Collected Short Fiction, page 616
They were at the center, and as the air reached earth-normal density the invisible small creatures that gave it light and life were thickly packed about them. They could move. Ryeland roamed restlessly around the mad little bubble of life they inhabited, with naked space only yards away, staring, thinking, asking quick questions of Quiveras. The little man had apologetically few answers for him, but the facts spoke for themselves. “Incredible!” he muttered. “Fantastic!” He caught himself on a tendril of vine eighteen inches from the faint veil that marked the end of the bubble and stared out at the stars. He could recognize no constellations; great Orion and the mighty Southern Cross alike were out there, but buried in a swarm of thousands of lesser lights, invisible on earth but here a snow-sprinkling of radiance. One great blue-white needle lanced him, and he knew that he had found one star at least. That could only be Sirius, many magnitudes brighter than from Earth’s surface, painful to look at directly.
Behind him Donna said hesitantly, “Steven, what is all this?”
Ryeland turned at last to confront her. “It’s remarkable! I think I understand it, though . . . The drive field holds this little cloud of air. Moving through space, it picks up dust and hydrogen gas. These vines have fusorian cells, that fuse the hydrogen into oxygen, carbon and all the other elements—and also release light and heat enough for the spaceling’s metabolism, or for ours. I’d guess,” he said thoughtfully, “that there’s a fair proportion of heavy elements in those plants. Conservation of energy. Fusion liberates nuclear energy at the light end of the scale; if the fusorians made only light elements there would be too much release of energy, we’d all be dead in a moment, one way or another. But up past silver fusion takes energy . . . He shook his head. “Sorry. But I can’t help running on about it. This is a complete little world, with its own complete economy.”
Donna asked simply, “What about food?”
Quiveras interrupted. “Ah, food!” he cried. He launched himself through the air like a swimmer in water, the vines like a strange seaweed. He gathered his hands full of the bright fruits and came soaring back. He begged: “Try them! They are good. Platinum? Gold? I do not know about heavy elements, Mr. Ryeland. But I know about flavor!”
At that moment a great soundless flower of fire unfolded behind them. They all whirled to look.
Ryeland said soberly: “There goes our rocket. I hope we’re going to like this place, Donna. It’s all we’ve got now.”
They gathered close to the film at the very rim of the bubble, peering out. “Not too close,” warned Quiveras. “You must not stick even your little finger through it. You will be blown out, you see.”
Ryeland looked startled, then, after a moment, nodded. “Of course. Anything much larger than a molecule is not reflected, eh? And once the field was penetrated, it would be forced out by the pressure differential.” Very cautiously they settled themselves to peer out at the ship they had left behind. The flame was gone, but even in its microseconds it had heated metal to red incandescence and they could see a ruddy skeleton that was all that was left of the craft’s main supporting beams. The hull and fitting were scattered by the blast; but near the dark red glow they could make out faint points of light. The war rocket, Quiveras declared positively. The lights they saw were the flare of its auxiliary rockets as it matched position with the abandoned hulk.
The spacelings hung looking out through the tangle of glowing vines, searching the dark outward sky. They made soft murmuring and whimpering sounds. Quiveras listened to them, stroking their sleek fur. crooning to them gently.
“They are watching the Plan rocket,” he told the others. “The ship radiates its own infrared. They can see it well, now that it is coming closer.”
“Closer?” Ryeland was startled. “Of course, Mr. Ryeland. The Plan is not stupid.”
“But—they must think we are dead! And even if not, they have no way of tracing the spacelings jetless drive—”
“Nor have they,” Quiveras told him solemnly. “The Plan is merely thorough. I can understand what they are saying in that cruiser. ‘Did they have an escape vessel? If so, where would they be going?’ To the Reefs. And the Plan knows where the Reefs must be.”
The spacelings were growing uneasy. “And our friends here are tiring,” Quiveras said soberly. “They need rest. Carrying all of us, and all of your equipment, Mr. Ryeland—even for two of them it is a great load. They cannot go faster, and so they are going to try to hide. There.” He pointed out through the glowing vines.
Ryeland looked. The brilliance of their little atmosphere was in his way. He kicked himself—very warily!—to the other end of their bubble and hung, clutching a vine and staring; but if there was something to see his untrained eyes could not make it out.
Quiveras followed. “It is a cluster of Reefs,” he explained. “There, near those three blue-white stars.” Ryeland’s Earth-adapted eyes were not equal to the task. But Chiquita and Adam slipped close to him and hung among the bright leaves, their sad eyes staring into the star-sprinkled space ahead. Ryeland shook his head. “I don’t see anything at all.”
“Nor did I,” Quiveras agreed, “until the spacelings showed me. We are not equipped to find a pebble in the dark, countless miles away; but they are.”
Ryeland said doubtfully, “Even if there are Reefs there, and we get to them—can’t the Plan rocket follow us?”
Quiveras shrugged. “Of course. But the Reefs are in a thicker cloud than this little bubble of Adam’s, Mr. Ryeland. There are swarms of the little fireflies that you call fusorians; they’ll fog his search screens. There are hunks of bigger stuff that will slow him down—perhaps even wreck him, Mr. Ryeland, if he should be careless! Still, he may get through and find us. Yes. It is a chance, but we have no choice but to take it.”
They drove on for hours, there was no way of measuring just how long. As destination and pursuer were alike invisible to Ryeland, there were only the shrouded stars as reference points, and their great distance was not affected by the tiny crawl of the spacelings. Adam and Chiquita seemed hardly to be working, as they slipped supplely about through the vines, yet Quiveras assured Ryeland they were moving nearly as fast as the Plan cruiser, in spite of the trail of machines that followed them.
Then Quiveras said, “We are almost there!”
Ryeland sought among the stars for “there”. What made it hardest was that there was neither bow nor stern to their tiny captive world, no sure way of knowing which way they were going. He could find nothing. The stars shone splendid and unobscured, as he hung at nearly the edge of their air capsule—red stars, blue-white giants, clouds of nebular matter . . .
Then he saw the Reef ahead.
XVI
It appeared first as a pale point of light that suddenly grew into a bulging, uneven sphere of splendor. It was a jeweled ball, floating in space, and the jewels were forests of crystal.
They came closer, like a comet, then slower. Ryeland saw spiked trees of crystal carbon—diamond!—glittering with their own inner light. There were strange bulging brain-shaped masses of blue and violet, patches of ghostly white sand, a frozen forest with bright metal leaves.
It was an incredible fairyland to Ryeland and the girl, but Quiveras surveyed it with a shrewd professional eye and shook his head.
“Not a good place to hide,” he said, peering at the glowing ball. “Still, that solid part might be useful. The Reefs are mostly hollow—because they’re dead inside.”
Ryeland nodded. “I suppose the surface organisms are the ones that pick up the free hydrogen and grow. The ones inside die of starvation.”
Quiveras was not listening. He cried gleefully: “Yes! There is a cave!—If it is not already occupied.”
Ryeland stared at him. Quiveras shrugged. “These Reefs do not have much gravitation; something must be holding the air there, as the spacelings do. It could be another spaceling. It could be small cells in the Reef itself—each Reef is its own world, I do not pretend that I know what to expect on this one. But it could be something quite bad.” He raised a hand. “Wait. Let us see.” The jeweled ball swam closer. “Watch,” ordered Quiveras. “See how Chiquita enters the air of this Reef. Adam is pulling us now; Chiquita is controlling our atmosphere. Do you see?”
The female spaceling was darting about, while Adam hung motionless. “I did wonder about that,” admitted Ryeland. “When the two spheres meet, air pressure will be forcing them apart.”
Quiveras shook his head. “See, she airlocks the Reef in.” Ryeland stared. They came closer to the Reef and closer. From the frightened movements of the little fish-birds, he saw that the shell was being contracted; yet there was no increase of pressure—“I see!” he cried suddenly. “She is setting up another shell, big enough for both us and the Reef! Then she’ll collapse our inner shell, letting the air leak out as it contracts to keep the pressure steady!”
Quiveras nodded. There was a sudden vibration, as though the shock-front of a distant explosion had raced past them, and a clicking in their ears. The inner shell was finally gone.
Ryeland stared about his new world. The steady rain of starlight, even through their light-fogged atmosphere, gave him a view of a wonderland. The sun itself, hardly brighter than Sirius, made yellowish sparkles in the crystal branches of the—could he call it “vegetation” ? But Quiveras gave him little time to admire the world.
“Now we must do our part, Mr. Ryeland,” he grinned.
Ryeland saw that the two spacelings were hanging at a distance from the dark cave mouth, regarding it with huge wet eyes. Their red noses flickered swiftly. They whimpered, and a shudder ran along Chiquita’s scarred flank. “What is our part?”
Quiveras said calmly: “The spacelings have natural enemies—clumsy, armored killers. Very slow—too slow to catch the spacelings out in space. But extremely deadly. They wait for them in places like these.” He said politely, “So we must ferret into this burrow, Mr. Ryeland, if you will do me the honor to join me.”
Quiveras propelled himself to the mouth of the cave, peered inside, looked at the others and shrugged. “We will see,” was all he said. Calmly he unwrapped a bundle of rags and took out an old Plan Police handweapon. He was not very skillful with it; he worried at it until he had opened the clip, checked the number of charges it contained—Ryeland saw that it only held four; undoubtedly Quiveras had found it difficult to obtain them—snapped it closed and balanced it in his hand. Then with the heel of his worn boot he kicked at a stalagmite of greenish crystal until it broke free. It was eighteen inches long or more and quite sharp. It made a queer but serviceable sword, Ryeland thought, and then realized that it made an even better torch. The interior of the cave was dark. The crystal sword glowed with its trapped fusorian cells.
Quiveras scrambled into the cave and Ryeland followed, unable to look at the girl.
It was a strange dark lair of winding passages. The entrance was worn smooth—alarmingly—as though large bodies had been scraping in and out. Ryeland thought swiftly of the probable age of the Reef, and felt somewhat reassured. Time moved along different scales out here. Change could be lightning fast, or ponderously slow; those ledges might have been worn smooth a hundred million years ago. The dark passages, smooth-worn rock walls made of the bodies of once-living fusorians, had perhaps been dead when the Earth was still a boiling incandescent blob. There simply was no way to tell. Nor had Ryeland any idea of how long or deep the passages might be. They were as labyrinthine as the maze inside a head of sea-coral, where tiny crustaceans wait for tinier fish to blunder in.
Quiveras paused where the passage branched—and, within sight, both divisions inside a dozen yards branched again. He was staring at the wall. As Ryeland joined him, he saw what Quiveras had seen.
The worn sides of some of the passages bore curving parallel scars, as though they had been rasped by the claws of some incredible monster.
Quiveras said cheerfully, “That one looks the most used, Mr. Ryeland. If we only knew when, eh? Well, I’ll try it—asking you, if you please, to remain here on guard.” He turned away, hesitated and said solemnly: “You see, it is you who must take the post of danger. For if a pyropod should come from one of the other passages while I am gone . . .”
He made a grave face, spread his hands politely and left.
Ryeland clung to a projection of rock and waited.
Pyropod . . .
He heard the word again, in the soft, apologetic, wheezy voice of Dr. Thrale. He was lying again on the therapy couch in the recreation center, clamped into the cold electrodes, helplessly enduring the merciless probing into his blank memory. He shuddered again, flinching from that pitiless pressure to make him reveal the secret he had never known—
Or had he really ever known how to build a jetless drive? That haunting fog of black oblivion and insane contradiction flowed into his brain. Through it, he heard the lazy malice of Angela’s voice, mocking him with her explanation of the riddle. He was a junk man, a meat machine designed to sabotage the plan, without a memory because he lacked a past.
A queer companion for the Planner’s daughter. He resolved again not to tell her what he was. Now when they were alone, when he and Quiveras were the only human beings in her world,—could she stand the shock of learning that even he was no real human being?
He shook himself impatiently, as if mere motion might dispell that paralyzing fog and reveal his true identity. That old riddle would have to wait—perhaps until the timing mechanism detonated the collar, and answered it forever. The problems of the present were more urgent now.
It was warm in the cavern, far from the surface of the little deformed globe, where the fusorian cells poured endless heat and light into the atmosphere. But he found himself shivering. Pyropod? Yes. He had heard the term. He did not want to recall just what he had heard about it.
Quiveras disappeared, the needle-sharp crystal blade giving a strange light. It disappeared around a bend in the passage, and then for a time there was no light at all.
Time passed.
It was dark . . . silent . . . empty. Ryeland felt as though the dead walls around him were closing in. He wiped slippery sweat from his palms glistening, reaching out, because he could not help himself, to touch the walls to make sure that they were not about to squeeze him . . . Then involuntarily he felt himself grinning. Claustrophobia—here! Billions of miles from the Earth, a floating dust mote in the middle of absolute emptiness! The incongruity reassured him; and he was calm and cheerful when, at last, he saw the glow of light appear again in the passage Quiveras had taken.
The crystal sword came into sight and Quiveras hailed him cheerfully. “A dead end, and nothing there. Very well.” He drew even with Ryeland and gazed at the other passages. “I think,” he said, with some doubt, “that we will leave these others for now. They do not seem occupied, and it would take us weeks to explore them all. Consider yourself fortunate, my friend. You have not yet been introduced to a pyropod.”
At Quiveras’s hail the spacelings came swimming gracefully down the tunnel, their red noses blinking as they probed its depths with infrared. Donna Creery followed more slowly, exploring the caves with a child’s wonder and awe. “Is it safe?” she asked.
Quiveras said calmly, “We will never be safe while Ryeland’s collar is with us. If you mean are we safe from pyropods, I do not know. From a full-grown one, yes. I do not guarantee there is not a cub lurking somewhere, but if there is we will find it out and meanwhile shall we not try to make this place into a home?”
They worked for three hard days, while the spacelings fluttered and mewed restlessly—because, Quiveras said without emotion, the Plan cruiser was still somewhere about.
As there was nothing they could do about it, they did nothing. To their little world they did a great deal.
They carried aerial fusorian vines into the caverns, choosing cubicles for sleeping, for eating, for rest, curtaining and cushioning them with the vines, bringing shining crystals of ruby and topaz for heat and illumination. Donna cried out at its beauty. Indeed it was beautiful; and they were not finished. With Quiveras for a teacher, Ryeland learned how to weave nets and ropes out of the fiber from the vines. The surface of the reef provided crystal and great branching arms of metal, pure copper, pure aluminum, pure silver. They hammered the metal into crude tools. And finally they made a sort of curtain, woven from the vines and crusted with broken pieces of crystal, which they stretched across the mouth of the cave to conceal it.
Quiveras stood back and regarded it.
“Well,” he said doubtfully, “it could be thicker and it could look more natural and those gadgets of yours could be hidden in better places. But if the Plan cruiser sniffs around here, it might miss you, at that.”
“Miss us? What about you?”
“I, Miss Creery, will go out to the main Reefs.” Quiveras’s gnarled face looked eager. “I’ll get help, more spacelings. And I’ll bring back Ron Donderevo!”
Ryeland and the girl were sorry to see him go, but their sorrow was nothing compared to the unhappiness of the two spacelings at being separated. Adam would carry Quiveras; Chiquita would have to stay with them, to maintain their atmosphere and to be ready to carry them away in desperate flight if the Plan cruiser should grow too inquisitive.
They watched him leave, all three of them, Ryeland, Donna Creery and the spaceling. He was gone out of sight in a moment. Ryeland thought he caught a single reddish wink from Adam’s nose—perhaps the male spaceling turning restlessly as it drove away, to bid a last farewell to Chiquita. Then there was nothing. They stared till their eyes watered, but it was useless. The Plan cruiser could be lurking a mere hundred miles away—a thousand men on spacelings could be within ten miles. Without radar gear they were blind. Out there were only the stars.
Ryeland’s mind drifted out among those stars wonderingly. He tried to imagine the clouds of new hydrogen, constantly being born of the Hoyle effect, and the myraid drifting fusorians that built the hydrogen into heavier elements that might someday be planets. There were other Reefs out there, the first concentrations of matter like the one they occupied, the larger ones that provided a home for the exiles of the Plan—great ones, even, that might in some remote millennium become the cores for first condensations of titanic new suns. They were all invisible.
