When our ship left its carefully planned trajectory and started to wobble through space in dizzy circles, I knew we shouldn’t have passed up that opportunity for an overhauling on Spica IV. My men and I were anxious to get back to Earth, and a hasty check had assured us that the Aaron Burr was in tip-top shape, so we had turned down the offer of an overhaul, which would have meant a month’s delay, and set out straight for home.
As so often happens, what seemed like the most direct route home turned out to be the longest. We had spent far too much time on this survey trip already, and we were rejoicing in the prospect of an immediate return to Earth when the ship started turning cartwheels.
Willendorf, computerman first class, came to me looking sheepish, a few minutes after I’d noticed we were off course.
“What is it, Gus?” I asked.
“The feed network’s oscillating, sir,” he said, tugging at his unruly reddish-brown beard. “It won’t stop, sir.”
“Is Ketteridge working on it?”
“I’ve just called him,” Willendorf said. His stolid face reflected acute embarrassment. Willendorf always took it personally whenever one of the cybers went haywire, as if it were his own fault. “You know what this means, don’t you, sir?”
I grinned. “Take a look at this, Willendorf,” I said, shoving the trajectory graphs toward him. I sketched out with my stylus the confused circles we had been traveling in all morning. “That’s what your feed network’s doing to us,” I said. “And we’ll keep on doing it until we get it fixed.”
“What are you going to do, sir?”
I sensed his impatience with me. Willendorf was a good man, but his psych charts indicated a latent desire for officer-hood. Deep down inside, he was sure he was at least as competent as I was to run this ship and probably a good deal more so.
“Send me Upper Navigating Technician Haley,” I snapped. “We’re going to have to find a planet in the neighborhood and put down for repairs.”
It turned out there was an insignificant solar system in the vicinity, consisting of a small but hot white star and a single unexplored planet, Terra-size, a few hundred million miles out. After Haley and I had decided that that was the nearest port of refuge, I called a general meeting.
Quickly and positively I outlined our situation and explained what would have to be done. I sensed the immediate disappointment, but, gratifyingly, the reaction was followed by a general feeling of resigned pitching in. If we all worked, we’d get back to Earth, sooner or later. If we didn’t, we’d spend the next century flip-flopping aimlessly through space.
After the meeting, we set about the business of recovering control of the ship and putting it down for repairs. The feed network, luckily, gave up the ghost about ninety minutes later; it meant we had to stoke the fuel by hand, but at least it stopped that accursed oscillating.
We got the ship going, and Haley, navigating by feel in a way I never would have dreamed possible, brought us into the nearby solar system in hardly any time at all. Finally we swung into our landing orbit and made our looping way down to the surface of the little planet.
I studied my crew’s faces carefully. We had spent a great deal of time together in space—much too much, really, for comfort—and an incident like this might very well snap them all if we didn’t get going again soon enough. I could foresee disagreements, bickering, declaration of opinion where no opinion was called for.
I was relieved to discover that the planet’s air was breathable. A rather high nitrogen concentration, to be sure—82 percent—but that left 17 percent for oxygen, plus some miscellaneous inerts, and it wouldn’t be too rough on the lungs. I decreed a one-hour free break before beginning repairs.
Remaining aboard ship, I gloomily surveyed the scrambled feed network and tried to formulate a preliminary plan of action for getting the complex cybernetic instrument to function again, while my crew went outside to relax.
Ten minutes after I had opened the lock and let them out, I heard someone clanking around in the aft supplies cabin. “Who’s there?” I yelled.
“Me,” grunted a heavy voice that could only be Willendorf’s. “I’m looking for the thought-converter, sir.”
I ran hastily through the corridor, flipped up the latch on the supplies cabin, and confronted him. “What do you want the converter for?” I snapped.
“Found an alien, sir,” he said laconically. My eyes widened. The survey chart had said nothing about intelligent extraterrestrials in this limb of the galaxy, but then again this planet hadn’t been explored yet.
I gestured toward the rear cabinet. “The converter helmets are in there,” I said. “I’ll be out in a little while. Make sure you follow technique in making contact.”
“Of course, sir.” Willendorf took the converter helmet and went out, leaving me standing there. I waited a few minutes, then climbed the catwalk to the air lock and peered out.
They were all clustered around a small alien being, who looked weak and inconsequential in the midst of the circle. I smiled at the sight. The alien was roughly humanoid in shape, with the usual complement of arms and legs, and a pale green complexion that blended well with the muted violet coloring of his world. He was wearing the thought-converter somewhat lopsidedly, and I saw a small, green, furry ear protruding from the left side. Willendorf was talking to him.
Then someone saw me standing at the open air lock, and I heard Haley yell to me, “Come on down, Chief!”
They were ringed around the alien in a tight circle. I shouldered my way into their midst. Willendorf turned to me. “Meet Alaree, sir,” he said. “Alaree, this is our commander.”
“We are pleased to meet you,” the alien said gravely. The converter automatically turned his thoughts into English, but maintained the trace of his oddly inflected accent. “You have been saying that you are from the skies.”
“His grammar’s pretty shaky,” Willendorf interposed. “He keeps referring to any of us as *you’—even you, who just got here.”
“Odd,” I said. “The converter’s supposed to conform to the rules of grammar.” I turned to the alien, who seemed perfectly at ease among us. “My name is Bryson,” I said. “This is Willendorf, over here.”
The alien wrinkled his soft-skinned forehead in momentary confusion. “We are Alaree,” he said again.
“We? You and who else?”
“We and we else,” Alaree said blandly. I stared at him for a moment, then gave up. The complexities of an alien mind are often too much for a mere Terran to fathom.
“You are welcome to our world,” Alaree said after a few moments of silence.
“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks.”
I turned away, leaving the alien with my men. They had twenty-six minutes left of the break I’d given them, after which we would have to get back to the serious business of repairing the ship. Making friends with floppy-eared aliens was one thing; getting back to Earth was another.
The planet was a warm, friendly sort of place, with rolling fields and acres of pleasant-looking purple vegetation. We had landed in a clearing at the edge of a fair-sized copse. Great broad-beamed trees shot up all around us.
Alaree returned to visit us every day, until he became almost a mascot of the crew. I liked the little alien myself and spent some time with him, although I found his conversation generally incomprehensible. No doubt he had the same trouble with us. The converter had only limited efficiency, after all.
He was the only representative of his species who came. For all we knew, he was the only one of his kind on the whole planet. There was no sign of life elsewhere, and, although Willendorf led an unauthorized scouting party during some free time on the third day, he failed to find a village of any sort. Where Alaree went every night, and how he had found us in the first place, remained mysteries.
As for the feed network, progress was slow. Ketteridge, the technician in charge, had tracked down the foul-up and was trying to repair it without building a completely new network.
Shortcuts again. He tinkered away for four days, setting up a tentative circuit, trying it out, watching it sputter and blow out, building another.
There was nothing I could do. But I sensed tension heightening among the crewmen. They were annoyed at themselves, at each other, at me, at everything.
On the fifth day, Ketteridge and Willendorf finally let their accumulated tenseness explode. They had been working together on the network, but they quarreled, and Ketteridge came storming into my cabin immediately afterward.
“Sir, I demand to be allowed to work on the network by myself. It’s my specialty, and Willendorf’s only snarling things up.”
“Get me Willendorf,” I said.
When Willendorf showed up I heard the whole story, decided quickly to let Ketteridge have his way—it was, after all, his specialty—and calmed Willendorf down. Then, reaching casually for some papers on my desk, I dismissed both of them. I knew they’d come to their senses in a day or so.
I spent most of the next day sitting placidly in the sun, while Ketteridge tinkered with the feed network some more. I watched the faces of the men. They were starting to smolder. They wanted to get home, and they weren’t getting there. Besides, this was a fairly dull planet, and even the novelty of Alaree wore off after a while. The little alien had a way of hanging around men who were busy scraping fuel deposits out of the jet tubes, or something equally unpleasant, and bothering them with all sorts of questions.
The following morning I was lying blissfully on the grass near the ship, talking to Alaree. Ketteridge came to me, and by the tightness of his lips I knew he was in trouble.
I brushed some antlike blue insects off my trousers and rose to a sitting position, leaning against the tall, tough-barked tree behind me. “What’s the matter, Ketteridge? How’s the feed network?”