Tania went first. A ten-day jump to Sirius took enough power to almost completely drain the crystal’s fuel cells. Jacque and Carol had to wait forty-five minutes while they recharged.
“Wonder if we’ll find one another,” Jacque said, standing by the crystal watching Sampson watch a dial.
“That’s up to Tania.” She had the floater.
“You can take your positions now,” Sampson said. “About two minutes.” Vivian and Gus raised their hands in a good-luck gesture. They were the only spectators-standing by GPEM-suited, in case something went wrong.
After two minutes the control room suddenly disappeared and Jacque floundered in total darkness. “Carol!”
She had been standing on his shoulders. “I’m here, Jacque . . . floating somewhere.”
His retinas were adjusting to the darkness. A few stars were visible. Sheepishly he remembered he’d set his optical circuits for the bright control room. He twisted the knob that controlled the sensitivity all the way to the left: stars grew bright all around him and, under his feet, the shiny black hull of a L’vrai ship.
Carol’s helmet appeared above his head; then her shoulders. She was moving out of the spaceship’s shadow, into the light from Sirius.
“I see you now. Are your boots on?” Their boots had magnetic soles.
“Yes, but I guess I’m too far away. Turn on your lights, give me something to aim at.”
Jacque did and Carol rotated slowly around, then threw him a line and he hauled her in.
“Go see what the other side looks like?” Jacque said.
“Just a second.” She wound the slender cable into a tight coil and slid it back into her thigh pocket. “Get anything from Tania?”
“No, not yet.”
“That’s not good.” Tania could be as much as a million kilometers away, much too far to travel on the floater in ten days. Or she might be on the other side of the ship.
They walked around to the other side. Sirius was a bright dot the size of a pinhead; its dwarf companion, a faint point almost lost in the glare.
“Jacque?” Tania’s voice was soft and blurred with static. “Carol? Do you read me?”
They both answered at once. “Wait,” Tania said. “Give me a time reading; see how far away you are.”
Jacque watched the digits shining just above his faceplate display. “Coming up on 11:14 . . . mark.”
“Damn,” she said. “Second and a half, that’s a good half-million kilometers. Looks like we work alone.”
“Guess so,” Jacque said. “Where are you,” Carol said, “are you on a ship?”
Three-second lag. “No, you’re on a ship?”
“On the outside of one, yeah,” Jacque said. “You found a planet, an asteroid?”
“A rock, anyhow. Maybe two kilometers long.”
“Will you just stay there,” Carol asked, “or go off looking for trouble?”
“I’ve been looking for ships. Don’t want to take off without a-wait. Think I see one. Like a dim star but elongated. A short little line of light.”
“That would be starlight reflected off the-“
“It wasn’t there before, I’m sure of it. They’re coming after me . . . Yes, it’s getting closer.”
Jacque felt a vibration in his boots just as Carol said “Behind you!”
A man-sized black spidery machine, like the first artifact the probe had encountered, came clicking across the hull toward him. “Get around to the other side,” Jacque said. “Then turn on your magnet. I’ll do the same here.”
Tania’s voice whispered, “Trouble?”
“We’ll see.” The machine didn’t appear to have any weapons. It approached Jacque and extended a pincered arm. He took one step forward, turned on his magnet . . .
And slammed chest-first to the hull, pinning the machine underneath him. It squirmed like a live thing, then emitted a shower of sparks-Jacque’s short hair tingled with the static electricity-and lay still.
“It’s a machine,” Jacque said; “I crushed it. Are you standing upright?”
No answer. “Carol! Are you standing upright?”
“Jacque,” Tania said, “if she’s on the other side of the ship, she can’t hear you. Line-of-sight transmission.”
Jacque felt his face warm. “That’s right. Say, how are you doing, is it still coming closer?”
“Yes. Not very fast. I think I’ll play with it a little bit. See how maneuverable it is.”
Jacque turned off his magnet. “I’m going to go check on Carol. Good luck.”
“Same to you.” He stood up and was surrounded by a cloud of floating metal fragments. Most of the machine lay flattened out, stuck to the hull by weak residual magnetism.
In the center of the wreck a bluish mass had oozed out and dried in the vacuum: the remnants of a L’vrai brain.
He walked around to where Carol was standing. From the crash of static in his ears, he knew that her suit was magnetized.
“What happened?” she shouted.
“Fell on top of it and crushed it. It’s a machine with a L’vrai brain attached.”
“Have to be careful walking.”
“Forgot. Turned it on with one foot in the air.”
“Vacuum,” she corrected. “We better do the back-to-back. There’ll be more.”
“Okay.” He backed up against her and thumbed the switch that magnetized his suit. They clicked together; the suits had been set up with opposite polarity so they could operate this way.
Nothing happened. After a half hour: “Carol, they aren’t going to come to us while we’re magnetized. Not after what happened to the last one.”
“I guess not.”
“Want to switch them off and go exploring?”
“No, wait. They must know where we are. They might be waiting right under our feet. Zap us as soon as we turn off the field.”
“Wait like this for ten days?” Actually, the prospect wasn’t unappealing to Jacque. At least they were relatively invulnerable.
“No. I have an idea. . . . Stay right where you are.” Carol turned off her field and knelt down, apparently studying the hull under their feet.
“What are you-oh.” Her laser glared. Where it punched through the hull, a long plume of air drifted out. She continued cutting in an arc, centered around Jacque’s feet. Air had stopped leaking out before she was halfway around.
“Now,” she said, a few centimeters from completing the circle- And they were falling in darkness.
They landed on something hard; Jacque stood up and turned on his lights.
“Artificial gravity.” They were standing in a wedge-shaped room, the floor a section of a circle. In one corner was a large round pillow; the only other piece of furniture was something that looked like a filing cabinet, but without handles.
A mass of tentacles protruded from the far wall, the side closest to the space ship’s central axis. They walked cautiously over to investigate.
“It’s the bottom part of a L’vrai,” Carol said.
“Yeah. Got stuck trying to get out of the room, looks like.” Jacque prodded the wall. It was slightly resilient. “Don’t see any seam. When you went through these things before. . . could you tell where they were before they opened?”
“No, but I didn’t really have time to-“
“Here!” Jacque’s finger disappeared into the wall. He pulled it out, pushed it back in, moved it up and down. “You can’t see it, no, but this is where it is.” He got both hands into the seam and tried to pull it open. It wouldn’t give.
“You take one side here; I’ll take the other.” Enough force to tie a knot in a steel girder, but nothing happened. Jacque put his arm in up to the elbow, and quickly withdrew it.
“What do you think?” Jacque said. “I guess we could just walk through it.”
“Let me take a look first.” Carol put her head against the wall and pushed; her helmet disappeared up to the shoulders.
She tilted forward and disappeared.
Jacque leaped after her; slammed against the wall. He pushed hard. Nothing happened. Calming, he pressed his hand across the wall until he found the seam, then leaned into it.
Vertigo: a well-lit elevator shaft 50 stories high. Jacque staggered back.
Bracing himself against the “doors,” he peered through again. Carol was floating on the other side of the shaft. “Come on in,” she said. “No gravity here.” With one hand she held on to a metal rod that ran the length of the shaft, like a fireman’s pole.
Jacque eased through the slit, stepping over the inert L’vrai body. The entrance acted like a flexible gasket, sealing itself around his suit as he passed through, keeping the vacuum out.
He treaded air and drifted toward the metal pole, the suit’s magnetism puffing him. Carol moved her hand just in time to keep from getting pinned between him and the pole.
“What now?” he said. “Up or down?”
“Up’s closer.” The shaft ended some twenty meters over their heads. “I’m going to switch on again. This place frightens me.”
“Yeah. Any moment I expect an army of them to come pouring out of the wall.” They worked their way up the pole hand-over-hand. The grip they had to exert to overcome the force of their magnetic fields was so great that their fingers left indentations in the metal.
Almost to the top, Carol said “Try infrared.” Jacque did; the entrance slits suddenly were visible, slightly lighter than the surrounding wall.
“Well, now we have someplace to go. Question is-“
“Do we go there, or let them come to us?” Carol said. “I vote we stay here for a while.”
“I don’t know,” Jacque said. “Maybe we ought to keep the initiative.”
“And maybe they’ve set a trap. They’ve had time.”
Jacque thought for a moment. “Maybe we ought to burn our way through one. We should be able to do it at this distance, not get too close to them.”
“All right. You choose.”
Jacque aimed at the seam directly in front of him. With one short burst, it opened along its whole length and sagged- And the spear of energy continued through the room beyond, to an assembly of heavy machinery arranged along the opposite wall. Some delicate balance was disturbed; some false signal initiated:
The wall was a loading bay. It snapped open to empty space.
Jacque and Carol were buffeted by the hurricane force of air being sucked out of the ship. All up and down the corridor, seams dilated open. Several L’vrai slid into the shaft, writhing in death throes. One passed by them to tumble on into space. Then the wind died, for lack of air.
After a long while, Jacque said “Makes sense....”
“What?”
“The seams. They’re only rigid against vacuum from one direction. No natural disaster’s going to fill the corridor with vacuum without breaching the outer shell.”
“We’re an unnatural disaster, then?”
They watched an alien float by, inert and cooling. For ten days they divided their time between scouting the wreckage and anxiously keeping a lookout for other L’vrai ships. It seemed unlikely that the rest or the flotilla would be ignorant of the disaster that had befallen one of their number.
But ignoring it, Jacque argued, was consistent with the way they acted toward one another. Even toward themselves.
Jacque or Carol often ventured outside of the ship, trying to contact Tania. They never had any success.
When slingshot time approached, they gathered a selection of small artifacts and assumed the feet-on-shoulders position.
“Rape,” Jacque said. “Then pillage. Then burn.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Old joke.”
When Jacque and Carol appeared, there were a lot of people gathered under the dome that housed the crystal. Only one was looking at them, the controller.
“Are you hurt?” Sampson said. “Are you all right?” Jacque tongued his outside channel and answered in chorus with Carol that they were all right. “What’s going on?”
“Jeeves came back. . . catatonic. You’re all right, though?”
“Hell, yes. Get us out of these damned tanks!” To Carol: “That’s why we couldn’t get through to her... must have been within a couple of hours-“
“-when she saw the ship,” Carol said. “What could it have been?”
Something I’m glad I didn’t see, Jacque thought. She’s a tough old bird.
Sampson led them around back and helped them out of their suits. “Doc says bring along the bridge,” he told Jacque. “Maybe you can get through to her.”
She was lying on a cot in a room next to the crystal, surrounded at a distance by a large circle of people. A fold of cloth covered a token of her nakedness. She was pale and flaccid and seemed not to be breathing; only her eyes showed life. They moved behind bruised slits.
When Jacque and Carol broke through the circle, Tania tried to sit up. The doctor pushed her back down with his knuckles, trying not to poke her with the empty hypodermic needle he held.
“Lie still for a moment. I’m trying to find a vein.” He kneaded the inside of her elbow with his thumb. “Blood test,” he said in Jacque’s direction. He made a pinch of skin and slid the needle in.
The transparent cylinder filled up with yellow fluid.
The doctor dropped the hypodermic as if stung. “L’vrai!”
It stood up and swept him aside with a casual backhand to the chest. It pointed at Jacque.
They all shrank back. “I’ll get the laser,” somebody said. They had one mounted by the crystal, in case.
“Can’t,” Sampson said. “It’s permanently mounted.” Jacque was standing his ground, staring at the thing that looked like Tania. “Get me a wrench, anything. I’ll kill it.”
The L’vrai shook its head, growled, and stepped toward Jacque.
A heavy ball-peen hammer slid across the floor to Jacque’s feet. He dropped the bridge and picked it up.
The Tania-image shimmered, flowed, grew. It became a handsome man, tall with gray hair: Robert Lefavre at his prime.
“Good trick,” Jacque said, hefting the weapon. “Won’t work, though.”
The creature took two impossibly large steps and was in front of Jacque. He swung at the head but it dodged, and the hammer crunched through collarbone; flesh grew up and over the metal. Jacque pulled on it but it was fast.
The creature seized Jacque by the arm and forced him to the ground. It picked up the bridge and pressed it against his chest.
Jacque’s face contorted with terror. “I-
“I-
“I can . . .” He suddenly calmed. “I can speak to you through this one. We have certain things in common.”
986. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
987. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
988. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
989. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
990. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
991. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
992. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
993. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
994. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
995. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
996. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
997. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
998. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
999. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
1000. I will never hurt cats or dogs again.
Jacques Lefavre