Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  But he, too, had been a giant among little-people then. If his conscious thoughts wouldn’t admit it, every cell of his body knew he’d lost his own kind.

  Jasse, all her mind groping carefully, questioningly out towards this phenomenon, this monster-slayer of Galactic Zones—beginning to understand all that and a good deal more—slowly relaxed again.

  A kinsman of hers! Her own eyes began to smile, finally.

  “Hello, Hallerock!” Jasse said.

  And that was, Pagadan decided, about the right moment to dissolve the PT-cell she’d spent an hour installing in the wall just above the upper right-hand corner of Jasse’s study mirror.

  Those two baby giants might be all full of emotional flutters just now at having met someone from the old home town; but they were going to start thinking of their good friend Pagadan almost immediately! And one of the very first things that would leap to Hallerock’s suspicious mind would he the possible presence of a Peeping Tommy.

  Good thing those tiny units left no detectable trace!

  She pulled off the PT-helmet, yawned delicately and sat relaxed for a minute, smirking reminiscently into the vision-tank.

  “What I call a really profitable mission!” she informed the vision-tank. “Not a slip anywhere either—and just think how tame it all started out!”

  She thought about that for a moment. The silver eyes closed slowly; and opened again.

  “It’s no particular wonder,” she remarked, “that Central’s picked me for a Five-Agent job—after only five missions! When you get right down to it, you can’t beat a Lannai brain!”

  The hundred thousand friendly points of light in the vision-tank applauded her silently. Pagadan smiled at them. In the middle of the smile her eyes closed once more—and this time, they stayed close. Her head began to droop forward.

  Then she, sat up with a start;

  “Hey,” she said in drowsy indignation, “what’s, all this?”

  “Sleepy gas,” the Viper’s voice returned. “If you’re headed for another job, you’re going to sleep all the way to Jeltad. You need your rest.”

  “That’s a whole week!” Pagadan protested. But though she could not remember being transported there, „ she was in her somno-cabin by then, and flat on her back. Pillows were just being shoved under her head; and lights were going out all over the ship.

  “You big, tricky bum!” she muttered. “I’ll, dismantle your reflexes yet!”

  There was no answer to that grim threat; but she couldn’t have heard it anyway. A week was due to pass before Zone Agent Pagadan would be permitted to become aware of her surroundings again.

  Meanwhile, a dim hum had begun to grow throughout the Viper’s giant body-: Simultaneously, in the darkened and deserted control room, a bright blue spark started climbing steadily up the velocity indicator.

  The humming rose suddenly to a howl, thinned out and became inaudible.

  The spark stood gleaming steadily then at a point just below the line marked “Emergency.”

  Space had flattened out before the Viper—she was homeward-bound with another mission accomplished.

  She began to travel—

  THE END

  CAPTIVES OF THIEVE-STAR

  When Peer and Channok grappled the derelict Ra-Twelve, they hooked a death-prize—haunted by the Yomm, stalked by the Mysterious Nine!

  THE CELEBRATION OF THE wedding of Peer and Channok had to be cut a little short, because a flock of police-boats from Irrek showed up at detector-range about midway. But it was carried off with a flourish nevertheless.

  The oxygen-bubble in the small moon-crater was filled with colorful solidographs, creating the impression of an outdoor banquet hall. The best bands playing in the Empire that night unwittingly contributed their efforts, and food and drink were beyond reproach.

  Though somewhat dazed throughout, Channok was startled to discover at one point that the thick carpets on which he stood were a genuine priceless Gaifornaab weave—and no solidographs either! The eighty-four small ships of the space-rat tribe—or voyageurs, as they distinctly preferred to be called—lined up along the outer edges of the banquet hall looked eerily out of place to him; but Peer didn’t seem to mind. Her people rarely did go far away from their ships, and the lawless, precarious life they led made that an advisable practice.

  It would be up to him now, Channok reflected, beaming down on Peer, to educate her into customs and attitudes more fitting for the wife of a regular citizen of the Empire and probable future member of the Imperial Secret Service—

  And then, suddenly, the whole ceremony seemed to be over! A bit puzzled by the abruptness with which everybody had begun to pack up and leave, Channok was standing beside the ramp of Ins own ship, the Asteroid—an honest, licensed trader—when Santis strolled over to talk to him. Santis was Peer’s father and the pint-sized chieftain of the tribe.

  “Didn’t tell you before, son,” he remarked, “because you were already nervous enough. But as soon as they finish collapsing the bubble, you’ll have about six minutes to get your Asteroid aloft and off this moon before the cops from Irrek arrive!”

  “I heard you, Pop, and everything’s packed!” Peer called down from the open lock of the Asteroid. “Come up and kiss me good-by and we’ll seal her up!”

  Frowning suspiciously, Channok followed Santis up the ramp. “Why should I worry about cops?” he inquired, looking down at the two little people while they briefly embraced. Peer came about up to his shoulder, though perfectly formed, and Santis was an inch or two shorter. The tribe didn’t run to bulk. “Nobody’s hunting for me!”

  “Not yet, son,” Santis conceded. He twirled his fierce brown mustache-tips thoughtfully and glanced at Peer.

  “If you’re passing anywhere near Old Nameless, you might cache that special cargo you’re carrying for me there,” he told her. “Around the foot of the Mound. Too bulky for the ships I’ve got here! Put a dowser plate in with it, and I’ll come pick it up with a transport sometime in the next four months.”

  “Yes, Pop,” said Peer.

  “The Fourth Voyageur Fleet will rendezvous at New Gymovaan next Terraspring. If you can talk this big lug into it, try to make it there, daughter!”

  “We’ll be there,” promised Peer.

  Channok cleared his throat impatiently. Not if he could help it, they wouldn’t!

  “Those cops are looking for the missing Crown Jewels of Irrek,” Santis resumed, looking at him. “After they’ve opened you up from stem to stern to make sure you’re not hiding them, they might apologize. And again they might not.”

  “Holy Satellites!” Channok said, stunned. “Did you actually—”

  “Not I, son. I just master-mind these things. Some of the boys did the job. There goes the oxygen-bubble! Now will you get going?”

  They got going, Channok speechless for once.

  SOME TWO MONTHS LATER, he stood in the Asteroid’s control room, watching a pale blur creep up along the starboard screen.

  “That’s not just one ship—that’s at least a hundred!” he announced presently, somewhat startled. “Looks like they’ve turned out the entire Dardrean war-fleet! Wonder what’s up?”

  Peer laid the cargo list she was checking down on the desk and came over to look at the screen.

  “Hm!” she said.

  “It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with us, could it?” he inquired, on a sudden alarming hunch. Being unfamiliar with the dialect used on Dardrea, he had left most of the bargaining there to her.

  Peer shrugged She showed the bland, innocent look of a ten-year-old child, but that was habitual with her. On one occasion she’d been mistaken for his daughter, and at times he even had to remind himself that she’d been eighteen and a student at the Imperial Institute of Technology when he first met her there—and then unwittingly became Santis’ tool in the abstraction of a small but important section of the IIT’s top-secret experimental files! He’d been trying to counteract that little brigand�
�s influence on Peer ever since, but he wasn’t too sure of his degree of success so far.

  “We took the Merchants Guild for plenty on our auction!” she admitted.

  “Well,” Channok frowned, “they’d hardly send a fleet after us for that.”

  “And, of course,” added Peer, “we got the Duke of Dardrea’s fabulous Coronet. Forgot to mention that. Perfectly legal, though! Some local crook swiped it and we took it in trade.”

  Channok winced. As a matter of fact, fencing was a perfectly legitimate business on Dardrea. But a man who planned to enter the Imperial Secret Service, as soon as he could save up the money to pay his way through the Academy, couldn’t afford any stains on his past! Throughout the Empire, the Service was renowned in song and story as the one body of men who stood above the suspicion of reproach.

  “The Duke won’t know it’s gone for another week,” Peer consoled him. “Anyway, it looks to me as if those ships are beginning to pull off our course!”

  There followed some seconds of tense observation.

  “So they are,” Channok acknowledged then. He mopped his forehead. “But I wish you wouldn’t be quite so technical in your interpretation of local laws, Peer! Those babies are really traveling. Wonder who or what they’re chasing?”

  Three days later, as the Asteroid approached the area of the red giant sun of Old Nameless, where they were going to cache Santis’ cargo for him—hot cargo, probably; and it would be a load off Channok’s mind to get rid of it—they picked up the trail of the foundering spaceship Ra-Twelve and found part of the answer on board.

  II

  “IT SEEMED TO ME,” CHANNOK remarked, watching the Ra-Twelve in the viewscreen before them, “as if her drives had cut off completely just then! But they’re on again now. What do you think, crew-member Peer?”

  “Let’s just follow her a bit,” Peer suggested. “I’ve seen ships act like that that were just running out of juice. But this one won’t even answer signals!”

  “It could be,” Channok said hopefully, “a case of fair salvage! You might keep working the communicators, though . . .” However, the Ra-Twelve continued to ignore them while she plodded on towards the distant red glare of the Nameless System like a blind, thirsty beast following its nose to a water-hole. Presently, she began a series of quavering zigzag motions, wandered aimlessly off her course, returned to it again on a few final puffs of invisible energy and at last went drifting off through space with her drives now obviously dead.

  The Asteroid continued to follow at a discreet distance like a chunky vulture, watching. If there was anyone on board the Ra-Twelve, it almost had to be a ghost. Her rear lock was wide open, and the hull showed deep scars and marks of some recent space-action.

  “But she wasn’t really badly hurt,” Channok pointed out. “What do you suppose could have happened to her crew?” Peer gave him a nervous grin. “Maybe a space-ghost came on board!”

  “You don’t really believe those spooky voyageur stories, do you?” he said tolerantly.

  “Sure I do—and so will you some day!” Peer promised him. “I’ll tell you a few true ones just before your next sleep-period!”

  “No, you won’t,” Channok said firmly. “Aside from space-ghosts, though, that crate has a downright creepy look to her. But I suppose I’d better go over and check, as soon as she slows down enough so we can latch on. And you’re going to stay on the Asteroid, Peer.”

  “In a pig’s eye, I am!” Peer said indignantly. And though Channok wished to know if she had forgotten that he was the Asteroid’s skipper, it turned out that this was one time he’d have to yield.

  “Because, Channy dear,” Peer said, her big dark eyes welling slow tears, “I’d just die if something happened to you over there and I was left all alone in space!”

  “All you’d have to do,” Channok said uncomfortably, “is to head the Asteroid for New Gymovaan, and you know it. Well—you’ve got to promise to stay right behind me, anyway!”

  “Of course,” promised Peer, the tears vanishing miraculously. “Santis says a wife should always stick with her husband in space, because he might lead her into a jam, all right, but nothing like the !!*****!; !**!! jams she’s likely to run into if she strays around by herself.”

  “Whereas Ship’s Regulation 66-B says,” said Channok with grim satisfaction, “that crew-member Peer gets her mouth washed out with soap just before the next sleep-period because of another uncontrolled lapse into vituperous profanity—and what was that comment?”

  “That one was under my breath,” said Peer, crestfallen, “so it doesn’t count!”

  WITHOUT making any particular remarks about it, both of them had fastened a brace of guns to their jet-harnesses. At close range—held thirty feet away against the Asteroid’s ring-bumpers fey a set of dock grapnels—the Ran Twelve’s yawning lock looked more than ever like the black mouth of a cavern in which something was lurking for them.

  Channok went over first, propelled by a single squirt of his jets, and landed a little heavier than he had intended to. Peer, following instructions to keep right behind him, came down an instant later in the middle of his back. They got untangled hurriedly, stood up and started swiveling their helmet beams about the Ra-Twelve’s storage lock.

  It was practically empty. So was the big rack that had held the ship’s single big lifeboat. There were some tools scattered around. They kicked at them thoughtfully, looked at each other and started forward through an open door up a dark passageway, switching their lights ahead and from side to side.

  There was a locked door which probably led into the Ra-Twelve’s engine section, and then four cabins, each of which had been used by two men. The cabins were in considerable disorder, but from what one could tell in a brief look-around, each of the occupants had found time to pack up about what you would expect a man to take along when he was planning on a lifeboat trip. So whatever had happened probably hadn’t been entirely unexpected.

  The mess-room, all tidied up, was next; two locked doors were at the back of it, and also an open entrance to the kitchen and food storage. They glanced around at everything, briefly, and went on to the control-room.

  It was considerably bigger than the one on the Asteroid and luxuriously equipped. The pilot’s section was in a transparently walled little office by itself. The instruments showed both Dardrean and Empire markings and instructions. Channok switched the dead drives off first and then reached out, quite automatically, for the spot above the control desk where a light button ought to be—

  Light instantly flooded the interior of the Ra-Twelve.

  The intruders jumped a foot. It was as if the ship had suddenly come alive around them! Then they looked at each other and grinned.

  “Automatic,” Channok sighed.

  “Might as well do it the easy way!” Peer admitted. She slid the Ophto Needle she’d half-drawn back into its holster.

  THE RA-TWELVE had eighteen fully charged drive batteries still untouched. With some system of automatic power transfer working, she could have gone cruising along on her course for months to come. However, she hadn’t been cruising, Channok discovered next; the speed controls were set to “Full Emergency”. . . . An empty ship, racing through space till the battery she was operating on went dead—

  He shook his head. And then Peer was tapping his arm.

  “Look what I found! I think it’s her log!”

  It was a fiat steel box with an illuminated tape at its front end, on which a date was printed. A line of spidery Dardrean script was engraved on a plate on the top of the box.

  “Ra-Twelve,” Peer translated. “That’s her name.”

  “So it’s a Dardrean ship! But they’re using the Empire calendar,” Channok pointed out, “which would make it an Empire crew . . . How do you work this thing? If it is her log, it might give us an idea of what’s happened.”

  “Afterwards, Channy! I just found another door leading off the other end of the control room—”

 
The door opened into a second passage, parallel to the one by which they had come forward, but only half as long and very dimly lit. Filled with uneasy speculations, Channok forgot his own instructions and let Peer take the lead.

  “More cabins!” her voice said, just as he became aware of the wrecked doorframe out of which the light was spilling ahead of her.

  A woman had been using that cabin. A woman who had liked beautiful and expensive things, judging by what was strewn about. It looked, Channok thought, as if she hadn’t had time to finish her packing.

  “Her spacesuit’s gone, though,” Peer’s voice announced from the interior of a disordered closet.

  Channok was inspecting the door. This was the first indication that there had been any violence connected with whatever had happened on the Ra-Twelve. The door had been locked from without and literally ripped open from within by a stream of incandescence played on it by a gun held probably not much more than a foot away. That woman had wanted out in an awful hurry!

  Peer came over to watch him. He couldn’t quite read her expression, but he had a notion she wanted to bawl.

  “Let’s take a quick look at the rest of it and get back to the Asteroid,” he suggested, somewhat disturbed himself. “We ought to talk this over.”

  The one remaining cabin lay just beyond the point where the passage angled back into the ship. There was light in that one, too, and the door was half open. Channok got there first and pushed it open a little farther. Then he stood frozen in the door-frame for a moment.

  “What’s stopping you?” Peer inquired impatiently, poking his ribs from behind.

  He stepped back into the passage, pulled the door shut all the way, scooped her up and heaved her to his shoulder. His space-boots felt like iron anchors as he clunk-clunked hastily back through the passages to the derelict’s lock. There was nothing definite to rim from any more; but he knew now what had happened on the Ra-Twelve, and he felt nightmare pacing after him all the way.

  He crossed to the Asteroid’s control room lock in a jump, without bothering with his jets.