Lucy and Ray

by Stan Ruecker

  “Why?” Ash echoed. “I’ll tell you why.”

  Ray blinked in surprise.

  “The galaxies are infested,” Ash said, “by presumptuous, vicious fools. Everywhere I look, I see corruption. I see rancour. I see self-promotion. You can’t look even at your own miserable species and fail to recognize that nothing that is, is good?”

  Ray cocked an eyebrow.

  “I have to admit—” he started.

  “Of course you do,” Ash said. “Anyone with the power of perception feels the same. Life is disgusting. Existence is execrable. The lowliest crawling cell—no, the very spores of life, swept along by winds of chance—are a curse.”

  “Still,” Ray said, talking again without any forethought, “there’s beauty.”

  “Beauty?” Ash asked. “The elegance of a nicely turned ackrick, the sound of a clear, crisp ahrroan? What are they? Nothing lasts. It all burns. They are just parts of the greater torment, temptations set up to lure the unwary into admiration or affection. But when beauty perishes, the sufferings of the admirer are multiplied tenfold. It’s nothing but vanity. Don’t think I haven’t got uses for beauty. It serves to lure people to suffering, and from suffering to despair.”

  “Honour,” Ray tried.

  “Honour consists in doing one’s duty,” Ash said humbly. “My duty is to dispose of the presumptuous, and to discourage its re-emergence.”

  “Friendship,” Ray said, and wondered again where all this was coming from. I don’t care what this guy thinks, he thought.

  “What?” Ash asked. “This translator isn’t working properly.”

  “Friendship,” Ray said.

  “Ah,” Ash said. “It must be some untranslatable alien notion. Well, no doubt it would have its drawbacks, the same as any other. The important point is that life must perish, and the sooner the better. That’s what I say, that’s what my people have said, and so we will continue to do our work down through the ages. We are an indispensable part of the cosmos.”

  Ash twisted a snaky appendage into a loop in his belt and two guards appeared.

  “Take him from here,” he told the guards. “He is of no further interest to me.”

  Apparently, if Ash had lost interest, that meant the guards could pursue their own. They debated for a few minutes out in the corridor, but since they didn’t have a translator, Ray wasn’t sure what the debate was about. Finally they hauled him off to an interrogation room and worked him over until he went unconscious again.

  The noose tightens

  Rachel Norman wasn’t always the easiest person in the world to get on the phone. Kim dedicated an electronic dialer and one line to calling Rachel’s computer every twenty minutes to see if she was back. It ran through its procedure all morning, and as far as Kim could tell, Rachel never even checked her messages.

  “How many times have we called?” she asked her computer.

  “That’s 14,” the computer told her.

  “And how many messages did you leave?”

  “Two,” the computer answered.”

  “What does her computer say?” Kim demanded. “Doesn’t it have any idea of her itinerary?”

  “No,” the computer said.

  “What did it say?” Kim asked.

  “She said she’d be back later.”

  “Is that all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Good grief,” Kim said. “I ask you, is that any way to run an operation?”

  “Excuse me?” her computer said.

  “God I hate computers,” Kim said.

  “Excuse me?” her computer said.

  “Never mind,” Kim told it, and went back to her internal audit.

  Her computer picked up the phone in the middle of an interruption by Martin.

  “But I need those camels,” Martin was complaining. “You can’t expect me to go in there with horses. I wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “Why don’t you just take a couple of helicopters?” Kim said. “If you think it’s so important.”

  “Kim,” Martin said. “You can’t expect us to do a first-class job if you won’t underwrite a few expenses.”

  “I’ll check with—” Kim was saying, but the computer interrupted.

  “Priority,” it said. “I have Rachel Norman on the line.”

  “Excuse me,” Kim told Martin. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of this woman for days now. ”

  “Switch her over to text,” Kim instructed the computer, and a display appeared with Rachel’s name on one box and Kim’s on another.

  “Two camels,” Martin tried. “I’ll use horses for the rest.”

  “Let me think about it,” Kim told him. “I’ll get back to you by tonight. Leave a number with the computer.”

  Martin left, closing the door behind him.

  “How did it go?” Kelly asked. “Do we get the camels?”

  “She said we might as well be asking for helicopters,” Martin told him. “I didn’t realize the budget was so tight.”

  “I bet she’s doing the books,” Kelly said. “She always gets crazy around income tax time.”

  “Great,” Martin said. “She does the books, and we end up in the middle of the desert with nothing but horses.”

  “Did she say she’d think about it?” Kelly asked. “I mean about the camels.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Then we’ve got a good chance. As long as she didn’t say no. She’ll reconsider once she has a minute to settle down. We just caught her at a bad time.”

  “Ted Jones?” Rachel typed. “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Kim typed back. “I’ve got positive hits on at least three different occasions, and all of them point right at our man Ted.”

  “Well,” Rachel responded. “Who better, I guess. If you’re going to corrupt somebody, you might as well go to the top.”

  “My question is…” Kim started, and Rachel’s typing echoed her own for the last four words: “Who’s doing the corrupting?”

  “We’re going to have to put a system in over Ted,” Rachel said.

  “That isn’t going to be easy, you know. For one thing, he’s your budget.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Rachel said. “But I’m already behind in my reports, so unless we lose all our good luck, he might not catch on until it’s too late.”

  “So what kind of system did you have in mind?”

  “I’m not sure,” Rachel said. “Audio anyway. Video if you can figure a way to do it. And you might as well keep your detectors going. I suppose one possibility is that he isn’t even connected to the Foundation in India. It could be the technology has more than one point of emergence.”

  “Same for the monkeys flying out of my butt,” Kim said. “I don’t think you get a jump like that at more than one place at a time.”

  “Well,” Rachel said. “You never know. And I do know I want more to go on before I start anything involving Mr. Jones.”

  “You’re not the only one,” Kim said. “It makes me nervous just putting up the system.”

  “Be careful,” Rachel said. “I don’t want to have to carry you in to any more doctors, all right?”

  “Whatever you say,” Kim told her. “I’ll be in touch within a day or two.”

  Ray and Cinnamon make a plan

  “Now what?” Ray asked Cinnamon, who just thumped her tail against the floor. They were sitting in the holding cell they’d occupied ever since Ray had revived enough to realize it was Cinnamon licking his face.

  “Hey,” he’d said, and licked back a couple of times to get her to quit.

  When he felt a bit better, he went around the walls of the cell half a dozen times, but there didn’t seem to be any weaknesses. He even tried going over to the door and sneezing, but nothing happened.

  “Don’t you know we’re in big trouble? For all I know this is the end of human civilization. Once these snakes get going, nothing can stop them. That’s what Lucy says, anyway. And as
far as I know, I can believe her. What do you think?”

  Cinnamon whined a little and pawed at the floor.

  “Yeah,” Ray agreed. “I think we need to get out of here too. But I don’t suppose you have any ideas about that, either, huh?”

  Cinnamon watched Ray with slitted eyes, and barked once, sharply.

  “Try a little more of that,” Ray suggested.

  Cinnamon went crazy. She barked and howled and ran around the room. She even started frothing at the mouth. Ray went to the cell door.

  “Help!” Ray shouted. “Help out there! My dog’s got rabies!”

  He looked at Cinnamon apologetically, but she was busy trying to dig a hole in a pool of her own saliva.

  There was some rattling outside the door, then it opened.

  “What’re you clowns doing in here?” the guard asked. At least, that’s what it might have been.

  Ray pointed at Cinnamon, who was chasing her own tail and howling.

  “Something’s wrong with my dog,” he said.

  The guard took a step closer, and they both jumped on him. An armed pile of snakes with corrosive sweat was not the ideal victim, but Cinnamon’s savage change of behaviour preoccupied him for the crucial second Ray needed to twist the gun strap around his neck. The only thing to do at that point was keep hanging and twisting and hoping the acid wouldn’t work too quickly through the cloth of Ray’s pants. It was a decided relief when the snakes relaxed, the fish began to appear, and the whole heap settled to the floor.

  Proof positive

  “So the supreme Ted Jones has an alien contact.” Rachel was sitting across the desk from Kim. “How sure are you?”

  “I’ve heard him talking to it,” Kim said. “I put up a remote with a reasonable radius, just like you suggested, and it picked him up. At first I thought he might have been losing it altogether, since he was basically by himself in the woods. I figured maybe he was talking to a tree. But then I recorded the responses. Let me play them for you.”

  “Everything is going fine,” the tape said reassuringly. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

  “I’m not convinced about that probe,” Ted said. “I sent an agent out to take a look at some surprise visitor at Phoenix II, and the probe took him and disappeared. That seems to me like something that might be cause for alarm.”

  “Not likely,” the other voice said. “There are no inhabited systems within fifty light years of here, which means we have at least a year before that probe can get anywhere and back again, and even then, how likely is any large-scale invasion? There just aren’t any hostile presences around this neck of the galaxy.”

  “Too remote,” Ted said.

  “Exactly. Who would bother, with so much going on in the galactic interior?”

  “You’re bothering,” Ted said. Rachel sat up straighter in her chair.

  “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” she said.

  “Aunt,” Kim corrected. “There’s more.”

  The tape resumed where it let off.

  “That’s different,” the other voice said. “We have an interest in the development of your planet, and we represent a peaceful coalition.”

  “But it wasn’t one of your probes, was it?”

  “We don’t really use probes,” the alien admitted. “We transport ourselves, just like that pocket transporter I gave you, only across interstellar distances. I admit it’s a little slower in the long run, and a bit more dangerous, but really, once you’re out in hyperspace anyway, why bother with a ship? Some people just can’t seem to navigate very accurately, is the only reason I can think. They’re worried about ending up somewhere unpleasant instead of near a planet. Some kind of security blanket. Like all technology–the more you have, the more dangerous it is.”

  “But how do you know you’ll end up somewhere that’ll keep you alive? I mean, you need an atmosphere, at least. Don’t you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” the other voice said.

  “I wish we had video,” Rachel said.

  “They were pretty far away as it was,” Kim told her. “There was no line-of-sight for video. I was lucky to get the right bounce for audio.”

  “Did it have to be that far?”

  “I didn’t want to take any chances. I can’t think of anybody who has more resources, and I didn’t want to be sloppy.”

  “It would be useful to know what the aliens look like, though,” Rachel said.

  “I suppose so. There’s no reason we couldn’t try again. Now that we have a better idea of what’s going on.”

  Rachel considered for a minute.

  “Too risky,” she decided. “We’ve got the data we need: the rest is just to satisfy my own curiousity.”

  “What about the Prime Minister?” Kim asked.

  “That’s right,” Rachel said. “I guess we can let him go, huh?”

  “You’re sure?” Kim said. “You wouldn’t want to squeeze a little money out of him, first?”

  Rachel grinned. “That’s a good idea.” she said. “How much do you think we can get?”

  Kim laughed out loud. “Okay,” she said, “we’ll let him go. But what if he insists on the anti-Turing bill?”

  “At this point,” Rachel said. “I think we’ve got bigger problems.”

  “I hate to leave the details,” Kim said. “It isn’t right.”

  “Well,” Rachel said, “he did agree to postpone.”

  “I’m not sure I believe him,” Kim said. “No matter what he says. He is a politician, after all. Are you going to tell him about Ted Jones?”

  “He’s never heard of Ted,” Rachel said. “I don’t think it’d mean anything to him. I could tell him there’s an alien invasion on the way, I suppose. That might make him stop and think.”

  “Think we’re crazy,” Kim said.

  Rachel scratched her ear.

  “I don’t know what else we can do,” she said. “We said we’d only keep him until we found out more, and now we’ve done it.”

  “Ah,” Kim said, “so now you think we have to keep our promises.”

  “Why not?” Rachel said. “The real trick is to stop Jones. If we do that, the money’ll dry up, and the bill won’t mean anything even if it has gone through.”

  “Good point,” Kim said. “But I’d still feel better if you did the talking.”

  “Okay,” Rachel said. “I’ll call Usha and let her know we have to get him home safely. I don’t suppose you’ve got any ideas on how we go about doing it?”

  “India’s a big country,” Kim said. “Why don’t we just fly him into the country someplace and set him down in a village?”

  “What if the people in the village recognize him?”

  “So we drop him in the middle of a field,” Kim said, “and we’re gone before anyone can get close enough to recognize him.”

  “But when they do find him,” Rachel said, “I’d hate for them to get rough. You don’t have the head of your country at your mercy every day. I don’t want the guy murdered by his own people.”

  “He’s not an unpopular president,” Kim pointed out.

  “But still,” Rachel answered.

  “Okay,” Kim agreed. “How about this? We put him in a disguise and let him loose in a train station with enough money to get home.”

  “A disguise?” Rachel said. “Do you think he’ll go along with that?”

  “He will if he’s worried about the wrath of the many-headed.”

  “And if he isn’t—”Rachel started.

  “—then we drop him in a field somewhere.”

  “Okay,” Rachel said. “I’ll explain it to the Prime Minister if you explain it to Usha first.

  “Will do,” Kim said. “Give us another day to get the arrangements made, then call.”

  “One other thing,” Rachel said, getting up to leave. “I wanted to tell you that you did a good job.”

  “Thanks,” Kim said. “You’ll get my bill.”

  Survivor

  As so
on as they got into the corridor, there was the problem of not knowing where the heck they were.

  “I think we shouldn’t hang around, anyway,” Ray said, and the two of them headed toward a down-ramp. They’d almost reached the end of it when someone stepped out from around the corner in front of them and grabbed Ray by the arm.

  “Please,” the person said, hooking one of the translators to Ray’s belt. “I need to talk to you. Come with me.”

  At first Ray thought it was just another pile of snakes. It was certainly big enough. Then he realized it was a kind of alien he hadn’t seen before. It was furrier, for one thing, and it had tendrils.

  “Hey,” Ray said. “Who are you?”

  “I’m the last of my people,” it answered. “Step in here.”

  The three of them had reached a doorway.

  “Where are we?” Ray asked, still not entirely convinced he should be following this creature.

  “It’s a warehouse,” the alien said. “We should be okay for a little while. But don’t get caught out here in the hall.”

  “Okay,” Ray said, and they went through the door.

  The warehouse was fairly large. The alien led them along an aisle and up a ladder to a second storey, where they stopped in a circle of boxes. Ray had a little trouble carrying Cinnamon up the ladder, but she didn’t struggle.

  “Good girl,” he told her, and set her down at the top. The alien was waiting for them just up the row.

  “Have a seat,” the alien said. “No one bothers to come here. It isn’t even monitored.”

  “That’s pretty careless,” Ray said, coming up with Cinnamon. “Why don’t they have better security?”

  “There’s no one left,” the alien told him. “There’s supposed to be guards, but they don’t bother to do anything. The only thing they could guard against would be each other, and none of them cares what the other ones do.”

  “Are you trying to tell me,” Ray asked, “that they’ve completely depopulated this planet?”

  “All but me,” the alien said. “At least, as far as I know. There might be a few people left somewhere. But I’ve been told I’m the last. Not that it matters. If not now, then soon.”

  “Soon,” Ray said.

  “They’re leaving,” the alien told him. “At least, that’s what I heard.”