Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

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Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 116

by James H. Schmitz


  “Have you got back any recollection at all of what the aliens that caught us are like?” Troy asked.

  Newland shook his head.

  “Well,” Troy said, “they’re downright cute, in a way. More like big penguins than anything else. Short little legs. The heads aren’t so cute . . . a hammerhead shark would be the closest thing there, which is why we call them Hammerheads—though not when we think some of them might be listening.

  “They don’t belong here any more than we do. They came from another system which is a lot closer than Sol but still a long way off. Now, we aren’t the first Earth people to get to Cassa. There was an Earth survey ship poking around the system about twenty years ago, and it seems that the Hammerheads also had an expedition here at the time. They spotted our survey ship but weren’t spotted themselves, and the survey ship eventually went back to Earth short two of its men. Those two were supposed to have got lost in the deserts on Cassa. Actually, the Hammerheads picked them up . . . Jerry?”

  The pilot’s head was beginning to nod. He straightened now and took a puff on the cigarette, grinning embarrassedly. “S’all right, Troy!” he muttered. “Seemed to get . . . sort of absent-minded there for a moment.”

  Which was, Troy knew, one of the symptoms of the re-awakening period. Newland’s mind had been shut away from reality for a long time, wrapped in soothing, vaguely pleasant dreams while the emergency tank went about the business of repairing his broken body. The habit of unconscious retreat from his surroundings could not be immediately discarded, and particularly not when the surroundings were as undesirable as those in which Newland now found himself. It would be better, Troy thought, to skip some of the uglier details . . . and yet he had to tell the man enough to make him willing to cooperate in what would be, at the very least, a desperately dangerous undertaking.

  HE said, “You’re still only three-quarters awake, Jerry. We have to expect that. But the closer you listen and the more information you can absorb, the faster you’ll shake off the cobwebs. And that’s important. These Hammerheads are a tough breed, and we’re in a bad spot.” Newland nodded. “I understand that much. Go ahead.”

  “Well,” Troy said, “whatever that first Earth survey ship had to report about the Cassa system looked good enough so that the administration put Cassa down for a major expedition some day. Twenty years later, we got here again—the interstellar exploration carrier Atlas with eight hundred men on board. I’m one of her engineers. And we found the Tareegs—that’s what the Hammerheads call themselves—waiting for us. Not another bunch of scientists and assistants but a war-party. They’d learned enough from the two survey ship men they’d caught to figure out we’d be coming back and how to handle us when we got here.

  “Now get straight on a few things about the Hammerheads, Jerry. Their weapons systems are as good or better than ours.

  In other ways, they’re behind us. They’ve got a fair interstellar drive but can’t make the same use of it we do, because they’ve still a lot to learn about inertial shielding. They have a couple of robot-directed interstellar drones standing in a hangar a few hundred yards from here which can hit half the speed of your courier, but no Hammerhead or human being could ride ’em up and live. The two big carriers that brought them to Cassa One are dead-slow boats compared to the Atlas. And that’s about the best they have at present.

  “Just the same, they’re out to get us. War is the best part of living as far as they’re concerned, and they’re plenty good at it. So far they’ve only been fighting among themselves but they’re itching for a chance at another race, and now we’re it. Capturing an Earth expedition in the Cassa System was only part of the plan to take Earth by surprise.”

  Newland blinked, said slowly, “How’s that? You’d think that might tip their hand. We’ll be missed, won’t we?”

  “Sure we’ll be missed,” Troy said. “But when? We were to stay here eight years . . . don’t remember that either, eh? The Hammerheads will have all the time they need to be set for who ever comes looking for us eventually.”

  “But would they know that?”

  Troy said bitterly, “They know everything about Earth that our top brass scientists of the Cassa Expedition were able to tell them. Pearson and Andrews—those names mean anything? They were the Expedition Chiefs when we were captured. One of the first things the Hammerheads did was to have the science staff and other department heads look on while they tortured those two men to death. As a result, they’ve had all the cooperation they could ask for—more than any decent human being would think of giving them—from our present leadership, the senior scientists Dr. Chris Dexter and Dr. Victor Clingman. They’re a couple of lousy traitors, Jerry, and I’m not sure they’re even capable of realizing it. Clingman’s in charge here at the ground base, and he acts as if he doesn’t see anything wrong in helping the Hammerheads.”

  “Helping the . . .” Vacancy showed for a moment in the pilot’s expression; he frowned uncertainly.

  “TRY to stay awake, Jerry! There’re just a few other things you should try to get nailed down in your memory this time. The Hammerheads are water animals. They can waddle around on land as long as they keep themselves moist, but they don’t like it. They’ve got a religion based on a universal struggle between water and land. Cassa One’s nothing but hot desert and rock and big salt beds, so it’s no good to them. And the other two planets in the system have no oxygen to speak of.

  “Now here’s the thing that’s hard to swallow. There’s a huge lumped-up asteroid swarm in the system. The Atlas stopped for a few days on the way in to look around in it. Dexter and Clingman, after we’d been captured, volunteered the information to the Hammerheads that a lot of that stuff was solid H2O and that if they wanted Cassa One fixed up the way they’d like it—wet—the Atlas could ferry enough asteroid ice over here in billion-ton loads to turn most of the surface of the planet into a sea.

  “You understand it wasn’t the Hammerheads who had the idea. They don’t have anything resembling the ship power and equipment to handle such a job; it hadn’t even occurred to them that it could be possible. But you can bet they bought it when it was handed to them. It will give them a base a third of the way between their own system and Sol. That’s what’s been going on since we landed and were grabbed off . . . almost three years ago now.

  “And these last weeks there’ve been, for the first time since we got here, a few clouds in the sky. It means the boys on the Atlas have as many of those mountains of ice riding on orbit as are needed, and they’ve started shoving them down into the atmosphere to break up and melt. So we . . . Jerry, wake up!”

  Troy Gordon paused, watching Newland, then shrugged, stood up and went over to take the butt of the cigarette from the pilot’s slack fingers. Newland had slid back into catatonic immobility; he offered no resistance as Troy swung his legs up on the bunk and straightened him out on his back.

  How much would he remember the next time he awoke? Troy didn’t know; he had no medical experience and was working on the basis of remembered scraps of information about the treatment given men recovering from an experience such as Newland’s. There were people on the ground station who could have told him what to do, but he hadn’t dared ask questions.

  It was chiefly a matter of time now. Or of lack of time. What would happen when the giant hauling operation was concluded, when the water which had been carried in from space came creeping across the vast desert plateaus about the station, was something he didn’t know. But it was almost certain that if his own plans hadn’t been carried out by that time, they never would be.

  “JERRY,” he addressed the sleeping pilot softly, “if you’ve wondered why I’m risking my neck to bring you back to life and keep you hidden away from the Hammerheads and Clingman, it’s because you’re the one man I still can trust in this lousy expeditionary group. It’s because you tried to do something about the situation on your own. You don’t remember it yet, but when the Hammerheads took over the At
las you made a break for it in the courier boat. You tried to get away and warn Earth. They shot you down before you could clear atmosphere; but then they couldn’t find the wreck. They thought it was down in one of the salt beds and gave up looking for it.

  “But I found it in the desert a couple of months later. You’d dropped through into the emergency tank and yon were still more or less alive. I smuggled the tank into the station here as soon as I’d rigged up a place where I could keep it. I can use some help, and you’ll be the best possible man for the job . . .”

  He stopped, surprised to see that Newland’s mouth had begun to work awkwardly as if he were trying to speak. Then a few words came, slow and slurred, but indicating that the pilot’s mind had not sunk nearly as far from full wakefulness as during his previous relapses.

  “Wha . . . want me . . . do?”

  Troy didn’t answer. Not yet, he thought. Not until Newland was no longer helpless. Because, in spite of all precautions, he might be discovered here at any hour; and if that should happen, Troy’s secret must still be his own. He could act without Newland’s help if necessary.

  He waited a few seconds longer, while the pilot’s face slowly smoothed out again into comatose blankness. Then Troy turned around quietly and left the room.

  * * *

  Troy Gordon’s personal living quarters were on the lowest of the station’s three underground levels, behind the central power plant and utilities section. Considerable privacy was their only attraction; and since the arrangement kept Troy, during his off-duty hours, close to his responsibilities as the station’s maintenance engineer, neither Dr. Clingman nor the Hammerheads had objected to it. He was a useful man; and to the useful, minor privileges could be extended.

  Troy had been able to take advantage of that circumstance. The room in which Newland was hidden lay behind his own quarters, forming an extension to them. The entrance to it was concealed, and while a careful search should have disclosed it, Troy—so far as he knew—had as yet given no one a reason to initiate such a search. The back room was not part of the station’s original design; he had cut it secretly out of the rock. With the equipment at his disposal, it had been a relatively minor job.

  But it involved a very ugly risk. Discovery would have meant death, and no easy one. With the exception of the cooperating chief scientists, the Hammerheads’ attitude towards their captives was largely one of watchful indifference, so long as no one got out of line. But they had taken one measure which insured that, after a short time, there was very little inclination left among the prisoners to get out of line knowingly. At intervals of about a month, whether or not an overt offense had been committed, one more member of Earth’s Cassa Expedition was methodically tortured to death by the aliens; and a group of his fellows, selected apparently at random, was obliged to witness the matter while fastened to a device which allowed them to experience the victim’s sensations in modified form.

  Troy had been included twice in the observing group. He hadn’t known whether it implied a personal warning or not. In the Hammerheads’ eyes, he was a useful servant; it might be that he was also a suspected one. Nevertheless, it had been necessary to construct the back room. One day, he was returning through the desert from one of the outlying automatic stations under his care when he caught the momentary whisper of a distress signal in his groundcar’s receiver. The slight sound had put his hair on end. It was an Earth signal, on an Earth band; and with the Atlas off-planet it could have only one possible source. In seconds, it wavered out and was lost, but Troy already had established the direction.

  A WEEK passed before he had the opportunity to obtain a second fix; then, hours later, he was standing beside the wreck of the courier ship. It had plunged into a deep cleft in the rocks and was now half covered by sand; it began to seem less of a miracle that the Hammerhead fliers had not found it. Troy shut off the quavering signal projector, discovered next that the emergency tank had a living occupant, but left Newland where he was while he hurriedly examined the rest of the ship The courier was hopelessly damaged, but before Troy concluded the examination, his plan against the Hammerheads had been born, at least as a possibility It took more than two and a half years then to convert the possibility into an operation which seemed at last to have something better than a fighting chance to succeed, For, of course, Troy had told no one of the discovery. A few words might have gained him eager helpers, but might also have reached a man paralyzed by the fear of torture to the extent that he would reveal everything to safeguard himself.

  Troy left his rooms, locking the outer door behind him. Moving thirty feet down the narrow steel-floored passage behind the power plant, he entered one of the tool rooms, again closing and locking the door as he went through. It had been a much more difficult and lengthy undertaking to drill a tunnel from the station’s lowest level up to the force-screened Hammerhead hangar outside than to carve an additional room out of the rock, but it had been completed months before. The tunnel’s hidden station entrance was beneath the tool room floor, the other opening out of the polished rock base of the hangar twenty feet from one of the interstellar drones. The most careful human scrutiny would hardly have read any significance there into the hairline crack which formed an irregular oval on the rock; and since Troy hadn’t been found out, he could assume that the Hammerheads’ powers of observation were no more acute.

  It had been night in the surrounding desert for some hours by now, but the hangar was brightly lit—a very unusual occurrence at such a time. Troy paused, momentarily disconcerted, studying the scene in the hangar through the vision screen installed in the tunnel just below the exit. If the Hammerheads—there were only Hammerheads—present—were initiating some major new activity in the next day or two, his plans might be, if not ruined, at least very dangerously delayed. He counted over a hundred of the creatures, mostly assembled near the far end of the hangar in three orderly groups. A few officers stood together, somewhat closer to him.

  Troy chewed his lip anxiously, the moisture-conserving suits they wore for outside duty on Cassa One, which concealed the two sets of swim flippers along their sides and left the top pair of upper limbs . . . short, sturdy brown arms with hands larger than human hands, quite as capable and rather unpleasantly human in appearance . . . free for use. The transparent, inverted-triangle helmets were clamped down. As he looked on, one of their big atmospheric personnel carriers came gliding into sight behind the immobile ranks. There were commands, and the Tareegs turned and filed into the vehicle, moving with the rapid, awkward little waddle which was their method of progress on land. A minute or two later, the loaded carrier moved out of the hangar, and the lights in the vast structure slowly faded away.

  WHERE were they going?

  They were carrying the usual weapons, but this was not some dryland drill. Troy could not remember seeing so large a group leave the station before. The uneasy conviction returned that the move must be connected with the fact that clouds had begun to show in Cassa One’s skies, that the mile-thick boulders of ice which had been brought across space already were falling through the atmosphere of the dessicated world.

  One or two more undisturbed days, Troy thought. In that time it would become clear whether Newland was going to recover sufficiently to be able to play a part in his plans. Only two sections of the shattered courier ship, the inertial shielding and the autonav, had been needed to transform the Hammerheads’ interstellar drone twenty feet from the tunnel exit into a spaceship which men could ride and direct. Both those sections had been repairable, and everything else Troy had been able to steal or build in the station. Month after month passed as he brought it all together in the tunnel, familiarized himself with every necessary detail of the drones mechanisms and fitted in the new installations . . . first in theory, then in actual fact. A part of almost every night was spent in the darkened hangar, assembling, checking and testing one section or another, then disassembling everything and taking it back down into the tunnel befor
e the moment came when the Tareeg watch-beams would sweep again through the hangar.

  The beam-search was repeated each three hours and twenty-seven minutes throughout the night. Within that period of time, Troy would have to carry out a final complete assembly, let the drone roar into life and send it flashing up through the force-screen and into space.

  By now, he knew he could do it. And if he had calculated the drone’s capacity correctly, he would then be less than six months from Earth. The Hammerheads had nothing they could send after him.

  But once in space, he needed Newland’s experience. Everything else would be on board to get them to Earth, but without a trained pilot the probability of arriving only on autonav was something Troy couldn’t calculate. With a great deal of luck, he thought, it still should be possible. Newland’s skills, on the other hand, would give them something considerably better than an even chance.

  But Newland would have to be recovered first. He was still under the ministrations of the emergency tank, embedded now in the wall of the back room beyond the bunk. The tank had to stay there; no amount of planning had shown a way it could be fitted into the drone besides everything else; there simply was no room left for it. And what Troy had learned made it clear that if he lifted into space with Newland before the pilot’s behavior was very nearly normal, he would have a half-dead zombie on his hands before the trip was well begun.

  That had been his reason for waiting. But the question was now whether he mightn’t already have waited a little too long . . .

  TROY checked his watch. Take a chance and begin the final installation at once? It would be an hour before the search-beams came back. The interior of the ships was inspected at irregular periods; he hadn’t been able to establish any pattern for that. But to leave his equipment in place in the drone for one day, or two at the most, might not be stretching his luck too far. Then, if Newland shaped up, there would be that much less delay in leaving, that much less time to spend in the Tareeg hangar finishing the job at the end. And no one could tell what new developments the next few days might bring, or how much time they would find that they had left . . .

 

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