Пол Андерсон: Orbit 1

When the Flonderans had come to Chlaesan, they had been greeted with friendliness and amusement. So eager, so impulsive, so childlike. The name Earthmen was rarely used for them; they remained the Flonderans, the children. It amused Staeen to think that when they had still been huddling in caves, more animal than man, his people already had mapped the galaxy; when they had been floundering with sails on rough seas, engrossed in mapping their small world, his people already had populated hundreds of planets, light-years away from one another.

When the Flonderans had burst on the Galactic scene, enthusiastic, vocal, boisterous even, they had been welcomed as children. Suspicious, prepared for rejection, for animosity, warfare, they had been met with patience and love. The Chlaesans loved the little Flonderans. The Chlaesans pitied the intelligent, short-lived Flonderans who had neither the longevity to learn from and enjoy what they found, nor the collective cooperation of a colonial organism that could ultimately share fully every experience felt by any part of itself.

It was doubly amusing to consider that the mathematicians and philosophers had proved that a race so short lived, so individually contained as the race of Flonderans could not possibly have been viable, and being viable could not possibly have advanced to the degree of intelligence that permitted space travel.

Blithely the Flonderans pushed on and out, oblivious to the dangers of space, to the improbability of their being in space. They went wearing guns, but they seldom had occasion to use them. This sector of the galaxy was peaceful, had been peaceful for thousands of years.

“Staeen,” Malko said suddenly, “haven’t your people ever come across a derelict like this?”

“Not just like this,” Staeen said. “Not just left empty. There have been ships with plague, accidents, other-life aboard, but not one where they simply left it.”

“This is the second for us,” Conly said. “This is how they found the first one — lifeboats gone, ship damaged by space after the crew left.” His voice sounded brutal. “Staeen, why don’t you stay here? This is our problem.”

Staeen was not made for smiling, and they could not feel the sympathy he was sending. He said, “Your problems are our problems now, Conly.” Affection-waves washed over him and his pink parts under the mantle glowed red with pleasure.

Malko made a deep throat noise that was untranslatable. “Stay with us, you hear? Between us. We don’t know what we might find in there. You understand?”

Staeen understood. They wanted to protect him. He quivered with pride and happiness. He said, “I am under your orders. Whatever you say.”

“Okay,” Conly said. “We suit up and go in through the airlock. We’ll have to put the rad-suits on. Some of the ship’s hotter than hell.” He looked doubtfully at Staeen. It made them uneasy that the Chlaesans needed no spacesuits. “Will you know when you should get the hell out?”

“I’ll know,” Staeen said, his voice gentle through the apparatus that sent the sound to the two men. While they suited up he thought of the comparative lifetimes of the two species. He had been fully adult when Rome was building an empire, and now thousands of years later, the Flonderans, who could expect to die in what was to him a flicker of a tentacle, were being solicitous of him. They were born, matured, died in less time than it took for his world to make one swing around its sun. Malko called him; they were ready.

They left the scout and floated along the big ship’s hull toward the airlock. Conly was familiar with her design and he led them through the outer door to the first of three chambers. The outermost one had been damaged, but the other two were functioning perfectly, and the radiation from space dropped to normal by the time they had gone through the last.

The ship was a standard transport-passenger model, discontinued seventy years ago. The emphasis had been on transport with this model; the corridor was narrow and closely lined with oval doors, some of them open to show cramped sleeping quarters, three hammocks to a cubicle. In some rooms television screens were uncovered, as if the watchers had only stepped out for a beer. Papers on a tabletop drew Conly: an unfinished letter to a girl-friend. In the mess hall the tables were set, waiting for the crew. The feeling of overcrowding persisted.

The tumble of the ship caused a slight pull of centrifugal force so that the men were constantly shifting their positions, now having one of the door-lined walls “down,” now the floor, then the ceiling. They went in single file with Staeen between them. Conly led them through the ship, corridor after corridor of the oval doors, up stairs when they found that the elevators were not working, more corridors. Everything they saw appeared in perfect order, neat and clean, except for one or two places near portholes, where Malko picked up a chess piece and a plasti-book. Only where meteorites had struck and entered, some lodging, some passing through and out again, was there actual disorder.

Finally they approached the control room. Conly’s radiation detection unit clicked angrily. “Malko, keep watch. I’ll go in,” he said.

“And I,” Staeen said. He could not see either of their faces, but they were sending washes of courage and bewilderment. He wished he had hands with which to pat and soothe them. He caught a wave of regret from Malko who pushed himself backward to hang, drifting gently, away from the hot area of the door.

Conly motioned to Staeen to follow and passed through the doorway into the control room. Staeen could feel the radiation like a warm yellow sun against his mantle; presently there was a change in the makeup of the covering and he could no longer feel anything through it.

“What the—?” Conly muttered. A fire had raged through the control room. Black dust dotted the space they moved through, the flakes stirring when they were touched. Conly studied the control panel that was left, cursing under his breath. “Like I thought,” he said. “The sons of bitches didn’t even set it on automatic, just walked away from it. None of the safeties operative. . damn fools. Explains the radiation in here.”

Staeen floated from him toward the next door that led into a safety corridor surrounding the engine room. He was stopped by another flow of radiation. The change in his mantle was longer in coming this time, the feeling of sun-warmth stronger. Conly followed him.

“No,” Staeen said, “it is too hot even for the suit.”

Conly worked a panel back from the wall and they both looked through the thick window that had been bared, through the corridor and into the engine room. A large meteorite lay in the corridor, lodged between the two walls; smaller ones had hit in the engine room. The ship turned, and one of the rocks slid from its resting place, moving very slowly to stop against the ruined machinery of the engines. Staeen felt a flare of warmth as it hit. He touched Conly gently with his rippling mantle, and they backed away from the window together.

Three days later, after their fifth trip inside the ship, as Staeen relaxed in his special cubicle where a five percent saline-ammonia mist played over his mantle, he listened to Conly and Malko talking.

“You can put it together,” Conly said. “Something happened and they left, just ran out, leaving everything exactly as they were using it. No safeties on, no automatic controls, nothing. The ship was empty when the meteorite hit the engine. The alarm system went off, but no one was there to do anything. It’s still in alert condition. Another meteorite knocked out the controls for it, shorted the wiring and caused the fire in the control room.”