Andre Norton (ed)

by Space Pioneers

  Grevan didn't. "Probably not," he said cautiously.

  "It required, of course, very deliberate, continuous and clever interference," the Dominator agreed. "Since no machine would

  be guilty of such tampering, and no ordinary group of human beings would be capable of it, the responsible intelligences appear to be the ones known to us as the Wild Variants."

  It paused for so long a moment then that it seemed almost to have forgotten Grevan's presence.

  "They have made a place for themselves in Central Government!" it resumed at last—and, very oddly, Grevan thought he sensed for an instant something like hatred and fear in the toneless voice. "Well, that fact, commander, is of great importance to us—but even more so to yourself! For these monsters are the new masters the Groups find when they have escaped CG."

  A curious chill touched Grevan briefly. "And why," he inquired, "should the Wild Variants be trying to take over the Groups?"

  "Consider their position," said the Dominator. "Their extremely small number scattered over many worlds, and the fact that exposure means certain death. Technologically, under such circumstances, the Variants have remained incapable of developing space-flight on their own. But with one of them in control of each Exploration Group as it goes beyond Central Government's reach, there is no practical limit to their degree of expansion; and the genetically stable Group strain insures them that their breed survives—"

  It paused a moment.

  "There is in this room at present, commander, the awareness of a mind, dormant at the moment, but different and in subtle ways far more powerful than the minds of any of your Group's members. Having this power, it will not hesitate to exercise it to assume full control of the Group whenever awakened. Such variant minds have been at times a threat to the Dom-t inators themselves. Do you understand now why you, the most efficient fighting organism of the Group, were permitted to remain alone on this ship? It was primarily to aid me in disposing of-"

  Attack and counterattack had been almost simultaneous.

  A thread of white brilliance stabbed out from one of the gadgets Grevan customarily wore clasped to his belt. It was no CG weapon. The thread touched the upper center of the yellowish space-alloy shielding of the Dominator and clung there, its energies washing furiously outward in swiftly dimming circles over the surrounding surfaces.

  Beneath it, the patterns appeared.

  A swift, hellish writhing of black and silver lines and flicker-ings over the frontal surface, which tore Grevan's eyes after them and seemed to rip at his brain. Impossible to look away, impossible to follow-But suddenly they were gone.

  A bank of grayness swam between him and the Dominator. Through the grayness, the threat of white brilliance still stretched from the gun in his hand to the point it had first touched. And as his vision cleared again, the beam suddenly sank through and into the machine.

  There was a crystal crashing of sound—and the thing went mad. Grevan was on the floor rolling sideways, as sheets of yellow fire flashed out from the upper rim of its shielding and recoiled from the walls behind him. The white brilliance shifted and ate swiftly along the line from which the fire sprang. The fire stopped.

  Something else continued: a shrilling, jangled sonic assault that could wrench and distort a strong living body within seconds into a flaccid, hemorrhaged lump of very dead tissue-like a multitude of tiny, darting, steel fingers that tore and twisted inside him.

  A voice somewhere was saying: "There! Bum there!"

  With unbearable slowness, the white brilliance ate down through the Dominator's bulk, from top to bottom, carving it into halves.

  The savage jangling ceased.

  The voice said quietly: "Do not harm the thing further. It can be useful now—" It went silent.

  He was going to black out, Grevan realized. And, simultaneously, feeling the tiny, quick steel fingers that had been trying to pluck him apart reluctantly relax, he knew that not one of the cubs could have endured those last few seconds beside him, and lived—

  Sometimes it was just a matter of physical size and strength.

  There were still a few matters to attend to, but the blackness was washing in on him now—his body urgently demanding time out to let it get in its adjusting.

  "Wrong on two counts, so far!" he told the ruined Dominator.

  Then he grudgingly let himself go. The blackness took him.

  Somebody nearby was insanely whistling the three clear, rising notes which meant within the Group that all was extremely well.

  In a distance somewhere, the whistle was promptly repeated.

  Then Freckles seemed to be saying in a wobbly voice: "Sit up, Grevan! I can't lift you, man-mountain! Oh, boss man, you really took it apart! You took down a Dominator!"

  The blackness was receding and suddenly washed away like racing streamers of smoke, and Grevan realized he was sitting up. The sectioned and partly glowing Dominator and the walls of the communications room appeared to be revolving sedately about him. There was a smell of overheated metals and more malodorous substances in the air; and for a moment then he had the curious impression that someone was sitting on top of the Dominator.

  Then he was on his feet and everything within and without him had come back to a state of apparent normalcy; and he was demanding of Freckles what she was doing in here.

  "I told you to keep out of range!" his voice was saying. "Of course, I took it down. Look at the way you're shaking! You might have known it would try sonics—"

  "I just stopped a few tingles," Freckles said defensively. "Out on top of the ramp. It was as far as I could go and be sure of potting you clean between the eyes, if you'd come walking out of here mindless-controlled and tried to interfere."

  Grevan blinked painfully at her. Thinking was still a little difficult. "Where are the others?"

  "Down in the engine room, of coursel The drives are a mess." She seemed to be studying him worriedly. "They went out by the ramp and right back in through the aft engine lock. Vemet stayed outside to see what would happen upstairs. How do you feel now, Grevan?"

  "I feel exactly all right!" he stated and discovered that, aside from the fact that every molecule in him still seemed to be quivering away from contact with every other one, he did, more or less. "Don't I look it?"

  "Sure, sure," said Freckles soothingly. "You look fine!"

  "And what was that with the drives again? Oh—I remember!"

  They'd caught on, of course, just as he'd known they wouldl That the all-important thing was to keep the Dominator from getting the information it had gained back to CG.

  "How bad a mess is it?"

  "Vemet said it might take a month to patch up. It wouldn't have been so bad if somebody hadn't started the fuel cooking for a moment."

  He swore in horror. "Are you lame-brains trying to blow a hole through the planet?"

  "Now, that's more like it!" Freckles said, satisfied. "They've got it all under control, anyhow. But I'll go down and give them a hand. You'd better take it easy for an hour or so!"

  "Hold on, Freck!" he said, as she started for the door.

  "Yes?"

  "I'd just like to find out how big a liar you are. How many members are there to this Group?"

  Freckles looked at him for a moment and then came back and sat down on the couch beside him. She pushed the white hat to the back of her head, indicating completely frank talk.

  "Now as to that," she said frowning, "nobody really ever lied to you about it. You just never asked. Anyway, there've been ten ever since we left Rhysgaat."

  Grevan swore again, softly this time. "How did you get her past the CG observers at the spaceport?"

  "We detailed Klim and Eliol to distract the observers, and Priderell came in tucked away in a load of supplies. Nothing much to that part of it. The hard part was to make sure first we were right about her. That's why we had to keep on sabotaging the ship so long."

  "So that's what— And there I was," said Grevan grimly, "working and w
orrying myself to death to get the ship ready to start again. A fine, underhanded lot you turned out to bel"

  "We all said it was a shame!" Freckles agreed. "And you almost caught up with us a couple of times, at that. We all felt it was simply superb, the way you went snorting and climbing around everywhere, figuring out all the trouble-spots and what to do about them. But what else could we do? You'd have let the poor girl wait there till you had the Group safely settled somewhere; and then we wouldn't have let you go back alone anyway. So when Klim finally told us Priderell was just what we'd been looking for all along—well, you know how sensitive Klim is. She couldn't be mistaken about anything like that!"

  "Klim's usually very discerning," Grevan admitted carefully. "Just how did you persuade Priderell to come along with us?"

  Freckles pulled the hat back down on her forehead, indicating an inner uncertainty.

  "We didn't do it that way exactly; so that's a point I ought to discuss with you now. As a matter of fact, Priderell was sound asleep when we picked her up at that farm of hers— Weyer had gassed her a little first. And we've kept her asleep since—it's Room Twenty-three, back of my quarters—and took turns taking care of her."

  There was a brief silence while Grevan absorbed the information.

  "And now I suppose I'm to wake her up and inform her she's been kidnaped by a bunch of outlaws and doomed to a life of exile?" he demanded.

  "Priderell won't mind," Freckles told him encouragingly. "You'll see! Klim says she's crazy about you—That's a very becoming blush you've got, Grevan," she added interestedly. "First time I've noticed it, I think."

  "You're too imaginative, Freck," Grevan remarked. "As you may have noticed, I heated our Dominator's little top up almost to the melting point, and it's still glowing. As a natural result, the temperature of this room has gone up by approximately fifteen degrees. I might, of course, be showing some effects of that—"

  "You might," Freckles admitted. "On the other hand, you're the most heat-adaptive member of the Group, and I haven't even begun to feel warm. That's a genuine blush, Grevan. So Klim was exactly right about you, too!"

  "I feel," Grevan remarked, "that the subject has been sufficiently discussed."

  "Just as you say, commander," Freckles agreed soothingly. "And whether or not she objects to having been kidnaped, we're going to have a little biochemical adaptation problem on our hands for a while—"

  "Now there's an interesting point!" Freckles interrupted. "We'd planned on giving her the full standard CG treatment for colonists, ordinary-human, before she ever woke up. But her reaction check showed she's had the full equivalent of that, or more! She must have been planning to change over to one of the more extreme colonial-type planets. But, of course, we'll have to look out for surprises—"

  "There're likely to be a few of those!" Grevan nodded. "Room Twenty-three, did you say?"

  "Right through my study and up those little stairs!" She stood up. "I suppose I'd better go help the others with the fuel now."

  "Perhaps you'd better. I'll just watch the Dominator until it's cooled off safely; and then I'll go wake up our guest." But he knew he wouldn't have to wake up Priderell—

  He sat listening to faint crackling sounds from within CG's machine, while Freckles ran off to the ramp and went out on it. There was a distant, soft thud, indicating she had taken the quick way down, and sudden, brief mingling of laughing voices. And then stillness again.

  As she had been doing for the past five minutes, Priderell remained sitting on the right-hand section of the slowly cooking Dominator, without showing any particular interest in Grevan's presence. It was a rather good trick, even for a Wild Variant whom CG undoubtedly would have classified as a neuronic monster.

  "Thanks for blanking out that compulsion pattern or whatever it was!" he remarked at last, experimentally. "It's not at all surprising that CG is a littie scared of you people."

  Priderell gazed out into the passageway beyond the door with a bored expression.

  "You're not fooling me much," he informed her. "If you weren't just an illusion, you'd get yourself singed good sitting up there."

  The green eyes switched haughtily about the room and continued to ignore him.

  "It wasn't even hard to figure out," Grevan went on doggedly, "as soon as I remembered your dance with those beasts. The fact is, there weren't any beasts there at all—you just made everybody think there were!"

  The eyes turned towards him then, but they only studied him thoughtfully.

  He began to feel baffled.

  Then the right words came up! Like an inspiration— "It would be just wild, wishful thinking, of course," he admitted gloomily, "to imagine that Klim could have been anywhere near as right about you as she was about me! But I can't help wondering whether possibly—" He paused hopefully.

  The coral-red lips smiled and moved for a few seconds. And, somewhere else, a low voice was saying:

  "Well, why don't you come to Room Twenty-three and find out?"

  The Dominator went on crackling, and hissing, and cooling off unguarded—

  THE SETTLERS

  J.T WAS AN earth suddenly become so alien that survivors of the bitter catastrophe might well believe that they struggled for bare existence on the surface of another planet. A boy roamed the eternal night to gather his frozen air—and saw a light move across the blankness of a distant window!

  FRITZ LEIBER

  Pa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air. I'd just about scooped it full and most of the warmth had leaked from my fingers when I saw the thing.

  You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa and Ma and Sis and you?

  Even at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it is natural we should react like that sometimes.

  When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times, for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but

  simply a light—a tiny light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have the Sun's protection.

  I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside.

  Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course. But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the heat—and came into the Nest.

  Let me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've never seen the real walls or ceiling.

  Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's very fuss
y about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time, and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.

  The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too.

  It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen air all around then and you didn't really need them.

  He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.

  Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside the Nest; you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa put it down close by the fire.

  Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive. It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal the whole place, but he can't—building's too earth-quake-twisted, and besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke.