The Warlock's Companion wisoh-9

by Christopher Stasheff

  So Whitey started travelling again, living the lifestyle he preferred, even though he wasn't travelling very far. He developed it into a system—move into town a month after the first semester began, and by the time the School Board realized he was there, he was already packing up to move on. Then three months there, and the school year was almost over, so there was no point in starting—and, of course, by the time the next school year was beginning, he'd already put his apartment on the market and gone to contract on a new one in another town-asteroid.

  And Lona learned. And learned. And learned.

  By the time she was ten, she knew enough to be able to piece-together the sequence of events from the printout. Not that she needed the hard copy, of course—she was able to access it by herself as she explained it to Whitey in a flat, controlled, emotionless voice.

  Only one force-field generator had blown. Only one, but all the force-domes interlocked—so when one went, it disrupted its six neighbors' fields badly enough so that all the air poured out of them into its sector—and gushed out into space in a swirl of snowflakes. Their generators all tried to strengthen their domes, and the whole system overloaded, fields weakening to the point where Terran sea level air pressure could rip through them, gusting in the first and only wind Homestead had ever known, howling around the eaves of all the houses the settlers had built in their cocksure confidence in their dome, around the eaves and down the streets and on into the fieldless sector, then out into space, leaving only vacuum behind.

  And bodies.

  And, in one house, a little girl whose silly, overprotective daddy had insisted on making his house airtight, even though everybody knew it wasn't necessary, because the dome enveloped the whole asteroid in a force field that could never be punctured by any meteor—a silly daddy and a silly mommy who had put their little girl to bed, then gone outside to hold hands and look at the stars.

  Whitey held his face immobile, his heart swelling up with pride in his son, but squeezing in with pity for the little girl.

  The little girl who had waked up to find everybody else dead, and no one nearby to tell her it wasn't her fault.

  The little girl who sat looking at the computer screen with eighty-year-old eyes in a ten-year-old face, a little girl whose foolish grandfather could only stand beside her, wishing there were something he could do, and asking,

  "But what made that first generator blow?"

  "I don't know," Lona answered, "but I'm going to find out. And when I do, I'm going to make sure that it never, ever happens again."

  But she didn't shed a single tear.

  Whitey wished that she would.

  So they hired a burro-boat and went out to Homestead. It wasn't hard to find a pressure suit in her size—children weren't all that rare in the Asteroid Belt. Not any more; not since the domes had been pronounced safe and fail-safe.

  The ordinary domes, that is—the standard ones.

  "Anybody who'd take a kid to live in an experiment has all the moral sensibility of a cuckoo," Whitey muttered—but it made him uneasy. Would his son have been a little less cocksure if Whitey had stayed with him?

  "What did you say, Gran'pa?"

  "Oh, nothing, Lona. Come on, let's go look." He fastened his helmet and checked her seals; she checked his. Then they stepped into the miniscule airlock.

  "An hour and ten, standard," the pilot told him. "Any more than that, and I'm pushing an energy crisis."

  "Back in forty-five," Whitey assured him, and sealed the inner hatch.

  Bastard could wait, he thought—a burro-boat could run for a week or more on a block of ice. Of course, the reason old Herman had taken the charter was because he was down to frost, or so he said—but Whitey had to admit it was better to play safe. Still, he doubted the prospector was that low.

  The patch turned green, and Whitey pushed it. The hatch swung open, and he reached out to clip his safety line to a ring bolt. Then he climbed out, moving slowly and smoothly in the negligible gravity, then turned back to take Lona's line, clip it to a ring bolt, and help her out.

  She came out easily; free fall was nothing new to her (Whitey had made sure she took gymnastic lessons). But she was pale, her eyes huge. He felt a stab of guilt at having brought her back to the scene of the calamity, but steeled himself to it—the doctor had said it was okay, hadn't she? Still, he watched the child very carefully. "Over here, Lona— Herman did a very good job. It's only fifty yards away."

  She nodded, looking all about her, face haunted, as she groped for his hand.

  And no wonder, Whitey thought, looking around him at the empty houses and storage buildings. They were near a park with playground equipment, swing chains dangling from a central mast, pathetic in their loneliness. There was only an occasional broken window (windows on an asteroid! The gall, the audacity, the sheer overweening pride of these pioneers!). That was all, no other damage. Oh, here and there, the odd tile had broken loose from a roof, but only a few—when the wind had come, it hadn't had much force. It was vacuum that had killed this place, not hurricane.

  It was a grim town, dead and forlorn, with memories of families and laughter and tears—a ghost town in space.

  "Are there any—bodies?" Lona swallowed, hard.

  "No—the disaster squad took them all away for burial." No need to add that the crypt was under the skin of the asteroid itself. "If it seems you've been here before, it's nothing to worry about. You have been."

  "I know," she said, her voice flat in his helmet speakers, "but it's really creepy. It all looks the same, and it makes me feel like I'm little again—but it's all so different."

  Yes, without life. Whitey reminded himself that the doctor had said this would strengthen her immensely, would banish any lingering ghosts of guilt, that there was almost no chance of another breakdown, she was a very strong little girl inside now. "Of course, we can't ever be completely sure, Mr. Whitey. The human brain is inconceivably complex."

  "Is that the generator?" Lona stared at the hemisphere of metal honeycomb before them, in a fenced-off section of the park.

  "No, just its antenna," Whitey answered. "The generator's underground."

  Lona stared up at him. "Then how could it blow up?"

  "We don't know it blew up," Whitey reminded her. "Come on, let's look."

  He found the trapdoor set into the rock beside the antenna, punched in the combination. It had been a real job getting that set of numbers—they were classified material of the highest order, vital to public safety (never mind the fact that the people they were supposed to guard had died four years before). But finally, with a letter from the doctor testifying how important the expedition was for the child's mental health, a few bribes, and a flawless train of logic, the relevant bureaucrat had reluctantly agreed to let him have the combination. It was reassuring, in its way, giving you the feeling that the living were protected as well as the dead.

  Whitey swung the lock handle and hauled the trapdoor open. They went down carefully, him first, flashlight probing the darkness around him. "Careful not to foul my line."

  "I won't, Gran'pa." But she wasn't being sassy about it—that worried him.

  Then he saw the generator.

  He stopped stock still, just standing there, staring.

  "Gran'pa," she said, "it's…"

  "In perfect condition." Whitey nodded. "At least, it looks that way. Let's just check, child."

  Then he brought out the toolkit, opened the access panels one by one, and took out the circuit checker. "What do I do with this thing?"

  "Red lead to contact A, Gran'pa—there." Lona pointed. "And blue lead to contact D."

  "I'm glad one of us knows what I'm doing…"

  But Lona was frowning at the meter, frowning and taking out her keypad. She punched in the data displayed on the circuit and said, "Red lead to contact B, Granpa, and blue lead to contact H."

  So it went, Whitey placing the probes where she told him, she frowning at the readout and punching data into
her keypad. He began to think she wasn't really aware of him any more, was just using him as a sort of voice-activated servomechanism.

  Well, at least it was some sign of life.

  Finally, she straightened up with a sigh and said, "That's all. We've checked every circuit. There's nothing more here for me."

  Whitey fastened the access panels back in place, listening to her words echo inside his head in secret, sad satisfaction. But he kept his face solemn, a little exasperated, and glanced at the time display built into his faceplate. "Not a minute too soon; I promised Herman forty-five minutes, and it's been fifty. Come on, child, let's go—and counterclockwise, please—let's not get our tails snarled."

  "Hm? Oh sure, Gran'pa." and she followed him out, frowning, deep in thought.

  Whitey fastened the trapdoor back in place and took her hand, turning back toward the burro-boat. "Learn anything?"

  "Uh-huh." She nodded. "It's in perfect working order."

  "What?" Whitey jerked to a stop, staring down at her.

  "It is, Gran'pa." She sounded a little bit afraid, as though she might have done something wrong. "We could power it up, and it could put out a dome."

  Whitey kept a firm hold on Lona's hand, but whether it was for her stability or his, he couldn't have said. His mind, at least, was in a whirl. "How could that generator have failed if it was in perfect working order?"

  "Somebody turned it off."

  He looked down at Lona, startled.

  She looked up at him out of wide, grave eyes. "Somebody had to have turned it off, Gran'pa. It's the only way."

  "But it took me a full week, a letter testifying need, and a dozen forms to five different offices, to get the combination for that lock—and that's when it wasn't operating! How could anybody even have gotten to it?"

  "I don't know," Lona said, "but somebody did."

  Whitey froze as a thought hit him. "Child," he said slowly, "I didn't see a power switch in there."

  Lona stopped dead with one foot in the air. Then, carefully, she put it down and nodded. "You're right, Gran'pa. There wasn't any."

  "Well, if there's no switch, who could turn it off?"

  "The computer," she said.

  "But that means somebody programmed it to turn off the field!"

  She was quiet for a moment, then asked, "Couldn't it have developed a glitch?"

  "Chances are obscenely low, child! But who could have reached the computer?"

  "Gotta find out," she mumbled, and turned away toward the boat.

  Whitey came out of his stupefaction and hurried after her. Abstracted as she was, she was apt to bump into a sharp piece of junk and tear her suit—so he was in the perfect position when he saw the drilling laser on the boat's bow turn toward them.

  He hurled himself at her in a long, flat dive that caught her hips right across his shoulder and carried her into cover behind a house as the laser bolt spattered molten rock where she'd been standing. She cried out, of course, and Whitey snapped, "Quiet!" His brain revved into high gear, picking illusion as their only defense and pegging the manner of it instantly. "Now get in there, and lie absolutely still!" he snapped, cradling her in one arm and holding the other forefinger up in front of his faceplate. Helmet or not, she recognized the "Sh!" sign and squeezed her lips shut, eyes wide, stiff as a fashion doll.

  The stiffness didn't help any, but he managed to dodge around a corner, weave a right-angled "S" around three houses, find a broken window that he could reach in and unlock, then opened the casement and pushed Lona through. She grabbed the nearest table and crouched under it, wide-eyed. Whitey pointed downward, hoping she understood that he wanted her to go down into the cellar, and very much aware that whoever had fired on them must be listening to their radio frequency. Then he turned away, dodging and weaving as far from his granddaughter as he could, eyeing the black sky with trepidation, knowing the burro-boat must be aloft and hunting.

  And it was. Fire spat down out of sun-glare—right into the first house he'd hidden behind. He felt a glow of satisfaction—the would-be murderer had blasted the spot where Whitey had said he was hiding Lona. Because the gunman had been eavesdropping on their suit frequency, of course, and thought Whitey had stuffed Lona into hiding at that first house.

  Only you can't "blast" something with a drilling laser—the beam is too narrow, and the power's too low. Constant, but low—and the blast was still walking down out of the sky, stabbing the house again, and again, and again.

  How long can he keep that up? Whitey wondered, and the idea blossomed. Because a laser used a lot more power than the bursts of acceleration needed in the Belt, and maybe Herman had been telling the truth, maybe he really was that low on fuel.

  But he had to keep that idiot in the boat firing. He'd be done with that house very soon—and he'd figure Whitey wasn't in it.

  Hatred seared through Whitey, hatred at any man who could try to burn up a child like that. He put his feet against the nearest wall and shoved off, darting from house to house, looking for something, anything, to keep the man shooting.

  And cover—to keep the murderer from shooting him.

  A blank wall loomed in front of him—a warehouse. The door was open, of course—why lock anything, when you know all your neighbors? He ducked in and breathed a sigh of relief, then pushed himself over to a window on the long side, and looked out at the square with the park at its far end.

  The boat was there, right enough, hovering fifty feet up, high enough to see any movement, low enough to be within range—and not firing.

  But if it was in range to shoot at them, it was in range to be shot. Whitey toggled his helmet lamp and cast about frantically, looking for a weapon, some kind of weapon, or at least something that would make a big explosion of light…

  And there they were, racked against the side wall, right next to the door he'd come in by, twenty rifles, plugged in to recharge. Whitey hopped over to them, blessing the Belter's inherited sense of caution—the Asteroid Belt detachment of Marines had kept the peace well for the last fifty years, but there were still old-timers around who could tell hair-raising stories of the pirates and claim-jumpers who had riddled the asteroids almost from the day they were opened to prospecting, and had even made a fair bid to establish their own tyranny. The pirates were gone, but it had become traditional to keep a rifle handy.

  Very handy. Whitey unplugged one, blessing his luck and hoping the current was still running. No reason why it shouldn't be—the planetoid had been powered by a fission generator, which was good for fifty years. No reason to have shut it down, either, with fissionables so plentiful out here. He picked out a rivet on the far wall for a target, set the rifle on low power, sighted, and squeezed.

  The bolt of energy spattered a circle of molten metal, just above and to the left of the target.

  Whitey's heart sang as he corrected the sights and fired again. This time the rivet disappeared, and he leaped back to the window, setting the rifle to full power, aiming at the burro-boat, breathing out, and squeezing the firing patch.

  A flower of fire lit the boat's bow.

  It was turning toward him even as Whitey was squeezing off his second shot. Whoever the pilot was, he recognized a real weapon when he saw its bolt, and knew he had to put it out of action fast. The boat shot toward the warehouse as the drill bored down, punching through the warehouse roof.

  But Whitey was already out the door and crouching behind the next house. He popped up above the roof, aimed, fired, and ducked down, then arrowed away behind the next house, then popped up to fire again just as the drill pierced the last roof he'd fired from. He torpedoed away again, but around a corner, because two points determine a straight line, and two events determine a trend, if you're the kind to jump to conclusions.

  The assassin was, and the beam hit the third house in the row. But Whitey was firing from two houses south, then from the house west, then two houses west. His blood pounded in his ears, his heart thrilled to the hunt, even though he
kept expecting to pop up and see ruby fire all around him.

  But he didn't—the assassin never knew where he'd be next. Not surprising—Whitey didn't, either.

  Then, finally, the beam grew dim.

  That was it—one shot dim, then only a feeble glow from the drill, then nothing. The burro-boat floated in the night, not a light showing, not a flicker of a rocket.

  Whitey waited, holding his breath. Finally, he had to breathe, but the boat still hadn't moved. Slowly, he started back to the warehouse, keeping an eye on the burro-boat, but there wasn't the least sign of life, or of movement. Whitey grinned, picturing the man inside raging, stabbing pressure patches in blind panic, not even able to get back to the asteroid and the hidden scooter he surely had ridden out from Ceres, not able to shoot, to transmit, to move.

  Out of juice. Completely.

  Whitey ducked in through the door and began to search the warehouse more thoroughly. If there were rifles, maybe there was a radio.

  There was, and it was plugged in to recharge, too. Whitey turned it on, set the frequency to the emergency mark, toggled his helmet's loudspeaker, and bent down to put it next to the microphone grille. "Emergency! Calling Marine Patrol, Sector 6…"

  The only sour note, he reflected, was that the assassin couldn't hear his call.

  The Marines were there in an hour—after all, Ceres was a commute, not a day trip. Not that the murderer was going anywhere, of course. But it was time enough for Whitey to go back and collect a very thoroughly frightened Lona, a little girl who was sobbing with fear and dread of the haunted place where she crouched alone, then crying her eyes out with relief. Whitey had soothed her and comforted her and had her looking brave, by the time the Marine ship loomed over them—space suits or not, a hug is a hug.

  "His name is Cornelius Hanash," the Marine captain said, closing the door to his office and coming around to sit down by the desk.