The World Swappers by John Brunner Page A

of intolerance in the history of pre-space Earth. There’s a fad for the period at present. We contrast such affairs as the apartheid situation in Africa and the persecution of the Australian aborigines with the advantages of co-operation. We shall climax with a hypothetical program regarding contact with intelligent aliens.”
    “It sounds valuable.” Counce displayed sudden interest.
    “For what it’s worth,” Falconetta qualified cynically. “We have the biggest audience on Earth, but we still only have it an hour a week, and the rest of the time the public is being fed the standard complacent pap. Damn it, Saïd, I sometimes think we could give people the transfax and they would just put it in the corner with a dust-cover over it and bury their heads again. How the hell are we going to make people fit to live with intelligent aliens if they are still prepared to dislike human beings just because they were born under a different sun?”
    “We’re trying,” Counce said wearily. “We are trying.”
    “But there remains the risk,” Ram pointed out, “that even if we succeed in making our race fit to live with the Others, the Others may not be fit to live with us.”
    There were plans to deal with that, too; they thought in silence about the results of delivering fusion bombs by transfax into every major alien city.
    The transfax alarm interrupted the pause. Counce opened the cabinet and found a single sheet of paper on its floor. He scanned it without expression.
    “Do you remember we were discussing the most disastrous things that could happen to us?” he said at last. “Ram, you recall what you said?”
    The old man nodded, clenching his thin hands to stop them from trembling.
    “Well, it’s happened. This is from Wu, on Regis. They’ve detected an alien ship. And it’s been to Ymir. They haven’t heard from Jaroslav, but there isn’t any room for doubt.
    “We’ve been discovered, and all the careful work we’ve been doing to prepare for the event is still unfinished.”
    He sounded as if he was pronouncing an epitaph on mankind. He felt that quite possibly he was.

CHAPTER XI

    The course was a true geodesic of the continuum–a straight line in the sense of being the actual shortest distance between two points–and that was suspicious in itself. For it implied the ship’s crew knew what they were going to find.
    Usually, a long voyage of exploration took the form of a series of dog-legs, from system to system; this one had bypassed half a dozen ostensibly promising stars, arrowing direct for Ymir’s own sun.
    The Others knew something.
    Because of the lapse of time involved in the propagation of the betraying “wake” of a hyperphotonic vessel, the watchers on Regis did not know what was happening until the alien craft had already been to Ymir. It had spent a few days in the neighborhood–by a convenient miracle, at a time when no human-built space-ships were scheduled to call. It was a bare outside chance, then, that the Others might have the impression they had chanced across an indigenous life-form, rather than a colony planted from elsewhere. If they had observed reasonably closely during their brief stay, however, the chance would have diminished to vanishing point. It was not worth banking on.
    Like it or not, they had to recognize that the human race’s one advantage over the Others–that they knew of their competitors’ existence–had been canceled out.
    The news was broached by Katya Ivanovna, on duty in the ever-watchful detector room, where by turns every individual on Regis calculated, identified, and plotted the course of ships in space, both human and alien. Katya was that much faster than most of the group at reducing the pattern of the vibrations in the cosmos to a line on a three-dimensional graph. This time, she wasted the small advantage in checking her calculations for error, hoping against hope she might be wrong.
    But the figures she gave to Wu left no room for