The Eleventh Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by F. L. Wallace

  He nudged the switch and sat down.

  His face was gray.

  “I don’t like to bother you,” said Jordan, “but what shall we do about them?”

  Docchi glanced at the telecom. “They” were uncomfortably close and considerably more numerous than the last time he had looked.

  “Take evasive action,” he said wearily. “Swing close to Earth and use the planet’s gravity to give us a good push. We’ve got to keep out of their hands until people have time to react.”

  “I think you ought to know—” began Cameron. There was an odd tone to his voice.

  “Save it for later,” said Docchi. “I’m going to sleep.” His body sagged. “Jordan, wake me up if anything important happens. And remember that you don’t have to listen to this fellow unless you want to.”

  Jordan nodded and touched the controls. Nona, leaning against the gravital panel, paid no attention to the scene. She seemed to be listening to something nobody else could hear. That was nothing new, but it broke Docchi’s heart whenever he saw it. His breath drew in almost with a sob as he left the control room.

  * * * *

  The race went on. Backdrop: planets, stars, darkness. The little flecks of light that edged nearer didn’t seem cheerful to Jordan. His lips were fixed in a straight, hard line. He could hear Docchi come in behind him.

  “Nice speech,” said Cameron.

  “Yeah.” Docchi glanced at the telecom. The view didn’t inspire further comment.

  “That’s the trouble, it was just a speech. It didn’t do you any good. My advice is to give up before you get hurt.”

  “It would be.”

  Cameron stood at the threshold. “I may as well tell you,” he said reluctantly. “I tried to before the broadcast, as soon as I found out what you were going to do. But you wouldn’t listen.”

  He came into the control compartment. Nona was huddled in a seat, motionless, expressionless. Anti was absent.

  “You know why the Medicouncil refused to let you go?”

  “Sure,” said Docchi.

  “The general metabolism of accidentals is further from normal than that of creatures we dredge from the bottom of the sea. Add to that an enormously elongated life span and you ought to see the Medicouncil’s objection.”

  “Get to the point!”

  “Look at it this way,” Cameron continued almost desperately. “The Centauri group contains quite a few planets. From what we know of cosmology, intelligent life probably exists there to a greater or lesser extent. You will be our representatives to them. What they look like isn’t important; it’s their concern. But our ambassadors have to meet certain minimum standards. They at least—damn it, don’t you see that they at least have to look like human beings?”

  “I know you feel that way,” said Jordan, rigid with contempt.

  “I’m not talking for myself,” Cameron said. “I’m a doctor. The medicouncilors are doctors. We graft on or regenerate legs and arms and eyes. We work with blood and bones and intestines. We know what a thin borderline separates normal people from—from you.

  “Don’t you understand? They’re perfect, perhaps too much so. They can’t tolerate even small blemishes. They rush to us with things like hangnails, pimples, simple dandruff. Health—or rather the appearance of it—has become a fetish. They may think they’re sympathetic to you, but what they actually feel is something else.”

  “What are you driving at?” whispered Docchi.

  “Just this: if it were up to the Medicouncil, you would be on your way to the Centauri group. But it isn’t. The decision always had to be referred back to the Solar System as a whole. And the Medicouncil can’t go counter to the mass of public opinion.”

  Docchi turned away in loathing.

  “Don’t believe me,” said Cameron. “You’re not too far from Earth. Pick up the reaction to your broadcast.”

  Worriedly, Jordan looked at Docchi.

  “We may as well find out,” said Docchi. “It’s settled now, one way or the other.”

  They searched band after band. The reaction was always the same. Obscure private citizen or prominent one, man or woman, they all told how sorry they were for the accidentals, but—

  “Turn it off,” said Docchi at last.

  “Now what?” Jordan asked numbly.

  “You have no choice,” said the doctor.

  “No choice,” repeated Docchi dully. “No choice but to give up. We misjudged who our allies were.”

  “We knew you had,” said Cameron. “It seemed better to let you go on thinking that way while you were on the asteroid. It gave you something to hope for. It made you feel you weren’t alone. The trouble was that you got farther than we thought you would ever be able to.”

  “So we did,” Docchi said. His lethargy seemed to lift a little. “And there’s no reason to stop now. Jordan, pick up the ships behind us. Tell them we’ve got Cameron on board. A hostage. Play him up as a hero. Basically, he’s not with those who are against us.”

  Anti came into the control compartment. Cheerfulness faded from her face. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Jordan will explain to you. I’ve got to think.”

  Docchi closed his eyes. The ship lurched slightly, though the vibration from the rockets did not change. There was no reason for alarm; the flight of a ship was never completely steady. Docchi paid no attention.

  At last he opened his eyes. “If we were properly fueled and provisioned,” he said without much hope, “I would be in favor of the four of us heading for Alpha or Proxima. Maybe even Sirius. It wouldn’t matter where, since we wouldn’t intend to come back. But we can’t make it with our small fuel reserve. If we can shake the ships behind us, we might be able to hide until we can steal the necessary fuel and food.”

  “What’ll we do with Doc?” asked Jordan.

  “We’d have to raid an unguarded outpost, of course. Probably a small mining asteroid. We can leave him there.”

  “Yeah,” said Jordan. “A good idea, if we can run away from our personal escort of bloodhounds. Offhand, that doesn’t seem very likely. They didn’t come any closer when I told them we had Doc with us, but they didn’t drop back—”

  He stopped and raised his eyes to the telecom. He blinked, not believing what he saw.

  “They’re gone!” His voice broke with excitement.

  Almost instantly Docchi was beside him. “No,” he corrected. “They’re still following, but they’re very far behind.” Even as he looked, the pursuing ships visibly lost ground.

  “What’s our relative speed?” asked Jordon. He looked at the dials himself, frowned, tapped them as if the needles had gone crazy.

  “What did you do to the rockets?” demanded Docchi.

  “Nothing! There wasn’t a thing I could do. We were already running at top speed.”

  “We’re above it. Way above it. How?”

  There was nothing to explain their astonishing velocity. Cameron, Anti, and Jordan were in the control compartment. Nona still sat huddled up, hands pressed tight against her head. There was no explanation at all, yet power was pouring into the gravital unit, as a long unused, actually useless dial was indicating.

  “The gravital drive is working,” Docchi blankly pointed out.

  “Nonsense,” said Anti. “I don’t feel any weight.”

  “You don’t,” answered Docchi. “You won’t. The gravital unit was originally installed to drive the ship. When that proved unsatisfactory, it was converted. The difference is slight but important. An undirected general field produces weight effects inside the ship. That’s for passenger comfort. A directed field, outside the ship, will drive it. You can have one or the other, not both.”

  “But I didn’t turn on the gravital drive,” said Jordan in flat bewilderment. “I couldn’t if I wanted to. It’s disconnected.”

  “I would agree with you, except for one thing. It’s working.” Docchi stared at Nona, whose eyes were closed. “Get her attention,” he
said.

  It was Jordan who gently touched her shoulder. She opened her eyes. On the instrument board, the needle of a once useless dial rose and fell.

  “What’s the matter with the poor dear?” asked Anti. “She’s shaking.”

  “Let her alone,” said Docchi.

  No one moved. No one said anything at all. Minutes passed while the ancient ship creaked and groaned and ran away from the fastest rockets in the Solar System.

  “I think I know,” said Docchi at last, still frowning. “Consider the gravity-generating plant. Part of it is an electronic computer, capable of making the necessary calculations and juggling the proportion of power required to produce, continuously, directed or undirected gravity. In other words, a brain, a complex mechanical intelligence. From the viewpoint of that intelligence, why should it perform ad infinitum a complicated but meaningless routine? It didn’t know why, and because it didn’t, very simply, it refused to do so.

  “Now consider Nona. She’s deaf, can’t speak, can’t communicate. In a way she’s comparable to the gravital computer. Like it, she has a very high potential intelligence. Like it, she’s had difficulty grasping the facts of her environment. Unlike it, though, she has learned something. How much, I don’t know, but it’s far more than the Medicouncil psychologists credit her with.”

  “Yeah,” said Jordan dubiously. “But what’s happening now?”

  “If there were two humans involved, you would call it telepathy,” answered Docchi hesitantly, fumbling for concepts he could only sense without grasping. “One intelligence is electronic, the other organic. You’ll have to coin a new term, because the only one I know is extrasensory perception, and that’s obviously ridiculous. It is, isn’t it?”

  Jordan smiled and flexed his arms. Under the shapeless garment his muscles rippled. “It isn’t,” he said. “The power was there, but we’re the only ones who know how to use it. Or rather Nona is.”

  “Power?” repeated Anti, rising majestically. “You can keep it. I want just enough to get to Centauri.”

  “I think you’ll get it,” Docchi promised. “A lot of things seem clearer now. For example, in the past, why didn’t gravital units work well at considerable distances from the Sun? As a matter of fact, the efficiency of each unit was inversely proportional to the square of the distance between it and the Sun.

  “The gravital computer is a deaf, blind, mass-sensitive brain. The major fact in its existence is the Sun, the greatest mass in the Solar System. To such a brain, leaving the Solar System would be like stepping off the edge of a flat world, because it couldn’t be aware of stars.

  “Now that it knows about the Galaxy, the drive will work anywhere. With Nona to direct it, even Sirius isn’t far away.”

  “Doc,” said Jordan carelessly, “you’d better be figuring a way to get off the ship. Remember, we’re going faster than man ever went before.” He chuckled. “Unless, of course, you like our company and don’t want to leave.”

  “We’ve got to do some figuring ourselves,” interposed Docchi. “Such as where we are heading now.”

  “A good idea,” said Jordan. He busied himself with charts and calculations. Gradually his flying fingers slowed. His head bent low over his work. At last he stopped and folded his arms.

  “Where?” asked Docchi.

  “There.” Jordan dully punched the telecom selector and a view became fixed on the screen. In the center glimmered a tiny world, a fragment of a long-exploded planet. Their destination was easily recognizable.

  It was Handicap Haven.

  “But why do we want to go there?” asked Anti. She looked in amazement at Docchi.

  “We’re not going voluntarily,” he answered, his voice flat and spent. “We’re going where the Medicouncil wants us to go. We forgot about the monitor system. When Nona activated the gravital unit, that fact was indicated at some central station. All the Medicouncil had to do was use the monitor to take the gravital drive away from Nona.”

  “We thought we were running away from the ships, which we were, but only to beat them back to the junkpile?” asked Anti.

  Docchi nodded.

  “Well, it’s over. We did our best. There’s no use crying about it.” Yet she was. She passed by Nona, patting her gently. “It’s all right, darling. You tried.”

  Jordan followed her from the compartment.

  Cameron remained; he came over to Docchi. “Everything isn’t lost,” he said, somewhat awkwardly. “You’re back where you started from, but Nona at least will benefit.”

  “Benefit?” said Docchi. “Someone will. It won’t be Nona.”

  “You’re wrong. Now that she is an important factor—”

  “So is a special experimental machine. Very valuable. I don’t think she’ll like that classification.”

  Silence met silence. It was Dr. Cameron who turned away.

  “That ghastly glow of yours when you’re angry always did upset me. I’ll come back when it’s dimmer.”

  Docchi glared after him. Cameron was the only normal aware that it was Nona who controlled the gravital unit. All the outside world could realize was that it was in operation, as it had been designed to work, but never had. If Cameron could be disposed of—

  He shook his head. It wouldn’t solve anything. He might fool them for a while. They might think he was responsible. In the end, they’d find out. Nona wasn’t capable of that much deception, for she never knew what a test was.

  He went over to her. Once he had hoped.… It didn’t matter what he had hoped.

  She looked up and smiled. She had a right to. No word had ever broken the silence of her mind, but now she was communicating with something, whatever it was that an electronic brain could say. Of course she didn’t understand that the conversation was taking place between two captives, herself and the gravital computer.

  Abruptly he turned away. He stopped at the telecom panel and methodically kicked it apart. Delicate tubes smashed into powder. The emergency radio he thoroughly demolished.

  The ship was firmly in the grip of the gravital monitor. There was nothing he could do about that. All that remained was to protect Nona from their prying minds as long as he could.

  She didn’t hear the noise, or didn’t care. She sat there, head in her hands, calm and smiling.

  * * * *

  The outer shell of the rocket dome opened before and closed behind them. Jordan set the controls in neutral and lifted his hands, muttering to himself. They were gliding through the lip of the inner shell. Home.

  “Cheer up,” said Cameron breezily. “You’re not really prisoners, you know.”

  Nona seemed content, though Jordan didn’t. Docchi said nothing, the light gone from his face. Anti wasn’t with them; she was floating in the tank of acid. The gravity field of the asteroid made that necessary.

  The ship scraped gently and they were down. Jordan touched a lever; passenger and freight locks were open.

  “Let’s go,” said Dr. Cameron. “I imagine there’s a reception committee for you.”

  There was. The little rocket dome held more ships than normally came in a year. The precise confusion of military discipline was everywhere in evidence. Armed guards lined either side of the landing ramp down which they walked.

  At the bottom, a large telecom unit had been set up. If size indicated anything, someone considered this an important occasion. From the screen, larger than life, Medicouncilor Thorton looked out approvingly.

  The procession from the ship halted in front of the telecom unit.

  “A good job, Dr. Cameron,” said the medicouncilor. “We were quite surprised at the escape of the four accidentals, and your disappearance, which coincided with it. From what we were able to piece together, you deliberately followed them. A splendid example of quick thinking, Doctor. You deserve recognition for it.”

  “Thank you,” said Cameron.

  “I’m sorry I can’t be there to congratulate you in person, but I will be soon.” The medicouncilor p
aused discreetly. “At first the publicity was bad. Very bad. We thought it unwise to conceal an affair of such magnitude. Of course the unauthorized broadcast made it impossible. Fortunately, the gravital discovery came along at just the right time. I don’t mind telling you that the net effect is now in our favor.”

  “I hoped it would be,” said Cameron. “Nona—”

  “You’ve spoken about her before.” The medicouncilor frowned. “We can discuss her later. For the moment, see that she and the rest of the accidentals are returned to their usual places. Bring Docchi to your office at once. I want to question him privately.”

  Cameron stared at him in bewilderment. “But I thought—”

  “No objections, Doctor,” snapped Thorton. “Important people are waiting for you. That is all.” The telecom darkened.

  “I think you heard what he said, Dr. Cameron.” The officer at his side was very polite. He could afford to be, with the rank of three big planets on his tunic.

  “Very well,” Cameron answered. “But as commander of the asteroid, I request that you furnish a guard for the girl.”

  “Commander?” repeated the officer. “That’s funny—my orders indicate that I am, until further notice. I haven’t got that notice.” He looked around at his men and crooked a finger. “Lieutenant, see that the little fellow—Jordan, I think his name is—gets a lift back to the main dome. And you can walk the pretty lady to her room. Or whatever it is she lives in.” He smiled negligently at Cameron. “Anything to oblige another commander.”

  * * * *

  The medicouncilor, Thorton, was waiting impatiently on the telecom when they got to Cameron’s office.

  “We will arrive in about two hours,” he said immediately. “When I say we, I mean a number of top governmental officials and scientists. Meanwhile, let’s get on with this gravital business.” He caught sight of the commander. “General Judd, this is a technical matter. I don’t think you’ll be interested in it.”

  “Very well, sir. I’ll stand guard outside.”

  The medicouncilor was silent until the door closed behind General Judd. “Sit down, Docchi,” he said with unexpected kindness. He paused to note the effect. “I can sympathize with you. You had everything you wanted nearly within your reach. And, after that, to return to Handicap Haven—well, I can understand how you feel. But since you did return, I think we can arrange to do something for you.”