* * * *
I was just waiting for a ’copter bus, I told myself, then along came this truck… I opened my eyes. I didn’t know where I was, but I knew it was a hospital. Everything was white, all around, the walls, the bed; and the sandy-haired young doctor bending over me was clad in white. He was just pulling a needle out of my arm when I woke up.
None of it registered with me. I watched him vacantly, waiting for him to say something, like, “This is a hospital,” or, “You’ve been in an accident,” or something like that. But he didn’t say anything; he just smiled and patted my arm with cotton that was cool and wet.
Then he straightened and said something over his shoulder to people standing there I hadn’t noticed. He spoke in a foreign language, and I saw he was talking to Coleman and Willie.
Coleman smiled at me. “The doctor says you’re okay now, Gil.”
“Thanks.” My tongue was thick and Willie said, grinning, “You had a close call; a needle-bolt missed your skull by a bare two inches.”
“I must be tough,” I said. “I let the breeze knock me down.”
“A needle-bolt can be fatal within six inches of the head!” reproved Coleman. He was wearing some kind of a dark blue, single-piece garment that looked like a uniform. He said, “You’re lucky to lose only ten days, instead of your life.”
So it had been ten days. Then I remembered what Cleo had told me last night…ten days ago, and I thought I ought to hate this man standing by my bed. But I couldn’t. He had saved my life.
Coleman leaned over me, squeezed my shoulder. “You’ll be up and around tomorrow. Don’t worry about anything.”
“How about Cleo…?”
“She’s safe, thanks to you.”
I shut my eyes. Coleman had looked solemn. Where would Coleman be now if Cleo had fallen into Bilfax’s hands? What was up between Coleman and Bilfax? My mind balked at that path.
“You’re friends play rough,” I grunted.
Coleman’s eyes looked deep and calculating. “The bigger the game, the rougher the contestants play, Gil.”
“You call this a game?” I touched the back of my head, expecting to feel bandages. There weren’t any; the hair was short and fuzzy, growing in.
“A little hair off the back,” grinned Coleman. “It’ll grow.”
He and Willie said goodbye and left. The doc went out, and by and by an orderly brought me a tray of food.
Cleo came in as I finished. She took the tray of dishes, placed it on the nightstand. She sat down with the dirty dishes between us.
“I brought you some cigarettes.” She offered me an opened pack. I took one, she lit it, and dropped the pack beside the tray.
“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” I said, drawing deep.
“It was all my fault, Gil. I should have worn my body shield when I dropped in on you.”
I thought of her body against mine when I had manhandled her, and I was glad she hadn’t been wearing a shield. “I guess Bilfax’s man wasn’t wearing his, either, or I couldn’t have slugged him.”
“And he couldn’t have touched me, either.” Her eyes were golden, a frightening combination with her flame-red hair. “Thanks, Gil.”
“Skip it. I’m going home tomorrow and forget the whole thing.”
She shook her head. “If you mean to your apartment, it’s over a thousand miles away. We had to bring you here for treatment.”
“More matter transmitting,” I suggested.
“That doesn’t work over a long range. We brought you by ’copter. You’re at Roy’s base of operations, in the mountains.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that. I was almost afraid to find out.
She went on. “You will have to stay with us, now. Roy thinks it’s better that way, now that you’ve gotten in as deeply as you have.”
“How do I know when it’s too deep? When I drown?”
I looked into her eyes, knowing it could happen there.
“Let’s hope it won’t come to that, Gil.”
Had she guessed my meaning? Frustration clamped my brain. I reached for her hand. Oddly enough, she let me take it.
“I remember sounding off,” I mumbled. “Sorry, Cleo. I guess it’s too late now…”
“Far too late, Gil.”
A look of exalted dedication came over her face. Whatever it was Cleo had been seeking when she left me, she had obviously found it. I said, brooding, “Tell me what it’s all about, Cleo.”
She was thoughtful, seeming reluctant to speak. I took my hand away.
“I’m in it,” I said bitterly, “without knowing what it is!”
She made the flames dance on her head, and frowned. “I’m trying to think how to tell you. I knew I would have to. It isn’t easy. Roy agrees you should know, if you will believe…”
“I’d believe it if you say he’s the man in the moon.”
I rubbed my fuzzy afterskull gingerly.
Her eyes gleamed molten gold. “Not the man in the moon, maybe…something more remote. His name isn’t Coleman…among Roy’s kind, he has a different name.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“Roy isn’t from anyplace on Earth…or the moon, either. He comes from a distant solar system, across the galaxy.”
Her words trickled into silence. I was thinking furiously. It all fitted, of course. “What’s he doing here?”
“He had to earn some money, Gil.”
“Don’t they have money where he comes from?” It was a facetious question. She shrugged it aside.
“Roy never wanted to come here. I like to think it was Fate, so that I…well, it was an accident, sort of. It’s against the law of Roy’s people to land on a…backward…planet like Earth. They are extremely advanced scientifically. Their… history goes back a million years before ours. We’re…well, we’re savages to them, not yet ready to take our place alongside the real civilizations of the galaxy.”
“He, the man, and we, the apes,” I said, bitterly.
She was looking ceilingward, her eyes mirroring fright.
In that tipping of her head and the turning of her eyes upward, I read a world of thoughts, of things that couldn’t be expressed in mere words.
“There’s a war going on out there,” she said breathlessly. She looked me full in the face. “I said we are savages, but maybe you’re right…we’re apes.” She tossed her head defiantly. “You’re wondering why Roy’s people don’t show themselves to us, offering us a helping hand?”
“As a matter of fact, I am.”
“They did that sort of thing, once; thousands of years ago. They discovered retarded cultures, like ours, among the stars, and taught them…tried to lift them up. It didn’t work. You lose the use of your own legs when you walk with the aid of a crutch. Other races took the shock of change differently. Bilfax’s race was one. They learned all Roy’s people could teach them, then renounced their mentors. They had been introduced to the future too soon, and it unbalanced them; they began to war against worlds around them. When Roy’s people moved to stop them, they turned on them. That war has been going on for thousands of years. There’s no such thing as blitzkrieg in interstellar warfare…
“Anyway, Earth is in enemy territory, a segment of the galaxy dominated by Bilfax’s race. Earth, to them, is an unimportant place. They consider us savages, too…or apes. But they are no better than apes, themselves.
“Five years ago, Roy brought his spaceship near here on a cruising expedition. It met an enemy cruiser. The engines were destroyed, but Roy escaped with his ship and part of his crew.”
“Escaped to Earth?”
“He brought the ship down here, yes. The damage was terrible. I couldn’t understand Roy’s explanation—it all has to do with space an
d time and the tremendous distances involved in traveling among the stars. You can imagine the complexity, and delicacy, of such a drive. And it was destroyed.”
“And Roy set down on Earth for repairs?”
“He is almost finished; it has been terribly costly. And Roy was all alone, with the fifty men left in his crew. He couldn’t call on his own for help. At first, he thought we could help him, but the dismaying truth is that our technology can’t even produce the parts he needed!”
“So he had to produce them himself.”
“Worse than that. He had to build the machines to produce the parts he needed. You can see how it was… and he had nothing to use for money.”
“He could have stolen what he needed.”
She gave me a smile of grim exasperation.
“Steal what didn’t exist? The materials he could buy—a few things he could have made—but money was the first need. It’s one of the peculiar aspects of our culture. He dared not reveal himself to us—you may be sure he’s dedicated along the lines of that concept. He studied our culture, and decided he could earn the most money, most quickly, in show business. So he became a stage magician—”
“Is that his line…out there?” I looked ceilingward.
She allowed herself a polite laugh. “Far from it! Roy is a scientist, a technician, a commander in the space navy, a…a person of high importance in the affairs of his own world. He saw how his scientific knowledge could help him produce stage illusions that would defy the explanation of our experts. This superior science is commonplace to him—to us…ignorant apes…it’s really and truly magic.”
“I see what you mean.”
“Roy has earned the money he needed, Gil.”
“And now he’s leaving Earth?”
“Not…yet. As soon as the final tests and adjustments are made. He’s expecting a shipment, or something, soon. But he is in a hurry, of course. You see—Bilfax has finally located Roy’s ship!”
The puzzle made a picture, now that I had all—or almost all—the pieces. I didn’t relish being caught between the opposing millstones of an interstellar war.
I felt like a man clinging to a rock on a nameless shore, washed by a tide of great force, insensate, of which I suffered the relentless wash without understanding. I saw the universe of stars in a new way, knowing their host of peopled worlds, where men strode among men; and I felt that our way was like the hanging by tails of monkeys in trees.
But were they so different, after all, these men of the galactic spaces? Didn’t they have the same passions and appetites as we, the same aspirations, both holy and unholy? Didn’t they, for all their million years of science in advance of us, love and breed the same way we do, build their cities, carry on trade, engage in occupations of peace and war?
Surely, man is the same wherever he is, whatever his race, his name, his technology…
Where was Bilfax now? Up there, perhaps, floating among the atoms of rarefied air in the upper atmosphere, biding his time to strike. Such as Bilfax would take no account of the difference between the man he sought to capture or slay, and the apelings drawn into this web of supercosmic intrigue.
I was grateful to Coleman for saving my life, but of what use was that life to me if Bilfax struck, or if… “You are leaving with him,” I said.
“I’m going with him, Gil.”
“Have you thought what it will be like?”
“He loves me, Gil, and I love him. What can make any difference between us, so long as we have that?
“Will you still have it, once you are set down on his world like a howling orangutan at a Fifth Avenue tea.” She flushed. “I don’t like that simile.”
“The least you can say is that you are a live mummy from a million years in the prehistory of his race!”
“At least, Gil, I’m a live mummy!”
CHAPTER 5
Coleman’s installation nestled in a cup of the mountains. There was snow on the slopes, and sentinel firs to the timberline. Below, the valley wore a spiky carpet of dark green forest, and the thin, silver thread of a stream curved through it. The air was cold, and it smelled of the forest and snow.
The building was long and low, built in board-and-batten style, with a roof of corrugated aluminum. Every piece had had to be brought in by helicopter. The far end was devoted to a machine shop. My late quarters, from which Cleo had conducted me that morning, was a sick bay, rather than a hospital. It adjoined the living quarters,: where the crew on surface duty slept, the kitchen, dining and recreation rooms. I could see no ship.
On the west, the downhill side, a natural shelf had been further leveled to afford a ’copter park. Two machines were parked there—one, a heavy duty ’copter for transporting freight, and a smaller one, for personal use.
Around the field, on its perimeter, were half a dozen rudely made sheds.
I shivered in the unusual chill. “Where’s the ship—in the machine shop?”
Cleo shook her head. “It’s far too big. He buried it—” She gestured to the mountain slope, where drifts of rubble, great boulders, and snow, created a fantastic moonscape of tumbled proportions, an uneven talus perhaps a thousand feet deep. “They turned nuclear weapons on the mountain to create a slide.”
I was stunned. I could visualize slashing rays, beams, I don’t know what, carving at the rocky face of the mountain, the great mass of detritus falling, sliding, rushing down upon the spaceship. What a ship it must be, how well anchored, to have withstood the hammering rush of millions of tons of rock.
“There’s a tunnel leading to the ship,” she went on. We walked in the direction of it. “Of course, it’s disguised as a mine. Roy even has a claim, properly filed, and all the papers. It’s supposed to be an exploratory shaft, in search of a vein of uranium.”
We stood at the tunnel entrance. A shaft, rigged with an elevator, went down and down into blackness. The machinery whined and grumbled. The elevator came up with a group of men.
“Roy runs his crew in shifts, around the clock. They’re very close to completing their work.” Her look clouded. “Now that Bilfax has located the ship, Roy is driving himself…”
Willie detached himself from the group and approached. “Our shipment has come in. I’m going to town and pick it up. Anything you’d like?” He was looking at Cleo, and he didn’t look like a superman.
“No…” She hesitated, shrugged. “Never mind. I almost thought of going with you.”
“I’m afraid,” said Willie, “it wouldn’t be wise.”
“Any objection to my going?” I asked. I was looking at Cleo, too; I had an idea, one I had nourished since yesterday.
Willie inclined his head, seeming to consider. “Roy says it’s all right. Come along.”
We left Cleo standing by the shaft, slim, straight, crowned with flame. Had I any right to carry out the thought I was thinking? And suppose it didn’t work out? It was worth trying, maybe…
Somebody had started the small ’copter for us, and the atomic jets on the rotor tips began to howl as they warmed up.
“How did Roy know I’d want to go along?” I wanted to know.
Willie grinned—the kindly grin of a man toward a dim-witted ape. “I told him.” Then, seeing that I was still blank, he laughed and pointed to his left ear. “See that button?”
It nestled in the hollow of his ear, almost invisible. “What is it?”
“You might call it a…telepathor. It’s a telepathic device—common with us. It takes the place of your videophone service—somewhat.”
“I shouldn’t think it very private.”
“Perhaps not, but it is. It works through the center of will in your mind. You can communicate with a whole group at once, or individually. You have complete control. Ana it can’t be tapped, like videophone wires.�
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“It would be worth a lot of money…”
“You think so?”
“Why not?”
“Introducing the telepathor into your culture would throw your entire communications system into confusion—panic! Who would ever make another videophone call? There’s a lot of money there, too, you know. Do you think you could promote this…” He touched the button in his ear. “…against that kind of pressure?”
I saw what he meant.
“Your culture isn’t ready for the telepathor,” he said, “or anything else we could offer. A technology like ours has to be grown up to; you can’t have it thrust upon you.”
“We aren’t so dumb!” I defended weakly. “I know you think we’re apes, and maybe we are, compared to you. But we’ve got some sense of our own!”
He looked at me pityingly. “You are as intelligent as I, Gil, perhaps more so; but intelligence, beyond a point, means nothing. Cultural background means everything. It’s a matter of time…of slow growth. We used to think that everybody in the galaxy ought to be at the same cultural level. We tried to correct the disparity we found everywhere. It didn’t pay. Either the culture collapsed completely—or a worse thing happened.” He frowned. “There’s a gap between us, Gil, that you aren’t ready to span…yet.”
He spoke in much the tone of a kind but stern parent pointing out to Junior why he can’t have coffee at meals. I felt then less like an ape and more like a child. I was grateful to Willie for that.
I had no difficulty getting away from Willie. He expected to spend a couple of hours transferring the shipment from the freight warehouse to the ’copter. I told him I want to look the mountain town over, and simply walked away.
I knew I was being followed almost from the moment I left the ’copter park. Could Willie have detailed a man to watch me? It occurred to me, too, that it might be one of Gregor’s men, or Bilfax’s. Whoever he was, he was good; I couldn’t pick him out of the throng jamming the streets behind me.
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 53
