A Sense of Infinity

by Howard L. Myers

  Which would do very little damage to the soggy greenery, except for one thing. The electrical spark was near a fire-control sensor, and had warmed it enough to turn on the extinguisher spray in the lockhold.

  And the extinguisher spray was, of course, interconnected with the ship's exterior, fire-fighting system, into which Olivine had had Charlo pipe fuel-cell juice in order to make a flamethrower out of the forecone nozzle! So the sprayers had sprayed a volatile liquid over the super-pot, the electric spark had supplied the ignition, and ashes were the result.

  Olivine slumped down on the deck, pressing his forehead against his knees, hugging his legs convulsively, and rocking back and forth.

  Damn it, grown men don't cry! he warned himself angrily.

  But the warning didn't help. That stinking CIT computer! It had gimmicked him every step of the way! Even to the point of counting on his determination not to be paranoically suspicious of such coincidental events as a prisoner transfer at a civilian spaceport, an easily commandeered ship close at hand, a planet within range of the escape scene which he alone would suspect held a big grab, and . . . and no guns on the ship and frozen closrem bearings, and a crew that was plainly beyond discipline . . .

  . . . And as the final result, an event that would give the Patrol all the reason it needed to put Dothlit Three under manned guard, which was what the Patrol had been after all along!

  Of course, this meant that the Patrol wasn't about to put the arm on Olivine and his remaining companions. Their role was to escape with what the Confederation public would be led to believe was a valuable and dangerous grab of one of the wildest narcotics ever found. Ashes! And cold-turkey time!

  Olivine's shoulders shook.

  Polywater Doodle

  "You're bad news, Starfuzz," groaned Icy Lingrad, pressing her hands against her beautiful but pale temples.

  "You're bad news, you're phony, and you're sick-sicksick."

  "I resent your implication that we're totally compatible!" Omar Olivine growled at her. He wished she would obligingly drop dead, or at least shut up. He felt in no condition to bandy insults with his psychotically antisexual shipmate.

  Ravi Holbein, with his usual smoothness even though his voice had a ravaged quiver, put in: "Among the possible actions we might consider is returning to Dothlit Three."

  "NO!" Olivine and Icy shouted in chorus.

  Holbein shrugged weakly. "It was just a thought," he mumbled.

  "For one thing," said Olivine, "the Patrol's sure to be swarming around that planet by now. For another . . . well, I hate these withdrawal symptoms as much as you do, but we must be over the worst of the cold-turkey routine. If we went back, and did succeed in landing and get ourselves some super-pot fixes, we'd just have this whole miserable routine to go through again. And probably in a Patrol prison, without the benefit of deepsleep tanks to make it easier."

  Feeling too twitchy to remain seated, Olivine stood and strode nervously around the control deck of the stolen port-service ship Glumers Jo. For a while he stared blankly at the viewscreen's portrayal of the starscape outside. As an ex-proxad of the Space Patrol he had no trouble estimating the ship's position and course after a mere glance at the visible blue-giant beacon stars. The Glumers Jo was five days out from Dothlit Three, on a bearing Flat External West 14 degrees.

  "Let's don't just sit here!" snapped Icy.

  "And what does the lady suggest?" Olivine asked harshly.

  "Sneak back into civilization some way!"

  "And how will we do that, with Patrol detectors peeled for us everywhere?"

  Icy grimaced, "You're supposed to be brainy, Starfuzz. You figure a way. No, don't. Every idea you have just gets us in a worse mess! You're a put-up job, Proxad Omar Olivine."

  "That's a nonsensical lie!" he yelped.

  "In fairness to the young woman's viewpoint, Mr. Olivine," Holbein said ponderously, "it does appear that misfortune has dogged our footsteps, since our escape, with a more than random consistency."

  Olivine continued to stare at the viewscreen. At last he turned and said, "O.K., we're in this together, so you two might as well know what's going on. I'll give it to you straight."

  "Hah!" snarled Icy.

  "As an eager young proxad in the Patrol," Olivine began, "I was the willing subject of hours of psychoanalytic probing. As a result, the Patrol's CIT computer knows me about as well as I know myself. It can predict me. It knows what I want, and how I'll go about getting it in a given set of circumstances.

  "So it probably wasn't a Patrol goof that enabled us to steal this ship and escape during the process of being transferred from one prison ship to another. It was the kind of opportunity the Patrol knew I would grab. And they knew I would take the ship to Dothlit Three for a cargo of super-pot. And that we would rig the ship's firefighting system to make a flamethrower to use on Dothlit Three's dinosaurs. And that we would store the superpot in the midship lockhold, where an electric spark was all set to activate the extinguisher sprays which would pour on enough fuel to burn our cargo to ashes, cooking us to the gills in the process.

  "That computer rigged the whole thing," he finished plaintively.

  "Aw-w-w-w," drawled Icy in mock pity.

  "Go to hell," he told her.

  "Most interesting," said Holbein. "It occurs to me that the flamethrower was not your idea, however. Forgive my immodesty, but I believe a remark of mine led us to try that."

  "O.K.," shrugged Olivine, "so the Patrol has your mind pretty well mapped, too. They psychoprobe con men as well as cops, don't they?"

  After some hesitation, Holbein admitted, "If one cooperates with those who ask questions, life in prison tends to be more abundant."

  "Slobs!" snorted Icy. "The starfuzz shrinks didn't get anything but a hard time from me!"

  "I find it difficult," said Holbein, "to see a purpose, a motivation, behind the Patrol's actions. Surely prisoners would not be permitted to escape without what the minions of the law considered a very good cause . . . "

  "They wanted to blow the lid on Dothlit Three," explained Olivine, "so the Confederal Council would be forced to go to the expense of putting an armed guard around the planet, to keep people away from the superpot. Either that, or send in a team of ecologists to do the equally expensive job of exterminating the super-pot weed. It was a political gambit the Patrol used us for."

  "I see. However, we've lost our cargo, which limits our ability to perform as lid-blowers," commented Holbein.

  "All the more reason for the Patrol to keep us from sneaking down on some civilized planet, where the whole story might leak out," said Olivine. "They'll hold us in secret if they catch us."

  "Then let's go to Dusty Roost," said Icy.

  Olivine frowned. "I think that's exactly what the Patrol wants us to do," he said. "If they could claim our cargo was delivered to the criminal stronghold of the Roost for gradual smuggling into civilization, it would scare hell out of everybody. So I'm not going to play into the Patrol's hands by going there . . . especially with no cargo."

  "A sound decision," approved Holbein. "Speaking for myself, I had doubts about the Roost even when our cargo was intact. While I am not a stickler for law and order, I admit a preference for the companionship of persons who are. Indeed, I had certain expectations that the Roosters might seize our cargo over our recently deceased bodies, as it were, rather than purchase it for coin of the realm."

  Olivine shook his head. "We could have avoided that. The Roosters aren't united. They're in gangs, sometimes just one planet per gang, that snipe at each other about as much as they exploit outside commerce. If the right man could consolidate the bunch of them . . . "

  He trailed his voice off and glanced around furtively at the others, but neither Holbein nor Icy seemed to have paid much attention to his inadvertent revelation. It wouldn't do to let his companions know what his goal was . . . his dream of power.

  Yes, he mused silently, he would go to Dusty Roost. But not yet. Not unde
r these circumstances, which would open nothing better for him than, perhaps, a job as a torp for some two-bit gang chief. When he went into the Roost, he would go with power . . . power with which to gain still more power . . . power to make the Space Patrol cringe in fear, and crawl to him on its lily-white belly . . .

  "Then we could have played one gang against another to assure ourselves fair compensation for our cargo," said Holbein.

  "Yes," Olivine nodded.

  "Blosh!" Icy snapped vulgarly. "Quit moaning over might-have-beens, you sticks! We're on a perch right now, and I want to know how we get off it!"

  There was a silence.

  Finally Holbein said: "The young woman has a point, Mr. Olivine. We are rather thoroughly perched. And, as you have so astutely deduced, any action you might take to improve our position would, in high probability, have been anticipated by the Patrol's CIT computer. A bind, indeed."

  Olivine couldn't disagree with that. He returned to his chair and sat in glum thought for several minutes.

  At last he said, "I can think of only one possibility. I'll step down, Holbein, and put you in charge. I'll instruct the ship to obey your orders from now on, not mine. With you running our show, the computer's predictions will no longer apply."

  Holbein looked startled. "Much as I appreciate the honor, Mr. Olivine, I have never commanded a ship before, and would find myself ill at ease in such a position. It also occurs to me that your offer might be among those anticipated by the Patrol."

  "Well, hell," exploded Olivine, "we've got to do something! The Patrol might also anticipate we'll get so balled up out of fear of being anticipated that we'll just sit here, like we've been doing!"

  "Quite true," murmured Holbein, "but I still cannot bring myself to accept your offer."

  Olivine cursed and stared at his knees. But there was no avoiding the obvious. Regretfully, he turned to look at the young woman. "Well, what about it, Icy?" he demanded. "Will you take charge of this tub?"

  "Sure, Starfuzz!" she leered. "If you care to risk it."

  "I don't have a choice," he growled. "Ship?"

  "Yes, sir," responded the Glumers Jo, in the unmodulated voice of a medium-capacity compucortex.

  "I hereby relinquish command to Miss Lingrad, with the instruction that you obey her orders, and her orders alone, as you have obeyed mine in the past. Is the instruction fully understood and accepted?"

  "Yes, Mr. Olivine. I await your orders, Miss Lingrad."

  "Continue on course for the present," Icy said.

  "What's this?" sneered Olivine. "No immediate brilliant action to instigate?"

  "I'm going to sleep on it," Icy said, rising from her chair.

  "We've wasted enough time already!" he snarled.

  "Shut up! I'm boss now, and I said I'm going to sleep!"

  She whirled and left the control deck.

  "This should prove interesting," said Holbein.

  "Maybe. At least she had a point about getting some sleep. That's the only escape we have from this cold turkey treatment. We may as well follow her example." They wandered separately to their sleeptanks. Olivine climbed into his, checked the fluid levels in the nutrient and deepsleep tubes, pulled down the lid over him, and felt the feeder needles snuggle into place in his upper arms.

  When he woke he was no longer in the tank. He opened his eyes on a cloudless blue-green sky, and with his facial tissues screaming sunburn!

  He leaped to his feet and stared wildly about at an arid, sparsely vegetated landscape, scorched under a blazing Type K sun.

  Marooned! That psychotic wench had dumped him! A pack of supplies was on the ground, by the spot where he had awakened. He tore off and read the note attached to it:

  "Dear" Starfuzz:

  Chuting you into space would suit me better but old Holbein and the ship might have been squeamish about that.

  I'm dumping you because I can't trust you. If you could override this ship's brain to take it away from the spaceport, you could take it away from me if you changed your mind. So bye-bye.

  Your planet is called Flandna. You're the only carnivore on it, so have fun and . . .

  Die quickly, P. Lingrad.

  He wondered numbly what the "P." stood for, having never heard Icy's real name.

  Groaning, Olivine opened the pack and found a tube of Kwikeeze. He applied the ointment to his burning face, and in a moment that source of discomfort faded. His other physical and mental miseries were not so easily cured, however. The gnaw of withdrawal seemed to feed on and gain new power from his dismay at having been marooned.

  And that dismay, by itself, would have been bad enough.

  He couldn't recall much about this planet Flandna, and that was a bad sign. If it was a world people could live on with any satisfaction, he would have heard more about it. From his first feel of the place, he sized it up as one of the many borderline worlds that just missed being livable. Air breathable, but a little too thin. Sunlight, a little too hot, and heavy on the ultraviolet. Water present, but too scarce. Native flora and fauna, also on the scarce side, and probably poisonous.

  The kind of world, in short, that had often wiped out human colonies with a delayed and sneaky ecologic backlash.

  Icy's note said he was the only carnivore on the planet, which meant he'd better watch out for dangerous plants. They probably had means of fighting back against grazing animals, to maintain a balance of population.

  Grimly, he examined the contents of the pack.

  There, the news was better than he had expected. Icy was at least giving him a chance to survive, so far as equipment would help.

  A major item was one of the recently developed rationmakers, into which any alien animal, or vegetable substance, could be loaded for conversion to edible protein and carbohydrate. It also purified water. Everything else was standard emergency survival gear of types Olivine was familiar with . . . bedding and tenting, sonic knife, nuclear powerblock, heater-cooler, and various incidentals.

  But no distress beeper with which to call for rescue. And Olivine was already beginning to feel he would prefer rescue, even by the Space Patrol, to spending much time on Flandna.

  Glumly he reloaded the pack, slid the straps on his shoulders and stood up. For a moment he studied the arid landscape, getting the lay of the terrain in mind. Then he chose his direction and began walking.

  The one necessity neither the pack nor his immediate surroundings could supply was an adequate water source. That he would have to find. By going downhill, he expected to find water sooner or later.

  The hiking quickly became pure torture. Olivine knew part of the trouble was that months in prison had softened him physically. Also, the dismal state of his morale was weakening him even further, but he couldn't fool himself with fake cheerfulness. And there was the heat, and the low humidity which was sucking up his body moisture so voraciously that his sweat evaporated before it had time to dampen his clothes.

  Under this load of misery, his formerly maddening withdrawal symptoms were soon too trivial to be noticed. And he seemed to be getting nowhere.

  After four hours of hiking with only brief breaks, he could see no improvement in the surrounding land. It was still marlboro of the harshest sort. The vegetation was stringy and dry, where it grew at all. He had seen a few insect-sized fliers, but no other animal life, although he had noticed occasional holes that could have been burrows. He guessed that the animals here, like those of many high-temperature desert climates, did most of their foraging and moving about in the cool of night.

  Finally he came upon a plant that was leafier than the others he had seen and promised to contain a fair amount of moisture. He stopped, got the knife, a pair of protective gloves, and the rationmaker out of his pack, and approached the plant cautiously.

  It made no move, so he took a tentative swipe at it with the knife, slashing off a small leafy limb. The plant quivered. Quickly Olivine waded in, hacking away with the knife until the entire plant was chopped to piece
s. He stuffed these into the receiving compartment of the rationmaker, closed the lid, and turned the device on. It worked with a dim humming sound.

  While he waited on it, Olivine inflated the tent and carried all his stuff inside. In almost desperate haste he plugged the heater-cooler into the powerblock and flicked the dial to the lowest temperature reading. A gush of cool air came out of it and he flopped down in relief. In a moment the rationmaker quit humming and sounded a soft chime. He picked it up and studied the product compartment readouts to find out what the plant had yielded.

  Very few ready-to-eat constituents, he saw, but a large amount of normal cellulose that could be reprocessed through a second stage into digestible molecules. More salts, many poisonous, than found in E-type plants, and all of these could be dumped except the sodium chloride, which Olivine figured he would need at the rate he had been sweating.

  The moisture content was disappointingly low: 3.3 cubic centimeters of free water and 1.8 c.c.'s of polywater.

  Olivine blinked at this last reading. This was something he hadn't seen before on the readouts of a food analysisresynthesis device—the separation of pure polywater. Usually the analysis process either left polymeric water as a moistening agent in the cellulose and carbohydrate compartments, or else blasted it into ordinary water. This was one of the advances of the rationmaker, which was reported to represent a breakthrough in this kind of device.

  For human consumption, however, polywater was of limited value. It was good for constipation, but that problem Olivine did not have. He flicked the little toggle that would convert the polywater into its more usual, drinkable form. Then, after studying the substances he had to work with, he set the resynthesis formula and reactivated the device.

  Five minutes later he was nibbling a little block that felt and tasted like salty ice cream, but that had to be chewed and swallowed like a non-melting food. It left him feeling better, though thirstier, than before.