Arcturus Landing

by Gordon R. Dickson

  When he was dressed, he wandered out of the bedroom and into the second-floor combination eating room and lounge, with its imitation rock ledge and illusory waterfall. Sorrel and Margie were seated at one of the tables playing double solitaire. They looked up as he weaved in.

  “Mal!” said Margie, then both demanded simultaneously: “How do you feel?”

  “I think I’ll sit down,” he answered, dropping somewhat heavily into an empty chair at their table. “I feel weak,” he explained.

  “A little food wouldn’t do you any harm,” said Margie, with a touch of sharpness. “It’s been three days since you ate.”

  “Oh?” said Mal. He considered the lack of sensation from his stomach. “I don’t feel hungry.” He did not really expect to do more than play with the food Margie prepared. But. the more he swallowed, the more his appetite seemed to revive, until by the time Dirk and Peep came strolling in, he was eating—there was no other word for it— ferociously.

  “Good afternoon, young friend,” said Peep, plumping himself down in a sitting position. “Feeling better, eh?” put in Dirk.

  “Mrmf!” said Mal with a full mouth, and waved a hand with a fork in it at them all. Then, having taken care of the amenities, he settled down to ignoring them until his eating was done.

  Finally he sat back and sighed deliciously over a full cup of coffee. “That was fine,” he said expansively. He looked at all of them and beamed. “What’s news?”

  “My God!” exploded Sorrel. “How about you telling us?”

  “Telling you?”

  “The last thing you told us before keeling over was that you’d got it. But we didn’t see anything around the ship,” snapped the Underground man. “Well? Well? Well?”

  “I didn’t actually build it,” explained Mal. “I just ran enough principle tests to know it’ll work. But there’s nothing to it. I told you the actual device would be simple. It’s simply a matter of using force fields to set up a uniform resonance of wave patterns in whatever’s to be moved. Then, to move, you simply de-emphasize your resonance in direct ratio to the distance you want to move. In other words, it’s a matter of making your present position in space so improbable that you move to the next most probable position. Of course it isn’t really a matter of movement at all. I’ll explain it a little more simply. You see in a strict sense, the position you believe yourself to be occupying isn’t really the position you are actually occupying. In reality, you’re really everywhere at once with a most probable position which can be defined by vectors of probability moving along a time coordinate. Now, imagine a three-dimensional graph enclosed in an n-dimensional universe of which one dimension at a time is extra-relative and time itself is represented in the graph by a—” Mal broke off suddenly, becoming aware of the stunned expressions on the three human faces before him.

  “Maybe I’m confusing you a bit,” he said. “Look, it’s really very simple. What it all boils down to is that for purposes of theory you assume a positionless time, which by conversion allows you to postulate such a thing as timeless position. With Time considered as irrelevant and therefore disregarded—”

  “Sure,” broke in Sorrel. “Absolutely. You’re one hundred per cent right. I see it now. Now, what kind of materials are you going to need to build this gizmo?”

  “But you aren’t letting me explain,” protested Mal. “Now, you all understand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle—” But his explanation dwindled away in the face of a dead silence.

  “If you just—” began Mal feebly.

  “Young friend,” interrupted Peep, with a cough, “certain flights of knowledge are unfortunately restricted to those who already possess wings. And wings, I need hardly point out, are scarcely grown in a minute—under ordinary conditions, that is,” he added conscientiously.

  “Oh,” said Mal. “Well—” he was struggling with the quite human and normal urge to tell somebody about what he had just accomplished. “Oh, well,” he sighed.

  “Now that that’s settled,” said Sorrel “I repeat—what sort of stuff are you going to need to build it?”

  “Why, we can adapt the ship out there with what we’ve already got,” said Mal. “I knew what we’d need all along. That’s why I ordered what I did.”

  “You did? If you knew all along, why’d you spend so much time figuring—no, no, don’t explain,” said Sorrel hastily, as Mal opened his mouth. “I’ll take it for granted you had a good reason. Well—there’s no reason why we can’t get started right away at fixing her up, is there?”

  “What time is it?” Mal asked Sorrel.

  “Afternoon,” the latter replied. “About four hours of daylight left.”

  “Well, we can work by inside lights tonight,” said Mal. “I think I will stretch out on a lounge chair here and take an hour’s nap. Feel weak and logy from the food. … If someone will just give me a hand—”

  Dirk stretched out a long arm and levered him up. Mal tottered across to a long, slope-backed lounge chair and literally fell into it.

  “Oof!” It was a sigh.

  “Of course,” he went on, “I’ll call you the minute I come to. It won’t be long, just a half hour or so, I think—call you zzoon, and maybe ug zuggle mph then zzzzz … ” His voice wandered off to a snore and inside of a few seconds he was deeply asleep.

  Hard hands on his arms jerked Mal back into sudden consciousness. Two men he had never seen before stood on either side of him, holding him upright and he was imprisoned between them. He blinked at the lounge about him and saw it aswarm with men who were holding Dirk and Margie and Sorrel equally helpless. Among them were uniforms of the Company Police; and, as this fact penetrated, Mal made one furious, convulsive attempt to throw off the men who pinioned him; but his sleep-slowed muscles betrayed him. There was a stir in the crowd and a man with a familiar face pushed his way through to come up and stand before Mal.

  “Thayer!” said Mal.

  “That’s right,” said Ron Thayer. The spurious ex-cyberneticist was wearing the uniform of a colonel in the Company Police and his narrow face under the black hair above it was lean and drawn with fatigue. “Where’s your Alien friend?”

  Mal thought of five good answers to this at once—all of them impolite and most of them improbable—and ended by saying nothing.

  “All right,” said Thayer, turning away. “We’ll get that information out of you later. Move them off, men.”

  Mal felt himself jerked forward by the two men that held him. The crowd closed in and out of the corners of his eyes he saw Sorrel, Dirk and Margie being shoved along in a like manner. The crowd boiled toward the entrance of the station and spilled out into the clearing where a large Company atmosphere transport stood waiting. Sick with disappointment and savage with rage against the man who had finally succeeded in destroying his hopes when they were all but realized, without a word, Mal let himself be shoved along, and locked up with his friends in the dark, metal-plated and thoroughly escape-proof pit of the transport’s hold.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “BUT WHAT DID happen to Peep?” asked Mal, after a careful check of the room that held them had failed to uncover any signs of a peek-scanner or a microphone. They had been moved to the Company Headquarters building at New Dorado—an edifice with an outer shell of bubble plastic, but with uncompromising metal walls and doors on the inside. The room had all the appearance of a lounge on one of the better space liners—and presented almost as much of a problem as far as the chances of breaking out went, particularly to people reduced to teeth and fingernails for tools.

  “How should I know?” growled Sorrel. He was examining a black eye in a mirror on the wall of the room opposite the only door. He had put up a fight and was suffering the usual delusion of a hot-blooded hangover—to wit, that if only everybody else had thrown themselves as willingly into the fray as he had, the day would have been won.

  “He went out somewhere—didn’t he, Margie?” said Dirk.

  “He went out for
a walk.”

  “A walk?” said Mal.

  “Yes,” replied Margie. “You’ve been so busy working you didn’t know, but Peep often went for walks.”

  “But how would he go for a walk?” insisted the perplexed Mal. “Where would he go for a walk? Why would he go for a walk—that’s the thing. I can see him going power-belt flying—”

  “He went walking on his mudshoes, out in the jungle,” said Margie. “And he used to do it because he needed exercise. bu don’t know how hard it was on Peep to sit still the way he’s been doing.”

  “Oh,” said Mal. “Yes, that makes sense. Different metabolism, I suppose. That explains why they didn’t find him. A human would never try to go any distance through the lowlands on foot, and it never occurred to them that Peep would either.”

  “So he got away!” Sorrel spun around from the mirror. “We didn’t. Now, what’re we going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think we can do anything as long as they’ve got us locked up here,” answered Mal honestly.

  “If you hadn’t been sleeping like—”

  “Frank!” blazed Margie, taking fire like dry grass in an autumn wind. “After he wore himself out working the way he did you talk to him like that?”

  Sorrel growled uneasily and retreated. Turning, he caught sight of Dirk lounging bonelessly in a chair.

  “Goddamn useless long drink of water!” he snarled.

  “Hey!” cried Dirk, shooting upright in resentment, which was to some extent justified. A good half dozen of the enemy had thrown themselves simultaneously upon him, apparently under the impression—which in spite of his apparent thinness was probably correct—that he was far and away the most physically formidable of the group.

  “Calm down, Sorrel,” said Mal, stepping into the breach. “Chewing over what’s already happened won’t help.”

  “I’d like to know how they found out where we were, that’s all,” muttered Sorrel.

  “Maybe they spotted a radiation leak from some of the equipment,” said Mal. “Maybe they saw someone coming or going. Maybe they found meteorological evidence of the funnel spot and wondered why there was vegetation underneath it on the ground. Does it matter? The thing is they’ve got us.”

  “Yes,” said Sorrel. Reluctantly he brought his attention to a consideration of their present situation. “There ought to be some way to break out of here.”

  “Without tools, I can’t see how,” said Mal.

  “Son of a gun!” said Sorrel. “Here we are in the middle of New Dorado. If we could just get word out to Bobby or some of the boys, they’d have this place apart and us out of it in five minutes.”

  “Sure,” said Dirk. “But how?”

  “Maybe somebody saw us brought in,” brooded Sorrel.

  “I doubt it,” said Mal. “They waited until night to bring us in and you know how much attention anybody pays to what’s going on around here after dark.”

  “Blasted mud-suckers!” snapped Sorrel.

  “Yes,” said Mal.

  An unhappy silence fell over the four people in the room, everyone hoping rather hopelessly for a sudden inspiration which would unlock their present prison. They were still engaged in this when Dirk suddenly raised his head.

  “Listen,” he said. “Do you hear something?”

  They all listened. For a moment there was undeniable silence; and then, distantly, from somewhere overhead, there came a faint, metallic scratching.

  “Probably nothing to do with us,” said Sorrel.

  Nobody bothered to reply. They were all too busy listening. Slowly the scratching noise approached until it was directly beside the ventilator grill in the ceiling overhead.

  “There’s something up there—” breathed Margie.

  Dirk reached out noiselessly and picked up a chair, which he hefted over his shoulder in swinging position.

  Abruptly, the ventilator bulged outward with a small screech, tore loose and dropped with a muffled thud to the carpeted floor below. A sharp, bewhiskered face pushed through the resultant opening; and a familiar voice filled the room. “Ah—young friends,” said Peep.

  Four people let out simultaneous sighs of relief; and Dirk set down the chair he had picked up. “Peep!” cried Mal.

  “Yes,” said Peep. “Are you all well?”

  “We’re fine,” said Mal. “How are you?”

  “I, also,” replied Peep from the hole in the ceiling, “am in excellent health and spirits.”

  “Oh, Peep!” cried Margie. “How did you manage to find us?”

  “When I returned,” replied Peep, “and found you all gone, I deduced from the appearance of the station what had happened. I located a power belt among the wreckage—”

  “Wreckage!” cried Sorrel in sharp agony. The station had been his baby.

  “—and came on to New Dorado. This building seemed the most likely place to find you, so I entered through the ventilating system, utilizing the methods that had met with success in the case of the warehouse robberies.”

  “Lucky break for us you weren’t at the station when they surprised us,” said Dirk.

  “Lucky indeed,” replied Peep. “The temptation to give way to the excitement of the situation might well have proved irresistible. I often ask myself,” he continued chattily, leaning a little further through the ventilator opening, “whether a cosmic sense of justice is indeed preferable to a unique or individual one. It may well be that the broader view, apparently by far the preferable of the two, in actual practice, allows the fine perception of rights and wrongs in particular cases to become obscure or confused—”

  “Sweet Susan!” cried Sorrel, jittering around like a man on a hot stove. “Are you going to talk all night?”

  “True,” said Peep. “Forgive me.” He peered down into the room. “Do you suppose the floor is a sturdy one?” he asked a trifle anxiously.

  “I think so,” said Mal. “Why?”

  “I was thinking of letting myself drop,” explained Peep.

  “Oh,” said Mal, “I see.” He stamped experimentally on the carpet, which seemed to be covering no more than the ordinary thickness of plastic flooring. “I don’t think you better do that. Suppose we pile up some furniture. Then you can climb down.”

  “A much sounder course of action,” agreed Peep.

  Hastily, the three men gathered together the furniture of the room and piled lounge chairs into a sort of shaky pyramid, with its peak just below the ventilator opening. Then, when it was fully erected, they stood about it, bracing it with their bodies while Peep cautiously crept out of the ventilator, negotiated a difficult complete turnabout while clinging to the opening with toe and fingernails, and began his descent. The structure creaked alarmingly under his weight, but held; and to the tune of “Look out, Peep” and “Put your foot here now,” he slowly descended to more solid footing.

  “Ah,” he said finally, with satisfaction, finding himself on solid floor. “And now?”

  “Now we break out of here,” said Sorrel. “Wait a minute,” interrupted Mal. “Let’s plan it out a little first. Peep can probably open the door for us, but where do we go from there? Do you know how this building is laid out, Sorrel?”

  The other man looked embarrassed.

  “Well—” he said. “As a matter of fact—well, no, I don’t.”

  “Then we can’t just shove off at random,” said Mal. “In fact, I think the safest thing would be to try to get out the way we came in. You remember how that was.”

  “I wish we could just get out the way Peep got in,” said Margie.

  Mal looked at her.

  “You might make it,” he said. “The rest of us are too big. It’s an idea, though. If you want to try it alone—”

  “Oh, no!” said Margie quickly. “I want to stick with the rest of you.”

  “I think you’ll probably be better off,” said Mal. He turned back to the others. “Now, as I remember it, the transport was set down in the Company yard betwee
n two buildings and we went into the right-hand one.”

  “There was some sort of office at first,” contributed Dirk.

  “That’s right,” said Mal. “We went through that and down a flight of stairs and along a corridor, one turn right and one left.”

  “Weren’t there two turns right and then one turn left?” put in Sorrel. “Seems to me I remember two turns.”

  “One turn, I’m positive,” said Mal. “What do the rest of you remember?”

  “One turn,” said Dirk, and Margie agreed.

  “All right, then,” said Mal. “To get out of here we go back down the corridor outside, turn right and then left, up the stairs and out. Right?”

  The others nodded agreement.

  “We’ll go as quietly as possible,” Mal went on. “If we have the bad luck to run into anybody— rush them fast. All right, Peep. Now, let’s see what you can do with the door.”

  Peep, who had been sitting on his haunches during most of this discussion, got up and walked over to the door. It was a heavy, rectangular sheet of metal with a single button for the latch—now, of course, locked. Peep looked it over, put his hands against it, and pushed.

  Nothing happened.

  He paused and looked it over again, vainly, for a corner by which he might get a grasp on it. There was none.

  “Skevamp!” he muttered, irritated.

  He put his weight against the door again. It creaked, but held firm.

  “Kck-kck-kck-kck!” he chittered on a rising note of irritation. He threw his weight against it. No result.

  “Polsk? Nak yr!”

  He hit it. Something snapped, but the door held.

  “Burgyr! Vik ynn!”

  His voice and temper were both rising.

  “Not so loud, Peep—” cautioned Mal nervously.

  “Bagr y chagpz U! Snok a Polsk! Myg? Myg? Taez a yak—a yak—a yak—Yarrroooouch!”

  With each yak he had slammed the door a little harder; and the final Yarrroooouch! came out as a sort of culminating, blood-curdling war whoop, accompanied by a smash against the door that tore it bodily from its hinges, and he tumbled out into the corridor in a fury.