Collected Short Fiction, page 579
“Was that—” Dane tried to swallow the dry croak in his throat. “Was that what Gellian showed me? A sort of half-metallic Christmas tree, growing out of lumps of iron and rock in a flower pot, with a toy ship hanging on it?” She nodded. “My first mutation—except for a new virus or two. I made it last fall in New York. Mr. Messenger was trying to teach me how to mutate the mules, but they were still too difficult. I tried the space ship because he said it would be easier, and because I could already see we were going to need one, to get away from men.”
“How did Gellian get it?”
“I left it for him,” she said. “Because he was getting too bold. His men were killing too many bright children—human as well as mutant. He was coming too close to Mr. Messenger, with that map and all his other clues. My little Christmas gift unnerved them all, and helped me rescue several children.”
A stem little smile crossed her face, when she spoke of that limited victory.
“Mr. Messenger was better at mutation than I am. His tree’s a neater job. It’s hollow—you saw how thick it is.
The ship was grown inside the trunk—all the parts formed inside sheathing membranes which were later absorbed.”
“And it’s still hidden there?” Dane shivered with wonder. “How far—” he whispered. “How far will it carry us?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice was hushed, as if she shared his awe. “Mr. Messenger came back to look at it four years ago—he had left it growing here long before, when he went out to organize the company. He found it fully formed, with the matrix tissues already absorbed. He didn’t try to fly it then, but he thinks it can reach Venus or Mars.”
Dane stood silent before the prospect of exile to another planet, which would surely be stranger and more hostile even than New Guinea. He shivered again, under a sudden shadow of loneliness and unease, and he reached impulsively to touch Nan’s hand.
“It’s a desperate thing, I know.” Her fingers clung to his, as if she sensed his dread. “But better than waiting for Gellian to kill us. Life on any other world would be hard at first, but we should be able to keep alive aboard the ship until we learn enough genetic engineering to grow a crop of mules—or something like them—to help us begin making a home for our people.”
The idea of that bold project took hold of Dane, and it slowly changed his fear to excited eagerness. The colony would be a tiny outpost against the perilous unknown. The sun would be too hot or too cold, the gravity wrong, the air itself probably unbreathable. But Homo excellens would have a chance to survive, he thought, where the older race would die.
“We can do it!” He squeezed her hand, reassuringly. “If we can really learn mutation. Even if we meet unfriendly kinds of life, we ought to be immune to infections—and perhaps we could mutate the hostile species into useful ones.”
“I think we can.” Looking through the windows as if she saw something far beyond the dazzling peak of Mt. Carstensz, Nan smiled confidently. “I think we can build a new sanctuary—and then we must come back for the children.”
“I’ve been wondering where you hid them,” Dane said anxiously. “They aren’t here?”
She shook her head. “It was hard to decide what to do about them. We were afraid to gather them here in New Guinea—or anywhere—for fear Gellian might get them all with one raid. I couldn’t even tell them much of the truth, when I tried to warn them—too many of those in danger were human, and even the mutants weren’t old enough to be sure of.”
Worry cut frowning lines around her eyes.
“I told the parents that their gifted offspring had been selected for a long range experiment in human genetics. I warned them of deadly danger from a murderous opposition group. When they were skeptical, I gave them cash enough to convince them, and to help them guard and educate the children—those gifts helped break Mr. Messenger.
“Also, I saw each child alone. I promised that we would come back with more help, and taught each one a set of recognition signals so that he could tell whom to trust, and armed the ones who seemed responsible—with injectors loaded with the forgetfulness virus.” Dane was watching that frowning basalt wall, and he pointed suddenly.
“The tree!” he whispered. “Up yonder.”
THE gorge was a sharp V of sky notched deep into the rim of that ragged black escarpment. The tree stood near the bottom point, looking no stranger than most New Guinea trees, deceptively small in the high distance.
“That canyon looks too narrow,” he muttered uneasily. “And I’m afraid we’re too low to reach it on this approach.”
“Vic can fly us in, if anybody can.” Nan was smiling confidently, but her mention of Van Doon brought Dane a dazing crash of danger.
“Don’t worry, Dane.” She seemed to feel his alarm, and her fingers tightened in his own. “We’ll soon be safe.”
“I don’t think so.” Dane clung to her taut hand, and he searched her face, which had become a lifeless ivory mask beneath that glare of shocking jeopardy. He sensed the secret unease behind that effort to encourage him and herself, and he glimpsed the depths of her trust in him. Suddenly, he could talk to her about Van Doon.
“I’m afraid of Vic,” he whispered. “I’ve tried hard to like him. But I can’t trust him, even if he is another mutant.”
“But he isn’t—” Her voice stumbled, and he saw the dark terror dilating her eyes. “If he is,” she whispered huskily, “he’s one that went wrong.”
“I’ve got a feeling—” He dropped her hand, and imperative purpose turned him. “I want to see what Van Doon’s doing now!”
He ran to the compartment door, and she followed silently. Danger was a biting chill in the narrow passage through the crew’s quarters. Its dusty bitterness took his breath and burned his tongue. It roared in his brain, louder than the engines.
He started up the narrow steps behind the cockpit, and paused when he could see Van Doon and Messenger. He reached back to check Nan, and touched his lips warningly. The aged maker sat slumped far down in the co-pilot’s seat, but Van Doon was leaning forward, with the radio headphones over his ears, shouting into the microphone.
“Captain Vaughn to General Soames, Comopsur!” Dane caught the hoarse and frantic words, above the drone of the engines and that louder roaring of alarm. The term Comopsur puzzled him for an instant, until he recognized it as military shorthand for Commander Operation Survival.
“Get this!” Dane was stumbling desperately up the steps again, but he felt weak and sick with shock, and that harsh voice raced faster than he could move. “Headquarters of not-men in canyon north of summit. Look for huge solitary tree below basalt cliffs. I’m crashing plane on rocky slope below, to mark spot for you—”
Dane felt half paralyzed. His dazed brain was grasping the enormity of this disaster. He could see a black tangle of fallen boulders ahead. He realized that the plane was already diving toward destruction, but his stunned body seemed too slow to do anything about it.
Moving in what seemed like the agonized slow motion of a nightmare, he came up the steps to the cockpit at last. He snatched the headset and microphone and hurled his body against Van Doon, fighting for the wheel.
He hauled it back, struggling to pull the plane out of that suicidal dive, but Van Doon pushed it down again instantly, with a monstrous strength. Rising half out of the seat, the spy lifted an improvised club; a hand fire extinguisher. Dane snatched at the heavy cylinder, but it slid out of his grasp, already slippery with blood.
“Mr. Messenger!” Nan had followed him up the steps, and her sudden scream knifed through his mind. “He’s killed Mr. Messenger!”
XVI
DANE still felt trapped in that strange slow motion. When he reached again for Van Doon’s weapon, the inertia of his limbs seemed to hold him back. The resistance was like some thick fluid.
That nightmare feeling was only illusion, he knew. Desperation must have speeded, up his mind to a pace that his body couldn’t match, for all Van Doon’s movements seemed as queerly deliberate as his own. He failed again to grasp that blood-stained club, but he had time to catch the hard bronze arm that held it. He ducked the blow, and twisted to drag Van Doon away from the controls.
“Take the wheel!” His shouted words to Nan seemed to come as slowly as his body moved, and he thought the diving plane would strike the rock-slide ahead before she could reach the Pilot’s seat.
“Pull it back!” he yelled. “Quick!”
Her movements must have been faster than they seemed. She slipped into the seat with a surprising air of knowing what she was doing. Her feet found the rudder controls, and she swung the wheel as she brought it back, watching the instruments as well as that tumbled boulder-slope ahead. She was trying to turn the plane away from the cliffs above the slope, and for an instant Dane thought she would succeed.
Van Doon gave him no time to watch.
He had always known, without thinking much about it, that he was strong for his size. Without pausing to consider the odds, he had attacked Van Doon with high confidence.
If his strength was a gift of the maker’s, however, their contest gave quick evidence that Van Doon was also a mutant. The spy was many pounds heavier, and equally in earnest. His brown arm twisted out of Dane’s desperate fingers, like a massive lever of actual bronze. Again it rose and fell with the fire extinguisher, murderously swift.
Dane flung up his hand defensively, but the heavy brass cylinder crushed it down and struck his temple. The blow rocked him backward. Van Doon swung instantly, lifting that red club to strike at the back of Nan’s head.
Dane was reeling and half blind with pain, but he swayed forward to clutch at the weapon. It slipped out of his fingers again but he caught Van Doon’s elbow and hung on groggily. That feeble effort took all his will. He expected to be flung away, but something made the mutant spy relax.
Dully, he realized that Van Doon had stopped to wait for the crash. The nose of the plane was still coming up. That wilderness of fallen rock had begun to slip aside, as Nan tried to bank and turn before they struck. Abruptly there was blue sky ahead, instead of the cliffs. He thought they would avoid a crash—until the right wingtip struck.
He heard Nan’s faint cry of despair, and then the shriek of tearing metal. Sharp pain stabbed his ears, as the air pressure went out of the cabin. He felt the sickening lurch of the lifting plane, and then he was hurled forward against Van Doon when it struck another boulder. They both were flung to the front of the cockpit. Something came against his head. . . .
Suddenly, then, everything was very quiet. The cockpit was tipped sharply downward, and he lay crumpled against the instruments. Van Doon’s heavy body was sprawled across his legs, still curiously relaxed. He caught a bitter-almond whiff of potassium cyanide.
The agony of death paralyzed him, a shock of emotion more violent than the crash. For one dreadful instant he thought he had felt Nan dying, but then he knew that the death he sensed had been Van Doon’s. As clearly as if she had spoken to him, he knew that Nan was still alive and not yet badly hurt.
Not yet—but the fuel would explode.
THAT sick fear swept over him—and then ebbed abruptly. Even before he had time to try to gather up his bruised and quivering limbs, the calm knowledge came to him that there would be no fire! Grateful to his mutant faculties for that assurance, he sank back to collect his strength and breath.
He managed to move a little, and found breath to speak.
“Nan!” he called faintly. “Can you answer?”
“I’m all right.” Her shaken whisper came from close beside him. “I—I think I am.”
He pushed Van Doon’s inert body off his knees. Blood was oozing from the lax lips, and he saw fine shards of glass upon them. The mouth sagged open as the head turned, and that bitter odor was suddenly powerful. He turned away from it, to look for Nan.
She lay almost beside him, crushed against the great inert bulk of Messenger’s body. Her lean cheeks were streaked with blood, but that must have come from the long ragged wound in the maker’s scalp, for he saw no wound in her face. She smiled at him, with a shaken relief.
“I’m so glad—you’re alive!” she sobbed. “Is Vic—”
“Dead,” he told her. “I think from an ampule of prussic acid crushed in his teeth.”
“He was faithful so long.” A troubled wonder edged her shaken voice. “I can’t quite believe he was against us all the time.”
“But he must have been,” Dane said. “I don’t think he ever knew he wasn’t human. His immunity from the virus protected his memory, and his mutant gifts made him an efficient spy. If you had been in time to find him, with the Sanderson Service, he might have been one of us.”
She tried uncertainly to get up, but sank back to rub her bruises.
“Not one of us!” She shook her head, quickly. “Or he’d have realized what he was, long ago. He must have been one of those that turned out wrong.” Her sick eyes went to the body at Dane’s feet, and quickly fled. “I wonder why he took that poison?”
“An accident, I think,” Dane said.
He could see how it must have happened. Sharing Gellian’s fear of the mutants, the spy must have been prepared for torture. He must have had the poison capsule ready in his mouth, just now, to protect his secrets if he were captured, and the crash must have made him break it.
“I trusted him,” Nan whispered. “I even liked him—I suppose he couldn’t help showing a little more personality than the real lotus-eaters.”
“Even now, I can almost admire him.” Dane nodded reluctantly. “We were monstrous enemies, in his imagination. I don’t see how he expected to survive his crash, even if his capsule hadn’t killed him. He was willing to give his life to kill us—and it may turn out that he succeeded.”
She tried to smile, through her tight-lipped apprehension. “Maybe nobody heard his call. You stopped him before he had time to say much.”
“He told where we are,” Dane muttered bleakly. “And anyhow that probably wasn’t his first call—he must have been reporting our progress every time I got that danger-feeling.”
“I guess you’re right.” Nodding hopelessly, she forgot to smile. “They let us lead them here. Now they’ll soon be closing in, with their whole expedition, to finish us off.”
“Which means we haven’t much time.” Dane glanced outside at the huge fallen boulders that walled the wreckage. “We must get out of here—if we can—before they spot us and drop a few sticks of bombs, just to make certain of us.”
“How far is the tree?” A desperate hope came back to her eyes. “Do you think we can get there on foot?”
“We can try.” He frowned doubtfully. “The going will be hard, at this altitude—up this rock-slide and then the cliffs. But perhaps there’s a trail.” He glanced at Messenger’s crumpled body. “Or how did he go there?”
“In a helicopter.”
Wincing from the pain of a dozen sprains and bruises of his own, he moved stiffly to help Nan rise from the tilted floor. She stooped to examine the wound in Messenger’s scalp, which was still oozing blood.
“It seems so cruel,” she whispered, “that he had to be killed by a creature he had made, when all he meant to do was good—” Her breath caught, and she bent lower. “He isn’t dead!”
MESSENGER was alive, but little more. Breath fluttered his lips feebly as they straightened his body on the sloping floor, behind the seats, but it seemed a long time before he struggled to inhale again. Half open beneath the folds of flesh, his faded eyes stared dimly at nothing. The blotches were darker on his swollen face, and his lips already blue.
“There’s a medical kit in his room,” Nan whispered anxiously. “Or it was there, before we crashed. Gray plastic, with a chrome catch. Will you see if you can find it?”
Dane went back to look for it, scrambling clumsily up the incline of the tilted wreck. Light struck through a wide hole torn in the cabin wall where the galley had been, and he paused to look out uneasily.
Both wings had been sheared off, he saw, when the cabin came between two great boulders. The crumpled wings and the battered engines, ripped from their mounts, were all many yards away. He could see no danger of fire, but his relief at that was forgotten when he glanced up toward the tree.
The boulder-slope stretched up far above the wreck, a forbidding wilderness of broken stones sometimes as large as buildings. Above and beyond, the vertical face of the cliff raised another barrier. Standing in that narrow notch against the sky, the tree looked no larger than a thick-stemmed shrub.
Its promise of safety and escape was suddenly far away. Messenger would never be able to reach it, with all the aid they could give. The climb would be heartbreaking, even for him and Nan. And time was short—Gellian had studied another mutant tree, and he was unlikely to overlook this one.
Dane clambered heavily on through the wreckage. He found the medical kit on the floor of Messenger’s room, and a metal canteen nearly full of water. He rolled them up in the blankets from the berth, and slid down with them to the cockpit.
The maker was still unconscious, breathing slowly and very feebly. Nan took the kit silently, to swab his flabby arm and stab it with a hypodermic needle. She felt his pulse and leaned to listen at his chest and finally shook her head.
“It doesn’t seem to help,” she said. “We must bring the ship down here.”
“I’ll try to get it,” he said. “If you can tell me something about how to operate it.”
“I’ll have to go,” she told him. “Because the ship is—protected. I know how to get inside, and something about how to pilot it—when I was working last year on that mutant tree of my own, I spent months studying the plans and specifications Mr. Messenger had worked out for this one.”
“It will be a terrible climb,” he protested uneasily. “Shouldn’t we tackle it together?”
“I wish you’d stay,” she whispered. “I’m afraid to leave him so long. He’ll need another shot in about an hour—I’ll show you what to do. Will you stay?”
