Time Bomb And Zahndry Others

by Timothy Zahn

  And then, with one final lurch, the shuttle vanished from the screen.

  "He's free!" Henson shouted unnecessarily. A tower controller, his voice a bare whisper in Betsy's ear, confirmed it, adding something about the shuttle being under good control as it braked... but Betsy wasn't really listening to him. Ahead, barely a mile of runway was left to them—just thirty seconds away at their current speed... and there was no way on Earth for them to stop before they reached it.

  But Betsy had no intention of stopping. Instead, she opened the throttle all the way, and with a thunderous roar that drowned out even the rumble of landing gear on tarmac, the giant plane leaped forward, pushing Betsy deeply back into the cushions of her seat. Beside her, Greenburg would be calling off the speed increments; but she couldn't hear him, and she didn't dare take her eyes from the window to check the numbers for herself. She could see the end of the runway rushing toward her, and unconsciously she braced herself for the terrible crash that would signify that her gamble had failed. The edge of the foam swung at her like a guillotine blade—passed beneath her—

  And the crash didn't come. Instead, the barren ground at the end of the runway flashed by, visibly receding below.

  They'd done it!

  —

  Betsy let Lewis and Greenburg handle the routine business of flying Seven back to link up again with the rest of the Skyport. The two had insisted, and Betsy's hands were shaking so much from delayed reaction that doing it herself would have been difficult. Besides, a sort of celebration had erupted spontaneously in Seven's crew lounge, at which the wing captain's presence was being demanded.

  What with the flurry of congratulatory hugs and handshakes and the general babble of tension-releasing conversation, Betsy missed the exact moment when the link-up occurred; her first real indication that Seven was back with the Skyport was the two grinning figures that strode unexpectedly into the lounge.

  "Hey, Carl!" the first person to spot them shouted, waving a dangerously full glass. "Join the celebration!"

  "Sorry—I can't spare the time," the Skyport captain said, speaking just loudly enough to penetrate the racket. "I just came by to congratulate Betsy in person. Mr. Whitney seems to think he's earned the right to do likewise."

  "Thanks," Betsy called, handing her glass of fruit juice—she was on duty, after all—to the nearest bystander and making her way through the crowd. "Hang on a second—I want to talk to both of you."

  She led them out into the hallway, where normal conversational levels would be possible. Once outside the din she turned to Young; but he'd already anticipated her first question. "I just talked to the tower," he said, "which had been in contact with the hospital. The landing did some extra damage to Meredith's internal bleeding problems, but with the ambulance and emergency room personnel standing by they think they got him in time. I'm also told, though very unofficially, that he probably wouldn't have made it if we'd tried to take him to L.A. instead."

  Betsy let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. They really had done it; they'd gambled Seven, the shuttle, and a lot of lives, and had won back all of it.

  Young was still talking. "We're moving your passengers back in for the moment, though of course they'll have to leave again before we reach L.A. I've talked to McDonnell Douglas and United, and they'll have another wing section ready to replace you when we arrive. This one was due to go in for routine maintenance next month, anyway; you'll just be a little early." He harrumphed. "The United man I talked to seemed a bit concerned that you'd be landing with your corner drogues missing. I told him that anyone who can do a touch-and-go with a flying football field wasn't someone he needed to worry about."

  She smiled. "That's for sure. After today, landing at Mirage Lake will feel like aiming to hit Utah. No problem."

  "Well, at least you've got your confidence back," Young said, smiling in return. "I had been wondering about that earlier."

  "Me, too," she admitted. "Which reminds me... Peter, I owe you a vote of thanks for that pep talk on command and responsibility you gave me a few hours ago. I don't know if it really made sense to me at the time, but it was just what I needed to break up the gloom and panic I was digging myself into."

  Whitney actually blushed. "Yeah, well... I felt a little strange playing psychiatrist but... well, I had to say something. I was getting pretty worried about Captain Rayburn, and, frankly, I was scared to death you were going to go off the same end of the pool—no offense."

  "No offense," Betsy assured him. "I can't honestly say that I wasn't a little worried about it myself." She shook her head, turning serious. "I still can't believe Eric went so badly to pieces. I know he was worried about Meredith's safety, but he was getting practically obsessive about it. He'll be very lucky if United doesn't boot him out for insubordination."

  Young cleared his throat self-consciously. "Actually, Betsy, I suspect his flying career is over anyway. I haven't got any proof yet, of course, but I'll wager any sum of money that when the shuttle's flight recorder is played back it'll show that Rayburn had his automatic approach system off and was flying manually when the crash occurred. He's docked like that before, I'm pretty sure, and if we hadn't hit that patch of turbulence he might have gotten away with it this time, too."

  Betsy felt her eyes widen in disbelief... but even as she opened her mouth to argue, all the puzzling parts of the incident suddenly made sense, and she knew he was right.

  "But isn't that dangerous, not to mention illegal?" Whitney asked.

  "Highly," Young told him, answering both parts of the question. "Even with an empty shuttle, which is how I gather he usually does it. Whatever possessed him to try it with a full passenger load I'll never know."

  Betsy's lip curled, ever so slightly; but she held her peace. A figurative rape, perhaps? Or just an overwhelming desire to prove in her presence that he was a superior pilot? It didn't really matter; either way, it told her something about Eric Rayburn that she had never suspected.

  "Anyway, as long as that's just my unsupported opinion, I'd appreciate it if you'd both keep it to yourselves," Young was saying. "Betsy, I've got to get below now, help ease any ruffled feathers among the passengers. Congratulations again on your fine job here." With a nod to Whitney, the Skyport captain headed off down the hall.

  Betsy watched him go, but without really seeing him. So it comes full circle, she thought bemusedly. I fight to quit reacting to Eric, and find out he's been reacting just as blindly and irrationally to me. She shook her head minutely. Puppets, all of us—even all the ones who think they're mavericks. Puppets pulling on each others' strings.

  "I suppose I should go back down, too," Whitney said, breaking into her thoughts. "It was really a privilege to watch you in action, Betsy—thanks for letting me be part of it."

  "Just a minute, Peter," she said as he turned to go, pushing the growing bitterness determinedly from her mind. After all, she was only forty-five—far too young to become a cynic. "I seem to recall you were interested earlier in a tour of the Skyport topdeck. That still true?"

  "Uh, yes," he said, an uncertain smile playing around his lips. "If it's not too much trouble."

  "No trouble at all." And besides, reacting with cynicism would just be giving Rayburn one final victory over her. "Come on, we'll start with the crew lounge. Drinks are on the house—and I understand the fruit juice is excellent today."

  Houseguest

  The fuzzy red ball that was Drym's sun hung low in the sky, and already the temperature had started its nightly descent. Measuring the angle between sun and mountains, Wynne Kendal estimated he had a good fifteen minutes to get home before sunset brought on the dangerous, highly energetic "musth" part of the tricorn activity cycle. He was all right though; across the shallow stream just ahead was the ruin of his original prefab home, and it was only a ten-minute walk from there to the House.

  As always, he glanced at the ruin as he passed. Little had changed in the past eight months; the tricorns
had pretty thoroughly trampled the plastic and metal structure the first week after he abandoned it and now, having driven him away, generally ignored it.

  "Bastards," he muttered, the oath expanding to include both the tricorns and the Company exploration group who had given Drym a fast once-over and blithely declared it safe. Perhaps if they'd hung around long enough, the tricorns would have turned on them instead of waiting until the mining group was settled and out of communication to turn from docile to nasty. Clearly, though, the survey had been a mere formality; with rich concentrations of precious scandium-bearing ores lying barely beneath the planetary surface, the Company would have sent miners in even if Drym had been covered with Bellatrix sparkbrats.

  Ahead of Kendal loomed a line of granite hills, and he could now make out the five-meter-high rocky dome and gaping circular entrance of his House. His heartbeat never failed to pick up slightly at this point; there was no way of telling from here which of its moods the other would be in, and some of them could be dangerous. Not that it made any real difference, of course. Staying outside alone all night would be even worse.

  The sun was just grazing the mountain tops as he reached the House. A few meters to one side of the dome was a hill with one flat face. A large stone rested against it, and Kendal manhandled it aside to expose the tiny cave he used for storage. He withdrew his night-pack, rations, and stove, brushing off with quick motions a few bloodworms who were clinging to the bundles. The mining team had briefly entertained the idea of living in caves after realizing their prefabs had no chance against the tricorns, but the bloodworms had ended that hope. Human tissue was supposed to be completely non-nourishing to Drym fauna, something the planet's flying insects seemed to sense from a distance. The cave-dwelling bloodworms, unfortunately, each needed a few bites to catch on.

  The last item Kendal withdrew from the cave was a telescoping duryai alloy pole, originally a part of the miners' shoring equipment. He extended it to the two-meter length required and gave it a quick visual check before stuffing his mining gear into the cave and resealing it. Picking up his packs, he lugged them to the House's entrance, setting them down outside. Taking a deep breath, he held the pole out in front of him like a spear and, ducking slightly, entered the House.

  It was not quite pitch-dark inside, but the light from the setting sun showed only that Kendal was in a dome-shaped space two meters high in the middle and perhaps four across at the ground. A strange, almost musky odor filled the air; strong, but not overpowering. Watching the walls warily, Kendal walked toward the center. "Hello, House," he called tentatively.

  The answer came promptly and in a tone so low Kendal could feel it as much as he could hear it: "Greetings, master."

  Kendal breathed a little easier. The House was only sarcastic when it was in a relatively good mood. It had probably fed today, he decided, setting one end of his pole into a notch dug in the hard clay of the floor and carefully wedging the other end against the ceiling. Only when that was done did he finally relax. Wasting no time, he retrieved his packs and brought them into the House. Flicking on a lantern, he nodded, "Okay, you can close up now," he said, sitting down cross-legged near the pole.

  "Very well, master," the House rumbled, and the circular orifice squeezed shut in a way that always reminded Kendal of someone pursing his lips.

  "Thank you," he said as he started to set up his stove. "How was your day?"

  "How should it have been?" the House responded. "I spoke for a time with the Others, and I waited. There is little else I can do."

  "You did eat, though," Kendal commented. He'd spotted a small rocky bulge high up on the wall that hadn't been there when he's left. "A white-wing, wasn't it?"

  "Yes. It was small, but will have to serve. You Men have seen to that."

  Kendal winced. In their self-defense killing of tricorns, the miners were apparently causing a serious threat to the Houses' main food supply. Along with the humiliation of having been turned into living bedrooms, this was just one more cause for resentment. And if they got mad enough... Kendal shuddered at the memory of the crushed bodies of the first handful of miners to innocently venture into the Houses. They had never known what hit them. If the exploration team had goofed on their analysis of the tricorns, they had missed the Houses completely, and it had cost seven lives before anyone figured out what was happening. Another four men were lost before the shoring pole technique was perfected. Like other creatures throughout history, the Houses had proved at least marginally tamable, and were taught by short laser bursts to open and close their "mouths" in response to slaps or light kicks. No one had been prepared, though, when the Houses started talking to them.

  Kendal's communicator buzzed. "Kendal; yeah?"

  "Tan here. You locked up for the night?"

  "Sure am." Cardman Tan had been the Number Three man of the mining team before the tricorns and Houses had taken their massive toll; now, he was Number One. "Any particular reason why you're doing a bedcheck tonight?"

  "I saw what looked like a new bevy of tricorns coming over the hills in your area a few minutes ago," Tan explained. "I wanted to make sure nobody was wandering around outside."

  More tricorns in the area. Damn. "Thanks for the warning. I'll be careful."

  "See you tomorrow." The communicator clicked off.

  The House was silent as Kendal turned back and finished his dinner preparations. It had listened to the conversation, of course, and certainly understood the implications. Theoretically, more tricorns meant more food for all the Houses scattered among the hills—but only if the bull-sized beasts came within sniffing range of the odor lures the Houses used. If the tricorns chose instead to hound the men at the mine two kilometers away, there wasn't a solitary thing the Houses could do about it. Their "roots"—Kendal's House's own word—went deep into the ground, drawing out water and dissolved rock for their organo-mineral metabolisms. And while no one knew how deep the roots went, it was for sure that the Houses weren't going out hunting.

  "I wonder how many tricorns are in this new bevy, Kendal remarked as he ate, just to break the silence.

  "Forty-seven," the House said promptly.

  Kendal looked up in surprise. "You've seen them?"

  "They passed near one of the Others a short time ago. He counted them."

  "I see." Kendal hadn't realized he'd been that preoccupied; usually he could feel the underground vibrations the Houses used to talk with each other. "Well, hopefully this group will stay close to the hills, where you can have a shot at them."

  "No. They will surely continue their attempts to drive you away from here."

  The House's tone was no longer sarcastic, and Kendal swallowed hard. At their friendliest, the Houses were barely tolerant of their human parasites. At other times... Kendal glanced involuntarily at the pole, making sure it was properly placed. "Now, House, you know we don't kill the tricorns because we want to. We'd be happy to live and let live. I know you're not crazy about putting up with us—" the understatement of the decade—"but if you can hold out just another hundred and fifty days or so, our company's transport ship will come and visit us. They'll have the knowledge and equipment to build us homes that the tricorns can't destroy—maybe even find a way to keep the tricorns away from us without having to kill them. Then maybe we can make up for all the inconveniences we've caused you."

  The House didn't answer. Kendal chewed his lip. He'd been planning to play chess with one of the other miners this evening via communicator, but it might pay him to talk to his House instead. The Houses had very little opportunity for mental stimulation, and Kendal had found that an interesting chat could often snap his out of a bad mood. "Did I ever tell you about my year on Majori?" he asked casually. "That planet had some of the strangest animals I've ever seen. There was one, for instance, with three legs—or five, depending on how you counted them."

  He stopped and waited. "Please explain," the House said at last, a touch of interest peeking through the surliness in i
ts tone.

  Inwardly, Kendal smiled. Just like offering candy to a child. And almost as effective. Some of the miners, he knew, treated their Houses like slaves or virtually ignored them, but Kendal had always tried to stay on friendly terms with his. All other reasons aside, it helped relieve the boredom of Drym's nights. "It's like this...."

  The conversation lasted far into the night.

  —

  Kendal's alarm went off a half hour before dawn, and the sun was barely up as the miners began the day's work. Early morning was their most productive time; for several hours after sunrise the tricorns hid away among the rocks and hills, presumably sleeping, and for that period no guards had to be posted to protect the others from attack. When the giant creatures did finally lumber forth, it took fully half of the forty men to stand guard around the perimeter of the wide, shallow strip mine. A smaller mine would have been easier to defend, but to carry the ore out of a deeper pit would have been agony. All of their powered equipment ran off of standard energy cells, and the decision had been made months ago to save as much power as possible for the hand lasers. Tricorns took a lot of energy to kill.

  For a while the miners made good progress, despite the early-morning chill. As the morning passed and temperatures rose, the tricorns began to congregate around the mine. Two of them had to be shot before the rest got the idea and thereafter kept at a respectful distance from the ring of guards. There seemed to be more of them than usual, Kendal thought—the new bevy was getting into the spirit of this thing with remarkable speed.

  "Of course they are," Jaker, the man standing guard to Kendal's right, said when Kendal commented on it. "They're at least as intelligent as dogs or wolves."

  "No way," another man down the line called back.

  Kendal sighed. That argument had been going on for months now, with Jaker and Welles the main participants. Kendal himself leaned toward Jaker's side—the tall miner's reasoning usually made sense to him—but he was getting sick of the whole debate. What he wanted to know was something no one here could even take a stab at: why were the Houses so intelligent? What possible reason was there for an unmoving pile of rock to develop the intelligence necessary to learn an alien language just by listening to communicator conversations? In addition, Kendal had proved—at least to his own satisfaction—that the Houses were capable of imagination and abstract thought. The how of it was reasonably straightforward: current theory implied that a sufficiently large brain would automatically develop sentence, and the Houses were certainly big enough to hold a brain that size. But the why of it still drove him crazy.