“Intergalactic space?” Alicar repeated.
Telzey said, “That’s not really the way to put it. He was simply somewhere else, and then he was here in the Hub. But that somewhere else doesn’t seem to have been even one of our neighbor galaxies! Still, he could have made it back to his starting point with a fresh supply of djeel oil. The reaction had almost exhausted what he had, and the nearest ore bed his machine could detect was on Mannafra. Soad barely made it there. But he had no way of processing the ore, so he had to wait then for something with enough intelligence to do it for him to come along. He waited a long time. Finally, you came.”
Alicar nodded. “And, of course, that clears me! If I was under that monster’s influence, I can’t be held responsible for what’s happened.”
Telzey looked at him a moment.
“Well, Alicar,” she said, “If you think you’ll get the Service to believe that, give it a try! Since they’ve been checking around in your mind while you were out, I doubt you’ll have much luck. And, frankly, I don’t feel you should get away with it. Seven men died at your djeel mine; and the way you made use of me was coldblooded, to say the least. Besides, I think—though that’s not my business now—that I had several predecessors who didn’t last very long as your controlled psi proxies. You’ve been letting others take chances for you for quite a while.”
She added, “All things considered, I understand they’re letting you off rather lightly. You were thinking of experimenting with djeel oil, and you’ll get the chance, in one of the Service’s high-risk space projects. You know too much about it to be turned loose anyway.”
Alicar glowered at her.
“What about yourself?” he demanded. “You know at least as much as I do!”
Telzey stood up. “True,” she said. “But the Service found out a while ago that I’m good at keeping secrets. I’ll be starling back to Orado in a few minutes. I just stopped in to say good-bye.”
He didn’t reply. She went to the door, looked back at him.
“Cheer up, Alicar!” she told him. “It’s still better than working for Soad until he decided to make a meal of you—which is what you would have been doing if things had turned out just a little differently!”
THE SYMBIOTES
A symbiotic relationship is fine for the symbiotes. But when they become parasites.
I
Trigger had been shopping at Wehall’s that morning, winding up with lunch on one of the store’s terrace restaurants. She had finished, lit a Twirpy, and was smoking it contemplatively when a tiny agitated-sounding voice spoke to her.
“Good lady,” it said, “you have a kind face! I’m a helpless fugitive and an enemy is looking for me. Would you let me hide in your handbag until he goes away?”
The words seemed to have come from the surface of the table. Someone’s idea of a joke . . . Trigger let the Twirpy drop from her fingers to the disposal disk and looked casually around, expecting to discover an acquaintance. People sat at tables here and there about the terrace, but no one was at all near her. And she saw no one she knew.
“Good lady, please! There isn’t much time!”
She shrugged. Why not go along with the humorist?
“Where are you?” she asked, in a conspiratorially low tone. “I don’t see you.”
“Between the large blue utensil and the smaller white one. I don’t dare show myself. The abominable Blethro wasn’t far behind me!”
Trigger glanced at the blue pitcher on the table, moved it a few inches back from a square white sandwich warmer. Her eyes widened briefly. Then she laughed.
One of Wehall’s advertising stunts! A manikin, a miniature male figure, crouched beside the pitcher. Straightened up, it might have reached a height of eight inches. The features were exquisitely mobile and lifelike. Blue eyes looked imploringly at her. It wore a velvety purple costume—the finery of an earlier century.
“You really are cute, little man!” she told it. “A work of art. And just what kind of work of art are you, eh? Protohom? Robot? Telecontrolled? Do you know?”
The doll was shaking its head violently. “No, no!” it said. “Please! I’m as human as you are. Help me hide before Blethro finds me, and I’ll explain everything.”
Her reactions were being recorded, of course. Well, she wouldn’t mind playing their game for a minute or two.
“A joke’s a joke, midget,” she remarked, drawing up her eyebrows. “But slipping you into my bag just might be construed as shoplifting. Do you realize you probably cost a good deal more than I make in a year?”
“They said no one would believe me,” the doll told her. Tears in the tiny eyes? She felt startled. “I’m from a world you’ve never heard about. Our size was reduced genetically. Blethro had three of us in a box in his aircar. We agreed to attempt to escape the next time he opened the car door . . .”
Trigger glanced about. Halfway across the terrace, a man stood staring in her direction. She shifted the blue pitcher slightly to give the doll better cover. “Where are the other two?” she asked.
“Blethro seized them before they could get out of the car. If I’m to find help for them, I must get away first. But you believe I’m a toy! So I—”
And now the man was coming purposefully along the aisles toward Trigger’s table. She cupped a light hand over the doll as it began to straighten up. “Wait a moment!” she muttered. “Does your abominable Blethro sport a great yellow moustache?”
“Yes! Is—”
Trigger swung her handbag around behind the pitcher, snapped it open, blocking the man’s line of view. “Blethro seems to have spotted you,” she whispered. “Keep down and pop inside the bag! We’re leaving.”
Bag slung from her shoulder, she set off quickly toward the nearest door leading from the terrace. Glancing back, she saw the man with the jutting yellow moustache lengthen his stride. But he checked at the table where she’d been sitting, hastily moved a few articles about and lifted the top off the sandwich warmer. Trigger hurried on, not quite running now.
A small sign on the door read Wehall Employees Only. She looked back. Blethro was hurrying, too, not far behind her. She pushed through the door, sprinted along the empty white hallway beyond it. After some seconds, she heard a yell and his footsteps pounding in hot pursuit.
The hall ended where another one crossed it. Blank walls, and nobody in sight. Left or right? Trigger ran up the branch on the right, turned another comer—there at last was a door!
A locked door, she discovered instants later. Blind alley! Blethro came rushing around the corner, slowed as he saw her. He smiled then, walked unhurriedly toward her.
“End of the line, eh?” he said, breathing heavily. “Now let’s see what you have in that bag!”
“Why?” Trigger asked, slipping the bag from her shoulder.
Blethro grinned. “Why? Why were you running?”
“That’s my business,” Trigger told him. “Perhaps I felt I needed the exercise. Unless you’re something like a police officer—and can prove it—you’d be well advised to leave me alone! I can make very serious trouble for you.”
The threat didn’t seem to alarm Blethro, who was large and muscular. He continued to grin through his moustache as he came up. “Well, perhaps I’m a Wehall detective.”
“Prove that!”
“I don’t think I’ll bother.” He held his hand out, the grin fading. “The bag! Fast!”
Trigger swung away from him. He made a quick grab for her. She let the bag slide to the floor, caught the grabbing arm with both hands, moving solidly back into Blethro, bent and hauled forward. He flew over her head, smacked against the locked door with satisfying force, landed on the floor more or less on his shoulders, made an unpleasant comment and rolled back up on his feet, face very red and angry.
Then he saw the handbag standing open on the floor beside Trigger and a gun pointed at him. It wasn’t a large gun, but its appearance was sleek and deadly; and it was held by a very steady h
and.
Blethro scowled uncertainly. “Here—wait a minute!”
“I hate arguments,” Trigger told him. “And I did warn you. So just go to sleep like a good boy now!”
She fired and Blethro slumped to the floor. Trigger glanced down. The doll figure was clinging to the rim of the handbag, peering at her with wide eyes. “Did Blethro have friends with him?” she asked.
“No. He came alone in the car. But he’d indicated he was to meet someone here.”
Trigger considered, nodded. “We’ll put this away again.” She slipped the gun into a cosmetics purse she’d been holding in her left hand, closed the purse and placed it in the bag. Then she knelt beside Blethro, began going quickly through his pockets.
“Is he dead?” the small voice inquired from behind her.
“Not dead, midget! Nor injured. But it’ll be an hour or two before he wakes up. Good thing I nailed him first—he carries a gun. What’s your name, by the way? Mine’s Trigger.”
“My name’s Salgol. What are you doing?”
“Something slightly illegal, I’m afraid. Borrowing Blethro’s car keys—and here they are!” Trigger straightened up. “Now let’s arrange this a little differently.” She picked up Salgol, eased him into her blazer pocket. “You stay down in there when there’s anyone around. Blethro left his car and the box with your friends in it on a lot next to the restaurant terrace?”
“Yes.”
“Fine,” Trigger said. “You point the car out to me when we get there. Then we’ll all go somewhere safe, and you’ll tell me what this is about so we can figure out what to do.”
“Thank you, Trigger!” Salgol piped from her pocket. “I did well to trust you. I didn’t have much hope for Smee and Runderin, or even for myself.”
“Well, we may not be out of trouble yet! We’ll see.” Trigger snapped the bag shut, slung it from her shoulder. “Let’s go before someone happens by here! Ready?”
“Ready.” Salgol dipped down out of sight.
A few people glanced curiously at Trigger as she came back out on the restaurant terrace. Apparently they’d realized something was going on between her and Blethro, and were wondering what it had been about. She thought it shouldn’t matter. Everyone having lunch here would have finished and left before Blethro regained his senses. She sauntered across the terrace, went along a passage to the parking lot, stopped at the entrance. There was no attendant in sight at the moment. She waited until a couple who’d just got out of their car went past her. All clear now . . .
“Salgol?”
She could barely hear his muffled reply from the pocket.
“Take a look around!” she told him quietly. “We’re there.”
Salgol stuck his head out and identified Blethro’s aircar as one of those standing against the parapet on the street side of the parking lot—the seventh from the left. Then he disappeared again until Trigger had unlocked the car door, stepped inside and locked the door behind her.
The car was of a fixed-canopy, one-way-view type. Trigger didn’t take off immediately. The box in which Salgol’s companions were confined stood on a back seat, and she wanted to make sure they were in there. She worked the latches off it and opened the top.
They were there—two tiny, charming females in costume dresses which matched Salgol’s outfit. They stared apprehensively up at her. She lifted Salgol into the box and he spoke a few unintelligible lilting sentences to them. Then they were beaming at Trigger, though they said nothing. Apparently they didn’t know Translinque. She smiled back, left the box open, sat down at the controls and took the car up into the air.
II
The hotel room ComWeb chimed, and Trigger switched it on. Telzey’s image appeared on the screen.
“I came home just now and got your message,” Telzey said. “I’m sorry there was a delay.” Her gaze shifted around the room. “Where are you?”
“Hotel room.”
“Why?”
“Seems better to keep away from the apartment just now.”
Telzey’s eyebrows lifted. “Trouble?”
“Not yet. But there’s more than likely to be! I ran into something unusual, and it’s a ticklish matter. Can you come over?”
“As soon as you tell me where you are.”
Trigger told her, and Telzey switched off, saying she was on her way.
There was a world called Marell . . .
Trigger said, “The Old Territory people who set up the genetic miniaturization project did it because they thought it had been proved there’d be a permanent shortage of habitable planets around. So that sets it back about eleven hundred years, when they’d begun to get range but didn’t yet know where and how to look.”
They’d discovered Marell, which seemed eminently habitable, and decided to populate it with a human strain reduced in size to the point where a vast number could be supported by the planet without crowding it. A staff of scientists and technicians of normal size accompanied the miniature colony to see it safely through any early problems.
On Marell, a plague put an abrupt end to the project before it could get under way. It wiped out the supervisory staff and more than half of the small people; and no Old Territory ship touched on the planet again. The survivors were left to their own resources, which were slender enough. They came close to extermination but recovered, began to develop a technology, and in the course of the following centuries spread out until they’d made a sizable part of Marell their own.
“Steam and electricity,” said Trigger. “They’d got up to that, but not beyond it. One group knew what actually had happened on Marell, but they kept their records a secret. Some others had legends that they were descendants of Giants who flew through space and that kind of thing. Not many believed the legends. Then the Hub ship came.”
It had been a surveyor ship. It moved about in Marell’s skies for weeks before coming down to take samples of the surface. It also took a section of a Marell town on board, along with about a hundred of its inhabitants. Then it left.
“When was that?” Telzey asked. “Salgol was one of the first group they picked up, and he was the equivalent of eleven standard years old at the time,” said Trigger. “That makes it fifteen standard years ago.”
“Most of the people they took with them then died,” Salgol told Telzey. “They didn’t treat us badly but they gave us bad diseases. They found out what to do about the diseases, and taught Translingue to those of us who were left, and some of the Giants learned one of our main languages.”
Telzey nodded. “And then?”
“We went back to Marell. They knew we had an electrical communication system. They used it.”
The Hub ship issued orders. Geologically, Marell was a rich world, and the Hub men wanted the choicest of its treasures. They were taking what was immediately on hand, and thereafter the Marells would work to provide them with more. Quotas were set. The ship would return each year to gather up what had been collected.
“How many Marells were there now?” Telzey asked.
Salgol shook his head. “That isn’t definitely known. But when I was there last, I was told there might be sixty million of the people.”
“So, even with limited equipment, it adds up to a very large annual haul of precious stones and metals.”
“Yes, lady, it has,” said Salgol.
“And you don’t have weapons against space armor.”
“No. The people do have weapons, of course, and good ones. There are huge animals there—huge as we see them—and some are still very dangerous. And the nations have fought among themselves, though not since the ship came. But they aren’t like your weapons. One town turned its cannon on the Giants when they came to collect. The Giants weren’t hurt, but they burned the town with everyone in it.” Trigger said, “Besides, there were threats. The Marells were told they’d better be thankful for the current arrangement and do what they could to keep it going. If the Hub government ever learned about them, the whole planet woul
d be occupied, and any surviving Marells would be slaves forever.”
“Did you believe that?” Telzey asked Salgol.
“I wasn’t sure, lady. The Hub people I’ve met before today might do it, if they saw enough advantage in it. Perhaps you had a very bad government.”
“Then why did you run away from Blethro? Wasn’t that endangering your world, as far as you knew?” Salgol glanced at his companions. “There’s a worse thing beginning now,” he said. “Those they took away before were to become interpreters like myself, or to provide some special information. But now they plan to collect the most physically perfect among our young people and sell them in the Hub like animal pets. I felt I had to take the chance to find out whether there weren’t some of you who would try to prevent it. I thought there must be, since you don’t seem really different from us except for your size.” Telzey said after a moment, “They’d risk spoiling the present setup with something like that?”
“It wouldn’t spoil it, Telzey,” Trigger said. “Blethro was acting as middleman. He was to make a contact today to sell the idea, with Runderin and Smee as samples and Salgol filling in as their male counterpart. If the deal went over, the merchandise would get amnesia treatment and be taught Translingue before delivery to the distributor. They’d be sold undercover as a protohorn android speciality. They’d think it’s what they were, and I doubt it would be possible to disprove it biologically. They’d be dead in ten years, before they could begin to show significant signs of aging. They were to be treated for that, too.”
Telzey remarked, “Developing self-aware intelligence in protohorn products is illegal, of course.”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 250