Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  Lueral, the red-headed woman who had attended the earlier part of the general conference, introduced him to a fat, elderly man, whose name Duffold did not catch, but who was Biology’s Section Head. He was operating the amplifier and remained in his seat. Lueral said into the darkened room:

  “This is the record of an objective restructure his Excellency brought shipward with him. The location of the original occurrence was at the eastward tip of Continent Two; the date, one hundred thirty-eight standard, roughly one hundred hours ago. To save time, we would like his Excellency to give us a brief explanation of the circumstances.”

  Duff old cleared his throat. “The circumstances,” he said carefully, “are that we have investigators working in that area. Ostensibly, they are archeologists. Actually, they’re part of an Outposts’ project, checking the theory that Palayata is operating under some kind of secret government. There is a concentration of the deserted settlements we find all over the planet around those swamps. The two men involved in the restructure were working through such a settlement—or supposed to be working through it—when the accident occurred.”

  He added, “If it was an accident. I brought the record along because of the possibility that it was something else.”

  The Section Head said in a heavy voice, “The restructure appears to have been made within two hours after the actual incident.”

  “A little less than two hours,” Duff old agreed. “There were hourly position checks. When the team failed to check in, a restructure heli began to track them. By the time they reached this keff animal, some natives already had killed it—with a kind of harpoon gun, as the restructure shows. Some portions of the bodies of our investigators were recovered.”

  “Had the natives observed the incident?” Lueral inquired.

  “They said they had—too far off to prevent it. They claim they kill a keff whenever they find one, not because they regard them as a danger to themselves but because they are highly destructive to food animals in the area. They hadn’t realized a keff might also be destructive to human beings.”

  The Section Head said, “This is a view of the keff some minutes after the killing of the two men. The promptness with which the restructure was made permits almost limitless detail.”

  Duffold felt himself wince as the colors in the amplification stage between them blurred and ran briefly and cleared again. The keff appeared, half-submerged in muddy water, a mottled green and black hulk, the eyeless head making occasional thrusting motions, with an unpleasant suggestion of swallowing.

  “Weight approximately three tons,” said the Section Head. “The head takes up almost a third of its length. Motions very slow. Normally, this would indicate a vegetarian or omnivorous animal with a limitless food supply, such as these mile-long swamp stretches would provide. Possibly aggressive when attacked, but not dangerous to any reasonably alert and mobile creature.”

  He added, “However, we were able to pick up tele-impulses at this point, which indicate that the natives’ description of its food habits are correct. I suggest using tel-dampers. The impulses are rather vivid.

  Pilch’s voice said, “Hold still!” behind Duffold, and something like a pliable ring slipped down around his skull. Soft damps fastened it here and there, and then he was aware of her settling down in the chair beside him. Her whisper reached him again, “If you don’t like what you’re getting, say so! They don’t really need you for this.”

  Duffold made a grunting sound, indicating complete contentment with his situation and a desire not to be disturbed, but not entirely turning down the suggestion. There were crawling feelings along his spine.

  He felt good. He felt drowsy but purposeful, because now there were only a few more steps to go, and then the great pink maw would open before him, and he could relax right into it. Relax and—

  He jerked upright in his chair, horror prickling through his nerves. Pilch was tapping his arm.

  “Outside!” she whispered. “Keep the damper on.” They moved through the dim room; a door clicked ahead of Duffold, then clicked again behind him, and light flooded around them.

  He pulled the tel-damper off his head like some small, unclean, clinging animal. “Whew!” he breathed. “Should have taken your advice, I think!”

  “Well, you didn’t know. We should have thought of it. There are ways of letting stuff like that come at you, and you—”

  “Don’t say it,” he warned. “I’m learning my limitations.” He was silent a moment. “Was that how it felt to them?” He described his sensations.

  “They felt something like that,” she said. “You gave the impulses your individual interpretations, of course, because you’d seen the restructure and knew what the keff was like. Cabon will be out in a moment, by the way. They got the Integrators’ report back on this. I gather there’s nothing definite enough in it to change our plans.”

  “I see,” Duffold said absently. Mentally, he was reliving that section of the restructure in which the two investigators had come walking and wading right up to the keff, looking about as if searching for something, and apparently not even aware of each other’s presence. Then they had stood still while the huge head came slowly up out of the water before them—and the wet, pink maw opened wide and slapped shut twice.

  Cabon stepped out of the room behind them. He grinned faintly. “Raw stuff,” he remarked. “You’ve got a fine restructure team, Excellency.”

  “Any delays indicated?” Pilch inquired.

  “No. You’d better go ahead on schedule. It’s almost certain we’ll still need our average Palayatan—and the one we’ve got spotted isn’t going to hold still for us forever.”

  Yunnan, the average Palayatan, had finished the satisfactory third day of his solitary camping hike with a satisfactory meal composed largely of a broiled platterful of hard-shelled and hard-to-catch little water creatures, famed for their delicacy. The notion of refreshing his memory of that delicacy had been in his mind for some weeks and had finally led him up to this high mountain plateau and its hundreds of quick, cold streams where they were to be found at their best.

  Having sucked out the last of the shells and pitched it into his camp fire, he sat on for a while under the darkening sky, watching the stars come out and occasionally glancing across the plateau at the dark, somber mass of the next mountain ridge. Two other camp fires had become very distantly visible there, indicating the presence of other soqua spearers. He would stay here two more days, Yunnan thought, and then turn back, towards the valleys and the plain, and return to his semi-permanent house in his semi-permanent settlement, to devote himself again for a while to his semi-permanent occupation of helping local unbannut-growers select the best seeds for next season’s crop.

  It was all a very pleasant prospect. Life, Yunnan told himself, with a sense of having summed it up, was a pretty good thing! It was a conclusion he had come to before under similar circumstances.

  Presently he rebuilt the fire, stretched out on some blankets close to it and pulled a few more blankets on top of him. He blinked up at the stars a few more times and fell sound asleep.

  Far overhead, a meteor that was not a meteor hit the atmosphere, glowed yellow and vanished. A survey heli of the Hub Station’s Planetary Geographers outfit, which had been moving high and unobtrusively above the plateau all day, came in closer to a point almost directly above Yunnan’s camp, remained there a few minutes and moved off again across the plateau and on beyond the mountain ridges to the east.

  A dark spherical body, the size of a small house, sank swiftly and silently toward the plateau and came to a halt finally a hundred yards above Yunnan’s camp and a little more than that to one side of it. Presently a breeze moved from that direction across the camp, carrying traces of a chemical not normally found in such concentration in Palayata’s air. Yunnan inhaled it obligingly. A few minutes later, the breeze grew suddenly into a smooth, sustained rush of air, like the first moan of an approaching storm. Sparks flew from the
fire, and leaves danced out of the trees. Then the wind subsided completely, and three people came walking into the camp. They bent above Yunnan.

  “Perfect reaction!” Pilch’s voice said. She straightened and glanced up. The sperical object had come gliding along at tree-top level behind them and was now stationed directly overhead. Various and sundry clicking, buzzing and purring sounds came out of its open lock. “Take them two or three more minutes to get a complete reproduction,” she remarked. “Nothing to do but wait.”

  Duffold grunted. He was feeling uncomfortable again, and not entirely because of the presence of a Palayatan. Pilch had explained what had happened to Yunnan; the patterns of external sensory impressions that had been sifting into his brain at the moment the trace-chemical reached it through his blood stream were fixed there now, and no new impressions were coming through. He would remain like that, his last moment of sleep-sensed external reality extending itself unchangingly through the hours and days until the blocking agent was removed. What worried Duffold was that the action was a deliberate preliminary prod at the mysterious “X” factor, and if “X” felt prodded, there was no telling at all just how it might respond.

  He looked down at their captive. Yunnan certainly looked quietly asleep, but the mild smile on his humanoid features might have expressed either childlike innocence or a rather sinister enjoyment of the situation, depending on how you felt about Palayatans.

  And assuming Yunnan was harmless, at least for the moment, was somebody—or something—else, far off or perhaps quite close in the thickening night around them, aware by now that untoward and puzzling things were going on in a Palayatan mind?

  Duffold knew they were trying to check on that, too. A voice began murmuring presently from one of the talkie gadgets Pilch wore as earrings. When it stopped, she said briefly, “All right.” And then, to Duffold, “Not a pulse coming through the tele-screens that wouldn’t be normal here! Just animals—” She sounded disappointed about it.

  “Too bad!” Duffold said blandly. His nerves unknotted a trifle.

  “Well, it’s negative evidence anyway!” Pilch consoled him. The voice murmured from the same earring again, and she said, “All right. Put down the carrier then!” and to her two companions, “They’re all done in the shuttle. Let’s go.”

  A grav-carrier came floating down through the dark air toward them, and the crewman who had accompanied them into the camp began to extinguish the fire. He was conscientious and thorough about it. Pilch stepped up on the carrier. Duffold looked at her, at the busy crewman, and at Yunnan. Then he set his teeth, wrapped the Palayatan up in his blankets, picked him up and laid him down on the carrier.

  “Hm-m-m!” said Pilch. “Not bad, Excellency!”

  Duffold thought a bad word and hoped she wasn’t being telepathic.

  “Of course not!” said Pilch, reaching up for the earring that hadn’t come into noticeable use so far. She began to unscrew it. “Besides, I’m shutting off the pick-up right now, Excellency—”

  Almost two hours later, Yunnan awakened briefly. He blinked up at the familiar star-patterns overhead, gazed out across the plateau and noted that one of the camp fires there had gone out. Thus reminded, he yawned and scratched himself, stood up and replenished his own fire. Then he lay down again, listened for a half-minute or so to the trilling night-cries of two small tree creatures not far away, and drifted back to sleep.

  “He’s completely out of the sensory stasis now, of course,” Wintan explained to Duffold as the view of Yunnan’s camp faded out before them. “How did you like the staging job?”

  Duffold admitted it was realistic. He was wondering, however, he added, what would have happened if the Palayatan had decided to go for a stroll and walked off the stage?

  “Well,” Wintan said reflectively, “if he’d done that, we would have known he was ignoring the five or six plausible reasons against doing it that were planted in his awareness. In that case, we could have counted on his being an individual embodiment of the ‘X’ factor, so to speak. The staff was prepared for the possibility.”

  Duffold knew that Psychological Service as such was, as a matter of fact, prepared for the possibility that they had hauled a super-being on board which conceivably could destroy or take control of this huge ship—and distant weapons were trained on the ship to insure that it wouldn’t be under alien control for more than an instant. Even more distantly, out in the nothingness of space somewhere, events on the ship were being subjected to a moment to moment scrutiny and analysis.

  Nor was that all. The Outposts patrol ships at Palayata had been relieved from duty by a Supreme Council order from the Hub; and, in their places, heavily armed cruisers of a type none of the patrol commanders could identify had begun to circle the planet.

  “They won’t break up Palayata unless they have to, of course!” Cabon had said, in reporting that matter to Duffold. “But that’s no worry of ours at the moment. Our job is to trace out, record and identify every type of thought, emotion and motivation that possibly could go ticking through this Yunnan’s inhuman little head. If we find out he’s exactly what he seems to be, that eliminates one possible form of ’X’.”

  And if Yunnan was something other than the not too intelligent humanoid he seemed to be, they had “X” neatly isolated for study. Whether or not they completed the study then depended largely on the nature of the subject.

  Rationally, Duffold couldn’t disagree with the method. It was drastic; the casually icy calculation behind the preparations made by the Service had, in fact, shocked him as nothing else had done in his life. But, at one stage or another, it would bring “X” into view. If “X” was both hostile and more than a match for man, man at least had avoided being taken by surprise. If “X” was merely more than a match for man—

  “Mightn’t hurt us at all to learn how to get along with our superiors for a while,” Wintan had observed thoughtfully.

  It was a notion Duffold found particularly difficult to swallow.

  He had noticed, in this last hour while they completed their preparations to invade the Average Palayatan’s mind, occasional traces of a tingling excitement in himself—something dose to elation. By and by, it dawned on him that it was the kind of elation that comes from an awareness of discovery.

  He was engaged in an operation with the most powerful single organization of the Hub Systems. The despised specialists of Psychology Service, the errand boys of the major Departments, were, as a matter of fact, telling everyone, apparently including the Hub’s Supreme Council, just what should be done about Palayata and how to do it.

  Probably, it hadn’t always been that way, Duffold decided; but the regular Departments of the Hub were getting old. For a decade, Outposts—one of the most brisk of the lot—had been gathering evidence that Palayatan civilization wasn’t so much quaint as incomprehensible. For an equal length of time, it had been postponing recognition of the fact that the incomprehensibility might have a deadly quality to it—that, quite possibly, something very strange and very intelligent was in concealment on Palayata, observing human beings and perhaps only tolerating their presence here for its unknown purposes.

  Even after the recognition had been forced on it, the Department had been unwilling to make any move at all on its own responsibility, for fear it might make the wrong one. Instead, it called in Psychology Service—

  For the same reason that Psychology Service always was called in when there was an exceptionally dirty and ticklish job to be done—the Service People showed an unqualified willingness to see any situation exactly as it was and began dealing with it immediately in the best possible manner, to the limits of human ability. It was an attitude that guaranteed in effect that any problem which was humanly resolvable was going to get resolved.

  The excitement surged up in Duffold again. And that, he added to himself, was why they didn’t share the normal distaste for the notion of encountering a superior life form. The most superior of life forms couldn’
t improve on that particular attitude! Here or elsewhere, the Service eventually might be defeated, but it could never be outclassed.

  He wondered at that difference in organizations that were equally human and decided it was simply that the Service now attracted the best in human material that happened to be around. At other times in history, the same type of people might have been engaged in very different activities—but they would always be found moving into the front ranks of humanity and moving out of the organizations that were settling down to the second-rate job of maintaining what others had gained.

  As for himself—well, he’d gone fast and far in Outposts. He knew he was brainier than most. If it took some esoteric kind of mental training to get himself into mankind’s real front ranks, he was going to take a look at it—

  Providing, that was, that the lives of everyone on the ship didn’t get snuffed out unexpectedly sometime in the next few hours!

  Wintan: Pilch, your lad has just bucked his way through simultaneously to the Basis of Self-Esteem and the Temptations of Power and Glory! I’m a little in awe of him. What to do?

  Pilch: Too early for a wide-open, I think! It could kill him. If we tap anything, we’re going to have trouble. Buchele isn’t—

  Cabon: Make it wide-open, Wintan. My responsibility.

  Pilch: No!

  Voice from Somewhere Far Out:

  Agreement with Cabon’s decision. Proceed!

  Wintan had left the pick-up room for the time being; and Duffold had it all to himself.