Chapter 3

The boat ran swiftly, accelerating on ion drive until Novaya was only one blue spark of beauty and Zolotoy became an aureate shield. There was much silence aboard. Watching his companions, Holbrook found time to think.

Grushenko said at last, "There must be some point of agreement with them. It is impossible that they could be imperialists."

Ekaterina curved her lips in a sad little grin. "Was it not impossible that disloyal elements could get onto the Rurik?"

"There were traitors on the selection board," said Grushenko. His voice darkened. "They were to choose from many nations; man's first voyage beyond the sun was to be a symbol of the brotherhood of all men in the World Soviets. And who did they pick? Svenstrup! Ximénez! Bunin! Golbrok!"

"Enough," said the woman. "Now we have only one cause, to survive."

Grushenko regarded her from narrowed glacial eyes. "Sometimes I wonder about your own loyalty, Comrade Saburov. You accepted the mutiny as an accomplished fact, without even trying to agitate—you have fully cooperated with Svenstrup's regime—this will not be forgotten when we get back to Earth."

"Fifty years hence?" she gibed.

"Fifty years is not so long when one has frozen sleep." Grushenko gave Holbrook a metallic stare. "It is true, we have a common interest at the moment. But suppose the aliens can be persuaded to aid one of our factions. Think of that, Comrade Saburov! As for you, Ami, consider yourself warned. At the first sign of any such attempt on your part, I shall kill you."

Holbrook shrugged. "I'm not too worried by that kind of threat," he said. "You Reds are a small minority, you know. And the minority will grow still smaller every year, as people get a taste for liberty."

"So far there has been nothing the loyal element could do," said Ekaterina. The frigidity of her tone was a pain within him; but he could not back down, even in words, when men had died in the spaceship's corridors that other men might be free. "Our time will come. Until then, do not mistake enforced cooperation for willingness. Svenstrup was clever. He spent a year organizing his conspiracy. He called the uprising at a moment when more Whites than Reds were awake on duty. We others woke up to find him in charge and all the weapons borne by his men. What could we do but help man the ship? If anything went wrong with it, no one aboard would ever see daylight again."

Holbrook fumbled after a reply: "If the government at home is, uh, so wonderful ... how did the selection board let would-be rebels like me into the crew? They must have known. They must have hoped ... some day the mutineers ... or their descendants ... would come back ... at the head of a liberating fleet!"

"No!" she cried. Wrath reddened her pale skin. "Your filthy propaganda has had some results among the crew, yes, but to make them all active traitors—the stars will grow cold first!"

Holbrook heard himself speaking fluently; the words sprang out like warriors. "Why not be honest with yourself?" he challenged. "Look at the facts. The expedition was to have spent a total of perhaps fifty years, at the most, getting to Alpha Centauri, surveying, planting a colony if feasible, and returning to glory. To Earth! Suddenly, because of a handful of rebels, every soul aboard found himself headed for another sun altogether. It would be almost six decades before we even got there. Not one of our friends and kin at home would be alive to welcome us back, if we tried to return. But we wouldn't. If Tau Ceti had no suitable planet, we were to go on, maybe for centuries. This generation will never see home again.

"So why did you, why did all of them, not heed the few fanatics like Grushenko, rise up and throw themselves on our guns? Was death too high a price, even the death of the whole ship? Or if so, you still had many years in which to engineer a counter-mutiny; all of you were awake from time to time, to stand watches. Why didn't you even conspire?

"You know very well why not! You saw women and grown men crying with joy, because they were free." Bitterness seared his tongue. "Even you noisy Red loyalists have cooperated—under protest, but you have done your assigned duties. Why? Why not set the crew an example? Why haven't you even gone on strike? Isn't it because down inside, not admitting it to yourself, you also know what a slave pen Earth has become?"

Her hand cracked across his face. The blow rang in him. He stood gaping after her, inwardly numbed, as she flung from the control cabin into the passageway beyond.

Grushenko nodded, not without compassion. "They may claim all the equality they will, Eben Petrovitch," he said. It was the first time he had offered that much friendship. "But they remain women. She will make a good wife for the first man who fully comprehends this is true in her own case too."

"Which I don't?" mumbled Holbrook.

Grushenko shook his head.

And the world Zolotoy grew. They decelerated, backing down upon it. A few whirling electrons piloted them; they stared through telescopes and held up photographs to the light, hardly believing.

"One city," whispered Ekaterina. "One city!"

Holbrook squinted at the picture. He was not a military man and had no experience with aerial photographs. Even greatly enlarged, it bewildered him. "A city over the whole planet?" he exclaimed.

Grushenko looked through the viewport. This close, the golden shield was darkly streaked and mottled; here and there lay a metallic gleam. "Well, perhaps twenty per cent of the total area," he replied. "But the city forms a continuous webwork, like a net spread over the entire oceanless globe. It is obviously a unit. And the open spaces are all used—mines, landing sites, transmission stations, I suppose. It is hard to tell, they are so different from any designs we understand."

"I imagine their food is synthetic," said Ekaterina. Her snub nose wrinkled. "I should not like that. My folk have been peasants too many centuries."

"There are no more peasants on Earth," said Grushenko stiffly. Then he shook his hairless skull and clicked his tongue in awe. "But the size of this! The power! How far ahead of us are they? A thousand years? Ten thousand? A million?"

"Not too far ahead to murder poor old Solomon Levine," said the woman raggedly. Holbrook stole a glance at her. Sweat glittered on the wide clear brow. So she was afraid too. He felt that the fear knocking under his own ribs would be less if he could have been warding her, but she had been bleak toward him since their quarrel. Well, he thought, I'm glad she liked Solly. I guess we all did.

"There was some mistake," said Grushenko.

"The same mistake could kill us," said Holbrook.

"It is possible. Are you wishing you had stayed behind?"

The engines growled and grumbled. Fire splashed a darkness burning with suns. At 7800 kilometers out they saw one of the sputniks already identified on photographs. It was colossal, bigger than the Rurik, enigmatic with turrets and lights and skeletal towers. It swung past them in a silence like death; the sense of instruments, unliving eyes upon him, prickled in Holbrook's skin.

Down and down. It was not really surprising when the spaceships came. They were larger than the boat, sleekly aerodynamic. Presumably the Zolotoyans did not have to bother about going into orbit and using shuttle rockets; even their biggest vessels landed directly. The lean blue shapes maneuvered with precision blasts, so close to absolute efficiency that only the dimmest glow revealed any jets at all.

"Automatic, or remote-controlled," decided Holbrook in wonder. "Live flesh couldn't take that kind of accelerations."

Fire blossomed in space, dazzling their eyes so they sat half blind for minutes afterward. "Magnesium flares," croaked Grushenko. "In a perfect circle around us. Precision shooting—to warn us they can put a nuclear shell in our airlock if they wish." He blinked out the viewport. Zolotoy had subtly changed position; it was no longer ahead, but below. He chuckled in a parched way. "We are not about to offer provocation, comrades."

Muted clanks beat through the hull and their bones. Holbrook saw each whale shape as a curve in the ports, like a new horizon. "Two of them," said Ekaterina. "They have laid alongside. There is some kind of grapple." She plucked nervously at the harness of her chair. "I think they intend to carry us in."

"We couldn't do that stunt," muttered Holbrook.

A day came back to him. He had been a country boy, remote even from the collective farms, but once when he was seven years old he sent in a winning Party slogan (he didn't know better then) and was awarded a trip to Europe. Somehow he had entered alone that museum called Notre Dame de Paris; and when he stood in its soaring twilight he realized how helplessly small and young he was.

He cut the engines. For a moment free fall clutched at his stomach, then a renewed pressure swiveled his chair about in the gymbals. The scout boat was being hauled around Zolotoy, but downward: they were going to some specific place on the planet for some specific purpose.

He looked through his loneliness at Ekaterina, and found her staring at him. Angrily, she jerked her face away, reached out and grasped the hand of Ilya Grushenko.