Robert Silverberg - Collision Course

Bernard was too weary to retort. Havig seemed to have an unearthly knack for turning even the most minor incident into an occasion for homily. Or, Bernard wondered wearily, what if Havig were only spoofing, parodying himself much of the time in a ponderous kind of humor? No, he thought, Havig didn’t have a scrap of humor anywhere in his huge frame. When he said something he meant it.

Bernard pushed ahead. Laurance and his men, moving along up front, never seemed to flag. They strode on like men in seven-league boots, clearing a way through the sometimes impassable brush that blocked the path; detouring skillfully to circle a fallen tree whose man-high trunk, already overgrown with yellow fungus, prevented advance; pausing to estimate the depth of a dark, swiftly flowing stream before plunging across through water that sometimes rose as high as the tops of their hip-boots.

He was beginning to lose his appreciation of this planet’s wild beauty. Even beauty can pall, especially under circumstances of discomfort. The blazing glory of purple flowers a foot across no longer registered on Bernard. The sleek grace of the white, cat-like creatures that bolted across their paths like streaks of flame no longer pleased him. The raucous, almost obscene cries of the birds in the towering trees no longer seemed amusing, but merely insulting.

Bernard had never realized in any concrete way that the abstract term “ten miles” meant quite so many weary steps. His feet felt numb, his calves stiff and throbbing, his thighs already beginning to develop a charley-horse that bid fair to double him up. And they had hardly begun to walk, he thought glumly. He felt ready to collapse, after only half an hour’s march.

Think we’re almost there?” he asked Dominici.

The stocky biochemist wrinkled his face in good-hearted scorn. “You kidding? We haven’t walked more than two and a half, three miles at most. Relax, Bernard. There’s plenty going ahead.”

Bernard nodded. A pace of ten minutes per mile was probably generous, he thought. Most likely they had done no more than two miles—a fifth or a sixth of the journey. And he was tired already.

But there was no help for it but to plug gamely on. The day had all but begun, now; the sky was bright and the sun seemed hidden just below the distant trees, biding its moment until bursting forth. The air had grown considerably warmer, too, the temperature climbing well into the sixties. Bernard had opened his jacket. He dipped frequently into his canteen, hoping the water would last him the round trip. Their last time here, Laurance and his men had tested the water and found it to be unobjectionable H 2O, presumably readily drinkable. But there had been no time for elaborate checks on microorganic life. Improbable though it was that a nonterrestrial organism could have serious effects on a Terran metabolism, Bernard was not minded to take chances.

At the end of the first hour they rested, leaning against the massive stumps of fallen trees.

“Tired?” Laurance asked.

Stone nodded; Bernard grunted his assent. A twinkle appeared in Laurance’s eyes. “So am I,” he admitted cheerfully. “But we’ll keep going.”

The sun rose finally a few minutes after they had resumed their trek. It burst into the sky gloriously, a young sun radiant in its youth. The temperature continued to climb; it was above seventy, now. Bernard realized bleakly that it was likely to reach ninety or better by high noon. He remembered that medieval jingle: Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun . He smiled at the thought. No more than once or twice a year did he think of himself as an Englishman, even though he was Manchester born and London bred. That was another effect of a transmat civilization; it provided such marvelous motility that no one really thought of himself as tied to one nation, one continent, even one world. Only in odd little moments of sudden insight did it occur to Bernard to regard himself as an Englishman, and thus in some nebulous way heir to the traditions of Alfred and William and Richard the Lion-Hearted and Churchill and the other titans of the misty past.

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun . Dr. Martin Bernard flicked sweat from his forehead and grimly forced his legs to continue carrying him forward.

It became purely mechanical after a while, and he stopped feeling sorry for himself and concentrated all his physical and mental energy on dragging one leg after another after another. And the yards lengthened into miles, and the distance between the spaceship and the alien encampment shrank. Nothing like a ten-mile hike in seventy- or eighty-degree heat to teach a transmat person what the concept of distance means , Bernard thought. He was finding out. Distance meant sweat pouring down your face and trickling into your eyes; distance meant the back of your boot gradually rubbing one of your heels raw; distance meant that bunchy, cramped feeling in the fleshy part of your leg, the bitter aching of your foot’s small bones, the steady pain in the forepart of your thigh. And this was only a ten-mile hike.

“I wonder how good a hiker the Technarch is?” Dominici asked irreverently.

“A damned good one, more likely than not,” Bernard muttered. “That’s why he’s a Technarch. He’s got to be able to outdo everyone in everything , whether it’s hiking or quantum mechanics.”

“Still, I’d like to see him out here sweating under this blasted sun, with…” The biophysicist paused. “They’re stopping, up ahead. Maybe we’ve arrived.”

“I hope so. We’ve been marching close to three hours.”

Up ahead, the procession had indeed come to a halt. Laurance and his men had stopped at the summit of a gently rising hill. Peterszoon was pointing into the valley, and Laurance was nodding.

As Bernard caught up to them, he saw what they were pointing at in the valley. It was the alien settlement.

The colony had been built on the west bank of a fast-flowing river about a hundred yards wide. It nestled in a broad green valley that was bordered on one side by the group of hills in which the Earthmen now stood, and on the other by a wide, gently upcurving thrust that rose into snub-nosed mountains several miles away.

In the colony, furious activity seemed to be the order of business. The aliens scurried like energetic insects.

They had built six rows of domed huts, radiating outward from a larger central building. Work was proceeding—no, boiling ahead—on other huts that would extend the radii of the colony’s spokes. In the distance, gouts of dirt sprang high as the aliens, using what seemed to be a hand-gripped excavating device of force-field nature, dug out the foundations for yet more of the six-sided, stiff little huts. Others were working on a well on the landward side of the colony, while still others clustered around curious machinery, unpacking crates and dragging bulky devices (generators? dynamos?) across the clearing.

Some thousand yards to the north of the main scene of activity stood a massive blue spaceship—adhering in the main to the cylindrical form, but strangely fluted and scalloped in superficial design to provide an unmistakably alien effect. The spaceship stood open, and aliens streamed to and fro, bearing material out of the big ship.

After he had taken in the first surprising sight of the furiously energetic colonizers, Bernard turned his attention to the aliens themselves, not without a chill. At this distance, better than five hundred yards, it was hard to see the creatures in great detail. But they bore themselves upright, like human beings, and only their skin coloration and the odd free-swinging motion of their double-elbowed arms bore witness to their unearthliness.