In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

by Hank Davis

  “Very dirty trick!” Wergard said approvingly. He glanced at the valise. “Supposing we manage to get out of this alive—how useful could the item become?”

  “Extremely useful, if it gets to really capable people. As far as I could make out, it must embody all the essentials of that system.”

  Wergard nodded. “We’ll hang on to it, then. As long as we can, anyway. We may have to destroy it, of course. Think the thing could spot there’s a part missing?”

  “It could if it has a way of testing it,” said Danestar. “But if the specimen’s been reassembled and resealed, nothing will show. . . . There the creature comes now!”

  They watched its emergence from the main building. It poured out of the landing lock area, swung west across the central square, moving swiftly. It might be carrying the specimen with it, as it had carried the shuttle.

  “Coming back here!” Wergard remarked some seconds later. “And if it can open sectional barriers, it can open the main Depot lock in the control building. . . . ”

  Danestar knew what he meant. The Pit creature might believe it had achieved its objective in regaining the lost signaling instrument and simply leave now. She began to feel almost feverish with hope, warned herself it was much more probable it did not intend to let any human being in the Depot remain alive to tell about it.

  Her gaze shifted again to the patterns in the projection field. No further changes had been apparent, but a sense of dissatisfaction, of missing some hidden significance, still stirred in her each time she studied them. I’m not seeing everything they should tell me, she thought. She shook her head tiredly. Too much had happened these hours! Now her thinking seemed dulled.

  She heard Wergard say, “It’s stopped for something!”

  It had come to an intersection, paused. Then suddenly it veered to the right, moved swiftly past three buildings, checked again before a fourth. A probing fire tentacle reached toward the building, and defense barriers promptly blazed into activity.

  The creature withdrew the tentacle, remained where it was, half-submerged in the street. Activated by its proximity, the defense field continued to flare while one or two minutes passed. Then the field subsided, vanished. The creature moved forward until some two-thirds of it appeared to be within the building. Barely seconds later, it drew back again, swung away. . . .

  “It caught somebody inside there!” Wergard said. “It couldn’t have been looking for anything else. How did it know some poor devils had holed up in that particular section?”

  The intercom signal on the viewscreen burred sharply with his last words, then stopped. They stared at it, glanced at each other. Neither attempted to move toward the switch.

  The intercom began ringing again. It rang, insistently, jarringly, with brief pauses, for a full minute now before it went silent.

  “So that’s how!” Wergard said heavily. He shrugged. “Well, if it—or a section of it—can manipulate a barrier lock and reproduce shortcode impulses, it can grasp and manipulate an intercom system. Not a bad way to locate survivors. If we don’t answer—”

  “We can’t stay here, anyway,” Danestar told him, frowning at the projection field. She had spoken in an oddly flat, detached manner.

  “No. It’s mopping up before it heads home—and now it can apparently cut off every sectional barrier that isn’t locally maintained directly from the control building. It won’t be long before it discovers that—if it hasn’t already done it.” Wergard picked up the energy gun. “Grab what you need and let’s move! I’ve thought of something better than trying to make it to the Keep and playing hide-and-seek with it there. With the tricks it’s developed, we wouldn’t last—” He looked over, said quickly, sharply, “Danestar!”

  Danestar glanced around at him, bemused, lips parted. “Yes? I . . . ”

  “Wake up!” Wergard’s voice was edged with nervous impatience. “I think I can work us over to the section the thing just cleared out. If we leave the barrier off, there’s a good chance it won’t check that building again. Let’s not hang around here!”

  “No.” She shook her head, turned to the instruments on the shelf. “You’ve got to get me to our quarters, Wergard—immediately!”

  “From here? Impossible! There’re several stretches—over three hundred yards in all—where we’d be in the open without the slightest cover. It’s suicide! We—” Wergard checked himself, staring at her. “You’ve thought up something? Is it going to work?”

  “It might, if we can get there.”

  He swore, blinked in scowling reflection.

  “All right!” he said suddenly. “Can do—I hope! Tell me on the way or when we’re there what you’re after. We’ll make a short detour. There’s something I could do to keep our friend occupied for a while. It may buy us an additional twenty, thirty minutes. . . . ”

  Hurrying up a narrow dim passage behind Wergard, Danestar felt clusters of eerie fears hurry along with her. Wergard swung on at a fast walking pace. Now and then she broke into a run to keep up with him; and when she did, he slowed instantly to let her walk again. It was sensible—they might have running enough to do shortly. But staying sensible wasn’t easy. Her legs wanted to run.

  They were blind here, she thought. Her awareness of it was what had built up the feeling of frightened helplessness during the past minutes to the point where it seemed hardly bearable. She couldn’t use her instruments, and the sectional barriers in this area were turned off; they were also deprived of that partial protection. As Wergard had suspected, the alien had discovered the force fields could be operated from the central control office. The Depot was open to it now except in sections where human beings had taken refuge and cut in defense barriers under local control. Such points, of course, were the ones it would investigate.

  And they might encounter it at any moment, with no warning at all. Whether they got through to their quarters had become a matter of luck—good luck or bad—and Danestar, who always prepared, always planned, found herself unable to accept that condition.

  Wergard halted ahead of her; and she stopped, watched him cautiously edge a door open, glance out. He looked back, slid the energy carbine from his shoulder, held it in one hand, made a beckoning motion with the other. Danestar followed him through the door and he eased it back into its lock. They had come out into one of the Depot’s side streets. It stretched away on either side between unbroken ðbuilding fronts, a strip of the dull black dome of the main barrier arching high above.

  They darted across the street, ran fifty feet along the building on the far side before Wergard stopped at another door. This one opened on a pitch-dark passage; and, a moment later, the darkness closed in about them.

  Wergard produced a light, said quietly, “Watch your step here! The section was sealed off officially fifty years ago and apparently hasn’t been inspected since.”

  He moved ahead, rapidly but carefully, holding the light down for her. They were some five minutes from their starting point. Beyond that, Danestar did not know what part of the Depot they’d come to, but Wergard had told her about this building. It had been part of the old fortress system, cheaper to seal off than remove, an emergency unit station which operated the barrier defenses of the complexes surrounding it. If the equipment was still in working order, Wergard would turn on those barriers. Approximately a tenth of ðDepot would again be shielded then, beyond manipulation by the control office. That should draw the creature’s attenðtion to the area, while they moved on. Their living quarters were in a building a considerable distance away.

  Eyes shifting about, Danestar followed the pool of light dancing ahead of her feet. The flooring was decayed here and there; little piles of undefinable litter lay about, and the air was stale and musty. Wergard, in his prowling, might in fact have been the first to enter the building in fifty years. They turned a corner of the passage, came to a dark doorspace. There he stopped.

  “You’d better wait here,” he told her. “There’s a mess of machiner
y inside, and some of it’s broken. I’ll have to climb around and over it. If the barrier system is operating, I’ll have it going within three or four minutes.”

  He vanished through the door. Danestar watched the receding light as it moved jerkily deeper into a forest of ancient machines, lost it when it went suddenly around a corner. There was complete darkness about her then. She fingered a lighter in her pocket but left it there. No need to nourish the swirling tide of apprehensions within her by peering about at shadows. Darkness wasn’t the enemy. After a minute or two, she heard a succession of metallic sounds in the distance. Presently they ended, and a little later Wergard returned. He was breathing hard and his face was covered with dirt-streaked sweat.

  “As far as I can make out, the barriers are on,” he said briefly. “Now we’d better get out of the neighborhood fast!”

  But they made slower overall progress than before, because now they had to use the personnel locks in the force fields as they moved from one complex section to the next. In between, they ran where they could. They crossed two more side streets. After the second one, Wergard said, “At the end of this building we’ll be out of the screened area.”

  “How far beyond that?” Danestar asked.

  “Three blocks. Two big sprints in the open!” He grimðaced. “We could use the underground systems along part of the stretch. But they won’t get us across the main streets unless we follow them all the way to the Keep and back down.”

  She shook her head. “Let’s stick to your route.” A transport shell of the underground system could have taken them to the Keep and into the far side of the Depot in minutes. But its use would register on betraying instruments in the control building, and might too easily draw the alien to the moving shell.

  The personnel lock at the other end of the building let them into a narrow alley. Across it was the flank of one of the Depot’s giant warehouses. As they started along the alley, there was a crackling, spitting, explosive sound—the snarl of a defense field flashing into action.

  Wergard reached out, snatched the valise from Danestar’s hand.

  “Run!”

  They raced up the alley. The furious crackle of the force field came from behind them, from some other building. It was not far away, and it was continuing. A hundred yards on, Wergard halted abruptly, caught Danestar as she plowed into him, thrust the valise at her.

  “Here—!” he gasped. She saw they’d reached a door to the warehouse; now Wergard was turning to open it. Clutching the valise, thoughts a roiling confusion of terror, she looked back, half-expecting to see a wave of purple fire sweeping up the alley toward them.

  But the alley was empty, though the building front along which the barrier blazed was only a few hundred yards away. Then, as Wergard caught her arm, hauled her in through the door, a closer section—the building from which they had emerged a moment before—erupted in glittering fury. The door slammed in back of her, and they were running again, through a great hall, along aisles between high-stacked rows of packing cases. And—where was the valise? Then she realized Wergard had taken it.

  She followed him into a cross-aisle. Another turn to the right, and the end of the hall was ahead, a wide passage leading off it. She had a glimpse of Wergard’s strained face looking back for her; then, suddenly, he swerved aside against the line of cases, crouched, his free arm making a violent gesture, motioning her to the floor.

  Danestar dropped instantly. A moment later, he was next to her.

  “Keep . . . down!” he warned. “Way . . . down!”

  Sobbing for breath, flattened against the cases, she twisted her head around, saw what he was staring at over the stacked rows behind them. A pale purple reflection went gliding silently along the ceiling at the far end of the hall, seemed to strengthen for an instant, abruptly faded out.

  They scrambled to their feet, ran on into the passage.

  Even after they’d slowed to a walk again, had reached a structure beyond the warehouse, they didn’t talk about it much. Both were badly winded and shaken. It had been difficult to believe that the thing could have failed to detect them. Its attention must have been wholly on the force fields it was skirting, even as a section of it flowed through the warehouse within a few hundred feet of them.

  If they’d been a few seconds later reaching the alley. . . .

  Danestar reached into her white jacket, turning up its cooling unit. Wergard glanced at her. His face was dripping sweat. He wiped at it with his sleeve.

  She asked, “You’re still wearing the sneaksuit?”

  Wergard lifted a strand of transparent webbing from under his collar, let it snap back. “Think it might have helped?”

  “I don’t know.” But the creature might have the equivalent of a life detector unit as part of its sensory equipment, and a sneaksuit, distorting and blurring the energy patterns of a living body, would perhaps afford some protection. She said, “I’ll get into one as soon as we reach our quarters. It may have known somebody was around but didn’t want to waste time picking up another human until it found out why the defense barriers were turned on again in that area.”

  Wergard remarked dubiously, “It seems to me it’s got picking up humans at the top of its priority list!” After a moment, he added, “The long sprint comes next. Feel up to it?”

  Danestar looked at him. “I’d better feel up to it! If we see that thing again—I’m one inch this side of pure panic right now!”

  He grunted. “Quit bragging!” He slid the carbine from his shoulder. “It’s that door ahead. Let me have a look out first.”

  As he began to unlock the door, Danestar found herself glancing back automatically once more at the long, lit, empty corridor through which they had come, their hurried steps echoing in the silence of the building. Then she saw Wergard had paused, half-crouched and motionless, at the barely opened door.

  “What is it?” she asked quickly.

  “I don’t know!” The face he turned to her was puzzled and apprehensive. “Come up and take a look!”

  She moved to where she could look out past him. After a moment, she said, “There are adjustment instruments for the Depot lighting somewhere in the control section.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Wergard. “Another item that’s been sealed away for a hundred years or so. But our Number Two Thing in the control building seems to have got to them. I’d like to know what it means.”

  He opened the door wider. Both moved forward carefully, glancing along the street outside.

  This was one of the main streets of the Depot. Across from them, a hundred and fifty yards away, was the massive white front of the structure which housed the central generators. Approximately two hundred yards to the left, it was pierced by a small entrance door which was the next step on Wergard’s route to their quarters. To west and east, the street stretched away for half a mile before rows of buildings crossed it.

  But all this was in semi-darkness now; too dim to let them make out the door in the wall of the generator building from where they stood. A hazy brightness above the line of buildings across the street indicated the rest of the Depot was still flooded by the projection lighting system which was that of the old fortress—wear-proof and ageless. If not deliberately tampered with, it would go on filling the Depot with eternal day-brightness for millennia.

  But something had tampered with it and was still tampering with it. As they looked, the gloom along the street deepened perceptibly, then, slowly, lightened to its previous level.

  “There can’t be much light in the Pit, of course,” Wergard said, staring up the street to the west. The control section, Danestar realized suddenly, lay in that direction. “It may be trying to improve visibility in the Depot for its perceptions.”

  “Or,” said Danestar, “ruin visibility for ours.”

  Wergard looked at her. “We don’t have the time left to try another route,” he said. “Whatever it’s doing, we may make a mistake in crossing the street while it’s experimenting.
But waiting here makes no sense.”

  She shook her head. “The intention might be to keep us waiting here.”

  “Yes, I thought of that. So let’s go. Right now. Top speed across. I’ll stay behind you.”

  For an instant, Danestar hesitated. Her feeling that the uncertain darkness of the wide street was under the scrutiny of alien senses, that they would be observed and tracked, like small scuttling animals, as soon as they left the shelter of the doorway, became almost a conviction in that moment. The fact remained that they could not stay where they were. She tightened her grip on the handle of the valise, drew a deep breath, darted out.

  They were half-across when the darkness thickened so completely that they might have moved in mid-stride into a black universe. Blind, she thought. It was an abrupt mental shock. She faltered, almost stumbled, felt she had swerved from the line she was following, tried to turn back to it . . . suddenly didn’t know at all in which direction to move. Now panic closed in.

  “Wergard!”

  “That way!” His voice, hoarse and strained, was on her right, rather than behind her. As she turned toward it, his light flicked on, narrowed to a pale thread, marking a small circle on the wall of the generator building ahead of Danestar. She was hurrying toward the wall again as the thread of light cut out . . . and seconds later, the wall and the street began to reappear, dim and vague as before, but tangibly present. They reached the wall together, turned left along it. Again the street darkened, became lost in absolute blackness.

  Wergard’s hand caught her arm. “Just walk.” He added something, muttered and indistinct, which might have been a curse. They went on, breathing raggedly. Wergard’s hand remained on Danestar’s arm. The darkness lightened a trifle, grew dense again. “Hold on a moment!” Wergard said, very softly.

  She stopped instantly, stood unmoving, let her breath out slowly. Wergard’s hand left her arm. She had an impression of cautious motion from him, decided he’d raised the carbine to fire-ready position. Then he, too, was still.