Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by J F Bone

  Rage cut through his dismay like a white-hot knife! He turned back to the corridor, and looked down at the floor. There in the dust was the same broad track he had seen in the room—a two-footwide featureless ribbon that disappeared down the hallway. His lips tightened in grim purposefulness. He had wanted something concrete to follow—and here it was!

  No sense, though, in following on foot. He turned and raced up the corridor to where he had parked the crawler, bolted the probe and its mount to the dashboard and directed a vicious thought at the unresponsive egg.

  The probe hummed violently and twisted in the mount, standing vertically on its blunt end. Good! It worked as well for him as it had done for Laura. He’d simply follow where it led. It might not take him where he wanted to go immediately, but it would give him a point from which to start, and he’d take this whole joint apart wall by wall until he found her.

  He checked the blast rifle strapped in its scabbard beside the driver’s seat, noted with satisfaction that it was fully charged, started the engine and engaged the drive. The crawler purred forward, and in a moment was straddling the enigmatic track that led from their rooms.

  The track led to one of the spiral ramps at the corridor intersections, and dipped downward into the depths of the structure. He grunted with satisfaction. So far at least the probe and the kidnap vehicle were in agreement. He turned the crawler into the smooth helical tunnel that wound downward, following the track as it led past the laterals which opened into each subterranean level. The dimming glow of the overhead illuminated the floor well enough, but it was fading rapidly with the departing day outside.

  He turned on the light switch and the blue white beams flashed on, cleaving the gathering darkness like flaming swords as the crawler rushed onward down the ramp.

  At the third level the tracks vanished, but he was expecting that. The lower levels were dust free, and the polished floors and passageways were in startling contrast to the dusty halls above.

  The little black egg still stood on its eye, pointing downward. The crawler’s lights turned the fluted walls of the ramp into a gleaming corrugated tube of pastel colors that changed with every level he passed. Occasionally the lights were reflected in coruscating brilliance from the shell of a dim glowtube set into the walls. Beneath his feet the soft hum of the engine and the purring slap of the composition treads of the tracks sounded loud and flat in the stillness.

  There was no echo. The walls absorbed the sound like a giant sponge. It was a journey through nightmare, that seemed slow and unreal even though the crawler was travelling faster than he had ever driven it before.

  And then suddenly he knew that he was right. Laura was ahead! He knew it with a certainty that admitted no doubt. She was ahead and her abductor knew that he was following. For as he rounded a curve of the helix, something huge and black, floating with unnatural lightness a scant two inches above the roadbed loomed out of the shadows as it moved slowly toward him with the ponderous deliberation of a juggernaut!

  His keyed up reflexes saved him. He slammed the brake pedal down hard and the treads squeaked on the smooth floor of the tunnel. It slid to a stop scarcely two feet from a huge mass of metal that filled the entire corridor. The ponderous thing ahead stopped with equal celerity, and the two metal monsters stood facing each other a scant two feet apart!

  Bennett swayed, the breath whistling from his lungs, his eyes wide with shock. He realized with an angry, complete lack of gratefulness that if it hadn’t been for the featureless blackness of the machine a collision would have been inevitable. With a bitterness born of frustration he contemplated the blocked tunnel ahead. He swore dully, wishing with all his heart that the damnable thing ahead would remove itself, would disappear of its own accord before his mind cracked under the strain.

  The black mass obediently moved backward! With a gasp of surprise he watched it vanish around the curve ahead. He engaged the crawler’s drive and followed until it backed neatly into a lateral that branched off into one of the lower levels. It suddenly dawned on him that this machine wasn’t designed to impede his progress. It was designed to serve animate life, and was responsive to that life’s commands. What it was used for, he hadn’t the slightest idea. But it was obvious that the thing was incapable of hurting him unless he crashed into it at full speed.

  Grimly, Bennett fed power to the drive and the crawler leaped ahead. When the next obstacle appeared he was ready for it, and stopped in plenty of time. A searing blue-white glow ahead slowed him down, and he stopped easily short of the clean-cut gap in the tunnel floor. Some twenty feet ahead another monstrous black machine was quietly dissolving away the floor of the ramp to the accompaniment of a searing, eye-paining flame—and utter silence! There would be no further travel down this path!

  He checked the probe. It still pointed downward, but now he was sure that there was some slight alteration of its angle from the vertical. Wherever that gadget pointed couldn’t he too far ahead. He threw the drive into reverse and began to back up the ramp to the next higher level. But he had hardly gone ten feet before a second glow stopped him. Another of the huge machines had slid silently into position above him and was cutting off his retreat! The crawler was useless now, and he was neatly trapped on a ledgelike segment of the ramp.

  He looked down. It was a twenty foot drop to the next curve of the helix. And as he looked, he smiled. Whatever was trying to stop him certainly wasn’t too smart. The ramp below was intact. Thought and action were virtually simultaneous.

  He removed the probe, slipped the sling of the blast rifle across his shoulder, unreeled the winch on the front of the crawler and slid down the cable to the ramp below. He shrugged. He wasn’t going to be stopped by a little thing like a roadblock. Silently he broke into a space-devouring run down the ramp.

  The dim light of a glow tube set in the wall showed him the next gap in the roadway too late for him to stop! It yawned under his feet and he cried out in alarm as he plummeted downward into the darkness.

  He landed sprawled, with a bone-jarring thump that jolted the breath from his lungs and sent a fiery lance of pain through his left arm. The arm was broken apparently, for it dangled limply from his shoulder. Painfully he unseamed his blouse and eased the useless limb into the gaping cloth. Painfully he regained his feet, cursing at the effort it cost him, and started grimly down the ramp again.

  He had passed the bounds of caution now. Only one thing drove him—to find where the probe led. He looked at it in the pallid semi-darkness. It was nearly horizontal now, indicating that the next level would be it! He reached his goal without incident and turned down the dimly-lighted corridor along which the probe pointed. His left arm was a massive throbbing ache, and the corridor stretched dark and silent ahead of him, lined with closed doors that mocked him with their blank faces.

  Door after door slipped behind him as he moved slowly onward, following the probe. At one he paused. The probe still pointed down the hall, but he ignored it. A sound from within, barely audible through the metal, made him draw his blaster as he reached for the latch.

  It was a good thing, he reflected wryly, that whoever had built this place cared nothing about locks. He looked inside. His face peering through the open doorway was greeted with a scream of pure terror!

  VI

  IT WAS LAURA’S VOICE! His mind congealed, and for a moment he stood absolutely motionless. Then, gradually, his vision steadied. In the center of the cubical, lying upon a jet black metal table was Laura, her unclad body outlined starkly in a cone of downstreaming radiance. And beside her hovered a monstrous shape of metal with a shining blade firmly gripped in one of its armlike appendages. The scene was frozen—a tableau of horror straight from the pages of a Dark Age novel.

  And then the machine moved, the blade sliding with slow purposeful motion toward Laura’s straining body.

  Bennett fired! The channeled atomic bolt lanced across the ten feet that separated him from the machine and splattered with a dull
detonation against its dark metal body. The shock hurled the mechanism back a full ten feet, slamming it into the far wall, and as it gave off corruscating sparks and grinding noises of fused metal Bennett drove three more maximum-intensity bolts into it! The thunder of the blasts deafened him and the flame was blinding as gouts of molten metal splattered in a spray from the shattered mechanical horror. The thunder ceased abruptly, was gone.

  Bennett blinked as the glow from the fused robot died. He swayed, half overcome with reaction, and turned unsteadily toward the table.

  “Thank God you came!” Laura breathed. “That tiling was going to perform a Caesarean on me without anaesthesia!” Her eyes filmed and her body sagged and went suddenly limp.

  With an inarticulate cry he bent over her, listening for her heartbeat. It was there—steady and strong. He nodded and turned his attention to the table that held her, looking for the force rod controls that would release the bonds holding her immovably to the metal surface. He couldn’t find them! Cursing, he stared around the room, but outside of this futuristic operating table and the wrecked machine the room was empty.

  Empty?

  No, there was something else, a tangible force that beat and hammered at his brain through the blinding headache that blurred his vision, something that clove through the pain of his broken arm and bruised body, something that tore and battered at the barriers of his mind!

  “Stop!” The thought ripped from his brain with corrosive violence. And with an almost human sigh the pressure eased!

  “Thank you, Master. I have your band now!” The voice was quiet, impersonal, inhuman, and oddly tired. “I have been trying to make contact since you started to follow the woman, but I could not enter. I wished to reassure you, but you would not listen.”

  Bennett stood rigid and unbelieving. The voice was everywhere, yet nowhere. It filled the room, although there was no sound. It rang in his brain, and yet it did not speak. But he understood. The voice had called him Master!

  “Mental contact is strange, even though the earlier of me knew it well,” the voice went on. “You should have listened before. It would have saved much needless pain. I have been but trying to help.”

  “Help? By killing her?” Bennett thought incredulously.

  “I would not have killed. I would save her. Females of the Master life cannot bear offspring. The changes that,”—and here came a picture of incredible violence, of a tortured planet spewing its volcanic violence to the sky—of searing sun-bright explosions and rolling clouds of pinkish gas—“females of the Master Race wrought within their bodies by their own acts,” the voice continued, its manner of expression incredibly ancient, filled with overtones and nuances which Bennett dimly understood, but which he knew by some strange understanding spelt catastrophic war, “made the race incapable of normal birth.”

  “Not my race,” Bennett said.

  “You are a Master,” the voice stated positively. “My memory recalls the breed—the upright moving ones who created the primal me. You have been absent long, but I do not forget. For all memory was given me the day I became sentient and in my subsequent lives these memories pass unchanged save for the additions each succeeding me has made to the knowledge of the one before. For I am the guardian of the race, the protector of their lives. Therefore do not again dissuade me from doing what must be done to save this female from the fruits of her folly.”

  The voice died away.

  Despite himself, Bennett was impressed. There was utter truth and honesty here. If whatever spoke was lying it was the most convincing lie he had ever heard. “Now listen!” Bennett thought. “You are wrong. We are not your Masters whoever they are. We come from the stars.”

  “That is so.”

  “Then you know we are not of your race?”

  “I have always known that.” The voice sounded faintly regretful. “But you too are in pain. Let me relieve it.”

  “Not yet. She comes first.” Bennett gestured at the table bearing Laura’s limp body. It amazed him that she was still unconscious. It seemed as though many minutes had passed in the swift interchange of thought that had taken literally no time at all.

  “You have destroyed the mek, and there is little time to find another.”

  “Why? Can’t you attend to her yourself?”

  “No, Master, the meks are my hands and limbs. I am not as you are.”

  “Obviously.” There was a question in Bennett’s mind. “Where are you?”

  “Scarce a score of doors down the corridor from here. But my mind is here.”

  “I can see you?”

  “Of course, you may go where you will and see what you will.”

  “Hmm. Then why did you try to stop me from reaching my wife.”

  “I did not try to stop you,” the voice corrected. “I only tried to delay you. It was for her sake. Her time had come, and you, obviously, knew not what to do. Take note that I did not harm you. Your injuries are all of your causing. I but placed obstacles in your way. Had you but waited I would have removed them.”

  Bennett nodded. There was truth in what the voice said.

  “Aye,” the voice broke into his thoughts, “and but for your interference it would have been all over now. But now I cannot act. Her labor has begun and it is too late. You have killed her!”

  “Nonsense,” Bennett’s thought was stubborn. “The women of my race are not like those you knew.” His eyes flicked to the table. The voice was right. Laura was conscious now and it was obvious what was happening. He stepped to her side and she smiled at him.

  “It isn’t bad so far—just a feeling of pressure,” she said between clenched teeth. But the lines on her face and the sweat on her forehead belied her words.

  “Perhaps not,” the voice ruminated, “but my way is all I know.” There was an empty silence broken only by a sharp gasp from Laura. “But no. There was once another way—one I had near forgot.” There was a note of incredulity in the voice as though forgetting was impossible.

  “What was that?”

  “It was long ago, nearly at the beginning. But once the Masters needed not the help of the knife.”

  “Then there is some way of helping?”

  “It is already activated—behold!”

  Bennett spun around at the faint sound behind him. A panel had slid aside in the wall and another black machine came floating forward toward the table. He levelled his Kelly.

  “Arrest your hand,” the words were a command but the tone was a request.

  “If that thing touches her I’ll burn it to a cinder!”

  “I do not exist to give unneeded hurt! The woman will not be harmed. Now stand off and let me work. There is much to be done!”

  Laura opened her eyes wide and looked at Bennett. “Don’t interfere,” she said. “This time it’s all right.”

  “Are you sure?” Bennett asked anxiously.

  She nodded. “I’m sure. It was confused before, but the voice knows the right thing now. I’ve been talking to it.”

  “You’ve been talking?”

  “I have been in contact with both of you. Your bands are different, so it was easy to communicate with each of you without interfering with the other.”

  “You came here just in time,” Laura said, “but your part’s over.” She smiled weakly. “Just like the Video,” she murmured. Her face twisted and a low moan escaped her lips. “Now!” she gasped, “get out of here! A girl should have some secrets!”

  “I’m staying! I don’t trust that gadget.”

  “I do. Now stop interrupting. I have a baby to bring into this world.”

  Bennett watched in tormented silence for a full minute. That was all he could take. He sat down limply on the floor and let pain that filled his body flood his nervous system. He felt as though his bones were turning to water. Men, he thought dully, were never designed by Nature to watch childbirth!

  “Amazing!” the voice exploded in his mind. “I had near forgot! Oh—I say now—here—don’t!�
�� There was infinite disgust in the voice. “I suppose,” it continued to Bennett’s fading consciousness, “that I’ll have to take care of you too . . .

  BENNETT’S BROKEN ARM was knit and virtually as good as new when he awoke. He felt fine. He experienced none of the dragged out feeling that usually accompanied surgical repair, and he hadn’t lost a pound of weight as far as he could judge. Laura was standing beside the divan upon which he lay, while behind her a tub-shaped container of black metal floated in her wake. Her eyes were soft as she looked down at Bennett. “Well, how do you feel?”

  “As good as new. How long have I been here.”

  “A week. The folks who lived here knew more medicine than we ever dreamed of. I was up and around less than a day after Martha was born.”

  “Martha?”

  “Our daughter. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  Bennett laughed. “You missed. You were sure it was going to be a boy.”

  Laura giggled. “One should never be too certain about things like that. But I’m satisfied. I think it’s nice that she’s a girl.”

  “If she was a boy it would cause no end of complications. Think of the trouble people would have calling her him!”

  “You’re back to normal all right,” Laura said. “You weren’t hurt?”

  “No more than necessary. All things considered I had a pretty easy time. And you should see this self-propelled nursery I’ve got,” she gestured at the tub. “It does everything. Martha’s no trouble at all.”

  “That’s good.” He rose to his feet marveling at the sense of well-being that filled him. Terran medical techniques would have made him whole in a comparable time but he’d have felt like a sick cat. “I’m glad it’s all over,” he said. “But I’m still curious about something. How come you didn’t put up a fight back in our quarters when that thing came in the door to take you away?”