I examined the stud. It was coated over with quick-setting leak-sealer. The stuff was tough but resilient. I got a steel rod and a hammer from the tool-rack and, placing the rod against the stud, hit it once. The leak-sealer cracked off. The bed rolled forward and opened.
It was useless to move him or touch him, or, for that matter, to say anything. Judson was dead, his head twisted almost all the way around. His face was bluish and his eyes stared. He was pushed, jammed, wedged into the small space.
I hit the stud again and the bunk rolled back. Moving without any volition that I could analyze, feeling nothing but a great angry numbness, I cleaned up. I put the rod and the hammer away and fluffed up the piling of the carpeting by the bunk. Then I went and stood in the service cubicle and began to wait.
Wait. Not just stay—wait. I knew he’d be back, just as I suddenly and belatedly understood what it was that every factor in five people had made inevitable. I was coldly hating myself for not having known it sooner.
The great, the admirable, the adventurous in modern civilizaton were Outbounders. To one who wanted and needed personal power, there would be an ultimate goal, greater even than being an Outbounder. And that would be to stand between an Outbounder and his destiny.
For months Flower had blocked Clinton. When she saw she must ultimately lose him to the stars, she went hunting. She saw Judson—reachable, restless Jud—and she heard my assurance that he would soon go Out. Then and there Judson was doomed.
Wold needed admiration the way Flower needed power. To be an Outbounder and wait for poor struggling Tween suited him perfectly. Tween’s certification gave him no alternative but to get rid of her; he couldn’t bring himself to go Out.
Once I had taken care of Tween for him, there remained one person on the entire project who could keep him from going Out—and she was married to Jud. Having married, Jud would stay married. Wold did what he could to smash that marriage. When Jud still hung on, wanting to help Flower, wanting to show me that he had made the right choice, there remained one alternative for Wold. Evidence of that lay cramped and staring under the bunk.
But Wold wasn’t finished. He wouldn’t be finished while Jud’s body remained on Curbstone. In Wold’s emotional state, he would have to go somewhere and drink to figure out the next step. There was no way of sending a ship Out without riding it. So—I waited.
He came back all right. I was cramped, then, and one foot was asleep. I curled and uncurled the toes frantically when I saw the door begin to move, and tried to flatten my big bulk back down out of sight.
He was breathing hard. He put his lips together and blew like a winded horse, wiped his lips on his forearm. He seemed to have difficulty in focusing his eyes. I wondered how much liquor he had poured into that empty place where most men keep their courage.
He took a fine coil of single-strand plastic cord out of his belt-pouch. Fumbling for the end, he found it and dropped the coil. With the exaggerated care of a drunk, he threw a bowline and drew the loop tight, pulled the bight through the loop so he had a running noose. He made this fast to a triangular bracket over the control panel, let it along the edge of the chart-rack and down to the launching control lever. He bent two half-hitches in the cord, slipped it over the end of the lever and drew it tight. The cord now bound the lever in the up—“off”—position.
From the bulkhead he unfastened the clamps which held the heavy-duty fire extinguisher and lifted it down. It weighed half as much as he did. He set it on the floor in front of the control panel, brought the dangling end of the cord through the U-shaped clamp gudgeons on the extinguisher, took a loose half-hitch around the bight, and, lifting the extinguisher between his free arm and his body, pulled the knot tight. Another half-hitch secured it.
Now the heavy extinguisher dangled in mid-air under the control panel. The cord which supported it ran up to the handle of the launching lever and from there, bending over the edge of the chart-rack, to the bracket.
Panting, Wold took out a cigarette and shook it alight. He drew on it hungrily, and then put it on the chart-rack, resting it against the plastic cord.
When the cigarette burned down to the cord, the thermoplastic would melt through with great enthusiasm. The cord would break, the extinguisher would fall, dragging the lever down. And Out would go all the evidence, to be hidden forever, as far as Wold was concerned, and six thousand years from anyone else.
Wold stepped back to survey his work just as I stepped forward out of the service cubicle. I brought up my broken arm and swung it with all my weight—and that is really weight—against the side of his head. The cast, though not heavy, was hard, and it must have hit him like a crowbar.
He went down like an elevator, hitched to his knees, and for a second seemed about to topple. His head sagged. He shook it, slowly looked up and saw me.
“I could use one of those needle-guns,” I said. “Or I could kick you cold and let Coordination handle you. There are regulations for things like you. But I’d rather do it this way. Get up.”
“I never …”
“Get up!” I bellowed, and kicked at him.
He threw his arms around my leg and rolled. As I started down, I pulled the leg in close and whipped it out again. We both hit with a crash on opposite sides of the room. The bunk broke my fall; he was not so lucky. He rose groggily, sliding his back up the door. I lumbered across, deliberately crashed into him and heard ribs crack as the wind gushed out of his lungs.
I stood back a little as he began to sag. I hit him savagely in the face, and his face came back and hit my hand again as his head bounced off the door. I let him fall, then knelt beside him.
There are things you can do to a human body if you know enough physiology—pressures on this and that nerve center which paralyze and cramp and immobilize whole motor-trunk systems. I did these things, and got up, finally, leaving him twisted, sweating in agony. I wheezed over to the control bank and looked critically at the smoldering cigarette. Less than a minute.
“I know you can hear me,” I whispered with what breath I could find. “I’d … like you to know … that you’ll be a hero. Your name will … be on the Great Roll of the … Outbounders. You always … wanted that without any … effort on your part … now you’ve got it.”
I went out. I stopped and leaned back against the wall beside the door. In a few seconds it swung silently shut. I forced back the waves of gray that wanted to engulf me, turned and peered into the port. It showed only blackness.
Jud … Jud, boy … you always wanted it, too. You almost got cheated out of it. You’ll be all right now, son.…
I tottered across the court and out the gate. There was someone standing there. She flew to me, pounded my chest with small hard hands. “Did he go? Did he really go?”
I brushed her off as if she had been a midge, and closed one eye so I could get a single image. It was Flower, without her come-on tunic. Her hair was disarrayed and her eyes were bloodshot.
“They left,” I croaked. “I told you they would. Jud and Wold … you couldn’t stop them.”
“Together? They left together?”
“That’s what Wold got certified for.” I looked bluntly up and down her supple body. “Like everybody else who goes Out together, they had something in common.”
I pushed past her and went back to my office. Lights were blazing over the desk. Judson and Wold. Ship replaced. Quarters cleared. Palm-key removed and filed. I sat and looked blindly until they were all lit and the board blanked out.
I thought, this pump of mine won’t last much longer under this kind of treatment.
I thought, I keep convincing myself that I handle things impartially and fairly, without getting involved.
I felt bad. Bad.
I thought, this is a job without authority, without any real power. I certify ’em, send ’em along, check ’em out. A clerk’s job. And because of that I have to be God. I have to make up my own justice, and execute it myself. Wold was no threat to me or
Curbstone, yet it was in me to give oblivion to him and purgatory to Flower.
I felt frightened and disgusted and puny.
Someone came in, and I looked up blindly. For a moment I could make out nothing but a silver-haloed figure and a muted, wordless murmuring. I forced my eyes to focus, and I had to close them again, as if I had looked into the sun.
Her hair was unbound beneath a diamond ring that circled her brows. The silver silk cascaded about her, brushing the floor behind her, mantling her warm-toned shoulders, capturing small threads of light and weaving them in and about the gleaming light that was her hair. Her deep pigeon’s-blood eyes shone and her lips trembled.
“Tween.…”
The soft murmuring became words, laughter that wept with happiness, small shaking syllables of rapture. “He’s waiting. He wanted to say good-by to you, too … but he asked me to do it for him. He said you’d like that better.”
I could only nod.
She came close to the desk. “I love him. I love him more than I thought anyone could. Somehow, loving him that much, I can … love you, too.”
She bent over the desk and kissed my mouth. Her lips were cool. She—blurred then. Or maybe it was my eyes. When I could see again, she was gone.
The chime, and the lights, one after another.
Marriage recorded.…
Suddenly I relaxed and I knew I could live with the viciousness of what I had done to Wold and to Flower. It had been my will that Judson go Out, and that Tween be happy, and I had been crossed, and I had taken vengeance. And that was small, and decidedly human—not godlike at all.
So, I thought, every day I find something out about people. And, today, I’m people. I felt the pudgy lips that Tween had kissed. I’m old and I’m fat, I thought, and by the Lord, I’m people.
When they call me Charon, they forget what it must be like to be denied both worlds instead of only one.
And they forget the other thing—the little-known fragment of the Charon legend. To the Etruscans, he was more than a ferryman.
He was an executioner.
Rule of Three
THEY WERE A decontamination squad—three energy-entities (each triple)—on a routine check of a known matter-entity culture. What they traveled in was undoubtedly a ship, since it moved through space, except that it was not a physical structure of metal. It slowed down like a light wave that had suddenly grown tired.
“There it is,” said RilRylRul.
The two other triads merged their light-perceptions and observed it. “Out at the edge,” said KadKedKud, in satisfaction. “It should not be too difficult to handle out there. When infection spreads near the heart of a Galaxy, it can be troublesome.”
MakMykMok cautioned, “Don’t underestimate the job until it’s surveyed.”
“It’s a very small sun,” said Ril. “Which one of the planets is it? The fourth?”
“No, the greenish-blue one, the third.”
“Very well.”
In due time the ship—a bubble of binding energy and collapsed, rarefied gas molecules—entered the atmosphere. It reshaped itself gradually into a round-nosed, tapered transparency and dropped sharply, heading due west over the planet’s equator.
“Busy little things, aren’t they?”
As the world turned under them, they watched. They saw the ships, the cities. In the microscopic, intangible fluxes of force which were nerve and sinew and psyche to their triple structure, they stored their observations. They recorded the temperature of steel converters and ships’ power plants, calculated the strength of materials of buildings and bridges by their flexure in a simply computed wind velocity, judged and compared the flow-shapes of air and ground vehicles.
“We could return right now,” said Kad. “Any race which has progressed this far in such a brief time must be a healthy one. Otherwise, how could—”
“Look!” Ril flashed.
They watched, appalled. “They are killing one another!”
“It must be a ritual,” said Kad, “or perhaps a hunt. But we’d better investigate closer.”
They dropped down, swiftly overtook a low-flying open-cockpit biplane with a black cross on the fuselage, and settled on the cowling behind the pilot’s head. Mak interpenetrated the ship’s wall and, treading and passing the air molecules which fled past, reached the pilot’s leather helmet at the nape of the neck. Contact was made and broken almost in the same moment of time, and Mak hurtled back in horror to the skin of their ship.
“Get clear!” he ordered.
In three microseconds the invisible ship was in the upper atmosphere, with Mak still clinging to the outer skin.
“What was it?”
“Pa’ak, the most vicious, most contagious energy-virus known. That creature is crawling with them! Never have I seen such an infestation! Examine me. Irradiate me. Be careful, now—be sure.”
It was strong medicine, but effective. Mak weakly permeated through the ship’s wall and came inside. “Disgusting. Utterly demoralizing. How can the creature live in that condition?”
“Worse than Murktur III?”
“Infinitely worse. On Murktur I never saw a concentration higher than 14, and that was enough to reduce the natives to permanent bickering. These bipeds can apparently stand a concentration of over 120 on the same scale. Incredible.”
“Perhaps that individual is quarantined.”
“I doubt it. It was flying its own machine; it can apparently land at will anywhere. But we will check further. Mak, you were quite right,” said Ril. “Don’t underestimate the job indeed. Why, with an infestation like that, and a drive like that … what couldn’t they accomplish if they were clean?”
They swooped close to the land, barely touched the hair of a child on a hilltop, and soared again, shaken and frightened.
“From what we’ve seen, that one was no more than 15% of maximum size. How do you read the Pa’ak concentration?”
“Over 70. This place is a pesthole. These creatures must be stopped—and soon. You know how soon such a technology reaches for the stars.”
“Shall we send for reinforcements?”
“Before investigating? Certainly not. And after all, there are three of us.”
“We shall have to protect ourselves,” Ril pointed out.
“You mean—dissociate? Divide our triple selves?”
“You know that’s the only way we can remain undetected by the Pa’ak. Of course, once we know exactly how they have developed here, and have analyzed the psychic components of the natives, we can re-synthesize.”
“I hate the thought of dividing myself. So weak, so impotent …”
“So safe. Don’t forget that. Once we’ve encased ourselves in the minds of these creatures and analyzed them, we’ll have to join ourselves again to fight the Pa’ak.”
“Yes, indeed. And we’ll be together again soon. Take care,” added Mak, the cautious one. “The Pa’ak are mindless, but exceedingly dangerous.”
“Hungry,” Kad supplemented.
“Especially for our kind. Shall we begin?”
The ship disappeared, bursting like a bubble. The three dropped, sharing a wordless thought that was like a handclasp. Then each of them separated into three, and the nine particles drifted down through the atmosphere.
The news is apples for the unemployed … disarmament … the Model A Ford.
A young girl lay on her stomach under a tree, reading. She yawned widely, choked a little, swallowed, and went back to her book.
Two friends shook hands. Later, one absentmindedly palmed the back of his neck. Something was rubbed into his skin. The other young man scratched his wrist as he walked away.
Something was in the drinking water, though neither the nurse, as she filled the glass, nor the little girl, as she drank, knew of it.
Some dust settled on a toothbrush.
A small boy sank his teeth into his bread-and-jam. The rich, red preserve drooled to the table. The boy put his finger in it, thrust t
he finger into his mouth.
Another youngster ran through the dewy morning grass in his bare feet.
Somewhere, two dust motes were waiting their turn.
And a number of years went by.
The news is Korea and Tibet … protein synthesis … Aureomycin … leaf and grain hormone poisons … the McCarran Act.
There was a character at the party named Irving, and Jonathan Prince, Consulting Psychologist, didn’t like him. This Irving played guitar and sang folk songs in a resonant baritone, which was fine; but after that he would put a lampshade on his head and be the “March of the Wooden Soldiers” or some such, and that was as funny, after the fourth viewing, as a rubber crutch. So Jonathan let his eyes wander.
When his gaze came to the dark girl sitting by the door, his breath hissed in suddenly.
Priscilla was sitting next to him. She said “Ouch,” and he realized he had squeezed her hand painfully.
“What’s the matter, Jon?”
“I just—nothing, Pris.” He knew it was tactless, because he knew the sharpness of Priscilla’s tilted eyes, but he couldn’t help it; he stared back at the dark girl.
The girl’s hair was blue-black and gleamed like metal, yet he knew how soft it would be. Her eyes were brown, wide apart, deep. He knew how they would crinkle on the outside ends when she smiled. He knew, as a matter of fact, that she had a small brown mole on the inside of her left thigh.
Irving was still singing. Of course it had to be “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” Priscilla pressed Jon’s hand, gently. He leaned toward her.
She whispered, “Who’s the charmer? Someone you know?”
He hesitated. Then he nodded and said, without smiling, “My ex-wife.”
Priscilla let his hand go.
Jonathan waited until Irving finished his song and, in the applause, rose.“ ’Scuse …” he muttered. Priscilla didn’t seem to be listening.
He crossed the room and stood in front of the dark girl until she looked up at him. He saw the little crinkle by her eyes before he saw the smile.
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