The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (14 page)

He kept the lifeboat in the shadow of his ship's wreckage as long as he could, then dove for the Vegan planet which loomed at two o'clock on his screen. As soon as his driver tubes came alight, the Vegan sped after him. Trent pushed the little boat to its limit, but the pursuer still gained. They were too close to the planet now for the Vegan to use another torpedo.

The lifeboat screamed into the thin edge of the atmosphere.
Too fast!
The air-cooling unit howled with the overload. A rear surface control flared red, melted, fused. Trent had time to fire the emergency nose rockets, cut in automatic pilot before he blacked out. The ship dived, partly out of control, nose rockets still firing. Relays clicked—
full alarm!
—circuits designed to guard human life in an emergency came alive. Some worked, some had been destroyed.

*   *   *

Somewhere, he could hear running water. It was dark where he was, or perhaps lighted by a faint redness. His eyelids were stuck tightly. He could feel folds of cloth around him. A parachute! The robot controls of the lifeboat had ejected him in the chute-seat as a last resort.

Trent tried to move. His muscles refused to obey. He could sense numbness in his hips, a tingling loss of specific perception in his arms.

Then he heard it—the baying of a hound—far and clear. It was a sound he had never again expected to hear. The bugling note was repeated. It reminded him of frosty nights on Earth, following Bess and Eagle and …

The baying of a hound!

Panic swept through him. The hound mustn't find him! He was Earth-human, loaded with deadly virus!

Straining at his cheek muscle, Trent managed to open one eye, saw that it was not dark, but a kind of yellow twilight under the folds of the parachute. His eyelids had been clotted with blood.

Now he could hear running feet, a hound's eager sniffing.

Please keep him away from me!
he begged.

An edge of the chute stirred. Now there was an eager whining. Something crept toward him under the cloth.

“Go away!” he croaked.

Through the blurred vision of his one eye, Trent saw a brown and white head—very like Eagle's. It bent toward something. With a sick feeling, Trent realized that the
something
was one of his own outstretched, virus-filled hands. He saw a pink tongue come out, lick the hand, but could not feel it. He tried to move and unconsciousness overwhelmed him. One last thought flitted through his mind before the darkness came—

“Each man kills the thing he…”

*   *   *

There was a bed beneath him—soft, sleep-lulling. In one part of his mind he knew a long time had passed. There had been hands, needles, wheeled carts taking him places, liquids in his mouth, tubes in his veins. He opened his eyes. Green walls, glaring white sunshine partially diffused by louvre shutters, a glimpse of blue-green hills outside.

“You are feeling better?” The voice had the peculiar whistling aspiration of the Vegan vocals.

Trent shifted his gaze to the right. Ger! The Vegan stood beside the bed, deceptively Earth-human in appearance. His shutter-like eye membranes were opened wide, the double crest of feathery hair retracted. He wore a yellow robe belted at the waist.

“How long…”

The Vegan put a seven-fingered hand on Trent's wrist, felt the pulse. “Yes, you are feeling much better. You have been very ill for almost four of your months.”

“Then the dogs are all dead,” said Trent, his voice flat.

“Dead?” Ger's eye membranes flicked closed, opened.

“I killed them,” said Trent. “My body's loaded with dormant virus.”

“No,” said the Vegan. “We gave the dogs an extra white blood cell—more predatory. Your puny virus could not survive it.”

Trent tried to sit up, but Ger restrained him. “Please, Varley. You are not yet recovered.”

“But if the dogs are immune to the virus…” He shook his head. “Give me a shipload of dogs and you can name your own price.”

“Varley, I did not say dogs are immune. They … are … not like dogs exactly. We cannot give you a shipload of your animals because we do not have them. They were sacrificed in our work.”

Trent stared at him.

“I have unfortunate news, my friend. We have made our planet restricted to humans. You may live out your life here, but you may not communicate with your fellows.”

“Is that why your ship fired on me?”

“We thought it was an Earth Vessel coming to investigate.”

“But…”

“It is regrettable that yourself must be kept here, Varley, but the pride of our peoples is at stake.”

“Pride?”

The Vegan looked at the floor. “We, who have never failed a bio-physical alteration…” He shook his head.

“What happened?”

The Vegan's face went blue with embarrassment.

Trent recalled his first awakening on this planet. “When I recovered consciousness I saw a dog. At least I saw its head.”

Ger pulled a wicker chair close to the bed, sat down. “Varley, we tried to combine the best elements of our own
progoas
and the Earth dogs.”

“Well, wasn't that what you were supposed to do?”

“Yes, but in the process we lost all of the dogs you sent us and the resultant animals…” He shrugged.

“What are they?”

“They do not have a scaly tail or horned snout. For centuries we have been telling the Universe that sentient pets of the highest quality must show these characteristics of our own
progoas
.”

“Aren't the new animals intelligent and loyal? Do they have as good hearing, sense of smell?”

“If anything, these characteristics have been heightened.”

He paused. “You realize, though, that this animal is not truly a dog.”

“Not truly a…”

“It's fully serviceable…”

Trent swallowed. “Then you can name your own price.”

“When we made our first cross, the
mikeses
fertilization process united an open
progoa
cell with a dog cell, but a series of peculiar linkages occurred. They were not what we had come to expect from our readings and from what you had told us.

Trent took a deep breath, exhaled slowly.

“It was as though the gene pattern of dog characteristics were predatory, tying down tightly even with
progoa
dominants,” said Ger. “Each time we repeated the process; the same thing occurred. From our knowledge of terrestrial biology, this should not have been. The blood chemistry of our animals is based on the element you call copper. We have not much iron on our planet, but what few of your type of animals we had proved to us that the copper-basic was dominant in a
mikeses
cross. Of course, without a
mikeses
generator, cells cannot be opened to permit such a cross, but still…”

Trent closed his eyes, opened them. “No one else will ever hear what I am about to tell you…” He hesitated.

Vertical lines of thoughtfulness appeared in the Vegan's cheeks. “Yes?”

“When I was here on the survey trip, I copied the diagram of a
mikeses
generator. I was able to build a working model on Earth. With it, I developed a line of hounds.” He wet his lips with his tongue. “We have life on Earth with blood of copper-base chemistry. The common squid of our oceans is one of them.”

Ger lowered his chin, continued to stare at Trent.

“With the generator, I linked the canine dominants of my dogs with a recessive of squid.”

“But they could not breed naturally. They…”

“Of course not. The hounds I sent you were from a line which had no fathers for six generations. I fertilized them with the generator. They had only the female side, open to the first linkage which presented itself.”

“Why?”

“Because, from my observations of
progoas,
I knew dogs were superior, but could profit by such a cross. I hoped to make that cross myself.”

The Vegan looked at the floor. “Varley, it pains me, but I am faced with the evidence that your claim is true. However, the pride of my world would never permit this to be known. Perhaps the Elders should reconsider.”

“You know me,” said Trent. “You have my word on it.”

Ger nodded. “It is as you say, Varley. I know you.” He preened a feather crest with three fingers. “And through knowing you, perhaps I have tempered the pride which rules my world.” He nodded to himself. “I, too, will remain silent.” A subtle Vegan smile flitted across his face, disappeared.

Trent recalled the beagle head he had seen under the parachute when he'd recovered consciousness. “I'd like to see one of these animals.”

“That can be…” Ger was interrupted by the near baying of a pack of hounds. He stood up, flung open the window louvres, returned to support Trent's head. “Look out there, friend Varley.”

On the blue-green Vegan plain, Trent could see a pack of hounds coursing in pursuit of a herd of runaway
ichikas.
The hounds had the familiar beagle head, brown and white fur. All had six legs.

 

PACK RAT PLANET

Vincent Coogan pulled at his thin lower lip as he stared at the image of his home planet growing larger in the star ship's viewscreen.

“What kind of an emergency would make Patterson call me off a Library election trip?” he muttered.

The chief navigator turned toward Coogan, noted the down-drooping angles on the Library official's face. “Did you say something, sir?”

“Huh?” Coogan realized he had been speaking his thoughts aloud. He drew in a deep breath, squared his stringy frame in front of the viewscreen, said, “It's good to get back to the Library.”

“Always good to be home,” said the navigator. He turned toward the planet in the screen.

It was a garden world of rolling plains turning beneath an old sun. Pleasure craft glided across shallow seas. Villages of flat, chalk-white houses clustered around elevator towers which plumbed the interior. Slow streams meandered across the plains. Giant butterflies fluttered among trees and flowers. People walked while reading books or reclined with scan-all viewers hung in front of their eyes.

The star ship throbbed as its landing auxiliaries were activated. Coogan felt the power through his feet. Suddenly, he sensed the homecoming feeling in his chest, an anticipating that brought senses to new alertness. It was enough to erase the worry over his call-back, to banish his displeasure at the year of work he had abandoned uncompleted.

It was enough to take the bitterness out of his thoughts when he recalled the words someone on an outworld had etched beside the star ship's main port. The words had been cut deeply beneath the winged boot emblem of the Galactic Library, probably with a Gernser flame chisel.

“Go home dirty pack rats!”

The
dirty pack rats
were home.

*   *   *

Director Caldwell Patterson of the Galactic Library sat at the desk in his office deep in the planet, a sheet of metallic paper in his hands. He was an old man even by Eighty-first Century standards when geriatrics made six hundred years a commonplace. Some said he had been at the Library that long. Gray hair clung in molting wisps to a pale pate. His face had the leathery, hook-nosed appearance of an ancient bird.

As Coogan entered the office, a desk visor in front of Patterson chimed. The director clicked a switch, motioned Coogan to a chair and said, “Yes,” with a tired, resigned air.

Coogan folded his tall frame into the chair and listened with half his mind to the conversation on the visor. It seemed some outworld ship was approaching and wanted special landing facilities. Coogan looked around the familiar office. Behind the director was a wall of panels, dials, switches, rheostats, speakers, microphones, oscillographs, code keys, screens. The two side walls were focus rhomboids for realized images. The wall which was split by the door held eight miniature viewscreens all tuned to separate channels of the Library information broadcasts. All sound switches had been turned to mute, leaving a continuous low murmur in the room.

Patterson began drumming his fingers on the desk top, glaring at the desk visor. Presently, he said, “Well, tell them we have no facilities for an honor reception. This planet is devoted to knowledge and research. Tell them to come in at the regular field. I'll obey my Code and any government order of which I'm capable, but we simply don't have the facilities for what they're asking.” The director cut the switch on his visor, turned to Coogan. “Well, Vincent, I see you avoided the Hesperides green rot. Now I presume you're anxious to learn why I called you back from there?”

Same old didactic, pompous humbug,
thought Coogan. He said, “I'm not exactly a robot,” and shaped his mouth in a brief, wry smile.

A frown formed on Patterson's bluish lips. “We've a new government,” he said.

“Is that why you called me in?” asked Coogan. He felt an upsurge of all the resentment he'd swallowed when he'd received the call-back message.

“In a way, yes,” said Patterson. “The new government is going to censor all Library broadcasts. The censor is on that ship just landing.”

“They can't do that!” blurted Coogan. “The Charter expressly forbids chosen broadcasts or any interference with Library function! I can quote you—”

Patterson interrupted him in a low voice. “What is the first rule of the Library Code?”

Coogan faltered, stared at the director. He said, “Well—” paused while the memory came back to him. “The first rule of the Galactic Library Code is to obey all direct orders of the government in power. For the preservation of the Library, this must be the primary command.”

“What does it mean?” demanded Patterson.

“It's just words that—”