He heard a sound from Hulida, an abrupt, soft intake of breath, looked over at him and saw the knotted jaw muscles, the tight, fixed grin of the machman’s mouth. Immediately, almost before he could form a conscious thought of why he should do it, Jeslin was spinning the Pointer away from the valley, back into the forest, and slamming on speed.
Behind him, the forest crashed. In the rear search screen, he saw the thing sweep after him . . . a vertical torrent, fifteen feet across, composed of earth, brush, uprooted and shattered trees rushing into the air, sucked up by a tractor beam. Beyond it, a group of flying figures darted into the forest, fanned out.
In thick growth, Jeslin turned the Pointer left again, raced on, hugging the ground, for a hundred yards, swung sharply to the right. For perhaps a minute, he saw nothing in the screens except the thickets the machine was slashing through. Then there was a glimpse of two machmen weaving around tree trunks above the undergrowth. The roar of the tractor beam had lessened, now grew stronger again. The Pointer flashed into another thicket.
“Useless, Jeslin!” Hulida was shouting. “They’ve found you and you can’t shake them off!”
For a while, it seemed Hulida was right. The fliers couldn’t match the Pointer’s speed in the forest; they would be there for instants, coming down through the crowns, fall behind as Jeslin swerved off, and vanish again. But they could rise back up through the trees and overtake him in the open air, and were doing it. He didn’t know how many they were in all, but half the time he seemed to be in momentary view of one or the other of them.
And the tractors followed the fliers. There must be at least two of the machines moving across the forest after him, guided by the flying scouts. Suddenly the roar of the beam would arise, shredding the growth as it rushed in towards him; sometimes a second one appeared almost simultaneously from the other side. Once he nearly ran the Pointer directly into one of the dark, hurtling columns of forest debris; as he slewed away from it, the vehicle shuddered as if it were being shaken apart, and Hulida uttered a short, hoarse cry.
And then everything was quiet again. The Pointer rushed on—a minute, two minutes, three, four; and no pursuer appeared in the screens. Jeslin saw a gully ahead, a narrow, dry water bed, dropped into it, moved along it a quarter of a mile until it turned into a deep, rocky ravine almost enclosed by dense undergrowth above. There he stopped the machine.
The timepiece in the instrument panel told him twelve minutes had passed since he reached the edge of the valley. He would have said he had been running from the tractors for nearly an hour.
He rubbed his sweating palms along his thighs, looked over at Hulida’s slumped form. There was no particular satisfaction in knowing that the chase had unnerved the machman more than it had him.
“Now talk,” he said unsteadily, “if you care to go on living. What happened?”
Hulida straightened slowly but did not answer at once. Then he said, speaking carefully and obviously struggling to recover his self-possession, “Several of the survey team members were given truth drugs and questioned as soon as we secured the station. They told us of the long-range transmitter which was to be used to call for help if the station was disabled or overwhelmed by a hostile force. When you were warned off and escaped, it was assumed that that was where you would try to go. The transmitter has been located and is, of course, being guarded. We ran into the group which was watching the route you were most likely to take.”
Jeslin had a sense of heavy, incredulous dismay. He hadn’t expected that particular piece of information to get to the machmen so quickly. It had been the one way left open now to defeat their plans.
After a moment, he asked, “Where did those tractors come from?”
“They are part of our ship’s equipment. The machines were sent ahead to help in your capture.”
Jeslin grunted. “If one of the beams had touched us,” he said, “there’s a good chance we would have been torn apart before they made a capture! You’re right about your group not caring who stands in the way when they’re out to do something.” He saw Hulida’s cheeks go gray below the blindfold, added, “Just before they jumped us, you knew it was coming. You machmen have a built-in communication system of some kind—”
Hulida hesitated, said, “Yes, we do.”
“How does it operate?”
“I could attempt to describe it to you,” Hulida said, “but the description would have meaning only to another machman. The use of the system cannot be taught until it can be experienced.”
“At any rate,” Jeslin said, “your friends know we have stopped running and have settled down somewhere.”
Hulida shook his head.
“I have not told them that.” He managed a brief, shaky grin. “After all, Jeslin, I prefer to go on living . . . and there is no reason why either of us should die. You can do nothing more, and you’ve had a demonstration of what your life as a fugitive would be like. The group won’t give up the hunt until they have you. You can calculate your final odds for yourself. But surrender to me—now—and all will still be well.”
There had been a growing urgency in his voice. Jeslin watched him, not answering. The machman’s mouth worked. Fear, Jeslin thought. More fear than Hulida should be feeling at the moment. His own skin began to crawl. Here at the bottom of the ravine, the search screens showed him nothing.
He reached out quietly, switched on the Pointer’s stungun.
“Jeslin . . .”
Jeslin remained silent.
“Jeslin, there is no time to lose!” Hulida’s voice was harsh with desperation. “I did not tell you the truth just now. I can conceal nothing from the group. There are multiple direct connections between the brains, the nervous systems, of all of us. Our communication is not wholly a mechanical process—we function almost as units of a group mind. They know you are hiding in the area and have been searching for you. At any instant—”
Jeslin turned the Pointer’s nose upward, triggered the gun. The stunfield smashed up out of the ravine, the machine following it. Man-shapes swirled about limply among the trees like drifting leaves, and something came thundering along the floor of the gully toward the place where the Pointer had been hiding.
Then the nightmare chase began again . . .
An endless period later, Jeslin realized he was clear of the pursuit for a second time. He kept the Pointer hurtling forward on a straight line, staying below the trees where he could, but flicking through open stretches and over stream beds without pausing. Once the screen showed him two figures wheeling high against the sky; he thought they were machmen but was under cover again before he could be sure.
Then something smashed against the Pointer’s engine section in the rear. Jeslin swung the machine about, saw a figure gliding away behind a massive tree trunk, sent it spinning with the stungun, turned again and rushed on. A minute later, there was a distant crashing in the forest; then silence.
The Pointer began to vibrate heavily, and presently the speed indicator dropped. Jeslin looked at the location chart, chewing his lip. His arm muscles ached; he was trembling with tension and fatigue. He found himself trying to urge the machine onward mentally, made a snorting sound of self-derision.
Then there was warm, golden sunlight ahead among the trees. Jeslin brought a folded black hood out from under the instrument panel, laid it beside him. He reached over and unfastened Hulida’s seat belt. The machman sagged sideways on the seat. His mouth moved as if he were speaking, but he seemed dazed.
Jeslin brought the Pointer to the ground, turned off the laboring engine. He picked up the black hood, dropped it over his head, its lower folds resting on his shoulders. From within, it seemed transparent, showing a glassy glitter around the edges of objects.
He took his gun from his pocket, hauled open the side door and stepped out. Ahead something slid quickly through a sunlit opening in the tree tops. Jeslin sent two bolts ripping through the foliage behind it, reached back into the Pointer and hauled Hulida ou
t by the arm. He swung the staggering machman around, started at a halfrun toward the area of open ground fifty yards away, thrusting Hulida ahead of him.
“Jeslin—” It was a hoarse gasp.
“Keep moving! They’ll have a tractor on our machine in a moment.” He felt the figure lighten suddenly, warned, “Don’t try to leave me! I’ll blow your head off before you’re ten feet away.”
“You’re insane! You can’t escape now!”
Tractor beams roared suddenly among the trees behind them, and Hulida screamed. They stumbled through a thicket, out into the sunlight of a wide glade. Machman figures darted above the tree tops of the far side, two hundred yards away. Jeslin ripped the blindfold from Hulida’s face, seized his arm again, ran forward with him into the glade.
From the center of the open area came a single deep bell note, a curiously attention-binding sound. Jeslin stopped, hurled Hulida forward, away from him. The machman rolled over, came swaying almost weightlessly to his feet.
The bell note sounded again. Hulida’s head turned toward it. He went motionless.
Here it comes, Jeslin thought . . .
And it came. Under the shielding hood, he was experiencing it, as he had many times before, as a pulsing, dizzying, visual blur. Outside, wave after wave of radiation was rushing out from the animal trap concealed in the center of the clearing, a pounding, numbing pattern of confusion to any mind within its range, increasing moment by moment in intensity.
After ten seconds, it stopped.
Hulida slumped sideways, settled slowly to the ground.
A man-shape streaked down out of the sky, turning over and over, crashed into the tree tops beyond the glade.
Something else passed through the thickets behind Jeslin, sucking noisily at the earth, and moved off into the distance, dirt and other debris cascading back down into the trees behind it. A similar din was receding through the forest to the south. The tractors were continuing on their course, uncontrolled.
Overhead, Jeslin saw other machman fliers drifting gradually down through the air.
He moved forward, picked up Hulida and drew back with him out of the trap’s range. It would reset itself automatically now for any moving thing of sufficient size to trigger its mechanisms.
He wasn’t sure he would find anything left of the Pointer, but the beams hadn’t come within fifty feet of it. As he came up, he heard the communicator signal inside. He put Hulida down hastily, climbed in and switched on the instrument.
The face of Govant, the team’s geophysicist, appeared in the screen.
“Jeslin, what the devil’s happened?” he demanded. “The machmen who took over the station all collapsed at the same instant just now! Aid says she’s sure you caused it in some manner. They’re alive but unconscious.”
“I know,” Jeslin said. “I suggest you disarm them and dump them into one of the cages.”
“That’s being done, of course!” Govant said irritably. “We’re not exactly stupid. But—”
“You’re yelling for help from any navy units around?”
“Naturally.” Govant looked aside, away from the screen, added, “Apparently, we’ve just had a response! But it may be weeks before help arrives, and the machmen said they had a spaceship which—”
“Their ship won’t be a problem,” Jeslin said. “Get a few airtrucks over here, will you? I’ll give you my location. In a rather short time, I’m going to have a great many machmen around to transport back to the station’s cages.”
Govant stared at him. “What did you do to them?”
“Well,” Jeslin said, “for all practical purposes, I’ve blown out their cortical fuses. I walked one of them into a hypnoshock trap here, and it hit the others through him. I’ll give you the details when I get back. At present, they’re simply paralyzed. In a few hours, they’ll be able to move again; but for days after that, they won’t make any move that somebody hasn’t specifically told them to make. By that time, we should have the last of them locked up.”
He stepped out of the Pointer after Govant had switched off and went back to Hulida, mentally shaping the compulsive suggestions which presently would shut off the wandering tractors, round up the tranced fliers, and bring the captured patrol boat and the machman spaceship gliding obediently down to the planet.
1965
A NICE DAY FOR SCREAMING
Sometimes, in deep space, it may be hard to tell the cargo from the owners of a ship . . .
As soon as the Marsar Shift began, Adacee newscaster Keth Deboll had the feeling that he wasn’t going to like this assignment. In part, it might be simply a reaction to the pitch-blackness which closed down instantly on the pseudospace ship. He knew the lights in the personnel section around him were on. Yet not the faintest glow was visible anywhere—not even from Furnay’s control console directly before him. It was the deadest, emptiest black he had ever experienced . . . the kind of black that might be left after the Universe ended. The thought came suddenly that, if he had to stay in it for any length of time, it would drain everything out of him and leave him sitting here, an empty, black shell, as dead as the rest of it.
However, the shift wouldn’t last long. The Navy men with whom Keth Deboll had talked during his briefing the day before had emphasized the eerie aspects of Space Three, no doubt deliberately. Keth knew he wasn’t welcome on board, and he couldn’t have cared less. It had taken a great deal of maneuvering and string-pulling by the Adacee News Viewer System to get him the assignment on one of the fourteen pseudospace ships presently in operation. The Navy wanted more money for its enormously expensive Space Three projects; and in the end the argument had prevailed that the best way to get popular support for their wishes was to have a popular newscaster provide an enthusiastic, first-hand projected report on one of the sorties into pseudospace. And there were simply no more popular newscasters in the Federation that year than Keth Deboll.
But the men he would actually be on shipboard with hadn’t liked the arrangement much, especially the provision that Keth was to have the run of the ship insofar as he didn’t interfere with operations. And like many other people who dealt with him in person, they might not have cared much for Keth. He was undersized and thin, still on the young side but already—since he lived well—sporting a small, round paunch. A point which seemed to irk the Navy scientists in particular was that he hadn’t bothered to take notes on the information they had given him for the telecast. Keth never did take notes, of course; he had nearly perfect recall. But they didn’t know that.
There was a brief, sharp tingling in the palm of his right hand—a signal from Furnay, his technician, that the telecast, which would be transmitted to normspace by special Navy communicators, was beginning; and Keth automatically began to talk . . .
As usual, he didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying. It wasn’t necessary. The relevant material was stored in his mind, already arranged into a number of variant patterns. Depending on the circumstances, it would emerge in one sequence or another, always coherently, smoothly, effectively. He discovered he had started now with the statement that this was another milestone in newscasting history—the first direct report from pseudospace or Space Three. They were shifting at the moment into the field of an entirely new class of energies, a region where space appeared to exist only as a useful symbol, or as an illusionary medium in the recording instruments. The discovery of pseudospace five years ago had been a triumph of human ingenuity; its existence had been established by the calculations of Navy mathematicians, and the means of contacting it derived from those same calculations. Since then two new mathematical systems already had been developed to provide even a theoretical understanding of the problems encountered in the further exploration of this weird new stratum of the Universe.
He turned briefly to technicalities. They would remain in pseudospace for the period of one hour less a few minutes, in a Navy ship especially designed and constructed to permit even temporary existence there. Aside fro
m the standard drives, it was equipped with an engine which made the shift possible. This engine would be shut off as soon as the shift was accomplished, would be turned on again ten minutes before the scheduled return because it took five minutes to build up the required power for the shift. One hour was at present the maximum period a ship could remain safely in Space Three.
The shift engine would be shut off for the curious reason that although motion in Space Three was impossible, motion relative to normal space and subspace while in Space Three was not only possible but greatly augmented. What produced it was any use of energy by the intruding vessel. The result was that a pseudospace ship always emerged into normspace again at a point removed from its point of entry—and at a distance far greater than it could otherwise have covered by the full use of standard drive engines in the same period of time. The potential value of this phenomenon for space travel was obvious; but at present there was no fixed ratio between the energy expended by a ship and the distance it moved, and the direction in which it would move was equally unpredictable. Many of the multiple studies programed for today’s one-hour shift were designed to yield additional information on precisely those points.
Their shift had been initiated in the vicinity of Orado. They would release an exceptional amount of energy because of a demonstration graciously prepared by the Navy to illustrate certain interesting qualities of pseudospace to Adacee’s billions of viewers. So all they knew definitely was that when they emerged again, they would find themselves somewhere within the space boundaries of the Federation. The exact location would be determined after they had arrived.
Keth Deboll came to that point at the instant the Marsar Shift ended and the ship lights reappeared. He hadn’t consciously planned it that way; but he’d been told how long the shift would take, and the material stored in his mind had re-sorted itself so that he’d have the preliminary explanations cleared up when the moment came.
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