Starmasters Gambit Read online

  The wall on his right opened up like a piece of cloth being tom.

  “Get up and go down the hall,” a voice said.

  He did so. The feebly lit corridor closed behind him. It was a one-way passage.

  He reached a small, totally dark room. As he was trying to get his bearings he felt something warm winding around his arm. He put up no resistance. He felt the slight sting from the hypodermic needle. Then a gentle rain fell on him. Heat from invisible rays dried him off. The wall in front of him opened again and he went down a wide brilliantly lit corridor which led to a small room. There were clothes hanging on the wall. Algan noted that they were a navigator’s outfit.

  “Get dressed,” said a voice.

  He quickly donned the clothes, uttering not one word of useless protest, and set forth down another corridor. The building seemed to be made of some kind of malleable material which lent itself to partitioning into vacuums. Then, suddenly, the walls of the long winding corridor sprang open and Algan stopped, blinking; he seemed to be suspended over space, afloat, in broad daylight, three rocket-lengths above the port. Or so he thought. Actually he was in a large room one whole wall of which was an enormous window that opened on the working part of the port. As his eyes became accustomed to the light he looked around him. A man in a blue shirt was seated behind a huge white desk. He seemed to be waiting.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Go ahead and admire the port. It’s as good a beginning as any.”

  Algan did not immediately answer. He was, actually, fascinated by the port and the huge ships but he also did not know what to say. This was his first visit to the Stellar Port. People like him were ordinarily kept out.

  “I’m ready to talk now,” he said quietly.

  “I’m glad you’re taking it like that,” the man in blue replied. “Usually I have to do so much arguing with people who come here for the first time that my job becomes almost unpleasant. Please sit down.”

  Algan settled into a large white chair.

  “I’m listening.”

  The man in blue looked somewhat embarrassed.

  “I thought you’d have some questions.”

  “Well, I’m hungry,” said Algan.

  He was in no hurry for explanations. He was enjoying the chair, the rug with its complicated pattern, the magnificent white desk, and especially the view of the Stellar Port.

  “Just as you like,” said the man in blue and he pushed a button.

  He watched Algan eat, without a word. When Algan had finished, he got up and faced the bay.

  “What’s your name?” asked Algan, “and why am I here?”

  “One thing at a time,” replied the man in blue. His searching gray eyes scanned Algan’s face. “My name is Tial, Jor Tial. I don’t suppose that means much to you. You seem resigned to your fate.”

  “What fate?” asked Algan coldly. He hoped his nervousness would not show through.

  “A marvelous fate,” said Tial, with a sweeping gesture that encompassed the room, the port, and the rockets.

  “The conquest of space.”

  “You’re joking,” said Algan. “I’ll never leave the Earth.”

  “Come, come,” said Tial, “don’t talk like that. Did you or did you not sign up?”

  “Sign up?” echoed Algan.

  He suddenly understood. He had been had by a recruiter. The fat Earthling of the night before had gotten him drunk to extort his signature and now he was committed to space, to any planet whatever, after an interminable cruise on a broken-down ship. Anger flooded him. He had heard stories of this, in the Old Port, but he had never paid any attention to them. When anyone disappeared from an old section of Dark, no questions were asked; the missing person was just as likely to turn up a year later, rich enough to buy half a continent on the Old Planet, as he was to simply vanish into the thick air of Dark.

  “I see that you follow me. Perhaps some of the details escape you? I can read you the contract. Usually the signatories accept it, hm…let’s say, trustingly. They don’t even bother to read the provisions. But I can assure you they are worth it.”

  “It’s against the law,” said Algan. “I’m not going to knuckle under. There’s still some justice on the Earth.”

  “Of course,” said Tial. “And there are judges who can determine whether or not a contract has been properly executed.”

  “It was extortion,” said Algan. “I assume I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.

  “The judges would be very happy to hear about this. Extortion, you say. By the use of force? Are you quite sure?”

  “There’s no question of force; I was drugged.”

  “Against your will?”

  “Not exactly. And anyway, you know better than I what happened. All I want is a fair trial; I’ll bring charges.”

  “I should be delighted to give you some advice before you do anything,” said Tial.

  He spoke coolly and evenly. Algan thought to himself that his case must be weak.

  “I presume you admit you drugged yourself. You claim someone took advantage of your condition to make you sign this paper. Is that correct?”

  “Not quite,” said Algan. “A man offered me several zotls. He seemed anxious to have me drink with him. I didn’t want to be unfriendly. Then the stinker took unfair advantage. I suppose he gets something out of this smalltime deal.”

  “You willingly accepted this…drug, didn’t you?”

  Algan agreed.

  “You admit having taken more than enough to lose control.”

  “I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

  “Just this: drugs are illegal. Losing control is illegal. I’m willing to believe in the existence of this man. Can you bring him to me? I imagine that the Psychological Police might try to find him for you, but you know that its policy is not to interfere with the people in the Old Port. People like you. Within certain limits, of course. So, do you prefer to be arrested by the Psychological Police for drug abuse and be judged by a jury freshly recruited from the Puritan Planets or will you accept the terms of the contract? I imagine the jury would sentence you to a few years of hard labor on a new planet. There isn’t much sympathy, you know, for drug addiction among the inhabitants of the Puritan Planets. Wouldn’t you rather spend ten glorious years in space, at government expense, being handsomely paid? You like adventure, I think. Don’t look back, look forward.”

  “Very clever,” said Algan. “I suppose everyone is in on this: the Psychological Police, the port authorities, the space program, and even the government itself. I just say ‘Goodbye,’ and leave.” lie got up, his eyes never wavering from the distant lights that shone on the prow of a ship. Beyond the bronze gates the city spread out on the hills, a teeming, disorderly city made up of multicolored cubes piled up haphazardly—the city which he would not see again for ten years. A now inaccessible city. Dozens of light-years of space and emptiness already lay between him and Dark— hundreds of suns, the possibility of shipwrecks, of unexpected dangers, of unknown, hostile and powerful beings.

  And behind the city were the green oceans and the green plains of the Earth, the inscrutable ruins of its civilizations submerged by a tide of moss, invaded by the great northern glaciers, its cities dead and their secrets forever lost. There couldn’t, Algan said to himself, there couldn’t be in the universe two planets like the Earth. Something welled up inside him, a need for revenge; it was a seed that was to grow during the years spent in emptiness; it would explode one day and destroy this port, this cold inhumanity of the Galactians. For a long time he had believed that the Galactians were coldly unconcerned with the inhabitants of Earth. He would see to it that they paid when their time came. Only it was too early now, much too early.

  “I’ve been kidnapped,” said Algan in a strangled voice. “I’ve been kidnapped. I did not come here of my own free will. You’ll admit that.”

  “OK, if you want to quibble, you’ve been kidnapped. Officially you were picked up by a squ
ad of the Psychological Police and it was only because of your contract that you were brought here. Under ordinary circumstances you’d have been tried. But the police officials generously agreed you were entitled to celebrate your departure and they were willing to look the other way. Of course, if you lodge a complaint, they will have to speak up. Believe me, they would rather not.”

  “If the people of the Galaxy knew how pioneers are recruited,” said Algan, “if only they knew!”

  “Lots of people do know, but the word of an inhabitant of old Dark does not carry much weight in space. I’d bet they’d laugh at you if you told your story. Unless they beat you up when they learn where you come from. The people of the Galaxy take a dim view of backward people like you.”

  Algan leaned against the large window. He was consumed with fury. He wanted to hurl himself through the glass onto the porcelain ground a thousand feet below. He wanted to see the ships explode and bum and sailors run in every direction, to see the port in mins while the city, in the shelter of the large bronze gates, looked on peacefully.

  Space was a prison and he knew it. He was going to roam for ten years in this prison. Rage and anxiety welled up inside him. He could see in his mind’s eye the shining gates of the old free city, hear the rumblings of the ancient and savage life on Earth.

  “I know just how you feel,” said Tial, “I’ve seen others, but none quite like you. Most of them scream, shout, threaten, beg. But at the end of three months they feel at home in space. I hope you will, too. Frankly, I’m not sure you will. I hope that somewhere else, on another world, you’ll find something similar to this city. I think this one will be very different when you come back in a thousand years.”

  Algan turned slowly. His eyes shone. One thousand years. It was the fall, the flight into time that he dreaded most; he had never wanted to talk about it. Ten light-years there and one thousand years here. The port would be unchanged, but the city would have disappeared.

  “I’ll be dead when you come back, that is, if you want to see the Earth. And everyone here will have forgotten me. I hope you will no longer hate* me then. In any event, it will not matter in the least. There will be other men, and they will be doing the same simple and difficult things. Sometimes I say to myself that we are lost, not so much in space as in time. Two thousand five hundred years ago, when men first started their voyages of exploration on the Earth, in ships that were wind-propelled, the distance from one place to its antipode was almost as insurmountable to the explorers as the walls of a cell are to a prisoner. Yet now we roam amid the stars. But we are still prisoners of time, more than ever.”

  “Stop it, stop it.”

  The sound of those years going by was like the sound of grains of sand tapping against the sides of an hourglass. This was senseless. One thousand years. Glaciers could spread, oceans rise or dry up. The people he knew on Earth would be dead. In the new worlds, everyone lived alone, worked, traded within his own time span. Ships came in and left with the flow and ebb of the years. On the Puritan Planets marriage was forbidden by law because of its immoral consequences; one month of traveling made a son older than his father.

  This was understandable. Men were thrown like grains of sand against the stars. They were so weak, so alone.

  But he, Algan, was the product of the old Earth. This couldn’t be happening to him. He couldn’t accept it. His universe was a limited one along a curved horizon; it held lifelong friendships, an old family house, and the land of his forefathers.

  “A backward, bestial point of view,” sneered the people on the Puritan Planets.

  Maybe. Maybe they were right. Maybe man had to . change, broaden his views to keep up with his new environment, the Galaxy; much of it was still unexplored after five centuries of space history.

  But this was the Future, and like all the inhabitants of ancient cities, like the inhabitants of the Earth who were universally despised, Algan felt himself to be a man of the Past.

  “I don’t like all the methods of the government,” Hal said gently, “but in some ways I think they are good. I, too, am a man of the Past, in my way, which is different from yours, because I wasn’t born on this planet. I’m trying to understand you. I know that after me there will be other men who will deal more harshly with the people from the old cities; these men will no longer know anything of the glory of the Earth. I want you to realize this. People like you, Jerg, are condemned for at least one thousand years. One thousand years in this world. When you come back there will be no one who can understand you. But perhaps some of the new planets will have a history by then. A history that is different, slower-moving, more peaceful than the Earth’s, but a history nonetheless. As yet, there are so few of us in space. There are more inhabitable worlds in the Galaxy than there are men. Our empire is so fragile. That’s why we are forced io send out, so far away, even those who don’t want to leave their world. We are spread awfully thin. Try to understand, Jerg.”

  / have one thousand years to destroy this, Algan thought. One thousand or ten; it comes to the same thing.

  A long vibration shook the port. A spaceship was rocketing up from a fiery pad. The sky seemed to darken as the ship rose majestically into the atmosphere. When it reached a height of one thousand kilometers, in an almost total vacuum, its reactors would go out and its nuclear propeller would take over. It would speed up almost to the velocity of light—and time for its passengers would come to a stop—and then it would leap into lateral space and there, motionless, during its crew’s long sleep, it would drift, outside of time, carried along by one of the great currents of the universe toward its distant and perhaps still unexplored destination.

  “A pleasant trip, Algan,” said Jor Tial.

  “Thank you,” Algan replied coldly. But his eyes were not on Tial’s; they were searching the sky.

  CHAPTER II

  The Stellar Part

  There were as many invisible threads crisscrossing the universe as there were possible trajectories for a ship. These threads made up something like a canvas and each knot in the canvas was a world, a port. The oldest of these stellar knots, the one from which had sailed the first ships in quest of unimaginable worlds, was the port of Dark. It had been like a spore explosion in those heroic times. Expansion had slowed down in the course of centuries. Not that all the worlds had been explored or that all the explored worlds were inhabited, but because humanity was thinning out. Whole systems were inhabited by only a few families. The most densely populated planets had less than a hundred thousand inhabitants, although there were a few cities in the Galaxy with a population of over fifty million.

  It was a time of paradoxes. Not the least of these was the vastness of these cities and the deserted planets. But the traffic of a port, because of its size, required the presence of ever-increasing numbers of men. Machines had been the beginning of a solution. There had been cities of a hundred million inhabitants spread over an entire continent during the heroic times, when for one single man in a spaceship ten thousand men were required on the Earth for the maintenance and repair of the port equipment. But the machines had made it possible to send forth most of the inhabitants of the cities to conquer new worlds. The most ancient cities, like Dark on the Earth, Tugar on Mars, Olnir on Tetla, were only shadows of the gigantic capitals they had once been. Those had been and still were, though widely separated, times of conquest and glory. A man could be his own master, but his life was not worth very much.

  Sometimes an entire stellar region sank into silence. It might be a century before the fate of its inhabitants was known. Sometimes they had disappeared altogether and the planet would be classified as dangerous. At other times it was only that they had given up all technological civilization and had simply neglected to turn on their transradios. Sociologists would study these neo-primitives with great interest when their attention was not taken up by the number of worlds and societies which grew up, lived, and died.

  Humanity flocked into space, but it also became lo
st in Time. The planets themselves did not experience the passing of time at the same speed: this varied according to their density or the rate of speed at which they revolved around their axes or their distance from the center of the Galaxy. And those segments of space trips which took place at the speed of light presented odd chronological pitfalls to travelers.

  History, as a continuous passing of time, no longer had any meaning. During the five centuries of conquest, as measured in Earth time, history had been a sort of fibrous matter in which it was difficult to discern cause and effect. Wars no longer had any meaning. The central government, whose seat was on a giant planet near Betelgeuse, was an effective and lasting symbol both in space and time, a symbol of unity which local authorities called upon. It seemed as though the rays of the enormous red star which was visible from one end to the other of the human Galaxy carried far and wide the will of central authority. Actually the governing planet did not revolve around the red giant but around a lesser, neighboring star, but the frightened or surprised looks of those who feared or admired the center of the largest human civilization turned instinctively toward Betelgeuse. Its name was whispered as if the brilliance of that star were indeed an indication of the power of its neighbors.

  However, had new cultures and civilizations grown up on each planet, the central government could not have lasted nor kept up its influence.

  But that distortion in time, experienced by all human societies which depended upon intersidereal voyages, had prevented the rise of individualism. There was a traditional loyalty throughout the Galaxy to the central government in Betelgeuse because its very endurance represented the only security in these times of permanent dislocation.

  The central government sent its officials, its researchers, and its pioneers into all the known worlds of the Galaxy. When they came back, bringing information that was already centuries old, the men in Betelgeuse who were responsible for the destiny of the Galaxy were no longer there. The very names of those who had made the arrangements for their trip were, more often than not, forgotten. But it was immaterial. Data piled up in the giant memory banks of the computers of Betelgeuse; plans that were to be put into effect five hundred years later in some distant section of the Galaxy were drawn up to the last detail.