SWIFT AS IT was in elapsed hours, the journey to Mars was the longest journey across space that Ben Trefon had ever experienced.
With the little scout ship’s nuclear engine providing fuel for a high-energy orbit outward, and with the null-gavity units working to make high accelerations tolerable to those inside the ship’s cabin, hardly more than eighteen hours passed before the great rusty red planet with its gleaming polar caps was looming large in the ship’s view screens. But to Ben every hour seemed like ten, and a thousand phantoms rose in his mind as he thought of the house he had left behind on the Martian desert, defenseless unless warning came in time.
Worst of all was the simple fact that Ben Trefon could not comprehend the idea of a full-scale war between Earthmen and Spacers, no matter how hard he tried. His mind balked at the thought; there was nothing in his experience, nor in his knowledge of Spacer history, that could account for such a thing being possible. As a result, he had the continuing feeling that it wasn’t really true at all, that it was merely a bad dream from which he would awaken at any moment. And the more he considered the idea the more incredible it became.
Of course he knew of the long centuries of animosity that had existed between the people who lived on the surface of the mother planet and the wandering band of outcasts who made their homes in space, on the outer planets or in the Asteroid Belt. He also knew that this animosity had flared into violence from time to time, ever since the beginning of the Spacers’ long exile from Earth. The periodic raids on the mother planet, so critical to the Spacers’ survival, never failed to whip the Earthmen into heights of frustrated rage, all the more intense because their efforts to fight off the raiders proved so feeble. This rage was reflected in the viciousness and cruelty Earthmen displayed on the rare occasions when they attempted to send out retaliatory missions against their tormentors. Space ships had been destroyed, men killed and maukis taken back to Earth in chains during those skirmishes, but to the Spacers the occasional Earth pirates had been nothing more than one of the unpleasant facts of their life in space, just another adverse condition that the Spacer clan had had to put up with in order to survive in their nomadic life.
But the Spacers’ long familiarity with space, their skill in navigation and their knowledge of interplanetary spaceways were also facts of life — facts that had given them unquestioned superiority beyond the limits of Earth’s gravitational field. Another fact of life was the horror with which Earthmen had always viewed contact with space, the dread of space travel that had always filled their minds. Space had always been the Spacers’ province; if they could not return to Earth, they had always felt themselves impregnable beyond her surface, and that impregnability had been demonstrated time and again when Earth ships had ventured out. It had been argued that nothing short of mass insanity would ever drive Earthmen to try to dislodge them from Space by force.
And now, with the fact of such a war staring them in the face, they were caught without warning. Of course, if it were true, there could be no question about the outcome of such a war, Ben Trefon thought. No ships from Earth, manned by Earthmen, could really hope to press an invasion of the Spacers’ domain successfully. But cruel and treacherous as Earthmen were, they might certainly wreak havoc before they were driven back to quarters.
Ben turned over these thoughts as he continued plotting the finer details of the ship’s course toward Mars. In a way, it was comforting to believe that Spacers were impregnable, but something in the idea caught in his mind and left him vaguely uneasy. If Earthmen had gone mad in their hatred of Spacers, there was no sign of it in his two Earth captives. Nor did they seem particularly formidable, or even evil, now that they were convinced he meant them no immediate harm. If anything, he reflected, these two seemed more stunned than treacherous, more terrified than cruel.
Yet as far as he could tell, there was nothing about Tom and Joyce Barron that made them different from other Earthmen. As brother and sister who could hardly be more than a year apart in age, they seemed very close; try as he would, Ben could not even imagine what it might be like to have a sister, but it seemed to be a very comfortable relationship. Until they had contacted the command ship they had been talking together quietly just as brothers might talk, and half the time they each seemed to know what the other was thinking.
On questioning them, Ben learned that their father was a colonel in the Earth civil defense garrison, commander of the guard units protecting the southern part of the metropolis of Chicago. Even Tom and Joyce did not know what part he might have in the launching of the Earth armada, although they seemed sure that he had known about it. Although they made no attempt to conceal their anger and frustration at being caught aboard a Spacer ship, neither could they conceal their curiosity when Ben pulled away from the command ship, set the ship moving, and began plotting orbit with the aid of the ship’s computer.
“What are you planning to do?” Tom Barron wanted to know. “What’s going to happen to us?”
“You heard what the man said,” Ben said bluntly. “We’re at war. Your ships are moving out to attack our space outposts. So that makes you enemy aliens aboard this ship, and I’m responsible for you until I can get you interned somewhere.”
“You mean we just have to stay aboard this ship forever?” Joyce Barron asked.
“Believe me, I don’t like it any better than you do,” Ben said. “But for the time being we’re stuck with it whether we like it or not.”
“Well, are you going to lock us up somewhere?”
Ben looked at the girl. “That’s up to you,” he said. “We have to count on this ship to keep us alive and get us where we want to go. But I can’t operate the ship if I have to be watching you two for tricks all the time.”
Tom Barron shrugged. “It seems to me that we don’t have much choice about it,” he said. “You won’t be operating this ship very long anyway, with our fleet in the sky. So we won’t interfere with you.”
Ben studied Tom Barron’s face. “I’ve heard that an Earthman’s word isn’t worth much,” he said.
“It’ll stand up to a Spacer’s word any time,” Joyce said hotly.
“Well, it doesn’t really matter. You wouldn’t get far trying to operate this ship, and even if you could you’d be blown out of space before you could land it on Earth. There’s no place out here for you to go without knowing where and how, so I guess I can trust you for the moment.”
Joyce Barron’s face flushed. “Maybe you want a written treaty,” she said.
“No, but I want some things understood,” Ben said. “Call them rules of the ship, if you wish.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “First, you keep your hands off the controls. You could kill us all in about ten seconds flat if you happened to pull the wrong switch. Second, you keep away from the radio. This is a Spacer ship, and from what I’ve heard any of your Earth ships we run into are likely to shoot first and ask questions later. So we won’t break radio silence unless we have to. Third, you do what you’re told to do and don’t argue. I’ve got to know where you are and what you’re doing all the time, in case anything were to go wrong with the ship. Okay?”
The Barrons looked at each other, and then nodded. “Okay,” Tom said. “But you might tell us a couple of things. We don’t even know your name.”
“You can call me Ben Trefon,” Ben said.
“And you were — born in space?”
“Of course,” Ben said, puzzled.
“There, I told you,” Tom said to his sister.
“Yes, but you still can’t be sure,” she said. Then she shook her head and whispered something in her brother’s ear.
“Well, there’s one way to find out,” Tom said.
“No, no, not now — ”
“Yes, now,” Tom told her. “We might as well know now as later.”
“Whatever are you talking about?” Ben asked.
“Let me feel your hand,” Tom challenged.
“My hand?”
“Hold it out — if you’re not afraid to.”
Ben held out his hand. To his amazement, the Earthman closed his eyes tight, reached out and touched the outstretched hand, felt the fingers and wrist, and patted his arm from wrist to elbow. Then with eyes still closed he reached up and touched Ben’s face. Finally he opened his eyes with a sigh of relief. “It’s just as I told you,” he said to Joyce. “It’s all right.”
The girl looked crestfallen. “And you’re the only one here?” she asked Ben. “I mean, you don’t have any other — crew — aboard?”
“Well, what do you expect? A hold full of monsters?” Ben turned away in disgust. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but I for one am getting hungry, and I have course corrections to make. Why don’t you break out some food?”
Following his directions, Joyce found the cupboard panel that opened out into a tiny galley. After experimenting with the heat-pump stove that worked from the ship’s heating system, she got to work heating up some canned stew and some biscuits as Tom followed Ben back to the control panel. A few moments later their mutual uneasiness was momentarily forgotten as they munched hungrily, and Ben began the complex task of plotting the final course adjustments for the run to Mars.
Tom watched him curiously as he took the plotting cards out of the computer slot, made his calculations on the backs of them, taped the new data back into the computer and waited for the revised cards to be returned. Finally curiosity won. “What are you doing with that machine?” Tom asked.
“Correcting our course,” Ben said. “The basic orbit was easy, just a matter of matching fuel against time and pointing the ship in the right direction. But we have to have the fine adjustments before we go into high gear. Once we’re on nuclear drive and really accelerating, even a minor course change might burn out the null-gravs and then we’d really be in the soup.”
“I see,” said Tom, who didn’t see at all. “But don’t you have to have starting co-ordinates before you can plot an orbit?”
“Of course. You can’t hope to make connection with any point in space unless you know where you’re starting from.”
Tom glanced up at the view screen. They were far beyond the range of the Earth ground-to-air barrage now, and all that was visible was a vast expanse of blackness peppered with stars. “So how can you ever tell where you are?”
The question seemed a little foolish to Ben. “We’re in the cabin of a ship, naturally.”
“But where’s the ship?”
“Relative to what?” Ben said. “Relative to Earth? If that’s what you mean, I don’t know and couldn’t care less. The computer could tell me, of course, if I had to find out. The important thing is where the ship is, relative to where we’re going right now. I had to establish that before I could even start this orbit. I also had to decide whether I wanted a long, low-energy orbit or a fast, high-energy course. Now I’ve got time to pin down the details and see just how fast we can afford to travel to intersect Mars’s orbit in the shortest possible elapsed time.”
“You mean you can pick your travel time?” Tom asked incredulously.
“Within the ship’s energy limits, yes. We have so much energy potential in the reactors. If we picked the highest-energy orbit to Mars that our fuel supply would allow, we could probably be landing within forty minutes including acceleration and deceleration — except that the acceleration we’d have to undertake would burn out the null-grav units in ten seconds and we’d be smashed into a pulp ten seconds later.”
Tom Barron frowned. “But I thought your antigravity generators were only good for landing and taking off from planetary surfaces.”
“Why? Why should they be limited to that? You measure acceleration in gravities, don’t you? And a human being without protection in a space ship can only tolerate a few gravities for a few minutes. Without null-G this trip would take us months, and even then we’d have to tolerate weighing four hundred pounds apiece for about half the time. Null-G takes the weight off us and puts it on the ship’s generators, which cut into the total fuel supply but still give us speed. So we balance fuel available against the maximum acceleration gravities the null-G units can handle, and that gives us the highest-energy orbit the ship is capable of and tells us our travel time. See what I mean?”
“I guess so,” Tom said dubiously. “But I still don’t see how you can ever locate yourself definitely relative to anything when you move around the way you do.”
“Well, obviously I have to have a baseline somewhere. We use our central dispatching station at Asteroid Central as a baseline. Otherwise we just plain couldn’t navigate in space. The computer at Central keeps running tabs on every known chunk of orbiting land mass in the solar system, relative to itself in its own orbit around the sun. So at any given instant the main computer can tell where each of the planets is in its orbit, how fast it is moving at the time, how rapidly it’s accelerating or decelerating in its orbit at the moment, and where Asteroid Central is in relation to it. That way any ship that leaves Asteroid Central can blank its own computer and file in its baseline co-ordinates at that particular point in time and space. It just lifts that chunk of information from the main computer. And then, to get a fix later the pilot just has to calculate back. Of course, every movement the ship makes after leaving Central is automatically filed into its own computer.”
Tom peered at the shiny bank of dials on the control panel. “That must be quite some little computer,” he said.
“It has to be. Its capacity is pretty amazing, but the pilot still has to do some of the work. On Asteroid Central the main computer does it all.” Ben scribbled once more on a card, punched the feeder tape running down into the computer, waited a few moments until the return card dropped down in the slot, and finally began setting the ship’s controls. Then he rechecked the figures, and shook his head. “It’s going to be slow,” he said. “We’re already fifteen degrees out of opposition with Mars, and losing ground all the time. We can do it in another seventeen hours if we accelerate for fourteen of them, and if the null-gravs don’t burn out when we try to slow down in three. But that’s the best we can do.” He made some final adjustments in the dials. “That should do it. Now here we go.”
He threw the drive switches, and sank back in the control chair with a sigh. There was a low-pitched rumble from somewhere in the rear of the ship, and a slight vibration beneath their feet; otherwise, nothing seemed to have happened. For a moment or two the star pattern in the view screen shifted slowly, then fixed again. The ship seemed to be standing still in the blackness.
Joyce joined them at the control panel as Ben was setting the dials. Now she said, “What’s wrong?”
“Not a thing,” Ben Trefon said.
“But nothing’s happening, we’re just standing still.”
Ben grinned. “You think so, eh?” He braced his feet, hooked his arm around a shock bar on the control panel, and then turned the null-gravity dial a fraction of a degree. Abruptly he felt the acceleration tugging at his arm; Tom and Joyce Barron began staggering back across the cabin as though drawn by a giant vacuum cleaner. Ben snapped the dial back sharply, and his prisoners jerked forward again, fighting to keep their balance.
“We’re moving, all right,” Ben assured them. “If the null-G’s weren’t working now, our acceleration would be quietly squeezing you through the rear bulkhead into the engine room, so you’d better just pray that nothing goes wrong with our generators.”
Visibly impressed, Joyce Barron stared out the view screen. “So we’re going to Mars.” She hesitated. “Are there any laboratories there?”
“Just some observation labs, and the Botanical Experiment Station. But we’re not going there. We’re going to my home.”
Joyce looked startled. “You mean you live on Mars?”
“Sometimes.”
“But I thought you people lived in space ships!”
“We do — sometimes. But you can’t grow food on a space ship. You can’t raise children there, either, or forge tools, or manufacture ships. Spacers have homes all over the solar system. It so happens that the House of Trefon has always been on Mars.”
“Trefon,” the girl said thoughtfully. “I never heard a name like that before.”
Ben laughed. “Maybe that’s because there isn’t any. I mean, officially. That’s just my short name. On the records I’m Benjamin Ivanovitch Trefonovsky, but that’s too clumsy to use. Ben Trefon works much better.”
The girl was looking at him with distaste. “Then you must be descended from the Russian traitors,” she said contemptuously.
“From the Russian space garrison, yes. From traitors, no. The Trefons have never been traitors.”
“They betrayed their government during the Great War, didn’t they?” Joyce Barron said indignantly. “Everybody knows that. They conspired with the American and British traitors and sold out their countries when they were needed the most.”
“They refused to burn their home planet to a cinder, that’s true,” Ben said slowly. “Maybe that’s your idea of treachery. But if it hadn’t been for the peace in space, there’d be nothing left on Earth at all, nothing. You wouldn’t be alive and neither would anybody else. But I don’t suppose you’d believe that, with all the lies your government tells you.”
“You can’t deny historical fact,” the girl exclaimed.
“I can, if it’s written by liars,” Ben retorted angrily. “I’ve heard about the lies they teach you on Earth. Well, that’s your concern. You can go ahead and believe them if you want, but don’t try to tell them to me.”
He turned away with a strange feeling of weariness and disgust. It was the old, old argument he had heard so many times before, and it was just as false and evil now as it ever was. Lies, officially presented as history and drummed into their heads from childhood on until they accepted them blindly and wouldn’t even consider that they might not be the truth. It must be true, Ben thought, what he had heard about the vicious propaganda that all Earthmen had thrown at them constantly; here were two in his own ship spouting it back at him. It was no wonder that there was no end to the bitterness between Earthmen and Spacers.
But he knew that there was no sense arguing the question now. He didn’t really care if his prisoners thought he was descended from traitors — why should he care what they thought? They were prisoners of war now, and nothing more, and he had other things more important to worry about.
He checked the controls, rechecked the pre-calculated orbit to be sure the ship was following precisely, and then fought down a yawn. “Look,” he said to Tom, “I haven’t slept for two days. The ship is on automatic so it won’t require checking for a while. I’m going to try to rest, and you two would be smart to get some sleep too. We may not have much chance when we get where we’re going.”
He threw himself down on an acceleration cot, feeling the vibration of the ship’s engines throbbing through his body as the ship moved out in the great arc that would take him to Mars and home. His body ached, and he desperately wanted to sleep, but rest was not easy. He could let his body sag and relax, but he could not throw off the vast weight of apprehension that lay on his mind, plaguing him as he thought of his father’s last words to him, and of the House of Trefon on the desert plateau above the Great Rift on Mars.
He had to get warning there in time. Anything else was unthinkable. He thought of the long history of the House of Trefon, of the pride and honor of his grandfather and his father in that house and of the unselfish leadership they had provided the Spacer clan. If the House of Trefon were to fall to an invading fleet from Earth, far more would be lost than a few lives and a house on the Martian desert….
He forced the thought out of his mind angrily, and thought instead of the happy days he had spent in his father’s house, the long exploratory trips they used to take down into the Rift, or north to the dessicated ruins of the Martian cities, the silent monuments of the race that had once lived on that planet before its water had gone, so very different from human beings and yet so strangely similar, from the evidence they had left behind them. As a race the Martians had perished, unable to escape a dying planet and unable to survive upon it. And eons later, another race of creatures on the blue-green planet closer to the sun had been threatened by extinction by their own hands and had survived only because a few of them had discovered a larger challenge than their own ambitions.
Ben thought of Joyce Barron’s scornful words, and again anger rose in his mind. He knew the true story of the Spacers’ exile, of course. Every Spacer did. It was recorded in the log books of the earliest space garrisons that existed before the Great War. Parts of it had been pieced together from official documents; much had been handed down from father to son. Ben had heard the story time and again in the songs and ballads of the maukis, and that more than anything had driven it into the very fiber of his mind, for the mournful chants of the maukis were one of the most powerful forces that bound all Spacers together in their loneliness.
So Ben Trefon knew that there had been a time when Earth had been divided against itself in a bitter war. For more than a century the two greatest nations on Earth had pitted themselves against each other, building horrible weapons and mounting massive artillery against the day when nuclear war would come. Outposts in space had become an important part of that race for armament, as the great powers competed to mount manned satellites in orbit around the Earth, armed with weapons powerful enough to smash the planet into fragments. Earth’s moon was explored and turned into a fortress; Mars and Venus were probed and even the asteroids were explored and exploited for the radioactive riches they contained.
A nuclear war, sooner or later, had seemed inevitable. In the council halls and government strongholds on Earth the jousting had become more and more desperate, until the final blow seemed only a matter of time. By then both sides knew that the final blow would come from the space garrisons, and both sides on Earth had built their hopes and their defenses in the powerful forces beyond the planet’s surface.
But in space an incredible thing happened. For those early pioneers in space, violent danger and sudden death were constant companions. Survival alone was a never ending, unremitting battle against fearful odds. To those men food, shelter, oxygen and water were the vital issues, and the ideas that divided the nations on Earth in their remoteness seemed petty and quibbling to these men who fought their hearts out merely to survive. It was not so strange that an esprit de corps grew up among them, a sense of closeness in the face of death, a common loyalty that seemed to override the importance of the nations of their birth and the politics of their governments. Nor was it strange that this common loyalty to themselves as men brought with it a new kind of sanity and opened their eyes to values their governments on Earth had long forgotten.
They realized that they held in their hands weapons that could wipe their home planet barren of life. At first as individuals and then in frank conspiracy they realized that these weapons must never be used. So, when the moment of truth arrived in the councils on Earth, and the Earth forces delivered their blows at each other, expecting the massive backing of their garrisons in space, the men in those garrisons drew together shoulder to shoulder and withheld the devastating attack they were expected to deliver.
There had surely been a conspiracy, Ben Trefon thought, but a conspiracy to draw the teeth of the warring factions on Earth. The Earth councils had raged and threatened and pleaded, and finally had gone on to fight their war as best they could, but its force was blunted as the space garrisons refused to deliver the suicidal blow. After the dust of the war had settled, those brave men in space reaped the reward of their deed as the councils on Earth turned against them in frustration and hatred. It was a bitter reward, and time did not change it. Branded as traitors, they were exiled from the planet of their birth, driven back when they attempted to come home, forced to take up a lonely, wandering life in the great emptiness of space beyond the boundaries of Earth.
This was the history of the Spacers that every Spacer knew: the history of a group of people cast out and reviled, with cruel injustice, by a homeland that became more bitter as the years passed. And now, Ben thought sleepily, injustice was heaped upon injustice, for the outcasts could not even be left alone to live in space! There was no doubt in his mind that this was the true account of Space history … yet a nagging question remained that he could not quite answer. If this was the whole truth, then his prisoners had to be wrong. And yet he had the strange feeling that Tom and Joyce Barron, born and raised on Earth, really believed that he and his father’s house were beneath contempt, the offspring of pirates and traitors who deserved nothing more than total extermination.
And he wondered, as he drifted to sleep, if any of them, Earthmen or Spacers, really knew the whole truth.
• • •
He awoke with a start, the alarm bell clanging in his ears. He had had a terrible dream; a huge black space ship had been attacking, firing wave after wave of missiles that were weaving their way inexorably toward him as his own defensive shells jammed in their tubes and refused to fire. Now he leaped from the cot and crossed the cabin in three steps, his hands on the missile controls before his eyes were completely open.
But there was no ship in the view screen. Instead, he saw a great ruddy disc growing larger by the minute, its polar caps glistening. Ben glanced at the chronometer; he had slept almost twelve hours, and now the alarm was signaling that deceleration was finished and the ship was ready to move into braking orbits around Mars.
Ben sighed with relief and snapped off the alarm. Between planets the ship required little attention, correcting its position automatically against the designated orbit and decelerating at precisely the rate necessary to bring ship’s orbit and planet’s orbit together to permit landing. But landing maneuvers required human skill and judgment. Only in the most extreme emergency would a pilot attempt to plot a landing for his ship without his own hands on the controls, for a few feet of miscalculation could make the difference between a safe landing and a heap of burning rubble on the desert sand.
Now the Barrons were up, crowding behind Ben as he set the controls for his first braking orbit. He felt the drag of the outer reaches of the planet’s atmosphere against the ship, and peered at the disk in the view screen, searching for the landmarks he knew so well.
Suddenly, Ben Trefon felt a chill settle in his chest. In some indefinable way, the surface of the planet looked odd, changed somehow since the last time he saw it. He searched for the shiny dome of the Botanical Experiment Station as he braked in closer to the surface. It was the first landmark he always spotted on a Mars landing, but now he could not find it. As the ship moved across the dark side of the planet, it seemed that there were a dozen glowing red patches visible in the blackness, an eerie succession of ghostly lights he had never seen before.
As he approached the twilight zone, he dipped the ship down sharply. Now details began to appear, and Ben forgot his passengers as he gripped the controls, almost crying out at the ruin he saw spread out before his eyes across the planet surface.
There was a great gaping scar, still smoking, where the experiment station had once stood. Ahead he saw another scar, and another. He searched for the Great Rift and found it, but the straight, clean line he had always seen now looked ragged and broken. He was still searching for the plateau that lay above it when the ship crossed again to the dark side and moved down into its final landing arc.
Stunned, Ben Trefon watched for the bright side again. Once more he found the Rift, saw the blackened crater where another Spacer house had stood. Then he saw the familiar landmarks, the low plateau rising between the Rift and the mountains, and his eyes confirmed what he had seen fleetingly on the last sweep.
He snapped on the null-gravity units, tapped the forward jets, and eased the ship down on a hillock overlooking the plateau. Dust rose around the ship as it settled, but Ben did not see it. He was climbing into a pressure suit before the generators stopped whining, and moments later he stepped down from the exit lock and felt the sand crunch beneath his feet as he walked to the brow of the hill.
Below him, the House of Trefon was a smoking ruin. Fragments of plastic dome stood shattered like broken glass in the sunlight. One of the great stone arches still stood among the fragments of the others. The hangar area was a glowing crater; in the back of the house the Council chamber was split open in a heap of rubble. The cold wind sweeping down from the north flapped a colored curtain back and forth against a ruined window frame. Except for this there was no movement, no breath of life, nothing but silence and desolation.
Numbly, Ben turned back to the ship. The radiation counter was clicking in his ear: that meant there was still activity in the craters, but the level was low. All the same, he would need a shielded suit before approaching closer.
Inside the ship he pulled off the helmet, and then stopped dead. Tom and Joyce Barron were staring at the view screen. They looked up at him, and their eyes reflected horror and disbelief. “Where are we?” Tom said. “Why are we stopping here? What is that out there?”
The numbness seemed to reach to Ben’s fingertips. “That’s our destination,” he said through the tightness in his throat. “Still hot. Still smoking. Take a good look.”
“But you said we were going to your home — ” Joyce’s voice trailed off.
Rage exploded in Ben Trefon’s mind. With a sweep of his arm he tore open a locker, hauled out heavy shielded suits, dumped them at the feet of his prisoners. “Go ahead, put them on,” he said. “Don’t worry, you won’t have to get your feet dirty. And you won’t get too close to the hot places, I’ll see to that. Well, what are you waiting for? You wouldn’t want to miss this. Put on the suits. I’ll take you on a private tour of the greatest house on Mars.”
• • •
It was a grim party that made its way down the slope to the edge of the ruins. Ben took the lead, his rage subsiding to a cold white flame. The Barrons followed close behind him. He skirted the obviously hot craters in the hangar area and moved on into the rubble-strewn entry hall. Fragments of the wall were still standing. Great chunks of the tile floor had been thrown up at angles, but Ben picked a careful path through the ruin. Some parts of the house were still recognizable, but his family’s living quarters had taken a shell directly. Not even a fragment remained.
Ben stopped. There was no point to going on. There was not even a stir of life, no sign of human activity. Nothing could have survived such an onslaught. The house had literally been pounded into the ground. Ben knew without looking that he would find no survivors.
In his earphones he heard a choked sob, and the girl said, “I’m going back to the ship.” Something in her voice brought a wave of shame to Ben’s mind. Irrationally he had been blaming the Barrons personally for his loss, rubbing their noses in it. “Yes, go back,” he said. “There’s nothing here for you to see.” He took her arm, guided her across the rubble and out of the danger area. “Go on up and wait in the ship,” he told her gently. “We won’t be long.”
Tom started to follow her, but Ben caught his arm. “I’m going to need some help. You’d better stay.”
The Earthman’s eyes were bright with suspicion. “What do you think you’re going to do here?”
“My father was in this house,” Ben said. “We have to be sure there are no survivors. And there’s something I have to look for.”
Reluctantly Tom followed him. For almost an hour they searched the rubble in vain. Maybe some of the people in the house had been evacuated, somehow, but Ben found the ruined shell of his father’s cruiser lying at the edge of the hangar crater. He looked no further. He knew that his father would never have left the house, no matter what the emergency, as long as anyone else remained to be evacuated.
Later he knew that he would try to piece together the details of his father’s death, try to imagine what had happened here from the first moment of warning until the last blow was struck. But for the time being Ben simply accepted it, numbly, as he accepted the ruin of the house. Just one thing burned in his mind now, one thing that had to be done.
He began searching for the stairs that led down to the vault. His father’s words were fresh in his mind; there was something there, something that was now his responsibility.
With Tom’s help he found a way down the sandstone passage that led to the armored vault. It took half an hour of work to clear the passage of rubble, but they managed it. One side of the vault had been caved in under the force of a direct hit, and part of the lead shielding in the ceiling sagged, but the main archives were intact, the repository of Spacer records, deeds, documents and other official papers. If only they had come down here, Ben thought, some of them might have survived. But he knew that no Spacers under attack would ever think of hiding in the ground. For them space would seem the only safe place.
Finally they reached the family vault. The mechanism of the door had been damaged by the bombardment, but it responded to Ben’s handprint and the door opened with a groan. Inside, on a steel table, they found a sealed pouch, and a hand-scribbled note on a piece of gray paper.
Ben picked up the note, recognized his father’s hasty scrawl. “These are yours,” the note said, “to guard with your life and pass on to your children. The belt is your authority and identification, to be worn until its contents are demanded. The tape is also to be passed on, although its words mean nothing now. One day you may understand it. These things are yours; guard them well, and good luck, my son.”
Inside the pouch were a belt and a spool of tape. The belt was black, a strip of elastic mesh with a capsule enclosed in the fabric. The capsule was the size of an egg, smooth and silvery as Ben removed it from its pocket in the belt. It felt metallic in his hand, and yet it was strangely warm to the touch. He replaced it in the belt and ran the belt around his waist. The elastic seemed to clasp him as though it welcomed a carrier.
“What is it?” Tom Barron said.
“I don’t know,” Ben replied. “My father wore it as long as I can remember. I always thought it was a gift from my mother, but now that I think of it I’m sure Dad told me once that it was handed down by my grandfather.” Ben paused, trying to draw forth a memory that had been buried completely for years. “Once when I was very small Dad showed me these things — the belt, and the tape too. He told me that the men of the House of Trefon were some kind of guardians, ‘Keepers of the keys’ was the way he put it, but he never told me what we were guarding.”
Tom pointed to the spool on the table. “What about the tape?”
“That’s part of it, too.” Ben crossed the room and slid a tape player out from the wall. The tape was an ancient one, wrinkled and frayed as though played many times. It was an old style tape spool with open edges, but it fit into the player. Ben threaded it, turned the switch, and waited as the tape slowly began to unwind.
At first there was just a crackle of static. Then, suddenly, they heard a voice, a woman’s voice, singing.
It was a mauki chant. It was the first time Tom Barron had ever heard a mauki sing; for a moment he dismissed it as foolishness at a time like this, just a tape recording of somebody singing a song. But then he stopped, and turned, and listened, suddenly shivering in the half-lighted room.
For Ben Trefon the voice brought back a flood of childhood memories, and a wave of loneliness that was almost unbearable. For as long as he could remember Spacer women had always sung; it was one of the things that made them maukis. Of course there were many kinds of mauki songs, but most familiar were the laments, the haunting songs of grief and loss, half ballad and half chant, that never really told a story yet always conveyed with overwhelming force their message of Spacer hopes and Spacer longings.
And this tape was a mauki chant, so familiar and so compelling that it brought tears to Ben’s eyes. Yet, in some ways it was different from any mauki chant he had ever heard before.
He had listened for several minutes before he realized that he was not understanding the words.
There was no question that words were being sung. They were clear and distinct in every syllable, and they seemed to match perfectly the eerie minors and halftones of the lament. For a moment Ben thought his ears were playing tricks on him, because the words were almost familiar, almost understandable — but not quite. He had the feeling that if only he could listen more intently he might be able to distinguish them, but even as he listened he realized that this was not so. Nor was he the only one — he saw the look of wonder and confusion on Tom’s face and knew the Earthman could not distinguish the words either.
A long while later the singing faded into silence, and the two stood staring at each other. Without a word Ben rewound the tape and played it again. Still the words remained obscure.
“I don’t understand it,” Tom Barron said finally, breaking the silence.
“Neither do I,” Ben said.
“But what language is it?”
“I never heard it before in my life. But this is one of the keys my father spoke of.”
“But what good is it? What does it mean, and why is it so important for you to guard it?”
“I don’t know,” Ben said thoughtfully. “At least, not now.” He took the tape out of the player, wrapped it carefully in the pouch and slipped it into his pocket. “If the tape and the belt are keys my father was keeping, what does that suggest to you?”
“That there’s a lock somewhere that they will open,” Tom Barron said.
“Yes,” Ben Trefon said softly. He stood silent for a moment, still hearing the mauki chant ringing in his ears. Then he shook his head and started for the door. “Yes,” he said again. “For once I think you are one hundred per cent right.”