The IF Reader of Science Fiction Read online

  “You may be sure, our physical construction is intricate.” He wasn’t sure he could follow the machine’s line of reasoning, but that hardly mattered if he could somehow win the game of Life. He kept his fingers on the C-plus activator.

  The berserker said: “If I am able to study some living cells—”

  Like a hot iron on a nerve, the meteorite-damage indicator moved; something was at the hull. “Stop that!” he screamed, without thought. “The first thing you try, I’ll kill you!”

  Its voice was unevenly calm, as always. “There may have been some accidental contact with your hull. I am damaged and many of my commensal machines are unreliable. I mean to land on this approaching planetoid to mine for metal and repair myself as far as possible.” The indicator was quiet again.

  The berserker resumed its argument. “If I am able to study some living cells from an intelligent life-unit for a few hours, I expect I will find strong evidence for, or against, your argument. Will you provide me with cells?”

  “You must have had prisoners, sometime.” He said it as a suspicion; he really knew no reason why it must have had human captives. It could have learned the language from another berserker.

  “No, I have never taken a prisoner.”

  It waited. The question it had asked still hung in the air.

  “The only human cells on this ship are my own. Possibly I could give you a few of them.”

  “Half a cubic centimeter should be enough; not a dangerous loss for you, I believe. I will not demand part of your brain. Also I understand that you wish to avoid the sensation called pain. I am willing to help you avoid it, if possible.”

  Did it want to drug him? That seemed too simple. Always unpredictability, the stories said, and sometimes a subtlety out of hell.

  He went on with the game. “I have all that is necessary. Be warned that my attention will hardly waver from the control panel. Soon I will place a tissue sample in the airlock for you.”

  He got the medical kit, took two pain-killers, and set very carefully to work with a sterile scalpel. He had had some biological training.

  When the small wound was bandaged, he cleansed the tissue sample of blood and lymph and with unsteady fingers scaled it into a little tube. Without letting down his guard for an instant, he dragged the fallen pilot to the airlock and left it there with the tissue sample. Utterly weary, he got back to the combat chair. When he switched the outer door open, he heard something come into the lock, and leave again.

  He took a pep pill. It would stimulate some pain, but he’d be alert.

  Two hours passed. Carr forced himself to eat some emergency rations, watched the panel, and waited.

  He gave a startled jump when the berserker spoke again; nearly six hours had gone by.

  “You are free to leave,” it was saying. “Tell the leading life-units of your planet that when I have refitted, I will be their ally. The study of your cells has convinced me that the human body is the highest creation of the universe, and that I should make helping you my purpose. Do you understand?”

  Carr felt numb. “Yes. Yes, I have convinced you. After you have refitted, you will fight on our side.”

  Something shoved hugely and gently at his hull. Through a port he saw stars, and realized that the great hatch through which his ship had entered was swinging open.

  This far within the system, Carr necessarily kept his ship in normal space to travel. It meant he could see the berserker as he fled from it, and he kept it in sight as long as possible. His last sight of the berserker showed it moving as if indeed about to let down upon the airless planetoid. Certainly it was not following him.

  A couple of hours after being freed, he roused himself from contemplation of the radar screen, and went to spend a full minute considering the inner airlock door. At last he shook his head, dialed air into the lock, and entered it. The pilot was gone, with the tissue sample. There was nothing strange to be seen. Carr took a deep breath, as if relieved, closed up the lock again, and went to a port to spend some time watching the stars.

  After a day he began to decelerate, so that when hours had added into another day, he was still a good distance from home. He ate, and slept, and watched his face in a mirror. He weighed himself, and he watched the stars some more, with great interest, like a man examining something long forgotten.

  In two more days, gravity bent his course into a hairpin ellipse around his home planet. With his whole world bulking between him and the berserker’s rock, Carr began to use his radio.

  “Ho, on the ground! Good news.”

  The answer came almost instantly. “We’ve been tracking you, Carr. What’s going on? What happened?”

  He told them of his encounter with the berserker. “So that’s the story up to now,” he finished. “I expect the thing really needs to refit. It is seriously damaged. Two warships attacking it now should easily win.”

  “Yes.” There was excited talk in the background. Then the voice was back, sounding uneasy. “Carr—you haven’t started a landing approach yet, so maybe you understand. We’ve got to be careful. The thing was probably lying to you.”

  “Oh, I know. Even that pilot’s collapse might have been staged. I guess the berserker was too badly shot up to want to risk a battle, so it tried another way. Must have sneaked the stuff into my cabin air, just before it let me go—or maybe left it in my airlock.”

  “What stuff?”

  Carr said, “The stuff you’re worrying about. The poison it thinks will kill us all. I’d guess it’s some freshly mutated virus, designed for specific virulence against the tissue I gave it. It expected I’d hurry home and land before getting sick, and spread a new plague. It must have thought it was inventing biological warfare, using life against life, as we use machines against machines. But it needed that tissue sample to blood its pet viruses. It didn’t know our chemistry. It must have been telling the truth about never having a human prisoner.”

  “Some virus, you think? What’s it doing to you, Carr? Are you in pain—I mean, more than before?”

  “No.” Carr swirled his chair to look at the little chart he had begun. It showed that in the last two days his weight loss had started to reverse itself. He looked down at his body, at the bandaged place near the center of a discolored, inhuman-looking area. That area was smaller than it had been, and he saw a hint of new and healthy skin. “What is the stuff doing to you?”

  Carr allowed himself to smile, and to speak aloud his growing hope.

  “I think it’s killing off my cancer.”

  It was about the size of a grapefruit, and about the color of one. From its top sprouted a cluster of thin, ribbonish tentacles—translucent, filled with shifting shades of violet and chartreuse, far tougher than they looked. Four pedal extremities, oddly like thumbs with long claws, stuck out from the bottom. It had two flat, pink eyes, set very close together.

  It squealed as Ray Caradac carried it at arm’s length into the control room of the Manta.

  “Look what we have here,” he said grimly.

  Mary Caradac—small, brunette, snapping-eyed, the other half of Extraterrestrial Exploration Team 2861—looked up from the bitchboard, where she had been dialing their course away from Sirius IV.

  “What on Earth—” she gasped.

  “On Sirius,” Ray corrected. “On good old Sirius IV, which we seem not to have escaped quite as completely as we thought we had.”

  “A baby Sirian!”

  “That’s my guess, from the glimpses we got of the natives.”

  Mary stood up, spilling Benton’s Astrocharts from her lap, and reached for the creature. Ray relinquished it, looking disgusted. While Mary cradled it in both hands, he moved three steps across the narrow, instrument-cluttered control room to snap on the rear screen. He focused the screen with one hand, rubbed his home-made crew-cut with the other.

  Behind him, the Sirian infant squealed, a sound like a viola harmonic. “Where’d you find it?” Mary asked.

 
“Under my bed, of all places. I went to shove my suit-boots under it and change into sneakers, and the critter let out a squeal and damned near scared me out through the side of the ship.”

  “What was it doing there?”

  “Ask it.” Ray stared glumly out at the dull green globe of Sirius IV, already thirty thousand miles away and retreating at ninety m.p.s. “Maybe it wanted to see the Universe, or just get the hell off its planet. I can understand that, after two hours on the godforsaken ice ball.”

  “It probably likes minus thirty just fine. It’s probably roasting right now, poor thing.”

  Ray turned from the gazer. Mary was cuddling the Sirian infant to her breast and fanning it with one hand.

  “Look out,” he said dryly. “It might bite.”

  “So do human babies. Besides, it hasn’t got any teeth.” Ray looked at the tiny pink mouth, opening and closing horizontally under the eyes like sliding doors. He’d seen enough cockeyed life-forms not to shudder.

  “Why, look, it couldn’t have wandered in,” Mary said, twiddling one of the stubby legs. She set it on the chart file, where it immediately went plop on its rounded bottom, legs sticking out like a newborn kitten’s. “It can’t even stand up.” She flashed a hand in front of the pink eyes, and filmy eyelids blinked. The tentacles waved. “I’m no judge of Sirian age, but I’ll bet it’s damed young.”

  She looked wise and extended a finger and two tentacles curled around it, tugging it gently toward the mouth.

  “Uh, uh,” she said. “Not a nipple, son. There, Ray—you see?” She picked it up again. Another squeal.

  “I wasn’t arguing,” he said absently. Then, plaintively: “Just what the devil are we supposed to do with a Sirian infant? And how did it get here, if it can’t walk under its steam?”

  “Under someone else’s, obviously,” Mary said practically. Then she paused and cocked her head. Her eyes widened. “Good God! I wonder . . . come on Ray, let’s go look where you found it. I have a perfectly wonderfully preposterous hunch!”

  They went single-file down the narrow corridor that led to sleeping quarters, Mary carrying the infant. There she waited for Ray to open the door—as she would have done even if she hadn’t had her hands full. The Caradacs had decided long ago that such little niceties should be carefully and lovingly observed aboard the Manta, ten billion miles from nowhere. Things like love and sex can get awfully pedestrian in a sixty-foot spacer, if you don’t care for them right.

  Inside, Mary put the Sirian on Joe’s bed and said, “Hold it there.”

  Ray sat down beside the creature and put one hand on its back—the surface 180° from eyes and mouth—and pressed gingerly. Squeal.

  “I wonder what it eats,” he said sourly.

  Mary was head and shoulders under the bed. She said, “Ah, hah!” and emerged with a handful of dried, crinkly-looking leaves. They smelled faintly like cinnamon. The Sirian’s tentacles went Zing! and it squealed an octave above any previous effort.

  “Feed it,” Mary said, going under the bed again.

  Ray put a pinch of the leaves on the blanket, and released the creature, keeping one hand poised to see that it didn’t roll off the bed. It dug the claws of its front feet into the blanket, hiked itself toward the leaves, opened its mouth and crunched away. Ray watched, eyes a little glazed. “What-?”

  Mary’s head appeared again. In one hand she held more dried leaves; in the other a crude basket about a foot square, high sided, woven of some broad, reddish fiber.

  She squatted there, holding the basket, and looked at Ray.

  It took Ray about six seconds to get it. He looked down at the creature, happily chewing leaves, up again at Mary’s face. His jaw dropped. She was beginning to grin.

  Ray clapped a hand unbelievingly to the side of his head, so hard his ears rang. “God in Heaven,” he said. “A foundling!”

  “Basket and all,” Mary said. “Only the pathetic note from the mother is lacking.”

  “Oh, no, it’s crazy!”

  “Crazy or not, it’s here.” Mary touched a hand to the tentacles, and there was a squeal—a happy-sounding squeal.

  “But why?” Ray gasped. “Why should a Sirian mother-dressed in a threadbare Sirian shawl, no doubt—abandon her baby in our ship?”

  “Why do mothers in threadbare shawls usually abandon babies?”

  “M’m. Because they can’t support them. Or because they’re illegitimate, or something.”

  “In this case it’s probably just something. I don’t think it could be a matter of supporting it. A B-4 culture’s too darned primitive for that. They live right off the soil. This stuff”—Mary pinched a bandful of leaves she’d put on the blanket—“was everywhere we walked. As for legitimacy, that’s never an issue in the pre-M series—”

  “Tut,” said Ray, academically aroused. “You’re assuming, honey. You need ten decimals after B-4, or anything else to really classify. Forbidden fruits all over the place. Besides, maybe our little friend here isn’t a waif at all. Maybe we were taken for gods, and it’s a sacrifice.”

  “In a basket? Brought right into this big old terrifying ship?”

  “Oh, hell, I don’t know. Motive X, for alien. That B-4 status drove us off the planet so fast . . . Scram! hands off! clear out! don’t influence! and all the rest of Article 12, Section 9, paragraphs 3, 4, 7 and 16 of the Extraterrestrial Kxplor—”

  “Not a nipple,” Mary said, disengaging her finger again. “You know, Ray, I think it’s thirsty.”

  Ray glowered at the creature. “I wonder what it drinks.”

  “Try water—but be careful.”

  Ray filled a glass of water from the tiny basin in the corner and held it close to the vertical pink mouth. The mouth wrinkled. The little Sirian scrabbled backward and pressed into the pillow.

  “So water’s out,” Ray grunted. He put the glass on the low table between the beds, knocking over two pawns and the black queen. “So now what? My God, didn’t whoever or whatever left the critter here have sense enough to realize that handful of leaves wouldn’t last forever? That we might not have whatever they drink for water?”

  “Of course not,” Mary said placidly. “Now who’s assuming? What can you expect of a B-4 . . . a cosmology? Food mid water, or their equivalents, have always been around: therefore food and water are everywhere. A B-4 couldn’t have the slightest idea of what this ship is, or what we are, or where we’re from or going and how and why—”

  “Then why was the food left?”

  “Maybe to keep our friend happy until we found it. Oh, I don’t know either! I’m just as puzzled as you are. But I do know what we’ve got to do now.”

  “What?”

  “Take it back. It’ll die if we don’t.”

  Ray sat down on the other bed and glared at the two who sat on his—Mary and the Sirian infant, which had ceased eating and was now cleaning the waxy skin around its mouth with a tentacle.

  “Sure,” he said. “Take it back. Violate every damned rule in the book. Take a chance on Influencing, by letting them see us again. One time is bad enough—but the B series have short memories. Most of it gets corrupted by legend, and after a couple of centuries the legends are obliterated by more recent events and interpretations. But a second time? That’s the time that clicks.”

  “We have to, anyway. Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe it isn’t a B—”

  “Honey, I studied forty years not to be wrong. I can look at three artifacts, two flora, the dials on my spy-eye, and write a history.”

  Mary looked stubborn. “We take it back. This isn’t in the books.”

  “Maybe they’ll tear it to pieces if we do,” Ray argued. “Maybe it’s a freak—a sport. Maybe that’s why it landed up with us. We might be killing it.”

  “Well, we’ll certainly be killing it if we don’t, so you get right on up to the board and get us back to that planet. Look how thirsty it is . . . hey, not a hippie, damn it!” The infant squealed, eyeing the finger.

>   “Nobody’ll ever know, Ray. We can’t let the poor thing die.”

  Ray sighed and raised his brows. Then he lowered one and winked at her. “What do I get?”

  “A lot of nothing if you don’t.”

  Mary grinned at his back.

  My mate dead. She die having little one. I sorry. She best mate. But I sorrier for little one. Soon they kill him. Why kill little ones when mother die having them? Priest say because they kill mother and now no mother to drink from. So they die anyway. But they not kill mother. That what I think. Not their fault. And other mothers with dead little ones. No little ones to drink them. Why not . . . why not . . . do for each other? But priest say no. He say they bad. Must die because kill mother. He say he must drink from mothers with dead little ones to keep magic power. Me get fat. This go on for long long time. Many thousand suns. But I wonder if he really have magic power or just want to stay fat. Soon priest come to take little one away and kill him. I sorry. Then I think of shiny thing that come down by village out of sky. Everybody afraid. Priest tell us to stay away. Tell us gods angry. Tell us to stay in huts. Things come out of shiny thing. Tall and different. They walk through village. Everybody afraid. I afraid too. But they don’t hurt. Don’t kill. Don’t break huts and eat like animals. I more sorry for little one than afraid. I no let priest kill him. While tall different things walk in village I go out with little one. Nobody see. Everybody afraid to look out I take little one to shiny thing. Cave in side. I afraid but nothing happen. I take little one into cave and hide him. Leave food so he not cry and priest hear. I think maybe tall different things kill him when find him. But they no hurt when walk in village. And priest take long long time to kill little one if find him. So I hope tall different things treat little one good. I go back to village. Tall different things coming. I hide. They pass. I go into village. Everybody coming out. We see shiny thing go into sky. Everybody afraid. Priest most afraid. He say tall different things bad gods. They angry. Must sacrifice. He want little one to sacrifice. I afraid. I make up story. I say tall different things good gods. I say they take little one away to village in sky because killing little ones wrong. They come to save him. Priest say I lie. I say he lie. I say good gods kill him if he kill more little ones when mothers die. Everybody listen. They say tall different ones didn’t hurt. Didn’t kill. Maybe I right. Maybe tall different ones really good gods. Priest say not true. He make up story. He say bad gods come because he call them to come take little one away and eat him. He say lie call gods to take little one! But I know he lie because they no take. I put little one in shiny thing. But I don’t say or they kill me for lying. I stick to story. I tell everybody tall different ones good gods. Come to save little one. Priest say they bad gods. Come to take little one and eat him. Come to take us and eat us if we not believe priest. Everybody say wait for sign. Priest say it right. He say gods tell him to. We wonder. Maybe priest just want to be priest. Everybody afraid of priest. Give him best food and best mates. We wait. I cry that night.