“Don’t do it, boy. If the time ever comes when you go so soft on me as to quit laying it on the line and start sifting out your language.…” Garlock paused. For one of the very few times in his life, he was at a loss for words. He thrust his hands into his pockets and shrugged his shoulders. “Hell, I don’t want to get maudlin, either…so…well, how many men, do you think, could have gone the route with me on this hellish job without killing me or me killing them?”
“Oh, that’s not.…”
“Lay it on the line, Jim. I know what I am. Just one. You. One man in six thousand million. Okay; how many women could live with me for a year without going crazy?”
“Lots of ’em; but, being masochists, they’d probably drive you nuts. And you can’t stand ‘stupidity’; which, by definition, lets everybody out. Nope, it’s a tough order to fill.”
“Check. She’d have to be strong enough and hard enough not to be afraid of me, by any trace. Able and eager to stand up to me and slug it out. To pin my ears back flat against my skull whenever she thinks I’m off the beam. Do it with skill and precision and nicety, with power and control; yet without doing herself any damage and without changing her basic feeling for me. In short, a female Jim James Nine.”
“Huh? Hell’s blowtorches! You think I’m like Belle Bellamy?”
“Not by nine thousand megacycles. Like Belle Bellamy could be and should be. Like I hope she will be. I’d have to give, too, of course—maybe we can make Christians out of each other. It’s quite a dream, I admit, but it’ll be Belle or nobody. But I’m not used to slopping over this way—let’s go.”
“I’m glad you did, big fellow—once in a lifetime is good for the soul. I’d say you were in love with her right now—except that if you were, you couldn’t possibly dissect her like a specimen on the table, the way you’ve just been doing. Are you or aren’t you?”
“I’ll be damned if I know. You and Brownie believe that the poets’ concept of love is valid. In fact, you make a case for its validity. I never have, and don’t now…but under certain conditions… I simply don’t know. Ask me again sometime; say in about a month?”
“That’s the surest thing you know. Oh, brother! This is a thing I’m going to watch with my eyes out on stalks!”
* * * *
For the next week, Belle locked her door every night. For another few nights, she did not lock it. Then, one night, she left it ajar. The following evening, the two again walked together to their doors.
“I left my door open last night.”
“I know you did.”
“Well?”
“And have you scream to high heaven that I opened it? And put me on a tape for willful inurbanity? For deliberate intersexual invasion of privacy?”
* * * *
“Blast and damn! You know perfectly well, Clee Garlock, I wouldn’t pull such a dirty, lousy trick as that.”
“Maybe I should apologize, then, but as a matter of fact I have no idea whatever as to what you wouldn’t do.” He stared at her, his face hard in thought. “As you probably know, I have had very little to do with women. That little has always been on a logical level. You are such a completely new experience that I can’t figure out what makes you tick.”
“So you’re afraid of me,” she sneered. “Is that it?”
“Close enough.”
“And I suppose it’s you that cartoonist what’s-his-name is using as a model for ‘Timorous Timmy’?”
“Since you’ve guessed it, yes.”
“You…you weasel!” She took three quick steps up the corridor, then back. “You say my logic is cockeyed. What system are you using now?”
“I’m trying to develop one to match yours.”
“Oh… I invited that one, I guess, since I know you aren’t afraid of God, man, woman, or devil…and you’re big enough so you don’t have to be proving it all the time.” She laughed suddenly, her face softening markedly. “Listen, you big lug. Why don’t you ever knock me into an outside loop? If I were you and you were me, I’d’ve busted me loose from my front teeth long ago.”
“I’m not sure whether I know better or am afraid to. Anyway, I’m not rocking any boat so far from shore.”
“Says you. You’re wonderful, Clee—simply priceless. Do you know you’re the only man I ever met that I couldn’t make fall for me like a rock falling down a cliff? And that the falling is altogether too apt to be the other way?”
“The first, I have suspected. The second is chemically-pure rocket-oil.”
“I hope it is.… I wish I could be as certain of it as you are.… You see, Clee, I really expected you to come in, last night, and there really wasn’t any bone in it. Surely, you don’t think I’m going toinvite you into my room, do you?”
“I can’t see why not. However, since no valid system of logic seems to apply, I accept your decision as a fact. By the same reasoning—however invalid—if I ask you again you will again refuse. So all that’s left, I guess, is for me to drag you into my room by force.”
He put his left arm around her and applied a tiny pressure against her side; under which she began to move slowly toward his door.
“You admit that you’re using force?” she asked. Her face was unreadable; her mental block was at its fullest force. “That I’m being coerced? Definitely?”
“Definitely,” he agreed. “At least ten dynes of sheer brute force. Not enough to affect a tape, but enough, I hope, to affect you. If it isn’t, I’ll use more.”
“Oh, ten dynes is enough. Just so it’s force.”
She raised her face toward his and threw both arms around his neck. His right arm went into action with his left, and Cleander Garlock forgot all about dynes and tapes.
After a time she disengaged one arm; reached out; opened his door. He gathered her up and, lips still locked to lips, carried her over the threshold.
* * * *
A few jumps later they met their first really old Arpalone. This Inspector was so old that his skin, instead of the usual bright, clear cobalt blue, was dull and tending toward gray. The old fellow was strangely garrulous, for a Guardian; he wanted them to pause a while and gossip.
“Yes, I am lonesome,” he admitted. “It has been a long time since I exchanged thoughts with anyone. You see, nobody has visited this planet—Groobe, its name is—since almost all our humanity was killed, a few periods ago.…”
“Killed? How?” Garlock asked sharply. “Not Dilipic?”
“Oh, you have seen them? I never have, myself. No, nothing nearly that bad. Merely the Ozobes. The world itself was scarcely harmed at all. Rehabilitation will be a simple matter, so there’s no real reason why some of those Engineers.…”
“The beast!” Lola shot a tight-beam thought at her husband. “Who cares anything about the rock and dirt of a planet? It’s the people that count and his are dead and he’s perfectly complaisant about it—just lonesome!”
“Don’t let it throw you, pet,” James soothed. “He’s an Arpalone, you know; not a sociological anthropologist.”
“…shouldn’t come out here and spend a few hours once in a while, but they don’t. Too busy with their own business, they say. But while you are physically human, mentally you are not. You’re all too…too… I can’t put my thought exactly on it, but…more as though you were human fighters, if such a thing could be possible.”
“We are fighters. Where we come from, most human beings are fighters.”
“Oh? I never heard of such a thing. Where can you be from?”
This took much explanation, since the Arpalone had never heard of inter-galactic travel. “You are willing, then, to fight side by side with us Arpalones against the enemies of humanity? You have actually done so, at times, and won?”
“We certainly have.”
“I am glad. I am expecting a call for help any time now. Will you please give me enough of your mental pattern, Doctor Garlock, so that I can call you in case of need? Thank you.”
“What makes you
think you’re going to get an S.O.S. so soon? Where from?”
“Because these Ozobe invasions come in cycles, years apart, but there are always several planets attacked at very nearly the same time. We were the first, this time; so there will be one or two others very shortly.”
“Do they always…kill all the people?” Lola asked.
“Oh, no. Scarcely half of the time. Depends on how many fighters the planet has, and how much outside help can get there soon enough.”
“Your call could come from any of the other solar systems in this neighborhood, then?” Garlock asked.
“Yes. There are fifteen inhabited planets within about six light-years of us, and we form a close-knit group.”
“What are these Ozobes?”
“Animals. Warm-blooded, but egg-layers, not mammals. Like this,” and the Inspector spread in their minds a picture of a creature somewhat like the flying tigers of Hodell, except that the color was black, shading off to iridescent green at the extremities. Also, it was armed with a short and heavy, but very sharp, sting.
“They say that they come from space, but I don’t believe it,” the old fellow went on. “What would a warm-blood be doing out in space? Besides, they couldn’t find anybody to lay their eggs in out there. No, sir, I think they live right here on Groobe somewhere, maybe holed up in caves or something for ten or thirteen years…but that wouldn’t make sense, either, would it? I just don’t know.…”
* * * *
Garlock finally broke away from the lonesome Inspector and thePleiades started down.
“That’s the most utterly horrible thing I ever heard of in my life!” Lola burst out. “Like wasps—only worse—people aren’t bugs! Why don’t all the planets get together and develop something to kill every Ozobe in every system of the group?”
“That one has got too many bones in it for me to answer,” James said.
“I’m going to get hold of that Engineer as soon as we land,” Lola said, darkly, “and stick a pin into him.”
They found the Engineering Office easily enough, in a snug camp well outside a large city. They grounded the starship and went out on foot; enjoying contact with solid ground. The Head Engineer was an Arpalone, too—Engineers were not a separate race, but dwellers on a planet of extremely high technology—but he did know anything about space-drives. His specialty was rehabilitation; he was top boss of a rehab crew.…
* * * *
Then Lola pushed Garlock aside. Yes, the Ozobes came from space. He was sure of it. Yes, they laid eggs in human bodies. Yes, they probably stayed alive quite a while—or might, except for the rehab crew. No, he didn’t know what would hatch out—he’d never let one live that long, but what the hell else could hatch except Ozobes? No, not one. Not one single damn one. If just one ever did, on any world where he bossed the job, he’d lose his job as boss and go to the mines for half a year.…
“Ridiculous!” Lola snapped. “If Ozobes hatched, they couldn’t possibly have come from space. If they did come from space, the adult form would have to be something able to get back into space, some way or other. That is simple elementary biology. Don’t you see that?”
He didn’t see it. He didn’t give a damn, either. It was none of his business; he was a rehab man.
Lola ran back to the ship in disgust.
“Something else is even more ridiculous, and is your business,” James told the Head Engineer. “Garlock and I are both engineers—top ones. We know definitely that a one-hundred-percent clean-up on such a job as this—millions—simply can’t be done. Ever. Under any conditions. Are you lying in your teeth or are you dumb enough to believe it yourself?”
“Neither one,” the Engineer insisted, stubbornly. “I’ve wondered, myself, at how I could get ’em all, but I always do—every time so far. That’s why they give me the big job. I’m good at it.”
“Oh—Lola’s right, Jim,” Garlock said. “It’s the adult form that hatches; something so different they don’t even recognize it. Something able to get into space. Enough survivors to produce the next generation.”
“Sure. I’ll tell Brownie—she’ll be tickled.”
“She’ll be more than tickled—she’ll want to hunt up somebody around here with three brain cells working and give ’em an earful.” Then, to the Engineer, “Do you know how they rehab a planet that’s been leveled flat by the golop?”
“You’ve seen one? I never have, but of course I’ve studied it. Slow, but not too difficult. After killing, the stuff weathers down in a few years—wonderful soil it makes—what makes it slow is that you have to wait fifty or a hundred years for the mountains to get built up again and for the earthquakes to quit.…”
“Excuse me, please—I’ve got a call—we have to leave, right now.”
The call was from the Inspector. The nearest planet, Clamer, was being invaded by the Ozobes and needed all the help they could get.
* * * *
In seconds the Pleiades was at the Port of Entry.
“Where is this Clamer?” Garlock asked.
The Inspector pointed a thought; all four followed it.
“Let’s go, Jim. Maybe.…”
“Just a minute!” Lola snapped. She was breathing hard, her eyes were almost shooting sparks as she turned to the old Arpalone and drove a thought so forcibly that he winced.
“Do you so-called ‘Guardians of Humanity’ care at all about the humanity you’re supposed to be protecting?” she demanded viciously, the thought boring in and twisting, “or are you just loafing on the job and doing as little as you possibly can without getting fired?”
Belle and Garlock looked at each other and grinned. James was surprised and shocked. This woman blowing her top was no Brownie Montandon any of them knew.
“We do everything we possibly can,” the Inspector was not only shocked, but injured and abused. “If there’s any one possible thing we haven’t done, even the tiniest.…”
“There’s plenty!” she snapped. “Plain, dumb stupidity, then, it must be. There must be somebody around here who has been at least exposed to elementary biology! You should have exterminated these Ozobe vermin ages ago. All you have to do is find out what its life cycle is. How many stages and what they are. How the adults get into space and where they go,” and she went on, in flashing thoughts, to explain in full detail.
“Are you smart enough to understand that?”
“Oh, yes. Your thought may be the truth, at that.”
“And are you interested enough to find out whose business it would be, and follow through on it?”
“Yes, of course. If it works, I’ll be quite famous for suggesting it. I’ll give you part of the credit.…”
“Keep the credit—just see to it that it gets done!” She whirled on James. “This loss of human life is so appallingly unnecessary! This time we’re going to Clamer, and nowhere else. Push the button, Jim.”
“All I can do is set up for it, pet. Whether we.…”
“We’ll get there!” she blazed. “It’s high time we got a break. Punch it! This time the ship’s going to Clamer, if we have to all get out and push it there! Now punch that button!”
James pushed the button, glanced into his scanner, and froze; eyes staring. He did not even whistle. Belle, however, did; with ear-shattering volume. Garlock’s mouth fell open in the biggest surprise of his life. They were in the same galaxy!
All three had studied charts of nebular configurations so long and so intensely that recognition of a full-sphere identity was automatic and instantaneous.
Lola, head buried in scanner, had already checked in with the Port Inspector.
“It is Clamer!” she shrieked aloud. “I told you it was time for our luck to change, if we pulled hard enough! They are being invaded by Ozobes and they did call for help and they didn’t think we could possibly get here this fast and we don’t need to be inspected because we’re compatible or we couldn’t have landed on Groobe!”
For five long minutes Garlock held
the starship motionless while he studied the entire situation. Then he drove a probe through the mental shield of the general in charge of the whole defense operation.
“Battle-Cruiser Pleiades, Captain Garlock commanding, reporting for duty in response to your S.O.S. received on Groobe.”
The general, furiously busy as he was, dropped all other business. “But you’re human! You can’t fight!”
“Watch us. You don’t know, apparently, that the Ozobe bases are on the far side of your moon. They’re bringing their fighters in most of the way in transports.”
“Why, they can’t be! They’re coming in from all directions from deep space!”
“That’s what they want you to think. They’re built to stand many hours of zero pressure and almost absolute zero cold. Question: if we destroy all their transport, say in three hours, can you handle all the fighters who will be in the air or in nearby space at that time?”
“Very easily. They’ve hardly started yet. I appoint you Admiral-pro-tem Garlock, in command of Space Operations, and will refer to you any other space-fighters who may come. I thank you, sir. Good luck.”
The general returned his attention to his boiling office. His mind was seething with questions as to what these not-human beings were, how or if they knew so much, and so on; but he forced them out of his mind and went, fast and efficient, back to work. James shot the Pleiades up to within a thousand miles or so of the moon.
“How long does it take to learn this bombing business, Jim?” Lola asked.
“About fifteen seconds. All you have to do is want to. Do you, really?”
“I really do. If I don’t do something to help these people,” it did not occur to her that she had already done a tremendous job, “I’ll never forgive myself.”
James showed her; and, much to her surprise, she found it very easy to do.
* * * *
The vessels transporting the invading forces were huge, spherical shells equipped with short-range drives—and with nothing else. No accommodations, no facilities, no food, no water, not even any air. Each transport, when filled to the bursting-point with as-yet-docile cargo, darted away; swinging around to approach Clamer from some previously-assigned direction. It did not, however, approach the planet’s surface. At about two thousand miles out, great ports opened and the load was dumped out into space, to fall the rest of the way by gravity. Then the empty shell, with only its one pilot aboard, rushed back for another load.
The Space Opera Megapack Page 104