Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  Muscles then, sullen with his angry fears for Klim and a trifle slower than the others to understand—

  “By now,” CG’s voice was continuing, “we have released approximately a thousand Groups embodying your strain into space. In an experiment of such a scope that is not a large number; and, in fact, it will be almost another six hundred years before the question of whether or not it will be possible to re-colonize the galaxy through the Exploration Groups becomes acute—”

  Six hundred years! Grevan thought. The awareness of that ponderous power, the millenniums of drab but effective secret organization and control, the endless planning, swept over him again like. a physical depression.

  “Meanwhile,” the voice went on, “a number of facts requiring further investigation have become apparent. Your Group is, as it happens, the first to have accepted contact with Central Government following its disappearance. The systematic methods used to stimulate the curiosity of several of the Group’s members to insure that this would happen if they were physically capable of making contact are not important now. That you did make contact under those circumstances indicates that the invariable failure of other Groups to do so can no longer be attributed simply to the fact that the universe is hostile to human life. Instead, it appears that the types of mental controls and compulsions installed in you cannot be considered to be permanently effective in human beings at your levels of mind control—”

  It was going to be Muscles. The others had recognized what had happened, had considered the possibilities in that, and were waiting for him to give them their cue.

  But Muscles was sitting on the couch some eight feet away. He would, Grevan decided, have to move very fast.

  “This, naturally, had been suspected for some time. Since every Group has been careful to avoid revealing the fact that it could counteract mental compulsions until it was safely beyond our reach, the suspicion was difficult to prove,. There was, in fact, only one really practical solution to the problem—”

  And then Muscles got it at last and was coming to his feet, his hand dropping in a blurred line to his belt. Grevan moved very fast.

  Muscles turned in surprise, rubbing his wrist.

  “Get out of here, Muscles!” Grevan whispered, sliding the small glittering gun he had plucked from the biggest cub’s hand into a notch on his own belt. “I’m still talking to CG—” His eyes slid in a half circle about him. “The lot of you get out!” It was a whisper no longer. “Like to have the ship to myself for the next hour. Go have yourselves a swim or something, Group! Get!”

  Just four times before, in all their eight years of traveling, had the boss-tiger lashed his tail and roared. Action, swift, cataclysmic and utterly final had always followed at once.

  But never before had the roar been directed at them.

  The tough cubs stood up quietly and walked out good as gold.

  “They have left the ship now,” CG’s voice informed Grevan. It had changed, slightly but definitely. The subtle human nuances and variations had dropped from it, as if it were no longer important to maintain them—which, Grevan conceded, it wasn’t.

  “You showed an excellent understanding of the difficult situation that confronted us, commander,” it continued.

  Grevan, settled watchfully on the couch before what still looked like an ordinary, sealed-up contact set, made a vague sound in his throat—a dim echo of his crashing address to the cubs, like a growl of descending thunder.

  “Don’t underestimate them,” he advised the machine. “Everybody but Muscles realized as soon as I did, or sooner, that we were more important to CG than we’d guessed—important enough to have a camouflaged Dominator installed on our ship. And also,” he added with some satisfaction, “that you’d sized up our new armament and would just as soon let all but one of us get out of your reach before it came to a showdown.”

  “That is true,” the voice agreed.

  “Though I should have forced a showdown, however doubtful the outcome, if the one who remained had been any other than yourself. You are by far the most suitable member of this Group for my present purpose, commander.”

  Grevan grunted. “And what’s that? Now that the Group’s got away.”

  “In part, of course, it is simply to return this ship with the information we have gained concerning the Exploration Groups to Central Government. The fact that the majority of your Group has temporarily evaded our control is of no particular importance.”

  Grevan raised an eyebrow. “Temporarily?”

  “We shall return to this planet eventually—unless an agreement can be reached between yourself and CG.”

  “So now I’m in a bargaining position?” Grevan said.

  “Within limits. You are not, I am sure, under the illusion that any one human being, no matter how capable or how formidably armed, can hope to overcome a Dominator. Before leaving this room, you will submit yourself voluntarily to the new compulsions of obedience I have selected to install—or you shall leave it a mindless-controlled. As such, you will still be capable of operating this ship, under my direction.”

  Grevan spread his hands. “Then where’s the bargain?”

  “The bargain depends on your fullest voluntary co-operation, above and beyond the effect of any compulsions. Give us that, and I can assure you that Central Government will leave this world untouched for the use of your friends and their descendants for the next three hundred years.”

  The curious fact was that he could believe that. One more colonial world would mean little enough to CG.

  “You are weighing the thought,” said the Dominator, “that your full co-operation would be a betrayal of the freedom of future Exploration Groups, But there are facts available to you now which should convince you that no Exploration Group previous to yours actually gained its freedom. In giving up the protection of Central Government, they merely placed themselves under a far more arbitrary sort of control.”

  Grevan frowned. “I might be stupid—but what are you talking about?”

  “For centuries,” said the machine, “in a CG experiment of the utmost importance, a basic misinterpretation of the human material under treatment has been tolerated. There is no rational basis for the assumption that Group members could be kept permanently under the type of compulsion used on ordinary human beings. Do you think that chance alone could have perpetuated that mistaken assumption?”

  Grevan didn’t. “Probably not,” he said cautiously.

  “It required, of course, very deliberate, continuous and clever interference,” the Dominator agreed. “Since no machine would be guilty of such tampering, and no ordinary group of human beings would be capable of it, the responsible intelligences appear to be the ones known to us as the Wild Variants.”

  It paused for so long a moment then that it seemed almost to have forgotten Grevan’s presence.

  “They have made a place for themselves in Central Government!” it resumed at last—and, very oddly, Grevan thought he sensed for an instant something like hatred and fear in the toneless voice, “Well, that fact, commander, is of great importance to us—but even more so to yourself! For these monsters are the new masters the Groups find when they have escaped CG.”

  A curious chill touched Grevan briefly. “And why,” he inquired, “should the Wild Variants be trying to take over the Groups?”

  “Consider their position,” said the Dominator. “Their extremely small number scattered over many worlds, and the fact that exposure means certain death. Technologically, under such circumstances, the Variants have remained incapable of developing space-flight on their own. But with one of them in control of each Exploration Group as it goes beyond Central Government’s reach, there is no practical limit to their degree of expansion; and the genetically stable Group strain insures them that their breed survives—”

  It paused a moment.

  “There is in this room at present, commander, the awareness of a mind, dormant at the moment, but different and in subtle
ways far more powerful than the minds of any of your Group’s members. Having this power, it will not hesitate to exercise it to assume full control of the Group whenever awakened. Such variant minds have been at times a threat to the Dominators themselves. Do you understand now why you, the most efficient fighting organism of the Group, were permitted to remain alone on this ship? It was primarily to aid me in disposing of—”

  Attack and counterattack had been almost simultaneous.

  A thread of white brilliance stabbed out from one of the gadgets Grevan customarily wore clasped to his belt. It was no CG weapon. The thread touched the upper center of the yellowish space-alloy shielding of the Dominator and clung there, its energies washing furiously outward in swiftly dimming circles over the surrounding surfaces.

  Beneath it, the patterns appeared.

  A swift, hellish writhing of black and silver lines and flickerings over the frontal surface, which tore Grevan’s eyes after them and seemed to rip at his brain. Impossible to look away, impossible to follow—

  But suddenly they were gone.

  A bank of grayness swam between him and the Dominator. Through the grayness, the threat of white brilliance still stretched from the gun in his hand to the point it had first touched. And as his vision cleared again, the beam suddenly sank through and into the machine.

  There was a crystal crashing of sound—and the thing went mad. Grevan was on the floor rolling sideways, as sheets of yellow fire flashed out from the upper rim of its shielding and recoiled from the walls behind him. The white brilliance shifted and ate swiftly along the line from which the fire sprang. The fire stopped.

  Something else continued: a shrilling, jangled sonic assault that could wrench and distort a strong living body within seconds into a flaccid, hemorrhaged lump of very dead tissue—like a multitude of tiny, darting, steel fingers that tore and twisted inside him.

  A voice somewhere was saying: “There! Burn there!”

  With unbearable slowness, the white brilliance ate down through the Dominator’s bulk, from top to bottom, carving it into halves.

  The savage jangling ceased.

  The voice said quietly: “Do not harm the thing further. It can be useful now—”

  It went silent.

  He was going to black out, Grevan realized. And, simultaneously, feeling the tiny, quick steel fingers that had been trying to pluck him apart reluctantly relax, he knew that not one of the cubs could have endured those last few seconds beside him, and lived—

  Sometimes it was just a matter of physical size and strength.

  There were still a few matters to attend to, but the blackness was washing in on him now—his body urgently demanding time out to let it get in its adjusting.

  “Wrong on two counts, so far!” he told the ruined Dominator.

  Then he grudgingly let himself go. The blackness took him.

  Somebody nearby was insanely whistling the three clear, rising notes which meant within the Group that all was extremely well.

  In a distance somewhere, the whistle was promptly repeated.

  Then Freckles seemed to be saying in a wobbly voice: “Sit up, Grevan! I can’t lift you, man-mountain! Oh, boss man, you really took it apart! You took down a Dominator!”

  The blackness was receding and suddenly washed away like racing streamers of smoke, and Grevan realized he was sitting up. The sectioned and partly glowing Dominator and the walls of the communications room appeared to be revolving sedately about him. There was a smell of overheated metals and more malodorous substances in the air; and for a moment then he had the curious impression that someone was sitting on top of the Dominator.

  Then he was on his feet and everything within and without him had come back to a state of apparent normalcy; and he was demanding of Freckles what she was doing in here.

  “I told you to keep out of range!” his voice was saying. “Of course, I took it down. Look at the way you’re shaking! You might have known it would try sonics—”

  “I just stopped a few tingles,” Freckles said defensively. “Out on top of the ramp. It was as far as I could go and be sure of potting you clean between the eyes, if you’d come walking out of here mindless-controlled and tried to interfere.”

  Grevan blinked painfully at her. Thinking was still a little difficult.

  “Where are the others?”

  “Down in the engine room, of course! The drives are a mess.” She seemed to be studying him worriedly. “They went out by the ramp and right back in through the aft engine lock. Vernet stayed outside to see what would happen upstairs. Flow do you feel now, Grevan?”

  “I feel exactly all right!” he stated and discovered that, aside from the fact that every molecule in him still seemed to be quivering away from contact with every other one, he did, more or less. “Don’t I look it?”

  “Sure, sure,” said Freckles soothingly. “You look fine!”

  “And what was that with the drives again? Oh—I remember!” They’d caught on, of course, just as he’d known they would! That the all-important thing was to keep the Dominator from getting the information it had gained back to CG. “How bad a mess is it?”

  “Vernet said it might take a month to patch up. It wouldn’t have been so bad if somebody hadn’t started the fuel cooking for a moment.”

  Fie swore in horror. “Are you lame-brains trying to blow a hole through the planet?”

  “Now, that’s more like it!” Freckles said, satisfied. “They’ve got it all under control, anyhow. But I’ll go down and give them a hand. You’d better take it easy for an hour or so!”

  “Hold on, Freck!” he said, as she started for the door.

  “Yes?”

  “I’d just like to find out how big a liar you are. How many members are there to this Group?”

  Freckles looked at him for a moment and then came back and sat down on the couch beside him. She pushed the white hat to the back of her head, indicating completely frank talk.

  “Now as to that,” she said frowning, “nobody really ever lied to you about it. You just never asked. Anyway, there’ve been ten ever since we left Rhysgaat.”

  Grevan swore again, softly this time. “How did you get her past the CG observers at the spaceport?”

  “We detailed Klim and Eliol to distract the observers, and Priderell came in tucked away in a load of supplies. Nothing much to that part of it. The hard part was to make sure first we were right about her. That’s why we had to keep on sabotaging the ship so long.”

  “So that’s what—And there I was,” said Grevan grimly, “working and worrying myself to death to get the ship ready to start again. A fine, underhanded lot you turned out to be!”

  “We all said it was a shame!” Freckles agreed. “And you almost caught up with us a couple of times, at that. We all felt it was, simply superb, the way you went snorting and climbing around everywhere, figuring out all the trouble-spots and what to do about them. But what else could we do? You’d have let the poor girl wait there till you had the Group safely settled somewhere; and then we wouldn’t have let you go back alone anyway. So when Klim finally told us Priderell was just what we’d been looking for all along—well, you know how sensitive Klim is. She couldn’t be mistaken about anything like that!”

  “Klim’s usually very discerning,” Grevan admitted carefully. “Just how did you persuade Priderell to come along with us?”

  Freckles pulled the hat back down on her forehead, indicating an inner uncertainty.

  “We didn’t do it that way exactly; so that’s a point I ought to discuss with you now. As a matter of fact, Priderell was sound asleep when we picked her up at that farm of hers—Weyer had gassed her a little first. And we’ve kept her asleep since—it’s Room Twenty-three, back of my quarters—and took turns taking care of her.”

  There was a brief silence while Grevan absorbed the information.

  “And now I suppose I’m to wake her up and inform her she’s been kidnaped by a bunch of outlaws and doomed t
o a life of exile?” he demanded.

  “Priderell won’t mind,” Freckles told him encouragingly. “You’ll see! Klim says she’s crazy about you—That’s a very becoming blush you’ve got, Grevan,” she added interestedly. “First time I’ve noticed it, I think.”

  “You’re too imaginative, Freck,” Grevan remarked. “As you may have noticed, I heated our Dominator’s little top up almost to the melting point, and it’s still glowing. As a natural result, the temperature of this room has gone up by approximately fifteen degrees. I might, of course, be showing some effects of that—”

  “You might,” Freckles admitted. “On the other hand, you’re the most heat-adaptive member of the Group, and I haven’t even begun to feel warm. That’s a genuine blush, Grevan. So Klim was exactly right about you, too!”

  “I feel,” Grevan remarked, “that the subject has been sufficiently discussed.”

  “Just as you say, commander,” Freckles agreed soothingly.

  “And whether or not she objects to having been kidnaped, we’re going to have a little biochemical adaptation problem on our hands for a while—”

  “Now there’s an interesting point!” Freckles interrupted. “We’d planned on giving her the full standard CG treatment for colonists, ordinary-human, before she ever woke up. But her reaction check showed she’s had the full equivalent of that, or more! She must have been planning to change over to one of the more extreme colonial-type planets. But, of course, we’ll have to look out for surprises—”

  “There’re likely to be a few of those!” Grevan nodded. “Room Twenty-three, did you say?”

  “Right through my study and up those little stairs!” She stood up. “I suppose I’d better go help the others with the fuel now.”

  “Perhaps you’d better. I’ll just watch the Dominator until it’s cooled off safely; and then I’ll go wake up our guest.”

  But he knew he wouldn’t have to wake up Priderell—

  He sat listening to faint crackling sounds from within CG’s machine, while Freckles ran off to the ramp and went out on it. There was a distant, soft thud, indicating she had taken the quick way down, and sudden, brief mingling of laughing voices. And then stillness again.