“By a much bigger one!” Wilma agreed. She was watching him shrewdly. “You know something you haven’t told me yet! What’s going to happen?”
“I’m not sure,” Fred admitted. “But I think in a minute or two—”
The world suddenly went black.
IT WAS still black when Fred found he was thinking again. He decided he must have been unconscious for some while, because he felt stiff all over. Now he was lying on his back on something hard and lumpy and warm. Wilma’s head, he discovered next, was pillowed on his arm, and she was breathing normally. Somewhere near the top of his head, Ruby clucked away irritably as she tended to do when she was half awake.
“Wilma?” he whispered.
“Yes, Fred?” she said sleepily. And then, “Where are we? It’s awfully dark here!”
He was wondering himself. “It’ll probably get light soon,” he said soothingly. Wilma was sitting up, and now she gave an exclamation of surprise.
“We’re outdoors somewhere, Fred! This is grass we’re lying on—”
“It was magnificently done!” another voice remarked, startlingly close to Fred’s ear. It was a small, rather squeaky voice, but it seemed familiar.
“Who was that?” Wilma inquired nervously.
“I think,” said Fred, “it’s the Cobrisol!” He groped about cautiously and found the shell lying next to his head. It appeared to be cracked down the long side, and something was stirring inside it. “Are you uncapsulating again?” he inquired.
“Correct!” said the Cobrisol. “But allow me to continue my congratulations, Fred. You appear to have resolved successfully a situation that had baffled even a Cobrisol! Need I say more?”
“I guess not,” said Fred. “Thanks—”
“Wilma,” the Cobrisol resumed, “you seem concerned about this darkness—”
“I’m glad you’re back, Cobrisol!” she told it.
“Thank you,” said the creature. “As I was about to explain, the appearance of darkness about us is a common phenomenon of transfer. Nothing to worry about! And—ah!”
They all cried out together, a chorus of startled and expectant voices. Around them, like black curtains whisking aside, like black smoke dispelled by a blower, the darkness shifted and vanished. Yellow sunlight blazed down on them, and the two humans threw up their hands to shield their eyes.
Then they lowered them again. It was, after all, no brighter than was normal for a clear summer day! They were sitting at the top of a sloping green meadow. They looked out over it, blinking . . .
“Why!” Wilma said, in a small, awed voice. “Why, Fred! We’re home!”
Then she burst into tears.
SOME HOURS later, sitting on the front porch of the farm house—the real front porch of the real farm house—Fred remarked, “There’s one thing I just don’t get!”
“What’s that, Fred?” The Cobrisol lifted its head inquiringly out of the hammock. It was about the size of a healthy rattlesnake by now and accepting a sandwich or two from Wilma every half hour.
Fred hesitated and then told the Cobrisol quietly about the gruesome, fluttering thing he’d seen Outside that looked like Cooney.
“There are various theories about what happens to those who get lost Outside,” the Cobrisol said thoughtfully. “There is no reason to provide you with additional material for nightmares, so I won’t tell you what I think you saw. But it was the fact that the Icien and I were acquainted with some of those theories that made it quite impossible for either of us to do what you did!”
It paused. “Otherwise, everything seems clear enough now. The One who collected you and Wilma and Ruby and the Cooney was obviously as immature as I suspected. He had no right to do it. Your interference with the mechanisms of the Outside created enough disturbance to attract the attention of a mature One, who then chastised the offender and returned you to Earth where you belonged—”
THE COBRISOL sniffed the air greedily. “That’s another bacon-and-egg sandwich Wilma is fixing!” it remarked with appreciation. “Yes, I’m sure I’ll like it on Earth, Fred. But your hypothesis that my shell came along by accident is highly debatable. For one thing, you’ve noticed, of course, that we have retained the ability to understand each other’s speech-forms—which, I gather, is not the rule among different species on Earth!”
“Well—” The fact had escaped Fred’s attention till now. “That could be an accident,” he pointed out. “They just forgot to switch it off, or whatever they do.”
“Possibly,” the Cobrisol acknowledged. “I believe, however, that having become aware of our cooperative efforts in the Little Place, the mature One decided to utilize the special talents of a Cobrisol in whatever Project is being conducted on Earth. Had you thought of going into politics, Fred?”
Fred chuckled. “No! And I don’t blame you for not being able to get rid of the feeling you’re still in some Place or other. But this is Earth—and nobody else has any Projects here! You’ll realize all that, by and by.”
“No doubt,” said the Cobrisol. “What’s that passing way up high above the apple orchard, Fred?”
Fred looked, and leaped excitedly out of his chair. “Hey, Wilma! Come quick!” he shouted. “No—it’s gone now! Boy, they are fast . . .”
Then his voice trailed off, and he felt his face go pale, as he turned to stare at the Cobrisol.
“A flying saucer!” he muttered.
“Oh?” said the Cobrisol. “Is that what they call the Eyes here, Fred?”
THE END
1958
HARVEST TIME
One of the things that makes Scientists dislike Engineering is that people don’t mind what you think, so long as you don’t do anything. But politics enters the moment you start accomplishing . . .
SENIOR Assistant Commissioner Holati Tate sat comfortably on a high green hill of the Precolonization world of Manon, and watched Communications Chief Trigger Argee co-ordinating the dials of a bio-signal pickup with those of a recorder. Trigger was a slim, tanned, red-haired girl, and watching her was a pleasure from which neither her moody expression nor Holati Tate’s advanced years detracted much. She got her settings finally, swung around on her camp chair and faced him. She smiled faintly.
“How’s it going?” the S.A.C. inquired.
“It’s going. Those bio-patterns aren’t easy to unscramble, though. That to be expected?”
He nodded. “They’re a mess. That’s why I had to borrow a communications expert from Headquarters.”
“Well,” said Trigger, “if you just want to rebroadcast the strongest individual signal, we’ll have a usable transcription in another ten minutes.” She shielded her eyes and peered up at the late afternoon sky. “Can’t see more than a green tinge from here. The Drift’s about nine miles up, isn’t it?”
“At nine miles you’re barely scratching the bottom layer,” Holati Tate told her. “The stuff floats high on this world.”
Trigger looked at him and smiled again, more easily now. She liked Holati, a weather-beaten little Precol veteran who’d come in as a replacement on the Manon Project only six months before. Assistant commissioners were mostly Academy graduates nowadays; he was one of the old guard the Academy was not too gradually shoving out of the supervisory field ranks. Trigger had heard he’d been in the Space Scouts until he reached the early retirement age of that arduous service. “What’s this beep pattern we’re copying supposed to be?” she inquired. “Sort of a plankton love call?”
Holati admitted that was as good a guess as any. “At the Bio Station we figure each of the various species keeps broadcasting its own signal to help the swarms keep together. This signal is pretty strong because the Drift’s mainly composed of a single species at the moment. When we set up the food-processing stations, we might be able to use signal patterns like that as a lure.”
Trigger smoothed her red hair back and nodded. “Dirty trick!” she observed amiably.
“Can’t be sentimental about it, Trigger
girl. Processed plankton could turn out to be Manon’s biggest export item by the time it’s a colony. The Federation’s appetite gets bigger every year.” He added, “I’m also interested in the possibility it’s the signals that attract those Harvester things we’d like to get rid of.”
“They been giving you trouble again?” Trigger’s duties kept her close to the Headquarters area as a rule, but she had heard the Harvesters were thoroughly dangerous creatures capable of producing a reasonable facsimile of a lightning bolt when disturbed.
“No,” he said. “I won’t let the boys fool with them. We’ll have to figure a way to handle them before we start collecting the plankton, though. Put in a requisition for heavy guns last month.” He studied her thoughtfully. “Something the matter? You don’t seem happy today, Trigger.”
Trigger’s thin brown brows slanted in a scowl. “I’m not! It’s that boss we’ve got, the Honorable Commissioner Ramog.”
Holati looked startled. He jerked his head meaningfully at the recorder. Trigger wrinkled her nose.
“Don’t worry. My instruments are probably the only thing that isn’t bugged around the Manon Project Headquarters. I pull the snoopies out as quick as Ramog can get them stuck in.”
“Hm-m-m!” he said dubiously. “What’s the commissioner doing to bother you?”
“He slung Brule Inger into the brig yesterday morning.” Brule was Trigger’s young man, Holati recalled. “He’ll be shipped home on the next supply ship. And I don’t know,” Trigger added, “whether Ramog wants Brule out of the way because of me, or because he really suspects Brule was out hunting Old Galactic artifacts on Project time. He wasn’t, of course, but that’s the charge. Either way I don’t like it.”
“People are getting mighty touchy about that Old Galactic business,” Holati said. “Biggest first-discovery bonus the Federation’s ever offered by now, just to start with.”
Trigger shrugged impatiently. “It’s a lot of nonsense. When the Project was moved out here last year, everyone was saying the Manon System looked like the hottest bet in the Cluster to make the big strike. For that matter, it’s why Ramog got the Manon Project assigned to him, and he’s been all over the planet with Essidy and those other stooges of his. They haven’t found a thing.”
Holati nodded. “I know. Wouldn’t be at all surprised, though, if the strike were made right here on Manon eventually. It’s in a pretty likely sector.”
Trigger regarded him skeptically. “So you believe in those Old Galactic stories, too? Well, maybe—but I’ll tell you one thing: it wouldn’t be healthy for anyone but Commissioner Ramog to make that kind of discovery on Commissioner Ramog’s Project!”
“Now, now, Trigger!” Holati began to look alarmed again. “There’s a way in which those things are handled, you know!”
Trigger’s lip curled. “A foolproof way?” she inquired.
“Well, practically,” the S.A.C. told her defensively. He was beginning to sound like a man who wanted to convince himself; and for a moment she felt sorry for disturbing him. “You make a strike, and you verify and register it with the Federation over any long-range communications transmitter. After that there isn’t a thing anybody else can do about your claim! Even the . . . well, even the Academy isn’t going to try to tangle with Federation Law!”
“The point might be,” Trigger said bleakly, “that you wouldn’t necessarily get near the transmitters here with that kind of message. As a matter of fact, I’ve seen a couple of pretty funny accidents in the two years I’ve been working with Ramog.” She shrugged. “Well, I’m heading back to the Colonial School when my hitch here is up—I’m fed up with the way the Academy boys are taking over in Precol. And I’ve noticed nobody seems to like to listen when I talk about it. Even Brule keeps hushing me up—” She turned her head to a rattling series of clicks from the recorder, reached out and shut it off. A flat plastic box popped halfway out of the recorder’s side. Trigger removed it and stood up. “Here’s your signal pattern duplicate. Hope it works—”
While Holati Tate was helping Trigger Argee load her equipment back into her little personal hopper, he maintained the uncomfortable look of a man who had just heard an attractive young woman imply with some reason that he was on the spineless side. After she had gone he quit looking uncomfortable, since it wasn’t impressing anybody any more, and began to look worried instead.
He liked Trigger about as well as anyone he knew, and her position here might be getting more precarious than she thought. When it became obvious a while ago that Commissioner Ramog had developed a definite interest in Trigger’s slim good looks, the bets of the more cynical elements at the Bio Station all went down on the commissioner. No one had tried to collect so far, but Brule Inger’s enforced departure from the Project was likely to send the odds soaring. While Ramog probably wouldn’t resort to anything very drastic at the moment, he was in a good position to become about as drastic as he liked, and if Trigger didn’t soften up on her own there wasn’t much doubt that Ramog eventually would help things along.
Frowning darkly, Holati climbed into his own service hopper and set it moving a bare fifty feet above the ground, headed at a leisurely rate down the slopes of a long green range of hills toward the local arm of Great Gruesome Swamp. Two hundred miles away, on the other side of this section of Great Gruesome, stood the domes of Manon’s Biological Station of which he was the head.
He had a good deal of work still to get done that evening, but he wanted to do some thinking first. Nothing Trigger had told him was exactly news. The Precol Academy group had been getting tougher to work with year after year, and Commissioner Ramog was unquestionably the toughest operator of them all. The grapevine of the Ancient and Honorable Society of Retired Space Scouts, which counted slightly more than twelve thousand members scattered through Precol, credited the commissioner with five probable direct murders of inconvenient Precol personnel, though none of these actions stood any chance of being proved after the event. Two of the victims, including an old-time commissioner, had been members of the Society. Ramog definitely was a bad boy to get involved with—
The hopper began moving out over the flat margins of Great Gruesome, a poisonous-looking wet tangle of purple and green and brown vegetation, gleaming like a seascape in the rays of Manon’s setting sun. There were occasional vague motions and sudden loud splashings down there, and Holati cautiously took the vehicle up a couple of hundred feet. The great chains of swamp and marshy lakes that girdled two-thirds of the planet’s equator contained numerous unclassified life-forms of a size and speed no sensible man would have cared to match himself against outside of full combat armor. Precol personnel avoided unnecessary encounters with such brutes; their control would be left to the colonists of a later year.
His immediate problem was the ticklish one of establishing the exact circumstances under which Commissioner Ramog was to murder Holati Tate. It was an undertaking which could only too easily be fumbled, and he still wasn’t at all certain of a number of details. Brow furrowed with worried thought, he kicked the hopper at last into a moderately rapid vertical ascent and unpackaged the bio-signal record Trigger Argee had transcribed for him. He fed it carefully into the hopper’s broadcast system.
Floating presently in the tinted evening air of the lower fringes of Manon’s aerial plankton zone, Holati Tate sat a while scanning the area about and above him. A few hundred yards away a sluggishly moving stream of the Drift was passing overhead. A few stars had winked on; and hardly a thousand miles out, a ribbon of Moon Belt dust drew thin glittering bands of fire across the sky. Here and there, then, Holati began to spot the huge greenish images of mankind’s established competitors for the protein of the Plankton Drift: the Harvesters of Manon.
In a couple of minutes he had counted thirty-six Harvesters within visual range. As he watched, two of them were rising until they dwindled and vanished in the darkening sky. The others continued to hover not far from the streams of the Drift, as sluggish at t
his hour as their prey. The sausage-shaped, almost featureless giant forms hardly looked menacing, but three venturesome biologists had been electrocuted by a Harvester within a week after the Project was opened on the planet; and the usual hands-off policy had been established until Project work advanced to the point where the problem required a wholesale solution.
Holati tuned in the bio-receiver. Around midday both Harvesters and plankton were furiously active, but there was only the barest murmur of signal now. He eased down the broadcast button on the set and waited.
He’d counted off eight seconds before he could determine any reaction. The plankton stream nearest him was losing momentum, its component masses began curving down slowly from all directions towards the hopper. Holati was not sure that the nearest Harvesters had stirred at all; keeping a wary eye on them, he gradually stepped up the signal strength by some fifty per cent. The hopper was a solid little craft, spaceworthy at interplanetary ranges, but he was only slightly curious about what would happen if he allowed it to accompany a mass of plankton into a Harvester’s interior. And he wasn’t in the least interested in stimulating one of the giants into cutting loose with its defensive electronic blasts.
The Harvesters were definitely moving toward him when the first streamers of the plankton arrived, thumped squashily upon the hopper’s viewplate receivers and generally proceeded to plaster themselves about the front part of the machine. Blinded for the moment, Holati switched on a mass-scope, spotted an oncoming Harvester at five hundred yards and promptly stopped the broadcast. Somewhat nervously, he watched the Harvester drift to a stop while the butterfly-sized plankton life, dropping away from what had become an uninteresting surface again, made languid motions at clustering into a new formation.
He hesitated, then eased the hopper backward out of the disturbed area. A mile off he stopped again and swept his glance once more over what he could see of the gliding clouds of the Drift. Then he jammed down the broadcast button, sending the bio-signal out with a bawling force the planet had never experienced before.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 66