Wergard looked at the field a moment, shrugged. “I’ll take your word for it. It’s a jumble to me. I don’t see any changes in it.”
Danestar hesitated. She had almost intuitive sensitivity for the significance of her instruments’ indications; and that something was being altered now, moment by moment, as the milionfold interplay of signals in the pattern seemed certain.
She said suddenly, “There’s a directing center to the thing, of course, or it couldn’t function as it does. Before it went through the force field, every part of it was oriented to that center. There was a kind of rhythm to the whole which showed that. Now, there’s a section that’s going out of phase with the general rhythm.”
“What does that add up to?” Danestar shook her head. “I can’t tell that yet. But if the shock it got from the barrier disrupted part of its internal communication system, it might be, in our terms, at least partly paralyzed now. A percentage of the individual entities—say about one tenth—are no longer coordinating with the whole, are disconnected from it. Of course, we can’t count on it, but it would explain why it hasn’t reappeared—” Both were silent a moment. Then Wergard said, “If it is immobilized, it killed everyone in the control building before the shock got through to it. Otherwise we would have had indications of action by Volcheme by now.”
She nodded. The intercom switch on the viewscreen was open, but the system remained dead. And whatever the smuggler and the group in the main building were engaged in, they were not at present in an area covered by her spy devices. But the space shuttle had not left the building, so they were still there. If the creature from the Pit was no longer a menace and Volcheme knew it, every survivor of the gang would be combing the Depot for traces of Wergard and herself. Since they weren’t, Volcheme had received no such report from the control building. Whatever else had happened, the men stationed there had died as the alien poured in through the barrier.
Her breath caught suddenly. She said, “Wergard, I think . . . it is trying to come out again!”
“The barrier’s flickering,” he acknowledged from the viewscreen. An instant later, “Full on now! Afraid you’re right! Watch for signs of damage. If it isn’t crippled, and if it suspects someone is here, it may hit this building next, immediately! It isn’t in sight—must be moving out below ground level.”
Danestar snapped the radiation headpiece back in position without taking her eyes from the projection field. Shock darkness crisscrossed the pattern of massed twinkling pinpoints of brightness again, deepened. She could judge the thing’s rate of progress through the barrier by that now. There were no indications of paralysis; if anything, its passage seemed swifter. Within seconds, the darkness stopped spreading, began to fade. “It’s outside,” she said. “It doesn’t seem seriously injured.”
“And it’s still not in sight,” said Wergard. “Stay ready to move!”
They were both on their feet now. The shortcode transmitter on the shelf was silent, but this time the creature might not be announcing its approach. Danestar’s eyes kept returning to the projection field. Again the barrier had achieved minor destruction, but she could make out no further significant changes. The cold probability was now that there was no practical limit to the number of such passages the creature could risk if it chose. But something about the pattern kept nagging at her mind. What was it?
A minute passed in a humming silence that stretched her nerves, another . . . and now, Danestar told herself, it was no longer likely that the monster’s attention would turn next to this building, to them. The barrier had remained quiet, and there had been no other sign of it. Perhaps it wasn’t certain humans were hiding here; at any rate, it must have shifted by now to some other section of the Depot.
Almost with the thought, she saw Wergard’s hand move on the viewscreen controls, and in the screen the area about them was replaced by a multiple-view pattern.
Nothing stirred in the various panels; no defense field was ablaze about any of the buildings shown. The entire great Depot seemed empty and quiet.
“At a guess,” Wergard remarked thoughtfully, “it’s hanging around the main building again now!” He moved back a step from the screen, still watching it, began to unfasten his antiradiation suit.
“What are you doing?” she asked. He glanced over at her. “Getting out of it. One thing these suits weren’t made for is fast running. I expect to be doing some of the fastest running in my career in perhaps another minute or two.”
“Running? You’re not—”
“Our alien,” Wergard said, “should take action concerning Volcheme’s boys next. But whatever it does, the instant we see it involved somewhere else, I’ll sprint for the control building. It may be the last chance we get to yell for help from outside. And I don’t want to be slowed down by twenty pounds of suit while I’m about it.”
Danestar swallowed hard. He was right. But there was something, a feeling—
“No! Don’t go there!” she said sharply, surprising herself.
He looked around in bewilderment. “Don’t go there? What are you . . . watch that!”
His eyes had shifted back to the screen. For an instant, she couldn’t tell what he had seen. Then, just as the view began to blur into another, she found it.
Volcheme’s space shuttle had darted out of the cover of the main building, swung right, was flashing up a wide street towards the eastern section of the Depot.
“Making a run for the Keep!” Wergard said harshly. He fingered the controls, following the shuttle from view section to view section. “They might just . . . no, there it is!”
The great fire body, flattened, elongated, whipped past between two warehouse complexes, a rushing brightness fifty feet above the ground, vanished beyond the buildings.
“Too fast for them!” Wergard shook his head. “It knows what they’re doing and is cutting them off. Perhaps their guns can check it! You watch what happens—I’m going now.”
“No! I . . .”
Then at last the realization surged up. Danestar stared at him, completely dismayed.
“It’s a trap,” she said evenly. “Of course!”
“What is? What are you talking about?”
“The control building! Don’t you see?” She jerked her head at the projection field. “I said a section of the thing was splitting off from the main body! When it came out through the barrier again, that section wasn’t showing any shock effects—I saw it but didn’t understand what it meant. Of course! It didn’t come through the barrier at all. It’s still in there, Wergard! In the control building. Waiting for any of us to show up. There’re two of them now—”
She watched stunned comprehension grow in his face as she spoke.
The smugglers’ shuttle was caught not much more than a minute later. It had discovered the enemy between it and the Keep section, turned back. When the space thing followed, tiny bursts of dazzling white light showed the shuttle’s energy guns were in action. The fire body jerked aside and paused . . . and now the shuttle turned again, flashed straight at its pursuer, guns blazing full out.
For a moment, it seemed a successful maneuver. The great creature swept up out of the path of the machine, slipped over the top of a building, disappeared. The shuttle rushed on towards the Keep—and at the next corner a loop of purple radiance snared it, drove it smashing into a building front. The fire giant flowed down, sent the shuttle hurtling against the building again, closed over it. For seconds, the radiance pulsed about the engulfed vehicle, then lifted into the air, moved off. There was no sign of the shuttle until, some hundreds of yards away, the fire body opened to let the shattered machine slide out, drop to the surface of the Depot. Its lock door was half twisted away; and Volcheme and his companions clearly were no longer within it.
To Danestar, watching in sick fascination, it had seemed as if a great beast of prey had picked up some shelled, stinging creature, disarmed it, cracked it to draw out the living contents, and flung aside the empty shell.
The alien swung west, towards the central section of the Depot, seemed to be returning to the main building complex, but then flowed down to the surface, sank into it and vanished.
Minutes passed and it did not reappear. Again the Depot’s sections stood quiet and lifeless in the view-screen.
“It may be waiting for somebody else to break from cover,” Wergard said suddenly. “But you’d think the first thing it would do now is push into the main building and get its gadget! Volcheme must have left it there—the thing wouldn’t have slammed the shuttle around like that if it hadn’t been sure the contraption wasn’t inside!”
Danestar didn’t reply. Their nerves were on edge, and Wergard was simply thinking aloud. They had no immediate explanation for the thing’s behavior. But it had been acting purposefully throughout, and there must be purpose in its disappearance.
All they could do at present was wait, alert for signs of an approach on any level. She had discarded her antiradiation suit, as Wergard had done previously. The men in the shuttle might have gained a second or two of life because of the protection the suits gave them; but against so overwhelmingly powerful a creature they obviously had made no real difference. And they were cumbersome enough to be a disadvantage in other respects. If there were indications that the second energy body, the smaller one in the control building, had left it, Wergard would still attempt a dash over there.
There were no such indications. There were, in fact, no indications of any kind of activity whatever until, approximately ten minutes after it vanished, the big space creature showed itself again.
It was rising slowly from the ground into the square before the deserted main building when Wergard detected it in the screen. Then, while they watched, it flowed deliberately up to the building and into it.
And no defending force fields flared into action.
As it disappeared, they exchanged startled looks. Wergard said quickly, “Volcheme must have had the barriers shut off just before they left by the lock—so the thing could pick up its device . . .”
“And let them get away?” Danestar hesitated. There’d been talk of that before she escaped from Volcheme’s group. But she was not at all certain that the smuggler, even under such intense immediate pressures, would abandon his prize completely. The flight might even have been designed in part to draw the raider away from it.
“Otherwise”—Wergard scowled, chewed his lip—“has there been anything in the projection pattern to show it’s split again?”
She shook her head. “No. But if you’re thinking it could detach a section small enough to get in through a personnel lock and turn off the building’s barrier—”
“That’s what I’m thinking.” Danestar shrugged, said, “I wouldn’t be able to tell that, Wergard. I’ve been watching the projection. But it would be too minor a difference to be noticeable. It may have done it.”
He was silent a moment. “Well,” he said then, “it has the gadget it came for now. We’ll see what it does next.” He added, without changing tone, “Incidentally, it doesn’t have all of it, does it?”
Danestar gave him a startled glance.
“How did you guess?” she asked. A half-grin flicked over Wergard’s tense face. “It’s the sort of thing you’d do. You’ve been hanging on to that valise as if there were something very precious inside.”
“There is,” Danestar agreed. “It’s not very big, but the specimen won’t work without it. And when those things in the Pit realize it’s gone, they won’t be able to replace it.”
“Very dirty trick!” Wergard said approvingly. He glanced at the valise. “Supposing we manage to get out of this alive—how useful could the item become?”
“Extremely useful, if it gets to really capable people. As far as I could make out, it must embody all the essentials of that system.”
Wergard nodded. “We’ll hang on to it then. As long as we can, anyway. We may have to destroy it, of course. Think the thing could spot there’s a part missing?”
“It could if it has a way of testing it,” said Danestar. “But the specimen’s been reassembled and resealed—nothing will show . . . There the creature comes now!”
They watched its emergence from the main building. It poured out of the landing lock area, swung west across the central square, moving swiftly. It might be carrying the specimen with it, as it had carried the shuttle.
“Coming back here!” Wergard remarked, some seconds later. “And if it can open sectional barriers, it can open the main Depot lock in the control building!”
Danestar knew what he meant. The Pit creature might believe it had achieved its objective in regaining the lost signaling instrument and simply leave now. She began to feel almost feverish with hope, warned herself it was much more probable it did not intend to let any human being in the Depot remain alive to tell about it.
Her gaze shifted again to the patterns in the projection field. No further changes had been apparent, but a sense of dissatisfaction; of missing some hidden significance, still stirred in her each time she studied them. I’m not seeing everything they should tell me, she thought. She shook her head tiredly. Too much had happened these past hours! Now her thinking seemed dulled.
She heard Wergard say, “It’s stopped for something!”
It had come to an intersection, paused. Then suddenly it veered to the right, moved swiftly past three buildings, checked again before a fourth. A probing fire tentacle reached towards the building. Defense barriers promptly blazed into activity.
The creature withdrew the tentacle, remained where it was, half submerged in the street. Activated by its proximity, the defense field continued to flare while one or two minutes passed. Then the field subsided, vanished. The creature moved forwards until some two thirds of it appeared to be within the building. Barely seconds later, it drew back again, swung away . . .
“It caught somebody inside there!” Wergard said. “It couldn’t have been looking for anything else. How did it know some poor devils had holed up in that particular section?”
The intercom signal on the viewscreen burred sharply with his last words, then stopped. They stared at it, glanced at each other. Neither attempted to move towards the switch.
The intercom began ringing again. It rang, insistently, jarringly, with brief pauses, for a full minute now before it went silent.
“So that’s how!” Wergard said heavily. He shrugged. “Well, if it—or a section of it—can manipulate a barrier lock and reproduce shortcode impulses, it can grasp and manipulate an intercom system. Not a bad way to locate survivors. If we don’t answer . . .”
“We can’t stay here anyway,” Danestar told him, frowning at the projection field. She had spoken in an oddly flat, detached manner.
“No. It’s mopping up before it heads home—and now it can apparently cut off every sectional barrier that isn’t locally maintained directly from the control building! It won’t be long before it discovers that—if it hasn’t already done it!” Wergard picked up the energy gun. “Grab what you need and let’s move! I’ve thought of something better than trying to make it to the Keep and playing hide-and-seek with it there. With the tricks it’s developed, we wouldn’t last—” He looked over, said quickly, sharply, “Danestar!”
Danestar glanced around at him, bemused, lips parted. “Yes? I . . .”
“Wake up!” Wergard’s voice was edged with nervous impatience. “I think I can work us over to the section the thing just cleared out. If we leave the barrier off, there’s a good chance it won’t check that building again. Let’s not hang around here!”
“No.” She shook her head, turned to the instruments on the shelf. “You’ve got to get me to our quarters, Wergard—immediately!”
“From here? Impossible! There’re several stretches—over three hundred yards in all—where we’d be in the open without the slightest cover. It’s suicide! We—” Wergard checked himself, staring at her. “You’ve thought up something? Is it going to
work?”
“It might, if we can get there.”
He swore, blinked in scowling reflection.
“All right!” he said suddenly. “Can do—I hope! Tell me on the way or when we’re there what you’re after. We’ll make a short detour. There’s something else I could do to keep our friend occupied for a while. It may buy us an additional twenty, thirty minutes . . .”
Hurrying up a narrow, dim passage behind Wergard, Danestar felt clusters of eerie fears hurrying along with her. Wergard swung on at a fast walking pace. Now and then she broke into a run to keep up with him, and when she did, he slowed instantly to let her walk again. It was sensible—they might have running enough to do very shortly. But staying sensible about it wasn’t easy. Her legs wanted to run.
They were blind here, she thought. Her awareness of it was what had built up the feeling of frightened helplessness during the past minutes to the point where it seemed hardly bearable. She couldn’t use her instruments, and the sectional barriers in this area were turned off; they were also deprived of that partial protection. As Wergard had suspected, the alien had discovered the force fields could be operated from the central control office. The Depot was open to it now except in sections where human beings had taken refuge and cut in defense barriers under local control. Such points, of course, would be the ones it would investigate.
And they might encounter it at any moment, with no warning at all. Whether they got through to their quarters had become a matter of luck—good luck or bad—and Danestar, who always prepared, always planned, found herself unable to accept that condition.
Wergard halted ahead of her; and she stopped, watched him cautiously edge a door open, glance out. He looked back, slid the energy carbine from his shoulder, held it in one hand, made a quick, beckoning motion with the other. Danestar followed him through the door and he eased it back into its lock. They had come out into one of the Depot’s side streets. It stretched away on either side between unbroken building fronts, a strip of the dull black dome of the main barrier arching high above.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 179