Collected short fiction, p.686
Collected Short Fiction, page 686
The unfelt pain was the worst. Every explosion produced noise and thrust, but it also sleeted a few more curies of radiation through the crew’s bodies and brought each member a few hours nearer to death. As the damage was not felt—and there was nothing that could be done about it—the beings seldom spoke of it to each other.
For a half-dozen periods no further violence occurred on board and the Aurora went on about its business. Pertin reserved his time in the cocoon for taping his endless reports to Sun One and for inspecting and studying the observation results on Object Lambda. When there was the blissful floating surcease—for half an hour or so at a time—he used it to roam around the ship. His announced purpose was to watch out for trouble. As time passed and trouble did not come he stopped talking about it, but continued to roam. He was interested in the ship on its own merits. Simply by its novelty it helped take his mind off the growing number of things he didn’t want to think about. The Aurora was the first real spaceship he had ever seen. The concept seemed strange to him, considered against the tens of thousands of light-years he had traveled since he volunteered for tachyon transmission from Earth. It was normal enough, though. Sun One was thick with beings who had crossed and recrossed the galaxy a dozen times and never seen a spaceship at all.
Object Lambda was getting perceptibly closer—not to the eye, to be sure. No eye on the ship was in a position to see it anyway. But the cameras were able to make out more and more detail—not easily or well, because its intrinsic luminosity was so very low and in the low-energy long-wave part of the spectrum at that. They had even discovered that Lambda was not alone in space. Huge as it was, nearly two A.U. in diameter, it carried with it little orbiting fleas. The biggest of them was not much more than a mile through and the distance was still enormous, but the T’Worlie instruments had managed to detect them, even identify them. The longest periods of free-fall came when the T’Worlie deployed their photon mirrors at the end of a tether, far from even the vibration of a footstep or shifting weight of robot mass in the ship—then their optical emulsions greedily drank up the scant flow of photons from Lambda and converted them into images.
If they had had a great deal of time, they could have answered all questions from there, or nearly all. They were in intergalactic space, and there was no such thing as haze beyond the advance scattering of their own rocket ejecta. But they had no time—the delta-V equation still ruled them and one of its tricky parentheses said that deceleration early was worth twice as much as deceleration late, since it gave them more time to slow down before they reached _ the neighborhood of Lambda. And then there was the mere fact of their rapid approach. The image did not remain still in the T’Worlie mirrors. It grew. Minutely, to be sure, but enough so that an exposure for more than an hour or so began to fuzz.
Even so, they learned. The nearest to pleasure Pertin ever found in a T’Worlie was when a particularly fine series of photographs had been taken and it was found to show a hint, a shadow, finally an orbital line for the biggest of the objects that circled Lambda. The pleasure was spoiled for Pertin when the calculations of orbit and time turned out to be impossible; Lambda would have had to have the density of the solar wind to have such a slow satellite. But the T’Worlie didn’t mind. Explanations would come. If not then, later.
V
BETWEEN the hours of thudding acceleration and the briefer periods of his frenzied darting about the ship, Pertin was nearly always bone-weary and aching. Sleep did not rest him. Communication with Sun One was more and more an effort. The twelve-hour wait between transmission and reply—often it was more, when the other beings on the ship had queued up for their own transmissions—destroyed the rhythm of communication. By the time he had a response to his report of the attack on the instrument chamber he was already relaxing in his comforting awareness that the attack had not been repeated. Once he himself—or anyway that other self named Ben Charles Pertin—reported to him. The experience put Ben James Pertin into a tailspin that only a carefully metered dose of tranquilizers from the cocoon’s store could deal with. From the expression on the other Ben Pertin’s face, it was some strain for him, too. But the worst from Sun. One was not from his other self; it was from Gerald York Bielowitz, who acknowledged a report, suggested some additional instrument readings that would be desirable, started to sign off, hesitated and then added: “Oh, you’ll be interested, I think. Zara Doy and Ben Charles were married three hours ago.”
Pertin did not remember turning off the stereo stage or seeing the little figure collapse. He lay there for a long time while the cocoon stroked and soothed him, lifted him, lowered him, gently massaged what pains it could from his limbs. At some point he fell asleep. In his dream Ben Charles Pertin married Zara Doy, but he was Ben Charles and the two of them, intoxicated with the wine they drank and with each other, spoke sadly and wistfully about the other Ben Pertin who was busy about the task of dying on an alien spaceship a galaxy away. When he woke up and remembered he was that other Ben Pertin he was in an instant unfocused rage.
IT WAS Doc Chimp who woke him. “Hey, Boss,” he whined. “Listen, wake up. I’ve been limping around this hellhole of a ship looking for the Scorpian robot and—”
“Shut up,” snarled Pertin through the outside communicator of his cocoon. His tone took the chimp aback. He slumped on his haunches, staring at Pertin’s cocoon. He was in bad shape, Pertin saw, unwilling to care about what he saw—the bright green plume was sagging under the thrust of the rockets, the paws and knuckles were scarred and stained. That was why he was there, of course—feet and paws. He could withstand the constantly varying G-force of the thrusters with only a good deal of pain, so it was his job to do what Pertin could not when he was bound to the cocoon. A part of Pertin’s brain told him that if he tried he probably could find ways of making the job easier.
The chimp’s expression abruptly was no longer woebegone. It was angry. “Sure,” he said thickly, “I’ll shut up. Why not? We’ll all shut up before long. Dead beings are all pretty quiet.”
Pertin fought to control his anger. “We’ll be dead all right. What difference does it make? Do you think this is a real life, what we’re doing here? Back on Sun One we’re alive and well—this is only a dream!”
The chimp wailed, “Ben James’, I’m tired and I hurt. I’m sorry if I said something wrong. Look, I’ll go away and come back, only—”
“Do that,” snapped Pertin, and turned off the outside communicator.
The agitated hairy face stared dolefully in at him. Doc Chimp was by no means a jungle primate. The shape of his skull was different. The structure of his respiratory system was different. The very chemicals that flowed in his blood were different. But he was not human either. Doc Chimp—his formal name was not that, but it was all Pertin had ever called him—was one of the mutated animals that had been constructed for special purposes in the molecular biology plants on Earth. His quadridexterous limbs made the ape particularly useful even in free-fall, where he could fling himself about with perfect ease from toe-rest to hand-hold, while humans like Pertin clumsily sprawled and spun. But he had his drawbacks.
A chimpanzee is simply not a human. His physiology is one count against him. He cannot develop the brain of a human because his skull is the wrong shape—and because the chemistry of his blood does not carry enough nourishment to meet the demands of abstract thought. He cannot fully master speech because he lacks the physical equipment to form the wide variety of phonemes in human language. The molecular-biology people knew how to deal with that. They could do things like widening the angle of the cranium called the kyphosis, thus allowing the brain to round out full frontal lobes, or restructuring tongue and palate, even adding new serum components to the blood like the alpha, globulins that bind human hemoglobin.
In practical terms what had been done to Doc Chimp and his siblings was to speed up evolution. But that was not quite enough. Two generations back Doc Chimp’s ancestors could form only one or two of the simplest words and learn rote tricks—they lacked conceptual thought entirely. Doc Chimp had capacity. He did not have background or tradition. His 600 kyphosis was close to the human average so that his skull was domed—he possessed a forehead, could remember complicated instructions and perform difficult tasks. He was capable of assimilating the equivalent of a trade-school education in skill and of conducting the equivalent of cocktail-party conversation in performance. What he lacked was ego. His psychological profile was high in cyclothymia but also in ergic tension—he was always adventurous and always afraid. His emotional index was about equal to a human five-year-old’s. Frightened, he ran. Angered, he struck out. Baffled, he wept.
Staring back through the cover of the cocoon, Pertin relented. “Sorry,” he said, snapping the communicator back on. “What were you trying to tell me?”
“I’ve lost the Scorpian,” wailed the chimp.
“Well? Are you supposed to be his keeper?”
“Be easy on me, Ben James,” begged the chimpanzee. “I hurt all over. The robot was supposed to be getting ready for some new instruments that were coming in. He isn’t there. The stuffs piling up in the transmission chamber and nobody to do anything about it. I’m afraid it’ll get damaged.”
“What about what’s-her-name—Angel? Can’t she store it?”
“She’s trying. But the Scorpian is a specialist in this stuff and she isn’t. None of the other high-G creatures is, as far as I can tell and—oh, Ben James, I’ve traveled so far trying to find someone who can help!”
He was a pitiable sight, his fur unpreened, his gay clothes smudged and wrinkled. Pertin said, “You’ve done your best, Doc. There is nothing I can do until the thrust stops—half an hour or so. Why don’t you rest up for a while?”
“Thanks, Ben James!” cried the chimp gratefully. “I’ll just take a few minutes. Wake me, will you? I—I—” But he was already clambering into the cocoon, his spiderlike arms shaking with strain. Pertin lay back and closed his own eyes, allowing the cocoon to do its best, which amounted to increasing its rate of stroking his back muscles, trying mindlessly to calm him down.
It had seemed very easy, back on Sun One, to volunteer for a task even though the end of it was his certain death. He had not counted on the fact that death did not come like the turning of a switch but slowly and with increasing pain—or that he would be watching friends die before him:
HE DIDN’T wake the chimp When finally he could move. He thrust his own way to the tachyon transmission chamber, hurling himself down the corridors carelessly and almost slamming into what turned out to be the silver pseudo-girl. He didn’t recognize the creature at first, for she had unfurled enormous silver-film wings and looked like a tinsel Christmas tree angel as she rushed past him.
In the tachyon chamber he found the T’Worlie, Nimmie, supervising an octopoidal creature from one of the Core stars in transporting crated equipment to an empty chamber. “What’s happened? Where did Angel go? What’s this stuff?” Pertin demanded, all at once.
Nimmie paused and hung in the air before him, balancing himself against stray currents of air with casual movements of his wings. He whistled a methodical answer and the I’mal translator converted it to his stately and precise form of speech in English: “Of those events which have occurred that which appears most significant is the arrival of eight hundred mass units of observing equipment. A currently occurring event is that this equipment is in process of being installed. A complicating event is that the Scorpian artificial-intelligence being has elected to engage his attention in other areas. There are other events but of lesser significance. The being you name Angel has gone to bring the Beta Bootis collective beings to assist in the aforesaid installation. The reason for this is that they are catalogued as possessing qualifications on this instrumentation similar to that of the artificial-intelligence Scorpian. The precise nature of the stuff is tachyar observing equipment. I offer an additional observation—the purpose of it is to map and survey Object Lambda. I offer another additional observation—it will add to the radiation load by a factor of not less than three nor more than eight.”
The T’Worlie hung silently in front of him, waiting for him to respond.
It had a long wait. Pertin was trying to assimilate the information be had just received. A factor of not less than three . . .
That meant that his life expectancy was not a matter of months or weeks. It might only be days.
Tachyar was simple enough in concept. It was like the ancient electromagnetic radar sets of Earth—the difference was that it used the faster-than-light tachyons to scan a distant object and return an echo of its shape and size.
Like ancient radar and sonar, tachyar generated a beam and measured reflections. The problem in using tachyar was the magnitude of the beam. Vast energies were used and the fraction wasted because of the natural inefficiency of the process produced ionizing radiation in large amplitudes.
Sun One must be taking the question of Object Lambda’s satellites seriously if it was sending tachyar equipment to study them. The cost was high. It would be paid in the shortened lives of those aboard.
THE single planet of the golden-yellow star Beta Bootis was like a cooler, older Venus. Because it was farther from its sun it was spared the huge flow of heat that cooked Venus sterile, but it possessed the same enormously deep, enormously dense atmosphere. It was spared the loss of its liquid water and its surface was covered an average of thirty miles deep in an oceanic soup. That was where the Boaty Bits had evolved. Aquatic in origin, they could survive on Sun One or the probe ship only in edited forms adapted for air-breathing—they could not live on high-gravity planets at all, since they had only the feeblest mechanisms for propelling themselves about their native seas. An individual Boaty Bit was about as useful as an infant jellyfish, and not much more intelligent. That didn’t matter. The Boaty Bits never operated as individuals. Their swarming instinct was overpowering and linked together they had a collective intelligence that was a direct function of their number. A quarter of a million Boaty Bits equaled a man. On their home planet they sometimes joined in collectives of four or five million or more, but those groupings could be maintained only briefly even in their oceans and were never attained in their air-breathing edited forms.
When they arrived in the tachyon receiver chamber, they immediately took command. They were not specialists in tachyar gear. They were generalists. The skills required to assemble and install the crated instruments were built into their collective intelligence. What they lacked was operating organs, but the T’Worlie, his octopoidal assistant, Ben James Pertin and every other being who came nearby were conscripted to be their hands and legs.
It was slow work. It would have been impossible in a gravity field for the T’Worlie or even for Pertin himself. But in free-fall they were able to tug and guide the components into place and the T’Worlie had mass enough to make the connections and calibrate the equipment. When they were nearly done Doc Chimp turned up, angry because he had been left behind, and his muscle finished the job quickly.
As they were closing up, a blast of white sound came from the tachyon receiving chamber and warning lights flashed. Doc Chimp spun around, his wide jaw gaping. “Something important coming in?” he guessed.
“I don’t know, but let’s go look.” They thrust themselves toward the chamber, got there just as the portal opened.
Three Sheliaks emerged.
They flashed out of the lock with a hollow hooting, long black shapes that rocketed toward the watching Terrestrials and bounced down on the green metal surface of the chamber. They clung in spite of the lack of gravity and flowed abruptly into new shapes—black velvet globes, thigh high.
Three more emerged—and three more. When Fifteen had come to rest on the floor of the chamber the transmission stopped. Without a detectable sign all of them moved in synchronization. From flattened spheres, like baker’s buns set in a tray, they suddenly turned luminous, flowing with patterns of soft color,—then elongated themselves and stretched up tapered necks that rose as tall as a man.
The tallest of them, the first through the chamber and the nearest to Ben James Pertin, made a noise like compressed gas escaping.
Pertin’s I’mal unit translated: “Take notice. We are under the direction of the collective council of Sun One. We are to take command of this vessel and all other beings aboard are to follow our orders.”
Pertin’s curiosity was suddenly transmuted into anger, a radiant rage that flooded his mind and overruled his inhibitions. “The hell you say! I’ve had no such instructions from the Earth representatives and I deny your authority.”
The Sheliak paused, the long neck swaying back and forth. “Your wishes are immaterial,” it stated at last. “We can destroy you.”
Doc Chimp chattered nervously, “Don’t make him mad, Ben James. You know how Sheliaks are.”
Pertin did; they were among the few races carrying built-in weaponry. On the infrequent occasions when the galaxy found itself troubled by unruly barbarians Sheliaks were employed to quiet the opposition—they were the Foreign Legion of the galaxy.
The long neck swayed toward the mutated chimpanzee. From the narrow orifice at its tip, sound exploded again and the translators shouted at the chimp: “Your name. Your function. Reply at once.”
“I am Napier Chimski, technician,” the chimp replied bravely.
The vase shape swung toward Pertin. “Your name arid function.”
“Oh, Ben James Pertin,” he said, distracted by hearing Doc Chimp’s real name for the first time. “I’m an engineer. But don’t go so fast. I’ve just come from Sun One myself and I know there’s no authority for one race to impose its will on another. I will certainly report this at once.”
