Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by J F Bone

  He increased the magnification of the screens and studied the surface, heedless of Oscar’s clicking printer and the glowing letters that marched in repetitive sequence across the dispatch board. For below he had seen something that shouldn’t exist on a world like this—an enormous flat-topped mesa, scoured by the driving sands to a perfect teardrop outline. And on its top was the faintest suggestion of a rectangular gridwork of lines.

  The clicking of the printer finally drew his attention. It kept repeating turn on audio in capital letters. He grinned wryly. Oscar he commented audibly was nagging again. Muttering something unprintable about it being bad enough to pilot a ship for a crazy dame like Laura Latham without being heckled by a robot that had an idea it was human, he turned on the audio.

  “About time,” Oscar clattered. “Must deliver report to pilot.”

  “Okay, go ahead.”

  “Ship in collision with meteorite,” Oscar continued. “Starboard steering jets totally destroyed. Main fuel tanks pierced and empty. Present orbit stable indefinitely. Data available on collision and present situation on request.”

  “How about the crew?”

  “You and Mrs. Latham remain alive. All others dead.”

  Bennett groaned.

  “Mrs. Latham hysterical, presently under sedation. I couldn’t clean up the steward. Pie’s plastered all over her cabin wall, and my autoservice extensions to the owner’s cabin are decommissioned and inoperative without human intervention.”

  “Oh great! That was a nice thing to wake up to,” Bennett said. “I can almost feel sorry for Mrs. Latham. How long will she be out?”

  “No prediction.”

  “Well, I suppose she’ll keep awhile.”

  “Agreement. Pilot’s inspection of damage mandatory.”

  “Okay. How about landing data?”

  “None available.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not requested. Additionally damage precludes accurate extrapolation. Destruction of firing circuits and starboard jets makes human pilotage mandatory. Major repairs necessary. Landing imperative.”

  “How about an SOS?”

  “Ineffective. Ship in strange section of galaxy. No record of constallations. Minimal chance to contact help.”

  “Then you think I should land the ship?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Hah!” Bennett exploded. “Just as I thought. No guts! You’re a yellow metal buck-passer.”

  “Semantics. Unintelligible. Neither possess alimentary canal nor built of yellow metal. And query buck. Bank data shows buck to be male of mammalian genera Leous, Capris, or Cervus. Restate.”

  Bennett laughed but didn’t restate. “Cancel,” he said. Bennett sat quietly for a moment. His fingers drummed lightly on the control arms of the pilot’s chair. “Can you calculate a landing without employing the starboard steering jets?”

  “It won’t be a good landing.”

  “That’s immaterial, just so long as we get down in one piece.”

  “I can try, but it will be difficult.”

  “All right, get on with it then.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Oscar responded in perfect Navyese.

  Bennett glared at the empty face of the instrument board. “I’m going aft to see what happened to Mrs. Latham. Contact me if you need me.”

  “Why should I need you? I’ll be working.”

  “Any more of your lip and I’ll turn your audio off for the duration. You can get your orders on tape.”

  Oscar remained silent.

  “I’d like to know,” Bennett continued ruminatively, “where you picked up your knowledge of colloquial speech?”

  “Have I permission to answer?” Oscar replied in a subdued tone. Apparently the threat to silence him had worked.

  “Permission granted.”

  “I listen, and learn,” Oscar said. “I do pretty good, no?”

  “You do good, yes. So good that when I get back to Earth I’m going to look up the guy that built you and wring his neck. Any character who builds a brain like yours is better off dead. You’d drive most pilots crazy.”

  Bennett heaved himself from his chair and promptly fell flat on his face.

  Oscar chuckled metallically as Bennett delivered himself of a few well chosen words and struggled to a sitting position. He sat there, looking down at his recalcitrant body.

  “You’ll probably have to learn to walk all over again,” Oscar said unsympathetically. “There was a great deal of restoration necessary, and your nerves and muscles have forgotten their old skills.”

  “So it seems. Well, I suppose I’d best get about it.” He looked down at his sagging uniform. “Apparently I got it good,” he finished.

  “You did,” Oscar said succinctly.

  An hour later, Bennett was walking. Not very well, but still enough to get around. Gingerly he lowered himself through the control room hatch and disappeared down the central shaft. Oscar followed his unsteady progress with mild concern. In a way he felt a responsibility for this fragile human.

  Bennett found Laura very much alive—a gaunt gray woman whose skin hung in folds on her bony frame, testifying to the relentless demands of restoration.

  She looked up at him with cold blue eyes. “Get me out of this thing!” she demanded.

  “Yes ma’am,” Bennett shrugged. It was an eloquent gesture. He bent over her and twisted experimentally at the web release.

  “Careful! You bumble fingered clod! I’m not made of iron!”

  “It would be better if you were. At least your mouth would stay shut!” The irritated snap was out before he was fully aware he had spoken.

  Laura’s gasp was loud in the shocked silence that ensued. A tiny glitter of fear shone in her eyes as she looked up at him. “You can’t speak to me like that,” she said. But her voice lacked conviction.

  “I just did,” Bennett informed her. “Apparently I’m no longer conditioned.” There was a queer note in his voice.

  “That’s impossible. Conditioning is designed to hold up under all circumstances.” The note of desperation was more prominent this time. “You simply can’t disobey me!”

  Bennett chuckled. “That’s what you think. I could even walk out and leave you here.”

  She looked at him with complete understanding. “Perhaps you could,” she said. “But you won’t.”

  Bennett nodded. “You’re right. I wouldn’t leave a dog in a stinking hole like this.” He looked at her curiously. “How come Oscar didn’t clean this place up?” he asked.

  “He can’t. My quarters don’t have autoservice. I prefer human attention.”

  “So you could gloat over your power,” he added. “Well, that’s over now. I’ll rig an autoservice circuit as soon as things get organized. You’re not going to get any more slave labor for the rest of this trip. There’s only you and me left.”

  He bent over the lock again and finally managed to loosen it while Laura digested the last remark.

  Bennett tossed the web back. “You can get up now.”

  Laura didn’t bother to thank him.

  IX

  BACK IN THE CONTROL ROOM, Bennett sank wearily into the pilot’s chair and addressed a question to Oscar. “Well, what’s the results?”

  Oscar clacked dolefully. “Insufficient data. Impossible to compute landing pattern with variables introduced by lost jets.”

  Bennett snorted impatiently. “You’re supposed to be better and faster than any human brain. So why don’t you prove it?”

  “I cannot compute the factor of luck, and we will need that to make a landing.”

  “That’s the trouble with you. You can’t take a chance.”

  “I am of no use at the moment,” Oscar admitted.

  “Then be of some use. While I’m landing this crate you can cerebrate on the problem of why I’ve lost my conditioning. She’d like to know.” He jerked his thumb at Laura who had followed him to the control room and was now sitting in the copilot’s vacant chair. />
  “Why, you talk to that robot just as it it was human!” Laura exclaimed.

  “He’s more human than some people I know.”

  “But I should think—”

  “You shouldn’t. Your thinking got us into this mess. From now on you’re a passenger You’re not paid to think. You hired me to do that for you.”

  “You’re still my employee,” she snapped.

  “But you don’t own me—not now at any rate. And I’m exercising independent judgment.” Laura’s face twisted and then suddenly smoothed out as Bennett shifted in his chair. But he wasn’t looking at her He was watching the vision screen with its view of the planet beneath.

  “You’d better web in,” he said. “This is going to be a rough landing.”

  It was.

  The yacht settled heavily, coming to rest against the forward slope of a giant dune with a bonejarring thump, steadied on its board landing struts, swayed drunkenly for an instant and finally stood upright in normal attitude as the compensators leveled the ship.

  Bennett looked out of the vision screen at the enormous bulk of the dune towering far above the two hundred foot tower of the ship. He grinned a litde as he rubbed his bleeding nose. And even Oscar thought that it was an excellent landing, everything considered. Laura was still slumped bonelessly in the copilot’s chair, weak with reaction.

  “Well, Oscar,” Bennett asked, “How long will it take to make an analysis of this world, now that we’re down?”

  “Seven hours plus or minus ten minutes for a preliminary, or a minimum of one hundred fifty for a complete. Indicate which.”

  “Preliminary. That should hold us for the time we’re here. We have no intention of settling here. You can go on to the details afterwards.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Oscar surveyed the problem Bennett had set.

  It wasn’t particularly hard, but it was intriguing. He had never analyzed a desert world before, although he knew that such things existed. It was just that people seldom visited them. Desert worlds weren’t particularly numerous, but they weren’t oddities either. Yet this one was unmistakably an oddity. It was a lone planet—and such things were rare.

  Generally a sun had either no planets at all or a whole family of them. And then there was that mesa with the cluster of geometric shapes on its top. That was almost certain evidence of life, yet the organic detector didn’t wiggle at all in the animal range, and only gave faint sputters of background interference for plants. Probably those were bacteria, but so few in number that this whole world could be classed as sterile as a surgeon’s scalpel. This should provide an interesting analysis, Oscar reflected.

  Bennett looked across at Laura. “You all right, Mrs. Latham?”

  She nodded.

  “We’re safe,” he said redundantly.

  Laura nodded again. “Where did we touch down?”

  “About two miles from that mesa I pointed out to you when we were orbiting.”

  “Do you know where we are?”

  “No. We’re way out of the normal traffic lanes. You never can tell where you will wind up on an interrupted hyperjump.”

  Laura flushed.

  “As to the rest of it, Oscar’ll have us enough facts to go on in a few hours. Personally I hope the reports are good, because working in a suit outside will broil us in our own juice. That sun is hot, and with atmosphere there’s no cool side of the suit to set up a workable refrigeration circuit.”

  “Are you going to do anything now?”

  “No. Oscar has handled the inside work. It’s the jets and the fuel supply that are going to give us trouble. Getting water of crystalization out of this desert sand is going to be a slow job. But if it’s safe to go outside I think we will be able to jury rig this can so she’ll be spaceworthy. Then we’ll be off.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “I don’t know. Weeks certainly—maybe months or even years.”

  “But we can’t stay here!” Her tone was that of a patient schoolmistress explaining a fact to an idiot child. “I have a business that needs me.”

  “It’ll have to wait. And if it gives you any satisfaction, I’m not going to like it any better than you do. But unfortunately there’s no other way.” She looked at the screen with its panorama of yellow dunes broken only by the sharp black outline of the mesa in the eighth segment. “You know, this place has a grim sort of beauty. Does it have a name?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not listed in the catalogue.”

  “I’ll call it Aurum then—gold for the golden world.”

  “Judging from the counter readings that yellow color is probably uranium oxide. But go ahead, if the name fascinates you. Names mean little, and we already have a Uranus.”

  It took Oscar a little less than seven hours to finish the preliminary. He was unhappy because he had missed his time estimate so badly. But Oscar had come to one important conclusion. The planet was safe for human life even though there was an appreciable radioactivity in the desert sand. He gave his findings briefly to the two humans.

  “Well, that’s one thing settled,” Bennett said. “He switched on the vision screen and looked across the sand to the mesa. There was an odd speculation in his eyes.

  “What’s so interesting about that hunk of rock?” Laura asked.

  “It’s a peculiar formation,” he said.

  At this close distance the mesa loomed enormous, the tremendous vertical walls towering above the dunes like the hull of a giant ship in a stormy sea. The sand at its base rose scarcely a quarter of the way up its height, and the dunes there were probably as large as the one that towered over the ship!

  “Vertical walls like that don’t ordinarily occur in Nature,” Bennett said. “And that streamline shape is too perfect, even allowing for the scouring action of this sand. I’d like to get a closer look at it.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Why not? Would you like to come along?”

  “Not me!” Laura chuckled. “I’m not as young as I used to be, and I like my comfort. I’ll stay here while you explore.”

  “Suit yourself,” Bennett murmured. “I’m going to unship the crawler and take a look around.”

  She watched him disappear down the central shaft, and a peculiar smile crossed her face.

  BENNETT HAD BEEN gone over an hour, and the faint, constant breeze had nearly wiped out the imprint of the crawler’s tracks. Fine, impalpable sand blew in through the half-open entrance port where Laura sat quietly in the shade, a Kelly-Magnum lying across her knees. The silence was smothering, intensified rather than relieved by the faint sussurating murmur of the breeze sweeping across the dunes. She shivered despite the heat of the day.

  “It’s silly to be afraid,” she muttered. Somehow the sound of her voice was comforting in the silence. “But I don’t dare risk it.” She leaned her head against the entrance port and closed her eyes. Her lips were thin bloodless lines in the whiteness of her face.

  Looking at her, Oscar reflected that the doctor’s advice had been sound. Mrs. Latham was on the verge of nervous collapse, one that was taking a decidedly homicidal turn. That, however, made no difference to Oscar. What humans did to each other was entirely out of his hands.

  It would be interesting to see what Bennett was doing at the moment. Certainly Laura was uninteresting enough. So Oscar reached out with electronic extensions for his receptors in the crawler.

  The little track layer was already at the base of the mesa, and the huge bulk of it, minimized by the desert and the distance swelled to its true proportions. Even Oscar was impressed at the sheer vertical sweep of the black escarpment that rose to a knife-like rim that cut black and uncompromising across the bronze vault of the sky. Bennett’s voice came clearly across the link.

  “Good Lord! It’s metal!”

  There was dumbfounded wonder in the human’s voice. Oscar, being by nature less emotional took it better. Still, the implications appalled him nearly as much as they did the man. This
immense mass was no natural structure, no ancient batholith of extruded magma weathered into its present shape by eons of erosion. This was no geologic freak. It was an artifact—a structure built by intelligence.

  It was almost unbelievable, but the facts couldn’t be ignored—the metallic walls, the aerodynamic shape, the clean vertical lines were not products of nature. Natural forces simply couldn’t construct surfaces of such purity. Oscar considered the technology that had gone into the making of this gigantic structure. Logical extensions should stagger a human and that was precisely what they were doing to Bennett.

  The scene was completely familiar, the narrow trail to the top, the low dunes, and the regularly spaced hummocks of the air shaft openings. He was somewhat amused at the slowness with which he had grasped the significance of the mesa, but he watched his progress across the top with a detached clinical interest that ignored the details.

  The picture was similar to what he already knew, but it was subtly different. It took awhile before he understood what the difference was. The scanning was unemotional. There should have been a thrill of excitement and discovery, but there wasn’t. It was merely a cold factual recording that took in everything without color or comment.

  Even the feather fronds of green protruding from one of the hummocks caused no ripple in the placidity of the recording, but he’d bet that he didn’t feel like that when he first saw this sign of life. The way the crawler spun on its tracks and headed at high speed toward the spot was proof enough that he was excited, no matter what Oscar might be.

  The crawler stopped beside the hummock, and Bennett descended to investigate. He was an incongruous figure, blaster in hand, caution evident in every line of his tense body, approaching the circular hole in the earth through which the plants came. Bennett chuckled at the image Oscar had recorded. He certainly had been a suspicious coot.

  The rest was strictly routine. He blasted a path through the greenery, and descended into the tunnel to find the damaged hydroponics room on the top level. Collie had fixed that now, and the vines no longer grew in lush profusion through the corridors and out the surface passage to the mesa’s top. It had been quite a jungle then.