Mother Lode

Mother Lode Page 3

by Zach Hughes

  under the bed, waited until all was still to sneak quietly to lie at Erin's feet with his head against her leg. She patted her hand on a spot by her side and the little dog came to snuggle there, sighing in contentment as she let her hand rest lightly on him. A living ship in space is never silent. Servomechanisms hum quietly. Relays and thermocouples click as they do their work vigilantly. The life-support system mutters contentedly to itself. The sounds were familiar, so much a part of life that Erin didn't notice them until the hums, the clicks, the muttering ceased to be mechanical and seemed to become a confused babble of voices. She stiffened. Mop, feeling the change in her, lifted his head. «It's all right,» she whispered. «I'm just getting a bit space happy.» It was time to find a nice deposit of a certain yellow metal, top off Mother's cargo, and drain the big generator while making blinks as fast as they could be punched into the computer. She wanted to be past the Dead Worlds before laying by to charge. She longed to be near human populations on civilized planets where sleek, converted military spaceships did not sneak up and disgorge killers. She could not understand the words, but the voices were there. She told herself that it was all in her mind, pulled Mop to her, and hugged him. Denton slept on, making a soft little buzzing noise. Was it censure she sensed in the garbled voices? She angrily rejected it. She had defended her life. She had killed only to keep from being killed. The voices faded. «Space happy,» she whispered to Mop. Aside from the comforting, familiar little sounds made by Mother's housekeeping, it was quiet. Erin closed her eyes and tried to go back to sleep, but her lids flew open when Mop suddenly stiffened and came to his feet. «What?» she asked. He jumped down from the bed, ran to the door, and scratched. With chills chasing each other up and down her spine, Erin pulled on a robe and opened the door to the bridge. Lights came on. A quick check of critical instruments showed that Mother and the computer were healthy. «What?» she asked. Mop ran here and there as if looking for something. «You're scaring me, you little poof.» She sat in the control chair and ran a quick systems check. Everything was humming along nicely. Feeling very foolish, she activated Mother's rather primitive biological sensors. Cold, empty space seemed to laugh at her as the sensors registered—nothing, blankness, the void. Before going to bed they had positioned Mother over a good vein of ore in solid rock. She went to the mining room and began working. With luck, three more days of digging would fill the ship's cargo areas. She could feel the slight vibrations as the biter scraped against rock. No more voices. Mop had climbed from her lap to a space just behind the controls for the mining equipment. Now and then he opened one eye to watch the movement of her hand. When the vein of gold-carrying ore was exhausted, she looked at the clock. She'd been at it for eight hours. It was almost time for the scheduled work period to begin. She secured the equipment, went back to the cabin. Denton slept on as she showered and dried herself. She reached for a nightgown, shrugged. The need for modesty was gone. Thoughts of man and woman together heated her as she knelt on the bed and looked at his sleeping face. She smiled as she noted that the light coverlet was tented over his manhood. She eased herself under the sheet and moved with stealth to position herself, eased down, down, sighing. She sat very still for a long time before he turned his head to one side and made a sound in his throat. She began to move, put her hands on his shoulders, shuddered with pleasure as he awakened and thrust upward. After a timeless period of fusion she lay beside him, pleasantly expended, warm, core-soft. «I was having the damnedest dream,» he said. «Umm.» «There was this city, this fairyland city, and people were flying in panic and screaming—» «Running away?» «Flying,» he said. «As in, like, birds?» «Yep.» She shivered, remembering the voices. «And I was there and not there, because at the same time I was in a great room, like a courtroom but more magnificent, and someone was saying that defiance of the law leads to ruin.» «Ah, guilt feelings,» she said. «As you are fond of saying, you bet your sweet ass.» He held her close. «Two more days,» she said. She thought it best not to admit that she, too, had experienced remorse. «And how many more trips after that?» «Well, if you want to be poor, with only a million or so, we can turn the whole thing over to X&A when we get to Haven with this load.» «Haven?» She knew the intent of his question. The ship that they had blinked into the sun had been a Haven ship. «It would look suspicious, since I sold my first load there, if I went anywhere else.» He nodded. «All right. But I've never been a good liar, Erin.» She brushed his thick hair back from his forehead tenderly. «I don't think anyone will question us. If Murdoch Plough sent that ship after us, he wouldn't dare ask questions, for that would be admitting that he knew his men tried to kill us.» «As always, you're probably right,» he said. «But let's not make that decision right now. We've got a few weeks of travel before we get to Haven.» He held her close and was quiet for a long time before he said, «They had golden skin.» «Who?» «The people in the dream.» «They were suntanned?» «Bronzed. Golden.» «Make up your mind.» «I wonder what caused it.» «What?» «The blowup. Whatever it was that shattered a planet.» She shivered again, remembering Mop's actions and her own feeling that there was something out there in the asteroid belt. «Did they know? In my dream the sky was fire. I could sense the fear.» He shook his head. «Wow. To know that you're going to die—» «Everyone knows that. « «Yeah, we all know we're going to die someday. But to know that you're going to die in a matter of—what? Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days? How much warning did they have? And to know that not only are you going to die but everyone you know, everyone you love, and everyone you don't know, and everyone you hate is going to die with you. Family, friends, lovers, children, the young, the old—» He sighed. «Pets? And every material thing is going to perish with you. Total destruction.» «You're being very negative,» she said, trying to sound as if she were teasing but not succeeding totally. «Yep.» He squeezed her. «Time to get up and about, lazybones.» «You get up. I just put in eight hours on the miner.» «Huh?» «Couldn't sleep.» «So you were bothered.» «I'm not totally insensitive.» «No. Sorry.» He slapped her playfully on the rump. Mop bounced up on the bed to get in on the fun. «Toes, Mop,» Denton said, removing the coverlet from Erin's feet. «Get those toes.» Mop attacked Erin's bare toes, gnawing carefully. He was a gentle little dog. Erin squealed. Denton held her legs down. «Toes,» he kept saying as Mop, stubby tail going in ecstatic circles, was urged on to greater efforts by Erin's laughing protest. Mop supervised from his usual perch on the console as Erin lifted the ship and started the search for one more deposit of the yellow metal. Several times the sensors gave heavy metal readings. «Since this is the last one,» she said, «let's make it good.» She set the detectors to the density of sedimentary rock of the type that had yielded pure gold in placer deposits. In such rock fossilized bones were found. Hours went by. They eased past hundreds of oddly shaped asteroids of the most common types. Most of the smooth-skinned rocks registered iron, and their contours seemed to indicate that they had solidified in cold space. Core material. The living heart of a planet, molten, fiery, bursting into the black emptiness through the fragile, solid crust, scattering the debris that had been a world. More than once the computer sang out that the sensors had found stone of the desired consistency with gold deposits near the surface, but for some reason that Erin did not try to explain, even to herself, she was not satisfied. Perhaps, since the next people to see the belt would be the crew of an X&A ship, she just wanted to explore as much of the belt as possible. Deep inside the tumbling, crowded belt the sensors located the largest slab of sedimentary rock they had seen. There were solid indications of gold. Erin ran an additional check, setting the sensors to detect the minerals present in fossil bone. Denton raised his eyebrows when the indicators registered a strong presence. «Are we mining or bone hunting?» he asked. «Little bit of both?» «Might as well,» he said. There was a perfect landing place directly atop the strongest readings for heavy metals. Erin locked Mother to the rock and stabilized the tumble. There was one final task to be perfo
rmed before beginning mining operations. She put a slow spin on the entire asteroid so that once every hour Mother's detectors could scan all of the spaces separating her from the neighbors. Twice now danger had crept up on the ship's blind side. It would not happen again. Heavy gold nuggets had collected in a pocket. They had a rich, pure color. To the relief of both of them the work went on with riches being accumulated in the cargo space without the distraction of encountering fossilized humanoid remains. «That's it,» Dent said. The nugget pocket had been very productive. He swung the loader back into its pod after dumping one last load of gold-flecked sand into the cargo space. «Unless you want to pile some ore under your bunk.» «I'm not quite that greedy,» she said. He checked the clock. «We can be back on the established blink routes in half an hour.» She nodded. She was toying with the sensor controls, zeroing in on an area that gave the readings of fossilized organic material. «Dent?» «I don't think I want to hear this.» «Just look.» He checked the sensor gauges. «Ummm. Big.» «Bigger than anything we've seen.» He shrugged. «All right.» She used the remote panel to lift ship just far enough off the rock to move a few feet to the right. She used the biter carefully to nibble away the rock, postponing the time when they would have to climb into suits and go extravehicular. When the sensors showed only a thin layer of stone over fossil, she employed the laser and exposed a dome of grayish material. «Looks like another skull,» Denton said. «I'm afraid so.» «It was your crazy idea,» he said. «You don't have to go with me,» she said. «No, I don't have to.» He leaned to kiss her on the cheek. «But I will because you have such splendidly proportioned mammary glands.» «Hands off,» she said, as he fondled her breasts. «I can play with your bosom if I want to,» he said. «It's my bosom.» «If that's the way you're going to be, then you'll have to marry me,» he said. «In fact, as captain of this ship you can marry us and then what's mine is yours and vice-versa.» «Not my body,» she said. «Just half of it,» he said, putting both hands on her left breast, which was slightly larger than the right. «I'll take this half.» «I don't think you quite understand the legal concept of community property,» she said, pressing his hand against her breast. «And besides, it's not play time.» «Anything I hate it's a bossy female captain,» he said, moving off toward the suit closet. «You never get used to it,» she said, as they stood outside on barren rock. Dent led the way into the rather cramped space under the ship. He started using his hand-held laser at one end of the trench. She worked around the skull, freeing it from its encasing stone to look down into rock-clogged eye sockets. «Erin, come have a look at this,» Denton said. There was something in his voice that caused her to look over her shoulder. The horizon was quite near. The rock burned with light, and beyond the rim there was the star-swarmed fabric of emptiness. She bent to let the glare of her helmet light merge with Demon's. He had carefully cut the matrix away from the upper surface of small bones. She did not at first understand the reason for his awe. «They're still articulated,» he said. The small bones, several of them, made up what was, obviously, a foot. The short joints of toes were in perfect position. She squatted, something that took some doing in the suit, and ran her fingers over the fossil bones. «Cartilage would have decayed long before it could be fossilized,» he said. «But look closely here, where I've cleared away the rock from the joints of the toes.» A grayish connection existed between the separate bones. She shook her head and stood. Denton used his laser and began to expose a long femur, working upward toward the hip joint. Erin watched in fascination as the joint was exposed, articulated to the hipbone by ball and socket. And then the pelvic saddle was bared. «Female,» she said. «Big lady,» he said. She went back to work, cutting away matrix along the shoulders, down one arm. All joints were intact. She had planned to simply free the bones from the rock that had held them for countless millennia, but the surprisingly intact condition of the fossil skeleton altered her plans. They used the mining laser to cut a deep trench around the entire deposit, then, after careful measurements and searchings, undercut the oblong, coffin shaped area of rock atop of which the skeleton was exposed like some ancient carving in bas relief. Weight, of course, was no problem in space. Inertia was another thing. It wouldn't do to let a few tons of rock bang Mother even at a very low rate of speed. Erin went aboard, greeted a wildly enthusiastic Mop—once again his humans had come back, had not, after all, deserted him, joy, joy— and moved the ship from atop the trench. Back outside with Dent, she said, «Slow, easy,» as they impelled the slab containing the fossil bones into motion. Erin used the jets of her suit to stop the upward movement, then, together, they eased the slab over a flat area, horsed it to a stop, lowered it to the surface. It was necessary to go aboard ship to renew the air in the suits. Air recycling equipment had not yet been successfully miniaturized to fit inside a unit as small as a flexsuit, but Mother's recycler took care of the stale, oxygen depleted air in the tanks and soon Erin and Dent were back at work, carefully cutting away matrix to reduce the bulk and weight of the slab but leaving enough of the encasing stone to hold the bones in their perfect alignment with each other. After some tricky adjustments the slab was suspended above the surface and Erin was working underneath, blowing away stone from the back of the skeleton. «She must have been lying atop something,» Erin said. Denton came to stand beside her. He rolled the slab to let the skeleton lie on its side. «Easier to work this way.» «Smart ass,» she said, wondering why she hadn't thought of that. Lying along the skeleton's back, there were long, delicate bones unlike any they had seen. Smaller bones, somewhat like ribs, radiated away from the long ones; and the longer bones were one atop the other next to the figure's back. «What the hell?» Denton asked. «Did she fall on an animal or something?» «I think we'd better leave this mess here at the back alone,» she said. «You're planning to take this thing with us?» Denton asked. «I think we'd better.» «She's been here a long, long time. I think she'd wait for an X&A ship.» Erin was reluctant to try to explain that it was absolutely vital to put the fossil skeleton aboard Mother. She couldn't have told him why, she just knew that it had to be done. «Let's melt away a few more pounds of rock,» she said. «But be careful.» Only the surface of the long, curving, graceful bones that reached down to the skeleton's knees had been exposed. The slab had been reduced to mummiform shape. To trim its bulk further, Erin worked around the neck and shoulders. The arm bones lay at the figure's side. There was a curious, rather massive protrusion from the back side of each shoulder blade. She used the laser carefully, hoping to detach the humanoid skeleton from the bones of the life-form that had lain under it. But the protrusions from the shoulder blades were fossil bone that formed a ball and socket joint much like the hip joint, and from that joint the long, delicate bones swept outward in a graceful ellipse. «Dent,» she whispered. He heard, for he had been standing directly behind her, watching as she cut away the matrix to expose two features of the humanoid skeleton that were definitely nonhuman. First, and most obvious, the long, delicate bones connected to the skeleton's shoulders by ball and socket joints could have had only one purpose. Second, a broad, solid bone extending across the skeleton's back was perforated with small holes where tendons had once been connected. The solid plane of the back formed a foundation for connecting muscles to power the leaflike formations extending downward from the shoulders. «Wings,» Erin whispered. «Yep,» Dent said. «The arts and crafts colonies of Delos make them,» Erin said. «They're patterned after the old illustrations in The Book.» Denton nodded inside his helmet. There was, of course, only one «The Book.» The Bible. The only book of Old Earth literature that had survived the exodus into space. «Angels,» Erin said. «They make angels on Delos. They wear long robes and they have beautiful, long hair and—» «And wings,» Dent said. «But before you start calling her Gabriel, tell me how, if she's an angel, she got here.» He spread his hands, taking in the small asteroid, the tumbling, crowded belt that arched off into the blackness, the glare of the core stars. «And angels don't die, Erin.» «No. I'm be
ing silly.» «Look, let's leave her here. Let's get to Haven as fast as we can and let the heavy thinkers at X&A figure it out.» «She's so lonely,» Erin said. «Come on, Erin. She might have been lonely once. She's not now.» «We can't just leave her here like this.» Dent sighed. «All right, whatever it takes to get you aboard and moving toward Haven.» There was still considerable weight to be put into motion, to be guided into the air lock, which became very crowded with two live, suited human beings and one very dead whatever it was. Mop took one look at the thing that his buddies pushed carefully out of the air lock and retreated, barking with high-pitched intensity. «Hush,» Erin said. «Minds well,» Denton said, as Mop barked more excitedly than ever. They had decided that there was only one place to carry the skeleton. Her mass—that's the way both of them were thinking, her, not it—had to be secured and the only place with floor space large enough to lay the mummiform slab flat was in the gym. That meant moving her through the bridge where one slip could smash the force of a few hundred pounds of inertial motion into delicate instrument panels. They secured the skeleton's slab with lines so that if it got away from them—they had to cut off the ship's artificial gravity in order to move the weight—the lines would halt the motion before the slab damaged something vital. The job was accomplished with only minor abrasions to Dent's arm, which became caught between the slab and the door frame as they floated the skeleton into the gym. Dent welded eyes to the metal deck and lashed the slab securely. Mop watched the operation with clearly expressed doubt, and from a distance, sitting with his head extended, making his neck look longer. Erin wasted no time in programming the ship's generator to blink them toward the U.P. sector. In quick order, Mother leapt to and past the sac in which swam the Dead Worlds. The last blink was on an established blink route. Mother lay beside a blink beacon, her generator drawing charge from the nearest stars. Her crew were celebrating, having a special meal with wine. The activity of the generator produced a not unpleasant tingle in the air, a deeply buried perception of dynamic energy. Mop wasn't particularly fond of the charging period. It tended to make his hair stand up, and, being a rather hairy, silky little dog, when his hair tried to stand up he looked rather bedraggled. He sat at Erin's feet, politely accepting a taste of people food now and then, but not being demanding about it. Denton had selected soft music to form a warm, bland background. Neither he nor Erin felt especially talkative. Both seemed content to smile as eye contact was made, to touch hands now and then across the little table. Erin selected a nice tidbit and, not taking her eyes off Dent's, held it down for Mop. When her offering was not seized immediately, she turned her head. Mop was seated at the closed door to the gym, his hair standing up oddly, a low growl issuing from his throat. «Hey,» Erin said. «Want a nibble?» Mop ignored her. She had never heard him growl in just that manner. She felt a shiver of dread, for there was definite warning in Mops' stance, in his steady, low growling. She walked to the gym door and opened it. Dent saw her freeze. He sprang to his feet and went to look over her shoulder. The metal deck was littered with rock particles. The encasing shell of matrix material had shattered away from the skeleton, leaving each fossil bone free of encumbrance. The accretion inside the skull cavity had been expelled. The eye sockets were empty, black. And, most unnerving of all, the wing bones that had been folded under the body were spread out on either side in a graceful sweep. «I am not liking this,» Erin said. «What the hell?"Dent asked, moving forward to kneel beside the skeleton. Mop, refusing to enter the gym, sat outside the door, growling steadily. «Let's get out of here,» Erin said, tugging on Demon's arm. «You talked me into it,» he said. She locked the door, went to the console, and activated the communicator. Dent looked over her shoulder as she sent a blinkstat to the beacon beside which the ship rested. It was directed to Captain Julie Roberts of the U.P.S. Rimfire. Over Erin's name, the number of the originating blink beacon, and the route that Mother would be following to Haven it said: «Imperative you come immediately.» To that message Erin added one word, a word that would have meaning only for Julie Roberts and the female officers aboard Rimfire. During the long and boring circumnavigation of the galaxy there'd been lots of time for girl talk, and not even the captain was above such diversions. One dreamy-eyed little ensign had voiced a reverie about finding a race of perfect men on some undiscovered planet on the opposite side of the galaxy, men who would know how to treat a woman, men who were tender and romantic, polite and considerate, and very skilled in the erotic arts. The ensign's dream became a sort of «in» joke among the female officers. They knew, of course, that Rimfire's mission was to lay a blink route around the periphery of the galaxy, but they all agreed that it would be fine with them if Rimfire also found what one wag called F.R.A.N.K., the Faultlessly Romantic Alien Nooky Knocker. Before the end of the trip the acronym F.R. A.N.K. had come to mean any alien, not just a romantic male. And so Erin's message read: «Imperative you come immediately. F.R.A.N.K.» A blinkstat was next to nothing traveling through nothingness instantaneously. The small generators in the blink beacons relayed the message along the way without pause and before Mother's generator was charged the stat had gone to X&A Headquarters on Xanthos to be relayed outward along Rimfire's known route into an unexplored area of the galaxy. «Will she come?» Denton asked, eyebrows raised in amazement. «She'll come,» Erin said. «Secret code?» She laughed. She didn't feel like laughing, for she could remember with more detail than she liked the way the skeleton had shed the matrix rock, the way the wings had been repositioned. She told him the meaning of F.R.A.N.K. «I guess she'll come, then,» he said. «You told her you'd found an alien. The question is, when?» «I doubt seriously if she'll be able to meet us before we get to Haven.» «What would you say,» he asked, «if I suggested that we drop back to DW I and deposit our friend in there on the surface in a safe place?» «Ah,» she said, «she makes you a little uneasy, too.» «A little? Hah.» He grinned. «Of course, we can say that it was an effect of blinking, or the charge in the air that caused all the rock to peel off of her.» «We can say that, I guess.» «I know that she's been dead for only God know how long,» Denton said. «My reason tells me that she's not even organic material anymore, that she's nothing but stone, but I seem to have a low threshold for terror.» «I think Mop would agree with you,» she said. Mop was sitting in front of the gym door, making that eerie, warning sound deep in his throat. «Maybe we'd better go see what she's doing in there now,» Denton said. «You go,» Erin said, only half-joking. Denton went to the door. «What's old Miss Bones doing in there, Mop?» he asked, as he opened the door. Mop yelped and went scrambling backward to hide under the console. Erin felt a thrill of pure fear. Before her eyes, Denton Gale ceased to exist. A red spray lashed at her face stingingly as Dent exploded. She opened her mouth to scream. A red mist clouded the viewport, beaded the glass of instruments, colored every surface on the bridge. Erin's scream did not make it past the original thought impulse before she, too, was annihilated, erupting into molecule-sized particles that dispersed themselves on the metal walls, deck, and ceiling of the bridge and further coated instruments and surfaces. Under the console, protected from the damp spray, a little dog cowered in abject fright. CHAPTER TEN Captain Julie Roberts never wore Rimfire's favorite duty uniform, shorts, overblouse, and hose. She was a private person. No one aboard her ship knew that under her service slacks she had a pair of legs that would stand comparison with those of any young woman in the crew. Her tailored tunic did not, however, completely conceal the fact that she was a well endowed woman. She wore her dark hair at optimum Service length so that it clung to her head in natural, kinky curls. She did not always wear a hat, but no member of the crew had ever seen her when her face was not perfectly done with skillfully applied, understated makeup. The captain did not always keep regular hours, did not pull a definitely timed watch. She just came and went, and the very unpredictability of her schedule kept the crew always on the alert. As it happened, Captain Roberts was asleep and Lieutenant Ursulina Wade was on br
idge watch when Erin Kenner's blinkstat caught up with Rimfire. The big ship was motionless in space, waiting for her generator to charge. She had covered the assigned area of search, laid new blink beacons to an area of the galaxy where there were no life zone planets, but where she had charted a few gas giants, a hot planet with an atmosphere of toxic chemicals, and one barren near-sun globe of rock that might offer mining possibilities after the proper exploration. Ursulina, known to her fellow officers as Ursy, had matured since she had dreamed openly of finding the perfect man on an alien planet in the first months of Rimfire's circumnavigation. She had not given up her dream, even if two periods of experimentation with a handsome married officer named Jack Burnish and a young man fresh out of the Academy had proven to be a bit disappointing, but she had learned to keep her fantasies to herself. When she took Erin Kenner's blinkstat off the machine and read it, she flushed, thinking that someone was bringing up an old joke that had lost its humor. But the stat had come through a host of beacons on its way to Rimfire. Ursy remembered Erin Kenner well. She had tried to pattern herself after Erin, for Erin had been an excellent officer. Apparently, since she'd enjoyed two promotions since Erin quit the service, she had succeeded. Now Ursy faced a decision. The «Captain's Status» board indicated that Julie Roberts was sleeping. The captain did not like to be awakened without very good cause. Ursy read the message again. «Imperative» was a pretty strong word, but the «F.R.A.N.K.» was even stronger. She pulled herself up, punched the captain's communicator, and waited. «Speak,» the captain's voice said. «Captain, there is a blinkstat that, in my opinion, requires your immediate attention.» «Send it to my cabin.» Ursy called the navigator from his cubbyhole and told him to take the watch. It wasn't that she couldn't entrust the message to someone else, it was just that she wanted to see the captain's face when the captain read it. She knocked on the captain's door. To her surprise Julie Roberts was not fully dressed, but was bundled into a furry, white robe. The captain nodded in answer to Ursy's greeting and held out her hand. «Did you back-check the blink routes?» the captain asked after a quick glance at the stat. «No, ma'am.» «This message could have originated on board. Some wag having a little joke?» «I'll go check immediately, ma'am.» «It would have saved time had you checked first.» «Yes, ma'am.» «Never mind. Go back to the bridge. I'll check it myself.» In a quarter hour the captain was on the bridge. She sat down at the computer and punched in a long series of numbers. Ursy looked over her shoulder as the viewer showed the route of Erin Kenner's stat. A long line extended back from Rimfire's position to a point opposite the U.P. main worlds, then inward to Xanthos. From Xanthos the line led toward the core and terminated at a blink beacon near the Dead World sac. «Lieutenant,» the captain asked, «what does this message mean to you?» «I think, ma'am, that Erin has found something, ah, well, something alien.» «And why does she contact me instead of X&A Central?» «Erin admired you very much, Captain. I think if she were in some kind of trouble she'd call on you first.» «Trouble?» «The same question came to me, ma'am,» Ursy said. «A ship could blink in to Erin's position from one of the U.P. planets much quicker than Rimfire can get there. But I think Erin would call on you in any emergency, Captain.» Julie thought for a few moments. She and Erin Kenner had enjoyed a good relationship, as much of a friendship as could exist between a junior officer and the ship's captain. Once or twice she'd heard Erin complain about Service red tape and the ground-bound commandos at X&A Central on Xanthos. It was understandable for a field officer, a woman who had spent six years aboard Rimfire without seeing a human face other than those in the ship's crew, to have a mild case of distrust for headquarters types. One thing was sure. Erin Kenner was not the hysterical type, not the type to send out false alarms. There was, of course, doubt in Julie Roberts' mind that Erin had found something alien. But the stat had originated quite near a spot in the galaxy that, if one dwelt upon it, could give one nightmares. «Ursy, this stat is to be kept between me and thee,» Julie said. «Yes, ma'am. We're going, then?» «Well, hell, Ursy, you've been looking for the Faultlessly Romantic Alien Nooky Knocker for years. Would you want to miss this opportunity?» «Ma'am,» Ursy said seriously, «I'm not sure that Erin is qualified to judge whether or not she's found F.R.A.N.K. I'm not so sure that I agree with her taste in men.» Julie Roberts did not answer, although she was aware that both Erin and Ursy had fallen for the smooth line of Jack Burnish. «Shall I program a blink, Captain? We're ninety percent charged.» «Blink away, Lieutenant,» Julie said. «Have navigation figure us the shortest route to Haven. Erin should be there well ahead of us.» Minutes later, Rimfire shimmered and disappeared to emerge into normal space light-years down the route toward home. CHAPTER ELEVEN She lashed out blindly toward movement and, although her reaction was a defensive one, stemming from the knowledge that she was weakened, her blow was catastrophically harmful to fragile flesh and blood entities. She realized that she'd made a mistake even as she struck and was taking readings and measurements to rectify her hasty action even as the two bio-masses were being disassembled into fragments no larger than molecules. She feared that she had been too slow, for she had been confused by the fossilized evidence of her long agony. As she preserved physical patterns down to and below the cellular level, she was surprised by the complexity of the entities. That degree of intricacy in intelligence was unexpected. As she began to loose the psychological bonds of the nightmares of frozen eternity, she came to respect what the two entities had been. It was pleasing to her to find that there was still another biosystem at hand, an entity of passive receptiveness that was available for use as a data bank. She made certain decisions, took action. That done, she allowed herself a respite. The fossil bones were, of course, useless to her. They were a curiosity, nothing more. Once she had shed them, once she had broken free of the constraining layers of stone, she was finished with that remnant of her former self. As she rested, she explored these new surroundings. Although the race that had constructed the thing of metals and artificial materials was familiar in form—she had seen two of them and there were images of many others contained in the electronic mind of the machines—their thought patterns and lifestyles were totally alien to her. They were quite primitive, having to depend on an artificial hard shell of protection against the vacuum of space and having to use electronics and machines to draw the power of movement from the stars, but the way in which they had compensated for their shortcomings was ingenious. The computer interested her. She explored it, had some difficulty understanding how it retrieved specific data from an electronically charged chamber filled with a dense cloud of aerated acid. Even though the computer had a greater capacity for logic than the minds of the beings who called themselves man, or humans, it was quite limited and had no ability to originate thought. She examined the small biosystem that had been hiding under a chair. Interesting. Relatively large brain capacity for its size, but of very low intelligence, operating, in fact, largely on the instinctive level. She was very weak. She wished for a companion with whom to share a joke: «I'm afraid that I'm feeling very insubstantial at the moment.» It amused her to assemble the scattered organic matter to form a composite of the originals. She did so because she was, or had been, accustomed to carrying more mass than was represented by either the male or the female man. She considered placing the genitalia of the two entities in opposition, but she had other things to do. She could experiment with the pathetic little emotions of man later. To her pleasure, she gained vitality as she formed a body and extended herself into it to feel two hearts beating, to experience the flow of blood and to wonder at the little secretions and acquisitions of some rather clever organs and glands. She became distracted for a period of time as she experimented with the release of certain chemicals into the large brain which she had assembled from the cells of both the male and the female, but she soon tired of such childish gratification. As she built and formed the large body, gathering the scattered material carefully, painstakingly, the little one—she discovered
by reviewing the images stored in the machines that they called it a dog—made an irritating noise and bared tiny, white teeth. «You are brave enough,» she said, using the words of man. The harshness of her voice sent the little dog cringing away to hide under a chair. She did some modifications on the voice box and practiced speech until the dog peered fearfully out from the shadows to see who it was who was calling him so softly and so caringly. Mop quickly saw that it wasn't one of his humans who was calling. It was a large thing that smelled familiar but was quite frightening in its bulk. It took a while to customize the body to her liking. She noted that the dog had his own food and water dispensers and that now and then he went into another room to sleep on a rumpled bed. Once she had her body adjusted for comfort and utility, she spent a few days gathering as much knowledge as there was available about the curious culture and lifestyle of man. She was ready to leave the limited confines of the ship and venture into the wider universe. She willed transfer to a rather pretty world that the men called Delos. Nothing happened. The ability to move instantly to any spot in the galaxy was gone from her. She accepted that lack along with the loss of her own physical form. She reentered the available body and cranked up its systems again. It seemed that she was to be confined, at least for the moment, to the ship. Since her body was only flesh and blood, it would not survive in the vacuum of space. Something had gone wrong in the indeterminable period of time since she had been locked away in the cooling core material of a destroyed world. She examined herself minutely and found that she had lost many abilities. She would simply have to make the best of what was left. Perhaps these men had developed materials and techniques that would help her regain the magnitude that had once been hers. She spent more time with the materials in the ship's library and resigned herself to the fact that she would have to travel about in a man-made spaceship and imitate the mechanical and electronic structures of man in order to accomplish her desires. She soon discovered that there was not quite enough written or recorded material aboard ship to tell her everything she wanted to know about the blink drive. Moreover, the men had been secure in their knowledge of ship's operations and had not included a basic manual in the library. The knowledge which she needed to operate the ship safely was not included in the material in the library. With her powers so diminished, she didn't want to chance being stranded in space, perhaps to drift for more eternities. She divided the organic matter in her large body into the two original units and lifted the female entity from her repository in the dog's skull and inserted her into her own frame. CHAPTER TWELVE Murdoch Plough, owner of the Haven Refining Company, leapt to his feet in shock when his secretary announced that Miss Erin Kenner was asking to see him. His face first drained itself of blood, so that he was quite pale, but by the time he had recovered himself enough to tell the secretary to send Miss Kenner in he was feeling flushed and feverish. Erin Kenner's presence on Haven presented possibilities that Plough was not quite ready to face. He tried to tell himself that there could be alternate explanations for his not having heard from his brother and the crew of four whom he had sent to replace Erin Kenner and the man she'd picked up on New Earth as possessors of the source of the richest gold ore he'd ever seen. Plough was still musing about the unpleasant possibilities when the Kenner woman and a man about her own age entered the room. He had received no messages from his brother since Kenner's Mother Lode left the main United Planets blink beacon range and headed toward the core. Seeing the woman brought an uneasy smile to his large, square face. She was a looker, all right. As he glanced toward her helper or lover or whatever the hell Denton Gale was, he felt a little easier about his brother, because there was no way that these two pussies could have survived had Brother Gordon and his crew isolated them on a mining planet somewhere off the established blink routes. «Well, Miss Kenner,» he said. «Have your brought a representative of X&A with you this trip?» It still rankled Plough that the woman had pulled influence on him, forcing him to pay premium prices for her ore. «Mr. Gale is my associate,» the Kenner woman said flatly. «What can I do for you?» Plough asked, walking around his desk to shake Denton Gale's hand. «We have a load of ore,» Kenner said. «Ah, excellent, excellent,» Plough said, wiping his hand on his trouser leg. Denton Gale's hand was cold and damp. «However, Miss Kenner, I'm afraid that the market has fallen slightly since you were last here.» «We have a load of ore,» Kenner said. Plough looked at her a bit more closely. She was looking straight at him, but there was an oddness in her eyes, as if they were focused beyond his face. He named a price lower than the price he'd offered her originally for her first load. «We will take the proceeds in U.P. credits,» Gale said. «Sure, sure,» Plough said. «I'll deposit the amount in your account, Miss Kenner.» «We will take the proceeds in U.P. credits,» Gale repeated. «You mean in cash?» There was a moment of hesitation until Kenner said, in that flat, wooden voice, «We will take the proceeds in cash.» «That's a lot of paper,» Plough said. «Is your load as heavy as the last one?» Neither Gale nor Kenner spoke. «Well,» Plough said, «I'll have my men move your ship over to the loading ramp.» «I will move the ship,» Kenner said, turning to lead Gale out of the office. Plough followed them into the reception area, watched them walk stiffly out of the office. «That broad act a little odd to you?» he asked the secretary. «I didn't notice, honey.» the secretary said. Since her prime duty to her employer was of a private nature, she tended to be a bit casual when she and Plough were alone. Plough watched the Mother Lode lift and move laterally to the ramp. Soon some very rich ore was rattling down the conveyor belts toward the smelters. Kenner and Gale stayed aboard the ship. Plough went to the communication room and placed a call to Haven X&A, expressed concern about an overdue Haven Refining Company mining ship, was told that there'd been no communication from the Murdoch Miner. «If you will give us the projected route of the ship, sir,» the X&A operator said, «we will begin a trace.» «No, no, thank you,» Plough said. «I'm probably being needlessly concerned. I'll get back to you.» The Mother Lode sat beside the loading ramp through the smelting operation. Neither Kenner nor Gale left her until Plough called to tell them that he had the money in United Planets credits. Gale came to the office and accepted the large bag of credits without a word. Plough kept waiting for an irate call from X&A complaining that he was cheating an ex-X&A officer, but nothing happened. When Gale left the office, Plough was just behind him. As the Mother Lode lifted ship, she was followed by Murdoch Plough's own private yacht, a converted fleet light destroyer armed with some weapons that were legal for a deep space miner that often entered unexplored areas and with some armament that would have landed Plough in deep trouble if his yacht were ever inspected by X&A. To Plough's surprise the Mother Lode did not leave Haven immediately. She orbited halfway around the world and landed at the spaceport on the other continent. Plough didn't like the idea of taking his heavily and illegally armed ship into a landing other than at his own home port where there were no interplanetary customs offices and no X&A station. But he wanted to know what Kenner was up to, so he went down from orbit in a launch. The Mother Lode was taking on cargo. It was fairly simple for Plough to find out that Kenner was buying a rather odd assortment of materials, calling in her orders from the ship, paying on delivery in cash. All he had to do was intercept the delivery vehicles and hand out a couple of credits and he knew that a wide array of chemicals and electronic equipment were being loaded into the Mother Lode's cargo bins. The most puzzling thing was that while the equipment and materials were being loaded, the mining equipment was being gutted from the Mother Lode. It looked as if Kenner and Gale intended leaving the almost new and very expensive equipment sitting out in the weather on the pad beside the ship, but when Kenner called Control for permission to lift ship she was asked—Plough was tuned into the control frequency—her intentions in regard to the discarded equipment. When she hesitated, Control told her that the machines would have to be removed from the pad before the Mother Lode could be given clearance. Plough shook
his head as the Kenner woman babbled on to Control, asking really stupid questions until she was finally told that Control didn't care what she did with the equipment just as long as it was removed from port property. Plough felt faint when a couple of hundred thousand credits worth of perfectly good mining machinery was given to the port's waste removal service, but he didn't have time to make an effort to salvage it, because Control was giving the Mother Lode lift clearance. He took the launch back to his yacht and was ready to follow when Kenner's ship reached orbit and blinked away. He had come to the conclusion that something had happened to his little brother. He wasn't worried. Knowing Gordon, the Murdoch Miner was probably cruising around a couple of hundred light-years away from where she was supposed to have followed Kenner's ship, with Gordon wondering how the hell to find his way home. As the Mother Lode used her big generator to make multiple blinks before recharging, Plough was happy that he had a converted military ship with a generator to match the capacity of the Mule. He had a good crew, six of them, four women and two men. They had been with him for a long time, and he had taken care of them as he built his business from one antiquated mining ship to a fleet and then to bigger and better things. More than once the crew had obeyed his orders without question when there was gain to be had in seizing a rich mining location that had been discovered by others, but Plough had not jumped a claim or disappeared isolated miners in the far outback of space for a long time. It had taken the unbelievably rich deposits being mined by Erin Kenner to arouse his instinct for avarice enough to lure him away from the comfort he had built on Haven. He knew he had goofed in sending his younger brother to do whatever it took to gain access to Kenner's mines; but now he had left the comfort of his office and the charms of no less than three mistresses to make up for his mistake. He wasn't too unhappy about it because in that last load of ore there'd been an almost incredible richness of pure nuggets mixed in with the veined rock. With a source like Kenner's mine, he'd be able to buy Haven, if he wanted to, but most likely he'd accumulate so much money that he could have power on any planet in the system. With the proper amounts of money it wouldn't be difficult to find a more pleasant spot than Haven. For a while it looked as if Kenner's mine was in the Dead World sac, but the Mother Lode had merely paused for charging and when her generator was ready she blinked onward. Plough brought his yacht back into normal space at a safe distance and saw the Mother Lode lying near an asteroid belt that formed a ring around a good G-class sun at approximately one astronomical unit of distance, the usual position for a life zone planet. To be sure he was at the right place, he put his sensors to work. He had the latest equipment, state of the art, and from outside the ring he was able to locate a dozen asteroids showing pleasingly large gold and platinum deposits. This was the place. He told his crew to get ready for some work. The converted light destroyer had huge cargo spaces. The load of ore he'd take back to Haven would make him a very rich man. First, however, there was a little chore to be done. Plough himself took the controls and maneuvered the yacht among the tumbling asteroids until he was within laser range of the Mother Lode. He considered using a computer guided torpedo, but that would have been overkill. It would simply blow the Mule into bits, and would leave enough scrap metal floating around in space so that if someone—like an X&A explorer—stumbled onto it the particles could be identified as having come from a Mule. Simple logic led him to arrive at the same solution for getting rid of a spaceship completely as both his brother and Erin Kenner had. He would hole the hull of the Mother Lode with a laser. Explosive decompression would take care of Kenner and Gale, leaving the ship intact. Then he'd use his generator to boost the Mother Lode into the sun and no one would ever be able to say what had become of her. He positioned the yacht to bring a laser cannon to bear, sighted in on the viewport on the control bridge, ordered the laser's power to be turned on. There was a sinister sizzling sound as the weapon built toward destruction force. Plough was calm. Getting rid of Kenner and Gale and their ship was going to be almost too easy. CHAPTER THIRTEEN Haven was a lightly populated planet composed mostly of scrublands and deserts. Her two principal land masses were of similar size and were on opposing sides of the globe in the northern hemisphere. So alike were the continents that their weather patterns were similar. Alpine ranges on the western edges lifted the moisture-laden ocean air to cooling heights so that a narrow band of rain forest faced the sea. On the eastern side of the mountains, on both continents, arid conditions prevailed, scrub giving way to the sand wastes and barren rock of the deserts that extended two thousand miles to the semi-arid west coast. Throughout the cruel deserts, where, in summer, the daytime temperatures reached one hundred and twenty degrees, were the camps and digs of miners and prospectors. Haven, having little agricultural land to offer, compensated for that lack by being rich in utile ores such as iron, manganese, copper, bauxite, and a good representation of trace minerals, in short, most of the metallic raw materials that were necessary to build and expand a civilization that had spread from one very old and rather small planet, New Earth, to encompass a degree of arc that, on charts, seemed impressive. A new feature appeared in Haven's skies, for Rimfire was that large, her surfaces that reflective. When she went into orbit she became, to those on the surface, a fast moving star, and the scattered seekers of metallic riches turned their faces upward. In Haven's two large cities word spread rapidly that the biggest and most complex spacecraft ever constructed was orbiting over Haven. The territorial governors of both continents were on hand when Rimfire requested landing instructions at East Havenport for the Captain's Gig. The launch was directed to the governor's own pad where Lieutenant Ursy Wade landed her after a spectacularly swift forty-five degree approach that flattened dramatically at the last possible second to allow the gig to contact the pad without so much as a jar. Ursy ran out the gig's boarding stairs before the dignitaries could approach the ship. A grimy worker standing on the edge of the pad behind the baffles said, «Welcome to Haven, babe.» «Thank you,» Ursy said. «After you get through messin' 'round with the H.M.F.I.C, I'll be glad to show you the sights.» «I appreciate that,» Ursy said, holding back a smile. «What did he say?» Julie Roberts asked from behind Ursy. «He tried to hit on me,» Ursy said. «I am aware of that,» Julie said icily. «What were those initials? H.M.F.—» «Don't ask, ma'am,» Ursy said. «I just did.» «Ask him,» Ursy said, pointing to the governor as the dignitaries reached the pad. «I'll give you a hint. H.M.F.I.C. Head mother in charge. Supply the middle initial from your knowledge of old English ma'am.» «I see,» Julie said, even more icily. «Thank you, Lieutenant.» Julie stepped forward, stood in the hatch at stiff attention, saluted, said, «Captain Julie Roberts, X&A Expo ship Rimfire, sir. I thank you for the hospitality of your world.» Ursy took advantage of the movement to slip away, descending to the pad via a cargo chute and walking away with the bulk of the ship hiding her from the crowd. Captain Roberts descended and stood in the chill wind while the H.M.F.I.C. of East Haven took turns with his West Haven counterpart in praising X&A, Captain Julie Roberts, the Rimfire, and the United Planets in general. Each of them managed to get in lengthy commercials for Haven which, Julie heard with some skepticism, was a garden planet waiting to be cultivated, lacking only a few billion credits from X&A's terraforming fund. Julie politely turned down an offer of a guided tour of the scenic deserts from both H.M.F.I.C.s, stating that Rimfire was at Haven on Service business, and that her stay would be quite brief. «I'm sure,» said his Honor, the governor of East Haven, «that you'll want to give your crew liberty. You'll find the accommodations in East Haven City to be quite—» «Gentlemen,» Julie interrupted, «I wish I could. My crew deserves it.» She mentally crossed her fingers for she had a good crew who deserved more than East Haven City. «However, there is a possibility that Rimfire will be passing Haven on her return trip and if time allows I will most certainly consider your kind invitation.» His Honor tried to smile, but the thought of losing the opportunity to have several hundred members of Rim
fire's crew turned loose with good U.P. credits in his town turned the attempt into a rather sickly smirk. Ursy Wade entered East Haven Control, saluted the guard on duty, requested to see the officer in charge, stated her business, and very quickly had a copy of the port's log showing that the Mother Lode, Erin Kenner's ship, had paid two visits to Haven, one that had been terminated quickly after a brief stay only weeks previously. East Havenport wasn't the busiest place in the U.P. sector by any means. Two full years of recorded comings and goings were recorded on one Compuleaf so that when Ursy fed the data into the ship's Unicloud it took only three or four «page turnings» to check every ship that had been in Haven's sector in that length of time. Julie Roberts joined Ursy in the computer room and nodded as Ursy pointed out the two visits of Erin's Mule to Haven. «You'll note, Cap'n, that she did not file a flight plan in either instance,» Ursy said. «Not all that unusual,» Julie said. It was prudent for a ship's captain to file a complete plan of his intended blink routes with the control tower at his point of departure, but since it was, after all, a free galaxy, such practical wisdom could not be mandated by law. «She wasn't the only one who didn't file a flight plan,» Ursy said. «This private yacht that left right behind her the last time didn't register her destination, either.» Julie took note of the name of the yacht, Murdoch's Plough. «It seems, ma'am, that she would have waited,» Ursy ventured. «Yes, it does.» «Unless she expected us to make for the blink beacon from which she sent the message,» Ursy said. «That's way to hell and gone toward the core,» Julie said. «A few blinks.» «Start making them, Lieutenant,» Julie said. «And her reasons for this had better be good. If she's jacking us around on a wild goose chase, I'll boot her ass right up between her shoulder blades.» Ursy smiled to herself. It was seldom that Captain Roberts resorted to spacehand vulgarity. That she had done so indicated that she was more than a little bit: 1. Angry. 2. Concerned. 3. Tired. Maybe just a little bit of all three, Ursy thought, as she went to the control bridge and gave orders to the navigation team. CHAPTER FOURTEEN The history of man was in the process of being rewritten. New and often humbling discoveries were being made on the planet where the race had originated. Some called Old Earth Man's Graveyard, for billions of the Old Ones had perished there in a cataclysm of nuclear fire. With the Old Ones had died their cities and a way of life—one hesitated to call it a civilization or a culture in view of its end—that had covered a world which had once had more habitable land area than any planet in the U.P. sector. There were acrimonious debates among scientists and historians about the length of time that had passed following the holocaust before an Old Earth Healer named Rack used the substance and life of a Power Giver to travel to Earth's moon in search of clean, breathable air. There were those who said the mutations that produced the New Ones in their several varieties, Healer, Power Giver, Far Seer, and Keeper, would have required millions of years. In opposition to this view were those who practiced the prevalent religion of the United Planets sector, a creed based on the one piece of Old Earth literature that had survived the Exodus. The mutants, said these later scholars, had developed as a result of divine intervention within no more than four generations. As proof they cited Old Earth's poisoned ecosphere. Only mutants could have survived the radiation that enveloped the Earth following the war; so God, they said, preserved that which He had created in His own image by making rapid changes in the race. By the time that Rack the Healer made his epic biopowered voyage from Earth to the Moon, Earth's atmosphere had become so toxic and, with the death of the microorganisms in the seas, so depleted of oxygen, that not even the mutated New Ones could have survived had they not been removed to more suitable planets after an X&A ship found Rack the Healer dying on the Moon, holding his love in his scaly arms. The Post-Holocaust history of Old Earth resided in the fleshy data banks of the idiot savant Keepers, accessible only to the Far Seer who had cared for his Keeper since her birth. The Pre-Holocaust record of mankind was a poisoned layer of crust on a devastated planet with the evidence consisting of scraps of stone, metal, and the artifacts of an advanced technological culture. The history of Modern Man, man of the United Planets, began on Terra II, called New Earth. There were men and women who specialized in each area of man's history, and a few who tried to assimilate the three separate branches into a logical whole. The most favored overall view was that man had evolved very slowly on Old Earth, sharing ancestors with a variety of other life-forms known to U.P. science from the scanty fossil records that had been accumulated since the reunion of the two racial branches. U.P. man, in his copious numbers, traced his ancestry to a very few men and women, perhaps less than a hundred, who survived a decades-long space voyage in a primitive sub-light, rocket-propelled spaceship to make a disastrous crash landing on New Earth. The colonists, most historians agreed, escaped Old Earth just before the final fury of war left billions dead. There was also agreement that the Exodus had been poorly planned, for, apparently, the accumulated wisdom of mankind had been contained in the bowels of a computer aboard the spaceship, to be lost completely when the crash destroyed all means of providing electrical power. There had been only one book aboard, an ornate presentation copy of The King James Bible, the Old and New Testaments. Fortunately for the future of the race, scientists aboard the ship were able to use the ship's laboratory to produce test-tube specimens of the domestic animals upon which mankind depended so heavily, for man was to find that while Old Earth had been a teeming stew of life, with life-forms filling all available niches in the ecosphere, animal life on even the most fertile of planets other than Old Earth was severely limited. The Tigian planets had their grass eaters and one carnivore, the Tigian tiger. Other than the Tigian varieties of life, man had encountered a few reptiles and some birds. Thus, from the beginning of U.P. history, it had been up to man, himself, to seed his newly discovered planets with life. On New Earth and—when the race struggled back into space on the spoils of yet another fruitful planet—throughout the inhabited worlds, one found food animals, cattle, and domestic fowl. Man the practical had provided the frozen seeds of milk cows and herd bulls which produced beef animals, for egg laying chickens and for ducks to be roasted. He had brought with him from Old Earth hundreds of varieties of plant seeds, fruits, vegetables, trees for lumber, shade, and shelter, crops of the fields, and the rose and other flowering things whose only purpose was to add beauty. Space-going man could have his wheaten cereal with milk and sugar, could sear a steak over charcoal briquettes made from an Old Earth oak, could start his day with a ham and egg breakfast. Man had his bread and his beer, and he marveled at how little things had changed during the thousands of years since the Few had left Old Earth on a roaring column of fire. For scientists wearing hot suits and breathing bottled air dug from the ruins of a vast museum on Old Earth ancient clay tablets that spoke of bread and beer; and on a scorched desert where once a mighty river had run they found, near one of Old Earth's greatest enigmas—a series of vast pyramids constructed of huge stones—drawings preserved in underground rooms that showed oddly dressed men hunting ducks with hand weapons, men harvesting grain, men herding long-horned cattle. Yes, practical man had sent the colony ship into space with her storage bins filled with the fruits of the Earth and the frozen seed of Earth's useful animals. But then man had always been efficient and ingenious. That he was not a creature of cold logic only, however, was illustrated by the fact that from New Earth there spread throughout the growing U.P. sector dozens of breeds of dogs and cats, for man had ceased being practical when faced with living without his pets. He had brought with him poodles and St. Bernards, greyhounds and terriers, sheep dogs and hounds, working breeds and miniature breeds in all their amusing varieties; and a few misguided masochists had insisted on bringing along Persian and Maltese and Siamese and Abyssinian and tabby and calico and plain old alley—cats. When self-styled philosophers and those who were called social scientists—social theorists would have been more accurate—dwelt on man's character, his ability to destroy himself a
nd Old Earth with nuclear war was balanced by his love affair with his dog. A race that could form so perfect a symbiosis with what most said was a lesser species—although an argument could be joined there—could not be all bad. A race of people who could weep bitter tears over one dead dog lying in the dust while accepting the destruction of entire planets in the Zede war was rather puzzling, but then no one had ever accused man of having understandable motivations. Man told himself, well, by God, we really can't be all bad when our dogs are so devoted to us. The dog. He is content to pattern his entire existence around his human. He has long since sacrificed his native survival instincts and when he is lost or abandoned he is helpless, for in giving his total devotion to his human he has left himself totally dependent. He lives for the sound of his human's voice, the touch of his human's hand. He makes his human chuckle with his enthusiasm as he treats a hundred foot walk to the mailbox with the same excited anticipation as a hunt in the meadow or a walk on the beach. He asks little. Food and water, attention and affection. He will forgive the crudest of treatment. And when he is heartbroken, he is one of the most pitiable things in the universe. Mr. Mop was heartbroken. He was a little dog, but not as small, at seven pounds, as some of his breed, the Yorkshire terrier. He was of the drop-ear variety, or at least mostly of that sort, since neither John Kenner, his original human, nor Erin Kenner, whom he adopted after John Kenner's death, trimmed the abundant hair that weighted his ears and left him able to lift the left one only in moments of great excitement, such as when his human said, «Let's go.» He had a sharp muzzle and a fine beard that shaded down into gray from the long, blond hair on top of his head. He was a silverback, the hair on his back lustrous and silver-gray, and the sweeping fall of hair that touched the floor all around, except under his chin, was golden brown. His stub of a tail trailed a long tendril of hair as it pointed proudly upward and blended in with the hair of his body when he was feeling sorry for himself, as he now was all the time, every day, every waking minute. He had been abandoned. He had been forgotten. He was being ignored. His humans, Erin and Dent, were there, and a Mule wasn't that big inside. There were times when Mop had to scoot away to keep from being stepped on as his humans went about their work. They were there, but they weren't there. Mop didn't go hungry, although he was a little off his feed. All he had to do for food and water was to push buttons that had been designed for his feet, but he couldn't push a button and make Dent say, «Hey, Mop, what's up?» He couldn't push a button to make Erin stoop down to pick him up and cradle him in the crook of her arm and rub his chest and belly. He couldn't even make them talk to him, couldn't elicit one word from either of them. They just worked and worked and paid absolutely no attention to a lonely little dog. He had tried everything. Time and again he had approached Erin, put his head on the deck between his front paws, hoisted his rear into the air in his look-at-me-I'm-charming pose, wiggled his tailbone in a frantic circle, and made pleading little noises. Time and again he had used his special little growl that had always paid off in attention from Dent. They didn't even speak to tell him to get out of the way. They just swept him aside with an arm or a foot, and it was breaking his heart. Any decent, dog-loving human being would have felt a stab of empathy for the little dog as he moped around with his usually ebullient tail tucked between his legs. He was a portrait of dejection, a canine magnet for maudlin sympathy. He was man's best friend betrayed, a subject for poets, a source for fountains of sentimental tears. Mankind, because his relationship with his dogs went back beyond the parameters of recorded time, would have looked at little Mop the Dog and said, «Shame, shame,» to his humans, for they looked quite normal as they worked almost around the clock to construct a maze of electronic webs and connectors and generating fields in the cabin that had once housed the mining equipment. At that time no one, not even Erin Kenner, who, at times, was closer to Mop the Dog than Mop could suspect, would have had any inkling that the fate of man, the race, the swarming billions, rested with one hairy little dog who pouted under the control room chair wondering why his humans were mad at him. CHAPTER FIFTEEN Murdoch Plough had not bothered to be stealthy in bringing his yacht into laser range of the Mother Lode. Once he had assured himself that the Kenner woman had, indeed, brought him to the source of her gold it didn't matter whether or not she and her friend knew that they were not alone in the belt. Neither of them was going to live long enough to be a problem. The Plough was threading her way among the drifting asteroids in the open, so there was no reason why the Mother Lode's sensors had not spotted her. Plough ordered readiness on the laser canon but held off giving the order to fire. He had a question or two for Erin Kenner. He activated the radio and said, «Mother Lode, I have you on visual. Come in.» The background sound of a deep space communicator was not exactly static, was not even noticeably audible. It was more a subconscious awareness of unfathomed distance and blank nothingness. Not even a man like Murdoch Plough was immune to the penetrating loneliness that was embodied in the hissing silence. He said, «Erin Kenner, I want to talk to you.» He knew that unless things had gone totally awry aboard the Mule the computer's monitor systems would alert Kenner and Gale to a radio call. «Now come on, Miss Kenner,» Plough said. «I've got a pair of fleet standard lasers trained on you. I want some answers.» * * * Mop the dog heard little bells and responded excitedly, running to the room where Erin and Denton were working to tell them, «Hey, someone's coming.» Mop's reaction to the call-incoming alert was conditioned by the fact that John Kenner, while overhauling the Lode, had made the radio alert the same as the doorbell in his home. Before John Kenner died, Mop had come to know a few friends such as Denton Gale and the sound of the doorbell meant either that one of his friends was paying a visit, in which case he'd get a cheerful greeting and some pats and rubs, or that there was a stranger at the door against whom John had to be warned. John had programmed the doorbell sound into the computer's alert system so that each time someone hailed the Lode by radio Mop would have a little excitement. And, although Mop was an exceptional little dog, handsome, personable, considerate, and highly intelligent, he never got over wondering why, when the doorbell rang aboard ship, no one ever came in. It really didn't matter, however, that the Mother Lode was way to hell and gone out in deep space, the bell had rung and it was Mop's duty to tell his humans that something important was happening. The problem was that they ignored him. He ran around in circles, barking, his stub of a tail going at flank speed, but Erin and Dent kept their heads down over some piece of equipment that was growing like a cancer in what had been Mother's mining control. He ran up to Erin and pressed his nose against the calf of her leg, a signal he used often to say, «Hey, I'm down here.» She didn't even glance down. Frustrated, Mop ran to stand on his hind legs and put his forepaws on Dent's knee. Dent's head remained bent over his work. She had to look into the female's mind to understand why the dog was exhibiting behavior she had not witnessed before. «Someone is calling us on the radio,» Erin said, not in words but in thought. She let her senses burst out of the body, through the metal hulls, and there was a thrill of elation. Ever since leaving the planet of men, Haven, she'd been regretting not having brought along a supply of basic biological building blocks. She could only assume that her long imprisonment had diminished her capacity for reason, at least temporarily. Now there were seven of the men at close range, not riches in way of material, but more than triple that which she had available aboard the Mother Lode. She willed. Her will was, of course, obeyed. «This is the Mother Lode, « a female voice said. «Miss Kenner?» Plough asked. «I am Erin Kenner.» «You know who I am.» «Yes.» The voice was without modulation, almost as flat and mechanical as that of a computer. «I know who you are.» «Good,» Plough said. «You heard me say I have two laser cannon on you.» «I heard.» «Not that I intend using them, of course,» Plough said, with a forced laugh. «It's just that I want to be sure I have your attention. Now listen. I sent a ship out here. I want to know what happened to it.» «It was annihilated in the
nearest star,» the robotic voice said. «Holy—» Plough was stunned. «Repeat, please?» «We set the generator to blink the ship into the corona of the sun,» the voice said. «Gaaaaawd damn,» Plough said, then punched the sender. «And the people on her?» «They were dead before the ship went into the sun.» «Stand ready to fire,» Plough said. She was probing. She could feel the minds of the five men aboard the Plough, but once again she was frustrated. Once she could have enforced her slightest whim on such minds from far greater distances. Now she was unable to break past the red haze of anger that she felt emanating from the mind of Murdoch Plough. That there was danger was evident. She knew something about the weapon the men called a laser, for there had been lasers aboard to be used in mining. A quick probe of the mind of the female who was manning fire control on the Plough gave her an image of the Mother's hull with a sizable hole, quite large enough to send all of Mother's air blasting out into the vacuum. That would be quite damaging to the bio-masses she controlled, and quite inconvenient to her, for, since she was incapable of independent movement in space, she would, at best, be left floating. At worst, she would be tossed into the nuclear fire of the sun if she did not leave Mother before those who were approaching carried out their intentions. She caused the female voice to be sent to the man who threatened. «We need to talk, Plough.» «All I want to know is how you managed to kill my brother and four other people,» Plough said. One tendril of her extension crept past the barriers and she saw a mind filled with anger, knew that the man fully intended to lance holes in the hulls of the Mother Lode. And then she found the weakness and began to influence the entire entity through his memory of Erin Kenner's ash blonde hair, sea green eyes, and her very feminine body. «There is gold enough for both of us,» Erin Kenner's voice was saying, and there'd been a change in tone. Plough couldn't help but notice. The flatness was gone, replaced by a breathy quality. «We can work together. We would be very good together.» Plough felt himself stir inside. She wasn't talking about mining gold. One part of him was laughing at the clumsy attempt to change his mind about killing Kenner and Gale. But need was growing in him, a desire more powerful, more debilitating, than anything he'd ever experienced. He had to swallow to prevent the suddenly stimulated flow of saliva from overflowing. He sniffed, for the mucus membranes in his nasal passages were becoming engorged, too. «I will bring my ship alongside,» Erin Kenner said. «Boss, what the hell's going on?» one of Plough's crew asked. «I'll handle this,» Plough said. «I am ready,» said the woman at the weapons control panel. «Hold your fire,» Plough ordered. «Secure lasers.» He was the boss. He was obeyed, although the crew members exchanged looks with each other and one of the women whispered, «Who the hell does that broad think she's kidding?» For to those not being affected by the She, the female voice coming over the radio was a burlesque of seduction, a bit out of some comedy routine. «I must see you, quickly,» Erin said. «I am moving ship. My lock is, of course, X&A standard.» «Same here,» Plough said. He felt an urgency that caused his teeth to chatter. In his mind was a picture of Erin Kenner nude. He'd never seen her nude, of course, but the vision was as real as the Mule class ship that was fluxing slowly to come alongside the Plough. «Boss, I don't like this,» one of the crewmen said, as Erin Kenner's voice made suggestive remarks that would have made a horny teenager laugh. «Shut up,» Plough said. «Let's see what the broad's up to.» Plough punched orders to the air lock control. The two ship swam side by side. The members of the Plough's crew fingered weapons as the distance closed and the clang of contact echoed throughout the ship. Plough checked instruments. Pressure in both ships was equal, X&A standard. There was a hiss of air into the Plough's lock. «Just stay alert,» Plough ordered his crew. He left the bridge and ran to the lock. He saw Erin Kenner standing in the hatch of the Mother Lode. Her ash blonde hair brushed her shoulders, her sea green eyes gleamed in invitation. She was wearing Service shorts, tunic, and hose. Wings extended outward from her shoulders. «Wha—» The question was never finished. Murdoch Plough's mouth remained open. He froze as he stood, feet apart, arms hanging at his sides, and then slowly sank to the deck. Behind him, on the bridge of the Plough, the six members of the crew became vegetables, retaining only enough brain function to power the basic life functions of their bodies. * * * The She had no use for the life force of the seven men. She wanted only the basic bio-matter. She was tired of being limited to the mass of the two men of the Mother Lode. She directed the female body to carry her on a tour of the converted destroyer. She was unimpressed by the luxury of the living quarters, but was pleased to find that the ship had additional generators to power her weapons system. She would be able to use that power when the time came to undo the disaster that had happened in a time so remote that not even she knew how to date the event. Satisfied with the new source of working materials, she went back to the gym aboard the Mother Lode and picked up the skull that the female man called Old Smiley. Old Smiley was a male. His bulk had been great when he was whole and alive. It would take more than two units of her new bio-material to form him. She concentrated and a glow of light seemed to emanate from the skull. Aside from that, there was nothing. The only force detectable came from her own resources. Hope that had grown failed and in a moment of pique she shattered Old Smiley into dust. The ship's filter system, detecting the source of the air pollution, caused her further irritation by closing off the gym and starting noisy suction to clean the air. She looked at the fossil skeleton on the deck. Although it was large, there was a delicacy about it. The wing bones, perfectly preserved, formed a graceful curve. She had been exceedingly beautiful. The suddenly realized knowledge of how much she had lost brought rage and sent a surge of fever through the human body, causing muscles to jerk spasmodically. She felt her limitations as lances of pain, knew a hate that threatened to damage the delicate brain cells of the human female. She sensed fear and pain, controlled her emotion, took out her frustration by destroying the fossilized reminders of her shame. The life-support system of the Mother Lode felt the electronic equivalent of panic and called in all of the mechanical reserves to combat the huge dust cloud that filled the gym. The She watched the miasma being absorbed and filtered. She was calm again. She sent her extensions searching outward, sensed, at some distance, a feeble, comatose presence locked away as she, herself, had been bound. Perhaps, soon, she would no longer be alone. In the meantime there was work to be done. CHAPTER SIXTEEN «I know, I know,» Erin said. «I know. I know.» There was a feeling of misty sadness. Her eyes would not work properly. She was looking at a very limited monochromatic world from the height of her ankles. There was a layer of fuzzy obstruction that obscured even that view. She lifted her eyes and saw a vaguely humanoid thing of nightmare proportions. There was something familiar about the face. Naked flesh had embarrassing but eerily distorted shapes. She was aware of fear, of dread. «Ohhh,» she moaned in sympathy, but there was no sound. There was no pain. There was no feeling. The impressions she registered seemed not to come from her own senses. There was a smell. Distinctive smells. Not long ago Denton had walked past the captain's chair in his stocking feet, leaving his own particular scent. From her place she saw herself walk past. Was that actually the way she smelled? Musk and perfume? «It's all right,» she said, not knowing why, but with a soothing tone to her voice, a tone heard by no one, for there was no sound. Eons or seconds later she seemed to be more aware. «Hey,» she said, and this time she knew that she was talking to a frightened little dog cowering under the console. «It's all right, little buddy.» She said the words, but they did not issue forth from her lips. She did not understand how she knew that Mop was hiding, and that he was sad. It wasn't because she was seeing him. She knew that eons or seconds before she'd been feeling sympathy for Mop. He had been so frightened. And the hair that fell down in front of his eyes interfered with his vision. She would, next time she gave him a bath, trim his bangs. It was bad enough to see the world in shades of one color without having part of it dimmed by a curtain of hair in fr
ont of one's eyes. «Mop?» The word was a scream of shock and pain, for she was looking upward through the fringes of hair, seeing herself and Denton moving about woodenly. She was looking out onto a limited world through the eyes of the dog, knowing his sadness, his fright. He was so lonely. Madness. One part of her was screaming mindlessly as she parroted words dictated to her by someone else, knowing on one level that Murdoch Plough was cheating her, paying her much less than her load of gold ore was worth, but unable to break the bonds that held her so tightly, her every action controlled, only the deep, deep down part of her mind free to voice protest and shock. Everything was blended into one jigsaw mosaic. There were moment of clarity, but most of the time she was floating mindlessly in a sea of confused images and thoughts and feelings. She was bending over a work table constructing a circuit board of impossible intricacy, working with a glue gun, the tip of which had been attenuated to incredible smallness. The opening was too minute to allow passage of the material, but the glue itself had been altered into smaller molecules. She had no sense of time or continuity. Mixed in with the work that she did not comprehend were seven dead people, including Murdoch Plough. She was so alone, no contact, no Denton, only memories of their closeness that had come—astonishing storms of regret—too late, too late. And poor Mop, as alone as she, able to see his humans but not being given a word, a touch. Like her, Mop was unable to understand what had happened, and his drooping tail seemed more lamentable to her than her own feeling of hazy unreality until she saw with her own eyes but with another's vision the brain dead bodies of Murdoch Plough and his crew and then was looking into the empty eye sockets of Old Smiley only to face a storm of fire that threatened to consume her. The helpless rage that she felt, she who controlled where Erin's eyes looked, what Erin's hands did, burned away some of the mist from Erin's mind. She had been dead. She remembered the instant of terrible pain. She remembered how it had felt—dull, incomplete, somnolent—to be a prisoner inside the tiny skull of Mop the dog. «Denton?» She saw the skeleton burst into dust motes, just as she and Denton had shattered into oblivion. The violence of it cleared her mind for a moment. «Who are you?» She was heard. Just as the thing that was in command of her eyes saw Mop's pathetic little efforts to gain the attention of his Erin, so did it hear her question. And just as Mop was ignored, she was ignored. «Damn you, who are you?» She was beneath notice, nothing more than a tool. «I am not something to be used and discarded,» she screamed with righteous anger. She had the attention of the thing. She felt a slight twisting of her mind that was something more than pain. Once again she was looking at the world from Mop's eyes. After the shock of adjustment she felt good, for she knew that she had annoyed it, whatever it was. She was banished. She was coiled in a very small place. Her nose-no, Mop's nose—brought to her the scent of a molecular bonding machine at work. She, or her body, was working side by side with Denton. She was getting used to seeing a one color world with a myopic lack of clarity. The mining equipment had been removed. The room that had housed the controls and Denton's quarters was almost filled with an electronic constructions of amazing complexity. «Mop,» she whispered, the word existing only in awareness, «let's go have a look.» Mop stayed as he was, curled into a ball, his nose tucked into the hair on his hind leg. She could feel his melancholy, but he could not be made aware that she—or some part of her—was closer than he knew. She called out. She talked to him softly. She sent waves of love toward him in an effort to get his attention, to make contact, but he merely lifted his head, looking up at the two humans bent over the workbench, and sighed. When she was allowed into her body, she had a sense that she was being told, «There, now behave yourself.» «You and the horse you rode in on,» she said, but the words didn't reach her lips. Erin knew, somehow, that the work was finished. There was no direct communication from the thing that held her prisoner in her own body, but she knew that the creature had accomplished whatever needed to be done. The order was to activate Mother's sensors. The instruments were set to search for heavy metal. Erin readjusted for the mineral content of fossilized bone. Mother was still attached, lock to lock, to Murdoch Plough's yacht. That made maneuvering a bit more difficult as Erin, under orders, searched the belt with all sensors on high, moving the two ships forward along the vector of the orbiting belt until, days later, there was a signal indicating a mass of fossilized material of a bulk surpassing the skeleton that Erin and Dent had found. To land Mother required disengaging from the Plough. The yacht was parked a few hundred yards away from the asteroid onto which Mother settled. «We have no mining equipment,» Erin said. But they had hand weapons, saffers. Once again Erin was in a flexsuit alone in the big empty, but her mind was not her own to be used in philosophical musings. She did not give way to the usual awe, but moved purposefully toward the spot indicated by Mother's sensors. She directed the saffer toward the rock and began to blast it away. It didn't matter if the embedded fossils were damaged. It was only necessary to remove the burden of rock from them. Gradually she exposed the gray stone that had once been living bone. And there was something else. She reached down a gloved hand and shook it loose from the shattered small bones of a hand. It was the only item she'd seen in the belt that indicated the work of intelligence. It was a beautifully cut yellow diamond of perhaps ten carats. She tucked it away in a pocket on the outside of her flexsuit and realized with a thrill that she had taken an independent action, had made movements that were not dictated by the thing that controlled her. She turned to face the ship, lifted the saffer. Yes, she could use the weapon, if she chose, against the ship. It was only a hand weapon, and it would have taken quite some time for the beam to cut through Mother's hull, and all she would have accomplished was death for herself and for Mop and Denton. As if to make up for the lapse, she was dominated so thoroughly that thought became a haze and she worked mechanically to free the skeleton from the rock and to move it as she and Dent had moved the first one, the bones still attached to a thin slab of rock, into Mother's air lock. The She blasted away the remaining matrix rock, causing the filtering system to panic again and leaving the broken skeleton lying in disarray on the deck of the gym. Her attention was diverted from the intelligence that she dominated. Erin saw the disjointed bones move as if of their own accord. The She gathered herself, prepared for what would surely be a strike when he was first released from the prison of eternity. It came, and because he was confused and weak it was easily countered, and then she was holding him close and whispering to him. He ceased his struggles and listened. A soundless laugh was an expression of sheer delight from him. The She joined in, for she was no longer alone. An observer of the actions of her own body, Erin was on Murdoch Plough's yacht. The thing's method of reassembly of the available materials was not as messy as it had been in the first instance, when she'd felt the presence of Erin and Denton and lashed out. First the five breathing bodies were placed in a heap. This task was accomplished by Erin and Denton. In the process of moving the bodies all of their clothing was removed. Erin cringed at being forced to inflict the indignity on the victims, even if they were nothing more than breathing corpses. Denton had taken on a new role, for the other creature was there. The She no longer occupied both human bodies. Together the aliens melted the bio-mass into a red-tinged, pulsating glob held together by their joint force. Once again, with the original creature's attention focused elsewhere, Erin was a careful observer as the mass was separated. One bulk was larger. Slowly the two masses began to take form. He stood a full seven feet high. His form was that of an idealized man except for the wings, huge, graceful wings that folded neatly against his back. She was grace in motion, beauty incarnate. She was tall, slim, shapely. Her skin had the color and smoothness of old silk. Her wings, smaller than his, formed lovely lines along her shoulders and back. Her golden hair gleamed with a light of its own. Her eyes were the blue of a desert sky. Erin was alone. For the first time in an eternity she could feel, see, hear, smell with her own organs. There was constraint, for when s
he decided instantly to take advantage of their preoccupation and backed toward the air locks connecting the two ships with the idea of getting her saffer from the flexsuit, she ran into an unseen barrier and could not move further. «You are useful but not indispensable,» the alien said inside Erin's head. «You noticed me,» Erin said. An image flashed into her mind—the way Mop touched his nose so softly, so gently to the back of her leg to say, «Hey, Erin, I'm down here.» She felt shame and anger. She was not some lesser being. She would never again be guilty of trying to attract the alien's attention just to say, «Look, you bitch, I'm here.» If she ever again tried to attract her captor's attention it would be to deliver a message of much more import and effectiveness. Without forming words the creature gave orders. Erin and Denton left the Plough, went aboard Mother. Mop stuck his head out from under Erin's bed when she went to her cabin. With tears in her eyes, Erin knelt and said, «Come on, little buddy.» Mop leaped into her arms with a yelp of pure joy. He forgot his usual politeness, surged upward to lick her face. He squirmed in bliss as she tucked him in the crook of her arm and rubbed his chest and belly. Dent was standing over them. Mop wriggled free of Erin's grasp and leapt up onto Dent's leg and received a greeting from his second most favorite human. «And I was feeling sorry for him,» Erin said. «Here we are facing God knows what and instead of trying to think of something to do about it we're both petting a hairy little dog.» «Erin,» Denton said, and the sound of a human voice after months of silence was sweet, «what in hell is going on? Who and what are those things?» Erin rose. Mop leapt onto the bed and stood on his rear legs. After months of being ignored he hadn't had enough loving. «They're old,» Erin said. It was difficult to form thoughts about her. Erin had observed her in action, had seen her power, her easily aroused rage. «She's able to manipulate matter. I don't know how potent her ability to destroy is—» «I felt it and saw it in action,» Dent said. «She's one mean mother, and I'd guess that he's as bad.» Erin was forming a thought that frightened her. She tried to keep it from being born, lest the alien hear, or feel, or sense, or do whatever it was that she did to get inside Erin's head and take over. She said, «Look at this room. Isn't it a mess? Give me a hand to clean it up.» «This is no time—» She put her finger to her lips to indicate silence, tapped her temple with one finger. «The whole ship needs a cleaning,» she said. «Give me a hand with this spread.» Denton moved to the other side of the bed and helped her smooth the sheets and pull up the spread. She continued to chatter on inanely, but she made motions with her hands, motions that he understood. He nodded and looked toward the door. «I'm going out onto the bridge,» Erin said. «There's some picking up to do.» Denton held his breath. He stood in the door to Erin's quarters, Mop in his arms. Erin picked up papers and put them into the disposer, moving ever closer to the control panel. With one glance over her shoulder she jabbed her fingers toward the air lock controls to close the lock and separate Mother from Murdoch's Plough. Just before the tip of her finger touched the button she felt the fires of a sun burst inside of her. She screamed once before the agony overcame her and left her to sink limply to the deck. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The electro-gravitational field aboard the Mother Lode was so powerful that Erin's ash blonde hair formed a huge, fair-colored, three-dimensional halo around her head as she bent over the controls in the room where the beings had built the electronic thing that, for lack of a name supplied by them, Erin had come to think of as the Amplifier. They, in all of their grace and beauty, stood motionless, hand in hand, their lovely faces blank of all expression, their entire force directed into the fields of power bursting outward from the two ships that were locked side to side. The military strength blink generators of both vessels contributed their eerie powers to the Amplifier. Erin's semiautonomy made it possible for her to try to analyze what was happening. The vastly complicated electronic construction that had been assembled by her hands, and by Dent's hands, produced no force of its own. However, the fields of power, will, force—choose a word—that came from the aliens, combined with the power of the blink generators, caused things to happen in the belt. The distances involved were measured in astronomical units. One astronomical unit equaled the average radius of the orbit of New Earth around the sun. Two astronomical units away from the Mother Lode, on the other side of the sun far removed from New Earth, the asteroids in the belt became agitated. Some slowed. Others increased their speed. Orbital stability was no more. Masses of rocks smashed together and rebounded only to be drawn into a chaos of new collisions. Erin could only guess at the intensity of the immense surges of power flowing outward from the Amplifier, but the effect was awesome. Asteroids were accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light to crunch into the growing mass with cosmic force. The darkness of space was brightened by the flares of impact. In an incredibly short time the entire belt was in frantic motion, asteroids flashing past the position of the two ships to their rendezvous with the accumulating mass that was beginning to take on a roughly globular shape even with perhaps no more than ten percent of the debris in the belt congregated. It was tiring work. Sweat poured down into Erin's eyes. Mop, seated on the control console, was uneasy, for the powerful field made him look quite odd, with all of his blond-brown, silky hair standing up straight. Even the beings tired, and the strain on the two blink generators drained them quickly so that recharging was necessary. «My God, they are beautiful,» Denton said, as he lifted his head to gaze at them. They were still side by side, hand in hand, larger than life. Their magnificent, graceful wings were partly open to show the gossamer film that connected the sweeping curves of the bones. A smile came to Erin's face, for they were wonderful. Her eyes stung with tears engendered by sheer beauty, but then her reason returned and she wiped away the telltale moisture while making a genuine effort to rekindle the hate she felt for the thing that held her prisoner in her own body. Ah, but it was difficult to hate, for the being's face glowed with her loveliness, and her stance was so proud, so proud. Erin jerked her eyes away. The strong field of power was fading. Her scalp tingled as her hair fell into place. She turned to Denton. «So now we know,» she said. He nodded, knowing that she was talking about the purpose of the Amplifier. On the opposite side of the orbital ring a moon-sized body swam in the darkness. «Poses some questions, doesn't it?» Denton asked. She nodded, glanced toward them. «I think we can go now.» She rose, picked up the Mop, who flung himself into position in the crook of her arm to have his chest rubbed. She nodded to them. They took no notice. Dent followed her out of the room. No overt permission had been given. They were above the ordinary little matter of day to day existence for the humans, but they had recognized the necessity for mere men to eat, rest, and perform bodily functions, all of which Dent and Erin did in the next hour. Erin had a shower and let the fragrant, dry wind evaporate the moisture from her skin. Dent was already in bed when she came out. His eyes were closed. She knew how he felt, for her limbs were leaden. They had not been overly generous in allowing sleep time. She eased into bed so as not to wake him. He sighed in his sleep, turned, put one arm around her. It was the first time since he had opened the door to the gym only to vaporize into a red mist that he had touched her. Reminded of what she had found with Dent, and then had lost, she wept quietly. She awoke with a sense of pleasure that became, as she swam up from deepest sleep, Dent's caress. She moaned in protest, but, after all, was she so tired? Her body said no as his lips found hers demandingly. She moaned again, but in a different tone. His hands were exploring her. «Ouch,» she said, wincing away from him. «You thought he was beautiful,» Dent said. «What?» The alien was the last thing she wanted to think about at that moment. Once before she had thought that she was in love—with Jack Burnish aboard Rimfire— but after that first night in Denton Gale's arm she had realized that she had never known the meaning of love until she was alone with Dent near the core of the galaxy. «His magnificent body,» Dent said. «You liked it.» «Hey, Dent—» «No need to be coy. Tell me what you would like for him
to do to you.» «Get out of here,» she said, pushing on his shoulders. His hands became cruel clamps bearing down on her shoulders. «You're hurting me, Dent.» «Then do as I tell you.» «I don't understand,» she said, trying to push him away. «You wanted him.» «Dent?» She lifted her head, looked into his eyes, felt her blood surge in fear, for in Dent's face was the slackness that she had come to associate with control by one of them. She knew, then, that the alien was there, that he'd pushed Dent back into the prison recess somewhere, that Dent was helpless, perhaps looking on to see him with his hand touching Erin's soft breast. «Yes, I am Dent. But you wanted him. Tell me.» She started a prayer in her secret mind and felt a sheet of pain as he punished her. His hand twisted and she screamed in sudden agony. «Tell me,» he said. «Yes, it is true,» she whispered, for, although he had done no visible damage, the twist of his iron fingers had sent a lance of pain throughout her entire body. «I wanted him. I thought he was beautiful.» He became gentle, but when she fell silent he hurt her in a very intimate area, a hurt that caused her to shudder and jerk in anguish until he stopped long enough for her to continue. She struggled for words to speak of his beauty. She became incoherent, for he was using her and although it was Denton's familiar, beloved body, she knew revulsion, felt that ultimate insult that only a woman can know when she is taken against her will. She found that she could keep him from administering pain by saying, «Yes, yes, yes,» by moaning as if she were in ecstasy, by doing something she had never done before, pretending to enjoy being used. When she thought it was over, it had just begun. «He found that to be quite unsatisfactory,» he said. «We must try again.» And this time she felt him entering into her mind as well as her body, so that he saw her revulsion and punished her. He knew how to find the most sensitive spots on her body, and he used the strength of Denton Gale's hands and fingers, combined with shocking force, heat, and lances of pure pain that originated in his own mind. And that mind became open to her, for the pain he gave her stimulated him and urged him on to strenuous moves. It seemed to excite him to force her to look into his mind and be driven to the brink of insanity by the cesspool of cruelty she saw there, evil so bottomless, so infinite that she could absorb only a fraction of his affliction before loathing and terror caused her mind to go blank to all but the hurt he was giving her. Surely; she thought, I will die. But she did not. She lay on the bed beside the exhausted body of Denton with her limbs trembling, her breath coming in short, frantic gasps. She was afraid to move, afraid that he would return, or that movement would bring back the excruciating agony that he had inflicted. She closed her eyes and lay very, very still. «Erin?» She tensed, jerked away from Dent's hand. «Erin, it's me.» She opened her eyes. Dent was weeping. «Don't,» she said. «He made sure that I was aware.» «Damn him.» «Oh, God—» He clasped her to him and his strong, young body shuddered with his sobs. «Don't, Dent. Please don't.» «I couldn't do a thing. Nothing. I could only watch, and hear you begging him to—» «Do you still think they're beautiful?» It worked. His sobs halted. He sniffed. «The thing is, I don't know what to do.» «I don't either,» she said. «We can't fight them. They're too powerful.» «And they are weakened by having lost their own world.» «Did you understand that from him?» «Yes.» «And what they're doing is recreating their world?» «Yes.» «Will they do it in seven days?» she asked, then clutched at Denton's hand. «Believe me, I'm not trying to be sacrilegious, not now.» «I know. But this wasn't heaven that was destroyed, Erin.» «If it was, then the preachers have been telling us lies all of our lives,» she agreed, shuddering as she remembered the enjoyment that he got from her pain and from her screams for mercy. «If they're angels—» «No,» she said. «They're not. They may look like the angels that the craftsmen make on Delos, and like some of the illustrations from that old Bible, but there is nothing divine about them.» «Do you remember my telling you about my dream, where the world was about to be destroyed and the people were flying around trying to think of a way to escape the cataclysm?» «Yes. The people in your dream were like them?» «Yes and no. Alike in form, but not in malevolence.» He cradled her in his arms, kissed her cheek. «There was something I didn't tell you about that dream, because, quite frankly, it scared the hell out of me. It seemed so real. After I saw the people with wings flying around in panic and it was all over, I woke up and then I heard a voice say, 'Leave them to their rest and go from here.' « «Now you tell me,» she said. «I should have told you,» he said. «But would it have made any difference?» She snuggled close, fighting the revulsion she felt, for it was Dent's arms around her, not his. «No,» she said. «I had gold fever. I would have laughed at you.» They were both silent for a long time. «Dent?» «Ummm.» «You know that they'll never let us go.» «I've been trying not to think about that.» «They'll use us to make a body for another one of them. They killed Plough and his crew without the slightest hesitation. They need us, at the moment, to do the work aboard ship. When they don't need us anymore, they'll take the life out of us and toss it away just as they did with those on the Plough ship.» He squeezed her, kissed her. She did not answer his kiss, for her mind was elsewhere. «Now and then,» she said, «when she's concentrating on something else, she relaxes her control over me. If the time ever comes when I can take advantage of it, be ready.» He did not speak. He held her close, so close that it was difficult for her to breathe and she sensed that he was terribly afraid not of the danger of becoming nothing, but of losing her. She'd never known such sweetness. What she felt for Dent and what he felt for her in return was worth fighting for. «All right, you gormless mother,» she said to herself, directing all of her hate toward the alien female. «All right.» And even though her reason told her the situation was hopeless, that she and Dent were helpless in the power of the two winged things, she was, after all, human, a product of a race that could find hope while standing on the brink of the grave. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The stats from X&A Headquarters on Xanthos caught up with Rimfire as she was leaving Haven.. The inquiries were politely worded, or at least as courteously stated as could be expected when the admirals on Xanthos became aware that the prime exploratory ship on X&A service had been diverted from her priority mission of opening up a new section of the galaxy. Messages left Rimfire traveling on two paths, one back to Xanthos and one along the blink route given to Captain Julie Roberts by Erin Kenner's blinkstat, the one that had invoked the magic letters, F.R.A.N.K. The messages to Xanthos were answered. The stats sent toward the swarming splendor of the core worlds were not. Julie Roberts knew that she was risking a lot on her personal assessment of Erin Kenner. She wasn't exactly betting her command and her career that Erin would not have evoked the ultimate dread of space-going mankind, xenophobia, without good cause; but if it turned out that she had taken Rimfire on a spook chase her status as the fair-haired, A-number-one, up-and-coming, sure-admiral-to-be would be eroded, perhaps enough to allow a couple of her male competitors to jump over her on the promotion list. You were allowed a few goofs as a junior officer, but when you reached the rank of captain you were playing a sudden death game. One serious mistake and you found yourself benched, navigating a desk back on Xanthos. The series of coded stats to Xanthos did not fully explain Julie's reasons for Rimfire's diversion toward the Dead Worlds and the radiation storms of the core. While the big ship was charging her generator in the Dead Worlds sac, drawing power from the stars that looked down unfeelingly on those devastated planets that were still capable of giving even the bravest human nightmares, Julie had her communications officer send one last stat to headquarters. «On the authority of the captain,» the stat read, «U.P.S. Rimfire will depart established blink routes at beacon D.W. 476 to pursue the basic purpose of the Service.» The captain of an exploration ship had the authority to make decisions in the field, for there were times when he would be at distances so great that even blinkstat contact with higher officials was inadequate, times when, indeed, he would be cut off completely, with no blink routes behind him to carry communications. That was not th
e case with Rimfire, at least not at the moment, but the authority of the ship's captain was still paramount, even when the leeway of a ship's captain to make independent decisions was being stretched to the breaking point, as Julie was doing. Not even in code would Julie state that she was chasing aliens, but the admirals on Xanthos could take two meanings from her message. They could read it with a slight chill, assuming Rimfire had some reason to suspect the presence of heretofore unknown intelligent life, or they could guess that somehow Rimfire had knowledge of a life zone planet in the dense star fields toward the core. The twofold basic purpose of the Service was embodied in its name, The United Planets Department of Exploration and Alien Search. The two functions were usually considered as one, although, for the most part, when laying new blink routes into formerly unexplored areas, a ship's primary interest was in looking for new planets suitable for habitation by man. However, when an X&A ship ventured into the unknown she went armed. Even though the idea was not always in the forefront, there was always the possibility that the race that had pulverized the surface of a score of planets and killed some of them from the inside out, leaving once molten cores cold, would be encountered in their own haunts, or that the planet killers would come sweeping in from vast, intergalactic distances with weapons flaring. While it was true that in the thousands of years that man had been in space, traversing distances measured in light years and parsecs, he had not encountered intelligence, he had found traumatic evidence that intelligence had existed. As Rimfire drifted in space, charging, she looked out— with her advanced instruments, on twenty worlds that had once flowered, had, according to the meager evidence that survived, harbored intelligent life. And the expedition to the colliding galaxies in Cygnus had brought back, salvaged from a radiation-scarred, heat-battered but still functioning beacon in space, a manuscript that told of the death of two advanced races. From the earliest known writings of man, the Bible, that one piece of man's early history that had survived the Exodus from Old Earth, to the musings of modern philosophers and teachers, it was agreed that there was evil in the world, system, galaxy, universe, and that there was good. Interestingly enough, the only living, overt evil known to man was the evil that men do. Although man had not committed mass murder since that most horrendous example of all, destruction of worlds during the Zede War, individual men still killed, and raped, and maimed, and coveted the property of others. Man was accustomed to that evil, and was in the process, it was hoped, of erasing the dark side of the human psyche. The galaxy itself, most thinking men felt, was neither good nor evil, but was simply intolerant of the weak flesh and blood of man except on those rare, miraculous havens called life zone planets, and neutral to his presence. When a man died in space because his ship blended with an object during the state of semi-nonexistence of a blink, or when a miner miscalculated and was trapped outside to die of oxygen deprivation in his flexsuit, the galaxy paid no heed. There was personal loss to the dead and to the survivors when a man died by accident in space, but there was no real evil involved. Of course, there was the age-old evil of which the Bible spoke. Everyone read the Bible at one time or another, for it was classically beautiful, the premier example of the one language that had reached space from Old Earth, but, although God lived—it was just too inane to think that the universe, and life in all of its complexity, was a cosmic accident—Satan had fallen out of favor. Hell had lost its fury, its pale fires dimmed into nothing more than a feeble reflection of the nuclear fire of a sun. Man knew the hell of war, and of tyrannical distances, and the weight of threat offered by nighttime skies with glimmers of light coming all the way from eternity. Compared to the deadly gravitational pull of a black hole the old boogeyman's power was puny. True evil was that miasma of almost superstitious dread that was associated with the Dead Worlds. Evil embodied was represented in the abstract by those, whoever they had been, who had destroyed worlds so completely that not one single artifact had survived or could be reassembled from the tiny fragments of fabricated things, alloys that did not occur in nature, everlasting plastics, all that remained of what had been, obviously, a highly technological culture. Evil was the stranger. Evil was alien. In Julie Roberts' time, scholars were just beginning to understand, based on the archaeological digs on Old Earth, that man had brought with him into space the one evil that had, more than any other single cause, made the home planet a perpetual war zone. Fear of the stranger had been, it seemed, a primordial defect in man. The murderer, Cain, had departed from the Garden of Eden to take a wife from an unknown people who, it was inferred, were evil. Fear of the stranger had grown into tribalism, and then nationalism, and then nuclear ruin. Once and only once in post Exodus times had that age-old defect in man surfaced and grown strong enough to cause man to revert to the barbarism of war. The belligerent nationalism of the Zede subsystem and the personal ambition of a charismatic leader had led to the destruction of worlds. In the long run, the loss of planets possessed of sweet water and clean air was the tragedy of war that was remembered. It was impossible for the mind to conceive of the instant death of hundreds of millions of people. But a life zone planet was the galaxy's most precious commodity. Considering man's history, his own talent for destruction, his knowledge that at times the universe shivered and blood flowed because of man's nature, he was quite ready to accept, even embrace, an unseen, frightening, almost omnipotent enemy—the alien. The Planet Killers. There were thinkers who said, but usually in still, small voices, that the Planet Killers had done more to advance science and technology than any other single factor, for even the most humane of local politicians knew the best way to unify a community was to present it with a challenge from the outside world. Therefore, the best way to unify a people, and to cause them to make sacrifices and the most prodigious efforts, was to supply them with a common enemy. The several hundred worlds of the United Planets sector had their boogeyman. The Planet Killers. Thus, when the captain of the Rimfire departed station and blinked parsecs away from the zone she was supposed to be charting, she got away with it because the admirals on Xanthos were as aware of the common but unseen enemy as anyone. They couldn't believe that the Planet Killers were there, just next door in a manner of speaking to the Dead Worlds, but Captain Roberts' cryptic message had hinted that she had knowledge that she did not want to transmit even by coded stat. For the time being, the admirals would assume that Roberts had good reason for altering her orders. The chilling coincidence that Captain Roberts was taking Rimfire into the sac of the Dead Worlds wrinkled many a brow back on Xanthos and caused the Chief of Staff to put the fleet on medium grade alert. As Rimfire blinked past the sac and to the end of the established blink routes, she was X&A in action. She went armed. Her crew was alert, and ready, and, perhaps, just a little bit nervous, for Julie Roberts told them while the ship lay charging in the sac: «Tomorrow we will leave the blink routes and venture once again into the unknown. I have heard your questions as to why we are here in this part of the galaxy. I have been made familiar with a few of your speculations. Most of them are wrong. «We are not here to make a new study of the Dead Worlds. This must be obvious to you since we have blinked past the sac. «I have always believed in being as honest as possible with you. Therefore, I am going to tell you that we are here because an alarm has been raised by a former officer of the Service.» She read Erin Kenner's blinkstat. «If there are those among you who are too new to the Rimfire to be familiar with the acronym used by Lieutenant Kenner, I will explain.» Poised on the dividing line between the explored and the unknown, Rimfire was the largest spaceship ever built. She represented the highest achievement of United Planets man. She carried in her crew scientists and experts in all fields. Her weapons were state of the art. She carried more firepower, up to and including planet busters, than the entire Zede fleet that, a thousand years in the past, had threatened the stability of the populated areas of the galaxy. She represented the power of the race of man at his most potent, and she tiptoed into the uncharted core zone, sending out
impulses ahead of her, not trusting the temporary blink beacons laid down by the Mother Lode, checking out each jump in advance. Her weapons systems were on standby. Her crew was in condition yellow, just short of battle stations, for space was wide and dark, and there were millions of stars and planetary systems that had not yet been explored, and Erin Kenner had said «F.R.A.N.K.» There were those who thought that calling all aliens F.R.A.N.K. was a little bit too precious, even before one spelled out the words indicated by the initials. But as Rimfire blinked her slow and cautious way deeper into the core, F.R.A.N.K. ceased to be cutesy and quaint and came to mean just one thing. «There are strangers here. Beware. « The big ship had to charge again. She lay amid the gleam of the core near a tandem system of suns that revolved around each other. Her instruments searched out the dimensions of the relatively uncrowded area around the twin suns and found that one of the stars had a planetary family. There were two parched and barren small planets near the sun that had spawned planets, a couple of gas giants, and… «The captain's presence is requested in the observatory,» Ursy Wade said into the communicator. Julie Roberts was inspecting the weapons control room when the call came. She said, «Carry on,» and marched to the observatory. Ursy Wade was bending over the shoulder of the technician who was operating the ship's optics. She straightened, nodded, motioned the captain to take her place. Julie looked down over the operator's shoulder to the large screen. One of the most beautiful sights in the universe, at least to a being who is composed of flesh and blood and has a large percentage of water in his makeup, is a water planet, a planet in the life zone of a star, a living world that gleams blue from space, blue because of her oceans, blue because of an abundance of that precious substance that is necessary to all life as man knows it. Water. «Ummmmm huh,» Julie said, for there on the screen swam a blue planet with green and brown land areas and fleecy areas of clouds and polar icecaps. «Oh, yes,» she whispered, and then, «Scan results?» «Negative on all, Cap'n,» the tech said. «Negative on electromagnetic radiations. Negative on life signals.» «Distance?» «Point-nine b.m.» Julie nodded. Rimfire was almost one billion miles from the pretty, blue planet. It would take some damned sophisticated equipment to detect her at that distance. «Keep on it,» she said. She motioned to Ursy and they left the observatory together. On the bridge Julie slumped into the captain's chair, chin in hand. Ursy brought up the blue planet on the bridge screens. «Get me communications,» Julie said. And when the signal was answered, «Service, emergency, and hailing frequencies. Send just this: Erin. Respond. Send it five times, thirty seconds apart.» She put her feet up on the console. Worn places in the service gray paint showed that she was not the only one who assumed that relaxed position while on watch. «Keep checking with the observatory,» she told Ursy. «Take her in on flux, slow, and keep all eyes on the planet.» «Aye, aye,» Ursy said, punching cruise orders into the computer. Minutes later communications said, «No answer, Captain.» «Thank you,» Julie said. «I really expected her to answer,» Ursy said. Julie Roberts felt a tickling, crawling feeling on the back of her neck. «I wonder why Erin didn't wait for us on Haven,» Ursy said. «Do you suppose she's down there somewhere on the planet?» «You tell me,» Julie said. «What I'm wondering is why she'd fool around mining a few million dollars worth of gold when the prize money for finding a life zone planet would make her one of the richest women in the U.P.» «I hadn't thought of that,» Ursy said. Julie pushed the communicator with her toe. «Observatory.» «Aye, Captain.» «Scan results?» «Still negative on everything.» «Combustion products?» «Not quite near enough yet for that, Cap'n.» «Let me know,» Julie said. So far there was no sign of life on the planet. There were no electromagnetic waves such as those created by the broadcast of sound, image, or power. There were no life signals such as would emanate from large groupings of biological life. If there was only scattered and nontechnologically advanced life on the planet, the ship's instruments would pick up combustion's products when she was near enough. Smoke from fossil fuel would be significant and would cause her to go into a program of approach that had been used only once before, when an X&A ship had rediscovered Old Earth and moved very, very carefully toward contact with what was thought to be an alien people. Widely scattered, small sources of wood smoke could mean a less advanced people. There was nothing to do but wait. «I'll be in my quarters, Ursy. I am available.» «Yes, ma'am.» No one had mentioned it as yet, at least not on the bridge, but Ursy was smiling because she knew that the whole crew stood to gain from the discovery of a water world. Since exploration was their job, the Service people wouldn't receive the rights and payments that went to a civilian who found a good world, but there'd be a small monetary bonus and, best of all, liberty time added to that which had accrued. Ursy's favorite place to spend liberty was on her home planet, Tigian III, where the waters of the lake on which her parents lived were virgin pure and teeming with the meanest and best tasting fish on any U.P. world. Finding a water world would mean an extra month there when Rimfire went back to Xanthos for routine servicing. CHAPTER NINETEEN As the work aboard the Mother Lode continued, Erin and Denton were locked into an exhausting routine. They were part of the Amplifier. They were only given time to sleep a few hours. In order to eat they had to snatch a bite on the run. A sense of urgency emanated from the two beautiful, winged entities as the titanic force of their will combined with the power from the generator and was funneled through the Amplifier to send the tumbling asteroids of the belt crashing into one growing mass. Time was meaningless. Erin saw the chronometer as she passed through the bridge, but hours, days, weeks, all were the same. While there was charge in Mother's generator she worked, and while she was working the control was tight, causing her to function mechanically, making independent thought difficult. While the generator was charging, both Erin and Dent fell into bed, spent. Talking required energy and the aliens were demanding more than the human body was equipped to give over a long period of time. Even thought was an effort, but after sleep, alone in Erin's quarters, dreading the next period of work, they could cling together and wonder. The winged beings were making a world. With the power of the stars and their own will they were reassembling the destroyed planet piece by piece. At first, swarming masses of asteroids had crashed together in roiling, splintering violence. Now, after a period of time, the accumulated mass was larger and the available material was thinning out. Even at accelerated speeds that were significant fractions of the speed of light it took time to move an asteroid along an orbital path that measured millions of miles in circumference. They were growing more and more intolerant. No longer were they oblivious to mere men. Even in the numbed state of helplessness that was existence under the control of the female alien, Erin began to sense that they were becoming more and more angry. Punishment in the form of mental pain that blacked out all existence for a period of time came for the smallest infraction, for looking up from the work, for an errant thought. Following one sleep period, while the generator was still charging and Erin and Dent were in the captain's cabin nervously awaiting the summons to return to the workroom, Dent said, «They are not divine.» Erin just shook her head, too weary to play the game of conjecture about them. «They're going to fail, Erin, and when they do they'll be mad as hell.» He put his hand on her shoulder and turned her to face him. «In a lot of ways they're ignorant, or naive. Or maybe what was done to them, having to spend only God knows how long imprisoned in rock, drove them just a bit insane. First of all, there's not enough material to form a planet of the same size as the original. When it was shattered, large chunks were

 

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