In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

by Hank Davis

  Wergard’s voice said from the communicator, “If you want to continue your studies, Dr. Hishkan, you’ll get the chance immediately! The thing is now approaching the main building from the north, and it’s coming fast.”

  Dr. Hishkan turned quickly back to the screen controls.

  There was a wide square enclosed by large buildings directly north of the main one. The current of fire was half across the square as it came to view in the screen. As Wergard had said, it was approaching very swiftly and there was a suggestion of purposeful malevolence in that rushing motion which sent a chill down Danestar’s spine. In an instant, it seemed, it reached the main building and the energy field shielding it; and now, instead of veering off to the side as it had done before, the tip of the fiery body curved upwards. It flowed vertically up along the wall of the building, inches away from the flickering defense field. For seconds, the wall screen showed nothing but pale purple flame streaming across it. Then the flame was gone; and the empty square again filled the screen.

  From the communicator, Wergard’s voice said quickly, “It crossed the top of the building, went down the other side and disappeared below the ground level surface—”

  The voice broke off. Almost immediately, it resumed. “I’ve had more luck keeping it in view than you. It’s been half around the Depot by now, and my impression is it’s been looking things over before it makes its next move—whatever that’s going to be.

  “But one thing I’ve noticed makes me feel much less secure behind a section energy field than some of you people think you are. The thing has kept carefully away from the outer Depot barrier—a hundred yards or so at all times—and it cuts its speed down sharply when it gets anywhere near that limit. On the other hand, as you saw just now, it shows very little respect for the sectional building fields. I haven’t seen it attempt to penetrate one of them, but it’s actually contacted them a number of times without apparent harm to itself, as it did again in passing over the main building a moment ago.”

  Volcheme snapped, “What’s that supposed to tell us?”

  “I think,” Wergard said, “that, among other things, our visitor has been testing the strength of those barriers. I wouldn’t care to bet my life on what it’s concluded, as you seem willing to do. Another point—it may be developing a particular interest in the building you’re in. I suggest you take a close look at the square on the north again.”

  At first glance, the square still seemed empty. Then one noticed that its flat surface was alive with tiny sparks, with flickers and ripplings of pale light. The thing was there, almost completely submerged beneath the Depot’s ground level, apparently unmoving.

  Tornull said, staring fascinatedly, “Perhaps it knows we have that specimen in here!”

  Nobody answered. But in the square, as if aware its presence had been discovered, the fire shape rose slowly to the surface of the ground until it lay in full view, flat and monstrous, sideways to the main building. The silence in the office was broken suddenly by a chattering sound. It had not been a loud noise, but everyone started nervously and looked over at the table where the pile of instruments had been assembled.

  “What was that?” Volcheme demanded.

  “My shortcode transmitter,” Danestar told him.

  “It’s recorded a message?”

  “Obviously.”

  “From whom?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Danestar evenly. “But let’s guess. It’s not from outside the Depot because shortcode won’t go through the barrier. It’s not from Wergard, and it’s not from one of your people. What’s left?”

  The smuggler stared at her. “That’s an insane suggestion!”

  “Perhaps,” Danestar said. “Why don’t we listen to the translation?”

  “We will!” Volcheme jerked his head at Decrain. “Go over to the table with her. She isn’t to touch anything but the transmitter!”

  He watched, mouth twisted unpleasantly, as Decrain followed Danestar to the table. She picked up the miniature transmitter, slid a fingernail quickly along a groove to the phonetic translator switch. As she set the instrument back on the table, the words began.

  “Who . . . has . . . it . . . where . . . is . . . it . . . I . . . want . . . it . . . who . . . has . . . it . . . where . . . ”

  It went on for perhaps a minute and a half, three sentences repeated monotonously over and over, then stopped with a click. Danestar wasn’t immediately aware of the effect on the others. She’d listened in a mixture of fear, grief, hatred, and sick revulsion. Shortcode was speech, transmitted in an economical flash, restored to phonetic speech in the translator at the reception point. Each of the words which made up the three sentences had been pronounced at one time by a human being, were so faithfully reproduced one could tell the sentences had, in fact, been patched together with words taken individually from the speech of three or four different human beings. Human beings captured by the enemy in the Pit, Danestar thought, long dead now, but allowed to live while the enemy learned human speech from them, recorded their voices for future use. . . .

  She looked around. The others seemed as shaken as she was. Volcheme’s face showed he no longer doubted that the owner of the alien instrument had come to claim it.

  Dr. Hishkan remarked carefully, “If it should turn out that we are unable to destroy or control this creature, it is possible we can get rid of it simply by reassembling the device it’s looking for and placing it outside the defense screen. If it picks it up, we can open the barrier lock as an indication of our willingness to let it depart in peace with its property.”

  Volcheme looked at him. “Doctor,” he said, “don’t panic just because you’ve heard the thing talk to you! What this does seem to prove is that the specimen you’re selling through us is at least as valuable as it appeared to be—and I for one don’t intend to be cheated out of my profit.”

  “Nor I,” Dr. Hishkan said hastily. “But the creature’s ability to utilize shortcode to address us indicates a dangerous level of intelligence. Do you have any thoughts on how it might be handled now?”

  Galester interrupted, indicating the screen. “I believe it’s beginning to move. . . . ”

  There was silence again as they watched the fire body in the square. Its purple luminescence deepened and paled in slowly pulsing waves; then the tip swung about, swift as a flicking tongue, first toward the building, then away from it; and the thing flowed in a darting curve across the square and into a side street.

  “Going to nose around for its treasure somewhere else!” Volcheme said after it had vanished. “So, while it may suspect it’s here, it isn’t sure. I’m less impressed by its apparent intelligence than you are, Doctor. A stupid man can learn to use a complicated instrument, if somebody shows him how to do it. This may be a stupid alien . . . a soldier type sent here from the Pit to carry out a specific, limited mission.”

  Galester nodded. “Possibly a robot.”

  “Possibly a robot,” Volcheme agreed. “And, to answer your question of a moment ago, Doctor—yes, I have thought of a way to get it off our necks.”

  “What’s that?” Dr. Hishkan inquired eagerly.

  “No need to discuss it here!” Volcheme gave Danestar a glance of mingled malevolence and triumph. She underðstood its meaning well enough. If Wergard could be located, Volcheme could now rid himself of the Kyth operators with impunity. There were plenty of witnesses to testify that the monstrous creature which had invaded the Depot had destroyed over a dozen men. She and Wergard would be put down as two more of its victims.

  “We won’t use the shuttle at present,” Volcheme went on. “But we want the portable guns, and we’ll get ourselves into antiradiation suits immediately. Decrain, watch the lady until we get back—use any methods necessary to make sure she stays where she is and behaves herself. We’ll bring a suit back up for you. The rest of you come along. Hurry!”

  Decrain started to say something, then stood silent and scowling as the others filed quick
ly out of the office and started down the hall to the right. The big man looked uneasy. With a gigantic fiery alien around, he might not appreciate being left alone to guard the prisoner while his companions climbed into the security of antiradiation suits. As the last of the group disappeared, he sighed heavily, shifted his attention back to Danestar.

  His eyes went huge with shocked surprise. The chair in which she had been sitting was empty. Decrain’s hand flashed to his gun holster, stopped as it touched it. He stood perfectly still.

  Something hard was pushing against the center of his back below his shoulder blades.

  “Yes, I’ve got it,” Danestar whispered behind him. “Not a sound, Decrain! If you even breathe louder than I like, I’ll split your spine!”

  They waited in silence. Decrain breathed cautiously while the voices and footsteps in the hall grew fainter, became inaudible. Then the gun muzzle stopped pressing against his back.

  “All right,” Danestar said softly—she’d moved off but was still close behind him—“just stand there now!”

  Decrain moistened his lips.

  “Miss Gems,” he said, speaking with some difficulty, “I was, you remember, a gentleman!”

  “So you were, buster,” her voice agreed. “And a very fortunate thing that is for you at the moment. But—”

  Decrain dropped forward, turning in the air, lashing out savagely with both feet in the direction of the voice. It was a trick that worked about half the time. A blurred glimpse of Danestar flashing a white smile above him and of her arm swinging down told him it hadn’t worked here. The butt of the gun caught the side of his head a solid wallop, and Decrain closed his eyes and drifted far, far away.

  She bent over him an instant, half-minded to give him a second rap for insurance, decided it wasn’t necessary, shoved the gun into a pocket of her coveralls and went quickly to the big table in the center of the office. Her control belt was there among the jumble of things they’d brought over from her room. Danestar fastened it about her waist, slipped on the white jacket lying beside it, rummaged hurriedly among the rest, storing the shortcode transmitter and half a dozen other items into various pockets before she picked up her emptied instrument valise and moved to the opposite end of the table where Galester had arranged the mechanisms he’d removed for examination from the false asteroid.

  She’d had her eye on one of those devices since she’d been brought to the office. It was enclosed in some brassy pseudometal, about the size of a goose egg and shaped like one. Galester hadn’t known what to make of it in his brief investigation, and Dr. Hishkan had offered only vague conjectures; but she had studied it and its relationship to a number of other instruments very carefully on the night she’d been in Dr. Hishkan’s vault, and knew exactly what to make of it. She placed it inside her valise, went back to the collection of her own instruments, turned on the spy-screen and fingered a switch on the control belt. The spy-screen made a staccato chirping noise.

  “I’m alone here,” she told it quickly. “Decrain’s out cold. Now, how do I get out of this building and to some rendezvous point—fastest? Volcheme’s gone berserk, as you heard. I don’t want to be anywhere near them when they start playing games with that animated slice of sheet lightning!”

  “Turn left when you leave the office,” Wergard’s voice said from the blank screen. “Take the first elevator two levels down and get out.”

  “And then?”

  “I’ll be waiting for you there.”

  “How long have you been in the building?” she asked, startled.

  “About five minutes. Came over to pick up a couple of those antiradiation suits for us, which I have. The way things were going then, I thought I’d better hang around and wait for a chance to get you away from our friends.”

  “I was about to start upstairs when Volcheme and the others left. Then I heard a little commotion in the office and decided you were doing something about Decrain. So I waited.”

  “Bless you, boy!” Danestar said gratefully. “Be with you in a minute!”

  She switched off the spy-screen, went out of the office, skirting Decrain’s harshly snoring form on the carpet, and turned left down the quiet hall.

  The hideaway from which Corvin Wergard had been keeping an observer’s eye on events in the Depot was one of a number he’d set up for emergency use shortly after their arrival. He’d selected it for operations today because it was only a few steps from an exit door in the building, and less than a hundred and twenty yards from both the control section and the outer barrier lock—potential critical points in whatever action would develop. Guiding Danestar back to it took minutes longer than either of them liked, but the route Wergard had worked out led almost entirely through structures shielded from the alien visitor by section defense screens.

  She sat across the tiny room from him, enclosed in one of the bulky antiradiation suits, the shortcode transmitter on a wall shelf before her, fingers delicately, minutely, adjusting another of the instruments she had brought back from Hishkan’s office. Her eyes were fixed on the projection field above the instrument. Occasional squigglings and ripples of light flashed through it—meaningless static. But she’d had glimpses of light patterns which seemed far from meaningless here, was tracking them now through the commband detector to establish the settings which would fix them in the visual projection field for study. That was a nearly automatic process—her hands knew what to do and were doing it. Her thoughts kept turning in ðnightmare fascination about other aspects of the gigantic raider.

  What did they know about it? And what did it know about them?

  That living, deadly energy body, or its kind, had not built the signaling device. If it was not acting for itself, if it had hidden masters in the Pit, the masters had not built the device, either. Regardless of its origin, the instrument, though centuries old, still had been in use; and in the dust cloud its value in establishing location, in permitting free purposeful action, must be immense. But whoever was using it evidently had lacked even the ability to keep it in repair. Much less would they have been able to replace it after it disappeared—and they must be in mortal fear that mankind would discover the secrets of the instrument and return to meet them on even terms in the cloud. . . .

  So this creature had traversed deep space to reach Mezmiali and recover it.

  Volcheme, conditioned to success in dealing with human opponents, still believed his resourcefulness was sufficient to permit him to handle the emissary from the Pit. To Danestar it seemed approximately like attempting to handle an animated warship. The thing was complex, not simply an elemental force directed by a limited robotic mind. It had demonstrated it could use its energies to duplicate the human shortcode system, and the glimpse she’d had in the detector’s field of one of its patterns implied it was capable of much more than had been shown so far. And it might not have come here alone. There could be others of its kind undetected beyond the Depot’s barrier with whom it was in communication.

  In the face of such possibilities, Volcheme’s determination amounted to lunacy. They might have convinced the others of the need to call for outside help; but the intercom system had been shut off, evidently on the smuggler’s orders, when Danestar’s escape was discovered. Through various spy devices they knew he was coordinating the activities of his men with personal communicators, and that a sectional force barrier was being set up across the center of the main building, connected to the external ones. Completed, the barrier system would transform half the building into a box trap, open at the end. The men and the specimen from the Pit would be in the other half. When the monster flowed into the trap to get at them, observers in the control building would snap a barrier shut across the open end. The thing would be safely inside . . . assuming that barriers of sectional strength were impassable to it.

  Volcheme’s calculations were based entirely on that assumption. So far, nothing had happened to prove him wrong. The alien creature was still moving about the Depot. Wergard, bef
ore the multiple-view screen through which he had followed the earlier events of the day, reported glimpses of it every minute or two. And there were increasing indications of purpose in its motions. It had passed along this building once, paused briefly. But it had shown itself three times about the control section, three times at the main building. Its interest appeared to be centering on those points.

  Until it ended its swift and unpredictable prowling, they could only wait here. Wergard was ready to slip over to a personnel lock in the barrier about the control building when an opportunity came. A gas charge would knock out the men inside, and the main barrier would open long enough then to let out their prepared shortðcode warning. Their main concern after that would be to stay alive until help arrived.

  Their heads turned sharply as the shortcode transmitter on the shelf before Danestar gave its chattering pickup signal. She stood up, snapped the headpiece of her radiation suit into position, collapsed the other instruments on the shelf, slid them into the suit’s pockets, and picked up the valise she’d brought back from Dr. Hishkan’s office.

  “. . . where . . . is . . . it . . . I . . . want . . . it . . .” whispered the transmitter.

  “Pickup range still set at thirty yards?” Wergard asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “There’s nothing in sight around here.”

  Danestar glanced over at him. He’d encased himself in the other radiation suit. A small high-power energy carbine lay across a chair beside him. His eyes were on the viewscreen which now showed only the area immediately around the building. She didn’t answer. The transmitter continued to whisper.

  It wasn’t in sight, but it was nearby. Very near. Within thirty yards of the transmitter, of their hideout, of them. And pausing now much longer than it had the first time it passed the building.