Collected Short Fiction, page 622
But M’Buna glanced at the radar display and said casually: “The commandant, I suppose. He comes out here every once in a while to check things over.”
Carefully, trying to hide his excitement, Gann said, “Wonder what he does there.” M’Buna shrugged, reached forward and turned a switch. The pod had emptied itself and returned to the ship. “Tell you what,” Gann went on. “Let’s look.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. The pod back, the scow ready, there was nothing to stop him. He fed the ion-stream to the reactionless drive and cut in the course-correcting side-rockets. The scow began to move.
M’Buna said tautly, “No! Cut it out, Gann. The Old Man isn’t going to want us skylarking around without permission.”
But Gann wasn’t listening. He was watching the screens intently.
If Machine Colonel Zafar was paying surreptitious visits to the ice-planetoid there had to be a reason. He was going to find out what that reason was. He cut in maximum magnification on the screens, and the surface of the little protoplanet of frozen gases leaped up toward him.
The thing was eight or ten miles thick, shaped more like a broken cinder block than a sphere. It was unusually dense, as the distant, orbiting blobs of frozen methane and hydrogen went; if it ever drifted in near the sun, it would make a major comet. In the screen its greenish crust of solid gases looked like a blizzard in slow motion. Disturbed by the impact of the waste they had dumped, the whole snowball was quivering and shaking, its light gas-snow. rising in sheets and falling again.
There was absolutely nothing to be seen . . .
But even a tiny planetoid has a great deal of surface by human standards. Somewhere on that surface Colonel Zafar had gone in his flying suit. Gann reached again for the controls to circle around.
Some noise warned him.
He turned, and saw M’Buna leaning toward him, a strange expression of mingled pity and hate on his face; and in M’Buna’s hand was a glittering metal pencil, pointed at him.
In that split-second of time that was left to him Gann thought wildly: If only I could get the report in, rye sure found something anti-Plan going on now . . .
And that was the last thought he had for a long time. He heard a hiss and had just time to realize that the sting on his cheek was a nerve-pellet fired from M’Buna’s contraband gun. That was all. Blackness closed over him, and cold.
III
A nerve pellet is an instant anesthetic. It is also something more.
It does not wear off. Not ever. The victim of a nerve pellet does not recover consciousness until he is given an antidote.
When Gann woke up, he had no idea of how long he had been under the influence of the nerve pellet. But what he knew for sure was that he was no longer in the control room of the garbage scow.
Nor was he anywhere else in the universe where he had ever been before.
He lay on an uneven, rocky ledge. Under him was a soft, moist—and warm!—blanket of something that seemed to be a lichen, a kind of clinging moss that grew in thick, flaky scales.
It was glowing with a soft steady light. On the rocks around him the light was greenish in hue. Farther away, on higher ridges, it shone purple and red.
And above the rocks the sky was velvet black, with a single dazzling star blazing down on him.
Boysie Gann struggled to his feet—and soared into the air.
As he came down he stared about him. When he looked away from the rocks and that bright star his eyes adjusted and he could see other stars. All the familiar constellations . . . And then it hit him.
That bright star was the sun.
He was on one of the Reefs of Space.
Gann never knew how he came there. The man who would surely know was M’Buna, and Gann never saw M’Buna again. But it was dear that while under the influence of the nerve pellet he had been transported and marooned. Alone, without a radio, without instruments, without a ship or spacesuit, he might five out his life on that Reef—but he would die there in the end. For he could never leave.
It was surely a good way to dispose of an unwanted man—simpler even than murder, since there was no body to get rid of.
He was stiff and cold. His wrists were swollen and his ankles numb. Evidently his captors had not trusted to the nerve pellet to keep him quiet, but had shackled lam as well.
But the shackles were gone now, with every other evidence of who it was who had brought him here. His head hurt. He was parched and hungry.
He began to look around him more methodically.
His first needs were food and water; but he could not resist a look around at the wonder of the place. Bright metallic fern fronds tinkled like wind-gongs from an overgrown vale to one side. A distant whirring sounded like a flock of grouse. Impossible that there should be grouse here, Gann knew; yet there might be some sort of life. The Reefs of Space were created by life, like the coral atolls on Earth’s warm seas. Life inhabited them all . . .
But it was not always—not even often!—life of a sort compatible with humankind. For the Reefs were formed from clusters of fusorians, feasting on the hydrogen formed between the stars according to the laws of the Neo-Hoyle Hypothesis, converting it into heavier atoms, and then into atoms heavier still. The life in the Reefs was sometimes warm-blooded, carbon-based, oxygen-breathing animal. But more often it was metal or crystal—at best, worthless for food; at worst, a deadly danger.
The bright star, Sol, was near the south celestial pole, Gann discovered. That put him more or less galactic north of the sun—and therefore, almost straight out from Polaris Station. How far out? He had no way of knowing, except that the major Reef clusters were thought to be some two hundred astronomical units from Sol. At a guess, twenty billion miles.
Gann turned his eyes from the stars and looked about him. He had a world to explore. It might be less than a hundred yards in its longest axis, but it was all he had.
He rubbed his aching wrists and ankles and began to explore. He climbed carefully out of that small, glowing green dell—carefully, because he knew the danger of a reeflet. The fusorian symbiotes held an atmosphere, somehow; but it was like a soap bubble, and if Gann were so incautious as to step too high and soar through it, he would find himself in the hard vacuum of the space between the stars, and death would come in a horrible explosive burst as his blood boiled off and his cells ruptured.
He climbed toward the ridge paused and looked around.
Ahead of him was another dell this one bearing some sort of glittering bush. The plants were shoulder-high, with plumes of narrow gloss, sprinkled with what seemed to be individual fusorian cells that glowed with their own light. Each leaf darkened from green at the base to black at the tip, and each ended in a bright red berry.
Queerly, they grew in rows.
They looked, in fact, like a truck farm in Earth’s populous market valleys, and at once Gann’s hunger surged forth. They looked like food! He started toward them at a shambling run—
And from behind him a voice spoke.
“Well, good for you. See you woke up finally. Headed right for the feedbag too, eh?”
Machine Major Boysie Gann’s training had prepared him for any shock. It was trained reflex that stopped him in mid-flight, turned him, brought him back down to the glowing mossy surface of the reeflet in a half crouch, ready to do battle.
But there was nothing was like in the figure that was coming toward him.
He was a stubby little man with a big belly and a dirty yellow beard. His clothing was woven out of some kind of rough fiber. It was ragged and filthy and half unbuttoned.
And clinging to his bald brown head was a black-fanged, green-scaled, red-eyed creature the size of a capuchin monkey. It looked like a toy dragon. And from under the knife-sharp edges of its scales seeped little wisps of smoke.
Boysie Gann said warily: “Hello.”
“Why, hello,” the man said in a mild voice, “You was sleeping. Figured I’d best leave you to sleep it off. Nice to have you here. I wasn’t expecting company.”
“I wasn’t exactly expecting to be here.”
The man nodded and thrust out a dirty, gnarled hand. “Figured that. Couple fellows dropped you five, six hours ago. Looks like they gave you a rough enough time so I let you be.”
The creature on its head wheeled to face Gann as its owner moved, glaring at him with hot red eyes. Gann shook the man’s hand and said, “I need some water. And food.”
“Why, sure. Come along then.” He nodded, the creature scrambling back and forth, and turned to lead the way across the cultivated field toward what seemed to be a tiny black lake. “Omer don’t like strangers,” he called over his shoulder, “but he won’t bother you none. Just don’t make any sudden moves, is all. Omer’s a pyropod—just a baby, of course, but they can be mean.”
Silently Gann agreed. The little creature looked mean enough, with its oozing plumes of smoke and fiery eyes. They loped across the glowing rows of the man’s little farm and reached the shore of the lake—no more than a pond really, fifty feet across, its surface disturbed with the slow, tall waves of low-gravity fluids. On its far bank a sharp cliff rose in a glitter of metallic outcroppings, softened by glowing plants and mosses, and in the base of the cliff was a metal lean-to that hid the mouth of the cave. “That’s home,” said the man cheerfully. “Welcome to it, such as His. Come in and rest yourself.”
“Thanks,” said Gann. “By the way, we didn’t really introduce ourselves.”
“Oh? Guess you’re right,” said the man. “I’m Harry Hickson. And you—” Gann started to speak, but Hickson didn’t pause—“you’re what you call it, Machine Major Boysie Gann, out of the spy school on Pluto.”
For twenty-four hours Gann rested in the cave of the hermit, Harry Hickson, and his thoughts were dark.
How had Hickson known his name? Even more—how had he known that he was not a shanghaied radar-laser tech, but a graduate of the spy school?
There was no answer in Gann’s brain, so he shut off his mind to conjectures and applied it to restoring his physical condition and reconnoitering his surroundings.
Evidently he had been unconscious for longer than he had thought on the ship that had dumped him on this reeflet, for he had lost weight and strength and there was a straggly stubble of beard on his chin. But Hickson fed him and cared for him. He gave Gann a bed of sorts to sleep on—only a stack of reeking blankets, but as good as the one he slept on himself—and fed him from the same pot of greasy stew as himself. The diet was crude but filling, supplemented with fruits and roots and shoots of the plants he grew on the rock. The reddish berries, which tasted like a sort of acid citrus fruit, were a good source of all necessary vitamins, Harry told him earnestly, and one of the lichens was a source of protein.
Gann did not question the food. Clearly it had kept Harry Hickson alive for a long time—the cave showed that it had been his home for months or even years—and it would keep Gann alive for at least as long as he intended to stay on the reeflet.
And that would not be long. For he had learned from Hickson that there was a way of communicating that would bring help if he needed it “Never needed it, of course,” he said, fishing a long string of a rhubarb-like vegetable out of his bowl of stew and licking his fingers. “But it’s comforting to know it’s there. . . Say, you worried about that collar, Boysie?”
Gann stopped in mid-gesture, suddenly aware that he had been tugging at it. “Not exactly,” he said quietly.
“Get it off of you, if you like,” Hickson offered mildly. “No trouble. Done it lots of times.”
Gann stared. “What the Plan are you talking about?” he demanded. “Don’t you know what this is? These things are built with automatic destruct circuits, as well as the remote triggering equipment. If anybody tries to take them off—”
He touched both sides of the collar with fingertips and flipped them up and outward, pantomiming the explosion of a decapitation charge.
“Oh, sure, I know all about that,” said Hickson. “Hold still. No, not you, Gann. You, Omer! Don’t wiggle so. Makes me nervous.
He got up from his squatting position at the rude plank table where they ate and came around behind Gann. “Just you sit there, Boysie,” he said. “Can move if you want to, it don’t matter, but don’t look toward me . . . Omer confound you! Get your claws outa my scalp! Raised him from an egg, that little devil, right here in my own smoke-pot, but he gets jumpy when he knows I’m going to—Well, here we are.”
And something moved around Gann’s neck. He couldn’t see what Hickson was doing, was sure that the tubby little hermit had not brought any tools or instruments. Yet there was a sudden constriction at his throat.
He heard the lock snap . . .
The collar fell of his neck and clattered to the floor of the cave. Gann leaped to his feet and spun, white-faced, to be ready for the explosion. But no explosion came.
“Now, rest easy, Boysie,” complained the hermit. “You’re spooking Omer, here. That thing can’t blow up any more.” Casually he picked up the collar and lifted it to examine it in the light of a mass of luminous diamond that would have been worth millions on earth. “They make them real nice,” he said admiringly. “Lot of detail in this thing. Too bad it can’t be something more useful—” And he tossed it to the rear of the cave. “Well,” he said, “you about ready to move on now?”
Gann stood silent for a second, looking at him. “Move on where?” he asked.
“Oh, don’t worry, Boysie. I know what you were thinking. Plain as day. You figure I ought to go back and get examined by the Planning Machine, ’cause you don’t quite understand what I’m up to but you think it’s unplanned. Well, that’s right. Unplanned is what I am. And I don’t mind if you do what you’re thinking, and take my laser-gun and call help so you can get out of here. But I’m not going with you, Boysie. Make up your mind to that.”
“All right,” said Gann, surrendering. But in his mind he was not surrendering at all.
Hickson had put it very mildly when he said that Gann wanted to take him back for study. Gann not only wanted to, he intended to. In fact, he had never intended anything as hard in his life—had never been so determined or insistent, not even about his career in the service of the Machine, not even in his great love for Julie Martinet.
This man Harry Hickson was an unplanned disaster in the making.
Whoever he was, however he did what he did, he was a terrible danger to the Plan of Man. Gann could almost hear the instructions of his briefing officer back on Pluto—if he had been able to report Hickson’s existence to him, and if the briefing officer could issue an order: Subject Hickson is a negative factor. His uncatalogued knowledge must be retrieved for the Plan. Then each organ of his unautomated body must be obliterated . . .
But how to get him back into the jurisdiction of the Planning Machine?
There had to be a way.
There would be a way. Machine Major Boysie Gann was sure of it. All it required was that he be patient—and then, when his chance came, be ready.
Gann said, “If you mean it, then let’s take your gun and signal right now. I’m ready to move on.”
Harry Hickson led Gann to a point of red-scaled rock, puffing and wheezing. On his bald scalp the fledgling pyropod wheeled and slithered, keeping its bright red eyes on Boysie Gann.
“See up there?” called Hickson over his shoulder. “That star there next to Vega—”
Boysie Gann followed his pointing finger. “You mean Theta Lyrae?”
The hermit turned and looked at him, mildly surprised. “That’s right, Boysie. You fellows learn a lot in that spy school. Too bad you don’t—Well, never mind that. One I mean, it’s just below. Theta Lyrae. The faint red one. Forget the name, but that one right there. That way’s Freehaven.”
Gann felt his blood pound. “Freehaven? I’ve heard of it. A colony of reef-rats.”
“Aw, Boysie don’t say it like that. They’re free men, that’s all. That’s the biggest place in the Reefs, Freehaven is. Like a—well, what would you call it? A kind of a town only its one whole cluster of Reefs, maybe a hundred thousand miles across. And maybe half a billion miles from here.”
“I see,” said Gann, thinking with exultation and pride: What a prize to bring back to Pluto! A whole city to be Planned and returned to the brotherhood of the Machine! He could almost see the glowing jet-trails of the Plan cruisers vectoring in on the cluster . . .
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Hickson said dryly. “You ain’t there yet, Boysie, and maybe even when you get there you won’t find it too easy to pick up a phone and call the Machine. Now hush a minute while I send for your ride out there.”
He picked up the clumsy old laser gun he had taken out of its greasy rag wrappings back in the cave, checked its power settings, raised it and aimed carefully at the distant red spark that was the line-of-sight to Freehaven. Three times he snapped the trigger, then lowered the gun and turned to Gann.
“That’s all there is to it. Take ‘em a while to get here. Might as well go back to the cave.”
But he paused, glancing at Boysie Gann as though he were mildly embarrassed about something. Then he seemed to come to a decision.
He turned back to the stars, set down the laser pistol and stretched out his arms. His lips moved, but Gann could hear no sound. On his bald pate the pyropod hissed and slithered. The hermit’s whole body seemed stretched, yearning, toward—toward what?
Gann could not tell. Toward Freehaven, perhaps. Toward the faint red star that marked its position—or toward Theta Lyrae nearby—or toward the great bright giants of the Summer Triangle that marked that part of the sky, Vega, Altair and Deneb . . .
