Threshold

by Janet Morris

  The ground sped by beneath, closer and closer, and suddenly he saw what must be a spaceport, if you could have a spaceport in a garden.

  And then, without a bit of deceleration, g-force, or a single growl from his thrusters, or a shiver of torque, the freighter's nosewheel touched down. He hadn't even heard the landing gear descend.

  He thanked his luck that the freighter was transatmospheric and capable of a landing at all. Yet something inside him told him it wouldn't have mattered.

  Dini had the mocket in her lap and it was licking her face.

  If the mocket was in her lap, where were the Brows?

  "Dini, where are the Brows?"

  "Oh, they went back to the cabin. Rick, they're so happy! I've never seen them like that before."

  Neither had he.

  Don't scare her. Maybe this is some wonderful adventure, just like she's been telling me.

  "Do you think this is the 'wonderful thing' you've been expecting?"

  "Of course it is. Woman's intuition." She sniffed and put her hand on her mocket's snout to stop its frantic licking. "Woman's intuition is never wrong."

  "Good. Then you'll be ready to meet our host and be polite. We can't stay here too long, Dini. ..."

  "Why not?" She was unbuckling her safety harness as if they'd been coming here all along.

  He tried to think of an answer. "Because ... we have to get the Brows back to Pegasus before they run out of Leetles," he said triumphantly.

  "They'll have enough Leetles," Dini said. "You watch. Those Leetles will breed just fine, as long as we don't eat them. We don't need to eat them," she said, her mocket in her arms. "Do we?"

  She slid around him and started to leave the flight deck. "Well, are you coming, beloved?"

  Dini was transported with a radiant excitement. She nearly skipped down the corridor.

  Rick wished he could truly decide whether there was something awfully wrong here, or not. Maybe he should have a weapon. There were some basic weapons aboard, because freighter pilots always worried about piracy and rip-offs. You had to be ready to repel boarders.

  But somehow he couldn't bring himself to get one. It would be wrong to meet his hosts with a weapon in his hand, wouldn't it?

  Especially when they were capable of doing what they'd just done with this ship.

  He could hardly believe they really had landed like that—so fast, so quietly, so safely, even though that kind of landing was far beyond the freighter's capabilities.

  He hesitated, unwilling to leave the flight deck. He kept looking at his instrumentation. He reached over and tapped his AI. It was still functioning. It brought him full views of what was outside.

  And so he saw the welcoming committee before Dini did.

  Then he ran down the corridor to get the Brows and join her before she opened the hatch.

  When he caught up with her, he took one Brow with shaking hands and coaxed it up onto his shoulder.

  Then he straightened his spacesuit and stood beside his companion, who had a Brow in her arms and an excited mocket yapping at her feet. The third Brow was scratching at the lock determinedly.

  "Ready?" he asked her.

  "Oh yes," she said.

  He pushed the lock's cycling button and they stepped into the air exchange chamber. The outer lock wouldn't open if, despite appearances, the air wasn't safe to breathe.

  As he stood in that lock, Rick Cummings's pulse pounded in his ears. His eardrums actually ached from it.

  The Brow on his shoulder was singing.

  "Coming home," Dini crooned to it. "You heard them. We're bringing you home."

  He didn't say anything, even though he'd seen the beings waiting outside. Dini would see them soon, and she'd make her own determination.

  The Brows had had something to do with them coming here; Rick was now absolutely sure of that.

  But it wasn't until the outer lock opened and the hatch came down that Dini saw the aliens.

  Rick pushed her lightly forward, still balancing his Brow on his shoulder. He was thinking the most pleasant thoughts he could imagine.

  They walked down the ramp and three of the aliens walked up, to meet them halfway.

  When they stood toe-to-toe with the aliens, Rick held out his hand. As he did, the Brow on his shoulder jumped to the shoulder of the sad-mouthed, huge-eyed alien before him.

  Its six-fingered hand touched his, and the feeling was strange: like touching your grandmother's hand; like touching your father's hand when you were very young. The hand seemed small and frail and yet bigger than his.

  The aliens, too, seemed small and frail and yet large, immensely powerful.

  "Welcome, children," said the alien whose hand he held.

  And Dini looked at Rick for a moment with sparkling eyes, so that Rick knew she realized that it wasn't the Brows who were the wayward ones, coming home.

  It was Dini, and Rick himself, whom the aliens had meant.

  "I love you, Rick," Dini said. "I'll always love you."

  "I love you too, Dini," Rick Cummings III answered.

  The huge, sad eyes of the foremost alien, the one that still held his hand, went from Dini's face to Rick's as they spoke.

  It nodded its delicate head and its huge eyes seemed to spin. "Welcome, all. We have much to show you."

  Dini's Brow scrambled out of her arms and went racing around the feet of the three aliens on the ramp.

  When Rick looked up, the sun was setting and a ringed planet was fading into view in the purple haze.

  CHAPTER 28

  Extravehicular Activity

  The scavenger was throwing a full-blown tantrum. The box wouldn't work. South thought the old guy was going to bust a gut.

  Keebler's face was purple and the veins bisecting his forehead looked as if they might pop right out of his skin: "I tol' y', sonny. I'm not satisfied! I'm not satisfied at all. It'll work, ifn it's close enough. It's this old piece-o'-crap ship that's screwin' things up! It's your relay system that's faulty. An' I'm gonna raise holy—"

  "Look, Keebler," South said, though he didn't know why, "I can't let you out of the ship in one of my suits—it'd be irresponsible." Keebler started to yell again and South held up his hand. "There's nothing that says I can't take the box out and try it for you, if you'll be satisfied with that. I think I can rig up remote monitoring through the suit systems, so you'll be sure I did it right. Now, is that okay with you?"

  Keebler chewed on that for a minute. Then he said, "Okay with me, sonny. So long's I c'n watch t' see yer doin' it right."

  In the parking lights of STARBIRD's flight deck, the old scavenger's face took on a diabolical cast for just an instant.

  "Well, get out of the way while I set up for EVA, then," South told him. He'd better get this happening before he changed his mind.

  The whole time he was coaxing Birdy into relaxing the trip-long prohibition against considering Keebler's suit as anything more than "Input B, to be ignored," South kept trying not to worry about what Keebler might do if left alone in STARBIRD.

  "Now, Keebler, don't you touch anything on the flight deck. Is that clear?" South, in full kit for EVA, checked his seals one more time before he stepped into the lock.

  "I hear y', sonny. What d'you think I am, an idiot? Anything happens to you out there, that crazy woman Director's gonna blame it on m' artifact. So y' come back safe, y' hear?"

  Then there was nothing left but to do it. "We'll check out systems in the lock one more time. If you can't see or hear what you want, Keebler, now's the time to tell me—while I can do something about it. Not when I'm out there. Copy?"

  "Copy, Cap'n," said Keebler with a broad, green-toothed grin.

  "Then pull down your faceplate and sit on my damned bunk and, for God's sake, don't touch anything," South said and slapped the lockplate without another backward glance.

  When the inner door closed behind him, he ran a systems check with Keebler. "Can you see the box through my helmet recorder?"

>   Keebler could.

  "Can you read its status there in the lower left of your visor?"

  Keebler could, thanks to Birdy, who ought to get a medal except that she was an AI and AIs didn't get medals, no matter how exemplary their performance was.

  The air lock's status indicator told him it would open for him anytime. His MMU was topped off and ready. Under his right hand was the joystick for the jetpack on his back, which would allow him as much fine control as he wanted.

  Nevertheless, he had a safety line on his belt.

  He looked at the black box in his left hand. "Okay, Keebler, I'm going out."

  South hit the exit button and STARBIRD opened up. Birdy cut the artificial gravity to the lock and he was weightless, with only the magnetized soles of his boots holding him down.

  He pushed off. Test pilots got to hate weightlessness real quick. It told you that you were a lightweight. It told you that people didn't mean a whole hell of a lot in the cosmic scheme of things. South had flown early missions where you were in zero-g most of the time.

  He hated free-fall.

  And he hated EVAs. Always had. They scared the hell out of him. He didn't like feeling his guts floating around inside him.

  Usually, you couldn't see much but stars, which was what EVAs were about.

  Space ought to be full of stars, not big silver globes and commercial spacedocks in the background.

  He was only five hundred yards from the ball. He'd kept parking STARBIRD closer and closer, trying to satisfy Keebler that distance wasn't the problem.

  Sling had sworn that the box in South's gloved left hand wouldn't work. But the mission wasn't accomplished, so far as South was concerned, until Keebler believed it.

  If he brought the scavenger back unsatisfied, it wasn't going to help his case with Director Lowe.

  So he clipped his safety line onto STARBIRD's hull and pushed off toward the ball, saying to Keebler, "I'm out and approaching. You getting all the signal you want?"

  Keebler's voice came back, "Looks good from here, sonny."

  South would rather be in intimate communication with Birdy, if he had to be out here nearly naked, but what could you do? He needed to give Keebler his money's worth.

  It took only two taps on his joystick to bring him up so close to the ball's hull that he could touch it.

  He didn't do that. He didn't want to do that.

  The ball was so close, he could see his reflection on its mirrored surface. His helmet light made him look like an undersea diver; the floods from STARBIRD were so bright, he almost didn't notice the colors as they started to change. . . .

  Joe South felt the prickle of his physiology kit and heard the whir as his suit's heater kicked down a notch, then another.

  The ball turned purple and misty. Why was he feeling so damned strange? Euphoric, even. Like he'd found a way home after all ...

  When he realized what he was doing, South had one gloved hand on the ball and Keebler's voice was saying, "Sonny, y' don't have to try to bash yer way in with that box. Just push the red button and that's all she wrote . . ."

  "Wrote?" But he was awake, or thought he was. Was he still dreaming? Euphoria during an EVA wasn't a great sign. Lots of good reasons why that could happen. He shunted his suit's technical data up where he could read it.

  There wasn't anything wrong with his oxygen mix or his life support. Then how come he'd blacked out like that and come back to his senses to find himself nearly hugging the huge ball? On Birdy's log, he was going to look like an ant trying to lift a grapefruit.

  Sweat was forming on his face and his suit was attempting to dry it before the moisture fogged the inside of his visor. The cool air circulating over his cheeks and eyelids felt good.

  He pushed Keebler's red button and braced for whatever was going to happen.

  An oblong seam of dark lavender appeared in the side of the ball. Then the oblong was drawing back, exposing a wonder of electronics and a flight deck within that looked almost familiar. . . .

  The lavender oblong disappeared as the ball shut tight.

  Simultaneously, South heard a voice in his ears say: "Hell with it, Cap'n. Never mind. Come on back. I guess I got took."

  Keebler. Keebler should be howling with triumph and joy. . . .

  Unless Keebler hadn't seen the ball open, let alone shut, and everything South had thought he'd seen was just his imagination.

  Unless Sling had been right and the black box hadn't made anything happen.

  South blinked and looked again at the ball. Then he had Birdy look at the ball. The ball was purely spherical, with no opening anywhere on its surface.

  He had Birdy replay the last five minutes of his EVA as fast as he could watch it. There was nothing on the log that matched his memory. There was nothing at all there but a guy trying to make a box work, up against the side of a featureless ball.

  None of what had seemed so clear to him was really there: no door, no internal components of the ball. Nothing. . . . South admitted to himself that he'd had another one of those half-dreams that seemed like a memory but was probably some psychological effect.

  Keebler had been so sure that the ball would open that the scavenger's fantasies must have worked on South's admittedly shaky psyche like some sort of posthypnotic suggestion.

  It was a good thing he hadn't said anything to Keebler, or to Birdy, which would have been a permanent part of the EVA record. Then everybody would have known that Captain Joseph South had a screw loose somewhere.

  This way, nobody knew, not even Birdy, what South had thought he saw. Nobody knew he was still a little loopy. His suit said there was nothing wrong with him. His physiology package was pronouncing him fit as a fiddle.

  "—sonny, I'm satisfied."

  "What?"

  "I said, come on in, sonny. I'm satisfied." Keebler's voice was gruffly wistful, disappointed, and more embarrassed than angry.

  "If you're satisfied, so am I," South managed thickly. Part of him wasn't really ready to leave. The ball was a mesmerizing surface that caught his reflection and did fascinating things with it. ...

  He punched his emergency line's retractor and let it drag him back as the spool on his belt rewound the line.

  The whole time, he kept talking to Keebler: "I'm trying combinations three and four, from here."

  "I'll give this narrow band transmitter one more try."

  "I don't see any change ... do you?"

  Because he still wasn't sure that he hadn't seen what he thought he'd seen. If he had seen it, Keebler hadn't.

  And what he'd seen, South knew, wasn't what Keebler was expecting. Or he thought he knew that.

  When his retracted line brought him to STARBIRD's hull, the lock was open, waiting for him. He didn't look back at the ball, just told Birdy to cycle him through.

  He held on to the handrail for dear life until the lock had cycled and he was surrounded once more with all the life-sustaining comforts that Birdy could provide.

  Inside, once he'd shrugged off the EVA harness, he handed the box to the waiting scavenger.

  "Sorry," South said.

  "I'm gonna bust that Sling's butt fer sellin' me this useless piece o' crap."

  "Sling told you it wouldn't work. You just wouldn't listen." South squeezed by the scavenger. "You want to prepare to debark, Keebler? Time to go back to civilization."

  Civilization, you bet. South was going to buy Sling a blue beer. If that ball was some kind of ship from a superior culture, South wasn't at all sure that people should be mucking around with it. As a matter of fact, whatever was in that thing ought to stay in that thing. The way he felt now was proof of that.

  It took all of Birdy's competence and long hours of concentration on his flying to forget about those feelings. But Birdy was absolutely sure that the ball wasn't any kind of threat, and STARBIRD was one seriously improved machine, since Sling had tweaked her, and all of that combined to help South shake off the spooky feeling that had overcome him wh
en he was out at the ball.

  It was just a ball, wasn't it?

  Keebler still didn't think so. "I'll get into that ball yet, sonny. Gonna make me rich 'n' famous when I do. Y'll see."

  "I believe you, Keebler," South said into the com channel that linked him to Keebler, back in his bunk. "You want to prepare for docking maneuvers now? I'm going to sign off until we're docked."

  South really wanted to do a flawless entry into the Blue South docking bay, so that he could quit feeling like such an alien himself.

  Once he did that, maybe he could shake these stupid aftereffects of his X-mission forever. It was just displacement trauma, after all.

  Birdy patched him through to the controller and he said, "Yeah, Sol Base Blue, this is Customs Special STARBIRD, ready for final approach. You got a slot for me, Blue Base Control?"

  CHAPTER 29

  Telling Tales

  When she got the call telling her that South wanted to bring the scavenger up to her office, Riva Lowe felt unreasonably relieved.

  She told her secretary to squeeze them in before lunch and then realized that she'd only given herself an hour to prepare.

  Then she wondered why she thought she had to be prepared. Her desk was stacked with paperwork and emergency requests because of the ongoing Medinan demonstrations in the conference zone and the extra security Croft's office had slapped on across-the-board.

  Lowe pushed back in her chair, nibbled a fingernail, and said into her intercom, "I'm going to the lounge for a few minutes."

  Then she shoveled everything on the top of her desk into her middle drawer and locked it. One didn't leave sensitive material lying around loose, not these days.

  As she did, Remson's priority request for a change of status caught her eye.

  She pulled it back out and sat down again. Vince wanted three recertifications: Ali-4, Ali-5, and Ali-7, imported provisionally for a three-week stay as equipment belonging to the Medinan delegation, needed to be recertified as human immigrants and issued visas and green cards.

  Vince ought to be spanked, asking her to do all this, half of which wasn't the purview of her department. But there was a handwritten note on a card that had come with the hand-delivered sheaf of forms: Riva: Help! Vince.