Terrors

by Richard A. Lupoff

  To reach Kaspak Portal, the Harris passed smack through the null-g point in the geometric center of Starrett.

  The null-g point and the ultra-low-g zone surrounding it were the homes of a number of fascinating species of life, both animal and vegetable. There was null-g lichen, for instance. There were floating blobs of water that hosted perfectly globular fishes of various colors. There were several species of footless birds that spent their entire lives in the air, never coming to earth (as it were), not even to lay their eggs or build nests (which they did in the null-g lichen).

  One interesting aspect of this null-g lichen was the complex, freeform network of neural-like filament that spread throughout the stuff. It had been theorized that consciousness and intelligence, rather than being discrete attributes of any particular species, were actually inescapable concomitants of any signaling network of sufficient size and complexity.

  And the null-g lichen that floated in the center of Starrett was big enough, and the network of signal-conducting, neural-like fibers it contained was complex enough, to come in well over the critical line.

  It might not be altogether inaccurate to characterize Starrett’s null-g lichen as … smart moss!

  And here was the ultralight shuttle Clare Winger Harris flittering upward Hollywood containing one fat, bald, sweaty-browed, cigar-chomping, rum-swigging studio head named Tarquin Armbruster IV, and one seven-foot-tall, elegant, metallic-green, imitation-polar-bear-fur-covered production chief called Golda Abromowitz.

  And what Tarquin and Golda have on their minds as their shuttle penetrated the wispy outer edges of the null-g lichen that drifted in the center of Starrett?

  Why, nothing other than the peculiar physical attributes of the wonderful Whateley brothers. You know, all those tentacles and suckers and half-formed eyes and writing ropes and stovepipe legs and Gawd in Heaven that half face on top!

  Now meet P. H. “Biff” Connaught.

  Biff Connaught was head of security for Macrotech Associates. A red-faced, gray-haired, middle-aged fellow, Biff had been up and down the corporate ladder in his day. He now held a responsible but not very glamorous position, the chief advantage of which was the chance it provided Biff to live out his fantasies.

  In his youth, Biff had wanted to be a policeman complete with uniform, badge and gun. He didn’t know quite why that job appealed to him. If he’d been a more insightful person, he might have detected a certain flaw in his own psyche, a gnawing sense of inadequacy, a psychic impotence, which he could overcome by placing himself in a position of psychological dominance and authority.

  By the time Biff was of age, he was able to live out his wishes by becoming a cop.

  How he came to leave the official police force is another story. But having done so, he moved into private security work, rose by diligent application from uniformed rent-a-bull to plainclothes, and ultimately to head of security for Macrotech. He had, by this time, realized that the power of the plainclothes chief of security was even greater than that of the uniformed harness bulls he commanded.

  Besides, Biff was issued a most impressive badge that he kept in a pocket-case ready for flashing. And he carried an old-fashioned snub-nose revolver under his armpit; the snubnose had been purchased in an antique shop on Mirzam Beta IV. Biff personally restored it to worker order and hand-loaded ammunition for it.

  Top management at Macrotech Associates was very worried about Alex Ulianov and Amy 2-3-4 Al-Khnemu’s research project on instantaneous communication.

  On the face of it, it should be a boon to interstellar civilization. After all, the hypospace drive developed by Macrotech’s competitor Vieux Carré Products A.G. had been a positive gift from heaven. Prior to the availability of hypospace, nobody had been able to travel any faster than the speed of light. In fact, travel had been limited to a pace asymptotically approaching light-speed. Four-plus years from Sol to Centaurus, four hundred thousand (except that nobody bothered to try it) from Centaurus to Yggdrasill.

  One the engineers at Vieux Carré developed hypospace drive and the company’s sales force marketed it, all of that changed. Little exploring ships—and later, big colonizing ships—and still later, roving traders and interstellar gypsy camps like Starrett, Weinbaum, and Zealia Reed—could go anywhere in the galaxy in a tiny fraction of the time it would have taken at mere light-speed.

  Hypospace wasn’t exactly a faster-than-light drive. It didn’t involve tachyons or anything like that. Nor did it involve the fourth dimension, or those famous (but, alas, apparently nonexistent) “wormholes” in space. What the Vieux Carré hypospace drive did, in effect, was let you cut across space-time vectors and re-emerge into normal space wherever you wanted. It still took time to make the trip, but it didn’t take anywhere near as long as it would have in normal space.

  Kind of like this. If you were sitting in a house on the surface of a planet—say, in the city of Xnmp’pr on Houdini III—and you could sort of anchor yourself to one spot while the globe spun beneath you at a thousand miles per hour or so, you’d get the effect of travelling at a thousand miles per hour without actually moving at all.

  If you added all of the vectored motions going on around you—the rotation of Houdini III, the orbital motion of the planet around its sun, the movement of that sun within its local star-group, the motion of that group relative to the rest of the galaxy, the motion of the galaxy within its local galactic cluster, and so on up the scale—you could accumulate a terrific amount of speed.

  That’s what the Vieux Carré drive did for you. And it yielded the effect, if not the literal actuality, of faster-than-light.

  But it still wasn’t instantaneous.

  Now then, while hypospace drive had been a vast blessing, matter-duplicators had been, let’s say, a mixed blessing at best.

  The folks in the executive suite at Macrotech Associates wanted to make that that instantaneous communication, if it ever happened, was put to only beneficial use.

  They were also concerned that it bring a nice fat profit to Macrotech. Unlike the matter-duplicator, which had yielded a modest profit to Z. Z. Zachary & Associates, but quickly ceased to do so once people caught on to the trick of using matter-duplicators to make more matter-duplicators. It was sure as hell cheaper than buying ’em from Z. Z. Zachary.

  So P. H. “Biff” Connaught was called to the executive suite of the Macrotech headquarters palace and presented with the problem of keeping Alex and Amy and their glittery project under control. Along with Biff, the top dogs also summoned Cyndora Vexmann, the head of Macrotech’s psychotechnology division. They figured Cyndora might have some pretty good suggestions to make.

  The little shuttle-ship Clare Winger Harris penetrated the null-g zone in the center of Starrett. As the ship moved through the region it pierced the cloudlike body of lichen that had mutated and evolved in the peculiar conditions that obtain in the very center of a hollow world.

  The ship’s passage through the lichen caused a wave-field to ripple through the lichen, making a sound, a barely audible sound. If you’d been there you might have described it as a kind of brushing, swishing, crackling noise. You might have reproduced it, at least approximately, by making a soft ch’ch’ch’ch sound with the middle of your tongue pressed against the roof of your mouth, the tip of your tongue pointed toward the backs of your top-front teeth, and your lips slightly pursed.

  Try that and exhale softly through your mouth, and you’ll something close to the sound.

  The lichen had never had a name, but if you want to call it something (other than “lichen,” of course) you might as well call it “Ch-ch-ch.”

  Inside the Clare Winger Harris, Tarquin Armbruster IV was sitting at the pilot’s post, chewing a black Nueva Cubana Magnifico and sweating bullets. Golda Abromowitz was bent over a copy of Martin van Buren MacTavish’s script for The Dunwich Horror, trying to figure out a way to portray the Whateley brothers and save the production (and Colossal Galactic into the bargain).

 
Ch-ch-ch was minding its own business, keeping its resident birds, insects, ponds, fishes and small reptiles happy.

  Suddenly Ch-ch-ch felt itself punctured. It was a hell of a shock, although probably didn’t exactly hurt Ch-ch-ch. Can you apply the concept of pain to a null-g lichen? Even to an intelligent one?

  Probably not.

  In a fleeting moment the Harris was gone. Ch-ch-ch, being fairly amorphous in composition, slowly drifted back together and resumed its commonplace little life.

  But a chunk of Ch-ch-ch got itself hooked onto the outer skin of the shuttle, and was carried away from its parent.

  Responding to the local gravity of the shuttle this new body of lichen spread itself thinly over the skin of the ship.

  Inside the Harris, Tarquin Armbruster IV chomped down on his Nueva Cubana Magnifico and grunted. To Golda Abromowitz he said, “Hey, I never noticed before, this little ship even has tinted glass in the viewplates. Not bad! Maybe we should try a space adventure.”

  “Too old hat. Forget it. Golda didn’t even look up from MacTavish’s Dunwich Horror script.

  The intelligent lichen spread almost invisibly thin over the shuttle was having all sorts of interesting new experiences. Gravity. Inertia. Weight. Kinesis. Thought.

  Above all, thought.

  Ch-ch-ch had been exposed to the mental activity, such as it was, of the many small creatures that lived within its spongelike channels and protuberances. But now Ch-ch-ch Junior was picking up on the mental emanations of Tarquin and Golda.

  Junior was absolutely flabbergasted. Dazzled, amazed, strangely pleased by the sensation of thought and mental imagery. And flabbergasted.

  “You understand why you can’t know anything about your work,” Cyndora Vexmann purred.

  “No, we really don’t,” Amy 2-3-4 Al-Khnemu replied. She shot a glance at Al Ulianov; he nodded in response. She was to speak for the two of them.

  Cyndora smiles. “Place yourselves in the company’s shoes. The operative precedent—I was briefed by legal, of course—goes back to the old Disney versus Sony case. You remember that.”

  “No, we really don’t,” Amy replied.

  Cyndora heaved a sigh. “It had to do with videotape recorders. I don’t suppose you remember those, or even heard of them.”

  Al Ulianov said, “I think I remember learning something about them in a history course. I think they were phased out in favor of gramophone cylinders. Or was it the other way around?”

  “What it had to do with,” Cyndora said, “was providing the public with technology they could use to duplicate copyrighted tapes. Disney held a lot of valuable copyrights. Once people had video recorders they could make copies of their own. Either capture broadcast material or duplicate existing tapes. Disney wanted to restrict the public to play-only technology.”

  “Huh! What happened?” Amy leaned forward in her chair. “I never heard of the case.”

  “What happened was, Disney won in court but it was too late to stop the recorder business. There were already millions of the things around. So they won the battle but lost the war.”

  Amy exchanged another glance with her partner. “What does all this have to do with us?”

  “I’ll tell you what, you little creeps!” That was Biff Connaught speaking, as you probably figured. Biff didn’t purr. He growled sometimes, and roared occasionally, but he did not purr.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Biff repeated. “We know what you’re up to. Instantaneous communication!”

  “Of course,” Amy agreed. “It’s in our reports. It’s in our funding requests. You’re some detective, Biff, to figure that out. Next you’ll tell us that you’ve discovered what the P. H. in your name stands for.”

  “Never mind my name! Biff will do, you –” The last few syllables of Biff’s speech trailed away. He glared at Amy. “Come to think of it, it’s Captain Connaught to you. As head of security I’m equivalent to a police captain in grade.”

  “Come on, Alex.” Amy 2-3-4 Al-Khnemu placed her hand on Alex Ulianov’s wrist. “We don’t have to put up with this.”

  Cyndora Vexmann stopped them. “Dr. Al-Khnemu. Dr. Ulianov. Please accept my apology in behalf of Macrotech Associates. Captain Connaught meant no harm. He’s just an unlettered ruffian.” She turned toward Connaught. “Please, Biff, either learn to treat people decently or limit yourself to dealing with trespassers and petty thieves.”

  Biff managed to flush beneath his walnut-colored complexion. “Uk! I guess I….” Again his words trailed away.

  “What top management is concerned about,” Cyndora turned back toward Amy and Alex, “is that your work will get out of corporate control. And once the secret is out—well, you know how hard it is to enforce things like patents and copyrights over interstellar distances.”

  “Indeed. But—what do you have in mind?”

  Cyndora smiled her most disarming smile. “We just can’t afford to have information leaking out about your work. And, to be totally candid, we can’t afford to have you know about your work, either. That goes back to the old video recorder case, too. Technicians were working for companies, trying to concoct security devices for broadcasters. Then they’d go home and design boxes to unscramble scrambled signals, crack the very codes they themselves had devised. Oh, it was really something!”

  “You still haven’t told us what you want to do. Or what you want us to do.”

  Cyndora short a glance at Biff Connaught. She said, “Amy, Alex, all we want to do is lock up Macrotech’s proprietary information. When you go home from work, we want you to leave everything behind you. Have a good time. Enjoy yourselves. Go null-g swimming, listen to good music, imbibe your favorite euphorics, do whatever you please.”

  She smiled as disarmingly as she knew how.

  “But we don’t want you to do anything about instantaneous communication. Not talk or even think about it. Not—even—know—about—it!”

  Amy laughed, a single, grunt-like laugh. “And how are we supposed to do that? It sounds like the famous club where the initiation test was to stand in the corner for five minutes and not think of a polar bear.”

  Cyndora stood up and took a few strides, so that she stood before Amy and Alex, facing them, a broad window stretching horizontally behind her.

  Though it, Amy could see the rolling, concave landscape of Dinganzicht. Linden trees, elms and willows dotted the green vista outside the Macrotech compound. In the distance, before the rising hills faded into a misted vista, a narrow stream purled over a rocky course. Jumping fish splashed every now and then.

  A small brown bear bent patiently at the edge of the water, waiting for dinner to make itself available.

  Cyndora Vexman said, “You’ll just forget all about instantaneous communication when you leave work each evening, and remember it again when you come back each morning.”

  “And how will we do that?”

  “Ah, that’s where Biff-O boy over there finally showed a little intelligence. He came to me and I devised a simple little scheme. We just give each of you a couple of key words. We set up a mental compartmentalization for the latest insta-com project, and we lock it off from the rest of your mind. When you come to work, we speak one key word, the lock opens, and you have complete access to the proprietary data. When it’s time to go home after work, we just speak the other key word and—click!—the door goes shut, the lock snaps closed, and you don’t have to worry anything about your work until tomorrow. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  Amy and Alex exchanged glances.

  “I’m not so sure it is,” Amy said. “I don’t like the idea of you or Biff-O or anybody else tampering with my mind. And I’m sure Alex feels the same way.

  Alex nodded. “Sure do.”

  Cyndora shook her head slowly. “I don’t blame you for feeling that way. I wouldn’t want anybody tampering with my mind either. But this has been used time after time. It works perfectly, and it doesn’t interfere with your free will or your recollections in any wa
y.”

  She smiled winsomely.

  Amy said, “Except?”

  Cyndora shot a glance at Biff, then said, “Except what? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, there has to be an except, or you wouldn’t bother with all this.”

  “Oh.” Cyndora gave Amy a very sincere look, turned and did the same to Alexander Ulianov. “Well except you can’t remember what you’re working on. Actually, we usually give people a little cover story. People feel uncomfortable not knowing what they do all day, and if they’re not allowed to know what it is, we give them something else to think they’ve been working on.”

  She shifted her position uncomfortably. “For instance, we might work out a little cover story for you two, for you and Alex here, that you were working on, say, a whole new generation of ultra-high-tech food processors. You see? You’d actually believe it yourselves, in your off-duty hours. You could tell that to your friends and they’d believe it. Only, when you got to work each morning, thinking you were going to work on the new food-processor line, why, Biff or I or someone else would be waiting, and we’d just say the key words, and you’d remember all about the instant-com project.”

  Alex Ulianov said, “I wonder how many people are already working this way. Amy, you know Zipper Dornbauer down at the lab? He always says he’s working on an advanced pastry wisk product. But Macrotech doesn’t make pastry wisks. I’ve wondered about that. And Magda di Gazzioli in advanced projects, says she’s reformulating basic cold Crayola x formulas. She’s really enthusiastic about the project, always talks about it down at the corner saloon. But Macrotech doesn’t make crayons.”

  Amy 2-3-4 al-Khnemu had been paying close attention to Alex’s words. Now she turned angrily back toward Biff and Cyndora. Before she could speak, Biff stood up.

  The stupid, somewhat cloddish features on Biff Connaught’s face assumed a more animated character than they usually showed. (Which, admittedly, was not very animated at that.)