The Creatures of Man

by Howard L. Myers

"Orrbaune's switching on immediately," Thydan reported. Gweanvin kept her attention spread over the interface glow, watching for any change.

  Now her fingers were wiring the device with strands of superconduct equipped with ready-weld tips. The two loose ends were then attached to insulated probe-needles.

  The interface was beginning to alter in an area near its center. Something was happening there. Gweanvin moved in tightly on this area. Yes, it really was something like a push coming from the other side . . .

  Her hands had left the finished device on the console and had picked up the two sheets of warprag. Her body had stood up and was walking toward the door.

  . . . and in a way the push resembled a magnetic field. It was swinging the fine-texture fields into consistent orientation. But how was it doing this, specifically?

  Her fingers separated the two sheets of warprag, and her hands slapped the exposed active surfaces into position, overlapping the edge of the door and the door frame. Absently, like a well-rehearsed piano player with a wandering mind, she watched her hands press firmly against the sheets, imbedding their grip. Only a powerful smashing could force the door from the balcony side while those warprags remained in place.

  . . . Ah! She was getting it! Monte was coming through! And for the instant he was too occupied opening up the interface to notice what lay beyond. Gweanvin watched him work. She saw how it was done . . .

  Her body had returned to the console. Her hands picked up the probe-needle contacts of her device and plunged them through the flesh under her ribs on her right side, seeking and finding the terminals of her main power pack imbedded there.

  . . . Anger! A flash of anger now and she would have the job finished. But emotions, while controllable, work more slowly than clean thought. The split-second required to work up a burst of rage was too long. Monte spotted her. Damn! Her rage flooded out in a quick spurt and was gone. And so, of course, was contact with Monte . . .

  * * *

  "Security break!" Thydan was yelling. "It's Gweanvin Oster! I caught a thought from Monte! The Bauble's dark!"

  Gweanvin grinned as she pointed her device at the wall of her office opposite the door and activated it. A thin, superhot laser-beam flashed from the zercrown, cutting a curving slash in the wall as the device kicked in her hand. For an instant her shieldscreen turned on automatically to protect her from the intense backflare. She had pulled out of the ruined Bauble, but was keeping a light contact with its sound-sensitive surface segments which, not being destructible by emotional overload, were still functioning.

  "I'm going after her," came a grim bark from Marvis, as Gweanvin re-aimed and made another curving cut through the wall. The curves came together at two points, and a two-foot-wide slice of metal-mass teetered for an instant and fell outward.

  Gweanvin had semi-inerted and slipped through the opening long before the chunk of wall reached the ground. She streaked upward from Narva as fast as atmospheric resistance against her shield screen would permit.

  "Alert the Guard!" came Thydan's voice. "She's out of the building and getting away!"

  "What happened to the Bauble?" came the rumble of Falor Dample.

  "How should I know?" Thydan returned bitterly. "Among those major contributions of hers you were just praising was a twist she didn't bother to tell you about! I'm trying to get a report relayed from Monte. Maybe he knows what happened."

  Gweanvin allowed herself six seconds of unswerving upward flight before taking evasive action. She figured on that much leeway before the Guardsmen could mount an effective response to the alert at upper-atmospheric levels. Out in open space, which she was fast approaching, they could react quicker, but so could she. She kept her laser device ready for use. It was clumsily small as a hand weapon and wasteful of energy, so low in resistance as to act as a virtual short-circuit across her power implant. It was no match for a zerburst pistol, though it worked on the same principle. She hoped she could get away without using it again.

  "Monte says she knows how to work the interface!" came Thydan's alarmed voice. "And she may be listening to us! Let's get out of this room!"

  4

  Gweanvin pulled away from the Bauble completely. It wasn't a good idea to enter warpflight with the ego-field lagging behind the body, anyway.

  She tongued her toothmike to her "father's" frequency. "Hey, Pops!"

  "Hello, Rayeal," the reply murmured in her left ear.

  "Cover's blown, Pops. Out."

  "Thanks, Gweanny. Out."

  That warning would give her "family" members a chance to scram before Lontastan counterespionage teams closed in on them. But she was the one the heat was really on. That report relayed from Monte to Thydan would make it plain that she had information she must not be allowed to carry to the Primgranese Commonality. The Guards had probably been ordered to shoot on sight . . .

  One of them did. Just as she was passing the forty-mile altitude level the flare from his zerburst pistol sparked less than three miles to her left. She caught a quick glimpse of the ionized trail of the beam leading to the flare. It hadn't missed her by more than fifty feet and wouldn't have missed at all if she hadn't made an evasive zag less than a second earlier.

  She risked a mini-warp—dangerous in the atmospheric fringe—and came out of it seventy miles higher, with body and ego-field still together. Her detector immediately revealed half a dozen Guardsmen within range. She had warped into the middle of a platoon! She quickly warped again, and came out to see a spectacular display of flares blossom around the spot she had just vacated.

  Nobody was close enough this time to get a good shot at her, but her detector showed the sky was now full of Guardsmen, above, below, and on all sides. This was a time to scoot, she decided, not to stand and fight. She would have to risk going into warp and staying there.

  She did so . . . and got away with it. No body/ego-field dissociation that came when one warped through a too-dense wisp of gas or dust, wisps that were always drifting unpredictably about the near vicinity of stars.

  Now the sun of Narva was shrinking to a pin-point and she was safely through the gauntlet of Guardsmen—thanks to the fact that the alarm had not gone out until she had escaped from the Gordeen building and was on her way. Two seconds later and she would not have made it.

  She would be pursued, of course, and Guardsmen from other Lontastan worlds would be swarming out to try to intercept her. But interstellar space was vast, and she possessed less mass than any of the Guardsmen—neobarbs were all big men—and therefore had a higher sustainable warp velocity. She'd be hard to either catch or head off.

  Nevertheless, she knew she could not make it to the Commonality without help. The necessity of cutting her way out of the Gordeen building had made that impossible. Those two blasts from her makeshift laser knife, brief though they were, had drained an awesome amount of power from her pack. Those packs weren't designed to be stingy; often a person in an emergency needed plenty of juice in a hurry, and a pack would supply current at the rate needed . . . while it had current to supply.

  But on a short-circuit discharge, and especially through superconduct wiring, an implant pack could be drained completely in ten seconds or less. Gweanvin's pack had not been fully charged to begin with, and had been on short-circuit for a good three seconds. It was, she guessed, at something less than half capacity now.

  And the Commonality was a long way off. Narva was located at the far side of the Lontastan Federation, and that put her home ground some twenty thousand light-years away, with nothing but unfriendly territory in between. Perhaps she had power for two-thirds of that distance.

  There was, however, no point in heading in the other direction, into the unsettled region of the galaxy behind the Lontastan worlds: That region had been explored for quite some distance. There were planets on which she could play a female Robinson Crusoe for the rest of her life, but that was all.

  There was just one destination within reach that made any sense—the Halstaynia
n Independency.

  The Independency lay roughly between but somewhat to one side of both the Federation and the Commonality, and bulged on the Federation side in the general direction of Orrbaune. It was not a participant in the econo-war, having been settled by people who viewed competitiveness with distaste, as a childish and demeaning habit man should have given up long ago.

  Gweanvin shared the majority view of Halstaynians—that they were somewhat less than half alive and getting more so every year. But when somebody from the Commonality or Federation went into the Independency, which was not often, the Halstaynians were friendly enough—if in an absurdly condescending manner. And from there she certainly shouldn't have any trouble getting her pack recharged and returning to the Commonality.

  The important point was that she had the power to reach the Independency.

  After a moment of consideration, she threw away her laser device. It was her only excuse for a weapon, but it was also mass, and if she made it out of Lontastan territory, she would do so by running, not by fighting.

  Next she considered her clothing, but her flimsy blouse and shorts really had too little mass to make discarding them worthwhile. The same was true of her sandals. As for her belt and pouch, they had mass but could not be parted with. She had to have something in which to keep her food pills, if nothing else. However, she went through the pouch and threw away everything in it she could possibly do without.

  After that she broke out of warp momentarily, got herself coordinated on a star beyond which was an entry through the gas cloud banked on this side of the Independency, and returned to warpflight on the new course.

  Then there was nothing to do but relax into dormancy from pill-time to pill-time, for the several standard days the journey would take. And despite the all-out search the Lontastans were making, this routine went undisturbed.

  * * *

  The gas clouds that lay between the Halstayne Independency and Earth accounted for the Independency's existence. As humanity began spreading out among the stars, forming the colonial societies that eventually became the Primgranese Commonality and the Lontastan Federation, the explorers moved along the edges of the clouds without attempting to penetrate. Much later, when gas-free passageways through the clouds were found and charted, neither the Commonality nor the Federation saw much potential in the hard-to-reach handful of habitable worlds the clouds concealed.

  These worlds went more or less by default to the individuals and small groups who, for various reasons, wanted no part in the econo-war. Gweanvin had never felt much affinity for any such drop-out philosophy; in fact, she had never visited the Independency before. But it was part of her job to know her way about the inhabited portion of the galaxy. She had learned the charts of the passageways through the clouds, and the locations and descriptions of the habitable worlds within.

  Also, she knew enough of the down-hill history of the Independency to have some idea of what to expect on those worlds. No more than a century ago, when fair numbers of people were still moving into the Independency, it was a fairly successful society. But of late the movement had been in the other direction. The more capable Halstaynians were realizing that a society that forbade the competitive spirit was, in essence, a denial of the basic nature of man . . . of life in general, for that matter. And being unrealistic, that kind of society had to either change or fall.

  The Halstaynians who could see this flaw for what it was usually found their personal solutions to it by immigrating to the Federation or Commonality, rather than staying home and pushing revolutionary reform against an opposition composed principally of a formidable mass of public inertia. As a result, the Independency as a whole had rusticated. It no longer even tried to keep up technologically with the econo-warring societies. What technology it had once had was falling into disuse. The population was dwindling.

  All of which was all right with Gweanvin. If that was the way the Halstaynians wanted it, she mused, that was the way they could have it. All she asked was a simple recharge of her power pack—and surely that much technology was still left.

  She was more than halfway through the series of short, zigzagging warps required to follow the charted passage through the cloud when she felt a warning twinge in her side. The power pack was advising her it was ninety per cent drained. She grunted. But at least she knew now precisely how much power she had left, and how stingy in its use she would have to be.

  No corner-cutting was advisable going through the passage, however. When she came into view of the Halstaynian suns she calculated she had enough power left for one sizeable or two short jumps.

  Okay, which planet was it to be? Bernswa was reportedly the most advanced Halstaynian world but unless she had greatly underestimated her remaining power it was out of reach. And Felis, with a so-so reputation, was barely within range. The only world that could be called close was Arbora, which was so far gone that the Halstaynians had blithely designated it a wilderness preserve nearly fifty years ago.

  Gweanvin ate a food pill while she pondered the matter. This was a crucial decision. If she made the wrong choice, she could wind up stranded in space . . . and the Halstaynians might not have a functioning space-rescue service these days. Or, if she went to Arbora, she could be stranded there, too, if there were no functioning power supplies.

  She needed more information before deciding. She tuned her comm receiver to the open-broadcast channels and drifted in space for several hours while she listened attentively for a few useful facts. There was little to hear except music, most of it ancient, interspersed with trivial gab. But there were a couple of mentions of persons on Arbora, which assured her that world wasn't totally deserted.

  In any event, she decided it almost had to be Arbora, because of the possibility that she was overestimating her remaining power. That could be the only world actually within reach.

  She was making the painstaking calculations needed for a precise warp when a bogie flicked into existence, a small glowing spot on the detection field surrounding her head. Whoever it was couldn't have been more than a thousand miles away, she saw, suggesting that it was someone who had followed her through the cloud.

  A Lontastan agent on her tail? Very likely, indeed.

  Gweanvin had gone full inert while listening to her comm, to save a trickle of power. Thus, she would not be as visible to the bogie as the bogie was to her. In fact, she might easily be mistaken for a chunk of space debris, so long as she remained inert.

  She played possum and watched. A couple of minutes passed, and the bogie flicked out, the person having warped off. But others might be following, so she continued to watch.

  Nobody else appeared, which was a bit puzzling. Was that bogie a single Lontastan agent, playing a lone hand on a hunch? Well, if so, Gweanvin herself had a hunch who the agent would be.

  She had left clues enough behind to give somebody as sharp as Marvis Jans a clear hint of what might have happened. Marvis would know that she hadn't blasted her way out of the Gordeen building with a zerburst pistol, for the obvious reason that as a security measure hardly any such weapons were allowed inside the building. Marvis would have accounted for those weapons quickly. Then she would have checked (if she hadn't already) to be sure the building's energy outlets were fused against short-circuit overdraws, also as a security measure.

  And Marvis would therefore conclude that the likelihood was very good that she had used her power pack implant, for lack of any other sufficient source, to blast through the wall. A little more checking would reveal how long it had been since Gweanvin had gotten a recharge. Marvis could then guess she would have to head for the Independency as the only non-enemy territory within reach.

  But it would be a guess, not a sure thing. And it would be like Marvis—or like herself if their positions were reversed—to play the guess on her own.

  Would Marvis investigate Arbora first?

  Perhaps. The agent's movements were not predictable. She could see no percentage in delayin
g planetfall any longer. The sooner she was on the surface of a world, the sooner she could make herself impossible to find.

  * * *

  She warped for Arbora . . . and missed. Only by some two hundred thousand miles, but that was enough to require a mini-warp approach jump. This brought her within five hundred miles of the surface. There she went full inert and let Arbora's gravity bring her down, knowing she would be less noticeable that way than in a semi-inert approach, and also would use less energy.

  When she hit air her shield screen reacted automatically, protecting her from friction and heat, and spreading into a wing conformation to slow her fall and allow her to steer. Not that it seemed to matter where she landed . . . all was field and forest below, with no indications of where the people might be.

  She angled toward a small grassy valley as she neared the surface, waiting until she was down to one hundred feet before trying to go semi-inert to soften the landing. Nothing happened when she did. She came down with a jarring thump, slowed only by ground-effect compression of the air between her shield and the surface at the last instant.