“Plankton eaters,” Lancey added lazily, “but apparently very fast swimmers. Anyone else get anything on them?”
“Cave builders,” said Freckles, from behind Weyer, only a few feet from Grevan. She propped herself up on an elbow to point across the fire. “That big drop-off to the west! They’ve tunneled it out below the surface. I don’t think they’re phosphorescent themselves, but they’ve got some method of keeping light in the caves. Bacterial, possibly—And they cultivate some form of plankton inside.”
“Sounds as if they might be intelligent enough to permit direct contact,” Grevan remarked, and realized in the moment of silence that followed that it must have been an hour since he’d last said a word.
“They’re easily that,” Freckles agreed. Her small face, shaded by the rather shapeless white hat she favored, turned to him. “If Klim hadn’t been cooking, I’d have called her to give it a try. I was afraid of frightening them off myself.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” promised Klim, who had much the deftest touch of them all for delicate ambassadorial work.
There was another pause then—it might have been the word “tomorrow.”
“Going to make contact tomorrow, Grevan?” Freckles inquired in a light, clear voice, as if it had just occurred to her.
“Unless,” nodded Grevan, “somebody has a better idea.”
It seemed nobody did until Muscles grumbled: “It’s CG who’s likely to have the ideas. If it were up to me, I’d just smash that set, tonight!”
Grevan looked at him thoughtfully. “Anybody else feel the same way?”
They shook their heads. “You go ahead, Grevan.” That was Weyer’s calm voice. “We’ll just see what happens. Think there’s a chance of jolting any worth-while information out of them at this stage?”
“Not if they’re on guard,” Grevan admitted. “But I think it will be safest for us if we’re right there when it dawns on CG that this Exploration Group has resigned from its service! And it might prod them into some kind of informative reaction—”
“Well, I still think,” Muscles began, looking worriedly at Klim, “that we . . . oh, well!”
“Vote’s eight to one,” Klim said crisply.
“I know it,” growled Muscles and shut up.
The rest seemed to have become disinterested in the matter again—a Hock of not quite human cubs, nearly grown and already enormously-capable of looking out for themselves. They’d put themselves into the best possible position to face the one enemy they’d never been able to meet on his own ground.
And until things started happening, they weren’t going to worry about them.
A few of them had drifted off to the beach below, when Grevan saw Klim stop beside Cusat and speak to him. Cusat opened both eyes and got to his feet, and Klim followed him over to Grevan.
“Klim thinks Albert is beginning to look puny again,” Cusat announced. “Probably nothing much to it, but how about coming along and helping us diagnose?”
The Group’s three top biologists adjourned to the ship, with Muscles, whose preferred field was almost-pure mathematics, trailing along just for company. They found Albert II quiescent in vitro—as close a thing to a self-restoring six-foot sirloin steak as ever had been developed.
“He’s quite assimilating, and he’s even a shade off-color,” Klim pointed out, a little anxiously.
They debated his requirements at some length. As a menu staple, Albert was hard to beat; but unfortunately he was rather dainty in his demands. Chemical balances, temperatures, radiations, flows of stimulant and nutritive currents—all had to be just so; and his notions of what was just so were subject to change without notice. If they weren’t catered to regardless, he languished and within the week perversely died. At least, the particular section of him that was here would die. As an institution, of course, he might go on growing and nourishing his Central Government clients immortally.
Muscles might have been of help in working out the delicate calculations involved in solving Albert’s current problems; but when they looked round for him, they found him blinking at a steady flow of invisible symbols over one wall of the tank room, while his lips moved in a rapid, low muttering; and they knew better than to interrupt. He had gone off on impromptu calculations of his own, from which he would emerge eventually with some useful bit of information or other; though ten to one it would have nothing to do with Albert. Meanwhile, he would be grouchy and useless if roused to direct his attention to anything below the level of an emergency.
They reset the currents finally and, at Cusat’s suggestion, trimmed Albert around the edges. Finding himself growing lighter, he suddenly began to absorb nourishment again at a very satisfactory rate.
“That did it, I guess,” Cusat said pleased. He glanced at the small pile of filets they’d sliced off. “Might as well have a barbecue now—”
“Run along and get it started,” Grevan suggested. “I’ll be with you as soon as I get Albert buttoned up.”
Klim regarded Muscles reflectively. “Just nudge my genius awake when you’re ready to come,” she instructed Grevan. “He looks so happy right now I don’t want to disturb him—”
It was some minutes later, while Grevan was carefully tightening down a seal valve, that Muscles suddenly yawned and announced: “Thirty-seven point oh two four hours! Checks either way, all right, boss. Say—where’s Klim gone?”
“Down to the beach, I suppose.” Grevan didn’t look up. He could find out later what Muscles was referring to. “Drowned dead by now, for all you seem to care!” he added cruelly.
Muscles left in the perturbed hurry that was his normal reaction to the discovery that Klim had strayed out of sight; and Grevan continued buttoning up Albert, undistracted by further mathematical mutterings. The cubs had finished sorting themselves out a year or so ago, and who was to be whose seemed pretty well settled by now. There had been a time when he’d thought it would have been a nice gesture on CG’s part to have increased their membership by a double for Klim or Eliol or Vernet or Freckles—depending more or less on which of them he was looking at at the moment—though preferably somebody three or four years older.
Of late, however, he had developed some plans of his own for rounding out the Group. If the question of getting and staying beyond CG’s range could be satisfactorily settled—
He shrugged off an uncomfortably convincing notion that any plans he might consider had been discounted long ago by the branch of Central Government which had developed the Group for its own purpose. Speculative eyes seemed to be following every move he made as he wished Albert pleasant dreams and a less temperamental future, closed the door to the tank room and went to the ramp. Halfway down it, he stopped short. For an endless second, his heart seemed to turn over slowly and, just as slowly then, to come right side up again.
The woman who stood at the foot of the ramp, looking up at him, was someone he knew—and he also knew she couldn’t possibly be there! The jolting recognition was almost crowded out by a flash of hot fright: obviously she wasn’t really there at all. At a distance of thirty feet, the starlight never could have showed him Priderell’s pale-ivory face so clearly—or the slow stirring of her long, clever dancer’s body under its red gown, and the sheen of the short red cloak she wore over it, clasped at her throat by a stone’s green glitter.
Afterwards, Grevan could not have said how long he stood there with his thoughts spinning along the edge of sheer panic. In actual time it might have been a bare instant before he became aware of a familiar distant voice:
“Hey, boss! Grevan!”
The sound seemed tiny and very far away. But he heard himself make some kind of an answer and suddenly realized then that the image had vanished.
“Do you want barbecued Albert, or don’t you?” Klim shouted again from the direction of the fire. “I can’t keep these pigs away from your share much longer!”
He drew a deep breath. “Coming right now!”
But it was another
minute or two before he showed himself at the fire, and he had arranged his thoughts carefully into other lines before he did. The cubs couldn’t actually tell what he was thinking—unless he made a deliberate effort to let them; and they weren’t too accurate then—but they were very quick to trace the general trend and coloring of one’s reflections.
And his reflections had been that his visualization of Priderell might have been something more than some monetary personal derangement. That it might be the beginning of a purposefully directed assault on the fortress of the Group’s sanity, backed by a power and knowledge that laughed at their hopes of escape.
Fortunately his companions seemed to feel that the barbecue had been exactly the right way of ending the day. A short while later they were stretched out on blankets here and there in the sand, fully relaxed and asleep, as far as Grevan could see, though never more than that small fraction of a second away from complete and active wakefulness which experienced travelers learn to regard as the margin that leaves them assured of awakening at all.
But Grevan sat aside for a while, and looked out at the sea and the stars.
There were a lot of stars to look at around here, and big ones. They had come within twenty-eight light-years of the center of a globular cluster near the heart of the Milky Way, where, so far as they knew, no humanly manned ship had ever gone before. In every direction the skies were hung, depth on depth, with the massed frozen flows of strange constellations. Somewhere, in that huge shining, four small moons wandered indistinguishably—indistinguishable, at any rate, if you didn’t know just where to look for them, and Grevan hadn’t bothered to find out.
Something stirred softly, off to his left.
“Hello, Freck,” he said quietly. “Come to help me plot against CG?”
The four little moons couldn’t have raised a tide in a barrel between them; but there was a big one at work below the horizon, and water had crept in to cover the flat stretches of shore. By now it was lapping at the base of the higher rocks that bordered their camp area.
Freckles sat on the edge of one of the rocks, a few yards off, the white hat pushed to the back of her head and her feet dangling over the ripples below.
“Just being companionable,” she said. “But if you think you need any help in your plotting, fire away! This is one place where CG couldn’t possibly have its long ears stuck out to listen.”
He played for a moment then with the notion of telling her about his green-eyed hallucination. Freckles was the Group’s unofficial psychologist. The youngest and smallest of the lot, but equipped with what was in some ways the boldest and most subtle mind of them all. The secret experiments she had conducted on herself and the others often had put Grevan’s hair on end; but the hard-won reward of that rocky road of research had been the method of dealing effectively with CG’s restraints.
“What kind of psychological triggers,” he said instead, “could CG still pull on us out here—aside from the ones we know?”
Freckles chuckled. “You’re asking the wrong kind of question.”
He frowned a little, that being one of his pet phrases.
“All right,” he said. “Then do you think we might still be carrying around a few compulsions that we simply don’t remember?”
“No,” Freckles said promptly. “You can install things like that in ordinary-human, because they’re half asleep to start with. I’ve done it myself. But you’d have to break any one of us down almost to mindless-controlled before you could knock out our memory to that extent. We wouldn’t be much good to CG afterwards.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “When I was a kid, a Dominator worked on me for a week trying to lay in a compulsion I wouldn’t be able to spot. And, believe me, after a day or two I was doing my best to co-operate! The type of mind we have simply can’t accept amnesia.”
She added, “Of course, a Dominator—or a human psycho, if you agree to it—can hold you in a cloud just as long as they can keep on direct pressure. You’ll do and believe anything they tell you then. Like the time when you—”
“I remember that time,” Grevan acknowledged shortly. She was referring to an occasion when he had authorized her without reserve to attempt some unspecified new line of investigation on him. Some while later, he had realized suddenly that for the past half hour he had been weeping noisily because he was a small, green, very sour apple which nobody wanted to eat.
“Boy, you looked silly!” Freckles remarked reminiscently.
Grevan cleared his throat. She might, he remarked, have looked somewhat silly herself, around the south polar region, if he’d caught up with her before he cooled off. “Ah, but you didn’t!” said Freckles. “A good researcher knows when to include a flying start in her computations. Actually, I did come across something really fancy in mental energy effects once. But if CG could operate on those levels, they wouldn’t need a hundredth part of the organization they’ve got. So it stands to reason they can’t.”
“What sort of effects?” he inquired uneasily.
“You’ve got me there!” Freckles admitted, pulling the white hat thoughtfully down on her forehead. “I haven’t the faintest idea of what they were, even in principle. I was still alone then—it was about four years before they got us together to make up the Group. They brought a man into the Center where I was, in an ambulance. He looked unconscious, and our psychos were all excited about him. They took him off to the laboratories, where they had one of those mobile Dominators—and then people suddenly started screaming and falling down all around me, and I felt something like fire—here!” She tapped the top of her hat. “I remember I seemed to understand at once that the man was using some kind of mental energy against the Dominator—”
“Eh?” said Grevan incredulously.
“That’s right. And also some kind of gun which wasn’t any CG type, by the sound of it. Of course, I was out of a window by then and going straight away; but the whole thing only lasted a few seconds anyhow. I heard the Dominator cut loose in the laboratories with its physical armament-disruptive sonics, flash-fire and plain projectiles. The burning feeling suddenly stopped again, and I knew the man was dead.”
“For a moment,” Grevan said gloomily, “I thought you were going to tell me a human being had beaten a Dominator!”
Freckles shook her head. “I doubt that’s ever happened. The filthy things know how to take care of themselves. I saw one handle a riot once—some suicide cult. The suiciders got what they were after, all right! But that man had enough on the mental level to make the Dominator use everything it had to stop him. So there definitely are degrees and forms of mental energy which we know nothing about. And, apparently, there are some people who do know about them and how to use them. But those people aren’t working for CG—”
Grevan pondered that for a moment, disturbed and dissatisfied.
“Freck,” he said finally, “everybody but Muscles and myself seems to agree that there’s no way of knowing whether we’re improving our chances or reducing them by inviting a showdown with CG via the contact set. If you had to decide it personally, what would you do?” Freckles stood up then and looked at the stars for a moment. “Personally,” she said—and he realized that there was a touch of laughter in her voice—“I wouldn’t do anything! I wouldn’t smash the set like Muscles, and I wouldn’t accept contact, like you. I’d just stay here, sit quiet and let GG make the next move, if any!”
Grevan swore gently.
“Well,” she said, “that’s the kind of situation it is! But we might as well do it your way.” She stretched her arms over her head and sniffed at the breeze. “That whole big beautiful ocean! If CG doesn’t eat us tomorrow, Grevan, I’ll sprout gills and be a fish! I’ll go live with those plankton eaters and swim up to the polar ice and all the way through beneath it! I’ll—”
“Listen, Freck; let’s be practical—”
“I’m listening,” Freckles assured him.
“If anyone—
including Muscles—can think of a valid reason why I shouldn’t make contact tomorrow, right up to the moment I plug in that set, I want to hear about it.”
“You will! And don’t worry about Muscles. He can’t see beyond Klim at the moment, so he’s riding a small panic just now. He’ll be all right again—after tomorrow.”
She waited then, but Grevan couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Well, good night, Grevan!”
“Good night, Freck.” He watched her move off like a slender ghost towards the dim glow of the fire. The cubs felt they’d won—simply by living long enough to have left the musty tang of half-alive, history-old Central Government worlds far behind them and to be breathing a wind that blew over an ocean no human being had seen before.
Whatever happened now, they were done with CG and all its works, forever.
And the difference might be simply, Grevan realized, that he wasn’t done with it yet. He still had to win. His thoughts began to shift back slowly, almost cautiously, to the image of a woman whose name was Priderell and who had stood impossibly at the foot of his ship’s ramp, smiling up at him with slanted green eyes. She had been in his mind a good deal these months; and if present tensions couldn’t quite account for that momentary hallucination, the prospect of future ones might do it. Because, while the cubs didn’t know it yet, once he had them settled safely here, he was going to make his way back into CG’s domain and head for a second-rate sort of planet called Rhysgaat, where—to be blunt about it—he intended to kidnap Priderell and bring her back to round out the Group.
It wouldn’t be an impossible undertaking if he could get that far unspotted. It seemed rather odd, when he considered it rationally, that the few meetings he’d had with Priderell should have impressed him with the absolute necessity of attempting it, and that somebody else—somebody who would be more accessible and less likely to be immediately missed—shouldn’t do just as well.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 36