Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by J F Bone

  Four: His work kept him from being bored. Bennett grimaced as he returned to analyzing the principles of the exposed engine. That reason alone would have been enough to justify all of his labors. Even without the final item . . .

  But the final item was the clincher! It isn’t the most soothing news in the world to be told that one is about to become a father. Even under the most favorable situations such news comes as something of a shock. But when one is stranded parsecs from nowhere, it takes on the attributes of a major catastrophe.

  In the Video back home, Bennett thought bitterly, when the lead character finally made the ego-satisfying discovery that he was a man in every sense of the word, it was the signal for a double take followed by an extravagant exhibition of masculine joy. He had adhered to the pattern as far as the double take, but the transports that followed were not precisely joyful!

  To his angry remonstrances Laura merely returned a wry smile and the comment that it was as much his fault as hers. And, of course, she was right. That was the worst part of it. But she should have known better. This situation was of her own making. She had undermined and destroyed his conditioning. She had leaped into biology with a blithe disregard for consequences. If she had confined her determination and recklessness to the alien technology, things would have been far simpler.

  Typically, he refused to give any weight to his part in this frightening new turn of events. Somewhere inside him a small voice kept telling him that he wasn’t being reasonable, but he didn’t want to be reasonable. He wanted to be angry. Her calmness irked him and her matter-of-fact air was infuriating. He knew hardly enough about medicine to set a broken arm, and the thought of being an obstetrician appalled him.

  His need to find the lost spaceship increased, became a driving, compulsive, night-and-day urge. He turned feverish energy to discovering in days what had previously taken weeks. And in a measure, he succeeded. Once he had figured out how to open the engine housings, the seamless inscrutability of the power plant was now open to inspection. The engine itself was a complete technological education, but he didn’t waste time admiring it.

  It didn’t matter to him that the light weight, high-efficiency power plant was a technological impossibility in his time. The fact that it burned water instead of hydrocarbons and developed an amazing amount of power for its size was interesting. But more important was the fact that its principle was apparently the same as that which operated the spaceship drive. According to the tech manuals it was a miniature of its big brothers in the drive room of ordinary Terran spacecraft.

  Learning took time, but it moved faster. He took chances he ordinarily would have looked upon with horror—even to extrapolating processes which should have been covered by careful stepwise progression.

  Somehow he managed to avoid serious injury as he ferreted out the full possibilities of the crawler. It was with a feeling of relief rather than elation that he discovered the function of the direction compass. Now he knew how to find the spaceship. The skull-cracking sessions had produced results. The hardest part was over!

  But in the meantime, time passed.

  Laura watched him with considerably more concern than she showed on the surface. He worried her. There was no need for this frantic haste. It wasn’t going to do the least bit of good. Eventually he would find the spaceship which had brought them here. She was sure of that in her mind. But she was equally certain that he would never be able to get the ship ready for flight in time. She would have her baby here.

  With unconscious wisdom she didn’t try to stop him. It would have only promoted discord, and she had no desire to upset the equilibrium of their lives. But there were limits . . .

  “You’re driving yourself into a nervous breakdown, and me into a state of mild insanity,” she said, in a tone that brooked no argument. “I don’t care whether you like it or not—you’re going to stop for a day and take me on a picnic!”

  Bennett was taken completely by surprise. But before he could protest she went on vehemently, “I’m sick and tired of sitting here thinking beautiful thoughts while you cover yourself with dirt diving around in that crawler. I’ve dreamed up a picnic lunch and we’re going topside, sit in the shade, and enjoy it. It’s about time you relaxed. And you’d better not start arguing about it. In the first place it won’t get you anywhere, and in the second—”

  He wilted underneath the barrage of words. “Oh all right—have it your own way,” he grumbled.

  “Thank you, darling.”

  “Don’t thank me. Thank this messed-up world we’re on. You were right when you said I’d find the ship but wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. We might just as well have a picnic.

  Her eyes widened in stunned incredulity. “You found the ship? When?”

  “Yesterday, while you were sleeping.”

  “Where is it?”

  “About a mile from the edge of the mesa, buried under about a million tons of sand. As far as I can judge, it’s a third of the way under one of those big dunes. It’s damnably frustrating. It’s so close that I can almost touch it. But as far as we’re concerned—it’s as far away as the stars.”

  “I guess you’d better turn your energies to the study of obstetrics,” Laura said. “The stork is about ten to one to come home a winner.” She spoke with a forced smile, but the torment in her eyes belied her levity.

  “You don’t sound happy about being right.”

  “I would rather have been wrong,” she said with stark honesty. “But nature will probably take care of things. She did all right long before there were any doctors.”

  “I don’t trust nature. Besides there may still be time with luck and a high wind. These dunes move pretty fast, and—well, you don’t look too pregnant.”

  “That, I’m afraid, is mere wishful thinking on your part. I’m beginning to think junior might be twins.”

  “God forbid! One is enough! Well, we might as well go on that picnic. There’s nothing else we can do.”

  IT WAS PLEASANT to lie in the sun and stare over the hot shimmer of the empty sands below the mesa. The shelter of the entrance valve made a good picnic ground, offering shade and protection from the constant wind that blew gritty particles around them, and the food Laura had dreamed up was precisely what she claimed it would be. He sighed and rose to his feet.

  Laura looked up at him. “Still thinking of that ship?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I can’t help it.”

  “I suppose not. But I brought you up here to get away from that. Besides,” she added darkly, “I think I’ve stumbled on something that may be more important than any ship.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What makes you think that this place is deserted?” she asked obliquely.

  “No people. No people, period.”

  “We haven’t seen it all,” she reminded him. “And the machinery still works.”

  “Most of it does,” he conceded. “But have you ever taken a good look at those machines?”

  “No. I wouldn’t know anything really significant about them if I did.”

  “Well, you can take my word for it. They’d run for a million years—barring accidents. Most of them have no moving parts, and in those which do, the parts don’t move very much. They work in fields of pure energy, magnetism, and subatomic binding forces. The people who built them were as far beyond us as we are beyond our ancestors of the Dark Ages. We’re living in the remains of a culture that was at least two levels above ours. About the only thing they didn’t have was spaceflight—and they could have had that if they had wanted it.” He shrugged. “They may have had that too. They may have simply grown tired of this place, and gone away.”

  “And that’s why you think this place is deserted?”

  “Of course not. It’s a personality matter. Geniuses or not, if there was any remnant of them left, they’d still be curious. That’s one of the attributes of intelligence. They’d have been aware of us by now and would have investigated.�
��

  “How do you know they haven’t? How can you be sure?”

  He ignored the question and went on, immersed in his reasoning. “And there’s another thing. Good as these machines are, they sometimes stop running like that cleaner in the hall. We’ve seen a few that don’t work, but nobody comes to fix them. There isn’t a solitary track in the dust on the upper two levels except our own, and below the third level we can assume the same thing, even though there isn’t any dust. Still it’s a fair assumption—” his face twisted suddenly as the import of her words sank in. “What did you mean by that last question?” he demanded.

  “I was going to wait for you to run down before I tried again,” she said mildly. “But I’d like to remind you that most of their machines don’t leave tracks. We can’t be sure we haven’t been under observation.”

  “Hmm, that’s right. But how do you explain the machines that keep on running, but serve no useful purpose?”

  “They could have been abandoned as unsuccessful experiments.”

  “And left running? That wouldn’t be sensible.”

  “How do we know what’s sensible to people who built a place like this? Maybe the machines couldn’t be shut down.”

  “No machines are built like that. There’s always some way to turn them off.”

  “These people weren’t like us.”

  “It seems to me that you’re going to great lengths to build a case,” he said. “What’s the reason?”

  “Lately,” she said soberly, “I’ve had the feeling that I’m being watched! For awhile I thought it might be one of those queer ideas a girl gets, but yesterday I knew I was wrong! I saw the thing that was watching me! That’s why I wanted you to bring me up here, away from those rooms. I wanted to tell you, and I didn’t want them to know!”

  “Paranoia?” Bennett’s mind rejected the thought instantly. No—she had seen something.

  “It was a little black thing shaped like an egg, and not much bigger. It had one oval, heavily-lidded eye and it was watching me! It was floating up close to the ceiling and the instant I raised my eyes it disappeared into the ventilator. And right then I had the most awful impression! It was something old—something that remembered rather than thought, something that was afraid!” She shivered. “I’m scared!” she finished in a small voice.

  “Brr! You even frighten me,” Bennett said. “You should be writing horror stories.” His expression turned serious. “You seem to have read a lot into one more gadget. I’ll bet it was an automatic duct inspector.”

  “It wasn’t,” she said positively.

  “I’m not going to make the mistake of not listening to you,” Bennett said soberly. “You may be all wet. But if you say it was watching you, I believe you. And if you felt something—well, I don’t intend to dispute it. Now then, let’s find out what you saw and felt.”

  “You’re sweet,” she said unsteadily, “And I appreciate your faith in me.”

  His arms went around her hungrily. Instantly, as eagerly as he could have desired, she kissed him.

  He loved her. That much was certain. He turned her hands palm up in his broad palms and looked at them. With an oddly restrained motion of his head he bent and kissed them while Laura looked at him with a peculiar expression of surprise and tenderness on her face.

  “Why that?” she asked softly.

  “They hold my heart,” was the simple answer. Something tight within her broke loose. She shivered uncontrollably. The sensation was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but the tingling warmth that swept through her a moment later was something she had never experienced before in her life—and it was heavenly. Quite unnaturally the brazen brightness of the day turned into something misty and soft . . .

  Bennett held her at arm’s length and looked at her. There was no doubt about it. He loved her, and she would be his woman until they were both too old to dream.

  Laura forgot about the metal egg with the eye that watched. But Bennett didn’t. Even as he held her close and stroked her shining hair, his eyes caught the dull gleam of the jet-black ovoid peering at them with a blank crystalline eye from the shadow of the tunnel behind her.

  V

  BACK IN THEIR living quarters Bennett wordlessly removed two fully charged Kellys from the neat rows of equipment he had taken from the crawler. Silently he handed her one of the deadly little weapons and snapped the other to his belt.

  “Do you know how to handle one of these?” he asked.

  “I think so. Weapons training was a part of my elementary school education. But why the guns?”

  “Eggs, with eyes,” he said quite seriously.

  “So you take this in dead earnest?”

  “I do. One of those things was watching us when we were topside.” His voice tightened. “The next time you see one of those things, blast it! That may give whatever’s watching something to think about.”

  Her face had gone very pale. “They’ve refined these blasters a lot from the ones I remember, but I think I can shoot it all right,” she said.

  She levelled the weapon and fired! The searing minimum-aperture bolt landed past his head and struck the wall in the corner of the room. There was a sharp detonation and a puff of smoke blossomed from the wall high up near the ventilator. Something clattered metallically on the floor.

  Bennett looked up at her from the floor where he had dropped in instinctive response to the shot. “Hey!” he exploded. “I thought you knew how—”

  “You said if I saw one of those things I should blast it,” she said equably. “Well, I saw one—and there it is!” She pointed to the floor in the corner of the room where something black and egg-shaped was spinning madly.

  Bennett stared down at it in horror. For a moment it reminded him of a poisoned fly. Then the spinning stopped and the egg lay quiet, looking up at him with the lens set in its blunter end. He picked it up and set it on the table where it instantly began spinning again. He trapped it and examined it closely.

  “It’s a clever little gadget,” he said.

  “What is it?” Laura asked.

  “A spy probe—a scanner transmitter like the ones we use in the Navy. But it’s only about one-tenth Navy-scanner size. It makes our gadget look old-fashioned. I wonder how it works.”

  “Now don’t get started on that,” Laura said. “It’s more important to find out where it came from.”

  He nodded, continuing to examine the gadget.

  “Finding out shouldn’t be too hard,” Laura said thoughtfully.

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “It probably operates like the food dispenser. I’ll bet if I told it to go home, it would obey me.” Her slim brows puckered faintly, and with a sudden trembling the metal ovoid stood upon its blunt end!

  “How come it isn’t spinning?” Bennett wondered audibly.

  “Don’t ask me. I’m not a mechanic. But as you can see, it’s trying to do what I told it to do. If I had thought of this before, we wouldn’t have had any trouble. I could have asked it to come to me, and it would have done so.”

  “I wonder,” Bennett said thoughtfully.

  “What?”

  “It just occurred to me that we can use this gadget even though it is damaged.” He grinned happily. “It would be poetic justice to hoist our unseen observer on his own petard. Apparently the homing mechanism isn’t damaged—merely the flight device. Now if we mounted it in a set of gimbals and stimulated it properly it should point out the way like a homesick Halsite. But how did you know that it would work that way?”

  “Oh, it just seemed worth a try. After all our food and waste disposal machinery works by thought impulses.”

  “But nothing else does,” Bennett pointed out.

  “That’s because the other machines have a definite job to do at a definite time. They can be present. But I’ll bet anything that’s variable, that a mechanism that has to respond to control will respond to thought. Now this spy gadget simply couldn’t be present. There was no way
of knowing what we’d do, or where we’d be at any given time.”

  “I’d love to know how your brain works,” he said admiringly. “There’s a touch of genius in it.”

  Laura blushed. “You’d have thought of it too.”

  “Probably. But you thought of it at once. I might have gotten around to it in a week or so.” He picked up the black egg. “I think I’ll take this over to the shop, and rig it up in a gimbal.”

  “A good idea,” Laura said. “And while you’re doing that I think I’ll get some rest. It’s been a pretty tiring day.”

  A moment later, alone with the probe, Bennett turned his attention to the tiny hole burned through its metallic outer shell. It was a lucky shot that had disabled it without harming it otherwise.

  It wasn’t hard to make a holder for the mechanism that would mount it firmly, yet allow it to swing freely. The tools and lathe-mountings in the well-equipped shop across the hallway made the task almost a pleasure. He was skillful with his hands and enjoyed the work, but it took time and several hours passed before he had the mounting machined to his satisfaction. He looked at it proudly.

  “Now to get Laura to give this thing directions. With a little luck we should find out quickly enough where it leads us,” he muttered, aloud to himself as he walked back to their quarters.

  He opened the door and the cheerful greeting on his lips died unspoken. The room was empty! Laura was gone, although the divan on which she had been resting still held the warm imprint of her body. And lying in the center of the couch was the Kelly he had given her! It worried him. She might have stepped out on some errand of her own, but it hardly seemed likely that she would leave the blaster behind after her earlier experiences.

  He looked down at the floor and swore softly. The broad dusty track leading from door to bed told him plainer than words could have done that she hadn’t left the room of her own free will! He had been the ultimate fool! Whoever had sent the spy gadget had come to retrieve it—and Laura had been seized and forcibly carried away.