by Joe Haldeman
“That would be starlight reflected off the-“
“It wasn’t there before, I’m sure of it. They’re coming after me . . . Yes, it’s getting closer.”
Jacque felt a vibration in his boots just as Carol said “Behind you!”
A man-sized black spidery machine, like the first artifact the probe had encountered, came clicking across the hull toward him. “Get around to the other side,” Jacque said. “Then turn on your magnet. I’ll do the same here.”
Tania’s voice whispered, “Trouble?”
“We’ll see.” The machine didn’t appear to have any weapons. It approached Jacque and extended a pincered arm. He took one step forward, turned on his magnet . . .
And slammed chest-first to the hull, pinning the machine underneath him. It squirmed like a live thing, then emitted a shower of sparks-Jacque’s short hair tingled with the static electricity-and lay still.
“It’s a machine,” Jacque said; “I crushed it. Are you standing upright?”
No answer. “Carol! Are you standing upright?”
“Jacque,” Tania said, “if she’s on the other side of the ship, she can’t hear you. Line-of-sight transmission.”
Jacque felt his face warm. “That’s right. Say, how are you doing, is it still coming closer?”
“Yes. Not very fast. I think I’ll play with it a little bit. See how maneuverable it is.”
Jacque turned off his magnet. “I’m going to go check on Carol. Good luck.”
“Same to you.” He stood up and was surrounded by a cloud of floating metal fragments. Most of the machine lay flattened out, stuck to the hull by weak residual magnetism.
In the center of the wreck a bluish mass had oozed out and dried in the vacuum: the remnants of a L’vrai brain.
He walked around to where Carol was standing. From the crash of static in his ears, he knew that her suit was magnetized.
“What happened?” she shouted.
“Fell on top of it and crushed it. It’s a machine with a L’vrai brain attached.”
“Have to be careful walking.”
“Forgot. Turned it on with one foot in the air.”
“Vacuum,” she corrected. “We better do the back-to-back. There’ll be more.”
“Okay.” He backed up against her and thumbed the switch that magnetized his suit. They clicked together; the suits had been set up with opposite polarity so they could operate this way.
Nothing happened. After a half hour: “Carol, they aren’t going to come to us while we’re magnetized. Not after what happened to the last one.”
“I guess not.”
“Want to switch them off and go exploring?”
“No, wait. They must know where we are. They might be waiting right under our feet. Zap us as soon as we turn off the field.”
“Wait like this for ten days?” Actually, the prospect wasn’t unappealing to Jacque. At least they were relatively invulnerable.
“No. I have an idea. . . . Stay right where you are.” Carol turned off her field and knelt down, apparently studying the hull under their feet.
“What are you-oh.” Her laser glared. Where it punched through the hull, a long plume of air drifted out. She continued cutting in an arc, centered around Jacque’s feet. Air had stopped leaking out before she was halfway around.
“Now,” she said, a few centimeters from completing the circle- And they were falling in darkness.
They landed on something hard; Jacque stood up and turned on his lights.
“Artificial gravity.” They were standing in a wedge-shaped room, the floor a section of a circle. In one corner was a large round pillow; the only other piece of furniture was something that looked like a filing cabinet, but without handles.
A mass of tentacles protruded from the far wall, the side closest to the space ship’s central axis. They walked cautiously over to investigate.
“It’s the bottom part of a L’vrai,” Carol said.
“Yeah. Got stuck trying to get out of the room, looks like.” Jacque prodded the wall. It was slightly resilient. “Don’t see any seam. When you went through these things before. . . could you tell where they were before they opened?”
“No, but I didn’t really have time to-“
“Here!” Jacque’s finger disappeared into the wall. He pulled it out, pushed it back in, moved it up and down. “You can’t see it, no, but this is where it is.” He got both hands into the seam and tried to pull it open. It wouldn’t give.
“You take one side here; I’ll take the other.” Enough force to tie a knot in a steel girder, but nothing happened. Jacque put his arm in up to the elbow, and quickly withdrew it.
“What do you think?” Jacque said. “I guess we could just walk through it.”
“Let me take a look first.” Carol put her head against the wall and pushed; her helmet disappeared up to the shoulders.
She tilted forward and disappeared.
Jacque leaped after her; slammed against the wall. He pushed hard. Nothing happened. Calming, he pressed his hand across the wall until he found the seam, then leaned into it.
Vertigo: a well-lit elevator shaft 50 stories high. Jacque staggered back.
Bracing himself against the “doors,” he peered through again. Carol was floating on the other side of the shaft. “Come on in,” she said. “No gravity here.” With one hand she held on to a metal rod that ran the length of the shaft, like a fireman’s pole.
Jacque eased through the slit, stepping over the inert L’vrai body. The entrance acted like a flexible gasket, sealing itself around his suit as he passed through, keeping the vacuum out.
He treaded air and drifted toward the metal pole, the suit’s magnetism puffing him. Carol moved her hand just in time to keep from getting pinned between him and the pole.
“What now?” he said. “Up or down?”
“Up’s closer.” The shaft ended some twenty meters over their heads. “I’m going to switch on again. This place frightens me.”
“Yeah. Any moment I expect an army of them to come pouring out of the wall.” They worked their way up the pole hand-over-hand. The grip they had to exert to overcome the force of their magnetic fields was so great that their fingers left indentations in the metal.
Almost to the top, Carol said “Try infrared.” Jacque did; the entrance slits suddenly were visible, slightly lighter than the surrounding wall.
“Well, now we have someplace to go. Question is-“
“Do we go there, or let them come to us?” Carol said. “I vote we stay here for a while.”
“I don’t know,” Jacque said. “Maybe we ought to keep the initiative.”
“And maybe they’ve set a trap. They’ve had time.”
Jacque thought for a moment. “Maybe we ought to burn our way through one. We should be able to do it at this distance, not get too close to them.”
“All right. You choose.”
Jacque aimed at the seam directly in front of him. With one short burst, it opened along its whole length and sagged- And the spear of energy continued through the room beyond, to an assembly of heavy machinery arranged along the opposite wall. Some delicate balance was disturbed; some false signal initiated:
The wall was a loading bay. It snapped open to empty space.
Jacque and Carol were buffeted by the hurricane force of air being sucked out of the ship. All up and down the corridor, seams dilated open. Several L’vrai slid into the shaft, writhing in death throes. One passed by them to tumble on into space. Then the wind died, for lack of air.
After a long while, Jacque said “Makes sense....”
“What?”
“The seams. They’re only rigid against vacuum from one direction. No natural disaster’s going to fill the corridor with vacuum without breaching the outer shell.”
“We’re an unnatural disaster, then?”
They watched an alien float by, inert and cooling. For ten days they divided their time between scouting the wreckage and a
nxiously keeping a lookout for other L’vrai ships. It seemed unlikely that the rest or the flotilla would be ignorant of the disaster that had befallen one of their number.
But ignoring it, Jacque argued, was consistent with the way they acted toward one another. Even toward themselves.
Jacque or Carol often ventured outside of the ship, trying to contact Tania. They never had any success.
When slingshot time approached, they gathered a selection of small artifacts and assumed the feet-on-shoulders position.
“Rape,” Jacque said. “Then pillage. Then burn.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Old joke.”
45 - Messenger
When Jacque and Carol appeared, there were a lot of people gathered under the dome that housed the crystal. Only one was looking at them, the controller.
“Are you hurt?” Sampson said. “Are you all right?” Jacque tongued his outside channel and answered in chorus with Carol that they were all right. “What’s going on?”
“Jeeves came back. . . catatonic. You’re all right, though?”
“Hell, yes. Get us out of these damned tanks!” To Carol: “That’s why we couldn’t get through to her... must have been within a couple of hours-“
“-when she saw the ship,” Carol said. “What could it have been?”
Something I’m glad I didn’t see, Jacque thought. She’s a tough old bird.
Sampson led them around back and helped them out of their suits. “Doc says bring along the bridge,” he told Jacque. “Maybe you can get through to her.”
She was lying on a cot in a room next to the crystal, surrounded at a distance by a large circle of people. A fold of cloth covered a token of her nakedness. She was pale and flaccid and seemed not to be breathing; only her eyes showed life. They moved behind bruised slits.
When Jacque and Carol broke through the circle, Tania tried to sit up. The doctor pushed her back down with his knuckles, trying not to poke her with the empty hypodermic needle he held.
“Lie still for a moment. I’m trying to find a vein.” He kneaded the inside of her elbow with his thumb. “Blood test,” he said in Jacque’s direction. He made a pinch of skin and slid the needle in.
The transparent cylinder filled up with yellow fluid.
The doctor dropped the hypodermic as if stung. “L’vrai!”
It stood up and swept him aside with a casual backhand to the chest. It pointed at Jacque.
They all shrank back. “I’ll get the laser,” somebody said. They had one mounted by the crystal, in case.
“Can’t,” Sampson said. “It’s permanently mounted.” Jacque was standing his ground, staring at the thing that looked like Tania. “Get me a wrench, anything. I’ll kill it.”
The L’vrai shook its head, growled, and stepped toward Jacque.
A heavy ball-peen hammer slid across the floor to Jacque’s feet. He dropped the bridge and picked it up.
The Tania-image shimmered, flowed, grew. It became a handsome man, tall with gray hair: Robert Lefavre at his prime.
“Good trick,” Jacque said, hefting the weapon. “Won’t work, though.”
The creature took two impossibly large steps and was in front of Jacque. He swung at the head but it dodged, and the hammer crunched through collarbone; flesh grew up and over the metal. Jacque pulled on it but it was fast.
The creature seized Jacque by the arm and forced him to the ground. It picked up the bridge and pressed it against his chest.
Jacque’s face contorted with terror. “I-
“I-
“I can . . .” He suddenly calmed. “I can speak to you through this one. We have certain things in common.”
46 - Autobiography 2034
986. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
987. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
988. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
989. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
990. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
991. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
992. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
993. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
994. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
995. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
996. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
997. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
998. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
999. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
1000. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
Jacques Lefavre
47 – CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Most of the crowd stood frozen, staring. Sampson was edging toward the door.
“None of you will attempt to leave, or to harm me. Normally that would be of little consequence. But it would be awkward, here and now.
“I could kill any or all of you without touching you. I would demonstrate on one but from what I understand of your nature, you would not take the logical course. This is my problem in dealing with you: you evolved a kind of intelligence, but too quickly. Your animal nature was kept separate, not properly assimilated.
“Who is in charge here?”
A black, gray-haired woman stepped forward. “I am Sara Bahadur. Coordinator of Research, Sirius Project.”
“But you cannot speak for all humans.”
She smiled. “No one can do that.”
“But there are those who can speak for larger numbers.”
“Yes.”
“Bring them to me. Now.”
“That isn’t possible. They’re all on Earth.”
“This isn’t Earth, then. Your home planet.”
“No. It’s very far away.”
“But you can travel between here and Earth instantaneously. In a sense.”
“That’s true.”
“I repeat: bring them to me.”
“And I repeat, that isn’t possible. Not in ten . . .”
“How long?” She didn’t answer. “Don’t worry about giving away secrets. I, the I-that-was-then, knew about this transportation process when-“ He paused, evidently searching Jacque’s mind. “-you humans were still in trees. I abandoned it as too limiting. How long?”
“Ten days. A day is-“
“I know.”
“I could take you to them.”
“No. I will not be in the presence of many humans. I perceive directly your.. . your subconscious beings. It would be distressing. I could not function. It is difficult enough here.
“Go to your planet and bring back such leaders as will come. Have this one well so that I can talk through him. I will go away until they come.”
“Wait,” Bahadur said. “You want to meet with all the leaders of humanity, but you haven’t established who you are. A spaceship pilot? What gives you authority to speak for all L’vrai?”
“The question is meaningless. I go now.”
“But how will we find you? Where are you go-“
“You will not find me. I will know when to come back. From this mind I see that we are surrounded by desert and mountain. That is where I will be.”
“Do you need food and water?” someone said.
“Only solitude.” It released Jacque and the bridge and stood up. The figure of Jacque’s father dissolved, then rose again as a python-sized serpent, covered with shimmering golden scales. It slithered to the door and out.
Carol broke the silence. “Jacque!” He was lying limp, his eyes rolled back, saliva drooling out of the corner of his mouth. She ran and kneeled by him and cradled his head between her breasts. She rocked back and forth with her eyes squeezed shut, making tight noises in her throat.
It took a minute for the doctor to pry her gently away.
48 - Psychiatrist’s Report
It is 14 April 2035. Drs. Mary and Robert Lefavre sit in a well-appointed psychiatrist’s office in New York City. He is Dr. Chaim Weinberg, a child psychiatrist who specializes in the problems of gifted child
ren.
Weinberg opens the slim folder on his desk. “Well, there’s no question that Jacques is a brilliant child.” He traces his finger along the top sheet. “His IQ is 188 on the Modified Stanford-Binet (181 on the acultural version); his reading ability is that of the average college junior. Thematic Apperception and vocational preference tests . . . reveal a creative and challenge seeking personality. He has as great a potential for success and happiness as I’ve ever seen in a child.” He looks at them expectantly.
Robert supplies his punctuation: “But.”
“Well, as you know, he doesn’t get along with the other children.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” Mary says.
“Dr. Lefavre, if I didn’t put things mildly to parents, I’d run out of patients in short order.” They share an urbane chuckle at Dr. Weinberg’s situation.
“I’ve had two talks with Jacques now, with Jacques under hypnosis. He believes that all of his classmates are either close allies or bitter enemies. No one in between.”
“Is that so unusual?” Robert says. “I think I felt the same way at his age.”
“Only unusual in its intensity and absoluteness. Most children are at least mildly paranoid. In your boy’s case, though, he sees the situation exactly backward. I’ve interviewed his teachers and social worker: they say he has a few close friends, but all of the other children are afraid of him. His unpredictable outbursts of violent temper-“
“They gang up on him!” Robert says sharply.
“Well, he’s a head taller than any of them, and stronger.”
“You aren’t suggesting we move him up another year?” Mary says.
“No. The others are already a year or two ahead of him in . . . the puberty sweepstakes. But as I say, the others don’t really hate him. In an odd way, they respect him. He’ll help anyone with his homework, without being arrogant about it, and he doesn’t show off his intelligence in the classroom. You trained him in that.”
“I was in his shoes once,” Robert says.
