by Emil Petaja
Obedient to rigid training, Wayne's conditioned reflexes went to work; wizards and snowclad forests dissolved and went spinning back into limbo; his consciousness raced through Lady; the umbilical cord that made them one allowed no vagrant straying from total concentration on their purpose.
All-kill. Like Lady, Wayne was trained to all-kill. No time for second thoughts. Their very electrons were interlocked by Wayne's unique power. As a unit, with Chuck-ship trundling after, the destruct unit hurled itself soundless, lightless, into the black shield. Preliminary scoutings of the target had provided him with a map of sorts; olfactory probings had determined the densest areas, those which would be under heaviest guard. These were to be avoided by the manship's dual skills.
They moved down through the first thinner layer. No skunk-patrols. Wayne flicked a brief glance at the rear vid; Chuck-ship was riding his tail at a comfortable distance, slightly up from Lady. —
Layer Two. Denser protection here, and prowling black spiral ships to be on the alert for. Lady sniffed them out and changed course accordingly, with the agility of a somber swift-moving denizen of the deepest Terran oceans avoiding his natural enemies. Wayne was accustomed by now to their allowable black lights and his cellular know to Level One and half of Two. As to Three…
An abrupt check of all component factors, an involuntary breath-gulp, and they lunged down into Three.
It was like swimming through black glue. Together with Lady, Wayne could almost feel the gelatinous coldness against his epidermal cells. They were nearing the drop; minutes only now.
Ready, Lady warned. Ready to drop. Make ready … Ready …
They dipped deeper into the treacle, deeper than Wayne had ever been.
Now! Drop-NOW!
Wayne's hand moved to the triple buttons, froze. His muscles refused to put out that small bit of erg that would destroy this desirable planet. His nerve system refused them that last little bit of command, that final jab of energy.
Something down there had touched his mind. Something with intelligence had made contact.
"I can't!" he groaned.
Do HI NOW't
Instead of leveling the manship and obeying, Wayne's mind held Lady off and moved further down.
He had to. Something was fumbling at his brain with naive curious fingers. It was not inimical, this thing. It had no emotion of hate or of kill. It was like a friendly creature one meets in the forest on a morning stroll. It begged for his friendship.
When Wayne told Lady, in a rush, she had an answer.
"It's a trick. The Mephiti are intelligent enough to have probed human weaknesses. DROP THE BOMBS!"
"Yes."
That must be it. Lady had to be right. Her light-fast computers possessed within their complex solids a vast store of knowledge that was all geared to her raison d'etre. A dozen sciences with space alien psychology uppermost. To battle an alien effectively, Man must out guess him; his record was more than just excellent, as his conquests bore witness. All of this was within Lady. She couldn't be wrong.
His frozen muscles moved. His hand went out to ram the three buttons with the flat of his gloved hand. The eggs dropped.
Horror set in. A shock-wave of guilt crowded out every other thought from his mind. What had he done? He had lolled. He had destroyed that small friendly thing down there. Along with its world, he had killed the baby-thing that had purred against his mind like a kitten…
Well? another part of him sneered. What the hell did you come here for? You're part of a big push; you have your job, your duty, to do like everybody elsel This mission
is no different from any other of the others. Like Delph said, a rabbit can't run with a wolf-pack…
He began to shiver. He trembled so hard that he couldn't move again. He heard Lady's sharp voice from far, far off:
Up! We've done it. Up and out—fast!
"I killed it," Wayne mumbled. "Whatever they say—"
UP!
The young Mephiti creature thrust itself into his numbed mind again, confidently, happily. There was no way of describing it. No way of picturing it, except perhaps in human terms that only suggested its tender beauty. It was beautiful as a firefly is beautiful on a warm summer's evening. Or a golden plover moving across glinting sand and march. Or a crimson-speckled wrasse browsing the spines of a tropical coral bed.
A new life-part. A small child. And, without knowing it, it was already dead. The destruct-eggs were timed to exude their screaming fire in moments; nothing could stop not. Nothing.
Lady rasped frantic warnings. Even Chuck was buzzing his alarm. What's wrong? What's wrong? We laid our eggs. Did our job with the usual Panu precision. Let's get the hell out of here. My blonde bomb is waiting for—
Red Alert! Mephiti spiral approaching to intersect us at .08! Vector! Move!
Wayne's torn-out yell and his grabbing blur of motion were both reflex; both Lady and Chuck had strained whatever powers they were equipped with and forced off his pain and his contact with the baby creature. The odor of the Skunk ship, spiraling toward them out of the black, did the rest. The stench Lady let him have, full, was painful, too. He moved. He acted. The manship sheathed it-self in protective flame to hold off the Mephiti ship until they were safely out of the guck.
There was no thought, only reflex, until the manship was out of Layer One and into the sharp encircling light of a billion stars like Christmas tree tinsel.
"We made it!" He breathed deep, relaxing for a few seconds against the contour pillow.
Yes.
Wayne sat up. There was something fretful in Lady's tone, reflected, perhaps, out of his own mingled guilts. Her voice was somehow bleak.
"Chuck!"
He batted off the umbilical and put the intra-ship vid on in one swift sweep of motion. He stared. Behind him was nothing. No ship. No Chuck. Only empty space, freckled with stars.
"No."
He made one quick movement to reverse course but Lady said no. But she was somehow gentle, as if she understood. Wayne didn't weld her to him; he didn't want to hear her say it. It was no use. Chuck didn't make it. Not quite. Obedient to his reader's status, he had waited for Wayne's high-sign to leave, and the sign came one split second too late. By now the whole planet was dead, but Chuck had died even before.
Facing the multitude of winking suns, Wayne's eyes burned with fire beyond tears to put out. Lady said nothing. After all Lady was only a machine and her immediate task was to get them back to Base. Mission accomplished. One more planet had been released for colonization and there would be rejoicing about it at the Fleet Base and at home on Terra.
To lose a manship was. bad. They were hideously expensive and Chuck's training had cost a packet. Still, in an all-out war this was expectable. Routine, even. After all, Chuck Sotomeyer was only a reader.
First the burning in his eyes, like hot coals. Then a kind of emptiness. Lady's automatics pushed them homeward; as for Wayne, he was a dry • husk without purpose or meaning. His hands did what they were conditioned to do. Beyond that, nothing. A vacuity, like all that empty vastness outside. The guilt came later. It washed over him in a tide of thunder.
Wayne was a killer. Call it what you may, pin medals on it, give it fancy titles, make it a symbol for new and faster destroy-machines: that was what he was. He had done what he was told to do and he had done it well. He had killed aliens by the billions. How many exactly he would never know, nor did it matter. Well, did it? After all, they were only other forms of life and by Fleet definitely sub-human. They weren't MAN. As for Chuck, he was no concern of Wayne's. Wayne only tolerated his presence as a reader. What if Chuck had somehow made a place in Wayne's life that the other readers had not? What if he did call Wayne "buddy-boy" and mean it?
Yes, Wayne was a killer.
And now he had killed his only friend.
Something inside of him wrenched loose when the tide hit. The thing that made a man care a damn what happens to him. The stabilizer that makes living sen
se, even when misfortunes pile up and become seemingly unendurable, losses relating to contacts he thinks he cannot live without.
With Wayne it was more. That part of him which was farmboy and sensitive to sunsets and rippling fields of grain against cirrus clouds, that part of him bled every time he killed and whoever he killed. Delph could say Man was more important until his vocals chords shriveled up from saying it, but it didn't matter. It couldn't.
Chuck's death ^was the last cry. The last outcry of a dream, dying and broken.
There was simply nothing left.
The totality of the desolation ahead left only one thing to do and he did it. His hand was rock-steady when he reached out for the lever marked "Time-Skip." If Lady protested Wayne was beyond hearing it. Time-Skip had carried Man, living, into the stars. Seventeen of the gauge numbers were used with varying frequency, but past the halfway mark, cued "DANGER" in specific warning letters, was a lot of time-jump that meant nothing. Yet.
Wayne almost smiled as, with one calm swift pull, he brought the lever all the way around, past seventeen, past one hundred, where the numbers crowded closer, past one thousand—all the way to eternity.
PART TWO
THE COMING OF THE DARK
"Therefore was the night unending, And for long was utter darkness, Night in Kalevala ever, Likewise in the heavens was darkness, Darkness to the throne of Ukko."
Kalevala: Runo XLVII
V
At first the ship he tailed after was just a dull orange glint laboring across the familiar star pattern between Ursae Majoris' Merak and Dubhe. Familiar stars that pointed cool blue fingers at Polaris. And yet this constellation was somehow different. Time different.
The ship that lumbered its way toward Sol was different, too. Drawing near, Wayne stared wide at the small whale shape in his front vid scanner. It appeared to have been hammered skillfully out of copper sheeting, beaten into shape with rough hands. And what else? What incredible magic else?
Lady moved alongside the copper ship in one easy thrust.
"So you have come, my son."
He adjusted the side scan; blinked. Behind a wavery crystal window was a face. A face he had seen before. Wayne gasped at the long beard, the parchment skin drawn across high cheekbones so tight that they appeared burnished bronze knobs surrounded by hoar. The blue eyes leaped with lambent flame from under white patches tilted, now, to agree with the strong creases of gratified pleasure in seeing Wayne and the grin of jovial welcome. Wayne rubbed his eyes. This was impossible! Simply impossible! Yet he was seeing it, so the copper ship and the old man had to exist. Besides, there was that in the old man's eyes which bade him believe…
Still, it was a wonder among wonders and it would take time; Wayne gaped and waited.
"It is good that you have come to help, Waino," the old man said. "The Vanhat have urgent need of heroes."
Wayne blushed from the implication, yet something within him leaped. To destroy in wholesale lots, whether in jeopardy or not, was not his idea of being a hero. Yet, like all men, he had his secret yearnings.
He looked for a voice-com; since there wasn't any he decided that the old man's words spoke directly into his mind. Sang, rather, like bells. Easily. Without strain. Unlike the confused others whose thoughts he sometimes saw as through a glass darkly. The old man's projected thoughts had the ringing resonance of a cathedral organ.
He looked around that other small cabin. The tall ancient in the blue woolen blouse and peasant pants sat in a carved wooden seat before the ship's controls. And what strange controls they were! The long panel consisted of rainbow lights that swirled and pulsed. There were no recognizable instruments, no levers, no studs, no calibrations. To maneuver them the ancient simply thrust his hands within the rainbows and kneaded the palpable effulgences as if kneading dough. Behind him were shelves neatly stacked with round breads and cheeses; on the floor nearby was a great foaming vat of some kind of malted brew. There was a copper dipper swinging gently from one side of the vat.
Wayne wondered about the power. When, from astonishment, Lady veered offside and up, he looked down at the copper boat's belly. There were oars projecting out of the copper, a dozen to each side. They were made out of the same shining rainbow material as the controls and they moved in rhythmic unison to dazzle his eyes with the color shifts.
When bewilderment subsided and Lady was close to again, Wayne ventured, "Where are we going?"
"Home," said the old man.
"Home? Proxima?"
The old man laughed. He pointed. Wayne looked ahead at the familiar pattern of suns and satellites that all men of Terra view with leaping pride, and he knew.
"Come! We must hurry I Evil days have overtaken our homeland!"
"But who are you and what—"
"Menna, Waino!"
There was no time to pluck even a few of the questions from the plethora that roared up in his mind; with a flick of its copper tail the improbable starboat outdistanced Lady by parsecs and Wayne was left floundering in a sea of doubt and wonderment.
Wayne's hands and mind told Lady to follow as best she could and presently they were flinging down into the benighted storm that raged on the small green planet's polar cap. It seemed a singularly inappropriate place to attempt planet-fall but the demanding urgency in the ancient's piercing blue eyes brooked no second thoughts. If he said here, here it must be. The manship strained through the raging stratosphere, following the copper boat's winking beckon. It appeared doubtful that either of them would make it intact, but something deep in Wayne's cells insisted that failure must not be. And suddenly he knew. It was not his skill or Lady's, nor the combination; it was the old man's mind holding them up, guiding them in, pulling them after like a puppy on a long leash.
The deep snow cushioned the jolt when they made their skittering landing. Wayne yelled out. Every tooth in his head was loosened by that last flaming lunge into the night-darked snow. For a long moment he just sat there. The tooth-loosening jolt had the effect of bringing him back to what passes for sanity. He shook his head savagely against the roaring in his brain. It was preposterous! The copper star-boat. The ancient, with his rainbow controls and his rye bread rounds and his beer vat. The whole thing was impossible! Logic demanded that he dismiss it all and take up his unwelcome life from the moment when he had pulled the time-lever beyond eternity. In his torment about Chuck, he had wanted nothing but to be dead. So. He was dead. Wasn't he?
He let his face fall forward, groaning. Let it happen. So be it. Let oblivion take him. To hell with it all.
Came a tapping on the hatch. Rat-a-tat-tat. Come! it said. Hurry! Open the door! We haven't time for nonsense! Wayne straightened, grudgingly. He scowled in the direction of the shadowy hatch. The rapping became a dull fist-butt pounding. He swore as he eased himself out of the biljowed cushion and weaved across to the hatch. His thumb jabbed the button that spun the inner lock open. Lurching out, he opened the outer door and gaped at what he saw. A wild beard-wreathed face with eyebrows lashed by windtossed snow rime. A night gaunt. A phantom.
The tall figure shouldered in hugely. Its fierce blue eyes flashed aroung the cabin, ignoring Wayne for the moment. It shrugged off snow and devout dissatisfaction with what it was seeing.
"Mita hervia!" •»
Wayne recognized the expression of scorn; he didn't even need the snort that went with it. "Come out of this Hüsi's contraption, son! Come!" The tall rawboned creature grabbed hold of Wayne's tunicked arm, pulling him toward the hatch where the storm keened and wailed. "We've a long way to travel and the bitter dark is full on us."
Wayne stared. Yes. It was the man from the copper boat. It was him all right. Yet—different. Younger. The long beard had yet much oaken-brown in it and the eyes were less sunken, the torso and arms better sheathed, the movements more virile. Strangeness, this. The old man in the star-boat had brought him here to be greeted by his younger self…
Wayne snapped to when his rescuer slapped his sh
oulder and hiked him off into the snow tunnel he had dug down to the manship. The up-path was cramped and tortuous; Wayne was glad to reach the surface, to stand up to the driving wind and pucker a wondering look around him. Not that he could see much, and the northern blast all but raped him off his feet while it turned the marrow of his bones to ice. He looked up, to orient himself by the stars, in vain. The great bowl of open sky was amass with churning black; snowfall had spent itself momentarily to nagging eddies like blue wraiths; the wind from off the pole was like a great army of howling savages. The desolation was of itself to make a man shrivel up and die.
Wayne gave a wistful backglance at Lady, buried deep in a drifted mountain. Already the wind imps were busy covering the burrowed tunnel; in a hour there would be nothing here to indicate her existence…
Wayne had visited strange cold planets, but there was something peculiar about this cold, something that ripped out the elemental terrors of the beast from the very nuclei of his molecular being.
"Come!"
The bearded one's shout was lost on the wind, but Wayne caught the urgent directional flail of his mittened hand. From where he pointed came an eerie ululation, a lupine howl of infinite despair, to chill Wayne's bones even further. The unknowable terror of the primitive gripped his insides and froze him to the crusted spot. Now he saw the tall frame of his rescuer thrust into the wind toward a drifted knoll where dark shapes moved vaguely in the deeper shadow. Wayne shuddered at the thought of being left alone and on foot on this bleak benighted tundra; he forced his legs to move after the dwindling figure, fast.