Oh, yes. Marvis would be fine. And so would her baby.
Pregnant!
By about two weeks, as near as Gweanvin could guess.
Oh, my, what a fine country bumpkin Holm Ocanon had turned out to be!
"Marvis," she said.
The woman roused slightly. "Uh-huh."
"You'll be okay in a little while. I removed the arrow. I'd better run along now."
Marvis managed to open her eyes and stare questioningly up at her. "Where are you going?"
"To the Commonality, naturally. I have a report to make, in case you've forgotten."
"Uh. See you again?"
"Not if I can help it. So long."
Gweanvin lifted off. She decided not to bother retrieving the bow she had left back by the rill-cliff. But before warping out of the Arbora system, she paused in thought. Despite what the pregnancy of Marvis told her, the point remained that she had promised to return in about three years . . .
She tongued her toothmike to nonspecific frequency and called, "Holm Ocanon?"
Silence.
"Speak up, Holm," she snapped. "I've caught on."
"Hi, Gweanny," his voice sounded in her left ear. "I'm sorry."
"I'll just bet you are!" she scolded, narrowing down to his comm frequency. "Quite a set-up you arranged for yourself. Not that I really blame you of course. Males of our species probably have polygamous instincts, just like homo sap, I suppose. Too bad for you your scheme didn't work. Wow, how you had it made!"
"Uh . . . how's Marvis?"
"Oh, don't fret! She's out cold at the moment, but she'll come limping back in a few hours."
"Does she know as much as you do?"
"Not from anything I said. But you won't gain anything from your masquerade now, Holm, so why not be honest with her?"
"Maybe I should," he replied glumly. "How did you catch on?"
"From her being pregnant. How stupid I was, admiring your woodsmanship! Wild chicken nests, indeed! What farmer did you buy those eggs from, Holm? Did you pick up that bow at a sporting-goods shop in Lopat, or did you have to hop on semi-inert to a bigger town to find it? Maybe a town halfway around the planet from where I was stuck, but close to the nest you shared with Marvis? Did you have to go all the way to Bernswa to pick up that recharger? Damn! No wonder that map you drew had me mired in bogs and scratched in briar thickets! The least you could have done was to survey it at a lower altitude!"
"Gweanny, I set things up like this because I'd given it years of thought, along with a lot of patient waiting for the right opportunity. Try to understand, won't you?" he urged. "We're a new species, too new to know what we really are, or even have a name for ourselves. We and our children should develop as much as possible on our own, not as members of the econo-war society of humanity. We should find our own paths and goals, Gweanny, as we can on a world like Arbora. Don't you see the reasonableness of that?"
"I decided earlier today not to be reasonable," she replied. "In any event, I don't see the reasonableness of starting our species off with personal relationships based on deception. Damn it, Holm, I wouldn't treat anybody but a Lontastan in the tricky, scheming way you've handled Marvis and me! I wouldn't . . ."
She paused as another light dawned on her. "But of course, you'd be good at things like that, as a former frontliner! Were you Primgran or Lontastan?"
"Primgran," he grunted.
"I'll be interested in looking up your personnel file, when I get home," she mused. "I want to see how you doctored your genetic chart to conceal yourself. And how you managed to keep tabs on Marvis and me, without us ever dreaming you existed! Very cleverly, I'm sure. You had to be bright indeed to anticipate by several hours that she and I might come to Arbora, so you could be on hand to welcome us separately. Well, so long, Holm. Fess up to Marvis, and have plenty of kids."
"You'll be back, Gweanny," he told her.
"Don't count on it."
"It pleases you now to be unreasonable, but in the long run you won't be unrealistic." He chuckled. "And the reality is that I'm the only available male."
"Don't count on that, either. You concealed yourself. Maybe another is somewhere around, doing the same. Not likely, maybe, but even so I'd prefer to spend my whole life waiting for him rather than be your second-stringer."
"I don't understand you," he complained.
"My unreasonableness. If you understood that, you would have anticipated my unreasonable decision to decoy Marvis away from Arbora when I left. If I hadn't tried that, I wouldn't have gotten wise to you."
"Well," he said confidently, "jealousy on your part was hardly expected. And, of course, feeling that way, you'll surely return."
"Meaning I love you?" she sneered. "Hah! If I did, do you think I'd fret over competition from Marvis? I'd just blow a hole through her! I was trying to prevent a competition I didn't care about enough to win! Love you? Hell, Holm, I don't even like you!"
With that she warped for home. She had meant what she said, but, golly, how she was going to need a male when she reached Marvis' age!
* * *
Hours later, and far from Arbora, a voice piped in her left ear: "Nice going, Gweanvin Oster."
"Huh? Who's that?"
No response.
Who could it have been? It had sounded like the voice of a boy, perhaps twelve years old. But what would a kid be doing way out here, and how could he have known of her?
She guessed the answers, of course, long before she knew them for sure nearly a decade later. By then the boyish voice had deepened and matured.
Gweanvin never returned to Arbora. Her children did.
Questor
Morgan's position in the fighting formation of the Lontastan raid brigade was well back, but on what would be the Earthward flank. Certainly he was not out of harm's way, but neither was he particularly in it. It was important that, when the Primgranese defenders studied the records of the coming skirmish, Morgan should not look special in any way.
His left ear hissed softly as the ultralight carrier came on, and he heard the voice of the brigade's navigator: "Delay in warp exit, three point four two seven seconds. Reset cut-outs for delay in warp exit of three point four two seven seconds. . . . Exit now due in eighty-five seconds. Prediction: Combat will commence four point five seconds after exit."
Morgan reset the timing of his warp cut-out and twisted his head for a moment to gaze toward the navigator's position. He couldn't see him, of course. The distance between the two men was something over twenty-three hundred miles, and also normal vision was of scant use at superlight velocities.
But he looked anyway as he thought half sympathetically of the navigator, as burdened with equipment as an ancient was with clothing. Morgan glanced down at his own well-muscled body, bare and exposed to space except for his black minishorts, his weapons belt, and his low boots.
For an instant he entertained himself with his daydream of encountering a famed ancient, mysteriously transported forward in time about a thousand years from the Early Interstellar Age, back when men still traveled in ships. How astonished that worthy would be to see almost naked men zipping routinely about the galaxy! And how puzzled by the microchemical mysteries of a modern life-support system!
The thought made him aware of his breathing, and of the pounding of his heart which was speeding up in anticipation of the coming battle in spite of his efforts to think of other things. He inhaled deeply and slowly, conscious of the oxygen and nitrogen coming out of combination with the chemicals lining certain nasal passages to fill his lungs. Then he exhaled, and other doped surfaces, mostly in the lower throat, quickly absorbed the gases and almost as quickly broke down the carbon dioxide. After three breaths, he would be using the same oxygen over again.
Meanwhile, he had not neglected to draw both of his zerburst guns and wave them about a bit to loosen his arm muscles. His comrades of the brigade, randomly spaced with an average separation of fifteen hundred yards, were doing the same thing. M
ost of these men would fight the Primgranese Commonality defenders of Earth for fourteen long, furious seconds . . . and probably live to tell about it.
Morgan expected to be out of the fight within six seconds.
* * *
The brigade made warp exit less than a million miles out from Earth, and automatically went semi-inert. A quick glance at the ancestral planet assured Morgan that the navigator hadn't blundered; the brigade's trajectory was carrying it Earthward in a slanting, curving power dive that would peri at maybe two thousand miles from the surface.
And the defenders were coming in a swarm! Satellite bases were ejecting Primgranese Commonality guardsmen like slugs from antique machine guns, precisely aimed to intercept and parallel the course of the raiders of the Lontastan Federation.
The battle was quickly joined. Zerburst terminals flowered in deadly beauty in both formations as the first shots were exchanged. Pale purple lances of light . . . the beams along which zerburst energy poured from gun to terminal point . . . criss-crossed the narrowing gap between the formations.
Morgan got off a few shots in rapid succession, less conscious of his aim than his position relative to the rapidly swelling Earth. Also, he needed a terminal for cover—one not close enough to terminate him, but one sufficiently near that, with luck on the side of the Primgranese gunner, some vital area of his life-support could conceivably be knocked out.
He felt the glare on his back of the terminal he needed two seconds before the time to make his move. That time came.
Instantly he went full inert and tumbled Earthward from the raider formation, a pinwheel of flailing arms and legs that quickly spread-eagled as if his pressor system were giving way and exposing him to the effects of space vacuum. In fact, the pressors did weaken sufficiently to assure the spread-eagling did not look faked.
That far, all was according to plan. But then came the unexpected . . . the statistically possible but improbable accident.
He was holed by a zerburst lance. It could have been fired by friend or foe, and could not have been aimed at him. It terminated too many hundreds of miles away for him to pick out its flare among all the others. He felt the intense burning pain as it drilled a neat quarter-inch hole in his side, and looked down to see blood spraying out of him.
His life-support went to work on the injury immediately. Localized pressor intensity stopped the blood loss, and internal reagents threw up sturdy walls of pseudo-tissues to contain organ ruptures for the hour that would be needed for normal healing.
But that lance of energy had punctured more than human flesh. From the way the injury felt, Morgan suspected it had also holed a major life-support packet carried in that part of his body.
Which could prove disastrous.
* * *
When he hit the upper fringes of the atmosphere he discovered what the damage was. His re-entry field came on full, taking up the heat of impact with the air and braking his fall. But he did not go semi-inert for even an instant! The inertial unit had been smashed.
It could have been worse, he told himself. With his re-entry field fully extended for maximum atmospheric retardation he could slow for a reasonably soft landing. But he was going to take a battering from G-forces on the way down.
At least his life-support wouldn't let him black out, and would give brain damage priority attention. He had to remain alert to pick out a landing site where he might expect some privacy for a while, since he was going to be in bad shape.
His target area was in the northern Rockies, on the dawn line and just breaking out of Earth's unmodified winter season. That area was, perhaps, the key spot in the galaxy, so far as the future of humanity was concerned, but if the Primgranese suspected nothing there shouldn't be a human within eighty miles at this time of year.
At an altitude of ten miles his ionization trail began to dim as he slowed, and soon vanished. Unless there was a very close tracking antenna, the Primgranese would not be able to pinpoint the remainder of his descent. He tilted himself to slant his fall slightly north of vertical as soon as he picked out the place he wanted to ground.
It was at the south end of a high valley, on a slope where snow lingered in—he hoped—a heavy drift. He wanted the snow not for softness but for concealment, because his body was overwhelming him with painful distress signals. He was quite sure that, once he was on the ground, he would not be able to move about, seeking cover, for quite some time.
He killed his re-entry field a split-second before hitting, to avoid making a broad dent in the snow. There was an icy crust on top, which shattered easily with his impact, and his body came to a halt several feet below the surface. Gratefully, he blacked out.
* * *
His revival came slowly, like a drowsy awakening. For a minute he remained motionless, monitoring his body sensations and considering his position. He had been out for a little more than two hours—a dangerously long time if the Primgranese were making a serious effort to find him. Since he was still buried under the snow and not in captivity, it seemed a reasonable assumption that the Primgranese had disregarded him, thinking he was merely one more dead or dying Lontastan whose inert trajectory had happened to intercept Earth. Or at most, they had made a cursory search from the air, and given up when they found no clear trace of him, perhaps assuming that his re-entry system had failed and he had burned like a meteor in the final stage of his fall.
For the moment, then, he was probably safe.
He pushed against the weight of snow that had caved on top of him, to come to his hands and knees. Then he began wriggling and crawling, pushing his way downhill through the drift.
Finally his head contacted harder stuff, and he butted through the icy crust and into the morning sunlight. As he looked around he felt his breathing mode change, his life-support having automatically sampled the air and found it suitable—with minor nasal warming—for human respiration. Now he could smell as well as see the snow and, not many yards away, the stunted trees and early growth of grass of this high and rugged valley. Off to his left somewhere he could hear the roar of water.
He pulled himself free of the snowdrift and ate two rations from his food pouch. It was an easy, well-prepared-for task of a few seconds to modify the appearance of his boots, weapons belt, and shorts to pass for an ordinary Primgran citizen. Then he turned his attention to the scars left by the zerburst lance.
Mentally he constructed an image of the area through which the lance of energy had passed, and ran a straight line from scar to scar. The line passed through the center of the inertial control complex of the life-support packet, but touched nothing else of importance.
However, the damage done was important enough. Without inertial control, his entire transport system was of little practical use. His repulsors wouldn't raise him a millimeter off the ground against full inertia; nor, if he should manage somehow to get into space, could he go into warp.
If he hoped to get home, he would have to stun or kill a Primgranese, and take the inertial-control complex from the enemy's body.
But that could be dealt with when the opportunity arose, or when it became necessary. What he had to do now was get out of this valley and start his quest.
He walked toward the sound of water and soon came to the rushing, swollen stream, with the intention of following its course down through the southwest end of the valley. The going was difficult, at times through a solid jumble of boulders, and after a mile Morgan found his route blocked completely. The valley narrowed to a steep-walled canyon. He could neither follow the stream nor climb the wall.
For a moment he eyed the water speculatively, but it was a rolling rapid, and even with the protection of his skin-field he could be battered into a lifeless pulp if he tried swimming down it.
It was annoying indeed to be impeded this way by such petty trivialities as a minor river and a rock wall! But without inertial-control, which would let him leap over such obstacles without a thought . . . well, he would have to find another w
ay out.
He turned back upstream, found a place where he could cross the water by leaping from boulder to boulder, and began exploring along the western slope of the valley, which was free of snow and appeared less steep than the eastern side. At several promising looking spots he tried to climb, but always he was stopped by a blank stretch of rock where he could find no further holds for hands or feet.
Finally he halted, sat down on a boulder, and tried to develop a solution to his problem. In the distant past, he knew, men had climbed mountains often—perhaps because they could not fly. Mountains far higher than the walls of this valley, and steeper too. But they had used equipment of some sort, judging by pictures he had seen: ropes, and spikes which could be driven into stone.
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