Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  He said, “Well, let’s suppose all that has happened. Carter’s Troopers are on their way here at this minute, riding pellmell. Giving them every break, what’s the earliest moment we can expect them to show up?”

  She said, “Not before morning.”

  “I’d figured it at perhaps two hours before sunrise,” Dowland said. “What would hold them up?”

  “They can’t climb the mesa at any point near the ranch by night. A descent might be possible, but even that would be difficult and dangerous. And they’ll be carrying repair equipment to take care of whatever’s gone wrong. So they’ll have too come up the northern end, where it isn’t so steep.”

  “And then,” Dowland said, “they still have to come down across the mesa on foot. Makes sense. And, of course, that messenger actually may not get here before tomorrow. If he comes then, at what time would he arrive?”

  She shrugged. “Before noon. The hour wasn’t specified.”

  “In any case,” Dowland said, “you were figuring on stalling me around here until Carter’s boys turned up. Then you realized I must be an Overgovernment man, and decided it would be too dangerous to allow me to prowl about the ranch until help came.”

  Jill nodded.

  Dowland considered her reflectively. “You understand, I believe, that unless I can somehow get word to the Solar Police Authority within the next few hours, Miguel’s injuries may very well kill him? And that if I could get word out, an SPA jet would have him in the nearest hospital ten minutes later?”

  “I understand both those things, Dowland,” she said. “But I also know that Miguel would not choose to have his life saved at the cost of exposing our plans.”

  Dowland shrugged. “Very well . . . Now, were the things that happened before I got here as you’ve described them?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know of no way to get into that laboratory at present?”

  “Not unless you can find the key to the door.”

  “That key should be around this immediate area?”

  “It should be,” she said, “but I haven’t been able to find it.”

  “No further ideas about that?”

  “None.”

  Dowland was silent a moment. “Miss Trelawney,” is there anything else that might be of importance here that you still have not told me?”

  Her eyes studied him coldly. “Perhaps one thing . . .”

  “And what’s that?”

  “If you had been willing to be bribed,” Jill Trelawney said, “I should have asked the Troopers to shoot you.”

  * * *

  THERE was a lady, Dowland was thinking a few minutes later, who was likely to be something of a problem to any man. However, she wouldn’t be his problem for a considerable number of hours now. She had swallowed the sleep tablet he had given her without any trouble. After the drug wore off, the tablet would keep her quiet till around dawn.

  He stood looking about the wind-swept darkened slopes of the ranch area. Clouds were moving past in the sky, but there would be intermittent moonlight. The conditions weren’t too bad for the search he had in mind. There had to be a concealed storeroom about the place somewhere, in which the Trelawneys would keep assorted stuff connected with their secret work which they didn’t want to have cluttering up the lab. Including, very likely, any spare keys to the lab. At a guess, neither of the brothers would have wanted Jill at Lion Mesa during this crucial and dangerous stage of the project. But they probably were used to letting their beautiful and headstrong niece do as she wanted. But they needn’t have mentioned things like the storeroom to her. If he could keep his mind slightly off the fact that within a hundred yards or so of him there were sixty-eight kilograms of Ym-400—with an unspecified amount of it at present in its horrendous radioactive state—he should stand a fairly good chance of finding the storeroom.

  And in that case, the half-inch atomic key Jill Trelawney had showed him, and which was at the moment weighing down his coat pocket, probably would turn out to be exactly what he needed to get into it.

  He located the place just under an hour later. It was a matter partly of observation, partly of remembering a remark Jill had made. The building which housed the giant hogs adjoined a corral three times its size. Corral and building were divided into two sections, the larger one harboring six sows. The single boar was in the other. A spider web of gangways led about above the huge stalls. It was the wall between building and corral which had drawn Dowland’s attention by the fact that a little calculating indicated it was something like a yard thicker than was necessary.

  He brought a dozen campfire sticks over from the grid-car and spaced them down the central gangway of the building, then deferred further inspection long enough to locate and trip the automatic feeding mechanisms. The hungry animal thunder which had greeted him at his entry ebbed away as they ate furiously and he studied them. They weren’t the grotesque monstrosities he had expected but massive, sculptured giants with the quick, freewheeling agility of a rhinoceros, sand-colored, with wickedly intelligent eyes. There wasn’t much question they’d make exciting game for anyone who enjoyed a touch of personal danger in the hunt.

  The danger was more obviously there in the boar. The brute’s eight hundred or so pounds of weight above that of the average of his prospective harem would not be significant when pitted against an opponent as physically inferior as a human being. His attitude might. The sows filed out into the corral after they had eaten what the feeding machine had thrown into them. The boar remained, watching Dowland on the gangway above him from the corner of one eye. The eye reflected no gratitude for the feeding. It was red-rimmed and angry. The jaw worked with a continuous chewing motion. There was a fringe of foam along the mouth.

  Jill Trelawney had mentioned that no one but Miguel could come near the boar.

  Dowland could believe it. A small steel ladder led down from the gangway into the brute’s stall. Dowland reached into his pocket and brought out the IPA gun. No sportsman would have considered using it against an animal. But this wasn’t sport. He started down the ladder.

  THE boar stood motionless, watching him. Dowland stopped at the foot of the ladder. After a moment, he took a step forward. The boar pivoted and came thundering across the floor of the stall, head low. The gun made its soft, heavy sound, and Dowland leaped aside. The huge body that slammed into the far wall behind him was dead before it struck, nearly headless. He went on to the thick dividing wall between stall and yard.

  The lock to the storeroom door was on the inner side of the wall, concealed by the planking but not too difficult to find. Dowland inserted the key, twisted it into position, felt a slight click, and stepped back as the door began to swing out toward him.

  The storeroom contained the general kind of paraphernalia he had expected to find, including three antiradiation suits. It took Dowland twenty minutes to convince himself that the one thing it definitely did not contain in any obvious manner was a key to the laboratory. Appropriate detection instruments might have disclosed it somewhere, but he didn’t have them.

  The fact was dismaying because it ended his hopes of finding the key. It would take most of the night to make a thorough search of the various ranch buildings, and at best there would be an even chance of discovering the key in the process. Wherever it was, it must be carefully concealed. If Miguel regained consciousness, the information could be forced from him, but it wasn’t too likely that the older Trelawney ever would wake up again.

  Dowland picked up two of the three AR suits, folded them over his arm, stood, still hesitant, glancing up and down the long, narrow space of the storeroom, half aware that he was hoping now some magical intuition might point out the location of the key to him at the last second. If he could get into the laboratory, he was reasonably sure he could puzzle out the mechanisms that directed the shift of YM into radioactivity, and shut them down. A machine was a machine, after all. Then, with the YM interference eliminated, grid power should be available ag
ain, and . . .

  Dowland glanced at his watch again, shook his head. No point in considering it—he couldn’t get into the laboratory. An hour and a half had gone to no purpose. Hunting for the key had looked like a good gamble, the quickest and therefore least dangerous method of solving the whole awesome problem. But it hadn’t worked out; and what was left was to work down the side of Lion Mesa, and start hiking out across the desert. With luck, he’d find the communicator start picking up grid power again around dawn—if the YM didn’t cut loose with further unpredictable and much more disastrous “phenomena” before then. Unsatisfactorily vague as the available information had been, it implied that what had happened around here was still, so far, on a very mild level. The Trelawneys, in spite of their confidence that the Overgovernment was bluffing, that YM was harmless if properly handled, might have had the good sense to work with only the most minute quantities to begin with.

  HE LEFT the storeroom door open, turned off the whitely glowing campfire sticks, and took them, with the AR suits, back to the house with him. The living room had become almost completely dark. Uncle and niece were where he had left them. Dowland worked for a minute or two to release the automatic shutters over the single wide window; they came down into position then with a sudden thud which shook the room but failed to arouse the Trelawneys. Dowland relit one of the sticks and dropped it into the fireplace. The room filled with clear light.

  He stacked the other sticks against the wall, laid the AR suits over the back of a chair. He had considered getting the Trelawneys into them as a safety measure against whatever might happen before the matter was over, but had dropped the idea again. It would be questionable protection. The antiradiation field was maintained automatically while a suit was worn, and it impeded breathing just enough to have occasionally suffocated an unconscious wearer. Jill would discover the suits when she woke up and could use her own judgment about them.

  Dowland was coming back from the grid-car with his mountaineering harness and portable communicator when the hogs began to scream again. He stopped, startled. There was an odd and disturbing quality to the racket this time—even more piercing than before—and, unless he was mistaken, the huge animals were in a sudden panic about something. Next, he heard them slamming against the sides of the corral, apparently trying to break out of it. His heart started to pound with instinctive alarms. Should he go down and investigate? Then, before he could decide, he heard through the din of the hogs, swelling gradually to almost match those incredible shrieks in volume, another sound. For a moment, something seemed to shut off Dowland’s listening to the rumble and roar of a rushing, turbulent mass of water—and his ears told him it was passing by beneath him.

  * * *

  IT MIGHT have been almost two minutes later before Dowland began to think clearly again. He had reached the house at a dead run—a senseless flight reaction under the circumstances, not far from complete panic. In the darkness outside, the mesa had seemed to sway and tilt, treacherous footing over the eerie booming of a river which had rolled through a long-dead past. In those seconds Dowland hadn’t thought to question Jill Trelawney’s story about a machine that brought about shifts in time. His senses seemed to have as much evidence to support it as anyone could demand.

  Back in the house, though the thundering disturbance continued, that conviction rapidly faded. He could close his eyes and immediately have the feeling of being on an unstable bridge above the swirls of some giant current. He could open them again and tell himself that YM-400 had a reputation for freakish effects—and that this specific effect, at any rate, should not be very harmful since Jill had reported it as having occurred on three separate occasions during the preceding day. To speak of such a commotion as being only the sound of a “river flowing under the house” seemed to approach the outrageous in understatement; but Jill Trelawney had turned out to be an unusual young person all around.

  She and her uncle hadn’t stirred, but Dowland knew that their presence in the room steadied him. He knew, too, that, whatever happened next, he couldn’t allow himself to be rattled into blind fright again. The situation was dangerous enough. If he let his nerves stampede him, he would find himself unable to take any effective action.

  He went over deliberately to the mountaineering harness he had dropped when he entered the lighted room, and began to check through the equipment. He intended to carry, in addition, only the communicator, the IPA gun, a canteen of water, and a small flashlight; and he would abandon the harness and its items at the foot of the mesa. There were two hunting rifles in the car, with a vastly better range than the handgun; but a rifle would slow him down and would make very little real difference if he had the bad luck to run into Carter’s Troopers in the desert.

  Somewhat to his surprise, the underground tumult appeared to be growing fainter before he had concluded his inspection. Dowland paused to listen, and within a few seconds there was no more doubt about it. Jill had said it had gone on for half an hour on each of the previous occasions; but Dowland’s watch confirmed that the present disturbance was subsiding rapidly after less than ten minutes. By the time he stood up, snapped on the harness and shrugged it into position, it had become almost inaudible.

  Which might be a good sign, or a bad one, or without particular significance of any kind. He couldn’t know, and he’d probably be better off if he didn’t start thinking too much about it. He turned for a last survey of the room before setting out, and discovered that Miguel Trelawney had opened his eyes and was looking at him.

  DOWLAND stood stockstill for a moment, hardly daring to believe it. Then, quietly, he unbuckled the harness again, and let it down to the floor. The eyes of the big man on the couch seemed to follow the motion, then shifted slowly up toward the ceiling of the room, and closed again.

  “Trelawney,” Dowland said softly, without moving.

  Miguel Trelawney made a deep, sighing sound, turned on his side and lay quiet, his back now to Dowland. A few seconds later, Dowland was looking down at him from the other side of the couch.

  It might have been only a momentary thing, a brief advantage medic had gained in its invisible struggle with a process which would still end in death. But he couldn’t be sure. The eyes remained closed, the pulse was weak and unsteady. Dowland thought of injecting a stimulant into Trelawney, and discarded the idea immediately. Medic manufactured its own stimulants as required, counteracted any others. Even the effects of the quiz-drug would be reduced by it, but not enough to keep Dowland from getting any answer he wanted—provided Trelawney’s mind cleared for only three or four minutes of lucidity.

  There was no way of knowing when such a period of lucidity might develop. But now that the man had appeared to awaken, the possibility that it would happen within the next hour or two became a very definite one.

  Dowland stood briefly in scowling indecision. The next hour or two could also see him nearly down the side of the mesa, depending on the difficulties of the descent . . . but there was no real choice. It was a gamble either way again; if Trelawney didn’t awaken, the other gamble remained . . . How long, at most, could he afford to delay?

  Leaving YM out of the calculation, since it couldn’t be calculated, he had only the arrival of the Freeholder Troopers to consider. There was no apparent possibility that any sizable party could appear before daybreak, but there was an even chance they would be there around that time. When they came, he must either be in communication with the Solar Police Authority or far enough away from Lion Mesa to be able to avoid detection . . .

  Four hours should be enough to give him a reasonable safety margin. He had till midnight, or a little later.

  Dowland pulled a chair up to the side of the couch and sat down. The night wasn’t quiet.

  The hogs squalled occasionally, and the wind still seemed to be rising. In spite of his efforts to avoid unsettling lines of thought, the nightmarish quality of the situation on the mesa kept returning to his mind and wasn’t easily dismissed. The pa
st—the past of over half a million years ago—had moved close too the present tonight . . . That was the stubborn, illogical feeling—and fear—which he couldn’t entirely shake off.

  Half an hour later, Miguel Trelawney began breathing uneasily, then stirred about, but lapsed again within seconds into immobile unconsciousness.

  Dowland resumed his waiting.

  His watch had just told him it was shortly before eleven-thirty when he heard the shots. They were three shots—clear, closely spaced cracks of sound, coming from a considerable distance away. Dowland was out of his chair with the second one, halfway down the dark entry hall as he heard the third. He opened the door at the end of the hall just wide enough to slip through, moved out quickly, and closed the door behind him to keep the glow of light from the living room from showing outside.

  As the door snapped shut, there were three more shots. A hunting rifle. Perhaps two miles to the north . . .

  DOWLAND stood staring up toward the wind-tossed line of the forest above the ranch area. Who was up there on the mesa—and why the shooting? Had the Troopers managed to get some men in by air? What would they be firing at?

  Signal shots, he thought then. And a signal to the ranch, in that case . . . Signaling what?

  With that, another thought came, so abruptly and convincingly that it sent a chill through him.

  Doctor Paul Trelawney . . . Paul Trelawney, not in the laboratory building—as Jill had surmised. Gone elsewhere, now returned. And, like his brother, returned to a point other than the one from which he had left.

  A man exhausted and not sure of where he was on the big tableland, an injured man—or perhaps one weakened by radiation sickness—such a man would fire a gun in the night to draw attention to himself. To get help.

  Minutes later, Dowland was headed in the direction from which the shots had come, carrying one of his own rifles, along with the police gun. It was very unlikely he could get close enough to Trelawney—if it was Trelawney—to be heard approaching; but once he reached the general area of the shots, he would fire the rifle, and wait for a response. In the forest, the wind was wild and noisy, and the going was as rough as he had suspected it would be. Moonlight flowed into the open rocky stretches occasionally, and faded again as clouds moved on overhead. Among the trees he could barely see his way and had to advance more slowly.