THE HIGH ONES
By POUL ANDERSON
Illustrated by ED EMSH
A mutiny had given the Whites control
of the starship—but that meant they
could never return to Red-ruled Earth!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity June 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
CHAPTER I
When he first saw the planet, green and blue and cloudy white across many cold stars, Eben Holbrook had a sense of coming home. He turned from the viewport so that Ekaterina Ivanovna should not see the quick tears in his eyes. Thereafter it became a long waiting, but his hope upbore him and he stayed free of the quarrels which now flared in the ship. Nerves were worn thin, three parsecs and fifty-eight years from Earth; only those who found a way to occupy their hands could endure this final unsureness. Because it might not be final. Tau Ceti might have no world on which men could walk freely. And then it would be back into the night of suspended animation and the night of unending space, for no man knew how long.
Holbrook was not a scientist, to examine how safe the planet was for rhesus monkeys and human volunteers. He was a nucleonics engineer. Since his chief, Rakitin, had been killed in the mutiny, he was in charge of the thermonuclear ion-drive. Now that the Rurik swung in orbit, he found his time empty, and he was too valuable for Captain Svenstrup to accept him as a guinea pig down on the surface. But he had an idea for improving the engines of the great spaceship's auxiliary boats, and he wrapped himself in a fog of mathematics and made tests and swore and returned to his computations, for all the weeks it took. In spare moments he amused himself with biological textbooks, an old hobby of his.
That was one way to stay out of trouble, and to forget the scorn in certain hazel eyes.