Repairmen of cyclops ace.., p.1
Repairmen of Cyclops (Ace Edition), page 1
19-07-2023
WHAT PRICE ETERNAL YOUTH?
The Corps Galactica, the Galaxy’s police force, had pledged itself to a policy of non-interference with the backward Zarathustra Refugee Planets. Langenschmidt, the Corps chief on the planet Cyclops, was content with this ruling. After all, if the refugee planets could form their own civilizations from scratch, logically they would come up with cultures suited to their own needs.
However, when the case of Justin Kolb came to his attention, Langenschmidt was forced to rethink the problem.
Kolb’s accident with the wolfshark revealed to the Corps’ medicos the leg-graft that had been done on him. It was a perfect match—only its gene-pattem wasn’t Cyclopean, and limb-grafting wasn’t practiced on Cyclops. Where then had the leg come from, who had been the unknown repairmen, and wasn’t this something that might be violating galactic law?
Turn this book over for
second complete novel
JOHN BRUNNER
is the author of these outstanding Ace novelsi
SECRET AGENT OF TERRA (F-133)
THE SUPER BARBARIANS (D-547)
TIMES WITHOUT NUMBER (F-161)
LISTEN! THE STARS! (F-215)
THE SPACE-TIME JUGGLER (F-227)
THE ASTRONAUTS MUST NOT LAND (F-227)
THE RITES OF OHE (F-242)
CASTAWAYS’WORLD (F-242)
TO CONQUER CHAOS (F-277)
ENDLESS SHADOW (F-299)
THE REPAIRMEN
OF CYCLOPS
John Brunner
ACE BOOKS, INC.
1120 Avenue of the Americas
New York, N.Y. 10036
the repairmen of cyclops
Copyright ©, 1965, by Ace Books, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Cover by Jack Goughan.
enigma from tantalus
Copyright ©, 1965, by Ace Books, Inc.
Printed in U.SA.
I
The sky rang with the reverberation of fierce white sunlight like the interior of a blue drum. Wind hot as the breath of a furnace teased the silver ocean into ripples, and the ripples shattered the sun’s image into a blazing pathway of diamond fragments. Itching with sweat, aching with tension, Justin Kolb had to narrow his eyes even behind his wholeface visor because the response-limit of the glass was exceeded if he turned his head towards that glistening track over the water and the opacity curve took a sudden dive towards complete blankness.
Maddeningly, it was to sunward that he had caught the first wing-glints.
He had expected that the sight of the Jackson’s buzzards would crystallize his formless tension into the old familiar excitement, re-unite mind and body into the efficient combination, as much weapon as person, which was Justin Kolb at peak operational efficiency. He had been trying for so long to get away on his own like this, on the hunter’s trail which now had to make do for his old, preferred pastimes, that the strain of habituation to waiting had soured his keen anticipation of the chase.
Only till I see the buzzards, he had promised himself. And then—
But he’d seen the buzzards at last, when he had half decided he was too far north even at this season, two days past midsummer, and the instant of thrill had been—an instant. Now he was back in the slough of dreary awareness which had plagued him the whole of yesterday and the whole of the day before. He was conscious of suffocating heat, of blinding brightness, of prickling perspiration, of cramp from keeping the skimmer level and aligned despite the tug of the waves. His hands were slippery on the controls, and the hard butt of his harpoon-gun seemed to take up twice as much room on the skimmer’s deck as it usually did.
Briefly, he shut his eyes, wishing with all his force that somehow time could turn back and he could be free to return to space.
But Cyclops was a relatively poor world. It could not support luxury spaceflight. Out there, a man had to be productive—mining asteroids, servicing solar power relays, doing some clock-around job with the absolute concentration of machinery.
What the hell am I now? A gigolo.
The thought passed. True or not, he was at least able to indulge this much of his thirst for excitement and challenge; if he had taken any other of the courses open to him, he would have been drudging away this glorious summer in a city or on a farm or in some squalid fishing-port, pestered continually by the demands of other people, by the need to stack up work-credits, by holes in his shoes or leaks in his roof.
Even her high-and-mightiness is preferable to that…
He blinked. The wing-glints had come again, and this time remained in view instead of vanishing into the blur of heat-haze and shimmery reflection along the skyline. His pulse beat faster as he began to count: five, six—eight, ten, at least a dozen and possibly more.
Name of the cosmos, but it must be a giant!
For one moment, uncharacteristic alarm filled him. He had come deliberately to this northern extreme of the wolfsharks’ range, because those that beat a path of slaughter more than a hundred miles from the equatorial shallows which were their customary habitat were certain to be the largest and greediest specimens, and after his long impatient chafing in Frecity he had felt nothing less than a monster would compensate him.
But seeing a dozen or more buzzards hovering was a shock.
It was perhaps the most characteristic sight on Cyclops: Jackson’s buzzards, swift, cruel-taloned, steely-winged, on the track of a wolfshark, which killed for savage delight and not for hunger, so that even the monstrous appetites of the birds were easily glutted by its gore-leaking victims. At this time of year, nearer the equator, one could look out over the sea and espy as many as five or six groups of the carrion-eaters following the blood-smeared killers, for the ocean teemed with life.
Yet it was rare to see more than six buzzards to every wolfshark. By twos and threes, they would sate themselves and flap heavily away, while others took their place, the total number in the sky remaining roughly constant. And there were reasons why those that roamed furthest north were followed usually only by two or three buzzards: first, the sea offered fewer victims and hence less carrion; second, the birds were still feeding their young at this time of year, and could not wander too far from their breeding-mats, the vast raft-like assemblies of Cyclops kelp which occurred only in a narrow belt around the planet’s center.
Nonetheless, here it was: a wolfshark so big, so fast, and so murderous that a hundred miles away from home it was killing in quantities great enough to tip the balance in the buzzards’ dim minds on the side of greed rather than loyalty to their offspring.
He pursed his lips and eased his harpoon-gun closer to the firing-notch cut in the forward gunwale of the skimmer. Would one shot do the job? Would it be better to load first with an unlined harpoon, to weaken the killer, before risking a shot with line attached and the consequent danger of being dragged to the bottom? Had this enormous beast been attacked and escaped before—if it had, how many times? The more often, the warier it would be of an approaching skimmer, and the more likely it would be to attack even if there was easy prey closer to hand.
He weighed the possibilities with half his mind, while with the other half he reviewed the area where he found himself.
This was the water-hemisphere of Cyclops, insofar as the differentiation was meaningful. It was a shallow-sea planet—its moon being rather small, and incapable of raising large tides either in the crustal material or in the oceans, although its sun exerted considerable tidal influence.
The shallowness of the sea, combined with a total volume of water close to the average for Class A planets (those on which human beings could survive, eating some of the vegetation and at least a few of the native animals) meant that the dry-land area was chopped up into small sections. The other half of the planet boasted some quite sizeable islands, and even a quasi-continent consisting of a score of large islands linked by isthmuses. This side was sparsely inhabited, and the largest island within hundreds of miles was officially not even part of Cyclops, but a repair and recreation base for the Corps Galactica.
A certain amount of fishing; a certain amount of scrap-reclamation; some terrafarms on islands isolated enough to be worth maintaining as pure-human ecological units against the risk of drifting seeds and wandering fauna from the Cyclops-normal islands around them—that was the sum of human engagement with this hemisphere, apart from solar and tidal power installations operating with a minimum of manned supervision.
Kolb hesitated. Then he gave a harsh laugh. Was he going to let the risk of dying alone and far from rescue prevent him from going after this record-breaking wolfshark? He would never be able to face his image in the mirror again!
In any case, out in space he had faced death not hundreds, but hundreds of thousands of miles from his fellow men.
His mind darkened briefly. He never cared to recall the circumstances that had brought him back from space to a planet-bound existence, and forbidden him to combine his lust for danger with valuable work. There was nothing of value to anyone but himself in this single-handed hunting; men had shared Cyclops with wolfsharks for long enough to determine the limits within which they could be a nuisance, and if the necessity arose, the species was culled efficiently and with precision by teams of men working from the air.
In fact, thought Kolb grayly, there’s damned little value to anybody in anything I’ve done with my life lately. Least of all to me…
Slowly, as the wing-glints came closer, following a line that would pass him within some four or five miles and if extended would eventually approach the island where the Corps Galactica maintained the repair base, a kind of muted exultation filled him. He could see now that the buzzards were too full already to make more than token swoops on what the wolfshark killed, yet—as though admiring the energy of the beast—they none of them made to flap back to the south and their breeding-mats.
It’ll break all the records. I never even heard of such a giant!
He put aside the unlined harpoon which his hand had automatically sought for the first shot. With fingers as exact as a surgeon’s, he loaded a harpoon with line attached, and laid the gun in its firing-notch.
Then he closed his left hand on the control levers, and without a tremor fed power to the reactor.
The skimmer leapt up on its planes with a shriek loud enough to startle a wolfshark at twice this range, and instantly the wheeling buzzards disgorged the last food they had eaten and climbed a safe hundred feet into the sky. Just audible over the thrum of power from his craft, Kolb heard their whickering cries, like the neighing of frightened horses.
And one of his questions was answered, anyway. This wolfshark had been attacked before, often enough to recognise a skimmer for the danger it represented. It forgot its business of stitching a line of destruction across the peaceful ocean, and spun around in the water to confront the fragile boat. It lowered its tail and spread its fans, and its head rose to the surface.
Kolb’s self-possession wavered, so that he had to cling desperately to his unverbalised decision: it doesn’t matter if I die or not! Thinking of it as huge, and seeing how huge it was, were two different things.
How big, then? Fifty feet from fan-tip to fan-tip, oscillating in the water like a manta ray, but having a tapered body which was all keel for the muscles driving those fans, perfectly streamlined; a mere twitch, a single shrug of those muscles would hurl it torpedo-swift on anything else which swam the waters of Cyclops, and jaws which could open to engulf a man would clamp serrated rows of fangs into, and through, the victim. The bite killed, and the killer forgot. In summer, it was never hungry. It swallowed what its jaws held, and that sufficed until the next kill, minutes later.
Kolb silenced the yammering alarms in his mind and lined up the sights of his gun rock-steady on the center of the maw.
And then, with the distance closing to two hundred yards, a hundred and fifty, there came the boom.
It rocked the skimmer. It startled the wolfshark. It was the noise of a Corps Galactica spacecraft braking at the edge of atmosphere to put down at the repair base.
By a reflex not even the danger of death could overrule, ex-spaceman Justin Kolb glanced up, and the sun shone full on his wholeface visor, triggering and overloading the glare response, so that he was blind. He cried out, his hand closing on the trigger of his gun. The harpoon whistled wide of a target, and the wolfshark charged.
II
During the flight Maddalena Santos had mostly sat staring at nothing, turning over and over in her mind the decision which now confronted her: to stay on, or not, in the Patrol Service.
Three other passengers were aboard—personnel from an airless Corps base further out towards the limits of the explored galaxy, on rotating local leave and very excited about it. Two of them were men. The fact that these men looked at her once only told her something about the effect of the last twenty years on her appearance.
It was one thing to know that she was assured of another two centuries of life. It was another to realize on this first visit to civilization in so long a time how deep the impact of two decades on a barbarian world had gone.
She was assured of her longevity by the Patrol’s payscale; in a galaxy where the older worlds were so rich it literally made no difference whether a given individual worked or not, it required either accidental dedication or a tempting bait to enlist volunteers for the necessary drudgery of governmental service.
Not that you can really call it government, Maddalena reminded herself listlessly. It’s more like herding cattle. And lazy cattle, at that.
The other branches of government service paid at lower rates; only the Patrol paid ten-for-one in the unique currency of life.
She had served twenty years as an on-planet agent, among stinking barbarians lost in a mud-wallow, and she was entitled—if she chose to take it here and now—to a guaranteed two centuries of comfortable, healthy life, anywhere she chose. She could even go clear back to Earth, for she had been born there.
Wistfully, she looked at the black star-spangled backdrop of space, wondering what had happened on the mother world in the period she had been away.
She had been so optimistic… Right at the beginning of her career, when she was making out so badly in the Corps that she risked not even being promoted lieutenant from her initial probationer status—and hence losing for ever her chance at longevity-payment—she had saved everything and indeed acquired some small reputation by a successful coup on a barbarian planet: one of the isolated Zarathustra Refugee Planets where fugitives had survived after fleeing the hell of the Zarathustra nova more than seven centuries previous.
But when she was offered a post as an on-planet agent, supervising and watching the progress of these stranded outcasts of humanity, since she was not permitted to return to the world where she had stirred up such a to-do, she had had to pick almost at random from the existing four or five vacancies.
And she had realized quite shortly after being assigned her post, in which the minimum stay was twenty years, that she had chosen wrong.
It had seemed that something was going to happen on the planet she selected—a transition from the typical mud-grubbing peasant level where many of the refugees had got stuck to an expanding phase of incipient civilization, with some industrialization and a great deal of cross-cultural influence—fascinating material to study at first-hand.
But that occurrence depended on the survival of an organizational genius who had inherited the headship of a strategically sited city-state. And within a month of her arrival, one of his jealous rivals assassinated him and seized power, condemning the planet to at least one more generation of stagnancy.
She was absolutely forbidden to interfere. And, having to sit helplessly by and watch nothing happen, she had grown so bored she hardly dared think about it.
Now was time for leave, and reassignment. Her “death” had been arranged; her successor had been briefed and was even now aboard the Patrol ship which would land him with utter secrecy to take over his carefully prepared role in the local society… and she was on her way to Cyclops, a planet she had never conceived she might want to visit.
Yet she had welcomed the reasonless order to come here before proceeding on leave. The delay gave her time to arrive at the decision she had postponed so long: stay on, ask for transfer to some lower-paying job, or resign?
She thought enviously of Gus Langenschmidt, the Patrol Major who had maintained the beat including her assigned world when she first went there; he was aging, graying, even running to fat when she last saw him, yet because he could think of no better purpose to which to devote his accrued longevity, he was continuing far beyond the maximum service-time which qualified for ten-to-one pay. Five centuries was the limit of credit. Fifty years in the Patrol.
More than the total of years I’ve lived, Maddalena reflected. How is Gus? Where is he? It would have been easier to endure my job if I’d known he was still going to call two or three times a year—but they pulled him off his beat to do something else when he topped the limit, and I could never like his successor so well.
The communicators announced the imminence of planetfall. The whisper of air began on the hull, like the drumming of scores of marching feet. Maddalena leaned back and closed her eyes, struggling once more with the irresoluble problem. She scarcely noticed the actual landing period, although her fellow passengers were chattering and joking and exchanging snippets of information about Cyclops. A rough world, they thought it was.
