Alien Harvest (a)

by Robert Sheckley

  There were always plenty of new criminals to deal with; no one had any time for the older ones.

  They followed the signs that had been set up to guide them to their quarter. But Walter Glint, a short, dark-haired barrel-chested man from Natchez who was Badger's closest friend aboard, noticed that Red Badger wasn't even bothering to look where he was going.

  “Hey, Red! You been on this ship before?”

  “You bet I have,” Red Badger said. “I know her layout like the back of my hand.”

  “How come you never said anything about it when that Hoban guy asked if you'd met before?”

  Badger shrugged. “If he didn't remember, I wasn't going to remind him. It was a pretty bad time for him. I'll tell you about it later.”

  They went into the crew's quarters. There was plenty of room. The Dolomite normally carried a crew of thirty-five, but Hoban had pared it down to the bare minimum after consulting with Stan. There was no trouble finding berths. Badger and Glint claimed their own corner, and were joined by their best friends from the federal facility. One of these, Connie Mindanao, was a diminutive woman, brown-skinned and black-haired and fierce looking, her features showing evidence of her mixed ancestry. She was the unlikely combination of a Moro from the Philippines and a Mohawk from New York's Iroquois Confederation.

  The only thing the two peoples had had in common was a history of head-hunting. Of the other two, one was a big black man from California named Andy Groggins, and the second was a taciturn Laotian hill woman who didn't say much but whose actions were direct and sudden, and apt to be lethal; her name was Min Dwin.

  There were others who were friendly with Badger, and some who downright hated him. They sorted out their sleeping arrangements accordingly.

  Badger was used to being the center of attention.

  A voice came over the loudspeaker. “All crew! Put away your gear and strip for hypersleep. Everybody must be on his acceleration couch in five minutes.”

  Badger called out, “What's our destination?”

  His voice was picked up by a wall monitor. “There'll be a full briefing immediately upon your awakening,” the loudspeaker voice replied.

  “How long we going to sleep this time?” Badger asked.

  “That information will be fed into the hypersleep machinery. No more questions, people! Get ready.”

  Connie Mindanao said, “What are they trying to pull on us? I don't know if I'm going to stand still for this.” She looked at Badger. “What do you think, Red?”

  “Relax,” Badger told her. “Nothing much we can do about it just now. The ship's sealed, and anyhow, the guards are still outside. We've got no chance of making a run for it.”

  They all settled down onto their hypersleep couches. The lights dimmed.

  19

  The Dolomite left its geosynchronous orbit and proceeded slowly to jump point: a position in space well enough beyond Earth's orbit to permit subspace operation without peril to others. From there Hoban radioed for permission to disembark, and shortly thereafter received an okay from the Coast Guard monitoring station at L6.

  Stan and his party strapped down. Hoban looked them over and asked, “All ready, Dr. Myakovsky?”

  “Ready,” Stan said.

  “All right,” Hoban said. “Mr. Gill — get us out of here!”

  Gill's hands moved across the switches. The lights dimmed in response to the sudden power surge as the tachyonic converters whirled into action, compressing time and space, tighter, tighter, until the Dolomite suddenly vanished from normal space.

  The voyage had begun.

  20

  Julie was used to the dark. It was friendly and warm, and she felt safe in it. Only in the dark had she found security and safety, shielded away from men's eyes and their motives. The dark was the place where she had trained, so many years ago, when she had learned those matters of stealth and suddenness that were her protection and her trademark. It was then that she learned to make the darkness her own.

  And so it had been for all her young life. But it was different now. This darkness that surrounded her now felt sinister, evil. Maybe that was because she knew something lurked within it, something that was trying to get her.

  She stopped for a moment in midstep, trying to get her bearings. Her hearing extended itself through the darkness, searching. As her eyes became accustomed to the gloom she made out vast shapes on either side of her. They were machines, made of dark, glistening metal, and they towered above her. Spots of white light from some unknown source winked off metallic surfaces, and reflected from coils and condensers. They didn't even look like objects. They were like the ghosts of objects because their shapes were indistinct, ambiguous, swathed in a darkness that had gradation and depth, and was textured with the layers of silence.

  A voice crackled in the tiny radio bug implanted in her ear.

  “Julie? Do you see him yet?” It was Stan Myakovsky, calling from the Dolomite's central control room. He wasn't far away, as distances go, but he could have been in another galaxy for all the good he could do her now.

  “Not yet,” she answered. “But I know he's in here somewhere.”

  “Be careful, huh?” Stan said. “I still think we should have, delayed this run. I'm still not entirely satisfied with Norbert's control system.”

  Now was a hell of a time to tell her that. She decided to ignore it. Stan sounded agitated. Was he getting cold feet?

  Or was he just having an ordinary attack of nerves?

  She snapped on a tiny flashlight. Ahead of her, picked up in the thin beam, she could see more profound glooms, silent caves of blackness where awful things might lurk. Some of these horrors were caused by the power of her imagination, but she was afraid that some were not.

  It was not imagination that told her something in this great dark place was tracking her. She knew it was there. But where was it? She strained her senses to the utmost, trying to pick up some clue. Nothing. But she could tell it was out there. She had a sense of presence, almost like a sixth sense. It was what a successful thief needed above all else, and Julie was an extremely successful thief.

  She thought back now on her years of training with Shen Hui, the old Chinese master criminal. She first met him when she was a little girl, the youngest one in the Shanghai slave market that morning. She remembered peering at the crowd that had come to attend the auction, trying to catch a final glimpse of her mother. But she had already left, unwilling to watch her only daughter being sold on the open market. The men started bidding, men from different countries. Then one old man had outbid the rest, and had paid the auctioneer in taels of gold. That was Shen Hui.

  He brought her to his house and raised her like his own flesh and blood. Shen Hui was a master thief, a master of the zen of thievery. He had taught her to develop her latent senses so that she could register things without literally seeing or hearing them. That ability came to her rescue now.

  Yes, it was not just imagination. There was something near, and it was situated right over … there!

  She whirled as a great looming thing detached itself from the deep knot of shadows near a gigantic machine that lay shrouded in its own dust. She found it fascinating, the way the shadows moved and grew, like something not human, the way they resolved into one, and that shadow suddenly turned solid and launched itself at her with an explosive hiss.

  “Julie! Watch out!” Stan's voice rang in her ears. He had picked up the sudden movement. But late. Stan was always late. What good could his warning do for her now? He never seemed to realize it. Not that she had expected anything more. She was responsible for herself. And Julie was already in motion as the thing came at her.

  Her long legs, clad in skintight black plastic, pumped smoothly as she sprinted down the central aisle of the Dolomite's great central cargo hold. The creature, three times her height, colored an unremitting black, with jaws filled with long closely packed fanglike teeth, came after her. Feeling herself being overtaken, Julie dodged and swe
rved around the faintly delineated center line of the hold. This one narrow strip had been set for twenty percent less of the faux gravity that so much resembled the real thing. Running on the light-gravity strip made her feel as though she had wings, so rapidly did she move, dodging fixed objects as they came up to smear her, vaulting over smaller obstacles, always moving, the sound of her own blood pounding in her ears.

  The creature came running after her, and a ray of light from a globe in the ceiling picked it up for a moment.

  It appeared to be a full-size alien, with the typical backward-sloping cranium of its kind.

  The thing was as startling as an apparition from hell. Its claws, with their doubled fingers, reached for her. Julie turned and fled down the narrow confines of the hold.

  The area she ran in widened, and the creature managed to gain a few steps on her.

  Stan, watching the action on a monitor in the control room, yelped in alarm as the creature loomed over her. He asked himself why he had ever agreed to let Julie take this training run. Thinking about it now, he could see that it had been an unnecessary risk. If anything went wrong, it could jeopardize the whole operation.

  And aside from that, if Julie got hurt … But he couldn't let himself think about that.

  Julie and the alien dodged around enormous packing cases, cubes of plastic ten feet on a side. There were a dozen or so of them, and they were scattered randomly on the floor, part of the clutter that accumulates in any spaceship. Julie ran her fingers over the edge of a box. With a quick look aided by her flashlight, she had fixed its location. A memory of the placement of the other boxes was burned into her short-term memory. In her mind she could see the zig-zag path she would have to follow to get to the next bulkhead. After that, a sally port served as a midpoint connection to the next part of the ship's hold.

  She ran full out, counting off step by step. Crossing a crowded room in darkness with speed and silence is one of a thief's most useful accomplishments. Julie continued across the hold, her senses on red alert, trying once again to locate the creature that was stalking her. Norbert was good, he was very quiet, she had to give him that. He had learned how to muffle his body movements, and even to quiet the sounds of his body functions. Good as he was, she still was aware of him, but it was an awareness that flickered in and out of existence.

  After the midpoint sally exit, she came to the platform that blocked the way to the farthest exit. It was a prestressed antimagnetic steel plate approximately twenty feet wide by two hundred feet long, and five inches deep. She climbed up onto it. It was drilled with many large, irregularly spaced holes ranging in diameter from two to five feet, where components would be fitted later. Running the length of the plate left you vulnerable to stepping into a hole and breaking a leg, or falling through an unshielded ventilator shaft to the deck below.

  She had to slow down to make it across. Julie went down the length of the platform at a half-speed sprint, unable visually to detect the openings in the darkness, relying on memory. Norbert came loping along steadily after her. She noticed that he, too, must have memorized the locations of the holes, because he was moving confidently and quickly. She forced herself to go a little faster, even though it increased her chances of a fall.

  She reached the far end and hopped off. Norbert had gained several steps on her. She hoped to make it up in the next stage.

  Just ahead were the spare firing tubes, big cylinders of cold-rolled steel, eighteen of them, each a hundred and eighty feet long. Moving by touch, Julie located a pipe with an aperture that would just permit her to squeeze in. Norbert, with his greater size, wouldn't be able to follow, would be forced to walk on top of the slippery pipes, thus giving Julie a brief breathing spell. A good escape could be composed of moments like these.

  That, at least, was how it was supposed to work. Norbert stopped and looked at the pipe, started to go around it, then came back and managed somehow to collapse his shoulders and crawl into the pipe after her. She could hear the tortured metal-to-metal squealing as he pushed himself through the pipe.

  Then she realized that not only was he in the pipe behind her, he was gaining, collapsing himself down to half his usual size and scuttling along like a giant malevolent insect. A sudden sense of claustrophobia came over Julie as she imagined Norbert's big clawed hand closing over her foot.

  She forced herself to remain calm. “You won't go any faster in a panic,” she reminded herself. One of the first lessons Shen Hui had taught her was to be extra cool in the face of a crisis, to force herself to slow down just when her senses were shrieking at her to speed up. This lesson stood her in good stead now. Suddenly the darkness came to an end and she was out of the pipe and running, a fraction of a second ahead of the alien.

  She dodged instinctively as Norbert's arm reached out for her. In a moment's inattention, she slammed into a precariously balanced cart containing machine parts and ball bearings. Metal objects flew in all directions and clattered against the sides of the hold. Julie came down on a bearing in midstride and both her feet shot out from under her. Catlike, she turned in midair, throwing up a protective forearm before she went crashing to the floor on her face.

  As she sprawled Norbert loomed above her, arms spread wide, jaws open in a terrifying grimace. Through his open jaws the little inner jaws came flickering out, more malevolent than a crazed pit viper.

  Norbert lunged at her, and she was momentarily unable to do anything to protect herself. He was almost on her….

  She had an instant to wonder what he was programmed to do if he caught her… or did he make up that part as he went along?

  And then Norbert slipped on the bearings and lost his balance. His taloned feet raked the metal floor as he tried to gain purchase. He crashed to the deck with a bone-smattering sound.

  For a moment Norbert sprawled there. His resemblance to a giant insect was now apparent as his arms and legs twitched and vibrated, trying to find something to hold. Then he righted himself and was up again and towering over her.

  Unable to do anything, Stan had to watch. His fingernails were already ragged, for he had been chewing at bloody cuticles while monitoring Julie's progress. He leaned forward, intent.

  Julie, at the last possible moment, slipped through the alien's claws and disappeared through the horizontally closing metal slabs at the end of the hold. The creature yowled in rage as the door shut in his face and Julie shot the lock.

  Immediately Norbert began wrenching at the door, then, having no luck with the lock, turned his attention to the hinges.

  Julie meanwhile was streaking through the cluttered compartment, sprinting at full stride and managing somehow to avoid the clutter of machines and packing cases that turned the place into an obstacle course filled with cutting edges.

  Stan was able to track her progress on his monitor against a schematic of the ship's hold.

  He watched a tiny silver dot, representing Julie, dodge around objects ahead of a longer blue-black streak that represented her pursuer.

  “Come on, Julie,” Stan muttered to himself. “You don't have to run it this close! Pull the plug! Bail out!”

  But Julie kept running. She seemed to be going for some kind of a record. Never had she been so graceful, so light on her feet. She had reached the far end of the compartment. The egress port was dogged down tight. Norbert was less than five feet behind her now. He reached for her with taloned claws, ending in dagger-sharp tips. Julie stood her ground, and Stan couldn't help but admire the game quality of her courage.

  Then she ducked down and scuttled between the creature's legs, catching it by surprise, and escaping with nothing more than a shallow scratch on her right shoulder.

  She was up to her full speed in two bounds, and for a moment she thought she had gained on it. But Norbert had learned something, too. He ignored her dodging run and came galloping up alongside her. His mouth, impossibly crowded with needle-tipped teeth, snarled and opened wide. From his jaw, and protruding through his mouth, c
ame the hateful small replica of these jaws, composed of a small rectangular body part like a tongue, which ended in a mouth filled with white sharp teeth.

  This was it. There was no place to go.

  The creature moved in for the kill.

  “Julie!” Stan screamed. “For God's sake!”

  At that final moment Julie screamed at the creature, “Cancel predation functions!”

  Norbert froze in midmovement. His feeding tube withdrew into his mouth. His jaws closed.

  Julie then said, “Return to standard program.”

  She turned away from the creature, who stood frozen in position, and walked through the connecting passageway to Stan, who was still in the control room, sitting numbly in the big command chair near the computer.

  21

  In the control room, where he had been watching her progress on a TV monitor, Stan heaved a sigh of relief. He knew Julie would join him soon, after she had showered and changed. He just had time to check the condition of the men in hypersleep, and then he and Julie would be able to go over their plans.

  He walked through a dilating door, down a short corridor, and into the long gray egg-shaped room that was devoted to hypersleep. The lights were low, leaving the place in an eternal twilight. The only sound Stan heard was the occasional short click of a circuit breaker.