The X Factor

by Andre Norton

  Diskan did not get to his feet. Intent even now on making no sound, no move that might betray him, on all fours like the animal he believed he was, he reached the tape rack. His big hand hovered over the three red disks. Which? Not that it mattered. His fingers closed about the middle one, transferred it to a belt pocket—but that left an easily noticeable gap. Diskan made a second shift at the rack; now that gap was at the end of the row, in the shadow. If he had any luck at all, it might not be noticed for some time.

  He was rising when he heard it, the click of the door latch. Two steps would carry him to cover. Dared he take them? But again, for once, body and brain worked together. He did not stumble over his own feet, lurch against the table to send the ornament crashing, or make any other mistake; he got safely behind the window curtains before the door opened.

  II

  Nothwithstanding the half light, the figure that entered shimmered. Frost stars glinted from a wide collar, from a belt of state. Drustans! Diskan flattened himself still closer to the window frame, felt it bite painfully into his thighs, tried to breathe as shallowly as possible. Rixa was bad enough, but to confront D.rustans, her brother, would be a double defeat.

  The Vaan youth moved with all the grace of his kind to the desk-table and hesitated there for an instant. Diskan expected him at any moment to wheel, face the window, and draw the skulker out of hiding by the very force of his will. There would be no change in the grave concern of his expression, of course. He would continue to be correct, always able to do the proper thing at the proper time and to do it well.

  A small smolder of dull anger still glowed in Diskan, perhaps fed by the fact that in this room he had been able to make a decision, to carry it through without mishap. To surrender now to Drustans would be a special sourness.

  But if the Vaan had come for Diskan, nosed him out in some manner—and Diskan was willing to concede that these aliens had powers he did not understand—then Drustans was not making the right moves, for his pause by the table had been only momentary. He went on now to kneel at the tape rack.

  Diskan's own hand pressed against the belt pocket. Did— could Drustans have picked, out of the air, the theft? Yes, the Vaan's hand was at the slots of the red tapes! But why—how—?

  Drustans plucked out one of the disks—the very one Diskan had moved to fill the empty space. Still on his knees, the Vaan tapped the disk with a forefinger and studied it. Then he tucked it into a belt pocket and, as quickly and silently as he had come, left the room.

  Diskan drew a deep breath. So, he had not been after him but had come after the tape. And that could mean trouble because of the switch in disks. Suppose Renfry had sent his alien stepson to get the tape for reference. There were at least three men here tonight who would be interested in information on "red" planets—a Free-Trader captain, Isin Ginzar; an attache from the Zacathan embassy, Zlismak; and another retired Scout, Bazilee Alpern.

  And once the mistake was discovered, Renfry would come here—which meant either Diskan must move at once, tonight, or he faced just another ignominious failure, with more shame and humiliation. He could replace the disk in another slot, let them believe a mistake had been made in filing, which was easy enough—but he could not make himself cross those few feet and put back his key, relinquish his plan. He had accomplished this all himself, thought it out, done it. And he was going to follow through—he had to!

  There was nothing he wanted to take with him from this house but that which was already in his belt. It was night. Once out of the garden, he could easily get to the space port. He knew the geography of this small strip of territory well enough. And, Diskan realized, if he did not attempt escape now, he never would; he could not nerve himself to another try.

  He swung through the window. The garden was a triangle, its narrowest point extending out from the house, and that point gave access to a side street. He looked down at himself. There was a smudge across the breast of his tunic. He was never able to wear clothing for more than a few moments without collecting stains or tears. Luckily, he was dressed very plainly for a feast day, no frost-star collar, none of the splendor Drustans and the other Vaans considered fitting. He might be taken for a port laborer, wandering lost, if he were sighted.

  With caution, Diskan worked his way to the spear point of the triangle. The house was very much alight, but it was close to midnight, and they would be serving supper in the banquet hall. Rixa must have long since given up the search for him in the garden. He must use well what time he had.

  Somehow he scrambled over the lacework of the wall, meant more as a frame for the garden than any barrier. One sleeve tore loose from the shoulder, and now he had a smarting scratch, oozing blood, above his elbow. His dress boots made no sound on the pavement. Their soft soles were thin enough to let him feel the stone. But that did not matter—he had gone barefoot so long that his feet were tougher perhaps than the fabric of the boots themselves.

  This way—to the corner, then to the first side turning— and that led straight to the port. He would enter quite far from the small ships he wanted, but once he was actually at the field, he could manage. This sudden small self-confidence was heady. Just as in the old tales, you obtained a talisman of sorts and then you were invincible. He had his talisman in the belt pocket, beneath his hand, and now there bubbled inside of him the belief that the rest would follow, that he would find the ship and escape—

  Such a spacer would be on two controls, one for manual and one for travel tape. Diskan scowled as he tried to remember small details. All ships took off by pattern, and he dared not ask the Control for a particular one. So, he would have to risk the other way—feed in his tape, set on auto-control, go into freeze himself—and just hope. And the steps for that—? Well, Renfry, striving hard to find a common interest between them back on Nyborg while they had been waiting for exit papers, had talked about himself and his work when he discovered Diskan uncommunicative. And Diskan had listened, well enough now, he hoped, to get him off Vaanchard.

  The field was lighted in one section. A liner must have just set down within the hour, as there was activity about one sky-pointing ship. Diskan watched closely and then moved forward, walking with a sureness of purpose. He paused by a pile of shipping cartons and hoisted one to his shoulder, then set out briskly on a course that angled toward his goal. To the casual glance, he hoped, he would be a laborer—one of those selected for the handling of cargo for which machines could not be trusted.

  He dared not stumble—he must keep his mind on those slim small ships in their cradles ahead. He must think of his arms, of his feet, of his unruly body, and of what he was going to do when he got inside a space lock. He would mount to the control cabin, strap in, feed the tape disk to the directive, then set the freeze needle, take the perlim tablets—

  Diskan was under the shadow of a trader before he thought it safe to dump his burden and quicken his pace to a trot. The first two of the smaller ships were still too large for his purpose, but the third, a racer made more for use within this solar system, between Vaanchard and her two inhabitable neighbors, was better—though he did not know if it could be used to voyage in deep space.

  However, such a ship could be set for maximum take-off, to wrench him out of the influence of the control tower. And speed was an important factor. For such a ship there would be a watch robot.

  Theft was not a native vice on Vaanchard, but all ports had a floating population of which a certain portion was untrustworthy. No racer was ever left without a watch robot. But Diskan had some useful information from Nyborg, learned by watching his companions at the labor depot. Robots were the enemies of the strong-back boys. When rations were scanty or poor, the human laborers had learned ways to circumvent the mechanical watchdogs at warehouses—though it was a tricky business.

  Diskan glanced at his big, calloused hands. He had never tried to discon a watcher before. That was a task he had believed he was too clumsy to handle, but tonight he was going to have to do i
t!

  He studied the ship in the launching cradle carefully. The port was closed, the ladder up, and the watcher would control both of those. But a watcher was not only there to check invasion; it was also attuned to any change in the ship. Diskan swung down into the cradle, put where the port inspectors had their scan-plate. He forced himself to move slowly. There must be no mistake in the false set of the dial he wanted. Sweat beaded his cheeks and chin when he achieved that bit of manipulation.

  Up out of the pit—to wait. A grating noise from above marked the opening port. The ladder fed out smoothly. This was it! Diskan tensed. The watch robot, once out of the ship, would sense him instantly, come for him. A watcher could not kill or even do bodily harm; it only captured and held its prisoner to be dealt with by human authority.

  And Diskan must allow himself to be so captured to serve his purpose. There was a clatter; the robot swung down the ladder and turned quickly to rush him. A thief would have run, tried to dodge. Diskan stood very still. The first rush of the machine slackened. It might have been disconcerted by his waiting for it, wondering if he had some legitimate reason to be there. Now if he had known the code word of its conditioning, he would have had nothing in the world to fear, but he did not have that knowledge.

  A capture net whirled out, flicked about him, drew Diskan toward the machine, and he went without struggling. The net, meant to handle a fighter, was loose about him. He was almost up to his captor when he sprang—not away from but toward the robot. And for the first time that Diskan could remember, his heavy bulk of body served him well. He crashed against the machine, and the force of that meeting rocked the robot off balance. It went down, dragging Diskan with it, but his arm was behind its body, and before they had rolled over, he had thrust one forefinger into the sensitive direction cell.

  Pain such as he had never known, running from his finger up his arm to the shoulder—the whole world was a haze of that pain. But somehow Diskan jerked away, held so much to his purpose that he had dragged himself part way up the ladder before his consciousness really functioned clearly again. Those who had told him of this trick had always used a tool to break the cell. To do it by finger was lunacy on a level they would not have believed possible. Diskan, racked with pain, stumbled through the hatch.

  Sweating and gasping, he got to his feet, slammed his good hand down on the close button, and then swayed on—up one more level. The wall lights glowed as he went, obeying the command triggered by his body heat. He had a blurred glimpse of the cradle of the pilot's seat and half fell into it. Somehow he managed to lean forward, to fumble the disk out of his pocket and into the auto-pilot, to thumb down the controls. The spacer came to life and took over. Around Diskan arose the cradle of the seat. His injured hand was engulfed in a pad that appeared out of nowhere. He felt the stab of a needle as the tremble of the atomics began to vibrate the walls.

  Diskan was already half into freeze and did not hear, save as a blur of meaningless words, the demand broadcast as those in Control suddenly realized an unauthorized take-off was in progress. He was under treatment for an injured pilot as the racer made its dart, at maximum, up from Vaanchard on the guide of the red tape.

  To a man in freeze, time did not exist. Measure of it began again for Diskan with a sharp, demanding clang, a noise biting at his very flesh and bones. He fought the pressure of that noise, the feeling of the necessity for responding to it. Opening his eyes wearily, he found himself facing a board of levers, switches, flashing lights. Two of those lights were an ominous red. Diskan knew nothing of piloting, but the smooth beat of the Scout ship that had taken him to Vaanchard in his father's company was lacking. There was instead a pulsation, an ebb and flow of power on a broken beat.

  Another light turned red.

  "Condition critical!"

  Diskan's head jerked against the padded surface of the cradle. The words were mechanical and came out of the walls around him.

  "Damage to the fifth part. Going on emergency for landing! Repeat: going on emergency for landing!"

  Substance spun out of the wall to his left. In the air it seemed a white mist. Settling on and about his body, it thickened, became a coating of cushioning stuff, weaving him into a cocoon of protective covering. The trembling beat in the walls was even more uneven. Diskan knew that an emergency landing might well end in a crash that would erase ship and passenger on the instant of impact.

  His helplessness was the worst. Simply to lie there in the covering spun by the ship to protect human life and wait for extinction was a torture. He struggled against the bonds of his padding—to no purpose. Then he yelled his need for freedom to the walls pressing in on him as his screams echoed from them.

  Mercifully, black closed about Diskan then, and there was an end to waiting. He was not conscious of the fact the ship had entered planetary atmosphere, that the journey tape guided a crippled ship down to the surface of the unknown world.

  The spinning ball of the planet lost the anonymity imposed by distance. Shadows of continents, spread of seas now showed on its surface, appeared waveringly on the visa-plate above Diskan's head. A dark world, a world with a certain forbidding aspect, not welcoming with lush green like Vaanchard or with brown-green like Nyborg—this was a gray-green, a slate or steel-hued world.

  Orbiting, the spacer passed from night to day, to night, in a weird procession of telescoping time. There was a sun, more pallid here, and five moons shedding a wan reflected light on saw-toothed heights, which formed spiny backs of firm land above morasses of swamp and fen, where the shallow seas and land eternally thieved, one from the other.

  There were eyes that witnessed the passage of the ship drawing closer to the surface of the world. And there was intelligence—of a sort—behind those eyes, assessing, wondering. Movement began over a relatively wide space—an ingathering such as was not natural, perhaps an abortive ingathering, or perhaps, this time— Eyes watched as the spacer, poised uneasily on its tail of flames, began the ride down via deter rockets to a small safety of rock and earth.

  The descent was not clean. One tube blew. Instead of a three-fin landing, the spacer crashed, rolled. Vegetation flamed into a holocaust during that crazy spin. Death of plant or animal came in an instant. Then the broken hulk was still, lying on mud that bubbled and shifted around it, allowing it to settle into its glutinous substance.

  For the second time, Diskan roused. The dying ship, in a last spasmodic effort, strove for the safety of the life it had guarded to the best of the ability its designers had devised. The cocoon of which he was the core was propelled from the pilot's seat, struck against a hatch that lifted part way and then stuck. The stench of the mud and the burned vegetation brought him to, coughing weakly.

  Wisps of torn white stuff blew around his head and shoulders. The fear of being bound and helpless, which had carried over from those seconds before his last blackout, set Diskan to a convulsive effort, which scraped him through the half-open hatch, meant for the emergency escape.

  He went head first into the mud, but his shoulder and side jarred brutally against stone, the pain bringing him around. Somehow he scrambled over stuff that slid and sucked at him until there was solid support under his flailing arms, and he drew himself up on an island in the midst of that instability.

  Clawing the remains of the cocoon padding from his head, Diskan stared about wildly. The spacer was three quarters under the sucking mud, a flood of which was now tonguing in the hatch through which he had come. Diskan tried to gain some idea of his present surroundings.

  The wind was cold, though the smoldering swamp vegetation still gave off a measure of heat. But the fire ignited by the ship was already dying. Not too far away Diskan saw white patches, which he thought might be snow, on a rising spine of rocks. He had known winter on Nyborg and winds as chill as the one now lapping about his body. But on Nyborg there had been clothing, shelter, food—

  Diskan gathered up the torn stuff of the cocoon and drew it about his shoulders, s
hawl fashion. It made an awkward-to-handle covering, but it was a protection. The ship! There should be a survival kit in that—means of making fire, iron rations, weapons—! Diskan slewed around on his rock perch.

  There was no hope of returning to the ship. The flood of mud had poured relentlessly into the open hatch; to try to return was to be trapped. Suddenly he wanted solid land, a lot of it, around and under him. And the best place for finding such a perch was the snow-streaked rocky spine.

  It must have been late afternoon when the ship crashed, for though there had been no sunlight, there had been the gray of a cloud-cast day to light the scene. But by the time Diskan, exhausted, smeared with icy slime and almost hopeless, reached his goal, it was well into twilight, and he dared not try to move farther, lest a misstep plunge him into the bog into which the ship had now totally disappeared.

  He crawled along the broken rock of the ridge, at last wedging himself into a crevice, where he pulled the cocoon fabric about him. The first moon was up, a round green-blue coin against the sky, and its following sister was above the horizon. But neither gave light enough for further travel over unknown territory.

  There were reddish coals on the other side of the mud pool, marking the blaze. Diskan longed for a few of those precious sparks now. But there was no fuel to feed them here and no way of crossing to the burned-over land. He squirmed as far as he could into his shelter, misery eating into him.

  So—one part of his mind jeered—you thought luck would change when you used your key, that you could make a better future. Well, here is that future, and in what way is it better than the past?

  Diskan coughed, shivered, and chewed on that bitter thought. He had his freedom, probably freedom to die one way or another—by freezing tonight, by slipping into the mud tomorrow, by a thousand and one traps on an unknown planet. But another thought warred against the jeering voice —he had survived so far. And every moment he continued to live was a small victory over fate—fate or something that had crippled him from his birth. He had this freedom—yes —and his life, and those were two things to hold fast to this night as if they could give him warmth, shelter, and nourishment.