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“That information will be fed into the hypersleep machinery. No more questions, people! Get ready.”
Connie Mindanao said, “What are they trying to pull on us? I don’t know if I’m going to stand still for this.” She looked at Badger. “What do you think, Red ?”
“Relax,” Badger told her. “Nothing much we can do about it just now. The ship’s sealed, and anyhow, the guards are still outside. We’ve got no chance of making a run for it.”
They all settled down onto their hypersleep couches. The lights dimmed.
19
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Connie Mindanao said, “What are they trying to pull on us? I don’t know if I’m going to stand still for this.” She looked at Badger. “What do you think, Red ?”
“Relax,” Badger told her. “Nothing much we can do about it just now. The ship’s sealed, and anyhow, the guards are still outside. We’ve got no chance of making a run for it.”
They all settled down onto their hypersleep couches. The lights dimmed.
19
The Dolomite left its geosynchronous orbit and proceeded slowly to jump point: a position in space well enough beyond Earth’s orbit to permit subspace operation without peril to others. From there Hoban radioed for permission to disembark, and shortly thereafter received an okay from the Coast Guard monitoring station at L6.
Stan and his party strapped down. Hoban looked them over and asked, “All ready, Dr. Myakovsky?”
“Ready,” Stan said.
“All right,” Hoban said. “Mr. Gill—get us out of here!”
Gill’s hands moved across the switches. The lights dimmed in response to the sudden power surge as the tachyonic converters whirled into action, compressing time and space, tighter, tighter, until the Dolomite suddenly vanished from normal space.
The voyage had begun.
Stan and his party strapped down. Hoban looked them over and asked, “All ready, Dr. Myakovsky?”
“Ready,” Stan said.
“All right,” Hoban said. “Mr. Gill—get us out of here!”
Gill’s hands moved across the switches. The lights dimmed in response to the sudden power surge as the tachyonic converters whirled into action, compressing time and space, tighter, tighter, until the Dolomite suddenly vanished from normal space.
The voyage had begun.
20
Julie was used to the dark. It was friendly and warm, and she felt safe in it. Only in the dark had she found security and safety, shielded away from men’s eyes and their motives. The dark was the place where she had trained, so many years ago, when she had learned those matters of stealth and suddenness that were her protection and her trademark. It was then that she learned to make the darkness her own.
And so it had been for all her young life. But it was different now. This darkness that surrounded her now felt sinister, evil. Maybe that was because she knew something lurked within it, something that was trying to get her.
She stopped for a moment in midstep, trying to get her bearings. Her hearing extended itself through the darkness, searching. As her eyes became accustomed to the gloom she made out vast shapes on either side of her. They were machines, made of dark, glistening metal, and they towered above her. Spots of white light from some unknown source winked off metallic surfaces, and reflected from coils and condensers. They didn’t even look like objects. They were like the ghosts of objects because their shapes were indistinct, ambiguous, swathed in a darkness that had gradation and depth, and was textured with the layers of silence.
A voice crackled in the tiny radio bug implanted in her ear.
“Julie? Do you see him yet?” It was Stan Myakov-sky, calling from the Dolomite’s central control room. He wasn’t far away, as distances go, but he could have been in another galaxy for all the good he could do her now.
“Not yet,” she answered. “But I know he’s in here somewhere.”
“Be careful, huh?” Stan said. “I still think we should have, delayed this run. I’m still not entirely satisfied with Norbert’s control system.”
Now was a hell of a time to tell her that. She decided to ignore it. Stan sounded agitated. Was he getting cold feet?
Or was he just having an ordinary attack of nerves?
She snapped on a tiny flashlight. Ahead of her, picked up in the thin beam, she could see more profound glooms, silent caves of blackness where awful things might lurk. Some of these horrors were caused by the power of her imagination, but she was afraid that some were not.
It was not imagination that told her something in this great dark place was tracking her. She knew it was there. But where was it? She strained her senses to the utmost, trying to pick up some clue. Nothing. But she could tell it was out there. She had a sense of presence, almost like a sixth sense. It was what a successful thief needed above all else, and Julie was an extremely successful thief.
She thought back now on her years of training with Shen Hui, the old Chinese master criminal. She first met him when she was a little girl, the youngest one in the Shanghai slave market that morning. She remembered peering at the crowd that had come to attend the auction, trying to catch a final glimpse of her mother. But she had already left, unwilling to watch her only daughter being sold on the open market. The men started bidding, men from different countries. Then one old man had outbid the rest, and had paid the auctioneer in taels of gold. That was Shen Hui.
He brought her to his house and raised her like his own flesh and blood. Shen Hui was a master thief, a master of the zen of thievery. He had taught her to develop her latent senses so that she could register things without literally seeing or hearing them. That ability came to her rescue now.
Yes, it was not just imagination. There was some-thing near, and it was situated right over … there!
She whirled as a great looming thing detached itself from the deep knot of shadows near a gigantic machine that lay shrouded in its own dust. She found it fascinating, the way the shadows moved and grew, like something not human, the way they resolved into one, and that shadow suddenly turned solid and launched itself at her with an explosive hiss.
“Julie! Watch out!” Stan’s voice rang in her ears. He had picked up the sudden movement. But late. Stan was always late. What good could his warning do for her now? He never seemed to realize it. Not that she had expected anything more. She was responsible for herself. And June was already in motion as the thing came at her.
Her long legs, clad in skintight black plastic, pumped smoothly as she sprinted down the central aisle of the Dolomite’s great central cargo hold. The creature, three times her height, colored an unremitting black, with jaws filled with long closely packed fanglike teeth, came after her. Feeling herself being oyertaken, Julie dodged and swerved around the faintly delineated center line of the hold. This one narrow strip had been set for twenty percent less of the faux gravity that so much resembled the real thing. Running on the light-gravity strip made her feel as though she had wings, so rapidly did she move, dodging fixed objects as they came up to smear her, vaulting over smaller obstacles, always moving, the sound of her own blood pounding in her ears.
The creature came running after her, and a ray of light from a globe in the ceiling picked it up for a moment.
It appeared to be a full-size alien, with the typical backward-sloping cranium of its kind.
The thing was as startling as an apparition from hell. Its claws, with their doubled fingers, reached for her. Julie turned and fled down the narrow confines of the hold.
The area she ran in widened, and the creature managed to gain a few steps on her.
Stan, watching the action on a monitor in the control room, yelped in alarm as the creature loomed over her. He asked himself why he had ever agreed to let Julie take this training run. Thinking about it now, he could see that it had been an unnecessary risk. If anything went wrong, it could jeopardize the whole operation.
And aside from that, if Julie got hurt … But he couldn’t let himself think about that.
Julie and the alien dodged around enormous packing cases, cubes of plastic ten feet on a side. There were a dozen or so of them, and they were scattered randomly on the floor, part of the clutter that accumulates in any spaceship. Julie ran her fingers over the edge of a box. With a quick look aided by her flashlight, she had fixed its location. A memory of the placement of the other boxes was burned into her short-term memory. In her mind she could see the zig-zag path she would have to follow to get to the next bulkhead. After that, a sally port served as a midpoint connection to the next part of the ship’s hold.
She ran full out, counting off step by step. Crossing a crowded room in darkness with speed and silence is one of a thiefs most useful accomplishments. Julie continued across the hold, her senses on red alert, trying once again to locate the creature that was stalking her. Norbert was good, he was very quiet, she had to give him that. He had learned how to muffle his body movements, and even to quiet the sounds of his body functions. Good as he was, she still was aware of him, but it was an awareness that flickered in and out of existence.
After the midpoint sally exit, she came to the platform that blocked the way to the farthest exit. It was a prestressed antimagnetic steel plate approximately twenty feet wide by two hundred feet long, and five inches deep. She climbed up onto it. It was drilled with many large, irregularly spaced holes ranging in diameter from two to five feet, where components would be fitted later. Running the length of the plate left you vulnerable to stepping into a hole and breaking a leg, or falling through an unshielded ventilator shaft to the deck below.
She had to slow down to make it across. Julie went down the length of the platform at a half-speed sprint, unable visually to detect the openings in the darkness, relying on memory. Norbert came loping along steadily after her. She noticed that he, too, must have memorized the locations of the holes, because he was moving confidently and quickly. She forced herself to go a little faster, even though it increased her chances of a fall.
She reached the far end and hopped off. Norbert had gained several steps on her. She hoped to make it up in the next stage.
Just ahead were the spare firing tubes, big cylinders of cold-rolled steel, eighteen of them, each a hundred and eighty feet long. Moving by touch, Julie located a pipe with an aperture that would just permit her to squeeze in. Norbert, with his greater size, wouldn’t be able to follow, would be forced to walk on top of the slippery pipes, thus giving Julie a brief breathing spell. A good escape could be composed of moments like these.
That, at least, was how it was supposed to work. Norbert stopped and looked at the pipe, started to go around it, then came back and managed somehow to collapse his shoulders and crawl into the pipe after her. She could hear the tortured metal-to-metal squealing as he pushed himself through the pipe.
Then she realized that not only was he in the pipe behind her, he was gaining, collapsing himself down to half his usual size and scuttling along like a giant malevolent insect. A sudden sense of claustrophobia came over Julie as she imagined Norbert’s big clawed hand closing over her foot.
She forced herself to remain calm. “You won’t go any faster in a panic,” she reminded herself. One of the first lessons Shen Hui had taught her was to be extra cool in the face of a crisis, to force herself to slow down just when her senses were shrieking at her to speed up. This lesson stood her in good stead now. Suddenly the darkness came to an end and she was out of the pipe and running, a fraction of a second ahead of the alien.
She dodged instinctively as Norbert’s arm reached out for her. In a moment’s inattention, she slammed into a precariously balanced cart containing machine parts and ball bearings. Metal objects flew in all directions and clattered against the sides of the hold. Julie came down on a bearing in midstride and both her feet shot out from under her. Catlike, she turned in midair, throwing up a protective forearm before she went crashing to the floor on her face.
As she sprawled Norbert loomed above her, arms spread wide, jaws open in a terrifying grimace. Through his open jaws the little inner jaws came flickering out, more malevolent than a crazed pit viper.
Norbert lunged at her, and she was momentarily unable to do anything to protect herself. He was almost on her…
She had an instant to wonder what he was programmed to do if he caught her… or did he make up that part as he went along?
And then Norbert slipped on the bearings and lost his balance. His taloned feet raked the metal floor as he tried to gain purchase. He crashed to the deck with a bone-smattering sound.
For a moment Norbert sprawled there. His resemblance to a giant insect was now apparent as his arms and legs twitched and vibrated, trying to find something to hold. Then he righted himself and was up again and towering over her.
Unable to do anything, Stan had to watch. His fingernails were already ragged, for he had been chewing at bloody cuticles while monitoring Julie’s progress. He leaned forward, intent.
Julie, at the last possible moment, slipped through the alien’s claws and disappeared through the horizontally closing metal slabs at the end of the hold. The creature yowled in rage as the door shut in his face and Julie shot the lock.
Immediately Norbert began wrenching at the door, then, having no luck with the lock, turned his attention to the hinges.
Julie meanwhile was streaking through the cluttered compartment, sprinting at full stride and managing somehow to avoid the clutter of machines and packing cases that turned the place into an obstacle course filled with cutting edges.
Stan was able to track her progress on his monitor against a schematic of the ship’s hold.
He watched a tiny silver dot, representing Julie, dodge around objects ahead of a longer blue-black streak that represented her pursuer.
“Come on, Julie,” Stan muttered to himself. “You don’t have to run it this close! Pull the plug! Bail out!”
But Julie kept running. She seemed to be going for some kind of a record. Never had she been so graceful, so light on her feet. She had reached the far end of the compartment. The egress port was dogged down tight. Norbert was less than five feet behind her now. He reached for her with taloned claws, ending in dagger-sharp tips. Julie stood her ground, and Stan couldn’t help but admire the game quality of her courage.
Then she ducked down and scuttled between the creature’s legs, catching it by surprise, and escaping with nothing more than a shallow scratch on her right shoulder.
She was up to her full speed in two bounds, and for a moment she thought she had gained on it. But Norbert had learned something, too. He ignored her dodging run and came galloping up alongside her. His mouth, impossibly crowded with needle-tipped teeth, snarled and opened wide. From his jaw, and protruding through his mouth, came the hateful small replica of these jaws, composed of a small rectangular body part like a tongue, which ended in a mouth filled with white sharp teeth.
This was it. There was no place to go.
The creature moved in for the kill.
“Julie!” Stan screamed. “For God’s sake!”
At that final moment Julie screamed at the creature,
“Cancel predation functions!”
Norbert froze in midmovement. His feeding tube withdrew into his mouth. His jaws closed.
Julie then said, “Return to standard program.”
She turned away from the creature, who stood frozen in position, and walked through the connecting passageway to Stan, who was still in the control room, sitting numbly in the big command chair near the computer.
And so it had been for all her young life. But it was different now. This darkness that surrounded her now felt sinister, evil. Maybe that was because she knew something lurked within it, something that was trying to get her.
She stopped for a moment in midstep, trying to get her bearings. Her hearing extended itself through the darkness, searching. As her eyes became accustomed to the gloom she made out vast shapes on either side of her. They were machines, made of dark, glistening metal, and they towered above her. Spots of white light from some unknown source winked off metallic surfaces, and reflected from coils and condensers. They didn’t even look like objects. They were like the ghosts of objects because their shapes were indistinct, ambiguous, swathed in a darkness that had gradation and depth, and was textured with the layers of silence.
A voice crackled in the tiny radio bug implanted in her ear.
“Julie? Do you see him yet?” It was Stan Myakov-sky, calling from the Dolomite’s central control room. He wasn’t far away, as distances go, but he could have been in another galaxy for all the good he could do her now.
“Not yet,” she answered. “But I know he’s in here somewhere.”
“Be careful, huh?” Stan said. “I still think we should have, delayed this run. I’m still not entirely satisfied with Norbert’s control system.”
Now was a hell of a time to tell her that. She decided to ignore it. Stan sounded agitated. Was he getting cold feet?
Or was he just having an ordinary attack of nerves?
She snapped on a tiny flashlight. Ahead of her, picked up in the thin beam, she could see more profound glooms, silent caves of blackness where awful things might lurk. Some of these horrors were caused by the power of her imagination, but she was afraid that some were not.
It was not imagination that told her something in this great dark place was tracking her. She knew it was there. But where was it? She strained her senses to the utmost, trying to pick up some clue. Nothing. But she could tell it was out there. She had a sense of presence, almost like a sixth sense. It was what a successful thief needed above all else, and Julie was an extremely successful thief.
She thought back now on her years of training with Shen Hui, the old Chinese master criminal. She first met him when she was a little girl, the youngest one in the Shanghai slave market that morning. She remembered peering at the crowd that had come to attend the auction, trying to catch a final glimpse of her mother. But she had already left, unwilling to watch her only daughter being sold on the open market. The men started bidding, men from different countries. Then one old man had outbid the rest, and had paid the auctioneer in taels of gold. That was Shen Hui.
He brought her to his house and raised her like his own flesh and blood. Shen Hui was a master thief, a master of the zen of thievery. He had taught her to develop her latent senses so that she could register things without literally seeing or hearing them. That ability came to her rescue now.
Yes, it was not just imagination. There was some-thing near, and it was situated right over … there!
She whirled as a great looming thing detached itself from the deep knot of shadows near a gigantic machine that lay shrouded in its own dust. She found it fascinating, the way the shadows moved and grew, like something not human, the way they resolved into one, and that shadow suddenly turned solid and launched itself at her with an explosive hiss.
“Julie! Watch out!” Stan’s voice rang in her ears. He had picked up the sudden movement. But late. Stan was always late. What good could his warning do for her now? He never seemed to realize it. Not that she had expected anything more. She was responsible for herself. And June was already in motion as the thing came at her.
Her long legs, clad in skintight black plastic, pumped smoothly as she sprinted down the central aisle of the Dolomite’s great central cargo hold. The creature, three times her height, colored an unremitting black, with jaws filled with long closely packed fanglike teeth, came after her. Feeling herself being oyertaken, Julie dodged and swerved around the faintly delineated center line of the hold. This one narrow strip had been set for twenty percent less of the faux gravity that so much resembled the real thing. Running on the light-gravity strip made her feel as though she had wings, so rapidly did she move, dodging fixed objects as they came up to smear her, vaulting over smaller obstacles, always moving, the sound of her own blood pounding in her ears.
The creature came running after her, and a ray of light from a globe in the ceiling picked it up for a moment.
It appeared to be a full-size alien, with the typical backward-sloping cranium of its kind.
The thing was as startling as an apparition from hell. Its claws, with their doubled fingers, reached for her. Julie turned and fled down the narrow confines of the hold.
The area she ran in widened, and the creature managed to gain a few steps on her.
Stan, watching the action on a monitor in the control room, yelped in alarm as the creature loomed over her. He asked himself why he had ever agreed to let Julie take this training run. Thinking about it now, he could see that it had been an unnecessary risk. If anything went wrong, it could jeopardize the whole operation.
And aside from that, if Julie got hurt … But he couldn’t let himself think about that.
Julie and the alien dodged around enormous packing cases, cubes of plastic ten feet on a side. There were a dozen or so of them, and they were scattered randomly on the floor, part of the clutter that accumulates in any spaceship. Julie ran her fingers over the edge of a box. With a quick look aided by her flashlight, she had fixed its location. A memory of the placement of the other boxes was burned into her short-term memory. In her mind she could see the zig-zag path she would have to follow to get to the next bulkhead. After that, a sally port served as a midpoint connection to the next part of the ship’s hold.
She ran full out, counting off step by step. Crossing a crowded room in darkness with speed and silence is one of a thiefs most useful accomplishments. Julie continued across the hold, her senses on red alert, trying once again to locate the creature that was stalking her. Norbert was good, he was very quiet, she had to give him that. He had learned how to muffle his body movements, and even to quiet the sounds of his body functions. Good as he was, she still was aware of him, but it was an awareness that flickered in and out of existence.
After the midpoint sally exit, she came to the platform that blocked the way to the farthest exit. It was a prestressed antimagnetic steel plate approximately twenty feet wide by two hundred feet long, and five inches deep. She climbed up onto it. It was drilled with many large, irregularly spaced holes ranging in diameter from two to five feet, where components would be fitted later. Running the length of the plate left you vulnerable to stepping into a hole and breaking a leg, or falling through an unshielded ventilator shaft to the deck below.
She had to slow down to make it across. Julie went down the length of the platform at a half-speed sprint, unable visually to detect the openings in the darkness, relying on memory. Norbert came loping along steadily after her. She noticed that he, too, must have memorized the locations of the holes, because he was moving confidently and quickly. She forced herself to go a little faster, even though it increased her chances of a fall.
She reached the far end and hopped off. Norbert had gained several steps on her. She hoped to make it up in the next stage.
Just ahead were the spare firing tubes, big cylinders of cold-rolled steel, eighteen of them, each a hundred and eighty feet long. Moving by touch, Julie located a pipe with an aperture that would just permit her to squeeze in. Norbert, with his greater size, wouldn’t be able to follow, would be forced to walk on top of the slippery pipes, thus giving Julie a brief breathing spell. A good escape could be composed of moments like these.
That, at least, was how it was supposed to work. Norbert stopped and looked at the pipe, started to go around it, then came back and managed somehow to collapse his shoulders and crawl into the pipe after her. She could hear the tortured metal-to-metal squealing as he pushed himself through the pipe.
Then she realized that not only was he in the pipe behind her, he was gaining, collapsing himself down to half his usual size and scuttling along like a giant malevolent insect. A sudden sense of claustrophobia came over Julie as she imagined Norbert’s big clawed hand closing over her foot.
She forced herself to remain calm. “You won’t go any faster in a panic,” she reminded herself. One of the first lessons Shen Hui had taught her was to be extra cool in the face of a crisis, to force herself to slow down just when her senses were shrieking at her to speed up. This lesson stood her in good stead now. Suddenly the darkness came to an end and she was out of the pipe and running, a fraction of a second ahead of the alien.
She dodged instinctively as Norbert’s arm reached out for her. In a moment’s inattention, she slammed into a precariously balanced cart containing machine parts and ball bearings. Metal objects flew in all directions and clattered against the sides of the hold. Julie came down on a bearing in midstride and both her feet shot out from under her. Catlike, she turned in midair, throwing up a protective forearm before she went crashing to the floor on her face.
As she sprawled Norbert loomed above her, arms spread wide, jaws open in a terrifying grimace. Through his open jaws the little inner jaws came flickering out, more malevolent than a crazed pit viper.
Norbert lunged at her, and she was momentarily unable to do anything to protect herself. He was almost on her…
She had an instant to wonder what he was programmed to do if he caught her… or did he make up that part as he went along?
And then Norbert slipped on the bearings and lost his balance. His taloned feet raked the metal floor as he tried to gain purchase. He crashed to the deck with a bone-smattering sound.
For a moment Norbert sprawled there. His resemblance to a giant insect was now apparent as his arms and legs twitched and vibrated, trying to find something to hold. Then he righted himself and was up again and towering over her.
Unable to do anything, Stan had to watch. His fingernails were already ragged, for he had been chewing at bloody cuticles while monitoring Julie’s progress. He leaned forward, intent.
Julie, at the last possible moment, slipped through the alien’s claws and disappeared through the horizontally closing metal slabs at the end of the hold. The creature yowled in rage as the door shut in his face and Julie shot the lock.
Immediately Norbert began wrenching at the door, then, having no luck with the lock, turned his attention to the hinges.
Julie meanwhile was streaking through the cluttered compartment, sprinting at full stride and managing somehow to avoid the clutter of machines and packing cases that turned the place into an obstacle course filled with cutting edges.
Stan was able to track her progress on his monitor against a schematic of the ship’s hold.
He watched a tiny silver dot, representing Julie, dodge around objects ahead of a longer blue-black streak that represented her pursuer.
“Come on, Julie,” Stan muttered to himself. “You don’t have to run it this close! Pull the plug! Bail out!”
But Julie kept running. She seemed to be going for some kind of a record. Never had she been so graceful, so light on her feet. She had reached the far end of the compartment. The egress port was dogged down tight. Norbert was less than five feet behind her now. He reached for her with taloned claws, ending in dagger-sharp tips. Julie stood her ground, and Stan couldn’t help but admire the game quality of her courage.
Then she ducked down and scuttled between the creature’s legs, catching it by surprise, and escaping with nothing more than a shallow scratch on her right shoulder.
She was up to her full speed in two bounds, and for a moment she thought she had gained on it. But Norbert had learned something, too. He ignored her dodging run and came galloping up alongside her. His mouth, impossibly crowded with needle-tipped teeth, snarled and opened wide. From his jaw, and protruding through his mouth, came the hateful small replica of these jaws, composed of a small rectangular body part like a tongue, which ended in a mouth filled with white sharp teeth.
This was it. There was no place to go.
The creature moved in for the kill.
“Julie!” Stan screamed. “For God’s sake!”
At that final moment Julie screamed at the creature,
“Cancel predation functions!”
Norbert froze in midmovement. His feeding tube withdrew into his mouth. His jaws closed.
Julie then said, “Return to standard program.”
She turned away from the creature, who stood frozen in position, and walked through the connecting passageway to Stan, who was still in the control room, sitting numbly in the big command chair near the computer.
21
In the control room, where he had been watching her progress on a TV monitor, Stan heaved a sigh of relief. He knew Julie would join him soon, after she had showered and changed. He just had time to check the condition of the men in hypersleep, and then he and Julie would be able to go over their plans.
He walked through a dilating door, down a short corridor, and into the long gray egg-shaped room that was devoted to hypersleep. The lights were low, leaving the place in an eternal twilight The only sound Stan heard was the occasional short click of a circuit breaker.
The men lay in rows in what looked like large coffins with glass tops. Pipes and electrical lines connected all of the coffins and ran to power boxes on the walls. All this maze of equipment was run through instruments that measured output and indicated sudden anomalous changes, checking for heart rate, respiration, and for the electrical brain activity. Every hour, samples were taken of the sleepers’ blood and stomach contents. Trace chemicals could set up strange chain reactions. It was necessary to keep the crew’s internal environments very stable. Other meters on the wall showed dream activity; it was important for the crew members to dream as they slept Dreaming too long suppressed can lead to psychosis.
For now, all was well. The men lay in their gray coffins. Most had their hands at their sides, some had crossed them on their chests. In one or two cases, the fingers pulled at each other. This was not abnormal. Events were occurring on deep levels of the brain that the dials and gauges couldn’t read.
It was to be a journey of almost two weeks’ duration. Not a long one, as space trips go. The men could have stayed awake throughout without harm. But it was policy on most ships to put the crew into hypersleep for anything longer than a week. For one thing, it saved on food and water—critical things on a spaceship. For another, it kept the men out of mischief. There was little to do on the outward leg of a deep-space voyage. The ship shuttled noiselessly through space, and time seemed to flow like invisible treacle.
Stan was pleased that there was no crew to contend with at the moment. He was somewhat less pleased that Captain Hoban had elected to take the hypersleep with his men. Stan would have enjoyed conversations with Hoban on the long outward journey.
“I’d like it, too,” Hoban had said. “But frankly, I need the sleep. I’m badly in need of reintegration.”
Hoban had come under severe pressure after being relieved of his ship’s command. The charge that he had been drunk while on duty, though untrue, had been tough to fight Even with all the recording instruments that were continuously running on the ship, it was unclear exactly how drunk he had been, or if indeed he had been drunk at all. There were matters of individual alcohol tolerance to consider. Even witnesses, the ship’s officers, had been of two minds about what had really happened and to what extent Hoban bore responsibility.
If all this was upsetting to the investigating authorities, it was even more so to Hoban. He didn’t know exactly himself what had happened in that fateful hour when the accident had occurred. His own defense mechanisms blocked his memory, preventing him from seeing a truth that might be damaging to him.
Hoban knew that, and so he couldn’t help but wonder what his defenses were trying to block.
The hypersleep was known to enhance psychic integration. It gave you a chance to drop out of the world of actions and judgments, into a timeless place beyond questions of morality. Hoban had welcomed that.
Now Stan looked forward to resuscitating Hoban. It was a little limiting for him, having only Julie and Gill to talk to. Julie was a darling, of course, and he was absolutely mad about her. At the same time he couldn’t help but recognize her limitations.
Although abundantly educated in the school of hard knocks, she had little formal training in the sciences. Worse, she had little interest in the arts and humanities. She tended to assume that material things were always the most desirable ones. This was an error in Stan’s judgment, for how do you price a sunset or a mountain at dawn? How much for the song of the swallow? Still, he realized that he himself was no doubt guilty of the typical human error of overvaluing what he liked and undervaluing what others liked.
Talking with Gill was also limiting. Gill had formidable training in the sciences and knew a great deal about history and philosophy. This didn’t give him judgment and compassion, however. For Gill, the proposition that the unexamined life was not worth living had no more relevance than e=mc2 . He wasn’t equipped to examine the emotional dimension, though Stan thought he saw signs of promise.
After showering and changing, Julie fluffed her hair and rejoined Stan in the main control room. “How’d I do, Stan?” she asked.
Stan pulled himself together. In a voice that strove to be casual he said, “Quite well, Julie. You shaved fifteen seconds off yesterday’s time. Keep on like this and you’ll soon break your old mark of three minutes in the hold with Norbert.”
“Norbert’s getting too good,” Julie said. “He’s learning faster than I am. I’m sure he’s smarter than the real thing.”
The real thing, in this case, was the aliens Norbert so resembled, and who had caused such strange and deadly events on Earth.
Despite his appearance, however, Norbert was not an alien. He was a perfectly simulated robot model of an alien, equipped with a number of computer-driven programs, among which was the predator mode that Julie had been testing out. At the moment Norbert was in the control room with them, showing no sign of his former ferocity.
“How are you, Norbert?” Stan asked.
“I am fine, Doctor, as always.”
“That was quite a little run you gave Julie. Did you think you were going to catch her this time?”
“I do not anticipate such things,” Norbert replied.
“What would you have done if you had caught her?”
“What my programming told me to do,” Norbert said.
“You would have killed her?”
“I cannot anticipate. I would have done what I had to do. Without feeling, I might add. But let me further add, if remorse were possible for a creature like myself, I would have felt it. Is there an analogue of remorse that does not involve feeling?”
“You have a complicated way of expressing yourself,” Stan said.
Norbert nodded. These matters require considerable thought and recalculation. And when they are expressed in words, they sometimes come out differently from what was intended.”
“I’ve noticed that myself,” Stan said. Just at that moment a large brown dog came racing into the hold from a corridor. Stan had named him Mac. No one was quite sure how he had gotten aboard, but no one had gotten around to putting him off and now he was taking the voyage with them.
Mac ran to Norbert’s feet and released a blue rubber ball he was holding in his jaws. The ball bounced three times and came to a rest at the monster’s instep.
Stan and Julie watched to see what Norbert would do. The robot alien bent down and his long black arm, which somehow resembled an ant’s chitinous appendage, brushed past the dog and picked up the ball. The monster’s arm came back, then forward, and he threw the ball through the open door into the corridor. Barking furiously, the dog went chasing after it.
“All right, Norbert,” Myakovsky said, “you’ve had your fun. Go to the laboratory. I’ll want to scan some of your response codes. And get Mac to shut up. The crew is still in hypersleep.”
“Yes, Dr. Myakovsky,” Norbert said, and walked quietly out of the room.
He walked through a dilating door, down a short corridor, and into the long gray egg-shaped room that was devoted to hypersleep. The lights were low, leaving the place in an eternal twilight The only sound Stan heard was the occasional short click of a circuit breaker.
The men lay in rows in what looked like large coffins with glass tops. Pipes and electrical lines connected all of the coffins and ran to power boxes on the walls. All this maze of equipment was run through instruments that measured output and indicated sudden anomalous changes, checking for heart rate, respiration, and for the electrical brain activity. Every hour, samples were taken of the sleepers’ blood and stomach contents. Trace chemicals could set up strange chain reactions. It was necessary to keep the crew’s internal environments very stable. Other meters on the wall showed dream activity; it was important for the crew members to dream as they slept Dreaming too long suppressed can lead to psychosis.
For now, all was well. The men lay in their gray coffins. Most had their hands at their sides, some had crossed them on their chests. In one or two cases, the fingers pulled at each other. This was not abnormal. Events were occurring on deep levels of the brain that the dials and gauges couldn’t read.
It was to be a journey of almost two weeks’ duration. Not a long one, as space trips go. The men could have stayed awake throughout without harm. But it was policy on most ships to put the crew into hypersleep for anything longer than a week. For one thing, it saved on food and water—critical things on a spaceship. For another, it kept the men out of mischief. There was little to do on the outward leg of a deep-space voyage. The ship shuttled noiselessly through space, and time seemed to flow like invisible treacle.
Stan was pleased that there was no crew to contend with at the moment. He was somewhat less pleased that Captain Hoban had elected to take the hypersleep with his men. Stan would have enjoyed conversations with Hoban on the long outward journey.
“I’d like it, too,” Hoban had said. “But frankly, I need the sleep. I’m badly in need of reintegration.”
Hoban had come under severe pressure after being relieved of his ship’s command. The charge that he had been drunk while on duty, though untrue, had been tough to fight Even with all the recording instruments that were continuously running on the ship, it was unclear exactly how drunk he had been, or if indeed he had been drunk at all. There were matters of individual alcohol tolerance to consider. Even witnesses, the ship’s officers, had been of two minds about what had really happened and to what extent Hoban bore responsibility.
If all this was upsetting to the investigating authorities, it was even more so to Hoban. He didn’t know exactly himself what had happened in that fateful hour when the accident had occurred. His own defense mechanisms blocked his memory, preventing him from seeing a truth that might be damaging to him.
Hoban knew that, and so he couldn’t help but wonder what his defenses were trying to block.
The hypersleep was known to enhance psychic integration. It gave you a chance to drop out of the world of actions and judgments, into a timeless place beyond questions of morality. Hoban had welcomed that.
Now Stan looked forward to resuscitating Hoban. It was a little limiting for him, having only Julie and Gill to talk to. Julie was a darling, of course, and he was absolutely mad about her. At the same time he couldn’t help but recognize her limitations.
Although abundantly educated in the school of hard knocks, she had little formal training in the sciences. Worse, she had little interest in the arts and humanities. She tended to assume that material things were always the most desirable ones. This was an error in Stan’s judgment, for how do you price a sunset or a mountain at dawn? How much for the song of the swallow? Still, he realized that he himself was no doubt guilty of the typical human error of overvaluing what he liked and undervaluing what others liked.
Talking with Gill was also limiting. Gill had formidable training in the sciences and knew a great deal about history and philosophy. This didn’t give him judgment and compassion, however. For Gill, the proposition that the unexamined life was not worth living had no more relevance than e=mc2 . He wasn’t equipped to examine the emotional dimension, though Stan thought he saw signs of promise.
After showering and changing, Julie fluffed her hair and rejoined Stan in the main control room. “How’d I do, Stan?” she asked.
Stan pulled himself together. In a voice that strove to be casual he said, “Quite well, Julie. You shaved fifteen seconds off yesterday’s time. Keep on like this and you’ll soon break your old mark of three minutes in the hold with Norbert.”
“Norbert’s getting too good,” Julie said. “He’s learning faster than I am. I’m sure he’s smarter than the real thing.”
The real thing, in this case, was the aliens Norbert so resembled, and who had caused such strange and deadly events on Earth.
Despite his appearance, however, Norbert was not an alien. He was a perfectly simulated robot model of an alien, equipped with a number of computer-driven programs, among which was the predator mode that Julie had been testing out. At the moment Norbert was in the control room with them, showing no sign of his former ferocity.
“How are you, Norbert?” Stan asked.
“I am fine, Doctor, as always.”
“That was quite a little run you gave Julie. Did you think you were going to catch her this time?”
“I do not anticipate such things,” Norbert replied.
“What would you have done if you had caught her?”
“What my programming told me to do,” Norbert said.
“You would have killed her?”
“I cannot anticipate. I would have done what I had to do. Without feeling, I might add. But let me further add, if remorse were possible for a creature like myself, I would have felt it. Is there an analogue of remorse that does not involve feeling?”
“You have a complicated way of expressing yourself,” Stan said.
Norbert nodded. These matters require considerable thought and recalculation. And when they are expressed in words, they sometimes come out differently from what was intended.”
“I’ve noticed that myself,” Stan said. Just at that moment a large brown dog came racing into the hold from a corridor. Stan had named him Mac. No one was quite sure how he had gotten aboard, but no one had gotten around to putting him off and now he was taking the voyage with them.
Mac ran to Norbert’s feet and released a blue rubber ball he was holding in his jaws. The ball bounced three times and came to a rest at the monster’s instep.
Stan and Julie watched to see what Norbert would do. The robot alien bent down and his long black arm, which somehow resembled an ant’s chitinous appendage, brushed past the dog and picked up the ball. The monster’s arm came back, then forward, and he threw the ball through the open door into the corridor. Barking furiously, the dog went chasing after it.
“All right, Norbert,” Myakovsky said, “you’ve had your fun. Go to the laboratory. I’ll want to scan some of your response codes. And get Mac to shut up. The crew is still in hypersleep.”
“Yes, Dr. Myakovsky,” Norbert said, and walked quietly out of the room.
22
A door slid open and Captain Hoban walked through. He had a dazed look in his eyes, and Stan knew he could not have been awake for long.
“You’re early out of the hypersleep, Captain:”
“Yes, sir. I had my dial set to get me up before the crew so I could pull myself together and have a talk with you.”
“I suppose it is time we had that,” Stan said. “I want to thank you again for throwing in your lot with me. I don’t know where this will end up, but I’m glad to be on this adventure with you.”
“Yes, sir. Could you tell me what it is exactly we are going to tell the crew?”
Julie, seated nearby, said, “Yes, Stan, I’d like to know myself.”
Stan nodded. “We’ll give a slightly altered version of what’s going on.”
“Are we on course, then?” Hoban asked.
“Yes. I fed the coordinates for AR-32 into the navigational computer.”
“AR-32? I think I’ve heard of the place,” Hoban said. “Wasn’t there some trouble there a while back?” “There was.”
“Then why are we going there, sir?”
“We’re pretty sure there’s an alien super-hive on that planet, which apparently won’t support anything else. A Bio-Pharm ship has been in orbit around AR-32, and my information is that they have been illegally harvesting royal jelly.”
“Yes, sir. I understand. But what does that have to do with us?”
“I have a right to my share in that matter,” Stan said. “Julie and I are going to relieve them of some of their plunder. Royal jelly is like pirate’s gold, Hoban. It belongs to whoever takes it.”
“Yes, sir. I don’t have much trouble with that concept, though Gill might. But what bothers me, sir, is, does that mean we’ll have to kill bugs?”
“It could come to that,” Stan said, “though it is not the primary intention of our expedition.”
“And might it not involve killing Bio-Pharm people, if we have to?”
Stan stared at him. “Yes, it could come to that. I don’t expect them to be too happy about our taking what they have come to regard as their own, but frankly, I don’t much care what they feel. No one gives up pirate’s gold easily. If they insist on making a fight of it… Well, we’ll take care of ourselves.”
Hoban nodded, though he didn’t look happy. “I suppose that follows, sir. But I wish you had told me all this beforehand.”
“Would you not have come?” Stan said. “Would you seriously have preferred to stay down-and-out in that crummy boardinghouse I found you in?”
“No, I don’t wish to be back there,” Hoban said. “I’m just considering the situation.”
“Then think about this,” Stan said. “This situation could make you rich. Julie and I intend to share our profits with you and the crew. They’ll get a small percentage for the dangers they’ll run. It won’t be much out of our shares, but it’ll be more money than they ever saw before.”
“Sounds good, sir,” Hoban said. But he was still worried. What good was it to be rich if you were also dead?
The time was nearing to wake the crew from hypersleep. The flight was almost at an end. Their destination, the planet AR-32, was coming up on the screens, a glowing dot in the dark sky. June knew this would be her last time alone with Stan for a long time.
There was a lot to do, a lot of last-minute details to attend to, and she didn’t know when she and Stan would get some quiet time alone. Maybe not until they had finished the expedition—or to call it by its true name, their raid. And that could take time. And if everything didn’t go just right…
Julie shook her head irritably. There was no sense thinking about failure. Hadn’t Shen Hui instilled that much in her?
“You’re early out of the hypersleep, Captain:”
“Yes, sir. I had my dial set to get me up before the crew so I could pull myself together and have a talk with you.”
“I suppose it is time we had that,” Stan said. “I want to thank you again for throwing in your lot with me. I don’t know where this will end up, but I’m glad to be on this adventure with you.”
“Yes, sir. Could you tell me what it is exactly we are going to tell the crew?”
Julie, seated nearby, said, “Yes, Stan, I’d like to know myself.”
Stan nodded. “We’ll give a slightly altered version of what’s going on.”
“Are we on course, then?” Hoban asked.
“Yes. I fed the coordinates for AR-32 into the navigational computer.”
“AR-32? I think I’ve heard of the place,” Hoban said. “Wasn’t there some trouble there a while back?” “There was.”
“Then why are we going there, sir?”
“We’re pretty sure there’s an alien super-hive on that planet, which apparently won’t support anything else. A Bio-Pharm ship has been in orbit around AR-32, and my information is that they have been illegally harvesting royal jelly.”
“Yes, sir. I understand. But what does that have to do with us?”
“I have a right to my share in that matter,” Stan said. “Julie and I are going to relieve them of some of their plunder. Royal jelly is like pirate’s gold, Hoban. It belongs to whoever takes it.”
“Yes, sir. I don’t have much trouble with that concept, though Gill might. But what bothers me, sir, is, does that mean we’ll have to kill bugs?”
“It could come to that,” Stan said, “though it is not the primary intention of our expedition.”
“And might it not involve killing Bio-Pharm people, if we have to?”
Stan stared at him. “Yes, it could come to that. I don’t expect them to be too happy about our taking what they have come to regard as their own, but frankly, I don’t much care what they feel. No one gives up pirate’s gold easily. If they insist on making a fight of it… Well, we’ll take care of ourselves.”
Hoban nodded, though he didn’t look happy. “I suppose that follows, sir. But I wish you had told me all this beforehand.”
“Would you not have come?” Stan said. “Would you seriously have preferred to stay down-and-out in that crummy boardinghouse I found you in?”
“No, I don’t wish to be back there,” Hoban said. “I’m just considering the situation.”
“Then think about this,” Stan said. “This situation could make you rich. Julie and I intend to share our profits with you and the crew. They’ll get a small percentage for the dangers they’ll run. It won’t be much out of our shares, but it’ll be more money than they ever saw before.”
“Sounds good, sir,” Hoban said. But he was still worried. What good was it to be rich if you were also dead?
The time was nearing to wake the crew from hypersleep. The flight was almost at an end. Their destination, the planet AR-32, was coming up on the screens, a glowing dot in the dark sky. June knew this would be her last time alone with Stan for a long time.
There was a lot to do, a lot of last-minute details to attend to, and she didn’t know when she and Stan would get some quiet time alone. Maybe not until they had finished the expedition—or to call it by its true name, their raid. And that could take time. And if everything didn’t go just right…
Julie shook her head irritably. There was no sense thinking about failure. Hadn’t Shen Hui instilled that much in her?
23
When Julie came into the control room, Stan was still seated in the big, padded command chair. He had taken an ampoule of royal jelly from a dozen that were nested in the padded box on the nearby worktable. He was holding the ampoule up to one of the arc lights, twirling it between his fingers and admiring its bluish glow in the light.
As usual, Julie was both attracted and repelled by the liquid and what it could do to Stan. Yet she had been hoping they could spend this evening together, doing things together instead of thinking about them. Sometimes she thought Stan allowed himself to have real experiences only for the pleasure of reliving them later, as he was able to do with the royal jelly.
Why did he love that stuff so much? She knew it eased the pain of his disease. But it was more than just a remedy: he was using it as a drug. And Julie didn’t approve of taking drugs.
She hadn’t tried the stuff herself. A well-trained thief allows nothing to dull her senses. Shen Hui and life itself had taught her this lesson. And yet, much as she missed him when he launched himself into the unknown regions that the drug brought him to, a part of her went with him, because she knew how Stan felt about her.
Returning the ampoule to its case, Stan asked, “What did you think about Norbert’s performance?”
“He’s ready,” she said. “You’ve done an amazing thing, Stan. Created a robot alien good enough to fool the real ones.”
“Except for the pheromones,” Stan pointed out.
“You’ve taken care of that, too. With the short-range zeta fields you’ve developed, plus the pheromone-altering qualities of the royal jelly, the aliens will think Norbert is one of them.”
Stan nodded. “Just like it was with Ari.” Stan was referring to how his cybernetic ant, Ari, had been programmed to enter the colony of a similar-looking ant species, where the other ants accepted him as the real thing.
“How close are we now, Stan?” Julie asked.
Stan punched up the computer screen in front of him. Numbers flowed across it, and lines weaved in and out and then held firm.
“We’re nearing the vicinity of AR-32,” Stan told her. “It’s time to get the crew out of hypersleep.”
“The adventure begins,” Julie said softly.
“That’s right.” Stan took out the ampoule of royal jelly again. “We need a lot more of this stuff, and AR-32 has it for us. It’s funny how a single substance can be both more valuable than diamonds and more necessary for life than water. More necessary for my life, anyhow.”
He swirled the little glass tube and watched the liquid flow. Then he looked at Julie.
“You look very lovely tonight.”
She smiled back mockingly. “Pretty as a shot glass, as they’d say in the Old West.”
“No, I really mean it,” Stan said. “You know how I feel about you, don’t you?”
“Maybe I do,” Julie said. “But it’s not because you ever talk about it.”
“I’ve always been shy,” Stan said. Abruptly he swallowed the ampoule. I’m going to go lie down now, Julie. Let’s talk more later.”
Without waiting for her answer, Stan shambled off to his small office just to the right of the main control-room entrance. Within it a folding cot was built into the wall. He lay down on it now, without bothering to take off his glasses.
With Xeno-Zip there was no habituation. Each time was like the first. It always amazed him just how quickly the stuff took effect. It was like no other drug he had ever tried, neither medicinal nor recreational, and Stan had tried them all. Alien royal jelly was neither a stimulant nor a soporific, though it had effects similar to both. Primarily it was a way of gaining instant access to all parts of your own brain, a royal road to your own dreams and memories. With royal jelly you could zoom in on your past like a skilled photographer zooming in on a detail, readjusting focus to bring up those images that had faded out You could freeze the frame on what seemed like reality. You could see what you wanted to see, as often as you liked, and then step outside the frame and watch yourself in the act of seeing. Nor was that all it did. Royal jelly was a painkiller, too, relieving the throb of the cancer that was shattering his life.
The vial dropped from his fingers. It fell to the floor, taking no more than a fraction of a second to shatter on the deck. And in that microsecond, Stan watched it all happen again.
As usual, Julie was both attracted and repelled by the liquid and what it could do to Stan. Yet she had been hoping they could spend this evening together, doing things together instead of thinking about them. Sometimes she thought Stan allowed himself to have real experiences only for the pleasure of reliving them later, as he was able to do with the royal jelly.
Why did he love that stuff so much? She knew it eased the pain of his disease. But it was more than just a remedy: he was using it as a drug. And Julie didn’t approve of taking drugs.
She hadn’t tried the stuff herself. A well-trained thief allows nothing to dull her senses. Shen Hui and life itself had taught her this lesson. And yet, much as she missed him when he launched himself into the unknown regions that the drug brought him to, a part of her went with him, because she knew how Stan felt about her.
Returning the ampoule to its case, Stan asked, “What did you think about Norbert’s performance?”
“He’s ready,” she said. “You’ve done an amazing thing, Stan. Created a robot alien good enough to fool the real ones.”
“Except for the pheromones,” Stan pointed out.
“You’ve taken care of that, too. With the short-range zeta fields you’ve developed, plus the pheromone-altering qualities of the royal jelly, the aliens will think Norbert is one of them.”
Stan nodded. “Just like it was with Ari.” Stan was referring to how his cybernetic ant, Ari, had been programmed to enter the colony of a similar-looking ant species, where the other ants accepted him as the real thing.
“How close are we now, Stan?” Julie asked.
Stan punched up the computer screen in front of him. Numbers flowed across it, and lines weaved in and out and then held firm.
“We’re nearing the vicinity of AR-32,” Stan told her. “It’s time to get the crew out of hypersleep.”
“The adventure begins,” Julie said softly.
“That’s right.” Stan took out the ampoule of royal jelly again. “We need a lot more of this stuff, and AR-32 has it for us. It’s funny how a single substance can be both more valuable than diamonds and more necessary for life than water. More necessary for my life, anyhow.”
He swirled the little glass tube and watched the liquid flow. Then he looked at Julie.
“You look very lovely tonight.”
She smiled back mockingly. “Pretty as a shot glass, as they’d say in the Old West.”
“No, I really mean it,” Stan said. “You know how I feel about you, don’t you?”
“Maybe I do,” Julie said. “But it’s not because you ever talk about it.”
“I’ve always been shy,” Stan said. Abruptly he swallowed the ampoule. I’m going to go lie down now, Julie. Let’s talk more later.”
Without waiting for her answer, Stan shambled off to his small office just to the right of the main control-room entrance. Within it a folding cot was built into the wall. He lay down on it now, without bothering to take off his glasses.
With Xeno-Zip there was no habituation. Each time was like the first. It always amazed him just how quickly the stuff took effect. It was like no other drug he had ever tried, neither medicinal nor recreational, and Stan had tried them all. Alien royal jelly was neither a stimulant nor a soporific, though it had effects similar to both. Primarily it was a way of gaining instant access to all parts of your own brain, a royal road to your own dreams and memories. With royal jelly you could zoom in on your past like a skilled photographer zooming in on a detail, readjusting focus to bring up those images that had faded out You could freeze the frame on what seemed like reality. You could see what you wanted to see, as often as you liked, and then step outside the frame and watch yourself in the act of seeing. Nor was that all it did. Royal jelly was a painkiller, too, relieving the throb of the cancer that was shattering his life.
The vial dropped from his fingers. It fell to the floor, taking no more than a fraction of a second to shatter on the deck. And in that microsecond, Stan watched it all happen again.
24
First came the rush. It seemed to move along his arteries, and Stan pictured himself, a tiny man in a canoe adrift on the great red waters of his bloodstream. The vision exploded into a thousand fragments, and in each fragment the scene was repeated. The fragments of his vision came together, like millions of diamond particles striving to become a diamond, and then exploded outward again like firework displays arcing in all directions. He could hear a sound that was accompanying this, and he couldn’t tell what it was at first, a deep-throated roar that could have come from no human source. At first he thought it was the gods singing, great choruses of ancient gods wearing strange headdresses, some with the heads of ducks and turtles, some jaguars, some foxes. And near them, suspended in shining space, were other choirs of women-gods, full-breasted Brunhildes and slender Naiads, and their song was full of sorrow and promise.
As the ampoule fell to the floor, Stan was already dozing fitfully. Tiny muscles in his eyelids jerked and twitched: REM sleep, but of a previously unheard-of intensity. Dream sleep, but with awareness. Blue-green lights played across his face. It was a broad face, with the beginning of a double chin. Light glinted off his glasses and threw a shadow on his small chin. He looked far younger than his twenty-eight years; like a schoolboy again, coming back to the big old house where he had lived with his parents before the devastation wrought by the aliens. Again he saw his stern father, the scholar, always with an ironic little Greek or Latin phrase on his lips; and his mother, with her high forehead, flinty gray eyes, and hastily pinned-up mass of dark blond hair.
Then he seemed to be walking down a long corridor. On either side, standing in niches like statues, were replicas of his parents at every age and in every mood. Stan could, in his imagination, freeze the frame, stop his parents in midtrack, and walk around them, inspecting them from every angle, and then start the tape of memory running again. All this while the ampoule was in midair.
The ampoule was still falling from his hand, and he could segue instantly from where he was to another memory, himself after class in high school, walking along beside the little brook that ran behind his home, thinking about everything under the sun except his homework assignments. Stan looked down on the work given him by his teachers. He thought it was beneath his intellectual level, unworthy of his efforts. So disdainful was he of school that his parents feared he would not graduate. But he did graduate—there he was at his own graduation, wearing an English schoolboy’s suit his parents had bought him while they were attending a seminar in London. He had always hated that suit; he had looked damned silly next to the casual attire of the other boys.
There were many scenes like that, ready for him to step into, but Stan wasn’t in the mood for childhood memories. There were other things he wanted to look at. Other times. Other people, places, things.
And so he moved, the ampoule still falling, moved as a spiritual presence, down the spiraling, faintly glowing corridors of the years. And now he was a man, in his twenties, already a well-known scientist, and he was in the doctor’s office, buttoning his shirt, listening dumbly as Dr. Johnston said, “I might as well give it to you straight, Dr. Myakovsky. You were correct in your surmise about those black marks on your chest and back. They are indeed cancers.”
“Is my condition terminal?”
“Yes.” The doctor nodded gravely. “In fact, you don’t have much time left. The condition, as I’m sure you know, is incurable. But its progress can be slowed, and we can ease some of the symptoms. You already have the medicine we prescribe for such cases. And there is also this.”
The doctor held out a small plastic box. Within it, packed in foam rubber, were a dozen ampoules of a bluish liquid.
“This is royal jelly. Have you heard of it?”
Stan nodded. “If memory serves, it is produced by the aliens.”
“That is correct,” Dr. Johnston said. “I must tell you it’s no cure. But it should relieve the symptoms. It could be just what you’re looking for.”
“Does it have much in the way of side effects?”
The doctor smiled grimly. “It has indeed. That’s why it hasn’t received government approval yet, though many people use it. Indeed, it has become the most-sought-after consciousness-altering substance in existence. It gives some an intense feeling of well-being and competence. Others experience levels of their own being not normally perceived. Still others have an orgasm that seems to go on forever.” “At least I’m going to die happy,” Stan said.
But of course there were also the bad side effects. Some people had been known to go berserk on the drug, or to undergo personality changes so great that their own families didn’t recognize them. Could that be happening in his case?
And then he forgot his concern as the images swept him up again. There was so much to look at! So many memories, all nicely staged and lighted, waiting for him, the sole audience, to put them into motion. It was like owning all of the theaters in the world, and in each of them a different movie was playing, and each movie starred himself, Stan Myakovsky, in all the scenes of his life. He glided past them, a ghostly presence in his own memories.
As the ampoule fell to the floor, Stan was already dozing fitfully. Tiny muscles in his eyelids jerked and twitched: REM sleep, but of a previously unheard-of intensity. Dream sleep, but with awareness. Blue-green lights played across his face. It was a broad face, with the beginning of a double chin. Light glinted off his glasses and threw a shadow on his small chin. He looked far younger than his twenty-eight years; like a schoolboy again, coming back to the big old house where he had lived with his parents before the devastation wrought by the aliens. Again he saw his stern father, the scholar, always with an ironic little Greek or Latin phrase on his lips; and his mother, with her high forehead, flinty gray eyes, and hastily pinned-up mass of dark blond hair.
Then he seemed to be walking down a long corridor. On either side, standing in niches like statues, were replicas of his parents at every age and in every mood. Stan could, in his imagination, freeze the frame, stop his parents in midtrack, and walk around them, inspecting them from every angle, and then start the tape of memory running again. All this while the ampoule was in midair.
The ampoule was still falling from his hand, and he could segue instantly from where he was to another memory, himself after class in high school, walking along beside the little brook that ran behind his home, thinking about everything under the sun except his homework assignments. Stan looked down on the work given him by his teachers. He thought it was beneath his intellectual level, unworthy of his efforts. So disdainful was he of school that his parents feared he would not graduate. But he did graduate—there he was at his own graduation, wearing an English schoolboy’s suit his parents had bought him while they were attending a seminar in London. He had always hated that suit; he had looked damned silly next to the casual attire of the other boys.
There were many scenes like that, ready for him to step into, but Stan wasn’t in the mood for childhood memories. There were other things he wanted to look at. Other times. Other people, places, things.
And so he moved, the ampoule still falling, moved as a spiritual presence, down the spiraling, faintly glowing corridors of the years. And now he was a man, in his twenties, already a well-known scientist, and he was in the doctor’s office, buttoning his shirt, listening dumbly as Dr. Johnston said, “I might as well give it to you straight, Dr. Myakovsky. You were correct in your surmise about those black marks on your chest and back. They are indeed cancers.”
“Is my condition terminal?”
“Yes.” The doctor nodded gravely. “In fact, you don’t have much time left. The condition, as I’m sure you know, is incurable. But its progress can be slowed, and we can ease some of the symptoms. You already have the medicine we prescribe for such cases. And there is also this.”
The doctor held out a small plastic box. Within it, packed in foam rubber, were a dozen ampoules of a bluish liquid.
“This is royal jelly. Have you heard of it?”
Stan nodded. “If memory serves, it is produced by the aliens.”
“That is correct,” Dr. Johnston said. “I must tell you it’s no cure. But it should relieve the symptoms. It could be just what you’re looking for.”
“Does it have much in the way of side effects?”
The doctor smiled grimly. “It has indeed. That’s why it hasn’t received government approval yet, though many people use it. Indeed, it has become the most-sought-after consciousness-altering substance in existence. It gives some an intense feeling of well-being and competence. Others experience levels of their own being not normally perceived. Still others have an orgasm that seems to go on forever.” “At least I’m going to die happy,” Stan said.
But of course there were also the bad side effects. Some people had been known to go berserk on the drug, or to undergo personality changes so great that their own families didn’t recognize them. Could that be happening in his case?
And then he forgot his concern as the images swept him up again. There was so much to look at! So many memories, all nicely staged and lighted, waiting for him, the sole audience, to put them into motion. It was like owning all of the theaters in the world, and in each of them a different movie was playing, and each movie starred himself, Stan Myakovsky, in all the scenes of his life. He glided past them, a ghostly presence in his own memories.
25
Red Badger was one of the first crewmen revived from hypersleep. He stretched and yawned, then carefully unplugged the leads that connected him to the central sleep inducer. He looked around. The rest of the crew was starting to revive. Cheerful music was playing over the PA system. There were sounds of coughing and spitting as men cleared their throats for the first time in almost a month.
Coffee was available at a little table. Crew were always given coffee mixed with a new amphetamine upon first awakening. It was needed to help them throw off the effects of hypersleep.
Badger sipped at a black sweetened cup of coffee and felt his head clear.
“You okay, Red?” It was Walter Glint, his sidekick.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Min ?”
The Laotian hill woman grunted her assent.
“Connie?”
“I’m great, Badger,” Connie Mindanao said. “You figure this might be a bonus run?” “For extra-hazardous duty? They haven’t said yet.” “I hope so.” “Why?”
“I’ve got a ranch house in Bangio I’m trying to pay off.”
“There just might be easier ways,” Badger said. He looked around. “That’s funny.”
“What’s that, Red?”
“They usually post the ship’s destination in the crew quarters. But look for yourself—the board’s empty.”
“Yeah, that is funny,” Glint said. “But there’s a notice there.”
Badger said, “I can see it, dummy. General assembly in twenty minutes. The captain and the owner’s gonna talk to us.”
Glint said, “You’ve been on these ships longer than I have. That’s not the way they usually do it, is it, Red?”
“Nope.” Badger scratched his jaw. “I’ll bet they’re up to something. This might be interesting, Glint.”
The loudspeaker said, “All crew! Assemble at once in the main theater.”
Stan and Julie walked out onto the raised stage. The crewmen looked up attentively when he rapped a pointer on the lectern to get their attention.
“Our destination is not far away now,” Stan said. “It is a small O-type star named AR-32 in the standard catalog. Around it revolves a single planet, with several good-sized moons to keep it company. These moons create violent and unpredictable weather currents on the planet, which has been named Vista. Captain Hoban, do you know anything about this planet?”
Hoban had been sitting to one side of the stage. He cleared his throat now and said, “I have heard of the place, sir. They used to call it the Festerhole, back when there were still a lot of pirates and privateers operating in the space lanes. There was once a jelly-gathering operation there involving one of the bionationals. That was some years ago. To the best of my knowledge it has been deserted since.”
Stan thought, “Good old honest Hoban telling the crew more than they need to know!” Still, they’d have to find out sometime what this mission really involved.
The crew stirred and looked at each other. This talk of the Festerhole was making them uneasy. What was this assignment, anyhow? What was it the powers wanted them to do this time? No one had spoken about a bug-hunting expedition. That called for extra pay!
There was a rising murmur of protest from the crew. The greatest menace of recent times were the aliens, those big black monsters who had been pushed off Earth with difficulty, and elsewhere continued to show their murderous abilities in the face of everything Earth had been able to throw against them.
Badger rose to his feet and said, “Sir, this wouldn’t by any chance be a bug-hunting expedition, would it?”
“Not exactly,” Stan said.
“Then what exactly is it… sir?”
Stan ignored the red-haired crewman’s insolent tone. “This is basically a salvage operation,” he said. “We’ll be taking a load of royal jelly off a wrecked freighter.”
“Yes, sir,” Badger said. “And aren’t the bugs going to have something to say about that?”
“Our information is that there are no bugs on the wreck. We’ll go in fast, take what we need, and be out of there again. There’s also the possibility we’ll find an abandoned hive on the planet. The jelly in that could be worth millions.”
Walter Glint said, “Nothing was said about bugs when we volunteered, sir.”
“Of course not,” Stan said. “My information is secret. If I told you back on Earth, half the freelance salvagers from Earth and the colonies would be there now.” “Bugs can be dangerous,” Glint said.
“Not when you take precautions,” Stan quickly put in. “You were warned that this was hazardous duty. You’re not getting time off your sentences for sitting around in some holiday spot. And remember, there’s bonus pay in this for all of you. It could come to quite a lot, if the salvage is as rich as I think it is.”
“How much?” Badger asked.
That’s impossible to calculate before we have it,” Stan said. “Don’t worry, there is a standard formula for crew shares. I intend to double it.”
The men cheered. Even Badger smiled and sat down. This was interesting, he thought. He wondered what would come next.
Coffee was available at a little table. Crew were always given coffee mixed with a new amphetamine upon first awakening. It was needed to help them throw off the effects of hypersleep.
Badger sipped at a black sweetened cup of coffee and felt his head clear.
“You okay, Red?” It was Walter Glint, his sidekick.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Min ?”
The Laotian hill woman grunted her assent.
“Connie?”
“I’m great, Badger,” Connie Mindanao said. “You figure this might be a bonus run?” “For extra-hazardous duty? They haven’t said yet.” “I hope so.” “Why?”
“I’ve got a ranch house in Bangio I’m trying to pay off.”
“There just might be easier ways,” Badger said. He looked around. “That’s funny.”
“What’s that, Red?”
“They usually post the ship’s destination in the crew quarters. But look for yourself—the board’s empty.”
“Yeah, that is funny,” Glint said. “But there’s a notice there.”
Badger said, “I can see it, dummy. General assembly in twenty minutes. The captain and the owner’s gonna talk to us.”
Glint said, “You’ve been on these ships longer than I have. That’s not the way they usually do it, is it, Red?”
“Nope.” Badger scratched his jaw. “I’ll bet they’re up to something. This might be interesting, Glint.”
The loudspeaker said, “All crew! Assemble at once in the main theater.”
Stan and Julie walked out onto the raised stage. The crewmen looked up attentively when he rapped a pointer on the lectern to get their attention.
“Our destination is not far away now,” Stan said. “It is a small O-type star named AR-32 in the standard catalog. Around it revolves a single planet, with several good-sized moons to keep it company. These moons create violent and unpredictable weather currents on the planet, which has been named Vista. Captain Hoban, do you know anything about this planet?”
Hoban had been sitting to one side of the stage. He cleared his throat now and said, “I have heard of the place, sir. They used to call it the Festerhole, back when there were still a lot of pirates and privateers operating in the space lanes. There was once a jelly-gathering operation there involving one of the bionationals. That was some years ago. To the best of my knowledge it has been deserted since.”
Stan thought, “Good old honest Hoban telling the crew more than they need to know!” Still, they’d have to find out sometime what this mission really involved.
The crew stirred and looked at each other. This talk of the Festerhole was making them uneasy. What was this assignment, anyhow? What was it the powers wanted them to do this time? No one had spoken about a bug-hunting expedition. That called for extra pay!
There was a rising murmur of protest from the crew. The greatest menace of recent times were the aliens, those big black monsters who had been pushed off Earth with difficulty, and elsewhere continued to show their murderous abilities in the face of everything Earth had been able to throw against them.
Badger rose to his feet and said, “Sir, this wouldn’t by any chance be a bug-hunting expedition, would it?”
“Not exactly,” Stan said.
“Then what exactly is it… sir?”
Stan ignored the red-haired crewman’s insolent tone. “This is basically a salvage operation,” he said. “We’ll be taking a load of royal jelly off a wrecked freighter.”
“Yes, sir,” Badger said. “And aren’t the bugs going to have something to say about that?”
“Our information is that there are no bugs on the wreck. We’ll go in fast, take what we need, and be out of there again. There’s also the possibility we’ll find an abandoned hive on the planet. The jelly in that could be worth millions.”
Walter Glint said, “Nothing was said about bugs when we volunteered, sir.”
“Of course not,” Stan said. “My information is secret. If I told you back on Earth, half the freelance salvagers from Earth and the colonies would be there now.” “Bugs can be dangerous,” Glint said.
“Not when you take precautions,” Stan quickly put in. “You were warned that this was hazardous duty. You’re not getting time off your sentences for sitting around in some holiday spot. And remember, there’s bonus pay in this for all of you. It could come to quite a lot, if the salvage is as rich as I think it is.”
“How much?” Badger asked.
That’s impossible to calculate before we have it,” Stan said. “Don’t worry, there is a standard formula for crew shares. I intend to double it.”
The men cheered. Even Badger smiled and sat down. This was interesting, he thought. He wondered what would come next.
26
Stan rapped for attention. But before he could get started again, a door opened and a man came in. He moved rapidly and with a strange grace, a cross between a glide and a lope. His face was expressionless. Although all of his individual features were human, the total result was not human at all. The crew knew at once, even before the introduction, that this man was a synthetic. Captain Hoban’s introduction clinched the matter.
“People, this is Gill, an artificial man from the Valparaiso People Factory. He’s the second-in-command.”
“Sorry to be late, Dr. Myakovsky,” Gill said. “I just finished the energy readings.”
“No problem, Mr. Gill. Take a seat.”
Gill sat down by himself in the back of the room.
Gill was a solitary. In recent years the People Factory in Valparaiso, Chile, where many of the better synthetics were produced, had been doing an improved job on skin colors and texturing. Gone was that old look of damp putty that had once characterized synthetic people and had provided a basis for so many jokes by bad comedians. Now the only reliable visual gauge for detection of an android was the speed of their comprehension responses. That and a certain mechanical jerkiness to their movements, since the final stage of fairing the input levels and ranges of the synthetics’ operating systems was a slow, expensive process, and many employers didn’t care if a synthetic’s hand trembled as long as he didn’t drop the test tube or light stylus—or whatever.
Despite their artificial origins, synthetic men were full-fledged members of human society, with voting rights and a sexual program.
Stan was about to go on. But just at that moment, from an outer corridor, Mac the dog came trotting into the room. He had a bright blue rubber ball in his mouth, and he looked around expectantly.
Someone in the crew laughed. “Fetch it here, boy!”
And then something else came into the room behind the dog.
“People, this is Gill, an artificial man from the Valparaiso People Factory. He’s the second-in-command.”
“Sorry to be late, Dr. Myakovsky,” Gill said. “I just finished the energy readings.”
“No problem, Mr. Gill. Take a seat.”
Gill sat down by himself in the back of the room.
Gill was a solitary. In recent years the People Factory in Valparaiso, Chile, where many of the better synthetics were produced, had been doing an improved job on skin colors and texturing. Gone was that old look of damp putty that had once characterized synthetic people and had provided a basis for so many jokes by bad comedians. Now the only reliable visual gauge for detection of an android was the speed of their comprehension responses. That and a certain mechanical jerkiness to their movements, since the final stage of fairing the input levels and ranges of the synthetics’ operating systems was a slow, expensive process, and many employers didn’t care if a synthetic’s hand trembled as long as he didn’t drop the test tube or light stylus—or whatever.
Despite their artificial origins, synthetic men were full-fledged members of human society, with voting rights and a sexual program.
Stan was about to go on. But just at that moment, from an outer corridor, Mac the dog came trotting into the room. He had a bright blue rubber ball in his mouth, and he looked around expectantly.
Someone in the crew laughed. “Fetch it here, boy!”
And then something else came into the room behind the dog.