Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by J F Bone

  Bernie and his men met them with a wall of flame that crisped the foremost dozen into cinders. But the others came on. There weren’t so many now, only twenty or so, but a Coren is twice the physical match of any human, and if one of those beasts got to close quarters it would be curtains. I swore insanely as I watched Bernie through the scanners, cold sweat running down my face. He had no business risking his life out there. Nor did those other five fools. He let them come to pointblank range and fired again. I yelled hoarsely as the yellow flames enveloped the front rank of the nearest jellies, and yelled again as the others turned and fled. They had enough. Fully two hundred of them were dead, and that price was too high even to their blood-soaked minds.

  The lifeboat was apparently intact as Bernie and his party walked cautiously toward it. I noticed for the first time that the men he was leading were the Solar Union people—and whatever feelings I had for their actions on Pluto vanished in admiration of their courage here on Titan. It took guts of the highest order to face a charging Coren.

  Bernie opened the emergency airlock on the lifeboat and slammed it shut again as a thick grayish blue pseudolimb extruded sluggishly from the opening. The closing steel sliced through the jelly-like mass which dropped to the ground, extruded a half dozen pseudolimbs of its own and scuttled off across the gray landscape. I felt sick. We were too late. The Corens had managed to crack the lifeboat’s hull.

  We had a little trouble getting the Corens out of the boat without destroying the recording apparatus, but the exhaust fumes of a small gasoline engine finally did the trick. Oxygen breathers like ourselves, the Corens were equally susceptible to carbon monoxide.

  We hooked them out of the interior, two three-foot pieplates of gray-blue meat, with a humped central area that held dozens of flat razor-edged siliceous spicules.

  “They look like jellyfish,” Martinelli observed as we flopped the limp amorphous masses onto the icy rocks.

  “Maybe they do to you,” I said, “but to me they represent something else.”

  “What?”

  “Vampires.”

  Martinelli’s eyebrows rose, but they didn’t stay that way. Two of the Solar Union men came out of the lifeboat carrying something horribly slashed and deflated that had once been Anderson. The knifelike silicon spicules had reduced his space armor to ribbons at every flexible joint, and inside the armor, a shrunken mass of bones and slashed skin was all that was left. Virtually all the soft tissues of his body had been absorbed. And the greatest horror of all was that there was no blood.

  “They’re fond of men,” I said bitterly, nudging one of the dead masses with an armored foot. “We’re a delicacy.”

  Martinelli’s face turned a pale green, but he didn’t get sick. Experience on Pluto had taught him to keep better control over his stomach.

  “Load the boat,” I ordered. “We can repair her on the way. There’s no use staying here—and there’s no use bringing Anderson,” I added.

  We buried him under a cairn of ice and melted it into a solid mass with our needle beams, while Martinelli went back to the ship with the sound tapes and his weak stomach, and the crew connected the hoist cables to rings welded in the lifeboat’s hull.

  It didn’t make me any happier to know that this recording was also perfect. Two lives for two noises seemed a pretty high price. Nor was Martinelli joyful.

  “At this rate,” he said bitterly, “we’ll be landing on Earth with half our personnel missing.”

  “I know,” I said, “and there’s worse to come.”

  I was thinking of the swampsucker. That thing is almost legendary in stories of the exploration of the Solar Union. Of all creatures dreamed up by an insane Nature in a moment of homicidal madness, the Venerian swampsucker is the worst. That animal fitted into no known category of solar life. It was even a stranger to its equally weird fellows on the Cloudy Planet. They, at least, had some similarity to Terran and Martian phylogeny. But not the swampsucker. It was a survivor of an older and fiercer age. I didn’t relish the thought of meeting it.

  “But let’s look on the brighter side,” Martinelli said, interrupting my unpleasant thoughts, “There’s Ganymede, Io, Callisto, and Mars.”

  “I’ll try to be happy about it,” I replied.

  He smiled without humor. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” he said.

  IO WAS our next stop. The run was made smoothly and without trouble. Oddly enough, the loss of Anderson didn’t seem to disturb the ship as much as I expected. There’s a difference between dying fighting and being crushed by an impersonal Nature. Anderson had known what his chances were. The fact that he had accepted them made his death easier to take. Why, I don’t know.

  The Kalliks—big, birdlike animals with downy jet plumage—thoroughly adapted to frigid, nearly airless Io, were an easy assignment. The human colony raised them by the thousands and harvested their feathers for insulation. Our best synthetics couldn’t compare with them either in weight or efficiency. Light as thistledown, the black plumage was fireproof, heat transmitting, and cold proof. Each feather possessed the peculiar property of directional transfer of heat. Turn it one way and every local erg of ambient temperature could be channelled inward. Turn it the other and heat would be channeled outward. The Kallik feathers had long ago done away with complex and cumbersome refrigeration and heating units. They lined the double hulls of ships, furnished insulation and temperature control for spacesuits, heated and cooled every dome city in the System, and most of the better houses on Earth. As a trade item they were almost priceless and the demand far outstripped the supply. And, since the birds couldn’t live away from Io, the moon had a corner on the System’s temperature control business. Kalliks were easy to find, and in the hundreds of Kallik brooders dotting the area around the spaceport, it was easy to find nesting Kalliks. The Solar Union-crew collected the necessary recordings inside of four hours—and Martinelli found several chitterings of the right tonal quality.

  I was almost happy as we took on more chemical fuel and blasted off for Callisto and the whistlers. The whistler is a solitary beast with sufficient antisocial traits to make it a problem to figure out how the species reproduces itself. Their call, a peculiar double-toned ululating whistle, is one of the oddest sounds in the System, It makes the listener want to laugh hysterically—and early explorers often did—with occasional fatal results. The effect on Earthmen is bad enough that the uninitiated are required to wear earplugs.

  We set down at the lone spaceport on Callisto, checked in with the Wildlife Conservation Division, who were all too happy to cooperate with us when they learned of our mission. One of the field agents turned out to be a sound bug and had made several recordings of the whistlers, which he was happy to give to the Solar Union men for use in the Natural History Archives.

  “See,” Martinelli said happily, “things are working out all right now.”

  I nodded, unconvinced. This was what I’d figured to be the easiest part of the journey. The life forms on Jupiter’s moons were singularly friendly and inoffensive. I hadn’t expected trouble here and I wasn’t disappointed. We stayed only long enough to record our log, visit the officials at the station, and compute a course for Ganymede now on the opposite side of Jupiter.

  I WAS glad to get off Callisto—the great, red bulk of Jupiter hanging overhead made me uneasy. I always have the feeling that the Big Boy’s satellites are falling into that hell of methane storms raging on the surface. It’s not a particularly secure feeling since it leaves me with the same sort of vertigo that grips some people who peer over the edge of earth’s skyscrapers. Aboard ship it’s different, but on a planetary surface I don’t like feeling like a cliff hanger.

  WE MET Ganymede about ten hours out, overtook her and made the third landing in as many days. This business of satellite jumping was almost pleasant after the long runs from Pluto and Saturn.

  “So you want to record the song of a Hegemon?” the Port Captain asked. He eyed us with amus
ement—one of those trim, darkly efficient young men who are taking over the Space Service. His voice soothed my jangled Norse nerves like a buzz saw cutting through a steel plate. I’ve never cared for Civil Servants who eye spacemen with amusement. We may be anachronisms, but we’ve done more to make the Solar Union work than a regiment of these neatly polished products of the Academy. “I’m afraid you’re in for a disappointment, gentlemen,” the Port Captain continued. “There probably isn’t a hegemon on this world that would sing for you. We humans aren’t liked too well.”

  Small wonder, I thought. If this character is representative of the earthmen on Ganymede, the hegemons would probably be only too happy to see our retreating backsides rather than our faces. I glowered at the captain who returned the glare.

  “Have you ever tried cooperating with them?” I asked.

  “Why? We have no need for them—and they have none for us. We leave each other alone.”

  “Oh—great!” I exploded.

  “Easy, skipper,” Martinelli said. “There’s no need to antagonize him.”

  “Why not? The poor fool obviously knows nothing about Ganymede.”

  The Port Captain stiffened. Dislike flashed from his brown eyes to my blue ones, and was returned with interest. “Since you are obviously an authority on Ganymedan life, Captain Lundfors,” he said, “I would appreciate your views on the matter. They might help us.”

  “They might at that,” I said.

  “And what would you suggest?” he asked icily.

  “Skipper!” Martinelli said, pleadingly.

  I ignored him. “What is your job here?” I asked the Captain.

  “To speed the work of the spaceport and improve efficiency, of course.”

  “Why?”

  “So trade can move freely.”

  “What sort of trade?”

  “Machinery, textiles, food, and living equipment from Earth—industrial bort, gem stones, and isotopes from here.”

  “No wonder the hegemons dislike you!” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “Certainly—we’re helping to keep the Solar Union’s economy in balance.”

  “And you’re taking without giving. Sure, I’ll admit most of the stuff you’re using is valueless to the hegemons, and they’re perfectly content to let you have it, but after all, it’s their property—a part of their world and you take without asking—and conduct a closed trade system—leaving them out They’re intelligent and sensitive in the mass, and they obviously resent being treated like country cousins.”

  “We have nothing they want,” the captain said. “They’re the most completely self-sufficient form of life in the Union. We’ve thought of a thousand things to trade, but they neither want them nor need them. We’ve been on this world officially for the past ten years, and the traders and prospectors were here nearly a hundred more. No one, except for one man, has in all that time even roused the slightest interest in a hegemon. They tolerate us, but they’ve never shown any interest in our activities except when we built this spaceport and trading station.”

  “For trade between Earth and her colonists,” I added.

  “For Solar Union trade,” he corrected.

  I GRINNED at him. “I was here in ‘08,” I said. “One of the Old Timers, had hegemons doing his work for him. He shipped out with us with over ten million credits in his account.”

  “You knew Isaac Miller?” the Captain asked. There was a faint note of respect in his voice.

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s the man I was talking about. What about him?”

  “He was the only “one who ever could work with the hegemons.”

  “Well—why don’t you do what he did?”

  “What did he do?”

  “What? Don’t you know? Why—he told me he was going to turn his secret over to your people.”

  The Port Captain nodded. “He was,” he said, “but he was killed in a groundcar accident less than a week after he returned to Earth. And he left no records.”

  “Oh—I didn’t know.”

  “And you know Isaac’s secret.”

  “I think so.”

  “And you’ll give it to us?”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “What’s this?” Martinelli broke in.

  “Remember me telling you that we’d have no trouble with the hegemons?” I asked.

  He nodded. “But you were wrong.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. It’s just that these Solar Union lads don’t use their heads. They’ve been ignoring the natives.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?” the Port Captain asked. “Just how do you trade with an entity that has no need for goods—which draws its sustenance out of the rocks—and who has such a completely different standard of behavior that it cannot even recognize that you’re intelligent except when you’re working in a group? The hegemons neither need nor want goods or money, and since they have neither sex nor sight, nor the ability to taste or smell, there’s virtually no way to contact them. The things which appeal to us do not appeal to them. We have no common basics, no meeting grounds. So we go our way and they go theirs. There’s one just outside the port—probably a million unit cluster. It’s been there ever since we phased in, and it ignores us. Once in awhile it shows a color change, but not often. It just sits there! For ten years it’s been sitting there ignoring us. We’ve tried everything.” The captain’s young voice sounded human and a little desperate. “And nothing works. Why it stays around is a mystery. Maybe it likes to observe us—with whatever it uses in place of vision.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s hoping. That’s why it stays.”

  “Hoping for what?” he asked.

  “Hoping that you’ll some day get some sense and give it what it wants.”

  “And what do we have that it could possibly want?”

  “Music,” I said.

  “Music?” his voice was incredulous. “What would a thing like that want with music?”

  “Possibly the same thing we do—emotional satisfaction.”

  “This I’ll believe when I see it,” the Port Captain said.

  “Well, come along and learn something. We old-timers aren’t quite as stupid as you youngsters think.”

  He didn’t laugh, but his smile was condescending, like that an indulgent father gives a child. It made me writhe. “I’ll come,” he said. “I wouldn’t miss this for worlds. We’ve tried sound on it. We know it’s sensitive to vibrations, but it never displayed the slightest interest.”

  “Why should it?” I asked. “Let’s suppose you were a music lover and someone kept jarring your ears with an oscillator. Would you pay him any attention?”

  The Port Captain grinned, “I guess not—except maybe to hit him over the head if he annoyed me too much.”

  “Now consider the patience and forbearance of the hegemon.”

  “Hmm—I see—but we did try music. Arlo Jelke brought out a whole album of dance music—progressive squirm. He didn’t get a nibble.

  “Why should he? The hegemon is logical and rational. It wouldn’t go for that stuff.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” the Port Captain said grudgingly, “but until you prove it I’m not buying.”

  We wore armor, of course. Not to protect us against the lack of air because there was plenty of that, but to keep the bitter cold from freezing us solid.

  THE hegemon, an enormous one, was nestled against the base of one of the low hills just outside the Spaceport Dome. It was an impressive sight, gleaming a rosy pink in the red light of Jupiter hanging above us. A tremendous structure of hexahedral crystals, it spread over nearly half an acre of Ganymede’s barren terrain, and as we watched, it moved sluggishly, rearranging the individual crystals of its mass into odd shapes and angularities and geometric patterns of startling beauty. I plucked a crystal from the branch of a surrealist tree that towered beside us. The tiny living entity scarcely two centimeters long,
a perfect hexahedron with fine tendrils protruding from either end, was one of the millions of units that composed this monstrous structure of crystalline life. It glowed, first pink and then an angry red, as its life substance realized that it was separated from its fellows. Individually it was nothing—merely a unit in the mass—but collectively a hegemon was a thing of incalculable strength and power. The energies contained in this giant could devastate half of Ganymede if they were released all at once.

  I looked at the crystal curiously and replaced it in the mass. Instantly its tendrils entwined with the others’ and its crystal shape blended into the growth around us.

  The Port Captain looked at me with horror in his eyes. “You were lucky,” he said. “I’ve seen men incinerated for meddling with a hegemon.”

  “Not for one crystal,” I said. “It’s too small compared to the total mass. But a dozen of them could burn your hand off.” I turned to the Solar Union men who were setting up the recording apparatus from the ship. “You about ready, boys?” I asked.

  Their chief, a grizzled veteran named Vance M’bonga, nodded—his white teeth gleaming in the darkness of his face. “Ready, skipper,” he said.

  “Did you bring that ‘Nine Worlds’ tape?” I asked Martinelli.

  “I did—but can’t we use something else?”

  “We could, but it would have to be something this fellow hasn’t experienced, and I don’t know whether this is one of old Isaac’s boys. It’s big enough to be, and the fact that it’s been hanging around here for ten years makes me think it might have had some dose contacts with humanity. So why take chances. We won’t miss with this one—and I’d like to show that young fellow something.” I jerked my thumb at the Port Captain. “Besides, I figure that patience like this hegemon has shown should be rewarded.”

  “All right, but I hope you’re not barking at the moon,” Martinelli threaded the tape on the stereo player and Vance turned the volume on full.