Grandy’s face appeared on the screen. “Congratulations,” he said.
The frown got a few lines deeper. Was that Grandy’s idea of a joke on Jason? He couldn’t escape them anywhere—hotel, or space between the stars. Jason ignored the remark. “What have you got in that ship?”
“Nothing,” said Grandy proudly.
He wasn’t in the mood for games, and hoped it showed on his face.
Grandy winked. “Nothing at all,” he said firmly.
Then it was only the fuel they thought they got for nothing from Restap, the by-product of manufacturing goop. As far as he was concerned a fuel like that wasn’t a secondary item, it was the main thing. And there would be a lot of others who would agree with him. That it could add such speed to a ship ready to fall apart was incredible. Later, when he was free of present entanglements, he’d help them market it, outside the Restapan sphere of influence. It wouldn’t be hard.
“I’ll discuss it later,” said Jason, sensing that someone had come in behind him. Airsta was there.
Grandy nodded in relief; his secret was safe. “You ran away before we could get in touch with you. Then we heard about it and decided to give you a present.”
“Heard about what?” asked Jason. Grandy had a genius for befuddlement. He could tie up a semanticist for hours with a simple statement.
“Do you want it or don’t you?” asked Grandy. “If you do, get your grapples ready because we’re going to shoot it over.”
“Take it,” urged Airsta in a whisper. “You can get rid of it later.”
Jason stared at her. That was the wrong reaction. She should have been interested in the speed of the Kransian ship, and instead was intent solely on getting them out of the way.
“What is it?” Jason asked Grandy.
“You’ll see. And be careful. It’s rare and delicate.”
“Get it over with,” advised Airsta, her back to the screen. Grandy couldn’t hear her.
Jason went to the controls and opened the freight lock. He maneuvered the ship as close as he could to the other. In the next few minutes he had all he could do to get the transfer can inside. Once it was there, he closed the lock.
Before he could get in touch with Grandy again, the Kransian ship had turned around and was speeding away. Jason put the ship on automatics.
“Leave it there,” suggested Airsta. “It will keep.” He shrugged. “Grandy says it’s delicate.” He went down to the freight bay, Airsta following.
* * * *
It was an ordinary space transfer can, and it could be heated inside, if the cargo made it necessary. It was heated.
He opened it. Inside was a cage, and in the cage was an animal. On the cage was a tag. Written in the queer flowing Kransian script was one word. He deciphered it. ‘Congratulations.”
That was what Grandy had first said, and here was more of the same. He didn’t like it any better this time. “What does this mean?” he asked her.
“I think there’s been a mistake.” She blushed.
She was a woman, of course, and what occurred in the capillaries of her cheeks was nothing unusual. Not unusual, but it made him uneasy. “What kind of a mistake?” He thought he knew.
“According to our custom,” she said, “when a woman leaves Restap alone with a man—”
“I can guess,” he said. “She’s considered married to him.”
“Not quite, although it is an announcement of intention. However, my position in Intrade overrides the fact that I’m a woman, and since it’s not your custom, I didn’t consider either of us bound by it.”
“You’re right,” he said. “It’s not my custom, and this is a business trip, not a prenuptial flight.” That sounded harsh but he let it stand. It was a good idea to make his position clear from the beginning. Actually she was an attractive woman, very much so, and certainly a capable one. Under different circumstances—with a shock he realized that under different circumstances he might not object. That was not what he had intended at all.
She half turned away and he couldn’t accurately determine her reactions, but he felt it was no surprise to her.
“Get rid of that thing,” she said, indicating the animal. “Shove it out. I don’t want to see it.”
Of course she didn’t. It had served to focus his attention on something she had wished concealed, for whatever reason. He could examine what those reasons were later. In the meantime he could add to her qualifications: she was also a ruthless woman, if crossed.
“Hardly,” he said. “It’s a living creature, highly evolved. Do you know what it is?”
“We have some in our zoos,” she answered. Her voice was not steady. “Now, will you get rid of it?”
He ignored the suggestion. Airsta crumpled the congratulation card and stalked out of the freight bay toward the upper part of the ship.
There were a number of items he had to straighten out. He sat down beside the cage and read the plaque.
ROSLING: a rare species of animal native to Kransi. Valued as an intelligent, docile pet.
It had more fur than he had ever seen on an animal, long curly golden fleece. The fur was matted thickly over the entire body, but was even more bushy on the creature’s face. How it could see at all through the fur was a mystery. The forelegs were shorter than the hind legs and it moved with kangaroo-like hops. It whined coaxingly at him.
Intelligent, docile pet, the plaque said, and so he opened the cage. It hopped out and rubbed against him. About as high as a large dog, there was no other point of resemblance.
He stroked the rosling’s head and then uncomfortably withdrew his hand. It was sticky. The creature’s eyes were watering. Perhaps it was sick. He’d have to turn it over to a zoo, where it would receive proper attention.
The rosling was unimportant in itself, only it reminded him of the main problem. Airsta had been on the ship two days and he had made no move to secure the information he was after. Why hadn’t he? There wasn’t much time left if he was ever going to succeed.
He thought he had been clever in isolating an Intrade official, but now he wondered. Which one of them was isolated? It was his ship, and he could find out. He walked up the passageway, the rosling hopping ahead of him. It disappeared into a side corridor and he let it go. It could do no harm.
* * * *
He locked himself in the lab and turned off the screen. Anyone of importance who ventured outside the boundaries of his own influence took chances. A good lab, though it didn’t provide complete protection, reduced chances to a minimum.
Jason thrust his hand into the aperture of a small machine and held it there until he felt the needle slide into the flesh and then withdraw. In a few minutes the report was ready: no trace of any drugs; endocrine balance normal. The report on drugs was satisfactory, but the endocrine balance was not. His body chemistry fitted into no exact category, and his glandular reactions were always above or below, but never in the normal range. He was a hybrid, product of two different races; it was not strange that he shouldn’t be normal; it was unexpected that suddenly he should fit in with the rest of mankind. He shrugged, he’d check again in an hour or so; if he was still normal then, he would worry. However, for a long-term control of a subject, drugs were crude, and he didn’t expect to find anything on that score.
* * * *
There were other tests, and he took them all, with the clear precision of a man who had gone through it many times. The final summary was disappointing, and disturbing. No trace of hypnotism, not an element of suggestion anywhere in his mind. Nevertheless his responses were flattened out, muted in an astonishing manner. Encephalocurves that usually peaked and dipped to the edges of the graph now wavered comfortably down the middle. He had seen his analysis too many times; it wasn’t he. Anger and elation were gone, despair and urgency were missing from the picture of his mind. Responses like this could be obtained by drugs or refined methods of hypnotism and in no other way. Yet he could eliminate both; his instruments were to
o good—he’d swear by them.
There was, there had to be, another way to control an individual. Because someone had suppressed his reactions. If he needed proof other than that his instruments gave him, it was right in front of him—he hadn’t got the information from Airsta. Hadn’t got the information, and, until jolted out of his lethargy, hadn’t thought about it. He didn’t have much time to wonder about it. A loud scream came from the rear of the ship. He leaped up and closed the lab. Before he could get to her room, Airsta met him in the corridor.
“It attacked me,” she said, her voice quavering with anger. “You’ll have to kill it.”
She was disheveled and semi-nude. Evidently it had occurred while she was undressing. There was no visible wound, and considering the amount of her body exposed, eliminating anything serious. “The rosling?” he asked. “I’ll put it back in the cage.”
“You’ll kill it,” she insisted, near hysteria. “It crept into my cabin and leaped on me while I was changing.”
Before he could answer, the rosling came out and hopped warily toward them. Screeching, Airsta fled. He knew where she was going and got there first. He grabbed the weapon from the desk and held it out of her reach. The rosling was essentially a docile creature and he wasn’t going to see it wantonly destroyed.
The rosling appeared behind them. Again Airsta fled, found a cabin that was open, turned into it, and slammed the door behind her. Jason gripped the weapon nervously, and then thrust it into his jacket. The rosling wasn’t acting docile, now, but it was a little creature and he could cuff it senseless if he had to.
The rosling stood erect, to his surprise. It came closer and leaped into his arms. “Jason,” wept the rosling.
He could recognize the voice anywhere. “Carlos!”
She thrust her damp muzzle into his face and meant it for a kiss. Then she wriggled out of his arms and locked the door of the cabin Airsta was in. Limping, she came back. “Jason,” she whimpered.
He led her toward the back of the ship and sat her down. He wasn’t anxious to have Airsta overhear what she had to say. At the moment, until he straightened things out, he didn’t want Airsta near him.
“Suppose you tell me why you did this,” he said as soon as Carlos stopped shaking.
“This is one of my best compositions,” she said proudly. “I can fool even an expert with it.” Composition? Grandy had said she composed animals. He hadn’t got to the end of it, but maybe her talent wasn’t as impractical as he had once thought. “How did you do it?”
“Goop, to grow hair. You know about that. But there’s a derivative of it that makes bones supple. We use that in childbirth. Between the two chemicals I can twist my body into practically any shape and hold it as long as I wish.”
It was logical to assume that a substance as complex as goop would have many derivatives, each of them with special properties. “But why did you do it?” he asked.
“Because I had to,” breathed Carlos. “She was going to marry you.”
“I think I’ve disposed of that,” he said dryly.
“But you haven’t,” said Carlos. “You are married to her, as much as any non-Restapan can be.”
Airsta had misled him. An “announcement of intention,” she had said. It was stronger than that. For practical purposes he was her male concubine. And it was legally embarrassing. He hadn’t known about that aspect of Restapan law; but he did know others. One feature was that the non-Restapan partner in semi-marriage had no legal rights. On Restap or any of its possessions his wealth belonged to her.
Fortunately, though, there was an interstellar law. It consisted mostly of loopholes. He could fight her claims successfully anywhere except on Restap. He could never go back there.
He had started out nicely with his own trap—and walked into one of her contriving. If it were she who set it up. What was the purpose behind it? It had to be connected with his interest in Kransi and Merhaven.
He inclined his head. “Tell me the rest of it!”
“Please,” said Carlos, squirming uncomfortably under the matted fur. “Let me get this off.”
“I have a laboratory,” he said ruefully. “But you won’t find the chemicals you need.”
“To grow it, I wouldn’t. But I can mix up something that will remove it.”
She left, and in a quarter of an hour was back, the Carlos he could recognize again. Her hair was close cropped and it was still gold—she hadn’t been able to change the color. She had sheared the fur remaining on her body so that it was a reasonable duplication of her everyday attire. The bones in her thighs were nearly straight as her muscular control counteracted the effects of the chemical that had made them supple.
There was time for personal appraisal later. He sat down beside her. “Tell me everything you know.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “Something changed in you during the picnic,” said Carlos. “I don’t know what it was, but I could feel it. I think Airsta had something to do with it.” She took a deep breath. “Afterward, when we couldn’t get in touch with you to tell you about it, we learned where you were going, and I persuaded Grandy to get me on board. I would have escaped from the cage anyway, but it made things easier that you let me out. I wandered into Airsta’s cabin, but she chased me out.
“I came in again while she wasn’t looking. I hid until I couldn’t stand it any longer. Then I leaped out and bit her.”
He frowned; he had expected more information. Airsta was part of a big plot, and Carlos had prevented his bumbling into it too far to get out. But if he were going to unravel it to the end, he must know more. “Why did you attack her?” he asked.
Carlos grimaced. “Because there in her cabin, watching her undress, I disliked her. I couldn’t like any woman who was scheming to get you.” She had difficulty breathing.
Fringe information of course, but it added to the picture. Under the circumstances, no woman would like Airsta.
“I think it’s time you let me out,” said Airsta.
He looked up. She was at the other end of the ship, but the screen was on. It didn’t matter that she had been listening; she was safe enough where she was. “Any time. Just tell me what I want to know.”
She laughed, completely comfortable in the situation. It was not attitude he expected. “I’ll wait till the rosling dies,” she said.
He turned; Carlos was sitting where she had been, but it seemed an effort for her to remain upright. Her face was rigid and yellow and her breathing was convulsive.
Suddenly he felt close to the answer. All the bits and pieces of fringe information were drawing together. And when they coalesced, the solution would be near. “You’d be glad if she did,” he said carefully. “But I’ll hold you responsible.”
“But I’ve done nothing, Jason. If she dies, it will be because of you. Don’t you know that?” She was working hard at it—that was obvious—but it didn’t pay to discount what she said.
Carlos was reacting to something; it might be him. If allowed to continue, that reaction could be lethal. It wouldn’t take long at this rate. The change in her appearance was startling. He couldn’t be the cause. He’d been with Carlos for days at a time, and nothing like this had occurred. Mentally he corrected himself. He’d been with her—Restap. That planet again.
He tried to make her comfortable, straightened her cramped legs, and laid her down gently. Acting on a theory, he brushed his hand over her face. She tried to smile but without success. He was right; at least it was partly a question of proximity.
He stood up. “What can I do for her?” he asked Airsta.
“Nothing. You’re the cause, but you can’t help her. I can, and when I get out of here, I’ll see what I can do.”
If that were true, and it was an assumption he wasn’t prepared to make, she could do it as easily from where she was. “I’ll see,” he said, and left Carlos there.
A half hour before, until Carlos had driven Airsta from her cabin, he had been sluggish. He wasn’t
now. If he had time, he could take the same tests, and the difference would show. But he didn’t need to take them—he knew he felt different. He was his old self again—a person who could be dangerous, for Airsta.
Carlos had surprised Airsta in her cabin. It seemed to hinge on that. If he could question Carlos more closely about it—but she was past speech. Meanwhile, there was her cabin. He could examine that.
Airsta was on the screen when he entered. She watched him impersonally while he ransacked her belongings. Piece by piece he took the cabin apart. When he found nothing he went through every item she had brought with her.
“You won’t find anything,” she said. “The effects on Carlos are purely mental.”
She was good at it; he nearly believed her. “Hypnosis?” he asked, trying to keep the strain out of his voice.
She laughed easily. “That’s what you were going to use on me, or something like it. However, it’s not hypnosis; you know it isn’t. You’ve checked yourself thoroughly.”
She leaned toward the screen. “The truth is that Kransians are emotionally unstable. When they come in contact with other races they react—unless a Restapan is very near and consciously gives them emotional support.”
Now she was talking like a mystic. “Emotional support”—well, Restapans did something, but it wasn’t comparable to a child leaning on his mother. Silently he went back to Carlos. She was worse than she had been, but not as bad as he expected. There was at least an element of truth in Airsta’s claim. His effect on Carlos was accumulative. By putting distance between them he had retarded the progress. If the ship were big enough, by placing her at one end and remaining at the other, she might recover. But the ship wasn’t that big.
Airsta looked out of the screen at Carlos. “There’s still time,” she said critically “But not much.”
He glanced again at Carlos. There wasn’t much time. He went through the ship to the cabin in which Airsta was presently confined.
She came out, her clothing skillfully disarranged. “You’ll have to let me get dressed,” she said, attempting to cover the uncovered parts and revealing more in the process.
The Eleventh Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack Page 35