There was no one in sight on the other side. He turned to the right along the passage through which he and Furnay had been conducted to the personnel section a little over an hour ago. The main entrance lock was just beyond its far end, out of sight. He might find something there to tell him how to get to the engine room. Since they were having trouble with the drives, that was presumably where the investigating senior officers would be.
At the end of the passage, he stopped, startled. The lock room was almost entirely filled with an assortment of items he found himself unable to identify. One wall was lined to the ceiling with luminous hexagonal boxes arranged like a honeycomb. Against them leaned bundled extrusions which looked like steel with bubbles of light trickling slowly through it. Completely blocking the lock was a great mass of rainbow-colored globes two feet in diameter, which appeared to be stuck together. The weirdest item was stacked by the hundreds along the left wall . . . transparent plastic blocks, each containing something which looked partly like a long-haired gloomy monkey and partly like a caterpillar.
Keth blinked at the arrangement, mouth open, for a moment, went over and touched a finger gingerly against one of the globes. It felt warm—around a hundred and ten degrees, he decided. Scowling and muttering to himself, he went off down another passage.
He passed a closed door, hesitated, returned and opened it. The area beyond was filled about equally by transparent sacks, bulging with what looked like white diamonds, and large, dark-red cylinders. The cylinders were groaning softly. Keth closed the door, opened another one thirty feet farther on, glanced in and hurriedly slammed it shut. He walked on, shaking his head, his mouth working nervously.
A minute or two later, he saw a sign which said ENGINE ROOM-MAINTENANCE above an opened lock. Keth entered, found himself on the upper level of the engine room with a spider web of catwalks running here and there about the machinery. From below came the sound of voices.
He edged out on one of the catwalks, peered down. Half a dozen men, two of them in uniform, stood about an open hatch from which another uniformed man, the engineering officer, was just emerging. These were the ship’s senior officers, and every one of them, Keth reminded himself, was also one of the Federation Navy’s top scientists. They were too far off to let him understand what they were talking about, but if he got within hearing range without being discovered, he should gather information they wouldn’t volunteer for the purposes of a newscast. He drew back out of sight, located a ladder along the wall and climbed down to the main level.
Guided by their voices, he threaded his way among the machines toward the group. There was a sudden, loud slam—the hatch being closed again. Then the voices were coming toward him on the other side of the massive steel bole along which he had been moving. Keth flattened himself quickly into a shallow niche of the machine, stayed still.
They came out into an intersection of passages on Keth’s left and stopped there. He held his breath. If they looked over at him now, they couldn’t miss seeing him. But the engineering officer was speaking and their attention was on him.
“Up to a point,” he was saying, “the matter is now clear! It removed our fuel plates and replaced them with its own . . .”
Keth’s ears seemed to flick forwards. What was that? His thoughts began to race.
“Those plates,” the man went on, “are producing energy. In fact, they have a really monstrous output. But the energy doesn’t do much for our drives. In some way, almost all of it is being diverted, dissipated, shunted off somewhere else.
“There’s no immediate explanation for that, but it isn’t a practical problem. We’ll simply shut off the drives, pull out the plates and put our own back again. We’ll be docking at the station in a week. If we had to use this stuff, it would take us half a dozen years to crawl back to the Hub under our own power.”
“In normspace,” another man said.
“Yes, in normspace. In pseudo, naturally, it would be a very different matter.”
The ship captain scratched his chin, remarked, “In pseudo, if your figures on the output are correct, those plates might have carried us out of the galaxy in a matter of hours.”
“Depending on the course we took,” the engineering officer agreed.
There was a pause. Then somebody said, “When we were maneuvering to get the siege boat in range, we may have been moving along, or nearly along, one of the scheduled courses. That and our slow speed would have been the signal.
“It seems to explain it,” the engineering officer said. He added, “A point I still don’t understand is why we didn’t lose our atmosphere in the process! We’re agreed that the fact we were aboard would have had no meaning for the thing—it was a detail it simply wouldn’t register. Yet there has been no drop in pressure.”
Another man said dryly, “But it isn’t quite the same atmosphere! I’ve found a substantially higher oxygen reading. I think it will be discovered that some of the objects it left on board—I suspect those in the lock room in particular—contain life in one form or another, and that it’s oxygen-breathing life.”
“That may have been a very fortunate circumstance for us,” the captain said. “And . . .” His eyes had shifted along the passage, stopped now on Keth. He paused. “Well,” he said mildly, “it seems we have company! It’s the gentleman from the newscast system.”
The others looked around in surprise.
“Mr. Deboll,” the captain went on thoughtfully, “I take it you overheard our discussion just now.”
Keth cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. He took off the medical officer’s cap.
“You came down here by way of the main lock passage?”
“Yes.”
There was silence for a moment. Then the engineering officer said, “As I see it, no harm has been done!” He looked rather pleased.
“Quite the contrary, in my opinion!” said the captain. He smiled at Keth. “Mr. Deboll please join our group! In observing you during yesterday’s briefing, I was struck by your quickness in grasping the essentials of a situation. No doubt, you already have realized what the explanation for this extraordinary series of events must be.”
“Yes, I have,” Keth said hoarsely.
“Excellent. Our instructions are that we must not interfere in any way with your report to the public. Now I have a feeling that what you will have to say may be a definite upset to those who have maintained the exploratory Space Three projects should be limited or abandoned because of their expense, and because no information of practical value could possibly be gained from them.”
“My guess is you’ll get anything you want for them now,” Keth told him.
The captain grinned. “Then let’s return to the personnel section and get that newscast going!”
They started back to the engine room entrance Keth mentally phrasing the manner in which he would explain to Adacee’s waiting billions of viewers that the pseudospace ship—one of Man’s great achievements—had been halted, engulfed, checked, fueled, loaded up and released by somebody else’s automatic depot and service station for intergalactic robot cargo carriers.
PLANET OF FORGETTING
On this world men could not live, for here you forgot everything—even forgot you were forgetting!
I
At best, Major Wade Colgrave decided, giving his mud-caked boot tips a brooding scowl, amnesia would be an annoying experience. But to find oneself, as he had just done, sitting on the rocky hillside of an unfamiliar world which showed no sign of human habitation, with one’s think-tank seemingly in good general working order but with no idea of how one had got there, was more than annoying. It could be fatal.
The immediate situation didn’t look too dangerous. He might have picked up some appalling local disease which would presently manifest itself, but it wasn’t likely. A foreign-duty agent of Earth’s military intelligence was immunized early in his career against almost every possible form of infection.
Otherwise, there was a vari
ety of strange lifeforms in sight, each going about its business. Some looked big enough to make a meal of a human being and might, if they noticed him. But the gun on Colgrave’s hip should be adequate to knock such ideas out of predators who came too close.
He’d checked the gun over automatically on discovering a few minutes before that he had one. It was a standard military type, manufactured by upward of a dozen Terran colonies and excolonies. There were no markings to indicate its origin; but more important at the moment was the fact that the ammocounter indicated that it contained a full charge.
What could have happened to get him into this position?
The amnesia, however he’d acquired it, took a peculiar form. He had no questions about his identity. He knew who he was. Further, up to a point . . . in fact, practically up to a specific second of his life . . . his memory seemed normal. He’d been on Earth, had been told to report at once to the office of Jerry Redman, his immediate superior. And he was walking along a hall on the eighteenth floor of the headquarters building, not more than thirty feet from the door of Redman’s office, when his memory simply stopped. He couldn’t recall a thing between that moment and the one when he’d found himself sitting there.
Presumably Redman had prepared a new assignment for him: and presumably he’d been briefed on it and set off. If he could extend his memory even thirty minutes beyond the instant of approaching the door, he might have a whole fistful of clues to what had gone on during the interval. But not a thing would come to mind. It wasn’t a matter of many years being wiped out; if he’d aged at all, he couldn’t detect it. Some months, however, might easily have vanished, or even as much as two or three years . . .
Had somebody given him a partially effective memory wipeout and left him marooned here? Not at all likely. A rather large number of people unquestionably would be glad to see Intelligence deprived of his talents, but they wouldn’t resort to such roundabout methods. A bullet through his head, and the job would have been done.
The thought that he’d been on a spaceship which cracked up in attempting a landing on this planet, knocking him out in the process, seemed more probable. He might have been the only survivor and staggered away from the wreck, his wits somewhat scrambled. If that was it, it had happened very recently.
He was thirsty, hungry, dirty, and needed a shave. But neither he nor his clothing suggested he had been an addled castaway on a wild planet for any significant length of time. The clothes were stained with mud and vegetable matter but in good general condition. He might have stumbled into a mud hole in the swamps which began at the foot of the hills below him and stretched away to the right, then climbed up here and sat down until he dried off. There was, in fact, a blurred impression that he’d been sitting in this spot an hour or so, blinking foggily at the landscape, before he suddenly grew aware of himself and his surroundings.
Colgrave’s gaze shifted slowly about the panorama before him, searching for the glitter of a downed ship or any signs of human activity. There was no immediate point in moving until he could decide in which direction he should go. It was a remarkable view of a rather unremarkable world. The yellow sun disk had somewhat more than Sol’s diameter. Glancing at it, he had a feeling it had been higher above the horizon when he noticed it first, which would make it afternoon in this area. It was warm but not disagreeably so; and now that he thought of it, his body was making no complaints about atmospheric conditions and gravity.
He saw nothing that was of direct interest to him. Ahead and to the left, a parched plain extended from the base of the hills to the horizon. In tire low marshland on the right, pools of dark, stagnant water showed occasionally through thick vegetation. Higher up, lichen-gray trees formed a dense forest sweeping along the crests of the hills to within a quarter-mile of where Colgrave sat. The rock-cluttered hillside about him bore only patches of bushy growth.
The fairly abundant animal life in view was of assorted sizes and shapes and, to Colgrave’s eyes, rather ungainly in appearance. Down at the edge of the marshes, herds of several species mingled peacefully, devoting themselves to chomping up the vegetation. An odd, green, bulky creature, something like a walking vegetable and about the height of a man, moved about slowly on stubby hind legs. It was using paired upper limbs to stuff leaves and whole plants into its lump of a head Most of the other animals were quadrupeds Only one of the carnivorous types was active . . . a dogsized beast with a narrow rod for a body and a long, weaving neck tipped by a round cat head. A pack of them quartered the tall grass between marsh and plain in a purposeful manner, evidently intent on small game.
The other predators Colgrave could see might be waiting for nightfall before they did something about dinner. Half a dozen heavy leonine brutes lay about companionably on the open plain, evidently taking a sunbath. Something much larger and dark squatted in the shade of a tree on the far side of the marsh, watching the browsing herds but making no move to approach them.
The only lifeforms above the size of a lizard on the slopes near Colgrave were a smallish gray hopper, which moved with nervous jerkiness from one clump of shrubs to another. They seemed to be young specimens of the green biped in the marsh. There was a fair number of those downhill on the slopes, ranging between one and three feet in height. They were more active than their elders; now and then about two or three would go gamboling clumsily around a bush together, like fat puppies at play. After returning to the business of stripping clumps of leaves from the shrubbery they would stuff them into the mouth-slits of their otherwise featureless heads. One of them, eating steadily away, was about twenty feet below him. It showed no interest whatever in the visitor from Earth.
However he considered the matter, he couldn’t have been stumbling around by himself on this world for more than fifteen hours. And he could imagine no circumstances under which he might have been abandoned here deliberately. Therefore there should be, within a fifteen-hour hike at the outside, something—ship, camp, Intelligence post, settlement—from which he had started out.
If it was a ship, it might be a broken wreck. But even a wreck would provide shelter, food, perhaps a means of sending an SOS call into space. There might be somebody else still alive on it. If there wasn’t, studying the ship itself should give him many indications of what had occurred, and why he was here.
Whatever he would find, he had to get back to his starting point—
Colgrave stiffened. Then he swore, relaxed slightly, sat still. There was a look of intense concentration on his face.
Quietly, unnoticed, while his attention was fixed on the immediate problem, a part of his lost memories had returned. They picked up at the instant he was walking along the hall toward Redman’s office, ran on for a number of months, ended again in the same complete, uncompromising manner as before.
He still didn’t know why he was on this world. But he felt he was close to the answer now—perhaps very close indeed.
II
The Lorn Worlds, Imperial Rala—the Sigma File—Imperial Rala, the trouble maker, two centuries ago the most remote of the scattered early Earth colonies, now a compact heavy-industry civilization which had indicated for some time that it intended to supplant Earth as the leading interstellar power. It had absorbed a number of other ex-colonies of minor status, turned its attention then on the nearby Lorn Worlds as its first important target of conquest. Colgrave had been assigned to the Lorn Worlds some years previously. At that time the Lornese were attempting to placate Rala and refused all assistance to Earth’s intelligence agencies.
Redman had called him to the office that day to inform him there had been a basic shift in Lornese policies. He was being sent back. A full-scale invasion by Imperial Rala was in the making, and the Lorn Worlds had asked for support. Earth’s military forces could not be redeployed in sufficient strength to meet a massive thrust in that distant area of space in time to check the expected invasion. When it came, the Lorn Worlds would fight a delaying action, giving ground as slowly as possible
until help arrived. Until it did arrive, they would remain sealed off from Earth almost completely by superior Ralan strength.
Colgrave worked with Lornese intelligence men for almost three months, setting up the Sigma File. It contained in code every scrap of previously withheld information they could give against Rala. For decades the Lornese had been concerned almost exclusively with the activities of their menacing neighbor and with their own defensive plans. The file would be of immense importance in determining Earth’s immediate strategy. For Rala, its possession would be of equal importance.
Colgrave set off with it finally in a Lornese naval courier to make the return run to Earth. The courier was a very fast small ship which could rely on its speed alone to avoid interception. As an additional precaution, it would follow a route designed to keep it well beyond the established range of Ralan patrols.
A week later, something happened to it. Just what, Colgrave didn’t yet know.
Besides himself there had been three men on board; the two pilot-navigators and an engineering officer. They were picked men and Colgrave had no doubt of their competence. He didn’t know whether they had been told the nature of his mission, the matter was not brought up. It should have been an uneventful, speedy voyage home.
When one of the Lornese pilots summoned Colgrave to the control room to tell him the courier was being tracked by another ship, the man showed no serious concern. Their pursuer could be identified on the screen; it was a Ralan raider of the Talada class, ten times the courier’s tonnage but still a rather small ship. More importantly, a Talada could produce nothing like the courier’s speed.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 148