The Riim were peculiarly vulnerable. Their method of communication, unique and wonderful though it was, made it possible to influence them all in a single intensive operation. Over and over Grosvenor repeated his message, adding each time one instruction that had to do with the ship. The instruction was: “Change the pattern you are using against those on the ship, and then withdraw it. Change the pattern, so that they can relax and sleep. then withdraw it. Your friendly action caused the ship great harm. We are friendly to you also, but your method of expressing friendship hurt us.”
He had only a vague notion as to how long he actually poured his commands into that tremendous neural circuit. He guessed about two hours. Whatever the time involved, it ended as the relay switch on the encephalo-adjuster automatically broke the connection between himself and the image in the wall of his department.
Abruptly, he was aware of the familiar surroundings. He glanced at where the image had been. It was gone. He sent a quick look toward Korita. The archaeologist was crumpled in his chair fast asleep.
Grosvenor sat up jerkily, remembering the instruction he had given—to relax and sleep. This was the result. All over the ship, men would be sleeping.
Pausing only to awaken Korita, Grosvenor headed out into the corridor. As he raced along, he saw that unconscious men lay everywhere but that the walls were bright and clear. Not once on his journey to the control room did he see an image.
Inside the control room, he stepped gingerly over the sleeping form of Captain Leeth, who lay on the floor near the control panel. With a sigh of relief, he threw the switch that energized the outer screen of the ship.
Seconds later, Elliott Grosvenor was in the control chair, altering the course of the Space Beagle.
Before leaving the control room, he put a time lock on the steering gear and set it for ten hours. Thus protected against the possibility that one of the men might wake up in a suicidal mood, he hurried out to the corridor and began to give medical aid to injured men.
His patients were, without exception, unconscious, and so he had to guess at their condition. He played safe. Where labored respiration indicated shock, he gave blood plasma. He injected specific drugs for pain whenever he saw dangerous-looking wounds, and he applied fast-healing salves for burns and cuts. Seven times—with Korita’s help now—he lifted dead men on to loading mules and rushed them to resuscitation chambers. Four revived. Even after that there were thirty-two dead men who, after an examination, Grosvenor did not so much as attempt to revive.
They were still tending the injured when a geology technician near by woke up, yawned lazily—and then groaned in dismay. Grosvenor guessed that a flood of memory had come, but he watched warily as the man climbed to his feet and came over. The technician glanced in puzzlement from Korita to Grosvenor; finally he said: “May I help?”
Soon a dozen men were helping, with a strained concentration and an occasional word that showed awareness of the temporary insanity that had caused such a nightmare of death and destruction.
Grosvenor was not aware that Captain Leeth and Director Morton had arrived until he saw them talking to Korita. Presently, Korita walked off, and the two leaders came over to Grosvenor and invited him to a meeting in the control room. Silently, Morton clapped him on the back. Grosvenor had been wondering if they would remember. Spontaneous amnesia was a common hypnotic phenomenon. Without their own recollections, it would be extremely hard to explain convincingly what had happened.
He was relieved when Captain Leeth said, “Mr. Grosvenor, in looking back over the disaster, Mr. Morton and I were both struck by the attempt you made to make us aware that we were the victims of an outside attack. Mr. Korita has now told us what he saw of your actions. I want you to tell the departmental executives in the control room what exactly took place.”
It required over an hour to give an orderly account. When Grosvenor had finished, a man said, “Am I to understand that this was actually an attempt at friendly communications?”
Grosvenor nodded. “I’m afraid it was.”
“You mean we can’t go over there and bomb hell out of them?” he said harshly.
“It would serve no useful purpose.” Grosvenor spoke steadily. “We could drop in on them and make a more direct contact.”
Captain Leeth said quickly, “It would take too long. We’ve got distance to cover.” He added in a sour voice, “It seems to be a particularly drab civilization.”
Grosvenor hesitated. Before he could speak, Director Morton said quickly, “What have you to say to that, Mr. Grosvenor?”
Grosvenor said, “I assume the commander is referring to the lack of mechanical aids. But living organisms can have satisfactions that do not require machines: food and drink, association with friends and loved ones. I suggest these bird folk find emotional release in the community thinking and in their method of propagation. Time was when man had little more, yet he called it civilization; and there were great men in those days as well as now.”
“Still,” said physicist von Grossen shrewdly, “you did not hesitate to upset their mode of life.”
Grosvenor was cool. “It is unwise for birds—or men—to live too specialized an existence. I broke down their resistance to new ideas, something which I have not yet been able to do aboard this ship.”
Several men laughed wryly, and the meeting began to break up. Afterwards, Grosvenor saw Morton speak to Yemens, the only man present from the chemistry department. The chemist—second only to Kent now—frowned, and shook his head several times. Finally, he spoke at some length, and he and Morton shook hands.
Morton came over to Grosvenor, and said in a low tone, “The chemistry department will move its equipment out of your rooms within twenty-four hours, on condition that no further reference is made to the incident, Mr. Yemens—”
Grosvenor said quickly, “What does Kent think of this?”
Morton hesitated. “He got a whiff of gas,” he said finally, “and will be on his back in bed for several months.”
“But,” said Grosvenor, “that will take us past the date of the election.”
Once more Morton hesitated, then said, “Yes, it will. It means I win the election without opposition, since no one but Kent filed against me.”
Grosvenor was silent, thinking of the potentialities. It was good to know that Morton would continue in office. But what about all the discontented men who had supported Kent?
Before he could speak, Morton went on. “I want to ask this as a personal favor, Mr. Grosvenor. I persuaded Mr. Yemens that it would be unwise to continue Kent’s attack on you. For the sake of peace, I’d like you to keep silent. Make no attempt to exploit your victory. Admit freely that it was a result of the accident, if you are asked, but do not bring up the matter yourself. Will you promise me?”
Grosvenor promised, then said hesitantly, “I wonder if I could make a suggestion.”
“By all means.”
“Why not name Kent your alternative?”
Morton studied him with narrowed eyes. He seemed nonplussed. He said finally, “That’s a suggestion I wouldn’t have expected from you. I’m not, personally, very anxious to boost Kent’s morale.”
“Not Kent’s,” said Grosvenor.
This time Morton was silent. In the end, he said slowly, “I suppose it would release tension.” But he still seemed reluctant.
Grosvenor said, “Your opinion of Kent himself seems to parallel my own.”
Morton laughed grimly. “There are several dozen men aboard whom I would rather see director, but for the sake of peace, I’ll follow your suggestion.”
They parted, Grosvenor with feelings more mixed than he had indicated. It was an unsatisfactory conclusion to Kent’s attack. Grosvenor had the feeling that, in getting the chemistry department out of his rooms, he had won a skirmish and not a battle. Nevertheless, from his own point of view, it was the best solution to what might have been a bitterly fought engagement.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
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nbsp; Ixtl sprawled unmoving in the boundless night. Time paced slowly toward the eternity, and space was fathomlessly black. Across the immensity, vague patches of light gleamed coldly at him. Each, he knew, was a galaxy of blazing stars, shrunk by incredible distance to shining swirls of mist. Life was out there, spawning on the myriad planets that wheeled endlessly around their parent suns. In the same way, life had once crawled out of the primeval mud of ancient Glor, before a cosmic explosion destroyed his own mighty race and flung his body out into the intergalactic deeps.
He lived; that was his personal catastrophe. Having survived the cataclysm, his almost unkillable body maintained itself in a gradually weakening state on the light energy that permeated all space and time. His brain pulsed on and on in the same old, old cycle of thought—thinking: one chance in decillions that he would ever again find himself in a galactic system. And then an even more infinitesimal chance that he fall on a planet and find a precious guul.
A billion billion times that thought had pounded to its unvarying conclusion. It was a part of him now. It was like an endless picture unrolling before his mind’s eye. Together with those remote wisps of shiningness out there in that gulf of blackness, it made up the world in which he had his existence. He had almost forgotten the far-flung field of sensitivity his body maintained. In past ages that field had been truly vast, but now that his powers were waning, no signals came to him beyond the range of a few light-years.
He expected nothing, and so the first stimulus from the ship scarcely more than touched him. Energy, hardness—matter! The vague sense perception fumbled into his dulled brain. It brought a living pain, like a disused muscle briefly, agonizingly forced into action.
The pain went away. The thought faded. His brain slid back into its sleep of ages. He lived again in the old world of hopelessness and shining light splotches in a black space. The very idea of energy and matter became a dream that receded. A remote corner of his mind, somehow more alert, watched it go, watched the shadows of forgetfulness reach out with their enveloping folds of mist, striving to engulf the dim consciousness that had flashed into such an anguish of ephemeral existence.
And then once more, stronger, sharper, the message flashed from a remote frontier of his field. His elongated body convulsed in senseless movement. His four arms lashed out, his four legs jackknifed with blind, unreasoning strength. That was his muscular reaction.
His dazed, staring eyes refocused. His stultified vision was galvanized into life. The part of his nervous system that controlled the field took its first unbalancing action. In a flash of tremendous effort, he withdrew it from the billions of cubic miles from which no signals had come, and concentrated its forces in an attempt to pinpoint the area of greatest stimulation.
Even as he fought to locate it, it moved a vast distance. For the first time, then, he thought of it as a ship flying from one galaxy to another. He had a moment of awful fear that it would move beyond where he could sense it, and that he would lose contact forever before he could do anything.
He let the field spread out slightly, and felt the shock of impact as once more he received the unmistakable excitation of alien matter and energy. This time he clung to it. What had been his field became a beam of all the energy his weakened body could concentrate.
Along the tightly held beam, he drew tremendous bolts of power from the ship. There was more energy—by many millions of times—than he could handle. He had to deflect it from himself, had to discharge it into the darkness and the distance. But, like some monstrous leech, he reached out four, five, ten light years, and drained the great ship of its drive power.
After countless aeons of eking out his existence on fragile darts of light energy, he did not even dare to try to handle the colossal power. The vastness of space absorbed the flow as if it had never been. What he did let himself receive shocked the life back into his body. With a savage intensity, he realized the extent of the opportunity. Frantically, he adjusted his atomic structure and drove himself along the beam.
In the far distance, the ship—its drive off but its momentum carrying it forward—coasted past him and began to draw farther away. It receded an entire light-year, then two, and then three. In a black despair, Ixtl realized it was going to escape in spite of all his efforts. And then..
The ship stopped. In mid-flight. One instant, it was coasting along at a velocity of many light-years a day. The next, it was poised in space, all its forward momentum inhibited and transformed. It was still a tremendous distance away, but it was no longer receding.
Ixtl could guess what had happened. Those aboard the vessel had become aware of his interference and were deliberately stopping to find out what had happened, and what had caused it. Their method of instantaneous deceleration suggested a very advanced science, though he could not decide just what technique of anti-acceleration they had used. There were several possibilities. He himself intended to stop by converting his gross velocity into electronic action within his body. Very little energy would be lost in the process. The electrons in each atom would speed up slightly—so slightly—and thus the microscopic speed would be transformed to movement on the microscopic level.
It was on that level that he suddenly sensed the ship was near.
A number of things happened then, following each other too swiftly for thought. The ship put up an impenetrable energy screen. The concentration of so much energy set off the automatic relays he had established in his body. That stopped him a fraction of a microsecond before he had intended to. In terms of distance, that came to just over thirty miles.
He could see the ship as a point of light in the blackness ahead. Its screen was still up, which meant, in all probability, that those inside could not detect him, and that he could no longer hope to get to the ship itself. He assumed that delicate instruments aboard had sensed his approach, identified him as a projectile, and raised the screen as a defense.
Ixtl flashed to within yards of the almost invisible barrier. And there, separated from the realization of his hopes, he gazed hungrily at the ship. It was less than fifty yards away, a round, dark-bodied metal monster, studded with row on row of glaring lights, like diamonds. The space ship floated in the velvet-black darkness, glowing like an immense jewel, quiescent but alive, enormously, vitally alive. It brought nostalgic and vivid suggestion of a thousand far-flung planets and of an indomitable, boisterous life that had reached for the stars, and grasped them. And—in spite of present frustration—it brought hope.
Till this instant there had been so many physical things to do that he had only dimly comprehended what it might mean to him if he could get aboard. His mind, grooved through the uncounted ages to ultimate despair, soared up insanely. His legs and arms glistened like tongues of living fire as they writhed and twisted in the light that blazed from the portholes. His mouth, a gash in his caricature of a human head, slavered a white frost that floated away in little frozen globules. His hope grew so big that the thought of it kept dissolving in his mind, and his vision blurred. Through the blur, he saw a thick vein of light form a circular bulge in the metallic surface of the ship. The bulge became a huge door that rotated open and tilted to one side. A flood of brilliance spilled out of the opening.
There was a pause, and then a dozen two-legged beings came into view. They wore almost transparent armor, and they dragged, or guided, great floating machines. Swiftly, the machines were concentrated around a small area on the ship’s surface. From a distance, the flames that poured forth seemed small, but their dazzling brightness indicated either enormous heat or else a titanic concentration of other radiation. What was obviously repair work proceeded at an alarming rate.
Frantically, Ixtl probed the screen that barred him from the ship, looking for weak spots. He found none. The force was too complex, its coverage too wide, for anything that he could muster against it. He had sensed that at a distance. Now he faced the reality of it.
The work—Ixtl saw they had removed a thick section of the o
uter wall and replaced it with new material—was finished almost as quickly as it had begun. The incandescent glare of the welders died spluttering into darkness. Machines were unclamped, floated toward the opening, down into it, and out of sight. The two-legged beings scrambled after them. The large, curved plain of metal was suddenly as deserted and lifeless as space itself.
The shock of that nearly unseated Ixtl’s reason. He couldn’t let them escape him now, when the whole universe was in his grasp—a few short yards away. His arms reached out, as if he would hold the ship by his need alone. His body ached with a slow, rhythmical hurt. His mind spun toward a black, bottomless pit of despair, but poised just before the final plunge.
The great door was slowing in its swift rotation. A solitary being squeezed through the ring of light and ran to the area that had been repaired. He picked up something and started back towards the open air lock. He was still some distance from it when he saw Ixtl.
He stopped as if he had been struck. Stopped, that is, in a physically unbalanced fashion. In the glow from the portholes, his face was plainly visible through his transparent space suit. His eyes were wide, his mouth open. He seemed to catch himself. His lips began to move rapidly. A minute later, the door was rotating again, outward. It swung open, and a group of the beings came out and looked at Ixtl. A discussion must have followed, for their lips moved at uneven intervals, first one individual’s, then another’s.
Presently, a large metal-barred cage was floated up out of the air lock. There were two men sitting on it, and they seemed to be steering it under its own power. Ixtl guessed that he was to be captured.
Curiously, he had no sense of lift. It was as if a drug was affecting him, dragging him down into an abyss of fatigue. Appalled, he tried to fight the enveloping stupor. He would need all his alertness if his race, which had attained the very threshold of ultimate knowledge, was to live again.
Space Beagle- the Complete Adventures Page 22
