Stephen Baxter - Xeelee
Date: 2012-01-04 12:24:33+01:00

The Switch

A.D. 5066

After the ship landed, Krupp and I made our reluctant way to the airlock. We found Ballantine already there, climbing into his neat little suit.

“Wouldn’t you know it, Gorman,” Krupp growled at me as he thrust his tree-trunk legs into silvered fabric. “That little bastard Ballantine always has to be first.”

I searched for my helmet in a cluttered locker. “Well, it is his job, Krupp. He’s the xenotechnologist… A landfall is the only time he gets to do anything useful around here.”

Krupp pulled his gigantic shoulders straight. “Ask me, that creep doesn’t ever do anything useful. Waste of a berth.” Little Ballantine heard all that, of course. Krupp didn’t care. Nor would you, I guess, if your biceps measured wider than the other guy’s chest. But I thought I saw Ballantine’s big-eyed face redden up just a little inside his helmet.

Captain Bayliss came stomping down the corridor. She was still rounding us all up for the EVA. Soon there were a dozen bodies, the entire crew, crammed into that airlock. Alien air whistled in and we grumbled quietly.

“Stow it!” Bayliss said irritably.

“Ah, Captain, these science stops are a waste of time,” Krupp rumbled. “We’re a cargo freighter, not a damn airy-fairy survey ship”

“I said stow it,” the Captain snapped. “Look, Krupp, you know the law. We’re obliged to make these stops. Every time his instruments detect something like that wreck outside.”

Well, we all knew who the “his” referred to. Ballantine kept his face turned to the door’s scuffed metal; but his shoulders sloped a bit more.

On that ship we were all alike, all semi-skilled cargo hands. All except for Ballantine. He was the xenotechnologist the law said we had to carry.

So he wasn’t exactly one of the guys.

But it wasn’t his fault. I suppose we were a little hard on himKrupp maybe harder than most. Mind you, not so much that he deserved what he got…

The outer door slid upwards. We tumbled down the ship’s ramp and spread out like an oil drop on water.

Swinging my arms with relief, I looked around. There was a double sun directly overhead, two white ovals like mismatched eggs. The sky was pinkish, washed-out. On the horizon a range of ancient hills made a splash of gray…

And in the center of the purple plain before me was the ruin of a Xeelee spacecraft. It looked like the blackened skeleton of a whale.

We moved tentatively towards it; Ballantine scampered ahead. Small fists clenched, he peered up at ribs that arched high over him. Then he dropped to his hands and knees and brushed excitedly at the dust.

Krupp came carrying Ballantine’s data desk, a big trunk-sized unit that he’d propped on one wide shoulder. Captain Bayliss shook her head in disgust. “Always got to show off, haven’t you, Krupp? You know that’s a two-man job.”

Krupp grinned, a little strain showing in his rocky face. “Aye, well, Ballantine normally does it. I just thought he deserved a break.” There was a ripple of appreciative laughter. Krupp dumped the desk hard in the middle of the wreck.

Ballantine came storming up to him. “You bloody fool! You could smash something”

Krupp considered him thoughtfully, like a biologist about to perform a dissection.

The Captain came strolling over, sending Krupp away with a simple glance. She poked one suited toe through the wreck’s crumbling skin. “Seems to me there’s not a lot left to smash, Mr. Ballantine,” she said smoothly.

“No,” Ballantine said, his breath shaking. “The Xeelee guard their technology like gold dust. When a Xeelee ship crashes, self-destruct mechanisms burn up anything that survives. But they aren’t perfect. The base of this ship is intact, and there’s some sort of control box down there.” He pointed. “A two-way switch…”

We collected probes from the data desk and were soon crawling like muscle-bound crabs over the ship’s bones. We all had our assigned tasks; with gloved fingers I poked tentatively at my Berry phase monitor, wishing I knew what it was for.

The Captain yelped in alarm. I dropped the instrument and whirled around.

Over the center of the wreck, a disc of dust as wide as a room had drifted up into the air. At its heart the data desk tumbled like an angular balloon. Captain Bayliss stood there staring, her mouth slack.

Evidently Ballantine had turned his two-way switch.

We gathered round eagerly. A working Xeelee artifact! The company paid good bounty for such things. Ballantine reached down to his switchit was a button set in a tiny boxand turned it back again. The data desk fell to earth with a surprisingly hard thump; Ballantine watched thoughtfully.

The Captain cleared her throat, taking short, determined paces. “Well?”

“It’s a gravity nullifier,” the xenotechnologist said excitedly. He peered into instrument displays. “Above this bit of floor there was about one percent gee.”

The Captain was in control again. “Gravity nullifier? Big deal. That’s standard technology; got one in the ship. No bounty there, I’m afraid.”

Disappointed, we turned away; but Ballantine trotted after Bayliss. “Captain, the ship’s nullifier consumes gigawatts. Its central generator fills a room! This thing must work on completely new principles”

The Captain turned on him. “Ballantine, get off my back, will you? All I care about is the schedule I’ve got to meet.” She looked at something approaching over Ballantine’s shoulder, and she smiled faintly as she continued: “If you can prise that thing out of the wreck in the next twelve hours, fine. Otherwise don’t bother me.” Her smile widened.

Ballantine opened his mouth to complain furtherbut never got the chance. A massive arm closed around his waist and lifted him, wriggling, into the air.

The Captain just kept on grinning.

“Come on, Ballantine!” Krupp roared, carrying him to the wreck. “Let’s see whether this thing of yours really works.” And he flicked the switch over and held Ballantine with two hands over the gravity disc. The other men watched expectantly. “Go for it, Krupp!” Ballantine just hung there like a limp doll.

With one mighty boost, Krupp hurled the little scientist straight up.

Now Krupp is a big man. Under normal gravity he could have launched Ballantine’s weight throughwhat? A couple of yards?

Under one percent of gee, Ballantine soared up two hundred yards. He took about thirty seconds to drift back down; he had to tumble like a clumsy snowflake into a circle of laughing faces.

He stumbled away, brushing past me. His eyes were bright, like ice.

After ten hours we’d just about finished. Most of the men were in their cabins, cleaning up. I stood on the ship’s ramp, peering up at the eclipse of one egg-shaped star by another.

Ballantine emerged from the ship and stood with me, gazing out in silence. After a while I decided to be sociable. Lethe, we were all a long way from home. “Did you get your nullifier free from the wreck?”

He shook his head angrily. “What a waste. And it works on a completely new principle.”

“Really?” I asked, already regretting opening my mouth.

“Did you know that gravity is actually made up of three forces?” he lectured. “There’s the positive force Newton discoveredand two extra, short-range forces called the Yukawa terms. Yukawa was a twentieth-century scientist.

“One Yukawa is positive and the other is negative, so they cancel each other out. Overall, two positives and a negative leave you with one positive, you see…”

His voice got higher, sharp with bitterness. I began to wonder how I could get away. “What the Xeelee artifact does is to nullify the Yukawas. The control switch has two settings. The first neutralizes the positive Yukawa, so that leaves the negative and just one positivenothing, to within one percent.

“But the other setting doesn’t turn the device off, as I thought at first. Instead itneutralizes… the…”

He tailed off, staring at the wreck. Only Krupp was still out there; as a nominal penalty for his prank the Captain had set him the chore of dumping the instruments’ data into the desk.

Krupp moved behind a blackened rib. Ballantine glanced at me, his face empty, then ran jerkily down the ramp towards the wreck.

Intrigued, I stayed to watch. Ballantine walked to the center of the nullifier disc and turned the two-way switch. Then he hoisted up the data desk’s one percent weight and set it on his shoulder. He posed like a parody of Krupp, grinning coldly

until Krupp himself came back into view. The big man stared, amazed. Then he strode up behind Ballantine and gave him a shove that sent him sprawling. The desk tumbled in the air; Krupp caught it neatly.

Ballantine hauled himself stiffly to his feet and brushed purple dust from his suit.

Krupp laughed at him. “Leave men’s work to the men,” he said harshly. “Turn that gravity thing off, Ballantine, and I’ll carry the desk back to the ship.”

Ballantine knelt and deftly turned the switch to its second setting.

Krupp gasped; his knees buckled. With a grunting effort he straightened up. I watched, bewildered. Ballantine approached Krupp and stared up into his face. “What’s the matter, big man? Can’t hold a little weight?”

Krupp looked as if he might drop the deskbut while Ballantine taunted he had to stand there, legs shaking.

Something was wrong, I realized. Shouting for help I ran to the wreck; I brushed Ballantine aside and turned the switch. As the weight lifted from him, Krupp sighed. His blood-swollen face smoothed over and he fell back into the dust.

It took three of us to carry him back to the ship.

The Captain spent a long time grilling Ballantine, but she came away frustrated. What was there to find out? Krupp had hoisted one load too many, crushed a few vertebrae

The Captain filed a report, and Krupp started to learn to use crutches.

I spent a long time thinking it all over.

We lifted off, and I found myself standing once more with Ballantine, this time at a port. We watched the planet recede. I began: “You were saying?”

His bony head swiveled towards me.

“On the ramp,” I prompted. “Remember? You said that switch wasn’t on-off…”

He turned away, but I grabbed one sharp-boned shoulder. “You see, I’ve worked it out. You said there were three gravity forces, two positive and one negative. One setting of the switch canceled out the positive Yukawa, leaving zero overall.

“But the other setting didn’t switch the device off. It canceled out the other Yukawa. The negative one. And that left two positives…”

Ballantine grinned abruptly, showing crooked teeth.

I went on, “The first time you turned that switch you watched the data desk fall twice as fast as it should have done. That was your clue… And that’s how you got Krupp. The data desk suddenly came down on him at two gravities”

“I had to abandon the nullifier on the planet,” he cut in harshly. “So you’ll never know for sure, will you, Gorman?” His head rotated and his pale eyes locked onto mine.

I knew he was right.

I had nothing else to say. I broke the stare and walked away. Ballantine stayed at the port, teeth bared.

The only law governing the squabbling junior races of the Galaxy was the iron rule of economics.

The second Occupation of the worlds of mankind was far more brutal than the first.

Because there were so few of them, the species called the Qax weren’t naturally warlikeindividual life was far too precious to them. They were instinctive traders, in fact; the Qax worked with each other like independent corporations, in perfect competition.

“The Qax enslaved mankind simply because it was an economically valid proposition,” Eve said. “They occupied Earth because it was so easybecause they could. They had to learn the techniques of oppression from humans themselves. Fortunately for the Qax, human history wasn’t short of object lessons…”

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