Dominant Species Omnibus Edition

by David Coy

  Phil walked over to the huge window and looked up at it. From his vantage on the floor, he could watch as it bowed in like a giant rubber balloon from the enormous vacuum on the other side. As ominous as it looked, he had an odd feeling of certainty about the wall’s strength.

  Flexibility and strength, he thought, is normal and natural to the animate.

  The sound died down and Mary echoed the last of it with a deep sigh of relief. Time for the tough part. She looked briefly at Phil for support.

  She extended her hand toward the evil root ball thing. As she got close to it, the bright red center changed from red to yellow like a chromatosphere on a squid. Mary paused and wondered if that was a go-ahead signal or a warning. There was only one way to find out. She put her hand down slowly on the center and pressed. It felt like stiff meringue on a week-old pie. She felt a clear pulse of energy, like a low-voltage shock through her arm. The sensation increased as she held her hand there, but the hatch stayed closed. She began to get a feeling of heat deep in the arm.

  “What’s happening?” Phil asked.

  “I’m getting current through my arm, but it’s not exactly a shock. It’s getting stronger.”

  “The door’s not opening.”

  “I know that!”

  The hot feeling in the arm continued to increase and was getting painful.

  “Ow . . . this hurts . . . ”

  “Let go,” he said.

  “No. It’s . . . it’s trying to work. I’m afraid of what’ll happen if I stop . . . in mid-cycle.”

  “I don’t like this. Let go.”

  “Just a minute more. It’s okay. Ouch . . . ”

  Suddenly, the roots sprang out as if they’d been held down by springs. Before she could respond, they wrapped around her hand and forearm, binding it tight to the panel with a neat swirl. She felt a sharp piercing sensation in her palm, and she clenched her teeth against the wiry probe she felt going up into her arm.

  “Jesus!” she cried out, grimacing. “It’s got me. It’s putting something up my arm.” She tried to make light of it by brightening for an instant, but the pained little smile vanished like smoke. She tried to pull her hand loose. It might as well have been welded there for the impact she had.

  “Christ, Phil, it’s really got me . . .”

  Phil could see the growing panic on her face. She started to tug frantically.

  “Phil it’s got me. ”

  Phil reached out toward the tentacles to try to pull them loose.

  “No! It might grab you, too!” She blocked his reach with her other hand, slapping at his arms. She jerked her head over her shoulder in the direction of the space-hatch.

  “Open, goddamned it!” she screamed.

  Just then, Mary sighed and slumped like a balloon loosing its air. A second later the light from the opening space-hatch flooded the chamber like cool, bright water. Holding Mary up like a rag, Phil squinted against the light.

  When the space-hatch was fully open, Mary recovered and got her legs back.

  “What’s it doing?” Phil asked.

  “Not it Phil—me. I did it. I opened the hatch. It took all of my . . . my . . . energy to do it. You’re not going to believe this, but I can feel everything in this shuttle bay.”

  The panel still had her hand bound tight to it.

  “What do you mean, feel?”

  “I mean I can feel the whole damned thing. I can even feel your feet on the floor. But it’s not the floor, exactly.”

  “What is it then?”

  “It’s me!” she giggled.

  “That’s not exactly funny, as Ned would say.”

  “I know,” she giggled some more. “But I’ll be damned if I can’t feel your feet.”

  “Can you open the doors?”

  “Not right now. It would be like scratching the back of my hand with the same hand . . . I . . . my . . . my . . . I couldn’t.”

  “How are we going to get you loose?”

  “That’s easy—I can release at any time.”

  “What’s next?”

  “I . . . I’m confused about that.”

  “Can you close the hatch, cycle it like you said?”

  “Yes, but it seems wrong. The shuttles are confused, too. The next one is very confused.”

  “What next one?”

  “The one to fly down next. I can feel them.” She shook her head in disbelief. “This is incredible ”

  “Are you in contact with those things?”

  Mary smiled strangely. “You bet. I am those things.”

  Phil stepped back from the panel and considered what was happening. He looked over at the shuttles. The five enormous creatures, part machine, part insect, sat there like nightmare images, illuminated by the light from the sixty-foot wide hole in the air-lock. Mary was directly tied into them, bonded to them by a physical connection. He noticed that in the empty spot left by the shuttle now on duty, that the floor there was covered by dozens of the same star-shaped structures that had Mary’s arm. That was it. The root balls were conductors or connectors from one nervous system to another.

  “Can you control the shuttles?”

  Mary held out her free arm and waved it around like a snake. “Just like this,” she said. It was an odd little display, and somewhat out of touch. Phil studied her face and the idiotic smile that was growing there.

  We might not be equipped mentally or physically for this alien connection, he thought.

  “Mary let go,” he said firmly.

  “The a . . . a . . . shuttles are afraid. Especially the next one.”

  “You said that. I don’t care about the next one. Close the hatch, equalize the air, then let go. Then they won’t be afraid.” She seemed to gain some of her senses.

  “Phil, it’s all right—really. I’m okay. I can’t tell you how strange this is, but it’s okay. We can do this.”

  Phil thought about it. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes . . . ”

  Phil wasn’t. The glazed expression was still there. He’d dealt with many persons who on drugs or otherwise out of control had their brief, lucid moments.

  “Mary, close the space hole,” he said.

  She was losing touch, drifting; he could sense it. The panel was absorbing her consciousness, and the line separating the ship’s mind from her’s was beginning to blur.

  She grimaced, and it took Phil a moment to realize that the weird ape-like expression was a grin of pleasure, a feral, lascivious grin.

  Christ, he thought. This is too much.

  Mary closed the hatch and as she did, the light from Earth shrank to a pinpoint then vanished. She reached over with her free hand and pressed the device to equalize pressure. The sound of rushing air filled the airlock.

  “Can you open the seams now, Mary?”

  “No. But you can . . . ”

  Phil reached out cautiously and put his hand down on the opener.

  “It’s okay . . . ” she said with a dreamy look.

  The seams separating the air-lock from the staging area bloomed open.

  “Mary, let loose. Let go of the panel.”

  To his abrupt surprise, the thick roots unfurled, then balled up around the center. Mary got a brief pained expression as the probe slipped out of her arm. She stepped back from the panel and rubbed the point of entry with her thumb. Her thumb came away pink with blood.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right.”

  “Do you know where you are?” He didn’t want to ask it, but there was no telling what kind of residual after-effect such a union might have. He wanted to be sure.

  “Better than you do,” she said evenly, then smiled.

  He would have preferred a less clever answer, but at least she didn’t hesitate in giving it. He stepped up and rubbed her arms. The smile of friendship he got in return put him at ease.

  The sheer size and mass of the shuttle overwh
elmed them. In color and texture, it was exactly as one would expect of an insect: beetle-brown like the rest of the ship and as shiny as a lacquered table. The legs were stunted, almost rudimentary, and fit smoothly along the creature’s sides. The head part was smallish in comparison to the rest of it, giving it a swollen look and contributing to the impression of a larval or immature form of whatever it was. The mechanical parts woven into it were perfectly fitted when viewed up close.

  “This is it,” Mary said pointing to the patch on the creature’s side. “This is the opener.” It was a raised patch of tissue, and an obvious add-on like all the ship’s openers.

  They exchanged looks and Mary reached out to put her hand on it. Phil stopped her.

  “You said one of these things was frightened,” he said. “What happens if we scare it more by opening it?”

  Mary scratched her chin. “They can’t do anything except what they’re told. Pressing the opener tells them to open. They can’t resist even if they wanted to.”

  “Then they’re not dangerous?”

  “I didn’t say that. They just can’t resist a command. We could get hurt if we get careless.”

  Phil studied her face, looking for some remnant of a panel-induced psychosis. Seeing nothing but a sane and confident Mary, he put his hand down on the patch of tissue with a show of resolve.

  There was a sound like a grunt deep inside the creature, and they both took an involuntary step backward. The creature seemed to arch against the dull metal frame, and then half of the abdomen split and rose up toward the top of the air-lock. From the cavernous interior, a plate of thick chitinous material slid out silently to form a ramp. From somewhere inside they heard the sound of hissing gas. The creature had acted precisely like a machine.

  They moved down to the end of the ramp, and Phil started up into the interior. It was like walking into a cave without knowing for sure if the opening might close you in.

  There were dirt and leaves and litter all over the floor, and Phil wondered why there had been no housekeeping here like there was in the tubes.

  The interior had a more fabricated look than he’d expected. Although the walls and ceiling were clearly organic in form, there were storage cabinets or lockers along the walls that looked built-in. They didn’t have the straight, square look of the human variety, and Phil had the impression that the designer, whoever or whatever it was, had drawn the plans for them by hand. The floor was the first real, solid floor he’d walked on since his abduction, but it met the walls in an irregular, waving line. The entire chamber had a hand-drawn look about it.

  The cargo bay was dominated by a large pit about fifteen feet wide. A woven net, used to cover it, lay in the bottom. The sight of it gave Phil the flash of a memory—of being trapped down in just such a place, and he swallowed hard. He thought he could smell animal musk coming off the floor, but couldn’t be sure it wasn’t an olfactory element to the memory itself. When he looked at Mary, he could tell by her knitted brow that she was having a similar reaction to it.

  There were two large, strangely shaped gray formations on either side of the pit. Phil walked over and looked down at the nearest one.

  It took him a moment to realize that he was looking down at the humped back and long neck of one of the gray creatures that had attacked him the night of his abduction. His heart jumped to his throat, and he signaled urgently to Mary, pointing it out with a silent, jabbing finger. He backed away from it and moved over to her position.

  It was so well-fitted to the floor that he’d wouldn’t have recognized it for what it was if he hadn’t seen one before. It was sunken down into the floor as if it had melted into it. He realized that the depressions they were in must have served as their traveling stations. Mary stood looking at it calmly like it was an odd rock stuck in the floor.

  “They’re asleep,” she said.

  “How do you know?” Phil whispered back.

  “I could feel them when I was . . . connected, but I didn’t know what they were exactly.”

  “We’d better get out before they wake up.”

  “They won’t wake up. They can’t.”

  To prove her point, she walked over and toed one with her shoe a couple of times. “See?”

  Phil walked over and cautiously nudged one with a toe, too. The bumpy skin was loose under his foot, but the loose skin couldn’t hide the thick muscles under it. He imagined what they would look like scrabbling up out of those odd seats in a rage and hoped he wouldn’t get a chance to see it.

  He walked over to one of the lockers and put his hand through what looked like some kind of alien handle and tried to turn it. It was well fitted and firmly locked. When he twisted his hand in any direction, he could detect no play in it at all. The handle had an antiqued and burnished look as if it had been opened and closed for hundreds of years. It occurred to him that perhaps it had. It was clear that the aliens gave no thought to the straight lines, hard right angles and precise measurements that make repeatable, mass production possible. Each mechanical element here had a one of a kind quality to it. He tried some others with the same result.

  “We won’t be hiding in these,” he said. “They’re locked.”

  “Let’s look up front,” Mary said.

  The cargo area narrowed as they walked toward the head, finally narrowing to a walkway approximately five feet wide— just wide enough for a big bastard to pass through. The channel opened abruptly into another chamber a fraction of the size of the cargo compartment. There were two clusters of root balls on each side of the cockpit and Mary knew exactly what it meant.

  “Looks like a spot for pilot and co-pilot,” she said. “I’ll bet you money.”

  “Sure looks like it.”

  The entire wall was inclined forward at such an angle that in order to contact the root balls, the pilot would have to lean over and nearly fall down on them. There were five of them on each side. As if wrapped in thick rope, the pilot—completely enveloped—would be bound to the shuttle. One root ball on each side was conspicuous by its location: the pilot’s forehead would rest directly on the red center, and the roots, like a bizarre turban, would wrap the pilots head.

  They had the same thought at the same time, but Mary was the first to voice it.

  “Phil, we can fly this thing back home,” she said.

  He thought about it; turned it around and considered the possibilities. Then his mind locked on the problem as if he’d found a lost puzzle piece.

  “There’s one little issue,” he said. “Who stays behind to open the space hole?”

  11

  T he sun, Greenbaum explained, was such a bright backlight that it wouldn’t be possible to get any details of the craft and filter the sun’s blinding brightness at the same time. They’d have to use filters that would reduce the sun’s brightness to a manageable level. But the contrast would be so high between foreground and background that what they’d see at first—if they saw anything at all—was a shape, a speck, in silhouette against the sun’s flaming nuclear backdrop.

  The first step was to find it. He was counting on the fact that it measured maybe five-hundred yards in at least one dimension based on Phil’s description and was in an orbit no greater than one hundred miles in altitude. Given those two parameters and a little luck, they could find the speck. “That’ll be the hard part,” he’d said.

  Once they’d spotted it, and assuming the speck was fairly stationary, they’d increase the magnification and let the camera do the rest. They wouldn’t see any details until the film was processed. He was fairly sure no one had ever attempted such a thing; but with enough care, it just might be possible.

  The sun was as straight up as it would get in June at 33 degrees of latitude. Greenbaum fit the dark eyepiece on the scope, sat in the chair and cranked the big scope around at the sun. He adjusted the viewing angle and tweaked the focus. After two hours of searching, he raised his head away from the ocular.

  “Huh! I’ll be damned,” he s
aid. “It’s huge.”

  “What is?” Linda queried, knowing the answer.

  It was one of the stiffest smiles she’d ever seen. She would have expected some genuine enthusiasm from him. What she saw reminded her of a frightened child smiling through fear.

  “We’ve found it, by God,” Greenbaum said.

  Linda looked like she’d just heard the phony zinger from a snake-oil salesman.

  “Let me see,” she said in a stony voice.

  Greenbaum guided her into the chair, and she scooted up to the eyepiece.

  Greenbaum would be right about something like this. He’d know what he was looking at.

  She framed the eyepiece with her hand, and her heart began to race.

  The sun was a perfectly round, flat disk in the viewer with perfectly crisp edges. The dark eyepiece reduced its godlike brightness to a cool, comfortable shade of gray. In spite of Greenbaum’s description of what they’d see, she still expected to see some fantastic and glorious image of a sleek alien starship, but there was nothing of the sort to be seen. But there was a tiny eye-shaped speck up near the edge.

  “It that it? The little swirl up there?”

  “That’s a sun spot. Look right in the center.”

  Linda did, and it took a moment to find the tiny round mote in the exact center of the eye of God.

  “That little round dot?”

  “That’s it,” he said.

  Linda studied the dot for a moment longer, hoping that by staring at it some detail would emerge. None did. It was inconceivable that Phil was stuffed into that little dot. She wished she could reach up, and by magic, pull him out of it. She felt herself shudder.

  “It’s awfully small . . . ” she said thickly.

  “It’s all relative.”

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “We’ll . . . increase the magnification about fifty times and get some pictures,” Greenbaum said with another stiff smile.

  He’s afraid, she thought. I can almost smell it. The actual sight of the ship, the seeing of it, has pierced him like cold steel.

  Her mouth was suddenly dry, like it had filled with cotton. She felt herself go faint, and she leaned over with her head down trying to regain her balance. The evil dot against the sun was like an afterimage she couldn’t clear from her mind’s eye. She blinked several times and still saw it. It floated in her space, against her sun, perched like some vulture, waiting. It wasn’t just Greenbaum’s fear she’d smelled—it was her own.