The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 02

by Anthology

  "Fast motion in B section. Going your way."

  Fast motion. A thought flicked up. "Quillan--" Trigger began.

  He raised a shushing hand. "Get a silhouette?" he asked. His hands went to a set of control switches and stayed there.

  "No. Pickup shows a haze like in the reconstruct." An instant's pause. "Leaving B section."

  "Motion in C section," said another voice.

  Quillan said, "All right. It's coming. No more verbal reports unless it changes direction. If you want to stay alive, don't move unless you're in armor."

  There was silence. Quillan sat unmoving, eyes fixed on the screen. Trigger stood just behind him. Her legs had begun to tremble. She'd better tell him.

  "Quillan--"

  For an instant, in the screen, there was something like heat shimmer at the far end of the passage. Then she saw her cabin door pop open.

  The interior of the cabin showed in a brief flare of blue light. In it was a shape. It vanished instantly again.

  She heard Quillan make a shocked, incredulous sound. His left hand slashed at a switch on the panel.

  Twenty feet from them, just behind the closed door to the passage, was a splatting noise like a tremendous slap. Then another noise, strangely like a brief cloudburst. Then silence again.

  She realized Quillan was on his feet beside her, the oversized gun in his hand. It was pointed at the door. His eyes switched suddenly from the door to the screen and back again. She felt him relaxing slowly. Then she discovered she was clutching a handful of his shirt along with a considerable chunk of tough skin. She went on clutching it.

  "Fly swatter got it!" he said. "Whew!" He looked down and patted the clutching hand. "No catassin! The trap in the cabin just wasn't fast enough. Had a gravity mine outside our door, just in case. That was barely fast enough!" For once, Quillan looked almost awed.

  "L-l-l-like--" Trigger began. She tried again. "Like a little yellow man--"

  "You saw it? In the cabin? Yes. Never saw anything just like it before!"

  Trigger pressed her lips together to make them stay steady.

  "I have," she said. "That's what I was trying to tell you."

  Quillan stared at her for an instant. "You'll tell me about it in a couple of minutes. I've got some quick work to do first." He checked himself. A wide grin spread suddenly over his face. "Know something, doll?"

  "What?"

  "The damn computers!" Major Quillan said happily. "They goofed!"

  * * * * *

  The gravity mine would have reduced almost any life-form which moved into its field to a rather thin smear, but there wasn't even that left of the yellow demon-shape. Something, presumably something it was carrying, had turned it into a small blaze of incandescent energy as the mine flattened it out. Which explained the sound like a cloudburst. That had been the passage's automatic fire extinguishers going into brief but correspondingly violent action.

  Quillan's group stayed out of sight for the time being. He'd barely got the mine put away, along with a handful of warped metal slugs, which was what the mine had left of their attacker's mechanical equipment, and Trigger's cabin door locked again, when three visitors came zooming down the storerooms hall in a small car. A ship's engineer and two assistants had arrived to check on what had started the extinguishers.

  "They may," Quillan said hopefully, "just go away again." He and Trigger were watching the engineers through the viewer which had been extended to cover their end of the passage.

  They didn't just go away again. They checked the extinguishers, looked at the floor, still wet but rapidly absorbing the last drops of the brief deluge. They exchanged puzzled comment. They checked everything once more. Finally the leader made use of the door announcer and asked if he might intrude.

  Quillan switched off the viewer. "Come in," he said resignedly.

  The door opened. The three glanced at Quillan, and then at Trigger-plus-Beldon. Their eyes widened only slightly. Duty on the Dawn City produced hardened men.

  Neither Quillan nor Trigger could offer the slightest explanation as to what had started the extinguishers. The engineers apologized and withdrew. The door closed again.

  Quillan switched on the viewer. Their voices came back into the cabin as they climbed into their car.

  "So that's how it happened," one of the assistants was saying reflectively.

  "Right," said the ship's engineer. "Like to burst into flames myself."

  "Ha-ha-ha!" They drove off.

  Trigger flushed. She looked at Quillan.

  "Perhaps I ought to get into something else," she said. "Now that the party's over."

  "Perhaps," Quillan admitted. "I'll have Gaya bring something down. We want to stay out of your cabin for an hour or so till everything's been checked. There'll be a few conferences to go through now."

  Gaya arrived next, with clothes. Trigger retired to the cabin's bathroom with them and came out a few minutes later, dressed again. Meanwhile the Dawn City's First Security Officer also had arrived and was setting up a portable restructure stage in the center of the cabin. He looked rather grim, but he also looked like a very much relieved man.

  "I suggest we run your sequence off first, Major," he said. "Then we can put them on together, and compare them."

  Trigger sat down on a couch beside Gaya to watch. She'd been told that the momentary view of the little demon-shape in the cabin had been deleted from Security's copy of their own sequence and wasn't to be mentioned.

  Otherwise there really was not too much to see. What the attacking creature had used to blur the restructure wasn't clear, except that it wasn't a standard scrambler. Amplified to the limits of clarity and stepped down in time to the limit of immobility, all that emerged was a shifting haze of energy, which very faintly hinted at a dwarfish human shape in outline. A rather unusually small and heavy catassin, the Security chief pointed out, would present such an outline. That something quite material was finally undergoing devastating structural disorganization on the gravity mine was unpleasantly obvious, but it produced no further information. The sequence ended with the short blaze of heat which had set off the extinguishers.

  Then they ran the restructure of the preceding double killing. Trigger watched, gulping a little, till it came to the point where the haze shape actually was about to touch its victims. Then she studied the carpet carefully until Gaya nudged her to indicate the business was over. Catassins almost invariably used their natural equipment in the kill; it was a swift process, of course, but shockingly brutal, and Trigger didn't care to remember what the results looked like in a human being. Both men had been killed in that manner; and the purpose obviously was to conceal the fact that the killer was not a catassin, but something even more efficient along those lines.

  It didn't occur to the Security chief to question Trigger. A temporal restructure of a recent event was a far more reliable witness than any set of human senses and memory mechanisms. He left presently, reassured that the catassin incident was concluded. It startled Trigger to realize that Security did not seem to be considering seriously the possibility of discovering the human agent behind the murders.

  Quillan shrugged. "Whoever did it is covered three ways in every direction. The chief knows it. He can't psych four thousand people on general suspicions, and he'd hit mind-blocks in every twentieth passenger presently on board if he did. Anyway he knows we're on it, and that we have a great deal better chance of nailing the responsible characters eventually."

  "More information for the computers, eh?" Trigger said.

  "Uh-huh."

  "You got this little chunk the hard way, I feel," she observed.

  "True," Quillan admitted, "But we have to get it any way we can till we get enough to move on. Then we move." He looked at her, with an air of regarding a new idea. "You know," he said, "you don't do badly for an amateur!"

  "She doesn't do badly," Gaya's voice said behind Trigger, "for anybody. How do you people feel about a drink? I thought I could use
one myself after looking at the chief's restructure."

  Trigger felt herself coloring. Praise from the cloak and dagger experts! For some reason it pleased her immensely. She turned her head to smile at Gaya, standing there with three glasses on a tray.

  "Thanks!" she said. She took one of the glasses. Gaya held the tray out to Quillan and took the third glass herself.

  It was some five minutes later when Trigger remarked, "You know, I'm getting sleepy."

  Quillan looked around the viewer equipment he and Gaya were dismantling. "Why not hit the couch over there and take a nap?" he suggested. "It'll be about an hour before the boys can get down here for the real conference."

  "Good idea." Trigger yawned, finished her drink, put the glass on a table, and wandered over to the couch. She stretched out on it. A drowsy somnolence enveloped her almost instantly. She closed her eyes.

  Ten minutes later, Gaya, standing over her, announced, "Well, she's out."

  "Fine," said Quillan, packaging the rest of the equipment. "Tell them to haul in the rest cubicle. I'll be done here in a minute. Then you and the lady warden can take over."

  Gaya looked down at Trigger. There was a trace of regret in her face. "I think," she said, "she's going to be fairly displeased with you when she wakes up and finds she's on Manon."

  "Wouldn't doubt it," said Quillan. "But from what I've seen of that chick, she's going to get fairly displeased with me from time to time on this operation anyway."

  Gaya looked at his back.

  "Major Quillan," she said, "would you like a tip from a keen-eyed operator?"

  "Go ahead, ole keen-eyed op!" Quillan said in kindly tones.

  "Not that you don't have it coming, boy," said Gaya. "But watch yourself! This one is dangerous. This one could sink you for keeps."

  "You're going out of your mind, doll," said Quillan.

  16

  The Precol headquarters dome on Manon Planet was still in the spot where Trigger had left it, looking unchanged; but everything else in the area seemed to have been moved, improved, expanded or taken away entirely, and unfamiliar features had appeared. In the screens of Commissioner Tate's Precol offices, Trigger could see both the new metropolitan-sized spaceport on which the Dawn City had set down that morning, and the towering glassy structures of the giant shopping and recreation center, which had been opened here recently by Grand Commerce in its bid for a cut of prospective outworld salaries. The salaries weren't entirely prospective either.

  Ten miles away on the other side of Headquarters dome, new squares of living domes were sprouting up daily. At this morning's count they housed fifty-two thousand people. The Hub's major industries and assorted branches of Federation government had established a solid foothold on Manon.

  Trigger turned her head as Holati Tate came into the office. He closed the door carefully behind him.

  "How's the little critter doing?" he asked.

  "Still absorbing the goop," Trigger said. She held Mantelish's small mystery plasmoid cupped lightly between thumbs and fingers, its bottom side down in a shallow bowl half full of something which Mantelish considered to be nutritive for plasmoids, or at least for this one. Its sides pulsed lightly and regularly against her palms. "The level of the stuff keeps going down," she added.

  "Good," said Holati. He pulled a chair up to the table and sat down opposite her. He looked broodingly at plasmoid 113-A.

  "You really think this thing likes me--personally?" Trigger inquired.

  Her boss said, "It's eating, isn't it? And moving. There were a couple of days before you got here when it looked pretty dead to me."

  "Hard to believe," Trigger observed, "that a sort of leech-looking thing could distinguish between people."

  "This one can. Do you get any sensations while holding it?"

  "Sensations?" She considered. "Nothing particular. It's just like I said the other time--little Repulsive is rather nice to feel."

  "For you," he said. "I didn't tell you everything."

  "You rarely do," Trigger remarked.

  "I'll tell you now," said Holati. "The day after we left, when it started acting very agitated and then very droopy, Mantelish said it might be missing the female touch it had got from you. He was being facetious, I think. But I couldn't see any reason not to try it, so I called in your facsimile and had her sit down at the table where the thing was lying."

  "Yes?"

  "Well, first it came flying up to her, crying 'Mama!' Not actually, of course. Then it touched her hand and recoiled in horror."

  Trigger raised an eyebrow.

  "It looked like it," he insisted. "We all commented on it. So then she reached out and touched it. Then she recoiled in horror."

  "Why?"

  "She said it had given her a very nasty electric jolt. Apparently like the one it gave Mantelish."

  Trigger glanced down dubiously at Repulsive. "Gee, thanks for letting me hold it, Holati! It seems to have stopped eating now, by the way. Or whatever it does. Doesn't look much fatter if any, does it?"

  The Commissioner looked. "No," he said. "And if you weighed it, you'd probably find it still weighs an exact three and a half pounds. Mantelish feels the thing turns any food intake directly into energy."

  "Then it should be able to produce a very nice jolt at the moment," Trigger commented. "Now, what do I do with Repulsive?"

  Holati took a towel from beneath the table and spread it out. "Absorbent material," he said. "Lay it on that and just let it dry. That's what we used to do."

  Trigger shook her head. "Next thing, I'll be changing its diapers!"

  "It isn't that bad," the Commissioner said. "Anyway, you will adopt baby, won't you?"

  "I suppose I have to." She placed the plasmoid on the towel, wiped her hands and stepped back from it. "What happens if it falls on the floor?"

  "Nothing," Holati said. "It just moves on in the direction it was going. Pretty hard to hurt those things."

  "In that case," Trigger said, "let's check out its container now."

  The Commissioner took Repulsive's container out of a desk safe and handed it to her. Its outer appearance was that of a neat modern woman's handbag with a shoulder strap. It had an antigrav setting which would reduce its overall weight, with the plasmoid inside, down to nine ounces if Trigger wanted it that way. It also had a combination lock, unmarked, virtually invisible, the settings of which Trigger already had memorized. Without knowing the settings, a determined man using a high-powered needle blaster might have opened the handbag in around nine hours. A very special job.

  Trigger ran through the settings, opened the container and peered inside. "Rather cramped," she observed.

  "Not for one of them. We needed room for the gadgetry."

  "Yes," she said. "Subspace rotation." She shook her head. "Is that another Space Scout invention?"

  "No," said Holati. "They stole it from Subspace Engineers. Engineers don't know we have it yet. Far as I know, nobody else has got it from them. Go ahead--give it a try."

  "I was going to." Trigger snapped the container shut, slipped the strap over her shoulder and stood straight, left hand closed over the lower rim of the purselike object. She shifted the ball of her thumb and the tip of her middle finger to the correct spots and began to apply pressure. Then she started. Handbag and strap had vanished.

  "Feels odd!" She smiled. "And to bring it back, I just have to be here--the same place--and say those words."

  He nodded. "Want to try that now?"

  Trigger waved her left hand gently through the air beside her. "What happens," she asked, "if the thing surfaces exactly where my hand happens to be?"

  "It won't surface if there's anything bulkier than a few dust motes in the way. That's one improvement the Sub Engineers haven't heard about yet."

  "Well...." She glanced around, picked up a plastic ruler from the desk behind her, and moved back a cautious step. She waved the ruler's tip gingerly about in the area where the handbag had been.

  "Co
me, Fido!" she said.

  Nothing happened. She drew the ruler back.

  "Come, Fido!"

  Handbag and strap materialized in mid-air and thumped to the floor.

  "Convinced?" Holati asked. He picked up the handbag and gave it back to her.

  "It seems to work. How long will that little plasmoid last if it's left in subspace like that?"

  He shrugged. "Indefinitely, probably. They're tough. We know that twenty-four hours at a stretch won't bother it in the least, so we've set that as the limit it's to stay rotated except in emergencies."

  "And you--and one other person I'm not to know about, but who isn't anywhere near here--can also bring it back?"

  "Yes. If we know the place from which it's been rotated. So the agreement is that--again except in absolute emergencies--it will be rotated only from one of the six points specified and known to all three of us."

  Trigger nodded. She opened the container and went over to the table where the plasmoid still lay on its towel. It was dry by now. She picked it up.

  "You're a lot of trouble, Repulsive!" she told it. "But these people think you must be worth it." She slipped it into the container, and it seemed to snuggle down comfortably inside. Trigger closed the handbag, lightened it to half its normal weight, slipped the strap back over her left shoulder. "And now," she inquired, "what am I to do with the stuff I usually keep in a purse?"

  "You'll be in Precol uniform while you're here. We've had a special uniform made for you. Extra pockets."

  Trigger sighed.

  "Oh, they're quite inconspicuous and convenient," he assured her. "We checked with the girls on that."

  "I'll bet!" she said. "Did they okay the porgee pouch too?"

  "Sure. Porgee doping is a big thing all over the Hub at the moment. Among the ladies anyway. Shows you're the delicate sort, or something like that. I forget what they said. Want to start carrying it?"

  "Hand it over," Trigger said resignedly. "I did see quite a few pouches on the ship. Might as well get people used to thinking I've turned into a porgee sniffer."

  Holati went back to the desk safe and took out a flat pouch, the length of his hand but narrower. He gave it to her. It appeared to be worked of gold thread; one side was studded with tiny pearls, the opposite surface was plain. Trigger laid the plain side against the cloth of her skirt, just below the right hip, and let go. It adhered there. She stretched her right leg out to the side and considered the porgee pouch.