Case and the Dreamer (22 page)

Will Hawkline went down on one knee and steadied his weapon, and I thought, “That is the tool-craziest slowpoke in all the Known and Unknown!” I shouted in words and inside their heads to Jonna and the Little John:
give me you!
and they did, and while the meercaths were wading through the horrible mess Will had made in the corridor, I flung the energy they gave me, together with my own, against the soft rocks overhead and a huge section came crashing down, shutting it off.

In the sudden silence and swirling dust I said to Will Hawkline, “Now if you can’t do what I ask, don’t do
anything!
” as gently as I could. Maybe it was this or maybe the way Jonna and the Little John looked at him, but he became very quiet and almost helpful.

I called on the Ceer net with the precise locus, and as around us the cave faded away, metal walls, flat and dark, took their place. We were inside the Orellian cruiser, and almost before we could take a breath, we had that crazy spinny inside-out feeling of space travel, zero time. The cruiser had lifted. It was a close thing.

It probably took us a little while to be able to think straight—you pups and pammies will never know what a wringing out you get from traveling that way. Once I got my wits back, I looked around. Flat metal walls. Dark. I made it a little lighter. Jonna and Will were stretched out, I guess still waiting for their minds to catch up with them. Little John Five was sitting up wagging his big head.

“Five,” I said, “can you think-in to the computer on this cruiser?”

He looked at me. If he was surprised to see me shining in the dark he didn’t say so. He closed his eyes and made some sort of effort. He opened his eyes and said, “It’s different.…”

“You have to expect that. But isn’t it the same in some ways?”

He closed his eyes again. After a while he nodded his head. “In a lot of ways.”

“Can you learn it?”

“I think so.”

“You do that, Five. Think-in all the way. Think-in so far that when they start looking for us with their finder-thing, they will think you are another part of their own computer. Can you see out of their see-it thing? I want to know where we are,” I said. “I’ll help,” I said.

He tried hard. I picked up what he mindsaw and made it shine on the dark wall. It was like a window. There was a planet.…

“My God,” I heard behind me, “that’s Earth!”

“There’s Avalon—see?”

“All right, that’s where we are. I would like to know
when
we are,” I said.

“I do not have the referents,” the Little John said.

“I do.
Look!
” Will Hawkline cried out. In the picture, from the curve of the planet’s shoulder, came a tiny golden spark. “A scout,” said Jonna Verret. “It’s … could it be …”

Across the picture came a line of fire, at almost the exact moment the scout winked out in that special way a craft flares when it slips into faster-than-light. A moment later another spark appeared, the fire speared out and sliced into the tail section just before the ship disappeared. Somehow, the faster-than-light change came when it was strangely brighter than the first one.

“It—it’s us.
Me
. They’re going to do terrible things to—to her.”

I decided to do a kind thing. I used a piece of the net and made it say to Jonna, deeply, “Sleep.” And I said to Will Hawkline, “Sleep.” They slept. They slept so deeply that even the Mindpod’s probes and search-sees wouldn’t know they were there. Then I said to the Little John: “Five: they are hidden in a special way, and I can put up my own shield. By now you know how they will search; can you make yourself seem like part of their computer? So much so they will not find you?” He said he could. Then I told him what to do.

When it was right, I got the net to bring Will Hawkline and Janna
up and up through their deeps until they were normally asleep, and then I woke them.

Immediately Little John Five said, “The computer reports stowaways. A meercath has told the commander.”

I said, “That’s all right.”

The Little John said, “The commander has ordered a search.”

I said, “That’s all right too.”

Jonna said, “Can we hide somewhere?”

I said I didn’t think so—not for long.

Jonna said, “You can’t mean for us just to sit here until they come for us!”

“They won’t take us without a fight,” Will Hawkline said, and he took the meercath heat-thing out of his belt; and wouldn’t you know before I could say another word the door of the compartment crashed open and there stood a meercath guard. Will aimed his weapon and of course nothing happened because I had taken the charges out while he slept. I had neglected, however, to remove one patch of stupidity or his appalling bravery. As the giant meercath opened his mouth to squall, Will Hawkline flung himself across the compartment and shoved the weapon between all those big teeth and into the meercath’s throat. And he didn’t stop with that. With the momentum of his rush he placed a hand on the meercath’s head and vaulted up and around, clamping his legs above and below the meercath’s long snout, forcing its jaws closed. I remembered then that all big lizards, especially the one with long jaws, might have, like a meercath, a bite powerful enough to nip someone my size in two, but the muscles that open the mouth are comparatively weak, and it’s easy to hold the mouth closed. So the guard, scrabbling at Will Hawkline with its clever tiny hands, whimpered and died, and sounded no alarm.

Panting and exultant, Will Hawkline came back. “Help me drag this thing inside.” Well, I helped him. And I thought, how can I tell him, without making him unhappy, that he had just done the worst possible thing he could do? Zados don’t make people unhappy. How could I tell him that if he had let himself be captured, he would have been taken to the commander on the bridge, where we might be able
to do something, but that now he has killed a guard, the other guards would bite his silly brave head off? How could I tell him that the most important thing of all was for the Little John not to be discovered, that he couldn’t now be detected except if he were seen, and guards looking for their missing meercath would certainly see him? I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say it. He was so smiling and proud.

“Will,” I said, trying so hard to be gentle, “See Jonna there.” And when he looked I threw the shield around her and she was gone. He gaped and took a step toward where she had been and I took the shield away. “See Little John Five.” And I threw the shield around Five and then removed it and put it around Will Hawkline. “Will,” I said, “you can see Jonna. You can see me. You can see Five. But they can’t see you. Is that right, Jonna? Five?” They nodded their heads and I took down the shield.

“Why are you talking to me as if I were a child?” Will Hawkline asked, so maybe my gentling did not work as well as I thought it would.

I said, “We are going to use the shield. And I want you to understand that no matter how close you come to anyone,
they can’t see you
. No matter how much you want to attack one of them, you must not. We are going out there and find a search party searching, and we are going to put Little John Five into some place they have just searched, because he has work to do and they can’t detect him anymore. And then the three of us are going to the bridge where the commander is, and we are going to do it without getting our legs torn off and our heads bitten by them. Do you understand?”

“You’re still talking to me as if I were a child,” said Will Hawkline.

“Well,” I said, “I love children. Let’s go.”

I opened the door and put up a shield big enough for all of us. We could see no meercaths but we could hear sounds to the left, snuffling and stamping. I waved them to follow (we could see each other inside the shield) and we went that way. Sure enough there was a squad of meercaths right around the corner, opening and closing doors. We stayed close to the wall and moved right down on them, and I don’t think the three Earthers really and truly believed in the shield until this moment. One by one the meercaths passed us
as we stepped quietly out of their way, until they were gone.

I opened a door. “In you go, Five. Tell me when it’s all done.”

He smiled. This was the first time I ever saw a Little John smile. “I will,” he said and closed the door.

The Little John had given me the cruiser’s own computer picture of the big jug, and I had it well in my head. It was huge and a lot more complicated than it had to be, and it was full of machines and inventions and ups and throughs. And meercaths.

The bridge was way down in the middle of the cruiser with layers and layers of shells within shells all around it that could be sealed off, one from another, in case the big dark cruiser was damaged in space. The bridge was a sort of metal cave all studded with the pictures given it by the computer—pictures from the see-outs, the feel-outs, the how-fasts, how-soons, where-are-we’s, and so on—and big ugly meercaths watching them. On a high place in the middle stood the commander, a special meercath, extra big.

Invisible under the shield, we stepped past the guard at the bottom of the ramp up to the high place, and went and stood behind the commander. We watched for a while, how he did the things a commander does to make a cruiser go. Mostly it was sticking out the tummy and looking fierce at one after another of the meercaths who were actually doing something.

From the compartment deep inside the cruiser where we had hidden him, Little John Five mindspoke me:
“I’m all finished, Althair.”
It was a very weary mindspeak.

So I took the shield off Will Hawkline and Jonna Verret. But I kept mine.

You know, it seemed like forever that they stood there in plain sight, not knowing that they could be seen, while the commander strutted back and forth, not knowing they were there. Then one of the meercaths tending the little lights glanced up at the command post, froze for a second, and slowly stood up off his tail. (Meercaths sit on their tails.) Then another glanced, stared, and rose, and another. They began a funny little murmur among them, as if they were afraid to say anything to the commander.

And oh, it seemed like such a long while before the commander thought to look behind him, and there were Will Hawkline and Jonna Verret looking him in the eye and smiling, quite used by now to being invisible, and not knowing they were not.

The commander’s huge mouth slowly came open, and slowly he raised his little right hand, and he pointed a claw at Jonna. He said, in Earth talk: “You! You! You’re the one who disappeared!” And only then did she realize she could be seen. “Althair! Althair!” she cried, but I didn’t say anything. Will Hawkline sidled in front of her, maybe thinking he was still invisible, maybe thinking he could protect her or attack the commander, maybe both; but the commander made it clear he could see him too. His pointing claw swung toward Will Hawkline. “You! I saw your picture from Earth. The Time Center … you’re the Coordinator. You’re Will Hawkline!” He whirled around and yelled, “This is what we want! He has the back-time invention in his head! Detonate the planet! Destroy Earth!”

“Oh … Althair!” Jonna’s soft hurt cry was the last thing I heard as the cruiser hung over Earth and a meercath slammed his hand down on the planet-smashing control.

There was a spiraling whirl and a blink of black, and a staggering, sickening feeling like traveling in zero time.

It
was
traveling in zero time.

And the terrible lightnings stroked out from the cruiser, red from this side, blue from that, green from below and a terrible yellow from above, and they met in a river of coruscating white as they plunged into the heart of the planet below, cracked it, kindled it, scorched and exploded it and turned it into a furious little star.

And the planet was Orel, and with it went the Mindpod, whoever they were, and never again would they move through the worlds, taking and killing.

But oh! my pups, my pammies: Oh! I stood with the Earth people and felt drowned in color and I couldn’t breathe for shock and sorrow. Yes, the Mindpod was gone, and no, they would no longer menace us, or Earth, or anyone else: but oh, Orel and its little animals, its brave grass and the swirls and swarms of life in its seas; any hope it might have to evolve and grow, gone, gone forever from the
universe. Oh yes, there are lots more worlds and lots more life, but sometimes, when you have done a good thing, you have to look at all of the good thing, and wonder forever if there couldn’t have been a better way, a way wherein nothing died.

We watched the death of Orel, all of Orel, layer after layer boiling and swirling; lava, explosions of gas, torn mountains, insane winds and oceans flowing into space. Never mind the Mindpod; never mind the meercaths; I cried for a world and all the life on that world, which can never be known again except in memory.

Meercaths … what of the meercaths? If I found myself heart-torn and shaking at the sight, what of the meercaths who had to watch their own home dying like that?

I looked around, and … and … and an incredible something else happened. With the death of the Mindpod, all of the meercaths in the cruiser disappeared. For each there was a little
pop!
of vacuum as they ceased to exist, and we understood at last that each was a projection, a solid projection, of a real meercath on the planet; and when they were gone, the projections were gone too.

I mindspoke: “Thank you, Little John Five.” And the answer came back, “Can I sleep now?”

“Sleep, my friend.”

I dropped the shield. They looked at me, Jonna and Will, as if they did not know what to say to me.

I said, “I know I gave you a bad time for a while. I needed to get you to the bridge without your getting killed on the way; I needed to have the commander see you and think he had you captured; it was the one thing which would make him smash the planet, and do it before he could find out what Little John Five had done.”

“Five! Where is Five? What did he do?”

“Something neither you nor I could have done. All the orders on a big jug like this come through the computer. The commander’s orders were meant to be:
Detonate the planet. Return to Orel
. Little John Five thought himself into the computer and made the orders go:
Return to Orel. Detonate the planet.…
He’s asleep, down there where we left him. Let him sleep. He’s already set your course for Earth. Just touch that little light over there—yes, the green one—and
off you’ll go. But don’t forget to message ahead. Earth may smash this cruiser the moment they detect it.”