“If we live long enough, maybe we’ll find out what he’s up to,” she said.
The Three were as uncertain as her.
If only he had told her more. He had a habit of withholding information, which only whetted her curiosity. She supposed that he had his reasons, but she’d always been the sort of person who wanted to learn about things, whether it was sex during puberty or how to talk to aliens as an adult colonist. She was determined to know.
It was silent in the closed-off sewer section, excepting an occasional metallic ping and the soft, liquid swishing of Cetian movement. The TA people must have been inside the building by now. They were probably searching the basement. How would Hob explain the pit to them, even if it was empty and covered with plasma screen animations? Oh, just storing some methane-soaked mud here in my cellar, officers, in the hope that there’ll be a bull market for it soon.
Once or twice Uxanna thought she heard muffled voices, but she couldn’t be sure. She drew the Three closer to her and felt their erratic pulsing.
“Just be patient,” Uxanna whispered, repeating the same admonition the Three had been hearing ever since they arrived on this planet. But this time it was true. They had to wait it out with her. Just as she had waited out all those years before returning, only to find that there was no place for her on Earth anymore. She had abandoned one world for another, and now she didn’t belong in either.
A loud noise brought her back.
The panel was scraping as it was pulled away from the wall. Glaring light shafted down into the muck and blinded her. Uxanna’s heart thumped in terror.
A man stood at the top of the slanted pipe. As she focused on him, she saw that he was wearing the green uniform of a TA. There were two other officers behind him. Their postures smacked of triumph.
She had failed.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
But the Three were too busy to accept her apology. Their minds merged with hers and a power grew among them. Trillions of vibrations transmogrified the immediate environment as particles spun into one another. A vibrating field engulfed her and the Three, expanding outward until it merged with the nearest bondable electrical fields. And then it compactified, pouring into the strangers’ minds.
The TA men absorbed infinitely more information than the electrical fields of their brains could manage.
Merciful entanglement snatched them up an instant before their minds were destroyed.
Uxanna lost consciousness for a moment. Her eyes were still open, looking up the shaft, when she came to. The TA men weren’t there anymore. Hob was.
“You better come up now,” he called down to her.
That wasn’t going to be easy. Still delirious, Uxanna got to her feet, the heavy mud falling from her shoulders in wet clods. She was groping for handholds when Cruvayn appeared above and dropped a lightweight folding ladder.
She climbed out and faced Hob, unmindful of the smell her mud coating exuded. Only Hob and Cruvayn were in the basement. Three green uniforms, underwear, socks, and boots were scattered around the pipe opening.
Hob and Cruvayn both looked shaken.
“Where did they go?” Hob said in a faltering voice.
“You’ll have to ask our friends,” Uxanna replied.
“They’re just…gone,” Cruvayn said, shaking his head.
“Let’s get the Three out of there,” she said.
Hob’s eyebrows lifted. “The Three?”
“That’s how they think of themselves.”
“You’ve been busy down there, huh? Well, go hose yourself down and we’ll talk.”
“Now?”
“Now.” Hob followed her to the hoses and watched as she turned one on and began to rinse her filthy hands.
“How did they do it?” he asked.
“Mathematically,” she said. “Logically.”
“It seems like sorcery.”
“But it’s not,” Uxanna said. “They can harness immense forces through scalar curvature.”
“You did mention that they’re good at math.”
“Next time maybe you’ll listen to me.”
“I’m sorry to say there isn’t going to be a next time.”
“Are you firing me?”
He laughed.
“What’s so funny, Hob?” she asked. “What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know what to think,” he said, turning back to look at the opening in the wall. “I’ve never been involved in anything remotely like this.”
“What happens when the TA sends someone to find out what happened to those guys?” she asked as she sprayed her legs and feet.
“They won’t find anything.”
“What if they discover the sewer section?”
“It won’t matter, because the Cetians will be gone.”
“What?”
“Somebody’s coming to pick them up.”
“Pick them up?” she said, cleaning off her shoulders and torso, enjoying the cold water splashing on her face. “I don’t see how we’re even going to get them back in the pit.”
“We’re not.”
“What do you mean?” She forgot about the hose, letting it soak the floor as it dangled from her left hand.
“People allied with us are on their way here through the sewer system right now,” Hob said. “They’re going to burn through the wall down there and take the Cetians to a safe house. It’ll be as if they were never here.”
“What are you going to say happened to those cops?”
“I’ll say they were here and they left.”
“True enough, but won’t the TA charge you with a crime?”
“They might, but they won’t have any evidence.”
“What about the pit?”
“I don’t know of any law against having a pit in your basement, do you?”
“I guess not.”
“By the time they send somebody else we’ll have it all cleaned out and sterilized, without a trace of the Three. Cruvayn’s already started on it.”
“My great-great-grandson is a clever one,” Uxanna said as she turned to watch Cruvayn directing a robot to dump chemicals into the pit.
“Runs in the family,” Hob said. “And now, about your bonus.”
“My bonus?”
“Yeah, an all-expenses-paid trip.”
“To where?”
“To wherever the Three are going.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes.”
“Hob…I don’t have the words.”
“No need to waste them on me anyway,” Hob said. “Just talk to the Three.”
“I’m making excellent progress with them.”
“Yeah, well, whatever you do, don’t get on their bad side.”
“I promise not to.”
“Good, now wash the rest of that stinking mud off you, Grandma.”
“Hob, there’s so much more to you than I realized.”
“I can honestly tell you that’s not saying much. I don’t know anything.”
“Like I told you before, nobody understands how the Cetians do these things, but you knew they had potential. Now you’ve seen an example of what they can do.”
“One thing I’m wondering is why it took them so long to use that power.”
“They needed a human mind to interact with.”
He grinned. “And you’re it.”
“Apparently,” Uxanna said. “They had limited contact with their TA captors. That was intentional, so they couldn’t bond with anyone the way they did with me.”
“This is going to work out even better than I’d hoped.” Hob nodded. “Once you’re cleaned up, go back to your place and pack,” he said. “You’re leaving tonight.”
“Tonight?”
; “Unless you’d rather stick around and talk to the next wave of TA cops.”
“Tonight, then.”
“I thought you’d see it my way.”
“Should I come back here after I get my things?”
“No, someone will meet you at your room.”
She looked into the dark eyes of her descendant, the man she had so misjudged, and felt tears start.
“I’ll tell your great-great-great-grandchildren about you,” Hob said, moving toward her and putting his arms around her. “Jesus, you’re a big woman.”
She hugged him, her wet face smiling as she stepped back and took one last look at him. After a few seconds, she turned and left Hob standing in his basement.
LABORATORY, by Jerome Bixby
Originally published in If, December 1955.
Gop’s thoughts had the bluish-purple tint of abject apology: “They’re landing, Master.”
Pud looked up from the tiny thig-field he had been shaping in his tentacles. “Of course they are,” he thought-snapped. “You practically invited them down, didn’t you? If you’d only kept a few eyes on the Detector, instead of day-dreaming—”
“I’m sorry,” Gop said unhappily. “I wasn’t day-dreaming, I was observing the magnificent skill and finesse with which you shaped the thig. After all, this system is so isolated. No one ever came along before… I just supposed no one ever would—”
“A Scientist isn’t supposed to suppose! Until he’s proven wrong, he’s supposed to know!” Thirty of Pud’s eyes glowered upward at the tiny alien spaceship, only ninety or so miles above the surface of the laboratory-planet and lowering rapidly. The rest of Pud’s eyes—more than a hundred of them, set haphazardly in his various-sized heads like gurf-seeds on rolls—scoured every inch of the planet’s visible surface, to make certain that no sign of the Vegans’ presence on the planet, from the tiniest experiment to the gigantic servo-mechanical eating pits, was left operating or visible.
Irritatedly he squelched out of existence a yim-field that had taken three weeks of laborious psychoinduction to develop. His psychokineticut stripped it of cohesion, and its faint whine-and-crackle vanished.
“I told you to deactivate all our experiments,” he snapped at Gop. “Don’t you understand Vegan?”
Abashed, the Junior Scientist lowered his many eyes.
“I—I’m sorry,” Gop said humbly. “I thought the yim might wait until the creatures landed, Master…perhaps their auditory apparatus would not have been sufficient to reveal its presence to them, in which case the field would not have had to be—”
“All right, all right,” Pud grunted. “I appreciate your point…but, dripping mouthfuls, you know that any risk of detection is too great. You know the regulations on Contact!”
“Yes, Master.”
“Speaking of which, part of your seventh head is showing.”
The Junior Scientist included the head in the personal invisibility field which he himself was broadcasting.
“Of all the suns in this sector,” Pud thought, eying the little spaceship, “and of all the planets around this particular sun, they have to choose this one to land on. Chew!”
Gop flushed. A member of the Transverse Colon Revivalists, he found Pud’s constant atheistic swearing very disturbing. He sighed inwardly. Usually at least one of Pud’s heads could manage to keep its sense of humor, but right now all of them were like proton-storms. The Senior Scientist was on the verge of one of his totalitantrums.
“They must have sighted flashes from our experiments,” Pud went on, “before you decided you could spare just one set of eyes for the Detector!”
Though both Vegans were invisible to other eyes, they remained visible to each other because their eyes were adjusted to the wavelength of their invisibility fields. By the same token, they could see all their invisible experiments—a vast litter of gadgets, gismos, gargantuan gimmicks, shining tools, huge and infinitesimal instruments, stacks of supplies, and various types of energy fields, the latter all frozen in mid-activity like smudges on a pane of glass. The sandy ground was the floor of the Vegans’ laboratory; small hills and outcroppings of rock were their chairs and workbenches. Like a spaceship junkyard, or an enormous open-air machinery warehouse, the laboratory stretched away from the two Scientists in every direction to the planetoid’s near horizon.
Pud intensified the general invisibility field to the last notch, and the invisible experiments became even more invisible.
The thig-field was a nameless-colored whorl of energy in the Senior Scientist’s tentacles. In his concern for the other experiments, he had forgotten to deactivate it. It grew eagerly to the size of a back yard, then of a baseball diamond, then of a traffic oval, and one shimmering edge of it touched his body, which he had not insulated. Energy crackled. Pud jumped forty feet into the air, swearing, and slapped the field into non-existence between two tentacles.
His body, big as an apartment house, floated slowly downward in the laboratory-planet’s light gravity.
The tiny alien spaceship touched the ground just as he did. The rocket flare flickered and died.
The ship sat on its fins, about thirty feet—Vegan feet—away. In its shining side, a few Vegan inches above the still smoking rocket tubes, was a small black hole.
“Master, look!” Gop thought. “Their ship is damaged…perhaps that’s why they landed!” And he started to extend a tentative extra-sensory probe through the hole.
Pud lashed out with a probe of his own, knocking Gop’s aside before it could enter the hole. “Nincompoop!… Don’t go esprobing until we know if they’re sensitive to it or not! Can’t you remember the regulations on Contact for just one minute?”
The tiny spaceship sat silently, while its occupants evidently studied the lay of the land. Small turrets halfway up its sides twitched this way and that, pointing popgun armament.
Pud inspected the weapons extra-sensorily, and thought an amused snort: the things tossed a simple hydrogen-helium pellet for a short distance.
Gop, nursing a walloping headache as a result of Pud’s rough counterprobe, thought sourly to himself: “I try to save the yim…that’s wrong. He forgets to deactivate the thig…that’s all right. I esprobe…that’s wrong. He esprobes…that’s all right.”
At last: “They’re getting out,” Gop observed.
A tiny airlock had opened in the side of the ship. A metal ladder poked out, swung down, settled against the ground.
The aliens—two of them—appeared; looked down, looked up, looked to the right and to the left. Then they came warily down the ladder.
For a few minutes the giant Vegans watched the creatures wander about. One of them approached one of Pud’s tails. Irritatedly Pud lifted it out of the way. The little creature snooped on, unaware that twenty tons of invisible silicoid flesh hung over its head. Pud curled the tail close to him, and did likewise with all his other tails.
“You’d better do the same,” he advised Gop, his thought-tone peevish.
Silently, Gop drew in his tails. One unwise move, he knew, and the Senior Scientist would start thinking in roars.
One of Gop’s tails scraped slightly against a huge boulder. The scales made a tractor-on-gravel sound.
Pud thought in roars.
The tiny creature had stopped and was turning its helmeted head this way and that, as if trying to see where the sound had come from. It had drawn a weapon of some sort from a holster at its belt—another thermonuclear popgun.
The creature turned and came back toward the Vegans, heading for his ship. Pud lifted his tail again. The creature passed under it, reached the ship, joined its partner.
“I heard it too, Johnny,” Helen Gorman said nervously. “A loud scraping noise—”
“It seemed to come from right behind me,” Johnny Gorman said. “Damn near scared me off the planet… I thought
it was a rockslide. Or the biggest critter in creation, sneaking up on me. I couldn’t see anything, though…could you?”
“No.”
Johnny stood there, blaster in hand, looking around, eyes sharp behind his faceplate. He saw nothing but flat, grayish-red ground, a scattering of stone outcroppings large and small; nothing but the star-clouded black of space above the near horizon, and the small sun of the system riding a low hillock like a beacon.
“Blue light,” he said thoughtfully. “Green light. Red and purple lights. And a mess of crazy colors we never saw before. Whatever those flashes were, honey, they looked artificial to me…”
Helen frowned. “We were pretty far off-world when we saw them, Johnny. Maybe they were aurorae—or reflections from mineral pockets. Or magnetic phenomena of some kind…that could be why the ship didn’t handle right during landing—” Johnny studied the upside-down dials on the protruding chest-board of his spacesuit.
“No neon in the atmosphere,” he said. “Darned little argon, or any other inert gas. The only large mineral deposits within fifty miles are straight down. And this clod’s about as magnetic as an onion.” He gave the surrounding bleak terrain another narrow-eyed scrutiny. “I suppose it could have been some kind of aurora, though…it’s gone now, and there isn’t a sign of anything that could have produced such a rumpus.” He looked around again, then sighed and finally holstered his blaster. “Guess I’m the worrying type, hon. Nothing alive around here.”
“I wonder what that sound was.”
“Probably a rock falling. This area’s been undisturbed for God knows how many million years…the jolt of our landing just shook things up a little.” He grinned, a little sheepishly. “As for the landing… I was so scared after that meteor hit us, it’s a wonder I didn’t nail the ship halfway into the planet, instead of just jolting us up.”
Helen looked up at the three-foot hole in the side of the ship.
The Alien MEGAPACK® Page 5
