Collected Short Fiction, page 689
Less than an hour remained until launch.
“We’ll build barricades,” said Pertin. “Anything. Those wrecked instrument boards—the spare plates and braces. Whatever we can move we’ll pile against the entrance. All we have to do is delay them—”
But they had barely begun when brightness glinted in the approach corridor and the silvery pseudo-girl came toward them, followed by the tumbling form of the Scorpian robot. They-brought up short at the entrance, the robot with one slim tentacle coiled caressingly around the silver girl.
Pertin put his weight behind the channel iron he had been about to emplace at the door and launched it toward the pair. The pseudo-girl made a sound that was partly laughter and partly the singing of a single piercing note and the Scorpian uncoiled a long silver sting. The sting reached out and touched Pertin. A blinding light stabbed from it, jolting him with a strong electric shock.
The girl glided in, spreading her tattered wings. The stirred air bathed him in her strong scent, ether-sweet, with undertones like the pits of peaches. Pertin searched the bright silvery face and found no expression. It was no more human than a doll’s. The Scorpian’s silver tentacles thrust away the pitiful obstructions, making a sound like an enormous gong which Pectin’s I’mal refused to translate.
The Purchased woman intervened, hurling herself toward the robot, and was brushed heedlessly aside. She struck against the side of the probe ship, a blow that must have been agony to her human nervous system, but she did not cry out. Awkwardly she tried to project herself again into the fight. Pertin forced himself to join her.
A bird-like trilling from outside indicated that others were coming, and behind the great winged hulk of the pseudo-girl Pertin could see black shadow-shapes moving across the dimly lighted shaft, growing rapidly as they approached.
“Oh, no!” moaned Doc Chimp. “Sheliaks and a Sirian!”
The robot was not deflected from its single-minded purpose. It floated toward Pertin, green dome pulsing. An elongating tentacle struck out at Pertin like an endless silver snake, not to sting this time but to snare. It wrapped him in slick, chill coils. He fought free, was caught again—and at last the Scorpian turned to confront the other beings. It arched its stinging jet, but held it poised, waiting.
The Sirian was first into the launch chamber, a tapered, blue-scaled torpedo shape fifteen feet long, all pliant wing and shining eye. With a ripple of trailing wing edges it flashed at the Scorpian.
The sting coiled, jetting white light into the wide blue eye. The Sirian was not defenseless—its own forces gathered the robot’s charge and repelled it, sending the jet back at the robot, reinforced and multiplied.
The pseudo-girl turned with great strokes of her wings, her three-fingered hand coming up with the gunshaped weapon that had killed Sheliaks. Desperately Pertin twisted to intercept her. Her wings were sadly battered now, but still gave her superior mobility; he missed her on the first try and crashed against a wall. Half blinded by his own blood, he doubled his legs under him and launched himself at her again.
The gun-shaped thing swung to meet him and the white jet hissed at him. He heard a brittle crackling sound in the air and felt the breath of icy death.
But the jet had missed and he was on her. With one hand he swung at her wrist. It was like striking a crowbar with his bare hand, but it jarred the weapon loose; and just then the battle between Scorpian and Sirian reached its climax.
The Sirian’s jet struck a vital place in the great green dome of the robot. It exploded. The mellow booming sound the robot made became a hollow jangle. The tentacles writhed and recoiled. It sprawled in the air, a grotesque huddle of tortured metal, spilling green fire and drops of an acid that sizzled and burned where they struck.
If the robot had known life, that life was gone—it was dead.
The silvery girl abandoned the fight with Pertin. With a great stroke of her wings she propelled herself to it, hovered over it, wailing an unearthly sound.
And the great blue eye of Sirian turned toward Pertin. Behind it the Sheliaks, late on the scene but ready for battle, were elongating their wrinkled necks toward him.
PERTIN cried desperately: “Wait! They—they were misleading you. They were trying to prevent the launch, to save their own lives—”
The eye hesitated.
“We’re dead already,” he croaked. “Nothing can help us now, not any organic creature. The radiation will kill us before long, even the Sheliaks. But the robot and the girl—”
He could hear his voice hissing or singing out of the aliens’ I’mals.
“The robot,” he repeated, “and the altered copy that looks like a terrestrial female—they weren’t radiation-vulnerable. They could go on indefinitely. But the rest of us—if we let them succeed in stopping the launch, then we all die for nothing!”
The eye paused, irresolute.
Then the foremost of the Sheliaks cried: “Fool! We, too, are not radiation-vulnerable! We simply need to conjugate and be born again. But we must have the tachyon receiver—and if you try to keep us from it you must die!”
The three tapered tear-drop shapes, like a school of sharks in formation, plunged toward Pertin. The Sirian eye irresolutely turned toward them—then, with decision, the being whirled to confront them.
Contemptuously the Sheliaks changed course to meet it. The leading one widened a ruff of flesh to act like an instant air-brake. It stopped in the air, flowed with a dazzle of color, narrowed a neck toward the Sirian eye.
The thin neck spat a stream of a yellow fluid. It struck the Sirian eye and clung, acid, adhesive, agonizing. The Sirian made an unearthly wailing noise at the sudden pain of the attack against which it had no built-in defenses. The great blue eye turned milky white; the huge body knotted in agony.
But it still had strength to fire a jet of energy that caught all three Sheliaks. They died instantly, but the effort was the last for the Sirian. All its stored energy had gone into that pulse. The reflected cascade of burning energy came bouncing back, bathing the silvery girl and sending her reeling soundlessly into a wall, to flop into an ungainly, contorted mass that didn’t move. Pertin was farther away and partly shielded by what was left of the robot—even so the bolt lanced his skin with pain.
But he was alive.
Slowly and painfully he caught a hold-fast on the wall, steadied himself while he looked around.
The Purchased People woman was dead, either bled empty or caught in that last furious bolt. The Sirian eye floated broken and aimless. The robot was destroyed.
The pseudo-girl was drifting impotently away. The Sheliaks were cinders.
The chamber was filled with the stench of many different kinds of death, but Pertin was still alive.
Suddenly remembering, he cried, “Doc Chimp!”
The ape was out of sight. Furiously Pertin ransacked the chamber and found him at the last, wedged between the wall of the probe and the ship’s canopy, not quite dead but unconscious.
Pertin looked down at him sadly and affectionately. It was nearly time to launch the probe and the question in Pertin’s mind was: was it better to wake him up or to let him sleep as the probe was launched, the canopy jettisoned and all the air in the chamber puffed instantly and murderously away into space?
The answer was taken out of his hands as the ape stirred, moaned softly and opened his eyes. He looked up at Ben James Pertin and said thickly, “The probe?”
“It’s all right,” said Pertin. “We’ll have to launch it by hand.”
“When, Ben James?”
Pertin checked the time. “Just a few minutes now,” he said.
The ape grinned painfully. “That’s good to know, Ben James,” he said. “No more problems. No more aches and pains. I always thought I’d be afraid of dying, but, you know? To tell you the truth, I’m kind of looking forward to it.”
THE process that animated the body of the silvery pseudo-girl was more like electrophoresis than chemistry, but it was vulnerable to attack. It was damaged now.
But she was not dead. The great wings were broken and useless, but her limbs still moved, the inappropriate angel face still held its bleak, proud expression.
She was in great pain. That is to say that all of the sensory nets of her edited body were transmitting messages of malfunction, damage and warning. She did not perceive them as a human perceives a toothache, a sensation so blinding that it can lead to suicide, but they did interfere with the few pleasure-bound processes left to her—reminiscence, forevision, contemplation. In the sense that these interfering messages were pain, she had experienced pain from the moment she floated out of the tachyon receiver on Aurora. All edited members of her race did. There was no way to rearrange their structures into forms viable in atmosphere and low-G that was comfortable for them.
Time was when Angel had experienced pain only infrequently, and in ways that were soon mended. Time was when she had lain with her sisters in the icy methane slush of her native planet, absorbing energy from the radioactive elements that swam about them, growing, learning from the tutorials of her ortho-father competing in the endless elimination battles of her race that finally won her the choice of assignments—and ultimately led her to the Aurora and its imminent doom. Her race was not greatly interested in astronomy. They had known almost nothing of it until the first T’Worlie probe survived the crushing pressures of their atmosphere and brought them into contact. From the surface of their enormous planet, there were no stars to be seen. Even their aircraft never reached an altitude beyond dense yellow-gray clouds.
What brought her to Aurora was the trait that her whole upbringing had trained into her: the competitive need to go farther and do more. It was not goal-oriented. It gained nothing from victories except the opportunity for further victories. The only victory now open to Angel was to survive—and the only way to do it was by preventing the launching of the probe.
She calculated she had strength enough left to destroy the two organic creatures in her way—but only just. And only if she acted now.
IT WAS Pertin who saw her first, his hand frozen on the release lever. It was Doc Chimp who acted. He flung himself on the pseudo-girl.
“Hurry up, Ben James!” he shouted. “She’s too strong for me—” His voice stopped, punctuated by a screech of pain as the silvery arm thrust him away like a cannon shot. The mutated chimp went flying into the floating wreckage of the Scorpian robot. The soft, frail dome of the skull, so cleverly mutated into the nearshape of man’s own, impaled itself on a steel shard and the thoughtful, considering brain was destroyed.
Pertin hardly even saw it happen. He was past the point for sorrow. It would be easy to let the pseudo-girl destroy him. At least one life would be saved—hers. His no longer counted. He could hope for a few days, a week or two at the most, of being able to move and breathe. And what would it be like? Increasing pain. Hopeless fear. Regret. Envy.
He pressed the lever just as her fingers touched him.
The instant sharp slap of the explosion was the last sound he heard.
AT THE instant Ben James IX Pertin pressed the release, explosive shears cut the aft end of the ship free. The canopy flew out and away. The air puffed into emptiness. The probe rocket dropped free and began to align itself with the now near great disk of Object Lambda.
The first thing Pertin felt was the sharp pain of the explosion, then the second, longer, more deadly pain as the air pressure dropped to instant zero and his blood and body fluids, the air in his lungs, the gases dissolved in his blood, tried to expand to fill the enormous emptiness all around. He caught a glimpse of the silvery girl, arms, legs and broken wings flailing, as she shot past him, careened off the jagged edge of metal where the shears had cut the probe satellite free and ricocheted out into emptiness. If she made a sound he could not hear it. There was no longer a way for him to hear. There was no longer a continuous medium of air to carry it.
He had just a glimpse of the huge near surface of Object Lambda—the body he had called “Cuckoo”—as it hung like a great dull circle in the empty sky, cutting off one spiral limb of his own, eternally lost, galaxy.
He did not see the orienting jets of the satellite spurt carefully controlled measures of flame to position it for its final thrust. He did not see the great violet flare of the fusion rockets that began to slow it. He could not see any of that, because by then he was dead.
Neither he nor anyone else in the probe ship saw the great series of flares as the satellite fought to slow itself. Aurora flew on, without power, containing only the last flickerings of life for a few of its beings, back toward the galaxy. The probe left it as it drew more and more rapidly away. The distance between them was millions of miles before the satellite made its first meteoric contact with the outer layers of that anomalously thick atmosphere around Cuckoo.
Here was a spectacle worth watching, if there had been eyes left in Aurora to see. The satellite plunged through a carefully planned chord of the atmosphere. Its ablative surface burned and tore away in a flare like all the fireworks in man’s history going off at once. But there was none to see—not Sirian eye nor Sheliak sensors, not T’Worlie or Earthman or alien of any kind. Where life remained at all it lacked strength for curiosity and it would not remain alive very long.
Fifty thousand years later Aurora might pass near some sun of an outstretched spiral arm. But by then it would no longer matter to anyone, except as a historical curiosity from a time about which no one any longer cared.
SOME days later the sensors on Sun One reported that the probe was in a stable orbit. The beings on Sun One responded with pleasure—everyone was delighted that the project was a success.
Now stable, the probe began to do the work for which it had been designed.
The complex H-bomb sequencing units and the small, strong pressure-plate shock absorbers fell away, responding to remote controls from Sun One. They would never be used again.
The tachyon receiving unit began to emit a stream of tiny metallic shards, none larger than a few inches in its greatest measure.
When some hundreds of them were through, floating like a metallic mist around the drone, a quick small machine came through and began to catch them and link them together. Time passed—hours and then days. A boxlike shape took form and became a larger tachyon receiver—now ready for action.
From tens of thousands of light-years away an angular, crystalline machine flashed along the tachyon patterns and emerged in the new receiver. It was not alive. It was not even a robot or a proxy like the Purchased People. It was simply an automatic machine that sensed certain potentials and charges, doublechecked the strength of the materials and the solidity of the joints, directed the hummingbird-sized construction machine to correct a few faults and then reported that Cuckoo Station, the orbiting body around what had been called Object Lambda, was now ready to be built.
A few hours later the first girders of what would eventually be a thousand-meter revolving wheel were being joined together.
Plates appeared to surround the girders with an airtight sheath. Machines arrived to be stored in them. Atmosphere was pumped through to All the chambers. The handling machines were busy, taxed beyond their capacities—more handling machines were sent and soon the orbiting station was whole, supplied: and being-rated.
The first living beings appeared. A Sheliak, naked to the cold of intergalactic space (but for the brief time of its transition to the orbiting wheel unharmed by it.) A dozen T’Worlies arrived in a single elastic air-bubble and scurried into the protection of the orbital wheel. There were Sirians, reptilian Aldebaranians, a hive of Boaty Bits, and at the last a couple of humans.
One of them was named Ben Line Pertin.
He floated out of the tachyon receiver in his pressure suit, his thruster unit at the ready in his hands.
He did not use it at once. He paused a moment to look around.
The first thing he did was to stare down at the enormous flat surface of Cuckoo, so near, so huge, so incredible as it hung like an endless shield in the sky.
The second was to look back to where the galaxy lay, sparkling like the sea of stars it was.
He could not see the doomship, but he knew it must be somewhere in his line of sight. There were no signals from it any more. There was no way of detecting it and would not be for tens of thousands of years.
He stared for a moment, then shrugged. “Poor bastards,” he whispered and turned and drove toward the wheel awaiting him.
The Power of Blackness
Here is some good, strong science fiction, the first of what will hopefully become a series about the character who comes to be called Blacklantern. Jack Williamson has been writing sf for some 40 years; his most recent novel is THE MOON CHILDREN (Berkley). Mr. Williamson is a professor of English at Eastern New Mexico University where he set up and still teaches one of the first college courses in Science Fiction.
1
The guide was a time-dried Nggonggan black, hopping ahead with dazzling agility on his one good leg and waving his single yellow-painted crutch like a banner to guide his company of tourists. They were a motley group of sunburnt other-worlders in bright shorts and black glasses. Nggongga was too hot for them, and most wore coolers that wrapped them in tiny individual cloudlets of condensation.
“Follow my crutch!”
He went bounding down the ramp to a reserved-seat section on the shady side, just above the barrier. His flock shuffled behind, grinning at his capers, squinting down into the painful blaze of the sun-flooded arena, gawking at Nggonggan natives that packed the cheaper sunlit seats beyond it, a little apprehensively sniffling the rich scents of a world not yet fully sterilized.
“Respected guests of Nggongga, you are lucky today—” Booming out of his scrawny frame, the guide’s voice had an unexpected mellow resonance, but he had to stop for his listeners to adjust their translators and recorders to his Nggonggan clicks and gliding tones.
