Balance of Power. Brian Stableford
a modest success with respect to the Salamen of Wildeblood—but they, as an amphibious species, had been somewhat remote from humanity. The Atticans were better approximations of primates, though slightly catlike in appearance. There had seemed to be much better prospects for establishing amicable relations between man and alien on Attica—mutually beneficial relations, too. But Mariel arrived to find that no avenues of communication had been opened up, and that there was no intercontinental traffic of any kind. Not only would she have to work from scratch, but there was hardly time for anything more than a brief expedition to Delta which might not even result in a fruitful contact being made. So far, she had found Attica a sad disappointment.
“There are birds sleeping in the rigging tonight,” said Ling, changing the subject. “They’re relying on us to carry them back to shore. That’s a good sign.”
Privately, I thought: Yes, but if anything should happen, they still have their wings. I did not, of course, voice any such thought. Nor did anyone else. But I didn’t need Mariel’s talent for reading minds to know that there were certain disturbing thoughts lurking furtively in the minds of my companions. We were two days from shore, and it had not been too difficult so far. But three other ships had made this journey, and not one had returned. They had been designed as well as the New Hope, built as strong. One, or even two, might have found exceptionally bad weather and gone down...but three was a number that preyed on the mind. It suggested that something more than coincidence was at work. Even to me, it suggested that more than coincidence was at work
Thirty-seven years had passed since a man named Verheyden had taken a ship named Floreat out of Lambda’s main harbor and headed west across the ocean. That span of time—a generation and a half—was testimony to just how seriously the colony took its loss. A colony that has to fight hard against starvation through every winter can’t afford to put men and money into projects which come to less than nothing, no matter what kind of principle is at stake. If Nieland didn’t return, it would be thirty-seven years more before another man like him managed to win approval for a similar expedition.
“What of your experiments?” Nieland asked me. “Have you found anything of interest?”
“I’ve only a light microscope,” I told him. “All I’m able to do is look at the plankton samples and the weed. I can’t possibly find anything that the survey team didn’t...and there’s hardly likely to have been any significant change in the marine population here in two hundred years. Really, this fetish for taking samples is a little absurd. But it’s routine—there’s a formularized pantomime we have to go through on every world, so that we can present the UN with a computer printout that weighs three tons, and thus justify our work here. There are always people who will ask what we’ve done to justify the colossal expense of sending us here. It’s not enough that we can say that we helped one or two colonies out of grave difficulties, showed them the way to success. You can’t measure things like that. The people who sent us need something with bulk, something they can literally weigh, and say, “This is a contribution to human knowledge and the welfare of our colonies on other worlds. It’s the political mind, you know...can’t deal with abstracts at all.”
He looked at me as if he thought I was sending him up. Essentially, he was a politician himself.
Ling smiled. Briefly.
“It’s not what we achieve that counts back home,” said Mariel, in a gentler tone. “It’s what we can be seen to have achieved. The UN can’t see the worlds themselves. All they can see is our reports, our measurements, our records. They have to be complete. Every moment of our time has to be accounted for, because every moment is costing the taxpayers of Earth real money.”
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.
CHAPTER TWO
After the meal, we played cards. It had become a ritual, a means of killing time. The sailors played games with coins on strangely marked boards—games deliberately made complex to absorb the attention. They played for favors and IOUs, to lend real significance to what they were doing. We didn’t bother.
“At least we’ll have some real work to do when we land,” said Nieland. “They’ll have no time for grumbling when we’ve land to clear and a base to build. And there’ll be fresh food. Things will get better.” He was still trying to convince himself.
“You can’t blame them too much,” said Ling. “We’re a long way from home. So far that some of the hardness has been knocked out of them—or perhaps I should say drained. They’re afraid, and they don’t like being afraid. It’s not something that usually afflicts them.”
By the standards that Mariel and I applied the ocean wasn’t so vast. We’d seen half a dozen worlds now (Earth included) and we measured our journeys in light-years. But for these men distance was only meaningful in terms of how far a man could walk, or ride, or sail. Delta was