by James White
"About fifteen minutes."
"Right. We'll meet you at the lifeship in fifteen minutes," Cross said briskly; then: "Harper had already left for the lifeship blister, Smith is following now with the data tapes. I'll stay here for a while in case they spring something new."
Grayson grunted acknowledgment, and hurried into the corridor containing the imprisoned Nurse 53. He felt uncomfortably like a cannibal as he ripped into the sleek white-enameled hide of the almost human robot—one of the very few mechanisms, he thought sadly as his eyes passed over the bright red cross painted on its side, that was specifically developed to save lives. The hypos and other instruments that he would need were not designed for human use, of course, but Grayson thought he could manage—Stuart wasn't, after all, a very intricate case. He rifled several of the robot's compartments, then wrapped the loot in some cotton and gauze found in another. He returned to Stuart.
The engineer looked really bad now. Grayson softened a small area of the cement above Stuart's shoulder, inserted a long needle, and deftly hardened it again before the air pressure could blow it out. He fed in glucose and anti-shock, then withdrew the needle slightly and squirted in coagulant to halt the flow of blood still coming from the wound. Until he got the man into the lifeship it was the best he could do but he was very much afraid that it wasn't enough.
Grayson switched on the self-powered cutter used for freeing injured men from metallic wreckage—also torn from the corpse of Nurse 53—and started slicing through the cables and structural members holding Stuart's pod to the floor.
The pod under Earth-normal gravity would have weighed easily a ton, and though weightless now, it retained all its mass and inertia. Grayson was hot and sticky inside his suit from his exertions, but he finally got it moving toward the gap in the wall. As it drifted ponderously through the breech section and into the tube proper, he bit his lips with sheer impatience. But then he realized that its great mass was really an advantage, because the pod cleared a six-foot tunnel through the loose wreckage which sometimes blocked the tube. Grayson had nothing to do but hold onto a piece of trailing cable and be towed along.
As they neared the end of the tube, Grayson wriggled ahead of the pod and began trying to slow it down. He didn't want it to drift completely off the ship.
A few yards from the tube's mouth he had it almost at a standstill, and began climbing up for a preliminary look at the condition of the ship's hull between him and the lifeship blister. Suddenly something began dragging him upward.
Grayson grabbed desperately for a beam, then jammed a leg between two others and twisted around to lock it in position, bare seconds before his handgrip let go. The suit and his leg, he thought sweating, should hold for a few seconds. He yelled: "Captain! The screen!"
Abruptly the force trying to tear him off the ship vanished.
Stupidly, Grayson had forgotten the Starcloud's repulsion screen. That screen was designed to throw back any material object trying to make contact with the ship's hull, and when Grayson had come too close to the hull it had naturally tried to fling him off the ship, too. Cross had cut the screen now, but that raised another problem. From now until they took off in the lifeship, the Starcloud had no protection whatever against the Raghman.
"I'm leaving now," Cross said suddenly, his voice sounding strangely husky. For the first time Grayson realized how the captain must hate losing his ship. "Everything is rigged for the getaway," he went on, "so there will be no contact between us until we meet you in the lifeship." With bitter formality he ended: "Control to Grayson. Off!"
A few minutes after the final click in his phones, Grayson had Stuart's pod out on the hull. He took another quick look at the engineer, and felt suddenly cold. Stuart's condition frightened him. The man had been in deep shock for far too long.
Despairingly, he dragged his eyes from the engineer and tried to orient himself. Stuart might never live to reach the lifeship, much less take it into sub-space, but while the slightest chance of success remained, he must exert maximum effort to get the man to the boat. He had to find it first, however.
From the indicator panels back in the control room, Grayson knew how badly the ship had been hit. But the actual sight of what the force-eddies had done to the Star-cloud's half mile of silvery hull made him feel physically ill. The whole ship was a brown, twisted mess. Its once diamond-hard shell was creased and buckled into folds that were sometimes twenty feet deep. During the battle there had been local failure of the repulsion screen, and the resultant unbalance together with the already well-advanced softening of the hull, had warped the longitudinal axis of the ship into a sharp arc. It was wrong— horribly, shockingly wrong—that this mighty torpedo of plastic and steel and super-hard alloy should end a soft and shapeless blob. It wasn't a fitting end for such a ship.
There came a flash of blue light as a force-eddy touched the hull a quarter of a mile away. Grayson flinched; but the softness of the intervening hull cut the shock wave down to a faint tremor. A section of the screen flicked into being on the "stricken area—due to short-circuiting by the explosion, probably—and rapidly twisted the hull still further out of true. But there was a force of one hundred gravities pushing against that part of the hull, and no opposing force to balance it. Grayson saw the hull beside the screen twist and writhe and stretch, then the whole section—fully one quarter the mass of the entire ship —tear free and flick out of sight.
He turned around quickly. Just before it had gone he had been able to identify the overdrive grids, so the de- parted piece of ship had been the stern section. The life-ship was forward, therefore, in the other direction.
About two hundred feet away a silvery bulge showed above a ridge of softened metal, which he had missed on his first look around. It could only be the lifeship blister. Grayson had to get to it as quickly as possible, and dragging Stuart's pod along as well. But the hull between was an expanse of brown fudge, relieved only occasionally by small bright patches of metal where the secondary, softening effects of the force-eddies had bypassed. His magnetic boots would not work on the soft stuff, and the hard patches were too far apart to serve as stepping stones. And it was a lightweight suit he was wearing, too, a type not fitted with a reaction motor. How were he and the massive pod going to get there?
If he could get something solid enough to prop himself against, Grayson thought suddenly, the trick he had used coming up the launching tube should work. He looked around. A few yards away the gray stump of a girder poked out of the tube's mouth; hard stuff. Though his nerves were jumping with impatience he carefully nudged the pod over to the protruding metal, lay with his back to it and his feet braced against the pod, took careful aim, and pushed.
Stuart's pod drifted slowly toward the lifeship blister. Gently, so as not to divert its course, Grayson launched himself after it and caught one of the trailing cables.
He had a very bad moment as the top of the ridge of soft metal approached, but they shaved over it without touching. If the pod had hit and caromed off, Grayson knew, they would have bounced away from the ship and would have been unable to return for hours, if ever. But his aim—either by luck or good judgment—had been good. They would hit the blister on the nose.
The thought made Grayson laugh nervously. Hitting the blister on the nose, indeed. Suppose the blister objected and hit him back ... A wild, surrealistic crosstalk started in his mind between the blister and himself. He knew it was crazy, but it kept him from thinking of the more realistic and unpleasantly deadly things. But one unpleasant and deadly thing obtruded itself suddenly: A Raghman force-eddy.
A gray, ghost-shape of twisting, luminous foe. it was drifting about twenty feet above him. Then he saw they were all over the ship. With the screen shut off they had been able to approach the ship unhindered, and there were dozens of them. As if wafted by some etheric breeze, they curled and writhed sometimes to within a few feet of the hull. Cold sweat broke on Grayson's spine as he thought of what they could do if they
made contact with it. He looked quickly toward the blister, and saw another force-eddy over it.
Probably his last sane thought was that he need not worry about Stuart if the lifeship was going to blow up in his face.
It was a strange feeling, to go insane. He knew why he had gone mad, of course; there were lots of reasons. A personality that wasn't properly adjusted in the first place, and then forcing himself to play the part of a hero—what a horrible piece of miscasting that had been. Then there were those traumatic experiences in the corridor and tube, culminating in this one where he was closely surrounded by things which went very violently bang. But did all madmen, he wondered, have such a sane and objective understanding of the process.
First of all the thoughts began roaring through his brain. Even the small, unimportant half-thoughts shouted and screamed inside his skull—like a sound receiver mistakenly switched on at maximum volume—with such savage power that he expected it to blow itself apart. Then he began seeing things, together. A distorted picture of his father that was a blaze of blinding incandescence, yet simultaneously he saw the dim outline of the blister, made hazy by the force-eddy now drifting ahead of him, growing steadily larger.
Suddenly every muscle in his body began to twitch, then to tie itself in an agonizing knot of cramp. The involuntary muscles were affected, too; all sorts of unpleasant things happened, and he had to force himself to breathe. He felt as though he was being brainwashed, with acid. Through the pain Grayson recalled how some of the Raghman victims looked—their contorted, burned-out bodies, dead by some weird form of electrocution__.
That Raghman force-eddy might not be ahead of him. Maybe he was inside it.
The physical and mental agony was too much. Gray* son wanted desperately to die. The only thing that kept him hanging on was the sudden realization that the force-eddy was not a Raghman weapon at all, but an entity trying to communicate with him.
The Raghman, a highly sentient and organized life-form composed of pure energy, were waging a preventative war on the Human race. Its cause was the landing of a human ship on a planet circling a certain White Dwarf star which the Raghma used as a "breeding" ground. Such interference could not be tolerated, and the Humans, it had been decided, were to be warned off, blockaded from space, or simply exterminated. Because the Raghma were, in their own fashion, a highly civilized and ethical race, the first of these alternatives was considered preferable. But there was a communications problem.
The globes had been merely a number of Raghma linked together in visible form in order to give the Humans something to focus their minds on. The Humans could not understand this as a means of opening communications, and so individual Raghma—force-eddies—had tried to make direct contact. The results of these Raghman boarding parties had been disastrous for the humans and unsatisfactory for them. They could not judge the power of their thought-probes through the metal hulls with enough accuracy to keep from burning out the nervous systems of the humans, and when they "softened" a way into the ships, decompression or secondary radiation set up in the metal of the men's spacesuits also had fatal effects. The Raghma could not enter a planetary atmosphere, so it was not until Grayson had gone out in a lightweight, practically all-plastic suit that direct telepathic contact had been possible.
But the Raghma were growing impatient. Unless the being Grayson could successfully warn off his race from meddling with the planets circling certain White Dwarf stars, they would use the third alternative. There were ways known to them that could wipe out all life on any planetary body....
Grayson, his mind still quivering under the mental manhandling of the Raghman, thought despairingly of the specialist knowledge necessary to tune overdrive engines, and of the man dying in the pod beside him. ...
It took only three minutes for him to reach the life-ship blister, though he felt he had aged years on the way. Then he was inside taking off his helmet, and Stuart's pod was collecting frost on the floor. Nobody moved toward it; they were staring at him, white-faced. His eyes especially, Grayson knew, were not nice to see.
"The war," he said harshly, "is over."
The wreck of the Starcloud shrank rapidly in the rear-view screen, then dissolved into grayness as the lifeship shot into overdrive. Captain Cross cleared his throat.
"I believe you, Doctor," he said, then went on thoughtfully, "but I don't think we should report it yet. This thing will have to be told—carefully."
Yes, Grayson thought. The human race had at last hit something that was too big for it. But the news that they weren't the dominant life-form among the stars had to be edited a bit, or a racial inferiority complex could well bring all human progress to a halt. Just as Grayson himself had held some of the more soul-destroying facts about the Raghma from Cross and the others. He hadn't wanted to tear the props away from their safe, comfortable philosophies in the way that contact with that Raghman mind had done to his own.
He glanced across to the engineer's panel, where Stuart, his shoulder and arm tightly bandaged, was smoking. The Raghman entity, seeing, as it had put it, that Stuart's life force was practically nonexistent, had, as a friendly gesture, replenished it. The engineer had climbed out of the pod himself.
Grayson knew that no matter what message Cross sent, it would be worded so that no further trespassing would occur. Dunstan's planet and all others like it would be left strictly alone. The war was over. But he wished fervently that he hadn't learned so much from that force-entity—living with that terrible knowledge, his life would be a constant nightmare. Or would it? Some of the more unpleasant items were already becoming fuzzy around the edges. By the time they reached home, he would probably be believing much the same story as he had told to Cross and the others. He laughed.
Humans had a psychological defense mechanism, that of selectively forgetting things which were unpleasant to them.
Either that, or Grayson had met a very kind and thoughtful Raghman.
PATROL
MACFALL watched the helicopter drop onto the tiny landing area—its downwash threatening to blow over the nearby tents—and a lieutenant jumped to the ground. One look then was enough for him to dislike this unknown lieutenant immediately. The officer's face was smooth, un-marred. He put on face armor despite the battery of perimeter sprays in operation all around the clearing, and as he began moving toward the C.O.'s tent, MacFall saw him looking at the ground as though he had never seen its like before. A new boy, obviously.
It was purely an impersonal dislike, caused by the fact that MacFall was usually given the task of breaking these new boys in. This one was new all right, a mere baby. MacFall hoped that he would not also turn out to be a brat.
The lieutenant disappeared into Colonel Dawson's tent. Shortly afterwards the tent canvas almost bulged to a bellow of "MacFall!"
MacFall went in, saluted and was stood at ease. He saw that close up the lieutenant's right eye had a distinct mouse under it—probably sustained in a fight with some civilian. That type of disfigurement was common these days, too, public opinion being as it was both strong and mixed. MacFall felt himself warming slightly to this lieutenant because of it. He looked away quickly before the other could accuse him of staring and let his eyes wander about the tent's interior. The colonel was still busy with papers.
Apart from a narrow, planked walkway leading to the folding table that the CO. used as his desk, the floor was of the same mud that covered the rest of the clearing-more unpleasant if anything, because outside the hot Madagascar sun was beginning to dry it out. It was peculiar stuff, a mixture of ashes, dirt and chemicals—the result of a chosen section of jungle being rendered sterile by napalm bombs then cooled by various chemical means until it became habitable. It stuck like glue and it stank.
But the mud was not the worst by a long shot. The perimeter sprays which maintained a constant protective curtain around the clearing produced a stench that was beyond words. Clean words, anyway. Inside the C.O.'s tent MacFall felt that he could bite chunk
s out of it, the smell was so strong. That was because, as an extra safety measure, the tent canvas had been soaked with Deedee as well. Some people held that one could get used to the smell of Deedee. MacFall thought that some people lied through their teeth.
The colonel looked up from the sheet of paper he had been studying. Under a head of close-cropped, steel-gray hair his face was quite hideous but the eyes looking out of it—soft, kindly but "I'll stand no nonsense" sort of eyes —made the horror of his features seem unimportant. He said briskly, "Sergeant, you know how quickly we were called on to set up this base here. Well, now I know the reason for all the rush." He nodded toward the lieutenant. "You will take a search party and Lieutenant Nolan here to the other side of that hill due west of the base. You will be ready to start in ten minutes. The object of the search—"
Was the old man slipping? MacFall thought, incredulous. He said quickly, "Excuse me, sir, but the Mark Eights haven't arrived yet."
"And they won't be coming," Colonel Dawson said. "With the exception of two, that is, which are for ambulance duty should you get into bad trouble. No, Sergeant, this time you will use your feet. Now, listen carefully ..."
For the first few seconds MacFall was not listening carefully. He was thinking of the Mark Eight, a two-man articulated tank which could crawl through, climb over or float across anything, with mounted optical equipment and Deedee guns capable of detecting and destroying the enemy at anything up to fifty yards. He thought of riding in the relative comfort of a Mark Eight, and then of chipping and pushing a way through the jungle on foot...
". . . The Bug ship landed somewhere in this area," the colonel was saying. He drew a small circle on the map before him. "We are here. You will get there as quickly as possible and without advertising your approach or presence until the last possible moment—the latter being one of the reasons for the absence of Mark Eights. You see, there seems to be something unusual about this particular Bug ship. ..."