Harold dropped behind the boulder, thumbed the stud on one of the little bombs and pitched it over into the opening of the hole. The second one went in the general direction of the semiportable. Their successive shock waves rammed at his eardrums, lifted the boulder against him. Clouds of dust filled the hall. After a moment he took out one of his guns and stood up.
They lay where the double shock had caught and battered them. Hiskey had been coming for him, had nearly reached the boulder when he was smashed down. Harold looked at the bloodied head and was surprised by a wash of heavy regret, a brief but intensely vivid awareness of that bright yesterday in which Jake Hiskey and he first swung their ship out past the sun, headed towards high adventure. Too bad, Jake, he thought. Too bad that in eight years the adventure soured so that it’s ending here like this.
McNulty and one or at most two of the original landing group left. Finish it up now before their reinforcements get here—
McNulty at any rate should be in the control room.
Harold went on along the hallway. No sounds anywhere. An open door. He approached it cautiously, looked in. A sizable office, half a dozen desks spaced out, machine stands, wall files—two of these left open. Not many minutes ago, people had been working here. Then the asteroid’s alarm reached them, and like ghosts they’d vanished. At the far side of the office was another door. As he started towards it, two men stood suddenly in the doorframe. Guns went off; Harold dropped behind the nearest desk. Across the room, the two had taken cover as quickly.
A real gun fight now, fast and vicious. The crewmen were Harding and Ruse, two of the Prideful Sue’s best hands. The office furniture, in spite of its elegant appearance, was of tough solid plastic; but within a minute it was hammered half to pieces. Harold had emptied the charge in one of his guns before he got Harding. Ruse was still pouring it at him, battering the shielding desk. There was no way to reach back at him from here. Harold took a chance finally, shifting to another desk in a crouching leap, felt pain jar up from the heel of his right leg as he reached cover. Not an immediately crippling charge, though any hit of that kind was bad enough. Now, however, lying half across the desk, he had the advantage and could pour it on Ruse and did. Pinned behind his cover, Ruse kept firing furiously but ineffectively. At last he stopped firing and tried to duplicate Harold’s trick, and Harold got him in the open. The second gun hissed out emptily instants later.
Ruse had rolled on behind a low console. Only his legs were in sight. He seemed to be sprawled loosely on his side, and the legs weren’t moving. It might be a trick, though Harold didn’t think so. He knew he’d caught Ruse with a head shot; and even at minimum charge that should have been almost instantly fatal. But he stayed where he was and reached back carefully with one hand to get the gun recharger he’d taken from Connick out of his pocket. A moment’s fumbling told him it was no longer there. At some point along the line it had been jolted from the pocket and lost.
But Harding should have a recharger. Harold slid back slowly off the desk and turned towards Harding’s body.
And there, coming towards him in a soft heavy rush across the littered office, clutching a thick metal spike in one human-looking hand, was McNulty.
Harold slipped back behind the desk. McNulty lunged across the desk with the spike, then lumbered around it; and as he came on, his big shape seemed to be blurring oddly from moment to moment. Then a hard deep droning noise swelled in the air, and Harold knew the Rilf’s thorax was spewing out its store of toziens.
The purpose was immediately obvious. The toziens couldn’t touch him, but they provided a distraction. In an instant Harold seemed enclosed in roaring thunders, and the office had turned into something seen through a shifting syrupy liquid. McNulty, in addition, hardly needed help. He was clumsy but strong and fast; his broad white face kept looming up distortedly in the tozien screen near Harold. For a nightmarish minute or two, it was all Harold could do to keep some sizable piece of office equipment between the Rilf and himself. McNulty didn’t give him a chance to get near Ruse’s or Harding’s guns. Then finally McNulty stumbled on a broken chair and fell; and with the tozien storm whirling about him, Harold managed to wrench the spike away from the Rilf. As McNulty came back up on his feet, he moved in, the spike gripped in both hands, and rammed it deep into what, if McNulty had been human, would have been McNulty’s abdomen. He had no idea where McNulty’s vital organs were or what they were like, but the spike reached one of them. McNulty’s mouth stretched wide. If he made any sound, it was lost in the droning uproar. His big body swayed left and right; then he went down heavily on his back and lay still, the spike’s handle sticking up out of him. His eyes remained open.
Harold leaned back for an instant against the edge of a desk, gasping for breath. The toziens still boiled around, sounding like a swarm of gigantic metallic insects, but they seemed to have drawn away a little; he began to see the office more clearly. Then one of them appeared suddenly on McNulty’s chest. It stayed there, quivering. Another appeared, and another. In a minute, McNulty’s body was covered with them, clustering, shifting about, like flies gathering thick on carrion. Harold’s skin crawled as he watched them. They were specialized cells produced by the Rilf body, pliable or steel-hard and razor-edged, depending on what they were doing. McNulty’s remote ancestor had been a hunting animal, too awkward perhaps to overtake nimble prey, which had evolved a method of detaching sections of itself to carry out the kill, not unlike the hawks men had trained on old Earth to hunt on sight. McNulty still had been able to use his toziens in that manner, releasing one or more under an inhibition which impelled them to return to him after bringing down a specific victim. Their use by the thousands for uninhibited wholesale slaughter evidently had been a more recent Rilf development, perhaps not attained until they had acquired a civilization and scientific methods. Under those conditions, the toziens ranged over an area of a dozen miles, destroying whatever life they found for almost fifty hours, until their furious energy was exhausted and they died.
Harding had been carrying a recharger, and Harold replenished his guns with it before placing it in his pocket. He looked over once more at McNulty’s body, motionless under its glittering blanket, and left the office by the door opposite to the one through which he had entered. Not all the toziens had returned to McNulty. An unidentifiable number still darted about, and some stayed near Harold, attracted by his motion. He knew it because they weren’t inaudible now but continued to make droning or whirring sounds as they had during McNulty’s attack. Perhaps McNulty’s death was having an effect on their life processes. At any rate, they no longer seemed to have any particular interest in him.
Limping a little because of the charge he’d stopped in his heel, he followed the narrow passage beyond the door to another doorway. There, at the bottom of a short flight of steps, the brightly lit deserted control room whispered and hummed. Harold hurried down the steps, looked around.
He found the space-lock controls almost immediately. And they were a puzzler. The instruments indicated that the lock was open to its fullest extent. But the screen view of the landing area showed only the skiff standing there, and the screen view of the force-field sections containing the space lock showed it wasn’t activated, was shut tight. He shifted the controls quickly back and forth. There was no change in the screens. He scowled at the indicators, left them at the shut and secured mark, turned to other instruments nearby, began manipulating them.
In a minute, he had the answer. He sat down at a console, heard himself make a short laughing sound. No wonder Jake Hiskey had worked so furiously to break through into the hidden passages leading into the interior of the asteroid. For every practical purpose, the control room was dead. Power was here, the gadgetry appeared to be operating. But it did and could do nothing. None of it. Nothing at all.
He drew a long slow breath, looked up at the ceiling.
“Is somebody listening?” he asked aloud. “Can you see me here?”
&n
bsp; There was a momentary excited babble of voices, male and female. Elisabeth? He discovered the speaker then, ten feet away. “Elisabeth?” he asked, a sudden rawness in his throat.
“Yes, I’m here, Harold. We’re all here!” Elisabeth’s voice told him. “Harold, we couldn’t see you. We didn’t know what was happening out—”
“The scanners, Mr. Gage.” That was Alston. “The scanning circuits in that section have been shorted. We were afraid of drawing attention to you by speaking. And—”
“I understand,” Harold said. “Better let me talk first because this thing isn’t finished. Captain Hiskey and the men he smuggled down here from the ship are dead. So is McNulty—the Rilf. But McNulty’s weapon isn’t dead and should stay effective for the next two days—make it two and a half, to be safe. You can’t come into this section before then, and you can’t go anywhere else on the asteroid where it might have spread. It can’t hurt me, but any of you would be killed immediately.”
“Just what is this biological weapon?” Alston’s voice asked.
Harold told him briefly about the toziens, added, “You may have thrown up those screen barriers about this section fast enough to trap them here. But if you didn’t, they’re all over the surface of the asteroid. And if they’re given an opening anywhere, they’ll come pouring down into it.”
“Fortunately,” Alston said, “they have been trapped in the space-lock section. Thanks to your prompt warning, Mr. Gage.”
“What makes you sure?”
“They were registering on biological sensing devices covering that section until the scanners went off. The impressions were difficult to define but match your description. Every section of the asteroid is compartmentalized by energy screens at present, and no similar impressions have been obtained elsewhere. Nevertheless, we shall take no chances. We’ll remain sealed off from the surface for the next sixty hours.”
“You seem to have an override on the instruments here,” Harold said.
“An automatic override,” Alston acknowledged. “It cuts in when the asteroid shifts to emergency status. The possibility of a successful raid always had to be considered. So there is an interior control room.”
Harold sighed. Jake Hiskey and McNulty, he thought, hadn’t been alone in underestimating these people. Well, let’s get the mess cleaned up . . . “You’ve asked the SP to do something about the Prideful Sue?”
“Yes,” Alston said. “They’ll be here within a few hours.”
Tozien whirring dipped past Harold’s face, moved off. “She has heavier armament than they might expect,” he said. “Eight men and another Rilf on board. Our gunnery isn’t the worst. But tell them to give her a chance.”
“I’ll do that. And I’ll advise the police to take precautions.”
“Yes, they should. There’s one more thing then. We guided a Rilf ship here and left it outside Earthsystem. It’s manned by more than half a hundred Rilfs. We’ve been negotiating to have them take a hand for pay in Earth’s miniwars. They may still try to go ahead with the deal. I think they should be turned back.”
“Where is that ship now?” Alston sounded startled.
“No fixed position. But it should be moving into Earthsystem to rendezvous on your orbit. If the SP look for it, they’ll find it.”
Alston began to reply, but his voice blurred out for Harold. Almost as he’d stopped speaking, something had slammed into his back, below his right shoulder blade. The impact threw him out of the chair. He went on down to the floor, rolled over, twisting, on his left side, stopped, and had one of the guns in his right hand, pointed up.
Jake Hiskey’s face was a smiling red mask as he leaned against the doorframe at the end of the room. There was a gun in his hand too, and he fired before Harold did. The charge shuddered into the transmitter stand behind Harold and crept quickly down. Harold pulled the trigger then, and Hiskey was flung back and fell beyond the doorframe, out of sight. Harold sucked air back into lungs that seemed tight as a clenched fist in his chest. Spent gun . . . or the hit where he’d taken it should have killed him outright. Jake had been too groggy to check that detail. Not that it was going to make very much difference.
Well, Jake, he thought, perhaps that wasn’t really the worst solution.
The big room swung in circles overhead as he pulled himself against the stand and sat up. Then a voice was crying his name. Elisabeth.
“It’s all right,” Harold announced thickly, idiotically. “I stopped a hit, that’s all.”
Questions.
“Captain Hiskey wasn’t quite as dead as I believed,” he explained. “He’s dead enough now.”
The voices grew blurred. Harold decided he was, definitely, finished. It might take a while. But the charge, spent though it had been, would start him hemorrhaging. In an hour or two heart and lungs should be dying mush. Wicked guns, thorough guns—
“. . . Immediate medical attention . . .”
Oh, sure.
But he was listening now to what they were telling him, and abruptly he became alarmed. “No one can come in here,” he said. “I told you why. Not even in armor. Lift the screens anywhere while the toziens are alive, and they’ll pour through They’re too fast to stop. You’ll have to wait till you know they’re dead.”
Then there was, they said, another way. Between this section and the next was a small emergency personnel lock—if he could follow their instructions, if he could reach it. A suit of armor couldn’t pass through it, but Harold could. And once he was inside the lock, sensing devices would establish with complete reliability whether any Rilf toziens had entered it with him.
Harold considered that. It seemed foolproof.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll see if it works.” He began struggling up to his feet. “Just keep those screens down.”
Some while later he reached the main entry to the control room, glanced down at Jake Hiskey and turned to the right, as they’d said. Toziens went with him, drawn towards the only thing that still moved in the section. There came a passage, and another one, and a door and, behind the door, a small room. Harold entered the room and looked around. “I think I’m there,” he said aloud.
“Yes, you’re in the right room,” Alston’s voice told him. “You won’t see the lock until it opens, but it’s in the center of the wall directly opposite the door.”
“Don’t open it yet,” Harold said. “They’re here, too.”
He got across the room. As Alston had told him, there was nothing in the smooth bare wall to suggest an emergency lock behind it, but he was lined up with the center of the door on the other side, as well as he could make it out; and he should be within a few feet, at most, of the lock.
“Professor Alston,” he said. “Yes?”
“I’m in front of the lock now. Wait till I give you the word. Then open it fast.”
“We’re ready,” Alston said. “We’ll know when you’re inside.” Harold fished the two guns from his pockets, took them by their barrels in one hand, turned around. Supporting himself against the wall with his other hand, he lifted the guns and began waving them about. Tozien droning drew in towards the motion, thickening, zigzagging back and forth above and in front of him. Then he pitched the guns towards the far corner of the room.
The droning darted off with them. They hit the wall with a fine crash, went clattering to the floor. The air seethed noisily above them there.
“Now!” Harold said.
He saw the narrow dark opening appear in the wall two feet away, stumbled into it. After that, he seemed to go on stumbling down through soft darkness.
At first there was nothing. Then came an occasional vague awareness of time passing. A great deal of time . . . years of it, centuries of it . . . seemed to drift by steadily and slowly. Shadows began to appear, and withdrew again. Now and then a thought turned up. Some thoughts attracted other thoughts, clusters of them. Finally he found he had acquired a few facts. Facts had great value, he realized; they could be fitted tog
ether to form solid structures.
Carefully, painstakingly, he drew in more facts. His thoughts took to playing about them like schools of fish, shifting from one fact to another. Then there came a point at which it occurred to him that he really had a great many facts on hand now, and should start lining them up and putting them in order.
So he started doing it.
The first group was easy to assemble. In the process, he remembered suddenly having been told all this by one of the shadows:
The men left on the Prideful Sue had elected to put up a fight when the System Police boats arrived, and they’d put up a good one. (They should have, a stray thought added as an aside; he’d trained them.) But in the end the Prideful Sue was shot apart, and there’d been no survivors.
The Rilf ship, edging into Earthsystem, turned sullenly back when challenged. By the time it faded beyond the instrument range of its SP escort, it was a quarter of a light-year away from the sun, traveling steadily out.
That seemed to clear up one parcel of facts.
Other matters were more complex. He himself, for example—first just lying there, then riding about on one of the small brown cattle which had once been a wild species of Earth, finally walking again—remained something of a puzzle. There were periods when he was present so to speak, and evidently longer, completely vacant periods into which he dropped from time to time. When he came out of them, he didn’t know where he’d been. He hadn’t noticed it much at first; but then he began to find it disturbing.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 202