"Well," Troy said, "whatever that first Earth survey ship had to report
about the Cassa system looked good enough so that the administration
put Cassa down for a major expedition some day. Twenty years later, we
got here again--the interstellar exploration carrier _Atlas_ with eight
hundred men on board. I'm one of her engineers. And we found the
Tareegs--that's what the Hammerheads call themselves--waiting for us.
Not another bunch of scientists and assistants but a war-party. They'd
learned enough from the two survey ship men they'd caught to figure out
we'd be coming back and how to handle us when we got here.
"Now get straight on a few things about the Hammerheads, Jerry. Their
weapons systems are as good or better than ours. In other ways,
they're behind us. They've got a fair interstellar drive but can't make
the same use of it we do, because they've still a lot to learn about
inertial shielding. They have a couple of robot-directed interstellar
drones standing in a hangar a few hundred yards from here which can hit
half the speed of your courier, but no Hammerhead or human being could
ride 'em up and live. The two big carriers that brought them to Cassa
One are dead-slow boats compared to the _Atlas_. And that's about the
best they have at present.
"Just the same, they're out to get us. War is the best part of living
as far as they're concerned, and they're plenty good at it. So far
they've only been fighting among themselves but they're itching for a
chance at another race, and now we're it. Capturing an Earth expedition
in the Cassa System was only part of the plan to take Earth by
surprise."
Newland blinked, said slowly, "How's that? You'd think that might tip
their hand. We'll be missed, won't we?"
"Sure we'll be missed," Troy said. "But when? We were to stay here
eight years ... don't remember that either, eh? The Hammerheads will
have all the time they need to be set for whoever comes looking for us
eventually."
"But would they know that?"
Troy said bitterly, "They know everything about Earth that our top
brass scientists of the Cassa Expedition were able to tell them.
Pearson and Andrews--those names mean anything? They were the
Expedition Chiefs when we were captured. One of the first things the
Hammerheads did was to have the science staff and other department
heads look on while they tortured those two men to death. As a result,
they've had all the cooperation they could ask for--more than any
decent human being would think of giving them--from our present
leadership, the senior scientists Dr. Chris Dexter and Dr. Victor
Clingman. They're a couple of lousy traitors, Jerry, and I'm not sure
they're even capable of realizing it. Clingman's in charge here at the
ground base, and he acts as if he doesn't see anything wrong in helping
the Hammerheads."
"Helping the...." Vacancy showed for a moment in the pilot's
expression; he frowned uncertainly.
* * * * *
"Try to stay awake, Jerry! There're just a few other things you should
try to get nailed down in your memory this time. The Hammerheads are
water animals. They can waddle around on land as long as they keep
themselves moist, but they don't like it. They've got a religion based
on a universal struggle between water and land. Cassa One's nothing but
hot desert and rock and big salt beds, so it's no good to them. And the
other two planets in the system have no oxygen to speak of.
"Now here's the thing that's hard to swallow. There's a huge lumped-up
asteroid swarm in the system. The _Atlas_ stopped for a few days on
the way in to look around in it. Dexter and Clingman, after we'd been
captured, volunteered the information to the Hammerheads that a lot of
that stuff was solid H_{2}O and that if they wanted Cassa One fixed up
the way they'd like it--wet--the _Atlas_ could ferry enough asteroid
ice over here in billion-ton loads to turn most of the surface of the
planet into a sea.
"You understand it wasn't the Hammerheads who had the idea. They don't
have anything resembling the ship power and equipment to handle such a
job; it hadn't even occurred to them that it could be possible. But you
can bet they bought it when it was handed to them. It will give them a
base a third of the way between their own system and Sol. That's what's
been going on since we landed and were grabbed off ... almost three
years ago now.
"And these last weeks there've been, for the first time since we got
here, a few clouds in the sky. It means the boys on the _Atlas_ have
as many of those mountains of ice riding on orbit as are needed, and
they've started shoving them down into the atmosphere to break up and
melt. So we ... Jerry, wake up!"
Troy Gordon paused, watching Newland, then shrugged, stood up and
went over to take the butt of the cigarette from the pilot's slack
fingers. Newland had slid back into catatonic immobility; he offered no
resistance as Troy swung his legs up on the bunk and straightened him
out on his back.
How much would he remember the next time he awoke? Troy didn't know; he
had no medical experience and was working on the basis of remembered
scraps of information about the treatment given men recovering from an
experience such as Newland's. There were people on the ground station
who could have told him what to do, but he hadn't dared ask questions.
It was chiefly a matter of time now. Or of lack of time. What would
happen when the giant hauling operation was concluded, when the water
which had been carried in from space came creeping across the vast
desert plateaus about the station, was something he didn't know. But
it was almost certain that if his own plans hadn't been carried out by
that time, they never would be.
* * * * *
"Jerry," he addressed the sleeping pilot softly, "if you've wondered
why I'm risking my neck to bring you back to life and keep you hidden
away from the Hammerheads and Clingman, it's because you're the one
man I still can trust in this lousy expeditionary group. It's because
you tried to do something about the situation on your own. You don't
remember it yet, but when the Hammerheads took over the _Atlas_ you
made a break for it in the courier boat. You tried to get away and warn
Earth. They shot you down before you could clear atmosphere; but then
they couldn't find the wreck. They thought it was down in one of the
salt beds and gave up looking for it.
"But I found it in the desert a couple of months later. You'd dropped
through into the emergency tank and you were still more or less alive.
I smuggled the tank into the station here as soon as I'd rigged up a
place where I could keep it. I can use some help, and you'll be the
best possible man for the job...."
He stopped, surprised to see that Newland's mouth had begun to work
awkwardly as if he were trying to speak. Then a few words came, slow
and slurred, but indicating that the pilot's mind had not sunk nearly
as far from full wakefulness as during his previous relapses.
"Wha ... want me ... do?"
Troy didn't answer. Not yet, he thought. Not until Newland was no
longer helpless. Because, in spite of all precautions, he might be
discovered here at any hour; and if that should happen, Troy's secret
must still be his own. He could act without Newland's help if necessary.
He waited a few seconds longer, while the pilot's face slowly smoothed
out again into comatose blankness. Then Troy turned around quietly and
left the room.
* * * * *
Troy Gordon's personal living quarters were on the lowest of the
station's three underground levels, behind the central power plant and
utilities section. Considerable privacy was their only attraction; and
since the arrangement kept Troy, during his off-duty hours, close to
his responsibilities as the station's maintenance engineer, neither Dr.
Clingman nor the Hammerheads had objected to it. He was a useful man;
and to the useful, minor privileges could be extended.
Troy had been able to take advantage of that circumstance. The room
in which Newland was hidden lay behind his own quarters, forming an
extension to them. The entrance to it was concealed, and while a
careful search should have disclosed it, Troy--so far as he knew--had
as yet given no one a reason to initiate such a search. The back room
was not part of the station's original design; he had cut it secretly
out of the rock. With the equipment at his disposal, it had been a
relatively minor job.
But it involved a very ugly risk. Discovery would have meant death, and
no easy one. With the exception of the cooperating chief scientists,
the Hammerheads' attitude towards their captives was largely one of
watchful indifference, so long as no one got out of line. But they
had taken one measure which insured that, after a short time, there
was very little inclination left among the prisoners to get out of
line knowingly. At intervals of about a month, whether or not an overt
offense had been committed, one more member of Earth's Cassa Expedition
was methodically tortured to death by the aliens; and a group of his
fellows, selected apparently at random, was obliged to witness the
matter while fastened to a device which allowed them to experience the
victim's sensations in modified form.
Troy had been included twice in the observing group. He hadn't known
whether it implied a personal warning or not. In the Hammerheads' eyes,
he was a useful servant; it might be that he was also a suspected
one. Nevertheless, it had been necessary to construct the back room.
One day, he was returning through the desert from one of the outlying
automatic stations under his care when he caught the momentary whisper
of a distress signal in his groundcar's receiver. The slight sound had
put his hair on end. It was an Earth signal, on an Earth band; and
with the _Atlas_ off-planet it could have only one possible source. In
seconds, it wavered out and was lost, but Troy already had established
the direction.
* * * * *
A week passed before he had the opportunity to obtain a second fix;
then, hours later, he was standing beside the wreck of the courier
ship. It had plunged into a deep cleft in the rocks and was now half
covered by sand; it began to seem less of a miracle that the Hammerhead
fliers had not found it. Troy shut off the quavering signal projector,
discovered next that the emergency tank had a living occupant, but
left Newland where he was while he hurriedly examined the rest of the
ship. The courier was hopelessly damaged, but before Troy concluded
the examination, his plan against the Hammerheads had been born, at
least as a possibility. It took more than two and a half years then to
convert the possibility into an operation which seemed at last to have
something better than a fighting chance to succeed. For, of course,
Troy had told no one of the discovery. A few words might have gained
him eager helpers, but might also have reached a man paralyzed by
the fear of torture to the extent that he would reveal everything to
safeguard himself.
Troy left his rooms, locking the outer door behind him. Moving thirty
feet down the narrow steel-floored passage behind the power plant,
he entered one of the tool rooms, again closing and locking the door
as he went through. It had been a much more difficult and lengthy
undertaking to drill a tunnel from the station's lowest level up to the
force-screened Hammerhead hangar outside than to carve an additional
room out of the rock, but it had been completed months before. The
tunnel's hidden station entrance was beneath the tool room floor, the
other opening out of the polished rock base of the hangar twenty feet
from one of the interstellar drones. The most careful human scrutiny
would hardly have read any significance there into the hairline crack
which formed an irregular oval on the rock; and since Troy hadn't been
found out, he could assume that the Hammerheads' powers of observation
were no more acute.
It had been night in the surrounding desert for some hours by now,
but the hangar was brightly lit--a very unusual occurrence at such a
time. Troy paused, momentarily disconcerted, studying the scene in the
hangar through the vision screen installed in the tunnel just below the
exit. If the Hammerheads--there were only Hammerheads--present--were
initiating some major new activity in the next day or two, his plans
might be, if not ruined, at least very dangerously delayed. He counted
over a hundred of the creatures, mostly assembled near the far end of
the hangar in three orderly groups. A few officers stood together,
somewhat closer to him.
Troy chewed his lip anxiously, the moisture-conserving suits they wore
for outside duty on Cassa One, which concealed the two sets of swim
flippers along their sides and left the top pair of upper limbs ...
short, sturdy brown arms with hands larger than human hands, quite
as capable and rather unpleasantly human in appearance ... free for
use. The transparent, inverted-triangle helmets were clamped down. As
he looked on, one of their big atmospheric personnel carriers came
gliding into sight behind the immobile ranks. There were commands, and
the Tareegs turned and filed into the vehicle, moving with the rapid,
awkward little waddle which was their method of progress on land. A
minute or two later, the loaded carrier moved out of the hangar, and
the lights in the vast structure slowly faded away.
* * * * *
Where were they going? They were carrying the usual weapons, but this
was not some dryland drill. Troy could not remember seeing so large a
group leave the station before. The uneasy conviction returned that
the move must be connected with the fact that clouds had begun to show
in Cassa One's skies, that the mile-thick boulders of ice which had
been brought across space already were falling through the atmosphere
of the desiccated world.
One or two more undisturbed days, Troy thought. In that time it would
become clear whether Newland was going to recover sufficiently to be
able to play a part in his plans. Only two sections of the shattered
courier ship, the inertial shielding and the autonav, had been needed
to transform the Hammerheads' interstellar drone twenty feet from the
tunnel exit into a spaceship which men could ride and direct. Both
those sections had been repairable, and everything else Troy had been
able to steal or build in the station. Month after month passed as
he brought it all together in the tunnel, familiarized himself with
every necessary detail of the drones' mechanisms and fitted in the
new installations ... first in theory, then in actual fact. A part
of almost every night was spent in the darkened hangar, assembling,
checking and testing one section or another, then disassembling
everything and taking it back down into the tunnel before the moment
came when the Tareeg watch-beams would sweep again through the hangar.
The beam-search was repeated each three hours and twenty-seven minutes
throughout the night. Within that period of time, Troy would have to
carry out a final complete assembly, let the drone roar into life and
send it flashing up through the force-screen and into space.
By now, he knew he could do it. And if he had calculated the drone's
capacity correctly, he would then be less than six months from Earth.
The Hammerheads had nothing they could send after him.
But once in space, he needed Newland's experience. Everything else
would be on board to get them to Earth, but without a trained pilot the
probability of arriving only on autonav was something Troy couldn't
calculate. With a great deal of luck, he thought, it still should
be possible. Newland's skills, on the other hand, would give them
something considerably better than an even chance.
But Newland would have to be recovered first. He was still under the
ministrations of the emergency tank, embedded now in the wall of the
back room beyond the bunk. The tank had to stay there; no amount of
planning had shown a way it could be fitted into the drone besides
everything else; there simply was no room left for it. And what Troy
had learned made it clear that if he lifted into space with Newland
before the pilot's behavior was very nearly normal, he would have a
half-dead zombie on his hands before the trip was well begun.
That had been his reason for waiting. But the question was now whether
he mightn't already have waited a little too long....
* * * * *
Troy checked his watch. Take a chance and begin the final installation
at once? It would be an hour before the search-beams came back. The
interior of the ships was inspected at irregular periods; he hadn't
been able to establish any pattern for that. But to leave his equipment
in place in the drone for one day, or two at the most, might not be
stretching his luck too far. Then, if Newland shaped up, there would be
that much less delay in leaving, that much less time to spend in the
Tareeg hangar finishing the job at the end. And no one could tell what
new developments the next few days might bring, or how much time they
would find that they had left....
He twisted the direction dials on the vision screen, swinging it slowly
once more about the darkened hangar. Then he unlocked and shifted the
exit switch, and the irregularly carved section of rock above him moved
on its lifting rods out of the hangar floor. Troy swung up and out
behind it, got to his feet and started over to the drone.
There was a thin, burring noise close to his ear.
Troy stopped in mid-stride, his face tight and wary. The noise meant
that his room communicator was being called. Probably some minor
technical emergency on the station, but.... He counted off twenty
seconds, then turned on the relay mike under his coat collar. Trying to
make his voice thick with drowsiness, he said, "Gordon speaking. Who's
it?"
"Reese," a carefully uninflected voice told him from the speaker. "Dr.
Clingman wants you to come up to his office immediately, Gordon."
Troy felt a sudden sharp prickling of fear.
"At this time of night?" he demanded petulantly. "It's the middle of my
sleep period! What's gone wrong now?"
"I wouldn't know," Reese said. "Our senior scientist"--he made the two
words sound like a worn, habitual curse--"didn't go into details."
* * * * *
Dr. Victor Clingman was a large, untidy man inclined to plumpness,
with stringy blond hair and protuberant pale eyes. His office adjoined
that of the Tareeg station commandant--a Low Dsala, in Hammerhead
terms--and it was permeated from there with a slightly salty, vaguely
perfumed moistness. Rank had its privileges; only the Low Dsala enjoyed
the luxury of keeping his station work quarters damp enough to make
the wearing of a suit unnecessary. The other Hammerheads waddled about
the cold, dry halls completely covered, breathing through humidifiers,
and were only occasionally permitted, and then after much ceremony, to
enter an area in their section called the Water Room and linger there
for several hours.
Troy came into Clingman's office with his tool kit through the double
doors designed to prevent moisture from escaping, shivering slightly as
the sudden clamminess touched his skin. Clingman, engaged as usual in
pecking out something on a writer, shirt sleeves rolled up on his plump
arms, ranked piles of notes on the table beside him, turned a pale,
unhealthy-looking face towards the door.
"Mister Gordon," he said mildly, dragging the "mister" out a little as
was his habit. He nodded at the wall to Troy's left. "Our recording
mechanisms became inoperative again ... and just as I was in the
process of noting down some very interesting fresh clues as to the
probable origin of the Tareeg coup system. Will you try to attend to
it?"
"Right away," Troy said, his vague fears dispelled. Clingman's
recorders were a standard problem; the repair parts for such items were
on the _Atlas_ which had not come down into atmosphere for almost a
year. There probably had been no reason to feel apprehensive about a
night call to the office. It had happened on such occasions before.
* * * * *
He went to work, glancing over from time to time at the senior
scientist who was frowning down pensively at the writer. Before the
Hammerheads executed his predecessors, Dr. Victor Clingman had been
head of the Biology Department on the Cassa Expedition, and his
interest in the subject had not changed, though it was now centered
exclusively on the life habits of their captors. The Tareegs did not
seem to object to his preoccupation with them. Possibly it amused them;
though Clingman had told Troy once, rather complacently, that his
research already had proved to be of some usefulness to the Tareegs in
answering certain questions they had had about themselves. That might
also be true. On several occasions, at any rate, Troy had found either
the Low Dsala or another Hammerhead officer in Clingman's office,
answering the scientist's questions in high-pitched, reedy voices
which always had the suggestion of a whistle in them. All of them
apparently had been taught human speech, though they rarely chose to
use it.
Clingman cleared his throat, asked without turning his head, "Did
I tell you, Gordon, that the Tareegs' known history goes back to
considerably less than a thousand years, by human time reckoning?"
"Yes, you did, doctor," Troy said. It had become almost impossible for
him to do work for Clingman--and Clingman invariably called on him
personally when he had some mechanical chore on hand--without listening
to a lengthy, rambling discourse on the scientist's latest discoveries
about the Tareegs. It was an indication, he thought, that Clingman had
grown increasingly hungry for human companionship of any kind. He could
hardly fail to know that the majority of the station's human component
was aware he had originated the suggestion made by the leading
scientific group to the Hammerheads concerning the possibility of
turning Cassa One into a Tareeg water world, and that he was generally
despised for it. Troy's noncommittal attitude might have led him to
believe that Troy either had not been informed of the fact or happened
to be a man who saw nothing very objectionable in such an act.
Troy was, as it happened, less certain than some of the others that
Clingman and the men like Dr. Chris Dexter, who had been directing
the ice-hauling operations of the _Atlas_, had come to a deliberate,
cold-blooded agreement among themselves to save their own skins by
offering to help the Hammerheads against mankind. It was perhaps more
likely that they had acted in unthinking panic, following the gruesome
executions the Hammerheads had forced them to witness. That would be
more forgivable, if only slightly so. It was difficult to be sure about
Clingman in any way. He might be unpardonably guilty in his own mind
and still no less frightened than before--for who knew, after all, what
the Tareegs ultimately intended with their prisoners? On the other
hand, he might actually have buried all such considerations beneath the
absorbed, objective interest he appeared to take in them.
* * * * *
Troy had paid no more attention than he could help at first to
Clingman's scholarly monologues on his favorite theme. His own thoughts
avoided the Hammerheads as far as possible. But as his personal plans
began to develop and the chance that he might reach Earth grew into
something more than a wildly improbable hope, he realized that the
more he learned about the new enemy, the more valuable an eventual
report would be. Thereafter he listened carefully, memorizing all
of Clingman's speculations, and gradually developed some degree of
detached interest of his own in the creatures. They had a curious
history, short though it was, a history of merciless strife on twin
water worlds of the same system in which any records of a common
background had been long lost or destroyed. Then had come the shock of
mutual discovery and renewed battling, now on an interplanetary scale,
which ended in a truce of carefully guarded equality between the rival
worlds.
"That situation, it seems possible," Clingman had said once, "may
have led to the legend of the lost home-world of the Tareegs." It was
a cautious reference to the obvious fact that neither Tareeg planet
would have been willing to admit that it might be no more than an
ancient colony of its twin. A remote and glorious ancestral world which
had brought both colonies forth as equals was a much more acceptable
theory. "And yet," Clingman went on, "the legend might well be based in
fact. And it may be that we, with our skills, will enable the Tareegs
to rediscover that world...."
It sounded, Troy had thought, with something like amused disgust, as if
the scientific brass had prudently worked out a new scheme to preserve
itself after the Cassa One operation closed out.
"There also, of course," Clingman continued, blinking his pale eyes
reflectively at Troy, "we have the origin of the parallel legend of
the Terrible Enemy. What except the conquest of the home-world by a
monstrous foe could have caused it to forget its colonies? In that
light, it becomes a little easier to understand the ... ah, well ...
the ... cautious distrust the Tareegs have shown towards the first
intelligent species they encountered in interstellar space."
And _that_ sounded like an attempted apology--not so much for the
Tareegs and their manner of expressing cautious distrust as for Dr.
Victor Clingman's collaboration with them. But Troy said nothing. By
then he was very eager to hear more.
He did. Almost week by week, something new was added to the Hammerhead
data filed away in his mind. Much of it might be unimportant detail,
but Earth's strategists could decide that for themselves. The Tareeg
coup system Clingman was mulling over again tonight had been of
significance at least to the prisoners; for it probably was the reason
the majority of them were still alive. The two High Dsalas who, each
representing one of the twin worlds, were in joint command of the
Tareeg forces here would have gained great honor merely by returning to
their system at once with the captured Earth expedition. But to have
stayed instead, silently to have assumed personal responsibility for
the creation of a new world fit for Tareeg use--_that_ assured them
honor and power beyond belief when the giant task was over and the
announcement went out....
* * * * *
The awareness that Clingman was speaking again broke into Troy's
thoughts.
"Almost everything they do," the scientist observed musingly, "is
filled with profound ceremonial meaning. It was a long while before we
really understood that. You've heard, I suppose, that cloud formations
have appeared on this side of the planet?"
Troy was about to answer, then checked himself, frowning down at the
cleanly severed end of the lead he had been tracing. Severed? What....
"Gordon?"
"Uh ... why, yes, I've seen them myself, doctor." Troy's mind began to
race. The lead had been deliberately cut, no question of that. But why?
He might have spent another hour checking over the recording equipment
before discovering it--
"It means, of course," he heard Clingman saying, "that the dry sea
basins of Cassa One gradually are filling with water. Now, we know the
vital importance to the Tareegs of being able to immerse themselves in
the--to them--sacred fluid, and how severely they have been rationed in
that respect here. One might have thought that, from the High Dsalas
down, all of them would have plunged eagerly into the first bodies of
water to appear on the planet. But, no ... so great a thing must not be
approached in that manner! A day was set, months in advance, when it
could be calculated that the water level would reach a certain point.
At that hour, every Tareeg who can be spared from essential duty will
be standing at the shore of the new sea. And together...."
Abruptly, the meaning of Clingman's words faded out of Troy's mind.
The sudden nighttime summons to Clingman's office--had it been no
accident after all? Had he done something in the past few hours to
arouse suspicion, and was he being detained here now while his rooms
were searched? Troy felt sweat start out on his face. Should he say
anything? He hesitated, then reached quietly into the tool kit.
"... and only then"--Clingman's voice returned suddenly to his
consciousness--"will the word be prepared to go back, and the messenger
ships filled with the sacred water so that it can be blended at the
same moment with the twin worlds' oceans, to show that Cassa One has
become jointly a part of each...."
Messenger ships--the interstellar drones, of course. And the big troop
of Hammerheads which had been taken from the station in the personnel
carrier less than an hour ago.... His hands trembling a little, Troy
quickly closed the recorder, picked up the tool kit.
Clingman checked himself. "Oh ... you've finished, Gordon?" He sounded
startled.
Troy managed to work a grin on his face. "Yes, doctor. Just a broken
lead. And now, if you'll excuse me...." He started to turn away.
"Ah, one moment!" Clingman said sharply. "There was ... I ... now
where...." He gazed about the table, pushing fretfully at the piles
of notes. "Oh, yes! Dr. Rojas ... Room 72. You were on your way up
here when he attempted to reach you. Something that needed ... well, I
forget now what he said. Would you mind going over there immediately?"
"Not at all." Troy's heart was pounding. If there had been any doubt
he was being deliberately delayed, it would have vanished now. Dr.
Rojas, of course, _would_ have something waiting that "needed" Troy's
attention before he got to Room 72. A call from Clingman would arrange
for it.
But if they were suspicious of him, why hadn't he been placed under
arrest? They don't want to scare me off, Troy thought. They're not
sure, and if I'm up to something they don't want to scare me off before
they know just what it is....
* * * * *
He'd swung around to the hall, mind reaching ahead through the next
few minutes, outlining quickly the immediate steps he would have to
take--and so he was almost past the Hammerhead before he saw it. The
door to the Low Dsala's offices had opened quietly, and the Low Dsala
stood there five feet away, the horizontally stalked eyes fixed on Troy.
Troy started involuntarily. He might be very close to death now. To
approach a Hammerhead ... let alone the station's ranking officer ...
unbidden within a dozen steps was a dangerous thing for a prisoner to
do. The Dsala's left hand hung beside the ornament-encrusted bolt-gun
all the officers carried--and those broad torturers' hands could move
with flashing speed. But the creature remained immobile. Troy averted
his eyes from it, keeping his face expressionless, walked on with
carefully unhurried steps, conscious of the Dsala's stare following him.
It was one of the comparatively few times he had seen a Hammerhead
without its suit. If one knew nothing about them, they would have
looked almost comical--there was a decided resemblance to the penguins,
the clown-birds of Earth, in the rotund, muscular bodies and the double
set of swimming flippers. The odd head with its thick protruding
eyelobes and the small, constantly moving crimson triangle of the
mouth were less funny, as were the dark, human-shaped hands. Troy felt
a chill on his back when he heard the Dsala break into sudden speech
behind him: a high, quick gabble in its own language. Was it expressing
anger? Drawing the door quietly shut, he heard Clingman begin to reply
in the same tongue.
* * * * *
Reese looked briefly up from the intercom desk as Troy stopped before
it. "Finished with Clingman?" he asked.
"Uh-huh," Troy said. "Any other little jobs waiting before I can get
back to sleep?"
"Not so far," Reese told him sourly. "Pleasant dreams." He returned his
attention to the panels before him.
So Dr. Rojas, as had seemed almost certain, had put in no call for him.
But if he didn't show up at Room 72, how long before they began to
wonder where he was? Perhaps four or five minutes....
Troy stepped out of the elevator on the maintenance level forty
seconds after leaving Reese, went quickly on into the engine room.
One Hammerhead guard stood watching him from the far end. As a rule,
three of them were stationed here. They were accustomed to Troy's
appearances, and he had been careful to establish as irregular a
pattern as was practicable in attending to routine chores, so that in
an emergency his motions would draw a minimum of attention. Ignoring
the guard now, he carried out a desultory inspection of a set of wall
controls, paused four times to remove four minor sections of machinery
and drop them into his tool kit, and was leaving the big room again a
minute and a half later.
Out in the passage, he re-opened the kit, quickly snapped three of the
small steel parts together. The carrying of firearms naturally was
not a privilege the Tareegs extended to human beings; but the newly
assembled device was a quite functional gun. Troy thumbed three dozen
hand-made shells out of the fourth piece removed from the control
equipment, loaded the gun and shoved it into his pocket.
The door to his quarters was locked, and there were no immediate
signs inside that an inspection might have been carried out during
his absence. Troy moved over to the rarely used intercom view-screen,
changed some settings behind it, and switched it on. The hidden back
room appeared in the screen, and--in spite of his near-certainty about
Clingman's purpose in detaining him--Troy felt his face whiten slowly
with shock.
Jerry Newland was no longer lying on his bunk, was nowhere in the room.
A gaping opening in the wall behind the bunk showed where the emergency
tank Troy had brought in from the crashed courier ship had been
installed. So they not only had the pilot in their hands--they already
were aware of his identity and of the condition he was in.
Troy felt a surge of physical sickness. Left to himself, Newland would
have died in the desert without regaining consciousness as the tank's
independent power source began to fail. Troy had saved him from that;
but very probably it was the Tareeg death the pilot faced now. Troy
switched off the screen, started back to the door, fighting down his
nausea. Self-blame was a luxury for which he had no time. He couldn't
help Newland, and there was not an instant to lose. Within a few
hours, he could still be in space and take his chances alone at getting
the warning to Earth.
But first the search for him must be directed away from the Tareeg
hangar. And that, very fortunately, was an action for which he had long
been thoroughly prepared....
* * * * *
The Hammerhead guard at the station's ground-level exit also had been
reduced to one soldier. And here the appearance of the maintenance
engineer's groundcar on its way to one of the automatic installations
out in the desert was as familiar an occurrence as Troy's irregular
inspection visits in the engine room. The guard watched him roll past
without moving and without indication of interest. Troy glanced at his
watch as the exit closed behind him. Not quite six minutes since he'd
left Clingman's office ... they should already have begun to check on
his whereabouts, and the fact that he alone of all the humans at the
station had access to a groundcar would then be one of the first things
to come to their minds.
He slowed the car near a tiny inspection door in the outer wall of the
station, cut its lights, jumped out and watched it roll on, picking
up speed as it swerved away to the east and rushed down into the
dark desert. Months before he had installed the automatic guidance
devices which would keep the car hurrying steadily eastwards now,
changing direction only to avoid impassable obstacles. It might be
that, at a time of such importance to the Tareegs, they would not
attempt to follow the car. If a flier did discover it from the air,
the vehicle would be destroyed ... and it was rigged to disintegrate
with sufficient violence then to conceal the fact that it had lacked a
driver.
* * * * *
Troy opened the inspection door, then stopped for a moment, staring
back at the Tareeg hangar beyond the station. Light had been glowing
through its screens again when he came out; now the hazy translucence
of the screens was drawing sideways and up from the great entrance
rectangle. Another of the big personnel carriers nosed slowly out,
moved up into the air and vanished against the night sky. If it was
loaded as close to capacity as the one he had watched from inside the
tunnel, almost two thirds of the Hammerhead force at the station had
gone by now to attend the rites at Cassa One's new sea.
He waited while the force-screen restored itself over the entrance.
Immediately afterwards, the lights in the hangar turned dim and faded
away. Troy climbed in through the inspection door, locked it and
started back down to the maintenance level.
With a little luck, he thought, he might even be able to work
undisturbed now inside the interstellar drone he had selected for his
escape. He would have to be back in the tunnel when the search-beams
came through again ... he suspected they might be quite sensitive
enough to detect the presence of a living being inside one of the
ships. But the Hammerheads themselves might not show up again until
he was prepared to leave. And then it wouldn't matter. If they did
appear--well, he would get some warning from the fact that the hangar
lights would begin to come on first. Not very much warning, but it
might be enough.
The passage leading past his quarters was empty and quiet. Troy
remained behind a corner for a minute or two listening. If Dr. Rojas
had reported his failure to arrive at Room 72, the Tareegs must also
have learned by now that he had left the station, and the last place
they would think of hunting for him was here. But somebody--Hammerhead
or human stooge--might be in his rooms, making a second and more
thorough investigation there.
* * * * *
Everything remained still. Troy came quietly out into the passage, went
down it to the tool room next to his quarters, opened the door, taking
the gun from his pocket, and slipped inside. With the door locked, he
stood still a moment, then turned on the lights.
A glance around showed that nobody was lurking for him here. He
darkened the room again, crossed it, removed the floor section over the
tunnel entrance and slipped down into the tunnel. Working by touch,
he pulled the floor section back across the opening, snapped it into
place and started up the familiar narrow passage he had cut through the
desert rock.
He couldn't have said exactly what warned him. It might have been the
tiny click of a black-light beam going on. But he knew suddenly that
something alive and breathing stood farther up the passage waiting for
him, and the gun came quickly from his pocket again.
His forehead was struck with almost paralyzing force. Stungun ... they
wanted him alive. Troy found himself on his knees, dizzy and sick,
while a voice yelled at him. _Human_, he thought, with a blaze of
hatred beyond anything he'd ever felt for the Tareegs. _Traitor human!_
The gun, still somehow in his hand, snarled its answer.
Then the stungun found him again, in three quick, hammering blows, and
consciousness was gone.
* * * * *
There came presently an extended period of foggy, groping thoughts
interspersed with sleep and vivid nightmares. After a time, Troy was
aware that he was in a section of the sick bay on the _Atlas_, and that
the great carrier was in interstellar flight. So the operation on Cassa
One was over.
He wondered how long he had been knocked out. Days perhaps. It was the
shrill, rapid-fire voice of a Tareeg which had first jolted him back
into partial awareness. For confused seconds, Troy thought the creature
was addressing him; then came the click of a speaker and the sounds
ended, and he realized he had heard the Tareeg's voice over the ship's
intercom system. A little later, it occurred to him that it had been
using its own language and therefore could not have been speaking to
him.
During that first muddled period, Troy knew now and then that he was
still almost completely paralyzed. Gradually, very gradually, his mind
began to clear and the intervals of sleep which always ended with
terrifying nightmares grew shorter. Simultaneously he found he was
acquiring a limited ability to move. And that, too, increased.
It might have been three or four hours after his first awakening
before he began to plan what he might do. He had made a number of
observations. There were three other men in this section with him. All
seemed to be unconscious. He thought the one lying in the bed next to
his own was Newland, but the room was dim and he had been careful to
avoid motions which might have been observed, so he wasn't certain.
There was a single human attendant in the small room beyond the open
doorspace opposite his bed. Troy didn't recall the man's face. He was
in the uniform of a medical corpsman; but whatever else the fellow
might be, he was here primarily in the role of a guard because he had
a gun fastened to his belt. It classed him as a human being whose
subservience to the Hammerheads was not in question. Twice, when the
man in the bed at the far end of the room had begun to groan and move
about, the guard came in and did something that left the restless one
quiet again. Troy couldn't see what he used, but the probability was
that it had been a drug administered with a hypodermic spray.
Getting his hands on the gun, Troy decided, shouldn't be too difficult
if he made no mistakes. His life was forfeit, and to lie and wait
until the Tareeg inquisitors were ready for him wasn't to his taste.
Neither ... though somewhat preferable ... was personal suicide. A
ship, even as great a ship as the _Atlas_, had certain vulnerabilities
in interstellar flight--and who knew them better than one of the ship's
own engineers? The prime nerve centers were the bridge and the sections
immediately surrounding it. It might be, Troy thought, it just might
be that the Hammerheads never would bring their prize in to the twin
worlds to have its treasures of technological information pried out of
it. And that in itself would be a major gain for Earth.
* * * * *
He turned various possibilities over in his mind with the detachment of
a man who has acknowledged the inevitable fact of his own death. And he
felt his strength flowing back into him.
The guard in the other room presently heard renewed groans and the
slurred muttering of a half-conscious man. As he came in through the
doorspace with the drug spray he walked into Troy's fist. It didn't
quite put him to sleep, but the spray did thirty seconds later, and
shortly he was resting, carefully bound and gagged since Troy didn't
know how long the drug would retain its effect, in the back of a large
clothes locker.
The man in the next bed was Newland. He seemed uninjured but was
unconscious, presumably drugged like the other two. Troy left the
section in the corpsman's uniform, the gun concealed in his pocket. It
was improbable that the guard's authority to carry it extended beyond
the sick bay area. In another pocket--it might come in handy--was the
refilled drug spray.
He was two decks closer to the bridge section when it struck him how
deserted the _Atlas_ seemed. Of course, he had avoided areas where he
would be likely to run into sizable groups of either men or Tareegs.
But he had seen only six humans so far, only two of the Hammerheads.
These last had come out of a cross-passage ahead of him and vanished
into another, two men following quietly behind, the high-pitched alien
voices continuing to make a thin, complaining clamor in the otherwise
empty hall seconds after they had disappeared. And the thought came to
Troy: suppose most of the ship's complement was down in the sleepers?
It wasn't impossible. The _Atlas_ must still be provisioned for years
to come, but an excellent way to avoid human mutiny on the approach
to the Hammerhead worlds would be to put any captives not needed for
essential duty to sleep. And the _Atlas_ hadn't been built for the
convenience of water-creatures. To control a human skeleton crew would
require a correspondingly small number of Tareegs. Most of their force,
he thought, very well might be making the return in their own vessels.
* * * * *
The reflection literally stopped Troy in his tracks. Because that could
change everything he'd had in mind, opened up possibilities he hadn't
thought existed ... including the one, still remote though it might be,
of returning the _Atlas_ to Earth. Perhaps the men now in charge of
the ship would be almost as unwilling to allow that to happen as the
Hammerheads; they had too much to answer for. But if the situation he
had imagined did exist, his thoughts raced on ... why then....
Troy's mind swam briefly with a wild premonition of triumph. There
_were_ ways in which it might be done! But because of that, there was
also now the sudden need for much more caution than he had intended to
use. What he needed first was somebody who could tell him exactly how
things stood on board--preferably somebody in a position of authority
who could be persuaded or forced to fall in then with Troy's subsequent
moves.
* * * * *
The bridge deck was as quiet as the others. On the old _Atlas_, most
of this area had been officers' country, reserved for the expedition
heads and top ship personnel; and presumably that arrangement had been
changed only by the addition of Tareeg commanders and guards. Troy kept
to the maintenance passages, encountered no one but presently found
unused crew quarters and exchanged the corpsman uniform there for less
conspicuous shipboard clothes. This would make a satisfactory temporary
base of operations. And now to get the information he wanted....
The voice was coming out of the only door open on the dim hall. There
were six staterooms on either side, and Troy remembered that the room
beyond the open door had been occupied by Dr. Clingman on the trip
out from Earth. The voice--preoccupied, mild, a little tired--was
unmistakably Dr. Victor Clingman's.
Was he alone? Troy thought so. He couldn't make out the words, but
it was a monologue, not a conversation. He had the impression of
Clingman dictating another rambling dissertation on Tareeg ways into
a recorder; and the conviction came to him, not for the first time,
that the man was in some essential manner no longer sane, that he had
come to believe that his observations on these deadly enemies some day
really could be compiled into an orderly and valuable addition to human
knowledge.
Sane or not, he was a frightened man, the perfect quarry for Troy's
present purpose. With a gun on him, he would talk. And once having
assisted Troy to any degree, he would be too terrified of Tareeg
reprisals to do anything but switch sides again and go along with Troy,
hoping that thereby the worst--once more--could be avoided. The worst
for Victor Clingman. It would be impossible, Troy thought, to trust
Clingman, but he could make very good use of him in spite of that.
He came quietly along the passage, his attention as much on the
closed doors about him as on the one which was open. The guard's gun
unfortunately wasn't a noiseless type, but he had wrapped a small
cushion around its muzzle and across it, which should muffle reports
satisfactorily if it came to that. Words became distinguishable.
"It is not a parasite in the ordinary sense," Clingman's tired voice
said. "It is a weapon. It kills and moves on. A biological weapon
limited to attack one species: the enemy. It is insidious. There is no
warning and no defense. Unconsciousness and death occur painlessly
within an hour after contact, and the victim has not realized he is
being destroyed. The radius of infection moves out indetectably and
with incredible swiftness. And yet there was a method of containing
this agent. That knowledge, however, is now lost.
"As an achievement of the Tareeg genius for warfare, the weapon seems
matched--in some respects surpassed--only by the one used to counteract
it. And in that, obviously, there were serious faults. They...."
The man, Troy decided, was quite close, perhaps twelve feet to the
right side of the door. He glanced back along the silent hall, slipped
the cover from the gun--with Clingman, he would only need to show
it--then came into the room in two quick strides, turning to the right
and drawing the door shut behind him.
* * * * *
There was no one in sight. The voice continued:
"... desperate, with no time to complete essential testing. A terrible
gamble, but one which inevitably...." The meaning faded from Troy's
mind as he discovered the wall-speaker from which the words were
coming. His eyes darted across the room to a comfortable chair drawn
up beside a table, to a familiar picture of untidily arrayed piles of
notes on the table, a thread of smoke still rising from a cigarette
in the tray among them. Clingman had been in the room within minutes,
listening to one of his previous recordings as he worked. Troy's glance
shifted to a closed door on his right. Bedroom and bath of the suite
lay behind it. Clingman might be there. He might also ... Troy reached
back, quietly opened the door to the hall again, moved on and slipped
out of sight behind an ornamental screen on the other side of the
speaker.
Clingman could have left his quarters for some reason. In any event, it
was obvious that he had intended to return to the room very shortly. If
he brought someone with him, the situation might be more difficult. But
hardly too difficult to be handled.
Troy worked the improvised silencer back over the gun muzzle, senses
straining to catch either the opening of the door on his right or the
sound of an approach down the hall.
"So it was possible," he heard the wall-speaker say, "to reconstruct,
in almost every essential detail, what the concluding situation must
have been on the world where the Tareeg species had its origin. The
attacking section was safely screened, presumably by a form of energy
barrier, against the deadly agent it had released. The section under
attack had no defense against an agent so nearly indestructible that it
subsequently survived for over a thousand years in its inert, frozen
condition without losing effectiveness in the least--"
Troy thought: What ... WHAT HAD IT SAID?
He stepped out from behind the screen as the door on his right opened.
Dr. Clingman stood in the door, mouth open, eyes bulging in surprise
and alarm at the gun in Troy's hand. Then his gaze shifted to Troy's
face, and his expression slowly changed.
"Mister Gordon," he murmured, smiling very cautiously, "you are really
the most difficult man to keep stopped!"
Troy pointed a shaking finger at the speaker. "That!" he cried.
"That ... it said _a thousand years in the ice_!"
Clingman nodded. "Yes." His eyes returned, still rather warily, to
the gun. "And I'm rather glad, you know, you happened to catch that
particular part before I appeared."
Troy was staring at him. "That was their lost home-world--the one
you've kept talking about. That great asteroid cloud here...."
"No, not here." Clingman came forward more confidently into the room,
and Troy saw now that the left side of the scientist's face and head
was covered with medical plastic. "The Cassa system is a long way
behind us, Gordon," Clingman said. "We've been on our way back to Earth
for more than two days."
"To Earth," Troy muttered. "And I...."
* * * * *
Clingman jabbed a stubby finger down on a control switch at the table,
and the wall-speaker went silent. "It will be easier to tell you
directly," he said. "You've already grasped the essential fact--our
Tareeg captors, for the most part, are dead. They were killed, with
some careful assistance from the men in charge of this expedition, by a
weapon developed approximately twelve centuries ago on their ancestral
world. A world which still circles today, though in a rather badly
disintegrated condition, about the Cassa sun....
"But let's be seated, if you will. You gave me a very unpleasant
fright just now." Dr. Clingman touched the side of his face. "I had an
ear shot off recently by a man who didn't wait to have the situation
explained to him. His aim, fortunately, was imperfect. And there is
still a minor war in progress on the _Atlas_. Oh, nothing to worry
about now--it's almost over. I heard less than twenty minutes ago that
the last of the Tareeg guards on board had surrendered. About fifty of
them have become our prisoners. Then there is a rather large group of
armed men in spacesuits in one section of the ship with whom we have
been unable to communicate. They regard us as traitors to the race,
Dr. Dexter and myself in particular. But we have worked out a system
of light signals which should tell them enough to make them willing to
parlay...."
He settled himself carefully into the big chair, turning a white,
fatigued face back to Troy. "That," he said, waving his pudgy hand at
the wall-speaker, "is a talk I made up to explain what actually has
happened to the main body of the mutineers. They comprised a large
majority of the crew and of the expedition members, of course, but
fortunately we were able to gas most of them into unconsciousness
almost at once, so that no further lives have been lost. We have begun
to arouse them again in small groups who are told immediately that the
space ice we were bringing in to Cassa One carried a component which
has resulted in the destruction of the Tareeg force, and who are then
given as much additional information as is needed to answer their
general questions and convince them that we are still qualified to
command the Cassa Expedition. I believe that in a few more days normal
conditions on the ship will have been restored...."
Clingman glanced over at the smoldering cigarette in the tray, stubbed
it out and lit another. "We had been aware for some time of your
plan to escape back to Earth in one of the Tareeg drones," he said.
"It was an audacious and ingenious scheme which might very well have
succeeded. We decided to let you go ahead with it, since it was by no
means certain until the very last day that our own plans would be an
unqualified success. On the other hand, we couldn't let you leave too
early because the Tareegs certainly would have taken the _Atlas_ to
the twin worlds then without completing the Cassa One operation. And
we didn't care to let you in on our secret, for reasons I'm sure you
understand."