One
Ghosts are almost always malevolent and should be given a clear berth.
This particular ghost was over four kilometers long, a giant oval orbiting a planet circling a yellow sun. Only one kind of spaceship was ever built that large: a generation-ship from centuries past, before Igor Kutzmanitov discovered how to bend space right around the laws of relativity. A large number of such ships had been launched in the twenty-first century, carrying everything needed to start a new colony on some hoped-for Earth-like planet out there in the void. Most had been crewed by members of political or religious groups, searching for worlds of their own with the dedication necessary to reach out across time and space, knowing that they probably wouldn’t live to see the promised land themselves.
I punched up the silhouette on my information screens. The ship’s computer matched itsomewhat to my surprise, since these scouts don’t exactly have the master library of Lubriana on themas a Type IV Generation Ship, launched between 2140 and 2165, probably by an American or West European group, complement at start-off between two and three hundred “with at least five master controllers in deep freeze. As to the actual identitywell, the computer said that seven such ships of that model were launched, and all were Utopians of one sort or another. Be-yond that it couldn’t go.
I punched in some figures, curious as to how long
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the thing could have been parked here. The screen told me that it couldn’t have been here more than fifteen or twenty years at the outside, perhaps less than that.
That would mean that the odds were good that as many as all five of the original masters would be still alive.
I sighed and turned to look at the blue-green planet on my port screens. I was paid to find Earth-like or Terraformable worlds; if this one was taken, then there were no gold stars for Bar Holliday on this stop. Seiglein Corporation hardly needed to go at it with a bunch of Utopians.
Even so, I would be expected to do a complete report. There was always the slim possibility of a profit in any discovery, even one like this, and while I’d get a zero for the discovery I’d get pilloried but good for failing to follow up.
I nipped open the communications lines and tried a scatter frequency that should have hit whatever twenty-first-century communications device they were using. The little red light on the panel lit up, announc-ing a lock, and I called the ship, not really expecting an answer. Even so, there might still be some people on boardor a relay to ground. The ship was in position for a relay if one there was.
“This is Seiglein Scout 2761XY,” I called in my most professional manner. “Come in, generation-ship. Acknowledge, please.”
There was only a hiss in return, and I repeated the message several times until I was satisfied that the store was empty.
Well, next step in the manual was to go aboard and check things out personally. I didn’t particularly relish this idea since the damned thing was bigger than some cities, but regulations were regulations, and Seiglein’s regulations book was Holy Writ.
The air lock on the big mother wasn’t compatible, of course. It wouldn’t be. However, I was able to
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establish a magnetic link near the lock, giving me only a meter or so to the lock itself, and I could play with the frequencies until I hit one the lock would recognize. In thirty minutes I was suited up, ready to go, and had both locks open. I prayed their automatics would still work; it would be hell to cut through the bulkhead to get in.
Only seconds after I cleared the big ship’s lock, the door slid noiselessly shut behind me, and I felt the pressure normalizing. I looked at the monitor strapped to the outside of my pressure suit and saw that the air was still good. That made me feel bet-ter, and substantiated the argument that the ship hadn’t been here all that long.
Well, they’d cleaned it out but good. Only the remains of the hydroponics tanks and the animal breeders and such were left. The rooms were empty of personal effects the crew and passengers would take with them, and all was doom and gloom.
The lights still worked, though. As per regulations the standby generators were on so that there was the possibility, however slim, of a quick getaway for colonists who ran into trouble.
There was no sign of anything like mutiny so they’d made it intact. Things looked really good. I tried to get at the bridge log to find out something about the crew and its origin, but the controls were out of a museum;
I couldn’t figure out how to work the damned computer.
There was, however, the usual plaque. Every crew mounted one next to the ship’s construction-data plate, as if their new home were now a hallowed national monument or something. Which, I suppose, it was to them.
The ship’s data plate said it was the Peace Victory, built by Corben Yards on Luna from parts made in such-and-so U.S.A. and Canada, launched July 21, 2163maybe the last of these babies, I thought.
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The commemorative plaque was a little more informative, although not much.
“Peace Victory,” it read, “brings the Communards to the place where they might found the society all mankind justly craves but cannot find under the fascist governments of Earth, no longer home. From this spot began the fulfillment of mankind.”
I searched my memory, but couldn’t remember anything about anybody called Communards. Communufs I knewwe had lots of thosebut Communards? A variation, maybe? It was at times like these that I re-gretted sleeping through my history classes all those yearsif the movement had been big enough and rich enough to fund a generation-ship they must have been mentioned there.
Oh, hell, I thought. Communard comes from community and common, meaning they were a group society of some kind, mutual cooperation and all that, sharing all. Probably a damned dull bunchalmost certainly not a bar on the planet.
I made my way back down the empty corridors, the soles of my pressure-suited feet clanging in the atmosphere that procedure said I still couldn’t breathe. I got lost twice and had to take advantage of a couple of You Are Here diagrams etched into the ship’s walls to make it back to the right lock.
It was there that I saw a sign I hadn’t noticed on entering, one that made me suddenly a bit more nervous and apprehensive.
On the door of the lock somebody had used a really hard tool or something to scrawl a crude Don’t.
Don’t what? I wondered. Don’t go? Don’t follow?
Or was it just somebody’s idea of a joke?
I looked around, but that’s all there was. Thai one lonely, crude Don’t and nothing more.
Well, I did anyway.
4
Two
Scouting is a lonely job, and I’m not the kind of person who normally likes being cooped up and isolated. Occasionally, both at home or on some other planet, peo-ple ask me why I’m in this line of work.
It’s really hard to explain. For one thing, there is what I must call, for want of a better term, the flyer’s mentality. Something in me loves to fly these things, loves to go out among the stars and see them the way no one else sees them, to poke into esoteric corners nobody imagined existed, to experience sights others see only in fictionalized dramas. Maybe that’s it, too there’s a little of the hero and the ham in every pilot I’ve ever known, even the milk-run ferryboat people.
And then, too, it’s so damned dull back home. Now they’ve got one’s expected lifespan up past three hundred years, more than two-thirds of it in near-guaranteed good health, and the best free social services around. Nobody has to work, and many don’t. They’re bom, live their lives in the same community where they’re bom, in government fiats on the not uncomfortable government dole, sitting around talking about all the big things they’re going to do and never get around to doing. Those who do something, who like to push buttons and things and people around, they’re in the managerial government or in the nine corporations that keep the resources flowing, provide the services, and thereby run the lives of just about everybody.
I don’t know why I turned out different. Bar 31—
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626-7645 Holliday, raised in Seiglein’s Total Care Center #31 along with a couple hundred other infants, was always different. Like all kids, I dreamedbut I dreamed beyond the time of settling, of puberty, and the dole. I guess in some ways I never grew up. I was good-looking, athletic, never any problems with the opposite sex, but I was troubled by things that others weren’t. I’m not sure whatI often think of those days and wonder. One thing is that I was never satisfied with anything other than first place in the things that interested meparticularly sports. I was competitive, no doubt about that. And the Seiglein Corp. loved that kind of oddball, encouraged him, nurtured him, until they had put him right where they wanted him.
Maybe that was ithere I was, out in the middle of nowhere, looking into places nobody else had been before.
First.
To find some more resources for the billions on the dole on the hundreds of worlds, to find more worlds to house more billions who would turn them into more plastic places.
That was a system?
I don’t know. Somehow I always thought of Seiglein and the other corporations as being in the vegetable-growing business.
Well, I wasn’t a vegetable, or, if I was, I was a unique kind of vegetable.
Out here, the only one in charge of my welfare and destiny was me, the way it used to be in the old days, the way I’m convinced it ought to be.
I fed the data on the Peace Victory into the scout’s computer and stared again at that pretty world out there. Looked a lot like Earth was supposed to look I’d never been there, but I’d seen pictures. Definitely the best prospect I’d ever found, and, dammitall, somebody else found it first.
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Well, next step was to survey the place in preparation for landing.
Those Communards, whatever they were, sounded like ripe candidates for Seiglein Products.
Still, that scrawled Don’t on the inside of the air lock bothered me. Something kept nagging at me in-side, and I decided that this one would be played safe. Budget be damned, I was going to scout this place as if there were nobody home.
I set up and shot a survey probe down to the planet. Hell, I couldn’t even name itthey’d already named it somewhere. A little less immortality for Bar Holliday this time around.
The probe broke, leveled off at about 10,000 meters, and started doing a survey. The optics were quite good, and the magnification was superb. I could find out most of what I wanted to know from my command chair.
The thing started shooting stop-frames every three seconds, and I got a look at this world. It looked nice, even sort of familiar. Four big continents with irregular coastlines, huge blue oceans, vast plains broken by large lakes and rivers, and a number of tall mountain ranges. Even spotted a few volcanoes, so the place was still very much alive and active.
I hadn’t seen any signs of human life as yet, but that was to be expected. At this stage I wasn’t looking for people, and even if Peace Victory had been parked for twenty years there wouldn’t be very many folks there yet, just some still getting along on the stuff from the ship, others living a primitive, self-reliant life in the best spots.
The place was warm; the south polar cap was small despite calculations that said it was winter; in summer, it probably vanished completely. The axial tilt was about nine degrees, not enough to cause severe seasons anyway. The mountains in both hemispheres had snow, though it was a little more pronounced in the southern hemisphere.
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I shifted the probe to the commercial spectrum, and whistled. Lots of nice stuff down there still in the groundthey sure had the resources for a nice little world.
Heavy forests in the north and south, but a broad band around the center, about forty degrees on either side of the equator, seemed to be tropical savanna broken only by the mountain ranges. North Pole temperature -4° C. South Pole -9°, not bad at all. Equator was hotover 50 degrees C, but the savannas generally ranged from about 20 to a high of 29. Very good.
They’d reached the land of milk and honey, all right. I tried to imagine them as they first explored it, probed it, realized what they had, and excitedly got ready to found their perfect society or whatever it was. If they had gods, they were definitely on their side.
I took a mid-savanna frame and held it, blew it up in register until I could have seen a pinhead on the plains.
Animals. Lots of them. Damned weird ones.
Took about two hours to get a really good, clear shot of them, unblurred and in perspective, but when I did I had to stare.
Now, I’ve been around a lot of the unknown universe. So far we haven’t found any alien civilizations or really intelligent beasties, but the animal and plant life has been roughly logical. This place was so close to Terranorm that I half expected to see the usual animalsmost of the plants did appear variations of existing types the environment would produce according to evolution’s laws.
But thesewell, they looked like they’d been designed by a committee that had debated what it was to be and never really decided. The creatures were a compromise.
Their heads were overlarge but somewhat human-old, although rough-hewn. Long, thick whiskers, like a cat’s, drooped down almost to the ground. Their
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earswell, I’d seen donkeys in zoos, and that’s about the closest I can come. Huge, long, almost a meter high, and they seemed to be able to turn them independently over at least a ninety-degree range. Two horns, fairly long, rose out of their heads above the eyes, terminating in flat membranes, purpose unknown. The male’s horns were grandthey curved around once before straightening up again; the female’s were straight and slightly shorter. And those eyes weird. Jet black. No, I don’t mean the pupilsthe big eyes were like obsidian, from lid to lid.
Their bodies were equally incongruous. Again I have to go back to Earth animals I’ve seen in zoos and picture books. The body was like a giant kangaroo’s, complete with massive hind legs which ended, not in big feet, but in large hooves, like horse’s hooves. Their forelimbs were very long, since then: bodies put them at an angle, but very horselike.
And all of this ended in a large, flat bushy tail, like a squirrel’s, proportional to those bodies and fully as long.
I put the probe on hold and started watching a group of the beasts. They could stand erect, maybe two meters or more tall, resting on that tail, but to walk or eat they needed to be on all fours.