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Authors: Howard L. Myers,edited by Eric Flint

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The Creatures of Man (32 page)

BOOK: The Creatures of Man
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So what he really needed instead of a lot more cash was an adult ally to take him away from Merga. This thought brought him back to the troupe of show people who had just arrived, and would be moving on in a very few days. His Mead-memories defined show people as a wild, unpredictable breed. Which meant that someone in the troupe might be just the adult he needed.

* * *

When he showed up backstage at Civic Hall, Cargy looked like a snappy city lad. He had spent money as never before, on a haircut and new clothes, and considered it a wise investment. He hunted down the troupe's manager, a man named Petron.

"What do you want, kid?" Petron asked brusquely.

"My name is Tommy Larkan," said Cargy, "and I want to know if your bunch needs an errand boy. If you do, I know where the best coffee in town is, and the best and cheapest sandwiches, and a lot of things like that."

"Yeah?" Petron stared speculatively at him. "I suppose you're too young to know where the action is, though. If there
is
any action in this burg!"

"I know where there's a card game, and where the women hang around."

"Don't try to string me, kid," Petron growled.

"No stringin'," Cargy vowed.

"Well . . . you're on. Two kons a day, and any tips you can get."

That started Cargy on four fascinating and exciting days that built to a big disappointment. He had no trouble making friends with all the players, but these experienced troupers knew the hazards of emotional entanglements with locals. They were willing enough to like Cargy, but not one was about to
love
him . . . certainly not to the extent of going along with any kind of adoption scheme.

The defeat was upsetting. For years Cargy had worked hard to keep his freedom, and now when he was perfectly willing to place himself in the hands of an adult, nobody who would do seemed to want him!

Also, he had been misguided by his Mead-memories in expecting a different reaction from the show people. He had presumed that his little-boy charm, plus his adult understanding of how to use it, was an unbeatable combination. But old Mead hadn't really known show people; he only knew their reputation. He hadn't suspected they kept their emotions so well-guarded.

The days passed, the final performance was given, and the troupe began packing. Cargy moped about backstage, feeling depressed, but nobody seemed to need his help at the moment. He climbed onto a high stack of dusty scenery and lay down to brood.

In a few minutes he heard one of the women passing below him call out: "Pete, have you seen Tommy, the errand kid?"

"Not for a while," Petron replied. "Maybe he went home after I paid him off."

"Oh. I wanted to slip him a five. He's such a sweet little guy."

"Keep your money," Petron advised sourly. "We're not taking enough kons out of here to upset Merga's balance-of-payments as it is."

Cargy thought of climbing down to receive the five, but decided it would be best to wait a few minutes.

"Something else, Pete," he heard the woman say. "I simply must work on my costumes during the flight to Princon. Can't I have my trunk in my stateroom?"

"Afraid not, Vonica. It's regulations. All company trunks have to go in the baggage compartment. But I'll arrange to have yours stored up front where you can get to it."

"That's good enough. Thanks, Pete."

The voices moved away, and after some cogitation Cargy grinned. Vonica's costume trunk was pretty big—with room enough to hold her stuff plus a boy, an oxygen flask, and a couple of sandwiches. And on board the ship, when she opened the trunk and found him . . . well, Vonica did seem to like him more than the others, and could be talked into keeping quiet, he figured.

Once aboard the ship and footloose, he thought he could manage okay. Old Mead knew spaceships well.

In any event, he had to do something to get off this planet, because that temptation wasn't easing off the least bit. Vonica's trunk offered the best opportunity open to him.

* * *

He was a reasonably comfortable stowaway. He had been bounced around only a little when the trunk was loaded on a van at the Civic Hall stage entrance, and again when it was lifted into the Princon-bound spaceship.

The sounds of loading died out, and after a tiresome wait of perhaps two hours Cargy heard the soft hum of the closrem drivers beginning to turn. The liftoff was so smooth that he didn't know exactly when it came. It made him feel good to know he was on his way.

There was the sound of someone moving about among the luggage, making a tally of some sort, judging by the rustle of papers. Cargy dozed.

The sudden bark of a loudspeaker snapped him alert:

"Orbital hold! Orbital hold! Notice to passengers and crew . . . We are holding in orbit around Merga for an unauthorized person check. Please remain where you are unless requested otherwise by a ship's officer."

"What the hell?" grunted the tally-taker. Cargy was wondering the same thing. There was no procedure he (or Mead) knew of that would have revealed his presence on board.

The loudspeaker clicked twice and spoke again:
"Passenger Luggage, Deck C! Respond, please!"

The tally-taker replied: "Luggage, Deck C, Mathurt here."

"Who's there with you, Mathurt?"

"Nobody, sir."

"Very well. Carry on, Mathurt."

If Mathurt continued his work, he did so in complete silence. A minute passed.

Then a door clanged open and the compartment was filled with loud voices. "Stand back, Mathurt, there's a stowaway in here! Getting a reading, Mike?"

"Yes, sir. This trunk in front." The lid over Cargy's head rattled briefly. "It's locked, sir. The tag on it reads 'Property of Petron Productions,' and 'Vonica' is painted on the lid."

"Get Sarl Petron down here. And this Vonica, too.
You in the trunk!"

Cargy knew the jig was up. "Yes, sir," he replied.

"A damn' kid!" the commanding voice grated. "What are you doing in there?"

That, Cargy thought, was a silly question. "Hitching a ride to Princon," he said.

"You got enough air?"

"Yes, sir."

"Relax, men. We can wait for Petron to come unlock it."

Cargy called out, "Mister Officer?"

"Yeah?"

"How'd you know I was here?"

"Our life-detection scanner showed one point too many," the man growled. "What did you think? Or didn't you know about scanners? We've had them for forty years!"

Cargy hadn't known. Mead knew of life-detectors used in hospitals and such places, but the old man had been out of touch for too long. Cargy sighed. "Well, why didn't you detect me before we took off?" he asked.

"We can't scan in the middle of a city. The population overloads the detectors."

"Oh." Cargy's self-confidence was shaken. This was the second time the combination of his youthful vitality and Mead's mature but dated knowledge had let him down.

He heard Petron's voice raised in protest and a peevish "What's this all about?" from Vonica. The lock of the trunk clicked and the lid was raised. Big arms plunged into Vonica's costumes and hauled Cargy out. He stood blinking in the light.

"I never saw the kid before!" Petron announced flatly. "Or . . . wait a minute. He could be the boy who ran errands for us. I believe he is. Tommy something-or-other."

"That's right," chimed in Vonica. "His name is Tommy Larkan."

"Okay," snapped the officer. "We can't hang in orbit all day! The Mergan Port Security men can get the truth out of this kid, and they will. You men, take the boy to Number Seven hatch. An autopod is being programmed to drop him back to Port City."

Cargy was hustled away. As he went, Petron and Vonica were loudly denying any complicity in the stowaway scheme. Meanwhile, Cargy's mind was busy digging out Mead's knowledge of autopods. The information was, he noted hopefully, pretty extensive. In his day, Mead had been an expert with all types of small craft, both space and atmospheric. If his data just wasn't a half-century out of date . . . !

The autopod was basically a miniature clopter, hulled and insulated for use in space, and propelled by a small set of closrem drivers that, in a planetary gravitational field, were somewhat overburdened by the pod's mass. It was a handy little vehicle for outer hull inspection and repair in free fall, and for dumping detected stowaways back to their POEs. Once its orbital velocity was nullified, there was no way it could go but down. Its drivers could power it for a safe landing, but not to go sailing away to some other planet. By using an autopod to return a stowaway, a spaceship saved the time, expense, and red tape of an extra landing and liftoff.

Cargy was safety-strapped into the pod's one seat and the transparent hatch-dome lowered over him. A tinny-voiced communicator in the pod said pod release would be in forty-five seconds. In another voice it answered itself:
"Inner lock sealed, now pumping . . . Pumping complete. Outer lock opening."

Cargy gaped and gasped as the open lock revealed a rectangle of stars and the bright horizon-bands of Merga. It was more of a sight than his Mead-memories had led him to expect.

Then suddenly the pod's closrems came to life, and he was through the lock and dropping away from the big ship. Voices on the communicator told him the ship was once more on its way to Princon.

With the spaceship no longer to be reckoned with, Cargy went into action.

There were no manual controls within his reach, these components having been removed when the pod was being readied for this descent. There was not even an emergency override of the pod's flight computer.

There was, however, the mounting panel from which the manuals had been removed, and it was perforated by a dozen plug holes. Ordinarily, these holes would offer no possibilities to a pod passenger. But Cargy spent most of his time in the Mergan wilderness, and he was never without his defense batteries, worn like curving plates along his belt.

Being in plain sight as they were, and also being so standard an item of apparel on Merga, the batteries hadn't attracted a glance, much less a thought, from the spaceship's officers and crew.

Now Cargy unsnapped his safety harness and got busy. Setting his batteries on parallel for low voltage, he rammed his electroprobes into a couple of plug holes and listened with satisfaction as the closrems' roar took on a lower pitch. He was feeding a counter-current into the driver power supply. This would cause the pod to lose orbital velocity more slowly and carry him past Port City. He could have plugged in the other way and dropped out of orbit more swiftly, but that would have plunked him in the ocean instead of on land.

A good two minutes passed before the communicator yapped:
"Scramble rescue squad! Autopod is overshooting! Scramble rescue squad! . . . Damnit, rescue squad! Respond!"
Cargy recognized the voice as that of a Port City Control Tower supervisor.

"Uh, this is Horax. The others are at supper."

"What the hell do you mean, at supper? They eat in the squad room!"

"Well, you see, tower, there ain't never much to do, and there's this cafe just across the road, so—"

"Good God! Heads are going to roll over this! I mean that! Get to that cafe and rout them out on the double!"

"Uh, okay."

"Kid in the autopod . . . Tommy Larkan! Speak up, boy."

As he recognized the tower man's voice, and figured the man might recognize his own as well, Cargy kept quiet. The rescue squad's goofing off was going to give him at least five minutes he hadn't counted on. Which opened a new possibility. Instead of letting the pod land a few miles outside of Port City and running like hell, why not go a hundred miles or so inland, land there, and try to knock out the tracer-bleep circuit before the rescue clopter could reach the scene? That way, he could keep the pod for his own use—and useful it would be indeed once he had stripped it of its overweight hull and rigged some manual controls!

He grinned at the frantic anger of the tower man's exclamations as the pod zipped over Port City at an altitude of nearly fifteen miles. "
No, he won't overshoot the entire continent,"
he heard him tell somebody.
"He's losing altitude too fast for that."

Soon thereafter Cargy realized he was losing altitude too fast, period. At this rate he would smash the pod and himself flat when he landed. Hastily, he yanked his electroprobes out of the plug holes, switched them about, and reinserted them. The pitch of the closrems rose and Cargy felt the increased tug of their upward and slightly rearward acceleration.

But he was already beyond Dappliner Valley and still going fast. He would come down slowly enough for a safe landing, but a good two thousand miles inland!

He thought of psychivores, and his stomach tried to turn upside down. This wasn't what he'd had in mind at all!

 

 

3

The small degree of control his electroprobes gave him permitted him to put the pod down in a small clearing, instead of in the treetops. But his control wasn't enough to stop him short of—or carry him past—the area which his mental map marked as psychivore country.

In trying to put as much distance as he could between himself and these spooky monstrosities, he had landed himself precisely in their midst.

He wanted to cringe down out of sight in the pod the instant it bounced to a halt, but he knew he couldn't do that. The tracer-bleep was doubtless on the job, guiding the rescue clopter toward him. He couldn't have those guys following him down here, where a casual glance around could cost them most of their souls and leave them with the evil-eye affliction.

He took a deep breath, threw back the dome cover, and scrambled to the ground, digging in his pockets for a thin ten-minal coin to use for a screwdriver. He undogged the hull patch that protected the antenna assembly and let it fall to the ground. He peered in at the connectors, radiants, and safety switches for an instant, and found them as Mead remembered. With shaking hands he unscrewed the stops on two switches, flicked them into OFF position, and then climbed hurriedly back into the pod and re-closed the dome.

BOOK: The Creatures of Man
9.99Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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