Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  “I won’t go back!” Qanya cried vehemently. “I’ll die first! I never wanted to be a spider, anyway!”

  “And I,” growled Dworn, “won’t let you take her. I won’t let her go—” his face was pale, but he went on resolutely—“even if it means I can’t return to my own people.”

  The beetle chief surveyed the two young people gravely, then turned to confront the old woman. He said, “I don’t see that you have any further claim on the girl. According to our customs, she too can be ‘reborn’—this time into the beetle horde, as one of my people—and my son’s.”

  The head scorpion, looking on, nodded approval and grinned encouragingly at Dworn.

  The Spider Mother and the chief exchanged a long, stony look—on either side, the look of a ruler used to command.

  “It would be too bad,” said Yold softly, “to mar the Peace. But my warriors are within call, and. . . .”

  The Spider Mother turned away and spat. “Have it your way. Who wants weaklings in the Family!”

  The chief glanced sidelong at Dworn and Qanya, and saw that they were wholly absorbed in one another. With an open-handed gesture he invited the Spider Mother to follow him.

  “Shall we go, then,” he suggested politely, “and—while the Peace still reigns—find out whether the pill-bugs’ beverage is all they claim it is?”

  THE END

  THE GUZZLER

  After all, Black Roger was an honest man—a properly-licensed space pirate, never even suspected of tax-evasion!

  KRACHMEYER slumped spinelessly over his desk, propped his elbows on it and his head on his hands. “It isn’t enough,” he groaned, “that Black Roger the space pirate has to pick this asteroid to land on. On top of that, the very same day a guzzler turns up in the shaft!”

  Dirk MacGregor looked sympathetically down at Krachmeyer’s pink, bespectacled despair. To make his sympathy more evident, he too leaned heavily on the mine superintendent’s desk, and that overburdened piece of furniture squawked painfully and subsided at one corner.

  Krachmeyer jumped as if stabbed. “Don’t do that!” he shouted.

  Hastily Dirk straightened his six-foot-two frame, which towered impressively in his green and gold Ranger’s uniform. He gazed hurtly down at the damaged desk, and shook his head, muttering, “Under this light gravity—Whatever you paid for it, you were swindled.”

  “Don’t change the subject!” flared Krachmeyer.

  “Sorry,” said Dirk. “About your guzzler—that’s news to me; I came here, in re your call to the Park Commission, to serve a sojourn notice on Black Roger. That’s as far as my orders go.”

  “What!” yelped the mine manager. “Do you mean to tell me you’re going to let that skulking pirate roost here for two months, without making a move to throw him off?”

  “It’s the law. A space ship may land for repairs on any body in the public domain, and remain for sixty Earth days if necessary, before towing at the owner’s expense becomes obligatory.”

  Krachmeyer tore what was left of his hair. “Law! Is there no law for honest men?”

  Dirk shrugged. “Black Roger is an honest man, too. A properly-licensed space pirate, never even suspected of tax-evasion.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with his ship!”

  “If I went over it,” sighed Dirk, “something would be adequately out of whack; Black Roger isn’t feebleminded.”

  Krachmeyer dropped his head in his hands again. After a time he said hollowly, “About that uranium guzzler, I don’t suppose the Park Commission can see its way to do anything about that, either?”

  “Well,” said Dirk with a touch of embarrassment, “I guess it’s my duty to remind you that uranium guzzlers are protected by the game-laws. It’s a penitentiary offense to harm one—not so much because they’re valuable, as because they’re harmless ordinarily, but unpredictably dangerous when roused. That’s another thing,” he added. “I wouldn’t advise you to rouse it.”

  “Thanks,” said Krachmeyer bitterly. “It won’t rouse me, either; it’ll just eat me out of house and home, or—” he glanced round with distaste at the windowless, lead-sheathed walls, “out of a good paying job, at any rate. Forty tons of ore in the last two days have gone down that beast’s gullet!”

  “If you like,” said Dirk helpfully, “I can report your trouble to the Pest Control Bureau. They have guzzler-catching equipment, but they’re about two years behind . . . On the other hand,” he interrupted himself, staring past Krachmeyer, “I think maybe I’ll stick around for a while and study your problem myself.”

  ON THE OTHER hand, a girl had appeared in the doorway behind Krachmeyer. Her lissome form was draped in a sexy negligee, and—Dirk noticed afterwards—she had chestnut hair and wide blue eyes that measured the Ranger’s well-proportioned height with frank appreciation.

  “Hello,” she said warmly.

  Krachmeyer swiveled round in his chair; his gaze flickered back and forth between the two young people as if caught in an oscillating magnetic field.

  “Hello, Uncle Krach,” added the girl negligently.

  The addressee gulped. He said mechanically, “This is my niece, Miss Lorraine Farrar—Mr. MacGregor of the Park Service—Lorraine! What are you doing here?”

  “I heard you were having trouble, Uncle Krach, so I hitched a ride on one of the ore boats.”

  “Hitched a—Don’t you realize those ships are radioactively contaminated? Do you want your offspring to have two heads?”

  The girl blushed delicately. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about my offspring as if I spawned on alternate Tuesdays,” she protested. “Anyway, I had a compartment shielded; and all the robots were very nice.” She looked back to Dirk, and drew her robe closer around her. “I was just getting freshed up after the trip. I didn’t know anybody else was here; Uncle Krach was making all the noise.”

  “Don’t call me Uncle Krach!” snorted Krachmeyer, but nobody paid attention to him. He returned to his favorite posture of despair, moaning, “It isn’t enough, Black Roger and a guzzler; she has to come along.”

  Dirk said smoothly, “I was just telling your Uncle that I feel it my duty, as representative of the Park Service, to do everything in my power to solve his difficulties.”

  “They’re my difficulties too,” said Lorraine Farrar. “I’m the owner.”

  “Oh.” Even Dirk was momentarily speechless.

  “I inherited the lease from my father. Father passed on just after he’d acquired it, from a lifetime of overwork supporting a family of eleven—me and ten wolfhounds. I’m carrying on his work. Since the mines here are completely robot-operated, and ordinarily don’t require any human attention, I hired Uncle Krach to manage them. But now things have gone wrong, I thought I’d better come out myself.”

  Dirk gave her a winning smile. “Don’t worry, everything will shortly be under control; I’m thinking.”

  LORRAINE looked at him with a hint of suspicion, but didn’t ask what he was thinking about. She perched herself cautiously on a corner of the sagging desk, and said, “I heard something about a guzzler. What’s that—more trouble?”

  “A uranium guzzler,” explained Dirk, “is the System’s only known animal with a nucleonic, rather than electronic, body chemistry. It’s very rare; they think it’s a survival from an earlier stage in planetary evolution, when radioactives were more plentiful than now.”

  “How could one get on an isolated asteroid?”

  “That’s hard to say. It may have been hibernating here the last billion years or so—since before the fifth planet broke up to form the Asteroid Belt—until finally it woke up and felt hungry. But a hungry guzzler will eat enormous quantities of uranium to stoke the atomic pile in its stomach. In one of its stomachs, I should say; it has a complex series of them, a lot like the Earthly ruminants’, where the ore it eats is refined and the uranium is transmutation to plutonium begun. Its power-pile is analogous to a cow’s abomasum.”

  “A cow’s abomination
he talks about now,” muttered Krachmeyer, shocked to the core.

  Lorraine looked seriously worried. “So the mine’s easy pickings for this thing with its peculiar appetite. And—working on a shoestring as we still are—we may be bankrupt before it’s satisfied.”

  “For two days now it’s eaten all the best ore.” Krachmeyer stared morosely at a wall clock. “It’ll be crawling into the shaft again any time now—it comes back every six hours.”

  “It comes and goes, eh?” Dirk brightened. “Why don’t you just slam the door in its face?”

  It was Lorraine who answered. “We’re using stripped-down Mark VI robots, for economy. If we closed the shaft, there’d soon be enough radon accumulated to short-circuit their brains.”

  “And anyway, the guzzler can blast its way through solid rock,” added Dirk. “That wasn’t so hot—but wait a minute.” He looked piercingly at Krachmeyer. “When did the animal first show up?”

  “What does that matter?” shrugged the manager. But he leafed through a log book, most of whose pages were blank save for neurotic-looking doodles, and eventually found an entry. “Thirteen o’clock, July 8—day before yesterday.”

  “And according to your radiogram,” remembered Dirk, “Black Roger landed his ship on the other side of the asteroid at 10:30. Ha!”

  “What do you mean, ‘Ha!’ ?”

  “I’ve got a new idea,” elaborated Dirk. He straightened his shoulders and his tunic. “First, I think I’d like to watch this guzzler at work; you must have an inspection runabout here . . .”

  THE RUNABOUT was a bathyspheric, lead-armored vehicle with periscopic viewports. It used an antigravity motor, which meant that when it was turned on, the stars in their courses faltered—relative to it—the expanding universe ceased to expand, and the unity of the Cosmic All received a severe kick in the pants. It was quite comfortable for the two of them, though—Krachmeyer had stayed home, pleading heartburn.

  Dirk piloted the sphere carefully down the wide shaft aimed at the asteroid’s heart. As the bottom came nearer, they could see, by the dim blue glow of the great uranium vein that made this insignificant body a simmering mass of wealth, spidery robots floating to and fro, wielding drills, picks, and shovels in a radioactive atmosphere that would have killed an unprotected human in nothing flat.

  The girl breathed in Dirk’s ear: “It’s already come! There—on the slag heap!”

  The Ranger stiffened and glued his eyes closer to the periscope. Then he saw the guzzler, hitching its bloated, Jointed length across the surface of a great pile of tailings, its magnetic tendrils mooring it to the rocks. It was a big one, a dozen segments long, with a new section budding at the rear end, seeming to indicate that it was thriving on its fat fare. Presently it would grow another head there, pinch in two in the middle, and be double trouble.

  “What’s it think it’s up to now?” frowned Dirk. The guzzler had stopped atop the slag heap, and lowered its nozzle-shaped head. Suddenly flaming-hot gases belched from its snout; rock and gravel sprayed in a directions under the light gravity. Fragments rattled on the runabout’s hull. Then, just as abruptly, the guzzler ceased to exhale and began to root and gulp contentedly. Beneath the surface layer of cast-off rock had appeared a solid heap of luminously pure uranium ore.

  Krachmeyer had forlornly ordered the robots to disguise the high-grade stuff as a worthless dump.

  Dirk shook his head sadly. “No good; the beast has a sort of Geiger counter in its head. It’ll go straight to the biggest center of radioactivity within miles.”

  As they watched, the guzzler continued to guzzle, burrowing and munching happily and growing steadily more rotund. The robots, having no instructions with regard to it, went stolidly ahead with their work.

  “Maybe,” Dirk broke a brooding silence, “you have some idea why Black Roger would choose to land here.”

  Lorraine’s smooth brow creased. “Well—obviously he must have designs on the mine. This lode will be one of the most profitable ever, once we get properly into production. Now you mention it—on Mars a couple of weeks ago I was approached by a lawyer who said he was acting as an agent for somebody he wouldn’t name, and offered me a price for the lease—a ridiculously low price. Later I heard that he was a well-known shyster who’d successfully defended Black Roger, not long ago, in a case before the Piracy Board.”

  “Ha!” said Dirk again.

  The guzzler finished its meal and, bulging, maneuvered its unwieldy bulk once more toward the top of the shaft. Dirk floated the runabout slowly upward before it until both ship and monster emerged onto the surface of the asteroid. Then he began to follow it as it ambled away across the rugged, meteor-pocked crust.

  IT WAS a patience-trying pursuit. After some minutes Lorraine demanded restlessly, “What are you trying to do? Where’s it going?”

  “Ask it,” advised Dirk enigmatically. “Or maybe Black Roger could tell you.”

  It took the full-fed guzzler most of two hours, traveling a great-circle route, to complete half a circuit of the little asteroid. But at last, dead ahead of its resolutely pointing snout, something loomed into view—a long, rakish, soot-colored space ship, resting in a little valley. It was Black Roger’s vessel, the Vulture. If there had been any doubt of that, it would have been removed by the skull-and-crossbones painted flamboyantly on the ship’s flank.

  Lorraine’s small fists clenched. “What a nerve!”

  But Dirk smiled exultantly. “The ends are meeting,” he observed as he lifted the runabout to where they could see everything that went on around the pirate ship.

  The guzzler jogged steadily onward; when it was a hundred yards away, an airlock opened in the Vulture’s side, and half a dozen members of its crew—lean, hardbitten Mark IX robots—scrambled out. One of them advanced directly to meet the uranium-eater, one metal hand invitingly extended.

  It was too far to see what he held, but the guzzler lowered its snout and snuffled enthusiastically at the mechanical man’s palm, for all the world like a horse receiving a lump of sugar.

  “Radium salts, probably,” judged Dirk. “Guzzlers are crazy about them.”

  The robot backed away to join his fellows where they stood at expectant attention. They, and the watchers above, had not long to wait. An odd shudder ran down the guzzler’s segmented length. Another followed, and another; the huge beast lurched in a vast paroxysm, and the eruption came in a shower of radio-active sparks.

  The pirate robots got going promptly; they produced big metal-fabric sacks, and—while the guzzler sat humped dejectedly, too sick to care—filled them with tons of almost-pure uranium. While the guzzler had been traveling between the mine and the space ship, its complicated stomachs had had time to sort and refine the ore it had wolfed.

  AS THE laden robots trudged off to the Vulture’s lock, Dirk swung the runabout back toward the mine. “Quite a system,” he admired. “A good strong emetic with the radium bait—and presto! Black Roger has the uranium, and the guzzler has nothing to do but hike back and make more inroads into your production. It’s a vicious cycle that keeps coming out in Black Roger’s favor; and after a while he can buy the whole works for a song.”

  The girl’s blue eyes shot sparks. “But we know his plot now. Can’t you arrest him?”

  “For what? Undoubtedly he caught the guzzler somewhere else, tamed it after a fashion, and brought it here. But how are you going to prove that in court? And until it’s proved, the guzzler is an indigenous wild animal, and Black Roger is no more responsible for its actions than any other citizen. His legal position is like the South American ambassador’s wife—impenetrable, impregnable and insurmountable.”

  But he whistled gaily as he piloted the runabout homeward. Lorraine stared frustratedly at him. Finally, as the vehicle sank into its concave cradle atop the mine headquarters, and its door opened automatically into the building, her expression changed, softened, and became helplessly, meltingly, irresistibly appealing. She brushed against Dirk
in the doorway and her eyelids fluttered as her gaze met his. “Aren’t you going to do something about that awful pirate?” she murmured.

  “Do something?” Dirk grinned.

  “Well, I’ve still got a sixty-day sojourn notice to serve on Black Roger; guess I’ll deliver it to him now.”

  Then he bent and kissed the girl with a suddenness and violence that left her views in the matter wholly an academic question, turned and was gone with long strides toward the chamber where he had left his spacesuit.

  As a matter of fact, Dirk did not start at once to serve the papers on Black Rogers. After he returned to his little Ranger’s patrol boat, he spent a busy while in its engine-compartment before going up to the control cabin and pointing the ship’s nose toward the Vulture’s roosting place.

  Even then he traveled slowly, following the route the guzzler had taken; about halfway along it, he paused to cruise in leisurely circles for ten minutes, dropping numerous small packages from the apparatus ordinarily used for firefighting bombs and miscellaneous missiles . . .

  A couple of minutes after that, he nosed his ship down a short distance from the black pirate vessel. On the way he had glimpsed the guzzler below, billowing methodically back toward the mine, and had waved at it benevolently. He had no fear that it would overlook his presents for it; its special senses would lead it straight to every one.

  Dirk thrust his official papers into a pouch, buckled his service whammy-gun around his waist outside his spacesuit, and shoved off in a long asteroid-leap for the Vulture. As he came within the artificial gravity field that both moored the ship and made it habitable, he dropped heavily to the ground; but, nothing abashed, Dirk advanced and banged deafeningly on the outer lock.

  It was opened promptly by a sour-looking robot. Dirk tapped the Ranger’s badge on his chest, and the automaton moved grudgingly aside, and even more grudgingly answered Dirk’s imperious question by pointing aft.

  DIRK COULD have located Black Roger’s living-quarters easily, anyway, by the noise of a loud phonograph playing “Hyperbolic Blues”. Dirk pushed a door open without ceremony, and surprised the pirate in the midst of a litter of recording tapes, unwashed glasses and dogeared magazines with terrifying covers.