by Ian Wallace
“Does that mean they’re humane?” Wel wanted to know.
In his first betrayal of .restored consciousness, floating Bill suggested: “Not necessarily. We may be mere specimens.”
After another hour of freefall, we found consensus on taking a bar break. Sven and Collins got us three casualties comfortably seated in the salon before he restored springrav: liquor in freefall is bad business. We agreed to nurse just one more round for an hour and then return sober to our respective posts to observe, each on our own instruments, our homing-in.
Sven observed: “I’ll remind you that we still have Hoolihan. He’s our five-megaton ace in the hole. Or monkey on our back, ha ha, if I may quote J.C.—”
Wel shrugged. Bill brooded. Collins was mentally away.
I put forth chest-painful effort to tell them: “I have completed my analysis of the space-manta stored aft.”
“So?” Wel queried.
“I understand its wiring principles. I am praying that their flagship operates on the same principles.”
A gentle Wel-hand was laid on my arm. He said: “I have a different sort of thought. My lover, don’t push your luck.” Sven was gazing at me. He said, “I guess I am praying with you, Hel. Hoolihan is kamikaze stuff, once they pull us aboard. Before we use him, we need to try something short of him—and maybe wiring is it.”
Wel let it go at that. But I could see that Wel had something on his mind, and it didn’t have anything to do with what Sven and I were discussing.
24
Just about as we had timed it, we felt retarding thrust. They could have slammed us with a fast braking, which might not have broken more bones, since we were ready, but easily could have punctured one of my lungs. But they continued to act as though they were considerate, easing us up to three-g deceleration over a half-hour period, then down again to practically stationary freefall; the perfect analogy is an untugged ocean liner nudging itself into dock.
Coming in, we could through the nose window directly see their flagship shining in sunlight—with a shining which did not seem metallic. Now, unexpectedly we learned that the ship’s tail and not the ship’s horned beak was pointed at Sun; they must have inspected us backward.
Close in, we gathered that the trend of our drifting was under a wing toward the ship’s belly; occasionally we felt tiny thrusts directing us thitherward. Our view of the ship was now oblique; we lost view of the kilometers-long body in the sun-shadows of distance. Everything we could see told us that the nineteen-kilometer wingspread which we had measured was close to being right, that the body-length was just as long, and that the girth was proportional.
Eventually we could no longer see any shape at all. We were tight-in, being gently drawn toward a broad hatch central in the centerwing belly; our feeling was that the ship might have been an oversized planetoid.
Hitherto invisible hatch doors parted in the belly. We were drawn inside. Hatch doors closed noiselessly beneath us.
Hull artigrav in the leviathan ship bottomed us on the flank of our own little cylinder, which rested on the mighty shell—and that flank just happened to be approximately our usual floor, so that Hoolihan rested on top 6f us. This gravity seemed about five-tenths g, which was our norm in space; but now we couldn’t run all around the periphery of our cylinder, because the Dhorner gravity draw from the sides and especially from far above us was much too weak to sustain human body-mass.
Mazda time was 0115 on Day 33. Our faces were glued to the Mazda windows; I had cut our interior lighting to help us peer outside. We were in a colossal cavern, dim-illumined blue; no feature could be descried, no wall or ceiling was visible—the cavern might have been infinite.
Sven at the nose window whispered: “Come here.” Wel and I gazed over his shoulder—and we stiffened. In the distance, a manta-ray shape swam toward us through blue atmosphere, small at first but growing fast. When it seemed man-size, it dropped languidly to the floor on its feet and submarine-walked toward us, still growing in nearing perspective—until nothing but its thighs showed in our nose window, dark silhouettes blocking out the blue beyond. It sank until it was its head that filled the window as it peered in at us; I shrank at the sight of the protruding muzzle. By stooping low and looking up, I could tell that the creature had horns.
Until now I have been talking in metrics; forgive me if I now shift to feet and inches which in 1996 are still more comprehensible to many people. * Remember that our command capsule Mazda was fifteen meters or forty-eight feet long, and five meters or over sixteen feet in diameter. (Behind the capsule, our bantam booster extended another forty feet.) Well: this creature, standing in front of our nose window, was so tall that, when it stood on its floor in front of our ship-nose, only its thighs showed in the window, which was six to ten feet above our capsule belly. And its head, to fill the window, had to be about four feet from chin to cranium, without counting its two-foot horns.
While we cringed, the giant turned its face away and reached for something out of view; it turned back to us with an enormous cylinder in its hairless four-web-fingered hand; and the head of the cylinder blasted us with bright light. We closed eyes and covered faces; then I thought to restore our interior illumination, and the cannon-size flashlight went out. The giant examined us during several minutes, its ugly face was unreadable; then it arose, and again its legs were visible, this time a hind view. It walked languorously away, revealing its double-knee leg action and more and more of its body; then it raised arms, spread manta-wings, rose off the shell, swam through a remote doorway, vanished.
Silence within Mazda. Then I, small: “Was that Captain Dhurk?” ;
“No,” Collins answered. “It was his first officer.”
Bill ventured: “I wonder whether they plan to feed us— - and with what. Not that we need their food—”
“Look, Bill.” Sven jerked; he was noticeably nervous, which, however, didn’t mean fear or loss of self-control. “Forget the food speculation. What you really ought to be doing, as crew scientist, is analyzing their atmosphere: is it breathable, or is it poison?” Bill nodded once and scrambled astern to his lab.
Two homed monsters appeared, swimming through the distant hatch. “The one to our left is Ultrasuperior Dhurk,” Collins whispered. (But why whisper?) Sinking to their hull-shell, they began to walk horizontally toward us on sinuous legs, growing as they came; they paused far enough away so that by pressing noses against our window we could see all of them. Probably they were talking together, although the Mazda hull admitted no exterior sound.
Then Mazda rose into the blue atmosphere, lifted not by a crane but by some kind of forcefield. Mazda was deposited on a broad surface which looked like a mesa but probably was just a table. (Mazda-cum-booster was eighty-eight feet long: some tablet) I killed the lights again. Standing near us, peering at us through our darkened nose window, were now three creatures—homed Captain Dhurk,' his horned officer, and a hornless individual who may have operated the force-field device which had lifted Mazda so effortlessly. Instantly I restored illumination to avoid being hit by that diabolical flashlight.
Sven murmured, “They have got to be better than nine meters tall. Good friends, prepare to be thumb-squashed if they get nasty.”
The three creatures were in close colloquy. Presently the captain acted: bending to our nose window, he beckoned to us with a rippling index finger. Then he straightened and waited.
“He wants us to come out,” Wel remarked. “If you’ll excuse my cleverness.”
I queried, “Should we, do you think?”
“If some of us don’t,” Sven returned, “that crewman will be coming up with a can opener, or worse. But we’ll have to suit-up, we don’t have an atmosphere report from Bill. Helen, you stay behind, you have a floating rib-chunk. How about you, Wel?” My husband nodded. “Collins?” He nodded. “You two suit-up then,” said Sven. “I’ll be right along.”
The crew-creature was bending to us, evincing impatience. Standing squa
rely in front of our nose window, Sven resorted to sign language: with his hands he described a bubble around his head, then went on to indicate drapage all the way down his body. The crew-creature nodded and straightened; at least we mutual aliens had sign language in common to some degree. Then Sven followed Wel and Collins aft, while I waited in the control room, watching our unearthly hosts as well as I could with our interior lighting on.
Intercom: “Helen, we’re going out.” I went to a side control-room window. Sven, Wel, and Collins, all suited, emerged from our aft flank hatch in that order and moved with undersea difficulty along the tabletop until, drawn up erect, they faced our captors directly by tilting their heads up and gazing far aloft.
Captain Dhurk, whom I found less ugly than his first officer and much less ugly than his crewperson, clearly considered us intelligent and initiated communication attempts. He began by pointing successively at the three humans and ticking-off three fingers; he then pointed both at them and at our capusle and counted five fingers (requiring both hands for this); he spread arms and wings in an obvious question, Why only three of you? Why not the others? Sven of course was equal to it: holding up a hand, he counted three fingers and pointed at himself and Wel and Collins; for a fourth finger (me) he violently thumped his chest and acted-out in-
tense pain; for a fifth (Bill) he fisted himself on a shoulder and again registered pain with arm hanging. Coming erect, Sven gazed at Dhurk; Dhurk nodded, satisfied, and went into the next act. I expected that it might be something about our attack with three savage missiles, but probably he couldn’t think how to act out “missiles.”
Dhurk pointed at our three men, pointed at his first officer and himself (oddly overlooking the crew-creature) and said a monosyllable which reverberated in his ship hull. Sven got the idea: he pointed at Dhurk and his first officer (cleverly overlooking the crew-creature), pointed at Collins and himself, and loudly said, “Men”—a sound which brought a grin to the face of the first officer and a corner-twitching to the mouth of Dhurk. (The crew-creature stayed impassive.) I murmured, “Sexist!”
Dhurk now carried it a step further: he pointed specifically to Sven, pointed to his own chest, and uttered a different ship-shaking sound. On a guess, Sven repeated the gestures and said “Leaders.”
Dhurk frowned, thinking. He said something to his first officer; the officer spread hands in a universal “Who’d know?” gesture. Dhurk thought further; then he issued some instructions to the officer, and he departed. The officer motioned our three men back into Mazda. They went. Activated by Sven, our hatch closed. The officer departed; the crew-creature stayed on guard.
Gathering in our salon, we pondered, not saying much— except for Bill’s contribution: “Good thing you suited up: that atmosphere is something akin to methane, you’d be dead.” Wel went to the bar; all our bottles were cradled against space-trauma, only two were broken; unhappily for Wel and me, broken was the Scotch. We would make up some more, but we didn’t want to take time for that now; grimacing, he and I settled for bourbon, and Wel served drinks around.
I said brightly: “Wel, you can file your story now.”
Bill ventured: “They don’t seem in any hurry to kill us.”
Sven replied: “I’d say they won’t kill us unless they have to. I think our existence astonishes them. We know from the Collins visions that Captain Dhurk didn’t know whether any of our planets was inhabited—and that he made a guilty point of not finding out. Now, quite by accident, he is confronted by intelligent life which is not totally different from his own kind of life—apart from our pygmy size and primitive technology. He won’t be in a hurry to kill us—but what will he do? Anyone?”
“They aren’t as big as they look,” Haley commented. “Remember that we are shrunk to a third of our normal size, assuming we weren’t further shrunk when we were pulled deeper into time. But they didn’t shrink. So I’d put their height at about three ,meters normally. That’s more than a third larger than we are normally, but it is within the theoretical limits for hyper-intelligent manipulative hominids.” “Why,” Sven demanded, “would they grow that large?”
“I think immediately of two possible factors, “ Bill ruminated. “If the gravity of their planet is less than ours, larger growth would be easy. But more: it seems, as Collins showed us, that their atmosphere is dense enough to be swimmable and to give them buoyancy; again, conducive to large growth. My God, look at our whales!”
Wel commented: “All very probable. But you aren’t answering Sven’s question as to what they may do to us.”
“I have, however, cut them down to size,” Bill retorted. “And that can have psychological value for us, at the very least—especially if they are reflecting that normally we would be almost two-thirds their own size.”
Collins inserted: “That is precisely what they are reflecting. Also, our presence and capture have thrown Dhurk into a positive tizzy of conflicting ideas. He has shrunk and enslaved a solar system for his priestess-princess, and in the process he has shrunk and enslaved intelligent creatures; the latter is bad in his moral lights, but it is also good because his princess will think we are cute. Only, we aren't cute. We have a civilization, he has discovered from us, which is relatively primitive but nevertheless advanced enough to field vehicles into solar orbit to hit him with three nuclear missiles at great distance, and therefore to cause eventual trouble for Dhora when we are stationed on high as part of Hréda’s Divine Museum. These considerations will amuse Hréda, no doubt, but they will not amuse her grandfather. Again: here we are, the enemy aboard his villain-ship; he cannot mistreat us because of his guilt feelings; nevertheless the question remains with him, what can we do against him?'For instance, do we perhaps have another nuclear bomb?”
Wel said wearily: “Look, all of us have got to get some shut-eye, it’s after three* a.m.” At that, all of us drank off and headed for cubicles. That was when we discovered an embarrassing fact: there was gravity, but it was the gravity of the Dhomer ship, and it definitively established down as our slightly tilted floor. Which meant that only the bunk in Wel's cabin was level and sleepable; the bunks in mine and Bill’s were tilted at sharp angles, and the cubicles for Sven and Collins were practically upside down. Chivalrously Wel offered me his cabin, but I refused; Wel shrugged and crawled in, while we other four snatched bedding out of our cubicles and bunked wherever we might.
Bill scrambled aft to his laboratory; Sven went forward to the control room; Collins and I found floor-spaces in the salon respectably distant from each other, and we sacked-in.
Just before sleep came, a thought hit me, and I dared voice it. Low: “Collins—are you awake?”
“Barely so, Doctor Cavell. What is it?”
“I was just wondering—how about that crew-creature?”
“I am persuaded, Doctor Cavell, that it is a robot. Good night, now.”
25
Bill was awakened around 0500 by clamor on our entry hatch in his lab. Sighing, Bill painfully worked his way erect, able to help the standing operation with only one arm; and he opened the outer door of the airlock. After a moment came three knocks, then silence. Closing the outer door, Bill opened the inner, holding breath against the assault of hostile atmosphere. When that had dissipated, he looked. On the lock-floor was a dishtray-size platter (one of their small saucers, Bill imagined) heaped with something hot that smelled like food, and also a vast lidded pot (for an individual Dhorner serving?) containing something hot that smelled like coffee.
Going to the intercom, Bill shouted for help.
We worked ourselves and our injuries gingerly-painfully out of our bunks; we had been resting in work togs. Uninjured Collins arrived first, naturally, and he was the only one who was not sleepy. Bill and Sven between them lifted the food tray onto one of Bill’s worktables while Collins alone somehow managed the pot. Standing around the table, we yawned, stared, grimaced, tasted.
It was some kind of hot meat. Not bad, really. Not very goo
d, either. And the same with what passed for coffee. Clearly there were no plans to starve us. Conversation, when it arose, turned on speculation whether this was breakfast or some other meal in terms of the Dhomer ship’s clock. “Supper, I think,” Collins clarified. “Want to see them eating?”
I said, “Not really.”
“I think we should, though,” said Wel.
Immediately we had clairvoyance of the officers’ mess: Dhurk and two horned under-officers; they were being served by hornless crew-creatures. “Servant robots,” Collins judged, “Which means that probably there is no crew-mess. I am convinced that the ship is commanded by these three live officers and otherwise crewed by robots.”
“This may be to our advantage,” Sven remarked.
I countered: “It could also be to our disadvantage, because the robots may have particularly keen perceptions. Look, they were monitoring us a million kilometers off; they must have us now under internal surveillance—they’ll want to know how we like their chow.”
“Then let’s eat hearty,” said Sven, grabbing more meat. “Look, Hel, the robots may be specialized for particular tasks which would not include critical inspection of enemy activities aboard ship. And I see another possible advantage: their clock seems to be just about the opposite of ours—which means that for their live officers, it must be sleepytime when we are used to being awake.”
“On the other hand,” I pressed, “robots don’t sleep. While the officers are sleeping, the robots probably watch operations and awaken officers if necessary. And that argues some robots which are very complex, programable to respond to any emergency, perhaps even to handle their ship in a crisis until the officers get there. And this says to me that some robots can be programed to watch out for us.” ,
Firmly Sven asserted, “Our time to operate is their night and our day. Any other course would be silly, whatever the hazards of this one. I say we should slightly modify our sleep hours from our 2100 to our 0500; that we catch their supper as our breakfast and vice versa.”