by David Drake
Charles Eisley stared at the scene. He was trying to pretend that what he saw was distanced by fiction, that it was a television picture. The shadowed clarity betrayed him and tightened his vocal cords.
The Vrage caressed its human remnant again. “You’ll tell me what we need to know, Eisley,” the alien said. “Either now or after we’ve sent you home—to our home—for more extensive treatment. And you’ll still be alive, but you won’t be quite as handsome, hey?”
The floating brain nodded in its trembling vat.
“So tell me, why did the Skiuli sent you here?”
Charles Eisley gave a grim smile. He had fantasized in Viet Nam and in the Moslem countries in which he had served later about how he would hold up under questioning by ruthless fanatics. He realized now that he really was willing to die rather than betray his country.
But he had absolutely nothing to protect in this situation, except his life—and Sue. Unfortunately, his very inability to tell the Vrage anything useful was apt to cost at least his own life.
“I’ve never heard of the Skiuli,” the diplomat said aloud. “So far as I know, I was sent back in time because of a mistake by, by a Professor Gustafson. He was … His experiment may have been aided by time travelers from—I was told—ten thousand years in the future. Ah, the future of our present.”
The statement, which was as truthful and circumstantial as Charles could make it, sounded absurd to him. It sounded more, not less, unlikely because he was speaking to something with four arms, four legs, and a human brain floating in a vat by its side. The least that he expected was another scorpion-tipped blast of noise. Only slightly deeper in Eisley’s awareness was a vision of his flesh sloughing and then the bone itself being eaten away, until all that was left of Charles Eisley was a bundle of nerve tissue in a bowl of heavy fluid.
To Eisley’s surprise, there was no gout of punishment when the Vrage stroked instruments below its prisoner’s sight. Instead the alien said, “Describe the beings who told you they were time travelers.” There was a flicker of lights reflecting within the vehicle as some hidden process took place.
The diplomat rolled his lips between his front teeth to moisten them. “There’s a man and two women,” he said. “One of them—the woman—is good-sized and very solid, like a Russian athlete.” The simile’s pointlessness struck him as the words came out, but he continued anyway. “Mu—my informant calls them travelers, the Travelers.” Charles paused, then blurted, “I don’t have any evidence to convince you, of course.”
The Vrage laughed its human laugh again. The mental effect on Eisley was almost as unnerving as the blast of white noise had been earlier. “I can’t read the thoughts I get from your mind, Eisley,” the alien said, “but this can.” He stroked the vat of brain once more. “Keep on telling the truth. It’s better for you.” Pale yellow light quivered again within the Vrage’s vehicle. A bubble began to rotate up its helical path to the top of the tank in which the brain hung.
The Vrage thrust forward its flat, mouthless head. “They’ve been lying to you, my man,” said its voice. “They’re travelers, all right—from Skius. They’re just as human as I am.” The laughter rippled around Eisley and echoed in his cell. It peeled his doubt like the skin of an orange.
“Then I don’t understand what’s going on,” said Charles Eisley. Unconsciously, he had set his feet half a step apart with the toes pointing on ninety-degree axes. His shoulders were set and his hands were crossed behind his back again. It was the posture he would have adopted as a junior officer being chewed out by his ambassador.
“What’s going on,” said the Vrage as it eased back against the support of its abdomen, “is that you’re all being used as cannon fodder by the Skiuli. Worse. They’re putting your whole planet out front to stop the lead we’re going to fire at them.” The chuckle with which the Vrage punctuated his discussion was as humorless as a death rattle.
“The Skiuli know,” the Vrage resumed, “that we’ll send hundreds of cobalt bombs along to rebound with their assault force. Not a World Wrecker like they’ll try to implant in the crust of Vrage, but enough to make the sky glow at night and burn away every scrap of life that isn’t protected for the next century by a mile of rock. And they don’t want that to happen to Skius, so they’re probably planning to launch their assault through your Earth instead of attacking directly from Skius. We’ll do the same thing, of course—from here. But first, we’ll see to it that the Skiuli’s plans are delayed.”
There was a pause during which the Vrage dismissed Eisley as thoroughly as if the door to the cell had already slammed. The viewscreen went black and opaque again.
“Wait!” the diplomat shouted. He jumped forward and set his palm against the screen. Its material felt cool and waxy. “What are you going to do with me?”
The vehicle shuddered with incipient motion, then settled again into clifflike stability. Charles snatched his hand back as the blackness cleared from the viewscreen.
The eyes of the Vrage were nearly human. They stared at the captive with the interest of a laboratory assistant for a white rat. “I’m going to send you home, Eisley,” the Vrage said. “Right now we’re holding you by using our drive coils to counteract the tendency of all the mass you were transported with to rebound. That creates a strong residual field. I’m going to ready a little present for your Skiuli friends. When we turn you loose, it’ll ride along on the wave of that field. And I don’t think the Skiuli’ll be using the hardware they built on your planet ever again.”
The viewscreen went opaque. The Vrage vehicle backed an inch, then spun on its axis. The vehicle was huge, the size of the tanks which had captured Eisley. In shape and sleekness it was more similar to the small utility vehicles, though the egg had been planed flat on the front and bottom. The magenta armor shone almost wholly purple under the artificial light.
Even as the Vrage vehicle swung clear, the six alien soldiers thrust their weapons toward the path of the closing door. They were as silent as poised spiders.
But from the vehicle that slid away rang out a terrible simulacrum of human laughter.
* * *
Lexie Market’s two-inch heels measured her paces down the aisle. The sound lost itself in the basement’s volume and angles.
Mike Gardner was seated on a metal folding chair in front of the silent control panels, not so much staring at the dials as communing with them. He turned just his head when the door opened behind him, not even lowering his feet from a crosspiece among the instruments. As a result, he could not see who had joined him in the darkened room until she paused at the gate into the enclosure.
The pressure of Lexie’s hand swung the gate open, surprising her slightly. She had come back to the engineering building without any specific agenda. The diamond-patterned screen pivoted away, and she met the eyes and half smile of Mike Gardner. The physics professor froze in her tracks.
The woman’s surprise recalled Gardner to society and recollection that the intruder was a professor, albeit in a sister discipline. He jumped to his feet in a clatter of chair supports. “Ah, hi, Mrs. Market,” he blurted. “Damn! Dr. Market, I mean. Will you…” The student’s hand drifted, searching for hospitality to offer. The closest approximation was the single metal chair.
“‘Lexie’ will do just fine,” the physicist said. She had started life as an ugly duckling; handsome men generally made her nervous. This one, however, managed to make her feel sophisticated, and that was more than a matter of the years she had on him. “It would be ‘Miss’ if it weren’t ‘Doctor,’ anyway.”
“Ah, do you want the lights?” Gardner asked. He was standing with one hand on the chair back, like a debater clinging to the podium for support. Both of them were well aware of what had happened in this room the night they first met. Memories of confusion and death emphasized instead of hiding other emotions which stirred in both of them. “I was just sitting here, trying to figure out what I was.…” His tongue waited while his brain
marshaled ideas and then made the decision to expose them to this stranger in dim light. “Sometimes,” Mike went on, “I think I’ve spent my first twenty-three years screwing things up so badly that I won’t be able to make them right in the next however-long I live.”
Market laughed, and the silver beads of her earrings winked in the haze of street lighting through the windows. She was wearing a dark skirt and a matching long-sleeved blouse, its throat rolled loosely so that it gave the suggestion of a stole as the woman moved. She touched Gardner’s hand where it rested on the metal. “I used to think that,” she said. “Now I think it’s thirty-two, when I get in that mood.” Her face sobered. She dropped her eyes from the man’s but did not remove her hand. “Which is a lot, lately,” she went on. “Has there been any news about Barry Rice?”
“Something’s coming,” said Gardner. He lifted his hand and hers to point past the controls. There was a touch of paleness forming over the docking area.
“Oh, my God,” Lexie whispered, her right hand clenched at her throat. She was determined to wait for the Travelers and demand to be told about Rice. Perhaps that had always been the plan her conscious mind would not admit.
“Come on,” Mike said, grasping her raised forearm. The strength of the woman’s resistance and the sudden taut look around her eyes were a shock to him. “No,” he explained, “we’ve got to get out of here.” He relaxed his grip.
“I need to talk to them,” Market said, and took a deep breath.
“You don’t understand!” Gardner cried. “There’s something else out there, spiders”—Professor Gustafson’s shocked description made the misidentification inevitable—“and they kill! Hide in the office.”
Market nodded, then ran ahead of him with the care required by her skirt and footgear. The light infusing the docking area was not really perceptibly brighter, but heightened attention made it seem so.
Mike slammed the gate shut and locked it. The heavy wire would not stop the sort of weapons the returnees had babblingly described, but it would at least pose a delay.
Lexie waited in the office doorway. When the student joined her, they both instinctively crouched below the level of the windows and peered through the narrow crack the woman had left between the door and its jamb. She could feel the pulse in his thigh as they squeezed together to watch.
The glow winked out in a nonevent. The appearance of two figures and the angular bulk of the Travelers’ locker in the docking area was less disconcerting than the eerie light had been. One of the figures spoke to the other. The words were only a murmur. Even the squeal of the locker was muted as the pair slid it beyond the painted circle.
“Selve and Astor,” Gardner mouthed, though the names would have meant nothing to his companion, even if she had heard them clearly.
The locker opened. Darkness and the conspiratorial silence in which they hid kept Lexie from greeting the Travelers, even now that their identity was certain. They were donning the atmosphere suits whose orange color was empurpled by the mercury vapor street lighting. Astor was sealing hers. Selve stepped to the control panels and began to bring up the system. Phosphorescence from the computer terminal gave his face definition if not color.
“It’s just what they were doing last night,” the woman whispered. She rested a hand on Gardner’s thigh to steady herself, physically and otherwise.
The building began to hum its insistent note. The office windows trembled, casting hinted shadows within because irregularities in the glass created minute lenses. Selve joined his larger companion in the center of the docking circle. Astor handed him one of the guns she held. Mike Gardner’s chest went numb with remembrance of how Keyliss had been mutilated. A different weapon, of course, but the same unexpected conflict.…
“Look away,” Lexie Market reminded him. Gardner closed his eyes. The flash was scarlet as it seared his retinas through the blood vessels of the eyelids.
Mike was moving through the door before the air had cleared of echoes. He was leaving the physicist behind, forgotten in his fear and sudden resolution.
Market uncoiled from her crouch with a gymnast’s grace, hiked up her skirt with one hand to keep from being hobbled, and met him when he thrust the key into the lock of the enclosure. “What are you doing?” she demanded as fiercely as if she already knew.
Mike went through the gate. He could already see that the Travelers’ locker was open, just as they usually left it. “Going to follow them,” he muttered, half hoping that he would not be understood. “We’ve got to find out what’s going on.”
He unhooked the third suit from within the locker. Keyliss’s weapon, bumped by the student’s arm, slipped and clashed its butt loudly on the floor of the locker. “They’re not going to tell us, so I’m going to look.”
“You saw Barry,” the woman said. She did not grab Gardner’s wrist, as her strength and agitation made him think she would.
Gardner scuffed his shoes off without untying them: the atmosphere suit would fit over his jeans and polo shirt. “Professor Rice wasn’t wearing one of these,” he said. “Mrs. Market, I think somebody’s got to do this. Please don’t get in the way.” Mike knew that the more he thought about what he was doing, the harder it would be when it came time for him to execute.
He stepped into the suit. The front of it was split down to the crotch. His hands fumbled as they tried to find a zipper.
“Here,” said Lexie as she brushed his fingers aside. She had watched the Travelers opening their suits the night before. As she expected, the seam closed neatly between her thumb and forefinger as she slid them up the opening to the man’s throat. She paused there, continuing to hold Mike as if she had caught him by the tie. “Now, wait,” she said firmly. “You don’t know what’s on the—other side, and you can’t. But before you do anything else, we’ll close the hood and you’ll breathe for a full minute to make sure that it’s really functioning. Agreed? Before anything else?”
The young man nodded because he did not fully trust his voice. “I need to check the controls,” he added, a statement without emotional baggage.
“Wait,” Market repeated. She lifted the cowl over Gardner’s head. The lower edge fell into a smooth join with the torso of the suit without even her touch to guide it. “If you can’t function normally while you’re wearing it, then you need to know that now.”
“Right,” he said. Though his voice was normal, it was an octave lower than before and came from his chest rather than the closed hood. “Hey, M—Lexie. This works!”
He was probably taking a deep breath in proof of his words, but Lexie could see no sign of it. The sheet covering Mike’s face was slick and opaque to her. Presumably he could see through it without distortion, because he stepped decisively to the instrument panel and threw a switch. Just as Barry had done, the woman thought.
Aloud she said, “I wanted you to wait.”
“It’ll take more than a minute,” Gardner explained, “for the charge to build, Keyliss says, but I—” He broke off with a catch in his voice. “I don’t guarantee the mechanism, but it’s true that it takes.…” He broke off, his faceless mask turning from the woman to the docking area.
Lexie held him by the inner crook of both elbows. Mike’s head spun to her again. She raised herself on tiptoe and kissed the smooth covering over where she thought his mouth must be. “Go get ’em, tiger,” she murmured as she released him.
Mike Gardner held his pose for a moment longer, looking like a statue of surprise sculpted by Henry Moore. Then the insistent buzzing that made the soles of his feet quiver reminded him of his decision. He jumped over the painted boundary of the docking area.
The flash came fifteen seconds later. Dr. Alexis Market was still within the fenced enclosure. Her back was turned to the drive coils and the circle. The arms that she had thrown over her lowered face were there to protect more than her eyes from what was coming.
* * *
Sue Schlicter had started to doubt that she would fin
d anything, even the creek. Then her right boot sank in mud, and there was no longer a sprawling tangle of branches in front of her.
She had assumed that she could pick her way downhill easily enough, despite the dark. That had not been true even on the steeper part of the slope. The trees camouflaged the terrain surface with unexpected thoroughness. When she did suddenly splash into her initial goal, however, the ultimate goal was facing her. In the soft plants across the stream lay the corpse of the giant carnivore; beside it hovered the car from which the beast had plucked the first alien to threaten it. The vehicle’s empty cockpit glowed the soft greenish amber of a sick man’s urine.
Sue splashed toward the car determinedly.
The sky glow was not sufficient to make more of the carnivore than a bulk whose surface quivered. The motion was not that of life or even the creature’s autonomic nervous system disengaging from the muscles it had served: the slayer had become carrion, and thousands of its lesser fellows were devouring their late lord. The chitinous buzz of insects was multiplied by the numbers of wings involved. It led to an unpleasant recollection of the time machine that had ambushed her and Charles.
Heavy insects lighted on the woman’s blouse and face as she strode closer. Their touch was shocking, and their feet drew blood as they briefly gripped. Schlicter’s cheeks were taut in fearful parody of a grin, but she managed to swat the creatures only with her left hand. Her right held the open knife, its three-and-a-half-inch blade her only hope against larger predators now that the dark foreclosed flight. The insects disliked the woman’s odor as much as she did their touch. None of them gripped her for long or tried to slash or suck her flesh.