To Be Concluded
Who were the murderers of Earth?
Just months before, Earth had been blossoming in the first thrilling leap into interstellar space—a booming, bustling planet of billions of people, with scientific progress that even the galactic visitors had admired. Earth itself had not discovered the secret of faster-than-light travel; but it had been quick to learn. Already half a dozen expeditions on Earth-built ships had plumbed the Galaxy.
Now one of them returned to find Earth a corpse.
The ship that first came back was the Benjamin Franklin, equipped for every emergency but this. It held weapons, food, medicine, books, instruments, wealth—it held everything except the one thing that no one had imagined it would need.
In all its crew—perhaps the only humans left alive in the Galaxy—there was not one woman.
In the eighty billion star systems of the Galaxy there were countless thousands of races—friendly merchants like the Monwaingi, warriors like the Kandemirians, pastoral peoples, emotionless semi-robots. Which of them had blasted Earth and left it a blazing ruin, guarded by orbiting missiles to destroy even the ships that returned?
The men of the Benjamin Franklin began the hunt for the murderers. In desperation they allied themselves with the Vorlakka, a fighting race who might themselves have been Earth’s assassins. (But what race might not?) With an Earth-born variation on a galactic weapon they joined a raid on the planet of the Kandemirians. Their plan was simple. To find the murderers, they must get allies. To get allies, they must take sides; the side they helped in a successful battle would then help them . . .
But their side lost.
All the men of the Franklin were captured by the Kandemirians. If they had been desperate before, they were nearly hopeless now. Their own lives were forfeit if they did not help their captors. And their race, with no women to produce new generations, was doomed.
Earth was on its way to becoming no longer even a memory . . .
But there was another ship.
Its name was the Europa, off on a cruise of its own, returned like the Franklin to find Earth a cinder. Like the Franklin it had escaped the satellite missiles and was now gypsying through the Galaxy.
Their plans were different. It was not revenge they sought but something else. The Europa’s crew set itself down on the planet called Zatlokopa and began to turn their human talents to good use. They were earning money. The needed money, lots of it, in order to finance the hunt for other Earth ships and for the Earthmen they prayed might somewhere be wandering in the starlanes.
For the Europa’s crew was made up entirely of women.
PART TWO
VIII
Mit shout and crash and saber
flash,
And vild husaren shout
De Dootchmen boorst de keller
in,
Und rolled de lager out;
Und in the coorlin’ powder
shmoke,
Vhile shtill de pullets sung,
Dere shtood der Breitmann, axe
in hand,
A knockin’ out de boong.
Gling, glang, gloria!
Victoria! Encoria!
De shpicket beats de boong.
—Leland
FROM their window high in that tower known as i-Chula—the Clouded—Sigrid Holmen and Alexandra Vukovic could easily see aro-Kito, One Who Awaits. That spire lifted shimmering walls and patinaed bronze roof above most of its neighbors; otherwise its corkscrew ramps and twisted buttresses were typical Eyzka architecture. The operations within, however, resembled none which had yet been seen on Zatlokopa, or in this entire civilization-cluster.
Terran Traders, Inc., had leased the whole building.
As yet the company was not big enough to fill every room.
There was no reason why the Europa crew should not live there, and a number of the women did. But some, like Sigrid and Alexandra, had to get away from their work physically or explode. They took lodgings throughout the city.
Occasionally, though, as the company’s growth continued, work sought them out. This evening Alexandra was bringing an important potential client home for dinner. The sha-Eyzka were very human in that respect: they settled more deals over dessert and liqueurs than over desks and dictoscribes. If Terran Traders could please Taltla of the sha-Oktzu—and if they could thus land that house’s account—a big step forward would have been taken.
Sigrid looked at her watch. By now she was used to the time units, eight-based number system and revolving clock faces employed here. Damn! The others would arrive in ten minutes, and she hadn’t perfumed yet.
A MOMENT she lingered, savoring the fresh air that blew across her skin. Zatlokopa was not only terrestroid, but midway through an interglacial period. Climatically it was a paradise for humans. The women had quickly adopted a version of native dress, little more than shorts and sandals, with the former only for the sake of pockets. The sun slanted long rays across the towers, a goldenness that seemed to fill the atmosphere. How quiet it was!
Too quiet, she thought. I winged snake cruised above the many-steepled skyline, but nothing else moved. No groundcars. No fliers. Not a walker in the grassy lanes between buildings, or a boat on the sunset-yellow canals. The city had subways, elevated tunnel-streets that looped like vines from tower to tower, halls and shaftways in the houses themselves. This was not Earth, she knew. It never had been, never could be.
Nothing could ever again be Earth.
A spaceship lifted silent on paragravity, kilometers distant and yet so big that she saw sunlight burn along its flanks. The Holdar liner, she thought; we have a consignment aboard. That reminded her. She had no time for self-pity. Closing the window, she hurried into the kitchen and checked the autochef. Everything seemed under control. Thank God for the high development of robotics in this cluster. No human cook had the sense of taste and smell to prepare a meal that an Eyzka would think fit to eat.
Sigrid returned to the living room, where Earth-type furniture looked homely and lost amidst intricate vaulting and miniature fountains. The perfume cabinet slid open for her. She consulted a chart. Formality on Zatlokopa paid no attention to clothes, but made a ritual of odors. For entertaining a guest of Taltla’s rank, you used a blend of Class Five aerosols . . . She wrinkled her nose. Everything in Class Five smelled alike to her—rather like ripe silage. Well, she could drench herself with . . . let’s see, the sha-Eyzka usually enjoyed cologne, and there was some left from the ship . . . Her hand closed on the little cut-glass bottle.
The door said: “Two desire admittance.”
Had Alexandra brought the fellow here early? She’d been told not to. “Let them in,” Sigrid said without looking at the scanner. The door opened.
BLANK, glistening metal met her eyes.
Not sun-browned human skin or the green and gold fur of an Eyzka, but polished alloy. The robots were approximately humanoid, a sheer two and a half meters tall. She stared up, and up, to faceless heads and photoelectric slits. Those glowed dull red, as if furnaces burned behind.
“Kors i Herrans namn!” she exclaimed. “What’s this?”
One glided past her, cat-silent. The other extended an arm and closed metal fingers on her shoulder, not hard, but chilling. She tried indignantly to step back. The grip tightened. She sucked in a gasp.
The other robot came back. It must have checked if she was alone. The first said: “Come. You need not be harmed, but make no trouble.” It spoke Uru, which was also the interstellar auxiliary language in this cluster as in several others.
“What the blazes do you mean?” Anger drove out fear.
Hearing her speak in Eyzka, the robot shifted to that language, fluent though accented. It laid its free hand on her head. The fingers nearly encircled her skull. “Come, before I squeeze,” it ordered.
That grip could crush her temples like an almond shell. “Make no outcry,” the second robot warned. Its accent was even thicker.
Num
bly, she accompanied them out. The corridor was a tube from nowhere to nowhere; doors were locked and blind; only the ventilators, gusting a vegetable smell in her face, made any noise. Her skin turned cold and wet, her lips tingled.
They picked the right hour for a kidnapping, she thought in hollowness. Nearly everyone is still at work, or else inside preparing for the workers’ return. You won’t find casuals moving about, as you would in a human city. This is not Earth. Because Earth is a cinder, ten thousand light-years distant.
She grew aware of a pain in one hand. With a dull astonishment, she saw that she still gripped the cologne bottle. The faceted glass had gouged red marks into her palm.
Suddenly she lifted the thing, unscrewed the atomizer nose and poured the contents over her head.
Steel fingers snatched it from her, and took a good deal of skin along too.
Sigrid tried not to whimper with pain. She sucked her hand while the twin giants bent their incandescent gaze on the bottle. The throbbing eased. No bones seemed broken . . .
The robots conferred in a language she didn’t know. Then to her, in sharp Eyzka: “Attempted suicide?”
“The liquid isn’t corrosive,” the other machine observed.
You noseless idiot! Sigrid thought wildly. She jammed her bleeding hand into one pocket and let them hustle her along.
FOOTFALLS were inaudible.
Nothing lived, nothing stirred, save themselves. They went down a dropshaft to a tunnel. A public gravsled halted at an arm signal. They boarded and it accelerated smoothly along its automatically programmed route.
They aren’t independent robots, Sigrid decided. She was becoming able to think more coolly now. They’re remote-control mechanisms. I’ve never seen their type before. But then, there are thousands of kinds of automaton in this galactic region, and I’ve been here less than a year. Yes, they’re just body-waldos.
But whose? Why?
Not natives. The sha-Eyzka had received the humans kindly, in their fashion: given them the freedom of Zatlokopa, taught them language and customs, heard their story. After that the newcomers were on their own, in the raw capitalism which dominated this whole cluster.
But a small syndicate of native investors had been willing to take a flyer and help them get started. There wasn’t much question of commercial rivalry yet. The women’s operations were too radically unlike anything seen before. Carriers and brokers existed in plenty throughout this cluster, but not on the scale which Terran Traders contemplated—nor with such razzle-dazzle innovations as profit sharing, systems analysis and motivational research among outworld cultures. So the kidnappers were not likely to be Eyzka competitors.
The accent with which the robots spoke, and the failure of their operators to guess what was in the cologne bottle, also suggested—
The sled halted for a native passenger.
He bounded on gracefully, beautiful as a hawk or a salmon had been beautiful on Earth. Steel fingers clenched about Sigrid’s wrist till she felt her bones creak. She didn’t cry out, though. “Not one sign to him,” the robot murmured in Uru.
“If you’ll let me go, I won’t,” she managed.
The pressure slackened. She leaned weakly back on the bench. The Eyzka gave her a startled glance, took out a perfumed handkerchief and pointedly moved as far from her as he could.
Presently she was taken off the sled. Down another ramp, through another passage, twist, turn, a last downward spiral, a dark dingy tunnel with a hundred identical doors, and one that opened for her. She stepped through between the robots. The door closed again at her back.
A DOZEN creatures sat at a table. They were squat and leathery, with flat countenances like goblins. Two more were at a waldo panel in the rear of the room. Those had obviously been guiding the robots. They also turned to face her, and the machines flanking Sigrid became statues.
The room was redly lit, shadowful and cold. A record player emitted a continuous thin wailing.
The creatures were Forsii, Sigrid realized. The second most powerful race in this cluster. She might have guessed.
One goblin leaned toward her. His skin rustled as he moved. “There is no reason to waste time,” he clipped. “We have already learned that you stand high among the sha-Terra. The highest ranking one, in fact, whom it was practicable for us to capture. You will cooperate or suffer the consequences. Understand, to Forsi commercial operations are not merely for private gain, as here on Zatlokopa, but are part of a larger design. Your Terran Traders corporation has upset the economic balance of this cluster. We extrapolate that the upsetting will grow exponentially if not checked. In order to counteract your operations, we must have detailed information about their rationale and the fundamental psychology behind it. You have shrewdly exploited the fact that no two species think entirely alike and that you yourselves, coming from an altogether foreign civilization-complex, are doubly unpredictable. We shall take you home with us and make studies.”
Despite herself, Sigrid’s knees wobbled. She leaned on one massive robot and struggled not to faint.
“If you cooperate fully, the research may not damage you too much,” said the Forsii. “At least, it will not be made unnecessarily painful. We bear you no ill will. Indeed, we admire your enterprise and only wish you had chosen our planet instead of Zatlokopa.” He shrugged. “But I daresay climate influenced you.”
“And society,” she husked. “A d-d-decent culture to live in.”
He was not insulted. Another asked curiously, “Did you search long before picking this culture?”
“We were lucky,” Sigrid admitted. Anything to gain time! “We had . . . this sort of goal . . . in mind—a free enterprise economy at a stage of pioneering and expansion. But there are so many clusters. After visiting only two, though, we heard rumors about yours.” A measure of strength returned. She straightened. The Forsii were apparently even more dull-nosed than humans, which gave some hope. “Do you think you can get away with this crime?” she blustered. “Let me go at once and I’ll make no complaint against you.”
The goblins chuckled.
“Best we start with you at once,” the leader told her. “If we can reach the spaceport before the evening rush, so you are not noticed by anyone, our ship can ask immediate clearance and lift within an hour. Otherwise we may have to wait for the same time tomorrow.”
Sigrid shivered in the bitter air.
“What harm have we done?” she protested. “We sha-Terra don’t threaten anybody. We’re alone, planetless, we can’t have children or—”
THE chief signaled his waldo operators, who returned to their control boards.
“We hope to leave within a few years,” Sigrid pleaded. “Can’t you realize our situation? We’ve made no secret of it. Our planet is dead. A few ships with our own kind—males—are scattered we know not where in the galaxy. We fled this far to be safe from Earth’s unknown enemy. Not to become powerful here, not even to make our home here, but to be safe. Then we had to make a living—”
“Which you have done with an effectiveness that has already overthrown many calculations,” said a Forsii dryly.
“But—but—but listen! Certainly we’re trying to become rich, as rich as possible. But not as an end in itself. Only as a means. When we have enough wealth, we can hire enough ships . . . to scour the Galaxy for other humans. That’s all, I swear!”
“A most ingenious scheme,” the chief nodded. “It might well succeed, given time.”
“And then . . . we wouldn’t stay here. We wouldn’t want to. This isn’t our civilization. We’d go back, get revenge for Earth, establish ourselves among familiar planets. Or else we’d make a clean break, go far beyond every frontier, colonize a wholly new world. We are not your competitors. Not in the long run. Can’t you understand?”
“The short run is proving unpleasant for us,” the chief said. “As for long-range consequences, you may indeed depart, as you say. But the corporate structure you will have built up—still more im
portant, the methods and ideas you introduce—those will remain. Forsii cannot cope with them. So you will now go with us through the rear exit. A private gravsled is waiting to bring us to the spaceport.”
The waldo operators put arms and legs into the transmission sheaths, heads into the control hoods. A robot reached out for Sigrid.
She dodged. It lumbered after her. She fled across the room.
No use yelling. Every apartment in this city was soundproofed. The second robot closed in from the other side. They herded her toward a corner. “Behave yourself!” The chief rose and rapped on the table. “There are punishments—”
She didn’t hear the rest. Backed against a wall, she saw the gap between the machines and moved as if to go through it. The robots glided together. Sigrid spun on her heel and went to the right. An arm swooped after her. It brushed her hair, then she was past.
The robots whirled and ran in pursuit. She snatched up a stool and threw it. The thing bounced off metal. Useless, useless! She scuttled toward the door. A robot got there first. She ran back. A Forsiu left his seat and intercepted her.
Cold arms closed about her waist. She snarled and brought her knee sharply up. Vulnerable as a man, the creature yammered and let go. She sprang by him. The stool lay in her path. She seized it and brought it down on a bald head at the table. The thonk! was loud above their voices.
Up onto the table top she jumped. The chief grabbed at her ankles. She kicked him in one bulging eye. As he sagged, cursing his pain, she stepped on his shoulder and leaped down behind.
RUNNING faster than human, the robots were on either side of her. She dropped to the floor and rolled beneath the table.
The Forsii shouted and scrambled. For a minute or more they milled around, interfered with the robots. She saw their thick gray legs churn and stamp.
Someone bawled an order. The Forsii moved out of the way. One robot lifted the table. Sigrid rose as it did. The other approached her. She balanced, waiting. As it grabbed, she threw herself forward. The hands clashed together above her head. She went on her knees before its legs. There was just room to squeeze between. She twisted clear, bounced to her feet, and pelted toward the rear exit.
The Day After Doomsday Page 8