Once beneath the protective cloud cover, the other scouts took off on their separate courses, leaving Zelda, her commander still slumped in a mind-fog coma, to find her own sanctuary. Then at thirty thousand feet the ship’s radiation detector suddenly triggered off a score of red danger lights on the instrument panel. From somewhere below, a sun-hot cone of lethal force was probing for the ship. After an almost instantaneous analysis of the nature of the threat, Zelda threw on a protective heterodyning canceler to shield the scout. Then she taped an evasive course that would take the little ship out of danger as soon as the retrorockets had slowed it enough to make a drastic course change possible without harm to its unconscious commander.
II
Gog’s time had almost come. Reluctantly she withdrew her tubelike extractor from the cobalt-rich layer fifty yards below the surface. The propagation pressures inside her were too great to allow her to finish the lode, much less find another. The nerve stem inside the extractor shrank into her body, followed by the acid conduit and ultrasonic tap. Then, ponderously, she began to drag her gravid body toward a nearby ravine. She paused for a moment while a rear short-range projector centered in on a furtive scavenger who had designs on her unfinished meal. One burst and its two-hundred-foot length exploded into a broken heap of metallic and organic rubble. She was tempted to turn back—the remnants would have made a tasty morsel—but birthing pressures drove her on. Reaching the ravine at last, she squatted over it. Slowly her ovipositor emerged from between sagging, armored buttocks. Gog strained and then moved on, leaving behind her a shining, five-hundred-foot-long egg.
Lighter now, her body quickly adapted for post egg-laying activities as sensors and projectors extruded from depressions in her tung-steel hide. Her semi-organic brain passed into a quiescent state while organo-metallic arrays of calculators and energy producers activated and joined into a network on her outer surfaces. The principal computer, located halfway down the fifteen-hundred-meter length of her grotesque body, activated and took over control of her formidable defenses. Then, everything in readiness, it triggered the egg.
The egg responded with a microwave pulse of such intensity that the sensitive antennae of several nearby lesser creatures grew hot, conducting a surge of power into their circuits that charred their internal organs and fused their metallic synapses.
Two hundred kilometers away, Magog woke from a gorged sleep as a strident mating call came pulsing in. He lunged erect, the whole kilometer of him. As he sucked the reducing atmosphere deep into the chain of ovens that served him as lungs, meter-wide nerve centers along his spinal columns pulsed with a voltage and current sufficient to fuse bus bars of several centimeters’ cross section. A cannonlike sperm launcher emerged from his forehead and stiffened as infernos churned inside him. Then his towering bulk jerked as the first spermatozoon shot out, followed by a swarm that dwindled to a few stragglers. Emptied, Magog sagged to the ground and, suddenly hungry, began to rip up great slabs of igneous rock to get at the rich vein of ferrous ore his sensors detected deep beneath. Far to the east, Gog withdrew a prudent distance from her egg and squatted down to await the results of its mating call.
The spermatozoa reached an altitude of half a kilometer before achieving homing ability. They circled, losing altitude until their newly activated homing mechanisms picked up the high-frequency emissions of the distant egg. Then tiny jets began pouring carbon dioxide, and flattened leading edges bit into the atmosphere as they arced toward their objective.
Each was a flattened cylinder, twenty meters long, with a scythe-shaped sensing element protruding from a flattened head, each with a pair of long tails connected at the trailing edge by a broad ribbon. It was an awesome armada, plowing through the turbulent atmosphere, homing on the distant signal.
As the leaders of the sperm swarm appeared over the horizon, Gog’s sensors locked in. The selection time was near. Energy banks cut in and fuel converters began to seethe, preparing for the demands of the activated weapons system. At twenty kilometers a long-range beam locked in on the leading spermatozoon. It lacked evasive ability and a single frontal shot fused it. Its remnants spiraled to the surface, a mass of carbonized debris interspersed with droplets of glowing metal.
The shock of its destruction spread through the armada and stimulated wild, evasive gyrations on the part of the rest. But Gog’s calculators predicted the course of one after another, and flickering bolts of energy burned them out of the sky. None was proving itself fit to survive. Then, suddenly, there was a moment of confusion in her intricate neural network. An intruder was approaching from the wrong direction. All her reserve projectors swiveled and spat a concentrated cone of lethal force at the rogue gamete that was screaming down through the atmosphere. Before the beam could take effect, a milky nimbus surrounded the approaching stranger and it continued on course unharmed. She shifted frequencies. The new bolt was as ineffective as the last. A ripple of excited anticipation ran through her great bulk. This was the one she’d been waiting for!
Gog was not a thinking entity in the usual sense, but she was equipped with a pattern of instinctive responses that told her that the gamete that was flashing down through the upper skies contained something precious in defensive armament that her species needed to survive. Mutations induced by the intense hard radiation from the nearby giant sun made each new generation of enemies even more terrible. Only if her egg were fertilized by a sperm bearing improved defensive and offensive characteristics would her offspring have a good chance of survival.
She relaxed her defenses and waited for the stranger to home in on her egg; but for some inexplicable reason, as it slowed down, it began to veer away. Instantly her energy converters and projectors combined to form a new beam, a cone that locked onto the escaping gamete and then narrowed and concentrated all its energy into a single, tight, titanic tractor. The stranger tried one evasive tactic after another, but inextricably it was drawn toward the waiting egg. Then, in response to her radiated command, the egg’s shell weakened at the calculated point of impact. A moment later the stranger punched through the ovid wall and came to rest at the egg’s exact center. Gog’s scanners quickly encoded its components and made appropriate adjustments to the genes of the egg’s nucleus.
Swiftly—the planet abounded in egg eaters—the fertilized ovum began to develop. It drew on the rich supply of heavy metals contained in the yolk sac to follow the altered genetic blueprint, incorporating in the growing embryo both the heritage of the strange gamete and that developed by Gog’s race in its long fight to stay alive in a hostile environment. When the yolk sac nourishment was finally exhausted, Gog sent out a vibratory beam that cracked the shell of her egg into tiny fragments and freed the fledgling that had developed within. Leaving the strange new hybrid to fend for itself, she crawled back to her abandoned lode to feed and prepare for another laying. In four hours she would be ready to bear again.
III
As Kurt began to regain consciousness, mind still reeling from the aftereffects of the Kierian fogger beam, he opened his eyes with an effort.
“Don’t say it,” said the computer’s voice box.
“Say what?” he mumbled.
“ ‘Where am I?’ You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”
Kurt shook his head to try to clear it of its fuzz. His front vision screen was on and strange things were happening. Zelda had obviously brought the scout down safely, but how long it was going to remain that way was open to question.
The screen showed a nightmare landscape, a narrow valley floor crisscrossed with ragged, smoking fissures. Low-hanging, boiling clouds were tinged an ugly red by the spouting firepits of the squat volcanoes that ringed the depression, It was a hobgoblin scene populated by hobgoblin forms. Strange shapes, seemingly of living metal, crawled, slithered and flapped. Titanic battles raged, victors ravenously consuming losers with maws like giant ore crushers, only to be vanquished and gulped down in turn by even more gigantic life forms, no two of which
were quite alike.
A weird battle at one corner of the vision screen caught Kurt’s attention, and he cranked up magnification. Half tank, half dinosaur, a lumbering creature the size of an imperial space cruiser was backed into a box canyon in the left escarpment, trying to defend itself against a pack of smaller but swifter horrors. A short thick projection stuck out from between its shoulders, pointing up at forty-five degrees like an ancient howitzer. As Kurt watched, flame suddenly flashed from it. A black spheroid arced out, fell among the attackers, and then exploded with a concussion that shook the scout, distant as it was. When the smoke cleared, a crater twenty feet deep marked where it had landed. Two of the smaller beasts were out of action, but the rest kept boring in, incredibly agile toadlike creatures twice the size of terrestrial elephants, spouting jets of some flaming substance and then skipping back.
This spectacular was suddenly interrupted when the computer said calmly, “If you think that’s something, take a look at the rear scanner.”
Kurt did and shuddered in spite of himself.
Crawling up behind the scout on stumpy, centipede legs was something the size of a lunar ore boat. Its front end was dotted with multifaceted eyes that revolved like radar bowls.
“What the hell is that?”
“Beats me,” said Zelda, “but I think it wants us for lunch.” Kurt flipped on his combat controls and centered the beast on his cross hairs. “Couple right down the throat ought to discourage it.”
“Might at that,” said Zelda. “But you’ve got one small problem. Our armament isn’t operational yet. The neural connections for the new stuff haven’t finished knitting in yet.”
“Listen, smart ass,” said Kurt in exasperation, “this is no time for funnies. If we can’t fight the ship, let’s lift the hell out of here. That thing’s big enough to swallow us whole.”
“Can’t lift either. The converters need more mass before they can crank out enough juice to activate the antigravs. We’ve only five kilomegs in the accumulators.”
“Five!” howled Kurt. “I could lift the whole damn squadron with three. I’m getting out of here!”
His fingers danced over the control board, setting up the sequence for emergency take off. The ship shuddered but nothing happened. The rear screen showed that the creature was only two hundred yards away, its mouth a gaping cavern lined with chisellike grinders.
Zelda made a chuckling sound. “Next time, listen to Mother. Strange things happened to all of us while you were in sleepy-bye land.” A number of red lights on the combat readiness board began changing to green. “Knew it wouldn’t take too much longer. Tell you what, why don’t you suit up and go outside and watch while I take care of junior back there. You aren’t going to believe what you’re about to see, but hang with it. I’ll explain everything when you get back. In the meantime I’ll keep an eye on you.”
Kurt made a dash for his space armor and wriggled into it. “I’m not running out on you, baby, but nothing seems to be working on this tub. If one of the other scouts is close enough, I may be able to raise him on my helmet phone and get him here soon enough to do us some good. But what about you?”
“Oh,” said Zelda casually, “if worse comes to worst, I can always run away. We now have feet. Thirty on each side.”
Kurt just snorted as he undogged the inner air-lock hatch.
Once outside he did the biggest and fastest double take in the history of man.
The scout did have feet. Lots of feet. And other things.
To begin with, though her general contours were the same, she’d grown from forty meters in length to two hundred. Her torp tubes had quadrupled in size and were many times more numerous. Between them, streamlined turrets housed wickedlooking devices whose purpose he didn’t understand. One of them suddenly swiveled, pointed at a spot somewhat behind him, and spat an incandescent beam. He spun just in time to see something that looked like a ten-ton crocodile collapse into a molten puddle.
“Told you I’d keep an eye on you,” said a cheerful voice in his helmet phone. “All central connections completed themselves while you were on your way out. Now we have teeth.”
“So has our friend back there. Check aft!” The whatever-it-was was determinedly gnawing away on the rear tubes.
“He’s just gumming. Our new hide makes the old one look like the skin of a jellyfish. Watch me nail him. But snap on your sun filter first. Otherwise you’ll blind yourself.”
Obediently Kurt pressed his polarizing stud. One of the scout’s rear turrets swung around and a buzzsaw vibration ran through the ground as a purple beam no thicker than a pencil slashed the attacker into piano-sized chunks. Then the reason for the scout’s new pedal extremities became apparent as the ship quickly ran around in a circle. Reaching what was left of her attacker, she extended a wedge-shaped head from a depression in her bow and began to feed.
“Just the mass we needed,” said Zelda. A tentacle suddenly emerged from a hidden port, circled Kurt’s waist, and pulled him inside the ship. “Welcome aboard your new command. And now do you want to hear what’s happened to us?”
When she finished, Kurt didn’t comment. He couldn’t. His vocal chords weren’t working.
A shave, a shower, a steak and three cups of coffee later, he gave a contented burp.
“Let’s go find some worms and try out our new stuff,” Zelda suggested.
“While I get fogged?”
“You won’t. Wait and see.”
Kurt shrugged dubiously and once again punched in the lifting sequence. This time when he pressed the activator stud the ship went shrieking up through the atmosphere. Gog, busily laying another egg, paid no attention to her strange offspring. Kurt paid attention to her, though.
Once out of the sheltering cloud cover, his detectors picked up three Kierian ships in stratospheric flight. They seemed to be systematically quartering the sun side of the planet in a deliberate search pattern. Then, as if they had detected one of the hidden scouts, they went into a steep purposeful dive. Concerns for his own safety suddenly were flushed away by the apparent threat to a defenseless ship from his flight. Kurt raced toward the alien ships under emergency thrust. The G needle climbed to twenty, but instead of the acceleration hammering him into organic pulp, it only pushed him back in his seat slightly.
The Kierians pulled up and turned to meet him. In spite of the size of the strange ship that was hurtling toward them, they didn’t seem concerned. There was no reason why they should be. Their foggers could hammer a pilot unconscious long before he could pose a real threat.
Kurt felt a slight vibration run through the scout as an enemy beam caught him, but he didn’t black out.
“Get the laser on the one that just hit you,” Zelda suggested. “It has some of the new stuff hooked into it.” Kurt did, and a bolt of raging energy raced back along the path of the fogger beam and converted the first attacker into a ball of ionized gas.
“Try torps on the other two.”
“They never work. The Kierians warp out before they get within range.”
“Want to bet? Give a try.”
“What’s to lose?” said Kurt. “Fire three and seven.” He felt the shudder of the torpedoes leaving the ship, but their tracks didn’t appear on his firing scope. “Where’d they go?”
“Subspace. Watch what happens to the worms when they flick out.”
Suddenly the two dots that marked the enemy vanished in an actinic burst.
“Wow!” said Kurt in an awestricken voice, “we something, we is! But why didn’t that fogger knock me out? New kind of shield?”
“Nope, new kind of pilot. The ship wasn’t the only thing that was changed. And that ain’t all. You’ve got all kinds of new equipment inside your head you don’t know about yet.”
“Such as?”
“For one thing,” she said, “once you learn how to use it, you’ll find that your brain can operate at almost ninety percent efficiency instead of its old ten. And that ain’t all; y
our memory bank has twice the storage of a standard ship computer and you can calculate four times as fast. But don’t get uppity, buster. You haven’t learned to handle it yet. It’s going to take months to get you up to full potential. In the meantime I’ll babysit as usual.”
Kurt had a sudden impulse to count fingers and toes to see if he still had the right number.
“My face didn’t look any different when I shaved. Am I still human?”
“Of course,” Zelda said soothingly. “You’re just a better one, that’s all. When the ship fertilized that egg, its cytoplasm went to work incorporating the best elements of both parent strains. Our own equipment was improved and the mother’s was added to it. There was no way of sorting you out from the other ship components, and you were improved too. So relax.”
Kurt tilted back his seat and stared thoughtfully at the ceiling for a long moment. “Well,” he said at last, “best we go round up the rest of the flight.”
“What about the Kierian mother ship?”
“We’re still not tough enough to tackle something that big.”
“But that thing down there was still laying eggs when we pulled out. If the whole flight . . .” Her voice trailed off suggestively.
Kurt sat bolt upright in his seat, his face suddenly split with a wide grin.
“Bird leader to fledglings. You can come out from under them there rocks, children. Coast is clear and Daddy is about to take you on an egg hunt.”
A babble of confused voices came from the communication panel speaker.
“One at a time!”
“What about those foggers?”
Kurt chuckled. “Tell them the facts of life, Zelda.”
“The facts are,” she said, her voice flat and impersonal, “that before too long you early birds are going to be able to get the worms before the worms get you.”
Collected Fiction Page 55