The Stolen Sun

by Emil Petaja

  "Sure, Chuck. But there's more to it. Don't you see?

  Our whole civilization is built on a kind of deviousness, a subtle cheating of each other. Look at the Syndicates and the way they prey on the colonists. It's the mental block we've unconsciously built up against outside intrusion. Dr. Delph wonders why our esp talents haven't kept up with the rest of our mental faculties. That's why! We. distrust each other! We hide what we know so somebody can't use it against us!"

  "Defense shield, like the black guck back there." Chuck scowled. "Yeah. When you think of all the back-stabbing and phony deals we've pulled on each other for thousands and thousands of years…"

  "The more subtle and sophisticated we got the greater was the need for this mental force field. Me? I was brought up in a clean natural environment. There was no need to lie, at least my mother and father never bothered to, nor most of the others. None of us had anything worth stealing or finagling."

  Chuck's nod was followed by a frown. "Still, lots of the men came from colonies. There must be more to you than that. Any ideas? Like for instance your people?"

  "I'm pretty much of a mongreL like everybody else these days. Since World Idiom and U.N^'t_

  There was a brief silence, interrupted by the Port's signal beep for Wayne's report on the flight. After he clicked off, Chuck's wide face grinned back and there was a lustful glint in his green eyes.

  "Hey, buddy-boy, wanna join me in a tour of the bistros tonight? I got this size thirty-six blonde and she must have a friend for you. Let's forget all this jazz, wipe the stink of the skunks off with a couple blashs and—" X

  "No, I don't think so."

  "C'monl You brood about all this too much, buddy-boy. I read you loud and clear. You take it to heart. Hell, it's dog eat dog out here! Gotta be! C'mon, buddy-boy! Well get Hashed. Do you good. I insist!"

  "Go right ahead and insist," Wayne smiled. "Those blash sewers don't do a thing for me."

  III

  Wayne's watch said half past one when the red light above his bunk flashed and the beeper began to "beep. His Captain's status earned him a cubicle of his own in the cramped Astro XXXI Base and for this he was grateful. There were times when he couldn't stand anybody, even himself. He raised up drowsily and flicked on the intercom. "Yes?"

  "Captain Panu, this is Ensign Gribble in Psych." Ensign Gribble was excited and plaintive at the same time. "So?" Wayne stifled a yawn.

  "Captain, I know you've only had a couple hours sleep, but Dr. Delph told-me to tell you—"

  "I know. This one is special. I'm the only one who can handle it."

  "Yes, Captain. That's it, all right. But-"

  "But what?" Already he was dropping his feet to the deck in a wide swing and reaching for his pants.

  "Sotomeyer! He doesn't answer. We can't find him. He must be off the Base. Have you any ideas where—"

  "If he hasn't had any sleep he wouldn't be much good, anyway. Jell Dr. Delph 111 make this run alone." He was at the basin, dousing his blond head and giving it a vigorous shake to remove the last shreds of a strange dream about an incredible copper starship that—it was gone; Ensign Gribble's voice was taut and high-pitched over a rush of protest. "What's that?" he demanded.

  "Dr. Delph wants Reader Chuck Sotomeyer with you. He insists. Seems as if the automatic computers on Sotomeyer's ship indicate that he is the closest thing to you we've hit yet. In spite of his bronco tendencies and drinking, the Manship-esper curves on his chart—" Ensign Gribble's voice lowered to a prim whisper, indicating an earnest desire to keep Chuck out of trouble, if he could. "If he's caught off limits one more time, he's had it."

  Wayne toweled and pulled on his boots, fast. "How much time do I have?"

  "Will an hour help, Captain?"

  "I'll find him", Wayne said grimly. "Do what you can."

  "Sure, Captain Panu. I'll stall 'em."

  "Do that."

  While the road-runner jeep he commandeered pummeled loose basalt rock to pumice on the so-called road toward the double row of bistros on the far side of Astro XXXI, Wayne swore inwardly at Chuck aftdJüs_"bronco tendencies." Sure Chuck was young, but he was smart enough to know that Space Navy rules were ironclad for good reason. Especially Manship. As for the bistros, which were presumably there to cater to colonials and frontier civilian workers but in effect were cosmic camp followers as well, these seamy joints were taboo and fraught with obvious perils. Most of the Fleet gave them a wide berth; still there were always a few men —like Chuck—whose libidos demanded the kind of diversion they could not buy in the PX. Funny how the fact that a man was bright, sharp, sensitive (and Chuck Sotomey-er was all of those things, besides high-random esp) could not overcome fleshly desires. Perhaps the closeness to death, the smelling of it and causing it in wholesale lots, was what did it. Tensions had to be released somehow. The invidious blash that hardcore spacers swilled in the bistros, and the soft yielding bodies with the hard calculating eyes—even this was something, after the aching desolation of so muck nothing out there and the everpresent realization that man had in Deep of his own insignificance in the scheme of things. Not much, but it was something.

  Wayne Panu, in his early years, had brushed with the camp followers and the civilian spacetraps, but something deep inside of him couldn't cut it. Reading the flashes of thought within their habitues with his esper's talent, revealed naked and heartless under the impetus of blash and raw need, disgusted and pained him. In fact, being high-esp in itself made him something of a loner. Yes. He understood Chuck, perhaps in a way better than the youngster did himself. But he didn't judge him. He liked the lad a lot and he would save him now, if he could.

  Moving into the mud-ruts of the neon-splashed main drag of temporary metal structures, Wayne glanced with frowning eyes over saloon signs like KENTUCKY MOONSHINE and MOM'S APPLE PIE, calculated to induce thoughts of "back home," an oldtime back home that didn't even exist any more. The whole thing reminded Wayne of a tri-vid play set. Something bike the shoot-'em-up western America dramas.

  The characters he saw shambling in and out of of the bars and girl-bistros were mainly hardfaced frontier colonists; they had to be hard to put up with the discomforts and rigors of bleak raw planets which had just been stripped of life by Manship for the later influx. Womanless, mainly, the early colonist ships included construction workers of all kinds whose job it was to set up some kind of living and functioning quarters for those who panted and strained at their leashes to get out here from overcrowded Terra, for good or bad.

  And the Syndicates.

  These were like the old Mafia. New colonies were easy pickings for these under cover gangs. Misfits. Navy deserters. Natural or unnatural predators. The Syndicates lost no time muscling in after the far-flung Fleet left, bringing in gifts of supplies which were always in demand on the outposts. Then they would plant in bosses among the colonists for later bleeding.

  The saloon with the rococo front and the batwings was definitely Old West. Old West Thirtieth Century space-style. Wayne pulled up and climbed out of the jeep. Chuck had mentioned the JESSE JAMES a number of times, vocally and in random esps. It seems there was this buxom blonde they called Lollipop.

  Wayne pushed through the batwings.

  The smoke and the effluvium struck him like a wall, but he managed to grope his way through the din and the unwashed bodies to a corner table. It was near a woodlike stairway leading to little rooms that rented by the hour. Next to the stairway was a pianci, a real piano, with a real piano player with a cigarette dangling from his thin mouth, Old West style.

  The bosomy waitress brought him a blash without asking. He paid her and took a sip. She lingered, eying his trim green uniform. When he coughed from the way it burned his throat all the way down, she laughed.

  "Never had one before, Navy?"

  "No. What's in them? Rocket fuel?"

  She shrugged. "Who knows? No two batches are exactly the same, but the kicker is a Venus-type fruit that transports light after it's dr
ied. Don't take more'n three."

  Wayne smiled and promised he wouldn't. He was about to ask her about Chuck but she was gone.

  His blue eyes ranged over the smoked-up pandemonium. They held at the piano. It was an open-front jazz affair that somehow hinted at older easier days. The piano player with the flying elbows pulled nostalgic tunes out of it to go with the pseudo-Old West nature of the bar. He crouched over the upright like a praying mantis.

  There was a girl standing next to the piano, a shy-eyed girl whose heavy makeup and sexy dress didn't suit her at all. There was a land of gamine wistfulness about her. She wasn't pretty, exactly, but her eyes were large and softly gray, odd-shaped as if she might have alien blood.

  Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly.

  The mantis put just enough schmaltz into the old song, which had somehow outlasted a million others like it. A lacing of hope for these humans in this frontier dropoff in space, who'd most likely never see Terra again, nor any of the Terra-like colonies they had left behind them.

  The girl just stood there, half-frightened and hopeless. A shy waif in an evil place.

  Wayne pushed out a preliminary probe to dig her mind, if he could. She looked easy. He stopped, as he usually did. It was not fair to use his talents like that. In fact, since his first year in space (seven years sometimes seemed an eternity) Wayne had rigidly avoided dipping into minds around him. He disciplined himself about it. Sometimes his mental probe struck blank walls of resistance; but when it wasn't there, that wall, he still boggled. Others, envying him, thought telepathy talent a blessing. It wasn't. Not to Wayne. It was more of a curse, reading the craftiness, the vulnerability to hurt, the thousand hints of beast-roots. Of course Lady was far different. Lady was designed just for him, to be part of him as he was part of her. As to human minds, they ought to be sacrosanct. As least, in a civilization that was still dog-eat-dog, as Chuck Sotomeyer tagged it.

  He considered the girl at the piano from appearance, from normal intuition.

  If bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why can't 1?

  The girl's eyes found Wayne's; held.

  He tilted an eyebrow over a second acid sip of blash.

  The gray eyes lowered quickly. Then, haltingly, she moved across the crowd to Wayne's table.

  "Buy me a drink?"

  Wayne nodded gravely. She sat. Rather, she perched. It was as if she definitely did not belong here, but there was no place else to go and there was only one mode of existence open to her on this barren rock at the end of known space. She accepted the blash with a forced smile and touched it to her lips. Wayne toyed with his glass, aware of a chemical warmth moving up within him that had nothing to do with the evil-tasting drink.

  The girl with the haunted eyes got to him.

  It hadn't happened in a long time. For one thing, since those bucolic harvest outings on Proxima, Wayne's time had been several taken up with Fleet duty, and Manship operated where girls were only a memory.

  "What-"

  "I know." She overlaid his thought, huskily; "What's a nice girl like me doing in a…" She let the cliche dwindle off. "Do you really want to know?"

  "As a matter of fact—" He started to ask her had she seen another Navy man in here tonight, but there must have been/some element of differentness, of compassion, in Wayne that compelled her to let out some of the welling hurt.

  Her story came in staccato bursts; Wayne had to infer most of it. Doreen was not the gabby type. Doreen Cutter. Mrs. Jack Cutter of Fleet Laser. Jack was the scholary, earnest kind; neither of them had any family, so when Jack was shipped out further and further into the void, and his letters stopped coming after a while, Doreen couldn't wait. She followed him, missing him by inches on her trek. Then the news. Jack was dead. Erased with his whole ship in a Mephiti action.

  Stranded, Doreen tried to stay out of the Astro night life. She tried hard, but something within her didn't care any more what happened to her. Jack was dead and again, there was nobody. Nobody at all.

  "Couldn't Fleet Authority across the rock help? After all, there's your widow's pension."

  Doreen nodded. "They did help, but the pension has to go through channels. As they pointed out, they're fighting an all-out war. They don't have much time and no room for waifs and strays. I wasn't supposed to come here."

  "They'll put you on a Fleet ship home, of course?"

  "Sure. When there is one. It might be six months. C'est la guerre, you know."

  "I know." Wayne's smile was grim. "But—why here? Why the gin-traps?"

  "Can you understand what it's like to sit alone in a room six feet by eight feet, night after night after night? Thinking. Wondering what's the use." Her eyes stormed with tears. "I—I guess I'm not very strong. I'm the kind who needs somebody. That's the kind who has never had anybody. Then, when it does come to you, it vanishes in a puff of Mephiti smoke—" Her head dropped and she gulped down half of her blash,~cho'tdng on it. "After awhile—" she whispered, "it doesn't matter who. Somebody. Anybody." Her eyes moved to the piano player. She shivered.

  "How about ciwie ships?" Wayne asked.

  "Mostly the ones I could get a berth on are Syndicate-run, and you know Jhem. They want an arm and a leg, not to mention your soul. But there is one leaving next week. I've got some credits left from what they gave me at the Base and if I stop eating entirely—"

  Wayne reached out his credits case and nipped out all but two c-notes. With no place to spend money in months, it amounted to quite a lot. Six months Manship Captain's pay.

  The girl stared at it when he shoved it toward her, then at Wayne. She reached toward it, then pulled her hand back and fled, out of the JESSE JAMES and into the black spacial night…

  Wayne understood. It didn't even take that involuntary esp-thrust into Doreen's unhappy mind when her haunted eyes touched his over the loot. Her story was not all lies. Not every word. Every other word was true. There had been a husband and he had been killed. But there was a lot left out. Such as the uses that had been made of her wide-eyed forlorn waif look. Doreen knew what she was doing, all right. But—as she had admitted—Doreen was weak… Wayne whistled silently at the sudden rebellion against evil that had taken hold of the girl, made her leave the proffered loot and run. He glanced toward the piano, muscles tensing. Wayne was no fight-lover, but right now it would be a pleasure to give the praying mantis something to think about. With his fists.

  But the piano player was gone.

  Stowing the credits back in his tunic, he called over the waitress. All this had taken time, precious time, and Dr. Delph and half the Base must be moving toward conniption fits by now.

  "Have you seen another Fleetman around tonight?" He slipped her a credit note for inspiration.

  "No. Gee, I'm sorry." 't

  This was no time to be coy about using his esp-talents. He moved his eyes and his probes around the grimy bistro in a wide random swash, seeking any shred of recent memory of a handsome wide-faced whelp with sensual eyes and dark curls. It was like digging in a garbage can; he gagged on it. But he kept it up until he needled what he was looking for. A free-lance girl at the bar was downing blashs and indulging in self-pity about a man she went for. Gee, he's cute. Why'd he have to go and switch to Lolli when I told him and told him I'd do just about anything …

  The face she projected was idealized from desire, but it was Chuck's, all right. And her most recent sight of the cause of her blash-binge was Chuck moving out through the batwings—with Lollipop.

  Wayne took one moment more to fix in his mind, as best he could from the blash-muddle, just where Lollipop would have taken Chuck. It was like siphoning up one grain of gold out of an unsavory gyrating whirlpool, but it was there. The alley. The outside stairway. The little room, with the giggles coming out through the billowing curtains.

  He moved out, fast.

  It took all of his power to hang onto the tenuous blur of knowledge he had gleaned from the disappointed bar-girl. He moved rapidly down the brief
benighted row of bistros, concentrating so fully on how many alleyways to pass and which one to move into that the furtive footsteps behind him didn't quite register.

  The alarm bell came seconds too late.

  There were two of them. The mantis and one other. They caught him just as his crackling boots moved onto that outside stairs toward the outbillowing curtain above, near the innocuous-looking door.

  They had unfinished business with Wayne. What Doreen had refused they were all too willing to take, without permission. ' ^

  Wayne whirled, yelling out. But the big man swung from behind, while he was battering out at the squeaking mantis. The leaded pouch struck.

  Wayne's knees crumpled. The steps clubbed his chin when he fell.

  It came as music, first. Brief, spellbinding chords of music struck from some ancient harp-like instrument. Then, very gradually, after his cellular totality of being luxuriated and bathed in the plucked elfin rhythms for a moment, came sight. He saw old gnarled fingers moving across strings; then, while he held his breath and waited, the miracle happened.

  As if—as if some time-well, occult beyond naming, had cracked open and permitted his genes an ancient incredible knowing.…

  It was difficult to hold on to it. It kept slipping away, and he must not let it go. It was too wonderful to bear, but more than that it was too wondrously rare to let go. The plucked chords were also plucking out notes of ancient memory that were buried deep within the smallest parts of his cells, within the mystery of existence itself. The gnarled brown fingers plucked and the ringing tune was the catalyst that pulled Wayne Panu away and apart from his time-place, across the loom of time itself.

  Watch, Wainff. Watch and remember.

  The voice rang like a tocsin. The words were of a language lost forever within the melting pot humanity had become, as its tentacles reached further and further out into space.

  Wainomoinen. Katsoan. Nyt!

  He saw, through smoky mists, a tall figure. An old, old man with a beard so white that the deep blue of his silver-figured robe was reflected in it. Under the robe, Wayne glimpsed brown boots and thonged deerskin leggings. As the figure stepped nearer, wonder prickled Wayne's scalp and his temples. The parchment skin of the old face was stretched over high cheekbones and involved in a smile incredibly kind as the deep blue eyes above were incredibly wise. Those blue eyes, with their flecks of argent silver, seemed to hold universes cupped within their depths. The calm assurance of god-within-man swept aside all fearful despair. Wayne believed in those eyes as he had never believed in anything before.