Tiger in the Stars

by Zach Hughes

  Perhaps, he thought, it had not, as yet, blinked back. It could be sitting off at limitless distances, awaiting a move. It could detect a jump. He programed a jump, out past the orbit of Pluto, and made it. Hara demanded to know what was going on, having felt the buildup of power in the generator. He told her, rather moodily, to bear with him. He had been

  especially alert for the feel of a blinking ship, but the feeling of his own blink, he knew, would override the feel of another ship blinking nearby. He had to assume, however, that his dark companion was now with him. Once again he threw full power into the detection circuits, finding nothing. He increased power steadily, feeding it in from other sources,

  exceeding the capacity of the circuits until, overloaded, a circuit blew. The redundancy system switched in and the ship began repair on the blown circuit. He fed power in and blew the standby circuit before repairs were completed. This blinded him in one sector for several minutes before the repaired circuit was completed. He was acting purely on hunch and in desperation. One by one he overloaded the circuits in the detection system and one by one they were repaired. By watching the repair process he learned. Materials were being manipulated at the atomic level, the system drawing on a bank of stored atoms, building tiny components a block at a time to replace the microscopic circuits as he destroyed them. And after hours of destruction and repair the results were the same. He could not detect any ship within light-minutes of his position. He was convinced, then, that any actions he himself might take were fruitless. A technology able to manipulate materials at the atomic level by preprogrammed automation could plant the blanking device in any repaired circuit. But he was not going to admit defeat. If he had been followed by a ship that had deliberately been blanked from him, then that ship was there for no good purpose. Somehow, the undetectable ship was tied in with the disappearance of the shuttle and the blink test vehicle and, consequently, with the disappearances of all the ships lost between Earth and Centauri. There were no access ports to the inner workings of the ship. It had not been designed for human repair. Still there was a way. In the well-stocked tool bin of the ship were torches, meters, handtools. He had long since been aware of their presence and was, at first, puzzled until he realized that they were duplicates of tools that had been carried on the old Pride. Perhaps those who had put him aboard the ship had considered his tools to be on a par with his library, something to make him more comfortable, or to amuse him. At any rate they were there, and with the help of Hara and Heath, he transported the necessary items to the proper area of the ship and very carefully cut into the covering, exposing the detection circuits. Then, one by one, using scrap materials from his tool bin, they began to replace the self-repairing circuits in one side of the system. It was necessary, due to the crudeness of their materials, to sacrifice some of the efficiency, some of the range. However, as testing followed the insertion of each man-made substitute, the thing worked. Since each circuit was a part of himself, Plank could know its function and could

  direct his mobile extension and the others to jury-rig a substitute. It was a tedious, time-consuming process that went on and on through circuit after circuit until Hara began to sag with fatigue. «One more, then we'll take a break,» Plank said, although he intended to continue working through his mobile form. The circuit was bypassed, then replaced. A test was run. The sensitive system was no longer perfect. There was distortion and noise, but there was something else. It was near, very near, arrogantly near. The black ship sat, dead silent in space, a mere 40 kilometers from them. Slowly, carefully, Plank moved weapons to bear on the ship. His first thought was to blast it out of space. Then he reconsidered. He kept the weapons ready. He opened a port, sent his mobile form out in the small vehicle and was ready at any moment to activate weapons which would be swift enough to destroy the dark ship should it begin to build power to blink away. He was alongside within minutes. The ship was much like his own. He searched for a port, found it, locked the small vehicle to the dark globe and found entry surprisingly easy. He flowed into the dark ship, found it to be mechanically the same as his own, and he possessed it. There was no directing brain, only an additional bank of circuits in the computer. Quick analysis of that bank told him its purpose; it was sending information even as he destroyed it with a surge of power that burned both primary and backup systems. Repair would take time, time enough for him to find a way to cut that bank completely away from the computer, time to investigate the ship and see its curious layout. No luxury quarters here. The ship was functional, strictly mechanical. In size and contour, it was the same as his. The interior, however, was given over to one huge bay cut into tiny cubicles, each containing a bed, sanitary facilities and a small store of water and a substance that, upon examination, proved to be an artificial nutrient suitable for human consumption. It was evident that the dark ship was, in essence, a prison ship, designed to transport humans, or some form of life very much like humans. Chilled, Plank hastily returned to the computer and burned the repairing circuits in the bank he had destroyed. To complete the job, he sent the vehicle back to the new Pride, then returned it, Hara aboard with the proper tools, to the dark ship. Then with torch and cutters he permanently severed the sending bank from the ship's computer. CHAPTER ELEVEN There were times when it was possible to forget that the hand that touched her was not his. He could feel the liveness of her, the warmth of her. She was so beautiful. In the moment of respite, he stood in his mobile form and looked at her and saw the depth of her ice-blue eyes, the slightly tousled length of light hair, the form of woman under the well-tailored uniform. Once again he touched her, his hand light on her arm. She looked up. Her smile was radiant. It seemed to him that she, too, was able to forget. Until that moment he had not allowed himself to think of her. The unanswered questions had preoccupied him. Now there was a moment, and the beauty of her sank into him, overwhelmed him; he forgot and his arms went out to hold her. Her smile closed, lips forming for the kiss. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and he could feel. It was a wonderful instrument, containing all the sensory equipment of his original body. He was lost in

  the thrill of her and his lips touched and felt the soft parting and the sweet wetness, and suddenly she was cold and stiff in his arms. «I'm sorry,» he said, letting his arms drop. «For a moment,» she said uncertainly. «Yes, I know,» he said. «It won't happen again.» «It's not you,» she said. «It feels.» «Oh, John,» she said, turning away. «Your friend Heath must be climbing the walls by now,» Plank said. «If we find that we have a use for two ships we'll have to rig a manual way to communicate. Right now I want to live with this baby for a while, so why don't you get into the scout and I'll zap you back over to pick up the commander.» Alone, he directed the movement of the small vehicle with a portion of his mind while concentrating on the working of the dark ship. The discovery that it was more heavily armed than his own ship did not add to his confidence. Otherwise it was the same, save for the disconnected bank whose purpose was communication. There, he felt, was the only possible source of new information. Although severed from the main computer of the ship, the unit was still wired into the portion of the computer that directed self-repair, and that work was almost complete. One system was operable, the backup nearly so. It was almost as if the bank of circuits were alive, a self-sustaining unit. For the first time since he had become aware of being the directing

  force of a starship he felt the sheer alien strangeness of his surroundings. Man, in his history, had accomplished much, but he had a long way to go before he could call himself master of the elemental building blocks of the universe. Man was still discovering new sub-atomic particles. The beings who had built this ship must, Plank knew, have command of those subatomic particles. The way the ships repaired themselves was astounding, a liquid flow of atomic material forming and growing as if poured into a mold. But the result was the same: mere items of hardware, a bit more sophisticated, perhaps, smaller, more efficient, but hardware nevertheless. And man was a master of hardw
are. What aliens could build, man could understand. The laws of physics did not change. But he knew that without his ability to be a part of that hardware, to feel it, to flow along its wiring, he would have been hard put to figure out even the first circuit. He had begun to think of his makers, those who had put his brain into a crystal container aboard a starship, as they. They had given him an advantage. He could feel their little gimmicks, quickly understand what they were about. Their hardware became his hardware. He was cautious. He didn't like what he'd found aboard this dark ship, the cell-like rooms. They had sent him wandering around searching for home and it was a lead-pipe cinch that they wanted to fill those cells with humans. He didn't know why, but he was certain it couldn't be for the good of the people involved. Taking away a man's body and putting his brain into a machine showed a certain amount of disregard for the rights of the individual. The communicating bank was the most complicated piece of machinery he'd encountered. It almost defeated him, baffled him long after Hara drew alongside and boarded with Heath. He left them to stare for a moment at his inactive mobile form. He himself, was deep inside the ship. He reasoned that if the communications bank could send, it could also receive. He inspected that section, activated it and waited. There was nothing. It was capable of receiving, but not on a frequency he knew. He had expected it to function much as his own detection gear functioned, a radarlike form of blinking energy out and back. In detecting a distant object, his system blinked waves, sending them not through space but into something else, in and out, in and out, on timed adjustable intervals, longer blinks to detect large objects, shorter and shorter as the search narrowed down. But the communications bank of the dark ship was not geared to receive or send any wavelength in the spectrum. At home, men were still working on communications by biological energy, the still unmastered technique of using the «minds» of plants to send messages. But there was no biological receptor aboard the dark ship. Another form of mental energy? If so, what mentality? The mind of them could be so different as to be removed from human perception. More than anything that had happened, his inability to master the communications bank made him aware of his limitations. What was he up against? Who were they? Super-beings? Because of his integration with a very sophisticated computer, he was superhuman, and

  he was still helpless. It seemed futile to think that he could tackle beings capable of slowing atoms and electrons and smaller particles into pre-set designs. Who the hell was he even to think about meeting them head-on and having the smallest chance of success? They would squash him. They could, probably, cause his own atoms to flow, killing all that was left of him, that small, unimpressive mass of gray matter back aboard the new Pride. But man had always been a little crazy. He'd always had that arrogant confidence in his own ability. In the beginning he fought the big saber-toothed tigers, stronger, more adapted to the conditions, almost as intelligent, and he won. He killed mastodons with stone-tipped spears and took on white sharks in their own environs. He did it not so much with his strength as with his brain, and Plank had his brain. A human brain. Somewhere out there was something probably very nasty. Something with some very advanced technology. Something unexplained. But then man had crawled into caves to see what was in the dark and probed into the universe to learn its secrets. Plank made his decision. He would take on the tiger. He prepared himself and hooked the communications bank into the system; there was an immediate rush of sending, which he stopped. He had the message on the computer's memory. It was one blip from the bank, cut off in midblip. He knew he had made a risky decision, letting the bank send, but it had led him to the section of the computer that, he discovered, was full of previous messages, all in the same form. He could find no indication of the energy involved, but whatever it was, it had been translated into mere electronic impulses. In the end, it was quite simple. There is really nothing new, he thought, only things unknown. The blips were squeezed. Lengthening them, slowing them down, he reduced them to computer language, which he understood. And the last message was merely a report on a malfunction that had been repaired. The others were more interesting. They went back to the beginning and contained coordinates that could be placed on the star

  charts aboard the Pride, They recorded the position of the first planet he'd explored, the planet he'd called Plank's World with the small, sluglike animals. They positioned his ship at all of the stops, at the beginning and end of each blink. He skipped. The big question to be answered was near the end of the tape. The answer was yes. Yes, the communications bank had sent the position of Plank's last blink. On the tape were the coordinates that would place an alien within visual distance of the sun and the populated planets of the system. He thought of the cold and barren cells aboard the dark ship, cells just large enough to house, with a complete lack of privacy and comfort, 1,000 people. When he first looked at the cells the image of a prison ship had come to him. And if his suspicions were correct, if the dark ship were, indeed, meant to transport humans, then danger was near. With the location of Earth now known to them, they could fill a million such ships with people if they desired. He could not be sure, as yet, that they wanted to fill ships with humans. It was difficult to imagine. Man was no longer a hunted creature. He had outlived such threats. He was no longer prey for larger animals. He felt a surge of anger. Who were they to offer even an implied threat to man? All right, their hardware was a bit more sophisticated, but it was just hardware. They had obviously wanted to find man's home planet. Now they had the information which would bring them to Earth. He couldn't prevent that. The information had already been sent. But he could see to it that man would prove to be the most dangerous game in the universe. He himself had been given the equipment to begin resistance. He did not consult the others lest his plan of action be slowed by their natural caution. He felt the need to move, to do something quickly. He was angered and he had months of frustration to vent on someone, something. In short, he needed something to hit. He reconnected the communications bank and let it send. This time he tracked the transmission and found a general line of direction. The beam, brief and powerful, blinked off toward galactic center. Simultaneously, Plank blinked the two ships after it. In an area of dense stars, he let the bank transmit again. It sent coordinates of the ships' position. He blinked in the direction of the beam and then repeated the process, the short blinks made necessary by the crowdings of the stars. It was a slow process. For the first time man was venturing into the heart of the galaxy: where the giant stars pull with magnificent force; where the emptiness of space is lessened, but not completely full; where deadly bursts of stellar winds blow in confused directions and the mass of neighboring stars influence each other; where planet formation was rare. There was a glory in the viewport. Hara and Heath found it difficult to sleep, wanting to be awake at the end of each blink to see the new spread of stars thicker than the Milky Way of home. At first Hara had been angry. Plank had given them no choice. But now that she was there she was awed; she felt dwarfed more than ever before by the sheer size and mass of the galaxy. Near the galactic core old stars lighted the hulls of the two ships traveling in tandem. The deadly gravity of a black hole tugged at them, forced use of all power, a quick blink away. Blue giants blazed. White dwarfs sported an occasional planet, but these were swept clean by the solar winds of nearby suns. The procedure became monotonous. Because of the closely massed suns, the blinks were short. Each blink was proceeded by a transmission burst from the communications bank. Direction established, the ships followed. And, although it zigzagged, the course was ever inward, toward the core. Finally there was one, carefully calculated jump, and the two ships lay