The Fenris Device

by Brian Stableford

  “I thought you said it couldn’t be done,” he said.

  “I don’t intend to land. That’s why I want a pilot. I just want him to do a curve. Just a long arc. In and out. No maneuvering, no hovering, no landing. He can take me as low as he dares and then I’ll jump.”

  I could tell by his open mouth that the boss was impressed. Not so Charlot. He already knew what I intended. It was obvious. There’s never any problem about getting down. Things fall down. The problem is getting down in a fit condition to come up again. If a ship could take me to the clouds, I could ride out the storm in a small life-raft. Sure it would crash. Sure I could get hurt. But just so long as I hit that expanse of rock close enough to the Swan I should be in a condition fit enough to reach her and fly her out. There were a lot of things that could go wrong, and a guy could get killed trying tricks like that. But it could work. And it was the only way.

  “There’s a ship coming out from Pallant,” said Titus. “The best they have. I can get better from New Alexandria, but it would take time.”

  “We’ll use what we have,” I said. “The ship’s anchored down there, but in that sort of weather she’s taking one hell of a pounding. I want her as fit as possible for a lift. Have you got a pilot?”

  “A good one.”

  “A liner jockey?”

  “An independent. He isn’t a hero either. We bought him too.”

  “And the engineer?”

  “The whole outfit. As a package.”

  “How much did you offer them?”

  Charlot smiled. “Fifty,” he said.

  “Fifty?”

  “Thousand,” he added. “If they succeed, that is. They don’t get anything if it doesn’t work. It’s a salvage fee.”

  “So OK,” I said. “You got me cheap. Lucky you.”

  “You didn’t have to go through all that,” he told me.

  “Like hell,” I said. “Are you trying to tell me that if I’d come here, said how do you do, and then gone down to get the ship, then you’d have fallen all over me and said ‘Here’s your money, good-bye and good luck’?”

  “I’m not talking about the deal,” he said. “I’m talking about the performance. I’m talking about the way you opened that circuit, and still have it open, so that you could shout out loud to everyone concerned that you weren’t doing it for nothing, that you were only doing it for the money. It wasn’t necessary. It’s futile. You’re a fool, Grainger.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “maybe I am. I’m signing off here, Nick. I need some rest before this ship arrives. I’ll be with you when I can.”

  I closed the circuit, without giving him a chance to say anything. I didn’t want to listen.

  I walked out of the room. The man who ran things on Iniomi just didn’t understand. He looked totally bemused. Titus watched me go. I don’t think he understood either, though he thought he did. I wasn’t even sure that I understood.

  OK, said the wind. You’re out. Out of it all. Not just the job, but the whole thing. You’re going to pick them up, and you’ve done your level best to make them hate you for doing it. But do you really think it’ll work? Do you really think that they’ll believe the act? I think they’ll thank you for it anyway. I think they’ll love you for it.

  They don’t have to, I told him. It’s just something I have to do. It’s not for them. Not for them at all. It’s my show. There’s no one I’d take risks for except myself.

  You’re running away, said the wind. Ever since I got into your mind on that black mountain, you’ve been running away. All you want to do is find yourself a hole and hide. You’re stacking excuses a mile high. You don’t like Charlot, you don’t like the political situation, you don’t like being under an obligation. Even your fear and the fact that you don’t like violence are just excuses. You’re running away because of sheer habit. It’s a way of life. You’ve got a Gallacellan mentality, Grainger.

  The Gallacellans do all right, I told him. They survive.

  It’s not enough, he told me. Even they know that.

  And it seemed that they did. Some of them. The men from the Cicindel obviously thought survival wasn’t enough. They had tried to stop Stylaster using the Varsovien.

  But I wasn’t so sure that my sympathies weren’t with Stylaster. I’d worked out, by logic alone, why he wanted the ship so badly. There was no way of confirming the guess, but I was pretty sure. I’d been right when I said the Varsovien was an emigration ship. It was the ultimate escape device—the ultimate insurance. It could take a million Gallacellans right out of the galaxy, and it had a Fenris device to see that nothing—absolutely nothing—could stop them.

  The Gallacellan wars had ended without the Varsovien being needed. It was needed again now. But not because the Gallacellans saw another break-up in their civilization. They were afraid of something else entirely.

  They were afraid of us. The human race.

  And who could blame them? The expansion of the companies was devouring the galaxy. The balance between the companies and New Rome plus New Alexandria was delicate enough to explode at a touch. War was coming. War between the companies and the law, war between the companies and each other. War between human and alien. Titus Charlot and a couple of thousand like him thought they could keep the lid on. Maybe they could. For ten years, a hundred, a thousand. But not forever. Who could blame the Gallacellans for being scared? Hell, I was scared. I wanted out. All the way out. I wanted a nice little niche where I could hide. A little corner which wasn’t worth fighting about, where I could handle my ship my way without interference. That was what the Gallacellans wanted too, and Stylaster had been prepared to go to Andromeda to find it. But the Gallacellans had their differences of opinion too. The Cicindel had tried to tip us off—tried to make us leave the Varsovien where she lay. And they had brought it off. Somehow.

  Maybe they wanted the ship for themselves. More likely, though, they didn’t approve of Stylaster’s methods. I think they didn’t want us to find out that the ship was an escape ship. I think they wanted us to think it was a warship. They didn’t want us to know how scared they were. Because they knew as little about us as we knew about them, and they could understand just as little of what they did know.

  They purely and simply didn’t want to reveal themselves.

  Prey mentality.

  Maybe the wind was right. Maybe I do have a mind like a Gallacellan.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  There was a long wait. Once the ship had come out from Pallant we had all the downship men on Iniomi poking about in her guts. She needed a complete checkout, and then she had to be fitted out to do the job we needed her to do.

  I let Charlot supervise the hardware. It was, I suppose, most unlike me to entrust a job like that to another man. In my “normal” state of mind I am extremely suspicious about hardware, and I like to supervise its organization right down to the last spring-catch. But my state of mind at this particular time was somewhat charged with tension, and a certain amount of resentment at the whole pattern of events. In addition, I was tired—not physically, but mentally tired, exhausted by heavy thought and the pace of happenings.

  I had other things to do besides check the rig that was supposed to deliver me to the surface in one piece. Primarily, I had to talk to the man who was going to take me down. I had nothing in particular to say to him—there was no vital piece of information about conditions in the lower atmosphere that I could pass on to him, and I knew that if I tried to reorganize his flight-plan for him he’d get upset. I would have. But I needed to talk to him anyway, to find out for myself that he was capable of doing what was needed.

  The ship was called the Coregon, and it was a compact but very solid mass-relaxation ship. She was very slow, by transport standards, but she was designed for work in atmosphere, and in dirty space. She carried far more power than she was able to use just for pushing herself along. Her one big failing was in her almost-total lack of maneuverability. Within her limitations she was a good sh
ip, but once her limitations were reached, she became so much scrap-iron. Well, that was all right—I didn’t intend that she should go anywhere she wasn’t equipped to go.

  Her captain, pilot, and owner was a man named Jacks. He told me only his surname and that was the only name I ever knew him by. That’s a matter of etiquette—real spacemen don’t have first names. Not many of them go as far as me and do without altogether, but while in space, operating independently, they abandon whatever other names they might have been born with, and only pick them up again when they’re down for a good long spell.

  I liked Jacks. He was nearly as old as me and he’d been in space even longer. He hadn’t put in anything like the distances I’d clocked up, but he’d never had a partner like Lapthorn. He’d worked for his living, pretty solidly, doing more or less the same job, for all his life. He’d seen virtually nothing of the expanding rim.

  He didn’t like me. That was understandable. It was nothing personal, just the fact that the present job was very unpleasant, and just because he was going to do it didn’t mean that he was going to like it as well. He was ready to talk to me because he was as keen to find out what kind of lunatic I was as I was to find out about him.

  He told me that his ship was guaranteed against any damage and that he was still too young to die, but that the big money he had been offered—the offer he couldn’t refuse—was dependent upon my pulling off the crazy stunt. He wanted to know what my chances were.

  To be quite honest, I had no idea. It wasn’t the kind of thing one could measure against precedent. It seemed fairly simple—I’d have a heavy-duty suit with a big power-pack (very uneconomical, but I was only going to use it once) which should see me through once I was on-surface. You can shoot bricks at a heavy-duty suit and they just bounce off, so the hailstones wouldn’t bother me. They’re virtually impossible to knock over, so the stormwinds wouldn’t be any real problem. Even the biggest power-packs die the death after ten or twelve hours, because the demands of just lifting the suit are so heavy, but ten or twelve hours ought to give me time, just so long as we got our sums right. The life raft was one big problem—I couldn’t just come down in a shell, because there was apt to be one hell of a bump when I hit the ground. There had to he an ejector and it had to be rigged to compensate for virtually all of the momentum I’d pick up while I was falling through the clouds. Life rafts with ejectors we had—rigging the ejector was something else again. Parachutes were out of the question in that mess, so I had to come down with some sort of bump. The problem of minimizing the bump so that it would leave both suit and Grainger in full working order was largely a problem in absolute timing. That was Charlot’s problem. The courses we were going to take and the precision of the sequence of events was going to have to be computed with an accuracy far beyond that demanded by ordinary circumstance.

  Jacks was shaking his head all the time I was explaining it to him. But he wasn’t an out and out pessimist. He had never heard of Titus Charlot, but he had the usual quasi-superstitious regard for the miracles which New Alexandria was capable of supplying to its customers. He knew he could do his part and if the rest of it couldn’t be done...well, his ship would be restored to health for free and he was still in work.

  It was a healthy attitude. I was pleased to see it. I’d encountered one or two spacemen since I came back from my involuntary exile that I wouldn’t have trusted to push a pram. (Not, I hasten to add, that a liner-jockey or a company ferryman was ever called upon to do anything more complicated than pushing a pram. But somebody has to chart their perfect courses and build their spaceports for them.)

  Once we’d got the matter of drawing the line between the impossible and the barely credible over and done with, Jacks naturally felt free to indulge his curiosity and ask how the hell the silly situation had arisen. I found myself somewhat at a loss to explain. I didn’t want to spread nasty rumors about Gallacellan fighting ships. In the end, I wrote the whole thing off to Maslax and insanity. Ludicrous as it may seem, I felt a twinge of guilt about doing so. I wasn’t wasting any sympathy for Maslax, but to write off all his actions to madness, period, seemed a little harsh. He did have a motive, when all was said and done, and his grievances were probably real. Whether he could read minds or not, there was no doubt that what he read had a touch of truth about it.

  But Maslax was the only scapegoat, and Maslax was the one who was going to have to answer for it all. So I blamed it all on Maslax and madness.

  Jacks was satisfied. It convinced him. I suspect that he was an easily-satisfied man.

  Before we lifted I had a few words with Eve. She hadn’t been present while I was exchanging unpleasantries with Charlot. She probably still thought that I was going to rescue the other half of our ill-matched crew out of sheer courage and devotion to duty. But then, she would probably have thought that anyway, and in my heart of hearts I couldn’t deny a certain sense of loyalty.

  “What did you tell Charlot?” she asked.

  “Not a damn thing,” I told her.

  “You intend to keep it a big secret?” she said. “About speaking Gallacellan?”

  “I don’t intend telling anyone,” I said. “Do you?”

  She didn’t answer the question. “I don’t see why you want to keep quiet about it,” she said. “Why do you always want to keep what you know to yourself? Charlot is desperate to contact these people. You can do it. Just like that. We don’t need to do them any favors, pay them any bribes. You swore you’d never try to land on Mormyr again, after the first time. If you’d told Charlot then what you knew about the Gallacellans, and that you could speak their language, you probably wouldn’t have had to try again. I just don’t see your logic.”

  There was no use at all trying to explain. Not to Eve, certainly not to Charlot. There was a basic difference of opinion. Charlot wanted to talk to everybody, thought he ought to be able to, and thought he would. I don’t. I don’t want to, think we ought to, or think we ever will. I think the whole reason we’re heading for a war is because everyone wants to own the universe, in his or her own little way. Caradoc, Charlot, the lot. They all have delusions of grandeur.

  The Gallacellans didn’t want to talk to me, and that was OK by me. I hadn’t anything in particular to say to them. I wasn’t about to do great things for the human race by becoming ambassador to the Gallacellan people any more than I was going to smash the whole Caradoc operation single-handed and save the galaxy from tragedy. Things like that just can’t be done. Not now, not ever.

  “Are you going to keep quiet?” I asked her. “Let me get away. Let this whole matter die. Let us all write an end to this whole sick business. Are you?”

  “I won’t say a word,” she said. She had a sense of loyalty too.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It is rumored that the human animal is born afraid of just two things: sudden loud noises and sudden loss of support. If that is really the case then the worst nightmare of the womb would probably simulate the experience of being jettisoned from a ship in an unpowered life raft, into the storm of Mormyr.

  I didn’t hit the release—the ship’s computer had been entrusted with the delicate task of sending me on my way. Charlot wasn’t a man to trust human reflexes where mechanical ones were available. I was in the cradle of the raft—and this was a real cradle, not the sort I was used to—stretched almost supine, just waiting, for long hours while the Coregon crawled her weary way to Mormyr and made along, long sequence of maneuvers in order to find the very narrow groove which Jacks and Charlot had plotted between them. Nobody counted me down—there was just a voice in my ear absently remarking that we were on our way, and then more silence, total silence, until I was catapulted clear.

  There was one giddy moment when I was out of the ship’s g-field but still free of Mormyr’s, and into that same suspended moment came the furious, hammering attack of the storm. The embryonic nightmare. I felt my heart jump, and there was a sharp pain as if a wasp had sunk its sting into the cardia
c wall. The pain that came from the sudden shock of fear was a surprise to me, and I think it helped me overcome the shock, rebalancing my mind. I couldn’t afford the luxury of shock—the next release was manual, and it had to be spot on. No fumbling.

  I heard Jacks murmur “Good luck,” and then I heard a click as he took himself out of the circuit. With the incredible clatter of the hailstones and the thunder and the buffeting wind all around me, I was suddenly aware of a complete inner silence—an utter loneliness, and seconds passed while I feared that it might stay that way, that I was deserted. Seconds of falling—free falling. I was already tensing myself for an impact that I knew was minutes away, that I knew I would not feel, because by then I would have kicked myself clear of the doomed raft.

  Then Titus Charlot’s voice cut in, cool and clear.

  “Can you hear me, Grainger?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Everything fine?”

  A rhetorical question. Neither he nor I could know. He was working to a set of calculations on an analogue simulation. I was a prisoner inside a falling tin can. If anything was wrong, neither of us could know.

  “Count,” I said, feeling as if I ought to scream. There was no time for calm words—I wanted to know where I was, or rather when. I wanted to be into the descending chain of numbers that I knew so well. He had all the time in the world for reassuring comments and patience while he played with his simulation. Not me. These seconds might well be my last. The very least he could do was label them for me, one by one, give me something to latch on to. I was in pitch-darkness, my body weighing tons inside the armored suit, breathing bottled air, with my ears assaulted by the howling of the atmospheric chaos. I needed something to orient myself, something that pretended to have a semblance of reality. To Titus Charlot, they might only be numbers, but to me they were fragments of the real world.

  He was counting. Coldly and mechanically.

  I have been listening to countdowns all my life. In space—the times that I really feel alive—time revolves around countdowns. They take you beyond the light-speed on which the fabric of the universe is built, and they bring you back again. All seconds are similar, all voices are flat and unemotional. I knew Lapthorn’s countdown, and Rothgar’s, and Johnny’s. I don’t even know how I could tell them apart, but they all had some hint of individuality which marked them. Charlot’s too. I had never heard a man sound so much like a clock as Charlot did. His was the absolute countdown. Pure mechanism. Perfect.