Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (29 page)

"About this flying saucer, Captain," said the two and a half ringer.

"It was not a flying saucer," said Lessing. "It was more like a flying
pineapple or flying porcupine. There were all sorts of vanes sticking out
at odd angles."

"And you say you really saw the thing? I've been talking to your chief
officer, and he tried to convince me that he was actually aboard it."

"He was," said Lessing. "And furthermore, one of the officers from the
thing was aboard here." He unlocked the door of the cabin, motioned the
naval officer to a seat. "Furthermore, he was sitting where you were
sitting."

"Was he human?"

"He looked human."

"What language did he talk?"

"I don't know. He was wearing a little box on his belt that he said was a
psionic translator, whatever that might be."

"And so you talked, you say. I suppose he told you that the people of Mars
or Venus or Jupiter were watching us, and that if we didn't stop making
atomic bombs it'd be just too bad, and all the rest of it."

Lessing flushed. "I've read those silly books too," he said, "and I
believe them as little as you do. This spaceship of ours was an
interstellar cargo vessel, and she made an emergency landing in the Bass
Strait to take on water, her tanks having sprung a leak. We were, it
seems, the nearest handy planet. The crew of the spaceship were as
surprised to see us as we were to see them—they thought that this
world was uninhabited. Anyhow, they took their water and they pushed off
to continue their voyage." Lessing opened a drawer of his desk and pulled
the key to his safe from under an untidy layer of papers. He got up from
his chair, went to his safe, and opened it. He took out the packet of
alien cigars, the torch. "I've been waiting," he said, "for the chance to
show this evidence to somebody official for a long time. These are cigars—of
a sort. They're self-igniting—"

"There was a self-igniting cigarette on the market a few years ago," said
the lieutenant commander. "It never caught on."

"All right," said Lessing. "Then what's this script on the packet? Is it
Greek, or Arabic, or what? Take one of the cigars and smell it. Does it
smell like any tobacco you've ever come across?"

"No," admitted the naval officer.

"Then there's this torch. I don't know how it works. You have to leave it
out in bright sunlight for an hour, and it will burn all night. No,
there's no way of opening it. I've tried."

"Do you mind if I take these with me?"

"I'd like a receipt."

"You shall have one. Oh, one more thing. Would you mind not saying another
word about this to the press?"

"Would
you
mind," replied Lessing, "telling the press to lay off my
crew and myself?"

It is axiomatic that the tide runs sluggishly in official channels. The
press had long forgotten Captain Lessing's flying saucer when he received
a letter from the company's head office. This informed him that he was to
be relieved of his command and that after handing over his ship he was to
proceed to Canberra, there to be interviewed by sundry highly placed
gentlemen. Like most Australians, Lessing had a distrust of politicians,
maintaining that they came in only two varieties, bad and worse. He did
not look forward to his trip to the nation's capital city.

The day of his journey was not an ideal day for flying. During the bumpy
passage, a cup of hot coffee was upset over Lessing's lap, and, as he was
wearing a light gray suit, his appearance suffered as well as his
feelings. He was very bad-tempered when the plane touched down at the
airport, and found it hard to be courteous to the obvious civil servants
who were there to greet him. They were diplomatic enough to suggest a
drink or two before he was taken to see the high officials who had
required his presence, and after a couple of stiff whiskies he felt a
little better.

He did not feel better for long. He said afterward, "They made me feel as
though I were a Russian spy. And I was expecting rubber truncheons and
glaring lights and all the rest of it at any minute. The trouble was, they
just didn't want to believe me. There was the evidence of the torch, and
the evidence of the cigars, but they just didn't want to believe me. But
they couldn't explain the things that I got from the spaceship any other
way."

Lessing was interviewed. Lessing was interrogated. After the politicians
had finished with him, it was the turn of the scientists, and then the
lawyers took over to see if they could trap him in any inconsistency. The
following day he was joined by his chief and second officers and the
bos'n. Their stories tallied with his; there was no reason why they should
not have.

The day after that the spaceship landed in the Bass Strait, just twenty
miles north of Albatross Island.

Lessing, of course, was one of the last people to hear about it. It was
the young lieutenant commander to whom he had given the torch and the
cigars who told him the news. He burst into the comfortable hotel room in
which the captain was almost a prisoner and said, "They'll have to believe
you now. Another of those things has come down, just about where you saw
the first one."

But it wasn't another of those things. It was the same one, and she was,
apparently, on her return voyage. She lay there in the water until she was
sighted by
Woollabra,
northbound to Melbourne.
Woollabra
was
the only ship on the trade, and she maintained a fairly regular service,
so the coincidence was in time rather than in space and was a temporal
coincidence only inasmuch as the spacecraft did not have to wait longer
than three hours.

Again
Woollabra
sent a boat, and again the chief officer of
Starlady,
Malvar Korring vis Korring, was ferried from his own ship to the surface
vessel. Apparently he expressed surprise at not being greeted by Captain
Lessing and Mr. Kennedy and said that he especially wished to see Captain
Lessing to organize some sort of trade agreement.

"They're rushing you down to your old ship," said the lieutenant
commander. "There's a special plane laid on from here to Melbourne, and,
as luck would have it, there's a destroyer at Williamstown ready for sea.
There's all the high brass going with you. I wish they could find room for
me—"

So there was another flight, no better than the first one had been, and
then an even more uncomfortable sea journey as the destroyer pitched,
rolled, and shipped green water in the heavy southwesterly swell. It was
late afternoon when she made her rendezvous with
Woollabra
and
Starlady.
Woollabra,
designed for the rapid and efficient handling of cargo,
was her usual unlovely self. Lessing gave her no more than a cursory
glance, then stared through a pair of borrowed binoculars at the other
ship, the spaceship. It had been at night that he had seen her before, and
he retained no more than a confused impression of glaring lights, of
gleaming surfaces that reflected the illumination at all kinds of odd
angles. Seeing her now, in the light of day, he was pleased to note that
his description of her as a "flying pineapple" had not been too unjust.
That was what she looked like—a huge pineapple of some black,
gleaming metal.

Lessing was aware that orders were being given and reports acknowledged by
the destroyer's captain, that the warship's armament was manned and ready.
His attention, however, was occupied by the winking daylight lamp from
Woollabra
's
bridge.

"Alien officer on board," he read. "He wishes to speak with Captain
Lessing."

"Commander," said Lessing, "that spaceman, Korring was his name, is aboard
my old ship. He is waiting for me. Will you send me across in one of your
boats?"

The destroyer captain sucked thoughtfully at his pipe.

"I wish they'd given me more specific orders, Lessing," he said at last.
"All I have is a sort of roving commission—to find out what cooks
and to shoot to defend my own ship if necessary, but on no account to
start an interplanetary war. It seems that these people are quite
determined to see you—"

One of the civilians on the destroyer's bridge interrupted. "I think that
I should go with Captain Lessing."

"All right, Doctor. It seems to me that this situation calls for an
astronomer as much as anybody." He turned to his first lieutenant, gave
orders for the clearing away of the motor launch.

In a matter of minutes Lessing was sitting in the boat. With him, in the
stern sheets, was Dr. Cappell, the astronomer, and the sublieutenant in
charge. The boat was lowered to the water with a run, too fast for
Lessing's taste; he was used to the more leisurely procedure of the
merchant service. She hit the water just as a huge swell came up beneath
her, and the sea fountained on either side of her. The patent slips were
released smartly and the lower blocks of the falls whipped up and clear on
their tripping lines. The motor was already running and pulled the boat
out and clear from the destroyer in a matter of seconds. After the swift
efficiency of their launching, the journey across the narrow stretch of
water seemed painfully slow.

At last they came alongside the
Woollabra
and Lessing clambered up
the pilot ladder to her low foredeck. He was followed by the scientist.
The young sublieutenant, after giving a few curt instructions to a petty
officer, followed. The third officer was there to receive them. Lessing
acknowledged the courtesy absentmindedly, himself led the way up to the
bridge.

Fat Kimberley, who had relieved Lessing, was there to meet him. He was
exhibiting all the bad temper of the easygoing fat man jolted out of his
comfortable routine.

"Really, Lessing," he said, "this is rather much. First you have to get me
called back in the middle of my holidays, and then you have to wish this
bloody flying saucer on to me. My wife's flown down from Sydney to be with
me for the weekend in Melbourne—and I have to waste precious time
loafing around in the Bass Strait standing guard over this … this—"

"I must apologize, Captain," said a metallic voice. It came, as before,
from the little box that Malvar Korring vis Korring carried at his belt.
"We thought that Captain Lessing would still be here." He advanced to
Lessing with outstretched hand. "Greetings, Captain Lessing."

"Greetings," replied Lessing, feeling rather foolish. "And what can I do
for you, Mr. Korring?"

"You remember," said the spaceman, "that the last time I saw you we
bartered goods. You gave me some of your … cigarettes, and a bottle
of the liquor you call whisky, and some boxes of … matches—"

"But this is incredible," the scientist was saying behind Lessing's back.
"This is fantastic. The meeting of two races from different worlds, and
all this man is worried about is cigarettes and whisky—"

"And wild, wild women?" wondered the sublieutenant audibly.

"We showed what remained of the cigarettes and the whisky to the …
commissioner on Maurig, and he was rather impressed. He requested us to
call here on our homeward voyage and to make arrangements for regular
trade between this planet and the other planets of the galaxy—"

"This is marvelous!" Dr. Cappell was saying. "Marvelous! The secret of the
interstellar drive is ours for the asking!"

"Who is this man, Captain?" asked the spaceman.

"One of our astronomers. His name is Dr. Cappell."

"Dr. Cappell," said Korring, "the secret of the interstellar drive will
never be yours until you work it out for yourself. We hope to set up a
trading station, and you can rest assured that only goods with which you
can do no damage will be sold to you."

Lessing remembered what Tom, the big Polynesian bos'n, had said. How was
it?
The familiar pattern—the chance contact, the trader, the
missionary, the incident, and the gunboat … But,
he thought,
Tom
is biased. The early European seamen were a rough lot, and the politicians
in their home countries were as bad, although more sophisticated. We can
expect nothing but good from a people able to travel between the stars.

"Then," persisted Cappell, "you might allow us, some of us, to make
voyages in your ships, as passengers."

"We might," said Korring vis Korring, and the mechanical voice coming from
the translator at his belt sounded elaborately uninterested. He turned to
Lessing. "You, Captain, are the first native of this planet with whom we
made real contact. In our society—I don't pretend to know how it is
with you—the masters of merchantmen are persons of consequence. In
any case, we want somebody who is, after all, our own sort of people to
act as our … our agent? No, that isn't quite the word—or is
it?"

"I think it's the nearest you'll get," said Lessing. "But it is only fair
to warn you that I am a person of very little consequence on this planet.
The masters of
some
merchantmen are people of consequence—but
Woollabra
isn't
Queen Mary.
"

"But we know
you,
" replied the spaceman. "Perhaps if you were to
come aboard our ship we could draw up a contract."

"May we use your boat?" Lessing asked the sublieutenant.

"I'll have to ask," replied the naval officer. "Have you a signalman?" he
demanded of Captain Kimberley.

"We have not," replied the fat man. "But if you're incapable of using the
Aldis lamp, doubtless my third mate will be able to oblige. And he can ask
your captain if I'm supposed to hang around here while you all play silly
beggars. I want to be getting back to Melbourne."

The daylight lamps flickered on the bridges of man-o'-war and merchant
vessel in staccato question and answer. After a few minutes Lessing was
shaking hands with Kimberley, and in a minute more was clambering down the
pilot ladder to the destroyer's boat. The boat was barely clear of the
ship when Lessing heard the jangle of engine room telegraphs, saw the
frothing wake appear at
Woollabra
's stern.
Woollabra
's
whistle blurted out the three conventional farewell blasts. And then the
alien starship was ahead of them, bulking big and black and ominous in the
golden path of light thrown by the setting sun.