Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

Ilena watched in silence. Now that she was alone with him, she seemed to have nothing to say, after all.

  So she said, merely to break that silence: “Do you know our direction yet?”

  Carefully he placed a limb of the tripod in its proper bed in the case. “I won’t know exactly until I get those computer results. But I can tell you now that it doesn’t look good. We’re heading into the Belt.”

  “I see,” said Ilena, and perhaps her voice shook a little though she willed it not to.

  He snapped the instrument case shut and stood up. His hard blue eyes looked into her dark ones with a look of . . . amusement? searching? appeal? and he gripped both her shoulders in his big hands.

  “You know, darling,” he said unhurriedly, “it comes to me what a great time and place this would be for a dramatic reconciliation. Here we are, diving into the Belt, and it’s a toss-up whether we hit another rock, or—”

  “You like that, don’t you?” flared Ilena. She was unhappily angry at herself, at the conflicting tides of emotion drowning reason in her, but she went on almost automatically, “The toss-up. The long shot. And the big fight and the ‘dramatic reconciliation.’ ”

  He drew back a little, and his hands on her shoulders relaxed. “Skip it. I just thought some such idea might’ve occurred to you. I wanted you to know that if it had, I knew why. You’ve figured out, just like I have, that your mother either has changed her will already, or is about to—giving me control of the Company. You couldn’t stand that, could you? You’re even willing to accept me, to stay within grasping distance of the Company.”

  Ilena struggled to make her voice steady. “Aren’t you putting me in your place?”

  “Not a bit of it. It seems, from what I’ve picked up, that you and your mother haven’t ever got along. But she’s a lot more impressed with my sterling qualities—or phony glamor, if you prefer—than you ever were. If you tried divorcing me now—well, you might get the kid to yourself, though by God I’d fight that through every court in the System. And in any case you’d find yourself on an annuity—with no more chance to tell me how your father would have run things.”

  “My father—” Ilena began, and stopped short, not trusting herself.

  Harry eyed her quizzically. “Take it easy,” he said. “Got to think of Junior now, too, you know. . . . Don’t worry; we’ll come through OK.”

  His hands slid down her arms, tightened and drew her to him, and he kissed heron the mouth. For a moment she was straining to draw away; then she went limp, leaned shudderingly against him, returned the kiss. . . .

  When he had gone Ilena stood there, shaken, hating herself. The cold stars of space stared through the cracked glass, stared in at her shame.

  Poignantly she remembered her father. His name in Martian business circles remained even now a synonym for an almost uncannily shrewd intelligence. But he had been a simple man, almost pious in his way; sometime in his youth he’d heard that the gods help those who help themselves, and later on he’d helped himself to a good 30 per cent of Mars’ undeveloped resources.

  He had been a great man. Now he was dead. When Ilena could think coolly, without passion, nothing—certainly no desire of her own—seemed so important as to preserve the structure he had built, as he would have wanted. Now it was all the more important, because of the child that was coming—a boy who would inherit the Company, as Loran Jordan’s son should have inherited it—the son who should have been born instead of Ilena.

  But she couldn’t always think coolly. Sometimes she couldn’t think at all. She was a woman. And that was why Harry Burk, reckless adventurer, irresponsible gambler, was in a position to wreck the great Jordan Enterprises.

  As a final token of her weakness, she felt two tears trickle slowly, burningly down her face.

  III

  In the vibrant clamor of the engine room, Harry Burk straightened up from where he crouched beside the control panel. He mopped sweat from his forehead with the back of a grimy hand, shuffled his numbed feet; some of the litter of tools about him clinked together.

  He had been working alone down here for a full hour, struggling with the maze of control wiring, since Charles Linforth’s brooding had burst into open near-mania. He’d sent the man back up the ladder, feverish with the pain of his broken arm and muttering about best-laid plans and the. hand of God.

  Burk worked best alone, but there had been times when he wished for company, somebody to talk to. Ilena. But Ilena was up in the salon taking care of her mother’s wobbly heart, and thinking, no doubt, what a louse she’d married.

  His heaviest burden, since the computer had delivered its verdict, was the full knowledge of the danger they were running into—knowledge it would have been pointless to share, since he was the only one who could do anything about it. Now, though, after a heartbreaking hour in the stifling heat of the engine room, he had to admit that he couldn’t do anything either.

  He wiped his forehead again and turned; then he saw that he wasn’t alone, after all. A slim figure crowned with pale blond hair stood half hidden between two of the piers of the great compound breech.

  “Leoce!” said Burk without much surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  The girl’s pale eyes met his squarely—narrow, almost Mongoloid eyes that betrayed some of her ancestors’ origin from somewhere on the Baltic Sea. “I’ve been watching you at work. Working so hard to save all of us useless, helpless ones . . .”

  He smiled wearily. “Don’t kid yourself. I’ve been trying to pull this derelict through mostly because Harry Burk happens to be aboard. But I seem to be pretty helpless, too. The people that built this boat believed in putting things together so they’d stay together till it was junked. But it never occurred to them that the front end of a ship might go off and leave the rear end to shift for itself.”

  “Then does that mean—that there’s no hope?”

  He was surprised at how little frightened she seemed. “No. We just can’t steer this damn wreck. We keep going, in a direction determined by our initial momentum, the push the meteor gave us, and the continuing thrust of the drive till the fuel runs out. If my stellar navigation still works, I think I have a close idea of where we’re going.”

  She didn’t miss the grim emphasis. She asked breathlessly, “Wh-where?”

  “That’s what I was just about to go up and announce to all the interested parties.”

  She grasped at his arm. “Tell me now—please!”

  He gave Leoce a searching look from reddened eyes. . . . “OK. In about an hour, the Morgan will pass right through the middle of the Dupays asteroid swarm. Then she’ll swing back out of the Belt again—south of the ecliptic, in the southern traffic lanes where there’s a pretty good chance of being rescued.”

  But the girl hadn’t really heard the last sentence. She recoiled a step, her slanted eyes widening in horror. “The Dupays!”

  “I wondered if you were up on their history,” said Burk evenly. “You won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve caught myself halfway wishing that rock back there had finished us off.”

  Leoce nodded numbly. Everybody knew the story, revived from time to time in fiction and magazine articles, of what had come out of the Dupays cluster a generation ago, when the first exploring vessels had penetrated it. Since then, the whole Belt had been out of bounds for ships. But it was the Dupays group itself, the region toward which they were helplessly plunging, in which the horror was known to dwell.

  Little enough was known beyond that, though altogether four ships had stumbled into the nests of the creatures of the Belt, whom someone had named the Fishers. The Crew of one of those craft had found the courage to blow it up. The others . . .

  They had been hunted down, on Earth and Mars. Human bodies, no longer, human. An alien intelligence looked out of their eyes and refused to answer questions.

  When some of them were caught, they had been trying to outfit a fleet of freighters for an expedition to the Belt. Freighters equipped
with the hold facilities and the engines to carry massive cargoes. The Fishers had failed in their purpose, because the men whose bodies they possessed had lacked the money for such an enterprise.

  But they could hardly hope for a better catch than was contained in the derelict Morgan le Fay.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Leoce in a small voice.

  “I don’t know,” Burk said bluntly. He gazed at the girl and past her, hardly seeing her; but it was a relief to unburden himself of his knowledge. “Once,” he said darkly, “I talked to Pete Goda. You’ve heard of him?”

  Leoce nodded again. Pete Goda had been a more than nine days’ wonder: the only man who ever came back from the Dupays alive and—still a man. With two comrades as ignorant as himself, he’d tried to take an illegal short cut through the Belt. The other two had died—one whom Pete had been forced to kill outright, the other who had died before planetfall from the beating Pete’s huge fists had given him to drive the unhuman consciousness out of his body. But Pete had somehow resisted whatever it was that seized on men’s minds out there; and, back on Earth, had shut his mouth and refused to talk.

  The story went, though, that he hadn’t refused under narcosynthesis; but what he had said was a secret of the Earth Government. . . .

  “Pete used to be a friend of mine,” said Burk. “I hadn’t seen him for years, when I ran into him one day in a—a cafe in Memphis. He was busy trying to forget what he’d been through, and the stuff he was using to forget made him want to talk instead.”

  “He told you about—them?”

  “Yes. In his own language, though. Pete was religious—belonged to the Post-Scientific Church of Repentance, I think. It seems that the Dupays are inhabited by devils who try to steal men’s souls. To begin with, one of them tempted him, most diabolically, showing him all the pleasures of Earth as a lonesome spaceman imagines them, offering him every desire he’d ever had—and some that he never knew he had. Pete gritted his teeth and thought of his soul’s salvation—and the Fisher showed him Heaven in all its glory, with the gates wide open to receive him. It was so much like the real Heaven that Saint Peter himself would have been fooled, but Pete Goda, who was no saint, knew it was phony, and kept on resisting. Finally the thing must have got angry, because it used its hypnotic power to punish him. All he’d tell me about that part was that he’d spent a thousand years in Hell, and it was a lot worse than he ever expected it to be.”

  “But he got away,” whispered Leoce, her hand at her throat.

  The far-off look in Burk’s eyes dissolved, and he gazed thoughtfully at her. “Pete had his faith to lay fast hold on,” he said softly. “Think any of us qualify? What have we got up above?” He gestured toward the ladder. “A bunch of money grabbers that have spent their lives looting Mars to buy themselves gold-plated yachts. And down here? A girl that’s so scared she’s ready to shake like a leaf, and a guy that’s sold his soul once already for that same damn filthy money.”

  Leoce reacted violently. Her young face grew taut with the tenseness that precedes tears. She said chokingly, “But I’m not scared, Harry!” Then her arms were about his neck, her body pressed against his; she was crying, looking up into his face. “Harry, we can’t get away, can we? Kiss me. We’re going to die. I love you, Harry. Kiss me.”

  Now why didn’t I see this coming? Burk asked himself. I’m slipping.

  He bent and kissed her on the lips, but gently, as one kisses a child.

  Too bad, he thought wrily. Under other circumstances . . .

  Over Leoce’s shoulder he glanced at his wrist watch. By his figuring there should be about 30 minutes left before they hit the Belt. Just about time to give the others the briefing—that might or might not do any good—about what they were in for.

  He disengaged the girl’s arms and held her a little away from him.

  “Look, baby,” he said soberly, “maybe this business is getting a little too much for you. We’ve either got about half an hour to live—but the hell of it is, you probably don’t die—or else we’ll come through somehow, and have all the time there is. But I’m a married man with responsibilities—too damn many of them,” he added frankly. “And in twenty years or so you won’t be able to tell me from a lot of other nasty, rich old men.”

  Leoce kept her eyes fixed on his face till he grew uncomfortable. It had been so long since he’d been looked at like that. His arm that was still around her shoulders tightened.

  He said, “Everybody wants crazy things. . . . Do you know what I’d like to do? I’d like to sell the Jordan Enterprises at auction and buy myself a present. A ship. Not a gold-plated yacht, but a ship like there never was before, a ship that a couple of billion credits could just maybe build, a ship to go to the stars. Maybe it could be done . . . if old lady Jordan and her fake heart weren’t going to live forever. . . He stopped and shook his head; he’d been talking to himself. “But that’s a lot of crud,” he growled, letting his arm slip from Leoce and jamming his fists into the pockets of his grease-stained jacket. “We’re bound for the Dupays!”

  “Th-thanks for telling me about it,” stammered Leoce. She didn’t mean the Dupays, she meant the interstellar rocket, and Burk understood.

  For a moment his eyes hardened curiously as he looked at the girl, but the expression wasn’t for her; he was thinking of Ilena’s reaction to the same confidences, in the first days of their marriage. The splitup had begun right then. . . .

  “Better fix your face a bit, baby,” he told Leoce flatly. “We’ve got to go upstairs, break the news to the rest of them.”

  What was left of the Morgan le Fay drove steadily ahead along its determinate curve through space—the remnant of a superb organism which, Dlind and crippled, could still go on. As near as a mile or two away, fragments of stone or of meteoric iron began to flash past, but there were no longer any detectors to warn of their presence, or any electronic brain to deflect the ship if one came dangerously near. But their threat was negligible compared to that which lay ahead, stirring, perhaps, already as it sensed the approach of victims.

  IV

  Mrs. Loran Jordan huddled deep into the cushions of her big chair, in her own magnificent salon aboard her own yacht that she had had built for 60,000,000 credits, covered with gold from nose to tail. She could feel her poor overworked heart beating fast and unsteadily, seeming from time to time almost to stop entirely. She wanted her medicine, she needed her medicine; but she knew hopelessly that Ilena would only shake her head brusquely. She felt almost too feeble to complain.

  Ilena was a cold, unnatural daughter. She was her father’s child, every bit of her. Ilena had never loved her mother and was willing to let her die now without a word of sympathy.

  Harry Burk was still pacing up and down, his steps dull on the carpet. He had been talking fast, jerkily: “. . . So, we know where we are and where we’re going. What more could we ask?” He smiled with humorless irony and looked round at the four others. “And,” he appended, glancing at his watch, “we’ll be where we’re going in about ten minutes.”

  For a moment or two Mrs. Jordan thought her heart really had stopped. . . . Then she lay wheezing in her chair, cowering before the passage of the minutes, the seconds. On the wall of the salon hung a big ornate clock; she had chosen it herself, but she didn’t remember what it had cost. It was a beautiful clock. But its second hand swept round and round, faster and faster, while her heart labored faster to keep up with it. And with each second that ticked away, the wrecked vessel plunged miles nearer to the Fishers’ fishing grounds.

  The others’ faces seemed far away and strange. Ilena sat upright in a chair opposite her own; her slender-fingered hands were relaxed on the broad arms, but her relaxation looked painful, artificial. Charles Linforth stood leaning stiffly, his face a mask, against the wall beside the elevator shaft; he had recovered from his outburst of a little earlier, and had scarcely reacted to the news of their latest misfortune. As Mrs. Jordan watched, he raised his go
od hand in a nervous gesture to stroke his neat little mustache, saw the blackened fingernails and put his hand behind him again.

  Mrs. Jordan twisted her head a little and brought Leoce Linforth into her field of vision. The girl sat limply in the third big chair, and her charming features wore an expression which Mrs. Jordan could not fathom. Her mouth was sober, but there was an odd light in her eyes, a smooth untroubled look in her young face, that didn’t fit the moment. She seemed to be somewhere else, unconnected with the tense gathering in the shattered rocket.

  Harry was still pacing and talking, as if he had to. “They’ve been waiting for us a long time,” he said. “Waiting out in the Belt since before the time of the first apes, maybe since before there was life on Earth. The scientists think the Dupays swarm was part of the crust of the old fifth planet. That planet had intelligent inhabitants, and when their world exploded a billion years ago they managed to survive after a fashion. They didn’t have space travel, but they knew some things we still don’t know. Their bodies were flimsy like any life—but they had some method of impressing the patterns of their minds on durable matter, rocks or metal, something that would have a good chance of surviving the smash. And they knew how to prepare those preserved minds to come out aggressively, when the chance arrived, to take possession of the bodies of future beings who might happen in their vicinity. Of us.”

  It was all only a part of the daze in which Mrs. Jordan was steeped, slumped in her armchair. She didn’t want to come out of the daze. But her mind insisted on running about like a busy mouse trying to escape from a cage—the cage of gross, sagging, weary flesh with which the years had surrounded it.

  That was another thing she could blame on her dead husband, when she tried. She had heard somewhere that rich, frustrated women get fat; and if Loran hadn’t made her rich and frustrated, who had? When would he ever listen to anything she said? She knew she was a strong-willed woman, but that was her nature; Loran should have known how to make allowances. But he had always given her silently the money she asked for, gone his own way deaf and dumb, a quiet little gray-faced man good for nothing in the world but piling up more money. . . .