by Hank Davis
“. . . who . . . has . . . it . . . where . . . is . . . it . . .”
Her skin crawled, icy and uncontrollable. If it had any way of sensing what she held concealed inside the ðvalise, it would want it. She didn’t think it could. No spying device she knew of could pierce the covering of the valise. But the egg-shaped alien instrument within—no bigger than her two fists placed together—was the heart and core of the specimen from the Pit, its black box, the part which must hold all significant clues to the range and penetrating power of its signals. Without it, the rest of the contents of that great boulder-shaped thing would be of no use now—to Volcheme or to the alien.
They waited, eyes on the viewscreen, ready to move. If the building was attacked and the creature showed it could force its way through the enclosing energy barrier, there was an unlocked door behind them. An elevator lay seconds beyond the door; and two levels down, they would be in the underground tunnel system where a transport shell waited. If they were followed, they could continue along the escape route Wergard had marked out, moving from barrier to barrier to slow the pursuer. Unless it overtook them, they would eventually reach the eastern section of the Depot, known as the Keep, where ancient defense screens formed so dense a honeycomb that they should be safe for hours from even the most persistent attacks.
But retreat would cost them their chance to make use of the control section. . . .
The transmitter’s whisper faded suddenly. For some seconds, neither stirred. Then Wergard said, relief sharp in his voice: “It may have moved off!”
He shifted the screen mechanisms. A pattern of half a dozen simultaneous views appeared. “There it is!”
On the far side of the control building, flowing purple fire lifted into view along fifty yards of one of the Depot’s streets like the back of a great surfacing sea beast, sank from sight again. Danestar hesitated, took the commband detector quickly out of her suit pocket, placed it on the wall shelf. She pressed a button on the little instrument and the projection field sprang into semi-visibility above it.
Wergard, eyes shifting about the viewscreen, said, “It’s still only seconds away from us. Don’t get too absorbed in whatever you’re trying to do.”
“I won’t.”
Danestar released the bulky radiation headpiece, turned it back out of her way. Her fingertips slipped along the side of the detector, touched a tiny adjustment knob, began a fractional turn, froze.
The visual projection she’d been hunting had appeared in the field before her.
A flickering, shifting, glowing galaxy of tiny momentary sparks and lines of light . . . the combined communication systems of a megacity might have presented approximately such a picture if the projector had presented them simultaneously. She licked her lips, breath still, as her fingers shifted cautiously, locking the settings into place.
When she drew her hand away, Wergard’s voice asked quietly, “What’s that?”
“The thing’s intercom system. It’s . . . let me think—Wergard! What’s it doing now?”
“It’s beside the control building.” Wergard paused. He hadn’t asked what her manipulations with the detector were about; she seemed to be on the trail of something, and he hadn’t wanted to distract her.
But now he added, “Its behavior indicates . . . yes! Apparently it is going to try to pass through the section barrier there!”
The viewscreen showed the ghostly, reddish glittering of an activated defense barrier along most of the solid front wall of the control building. Two deep-rose glowing patches, perhaps a yard across, marked points where the alien had come into direct contact with the barrier’s energies.
It hadn’t, Danestar thought, liked the experience, though in each case it had maintained the contact for seconds, evidently in a deliberate test of the barrier’s strength. Her eyes shifted in a brief glance to the viewscreen, returned to the patterns of swarming lights in the projector field.
The reaction of the creature could be observed better there. As it touched the barrier, dark stains had appeared in the patterns, spread, then faded quickly after it withdrew. There was a shock effect of sorts. But not a lasting one. Danestar’s breathing seemed constricted. She was badly frightened now. The section barriers did hurt this thing, but they wouldn’t stop it if it was determined to force its way through their energies. Perhaps the men in the control building weren’t yet aware of the fact. She didn’t want to think of that—
She heard a brief exclamation from Wergard, glanced over again at the screen.
And here it comes, she thought.
The thing was rising unhurriedly out of the street surface before the control building, yards from the wall. When it tested the barrier, it had extruded a fiery pointed tentacle and touched it to the building. Now it surged into view as a rounded luminous column twenty feet across, widening as it lifted higher. The top of the column began to lean slowly forward like a ponderous cresting wave, reached the wall, passed shuddering into it. The force field blazed in red brilliance about it and its own purple radiance flared, but the great mass continued to flow steadily through the barrier.
And throughout the galaxy of dancing, scintillating, tiny lights in the projector field, Danestar watched long shock shadows sweep, darken, and spread . . . then gradually lighten and commence to fade.
When she looked again at the viewscreen, the defense barrier still blazed wildly. But the street was empty. The alien had vanished into the control building.
“It isn’t one being,” Danestar said. “It’s probably several billion. Like a city at work, an army on the march. An organization. A system. The force field did hurt it—but at most it lost one half of one percent of the entities that make it up in going through the barrier.”
Wergard glanced at the projection field, then at her.
“Nobody in the control building had access to a radiaðtion suit,” he said. “So they must have been dead in an instant when the thing reached them. If it can move through a section barrier with no more damage than you feel it took, why hasn’t it come out again? It’s been in there for over five minutes now.”
Danestar, eyes on the pattern in the projection field, said, “It may have been damaged in another way. I don’t know. . . . ”
“What do you mean?”
She nodded at the pattern. “It’s difficult to describe. But there’s a change there! And it’s becoming more distinct. I’m not sure what it means.”
Wergard looked at the field a moment, shrugged. “I’ll take your word for it. It’s a jumble to me. I don’t see any changes in it.”
Danestar hesitated. She had almost intuitive sensitivity for the significance of her instruments’ indications; and that something was being altered now, moment by moment, in the millionfold interplay of signals in the pattern seemed certain.
She said suddenly, “There’s a directing center to the thing, of course, or it couldn’t function as it does. Before it went through the force field, every part of it was oriented to that center. There was a kind of rhythm to the whole which showed that. Now, there’s a section that’s going out of phase with the general rhythm.”
“What does that add up to?”
Danestar shook her head. “I can’t tell that yet. But if the shock it got from the barrier disrupted part of its internal communication system, it might be, in our terms, at least partly paralyzed now. A percentage of the individual entities—say about one-tenth—are no longer coordinating with the whole, are disconnected from it. . . . Of course, we can’t count on it, but it would explain why it hasn’t reappeared.”
Both were silent a moment. Then Wergard said, “If it is immobilized, it killed everyone in the control building before the shock got through to it. Otherwise we would have had indications of action by Volcheme by now.”
She nodded. The intercom switch on the viewscreen was open, but the system remained dead. And whatever the smuggler and the group in the main building were engaged in, they were not at present in an area covered b
y her spy devices. But the space shuttle had not left the building, so they were still there. If the creature from the Pit was no longer a menace and Volcheme knew it, every survivor of the gang would be combing the Depot for traces of Wergard and herself. Since they weren’t, Volcheme had received no such report from the control building. Whatever else had happened, the men stationed there had died as the alien poured in through the barrier.
Her breath caught suddenly. She said, “Wergard, I think . . . it’s trying to come out again!”
“The barrier’s flickering,” he acknowledged from the viewscreen. An instant later: “Full on now! Afraid you’re right! Watch for signs of damage. If it isn’t crippled, and if it suspects someone is here, it may hit this building next, immediately! It isn’t in sight . . . must be moving out below ground level.”
Danestar snapped the radiation headpiece back in position without taking her eyes from the projection field. Shock darkness crisscrossed the pattern of massed twinkðling pinpoints of brightness again, deepened. She could judge the thing’s rate of progress through the barrier by that now. There were no indications of paralysis; if anything, its passage seemed swifter. Within seconds, the darkness stopped spreading, began to fade. “It’s outside,” she said. “It doesn’t seem seriously injured.”
“And it’s still not in sight,” said Wergard. “Stay ready to move!”
They were both on their feet. The shortcode transmitter on the shelf was silent, but this time the creature might not be announcing its approach. Danestar’s eyes kept returning to the projection field. Again the barrier had achieved minor destruction, but she could make out no further significant changes. The cold probability was now that there was no practical limit to the number of such passages the creature could risk if it chose. But something about the pattern kept nagging at her mind. What was it?
A minute passed in a humming silence that stretched her nerves, another . . . and now, Danestar told herself, it was no longer likely that the monster’s attention would turn next to this building, to them. The barrier had remained quiet, and there had been no other sign of it. Perhaps it wasn’t certain humans were hiding here; at any rate, it must have shifted by now to some other section of the Depot.
Almost with the thought, she saw Wergard’s hand move on the viewscreen controls, and in the screen the area about them was replaced by a multiple-view pattern.
Nothing stirred in the various panels; no defense field was ablaze about any of the buildings shown. The entire great Depot seemed empty and quiet.
“At a guess,” Wergard remarked thoughtfully, “it’s hanging around the main building again now.” He moved back a step from the screen, still watching it, began to unfasten his antiradiation suit.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He glanced over at her. “Getting out of it. One thing these suits weren’t made for is fast running. I expect to be doing some of the fastest running in my career in perhaps another minute or two.”
“Running? You’re not—”
“Our alien,” Wergard said, “should take action concerning Volcheme’s boys next. But whatever it does, the instant we see it involved somewhere else, I’ll sprint for the control building. It may be the last chance we get to yell for help from outside. And I don’t want to be slowed down by twenty pounds of suit while I’m about it.”
Danestar swallowed hard. He was right. But there was something, a feeling. . . .
“No! Don’t go there!” she said sharply, surprising herself.
He looked around in bewilderment. “Don’t go there? What are you—watch that!”
His eyes had shifted back to the screen. For an instant, she couldn’t tell what he had seen. Then, just as the view began to blur into another, she found it.
Volcheme’s space shuttle had darted out of the cover of the main building, swung right, was flashing up a wide street toward the eastern section of the Depot.
“Making a run for the Keep!” Wergard said harshly. He fingered the controls, following the shuttle from view section to view section. “They might just—no, there it is!”
The great fire body—flattened, elongated—whipped past between two warehouse complexes, a rushing brightness fifty feet above the ground, vanished beyond the buildings.
“Too fast for them!” Wergard shook his head. “It knows what they’re doing and is cutting them off. Perhaps their guns can check it! You watch what happens—I’m going now.”
“No! I . . .”
Then at last the realization surged up. Danestar stared at him, completely dismayed.
“It’s a trap,” she said evenly. “Of course!”
“What is? What are you talking about?”
“The control building! Don’t you see?” She jerked her head at the projection field. “I said a section of the thing was splitting off from the main body! When it came out through the barrier again, that section wasn’t showing any shock effects. I saw it but didn’t understand what it meant. Of course! It didn’t come through the barrier at all. It’s still in there, Wergard! In the control building. Waiting for any of us to show up. There’re two of them now. . . . ”
She watched stunned comprehension grow in his face as she spoke.
The smugglers’ shuttle was caught not much more than a minute later. It had discovered the enemy between it and the Keep section, turned back. When the space thing followed, tiny bursts of dazzling white light showed the shuttle’s energy guns were in action. The fire body jerked aside and paused . . . and now the shuttle turned again, flashed straight at its pursuer, guns blazing full out.
For a moment, it seemed a successful maneuver. The great creature swept up out of the path of the machine, slipped over the top of a building, disappeared. The shuttle rushed on toward the Keep—and at the next corner a loop of purple radiance snared it, drove it smashing into a building front. The fire giant flowed down, sent the shuttle hurtling against the building again, closed over it. For seconds, the radiance pulsed about the engulfed vehicle, then lifted into the air, moved off. There was no sign of the shuttle until, some hundreds of yards away, the fire body opened to let the shattered machine slide out, drop to the surface of the Depot. Its lock door was half-twisted away; and Volcheme and his companions clearly were no longer within it.
To Danestar, watching in sick fascination, it had seemed as if a great beast of prey had picked up some shelled, stinging creature, disarmed it, cracked it to draw out the living contents, and flung aside the empty shell.
The alien swung west, toward the central section of the Depot, seemed to be returning to the main building complex, but then flowed down to the surface, sank into it and vanished.
Minutes passed and it did not reappear. Again the Depot’s sections stood quiet and lifeless in the viewscreen.
“It may be waiting for somebody else to break from cover,” Wergard said suddenly. “But you’d think the first thing it would do now is push into the main building and get its gadget! Volcheme must have left it there—the thing wouldn’t have slammed the shuttle around like that if it hadn’t been sure the contraption wasn’t inside.”
Danestar didn’t reply. Their nerves were on edge, and Wergard was simply thinking aloud. They had no immediate explanation for the thing’s behavior. But it had been acting purposefully throughout, and there must be purpose in its disappearance.
All they could do at present was wait, alert for signs of an approach on any level. She had discarded her antiradiation suit, as Wergard had done previously. The men in the shuttle might have gained a second or two of life because of the protection the suits gave them; but against so overwhelmingly powerful a creature they obviously had made no real difference. And they were cumbersome enough to be a serious disadvantage in other respects. If there were indications that the second energy body, the smaller one in the control building, had left it, Wergard would still attempt a dash over there.
There were no such indications. There were, in fact, no indications of any kind of act
ivity whatever until, approximately ten minutes after it vanished, the big space creature showed itself again.
It was rising slowly from the ground into the square before the deserted main building when Wergard detected it in the screen. Then, while they watched, it flowed deliberately up to the building and into it.
And no defending force fields flared into action.
As it disappeared, they exchanged startled looks. Wergard said quickly, “Volcheme must have had the barriers shut off just before they left by the lock—so the thing could pick up its device. . . . ”
“And let them get away?” Danestar hesitated. There’d been talk of that before she escaped from Volcheme’s group. But she was not at all certain that the smuggler, even under such intense immediate pressures, would abandon his prize completely. The flight might even have been designed in part to draw the raider away from it.
“Otherwise—” Wergard scowled, chewed his lip. “Has there been anything in the projection pattern to show it’s split again?”
She shook her head. “No. But if you’re thinking it could detach a section small enough to get in through a personnel lock and turn off the building’s barrier—”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
Danestar shrugged, said, “I wouldn’t be able to tell that, Wergard. I’ve been watching the projection. But it would be too minor a difference to be noticeable. It may have done it.”
He was silent a moment. “Well,” he said then, “it has the gadget it came for now. We’ll see what it does next.” He added, without change of tone, “Incidentally, it doesn’t have all of it, does it?”
Danestar gave him a startled glance.
“How did you guess?” she asked.
A half-grin flicked over Wergard’s tense face. “It’s the sort of thing you’d do. You’ve been hanging on to that valise as if there were something very precious inside.”
“There is,” Danestar agreed. “It’s not very big, but the specimen won’t work without it. And when those things in the Pit realize it’s gone, they won’t be able to replace it.”