The officers of the Rurik sat at a long rough table, under trees whose rustling was not quite like that of any trees on Earth. They looked toward Holbrook and Grushenko, and they listened.
“So we got the jet aloft,” finished Holbrook. “We, uh, took a long route home—didn’t see any, uh, pursuit—” He swore at himself and sat down. “That’s all, I guess.”
Captain Svenstrup stroked his red beard and said heavily: “Well, ladies and gentlemen. The problem is whether we hide out for a while in hopes of some lucky chance, or evacuate this system at once.”
“You forget that we might fight!”
Ekaterina Ivanovna Saburov said it in a voice that rang. The blood leaped up in her wide, high-boned face; under her battered cap, Tau Ceti tinged the short wheaten hair with copper.
“Fight?” Svenstrup skinned his teeth. “A hundred humans, one spaceship, against a whole planet?”
The young woman rose to her feet. Even through the baggy green tunic and breeches of her uniform—she had clung to it after the mutiny, Red Star and all—she was big and supple. Holbrook’s heart stumbled, rose again, and hurried through a dark emptiness. She clapped a hand to her pistol and said: “But they do not belong on this planet. They must be strangers too, as far from home as we. Shall we run just because their technology is a little ahead of ours? My nation never felt that was an excuse to surrender her own soil!”
“No,” mumbled Domingo Ximénez. “Instead you went on to plunder the soil of everyone else.”
“Quiet, there!” roared Svenstrup.
His eyes flickered back and forth, down the table and across the camp. Just inside the forest, a log cabin stood half erected; but the Finnish couple who had been making it now crouched with the rest of the crew, among guns and silence. The captain tamped tobacco into his pipe and growled: “We are all here together, Reds and Whites alike. We cannot even return to Earth without filling the ship’s reaction-mass tanks, and we need a week or more just to refine enough water. Meanwhile, non-humans are operating a mine and have killed one of us without any provocation we can imagine. They could fly over and drop one nuclear bomb, and that would be the end of man on Novaya. I’m astonished that they haven’t so far.”
“Or haven’t even been aware of us,” murmured Ekaterina. “Our boats were coming and going for a pair of months or three. Did they not notice our jet trails above the mountains? Comrades, it does not make sense!”
Ximénez said very low: “How much sense would a mind which is not human make to us?”
He crossed himself.
The gesture jarred Holbrook. Had the government of the United World S.S.R. been that careless? Crypto-libertarians had gotten aboard the Rurik, yes, but a crypto-believer in God?
Grushenko saw the movement too. His mouth lifted sardonically. “I would expect you to substitute word magic for thought,” he declared. To Svenstrup: “Captain, somehow, we have alarmed the aliens—possibly we happen to resemble another species with which they are at war—but their reasoning processes must be fundamentally akin to ours, simply because the laws of nature are the same throughout the universe. Including those laws of behavior first seen by Karl Marx.”
“Pseudo-laws for a pseudo-religion!” Holbrook was surprised at himself, the way he got it out.
Ekaterina lifted one dark brow and said, “You do not advance our cause by name calling, Lieutenant Golbrok.” Dryly: “Especially when the epithets are not even original.”
He retreated into hot-faced wretchedness. But I love you, he wanted to call out. If you are Russian and I am American, if you are Red and I am White, is that a wall between us through all space and time? Can we never be simply human, my tall darling?
“That will do,” said Svenstrup. “Let’s consider practicalities. Dr. Sugimoto, will you give us the reasons you gave me an hour ago, for assuming that the aliens come from Zolotoy?”
Holbrook started. Zolotoy—the next planet out, gold-colored in the evening sky—the enemy belonged to this same system? Then there was indeed no hope but another plunge into night.
The astronomer rose and said in singsong Russian: “It is unlikely that anyone would mine the planets of another star on so extensive a scale. It does not appear economically feasible, even if one had a spaceship which could travel nearly at light-velocity. Now long-range spectroscopy has shown Zolotoy to have a thin but essentially terrestroid atmosphere. The aliens were not wearing air suits, merely some kind of respirator—I think probably it reduces the oxygen content of their inhalations—but at any rate, they must use that gas, which is only found free on Zolotoy and Novaya in this system. The high thin bipedal shape also suggests life evolved for a lower gravity than here. If they actually heard our scouts, such sensitive ears probably developed in more tenuous air.” He sat down again and drummed on the table top with jittery fingers.
“I suppose we should have sent boats to all the other planets before landing on this one,” said Svenstrup heavily. “But there was too much impatience, the crew had been locked up too long.”
“The old captain would not have tolerated such indiscipline,” said Ekaterina.
“I won’t tolerate much more from you, either.” Svenstrup got his pipe going. “Here is my plan, We must have more information. I am going to put the Rurik into an orbit skewed to the ecliptic plane, as safe a hiding place as any. A few volunteers will stay hidden on Novaya, refining reaction-mass water and maintaining radio contact with the ship; everyone else will wait up there. One boat will go to Zolotoy and learn what it can. Its crew will not know the Rurik’s orbit; they’ll report back here. Then we can decide what to do.”
He finished grayly: “If the boat returns at all, of course.”
Grushenko stood up. Something like triumph blazed in him. “As a politico-military specialist, I have been selected and trained for linguistic ability,” he said. “Furthermore, I have had combat experience in suppressing the Brazilian capitalist uprising. I volunteer myself for the boat.”
“Good,” said Svenstrup. “We need about two more.”
Ekaterina Ivanovna Saburov smiled and said in her low, oddly gentle voice, “If a Ukrainian like Comrade Grushenko goes, a Great Russian must also be represented.” Her humor faded and she went on earnestly, overriding the captain, “My sex has nothing to do with it. I am a gunnery officer of the World Soviet Space Fleet. I spent two years on Mars, helping to establish a naval outpost. I feel myself qualified.”
Somehow, Holbrook was standing up. He stuttered incoherently for a moment. Their eyes speared him, a big square-faced young man with rumpled brown hair, brown eyes nearsighted behind contact lenses, his body drab in coveralls and boots. He got out finally: “Let Bunin take my post. I, I, I can find out something about their machinery—”
“Or die with the others,” said Svenstrup. “We need you here.”
Ekaterina spoke quietly. “Let him come, captain. Shall not an American also have the right to dare?”