The door opened. The attendant stood at rigid attention before the control panel six feet away, rifle grounded, eyes front. Mentally blessing Ralan discipline, Colgrave stepped up beside him, drew out the gun and gave the back of the man’s skull a solid thump with the barrel.
When the attendant opened his eyes again a few minutes later, his head ached and there was a gag in his mouth. His hands were tied behind him, and Colgrave was wearing his uniform.
Colgrave hauled him to his feet, poked a gun muzzle against his back.
“Lead the way to the control room,” he said.
The attendant led the way. Colgrave followed, the uniform cap pulled down to conceal his face. Ajoran’s handgun and a stunner he had taken from the attendant were stuck into his belt. The attendant’s energy rifle and the one which had been strapped to the spacesuit were concealed in a closet near the lock. He had assembled quite an arsenal.
When they reached the wide main passage in the upper level of the ship, he halted the lock attendant. They retraced their steps to the last door they had passed. Colgrave opened it. An office of some kind . . . he motioned the attendant in and followed him, closing the door.
He came out a few seconds later, shoved the stunner back under his belt, and stood listening. The Talada seemed almost eerily silent. Not very surprising, he thought. The number of men who had set out after him indicated that only those of the crew who were needed to coordinate the hunt and maintain the ship’s planetary security measures had remained on board. That could be ten or twelve at most; and every one of them would be stationed at his post at the moment.
Colgrave went out into the main passage, walked quietly along it. Now he could hear an intermittent murmur of voices from the control room. One of them seemed to be that of a woman, but he wasn’t sure. They were being silent again before he came close enough to distinguish what was being said.
There was nothing to be gained by hesitating at this point. The control room was the nerve center of the ship, but there couldn’t be more than four or five of them in it. Colgrave had a gun in either hand as he reached the open doorspace. He turned through it, started unhurriedly down the carpeted stairs leading into the control room, eye and mind photographing the details of the scene below.
Ajoran’s lady was nearest, seated at a small table, her attention on the man before the communicator set in a corner alcove on the left. This man’s back was turned. A gun was belted to his waist. Farther down in the control room sat another man, facing the passage but bent over some instrument on the desk before him. The desk shielded him almost completely, which made him the most dangerous of the three at the moment. No one else was in view, but that didn’t necessarily mean that no one else was here.
Hace became aware of him as he reached the foot of the stairs. Her head turned sharply; she seemed about to speak. Then her eyes were wide with shocked recognition.
He’d have to get the man at the desk the instant she screamed, But she didn’t scream. Instead, her right hand went up, two fingers lifted and spread. She nodded fiercely at the communicator operator, next at the man behind the desk.
Only two of them? Well, that probably was true. But he’d better use the stunner on Hace before attempting to deal with two armed men.
At that moment, the communicator operator looked around.
He was young and his reactions were as fast as Hace’s. He threw himself sideways out of the chair with a shout of warning, hit the floor rolling over and clawing for his gun. The man behind the desk had no chance. As he jerked upright, startled, an energy bolt took him in the head. The operator had no real chance, either. Colgrave swung the gun to the left, saw for an instant eyes fixed on him, bright with hatred, and the other gun coming up, and fired again.
He waited a number of seconds, then, alert for further motion. But the control room remained quiet. So Ajoran’s lady hadn’t lied. She stayed where she was, unstirring, until he turned toward her. Then she said quietly, her expression still incredulous, “It seemed like magic! How could you get into the ship?”
Colgrave looked at the dark, ugly bruise his fist had printed along the side of her jaw, said, “In Ajoran’s spacesuit, of course.”
She hesitated. “He’s dead?”
“Quite dead,” Colgrave said thoughtfully.
“I wanted,” Hace said, “to kill him myself. I would have done it finally, I believe . . .” She hesitated again. “It doesn’t matter now. What can I do to help you? They’re in trouble down in the swamp.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“That isn’t clear. It began two or three minutes ago, but we haven’t been able to get an intelligible report from the two communicator men. They were excited, shouted, almost irrational.”
Colgrave scowled. After a moment, he shook his head. “Let’s clean up the ship first. How many on board?”
“Nine besides those two . . . and myself.”
“The man in the lock’s taken care of,” Colgrave said. “Eight. On the lifeboat?”
“Nobody. Ajoran had a trap prepared for you there, in case you came back before they caught you. You could have got inside, but you couldn’t have started the engines, and you would have been unable to get out again.”
Colgrave grunted. “Can you get the men in the ship to come individually to the control room?”
“I see. Yes, I think I can do that.”
“I’ll want to check you over for weapons first.”
“Of course.” Hace smiled slightly, stood up. “Why should you trust me?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Colgrave said.
They came in, unsuspecting, one by one; and, one by one, the stunner brought them down from behind. Shortly afterwards, a freight carrier floated into the Talada’s vat room. Hace stood aside as Colgrave unlocked the cover of the drop hole in the deck and hauled it back. A heavy stench surged up from the vat. Colgrave looked down a moment at the oily black liquid eight feet below, then dragged the nine unconscious men in turn over from the carrier, dropped them in, and resealed the vat.
A man’s voice babbled and sobbed. Another man screamed in sudden fright; then there was a sound of rapid, panicky breathing mingled with the sobs Colgrave switched off the communicator, looked over at Hace. “Is this what it was like before?” She moistened her lips. “No. this is insanity!” Her voice was unsteady. “They’re both completely incapable of responding to us now. What could there be in that swamp at night to have terrified them to that extent? At least some of the others should have come back to the ship . . .” She paused. “Colgrave, why do we stay here? You know what they’re like—why bother with them? You don’t need any of them to handle the ship. One person can take it to Earth if necessary.”
“I know,” Colgrave said. He studied her, added, “I’m wondering a little why you’re willing to help me get to Earth.”
Anger showed for an instant in the pale, beautiful face.
“I’m no Ralan! I was picked up in a raid on Beristeen when I was twelve. I’ve never wanted to do anything but get away from Rala since that day.”
Colgrave grunted, rubbed his chin. “I see . . . Well, we can’t leave immediately. For one thing, I left the Sigma File in that swamp.”
Hace stared at him. “You haven’t destroyed it?”
“No. It never quite came to that point.”
She laughed shortly. “Colgrave, you’re rather wonderful! Ajoran was convinced the file was lost, and that his only chance of saving his own skin was to get you back alive so he could find out what you had learned on the Lorn Worlds . . . No, you can’t leave the file behind, of course! I understand that. But why don’t we lift the ship out of atmosphere until it’s morning here?” She nodded at the communicator. “That disturbance—whatever they’ve aroused down there—should have settled out by then. The swamp will be quiet again. Then you can work out a way to get the file back without too much danger.”
Colgrave shook his head, got to his feet. “No, that shouldn’t be necessary.
The man-tracker was being monitored from the ship, wasn’t it? Where is the control set kept?”
Hace indicated the desk twenty feet behind her where the second man had sat when Colgrave came into the control room.
“It’s lying over there. That’s what he was doing.”
Colgrave said, “Let’s take a look at it. I want the thing to return to the ship.” He started toward the desk.
Hace stood up, went over to the desk with him. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you how to operate it.”
“I should be able to do it,” Colgrave said. “I played around a few hours once with a captured man-tracker which had been shipped back to Earth. This appears to be a very similar model.” He looked down at the moving dark blurs in the screen which formed the center of the control set, twisted a knob to one side of it. “Let’s see what it’s doing now before I have it return to the ship.”
The screen cleared suddenly.
The scene was still dark, but in the machine’s night-vision details were distinct. A rippling weed bed was gliding slowly past below; a taller leafy thicket ahead moved closer. Then the thicket closed about the tracker.
Hace said, “The operator was trying to discover through the tracker what was happening to the men down there, but it moved out of the range of their lights almost as soon as the disturbance began. Apparently the devices, once set, can’t be turned around.”
“Not unless you’re riding them,” Colgrave agreed. “Telemonitoring starts them off and observes what they’re doing. They either go on and finish their business, or get their sensors switched off and return to their starting point. It’s still following my trail. Now . . .”
“What’s that light?” Hace asked uneasily. “It looks like the reflection of a fire.”
The tracker had emerged from the thicket, swung to the left, and was gliding low over an expanse of open water, almost touching it. There were pale orange glitters on the surface ahead of it.
Colgrave studied them, said, “At a guess it simply means there’s a moon in the sky.” He pushed a stud on the set, and the scene vanished. “That wiped out the last instructions it was given. It will come back to the ship in a minute or two.” Hace looked at him. “What do you have in mind?”
“I’m riding it down to the swamp.”
“Not now! In the morning you . . .”
“I don’t think I’ll be in any danger. Now let’s find a place where I’m sure you’ll stay locked up until I get back. As you said, one person can do all that’s needed to lift this ship off the planet and head away . . .
VI
Five hundred feet above the ground, the man-tracker’s open saddle was not the most reassuring place to be in. But the machine was considerably easier to maneuver than the spacesuit had been and the direct route by air to the giant tree beneath which he’d concealed the Sigma File was the shortest and fastest. Colgrave was reasonably certain nothing had happened to the file, but he wouldn’t know until he held it in his hands again.
The orange moon that had pushed above the horizon was a big one, the apparent diameter of its disk twice that of the vanished sun. Colgrave was holding the tracker’s pace down. But no more than a few minutes passed before he could make out the big tree in the vague light, ahead and a little to his right. He guided the machine over to it, circled its crown slowly twice, looking down, then lowered the tracker down to a section of open water near the base of the tree, turned it and went gliding in toward the tangled root system of the giant. He turned the control set off, remained in the saddle a few moments, looking about and listening.
The swamp was full of sound, most of it of a minor nature . . . chirps, twittering, soft hoots. Something whistled piercingly three times in the tree overhead. Behind him, not too far off, was a slow, heavy splashing which gradually moved away. At the very limit of his hearing was something else. It might have been human voices, faint with distance, or simply his imagination at work.
Nearby, nothing moved. Colgrave pulled the control set out of its saddle frame, slid down from the saddle, clinging to it with one hand, finally dropped a few inches into a layer of mud above the mass of tree roots. He climbed farther up on the roots, found a dry place under one of them where he shoved the control set in out of sight. Then he went climbing cautiously on around the great trunk, slipping now and then on the slimy root tangle beneath the mud . . .
And here was where he had concealed the Sigma File. A little bay of water extended almost to the trunk itself about five feet deep. Colgrave slipped down into it. There was firm footing here. He moved forward to the tip of the bay, took a deep breath and crouched down. The warm water closed over his head. He groped about among the root shelves before him, touched the file, gripped it by its handle and drew it out.
He clambered up out of the water, started back around the tree . . .
And there the thing stood.
Colgrave stopped short. This was almost an exact duplication of what happened after he brought the Sigma File down here and concealed it. It had been daylight then, and what he saw now as a bulky manlike shape in the shadow of the tree had been clearly visible. It was a green monstrosity, heavy as a gorilla, with a huge, round bobbing ball of a head which showed no features at all through its leafy appendages. It was bigger than it had looked at a distance from the hillside, standing almost eight foot tall.
The first time, it had been only a few yards away, moving toward him around the tree, when he saw it. His instant reaction had been to haul out his gun . . .
Now he stayed still, looking at it. His heart beat had speeded up noticeably. But this was, he told himself, an essentially vegetarian creature. And it was peaceable because it had a completely effective means of defense. It could sense the impulse to attack in an approaching carnivore, and it could make the carnivore forget its purpose.
As often as was necessary.
Colgrave made himself start forwards. He had no intention, his mind kept repeating, of harming this oversized fleegle, and it had no intention of harming him. It did not move out of his path as he came toward it, but turned slowly to keep facing him as he clambered past over the roots a few feet away.
Colgrave didn’t look back at it and heard no movement behind him. He saw the man-tracker floating motionless above the mud ahead, put the file down and pulled the tracker’s control set out from under the root where he had left it. A minute or two later, he was back in the machine’s saddle, out in the moonlight away from the big tree, the Sigma File fastened to his belt.
He tapped it pattern of instructions into the control set, checked them very carefully, slid the set into the saddle frame and switched it on.
The man-tracker swung about purposefully, went gliding away through the swamp. A hundred yards on, it encountered three fleegles, somewhat smaller than the one under the tree, wading slowly leg-deep through the mud. They stopped as the machine appeared, and Colgrave thought friendly and admiring things about fleegles until they were well behind him again. Perhaps a minute later, the man-tracker stopped in the air above the first of the Talada’s lost crew.
He had crawled into a thicket and was blubbering noisily to himself. When two of the machine’s grapplers flicked down into the thicket and locked about him, he bawled in horror. Colgrave looked straight ahead, not particularly wanting to watch this. There was a click behind him as the preservative tank opened. For a moment, his nostrils were full of the stink of the liquid. Then there was a splash, and the bawling stopped abruptly. The tank clicked shut.
The man-tracker swung around on a new point, set off again. Its present instructions were to trail and collect every human being within the range of its sensory equipment, except its rider.
They’d been on edge to begin with here, Colgrave told himself. Their rifles already had brought down one brute which came roaring monstrously at them in the dusk; and presumably the rifles could handle anything else they might encounter. But they hadn’t liked the look of the swamp the man-tracker was leading them into
. Wading through pools, slipping in the mud, flashing their lights about at every menacing shadow, they followed the machine, mentally cursing the order that had sent them after the Earth intelligence agent as night was closing in.
And then a great green ogre was standing in one of the light beams . . .
Naturally, they tried to shoot it.
And as they made the decision, they began to forget.
Progressive waves of amnesia . . . first, perhaps, only a touch. The men lifting rifles forgot they were lifting them. Until they saw the fleegle again—
The past few hours might be wiped out next. They stood in a swamp at night, not knowing how they’d got there or why they were there. But they had rifles in their hands, and an ogrish shape was watching them.
Months forgotten now. The fleegle could keep it up.
About that point, they’d begun to stampede, scattered, ploughed this way and that through the swamp. But the fleegles were everywhere. And as often as a gun was lifted in panic, another chunk of memory would go. Until the last of the weapons was dropped.
The man-tracker wasn’t rounding up men but children in grown-up bodies, huddled in hiding on a wet, dark nightmare world, dazed and uncomprehending, unable to do more than wail wildly as the machine picked them up and placed them in its tank.
VII
Colgrave came out of the compartment where the man-tracker was housed, locked the door and turned off the control set.
“You haven’t closed the vat yet,” Hace said.
He nodded. “I know. Let’s go back.”
“I’m still not clear on just what did happen,” she went on, walking beside him up the passage. “You say they lost their memories . . .?”
“Yes. It’s a temporary thing. I had the same experience when I first got here, though I don’t seem to have been hit as hard as most of them were. If they weren’t floating around in that slop now, they’d start remembering within hours.”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 151