by Hank Davis
He’d speak when he thought he could. Danestar’s eyes shifted quickly, scanning the unrelieved dark about them. The only sound was a dim faint hum of machinery from within the structure on their right.
Then she realized something had appeared in her field of vision.
It was ahead and to the left. A small pale patch of purple luminescence, moving swiftly but in an oddly jerky manner, its outline shifting and wavering, as it approached their path at what might be a right angle. How far away? If it was touching the ground, Danestar thought, or just above it, it must be at least two hundred yards farther up the street. That would make it a considerably larger thing than her first impression had suggested.
As these calculations flicked through her mind, their object passed by ahead, moved on to the right, abruptly vanished.
“You saw it?” Wergard whispered.
“Yes.”
“Went in between a couple of buildings. Not so good—but it was some distance off. We don’t seem to have been noticed. Let’s go on.”
Wergard had glimpsed another of the minor fire shapes just before they stopped. That one had been smaller—or farther away—and had been in sight for only an instant, on the left side of the street.
“They shouldn’t be too large to get through a personnel lock and switch off a barrier for Thing Number One,” he said as they hurried along a catwalk in the generator building. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean Number One is in this area.”
“Scouts?” Danestar suggested.
That had been Wergard’s thought. The Pit creature could have split off several dozen autonomous sections of itself of the size they had observed without noticeably reducing its main bulk, and scattered them about the Depot to speed up the search for any humans still hiding out. The carbine couldn’t have done significant damage to the alien giant but should have the power to disrupt essential force patterns in these lesser replicas. “They don’t make things easier for us,” Wergard said, “but we’ll have to show ourselves only once more. After that, we’ll have cover. And we can change our tactics a little. . . . ”
At the end of the generator building was the central street of the Depot, slightly wider than the last one they had crossed. It was almost startling to find it normally lit. Directly opposite was the entrance recess to another building. This was the final open stretch on the way to their quarters. Wergard mopped his forehead, asked, “Ready to try it?”
Danestar nodded. She felt lightly tensed, not at all tired. Dread had its uses—her body had recognized an ultimate emergency and responded. She thought it would go on running now when she called on it until it fell dead.
Wergard was wearing a sneaksuit; she wasn’t. It was possible they were being followed, that the light-shapes they’d seen were casting about in the area for the source of the life energy they’d detected here, of which she was the focus. In that case, getting across the central street might be the point of greatest danger. They’d decided she should go first while Wergard covered her with the carbine. He would follow as soon as she was within the other building.
She slipped out the door ahead of him, drew a deep breath, ran straight across the too-silent, bright-lit street toward the entrance recess.
And nothing happened. The carbine stayed quiet. The paving flowed by, and it seemed only an instant then before the building front swayed close before her. Danestar flung herself into the recess, came up gasping against the wall.
A door on the left, Wergard had said. Where?—she discovered it next to her, pulled it open.
For a moment, her mind seemed about to spin into insanity. Then she was backing away from the door, screaming with all her strength, while two shapes of pale fire glided out through it toward her. Somewhere, she heard the distant sharp snarl of the carbine. A blizzard of darting, writhing lines of purple light enveloped her suddenly, boiled in wild turmoil about the recess. The closer of the shapes had vanished, and the carbine was snarling again.
Abruptly, her awareness was wiped out.
“Got your third setting now, I think!” Wergard announced.
Danestar glanced at him. He sat at a table a few feet to her left, hunched forward, elbows planted on the table, face twisted in concentration as he peered at the tiny paper-flat instrument in his left hand.
“Uh-huh, that’s it!” He sighed heavily. “Four to go.”
His right forefinger and thumb closed cautiously down on the device, shifted minutely, shifted back again. It was an attachment taken from Danestar’s commband detector. She had designed it, used it on occasion to intrude on covert communications in which she had a professional interest, sometimes blanking a band out gently at a critical moment, sometimes injecting misinformation.
But it was an instrument designed for her fingers, magical instruments themselves in their sensitized skill, deftness, and experience. It had not been designed for Wergard’s fingers, or anyone else’s; and the only help she could give him with it was to tell him what must be done. Both hands were needed to operate the settings, and at present she couldn’t use her left hand. What had knocked her out in the building entrance, an instant before Wergard’s gun disrupted the second of the two Pit things that surprised her there, seemed to have been the approximate equivalent of a near miss from a bolt of lightning. Wergard had carried her two Depot blocks to their quarters, was working a sneaksuit over her, before she regained consciousness. Then she woke up suddenly, muscles knotted, trying to scream, voice thick and slurred when she started to answer Wergard’s questions. They discovered her left side was almost completely paralyzed, her tongue partly affected. As soon as he could make out what she wanted, what her plan had been, Wergard hauled her down to the ground-level barrier room of the building, along with an assortment of hastily selected gadgetry, settled her in a chair next to the barrier control panel, arranged the various instruments on a table before her where she could reach them with her right hand. Then he went to work on the attachment’s miniature dials to adjust them to the seven settings she’d told him were needed.
He swore suddenly, in a gust of savage impatience, asked without looking up, “How long have I been playing around with this midget monster of yours?”
“Sixteen minutes,” Danestar told him. The paralysis had begun to lift; she could enunciate well enough, though the left side of her face remained numb. But she still couldn’t force meaningful motion into her left hand. If she had been able to use it, she wouldn’t have needed half a minute to flick in the dial readings, slap the attachment back into the detector. It was a job no more involved than threading a series of miniature needles. The problem was simply that Wergard’s hands weren’t made for work on that scale, weren’t trained to it.
“Sixteen minutes!” He groaned. His face was beaded with the sweat of effort. “Well, I seem to be getting the hang of it. Our luck may hold up.”
It might, she thought. It was still a matter of luck. They’d had good luck and bad luck both during the past half-hour. Until now, the main alien body had been engaged in the cluster of activated defense barriers on the north side of the Depot. The viewscreen on the table showed her the intermittent flickering of force fields there; now and then, a section blazed brightly. And sometimes she’d seen the great purple glow passing among the buildings. While it remained in that area, they had time left. But the barriers were being shut off, one by one. Detached work segments of the thing would be able to enter by a personnel lock and cut the controls. And—perhaps when the locks could not be immeðdiately found—the main body was again driving directly through the force fields and absorbing what damage it must to get into a protected building.
During the past four minutes alone, it appeared to have passed through three such sectional barriers. Changes in the detector’s visual pattern revealed the damage. The accumulated effect was not inconsiderable.
Danestar’s gaze went to the locked instrument valise, lying on the table between the detector and the shortcode transmitter, in immediate reach of her r
ight hand. Within it was still the alien instrument she’d taken from Dr. Hishkan’s office, the small, all-essential coordinating device without which the artificial asteroid from the cosmic cloud was a nonoperative, useless, meaningless lump of deteriorating machinery.
Had the alien mind discovered it wouldn’t function, that the humans here had removed a section of it?
She thought it had. The repeated acceptance, during these last minutes, of the destruction of whole layers of its units in the raging force fields, to allow it to reach the barrier controls more quickly, suggested a new urgency in its search for human survivors. It would have been logical for it to assume that whoever had the missing instrument had sought refuge in the one area still shielded by multiple barriers.
But when the last of those defense fields was shut off and the last of the northern buildings hunted through, the creature would turn here. In that, their luck had been bad—very bad! To avoid attracting attention to the building, they’d planned to leave its barrier off as long as possible. They were in sneaksuits, perhaps untraceable. They might have remained undetected indefinitely.
But they had been in the barrier room only a few minutes before one of the prowling segments found them. Danestar had the streets along two sides of the building under observation, and nothing had been in sight there. Evidently, the thing had approached through an adjacent building. Without warning, it erupted from an upper corner of the room, swept down toward them. Danestar barely glimpsed it before Wergard scooped up the carbine placed across the table beside him and triggered it one-handed.
The segment vanished, as its counterparts in the building entry had done, in an exploding swirl of darting, purple-gleaming lines of light. The individual energy entities which had survived the gun’s shock-charge seemed as mindless and purposeless as an insect swarm whirled away on a sudden gust of wind. Danestar had slapped on the building’s defense fields almost as Wergard fired; and in seconds, the indicators showed the fields flickering momentarily at thousands of points as the glittering purple threads flashed against them and were absorbed. Within a minute, the building was clear again.
But almost immediately afterwards, the barrier was impacted in a far more solid manner; and now the viewscreen showed a sudden shifting and weaving of fire shapes in one of the streets beside the building. Four or five segments had appeared together; one had attempted to slip into the building and encountered the force field. Lacking the protective bulk of the main body, it was instantly destroyed. The others obviously had become aware of the danger.
“If they can find the personnel lock here, they should try that!” Wergard remarked.
He laid Danestar’s instrument carefully to one side, stood waiting with the gun. The entry surface of the lock was in the wall across from them, ringed in warning light to show the field was active. Danestar kept her eyes on the control panel. After a moment, she said sharply, “They have found the lock!” A yellow light had begun to flash beside the field indicators, signaling that the lock was in use. As it began to open on the room, the carbine flicked a charge into it, and the purple glow within exploded in glittering frenzies.
The attempt to use the lock wasn’t repeated. The scouting segments were not in themselves an immediate danger here. But in the open, away from the building, where they could bring their destructive powers into play, a few of them should be more than a match for the carbine. To retreat again to some other point of the Depot had become impossible. The things remained in the vicinity and were on guard, and other segments began to join them.
That made it simply a question of how many minutes it still would be before the main body appeared to deal with the humans pinned down in this building. Neither Wergard nor Danestar mentioned it. They’d had good luck and bad, lasted longer than there had been any real reason to expect; now they’d run out of alternative moves. Nothing was left to discuss. Wergard had laid the carbine down, resumed his carefully deliberate groping with the spidery dials of Danestar’s device. Danestar watched the instruments; and the instruments, in their various ways, watched the enemy. A tic began working in the corner of Wergard’s jaw; sweat ran down his face. But his hands remained steady. After a time, he announced he had locked in the first setting. Then the second, and the third. . . .
There were developments in the instruments Danestar didn’t tell him about. That the main body of the alien was absorbing savage punishment in its onslaught on the force fields became increasingly evident. The detector’s projection field pattern almost might have been that of a city undergoing an intermittent brutal barrage. Blacked-out sections remained lifeless now, and there were indications of an erratically spreading breakdown in general organization.
But it should know, she thought, how much of that it could tolerate. Meanwhile it was achieving its purpose with frightening quickness. Barrier after barrier blazed in sudden bright fury along the line of search through the northern complex, subsided again. The viewscreen panels kept shifting as Danestar followed the thing’s progress. Then she cut in one more panel, and knew it was the last. The alien had very little farther to go.
She switched the screen back momentarily to the local area, the streets immediately around their building. There was evidence here, she thought, in the steadily increasing number of ghostly darting light shapes beyond the barrier, that alien control of the Depot was almost complete. The segments had been sent through it like minor detachments of an invading army to make sure no humans were left in hiding anywhere. They were massing about this building now because the composite mind knew that within the building were the only survivors outside of the northern complex.
The thing was intelligent by any standards, had used its resources methodically and calculatingly. The major section which had been detached from it after it captured the control building apparently had remained there throughout, taking no part in other action. That eliminated the possibility that humans might escape from the Depot or obtain outside help. Only during the past few minutes, after the alien mind was assured that the last survivors were pinned down, had there been a change in that part of the pattern in the projector field. The thing seemed to be on the move now, filling some other role in the overall plan. Perhaps, Danestar thought, it would rejoin the main body as a reserve force, to make up for the losses suffered in the barriers. Or it might be on its way here.
Wergard said absently, as if it had occurred to him to mention in passing something that was of no great interest to either of them, “Got that fourth setting now. . . .”
Less than a minute later, in the same flat, perfunctory tone, he announced the fifth setting was locked in; and hope flared in Danestar so suddenly it was like a shock of hot fright.
She glanced quickly at him. Staring down at the instrument he fingered with infinite two-handed deliberation, Wergard looked drugged, in a white-faced trance. She didn’t dare address him, do anything that might break into that complete absorption.
But mentally she found herself screaming at him to hurry. There was so little time left. The last barrier in the northern complex had flared, gone dead, minutes before. The giant main body of the alien seemed quiescent then. There were indications of deep continuing disturbances in the scintillating signal swarms in the projector, and briefly Danestar had thought that the last tearing shock of force field energies could have left the great mass finally disorganized, crippled and stunned.
But then evidence grew that the component which had remained in the control station was, in fact, rejoining the main body. And its role became clear. As the two merged, the erratic disturbances in the major section dimmed, smoothed out. A suggestion of swift, multitudinous rhythms coordinating the whole gradually returned.
The Pit thing was the equivalent of an army of billions of individuals. And that entity had a directing intelligence—centered in the section which had held itself out of action until the energy defenses of the Depot were neutralized. Now it had reappeared, unaffected by the damage the main body had suffered, to res
ume control, restore order. Quantitatively, the composite monster was reduced, shrunken. But its efficiency remained unimpaired; and as far as she and Wergard were concerned, the loss in sheer mass made no difference at all.
And where was it now? She’d kept the panels of the viewscreen shifting about along the line of approach it should take between the northern complex and this building. She did not catch sight of it. But, of course, if it was in motion again, it could as easily be flowing toward them below ground level where the screen wouldn’t show it. . . .
Danestar paused, right hand on the screen mechanism.
Had there been the lightest, most momentary, betraying quiver in a section of the defense barrier indicator: just then? The screen was turned to the area about the building; and only the swift gliding ghost shapes of the segments were visible in the streets outside.
But that meant nothing. She kept her eyes on the barrier panel. Seconds passed; then a brief quivering ran through the indicators and subsided.
The thing was here, beneath the building, barely beyond range of its force field.
Danestar drew the instrument valise quietly toward her, opened its dial lock and took out the ovoid alien device and a small gun lying in the valise beside it. She laid the device on the table, placed the gun’s muzzle against it. A slight pull of her trigger finger would drive a shattering charge into the instrument. . . .
Her eyes went back to the viewscreen. The swirling mass of light shapes out there abruptly had stopped moving.
* * *
She and Wergard had discussed this. The alien had traced the U-League’s asteroid specimen from the Pit to Mezmiali, and to the Depot. While the instrument now missing from the specimen had been enclosed by the spyproof screens of Danestar’s valise, the alien’s senses evidently had not detected it. But it should register on them as soon as it was removed again from the valise.