Ship of Strangers

CHAPTER TWELVE

“I very much regret this,” Major Giyani said soberly, “but there is no point in continuing the discussion. There can be no argument about who has to go through next.” The late afternoon sun, reflecting from the unbroken green of the jungle vegetation, made his face appear paler than normal.

“That means you, of course.” Surgenor looked down at his hands, which were cut in several places from the work of building a crude ramp up to the lower rim of the circle.

“Not of course—it simply happens that I am the only one here who has had a thorough briefing on the whole Saladinian situation. That fact, coupled with my special training, means that my report on this affair would be of greater value to Staff than one from either of you.”

“I question that,” Surgenor said. “How do you know I haven’t got an eidetic memory?”

“This could become childish, but how do you know I haven’t got one?” Giyani’s right hand descended, with seeming carelessness, on to the butt of his sidearm. “Anyway—with hypno techniques available it isn’t a question of what can be remembered, but of what one has taken the trouble to observe.”

“In that case,” McErlain put in, “what have you observed about this jungle?”

“What do you mean, sergeant?” Giyani said impatiently.

“Simple question. There’s something very unusual about this jungle we’re in. A real hotshot observer like you is bound to have picked it up by this time—so what is it?” McErlain paused. “Sir.”

Giyani’s eyes flicked sideways. “This is no time for parlour games.”

The sergeant’s words had struck a chord in Surgenor’s memory, reminding him that he too had sensed something out of place about their surroundings, something which made them different from any other jungle he had ever been in. “Go on,” he said.

McErlain glanced around triumphantly, almost possessively, before he spoke. “There aren’t any flowers.”

“So what?” Giyani looked baffled.

“Flowers are designed to attract insects. That’s the way most plants reproduce—through winged bugs getting pollen on their legs and bodies and spreading it around. All this stuff,” McErlain waved at the surrounding palisades of foliage, “has been forced to reproduce some other way. Some other way which doesn’t depend on…’

“Animal life!” Surgenor blurted the words out, wondering how he could have failed to complete the discovery earlier. This jungle, the ancient green world of Saladin, was quiet. No animals moved in its undergrowth, no birds sang, no insects throbbed in the still air. It was a world without any form of mobile life.

“Quite an interesting observation,” Giyani said coldly, “but hardly relevant to the immediate problem.”

“That’s what you think.” McErlain spoke with a savage intensity which caused Surgenor to look at him more closely. The big sergeant appeared to be standing at ease, but his eyes were locked on Giyani. He had positioned himself close to the silent Saladinian woman, closer than one might have expected under the circumstances. It was almost as if—the thought disturbed Surgenor—he and the alien woman had begun to share a bond.

Surgenor turned his attention to the ramp they had built with trees felled by the module. The base of it was only a few paces away from him, and he could have sprinted up it to reach the portal in as little as two seconds—but he was certain that the sergeant could burn him down in a fraction of that time. His main hope seemed to lie in Giyani and McErlain becoming so intent on their own conflict that they would forget to keep an eye on him. He edged closer to the ramp and tried to think of a way to steer the two soldiers into a direct confrontation.

“Major,” he said casually, “you say your principal concern is with the overall situation? With serving Earth’s interests in the best way possible?”

“That’s correct.”

“Well, has it occurred to you that the Saladinians didn’t set up that tunnel, lifeline, or whatever it is, for our benefit? Their sole concern was probably with rescuing the prisoner.”

“What of it?”

“In that case, you have a chance to make a really important gesture of goodwill. One which might make the Saladinians much more co-operative with our forces. If we sent the prisoner through to her own time…’

Giyani undid the retaining strap of his holster with a single rapid movement. “Don’t try to be clever with me, David. And move away from that ramp.”

Surgenor experienced an upsurge of fear, but did not move. “How about it, Major. The Saladinian mind is so alien to us that we’ve no idea what that woman over there is thinking. We can’t exchange a single thought or word with her or her people, but there’d be no mistaking our intentions if we sent her through the circle.” He put his foot on the base of the ramp.

“Get back!” Giyani gripped his sidearm and began to draw it clear of the holster.

McErlain’s rifle clicked faintly. “Take your hand away from the pistol,” he said quietly.

Giyani froze. “Don’t be a fool, sergeant. Don’t you see what he’s doing?”

“Just don’t try to pull that pistol.”

“Who do you think you are?” Giyani’s face darkened with barely suppressed fury. “This isn’t the…’

“Go on,” McErlain prompted with spurious pleasantness. “Tell me I’m not with the Georgetown any more. Let’s have a few more genocide jokes—you like those, Major.”

“I wasn’t…’

“You were! That’s all I’ve had from you for the last year, Major.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be—it was all true, you see.” McErlain’s gaze travelled slowly from Giyani to the enigmatic figure of the Saladinian, and back again. “I was one of the trigger men in that party. We didn’t know anything about the way-out reproductive set-up the natives had. We didn’t know that the handful of males had to preserve their honour and the honour of their race by making a ritual attack. All we saw was a bunch of shaggy centaurs coming at us with spears. So we burned ’em down.”

Surgenor shifted his weight in preparation for a dash up the single tree trunk which was the spine of the ramp.

“They kept coming at us,” McErlain continued, his eyes dull with pain. “So we kept on burning ’em down—and that’s all there was to it. We didn’t find out till afterwards that we had wiped out all the functional males, or that they wouldn’t have done us any harm anyway.”

Giyani spread out his hands. “I’m sorry, McErlain. I didn’t know how it was, but we’ve got to talk about the situation right here, right now.”

But that’s what I am talking about, Major. Didn’t you know?” McErlain looked puzzled. “I thought you’d have known that.”

Giyani took a deep breath, walked towards the sergeant and when he spoke his voice was unwavering. “You’re a thirty-year old man, McErlain. You and I know what that means to you. Now, listen to me carefully—I am ordering you to hand me that rifle.”

“You’re ordering me?”

“I’m ordering you, sergeant.”

“By what authority?”

“You already know that, sergeant. I’m an officer in the armed forces of the planet you and I were born on.”

“An officer!” McErlain’s expression of bafflement grew more pronounced. “But you don’t understand. Not anything…When did you become an officer in the armed forces of the planet you and I were born on?”

Giyani sighed, but decided to humour the sergeant. “On the tenth of June, 2276.”

“And because you’re an officer you’re entitled to give me orders?”

“You’re a thirty-year man, McErlain.”

“Tell me this…sir. Would you have been entitled to give me orders on the ninth of June, 2276?”

“Of course not,” Giyani said soothingly. He extended his hand and grasped the muzzle of the rifle.

McErlain did not relax his grip. “What date is it now?”

“How can we tell?”

“Let me put it another way—is this later than the tenth of June, 2276? Or earlier?”

Giyani showed the first signs of strain. “Don’t be ridiculous, sergeant. In a situation like this, subjective time is what counts.”

“That’s a new one on me,” McErlain commented. “Is it part of Regulations, or did you get it from the book which is going to be written by our friend over there who thinks I can’t see him edging on to the ramp?”

Surgenor took his foot off the silvery trunk and waited, with a growing conviction that an inexplicable and dangerous new element had been added to the situation. The Saladinian had drawn the hood back over her head, but her eyes seemed to be fixed on McErlain. Surgenor could almost believe that she understood what the sergeant was saying.

“It’s like that is it?” Giyani shrugged, walked away from McErlain and leaned against the base of a large yellow-leaved tree. He turned his attention to Surgenor. “Is it just my imagination, David, or is that circle still shrinking a little?”

Surgenor inspected the black disc with its incongruous sprinkling of stars, and his sense of urgency was intensified. The circle did appear to be fractionally smaller.

“It might be due to the air blowing through there,” he said. “Humid air has a lot of mass…’

He stopped speaking as Giyani quickly moved behind the tree against which he had been leaning. From Surgenor’s vantage point he was able to see the major clawing out his sidearm. He threw himself into the lee of the ramp for protection, knowing in his heart that it was totally inadequate, and in the same instant McErlain’s rifle emitted a blaze of man-made lightning. The rifle must have been set at maximum power, because the ultralaser ray sliced explosively clear through the thickness of the tree trunk—and then through Giyani’s chest. He went down in a welter of blood and fire. The tree rocked for a few seconds, grinding the ashes in the blackened cross-section, and tilted away to sprawl noisily downwards through other trees.

Belatedly acknowledging that the ramp offered him no shelter, Surgenor got to his feet and faced McErlain. “My turn now?”

The sergeant nodded.

“You’d better dive through that hole before it disappears,” he said.

“But…’ Surgenor stared at the ill-matched couple—Sergeant McErlain and the small grey figure of the Saladinian woman—and his mind began to teem with conjecture. “Aren’t you going?” he said, scarcely aware of the inanity.

“I have things to do.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do me a favour,” McErlain said. “Tell them I put my record straight. I helped kill a planet once—now I’m helping to bring another one to life.”

“I still don’t understand.”

McErlain glanced at the nameless alien woman. “She’s going to have a child soon, perhaps more than one. They’d never survive without my help. Food can’t be all that plentiful.”

Surgenor walked up the ramp and stood beside the black circle. “Suppose there isn’t any food? How do you know any of you will survive?”

“We must,” McErlain said simply. “Where do you think the people of this planet came from?”

“They could have come from anywhere. The chances that the Saladinian race originated here, at this point, are so small that…Surgenor broke off, guiltily, as he saw the desperate need in McErlain’s eyes.

He took one final look at the sergeant and his enigmatic companion, then dived cleanly through the black circle. There was a moment of fear as he fell into the darkness, then he rolled over on cold sand and sat up, shivering. The familiar stars of the Saladinian night sky shone overhead, but his attention was taken up by the circle from which he had emerged.

In this age it was a disc of greeenish light—looking from night into day—hovering above the desert floor. He watched as it shrank unsteadily to the size of a sun-blazing golden plate, to an eye-searing diamond. Air whistled through the aperture with a plaintively ascending note as it dwindled to a star and finally vanished.

When his eyes readjusted to the darkness he picked out the shape of Lieutenant Kelvin lying on the sand a short distance away. The blob of spray-on tissue-weld at his ankle was visible as a whitish blur.

“Do you need any help?” Surgenor asked.

“I’ve already put in a call,” Kelvin said faintly, without moving. “They should be here soon. Where are the others?”

“Back there.” One part of his mind told Surgenor that McErlain and the Saladinian woman had been dead for millions of years, but another now understood they were still alive, because the past and the present and the future are as one. “They can’t make it.”

“That means…they’ve been dead for a long time.”

“You could say that.”

“Oh, Christ,” Kelvin whispered. “What a stupid, pointless way to go. It’s as if they’d never lived.”

“Not quite,” Surgenor said. It had just occurred to him that Sergeant McErlain’s wish to help seed a world with new life might have been granted—literally. He did not know enough biology to let him be sure, but it seemed possible that—given, say, a hundred million years—the teeming organisms of a human body could thrive and spread right through a receptive environment, and then begin to evolve. After all, Saladin had produced an intelligent life form…

The scope of the speculation was too great for Surgenor in his shocked condition, but in another mental level he had an illogical flicker of hope that, somehow, the Saladinians would learn what McErlain had done for a member of their race. If that happened, they might just have the beginnings of the basis for a working relationship.

Kelvin sighed tiredly in the darkness. “It’s time we got off this planet anyway.”

Surgenor turned his gaze towards the sky. He could imagine himself back on board the Sarafand—travelling far and fast—but the after-image of the bright circle persisted in his vision for a long, long time, like an insubstantial sun.

McErlain stirred feebly in the dimness of the cave. He tried to call out, but the congestion in his lungs had grown so great that he produced only a faint, dry rattle. The small grey figure at the mouth of the cave did not move, but continued to stare patiently outwards at the rain-soaked banks of foliage. There was no way, even after all the years, of knowing if she heard him or not. He lay back and, as the fever intensified its hold, tried to reconcile himself to dying.

Summing it all up—he had been fortunate. The Saladinian woman had remained as uncommunicative as only an alien member of an alien race could do, but she had stayed with him, accepted his aid. He could swear he had seen something like gratitude in her eyes when he had helped her through the difficult period of the birth and her subsequent illness. That had been good for him.

Then there had been the times when he in turn lay ill; poisoned as a result of trying the wrong fruit or plants or seeds in his quest to find food suitable for her and the children. At those times, he fancied, she had never been far from his side.

Most gratifying of all was the fact that the Saladinian women and her kind were very fertile. The offspring of that first quadruple birth were young adults now, and had produced many more children. As he had watched them multiply, the cancer of guilt which had been devouring him since the Georgetown incident had ceased to dominate his life. It was still there, of course, but he had learned to forget it for hours on end.

If only he had been able to teach the children his own language, to drive one idea through the logic-structure barrier, things would have been better—but there was a limit to what a man could ask. He was a thirty-year man, McErlain decided as the conscious world tilted ponderously away from him, and it was enough that he had been given the chance to put his record straight…

Late that evening, as the sun’s light was fleeing through the trees, the Family gathered around the bed on which McErlain’s body lay. They stood in silence while the Mother laid one hand on the dewed, icy brow.

This being is dead, she told them silently. And now that our debt to him is paid, and his need for us has ended, we shall travel to the great home-time of our own people. The children and adults joined hands. And the Family vanished.