The Shapechanger Scenario

by Simon Hawke

  "That makes no difference," I said. "We're a team. Partners. And partners don't let each other down. And I guess maybe there's more to it than that. AH my life, I've been a gambler. A hustler, strictly small-time, until I got into a game that was way over my head and that led me to what I'm doing now. The game's not over. The pot in the center of the table simply keeps on getting bigger and bigger, but the game goes on. And I just can't throw 'em in and fold so long as I've got money on the table. That make any sense to you?"

  "I think I understand," he said, with a smile. "We're not really so very different after all, you know. A scientist is a great deal like a gambler, in a sense. You don't really know the outcome of what you're doing. But you don't merely stumble along blindly, either. You play the odds. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And in science, as in gambling, you probably lose more often than you win, but you keep going, hoping to at least break even, going for that win because it's worth it and because it feels so satisfying. And there's that special thrill when you know you've played the long shot and it's paid off.

  "And then, aside from that, there's also a certain sense of duty," he continued. "Like the responsibility you feel for your partner, Breck. It's my job, too, O’Toole.. And I can't let down all the other scientists out there who need to know what only I am in the position to find out right now. So perhaps you understand scientists a lot better than you think. We're gamblers, too. The only real difference is that most of the time, we don't stand to lose as much as you do. Except maybe in this case."

  I watched the Nomads light their torches and felt my heart inching its way up my throat.

  "I guess I never thought about it that way before," I said. "But it makes sense to me."

  "What I don't quite understand," said Higgins, "is why he does it." He glanced at Breck. "He's not a scientist and he's not a gambler. Risk holds no thrill for him. Hybreeds can't feel fear, so it can't be a danger high that motivates him. What is it with him, duty? Patriotism? A test of his abilities? What?"

  "All of those, I guess," I said. "But mostly it's what he does best. He's a soldier. It's what he was trained to do, what he was designed to do. I was a soldier once, myself. Not like Breck, of course, but I think that soldiers-regular army soldiers, that is-probably understand hybreeds better than anybody else. Better even than the people who designed them. They're different from ordinary people, sometimes in very obvious ways, sometimes in very subtle ones. And it goes beyond the biological differences between us. You and I are not the result of a carefully designed genetic matrix created in a laboratory. We had parents. We had a family life. We had roots. Hybreeds had none of those things. Behind all their strutting elitism, their arrogant nonchalance, is a very real and very painful awareness of the fact that they were shortchanged in some fairly important ways. And they're also painfully aware that in a certain sense, they were never really born so much as made. They can never have children of their own. There are certain emotions, such as fear, that they can never feel. And they know that something's missing."

  I watched Breck giving- instructions to Tali, who passed them on telepathically to the others. An officer giving a final briefing to his troops. He was in his element.

  "He can do more with that artificial arm of his than anyone could do with one made of flesh and blood," I said, "but technically, he's disabled and that means the SS can't use him anymore except in some administrative capacity. They designed him to do just one thing and then when he got hurt in the line of duty, they told him he couldn't do it anymore." I glanced from Breck, standing with the Nomads, to Higgins, standing next to me and watching him. "A lot of hybreeds commit suicide after they leave the service, did you know that?"

  "No, I didn't," he said. "I thought depression was stress-related, like fear. I would have thought they couldn't feel it because of the way they were designed."

  I nodded. "True, but I don't know what's worse, being depressed and feeling despair or not feeling anything at all. Except maybe that you're useless."

  "God," said Higgins, softly.

  "Breck's one of the lucky ones," I said. "He's found another way to keep on fighting battles, to continue being useful. And he's a glamorous star, famous and incredibly wealthy. A lot of people think he's got everything. But you know what? I think he'd trade it all to know, just once, what it was like to feel afraid."

  Breck was beckoning to us.

  "Poor bastard doesn't know what he's missing," I said wryly, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly in an effort to steady my nerves. I moistened my lips and checked my weapons. "Shit. Let's go."

  ELEVEN

  How do you sneak up on creatures who can read your mind? The answer is, of course, you can't. To some extent, the Nomads could keep their thoughts secret from the ambimorphs, but they couldn't hide their presence. They could shut down their secondary level of intelligence, but the ambimorphs would detect their primary mental energy. And Higgins, Breck, and I couldn't do anything to hide. Tali could try to shield me telepathically, as she had done before, but I'd need all my faculties intact to get through this one. I couldn't take a chance on not being completely in control. Besides, Coles wanted both Breck and me clearheaded, so we could transmit our experiences back to Game Control. That way, even if we didn't make it, Coles would still have a record of what happened and the public would get one hell of a show-never suspecting it was real. And if we died, the official story would probably be that we had succumbed to the mental stress of a hallucinact computer simulation. Another case of psycho stars dying for the public's entertainment. Hey, that's show biz, folks.

  I recalled the nightmare in the mountain cavern on Draconis 9, when I'd come so very close to dying. The raw fire crystal that veined the cavern walls had kept Game Control from picking up our signal. Fire crystals were used for focusing the tachyon beam transmissions and the crystal formations in the cavern had kept our signals bouncing around inside the mountain. Fire crystals were not to be found on Purgatory, so there was no reason why Coles and Mondago couldn't follow all the action back at Game Control. Coles had insisted that under no circumstances were we to allow the Nomads to shield us telepathically. He didn't want to miss this for the world.

  I tried to imagine what the scene would be like back there, Mondago at the playermaster's console in the darkened room, Coles standing tensely behind him, plugged into an auxiliary psych-fidelity channel, watching the screens intently as the scan team monitored the readouts. Meanwhile, the xenobiologists and psychocybernetic engineers would all be glued to their own sets, plugged in and fail-safed, their access terminals on stand-by to receive the data as they fed in their impressions of what they would vicariously experience through us.

  I felt as if I were some kind of remote probe being sent into unexplored territory to record as much information as possible before the hostile environment destroyed me. In effect, that's exactly what I was to them, no more, no less. If I stopped functioning, at least they still had Breck. And if Breck was killed, they would all sigh collectively and go analyze the data we'd sent in while Coles lined up a couple of new probes. I didn't harbor any illusions that we meant anything to him or any of the vultures back there. We were nothing more than a means to an end. With any luck, not our end.

  As we went through the cavern mouth and the torchlight cast ghostly shadows on the rock walls, I wondered if Chameleon was tuned in.

  There was a time when I felt a certain sympathy for the ambimorph Coles had appropriately named Chameleon. He could easily have killed us in the Fire Islands or later on Draconis 9, when we believed him to be a crystal hunter named Nikolai Razin, but he hadn't, although he certainly had reason to.

  How would humans have reacted if we were confronted with aliens who came to Earth as if they owned the place and started hunting us for food? The idiots in the first survey party sent out to Draconis 9 had decided that the herds of large, slow-moving, placid creatures they had found there looked enough like steers to barbecue. The meat was apparently qu
ite tasty, so the fools had continued to shoot the animals for food. And the ambimorphs, who made up a large part of the herds of peaceful quadrupeds, started to shapechange to human form in self-defense.

  I recalled how "Razin" had revealed himself to us and I recalled how he had said, "We want only to survive." I could understand that. I could even sympathize. But the trouble was, being telepaths, they knew us well enough to realize that we could not trust them and they could not trust us.

  There seemed to be no way around it. A shapechanger was a shapechanger and a human was a human and the universe, absurdly, did not seem big enough for both of us. We did not want them among us, pretending to be human, living with us, working with us, marrying our daughters, God forbid, and they did not want to take us at our word that we would not reduce Draconis to a cinder if they all went back to where they came from. Because, the sad truth of the matter was, that's probably just what we'd have done.

  And so the game continued-a game within a game within a game, with bystanders like the Nomads getting dragged in against their will. So long as there were ambimorphs among us, we could not attack their home world for fear of their unleashing war the like of which the human race had never seen. Something they had learned from us. And what kept the ambimorphs from all-out warfare was the fear that we would then destroy their home world. An impasse.

  Meanwhile, we tried to protect people from the truth, to pretend that none of this was really happening, to convince them all-with a massive cover-up and propaganda reinforced with covert mind-control techniques-that it was merely another game scenario of Psychodrome. And as we played for time, working desperately to find a way to ferret out the ambimorphs among us, they increased their number and made their presence felt with acts of terrorism here and there, such as the sabotage on Purgatory. Except at least one of them, Chameleon, had started to escalate the game.

  Could anybody win? Hell, I didn't know. I was still trying to figure out which was worse, living in a world where you never had any way of knowing if the person you were with was really human or living in a world where everyone was hardwired with a biochip and you never had any way of knowing if someone was accessing your mind. The way we were going, we'd probably wind up with both. An ambimorph could read your mind, a man like Coles could program it subliminally. Christ, no wonder Higgins wanted to remain on Purgatory.

  "Never mind me," Higgins said, "just keep your mind on what you're doing."

  I jerked and. spun around to face him, startled to hear him say that, and then I realized that he hadn't actually said it. He had thought it.

  "Tali's got us mindlinked," he said, though he said it in my mind and not out loud. The phenomenon was similar to the effect of Coles or Mondago contacting me via my biochip. I could actually "hear" him, though, of course, I wasn't really hearing him at all. Tali was picking up his thoughts and relaying them to me.

  "It feels strange at first" Higgins continued thinking at me, through Tali, "but being accustomed to a biochip, you and Breck should make the adjustment pretty quickly. Try not to let your mind wander. Otherwise, that makes it difficult for Tali. Concentrate. Discipline your mind. Think only about the job at hand.''

  I tried to push all extraneous thoughts out of my head and concentrate only on the damp, downward-sloping tunnel floor before me. It was not an easy task. I was nervous as all hell-frankly, I was scared to death-and at such times, my mind has a tendency to bounce from train of thought to train of thought like a ping-pong ball. But I had to make an effort to "empty my mind," as the Zen roshis in Japan would say, and open myself up only to the here and now, to the sights and smells and sounds inside the cavern tunnel.

  The four Nomad females who had accompanied us were the four most gifted telepaths in the tribe. And their job would be a great deal more difficult than ours. Between the four of them, they not only had to link the rest of us together telepathically, so that the ambimorphs would not be able to confuse us, but they had to be prepared to defend themselves, as well. And having three humans in the telepathic matrix made things much more difficult for them than if all of us were Nomads. We were the weak link. We had the least amount of mental discipline. Except for Breck, whose will and self-control were superhuman. I breathed deeply as I walked and forced myself to relax as much as possible under the circumstances. I think Tali helped. Or maybe it was Breck.

  It was an incredible experience. In a sense, it was roughly similar to the experience that someone in our home audience might have. It was like being tuned in to someone else, sharing their perceptions, their feelings, and even their thoughts, which was something psych-fidelity did not offer to the fans. My audience at home, apparently because I was a better "projector" than most, had a superficial sense of what it felt like to be me, to feel about things the way I did and to experience my emotions, but they could not literally read my mind. In this case, we could do that. I could tell what Breck was thinking. Breck knew what Higgins thought. And Higgins was able to share Garr's thoughts and so on and so on, all of us linked in a gestalt that gave us shared thoughts and perceptions. It had to be incredibly exhausting for Tali and the other females, Tyla, Lina, and Tola, one of Tyla's daughters with her husband Zaal-who was also with us. I wondered how long they would be able to keep it up and was immediately reprimanded by Higgins once again, who told me-or thought at me-to keep my mind on the business at hand and stop plugging up the matrix with my anxieties.

  Sure. Easier thought than done. I sensed Tali's displeasure and tried to concentrate on our surroundings.

  The mountain was honeycombed with caverns. Smaller tunnels created by volcanic action met up with ours from time to time and I hoped we'd be able to find our way out again-no, stop that, don't think about that stuff, just pay attention to everything around you-there was a barely perceptible, cool breeze against my cheek, coming up from the caverns somewhere still ahead of us, which meant that there were other openings connecting with the cavern. It was just like that cavern back on Draconis 9, when we-no. I swallowed hard and concentrated on the present.

  The torchlights flickered ahead of me as the Nomads in the vanguard descended down into the tunnel, heading deeper and deeper inside the mountain. I saw their shadows lengthen on the rock walls as they turned around a bend. The tunnel floor was sloping much more sharply now and the breeze coming from below seemed stronger. I slipped slightly on the steep grade and put my hand out to steady myself on a large thick stalagmite to my right . . . and immediately jerked back my hand as it encountered something slimey.

  I stopped abruptly and brought my hand up in front of my face, staring at it in the torchlight. It was glistening, covered with a slippery, slimey, clear substance of some sort. I was suddenly overcome with revulsion and I started frantically wiping the stuff off on my hides.

  "O'Toole ..."

  Behind me, Higgins was holding his torch close to the stalagmite. The entire rock formation was coated with the slick, glistening slime. My stomach felt queasy.

  "What is it?" I thought.

  Higgins shook his head. "I don't know." He brought the torch down lower, illuminating more of the stalagmite, closer to the ground. The glistening slime coated the stalagmite down to its base and then it went across the tunnel floor and up the opposite rock wall, ending at a large crevice high up in the wall. "Jesus," Higgins thought. "It's a trail, like what a slug would leave or . . ."He glanced back at me. ". . .an ambimorph in its natural state?"

  I shivered and started wiping my hand against my hides again.

  "Come on, you two" Breck's voice came to us in our minds. "You're falling behind."

  "Breck," I thought intently, "there's a-"

  "I know. Keep your eyes open and your weapon handy."

  I pulled my plasma pistol out of its holster and checked the charge pak again. Then I flicked the safety off. Unlike Breck, I could only handle one weapon at a time. I was never any good at that fancy two-gun stuff, so I had given my semiauto to Higgins, along with a pouch containing spare maga
zines. They were color coded. The black magazines contained the stunners. The red ones held the fragmentation rounds.

  "If the stunners don't get the job done," I had told him before we started down, "forget about taking one alive. Jack out the magazine and slap in one of the red ones. The frags will stop 'em."

  "Assuming I can hit anything with this," Higgins had said wryly. "I don't have much experience with firearms. Maybe I'd be better off with the plasma gun."

  "Are you kidding? If you start shooting wild with that thing, we're all going to cook! If you're not sure what you're doing, you're better off with the semiauto. It's lighter and a lot easier to use."

  "There's only one problem," he had said. "You know what's liable to happen if I start popping off with exploding rounds inside a cavern?"

  "Would you rather carry a spear?" I had said.

  "Might be a whole lot safer," he had replied.

  "Yeah, for the ambimorphs. Just take the damn thing and make sure you hit what you shoot at. Wait till your target's close enough to spit at if you have to. Whatever you do, don't panic and start spraying frags all over the place. That's liable to get real messy."

  He had looked at the gun as if it would bite him.

  "Christ, what the hell do you use when you go out in the desert all by yourself?" I'd asked him.

  He had reached into his pack and pulled out a small canister about ten inches long with a circumference only slightly larger than that of a small billy club.

  "What the hell is that?". I'd said.

  "XQ-4," he had said. "Chemical irritant. It's got good range, you don't have to be all that accurate. It discourages most creatures without harming them."

  "Well, what happens if you get a stubborn one that just keeps right on coming?"

  He had reached into his pack again and took out a leather bootsheath, from which he had pulled a huge honest-to-God Bowie knife. I had stared at it with disbelief.