The IF Reader of Science Fiction Page 13

  Cemp found Joanne in one of the spare bedrooms. She lay on the bed, fully dressed, breathing slowly and deeply. He sent a quick flow of energy through her brain. The reflexes that were stirred reassured him that she was merely sleeping. He also picked up some of the alien energy that was still in her cells. They told a story that made it instantly obvious why she was still alive: The Kibmadine had used her living body as a model for his duplication of her.

  On this occasion at least the creature had been after bigger game: a Silkie.

  Cemp did not try to rouse the sleeping woman. But he was greatly relieved as he went out onto the patio, which overlooked a white, sandy beach and the timeless blue ocean beyond. He sat there until Baxter presently joined him.

  Baxter said, “I sense a doubt in you.”

  Cemp nodded.

  Baxter asked gently, “What do you fear?”

  “Death!”

  It was a feeling deep inside him.

  Sitting there, he made up his mind—for the second time since he had become involved with the alien—to die if necessary. And with that decision, he began to turn on his receptors, all of them except that to start, he turned out local Earth noise. TV, radio, innumerable energies from machines—these had to be shut away from him. Swiftly, then, he began to “hear” the signals from the plenum.

  Long before Silkies it had been known that space was alive with messages; the entire sidereal universe pulsed with an incredible number of vibrations. Hour on hour and year by year, Silkies lived with that ceaseless “noise,” and most of their early training was entirely and exclusively directed to the development of selective sleep and rest and wakefulness mechanisms for each receptor.

  Now—those that were asleep awakened. Those that were at rest alerted.

  His brain came to peak awareness.

  He began to sense the near stars, the distant stars, the clusters, the galaxies. Every star had its own complex signal. Nowhere was there a duplication or even a close similarity.

  The universe that he tuned in upon was composed entirely of individuals. Cemp appraised the distance of each star, the uniqueness of each signal. Friendly space world! Every star being exactly and precisely what it was and where it was gave meaning to the immense stellar universe. There was no chaos. He experienced his own location in space and time, and it gave him a certainty of the basic rightness of things.

  VII

  He came back from his far-flung ranging to about a million miles from Earth. There he paused to let the signals come in from all of the space between.

  Without opening his eyes, he said to Baxter, “I don’t read him. He must have gone around the planet and put the mass of Earth between him and me. Are the reflectors ready?” Baxter talked on a phone line that had been kept open for him. Previously alerted Telstar and astronomical satellites were placed at Cemp’s disposition. Through one of the ,reflectors, he focused on the invading entity.

  Cemp said to the alien, “Above everything else we want information.”

  The other said, “Perhaps I should tell you our history.” And so Cemp was given the story of the eternal lovers, more than a million beings who moved from one planetary system to another, and each time altered themselves to the form of the inhabitants and established a love relationship with them—a love relationship that meant death and pain for their love-objects. Only twice had the lovers met beings of sufficient power to make them draw back. In each instance, they had destroyed the entire system.

  Di-isarill finished: “No additional information is available no matter what you do.”

  Cemp broke contact. A shaken Baxter said, “Do you think that was true information?”

  Cemp answered that he thought it was.

  He finished with finality: “Our job is to find out one tiling: Where does he come from? And then destroy him.”

  “But how do you propose to do this?”

  It was a good question. His single clash with the creature had brought him up hard against a wall of power.

  Cemp sank lower into his settee and with closed eyes considered the problem of a race of beings who had complete control of body change. Many times in those long duty watches out in space, he had pondered such possibilities; for the cell could grow and ungrow, divide, split off, fall away and re-form, all within a few seconds. In the twilight virus, the bacteria and the cell had their complex being, the enormous speed of change had made possible the almost instantaneous orderly altering of human to Silkie and back again.

  The invader apparently could change to an infinite number of forms with equal rapidity, assuming any body shape at will.

  But the logic of levels applied to the Kibmadine’s every action.

  From somewhere behind Cemp, Baxter said, “Are you sure?” His voice sounded incredulous.

  Cemp had two reactions to the question: Extreme joy at the hope that his analysis brought . . . and the stronger conviction. He said aloud, “Yes, logic applies. But for him we’ll need the closest contact of the energies involved. Inches would be better than feet, feet better than yards. So I’ll have to get out there in person.”

  “Out where?” Baxter asked, almost incredulous.

  “To his ship.”

  “Do you think he has a ship?”

  “Of course he has one. Anything else would be impractical for his operations.

  Cemp was patient as he made his explanation. He had observed that even the Special People had exaggerated idea’s on such matters. They tended to accept that Silkies were more capable than they were. But the logic of it was simple: coming in toward a sun, one could utilize its full gravitational pull to get up speed. Right now the Kibmadine would be “climbing the ladder” of the planets, cutting off the sun’s gravity from behind, opening up to the pull of Jupiter and the outer planets.

  No sensible being would try to bridge the distance between stars by such a method. So there was a ship. There had to be.

  Cemp said, “Order a spaceship for me, complete with a tank of water that can be moved.”

  “You expect to change before you get there?”

  “It’ll happen any minute.”

  Baxter said, amazed, “You intend to confront the most powerful being that we can imagine without a single bit of energy of your own available?”

  “Yes,” said Cemp. “It’s the only way we’ll get him within inches of the energy source I want installed in the tank. For heaven’s sake, man, get started.”

  Reluctantly, Baxter reached for the phone.

  VIII

  As Cemp expected, he began his change en route. By the time he was put aboard the Kibmadine ship, he was already in a tank of water in his first compulsive change, which was to the fish state.

  He would be a class B Silkie for slightly more than two months.

  As Di-isarill came finally to the tiny ship in its remote orbit beyond Pluto, he noticed at once that the entrance mechanism had been tampered with, and he sensed the presence of Cemp aboard.

  In the course of countless millennia his fear reflexes had fallen into disuse. So he had no anxiety. But he recognized that here was all the appearance of a trap.

  In a flash, he checked to insure that there was no source of energy aboard that could destroy him. There was none; no relay; nothing.

  A faint energy emanated from the tank. But it had no purpose that Di-isarill could detect.

  He wondered scathingly if these human beings expected somehow to work a bluff whereby he would be impelled by uncertainty to stay away from his own ship.

  With that thought, he activated the entrance mechanism, entered, transformed to human, walked over to the tank that stood in the center of the tiny cabin—and looked down at Cemp, who lay at the bottom.

  Di-isarill said, “If it’s a bluff, I couldn’t possibly yield to it because I have nowhere else that I can go.”

  In his fish state, Cemp could hear and understand human words but could not speak them.

  Di-isarill persisted: “It’s interesting that the one Sil
kie whom I cannot read has taken the enormous risk of coming aboard. Perhaps you were more affected by the desire I attempted to rouse in your home than appeared at the time. Perhaps you long for the ecstasy and the anguish that I offered.”

  Cemp was thinking tensely: “It’s working. He doesn’t notice how he got onto that subject.”

  The logic of levels was beginning to take effect.

  It was a strange world, the world of logic. For nearly all of his long history, man had been moved by unsuspected mechanisms in his brain and nervous system. A sleep center put him to sleep. A waking center woke him up. A rage mechanism mobilized him for attack. A fear complex propelled him to flight. There were a hundred or more other mechanisms, each with its special task for him, each in itself a marvel of perfect functioning but degraded by his uncomprehending obedience to a chance triggering of one or another.

  During this period, all civilization consisted of codes of honor and conduct and of attempts noble and ignoble to rationalize the unknown simplicities underneath. Finally, came a developing comprehension and control of the neural mechanisms, one, then another, then many.

  The real age of reason began.

  On the basis of that reason Cemp asked himself: Was the Kibmadine level lower, or higher, than for example the shark?

  It was lower, he decided. The comparison would be, if man had brought cannibalism into civilization with him. A lower level of logic applied to that.

  The shark was relatively pure within his frame. He lived by the feedback system, in a pretty good balance. He did not age, as humans did. He grew older—and longer.

  It was a savagely simple system. Keep in motion: that was the law of it. What poetry that motion was, in the wide, deep sea that had spawned him! But it was—feel need of oxygen, get excited, swim faster; enough oxygen, slow, cruise, even stop. But not for long. Movement continuous—life.

  Eating, of itself, was lower, more basic, went farther back into the antiquity of the cell.

  And so, the mighty Kibmadine had brought into their innumerable forms one pattern that was vulnerable, one they wouldn’t give up, no matter how much they controlled the other basic mechanisms of their bodies . . .

  Di-isarill was calm as he sped through space. He sensed that he had subtly managed to influence Cemp to the fear of intolerable retaliation . . . Unfortunate that the Silkie had analyzed the Kibmadine structure so accurately. It made direct reading of Cemp’s feelings and thoughts difficult.

  Not that it mattered. Under other circumstances, Earth might well have been a planet to be destroyed. But there was no chance at all of enough Silkies being produced in time to save the system from being conquered.

  And so another race would, one at a time, experience the ecstasy of being eaten as the culmination of the act of love.

  . . . What a joy it was to receive from tens of millions of cells! First resistance, terror, shrinking; and then the inversion: every part of the being craving to be eaten, longing, begging, demanding—

  Di-isarill’s calmness yielded to excitement, as the pictures and the feelings re-formed in his mind, from ten thousand remembered feasts of love-objects.

  “I really loved them all,” he thought sadly.

  Too bad they were not brought up to appreciate in advance the ultimate delight of the all-consuming end of the sex orgy.

  It had always bothered Di-isarill that the preliminaries had to be secret, particularly with beings who had the ability to transmit thoughts to others of their kind and thus warn them. The greatest pleasure always came when the ending was known, when part of the love play consisted of reassuring the troubled, trembling being, quieting the pounding heart.

  “Some day,” he told thousands of love partners, “I shall meet someone who will eat me. And when that happens—”

  Always he had tried to persuade them that he would rejoice as he was being devoured.

  The inversion involved was a phenomenon of the life condition: first, resistance, terror, shrinking; then every part of the being craving to be eaten, longing, begging, demanding. The urge to succumb could be as powerful as the urge to survive.

  Standing there in front of the tank, looking down at Cemp, Di-isarill felt a quickening of emotion as the conjuration of himself being eaten flitted like a fantasy through his brain. He had had such pictures before but never before so strong.

  He did not notice that he had passed the point of no return.

  Without thinking, he turned away from the tank. Cemp forgotten, he transformed quickly into a remembered form, long-necked, with smooth dappled skin and powerful teeth. He remembered the form well and lovingly. The members of the race had been love objects for the Kibmadine not too long ago. Their bodies had a particularly excruciating pleasure nerve system.

  Di-isarill could scarcely wait.

  Even as he became the form, his long neck twisted. A moment later the teeth, impelled by the merciless Kibmadine biting drive, cut off an entire thigh.

  The pain was so hideous he screamed. But in his enchanted brain the scream was only an echo of the countless screams that his bite had evoked in the past. Now, as then, the sound excited him almost beyond endurance. He bit deeper, champed harder, ate fast.

  He devoured nearly one half of his own body before the imminence of death brought a baby fear from his own true past. Whimpering, blindly longing for home, he opened a line to his contact on the planet of the far sun where his kind now dwelt.

  At this instant an outside force surged past him and overwhelmed his personal communication. As one, a dozen Silkies loaded an electric charge on that line, all they believed it could carry.

  The charge that struck the distant Kibmadine totalled more than 80,000 volts and over 140,000 amperes of electricity. It was so powerful it smashed all his reflex defenses and burnt him in a single puff of flame and smoke.

  As quickly as it had opened, the line ceased to exist. The Sol system was now only an anonymous, distant star.

  The tank with Cemp in it was carried to the ocean. He crawled out into the sea, breasted the incoming tide.

  The bubbling fresh liquid poured through his gills. As he reached the deeper water, he submerged. Soon the thunder of the surf was behind him. Ahead was a blue sea and the great underwater shelf where a colony of class B Silkies lived their fishlike existence.

  He would dwell in their domed cities with them . . . for a time.

  “I’d like you to meet Professor Aylward of Copernicus Observatory,” said Angus.

  Up to that point, Captain Martinu had seriously been considering leaving the party. The band was much too loud. The dancing was far too energetic for someone like himself, who was used to long periods of free fall that wasted the muscles. And the promise of interesting people to talk to, with which Angus had persuaded him to come along, had not been fulfilled.

  Now, though, he felt a sudden stir of interest as he shook the hand of the short, bespectacled, balding scientist, lie said, “You mean you’re the Aylward they named the Aylward Field after?”

  “Er—” Aylward looked uncomfortable. “Well, as a matter of Tact, yes, I am.”

  “As a result of which,” Angus said, “I owe you my life, among other things.” He ran his hand through his shock of coarse black hair, which stuck up from his head, in the currently fashionable Fijian style, like a chimneysweep’s brush.

  Martinu said, “And I owe you a couple of billion dollars. We picked up a buster with your field in the old Castor, when I was a junior engine tech.”

  Rather diffidently, Aylward eyed the other’s immaculate uniform. “And stayed on in the space service?” he said. “Isn’t that unusual?”

  “Oh, unique!” Martinu agreed with a trace of pride. “I’m the only man in the service who’s picked up a buster and not immediately bought himself out of a career job. I say, is there anything I can do for you?”

  Aylward seemed to be in some distress, his breathing deep and stertorous, his shoulders hunching forward. He said, “You can help me to a chai
r, if you will. I’ve been on Luna for the past seventeen years. Full gravity makes me terribly tired.”

  Martinu hastily took the professor’s arm. He was in top physical condition—had to be—but even so he was quickly exhausted by a couple of hours on his feet, so he could appreciate Aylward’s discomfort. Angus, as always, had vanished the moment he saw a conversation starting and gone to spark another one elsewhere.

  There was a vacant double seat in the nearest of the alcoves off the dance floor. Martinu headed for it. There was a couple engaged in violent love-making on the other seat but he ignored their looks of irritation as he sat Aylward down. He said, “Let me get you a drink.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” said Aylward. He wiped sweat from his forehead with a bandanna handkerchief matching his Mexican-styled cummerbund. “A long cool one, for choice.”

  “Will do,” said Martinu, and went in search of a waiter. He was on his way back with the drinks when Angus, a look of anxiety on his long face, pushed through a cluster of other guests and caught his arm.

  “Martinu, I guess I should warn you about old Aylward. I mean, he’s a nice guy and a genius and all that. But like a lot of geniuses he’s a bit nutty on one point. Unfortunately you’ve hit it right away.”

  “What? Busters?”

  “Yes. He has a perfectly absurd theory about what they are and where they come from. If you get him started on it, he’ll bend your ear all night.”

  Martinu shrugged. “If he hasn’t got a right to theorize about busters, who has? Besides, the Aylward Field got me a share in one. I reckon listening to him for an hour or two is a cheap price to pay for that.”

  “Damn it, I had to tell him what a buster was, once!”

  Angus made a sweeping gesture which spilled his drink over the back of his hand. Fishing for a handkerchief to dry it, he went on, “In fact, if it hadn’t been for me—”

  Something in Martinu’s expression warned him. He broke off. “I guess I told you about that. Sorry. But don’t say I didn’t warn you, will you?”