Robert Silverberg - Collision Course

“A younger race than we are, would you say?” Bernard went on.

Uncertainty hooded Dominici’s eyes. “Younger? No, I wouldn’t say that. I’d be inclined to say they were an older race than we are.”

“Why do you say that?”

Dominici shrugged. “Call it a hunch. They seem settled in their ways, stratified almost. The difference couldn’t be much—two or three thousand years, maybe—but I have a definite feeling they’ve been civilized longer than we have.”

“I tend to agree,” Havig said from his corner of the cabin. “From what little I could catch of that complicated language of theirs, I’d say it’s a highly evolved one—the sort of language a race might have been speaking for a couple of thousand years. But what’s on your mind, Bernard? Why the sudden questions?”

Bernard shrugged. “I’m piecing together something to tell the Technarch when we get back,” he said flatly, and made no other attempt at an explanation.

The gong sounded, signalling conversion. Conversion came; not long after, Nakamura came aft to let the passengers know that this time the ship was square on course, and that a meal was about to be served.

They ate quietly. There was no reason to be jubilant after such a mission to the stars. They were all conscious that they were returning to Earth after a mission that had ended in unexpected diminution of man’s place in the universe. The news they bore would hardly be welcome to the people of the Terran worlds or to that hard, inflexibly proud man who had impelled them to take this journey. Harsh truths are rarely welcomed.

Havig remained in the galley to give Nakamura a hand with the job of clearing away the meal. Bernard returned to the cabin with Stone and Dominici. A hush had fallen over them once again. Each minute, now, brought them closer to Earth, to the reckoning with the Technarch.

Stone sat quietly on his bunk, his hands covering his face. Bernard looked up suddenly and realized that the pudgy diplomat was weeping.

He went over to him.

“ Stone . Snap out of it!”

“Leave me alone!” was the muffled reply.

“Come on, knock it off…”

“Go away.”

“Dammit,” Bernard said hoarsely, “what are you crying about, anyway? Does the fact that Earthmen aren’t the big cheeses we used to think we were upset you so damned much? Or is it the fact that you’re probably out of a job in the Archonate that’s digging into you?”

Stone looked up, white-faced, red-eyed, with the shocked look of a man whose most carefully hidden secret has been punctured. “How dare you say that…”

“It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

“What are you trying to…”

“Admit it,” Bernard said in a deliberately harsh voice. “Face the truth. It’s a habit we all could stand to cultivate around here.”

The diplomat looked as though he’s been given five strokes with a neural whip. He shrank into himself and after a moment’s silence said in a soft, distant voice, “All right, it’s the truth. I won’t try to hide it any more. For twenty-five years I’ve been training for the Archonate, and it’s all shot to hell now. I’ve got no career left. I’m nothing but a used-up shell. Am I supposed to be happy about the way things have turned out? Do you think they would ever pick as Archon the very man who brought back the crushing news that we— that we…”

Stone could not go on.

He started to blubber again. Bernard felt uncomfortable and helpless, as he stood there watching the fleshy shoulders shake uncontrollably.

I might as well let him cry , Bernard thought. Maybe his career’s finished and maybe it isn’t, but he can use the nervous release anyway. God knows, we all can .

Bernard returned to his bunk. After a while he saw Stone rise, wash his face, dry his eyes, and jab his arm with a spraytube of a sedative. The diplomat lay down again and was asleep almost at once. Bernard remained awake, watching the grayness of the vision screen, watching the steadily advancing hands of the clock. His mood was a depressed one, yet not as bleak as it might have been. It had been, he knew, a valuable voyage—for him, for everyone on Earth. Earth had learned some things about itself that it desperately had needed to find out—and so had Martin Bernard. Some of his actions surprised him, as he looked back. His burst of sympathy and understanding for Havig, for instance.

The trip had broadened him, had extended his knowledge of himself and of others. He could look back now and see the Martin Bernard of the recent past in a cold, clear new perspective.

What he saw hardly pleased him.

He saw a self-centered, almost irritatingly selfish man, with a streak of cruelty well camouflaged by his outward amiable ways. His hatchet job on Havig’s article, for instance, had not been an expression of scholarly dissent as much as it had been an attack on a philosophy of life that called his own hedonistic ways into question. His relationship with his wife, too, he saw with uncomfortable clarity: it was not that he was not “born” to be a good husband, but simply that he had not been willing to work at it. She was no shrew, merely a woman who wanted to share her husband’s inner life and had been shut completely away from it.

Bernard stared steadily ahead. This close confinement, away from the lulling influences of his cozy nest at home, had forced him in on himself, compelled him to take a healing look at the real self enclosed in a shell of complacency.

Earth was in for the same kind of rough awakening, Bernard thought. He wondered if the people in general would profit from the jolt of truth, as he felt he had, or if they would angrily throw up defense mechanisms to keep the true barb from sinking in. Bernard frowned. He had his doubts.

And time was running out, now. Only twelve hours remained until conversion time. The clock hands moved, slowly, inexorably.

Ten hours.

Eight.

Six.

Four.

Twenty minutes.

The last minutes took the longest. Bernard’s face was set in a rigid mask, his eyeballs throbbing as he watched the clock. No one had spoken in hours.

The gongs sounded, finally, their resonance booming through the cabin like an annunciation of Judgment. The moment of conversion came. The vision screen brightened as the faster-than-light ship twisted out of the unknown void and crashed across the barrier into the familiar universe.

The message came aft from Laurance, in slow, measured tones. “We’re crossing the orbit of Neptune at this moment, heading inward. I’ve radioed ahead to Earth and they got the message. They know we’re coming home.”

The private chamber of the Technarch McKenzie had a harsh, almost hieractic simplicity, with its black stone walls and its bright, shimmering marble floor. The windowless chamber had been designed to impress both its occupant and his visitors with the somber importance of the Technarch’s responsibilities—and in that it succeeded, Martin Bernard thought. He felt a tinge of something quite like awe as he followed McKenzie in.

Few words had been interchanged since the landing of the XV-ftl in Central Australia an hour before. The wanderers had come forth; and perhaps the Technarch had seen from their tense, bleak faces that the news they bore was not to be blurted out hastily. In any event, he had asked no questions, merely nodded a Technarchical greeting as the men left the ship. Bernard had come up to him.

“Hearkening, Excellency.”

“Hello, Bernard. What news?”

“Might I report to Your Excellency in your private chambers?”

The audience had been granted. One by one, stepping through the transmat, they had crossed the gap from the spacefield to the Archonate Center. Now Dominici, Stone, and Havig waited in the Technarch’s antechamber, while Bernard, alone, faced McKenzie within.