Collision Course by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg [Silverberg, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780812554731
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1961-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

Laurance's defiant words remained with Bernard as he boarded the ship and made his way to the passenger cabin to await blastoff. It was not often that you heard anyone openly expressing antagonism to the Archonate, especially when the outburst came from someone like Laurance. Bernard realized with surprise that the little interchange had jangled his nerves more than it had any right to do. We're conditioned to love and respect the Archonate, he thought. And we don't realize how deep that conditioning lies until someone rubs against it.

It was strange to think of criticizing the Archonate or a specific Archon. To do so was virtually to demonstrate an atavistic urge to return to the dreadful confusion of pre-Archonate days. And such a return, of course, was inconceivable.

The Archons had ruled Earth since the dim days of the early space age. The First Archonate had risen out of the nightmare anarchy of the twenty-second century; despairing of mankind, thirteen strong men and true had seized the reins of command and set things aright. Before the Archonate, mankind had been splintered into nations forever at each other's throats, and the stars waited in vain. But Merriman's invention of the transmat had made possible the rise of the Archonate, with Merriman himself as the First Technarch, five centuries gone. And man had yielded to oligarchic rule, and the Archons had goaded man to the stars.

And, training and choosing their own successors, the Archonate had endured, a continuing body holding supreme authority, by now almost sacred to Terrans of whatever planet. But Martin Bernard had studied medieval history; the pattern of the past argued that no empire sustained itself indefinitely. In time each made its fatal mistake, and gave way to a successor.

Was the cycle of the Archonate ended now, Bernard asked himself as he waited for blastoff? A month ago such a thought would never have occurred. But perhaps McKenzie—one of the greatest Technarchs since Merriman, all admitted—had overreached himself, had committed the sin the Greeks knew as hybris, by spurring man into breaking the bounds of the limiting velocity. McKenzie's rash thrust into interstellar space now threatened to bring war down on Terra—war whose outcome might shatter the peace of five centuries and cast the Archonate into limbo with the other discarded rulers of man's eight thousand years.

Nakamura entered the cabin. "Commander Laurance says he's ready to go. Everybody cradled down for acceleration already?"

Here we go homeward like whipped curs, Bernard thought.

He checked the straps of his protective cradle. They were bound fast.

The signal came not much later. With landing jacks and stabilizing fins retracted, the XV-ftl sat poised in its meadow, while ten miles away unheeding aliens built their colony. A thunder of ions drove the ship upward, until the green planet dwindled and became nothing but a dot against the flaming backdrop of its nameless sun. Within the ship, Bernard lay back, his body involuntarily tensing against the push of three gravities as the XV-ftl sprang away from the planet below.

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