The Star Road

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Yeah,” said Clancy, putting on his helmet, but with the faceplate still open. “I could have used some of that shielding myself, before this.”

  “You’ve done a marvelous job, Lineman,” said Charles Li, “in resisting hobgoblin attack so far. They haven’t been able to affect you at all, no matter how exhausted you’ve become. That will be going in my report, too. Well—good luck! And remember, head back the way you came.”

  Li reached out to shake hands. But, just at that moment, Clancy remembered something.

  “Plotch!” he said. “I’ve got to take Plotch on in with me! He’ll need medical attention.”

  “I’m afraid it’s too late for medical attention.” Li shook his head sharply. “Your teammate is dead.”

  “No, he isn’t!” insisted Clancy. “You don’t understand. There was a cryogenic unit in his suit.”

  “Yes, I know all about that,” Li interrupted, “but you’re mistaken. The cryogenic unit was actually in one of the other suits. Your teammate is indeed dead. Come along, I’ll show him to you.”

  He turned and led the way once more into the corridor, the girl and Clancy following. They went down the corridor a little way and into another room with a single bunk in it. On this bunk lay Plotch, in his suit, but with the faceplate open and unfrosted; and with his hands folded on his chest. His face had the stiff, powdered and rouged look of a body that has been embalmed.

  “You see?” said Li, after a moment. “I sympathize with you. But your friend is quite dead; and carrying him, you might not have the strength to make it to your ship. You can leave him safely to us to be taken care of.” Clancy stared at Plotch, he did not believe Li. He thought he detected a slight rise and fall of Plotch’s chest, under his coveralls, which were now as clean and pressed as Clancy’s own.

  But cleverly, Clancy saw the futility of arguing with the powerful Head of the R. and E. Service. Clancy nodded his head and went back out into the corridor; he began to fasten up his faceplate.

  “Don’t bother to show me out,” he said, grinning. “I can handle the airlock by myself.”

  “Good luck, then,” said the mustached man. He and the girl shook hands with him and then went off down the corridor, around a bend of it, and disappeared. Clancy turned and walked heavily to the airlock entrance, walked into it, waited a second, then turned and tiptoed back into the corridor and back up to the room in which Plotch lay.

  Even thawed out in his suit, Plotch was a heavy load to get up from the bunk, but Clancy closed his faceplate and got him up in his arms in the same awkward, front-carrying position in which he had first tried to carry the other away from the smashed flitter. Carrying Plotch, he tiptoed back out into the corridor into the airlock and cycled the lock open. Once outside, with the airlock’s outer door closed behind him, he started tiptoeing off toward a sunlight-blazoned patch of clouds, which was only an hour or two above horizon. He was almost sure it was nearly sunset and that he was still headed in his original direction.

  As he went, the weight of Plotch forced him down off his toes, to walk flat-footedly. Slowly, Plotch seemed to gain heaviness, and tremendous weariness began to flood back into Clancy. He was dreadfully thirsty. But when he gave in at last to temptation and sucked on the water tube in his helmet, only a little raspy gasp of moisture-laden air came through his mouth. Somehow, although he could not remember doing it, he must have emptied his reserve water supply. But he could have sworn that there had been some liquid still in reserve.

  However, there was no help for him now. As if in compensation, he made the discovery that Plotch had frozen stiff once more in the same old position. Almost without thought, he maneuvered the frozen body back up on his helmet and shoulders in the same position in which he had carried it so far and tottered on toward the red, glaring patch of sunlight-illumined cloud before him.

  His head swam. With every step, the efforts of moving seemed to grow greater. But now he had no strength left, even for the process of reason. He did not know exactly why he was carrying Plotch, with such great effort, toward the sunset; and it was too great an effort to reason it out. All he had strength for was to plod onward, one foot after another, one foot after another. . . .

  Several times it seemed to him that he passed out, or went to sleep on his feet. But when he woke up he was still walking. . . .

  Finally, he had lost all contact with his body and its strange desire to carry a frozen Plotch into the sunset. He stood as if apart from it in his mind and watched with a detached and uncurious amazement as that body staggered on, tilting precariously now and then under its burden, but never quite going down, while the landscape danced about it, one moment being rocky plain—the next a fantastic, low-walled city thronged with hobgoblins—the next a dusty African plain where elephants fled before hunters in a wheeled cart. . . .

  He was still walking when the sun went down. And after that he remembered nothing . . . when he finally came to again, it was to a fuzzy, unreal state. He was lying on some flat surface and a body was bending over him; but the features in the face of the body danced so that he could not identify whoever it was. But, in spite of the unreality of it all, the smells were hard and familiar—the interior stink of a Line transmit ship, the smell of his own bunk aboard it, a mingled odor of men and grease.

  VII

  “He’ll be all right,” a familiar voice said above him. It came from the figure with the mixed-up features, but it was the voice of Jeph Wasca, his Team Captain.

  “Plotch?” Clancy managed to croak.

  “What?” The blurry figure with the dancing features bent down close to Clancy’s face.

  “Plotch. . . .” Clancy felt the strength draining out of him. After a few seconds, the figure straightened up, the dancing face withdrawing.

  “I can’t understand you. Tell me later, then,” said Jeph’s voice, brusquely. “I haven’t got time to talk to you now, Clance. You go to sleep. When you wake up, you’ll be back Earthside.”

  The indefinite figure withdrew, and all the fuzzy lights, colors, sounds and smells surrounding Clancy whirled themselves into a funnel that drew him down into dark unconsciousness.

  When he woke this third time, he was indeed—as Jeph had promised—Earthside. He could tell it, if no way else, by the added pull of gravity, holding him down harder upon the bed in which he lay. The room he opened his eyes upon was plainly a hospital room, and there was a bottle of glucose solution with a tube leading to a needle inserted in his wrist.

  He felt as if he had spent half a year locked up in a packing case with a pack of angry bobcats. Where he was not sore, he ached; and he did not feel as if he had strength enough to move the little finger of one hand. He lay for a while, placidly and contentedly watching the featureless white ceiling above him, and then a nurse came in. She put a thermometer sensor-strip into his mouth briefly, and then took it out again to examine it. Once his lips were free, he spoke to her.

  “You’re a real nurse?” he asked.

  She laughed. She had freckles on her short nose, and they crowded together when she laughed out loud.

  “They don’t let imitations work in this ward,” she said. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Terrible,” he said. “But just as long as I don’t try to move, I feel fine.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “You just go on not trying to move. That’s doctor’s orders for you anyway. Do you think you’re up to having some visitors later on this afternoon?”

  “Visitors?” he asked.

  “Your Line Team Captain,” she said. “Maybe some other people.”

  “Sure,” Clancy said. She went out; and Clancy fell asleep.

  He was awakened by someone speaking gently in his ear and a light touch on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and looked up into the face of Jeph standing at his bedside with another man—a tall man standing a little behind him.

  “How are you feeling, Clance?” Jeph asked.

  “Fine,” answered Clancy sleepily. His
fingers groped automatically for the bed-control lever at the bedside and closed upon it. He set the little motors whirring to raise him up into half-sitting position. “The nurse said you might be in to see me.”

  “I’ve been waiting to see you,” said Jeph. “Got somebody here to see you.” The man behind Jeph moved forward; but Clancy’s eyes were all on Jeph.

  “Plotch?” Clancy asked.

  “He’s going to be all right,” Jeph answered. “They’ve got him defrosted and on his way back to normal—thanks to you.”

  “Don’t thank me!” exploded Clancy. “Jeph, I can’t take that guy any more! If I have to take any more of him, I’ll kill him!”

  “Relax,” said Jeph. “I’ve known that for some time. I made up my mind some months back that one of you had to leave the Team.”

  “One of us—” Clancy went rigid, under the covers of the bed.

  “Plotch’s being transferred.”

  Clancy relaxed.

  “Thanks,” he muttered.

  “Don’t thank me,” said Jeph. “You earned it. You saved all our necks out there on XN-4010—and more. That’s why the Commandant’s here to talk to you.”

  Clancy’s gaze shot past Jeph for the first time; and the tall man stepped right up to the bedside. It was Janssen all right, with his gray, bristling little military mustache, just as Clancy remembered him. Janssen smiled stiffly down at Clancy.

  Clancy’s nerves, abraded by his sessions with the hobgoblins, took sudden alarm.

  “What about?” he demanded warily.

  “Let’s get you briefed first,” said Janssen sharply. He pulled up a chair and sat down, kicking another chair over to Jeph, who also sat down.

  “Sorry to put you through your paces like this,” Janssen said, not sounding sorry at all, “just the minute you get your eyes open. But when the time’s ripe, the time’s ripe. We’ve got someone else due to meet us here; and he may want to ask you some questions. I’m going to be asking you some questions for his benefit, in any case; and what I want you to do is just speak up. Give us both straight answers, just the way they come to you. You’ve got that?”

  Clancy nodded again, warily.

  “All right. Now, to get you briefed on the situation,” said Janssen. “First, it seems you ran into something new out there on XN-4010. That planet’s got an actual sentient life form, which exists as something like clouds of free electrons. Beyond that, we don’t know much about them, except for three things; none of which we’d have known if you hadn’t managed to carry Plotch on foot all the way back to the ship. One-”

  Janssen held up a knobby forefinger to mark the point.

  “—They can move material objects up to a certain size, with a great deal of effort—as in that shower of rocks you remember,” he said. “But evidently it’s not easy for them. Also, they can affect human thinking processes—up to a point. Again, though, it’s not easy for them. For one thing, any kind of material envelope, like the body of a ship, or a flitter, or a suit like you were wearing, shields them out to a certain extent, depending on its thickness. For another, it seems they only become really effective if the human is the way you were, near the end of your walk—in a highly exhausted condition; the kind of condition where lack of sleep or extreme effort might have brought you to the point of hallucinations, anyway. Third—and most important—they were trying to kill off all the men of your Team. It seems they were able to understand that with the drone dismantled, the ship unmanned and the terminal not yet fully built and operative, there’d be no way for another ship out to XN-4010. In fact, the chances of our hitting the planet on a blind-transmit once more, let alone getting another drone safely landed on it, were microscopic. For some reason they didn’t want us to know about their existence; and that suggests that maybe they wanted to make preparations of some kind—either for defense or offense against the human race.”

  He paused.

  “Lucky for us,” he said brusquely to Clancy, “you frustrated them.”

  “Just by bringing Plotch in?” Clancy demanded. There was something disproportionate in all this. He did not trust Janssen at all.

  “That’s right, Clance,” said Jeph. “There’s something you don’t know. If you’d decided to sit down out there and wait for rescue, you’d have dried up to dust inside your suit before any rescue came.”

  Clancy stared at the Team Captain.

  “All but one flitter and two-man crew,” said Jeph slowly,

  “were out on jobs—and the closest one out was farther away from the ship than you and Plotch were. Clance, every one of those flitters was smashed by rock showers, and its crew killed or stranded.”

  VIII

  Clancy swallowed for the moment forgetting the Line Commandant.

  “Who . . he could not finish the question. He only stared at Jeph with bright eyes. Jeph answered slowly, but without any attempt at emotion.

  “Fletch,” the Team Leader said, “Jim, Wally, Pockets, Ush and Pappy.”

  Clancy lay still for a moment, gazing at the wall of the room opposite. Then he looked back at Jeph.

  “What kind of replacements are we getting?” he asked. He looked at Janssen challengingly.

  “The best,” answered the Commandant. “And I’ll keep that promise. Again, because of you and your bringing Plotch in on foot.”

  “I still don’t see what that did—” Clancy broke off, suddenly thoughtful.

  “Now you start to see it, don’t you?” said Jeph. “There were three of us and one flitter left in the spaceship. Twelve men and six flitters—including you and Plotch, all the other flitters and men we had—were out on work location. All of them overdue, and none of them back. What was I going to do? I could not risk sending out the two men I had left for fear the same thing would happen to them—they might not come back. On the other hand, without the Star-points all finished, there was no way we could transmit the ship back Earthside. The only thing was for the three of us to stay put and keep the ship powered. We couldn’t transmit or receive, but with luck we could act as a beacon for another blind drone transmit from Earth—once Earth figured we were in trouble.”

  Jeph paused. Clancy slowly nodded.

  “Then you came staggering in, with your load of frozen Plotch,” said Jeph. “We shoved Plotch into the freeze-chamber and tried to find out from you what had happened. You weren’t up to talking consciously; but I pumped you full of parasympathetic narcos, and you babbled in your sleep. You babbled it all. Once I knew what I was up against, I was able to risk my last flitter and my last two men to go out on quick rescue missions to each of the work-points. After that we went out with the men who were left for only a couple of hours on the job at a time, until the last Star-point was finished and we could transmit ourselves back here.”

  Clancy nodded again. He was thinking of Jim, Wally, and all the rest who had not come back, looking out the window of his room at the green hospital grounds outside with unfocused eyes. Someone else had just come into the room; but Clancy was too full of feeling to bother to look to see who it was. He was aware of Jeph and the Commandant turning briefly to glance toward the newcomer, then they were back looking at him.

  “All right,” Janssen said grimly, with one eye still on whoever had just come in. “Let’s have your attention Lineman. There’s a question some people may be wanting to ask you. That’s how you were able to see through what the hobgoblins were trying to do to you, in making you leave Plotchin and go off in the wrong direction; once they’d gotten you to hallucinating about a new experimental type ship that didn’t need the Line to shift from Earth out to XN-4010?”

  Clancy scowled down at the white bedspread.

  “Hell,” he grumbled, “I didn’t see through it! I mean I didn’t start adding up reasons until later. Like the rescue ship landing right beside me; and the people on her using our Team’s

  own word, for the ‘hobgoblins’; when they hadn’t heard me calling them that myself.”

  “But
you didn’t leave Plotchin the way they wanted you to. And you didn’t take their word for it that you were headed wrong for your ship,” said Janssen.

  “Of course not!” Clancy growled. “But it was just because I felt there was something wrong about it all; and I wasn’t going to leave Plotch behind, as long as there was a chance they were lying about his being dead.”

  “All right. Wait a minute.” It was the newcomer to the room speaking. He stepped close to the bedside. “Wasn’t I given to understand you hated this teammate of yours—this, uh, Plotchin?”

  Clancy looked up and goggled. He was gazing at a short man with a round face, black hair and a little black mustache. The man of his hallucination, only this time he was real: Charles Li, the head of Research and Experimentation Service.

  Li’s voice was not as deep as it had been in Clancy’s hallucination—in fact there was almost a querulous note in it. But he sounded decisive enough.

  “Why—I still hate him!” snapped Clancy. “I hate his guts! But that didn’t mean I was going to leave him out there!”

  He stared at Li. Li stared back down at him.

  “I guess you haven’t heard the latest interpretation of that, Charlie,” Janssen said stiffly to Li, and the head of R. and E. turned about to face the Commandant. “Our Service psychologists came up with a paper on it just a couple of hours ago— I’ll see you get a copy of it by the end of the day.”

  Li frowned suddenly at Janssen.

  “Never mind,” Li said, “just give me the gist of it.”

  “It’s simple enough,” said Janssen. “The immaterial life forms on XN-4010 got control of Clancy’s conscious mind. But the only way they could make him hallucinate was by telling him what he ought to see and then letting him drag the parts to build the hallucination out of his own mind and memory. So while they had control of him pretty well, consciously, they never did get down into the part of him where his unconscious reflexes live. And did you know that team loyalty lives down among the instincts in some men, Charlie?”