Alien Harvest (a)

by Robert Sheckley

  “And hear it you shall.” Stan smiled. Never had he felt so at peace with himself. He didn't know where this course of action was going to take him, but he was satisfied to follow it.

  “We're going to go with your plan, Julie. And we're going to follow it all the way. We both know the risks. We discussed them yesterday. We both know the odds are against us. But no more talk about that. I've decided, and I know that you have, too. We'll start in the morning.”

  She reached across the snowy tablecloth and held his hand tightly. “Why tomorrow morning?”

  “Because that's when my bank opens,” Stan said. “I'm ready for whatever we have to do.”

  “I'm ready, too, Stan.”

  “Well,” he said, half as a joke and half seriously, “I guess we've taken care of everything except what to name our alien.”

  “What would you suggest?”

  “What about Norbert, after the great Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, the science that gave it birth?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Julie said. “I guess that just about covers it, Stan. Except for one thing.”

  “What's that?”

  She leaned close to him. He felt dizzy with her face so close to his. She bent closer. Her lips were partially open. He was fascinated by her teeth, all perfect except one small one to the left, an eyetooth. It was a little crooked.

  And then he stopped thinking as she kissed him, and Ari the cybernetic ant stood in his box on the mantel and watched, and the flames of the fire lifted and died away, and Stan watched Ari watching and watched himself kissing Julie, not knowing that Ari was watching, and all this from within his frozen moment in time and all of it stained in the blue light of the royal jelly of memory.

  4

  Next morning he had a chance to show Julie around his house. She admired the fine old silverware he had inherited from his grandparents, and looked with something approaching awe at the portraits of his ancestors that hung on the great staircase that led to the upper rooms. There were dozens of somber oil paintings in ornate gilt frames, showing stern-faced men — some with side-whiskers and some clean-shaven — and proper-looking ladies in starched black bombazine and stiff Dutch lace. Stan had been lucky that this stuff still remained after the great destruction.

  “It's wonderful, Stan,” Julie said. “I never knew who my parents were. They sold me before I knew them.”

  “I've got more than enough relatives,” Stan said. “You can have some of mine.”

  “Can I? I'd like that. I'll take that fat one with the smile for my mother.”

  “That's Aunt Emilia. You've picked well. She was the best of the bunch.”

  There were other treasures upstairs. Eiderdowns whose cases were heavy with intricate embroidery; gaudy antique jewelry; massive furniture cut from gigantic tropical trees whose species had become extinct.

  “This is such beautiful stuff,” Julie said. “I could look at it forever. How do you ever pull yourself away?”

  “You know, it's funny,” Stan said. “I never liked any of this before. But since you've come here… Well, it looks pretty nice to me now.”

  The next day Stan was pleased when it was the time for action. He felt like his life was just beginning. He was very pleased with this notion, although he also dreaded it, because if his life was beginning, it was also drawing to a close. Which would come first, he wondered, victory or death? Or would they arrive simultaneously?

  He refused to think about it. What was important was that he and Julie were in this together. He was no longer alone.

  He dressed with special care that morning, humming to himself as he shaved. He selected an Italian silk suit and a colorful Brazilian imported shirt made of a light cotton. He wore his tasseled loafers, even going so far as to buff them up to a high polish. He usually laughed at people who took pains over their dress and appearance, but for this morning, at least, he was one of them. It was a way of reminding himself that he was making a fresh start.

  He had been thinking a lot about fate and chance, and how they were influenced by the human will. He had come to the conclusion that what he wanted very badly was going to happen, as long as he willed it hard enough. It seemed to him that he was allied to a universal spirit that determined the course of things.

  As long as he wanted what the universal spirit wanted for him, he couldn't go wrong.

  Although these were exhilarating thoughts, Stan also had some doubts. He wondered if the fire caused by the Xeno-Zip might be affecting his mind. Was he getting a little … grandiose? Did he really think he had found a way to cheat death?

  Sometimes it seemed obvious to him that death was what was really happening to him. This was the real meaning of the disease rotting out his insides. There were too many details of his everyday life to remind him; the spitting and spewing into basins; the many pills he was continually taking, and their many strange effects.

  He knew he was a very sick man. But he thought it represented some ultimate courage in himself that he was refusing to face the facts. He decided that if people really faced the facts, they'd all be licked before they could start.

  He was determined to go on. It was not yet time to give up and let go. That would come later, when he found his doom; for Stan sensed a horrible fate awaiting him, one that was presently without a name or a face. Then he shook his head angrily and put those thoughts out of his mind.

  He found a fresh daisy from the garden for his buttonhole.

  It was a bright crisp day outside, a day that seemed filled with infinite promise. He could hear Julie humming from the kitchen. She had come down after her shower and was making breakfast. He went in. She was wearing his long fluffy bathrobe. Her hair was tied up in a Donald Duck towel. Her face sparkled, and she looked very young, ingenuous. It was a nice thing to see, though he knew it was an illusion, and only a temporary one at that.

  They had bacon and eggs over easy, toast, coffee. A simple breaking of the fast. And now they were ready to discuss plans.

  “The first thing we need,” Stan said, “is operating capital. I've got a lot of ideas for how to get this project of ours going. But it's going to take some money. Have you any thoughts on how we could acquire a cash flow?”

  “I do,” Julie said. “Raising money at short notice is what a thief does best, Stan. And I'm the best thief that ever was. How much do we need?”

  Stan made some calculations. “A hundred thousand, anyway.”

  “And how much money do you have right now?”

  “I don't know,” Stan said. “A couple hundred, I suppose, maybe a thousand in savings.”

  “That's not enough, is it?” Julie asked.

  “Nowhere near. We need fifty thousand anyway.”

  “As much as that?” Julie said. “Are you sure we need so much?”

  “I'm afraid so,” Stan said. “We'll have a lot of expenses to set up what we need in order to get a ship, put Norbert into final working shape, get the equipment we need, and get on with our plan.”

  “All right, Stan,” Julie said. “I think I can be of some use here. Give me what you've got. I'll double it.”

  “How will you do that?”

  “Watch and see.”

  “Will you use your skills as a thief?”

  “Not immediately,” Julie said. “There's an intermediate step I need to take.”

  “Could you be a little clearer?”

  “I'm talking about gambling.”

  “I didn't know you were a gambler as well as a thief,” Stan said.

  “My real profession is thief, but I'm a gambler also because everyone needs a second line of work. The fact is, I'm lucky at certain games. Like Whorgle. I've been told that I've got latent psychokinetic abilities. I can affect the fall of dice sometimes. But they don't play dice at Callahan's, only card games. Well, Whorgle is a new game that depends on hand-eye coordination. I've got that, and I've also got something else. A certain X-factor that sometimes does the trick.”

  “Well
, I guess you know what you're doing,” Stan said. “Although I've been wanting to see some of this thieving of yours in action.”

  “Being a good thief costs money, Stan.”

  “That's a funny thing to say. I thought you were supposed to make money that way.”

  “That's the result, of course. But when you work in the upper echelon of crime, you don't go in and hold up a candy store. And you don't knock off a bank, either.

  Those are not what I was trained for. You never asked what kind of thief I was, Stan. Well, I'm telling you now. I'm a high-society jewelry thief. I knock off only the best people. I work at political conventions, movie openings, awards ceremonies, great sports events, things that bring together crowds of people with lots of money. But that requires a setup. Otherwise I'd have to spend too long just trying to dope out how to do it. I buy a ready-made plan from an expert in the field. It comes high. But it's guaranteed to bring me to large amounts of money and jewelry.”

  “How much does a plan like that cost?”

  “If you buy one from an expert like Gibberman, it can cost plenty. I'm going to use your money to win more money so I can pay Gibberman to give me one of his great plans. It may sound like a roundabout way to you, but name me any other profession where you can go from a thousand dollars to around a million in less than three days.”

  “Sounds interesting,” said Stan. “Can I come along?”

  “Well, of course you can, at least for some of it, but you have to be real cool. You mustn't even act like you're with me. You see, gambling is hard work. I'm going to have to give it all my attention. Then, assuming I win, there's the next part of the operation, which calls for even more attention.”

  “Yeah? What's that?”

  “That's walking out of the gambling place with your money, Stan.”

  5

  At first Stan didn't want to show his robot alien to Julie. On the one hand, he thought it was the best piece of work he had ever done. But would she realize that? What would her reaction be?

  It didn't matter what she thought, of course, Stan told himself logically. Yet all the time he knew it did matter, very much. He realized he wanted Julie to think well of him. He had been alone too long, and he had hidden from everyone, including himself, just how lonely and desperate he had been. It would have been too much to have realized that earlier. But now that Julie had come into his life, he could no longer bear being without her. He wanted to make sure that never happened.

  He didn't know what was going to happen. He was scared. But he was also strangely happy. Over the last few days the individual moments of his life felt better than they had for a long time. Maybe he'd never felt so good.

  He was thinking about this while he showered and put on clothes fresh from the dry cleaners. He shaved with special care, and he laughed at himself for doing all this, but that didn't stop him. He saw Julie over breakfast. She was looking radiant, her hair sparkling in the sunshine.

  After breakfast, Stan showed her his lab.

  After that, it was time to show off his robot alien.

  He kept it in a special temperature-controlled room behind a locked door. The door was to keep people out, not to keep the robot in, he told Julie. It stood perfectly immobile, since it was not presently activated.

  Its black, heavily muscled body seemed ready to lunge. Yet Julie did not hesitate when Stan took her hand and peeled back the robot's lips to show its gleaming rows of needle-sharp fangs.

  “Your pet looks like evil incarnate,” Julie said.

  “As a matter of fact, he's surprisingly gentle. I hope I haven't made a mistake in the circuitry. He may need to be trained to fight.”

  “I can be of some help there,” Julie said.

  6

  In Jersey City, lying on a rank bed with a filthy mattress, Thomas Hoban stirred uneasily in his sleep. The dreams didn't come so often, but they still came. And always the same …

  Captain Thomas Hoban was seated in the big command chair, viewscreens above him, clear-steel glass canopy in front. Not that you get to see much in space, not even in the Asteroid Belt. But even the biggest spaceship is small in terms of space for humans, and you get to appreciate even a view of nothingness. It's better than being sealed up in a duralloy cocoon without any vision except for what the TV monitors can offer.

  The Dolomite — a good ship with an old but reliable atomic drive, but also recently fitted with tachyonic gear for multiparsec jumps — was currently on a local run within the solar system, tooling around doing a job here, a job there, trying to pick up some money for the owners. Then they got the signal that took them to Lea II in the asteroids.

  Lea was a fueling base, owned by Universal Obsidian but open to all ships. It was a refueling spot. It even had a kind of café, only a dozen seats and a menu like you'd expect at a place that hired their cooks by how little they would steal and cut costs by never bringing in fresh provisions. Not that fresh produce comes easy in the asteroids. It costs too much to make special runs with your iceberg lettuce.

  After leaving Lea, Hoban had taken the Dolomite to Position A23 in the asteroids. That was the location for the Ayngell Works, a refinery on its own slab of rock, where a robot work crew purified metals and rare earths mined elsewhere in the asteroids. A23 was located in one of the densest parts of the cluster. You had to navigate at slow speeds and with care, but who didn't know that? And Hoban was a careful man. He didn't let his second-in-command do the job for him. Even though Gill was an android and a top pilot and navigator, Hoban did it himself, and he did it well. In any event, no one had any complaints about him before he came to A23.

  His job on A23 was to take a big metals hopper into tow and bring it to the Luna Reclamations Facility.

  Taking it up was no small job. It was a big mother, too big to fit into the Dolomite's hold. But of course the asteroid it was perched on had negligible gravity, so there was no difficulty in pulling the hopper away from the surface once the magnetic clamps that held it to its massive base plate were released. Hoban's crew, by all accounts, were trained men; it should have been a piece of cake.

  The trouble was, they weren't really a trained crew. There were three Malays aboard who spoke no English and only understood the simplest commands. That usually worked out all right, but not this time. It had never been proven, but one of those Malays must have gotten confused working in the lowest bay. Somehow he or someone had missed the towline entirely and had locked a fuel-line feeder into the coupling winch. The next thing Hoban knew, the feeding mechanism had been jerked out of the atomic pile, which had shut down automatically, leaving him floating in space without main power.

  This wasn't the first time a spacecraft had lost a main engine. Gill estimated six hours to repair it. Meantime the backup accumulators and the steering jets would provide enough propulsion to get back to A23 so they could pick up the five crewmen who had gone down to manhandle the cargo ties into position.

  At least that's what should have happened, or so it was claimed in the court inquiry later.

  Instead, Hoban had turned the ship toward Luna and got away as fast as he could. He claimed afterward that there was a lot more wrong than just losing an engine. Down on A23, an inexperienced crew member had accidentally pulled the interlocks on the atomic pile that kept A23 running. The damned thing was going critical and there was no time to do anything but run for it….

  Leaving the five crewmen on A23 to their fate.

  Hoban had had to make a quick decision. He calculated that the pile was going to blow up in three minutes. If he stayed around or moved in closer, the blast would take him with it. Even a class-four duralloy hull wasn't built for that kind of treatment. And anyhow, nonmilitary spacecraft were usually built of lighter gauge metal than the fighting ships.

  It was pandemonium aboard the Dolomite. There was a crew of twenty aboard, and five of them were down at A23 with the blast coming up on them in minutes. Half of the remaining crew had wanted the captain to ignore the l
apsed-time indicator, ignore the risk, and go back to pick up the men; the other half wanted him to blow off what remained of battery power and get out of there as fast as his jets would take him.

  The crew had burst into the control room, hysterical and entirely out of order, and they had begun to come to blows right there while Hoban was trying to con the ship and Gill into attending to the navigation. Letting those men in there had been the captain's first mistake.

  Crewmen were not allowed in officer country except by specific invitation. When a crewman trespasses, shipboard code says he should be punished immediately. If Hoban had ordered Gill to seize the first man to come in and put him into the crowded little locker belowdecks that served as jail space, the others might have had second thoughts. Crews obey strong leadership, and Hoban's leadership at this point was decidedly weak.

  It was in the middle of that shouting writhing mass of people that Hoban had come to his decision.

  “Open the accumulators! Get us out of here, Mr. Gill!”

  That had shut everybody up, since the acceleration alarm had gone off and they had to get back to their own part of the ship and strap down while the faux gravity was still in operation. It was Hoban's hesitation that had almost set off the men, but once he'd made up his mind, things were better.

  The question was, had he made the right choice? The jury decided there was reason enough to believe that Hoban had panicked, had not thought through his position, had not properly calculated the risk. The jury's report said that he had had more than enough time and could have gone in for the men without undue risk to the ship. It would have been cutting it a little fine, but in the atmosphere of the trial, men didn't think about that. They didn't really ask themselves what they would have done in Hoban's shoes. They just knew that five crewmen were dead, and the company was liable.

  But the question was, under which clause of the insurance contract was the company liable? If what had happened was beyond anyone's power to change, that was one thing. But if it was due to pilot error or poor judgment, then the company had less direct liability. Guess which the jury went for?