The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction MEGAPACK® (11 page)

* * * *

“What are you going to do with us?” Val finally asked, after a long silence.

He didn’t smile this time. “Kill you,” he told her. “Not your husband. I want him as an envoy, to go back and tell the others to clear off.” He rocked back and forth in his wheelchair, toying with the gleaming, deadly blaster in his hand.

We stared in horror. It was a nightmare—sitting there, placidly rocking back and forth, a nightmare.

I found myself fervently wishing I was back out there on the infinitely safer desert.

“Do I shock you?” he asked. “I shouldn’t—not when you see my motives.”

“We don’t see them,” I snapped.

“Well, let me show you. You’re on Mars hunting uranium, right? To mine and ship the radioactives back to Earth to keep the atomic engines going. Right?”

I nodded over at our geiger counters.

“We volunteered to come to Mars,” Val said irrelevantly.

“Ah—two young heroes,” Ledman said acidly. “How sad. I could almost feel sorry for you. Almost.”

“Just what is it you’re after?” I said, stalling, stalling.

“Atomics cost me my legs,” he said. “You remember the Sadlerville Blast?” he asked.

“Of course.” And I did, too. I’d never forget it. No one would. How could I forget that great accident—killing hundreds, injuring thousands more, sterilizing forty miles of Mississippi land—when the Sadlerville pile went up?

“I was there on business at the time,” Ledman said. “I represented Ledman Atomics. I was there to sign a new contract for my company. You know who I am, now?”

I nodded.

“I was fairly well shielded when it happened. I never got the contract, but I got a good dose of radiation instead. Not enough to kill me,” he said. “Just enough to necessitate the removal of—” he indicated the empty space at his thighs. “So I got off lightly.” He gestured at the wheelchair blanket.

I still didn’t understand. “But why kill us Geigs?
We
had nothing to do with it.”

“You’re just in this by accident,” he said. “You see, after the explosion and the amputation, my fellow-members on the board of Ledman Atomics decided that a semi-basket case like myself was a poor risk as Head of the Board, and they took my company away. All quite legal, I assure you. They left me almost a pauper!” Then he snapped the punchline at me.

“They renamed Ledman Atomics. Who did you say you worked for?”

I began, “Uran—”

“Don’t bother. A more inventive title than Ledman Atomics, but not quite as much heart, wouldn’t you say?” He grinned. “I saved for years; then I came to Mars, lost myself, built this Dome, and swore to get even. There’s not a great deal of uranium on this planet, but enough to keep me in a style to which, unfortunately, I’m no longer accustomed.”

* * * *

He consulted his wrist watch. “Time for my injection.” He pulled out the tanglegun and sprayed us again, just to make doubly certain. “That’s another little souvenir of Sadlerville. I’m short on red blood corpuscles.”

He rolled over to a wall table and fumbled in a container among a pile of hypodermics. “There are other injections, too. Adrenalin, insulin. Others. The Blast turned me into a walking pin-cushion. But I’ll pay it all back,” he said. He plunged the needle into his arm.

My eyes widened. It was too nightmarish to be real. I wasn’t seriously worried about his threat to wipe out the entire Geig Corps, since it was unlikely that one man in a wheelchair could pick us all off. No, it wasn’t the threat that disturbed me, so much as the whole concept, so strange to me, that the human mind could be as warped and twisted as Ledman’s.

I saw the horror on Val’s face, and I knew she felt the same way I did.

“Do you really think you can succeed?” I taunted him. “Really think you can kill every Earthman on Mars? Of all the insane, cockeyed—”

Val’s quick, worried head-shake cut me off. But Ledman had felt my words, all right.

“Yes! I’ll get even with every one of you for taking away my legs! If we hadn’t meddled with the atom in the first place, I’d be as tall and powerful as you, today—instead of a useless cripple in a wheelchair.”

“You’re sick, Gregory Ledman,” Val said quietly. “You’ve conceived an impossible scheme of revenge and now you’re taking it out on innocent people who’ve done nothing, nothing at all to you. That’s not sane!”

His eyes blazed. “Who are you to talk of sanity?”

Uneasily I caught Val’s glance from a corner of my eye. Sweat was rolling down her smooth forehead faster than the auto-wiper could swab it away.

“Why don’t you do something? What are you waiting for, Ron?”

“Easy, baby,” I said. I knew what our ace in the hole was. But I had to get Ledman within reach of me first.

“Enough,” he said. “I’m going to turn you loose outside, right after—”

“
Get sick!
” I hissed to Val, low. She began immediately to cough violently, emitting harsh, choking sobs. “Can’t breathe!” She began to yell, writhing in her bonds.

That did it. Ledman hadn’t much humanity left in him, but there was a little. He lowered the blaster a bit and wheeled one-hand over to see what was wrong with Val. She continued to retch and moan most horribly. It almost convinced me. I saw Val’s pale, frightened face turn to me.

He approached and peered down at her. He opened his mouth to say something, and at that moment I snapped my leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord with a snicking rasp, and kicked his wheelchair over.

The blaster went off, burning a hole through the Dome roof. The automatic sealers glued-in instantly. Ledman went sprawling helplessly out into the middle of the floor, the wheelchair upended next to him, its wheels slowly revolving in the air. The blaster flew from his hands at the impact of landing and spun out near me. In one quick motion I rolled over and covered it with my body.

Ledman clawed his way to me with tremendous effort and tried wildly to pry the blaster out from under me, but without success. I twisted a bit, reached out with my free leg, and booted him across the floor. He fetched up against the wall of the Dome and lay there.

Val rolled over to me.

“Now if I could get free of this stuff,” I said, “I could get him covered before he comes to. But how?”

“Teamwork,” Val said. She swivelled around on the floor until her head was near my boot. “Push my oxymask off with your foot, if you can.”

I searched for the clamp and tried to flip it. No luck, with my heavy, clumsy boot. I tried again, and this time it snapped open. I got the tip of my boot in and pried upward. The oxymask came off, slowly, scraping a jagged red scratch up the side of Val’s neck as it came.

“There,” she breathed. “That’s that.”

I looked uneasily at Ledman. He was groaning and beginning to stir.

Val rolled on the floor and her face lay near my right arm. I saw what she had in mind. She began to nibble the vile-tasting tangle-cord, running her teeth up and down it until it started to give. She continued unfailingly.

Finally one strand snapped. Then another. At last I had enough use of my hand to reach out and grasp the blaster. Then I pulled myself across the floor to Ledman, removed the tanglegun, and melted the remaining tangle-cord off.

My muscles were stiff and bunched, and rising made me wince. I turned and freed Val. Then I turned and faced Ledman.

“I suppose you’ll kill me now,” he said.

“No. That’s the difference between sane people and insane,” I told him. “I’m not going to kill you at all. I’m going to see to it that you’re sent back to Earth.”

“
No!
” he shouted. “No! Anything but back there. I don’t want to face them again—not after what they did to me—”

“Not so loud,” I broke in. “They’ll help you on Earth. They’ll take all the hatred and sickness out of you, and turn you into a useful member of society again.”

“I hate Earthmen,” he spat out. “I hate all of them.”

“I know,” I said sarcastically. “You’re just all full of hate. You hated us so much that you couldn’t bear to hang around on Earth for as much as a year after the Sadlerville Blast. You had to take right off for Mars without a moment’s delay, didn’t you? You hated Earth so much you
had
to leave.”

“Why are you telling all this to me?”

“Because if you’d stayed long enough, you’d have used some of your pension money to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic legs, and then you wouldn’t need this wheelchair.”

Ledman scowled, and then his face went belligerent again. “They told me I was paralyzed below the waist. That I’d never walk again, even with prosthetic legs, because I had no muscles to fit them to.”

“You left Earth too quickly,” Val said.

“It was the only way,” he protested. “I had to get off—”

“She’s right,” I told him. “The atom can take away, but it can give as well. Soon after you left they developed
atomic-powered
prosthetics—amazing things, virtually robot legs. All the survivors of the Sadlerville Blast were given the necessary replacement limbs free of charge. All except you. You were so sick you had to get away from the world you despised and come here.”

“You’re lying,” he said. “It’s not true!”

“Oh, but it is,” Val smiled.

I saw him wilt visibly, and for a moment I almost felt sorry for him, a pathetic legless figure propped up against the wall of the Dome at blaster-point. But then I remembered he’d killed twelve Geigs—or more—and would have added Val to the number had he had the chance.

* * * *

“You’re a very sick man, Ledman,” I said. “All this time you could have been happy, useful on Earth, instead of being holed up here nursing your hatred. You might have been useful, on Earth. But you decided to channel everything out as revenge.”

“I still don’t believe it—those legs. I might have walked again. No—no, it’s all a lie. They told me I’d never walk,” he said, weakly but stubbornly still.

I could see his whole structure of hate starting to topple, and I decided to give it the final push.

“Haven’t you wondered how I managed to break the tangle-cord when I kicked you over?”

“Yes—human legs aren’t strong enough to break tangle-cord that way.”

“Of course not,” I said. I gave Val the blaster and slipped out of my oxysuit. “Look,” I said. I pointed to my smooth, gleaming metal legs. The almost soundless purr of their motors was the only noise in the room. “I was in the Sadlerville Blast, too,” I said. “But I didn’t go crazy with hate when I lost
my
legs.”

Ledman was sobbing.

“Okay, Ledman,” I said. Val got him into his suit, and brought him the fishbowl helmet. “Get your helmet on and let’s go. Between the psychs and the prosthetics men, you’ll be a new man inside of a year.”

“But I’m a murderer!”

“That’s right. And you’ll be sentenced to psych adjustment. When they’re finished, Gregory Ledman the killer will be as dead as if they’d electrocuted you, but there’ll be a new—and sane—Gregory Ledman.” I turned to Val.

“Got the geigers, honey?”

For the first time since Ledman had caught us, I remembered how tired Val had been out on the desert. I realized now that I had been driving her mercilessly—me, with my chromium legs and atomic-powered muscles. No wonder she was ready to fold! And I’d been too dense to see how unfair I had been.

She lifted the geiger harnesses, and I put Ledman back in his wheelchair.

Val slipped her oxymask back on and fastened it shut.

“Let’s get back to the Dome in a hurry,” I said. “We’ll turn Ledman over to the authorities. Then we can catch the next ship for Earth.”

“Go back?
Go back?
If you think I’m backing down now and quitting you can find yourself another wife! After we dump this guy I’m sacking in for twenty hours, and then we’re going back out there to finish that search-pattern. Earth needs uranium, honey, and I know you’d never be happy quitting in the middle like that.” She smiled. “I can’t wait to get out there and start listening for those tell-tale clicks.”

I gave a joyful whoop and swung her around. When I put her down, she squeezed my hand, hard.

“Let’s get moving, fellow hero,” she said.

I pressed the stud for the airlock, smiling.

THE IRON STAR

Originally published in
Amazing Stories
, January 1988.

The alien ship came drifting up from behind the far side of the neutron star just as I was going on watch. It looked a little like a miniature neutron star itself: a perfect sphere, metallic, dark. But neutron stars don’t have six perky little out-thrust legs and the alien craft did.

While I paused in front of the screen the alien floated diagonally upward, cutting a swathe of darkness across the brilliantly starry sky like a fast-moving black hole. It even occulted the real black hole that lay thirty light-minutes away.

I stared at the strange vessel, fascinated and annoyed, wishing I had never seen it, wishing it would softly and suddenly vanish away. This mission was sufficiently complicated already. We hadn’t needed an alien ship to appear on the scene. For five days now we had circled the neutron star in seesaw orbit with the aliens, a hundred eighty degrees apart. They hadn’t said anything to us and we didn’t know how to say anything to them. I didn’t feel good about that. I like things direct, succinct, known.

Lina Sorabji, busy enhancing sonar transparencies over at our improvised archaeology station, looked up from her work and caught me scowling. Lina is a slender, dark woman from Madras whose ancestors were priests and scholars when mine were hunting bison on the Great Plains. She said, “You shouldn’t let it get to you like that, Tom.”

“You know what it feels like, every time I see it cross the screen? It’s like having a little speck wandering around on the visual field of your eye. Irritating, frustrating, maddening—and absolutely impossible to get rid of.”

“You want to get rid of it?”

I shrugged. “Isn’t this job tough enough? Attempting to scoop a sample from the core of a neutron star? Do we really have to have an alien spaceship looking over our shoulders while we work?”

“Maybe it’s not a spaceship at all,” Lina said cheerily. “Maybe it’s just some kind of giant spacebug.”

I suppose she was trying to amuse me. I wasn’t amused. This was going to win me a place in the history of space exploration, sure: Chief Executive Officer of the first expedition from Earth ever to encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life. Terrific. But that wasn’t what IBM/Toshiba had hired me to do. And I’m more interested in completing assignments than in making history. You don’t get paid for making history.

Basically the aliens were a distraction from our real work, just as last month’s discovery of a dead civilization on a nearby solar system had been, the one whose photographs Lina Sorabji now was studying. This was supposed to be a business venture involving the experimental use of new technology, not an archaeological mission or an exercise in interspecies diplomacy. And I knew that there was a ship from the Exxon/Hyundai combine loose somewhere in hyperspace right now working on the same task we’d been sent out to handle. If they brought it off first, IBM/Toshiba would suffer a very severe loss of face, which is considered very bad on the corporate level. What’s bad for IBM/Toshiba would be exceedingly bad for me. For all of us.

I glowered at the screen. Then the orbit of the
Ben-wah Maru
carried us down and away and the alien disappeared from my line of sight. But not for long, I knew.

As I keyed up the log reports from my sleep period I said to Lina, “You have anything new today?” She had spent the past three weeks analysing the dead-world data. You never know what the parent companies will see as potentially profitable.

“I’m down to hundred-meter penetration now. There’s a system of broad tunnels wormholing the entire planet. Some kind of pneumatic transportation network, is my guess. Here, have a look.”

A holoprint sprang into vivid life in the air between us. It was a sonar scan that we had taken from ten thousand kilometers out, reaching a short distance below the surface of the dead world. I saw odd-angled tunnels lined with gleaming luminescent tiles that still pulsed with dazzling colors, centuries after the cataclysm that had destroyed all life there. Amazing decorative patterns of bright lines were plainly visible along the tunnel walls, lines that swirled and overlapped and entwined and beckoned my eye into some adjoining dimension.

Trains of sleek snub-nosed vehicles were scattered like caterpillars everywhere in the tunnels. In them and around them lay skeletons, thousands of them, millions, a whole continent full of commuters slaughtered as they waited at the station for the morning express. Lina touched the fine scan and gave me a close look: biped creatures, broad skulls tapering sharply at the sides, long apelike arms, seven-fingered hands with what seemed like an opposable thumb at each end, pelvises enlarged into peculiar bony crests jutting far out from their hips. It wasn’t the first time a hyperspace exploring vessel had come across relics of extinct extraterrestrial races, even a fossil or two. But these weren’t fossils. These beings had died only a few hundred years ago. And they had all died at the same time.

I shook my head somberly. “Those are some tunnels. They might have been able to convert them into pretty fair radiation shelters, is my guess. If only they’d had a little warning of what was coming.”

“They never knew what hit them.”

“No,” I said. “They never knew a thing. A supernova brewing right next door and they must not have been able to tell what was getting ready to happen.”

Lina called up another print, and another, then another. During our brief fly-by last month our sensors had captured an amazing panoramic view of this magnificent lost civilization: wide streets, spacious parks, splendid public buildings, imposing private houses, the works. Bizarre architecture, all unlikely angles and jutting crests like its creators, but unquestionably grand, noble, impressive. There had been keen intelligence at work here, and high artistry. Everything was intact and in a remarkable state of preservation, if you make allowances for the natural inroads that time and weather and I suppose the occasional earthquake will bring over three or four hundred years. Obviously this had been a wealthy, powerful society, stable and confident.

And between one instant and the next it had all been stopped dead in its tracks, wiped out, extinguished, annihilated. Perhaps they had had a fraction of a second to realize that the end of the world had come, but no more than that. I saw what surely were family groups huddling together, skeletons clumped in threes or fours or fives. I saw what I took to be couples with their seven-fingered hands still clasped in a final exchange of love. I saw some kneeling in a weird elbows-down position that might have been one of—who can say? Prayer? Despair? Acceptance?

A sun had exploded and this great world had died. I shuddered, not for the first time, thinking of it.

It hadn’t even been their own sun. What had blown up was this one, forty light-years away from them, the one that was now the neutron star about which we orbited and which once had been a main-sequence sun maybe three or four times as big as Earth’s. Or else it had been the other one in this binary system, thirty light-minutes from the first, the blazing young giant companion star of which nothing remained except the black hole nearby. At the moment we had no way of knowing which of these two stars had gone supernova first. Whichever one it was, though, had sent a furious burst of radiation heading outward, a lethal flux of cosmic rays capable of destroying most or perhaps all life-forms within a sphere a hundred light-years in diameter.

The planet of the underground tunnels and the noble temples had simply been in the way. One of these two suns had come to the moment when all the fuel in its core had been consumed: hydrogen had been fused into helium, helium into carbon, carbon into neon, oxygen, sulphur, silicon, until at last a core of pure iron lay at its heart. There is no atomic nucleus more strongly bound than iron. The star had reached the point where its release of energy through fusion had to cease; and with the end of energy production the star no longer could withstand the gravitational pressure of its own vast mass. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the core underwent a catastrophic collapse. Its matter was compressed—beyond the point of equilibrium. And rebounded. And sent forth an intense shock wave that went rushing through the star’s outer layers at a speed of 15,000 kilometers a second.

Which ripped the fabric of the star apart, generating an explosion releasing more energy than a billion suns.

The shock wave would have continued outward and outward across space, carrying debris from the exploded star with it, and interstellar gas that the debris had swept up. A fierce sleet of radiation would have been riding on that wave, too: cosmic rays, X-rays, radio waves, gamma rays, everything, all up and down the spectrum. If the sun that had gone supernova had had planets close by, they would have been vaporized immediately. Outlying worlds of that system might merely have been fried.

The people of the world of the tunnels, forty light-years distant, must have known nothing of the great explosion for a full generation after it had happened. But, all that while, the light of that shattered star was traveling towards them at a speed of 300,000 kilometers per second, and one night its frightful baleful unexpected glare must have burst suddenly into their sky in the most terrifying way. And almost in that same moment—for the deadly cosmic rays thrown off by the explosion move nearly at the speed of light—the killing blast of hard radiation would have arrived. And so these people and all else that lived on their world perished in terror and light.

All this took place a thousand light-years from Earth: that surging burst of radiation will need another six centuries to complete its journey towards our home world. At that distance, the cosmic rays will do us little or no harm. But for a time that long-dead star will shine in our skies so brilliantly that it will be visible by day, and by night it will cast deep shadows, longer than those of the Moon.

That’s still in Earth’s future. Here the fatal supernova, and the second one that must have happened not long afterwards, were some four hundred years in the past. What we had here now was a neutron star left over from one cataclysm and a black hole left over from the other. Plus the pathetic remains of a great civilization on a scorched planet orbiting a neighboring star. And now a ship from some alien culture. A busy corner of the galaxy, this one. A busy time for the crew of the IBM/Toshiba hyperspace ship
Ben-wah Maru
.

* * * *

I was still going over the reports that had piled up at my station during my sleep period—mass-and-output readings on the neutron star, progress bulletins on the setup procedures for the neutronium scoop, and other routine stuff of that nature—when the communicator cone in front of me started to glow. I flipped it on. Cal Bjornsen, our communications guru, was calling from Brain Central downstairs.

Bjornsen is mostly black African with some Viking genes salted in. The whole left side of his face is cyborg, the result of some extreme bit of teenage carelessness. The story is that he was gravity-vaulting and lost polarity at sixty meters. The mix of ebony skin, blue eyes, blond hair, and sculpted titanium is an odd one, but I’ve seen a lot of faces less friendly than Cal’s. He’s a good man with anything electronic.

He said, “I think they’re finally trying to send us messages, Tom.”

I sat up fast. “What’s that?”

“We’ve been pulling in signals of some sort for the past ninety minutes that didn’t look random, but we weren’t sure about it. A dozen or so different frequencies all up and down the line, mostly in the radio band, but we’re also getting what seem to be infra-red pulses, and something flashing in the ultraviolet range. A kind of scattershot noise effect, only it isn’t noise.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“The computer’s still chewing on it,” Bjornsen said. The fingers of his right hand glided nervously up and down his smooth metal cheek. “But we can see already that there are clumps of repetitive patterns.”

“Coming from them? How do you know?”

“We didn’t, at first. But the transmissions conked out when we lost line-of-sight with them, and started up again when they came back into view.”

“I’ll be right down,” I said.

Bjornsen is normally a calm man, but he was running in frantic circles when I reached Brain Central three or four minutes later. There was stuff dancing on all the walls: sine waves, mainly, but plenty of other patterns jumping around on the monitors. He had already pulled in specialists from practically every department—the whole astronomy staff, two of the math guys, a couple from the external maintenance team, and somebody from engines. I felt preempted. Who was CEO on this ship, anyway? They were all babbling at once. “Fourier series,” someone said, and someone yelled back, “Dirichlet factor,” and someone else said, “Gibbs phenomenon!” I heard Angie Seraphin insisting vehemently, “—continuous except possibly for a finite number of finite discontinuities in the interval—pi to pi—”

“Hold it,” I said, “What’s going on?”

More babble, more gibberish. I got them quiet again and repeated my question, aiming it this time at Bjornsen.

“We have the analysis now,” he said.

“So?”

“You understand that it’s only guesswork, but Brain Central gives good guess. The way it looks, they seem to want us to broadcast a carrier wave they can tune in on, and just talk to them while they lock in with some sort of word-to-word translating device of theirs.”

“That’s what Brain Central thinks they’re saying?”

“It’s the most plausible semantic content of the patterns they’re transmitting,” Bjornsen answered.

I felt a chill. The aliens had word-to-word translating devices? That was a lot more than we could claim. Brain Central is one very smart computer, and if it thought that it had correctly deciphered the message coming in, them in all likelihood it had. An astonishing accomplishment, taking a bunch of ones and zeros put together by an alien mind and culling some sense out of them.

But even Brain Central wasn’t capable of word-to-word translation out of some unknown language. Nothing in our technology is. The alien message had been
designed
to be easy: put together, most likely, in a careful high-redundancy manner, the computer equivalent of picture-writing. Any race able to undertake interstellar travel ought to have a computer powerful enough to sweat the essential meaning out of a message like that, and we did. We couldn’t go farther than that though. Let the entropy of that message—that is, the unexpectedness of it, the unpredictability of its semantic content—rise just a little beyond the picture-writing level, and Brain Central would be lost. A computer that knows French should be able to puzzle out Spanish, and maybe even Greek. But Chinese? A tough proposition. And an
alien
language? Languages may start out logical, but they don’t stay that way. And when its underlying grammatical assumptions were put together in the first place by beings with nervous systems that were wired up in ways entirely different from our own, well, the notion of instantaneous decoding becomes hopeless.

Yet our computer said that their computer could do word-to-word. That was scary.

On the other hand, if we couldn’t talk to them, we wouldn’t begin to find out what they were doing here and what threat, if any, they might pose to us. By revealing our language to them we might be handing them some sort of advantage, but I couldn’t be sure of that, and it seemed to me we had to take the risk.

It struck me as a good idea to get some backing for that decision, though. After a dozen years as CEO aboard various corporate ships I knew the protocols. You did what you thought was right, but you didn’t go all the way out on the limb by yourself if you could help it.

“Request a call for a meeting of the corporate staff,” I told Bjornsen.