The Perfect Host (38 page)

“The four ships made a square, perhaps two miles on a side. There was a dim purple glow from a single plate on each side of each ship, and from this purple spot a blackness gathered and spread. Whether it was gas or dust or a substance, we could not tell. It reached out from the four ships, filling the square of space between them, blotting out the stars, until it lay like a great black blanket in space.

“And then lights appeared on the expanse of blackness—a yellow triangle, a red circle, a series of coruscating amber lines, moving and merging, writhing about, forming mosaic and kaleidoscopic patterns. We were all three spellbound, watching them, and this, apparently, was what the aliens wanted of us.

“For they began to show us pictures, and never have there been such pictures, such blendings of color and proportion. The black velvet of the screen on which they were projected—or which projected them to us—lent a depth that made the screen more a vast window through which we looked at happenings, rather than a mere picture. I could understand why Falu cried out wordlessly and leapt to his feet when the designs faded away and were replaced suddenly, brilliantly, by the picture that had burned in his brain since he was a downy youth; for here, with colors and depth, was the shape of his dream.

“A ship. An Earth ship.

“The
Falu
herself.

“She was shown from behind and above, gleaming and beautiful, and before her were the edge of the red sun and the cloudy planet we had seen.

“We saw the planet come nearer, but with the action speeded up so that it swelled visibly, and we understood that this would be a reenactment of what had happened to the
Falu
.

“Until the planet was a great curving mass filling the lower half of the picture, the
Falu’s
broad shining back was in the foreground, but now it receded from us, curving down and away toward the clouds. And suddenly the picture was gone.

“It was replaced by another view of the cloudy sphere, and in a moment there was a rift in the clouds through which we saw a valley, not brown like the ones we had actually seen, but green and lush. There
was a river set about with groves of feathery trees, and there were rolling fields under cultivation. Some of these were blood-red, some fallow, some pale blue with blossoms. It was a rich and peaceful valley.

“The view followed it upstream. There were boats on the water, moving rapidly without sails or turbulence in their wakes, and soon there was a city.

“It was a low, wide city of low, wide houses, not crowded together like Earth cities, but parklike. The water’s edge was not bunioned with cramped and rusty sheds and quays, but forest and lawn. We could see the prim openings here and there into which towboats and barges slipped into the bank and disappeared, probably to underground terminals.

“The view, the camera-eye, swept down into the city and slowed, as if one were driving through the wide streets. As it swung from side to side, we saw the planet’s people.

“They were not human. They were bipeds with strange flexible legs having two knee-joints each. Their arms were set low on their bodies, and were jointed differently from those of humanity, bending up and downward like the claws of a mantis, rather than down and forward like the arms of a man. Their heads and faces were tiny and grotesquely human, except for the placement of ear-flaps where cheekbones should be. Their bodies extended downward past the hips, terminating in a flattened point on which they sat, bracing themselves with legs folded to make a three-point support; they used no chairs.

“They were busy people. We saw pictures of them making metal beams in great automatic forges, growing food in tanks, and making paint and tools. There were beds of truly gorgeous flowers, and parks in which were shapes of stone that must have been sculpture, though none resembled the people; but people walked among them.

“Through the city the pictures took us, and it was a wondrous thing. It made one realize that this was a people completely in command of itself; that it used its resources and did not abuse them; that the stretches of wild country we saw around the city were so because the people wanted it so, and not because there was any frontier which they could not conquer.

“Outside the city again the pictures showed us a wide expanse that at first view seemed to be an airfield; indeed it was so, but it was something more. There were launching cradles on which rested great ships—ships ten times the size of the
Falu
and the
Gryce
, though of roughly the same pattern; and in addition were the bowl-ships, a row of perhaps thirty of them. There were some small ones, but most of them were two hundred feet or more across.

“Then, in a beautifully synthesized picture diagram, we saw one of the ovoid ships leave its cradle in a cloud of flame, and mount the sky; and behind it appeared a silver dotted line, while the whole picture contracted as if the camera were leaping away from the planet, back and back, until it was a ball again, and the dotted line showing us the course of the ship; and still back and back, until the red sun itself was a small disk and the cloudy planet a dot, and the dotted silver line reached outward until it touched another planet.

“And suddenly, making us gasp with the brilliance of it, the same dotted silver lines appeared throughout a system of the red sun and seven planets—a great silver network of them.

“Hawton said, ‘I don’t understand.’

“Falu Englehart growled at him, without turning his face from the screen, ‘Their commerce, stupid. They’re showing us that they have a highly developed space commerce.’

“The pictures changed again; again we saw the spaceport, and the aircraft, and the rocketship ramps, and the camera swung to show us the bowl-ships. One of them lifted; but here was no screaming flame, no gout of dust. Here was simply the balloonlike lifting of the whole sweetly curved structure of the ship, up and up into the iridescent sky. And now there was a golden dotted line; and again we had the breathtaking recession from the planet. But this time it was a greater one; this time it left the red sun, and the stars about it rushed together, until we saw a whole segment of the galaxy, thousands of suns. And yet the golden line went out and out, until at last it touched a blue-white star. And then there was a network again, this time golden, and so vast that one wanted to cry. For the whole galaxy seemed woven together with a fabric of golden threads.

“Hawton snorted. ‘I don’t believe it. That simply can’t be. They’re
lying to us. If they had a commerce like that, we’d have had them on Earth thousands of years ago.’

“Falu said, ‘Wait.’

“The cosmic picture winked out, and after a moment of that total blackness, we saw again the picture of Gryce’s ship, the
Falu
, spinning down into the clouds of the planet we had visited.

“As she entered the gaseous envelope, a flame appeared, purple, but blue-white at the center, around the
Falu
. And in a moment, the whole side of the planet seemed to open outward in one furious, hellish blast. Falu grunted and covered his eyes against that terrible radiance, and Horton closed his and wrinkled up his face, turning away.

“Down and down the picture-eye took us, to the infuriated clouds. It swept us along the valley we had seen before, and as we reached the same city street, we saw the people stop in the shops, in the factories and parks, and turn as one to the sky. A great glare, purple and white, filled the scene, and the ground came up once, twice, again, hurling the people off their feet, bringing the buildings down on them. Here an inhabitant holding two young ones was crushed; there another fell into the gaping mouth of a crack in the Earth, which closed on him.

“Out we were taken, to the spaceport. We saw a rocket blast off just as its cradle crumpled, and the ship wavered, turned, and crashed into the row of bowl-ships. Great ravines appeared on the smooth landing area; and then we saw, in the distance, a gleaming cliff that was not a cliff, but a towering continent of water, rushing toward us. So real was this that as it approached the picture’s foreground, we all found ourselves in our own control cabin, shaken and looking at each other foolishly.

“Now the picture was of the planet again, back and back from the planet with its ravening scar, back to show the whole system of the red sun. Again we saw the silver network, and part of the greater, golden one; and where they based on the cloudy planet, those lines dimmed and died out, until at last the planet lay deserted, alone, unwanted, and dead.

“Once more the picture brought us to the planet, only briefly, to show up again the wrack and ruin, the burned, broken, murdered thing that we had seen before with our own eyes, when the two bowl-ships had opened the clouds for us. And then the great screen went dark.

“ ‘I don’t understand,’ whispered Hawton. ‘Gryce went to that planet and something happened, something that—’

“ ‘Wait,’ Falu said again.

“And now the two bowl-ships which bore between them, on beams of orange light, the great rock which was as big as our factory on Earth, came forward. They swung the rock between us and the strange black screen steadied it, and their orange rays disappeared. The ships withdrew to a point above us.

“There was a picture again on the huge screen, a picture of our ship, seen from a point just at the other side of the floating rock. We saw, at the side of the image of our ship, a movement, as something came from it toward the rock. It drifted out until it touched the rock, and just before it touched, we saw it was a piece of metal, a block. Then the picture disappeared, to be replaced immediately by the same scene, the only difference being that the object, when it came near enough to see, was a metal disk. Again the picture disappeared and repeated itself, but this time the object which came from our ship was a cube.

“Again and again this was repeated, this scene of some object being projected from our ship to the rock, and each time the object was different. Sometimes it was metal with a silver or golden luster, and sometimes it was a smaller piece of rock, and sometimes a red or green or yellow lump of plastic. I understood what they wanted of us, but said nothing.”

(Why did Gudge never, or almost never, speak?)

“Falu, watching this reiteration for the twentieth time, said, ‘They want us to do something. They want us to throw something out to that rock. I wonder what exactly they want us to throw?’

“And Hawton said, ‘From the looks of those pictures, it might be almost anything.’

“Falu said, ‘Well, let’s throw something. Gudge—’

“But I had already gone, as soon as Falu said he wanted it done. In the after storeroom was a dense roll of insulex for space repair. There was more. It weighed four hundred pounds on Earth, but nothing here, of course. I cast off its buckle-clamps and brought it out to the disposal chute. Beside it I put a pressure-bottle of carbon dioxide. Then I waited. Falu came aft to watch me, and said, ‘You know, Gudge, sometimes I wonder just where the limits of your mind are. Yes, I’ll turn the ship.’ He was always surprised when I understood anything before he did. Hawton was never surprised. He forgot it, time and time again, because he wanted to.

“With the steering jets Falu gently nudged the ship over so that the disposal lock pointed directly at the rock. As soon as his jets appeared, the pictures on the black screen ceased, and all of the ships around us withdrew perhaps a hundred miles, in a single instant.

“I put the roll of insulex and the bottle in the disposal lock, tripped the trigger on the bottle, and slammed the inside port as the carbon dioxide began whistling out. In a moment the bottle was empty and the lock full of gas under pressure. When Falu had steadied the ship and called out to me, I turned the valve that opened the outer port, and with a
whoosh
the gas swept out, taking the insulex with it. Then I went to the control room and stood again behind Falu, where I could see the forward visiscreen.

“The bulky roll turned slowly end over end as it flew, in the spot of light that Hawton kept on it with the pistol-grip control over the chart table. It needed no light when it struck, though—

“And I thought it was going to miss! It barely touched, and yet—

“Before us, we saw a miniature of what had happened to the cloudy planet—a miniature, because it was only a roll of insulex and a fragment of rock compared with the mass of the
Falu
and an entire planet. But it was a miniature close to our eyes, too close. Had we known, we could have put the filters up over the viewing cells; at least we could have looked away.

“In the split second before the cells went out, we got a flash of that white and purple radiance that was knives in our eyes, and then blindness, for our ship and for us. And I know that as I lie dying I shall carry still a tattered shard of that frightful brilliance in my old
eyes. In that moment there was nothing to do, no thought to pass, no move to make but to claw at the eyes which had captured and held white flame behind their lids.

“It was an hour before we could see dimly again, and six before we could ship new cells on the forward and low starboard viewers.

“And there on the restored screen we saw the seven bowl-ships, patiently and passively waiting some sign from us. Falu shoved the trembling, red-eyed Hawton aside and grasped the searchlight grip. ‘I want the rest of it,’ he said. His face was deeply scored, pouchy. The loss of his dream of finding Gryce was as much as he could bear—all the burden he could ever carry. Anything else he might learn would be a small thing indeed. He blinked the light.

“The four bowl-ships had restored, or rebuilt, the great screen. Again we saw the shifting patterns and mosaics, which were apparently their ‘ready’ signal. And then there were more pictures.

“First a picture of our roll of insulex and the rock, and then, in that bewildering fashion, the picture became a diagram. The roll of insulex turned into a glowing ruby color, ran together, separated into two blobs which in turn became two cubes. They approached each other, touched, separated, touched again, separated and were still.