A slightly chilled breeze tickled the Metag’s back-spines for a moment. There was no nonsense about the Metag; but just the same, his conscience—like that of Cushgar generally—was riddled enough to be conducive to occasional superstitious chills.
“There they are, sir!” the adjutant announced suddenly, in an excited quaver.
The Metag stared unbelievingly.
It was as bad as the worst of the reports. It was worse! Secure behind the Giant’s defenses, the sight of a few thousand hostile cruisers wouldn’t have caused him a qualm—
But this!
There were a few small war vessels among them—none over six hundred feet long. But, so far as one could tell from their seared, beam-blasted exteriors, most of them had been freighters of every possible size, type and description. There was a sprinkling of dainty, badly slashed yachts and other personal space craft. No wonder they’d been mistaken for the murdered cold hulks of the centuries, swept along in a current of awful new life—!
But the worst of it was that, mixed up with that stream, was stuff which simply didn’t belong in space—it should have been gliding sedately over the surface of some planetary sea! Some, by Old Webolt, had wings!
And that one, there!
“It’s a house!” the Metag howled, in horrified recognition. “A thundering, Old-Webolt-damned HOUSE!”
House and all, the battered ghost-horde came flashing up at a pace that couldn’t have been matched by Cushgar’s newest destroyers. Ponderously and enormously, the Giant raced forward in what was, even now, an obviously futile attempt to meet them.
The adjutant was gabbling at his side.
“Sir, we may just be able to reach their flank with the grapnels before they’re past!”
“Get them out!” the Metag roared. “Full range! Get them out! We’ve got to stop one of them—find out! It’s a masquerade—”
They didn’t quite make it. Near the end of the van, a torpedo-shaped, blackened thing seemed to be touched for a moment by a grapnel beam’s tip. It was whirled about in a monstrous semicircle, then darted off at a tangent and shot away after the others. They vanished in the direction of; Cushgar’s heart-cluster.
“That was a mistake!” breathed the Metag.” It’ll be telling them about us. If the main body deflects its course, we’ll never . . . no, wait! There’s one more coming—stop it! NOW!”
A slender, three-hundred-foot space yacht flashed headlong into a cluster of the Giant’s grapnels and freezers and stopped dead.
“And now!” The Metag passed a broad tongue over his trembling lips. “Now we’ll find out! Bring them in!”
Grapnels and tractors began to maneuver the little yacht in carefully through the intricate maze of passages between the Giant’s overlapping first, second, and third defense zones. There was nothing wrong with this ghost’s looks; it gleamed blue and silver and unblemished in the lights glaring upon it from a hundred different directions. It might have taken off ten minutes before on its maiden flight.
The Great Squid of space had caught itself a shining minnow.
“Sir,” the adjutant said uneasily, “mightn’t it be better to beam it first?”
The Metag stared at him.
“And kill whoever’s inside before we’ve talked to them?” he inquired carefully. “Have you gone mad? Does that look like a battleship to you—or do you think they are ghosts? It’s the wildest good luck we caught them. If it hadn’t come straight at us, as if it wanted to be caught—”
He paused a moment, scowling out through the screens at the yacht which now hung in a bundle of guide beams just above the Giant’s yawning intake-port. The minnow was about to be swallowed.
“As if it wanted to be caught?” he repeated doubtfully.
It was the last doubt he had.
The little yacht moved.
It moved out of the grapnels and tractors and freezers as if there weren’t any! It slid over the monitor’s spindle length inside its defenses like a horrible caress. Behind it, the Giant’s multiple walls folded back in a white-hot, thick-lipped wound. The Giant split down its length like a giant clam, opened out and spilled its flaming, exploding guts into space.
The little yacht darted on, unblemished, to resume its outrider position on the ghost-van’s flank.
Zone Agent Pagadan of Lar-Sancaya really earned herself a chunk of immortal glory that day! But, unfortunately, no trace of the Giant was ever discovered again. And so no one would believe her, though she swore to the truth on a stack of Lar-Sancava’s holiest writings and on seven different lie detectors. Everyone knew what Pagadan could do to a lie detector, and as for the other—
Well, there remained a reasonable doubt.
“What about your contact with the ghosts—the invaders?” Cushgar-called to the invincible Giant. “Have you stopped them? Destroyed them?”
The Giant gave no answer.
Cushgar called the Giant. Cushgar called the Giant. Cushgar called the Giant. Cushgar called the Giant—
Cushgar stared, appalled, into its night-sky and listened. Some millions of hostile stars stared back with icy disdain. Not a cry came again from the Giant—not a whisper!
The main body of the ghost fleet passed the spot twenty minutes later. It looked hardly damaged at all. In its approximate center was Zone Agent Zamman Tarradang-Pok’s black globe, and inside the globe Zamm lay in Deep Rest. Her robot knew its duty—it would arouse her the instant it made hostile contact. It had passed through a third of Cushgar’s territory by now, but it hadn’t made any as yet.
The main body overtook the eager beavers up front eight hours later and merged with them. Straggled groups came up at intervals from behind and joined. The ghost fleet formed into a single cluster—
A hell-wind blew from the Galaxy’s center on Cushgar’s heart; and panic rushed before it. The dead were combing: the slaughtered billions, the shattered hulks, the broken defenders—joined now in a monstrous, unstoppable army of judgment that outsped sane thought!
Cushgar panicked—and the good, solid strategy of centuries was lost. Nightmare was plunging at it! Scattered fleet after fleet, ship after ship, it hurled what it could grab up into the path of the ghosts.
Not a cry, not a whisper, came back from the sacrifices!
Then the remaining fleets refused to move.
Zamm was having a nice dream.
It didn’t surprise her particularly. Deep Rest was mostly dreamless; but at some levels it produced remarkably vivid and detailed effects. On more than one occasion they’d even tricked her into thinking they were real!
This time her ship appeared to have docked itself somewhere. The somno-cabin was still darkened, but the rest of it was all lit up. There were a lot of voices.
Zamm zipped up the side of her coverall suit and sat up on the edge of the couch. She listened a moment, and laughed. This one was going to be silly but nice!
“Box cars again!” a woman’s voice shouted in the control room as Zamm came down the passage from her cabin. “You crummy, white-whiskered, cheating old—” A round of applause drowned out the last word, or words.
“Lady or no lady,” the voice of Senator Thartwith rose in sonorous indignation, “one more such crack and I mow you down!”
The applause went up a few decibels.
“And here’s Zamm!” someone yelled.
They were all around her suddenly. Zamm grinned at them, embarrassed. “Glad you found the drinks!” she murmured.
The tall Goddess of Amuth, still flushed from her argument with Zone Agent Thartwith, scooped Zamm up from behind and set her on the edge of a table.
“Where’s a glass for Zamm?”
She sipped it slowly, looking them over. There they were, the tricky and tough ones—the assassins and hunters and organizers and spies! The Co-ordinator’s space pack, the innermost circle. There he was himself!
“Hi, Bent!” she said, respecting his mission-alias even in a dream. “Hi, Weems! . . . Hi, Ferd!” she nodded
around the circle between sips.
Two score of them or more, come into Deep Rest to tell her good-by! She’d bought them all their lives, at one time or another; and they’d bought her hers. But she’d never seen more than three together at any one time in reality. Took a dream to gather them all!
Zamm laughed.
“Nice party!” she smiled. Nice dream. She put down her empty glass.
“That’s it!” said the Goddess Loppos. She swung Zamm’s feet up on the table, and pulled her around by the shoulders to look at the wall. There was a vision port there, but it was closed.
“What’s all this?” Zamm smiled expectantly, lying back in Loppos’ arms. What goofy turn would it take now?
The vision port clicked open.
Harsh daylight streamed in.
The ship seemed to have set itself down in a sort of hot, sandy park. There was a huge gray building in the background. Zamm gazed at the building, the smile going slowly from her lips. A hospital, wasn’t it? Where’d she seen—?
Her eyes darted suddenly to the lower left corner of the port. The edge of another building was visible there—a small house it was, also gray and very close. It would be right beside the ship!
Zamm convulsed.
“No!” she screamed. “It’s a dream!”
She was being lifted from the table and put on her feet. Her knees wobbled, then stiffened.
“They’re feeling fine, Zamm!” the voice of the gray-haired man called Bent was saying. He added: “The boy’s got pretty big!”
“She’ll be all right now!” somebody else murmured behind her. “Zamm, you know Deep Rest! We couldn’t take chances with it. We told them they’d have to wait there in the house till you woke.”
The ramp beam set her down on the sand of a path. There was hot daylight around her then—seventeen years behind her, and an open door twenty steps ahead.
Her knees began wobbling again.
Zamm couldn’t move.
For a score of scores of light-years about, Cushgar the Mighty lay on its face, howling to its gods to save it from the wrath of the ghosts and the wrath of Zamm.
But she—Zone Agent Zamman Tarradang-Pok, conqueror of space, time, and all the laws of probability—she, Free-mind. Unqualified of the Free Daya-Bals—Doctor of Neuronics—Vega’s grand champion of the Galaxy:
No, she just couldn’t move!
Something put-putted suddenly by overhead. Enough of its seared and molten exterior remained to indicate that at some earlier stage of its career it might have been a fat, amiable-looking freighter. But there was nothing amiable about its appearance now! It looked like a wreck that had rolled for a century in the fires of hell, and put in another decade or two sunk deep in an acid sea. It looked, in fact, exactly as a ship might expect to look whose pilot had a weakness for withholding his fire till he was well within point-blank range.
But though it had lost its make-up, the ship was otherwise still in extragood condition! It passed over Zamm’s head, bobbed up and down twice in cheerful greeting, and went putting off on its secondaries, across the vast hospital and toward the city beyond, dropping a bit as it went, to encourage Cushgar to howl a little louder.
Zamm gazed blankly after the beat-up, impossible warrior, and heard herself laughing. She took a step—and another step.
Why, sure, she could move!
She was running—
“. . . so that’s how it was,” the Third Co-ordinator told Bropha. He swirled the contents of his nearly empty glass around gently, raised it and finished his drink. “All we’d really intended was to hold that dead-straight course, and smash their light interception all the way in. That was to make sure they’d bunch every heavy ship they had on that line, to stop us just before we reached the Cluster.
“Then we were going to pop off at an angle, streak for the place they were keeping Zamm’s folks, grab them up and get out of Cushgar again—
“Rut, of course,” he added, “when we discovered they’d all rolled over on their back spikes and were waving their hands in the air, we couldn’t resist taking over! You just never know what you start when you go off on an impromptu mission like that!”
lie paused and frowned, and sighed. For the Third Co-ordinator was a man of method, who liked to see a job well worked out in advance, with all its angles considered and plenty of allowance made for any unforeseeable developments.
“How about a second drink?” Bropha inquired.
“No,” said his friend; “I’ve got to get back to work. They can squawk all they like”—Bropha realized he was referring to his colleagues of the Council—“but there isn’t another Department of the Confederacy that’s been jammed up by the Cushgar affair as badly as Galactic Zones is right now! That was forty-two thousand two hundred and thirty-eight individual mission-schedules we had to re-plot!” he said, still somewhat aghast at the completeness of the jam. “Only a third of it’s done! And afterwards, I’ll have time to worry about finding a replacement for Zamm. There’s nothing so scarce as a really good Peripheral Agent! That’s all I got out of it—”
Bropha looked sympathetic.
“I talked to that boy, and I’ve got some hopes for him,” the Coordinator added glumly. “If she keeps her promise, that is, and lets him, come to Jeltad, by and by. But he’ll never be like Zamm!”
“Give hint time,” Bropha said consolingly. “They grow up slowly. They’re a long-lived race, the Daya-Bals.”
“I thought of that, too!” the Coordinator nodded. “She’ll raise a dozen now before she’s done; and among them there might be one, or two—But, by the way she talked, I knew right then Zamm would never let any of the others go beyond fifty light-years of Betelgeuse!”
THE END
SECOND NIGHT OF SUMMER
Throwing a person to the wolves to save the rest is never a pleasant solution. In this case it was an entire world!
ON THE night after the day that brought summer officially to the land of Wend, on the planet of Noorhut, the shining lights were seen again in the big hollow at the east end of Grimp’s father’s farm.
Grimp watched them for more than an hour from his upstairs room. The house was dark, but an occasional murmur of voices floated up to him through the windows below. Everyone in the farmhouse was looking at the lights.
On the other farms around and in the village, which was over a hill and another two miles up the valley, every living soul who could get within view of the hollow was probably doing the same. For a time, the agitated yelling of the Village Guardian’s big pank-hound had sounded clearly over the hill, but he had quieted down then very suddenly—or had been quieted down, more likely, Grimp suspected. The Guardian was dead-set against anyone making a fuss about the lights—and that included the pank-hound, too.
There was some excuse for the pank-hound’s excitement, though. From the window, Grimp could see there were a lot more lights tonight than had turned up in previous years—big, brilliant-blue bubbles, drifting and rising and falling silently all about the hollow. Sometimes one would lift straight up for several hundred feet, or move off over the edge of the hollow for about the same distance, and hang there suspended for a few minutes, before floating back to the others. That was as far as they ever went away from the hollow.
There was, in fact, no need for the Halpa detector-globes to go any farther than that to get the information wanted by those who had sent them out, and who were listening now to the steady flow of brief reports, in some Halpa equivalent of human speech-thought, coming back to them through the globes:
No signs of hostile activity in the vicinity of the breakthrough point. No weapons or engines of power within range of detection. The area shows no significant alterations since the last investigation. Sharp curiosity among those who observe us consciously—traces of alarm and suspicion. But no overt hostility.”
The reports streamed on without interruption, repeating the same bits of information automatically and incessantly, while the globes fl
oated and dipped soundlessly above and about the hollow.
Grimp continued to watch them, blinking sleepily now and then, until a spreading glow over the edge of the valley announced that Noorhut’s Big Moon was coming up slowly, like a Planetary Guardian, to make its own inspection of the lights. The globes began to dim out then, just as they always had done at moonrise in the preceding summers; and even before the top rim of the Big Moon’s yellow disk edged over the hills, the hollow was completely dark.
Grimp heard his mother starting up the stairs. He got hurriedly into bed. The show was over for the night and he had a lot of pleasant things to think about before he went to sleep.
Now that the lights had showed up, his good friend Grandma Erisa Wannattel and her patent-medicine trailer were sure to arrive, too. Sometime late tomorrow afternoon, the big draft-trailer would come rolling up the valley road from the city. For that was what Grandma Wannattel had done the past four summers—ever since the lights first started appearing above the hollow for the few nights they were to be seen there each year. And since four years were exactly half of Grimp’s whole life, that made Grandma’s return a mathematical certainty for him.
Other people, of course, like the Village Guardian, might have a poor opinion of Grandma, but just hanging around her and the trailer and the gigantic, exotic-looking rhinocerine pony that pulled it was, in Grimp’s opinion, a lot better even than going to the circus.
And vacations started the day after tomorrow! The whole future just now, in fact, looked like one good thing after another, extending through a vista of summery infinities.
Grimp went to sleep happily.
AT ABOUT the same hour, though at a distance greater than Grimp’s imagination had stretched as yet, eight large ships came individually out of the darkness between the stars that was their sea, and began to move about Noorhut in a carefully timed pattern of orbits. They stayed much too far out to permit any instrument of space-detection to suspect that Noorhut might be their common center of interest.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 21