Collected Short Fiction, page 671
A heavy cast-bronze ashtray lay on the table before us—a doughnut-shaped replica of the moon platform. He picked it up in his massive paws, turning it absently. Presently I heard a crack like a gunshot and saw that he had snapped it in two. The guards around us were startled, but Guy sat fingering one of the fragments, unaware of anything amiss. Before we left he had broken the bronze into a dozen lumps.
The guards stood up when Thorsen came in with his new security chief. Major Gort was a tall, lank, sallow man with sparse red hair and sleepy greenish eyes. He moved with an unmilitary slouch and spoke in a hoarse undertaker whisper.
Thorsen had put on a kind of armored arrogance along with his two new stars. Scowling at the children as if they stood accused of something unspeakable, he introduced Gort and laid down new rules for us.
“Skygate’s a fortress now.” Staring at the many-colored pyramid as if hypnotized, he recovered himself with a spasmodic twitch. “We’re setting up a strictly military effort to control all our space contacts—and we’re on the front line here.”
“Father, please!” Kyrie raised her hand like a child in school. “Won’t we be allowed to work on the terminal—”
“Absolutely not.” He scowled bleakly. “We’re losing a war with the space aliens already around us. Our mission here is to perfect new defenses.” His sunken eyes flashed to Nick. “The engineers think your flying beer can might be used to propel a missile fast enough to knock out the space snakes.”
“But, sir—” Nick’s small voice shook—“we were born to build the terminal. We can’t waste ourselves killing other creatures.” Thorsen’s gaunt face lost color. He gulped and reached for a glass of water that Gort was hastily pouring. It shook and spilled over his hand.
“Now get this,” he rasped at last. “COSMOS is dead. Skygate’s a military post—and you’ll all obey my orders. You’ll forget that terminal. You’ll waste no time on what you call pure research—on what you call knowledge for its own sake.” Carolina tried to say something about academic freedom.
“Get this!” The cracked voice rose to cut her off. “We’re fighting for survival. Space war is a new game. We can lose it to a bug from Saturn or maybe win it with Nick’s beer car. Every act will have to fit our total military effort. Get me?”
“I get you, General.” Carolina stung him with her tone.
“All of you had better get—” His face turned dark and his old voice broke. He gulped water, cleared his throat and tried to smile. “Don’t take me wrong. We used to be friends. I don’t want to injure anybody. Remember—I didn’t trade the kids to Petrov. I’ll try to keep you here as you are if you’ll only play the game. But get this—”
His dull eyes swept across us, one by one.
“Marko.” This was a grim stranger speaking, no longer Marko’s old comrade on the moon. “Hodian. Carolina. If you fail to see things my way, you’ll be replaced. You may not see the kids again. Am I clear?”
“You’re clear, General Thorsen,” Carolina whispered bitterly. “Very clear.”
I hated Thorsen from that day, yet I felt a growing pity for him, too. Bewildered and despairing, he was fighting desperately for the survival of the only world he knew. As much as I loved Nick and Kyrie and Guy, I, too, had come from his old world. I could feel his tragedy.
GUY growled once, softly, just before Thorsen rose to close the meeting. Even then he didn’t look at Nick and Kyrie, but I could see them bending eagerly over the tetrahedron, their intent faces turning brown again in its growing light. Absorbed in it, they started when Carolina spoke to them.
“Please! Let’s go back to the lab.” Kyrie whispered eagerly. “I think we’ve found something new.”
“A weapon?” Carolina was sardonic.
Kyrie looked hurt and shook her head.
“We don’t know.” Nick was still staring into the tetrahedron, his eyes oddly dilated. “We don’t know yet.”
Major Gort sent a security car to take them to the lab, and they entered the darkroom together. They stayed all day. Late that night, worried about them, Carolina knocked and went in.
She found them lying like two children on the floor, the tetrahedron glowing splendidly between them. Their wide eyes were fixed on it and they didn’t move until she touched them.
She persuaded them to take a break. They came to the kitchen, walking dreamily together with intimate collisions of hips and shoulders, as if what they were finding had been some delightful new awareness of each other. Silent about the nexode, they gulped a little orange juice and hurried back to the darkroom.
THORSEN called my office the next morning. My brother was to be questioned and he wanted me present. The interrogation took place in the same briefing room. Major Gort presided. Tom came in between two guards, who led him to a chair and stood alert behind him.
He looked puffy with soft, fat, rumpled and seedy. Squirming uneasily under Gort’s sleepy stare, he caught my eye and grinned appealing, turned nervously to beg his guards for a narcorette, stared defiantly back at Gort.
“Mr. Hood, we’re considering your request for sanctuary,” Gort began at last. “Before we can do you any favors, you have a good deal to explain.”
“I’m no crook.” Tom’s voice shook with indignation. “I’m an astronaut. I was trained by COSMOS. After retirement, I took a civilian job in a member nation—a right guaranteed by the charter and my COSMOS contract. Now I’ve come home to see my brother and my son. Is that criminal?”
“We’ve heard about your civilian jobs.” Gort’s cat-eyes were blankly alert, as if Tom were a tricky mouse. “I believe one of them was smuggling moon grit.”
“But that was a kosher deal.” Tom looked offended. “I was a legitimate agent, acting for Mr. Howard Hudson. He mined the grit on the moon. His operations there were legally licensed, with all fees paid.”
“That grit was stolen from under the nose of Moon Control.”
“Perhaps it was mined in the dark.” Tom shrugged. “Hudson didn’t make his billions sitting on his tail.”
“You sold the grit,” Gort resumed. “As part of your payment you were employed, I believe, by the Sino-Soviet.”
“I was hired as a space engineer.” Tom’s voice stayed level, but his fat dark face shone with sweat. “I soon found, however, that all they wanted was my genes—the altered genes I had brought back from the moon. I was sent to a lab in the Gobi to breed more moon children.”
“So we’d heard.” Gort nodded sleepily. “What were the results?”
“Not good,” Tom said. “The experiment lasted five years. A dozen creatures were born alive. Not one was even semihuman. Three lived a year or longer, but they’re all dead now.” He hunched and shuddered. “Hideous little things. I couldn’t bear to see them.”
“You did other research with the grit?”
“As a matter of fact, I did.” Tom’s bulgy eyes widened warily. “I had a fine staff. We repeated most of your early work here. We were able to assemble a couple of second-stage tetahedrons, though none so large as yours. I think we learned a few things you don’t know.”
“Such as what?”
New uses for the tetrahedrons.”
“We’ll get to that.” Gort crouched a little, like a cat about to spring. “Now—why did you defect?”
“The project had gone kaput.” Tom’s puffy shoulders drooped expressively. “My sperm had gone bad. All our moon grit had turned to dust—drained, I suppose, by your tetrahedron. The Gobi lab was abandoned to the space snakes. My bosses got what I call space paranoia.”
“Huh?” Gort drew slightly back. “What’s that?”
“They couldn’t cope. Their image of mankind didn’t fit them to meet the creatures of our sister biocosms. When they encountered another intelligence they expected to understand it. When they couldn’t, their impulse was to attack. When nothing fought back—when the snakes just played hide-and-seek with their best missies—they went paranoid.”
Gort froze, as if the mouse had suddenly become an ugly rat.
“I believe I can be useful in your work here,” Tom added smoothly. “Besides, as I told you, I was anxious to see my brother and my son. How about it, sir?”
XIII
GORT ruled at last that Tom would remain in custody while his case was under review, but Thorsen gave him leave next morning to see the children. I rode with him in a security car down to the lab. Nick and Kyrie ran out of the darkroom to greet him with a warmth that surprised me.
“Guy’s father!” Kyrie hugged him eagerly. “I’m so glad you’re here. Poor dear Guy will surely be happier now.
Nick shook his hand politely. “Please, Mr. Hood. Tell us about your work with the moon grit.” His voice quivered with interest. “Carolina says you’ve learned new uses for it.”
“We put together two second-stage tetrahedrons.” Tom paused to study Nick the way he used to study me when we played chess. “They were too weak to project a readable record, but we found a linkage between them nobody had expected. They turned out to be remarkable signal devices.”
“That’s no good to us.” Disappointment erased Kyrie’s eager smile. “We’ve only one nexode—” Her breath caught. She and Nick stared at one another, eyes black and wide. Bright hope flowed back into her face. Nick turned abruptly back to Tom.
“Do you think other messenger missiles have reached the solar system?” His breathless voice was almost too fast for me to follow. “Do you think the other biocosms may have assembled nexodes of their own? Or do you think—” emotion froze him for an instant—“our nexode might have power enough to reach the people of other stars?”
Tom gestured with the fluent assurance of some bazaar merchant proclaiming the unutterable worth of a smuggled emerald.
“I bring you these questions,” he said, “and others equally exciting. I hope to help you answer them—with General Thorsen’s permission.”
They took him into the darkroom, where the nexode was. He spent three hours there. The waiting security men grew restive and finally sent Carolina in to learn what they were doing.
She found the lights on. Nick and Kyrie were seated on the floor, face to face. Nick holding the pyramid in his two hands and Kyrie leaning over it, her brown fingers touching and stroking the bright triangles of its patterned faces as if playing some curious musical instrument.
Tom sat near them on a stool, smoking his scented narcorette and calling out rhythmic syllables that Carolina though were numerals and direction-words in Mandarin.
He scowled with annoyance at her intrusion, but Nick and Kyrie gave her no attention. She watched for a few minutes and came out to report. The guards phoned Major Gort, who bustled over to discover what was going on. Nodding for us to follow, he burst into the darkroom.
TOM objected angrily, but Nick and Kyrie didn’t look up until Carolina touched them. They seemed frightened then. Nick clutched the tetrahedron against his bare chest. Kyrie turned pale and tried to wave us back.
“What’s all this?” Gort’s hand was on his gun. “What are you up to?”
“I’m only showing them what we learned at the Gobi lab.” Tom was sullenly plaintive. “A technique for operating the crystal. An orientation to the operator’s brain. A sequence of contact points. A rhythm of relaxation and attention.”
Cateyes narrowed, Gort drew back from the tetrahedron as if it had become a dangerous dog. “What does it do,” he asked, “when you operate it?”
“That’s what we were trying to discover when you stopped us.” Gort snorted. “You’ll have to tell me more than that if you want permission to go on.”
“Sir.” Nick stood up with the prismatic tetrahedron. “The nexode is a kind of machine. It communicates ideas, but not with anything quite like language. It uses its own sort of symbolic system for grasping reality.” He hesitated. “I’d like to tell you more about it, sir, but the symbols are not translatable in any way I think you could understand and the reality they represent doesn’t fit any symbolic system you know. Mr. Hood is trying to show us a better way to operate the machine.”
“To communicate with what?”
“So far—just with itself.” Nick’s intense black stare dropped back to the tetrahedron. “Now I think we can read parts of the record that we couldn’t before. Mr. Hood thinks it might be linked with other nexodes, perhaps on other worlds. But we have not yet established any such contact.”
Gort’s greenish eyes blinked sleepily.
“Come along, Hood,” his raspy whisper came at last. “I want to check with the general before you go any farther.” He swung lazily to Nick and Kyrie. “Any attempt to use that object for communication with anything at all will have to be cleared with General Thorsen in advance. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Nick glanced quickly at Kyrie. “We understand.”
Grumbling under his breath, Tom left with Gort. Nick and Kyrie hurried back into the darkroom. Guy had been asleep for sixty hours, but he woke that afternoon. When he wandered into my office I called Gort and got permission for him to visit Tom.
A SECURITY car took us to the old Sino-Soviet residence. Tom’s guards brought him down to meet us in a big room which the departing delegates had stripped of everything movable.
“So you’re Guy! My son—”
Tom was waddling eagerly to meet him, fat hands reaching out, but he stopped with a gasp when Guy bounded toward him like a bear masquerading as a man. Before he could run he was crushed in Guy’s embrace. His breath came out in a frightened grunt.
“Father! Father!” Guy’s slow voice was thick and strange with surging emotion. “I thought you would never come.”
Tom squirmed with terror until Guy’s arms opened. He tried to escape then, but Guy still held him with one great paw, stroking him eagerly with the other, whimpering like some tormented beast. Tom wheezed for breath and offered Guy a trembling hand. Soon they were famous friends.
For the next three days they were never apart. They walked on the mesa, worked out together in the gym and lounged in the nursery. The guards tried to protest when Guy followed Tom back to his room at night, but his rumbling growls persuaded them to let him stay.
Each day Guy came by the office and picked me up, with an air of apology for putting his father first. I watched them together, astonished by his emotion and searching for Tom’s intention. Later security let me listen to the tapes of their talk in Tom’s bugged room.
Guy’s role was doglike adoration. After lonely years, he had found his father. He sat for hour after hour, great yellow eyes fastened on Tom, begging for every detail of his life and Robin’s.
Tom’s tales amused me. Though the truth should have been sufficient, he made Gamal Hodian a martyred saint, our mother a comic peasant, Robin a wild nymphomaniac. In his stories of the moon and the stud farm under the Gobi he made such an unlikely hero of himself that one day I warned Guy of his gift for fiction.
“Don’t lose your cool, Uncle Kim.” He winked a tawny eye. “I know what isn’t true. I’m only helping my Dad play his little joke on security.”
I failed to guess the nature of that little joke—even the next day when Guy had a distressing encounter with Nick and Kyrie. He and Tom had stopped for me. As we were strolling past the lab on our way toward the gym, Tom began asking Guy how he had been able to build the great tetrahedron out of the grit. The questions worried Guy.
“I don’t—don’t remember.” His slow voice thickened, and he stopped on the sidewalk outside the lab. His gray ears flared. A low growl rattled in his throat.
“But come,” he rumbled suddenly. “I’ll show you.”
He darted into the lab. Tom gave me a searching look and ran after him. The security men shouted and fired a warning shot, but Guy was already gone. I followed them into the building.
The tetrahedron lay blazing on the darkroom floor. Guy crouched over it, whining as if hurt. Nick was backing away, fingering a long red mark where a point of the crystal must have raked his naked chest. Kyrie fluttered between Nick and Guy, white with terror and dismay. Tom stood in the doorway, gesticulating with his reeking narcorette and trying glibly to talk the tension down, imitating our father’s Turko-Yiddish accent to retell a peasant fable about three thieves and a stolen goat.
“Come along, Hood!” One of the security men jabbed a gun at him. “You’re in real trouble now—”
Guy’s gorilla roar paralyzed me. In a blur of motion, he reached past Tom, snatched the guard’s arm, hauled him into the darkroom. When the roar died, the guard lay flat on the floor and Guy was snapping the stock off his gun as if it had been a candy toy. The other man had gone for help.
“Easy, now—” Tom had to wheeze for his own breath. “Let’s get the goat back in the bag.” He waved the narcorette and grinned at me. “How about it, Kimmie? Are you old Thorsen’s stoolie? Or will you take a chance?”
I didn’t know what he meant.
“Once a schlemiel—” He shrugged and turned to Nick and Kyrie. “How about you kids? You want to die for good old Gort? Or try your luck with us?”
“Our mission is to build the tachyon terminal.” Nick caught Kyrie’s pale hand and they faced Tom steadily. “We won’t let anything stop us. But I’m afraid you can’t help us, Mr. Hood.”
SIRENS were screaming outside by then. Gort came catfooting down the hall, the alert squad behind him. He handcuffed Tom, scooped up the tetrahedron and herded us all outside to wait for Thorsen, who was just pulling up in his staff car.
“Erik!” Tom grinned and started toward the car, holding up his cuffed wrists. “I’m glad you got here. Your people are about to muck us up. Let me explain—”
“Stand back, Hood.” Savagely angry and visibly ill, Thorsen beckoned Gort to the car. “Hold this man under double guard,” he rapped. “Check out your notion that he’s spying for our space enemies. Charge him with treason.”
