The Best of Fences

It was a race between man and alien to rule the stars. Scientifically, the aliens were decades ahead--but their real advantage was their incredible elusiveness!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Infinity Science Fiction, February 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Romm Parmay stepped into the Interstellar Communications Central and eased the door shut behind him.

Nobody paid much attention to him; the five hundred ICC men at the boards were talking in quiet, well-modulated voices that filled the room with a fluctuating murmur of unintelligible sound.

At Number One board, Kerrman was staring moodily at the dead screen, blowing clouds of cigarette smoke at the control panel and watching the smoke writhe and flow down around the pilot lights and switch plates. Parmay walked across the room quietly, and stopped a few feet behind Kerrman.

"Boo!"

Kerrman jerked, inhaled a cloud of smoke, coughed, and turned around, glaring.

"Romm! Dammit, if you weren't my boss, I'd kick you where it would do the most good!"

Parmay turned solemnly, presenting his gluteal region for assault.

"Go ahead," he said sorrowfully, "I'm not the boss any more."

"All right, you're asking--_what? What did you say?_"

Parmay turned back to face Kerrman. The grin on his face threatened to break into laughter.

"Let you be the first to congratulate me. You are gazing at the Chief of Psychological Contact."

"Contact!" Kerrman grinned back. "You mean you're going out with the fleet?"

"Right. They just told me. I've got to get myself a group together, one for each hypersee ship. So far, I am the head cheese of a totally nonexistent group; I'm nobody's boss."

"Need a good assistant?" Kerrman asked hopefully.

"No, I need a good contact here. You've got my job now, and more. There isn't room on a ship to carry a complete psych analyzer, much less a synthesizer, so, for anything I dig up, you'll have to do most of the math."

"Good enough. I have--" Kerrman stopped suddenly and looked at his watch. "Wow! Almost talked too long. There's an Ancestor due in five minutes."

He sat down again at the board, cutting in the instruments. A shadow pointer moved slowly up a dial, then stopped.

"Not early, at any rate," he commented.

Better than four hundred light years away, a hypersee communicator fired out its carrier; at vast multiples of the velocity of light, that disturbance radiated in all directions through space. Less than a thousandth of a second after leaving its origin, the carrier was nudging the receptors on Earth.

On Kerrman's panel the shadow pointer began a smoothly oscillating dance. Kerrman touched three switch plates in swift succession. A voice came from the speaker.

"Expedition Seven Nine Six calling Earth. Seven Nine Six calling Earth. Come in, Earth."

The accent was odd, and most people would have had trouble understanding it, but Kerrman was used to handling the changes that had taken place in the language in four centuries.

"Communications Central, Earth," he replied. "We're in, Seven Nine Six."

"Seven Nine Six in," said the speaker definitely. "We've been here twenty-four hours. How long have we been gone?"

"You're four minutes late; not bad correlation at all. You left Earth four hundred thirteen years, seventy-one days, two hours, thirty seconds as of now." He touched a button to produce a ting! "What's your subjective time?"

"Eleven years, sixty-two days, twelve hours, five minutes even as of now." A similar sound came from the speaker.

Kerrman jabbed the figures into the MAC for subjective-objective time correlation.

"Any sign of the enemy?" he asked next.

"None. They haven't landed here. We've scouted the planet carefully."

Romm Parmay, standing beside Kerrman, shook his head resignedly. No sign of them. There never was.