The Mote in God's Eye (17 page)

“Wouldn’t kill you fast, then. You could breathe it a while and still get help in time to save your lungs.”

“That’s what I thought,” Whitbread said uneasily. He began loosening the dogs holding down his faceplate.

“What does that mean, Whitbread?”

“Nothing, sir.” Jonathon had been doubled over far too long. Every joint and muscle screamed for surcease. He had run out of things to describe in the alien cabin. And the thrice-damned Motie just
stood
there in its sandals and its faint smile, watching, watching...

“Whitbread?”

Whitbread took a deep breath and held it. He lifted the faceplate against slight pressure, looked the alien in the eye, and screamed all in one breath, “
Will
you for God’s sake turn off that damned force field!” and snapped the faceplate down.

The alien turned to his control board and moved something. The soft barrier in front of Whitbread vanished.

Whitbread took two steps forward. He straightened up a half-inch at a time, feeling the pain and hearing the cracking of unused joints. He had been crouched in that cramped space for an hour and a half, examined by half a dozen twisted Brownies and one bland, patient alien. He hurt!

He had trapped cabin air under his faceplate. The stink caught at his throat, so that he stopped breathing; then self-consciously he sniffed at it in case anyone wanted to know what it was.

He smelled animais and machines, ozone, gasoline, hot oil, halitosis, old sweat socks, burning, glue, and things he had never smelled before. It was unbelievably rich—and his suit was removing it, thank God.

He asked, “Did you hear me yell?”

“Yes, and so did everyone in this ship,” said Cargill’s voice. “I don’t think there’s a man aboard who isn’t following you, unless it’s Buckman. Any result?”

“He turned off the force field. Right away. He was just waiting for me to remind him.

“And I’m in the cabin now. I told you about the repairs? It’s
all
repairs, all hand made, even the control panels. But it’s all well done, nothing actually in the way, for a Motie, that is. Me, I’m too big. I don’t dare move.

“The little ones have all disappeared. No, there’s one peeping out of a corner . . . the big one is waiting to see what I do. I wish he’d stop that.”

“See if he’ll come back to the ship with you—”

“I’ll try, sir.”

The alien had understood him before, or seemed to, but it did not understand him now. Whitbread thought furiously. Sign language? His eye fell on something that had to be a Motie pressure suit.

He pulled it from its rack, noting its lightness: no weaponry, no armor. He handed it to the alien, then pointed to
MacArthur
beyond the bubble.

The alien began dressing at once. In literally seconds it was in full gear, in a suit that, inflated, looked like ten beach balls glued together. Only the gauntlets were more than simple inflated spheres.

It took a transparent plastic sack from the wall and reached suddenly to capture one of the 1/2-meter-high miniatures. He stuffed it into the sack headfirst while the miniature wriggled, then turned to Whitbread and rushed at the middie with lightning speed. It had reached behind Whitbread with two right hands and was already moving away when Whitbread reacted: a violent and involuntary
yip!

“Whitbread? What’s happening? Answer me!” Another voice in the background of Whitbread’s suit said crisply, “Marines, stand by.”

“Nothing, Commander Cargill. It’s all right. No attack, I mean, I think the alien’s ready to go—no, it isn’t. It’s got two of the parasites in a plastic sack, and it’s inflating the sack from an air spiggot. One of the little beasts was on my back. I never felt it.

“Now the alien’s making something. I don’t understand what’s keeping it. It
knows
we want to go to
MacArthur
—it put on a pressure suit.”

“What’s it doing?”

“It’s got the cover off the control panel. It’s rewiring things. A moment ago it was squeezing sliver toothpaste in a ribbon along the printed circuitry. I’m only telling you what it
looks
like, of course. YIPE!”

“Whitbread?”

The midshipman was caught in a hurricane. Arms and legs flailing, he snatched frantically for something,
anything
solid. He was scraped along the side of the air lock, reached and found nothing to grasp. Then night and stars whirled past him.

“The Motie opened the air lock,” he reported. “No warning. I’m outside, in space.” His hands used attitude jets to stop his tumbling. “I think he let all the breathing air out. There’s a great fog of ice crystals around me, and— Oh, Lord, it’s the Motie! No, it isn’t, it’s not wearing a pressure suit. There goes another one.

“They must be the little ones,” Cargill said.

“Right. He’s killed all the parasites. He probably has to do it every so often, to clear them out. He doesn’t know how long he’ll be aboard
MacArthur
and he doesn’t want them running wild. So he’s evacuated the ship.”

“He should have warned you.”

“Damn right he should! Excuse me, sir.”

“Are you all right, Whitbread?” A new voice. The Captain’s.

“Yessir. I’m approaching the alien’s ship. Ah, here he comes now. He’s jumping for the taxi.” Whitbread stopped his approach and turned to watch the Motie. The alien sailed through space like a cluster of beach balls, but graceful, graceful. Within a transparent balloon fixed to its torso, two small, spidery figures gestured wildly. The alien paid them no attention.

“A perfect jump,” Whithread muttered. “Unless—he’s cutting it a bit fine. Jesus!” The alien was still decelerating as it flew through the taxi door, dead centered, so that it never touched the edges. “He must be awfully sure of his balance.”

“Whitbread, is that alien inside your vehicle? Without you?”

Whitbread winced at the bite in the Captain’s voice. “Yes, sir. I’m going after him.”

“See you do, Mister.”

The alien was at the pilot’s station, studying the controls intensely. Suddenly it reached out and began to turn the quick fasteners at the panel’s edge. Whitbread yelped and rushed up to grab the alien’s shoulder. It paid no attention. Whitbread put his helmet against the alien’s. “Leave that to hell alone!” he shouted. Then he gestured to the passenger’s saddle. The alien rose slowly, turned, and straddled the saddle. It didn’t fit there. Whitbread took the controls gratefully and began to maneuver the taxi toward
MacArthur
.

He brought the taxi to a stop just beyond the neat hole Sinclair had opened in
MacArthur
’s Field. The alien ship was out of sight around the bulk of the warship. Hangar deck was below, and the midshipman yearned to take the gig through under her own power, to demonstrate his ability to the watching alien, but he knew better. They waited.

Suited spacers came up from the hangar deck. Cables trailed behind them. The spacers waved. Whitbread waved back, and seconds later Sinclair started the winches to tug the gig down into
MacArthur
. As they passed the hangar doors more cables were made fast to the top side of the gig. These pulled taut, slowing the taxi, as the great hangar doors began to close.

The Motie was watching, its entire body swiveling from side to side, reminding Whitbread of an owl he had once seen in a zoo on Sparta. Amazingly, the tiny creatures in the alien’s bag were also watching; they aped the larger alien. Finally they were at rest, and Whitbread gestured toward tha air lock. Through the thick glass he could see Gunner Kelley and a dozen armed Marines.

There were twenty screens in a curved array in front of Rod Blaine and consequently every scientist aboard
MacArthur
wanted to sit near him. As the only possible way to settle the squabbling Rod ordered the ship to battle stations and the bridge cleared of all civilian personnel. Now he watched as Whitbread climbed aboard the gig.

Through the camera eye mounted on Whitbread’s helmet Blaine could see the alien seated in the pilot’s chair, its image seemng to grow as the middie rushed toward it. Blaine turned to Renner. “Did you see what it did?”

“Yah. Sir. The alien was— Captain, I’d swear it was trying to take the gig’s controls apart.”

“So would I.” They watched in frustration as Whitbread piloted the gig toward
MacArthur
. Blaine couldn’t blame the boy for not looking around at his passenger while trying to steer the boat, but . . . best leave him alone. They waited while the cables were made fast to the gig and it was winched down into
MacArthur
.

“Captain!” It was Staley, midshipman of the watch, but Rod could see it too. Several screens and a couple of minor batteries were trained on the gig, but the heavy stuff was all aimed at the alien ship; and it had come to life.

A streamer of blue light glowed at the stem of the alien craft. The color of Cherenkov radiation, it flowed parallel to the slender silver spine at the tail. Suddenly there was a line of intense white light beside it.

“Yon ship’s under way, Captain,” Sinclair reported.

“God damn it to hell!” His own screens showed the same thing, also that the ship’s batteries were tracking the alien craft.

“Permission to fire?” the gunnery officer asked.

“No!” But what was the thing up to? Rod wondered. Time enough when Whitbread got aboard, he supposed. The alien ship couldn’t escape. And neither would the alien.

“Kelley!”

“Sir!”

“Squad to the air lock. Escort Whitbread and that thing to the reception room. Politely, Gunner. Politely, but make sure it doesn’t go anywhere else.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

“Number One?” Blaine called.

“Yes, sir,” Cargill answered.

“You were monitoring Whitbread’s helmet camera the entire time he was in that ship?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any chance there was another alien aboard?”

“No, sir. There wasn’t room. Right, Sandy?”

“Aye, Captain,” Sinclair answered. Blaine had activated a com circuit to both the after bridge and
the engine room. “Not if that beastie were to carry fuel too. And we saw nae doors.”

“There wasn’t any air-lock door either, until it opened,” Rod reminded him. “Was there anything that might have been a bathroom?”

“Captain, did we nae see the w.c.? I took the object on port side near the air lock to be such.”

“Yeah. Then that thing’s on autopilot, would you both agree? But we didn’t see him program it.”

“We saw him practically rebuild the controls, Captain,” Cargill said. “My Lord! Do you think that’s how they control...”

“Seems verra inefficient, but the beastie did nae else that could hae been the programming of an autopilot,” Sinclair mused. “And ‘twas bloody quick about it, sir. Captain, do ye think it
built
an autopilot?”

There was a glare on one of Rod’s screens. “Catch that? A blue flare in the alien ship’s air lock. Now what was that for?”

“To kill yon vermin?” Sinclair asked.

“Hardly. The vacuum would have done,” Cargill answered.

Whitbread came onto the bridge and stood stiffly in front of Blaine’s command chair. “Reporting to Captain, sir.”

“Well done, Mr. Whitbread,” Rod said. “Uh—have you any ideas about those two vermin he brought abroad? Such as why they’re here?”

“No, sir—courtesy? We might want to dissect one?”

“Possibly. If we knew what they were. Now take a look at that.” Blaine pointed at his screens.

The alien ship was turning, the white light of its drive drawing an arc on the sky. It seemed to be heading back to the Trojan points.

And Jonathon Whitbread was the only man alive who had ever been inside. As Blaine released the crew from action stations, the red-haired midshipman was probably thinking that the ordeal was over.

The Engineer’s mouth was wide and lipless, turned up at the corners. It looked like a half-smile of gentle happiness, but it was not. It was a permanent fixture of her cartoon face.

Nonetheless, the Engineer was happy.

Her joy had grown and grown. Coming through the Langston Field had been a new experience, like penetrating a black bubble of retarded time. Even without instruments, that told her something about the Field. She was more eager than ever to see that generator.

The ship within the bubble seemed unnecessarily crude, and it was rich, rich! There were parts in the hangar deck that seemed unattached to anything else, mechanisms so plentiful that they didn’t have to be used! And many things she could not understand at a glance.

Some would be structural adaptations to the Field, or to the mysterious drive that worked from the Field. Others must be genuinely new inventions to do familiar things, new circuits, at least new to an unsophisticated Engineer miner. She recognized weapons, weapons on the big ship, weapons on the boats in the hangar space, personal weapons carried by the aliens clustered around the other side of the air lock.

This did not surprise her. She had known this new class were givers of orders, not takers of orders. Naturally they would have weapons. They might even have Warriors.

The double-door air lock was too complex, too easy to jam, primitive, and wasteful of metals and materials. She was needed here, she could see that. The new class must have come here to get her, there couldn’t be any Engineers aboard the ship if they used things like this. She started to take the mechanism apart, but the stranger pulled at her arm and she abandoned the idea. She didn’t have the tools anyway, and she didn’t know what it would be lawful to use to make the tools. There would be time for all that...

A lot of others, much like the first one, clustered around her. They wore strange coverings, most of it alike, and carried weapons, but they didn’t give orders. The stranger kept trying to talk to her.

Couldn’t they see she wasn’t a Mediator? They were not too bright, this primitive new class. But they were givers of orders. The first one had shouted a clear command.

And they couldn’t speak Language.

The situation was remarkably free of decisions. An Engineer need only go where she was led, repair and redesign where the opportunity arose, and wait for a Mediator. Or a Master. And there was so much to do, so much to do...