Collected Short Fiction, page 624
True, there were some puzzling problems. Some of them, indeed, were almost frightening.
What could Quarla Snow hope to gain by pretending that Harry Hickson was dead? What did she think Gann had seen on the little reeflet? A ghost? It was no ghost that had fed him, healed him, taken the collar from around his neck.
And it was no coincidence, he was coming to believe, that had brought him to Hickson’s world in the first place.
There was no proof, of course. But he was sure that M’Buna, perhaps Colonel Zafar as well, was in some way related to Hickson and the treasonable activities that were going on all around him in this unplanned, decadent, dangerous world of the Reefs. He had heard hints. An unguarded word, a look, a remark that was halted before it began. Nothing tangible, but enough to make him sure that there were links between the Reefs and the Plan worlds—links that extended even into the Technicorps, even into the vital defenses of the Spacewall itself.
If he could get back—No! he thought. When he got back, with the proof of this spreading rot, with the names of the conspirators and the evidence that would send them to the Body Bank, then no reward in the Machine’s power would be too great to give to Machine Major Boysie Gann. And Julte Martinet would be waiting . . . Meanwhile there was a lot of work to do.
Gann dared not make notes or attempt to secure tapes or photographs; but he missed no opportunity to scout and examine every part of this queer community of Free-haven. Even the name was strange and somehow disconcerting. Freehaven.
As if “freedom” were important!
Yet Boysie Gann could not help but notice that strangely the decadent, unruly mobs that dwelt in Freehaven seemed somehow sturdier, somehow happier, in some way more alert and even more prosperous than the billions who lived under the all-powerful and protective embrace of the Plan of Man . . .
It was confusing.
But his duty was clear. Gann set himself to learn all there was to know.
Freehaven consisted of a couple of thousand people, scattered over a hundred fusorian-grown rocks and a hundred thousand miles of space. Many of the rocks had been terraformed, Gann learned, with the lichenous air-plant he had first seen on Harry Hickson’s little reef. The rest of them were airless, but all of them supplied useful metals and minerals to the bustling economy of Freehaven.
Gann was not sure just what he had expected—tattooed savages, perhaps, dancing to a wild tomtom—but he had surely not been prepared for this modern, busy community. There were farms and herds—of spacelings and even, in one case, a stock farm with sixty head of what seemed to be Guernsey cattle, stolen somehow from the Plan of Man and transported in some improbable manner out to this hydrogen-based worldlet twenty billion miles from the sun. On one airless reef that was mostly pure fusorian iron was a steel mill—one of the small nuclear-powered units developed by Technicorps engineers for use on the asteroids, to save the high cost of lifting terrain steel into space. Gann marveled at it all. He admitted it to Quarla Snow and her father, with whom he was staying as guest-—or prisoner, he was never sure which—at a meal when he was served as fine a steak as he had ever tasted, with wines that bore the bouquet of French vineyards.
Dr. Snow boomed, “It isn’t only the food that is good here, young man. It is life! It has a flavor here that the Plan worlds will never taste.”
Boysie Gann said engagingly, “You may be right. I . . . well, you have to excuse me. You see, I’ve never known anything but the Plan.”
Quarla’s father nodded briskly. “Of course. None of us had, before we made our way out here. None but Quarla, at any rate, and a few others like her who were born here. They’ve lived in freedom all their lives.”
Gann said, with just the right inflexion of doubt, “But I don’t understand. I mean, how does it work? Who tells you what you’re to do?”
“No one, boy! That’s the whole point of freedom! We came here because we didn’t want to live under the collar of the Machine. We work together, and as you see we work well. Prosperity and happiness! That’s what we’ve built out of nothingness, just as the fusorians build our worlds for us out of thin gas and energy. Why, when Harry Hickson and I came here—” He broke off and tugged at his chin, frowning at Boysie Gann.
“Yes?” said Gann. “You and Hickson . . .”
“It was different then,” said Dr. Snow shortly. “Boy, do you still want us to believe that story of yours about Hickson? A man I helped to bury myself, right under the rocks of his home?”
Gann said carefully, knowing that he was on dangerous ground, “Well, sir, of course I don’t know anything about Hickson. But what I told you was true. The man who summoned Quarla said he was Harry Hickson, and I had absolutely no reason at all to doubt him at the time.”
Snow nodded somberly and said no more; but Gann noticed that he no longer seemed to enjoy his meal.
Gann put the matter from his mind. He was thinking of something bigger. He was thinking of the gratitude of the Machine when he returned, riding one of Quarla Snow’s spacelings—as she was even now teaching him to do-—bringing word of the community of Freehaven and its precious crop of several thousand splendid candidates for tissue salvage at the Body Bank!
He rose and strolled outside with Quarla. Harry Hick-son’s pet pyropod, which Quarla had insisted on rescuing from the cave when her father arrived to take them off the reeflet, hissed and slithered around the area outside the door where its staked chain permitted it to move.
He took her hand and held it, as they looked over the green ramble of glowing vines toward the distant beacon that was the central urban area of Freehaven. “You promised to let me ride one of your spacelings,” he said, squeezing her hand and grinning. “If I’m going to be a permanent inhabitant here, I’d better start learning my way around.”
She looked at him thoughtfully, then smiled. Under her golden hair her eyes were an intense blue. “Why not?” she said. “But not out of the atmosphere, Boysie. Not at first.”
“I thought the spacelings brought their air with them.”
She nodded but said firmly, “Not out of the atmosphere. For one thing, there might be pyropods.”
He scoffed, “So close to Freehaven? Nonsense, Quarla! What’s the other thing?”
She hesitated. “Well,” she began. She was saved the trouble of answering. A pale blue wash of energy brightened up the sky over their heads.
Both of them turned to look; a spacecraft was coming in for a landing, full jets blazing to slow its racing drive. Whoever it was who was piloting the craft, he was in a hurry. In a matter of seconds the ship was down on the lichenous lawn before Dr. Snow’s clinic, its lock open, a man leaping out. He glanced toward Quarla and Boysie Gann, cried, “Emergency!” and turned to receive something that was being handed to him out the lock of the ship.
Quarla cried, “I’ll get my father. Boysie, run and help them!” Gann was already in motion, hurtling across the lichenous ground, though the two men in the rocket needed little help. What was coming through the lock of the ship was a man on a stretcher, wrapped in white sheets. In the light gravity of the Reef the two of them were perfectly adequate to handle it. Gann bore a hand anyway.
“Sick,” panted one of the men. “Don’t know who he is, but he collapsed in my spaceling corral. Thought it might be something dangerous—”
Gann nodded, helped lift the stretcher on which the sick man was thrashing and babbling . . .
And almost dropped it, light gravity or not.
He stood there, jaw hanging, eyes wide. Face streaming with perspiration, eyes vacant, head tossing from side to side in delirium, the face of the man on the stretcher was nevertheless very familiar to Boysie Gann. It was the face of Machine Colonel Mohammed Zafar.
If ever Boysie Gann had needed all the wits and wiles that had been drummed into him in the spy school on Pluto, now was the moment. “Dangerous,” the reef rat who had brought Zafar had called him. He was more than dangerous; he spelled a strong probability of disaster for Boysie Gann. Zafar of all people would know him—and if, as Gann was morally certain, Zafar and M’Buna had been joined in some anti-Plan scheme on Polaris Station, Zafar would surely now know that Gann was no simple radar tech.
He dared not risk Zafar’s recovering consciousness and identifying him. Yet his every loyalty to the Plan of Man demanded that he take every chance to learn more about Zafar from the colonel’s disjointed ravings.
Dr. Snow made it easy for him, without knowing it. “You, boy!” he snapped. “Stay out of here. Quarla too! May be contagious . . . But stay where I can find you if I need you,” he added, bending over his patient.
The two of them stood at the door of the emergency room, Quarla’s hand, forgotten, in Boysie Gann’s. “He’s bad, Boysie,” she whispered. “Don’t know what it is. I haven’t seen anything like that since Harry—” Then she stopped, and went on, in a different tone, to the men who had brought him: “You’d better wait until my father’s examined him. You might have been exposed.”
In the emergency room Dr. Snow was lifting a bimetal thermometer out of Zafar’s slack, mumbling mouth. Boysie Gann strained to hear what the man was saying, but all he could catch were words like “. . . trap for minds . . .” “. . . living dust and lying dreams . . .”
Dr. Snow’s expression was serious. “High,” he muttered, then glanced toward the group at the door. “Quarla!” he called. “You’ll have to compound an injection for me. Standard broad-spectrum antibiotics, afebrilium, analgesics. Call his weight—let’s see—ninety kilos. And make the dosage maximum.”
Quarla nodded and hurried to the pharmacy room, while Snow bent back to the man. Even at this distance, Gann could see that the former Machine Colonel’s face was contorted in agony and fear. There was more than sickness in Zafar’s wild muttering; there was terror. He pushed himself erect, eyes staring, and shouted: “Graveyard of the galaxy! Starchild! Beware the trap! Beware your heart’s desire!” Then Quarla was back with a spray hypodermic. Her father took it from her, pushed her out of the room again, and quickly injected the man.
Zafar slumped back onto the examining couch, eyes closing, still mumbling to himself.
The doctor watched him for a second, then came toward the group at the door. “He’ll sleep for a while,” he said. “Nothing else to do at this moment. We’ve got to see how he responds to the drug.”
The man who had brought him said, “Doc, what is it? Are we all going to . . .” But Dr. Snow was shaking his head.
“I can’t answer your question,” he said. “I don’t know what it is. But I don’t think you’re in any danger. I’ve seen only one other case like this, three years ago. But I was exposed, and so was my daughter, and several others—and no one was infected.”
He hesitated, glancing at Gann. Then he said abruptly, “The other case was Harry Hickson, Mr. Gann. It killed him.”
Boysie Gann started to speak, then nodded. “I understand.”
“Do you?” Dr. Snow’s voice was heavy with irony. “I don’t! I don’t understand at all. Let me show you something—then tell me if you understand!” He stood away from the door, reached out a hand, and switched off the lights in the emergency room. “Look!” he cried. “Do you understand that?”
The four in the doorway gasped as one. “Father!” cried Quarla, and the men swore softly. Inside the emergency room, in the semi-darkness Dr. Snow had brought about, Mohammed Zafar’s leather-colored skin was leather-colored no longer. Like the spilled blood of the spaceling Gann had seen murdered, Zafar’s skin was bright with a golden glow! His face shone with the radiance of a muted sun. One wasted hand, dangling out of the sheets, was limned in a yellowish, unsteady light like the flicker of a million flashing fusorians.
Quarla choked, “It’s . . . it’s just like Harry, Father!”
The doctor nodded somberly. “And it will end the same way, too. Unless there’s a miracle, that man will be dead in an hour.”
He sighed and reached to turn the light on again, but there was an abrupt hissing, swishing sound and something darted past them, over their heads. “What the devil!” cried Dr. Snow, and turned on the lights.
Something was on the dying man’s head, something that scuttled about and glared at them with hot red eyes, like incandescent shoebuttons.
“Father! It’s Harry’s—I mean, it’s the pyropod! The one Boysie and I brought back!” cried Quarla Snow.
Gann said tightly, “Look! He broke the chain.” Then he laughed shakily. “Harry would be pleased,” he said unsteadily. “At last the thing’s learned how to fly.”
Machine Colonel Zafar lived longer than the hour Dr. Snow had promised, but it was obvious that the extra time would not be very long. He was sinking. For minutes at a time he seemed hardly to breathe, then roused himself Jong enough to mumble incoherent phrases like “The Starchild! But the Swan won’t help him . . .”
Snow was working over his laboratory equipment in the corner of the room, pausing every few minutes to check his patient’s breathing, and shake his head. He summoned Quarla and Gann to him and gestured to a microscope.
“I want to show you something,” he said, his face somber and wondering. “Look.” And he stepped aside.
Quarla looked into the slim chromed barrels of the microscope, then lifted her head to stare questioningly at her father. He nodded. “You see? Mr. Gann, look.”
Slowly Boysie Gann took her place. “I’m not a scientist, Doctor,” he protested. “I won’t know what to look for.”
But then he was looking through the eyepieces and his voice stopped. He did not need to be a scientist. The spectacle before him, standing out clear in three dimensions in the stereoscopic field of the microscope, was nothing he had ever seen before.
Straw-colored erythrocytes and pale eosinophiles floated among colonies of benign microorganisms that live in every human’s blood. Rodlike and amoeboid, radial or amorphous, all the tiny bacteria were familiar, in a vague, half-remembered way, to Gann.
All but one.
For dominating the field were masses of globular bodies, dark and uninteresting-looking at first, but bursting under his eyes into spurts of golden light. Like the luminous plankton of Earth’s warm seas, they flared brilliantly, then subsided, then flared again. It was like tiny warning lights signaling disaster in the sample of the sick man’s blood—hundreds of them, perhaps thousands—so many that the field of the microscope was brilliantly illuminated with a flickering golden glow.
“Great Plan!” whispered Boysie Gann. “And this is what made him sick?”
Dr. Snow said slowly, “It is the same thing I saw in Harry Hickson’s blood. Just before he died.”
He took his place at the twin eyepieces and glanced for a second at the tiny golden spheres. “Fusorians,” he said. “It took me a month with paper chromatography and mass spectrograms to verify it in Harry’s blood, but that is what they were. Colonies of fusorian symbiotes gone wild. They’re killing him.”
He stared blankly at the microscope, then roused himself and hurried back to his patient. Machine Colonel Zafar was gasping for breath, his eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling, his fingers working aimlessly, his whole skin suffused with that golden glow.
“Quarla!” rapped Dr. Snow. “Seal the room! We’ll give him a positive partial pressure of oxygen! . . . It won’t save his life,” he added wearily, “but it may prolong it—by minutes, at least.”
The girl hurried to close the door tightly against its resilient seals, while her father adjusted valves on his mediconsole. Boysie Gann heard a “white” sound of hissing gas and felt a quick increase of pressure in his ears. He swallowed and heard Quarla’s voice, queerly distant, say, “Father! He’s—he’s trying to get up!”
Machine Colonel Zafar was sitting up. His eyes were less remote, his breathing easier in the hypobaric atmosphere. But the golden glow was even more intense, the perspiration streaming from his brow.
And his eyes were on Boysie Gann. “You!” he cried. “Swan take you! Get back to the Machine, you traitor!” And he made the curious looping gesture with his arm that Gann had seen in Harry Hickson . . .
And then Boysie Gann remembered what the star was that lived in the heart of the Swan.
“Alpha Cygni!” he cried. “Deneb! The star in the constellation of the Swan!”
Zafar fell back on an elbow, glaring at him. “Your dirty mouth profanes the sacred name,” he hissed. “The Starchild will punish you. In the heart of the Planner’s citadel—in the bowels of Terra, where the Machine plays with its human toys—the Starchild will seek out and destroy its enemies!”
His eyes closed and he gasped for breath. Gann looked at Quarla and her father, but their expressions were as clouded as his own. “Starchild?” whispered the girl. “Father, do you know what—”
The doctor rumbled, “No, Quarla. I know nothing. Only rumors. A myth that there is a Starchild, and that he will bring the faithful of the Church of the Star home to Deneb’s planets one day.”
“No rumor!” shouted the glowing, golden man, and he paused to cough hackingly. “The Starchild lives! I’ve seen him in the heart of the Whirlpool! He has touched me with his radiant hand!”
But Dr. Snow was beside him, thrusting him back down on the bed, hushing him. “No!” cried Zafar wildly. “Don’t stop the word of the Starchild! See here!”
And with a convulsive effort he drew out of the pouch of the one garment he still wore a stiff, cream-colored sheet of parchment. “The Writ of Liberation!” he shouted. “The Starchild gave it to me to send to Earth. And I send it—now!”
The pyropod that had belonged to Harry Hickson scuttled wildly about, its red eyes bright orange in the high-oxygen air. It hissed and shook its scales; and Zafar’s ‘eyes, too, were almost orange, glowing with tiny, dancing golden atoms, even in the pupil. They seemed blind—or fixed on something far more distant than the walls of the doctor’s clinic.
