“Mr. Spigot, with the moral atmosphere of godlessness that has been descending upon Portown in the past years, it is understandable that some heretical ideas should seep down to our children. This is the reason I am instructing you on this subject today. The public stoning and burning of the first Body Parlour in this city a year ago did not stop the criminal element from starting more of them, and the government from considering legalization. But I am surprised at the depth to which these things have affected you. Perhaps I should speak with your mother.” He leaned over, a victorious little smirk on his thin face.
Todd’s classmates looked at him. He had so much more he wanted to discuss with Mr. Evans. They were all so interesting, these ideas. But mention of his mother evoked her image and seeming presence in his mind. He shivered at the thought of her resonant displeasure.
“No,” he said, staring down at his scuffed Oxfords. “Please don’t.”
Mommy.
Momma.
Mom.
She rose up now, a fat specter, pointing an accusing finger.
“Todd. Todd, what are you doing?”
Mother. Mother loves you. You need Mother, or things will fall apart.
Mother.
Mom.
Momma.
Mommy.
He seemed to be floating. He felt so light ...
The microsurgery commenced.
Electronically and with the hovering lasers, the myriad nerve strands and capillaries about the brain were cut and cauterized. Incisions were made on his lower back. The spinal cord was severed between the occiput and first cervical vertebra, on the synapses thereby opening them on a molecular level: an antimagnetic surge that neutralized the negative-positive dipole moment of each molecule.
After much work, the spinal cord slid out like meat from a crab claw ...
WHEN HIS asteroid-sized destination loomed in the vu-plate, Abner Jox stared slack-jawed at it for a long time. It was the biggest goddamned man-made thing that Abner had ever seen, a bloody bizarre sight looking like something sculptured by an absurdist artist with time logged at the loony bin.
But of course no human had designed that thing.
The Morapns had.
The Star Fall.
Abner Jox shivered as the sheen of reflected sunlight glared from a web-work of bright-polished wires, crisscrossing two towers of the spaceship that would look more at home on a planet’s surface. His radio crackled and static coalesced into words:
“Approaching vessel. Code in identification and purpose of visit. Presence acknowledged and noted.” A neutral voice. Computer? Robot? A guy with a head cold? Damned if Jox knew. All the free-lance miner, cum star comber, wanted to do was to deposit this hot load of his and split before the authorities got wind of his actions. Trouble enough with the assholes without getting caught pulling this particular stunt.
Blithely, he thumbed through the pile of mag-crystals in the little box beside him, not feeling much like diddling with direct input. Punching the correct black, shiny cube into its hole, he leaned back in his pilot’s chair, smoking a fragrant cigarette of genuine Maryland tobacco to steady his nerves after this particularly harrowing run. But, shit, with the money he was pulling in on the job, he’d be able to buy thousands of the little nic-stics imported from Earth, despite their prohibitive price.
Of course, he’d risked his life to do the chore. He didn’t know why they’d come to him. His little one-man, battered, two-hundred-year-old Dusky Planet-cruiser was hardly the best of the runners plying this trade. It was barely suitable even for the asteroids, prospecting and grabbing in chunks of asteroid ore with sucker beams and grapple arms and a scarred hold that had hauled too many tons of stuff without a repair to really be safe. For sure, he couldn’t have done it if they hadn’t sent him that weird doohickey for capture, storage, and eventual transfer.
And Jox certainly wanted to transfer the stuff, quick.
He’d never seen the like of it and never wanted to again.
Staring at it, even through filter-screens, was like looking into the yawning mouth of Hell. A Hell that wanted him.
His transmitter was busy banging out the codes, and still no response. You’d think they’d be expecting me, he thought. You’d think they’d have a red carpet wagging out like a hungry tongue for me.
But of course nothing about the assignment had any hint of ceremony—only a sense of covert silence.
The readout screen rearing beside him sprang to fizzling life, blinked once, twice, flipped horizontally and then steadied, holding a message. For the umpteenth time, Jox noted to himself that he’d have to get that thing fixed. You don’t bop around space for long with faulty equipment. But damn, maybe he’d get a new one. Or perhaps a whole new ship. Maybe one of those gleaming, sleek, fifty-meter jobs, with the new miniature Mattin drive. The starways would be his then. He’d be able to realize his lifelong wish to visit a bar on every human colonized planet.
Before the message communicated, the ship jumped. Once, twice, rattling him. Odds and ends in a medical cabinet clamped onto a curved wall tumbled slowly to the floor in the low-gee environment.
The message read:
IDENTIFICATION SATISFACTORY. TRACTOR BEAMS
WILL BEAR YOU TO DESIRED ENTRY POINT INTO SHIP.
Well, a lot of good that did him now. Every loose thing in the cabin was probably rolling around on the floor now. It would be a bitch to clean up, even if the quarters were small. He hated to clean up. Too bad he didn’t have a first mate or something.
He felt the seams groan with the pressure of the beams. Powerful things, those tractor beams. They’d better treat the Jim Dandy carefully, considering what it had on board, for the good of him, them, and their whole frigging behemoth ship!
Inexorably, the beams pulled him closer to the mottled surface of the space-liner. He could see the huge doors of the hangar slide back. He didn’t like the associations the image brought to mind. Was this what it was like to be swallowed, eaten, the prey of a ravenous predator? Sucked into a maw like he might suck into a bit of candy?
Jox had been combing these particular barren star beaches for twelve years now. Bad as it was, it was a sight better than drilling in those god-awful mines of Deadrock, your sweat sizzling in laser light, evaporating with your hope. Jox had been lucky. He’d abandoned all that and started out working the regulated asteroid mining, saving his creds ... then, with a few machinations, legal and illegal, buying this old boat and going solo. He’d made a slight underworld rep for himself, doing loco runs, smuggling this and that, obtaining raw ore for questionable parties. And always, amongst the boys he’d hoist beers with in port, he’d heard the tales of the Ghost Group, the Haunted Rocks, where things were not quite normal, to say the least ...
He had always scoffed at those rumors, calling them superstitious claptrap.
Until the small punctilious man had sat behind him at a bar one day, bought him a drink, and made a deal.
This had caused Jox a deal of trouble. No doubt about it, he’d earned every cred coming to him.
The glistening lights of the port spewed out into space like a translucent pavement. Don’t look, Jox told himself. Don’t watch, don’t think about what might happen if they jar you too hard or crash you into something. He cut off the visuals. The blank glass bounced his reflection back to him. The ragged, mussed hair. The broken nose. The beady eyes. The almost pointed jaw. The scars. Forty-two years old, and I ain’t even started to really live yet. But he would. He would when he got himself a new body. He closed his eyes and visualized it ... imagined how nice it would be to actually be rich. That was why he had taken the little pipsqueak’s offer, despite the danger. For the money. The money that would ... that would make his life livable for a change. The gentle stroking hands of a woman angled down, and he was lost in his dream.
The abrupt impact with
the docking apparatus jarred him out of his reverie. “Hey, you jerks! Careful!”
Then all was still, silent as the grave.
He gave them a while to close the back doors, get some air in this place. When the red light pinged on, signaling repressurization, he cycled his lock open and exited.
A single man waited for him as he clambered out of the Jim Dandy. A nondescript enough man ... but what Jox noticed immediately was the strange little clothes hanger coming down from his cap, holding a dope-stick. Smoke streamed up. Gray smoke, twining, crisscrossing like a DNA Helix.
A hand extended. “Mr. Jox. I’m very happy to see you. My name is MacNeil. I’m Captain of this ship.” He glanced down the length of the pocked fuselage. “Uhm, I trust you have the ... er ... item that was requested?”
Exasperated, Jox shook his head. “Shit man, you think I’d show up with an empty cargo hold?”
“No. I inspected your record. I suspect you just would have vanished with the small amount of money that was deposited with you.”
“Hey, fellow, I’m playing no tricks with you. Yeah, I got what you asked for.”
MacNeil smiled. “I thought so. The owner will be most pleased.”
“Owner? Listen. I don’t want to know anybody but you. I want to load that little magnetic box off my—”
“Maxi-entropic transit-molecular magnetic box, Mr. Jox. What it holds, I have recently been told, will power our ship for years. At first I questioned the reason for stopping off at this—” Pause. “—this nothing of a system. But I have been reassured.”
“I don’t care, man! Just load it off, give me my money, and I’m gone. I can’t tell you how hard it was to coax that little rock”
“Anti-rock, Mr. Jox.” MacNeil smiled broadly at the joke.
“Yeah, well, whatever it is, I don’t want nothing to do with it no more. You’ve got the money? In the chits I asked for?”
MacNeil nodded at a little plastic box at his feet. “All there, I assure you. The owner pays well. We well realize the risk you took.”
“Hey, man, you don’t know the half of it.” He felt sweat dribbling down his temple and wiped it off. “As if being illegal to pick that stuff up—as if anyone could before!—it’s also damned dangerous. Why, did you know—”
“I have been supplied with all the details, I assure you, of the nature of the substance. My only reason for being present is to see that you are dispatched with your pay. Now please take it, reenter your ship, and follow orders exactly on the discharge of your cargo.” He indicated the crane-work overhead. “The waldos will take good care of the antimatter.”
Jox strode to the money box, knelt down beside it, flipped off the lock switch and pried it open, hands shaking expectantly. They’d offered to just change the number on his cred-account down below, but Jox didn’t like numbers. You couldn’t touch numbers, you couldn’t count them one by one, let them tinkle over your body as you lay in your cramped sleep booth. The image of that had gone over and over in the man’s head dozens of times—indeed, even as he had sweated painstakingly over the gentle nudges of the switches, noodling with the massive energy levels needed to grasp that little floating chunk of negativity out there in space with its spooky fellows, out there where maybe one dimension bled into another ...
The lid flipped back, and there they were in all their solid plastoid splendor, the cred chits, hundred-markers all. A thousand of them. A thousand! He ran his fingers over them, flawing the perfect stacks.
“I quite assure you,” said the officious little creep hovering over him. “All your money is there.”
Jox nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. Looks right.” He slammed the box, peered up at the Captain. “Now that I’m paid, I just got one more question.”
“You were not paid to ask questions, Mr. Jox.” The Captain sucked absently on his dope-stick, his arms folded nonchalantly.
“Okay. But let me say this, just out of whatever shred of humanity I got left. That antimatter cluster ...”
“It was where we indicated, no? Your presence here seems to support our instructions on the delicate task of approaching the stuff, selecting a small, random chunk, and getting it safely back here. What more can you possibly ask?”
“You say that it’s to help power this ship?”
“Quite right. The energy stored in that small bit is enough—”
Annoyed, Jox waved him to silence. “Don’t give me the technical details. You may well be right ... but my question is how come nobody else has mined that place before? I heard tell of expeditions going out there and not coming back—and when one did, they claimed that stuff, though awful interesting to study, was virtually useless. But that ain’t it.” He stood, hefting the box up into his arms. “You get there, and you look at that stuff—aglowing like damned ghostshit, all alone, and you look inside at the roiling of it ... Well, it ain’t good for the sanity, know what I mean? I can’t see no good coming from that stuff, so I’d advise you to be real careful.”
“I trust that advice is free.” The little arm rose and delicately tapped off a speck of ash.
Jox snorted. “Yah. Yah, free. Shove it up your—”
“Good day, Mr. Jox.” The neat man about-faced and marched away, trailing yellowish dope-stick smoke.
Jox shrugged and turned back to the ship. The whole feeling he had about this was bad. The money didn’t feel right—didn’t feel good in his grasp like he’d expected it to. Damn. Maybe, after he deposited the stuff—stashed it safe someplace or spent it—he should, anonymous-like, let the authorities know that a bit of—what did the miners call it? Yah ... Satan’s Gallstones. Let someone know that these jokers seemed to have learned to harness the power of one.
Yah. That would sure make him feel better about the whole business. He didn’t like this ship, didn’t like that bastard MacNeil. At all.
In the mottled darkness beyond the Jim Dandy, something moved. He looked around; saw the waldo cranes swinging into position.
Must have been a shadow from those, he assumed, stepping toward his open air lock. Well, he’d better get inside, close up tight, and follow directions so he could get that hot rock out of his cargo hold.
No, he didn’t like the way it looked at all, those boiling energy auras splayed out in crystalline blackness. Like staring the cold lord of nothingness square in the eye—locking stares with the Reaper.
A slopping sound—like sea polyps flapping against metal. From the other side of the ship, definitely. What the hell? Had it gotten tangled in loose wiring in this goddamned hangar? That could play hell with the departure process, and Jox didn’t want to loiter around here any longer than he had to. He figured he’d better go check.
Smoothing a hand along the pitted surface of the rocket (gotta get those deflectors fixed!) he negotiated the curve of the ship’s nose and ran straight into the horror.
A dark amorphous blob ciliated over the hull of the Jim Dandy like a mound of solidified oil. Eye-cluster like frog-egg sacks hung in rows. Teeth glistened. Tentacles sported fingers half a meter long.
Desperately, Jox turned to flee. But too late. A stream of coherent light speared him, gutting him like a lance of fire.
The last blink of his life was like staring into that chunk of antimatter ... a funneling, endless, and demanding darkness full of nothing but nothing.
* * *
The Zism flowed soundless over the corpse of the space pilot—eradicating evidence.
Ingestion through assimilation apertures. Not a scrap would be left, not a bit of the human, from clothes to toes, would remain.
Which was why it had been chosen for the task?
In the concealment afforded by an indentation close to a wall-side girder, keeping all but the top of her head in shadow, the agent watched, horrified, helpless.
THE LASER filament-wires withdrew from Todd Spigot’s backbone.
Vision assailed his cut-off consciousness.
They came to him in a series of emotions as well as memories. Those memories seemed to blur into one another. And finally, they seemed to belong to someone else, not to him at all:
Ache of joints. Swathed in joggling, sweaty folds of fat—
Oh, God, I wish I could just take a knife and cut it out!
He walked and jogged in painful spurts in the woodsy cross-country trail, for second period gym class.
(“Spigot, let’s see if you can do a mile in twenty minutes or else I’m afraid I’m going to have to fail you this quarter. Get some of that baby fat off you.” The teacher gripped the stopwatch like an instrument of torture. Muscles rippled under tanned skin. “Come on, Todd. Really, you’ll feel better for it.”)
The air ripped at his throat with sharp hot claws. The violent summer sun shone above like a porthole into Hell. The early summer was murder on Deadrock, because of its eccentric orbit. Todd struggled on through the parched landscape, alone. His classmates outdistanced him long before with their eager, healthy, thin youth.
The salty sweat dripped in rivulets into his mouth—made splotchy stains in his well-stretched t-shirt. An insistent nausea quivered deep in him as he slowed to a panting walk. He had to stop and rest. He sat down heavily on a flat rock and put his head between his legs. He had tried. Oh God, he had tried so hard, pushed so much to keep up with the others. He had strained and strained and strained, and they had pulled easily ahead, ignoring his efforts, just as they ignored his contemptible clumsy efforts to be friendly.
He was sitting there, spitting phlegm onto the dried, dusty grass, the sickness ebbing, when Spiv Hurdfield and Marty Rancer loped along, matching strides, muscles working efficiently under taut skin thick with veins. They must have chosen to run a second lap, Todd thought.
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