Ahead of Time

by Henry Kuttner

  "Seven G's," Brown said thoughtfully.

  "Which would black out the Transplant too. He'll have to remain conscious to pilot the ship through Earth atmosphere. We've got plenty of time."

  "We're going pretty slow now," Dalquist put in.

  Fern gave the celestial globe a sharp glance. "Looks like it. Let me work on this." He paid out a coil from his belt and hitched himself to one of the central pillars. "That'll guard against any more accidents."

  "Tracing a circuit shouldn't be so hard," Brown said.

  "Ordinarily it isn't. But you've got everything in this chamber—atomic control, radar, the kitchen sink. And these labels are only for construction convenience. There wasn't any blueprint to this ship. It's a single-shot model. I can find the Transplant, but it'll take time. So shut up and let me work."

  Brown scowled but didn't say anything. Cotton's bald head was sweating. Dalquist wrapped his arm about a metal pillar and waited. Talman looked up again at the balcony that hung from the walls. The celestial globe showed a crawling disk of red light.

  "Quent," he said.

  "Yes, Van." Quentin's voice was quietly distant. Brown put one hand casually to the blaster at his belt.

  "Why don't you give up?"

  "Why don't you?"

  "You can't fight us. Your getting Cunningham was a fluke. We're on guard now—you can't hurt us. It's only a matter of time until we trace you down. Don't look for mercy then, Quent. You can save us trouble by telling us where you are. We're willing to pay for that. After we find you—on our own initiative—you can't bargain. How about it?"

  Quentin said simply, "No."

  There was silence for a few minutes. Talman was watching Fern, who, very cautiously paying out his coil, was investigating the tangle where Cunningham's body still hung.

  Quentin said, "He won't find the answer there. I'm pretty well camouflaged."

  "But helpless," Talman said quickly.

  "So are you. Ask Fern. If he monkeys with the wrong connections, he's apt to destroy the ship. Look at your own problem. We're heading back toward Earth. I'm swinging into a new course that'll end at the home berth. If you give up now——"

  Brown said, "The old statutes never were altered. The punishment for piracy is death."

  "There's been no piracy for a hundred years. If an actual case came to trial, it might be a different matter."

  "Imprisonment? Reconditioning?" Talman asked. "I'd a lot rather be dead."

  "We're decelerating," Dalquist called, getting a firmer grip on his pillar.

  Looking at Brown, Talman thought the fat man knew what he had in mind. If technical knowledge failed, psychology might not. And Quentin, after all, was a human brain.

  First get the subject off guard.

  "Quent."

  But Quentin didn't answer. Brown grimaced and turned to watch Fern. Sweat was pouring down the physicist's swarthy face as he concentrated on the hookups, drawing diagrams on the stylopad he wore attached to his forearm.

  After a while Talman began to feel dizzy. He shook his head, realizing that the ship had decelerated almost to zero, and got a firmer grip on the nearest pillar. Fern cursed. He was having a difficult time keeping his footing.

  Presently he lost it altogether as the ship went free. Five space-suited figures clung to convenient handgrips. Fern snarled, "This may be deadlock, but it doesn't help the Transplant. I can't work without gravity—he can't get to Earth without acceleration."

  The voicebox said, "I've sent out an S O S."

  Fern laughed. "I worked that out with Cunningham —and you talked too much to Talman, too. With a radar meteor-avoider, you don't need signaling apparatus, and you haven't got it." He eyed the apparatus he had just left. "Maybe I was getting too close to the right answer, though, eh? Is that why——"

  "You weren't even near it," Quentin said.

  "Just the same——" Fern kicked himself away from the pillar, paying out the line behind him. He made a loop about his left wrist, and, hanging in midair, fell to studying the hookup.

  Brown lost his grip on the slippery column and floated free like some overinflated balloon. Talman kicked himself across to the railed balcony. He caught the metal bar in gloved hands, swung himself in like an acrobat, and looked down—though it wasn't really down—at the control chamber.

  "I think you'd better give up," Quentin said.

  Brown was floating across to join Fern. "Never," he said, and simultaneously four G's hit the ship with the impact of a pile driver. It wasn't forward acceleration. It was in another, foreplanned direction. Fern saved himself at the cost of an almost dislocated wrist—but the looped line rescued him from a fatal dive into uninsulated wiring.

  Talman was slammed down on the balcony. He could see the others plummet to hard impacts on unyielding surfaces. Brown wasn't stopped by the floor plate, though.

  He had been hovering over the fuel-feed hole when the acceleration was slammed on.

  Talman saw the bulky body pop out of sight down the opening. There was an indescribable sound.

  Dalquist, Fern, and Cotton struggled to their feet. They cautiously went toward the hole and peered down.

  Talman called, "Is he——"

  Cotton had turned away. Dalquist remained where he was, apparently fascinated, Talman thought, until he saw the man's shoulders heaving. Fern looked up toward the balcony.

  "He went through the filter screen," he said. "It's a one-inch gauge metal mesh."

  "Broke through?"

  "No," Fern said deliberately. "He didn't break through. He went through."

  Four gravities and a fall of eighty feet add up to something slightly terrific. Talman shut his eyes and said, "Quent!"

  "Do you give up?"

  Fern snarled, "Not on your life! Our unit's not that interdependent. We can do without Brown."

  Talman sat on the balcony, held on to the rail, and let his feet hang down into emptiness. He stared across to the celestial globe, forty feet to his left. The red spot that marked the ship stood motionless.

  "I don't think you're human any more, Quent," he said.

  "Because I don't use a blaster? I've different weapons to fight with now. I'm not kidding myself, Van. I'm fighting for my life."

  "We could still bargain."

  Quentin said, "I told you you'd forget our friendship before I did. You must have known this highjacking could only end in my death. But apparently you didn't care about that."

  "I didn't expect you to——"

  "Yeah," the voicebox said. "I wonder if you'd have been as ready to go through with the plan if I'd still had human form? As for friendship—use your own tricks of psychology, Van. You look on my mechanical body as an enemy, a barrier between you and the real Bart Quentin. Subconsciously, maybe, you hate it, and you're therefore willing to destroy it. Even though you'll be destroying me with it. I don't know—perhaps you rationalize that you'd thus be rescuing me from the thing that's erected the barrier. And you forget that I haven't changed, basically."

  "We used to play chess together," Talman said, "but we didn't smash the pawns."

  "I'm in check," Quentin countered. "All I've got to fight with are knights. You've still got castles and bishops. You can move straight for your goal. Do you give up?"

  "No!" Talman snapped. His eyes were on the red light. He saw a tremor move it, and gripped the metal rail with a frantic clutch. His body swung out as the ship jumped. One gloved hand was torn from its grip. But the other held. The celestial globe was swinging violently. Talman threw a leg over the rail, clambered back to his precarious perch, and looked down.

  Fern was still braced by his emergency line. Dalquist and little Cotton were sliding across the floor, to bring up with a crash against a pillar. Someone screamed.

  Sweating, Talman warily descended. But by the time he had reached Cotton the man was dead. Radiating cracks in his faceplate and contorted, discolored features gave the answer.

  "He slammed right into me," Dalquist
gulped. "His plate cracked into the back of my helmet——"

  The chlorinated atmosphere within the sealed ship had ended Cotton's life, not easily, but rapidly. Dalquist, Fern and Talman matched glances.

  The blond giant said, "Three of us left. I don't like this. I don't like it at all."

  Fern showed his teeth. "So we're still underestimating that thing. From now on, hitch yourselves to pillars. Don't move without sound anchorage. Stay clear of everything that might cause trouble."

  "We're still heading back toward Earth," Talman said.

  "Yeah." Fern nodded. "We could open a port and walk out into free space. But then what? We figured we'd be using this ship. Now we've got to."

  Dalquist said, "If we gave up——"

  "Execution," Fern said flatly. "We've still got time. I've traced some of the connections. I've eliminated a lot of hookups."

  "Still think you can do it?"

  "I think so. But don't let go of your handgrips for a second. I'll find the answer before we hit atmosphere."

  Talman had a suggestion. "Brains send out recognizable vibration patterns. A directional finder, maybe?"

  "If we were in the middle of the Mojave, that would work. Not here. This ship's lousy with currents and radiations. How could we unscramble them without apparatus?"

  "We brought some apparatus with us. And there's plenty all around the walls."

  "Hooked up. I'm going to be plenty careful about upsetting the status quo. I wish Cunningham hadn't gone down the drain."

  "Quentin's no fool," Talman said. "He got the electronic engineer first and Brown second. He was trying for you then, too. Bishop and queen."

  "Which makes me what?"

  "Castle. He'll get you if he can." Talman frowned, trying to remember something. Then he had it. He bent over the stylopad on Fern's arm, shielding the writing with his own body from any photoelectrics that might be spotted around the walls or ceiling. He wrote: "He gets drunk on high frequency. Can do?"

  Fern crumpled the tissue slip and tore it awkwardly into fragments with his gloved fingers. He winked at Talman and nodded briefly.

  "Well, I'll keep trying," he said, and paid out his line to the kit of apparatus he and Cunningham had brought aboard.

  Left alone, Dalquist and Talman hitched themselves to pillars and waited. There was nothing else they could do. Talman had already mentioned this high-frequency irritation angle to Fern and Cunningham; they had seen no value to the knowledge then. Now it might be the answer, with applied practical psychology to supplement technology.

  Meanwhile, Talman longed for a cigarette. All he could do, sweating in the uncomfortable suit, was to manipulate a built-in gadget so that he managed to swallow a salt tablet and a few gulps of tepid water. His heart was pounding, and there was a dull ache in his temples. The spacesuit was uncomfortable; he wasn't used to such personal confinement.

  Through the built-in receiving gadget he could hear the humming silence, broken by the padding rustle of sheathed boots as Fern moved about. Talman blinked at the chaos of equipment and closed his eyes; the relentless yellow light, not intended for human vision, made little pulses beat nervously somewhere in his eye sockets. Somewhere in this ship, he thought, probably in this very chamber, was Quentin. But camouflaged. How?

  Purloined letter stuff? Scarcely. Quentin would have had no reason to expect highjackers. It was pure accident that had intervened to protect the Transplant with such an excellent hiding place. That, and the slapdash methods of technicians, constructing a one-job piece of equipment with the casual convenience of a slipstick.

  But, Talman thought, if Quentin could be made to reveal his location——

  How? Via induced cerebral irritation—intoxication?

  Appeal to basics? But a brain couldn't propagate the species. Self-preservation remained the only constant. Talman wished he'd brought Linda along. He'd have had a lever then.

  If only Quentin had had a human body, the answer would not be so difficult to find. And not necessarily by torture. Automatic muscular reactions, the old stand-by of professional magicians, could have led Talman to his goal. Unfortunately, Quentin himself was the goal—a bodiless brain in a padded, insulated metal cylinder. And his spinal cord was a wire.

  If Fern could rig up a high-frequency device, the radiations would weaken Quentin's defenses—in one way, if not another. At present the Transplant was a very, very dangerous opponent. And he was perfectly camouflaged.

  Well, not perfectly. Definitely no. Because, Talman realized with a sudden glow of excitement, Quentin wasn't simply sitting back, ignoring the pirates, and taking the quickest route back to Earth. The very fact that he was retracing his course instead of going on to Callisto indicated that Quentin wanted to get help. And, meanwhile, via murder, he was doing his utmost to distract his unwelcome guests.

  Because, obviously, Quentin could be found.

  Given time.

  Cunningham could have done it. And even Fern was a menace to the Transplant. That meant that Quentin—was afraid.

  Talman sucked in his breath. "Quent," he said, "I've a proposition. You listening?"

  "Yes," the distant, terribly familiar voice said.

  "I've an answer for all of us. You want to stay alive. We want this ship. Right?"

  "Correct."

  "Suppose we drop you by parachute when we hit Earth atmosphere. Then we can take over the controls and head out again. That way——"

  "And Brutus is an honorable man," Quentin remarked. "But of course he wasn't. I can't trust you any more, Van. Psychopaths and criminals are too amoral. They're ruthless, because they feel the end justifies the means. You're a psychopathic psychologist, Van, and that's exactly why I'd never take your word for anything."

  "You're taking a long chance. If we do find the right hookup in time, there'll be no bargaining, you know."

  "If."

  "It's a long way back to Earth. We're taking precautions now. You can't kill any more of us. We'll simply keep working steadily till we find you. Now—what about it?"

  After a pause Quentin said, "I'd rather take my chances. I know technological values better than I do human ones. As long as I depend on my own field of knowledge, I'm safer than if I tried to deal in psychology. I know coefficients and cosines, but I don't know much about the colloid machine in your skull."

  Talman lowered his head; sweat dripped from his nose to the interior of the faceplate. He felt a sudden claustrophobia; fear of the cramped quarters of the suit, and fear of the larger dungeon that was the room and the ship itself.

  "You're restricted, Quent," he said, too loudly. "You're limited in your weapons. You can't adjust atmospheric pressure in here, or you'd have compressed already and crushed us."

  "Crushing vital equipment at the same time. Besides, those suits can take a lot of pressure."

  "Your king's still in check."

  "So is yours," Quentin said calmly.

  Fern gave Talman a slow look that held approval and faint triumph. Under the clumsy gloves, manipulating delicate instruments, the hookup was beginning to take shape. Luckily, it was a job of conversion rather than construction, or time would have been too short.

  "Enjoy yourself," Quentin said. "I'm slamming on all the G's we can take."

  "I don't feel it," Talman said.

  "All we can take, not all I could give out. Go ahead and amuse yourselves. You can't win."

  "No?"

  "Well—figure it out. As long as you stay hitched in one place, you're reasonably safe. But if you start moving around, I can destroy you."

  "Which means we'll have to move—somewhere—in order to reach you, eh?"

  Quentin laughed. "I didn't say so. I'm well camouflaged. Turn that thing off!"

  The shout echoed and re-echoed against the vaulted roof, shaking the amber air. Talman jerked nervously. He met Fern's eye and saw the astrophysicist grin.

  "It's hitting him," Fern said. Then there was silence, for many minutes.

 
The ship abruptly jumped. But the frequency inductor was securely moored, and the men, too, were anchored by their lines.

  "Turn it off," Quentin said again. His voice wasn't quite under control.

  "Where are you?" Talman asked.

  No answer.

  "We can wait, Quent."

  "Keep waiting, then! I'm . . . I'm not distracted by personal fear. That's one advantage of being a Transplant."

  "High irritant value," Fern murmured. "It works fast."

  "Come on, Quent," Talman said persuasively. "You've still got the instinct of self-preservation. This can't be pleasant for you?"

  "It's . . . too pleasant," Quentin said unevenly. "But it won't work. I could always stand my liquor."

  "This isn't liquor," Fern countered. He touched a dial.

  The Transplant laughed; Talman noted with satisfaction that oral control was slipping. "It won't work, I say. I'm too . . . smart for you."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. You're not morons—none of you are. Fern's a good technician, maybe, but he isn't good enough. Remember, Van, you asked me in Quebec if there'd been any. . . change? I said there hadn't. I'm finding out now that I was wrong."

  "How?"

  "Lack of distraction." Quentin was talking too much; a symptom of intoxication. "A brain in a body can never concentrate fully. It's too conscious of the body itself. Which is an imperfect mechanism. Too specialized to be efficient. Respiratory, circulatory—all the systems intrude. Even the habit of breathing's a distraction. Now the ship's my body—at the moment—but it's a perfect mechanism. It functions with absolute efficiency. So my brain's correspondingly better."

  "Superman."

  "Superefficient. The better mind generally wins at chess, because it can foresee the possible gambits. I can foresee everything you might do. And you're badly handicapped."

  "Why?"

  "You're human."

  Egotism, Talman thought. Was this the Achillean heel? A taste of success had apparently done its psychological work, and the electronic equivalent of drunkenness had released inhibitions. Logical enough. After five years of routine work, no matter how novel that work might be, this suddenly altered situation—this change from active to passive, from machine to protagonist—might have been the catalyst. Ego. And cloudy thinking.