Roger D. Aycock - Control Group.pdf - Roger D. Aycock - widez2

Control Group

Aycock, Roger D.

Published: 1960

Type(s): Short Fiction, Science Fiction

Source: http://gutenberg.org

About Aycock:

Roger D. Aycock (1914-2004) was an American author who wrote un-

der the pseudonym Roger Dee. He primarily wrote science fiction.

Source: Wikipedia

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• Traders Risk (1958)

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The cool green disk of Alphard Six on the screen was infinitely welcome

after the arid desolation and stinking swamplands of the inner planets,

an airy jewel of a world that might have been designed specifically for

the hard-earned month of rest ahead. Navigator Farrell, youngest and

certainly most impulsive of the three-man Terran Reclamations crew,

would have set the Marco Four down at once but for the greater caution

of Stryker, nominally captain of the group, and of Gibson, engineer, and

linguist. Xavier, the ship's little mechanical, had—as was usual and prop-

er—no voice in the matter.

"Reconnaissance spiral first, Arthur," Stryker said firmly. He chuckled

at Farrell's instant scowl, his little eyes twinkling and his naked paunch

quaking over the belt of his shipboard shorts. "Chapter One, Subsection

Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed world shall

be deemed safe without proper— "

Farrell, as Stryker had expected, interrupted with characteristic impa-

tience. "Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations Handbook, Lee?

Alphard Six isn't an unreclaimed world—it was never colonized before

the Hymenop invasion back in 3025, so why should it be inhabited

now?"

Gibson, who for four hours had not looked up from his interminable

chess game with Xavier, paused with a beleaguered knight in one blunt

brown hand.

"No point in taking chances," Gibson said in his neutral baritone. He

shrugged thick bare shoulders, his humorless black-browed face un-

moved, when Farrell included him in his scowl. "We're two hundred

twenty-six light-years from Sol, at the old limits of Terran expansion, and

there's no knowing what we may turn up here. Alphard's was one of the

first systems the Bees took over. It must have been one of the last to be

abandoned when they pulled back to 70 Ophiuchi."

"And I think you live for the day," Farrell said acidly, "when we'll

stumble across a functioning dome of live, buzzing Hymenops. Damn it,

Gib, the Bees pulled out a hundred years ago, before you and I were

born—neither of us ever saw a Hymenop, and never will!"

"But I saw them," Stryker said. "I fought them for the better part of the

century they were here, and I learned there's no predicting nor under-

standing them. We never knew why they came nor why they gave up

and left. How can we know whether they'd leave a rear-guard or booby

trap here?"

He put a paternal hand on Farrell's shoulder, understanding the

younger man's eagerness and knowing that their close-knit team would

have been the more poorly balanced without it.

"Gib's right," he said. He nearly added as usual . "We're on rest leave at

the moment, yes, but our mission is still to find Terran colonies enslaved

and abandoned by the Bees, not to risk our necks and a valuable Reori-

entations ship by landing blind on an unobserved planet. We're too close

already. Cut in your shields and find a reconnaissance spiral, will you?"

Grumbling, Farrell punched coordinates on the Ringwave board that

lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored the bluish envelop-

ing haze of her repellors.

Stryker's caution was justified on the instant. The speeding stream-

lined shape that had flashed up unobserved from below swerved

sharply and exploded in a cataclysmic blaze of atomic fire that rocked

the ship wildly and flung the three men to the floor in a jangling roar of

alarms.

"So the Handbook tacticians knew what they were about," Stryker said

minutes later. Deliberately he adopted the smug tone best calculated to

sting Farrell out of his first self-reproach, and grinned when the navigat-

or bristled defensively. "Some of their enjoinders seem a little stuffy and

obvious at times, but they're eminently sensible."

When Farrell refused to be baited Stryker turned to Gibson, who was

busily assessing the damage done to the ship's more fragile equipment,

and to Xavier, who searched the planet's surface with the ship's

magnoscanner. The Marco Four , Ringwave generators humming gently,

hung at the moment just inside the orbit of Alphard Six's single dun-

colored moon.

Gibson put down a test meter with an air of finality.

"Nothing damaged but the Zero Interval Transfer computer. I can re-

align that in a couple of hours, but it'll have to be done before we hit

Transfer again."

Stryker looked dubious. "What if the issue is forced before the ZIT unit

is repaired? Suppose they come up after us?"

"I doubt that they can. Any installation crudely enough equipped to

trust in guided missiles is hardly likely to have developed efficient space

craft."

Stryker was not reassured.

"That torpedo of theirs was deadly enough," he said. "And its nature

reflects the nature of the people who made it. Any race vicious enough to

use atomic charges is too dangerous to trifle with." Worry made comical

creases in his fat, good-humored face. "We'll have to find out who they

are and why they're here, you know."

"They can't be Hymenops," Gibson said promptly. "First, because the

Bees pinned their faith on Ringwave energy fields, as we did, rather than

on missiles. Second, because there's no dome on Six."

"There were three empty domes on Five, which is a desert planet," Far-

rell pointed out. "Why didn't they settle Six? It's a more habitable world."

Gibson shrugged. "I know the Bees always erected domes on every

planet they colonized, Arthur, but precedent is a fallible tool. And it's

even more firmly established that there's no possibility of our rationaliz-

ing the motivations of a culture as alien as the Hymenops'—we've been

over that argument a hundred times on other reclaimed worlds."

"But this was never an unreclaimed world," Farrell said with the faint

malice of one too recently caught in the wrong. "Alphard Six was sur-

veyed and seeded with Terran bacteria around the year 3000, but the

Bees invaded before we could colonize. And that means we'll have to

rule out any resurgent colonial group down there, because Six never had

a colony in the beginning."

"The Bees have been gone for over a hundred years," Stryker said.

"Colonists might have migrated from another Terran-occupied planet."

Gibson disagreed.

"We've touched at every inhabited world in this sector, Lee, and not

one surviving colony has developed space travel on its own. The Hy-

menops had a hundred years to condition their human slaves to ignor-

ance of everything beyond their immediate environment—the motives

behind that conditioning usually escape us, but that's beside the

point—and they did a thorough job of it. The colonists have had no more

than a century of freedom since the Bees pulled out, and four genera-

tions simply isn't enough time for any subjugated culture to climb from

slavery to interstellar flight."

Stryker made a padding turn about the control room, tugging unhap-

pily at the scanty fringe of hair the years had left him.

"If they're neither Hymenops nor resurgent colonists," he said, "then

there's only one choice remaining—they're aliens from a system we

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