Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

by Bob Shaw

  “Mr. Garnett,” he said quietly, “I have no desire to use violence against you.”

  “I can understand that,” Garnett said. “Facing an armed man is rather more difficult than aiming meteorites at him from the safety of your ship.”

  “That isn’t my point. If it were necessary I could kill you without leaving this chair. I could, for example, withdraw the air from your sector of the ship.”

  “You could,” Garnett conceded, ‘but I have enough oxygen here for several hours. At the end of that time there would be very little left of your wing unit.”

  The old man’s face became bleak. “You must not touch the unit, Mr. Garnett. We have waited too long to permit anything to happen to it now. I must advise you that several members of my crew have armed themselves and are returning to the vicinity of your aircraft. I repeat, we have no desire to use violence, but we will not allow you to damage the unit. Now let us talk more reasonably—I know you well enough to be convinced we can be friends.”

  Garnett was astounded at the idea. “No, Xoanon, you don’t know me.” He suddenly became aware of the woman behind Xoanon—could she be the old man’s daughter? He had not thought of the aliens as having daughters, sons, wives.

  “I know you,” the old man insisted, ‘and now we must talk before it is too late. Some of my crew are running out of patience. This ship, although large by your standards, is regarded by my people as an ordinary commercial vessel, the equivalent of one of your tramp steamers. I could lie to you about its purpose. I could say it is a mercy ship filled with enough serum to save the lives of a billion people, or that it had some other equally important role, but I give you the simple truth. It is a rather old, rather shabby freighter which a long time ago, during a routine journey, suffered a major breakdown—an explosion which destroyed essential equipment and at the same time deprived us of much of our workshop facilities.

  “At that time the ship had a crew of almost two hundred, all of whom had a very natural desire to return to their home planet, so we took a number of risks,” Xoanon glanced momentarily at the stump of his arm, ‘and got our vessel as far as this planet. However, our troubles were only beginning. We were unable to land and even if we had been able to put down your high gravity would have made us almost helpless. The component we required was not available on Earth, naturally enough, nor was the means to manufacture and deliver it. No solution at all would have been possible but for the fact that our ship normally travelled to a number of ‘backwoods’ planetary systems and therefore was fitted with a standard brain-to-brain communications device. Our engineers were able to effect a number of illegal modifications to it and …’

  “I don’t understand,” Garnett interrupted. “What use would an aircraft wing be to a ship this size?”

  Xoanon smiled faintly. “To you it is an aircraft wing—to my engineers it is one of a system of drive thrust deflectors without which the ship cannot be manoeuvred. It is necessary to employ a force field, as you call it, because no physical deflector can exist for more than a few seconds in the drive stream.”

  “I see,” Garnett said grimly. “So you took over a man called Garnett and had him order his firm to build a unit the size you needed.”

  The old man shook his head. “It wasn’t that simple. The first person we took over was called Clifford Pryce….”

  “Pryce ! But that means …’

  “Yes, Mr. Garnett. When we reached your world it had an electronics industry of sorts, but our requirements were far beyond its capabilities, so far …’

  Garnett stopped listening. There had been a movement of shadows near the doorway. Two aliens carrying what looked like weapons sped through the opening and vanished into the dimness beyond the T.6. Garnett decided to get closer to the wing unit so as to be certain of destroying it with his first shots and began working his way downwards, trying to remain in cover. At the same time his mind swung dizzily over chasms of thought opened by Xoanon’s words.

  “Exactly when,” he said, ‘did you take over Pryce?”

  “I have already given you that information. It was in your year 1940.”

  ‘But that was …’

  “Several years before you were born, Mr. Garnett. At that time Clifford Pryce was a young radio engineer. It was necessary for us to guide his development so that he could ‘invent’ the force field generator. We had to steer him into aviation in order that he would not find some more obvious application than constructing aerofoil surfaces, and at the same time made him a multi-millionaire so that we could retain control of the new invention. The aircraft you refer to as the T.6 had a triple function—it gave your technicians the experience they needed to develop successfully the larger force field unit, it financed the larger unit and, most important, it …’

  “It provided the means to get the unit into your hands,” Garnett finished, listening to the strangely distant sound of his own voice. He spoke automatically, all his attention centred on the task of moving downwards without swinging out into view of the two aliens. “You said you know me, Xoanon—but you don’t. You have learned nothing at all about the primitives down there if you think you have just presented a case against my killing you. Not one inhabitant of my world would hesitate in this situation. By your own admission you have twisted people’s lives, you have tampered with Earth’s very history, you have provided a new dimension in weapon building for a race which specialises in weapon building….

  “And you took a human life. A very human life.” Garnett reached the metal floor and began to work his way towards the T.6, talking feverishly. “You can have the unit, Xoanon, but you must come here and collect it in person, and pay for it in person. I am close enough to the T.6 to guarantee to put a bullet into the unit unless you come through that doorway within the next five minutes.” Without warning from his stomach, Garnett found himself retching violently, each convulsion tearing the wound in his chest until his eyes blurred with tears. When he had recovered, he again noticed the wispy-haired woman behind Xoanon. She had the typical silt-coloured alien complexion, but her eyes were large and somehow disturbing.

  Xoanon remained seated. ‘Before you act, Mr. Garnett, let me remind you of a few basic facts. I told you it was necessary to steer Clifford Pryce into the aircraft industry so that he would not concentrate on more obvious applications of the force field generator. Has it occurred to you that the field could make an excellent instrument of defence in, for instance, the form of a city-sized dome?”

  Garnett was no longer listening. He had become the matrix for a ferocious concentration of pain, nausea, exhaustion and, above all, the sheer psychological shock of being translated from his own physical and mental universe into another in which different players played a different game to strange rules. Worlds tilted crazily beneath his feet and spun away, stars became black orbs in a continuum of blinding light. Garnett was foundering, falling, but he hung desperately to the one unalterable fact which remained to him.

  “The girl,” he whispered hoarsely. “You can change all the rest, but not that—now get down here or I start blasting the unit apart.”

  Xoanon rose from his chair. “You haven’t yet learned …’

  “Enough!” Garnett shouted desperately. “No more talk. If you want the unit—come for it!” He dragged his suit microphone free of its socket and pushed it away from him. It twinkled briefly in the shaft of light then floated up into the dimness, and when he looked back into the screen Xoanon’s chair was empty. As he lay waiting for the old man to appear in the doorway several dark, trembling globules escaped from his helmet and drifted away on his breath. Blood, he thought. The old bastard has to get here soon….

  Shadow movements disturbed the light again, then Xoanon silently appeared, holding himself upright in the shifting air by gripping the edge of the doorway. Garnett stared at him over the sights of the automatic. He looked frail and helpless—but not as helpless as Janice had been.

  “I haven’t finished talking, Mr. Gar
nett, you …’

  “I’ve finished listening,” Garnett shouted. He tightened his finger on the trigger, but there was a new flurry of activity as the alien woman ducked under Xoanon’s arm. She straightened up with a strangely clumsy movement and launched herself towards Garnett.

  “Get out of the way,” he warned frantically. “You’ll get yourself killed.”

  The woman caught a vertical frame and pulled herself down in front of him, disregarding the pistol.

  “Take it easy, Tony,” she said gently. “You’ve been neglecting your milk again, haven’t you?”

  Garnett stared up at her face. It was the colourless face of an alien woman, but those eyes….

  After a long time he said, “Janice.”

  She nodded and Garnett felt himself slide over the edge of reality into darkness.

  The woman cradled his head in thin brown arms with a kind of reverence. “You did love me,” she whispered. “You did!”

  7

  Though large by Earth standards, the spaceship was in fact a rather old and rather shabby commercial vessel, the equivalent of a tramp steamer. Nor did the fact that its main drive had not been activated for forty-five Earth years make the task of getting under way any easier. There were many unforeseen difficulties in preparing for the journey and after three days it was still far from ready.

  Garnett opened his eyes and found himself wrapped in a soft, warm cocoon which was anchored to the wall of a green and silver room. There was the smell of hot soup and he realised he had not eaten for a long time. He raised his head and looked around.

  She was there beside him—the woman who had looked at him with Janice’s eyes. He remembered vaguely that she had been there on earlier occasions when he had wakened and fallen back into the sleep on which his body was gorging itself. Then he had been able to accept the impossible, but how—how could it be?

  “Awake at last,” she said quickly, nervously. “It must have been the smell of food. The way to a man’s heart…. What disgusting anatomical details some of these sayings conjure up—or is it just my mind?”

  Garnett closed his eyes and smiled peacefully. He knew Janice Villiers when he heard her.

  “Are you going to sleep again, Tony? Or am I too horrible to look at?”

  He took her hand. “I’m not going to sleep, so stop asking questions and provide a few answers.”

  “All right, all right—don’t let the fact that you’re bigger than I am now go to your head. I can only remember part of what Xoanon told me. He said the only way they could control somebody down there was for one of them to have his own identity temporarily erased so that the new patterns could be impressed on his brain. Xoanon called it becoming a living analogue, whatever that means. He said a person they were controlling existed in two bodies at once, one up here and one down there. If anything happened to the body on Earth the identity was preserved up here—it’s a bit like astral bodies, isn’t it?”

  “That means you too were under control?”

  Janice shook her head. “I wasn’t—not until they discovered their mistake when they tried to kill you, then they had to act quickly. One of their women voluntarily died for me, Tony. Or, at least, her identity is in indefinitely prolonged storage—but she still had to go through it. Her name was Temnare. I’ve learned something from her.”

  Garnett thought in silence. “I wasn’t under control though. If the meteorite had killed me, that would have been the end.”

  “I know. Xoanon wasn’t: happy about it, but the population of the ship has grown to over three hundred and all of them will die eventually unless they get it back to their own world. The vitamin shortages caused by synthetic food are already chronic—look at my new hair! What would you do in a case where the life of one stranger was weighed against the lives of three hundred friends?”

  “Well, if you put it like that…. Whose side are you on anyway?”

  “I’m on their side. I’m one of them now. I can’t go back to Earth with you, Tony.”

  He had known it was coming, and the decision was strangely easy. “I’m not going back to Earth either. I’m finished building aeroplanes and, from what the doctors told me, a low-gravity world is just what I need. Besides, all this hasn’t really changed anything so far as I am concerned. You might as well get ready to laugh—but I …’ He hesitated.

  Janice smiled. “Go ahead and say it, Tony—some things have changed.”

  Telemart Three

  Four days after the honeymoon, Ted Trymble came home from golf and found his wife had been unfaithful to him. The evidence was there—right outside his front door—for all the world to see.

  “Why did you do it, Maggie?” he demanded, setting his clubs down in a corner with exaggerated care. He kept his face immobile and his voice crisp, pretending to be not unduly shocked, though inwardly he was praying to hear it was all a mistake.

  But Maggie smiled her calm, careless smile and shrugged, “It was just an impulse,” she said. “An irresistible impulse.”

  Ted went to the window and eyed the evidence. The black Turbo-Cadillac was almost as long as the house, and its haunches gleamed in the late afternoon sun like those of a panther about to spring. So she was admitting it, just like that.

  “Maggie,” he said reasonably. “Everybody gets that kind of impulse now and then, but they just have to learn to control it.”

  “I can’t,” she replied blandly. “When I find something I like—I buy it.”

  “I see.” Ted went into the kitchen, took a beer bulb from the the refrigerator and squirted some of the frothy liquid into his mouth. He sat down in the cool seclusion of the dining alcove to consider the matter of his wife’s dereliction. Maggie’s parents had left her a lump sum of almost $100,000, the income from which was just enough to maintain Ted and her in modest comfort for the rest of their lives. When they got engaged the agreement was that the capital would be kept intact. Ted was a personable young man and he knew he could probably have married real money; but he had exchanged his boyish hopes of someday owning a private airplane and yacht for the certitude of never having to work. And he had been prepared to stick to the bargain because marriage was, in his opinion, still a sacred covenant.

  The trouble was that Maggie appeared not to share his high sense of principle—for she had just blown a noticeable fraction of their livelihood in one afternoon. A pang of anguish caused Ted’s fingers to clamp inwards on the plastic bulb, and a wavering stream of beer leaped across the kitchen. He composed himself with an effort and went back into the lounge.

  “I forgive you this time, Maggie,” he said stiffly. “I guess it won’t do any harm for me to be seen in a better car, but you must promise not to do it again.”

  “Of course, honey.” Maggie spoke a lack of effort which Ted found disturbing, and she went on flicking the glowing pages of a tri-di magazine.

  Two days later he came in from a morning’s workout in the gymnasium to find that his fears had been well founded. Maggie was sporting a bracelet of genuine green-veined Venusian gold costing roughly ten times as much as its counterpart in Earth gold would have done.

  “I promised not to buy another car,” was her defence. “This isn’t another car, is it? It doesn’t look much like a car to me.” She flirted her wrist in his face and the bracelet’s chunky links clicked like the action of a well-oiled rifle.

  “It isn’t a car,” Ted agreed, ‘but it’s something we can afford even less. What about our investments?”

  “This is an investment. Isn’t gold an investment?”

  “Not that kind. Don’t you ever read the financial pages? Don’t you know that big nuclear powered ships have just been proved out on the Venus and Mars hauls? The cost of Venusian gold at the moment is ninety per cent freight charge, but by this time next year it’ll be as common as dirt.”

  Maggie sniffed disbelievingly. “Well, I was bored sitting here by myself. Other girls’ husbands stay at home with them.”

  ‘Bored!�
�� Ted was aghast. “You absolutely seem to forget that when those other guys are swanning round the house watching television and getting fat, I’m working hard to build up my health. That’s a marriage partner’s most important duty—to keep himself healthy.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Maggie whispered. “What have I done?”

  Three days later, while Ted was surfing, she bought a luminous mink costing as much as the car and the bracelet put together. Ted examined the price tag then went into the kitchen, took a beer bulb in each hand and expended them in a foaming orgasm of fury. When calmness returned he went back to the lounge and greeted his wife with a numb smile.

  “It has just occurred to me that I’ve been neglecting you a little, Maggie. Let’s go out tonight and see what we can do about hitting the town.”

  Maggie’s eye flickered with enthusiasm as she hurried away to engage in lengthy cosmetic rituals, and that night she really did hit the town. When she was too full of assorted liquors to be aware of what was happening, Ted pushed her out through the window of their third floor bedroom.