Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 32

  “CLOSE the outer lock!” he told Peer hoarsely, reaching up for the switch marked “Decontaminant” above him.

  A fourfold spray of yellowish Killall was misting the trapped air in the lock about them an instant later.

  “What was it?” Peer’s voice came out of the fog.

  “Antibiotic,” Channok said, his scalp still crawling. “What you—what voyageurs call a lich, I think. I don’t know that kind. But it got the guy in that last cabin.”

  The occupant of the last cabin had looked as if somebody had used a particularly vicious sort of acid gun on him, which somehow had missed damaging his clothing. To the grisly class of life-forms that produced that effect, an ordinary spacesuit offered exactly no resistance.

  “A lich can’t last more than an hour or so in space, Channy,” Peer’s voice came shakily after a pause. “It’s a pretty awful way to get it, but that stuff over there must have been dead for a long time now.”

  “I know,” said Channok. He hesitated, and then cut off the Killall spray and started the blowers to clear the lock. “I guess I just panicked for a moment. But I’m going to go over that ship with decontaminant before we do any more investigating! And meanwhile you’d better get in a few hours of sleep!”

  “Wouldn’t hurt any,” Peer agreed. “How do you suppose the lich got on board?”

  He could tell her that. He’d seen a heavy, steel-framed glassite container in a corner of the cabin, opened. They must have been transporting some virulent form of antibiotic; and there might have been an accident—

  Five hours later, they had come to the conclusion that it had been no accident. Four hours of that time, Channok had been engaged in disinfecting the Ra-Twelve, even her engine sections. He’d given the one man left on board space-burial in one of the Asteroid’s steel cargo crates. The crate hadn’t been launched very far and presently hung suspended some eighty yards above the two ships, visible as a black oblong that obscured the stars behind it.

  It and its contents were one of the reasons Channok was anxious to get done with the job of salvaging the Ra-Twelve. She was a stream-lined, beautiful ship; but after what had happened, he knew he would never be able to work up any liking for her. She seemed to be waiting sullenly and silently for a chance to deal with the two humans who had dared come on board her again.

  He sealed her up presently, filled her with a fresh airmix and, having once more checked everything he could think of, let Peer come over again for a final briefing on their run to Old Nameless.

  Peer wandered promptly into the cabin where the dead man had been and there discovered the wall-safe.

  III

  SHE CALLED HIM. HE COULDN’T imagine how he had overlooked it. Perhaps because it was so obviously there! It was an ordinary enough safe, from what they could see of the front of it; and there was a tiny key in its lock.

  They looked at it thoughtfully.

  “You didn’t try to open it, did you?” Channok inquired.

  “No,” said Peer; “because—”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Channok admitted.

  There had been, they had decided, at least two groups working against each other in the ship. The dead man had been in charge of the antibiotic. Perhaps the woman had been on his side, perhaps not. But the eight other men had acted together and had controlled the ship. What action or threat of theirs had caused the dead man to release his terrible weapon would be hard to discover now. But he had done it, and the eight men had abandoned the Ra-Twelve promptly, leaving the woman locked in her cabin . . .

  It looked pretty much as if she had been the one who had switched the drives to full speed—before jumping out into space. A pretty tough, desperate lot all around, in Channok’s opinion. The Ra-Twelve’s log offered the information that they had left Dardrea three calendric days earlier, but had been of no further help in identifying crew or passengers. That most of them were professional criminals, however, seemed a pretty safe bet—as Peer had pointed out, in voyageur terms, amateurs didn’t play around with taboo-weapons like a bottled lich!

  Also, amateurs—Peer and Channok, for example—could have sense enough not to blunder into a booby-trap . . .

  “He’d know, of course,” Channok said reflectively, “that everybody would be wondering what’s hidden in that safe! And it could be anything up to and including full instructions on how to set up an artificial culture of antibiotics. Plenty of governments would pay twenty times what the Ra-Twelve is worth as salvage for that kind of information. But it’s no tiling we need to know.”

  “Not that bad,” Peer agreed.

  “And the guy who opens that wall-safe had better be an armaments expert! Which we’re not. But now, crew-member Peer, if we want to get Santis’ cargo cached on Old Nameless before I fall asleep, we ought to get started. Idle curiosity is something we can satisfy some other time.”

  “Two hours past your sleep-period right now!” said Peer, glancing at her wrist-watch. “Tsk, tsk! That always makes you so grouchy.”

  Half an hour later, they were on their way—Channok in the Ra-Twelve, Peer in the Asteroid, keeping as close to each other as two ships in flight could safely get. With the red glare of the Old Nameless sun a trifle off-center before him, Channok settled down in the most comfortable pilot-seat he’d ever found on any ship and decided he could relax a trifle. Peer was obviously having a wonderful time doing her first solo-piloting job on a ship of the Asteroid’s size; and since she’d run and landed the Asteroid any number of times under his supervision, he wasn’t worried about her ability to handle it However, he continued to check in on her over the communicators every five minutes or so, and grinned at the brisk, spacemanlike replies he got in return. Crew-member Peer was on her best behavior right now!

  By and by, then—he couldn’t have said just when it started—Channok began to realize that some very odd things were happening around him—

  IT APPEARED that the Thing he had put out for burial in a space-crate hadn’t like the idea of being left alone. So it was following him.

  Channok decided uneasily that it might be best to ignore it. But it kept coming closer and closer until, finally, the crate was floating just outside the Ra-Twelve’s control room port, spinning slowly like a running-down top.

  The crate stayed shut, but he knew the Thing inside it was watching him.

  “That’s my ship,” the Thing remarked presently.

  Channok ignored it.

  “And you’re all alone,” said the Tiling. “No, I’m not!” said Channok. “Peer’s with me.”

  “Peer’s gone back to Santis,” said the Thing. “You’re all alone! Except,” it added, “for me.”

  “Well, good-by!” Channok said firmly. There was no point in getting too chummy with it. He punched the Ra-Twelve’s drives down as far as they would go, and the crate vanished.

  How that ship could travel! Nothing could hope to keep up with him now—except, perhaps, that round, red glare of light just behind the Ra-Twelve.

  That was actually overtaking him, and fast. It was coming up like a cosmic police-ship, with a huge, hollow noise rushing before it. Channok listened apprehensively. Suddenly, there were words: “WHOO-WHOOO!” it howled. “This is the Space Ghost!”

  He shot up out of his chair like a jabbed cat, knocking it over, and glared around.

  The Ra-Twelve’s control room lay brightly lit and silent behind him.

  “Ha-ha!” Peer’s chuckle came from the communicator. “That woke you up, I bet! Was that you that fell over?”

  “Aw-awk!” breathed Channok. Articulation came back to him. “All right, crewmember Peer! Just wait till we get to Old Nameless! I’ll fix you good!”

  “Shall I tell you the story now about the Horror Ship from Mizar?” Peer inquired intrepidly.

  “Go right ahead,” Channok challenged, righting his chair and settling back into it. “You can’t scare me with that sort of stuff!” He began checking their position.

  He must ha
ve been asleep for quite a while! The Nameless System was less than two hours ahead now. He switched on the front screen; and the sun swam up like a big, glowing coal before him. He began checking for the seventh planet.

  “Well,” he reminded the communicator grimly, “you were going to tell me a story.”

  The communicator remained silent a moment.

  “I don’t think I will, anyway,” Peer said then, rather quietly.

  “Why not?” Channok inquired, getting his screen-viewer disentangled from a meteor-belt in the Nameless System.

  “I made that Space Ghost too good!” whispered Peer. “I’m getting scared myself now.”

  “Aha!” said Channok. “See what behaving like that will get you?” He got Old Nameless VII into the viewer.

  The communicator remained still. He looked over at it.

  “Of course, there’s really nothing to be scared of!” he added reassuringly.

  “How do you know?” quavered Peer.

  “I’m all alone.”

  “Nonsense!” Channok said heartily. “I can see the Asteroid right over there on the screen! You can see me, can’t you?”

  “Sure,” said Peer. “That’s a long way off, though. You couldn’t do anything!”

  “It’s not safe for two ships to travel much closer together,” Channok reminded her. “We’re only two hours from Old Nameless right now—I’m already focussed on it.”

  “I’ve been focussed on it for an hour,” said Peer. “While you were snoring,” she added. “Two hours is an awful long time!”

  “Tell you what,” suggested Channok. “I’ll race you to it. The Ra-Twelve’s a mighty fast boat—” He checked himself. He’d only dreamed that, after all.

  “Let’s go!” Peer said briefly.

  HE LET PEER STAY just ahead of him all the way in, though the streamlined derelict probably could have flown rings around the Asteroid, at that. Just an hour later, they went around Old Nameless VII twice, braking down, and then coasted into its atmosphere on their secondary drives.

  “That’s the place,” Peer’s voice said suddenly. “I can see the old Mound in the plain! In the evening strip, Channy—that straight-up cliff!”

  He set the Ra-Twelve down first, at the base of a mountain that reared up almost vertically for eighteen thousand feet or so out of a flat, dimly-lit stretch of rocky desert land.

  The Asteroid came down in a very neat landing, two hundred yards away. He got there on the run, just as the front lock opened. Peer came tumbling out of it into his arms and hung on fiercely, while her skipper hugged her.

  “Let that scare be a lesson to you!” he remarked when he set her down.

  “It certainly will,” said Peer, still clutching his arm as they started over to the Ra-Twelve. “That old Space Ghost had me going!”

  “Me, too,” he confessed; “just for a moment, anyway! Well, let’s get busy.” They went over the Ra-Twelve again from bow to stern, to make sure there was nothing they would want to take along immediately, and found there wasn’t. They gave the unopened wall-safe a last calculating regard, and decided once more that they’d better not. Then they shut off everything, closed the front lock behind them and safetied it with the dock bolts.

  The plain was darkening when they came out, but the top of the mountain still glowed with red light. They climbed into the Asteroid, and Channok closed the lock. He started for the control desk then; but Peer beat him to it and anchored herself into the seat of command with hands, knees and feet. It became apparent almost at once that he couldn’t get her out of it without running the risk of pulling off her head.

  “Now look here, crew-member Peer,” he said persuasively, “you know good and well that if these top-heavy cargo crates have one weakness, it’s the take-off!”

  “It could be the pilot, too,” Peer said meaningly. “I’ve been studying the manual, and I’ve watched you do it. It’s my turn now.”

  He considered her thoughtfully.

  “Suppose you die of old age, all of a sudden?” argued Peer. “Wouldn’t want me to sit here alone without knowing even how to take her off, would you?”

  That did it.

  “Go ahead,” said Channok with dignity, taking a position back of the chair. “Go right ahead! This decrepit old man of twenty-eight is going to stand right here and laugh himself sick!”

  “You’ll be sick, all right,” promised Peer. “But it won’t be from laughing! I’ll read that chapter out of the manual to you sometime.”

  She had studied it, too, he decided. She sat perched forward on the edge of the chair, alert and cocky, and went through the starting operations without hitch or hesitation. The Asteroid rumbled beneath them, briefly building up power . . .

  Channok braced himself—

  IV

  FOR THE NEXT few seconds, the question seemed to be whether they’d pile into the plain or the mountain first; and, for another improbable moment, they were distinctly skidding along upside down. Then Peer got them straightened out, and they soared up rapidly into the night sky above Old Nameless.

  Channok’s hair settled slowly back into place.

  Peer looked around at him, puzzled and rather pale.

  “That’s not the way it said in the manual!” she stated.

  Channok whooped. Then he sat down on the floor, bent over and yelled.

  When he got around to wiping the tears from his eyes, Peer was looking down at him disgustedly from the control chair.

  “It wasn’t the way it said in the manual!” she repeated firmly. “We’re going to have to have this old crate overhauled before she’ll be safe to fly—and if you weren’t my husband, I’d really let you have it now!”

  He stood up, muttering some sort of apology.

  “I’ve done some just as bad!” he assured her.

  “Hum!” said Peer coldly, studying Old Nameless in the screen below them. It seemed safe to pat her on the head then, but he kept his hand well out of biting range.

  “We’d better get back to that mountain and bury the Ra-Twelve before it gets too dark to find the spot,” he suggested.

  “It’s still just in sight,” said Peer. “You get the guns ready, and I’ll run us past it slowly.”

  Spaceships being what they were, there wasn’t much ceremony about caching the Ra-Twelve. Channok got the bow-turret out; and as Peer ran the Asteroid slowly along the mountainside a few hundred feet above the Ra-Twelve, he cut a jagged line into the rock with the gun’s twin beams. A few dozen tons of rock came thundering down on the Ra-Twelve.

  They came back from the other side, a little higher up, and he loosened it some more. This time, it looked as if a sizable section of the mountain were descending; and when the dust had settled the Ra-Twelve was fifty feet under a sloping pile of very natural-looking debris. To get her out again, they’d only have to cut a path down to her lock and start her drives.

  She’d come out of the stuff then, like a trout breaking water . . .

  Satisfied, they went off and got the Asteroid on an orbit around Old Nameless, not too far out. Peer had assured Channok that Santis’ investigations had proved the planet safe for human beings, so it probably was. But he knew he’d feel more comfortable if they put in their sleep-periods outside its atmosphere. Bathed in the dismal light of its giant sun, Old Nameless looked like a desolate backyard of Hell. It was rocky, sandy, apparently waterless and lifeless and splotched with pale stretches of dry salt seas. Incongruously delicate auroras went crawling about its poles, like lopsided haloes circling a squat, brooding demon. It wasn’t, Channok decided, the kind of planet he would have stopped at of his own accord, for any purpose.

  THE CLIFF against which they had buried the Ra-Twelve was the loftiest section of an almost unbroken chain of mountains, surrounding the roughly circular hundred-mile plain, which was littered with beds of boulders and sandhills, like a moon crater. What Peer had referred to as the “Mound” lay approximately at the center of the plain. It turned out, next morning, to
be a heavily weathered, dome-shaped structure half a mile high and five miles across, which gave the impression that all but the top tenth of a giant’s skull had been buried in the sand, dented here and there with massive hammers, and sprinkled thickly with rock dust. It was obviously an artifact—constructed with hundred-foot bricks! As the Asteroid drifted down closer to it, Channok became interested.

  “Who built it?” he asked.

  Peer shrugged. She didn’t know’. “Santis spent a few hours jetting around the edges of it once,” she said. “But he wouldn’t tell us much; and, afterwards, he wouldn’t let us get nearer than a mile to it. He didn’t go back himself, either—said it was dangerous to get too close!”

  It didn’t look dangerous. But fifty thousand years ago, it might have been a fortress of some sort.

  “You oughtn’t to be flying so low over it, even!” Peer said warningly. “Right in the middle on top is where it’s the most dangerous, Santis said!”

  Channok didn’t argue the matter—they had to get Santis’ special cargo cached and off their hands first, anyway. He lifted the Asteroid a mile or so and then brought her down a couple of miles beyond the Mound, at the point Peer had designated.

  They got out of the ship and gazed about the broken, rocky plain. The red light of the Nameless Sun was spilling across it in what passed for morning on this world. In it, the black mountain chains rearing about the horizon and the craggy waves of flat land had the general effect of a bomb-shattered and slowly burning city. Far off to their left, he could see the upper half of the towering precipice which marked the Ra-Twelve’s resting-place.

  “How long a time did you say you spent here?” he asked.

  Peer reflected. “About two Terra-months, I guess. I’m not sure, though. That was a long time ago. My youngest brother Dobby wasn’t born yet.”

  He shook his head. “What a spot for a nice family picnic!”

  “It wasn’t a picnic,” Peer said. “But my kid brother Wilf and I had a lot of fun anyway, just running around and teasing the ghouls. I guess you don’t notice so much what a place looks like when you’re little.”