Part 1

Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

TASK MISSION

BY FOX B. HOLDEN

_Captain Jorl thought Arcturus IV was the answer to all he had ever wanted. And it was. But there was also a twist.... How can there be an ideal where everything is perfection?_

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, April 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Captain Nicholas Joel stood waiting in his fore-waist bridge; he looked again through its heavy, slotted quartz windows and now he could see them coming. He could make out the toy-like silhouette of their jeep, emerging in reckless, bounding leaps from the edge of the cultivated forest. Now they were racing at full tilt across the hard-packed yellow sand of the desert in a bee-line for the ship that had landed them here a scant three weeks ago.

Captain Nicholas Joel watched them, their excitement a visible thing as they pounded up clouds of saffron behind them, and knew without activating his personal communicator what they'd have to tell him.

"We've hit it again!" they'd tell him.

He turned his big body from the curving windows, quickly calculated the time it would take the jeep to reach the flaring stern of the _White Whale_, figured how many minutes it would take the pneumatic lift to whisk them three hundred and twelve feet up to the fore-waist, and snatched open the door of his liquor cabinet.

Sam Carruthers would be the first one to say it.

Thin, quiet Sam, who'd been in space as ship's surgeon and psychiatrist for as long as Joel himself. It had been twenty-two years since they'd left the Academy together. Sam had taken his specialty training in space medicine, while he, Joel, had let himself get sucked into qualifying as pilot.

Twelve years of the Academy. And twenty-two more being ordered around the freezing hell of God's black universe like a toy on a string.

And for all of it, Sam still had that look in his dark, brooding eyes--the look that had been glazed with shock, but which had still not surrendered, the day they told Sam he wasn't going to make pilot.

The look would still be there four minutes and thirty seconds from now when he led the others into the fore-waist bridge to holler "We've hit it again!" It would always be.

Joel tilted the liquor bottle and one big, clumsy-looking hand poured steadily into the thick glassite flagon he held in the other. He downed it in a gulp.

Hit it again _hell_!

And behind Sam there would be the first officer, Dobermann. Little, wiry German who knew more about languages and semantics than the guy who'd invented them, and the best astro-navigator you could find in this or any other galaxy. Sure, they always gave Nicholas Joel nothing but the best. That was part of it. Part and parcel of the whole damn conspiracy.

Dobermann wouldn't say anything when he came in. But there'd be a thorough-going, successful, mission-accomplished look on his handsome face. Dobermann never missed.

And Southard.... Still a kid, still wet behind the ears, but a hell of a promising astrophysicist, backed up with plenty of biochemistry and geophysics. It was still a big, romantic adventure to Southard, and he wore the single red, gleaming stripe of ship's second officer on his broad young shoulders as though it was the thick gold circle of a full captaincy.

Joel filled the flagon and emptied it a second time. He went back to the windows, the liquor bottle and flagon still in his hands.

To most men, he supposed, the panorama that spread for miles from the stern of the up-ended _White Whale_ would be a thing of sheer beauty. It would be hard for them to believe that there existed other planets far beyond the rim of their own hostile Solar System which could equal or exceed the soft beauty of the oasis they called Earth. But there it was--gently-rolling, golden desert beneath a temperate, dark-gold sun, flanked at one gently curving edge by a forest that looked as though it had been scientifically planned and landscaped for beauty. It was a big forest that covered a full third of the planet, and at its opposite edge it gave way to twelve thousand miles of unblemished shoreline which descended into gleaming, azure ocean.

And in the forest, on the ocean, even on the wide expanse of desert, there were people. Intelligent, strong, peaceful, quiet people, who might have been natives of Earth's Pacific islands of three centuries ago, save that their flesh was lighter in tone; their sun was not as young as Sol.

Farmers, mostly, Carruthers had reported. Some merchants, some travelers and explorers, even some men of a very young science, but, mostly, farmers ... it was the way they lived. A good way, Joel thought. A good way, in a good place.

He looked through the fore-waist bridge windows, and what he saw was beautiful.

But he filled the flagon again.

A buzzer sounded softly from the compact secondary control console which banked a full third of the bridge's fore bulkhead, and deliberately, Joel let it buzz a second and a third time before he fingered the stud that slid the small metal door open behind him. He turned as they came through it.

Fatigue and sweat lined Sam's thin face; Dobermann was audibly out of breath. Southard had to duck slightly to get into the room, but when he straightened he seemed as fresh as when the party had left the ship seventeen days before.

Joel returned their salute with the full flagon still in his left hand, and then beat Carruthers to the punch.

"All right, so we've hit it one more time! Bully for us--" He drained the flagon, reached for the bottle.

Without Carruthers, there would have been an awkward silence. But after twenty-two years, Sam knew his man.

"Ahh, you've shown us more than this, Skipper. I suppose it is a little better than our prelim reports indicate, if you want to get technical. The people want to co-operate. They're intelligent, healthy, and friendly and they realize fully what we're trying to do. They want to help us, and say we're welcome to all the mneurium-4 we want. 'Course there's only a few hundred pure megatons of it lying around, but, if you want to get technical--"

"Go to hell," Joel said, and poured his flagon half full. He felt a little better, but it would take more than a half-bottle of Martian Colony Bond and Sam's wise answers to change things. "Go right straight to hell!" He sniffed at the Bond. "So the long arm of Superior Civilization has reached out its clanking claws again to make the Universe a Better Place to Live in, has it? God help 'em if they _believed_ all the hog-wash you fed 'em, Sam."

The thin face sobered. "I spoke to them in good faith, Nicholas, and they did believe me. The fact is, they--"

"All right, I get your point! Got my mind made up, so don't start confusing me with facts." He transfixed the three of them with a restless look; a look they had grown used to. It was a gaze that matched the rest of him; the unruly, untrimmed black hair, the short, thick beard which was unneeded on a chin and jaw as big and square as Joel's, the careless, unmilitary carriage of his thick shoulders and blocky body, the blood-shot metal-blue eyes themselves. But during the split-second the gaze was upon them, they knew pages were flipping in Joel's massive head. Pages of regulations, procedures, memorized down to the last foot-note.

"Let's go in order with your reports," Joel snapped.

Southard stepped forward. "Constellation Boötis, Arcturus, planet IV. Preliminary analysis of ore-samples indicate rich lodes of mneurium-4, relatively close to the surface, and in unprecedentedly great number. Purity is unbelievably high, with--"

"All right, Southard, good report. Dobermann."

"Minimum of linguistic difficulty, coupled with a surprisingly high aptitude on the natives' part for language learning. In the seventeen days I had with them, I'm almost certain those with whom I worked learned at least half as much English as I did of their tongue," the German said. He added, simply, as though the seventeen days of exhausting gesticulating, diagramming, systematizing, learning, recording, had never existed, "There will be no language difficulty, sir."

"Good. Now you, Sam, and no schmaltz!"

"Healthy people, no cancer, no TB, no coronary troubles--"

"The mneurium-4, I know. Go on."

"Average IQ in the 120's--and there's something for us to keep in mind in spite of our big technological and scientific jump on them. They're still working with wood, iron and crude steel, but they won't be for long. Agrarian civilization so far; they've got a representative type of government--democracy, and a damn good one, and they're psychologically suited for just what they've evolved along that line. They actually practice what they preach, from the individual status right on up through the framework of their government. Open, honest, sincere--they have to be, because of the high degree of uniformity of IQ, and because--now get this--they _want_ to be. It's the way their minds are built, and--"

"All right, so if I believe you, we won't be fighting to get what we want. They're willing to meet our terms, that it?"

"Yes, Skipper. Access to all scientific data with which we can supply them now, and as much more later as they think they'll require, in exchange for reasonable mining rights."

"_Reasonable?_" Joel thundered. He slammed the heavy bottle down on the old-fashioned mahogany desk at his elbow. "Was _that_ in the contract you made with them? How do you know what the hell they mean by reasonable?"

"Sir, if I may--"

"All right, Dobermann, go ahead and enlighten me."

"I worked a number of hours with them on that point, to make certain there would be no errors in the semantics involved. They have learned, despite their lack of scientific medical knowledge, that as long as there is mneurium-4 around, they don't get sick. They trust us to leave enough to insure their own well-being."

"That's crazy," Joel shot back at his first officer. "How in God's name can they know about mneurium-4 and how to use it when we've only known about it and have been scratching the universe for it for less than thirty years? That's goddam nonsense--" He refilled the flagon, spilled a little of the potent liquor on his beard as he downed it.

"No, Nicholas," Sam said. "You're the bug on history around here. Think a minute."

Joel drew a sleeve across his mouth, and pages flipped in his head again. Yes, Sam was right. Back as far as the twentieth century, there had been isolated tribes in South America which had been found free of the diseases that had plagued their more civilized neighbors of the north, and it had taken the medical experts years to find out exactly why. Invariably, the answer had been usage of the most promising materials provided by nature which were closest at hand. A tribe stumbled onto something, used it--experimentally at first, then wastefully, but finally, with a thousand years' practice, pretty efficiently. And it had nothing to do with the fact that they still went around with spears and animal-hide shields....

"All right, I get your point, Sam," Joel said. Sam quit talking, and for a moment there was silence in the limited confines of the fore-waist bridge. Then Joel put the bottle and the flagon down on the desk, turned his back to it and faced them.

"From the way you boys talk this thing up, it all must be just jim-dandy. Maybe better than on that rock back in Aldeberan, or even better than we did in Altair, or Fomalhaut, or Procyon Seven, or any of the rest of 'em...." He paused again, watched their faces. They remembered--all except Southard, who hadn't been with them on any of the old strikes. But his youthful enthusiasm just about made up for the fierce pride that shone in the eyes of the others.

* * * * *

Back home, the _White Whale_, of all of Earth's great fleet of Explorer-class ships, had hung up the most enviable record. She had brought back rare elements known to men but unobtainable by them within the confines of their own tiny Solar System, or rare life-forms, impossible to study effectively in their native habitats, or precious new data which were beyond the reach of the astronomer's observatory. It meant progress. It meant a living force in the universe, a force of learning and of knowing, which would tolerate no barrier, which would broach neither defeat nor ultimate conclusion. In short, it meant Man.

Nicholas Joel knew it, and he still hated space.

Since that first indoctrination blast out to the moon and back when he'd been a plebe--since that day that he'd realized for the first time how _big_ it was. And how big men ought to be, but weren't. Big muscles, but little minds....

He still wondered just how the hell they'd sucked him in. They'd hit him somewhere inside, in a place he'd forgotten to guard--his instructors, his Commandant, the Secretary of Science himself. They'd sweet-talked him into staying those twelve years. Young man, they had told him, yours is a body and a brain with an adaptability to space exploration the like of which has never been duplicated in our records. You hate to fly, yet you are the best cadet pilot ever to enter the Academy. You dislike technical and scientific study, yet your grades in this field are the highest on record. You despise the regimen of the military necessary to survival in Space, yet, unaccountably, your cadet commands have been the most efficient and best handled of any in our knowledge.

Young man, they had said, here's the works on a silver platter--be a pilot--you owe it to yourself, to the world, to humanity!

Say you'll take our ships where no other man would dare, and you can write your own ticket for the rest of your life! _But you simply have to be a Pilot, young man...._

And he remembered how it had been with Sam, who would have moved the Earth with arms and legs tied behind him to have qualified. Sam, who had hungered for it, but had taken a lesser assignment cheerfully, just so, at least, he could be a part of some other pilot's team in space.

Sam, who had that look in his eyes.

But since his assignment to the _White Whale_ fifteen years ago, there had never been a sign--not the slightest, that Joel had been able to detect, that he was doing anything but what he most wanted. That took guts, and guts. Joel understood.

And so now they'd hit it again. Mneurium-4, the "wonder-element" that science had discovered would put a host of Earth's most dreaded diseases to rout, but which it had not been able to obtain or synthesize despite years of exhaustive effort.

Captain Joel, they had told him, the radio-astronomers say there could be mneurium-4 somewhere out in Boötis. Get some.

And in spite of them and their damned passion for onward-and-upward, if they insisted he pilot space to bring them back one new gew-gaw after another to play with, then he'd bring them back gew-gaws until they choked! _Choked!_

And the world he wanted--the world he'd always wanted, would just have to be for somebody else.

Then he looked at their faces, and they were waiting.

"All right, I get your point! Don't just stand there--Southard, get your 'copters going! I want a fully plotted area of operation for the next six months, including jump-off point as of tomorrow at 0600 hours, and on this desk by 2200 tonight! Dobermann, you won't have anything to do for awhile, so you can get Southard's servodrillers going for him; get 'em all out, form 'em on the port flank in details of five. I want to see it by 2100. Sam, has Dobermann given you any practice in their lingo? Good--all right, it's time I met 'em--you'll take me to their capital city or wherever it is their top people are and we'll get things down in black and white. I'll be ready for you in twenty minutes. Any questions?"

There weren't. Joel's three officers turned and left, each scrambling to his new assignment, glad to actually get started before something happened to upset the unexpected simplicity of the whole thing. There'd never been a mission that had come off as smoothly as this one was beginning. It promised to make them feel guilty to draw their pay checks for it. For once, it looked as though Joel was going to get what he came after without having to fight down to raw nerve and bone to get it. Good. The Captain had an easy one coming.

When they'd gone, Joel dropped his great frame into the ancient chair behind his big desk and got to work with the ship's intercom, flipping it to main circuit. He did ten minutes' talking in six, and Phase One was organized, down to the last ship's guard, down to the last assistant servomech.

Then he had fourteen minutes until Carruthers was due, ready to drive him to meet these people in their cultivated forest.

So for every one of the fourteen minutes, Captain Nicholas Joel leaned back in the chair, shut his eyes tight, and filled in a little more of the world he wanted.

* * * * *

The roads were of hard-packed dirt, but level, and wide. Occasionally, as Sam Carruthers drove, they would pass through a hamlet, or go by small knots of men and women in carriages and wagons drawn by striped animals resembling Earth's African zebra. The farms were small but numerous, and none, Joel noted, had been entirely cleared; the trees had been thinned, and they were of a far more slender variety than grew elsewhere, but they had not been eliminated. It set well with him. Joel had always liked trees, and he had a feeling he was going to like other people who did to such an obvious extent.

Buildings, he noted, were almost entirely of wood; structures very similar to those he remembered having seen in a history text dealing with the western United States in the nineteenth century. A few were of stone, some of small, brick cubes; all were pleasing enough to the eye. And the people themselves were--

The people looked up as the jeep roared past; looked up from their work in the fields, looked out from their wagons and carriages, looked from their saddled mounts at the roadside. But there was no fear in their glances, only the quick puzzlement of inquiring intelligence.

They were straight, well-bodied people, clothed simply in colorful garments which Joel assumed were made of cloth; the men were tall and broad and he could mentally picture the powerful muscles that rippled beneath their shirts. And the women--The women were the most graceful creatures he had ever seen, even those who were obviously no longer young; they were less fully clad than their men, and Captain Nicholas Joel liked that.

He liked it because it was honest. Where there was something beautiful, why in the name of anything holy or otherwise should it be covered up? That was the trouble with Earth and her people. There were too few things of real beauty, and when they did exist, humans seemed to have a psychotic compulsion for either ignoring them or hiding them completely. And those who did hesitate for a stolen moment's admiration were hurriedly hollered back to their jobs.

"You're surprised that they're not cluttering up the roads, trying to get a closer look at us?" Sam was hollering over the howl of the warm, oxygen-rich atmosphere.

"Good discipline," Joel grunted, still occupied with his own thoughts.

"Well, you're partly right. But more than that, we haven't stopped to look at _them_! It's sort of a half-courtesy, half-pride they have. They won't slow a stranger down if he doesn't slow them down, figuring that if he wanted to, he would; the prerogative is his. And, if he's not that interested, then neither are they!"

"You're sure some expedition didn't get here before we did?" Joel asked. "I mean--hell, they could be from Earth--"

"Ever hear of an Earthman with two hearts, Skipper? But physically that's about the only difference I could find. Psychologically--" The Space surgeon hesitated.

"Psychologically what?"

"Take too long to explain--we're coming into the capital city you were talking about. And besides--" he grinned in a sidelong glance at Joel, "you might even have the brains to figure it out all by yourself."

"Go to hell!"

In a moment Carruthers was busy with the jeep, tooling it through narrowing streets, slowing it to almost a walk as men and women hastened out of their way, crowded the board sidewalks to allow them to pass unhampered. The buildings were much like those he had seen in the rural districts; a little larger, a bit taller, but none more than fifty feet in height. Neatly painted, their thin glass windows bright and clean, they did not look like part of a city at all, Joel reflected, much less part of a capital city. And everything was so quiet.

Maybe too quiet. He felt a little chill at the base of his spine, but kept looking straight ahead.

"You're sure, Sam, about leaving my guns back at the ship?"

Carruthers just grinned again. And then they turned abruptly, and hauled up in front of a long, low building of flagstone.

"This is it," the surgeon said. "No reporters, no photographers, no autograph seekers, no brass band or politicians. But you're on, Skipper."

* * * * *

Captain Nicholas Joel felt naked without his guns, and he felt off-balance and out of place. Standing in the sedate, oval-shaped council-chamber with these peaceful-looking people confronting him, he felt clumsy in his heavy black leatheroid uniform, big, highly-polished black boots. He felt as if he looked like what he'd been forced to be on other occasions, facing forms of life so alien that no difference counted--like a man-at-arms, like a conqueror.

Suddenly, he was glad Sam had made him leave his guns back at the ship.

"Nicholas Joel, United Americas Intergalactic Exploration Fleet, of the Ship _White Whale_, commanding!" Carruthers was introducing him in English, and he wished that Sam would have had the good sense to have said "This is Captain Joel" and let it go at that. Didn't the grinning idiot know it must have been an awful pill for these people to swallow all at once? That there were, to begin with, such things as other planets and other galaxies--and that there were, even more incredibly, other creatures that lived on them. And, whether they cared to believe it or not, some of these creatures had just landed among them, and there was nothing they could do about it!

Sam was picking his way along now in their speech, and then at an obvious gesture, Joel knew he was being introduced to their top man. Sam waved an arm toward the tallest of the twelve-man group, who arose from the opposite side of a polished wooden table, and bowed gently from the waist.

"His Excellency and Prime Governor, K'hall-i-k'hall."

Joel hesitated, then returned the bow. He had never bowed in his life, but a salute to somebody dressed in civilian clothes seemed crazy.

"Sam, you mean he's Prime Governor of--"

"The whole planet."

"Am I always supposed to say his name twice?"

"That is his name. That's the way they do it. Now shut up, Skipper, and let me do the talking. I'm going to go through the whole works again with 'em. Then we sign. Then you get a tour of the town so the people can be introduced to you officially. But don't go making any speeches! Behave, and we're in business."

"You go to--"