Ship of Strangers

CHAPTER TEN

They moved back along the rough path which Module Five had created until the polyrad dial on Surgenor’s wrist showed they were at a safe distance from the radioactive spillage inside the vehicle.

Kelvin and McErlain set the shrouded alien woman down gently, making sure that her back was supported against the stump of a tree. Although they had carried her only a short distance their uniforms were pied with sweat. Surgenor felt his own clothing bind itself to his arms and thighs, but the physical discomfort was insignificant compared to the mental stress of dislocation. Night had become day, and in the same instant desert had become jungle. The hot yellow sun—the impossible sun—speared savagely into his eyes, blinding him, racking him with dismay.

“One of two things has happened,” Giyani said emotionlessly, sitting down on a tree trunk and massaging his ankle. “We’re in a different place at the same time—or we’re in the same place at a different time.” He met Surgenor’s gaze squarely. “What do you say, David?”

“I say the first rule in that book on tactics by D. Surgenor, bus driver, will be ‘Drive slowly’—the way I told you earlier. We almost got ourselves…’

“I know you say that, David. I admit you made a good point back there, or then, but what else do you say?”

“It looks as though we ran into the Saladinian equivalent of a landmine. I thought I saw something moving just before we hit.”

“A mine?” Kelvin said, looking around him with hurt eyes, and Surgenor realized for the first time that the lieutenant was barely out of his teens.

Giyani nodded. “I’m inclined to agree. A time bomb, you might call it. We got ourselves a prisoner, and the Saladinians weren’t prepared to stand for that. In similar circumstances we might have used a bomb which would have repositioned the target in space, but the natives here don’t think the way we do…’

“A surveyor is bound to have picked up some geology, David—how far back would you say we’ve been thrown?”

“I don’t know all that much about geology, and the evolutionary timescales are bound to vary from planet to planet, but…’ Surgenor made a gesture which took in the surrounding walls of glossy green vegetation, the silent and humid air, and the riotous sun.

“For a climatic change of this magnitude you can probably talk in terms of millions of years. One, ten, fifty—take your pick.” He listened to his own words in fascination, marvelling at his body’s ability to go on functioning with every appearance of normality in spite of what had happened.

“As far as that?” Giyani still sounded calm, but thoughtful now.

“Would it make any difference if I’d said only a thousand years? We’ve been eliminated, Major. There’s no way back.” Surgenor tried to accept the fact as he spoke, but he knew the reaction would come later. Giyani nodded slowly, Kelvin lowered his face into cupped hands, and McErlain stood impassively staring at the hooded figure of the Saladinian woman. With one part of his mind Surgenor noted that the heavily-built sergeant was still holding the rifle, which apparently never left his hands.

“There might be a way back,” McErlain said, with an obstinate expression on his face. “If we could get some information out of her.” He indicated the woman with his rifle.

“I doubt it, sergeant.” Giyani looked unimpressed.

“Well, they made bloody certain we didn’t get her back to the ship. Risked killing her. Why was that?”

“I don’t know, sergeant, but you can stop pointing that rifle at the prisoner—we can’t afford any massacres here.”

“Sir?” McErlain’s rough-hewn features were grim.

“What is it, sergeant?”

“I just wanted to tell you that the next time you make a crack about me and the Georgetown,” McErlain said in flat tones, “you’ll get the butt of this rifle down your throat.”

Giyani jumped to his feet, his brown eyes wide with shock. “Do you know what I can do to you for that remark?”

“No, but I’m real interested, Major. Lay it on the line.” The sergeant was holding his rifle as casually as ever, but it had acquired significance.

“I can start by removing that weapon from you.”

“You think so?” McErlain smiled, showing uneven but exceptionally white teeth, and Surgenor suddenly became aware of him as a human being instead of as a cutout military figure. The two uniformed men faced each other in the jungle’s sweltering silence. Watching the brilliantly lit tableau, Surgenor felt his attention being distracted by a curious irrelevancy. There was an incongruity somewhere. There was something strangely out of place, or lacking about the whole primeval scene…

The Saladinian woman whimpered faintly and sat upright with deliberate, painful movements. McErlain went towards her and with an abrupt movement threw the grey cowl back from her head.

Surgenor felt a vague sense of shame as he saw the alien face in bright, uncompromising light. The blurred glimpse he had caught in the darkness of the module’s cabin had left him with an impression not of beauty—that hardly seemed possible—yet of some degree of compatibility with human standards of beauty. But here in the fierce sunlight there was no disguising the fact that her nose was a shapeless mound, that her eyes were much smaller than a human’s, or that her black hair was so coarse that the individual strands gleamed separately like enamelled wire.

For all that, he thought, there’s no doubt that this is a woman. He wondered if there could be a cosmic female principle which made itself obvious at first glance, even to an alien, then felt oddly uncomfortable as he realized he had thought of himself as the alien.

Further plaintive sounds came from the Saladinian’s dry-lipped mouth as she turned her head from side to side, her plum-coloured eyes flicking over the four men and the background of jungle.

“Go ahead, sergeant,” Giyani said sardonically. “Interrogate the prisoner and find out how to travel a million years into the future.”

Surgenor turned to him. “Have we anything at all on the Saladinian language?”

“Not a word. In fact, we don’t even know if they employ words—it might be one of those continuously inflected hums or buzzes that we’ve found on some planets.” He narrowed his eyes as the alien woman got to her feet and stood swaying slightly, her pale skin glistening with oily secretions.

“She keeps looking back that way,” Lieutenant Kelvin said loudly, pointing down the avenue of shattered trees and uprooted vegetation in the direction from which the module had come. He ran a few paces along the trail with a boyish lope. “Major! There’s something back here. A tunnel or something.”

“Impossible,” Surgenor said instinctively, but he climbed up on a fallen trunk and shaded his eyes against the sun. At the far end of the trail he picked out a circular area of blackness. It looked like the mouth of a cave or tunnel, except that there was no visible background of hillside.

“I’m going to have a look.” Kelvin’s tall spare figure bounded farther away from the group.

“Lieutenant!” Giyani spoke crisply, assuming command again after his inconclusive brush with McErlain. “We’ll go together.”

He looked directly at the Saladinian, then pointed down the trail. She appeared to understand at once and began walking, gathering the skirts of her robe exactly as an Earth woman would have done it. The sergeant fell in behind her with his rifle. Surgenor, walking beside McErlain, noted that the woman seemed to be moving with some difficulty, almost as if she were ill, but with a subtle difference…

“Major, sir,” he said, “we don’t need any security precautions here—so how did you know in advance that the prisoner would be a pregnant female?”

“It seemed likely from blow-ups of the satellite photographs. The natives are usually much slimmer and more mobile than this one.”

“I see.” Surgenor got a disturbing thought—at any minute they could be faced with the daunting task of having to deliver an alien child, with none of the customary facilities. “So why did we have to go for one that was pregnant?”

“When I said they were less mobile I was using the word in the full context of this planet.” Giyani fell back beside Surgenor and offered him a cigarette, which he accepted gratefully in the absence of his pipe. “The scanner records show that pregnant natives don’t flit through time as easily as the others. They materialize solidly, fully into the present, and when they’ve done it they stay around longer. It seems harder for them to vanish.”

“Why should that be?”

Giyani shrugged and blew out a plume of smoke. “Who knows? If it’s all done by mental control, as it seems to be, perhaps the presence of another mind right inside her own body ties the female down a bit. We’d never have caught this one otherwise.”

Surgenor stepped carefully around a newly sheared tree stump. “That’s the other thing I don’t understand. If the Saladinians are so anxious to avoid contact, why did they let a vulnerable female into a sector of space-time occupied by us?”

“Maybe their control over time isn’t as good as they’d like it to be, just the way our grip over normal space isn’t perfect. Since we landed on Saladin some of our intellectual types on the ship have been claiming the natives have proved that the past, present and future are co-existent. All right—they may be if you look at them from the right angle—but supposing the present is still more important than the other two in some way.

“It might be like a wave crest which drags the females along with it when they’re ready to give birth. Maybe the foetus is tied to the present because it hasn’t learned the mental disciplines, or…’

“What’s the point in going over all this woolly theorizing?” Giyani demanded, checking his own expansiveness. “It doesn’t change anything or get us anywhere.”

Surgenor nodded thoughtfully, revising his assessment of Giyani. He had guessed the major was an intelligent man walking into danger with his eyes open, but he had been guilty—as he had also been with McErlain—of regarding him as just another military stereotype with a closed, inflexible mind. His talk with Giyani had been instructive in more ways than one.

At that moment Surgenor got a glimpse of what lay ahead of him on the rough jungle track and he stopped thinking about the major.

A night-black disc about three metres in diameter was floating in the air, its lower rim a short distance above the ground. Its edges were blurred, shimmering, and when Surgenor drew closer he saw that the blackness of the disc was relieved by the intense glitter of stars.