Murdoc Jern #2 - Uncharted Stars

by Andre Norton

  The zero stone plus a machine already alive with energy meant a heightened flow, an output which had been almost too much for the engine in the scout ship to handle. Zero stones had apparently powered the drifting derelict we had found in space, Eet and I. And it had been their energy broadcast that had activated the stone I then carried, causing it to draw us to the derelict in the first place. Just as on the unnamed planet a similar broadcast had guided us to the long-forsaken ruins where the stones' owners had left their caches.

  Energy— But the idea which was in my mind was no wilder than others that had visited me lately. There was a very simple trial. Not on myself, not yet. I was wary of experimentation I might not be able to control. I looked about me hurriedly, seeing Eet curled apparently asleep, on the foot of my bunk. For a moment I hesitated—Eet? There was humor in that, and something else—the desire to see Eet for once startled out of his usual competent control over the situation.

  I stared at Eet. I held the zero stone, and I thought—

  The cold gem between my hands began to warm, grew hotter. And the lines of Eet's body began to dim. I dared not allow one small spark of triumph to break my concentration. The stone was afire almost past the point where I could continue to hold it. And Eet—Eet was gone! What lay on the foot of my bunk now was what his mother had been, a ship's cat.

  I had to drop the stone. The pain was too intense for me to continue to hold it. Eet came to his feet in one of those quick feline movements, stretched his neck to right and left, to look along his body, and then faced me, his cat's ears flattened to his skull, his mouth open in an angry hiss.

  "You see!" I was exultant.

  But there was no answer to my mind-touch—nothing at all. It was not that I met the barrier which Eet used to cut off communication when he desired to retire into his own thoughts. Rather it seemed that Eet was not!

  I sank down on the pull seat to stare back at the angry cat now crouched snarling, as if to spring for my throat Could it be true that I had done more than create an illusion? It was as if Eet was now a cat and not himself at all! I had indeed stepped up energy and to what disastrous point? Frantically I took the stone tightly into my seared hands, grasped it between my painful palms, and set about undoing what I had done.

  No cat, I thought furiously, but Eet—Eet in his mutation from the enraged bundle of fur now facing me with anger enough, had it been larger, to tear out my life. Eet, my thoughts commanded as I fought panic and tried only to concentrate on what I must do—get Eet back again.

  Again the stone warmed, burned, but I held it in spite of the torment to my flesh. The furry contours of the cat dimmed, changed. Eet crouched there now, his rage even somehow heightened by the change into his rightful body. But was it truly Eet?

  "Fool!" That single word, hurled at me as a laser beam might be aimed, made me relax. This was Eet.

  He leaped to the table between us, stalked back and forth, lashing his ridged tail; in his fury, very feline.

  "Child playing with fire," he hissed.

  I began to laugh then. There had been little to amuse one in the weeks immediately behind us, but the relief of having pulled off this impossibility successfully, plus the pleasure of having at last surprised and bested Eet in his own field, made me continue to laugh helplessly, until I leaned weakly back against the wall of the cabin, unwitting of the pain in my hands.

  Eet stopped his angry pacing, sat down in a feline posture (it seemed to me his cat ancestry was more no-table than before) with his tail curled about him so that its tip rested on his paws. He had closed his mind tightly, but I was neither alarmed nor abashed by his attitude. I was very sure that Eet's startled reaction to transformation was only momentary and that his alert intelligence would speedily be bent to consider the possibilities of what we had learned.

  I stowed the stone carefully in my belt and treated my burned hands with a soothing paste. The mutant continued to sit statue-still and I made no further attempts at mind-touch, waiting for him to make the first move.

  That I had made a momentous discovery exhilarated me. At that moment nothing seemed outside my grasp. It was not only machine energy which the zero stone furthered; it could also be mental. As a cat, Eet had been silenced and, I was sure, unable by himself to break the image I had thought on him, even for his own defense. This must mean that any illusion created with the aid of the stone would have no time limit, remaining so until one thought it away.

  "Entirely right." Eet came out of his sulk—or perhaps it was a deep study. His rage also seemed to have vanished. "But you were indeed playing with a fire which might have consumed us both!" And I knew that he did not mean the burns on my hands. Even so, I was not going to say that I was sorry the experiment had worked. We needed it. Hywel Jern could indeed go to Waystar and it would require no expenditure of energy to keep the illusion intact as long as he carried the zero stone.

  "To take that in," remarked Eet, "is a great hazard." And his reluctance puzzled me.

  "You suspect"—I thought I guessed what bothered him—"they might have one, able to pick up emanations from ours?"

  "We do not know what the Guild had as their original guide to the stones. And Waystar would be an excellent stronghold for the keeping of such. But I agree that we cannot be choosers. We must take such a chance."

  Eleven

  "It must be here." Ryzk had brought us out of hyper in a very old system where the sun was an almost-dead red dwarf, the planets orbiting around it black and burned-out cinders. He indicated a small asteroid. "There is a defense shield up there. And I don't see how you are going to break through that. They must have an entrance code and anything not answering that and getting within range—" He snapped his fingers in a significant gesture of instantaneous extinction.

  Zilwrich studied what showed on the small relay visa-screen we had set up in his cabin. He leaned against the back rest we had improvised, his inert head frill crumpled about his neck. But though he appeared very weak, his eye was bright, and I think that the interest in the unusual which motivated his race made him forget his wounds now.

  "If I only had my equipment!" He spoke Basic with the hissing intonation of his species. "Somehow I do not believe that is a true asteroid."

  "It may be a Forerunner space station. But knowing that is not going to get us in undetected," rasped Ryzk.

  "We cannot all go in," I said. "We play the same game over. Eet and I shall take in the LB."

  "Blasting through screens?" scoffed Ryzk. "I tell you our detect picked up emanations as strong as any on a defensive Patrol outpost. You'd be lasered out of existence quicker than one could pinch out an angk bug!"

  "Suppose one dogged in a ship which did have the pass code," I suggested. "The LB is small enough not to enlarge the warn beep of such a one—"

  "And when are you going to pick up a ship to dog in?" Ryzk wanted to know. "We might hang here for days—"

  "I think not," Eet cut in. "If this is truly Waystar, then there will be traffic, enough to cut down days of waiting. You are the pilot. Tell us if this could be done—could the LB ride in behind another ship in that way?"

  It secretly surprised me that there were some things Eet did not know. Ryzk scowled, his usual prelude to concentrated thought.

  "I could rig a distort combined with a weak traction beam. Cut off the power when that connected with another ship. You'd have this in your favor—those defenses may only be set for big stuff. They'd expect the Fleet to burn them out, not a one-man operation. Or they might detect and let you through. Then you'd find a welcome-guard waiting, which would probably be worse than being lasered out at first contact."

  He seemed determined to paint the future as black as possible. I had only what I had learned of the zero stone to support me against the very unpleasant possibilities ahead. Yet the confidence my experiment had bred in me wavered only in the slightest degree.

  In the end, Ryzk turned his Free Trader's ingenuity to more work on the LB, giving it wha
t defenses he could devise. We could not fight, but we were now provided with distorters which would permit us to approach the blot our ship's radar told us was Waystar, and then wait for the slim chance of making a run into the enemies' most securely guarded fortress.

  Meanwhile, the Wendwind set down on the moon of the nearest dead planet, a ball of creviced rock so bleak and black that it should afford a good hiding place. And the co-ordinates of that temporary landing site were fed into the computer of the LB to home us if and when we left the pirate station—though Ryzk was certain we would never be back and said so frankly, demanding at last that I make a ship recording releasing him from contract and responsibility after an agreed-upon length of time. This I did, Zilwrich acting as witness.

  All this did not tend to make me set about the next part of our venture with a great belief in success. I kept feeling the lump of the zero stone as a kind of talisman against all that could go wrong, too long a list of possible disasters to count.

  Eet made a firm statement as we prepared our disguise.

  "I choose my own form!" he said in a manner I dared not question.

  We were in my cabin, for I had no wish to share the secret of the zero stone with either Ryzk or the Zacathan —though what they might think of our disguises I could not tell.

  But Eet's demand was fair enough. I took the dull, apparently lifeless gem and laid it on the table between us. My own change was already thought out. But in case I needed a reminder of some details, I had something else, a vividly clear tri-dee of my father. He had never willingly allowed such to be taken, but this had belonged to my foster mother and had been the one thing I had taken, besides the zero stone, from my home when his death closed its doors to me. Why I had done so I could not have said—unless there was buried deep inside me a fragment of true esper talent, that of precognition. I had not looked at the tri-dee since the day I had lifted from that planet. Now, studying it carefully, I was very glad I had it. The face I remembered had, as usual, been hazed by time, and I found memory differed from this more exact record.

  Warned by the fury of heat in the stone when I had used it on Eet, I touched it now with some care, my attention centering on the tri-dee, concentrating on the face appearing therein. I was only dimly aware that Eet crouched on the table, a clawed hand-paw joining mine in touching the jewel.

  I could not be sure of the change in my outward appearance. I felt no different. But after an interval I glanced at the mirror ready for the necessary check, and indeed saw a strange face there. It was my father, yes, but in a subtle way younger than I remembered him last. But then I was using as my guide a picture taken planet years before I knew him, when he had first wed my foster mother.

  There could certainly be no mistaking his sharp, almost harsh features by anyone who had ever known him. And I hoped that Eet could help me carry out the rest of the deception by mind reading and supplying me with the memories necessary to make me a passable counterfeit of a man known in Guild circles.

  Eet—what had been his choice of disguise? I fully expected something such as the pookha or the reptilian form he had taken on Lylestane. But this I did not foresee. For it was no animal sitting cross-legged on the table, but a humanoid perhaps as large as a human child of five or six years.

  The skin was not smooth, but covered with a short plushy fur, much like that of the pookha. On the top of the head this grew longer, into a pointed crest. Only the palms of the hands were bare of the fur, which in color was an inky black, and the skin bared there was red, as were the eyes, large and bulging a little from their sockets, the red broken only by vertical pupils. The nose had a narrow ridge of fur up and down it, giving a greater prominence to that feature. But the mouth showed only very narrow slits of lips and those as black as the fur about them.

  To my knowledge I had neither seen nor heard described such a creature, and why Eet had chosen to assume this form first intrigued and then bothered me. Space-rovers were addicted to pets and one met with many oddities accompanying their masters. But this was no pet, unusual as it looked. It had the aura of an intelligent life form, one which could be termed "man."

  "Just so." Eet gave his old form of agreement. "But I think you will discover that this pirate hold will have varied life forms aboard. And also this body has possibilities which may be an aid in future difficulties."

  "What are you?" curiosity made me ask.

  "You have no name for me," Eet returned. "This is a life form which I believe long gone from space."

  He ran his red-palmed hands over his furred sides, absent-mindedly scratching his slightly protrudent middle. "You, yourselves, admit you are late-comers to the stars. Let it suffice that this is an adequate body for my present need."

  I hoped Eet was right, as there was no use in arguing with him. Now I saw something else. That hand not occupied with methodical hide-scratching hovered near the zero stone—though if Eet was preparing to snatch that treasure I did not see where, in his present unclothed state, he would stow it. However, my fingers closed promptly on the gem and sealed it back in my belt. Eet was apparently not concerned, for his straying hand dropped back on his knee.

  We bade good-by to Ryzk and the Zacathan. And I did not miss that Zilwrich watched Eet with an attention which might have been rooted in puzzlement but which grew into a subdued excitement, as if he recognized in that black-furred body something he knew.

  Ryzk stared at us. "How long can you keep that on?" It was plain that he thought our appearances the result of some plasta change. But how he could have believed we carried such elaborate equipment with us I did not know.

  "As long as necessary," I assured him and we went to board the greatly altered LB.

  As we took off, forceably ejected from the parent ship by the original escape method, we aimed in the general direction of the pirate station. But Ryzk's modifications allowed us to hover in space, waiting a guide. And it was Eet in his new form who took over the controls.

  How long we would have to patrol was the question. Waiting in any form is far more wearisome than any action. We spent the slowly dragging time in silence. I was trying to recall every small scrap of what my father had said about his days with the Guild. And what lay in Eet's mind I would not have tried to guess. In fact, I was far too occupied with the thought that my father had been remarkably reticent about his Guild activities and that there might be as many pitfalls ahead as those pocking the dead moon, with only hair-thick bridges spanning them.

  But our silence was broken at last by a clatter from the control board and I knew our radar had picked up a moving object. The tiny visa-screen gave us a ship heading purposefully for the station. Eet glanced over his shoulder and I thought he was looking at me for orders. The mutant was not accustomed, once a matter had been decided, to wait for permission or agreement. I found myself nodding my head, and his fingers made the necessary adjustments to bring us behind that other ship, a little under its bulk where we might apply that weak traction beam without being sighted, or so we hoped.

  The size of the newcomer was in our favor. I had expected something such as a scout ship, or certainly not larger than the smallest Free Trader. But this was a bulk-cargo vessel, of the smallest class, to be sure, but still of a size to be considered only a wallowing second-rate transfer ship.

  Our traction beam centered and held, drawing us under the belly of the bigger vessel, which overhung us, if anyone had been out in space to see, as a covering shadow. We waited tensely for some sign that those in the other ship might be alarmed. But as long moments slipped by we breathed more freely, reassured by so much, though it was very little.

  However, on the visa-screen what we picked up now was not the ship, but what lay ahead. For additional safety Eet had snapped on the distort beam and through that we could see just a little of the amazing port we neared.

  Whatever formed its original core—an asteroid, a moon, an ancient space station—could not be distinguished now. What remained was a mass of ships, der
elicts declared so by their broken sides, their general decrepit appearances. They were massed, jammed tightly together into an irregular ovoid except in one place directly before us, where there was a dark gap, into which the ship controlling our path was now headed.

  "Looted ships—" I hazarded, ready to believe now in every wild story of Waystar. Pirates had dragged in victim ships to help form their hiding place—though why any such labor was necessary I could not guess. Then I saw—and felt—the faint vibration of a defense screen. The LB shuddered but it did not break linkage with the ship. Then we were through without any attack.

  As the wall of those crumpled and broken ships funneled about us, I foresaw a new danger, that we might be scraped or caught by the wreckage, for that space down which we were being towed narrowed the farther we advanced.

  Also, though the ships had seemed tightly massed at first sight, this proved not to be so upon closer inspection. There were evidences that they had been intended as an enveloping cover for whatever core lay at the heart. There were girders and patches of skin welded together, anchoring one wreck to another. But it was a loose unity and there were spaces in between, some large enough to hold the LB.

  Seeing those, and calculating that we might come to grief ahead were the passage to narrow to the point where only the cargo ship might wedge through, I decided one gamble was better than another.

  "Wedge in here"—I made this more a suggestion than an order—"then suit up and go through?"

  "Perhaps that is best," Eet answered. However, I suddenly remembered that though I might suit up, there was no protective covering on board which would take Eet's smaller body.

  "The disaster bag," Eet reminded me as his hands moved to loose our tie with the bulk of ship overhead.

  Of course, the baglike covering intended to serve a seriously injured escapee using the LB, one whose hurt body could not be suited up if the emergency landing had been made on a planet with a hostile atmosphere and it was necessary to leave the boat. I unstrapped, and opened the cupboard where the suit lay at full length. The disaster bag was in tight folds beside its booted feet. Passage in that would leave Eet helpless, wholly dependent on me, but there was hope it would not be for long.