Balance of Power (2 page)

Nieland understood. He understood perfectly. Because his problem was ours, in miniature. His project, like ours, had been funded grudgingly. Like ours, it was a project whose purpose was hard to assess in terms of money. Like us, he had to have something to show for it at the end. He had to make some kind of profit. Unlike us, he couldn’t do it by sheer weight of paperwork and the ritualistic pretense that facts and figures were additions to the sum of human understanding. He needed something more obvious than that.

In the long run, so would we. If the space program were to be revived we’d have to come up with some very good reasons for its revival. We had set out not knowing quite what we might find to serve our purpose, but determined to find something. (I, at least, was determined. I sometimes had my doubts about my companions.) Nieland was in very much the same sort of position. He felt that it was wrong that the colony should adopt a policy of determined insularity in search of solutions to its problems. He felt, without perhaps having any real reason for his feeling, that the answer might lie beyond the horizon, across the ocean. He felt that it was
necessary
that the colony should have
something
beyond its horizons, lest those horizons shrink and the colony should die without ever having investigated the possibilities open to it. Such a feeling can be a hard thing to justify, in economic terms.

I think that Nieland looked to me for moral support. And he also hoped that I might find whatever it was that he was looking for. It was rather touching, in a way. Except that I didn’t feel any more capable than he did, save in the more optimistic flights of my wildest imagination.

“Your men will be pleased,” said Ling to Ogburn. “They will be very glad to sight land.”

Ogburn was already rising from his chair, pouring the last of his coffee-substitute down his throat.

“Haven’t yet,” he said, gruffly, as he moved toward the door. “An’ the land may be wo’se than the sea.”

He left, slamming the door behind him.

“Cheerful soul,” I commented. It was not the first time I’d passed the comment. It was getting to be a cliché.

“I wouldn’t bank on our landfall coining as any relief,” said Mariel to Nieland. “The only thing that would make them happy would be to turn tail and run with the wind behind us. They’re a long way from home now, and the money you paid out to them when they signed on is a long way away, along with all the things it can buy. The bonus they get on completing the trip doesn’t look a tenth as attractive now as it did then. I think there’ll be trouble.”

“I think we can trust Ogburn,” said Ling.

“He’s a strong man,” said Nieland. “He’ll keep them in line.”

Mariel bowed her head, deferring to their statements out of diplomacy. The question that was in her head, and mine, was: Who’s going to keep
him
in line? But we left it unvoiced, and let silence descend.

Outside, we could hear the tiny sound of little wavelets lapping against the timbers.

For the millionth time, I wished I’d never set out on this lousy trip. I felt very sorry for Mariel, who had much the same feeling, but also the desperate knowledge that this was the only hope of her reaching the aliens...her only hope of making the contact which was her reason for being here.

When they had tried to cultivate local produce on a large scale they had affected the ecological balance of the area and created problems. Local pests and parasites, normally controlled by the balance of nature, had become uncontrollable. They had been forced to fight for their sustenance, and for their lives. One by one, they beat the problems, but one by one more emerged. A colony on an alien world, no matter how effective the survey has been, has a great deal to learn, and the processes of learning can be expensive.

Lambda’s colony had never managed to get into the positive feedback loop in which their endeavors would have made subsequent endeavors much easier. All their efforts had been sidetracked into the simple battle for survival. They had faced no major crises, but one long enduring series of sub-crises. They had not managed to start their industrial revolution, despite knowing how. They knew where to find the iron ore, the coal, the oil...but they just could not free the manpower to begin the necessary flow of supplies.

Knowing how had, in a way, made it worse. It had made them frustrated, had given them a bitter sense of failure.

The visit of the
Daedalus
would almost certainly turn the battle their way. Our laboratory could put right their food-supply problems without too much difficulty. We could engineer their crops to suit the changed circumstances, and help to eliminate the pests. At the very least we could win them another decade’s breathing space. On top of what they already had, that should be enough. The feedback process would begin.

But our arrival hadn’t made them any happier. In a way, it had reminded them of their failure. They had not made it on their own. Now they needed help. They resented our coming. They resented the necessity of what we had come to do. I couldn’t blame them for that.

I’d left Conrad and Linda to take care of the routine work in the colony, largely because I felt that it was my turn to join Mariel as part of the contact team. I’d felt guilty at the time, but now I was regretting my determination. I felt I’d missed out on Wildeblood, remaining in the colony while Conrad and Linda went with Mariel, but by now I was quite prepared to miss out again, if only I could be sure that this particular expedition would some day sail safely home. Curiously, I would have felt a lot safer had there been someone else along. The responsibility of being Mariel’s sole companion and guardian weighed a little heavy upon me. But there had been no way that we could spare another biologist, and Karen had been required because there was a good deal of work to be done on the ship’s equipment and stores. We hadn’t had much of a chance to effect repairs on Arcadia; we had to do work now if we were going to complete our mission by going on to a sixth world.

“The trouble is,” I mused, aloud—feeling obliged to make some contribution to the anxious conversation—”that they really are going to find Delta alien. The two continents were never connected at any time during the entire geological history of this planet. Such continental drift as there has been has simply been a partial fragmentation of the initial land masses. The living things on the two continents have to go right back to the initial invasion from the sea to find a common ancestry—and even there the characteristic marine fauna of this continental shelf is very different from that of Lambda’s except at the microscopic level.

“Delta is much more heavily forested than Lambda over the entire southern bulge, except for a grassland plain in the middle and some mountainous regions. Only in the north, where it begins to thin out into the curlicue do you have conditions similar to those in the colony. The colony has a complex weather pattern because of the relative nearness of the three seas, but Delta doesn’t. Its rainfall is much more seasonal. That’s why the colony was planted on Lambda, of course—but it also means that Delta has evolved a life-system very different from what you’re used to. Most significantly, there are the aliens. But it’s not just them. The birds you saw resting in the rigging are unfamiliar species—and every other species of bird, animal or reptile that we see will be unfamiliar, too. It isn’t the kind of terrain your men are used to. They’re not going to be able to feel at home there.”

I could have added more. I could have added that the aliens themselves were likely to prove fearsome. They would be about a head taller than Ogburn, who was a big man by colony standards—even the females would be his size—and their faces would have what seemed to a human to be an inherent ferocity—a nose like a cat’s, with the same split upper lip and front teeth built for rending as much as for slicing. Their ears would be perched high at the sides of their heads, tufted like those of a lynx. Their bodies would be covered with a light but usually highly colored fur, dappled yellow and brown. They would be bipedal, but would be bound to give the impression of a gorilla rather than a man.

“We have to think of something to maintain our equilibrium,” said Nieland. “I’d offer them more money, but it isn’t mine to offer, and we’re a long way from the places they can spend it. I almost wish that I could promise them loot of some kind...an El Dorado lost in the forests. Something that would make their minds come alive.”

“That’s a dangerous policy,” I said.

“And they wouldn’t believe me anyhow,” he added.

I glanced at Mariel, knowing that she wasn’t going to like my next suggestion, but seeing no alternative.

“We’ve only one reasonable incentive to offer them,” I said. “And that’s to offer to shorten our stay. Say that if they get the base established quickly, and can make contact with the aliens without much trouble, then we’ll cut our stay by half. If they know that the faster we get things done the faster we can go home, they’ll work.”

“It won’t leave us enough time,” said Mariel. “I have to have time.”

“These men don’t have our sense of mission,” I told her gently. “They’re not stupid men, or even particularly unreasonable men...but you know their priorities and understand their anxieties better than anyone. You know that our aims mean nothing to them. If we try to force them to do everything our way they’re just going to get angrier. They already think we’re insane.”

“You may say they’re not stupid,” she said, “but they have closed minds. They’re not willing to listen to argument. That’s not reasonable.”

“All the more reason for compromise,” I said. “If we can’t make them see our way of thinking...then we have to concede ground to theirs.”

“It seems a pity,” said Ling.

“But there’ll be another day,” said Nieland. “Once we’ve been here and returned home, the dam is broached. We’ll have proved it can be done. That’s the main thing. We can always come back.”

“You
can,” said Mariel.

“Our first priority is to help the colony,” I reminded her. “The contact mission is secondary. You know that I think it’s important—hell, you know that I feel almost as strongly as you do. But it won’t be the end of everything if you can’t follow through as you’d like to. You’ve already achieved a great deal on Wildeblood. You don’t have to prove yourself all over again.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. The way she said it made me feel that I didn’t.

“Nevertheless,” I said, “that’s how we’re going to do it. We establish the base. We try to make contact. If they’re ready to come and talk to us, okay. But if they’re not interested we’re not chasing them...and if they show any sign of hostility we get out. Fast.”

“That doesn’t give me a
chance
to get over any barriers,” she complained. “And these people
need
that chance. Who else is going to get over any difficulties the way I could? Is there anyone in the colony with the gift of tongues? If the other expeditions really
were
destroyed by the aliens then my talent may be the only hope we have of finding out why and making sure that it doesn’t happen again. The colony can’t isolate itself forever...someday, now or in a thousand years, it’s going to have to contact the aliens.”