The Lost Kafoozalum Read online

words we switch thesepeople off a war only to send them on a wild goose chase."

  At which a strange voice chimes in, "No, no, no, son, you've got itall _wrong_."

  * * * * *

  Mr. Yardo is with us like a well-meaning skeleton.

  During the next twenty-five minutes we learn a lot about Mr. Yardoincluding material for a good guess at how he came to be picked forthis expedition; doubtless there are many experts on Reversal OfVacuum-Induced Changes in Organic Tissues but maybe only one of them aRomantic at heart.

  Mr. Yardo thinks chasing the Wild Goose will do the Incognitans allthe good in the galaxy, it will take their minds off controversiesover interhemispherical trade and put them on to the quest of theUnobtainable; they will get to know something of the Universe outsidetheir own little speck. Mr. Yardo has seen a good deal of the Universein the course of advising on how to recondition space-packed meat andhe found it an Uplifting Experience.

  We gather he finds this desperate bit of damfoolery we are on nowpretty Uplifting altogether.

  Cray keeps surprisingly quiet but it is as well that the rest of theparty start to trickle in about twenty minutes later the firstarrivals remarking Oh _that's_ where you've got to!

  Presently we are all congregated at one end of the table as before,except that Mr. Yardo is now sitting between B and me; when M'Clareand the colonel come in he firmly stays where he is evidentlyconsidering himself One of Us now.

  "The proposition," says M'Clare, "is that we intend to take_Gilgamesh_ to Incognita and land her there in such a way as tosuggest that she crashed. In the absence of evidence to the contrarythe Incognitans are bound to assume that that was her intendeddestination, and the presence of weapons, even disarmed, will suggestthat her mission was aggressive. Firstly, can anyone suggest a bettercourse of action? or does anyone object to this one?"

  We all look at Lennie who sticks his hands in his pockets and mutters"No."

  Kirsty gives her little cough and says there is a point which has notbeen mentioned.

  If a heavily-armed ship crashes on Incognita, will not the governmentof the hemisphere in which it crashes be presented with new ideas foroffensive weapons? And won't this make it _more_ likely that they willstart aggression? And won't the fear of this make the other hemisphereeven more likely to try and get in first before the new weapons arecomplete?

  Hell, I ought to have thought of that.

  From the glance of unwilling respect which the colonel bestows onM'Clare it is plain these points have been dealt with.

  "The weapons on Gilgamesh were disarmed when she was rediscovered," hesays. "Essential sections were removed. The Incognitans won't be ableto reconstruct how they worked."

  _Another_ fact for which we shall have to provide an explanation. Wellhow about this: The early explorers sent out by these people--thepeople in Gilgamesh ... oh, use Cray's word and call them LostKafoozalum anyway their ships were armed, but they never found anyenemies and the Idealists of B's story refused even to carry arms anymore.

  (Which is just about what happened when the Terries set out torediscover the colonies, after all.)

  So the Lost Kafoozalum could not get rid of their weapons completelybecause it would have meant rebuilding the ship; so they justpartially dismantled them.

  Mr. Yardo suddenly chips in, "About that other point, girlie, surelythere must be some neutral ground left on a half-occupied planet likethat?" He beams round, pleased at being able to contribute.

  B says, "The thing is," and stops.

  We wait.

  We have about given up hope when she resumes, "The thing is, it willhave to be neutral ground of course, only that might easily become athingummy ... I mean a, a _casus belli_ in itself. So the _other_thing is it ought to be a place which is very hard to get at, sodifficult that neither side can really get to it first, they'll haveto reach an agreement and co-operate."

  "Yeah," says Dillie "that sounds fine, but what sort of place isthat?"

  I am sorting out in my head the relative merits of mountains,deserts, gorges, et cetera, when I an seized with inspiration at thesame time as half the group; we say the same thing in different wordsand for a time there is Babel, then the idea emerges:

  "Drop her into the sea!"

  The colonel nods resignedly.

  "Yes," he says, "that's what we're going to do."

  He presses a button and our projection-screens light up, first with amap of one pole of Incognita, expanding in scale till finally we arelooking down on one little bit of coast on one of the polar islands. Aglacier descends on to it from mountains inland and there is a baybetween cliffs. Then we get a stereo scene of approximately the leasthospitable of scenery I ever did see--except maybe when Parvati LalDutt's brother made me climb up what he swore was the smallest peak inthe Himalayas.

  It is a small bay backed by tumbled cliffs. A shelving beach can bededuced from contour and occasional boulders big enough to stickthrough the snow that smothers it all. A sort of mess of rocks and mudat the back may be glacial moraine. Over the sea the ice is split inall directions by jagged rifts and channels; the whole thing is a bitlike Antarctica but nothing is high enough or white enough to upliftthe spirit, it looks not only chilly but kind of mean.

  "This place," says the colonel, "is the only one, about which we haveany topographical information, that seems to meet the requirements.Got to know about it through an elementary planetography. One of theobservers had the sense to see we might need something of the sort.This place"--the stereo jigs as he taps his projector--"seems it's thecenter of a rising movement in the crust ... that's not to the point.Neither side has bothered to claim the land at the poles...."

  I see their point if it's all like this--

  "... And a ship trying to land on those cliffs might very well pitchover into the sea. That is, if she were trying to land on emergencyrockets."

  Rockets--that brings home the ancientness of this ship_Gilgamesh_--but after all the ships that settled Incognita probablycarried emergency rockets, too.

  This settled, the meeting turns into a briefing session and mergesimperceptibly with the beginning of the job.

  * * * * *

  The job of course is Faking the background of the crash; working outthe past history and present aims of the Lost Kafoozalum. We have toinvent a planet and what's more difficult convey all the essentialinformation about it by the sort of sideways hints you gather amongpeoples' personal possessions; diaries, letters et cetera; and what iseven _more_ difficult we have to leave out anything that could lead todefinite identification of our unknown world with any known one.

  We never gave that world a name; it might be dangerous. Who speaks oftheir world by name, except to strangers? They call it "home"--or"Earth," as often as not.

  Some things have been decided for us. Language, for instance--one oftwo thousand or so Earth tongues that went out of use late enough tobe plausible as the main language of a colonized planet. The settlerson Incognita were not of the sort to take along dictionaries of thelesser-known tongues, so the computers at Russett had a fairly widechoice.

  We had to take a hypnocourse in that language. Ditto the script, oneof several forgotten phonetic shorthands. (Designed to enable thetongues of Aliens to be written down; but the Aliens have never beenmet. It is plausible enough that some colony might have kept thescript alive; after all Thasia uses something of the sort to thisday.)

  The final result of our work looks pretty small. Twenty-three"Personal Background Sets"--a few letters, a diary in some, anassortment of artifacts. Whoever stocked this ship we are on suppliedwood, of the half-dozen kinds that have been taken wherever men havegone; stocks of a few plastics--known at the time of the Exodus, oreasily developed from those known, and not associated with anyparticular planet. Also books on Design, a Form-writer for translatingdrawings into materials, and so on. Someone put in a lot of workbefore this voyage began.

  Most of the time it is li
ke being back on Russet doing a groupProject. What we are working on has no more and no less reality thanthat. Our work is all read into a computer and checked againsteverybody else's. At first we keep clashing. Gradually a consistentpicture builds up and gets translated finally into the PersonalBackground Kits. The Lost Kafoozalum start to exist like people in aHistory book.

  Fifteen days hard work and we have just about finished; then wereach--call it Planet Gilgamesh.

  I wake in my bunk to hear that there will be brief cessation ofweight; strap down, please.

  We are coming off Mass-Time to go on planetary drive.

  Colonel Delano-Smith is in charge of operations on the planet, withRam and Peter to assist. None of the rest of us see the melting out offifty years' accumulation of ice, the pumping away of the water, thefitting and testing of the holds for the