“How much have you taken?”
“My limit. A ten-hour dose . . . sixty-five units.”
She was telling the truth—her developed ability to absorb massive dosages of quizproof without permanent ill effects had pulled her out of more than one difficult situation. But a third of the amount she’d mentioned was considered potentially lethal. Decrain studied her doubtfully a moment as if pondering the degree of her humanity. Decrain appeared to be a stolid type, but the uncovering of successive batteries of spidery instruments, unlike anything he had encountered in his professional career, had caused him mental discomfort; and when he brought Danestar’s set of gimmicked wigs—to which the green one she’d been wearing was now added—out of a shrinkcase and watched them unfold on the table, he’d seemed shaken.
“You’ll be brought over here now, Miss Gems,” Volcheme said, his face sour. “We want a relaxed atmosphere for our discussion, so Decrain will have to search you thoroughly first. As far as possible, he’ll be a gentleman about it, of course.”
“I’m sure he will be,” Danestar said agreeably. “Because if he isn’t, his hide becomes part of our deal.”
The muscles along Decrain’s jaw tightened for an instant, but he continued packaging the sections of Danestar’s instruments Galester wanted to examine without comment. Tornull began to laugh, caught sight of the big man’s expression and checked himself abruptly, looking startled.
The semimaterial composite body of the goyal flowed below the solid surface of the world of Mezmiali towards the Unclassified Specimens Depot, swerving from its course occasionally to avoid the confusing turbulences of radiation about the larger cities. Its myriad units hummed with co-ordinating communal impulses of direction and purpose.
Before this, in all its thousand years of existence, the goyal had known only the planets of the Pit, murkily lit by stars which swam like a glowing fog in the dusk. Once those worlds had supported the civilization of an inventive race which called itself the Builders. The Builders developed spaceships capable of sliding unharmed through the cosmic dust at a speed above that of light, and a location system to guide them infallibly through the formless gloom where ordinary communication methods were useless. Eventually, they reached the edges of the Pit—and shrank back. They had assumed the dust cloud stretched on to the end of the universe, were appalled when they realized it was limited and seemed suspended in some awesome, gleaming, impossibly open void.
To venture into that terrible alien emptiness themselves was unthinkable. But the urge to explore it by other means grew strong. The means they presently selected was a lowly form of energy life, at home both in the space and on the planets of the Pit. The ingenuity of the Builders produced in it the impulse to combine with its kind into increasingly large, more coherent and more purposeful groups; and the final result of their manipulations was the goyal, a superbeing which thought and acted as an individual, while its essential structure was still that of a gigantic swarm of the minor, uncomplicated prototypes of energy life with which the Builders had begun. The goyal was intended to be their galactic explorer, an intelligent, superbly adaptable servant, capable of existing and sustaining itself as readily in space as on the worlds it encountered.
In its way, the goyal was an ultimate achievement of the Builders’ skills. But it was to become also the monument to an irredeemable act of stupidity. They had endowed it with great and varied powers and with keen, specialized intelligence, but not with gratitude. When it discovered it was stronger than its creators and swifter than their ships, it turned on the Builders and made war on them, exterminating them on planet after planet until, within a century, it had become sole master of the Pit.
For a long time, it remained unchallenged there. It shifted about the great dust cloud at will, guided by the Builders’ locator system, feeding on the life of the dim worlds. During that period, it had no concept of intelligence other than its own and that of the Builders. Then a signal which had not come into use since the last of the Builders vanished alerted the locator system. A ship again had appeared within its range . . .
The goyal flashed through the cloud on the locator impulses like a great spider darting along the strands of its web. At the point of disturbance, it found an alien ship groping slowly and blindly through the gloom. Without hesitation, it flowed aboard and swept through the ship, destroying all life inside.
It had been given an understanding of instruments, and it studied the ship in detail, then studied the dead beings. They were not Builders though they showed some resemblance to them. Their ship was not designed to respond to the locator system; it had come probing into the Pit from the surrounding void.
Other ships presently followed it, singly and in groups. They came cautiously, scanning the smothering haze for peril, minds and instruments alert behind a variety of protective devices which seemed adequate until the moment the goyal struck. The enveloping protective screens simply were too light to hamper it seriously; and once it was through the screens, the alien crew was at its mercy. But the persistence these beings showed in intruding on its domain was disturbing to it. It let some of them live for a time on the ships it captured, while it watched and studied them, manipulated them, experimented with them. Gradually, it formed a picture of an enemy race in the void which must be destroyed, as it had destroyed the Builders, if its supremacy was to be maintained.
It did not intend to venture into the void alone. It had planted sections of its body on a number of the worlds of the Pit. The sections were as yet immature. They could not move about in space as the parent body did, possessed barely enough communal mind to know how to nourish themselves from the planetary life around them. But they were growing and developing. In time, the goyal would have others of its kind to support it. Until then, it planned to hold the Pit against the blind intruders from the void without letting the enemy race become aware of its existence.
Then the unforeseeable happened. An entire section of the locator system suddenly went dead, leaving the remainder functioning erratically. For the first time in its long existence, the goyal was made aware of the extent of its dependence on the work of the Builders. After a long, difficult search, it discovered the source of the trouble. A key locator near the edge of the dust cloud had disappeared. Its loss threatened to make the entire system unusable.
There was no way of replacing it. The goyal’s mind was not that of a Builder. It had learned readily to use instruments, but it could not construct them. Now it realized its mistake in exterminating the only civilized race in the Pit. It should have kept the Builders in subservience to itself so that their skills would always be at its disposal. It could no longer be certain even of detecting the intruding aliens when they came again and preventing them from discovering the secrets of the cloud. Suddenly, the end of its reign seemed near.
Unable to develop a solution to the problem, the goyal settled into a kind of apathy, drifted with dimming energies aimlessly about the Pit—until, unmistakably, the lost locator called it! Alert at once, the goyal sped to other units of the system, found they had recorded and pinpointed the distant blast. It had come from beyond the cloud, out of the void! Raging, the goyal set off in the indicated direction. It had no doubt of what had happened—one of the alien ships had discovered the locator and carried it away. But now it could be and would be recovered.
Extended into a needle of attenuated energy over a million miles in length, the goyal flashed out into the starlit void, its sensor units straining. There was a sun dead ahead; the stolen instrument must be within that system. The goyal discovered a spaceship of the aliens moving in the same direction, closed with it and drew itself on board. For a time, its presence unsuspected, it remained there, forming its plans. It could use the ship’s energies to build up its reserves, but while the ship continued towards Mezmiali, it made no move.
Presently, it noted a course shift which would take the ship past the Mezmiali system but close enough to it to make the transfer to any
of the sun’s four planets an almost effortless step. The goyal remained quiet. Not long afterwards, its sensors recorded a second blast from the lost locator. Now it knew not only to which planet it should go but, within a few hundred miles, at what point of that planet the instrument was to be found.
Purple fire lashed out from the ship’s bulkheads to engulf every human being on board simultaneously. Within moments, the crew was absorbed. The goyal drank energy from the drive generators to the point of surfeit, left the ship and vanished in the direction of Mezmiali. Within the system, it again closed in on a ship and rode down with it to the planet.
It had reached its destination undetected and at the peak of power, its reserves intact; but this was unknown enemy territory, and it remained cautious. For hours, its sensors had known precisely where the locator was. The goyal waited until the humans had disembarked from the ship, until the engines were quiet and it could detect no significant activity in the area immediately about it. Then it flowed out of the ship and into the ground. The two humans who saw it were absorbed before they could make a report.
There was no reason to hesitate longer. Moving through the dense solid matter of the planet was a tedious process by the goyal’s standards; but, in fact, only a short time passed before it reached the University League’s isolated Depot.
There it was brought to a very abrupt stop.
It had flowed up to the energy barrier surrounding the old fortress site and partly into it. Hostile forces crashed through it instantly with hideous, destructive power. A quarter of its units died in that moment. The remaining units whipped back out of the boiling fury of the field, reassembled painfully underground near the Depot. The body was reduced and its energy depleted, but it had suffered no lasting damage.
The communal mind remained badly shocked for minutes; then it, too, began to function again. There was not the slightest possibility of breaking through that terrible barrier! In all its experience, the goyal had never encountered anything similar to it. The defensive ship screens it had driven through in its secretive murders in the Pit had been fragile webs by comparison, and the Builders’ stoutest planetary energy shields had been hardly more effective. It began searching cautiously along the perimeter of the barrier. Presently, it discovered the entrance lock.
It was closed, but the goyal knew about locks and their use. The missing locator was so close that the sensors’ reports on it were blurred, but it was somewhere within this monstrously guarded structure. The goyal decided it needed only to wait. In time, the lock would open and it would enter through it. It would reduce some of the human beings inside to a state of obedient semilife in which they could handle unfamiliar mechanisms for it, destroy the others immediately, find the locator and be on its way back to the Pit before the alien world realized that anything was amiss here . . .
Approximately an hour later, a slow, bulky vehicle came gliding down from the sky towards the Depot. Messages were exchanged between it and a small building on the outside of the barrier in the language employed on the ships which had come into the Pit. A section of the communal mind interpreted the exchange without difficulty, reported:
The vehicle was bringing supplies, was expected, and would be passed through the barrier lock.
At the lock, just below the surface of the ground, the goyal waited, its form compressed to nearsolidity, to accompany the vehicle inside.
In Dr. Hishkan’s office in the central building of the Depot, the arrival of the supplies truck was being awaited with a similar degree of interest by the group assembled there. Their feelings about it varied. Danestar’s feeling—in part—was vast relief. Volcheme was a very tough character, and there was a streak of gambler’s recklessness in him which might have ruined her plan.
“Any time anything big enough to have that apparatus on board leaves the Depot now, we clear it by shortcode before the lock closes,” she’d said. “You don’t know what message to send! You can’t get it from me, and you can’t get it from Wergard. The next truck or shuttle that leaves won’t get cleared. And it will get stopped almost as soon as it’s outside.”
That was it—the basic lie! If they’d been willing to take the chance, they could have established in five minutes that it was a lie.
“You’re bluffing,” Volcheme had said, icily hating her. “The bluff won’t stop us from leaving when we’re ready to go. We won’t have to run any risks. We’ll simply go out with the shuttle to check your story before we load the thing on.”
“Then why don’t you do it? Why wait?” She’d laughed, a little high, a little feverish, with the drugs cooking in her—her own and the stuff Galester had given her in an attempt to counteract the quizproof effect. She’d told them it wasn’t going to work; and now, almost two hours later, they knew it wasn’t going to work.
They couldn’t make her feel physical pain, they couldn’t intimidate her, they couldn’t touch her mind. They’d tried all that in the first fifteen minutes when she came into the office, escorted by Decrain and Tornull, and told Volcheme bluntly what the situation was, what he had to do. They could, of course, as they suggested, kill her, maim her, disfigure her. Danestar shrugged it off. They could, but she didn’t have to mention the price tag it would saddle them with. Volcheme was aware of it.
The threats soon stopped. Volcheme either was in a trap, or he wasn’t. If the Kyth Agency had him boxed in here, he would have to accept Danestar’s offer, leave with his group and without the specimen. He could see her point—they had an airtight case against Dr. Hishkan and his accomplices now. The specimen, whatever its nature, was a very valuable one; if it had to be recaptured in a running fight with the shuttle, it might be damaged or destroyed. That was the extent of the agency’s responsibility to the U-League. They had no interest in Volcheme.
The smuggler was being given an out, as Danestar had indicated. But he’d had the biggest, most profitable transaction of his career set up, and he was being told he couldn’t go through with it. He didn’t know whether Danestar was lying or not, and he was savage with indecision. If the Depot was being watched—Volcheme didn’t much doubt that part of the story—sending the shuttle out to check around and come back could arouse the suspicions of the observers enough to make them halt it when it emerged the second time. That, in fact, might be precisely what Danestar wanted him to do.
He was forced to conclude he couldn’t take the chance. To wait for the scheduled arrival of the supplies truck was the smaller risk. Volcheme didn’t like waiting either . . . Wergard hadn’t been found; and he didn’t know what other tricks the Kyth agents could have prepared. But, at any rate, the truck was the answer to part of his problem. It would be let in, unloaded routinely, allowed to depart, its men unaware that anything out of the ordinary was going on in the Depot. They would watch then to see if the truck was stopped outside and searched. If that happened, Volcheme would be obliged to agree to Danestar’s proposal.
If it didn’t happen, he would know she’d been lying on one point; but that would not be the end of his difficulties. Until Wergard was captured or killed, he still couldn’t leave with the specimen. The Kyth agents knew enough about him to make the success of the enterprise depend on whether he could silence both of them permanently. If it was possible, he would do it. With stakes as high as they were here, Volcheme was not inclined to be squeamish. But that would put an interstellar organization of experienced man-hunters on an unrelenting search for the murderers of two of its members.
Whatever the outcome, Volcheme wasn’t going to be happy. What had looked like the haul of a lifetime, sweetly clean and simple, would wind up either in failure or as a dangerously messy partial success. Galester and Decrain, seeing the same prospects, shared their chief’s feelings. And while nobody mentioned that the situation looked even less promising for Dr. Hishkan and Tornull, those two had at least begun to suspect that if the smugglers succeeded in escaping with the specimen, they would not want to leave informed witnesses behind.
When the voice of an attendant in the control building near the lock entry finally announced from the wall screen communicator that the supplies truck had arrived and was about to be let into the Depot, Danestar therefore was the most composed of the group. Even Decrain, who had been detailed to keep his attention on her at all times, stood staring with the others at the screen where Dr. Hishkan was switching on a view of the interior lock area.
Danestar made a mental note of Decrain’s momentary lapse in alertness, though it could make no difference to her at present. The only thing she needed to do, or could do, now was wait. Her gaze shifted to the table where assorted instruments Galester had taken out of the alien signaling device still stood. At the other side of the table was the gadgetry Decrain had brought here from her room, a toy-sized shortcode transmitter among it. Volcheme had wanted to be sure nobody would send out messages while the lock was open.
And neither she nor Wergard would be sending any messages. But automatically, as the lock switches were thrown, the duplicate transmitter concealed in the wall of her room would start flicking its coded alert out of the Depot, repeating it over and over until the lock closed.
And twenty or thirty minutes later, when the supplies truck slid back out through the lock and lifted into the air, it would be challenged and stopped.
Then Volcheme would give up, buy his pass to liberty on her terms. There was nothing else he could do.
It wasn’t the kind of stunt she’d care to repeat too often—her nerves were still quivering with unresolved tensions. But she’d carried it off without letting matters get to a point where Wergard might have had to help her out with some of his fast-action gunplay. Danestar told herself to relax, that nothing at all was likely to go wrong now.
Her glance slipped over to Volcheme and the others, silently watching the wall screen, which was filled with the dead, light-drinking black of the energy barrier, except at the far left where the edge of the control building blocked the barrier from view. A great glowing circle, marking the opened lock in the barrier, was centered on the screen. As Danestar looked at it, it was turning a brilliant white.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 176