chapter EIGHTEEN
“He smashed the culture for spite,” thought Elysium. “Not because he believed the replacement would be better.”
“It will be better,” the other current noted. Extrapolations flickering through the group consciousness supported that view.
“But all that mattered to him was bringing down the structure around the ears of those who had threatened him,” pressed the flow that was too rigorous to be hostile, too chilling not to be negative.
“What he did,” closed the other current, “benefitted individuals and Mankind. If he acted from instinct rather than belief, so much the better for him . . . and for his universe, which is our universe as well. . . .”
“When it’s somebody else’s specialty,” Don Slade was saying, “and they’ve pulled it out every time despite the disaster they’re predicting, then it’s easy to discount what they say the next time. It happens—I’m told it happens—in military settings, too.”
Those who knew as well as heard Slade were flashed a glass-edged vision: the doorway of a command post, three men in gray uniforms pistol-shot on the ground and the neck of the fourth being broken by Slade’s bloody hands.
“They always think you can hold it if you’ve held before,” Slade muttered. “They tell me.”
The big man cleared his throat. “So it shouldn’t have been a shock when we popped out of Transit only a kay above the ground the next time . . .”
The buzzer went off. All the instrument consoles were bathed in red lights. Such warnings were unnecessary, because only the dead could doubt there was an emergency when the starship flipped on its back in a gravity well.
Slade was on the bridge as usual during maneuvering. He was not strapped in. GAC 59 had no facilities to immobilize as many men as the ship now carried. Besides, the hot LZs on which the tanker was trained had no time for such frills.
Slade’s legs shot up because his arms hugged the curve of the analog tub instinctively. Then Levine righted the ship in a corkscrew motion through a massive forward thrust. As a result, GAC 59 was moving at over a hundred kph when it plowed through the trees and into a field. Things began happening in a hurry. Slade probably lost his grip before the display unit shredded its clamps and flew into a console. By then the question was academic, even to Slade himself.
The sirens of the emergency vehicles merged in Slade’s mind with the screams. Some of the screams were his own. . . .
“Because,” Slade said, and the speakers amplified his voice so that it could be heard by all the hundred and three other survivors, “the authorities here think they’re being exceptionally nice in not standing us against a wall and shooting us every one.”
The tanker nodded toward the double doors of the hall. Many of the mercenaries turned to look also, though they all knew what they would see there. The detachment of Rusatan police wore neat, white uniforms. Some of them seemed unfamiliar with the submachine guns they had been issued for this detail. Those were the only guns in the room, however, and they were gripped the tighter when the local men felt the mercenaries looking at them.
“So,” Slade continued from the dais, “staying here on Rusata isn’t an option. Unless you figure to stay the way the folks will who were too late for the medics.”
Men looked at one another, at themselves. The Rusatans had given the crash victims excellent medical treatment, but reconstruction had stopped with grafts of synthetic skin. Prosthetics, the locals had noted bluntly, were the business of the mercenaries themselves. The salvage value of GAC 59 would not cover the cost of necessary treatment—and the necessary shipment of the survivors off a world their presence would disrupt.
“It’s not fair!” muttered Captain Levine. He sat beside Slade on the dais. “She was my ship. I ought at least to have had all she brought for scrap.”
“That wasn’t an option either, my friend,” said the tanker in a low, dangerous voice. Slade cut on the amplifier again and continued, “So we have the choice of leaving on either of the ships in port right now. That’s a human tramp out of Barmaki; and an Alayan ship.”
“Those’re the ones that look like bloody lightwands?” somebody demanded from the audience.
“The Alayans have exoskeletons, yes,” Slade replied. He raised his voice so that it would ride over the disgust. “They have eight limbs, and they speak to humans through vocalizers. They also—” his voice went up a further notch; he rose to focus attention—“have extremely well-found ships, although they don’t operate on the same principles that ours do. Captain Levine is going to talk to you now about the other choice.”
Slade sat down. Levine glanced at the gathered men, then looked at his boots again. “It won’t—” he began. Slade reached across the spacer and flicked the mike on his epaulette to ‘ON.’ “I’ve been over the ship,” Levine resumed. “They want us bad, so they’re making a price to Rusata. Doesn’t do cop for us . . .”
He looked up. In a stronger voice, Levine continued. “It won’t get us there. Not one more landing, not two or I’m the Messiah. They want us because they’re worse-crewed than we were, and their captain thinks he can make Barmaki with me and what’s left of my people.” Levine nodded. Three or four of the audience nodded back, the remnant of GAC 59’s crew.
“But they can’t,” Levine said. He stood up as Slade had done, but without the tanker’s deliberation. Levine’s hands washed each other unnoticed. “I don’t know how they got here. One of their generators has kicked out three times, and it’s heaven’s own providence they weren’t actually in Transit when it happened. Their captain hoped I could help fix it. You can’t fix a generator except to pull out the boards and replace them. They’re trying to use jumpers to the other generators, heaven blast me if I lie!”
Captain Levine paused, then sat down abruptly. In a lowered voice he closed, “I—I don’t want the bugs either. But we’ll all die if we ship with the Barmacids. I’m sure of it.”
“The Alayans offer passage for as far along their route as the individual wants,” Slade said over the worried murmur. “They won’t alter their course, but they’ll disembark passengers at any point. So long as the ground authorities are willing. They say that eighty to ninety percent of the worlds they touch are human, and—”
“And that’s cop!” roared someone from the audience.
“All right, maybe it is!” Slade shouted back with the support of the amplifier. “But we know they do land on human worlds or they wouldn’t be here, would they?”
Breathing hard, but in a more reasonable voice, the tanker went on. “People, this is no time to wedge our heads. We can take passage to someplace livable with the Alayans—or we can jump straight to Hell with the Barmacids. If anybody’s that determined to die, there’s people right here can probably oblige him.” Slade waved again at the police.
The tanker had risen to a half crouch during his burst of anger. Now he settled himself again in his chair as the audience buzzed. “Oh,” Slade added, “there’s one other thing. Some of you may have the notion that going off in a human ship might leave the way open to—opportunities. Other than settling someplace.” He nodded toward the police detachment, this time to explain why he had chosen a euphemism instead of saying piracy. “No guns leave here with us. Everything aboard GAC 59 except your asses and mine became government property when we crashed. If you don’t like the word salvaged, you can say confiscated. It won’t bother the locals a scrap, and it’s how things are.”
The buzzing lowered despondently.
“Now,” Slade concluded, “you were each issued a ballot and a stylus when they marched you in. There’s a box for your votes right here.” He pointed to the foot of the dais. “We all go the way the majority decides. You mark A for Alayans, B for Barmacids. You drop it in the box. And if you want to live, you mark an A”
Levine shut off his microphone. As the hall rustled with men marking ballots, the spacer whispered, “I wonder what they’d vote if they knew the Alayan ship drives people crazy?”
Slade shut off his mike as well. “A chance of going crazy’s better than near certainty of being lost in Transit,” he whispered back. “So they’d for sure vote the same way they’re going to now.”
The first of the castaways were shuffling toward the box, clutching their ballots.
“Just as sure as I’m doing the counting,” Don Slade concluded in a voice that did not move his lips.
The screams were attenuated by the hundred meters of corridor between Slade and their source. They were still easily loud enough to identify. The tanker was off his mattress and running for the sound even before his conscious mind was aware of the occurrence it had dreaded.
The Alayan starship was an assemblage of globes joined by tubes. The ship appeared to have as much and as little geometric certainty as a spider’s web. That is, the basic form was certain, but the location of any single element within the whole might well have been random.
There was no way the ship itself could land or take off in a gravity well. Two of the globes carried lighters for ferrying cargo and passengers to the vessel in orbit. It had concerned Slade to realize that the lighters were of human manufacture though none of the vessel’s other apparatus was. The situation suggested absurdly that the Alayans had not touched down on planets before their scattered vessels encountered humans some centuries before.
The survivors of GAC 59 were in three connected globes. The decks and fittings within were of plastic with evident mold marks. The globes themselves, like the tubular corridors which joined them, seemed chitinously natural.
Now men were running toward Slade down the corridor as if the screams were whips behind them. The fugitives were an incident of passage to the big tanker, an impediment through which he trampled as he would have a sleet storm.
There were no artificial weapons in the human sections of the ship. The Alayans had segregated even the slight personal effects the Rusatans had let the survivors take on board. Men played ball with wadded sheets and played checkers with scraps of fabric on a board scribed on the deck with fingernails. It was boring as Hell, but it should have been safe.
Stoudemeyer leaped from his victim, Captain Levine. Levine was the third, judging from the wrack in the blood-splattered room. The pearly glow from the ceiling glistened on Stoudemeyer’s face. The man from Telemark now looked a bestial caricature of a man. Someone had clawed out Stoudemeyer’s left eye so that it hung down his cheek by the nerve. Most of the blood on his face and bare chest had come from the throats of his victims, however—like Levine, now in spraying convulsions beneath his killer.
Slade snatched the blanket from an abandoned bunk. “Easy now, sol—” he began.
Stoudemeyer grinned wider and launched himself at the tanker.
The blanket had been extended for a makeshift net. Slade was wholly confident in his strength. He planned to wrap the madman in the fabric and hold him without further injury until more help dribbled back to view the excitement. Stoudemeyer’s furious attack was no surprise, but the madman’s strength was. Despite a conscious awareness of hysterical strength, Don Slade had met very few men who could overpower him under any circumstances.
As the short, pudgy Stoudemeyer proceeded to do.
The madman’s clawed hands swept the blanket down. Slade caught Stoudemeyer’s wrists and held him, but the blanket tangled both their legs. They staggered sideways and fell as a pair, Stoudemeyer on top. His face was marked with streaks and bubbles of blood. He glared at Slade with his good eye while the other bobbled on his cheek.
Slade shouted. He thrust upward against Stoudemeyer’s wrists with all his strength. The madman giggled and continued to force his claws down toward his victim. Stoudemeyer’s bloody gape was lowering toward Slade’s throat inexorably.
Black with snarling madness himself, the tanker bit at Stoudemeyer’s scalp. It was the only part of the shorter man Slade could reach with his teeth. They gouged hair and blood vessels aside before they skidded on bone. It was a useless attempt; but to Slade it was better than shouting for help that would not come.
Something bathed him in cold light.
Slade had been wounded before. He had even been left for dead on a field with hundreds of bomb fragments in his body. His flesh had chilled then and his mind had withdrawn to a single hot spark throbbing like an overloaded transformer.
He had never before been ice all over, though with full command of his senses. Slade could feel the tickling strands of Stoudemeyer’s hair against the roof of his mouth. He could also feel the edge of the madman’s incisors, against the pulse of the tanker’s throat and just short of slashing through it.
The members that lifted Stoudemeyer gently away were blue and they were not hands. Slade could no longer control his field of vision. In and out of it drifted several Alayans. There were flickers of light at the violet end of the human range. It could have been cross-talk among the aliens . . . or synapses stuttering in Slade’s own brain.
Sucker-tipped tendrils lifted the tanker upright. Something swabbed at the peak of his breastbone. The touch was cold momentarily as all things were cold. Then natural warmth and control flooded back through Slade’s body.
“We regret,” purred the vocalizer of one of the three Alayans, “that we struck you also, Mr. Slade.” The Alayan waggled the device he held in one of his upper limbs. The object looked like petrified sea-foam, but it was not difficult to connect it with the stunning chill that had ended the fight. “We could not be sure in the haste of the moment which of you was the attacker.”
“Umm,” Slade said. He spat to clear his mouth, then rubbed his lips. “Yeah.”
The other two Alayans had lifted Stoudemeyer. The madman was still in a state of supple uncontrol as the Alayan device had left him. The Alayans were carrying Stoudemeyer toward the opening through which they had entered the passenger section. That passage was normally closed to humans.
“Wait a—” Slade began. Humans were entering the compartment again. Late-comers tried to push aside the earlier returnees who tended to conglomerate at the ends of the corridor instead of coming fully within the spattered compartment.
In a lower voice, the tanker continued. “Look, we’ve got to talk. I need to know—” his tongue paused between two questions, settled on the short-term one—”where you’re taking him.”
“Come,” said the Alayan’s vocalizer as he touched it. There was a flash of violet light from one of the six stalked projections—surely not heads—atop the alien’s carapace. It might have been meant for a nod. “We will explain that to you. And now that you have more knowledge, we will explain again what you can expect to happen on the voyage.”
The Alayan moved toward the exit after his companions and Stoudemeyer. His four lower limbs made delicate, twinkling motions so that his tall body seemed to roll rather than walk.
Slade wondered morosely as he followed whether the Alayan had made a lucky guess at the unspoken question, or whether they could read human minds.
The corridor blurred in both directions as soon as the door to the passenger chamber spasmed closed. There was no apparent beginning or end to the tube, and there was no sign of Stoudemeyer or the aliens who had carried him off.
“You’ve dumped him into—” Slade waved a hand at the glowing blue wall of the corridor. “Dumped him outside. Didn’t you?”
“Assuredly not, Mister Slade,” said the soft, mechanical voice. “He will be cared for, be repaired physically, as ably as possible. We will keep him sedated, or co—”
“You’re going to use him to drive the ship,” the tanker broke in again. Levine had told him the scuttlebutt about the Alayan drive, suggestions that the Alayans themselves had not denied in discussions before Slade made the survivors’ decision for them. A warping of real space very different from the human technique of entering a separate Transit universe. A warping of space achieved through the warping of a human mind, the rumors went. . . .
“No, Mister Slade,” replied the dancing fingers on the vocalizer, “we have used him to drive the ship. We cannot use his mind again, because it no longer has a basis in objective reality. That is always the case, I am afraid. You were aware of the situation when you accepted our offer of transport.”
Slade ignored the last part of the statement. It was true; he simply did not care to dwell on it. “They always go—go berserk like Stoudemeyer just did?”
Light of no discernible hue played over one of the Alayan’s—faces; a shrug of sorts. “Rarely that. We apologize. Generally catatonia, sometimes other forms of aberration. We did not expect this—” Warmth spread across the human’s skin that implied the speaker had gestured in the infrared. “—but one cannot be certain what the ash will look like when one burns a log.”
“And you can’t—do this—travel—yourselves,” Slade asked through a grimace that reflected his difficulty in finding words. Slade no longer believed he was simply in a tube connected to the passenger compartment, though he had no better explanation of where the Alayan might have taken him.
“Any sentient mind will serve the purpose,” said the Alayan. “Any mind with a grasp of reality and the ability to change reality through—fantasy, if you will. We direct the fantasies so that they become real . . . and the vessel moves in objective reality through the—pressure of the subject’s mind. Unfortunately, that mind moves as well, in a psychic dimension from which it cannot be retrieved. We could use ourselves as subjects, but we do not do so while we have minds aboard which are not ours. That is the main value for which we trade.”
The listening human realized that there would have been no hostility or even emotion in the words whether or not they were the construct of a vocalizer. The Alayans did not hate their passengers; nor did they treat humans cruelly, the way humans were often wont to do to their own species. It was a simple operation, like triage: separating victims into those who would survive and those who would not. Nothing in the process implied a desire that some not survive . . . a wish for Kile Stoudemeyer to bite through his fellows’ throats and to spend the rest of his life in total sedation.
But better that than similar destruction of an Alayan mind. The choice, after all, was the Alayans’.
“I knew,” Slade said, aloud but more to himself than to the exoskeletal creature before him, “that people—some of us—might go nuts because of your drive. I mean, Transit hits some people like that, the sensation’s different for everybody . . . and it makes some people snap. I didn’t figure that it wasn’t may go nuts, it was like firing a gun and watching the empty case spit out. I think we’d better, ah, disembark at the next landfall. Unless—I mean, how many stops can you make on the—” Slade did not pause, but his lips stuck momentarily in a rictus as he finished, “—present fuel?”
“Everyone who wishes to leave and is permitted to do so by the planetary authorities,” said the Alayan, “may of course disembark on Terzia. There will have to be a second—impetus—to reach that world, Mister Slade. More than that to reach any other planet which could be suitable for your purpose, for your leaving the ship.”
Slade hammered his fist into the corridor wall. The wall absorbed the blow with a massive resilience like that of deep sod. The hazy light seemed to fluctuate.
“You may do as you see fit, Mister Slade,” the alien went on. His faces flickered, occasionally in the visible spectrum, “but I would suggest that you not discuss the situation in detail with your fellows until you have landed. It would cause distress, and it would probably lead to violence and injuries more serious than any the need of propulsion will cause.”
“Who goes next?” the tanker demanded as he stared at his hand.
“The choice is generally random,” the vocalizer said. “Not you, of course. Though if there is someone you would like to choose for the next segment? Or however far you choose to prolong the association after you have had time to reflect.”
“Anyone?” Slade said. He turned and looked at the alien: the courteous, slim-bodied creature who was discussing his human cargo like lambs in a pen. “Shouldn’t be hard to find somebody dead worthless in this lot, you’d think. . . .”
Not hard at all. Some of the outlaws were men Don Slade had been on the verge of killing a time or two himself. There were others, a few, whom the tanker still did not know by name. They were without personalities—to Slade. Without any of the factors that would have made them people instead of objects.
And there were those whom the crash of GAC 59 had disabled: paraplegics for whom no therapy could do more than maintain life, limbless torsos who would be shambling wrecks even with better prosthetics than they were ever likely to afford.
No problem for Don Slade. No problem for Captain Slade, who had hosed innocents with cyan fire during more operations than he cared to remember.
“All right,” the tanker whispered to his clenched fist. “Take me.” He turned his back on the Alayan. In the hollow distance, there was no sign of the door by which they had entered the corridor.
“You mean, Mister Slade—” began the mechanical voice. Its tone could not be hesitant, but the words’ pacing was.
“I mean use me in your drive, curse it!” Slade shouted as he spun around. “I—”
He paused. The anger melted away from the fear it had been intended to cloak. Then the fear surrendered itself to the honesty of desperation. “There’s none of them worth the powder to blow them away,” the tanker whispered. “And I’ve sent men to die, the Lord knows. . . . But these’re mine, like it or don’t. And it’s all too much like deciding who to butcher so that the rest of the lifeboat gets another meal. I’m not going to do that.”
“Your principles do you credit, Mister Slade,” said the Alayan, “but as the leader—”
“I don’t have any bloody principles!” Slade said. “I’m just not going to axe one of my men for no better reason than to save my ass. Besides—” more calmly, now; almost diffident— “I don’t see. . . . I mean, some of those fellows aren’t bolted together real tight. Me, though . . . well, you’ll see.”
The Alayan’s exoskeleton dulled for a moment to an almost perfect matte finish. Then the sheen that Slade had equated with health, but which probably indicated something else, returned. “All right, Mister Slade,” the alien said. One of his tendrils played over an object on the belt around his midsection. The corridor began to fall in on itself. A door formed in the end of it as there had been when the pair entered. “You will not feel anything. There will be no pain. I cannot tell you exactly when it will happen, though it will not be soon.”
Slade nodded. He stepped to the door. It was already opening onto the globe in which Slade had been sleeping when Stoudemeyer went berserk in the adjacent compartment.
“And Mister Slade,” continued the voice which the tanker did not turn to face, “this passage will open for you if you wish to reconsider your decision.”
“I won’t,” said Slade as he rejoined the wondering humans who called him their leader.