Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Read online

“Uh-huh,” Nasal-voice said comprehendingly.

  “Yes, sir!” added Peer.

  There was another short pause.

  “Might as well skip the circumlocutions,” the deep voice continued. “Barely human! I’ll send a couple of men through the ship and, if it’s empty, I’ll leave one of them in the forward lock where you can see him. That’s just in case anyone slips past us and comes back. The rest of us will go over to the reservoir in the launch. If the entrance is where she says it is, we’ve got them bottled. If it looks right, we’ll go in.”

  “That’ll be only four of you,” said Nasal-voice. “No; three—you’re keeping one at the launch-guns, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, of course. Hey, little girl—how many are with Flauval?”

  “Of us, you mean?” Peer asked.

  “Of what else?” snarled Nasal-voice.

  “Now don’t get her so scared she can’t talk!” the deep voice reproved. “That’s right, little girl—how many of you?”

  “Well, there’s me,” sniffled Peer, “and my old man, and my big brother Dobby. And then there’s Wilf—that’s all. But I don’t like Wilf!”

  “I don’t like Wilf either!” agreed Nasal-voice. “Four against three, chief! It might be safer to bring over the two from the Ra-Twelve first—no point in searching her anyway, now that we know where the records are!”

  “No,” said the deep voice. “Flauval could just happen to decide to come out in the few minutes we’re gone. It’s sewed up too neatly right now. We’ll have the heavy guns from the launch and we’ll give them a chance to surrender. Flauval’s too intelligent to pass that up—she never stops hoping! The chances are there won’t be any shooting, till, afterwards.”

  “Any friends of hers are likely to be tough,” Nasal-voice warned.

  “Very tough,” said his chief. “Like the kid there! You worry at the wrong times, my boy. A parcel of space-rats that happened along.” He swore again. “That woman’s unbelievable luck! Well, take care of yourself, Ezeff. I’m off. Keep your eyes open both ways! Just in case—”

  VII

  THERE WAS SILENCE FOR A moment. Then footsteps came crunching over the rocks towards the ghoul-burrow, and Channok got set. But the footsteps halted a few yards away.

  “That’s the one I was sitting on,” Peer volunteered. “Nice, easy one to climb!”

  “Yeah, I never saw a nicer looking rock,” Nasal-voice said sourly. “We’ve got to climb it, too! I’m not trying any point-landings with jets. Get on up there then, before I boot you up!”

  There were sounds of scrambling. “Don’t you move now!” Peer said suddenly.

  “What are you talking about?” demanded Nasal-voice.

  “Durn rock come loose!” muttered Peer.

  “Near flung me off!”

  But Channok, meanwhile, had got the idea and settled back. It was not yet the Right Moment . . .

  There were more scrambling sounds and some breathless swearing from Ezeff, who obviously had not spent his formative years in asteroid-hopping either. But at last all become quiet.

  “And here we are!” Peer’s voice floated down clearly. A small chunk of rock dropped right in front of the burrow’s entrance, like a punctuation mark.

  “Sit still, blast you!” said Nasal-voice, badly out of breath.

  A large, dim shadow swept silently over the ground before the ghoul’s burrow just then. That would be the launch, going towards the Mound. A prolonged silence overhead confirmed the impression.

  “They want to give Flauval a surprise?” Peer inquired meekly at last.

  Rather startlingly, Nasal-voice laughed. “They sure do!” he agreed. “That’s a good one! Yes, sir, they sure do!”

  “Flauval’s nice, don’t you think?” continued Peer conversationally, picking up courage.

  “Depends a lot on how you look at it,” Nasal-voice said dreamily. “She’s a real pretty thing anyhow, that Flauval! Luck of the devil she’s had, too. But it’s got to run out sometime.”

  There was another silence. Then Peer remarked:

  “Boy, he set that launch down nice! Right quick spang on top of the—what the big guy said it was. On the Mound.”

  “We’ve got a good pilot,” Nasal-voice agreed. “Flauval’s going to get her surprise in just a minute now!”

  “And there they come out of the launch,” continued Peer. “One, two, three, four. All four of them. Marching right down into the Mound!”

  “You’ve got sharp eyes,” Nasal-voice acknowledged. “But that’s funny!” he continued worriedly. “One of them was to stay with the guns.”

  “And now look at the launch!” cried Peer in a high, bright voice. “Getting pulled right into the Mound!”

  Nasal-voice was making loud, choking sounds.

  “What was that?” he screamed then. “What’s happened? What’s that over there?”

  “Let go my arm!” cried Peer. “Don’t pull it—you’re pushing me off! Here we go!”

  A SMALL AVALANCHE of weathered rock came down before the burrow’s mouth as Channok shot out through it into the open. He looked up. In what looked like an inextricable tangle of arms and legs, Peer and Nasal-voice were sliding and scuffling down the steep side of the rock together. Nasal-voice was trying to hang on to the rock, but Peer was hanging on to him and jerking like a hooked fish whenever he got a momentary hold.

  She looked down and saw Channok, put her boots into the small of Nasal-voice’s back, pushed off and landed two yards from Channok on hands and feet. He flattened himself back against the boulder, while Nasal-voice skidded down the rest of the way unaided, wisely refraining from triggering his jets. In the position he was in, they simply would have accelerated his descent to a fatal degree.

  He arrived more or less on his feet. Peer bounced up and down before him, her finger pointed, like a small lunatic.

  “Surprise!” she screamed. “Surprise! Like Flauval got! When you locked her in her cabin and ran off with the launch, so she’d have to jump out into space!”

  “That’s right, kid,” Nasal-voice panted softly, fumbling for his gun without taking his eyes off her. He looked somewhat like a white-faced lunatic himself just then. “Don’t get scared, kid! Don’t run off! I won’t shoot.”

  He pulled the gun out suddenly.

  But Channok had taken two soft steps forward by then, and he had only to swing. The Reaper was clubbed in his right hand, and he brought the butt end down on the top of Nasal-voice Ezeff’s skull-tight flying cap as if he were trying to ram a stake through the surface rock of Old Nameless.

  “WHAT happened over there on the Mound?” he inquired in a voice that kept wanting to quaver. He was hurriedly pulling on Nasal-voice’s flight suit.

  “Here’s his goggles,” said Peer, also shakily. “Tell you tonight about the Mound. But Santis was right!”

  “That’s what it sounded like,” Channok admitted. He slipped on the goggles. “Do I look like this Ezeff now?”

  “Not very much,” Peer said doubtfully. “You still got that nose and that jaw. Better hold me close up to your face! I’ll put on a good act.”

  “All right. As soon as I set you down in the lock, jump past the guard and yell, or something. If he looks after you, we mightn’t have to kill this one.” He held out his arms. “Hop up! We’d better get started before those last two on the Ra-Twelve decide to come over.”

  Peer hopped up. Channok wrapped his right arm carefully around her. They looked at each other thoughtfully for a moment.

  “All set?” he asked.

  “Sure,” said crew-member Peer. She smiled faintly.

  He triggered the jets with his left hand, and they shot upwards. Peer drew a deep breath.

  “Quit bossing me around all the time, you big lug!” she yelled suddenly. She reached up for that nose and gave it a good yank.

  “All right,” Channok muttered, startled. “You don’t have to be so realistic! He can’t even see us yet!”

  “Just becaus
e you’re bigger’n me!” shrieked Peer as they soared over the top of the rocks into view of the Asteroid’s lock. She hooked a smart right to Channok’s left ear.

  “Cut that out now, Peer!” he ordered futilely.

  He was lightly battered all around by the time they reached the Asteroid’s lock, though the act did get them in safely. But then—whether it was the nose or the jaw—the instant he dropped Peer to her feet, the guard stopped laughing and brought a gun out and up faster than Channok ever had seen a man produce one before. However, the Reaper had been ready in his hand all the time; so, with a safe fraction of a second to spare, it talked first—

  The glare of the discharge seemed about fifty times brighter than normal.

  “Hit the floor, Channy!” he heard Peer’s shout.

  He hit it without thought, dropping over the dead guard’s legs . . .

  Sound rammed at him enormously, roared on and began banging itself about and away among distant mountains. The Asteroid’s floor had surged up ponderously, settled back, quivered a bit and become stable again.

  “An earthquake,” Channok muttered, sitting up dazedly, “was exactly all we needed right now!”

  “That wasn’t any earthquake!” said Peer, standing pale-faced above him. “Get up and look!”

  LONG VEILS of stuff, presumably solid chunks of mountain, were drifting down the distant, towering face of the cliff at the foot of which they had buried the Ra-Twelve. Rising to meet them, its source concealed beyond the horizon of the plain, was the slow, grey cloud of some super-explosion.

  “I guess,” he said slowly, “one of those two must have got curious about Koyle’s wall-safe!”

  “We were pretty smart about that,” nodded Peer.

  “We were, for once!” Channok agreed. He was looking around for something to sit down on quietly when he caught sight of the dead guard again. He started violently.

  “Almost forgot about him! I guess now I’ll have to bury him, and that Ezeff, the first thing. Maybe this one is carrying something that will show who they were.” He found something almost instantly—and he was glad then that Peer was still watching the oily writhings of the cloud across the plain. It was in a flat steel case he took out of one of the dead man’s pockets: the identification disk of a member of the Imperial Secret Service—

  The Service!

  And they would have murdered us, he thought, shocked. They were going to do it!

  He turned the guard over on his back.

  A big muscular young man with a look of sudden purpose and confidence still fixed on his face. It was the same face as the one on the disk.

  Channok put the disk back in its case and shoved the case into the dead man’s pocket. He stood up, feeling rather sick. Peer turned around from the lock and regarded him reflectively for a moment.

  “You know, Channy,” she stated carefully, “if you can’t help it, it doesn’t count.”

  He looked back at her. “I guess not,” he said—and suddenly, for a moment, he could see four men marching one after the other down into the Mound. “Of course, it doesn’t count!” he told her firmly.

  VIII

  THEY WORKED HARD AT shifting the cargo into the cache, but the Nameless Sun was beginning to slide down behind the mountains before they were finished. And by the time Channok had rammed the tunnel full of rocks with the tractor and cemented them into a glassy plug with the drill-blast, and scattered a camouflaging mess of boulders over everything, only a foggy red glow over the mountain crests, half obscured by the lingering upper drifts of the explosion of the Ra-Twelve, remained of the day.

  There was no moon, but the sky had come full of stars big and little over the opposite section of the plain; and so there was light enough to make out the dark hump of the Mound in the distance. Every time Channok looked in that direction, the low, sinister pile seemed to have edged a little closer; and he looked as often as his work gave him a chance to do it. Santis might have been right in stating that the Mound wasn’t dangerous if you didn’t get too close to it—but the instant he suspected there might be something going on over there, Channok was going to hop off the tractor, grab up Peer and get off Old Nameless at the best speed he and the Asteroid could produce.

  However, the Mound remained quiet. With everything done, he gave Peer a last ride back to the Asteroid on the tractor, ran it up the ramp into the storage section and closed the rear lock. Then they discovered they’d left then lunch containers lying among the rocks.

  If he’d been alone, Channok would have left them there. But Peer looked so matter-of-fact about it that he detached the tractor’s headlight and started back with her on foot. It was only a couple of hundred yards, and they found the containers without any difficulty. The Mound seemed to have moved a little closer again, but not too much. He gave it only a casual glance this time.

  “Where are your friends, the ghouls?” he inquired, shining the light around the rocks as they started back. The grisly creatures had put in a few cautious appearances during the afternoon, but their nerves seemed to have suffered even more than his own from all that had happened.

  “The ghouls always hit their burrows at sundown,” Peer explained. “They’re not like the story ones.”

  “What do they find to eat around here?” Channok inquired.

  “Some sorts of rocks. They’ve got no real teeth but their mouth is like a grinder inside. Most of the rest of their insides, too, Santis said. I had a tame one I used to pitch stones at and he’d snap ’em up. But all that weren’t blue he’d spit out. The blue ones went right down—you could hear them crunching for about a foot.”

  “What a diet!” Channok commented. Then he stopped short. “Say, Peer! If they bite like that, they could chew right into our cache!”

  “They won’t,” said Peer. “Come on.”

  “How do you know?” Channok asked, following her.

  “They can’t bite through a good grade of steel-alloy. And they don’t like its taste anyhow. Santis said so.”

  WELL, IT HAD BEEN Santis this and Santis that for quite a while now! Peer’s father seemed to be on record with a definite opinion on just about everything. And what made him think he knew what a ghoul liked to chew on?

  Perhaps Channok couldn’t be blamed too much. He was dog-tired and dirty and hungry, He’d killed his first two men that day, and not in fair fight either but with an assassin’s sneak thrusts, from behind and by trickery; and he’d buried them, too. He’d seen the shining ISS disclose itself in action as something very tarnished and ugly, and a salvaged ship worth a fortune go up in a cloud of writhing grey smoke . . .

  There had been a number of other things—close shaves that had felt too close, mostly.

  At any rate, Channok stated, in flat unequivocal terms, that he didn’t wish to hear anything else that Santis had said. Not ever!

  “You’re taking the wrong attitude,” Peer informed him, frowning. “Santis is a very smart man. He could teach you a lot!”

  “What makes you think I want to learn anything from a space-rat?” Channok inquired, exasperated.

  Peer stopped short. “That was a dirty thing to say!” she said in a low, furious voice. “I’m not talking to you any more.”

  She drew away till there was a space of about six feet between them and marched on briskly towards the Asteroid, looking straight ahead.

  Channok had to hurry to keep abreast of her. He watched her in the starlight for a few moments from the corners of his eyes. He probably shouldn’t have used that term—the half-pint did look good and mad!

  “Tsk! Tsk!” he said, disturbed.

  Peer said nothing. She walked a bit faster. Channok lengthened his stride again.

  “Who’s my nice little girl friend?” he inquired wheedlingly.

  “Shuddup!” growled Peer.

  She climbed into the Asteroid ahead of him and disappeared while he sealed the locks. The control room was dark, but he felt she was around somewhere. He switched on the power and t
he instruments. Familiar dim pools of green and pink gleamings sprang up in quick sequence like witchfire quivering over the control desk. Perhaps it wasn’t an exceptionally beautiful sight, but it looked homelike to Channok. Like fires lighting up on a hearth.

  “Well, let’s see you handle this takeoff!” he invited the shadows around him briskly. This time there weren’t any mountains nearby to worry about.

  “You handle it,” Peer said from behind his shoulder. “It’s my turn to laugh.”

  She did, too, a few minutes later—loud and long! After he’d got over the first shock of narrowly missing the Mound, Channok gave a convincing imitation of a chagrined pilot and indignantly blamed the Asteroid . . .

  HE’D GUIDED THEM halfway out of the Nameless System when she came behind the control chair in the dark, wrapped her arms in a stranglehold around his neck, and fondly bit his ear.

  “Cut it out,” Channok choked.

  “Just the same,” stated Peer, loosening her grip a trifle, “you’re not so smart, like Santis is!”

  “I’m not, eh?”

  “No,” said Peer. “But Santis said you would be some time. ‘That Channok’s going to make a real spacer!’ he said. ‘Just give him a chance to catch on.’ ”

  “Well,” Channok muttered, secretly flattered, “we’ll hope he was right.”

  “And, anyway,” said Peer, “I LOVE you just as much!”

  “Well, that’s something, too!” Channok admitted. He was beginning to feel very much better.

  “And guess what I’ve got here,” Peer said tenderly.

  “What?”

  “A nice, soapy cloth. For what you said when you saw the first ghoul. So just open that big trap right up now, Channy!” He couldn’t tell in the dark; but it tasted like she’d taken the trouble to mix something extra foul into the soap lather, too.

  “And after you’ve stopped spitting bubbles,” said crew-member Peer, who was switching on all lights to observe that part of the business, “I’ll tell you what I saw on the Mound.”

  Channok shuddered.

  “If you don’t mind, Peer,” he suggested soapily, “let’s wait with that till we’re a lightyear or two farther out!”