Collected Short Fiction, page 685
“The T’Worlie backplotted its position from all observations of their drones, as recorded over the past several thousand years. Most of the data are ambiguous, but they did establish a probable line of flight. Their hope was to find a galaxy from which it might have been ejected and then to try to discover the reason for its high-velocity.
“But they were only partly successful—I should say, only possibly successful. No such galaxy was detected. They did, however, find scattered star swarms which they believe to be the fragments of a galaxy that collapsed and then exploded more than a half-billion years ago. It is the present working hypothesis that Object Lambda was ejected from that galaxy, by what means we cannot say.”
The speaker’s expression became enthusiastic. “Because of the anomalous nature of Object Lambda,” he said, “the all-race conference on Sol One decided to transmit a full-size scout ship through the drone equipment and to staff it with a crew of volunteers of all races.” Volunteers! thought Pertin, grimacing. “And after considerable effort in negotiating, it was agreed to include Earth humans as part of the crew. The political implications of this step are of enormous consequence and reflect the true coming of age of Earth humanity in the galaxy-wide confraternity of civilized peoples. Thank you,” he said, bowed, smiled and disappeared as the fiche came to an end.
Not a minute too soon, thought Pertin. A little more of that and he would have been ill. The cocoon had a fine built-in waste handling system, but there was no sense in overloading it.
IV
HE BEGAN to see what Zara had been talking about when she accused him of an “Earthman’s burden” complex. This whole deal sounded pompous, stupid and faintly threatening, he realized, as it was put by the man in the briefing fiche. He tried to get his mind off that track—because he didn’t want to question the cause for which he was, after all, going to die, and because above all he didn’t want to think about Zara Doy. He was in the middle of trying to get The Belle of Bellatrix back on the stage when he became aware that something was scratching angrily at his cocoon.
For a moment he thought he was dreaming. He glanced back at the fading nude on the screen, then out at the nude girl who stood there.
But Pertin was a pretty superior type and he oriented himself quickly. It was no girl. It was not even human. It was a female young Earth person in shape, but the stuff of which the shape was constructed was not flesh and blood. It was silvery and bright, with a metallic hue. The eyes were orange and glowing. The hair was not made up of separate tendrils; it was a single solid piece, sculptured slightly for cosmetic effect. The creature was, in short, he realized, an “edited” version of some methane-breather or even more exotic chemistry, some being who was structurally non-viable in oxygen-bearing air and had had itself transmitted in an altered form to take up tis duties on Aurora. And it was holding a scrap of what looked like paper.
The paper was not right side up. Pertin gestured and finally the “girl” understood and rotated it until, able to read it, he signaled her to stop. He read:
Sorry, Ben James, but you’ve got to get out of there. Things are worse than we thought. Angel here will carry you to me. They guarantee she won’t drop you and squash you and actually, Ben James, this seems to be a matter of life and death.
The note was signed “Doc.”
The girl, did not speak, but the orange eyes blazed imperatively and the hands beckoned.
Pertin sighed, and opened the lid of his cocoon. “Okay Angel,” he said. “Carry me away.” Astonishingly, being carried by the pseudo-girl was actually worse than being toted by the robot, but she moved more slowly and Pertin had a chance to see something of the ship. The Aurora was roughly cone-shaped. At the nose and through the midsection were living quarters for the several score individuals who manned it—that was where they had entered to scene. Since the crew varied widely, it needed a good deal of room. Space had been provided for methane-dwellers, space-flyers and cold creatures as well as the more common forms based on C-O2 H2O—however, most of the nonviables had either stayed home or sent proxies or edited copies, so these spaces were largely empty. “Below” the living quarters and the space for the exotics were the hardware instrument sections. Below them still—in the sense of being sternward, toward the thrusters—was a layer of dense liquid for a radiation shield. It was not very effective, but of course, Pertin thought, it didn’t have to keep them alive forever, since there was neither hope for nor point in the system’s doing so. Below the shield was the tachyon transmission deck, where Pertin and the chimp had arrived. And beyond them, the thrusters and shock-absorbing gear. Since the Aurora was decelerating, it happened that the “stern” of the ship came first in line of flight, but that made little difference to anyone aboard. It was “down.” And down was the direction they were going.
The pseudo-girl had wrapped Pertin in a thick blanket of something like heavy-duty plastic foam. It was not as good as his cocoon by a long shot, but it kept him from dying of the ceaseless grinding changes in gravity as the thrusters shoved and the “girl” levered herself down a ladder-like series of projecting rods. She did not speak, nor acknowledge Pertin’s efforts to speak to her. Either there was something wrong with his I’mal translator or she simply was not a conversationalist. But she was considerate enough and when they reached the instrument deck Pertin was bruised and sick, but alive.
“Ben James!” cried a familiar voice. “I told you Angel would get you here all right!”
Doc Chimp, thin lips grinning widely, scrambled over to help the silvery girl put him down, propping him against a sloping bulkhead so he could look around. His shipmates were worth looking at—a nightmare crew if he ever had seen one. Besides the pseudo-girl and the mutated chimp, there was a Sheliak in its high-G mode, looking like a flattened baker’s bun on the deck. A web of plastic foam hid an apparently humansized figure. Pertin also saw a row of small cocoons. Two were empty—the third contained a T’Worlie. From a speaker outside the cocoon a T’Worlie voice whistled a greeting and Pertin’s I’mal translated: “I recognize your identity, Ben James Pertin. It is advantageous to all of us that you are here.”
“Thanks, Nimmie,” said Pertin, but he was staring at the plastic wrappings. A human being seemed to be concealed, in them and, apart from himself, he knew of only one human being on the Aurora—one he didn’t really want to think about.
He asked softly, “Doc, who’s over there?”
Doc Chimp said, “Who? Her?
Oh, I don’t know her name. She’s Purchased People for some low-G type of other. But she’s on our side.” The web stirred and a face peered out. It was human enough as far as features went, but the emptiness in the eyes told Pertin. that Doc Chimp was right. “Anyway,” chattered the chimp, “I better fill you in. Hell’s really broken loose, Ben James. A bunch of beings tried to wreck the telescope. Not sure but what they’ve done it, too—the Scorpian’s trying to see how much of it can be salvaged. If it and Angel here hadn’t come along we’d be out of business till they could send new instruments through—and by then it would likely be too late.”
The thuud-screech was a lot closer here—apart from everything else, it was making Pertin’s head pound. “What beings?” he managed to croak.
“Didn’t see them. I just saw somebody disappearing into a passage, and then the Sheliak here came hellfire fast after him and saw me. For a minute he thought I was them.” Doc Chimp cocked his head ruefully. “You could have found yourself short a monkey right there, Ben James, if I hadn’t talked fast. So he commandeered me to help and we came down here to hold the fort. Oh, how sore my soles and knuckles are, Ben James, against the pounding of those rockets! But I did my duty. Then we got the observatory deck sealed off—they’d used a chemical explosive on the telescope and sprung a port—and then I happened to think of my human master, off there watching The Belle of Bellatrix without a care, and I persuaded Angel to fetch you.”
Pertin frowned. “I don’t quite see why,” he objected. “I can’t help.
“You can stay alive,” declared the chimp. “I didn’t tell you all of it. When they came for the telescope they had to get past the T’Worlie here. Well, you know T’Worlie can’t do much against any being that can operate in high-G. But they tried to do what they could. And two of them got killed.”
THAT was a shocker. One cardinal rule among the races of the galaxy was that no race could ever kill Or seriously maim a member of another. Even on Sun One disciplinary problems were handled within the delegation of the race that produced the problem. Some provision existed for a body of other races sitting in judgment if the offending race failed to deal with the problem, but it had never had to be invoked. Pertin would hardly have believed the chimp if Nimmie hadn’t confirmed the facts.
“They’re crazy, then,” said Pertin. “All right. We’ll have to get a report back to Sun One. Nimmie, is your stereo stage operating?”
“Confirm that it is operative,” sang the I’mal in his ear. “State that such a transmission has already been sent.”
“Good. I’ll have to send one, too, and I think the rest of us should, but that can wait.” He tried to shift position as the floor surged particularly viciously. “Since we’re here they probably won’t try anything right away. What we need is a comb-out—get every being on board to account for his whereabouts and try to identify the ones who did it. For that we need a little free-fall. Can we arrange that?”
The silvery girl spoke at last. Apparently she had heard everything, had simply seen no need to comment. “We can have a little free-fall. We can have a comb-out. We probably won’t need to arrange it right away as next observation period is only—” A meaningless squawk followed.
Doc Chimp filled in: “She means about fifteen minutes away.”
It took a moment for Pertin to realize that the girl’s words had been in English. He looked at her curiously.
“Fine,” he said. “How many were involved in the bombing?”
“There were not less than three nor more than eight.” piped the I’mal translator, responding to the T’Worlie’s whistle.
“Out of how many in the crew?” The T’Worlie hesitated. “There are in excess of three hundred thousand beings at present existing within the ship hull. Of these a large number are collective creatures.”
“Not counting the Boaty Bits—I mean how many individuals?”
“There are not less then two hundred forty nor more than two hundred fifty.”
Pertin said, “So the troublemakers are a tiny fraction. That’s good. We’ll broadcast a shipwide alarm. Most of the crew will cooperate—”
He stopped, staring at the silver pseudo-girl. “What’s the matter?” She had stretched out her fingertips toward the entrance port, almost in the traditional pose of a human sleepwalker. “The matter,” she said in her incongruous colloquial English, the tones as deep as Pertin’s own, “is that the tiny fraction of troublemakers is coming back.”
IN A moment no one needed the silvery girl’s fingers to pick up the audios—the rushing sound grew rapidly louder, a harsh, crackling, electrical noise like the patter of a collapsing charge field. Into the room burst what looked at first like a single huge blue eye. “Sirian!” howled Doc Chimp in terror, and tried to leap out of the way. Even his simian muscles did not have the strength to leap against the suddenly surging G-force of the rockets. He stumbled and fell heavily against the silvery girl. At one stroke two-thirds of the beings able to move at all in the high-G field were immobilized—the T’Worlie, the Purchased Person and Ben Pertin himself were wholly useless while the rockets were on. The Sirian, moving by electrostatic forces, was immune to mere 10 and 12-G thrusts. He bore with him something that glittered, carried under the great forward eye in a pair of crablike pincers, tiny and almost invisible.
Pertin, thrown heedlessly just inside the portal, was first in the creature’s path. He did not even have time to realize he was in danger before the Sirian was upon him. Then, oddly, the great eye stared at him. The Sirian paused, hesitated and turned away. It propelled its glittering metal object at the bulkhead and at once reversed its field and sped away.
If that was another bomb, Pertin thought, they’d all had it now; beyond that bulkhead was empty space from the last attack. The rest of the ship might be saved if the automatic seals worked fast enough, but he himself, the Purchased Person, Doc Chimp and the T’Worlie would be boiled into outer space.
But he had forgotten the Sheliak. The soggy baker’s bun that slumped on the deck and had taken no part in the conversation was still in fact an able and intelligent being. It acted faster than Pertin would have believed possible. The bun shape elongated itself into a Sort of stemmed sea anemone, flowed like lightning up and down around the bomb, surrounding it, drowning it in thick alien flesh. It exploded.
The only sign the rest of them could see was a quick convulsive shudder of the Sheliak’s tissue. Even the noise was muffled and almost inaudible in the constant thunder of the rockets.
The Sheliak glowed brilliant gold for a moment and, with a flash of the last light of its life, died.
They had defended themselves, but at the cost of one of their allies.
As though on cue the thunder of the rockets stopped and they found themselves blessedly free of the crushing G forces. Doc Chimp, struggling to untangle himself from the silvery girl, went flying across the chamber, ricocheted against a wall and brought up short next, to where Pertin was struggling to disassociate himself from the plastic foam.
“Are you all right, Ben James?” Pertin pushed himself free and caught the outstretched chimpanzee arm for stability. He ached in every bone and muscle and he was drenched in sweat from the trapped heat of the plastic wrap or from fear—he could not say.
“I think so,” he said. “Why do you suppose he did that?”
“What? Who? You mean the Sheliak? Why, I guess it’s their nature, Ben James—”
“No, not the Sheliak,” said Pertin, but he didn’t say out loud what it was that was perplexing him. He only thought it to himself. Why had the Sirian look at him with death in his eye, then stopped and turned away?
IT TURNED out there were two things wrong with Pertin’s calculations. First, the odds weren’t quite as favorable has he had guessed; he had not thought of the fact that the bombers might have allies who were as gravity-bound as himself and so hadn’t put in an appearance. Second, he had not realized that most of the beings aboard the Aurora simply didn’t want to be bothered with the mission. They were apathetic, hopeless, detached, or in some exotic mood with no human analogue. And perhaps, here and there, they just weren’t about to take orders from an upstart biped from Earth.
The other problem was that the work of the Aurora lay in observing Object Lambda, not in tracking down aberrant entities. Not even the fact that beings of one or two races had killed beings of another race could cloud the goal. The Scorpian robot, when it returned from patching together what it could of the damaged optical equipment, would not even take time to talk to Pertin. It went at once to its assigned place in the instrument chamber and began to oversee the series of observations—this had been the reason, evidently, for the thrust stoppage.
Pertin could not even get the free-fall period extended to permit a full-scale search of the ship. The T’Worlie pointed out to him, reasonably enough, that since they were all going to die anyhow the first priority was the errand for which they had all undertaken to give their lives—to complete the observation of Object Lambda. And the laws of celestial dynamics were remorseless. A certain quantum of delta-V had to be applied to Aurora’s course. There was only finite time in which to do it. If they failed to put in the necessary velocity change the probe would fly past Object Lambda too fast to accomplish its several missions. So the T’Worlie were going to work on their instrument observations and nothing else, although they certainly wished him well, they indicated, in his search for the guilty ones.
What he had to work with-turned out to be a party of five—Pertin, Doc Chimp, the pseudo-girl, the Purchased-People woman and a small kittenish being who had joined the party to greet them on arrival. They couldn’t even recruit the Boaty Bits to their cause. As soon as the collective creatures had learned of the bombing attempt they had departed en masse to swarm in some obscure corner of the vessel and unite all their intelligence on the problem of deciding what to do about it.
Pertin saw a great deal of the ship, but found no criminals. The one being they had certainly identified, the Sirian, eluded their search. If a being the size of a horse, emitting an electrostatic crackle every time it moved, could avoid the searchers, what chance had they for locating a party of unidentified marauders? Not any chance, answered echo. They found nothing.
ABOUT all they really accomplished was to move the acceleration cocoons for the low-G beings, whom they had come to think of as friends, close enough together so that they could watch out for each other when the delta-V thrust immobilized them. There were many such periods. By the nature of things, there had to be. It was thuuud-screech for at least eighty per cent of the time, cut up the individual portions as they would. The Aurora had thousands of kps of velocity to shed as it overtook Lambda, if they were to avoid overrunning it too fast for orbiting their package. It made little difference how it felt to the members of the crew.
To Pertin it felt like being kicked in the kidneys four or five times a minute for hours on end. With allowances for variations in anatomy, it felt very much the same to most of the beings. Frail little creatures like the T’Worlie were particularly hard hit—or would have been if it hadn’t been for the fact that the Aurora was their own design, cocoons and all, and many thousands of years of thought had gone, into reducing the damage to a T’Worlie frame in a cocoon. It was an advantage of a sort, but against it was the overpowering debit that on their native planet the surface gravity was less than a quarter-G. They were not creatures designed for strain.
