The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

  He pulled in his receptors and scanned the crowded ways for guardians—he’d have to call them that until either he or Lola found out their real name. Same as at the airport—the more people, the more guardians. What were they? How? And why?

  * * * *

  He probed; carefully but thoroughly. When he had talked to the Arpalone he had read him easily enough, but here there was nothing whatever to read. The creature simply was not thinking at all. But that didn’t make sense! Garlock tuned, first down, then up; and finally, at the very top of his range, he found something, but he did not at first know what it was. It seemed to be a mass-detector…no, two of them, paired and balanced. Oh, that was it! One tuned to humanity, one to the other guardians—balanced across a sort of bridge—that was how they kept the ratio so constant! But why? There seemed to be some wide-range receptors there, too, but nothing seemed to be coming in.…

  While he was still studying and still baffled, some kind of stimulus, which was so high and so faint and so alien that he could neither identify nor interpret it, touched the Arpalone’s far-flung receptors. Instantly the creature jumped, his powerful, widely-bowed legs sending him high above the heads of the crowd and, it seemed to Garlock, directly toward him. Simultaneously there was an insistent, low-pitched, whistling scream, somewhat like the noise made by an airplane in a no-power dive; and Garlock saw, out of the corner of one eye, a yellowish something flashing downward through the air.

  At the same moment the woman immediately in front of Garlock stifled a scream and jumped backward, bumping into him and almost knocking him down. He staggered, caught his balance, and automatically put his arm around his assailant, to keep her from falling to the sidewalk.

  * * * *

  In the meantime the guardian, having landed very close to the spot the woman had occupied a moment before, leaped again; this time vertically upward. The thing, whatever it was, was now braking frantically with wings, tail, and body; trying madly to get away. Too late. There was a bone-crushing impact as the two bodies came together in mid-air; a jarring thud as the two creatures, inextricably intertwined, struck the pavement as one.

  The thing varied in color, Garlock now saw, shading from bright orange at the head to pale yellow at the tail. It had a savagely-tearing curved beak; tremendously powerful wings; its short, thick legs ended in hawk-like talons.

  The guardian’s bowed legs had already immobilized the yellow wings by clamping them solidly against the yellow body. His two lower arms were holding the frightful talons out of action. His third hand gripped the orange throat, his fourth was exerting tremendous force against the jointure of neck and body. The neck, originally short, was beginning to stretch.

  For several seconds Garlock had been half-conscious that his accidental companion was trying, with more and more energy, to disengage his encircling left arm from her waist. He wrenched his attention away from the spectacular fight—to which no one else, not even the near-victim, had paid the slightest attention—and now saw that he had his arm around the bare waist of a statuesque matron whose entire costume would have made perhaps half of a Tellurian sun-suit. He dropped his arm with a quick and abject apology.

  “I should apologize to you instead, Captain Garlock,” she thought, with a wide and friendly smile, “for knocking you down, and I thank you for catching me before I fell. I should not have been startled, of course. I would not have been, except that this is the first time that I, personally, have been attacked.”

  “But what are they?” Garlock blurted.

  “I don’t know.” The woman turned her head and glanced, in complete disinterest, at the two furiously-battling creatures. Garlock knew now that this was the first time, except for that instantly-dismissed thrill of surprise at being the actual target of an attack, that she had thought of either of them. “Orange-yellow? It could be a…a fumapty, perhaps, but I’ve no idea, really. You see, such things are none of our business.”

  She thought at him, a half-shrug, half-grimace of mild distaste—not at the personal contact with the man nor at the savage duel; but at even thinking of either the guardian or the yellow monster—and walked away into the crowd.

  Garlock’s attention flashed back to the fighters. The yellow thing’s neck had been stretched to twice its natural length and the guardian hadeaten almost through it. There was a terrific crunch, a couple of smacking, gobbling swallows, and head parted from body. The orange beak still clashed open and shut, however, and the body still thrashed violently.

  Shifting his grips, the guardian proceeded to tear a hole into his victim’s body, just below its breast-bone. Thrusting two arms into the opening, he yanked out two organs—one of which, Garlock thought, could have been the heart—and ate them both; if not with extreme gusto, at least in a workmanlike and thoroughly competent fashion. He then picked up the head in one hand, grabbed the tip of a wing with another, and marched up the street for half a block, dragging the body behind him.

  He lifted a manhole cover with his two unoccupied hands, dropped the remains down the hole thus exposed, and let the cover slam back into place. He then squatted down, licked himself meticulously clean with a long, black, extremely agile tongue, and went on about his enigmatic business quite as though nothing had happened.

  Garlock strolled around a few minutes longer, but could not recapture any interest in the doings of the human beings around him. He had filed away every detail of what had just happened, and it had so many bizarre aspects that he could not think of anything else. Wherefore he flagged down a “taxi” and was taken out to the Pleiades. Belle and Lola were in the Main.

  * * * *

  “I saw the damndest thing, Clee!” Lola exclaimed. “I’ve been gnawing my fingernails off up to the knuckles, waiting for you!”

  Lola’s experience had been very similar to Garlock’s own, except in that her monster was an intense green in color and looked something like a bat about four feet long, with six-inch canine teeth and several stingers.…

  “Did you find out the name of the thing?” Garlock asked.

  “No. I asked half-a-dozen people, but nobody would even listen to me except one half-grown boy, and the best he could do was that it might be something he had heard another boy say somebody had told him might be a ‘lemart.’ And as to those lower-case Arpalones, the best I could dig out of anybody was just ‘guardians.’ Did you do any better?”

  “No, I didn’t do as well,” and he told the girls about his own experience.

  “But I didn’t find any detectors or receptors, Clee,” Lola frowned. “Where were they?”

  “’Way up—up here,” he showed her. “I’ll make a full tape tonight on everything I found out about the guardians and the Arpalones—besides my regular report, I mean—since they’re yours, and you can make me one about your friend the green bat.…”

  * * * *

  “Hey, I like that!” Belle broke in. “That could be taken amiss, you know, by such a sensitive soul as I!”

  “Check.” Garlock chuckled. “I’ll have to file that one, in case I want to use it sometime. How’re you coming, Belle?”

  “Nice!” Belle’s voracious mind had been so busy absorbing new knowledge that she had temporarily forgotten about her fight with her captain. “I’m just about done here. I’ll be ready tomorrow, I think, to visit their library and tape up some planetological and planetographical—notice how insouciantly I toss off those two-credit words?—data on this here planet Hodell.”

  “Good going. You’ve been listening to this stuff Lola and I were chewing on—does any of it make sense to you?”

  “It does not. I never heard anything to compare with it.”

  “Excuse me for changing the subject,” Lola put in, plaintively, “but when, if ever, do we eat? Do we have to wait until that confounded James boy gets back from wherever it was he went?”

  “If you’re hungry, we’ll eat now.”

  “Hungry? Look!” Lola turned herself sidewise, placed one hand in the small
of her back, and pressed hard with the other her flat, taut belly. “See? Only a couple of inches from belt-buckle to backbone—dangerously close to the point of utter collapse.”

  “You poor, abused little thing!” Garlock laughed and all three crossed the room to the dining alcove. While they were still ordering, James appeared beside them.

  “Find out anything?” Garlock asked.

  “Yes and no. Yes, in that they have an excellent observatory, with a hundred-eighty-inch reflector, on a mountain only seventy-five miles from here. No, in that I didn’t find any duplication of nebulary configurations with the stuff I had with me. However, it was relatively coarse. Tomorrow I’ll take a lot of fine stuff along. It’ll take some time—a full day, at least.”

  “I expected that. Good going, Jim!”

  All four ate heartily, and, after eating, they taped up the day’s reports. Then, tired from their first real day’s work in weeks, all went to their rooms.

  * * * *

  A few minutes later, Garlock tapped lightly at Lola’s door.

  “Come in.” She stiffened involuntarily, then relaxed and smiled. “Oh, yes, Clee: of course. You’re.…”

  “No, I’m not. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about you since last night, and I may have come up with an answer or two. Also, Belle knows we aren’t pairing, and if we don’t hide behind a screen at least once in a while, she’ll know we aren’t going to.”

  “Screen?”

  “Screen. Didn’t you know these four private rooms are solid? Haven’t you read your house-tape yet?”

  “No. But do you think Belle would actually peek?”

  “Do you think she wouldn’t?”

  “Well, I don’t like her very much, but I wouldn’t think she would do anything like that, Clee. It isn’t urbane.”

  “She isn’t urbane, either, whenever she thinks it might be advantageous not to be.”

  “What a terrible thing to say!”

  “Take it from me, if Belle Bellamy doesn’t know everything that goes on it isn’t from lack of trying. You wouldn’t know about room service, either, then—better scan that tape before you go to sleep tonight—what’ll you have in the line of a drink to while away enough time so she will know we’ve been playing games?”

  “Ginger ale, please.”

  “I’ll have ginger beer. You do it like so.” He slid a panel aside, his fingers played briefly on a typewriter-like keyboard. Drinks and ice appeared. “Anything you want—details of the tape.”

  He lighted two cigarettes, handed her one, stirred his drink. “Now, fair lady—or should I say beauteous dark lady?—we will follow the precept of that immortal Chinese philosopher, Chin On.”

  “You are a Prime Operator, aren’t you?” She laughed, but sobered quickly. “I’m worried. You said I flaunted virginity like a banner, and now Belle.… What am I doing wrong?”

  “There’s a lot wrong. Not so much what you’re doing as what you aren’t doing. You’re too aloof—detached—egg-headish. You know the score, words and music, but you don’t sing. All you do is listen. Belle thinks you’re not only a physical virgin, but a psychic-blocked prude. I know better. You’re so full of conflict between what you want to do—what you know is right—and what those three-cell-brained nincompoops made you think you ought to do that you have got no more degrees of freedom than a piston-rod. You haven’t been yourself for a minute since you came aboard. Check?”

  “You have been thinking, haven’t you? You may be right; except that it’s been longer than that…ever since the first preliminaries, I think. But what can I do about it, Clee?”

  “Contact. Three-quarters full, say; enough for me to give you what I think is the truth.”

  “But you said you never went screens down with a woman?”

  “There’s a first time for everything. Come in.”

  * * * *

  She did so, held contact for almost a minute, then pulled herself loose.

  “Ug-gh-gh.” She shivered. “I’m glad I haven’t got a mind like that.”

  “And the same from me to you. Of course the real truth may lie somewhere in between. I may be as far off the beam on one side as you are on the other.”

  “I hope so. But it cleared things up no end—it untied a million knots. Even that other thing—brotherly love? It’s a very nice concept—you see, I never had any brothers.”

  “That’s probably one thing that was the matter with you. Nothing warmer than that, certainly, and never will be.”

  “And I suppose you got the thought—it must have jumped up and smacked you—” Lola’s hot blush was visible even through her heavy tan, “how many times I’ve felt like running my fingers up and down your ribs and grabbing a handful of those terrific muscles of yours, just to see if they’re as hard as they look?”

  “I’m glad you brought that up; I don’t know whether I would have dared to or not. You’ve got to stop acting like a Third instead of an Operator; and you’ve got to stop acting as though you had never been within ten feet of me. Now’s as good a time as any.” He took off his shirt and struck a strong-man’s pose. “Come ahead.”

  “By golly, I’m going to!” Then, a moment later, “Why, they’re even harder! How do you, a scientist, psionicist, and scholar, keep in such hard shape as that?”

  “An hour a day in the gym, three hundred sixty-five days a year. Many are better—but a hell of a lot are worse.”

  “I’ll say.” She finished her ginger ale, sat down in her chair, leaned back and put her legs up on the bed. “That was a relief of tension if there ever was one. I haven’t felt so good since they picked me as home-town candidate—and that was a mighty small town and eight months ago. Bring on your dragons, Clee, and I’ll slay ’em far and wide. But I can’t actually be like she is.…”

  “Thank God for that. Deliver me from two such pretzel-benders aboard one ship.”

  “…but I could have been a pretty good actress, I think.”

  “Correction, please. ‘Outstanding’ is the word.”

  “Thank you, kind sir. And women—men, too, of course—do bring up certain memories, to…to.…”

  “To roll ’em around on their tongues and give their taste-buds a treat.”

  “Exactly. So where I don’t have any appropriate actual memories to bring up, I’ll make like an actress. Check?”

  “Good girl! Now you’re rolling—we’re in like Flynn. Well, we’ve been in screen long enough, I guess. Fare thee well, little sister Brownie, until we meet again.” He tossed the remains of their refreshments, trays and all, into the chute, picked up his shirt, and started out.

  “Put it on, Clee!” she whispered, intensely.

  “Why?” He grinned cheerfully. “It’d look still better if I peeled down to the altogether.”

  “You’re incorrigible,” she said, but her answering grin was wide and perfectly natural. “You know, if I had had a brother something like you it would have saved me a lot of wear and tear. I’ll see you in the morning before breakfast.”

  * * * *

  And she did. They strolled together to breakfast; not holding hands, but with hip almost touching hip. Relaxed, friendly, on very cordial and satisfactory terms. Lola punched breakfast orders for them both. Belle drove a probe, which bounced—Lola’s screen was tight, although her brown eyes were innocent and bland.

  But during the meal, in response to a double-edged, wickedly-barbed remark of Belle’s, a memory flashed into being above Lola’s shield. It was the veriest flash, instantly suppressed. Her eyes held clear and steady; if she blushed at all it did not show.

  Belle caught it, of course, and winked triumphantly at Garlock. She knew, now, what she had wanted to know. And, Prime Operator though he was, it was all he could do to make no sign; for that fleetingly-revealed memory was a perfect job. He would not have—couldnot have—questioned it himself, except for one highly startling fact. It was of an event that had not happened and never would!

  And after breakfas
t, at some distance from the others, “That is my girl, Brownie! You’re firing on all forty barrels. You’re an Operator, all right; and it takes a damn good one to lie like that with her mind!”

  “Thanks to you, Clee. And thanks a million, really. I’m me again—I think.”

  Then, since Belle was looking, she took him by both ears, pulled his head down, and kissed him lightly on the lips. The spontaneity and tenderness were perfect at that moment. Clee’s appreciation was obvious.

  “I know I said you’d have to kiss me next time,” Lola said, very low, “but this act needs just this much of an extra touch. Anyway, suchlittle, tiny, sisterly ones as this, and out in public, don’t count.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Lola and Garlock went to town in the same taxi. As they were about to separate, Garlock said:

  “I don’t like those hell-divers, yellow, green, or any other color; and you, Brownie, are very definitely not expendable. Are you any good at mind-bombing?”

  “Why, I never heard of such a thing.”

  “You isolate a little energy in the Op field, remembering of course, that you’re handling a hundred thousand gunts. Transpose it into platinum or uranium—anything good and heavy. For one of these monsters you’d need two or three micrograms. For a battleship, up to maybe a gram or so. ’Port it to the exact place you want it to detonate. Reconvert and release instantaneously. One-hundred-percent-conversion atomic bomb, tailored exactly to fit the job. Very effective.”

  “It would be. My God, Clee, can you do that?”

  “Sure—so can you. Any Operator can.”

  “Well, I won’t. I never will. Besides, I’d probably kill too many people, besides the monster. No, I’ll ’port back to the Main if anything attacks me. I’m chain lightning at that.”

  “Do that, then. And if anything very unusual happens give me a flash.”