TROY opened the inspection door, then stopped for a moment, staring back at the Tareeg hangar beyond the station. Light had been glowing through its screens again when he came out; now the hazy translucence of the screens was drawing sideways and up from the great entrance rectangle. Another of the big personnel carriers nosed slowly out, moved up into the air and vanished against the night sky. If it was loaded as close to capacity as the one he had watched from inside the tunnel, almost two thirds of the Hammerhead force at the station had gone by now to attend the rites at Cassa One’s new sea.
He waited while the force screen restored itself over the entrance. Immediately afterwards, the lights in the hangar turned dim and faded away. Troy climbed in through the inspection door, locked it and started back down to the maintenance level.
With a little luck, he thought, he might even be able to work undisturbed now inside the interstellar drone he had selected for his escape. He would have to be back in the tunnel when the search-beams came through again . . . he suspected they might be quite sensitive enough to detect the presence of a living being inside one of the ships. But the Hammerheads themselves might not show up again until he was prepared to leave. And then it wouldn’t matter. If they did appear—well, he would get some warning from the fact that the hangar lights would begin to come on first. Not very much warning, but it might be enough.
The passage leading past his quarters was empty and quiet. Troy remained behind a corner for a minute or two listening. If Dr. Rojas had reported his failure to arrive at Room 72, the Tareegs must also have learned by now that he had left the station, and the last place they would think of hunting for him was here. But somebody—Hammerhead or human stooge—might be in his rooms, making a second and more thorough investigation there.
EVERYTHING remained still. Troy came quietly out into the passage, went down it to the tool room next to his quarters, opened the door, taking the gun from his pocket, and slipped inside. With the door locked, he stood still a moment, then turned on the lights.
A glance around showed that nobody was lurking for him here. Ho darkened the room again, crossed it, removed the floor section over the tunnel entrance and slipped down into the tunnel. Working-by touch, he pulled the floor section back across the opening, snapped it into place and started up the familiar narrow passage he had cut through the desert rock.
He couldn’t have said exactly what warned him. It might have boon the tiny click of a black-light beam going on. But he knew suddenly that something alive and breathing stood farther up the passage waiting for him, and the gun came quickly from Ids pocket again.
His forehead was struck with almost paralyzing force. Stungun . . . they wanted him alive. Troy found himself on his knees, dizzy and sick, while a voice yelled at him. Human, he thought, with a blaze of hatred beyond anything he’d ever felt for the Tareegs, Traitor human! The gun, still somehow in his build, snarled its answer.
Then the stungun found him again, in three quick, hammering blows, and consciousness was gone.
* * *
There came presently an extended period of foggy, groping thoughts interspersed with sleep and vivid nightmares. After a time, Troy was aware that he was in a section of the sick bay on the Atlas, and that the great carrier was in interstellar flight. So the operation on Cassa One was over.
He wondered how long he had been knocked out. Days perhaps. It was the shrill, rapid-fire voice of a Tareeg which had first jolted him back into partial awareness. For confused seconds, Troy thought the creature was addressing him; then came the click of a speaker and the sounds ended, and he realized he had heard the Tareeg’s voice over the ship’s intercom system. A little later, it occurred to him that it had been using its own language and therefore could not have been speaking to him.
During that first muddled period, Troy knew now and then that he was still almost completely paralyzed. Gradually, very gradually, his mind began to clear and the intervals of sleep which always ended with terrifying nightmares grew shorter. Simultaneously he found he was acquiring a limited ability to move. And that, too, increased.
It might have been three or four hours after his first awakening before he began to plan what he might do. He had made a number of observations. There were three other men in this section with him. All seemed to be unconscious. He thought the one lying in the bed next to his own was Newland, but the room was dim and he had been careful to avoid motions which might have been observed, so he wasn’t certain. There was a single human attendant in, the small room beyond the open doorspace opposite his bed. Troy didn’t recall the man’s face. He was in the uniform of a medical corpsman; but whatever else the fellow might be, he was here primarily in the role of a guard because he had a gun fastened to his belt. It classed him as a human being whose subservience to the Hammerheads was not in question. Twice, when the man in the bed at the far end of the room had begun to groan and move about, the guard came in and did something that left the restless one quiet again. Troy couldn’t see what he used, but the probability was that it had been a drug administered with a hypodermic spray.
Getting his hands on the gun, Troy decided, shouldn’t be too difficult if he made no mistakes. His life was forfeit, and to lie and wait until the Tareeg inquisitors were ready for him wasn’t to his taste. Neither . . . though somewhat preferable . . . was personal suicide. A ship, even as great a ship as the Atlas, had certain vulnerabilities in interstellar flight—and who knew them better than one of the ship’s own engineers? The prime nerve centers were the bridge and the sections immediately surrounding it. It might be, Troy thought, it just might be that the Hammerheads never would bring their prize in to the twin worlds to have its treasures of technological information pried out of it. And that in itself would be a major gain for Earth.
HE turned various possibilities over in his mind with the detachment of a man who has acknowledged the inevitable fact of his own death. And he felt his strength flowing back into him.
The guard in the other room presently heard renewed groans and the slurred muttering of a half-conscious man. As he came in through the doorspace with the drug spray he walked into Troy’s fist. It didn’t quite put him to sleep, but the spray did thirty seconds later, and shortly he was resting, carefully bound and gagged since Troy didn’t know how long the drug would retain its effect, in the back of a large clothes locker.
The man in the next bed was Newland. He seemed uninjured but was unconscious, presumably drugged like the other two. Troy left the section in the corpsman’s uniform, the gun concealed in his pocket. It was improbable that the guard’s authority to carry it extended beyond the sick bay area. In another pocket—it might come in handy—was the refilled drug—pray.
He was two decks closer to the bridge section when it struck him how deserted the Atlas seemed. Of course, he had avoided areas where he would be likely to run into sizable groups of either men or Tareegs. But he had seen only six humans so far, only two of the Hammerheads. These last had come out of a cross-passage ahead of him and vanished into another, two men following quietly behind, the high-pitched alien voices continuing to make a thin, complaining clamor in the otherwise empty hall seconds after they had disappeared. And the thought came to Troy: suppose most of the ship’s complement was down in the sleepers?
It wasn’t impossible. The Atlas must still be provisioned for years to come, but an excellent way to avoid human mutiny on the approach to the Hammerhead worlds would be to put any captives not needed for essential duty to sleep. And the Atlas hadn’t been built for the convenience of water-creatures. To control a human skeleton crew would require a correspondingly small number of Tareegs. Most of their force, he thought, very well might be making the return in their own vessels.
THE reflection literally stopped Troy in his tracks. Because that could change everything he’d had in mind, opened up possibilities he hadn’t thought existed . . . including the one, still remote though it might be, of returning the Atlas to Earth. Perhaps the men
now in charge of the ship would be almost as unwilling to allow that to happen as the Hammerheads; they had too much to answer for. But if the situation he had imagined did exist, his thoughts raced on . . . why then . . .
Troy’s mind swam briefly with a wild premonition of triumph. There were ways in which it might be done! But because of that, there was also now the sudden need for much more caution than he had intended to use. What he needed first was somebody who could tell him exactly how things stood on board—preferably somebody in a position of authority who could be persuaded or forced to fall in then with Troy’s subsequent moves.
THE bridge deck was as quiet as the others. On the old Atlas, most of this area had been officers’ country, reserved for the expedition heads and top ship personnel; and presumably that arrangement had been changed only by the addition of Tareeg commanders and guards. Troy kept to the maintenance passages, encountered no one but presently found unused crew quarters and exchanged the corpsman uniform there for less conspicuous shipboard clothes. This would make a satisfactory temporary base of operations. And now to get the information he wanted . . .
The voice was coming out of the only door open on the dim hall. There were six staterooms on either side, and Troy remembered that the room beyond the open door had been occupied by Dr. Clingman on the trip out from Earth. The voice—preoccupied, mild, a little tired—was unmistakably Dr. Victor Clingman’s.
Was he alone? Troy thought so. He couldn’t make out the words, but it was a monologue, not a conversation. He had the impression of Clingman dictating another rambling dissertation on Tareeg ways into a recorder; and the conviction came to him, not for the first time, that the man was in some essential manner no longer sane, that be had come to believe that his observations on these deadly enemies some day really could be compiled into an orderly and valuable addition to human knowledge.
Sane or not, he was a frightened man, the perfect quarry for Troy’s present purpose. With a gun on him, he would talk. And once having assisted Troy to any degree, he would be too terrified of Tareeg reprisals to do anything but switch sides again and go along with Troy, hoping that thereby the worst—once more—could be avoided. The worst for Victor Clingman. It would be impossible, Troy thought, to trust Clingman, but he could make very good use of him in spite of that.
He came quietly along the passage, his attention as much on the closed doors about him as on the one which was open. The guard’s gun unfortunately wasn’t a noiseless type, but he had wrapped a small cushion around its muzzle and across it, which should muffle reports satisfactorily if it came to that. Words became distinguishable.
“It is not a parasite in the ordinary sense,” Clingman’s tired voice said. “It is a weapon. It kills and moves on. A biological weapon limited to attack one species: the enemy. It is insidious. There is no warning and no defense. Unconsciousness and death occur painlessly within an hour after contact, and the victim has not realized he is being destroyed. The radius of infection moves out indetectably and with incredible swiftness. And yet there was a method of containing this agent. That knowledge, however, is now lost.”
“As an achievement of the Tareeg genius for warfare, the weapon seems matched—in some respects surpassed—only by the one used to counteract it. And in that, obviously, there were serious faults. They . . .”
The man, Troy decided, was quite close, perhaps twelve feet to the right side of the door. He glanced back along the silent hall, slipped the cover from the gun—with Clingman, he would only need to show it—then came into the room in two quick strides, turning to the right and drawing the door shut behind him.
THERE was no one in sight.
The voice continued:
“. . . desperate, with no time to complete essential testing. A terrible gamble, but one which Inevitably . . .”
The meaning faded from Troy’s mind as he discovered the wall-speaker from which the words were coming.
His eyes darted across the room to a comfortable chair drawn up beside a table, to a familiar picture of untidily arrayed piles of notes on the table, a thread of smoke still rising from a cigarette in the tray among them. Clingman had been in the room within minutes, listening to one of his previous recordings as he worked. Troy’s glance shifted to a closed door on his right. Bedroom and bath of the suite lay behind it. Clingman might be there. He might also . . . Troy reached back, quietly opened the door to the hall again, moved on and slipped out of sight behind an ornamental screen on the other side of the speaker.
Clingman could have left his quarters for some reason. In any event, it was obvious that he had intended to return to the room very shortly. If he brought someone with him, the situation might be more difficult. But hardly too difficult to be handled.
Troy worked the improvised silencer back over the gun muzzle, senses straining to catch either the opening of the door on his right or the sound of an approach down the hall.
“So it was possible,” he heard the wall-speaker say, “to reconstruct, in almost every essential detail, what the concluding situation must have been on the world where the Tareeg species had its origin. The attacking section was safely screened, presumably by a form of energy barrier, against the deadly agent it had released. The section under attack had no defense against an agent so nearly indestructible that it subsequently survived for over a thousand years in its inert, frozen condition without losing effectiveness in the least—”
Troy thought: What . . .
WHAT HAD IT SAID?
He stepped out from behind the screen as the door on his right opened. Dr. Clingman stood in the door, mouth open, eyes bulging in surprise and alarm at the gun in Troy’s hand. Then his gaze shifted to Troy’s face, and his expression slowly changed.
“Mister Gordon,” he murmured, smiling very cautiously, “you are really the most difficult man to keep stopped!”
Troy pointed a shaking finger at the speaker. “That!” he cried. “That . . . it said a thousand years in the ice!”
Clingman nodded. “Yes.” His eyes returned, still rather warily, to the gun. “And I’m rather glad, you know, you happened to catch that particular part before I appeared.”
Troy was staring at him. “That was their lost home world—the one you’ve kept talking about. That great asteroid cloud here . . .”
“No, not here.” Clingman came forward more confidently into the room, and Troy saw now that the left side of the scientist’s face and head was covered with medical plastic. “The Cassa system is a long way behind us, Gordon,” Clingman said. “We’ve been on our way back to Earth for more than two days.”
“To Earth,” Troy muttered. “And I . . .”
CLINGMAN jabbed a stubby finger down on a control switch at the table, and the wall-speaker went silent. “It will be easier to tell you directly,” he said. “You’ve already grasped the essential fact—our Tareeg captors, for the most part, are dead. They were killed, with some careful assistance from the men in charge of this expedition, by a weapon developed approximately twelve centuries ago on their ancestral world. A world which still circles today, though in a rather badly disintegrated condition, about the Cassa sun.
“But let’s be seated, if you will. You gave me a very unpleasant fright just now.” Dr. Clingman touched the side of his face. “I had an ear shot off recently by a man who didn’t wait to have the situation explained to him. His aim, fortunately, was imperfect. And there is still a minor war in progress on the Atlas. Oh, nothing to worry about now—it’s almost over. I heard less than twenty minutes ago that the last of the Tareeg guards on board had surrendered. About fifty of them have become our prisoners. Then there is a rather large group of armed men in spacesuits in one section of the ship with whom we have been unable to communicate. They regard us as traitors to the race, Dr. Dexter and myself in particular. But we have worked out a system of light signals which should tell them enough to make them willing to parley . . .”
He settled himself carefully into the big chair
, turning a white, fatigued face back to Troy. “That,” he said, waving his pudgy hand at the wall-speaker, “is a talk I made up to explain what actually has happened to the main body of the mutineers. They comprised a large majority of the crew and of the expedition members, of course, but fortunately we were able to gas most of them into unconsciousness almost at once, and that no further lives have been lost. We have begun to arouse them again in small groups who are told immediately that the space ice we were bringing in to Cassa One carried a component which has resulted in the destruction of the Tareeg force, and who are then given as much additional information as is needed to answer their general questions and convince them that we are still qualified to command the Cassa Expedition. I believe that in a few more days normal conditions on the ship will have been restored . . .
Clingman glanced over at the smoldering cigarette in the tray, stubbed it out and lit another. “We had been aware for some time of your plan to escape back to Earth in one of the Tareeg drones,” he said. “It was an audacious and ingenious scheme which might very well have succeeded. We decided to let you go ahead with it, since it was by no means certain until the very last day that our own plans would be an unqualified success. On the other hand, we couldn’t let you leave too early because the Tareegs certainly would have taken the Atlas to the twin worlds then without completing the Cassa One operation. And we didn’t care to let you in on our secret, for reasons I’m sure you understand.”
Troy nodded. “If they’d got on to me, I might have spilled that, too.”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 118