Collected Short Fiction, page 606
“How?”
“By fusing the hydrogen into heavier elements,” the colonel said solemnly.
He flicked a switch. A screen slid down out of the ceiling. An image appeared on it, the image of little darting bodies, flashing with light, crossing the field of vision. The picture might have been one of pond life under a microscope, except for the difference in shapes . . . and for the fact that these creatures gave off a light of their own. “The fusorians,” said the colonel somberly. “Hardy little things. They fuse hydrogen atoms and generate energy, and they live in space.”
Fusorians! Ryeland felt his body tense as though an electric shock had passed through it. He was conscious of the colonel’s gaze on him, and tried to relax, but the colonel studied him thoughtfully for a moment.
He said only: “No wonder you’re excited.” He blinked at Ryeland mildly. “This thing is big. It means that the planets are not lonely oases in a dead desert of emptiness. It means that they are islands in an infinite ocean of life—strange life, which we had never suspected.”
“But why haven’t any of them ever appeared on Earth?” Ryeland demanded. Infuriating how slowly Lescure spoke! It was life and death to Ryeland—perhaps it was the answer to all his questions—but the colonel treated it only as another lecture, and a rather dull one.
The colonel shrugged. “Perhaps they drown in air. I suppose the heavier elements are their own waste products, and therefore poisonous to them.” He took another pull at his drink. “Perhaps these creatures built the Earth,” he said meditatively. “It accounts for the proportions of heavy elements better than the theories of the cosmologists. But of course it doesn’t really matter—not to the Plan, I mean.” Ryeland frowned. There had been something almost disloyal about the colonel’s tone. He changed the subject. “These things—” touching the plastic models—“they aren’t fusorians?”
“No. They’re pyropods. They live in the reefs.” Irritably the colonel waved a hand. The screen glowed with another picture.
Ryeland leaned forward staring. “Fairyland!” he breathed. The colonel laughed harshly. The view on the screen was of a delicate tracery of glowing vines and plants, where birdlike things moved effortlessly among the branches.
“Call it that,” said the colonel. “I called it other things when I was there. You see, there is a constant new flow of matter into the universe. There is a steady rebirth of hydrogen between the stars. I know—I’ve seen it!”
Nervously he took another drink.
“It was a few years ago. The pyropods had been seen, but none had been captured. The Planner ordered me out on a hunting trip to catch one.”
Ryeland frowned. “Hunting? But the Plan of Man has no energy to waste on that sort of thing! Every calorie must go to some productive use!”
“You’re an apt pupil,” the colonel said wryly, “but it was the Machine’s decision, not mine. Or so the Planner said. At any rate, we took off for the planet beyond Pluto. Was there one? It was necessary to assume one, to provide a home for the pyropods—or so we thought. We knew they had no home from Pluto sunwards . . .
“It was a long trip. You know why interstellar flight has never been possible. There’s power enough for us to reach the stars, but the difficulty is in finding the reaction mass to hurl away. Once you pass Orbit Pluto you begin to face those problems in practice. We were in the old Cristobal Colon, with hydrion jets. Our reaction mass was water. All we could carry was barely enough to land us on the hypothetical planet. We were to reload there for the flight home, if we found it.” The colonel chuckled dryly. “We didn’t find it,” he said.
“Then—how did you get back?” Ryeland demanded, startled.
“We blundered into something. What we called the Rim. Don’t confuse it with—it wasn’t them, not for billions of miles yet. It belongs to the solar system, a scattered swarm of little asteroids, strung in a wide orbit all around the sun. A ring of snowballs, actually. Cold snow—mostly methane and ammonia; but we found enough water to refill our tanks. And then we went on. The Machine’s orders had been definite.”
The colonel shivered and finished his drink. “We went out and out,” he said, mixing a fresh one, “beyond the Rim, until the sun was just a bright star behind—then not even particularly bright. We were braking, on the point of turning back—
“And then we saw the first Reef.” Colonel Lescure waved at the strange scene on the screen. He began to look alive again. “It didn’t look like much at first. A mottled, lopsided mass, not much bigger than the snowballs. But it was luminous!”
Ryeland found himself gulping his drink. Silently he held out the empty glass and the colonel refilled it without pausing.
“An unearthly place. We came down in a brittle forest of things like coral branches. Thickets of shining crystal thorns snagged at our spacesuits when we went out exploring. We blundered through metal jungles that tripped and snared us with living wires and stabbed at us with sharp blades. And there were stranger things still!
“There were enormous lovely flowers that shone with uncanny colors—and gave off deadly gamma rays. There was a kind of golden vine that struck back with a high-voltage kick when you touched it. There were innocent little pods that squirted jets of radioactive isotopes.
“It was a nightmare! But while we were reviving and decontaminating our casualties we worked out the natural history of the Reef. It was a cluster of living fusorian colonies!
“We counted almost a hundred species. They must have grown from a few spores, drifting in the interstellar hydrosen. The rate of growth must be terribly slow—a few inches, perhaps, in a million years. But the fusorians have time.
“We looked at each other. We knew we had found something more than we had been sent for.
“We had found a new frontier.” Ryeland was on his feet, a sudden uncontrollable surge of emotion driving him there. “Frontier? Could—could people survive out there?”
“Why not? They’re rich with everything we need. There’s hydrogen for power, metal for machines, raw materials for food. We brought treasures back with us! We loaded our ship with every sort of specimen we could carry. Fantastic diamond spikes, and masses of malleable iron in perfectly pure crystals. Living prisms that shone with their own cold glow of fusion. Spongy metal mushrooms, in hundred-pound chunks, that tested more than ninety per cent uranium-235. Much more than critical mass! And yet they didn’t explode, while they lived. But one chunk did let go after we had jettisoned it in space, and after that we were careful to divide the masses.”
“So that’s why the Machine needs a jetless drive?” Ryeland saw a ray of understanding, stabbing through the gray fog of confusion which had followed him from his suite in the maximum security camp. “To reach—because they’re beyond the range of our ion drives!”
“I suppose so.” Lescure nodded. “Though such thinking goes a little beyond our function.”
“But why would the Machine want to explore them?” Ryeland frowned at him. “Is there something in the reefs which could threaten the security of the Plan?”
“Better not exceed our function,” Lescure warned him. “I imagine the planets are pretty well protected from the life of space, by their atmospheres and their Van Allen belts. But of course there was the pyropod that rammed us—”
“Pyropod?”
For a second Ryeland was lying on his couch in the therapy room again, with the cold electrodes clamped on his body and Thrale’s apologetic voice lisping out the words that had been senseless to him then, jetless drive . . . fusorian . . . pyropod.
Lescure’s eyes had narrowed. “Ryeland, you appear unduly agitated. I don’t quite understand your reactions—unless you have heard this story before.”
“I have not.” That, at least, was true. The therapists had always been careful to tell him nothing at all about pyropods or fusorians or . . .”
For another uncomfortable moment, Lescure stared. “Relax, then.” At last he smiled. “Forgive my question. I asked it because there was an unfortunate breach of security. One member of my crew jumped ship after our return. He had managed to steal unauthorized specimens and descriptions of the life of space. Of course he went to the Body Bank.”
His eyes brushed Ryeland again, casually.
“I forget the fellow’s name. Herrick? Horlick? Horrocks?”
Ryeland sat still, feeling numb.
Colonel Lescure waved carelessly, and the screen retracted, shutting itself off. “Drink?” he demanded. Ryeland shook his head, waiting.
Lescure sighed and poked through his plastic toys. “Here,” he said suddenly.
Ryeland took the tiny things from him, a two-inch figurine in black and silver with a wicked, knife-edged snout. Lescure’s glazed eyes remained on it in fascination. “That’s the one that attacked us,” he said. “This little thing?”
The colonel laughed. “It was ninety feet long,” he said. He took it back from Steve and patted it. “Vicious little creature,” he said, half fondly. “Evolution has made them vicious, Ryeland. They are living war rockets. They’ve been hammered into a horrible perfection, by eternities of evolution.”
He swept the whole menagerie back into its box. “But they are only rockets,” he said thoughtfully. “They need mass, too. We’ve cut up a dozen of them, and the squid is as much a rocket as they—Perhaps that accounts for their voracity. They’ll attack anything, with a hungry fury you can’t imagine. Mass is not plentiful in space, and they need what they can find.
“At any rate, this one rammed us, and—well, we had another dozen casualties.” The colonel shrugged. “It was touch and go, because the thing was faster than we. But ultimately the survivors manned a torpedo station, and then the contest was over.
“Even the pyropods have not achieved a jetless drive.”
“If there is such a thing,” said Ryeland.
Colonel Lescure chuckled. He looked thoughtfully at Ryeland, as though choosing which of several to make. Finally he said: “You don’t think the Team Attack will succeed?”
Ryeland said stiffly: “I will do my best, Colonel. But Newton’s Third Law—”
Colonel Lescure laughed aloud.
“Ah, well,” he said, “who knows? Perhaps it won’t succeed. Perhaps there is no jetless drive.” Hilariously amused, though Ryeland could not tell why, he tossed the box of plastic figurines back in a cupboard.
“Ugly little things, good night,” he said affectionately.
Ryeland commented: “You sound as though you like them.”
“Why not? They don’t bother us. If they haven’t attacked the earth in the past billion years or so, they aren’t likely to start very soon. They aren’t adapted for atmosphere, or for direct, strong sunlight. Only a few of the strongest ventured in beyond Orbit Pluto to be sighted, before our expedition. None was ever seen in closer than Orbit Saturn—and that one, I think, was dying.” Ryeland was puzzled. “But—you spoke of danger.”
“The danger that lurks in, yes!”
“But, if it isn’t the pyropods, then what is it?”
“Freedom!” snapped Colonel Lescure, and clamped his lips shut.
V
Faith carried Ryeland off to his next interview. “You liked Colonel Lescure, didn’t you?” she chattered. “He’s such a nice man. If it were up to him, the reef rat wouldn’t be suffering—” She stopped, the very picture of embarrassed confusion.
Ryeland looked at her thoughtfully “What’s a reefrat?”
“Here’s Major Chatterji’s office,” said Faith nervously, and almost pushed him through the door.
Machine Major Chatterji got up, smiling blankly through his gleaming glasses, waving a copy of Ryeland’s orders from the Machine. “Ready, Ryeland,” he called. “We’re all set for you now.”
Ryeland advanced into the room, thinking. “I’ll need my computer,” he said. “And someone to look up all the work that’s been done on the Hoyle Effect, boil it down, give me the essential information.”
“Right! You can have three assistants from Colonel Lescure’s section. And I’ve already requisitioned a binary computer.”
“No,” said Ryeland impatiently, “not a binary computer. My computer. Oddball Oporto.”
Major Chatterji’s gold-rimmed glasses twinkled with alarm. “The Risk? But Ryeland, really!”
“I need him,” said Ryeland obstinately. The Machine’s orders had been perfectly clear.
Chatterji surrendered. “We’ll have to get General Fleemer’s okay,” he said. “Come along.” He led Ryeland out through a short corridor to an elevator; Faith tagged after inconspicuously. The three of them went up, out, down another hall. Chatterji tapped on a door.
“All right,” grumbled a voice from a speaker over the door, and it swung open. They walked into a silver room, with silver walls and furnishings plated in silver. General Fleemer, in a silver robe that he was knotting about him, stumped in from a bedroom. “Well?”
Machine Major Chatterji cleared his throat. “Sir, Ryeland wants the other Risk, Oporto, assigned to him.”
“For calculation purposes, General,” Ryeland cut in. “He’s a natural calculator. What they used to call an idiot-savant, or the next thing to it.”
The general looked at him through his deepset eyes. “Will that help you solve the jetless drive?”
“Why,” Ryeland began, “I haven’t started on that yet. This is the Hoyle Effect. The Machine ordered—”
“I know what the Machine ordered,” the general grumbled. He scratched his nose reflectively. “All right, give him his man. But Ryeland. The important part of your work is the jetless drive.”
Ryeland was startled. “General, the Machine’s orders didn’t give priority to either section.”
“I give priority,” said the general sharply. “Get along with it, man! And get out.”
In the corridor, Chatterji vanished toward his office and the Togetherness Girl took over again. “A very fine man, the general, don’t you agree?” she chatted, leading him back to the elevator.
Ryeland took a deep breath. “Faith,” he said, “there’s something funny here. General Fleemer lives awfully well! And he seems to take it upon himself to, at least, interpret the Machine’s orders. Is that customary, in Team Attack?”
The Togetherness Girl hesitated. She glanced at Ryeland, then led him down the corridor without speaking for a moment. She stopped before another door. “General Fleemer,” she said, “is a fine man. I knew you’d like him. And you’ll like Colonel Gottling too, don’t think you won’t!” And without any more of an answer than that, she opened the door to Gottling’s office for him and left him there.
But Colonel Gottling proved himself very hard to like.
He was a huge man with a face like a skull, the horned helmet over it. He stood fingering the controls of his radar-horns angrily as Ryeland reported in on the teletype. “Hurry up, man,” he muttered, and clumped out of his office, motioning Ryeland ahead of him. “You’re next,” he snapped. “Lescure had his whacks at the creature and he failed. They wouldn’t let me handle it the way I wanted! And now it’s up to you.”
Ryeland said, “I don’t understand. What creature?”
“The spaceling! The reef rat! The creature with the jetless drive.” Ryeland said humbly, “Colonel, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Gottling spread his bony hands and stared at the ceiling in exasperation. “What under the Plan is this? What kind of idiots do they salvage for top-priority Teams these days? Do you mean you never heard of the reefrats?”
“Only the word,” Ryeland admitted. “But didn’t you just say ‘spaceling’ ?”
“Same thing!” Gottling stopped in an anteroom, jerking a thumb at a file cabinet. He barked: “Here! Here’s everything you want to know about them. Everything from resting weight to the chemistry of what passes for blood. The only thing I can’t tell you is what makes them go, and I could tell you that if they’d let me alone with the thing!”
“But—”
“You fool, stop saying ‘but’ !” howled Colonel Gottling. “Look here!”
He opened a door. Beyond was a big room, once a repair shop attached to one of the rocket pits, now hastily improvised into a laboratory. There were unpainted partitions, unconcealed electric wiring. Chemical lab benches held glassware and flasks of reagents, reeking acidly. There were transformers; an X-ray generator; various bulky devices that might have been centrifuges, biological research equipment—heaven knew what.
And the lab was busy.
There were at least two dozen men and women in scarlet Technicorps smocks working at the benches and instruments. They glanced up only briefly as Colonel Gottling and Ryeland entered and checked in, then quickly went back to their work without speaking.
Evidently the cheery good will among the brass didn’t extend to the lower echelons.
Colonel Gottling, in a good humor again, lighted a long, green-tinted cigarette and waved at the room “It’s all yours now,” he grunted. “Temporarily.”
Ryeland looked at him.
“Or permanently,” grinned the colonel, “provided you can tell us what makes the spaceling fly. Me, I think you can’t. You look soft, Ryeland. The collar has not hardened you enough. Still—Do you want me to tell you something about the spaceling?”
“I certainly do,” Ryeland said fervently.
“All right, why not? It’s fairly intelligent. Lower primate level, at least. It is a warm-blooded oxygen-breathing mammal which—why do you look that way, man?” Ryeland closed his mouth. “It’s just that I thought it lived in space.” Colonel Gottling guffawed. “And it does! An oxygen-breather, living in open space! Amusing, is it not? But it possesses some remarkable adaptations.”
“Such as what?”
Colonel Gottling looked bored. “You should have asked Lescure these questions. I am a rocket man! But first, of course, there is the jetless drive. Then there is something else—a field of force, perhaps, which enables it to hold a little cloud of air around it, even out in interstellar vacuum.”
