She had to slow down to make it across. Julie went down the length of the platform at a half-speed sprint, unable visually to detect the openings in the darkness, relying on memory. Norbert came loping along steadily after her. She noticed that he, too, must have memorized the locations of the holes, because he was moving confidently and quickly. She forced herself to go a little faster, even though it increased her chances of a fall.
She reached the far end and hopped off. Norbert had gained several steps on her. She hoped to make it up in the next stage.
Just ahead were the spare firing tubes, big cylinders of cold-rolled steel, eighteen of them, each a hundred and eighty feet long. Moving by touch, Julie located a pipe with an aperture that would just permit her to squeeze in. Norbert, with his greater size, wouldn’t be able to follow, would be forced to walk on top of the slippery pipes, thus giving Julie a brief breathing spell. A good escape could be composed of moments like these.
That, at least, was how it was supposed to work. Norbert stopped and looked at the pipe, started to go around it, then came back and managed somehow to collapse his shoulders and crawl into the pipe after her. She could hear the tortured metal-to-metal squealing as he pushed himself through the pipe.
Then she realized that not only was he in the pipe behind her, he was gaining, collapsing himself down to half his usual size and scuttling along like a giant malevolent insect. A sudden sense of claustrophobia came over Julie as she imagined Norbert’s big clawed hand closing over her foot.
She forced herself to remain calm. “You won’t go any faster in a panic,” she reminded herself. One of the first lessons Shen Hui had taught her was to be extra cool in the face of a crisis, to force herself to slow down just when her senses were shrieking at her to speed up. This lesson stood her in good stead now. Suddenly the darkness came to an end and she was out of the pipe and running, a fraction of a second ahead of the alien.
She dodged instinctively as Norbert’s arm reached out for her. In a moment’s inattention, she slammed into a precariously balanced cart containing machine parts and ball bearings. Metal objects flew in all directions and clattered against the sides of the hold. Julie came down on a bearing in midstride and both her feet shot out from under her. Catlike, she turned in midair, throwing up a protective forearm before she went crashing to the floor on her face.
As she sprawled Norbert loomed above her, arms spread wide, jaws open in a terrifying grimace. Through his open jaws the little inner jaws came flickering out, more malevolent than a crazed pit viper.
Norbert lunged at her, and she was momentarily unable to do anything to protect herself. He was almost on her…
She had an instant to wonder what he was programmed to do if he caught her… or did he make up that part as he went along?
And then Norbert slipped on the bearings and lost his balance.
His taloned feet raked the metal floor as he tried to gain purchase. He crashed to the deck with a bone-smattering sound.
For a moment Norbert sprawled there. His resemblance to a giant insect was now apparent as his arms and legs twitched and vibrated, trying to find something to hold. Then he righted himself and was up again and towering over her.
Unable to do anything, Stan had to watch. His fingernails were already ragged, for he had been chewing at bloody cuticles while monitoring Julie’s progress. He leaned forward, intent.
Julie, at the last possible moment, slipped through the alien’s claws and disappeared through the horizontally closing metal slabs at the end of the hold. The creature yowled in rage as the door shut in his face and Julie shot the lock.
Immediately Norbert began wrenching at the door, then, having no luck with the lock, turned his attention to the hinges.
Julie meanwhile was streaking through the cluttered compartment, sprinting at full stride and managing somehow to avoid the clutter of machines and packing cases that turned the place into an obstacle course filled with cutting edges.
Stan was able to track her progress on his monitor against a schematic of the ship’s hold.
He watched a tiny silver dot, representing Julie, dodge around objects ahead of a longer blue-black streak that represented her pursuer.
“Come on, Julie,” Stan muttered to himself. “You don’t have to run it this close! Pull the plug! Bail out!”
But Julie kept running. She seemed to be going for some kind of a record. Never had she been so graceful, so light on her feet. She had reached the far end of the compartment. The egress port was dogged down tight. Norbert was less than five feet behind her now. He reached for her with taloned claws, ending in dagger-sharp tips. Julie stood her ground, and Stan couldn’t help but admire the game quality of her courage. Then she ducked down and scuttled between the creature’s legs, catching it by surprise, and escaping with nothing more than a shallow scratch on her right shoulder.
She was up to her full speed in two bounds, and for a moment she thought she had gained on it. But Norbert had learned something, too. He ignored her dodging run and came galloping up alongside her. His mouth, impossibly crowded with needle-tipped teeth, snarled and opened wide. From his jaw, and protruding through his mouth, came the hateful small replica of these jaws, composed of a small rectangular body part like a tongue, which ended in a mouth filled with white sharp teeth.
This was it. There was no place to go.
The creature moved in for the kill.
“Julie!” Stan screamed. “For God’s sake!”
At that final moment Julie screamed at the creature, “Cancel predation functions!”
Norbert froze in midmovement. His feeding tube withdrew into his mouth. His jaws closed.
Julie then said, “Return to standard program.”
She turned away from the creature, who stood frozen in position, and walked through the connecting passageway to Stan, who was still in the control room, sitting numbly in the big command chair near the computer.
21
In the control room, where he had been watching her progress on a TV monitor, Stan heaved a sigh of relief. He knew Julie would join him soon, after she had showered and changed. He just had time to check the condition of the men in hypersleep, and then he and Julie would be able to go over their plans.
He walked through a dilating door, down a short corridor, and into the long gray egg-shaped room that was devoted to hypersleep. The lights were low, leaving the place in an eternal twilight. The only sound Stan heard was the occasional short click of a circuit breaker.
The men lay in rows in what looked like large coffins with glass tops. Pipes and electrical lines connected all of the coffins and ran to power boxes on the walls. All this maze of equipment was run through instruments that measured output and indicated sudden anomalous changes, checking for heart rate, respiration, and for the electrical brain activity. Every hour, samples were taken of the sleepers’ blood and stomach contents. Trace chemicals could set up strange chain reactions. It was necessary to keep the crew’s internal environments very stable. Other meters on the wall showed dream activity; it was important for the crew members to dream as they slept. Dreaming too long suppressed can lead to psychosis.
For now, all was well. The men lay in their gray coffins. Most had their hands at their sides, some had crossed them on their chests. In one or two cases, the fingers pulled at each other. This was not abnormal. Events were occurring on deep levels of the brain that the dials and gauges couldn’t read.
It was to be a journey of almost two weeks’ duration. Not a long one, as space trips go. The men could have stayed awake throughout without harm. But it was policy on most ships to put the crew into hypersleep for anything longer than a week. For one thing, it saved on food and water—critical things on a spaceship. For another, it kept the men out of mischief. There was little to do on the outward leg of a deep-space voyage. The ship shuttled noiselessly through space, and time seemed to flow like invisible treacle.
Stan was pleased that there was no crew to co
ntend with at the moment. He was somewhat less pleased that Captain Hoban had elected to take the hypersleep with his men. Stan would have enjoyed conversations with Hoban on the long outward journey.
“I’d like it, too,” Hoban had said. “But frankly, I need the sleep. I’m badly in need of reintegration.”
Hoban had come under severe pressure after being relieved of his ship’s command. The charge that he had been drunk while on duty, though untrue, had been tough to fight. Even with all the recording instruments that were continuously running on the ship, it was unclear exactly how drunk he had been, or if indeed he had been drunk at all. There were matters of individual alcohol tolerance to consider. Even witnesses, the ship’s officers, had been of two minds about what had really happened and to what extent Hoban bore responsibility.
If all this was upsetting to the investigating authorities, it was even more so to Hoban. He didn’t know exactly himself what had happened in that fateful hour when the accident had occurred. His own defense mechanisms blocked his memory, preventing him from seeing a truth that might be damaging to him.
Hoban knew that, and so he couldn’t help but wonder what his defenses were trying to block.
The hypersleep was known to enhance psychic integration. It gave you a chance to drop out of the world of actions and judgments, into a timeless place beyond questions of morality. Hoban had welcomed that.
Now Stan looked forward to resuscitating Hoban. It was a little limiting for him, having only Julie and Gill to talk to. Julie was a darling, of course, and he was absolutely mad about her. At the same time he couldn’t help but recognize her limitations.
Although abundantly educated in the school of hard knocks, she had little formal training in the sciences. Worse, she had little interest in the arts and humanities. She tended to assume that material things were always the most desirable ones. This was an error in Stan’s judgment, for how do you price a sunset or a mountain at dawn? How much for the song of the swallow? Still, he realized that he himself was no doubt guilty of the typical human error of overvaluing what he liked and undervaluing what others liked.
Talking with Gill was also limiting. Gill had formidable training in the sciences and knew a great deal about history and philosophy. This didn’t give him judgment and compassion, however. For Gill, the proposition that the unexamined life was not worth living had no more relevance than E=mc2. He wasn’t equipped to examine the emotional dimension, though Stan thought he saw signs of promise.
After showering and changing, Julie fluffed her hair and rejoined Stan in the main control room. “How’d I do, Stan?” she asked.
Stan pulled himself together. In a voice that strove to be casual he said, “Quite well, Julie. You shaved fifteen seconds off yesterday’s time. Keep on like this and you’ll soon break your old mark of three minutes in the hold with Norbert.”
“Norbert’s getting too good,” Julie said. “He’s learning faster than I am. I’m sure he’s smarter than the real thing.”
The real thing, in this case, was the aliens Norbert so resembled, and who had caused such strange and deadly events on Earth.
Despite his appearance, however, Norbert was not an alien. He was a perfectly simulated robot model of an alien, equipped with a number of computer-driven programs, among which was the predator mode that Julie had been testing out. At the moment Norbert was in the control room with them, showing no sign of his former ferocity.
“How are you, Norbert?” Stan asked.
“I am fine, Doctor, as always.”
“That was quite a little run you gave Julie. Did you think you were going to catch her this time?”
“I do not anticipate such things,” Norbert replied.
“What would you have done if you had caught her?”
“What my programming told me to do,” Norbert said.
“You would have killed her?”
“I cannot anticipate. I would have done what I had to do. Without feeling, I might add. But let me further add, if remorse were possible for a creature like myself, I would have felt it. Is there an analogue of remorse that does not involve feeling?”
“You have a complicated way of expressing yourself,” Stan said.
Norbert nodded. “These matters require considerable thought and recalculation. And when they are expressed in words, they sometimes come out differently from what was intended.”
“I’ve noticed that myself,” Stan said.
Just at that moment a large brown dog came racing into the hold from a corridor. Stan had named him Mac. No one was quite sure how he had gotten aboard, but no one had gotten around to putting him off and now he was taking the voyage with them.
Mac ran to Norbert’s feet and released a blue rubber ball he was holding in his jaws. The ball bounced three times and came to a rest at the monster’s instep.
Stan and Julie watched to see what Norbert would do. The robot alien bent down and his long black arm, which somehow resembled an ant’s chitinous appendage, brushed past the dog and picked up the ball. The monster’s arm came back, then forward, and he threw the ball through the open door into the corridor. Barking furiously, the dog went chasing after it.
“All right, Norbert,” Myakovsky said, “you’ve had your fun. Go to the laboratory. I’ll want to scan some of your response codes. And get Mac to shut up. The crew is still in hypersleep.”
“Yes, Dr. Myakovsky,” Norbert said, and walked quietly out of the room.
22
A door slid open and Captain Hoban walked through. He had a dazed look in his eyes, and Stan knew he could not have been awake for long.
“You’re early out of the hypersleep, Captain.”
“Yes, sir. I had my dial set to get me up before the crew so I could pull myself together and have a talk with you.”
“I suppose it is time we had that,” Stan said. “I want to thank you again for throwing in your lot with me. I don’t know where this will end up, but I’m glad to be on this adventure with you.”
“Yes, sir. Could you tell me what it is exactly we are going to tell the crew?”
Julie, seated nearby, said, “Yes, Stan, I’d like to know myself.”
Stan nodded. “We’ll give a slightly altered version of what’s going on.”
“Are we on course, then?” Hoban asked.
“Yes. I fed the coordinates for AR-32 into the navigational computer.”
“AR-32? I think I’ve heard of the place,” Hoban said. “Wasn’t there some trouble there a while back?”
“There was.”
“Then why are we going there, sir?”
“We’re pretty sure there’s an alien super-hive on that planet, which apparently won’t support anything else. A Bio-Pharm ship has been in orbit around AR-32, and my information is that they have been illegally harvesting royal jelly.”
“Yes, sir. I understand. But what does that have to do with us?”
“I have a right to my share in that matter,” Stan said. “Julie and I are going to relieve them of some of their plunder. Royal jelly is like pirate’s gold, Hoban. It belongs to whoever takes it.”
“Yes, sir. I don’t have much trouble with that concept, though Gill might. But what bothers me, sir, is, does that mean we’ll have to kill bugs?”
“It could come to that,” Stan said, “though it is not the primary intention of our expedition.”
“And might it not involve killing Bio-Pharm people, if we have to?”
Stan stared at him. “Yes, it could come to that. I don’t expect them to be too happy about our taking what they have come to regard as their own, but frankly, I don’t much care what they feel. No one gives up pirate’s gold easily. If they insist on making a fight of it… Well, we’ll take care of ourselves.”
Hoban nodded, though he didn’t look happy. “I suppose that follows, sir. But I wish you had told me all this beforehand.”
“Would you not have come?” Stan said. “Would you seriously have preferred to stay down
-and-out in that crummy boardinghouse I found you in?”
“No, I don’t wish to be back there,” Hoban said. “I’m just considering the situation.”
“Then think about this,” Stan said. “This situation could make you rich. Julie and I intend to share our profits with you and the crew. They’ll get a small percentage for the dangers they’ll run. It won’t be much out of our shares, but it’ll be more money than they ever saw before.”
“Sounds good, sir,” Hoban said. But he was still worried. What good was it to be rich if you were also dead?
The time was nearing to wake the crew from hypersleep. The flight was almost at an end. Their destination, the planet AR-32, was coming up on the screens, a glowing dot in the dark sky. Julie knew this would be her last time alone with Stan for a long time.
There was a lot to do, a lot of last-minute details to attend to, and she didn’t know when she and Stan would get some quiet time alone. Maybe not until they had finished the expedition—or to call it by its true name, their raid. And that could take time. And if everything didn’t go just right…
Julie shook her head irritably. There was no sense thinking about failure. Hadn’t Shen Hui instilled that much in her?
23
When Julie came into the control room, Stan was still seated in the big, padded command chair. He had taken an ampoule of royal jelly from a dozen that were nested in the padded box on the nearby worktable. He was holding the ampoule up to one of the arc lights, twirling it between his fingers and admiring its bluish glow in the light.
As usual, Julie was both attracted and repelled by the liquid and what it could do to Stan. Yet she had been hoping they could spend this evening together, doing things together instead of thinking about them. Sometimes she thought Stan allowed himself to have real experiences only for the pleasure of reliving them later, as he was able to do with the royal jelly.
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