by Emil Petaja
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The Stolen Sun by Emil Petaja
PART ONE
THE TIME GAP
"Then the sky was cleft asunder All the air was filled with windows, Burst asunder by the fire sparks As the red drop quick descended And a gap gleamed forth in heaven/
Kalevala: Runo XLVII
I
The manship dropped into the seething darkness like a predatory fish. This alien-made dark was as virulent as it was viscuous; it brought corrosive death to anything less than a manship Destroyer of the Terran Deep Fleet, with its heavy coat of force field armor that deflected the planet's lethal triple-shield.
"Go, Lady!"
Warily now, Lady sent out invisible probes to lick out into the stygian dark for Mephiti ships. Wayne Panu's eyes were her eyes, hers his.
"So far, so good, your Lady-ship!" Wayne's mind stroked hers but joined her in a tight watchfulness.
"Too close to light," Lady pontificated out of her tapes. "Mephiti detest all light and sound. That's why it is impossible for us to communicate, why we keep losing ships. Even the reflected absorbed light we can't see, from stored energy and released energy, offends the Mephiti. So—they kill us out of fear."
"Or we kill them," Wayne said grimly. "The first thing we knew about them was losing a big wedge of Fleet ships in some black goop we couldn't see. Can't detect them by sound, either. The bases of their ecology is completely alien. If it wasn't for the smell—"
"They are gaseous, obviously. Yet they are highly sophisticated and cunning. As far as our scientists have been able to deduce they evolved by skips and jumps straight out of N.C.C. 6720 itself, before it started to become a planetary nebula."
Wayne made a rough noise. "Deep Fleet had some very desirable real estate all pegged out in this sector of Orion, what with a few million hopeful colonists… Then we slammed into one of these seething nightmare pockets. Two. Ten. A hundred. Their own roving colonies travel within these semi-solid shields until they reach a planet they want, then they spread the black goop all over it and take it from under our noses. Naturally we weren't happy about this invasion, and the war was on. But what a war! If it wasn't that the Mephiti smell so bad—"
"We have concluded that odor is their means of communication. When we tried to get close enough for the usual sight or sound symbols, trying to make contact, we got killed for our pains. And they are multiplying fast, oozing in from God-knows-where. Finally we were able to design our manships to be both sightless and soundless, like us."
"I keep pointing out," Wayne grumbled, "that the Mephiti stink to high heaven."
"To Terran noses, yes. But this is their attempt to communicate with us, warn us away. Doubtless, like us, they need elbow room and new resources. They presume to take over planets we had claimed for ours, shrouding each one they take with a protective shield like this and—"
Wayne gave Lady her head; he had to. Once her micro-tapes were triggered off she was good for a solid hour or maybe ten. Just like a woman, he thought, grinning. In any case the Psychs who had engineered that phase of the incredible manships (Wayne preferred to call them Ladyships) had done this on purpose; it kept the weary enforced silences, after his brain had been umbilicated to hers, from becoming unendurable. Her microtapes fed his brain vast stores of mnemonic knowledge, prodding his own memory cells. When the time for action came, though, Lady shut up, whipping her sophisticated capacities and draining his toward the immediate end. The built-in irritation kept Wayne's faculties honed to a fine edge. Lady was, after all, a machine, unsubject to human vacillations and quixotics; at the same time Wayne's agility and reflexive capacities were more able to take care of intangibles and sudden changes. Wayne was super-high esp, too.
They made a beautiful couple. Everybody said so.
Dr. R. Roland Delph said so, over and over and over. Dr. Delph was the Fleet's top Psych, was largely responsible for the manship umbilicus, and he told every new class of tyros the same thing. Emulate Wayne-plus-Lady for all you're worth. They were Numero Uno.
The recruits who had made it to Astro Post XXXI were high-esp, of course, and the tests they had passed were grueling. Physically and psychologically, and para. Extrasensory talent was still hit and miss, still in the wistful stages. Chemo-therapeutie goosing upped the ante a little.
But Wayne Panu was special.
"Damn special," Dr. Delph told each new crop. "Now that we need out-talents desperately to save our whole Deep Colonization program—where is it? Primitives had more of it than we do. Like animals, they had to have it to survive. We have our mental gymnastics to depend on, not to mention our robotic technology. We've let these unexplored areas of our mind sit and atrophy. Even a child—"
"Excuse me, sir," one bright-eyed recruit said cheerfully, "We've already been briefed on all this. Children and animals empathize with their playthings, etcetera, etcetera. A dog knows when his master has had a fight with his boss. As the Neanderthals learned to talk and think they forgot how to esp. If you don't mind—sir!—tell us about Panu. Just what is it he's got and how do we go about getting itr
Dr. Delph's shook his loose jowls. "Son, if I could tell you that I would be a reasonably happy man. We've tried to find out. Gone into his ancestry with a fine-tooth comb. Picked his brains, his glands, his psych—until he threatened to leave Project Manship. Every time he goes out we send a likely newcomer to tail him, observe, intuit, work him. But how can you explain the inexplicable? Apart from the purely thought-mechanics, which we ordinarily have to settle for, how can I explain the manner in which Wayne Panu actually becomes part of his ship?"
"You don't actually mean—"
"Whatever you are thinking, I mean it! Panu empathizes in toto. He is the hull. He is the motors. And of course the computer complex."
Whistles of grudging admiration.
"He must be a mutant. A giant jump in evolution."
"Or—" Dr. Delph broke off with a vasty sigh.
"Or what, sin1"
"A throwback to an unknown race that had such powers." 't
A burst of protest. TBut^jsir! There never was such a race! Not on Terra! Nor anyplace else, as far as we've come!"
"We're the cream of the crop," somebody added smugly.
The balding Psych stared into infinity. "Somewhere along the ancestral thread, like a genetic overfold…"
"Red alert! Red alert!" Lady's electric arteries put Wayne's mind on the qui vive.
"Where?"
"Left. Ahead and down."
"Don't see a thing in the vid," Wayne grinned.
"No time for comedy," Lady said acidly. "Recheck instruments for position. Ready kill-ray. Confirm speed. Confirm trajectory."
"Yes, ma'am."
Wayne's hands went to work on the instrument panel; they snapped on buttons that aimed the infrared ray on the Mephiti ship's olfactory nerve center, which Wayne's nose and the odor-sensitive detectors had beamed in. As they dipped into Layer Two of the black goop, they found themselves rapidly nosing toward a lurking sentinal ship of the enemy.
"If we win this war," Wayne quipped grimly, "we'll win by a nose."
Lady was oblivious to his humor at this point. Wayne sent his mind down into the innards of the shark-shape, checking guns and thrusters. The robotics of Lady accepted his intrusion with military acumen. Moving up into the ship's engines, he nudged the accelerators; vectored; while dipping further into the second layer he made a cortical note of a buzzing connector. A minor defect, like a human hair out of place, but Wayne took cerebral pride in Lady's appearance. Even in her insides. Especially in her insides, since they were most important.
Curious, he s
ometimes mused, to be roving among his wife's arteries and organs like this!
"Ten seconds!" Lady's voice was tart.
The blacker patch in the blackness now bogeyed the smell-scanner, clearly defined. Wayne held his breath while mind and hands poised for Jdll. He counted along with Lady.
"Damn!" He broke at six. "He's spotted us! He—" The bogey was moving out of fire range, fast. "Now!" Lady shrilled. "Fire now!"
Wayne's hand had already slammed the trigger studs. Hot red lightning sprayed out of twenty vents, stabbing the skunk-cloud's tail in a dozen places. Light limned an odd spiral shape just before the Mephiti ship imploded and vanished in a thunder of sonics. Grim-mouthed, Wayne released the four levers that laid destructive eggs on the surface below.
Lady precogged Wayne's mind; before he even said, "Let's get to hell out of here!" they were on their way up. Wayne gasped back against the auto-cushion enveloping him against the fury of their up-thrust into open space. "What would I do without you, Lady?" he asked, taking a deep breath and savoring the sight of all those salt-sprinkle stars.
"Without my hull to protect your human body, without the properly mixed air in my automatic tanks, without—"
"Yeah, I know." Wayne blew her a quick kiss. "Without you I'd just die!"
Lady reminded him, rather primly, "Have you checked the other manship?"
"Mother of pearl!" Wayne whistled. "I forgot all about the reader Dr. Delph stuck on iny tail!"
II
Chuck Sotomeyer was, taken physically, near to being the antithesis of Wayne. Where Wayne was lean and hard, with a narrow contoured face, an almost ascetic cast to his jaw-line, needle-sharp blue eyes, and close-clipped wheat blond hair, Chuck was short, muscular, stocky, and he wore his sheen-black hair rather long in front so that the crisp curls flung themselves down over straight-cut black brows and amiable green eyes. His wide young face had dimples and laugh-lines, his lips red and ready. When there were any women available, Chuck cut a wide swath.
Just as soon as Wayne tripped the umbilical switch and temporary divorced Lady, Chuck stuck his happy face in the vid.
"Yeah, buddy! I took it in and got the hell out as soon as Lady gave me the high sign! Gad, what a blastl Talk about splatter! How many skunks you figured we liquidated?"
Wayne ignored the "we," but his brows puckered. Not because he didn't like Chuck. He did. He liked Chuck best of any of the readers Dr. Delph had saddled him with. Chuck's cockiness and good humor pulled him out of the sloughs of despond into which his work as Destroyer dropped him after the key-up demand for all-out action and target-directed thought was over. Each day, or almost, meant one more target. One more colony of aliens blasted out of existence. It wasn't a fun thing to have on your mind when the whole thing was over and it was time to go to sleep. If you could sleep.
But no jokes now, please. Not right now. Not right after. Maybe to Chuck it was some kind of a game, killing "skunks." But deep inside of Wayne Panu something rebelled; beyond his punning with Lady, his byplay with Chuck, Dr. Delph's shoulder-massaging, something resisted and loathed the whole thing. He killed Mephiti, by the thousands, millions for all he knew. If he didn't, they'd kill him, and God knows how many Terran colonists. Still, Wayne rebelled. Rebelled deep inside of his cells, and resented the super-mental equipment he was born with because it had brought him to this. …
He didn't tell anybody. Who could he tell? Not Lady. Her brain wasn't equipped to understand compassion. He couldn't tell Dr. Delph. Delph couldn't permit himself to agree, even a little bit. Wayne was the Fleet's bright hope. Lord! It would never do to let the Psych Head know that he was starting—insidiously and without volition—to empathize with the Mephiti…
Wayne's upbringing was nothing unusual. In fact, it was commonplace these days. Wayne was born of simple second generation colonists on a farm in Proxima. His grandparents had, like so many billions, fled the crowded Levels of Terra and the monotonous complexity of rat-hole living. It was a rough pull, those first fifty years, what with the thin blue light of Proxima shining /town on a virtually lifeless rock. Somehow, as elsewhere, they had survived and scratched out a scanty existence. Children had been born, married, stayed there on the scattered farms because there was no money to leave and nowhere else to go. Even Terra closed behind them after they had once made, the colonial lists, like a sea closes behind a flung stone.
Wayne thrived. He loved to watch the saffron blush of dawn over the jagged crystal peaks, along the clean green patent-leather shine of com leaves sprouting tall and straight under anxious loving hands. The corn-stalks talked to Wayne; they whispered secrets about the paRMblue sun and the soil, and how content they would be to become part of Wayne and the others who had tended them so faithfully. It was continuance; it was becoming part of something greater than themselves, to the great time pattern being woven on some cosmic loom beyond the stars.
Wayne's thin bones sprouted up with the com. Hard work sheathed them with efficient useful muscles. But Wayne was not oriented to the technical sciences. He didn't know what he knew. Like the other youngsters, he studied the books and the vid tapes, and he did his share of squirming about it. Tech books weren't much fun. But, like most, he had his secret life.
At first it seemed natural to him to "see" into the heart of the corn and the barley. When his dog, Sisu talked to him, it was the most natural thing in his world. It was only after some stinging remarks and fist fights that he began to realize that it was best to keep his mouth shut about these things. When he tried to "see" his mother and father, or his playmates, it didn't work. Or just a little, randomly, vaguely. The lack he decided much later, was in them. They had no transmitter to his receiver.
"You came from a farm on Proxima, eh, buddy-boy?"
Wayne snapped to from Chuck's casual mind-thrust into his thoughts. After all, like all of the Manship Project pilots, Sotomeyer was a random esper, and Wayne's musing cut a deep rut.
Wayne smiled at him in the bid. "Yes. I got to hating the monotony of the same faces, same routine. When our twice-a-year offworld supplies were shipped in I'd get thinking about stowing away. I wanted out in a bad way, then." He ended, glumly, "I'm not so sure now."
"You were lucky, buddy-boy," Chuck grinned. "I had to claw my way up out of Level-84. Never even saw Sol until I was nine."
Wayne nodded. His one leave on the mother planet had bothered him, still did. All those hundreds of eggcrate levels, efficient/antiseptic, stretching out across all the continents. Oh, there were a few gardens and wild places, but these too were rigidly controlled. Everything was under control. It had to be; Terra was a technological sardine can. No wonder colonists were willing to endure anything to get off! And no wonder the Destroyers. Humanly inhabitable worlds were pitifully few and far between. The nothing in between was endless. And those planets which could support life already had life. They quite naturally resented intrusion. So. After the early X-Plor ships had tagged them, the Fleet Destroyers moved in. It took Man a while to work himself up to All-Destroy, but he made it. It wasn't the only way, but it was the best way because it came to that in the end.
Wayne saw death, brought death wherever he went. He watched inoffensive alien civilizations blown out of existence on their own worlds with steady eyes. Man's claw-out was too desperate, too needful. The stakes were too high. And each out-push led to others, like stepping stones. Man continued to breed and need, and the breeding and the needing shoved him further and further out in radiating circles from congested Terra. It was all—or nothing…
"How come you didn't go back home when your stretch in the Fleet ended?" Chuck asked.
"It was my trip to Terra." Wayne smiled a tight grimace. "The Mephiti had just started. Manship was cooking. Somebody someplace got a look at my esp chart."
"Three cheers for the red, white and black." But Chuck's green eyes registered a kind of envy. Chuck had scrambled into Manship the hard way, driven hard to pull himself out of the ranks of the nonentity numbers. "And
now you are Number One." He whistled as a kind of^genuflection. "Wanna tell Chuckie-boy about it?"
"Not particularly."
"Tell me anyway, buddy-boy. We're not going anyplace and"—he winked—"I'm supposed to dig you a little. Orders of Dr. Delph."
Wayne shrugged, gave the automatics a quick check.
Lady was right on course for home, which this time meant Astro Port XXXI, a ragbag of hangers-on to satisfy the off-tint needs of the Fleet.
"Dr. Delph and his staff must have combed through a billion esp records. Everything from precog to table tapping. Every possible candidate for Manship got screened. Lots of random, but random just isn't enough. In order to succeed in establishing the kind of rapport Dr. Delph was after, he had to reach way down into the cells, the genes, the molecules, and whatever comes before them!
"I was just one of the boys. Passed the physical easy enough but when it came to college level bio-chem and physics I was out on my can. I pointed out that I was a farm boy; I had my book-learning with the rest, and I was a reader. But not tech stuff. Early sci-fiction. Adventure. History. Like that. Not much I didn't know about space pioneering, but toss an equation at me and I'm lost. I thought here is where I get dumped and goody-goody. Then—the card-esp…"
"One hundred percent!"
"Not first. Delph pulled me in for a personal interview. Here was when I tried to explain what my trouble was."
"Andr
"I saw the cards all right. Only I saw them too well. I saw them inside. The numbers on top didn't register; I was down inside of the molecular structure of the plastic. I had to train myself to skim off the top!"
Chuck whistled awe. "How about that! But, listen, if you can get inside of Lady like we are all supposed to do and can't Quite, how come you can't read minds?"
"I think I know why. Either because the minds don't have a good enough amplifier to—"
"Mine does!" Chuck bragged. "All the Manship picks—"