by Ted White
Fortunately, I didn’t have to go blundering into the heart of the city. I was on the surface-level, just below the actual lunar surface, somewhere immediately under the Earth-shuttle landing area. Not too far off would be the interplanetary field, and the Longhaul II. I tried to remember the way Simmons had taken me, and how we’d escorted Bjonn from there to here. The day I’d met Bjonn seemed long ago and far away; my memories were flat and sepia-tinted and hard to believe. Had it been only a few months?
I must have shown my indecision. A girl in Bio-Customs uniform stopped and gave me a curious look. “Can I be of help?” she asked. Her smile was warm and concerned.
I gave her a tired smile in reply. I really was tired; I hadn’t been able to sleep on the hop up. “I want to get over to the Longhaul II,” I said. “I’ve been assigned.…”
“Oh, yes,” she nodded, “you’ll be Mr. Ditmas.”
I agreed.
“I’ll take you over,” she said. “It’s not far away, but for newcomers it is complicated to explain.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s very nice of you.”
She gave me another smile, her eyes leveling with my own. “I’m glad to,” she said. I was too tired to care.
It wasn’t far. I vaguely remembered the way, once she had me firmly in hand and led me there. Memories of the sort which pop back up the instant after they’re no longer needed; useless for anything but confirmation. I was running on reserve energy, and it felt like I didn’t have much left.
We skipped the room where I’d met Bjonn, took a different corridor at that point, and then went through a curious double chamber. Then we were in the interstellar ship.
The knowledge hit me with a jolt of adrenalin.
“This is the ship, isn’t it?” I asked. It wasn’t exactly a stupid question. The corridor we were now in was of about the same dimensions as the one we’d left, its walls plastic instead of tiled, the floor underfoot no different to tread upon—but the smell was different in a subtle way. The air no longer had that almost antiseptic, vaguely ozoned odor. It smelled of men and machines and, yes, even plants. And I knew, because space had always been my dream and I’d studied the published plans for this ship just as I’d hero-worshipped its captain, that this ship carried a mixed crew of fifty-eight, a hydroponics section wherein alga were grown and supplementary oxygen generated, as well as the life-support machinery for the entire globe of the ship. Right now the Longhaul II was resting in its cradle, the cradle lowered below the lunar surface, its exit-port (or ports; there were others on other levels and other quadrants) aligned with and sealed to the life-system and corridors of Lunaport. I’d expected something more, though, the first time I stepped aboard an interstellar ship. A subtle throb in the decks under my feet, I suppose, and the patina of journeys between the stars. It was, somehow, mundane—anticlimactic.
“That’s right,” my guide said. “I’ll show you to your quarters, and then I’m sure the Captain will want you to report to him.”
“That’s it?” I asked. “No more red tape? No additional Bio-Customs check? I’m here?” It was at once both more and less real than I’d imagined.
“You just checked through Bio-Customs, didn’t you?” she said with a brief laugh. “And I brought you directly here. What more could there be?”
It all seems too easy, I thought.
“Here,” I said, echoing her. “Which deck are we on?”
She pointed at an inconspicuous letter on the wall of the intersection we’d just reached. A tightly coiled stair led both upward and below. “This is E Level,” she said, confirming the point she’d made visually. “Your quarters are up two levels, on C. You’ll find the Captain on A Level, I believe.”
I followed her up two levels. E Level is the business level of the ship. The mysterious engines of the Feinberg Drive lurked somewhere beyond the unbreached walls of that featureless corridor. Below were the shops, gardens, and kitchens, as well as the small-craft docks and additional quarters. And above.…
It was easy to follow my guide up the tight spiral of the stair—she was built to be followed upstairs. But you can climb sixteen feet in lunar gravity very quickly, even under such constraining and distracting circumstances. I wondered if the brief climb had put the slight flush in the girl’s cheeks.
She showed me to an empty cell with a number on its door. Inside was a double bunk, a mirror on one wall, a set of drawers under it, an audio-only ship’s phone, and a prison-like sense of cramped confinement. I wondered if I could live for a period of weeks—hell, months—in that tiny room. I doubted it, even then.
She pointed out the phone. “You’d best call up; I don’t know when the Captain was expecting you.”
I threw my bag on the lower bunk and nodded. I didn’t know either. “Thanks again,” I said.
She gave me a wistful look that said she was open to an invitation to linger, but I was too tired to intercept it. I let her innocent green eyes gaze unblinkingly into mine for a moment, and then turned and picked up the phone. I heard her expelling her breath as I punched the code thoughtfully listed on the wall for Captain Lasher. When I turned around again, she was gone.
I was tempted to do a little exploring first. The memory of the plans I’d studied as a boy were sharp in my mind, the different colors that coded the different sections of the ship were as vivid now as they’d been those many years before when I’d translated them into one of many scale models.
But maps do not the territory make. My model was just a thing of plastics and thermal joints; this was the Longhaul II. As I went back out into the corridor again, I felt something of the old thrill seize me again.
I was walking the decks of an interstellar ship.
But I had the time to do my exploring later. Right now I was up to see the Captain, to officially check in. For a fleeting moment while I’d spoken to him on the phone, I’d wondered if, he might remember me from that day when Simmons and I had been part of the reception committee. But there was no good reason for him to recall my face. I’d been one of a horde of greeters, lost among the men from the media. I’d never even spoken to him.
I swarmed up the stair to the A Level and found myself in a large, almost dark room. Directly overhead were stars; for a moment I had the heart-stopping fear that I had somehow blundered out onto the lunar surface. Foolish, of course; I was in the control room of the Longhaul II. The A Level was but a single vast room. Somewhere nine levels below was the torch of the Feinberg Drive, aimed at the Moon’s core.
I glanced around. Consoles and recliners rimmed the gloom of the vast (or so it seemed, after my tiny bunkroom) room. The viewport overhead was immense, a transparent dome through which I could see not only the starry night above—incredibly rich blackness punctured by a million pinpoints of colored light—but also the distant rim of the lunar crater with Earth beyond it, either just rising or just setting. It was a jewel in a priceless setting.
“Quite a sight,” commented a dry voice from somewhere behind me, Captain Lasher’s voice.
“It is,” I said. My voice was hushed, involuntarily. This was my church. Reluctantly, I turned.
The glow of his console unit was a spot of light in the darkness of the deck, and I saw his figure silhouetted against it. He was leaning toward me from a recliner. I moved across the deck toward him almost like a man in a trance. I was lucky there was nothing in my path. Had there been, I would have stumbled over it. I was conscious with every step of the tapestry of space hanging so closely over my head—and also of the immediate confrontation with Captain Lasher, my boyhood idol.
“Ditmas reporting, sir,” I said, when I approached him.
His expression was hard to read in the dim light. The console’s lights behind him seemed to cast a reddish halo around his head. He looked stern, “Ditmas, is it?” he said.
“Yes sir,” I said. “Bureau of Non-Terran Affairs.” I expected something on the order of “Glad to have you aboard, Ditmas,” from him. Instead:
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�I think not, Mr. Dameron. I think this charade had played itself out.”
My mouth went dry, and my tongue felt glued to my palate. “I, uh, Dameron, sir?”
“Let’s don’t run a bluff, Dameron,” Lasher said. “You have an old friend here.” He gestured.
A shape peeled itself loose from a recliner I’d thought empty; it had been facing three-quarters away from me. It was still too dark for me to make the man out, but I recognized his voice, of course.
“Your journey to the stars is over now, Dameron,” Bjonn said. “This is as far as you go.”
PART THREE
REPOSSESSED
Chapter Eighteen
In retrospect it was easy to see; I’d been blind to miss it.
Of course Bjonn had spread his parasites among the ship’s crew. He’d had months in which to do it: months in which to win them over, subtly, insidiously, starting first with just one of them, the weakest and most easily swayed. Possibly it had been a woman. Then with the help of his first convert, another, and then others, pairs perhaps, and then larger groups. The ship was a microcosmic society. Once he had won over the important people, or perhaps just the bulk of the personnel, his battle was won. The rest was easy—perhaps even a matter of simple force. I wondered why I hadn’t seen it.
And then Lunaport. When Bjonn came to Earth, he left behind fifty-eight men and women who were now controlled by the alien parasites. Lunaport too was a closed system, a somewhat larger microcosmic world from which there was no escape. Perhaps they started with the Bio-Customs Department. Their aid would be helpful, after all.
I looked back on the memory of the girl who had so efficiently guided me aboard the ship. They’d been expecting me. She was one of them. Why hadn’t I seen it then?
Because I was tired, and the girl was too distractingly female. I’d misinterpreted her looks at me. Where’s that much-vaunted talent of yours now, Dameron?
They took me into custody. Bjonn had a hand-weapon, a device which fired a chemical spray. I recognized it as part of the ship’s stores. The chemical, he assured me, penetrated directly through the skin. It would paralyze my nerves. If it struck me in the wrong place, it might kill me. He pointed this out more in tones of regret than anger; he told me he hoped I would not cause him to use the weapon.
“So why threaten me with it?” I asked. “You’ve got me; isn’t that enough?” He was marching me back to the cell-like cubicle in which I’d stowed my bag and briefly considered home.
“You’re a dangerous psychopath, Dameron,” he said. “You’ve already killed one man—yes, we know all about Ditmas—and we don’t propose to let you try it again.” He ushered me back into the bunkroom.
“You’ve got your way of looking at it,” I said, the nervous, physical and emotional exhaustion all crowding into my voice, “—I’ve got mine. Don’t call me names, alien.”
He gave me a strange look and started to slide the door shut.
“Wait a minute,” I said.
He paused, the weapon still directed at me through the half-closed door. “What is it?” he asked.
“What are you going to do with me?” I asked. I was wondering why they were putting me into this cell—aboard the ship. For a moment, my heart leapt with wild surmise.
“We’re taking you back to Earth,” he said, dashing my last hopes.
I felt exhaustion sweep over me. “I’m surprised you aren’t disposing of me here,” I said. “It would seem to serve your purposes better.” They weren’t going to let me make the trip, after all. I wasn’t going to see real space.
“Your mind is an endless source of melodramatic claptrap,” Bjonn said. He looked about fed up, probably with me. “We’re holding you here until we can get clearance for a special shuttle back to Earth. Then we’ll be taking you down. Is that all you wanted to know?” He began sliding the door panel shut again.
“A special shuttle?” I said. “You bastards must have worked your way all the way up to the top.”
The door closed shut.
I passed the time in dreamless sleep. I slept for fourteen hours, by my chronometer. But I still felt drained and exhausted when they opened the door again and took me out. There were three men—Bjonn, and two who were strangers to me. All carried the same weapons. All looked deeply annoyed with me. They answered my few questions in monosyllables, and didn’t pursue the topics I’d raised. Mostly I wanted to know what they were going to do to me, and mostly they said I would find out soon enough.
I had passed beyond fear to a kind of exhausted stoicism. I moved like a puppet in another person’s dream, going through the motions demanded of me. My curiosity remained, but it was a blunted emotion, rather like that of a bewildered child. The last time I’d felt that way was when they’d taken me away from my parents. This time I was dry-eyed, though—if that was any improvement.
I had been caught, well and fairly caught. I had penetrated to the core of their conspiracy, and now they had me. I wondered what they planned for me, but it was an abstracted, intellectual curiosity. There were only two things they could do to me now: either they could kill me or take me over, turning my body into a host for one of their jellylike parasites. Either way, I would be dead. It wouldn’t matter much.
Oh, I’d thought brave and heroic thoughts, back in that cell before I’d fallen asleep in the midst of their jumble. I’d thought of somehow dramatically warning the world, or bursting into the Executive Session in Geneva to herald the parasites and the doom they brought—but it was all public 3-D nonsense, and a little beyond even that. Daydreams: thriller stuff. It was all of a piece, I realized bitterly, with my dreams for a career in deep space; in the end it was only nonsense. I wasn’t going to warn anyone, because, first they wouldn’t let me—and, second, pretty soon now there would probably not be anyone left to warn.
I’d done a little elementary math, and it frightened me.
One man brings one parasite. God only knows how fast the things multiply, but I could assume no less than one a day. Bjonn had given one to Dian one day, and two to her friends the next. (Although the second of those might have been Dian’s contribution—how fast did the pasty little slugs settle in before they started to breed again?) So work it out. One man the first day. Two the next. Four the next. Keep doubling. Do it every day for several months. The sum gets astronomical pretty fast; no wonder they’d gotten to Tucker. I wondered if anyone over his head was still human yet.
Oh, sure, there must be millions—even billions—they hadn’t gotten to yet. People exist in pockets, and the recruitment program wasn’t flawless. There had to be delays and snags. The whole world wasn’t gone yet. Just the best part of it.
Heroics are for the 3-D. In real life I’d be lucky, unbelievably lucky, just to keep my own personality alive.
Simmons was there to see me off. He stared at me with alien and unwavering eyes, his face devoid of expression. I felt sorry for the poor son of a bitch. At least he’d been a prig before—when he’d been human. I felt real pity for him. Anything was better than this.
The shuttle was empty except for me and my captors. I suppose I should’ve felt honored, but I didn’t.
We took seats in the public lounge—no nonsense about the private berths this time. A shame, despite my lack of any real appetite, it had been a long time since I’d eaten.
“You’re treating a plain old Level Seven Agent pretty special, aren’t you?” I asked Bjonn. Mostly I was just jabbing in the dark. I didn’t expect to get much of a rise from him.
“Oh, you are special, Tad,” he said somberly.
“Tell me about it,” I suggested. Talk to me, alien.
“What made you think you could get away with it?” he said.
“With what?”
The gymballed seats swung gently from horizontal to vertical. I glanced at the narrow viewport. Soon the Moon’s arid surface would come into view. Just now there was nothing but lights and darkness; the lights swung past in a blur.
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��With this Farhome nonsense,” he said. “Passing yourself off as Ditmas. How long did you plan to keep the impersonation going?”
“It wouldn’t have mattered, once we were underway,” I said. “They wouldn’t have aborted the trip.”
“I see,” he nodded. “Ditmas—Farhome—it was all just an excuse.”
“An excuse?” I echoed.
‘To get into space. Into real space.” He seemed to be sneering at me.
“I figured that maybe on Farhome…” I let my voice trail off.
“Yes? What? What did you expect to find on Farhome, Dameron?”
“Some answers,” I mumbled.
“I didn’t hear that.” A vibration had started up in the shuttle rocket. I felt it more than I heard it.
“Answers,” I said, more distinctly. “I was looking for answers.”
“What were your questions, Dameron?” Bjonn asked, his voice relentlessly probing at me.
I turned my head away from him and stared out the viewport. I’d never watched during a liftoff. Now I could.
“I asked you,” Bjonn repeated, “what were the questions you thought you’d find answers for on Farhome?”
I ignored him. Beyond the port the distant ridge on the strangely close horizon was a sun-washed slate-gray. A black needle shadow pointed directly toward the ridge, its broad base disappearing beneath the viewport. It divided the pocked lunar landscape neatly into two equal sections. As I watched, the ridge seemed to shift position, to fall back a little, and I realized that what I was actually seeing was the point of the black shadow racing across the flat moonscape toward the ridge. For a moment the shadow stood free and I could see it in its entirety: exaggeratedly long trunk, stubbed wings at nose and tail; stretched out but shrinking by the moment. The ridge dropped suddenly away, no longer anywhere close to the horizon, the shadow over it in one ripple and darting out of the sawtooth shadows of the ridge to race over the floor of the Moon as an ever-tinier splinter of darkness. Beyond, the Earth rose sharply in the deep blackness of the sky, and then disappeared above my vision. We passed over into the nightside of the Moon.