Collected Short Fiction, page 684
So when the T’Worlie began to be deeply interested in Object Lambda it was easy enough for them to find some hundreds of drones on courses and at points that were not too remote from it.
The next job for the T’Worlie computers was calculating which of these drones was on the course that would involve least time and energy to divert it to the neighborhood of Lambda with its high galaxyward velocity. Fortunately a handful of drones in that section had been redirected inward much earlier to HU gaps in the global screen. Among them was one whose course would match Lambda’s in less than five years.
After that there was no problem. The drone’s matter receiver was put to work giving birth to automatic tools, hull sections, drive. units, instruments, finally people. The tools went to work, assembling the hull sections, installing the drives, making room for the people. What had been a tiny kick-ram—no bigger than Earth’s early Apollo capsule—was transformed and expanded into a thousand-meter vessel with room for a crew of several hundred.
There was, to be sure, one problem.
The rebuilt T’Worlie ship, now named Aurora, was big, but it needed to be big. It did not possess a great deal of surplus mass.
It was driven by the sequential explosion of hydrogen fusion charges, directional in a coneshaped blast against a great battering plate at its base. Not much of the radiation from the fusion explosions seeped through the base plate, but some did. Enough for ionizing radiation constantly to bathe the members of the crew.
T’Worlie and Sheliaks, Purchased People and bits, robots and humans all responded to this in their individual, idiosyncratic racial ways.
But few complex chemical or electronic processes can operate without damage in the presence of ionizing radiation. It didn’t matter who they were—in the long run it came to much the same for all of them.
They died.
III
PERTIN and the chimp scrambled to the corridor entrance and peered out. The vinegary T’Worlie smell was strong now and they could hear the sounds of something happening outside: a punctured-tire hiss, a faint high-pitched singing.
A circus procession was sailing toward them down the center of the corridor. First came a T’Worlie, bat’s head on butterfly body, no bigger than a pigeon but strong enough to be carrying a kitten-sized furry creature with enormous saucer eyes. Behind the T’Worlie, as it flew with powerful strokes of its green-spotted filmy wings, came a glittering cloud of steel-blue particles—like a swarm of gnats in the sun—and behind them, coming fast but decelerating strongly because of its mass, the square-edged form of a Scorpian robot, all fore jets pumping reaction mass.
The T’Worlie made its shrill whistling sounds and the I’mal translator on Pertin’s shoulder rattled into life. “I identify you as a Pertin,” it said with mechanical precision. “I propose you transfer at once to high-G accommodations suitable to your structure, mode urgent.”
“Why, Nimmie!” cried Ben James, suddenly inexplicably, foolishly glad. “It’s good—to see you.”
The T’Worlie braked with its filmy wings and the five patterned eyes studied Pertin. “Verify your statement of identity,” the I’mal translator rattled in his ear. “Query implications. Request quick clarification.”
“Why, it’s me, Ben Ch—Ben James Pertin. From Sun One. Why, just yesterday I saw you in the social concourse, remember?” But he stopped; this copy of the T’Worlie he had known would not remember.
The T’Worlie hesitated. It was some Nimmie or other, Pertin was sure; the key to recognizing T’Worlie was not the five eyes or the small sphincter mouth with its cat’s-whisker vibrissae, but the patterns on the wings. Green spots predominating on a pale yellow background—five of the bigger spots arranged in a sort of wobbly letter W, like the constellation Cassiopeia from Earth—yes it was Nimmie, all right, Pertin knew. But perhaps a Nimmie he had never met, in some different line of descent.
The vinegary smell deepened. It was a sign of a polite cogitation in a T’Worlie, like a human being’s Hmmm. But Nimmie did not respond, exactly. He was distracted by the swarm of tiny beings which Pertin recognized as the collective entity called Boaty Bits. They swept into the tachyon transport room, swirled around Pertin and the chimp and reformed under the T’Worlie’s wings.
The kitten-like creature spoke with a voice like a purr. The translator rendered it as: “No time kidding around, get hell out!” The T’Worlie concurred. “Mode urgent. Accept transportation via robot. Your physical safety at risk!”
Doc Chimp chattered, “I told you I wasn’t going to like this place, Ben James. It isn’t safe. Of course, I’m only a monkey, so it doesn’t matter much about me. It’s you I worry about.”
“You’re an ape,” Pertin corrected automatically, his brain concentrating on what the T’Worlie had said.
“Sure, but an ape that knows what isn’t safe. Come on, Ben James! Let’s do like bat-ears says and split!”
The decision was taken from Pertin. The Scorpian hissed slowly by, still decelerating. It came to a stop, reversed itself and began to pick up momentum for the return. And as it passed Pertin and Doc Chimp it simply caught them up, each under a silvery tentacle, and bore them away. In reverse order the procession steamed away—first the robot with the two terrestrial primates, then the swarm of bit creatures, then the T’Worlie and its passenger.
THE probe was powered by huge nuclear thrusters. The power was off only for short periods, long enough to permit instrument readings or other work that could not be carried on during deceleration times. The rest of the time the entire ship suffered under a surging, uneven, pulsing drive that averaged nearly seven gravities.
The welcoming-and-transporting committee barely got Pertin and Doc Chimp to a place of refuge before the thrusters started again. The Boaty Bits had darted away at the first warning white-noise “blast—they could not operate at all under thrust and had to find safety lest they be stepped on. The T’Worlie and his passenger were next to go, leaving only the robot to see to tucking Pertin and Doc Chimp in. The robot had no particular objection to high gravity. Pertin had noticed that on the trip from the tachyon chamber. When the robot had to change direction it simply braced itself with a few of the steel-coil tentacles, stopped against whatever was in the way and pushed off in another direction; The sensation for Pertin was like being tossed around at the end of a cracking whip, but he survived it.
The thrusting started before the robot had finished sealing their cocoons and it was even worse then the ride. The cocoons were meant to protect them against it—were tailor-made to their dimensions, equipped with the best of springing devices and every comfort. But there was no such thing as antigravity and that was what was needed.
The. robot tarried for a moment. It could no longer jet about, but its tentacles held it easily off the floor, octopus-like. As the thrusts came they gave gently, then returned to position.
It seemed to be trying to communicate. Pertin, looking out of the cocoon faceplate, shrugged and spread his hands. One Scorpian looked like another, but if this one had come from Sun One it might recognize the human gesture. The trouble was, there was no way to tell whether it was responding to it.
Then the I’mal crackled into life: “—not move. Prerequisite explanations to you. I am repeating this on all comm frequencies. Most imperative you not move. Prerequisite—”
The sound faded again as the robot evidently shifted to another possible frequency. “All right,” said Pertin, “we’ll wait.” But whether the robot understood him or not he could not say—it rested there on its tentacles, swaying under the thrust, for a few moments more and then undulated away.
The probe was decelerating furiously now—a roller-coaster ride multiplied by a hundred. There was a lot more noise then Pertin had expected—the thudding of the nuclear engines and the screeching of the torsion-bar shock absorbers that did their best to level out the thrust.
“Doc,” he called. “Can you hear me?”
The chimp’s cocoon was only yards away, but the thuud-screech drowned out all other sounds. Pertin stared around. The room was half machine. Bright metal valves, gray plastic tubes coiling like dead entrails, colored screens where enigmatic symbols flickered and vanished. The walls were a sick, off-color green. No human would have designed a room like this, but of course it had not been designed for humans in the first place. It was a standard T’Worlie cocoon container, modified to take terrestrials.
The thud-screech pounded on and on. Experimenting with the cocoon, Pertin discovered that it would meter an anesthetic dose into his veins—or even a selective analgesic to deaden the auditory nerve for a time and block out the remorseless nuclear thunder. But he didn’t want to sleep. He wasn’t tired—he wanted to get about his business. When your time is running out, he thought, you don’t like to lose any of it.
Then he discovered that the cocoon had a built-in stereo stage.
The device was not wholly familiar, but with any luck he should be able to. reach Doc Chimp, at least. His first attempt was not a success. He gently turned a knurled pointer under the hollow silver hemisphere of the stage and was delighted to see it fill with the shining silver mist that indicated it was operating.
But when the mist abruptly condensed it was to show the image of a nude blonde. “Mr. Pertin, sir,” she caroled sweetly, “welcome aboard! Tonight for your entertainment, sir, you may watch me star in The Belle of Bellatrix. A thriller-drama of the love of a human beauty for a mutated alien and its fatal consequences. Feel the fear of the terrified girl! Share the wrath of her human lover! Feel the coils of the monster around her! Taste its dying blood! All these available by using the sen-sat coils in the small cabinet by your right hand. We have many other stereostage fiches, Mr. Pertin, and—”
He finally got the fiche turned off and the nude blonde vanished, still smiling. She dissipated as the camera zoomed in at her until at the end all that was left was a Cheshire-cat smile and the memory of her pale, slim figure.
Then the stereo stage blinked, swirled with color, solidified and Doc Chimp’s homely face was staring out at him.
“Got you,” cried Pertin, pleased. “I didn’t think I would be so lucky.”
“You weren’t,” said the chimp. “I called you. I want to volunteer for something.”
The chimpanzee face looked subdued Pertin said, “What?”
“I think I ought to take a look around,” said Doc Chimp sadly. “God knows I don’t want to. But most of the beings will be tied down to pressure cocoons and I’m not.”
“Good idea,” said Pertin, a little surprised. He hadn’t known the chimp well on Sun One—it wasn’t that he was prejudiced against mutated animals, but of course they didn’t have much in common. But he had an impression of Doc Chimp’s personality that was at variance with the act of volunteering for a solitary excursion into what might be trouble. Humorous, pleasure-seeking, a little lazy—that was how he would have described the chimp. “And thanks,” he added. “Meanwhile I’ll just send a report to Sun One if I can figure out how to use this stereo stage.”
“Ah,” said Doc Chimp, the mocking light in his eyes again, “allow me to instruct you, mighty human. You know, I figured you’d be too involved with high-level considerations to take much interest in hardware. So I checked out all the instrumentation with the T’Worlie on Sun One before we left.”
IT ONLY took a few minutes for Pertin to learn to operate the stereo stage in his cocoon—it was not, after all, basically anything but a stereo stage and they were common all over the galaxy. Then he lifted himself on one elbow against the surging thrusts of the drive—the cocoon’s self-adjusting circuits buzzed busily, trying to compensate for his unusual position—and watched the chimp cautiously lever himself over the side of his own cocoon, timing his movements to the surging of the drive, drop clumsily to the floor, mutter to himself angrily for a moment and then slowly, painfully lumber off on all fours. He did not look back.
Pertin felt curiously better, as though he had discovered a friend where he had expected only an inadequate tool. He worked the controls of the stereo stage, got himself a circuit through to the recording fiches of the tachyon communicator and spoke.
“This is Ben James Pertin,” he said, “reporting in to Sun One. Doc Chimp and I have arrived safely. There was no apparent problem from the transmission-r-at least, we look all right, are breathing and our hearts are working. Whether our brains are scrambled or not I could not say. No more than when we volunteered for this, anyway, I’d guess. We have seen very little of the probe, have contacted only a few of the personnel, but in general the situation appears much as we understood it. At present I am in an acceleration couch, waiting for the next period of free fall for further investigation. Doc Chimp, who is performing very well and deserves credit; has voluntarily left on a scouting mission.
“I’ll report again when I have something to say,” he finished. “And—personal to Ben Charles Pertin: Have a good time on my honeymoon.”
He snapped off the stage before he could decide to erase the last part of the message.
In spite of the best efforts of the cocoon his kidneys were beginning to feel bruised. The noise was even more of a problem. Efficient soundproofing kept it out of the cocoon as airborne vibrations—but there was too much of it to be shut out entirely. It seeped through as a continual thunder and squeal.
Pertin shut it out of his mind, thought of sleep, decided to brush up on his knowledge of the “hardware.”
His first attempt at the fiche library of the stereo stage was only half successful. He just managed to avert the reappearance of the bareskinned blonde and found he had secured a record transmitted by another member of the crew, race unspecified, apparently for a sort of public stereo-stage broadcast on its home planet. He shut out of his mind the public broadcaster he should have been getting ready to marry about this time—some thousands of light-years away he was getting ready to marry her—and discovered that the name of the vessel was the Aurora, or Dawn. The sound was, of course, different in the T’Worlie tongue and they had named it—but he learned it held the same connotations of new day and bright glowing promise in both cultures. He also found that he had only limited facilities for recreation—well, he had expected that. There were tape-fiche libraries for almost every known race of beings, some special high-pressure atmosphere chambers for a few of the exotics. That was it.
had not learned exactly what he wanted, so he tried again. But instead of getting a fiche on the ship itself he got one on its mission, evidently a briefing record dubbed for humans. It was narrated by a man Pertin recognized as a minor functionary on Sun One. He spoke in a high-pitched voice, smiling emptily at the stereo pickup: “We will show you all that is known about Object Lambda. First we will locate it, as it would be seen from Earth if visible at that distance.”
Behind the speaker another stereo-stage tank glowed, shimmered and filled with a universe of stars. Two of the brighter ones pulsed to call attention to themselves as the man spoke.
“Those stars are Benetnasch in Ursa Major and Cor Caroli in Canes Venatici. Those faint stars over there—” as he spoke a faint line of light ran around ah area of the tank, enclosing it in a square—” are in Coma Berenices, hear the north galactic pole. Now we’ll take a closer look.”
Benetnasch and Cor Caroli swam aside. The faint stars on Coma Berenices grew brighter, spreading apart, as the. whole field seemed to move. The bright points fled out of the sides of the stage, and the few remaining ones became brighter until only a few were left—and beyond them ghostly faint blurs that were no longer part of the Milky Way but galaxies in their own right.
The illusion of motion stopped.
Another square of light formed around a patch of blackness in the center of the stage, indistinguishable from the emptiness around it.
The man said, “Now we’ve reached the limits of Sol-orbiting instruments. Object Lambda is at the center of that square, but it is invisible. It is slightly better in the far infrared.”
The pattern of stars shimmered. Some became brighter, some dimmer, and in the center of the square appeared what might have been a faint and shapeless glow.
“This is not instantaneous,” explained the lecturer. “It’s long exposure and image-intensified. The Object would never have been detected in routine sweeps from Sol-based instruments. Even the T’Worlie scouts first detected it only because of a chance occultation of some stars in the Milky Way itself, seen from beyond. What we will show you next is not an actual observation but an artifact as it would look from Earth, as deduced from all available observations.”
The object brightened a halfdozen magnitudes as he spoke. “As you see, it has a sort of tipped-disk shape, like certain classifications of external galaxies. However, that’s not what it is. First of all, it is far too small, perhaps only two or three A.U. in diameter. Second, its spectrum is wrong.
“At its apparent distance, as determined by its angular diameter—if it were indeed a galaxy—it should be receding at a major fraction of the speed of light. Of course we know from triangulation from the T’Worlie ships that that distance is wrong by a good many orders of magnitude. But according to its spectrum displacement it is actually approaching the Milky Way at nearly relativistic speeds.”
The image blurred and disappeared and the plump human was standing there by himself. He said with satisfaction, “The T’Worlie scout has confirmed the speed as accurate in the range of 50,000 kps. Its position relative to Earth is some 30,000 light-years from Sol, in the direction of a point near the northern fringe of Coma Berenices. It is not an object from our galaxy. There are no spiral arms in that direction and few isolated stars or clusters much nearer than Sol itself.
