Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

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Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 77

by James H. Schmitz


  Hallerock laughed uneasily. “I just finished doing that,” he admitted.

  Pagadan shrugged. Gloomy old Hallerock! From here on out, he’d be waiting for the worst to happen, though this kind of a job, as anyone who had studied his training records would know, was right up his alley. And it had been a pleasure, at that, to observe the swift accuracy with which he’d planned and worked out the schedule and details of this operation, in spite of head-shakings and forebodings. The only thing he couldn’t possibly have done was to take the responsibility for it himself.

  She smiled faintly, and came over to sit down for a while beside the bunk on which Jasse was lying.

  * * *

  Two hours later, when her aide contacted her again, he seemed comparatively optimistic.

  “Reaction as predicted,” he reported laconically. “I’m beginning to believe you might know what you’re doing.”

  “Moyuscane’s got the Kynoleen space-tests stalled?”

  “Yes. The whole affair was hushed up rather neatly. The H-Ship is down now at some big biochemical center five hundred miles from Central City, and the staff was routed through to top officials immediately. The question was raised then whether Ulphian body chemistry mightn’t have varied just far enough from standard A-Class to make it advisable to conduct a series of local lab experiments with the drug before putting it to use. Our medics agreed and were asked, as between scientists, to keep the matter quiet meanwhile, to avoid exciting the population unduly. There also was the expected vagueness as to how long the experiments might take.”

  “It makes it so much easier,” Pagadan said gratefully, “when the opposition is using its brains! Was anyone shown around the ship?”

  “A few dozen types of specialists are still prowling all over it. They’ve been introduced to our personnel. It seems a pretty safe bet,” Hallerock acknowledged hesitantly, “that Moyuscane has discovered there isn’t a shielded mind among them, and that he can take control of the crate and its crew whenever he wants.” He paused. “So now we just wait a while?”

  “And let him toy around with the right kind of ideas,” agreed Pagadan. “He should be worried just enough by now to let them come floating up naturally.”

  Night had fallen over Central City when the message she was expecting was rattled suddenly from the skiff’s communicator. She decoded it, produced evidence of considerable emotional shock, shook Jasse awake and, in a few dozen suitably excited sentences, handed Moyuscane his jolt. After that, though, there were some anxious moments before she got her patient quieted down enough to let the antishock resume its over-all effect.

  “She kept wanting to get up and do something about it!” Pagadan reported to Hallerock, rubbing a slightly sprained wrist. “But I finally got it across that it wasn’t Cultures’ job to investigate undercover mass homicide on a foreign planet, and that one of our own Zone Agents, no less, was landing secretly tomorrow to take charge of the case.”

  “And that,” said Hallerock darkly, “really is switching on the pressure!”

  “Just pressure enough for our purpose. It’s still a big, hidden organization that’s suspected of those fancy murder rituals, and not just one little telepath who’s played at being planetary god for the past few centuries. Of course, if we’d pointed a finger straight at Moyuscane himself, he would have cracked right there.”

  She passed a small handkerchief once, quickly, over her forehead. “This kind of thing is likely to be a bit nerve-wracking until you get used to it,” she added reassuringly. “I can remember when I’ve felt just about as jumpy as you’re feeling now. But all we have to do is to settle down and let Moyuscane work out his little problem by himself. He can’t help seeing the answer—”

  But a full two hours passed then, and the better part of a third, while Pelial, the minor official of Galactic Zones, continued to work quietly at her files of reports and recordings, and received and dispatched various coded communications connected with the impending arrival of her superior—the hypothetical avenging Zone Agent.

  By now, she conceded at last, she might be beginning to feel a little disturbed, though, naturally, she had prepared alternative measures, in case—

  Hallerock’s thought flashed questioningly into her mind then. For a moment, Pagadan stopped breathing.

  * * *

  “Linked!” she told him crisply. “Go ahead!”

  “The leading biochemists of Ulphi,” Hallerock informed her, “have just come up with a scientific achievement that would be regarded as noteworthy almost anywhere—”

  “You subhuman comic!” snapped Pagadan. “Tell me!”

  “. . . Inasmuch as they were able to complete—analyze, summarize and correlate—all tests required to establish the complete harmlessness of the new space-fear drug Kynoleen for all type variations of Ulphian body-chemistry. They admit that, to some extent, they are relying—”

  “Hallerock,” Pagadan interrupted, in cold sincerity now, “you drag in one more unnecessary detail, and the very next time I meet you, you’re going to be a great, big, ugly-looking dead body!”

  “That’s not like you, Pag!” Hallerock complained. “Well, they rushed fifty volunteers over to the H-Ship anyway, to have Kynoleen given a final check in space right away—all Ulphi is now to have the benefit of it as soon as possible. But nobody seemed particularly upset when our medics reminded them they had been informed that the ship was equipped to conduct tests on only one subject at a time—”

  Pagadan drew a shivery breath and sat suffused for a moment by a pure, bright glow of self-admiration.

  “When will they take off with him?” she inquired with quiet triumph.

  “They took off ten minutes ago,” her aide returned innocently, “and headed straight out. As a matter of fact, just before I beamed you, the test-subject had discovered that ten minutes in space will get you a whole lot farther than any Telep-Two can drive a directing thought. It seemed to disturb him to lose contact with Ulphi—WOW! Watch it, Pag! Supposing I hadn’t been shielded when that lethal stunner of yours landed!”

  “That’s a beautiful supposition!” hissed Pagadan. “Some day, you won’t be! But the planet’s safe, anyway—I guess I can forgive you. And now, my friend, you may start worrying about the ship!”

  “I’ve got to compliment you,” she admitted a while later, “on the job you did when you installed those PT-cells. What I call perfect coverage! Half the time I don’t know myself from just what point of the ship I’m watching the show.”

  She was curled up now in a large chair, next to the bunk on which Jasse still slumbered quietly; and she appeared almost as completely relaxed as her guest. The upper part of her head was covered by something like a very large and thick-walled but apparently light helmet, which came down over her forehead to a line almost with her eyes, and her eyes were closed.

  “Just at the moment”—Hallerock hesitated—“I think you’re using the Peeping Tommy in the top left corner of the visitank Moyuscane’s looking into. He still doesn’t really like the idea of being out in deep space, does he?”

  “No, but he’s got his dislike of it under control,” Pagadan said lazily. “He’s the one,” she added presently, “who directed the attack on our D.C. today at the Historical Institute. She has a short but very sharp memory-picture of him. So it is Moyuscane, all right!”

  “You mean,” Hallerock asked, stunned, “you weren’t really sure of it?”

  “Well—you can’t ever be sure till everything’s all over,” Pagadan informed him cheerfully. “And then you sometimes wonder.” She opened her eyes, changed her position in the chair and settled back carefully again. “Don’t you pass out on me, Hallerock!” she warned. “You’re supposed to be recording every single thing that happens on the H-Ship for Lab!”

  There hadn’t been, Hallerock remarked, apparently still somewhat disturbed, very much to record as yet. The dark-skinned, trimly bearded Ulphian volunteer was, of course, indulging in a remarkable degree of a
ctivity, considering he’d been taken on board solely as an object of scientific investigation. But no one about him appeared to find anything odd in that. Wherever he went, padding around swiftly on bare feet and dressed in a set of white hospital pajamas, the three doctors who made up the ship’s experimental staff followed him earnestly, with a variety of instruments at the ready, rather like a trio of mother hens trailing an agitated chicken. Occasionally, they interrupted whatever he was doing and carried out some swift examination or other, to which he submitted indifferently.

  But he spoke neither to them nor to any of the ship’s officers he passed. And they, submerged in their various duties with an intentness which alone might have indicated that this was no routine flight, appeared unaware of his presence.

  “The old boy’s an organizer,” Pagadan conceded critically. “He’s put a flock of experts to work for him, and he’s smart enough to leave them alone. They’ve got the ship on her new course by now, haven’t they? Can you make out where they think they’re going?”

  Hallerock told her.

  “An eighty-three day trip!” she said thoughtfully. “Looks like he didn’t want to have anything at all to do with us any more! Someone on board must know what’s in that region—or was able to get information on it.”

  Up to the end, that was almost all there was to see. At a velocity barely below the cruising speed of a Vegan destroyer, the H-Ship moved away from Ulphi. Like a harried executive, too involved in weighty responsibilities to bother about his informal attire, the solitary Ulphian continued to roam about within the ship, disregarded by all but his attendant physicians. But finally—he was back in the ship’s big control room by then and had just cast another distasteful glance at the expanse of star-glittering blackness within the visitank between the two pilots—Moyuscane began to speak.

  It became startlingly clear in that instant how completely alone he actually was among the H-Ship’s control crew. Like a man who knows he need not act with restraint in a dream peopled by phantoms, the ex-ruler of Ulphi poured forth what was in his mind, in a single screaming spurt of frustrated fury and fears and hopes that should have swung the startled attention of everybody within hearing range upon him, like the sudden ravings of a madman.

  The pilots became involved with the chief navigator and his two assistants in a brisk five-cornered discussion of a stack of hitherto unused star-plates. The three doctors gathered about the couch on which Moyuscane sat—exchanged occasional comments with the calm unhurriedness of men observing the gradual development of a test, the satisfactory conclusion of which already is assured.

  * * *

  As suddenly as the outburst had begun, it was over. The Ulphian wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and sat scowling quietly at the floor.

  “I think,” said Pagadan, “you could start the destroyers out after them now, Hallerock!”

  “I just did,” Hallerock said. “I clocked the end of `minimum effective period’ right in the middle of that little speech.”

  “So did I,” she replied. “And I hope it won’t be too long now. I’ve got work to do here, and it shouldn’t wait.”

  There were sufficiently deadly gadgets of various types installed throughout the fugitive ship, which they could have operated through the PT-cells. But since all of them involved some degree of risk to the ship’s personnel they were intended for emergency use only—in case Moyuscane attempted to vent his annoyance with the change in his worldly fortunes on one of his new subjects. Pagadan, however, had not believed that the recent lord of all Ulphi would be capable of wasting any part of his reduced human resources for any motive so impractical as spite.

  Convinced by now that she was right in that, she waited, more patiently on the whole than Hallerock, for something safer than gun or gas to conclude Moyuscane’s career.

  It caught up with him some twenty minutes later—something that touched him and went through him in a hardly perceptible fashion, like the twitching of a minor electric shock.

  The reaction of the two watchers was so nearly simultaneous that neither knew afterwards which of them actually tripped the thought-operated mechanism which filled the H-Ship briefly with a flicker of cold radiation near the upper limit of visibility for that particular crew.

  To that signal, the ship’s personnel reacted in turn, though in a far more leisurely manner. They blinked about doubtfully for a few seconds as if trying to remember something; and then—wherever they were and whatever they happened to be doing—they settled down deliberately on chairs, bunks, beds, and the floor, stretched out, and went to sleep.

  Moyuscane alone remained active, since his nerve centers had not been drenched several days before with a catalyst held there in suspense until that flare of radiance should touch it off. Almost within seconds though, he was plucked out of his appalled comprehension of the fact that there was no longer a single mind within his reach that would respond to control. For Kynoleen gave complete immunity to space-fear within the time limit determined by the size of the dose and the type of organism affected, but none at all thereafter. And whatever the nature of the shattering terrors the hidden mechanisms of the mind flung up when gripped in mid-space by that dreaded psychosis, their secondary effects on body and brain were utterly devastating.

  Swiftly and violently, then, Moyuscane the Immortal died, some four centuries after his time, bones and muscles snapping in the mounting fury of the Fear’s paroxysms. Hallerock, still conscientiously observing and recording for G.Z. Lab’s omnivorous files, felt somewhat sick. But Pagadan appeared undisturbed.

  “I’d have let him out an easier way if it could have been done safely,” her thought came indifferently. “But he would, after all, have considered this barely up to his own standards of dispatch. Turn the ship back now and let the destroyers pick it up, will you, Hallerock? I’ll be along to see you after a while—”

  * * *

  The Viper came slamming up behind the Observation Ship some five hours later, kicked it negligently out of its orbit around Ulphi, slapped on a set of tractors fore and aft, and hauled it in, lock to lock.

  “Just thirty-five seconds ago,” Hallerock informed Pagadan coldly as she trotted into the O-Ship’s control room, “every highly condemned instrument on this unusually condemned crate got knocked clean out of alignment! Any suggestions as to what might have caused it?”

  “Your language, my pet!” Pagadan admonished, for his actual phrasing had been more crisp. She flipped a small package across his desk into his hands. “To be studied with care immediately after my departure! But you might open it now.”

  A five-inch cube of translucence made up half the package. It contained the full-length image of a slender girl with shining black hair, who carried a javelin in one hand and wore the short golden skirt of a contestant in the planetary games of Jeltad.

  “Cute kid!” Hallerock acknowledged. “Vegan, eh? The rest of it’s a stack of her equation-plates? Who is she and what do I do about it?”

  “That’s our Department of Cultures investigator,” Pagadan explained.

  “The System Chief?” Hallerock said surprised. He glanced at the image again, which was a copy of one of Snoops’ three-dimensionals, and looked curiously up at the Lannai. “Didn’t you just finish doing a mental job on her?”

  “In a way. Mostly a little hypno-information to bring her up to date on what’s been going on around Ulphi—including her part in it. She was asleep in that D.C. perambulator she’s camping in here when I left her.”

  “As I understand it,” Hallerock remarked thoughtfully, “the recent events on Ulphi would be classified as information very much restricted to Galactic Zones! So you wouldn’t have spotted the makings of a G.Z. parapsychic mind in a D.C. System Chief, would you?”

  “Bright boy! I’ll admit it’s an unlikely place to look for one, but she is a type we can use. I’m releasing her now for G.Z. information, on Agent authority. Her equation-plates will tell you how to handle her in case she ru
ns into emotional snags while absorbing it. You’re to be stationed on Ulphi another four months anyway, and you’re to consider that a high-priority part of your job.”

  “I will? Another four months?” Hallerock repeated incredulously. “I was winding up things on the O-Ship to start back to Jeltad. You don’t need me around here any more, do you?”

  “I don’t, no!” Pagadan appeared to be quietly enjoying herself. “The point is, though, I’m the one who’s leaving. Got word from Central two hours ago to report back at speed, just as soon as we’d mopped up Old Man Moyuscane.”

  “What for?” Hallerock began to look bewildered. “The Agent work isn’t finished here.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t know myself yet! But it’s got to do with the recordings on those pickled Bjantas you homed back to Lab. Central sounded rather excited.” The silver eyes were sparkling with unconcealed delight now. “It’s to be a Five-Agent Mission, Hallerock!” she fairly sang. “Beyond Galactic Rim!”

  “Beyond the Rim? For Bjanta? They’ve got something really new on them then!” Hallerock had come to his feet.

  Pagadan nodded and smacked her lips lightly. “Sounds like it, doesn’t it? New and conclusive—and we delivered it to them! But now look what a face it’s making,” she added maliciously, “just because it doesn’t get to go along!”

  Hallerock scowled and laughed. “Well, I’ve been wondering all this time about those Bjantas. Now you take out after them—and I can hang around Ulphi dishing out a little therapy to a D.C. neurotic.”

  “We all start out small,” said the Lannai. “Look at me—would you believe that a few short years ago I was nothing but the High Queen of Lar-Sancaya? Not,” she added loyally, “that there’s a sweeter planet anywhere, from the Center to the Clouds or beyond!”

  “And that stretch distinctly includes Ulphi,” Hallerock stated, unreconciled to his fate. “When’s the new Agent coming out to this hive of morons?”

 

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