Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Read online

Grandma settled down carefully to sleep in the long marsh grass without disturbing Grimp’s position too much. She appeared calm, but her sleep was more of a faint than untroubled slumber.

  BY SUNRISE, Grandma Wannattel’s patent-medicine trailer was nine miles from the village and rolling steadily southward up the valley road through the woods. As usual, she was departing under an official cloud.

  Grimp and the policeman had showed up early to warn her. The Guardian was making use of the night’s various unprecedented disturbances to press through a vote on a Public Menace charge against Grandma in the village. Since everybody still felt rather excited and upset, he had a good chance just now of getting a majority.

  Grimp had accompanied her far enough to explain that this state of affairs wasn’t going to be permanent. He had it all worked out: Runny’s new immunity to hay-fever had brought him and the pretty Vellit to a fresh understanding overnight; they were going to get married five weeks from now. As a married man, Runny would then be eligible for the post of Village Guardian at the harvest elections. Between Grimp’s cousins and Vellit’s cousins, Runny’s backers would just about control the vote. So when Grandma got around to visiting the valley again next summer, she needn’t worry any more about police interference or official disapproval . . .

  Grandma had nodded approvingly. That was about the kind of neighborhood politics she’d begun to play herself at Grimp’s age. She was pretty sure by now that Grimp was the one who eventually would become her successor as guardian of Noorhut, as well as of the star-system to which Noorhut belonged, and perhaps of a good many other star-systems besides. With careful schooling, he ought to be just about ready for the job by the time she was willing, finally, to retire.

  An hour after he had started back to the farm, looking suddenly a little forlorn, the trailer swung off the valley road into a narrow-forest path. Here the pony lengthened its stride, and less than five minutes later they entered a curving ravine, at the far end of which lay something that Grimp would have recognized instantly as a small spaceship from his one visit to the nearest port city.

  A large round door opened soundlessly in its side as they approached. The pony came to a stop. Grandma got down from the driver’s seat and unhitched it. The pony walked into the airlock, and the trailer picked its wheels off the ground and floated in behind it. Grandma Wannattel walked in last, and the lock closed quietly.

  The ship lay still a moment longer. Then it was suddenly gone. Dead leaves went dancing for a while about the ravine, disturbed by the breeze of its departure.

  In a place very far away—so far that neither Grimp nor his parents nor anyone in the village except the schoolteacher had ever heard of it—a set of instruments began signaling for attention. Somebody answered them.

  Grandma’s voice announced distinctly:

  “This is Agent Wannattel’s report on the successful conclusion of the Halpa operation on Noorhut—”

  High above Noorhut’s skies, eight great ships swung instantly out of their watchful orbits about the planet and flashed off again into the blackness of space that was their sea and their home.

  1951

  SPACE FEAR

  Of all the weapons man can use against man, none is so powerful, so binding and paralyzing, as Fear. And in an interstellar culture, dictators who rule by fear have special problems . . .

  I.

  The three Bjanta scouts were within an hour’s flight of the yellow dwarf star of Ulphi when the Viper’s needle-shape drove into their detection range, high up but on a course that promised almost to intersect their own.

  It didn’t exactly come to that point, though the unwary newcomer continued to approach for several minutes more. But then, with an abruptness which implied considerable shock On board at discovering Bjanta ahead, she veered off sharply and shot away at a very respectable speed.

  The scout disks swung about unhurriedly, opened out in pursuit formation and were presently closing in again, with leisurely caution, on the fugitive. Everything about that beautifully designed, blue-gleaming yacht suggested the most valuable sort of catch. Some very wealthy individual’s plaything it might have been, out of one of the major centers of civilization, though adventuring now far from the beaten path of commercial spaceways. In which case, she would be very competently piloted and crewed and somewhat better armed than the average freighter. Which should make her capable of resisting their combined attack for a maximum of four or five minutes—or, if she preferred energy-devouring top velocity, of keeping ahead of them for even one or two minutes longer than that.

  But no Bjanta was ever found guilty of impulsive recklessness. And, just possibly, this, yacht could also turn out to be another variation of those hellish engines of destruction which galactic humanity and its allies had been developing with ever-increasing skill during the past few thousand years, against just such marauders as they.

  As it happened, that described the Viper exactly. A Vegan G.Z. Agent-Ship, and one of the last fifty or so of her type to be completed, she was, compared with anything else up to five times her three-hundred-foot length, the peak, the top, the absolute culmination of space-splitting sudden death. And, furthermore, she knew it.

  “They’re maintaining pattern and keeping up with no sign of effort,” her electronic brain reported to her pilot. “Should we show them a little more speed?”

  “The fifteen percent increase was plenty,” the pilot returned in a pleasant soprano voice. “If they edge in, you can start weaving, but remember they’re sensitive little apes! Anything fancy before we get within range of our cruiser is bound to scare them off.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then the ship’s robot voice came into the control room again:

  “Pagadan, the disk low in Sector Twelve has moved in almost to contact beaming range! You could get any two of them at any time now and leave us the third to run down.”

  “I know it, little Viper,” the pilot gave back patiently, “but this whole job’s based on the assumption that the Bjantas are operating true to form. In which case, their Mother Disk will be somewhere within three light-years behind us—and the cruiser wants to run two of these scouts back far enough to show just where it’s lying. We need only one for ourselves.”

  Her face had turned up over her shoulder as she spoke. Except for the eyes, it was a human face, the face of a very pretty young woman. But the eyes were inhumanly large and elongated, the silver eyes and squared black pupils of a Lannai humanoid—the first nonhuman race to have become a member-nation of the far-flung Confederacy of Vega.

  There was no one else on board, or required there. Agent-Ship and Agent were not so much a team as a calculated synthesis of optimal efficiency in their specialized branch of Confederacy business. And so smoothly did their function overlap that sometimes it would have been a little difficult for Pagadan to say immediately whether it was her organic brain or its various electronic extensions in the ship which was attending to some specific hit of business. Just now it was the Viper who was watching the communicators.

  “The Agent-Trainee on the O-Ship off Ulphi is trying to talk to you, Pagadan,” the robot-voice came into the room. “Will you adjust to his range?”

  The Lannai’s silver-nailed hand shot out and spun a tiny dial on the desk before her. From a communicator to her left a deep voice inquired, a little anxiously:

  “Pag? Do you hear me? This is Hallerock. Pag?”

  “Go ahead, chum!” she invited. “I was off beam for a moment there. The planet still look all right?”

  “No worse than it ever did,” said Hallerock. “But this is about your Fleet operation. The six destroyers are spread out behind you in interception positions by now, and the cruiser should he coming into detection dead ahead at any moment. You still want them to communicate with you through the Observation Ship here?”

  “Better keep it that way,” Pagadan nodded. “The Bjantas might spot Fleet signals, as close to me as they are, but it’s a cinch they can’t ta
p this beam! I won’t slip up again. Anything from the Department?”

  “Correlation is sending some new stuff out on the Ulphi business, hut nothing important. At any rate, they didn’t want to break into your maneuver with the Bjantas. I told them to home it here to the O-Ship. Right?”

  “Right,” Pagadan approved. “You’ll make a Zone Agent yet, my friend! In time.”

  “I doubt it,” Hallerock grunted. “There’s no real future in it anyway. Here’s the cruiser calling again, Pag! I’ll be standing by—”

  Pagadan pursed her lips thoughtfully as a barely audible click indicated her aide had gone off communication. She’d been a full-fledged Zone Agent of the Vegan Confederacy for exactly four months now—the first member of any nonhuman race to attain that, rank in the super-secretive Department of Galactic Zones. Hallerock, human, was an advanced Trainee. Just how advanced was a question she’d have to decide, and very soon.

  The surface reflections vanished from her mind at the Viper’s subvocal warning:

  “Cruiser—dead ahead!”

  “The disk on your left!” Pagadan snapped. “Cut it off from the others as soon as they begin to turn. Give it a good start then—and be sure you’re crowding the last bit of speed out of it before you even think of closing in. We may not be able to get what we’re after—probably won’t—but Lab can use every scrap of information we collect on those babies!”

  “We’ll get what we’re after, too,” the Viper almost purred. And, a bare instant later:

  “They’ve spotted, the cruiser. Now!”

  In the vision tank, the fleeing disk grew and grew. During the first few minutes, it had appeared there, only as a comet-tailed spark, a dozen radiant streamers of different colors fanning out behind it—not an image of the disk itself but the tank’s visual representation of any remote moving object on which the ship’s detectors were held. The shifting lengths arid brightness of the streamers announced at a glance to those trained to read them the object’s distance, direction, comparative and absolute speeds and other matters of interest to a curious observer.

  But as the Viper began to reduce, the headstart the Bjanta had been permitted to get, at the exact rate calculated to incite it to the most intensive efforts to hold that lead, a shadowy outline of the disk’s true shape began to grow about the spark. A bare quarter million miles away finally, the disk itself appeared to be moving at a visual range of two, hundred yards ahead of the ship, while the spark still flickered its varied information from the center of the image.

  Pagadan’s hands, meanwhile, played continuously over the control desk’s panels, racing the ship’s recording instruments through every sequence of descriptive analysis of which they were capable.

  “We’re still getting nothing really new, I’m afraid,” she said at last, matter-of-factly. She had never been within sight of a Bjanta before; but Vega’s Department of Galactic Zones had copies of every available record ever made of them, and she had studied the records. The information was largely repetitious and not conclusive enough to have ever permitted a really decisive thrust against the marauders. Bjantas no longer constituted a major threat to civilization, but they had never stopped being a dangerous nuisance along its fringes—space-vermin of a particularly elusive and obnoxious sort.

  “They’ve made no attempt to change direction at all?” she inquired.

  “Not since they first broke out of their escape-curve,” the Viper replied. “Shall I close in now?”

  “Might as well, I suppose.” Pagadan was still gazing, almost wistfully, into the tank. The disk was tilted slightly sideways, dipping and quivering in the familiar motion-pattern of Bjanta vessels; a faint glimmer of radiation ran and vanished and ran again continuously around its yard-thick edge. The Bjantas were conservatives; the first known recordings made of them in the early centuries of the First Empire had shown space-machines of virtually the same appearance as the one now racing ahead of the Viper.

  “The cruiser seems satisfied we check with its own line on the Mother Disk,” she went on. She sighed, tapping the tank anxiously. “Well, nudge them a bit—and be ready to jump!”

  The Viper’s nudging was on the emphatic side. A greenish, transparent halo appeared instantly about the disk; a rainbow-hued one flashed into visibility just beyond it immediately after. Then the disk’s dual barrier vanished again; and the disk itself veered crazily off its course, flipping over and over like a crippled bat, showing at every turn the deep, white-hot gash the Viper’s touch had seared across its top.

  It was on the fifth turn, some tour-tenths of a second later, that it split halfway around its rim. Out of that yawning mouth a few score minute duplicates of itself were spewed into space and flashed away in all directions—individual Bjantas in their equivalent of a combined spacesuit and lifeboat. As they dispersed the stricken scout gaped wider; a blinding glare burst out of it; and the disk had vanished in the traditional Bjanta style of self-destruction when trapped by superior force.

  Fast as the reaction had been, the Viper’s forward surge at full acceleration following her first jabbing beam was barely slower. She stopped close enough to the explosion to feel its radiations activate her own barriers; and even before she stopped, every one of her grappling devices was fully extended and combing space about her.

  Within another two seconds, therefore, each of the fleeing Bjantas was caught—and at the instant of contact, all but two had followed the scout into explosive and practically traceless suicide. Those two, however, were wrenched open by paired tractors which gripped simultaneously and twisted as they gripped—an innovation with which the Viper had been outfitted for this specific job.

  Pagadan, taut and watching, went white and was on her feet with a shriek of inarticulate triumph.

  “You did it, you sweetheart!” she yelped then. “First ones picked up intact in five hundred years!”

  “They’re not intact,” the Viper corrected, less excitedly. “But I have all the pieces, I think!”

  “The bodies are hardly, damaged,” gloated Pagadan, staring into, the tank. “It doesn’t matter much about the shells, just bring it all in easy now! The lovely things. Wait till Lab hears we got them.”

  She hovered around nervously while the flat, brown, soft-shelled—and really not badly dented—bodies of the two Bjantas were being drawn in through one of the Vipers locks and deposited gently in a preservative tank, where they floated against the top, their twenty-two angular legs folded up tightly against their undersides. Most of the bunched neural extensions that made them a unit with the mechanisms of their detachable space-shells had been sheared off, of course; but the Viper had saved everything.

  “Nice work, Pag!” Hallerock’s voice came from the communicator as she returned exultantly to the control room. “No chance of any life being left: in those things, I suppose?”

  “Not after that treatment!” Pagadan said regretfully. “But I’m really not complaining. You heard me then?”

  “I did,” acknowledged Hallerock. “Paralyzing sort of war whoop you’ve got! Want to see the recording the cruiser shot back to me on the Mother Disk? That run just went off, too, as per schedule.”

  “Put it on!” Pagadan said, curling herself comfortably and happily into her desk chair. “So they found Mommy, eh? Never had such fun before I started slumming around with humans. What were the destructive results?”

  “They did all right. An estimated forty-five percent of the scouts right on the strike—and they figure it will be over eighty before the survivors get out of pursuit range. One of the destroyers and a couple of the cruiser’s strike-ships were slightly damaged when the core blew up. Nothing serious.”

  The visual recording appeared on the communication screen a moment later. It was very brief, as seen from the cruiser—following its hornet-swarm of released strike-ships in on the great, flat, scaly-looking pancake bulk of the Mother Disk, while a trio of destroyers closed down on either side. As a fight, Pagadan decided critical
ly, it was also the worst flop she’d seen in years, considering that the trapped quarry was actually a layered composite of several thousand well-armed scouts! For a brief instant, the barriers of every charging Vegan ship blazed a warning white; then the screen filled momentarily with a rainbow-hued sparkle of scouts scattering under the lethal fire of the attackers—and the brighter flashing of those that failed.

  As both darkened out and, the hunters swirled off in pursuit of the fugitive swarms, an ellipsoid crystalline core, several hundred yards in diameter, appeared where the Disk had lain space. The Bjanta breeding center—

  It seemed to expand slightly.

  An instant later, it was a miniature nova.

  Pagadan blinked and nodded approvingly as the screen went blank.

  “Tidy habit! Saves us a lot of trouble. But we made the only real haul of the day, Viper, old girl!” She grimaced. “So now we’ve still got to worry about that sleep-walking silly little planet of Ulphi, and the one guy on it who isn’t . . . isn’t sleep-walking, anyway. And a couple of other—” She straightened up suddenly. “Who’s that working your communicators now?”

  “That’s the robot-tracker you put on the Department of Cultures investigator on Ulphi,” the. Viper informed her. “He wants to come in to tell you the lady’s got herself into some kind of jam with the population down there. Shall I switch him to the O-ship and have the Agent-Trainee check and take over, if necessary?”

  “Hold it!” Pagadan’s hands flew out towards the section of instrument panel controlling the communicators. “Not if it’s the D.C. girl! That would mess up all my plans. The tracker’s ready and equipped to see nothing happens to her before I get there. Just put that line through to me, fast!”

  Some while later, she summoned Hallerock to the Ship’s communicator.

  “. . . So I’m picking you up in a few minutes and taking you on board the Viper. Central Lab wants a set of structural recordings of these pickled Bjantas right away—and you’ll have to do it, because I won’t have the time.”