Collected Short Fiction, page 623
Then Harry Hickson relaxed and the pyropod scuttled down from his scalp onto his shoulder, as the hermit raised one arm and made a sinuous, undulating motion. Like the wriggle of a snake, Gann thought. Or the looping movement of a swan’s neck.
Swan? Some faint old memory stirred in Boysie Gann’s mind. Something about a swan—and a star—
But it would not come clear, and be followed Harry Hickson back to the cave.
Harry Hickson’s little reeflet was one drifting island in an expanding infinity of matter and space. The doctrine of the Neo-Hoyle Hypothesis was clear: The universe was limitless, in space, in time—and in matter. New mass was forming everywhere in the form of newly created hydrogen atoms, as the old complexes of matter—the stars and planets, the dust clouds and the galaxies—were spinning slowly apart.
Hickson’s reeflet was an infant among bodies of organized matter, probably only a few millions of years in age, in size no more than a dust mote. Yet it was like most of the universe in that; for most matter is young. The spiralling growth in rate of creation of new matter makes that sure. Some galaxies, and even some of the reefs between them, are old beyond computation and imagination, because the steady-state universe has neither beginning nor end. And life is the oldest phenomenon of all. Older than the oldest stars—but yet young, though those scattered and forgotten stars are black and dead.
Life in space has lived—literally—forever.
Every possible biology has been evolved, through every conceivable evolutionary test.
Watching Harry Hickson play with his pet pyropod, Boysie Gann reflected that the strangest life-form he knew was man. For here was the pudgy, balding hermit—unnlanned and deviant, a deadly danger by every standard of the Planning Machine—solemnly attempting to teach his pyropod to fly.
He lifted the little horror off his head and set it carefully on a high ledge, then retreated. Spitting and hissing, its red eyes glittering, its scales seeping the smoke of its internal jet fires, it wailed in a thin, raucous screech for him to come back. Then, despairing, it launched itself out into the air, missed Hickson by yards and crashed into the rock wall at the far side of the cave, where it remained, writhing and hissing, until Hickson took pity on it and picked it up. “It’s a wonder it doesn’t dash its brains out,” muttered Gann, die fifth time the little beast crashed into the rock.
“Oh, I guess so,” Hickson agreed mildly. “Don’t suppose it has any, really, though. A pretty clumsy kind of beast it is, right, Omer?” And he patted the little monster with the appearance of real affection for a moment, then sighed and set it down. He carefully inverted a crate and set it down over the pyropod, then put a mass of silvery fusorian coral upon the crate.
The pyropod squalled and hissed but Hickson ignored it. “Hoped I could teach it to fly before I go,” he said regretfully, “but I guess I won’t make it. Boysie, your transportation ought to be here in an hour. Care to see what the pilot’s gonna look like?” He thumbed an old-fashioned two-dimensional color print out of a button-down pocket in his ragged coat and handed it to Gann. It was a pretty, quite young girl, one hand resting on the head of a seal-like creature, before a background of a glowing purple and silver Reef. “Name’s Quarla,” said the old man affectionately. “Quarla Snow. Daughter of an old friend of mine. He treated me, couple years ago. Doctor, he is, and a good one. Don’t know much about what ails me, though . . .”
The hermit seemed to realize he was rambling and caught himself up short. “Guess that’s all,” he said, smiling with a touch of embarrassment. “Swan bless you, Boysie. Give Quarla my love.” And in a moment, before Gann could realize what he was about to do, the old man had turned, pushed aside the metal door that overhung the entrance to the cave, and stepped out.
Gann shook his head, half in rueful amusement, half in surprise. “Hey!” he called. “Hickson! Where are you going? Wait for me!” And he hurried to the door of the cave and out onto the sward the old hermit had so carefully cropped.
The man was not there.
His footprints were there, still visible in the faint bruises on the lichenous surface of the earth.
But Harry Hickson was gone.
Gann ranged the surface of the entire reef in the next few hours, shouting and searching. But there was no answer to his call, no sight of Hickson anywhere.
The man had simply vanished.
IV
In the cave Machine Major Gann found the old man’s laser gun—an ancient Technicorps model that must have been smuggled into space before the Spacewall was set up. It gave him a small feeling of confidence to carry it, though there was no visible enemy to shoot it at.
He needed that confidence.
No man can be alone. Each man has his place in the Plan of Man under the benevolent guidance of the Planning Machine. Each man serves the Plan, so that Plan may serve all men . . .
That was doctrine, and Boysie Gann found himself foolishly repeating it as he clambered up the red-scaled rock to the point from which Hickson had signaled to Freehaven. It did not help very much.
No man can be alone . . . but Boysie Gann felt very much alone indeed, on that tiny floating islet of reef, under the blazing stare of a billion stars.
There was no reason for him to be on this point of rock, rather than anywhere else on the surface of the reeflet. He had no reason to believe his rescuer would come to look for him there. Had no reason to be sure there would be a rescuer at all, in fact, for what the half-demented hermit, Harry Hickson, had said could not be accepted as reliable . . .
Yet he stayed there, waiting, for hours. He leaned against a cairn of rock and scanned the skies. Only the distant, unfriendly stars returned his look. He sat, leaning against the rock, and drowsed. No sound or motion disturbed him. Then . . .
There was a faint blur of greenish mist in the low black sky, moving at the threshold of vision.
Gann sprang to his feet, eyes peering into the immense emptiness above him. The greenish blur was so faint that he could not be sure it was real. Yet . . . surely there was something there and, following it, a cluster of even fainter reddish sparks.
Gann raised the laser, checked the settings to make sure he was not firing a blast of destruction into the sky, and thumbed the trigger thrice, as he had seen Hickson do, pointing it toward the greenish blur.
A moment . . . then the green glow veered toward him.
It was his rescuer—he was sure of it. But what were the red sparks? Even as he watched, the tiny, distant coals veered too, following the greenish glow. Rapidly they grew nearer . . .
Then one of the red sparks dashed ahead of the rest, with a long blue trail of incandescence faintly visible behind it. It was like an ominous comet as it dived through the greenish cloud.
Noise smote Gann’s ears abruptly: a sudden roaring, like the jet of an old-time rocket.
The things had come at last into the shallow atmosphere of his reeflet. He heard the shriek of their motion through the air—and something else.
Something was screaming.
The red spark thundered overhead, out of the green cloud, toward Gann like some deadly ancient missile homing in on a radar trace—then at the last moment rose up a dozen yards above his head, and as it passed he caught a sudden glimpse of nightmare.
Metal scales like, broken mirrors. Enormous talons, dripping something that glowed and was golden, something that splattered to the ground near Gann like a soft, fitful rain. The red spark divided into two red, monstrous, blinking eyes, mirror-rimmed, in a head like a maniac dragon’s. And the roaring blue flame was the tail of the thing.
“Pyropod!” breathed Boysie Gann aloud, transfixed.
He had never seen an adult before—had heard of them only as distant rumors, like the sort of ghost stories unplanned parents used to tell their children. The baby pyropod that had been Harry Hickson’s pet had not prepared him for the huge, menacing reality that shrieked through the air above him now. He stood, stunned.
A pyropod is a living rocket, flame-footed and deadly. Their chemistry is not that of Earthly air-breathers; their primeval genesis came from the same noncarbon evolutionary strain that shaped the fusorians. On their plasma jets, nuclear in temperature, fired by fusorian symbiotes, they can outrun a Plan cruiser and outfight any Terrestrial beast in search of prey. And to the pyropods, anything that moves is prey. Their jets take enormous quantities of reaction mass. Their appetites are insatiable. Scavengers of space, they will attack anything.
Fortunately for the continuation of life on the inner planets and the Reefs of Space, atmosphere is a slow poison to the pyropods and gravity damages their reflexes. They are beasts of the interstellar void, ship-sized monstrosities at their hugest, big as cave bears even when barely mature. Standing in shock, watching the great beast, Boysie Gann stared at the red eyes pulsing in their telescopic mirrors, wheel and flash back toward him, imagined the black talons ripping metal or rock like bread . . .
And realized, almost too late, that he was the target of those monstrous talons now.
Instinctively he raised the laser gun and fired.
The charge was minimal, only the message setting; yet the great pyropod felt it, screamed, and soared away. Gann hurled himself to the shelter of the rock cairn, staring about. The torn green cloud of luminosity was dissolving in the night sky above him. Streamers of mist scattered and faded. And where the cloud had been, Gann could see what had brought it.
A spaceling. One of the warm-blooded, seal-like creatures that roam the space between the stars, natural prey to the pyropods, friend to man. It had brought the cloud—for it was the spaceling’s ability to hold atmosphere about it, in a Ryeland-effect field, that permitted them, as oxygen-breathers, to live in space at all.
The spaceling had been grievously wounded. Even from so far away, Gann could see the hideous slash that ripped along the whole length of its sleek, golden body as it came tumbling down. Something was clinging to its fur—a rider? Gann could not be sure; but what he was certain of was that the end for both the spaceling and its burden was very near.
The pyropod that had attacked him had wheeled again and was diving on the wounded seal-like beast. A louder howling drowned out the spaceling’s scream as the pyropod came out of the dark over a purple-scaled ridge, red eyes pulsing and dripping talons reaching again.
Gann reacted without thought. He twisted the crystal of that old laser to maximal intensity, steadied the tube on the rocks of the cairn, and fired into those dreadful flashing eyes. They exploded.
The pyropod bellowed in agony. Its eyes were gone—eyes or eyelike structures; actually, Gann knew, they were more like laser search gear. But whatever they were, they were gone now, burst like the shattered hull of a subtrain when the field of its tunnel fails and the fluid rock crushes it. The pyropod drove blindly up and away, squalling until its sound was cut off like the dropping of a curtain.
It had passed beyond the atmosphere into space. Blind and wounded, it would not, Gann thought, be back. And a blessing that was, since an orange light was blinking on the laser gun, warning him that the fuel cell was fully exhausted.
He knew there were other pyropods still out there, somewhere beyond the veil of air. He could see their faint red sparks circling, and the blue trails of their fiery exhausts. They veered all at once, and drove in toward the retreating comet tail of the pyropod he had wounded. There was a puff of incandescent vapor . . .
Dimly Gann realized that its mates had destroyed the wounded one, torn it open and were now wheeling and diving, fighting for their shares of the kill. But he had no time for them. The spaceling had tumbled to earth halfway across the little reeflet, and Gann stumbled and leaped across the red-scaled rocks to find it.
It was lying at the edge of Harry Hickson’s little plantation, spurting glowing yellow blood across the green moss. Beside it was its rider, bent over the terrible wound, trying with both hands to stanch the flow of blood.
The rider was a girl. Hickson had been right. It was the girl in the photograph he had displayed.
The spaceling moaned and shuddered as Gann drew near, its voice a faint, inarticulate sob. The girl was sobbing too.
“Can I help?” said Boysie Gann.
The girl, Quarla Snow, turned quickly, startled. She stared at Gann as if he were himself a pyropod, or some more fearsome monster from legend. There was fright in her eyes—and yet, queerly, thought Gann, almost relief as well, as if she had expected something even worse. It was the expression of a man who finds himself confronted by a wolf, when he expects a tiger.
“Who are you?” she demanded. Her voice was low and controlled. She was tall and strong, but very young.
“Boysie Gann,” he said. “And you’re Quarla Snow. Harry Hickson told me you’d be here.”
Her hand flew to her mouth. Her eyes widened in fear. For a moment she seemed about to run; then she shook her head in a pathetic gesture and turned back to the spaceling.
Its golden blood had ceased to flow, its body to move. The sounds it had uttered were still.
“Sultana’s dead,” the girl said softly, as if to herself.
“I’m sorry,” Boysie Gann said inadequately. He glanced aloft—the pyropods were out of sight entirely now—then back to her. Quarla Snow’s face was lightly tanned, almost to match her honey-colored hair. She was nearly the color of her spaceling. Her white coveralls were splashed with that golden ichor, her hands dripping with it. Yet she was beautiful.
For a moment a buried emotion trembled inside Boysie Gann, a memory of Julie Martinet and the taste of the fresh salt surf on her mouth when he kissed her on the beach of the little Mexican resort, Playa Blanca, long ages ago when they had said good-by. This girl did not in the least resemble Julie Martinet. She was blond where Julie had hair like night; she was tall, and Julie tiny. Her face was broad, friendly, and even hi her sorrow and fear it showed contentment and joy in life, while Julie Martinet was a girl of sad pleasures and half-expressed sorrows. Yet there was something in both of them that stirred him.
He said hastily, “Those things may be back. We’d better do something about it.”
The girl’s tears were drying on her cheeks and her expression had become more calm. She looked down at the dead gun in Gann’s hands and half smiled. “Not with that, Boysie Gann. It’s empty.”
“I know. We’d better get back to Hickson’s cave. He may have left other charges.”
“Left them? But I thought you said he was here!” The shadow fell over her face again, her eyes bright and fearful.
“He was, yes. But he’s gone. Disappeared. I don’t know where.”
The girl nodded absently, as if she were too dazed to take in what he had said. She dropped to her knees beside the dead spaceling and stroked its golden head. “Poor Sultana. I’ll never forgive myself. When I got your signal I . . . well, I was frightened. I didn’t know what to do. Dad was gone on an emergency call. He’d taken our ship, and . . . I decided to ride Sultana out here by myself.”
Her mouth set white for a moment “I didn’t really think of any danger. There aren’t many pyropods in these clusters any more—been hunted out years ago, though they keep straying back. But I’d outrun them on Sultana often enough before. I didn’t think about the fact that she’s . . . that she was . . . getting old.”
She stood up and touched Gann lightly on the arm, a gesture of reassurance. “But you’re not to worry. We aren’t marooned here; Dad will come for us in the ship as soon as he gets home. I left a message.”
Gann nodded. “So he’ll wait a while,” he said, comprehendingly, “and then, if you haven’t returned in—what? a day or so? Then he’ll come looking for you.”
But Quarla Snow shook her golden head, her expression unreadable. “No. He won’t wait Not even a second. I said in my note that Harry Hickson’s old distress signal had come. He’ll be here as fast as his ship can bring him, to see who sent Harry’s signal.”
Gann stared. “Harry did. Harry Hickson. I told you!”
“I know you told me,” the girl said, her voice calm but with an undercurrent of wonder and of fear. “But you see, it couldn’t have been Harry. I—no, wait. I’ll show you.”
And she turned and led him away from the cultivated little field, back up to the red-scaled crest of rock, where he had rested his laser gun on the cairn of rocks to fire at the pyropod. “See?” she said, touching the cairn.
He bent closer to look, and there on the lowermost rock, on one half-smoothed face of a boulder, was a faint scratching of carved letters, whittled out a line at a time with a laser gun, almost invisible unless you knew just where to look:
Harry Hickson
Died of a fusorian infection
Deneb light his way
“You see?” said the girl. “Harry could not have sent the message. He died here three years ago.”
V
All this was months before the Writ of Liberation. On Earth the old Planner sat in silent, joyous communion with the Planning Machine. In solarian space the great Plan cruisers arrowed from satellite to planet, from asteroid to distant Spacewall post, carrying the weapons and the orders of the Machine to all the far-flung territories of the Plan of Man. On the island of Cuba, in the Body Bank, a Nigerian ex-Technicorps man, broken for inefficiency, gave up the last of his vital organs to serve some more worthy servant of the Plan, and died. (His name had once been M’Buna. He had been captured and court-martialed for desertion.) A girl named Julie Martinet, in a dormitory hall far below the surface of the Peruvian Andes, sat with stylus in hand deciding on which letter to write—one to the man she loved “but had not heard from”; the other an application for special duty in the service of the Machine.
And out on the Reefs, in the sprawling hundred-orbed community called Freehaven, Machine Major Boysie Gann began to understand that his greatest opportunity for service—and his greatest hope of reward!—had been handed to him on a silver platter.
For he was at large in Freehaven, the very heart of the Reefs of Space. And he knew, or thought he knew, a way to get back to the worlds of the Plan.
