“He’s even given himself a human name,” Sally told Elisabeth. “McNulty!” She smiled at Harold. “I must admit I find him a little shivery!”
“He’s here?” Harold heard himself saying. “McNulty’s here, on the asteroid?”
“Of course! We invited him down. When Captain Hiskey—”
“How long’s he been here?”
She looked at him, startled by his tone. “Why, about twenty minutes. Why?”
“No,” Harold said. “Don’t ask questions.” He took each of them by an arm, began to walk them quickly towards the opening in the cliff. “Do you know exactly where McNulty is at the moment?”
“Well, they—my husband and Captain Hiskey and McNulty—probably are in the control room now. McNulty was saying how interested he’d be in seeing how the asteroid was operated.”
That tied it. “You didn’t send up for him?” Harold asked. “The ship’s skiff brought him down?”
“Yes, it did. But what is the matter, Mr. Gage? Is—”
“And the skiff’s still here?” Harold said. “It’s inside the field lock?”
“I suppose so. I don’t know.”
“All right,” Harold said. He stopped before the opening. “Now listen carefully because we’re not likely to have much time!” He drew a quick deep breath. “First, where is the control room?”
“In the building in the space lock section,” Sally said. “The administration building. You saw it when you came down.” They were watching him, expressions puzzled and alarmed.
Harold nodded. “Yes, I remember. Now—you and everyone else on the asteroid is in very serious danger. McNulty is a real horror. He has a special weapon. The only way you can stay reasonably safe from it is to hide out behind good solid locked doors. I hope you’ll have some way of warning Professor Alston and whoever else is around to do the same thing. Anyone who’s in the open, isn’t behind walls, when McNulty cuts loose won’t have a chance. Not for a moment! Unless he belongs to the Prideful Sue’s crew. If you can get to a transmitter in the next few minutes, call the SP and tell them to come here and get in any way they can—in space armor. But transmitters aren’t going to stay operable very long. You’ll have to hurry.” He looked at their whitened faces. “Don’t think I’m crazy! The only reason Hiskey would have told you about McNulty, and the only reason McNulty would have showed himself, is that they’ve decided between them to take over the place.”
“But why?” cried Sally.
“Because we’re the next thing to lousy pirates. Because they think they can use this asteroid.” Harold started to turn away. “Now get inside, seal that door tight, move fast, and with luck you’ll stay alive.”
So this was one place guns wouldn’t be needed! In mentioning that, Jake Hiskey had made sure his navigator wouldn’t—quite out of habit and absentmindedly—be going down armed to the peaceful Alston asteroid and to the reunion with his sister. He knew this was a job I couldn’t buy, Harold thought. Even if Elisabeth hadn’t been involved—
He’d set off at a long lope as soon as the camouflaged door in the cliff snapped shut. The asteroid surface in this area was simulated hilly ground, slopes rising and dipping, occasional smooth slabs of meteorite rock showing through. Clusters of trees, shrubbery, cultivated grassy ground . . . The space lock section couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards away, but he couldn’t see it from here. Neither could anyone in the open see him approaching. Sally Alston had said she’d located them by using scanners. Hiskey and McNulty could spot him by the same means, but they wouldn’t be looking for him before they’d secured the control room. Standard raiding procedure . . . hit the nerve center of an installation as quickly as possible; take it, and the rest is paralyzed, helpless, silenced.
He checked an instant. A curious sensation, like a vibrating pressure on his eardrums, a tingling all through his nerves; it continued a few seconds, faded, returned, faded again . . . and the herd came suddenly around the side of the hill ahead of him. Some fifteen large gray-brown animals, a kind of antelope with thick corkscrew horns, running hard and fast. In the moment he saw them, startled, he took it for an indication that McNulty had released the toziens—and knew immediately it wasn’t that. Nothing ran from toziens; there was no time. The herd crossed his path with a rapid drumming of hoofs, pounded through thickets, wheeled and appeared about to slam head-on into a vertical cliff wall. At the last moment an opening was there in the rock, similar to the one out of which Sally Alston had stepped, five or six times as wide. The beasts plunged through it, shouldering and jostling one another, and the opening vanished behind the last of them.
It all seemed to have happened in an instant. He ran on, wondering. That odd sensation, switching on and off—an alert signal? An alarm to which even the animals here were conditioned to respond immediately, in a predetermined manner, a “take cover!” that cleared the surface level of anything capable of reacting to it in moments . . . it indicated a degree of efficiency and preparedness he wouldn’t have attributed to these asteroid dwellers. What sort of emergencies could they expect here?
He saw no more fleeing beasts, or any beasts at all; and in perhaps another minute the tingling irritation in his nerves had ended. The space-lock section couldn’t be far away. He’d been cutting across the slopes, avoiding the leisurely winding and intersecting paths along which he’d come with Elisabeth, and keeping to cover when it didn’t slow him down. At last then, coming out of a grove of trees on the crest of one of the little hills, he saw the administration building ahead—or rather one corner of it, warm brown, edged with gleaming black, the rest concealed behind trees. There was no one in sight, but he moved cautiously now, staying within the shrubbery. A hundred feet on, he came to a point which overlooked the landing area beneath the space lock. The Prideful Sue’s skiff stood in the center of the area, entry port open. Otherwise the section looked deserted.
Above the skiff nothing showed but the simulated Earth sky. If the space lock through the energy carriers englobing the asteroid had been activated, it would have been visible—a ring of frozen fire from below, a glowing cylinder from where Harold stood, the cylinder’s thickness depending on the degree to which the lock was expanded. Undoubtedly it could be expanded enough to let in the Prideful Sue, and undoubtedly Hiskey had just that in mind. But whatever else he might have accomplished so far, he hadn’t yet got around to bringing down the ship.
The skiff wasn’t large, but eight or nine men with raiding gear—about half the crew—could have been crammed in with McNulty and left waiting in concealment until they received Hiskey’s signal to emerge and go into action. The open entry lock indicated they’d already received the signal, were now inside the administration building. In other words, at some point within the past few minutes the attack on the asteroid had begun. Barnes, the second Rilf, and the rest of the crew were still on the ship. If they joined the group on the asteroid, the situation might become nearly hopeless. As things stood, it seemed quite bad enough, but at least there’d been no sign as yet of the Rilf toziens. It was possible that if Jake Hiskey met no significant resistance from Alston’s people, he would prefer not to turn this into a killing operation.
But he’ll want to get me in any case, Harold thought. To keep me from interfering . . .
They hadn’t had time to try to locate him with scanners, but somebody might have been posted outside the administration building to ambush him if he showed up here. The most likely spot for a watcher seemed the cluster of trees and bushes which screened the building—
A blue and golden bird twice the size of a pigeon burst out of the undergrowth six feet ahead and launched itself upwards with a strong beat of wings. Startled—that might easily have advertised his approach—Harold dropped to a deep crouch, glancing after the bird. It rose swiftly to a point about thirty feet above the ground. There something struck and destroyed it.
It seemed as abrupt as an explosion. The flying shape changed to sprays of blood and color
ful ribbons and rags which were slashed and scattered again and again in the same instant, then left to fall back to earth. So it was a killing operation after all and McNulty had turned loose his toziens. Not, of course, all of them. There were thousands packed away in his thick nonhuman thorax; and only a small fraction of that number were required to sweep the surface of the asteroid and any sections of the interior open to intrusion clear of animal life large enough to attract their attention. They could have been released only moments ago or he would have been made aware of their presence—as he was aware of it now. An eerie whispering about him, now here, now there, as the toziens darted down in turn in their invisible speed towards this living flesh, sensed the Rilf drug which protected him as it protected all those who manned the Prideful Sue, and swerved away. But everyone else on the asteroid who had not found shelter had died or was dying in these seconds.
Starting forwards again, he shut that thought away. Jake Hiskey and McNulty, having begun the slaughter, would finish it. They’d be in the control room at present, securing their hold on the asteroid. That done, they’d bring in the ship and start looking for holed-up survivors.
The man Hiskey had selected to act as lookout at the building was Tom Connick. Not the brightest, but an excellent shot and normally steady as a rock—a good choice as an assassin. He stood, screened by a thicket, thirty feet from what seemed to be the only entrance into the building, a gun ready in his hand. They knew Harold wasn’t armed; and if he wanted to get into the administration building, he’d have to come past the thicket, within easy range for Connick. It must have seemed as simple as that.
McNulty’s toziens, however, had provided a complication. Connick’s usual calm was not in evidence. He kept making small abrupt motions, bobbing his head, flinching right or left, jerking up the gun and putting it down again. Harold could appreciate his feelings. He, too, was still drawing the interest of the invisible swarm; every few seconds there would be a momentary indication that a tozien was nearby, and each time his flesh crawled though he knew, as Connick did, that theoretically they were protected from the little horrors. The thought remained that some tozien or other might not realize in time that they were protected. But at present that was all to his advantage. Connick darted glances this way and that, now and then half turning to see what was in back of him; but he was looking for the wrong kind of danger. So in the end Harold rose up quietly from the undergrowth ten steps behind Connick with a sizable rock in either hand.
He lobbed the left-hand rock gently upwards. It lifted in a steep arc above Connick’s head and came down in front of him. And, for a moment, Connick’s nerves snapped. He uttered a frightened sound, a stifled squeal, jabbed the gun forward, shoulders hunching, attention frozen by the deadly dark moving thing which had appeared out of nowhere. It was doubtful whether he even heard the brief rustle of the thicket as Harold came up behind him. Then the edge of the second rock smashed through his skull.
And now there was a gun for Harold, and for Jake Hiskey one man less he might presently send out to look for surviving asteroid people. Harold found a recharger for the gun in one of Connick’s pockets. There’d been some question in his mind whether there mightn’t be a second man around, though he had studied the vicinity thoroughly before moving in on Connick. But nothing stirred, so Connick’s death had not been observed. He could expect to find somebody else stationed inside the building entrance, as a standard precaution.
He started quickly towards the building, then checked. On the far side of the space-lock area there was a faint greenish shimmering in the air, which hadn’t been there before. Harold stared at it sharply, looked around. Behind him, too, much closer, barely a hundred feet away—like a nearly invisible curtain hanging from the simulated sky, fitted against the irregularities of the ground below. He pointed Connick’s gun into the air, triggered it for an instant. There was a momentary puff of brightness as the charge hit the immaterial curtain. More distantly to the right, and, beyond the administration building to the left, was the same shimmering aerial effect.
Energy screens. Activated within the past few minutes. By whom? They enclosed the space-lock section, boxed it in. If they’d been thrown up before the tozien swarm appeared in the section, then McNulty’s weapon was still confined here unless it had found an entry to the asteroid’s interior from within the building. And the screens might have gone up just in time to do that; he’d been too involved in his wary approach to the building area to have noticed what happened behind him. There was suddenly some real reason for hope . . . because this fitted in with the silently pervasive alert signal which had come so quickly after his warning to Sally Alston, with concealed doors opening and closing on the surface and animals streaming off it into the interior. The asteroid had defenses, and somebody was using them—which did not make it any less urgent to do something about the Prideful Sue’s crew and its Rilf allies before the defenses were broken down.
There was someone waiting inside the entrance. It was Dionisio.
“What’s slowing you down in there, Dionisio?” Navigator Gage demanded curtly, striding towards him. “Why aren’t you moving?”
Dionisio was considerably more intelligent than Connick, but, besides being also badly fretted by the toziens, he was, for a moment, confused. He’d been told the navigator was among those to get it here; but he’d also been told that the navigator was unarmed and had no idea of what was going to happen. And here the navigator came walking up, casually holding a gun at half-ready, looking annoyed and impatient, which was standard for him on an operation, and sounding as if he were very much in on the deal. And, of course, there was the further consideration that the navigator was an extremely fast and accurate man with a gun. So Dionisio blinked, licked his lips, cleared his throat, finally began, “Well . . . uh—”
“The skipper’s got the control room cleaned up?”
“Well, sir, I guess so.”
“You guess so?”
“I wasn’t there,” Dionisio said sullenly, eyes fixed with some nervousness on the gun Navigator Gage was waving around rather freely. “I was in the skiff. There was that funny feeling we all got. Right after that we got the skipper’s signal. So we came out. The skipper tells us to start looking around for the people.”
“The people in the building?”
“Uh-huh. The skipper and McNulty were in the control room. There were five, six of the people here with them. And then the skipper looks around, and there’s nobody there.”
The navigator’s lip curled. “You’re implying they disappeared? Just like that?”
“Looks like it,” said Dionisio warily.
“Everybody in the building?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So what are they doing in there now?”
“Blowing in the walls. Looking for, uh, doors.”
“Looking for doors!” repeated Navigator Gage, total disgust in his voice. “And what are you doing up here?”
Dionisio swallowed. “I’m to, uh, look out to see if somebody comes.”
“With the toziens around? You out of your mind? Who’s in the skiff? Have the rest of them come down from the ship?”
“No. There’s nobody in the—” And then Dionisio stopped talking and twitched his gunbarrel up very quickly. Because Navigator Gage had glanced back towards the skiff out in the landing area just then; and while this was a kind of odd situation, Dionisio was positive the skipper anyhow wanted Navigator Gage dead, and he himself had no slightest use for the navigator. So up came the gun, and it was Dionisio who was dead in the same moment, because Navigator Gage had, after all, not glanced away to the extent of not being able to catch the motion.
Beyond the entry a lit hallway extended back into the building. Harold thought he’d heard distant human voices in there while he was talking to Dionisio, but at the moment there was silence. He checked quickly through the man’s gear, found a folded gas-breather and fitted that over his face. He took off his suit coat, put on Dionisi
o’s faded brown jacket, slapped Dionisio’s visor cap on his head and set it at the jaunty angle Dionisio favored. As he finished, there was a remote heavy thump from within the building, followed in seconds by another. Jake Hiskey was still having holes blown out of the walls, looking for the hidden passages through which Professor Alston and the people working in the administration building had vanished when they got the alert signal. He should find them if he kept at it long enough. And as soon as they had the space-lock controls figured out, they’d haul down the Prideful Sue with the heavier raiding equipment she carried.
Dionisio’s gun was the only other useful item here. Harold pocketed it, pulled the body over against the entry wall where it wouldn’t be visible from within the building and set off quickly along the long hallway. Glassy motion flickered for an instant before his eyes; the toziens were still around. Now a series of five doors on the right—all locked. Ahead the hall made a turn to the right. As he came towards the corner, he heard men’s voices again, at least three or four, mingled in a short burst of jabbering, harsh with excitement. Hiskey’s voice among them? The ammonia smell of jolt bombs began to tingle faintly in his nostrils.
He went around the corner without hesitating or slowing his stride. The gas-breather covered half his face; and while Dionisio was about an inch shorter, they were similar enough in general build that he could be accepted as Dionisio for a few moments by men with their attention on other things. Sixty feet ahead, rubble covered the hall floor, chunks of colorful plastic masonry shaken by jolt bombs out of a great jagged hole in the left wall. Only two men in sight, standing waiting in tensed attitudes behind a semi-portable gun pointed at the hole. Jake Hiskey’s voice now, raw with impatient anger; “Hurry it up! Hurry it up!” A glow spilled from the hole and there was the savage hiss of cutters. Bomb fumes hung thick in the air. Hiskey and at least four of the crew here. Wait till you’re right among them.
One of the men at the semiportable glanced around as Harold came up, looked away again. He went past them. The hole drove deep into the wall; evidently they’d uncovered a passage but found it sealed a few yards farther on, and the sealing material was holding. Three men were at work in there with Hiskey. The cutters blazed and a broken conduit spat vicious shorted, power . . . And what damn fool had left two unused jolt bombs lying on this boulder of plastic? Harold scooped them up in passing, glanced back and saw Hiskey staring open-mouthed over at him, then clawing for his gun.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 201