Chapter 7

The spaceboat floated on upon a collision-course with the arriving fleet. That would not mean, of course, actual contact with any of the improbable vessels themselves. Crowded as the sunlit specks might seem from Darth’s night-side shadow, they were sufficiently separated. It was more than likely that even with ten-mile intervals the ships would be considered much too crowded. But they came pouring out of emptiness to go into a swirling, plainly pre-intended orbit about the planet from which Hoddan had risen less than an hour before.

There was inevitable confusion, though, and the spacephone proved it. There were disputes between freakish ships when craft with the astrogational qualities of washtubs tried to keep assigned positions, and failed, and there were squabbles when ships had to pass close together. One had to shut off its drive-field to keep from blowing the fuses of both.

But there were some ships which proceeded quietly to their positions and others which did the same after tumult amounting to rebellion. And naturally there were a few others which seemed incapable of co-operation with anybody. They went careening through the other ships’ paths in what must have seemed to the planet’s sunset area like a most unlikely dancing of brand-new stars.

It was a gigantic traffic tangle, and Hoddan’s boat drifted toward and into it. He’d counted a hundred ships long before. His count now passed two hundred and continued. Before he gave up he’d numbered two hundred forty-seven space-oddities swarming to make a whirling band--a ring--around the planet Darth.

He was fairly sure that he knew what they were, now. But he could not possibly guess where they came from. And most mysterious of all was the question of why they’d come out of faster-than-light drive to make of themselves a celestial feature about a planet which had practically nothing to offer to anybody.

Presently the spaceboat was in the very thick of the fleet. His communicator spouted voices whose tones ranged from basso profundo to high tenor, and whose ideas of proper astrogation seemed to vary more widely still.

“You there!“ boomed a voice with deafening volume. “You’re in our clear-space! Sheer off!“

The volume of a signal in space varies as the square of the distance. This voice was thunderous. It came apparently from a nearby, pot-bellied tripper ship of really ancient vintage. Rows of ports in its sides had been welded over. It had rocket tubes whose size was indicative of the kind of long-obsolete fuel on which it once had operated. Slenderer nozzles peered out of the original ones now. It had been adapted to modern propellants by simply welding modern rockets inside the old ones. It was only half a mile away.

Hoddan’s spaceboat floated on. The relative position of the two ships changed slowly. Another voice said indignantly:

“That’s the same thing that missed us by less than a mile! You, there! Stop acting like a squig! Get on your own course!“

A third voice;

“What boat’s that? I don’t recognize it! I thought I knew all the freaks in this fleet, too!“

A fourth voice said sharply:

“That’s not one of us! Look at the design! That’s not us!“

Other voices broke in. There was babbling. Then a harsh voice roared:

“Quiet! I order it!“ There was silence. The harsh voice said heavily, “Relay the image to me.“ There was a pause. The same voice said grimly: “It is not of our fleet. You, stranger! Identify yourself! Who are you and why do you slip secretly among us?“

Hoddan pushed the transmit button.

“My name is Bron Hoddan,” he said. “I came up to find out why three ships, and then nine ships, went into orbit around Darth. It was somewhat alarming. Our landing grid’s disabled, anyhow, and it seemed wisest to look you over before we communicated and possibly told you something you might not believe. But you surely don’t expect to land all this fleet! Actually, we can’t land any.”

The harsh voice said as grimly as before:

“You come from the planet below us? Darth? Why is your ship so small? The smallest of ours is greater.“

“This is a lifeboat,” said Hoddan pleasantly. “It’s supposed to be carried on larger ships in case of emergency.”

“If you will come to our leading ship,” said the voice, “we will answer all your questions. I will have a smoke flare set off to guide you.“

Hoddan said to himself:

“No threats and no offers. I can guess why there are no threats. But they should offer something!”

He waited. There was a sudden huge eruption of vapor in space some two hundred miles away. Perhaps an ounce of explosive had been introduced into a rocket tube and fired. The smoke particles, naturally ionized, added their self-repulsion to the expansiveness of the explosive’s gases. A cauliflowerlike shape of filmy whiteness appeared and grew larger and thinner.

Hoddan drove toward the spot with very light touches of rocket power. He swung the boat around and killed its relative velocity. The leading ship was a sort of gigantic, shapeless, utterly preposterous ark-like thing. Hoddan could neither imagine a purpose for which it could have been used, nor a time when men would have built anything like it. Its huge sides seemed to be made exclusively of great doorways now tightly closed.

One of those doorways suddenly gaped wide. It would have admitted a good-sized modern ship. A nervous voice essayed to give Hoddan directions for getting the spaceboat inside what was plainly an enormous hold now pumped empty of air. He grunted and made the attempt. It was tricky. He sweated when he cut off his power. But he felt fairly safe. Rocket flames would burn down such a door, if necessary. He could work havoc if hostilities began.

The great cargo door swung shut. The outside-pressure needle swung sharply and stopped at thirty centimeters of mercury pressure. There was a clanging. A smaller door evidently opened somewhere. Lights came on--old-fashioned glow tubes. Then figures appeared through a door leading to some other part of this ship.

Hoddan nodded to himself. The costume was odd. It was awkward. It was even primitive, but not in the fashion of the soiled but gaudily colored garments of Darth. These men wore unrelieved black, with gray shirts. There was no touch of color about them. Even the younger ones wore beards. And of all unnecessary things, they wore flat-brimmed hats--in a spaceship!

Hoddan opened the boat door and said politely:

“Good morning. I’m Bron Hoddan. You were talking to me just now.”

The oldest and most fiercely bearded of the men said harshly:

“I am the leader here. We are the people of Colin.” He frowned when Hoddan’s expression remained unchanged. “The people of Colin!” he repeated more loudly. “The people whose forefathers settled that planet, and brought it to be a world of peace and plenty--and then foolishly welcomed strangers to their midst!”

“Too bad,” said Hoddan. He knew what these people were doing, he believed, but putting a name to where they’d come from told him nothing of what they wanted of Darth.

“We made it a fair world,” said the bearded man fiercely. “But it was my great-grandfather who destroyed it. He believed that we should share it. It was he who persuaded the Synod to allow strangers to settle among us, believing that they would become like us.”

Hoddan nodded expectantly. These people were in some sort of trouble or they wouldn’t have come out of overdrive. But they’d talked about it until it had become an emotionalized obsession that couldn’t be summarized. When they encountered a stranger, they had to picture their predicament passionately and at length.

This bearded man looked at Hoddan with burning eyes. When he went on, it was with gestures as if he were making a speech, but it was a special sort of speech. The first sentence told what kind.

“They clung to their sins!” said the bearded man bitterly. “They did not adopt our ways! Our example went for naught! They brought others of their kind to Colin. After a little they laughed at us. In a little more they outnumbered us! Then they ruled that the laws of our Synod should not govern them. And they lured our young people to imitate them--frivolous, sinful, riotous folk that they were!”

Hoddan nodded again. There were elderly people on Zan who talked like this. Not his grandfather! If you listened long enough they’d come to some point or other, but they had arranged their thoughts so solidly that any attempt to get quickly at their meaning would only produce confusion.

“Twenty years since,” said the bearded man with an angry gesture, “we made a bargain. We held a third of all the land of the planet, but our young men were falling away from the ways of their fathers. We made a bargain with the newcomers we had cherished. We would trade our lands, our cities, our farms, our highways, for ships to take us to a new world with food for the journey and machines for the taming of the planet we would select. We sent of our number to find a world to which we could move. Ten years back, they returned. They had found it. The planet Thetis.”

Again Hoddan had no reaction. The name meant nothing.

“We began to prepare,” said the old man, his eyes flashing. “Five years since, we were ready. But we had to wait three more before the bargainers were ready to complete the trade. They had to buy and collect the ships. They had to design and build the machinery we would need. They had to collect the food supplies. Two years ago we moved our animals into the ships, and loaded our food and our furnishings, and took our places. We set out. For two years we have journeyed toward Thetis.”

Hoddan felt an instinctive respect for people who would undertake to move themselves, the third of the population of a planet, over a distance that meant years of voyaging. They might have tastes in costume that he did not share, and they might go in for elaborate oratory instead of matter-of-fact statements, but they had courage.

“Yes, sir,” said Hoddan. “I take it this brings us up to the present.”

“No,” said the old man, his eyes flashing. “Six months ago we considered that we might well begin to train the operators of the machines we would use on Thetis. We uncrated machines. We found ourselves cheated!”

Hoddan found that he could make a fairly dispassionate guess of what advantage--say--Nedda’s father would take of people who would not check on his good faith for two years and until they were two years’ journey away. The business men on Krim would have some sort of code determining how completely one could swindle a customer. Don Loris, now--

“How badly were you cheated?” asked Hoddan.

“Of our lives!” said the angry old man. “Do you know machinery?”

“Some kinds,” admitted Hoddan.

“Come,” said the leader of the fleet.

With a sort of dignity that was theatrical only because he was aware of it, the leader of the people of Colin showed the way. Hoddan had been admitted with his spaceboat into one gigantic cargo hold. He was now escorted to the next. It was packed tightly with cases of machinery. One huge crate had been opened and its contents fully disclosed. Others had been hacked at enough to show their contents.

The uncrated machine was a jungle plow. It was a powerful piece of equipment which would attack jungle on a thirty-foot front, knock down all vegetation up to trees of four-foot diameter, shred it, loosen and sift the soil to a three-foot depth, and leave behind it smoothed, broken, pulverized dirt mixed with ground-up vegetation ready to break down into humus. Such a machine would clear tens of acres in a day and night, turning jungle into farmland ready for terrestrial crops.

“We ran this for five minutes,” said the bearded man fiercely as Hoddan nodded approval. He lifted a motor hood.

The motors were burned out. Worthless insulation. Gears were splintered and smashed. Low-grade metal castings. Assembly bolts had parted. Tractor treads were bent and cracked. It was not a machine except in shape. It was a mock-up in worthless materials which probably cost its maker the twentieth part of what an honest jungle plow would cost to build.

Hoddan felt the anger any man feels when he sees betrayal of that honor a competent machine represents.

“It’s not all like this!” he said incredulously.

“Some is worse,” said the old man, with dignity. “There are crates which are marked to contain turbines. Their contents are ancient, worn-out brick-making machines. There are crates marked to contain generators. They are filled with corroded irrigation pipe and broken castings. We have shiploads of crush-baled, rusted sheet-metal trimmings! We have been cheated of our lives!”

Hoddan found himself sick with honest fury. The population of one-third of a planet, packed into spaceships for two years and more, would be appropriate subjects for sympathy at the best of times. But it was only accident that had kept these people from landing on Thetis by rocket--since none of their ships would be expected ever to rise again--and from having their men go out and joyfully hack at an alien jungle to make room for their machines to land--and then find out they’d brought scrap metal for some thousands of light-years to no purpose.

They’d have starved outright. In fact, they were in not much better case right now. Because there was nowhere else that they could go! There was no new colony which could absorb so many people, with only their bare hands for equipment to live by. There was no civilized, settled world which could admit so many paupers without starving its own population. There was nowhere for these people to go!

Hoddan’s anger took on the feeling of guilt. He could do nothing, and something had to be done.

“Why ... why did you come to Darth?” he asked. “What can you gain by orbiting here? You can’t expect--”

The old man faced him.

“We are beggars,” he said with bitter dignity. “We stopped here to ask for charity--for the old and worn-out machines the people of Darth can spare us. We will be grateful for even a single rusty plow. Because we have to go on. We can do nothing else. We will land on Thetis. And one plow can mean that a few of us will live who otherwise would die with ... with the most of us.”

Hoddan ran his hands through his hair. This was not his trouble, but he could not thrust it from him.

“But again--why Darth?” he asked helplessly. “Why not stop at a world with riches to spare? Darth’s a poor place--”

“Because it is the poor who are generous,” said the bearded man evenly. “The rich might give us what they could spare. But simple, not-rich people, close to the soil, will give us what they need themselves. They will share what they have, and accept a share of our need.”

Hoddan paced up and down the ancient flooring of this compartment in an ancient ship. Presently he said jerkily:

“With all the good will in the world ... Darth is poverty-stricken. It has no industries. It has no technology. It has not even roads! It is a planet of little villages and tiny towns. A ship from elsewhere stops here only once a month. Ground communications are almost nonexistent. To spread the word of your need over Darth would require months. But to collect what might be given, without roads or even wheeled vehicles-- No. It’s impossible! And I have the only space vessel on the planet, and it’s not fit for a journey between suns.”

The bearded man waited with a sort of implacable despair.

“But,” said Hoddan grimly, “I have an idea. I ... ah ... have contacts on Walden. The government of Walden does not regard charity with favor. The need for charity seems a ... ah ... a criticism of the Waldenian standard of living.”

The bearded man said coldly:

“I can understand that. The hearts of the rich are hardened. The existence of the poor is a reproach to them.”

But Hoddan began suddenly to see real possibilities. This was not a direct move toward the realization of his personal ambitions. But on the other hand, it wasn’t a movement away from them. Hoddan suddenly remembered an oration he’d heard his grandfather give many, many times in the past.

“Straight thinkin’,” the old man had said obstinately, “is a delusion. You think things out clear and simple, and you can see yourself ruined and your family starving any day! But real things ain’t simple! They ain’t clear! Any time you try to figure things out so they’re simple and straightforward, you’re goin’ against nature and you’re going to get ‘em mixed up! So when something happens and you’re in a straightforward, hopeless fix--why, you go along with nature! Make it as complicated as you can, and the people who want you in trouble will get hopeless confused and you can get out!”