Beyond Another Sun
(1971)*
Tom Godwin
Norman Grey watched the sun grow in the viewscreen until the lonely little control room of his ship was flooded with its light. It was a yellow sun, like the one that warmed Earth and would so soon destroy it, and the fourth planet was Earth-type. He decelerated, feeling the familiar eagerness to know if this would at last be the world he had came across a hundred and fifty light-years to find.
The Davis Field's warning light was a bright orange as he decelerated, touching danger red, and he wondered again if his ship might not be a flying bomb with an increasingly shorter fuse. However, there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. The Davis Field enclosed the ship and all it contained in a permeating protective force that permitted extremely rapid acceleration to near the speed of light and equally rapid deceleration. Interstellar journeys without the Field would require lifetimes.
He passed under the small, bright moon and made a swift orbit around the planet, still decelerating. Instruments aboard the ship surveyed and mapped as he did so.
He saw, with the old disillusionment, that it was not the world he sought. But it would serve as a vitally important way station for the Emigrant ships coming across the great void behind him.
He dropped down near the sea, on the green eastern portion of a vast continent, and the ship settled its broad tail fins in the grassy sod. He switched off the Davis Field. The warning light continued to burn, as he had expected. On Rona, the last world behind him, he had had to wait ten minutes for the malfunctioning unit's cumulative charge to drain away and let the Field collapse.
He switched on the hyperspace communicator that would connect him with the Advance Ship Board on Earth, a hundred and fifty light-years behind him. The output gauges of the ship's convertors swung far over as the tremendous energy needed to break through into hyperspace was produced.
The communicator beeped in reply almost at once and a blue light flashed on above it.
"Advance Ship Board," a voice said, one too young to be that of a Board Supervisor. "Your signal shows you to be Advance Ship Two—and your last world was Tone—"
It was a statement rather than a question and Grey thought: To Earth I'm not a human being. I'm a ship with neither body nor soul which speaks to them a few times out of a century ...
"Just a moment," the voice said. "Mr. Gault is coming now."
So Gault would be his new supervisor? Baker had been the one before. He had last talked to Baker from Rona, a fraction more than twenty weeks ago—which would have been twenty years for Baker. Before Baker there had been Lafayette—but Lafayette and the Board had not found it necessary to use the whips on Gnome ...
"Hello Grey," A voice spoke from the communicator, mature and assured. "My name is Gault and I'll take all your reports from now on. What have you found?"
Gault waited for him to commence his report and Norman Grey thought: Go ahead, Advance Ship Two. Report. We'll not waste time with any preliminary amenities such as, "Glad to hear from you again—gets pretty lonesome out there, doesn't it, old boy? ..."
He put the thought from his mind as childishly illogical. By the nature of the roles each had to play, there could be no camaraderie between an Advance Ship pilot and his Board Supervisor.
"Yellow Class G sun," Grey said. "This fourth planet is Earth-type but for being almost entirely desert in the land areas. There is only one ocean of any size—I set down near the western shore of it. There is a fairly large section of the eastern portion of this continent which seems to be ideal. In fact, it's the only green area of any size on the entire world.
"It seems that the only inhabited section is a valley at the north-east corner of this continent. A very high mountain range, running east and west, has the valley isolated from all this country. But someone has lived here in the past—I set down by the remains of a small village that has been abandoned for a long time."
"And you have found no reason for the abandonment?"
"None. All conditions here are ideally Earth-type. It's odd that the only inhabitants of this world should be in that hungry-looking valley to the north instead of here."
"Have you yet been outside your ship?" Gault asked.
"I'm going as soon as the warning light goes off. Has anything new been learned about that trouble? All Baker could tell me on Rona was that they felt sure that certain elements had deteriorated in the outside molecular-permeation field unit and the cure would be to install a new unit—which, of course, I didn't and won't have."
"Unfortunately, that is true. But you have not been alone with that trouble—Gonzales reported the same experience just after you left Rona."
"Is he still going on?"
"So far as we know, he is dead."
"Dead?" He looked again at the orange light. "Do you mean it killed him!"
"There is no evidence that the Field had anything to do with his disappearance."
"Do you have any idea what might have happened to him?"
"There is a possibility that he was injured much more severely than he thought on Ursa. Ursa is the remotely-Earth-type world he was approaching when his own warning light came on; so named by him because the dominant form of life was a very large and ferocious creature resembling a grizzly bear of Earth. A band of them caught him by surprise while he was inspecting an outcropping of radium ore and he barely escaped ahead of them into his ship, with what he reported as relatively minor injuries. He lifted ship as soon as he had given himself first-aid—there was no reason to stay any longer since Ursa had an atmosphere that would kill a human within a few days and could be used only as an emergency refueling station.
"When he reached the next world, four light-years further on, he reported his injuries to be healing well. He reported his survey of the new world to show it to be Earth-type essentially, possessing very little in the way of arable land, however—but also possessing nothing harmful. Human inhabitants consisted of a few small bands of nomads. But Gonzales was sure that with their help he could make that world into a way station of some value. He landed, to go out and get some soil and plant specimens as a final check before he contacted the natives.
"As soon as t he Davis Field collapsed he walked out of his ship, never to come back. We waited a hundred days, then recalled his ship by remote control."
"It's already been examined, of course?"
"Oh, yes," Gault answered. "It met the foremost Emigrant ship years ago and went on again with a new pilot as soon as the Field unit was replaced. But a very thorough inspection of the ship gave no clue as to what might have caused Gonzales not to return."
"And you're sure the Field unit had nothing to do with it?"
"Such appears impossible since the unit is concerned only with the Field's outer shell—and the entire Field had collapsed before Gonzales left the ship. And, so far as these faulty units go: the technicians who examine Gonzales' unit said that there would have been no further deterioration in it, nor will there be in yours. So there is nothing to worry about in that respect."
There was a pause, then Gault continued:
"As I said, there is a possibility that Gonzales was more severely injured than he realized. But we of the Board fear that there was some danger on this new world that was too well hidden for him to detect until it was too late. The replacement pilot will land there in a few months—we hope that he will be able to avoid Gonzales' fate so he can make that world in to a way station. Success or failure can mean life or death for those on the Emigrant ships behind."
"None of the Advance men have found anything of much value, then?" Grey asked.
"Only a few worlds that can be used as way stations—and too few of those. The situation is becoming very critical."
"There is an area in space—beginning about two hundred light-years from here—where yellow suns are much more numerous. Maybe the world we're all looking for will be there."
"I hope so," Gault said. "But the Emigrant ships behind you will have to have food and fuel long, long before they can go that far. It is imperative that your present world be made into a way station."
"I know—that's why I'm here," he said, then asked the hopeful question he always asked, "Have the new observations given any chance for Earth?"
"No, Earth's sun and that wandering dark star will collide twenty-five years from now. It is inevitable."
"I was hoping ..." He sighed and said, "When the warning light goes off, I'll go outside. By the way, what would happen if I should walk out into the Field now?"
"So far as we know," Gault answered, "you would be transformed into disassociated atoms. Don't do it."
"I don't intent to. I'll report later, when I have something definite to report."
When the orange light vanished he took the elevator down to the airlock. He pushed the buttons that would drop the boarding ramp and open the airlock.
A few seconds later he stepped out onto the top of the ramp, into the sweet-scented air of early summer. He stood for a little while, observing the green, flowering beauty of the land before him. It was an Earth-type paradise—but there was not enough of it to give a home to what would soon be all that were left of the human race on Earth ...
Then he heard the lark and for a moment he had the wild conviction that he had travelled in a circle and returned to Rona.
It was suddenly singing to him from a tree nearby—the same golden lark that had sung so gayly that emerald dawn on Rona when Thorlita had held to him crying, and said: "I wish I was as small as it so I could hide on your ship and go with you ..."
Then he shook his head, as though that would drive away the lonely memories of that morning, and said aloud, "Coincidence. Similar environments produce similar life forms. That other lark died long ago."
It was true that there were strange things in the galaxy, such as the fact that human life upon Earth-type worlds, no matter what that world might be, would be essentially the same as human life upon all other Earth-type worlds. There was a theory that all human life had originated on some distant world of the past and that some approaching catastrophe, such as a sun about to go into the nova stage, had caused that world to send out small ships in all directions to establish colonies upon all suitable worlds found.
Animal life upon Earth-type worlds, however, was only similar from one world to the next and not identical. Except the lark—
It was only somewhat similar to t he larks of Earth but it was exactly the same as the one he had seen on Rona so many years ago.
He went on down the boarding ramp and toward the nearest stone building, passing under the tree where the lark was still singing.
It was also strange that the song should be exactly the same, note for note, as that of the lark on Rona.
He went into the ruined village area. Vegetation grew as thickly inside the tumbled stone walls as outside, including large trees, and he estimated the village had been abandoned for almost two hundred years. He found numerous flint arrow heads and much pottery, most of it still unbroken. The metal locator he had brought with him disclosed a large number of artifacts hammered from native copper. All of it indicated a very sudden and unanticipated abandonment but he found nothing to show the reason for such a sudden flight.
He went back to the ship and set down at several other points farther inland to procure soil and plant specimens. He had taken his last specimen and was in the ship again when a nagging subconscious feeling of something wrong resolved itself into a question:
Animal life was abundant in the green land—why had he seen no birds of any kind other than the golden lark?
He lifted ship and approached the towering range that lay like a mighty barrier east and west across the north end of the continent, its lowest peak twenty thousand feet above sea level. He went east, along the south side of if, until he came to the sea again.
There the mountain ran out into the ocean for almost a hundred miles, still towering and show-clad, before it began breaking up into a series of rocky islands. He raised higher, to go over the range, and the valley came into view.
It set deep and narrow between the gigantic range on the south side and the high plateau to the north. It was checker-boarded with fields, now green with what for the valley would be only early spring, irrigation ditches leading to most of them from a very small river which ran down the middle of the valley. He saw that the north side of the mountain range was so steep, with the strata dipping to the south, that it would afford very little watershed for the river.
There were twenty towns and villages scattered up the length of the valley, two of the towns larger than any of the others. One was the lower end of the valley, just above the place where the river began dropping in a series of white falls to the sea a mile below. The other was at the upper end of the valley, where the river broke up into tributary creeks.
He stopped at a point where the glare of t he sun would conceal the ship from those in the valley and studied it with the viewscreens at magnification. The stage of development seemed to be roughly equivalent to that of Western Europe during the Fourteenth Century. Several of the towns seemed to have small manufacturing industries of some kind although he saw nothing resembling machines. The only traffic on the dusty roads consisted of those on foot and those riding in wooden carts pulled by animals resembling water buffalo.
He left the valley when he was done, to go north up over the plateau. It was a cold, bleak land, even in spring, with no vegetation visible through the snow but for some stunted bushes and with no sign of life.
He returned to the valley and decided upon the upper of the two largest towns as the one for his first contact with the natives. He went to it and dropped down toward a level, grassy area near the edge of it.
Two children, playing not far away, became aware of his silently descending ship only when its shadow fell across them. For a moment they were two tiny, fore-shortened statues, staring upward with startled, incredulous faces. Then they were gone, their bare legs flashing in the sunlight as they ran in terrified flight, their treble shrieks of alarm coming in through the audio pickup mounted beside the ship's scanner pickup.
He took the elevator down to the largest room in the ship, called a "reception room" for lack of a better name. Here he picked up the three-dimensional recorder-projector and took it into the ship's library where, in addition to books and microfilm, there was an immense amount of special-purpose 3-D tape. He loaded the projector with what he would need, buckled the projector's remote control belt around him, then put on the grey cloak that, with its modification of the Davis Field, would protect him from any quickly-shot arrows.
When he stepped out through the airlock, he found the natives already waiting for him.
Five men were determinedly approaching the ship, no more than sixty feet away. One, scarred and muscular and apparently the chief, walked a little in advance of the others. All of them had their bows ready in their hands. Grey could see other bowmen ready in the nearby trees and there was hurried movement in the visible portion of the town as defense positions were taken up.
The five men before him halted in their tracks at his appearance and brought up their bows in unmistakable warning. He descended the ramp and stopped ten feet short of them. They watched him with wary suspicion, especially the blonde bowman on the extreme right.
"I come as a friend," he said to them. "But for you to know that, I first have to learn your language."
He set the projector on the ground beside him and motioned to his left, where the projected scene would appear. "Watch," he said, and pressed a button on the control belt.
A five-foot sphere of life and movement appeared with magical abruptness, six feet to his left and just above the ground.
The four bowmen shot an instant later, not at the sphere but at him. A stunned expression flashed across their faces as their arrows, shot hard and true at close range, shattered ...
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