Collected Short Fiction, page 703
“Confirmed,” stated the Arcturan robot without passion. It did not speak aloud at all. Its talk circuits used radio waves, but the pmal picked up and faithfully translated the message.
ZARA pressed her elbows into her sides and felt herself begin to drop. It was not what she had intended, but it was better than floundering around while she tried to adjust her telescopic visor to check out what the Sirian had told her. She caught a glimpse of something at the indicated position, realized she was falling farther behind and below the others than she wanted, flapped herself back into position and at last got a clear look at what the Sirian had reported.
There were three of them all right. Unidentified traces of what? She saw a body gleaming like metallic copper, stubby wings that shone silver at the tips; great claws that were coming out of concealment from under the creature’s body in anticipation of combat.
For a moment she knew terror—then she heard her husband’s voice, triumphant and challenging. “There they are!” Jon shouted. “I’ve got’em—”
And without waiting for the others he aimed himself and fired his jet.
Directly behind him, Zara got the full roar of the athodyd as it thrumped huge smoke rings of steam, thrusting Jon like an arrow toward the onrushing orgs. She was aware of a confusion of argument that the pmals were unable to handle—too many beings were shouting at once. What they were saying was clear enough, but Jon Gentry was paying no attention. He felt the hunter’s taste for blood and he was on the kill.
The orgs were wise in warfare. They split to come at this lone attacker from three directions at once. Against any of the beings that were their natural prey the strategy would have worked. Against galactic weapons it was hopeless.
Gentry’s hours on the practice range on Earth had not been wasted. The first spark that marked the firing of his laser was a miss, but the second found a target. Three times the cobalt streak of his laser reached out to touch an org. Three times a creature screamed and each time the scream was cut off as the blue ray burned through scales and flesh. Each org flamed briefly, then tumbled slowly and ungracefully toward the mountain far below.
Gentry stopped his athodyd and returned by wing-power. Zara could hear him singing. He swooped past her, touching her with what might have been meant for a caress—it sent her spinning.
“Got’em!” he shouted. “That was worth the whole trip, Zara—”
The silver girl chimed, “It is true that you killed those creatures. I do not think it was wise to attack them single-handedly, however.”
And the Arcturan robot muttered through its pmal, “Confirm statement as to organic creatures. Propose consequential probability. Premiss: Organic creatures are not principal adversaries. Second premiss: Use of laser weapons may alert more serious opponents. Deduction: Use of laser weapons may be counter-productive at this time.”
“Ah,” grumbled Gentry, “you’re just scared—”
Illogically, Zara thought with resentment—all the galaxy knew that Arcturans could not be frightened, since they were not only nearly indestructible physically but had little emotional attachment to life.
Val chimed, “I suggest we proceed to our objective. I have a strong spotter trace from a point on the mountainside fifteen kilometers away, nearly in direction of flight. The characteristics are compatible with one of the previous exploration ships.”
“Propose we go there now,” twittered the T’Worlie.
“Why not?” Jon Gentry said, with careless courage. “I think we’ve seen we can deal with any problems that come up.”
Zara dropped back a few meters to regard her husband curiously. This was a side of him she had not known very well. Of course, on placid Earth there was little occasion for physical conflict, but even so she could hardly reconcile this fire-eyed warrior with the gentle, sedentary, rather dull man she had been married to for three years on Earth. She had never questioned his courage. It had simply never occurred to her to consider it. If she had been aware of it at all, she might have considered it as a sort of mildly disturbing anachronism, like an excess of body hair or a desire for raw meat.
She was jolted out of her reverie by a sudden gabble in the pmals. Once again several members of the party were speaking at once. The first clear transmission was from Val, who called out, “I think we are in trouble—”
The trouble was confirmed by the Sirian’s little sphincter mouth, which squeaked its inaudible message that the pmal translated as: “Air-palping now registers three new high-speed traces vectoring toward us. Correction. Four traces. Correction—five—six—six-plus traces. Points of origin widely separated. Suggest indications are technological intervention is now occurring.”
T’WORLIE and humans, plus Val, tried desperately to see what the Sirian and the Arcturan had detected. Even for Val, however, the approaching objects were still out of sight, but Val confirmed the location.
“I have the trace,” she agreed. “Recommend seeking cover,” chattered the pmal, responding to the Arcturan’s signal.
Jon Gentry snorted, “What, run away? We’ve got weapons—let’s use them.”
Val pealed, “That is countersurvival, Jon Gentry. I have an alternative proposal. You organics seek cover. The Arcturan and I will intercept the arrivals.”
“Concurring,” chattered the Arcturan at once.
“No bloody chance!” Jon Gentry blazed. “I guess you don’t know much about Earthmen—fighting’s nothing strange to us. We came here to carry an equal share of the load and that includes fighting. We’re not going to hide behind a bunch of aliens.”
“He means,” Zara said quickly, “that we feel an obligation to help. And honestly, Val—don’t you think we can take care of ourselves?”
The silvery girl swept her great wings up to a point over her head, thus dropping and turning toward Zara. “Doubt it very much,” she pealed. “Please study the approaching objects at thirty-four degrees right ascension, eighteen degrees plus declination.” She paused while Zara struggled with her telescopic visor.
“Oh,” said Zara at last. “They are—formidable looking, aren’t they?”
They were that. Blunt spear-points, mottled in colors of bronze and gray that glinted with underlying metal, were arrowing toward the galactic party at supersonic speed. At first the explorers saw only two. How many had the Arcturan reported? More than six.
These explorers were not facing animals or primitives, but complex and powerful technological devices and, Zara thought with a sinking heart, no doubt armed accordingly.
“I accept offer,” chirped T’Worlie. “Come—” Nleem stood on his head in air and used his deceptively filmy wings to drive himself straight down at the forest cover beneath. After a spatter of electrical fields he was followed by the Sirian eye.
Zara wailed nervously, “Please, Jon—let’s do as Val says.” She tried to catch her husband’s eye, but he was already higher than she, peering toward the approaching watcher ships eagerly. “Please?” she coaxed.
“Not a chance,” he snapped. “You go ahead. I’m going to fight this out!”
“Then I’d better stay, too—”
“No way. Damned if you will, Zara—now get out of the way. There’s going to be a fight and I don’t want to have to worry about your getting hurt.”
Angry and afraid in a way she could not define Zara turned herself over in the air, aimed herself at the rapidly diminishing forms of the T’Worlie and the Sirian and activated the pulse jet. Thrump, thrump, thrump—The acceleration was terrific. She was rapidly catching up on the Sirian and the T’Worlie.
Her previous experience had made her cautious. She did not want to overshoot this time—to do so would mean driving herself into the ground. She judged the distance as well as she could, allowed the jet to build up speed. When she gauged she had enough margin left she cut the pulse and arrowed down on inertia. At the last moment she rotated herself and applied maximum counter-thrust with the jet to slow her fall.
She had carried out the maneuver with considerable skill—as far as it went. Unfortunately, she had not had much practice with the athodyd, neither on Cuckoo nor on Earth, where this simplest and oldest of jet engines had been nearly forgotten. She did not know, for instance, that it relied for much of its thrust on the augmentation furnished by its forward motion. When it was reversed it lost a large fraction of its efficiency.
She discovered she had started the counter-thrust too late. It slowed her headlong drop just enough for her to hit the treetops at something like thirty miles an hour.
She hit hard, broke off sprigs and branches, went flying through a tangle of vines that ripped at her skin and bruised her brutally. Every snag hurt her, but every snag also slowed her, so that when she hit the soggy, mossy marsh under the trees she merely knocked herself unconscious.
When she came to she was alone.
She could see very little of the sky, but in it were neither husband nor allies, nor even the enemy ships that had been attacking them; and of the T’Worlie and the Sirian eye that she had been trying to join there was no trace at all.
TO BE CONTINUED
The Org’s Egg
Part III of III
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE
The astronomical object called Cuckoo is plunging toward our Galaxy. Literally the biggest riddle in the universe, it is impossibly large and impossibly light. With ten million times the sun’s bulk, it has only ten times the mass.
Yet—with the average density of the inside of an electric-light bulb—it somehow has a solid surface, and that surface is inhabited by human beings and other creatures.
In the deep air and weak gravity of Cuckoo, human beings can fly with only their own muscle-power. ORG RIDER, a boy from a tribe of native wingmen. has set out to find the nest of an org. a strange creature native to Cuckoo, so that he can steal an egg. hatch it and train the infant org to be a mount for him.
In his journey, he has encountered the beetle-like WATCHERS, intelligent and malevolent creatures that breed human beings like cattle, and REDLAW, a gigantic human slave.
An expedition of Terrestrial human beings and other intelligent races of the galactic culture is exploring Cuckoo. They have arrived by tachyonic transmission—a process that uses the faster-than-light speed of tachyon beams to transmit an exact copy of any person or thing anywhere in the universe—leaving the unchanged originals behind. Every time a person travels by tachyon he replicates himself, so that a person may have a dozen or more copies of himself scattered about the galaxy.
BEN PERTIN and ZARA DOY are two of the humans engaged in exploring Cuckoo. Both of them originated on Earth and were transmitted to the central administrative headquarters for the galaxy. Sun One. There they met and married. Now other copies of them are on or near Cuckoo. Several of the copies of Pertin have already reached the surface and died there; one or two are still alive, but out of touch with the others.
Org Rider achieves his objective by stealing an egg from an org’s nest. Pursued by the enraged parents, he hides in a cave and there meets one of the fugitive, injured copies of Ben Pertin. Along with Redlaw, they evade the adult orgs and the watchers and head for what they hope will be a safe refuge—but there they find themselves witness to an attack on Zara Doy and others of her expedition. Zara is injured and forced to land, alone in the jungle—completely alone, in the weird wilderness of Cuckoo.
ORG RIDER involuntarily started to move forward to help Ben Yale Pertin, but Redlaw caught his arm.
“Don’t touch him!” the giant rumbled. Then, looking past Org Rider to the stranger, he lowered his voice. “There’s nothing you can do for him now. That slime doesn’t thrive on vegetation. It eats flesh. He’s done for.”
“But—but it’s only some kind of sap, or something like that. We can take him to the river, wash it off—”
“You’re not hearing me, boy. There’s no chance for him at all. If he’s lucky, he’ll be dead in five sleeps. If he’s not, he’ll linger on for a dozen. But there’s no way to clean him now, and he’s death to touch.”
Pertin was staring at them, aware they were talking about him, suspicious of what they were saying. He asked a question that Org Rider could not understand, but Redlaw chirped some sort of answer in the whistling screech of the watchers. Under his breath he remarked to the boy, “He said those bones were his. What can he mean by that?” Org Rider said, with the uneasy fascination of horror. “It is as it was before, Redlaw. Remember? He died already, and he came alive again. Can it be that he dies many times and always lives again?”
“If he lives again after that blue slime gets through with him, I’ll be astonished,” rumbled the giant. “Ah, well. We can’t help him, but we can feed him. I’ll get some food. You build a fire.”
“What about the slamming machine?” cried the boy.
The giant nodded somberly. “There it is,” he agreed. “We’ll ask Ben Yale Pertin if there are weapons there. But if they’ve got that blue slime on them, it will be ticklish work to find a way to use them.”
“Can’t we clean them?”
“Ah, yes, clean them. But it’s being sure they’re clean that’s the hard part. And one single drop of the blue murder, so tiny you might not even see it, is enough for death. If you see it anywhere on you, boy, on toe or finger, wherever, don’t wait. If it’s only a toe, lop off the foot! It’s miserable work to do, but it’s your life if you don’t!”
Numbly the boy nodded, then turned to his org. “Don’t go near him. Babe,” he ordered. The soft trunk squirmed out to touch him reassuringly.
“What I think,” ruminated Redlaw, staring at Ben Yale Pertin, who was scrabbling feverishly in the wreckage of the ship, “is that this slamming machine is not his but another’s. Identical ships. Maybe identical people. I think it landed on the living peak of Knife-in-the-Sky and touched the slime. Then it came down here. Its occupant, perhaps another Ben Pertin, came out and touched the slime. When he did that, it was too late for him.”
The boy nodded, frowning. “Stay with this one, Redlaw,” he said. “Perhaps you can help him. I will get food.” But he knew as he left the org with a cautioning word and turned into the forest that there was no way for Redlaw to help Pertin, and that his real reason for going after food was that he could not bear to see him doomed thus to die. To die a third time! It was heavy enough to die once. What courage these people must have, to die again and again!
He was fortunate almost at once, scouring the wet black gravel along a sluggish stream, when something like a buried log humped itself and sprang free of the black muck. The boy caught his knife and waited. In a moment he was rewarded; the “log” ripped suddenly down the back.
A wild-flower sweetness exploded into the air, and a delicate pink shape thrust and thrust, struggling to escape from its black prison. Org Rider paused, entranced. It was too beautiful to kill for food! But he thought of the dying Ben Yale Pertin, of the org; he had no choice.
He waited until the lacy wings of black-veined rose unfolded, until the new-hatched creature gripped the sides of the canoe-like shell and slowly pulled itself free. Huge luminous eyes, glowing with the rosy red of live coals, gazed blankly at him. They were just beginning to focus when he was upon the thing with his knife, stabbing the new life out of it.
WHEN they had the skinned and gutted body of the butterfly-creature broiling over the low fire Redlaw had made, the giant took him aside. “Here is what I have found,” he said with satisfaction. “Look?” And he offered an armful of gleaming objects to the boy.
Org Rider recoiled. “They’re from the slamming machine!”
“Yes,” agreed Redlaw. “But I have taken them out myself, from the interior, where the blue slime did not penetrate. Ben Yale is angry at me because I would not let him touch them. I made him understand that the blue slime is deadly to us—though I did not say that it was also deadly to him,” he added in an undertone.
“What is that stuff good for?”
“This,” said Redlaw proudly, “is a weapon.” He held up a thing shaped like a short seed-cone, with a slim cylinder perched at angles at its top. “It is not what I had hoped for,” he admitted. “It is only a laser. The watchers, too, have lasers. Still, it is better than any we have found so far!”
The boy pointed to an elastic band in which were set tiny windows. “And that?”
“It is for far-seeing. Look through it, Org Rider! You will see as far as you can travel in a dozen sleeps!”
The boy took it gingerly. The elastic part clasped his skull gently but firmly as he donned it; the transparent part hung just over his eyebrows. Squinting upward, he caught strange bent glimpses of the treetops and clouds, like water-snakes seen through the turbulence of a rapid.
He shook his head, causing the visor to pop into place in front of his eyes. And suddenly great broad yellow leaves rushed in on him from the tree over his head, and the bright golden clouds beyond swooped down almost within arm’s length. Involuntarily he ducked, yelping.
Redlaw guffawed. “Startles you, doesn’t it?” he rumbled. “But you’ll see watchers coming at you through that a hundred breaths before your bare eyes will see them, boy. And this thing—Ben Yale Pertin calls it an ‘audio log,’ whatever that is—listen!” He touched a switch on the box, and a voice—Ben’s voice, the boy realized—began to come from inside it somewhere. Org Rider could not understand the word being said, to be sure; they were words of that strange gibberish tongue the stranger used. But it was his voice, beyond doubt.
Redlaw’s mood changed. He dropped the audio log to the ground and stared at it angrily. “But there’s not what I wanted,” he muttered. “Not a weapon that the watchers don’t already have. Not anything that will let us destroy them!”
“Perhaps Ben Pertin does not have such weapons,” Org Rider said.
