Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  “Trigger! You’re here!”

  “I didn’t know you were here, Telzey!”

  “I woke up just a few minutes ago!” Telzey shook her head. “Last thing I—”

  Trigger said hastily, “Better wait with that! We’re on a private satellite, Rasolmen System. Somebody had unpleasant plans for both of us, but I’m on my way to a spacelock now. With luck, if we move fast enough, we can make it!” She turned to the left. “Come on!”

  Telzey stepped out from the thicket. Trigger’s right hand went under her sweater front, came out with the gun. She shot the Telzey shape through the head, jumped back as it staggered toward her, stitched a line of fire down the front of its body as it fell and began to blur, then stood there, gun held ready, watching it change into something much larger.

  Anthropoid Attuk wasn’t dead, somewhat to her surprise. But then it was a life form she didn’t know much about. It was down, at any rate, making watery sounds as it tried to lever itself up on its thick arms. She leveled the gun at the staring yellow eyes.

  “No! Wait!” Perr Hasta, slipping out from the thicket, dropped to her knees beside Attuk. “Attuk, too! Oh, Trigger, I’m grateful! I wanted him almost even more than Torai. Now-”

  Her face smoothed into its empty feeding look. There was a tug at Trigger’s slacks. She glanced down. The Marells were looking at her, white-faced. “What are those two doing?” Salgol’s small voice asked nervously.

  Trigger cleared her throat.

  “The big one’s dying,” she said. “The other one’s helping it die. It’s all right—it may have saved us some trouble.”

  “How did you know the big one wasn’t Telzey?” Salgol asked. “We thought you’d killed her!”

  Well, Trigger thought, for one thing Telzey would have discovered I was around moments after she woke up. Unless something had been done to her mind after Attuk had her brought to the satellite. There’d been that doubt . . .

  Trigger said, “I was almost sure as soon as I saw her. But, of course, I had to be quite sure. Did you notice how deeply she sank into the moss? She would have had to weigh almost three times as much as I do.” She shrugged. “So now we’ll let Perr Hasta have her treat!”

  Attuk had collapsed meanwhile, and Perr Hasta was bent above him, her long silky hair almost concealing his head. Trigger added, “It won’t take long. Then I’ll talk to her.”

  Perr Hasta said drowsily, “That should last me quite a time! Why, yes, you’re right, Trigger. Your gun would kill me as quickly as it did Attuk. Much more quickly, in fact. My physical structure is delicate and could be easily disrupted. You’d like me to show you to the spacelock? That will be simple. You’re already past the screen barriers.”

  Trigger said, “There’s a guard at the lock?”

  “No guard,” said Perr. She yawned. “Torai had the satellite planned so no humans would be needed on it, except the ones who come to deliver this and that, or to fix something. And, of course, our visitors. My! What a visitor you turned out to be, Trigger! This has been a most interesting experience.”

  “All right,” Trigger said. “No guard. If you’re lying, you’re likely to go before he does. Blethro first, then. I’m not leaving anything human here. Where is he?”

  “Blethro’s dead,” Perr said. “Attuk’s been feeding. I’ll take you to what’s left, if you want, but you won’t like what you see.”

  “Let’s go there anyway,” Trigger said.

  She didn’t like what Perr Hasta presently showed her, but there was no question that it had been Blethro.

  “Now we’ll go to the spacelock,” she said.

  They went there. There was no guard. One vessel was docked in the inner lock area, the Sebaloun cruiser, a luxury boat. Trigger motioned Perr Hasta into it ahead of her with the gun, the Marells following. She checked out the cruiser’s controls, with Perr standing beside her, decided she understood them well enough. “Back outside, Perr!” she said.

  She followed Perr Hasta outside. Lock controls next; and they were simplicity itself, computer directed, the satellite computers responding to the cruiser’s signals. No operator required. “Perr—” she began.

  Perr wasn’t there.

  Trigger looked quickly around, skin prickling. She hadn’t seen Perr disappear, hadn’t been aware of her disappearance. Perr had been there, standing next to her, a bare instant ago. Now Perr was nowhere in sight.

  A faint giggle behind her. Trigger turned, gun pointed. Nothing. But then the giggle again. She fired. Pause, and there was giggling overhead, in the dull gleam of the inner lock. Her gun point searched for it. The giggling shifted. This way, that— A whisper then. “I’d drink your personality now, Trigger! I was saving it up. But I can’t. I’m too full. Perhaps the next time.”

  Trigger backed to the cruiser’s entry lock, gun covering the area behind her, slipped in and dove into the pilot seat. The entry lock slammed shut. Engines already on . . . purr of power. She threw in the satellite’s lock switches. The cruiser moved forward into the outer lock. Inner lock slid shut. Outer lock opened. She cut in full drive. In the same instant, it seemed, the satellite shrank into invisibility behind them, and she hit the subspace switch.

  Some minutes later, Salgol addressed her tentatively from the seat beside her. “Would it distract you if I spoke to you now?”

  “Huh?” Trigger looked around, saw the three of them gathered there, watching her solemnly. “No, it’s all right to talk,” she said. “We’ll be running on automatics for a while.” Salgol hesitated. “Well, I—we noticed your face is quite pale.”

  “I suppose it might be.” Trigger sighed. “There’s some reason for it, Salgol.”

  “There is? We aren’t safe?”

  “Oh, we should be physically safe enough at the moment.” Trigger shook her head. “But we may find we still have very big problems.”

  IX

  “How much did the Service tell you after I got back?” Trigger asked.

  “Not much at all,” Telzey said. “Just that you were safe and sound but currently incommunicado. And that your little people were all right, too.” They’d been having dinner together while Trigger related her experiences on the Sebaloun satellite.

  “Of course, I had my own lines out,” Telzey went on, “so I did pick up a few things. There’s a flock of diplomats preparing for a trip to Marell to make official contact with its civilization, so somebody got to the group which was exploiting the Marells in time. Then I tapped a man who knew that group had a connection to the Sebaloun enterprises. When it was reported that Torai Sebaloun and two close associates had disappeared in space on her private cruiser and were presumed dead, I figured you could have had something to do with it.

  “And, by the way, there were a couple of matters we were able to clean up at this end meanwhile. Some detective friends tracked down the outfit Wrann had hired to hunt for you. They were working without a license and had broken a number of unwritten rules on the job, and the big private agencies feel that sort of thing reflects on everyone. Once we’d identified them, all that was necessary was to pass the word along here and there.”

  “I hope they weren’t treated too roughly,” Trigger said.

  Telzey shrugged. “I didn’t ask. But I understand someone was extremely rough on the hotel security people who fingered you for Wrann and helped smuggle you out. I suppose that was regarded as the nth degree in unprofessional conduct. At any rate, you won’t have problems in that area. No one seems much interested in Blethro’s disappearance. He had a long, very bad record—it was almost bound to catch up with him eventually. But that still leaves a number of people who might connect you to the Sebaloun satellite and Torai Sebaloun.”

  Trigger said, “It turned out to be only Wrann and the yacht pilot and some of Wrann’s underlings. They’ve had a case of group amnesia. Anyway, they’re mostly in Rehabilitation.”

  Telzey settled back. “So, what were they keeping you incommunicado about?”

 
“Symbiote Control.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s a special Service group,” Trigger said. “Top-secret. They figured I might as well tell you since you’d be finding out anyway.”

  “I’d be trying to,” Telzey admitted.

  “Uh-huh. It seems there’s a variety of immigrant creatures that keep out of sight in one way and another. They like the advantages of life in the Hub. Some pretend to be human. Mostly they’re harmless, and some are considered useful. The Service likes to keep an eye on them, but sees no special reason to bother them otherwise.

  “But then there are the ones that aren’t harmless. Symbiote Control pumped me about everything that happened on the satellite. They already knew about the Torai type of entity and the Attuk type. The Perr Hasta type was completely new; but what I could tell them about it seemed to explain some rather mysterious occurrences they have on record.”

  “They knew about the first two?” Telzey said.

  “Yes. They’re taking care of that quietly, partly because there aren’t enough of either around to be worth setting off a public panic. Attuk was a Gelver. It’s their name for themselves. Gelvers get checked out individually. Most of them have sense enough not to use their shape-changing in ways they shouldn’t, and they help locate others who might be doing it. They have an understanding with the Service. They can stay as long as they make no trouble.”

  “Where do they come from?”

  “They don’t know,” said Trigger. “A Gelver ship got wrecked on a Hub world before humans ever reached this galactic area. The ones here now are remote descendants of the crew. They have no record of their home world and, of course, it could be almost anywhere. It’s different with the Torai type of entity. They do know where that one came from and how it got here, and some other things about it. It’s in the exploration records . . .”

  Most of the surface of the entity’s planet of origin, Trigger explained, was a watery swamp where no intelligent life had evolved. The host bodies available to it there had primitive nervous systems, and it was incapable of developing awareness which extended beyond that of its host. But a Hub expedition had spent some time on the planet and left it with numerous living specimens. The entities in the specimens began to transfer to human bodies. It was an instinctive process at that point; but with human brains, they acquired a human intelligence potential. They made use of it. Their existence wasn’t suspected until decades later.

  “What’s been done about their world?” Telzey asked.

  “It’s posted. Satellite warnings in Translingue and a dozen other major Galactic languages, explicit about the danger of psychic invasion. Fortunately, the entity can’t reproduce when it adopts a host outside its native ecology. There’s no way to establish exactly how many were set at large in the Hub by that one expedition, but almost all of them seem to have been located by now.”

  “What do they do with them when they’re located?”

  “Not much one can do with them really, is there?” Trigger said. “They don’t harm the host body. It lives and procreates and doesn’t mutate out of the species. It uses its brain and may be performing a valuable function in society. To the sentient individual, of course, they’re a destructive parasite. But that’s how they’ve evolved. They get a choice between dying when the body they’ve currently occupied dies or going back to their world and its water creatures. I understand most of them decide to go back.”

  “So those three entities found one another,” Telzey said, “and formed an evil little coven, grouped about the Torai Sebaloun figure . . .”

  “For their mutual benefit,” said Trigger. “You can see how Attuk and Perr could be useful to Torai. The Sebaloun family members who might have competed for control with her all seem to have died at convenient moments.”

  Telzey said after a pause, “There’s still nothing to show what happened to Perr Hasta?”

  “Nothing whatever. It was hardly three hours before I was back at the satellite in a Service ship with psi operators on board. But it was airless by then—open to space—the computer system off. And Perr was gone. It’s a little odd, because the delivery lock was sealed, and there are no other facilities for a second spacecraft on the satellite. But perhaps she wouldn’t need a spacecraft. After all, we don’t know what she’s really like. At any rate, I’m reasonably certain Perr Hasta is still around.”

  “And being around, she could look you up,” Telzey said.

  “Yes,” said Trigger. “That’s what makes it awkward for me. Of course, she’s a capricious sort. She may have dropped the idea of absorbing my personality by now.”

  Telzey shook her head. “She doesn’t seem to have been capricious about waiting for her chance to get at Torai and Attuk!”

  “I know,” Trigger said moodily. “I can’t count on her forgetting about me—and that doesn’t leave me much choice. I’m not going into hiding because of Perr, and I wouldn’t want to have a Service operator keep me under indefinite mind-watch, even if they were willing to do it. Or even you. So I’ll accept the Service offer to get those latent abilities of mine organized enough to turn me into some sort of functioning psi.” She looked at Telzey. “They don’t expect me to reach your level, but they think I should become easily good enough to handle Perr if she shows up. She didn’t try to tackle Torai or Attuk until she had them at a disadvantage, so she must have limitations.”

  “They’ll probably have you that far along in no time,” Telzey said. “Yes, I suppose so . . .”

  Telzey smiled. “Cheer up, Trigger! It really isn’t all that bad, being a functioning psi.”

  “Oh, I know!” Trigger returned the smile briefly. “I imagine it will be fun, in a way. And it certainly has its advantages. It’s just that I never planned to be one. And now that I’m about to get started—well, it still seems rather strange to me! Shall we go?”

  “Might as well.” They gathered their purses and rose from the table. Telzey remarked, “You won’t find it any stranger than a number of things you’ve already done.”

  “No?” said Trigger doubtfully. “Definitely not. Take tangling with three inhuman monsters on a Rasolmen satellite, for example—”

  1973

  CRIME BUFF

  If given a choice, one might find ‘facile dissimulation’ more exhilarating and (to his shame) frequently more propitious than veracity.

  Jeff Clary stood halfway down the forested hillside at the edge of a short drop-off, studying the house on the cleared land below. It was a large two-story house with a wing; Jeff thought it might contain as many as twenty-five to thirty rooms. There was an old-fashioned, moneyed look about it, and the lawns around it seemed well-tended. It could have been an exclusive sanitarium as easily as a private residence. So far, there’d been no way to decide what, exactly, it was. In the time he’d been watching it, Jeff hadn’t caught sight of a human being or noticed indications of current human activity.

  What had riveted his attention at first glimpse wasn’t so much the house itself as the gleaming blue and white airplane which stood some two hundred yards to the left of it. A small white structure next to the plane should be its hangar. The plane was pointed up a closely mowed field. It seemed a rather short runway even for so small a plane, but he didn’t know much about airplanes. Specifically—importantly at the moment—he didn’t know how to fly one.

  That summed up the situation.

  A large number of people were engaged today in searching for Jeff Clary, but the blue and white plane could take him where he wanted to go in a few hours, safely, unnoticeably. He needed someone to handle it.

  That someone might be in the house. If not, there should be one or more cars in the garage adjoining the house on the right. A car would be less desirable than the plane, but vastly superior to hiking on foot into the open countryside. If he could get to the city without being stopped, he’d have gained a new head start on the searchers. If he got there with a substantial stake as well, his chances o
f shaking them off for good would be considerably better than even.

  Jeff scratched the dense bristles on his chin. There was a gun tucked into his belt, but he’d used the last bullet in it eight hours ago. A hunting knife was fastened to the belt’s other side. A knife and a gun—even an empty gun—could get him a hostage to start with. He’d take it from there.

  Shade trees and shrubbery grew up close to the sides of the building. It shouldn’t be difficult to get inside before he was noticed. If it turned out there were dogs around, he’d come up openly—a footsore sportsman who’d got lost and spent half the night stumbling around in the rain-wet hills. As soon as anyone let him get close enough to start talking, he’d be as close as he needed to be.

  He sent a last sweeping look around and started downhill, keeping to the cover of the trees. His feet hurt. The boots he wore were too small for him, as were the rest of his fishing clothes. Those items had belonged recently to another man who had no present use for them.

  He reached the side of the house minutes later. No dogs had bayed an alarm, and he’d been only momentarily in sight of a few front windows of the building. He’d begun to doubt seriously that there was anybody home, but two of the upper-floor windows were open. If all the occupants had left, they should have remembered to close the windows on a day of uncertain weather like this.

  He moved quickly over to a side door. Taking the empty gun from his belt, he turned the heavy brass doorknob cautiously. The door was unlocked. Jeff pushed it open a few inches, peering into the short passage beyond.

  A moment later, he was inside with the door closed again. He walked softly along the tiled passageway, listening. Still no sound. The passage ended at a large, dimly lit central hall across from a stairwell. There were several rooms on either side of the hall, and most of the doors were open. What he could see of the furnishings seemed to match the outer appearance of the house—old-fashioned, expensive, well cared for.