Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 8

  “He seems to be alone,” Ronal said.

  “And he doesn’t even seem to know we’re still here.”

  “I wonder if he really cares,” Ronal said, and began walking slowly toward the clearing’s edge.

  “You aren’t going to—”

  “Got a funny feeling. And I want a closer look. He could get that fruit, if—”

  “If he could stand!” Marla completed. The implications of what Ronal suggested came fully upon her for the first time. Quite evidently, she understood now, the all-fours attitude of the Hairy One was not just for ease of jungle travel. It was a permanent attitude because the beast had not yet attained the ability to stand erect!

  “I’ve an idea,” Ronal said. He quickened his stride. “But you’d better go back with Krist and Logan. It’s possible that—”

  “I will not! And what danger is there? For nearly a week we’ve been here, and although we’ve all felt uneasy, this is the first we’ve seen him since that first day. There hasn’t been even a hint of hostility. What more can he be than just a harmless, stupid beast?”

  The Hairy One halted his tree-climbing efforts when he saw them, but made no move to either retreat or advance. As before, he stood immobile and watched. Ronal and Marla approached with the palms of their hands opened and outward, hanging limply at their sides. And as they approached, Ronal swept the jungle edge with his eyes, to peer as deeply into its tangled growth as he could. Nothing moved.

  Within scant yards of the beast, they stopped.

  The Hairy One was watching Marla.

  RONAL dropped to all fours. And it was a peculiar, silent melodrama that followed then. A highly-cultured man from a well-ordered, civilized galaxy, making a crude attempt to teach a beast to walk, on the face of a planet which, but a few days before, he had never known existed.

  Why? Marla wondered. What fascination had there always been between alien cultures, that had always made one attempt to instruct the other in its ways? Certainly Ronal was no scientist, no explorer. Yet, as though he were an appointed ambassador of his own kind, he was attempting the always risky job of finding a common level of understanding with an alien mind.

  Or perhaps it was just natural curiosity, and an overabundance of self-confidence!

  Ronal had imitated the creature’s all-fours shamble until he was beneath the tree limb.

  “Careful,” Marla said. “Don’t give him the idea you’re trying to steal his fruit, or we will be in trouble.”

  Far out from where the fruit hung, Ronal stood up slowly. Then he raised his arms, opened his hands, touched the limb with his fingers.

  Then he dropped back to the all-fours position, and repeated the standing up process.

  Then at length, he pointed to the Hairy One, to the position under the limb above which the fruit swung, and backed slowly to where Marla stood, fascination in her eyes.

  The Hairy One remained immobile. There seemed no flicker of comprehension in his flat, black eyes. Then suddenly, for the quickest flash of an instant, he came almost erect, his arms half upraised!

  Then he dropped back, as though exhausted and baffled by the effort.

  “He did it!” Ronal exclaimed. “He can understand!”

  Ronal went through the weird pantomime again, but although the Hairy One stood once again and even accomplished two staggering steps forward, he dropped back once more without having reached the fruit.

  “We had better go back,” Marla said. “He—it—I don’t think you should’ve, Ronal.”

  “No harm done. But before we give up my little experiment—”

  Ronal reached up, plucked the fruit and in one fluid motion tossed it to the Hairy One. And deftly, it was caught!

  And as quickly thrown forcefully to the ground!

  “You’ve angered him, Ronal! You’ve—”

  “But he could see I wasn’t stealing it—”

  The Hairy One did not move. Crouched, he watched them; watched Marla.

  SUDDENLY, Ronal was clearing a small area of the thick, carpet-like grass. Then in the soft, rich dirt which he had exposed, he began making swift, simple diagrams. They depicted the ship, surrounded by a forest. Then, pointing first to his crude drawing, then to the Hairy One, to themselves, then to the ship, Ronal waited.

  But the beast did not move.

  “Take him along? Back with us?” Marla whispered.

  “Why not?” Ronal answered. “If our experts could communicate with him, or at least study him. there’s no telling—wait!”

  The Hairy One had started to stand, step forward, then stopped.

  “We had better go, Ronal.” Marla was frightened, now. “You’ve made him resent us. We should leave him to this world where he belongs, and we should return to ours where we belong.”

  “One more try. Then, if it doesn’t work—”

  Ronal, almost as though caught in a trance, began to take a slow, cautious step toward the immobile beast before him. And stepped back quickly!

  For the Hairy One had in an instant grabbed from the ground a heavy, club-like stick! Yet he had not raised it, but merely held it meaningfully, pointed downward.

  Ronal stood motionless. The Hairy One watched Marla, then Ronal. Then he dropped his club, silently picked up the fruit he had thrown to the ground, and turned. Then he vanished once more into the jungle.

  A day later, for merely a moment before Logan punched the acceleration warning buzzer for takeoff and switched on the jet detonators; they saw the Hairy One for the last time.

  “Look, Krist! Marla! There he is! And by Betelgeuse if he isn’t standing up!”

  Even at a mile distance they could discern the erect figure of the mute, enigmatic denizen of this strange, new planet—immobile, watching, but on two feet.

  “And on those forelegs of his were more hands than feet—and what someday might be a thumb, to oppose his fingers!” Ronal was saying quietly.

  Marla and Krist knew what was in Ronal’s mind. And Marla was glad they were about to blast off. There had been something in the way the beast had watched them, had watched her—

  They knew what Ronal was thinking. But it was all they would ever know.

  They took their places in the acceleration hammocks.

  Seconds later, with a great, shuddering roar, the gleaming Spaceyacht leaped skyward and disappeared into the blue vault of the sky.

  * * *

  The Hairy One watched for minutes afterward, then dropped back to all fours and shambled through the jungle. His legs hurt strangely, and his arms—

  Perhaps he should have accepted their offer and gone with them to their bright, shining world.

  Or, perhaps, taken the woman and started—started what? He could not remember.

  He stumbled awkwardly into the overgrown ruin of shattered masonry and twisted steel wherein he slept, and laid down.

  He felt very tired.

  THE END

  Hideout

  When a man has a price on his head he runs for his life. And if he’s finally cornered he may have only one door left open to him—Time!

  “CAP’N Cutlass! Earth merchantman three points starboard, oblique ecliptic eight degrees. Estimate speed 400,000, Marsbound. Your orders, sir?”

  Robbin Cutlass was angry. He wouldn’t let this one go by. Not even with a million credits on his head. But damn it, one ship and one crew couldn’t fight the whole Tri-Planet Entente Space Patrol alone. But that was how it had to be.

  “Track her down!” He switched over to all-stations. “All hands read this. Gunners to stations, oblique ecliptic eight, Earth reading three starboard, two torpedoes across her bow and stand alert to blow her! Boarders don your suits, man lock stations and stand by. Drive room cut in your Raven converters, jet minus 177 ecliptic acute 3-5-2 and hold her steady as she blasts. Now wait.”

  He checked in his own radar screen as a matter of routine.

  Twenty years ago when his father had given orders from this same control room things hadn’t be
en like this. You knew, when the Vulture and a section of her fleet closed in to make the kill that nobody had the guts to try to stop you. Sure, Jeremy Cutlass had been a tough old duck—but even he wouldn’t have been able to hold the fifty-ship buccaneer fleet together after the Patrol had gotten fully organized. Robbin remembered how it had been when he died—the whole fleet had hovered in double-echelon to each side of the Vulture, the faded sun-glow from Pluto glimmering shadowlike from its long, slender hulls—right at the very edge of the total darkness of Deep Space itself. And then the body of Jeremy Cutlass had been committed to the deep of Infinity.

  Those were the days when a man had friends—and now, all that Jeremy Cutlass had had, scattered as they’d been from one end of the Universe to the other—were either dead or sweating out their last days in the penal colonies of Earth or Mars. All except for old Doc Raven—and he’d be under lock and key too if the Vulture hadn’t been able to carry out Jeremy’s dying command—to rescue him from the penal colony of Mars, regardless of the cost. The cost had been the last eleven ships of the fleet.

  It had been worth it, yes. Not just because the conniving old toad was probably the best scientist Mars had ever produced, but because—

  THE intercom squealed frantically even as Cutlass saw what was happening in his own screen.

  “Cap’n Cutlass! It’s a trap, sir! I’m tracking Patrol ships from all points—”

  There were at least 200 of them.

  Even the Raven drive couldn’t keep the Vulture from slewing, losing some of her precious speed as Cutlass tapped out an unprecedented ecliptic-deviation and trajectory-variation pattern on the master control console.

  A screen generator whined its overload as the Patrol ships got the Vulture’s range and pounded her with everything they had. This time, they were too many—and too fast.

  “Run!” Cutlass howled to the drive-room. “Godammit, run!”

  His eyes were hot and wet with the rage that rasped in his voice. No Cutlass that had ever buccaneered Space for four generations had ever given that command. But now the notorious Vulture, last of her kind in the Solar System, finally was forced to take to her jets or be torpedoed to cosmic dust like all the rest.

  Two screen generators went to hell and plastered the control room with jagged shards of smoking metal. There was a searing pain in Cutlass’ shoulder, and blood trickled the length of his arm and along his fingers as he flipped the ship’s inter-teleco switches. Just a glance told him they’d gotten through the screens—the jagged, gaping holes in the Vulture’s ripped flanks told him he didn’t have a gunner or a radarman left alive.

  Damn them damn them . . .

  He choked on the acrid fumes of the burnt-out screen generators as he fumbled painfully into a spacesuit. Old Doc had bragged to him once that a man could travel the system end to end and back in a Raven-built suit—with a certain amount of pirates’ luck, of course. Well, the Patrol wasn’t to have Robbin Cutlass alive—

  He was less than five thousand miles out when he saw the Vulture die. It was a Viking’s death—a great mass of blinding white flame which seemed to rip Space wide open for a silent, corruscating second—and then there was the cold darkness of any grave.

  Pluto glimmered eerily a hundred million miles ahead of him. And somewhere, a half-light-year beyond, was Doc’s old freighter. Doc, with his well hidden laboratory, circling away the last years of his life in the quiet solitude of Deep Space—all that was left.

  * * *

  BARREL-chested and heavy-browed like his father, Robbin Cutlass stood there, his spacesuit crumpled in a heap at his feet, and looked about him. Doc had explained it to him, but he still was not sure he understood.

  This was the freighter—or, more accurately, Doc Raven’s great laboratory, suspension-built in the long, tapering mid-section of the battered, engineless ship which drifted silently in its dark, remote path around a pale sun. Only a scant five years ago Doc had been brought here following his costly Martian rescue, yet his equipment, which had been salvaged from a half-dozen hidden sanctuaries on as many different planets and brought here for him to assemble, had in that time grown to twice its original bulk. Sometimes Robbin thought of Doc as something less of a scientist and more of a wizard. It was often said, in the deadly seriousness that marked the spaceman’s legends, that there is more to the Martian mind than a man of Earth might even dream of.

  The long banks of control consoles emitted a blue-green glow of their own, silhouetting as they did the rows of relays, grid-circuits and reactor-registers.

  Robbin did not know the little Martian scientist’s source of power—but he knew that through this Colossus of engineering enough must pour to change the very courses of the planets in their paths, if Doc should will it.

  His eyes turned back for a second time to the metal cylinder, gleaming dully in the blue-green light of the consoles, which stood more than half the height of the long, narrow lab itself. Except that it was twice as high and a little more than twice the diameter it looked like nothing more complex than an old-fashioned hot-water heater. Yet through it, the bent old man had said, flowed the raw flux of space-time, tapped from the fabric of the Universe itself.

  “I’m not the guy for this job, Doc. You want somebody who’s a scientific explorer or something. Right now, I’ve got to heist a new ship from someplace. I must be as hot as a two-credit rocket.”

  THE echoes of his heavy voice were distorted strangely, and came back to him in half-sounds and whispers that had a hollowness of words that were spoken and had died a thousand years ago.

  “It wouldn’t work, Robbin boy. The day of the Vulture and her great legion is over,” the old Martian said softly. The years in the penal colony had taken their toll, but his face still showed the intelligence that had once come close to conquering three, worlds. “I could get you your ship within an hour with this—” he gestured toward the dully-glinting cylinder, “just as I plucked you from Space. But—in one other ship or with a fleet of one hundred, they’d have you by tomorrow or in a year from tomorrow. You’ve got to hide, Robbin. Believe an old man . . . if I could devise an armor or a drive or a screen generator that would hide you from their tracks and torpedoes for the rest of your rebellious life I’d be at work on them this instant. But there is only one place left that I can hide you now—only one realm that they have not yet conquered. I grow old, Robbin, and they are catching up—”

  “You said you could hide me in—in Time, I guess you said. I don’t know what you mean, Doc. You could tell me about space-warps and time-continua and all that for the next ten years, and—”

  “Space-time is like the very fabric of your tunic, Robbin.” The answer came with the hint of a new excitement. “A set of slender threads in myriad numbers running in two dimensions, and another set running at right angles in another two. If they are the fabric of space-time, they comprise four simple dimensions—length and width, depth and time. You are—how tall? Six feet three inches. And, eleven inches through the chest, perhaps. Across the shoulders you measure twenty-three inches. And—you are thirty-three years old. Is that so difficult?”

  “That’s not a new theory, Doc. That’s been in the books for a hell of awhile.”

  “Of course, Robbin. But—I have learned to separate the threads!”

  “Doc, you old madman, talk sense! Not that I don’t appreciate what you did. I do. They had a track on me before I was half way to Pluto. But you had your eye on me as always—”

  “I owed you and your father that, boy. No man soon forgets the colon y.”

  “I know. And I realize that somehow you were able to use this hot-water tank here to pluck me out of Space—warp me from there to here, or whatever it is you said you did. Believe me I’m grateful. But this space-time stuff I don’t understand-. All I know is that there’s a million-credit price on my head, and everywhere I look there’s the Patrol. Everywhere. In a new ship, I could cruise Deep Space for awhile until I cooled off—”


  “When has a Cutlass ever cooled off, Robbin? As long as they have not seen you die with their own eyes . . .”

  ROBBIN put a cigarette to his lips, smoked quietly for minutes. The little man seated behind the most fantastic master-control panel he had ever seen remained silent, waiting, expectant.

  “You really want me to give it a try, don’t you, Doc?”

  The old man’s eyes glittered, and Robbin knew it was all the answer that he’d get. What the hell. If it worked—maybe, back sometime else—

  “You’re really pretty sure of this thing, ain’t you, Doc?”

  Wordlessly, the old Martian rose from his bench, pressed a stud on the side of a bulky automatic cataloguing file. He returned with several objects that Robbin could only identify from his memory of the history tapes he’d studied as a boy.

  “I could say you’ve been capering in museums, Doc, but I guess I know better . . .” He turned the objects around in his hands. A 19th century Colt revolver. An ornate dagger from perhaps the scabbard of a Spanish nobleman who had lived and died a thousand years ago. A book of names and numbers—MANHATTAN TELEPHONE DIRECTORY—1967 was printed on its cover.

  “I warped Space to effect your rescue, Robbin. I can warp Time to hide you. The Patrol is growing in efficiency and in sheer numbers—there’s no hiding place for you in Space, lad. None. Not even—here.”

  Cutlass knew he was right. If they found him here, it’d be the colony again for Doc. He owed him too much, for his father as well as himself, to let that happen. And anywhere else, sooner or later—

  “I guess you win, Doc. But I’ve still got questions. I step into the cylinder—and then where’ll I be? What’ll I be? Suppose I don’t like it where I end up? I’m sick of the sight of space police—or any other kind of police.”

  “I’ll place you on Earth, because you’re native to it, Robbin, and have a knowledge of its history. And—I’ll try to pick a time that suits a young fellow of your talents! And if you don’t like it, you have only to use this—”