The World Swappers by John Brunner Page B

doubt.
    For a long time the director of the expedition sat silent at his desk, contemplating the neat handwritten symbols before him. At length he pushed his chair back and stood up.
    “Well, we’re on the downgrade now,” he said. “So far as I can see at the moment, there’s not a thing we can do. But we’ll scrape the barrel for ideas just in case. Pass this news to everybody. Tell them to drop what they’re doing and come here at once. Maybe someone will think of something.”
    “And if they don’t?” Katya sounded as though she knew the answer to that; Wu gave it to her regardless.
    “Then I guess we just have to blow them to bits.”
    He crossed the room to the master public-address panel and leaned his thumb heavily on the activating switch.
    “Drop what you’re doing, everybody, and come out into the plaza. The Others appear to have discovered Ymir. Somehow we’ve got to figure out a way of getting around this.”
    It was a dispirited group that assembled on the hard-beaten sand of the plaza. Regis Main Base consisted of a haphazard arrangement of huts surrounding the heavy-duty transfax which was capable of handling practically any mass or size that might conceivably be required. They had chosen this spot for their base because it never rained, very seldom clouded over to interfere with local visual observation. The choice had drawbacks; one was that the heat was usually scorching around noon. People sweated and blinked their eyes as they waited for Wu to climb on the transfax platform and address them.
    Miserably, Anty Dreean watched the director’s compact figure rise to the impromptu dais, straighten, and look around. What the hell could be done? They might as well throw their hands in and go home–if they had any homes to go to. Once you accepted the responsibility of the knowledge the group guarded, though, the group became your family. It had to. The risks were too great otherwise.
    Now Wu picked up a hand amplifier and started to speak.
    “We’ve detected the wake of an alien ship,” he said baldly. “It apparently went straight from one of the Others’ local bases to the Ymiran system. It spent a short time in scouting around. Now it’s heading directly back the way it came. There’s no room for doubt that we’ve been discovered; from what we know of the Others’ preferences in regard to climate and atmosphere, they will automatically have decided we represent a serious rival to their ambitions. Ymir has always been a major threat in two respects: first, it is the nearest of the human-inhabited worlds, except for Regis, to the Others’ sphere of activity; second, it is the only human-inhabited world which the Others could comfortably occupy.
    “So far, presumably, none of the aliens except those actually aboard the scouting vessel are aware of our existence. I’ve seen figures on the ship’s course. It is now about one day out from Ymir, and six to seven days from its home base. It will pass closest to Regis about two and a quarter days from now. We could transfax a bomb over such a distance and destroy it and the knowledge it carries.
    “Only the fact that it went straight from its base to Ymir suggests that the Others deduced the existence of a planet suitable for their race in that system. If their ship simply disappears without trace, they will send another; if they lose that too, they are probably sufficiently like ourselves in their patterns of thought to suspect deliberate interference. This problem presents the toughest enigma I can recall. We have less than two days in which to solve it some other way than by destroying the ship. Have you any suggestions?”
    He looked around the gathering. He saw only down-cast eyes, blank, worried expressions. The gloom was tangible, almost; everyone reflected that the aims they had given their lives to now stood in immediate danger of annihilation.
    Anty Dreean felt perhaps the most miserable of all. He had not yet managed to grow