The high ones

They left the Rurik in orbit and the boats gleamed through a high blue heaven--with just the faintest tinge of purple, in this slightly redder sunlight--to land on grass twin-bladed but soft and green, near trees which swayed almost like poplars above a hurried chill river. Not far away lifted steep, darkly forested hills, and beyond them a few snow-peaks haunted the sky. That night fires blazed among temporary shelters, folk danced and sang, accordions mingled with banjos, the vodka bottle worked harder than the samovar, and quite likely a few new human lives were begun.

There were two moons, one so close that it hurtled between constellations not very different from those of home (what was ten light-years in this god-sized cosmos?) and one stately in a clear crystal dark. The planet's period of rotation was 31 hours, its axial tilt 11°; seasons here would not be extreme. They named it New Earth in their various languages, but the Russian majority soon had everyone else calling it Novaya Zemlya, and that quickly became a simple Novaya. Meanwhile they got busy.

There had been no sign of aborigines to dispute Paradise, but one could never be certain, nor learn too much. Man had had a long time to familiarize himself with Old Earth; the colonists must gain equivalent information in months. So small aircraft were brought down and assembled, and ranged widely.

Holbrook was taking a scout turn, with Ilya Feodorovitch Grushenko and Solomon Levine, when they found the aliens.

It was several hundred kilometers from the settlement, on the other side of the mountains. Suddenly the jet flashed over a wooded ridge, and there was the mine pit, and the machines, and the spaceships.

"Judas priest!" gasped Holbrook. He crammed back the stick. The jet spurted forward.

Grushenko picked up the mike and rattled a report. Only a tape recorder heard it: they had too much work to do in camp. He slammed the mike back down and looked grimly at the Americans. "We had best investigate on foot, comrades," he said.

"Hadn't we better ... get back ... maybe they didn't see us go over," stammered Holbrook.

Grushenko barked a laugh. "How long do you expect them not to know about us? Let us learn what we can while we can."

He was a heavy-muscled man, affecting the shaven pate of an Army officer; he made no bones about being an unreconstructed sovietist, he had killed two mutineers before they overpowered him and since then his cooperation was surly. But now Levine nodded a bespectacled head and put in: "He's right, Eben. We can take a walky-talky, and the jet's transmitter will relay back to camp." He lifted a rifle from its rack and sighed. "I had hoped never to carry one of these again."

"It may not be necessary," said Holbrook in a desperate voice. "Those creatures ... they don't live here ... they can't! Why couldn't we make an ... agreement--"

"Perhaps." A faraway light flickered in Grushenko's pale eyes. "Yes, once we learn their language ... it might very well be possible, mutual interest and--After all, their level of technology implies they have reached the soviet stage of development."

"Oh, come off it," said Levine in English.

Holbrook used a downblast to land the jet in a meadow, a few kilometers from the alien diggings. If the craft had not been noticed--and it had gone over very quickly--its crew should be able to steal up and observe.... He was glad of the imposed silence as they slipped among great shadowy trees; what could he have said, even to Levine? That was how it always went, he thought in a curious irrelevant anguish. He was not much more nervous than the next man, but he had no words at the high moments. His tongue knotted up and he stood like a wooden Indian under the gaze of Ekaterina Ivanovna.

At the end of their walk, they stood peering down a slope through a screen of brush. The land was raw and devastated, it must have been worked for centuries. Holbrook remembered a survey report: curious formations spotted all over the planet, pits hundreds of meters deep. Yes, they must be the grass-grown remnants of similar mines, exhausted and abandoned. How long had the aliens been coming here? The automatons which purred about, digging and carrying, grinding, purifying, loading into the incredibly big and sleek blue spaceships, were such as no one on Earth had ever built.

Levine's voice muttered to a recorder beyond the mountains, "Looks like rare-earth ores to me. That suggests they've been civilized long enough to use up their home planet's supply, which is one hell of a long time, my friends." Holbrook thought in a frozenness that it would be very hard to describe the engines down there; they were too foreign, the eye saw them but the mind wasn't yet prepared to register--

"They heard us! They are coming!"

Grushenko said it almost exultantly. Holbrook and Levine whirled about. Half a dozen forms were moving at a trot up the slope, directly toward the humans. Holbrook had a lurching impression of creatures dressed in black, with purplish faces muffled by some kind of respirator snout, two legs, two arms, but much too long and thin. He remembered the goblins of his childhood, in a lost Maine forest, and a primitive terror took him.

He fought it down just as Grushenko stepped out of concealment. "Friends!" cried Grushenko. He raised both hands. "Friends!" The sun gleamed on his bare head.

An alien raised a tube. Something like a fist struck Holbrook. He went to his knees. A small hot crater smoked not two meters from him. Grushenko staggered back, shooting. One of the aliens went on its unhuman face. They deployed, still running to the attack. Another explosion outraged the earth; fire crawled up a tree trunk. And another. "Let's go!" yelled Holbrook.

He saw Levine fall. The little man stared surprised at the cooked remnant of a leg. Holbrook made a grab for him. A gray face turned up. "No," said Levine. He cradled his rifle and thumbed it to full automatic. "No heroics, please. Get the hell back to camp. I'll hold 'em."

He began to shoot. Grushenko snatched at Holbrook's wrist. Both men pounded down the farther hillside. The snarl of the Terrestrial rifle and the boom of the alien blast-guns followed them. Through the racket, for a second as he ran, Holbrook heard Levine's voice into the walky-talky mike: "Four of 'em left. A few more coming out of the spaceships. I see three in green clothes. The weapons seem ... oh, Sarah, help me, the pain ... packaged energy ... a super-dielectric maybe."

The officers of the Rurik sat at a long rough table, under trees whose rustling was not quite like that of any trees on Earth. They looked toward Holbrook and Grushenko, and they listened.

"So we got the jet aloft," finished Holbrook. "We, uh, took a long route home--didn't see any, uh, pursuit--" He swore at himself and sat down. "That's all, I guess."

Captain Svenstrup stroked his red beard and said heavily: "Well, ladies and gentlemen. The problem is whether we hide out for a while in hopes of some lucky chance, or evacuate this system at once."

"You forget that we might fight!"

Ekaterina Ivanovna Saburov said it in a voice that rang. The blood leaped up in her wide, high-boned face; under her battered cap, Tau Ceti tinged the short wheaten hair with copper.

"Fight?" Svenstrup skinned his teeth. "A hundred humans, one spaceship, against a whole planet?"

The young woman rose to her feet. Even through the baggy green tunic and breeches of her uniform--she had clung to it after the mutiny, Red Star and all--she was big and supple. Holbrook's heart stumbled, rose again, and hurried through a dark emptiness. She clapped a hand to her pistol and said: "But they do not belong on this planet. They must be strangers too, as far from home as we. Shall we run just because their technology is a little ahead of ours? My nation never felt that was an excuse to surrender her own soil!"

"No," mumbled Domingo Ximénez. "Instead you went on to plunder the soil of everyone else."

"Quiet, there!" roared Svenstrup.

His eyes flickered back and forth, down the table and across the camp. Just inside the forest, a log cabin stood half erected; but the Finnish couple who had been making it now crouched with the rest of the crew, among guns and silence. The captain tamped tobacco into his pipe and growled: "We are all here together, Reds and Whites alike. We cannot even return to Earth without filling the ship's reaction-mass tanks, and we need a week or more just to refine enough water. Meanwhile, non-humans are operating a mine and have killed one of us without any provocation we can imagine. They could fly over and drop one nuclear bomb, and that would be the end of man on Novaya. I'm astonished that they haven't so far."

"Or haven't even been aware of us," murmured Ekaterina. "Our boats were coming and going for a pair of months or three. Did they not notice our jet trails above the mountains? Comrades, it does not make sense!"