Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  She waited a moment, tanned face intent. A hum began in the communicator, rose to a wavering howl, interspersed with explosive cracklings. Impatiently, Nile spun the filter control right, then left. Racketing noise erupted along the scale. She muttered bitter comment. Her fingers flicked over the call buttons, picked out another symbol.

  “Danrich Parrol—Nile calling! Come in! Dan, can you hear me? Come in!”

  Silence for an instant. Then meaningless sound spat and spluttered again. Nile’s lips twisted in angry frustration. She muted the speaker, glanced down at the animal curled in a thick loop of richly gleaming brown fur on the floorboards beside her. It lifted a whiskered head, dark eyes watching Nile.

  “Dan?” it asked, in a high thin voice.

  “No Dan! No anybody!” snapped Nile. “We keep hitting a soup of static anywhere beyond twenty miles all around.”

  “Soup?”

  “Forget it, Sweeting. We’ll try calling the sledmen. Maybe they can help us find Ticos.”

  “Find Tikkos!” Sweeting agreed. The furred shape shifted, flowed, came upright. Bracing short sturdy forelegs against the control panel, Sweeting peered at the sections of seascape and sky in the viewscreens, looked over at Nile. Seven and a half feet in length from nose to the tip of her muscular tail, she was the smaller of Nile’s pair of mutant hunting otters. “Where’s sledman?”

  “Somewhere ahead.” Nile had swung the car fifteen degrees to the east. “Settle down.”

  The sled she’d sighted in the screens several minutes earlier presently came to view again, now only a few miles away. The car’s magnification scanners showed a five-hundred-foot floatwood raft with flattened, streamlined superstructure, riding its runners twelve yards above the surging seas. The central heavy-weather keel was down, knifing through the waves between the runners. On a day of less violence, the sled would have been drifting with an illusion of airy lightness over the water, kee, withdrawn, sails spread. Now the masts were hauled flat to the deck, and it was the set of cannon drives along the sled’s edges which sent it rushing towards the moving front of the storm. The rain-darkened afterdeck was emblazoned with a pair of deep-blue triangles—the Blue Guul symbol of the Sotira Fleet.

  As the sled vanished below the next cloud bank, Nile switched the communicator to the ten-mile close-contact band and said into the transmitter: “Dr. Nile Etland of Giard Pharmaceuticals calling Sotira sled! Acknowledge, please!”

  Close-contact seemed to have stayed operational. And they should know her by name down there. The Sotira sleds did regular sea-harvest work for Giard.

  The communicator said suddenly, “Captain Doncar of Sotira sled acknowledging. Go ahead, Dr. Etland.”

  “I’m in the air behind you,” Nile announced. “May I come aboard?”

  A moment of silence. Then Doncar’s voice said, “If you wish. But we’ll be running through a heavy storm in less than fifteen minutes.”

  “I know—I don’t want to lose you in it.”

  “Come down immediately then,” Doncar advised her. “We’ll be ready for you.”

  They were. Almost before Nile could climb out of the aircar, half a dozen men in swimming gear, muscular naked backs glistening in the slashing rain, had the small vehicle strapped securely against the sled’s deck beside a plastic-shrouded object which might be an oversized harpoon gun. It was a disciplined, practiced operation. As they stepped back, a brown-skinned girl, dressed down for the weather like the crewmen, hurried up from the central row of cabins. She shouted something almost lost in the din of wind and rain.

  Nile turned. “Jath!”

  “This way, Nile! Before the slop drowns us—”

  They sprinted back to the cabins through the solid downpour. The otter loped easily after them, given plenty of room by the deckhands. Many of Sweeting’s relatives preferred the unhampered freedom of Nandy-Cline’s ocean to a domesticated life; and the seagoing mutant otters were known to any sledman at least by reputation. Nothing was gained by asking for trouble with them.

  “In here!” Jath hauled open a door, slipped into the cabin behind Nile and the otter and let the door slam shut. Towels lay ready on a table; she tossed two to Nile, dabbed a third perfunctorily over her copper skin. Sweeting shook spray from her fur with a twist that spattered half the cabin. Nile mopped at her dripping coveralls, handed back one of the towels, used the other to dry hair, face and hands. “Thanks!”

  “Doncar can’t get away at the moment,” Jath told her. “He asked me to find out what we can do for you. So—what brings you out in this weather?”

  “I’m looking for somebody.”

  “Here?” There was startled surprise in Jath’s voice.

  “Dr. Ticos Cay.”

  A pause. “Dr. Cay is in this area?”

  “He might be—” Nile checked momentarily. Jath, in a motion as quick as it was purposeful, had cupped her right hand to her ear, lowered it again.

  They knew each other well enough to make the point of the gesture clear. Someone elsewhere on the sled was listening to what was being said in the cabin.

  Nile gave Jath the briefest of understanding nods. Evidently there was something going on in this section of the sea which the Sotira sleds regarded as strictly sledman business. She was a mainlander, though a privileged one—an outsider.

  She said, “I had a report from meteorological observers this morning about a major floatwood drift they’d spotted moving before the typhoons around here. The island Dr. Cay’s been camping on could be part of that drift.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “I’m not at all sure. I haven’t been in touch with him for two months. But the Merala may have carried him this far south. I’ve been unable to get in contact with him. He’s probably all right, but I’ve begun to feel worried.”

  Jath bit her lip, blue-green eyes staring at Nile’s forehead. Then she shrugged. “You should be worried! But if he’s on the floatwood the weather men saw, we wouldn’t know it.”

  “Why not? And why should I be worried?”

  “Floatwood’s gromgorru this season. So is the water twenty miles around any island. That’s Fleet word.”

  Nile hesitated, startled. “When was the word given?”

  “Five weeks ago,” lath told her.

  Gromgorru—sledman term for bad luck, evil magic. The malignant unknown. Something to be avoided. And something not discussed, under ordinary circumstances, with mainlanders. Jath’s use of the term was deliberate. It was not likely to please the unseen listeners.

  A buzzer sounded. Jath gave Nile a quick wink.

  “That’s for me.” She started for the door, turned again. “We have Venn aboard. They’ll want to see you now.”

  Alone with Sweeting, Nile scowled uneasily at the closed door. What the gromgorru business in connection with the floatwood islands was she couldn’t imagine. But if Ticos Cay was in this ocean area—and her calculations indicated he shouldn’t be too far away—she’d better be getting him out.

  II

  Ticos Cay had showed up unannounced one day at the Giard Pharmaceuticals Station on Nandy-Cline, to see Nile. He’d been her biochemistry instructor during her final university year on Orado. He was white-haired, stringy, bouncy, tough-minded, something of a genius, something of a crank, and the best all-around teacher she’d ever encountered. She was delighted to meet him again. Ticos informed her she was responsible for his presence here.

  “In what way?” Nile Etland asked.

  “The research you’ve done on the floatwood.”

  Nile gave him a questioning look. She’d written over a dozen papers on Nandy-Cline’s pelagic floatwood forests, forever on the move about the watery planet where one narrow continent and the polar ice massifs represented the only significant barriers to the circling tides of ocean. It was a subject on which she’d been acquiring firsthand information since childhood. The forests she’d studied most specifically rode the great Meral Current down through the equatorial belt and wh
eeled with it far to the south. Many returned eventually over the same path, taking four to ten years to complete the cycle, until at length they were drawn off into other currents. Unless the polar ice closed about it permanently or it became grounded in mainland shallows, the floatwood organism seemed to know no natural death. It was an old species, old enough to have become the home of innumerable other species adjusted in a variety of ways to the climatic changes encountered in its migrations and of temporary guests who attached themselves to forests crossing the ocean zones they frequented, deserting them again or dying as the floatwood moved beyond their ranges of temperature tolerance.

  “It’s an interesting subject,” she said. “But—”

  “You’re wondering why I’d make a three weeks’ trip out here to discuss the subject with you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “It isn’t all I had in mind,” said Ticos. “I paid a visit to Giard’s Central in Orado City a month or so ago. I learned, among other things, that there’s a shortage of trained field biologists on Nandy-Cline.”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “Evidently,” Ticos remarked, “it hasn’t hampered you too much. Your lab’s held in high esteem by the home office.”

  “I know. We earn their high esteem by keeping way ahead of the competition. But for every new item we turn up with an immediate practical application for Giard, there are a thousand out there that remain unsuspected. The people who work for us are good collectors but they can’t do instrument analysis and wouldn’t know what to look for if they could. They bring in what you tell them to bring in. I still go out myself when I can, but that’s not too often now.”

  “What’s the problem with getting new hire?”

  Nile shrugged. “The obvious one. If a man’s a good enough biologist, he has his pick of jobs in the Hub. He’d probably make more here, but he isn’t interested in coming all the way out to Nandy-Cline to do rough field work. I . . . Ticos, you don’t happen to be looking for a job here with Giard?”

  He nodded. “I am, as a matter of fact. I believe I’m qualified, and I have my own analytical laboratory at the spaceport. Do you think your station manager would consider me?”

  Nile blinked. “Parrol will snap you up, of course! But I don’t get it. How do you intend to fit this in with your university work?”

  “I resigned from the university early this year. About the job here—I do have a few conditions.”

  “What are they?”

  “For one thing, I’ll limit my work to the floatwood islands.”

  Why not, Nile thought. Provided they took adequate precautions. He looked in good physical shape, and she knew he’d been on a number of outworld field trips.

  She nodded, said, “We can fit you up with a first-class staff of assistants. Short on scientific training but long on floatwood experience. Say ten or—”

  “Uh-uh!” Ticos shook his head decidedly. “You and I will select an island and I’ll set myself up there alone. That’s Condition Two. It’s an essential part of the project.”

  Nile stared at him. The multi-formed life supported by the floatwood wasn’t abnormally ferocious; but it existed because it could take care of itself under constantly changing conditions, which included frequent shifts in the nature of enemies and prey, and in the defensive and offensive apparatus developed to deal with them. For the uninformed human intruder such apparatus could turn into a wide variety of death traps. Their menace was for the most part as mindlessly impersonal as quicksand. But that didn’t make them any less deadly.

  “Ticos Cay,” she stated, “you’re out of your mind! You wouldn’t last! Do you have any idea—”

  “I do. I’ve studied your papers carefully, along with the rather skimpy material that’s available otherwise on the planet’s indigenous life. I’m aware there may be serious environmental problems. We’ll discuss them. But solitude is a requirement.”

  “Why in the world should—”

  “From a personal point of view, I’ll be involved here primarily in longevity research.”

  She hesitated, said, “Frankly I don’t see the connection.”

  Ticos grunted. “Of course you don’t. I’d better start at the beginning.”

  “Perhaps you should. Longevity research . . .” Nile paused “Is there some, uh, personal—”

  “Is the life I’m interested in extending my own? Definitely. I’m at a point where it requires careful firsthand attention.”

  Nile felt startled. Ticos was lean but firmly muscled, agile and unwrinkled. In spite of his white hair, she hadn’t considered him old. He might have been somewhat over sixty and not interested in cosmetic hormones. “You’ve begun extension treatments?” she asked.

  “Quite a while ago,” Ticos said dryly. “How much do you know about the assorted longevity techniques?”

  “I have a general understanding of them, of course. But I’ve never made a special study of the subject. Nobody I’ve known has—” Her voice trailed off again.

  “Don’t let it embarrass you to be talking to a creaky ancient about it,” Ticos said.

  She stared at him. “How old are you?”

  “Rather close to two hundred standard years. One of the Hub’s most senior citizens, I believe. Not considering, of course, the calendar age of old timers who resorted to longsleep and are still around.”

  Two hundred years was the practical limit to the human biological life span. For a moment Nile didn’t know what to say. She tried to keep shock from showing in her face. But perhaps Ticos noticed it because he went on quickly, his tone light. “It’s curious, you know, that we still aren’t able to do much better along those lines! Of course, during the war centuries there evidently wasn’t much attention given to such impractical lines of research.”

  “Impractical?” Nile repeated.

  “From the viewpoint of the species. The indefinite extension of individual life units isn’t really too desirable in that respect. Natural replacements have obvious advantages. I can agree in theory. Nevertheless, I find myself resenting the fact that the theory should also apply to me.”

  He’d started resenting it some two decades ago. Up to then he’d been getting by exceptionally well on biochemical adjustments and gene manipulations, aided by occasional tissue transplants. Then trouble began—so gradually that it was a considerable while before he realized there was a real problem. He was informed at last that adjustment results were becoming increasingly erratic and that there was no known way of balancing them more accurately. Major transplants and the extensive use of synthetics would presently be required. It was suggested that he get his memory stores computerized and transferred to an information bank for reference purposes—and then perhaps check in for longsleep.

  Ticos found he didn’t like any of the prospects. His interest level hadn’t diminished noticeably, and he didn’t care to have his activities curtailed by a progressively patched-up body or suspended indefinitely by longsleep. If he didn’t take longsleep, he might make it past the two hundred year mark but evidently not by much. Previously he hadn’t given a great deal of attention to regeneration research. Those problems were for other men—he had a large variety of pet projects of his own going. Now he thought he’d better start investigating the field and look for more acceptable alternatives to the prognosis offered him.

  “You’ve been doing that for the past twenty years?” Nile asked.

  “Very nearly. Some thousands of lines of research are involved. It makes for a lengthy investigation.”

  “I thought most of those lines of research were over on the crackpot side,” she remarked.

  “A great many are. I still had to check them out. One problem here is that nobody can prove his method is going to work out indefinitely—no method has been practiced long enough for that. For the same reason it’s difficult to disprove the value of any approach, at least to those who believe in it. So egos and individualism run rampant in that area. Even the orthodox work isn�
��t well coordinated.”

  “You’d think the Federation would take a hand in it,” Nile said.

  “You might think so,” Ticos agreed. “However, there may be a consensus at Overgovernment levels that, because of economic and other factors, the unlimited prolongation of life in human beings would have questionable value. At any rate, while the Federation doesn’t discourage longevity research, it doesn’t actively support it. You could say it tolerates it.”

  “What about their own lives? They’re human.”

  He shrugged. “They may be putting their trust in longsleep—some happy future in which all such problems will be solved. I wouldn’t know. Of course, a good many people suspect that if you’re one of the elect, you’ll have treatments that work indefinitely. It seems a little improbable. Anyway I’m betting largely on biochemistry now—the individual cells. Keep them cleared of degenerative garbage, and other problems may no longer be too significant. I made some improvements in that area a few years ago. An immediate result was improvements in myself. As a matter of fact, I’ve been given to understand they’re probably the reason I’m still operational.”

  “You’ve written that up?” Nile asked.

  “Not under my name. The university handles that end of it. I’ve kept the biochemical research going, but I’ve also been working on new slants since. It struck me frequently in the course of all this that our instincts evidently aren’t in favor of letting us go on indefinitely.”

  She frowned. “What gives you that impression?”

  “For one thing, the fact that we generally won’t put out very much effort for it. A remarkable number of my earlier associates dropped out on treatments simply because they kept forgetting to do, or refused to do, the relatively simple things needed to stay alive. It was as though they’d decided it wasn’t important enough and they couldn’t be bothered.”

  Nile said doubtfully, “You aren’t exaggerating?”

  “No. It’s a common picture. The instincts accept the life and death cycle even when we’re consciously opposed to it. They work for the species. The individual has significance to the species only to the point of maturity. The instincts support him until he’s had an opportunity to pass along his genetic contribution. Then they start pulling him down. If a method eventually is developed to retain life and biological youth with no effort, it might be a different matter. Longsleep provides an illusion of that at present. But longsleep shelves the problem. I began to suspect longevity research itself is hampered by the instincts. And I’m not sure it isn’t . . . we really should be farther along with it. At any rate, I decided to check with people who are interested in the less accessible areas of the mind. They’re working in a major playground of the instincts, and they might have information—”