Complete Short Fiction, page 406
The airlock irises in the hull of Starfigher 88 and the spacesuited female swims out, moving smoothly across toward Ship. Half conscious, dreaming this dream of the female, I think about golden crab-creatures swimming deep in aquamarine waters, singing of sweetness. I black out again.
When I rise through the blackness, I realize I am being touched, and I smell something sharp and stinging that burns the fining of my nostrils. Tiny pin-pricks of pain, a pattern of them. I cough, and come fully awake, and jerk my body . . . and scream as pain goes through every nerve and fiber in me.
I open my eyes and it is the female.
She smiles worriedly and removes the tube of awakener.
“Hello,” she says.
Ship says nothing.
“Ever since I discovered how to take control of my Starfighter, I’ve been using the ship as a decoy for other ships of the series. I dummied a way of making it seem my ship was talking, so I could communicate with other slave ships. I’ve run across ten others since I went on my own. You’re the eleventh. It hasn’t been easy, but several of the men I’ve freed—like you—started using their ships as decoys for Starfighters with female human operators.”
I stare at her. The sight is pleasant.
“But what if you lose? What if you can’t get the message across, about the corridor between control room and freezers? That the control room is the key?”
She shrugs. “It’s happened a couple of times. The men were too frightened of their ships—or the ships had . . . done something to them—or maybe they were just too dumb to know they could break out. In that case, well, things just went on the way they’d been. It seems sad, but what could I do beyond what I did?”
We sit here, not speaking for a while.
“Now what do we do? Where do we go?”
“That’s up to you,” she says. “Will you go with me?”
She shakes her head uncertainly. “I don’t think so. Every time I free a man he wants that. But I just haven’t wanted to go with any of them.”
“Could we go back to the Home Galaxy, the place we came from, where the war was?”
She stands up and walks around the stateroom where we have coupled for three weeks. She speaks, not looking at me, looking in the viewplate at the darkness and the far, bright points of the stars. “I don’t think so. We’re free of our ships, but we couldn’t possibly get them working well enough to carry us all the way back there. It would take a lot of charting, and we’d be running the risk of activating the intermind sufficiently to take over again, if we asked it to do the charts. Besides, I don’t even know where the Home Galaxy is.”
“Maybe we should find a new place. Someplace where we could be free and outside the ships.” She turns and looks at me. “Where?”
So I tell her what I heard the intermind say, about the world of golden crab-creatures.
It takes me a long time to tell, and I make some of it up. It isn’t lying, because it might be true; I do so want her to go with me.
They came down from space. Far down from the star-sun Sol in a Galaxy lost forever to them. Down past the star-sun M-13 in Perseus. Down through the gummy atmosphere and straight down into the sapphire sea. Ship, Starfighter 31, settled delicately on an enormous underwater mountaintop, and they spent many days listening, watching, drawing samples and hoping. They had landed on many worlds and they hoped.
Finally, they came out; looking. They wore underwater suits and they began gathering marine samples; looking.
They found the ruined diving suit with its fish-eaten contents lying on its back in deep azure sand, sextet of insectoidal legs bent up at the joints, in a posture of agony. And they knew the intermind had remembered, but not correctly. The faceplate had been shattered, and what was observable within the helmet—orange and awful in the light of their portable lamp—convinced them more by implication than specific that whatever had swum in that suit, had never seen or known humans.
They went back to the ship and she broke out the big camera, and they returned to the crab-like diving suit. They photographed it, without moving it. Then they used a seine to get it out of the sand and they hauled it back to the ship on the mountaintop.
He set up the Condition and the diving suit was analyzed. The rust. The joint mechanisms. The controls. The substance of the flipper-feet. The jagged points of the faceplate. The . . . stuff . . . inside.
It took two days. They stayed in the ship, with green and blue shadows moving languidly in the viewplates.
When the analyses were concluded they knew what they had found. And they went out again, to find the swimmers.
Blue it was, and warm. And when the swimmers found them, finally, they beckoned them to follow, and they swam after the many-legged creatures, who led them through underwater caverns as smooth and shining as onyx, to a lagoon. And they rose to the surface and saw a land against whose shores the azure, aquamarine seas lapped quietly. And they climbed out onto the land, and there they removed their face-masks, never to put them on again, and they shoved back the tight coifs of their suits, and they breathed for the first time an air that did not come from metal sources; they breathed the sweet musical air of a new place.
In time, the sea rains would claim the corpse of Starfighter 31.
THE PROXY INTELLIGENCE
(full-length version)
1
Take a sentient being—
Even Steve Hanardy could fit that description. He was a short, stocky man, with the look about him of someone who had lived too close to the animal stage. His eyes were perpetually narrowed, as if he were peering against a bright light. His face was broad and fleshy. But he was human. He could think and act, and he was a giver and not a taker.
—Put this sentient person in a solar system surrounded by a two billion light-year ocean of virtual nothingness beyond which, apparently, is more nothingness—
Hanardy, a product of the Earth’s migration to the moon and to the planets of the solar system, was born on Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, before the educational system caught up to the colonists. He grew up an incoherent roustabout and a spacehand on the freighters and passenger liners that sped about among the immense amount of debris—from moons to habitable meteorites—that surrounded the massive Jupiter. It was a rich and ever-growing trade area, and so presently even the stolid, unimaginative Hanardy had a freighter of his own. Almost from the beginning, his most fruitful journeys were occasional trips to the meteorite where a scientist, Professor Ungarn, lived with his daughter, Patricia. For years, it was a lucrative, routine voyage, without incident.
—Confront this sentient individual with this enigma of being—
The last voyage had been different.
To begin with, he accepted a passenger—a reporter named William Leigh, who ostensibly wanted to write up the lonely route for his news syndicate. But almost as soon as the freighter reached the Ungarn meteorite and entered the airlock, the meteorite was attacked by strange space vessels, which were capable of far greater speeds than anything Hanardy had ever seen. And William Leigh was not who he seemed.
It was hard to know just who he was. What actually happened as far as Hanardy was confused, was quite simple: One of the defensive energy screens had gone down before the attack of the strange ships; and Professor Ungarn sent Hanardy to machine a new part for the screen’s drive unit. While he was engaged in this, Leigh came upon him by surprise, attacked him, and tied him up.
Lying there on the floor, bound hand and foot, Hanardy thought in anguish: ‘If I ever get loose, I’m gonna hightail it out of here!’
He tested the rope that held him and groaned at its unyielding toughness. He lay, then, for a while, accepting the confinement of the bonds, but underneath was a great grief and a great fear.
He suspected that Professor Ungarn and the professor’s daughter, Patricia, were equally helpless, or they would have tried during the past hour to find out what had happened to him.
He listened again, intently, holding himself still. But only the steady throbbing of the distant dynamos was audible. No footsteps approached; there was no other movement.
He was still listening when he felt an odd tugging inside his body.
Shivering a little, Hanardy shook his head as If to clear it of mental fog—and climbed to his feet.
He didn’t notice that the cords that had bound him fell away.
Out in the corridor, he paused tensely. The place looked deserted, empty. Except for the vague vibration from the dynamos, a great silence pressed in upon him. The place had the look and feel of being on a planet. The artificial gravity made him somewhat lighter than on Earth, but he was used to such changes. It was hard to grasp that he was inside a meteorite, hundreds of thousands of miles from the nearest moon or inhabited planet. Being here was like being inside a big building, on an upper floor.
Hanardy headed for the nearest elevator shaft. He thought: I’d better untie Miss Pat, then her pop, and then get.
It was an automatic decision, to go to the girl first. Despite her sharp tongue, he admired her. He had seen her use weapons to injure, but that didn’t change his feeling. He guessed that she’d be very angry—very possibly she’d blame him for the whole mess.
Presently he was knocking hesitantly on the door to Patricia’s apartment. Hesitantly, because he was certain that she was not in a position to answer.
When, after a reasonable pause, there was no reply, he pressed gently on the latch. The door swung open.
He entered pure enchantment.
The apartment was a physical delight. There were French-type windows that opened onto a sunlit window. The French doors were open, and the sound of birds singing wafted in through them. There were other doors leading to the inner world of the girl’s home, and Hanardy, who had occasionally been in the other rooms to do minor repair work, knew that there also everything was as costly as it was here in this large room that he could see.
Then he saw the girl. She was lying on the floor, halfhidden behind her favorite chair, and she was bound hand and foot with wire.
Hanardy walked toward her unhappily. It was he who had brought William Leigh, and he wasn’t quite sure just how he would argue himself out of any accusation she might make about that. His guilt showed in the way he held his thick-set body, in the shuffling of his legs, in the awkward way he knelt beside her. He began gingerly to deal with the thin wire that enlaced and interlaced her limbs.
The girl was patient She waited till he had taken all the wire off her and then, without moving from the floor, began to rub the circulation back into her wrists and ankles.
She looked up at him and made her first comment: ‘How did you avoid being tied up?’
‘I didn’t. He got me, too,’ said Hanardy. He spoke eagerly, anxious to be one of the injured, along with her. He already felt better. She didn’t seem to be angry.
Then how did you get free?’ Patricia Ungarn asked.
‘Why, I just—’ Hanardy began.
He stopped, thunderstruck. He thought back, then over what had happened. He had been lying there, tied. And then . . . and then . . .
What?
He stood blank, scarcely daring to think. Realizing that an answer was expected, he began apologetically, ‘I guess he didn’t tie me up so good, and I was in a kind of a hurry, figuring you were here, and so I just—’
Even as he spoke, his whole being rocked with the remembrance of how tough those ropes had been a few minutes before he freed himself.
He stopped his mumbling explanation because the girl wasn’t listening, wasn’t even looking. She had climbed to her feet, and she was continuing to rub her hands. She was small of build and good-looking in a bitter way. Her lips were pressed too tightly together; her eyes were slightly narrowed with a kind of permanent anxiety. Except for that, she looked like a girl in her teens, but cleverer and more sophisticated than most girls her age.
Even as Hanardy, in his heavy way, was aware of the complexity of her, she faced him again. She said with an ungirl-like decisiveness, ‘Tell me everything that happened to you.’
Hanardy was glad to let go of the unsatisfactory recollection of his own escape. He said, ‘First thing I know, this guy comes in there while I’m working at the lathe. And is he strong, and is he fast! I never would’ve thought he had that kind of muscle and that Fast way of moving. I’m pretty chunky, y’understand—’
‘What then?’ She was patient, but there was a pointedness about her question that channeled his attention back to the main line of events.
Then he ties me up, and then he goes out, and then he takes those Dreeghs from the spaceship and disappears into space.’ Hanardy shook his head, wonderingly. ‘That’s what gets me. How did he do that?’
He paused, in a brown study; but be came from the distance of his thought back into the room, to realize guiltily that the girl had spoken to him twice.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I was thinking about how he did that, and it’s kind of hard to get the idea.’ He finished, almost accusingly: ‘Do you know what he does?’
The girl looked at him, a startled expression on her face. Hanardy thought she was angry at his inattention and said hastily: ‘I didn’t hear what you wanted me to do. Tell me again, huh!’
She seemed unaware that he had spoken. ‘What does he do, Steve?’
‘Why, he just—’
At that point, Hanardy stopped short and glanced back mentally over the glib words he had been using. It was such a fantastic dialogue, that he could feel the blood draining from his cheeks.
‘Huh!’ he said.
‘What does he do, Steve?’ He saw that she was looking at him, as if she understood something that he didn’t It irritated him.
He said unhappily: Td better go and untie your father before that last bunch of Dreeghs shows up.’
Having spoken, he stopped again, his mouth open in amazement. He thought: ‘I must be nuts. What am I saying?’
He turned and started for the door.
‘Come back here!’
Her voice, sharp and commanding, cut into him. Defensively, he put up between himself and her the thick barrier of stolidity which had served him for so many years in his relations with other people. He swung awkwardly around to face her again. Before he could speak, she said with intensity: ‘How did he do it, Steve?’
The question ran up against a great stubbornness in him. He had no feeling of deliberately resisting her. But the mental fog seemed to settle down upon his being, and he said: ‘Do what. Miss?’
‘Leave?’
‘Who?’ He felt stupid before her questions, but he felt even more stupid for having had meaningless thoughts and said meaningless things.
‘Leigh—you fool! That’s who.’
‘I thought he took that spaceboat of yours that looks like an automobile.’
There was a long pause. The girl clenched and unclenched her hands. Now she seemed very unchildlike indeed. Hanardy, who had seen her angry before, cringed and waited for the thunder and lightning of her rage to lash out at him. Instead, the tenseness faded. She seemed suddenly thoughtful and said with unexpected gentleness: ‘After that, Steve? After he got out there!’
She swung her arm and pointed at the aviary, where the sunlight glinted beyond the French windows. Hanardy saw birds fluttering among the trees. Their musical cries gave the scene a homey touch, as if it really were a garden. As he watched, the tree leaves stirred; and he knew that hidden fans were blowing an artificial breeze. It was like a summer afternoon, except that just beyond the glasslike wall was the blackness of space.
It was a cosmic night outside, disturbed here and there by an atom of matter—a planet hidden from sight by its own relative smallness and distance from anything else, a sun, a point of light and energy, quickly lost in darkness so vast that presently its light would fade, and become one grain in a misty bright cloud that obscured the blackness for a moment of universe time and occupied an inch of space, or so it seemed . . . .
Hanardy contemplated that startling vista. He was only vaguely aware that his present intensity of interest was quite different from similar thoughts he had had in the past. On his long journeys, such ideas had slipped into and out of his mind. He recalled having had a thought about it just a few months before. He had been looking out of a porthole, and—just for an instant—the mystery of the empty immensity had touched him. And he’d thought: ‘What the heck is behind all this? How does a guy like me rate being alive?’
Aloud, Hanardy muttered: Td better get your father free. Miss Pat.’ He finished under his breath: ‘And then beat it out of here—fast.’
2
He turned, and this time, though she called after him angrily, he stumbled out into the corridor and went down to the depths of the meteorite, where the dynamos hummed and throbbed; and where, presently, he had Professor Ungarn untied.
The older man was quite cheerful. ‘Well, Steve, we’re not dead yet. I don’t know why they didn’t jump in on us, but the screens are still holding, I see.’
He was a gaunt man with deep-set eyes and the unhappiest face Hanardy had ever seen. He stood, rubbing the circulation back into his arms. Strength of intellect shone from his face, along with the melancholy. He had defended the meteorite in such a calm, practical way from the attacking Dreeghs that it was suddenly easy to realize that this sadfaced man was actually the hitherto unsuspected observer of the solar system for a vast galactic culture, which included at its top echelon the Great Galactic—who had been William Leigh—and at the bottom. Professor Ungarn and his lovely daughter.
The thoughts about that seeped into Hanardy’s foreconscious. He realized that the scientist was primarily a protector. He and this station were here to prevent contact between Earth and the galaxy. Man and his earth-born civilization were still too low on the scale of development to be admitted to awareness that a gigantic galactic culture existed. Interstellar ships of other low-echelon cultures which had been admitted to the galactic union were warned away from the solar system whenever they came too close. Accidentally, the hunted, lawless Dreeghs had wandered into this forbidden sector of space. In their lust for blood and life energy they had avidly concentrated here in the hope of gaining such a quantity of blood, and so great a supply of life energy, that they would be freed for endless years from their terrible search.
