Fiction Complete, page 40
“Has he gone?” he asked.
“Yes. Have you escaped? He is searching, we think.”
“I found a better hole,” said Kleweski. “Now, what were you about to tell me?”
“You requested advice. We have long spent much effort on analyzing Ouayo for faults and weaknesses. What weapon have you?”
“That’s a good one!” muttered Kleweski mirthlessly.
“We did not hear you.”
“My two hands,” said the engineer more plainly.
It created a pause. Then the Skrenthi checked back.
“You are being ironic?”
“Exactly,” said Kleweski.
“We . . . understand. Ouayo has been . . . difficult for us also. Perhaps our estimate of his mentality would interest you.”
“Perhaps,” said Kleweski.
“We think it will be quite hard to fool him. However, any intelligent entity has some limit to the number of actions he can consider or carry on simultaneously. After long study, we conclude that Ouayo would probably be confused by more than four simultaneous alternatives.”
“If I had five or six places to shoot him from, and he saw them all at once, he might forget to duck?”
“That is one example,” agreed the Skrenthi.
If I had something to shoot him with, thought Kleweski.
“We advise you to set a trap for him.”
“Thanks a lot,” retorted Kleweski.
I’d better get out of here, he told himself.
Cautiously, he pushed open the hatch and traversed the, short tunnel. Emerging from the other end, he started for a ladder to the upper levels but changed his mind.
“Come to think of it,” he muttered, “aren’t the main gravity controls in one of these machine compartments?”
He walked along watchfully, and presently spotted the control room in question. It took him only a moment to step inside and cut the artificial gravity by half.
Now I can make some time, he congratulated himself, bounding along at a previously impossible speed. Wonder what Ouayo thinks of that? Maybe I ought to do as they said. Some place like the hangar air lock might do.
He saw no sign of Ouayo as he sneaked “down” through the thick central deck and then “up” a ladder to the section near the air lock.
After a few moments of thought, during which he was annoyed to catch himself peering frequently up and down the corridor, Kleweski went to work. He chose a spot where two supply compartments opened on the corridor near the air lock.
For safety, this section was bounded by an extra air-tight emergency door besides the one at the nearby angle in the passage, making a twenty-foot supplemental air lock. Next to one of the compartment exits was a ladder up. the bulkhead to a high hatch. Kleweski climbed up, swung open the hatch, and stepped into the air lock beyond which the rocket was berthed.
He moved certain controls. Sections of bulkhead opposite him began to slide open. Air rushed out, and the hatch started immediately to close. Kleweski hastily dropped through and let it snap shut above his head. As it did so, the two big-emergency doors ceased their closing motion and slid back into the bulkheads.
Kleweski nodded in satisfaction.
Now to fix it so he’ll stick that ugly head of his into the airless chamber, he thought.
He opened the door beside the ladder and bolted the one on the opposite side of the corridor. There was no purpose in having it bolted, and he hoped that Ouayo might wonder momentarily why it was. He decided that a loud noise of some kind should help, and rummaged around a workshop down the line till he had hooked up an electric bell. This he planted some way beyond the standard safety door but led a loop of wire with the switch back around the angle. Several pipe lines ran overhead, and Kleweski tied the wire to one of these.
He picked up the radio he still carried with him, to ask the Skrenthi their opinion of his setup. When his call went unanswered, however, he remembered the shielding around the pit. Ouayo’s relay auxiliary would be on the other side of it.
There’s just one more thing, he decided. If he doesn’t get sucked into the air lock and pop a few blood vessels in the vacuum, I’ll need a way out of here fast! Maybe I’d better shut off that safety door.
He found the switch in the bulkhead at the corridor angle, and immobilized the door.
“Now,” murmured Kleweski, “all I need is to find a good, big monkey wrench and go looking for Ouayo!”
As it turned out, he never had time to choose a weapon. Returning to the shop to search for one, he heard the hum of a nearby elevator. About thirty feet away, the door slid open. Kleweski ducked into the shop.
Too late! he thought. He saw me!
He heard a rapidly approaching pad-pad-pad and ran for a connecting door to the next compartment. It was a half-empty storeroom. He scrambled over light plastic bags of various colors toward the corridor exit. Something in the shop hit the deck with a jingling crash. Small objects, sounding like nails or bolts, continued to bounce lingeringly in the light gravity.
“Stop where you are!” called Ouayo.
Kleweski tore open the door and set sail for the angle in the corridor. Behind him, he heard a commotion as the Arcturan drove after him through the storeroom.
Panting, he bounced to a halt at the intersection he had prepared for the showdown. He leaped for the handle of the hatch to the air lock without bothering with the ladder.
The sound of Ouayo’s approach became louder, then was drowned out by the gush of air escaping into the lock and through it to the rocket cradles and space. Kleweski opened the hatch as far as he could and dropped back to the deck.
The supply compartment doors faced each other, one ajar and one bolted. Electric motors hummed as the extra emergency door and the overhead hatch began to close in response to the decreasing air pressure-The gush of air was approaching a moan.
The Terran, with the strap of the radio clamped between his teeth, had just pulled himself up among the pipe lines along the upper pit-side corner of the corridor when Ouayo bounded through the inoperative doorway. Kleweski pressed his button, sending the bell back down the passage into strident life.
The Arcturan spread his four stumpy legs as brakes. One tentacle grabbed at the ladder. The bulky blaster came up viciously to cover the moving safety door ahead.
Ouayo dismissed that immediately. He side-stepped, slapped the left-hand door wide open. He drove a blast of heat across at the other door. Kleweski saw the bolt area flare white. The thunderclap deafened him. Ouayo leaped for the overhead hatch. Spatters of hot metal from the blasted bolt pattered on the deck. Ouayo shoved the half-closed hatch back, bracing one tentacle on the ladder. Then he recoiled to drop back to the deck.
I lose! despaired Kleweski. lie didn’t make the mistake.
Something deep inside him flinched in sheer terror as he released his grip and kicked off from the bulkhead to gain power for whipping the radio straight at Ouayo’s broad head and the eye that had just discovered him. The Arcturan, twisting awkwardly in midair, swung his weapon around.
In the reduced gravity, the radio snapped across the corridor like a cannon shot. Just before Ouayo’s thick feet slapped on the deck, while Kleweski was still falling, it struck.
Ouayo spun off-balance and thumped against the bulkhead, catching between it and his own bulky body the blast already triggered for Kleweski.
The report was soggily muffled.
Kleweski found himself on hands and knees, staring wide-eyed at the queerly collapsed brown hulk that had been knocked away from the bulkhead to sprawl across the deck.
A two-foot length of tentacle with a seared end marking the amputation lay a yard in front of Kleweski, but it did not bother him—it just did not look real.
The overhead hatch chunked shut. Kleweski realized he could hear.
He never had time to even scream, he thought, still dazed.
Smells began to reach him, now that the air was no longer rushing up through the hatchway. Ozone, a pungent gas from Ouayo’s breathing apparatus, scorched paint fumes from the two glowing spots on the bulkheads.
Mixed with all these, the smell of Ouayo.
Not much different from . . . well, if it had been . . . me, Kleweski thought as he fumbled for the switch to reactivate the door behind him.
He staggered through and along the corridor, listening for the door to close. With the thump, there returned a memory he had not been aware of—the sound of that tentacle plopping on the deck in front of him. He paused, leaned over to brace both hands against the bulkhead, and was sick.
By the time he reached the pit balcony, the shock was wearing off. He could even face the idea of going back to clean up, but his first intention was to contact the Skrenthi.
He stopped short at the thought.
“Now they have nobody to run the place but me,” he murmured.
There was no denying that Ouayo had arranged the perfect setup. Millions to work his calculations and tests for him—plus whatever electronic devices they built to make the task speedier. And their whole existence was dependent upon whoever controlled the station, the medium of their survival.
“Nuts!” he growled, shaking his head. “You’re still dizzy from the shooting. That’s just what you were against!”
He opened the door and strode down the short flight of steps to the screen. The Skrenthi were already on, waiting.
“What happened? We heard no radio message.”
Kleweski explained, and described what had occurred.
“I was lucky,” he concluded, “even though he didn’t slip.”
The Skrenthi looked at each other. Kleweski decided that they were considering the altered situation, wondering how to deal with him. He could see their problem. What he ought to do, he realized, was to reassure them that he would not expect too much—
Get that idea out of your head! he told himself.
But he could not help thinking of the staggering amount of research that would be possible. He visualized millions of Skrenthi hustling about, feeding problems into thousands of mechanical brains.
Well, that much seemed perfectly legitimate, he decided. His manner of controlling it was what bothered him.
“It was not mere luck,” said the Skrenthi spokesman.
“What?”
“Not at all. Did we not tell you Ouayo would make a mistake if given too many alternatives to handle in a brief instant?”
“Yes, but he handled them all,” objected Kleweski. “I thought he’d get caught in the empty air lock as the hatch closed and never get out again, but he pulled back. And he’d already checked or blasted every other way I could have gone.”
“But you had not gone.”
“No . . . but he found that out quick enough!”
“Please!” said the other. “He was not quick enough. Perhaps, had he chosen to check the possibilities confronting him in a slightly different order—who shall say? But the actual result bears out our careful estimate of Ouayo—end of you!”
Kleweski started to answer, but puffed out his cheeks as he caught up to the last statement. He chose to listen further.
“We are well satisfied,” he was told. “We have succeeded in the very first of our planned attempts to escape from a sort of tyranny that was intolerable to us; and we have every expectation that you will aid us in the future, since our advice has proved accurate in helping you to save your own life.”
Kleweski discovered that he was relieved more than he would have expected, both at finding himself in the good graces of the Skrenthi and at having been distracted from making a very possibly fatal decision.
They can be quite dangerous in their own little way, he realized, deciding that they would certainly have found another tool with which to deal with Ouayo had Kleweski not been handy.
“You still want to make a business of computation and research?” he asked.
“It seems a likely way to earn our . . . living.”
“Then I think,” said Kleweski, “that I will just leave the terms to you. I am sure we can trust each other.”
After the screen had darkened while the Skrenthi went to inform their people, he remained to stare speculatively at the gleaming spheres hanging serenely in the pit.
“It’s the most marvelous research tool I ever heard of,” he told himself at last. “I just wish I could be sure of who’s the tool!”
THE END
Implode and Peddle
The Bureau of Slick Tricks could take advantage of anything—but it wasn’t often they took advantage of nothing. In this case, was nothing, in one sense or another, that they needed . . .
When his secretary announced the interstellar telecall, Tom Ramsay was on the balcony outside his office, watching one of his spaceships land. He smiled proudly as it flared down against the hazy background of Delthig IV’s remaining sea.
Used to think I was big stuff with one interstellar ship, he thought. Now I have three, plus ten locals. Guess I ought to find a buyer for the locals, though, before the Delthigans on III crank up to expand that Planetary State of theirs.
He glanced with continued satisfaction at his secretary. Tall, willowy, with hair nearly as Slack as his own short brush but features far easier to look at, Marie Furman was another symbol of his progress in this Terran colony. Then she spoke, and a cold little knot formed in the pit of Ramsay’s stomach.
“Telecall from Bormek V, Mr. Ramsay. A gentleman named J. Gilbert Fuller, of Sol III.”
Ramsay hastily checked over in his mind all his recent operations. This, somehow, had become habitual whenever he recalled his one entanglement with the Bureau of Special Trading, during a stop on Terra two years earlier.
Fie noticed the girl eying the thin scar that ran back from his left temple, and realized that it had become more prominent with the paling of his features.
“Put it on my desk visor, Marie,” he muttered.
Whatever he wants, he promised himself, I won’t even splash it with a rocket blast. That guy is always one orbit closer to the heat than anybody else!
A moment later, the subspace waves were relayed to his desk and he saw Fuller face to face. An almost imperceptible lag after each speech was the only indication of the empty light-years between their physical locations.
“You’re looking well,” Fuller commented genially. “I hear that spaceline of yours is growing fast.”
He looks just the same, thought Ramsay. As if he just finishing licking that mustache after swallowing the canary. And not one gold-plated hair of his head out of place!
Aloud, he remarked on the excellence of communication.
“Oh, this is not a relay,” said Fuller. “I really am on Bormek V, only two light-years away. Having a little vacation.”
“Hope you’re having a good time,” Ramsay ventured warily.
“Well, I was, but something . . . ah, came up.”
“Uh-huh!” Ramsay grunted.
He pressed both palms against the edge of the shiny black desk and braced his shoulders against the imitation Cagsan lizard skin of his chair, for the sake of feeling something at his back.
“Not exactly business of the Bureau,” Fuller went on blithely, “but the Bormekians asked me to look into it.”
“Don’t tell me your Bureau of Slick Tricks doesn’t have an agent around Delthig!”
Ramsay thought he knew of at least four, not counting the elderly gentleman in charge of the Bureau’s local information service. Fuller waved one hand in a broad gesture, as if to imply that he would hardly make such a bald claim to an intelligent and sophisticated intimate like‘ Ramsay.
“I fear I shall require . . . him, for other tasks,” he said blandly. “So, naturally, I thought of you.”
“Naturally,” said Ramsay, glumly. “Glad to help if I can.”
“Excellent!” Fuller beamed. “I knew you would be eager to cooperate. You are hardly one to miss noticing that we have been throwing a little influence behind you occasionally.”
The spaceman’s gaze wavered momentarily. He had wondered a few times how he had managed to expand so rapidly. Hauling refined metals from the mines on Delthig II was standard, but out-system freighting from the fourth planet competed with some powerful interstellar companies.
Of course, the B.S.T. had power too, reflecting that which Terra had acquired by being at a spatial crossroads between the interior of the galaxy and the stars near the Edge. Ramsay usually thought of Fuller as lurking beside that crossroads, the biggest highwayman of all the Bureau.
“Now, then,” continued the blond agent, “what can you tell me about Delthig III and its natives? I want to check our files.”
“Well,” said Ramsay, “the average Delthigan is half a foot taller than I am, wasp-waisted, with roundish, heavy shoulders. Arms and legs skinny but knotty, four each and three sections where we have two. Three mutually opposing digits for hands.”
“Yes, I have the right file,” agreed Fuller, checking.
“He’d have a sort of warty skin, gray with greenish tints. Three eyes, air vents like gills across the front of his face over a big shark mouth. Flappy ears set low on the side of his head, far back.”
“What I’m interested in,” said Fuller, “is political and economic information.”
“Frankly,” said Ramsay, “they won’t have much to do with us.
They’re totalitarians, you know, and they make a point of resenting our having two planets in the system. Guess they have their troubles keeping every John Doe at least half-fed and spinning the grindstone with all four floppy hands.”
“Overpopulated?”
“Badly. Local guess is five or six billion.”
“Other planets?”
“Nothing of use to them except ours, the fourth. Delthig II has good mines, but it’s dead rock like the first. V and VI are little ice-balls circling way out back somewhere.”
“So that they might be attracted to our colony?”
Ramsay hesitated, but decided that Fuller was quite capable of knowing a rumor from a trend.
“Talk is,” he said, “that not only are they planning to throw us out, but they also are talking about spreading out-system.”
