Lucifer Comet (2464 CE)

by Ian Wallace

  And it left her facing a life-problem.

  Having eliminated all career-objectives other than stealing or fraud, she had brought off one high-level stealing with an

  associated number of ancillary frauds. And along the way, she had mastered telepathy receptive and projective, some degree of clairvoyance, telekinesis, tempokinesis (a bastard word), and even self-tempokinesis. All that was left for her was to go onward and upward in the same lines. And since now she knew from experience that she could, with systematic preparation, bring off anything along these lines that she might want, all the way up to removing the gold from Fort Knox or bamboozling the SEC, it seemed really silly to make the effort.

  So there was nothing. All the future. Nothing.

  Unless she could think of something absolutely cosmic. …

  4

  Narsua flittered the forest floor, seeking prey, seeking also not to become prey. Narsua’s movements were less than systematic: she would pause, peer and smell around, feel temporarily safe, contort herself to nibble clean the hair on some of her legs, leap erect, peer, smell, contort again to do other legs, leap erect, peer, smell, work her way onward.

  Instinct-fear made her jump two yards sideways: the web-shot meant to ensnare her missed narrowly, entangled a fallen tree branch, then elastically sproinged around the branch as its shooter bit it loose from herself. Narsua did a dart-spin poised stiff-legged ready with her abdomen swung beneath her legs so that her tailgun was aimed for action: before she had consciously located the adversary, already her tail had shot, and the foe was entangled. For this one more time, experienced Narsua was predator, not prey.

  Having cut her web, she straightened out her body and moved with leisure toward the entangled one: an almost identical eight-legged replica of herself. Eight eyes glowered into eight eyes.

  Narsua mindspoke ritual: As with thee, some day with me also. Meanwhile, I eat thy knowledge. May all our eggs be blessed.

  Responded her prey, reluctant but compelled: As with me, some day with thee also. Meanwhile, eat my knowledge. May all our eggs be blessed.

  Narsua fanged. Then Narsua activated her eight mouth parts.

  Sated, Narsua lumbered out of the forest, around-and-back-alert for possible attackers, but herself no longer on the prowl. Being sated, she had time for the occasional pleasure of indulging in the only wonder that she knew.

  This wonder was not the sky of her world. That sky was a featureless gray by day, except for clouds which periodically would grow and blacken and bring flooding rain; no sun, only perpetual unvarying diffuse luminosity which faded at night until darkness in her world became total without moon or stars. Even the concept of sky had not occurred to her.

  The wall was her wonder.

  The wall towered indefinitely above her: sheer, smooth-polished bare rock rising a hundred meters (although Narsua could not measure) concavely like the inside of a bowl; above that, jagged rock, practically vertical for most of its height until it lost itself in sky; arising so suddenly out of ground that Narsua had been able to mount the base curvature only a little way before she had been hopelessly balked by impossible steep slipperyness.

  The wall went on and on, as far as she could see in either direction. A long time ago, Narsua had set forth on a journey along the base of this wall, pausing each hunger-time only long enough to dart into the forest after viciously backlighting food, pausing at nightfall to sleep serenely (because nobody was hungry then). At the end of many eights of hungers, the wall had only brought her back to her starting point, and she had found no outward passage anywhere.

  Did it wall her in from something, or wall her out of something? It was not a question too complex for Narsua, who had been caught within things and who had eaten the knowledge of many sisters who had been caught within things. She thought it must wall her in: for she had ranged her forest exhaustively, and wherever she might come out from among trees, she would always see the wall.

  She snapped alert: during a few moments, wonder had overwhelmed her, monopolizing her consciousness, and that was dangerous. But there were no attackers in sight, naturally: most of her kind held to the forest.

  Wonder gave way to fear. The wall was a solid tabu, dangerous even to look upon. Yet wonder crept back into her: what beyond?

  Disaster struck! Crumpling, terrorized Narsua wrapped protective legs about her abdomen and rolled helpless with shock upon shock.

  Half a thousand kilometers from Narsua’s world, a pocket of gas which had been accumulating pressure for centuries reached a level of intensity which the thin planetary crust above it could no longer withstand. Gas blasted the rock, driving into sky dust and pebbles and boulders of ice. Precisely at the center of eruptive force, a billion-ton iceberg was catapulted into sky at a beginning velocity of twelve kilometers per second.

  The year of Earth-simultaneity with events on Narsua’s planet was something like 48,000 BC.

  Narsua’s world convulsed and shook, slamming Narsua against a tree at forest edge. She clung, shriveled, to the tree, playing dead, while the world-trembling dislodged great boulders from the wall’s height and rolled them down upon her in avalanche. Behind and beyond the rock-rolling noise there was a deep rumble-thundering which continued for time-immeasurable and gradually diminished into silence.

  After a prudent while, Narsua allowed herself to appear alive again, although the ground continued to quiver. It had been many eights of eatings since she had experienced that sort of chaos, and this episode had been the most violent. Perhaps it was her punishment for questioningly prowling the wall.

  Soul-shriveled, she scuttled back into the forest. Perhaps tomorrow she would ask gods about it. She might even ask God. But God and the other gods probably could tell her no more about the cataclysm than they could tell her about whatever lay beyond the wall.

  5

  The news of Ice-Comet Gladys reached Erth long before the Ventura did. Methuen, soon after pulling away from Bellatrix in the wake of his quarry, had fired a report to Astrofleet HQ via a robot carrier which, having no living cargo and therefore needing only a small inertial shield to protect its engine, was able to reach Erth in a week which was half Ventura*s time. And once he had reached the periphery of the Sol System off Pluto-orbit, Methuen could open radio communication requiring (at that time in that year) no more than six hours each way; and this time shortened with each planetary orbit overpassed inbound. (He could have talked with the Erthworld capital on Nereid in one hour each way from Pluto, but he hesitated to go so high.)

  Capture of a comet was fairly routine. Gladys was very large but not quite the largest ever. The report of the weird organic inclusions was another matter entirely, especially when it was coupled with the comet’s uniquely high velocity. Astrofleet was inclined to keep the business under wraps pending extensive scientific consultation; but there is always one crewperson who doesn’t get the message, and this time it was an assistant PR spokesman who learned the news just before a newskenner conference and blurted it out there. Questions were fired, the PR man backed and filled, and newsmedia blared MONSTERS COMING IN ICE-COMET! The public fuss wasn’t much, in these advanced days of an interstellar Sol/Centauri League, and the newskenner interest waned.

  But Dorita Lanceo, on the prowl for a purpose, had caught the first stories and went into furtive investigative action.

  An unencumbered starship coming in on the Sol System at nine thousand times the speed of light could simply rotate presenting her stern repulsors to Erth and brake down to a glide-in. It wasn’t that simple when you had twenty billion tons of comet in tow at about thirty thousand times a comet’s normal velocity. Methuen and Zorbin, outside Pluto, went into a decaying freefall orbit all around the Sol System. It had been nearly two weeks from Bellatrix, at high speed, to an astronomical unit outside Pluto; the first Sol System orbit of 3.7 x 1010 kilometers, which would take light nearly thirty-five hours to course, took the Ventura-plus-Gladys thirteen seconds.

  With s
ucceeding orbits, the effect of the circular vectors without compensating acceleration was to slow Gladys until she began to pull back on Ventura; and when after a number of orbits their velocity had declined to a hundred C, Gladys was tame enough so that Methuen could do increasingly tighter orbits inside the Sol System. Inwards of Jupiter, but outside the asteroid belt, he chanced another 180° turn, so that Gladys was dragging him; his ship resisted, and they ended by moving into Erth orbit in freefall just outside the band of communications satellites.

  All this orbiting had required five tense days. Both Methuen and Zorbin were thoroughly pooped because of numerous complications such as avoiding planets and large asteroids and space-ships en route.

  Advice was streaming in to Methuen from very high levels; it appeared that even Erthworld Chairman Marta Evans was interested. It was unsteadying, but Methuen drove down the temptation to be heady about it and went to work mentally sorting the diversified advice.

  Ventura and Gladys remained in Erth orbit for the best part of two weeks. The first visitors from Erth were, of course, Astrofleet officers and assorted scientists; the latter, apart from questioning Methuen and Zorbin in far-and-deep-ranging detail, besides scrutinizing all their instrumental data and their qualitative notes, circumcruised Gladys over and over again, using, instrumentation far more sophisticated than the Ventura’s. At the end of a week, after endless argument around tables in Erthworld Headquarters in Manhattan, with Methuen present at most conferences for expert advice (while Zorbin remained in deputy command aboard the Ventura), diplomats and scientists and Astrofleet had arrived at decisions for carving up the comet and disposing of the pieces.

  The cutters arrived in Ventura’s orbit. Gladys was laser-cut (and she submitted without a quiver) into fifty-million-kilo ice chunks—four hundred thousand pieces, all dirty amalgams of ice and rock. Each chunk was coated with a thin silicon derivative for insulation against reentry heat; and then each chunk was pulled out of orbit by a cutter and first tugged and then launched in a precalculated trajectory into one of several hundred-square-kilometer processing basins in the Red Sea.

  One fifty-million-kilo ice-chunk was otherwise handled. This was the precious core of the comet—a core of relatively pure ice—containing the two humanoid inclusions.

  Entrapment of two apparently unmutilated humanoids in the ice of a comet was in itself unique; and wonder piled upon wonder. On none of the three planets in the interstellar Sol/Centauri League (Sol’s Erth, and Alpha Centauri’s Vash and Rab), nor on any of the other two dozen planets in various star systems with which Sol/Centauri maintained trade relationships, did anybody know of a humanoid having any kind of wings.

  Consequently, some investigating scientists had spent much time questioning the Ventura officers and poring over their instrumental flakes in an effort to ascertain or at least surmise the total orbit of Gladys, and in particular, the planet of her origin (assuming that, like numerous other comets, she had originated in an explosion on a planet), but the trajectory of Gladys as plotted by Zorbin was so clearly linear that a closed elliptical course could not be established, and there was even speculation that her total course might have been hyperbolic. These uncertainties led to the wildest speculation as to her possible origin, some surmises making her extra-galactic; but excluded as origin-points were all the stars in and related to the Sol/Centauri League, since beings unknown in the League had been trapped near comet-center and therefore at or near comet-origin.

  The central chunk underwent five days of intensive instrumental study at the Erthworld Interdisciplinary Science Center in Manhattan, where the ice-block was stored in a deep-freeze laboratory. Thereafter the institute chief, lean fiftyish Dr. Xavier Almagor, reported as follows directly to the Cabinet Secretary for the Department of Education, Science, and Culture: that the two humanoids were indeed humanoids, that they were frozen into a central comet-stratum which was apparently between 48,000 and 53,000 years old (adjudged by radioactive study of associated mineral inclusions)—and, most arrestingly, that the humanoids were indeed undamaged, were quite possibly not dead but in a state of cryogenic suspended animation. Almagor added that by a careful process of unfreezing the chunk in several successive strata, combined with slow radioheating techniques common in modern cryogenic unfreezings, it might be possible to restore the specimens to full life in a witnessable length of time.

  The Secretary immediately reported these findings to Erthworld Chairman Marta Evans. The result, a week later, was a hell of a good show: a cosmic unfreezing before a select group of notables in the five-hundred-seat theater of the Scientific Center. The unfreezing was attended by carefully culled statesmen, diplomats, scientists and newskenner people from Norwestia (the host constellation in which Manhattan was located), Centralia and Cathay (the other two most powerful constellations) and the other eight constellations composing Erthworld Union.

  Commander B. J. Methuen, who by this time was restive under a great deal of favorable notoriety, was awarded two seats in a good location. He brought along Lieutenant Saul Zorbin. Hints had been dropped to Methuen from high Astrofleet staffers that he was now in the slot for special promotion; that part of it pleased him, but he did not at all like some signs that the promotion might subtract him from line duty and put him into public relations. He was so preoccupied with strategies and tactics to sidetrack so disgusting a development, without besmirching his escutcheon by declining promotion, that in the theater it required great effort for him to concentrate on the important business at hand.

  Also present, on a newskenner pass which she had obtained by a modification of the methods used with the bank, was Dorita Lanceo.

  6

  Under complex lighting on the big stage squatted the enormous core-cube of relatively clean ice: forty million kilograms of it, sixty-four cubic meters, more than four meters along every edge, beginning to surface-melt sluggishly on the refrigerated stage, whose temperature lighted was ten degrees Celsius.

  - The lighting changed: the markers hitting the front face of the cube were statted down to ten percent, the floods at the sides and above to fifty percent, while the floods behind stayed full. The cube went translucent, revealing largely in silhouette but dimly in fullness the semi-shadow shapes of the frozen humanoid and the batwinged monster at cube-heart. The spectators were rigid; Dorita heard some gasps, one of them her own.

  From among the five doctors who flanked the cube gravely contemplating its contents, their chief Dr. Almagor stepped forward; there was no lectern, the stage had concealed voice-pickups everywhere. In a professionally conversational voice he told them:

  “Gentlepeople, all of you have received advance copies of the comet story outlining the unsolved questions about its origin and trajectory and noting also the difficulty of how these two creatures could become entrapped in the comet, without personal damage, perhaps fifty millennia ago. Be reminded that civilization on Erth is only seven or eight millennia old. I will assume that you have read this material, and I will move right on to explain our planned procedure today. There will be a decision for you to make on the spot.

  “We will melt their present ice environment by an adaptation of radiant heating. The ice will be melted in successive layers. As we approach the terminal melting, enough of the heat will have penetrated these bodies to thaw them.

  “Now, we have every reason to believe that these creatures are still alive, in suspended animation. When they are entirely free of ice, I expect that they will be alive and awake. This fact will present an immediate hazard which I will defer explaining until we will have removed two layers so that you can see the creatures more clearly.”

  The melting process began, with the doctor laconically describing it. Each melt-layer had been pre-indexed; and as the sludge-milky water ran down into drains, it was being collected below in labeled containers for study. Thus science would learn more about the comet cores, and perhaps more about the humanoid inclusions.

  When the second layer had
been removed, the creatures were so near the surface that everyone could see both of them rather clearly.

  The unwinged man was a naked demigod, apparently brown, and he still-brandished a long spear at the monster— which was a hairy-naked gnarled male, apparently green confused with red, whose big front teeth protruded in an angry grin and whose batwings were spread for fight or for flight.

  The theater was pervaded by comet-chill.

  Said Almagor: “Now we must call upon you people to decide an issue. It depends on the fact that these specimens must have been somehow deep-frozen instantly while in a combat situation. When the last pieces of ice fall away from them, they will be entirely alive, with no clear memory of anything having happened to them, with no immediate sense of disorientation. Undoubtedly they will go into combat-action.

  “Should the humanoid kill the monster, the sequel would perhaps be controllable. But should the monster kill the humanoid or flee on his wings, obviously there would be a peril. The monster must not be let loose upon the world, and consequently we have sealed all openings in this theater; but by the same token, all of you would be confined in a place of great hazard, and there might be injuries or even deaths before we could bring the monster under control.

  “On the other hand, we could use a different technique which would leave both of them in suspended animation. But this would rule out the scientifically interesting spectacle of their reactions face-to-face. And we do have methods of bringing one or both of them under control, although we cannot guarantee immediate success.