Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  “Teasing the what?”

  “Ghouls,” said Peer carelessly.

  He looked at her suspiciously; but she seemed to be studying the nearby terrain for a good spot to start digging.

  “And what were Santis and your mother doing?” he inquired.

  “They were looking for some sort of mineral, deposit on Old Nameless; I forget just what. How about that spot—just under that little overhang? It looks like good, solid top-rock.”

  CHANNOK agreed it was just the place. He’d got a drilling attachment mounted to the Asteroid’s small all-purpose tractor; and now he went back and ran the machine down the ramp from the storage lock. He ordered Peer, who wanted to help, up a rock about twenty feet overhead, where she perched looking like an indignant elf, out of reach of any stray puffs of the drill-blast. Then he started running a slanting, narrow tunnel down under the overhang.

  Half an hour later, when he backed the tractor out of the tunnel, pushing a pile of cooking slag behind him, he saw her standing up on the rock with a small stun-gun in her hand. She beckoned to him.

  Channok pulled off his breather-mask, shut off the tractor, and jumped from the saddle.

  “What is it?” he called anxiously, trotting towards her, while the machine’s clacking and roaring subsided.

  “Some of those ghouls!” Peer called back. “Climb up here and I’ll show you.” She didn’t seem worried.

  “They’ve ducked behind those rocks now,” she said as he clambered up beside her; “but they won’t stay there long. They’re curious, and I think some of them remember the time we were here before.”

  “Are they dangerous?” he inquired, patting his holstered set of heavy-duty Reaper guns.

  “No,” said Peer. “They look sort of awful, but you mustn’t shoot them! If they get inside of thirty feet I’ll hit them in the stomach with a stunner. They grunt then and run. Santis said that was the right way to teach them not to get too nosey.”

  They waited a moment in silence, scanning the rocks.

  Then Channok started violently.

  “Holy!!**?** Satellites!” he swore, his hair bristling.

  A big, dead-white shape had popped up springily on a rock about fifty feet away, stared at him for an instant out of eyes like grey glass-platters, and popped down out of sight again. Awful was right!

  “Aha!” crew-member Peer gloated, grinning. “You shouldn’t have said that! Tonight you’ve got to let me soap out your mouth!”

  A light dawned gradually.

  “You did it on purpose!” he accused her. “You knew I’d say something like that the first time I saw one!”

  Peer didn’t deny it.

  “It’s the soap for you, just the same!” she shrugged. “People ought to have some self-control—that’s what you said! Look, then?’ another one now—no, two!”

  V

  WHEN HE CAME UP FOR lunch, he found about fifty ghouls collected around the area. By that time he had dug the cache, steel-lined it, disinfected it and installed preservatives, a humidifier and a dowser plate. Loading it up would take most of the rest of the day.

  He avoided looking at the local population as much as he could while he ate. However, the occasional glimpses he got suggested that the Nameless System had made a half-hearted and badly botched attempt at developing its own type of humanoid inhabitant. They had extremely capable looking jaws, at any rate, and their wide, lipless mouths were wreathed in perpetual idiot grins. The most completely disagreeable parts of them, Channok decided, were the enormous, red-nailed hands and feet. Like fat, white gargoyles, they sat perched around the tops of the rocks in a wide circle and just stared.

  “Sloppy-looking things,” he remarked, noticing Peer’s observant eyes on him. “But at least they’re not trying to strike up a conversation!”

  “They never say anything until you hit them in the stomach with a stunner,” she informed him. “Then they just grunt and run.”

  “Sure they mightn’t get mean about that? The smallest of this lot looks plenty big enough to take us both apart.”

  Peer laughed. “All of them together wouldn’t try it! They’re real yellow. Wilf got mad at a couple of ’em once and ran ’em halfway over to the Mound before mother caught up with him and stopped him. Wilf had his blood up, that time!”

  “Maybe the ghouls built the Mound,” Channok suggested. “Their great-great-ancestors, anyway.”

  “They won’t go near it now,” Peer said, following his gaze. “They’re scared of that, too!”

  They studied the rugged, ungainly slopes of the huge artifact for a moment.

  There was something fascinating about it, Channok thought. Perhaps just its size.

  “Santis said the plain was the bottom of a sea a while ago,” Peer offered. “So it could have been some sort of sea-things that built it.”

  “Any entrances into it?” he asked casually.

  “Just one, right at the top.”

  “You know,” he said, “I think I’d like to go over and have a look at that thing before we leave.”

  “No!” said Peer, alarmed. “You’d better not. Santis said it was dangerous—and there is something there! We saw a light one night.”

  “What kind of a light?”

  “Like someone walking around the top of it, near that entrance, with a big lamp in his hand,” Peer remembered. “Like he might have been looking for something.”

  “Sounds a bit like your old friend, the Space Ghost,” Channok murmured suspiciously.

  “No,” Peer grinned. “This was a real light—and we took off the next evening. Santis said it might be as well if we moved somewhere else for a while.”

  Channok considered a moment. “Look,” he said finally, “we can do it like this. I’ll jet myself over there and stroll around it a bit in daylight; and if you’re worried, you could hang overhead in the Asteroid with a couple of turrets out. Just in case someone gets tough.”

  “I could, maybe,” said Peer, in a tight voice, “but I’m not going to. If you’re going to go walking around there, after all Santis said, I’m going to be walking right behind you!”

  “Oh, no, you’re not,” Channok said. “Oh, yes, I am!” said Peer. “You can’t make me stay here!”

  He looked at her in surprise. Her eyes were angry, but her lower lip. quivered.

  “Hey,” he said, startled. “Maybe I’m being a pig!”

  “You sure are!” Peer said, relieved. The lip stopped quivering. “You’re not going over there, then?”

  “Not if you feel that way about it,” Channok said. He paused. “I guess,” he admitted awkwardly, “I just didn’t like the idea of Santis flitting around space.

  Holy Aynstyn knows where, and still putting in his two millicredits worth every so often, through crew-member Peer!” Peer blew her nose and considered in turn. “Just the same,” she concluded, “when Santis says something like that, it’s a lot better if people do it. Is ‘Holy Aynstyn knows where a swear-word?”

  “No,” said Channok. “Not exactly.”

  HE’D FINISHED his lunch and was just going to suggest they rim the tractor out of the cache and back the few hundred yards to the Asteroid for the first load of Santis’ cargo, when he noticed that all the ghouls had vanished.

  He called Peer’s attention to the fact. “Uh-huh,” she said in an absent-minded tone. “They do that sometimes . . .”

  Channok looked at her. She was staring at a high boulder a short distance away, with a queer, intent expression, as if she were deep in thought about something. He hoped she wasn’t still brooding about their little argument—

  Then she glanced at him, gave him a sudden grin, swung herself around and slid nimbly off the rock.

  “Come on down quick!” she said. “I want to show you something before you get back to work. A ghoul-burrow!”

  “A ghoul-burrow?” Channok repeated unenthusiastically.

  “Yes, sure!” said Peer impatiently. “They’re cute! They’re all lined wi
th glass or something.” She spread her arms wide. “Jump, and I’ll catch you!”

  Channok laughed, flopped over on his stomach with his legs over the edge of the rock, and slid down in a fair imitation of Peer’s nonchalant style of descent, spraining his ankle only a little. Well, he hadn’t grown up skipping from craggy moon to asteroid to heavy-planet to whatnot like she had . . .

  They threaded their way about the rocks to the spot she had been studying. She explained that he’d have to climb into the burrow to get a good idea of what it was like.

  “Well, look now, Peer!” Channok protested, staring into the big, round hole that slanted downwards under a big boulder—it did seem to be lined with black glass or some similar stuff. “That cave’s got ‘No Trespassing’ written all over it. Supposing I slide down a half a mile and land in a mess of ghouls!”

  “No, you won’t,” Peer said hurriedly. “It goes level right away, and they’re never more than thirty feet long. And the ghoul’s out—there’s never more than one to a burrow; and I saw this one pop out and run off just before we started here! You’re not scared, are you? Wilf and I crawled in and out of hundreds of them!”

  “Well, just for a moment then,” said Channok resignedly.

  HE GOT DOWN on hands and knees and crept into the tunnel. After about six feet, he stopped and found he could turn around, without too much trouble. “Peer?” he called back.

  “Yes?” said Peer.

  “How can I see anything here,” Channok demanded peevishly, “when it’s all dark?”

  “Well, you’re in far enough now,” said Peer, who had sat down before the entrance of the tunnel and was looking in after him. “And now I’ve got to ask you to do something! You know how I always promptly carry out any orders you give me, like getting in my full sleep-period and all?” she added anxiously.

  “No, you do not!” Channok stated flatly, resting on his elbows. “Half the time I practically have to drag you to the cabin. Anyway, what’s that got to do with—”

  “It’s like this,” Peer said desperately. She glanced up for a moment, as if she had caught sight of something in the dim red sky overhead. “You’ve got to stay in there a while, Channy!”

  “Eh?” said Channok.

  “When those ghouls pop out of sight in daytime like that, it’s because there’s a ship or something coming.”

  “Peer, are you crazy? A ship! Who—I’m coming right out!”

  “Stay there, Channy!. It’s hanging over the Asteroid right now. A big lifeboat with its guns out—it must be those men from the Ra-Twelve! They must have had a tracer of some sort on her!”

  “Then get in here quick, Peer!” Channok choked, hauling out one of the Reapers. “You know good and well that bunch would kill a woman as soon as a man!”

  “They’ve already seen me—I wanted them to,” Peer informed him. She was talking out of the side of her mouth, looking straight ahead of her, away from the cave. “I’m not going to be a woman. I’m going to be a dumb little girl, ordinary size. I can pull that one off any time!”

  “But—”

  “They’ll want to ask questions. I think I can get them to send that lifeboat away. We can’t fight that, Channy; it’s a regular armed launch! Santis says you can always get the other side to split its forces, if you’re smart about it.”

  “But how—”

  “And then, when I yell ‘Here we go!’ then you pop out. That’ll be the right moment—” She stood up suddenly. “We can’t talk any more! They’re getting close—” She vanished with that from before the mouth of the burrow.

  “Hold on there!” a voice yelled in the distance a few seconds later, as Channok came crawling clumsily up the glassy floor of the tunnel, hampered by the Reaper he still clutched in one hand. It seemed to come from up in the air, and it was using the Empire’s universal dialect.

  Peer’s footsteps stopped abruptly.

  “Who you people?” her voice screeched in shrill alarm. “You cops? I ain’t done nothing!”

  VI

  “AND JUST LOOK AT THOSE guns she’s carrying!” the deeper of the two strange voices commented. “The real stuff, too—a stunner and an Ophto Needle! Better get them from her. If it isn’t a baby Flauval!”

  “I didn’t shoot nobody lately!” Peer said, trembly-voiced.

  “No, and you ain’t going to shoot nobody either!” the other strange voice mimicked her. That one was high-pitched and thin, with a pronounced nasal twang to it. “Chief, if there’re kids with them, it’s just a bunch of space-rats that happened along. It couldn’t be Flauval!”

  “I’d say ‘it couldn’t be Flauval, if we’d 2—Planet Stories—May found her dead in her cabin,” the deep voice said irritably. “But that door was burned out from inside—and somebody ditched the Ra-Twelve on this clod!” It sounded as if the discovery of Peer had interrupted an argument between them.

  “I still can’t see how she got out,” Nasal-voice Ezeff said sullenly. “She must have been sleeping in her spacesuit. We were out of the ship thirty seconds after I slap-welded that lock across her door! She must have felt the boat leaving and started burning her way out the same instant—”

  “It doesn’t matter how she did it,” said the deep voice. Apparently, it belonged to someone with authority. “If Flauval could think and move fast enough to switch the drives to Full Emergency and still get alive out of a ship full of the Yomm, she could cheat space, too! She always did have the luck of the devil. If we’d had just that minute to spare before leaving, to make sure—”

  It paused a moment and resumed gloomily: “That stubborn old maniac of a Koyle—‘I’m the Duke’s man, sir!’ Committing suicide—like that—so no one else would get control of the Yomm! If we hadn’t managed to start the launch’s locators in time . . . Well, I hope I’ll never have to sweat out another four days like the last. And now we still have to find whoever got Koyle’s records!”

  “Flauval ain’t here,” Peer offered at that point, brightly.

  There was a pause. It seemed that the two newcomers must have almost forgotten their prisoner for a moment.

  “WHAT WAS THAT you said, kid?” Nasal-voice inquired carefully.

  “Those space-rats are all half crazy,” the deep voice said contemptuously. “She doesn’t know what we’re talking about.”

  “Sure I know!” Peer said indignantly. “You was talking about Flauval. It’s Wilf that’s the crazy one—I ain’t! And she ain’t here. Flauval.”

  “She ain’t, eh?” Nasal-voice said, with speculative alertness.

  “No, sir,” Peer said, timid again. “She’s went with the rest of ’m.”

  Both voices swore together in startled shock.

  “Where are they?” the deep voice demanded. “Hiding on the ship?”

  “No, sir,” quavered Peer. “It’s just me on the ship, till they come back.”

  “You mean,” the deep voice said, with strained patience, “you’re supposed to be on the ship?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Peer. She added in a guilty mutter, “Sleepin’ . . .”

  “Where did the others go?” Nasal-voice inquired sharply.

  “But I ain’t tired,” said Peer. “Well, with the boxes and stuff! What Flauval wants buried.”

  There was another duet of exclamations which Channok, at almost any other time, would have considered highly unsuitable for Peer’s ears. Right now, it escaped his attention.

  “She’s got Koyle’s records!” stated the deep voice then.

  “What’s in those boxes?” Nasal-voice snapped.

  “D-d-don’t shake me!” wept Peer. “Papers and stuff—I don’t know. They don’t never tell me nothing,” she wailed, “because I’m just a little girl!”

  “Yes, you’re just a little girl,” said Nasal-voice, exasperated. “You’re not going to get much bigger either.”

  “Cut that,” said the deep voice. “No sense scaring the kid.”

  “Well, you’re not figuring on taking them back,
are you?” Nasal-voice inquired.

  “No. Just Flauval. The colonel will be glad to chat with Flauval a bit, now that she’s turned up alive again. Koyle may have told her plenty before we soured him on her. But there’s no point in making the rest of them desperate. It’s easier when they surrender.”

  There was a short pause. Then the deep voice addressed Peer with a sort of amiable gruffness:

  “So they all went off to bury the boxes, but you don’t know where they went—is that it, little girl?”

  “Oh, sure!” Peer said, anxious to please. “Yes, sir! I know that!”

  “WHERE?” said both voices together, chorusing for the third time.

  “It’s that big Mound over there,” Peer said; and Channok started nervously. “It’s got a big door on top. No,” she added, “I guess you can’t see from down here—and you can’t see from the ship. That’s why I came out. To watch for’m. But you can see it plain from the top of the rocks.”

  “That would be the old reservoir or whatever it was we passed back there,” said the deep voice.

  “That’s right,” said Peer. “That’s just what Flauval called it at lunch! The word you said. There was water there oncet, she said. They flew the boxes over with jets, but they’ll be back before it’s dark, they said.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “Scares me when it’s dark, it does!” grumbled the idiot-child.

  “Well, that ties it up!” the deep voice said, satisfied. “It’s the exact kind of stunt Flauval would try. But she’s outsmarted herself, this time!”

  “HOW DO YOU figure on handling it?” Nasal-voice inquired.

  “Get up on one of those rocks with the kid where you can watch both that ‘mound’ and the lock of their ship. Yes, I know it’s more trouble that way—but don’t, ah, do anything conclusive about the—uh—aforementioned, before we’ve corralled the rest! Much more useful while capable of inhaling. Hostage possibilities. Inducement to surrender!”