The Co-ordinator was silent for a moment.
"I thought it would be that," he admitted. "Well, it's an unpleasant notion to our way of thinking, I grant you—even a somewhat nightmarish one. There's a flavor of necromancy. However, you can see it's obviously not a matter that involves any question of Zamm's loyalty. As you say, the Daya-Bals are very clever in robotics. And she was a neurosurgeon before she came to us. Those were just two marionettes, Bropha!"
He stood up. "Shall we rejoin your party, now?"
Bropha had come to his feet, too. "And you still say she isn't insane?" he cried.
The Co-ordinator spread his hands. "So far as I can see, your experience offers no contradictory proof. So I shall simply continue to rely on the department's psychologists. You know their verdict: that whatever our Agents may do, their judgment will be almost as nearly infallible as it is possible for highly-trained human-type intelligences to become. And, further, that no matter how widely their motivations may vary, they will not vary ever to the extent of being unacceptable to the department."
* * *
Three days out in space by now, Zone Agent Zamm was rapidly approaching the point at which she had first swerved aside to join the search for Bropha.
She was traveling fast—a great deal faster than she had done while taking her damaged and politically valuable passenger home. With him on board she'd felt obliged to loiter, since the department did not recommend top velocities when some immediate emergency wasn't impending. Only vessels of the truly titanic bulk of Vega's Giant Rangers could navigate with apparent safety at such speeds; while to smaller ships things were likely to happen—resulting usually in sudden and traceless disappearances which had been the subject of much unsatisfactory theorizing in Department Lab and similar scientific centers throughout civilization. But Zamm was impatient both with the numbing, senseless vastness of space and with its less open dangers. Let it snap at her from ambush if it liked! It always missed.
"Want a hot-spot chart on this line I'm following, for a week's cruising range," she informed the ship's telepath transmitter; and her request was repeated promptly in Galactic Zones Central on the now faraway planet of Jeltad.
Almost as promptly, a three-dimensional star-map swam into view on the transmitter-screen before Zamm. She studied it thoughtfully.
The green dot in the center indicated her position. Visually, it coincided with the fringe of a group of short crimson dashes denoting the estimated present position of the migrating Shaggar ships she had contacted briefly and reported on her run to Jeltad. A cloud of white light far ahead was a civilized star cluster. Here and there within that cluster, and scattered also around the periphery of the chart, some dozens of near-microscopic sun-systems stood circled in lines of deep red. Enclosing the red circles appeared others: orange, purple, green—indicating the more specific nature of the emergency.
Zamm stabbed a pointer at three systems marked thus as focal points of trouble inviting a Zone Agent's attention, near the far left of the chart.
"Going to try to pick up the Shaggar drift again," she announced. "If we find it, we ought to be somewhere up in that area before we're done with them. Get me the particulars on what's wrong around there, and home it out to me. That's all—"
She switched off the transmitter. The star-map vanished and a soft, clear light filled the room. Zamm rubbed a thin, long hand over her forearm and blinked pale eyes at the light. "How about a snack?" she asked.
A food tray slid out of the wall to a side table of the big desk, its containers variously iced or steaming.
She ate slowly and lightly, mentally organizing the period of time ahead. Only for a few weeks—once she had laid out plans for a year or more—so and so many planets to investigate—such and such a field to cover! But the hugeness of the task had gradually overwhelmed her will to major planning. Now she moved about in briefer spurts, not aimlessly but diverted toward new areas constantly by hunches, sudden impulses and hopes—careful only not to retrace her tracks any more than could be avoided.
But she was beaten, she knew. She'd never find them! Neither would any of the thousands and thousands of people she'd set watching and looking for traces of them. The Universe that had taken them was the winner.
She glanced over at the black, cold face that filled the whole of her ship's vision tank, its million glittering eyes mocking her.
"Stupid thing—grinning!" she whispered, hating it tiredly. She got up and started moving restlessly about the big room.
Black Face out there was her enemy! She could hurt it a little, but not much. Not enough to count. It was so big it only had to wait. For centuries; for thousands, for tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. Waiting while life built up somewhere, warm and brave and frail and hopeful—then it came suddenly with its flow of cold foulness to end it again! With some ravaging, savage destruction from outside, like the Shaggar; or more subtly with a dark pulse that slowly poisoned the mind of a race. Or it might be even only a single intelligent brain in which the cold death pattern grew till it burst out suddenly to engulf a nation, a planet— There was simply no end to the number and kinds of weapons the Universe had against life!
Zamm had stopped her pacing. She stood looking down at a big couch in the center of the room.
"You shouldn't try mind-search now, Zamm!" The voice of the gigantic robot that was the ship came, almost anxiously, into the room. "You've been under severe emotional tensions throughout the past weeks!"
"I know," she murmured. "Glad they got him back though—nice people; nice guy! We worried him, I think—" She kicked the side of the couch reflectively with the tip of one soft boot. "Those tensions might help, you know! Send the doll out and we'll see."
"The big one?" the voice inquired.
"No!" said Zamm with a sort of terror. "Can't stand to look at him when I'm all alone. No, the little one—"
Somewhere in the ship a door opened and closed. After a few seconds, footsteps came running, lightly, swiftly. A small shape scampered into the room, stopped, glanced about with bright sharp eyes, saw Zamm and ran to her.
She opened her arms and swept up the shape as it flung itself at her laughing.
"What an artist made those masks!" she said wonderingly, her fingertips tracing over a cheek of the face that was very like her own and yet different. "You couldn't tell by just touching—!" She smiled down at the shape cradled in her arms. "Fifteen years! Be a bigger boy now—but not too much. We don't shoot up quick like those old A-Class humans, do we? But for that, we grow up smarter. Don't we?"
The shape chuckled amiable agreement. Zamm blinked at it, half-smiling but alert, as if listening to something within herself. The dolls had very little in common with her working robots; they were designed to be visual hypnotics, compelling and dangerous agents that could permanently distort the fabric of sanity. Those of her people who had helped her in their design had done it reluctantly, though they understood the value of such devices for one who went searching in memory for what she had lost in time. With almost clinical detachment, she watched herself being drawn under the familiar compulsion that seemed to combine past and present, illusion and reality, until something stormy and cold washed suddenly through her face, slackening its features. Then she closed her eyes for a moment, and set the shape carefully back on its feet on the floor.
"Run along, little boy!" she told it absently, her face taut and blank once more. "Back to your place! Mother's busy."
Its gurgle of laughter merged into a receding rush of footsteps. Presently a door clicked shut again, somewhere.
Zamm went slowly to the couch and lay down on it, flat on her back, arms over her head.
"We'll try mind-search now!" she said.
The robot made no comment. A half-score glassy tentacles came out from under the couch and began to fasten themselves here and there over Zamm's body, coiled about her skull and glued flaring tips to her temples.
"I'm set," she said. "Let it
go!"
A faint humming rose from the wall. Her body stiffened suddenly, went rigid, and then relaxed completely.
* * *
There had been a brief awareness of cold, rushing inwards from all sides. But almost instantly, it reached and chilled the nerve-linkages at which it was directed.
Incoming sensation ceased with that, abruptly. Zamm's brain swam alone, released, its consciousness diffused momentarily over an infinity of the what-had-been, the time-past—but also over deceptively similar infinities of the might-have-been, the never-was. Those swirling universes of events and symbols would crystallize now, obediently but not necessarily truthfully, into whatever pattern consciousness chose to impress on them.
The brain could fool itself there! But it had an ally who wouldn't be tricked.
It ordered:
"Back to just before it began!"
Swarm after swarm of neurons woke suddenly to the spreading advance of the robot's stimulating, probing forces through their pathways. Million-factored time-past events formed briefly, were discarded and combined anew. At last, familiar images began to flick up and reel away within the brain. Remembered sound crashed; remembered warmth swept in—pain, cold, touch, rest.
Hate, love, terror—possession, loss.
"We're there! Where it began."
There was the darkened cabin on the doomed spaceliner; only a small pool of amber light glowed against one tapestried wall. Distant and faint came the quivering of gigantic engines.
"They hadn't quite worked the shake out of them, those days," Zamm's brain remembered.
She lay on the cabin's big bed, lazing, content, half asleep on her side, blinking at the amber glow. She'd been first to take note of the rest period's arrival and come back to the cabin. As usual.
" . . . used to love to sleep, those days!"
Her menfolk were still playing around somewhere in the vacation ship's variously and beautifully equipped playrooms. The big one and the little one—should be getting more rest, both of them! What's a vacation for, otherwise?
Zamm was beginning to wonder idly just where they'd gone to loiter this time, when the amber light flickered twice
"It's begun!"
* * *
Roar of sound, flash of light! Then the blaring attack-alarm from the cabin's communicator was cut short; and a body went flip-flopping crazily about the room like an experimental animal speared by an electric current. Everywhere, the liner's injured artificial gravs were breaking circuits, reforming instantly, breaking at other points; and reforming again. And holding at last, locked into a new, emergency-created pattern.
But in the cabin was darkness and unconsciousness, while over the fifteen years, for the two-thousandth time, Zamm's brain strained and tore for the one look out, the one identifiable sound—perhaps even a touch. A fraction of a second might be all she'd need!
And it had lasted two hours, that period! For two hours, they swarmed about the ship they had murdered, looting, despoiling, dragging away the ones still alive and not too badly hurt. They must have come into the cabin more than once, prowled about it, stared at her, touched her. Gone on—
But—nothing.
Full consciousness emerged suddenly at the same point as always. Then the body went crawling and scrambling up the tilted flat of a floor, tilted irrevocably now in the new gravitational pattern the stricken liner had achieved for its rigor mortis. Broken bone in lower right arm, right ankle flapping loosely—like the splintered cabin door overhead, that flapped from what was now one edge of a tilted ceiling! From somewhere within the ship came the steady roar of atomic fires; and then sudden sounds like the yelping of animals, rising into long shrieks.
"The ray-burned ones!" gasped Zamm, as the clambering body stiffened in horror, unmoving, listening. "But those weren't mine!" she screamed. "I checked them all!" She caught herself. "Wait—I'll have to go through that period again."
"You can't do that twice!" the robot's voice said. "Not now. Not that part!"
"Well—" It was right, of course. It usually was. "Get on with the sequence then!"
"Even that's too dangerous. You're nearly exhausted, Zamm!"
But the body reached for the edge of the door, hung on with the good arm, kicked with both legs and wriggled over awkwardly into a bright-lit corridor, slanted upward at a nightmarish angle. Other bodies lay there, in tumbled piles, not moving.
"If I hadn't stopped to check those—If I'd looked up sooner—just a few seconds sooner!"
One by one, the lost seconds passed away as always, and then the body suddenly looked up. A bright glare filled the upper end of the tilted corridor. Something had moved within that glare of light—had just crossed the corridor and was disappearing again down another hallway that angled off it, slanting downwards. The light followed the moving shape like a personal shadow and vanished behind it.
"Working in individual light-barriers, making a last check before they left," murmured Zamm, while the body crawled and hobbled toward the point where the light had been, screaming with terror, rage, question and despair.
"If I'd looked up that moment sooner, I'd have seen what they were like, even in space armor—human or what. I'd have seen!"
She found herself staring up at the ceiling of her ship's control room, muttering the worn old words.
She stirred stiffly but made no attempt to sit up.
"Nearly went out here," she said tonelessly.
"That was dangerous, Zamm," said the robot-voice. "I warned you."
"No harm done!" she said. "Next time, we'll just work the unconscious period through all by itself."
She lay quiet, her mouth bitter. Somewhere in memory, as somewhere in space, were points where she might pick up their trail. Things she had experienced in those hours but not consciously remembered. Scattered groups of cells within the bony box that enclosed her brain still held them locked.
Statistically, it couldn't happen that she would ever flood any specific group of cells with the impulse-pattern that revived those specific flickers of memory. Statistically, it would be a whole lot easier even to pick the one sun-system and planet where they might be out of the numberless fiery cells that were the galaxy's body!
But she was still learning! One way or the other, she was going to do it. Find them.
Zamm lay there, staring upwards, bitter and unbelieving.
"What is it?" she asked suddenly.
"Company!" the robot said.
* * *
They were a long, long distance away, moving at many times the speed of light. In the vision tank, they seemed to glide past unhurriedly almost within shouting range of the ship. One, two, three, four—
Four clouds of diffused radiance, like great, luminous jellyfish pulsing down an indetectable current of space. Migrating Shaggar ships behind their camouflaging screens. They had spotted her, of course, but like most of the older forms of space life they had learned to be careful about strange ships that did not flee from them at once. They were waiting to see her next move.
"Confirm position and direction of the drift for Central first!" Zamm said. Despair and rage were still bleak in her eyes, but her long, tapered fingers slid swiftly and surely above and about the armament banks of the control desk. Not touching anything just yet; only checking.
"Two of these are nearly in line," the robot reported.
"Five in all!" sniffed Zamm. "One more could make it a fight. Parallel course, and swing round once to make them bunch up—"
A minute or so later, they flashed across the Shaggars' path, at point-blank range ahead of them. The nebular screens vanished suddenly, and five deep-bellied, dark ships became visible instead. Light and energy boiled abruptly all about Zamm's black globe—before, behind. It missed.
"Spot any more, this side?"
"Four more are approaching—barely detectable! They may have been called by this group."
"Good enough! We'll take them next." Zamm waited as the ship completed its swing and drov
e into line behind her quarry. They were beyond any weapon-reach by then, but space far ahead was being churned into a long whirlpool of flame. At the whirlpool's core, the five Shaggar ships, retreating at speed, had drawn close together and were throwing back everything they had.
"Instructions?" the robot-voice murmured.
"Contact range—Move in!"
Up the long cone of flame, the ship sprang at the five. Zamm's hands soared, spread and high, above the armament banks—thin, curved, white claws of hate! Those seeming to swim down toward her now, turning and shifting slowly within their fire-veils, were not the faceless, more or less humanlike ones she sought. But they were marked with the same red brand: brand of the butchers, looters, despoilers—of all the death-thoughts drifting and writhing through the great stupid carnivore mind of the Universe—
At point-blank range, a spectral brilliance clung and hammered at her ship and fell away. At half-range, the ship shuddered and slowed like a beast plowing through a mudhole and out. At one-quarter, space turned to solid, jarring fire for seconds at a time.
Zamm's hands flashed.
"NOW—"
A power ravened ahead of them then like the bellowing of a sun. Behind it, hardly slower, all defenses cut and every weapon blaring its specific ultimate of destruction, the ship came screaming the hate of Zamm.
* * *
Two years—
The king-shark was bothering Zamm! It hung around some subspace usually where she couldn't hope to trace it.
It was a big ship, fast and smart and tricky. It had weapons and powers of which she knew nothing. She couldn't even guess whether it realized she was on its tail or not. Probably, it didn't.
Its field of operations was wide enough so that its regularly spaced schedule of kills didn't actually disrupt traffic there or scare it away. A certain percentage of losses had to be taken for granted in interstellar commerce. The chief difference seemed to be that in this area the losses all went to the king-shark.
Zamm circled after it, trying to calculate its next points of appearance. A dozen times she didn't miss it by much; but its gutted kills were still all she got.
Agent of Vega and Other Stories Page 19