Galester interrupted, indicating the screen. “I believe it’s beginning to move . . .”
There was silence again as they watched the fire body in the square. Its purple luminescence deepened and paled in slowly pulsing waves; then the tip swung about, swift as a flicking tongue, first towards the building, then away from it; and the thing flowed in a darting curve off across the square and into a side street.
“Going to nose around for its treasure somewhere else!” Volcheme said after it had vanished. “So while it may suspect it’s here, it isn’t sure. I’m less impressed by its apparent intelligence than you are, doctor! A stupid man can learn to use a complicated instrument, if somebody shows him how to do it. This may be a stupid alien . . . a soldier type sent from the Pit to carry out a specific mission.”
“Possibly a robot,” Galester said.
“Possibly a robot,” Volcheme agreed. “And, to answer your question of a moment ago, doctor—yes, I have thought of a way to get it off our necks.”
“What’s that?” Dr. Hishkan inquired eagerly.
“No need to discuss it here!” Volcheme gave Danestar a glance of mingled malevolence and triumph. She understood its meaning well enough. If Wergard could be located, Volcheme could rid himself of the Kyth operators with impunity now. There were plenty of witnesses to testify that the monstrous creature which had invaded the Depot had destroyed over a dozen men. She and Wergard would be put down as two more of its victims.
“We won’t use the shuttle at present,” Volcheme went on. “But we want the portable guns, and we’ll get ourselves into antiradiation suits immediately. Decrain, watch the lady until we get back—use any methods necessary to make sure she stays where she is and behaves herself! We’ll bring a suit back up for you. The rest of you come along. Hurry!”
Decrain started to say something, stood scowling as the others filed quickly out of the office and started down the hall to the right. The big man looked uneasy. With a gigantic fiery alien around, he might not appreciate being left alone to guard the prisoner while his companions climbed into the security of antiradiation suits. As the last of the group disappeared, he sighed heavily, shifted his attention back to Danestar.
His eyes went huge with shocked surprise. The chair in which she had been sitting was empty. Decrain’s hand flicked back to his gun holster, stopped as it touched it. He stood perfectly still.
Something hard was pushing against the center of his back below his shoulder blades.
“Yes, I’ve got it,” Danestar whispered behind him. “Not a sound, Decrain! If you even breathe louder than I like, I’ll split your spine!”
They waited in silence. Decrain breathed carefully while the voices and footsteps in the hall grew fainter, became inaudible. Then the gun muzzle stopped pressing against his back.
“All right,” Danestar said softly—she’d moved off but was still close behind him—“just stand there now!”
Decrain moistened his lips.
“Miss Gems,” he said, speaking with difficulty, “I was, you remember, a gentleman!”
“So you were, buster,” her voice agreed. “And a very fortunate thing that is for you at present. But—” Decrain dropped forwards, turning in the air, lashing out savagely with both heels in the direction of the voice. It was a trick that worked about half the time. A blurred glimpse of Danestar flashing a white smile above him and of her arm swinging down told him it hadn’t worked now. The butt of the gun caught the side of his head a solid wallop, and Decrain closed his eyes and drifted far, far away.
She bent over him an instant, half minded to give him a second rap for insurance, decided it wasn’t necessary, shoved the gun into a pocket of her coveralls and went quickly to the big table in the center of the office. Her control belt was there among the jumble of things they’d brought over from her room. Danestar fastened it about her waist, slipped on the white jacket lying beside it, rummaged hurriedly among the rest, storing the shortcode transmitter and half a dozen other items into various pockets before she picked up her emptied instrument valise and moved to the opposite end of the table where Galester had arranged the mechanisms he’d removed for examination from the false asteroid.
She’d had her eye on one of those devices since she’d been brought to the office. It was enclosed in some brassy pseudometal, about the size of a goose egg and shaped like one. Galester hadn’t known what to make of it in his brief investigation and Dr. Hishkan had offered only vague conjectures; but she had studied it and its relationship to a number of other instruments very carefully on the night she’d been in Dr. Hishkan’s vault and knew exactly what to make of it. She placed it inside her valise, went back to the collection of her own instruments, turned on the spy screen and fingered a switch on the control belt. The spy screen made a staccato chirping noise.
“I’m alone here,” she told it quickly. “Decrain’s out cold. Now how do I get out of this building and to some rendezvous point—fastest? Volcheme’s gone lunatic, as you heard. I don’t want to be anywhere near them when they start playing games with that animated slice of sheet lightning.”
“Turn left when you leave the office,” Wergard’s voice said from the blank screen. “Take the first elevator two levels down and get out.”
“And then?”
“I’ll be waiting for you there.”
“How long have you been in the building?” she asked, startled.
“About five minutes. Came over to pick up a couple of those antiradiation suits for us, which I have. The way things were going then, I thought I’d better hang around and wait for a chance to get you away from our friends. I was about to start upstairs when Volcheme and the others left. Then I heard a little commotion in the office and decided you’d probably done something about Decrain. So I waited.”
“Bless you, boy!” Danestar said gratefully. “I’ll be with you in a moment!”
She switched off the spy screen, went out of the office, skirting Decrain’s harshly snoring form on the carpet, and turned left down the quiet hall.
The hideaway from which Corvin Wergard had been keeping an observer’s eye on events in the Depot was one of a number he’d set up for emergency use shortly after their arrival. He’d selected it for operations today because, within a few seconds, he could reach an exit door in the building less than a hundred and twenty yards from both the control section and the outer barrier lock—potential critical points in whatever action would develop.
Guiding Danestar back to it took minutes longer than either of them liked, but the route Wergard had worked out led almost entirely through structures shielded from the alien visitor by section defense screens.
She sat across the tiny room from him, enclosed in one of the bulky antiradiation suits, the shortcode transmitter on a wall shelf before her, fingers delicately, minutely, adjusting another of the instruments she had brought back from Hishkan’s office. Her eyes were fixed on the projection field above the instrument. Occasional squigglings and ripples of light flashed through it—meaningless static. But she’d had glimpses of light patterns which seemed far from meaningless here, was tracking them now through the commband detector to establish the settings which would fix them in the visual projection field for study. That was a nearly automatic process—her hands knew what to do and were doing it. Her thoughts kept turning in nightmare fascination about other aspects of the gigantic raider.
What did they know about it? And what did it know about them?
That living, deadly energy body, or its kind, had not built the signaling device. If it was not acting for itself, if it had hidden masters in the Pit, the masters had not built the device either. Regardless of its origin, the instrument, though centuries old, still had been in use; and in the dust cloud, its value in establishing location, in permitting free, purposeful action, must be immense. But whoever was using it evidently had lacked even the ability to keep it in repair. Much less would they have been able to replace it after it disappeared—and they
must be in mortal fear that mankind would discover the secrets of the instrument and return to meet them on even terms in the cloud . . .
So this creature had traversed deep space to reach Mezmiali and recover it.
Volcheme, accustomed to success in dealing with human opponents, was still confident his resourcefulness was sufficient to permit him to handle the emissary from the Pit. To Danestar it seemed approximately like attempting to handle an animated warship. The thing was complex, not simply an elemental force directed by a limited robotic mind. It had demonstrated it could use its energies to duplicate the human shortcode system, and the glimpse she’d had in the detector’s field of one of its patterns implied it was capable of much more than had been shown so far. And it might not have come here alone. There could be others of its kind undetected beyond the Depot’s barrier with whom it was in communication.
In the face of such possibilities, Volcheme’s determination amounted to lunacy. They might have convinced the others of the need to call for outside help; but the intercom system had been shut off, evidently on the smuggler’s orders, when Danestar’s escape was discovered. For the moment, he had silenced them. Through various spy devices they knew he was co-ordinating the activities of his men with personal communicators, and that a sectional force barrier was being set up across the center of the main building, connected to the external ones. Completed, the barrier system would transform half the building into a box trap, open at the end. The men and the specimen from the Pit would be in the other half. When the monster flowed into the trap to get at them, observers in the control building would snap a barrier shut across the open end. The thing would be safely inside—assuming that barriers of sectional strength were impassable to it.
Volcheme’s calculations were based entirely on that assumption. So far, nothing had happened to prove him wrong. The alien creature was still moving about the Depot. Wergard, before the multiple-view screen through which he had followed the earlier events of the day, reported glimpses of it every minute or two. There were increasing indications of purpose in its motions. It had passed along this building once, paused briefly. But it had shown itself three times about the control section, three times at the main building. Its interest appeared to be centering on those points.
Until it ended its swift, unpredictable prowling, they could only wait here. Wergard was ready to slip over to a personnel lock in the barrier about the control building when an opportunity came. A gas charge would knock out the men inside, and the main barrier would open long enough then to let out their prepared shortcode warning. Their main concern after that would be to stay alive until help arrived.
Their heads turned sharply as the shortcode transmitter on the shelf before Danestar gave its chattering pickup signal. She stood up, snapped the headpiece of her radiation suit into position, collapsed the other instruments on the shelf, slid them into the suit’s pockets, and picked up the valise she’d brought back from Dr. Hishkan’s office.
“. . . Where . . . is . . . it . . . who . . . has . . . it . . .” whispered the transmitter.
“Pickup range still set at thirty yards?” Wergard asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“There’s nothing in sight around here.”
Danestar glanced over at him. He’d encased himself in the other radiation suit. A small high-power energy carbine lay across a chair beside him. His eyes were on the viewscreen which now showed only the area immediately around the building. She didn’t answer. The transmitter continued to whisper.
It wasn’t in sight, but it was nearby. Very near. Within thirty yards of the transmitter, of the hideout, of them. And pausing now much longer than it had the first time it passed the building.
“. . . I . . . want . . . it . . . where . . . is . . . it . . .”
Her skin crawled, icy and uncontrollable. If it had any way of sensing what she held concealed inside the valise, it would want it. She didn’t think it could. No spying device she knew of could pierce the covering of the valise. But the egg-shaped alien instrument within—no bigger than her two fists placed together—was the heart and core of the specimen from the Pit, its black box, the part which must hold all significant clues to the range and penetrating power of its signals. Without it, the rest of the contents of that great boulder-shaped thing would be of no use now—to Volcheme or to the alien.
They waited, eyes on the viewscreen, ready to move. If the building was attacked and the creature showed it could force its way through the enclosing energy barrier, there was an unlocked door behind them. An elevator lay seconds beyond the door; and two levels down, they would be in the underground tunnel system where a transport shell waited. If they were followed, they would continue along the escape route Wergard had marked out, moving from barrier to barrier to slow the pursuer. Unless it overtook them, they would eventually reach the eastern section of the Depot, known as the Keep, where ancient defense screens formed so dense a honeycomb that they should be safe for hours from even the most persistent attacks.
But retreat would cost them their chance to make use of the control section—
The transmitter’s whisper faded suddenly. For some seconds, neither stirred. Then Wergard said, relief sharp in his voice, “It may have moved off!”
He shifted the screen mechanism. A pattern of half a dozen simultaneous views appeared. “There it is!”
On the far side of the control building, flowing purple fire lifted into view along fifty yards of one of the Depot’s streets like the back of a great surfacing sea beast, sank from sight again. Danestar hesitated, took the commband detector quickly out of her suit pocket, placed it on the wall shelf. She pressed a button on the little instrument and the projection field sprang into semivisibility above it.
Wergard, eyes shifting about the viewscreen, said, “It’s still only seconds away from us. Don’t get too absorbed in whatever you’re trying to do.”
“I won’t.”
Danestar released the bulky radiation headpiece, turned it back out of her way. Her fingertips slipped along the side of the detector, touched a tiny adjustment knob, began a fractional turn, froze.
The visual projection she’d been hunting had appeared in the field before her.
A flickering, shifting, glowing galaxy of tiny momentary sparks and lines of light—the combined communication systems of a megacity might have presented approximately such a picture if the projector had presented them simultaneously. She licked her lips, breath still, as her fingers shifted cautiously, locking the settings into place.
When she drew her hand away, Wergard’s voice asked quietly, “What’s that?”
“The thing’s intercom system. It’s . . . let me think, Wergard! What’s it doing now?”
“It’s beside the control building.” Wergard paused. He hadn’t asked what her manipulations with the detector were about; she seemed to be on the trail of something, and he hadn’t wanted to distract her.
But now he added, “Its behavior indicates . . . yes! Apparently it is going to try to pass through the section barrier there—!”
The viewscreen showed the ghostly, reddish glittering of an activated defense barrier along most of the solid front wall of the control building. Two deep-rose glowing patches, perhaps a yard across, marked points where the alien had come into direct contact with the barrier’s energies.
It hadn’t, Danestar thought, liked the experience, though in each case it had maintained the contact for seconds, evidently in a deliberate test of the barrier’s strength. Her eyes shifted in a brief glance to the viewscreen, returned to the patterns of swarming lights in the projector field.
The reaction of the creature could be observed better there. As it touched the barrier, dark stains had appeared in the patterns, spread, then faded quickly after it withdrew. There was a shock effect of sorts. But not a lasting one. Danestar’s breathing seemed constricted. She was badly frightened, and knew it. The section barriers couldn’t stop this thing! Perhaps the men
in the control building weren’t aware of it yet. She didn’t want to think of that—
She heard a brief exclamation from Wergard, glanced over again at the screen.
And here it comes, she thought.
The thing was rising unhurriedly out of the street surface before the control building, yards from the wall. When it tested the barrier, it had extruded a fiery, pointed tentacle and touched it to the building. Now it surged into view as a rounded, luminous column twenty feet across, widening as it lifted higher. The top of the column began to lean slowly forward like a cresting, ponderous wave, reached the wall, passed shuddering into it. The force field blazed in red brilliance about it and its own purple radiance flared, but the great mass continued to flow steadily through the barrier.
And throughout the galaxy of dancing, scintillating, tiny lights in the projector field, Danestar watched long shock shadows sweep, darken, and spread—then gradually lighten and commence to fade.
When she looked again at the viewscreen, the defense barrier still blazed wildly. But the street was empty. The alien had vanished into the control building.
“It isn’t one being,” Danestar said. “It’s probably several billion. Like a city at work, an army on the march. An organization. A system. The force field did hurt it—but at most it lost one half of one per cent of the entities that make it up in going through the barrier.”
Wergard glanced at the projection field, then at her.
“Nobody in the control building had access to a radiation suit,” he said. “So they must have been dead in an instant when the thing reached them. If it can move through a section barrier with no more damage than you feel it took, why hasn’t it come out again? It’s been in there for over four minutes now.”
Danestar, eyes on the pattern in the projection field, said, “It may have been damaged in another way. I don’t know—”
“What do you mean?”
She nodded at the pattern. “It’s difficult to describe. But there’s a change there! And it’s becoming more distinct. I’m not sure what it means.”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 178