It was—gone. The planet vanished! All about them the stars shone, the distant sun flamed, but this world was gone Because he felt what he felt, Will Hawkline said, “Tighten your orbit. Move in closer.”
“Orbit around what? Closer to what? There’s nothing there anymore! I can’t see it, my instruments can’t see it.…” Will Hawkline had never seen a Little John so upset. But he could feel the emanations of Mind close by, and he smiled and said, “Pretend it’s still there, and go down.”
Obediently the Little John did it. Nothing, and nothing, and “ah.”
And of course you know where they were, and when. They had witnessed the birth of our dear Ceer, and the beginnings of our shield, and had now passed inside it and were filled with wonder.
“Her signs! Her signs! She’s alive here!” The Little John was really excited: amazing! And just then the scout gave a sickening lurch and Will himself overrode the computerized controls and summoned his old skill as a pilot—trained to manage these flying things with his own two hands. He righted it, but lost a great deal of altitude, and the scout apparently disliked his firmness because it fought back and set up a great grinding clatter from somewhere inside it. “Where is she?” he shouted over the noise.
“Over there, right at the base of the peninsula! But there’s a mountain …”
Will Hawkline saw it, then lost it in the rush of clouds and rain that swept down on it. He turned toward where he thought Jonna was.
“Climb! Climb!”
“Climb she won’t,” Will said grimly. “Anyway, I don’t see any mountain now,” which was perfectly true. As if insulted, the mountain reached up a high crag, or seemed to, and gouged out a slit a third of the way down the hull, throwing the nose of the scout almost straight up. Through the slit, which stopped just under his feet, he got a split-second glimpse of the peninsula and a wide flat meadow. As the nose came down he swung it that way. The scout tilted to the left and wouldn’t correct, and they came in like that, skittered and slid, nose down, up and over, and it was all black everywhere and quiet.
The first thing Will Hawkline saw as he came out of the blackness was something he couldn’t believe.
Me.
The next thing he knew was that the warm pillow under his head spoke to him: “Will … Oh Will—are you all right?” It had Jonna Verret’s voice because the pillow was Jonna Verret’s lap. He tipped his head back and looked at her and then again at me, and tried to sit up and scrabble backwards at once. I think he was afraid. Maybe my teeth. Jonna said, “It’s all right, Will. That’s Althair. He pulled you out of the scout.”
“What was left of it,” said the Little John. Will saw him sitting on the floor nearby. He had a bump over one eye but seemed well otherwise. They were in what Will thought was a polished wooden cave. Well, what would you think if you’d never seen one of our living living-places before?
Anyway, you never heard such a flurry of questions in your life, and if it hadn’t been for Little John Five sitting there nodding his big golden head every now and then, I don’t think Will Hawkline would have believed a word of it. He had to know all about Ceer and we Zados, and the shield we thought up around our planet, and why we have no machines, and how we grow living-places and see-far and move to other worlds when we want to, without jugs.
“The Zados took me away from the Mindpod on Orel,” Jonna told him. “Right out from under a force-beam. They brought me here and stopped the poison the Mindpod had put into my blood and made me well all over, even my head.” And Will had to believe it, because she was here. But when I tried to explain how that making where she was, the only place in the universe she couldn’t be (so she disappeared) and Ceer the only place in the universe she could be, he couldn’t understand it. Slowpokes think tools, you see. When they want to do something, the first thing they look for is something outside of themselves to do it with; tools, machines, inventions. They can do a lot with tools, but that kind of thinking keeps them from doing things the simple way, which is why they are slowpokes. What makes them so funny is that they don’t have to be slowpokes, and they just are.
Will Hawkline was very very bright; you have to understand that. He had to be, to have become Coordinator of his Time Center on Avalon while still so young. As I told you, that is a very high place to reach on Earth. But he was bright in a way that made things a lot more difficult than they had to be. He never stopped asking questions, which is a fine thing in itself, but when he couldn’t understand the answers, he wanted to stop and work at it, and found it very hard just to accept and go on. We can do certain things, we Zados. We had proved it to him. But it was very uphill for him to use what we could do without knowing how it worked, and without tools and inventions to test all the parts. Acceptance is the big word. Acceptance was very hard for Will Hawkline.
Little John Five was no problem. He could think like a living thinker, but he was conditioned by computers and computers can’t think. Computers now—they know the meaning of acceptance. And Jonna … well, she was a pammie, and Earth pammies are sort of special, and seem to be able to know a great many things without needing to be told. Acceptance is easier for them.
By this time, of course, I knew all about the terrible things the Pod had done to Jonna on Orel (we had known about the Mindpod by our own mindnet from the moment they landed there, and had been watching) and also about the threat to Earth. And we had worked out a plan.
To do it, we would have to get into the caves under the big basket-cradle, the Little John called it, which held the Orellian cruiser on the surface of Orel. (Orel is mostly porous under the surface, great chains and tangles of holes and caves.) We could then try to get into the cruiser itself and see what we could do from there.
Getting to Orel was a lot harder than it had to be, mostly because of Will Hawkline’s insistence on understanding everything we did. When I told him that the Zado High Council would convene for the ritual which would take us to Orel, he wanted to know where the council would meet, and I had to explain that it didn’t actually meet at any certain place; the mindnet could be cast wherever the Council Zados happened to be. Then I had to tell him what to do with his own mind, which is just accept. And at first he wouldn’t and then he couldn’t, and I had a time, I tell you, showing him how he could. I didn’t want him to see me laughing, and really, that was the hardest part.
I got them all comfortable and convened the High Council and we started to weave the Net that would send us to Orel. And wouldn’t you know the moment the Ceer-reality began to fade around us, up pops Will Hawkline, bolt upright, demanding to know what’s happening, and of course he broke the net and we had to start all over.
I was going to speak to him but Jonna said, “Let me,” and went and sat down beside him. She took both his hands and looked into his eyes and said, “Will—just let it happen. Trust,” she said. “Trust. Go with me.” And while she held him with her hands and her eyes I quickly convened again. We got a good Net this time. The glowing sound-beds of shimmer lifted us and blip! we were in the caves on Orel.
Whatever Will Hawkline or any of them were going to say then, they didn’t say it. Not so much because of the caves themselves, the crazy light (there are patches of luminescent rock, blue and green, and reddish moss and fungus that glows purple) and the odd smell of the air; none of this. It was the meercath standing there, scratching its stomach with one of its little hands. It was wearing a harness with a heat weapon stuck on it. It was the first meercath the Earth folk had ever seen and I guess I don’t blame them for being upset. Jonna made a little scream and the Little John opened his big eyes wide, and Will Hawkline slapped a weapon out of his belt and whsssht! blew the meercath’s big head right off.
I was not pleased about that. I had never thought to tell them, but I had a shield around us just like the one we put around Ceer, and the meercath never knew we were there. But now that Will Hawkline had used his weapon, the whole planet, or anyway the Mindpod, knew it and knew where we were. I
didn’t tell him this. Zados do not say things that make anyone unhappy. Will Hawkline was pleased and it was too late to correct what he had done. I took the heat weapon away from the dead meercath and gave it to Will Hawkline and showed him how to use it, and asked him for his; I told him the Mindpod could find us instantly if it was used again, but the meercath’s weapon would be harder to trace.
Then we ran. Oh, we ran! I led them through the caves and into the labyrinth under the cradle, and you know I couldn’t create the shield while we were moving that fast. Another meercath saw us and set up that horrible wailing cry, and in a moment it was coming from everywhere. We ran through the green and blue, through patches of purple, and soon there came the bright orange flare of the heat weapons.
At last we were where I wanted us to be, right under the cradle, but it happened to be a blind corridor as well. If the meercaths found us here it would be a bad thing. As long as we were running they would try to bring us down with their heat-things, but if they had us trapped they would catch us and pull us apart and bite. That’s the way the Mindpod trained them.
There was only one thing I could do—make a little mindnet and get us out of there. But I would need their help. Jonna and Little John Five seemed to understand right away what I needed—just to relax, give themselves to me and the net—and oh, how I wished Will Hawkline was a little less curious, a little less brave, and maybe a little more stupid! I will give him credit: he tried, but then he saw the meercaths, two, three, then seven, eight, nine of them. I instantly threw up the shield—I didn’t need their help for that—and they could not see us, and in a moment they would have moved on to search somewhere else. But Will Hawkline could see them as clearly as we can see the stars here on Ceer, and he raised the meercath heat-thing I had given him and sent a great orange flash down the corridor. Two of the meercaths went down howling, and then they all knew for sure where we were.
Will Hawkline went down on one knee and steadied his weapon, and I thought, “That is the tool-craziest slowpoke in all the Known and Unknown!” I shouted in words and inside their heads to Jonna and the Little John: give me you! and they did, and while the meercaths were wading through the horrible mess Will had made in the corridor, I flung the energy they gave me, together with my own, against the soft rocks overhead and a huge section came crashing down, shutting it off.
In the sudden silence and swirling dust I said to Will Hawkline, “Now if you can’t do what I ask, don’t do anything!” as gently as I could. Maybe it was this or maybe the way Jonna and the Little John looked at him, but he became very quiet and almost helpful.
I called on the Ceer net with the precise locus, and as around us the cave faded away, metal walls, flat and dark, took their place. We were inside the Orellian cruiser, and almost before we could take a breath, we had that crazy spinny inside-out feeling of space travel, zero time. The cruiser had lifted. It was a close thing.
It probably took us a little while to be able to think straight—you pups and pammies will never know what a wringing out you get from traveling that way. Once I got my wits back, I looked around. Flat metal walls. Dark. I made it a little lighter. Jonna and Will were stretched out, I guess still waiting for their minds to catch up with them. Little John Five was sitting up wagging his big head.
“Five,” I said, “can you think-in to the computer on this cruiser?”
He looked at me. If he was surprised to see me shining in the dark he didn’t say so. He closed his eyes and made some sort of effort. He opened his eyes and said, “It’s different.…”
“You have to expect that. But isn’t it the same in some ways?”
He closed his eyes again. After a while he nodded his head. “In a lot of ways.”
“Can you learn it?”
“I think so.”
“You do that, Five. Think-in all the way. Think-in so far that when they start looking for us with their finder-thing, they will think you are another part of their own computer. Can you see out of their see-it thing? I want to know where we are,” I said. “I’ll help,” I said.
He tried hard. I picked up what he mindsaw and made it shine on the dark wall. It was like a window. There was a planet.…
“My God,” I heard behind me, “that’s Earth!”
“There’s Avalon—see?”
“All right, that’s where we are. I would like to know when we are,” I said.
“I do not have the referents,” the Little John said.
“I do. Look!” Will Hawkline cried out. In the picture, from the curve of the planet’s shoulder, came a tiny golden spark. “A scout,” said Jonna Verret. “It’s … could it be …”
Across the picture came a line of fire, at almost the exact moment the scout winked out in that special way a craft flares when it slips into faster-than-light. A moment later another spark appeared, the fire speared out and sliced into the tail section just before the ship disappeared. Somehow, the faster-than-light change came when it was strangely brighter than the first one.
“It—it’s us. Me. They’re going to do terrible things to—to her.”
I decided to do a kind thing. I used a piece of the net and made it say to Jonna, deeply, “Sleep.” And I said to Will Hawkline, “Sleep.” They slept. They slept so deeply that even the Mindpod’s probes and search-sees wouldn’t know they were there. Then I said to the Little John: “Five: they are hidden in a special way, and I can put up my own shield. By now you know how they will search; can you make yourself seem like part of their computer? So much so they will not find you?” He said he could. Then I told him what to do.
When it was right, I got the net to bring Will Hawkline and Janna up and up through their deeps until they were normally asleep, and then I woke them.
Immediately Little John Five said, “The computer reports stowaways. A meercath has told the commander.”
I said, “That’s all right.”
The Little John said, “The commander has ordered a search.”
I said, “That’s all right too.”
Jonna said, “Can we hide somewhere?”
I said I didn’t think so—not for long.
Jonna said, “You can’t mean for us just to sit here until they come for us!”
“They won’t take us without a fight,” Will Hawkline said, and he took the meercath heat-thing out of his belt; and wouldn’t you know before I could say another word the door of the compartment crashed open and there stood a meercath guard. Will aimed his weapon and of course nothing happened because I had taken the charges out while he slept. I had neglected, however, to remove one patch of stupidity or his appalling bravery. As the giant meercath opened his mouth to squall, Will Hawkline flung himself across the compartment and shoved the weapon between all those big teeth and into the meercath’s throat. And he didn’t stop with that. With the momentum of his rush he placed a hand on the meercath’s head and vaulted up and around, clamping his legs above and below the meercath’s long snout, forcing its jaws closed. I remembered then that all big lizards, especially the one with long jaws, might have, like a meercath, a bite powerful enough to nip someone my size in two, but the muscles that open the mouth are comparatively weak, and it’s easy to hold the mouth closed. So the guard, scrabbling at Will Hawkline with its clever tiny hands, whimpered and died, and sounded no alarm.
Panting and exultant, Will Hawkline came back. “Help me drag this thing inside.” Well, I helped him. And I thought, how can I tell him, without making him unhappy, that he had just done the worst possible thing he could do? Zados don’t make people unhappy. How could I tell him that if he had let himself be captured, he would have been taken to the commander on the bridge, where we might be able to do something, but that now he has killed a guard, the other guards would bite his silly brave head off? How could I tell him that the most important thing of all was for the Little John not to be discovered, that he couldn’t now be detected except if he were seen, and guards looking for their missing meercath would certain
ly see him? I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say it. He was so smiling and proud.
“Will,” I said, trying so hard to be gentle, “See Jonna there.” And when he looked I threw the shield around her and she was gone. He gaped and took a step toward where she had been and I took the shield away. “See Little John Five.” And I threw the shield around Five and then removed it and put it around Will Hawkline. “Will,” I said, “you can see Jonna. You can see me. You can see Five. But they can’t see you. Is that right, Jonna? Five?” They nodded their heads and I took down the shield.
“Why are you talking to me as if I were a child?” Will Hawkline asked, so maybe my gentling did not work as well as I thought it would.
I said, “We are going to use the shield. And I want you to understand that no matter how close you come to anyone, they can’t see you. No matter how much you want to attack one of them, you must not. We are going out there and find a search party searching, and we are going to put Little John Five into some place they have just searched, because he has work to do and they can’t detect him anymore. And then the three of us are going to the bridge where the commander is, and we are going to do it without getting our legs torn off and our heads bitten by them. Do you understand?”
“You’re still talking to me as if I were a child,” said Will Hawkline.
“Well,” I said, “I love children. Let’s go.”
I opened the door and put up a shield big enough for all of us. We could see no meercaths but we could hear sounds to the left, snuffling and stamping. I waved them to follow (we could see each other inside the shield) and we went that way. Sure enough there was a squad of meercaths right around the corner, opening and closing doors. We stayed close to the wall and moved right down on them, and I don’t think the three Earthers really and truly believed in the shield until this moment. One by one the meercaths passed us as we stepped quietly out of their way, until they were gone.
I opened a door. “In you go, Five. Tell me when it’s all done.”
Case and the Dreamer Page 17
