Breaking Point Read online

  BREAKING POINT

  by

  JAMES E. GUNN

  Illustrated by Ebel

  Frontispiece: spaceman studying a chess board.]

  Spider and rat in outer space surrounded by planets.]

  The ship was proof against any test, but the men inside her could bestrained and warped, individually and horribly. Unfortunately, while themen knew that, they couldn't really believe it. The Aliens could--anddid.

  _They sent the advance unit out to scout the new planet in the _Ambassador_, homing down on the secret beeping of a featureless box dropped by an earlier survey party. Then they sat back at GHQ and began the same old pattern of worry that followed every advance unit._

  _Not about the ship. The _Ambassador_ was a perfect machine, automatic, self-adjusting, self-regulating. It was built to last and do its job without failure under any and all conditions, as long as there was a universe around it. And it could not fail. There was no question about that._

  _But an advance unit is composed of men. The factors of safety are indeterminable; the duplications of their internal mechanisms are conjectural, variable. The strength of the unit is the sum of the strengths of its members. The weakness of the unit can be a single small failing in a single man._

  _Beep ... boop ..._

  "Gotcha!" said Ives. Ives was Communications. He had quick eyes, quickhands. He was huge, almost gross, but graceful. "On the nose," hegrinned, and turned up the volume.

  _Beep ... boop ..._

  "What else do you expect?" said Johnny. Johnny was the pilot--young,wide, flat. His movements were as controlled and decisive as those ofthe ship itself, in which he had an unshakeable faith. He slid into thebucket seat before the great master console.

  _Beep ... boop ..._

  "We expect the ship to do her job," said Hoskins, the Engineer. He wasmild and deft, middle-aged, with a domed head and wide, light-blue eyesbehind old fashioned spectacles. He shared Johnny's belief in themachine, but through understanding rather than through admiration. "Butit's always good to see her do it."

  _Beep ... boop ..._

  "Beautiful," said Captain Anderson softly, and he may have been talkingabout the way the ship was homing in on the tiny, featureless box thatSurvey had dropped on the unexplored planet, or about the planet itself,or even about the smooth integration of his crew.

  _Beep ... boop ..._

  Paresi said nothing. He had eyebrows and nostrils as sensitive as aradarscope, and masked eyes of a luminous black. Faces and motives wereto him what gauges and log-entries were to the Engineer. Paresi was theDoctor, and he had many a salve and many a splint for invisible ills. Hesaw everything and understood much. He leaned against the bulkhead, hisgaze flicking from one to the other of the crew. Occasionally his smallmustache twitched like the antennae of a cat watching a bird.

  Barely audible, faint as the blue outline of a distant hill, hungry andlost as the half-heard cry of a banshee, came the thin sound of highatmosphere against the ship's hull.

  An hour passed.

  _Bup-bup-bup-bup ..._

  "Shut that damned thing off!"

  Ives looked up at the pilot, startled. He turned the gain down to awhisper. Paresi left the bulkhead and stood behind Johnny. "What's thematter?" he asked. His voice was feline, too--a sort of purr.

  Johnny looked up at him quickly, and grinned. "I can put her down," hesaid. "That's what I'm here for. I--like to think maybe I'll get to doit, that's all. I can't think that with the autopilot blasting out an'on course'." He punched the veering-jet controls. It served menperfectly. The ship ignored him, homed on the beam. The ship computedvelocity, altitude, gravity, magnetic polarization, windage; used andbalanced and adjusted for them all. It adjusted for interference fromthe manual controls. It served men perfectly. It ignored them utterly.

  Johnny turned to look out and downward. Paresi's gaze followed. It was abeautiful planet, perhaps a shade greener than the blue-green of earth.It seemed, indefinably, more park-like than wild. It had an air ofcontrolled lushness and peace.

  The braking jets thundered as Johnny depressed a control. Paresi noddedslightly as he saw the pilot's hand move, for he knew that the autopilothad done it, and that Johnny's movement was one of trained reflex. Theyoungster was intense and alert, hair-trigger schooled, taught topretend in such detail that the pretense was reality to him; a precisepretense that would become reality for all of them if the machinefailed.

  But of course the machine would not fail.

  Fields fled beneath them, looking like a crazy-quilt in pastel. On them,nothing moved. Hoskins moved to the viewport and watched them mildly."Very pastoral," he said. "Pretty."

  "They haven't gotten very far," said Ives.

  "Or they've gotten very far indeed," said Captain Anderson.

  Johnny snorted. "No factories. No bridges. Cow-tracks and goat paths."

  The Captain chuckled. "Some cultures go through an agrarian stage toreach a technological civilization, and some pass through technology toreach the pastoral."

  "I don't see it," said Johnny shortly, eyes ahead.

  Paresi's hand touched the Captain's arm, and the Captain then saidnothing.

  _Pwing-g-g!_

  "Stand by for landing," said the Captain.

  Ives and Hoskins went aft to the shock-panels in the after bulkhead.Paresi and the Captain stepped into niches flanking the console. Johnnytouched a control that freed his chair in its hydraulic gimbals. Chairand niches and shock-panels would not be needed as long as theartificial gravity and inertialess field functioned; it was a ritual.

  The ship skimmed treetops, heading phlegmatically for a rocky bluff. Agush of flame from its underjets and it shouldered heavily upward, justmissing the jagged crest. A gout of fire forward, another, and it wentinto a long flat glide, following the fall of a foothill to the plainbeyond. It held course and reduced speed, letting the ground billow upto it rather than descending. There was a moment of almost-flight,almost-sliding, and then a rush of dust and smoke which over-took andpassed them. When it cleared, they were part of the plain, part of theplanet.

  "A good landing, John," Paresi said. Hoskins caught his eye and frowned.Paresi grinned broadly, and the exchange between them was clear: _Why doyou needle the kid?_ and _Quiet, Engine-room. I know what I'm doing._Hoskins shrugged, and, with Ives, crossed to the communications desk.

  Ives ran his fat, skilled hands over the controls and peered at hisindicators. "It's more than a good landing," he grunted. "Thatsqueak-box we homed in on can't be more than a hundred meters from here.First time I've ever seen a ship bullseye like that."

  Johnny locked his gimbals, ran a steady, sensitive hand over the turn ofthe console as if it were a woman's flank. "Why--how close do youusually come?"

  "Planetfall's close enough to satisfy Survey," said the Captain. "Oncein a while the box will materialize conveniently on a continent. Butthis--this is too good to be true. We practically landed on it."

  Hoskins nodded. "It's usually buried in some jungle, or at the bottom ofa sea. But this is really all right. What a lineup! Point nine-eightearth gravity, Earth-type atmosphere--"

  "Argon-rich," said, Ives, from the panel. "Very rich."

  "That'll make no real difference," Hoskins went on. "Temperature, aboutnormal for an early summer back home ... looks as if there's a fiendishplot afoot here to make things easy for us."

  Paresi said, as if to himself, "I worry about easy things."

  "Yeah, I know," snorted Johnny, rising to stretch. "The head-shrinkeralways does it the hard way. You can't just dislike rice pudding; it hasto be a sister-syndrome. If the shortest distance is from here to there,don't take it--remember your Uncle Oedipus."

  Captain And
erson chuckled. "Cut your jets, Johnny. Maybe Paresi'stortuous reasoning does seem out of order on such a nice day. Butremember--eternal vigilance isn't just the price of liberty, as the oldbooks say. It's the price of existence. We know we're here--but we don'tknow where 'here' is, and won't until after we get back. This is_really_ Terra Incognita. The location of Earth, or even of our part ofthe galaxy, is something that has to be concealed at all costs, untilwe're sure we're not going to turn up a potentially dangerous, possiblysuperior alien culture. What we don't know can't hurt Earth. Noconceivable method could get that information out of us, any more thanit could be had from the squeak-box that Survey dropped here.

  "Base all your thinking on that, Johnny. If that seems like leaning overbackwards, it's only a sample of how careful we've got to be, how manyangles we've got to figure."

  "Hell," said the pilot. "I know all that. I was just ribbing thebat-snatcher here." He thumbed a cigarette out of his tunic, touched hislighter to it. He frowned, stared at the lighter, tried it again. "Itdoesn't work. _Damn_ it!" he barked explosively, "I don't like thingsthat don't work!"

  Paresi was beside him, catlike, watchful. "Here's a light. Take it easy,Johnny! A bum lighter's not that important."

  Johnny looked sullenly at his lighter. "It doesn't work," he muttered."Guaranteed, too. When we get back I'm going to feed it to Supply." Hemade a vivid gesture to describe the feeding technique, and jammed thelighter back into his pocket.

  "Heh!" Ives' heavy voice came from the communications desk. "Maybe thenatives are primitives, at that. Not a whisper of any radio on any band.No powerline fields, either. These are plowboys, for sure."

  Johnny looked out at the sleeping valley. His irritation over thelighter was still in his voice. "Imagine that. No video or trideo. Nojet-races or feelies. What do people do with their time in a place likethis?"

  "Books," said Hoskins, almost absently. "Chess. Conversation."

  "I don't know what chess is, and conversation's great if you want totell somebody something, like 'bring me a steak'," said Johnny. "Let'sget out of this fire-trap," he said to the Captain.

  "In time," said the Captain. "Ives, DX those radio frequencies.If there's so much as a smell of radiation even from the otherside of this planet, we want to know about it. Hoskins, check thelanding-suits--food, water, oxygen, radio, everything. Earth-type planetor no, we're not fooling with alien viruses. Johnny, I want you tosurvey this valley in every way you can and plot a minimum of threetake-off vectors."

  The crew fell to work, Ives and Hoskins intently, Johnny off-handedly,as if he were playing out a ritual with some children. Paresi bent overa stereomicroscope, manipulating controls which brought in samples ofair-borne bacteria and fungi and placed them under its objective.Captain Anderson ranged up beside him.

  "We could walk out of the ship as if we were on Muroc Port," saidParesi. "These couldn't be more like Earth organisms if they'd beentransplanted from home to delude us."

  The Captain laughed. "Sometimes I tend to agree with Johnny. I never meta more suspicious character. How'd you ever bring yourself to sign yourcontract?"

  "Turned my back on a couple of clauses," said Paresi. "Here--have alook."

  At that moment the usually imperturbable Ives uttered a sharp grunt thatechoed and re-echoed through the cabin. Paresi and the Captain turned.Hoskins was just coming out of the after alleyway with an oxygen bottlein his hand, and had frozen in his tracks at the sharp sound Ives hadmade. Johnny had whipped around as if the grunt had been a lion's roar.His back was to the bulkhead, his lean, long frame tensed for fight orflight. It was indescribable, Ives' grunt, and it was the only soundwhich could have had such an effect on such a variety of men--the sameshocked immobility.

  Ives sat over his Communications desk as if hypnotized by it. He movedone great arm forward, almost reluctantly, and turned a knob.

  A soft, smooth hum filled the room. "Carrier," said Ives.

  Then the words came. They were English words, faultlessly spoken, loudand clear and precise. They were harmless words, pleasant words even.

  They were: "_Men of Earth! Welcome to our planet._"

  The voice hung in the air. The words stuck in the silence like insectswriggling upon a pin. Then the voice was gone, and the silence wascomplete and heavy. The carrier hum ceased. With a spine-tingling briefblaze of high-frequency sound, Hoskins' oxygen-bottle hit the steeldeck.

  Then they all began to breathe again.

  "There's your farmers, Johnny," said Paresi.

  "Knight to bishop's third," said Hoskins softly.

  "What's that?" demanded Johnny.

  "Chess again," said the Captain appreciatively. "An opening gambit."

  Johnny put a cigarette to his lips, tried his lighter. "Damn. Gimme alight, Ives."

  Ives complied, saying over his big shoulder to the Captain, "In case youwondered, there was no fix on that. My direction-finders indicate thatthe signal came simultaneously from forty-odd transmitters placed in acircle around the ship which is their way of saying 'I dunno'."

  The Captain walked to the view bubble in front of the console and peeredaround. He saw the valley, the warm light of mid-afternoon, thetoo-green slopes and the blue-green distances. Trees, rocks, a balancingbird.

  "It doesn't work," muttered Johnny.

  The Captain ignored him. "'_Men of Earth...._'" he quoted. "Ives,they've gotten into Survey's squeak-box and analyzed its origin. Theyknow all about us!"

  "They don't because they can't," said Ives flatly. "Survey traversesthose boxes through second-order space. They materialize near a planetand drop in. No computation on earth or off it could trace theirnormal-space trajectory, let alone what happens in the second-ordercondition. The elements the box is made of are carefully averagedisotopic forms that could have come from any of nine galaxies we knowabout and probably more. And all it does is throw out a VUHF signal thatsays _beep_ on one side, _boop_ on the other, and _bup-bup_ in between.It does _not_ speak English, mention the planet Earth, announce anyone'sarrival and purpose, or teach etiquette."

  Captain Anderson spread his hands. "They got it from somewhere. Theydidn't get it from us. This ship and the box are the only Terranobjects on this planet. Therefore they got their information from thebox."

  "Q.E.D. You reason like Euclid," said Paresi admiringly. "But don'tforget that geometry is an artificial school, based on arbitrary axioms.It just doesn't work where the shortest distance is _not_ a straightline.... I'd suggest we gather evidence and postpone our conclusions."

  "How do you think they got it?" Ives challenged.

  "I think we can operate from the fact they got it, and make our analyseswhen we have more data."

  Ives went back to his desk and threw a switch.

  "What are you doing?" asked the Captain.

  "Don't you think they ought to be answered?"

  "Turn it off, Ives."

  "But--"

  "Turn it off!" Ives did. An expedition is an informal, highly democraticgroup, and can afford to be, for when the situation calls for it, thereis never any question of where authority lies. The Captain said, "Thereis nothing we can say to them which won't yield them more information.Nothing. For all we know it may be very important to them to learnwhether or not we received their message. Our countermove is obviouslyto make no move at all."

  "You mean just sit here and wait until they do something else?" askedJohnny, appalled.

  The Captain thumped his shoulder. "Don't worry. We'll do something insome other area than communications. Hoskins--are those landing suitsready?"

  "All but," rapped Hoskins. He scooped up the oxygen bottle anddisappeared.

  Paresi said, "We'll tell them something if we _don't_ answer."

  The Captain set his jaw. "We do what we can, Nick. We do the best wecan. Got any better ideas?"

  Paresi shrugged easily and smiled. "Just knocking, skipper. Knockeverything. Then what's hollow, you know about."

  "I should know better than to jump salty with
you," said the Captain,all but returning the doctor's smile. "Johnny. Hoskins. Prepare forexploratory patrol."

  "I'll go," said Paresi.

  "Johnny goes," said the Captain bluntly, "because it's his first trip,and because if he isn't given something to do he'll bust his adrenals.Hoskins goes, because of all of us, the Engineer is most expendable.Ives stays because we need hair-trigger communications. I stay tocorrelate what goes on outside with what goes on inside. You staybecause if anything goes wrong I'd rather have you fixing the men upthan find myself trying to fix you up." He squinted at Paresi. "Doesthat knock solid?"

  "Solid."

  "Testing, Johnny," Ives said into a microphone. Johnny's duplicatedvoice, from the open face-plate of his helmet and from the intercomspeaker, said, "I hear you fine."

  "Testing, Hoskins."

  "If I'd never seen you," said the speaker softly, "I'd think you wereright here in the suit with me." Hoskins' helmet was obviously buttonedup.

  The two men came shuffling into the cabin, looking like gleaming ghostsin their chameleon-suits, which repeated the color of the walls."Someday," growled Johnny, "there'll be a type suit where you canscratch your--"

  "Scratch when you get back," said the Captain. "Now hear this. Johnny,you can move fastest. You go out first. Wait in the airlock for thirtyseconds after the outer port opens. When Ives gives you the beep, jumpout, run around the bows and plant your back against the hull directlyopposite the port. Hold your blaster at the ready, aimed down--you hearme? _Down_, so that any observer will know you're armed but notattacking. Hoskins, you'll be in the lock with the outer port open bythat time. When Johnny gives the all clear, you'll jump out and put yourback against the hull by the port. Then you'll both stay where you areuntil you get further orders. Is that clear?"

  "Aye."

  "Yup."

  "You're covered adequately from the ship. Don't fire without orders.There's nothing you can get with a blaster that we can't get first witha projector--unless it happens to be within ten meters of the hull andwe can't depress to it. Even then, describe it first and await orders tofire except in really extreme emergency. A single shot at the wrong timecould set us back a thousand years with this planet. Remember that thisship isn't called _Killer_ or _Warrior_ or even _Hero_. It's the EarthShip _Ambassador_. Go to it, and good luck."

  Hoskins stepped back and waved Johnny past him. "After you, Jets."

  Johnny's teeth flashed behind the face-plate. He clicked his heels andbowed stiffly from the waist, in a fine burlesque of an ancientcourtier. He stalked past Hoskins and punched the button whichcontrolled the airlock.

  They waited. Nothing.

  Johnny frowned, jabbed the button again. And again. The Captain startedto speak, then fell watchfully silent. Johnny reached toward the button,touched it, then struck it savagely. He stepped back then, one footstriking the other like that of a clumsy child. He turned partially tothe others. In his voice, as it came from the speaker across the room,was a deep amazement that rang like the opening chords of a propheticand gloomy symphony.

  He said, "The port won't open."