Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 35

  THE END OF THE LINE

  A well-integrated civilization gets to be hard to retire from. Civilizations get that way—because the threat of trouble always comes from the other side of the frontier. But the frontier isn’t necessarily geographical!

  The spaceship dropped near evening towards the edge of a curving beach. A half-mile strip of grassy growth stood tall and still behind the beach; and beyond the jungle smoothly marbled prows of pink and gray cliffs swept steeply upwards for nearly two thousand feet to the northernmost shelf of a wide, flat continent. The green-black waters of the planet’s largest ocean stretched away in a glassy curve ahead, broken by two narrow chains of islands some thirty miles out.

  The sleek machine from beyond the stars settled down slowly, a wind thundering out below it and wrinkling the shallows near the beach into sudden zigzag patterns.

  It fell through explosive sprays of dry sand, sank its base twenty feet deep into the rock below and stopped. A sharp click announced the opening of a lock a third of the way up its rounded flank; and seven of the nine members of Central Government’s Exploration Group 1176 came riding out of the lock a moment later, bunched forty feet above the beach on the tip of their ship’s extension ramp.

  Six of them dropped free of the ramp at various points of its swooping descent. They hit the hard sand in a succession of soft, bounceless thumps like so many cats and went loping off towards the water. Grevan alone, with the restraint to be looked for in a Group Commander, rode the ramp all the way down to the ground.

  He stepped off it unhurriedly there: a very big man, heavy of bone and muscle, though lean where weight wasn’t useful, and easy-moving as the professional gladiators and beast-fighters whose training quarters he’d shared in his time. A brooding, implacable expression went so naturally with the rest of it that ordinary human beings were likely to give him one look and step out of his way, even when they weren’t aware of his technical rank of Central Government Official.

  It was a pity in a way that the members of his Exploration Group weren’t so easily impressed.

  Grevan scowled reflectively, watching five of the six who had come out of the ship with him begin shucking off weapon belts, suits and other items of equipment with scarcely a break in their run as they approached the water’s edge. Cusat, Eliol, Freckles, Lancey, Vernet—he checked them off mentally as they vanished a few seconds later, with almost simultaneous splashes, from the planet’s surface. They were of his own experimental breed or something very near it, born in one of Central Government’s germination laboratories and physically, though not quite adults yet, very nearly as capable as Grevan was himself. However, nobody could tell from here what sort of alien, carnivorous life might be floating around beyond this ocean’s shallows—

  They had too good an opinion of themselves!

  Weyer, at any rate, seemed to have decided to stay on shore with his clothes on and his armament handy, in case of trouble. Somewhat reassured, Grevan turned his attention next to a metallic bumping and scraping at the ship’s open lock overhead. Klim and Muscles, K.P.’s for the day, were trying to move a bulky cooking unit out of the ship so the Group could dine outdoors.

  “Boss?” Klim’s clear soprano floated down.

  “Right here,” Grevan called back. “Having trouble?”

  “Looks like we’re stuck,” Klim announced from within the, lock. “Would you come up and . . . no, wait a minute! Muscles is getting it cleared now, I think—Wait till I’ve degraved it again, you big ape! Now, push!”

  The cooker popped into sight with a grinding noise, ejected with considerable violence from the ship’s interior. For a moment, it hung spinning quietly in the air above the ramp, with Klim perched on top. Then Muscles came out through the lock and attached himself to the gadget’s side. They floated down lop-sidedly together, accompanied by tinkling sounds from the cooker’s interior.

  “What’s it going to be tonight?” Grevan asked, reaching up to guide them in to an even landing.

  “Albert II in mushroom sauce,” said Klim. She was a tall, slender blonde with huge blue eyes and a deceptively wistful expression. As he grounded the cooker, she put a hand on his shoulder and stepped down. “Not a very original menu, I’ll admit! But there’s a nice dessert anyway. Flow about sampling some local vegetables to go with Albert?”

  “Maybe,” said Grevan cautiously. “Whose turn is it to sample?” Too often, preoccupied with other matters, he’d discovered suddenly that he’d been roped in again for that chore when the items to be sampled were suspected of being of a particularly unco-operative nature. And then the Group would drop whatever it was doing to gather around and sympathize while he adapted.

  “Vernet’s turn, isn’t it?” said Muscles.

  “Vernet’s the victim,” Klim nodded. “You’re safe this time.”

  “In that case,” Grevan said, relieved, “you’ll find Vernet out there full fathoms five somewhere. Bring her in if you can and we’ll go browse in the shrubbery a bit.”

  “This,” Klim remarked, gazing out over the shore-line towards which Muscles was heading in search of Vernet, “is still the best spot of an all-right little world! Know what the cubs were calling it when we first set down here three weeks ago?” She was Grevan’s junior by a good ten years but a year or so older than the Group’s other members and inclined to regard them all with motherly tolerance. “Our point of no return.”

  Grevan grimaced uneasily, because that phrase did describe the Group’s position here, in one way or another. Never once, in the eight years since Central Government had put him in charge of what had been a flock of rebellious, suspicious and thoroughly “unhappy youngsters, who weren’t even sure whether they were actually human beings or some sort of biological robots, had the question of escaping from CG controls been openly discussed among them. You never knew who might be listening, somewhere. The amazing thing to Grevan even now was that—eight weeks travel on the full fury of their great ship’s drives beyond the borders of Central Government’s sprawling interstellar domain—they did seem to have escaped. But that was a theory that still remained to be proved.

  “Are you going to accept contact with CG tomorrow?” Klim inquired.

  Grevan shrugged. “I don’t know.” Their only remaining connection with CG, so far as they could tell, were the vocal messages which flashed sub-spatially on prearranged occasions between two paired contact sets, one of which was installed on their ship. They had no way of guessing where the other one might be, but it was activated periodically by one of the CG officials who directed the Group’s affairs.

  “I was going to put it to a vote tonight,” Grevan hedged. “They can’t possibly trace us through the sets, and I’d like to hear what they have to say when they find out we’ve resigned.”

  “It might be a good idea. But you won’t get a vote on it.”

  He looked down at her, while she stooped to haul a small portable cooker out of the big one’s interior and slung it over her shoulder.

  “Why not?”

  “The cubs seem to think there’s no way of guessing whether accepting contact at this stage is more likely to help us or hurt its. They’ll leave it up to you to decide.”

  “Aren’t you worried about it at all?” he inquired, somewhat startled. However well he felt he knew the cubs, they still managed to amaze him on occasion.

  Klim shrugged. “Not too much.” She clamped a chemical testing set to the portable cooker. “After all, we’re not going back, whatever happens. If CG’s still got some fancy way of reaching out and stopping us, wherever we are, I’d much rather be stopped out here than get another going-over in one of their psych laboratories—and come out a mindless-controlled this time—”

  She paused. Faint, protesting outcries were arising from a point a few hundred yards out in the water. “Sounds like Muscles caught up with Vernet. Let’s get down to the beach.”

  Vernet raked wet brown hair out of her eyes and indignantly denied that it was her
turn to sample. But the Group contradicted her seven to one, with Lancey withholding his vote on a plea of bad memory. She dried and dressed resignedly and came along.

  The first three likely-looking growths the foraging party tested and offered her were neither here nor there. They put up no worthwhile argument against assimilation and probably would turn out to be nourishing enough. But raw or variously treated and flavored in Klim’s portable cooker, they remained, Vernet reported, as flatly uninspiring as any potential mouthful could hope to be.

  The fourth item to pass the chemical tests was a plump little cabbage-arrangement, sky-blue with scarlet leaf-fringes. She sniffed around it forebodingly.

  “They don’t advertise identity like that for nothing!” she pointed out. “Loaded for bear, I bet!” She scowled at Klim. “You picked it on purpose!”

  “Ho-hum,” Klim murmured languidly. “Remember who had me sampling that large fried spider-type on wherever-it-was?”

  “That was different,” said Vernet. “I had a hunch the thing would turn out to be perfectly delicious!” Klim smiled at her. “I’m K.P. today. I’m having the hunches. How would you like it?”

  “Quick-baked,” snarled Vernet. “And my blood be on your head!” Half a minute later, she nibbled tentatively at a crisped leaf of the cabbage, announced with surprise that it was indeed delicious and helped herself to more. On the third leaf, she uttered a wild whoop, doubled up and began to adapt at speed. That took about twelve seconds, but they allowed a full ten minutes then to let the reaction flush her blood stream. Then Vernet was sampled in turn and staggered back to the beach with a martyred expression, while Klim and Muscles started cabbage-hunting.

  Grevan retired to the ship’s laboratory, where he poured the half cupful of blood he had extracted from the martyr’s veins carefully into a small retort. Ontogenetic adaptation, with reaction-times that crowded zero, to anything new in the way of infections or absorbed venoms was one of the more useful talents of their specialized strain. Considerable unauthorized research and experimentation finally had revealed to them just how they did it. The invading substance was met by an instantaneous regrouping of complex enzyme chains in every body cell affected by it, which matched and nullified its specific harmful properties and left the Group member involved permanently immune to them.

  The experience of getting immunized sometimes included the momentary impression of having swallowed a small but active volcano, but that illusion didn’t last long enough to be taken very seriously by anyone but the sufferer. Vernet’s blood emerged from processing presently in the shape of small pink pills; and just before dinner everybody washed down two each of these and thus adapted the easy way, while the donor denounced them as vampires.

  Albert II, in a vintage mushroom sauce and garnished with quick-baked Vernet Cabbages, was hailed as an outstanding culinary composition all around. Klim took the bows.

  By nightfall, they had built a fire among rocks above the highest tide mark, not far from the edge of the rustling jungle; and a little later they were settled about it, making lazy conversation or just watching the dancing flames.

  Special precautions did not seem required at the moment, though Weyer had reported direct neuronic impressions of carnivorous and aggressive big-life in the immediate neighborhood, and the Group’s investigation of the planet had revealed scattered traces of at least two deep-water civilizations maintained by life forms of unknown type but with suggestively secretive habits. A half dozen forms of sudden death snuggled inside the ornamental little gadgets clamped to their gun belts, not to mention the monstrous argument the pocket-sized battleship which had carried them here could put up; and their perceptions were quick and accurate and very far-ranging. If any of this world’s denizens were considering a hostile first encounter, the Group was more than willing to let them do the worrying about it.

  Not a care in their heads, to look at them, Grevan thought, a trifle enviously. Handsome young animals, just touching adulthood—four young men and four young women, who acted as if they had been sent on a star-hopping picnic, with Grevan trailing along as a sort of scoutmaster.

  Which wasn’t of course, quite fair.

  The cubs were as conscious as he was of the fact that they might still be on a long, invisible leash out here—artificial mental restraints imposed by Central Government’s psychological machines. They had developed a practical psychology of their own to free themselves of those thought-traps, but they had no way of knowing how successful they had been. If any such hypnotic mechanisms remained undiscovered in them, the penalty for defying Central Government’s instructions would he automatic and disastrous. Grevan could see himself again as a frightened, rebellious boy inside a subterranean conditioning vault, facing the apparently blank wall which concealed one of the machines known as Dominators. He heard the flat, toneless voice of the legendary monster, almost as old as Central Government itself, watched the dazzling hypnotic patterns slide and shift suddenly across the wall and felt hard knots of compulsive thought leap up in response and fade almost instantly beyond the reach of his consciousness.

  That had been his first experience with CG’s euphemistically termed “restraints.” The Dominator had installed three of them and let the boy know what to expect if rebellion was attempted again. Two days later, he had skeptically put the power of the restraints to a test, and had very nearly died then and there.

  They would know soon enough. Failure to keep the scheduled Contact tomorrow would trigger any compulsive responses left in them as certainly as direct defiance of CG’s instructions would do. And because they had found finally a world beyond CG’s reach that could be their home, they were going to follow one or the other of those courses of action tomorrow. Looking around at the circle of thoughtfully relaxed young faces, he couldn’t even imagine one of them suggesting the possibility of a compromise with CG instead. After eight years of secret planning and preparing, it wouldn’t have occurred to them.

  He relaxed himself, with a sigh and a conscious effort, releasing his perceptions to mingle with theirs. A cool breeze was shifting overhead, slowly drawing fresh scents from new sources, while unseen night things with thin, crying voices flew out over the sea. The ocean muttered about the lower rocks; and a mile to the east something big came splashing noisily into the shallows and presently returned again to the deeper water. Resting, the cubs seemed to be fitting themselves into the night, putting out tentative sensory roots to gather up the essence of this new world’s life.

  Then their attention began to shift and gather, and Grevan again let his mind follow where they seemed to be pointing without effort of his own.

  It came to him quickly—a composite of impressions which were being picked up individually by one or the other of them and then formed by all into an increasingly definite picture. The picture of a pair of shaggy, shambling appetites working their way awkwardly down the cliffs behind the Group, towards the gleam of the fire.

  The cubs sat still and waited while the things approached, and Grevan watched them, amused and momentarily distracted from his worries. The shaggy appetites reached the foot of the cliff at length and came moving down through the jungle. Heavy-footed but accomplished stalkers, Grevan decided. The local species of king-beast probably, who knew the need of a long, cautious approach before their final rush upon nimbler prey—he filed the fact away for future consideration that a camp fire seemed to mean such prey to them.

  On a rocky ridge two hundred yards above the fire, the stalkers came to a sudden halt. He had an impression of great, gray, shadowy forms and two sets of staring red eyes—

  It would be interesting, he thought, to know just what sort of intuitive alarms went off in the more intelligent forms of alien carnivores whenever they got their first good look at the Group. The cubs still hadn’t moved, but the visitors seemed to have come almost immediately to the conclusion that they weren’t nearly as hungry now as they had thought. They were beginning a stealthy withdrawal—

>   And then Eliol suddenly threw back her head and laughed, a quick, rippling sound like a flash of wicked white teeth; a yell of pure mirth went up from the others, and the withdrawal turned instantly into ludicrously panicky flight.

  The incident had brought them awake and put them into a talkative mood. It might be a good time to find out what they really thought of their chances of breaking free of CG tomorrow. Grevan sat up, waiting for an opening in an impassioned argument that had started up on the other side of the fire.

  There had been a bet involved, it seemed, in that impulsive five-fold plunge into the ocean on landing. Last one in to be tomorrow’s K.P.—and Vernet had come out on the sticky end of the bet.

  Everybody else agreed thoughtfully that it just hadn’t been Vernet’s day. Vernet appeared unreconciled.

  “You knew my gun belt was stuck again,” she accused Eliol. “You had it planned so I’d be last!”

  Eliol, having postponed her own turn at the Group’s least-favored chore for one day by issuing the challenge, permitted herself a gentle chuckle.

  “Teach you to keep your equipment in regulation condition! You didn’t have to take me up on it. Weyer didn’t.”

  “Well, anyway,” said Vernet, “Lancey will help Vernet live through it. Won’t he?”

  “Uh-huh!” beamed Lancey. “You bet!”

  “How he dotes!” Eliol remarked critically. “Sometimes it gets a little disgusting. Take Cusat there—flat on his back as usual. There’s a boy who shows some decent restraint. Nobody would guess that he’s actually a slave to my slightest whim.”

  Cusat, stretched out on the sand nearby, opened one eye to look at her. “Dream on, little one!” he muttered and let the eye fall shut again.

  The others were off on another subject. There had been an alien awareness, Grevan gathered, which had followed the five swimmers about in the water. Not a hostile one, but one that wondered about them—recognized them as a very strange sort of new life, and was somewhat afraid. “They were thinking they were so very—edible!” Eliol said and laughed. “Perhaps they knew the swim was making us hungry! Anyway they kept warning one another to stay out of our sight!”