by Anthology
Trigger put her fist to her mouth and bit down hard on her knuckles for a moment. She frowned intensely at nothing. Then she closed and locked the cabin door, went back up the passage and into the control room. She sat down before the communicator, glanced up once more at the plasmoid station in the screen, got up restlessly and went over to the Commissioner's chair. She stood there, looking down at him. The Commissioner slept on.
Then Repulsive said it again.
"No!" Trigger whispered fiercely. "I won't! I can't! You can't make me do it!"
There was a stillness then, In the stillness, it was made very clear that nobody intended to make her do anything.
And then the stillness just waited.
She cried a little.
So this was it.
"All right," she said.
* * * * *
The armor suit's triple light-beam blazed into the wide, low, black, wet-looking mouth rushing toward her. It was much bigger than she had thought when looking at it from the ship. Far behind her, the fire needles of the single gun pit which her passage to the station had aroused still slashed mindlessly about. They weren't geared to stop suits, and they hadn't come anywhere near her. But the plasmoids looked geared to stop suits.
They were swarming in clusters in the black mouth like maggots in a rotting skull. Part of the swarms had spilled out over the lips of the mouth, clinging, crawling, rippling swiftly about. Trigger shifted the flight controls with the fingers of one hand, dropping a little, then straightening again. She might be coming in too fast. But she had to get past that mass at the opening.
Then the black mouth suddenly yawned wide before her. Her left hand pressed the gun handle. Twin blasts stabbed ahead, blinding white, struck the churning masses, blazed over them. They burned, scattered, exploded, and rolled back, burning and exploding, in a double wave to meet her.
"Too fast!" Repulsive said anxiously. "Much too fast!"
She knew it. But she couldn't have forced herself to do it slowly. The armor suit slammed at a slant into a piled, writhing, burning hardness of plasmoid bodies, bounced upward. She went over and over, yanking down all the way on the flight controls. She closed her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them again, the suit hung poised a little above black uneven flooring, turned back half toward the entrance mouth. A black ceiling was less than twenty feet above her head.
The plasmoids were there. The suit's light beams played over the massed, moving ranks: squat bodies and sinuous ones, immensities that scraped the ceiling, stalked limbs and gaping nutcracker jaws, blurs of motion her eyes couldn't step down to define into shapes. Some still blazed with her guns' white fire. The closest were thirty feet away.
They stayed there. They didn't come any closer.
She swung the suit slowly away from the entrance. The ring was closed all about her. But it wasn't tightening.
Repulsive had thought he could do it.
She asked in her mind, "Which way?"
She got a feeling of direction, turned the suit a little more and started it gliding forward. The ranks ahead didn't give way, but they went down. Those that could go down. Some weren't built for it. The suit bumped up gently against one huge bulk, and a six-inch pale blue eye looked at her for a moment as she went circling around it. "Eyes for what?" somebody in the back of her mind wondered briefly. She glanced into the suit's rear view screen and saw that the ones who had gone down were getting up again, mixed with the ones who came crowding after her. Thirty feet away!
Repulsive was doing it.
So far there weren't any guns. If they hit guns, that would be her job and the suit's. The king plasmoid should be regretting by now that it had wasted its experimental human material. Though it mightn't have been really wasted; it might be incorporated in the stuff that came crowding after her, and kept going down ahead.
Black ceiling, black floor seemed to stretch on endlessly. She kept the suit moving slowly along. At last the beams picked up low walls ahead, converging at the point toward which the suit was gliding. At the point of convergence there seemed to be a narrow passage.
Plasmoid bodies were wedged into it.
* * * * *
The suit pulled them out one by one, its steel grippers clamping down upon things no softer than itself. But it had power to work with and they didn't, at the moment. Behind the ones it pulled out there were presently glimpses of the swiftly weaving motion of giant red worm-shapes sealing up the passage. After a while, they stopped weaving each time the suit returned and started again as it withdrew, dragging out another plasmoid body.
Then the suit went gliding over a stilled tangle of red worm bodies. And there was the sealed end of the passage.
The stuff was still soft. The guns blazed, bit into it, ate it away, their brilliance washing back over the suit. The sealing gave way before the suit did. They went through and came out into....
She didn't know what they had come out into. It was like a fog of darkness, growing thicker as they went sliding forward. The light beams seemed to be dimming. Then they quietly went out as if they'd switched themselves off.
In blackness, she fingered the light controls and knew they weren't switched off.
"Repulsive!" she cried in her mind.
Repulsive couldn't help with the blackness. She got the feeling of direction. The blackness seemed to be soaking behind her eyes. She held the speed throttle steady in fingers slippery with sweat, and that was the only way she could tell they were still moving forward.
After a while, they bumped gently against something that had to be a wall, it was so big, though at first she wasn't sure it was a wall. They moved along it for a time, then came to the end of it and were moving in the right direction again.
They seemed to be in a passage now, a rather narrow one. They touched walls and ceiling from time to time. She thought they were moving downward.
There was a picture in front of her. She realized suddenly that she had been watching it for some time. But it wasn't until this moment that she became really aware of it.
The beast was big, strong and angry. It bellowed and screamed, shaking and covered with foam. She couldn't see it too clearly, but she had the impression of mad, staring eyes and a terrible lust to crush and destroy.
But something was holding it. Something held it quietly and firmly, for all its plunging. It reared once more now, a gross, lumbering hugeness, and came crashing down to its knees. Then it went over on its side.
The suit's beams flashed on. Trigger squeezed her eyes tight shut, blinded by the light that flashed back from black walls all around. Then her fingers remembered the right drill and dimmed the lights. She opened her eyes again and stared for a long moment at the great gray mummy-shape before one of the black walls.
"Repulsive?" she asked in her mind.
Repulsive didn't answer. The suit hung quietly in the huge black chamber. She didn't remember having stopped it. She turned it now slowly. There were eight or nine passages leading out of here, through walls, ceiling, floor.
"Repulsive!" she cried plaintively.
Silence.
She glanced once more at the king plasmoid against the wall. It stayed silent too. And it was as if the two silences cancelled each other out.
She remembered the last feeling of moving downward and lifted the suit toward a passage that came in through the ceiling. She hung before it, considering. Far up and back in its darkness, a bright light suddenly blazed, vanished, and blazed again. Something was coming down the passage, fast....
Her hand started for the gun handle. Then it remembered another drill and flashed to the suit's communicator. A voice crashed in around her.
"Trigger, Trigger, Trigger!" it sobbed.
"Ape!" she screamed. "You aren't hurt?"
29
Mantelish's garden in the highland south of Ceyce had a certain renown all over the Hub. It had been donated to the professor twenty-five years ago by the populace of another Federation world.
That populace had negligently permitted a hideous pestilence of some kind to be imported, and had been saved in the nick of time by the appropriate pestilence-killer, hastily developed and forwarded to it by Mantelish. In return, a lifetime ambition had been fulfilled for him--his own private botanical garden plus an unlimited fund for stocking and upkeep.
To one side of the big garden house, where Mantelish stayed whenever he found the time to go puttering around among his specimens, stood a giant sequoia, generally reputed to be the oldest living thing in the Hub outside of the Life Banks. It was certainly extremely old, even for a sequoia. For the last decade there had been considerable talk about the advisability of removing it before it collapsed and crushed the house and everyone in it. But it was one of the professor's great favorites, and so far he had vetoed the suggestion.
Elbows propped on the broad white balustrade of the porch before her third-story bedroom, Trigger was studying the sequoia's crown with a pair of field glasses when Pilch arrived. She laid the glasses down and invited her guest to pull up a chair and help her admire the view.
They admired the view for a little in silence. "It certainly is a beautiful place!" Pilch said then. She glanced down at Professor Mantelish, a couple of hundred yards from the house, dressed in a pair of tanned shorts and busily grubbing away with a spade around some new sort of shrub he'd just planted, and smiled. "I took the first opportunity I've had to come see you," she said.
Trigger looked at her and laughed. "I thought you might. You weren't satisfied with the reports then?"
Pilch said, "Of course not! But it was obvious the emergency was over, so I was whisked away to something else." She frowned slightly. "Sometimes," she admitted, "the Service keeps me the least bit busier than I'd prefer to be. So now it's been six months!"
"I would have come in for another interview if you'd called me," Trigger said.
"I know," said Pilch. "But that would have made it official. I can keep this visit off the record." Her eyes met Trigger's for a moment. "And I have a feeling I will. Also, of course, I'm not pushing for any answers you mightn't care to give."
"Just push away," Trigger said agreeably.
"Well, we got the Commissioner's call from his ship. A worried man he was. So it seems now that we've had one of the Old Galactics around for a while. When did you first find out about it?"
"On the morning after our interview. Right after I got up."
"How?"
Trigger laughed. "I watch my weight. When I noticed I'd turned three and a half pounds heavier overnight than I'd averaged the past four years, I knew all right!"
Pilch smiled faintly. "You weren't alarmed at all?"
"No. I guess I'd been prepared just enough by that time. But then, you know, I forgot all about it again until Lyad and Flam opened that purse--and he wasn't inside. Then I remembered, and after that I didn't forget again."
"No. Of course." Pilch's slim fingers tapped the surface of the table between them. She said then, paying Repulsive the highest compliment Pilch could give, "It--he--was a good therapist!" After a moment, she added. "I had a talk with Commissioner Tate an hour or so ago. He's preparing to leave Maccadon again, I understand."
"That's right. He's been organizing that big exploration trip of Mantelish's the past couple of months. He'll be in charge of it when they take off."
"You're not going along?" Pilch asked.
Trigger shook her head. "Not this time. Ape and I--Captain Quillan and I, that is--"
"I heard," Pilch said. She smiled. "You picked a good one on the second try!"
"Quillan's all right," Trigger agreed. "If you watch him a little."
"Anyway," said Pilch, "Commissioner Tate seems to be just the least bit worried about you still."
Trigger put a finger to her temple and made a small circling motion. "A bit ta-ta?"
"Not exactly that, perhaps. But it seems," said Pilch, "that you've told him a good deal about the history of the Old Galactics, including what ended them as a race thirty-two thousand years ago."
Trigger's face clouded a little. "Yes," she said. She sat silent for a moment. "Well, I got that from Repulsive somewhere along the line," she said then. "It didn't really come clear until some time after we'd got back. But it was there in those pictures in the interview."
"The giants stamping on the farm?"
Trigger nodded. "And the fast clock and the slow one. He was trying to tell it then. The Jesters--that's the giants--they're fast and tough like us. Apparently," Trigger said thoughtfully, "they're a good deal like us in a lot of ways. But worse. Much worse! And the Old Galactics were just slow. They thought slow; they moved slow--they did almost everything slow. At full gallop, old Repulsive couldn't have kept up with a healthy snail. Besides, they just liked to grow things and tinker with things and so on. They didn't go in for fighting, and they never got to be at all good at it. So they just got wiped out, practically."
"The Jesters were good at fighting, eh?"
Trigger nodded. "Very good. Like us, again."
"Where did they come from?"
"Repulsive thought they were outsiders. He wasn't sure. He and that other O.G. were on the sidelines, running their protein collecting station, when the Jesters arrived; and it was all over and they were gone before he had learned much about it."
"From outside the galaxy!" Pilch said thoughtfully. She cleared her throat. "What's this business about they might be back again?"
"Well," Trigger said, "he thought they might be. Just might. Actually he believed the Jesters got wiped out too."
"Eh?" Pilch said. "How's that?"
"Quite a lot of the Old Galactics went along with them like Repulsive went along with me. And one of the things they did know," Trigger said, "was how to spread diseases like nobody's business. About like we use weed-killers. Wholesale. They could clean out the average planet of any particular thing they didn't want there in about a week. So it's not really too likely the Jesters will be back."
"Oh!" said Pilch.
"But if they are coming, Repulsive thought they'd be due in this area in about another eight centuries. That looked like a very short time to him, of course. He thought it would be best to pass on a warning."
"You know," Pilch said after a brief pause, "I find myself agreeing with him there, Trigger! I might turn in a short report on this, after all."
"I think you should, really," Trigger said. She smiled suddenly. "Of course, it might wind up with people thinking both of us are ta-ta!"
"I'll risk that," said Pilch. "It's been thought of me before."
"If they did come," Trigger said, "I guess we'd take them anyway. We've taken everything else like that that came long. And besides--"
Her voice trailed off thoughtfully. She studied the table top for a moment. Then she looked up at Pilch.
"Well," she said, smiling, "any other questions?"
"A few," said Pilch, passing up the "and besides--" She considered. "Did you ever actually see him make contact with you?"
"No," Trigger said. "I was always asleep, and I suppose he made sure I'd stay asleep. They're built sort of like a leech, you know. I guess he knew I wouldn't feel comfortable about having something like that go oozing into the side of my neck or start oozing out again. Anyway, he never did let me see it."
"Considerate little fellow!" said Pilch. She sighed. "Well, everything came out very satisfactorily--much more so than anyone could have dared hope at one time. All that's left is a very intriguing mystery which the Hub will be chatting about for years.... What happened aboard Doctor Fayle's vanished ship that caused the king plasmoid to awaken to awful life?" she cried. "What equally mysterious event brought about its death on that strangely hideous structure it had built in subspace? What was it planning to do there? Etcetera." She smiled at Trigger. "Yes, very good!"
"I saw they camouflaged out what was still visible of the original substation before they let in the news viewers," Trigger remarked. "Bright idea somebody had there!"
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"Yes. It was I. And the Devagas hierarchy is broken, and the Ermetynes run out of Tranest. Two very bad spots, those were! I don't recall having heard what they did to your friend, Pluly."
"I heard," Trigger said. "He just got black-listed by Grand Commerce finally and lost all his shipping concessions. However, his daughter is married to an up and coming young businessman who happened to be on hand and have the money and other qualifications to pick up those concessions." She laughed. "It's the Inger Lines now. They're smart characters, in a way!"
"Yes," said Pilch. "In a way. Did you know Lyad Ermetyne put in for voluntary rehabilitation with us, and then changed her mind and joined the Service?"
"I'd heard of it." Trigger hesitated. "Did you know Lyad paid me a short visit about an hour before you got here this morning?"
"I thought she would," Pilch said. "We came in to Maccadon together."
Trigger had been a little startled when she answered the doorchime and saw Lyad standing there. She invited the Ermetyne in.
"I thought I'd thank you personally," Lyad said casually, "for a recording which was delivered to me some months ago."
"That's quite all right," Trigger said, also casually. "I was sure I wasn't going to have any use for it."
Lyad studied her face for a moment. "To be honest about it, Trigger Argee," she said, "I still don't feel entirely cordial toward you! However, I did appreciate the gesture of letting me have the recording. So I decided to drop by to tell you there isn't really too much left in the way of hard feelings, on my part."
They shook hands restrainedly, and the Ermetyne sauntered out again.
"The other reason she came here," Pilch said, "is to take care of the financing of Mantelish's expedition."
"I didn't know that!" Trigger said, surprised.
"It's her way of making amends. Her legitimate Hub holdings are still enormous, of course. She can afford it."
"Well," Trigger said, "that's one thing about Lyad--she's wholehearted!"
"She's that," said Pilch. "Rarely have I seen anyone rip into total therapy with the verve displayed by the Ermetyne. She mentioned on one occasion that there simply had to be some way of getting ahead of you again."