Manhattan Transfer

by John E. Stith

  "Have the pilot ready to cut the lines holding that thing in the center as soon as I'm finished and the hatch is closed again." Richard took his knapsack, edged around the Archie pilot, and started crawling up the passageway. "Can you still hear me?"

  "Yes," called Abby.

  "And now?" Richard called from just around the corner into the middle section of the corridor. He could no longer see the Archie pilot. Apparently the ship's hull hadn't actually turned transparent, but rather the center of the ship was the focus of an elaborate view screen.

  "Yes."

  Richard turned the final bend and found himself at the hatch. He found a couple of adequate handholds. "And now?" he yelled.

  "Yes," came Abby's voice faintly.

  "Have him position the shuttle so the hatch is near one of the crevices. When I give the signal, have him open the hatch. Tell him to close it again after twenty seconds."

  "Will do."

  Richard's forehead dripped sweat as he waited the half–minute for the pilot to position the ship.

  "He's all set," Abby said.

  Richard took several deep breaths, both to calm himself and to oxygenate his lungs. Dear God, please let me live through this. Finally he yelled, "Go!"

  The hatch slid suddenly aside and air began to gust out. Directly ahead of him Richard could see the ugly mottled surface with a crevice right in the middle of the stretch he could see.

  His ears popped and he tried to swallow fast enough to keep up. The scene began to turn red. The instant the airflow finally stabilized enough that he didn't feel in as much danger of being blown out of the ship, Richard reached into his knapsack and hit the combination on the detonator timer. He made sure he saw it flash once before he hoisted the knapsack by a strap, swung it back and forth twice to gauge the gravity, and hurled the whole thing into the crevice.

  His vision lasted long enough to see the knapsack lodge itself in the crevice, and he shut his eyes. Already his lungs felt red hot and his head felt flushed. He pulled back into the corridor and made sure no part of his body would block the hatch as it closed.

  Time played tricks on him. By the time the hatch slid closed, he was convinced that five minutes had gone by. He had been expelling the air from his lungs as slowly as possible despite the fact that the air seemed to want to force itself out through his mouth and nostrils.

  His ears ached horribly, and he could hear nothing. Please, God, let the air be filling up the shuttle again.

  His head rang. His eyes kept tightly closed, partly because of the pain, partly because he worried about damage to them in the low pressure.

  Finally he could not wait any longer. His lungs were on fire. He opened his mouth and sucked in as much air as he could, which was nothing. It wasn't like breathing in water, but it was no less frightening. He heard no sound as his lungs expanded, and felt no resistance of air trying to squeeze through his throat. There was just nothing there.

  The black before his eyes filled with even more sparkles.

  #

  A throbbing in Richard's ears was the first sign that he was in fact still alive. He realized he was breathing again.

  His chest was on fire, his eyes stung, and his ears rang. He realized with shame that his shorts were wet.

  He heard a hiss of air. He could hear!

  He opened his eyes. The shuttle corridor was still tinged in red. He pulled himself along the floor to the point where the corridor dipped down into the control area where the pilot's eye–stalk pointed at him.

  "I'm okay," he said shakily. Either his ears were still recovering, or his voice had popped up an octave.

  Dimly from somewhere he heard two or three human voices exclaim, "All right!"

  Richard started down the sloping corridor on his hands and knees. He was halfway down the corridor when he lost his grip, and he tumbled the rest of the way, banging into the pilot as he jolted to a stop. "Sorry about that." You damn klutz, he told himself.

  Amazingly the four minutes hadn't elapsed. The pilot had the shuttlecraft hovering near one wall of the chamber. The laser must have been trained on one of the cords between the sphere and the chamber wall, because a spot glowed brightly near the center of one strand.

  Richard looked at his watch. Just as he looked back up, one of the other tunnel covers dilated open and eight shuttlecraft drifted into the chamber. At first Richard thought they were Archie shuttlecraft, but he would have been told if eight more shuttles were inside.

  One of them must have fired on his shuttlecraft, because abruptly another segment of the hull turned from transparent to frosted translucence.

  "What the hell's going on? Those shuttles look like Archie shuttles," Richard said just as the explosive in the crevice detonated.

  Chapter 19

  Plan Nine

  Frozen in place, Matt watched the screen as Richard's words flooded the bridge, and the alarm in his voice spread through Matt's body. The approaching shuttlecraft did look like the ones the Archies themselves had employed. These were black and boxy, too, though they sported two bright circles on the front surface. The pair of spots suggested headlights, but Matt felt sure they were weapons. Apart from the bright circles, the shuttlecraft looked virtually identical to the Archies' vehicles. As Richard had said, what the hell was going on?

  The adjacent screen showed a view of what had happened to the ruddy sphere in the center of the enormous chamber. The explosives scattered small fragments and reddish globs into space, filling half the chamber with clutter as though someone had exploded a bowl of red gelatin. Bits and pieces flew into the few tunnels that were open, while the rest of the spray hit the side of the chamber or closed tunnel mouths. Most of the material stuck where it landed, but some of it bounced back into space and drifted.

  Half of the sphere was gone. One side of it was nothing more than a huge irregular crater. The half–sphere drifted back and forth as its tethers started to damp the motion. The tethers themselves must also have been the source of nutrients used to rebuild the sphere, because they had all become fatter than before. In spots where the contrast was high, Matt could see that the tethers were acting like engorged blood vessels, carrying fluid inward to the surface of the sphere. The damaged area of the sphere began to grow smoother.

  At the same time, the eight newly arrived ships spread apart as if to attack from several positions.

  On the screen, Richard shouted, "Get us out of here!" Abby instantly translated through the Archie captain, but Matt was sure the Archie pilot acted even before getting the translation of what Richard had said. Even as the shuttle began to move, the attacking craft opened fire. An instantaneous spurt of red light came from one of the craft, and in line with the flare of red, the hull lost some of its transparency. Spots started forming all over the side facing the enemy, blotches where the clear view suddenly turned to frosty translucence, as though dirty raindrops were falling on clean glass.

  "No, not that one. That one!" Richard pointed at the tunnel next to the one the pilot was heading for.

  Matt held his breath. The only sound on the bridge was coming from Richard's transmission.

  More frosted splatters formed on the hull, coming faster and faster. The shuttlecraft didn't make it to either tunnel. When it was no more than a couple of seconds away from the relative safety of even the wrong tunnel, a huge cracking sound came over the speaker.

  Only a slow–motion replay made the sickening events clear, but the hull of the shuttle split open. Even before the air had time to rush out, weapon beams crashed through to the inside, and a flame started playing on the interior of the shuttle, like a scientist's butane torch blasting through the open end of a short test tube. Mercifully, the transmission from that point onward lasted significantly less than a second, not even time enough for Richard to scream.

  The screen displaying the last image of the interior of the shuttlecraft froze, and the screen showing a better view of the attacking ships froze at the same time.

  Mat
t closed his eyes against the pain. He felt Abby sag against him, and he blindly put one arm around her. From somewhere in the room came sobbing sounds. Bobby Joe shouted, "Damn it!"

  Matt forced his eyes open again. The screen they had been watching was black. One of the other screens showed the planet shaper still in orbit over Venus, still throwing a series of huge sparks down into the atmosphere as though nothing of consequence was happening inside its breached hull.

  To the blank screen, Matt said softly, "I'm sorry, Richard. You did everything you possibly could do."

  Abby wiped tears away as Matt looked back at her. He gave her a few seconds to recover and then said, "Tell the captain we want to know why it is that the planet shaper has what look like Archie shuttlecraft protecting its interior." As Matt spoke, he was aware that the captain's eye–stalk was trained on him.

  Abby nodded and took a couple of breaths, then began to speak to the translation computer. After her question was complete, the bridge seemed quieter than it had ever been.

  After a delay long enough that Matt thought the captain was refusing to reply, she chattered at the computer. Matt heard the response directly from the computer in Abby's voice. "Archies built the planet shaper."

  A flurry of conversation and amazed reactions erupted. Julie moved closer with her minivid.

  Matt clenched his fist. "So this whole thing has been some God damn charade? They're just pretending to try to stop it?"

  #

  David Suth stared at the huge Sony screen at the north end of Times Square as The Mayor Channel relayed video from the bridge. The crowd around him had shuddered with the destruction of the craft carrying Richard, and now David felt the outrage of betrayal. The crowd went wild, and the shouting masked the sounds piped down from the bridge for almost a minute. For another fifteen seconds, all David could hear was the sound of people telling each other to hush.

  #

  A young voice on the phone said, "Them spiders should use that same stuff that's in the dome. Make a big wall between the ship and the Earth. Or put a gigantic bubble around the Earth so they can't get at it. Or take some of that black stuff that's underground and make it so they can't see the Earth. Maybe they'll just leave."

  #

  Almost everyone on the bridge was in motion, either moving from one place to another or simply shifting from one foot to the other. Matt was so angry at the revelation that the Archies had built the planet shaper and the loss of Richard that he deliberately forced himself to wait a moment and get a grip on his temper before trying to find out what was going on.

  Without being asked more questions, the captain began chattering again. Abby rephrased some of the sentences spat out by the translating computer and said, "The planet shaper is a real threat. And she says the Archies have honestly been trying to defeat it." More chattering. As the Archie captain spoke, her eye–stalk drooped.

  Abby said, "She says she'll give us more information, but that the planet shaper was built by a—a subspecies of one of the Archie races—by Archies anyway. It was built a long time ago, and they now see it as a horrible mistake. They really are building a huge destroyer that should be capable of eliminating the planet shaper, but it won't be finished in time to help any of the worlds the planet shaper will visit soon. In the meantime, they've been trying to save parts of the populations. I think the reason they didn't tell us this before is that they are ashamed."

  "God almighty!" Matt yelled to no one. He took a deep breath and to Abby he said, "Why can't they just stop the planet shaper? Turn it off."

  Shortly Abby said, "It's completely automated. There aren't any Archies on board controlling it. They designed it to be autonomous and set it in motion. They figured there would be a chance that some other race might try to shut it off or subvert its goal, so they tried to make it indestructible. Apparently there are safeguards to keep it from destroying worlds occupied by Archies."

  "Unbelievable. This is just unbelievable." Matt looked back at the screen showing the planet shaper continuing to seed Venus' atmosphere. "Is there anything else important we should know?"

  Moments later Abby said, "She says no. I really don't have any way to know how straight she's being with us, but my gut says she's telling us the truth."

  "I just don't understand how a race that built something like the planet shaper can now be so ineffectual, so unequipped to live with the consequences."

  "We're not dealing with the inventors of the planet shaper. We're dealing with accountants in space."

  Matt raised his eyebrows.

  "I mean the captain is no more representative of their race than I am. The Archies on this ship simply aren't warriors. They were picked for their ability to cut cities loose and provide life support for them. A crew meant for fighting the planet shaper would have had completely different selection criteria.

  "This is still all too new, but if I'm understanding things right, the Archies are a much older race than we are. Maybe because of that age, they've been growing more and more specialized. For whatever reason, we're generalists compared to them, and the captain has realized that. In fact, I think that's the main reason they're willing to follow our orders; we're the only ones around who are adept at stepping outside the boundaries of their normal job descriptions."

  Matt nodded, finally understanding.

  "There's something I don't understand," said Rudy. "If Archies and humans can live in the same environment, why would the planet shaper do anything to Earth?"

  Matt nodded for Abby to go ahead and ask.

  Abby finished asking the question and listening. "She says one of the planet shaper's tasks is to eliminate all local life, whether on the ground, in the oceans, or in the air. It seeds the planet with vegetation that supports their own metabolism. Apparently the planet shaper scorches the surface, then freezes it, then starts the seeding process. If necessary, the planet shaper performs additional jobs. Venus is too hot, so the planet shaper is going to leave a huge sun screen in orbit."

  "That must be what it's doing now," Bobby Joe said.

  Matt looked at the screen Bobby Joe watched. A series of small explosions trailed the planet shaper as the ship moved along its orbit. Behind the explosions, what looked like a dark cloud stretched into a wider and wider band, forming a very wide but thin ring around the equator, high above Venus's natural cloud cover.

  "I wonder if that stuff is something like solid smoke material," said Bobby Joe.

  "If it is, would it stay in a stable orbit?" asked Rudy.

  "I don't know. Maybe it'll stay up until they don't need it anymore. Look, you can see a huge portion of the surface already—that patch in the upper right. If they're getting rid of the cloud cover and blocking some of the sunlight from reaching the planet in the first place, I'd bet Venus is going to cool down pretty fast—at least on the time scale we're talking about. I don't imagine anyone's going to arrive here to live in the next few years."

  "Does that mean it's almost finished with Venus already?" asked Matt.

  "Yes," was the answer from the captain.

  "What about scarecrows?" asked Bobby Joe. "If the planet shaper is programmed to avoid worlds populated by Archies, can we do something quick to Earth to trick the planet shaper into thinking it's occupied by Archies?"

  A moment later Abby reported the captain's response. She was utterly convinced nothing could be done. The criteria were unclear, but evidently a world had to be supporting millions of Archies for the planet shaper to decide to pass it by. Apparently when the Archies started to settle a new world, they typically had an enormous number of colonists ready to go all at the same time.

  "Look," Rudy said. He pointed at the screen showing the planet shaper. Where there had been an ellipse around Venus, the display now showed a straight line toward Earth. The planet shaper was moving off rapidly.

  "Follow it," Matt said quickly to Abby. "Maintain this distance."

  Abby relayed the instructions to the Archie captain, who followed
them without argument this time.

  "How long do we have before arrival at Earth?" Matt asked.

  Abby's face was pale when she passed back the answer. "About three hours."

  Matt took a deep breath. "Can the shuttlecraft keep up with us? Can they accelerate as rapidly as this ship?"

  The answer was yes.

  "I want all remaining shuttlecraft launched. Have them stay close to this ship, but ready to move."

  This time the captain seemed uneasy about obeying. She didn't want to lose any more shuttles, she said.

  Matt looked at the Archie captain as he spoke to Abby. "We've got to settle this for once and for all. We cannot waste time like this. Remind her this small party of humans did extensive damage to this ship. There are millions more of us watching every move that's made now. And if any request we make in the next few hours is denied, the penalty will be higher than whatever the request would have cost. The Archies started this, and they damn well better be ready to stop it."

  Matt went on. "Tell her the Earth and the people on it are far more important than we are, and we will go to any length necessary to guarantee the Archies meet our demands. The Archies caused this situation, and they're damn well going to risk anything we ask them to risk to set things right."

  When Matt finished and Abby began to talk to the captain, Bobby Joe said. "Maybe we can try convincing them with images. Manhattan is sure to have some stock footage of atomic bomb testing. We could be ready to display it here it in a couple of minutes to show them what we're capable of."

  "Good suggestion. But what if she says, 'Great. Let's use it on the planet shaper'?"

  Bobby Joe said, "Never mind."

  Abby spoke to her computer, which chattered as Matt kept staring at the captain. For a solid ten seconds after the computer became silent, the Archie stared back, as though trying to arrive at a painful decision.

  Matt suddenly said to Abby, "Tell her this ship is useless for its intended mission now since we can't follow the planet shaper until the drive is fixed. This is their only chance to do something genuinely useful since this ship left port. They owe us that much. And remind her that we're their only hope. We're the generalists, right? We're the ones best equipped to make the decisions right now."