“You, Rae,” said Brabant’s voice, and she looked up, startled; she had been sitting staring at the Marne baby and had somehow managed to attain that total emptiness called nirvana. “You come along. And Hibsen and de Jouvenel, I have a special treat for all of you.”
Hibsen said six words, one a preposition and the other five obscene.
“Yes, I know,” said Brabant remotely. “Come along.”
He marched off, not looking back. He didn’t have to see if they were following; the Gormen were there for that. He marched his subjects across the square and to the base of the hidden Gorman rocket.
“I want,” he said, “to show you what you’re up against. In you go.”
He glanced at them. Their expressions were amusingly surprised, though no one on all that planet, just then, was amused.
“It’s all right,” said Brabant. “I’ve got permission from the Gormen. We’ll have company, never fear. But they don’t really need to watch us. That’s what I want you to see.”
De Jouvenel trailed him, and the girl and Hibsen followed. Hibsen said flatly: “I’d kill you if I could. You know that.”
Brabant nodded. It wasn’t worth an answer, it was so obviously true. “Here,” he said, “this is the control room. Sit down, Hibsen.”
“In that?” Hibsen was honestly shocked.
“Or stand if you like. But look around.”
Hibsen forgot to be murderous. His eyes were wide open for the first time in days; his curiosity had mastered him. He looked about him like a child in storyland. Hibsen was a pilot of spaceships, and not even the blinding hatred he bore for Brabant could keep him from being interested in a strange ship built by a strange race.
A spaceship is the simplest of machines. You push something out of one end, the ship squirts away in the opposite direction, that’s all. No moving parts (in schematic design), no complications, no possible variations of construction, no matter by whom designed or where. How can there be, as an analogy, more than one way to go Up?
That’s the theory. The practice…
Hibsen’s heart shriveled in him. He found himself caressing the star sapphire, rubbing an unsure finger over the gold braid. This was the ship he and de Jouvenel had thought to steal. What Brabant had said was all too true.
It was no more possible for a human to walk in and operate a ship like this than for a monkey to punch out a Shakespeare sonnet by random thumping of a typewriter.
De Jouvenel said faintly behind him, “Sweet heaven. There’s nothing here.”
It was plain fact. There were, for example, no such things as: triple-gyro altitude indicator, linked through selsyn motors to a homeostatic negative-feedback course corrector; self-compensating thrust control, capable of measuring the minute variations of squirt of each component in each mixing chamber and increasing or decreasing the flow of fuel appropriately; feedback-aligned course plotter, able to read a tape which dictated the parameters of all possible orbits which would take one from here to there, to select the best of them, to put the ship on it and keep it there and to discard that orbit and select another, without pause or faltering, if for any reason of failure of parts, motion of objective, interposition of obstacle (i.e., meteorite, astronomical body, other vessel) the chosen orbit became unsuitable and it was necessary to change.
There was, in other words, no smoothly humming Black Box. There was no compensator that could measure all of these things and balance them one against another. There was no standby circuit to compensate for the ultimate failure of all, the failure of the compensator.
There was, instead, only—
Item: An artificial horizon. (It was a thin jet of mercury, impinging on a spider’s orb-web of wires marked in circles and radians, the whole reflected in a ninety-degree mirror into the pilot’s eyes.)
Item: A porthole. Yes, a porthole. A glassed-in nose cone to look out of. Radar, periscopes, photocell detectors? No. Nothing like that.
And, item: Eight little rings, one to fit each of the eight fingers of a Gorman’s two hands, each one of which controlled the flow of fuel to one jet.
There were those and there was nothing else.
“You see?” demanded Brabant irritably.
“I see,” said Hibsen after a pause, his hand clinging to the star sapphire. “I—”
He stopped. There was nothing to say. “You want us to go now, Brabant?”
“Not you,” said Brabant shortly. “Rae, de Jouvenel, you can go back. Hibsen I want to stay here. You’ve had your treat. Now I need you for a little more guinea-pigging. And,” he said over his shoulder, turning his back on all of them, “maybe now you’ll see the wisdom of my advice. Give up. It’s all over.”
IX
But it wasn’t all over. not really. There was one more act on the program, that program which Brabant had carefully contrived in the silent hours watching over the injured Lt. Marne, just after the first landing.
Brabant squatted on his thin, sour-smelling pad in the predawn darkness, looking at a window that showed only the faintest difference in shade from the wall around it.
In the past few days, the Gormen had made it adequately clear that his work for them was just about at an end. What they wanted to know, they knew. The mine had been worked; the tailings were decreasingly valuable and soon they would decide to terminate the operation. At that point—
There were other things the Gormen wanted to know about Earthman than how their minds worked, and though they’d learned some of them from Jaroff and the late Chapman, they would proceed as rapidly as possible to learn the rest. The psyche digested, the soma would be next to be studied. Equally thoroughly. And with a great deal more carelessly distributed pain.
Dr. Brabant felt sick and empty inside.
It wasn’t only the reasonable prospect of laboratory-animal dissection that worried him. It was something more. It was the knowledge that if all the humans died, all but one of them would die hating him.
Brabant did not enjoy being hated.
In his profession, the position was not unfamiliar. Brabant’s job was to keep the mind in balance, and in the process of adjustment, a great deal of free-floating hatred clung to the psychologist in charge. (So did love.) He had made himself apart and—more or less—independent of the temporary emotional states of those around him; that was the way the job was done.
But now he was utterly, utterly, completely alone. On all this planet, there was not one soul who loved, respected or trusted him, not even the orphaned Crescenzi children, who had taken to running and hiding from him when he came near.
Brabant sighed, and then, abruptly, sat tensely erect.
There was a subdued twittering and motion on the floor below. Brabant frowned. What he knew of the Gormen more than anything else was that they were reliably creatures of habit; it was not their habit to arise before full light. He listened carefully, but there was nothing to hear that did him any good, only the fact that, for some reason, the barracks was early awake. Gradually he relaxed, but without ceasing to frown … he seldom ceased to frown anyhow, these days.
He thought wistfully of the rest of the party, huddled together in the building across the square, hardly a hundred yards away. At least they had each other. Though it was his job to keep them stable, and though in the course of it he learned more about their weaknesses, faults and subdued internal evils than most of them knew themselves, Brabant liked —loved—no, needed them; needed their regard and their warmth. They were his friends. They were all he had.
Time was when Brabant, new at the job, had dreamed with regret of the possible high-stability, non-neurotic personnel an interstellar flight might—should—enlist. But you had to take what you could get; that was the law. Brabant hadn’t made that law. Actually, the law had been made by herbalists, ratified by surgery, and confirmed by Alexander Fleming and the pharmaceutical houses. Modern medicine, over a good many generations, had saved so many lives that it had enforced a general lowering of psychological stan
dards in favor of some rather special physical ones.
An Rh baby in a modern hospital was a trivial happenstance in a dull morning’s routine; on an alien planet, without endless blood of every conceivable type (not to mention accessories) the same happenstance was—a dead baby. Colonists could not afford, simply could not afford, to carry in their genes and chromosomes the risk of an Rh-negative response— or of sickle-cell anemia, hemophilia, agammaglobulinemia— you name it Hardly a child was born on Earth that did not receive at least one tender flick of a scalpel—to correct a squint, tighten a ventricle, ease a pyloric stenosis or whatever—in its first months of life. On Aleph Four, that scalpel might not be there. Sure, a doctor or two went with each party, but if something happened to the doctor? The risk could not be borne.
And so Part One of the Qualifying Tests was a rigorous genetic study, and the passing grade was 100%. And that eliminated very many of those who were willing to apply. The ones that were left had to be combed for—no, not the utterly stable; the utterly stable organism, being satisfied, stays where its roots are dug in—but for those nearest stable, or those who could be kept stable for the purposes of their jobs.
Like Hibsen. Given the security he wore on his jacket and a job that he knew he could do, Hibsen was hard, bright, aggressive and able. Take those things away and Hibsen was something else again; but those things weren’t meant to be taken from him—wouldn’t have been, except for the Gormen. …
And Brabant liked Hibsen.
He liked them all—needed them—and, yes, loved them. Neurotic or not. Stable or not. With warmth toward Brabant himself or not; and at that moment, he wryly knew, it most decidedly was not.
A distant metallic scream made him look up. It was daylight now, and the noise was coming from outside and up.
Brabant jumped to his feet and pressed against the window, trying to see what was outside his field of view. Something was coming. The scream grew louder and louder; it thundered and blared.
Light—flame—thrust down out of the clouds.
“It’s here,” whispered Brabant, held to the window, staring; and he watched as the hugest of all imaginable ships dropped, flame-tailed, out of the clouds.
It settled into the square outside, next to the dismantled Terrestrial scout, with a wash of fire that made Brabant avert his eyes and scorched the rock walls. It was a towering brute of a ship, more than two hundred feet tall—bigger than the trailer of Explorer II, silently orbiting out in space—bigger than any vessel the human race had yet been able to transport from Sol to another star. In the Solar System itself, big ships were by no means uncommon, but even there this one would have been a monster. It was all one piece, and that piece towered higher than a twenty-story building.
Brabant took his hands away from his eyes and squinted out at the giant. Gormen already were hurrying out to its base; that explained, at least, why the barracks had arisen so early that morning. It was the ship they had been waiting for, the one big enough to carry all the humans to—wherever the Gormen proposed to take them.
“All right,” Brabant whispered crazily, dizzy with fatigue and shaking with nerves, “you’ve come. I hope I’m ready for you.”
And before noon of that day, they were embarked. Brabant, for his services to the captors, had the job of straw boss.
“Come on, come on,” he said tightly, looking at no one, “move along, get aboard.” And the humans moved toward the ship, carrying what they could.
Hibsen and de Jouvenel, glowering, mumbled loud enough for Brabant to hear, but he wouldn’t look at them. Mary Marne and her husband came, carrying the child, Mary near to tears and the child already howling. Retty and the two Crescenzi children, tear-streaked and clinging; Sam Jaroff, his eyes wide with horror like a man floating on a wide sea, who sees the rescuing vessel steam carelessly away. And last of all Rae Wensley, and if Brabant didn’t meet her eyes, neither did she look at Dr. Howard Brabant.
“Inside,” grumbled Brabant, following along.
One Gorman was with them, silent, motionless and armed.
He was enough. The Gorman hand weapon was a rapid-fire flame ejector. In that confined space, he could easily kill every one of them before the first could quite make up his mind to move.
The rest of the Gormen were busy with more important things—looting the scout rocket, carrying what probably were records and equipment from their headquarters to the square.
“Judas!” hissed de Jouvenel as he went by.
Brabant did not turn. He was staring into space.
Inside the rocket, Rae Wensley leaned against a cold brassy bulkhead, half closing her eyes. The Gorman reek soured the air around her. They were in a bare chamber; whatever the Gormen themselves liked in the way of creature comforts, they had provided nothing at all for their captives. It looked like a long, uncomfortable trip.
And the destination would be the worst part of it.
Brabant glanced at the girl. She might have been speaking aloud; every thought she had was written on her face.
All right, Howard, he said to himself, what are you waiting for? Everybody was aboard. One Gorman stood there and no others; if there was ever going to be a moment, the moment was now. But he couldn’t help waiting a second, just another second, like a gambler with the rent money standing hypnotized before the pari-mutuel window; the risk was great, and it was hard, hard to make himself go ahead …
But something took over for him.
Brabant found himself standing next to the Gorman. He reached into his frayed blouse and took out the knife the Gormen had commandeered from Hibsen, that Brabant himself had commandeered from the Gormen.
“Here,” he said. The alien looked at him and twittered, but accepted the knife. “And—oh, yes,” said Brabant, licking his lips, “I think they’ve got another. In the same place.”
Twitter, twitter. Gorman-accented English was hard to follow at best.
“Yes,” nodded Brabant, “in the same place, under the baby.” He closed his eyes for a second.
When he looked up, the Gorman was moving rapidly toward the baby, the knife in one hand, the other outstretched for the child.
“Dear God,” cried Brabant, the words a prayer, “he’s going to kill the baby!”
Kill the baby—kill the baby. The words rolled around the metal chamber. Everything stopped.
The Gorman half-turned, the expression almost humanly surprised, but it didn’t matter. There wasn’t a second’s hesitation; there was no time for thought. Marne leaped at the alien as quickly as any Gorman. It was reflex that moved him, not thinking. He was on top of the rhino before even that super-fast creature could whirl, and half a dozen of the others were right behind.
The Gorman was out cold, under a hundred blows, before he could lift the knife; he never even started for the gun; that massive skull could endure pounding, but the brain beneath was subject to syncope like any human’s; he was unconscious. It was the second time the humans had surprised a Gorman, and the first when it had mattered.
The fighters jumped back, triumphant and amazed.
“We—we got him!” gasped Hibsen, unbelieving.
Brabant, weary but ready, dug into his worn pockets for the other essential ingredient of his plan.
“Here!” he said, holding out a thin wire coil. “Tie him up, Hibsen! De Jouvenel—close that port!”
X
The bound Gorman lay on the floor, its eyes open; it had not stayed unconscious long. Outside scrabblings against the Port Said the other Gormen were suspicious. And Rae Wensley cried out: “Brabant! I thought you told me they wouldn’t hurt the baby!”
Brabant was breathing raggedly; he looked utterly spent. But the hangdog expression was gone from his eyes, the crucified look from his face; he was almost triumphant. He said: “That’s right, Rae. He was only searching for another knife.” “But—”
“But I lied to you, yes! We need this ship. We couldn’t plan to jump him—nothing could make us do it fast eno
ugh; the second’s lag in our thinking would give him plenty of warning. So I had to make you attack him—without thinking—as fast as a Gorman, and the only way i could make you do that was to see that you were pushed by reflex. Protecting the young—that doesn’t have to filter through the conscious; that makes you move; we saw that already. So—”
“So now,” said Hibsen, raging, “we’ve won a battle and lost a war. What’s the use of all this, Brabant? We’ve got a ship, but we can’t fly it. You said so yourself—you proved it to us!”
“No,” corrected Brabant, “I proved it to the Gormen. Wait. Listen.”
Outside, there was a muffled clattering. The Crescenzi children began to whimper; they hadn’t had time to before.
Brabant nodded absently. “The Gormen are getting ready to break in. This is an important ship, you see. It’s their biggest in this system, and the only one that’s armed.”
“You—want us to destroy it?” Hibsen guessed.
“I want to fly it up to Explorer.”
“Without computers? But—”
“But we have computers, Hibsen,” said Brabant “Three of them. You, and de Jouvenel, and Rae.”
He had them, Brabant exulted wearily. A month of hatred could not be wiped out in a second, but he had managed a suspension of emotion. They were all waiting. They would give his plan a try.
“Come along,” he said, nodding to the three of them, and climbed the rounded spikes that took them to the bare pilot’s room.
The muffled outside clattering stopped and was replaced by a persistent, purposeful rasp, rasp.Time was flying. But there would be time; and either they would succeed or, as a bare minimum, there would be a good many dead Gormen around the base of a destroyed ship.
“Sit down, Hibsen,” he ordered.
The Abominal Earthman (1963) SSC Page 13