The Overlords of War (2 page)

At all events, the Monster had been delivered safely.

The night protected Corson from the Monster, whose eyes could not detect infrared or even red, though they saw well enough in the ultraviolet. It was capable of finding its way about in the dark by using sonar frequencies, but it was far too preoccupied with self-pity to bother about tracking him down.

He was trying desperately to work out the nature of the beast’s distress. He was virtually certain that Monsters experienced no counterpart of fear. On their mother world no enemy was known that could seriously endanger their lives. Unacquainted with defeat, they doubtless had never imagined an opponent more powerful than themselves before meeting humans. The only limit on their expansion was imposed by hunger. They could not reproduce except when there was an adequate surplus of food. Without it, they remained sterile. One of the chief problems the biologists from Earth had encountered in accomplishing their project had been how to get the Monster gorged.

Corson could not believe, either, that the creature was hungry or cold. Its metabolism was capable of drawing sustenance from most organic substances and many minerals. The rich pastures of Uria would furnish it with a splendid diet. The climate distantly resembled the most hospitable regions of its mother world. The composition of the air was different, but not so much so as to worry a being which, as experiment had shown, could without apparent harm endure vacuum for hours on end or wallow in sulphuric acid.

And mere loneliness was unlikely to affect the Monster. Experiments which consisted in turning loose Monsters on barren asteroids to study their behavior had indicated how little store they set by the company of their own kind. Given that they were capable of congregating for tasks that exceeded the abilities of an individual, or to play, or to exchange the spores containing their gene equivalents, it nonetheless seemed that they were in no sense sociable.

No, none of his ideas fitted. The voice of the Monster made him think of the cries of a child shut up by mistake or for punishment in a dark closet, feeling himself lost in a vast, unfathomable, terrifying universe full of nightmares and hallucinations, caught in a trap from which he cannot escape by himself. Corson wished he could explain the nature of the trap. But that was impossible. Throughout the voyage he had tried to establish contact with the Monster. He knew it was susceptible to various types of argument, but he had fared no better than his predecessors when trying to carry on a conversation with it. There was one obvious cause: the implacable hostility the Monster displayed toward humans. Why this should be so, no one knew. It might be a matter of smell, color, sound . . . The biologists had tried many ways of deceiving the Monster, all in vain. Its tragedy was that it was too intelligent to be misled by tricks played on its instinctual reactions, and not intelligent enough to identify and tame the mindless powers snarling within which made it good for nothing but to kill.

Having tried a few steps forward, and stumbled, then continued on his knees for some hundreds of meters, Corson, worn out, decided to drowse without entirely relaxing his vigilance. He started awake again after what felt like only a few minutes. His watch told him he had slept for four hours. It was still night. The Monster had fallen silent.

A thick cloud must be crossing the sky, for the stars had vanished from a whole area to his left. It was moving rapidly. It had a sharply defined edge. A huge object, doubtless a flying machine of a type he had never heard of despite having studied all the engines of war employed by the Princes of Uria, was passing soundlessly overhead. It was hard to guess at its height or speed because it was so difficult to see clearly. But when it was directly above him, its black outline on the heavens swiftly grew larger and he just had time to realize that it was going to crush him.

It must be this intruder which had quieted the Monster; it must have been the sudden silence which had awakened him. Knowing what was about to happen a few seconds ahead of time, the Monster had inadvertently warned its unwilling human ally.

Corson felt his belly muscles tense, his blood run chill. He grasped his gun, under no illusions. He did not doubt that the vessel had come to capture him. Determination alone would be useless against a machine so vast. The only course for him to adopt was, once he had been made prisoner, to persuade the occupants of the ship to lure the Monster on board too. Whatever cage or cell the craft was fitted with, that would be all he’d need to do. With a bit of luck the strange ship would be as completely destroyed as the Archimedes, and the Princes of Uria would never find a trace of George Corson’s visit to their world.

Details of the ship emerged from a blur of nothing. A lance of light stabbed down from its black, shiny hull and raked the thicket where Corson was hiding. The Princes of Uria must then have such confidence in themselves that they did not even bother to use a black-light projector. Reflexively Corson trained his gun on the lamp. The underside of the ship was sleek and polished like the surface of a jewel. Its builder had taken esthetic advantage of the geodesics, along which leaves of metal had been attached. This craft did not look in the least like a war machine.

Corson braced himself against a gun bolt, a blast of gas, or the shock of a steel cable around his shoulders. He anticipated the chirping cry of a Urian soldier. But the beam merely focused on him and remained there. The craft descended further, then halted so close that he could have touched its side without getting up. Big ports shone around its circumference. Corson could have tried to break one with his gun. But he didn’t do it. He was trembling, yet at the same time he was more puzzled than frightened by the odd and unmilitary behavior of the craft’s commander.

Doubled over, he walked around the circular hull. He tried to catch a glimpse of the interior through the ports, but they dazzled him, and the only impression he gained of the equipment within was

distorted and vague. He did fancy he discerned a humanoid silhouette, but that was not surprising. From a distance the natives could pass for humanoid enough.

Startled by bright light, he shut his eyes for a moment. A brilliantly illuminated doorway was opening in the ship’s side above a flight of steps suspended on nothing. Corson hesitated, then rushed up them. The door closed again silently as soon as he had passed through, but he had been prepared for that.

“Come in, Corson,” said a voice—a young girl’s voice. ‘There’s no reason to stand about in the corridor.”

That was a human voice! Not an imitation! The Urians would not have been able to fake one so convincingly. A machine might have managed it, but Corson doubted whether his enemies would have added such a finishing touch to a trap he had already fallen into. People at war seldom gave invaders the tourist treatment.

Corson obeyed. He pushed at a half-open door nearby, and it slid back into the wall. He saw a wide room, at the far end of which was a gigantic viewport. He could clearly make out the dark mass of the forest they were flying over and, sparkling at the horizon, a brighter line which he reasoned must be an ocean with the sunrise glinting on it.

He swung around. A girl was looking at him. A sort of veil, or mist, was all she wore. Fair hair framed her smiling face. He could detect no enmity in her gray eyes. She seemed remarkably at ease. It had been five years since Corson had seen anything remotely like a woman apart from the issue plastoids with which you had to make do aboard a ship of war. The ability to reproduce was too critical a resource for women of breeding age to be risked in space. And this one, moreover, was beautiful.

He regained his breath, swiftly reviewed the situation, and allowed his combat reflexes to gain control. It was as though a secondary personality took him over. He snapped, “How did you know I’m called Corson?”

At once the girl’s expression betrayed astonishment mingled with fear. He had put his finger on the crux of the matter. The fact that she used his name might imply that the Princes of Uria knew about the mission of the Archimedes, right down to the identities of the crew. On the other hand the girl was definitely human, body and voice, and her presence on Uria was in itself a total mystery. No surgeon could make a Urian look like that; no operation could re-

place a homy beak with soft lips like those. If the girl had been fully clad he might have felt reservations. As it was, every detail of her figure proclaimed her origin. He could clearly see her navel, something which Urians—hatched from eggs—did not possess. And plastoids were never built to a standard that could deceive a man.

“But you’ve just told me!” she exclaimed.

“No, you called me by name first of all,” he said, feeling as though he were spinning round and round. His brain was working frantically, but in vain. He felt a strong impulse to kill the girl and make off with the ship, but surely she could not be alone on board, and he must know more before he acted. Perhaps he might not in fact have to kill her.

He had never heard any report of humans going over to the Urian side. In a war whose main and perhaps sole basis lay in a fundamental biological difference combined with the ability to inhabit similar planets, there was no future for the traitor’s trade. And—he realized suddenly—he had not noticed the characteristic Urian smell when he came aboard. He was certain he could have detected the tang of chlorine instantly. Even so . . .

“Are you a prisoner?”

He wasn’t hoping that she would admit it, but she might let fall a clue.

“What funny questions you ask!” She opened her eyes wide and her lips started to tremble. “You’re a stranger! I thought— Why should I be a prisoner? Are women kept prisoner on your planet?”

Her expression changed suddenly. He read intense terror in her gaze.

“No!”

She cried out and flinched away, casting around for something to use as a weapon. Then he knew what he had to do. He strode across the room, brushed aside the feeble blow she aimed at him, planted a palm on her mouth and caught her in a wrestling hold. His thumb and forefinger sought the pressure points in her throat. She slumped. A trifle harder and she would have died. He was content to knock her out. He wanted to give himself time to think.

He searched the ship and convinced himself they were alone on board. Fantastic! That a young girl in a pleasure boat—he couldn’t find a single weapon—should be cruising cheerfully over the forests of an enemy planet: it defied belief. He located the instrument panel, but the controls meant nothing to him. A red spot which must represent the ship was moving across a wall map. He recognized neither the continents nor the oceans of Uria. Had the commander of the Archimedes brought them to the wrong planet? Out of the question. The vegetation, the solar spectrum, the composition of the air, were enough to identify Uria, and the attack they had suffered wiped away the final doubt

He glanced out of a viewport. They were flying at about three thousand meters, and as nearly as he could judge at about four hundred k.p.h. In ten minutes at most they would be over the ocean.

He returned to the first cabin and sat down on an ornate chair, staring at the girl. He had laid her on the floor and put a cushion under her head. One seldom finds cushions aboard a warship—embroidered ones, at any rate. He struggled to recall precisely what had happened since he set foot in the ship.

She had called him by name.

Before he had opened his mouth.

She had seemed terrified.

Before he had thought of attacking her.

Partly, it had been the fear he could read in her eyes which drove him to action.

Telepathic?

If so, she knew his name and his mission and knew about the Monster, too. So she would have to disappear, especially if she was in the pay of the Princes of Uria.

But she had retreated even before he thought of overpowering her . . .

She was stirring. He set about tying her up, tearing long strips of cloth from a tapestry. One doesn’t find tapestries aboard a warship. He bound her wrists and ankles, but did not gag her. Also he tried to determine the nature of the garment she had on. It was neither woven fabric nor a gas, but something more like a gleaming mist, so light that it was hard to see. Only at the comer of his eye could he clearly discern its contours. A sort of energy field? Certainly not a force field, anyhow.

The language she had addressed him in was pure Pangal, but that meant nothing. Urians spoke it as well as Terrestrials. Corson had even tried to teach the rudiments of Pangal—that language which proudly claimed to embody the common factors of all intelligence —to the Monster, but without success. As usual.

But it was thinking about the Monster which gave him the key to the puzzle.

This girl must have at least one talent in common with the Monster. She must be capable of foreseeing the future, within limits. She had been aware, the moment he entered the ship, that he would ask her, “How do you know I’m called Corson?” The fact that her terror had decided him to attack her made no odds, merely posed the problem of proximate cause. As did most temporal paradoxes. Those who came in contact with Monsters learned something about temporal paradoxes, generally the hard way. So he could assess the girl’s precognitive range at about two minutes. She was doing better than the Monster, then.

Not that that shed any light on her presence on Uria.

The sun had been up for more than an hour, and they were flying over the ocean out of sight of land. Corson was beginning to wonder what was keeping the Urian fleet when the girl suddenly roused.

“Corson, you’re a brute!” she said. “Attacking a woman who had made you welcome—that was contemptible! We might be back in the barbarian days of the Solar Powers!”

He studied her closely. Although she was writhing in her bonds,

he could read no alarm in her face, only anger. It followed that she knew he did not mean her any immediate harm. Her delicate features relaxed and the rage gave way to cool determination. She seemed too civilized to spit in his face, but effectively that must be what she wanted to do.