As he was setting the last of the transfer dials, there was a touch of odd weakness, a heaviness. A feeling then as if, in an instant, all his strength had been drained from him.
With immeasurable effort, in total dismay and incredulity, he forced himself to turn his head.
And there they stood. Sashien and the woman Griliom—
The third?
The insane realization came that the third figure was himself.
“No,” the figure said, “this isn’t you, Azard. We’ve concocted a disguise which will lend me your physical appearance for a while.” The voice was Odun’s.
Staring, unable to do more than stare, Azard watched Sashien hand a device which had been pointed at him to Griliom. The two men approached, picked him up from the floor and set him in a chair.
Griliom told him, “I’m reducing the pressure. You’ll be able to speak.”
Azard drew a deep breath. Some hope flowed back into him. The elds he had provided with bodies and information should soon be arming themselves and coming here. He’d warned them to be cautious. If these three wanted him to talk, he would talk. He said hoarsely, “What do you want?”
Odun said, “Why did you try to kill us?”
“I didn’t,” Azard said. How could they possibly have escaped? “You should have been unconscious for a time but unhurt.” They stared at him a moment. Sashien said, “What was your purpose in making the attempt?” Azard sighed. “I needed this ship for Malatlo.”
“Malatlo could have had the ship for the asking,” said Odun. “You knew that.”
“Yes. But we can’t stay here. This world is still too close to the Federation, and too many people would know Malatlo was here. We owe renewed gratitude to the Federation. But now we must break all ties with its people. The new Malatlo must be born on a world no one knows about—and too far away to be discovered accidentally.”
“Malatlo,” said Griliom, “did not object to maintaining limited contacts with the Federation before this.”
“Many did object to it,” Azard assured her. “And at the end many believed that our trouble arose because the Raceels of Tiurs had learned through us about the Federation. They tried to exterminate us not because they were afraid of us but because they were afraid of the Federation where the Malatlo Attitude didn’t prevail.”
“You still needed the Federation to supply you with zombi bodies,” Griliom remarked. “The number we were able to store on this ship were no more than a beginning.”
“But they were sufficient,” said Azard. “Naturally our best scientists would have been among those awakened first. Their study of the bodies and of what I recorded of the techniques involved in developing them would allow them to duplicate the process.”
He went on earnestly. “You must believe that no harm would have come to you. You would have been left here on the planet with the atmosphere cruiser and supplies. As soon as the cargo carrier was far enough away so that It could no longer be traced, we would have transmitted word to the escort ships to return and pick you up.”
Sashien and Odun looked at Griliom. She shook her head. “Analysis showed three lethal components in the gas he released,” she said. She glanced at Azard. “We weren’t in that room. What you saw and heard were programmed zombis. They died in moments—as we would have done in their place.” She added to the other two, “So we have here an alleged Malatlo Follower who was willing to kill three human beings to attain his ends. That seems difficult to believe.”
Azard said doggedly, “The fact that I am a Malatlo Follower must indicate to you that if the gas I used was in fact deadly, it could only have been a mistake! A mistake which, I must admit, might have had terrible consequences . . .”
Odun said thoughtfully, “Perhaps we should question one of the others.” He nodded at the case standing before the body container. “I’ll take the paralyzer, Griliom. Will you see how far along he was with that.”
Azard slowly tensed his muscles as the woman went to the eld case, stooped above it to inspect the pattern of dials inside. There was no hesitancy in her manner—did she understand what she saw?
She said, “He’s selected a specific psyche for transfer to the body. Let me see . . .” She turned to the container, opened it, bent over the zombi. Her shoulders moved. Azard couldn’t see what she was doing, but he could assume she was checking its condition on the various instruments. She straightened again presently, looked at Odun. “Total capacity,” she said. “We can effect the transfer.”
Azard made a straining effort to arise. But they were watchful; the paralyzer’s pressure increased instantly—he could not move, and now he discovered he had also become unable to speak. A wave of dizziness passed through him, his vision blurred. He became aware next that Griliom and Sashien were moving about him; then clear sight gradually returned.
He found himself still immobilized in the chair, looking out into the room through something like a thin veil of darkness. He guessed it was an energy field of some kind. Odun stood in the center of the room. Some twenty feet from him the zombi body Azard had prepared lay on its back, on the floor. Azard realized then that Sashien and Griliom stood on either side of his chair, a little behind him.
The body stirred, opened its eyes, sat up.
It looked about the room but seemed unable to see Azard and the two on his right and left. The energy veil evidently blocked vision from that side. Its gaze fastened on Odun, who stood watching it with the face of Azard. It came to its feet.
There had been no uncertainty in any of its motions; This was a powerful eld, instantly capable of impressing its intentions on the full range of the zombis physical and mental response patterns. Azard should have been able to sense its presence in the room, but he could force no eld contact through the energy barrier. There was no way to transmit a warning.
“Dom belke anda grom, Azard!” the body addressed Odun. It was a strong, self-assured voice.
“Gelan ra Azard,” Odun said. “Ra diriog Federation. Sellen ra Raceel.”
The body moved instantly. It sprang sideways to a table standing ten feet away. And Azard saw only now what it must have noted in its sweeping glance about the room—the gun which lay on the table. The body snatched it up, pointed the muzzle at Odun, pulled the trigger.
And dropped limply back to the floor, the gun spinning from its hand.
“This was a test,” Odun told Azard. He no longer wore Azard’s face; the false skin or whatever it was had been removed. “You heard what I said to him. I identified myself as a human of the Federation and told him he was a Raceel. He immediately attempted to destroy me. The weapon, of course, was rigged. If the trigger was pressed, it would kill the user.”
Azard did not reply.
“So you are Raceels,” Odun went on. “And you’d kill any of us—any human being—as readily as you destroyed the people of Malatlo. We should like to know how this came about. Are you willing to talk?”
“Yes. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.” Azard made his voice dull, his expression listless and resigned. But there was savage anger in him—and the longer he held these three in talk, the more certain their death and eventual Raced victory became. The thirty elds he’d released had been a select group of superb fighters, and they must be searching the ship by now, in strong new bodies and with weapons in their hands. The demonstration here confirmed that they’d know very quickly how to put those bodies to full use.
“We were desperate,” he said, and went on, knowing the statement had gained him their full attention. Before the Malatlo settlers contacted it, Tiurs had faced the problem of a population constantly on the verge of expanding beyond the ability of the planet to support it and no adequate techniques of space travel which might have helped alleviate the problem. A temporary and unsatisfactory solution had been the development of methods of preserving a conscious personality indefinitely without the support of a physical body . . .
“So it was you and not Malatlo,” said Sas
hien, “who originated the eld sciences.”
“They were investigating the subject,” Azard told him. “But we accomplished the eld separation a century before they began to make significant progress in that direction—”
The Malatlo Followers did not push their contacts with Tiurs, believing it best to let the relationship develop gradually and in a manner which would be satisfactory to the Raceels. And the Raceels, though hungry for the information they might get from the humans, remained equally cautious. For them the situation held both great promise and a great threat. There were means of practical interstellar space travel, and there were worlds upon worlds among the stars to which their kind might spread. That was the promise.
The threat was the prospect of encountering competitors in space more formidable than themselves. The Followers were harmless, but from what they had told the Raceels of the species to which they? belonged, the species certainly was not. Evidently it already controlled an enormous sector of space. Further, there might be other species equally dangerous to those weaker than they.
The logical approach was to remain unnoticed until one became strong enough to meet any opposition.
The Raceels immersed themselves in research on many levels, including lines long since abandoned as being too immediately dangerous to themselves. Somewhat to their surprise, they found Malatlo completely willing to supply them with spaceships for study when they indicated an interest in them. Unfortunately, these craft were not designed to accomplish interstellar flights, but they advanced the scientists of Tiurs a long step in that direction. The Raceels kept this as well as their other hopes and fears a careful secret from Malatlo.
They were a race which had a naturally high rate of reproduction and which throughout a war-studded history had made a fetish of the expansion of its kind. That drive became a liability when Tiurs was united at last into a single rigidly controlled society confined to the surface of its planet. Now suddenly it might be turned into an asset again. When they burst upon the stars, it would be in no timid and tentative colonial probes, but in many thousands of ships, each capable of peopling a world in a single generation.
They worked towards that end with feverish determination. From Malatlo they learned of the eldless zombi bodies Federation science knew how to produce in theoretically limitless quantities, and they took up that line of investigation. The disembodied elds in the storage vaults, for whom there had been no room for normal existence on Tiurs, would come to life again in new bodies on new worlds. Dormant fertile germ cells of selected strains were stockpiled by the millions. Weaponry research moved quickly forwards. The full interstellar drive seemed almost within reach.
And then—
“Malatlo Followers informed us they had become aware of our plans and were horrified by them.” Azard said. “Apparently they believed they could persuade us to abandon them.” He hesitated. “So we silenced them.”
“You extinguished a living world,” said Griliom.
Azard said, “We couldn’t stop what we were doing. And Malatlo would reveal what it had learned to the Federation. We believed we had no choice.”
“How was Tiurs destroyed?” Sashien asked.
“We had intended to destroy it with mass-converter fields after we left,” said Azard. “To later investigators it would appear that Malatlo and Tiurs had been engulfed by the same unexplained disaster. We didn’t realize then how dangerously unstable the fields were. There was a premature reaction among the ones being positioned on Tiurs. After that—”
He shrugged. For a moment a three-year old horror seemed to darken his mind again.
“We were totally unprepared, and we had only days left to act, he continued. Up to the last moment, the most valuable sections of the population were moved through eld separation centers. Only one ship equipped with an experimental interstellar drive had escaped the initial conversion burst. It was very small. But it could carry as many Raceel elds as there would be time to salvage. It could carry a relatively huge quantity of stored fertile germ cells. And supplies for one Raceel during a trip that must take years. Because there was now only one place where zombi bodies for the salvaged elds could be produced, and that place was the human Federation of the Hub . . .
Griliom remarked, “The body you use has been analyzed. It obviously is a human one. How did you obtain it?”
“There were a number of Followers on Tiurs when we destroyed Malatlo,” Azard said. “I was one of a group who had the various qualifications required to take our survival ship to the Federation. My eld was transferred to the body of a Follower for the purpose. The method employed was to bring the human subject to the point of physical death. The death process dissolved the inhabiting eld. The Raceel eld was then injected and an attempt made to revive the body. The first forty-eight such attempts failed, and the Raceel elds involved also died before they could be detached again from the dying bodies which had absorbed them. I was the forty-ninth transfer. That body was successfully revived, and so I lived.
He added, “There is much valuable information we could exchange if, for example, the Raceel scientists in charge of the eld transfer methods and the ones who developed the mass-converter fields were restored to physical existence. We offer you what they have learned in return for the use of your zombi bodies.”
He didn’t expect them to respond to the offer. They must believe that if they wanted such information they could get it from the elds who were now in effect their prisoners, without giving anything in return. But if they continued to let him talk, the released elds would have more time to find them here and destroy them.
He added again, “You must not judge us too harshly. Our history and traditions made the continued expansion of our species a matter of driving necessity to us. Nothing could be allowed to block it. But your species and mine can now be of value to each other. You should consider that rather than the question of avenging Malatlo.”
“Azard,” Odun said, “you don’t fully understand the situation. The story you told in the Federation was tentatively accepted, but you were under close observation. And certain incongruities gradually became evident. Even allowing for the shock of the disaster, you didn’t speak and act quite as a Malatlo Follower might be expected to speak and act. Your demands were logical, in the light of the Malatlo Attitude. But they were a trifle too precisely logical and uncompromising.
“Then there is the matter of your mind. It presents automatic blocks to psychic probes. Human minds can demonstrate that ability in various forms. In your case, however, it is brought into action in a manner no human mind of record has employed to date. So there presently was the question of whether you were in fact, in spite of physical appearances, wholly human. Meanwhile it had been confirmed that, as you reported, the worlds of Malatlo and Tiurs had disappeared. If you weren’t human then, it followed that you were in all probability a Raceel eld in a human body . . . and that you were trying to trick the Federation into helping you reestablish the Raceel species.”
Azard stared at him. “If that was suspected, why—”
“It was a test.”
“A test?” Azard repeated. Odun sighed. “Even at second hand,” he remarked, “the Malatlo Attitude seems to retain a curious power. It was decided that if some indication could be found that the destruction of Malatlo was an act of thoughtless panic, an act which you and your kind regretted not only because of the destruction it brought in turn on yourselves, we would then help bring the stored Raceel elds into physical existence. But everything you’ve done since this voyage began was continuing evidence of the implacable hostility your species entertains towards all others. And you’ve been kept under constant observation.”
Azard said harshly, “That would have been impossible!”
“We employed certain safeguards, of course,” Griliom Tantrey told him. She nodded at the zombi body on the floor. “I gave that body a final stimulant before we transferred the eld of what was presumably one of your people’s leaders to
it. This was a step in the animation of zombis of which you had not been informed. The bodies to which you transferred elds an hour ago lacked that stimulant. They all died therefore within minutes after the elds brought them into full normal activity, and the elds, of course, died with them.”
He tried for some seconds to make himself disbelieve her, but it was clear that she spoke the truth. He looked at their faces, addressed Odun. “You used our language. How did you learn it?”
“I’ve made a study of the Malatlo-Raceel relationship for some years,” Odun said. “The last ship to return from the system provided me with language tapes.” He looked at his companions. “I believe Azard has told us as much as we need or wish to know.”
They nodded.
“Then,” Odun resumed, “it’s time to take the final steps in this.”
His hand moved. And darkness closed in with a rush around Azard.
He came awake again presently and looked about in dimness. He was seated in another chair, again unable to move his limbs or body, and the three were busy with something not far from him.
After some seconds he realized they were in the atmosphere cruiser. The screen showed the surface of one of the planetary oceans. The two eld cases stood near it.
Azard discovered he could speak and asked aloud, “What are you doing?”
They looked around. Griliom said matter-of-factly, “Well dispose of the elds here.”
In spite of everything, Azard felt a shock of incredulous rage.
But at least, he thought, these three would also die! Released simultaneously, the eld hordes would struggle furiously for possession of their bodies as well as his own. And neither the inhabiting elds nor the physical bodies could survive such an onslaught.
He said, “You have no authority to make such a decision!”
“We do have that authority, Azard,” said Odun. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Then,” Azard told him, “you’re worse than we ever were. We destroyed only the population of a world. You’re taking it on yourselves to destroy an intelligent species.”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 206