by David Coy
“See you later.”
He broke the connection and handed the phone to Bailey who stuffed it back into her bag.
He briefed the others.
The ship was bi-symmetrical with a single head. Of all the possible configurations it could have possessed, it had the one most in common with known life forms. Since it had just one head, it was likely that it possessed just one nervous system. Phil was even more convinced that the nerve bundle was its weak point. Now that he knew how far the head was from the shuttle opening, there was just one parameter yet to establish, the direction of the head from their present position. There was no way to tell. He turned the pages of Bailey’s notebook until he found her sketch of the layout of the tubes. She’d rightly drawn the central tube down the middle of the ship; that was its lateral line. Where the tube terminated, the shuttle bay started. Looking at the sketch, Phil could see the symmetry in the pattern of the tubes laid out on both sides of the central tube.
“Which way is the head?” he asked of no one in particular.
It was Mary who piped up. “It’s . . . that way,” she said pointing along the central tube with a finger.
“How’s that?”
“Well, if the head is fifteen hundred feet from the shuttle hole, and if the shuttle hole is nearer the ass-end as your friend says—at least closer to one end—then the only distance that can be more than half of the thing’s length is in the direction away from the propulsion machinery along a line through the shuttle bay.”
“Fine. But how do we know where the propulsion crap is?”
“Simple. Bailey traveled at least seven hundred feet to get here, right?”
“Okay.”
“You can count the loops and see that . . .”
“I said okay.”
“A quarter mile is half the thing’s length. Since she traveled half of its length and did not encounter the end of it and came to the shuttle bay at the end of her travel, she must have departed from a point at least, at least, one quarter of a mile, half the thing’s length, away from the shuttle bay.”
“So?”
“So the only place the head can be—assuming your buddy is right about the size—is about seven hundred feet from the shuttle bay along the central tube in the direction Bailey came. I’d say she was within a hundred feet of it when she left Gilbert’s chamber.”
Phil thought it over.
“Get it?” she asked.
“I think so . . . ”
“Think of it this way, whichever departure point allowed her to travel a total distance equal or greater than half the thing’s length, must provide the starting point for the direction of travel.”
“Huh . . . ?”
“She couldn’t have come from any other direction than the one she came from and still have traveled half the thing’s length.”
“So what!”
“So—she couldn’t have come from the other way because she would have come from outside the ship!”
“Goddammit, Mary . . . ”
“Clear your mind. Clear your mind. Look, there’s only so much ship, right? I mean, it’s not infinite in size.”
“Right.”
Mary sighed and lowered her head. This was hopeless. “The head, Phil,” she said slowly. “Is that way,” she pointed again, “because I say so . . . period.”
“Fine.”
“If we didn’t know the thing’s size, we couldn’t have deduced where the head was.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank your friend, Linda.”
* * *
Gilbert hadn’t expected having to explain the concept of cellular telephone to the alien, but he was. The fact that this alien race had no radio flew in the face of the Earthly version of technology’s evolution. They had obviously grown their own complete and peculiar branches of technology’s tree, not just climbed up and out the arms of an imagined and universal oak. The inability to fathom radio signals made the entire idea of communicating over long distances a notion of such fantastic and magical proportions to the alien that Gilbert was hard pressed to find believable examples, so he’d stopped and was now trying to explain the actual process in straightforward terms.
“I have heard of this,” the alpha rasped. “I do not know how it can be done.”
Gilbert swallowed hard. The conversation had an edge of danger about it. As a defense, Gilbert’s voice had taken on that intermittent interrogative quality as if the odd punctuation somehow added weight or clarity to his words.
“The waves are . . . modulated? in such a way that information can be . . . carried? . . . on them? Information such as . . . speech? can be . . . carried on them?”
“On what do the waves travel?”
The alien had hit the nail on the head. If radio was in fact wave form energy, something had to carry the waves. There was no evidence of any such ether or spatial water, thus the actual mode of wave travel through space was unknown.
“It is . . . not known? . . . how the waves . . . travel? . . . but they do?”
“I do not understand.”
“Have you seen or heard our . . . devices? . . . that transform? . . . the waves into . . . sound?”
“There have been reports of devices which create speech and images, but there is no evidence of the waves that carry it.”
Of course, Gilbert thought. Seeing or hearing the result of television or radio would give no hint of the underlying radio waves that carried the signals.
“May I lead the . . . search? . . . for the telephone device?”
The alien raised its head and began to produce, from some unknown part of its anatomy a kind of rapid and high-pitched staccato whistle. Another sound, something like a squeal underneath, added an odd harmonic to the sound.
The chamber was suddenly filled with a dozen or more aliens that joined in with their own whistling until the chamber was filled with a cacophony of high-pitched squealing and whistling. The din made Gilbert want to wince from its volume and almost smile at it. There was a sense of malice in the sound that fascinated him. He stood there very still and let them know that even this sound did not make him afraid.
He swallowed with his mouth open.
They continued to converse for some time, then one by one they drifted out of the chamber and the sound trailed out with the last.
“Now you see how communication can be carried as waves on the air,” the alien said. “It has been discussed. The device will be found.”
“And the ones who have it?”
“They will suffer the punishment of . . . ” The sound that followed was a low rustling growl but with that same squealing undertone.
“It that . . . thing? . . . you said, a punishment for transgressions?”
“They will be made to suffer until our moons align as one.”
“Is that . . . a long time?” he asked and swallowed.
“Our moons can never align as one.”
Gilbert wanted to smile.
15
H e pulled the blankets back off the weapons and put his arrow-filled quiver over his shoulder. He’d made up three such pants-leg quivers. He’d kept the lion’s share of the arrows for himself and given the others an even dozen each. Their entire war machine was composed of the arrows, the bow, a plastic bag with maybe twenty additional poison tips in it, a flashlight, the backpack filled with some food and water and, of course, the frogs in the woven basket. Ned had added a weapon of his own—one of the wooden legs of the little chair made a short, but acceptable, club that he’d stuffed in the front of his pants.
It was just like Phil said it would be. He’d said they’d come for Bailey and the phone and kill them all, or worse.
The stress had made Mary’s voice as stiff as wood. “Here they come,” Mary whispered over her shoulder.
“How many?” Phil asked.
“Two big bastards. They’ve got a gray hunter with them. That must be Gilbert behind them. Christ, you should see this. It’s worse than Baile
y described it.”
She paused and watched some more.
“Uh, oh. The hunter’s sticking its nose in every chamber.”
“Get ready,” Phil said.
“Try to recover your darts if you can,” he said to Mary, handing her a quiver. “They’re all we’ve got.”
Staggering themselves in two teams, they’d abandoned their former chambers and taken up positions farther up the tube. They were anticipating that any shakedown would start with the holes Phil and Ned had occupied, much farther down. When, and if, the searchers passed them, the element of surprise would be theirs—they’d have them flanked. The hunter-thing changed all that by checking for them in every hole and leaving nothing to chance.
“They’re at the Mexican’s hole. He’s coming out,” Mary said.
Phil looked up the tube and over at Ned who was watching closely from the cover of the chamber’s opening. They made eye contact, and Ned gave Phil a thumb’s up. Phil signaled back to Ned with an open palm for him to stay put.
Mary watched for a minute more.
“They’re roughing him up,” she said and slipped back inside.
“Here’s the plan,” Phil said. “Better to take the offensive. We’ll get them to chase us up the tube.”
Phil nocked an arrow in his bow.
“Let’s move,” he said and stepped down into the tube. “Show no mercy.”
“What mercy?” Mary asked, her heart in her throat.
They stood there in the middle of the tube with their makeshift weaponry at the ready. The hunter saw them first and reared up on its hind legs, with its neck fully extended, and sniffed loudly. The goons stopped cold. Standing side by side, their combined girth nearly filled the tube.
Phil could make out Gilbert’s ridiculous form standing a safe distance behind the wall of flesh formed by the goons.
Fucking coward, Phil thought.
Mary looked down at the knot of freaks just fifty feet away; and as the memories of the pain and injustice of her abduction heated her blood, the icy fear in her breast began to melt and her rage drove her to unthinking blindness.
Without warning, she yelled like a banshee and ran a few steps up and threw her dart like a javelin at the cluster of freaks in the tube in the alien ship. The dart flew fast in a perfect arch, nearly grazing the tube’s ceiling. It struck the smaller of the goons in the neck, driving its wicked tip deep into its flesh. The goon staggered and slapped the shaft away. It felt at the point of impact with its fingers and making a sound like a bull breathing, it removed the dart’s tip and looked at it, collapsing to the floor just as the other goon and hunter charged.
Mary turned and ran, reaching for another dart. Phil waited a second or two longer, took aim and let his arrow go with a thrump. His shot went low and the arrow stuck in the goon’s leg just above the knee. He turned and ran as fast as he could.
It wasn’t fast enough.
The goon caught him by the denim quiver and spun him around. The quiver came off in the creature’s huge hand, spraying arrows onto the floor. Phil twisted loose and fell. When he hit the ground, the hunter leaped over him like a hound jumping a fence. One of its rear feet clipped Phil’s temple and a bright pattern of stars exploded in his head.
Its leg weakened by the dart’s poison, the goon stumbled and fell against the wall.
As Mary streaked past Ned’s position, she got a glimpse of him crouching in the opening. The dead end of the tube with its closed seam loomed ahead like a trap.
When it got close enough, the hunter raised up and brought both front feet down into Mary’s back, shoving her forward onto the tube’s floor. She tumbled and when she turned around the hunter was straddling her in a wide-footed stance, its neck extended out like a hyena’s.
Mary looked up into the face of the hunter and knew she was going to die. Fixing her gaze on that flat and vicious face, a faraway note of recognition called out to her like a distant greeting.
“Tom . . . ?” she said.
The hunter twisted its face into a feral smile and pulled its lips back over its short, sharp teeth. Suddenly, the hunter snapped its head to the rear, once, twice and Mary was aware of some activity behind it.
Phil managed to get his feet, spun and ran as hard as he could toward the soakers. Sluggish, but not disabled, the goon plodded after him. He could hear the sound of the thing’s feet pounding on the floor of the tube behind him. The image of the running girl in the shuttle bay flashed in his mind. She must have heard the same sound before the big bastard snatched her around and clobbered her to death.
As he approached the dripper he was running straight at the lop-sided and retreating form of Gilbert. Bug-eyed, Gilbert looked over his shoulder then dashed through the seam. The seam closed almost instantly.
Mary knew it was Tom Moon—or at least a vestige of Tom Moon who loomed over her. She realized too, that like a dog gone mad, the thing had no choice. It was about to tear her to shreds.
“Tom . . . ” she said. “It’s Mary.”
The hunter cocked its head and snarled.
Phil sprinted past the clothes dump and into the dripper. After that, there would only be the soakers then a thirty foot wall straight up. The goon’s splashing feet were right behind him.
He was almost to the end when he heard a massive thump and splash as the goon fell. He stumbled on the slight rise that marked the entrance to the dripper and tumbled hard.
“Tom . . . please . . . ” Mary pleaded.
The creature blinked its Tom Moon eyes slowly. Then, like a tree being felled, it pitched gently over against the wall of the tube and remained quite still. Inside the alien skin and muscles and skull, the last trace of Tom Moon fluttered awkwardly toward a bright light and the soft sound of a woman’s voice.
Mary clamored away from it and saw the darts, one in its side, dangling by the wire wrapped around its buried tip, the other two hanging limp in its rump. Ned and Bailey had killed it. She reached out and as gently as she could, she closed Tom’s eyes in that alien head.
“It could have killed me, but it didn’t,” she said to Bailey. “It was Tom. It was Tom Moon.”
Phil saw the goon lying face down, half in, half out of the dripper, its arms stretched out straight. He breathed a sigh of relief, and was amazed, yet again, at just how potent, if not fast-acting, the frog’s poison was.
Mary and Ned appeared at the other end of the dripper. Mary’s voice echoed through it.
“Are you okay!” she yelled.
“Yeah!”
They double-timed back and Phil paused to study the first goon lying in a massive heap in the middle of the tube. The neat little stab in its neck was plainly visible. It didn’t come as a surprise that there was a relationship between the location and amount of poison delivered and the length of time the fuckers would live after getting jabbed. Mary had stuck the goon with a single dart to the neck and it had died quickly; Phil’s had received one in the leg, and the goon had had nearly enough time left to kill him.
He scanned the area looking for the tip; and when he didn’t find it, it dawned on him:
“That mother fucker,” he said, unfurling the goon’s big dead hand just to be sure it wasn’t there after all.
“Who?” Mary wanted to know.
“Gilbert! He picked up the goddamned tip from the dart and ran out with it. He’ll give the fucking thing to the aliens.”
“Bad news?” Bailey asked.
“You bet. The aliens’ll have the poison on the dart analyzed in no time. It’s right up their alley, all that chemical weapons shit.”
“Do you think they can find an antidote?” Ned asked.
“Maybe. Probably. Shit! It won’t matter! They’re gonna swarm all over us as soon as they can since they think we’ve got a real weapon. We’ve got to move right now. Right now! Move! Get your asses moving!”
They gathered up the spilled darts and the rest of their war machine and headed for the back seam.
*
* *
The French woman and the Indian had moved down into the tube and were standing there when the group approached. Phil could see the zombie-like look on the woman’s face; it was a very common expression after any time at all in the ship. She was in her late forties, perhaps fifty. She was staring at the dead hunter and muttering under her breath. When Phil put his hand on her shoulder, she shrank away from it like it had caused pain and sat down sloppily against the tube wall.
“She’s a goner,” Mary said.
“That’s a fact,” Phil replied. Her condition was what happened as a result of being captured and tortured by aliens. That was the simple diagnosis.
“We can’t help her,” he added.
The Indian touched Phil’s arm with his fingers as lightly as a butterfly and started to yammer at Phil in his native tongue.
“What’s he saying?” Mary asked Phil, as if he just wasn’t speaking loud enough to be understood.
“Goddamn it, Mary, how should I know?” Phil asked.
He turned his head to the Indian, listened to the noises that came at him and scowled.
Seseidi touched the bow then the arrows and the frog-basket then his own breast, all the time yammering at Phil. He did that over and over, waiting for Phil to catch on.
“I think he wants to join up,” Ned said.
Phil thought it over. He wasn’t sure he wanted a soldier on the squad who couldn’t understand a word of English.
“Do you understand English?” Phil asked loudly.
“Englese. No. No, Englese.” Seseidi said.
“Well, he understood that,” Phil said and stepped around the little Indian. “Let’s go.”
Seseidi stepped in front of Phil and rested his hand on Phil’s chest, yammered and touched the bow then the quiver. Phil made a half-hearted attempt to step around him again.
“I think he wants the bow and arrows,” Mary said.
“He wants too much. Mine! Mine!” Phil said, tapping his chest. His patience was getting thin. He didn’t want to throttle the little Indian, but was prepared to do just that if this didn’t end right now.
Seseidi put his hands together like a prayer and yammered some more.
