Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  “Sixteen minutes!” he groaned. His face was beaded with the sweat of effort. “Well, I seem to be getting the hang of it. Our luck may hold up.”

  It might, she thought. It was still a matter of luck. They’d had good luck and bad luck both during the past half hour. Until now, the main alien body had been engaged in the cluster of activated defense barriers on the north side of the Depot. The viewscreen on the table showed her the intermittent flickering of force fields there; now and then, a section blazed bright for half a minute or more. And sometimes she’d seen the great purple glow passing among the buildings. While it remained in that area, they had time left. But the barriers were being shut off, one by one. Detached work segments of the thing usually would be able to enter by a personnel lock and cut the controls. And—perhaps when the locks could not be immediately found—the main body was again driving directly through the force fields and absorbing what damage it must to get into a protected building.

  During the past four minutes alone, it appeared to have passed through three such sectional barriers. Changes in the detector’s visual pattern revealed the damage. The accumulated effect was not inconsiderable.

  Danestar’s gaze went to the locked instrument valise, lying on the table between the detector and the shortcode transmitter, in immediate reach of her right hand. Within it was still the alien instrument she’d taken from Dr. Hishkan’s office, the small, all-essential co-ordinating device without which the artificial asteroid from the cosmic cloud was a nonoperative, meaningless, useless lump of deteriorating machinery.

  Had the alien mind discovered it wouldn’t function, that the humans here had removed a section of it?

  She thought it had. The repeated acceptance, during these last minutes, of the destruction of whole layers of its units in the raging force fields, to allow it to reach the barrier controls more quickly, suggested a new urgency in its search for human survivors. It would have been logical for it to assume that whoever had the missing instrument had sought refuge in the one area still shielded by multiple barriers.

  But when the last of those defense fields was shut off and the last of the northern buildings hunted through, the creature would turn here. In that, their luck had been bad—very bad! To avoid attracting attention to the building, they’d planned to leave its barrier off as long as possible. They were in sneaksuits, perhaps untraceable. They might have remained undetected indefinitely.

  But they had been in the barrier room only a few minutes before one of the prowling segments found them. Danestar had the streets along two sides of the building under observation, and nothing had been in sight there. Evidently, the thing had approached through an adjacent building. Without warning, it erupted from an upper corner of the room, swept down towards them. Danestar barely glimpsed it before Wergard scooped up the carbine placed across the table beside him and triggered it one-handed.

  The segment vanished, as its counterparts in the building entry had done, in an exploding swirl of darting, purple-gleaming lines of light. The individual energy entities which had survived the gun’s shock-charge seemed as mindless and purposeless as an insect swarm whirled away on a sudden gust of wind. Danestar had slapped on the building’s defense fields almost as Wergard fired; and in seconds, the indicators showed the fields flickering momentarily at thousands of points as glittering purple threads flashed against them and were absorbed. Within a minute, the building was clear again.

  But almost immediately afterwards, the barrier was impacted in a far more solid manner; and now the viewscreen showed a sudden shifting and weaving of fire shapes in one of the streets beside the building. Four or five segments had appeared together; one had attempted to slip into the building and encountered the force field. Lacking the protective bulk of the main body, it was instantly destroyed. The others obviously had become aware of the danger.

  “If they can find the personnel lock here, they might try that!” Wergard remarked.

  He placed Danestar’s instrument carefully to one side on the table, stood waiting with the gun. The entry surface of the lock was in the wall across from them, ringed in warning light to show the field was active. Danestar kept her eyes on the control panel. After a moment, she said sharply, “They have found the lock!” A yellow light had begun to flash beside the field indicators, signaling that the lock was in use. As it began to open on the room, the carbine flicked a charge into it, and the purple glow within exploded in glittering frenzies.

  The attempt to use the lock wasn’t repeated. The scouting segments were not in themselves an immediate danger here. But in the open, away from the building, where they could bring their destructive powers into play, a few of them should be more than a match for the gun. To retreat again to some other point of the Depot had become impossible. The things remained in the vicinity and were on guard, and other segments began to join them.

  That made it simply a question of how many minutes it still would be before the main body appeared to deal with the humans pinned down in this building. Neither Wergard nor Danestar mentioned it. They’d had good luck and bad, lasted longer than there had been any real reason to expect; now they’d run out of alternative moves. Nothing was left to discuss. Wergard had laid the carbine aside, resumed his carefully deliberate groping with the spidery dials of Danestar’s device. Danestar watched the instruments; and the instruments, in their various ways, watched the enemy.

  A tic began working in the corner of Wergard’s jaw; sweat ran down his face. But his hands remained steady. After a time, he announced he had locked in the first setting. Then the second, and the third . . .

  There were developments in the instruments Danestar didn’t tell him about. That the main body of the alien was absorbing savage punishment in its onslaught on the force fields became increasingly evident. The detector’s projection field pattern almost might have been that of a city undergoing an intermittent brutal barrage. Blacked-out sections remained lifeless now, and there were indications of an erratically spreading breakdown in general organization.

  But it should know, she thought, how much of that it could tolerate. Meanwhile it was achieving its purpose with frightening quickness. Barrier after barrier blazed in sudden fury along the line of search through the northern complex, subsided again. The viewscreen panel kept shifting as Danestar followed the thing’s progress. Then she cut in one more panel, and knew it was the last. The alien had very little farther to go.

  She switched the screen back momentarily to the local area, the streets immediately around their building.

  There was evidence here, she thought, in the steadily increasing number of ghostly, darting light shapes beyond the barrier, that alien control of the Depot was almost complete. The segments had been sent through it like minor detachments of an invading army to make sure no humans were left in hiding anywhere. They were massing about this building now because the composite mind knew that within the building were the only survivors outside of the northern complex.

  The thing was intelligent by any standards, had used its resources methodically and calculatingly. The major section which had been detached from it, after it captured the control building, apparently had remained there throughout, taking no part in other action. That eliminated the possibility that humans might escape from the Depot or obtain outside help. Only during the past few minutes, after the alien mind was assured that the last survivors were pinned down, had there been a change in that part of the pattern in the projector field. The thing seemed to be on the move now, filling some other role in the overall plan. Perhaps, Danestar thought, it would rejoin the main body as a reserve force, to make up for the losses suffered in the barrier. Or it might be on its way here.

  Wergard said absently, as if it had occurred to him to mention in passing something that was of no great interest to either of them, “Got that fourth setting now—”

  Less than a minute later, in the same flat, perfunctory tone, he announced the fifth setting was locked in; and hope flared in
Danestar so suddenly it was like a shock of hot fright.

  She glanced quickly at him. Staring down at the instrument he fingered with infinite two-handed deliberation, Wergard looked drugged, in a white-faced trance. She didn’t dare address him, do anything that might break into that complete absorption.

  But mentally she found herself screaming at him to hurry. There was so little time left. The last barrier in the northern complex had flared, gone dead, minutes before. The giant main body of the alien seemed quiescent then. There were indications of deep continuing disturbances in the scintillating signal swarms in the projector, and briefly Danestar had thought that the last tearing shock of force field energies could have left the great mass finally disorganized, crippled and stunned.

  But then evidence grew that the component which had remained in the control station was, in fact, rejoining the main body. And its role became clear. As the two merged, the erratic disturbances in the major section dimmed, smoothed out. A suggestion of swift, multitudinous rhythms co-ordinating the whole gradually returned.

  The Pit thing was the equivalent of an army of billions of individuals. And that entity had a directing intelligence—centered in the section which had held itself out of action until the energy defenses of the Depot were neutralized. Now it had reappeared, unaffected by the damage the main body had suffered, to resume immediate control, restore order. Quantitatively, the composite monster was reduced, shrunken. But its efficiency remained unimpaired; and as far as she and Wergard were concerned, the loss in sheer mass made no difference.

  And where was it now? She’d kept the panels of the viewscreen shifting about along the line of approach it should take between the northern complex and this building. She did not catch sight of it. But, of course, if it was in motion again, it could as easily be flowing towards them below ground level where the screen wouldn’t show it—

  Danestar paused, right hand on the screen mechanism.

  Had there been the lightest, most momentary, betraying quiver in a section of the defense barrier indicators just then? The screen was turned to the area about the building; and only the gliding, swift ghost-shapes of the segments were visible in the streets outside.

  But that meant nothing. She kept her eyes on the barrier panel. Seconds passed; then a brief quivering ran through the indicators and subsided.

  The thing was here, beneath the building, barely beyond range of its force field.

  Danestar drew the instrument valise quietly towards her, opened its dial lock and took out the ovoid alien device and a small gun lying in the valise beside it. She laid the device on the table, placed the gun’s muzzle against it. A slight pull of her trigger finger would drive a shattering charge into the instrument . . .

  Her eyes went back to the viewscreen. The swirling mass of light shapes out there abruptly had stopped moving.

  She and Wergard had discussed this. The alien had traced the U-League’s asteroid specimen from the Pit to Mezmiali, and to the Depot. While the instrument now missing from the specimen had been enclosed by the spyproof screens of Danestar’s valise, the alien’s senses evidently had not detected it. But it should register on them as soon as it was removed again from the valise.

  One question had been then whether the alien would be aware of the device’s importance to it. Danestar thought now that it was. The other question was whether it had learned enough from its contacts with humans to realize that, cornered and facing death, they might destroy such an instrument to keep it from an enemy.

  If the alien knew that, it might, in the final situation, gain them a little more time.

  She would not have been surprised if the barrier indicators had blazed red the instant after she opened the valise. And she would, in that moment, which certainly must be the last of her life and Wergard’s, have pulled the gun’s trigger.

  But nothing happened immediately, except that the segments in the streets outside the building went motionless. That, of course, should have some significance. Danestar waited now as motionlessly. Perhaps half a minute passed. Then the rattling pickup signal of the shortcode transmitter on the table suddenly jarred the stillness of the room.

  Some seconds later, three spaced words, stolen from living human voices, patched together by the alien’s cunning, came from the transmitter:

  “I . . . want . . . it . . .”

  There was a pause. On Danestar’s left, Wergard made a harsh, laughing sound. She watched the barrier panel. The indicators there remained quiet.

  “I . . . want . . . it . . .” repeated the transmitter suddenly. It paused again.

  “Six, Danestar!” Wergard’s voice told her. He added something in a mutter, went silent.

  “I . . . want—”

  The transmitter cut off abruptly. The force field indicators flickered very slightly and then were still. But in the viewscreen there was renewed motion.

  The segments in the street to the left of the building lifted like burning leaves caught by the breath of an approaching storm, swirled up together, streamed into and across the building beyond. In an instant, the street was empty of them. In the street on the right, ghostly fire-shapes also were moving off, more slowly, gliding away to the east, while the others began pouring out of building fronts and down through the air again to join the withdrawal. Some four hundred yards away, the swarm came to a stop, massing together. Seconds later, the paving about them showed the familiar purple glitter and the gleaming mass of the Pit creature lifted slowly into view from below, its minor emissaries merging into it and vanishing as it arose. It lay there quietly then, filling the width of the street.

  The situation had been presented in a manner which could not be misunderstood. The alien mind wanted the instrument. It knew the humans in this building had it. It had communicated the fact to them, then drawn back from the building, drawn its segments with it.

  The humans, it implied, were free to go now, leaving the instrument behind—

  But, of course, that was not the real situation. There was no possible compromise. The insignificantlooking device against which Danestar’s gun was held was the key to the Pit. To abandon it to the alien at this final moment was out of the question. And the act, in any case, would not have extended their lives by more than a few minutes.

  So the muzzle of the gun remained where it was, and Danestar made no other move. Revealing they had here what the creature wanted had gained them a trifling addition in time. Until she heard Wergard tell her he had locked in the seventh and final setting on the diabolically tiny instrument with which he had been struggling for almost twenty minutes, she could do nothing else.

  But Wergard stayed silent while the seconds slipped away. When some two minutes had passed, Danestar realized the giant fire shape was settling back beneath the surface of the street. Within seconds then it disappeared.

  A leaden hopelessness settled on her at last. When they saw the thing again, it would be coming in for the final attack. And if it rose against the force fields from below the building, they would not see it then. She must remember to pull the trigger the instant the barrier indicators flashed their warning. Then it would be over.

  She looked around at Wergard, saw he had placed the instrument on the table before him and was scowling down at it, lost in the black abstraction that somehow had enabled his fingers to do what normally must have been impossible to them. Only a few more minutes, Danestar thought, and he should have completed it. She parted her lips to warn him of what was about to happen, shook her head. Why disturb him now? There was nothing more Wergard could do either.

  As she looked back at the viewscreen, the Pit creature began to rise through the street level a hundred yards away. It lifted smoothly, monstrously, a flowing mountain of purple brilliance, poured towards them.

  Seconds left . . . her finger went taut on the trigger.

  A bemused, slow voice seemed to say heavily, “My eyes keep blurring now. Want to check this, Danestar? I think I have the setting but—”
>
  “No time!” She screamed it out, as the gun dropped to the table. She twisted awkwardly around on the chair, right hand reaching. “Let me have it!”

  Then Wergard, shocked free of whatever trance had closed on him, was there, slapping the device into her hand, steadying her as she twisted back towards the detector and fitted it in. He swung away from her. Danestar locked the attachment down, glanced over her shoulder, saw him standing again at the other table, eyes fixed on her, hand lifted above the plunger of the power pack beside the carbine.

  “Now!” she whispered.

  Wergard couldn’t possibly have heard it. But his palm came down in a hard slap on the plunger as the indicators of the entire eastern section of the barrier flared red.

  Danestar was a girl who preferred subtle methods in her work when possible. She had designed the detector’s interference attachment primarily to permit careful, unnoticeable manipulations of messages passing over some supposedly untappable communication line or other; and it worked very well.

  On this occasion, however, with the peak thrust of the power pack surging into it, there was nothing subtle about its action. A storm of static howled through the Depot along the Pit creature’s internal communication band. In reaction to it, the composite body quite literally shattered. The viewscreen filled with boiling geysers of purple light. Under the dull black dome of the main barrier, the rising mass expanded into a writhing, glowing cloud. Ripped by continuing torrents of static, it faded farther, dissipated into billions of flashing lines of light mindlessly seeking escape. In their billions, they poured upon the defense globe of the ancient fortress.