by Hank Davis
Dr. Hishkan, Volcheme, and Galester were alone in it at the moment. Three of Volcheme’s men waited with Tornull, the Depot manager, in the hall outside of Danestar’s room; the remaining three had been sent to join the search for Wergard. The craggy lump of the asteroid which wasn’t an asteroid stood in one corner. Several of its sections had been opened, and Galester was making a careful examination of a number of instruments he’d removed from them.
Dr. Hishkan, showing signs of nervousness, evidently had protested that this was an unnecessary delay because Galester was now saying to Volcheme, “Perhaps he doesn’t understand that when our clients pay for this specimen, they’re buying the exclusive privilege of studying it and making use of what they learn.”
“Naturally I understand that!” Dr. Hishkan snapped.
“Then,” Galester went on, “I think we should have an explanation for the fact that copies have been made of several of these subassemblies.”
“Copies?” Dr. Hishkan’s eyes went wide with amazed suspicion. “Ridiculous! I—”
“You’re certain?” Volcheme interrupted.
“Absolutely,” Galester told him. “There’s measurable duplo radiation coming from four of the devices I’ve checked so far. There’s no point in denying that, Doctor. We simply want to know why you made the duplicates and what you’ve done with them.”
“Excuse me!” Danestar said crisply as Dr. Hishkan began to splutter an indignant denial. “I can explain the matter. The duplos are here.”
In the office, a brief silence followed her announcement. Eyes switched right and left, then, as if obeying a common impulse, swung suddenly around to the wall screen in which Danestar’s image had appeared.
Dr. Hishkan gasped, “Why—why that’s—”
“Miss Gems, the communications technician, no doubt,” Volcheme said dryly.
“Of course, it is,” Danestar said. “Volcheme, I’ve listened to this discussion. You put yourself in a jam by coming here. But, under the circumstances, we can make a deal.”
The smuggler studied her. He was a lean, blond man, no longer young, with a hard, wise face. He smiled briefly, said, “A deal I’ll like?”
“If you like an out. That’s what you’re being offered.”
Dr. Hishkan’s eyes had swiveled with growing incredulity between the screen and Volcheme’s face. He said angrily, “What nonsense is this? Have her picked up and brought here at once! We must find out what—”
“I suggest,” Volcheme interrupted gently, “you let me handle the matter. Miss Gems, I assume your primary purpose here is to obtain evidence against Dr. Hishkan?”
“Yes,” said Danestar.
“You and your associate—Mr. Wergard—are U-League detectives?”
She shook her head.
“No such luck, Volcheme! We’re private agency, full-privilege, Federation charter.”
“I suspected it.” Volcheme’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a grimace of hostility. “You show the attributes of the breed. Do I know the agency?”
“Kyth Interstellar.”
He was silent a moment, said, “I see. . . . Is Mr. Wergard available for negotiations?”
“No. You’ll talk to me.”
“That will be satisfactory. You realize, of course, that I don’t propose to buy your deal blind. . . . ”
“You aren’t expected to,” Danestar said.
“Then let’s get the preliminaries out of the way.” The smuggler’s face was bleak and watchful. “I have men guarding your room. Unlock the door for them.”
“Of course.” Danestar turned toward the door’s lock control in the wall on her left. Volcheme pulled a speaker from his pocket.
They understood each other perfectly. One of the last things a man of Volcheme’s sort cared to do was get a major private detective agency on his neck. It was a mistake, frequently a fatal one. As a matter of principle and good business, the agencies didn’t get off again.
But if he saw a chance to go free with the loot, leaving no witnesses to point a finger at him, he’d take it. Danestar would remain personally safe so long as Volcheme’s men didn’t catch up with Wergard. After that, she’d be safe only if she kept the smuggler convinced he was in a trap from which there was no escape. Within a few hours he would be in such a trap, but he wasn’t in it at present. Her arrangements were designed to keep him from discovering that.
The door clicked open and four men came quickly and cautiously into the room. Three of them were smugglers; the fourth was Tornull, the U-League depot manager. The one who’d entered first stayed at the door, pointing a gun at Danestar. Volcheme’s other two men separated, moved toward her watchfully from right and left. They were competent professionals who had just heard that Danestar was also one. The gun aimed at her from the door wasn’t there for display.
“As a start, Decrain,” Volcheme’s voice said from the screen, “have Miss Gems give you the control belt she’s wearing.”
Danestar unsnapped the belt, making no unnecessary motions, and handed it to the big man named Decrain. They were pulling her teeth, or thought they were, which was sensible from their point of view and made no immediate difference from hers; the belt could be of no use at present. Decrain drew out a chair, told her to sit down and keep her hands in sight. She complied, and the man with the gun came up and stood eight feet to her left. Decrain and his companion began a quick, expert search of her living quarters with detectors. Tornull, Dr. Hishkan’s accomplice in amateur crime, watched them, now and then giving Danestar and her guard a puzzled look which indicated the girl didn’t appear very dangerous to him and that he couldn’t understand why they were taking such elaborate precautions with her.
Within six minutes, Decrain discovered as much as Danestar had wanted them to find of her equipment and records. Whenever the detector beams approached the rest of it, other beams reached out gently and blended with them until they’d slid without a quiver past the shielded areas. The collection of gadgetry Decrain laid out on Danestar’s worktable was impressive and exotic enough to still suspicions, as she had expected. When he announced yet another discovery, Galester observed thoughtfully from the screen, “That’s a dangerously powerful anti-interrogation drug you use, Miss Gems!”
“It is,” Danestar acknowledged. “But it’s dependable. I’m conditioned to it.”
“How much have you taken?”
“My limit. A ten-hour dose . . . sixty-five units.”
She was telling the truth—her developed ability to absorb massive dosages of quizproof without permanent ill effects had pulled her out of more than one difficult situation. But a third of the amount she’d mentioned was considered potentially lethal. Decrain studied her dubiously a moment as if pondering the degree of her humanity. Decrain appeared to be a stolid type, but the uncovering of successive batteries of spidery instruments unlike anything he had encountered in his professional career had caused him mental discomfort; and when he brought Danestar’s set of gimmicked wigs—to which the green one she’d been wearing was now added—out of a shrinkcase and watched them unfold on the table, he’d seemed shaken.
“You’ll be brought over here now, Miss Gems,” Volcheme said, his face sour. “We want a relaxed atmosphere for our discussion, so Decrain will search you thoroughly first. As far as possible, he’ll be a gentleman about it, of course,”
“I’m sure he will be,” Danestar said agreeably. “Because if he isn’t, his hide becomes part of the deal.”
The muscles along Decrain’s jaw tightened, but he continued packaging the sections of Danestar’s instruments Galester wanted to examine without comment. Tornull began to laugh, caught sight of the big man’s expression, and sobered abruptly, looking startled.
The semi-material composite body of the goyal flowed below the solid surface of the world of Mezmiali toward the Unclassified Specimens Depot, swerving from its course occasionally to avoid the confusing turbulences of radiation about the larger cities. Its myriad units h
ummed with coordinating communal impulses of direction and purpose.
Before this, in all its thousand years of existence, the goyal had known only the planets of the Pit, murkily lit by stars which swam like patches of glowing fog in the dark. Once those worlds had supported the civilization of an inventive race which called itself the Builders.
The Builders developed spaceships capable of sliding unharmed through the cosmic dust at a speed above that of light, and a location system to guide them infallibly through the formless gloom where ordinary communication methods were useless. Eventually they reached the edges of the Pit . . . and shrank back. They had ðassumed the dust cloud stretched on to the end of the universe, were appalled when they realized it was limited, seemed suspended in some awesome, gleaming, impossibly open void.
To venture into that terrible alien emptiness themselves was unthinkable. But the urge to explore it by other means grew strong. The means they presently selected was a lowly form of energy life, at home both in the space and on the planets of the Pit. The ingenuity of the Builders produced in it the impulse to combine with its kind into increasingly large, more coherent and more purposeful groups; and the final result of their manipulations was the goyal, a superbeing which thought and acted as an individual, while its essential structure was still that of a gigantic swarm of the minor uncomplicated prototypes of energy life with which the Builders had begun. The goyal was intended to be their galactic explorer, an intelligent, superbly adaptable servant, capable of existing and sustaining itself as readily in space as on the worlds it encountered.
In its way, the goyal was an ultimate achievement of the Builders’ skills. But it was to become also the ðmonument to an irredeemable act of stupidity. They had endowed it with great and varied powers and with keen, specialized intelligence, but not with gratitude. When it discovered it was stronger than its creators and swifter than their ships, it turned on the Builders and made war on them, exterminating them on planet after planet until, within not much more than a century, it became sole master of the Pit.
For a long time, it remained unchallenged there. It shifted about the great dust cloud at will, guided by the Builders’ locator system, feeding on the life of the dim worlds. During that period, it had no concept of intelligence other than its own and that of the Builders. Then a signal which had not come into use since the last of the Builders vanished alerted the locator system. A ship again had appeared within its range.
The goyal flashed through the cloud on the locator impulses like a great spider darting along the strands of its web. At the point of disturbance, it found an alien ship groping slowly and blindly through the gloom. Without hesitation, it flowed aboard and swept through the ship, destroying all life inside.
It had been given an understanding of instruments, and it studied the ship in detail, then studied the dead beings. They were not Builders though they showed some resemblance to them. Their ship was not designed to respond to the locator system; it had come probing into the Pit from the surrounding void.
Other ships presently followed it, singly and in groups. They came cautiously, scanning the smothering haze for peril, minds and instruments alert behind a variety of protective devices which seemed adequate until the moment the goyal struck. The enveloping protective screens simply were too light to hamper it seriously; and once it was through the screens, the alien crew was at its mercy. But the persistence these beings showed in intruding on its domain was disturbing to it. It let some of them live for a time on the ships it captured while it watched and studied them, manipulated them, experimented with them. Gradually, it formed a picture of an enemy race in the void which must be destroyed as it had destroyed the Builders if its supremacy was to be maintained.
It did not intend to venture into the void alone. It had planted sections of its body on a number of the worlds of the Pit. The sections were as yet immature. They could not move about in space as the parent body did, possessed barely enough communal mind to know how to nourish themselves from the planetary life about them. But they were growing and developing. In time the goyal would have others of its kind to support it. Until then, it planned to hold the Pit against the blind intruders from the void without letting the enemy race become aware of its existence.
Then the unforeseeable happened. An entire section of the locator system suddenly went dead, leaving the remainder functioning erratically. For the first time in its long existence, the goyal was made aware of the extent of its dependence on the work of the Builders. After a long difficult search, it discovered the source of the trouble. A key locator near the edge of the dust cloud had disappeared. Its loss threatened to make the entire system unusable.
There was no way of replacing it. The goyal’s mind was not that of a Builder. It had learned readily to use instruments, but it could not construct them. Now it realized its mistake in exterminating the only civilized race in the Pit. It should have kept the Builders in subservience to itself so that their skills would always be at its disposal. It could no longer be certain even of detecting the intruding aliens when they came again and preventing them from discovering the secrets of the cloud. Suddenly, the end of its reign seemed near.
Unable to develop a solution to the problem, the goyal settled into a kind of apathy, drifted with dimming energies aimlessly about the Pit . . . until, unmistakably, the lost locator called it! Alert at once, the goyal sped to other units of the system, found they had recorded and pinpointed the distant blast. It had come from beyond the cloud, out of the void! Raging, the goyal set off in the indicated direction. It had no doubt of what had happened—one of the alien ships had discovered the locator and carried it away. But now it could be and would be recovered.
Extended into a needle of attenuated energy over a million miles in length, the goyal flashed out into the starlit void, its sensor units straining. There was a sun dead ahead; the stolen instrument must be within that system. The goyal discovered a spaceship of the aliens moving in the same direction, closed with it and drew itself on board. For a time, its presence unsuspected, it remained there, forming its plans. It could use the ship’s energies to build up its reserves, but while the ship continued toward Mezmiali, it made no move.
Presently it noted a course shift which would take the ship past the Mezmiali system but close enough to it to make the transfer to any of the sun’s four planets an almost effortless step. The goyal remained quiet. Not long afterwards, its sensors recorded a second blast from the lost locator. Now it knew not only to which planet it should go but, within a few hundred miles, at what point of that planet the instrument was to be found.
Purple fire lashed out from the ship’s bulkheads to engulf every human being on board simultaneously. Within moments, the crew was absorbed. The goyal drank energy from the drive generators to the point of surfeit, left the ship and vanished in the direction of Mezmiali. Within the system, it again closed in on a ship and rode down with it to the planet.
It had reached its destination undetected and at the peak of power, its reserves intact. But this was unknown enemy territory, and it remained cautious. For hours, its sensors had known precisely where the locator was to be found. The goyal waited until the humans had disembarked from the ship, until the engines were quiet and it could detect no significant activity in the area immedðiately about it. Then it flowed out of the ship and into the ground. The two humans who saw it emerge were absorbed before they could make a report.
There was no reason to hesitate longer. Moving through the dense solid matter of the planet was a tedious process by the goyal’s standards; but, in fact, only a short time passed before it reached the University League’s isolated Depot.
There it was brought to a very abrupt stop.
It had flowed up to the energy barrier surrounding the old fortress site and partly into it. Hostile forces crashed through it instantly with hideous, destructive power. A quarter of its units died in that moment. The remaining units whipped back out of the boiling fury o
f the field, reassembled painfully underground near the Depot. The body was reduced and its energy depleted, but it had suffered no lasting damage.
The communal mind remained badly shocked for minutes; then it, too, began to function again. There was not the slightest possibility of breaking through that terrible barrier! In all its experience, the goyal had never encountered anything similar to it. The defensive ship screens it had driven through in its secretive murders in the Pit had been fragile webs by comparison, and the Builders’ stoutest planetary energy shields had been hardly more effective. It began searching cautiously along the perimeter of the barrier. Presently it discovered the entrance lock.
It was closed, but the goyal knew about locks and their uses. The missing locator was so close that the sensors’ reports on it were blurred, but it was somewhere within this monstrously guarded structure. The goyal decided it needed only to wait. In time, the lock would open and it would enter. It would destroy the humans inside, and be back on its way to the Pit with the locator before the alien world realized that anything was amiss. . . .
Approximately an hour later, a slow bulky vehicle came gliding down from the sky toward the Depot. Messages were exchanged between it and a small building on the outside of the barrier in the language employed on the ships which had come into the Pit. A section of the communal mind interpreted the exchange without difficulty, reported:
The vehicle was bringing supplies, was expected, and would be passed through the barrier lock.
At the lock, just below the surface of the ground, the goyal waited, its form compressed to near-solidity, to accompany the vehicle inside.
* * *
In Dr. Hishkan’s office in the central building of the Depot, the arrival of the supplies truck was being awaited with a similar degree of interest by the group assembled there. Their feelings about it varied. Danestar’s feeling—in part—was vast relief. Volcheme was a very tough character, and there was a streak of gambler’s recklessness in him which might have ruined her plan.
