Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  They darted across the street, ran fifty feet along the building on the far side before Wergard stopped at another door. This one opened on a pitch dark passage; and, a moment later, the darkness closed in about them.

  Wergard produced a light, said quietly, “Watch your step here! The section was sealed off officially fifty years ago and apparently hasn’t been inspected since.”

  He moved ahead, rapidly but carefully, holding the light down for her. They were some five minutes from their starting point. Beyond that, Danestar did not know what part of the Depot they’d come to, but Wergard had told her about this building. It had been part of the old fortress system, cheaper to seal off than remove, an emergency unit station which operated the barrier defenses of the complexes surrounding it. If the equipment was still in working order, Wergard would turn on those barriers. Approximately a tenth of the Depot would again be shielded then, beyond manipulation by the control office. That should draw the Pit creature’s attention to the area, while they moved on. Their living quarters were in a building a considerable distance away.

  Eyes shifting about, Danestar followed the pool of light dancing ahead of her feet. The flooring was decayed here and there; little piles of undefinable litter lay about, and the air was stale and musty. Wergard, in his prowling, might, in fact, have been the first to enter the building in fifty years. They turned a corner of the passage, came to a dark doorspace. There he stopped.

  “You’d better wait here,” he told her. “There’s a mess of machinery inside and some of it’s broken. I’ll have to climb around and over it. If the barrier system is operating, I’ll have it going within three or four minutes.”

  He vanished through the door. Danestar watched the receding light as it moved jerkily deeper into a forest of ancient machines, lost it when it went suddenly around a corner. There was complete darkness about her then. She fingered a lighter in her pocket but left it there. No need to nourish the swirling tide of apprehensions within her by peering about at shadows. Darkness wasn’t the enemy. After a minute or two, she heard a succession of metallic sounds in the distance. Presently they ended, and a little later Wergard returned. He was breathing hard and his face was covered with dirt-streaked sweat.

  “As far as I can make out, the barriers are on,” he said briefly. “Now we’d better get out of the neighborhood fast!”

  But they made slower overall progress then before, because now they had to use the personnel locks in the force fields as they moved from one complex section to the next. In between, they ran where they could. They crossed two more side streets. After the second one, Wergard said, “At the end of this building we’ll be out of the screened area.”

  “How far beyond that?” Danestar asked.

  “Three blocks. Two big sprints in the open!” He grimaced. “We could use the underground systems along part of the stretch. But they won’t get us across the main streets unless we follow them all the way to the Keep and back down.”

  She shook her head. “Let’s stick to your route.” A transport shell of the underground system could have taken them to the Keep and into the far side of the Depot in minutes. But its use would register on betraying instruments in the control building, and might too easily draw the alien to the moving shell.

  The personnel lock at the other end of the building let them into a narrow alley. Across it was the flank of one of the Depot’s giant warehouses. As they started along the alley, there was a crackling, spitting, explosive sound—the snarl of a defense field flashing into action.

  Wergard reached out, snatched the valise from Danestar’s hand.

  “Run!”

  They raced up the alley. The furious crackle of the force field came from behind them, from some other building. It was not far away; and it was continuing. A hundred yards on, Wergard halted abruptly, caught Danestar as she plowed into him, thrust the valise back at her.

  “Here—!” he gasped. She saw they’d reached a door to the warehouse; now Wergard was turning to open it. Clutching the valise, thoughts a roiling confusion of terror, she looked back, half expecting to see a wave of purple fire sweeping up the alley towards them.

  But the alley was empty, though the building front along which the barrier blazed was only a few hundred yards away. Then, as Wergard caught her arm, hauled her in through the door, a closer section—the building from which they had emerged a moment before—erupted in glittering fury. The door slammed in back of her, and they were running again, through a great hall, along aisles between high-stacked rows of packing cases. And—where was the valise? Then she realized Wergard had taken it.

  She followed him left into a cross-aisle . . . another turn to the right; and the end of the hall was ahead, a wide passage leading off it. She had a glimpse of Wergard’s strained face looking back for her; then, suddenly, he swerved aside against the line of cases, crouched, his free arm making a violent gesture, motioning her to the floor.

  Danestar dropped instantly. A moment later, he was next to her.

  “Keep . . . down!” he warned. “Way . . . down!”

  Sobbing for breath, flattened against the cases, she twisted her head around, saw what he was staring at over the stacked rows behind them. A pale purple reflection went gliding silently along the ceiling at the far end of the hall, seemed to strengthen for an instant, abruptly faded out.

  They scrambled to their feet, ran on into the passage.

  Even after they’d slowed to a walk again, were in the structure beyond the warehouse, they didn’t talk about it much. Both were badly winded and shaken. It had been difficult to believe that the thing could have failed to detect them. Its attention must have been wholly on the force fields it was skirting, even as a section of it flowed through the warehouse hall within a few hundred feet of them.

  If they’d been a few seconds later reaching the alley—

  Danestar reached into her white jacket, turned on its cooling unit. Wergard glanced at her. His face was dripping sweat. He wiped at it with the back of his sleeve.

  She asked, “You’re still wearing the sneaksuit?”

  Wergard lifted a strand of transparent webbing from under his collar, let it snap back. “Think it might have helped?”

  “I don’t know.” But the creature might have the equivalent of a life detector unit as part of its sensory equipment, and a sneaksuit, distorting and blurring the energy patterns of a living body, would perhaps afford some protection. She said, “I’ll get into one as soon as we reach our quarters. It may have known somebody was around but didn’t want to waste time picking up another human until it found out why the defense barriers were turned on again in that area.”

  Wergard remarked dubiously, “It seems to me it’s got picking up humans at the top of its priority list!” After a moment, he added, “The long sprint comes next. Feel up to it?”

  Danestar looked over at him. “I’d better feel up to it! If we see that thing again—I’m one inch this side of panic right now!”

  He grunted. “Quit bragging!” He slid the carbine from his shoulder. “It’s that door ahead. Let me have a look out first.”

  As he began to unlock the door, Danestar found herself glancing back automatically once more at the long, lit, empty corridor through which they had come, their hurried steps echoing in the silence of the building. Then she saw Wergard had paused, half crouched and motionless, at the barely opened door.

  “What is it?” she asked quickly.

  “I don’t know!” The face he turned to her was puzzled and apprehensive. “Come up and take a look!”

  She moved to where she could look out past him. After a moment, she said, “There are adjustment instruments for the Depot lighting somewhere in the control section.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Wergard. “Another item that’s been sealed away for a hundred years or so. But our Number Two Thing in the control building seems to have got to them. I’d like to know what it means.”

  He opened the door wider. Both moved fo
rward carefully, glancing along the street outside.

  This was one of the main streets of the Depot. Across from them, eighty yards away, was the massive white front of the structure which housed the central generators. Approximately two hundred yards to the left, it was pierced by a small entrance door which was the next step on Wergard’s route to their quarters. To west and east, the street stretched away for half a mile before rows of buildings crossed it.

  But all this was in semidarkness now—too dim to let them make out the door in the wall of the generator building from where they stood. A hazy brightness above the line of buildings across the street indicated the rest of the Depot was still flooded by the projection lighting system which was that of the old fortress—wearproof and ageless. If not deliberately tampered with, it would go on filling the Depot with eternal day-brightness for millennia.

  But something had tampered with it—was still tampering with it. As they looked, the gloom along the street deepened perceptibly, then, slowly, lightened to its previous level.

  “There can’t be much light in the Pit, of course,” Wergard said, staring up the street to the west. The control section, Danestar realized suddenly, lay in that direction. “It may be trying to improve visibility in the Depot for its perceptions.”

  “Or,” said Danestar, “ruin visibility for ours.”

  Wergard looked at her. “We don’t have the time left to try another route,” he said. “Whatever it’s doing, we may make a mistake in crossing the street while it’s experimenting. But waiting here makes no sense—”

  She shook her head. “The intention might be to keep us waiting here.”

  “Uh-huh! I thought of that. So let’s go. Right now. Top speed across. I’ll stay behind you.”

  For an instant, Danestar hesitated. The feeling that the uncertain darkness of the wide street was under the scrutiny of alien senses, that they would be observed and tracked, like small, scuttling animals, as soon as they left the shelter of the doorway, became almost a conviction in that instant. The fact remained that they could not stay where they were. She tightened her grip on the handle of the valise, drew a deep breath, darted out.

  They were half across when the darkness thickened so completely that they might have been shifted in mid-stride into a black universe. Blind, she thought. It was like an abrupt mental shock. She faltered, almost stumbled, felt she had swerved from the line she was following, tried to turn back to it . . . suddenly didn’t know in which direction to move. Panic closed in.

  “Wergard!”

  “That way!” His voice, hoarse and strained, was on her right, rather than behind her. As she turned towards it, his light flicked on, narrowed to a pale thread, marking a small circle on the wall of the generator building ahead of Danestar. She was hurrying towards the wall again as the thread of light cut out . . . and seconds later, the wall and the street began to reappear, dim and vague as before, but tangibly present. They reached the wall together, turned left along it. Again the street darkened, became lost in absolute blackness.

  Wergard’s hand caught her arm. “Just walk—” He added something, muttered and indistinct, which might have been a curse. They went on, breathing raggedly. Wergard’s hand remained on Danestar’s arm. The darkness lightened a trifle, grew dense again. “Hold on a moment!” Wergard said, very softly.

  She stopped instantly, stood unmoving, let her breath out slowly. Wergard’s hand left her arm. She had an impression of cautious motion from him, decided he’d raised the carbine to fire-ready position.

  He’d speak when he thought he could. Danestar’s eyes shifted quickly, scanning the unrelieved dark about them. The only audible sound was a dim, faint hum of machinery from within the structure on their right.

  Then she realized something had appeared in her field of vision.

  It was ahead and to the left. A small, pale patch of purple luminance, moving swiftly but in an oddly jerky manner, its outline shifting and wavering, as it approached their path at what might be a right angle. How far away? If it were touching the ground, Danestar thought, or just above it, it must be at least two hundred yards farther up the street. That made it a considerably larger thing than her first impression had suggested.

  As these calculations flicked through her mind, their object passed by ahead, moved on to the right, abruptly vanished.

  “You saw it?” Wergard whispered a moment later.

  “Yes.”

  “Went in between a couple of buildings. Not so good—but it was some distance off. We don’t seem to have been noticed. Let’s go on.”

  Wergard had glimpsed another of the minor fire shapes just before they stopped. That one had been smaller—or farther away—and had been in sight only for an instant, on the left side of the street.

  “They shouldn’t be too large to get through a personnel lock and switch off a barrier for Thing Number One,” he said, as they hurried along a catwalk in the generator building. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean Number One is in this area.”

  “Scouts,” Danestar suggested.

  That had been Wergard’s thought. The Pit creature could have split off several dozen autonomous sections of itself of the size they had observed without noticeably reducing its main bulk, and scattered them about the Depot to speed up its search for any humans still hiding out. The carbine couldn’t have done significant damage to the alien giant but should have the power to disrupt essential force patterns in these lesser replicas. “They don’t make things easier,” Wergard said, “but we’ll have to show ourselves only this once more. After that, we’ll have cover. And we can change our tactics a little . . .”

  At the end of the generator building was the central street of the Depot, somewhat wider than the last one they had crossed. It was almost startling to find it normally lit. Directly opposite was the entrance recess to another building. This was the final open stretch on the way to their quarters. Wergard wiped his forehead, asked, “Want to try it?”

  Danestar nodded. She felt lightly tensed, not at all tired. Dread had its uses—her body had recognized an ultimate emergency and responded. She thought it would go on running now when she called on it until it fell dead.

  Wergard was wearing a sneaksuit; she wasn’t. It was possible they were being followed, that the light-shapes they’d seen were casting about in the area for the source of the life energy they’d detected here, of which she was the focus. In that case, getting across the central street might be the point of greatest danger. They’d decided she should go first while Wergard covered her with the carbine. He would follow as soon as she was within the other building.

  She slipped out the door ahead of him, drew a deep breath, ran straight across the too-silent, bright-lit street towards the entrance recess.

  And nothing happened. The carbine stayed quiet. The paving flowed by, and it seemed only an instant then before the building front swayed close before her. Danestar flung herself into the recess, came up gasping against the wall.

  A door on the left, Wergard had said. Where—she discovered it next to her, pulled it open.

  For a moment, her mind seemed about to spin into insanity. Then she was backing away from the door, screaming with all her strength, while two shapes of pale fire glided out through it towards her. Somewhere, she heard the distant sharp snarl of the carbine. A blizzard of darting, writhing lines of purple light enveloped her suddenly, boiled in wild turmoil about the recess. The closer of the shapes had vanished; and the carbine was snarling again.

  Abruptly, her awareness was wiped out.

  “Got your third setting now, I think!” Wergard said.

  Danestar glanced at him. He sat at a table a few feet to her left, hunched forwards, elbows planted on the table, face twisted in concentration as he peered at the tiny, paper-flat instrument in his left hand.

  “Uh-huh, that’s it!” He sighed heavily. “Four to go . . .” His right forefinger and thumb closed cautiously down on the device, shifted minutely, shifted back
again. It was an attachment taken from Danestar’s commband detector. She had designed it, used it on occasion to intrude on covert communications in which she had a professional interest, sometimes blanking a band out gently at a critical moment, sometimes injecting misinformation.

  But it was an instrument designed for her fingers, magical instruments themselves in their sensitized skill, deftness and experience. It had not been designed for Wergard’s fingers, or anyone else’s; and the only help she could give him with it was to tell him what must be done. Both hands were needed to operate the settings, and at present she couldn’t use her left hand. What had knocked her out in the building entrance, an instant before Wergard’s gun disrupted the second of the two Pit things that surprised her there, seemed to have been the approximate equivalent of a near miss from a bolt of lightning. Wergard had carried her two Depot blocks to their quarters, was working a sneaksuit over her, before she regained consciousness. Then she woke up suddenly, muscles knotted, trying to scream, voice thick and slurred when she started to answer Wergard’s questions. They discovered her left side was almost completely paralyzed, her tongue partly affected.

  As soon as he could make out what she wanted, what her plan had been, Wergard hauled her down to the ground-level barrier room of the building, along with an assortment of hastily selected gadgetry, settled her in a chair next to the barrier control panel, arranged the various instruments on a table before her where she could reach them with her right hand. Then he went to work on the attachment’s miniature dials to adjust them to the seven settings she’d told him were needed.

  He swore suddenly, in a gust of savage impatience, asked without looking up, “How long—counting the interruption—have I been playing around with this midget monster of yours?”

  “Sixteen minutes,” Danestar told him. The paralysis had begun to lift; she could enunciate well enough again, though the left side of her face remained numb. But she still couldn’t force meaningful motion into her left hand. If she had been able to use it, she wouldn’t have needed a quarter of a minute to flick in the dial readings, slap the attachment back into the detector. It was a job no more involved than threading a series of miniature needles. The problem was simply that Wergard’s hands weren’t made for work on that scale, weren’t trained to it.