Voyage Across the Stars (21 page)

The survivors of GAC 59 were in three connected globes. The decks and fittings within were of plastic with evident mold marks. The globes themselves, like the tubular corridors which joined them, seemed chitinously natural.

Now men were running toward Slade down the corridor as if the screams were whips behind them. The fugitives were an incident of passage to the big tanker, an impediment through which he trampled as he would have a sleet storm.

There were no artificial weapons in the human sections of the ship. The Alayans had segregated even the slight personal effects the Rusatans had let the survivors take on board. Men played ball with wadded sheets and played checkers with scraps of fabric on a board scribed on the deck with fingernails. It was boring as Hell, but it should have been safe.

Stoudemeyer leaped from his victim, Captain Levine. Levine was the third, judging from the wrack in the blood-splattered room. The pearly glow from the ceiling glistened on Stoudemeyer’s face. The man from Telemark now looked a bestial caricature of a man. Someone had clawed out Stoudemeyer’s left eye so that it hung down his cheek by the nerve. Most of the blood on his face and bare chest had come from the throats of his victims, however—like Levine, now in spraying convulsions beneath his killer.

Slade snatched the blanket from an abandoned bunk. “Easy now, sol—” he began.

Stoudemeyer grinned wider and launched himself at the tanker.

The blanket had been extended for a makeshift net. Slade was wholly confident in his strength. He planned to wrap the madman in the fabric and hold him without further injury until more help dribbled back to view the excitement. Stoudemeyer’s furious attack was no surprise, but the madman’s strength was. Despite a conscious awareness of hysterical strength, Don Slade had met very few men who could overpower him under any circumstances.

As the short, pudgy Stoudemeyer proceeded to do.

The madman’s clawed hands swept the blanket down. Slade caught Stoudemeyer’s wrists and held him, but the blanket tangled both their legs. They staggered sideways and fell as a pair, Stoudemeyer on top. His face was marked with streaks and bubbles of blood. He glared at Slade with his good eye while the other bobbled on his cheek.

Slade shouted. He thrust upward against Stoudemeyer’s wrists with all his strength. The madman giggled and continued to force his claws down toward his victim. Stoudemeyer’s bloody gape was lowering toward Slade’s throat inexorably.

Black with snarling madness himself, the tanker bit at Stoudemeyer’s scalp. It was the only part of the shorter man Slade could reach with his teeth. They gouged hair and blood vessels aside before they skidded on bone. It was a useless attempt; but to Slade it was better than shouting for help that would not come.

Something bathed him in cold light.

Slade had been wounded before. He had even been left for dead on a field with hundreds of bomb fragments in his body. His flesh had chilled then and his mind had withdrawn to a single hot spark throbbing like an overloaded transformer.

He had never before been ice all over, though with full command of his senses. Slade could feel the tickling strands of Stoudemeyer’s hair against the roof of his mouth. He could also feel the edge of the madman’s incisors, against the pulse of the tanker’s throat and just short of slashing through it.

The members that lifted Stoudemeyer gently away were blue and they were not hands. Slade could no longer control his field of vision. In and out of it drifted several Alayans. There were flickers of light at the violet end of the human range. It could have been cross-talk among the aliens . . . or synapses stuttering in Slade’s own brain.

Sucker-tipped tendrils lifted the tanker upright. Something swabbed at the peak of his breastbone. The touch was cold momentarily as all things were cold. Then natural warmth and control flooded back through Slade’s body.

“We regret,” purred the vocalizer of one of the three Alayans, “that we struck you also, Mr. Slade.” The Alayan waggled the device he held in one of his upper limbs. The object looked like petrified sea-foam, but it was not difficult to connect it with the stunning chill that had ended the fight. “We could not be sure in the haste of the moment which of you was the attacker.”

“Umm,” Slade said. He spat to clear his mouth, then rubbed his lips. “Yeah.”

The other two Alayans had lifted Stoudemeyer. The madman was still in a state of supple uncontrol as the Alayan device had left him. The Alayans were carrying Stoudemeyer toward the opening through which they had entered the passenger section. That passage was normally closed to humans.

“Wait a—” Slade began. Humans were entering the compartment again. Late-comers tried to push aside the earlier returnees who tended to conglomerate at the ends of the corridor instead of coming fully within the spattered compartment.

In a lower voice, the tanker continued. “Look, we’ve got to talk. I need to know—” his tongue paused between two questions, settled on the short-term one—”where you’re taking him.”

“Come,” said the Alayan’s vocalizer as he touched it. There was a flash of violet light from one of the six stalked projections—surely not heads—atop the alien’s carapace. It might have been meant for a nod. “We will explain that to you. And now that you have more knowledge, we will explain again what you can expect to happen on the voyage.”

The Alayan moved toward the exit after his companions and Stoudemeyer. His four lower limbs made delicate, twinkling motions so that his tall body seemed to roll rather than walk.

Slade wondered morosely as he followed whether the Alayan had made a lucky guess at the unspoken question, or whether they could read human minds.

The corridor blurred in both directions as soon as the door to the passenger chamber spasmed closed. There was no apparent beginning or end to the tube, and there was no sign of Stoudemeyer or the aliens who had carried him off.

“You’ve dumped him into—” Slade waved a hand at the glowing blue wall of the corridor. “Dumped him outside. Didn’t you?”

“Assuredly not, Mister Slade,” said the soft, mechanical voice. “He will be cared for, be repaired physically, as ably as possible. We will keep him sedated, or co—”

“You’re going to use him to drive the ship,” the tanker broke in again. Levine had told him the scuttlebutt about the Alayan drive, suggestions that the Alayans themselves had not denied in discussions before Slade made the survivors’ decision for them. A warping of real space very different from the human technique of entering a separate Transit universe. A warping of space achieved through the warping of a human mind, the rumors went. . . .

“No, Mister Slade,” replied the dancing fingers on the vocalizer, “we
have
used him to drive the ship. We cannot use his mind again, because it no longer has a basis in objective reality. That is always the case, I am afraid. You were aware of the situation when you accepted our offer of transport.”

Slade ignored the last part of the statement. It was true; he simply did not care to dwell on it. “They always go—go berserk like Stoudemeyer just did?”

Light of no discernible hue played over one of the Alayan’s—faces; a shrug of sorts. “Rarely that. We apologize. Generally catatonia, sometimes other forms of aberration. We did not expect this—” Warmth spread across the human’s skin that implied the speaker had gestured in the infrared. “—but one cannot be certain what the ash will look like when one burns a log.”

“And you can’t—do this—travel—yourselves,” Slade asked through a grimace that reflected his difficulty in finding words. Slade no longer believed he was simply in a tube connected to the passenger compartment, though he had no better explanation of where the Alayan might have taken him.

“Any sentient mind will serve the purpose,” said the Alayan. “Any mind with a grasp of reality and the ability to change reality through—fantasy, if you will. We direct the fantasies so that they become real . . . and the vessel moves in objective reality through the—pressure of the subject’s mind. Unfortunately, that mind moves as well, in a psychic dimension from which it cannot be retrieved. We could use ourselves as subjects, but we do not do so while we have minds aboard which are not ours. That is the main value for which we trade.”

The listening human realized that there would have been no hostility or even emotion in the words whether or not they were the construct of a vocalizer. The Alayans did not hate their passengers; nor did they treat humans cruelly, the way humans were often wont to do to their own species. It was a simple operation, like
triage
:
separating victims into those who would survive and those who would not. Nothing in the process implied a desire that some not survive . . . a wish for Kile Stoudemeyer to bite through his fellows’ throats and to spend the rest of his life in total sedation.

But better that than similar destruction of an Alayan mind. The choice, after all, was the Alayans’.

“I knew,” Slade said, aloud but more to himself than to the exoskeletal creature before him, “that people—some of us—might go nuts because of your drive. I mean, Transit hits some people like that, the sensation’s different for everybody . . . and it makes some people snap. I didn’t figure that it wasn’t
may
go nuts, it was like firing a gun and watching the empty case spit out. I think we’d better, ah, disembark at the next landfall. Unless—I mean, how many stops can you make on the—” Slade did not pause, but his lips stuck momentarily in a rictus as he finished, “—present fuel?”

“Everyone who wishes to leave and is permitted to do so by the planetary authorities,” said the Alayan, “may of course disembark on Terzia. There will have to be a second—impetus—to reach that world, Mister Slade. More than that to reach any other planet which could be suitable for your purpose, for your leaving the ship.”

Slade hammered his fist into the corridor wall. The wall absorbed the blow with a massive resilience like that of deep sod. The hazy light seemed to fluctuate.

“You may do as you see fit, Mister Slade,” the alien went on. His faces flickered, occasionally in the visible spectrum, “but I would suggest that you not discuss the situation in detail with your fellows until you have landed. It would cause distress, and it would probably lead to violence and injuries more serious than any the need of propulsion will cause.”

“Who goes next?” the tanker demanded as he stared at his hand.

“The choice is generally random,” the vocalizer said. “Not you, of course. Though if there is someone you would like to choose for the next segment? Or however far you choose to prolong the association after you have had time to reflect.”

“Anyone?” Slade said. He turned and looked at the alien: the courteous, slim-bodied creature who was discussing his human cargo like lambs in a pen. “Shouldn’t be hard to find somebody dead worthless in this lot, you’d think. . . .”

Not hard at all. Some of the outlaws were men Don Slade had been on the verge of killing a time or two himself. There were others, a few, whom the tanker still did not know by name. They were without personalities—to Slade. Without any of the factors that would have made them people instead of objects.

And there were those whom the crash of GAC 59 had disabled: paraplegics for whom no therapy could do more than maintain life, limbless torsos who would be shambling wrecks even with better prosthetics than they were ever likely to afford.

No problem for Don Slade. No problem for Captain Slade, who had hosed innocents with cyan fire during more operations than he cared to remember.

“All right,” the tanker whispered to his clenched fist. “Take me.” He turned his back on the Alayan. In the hollow distance, there was no sign of the door by which they had entered the corridor.

“You mean, Mister Slade—” began the mechanical voice. Its tone could not be hesitant, but the words’ pacing was.

“I mean use me in your drive, curse it!” Slade shouted as he spun around. “I—”

He paused. The anger melted away from the fear it had been intended to cloak. Then the fear surrendered itself to the honesty of desperation. “There’s none of them worth the powder to blow them away,” the tanker whispered. “And I’ve sent men to die, the
Lord
knows. . . . But these’re mine, like it or don’t. And it’s all too much like deciding who to butcher so that the rest of the lifeboat gets another meal. I’m not going to do that.”

“Your principles do you credit, Mister Slade,” said the Alayan, “but as the leader—”

“I don’t have any bloody principles!” Slade said. “I’m just not going to axe one of
my
men for no better reason than to save my ass. Besides—” more calmly, now; almost diffident— “I don’t see. . . . I mean, some of those fellows aren’t bolted together real tight. Me, though . . . well, you’ll see.”

The Alayan’s exoskeleton dulled for a moment to an almost perfect matte finish. Then the sheen that Slade had equated with health, but which probably indicated something else, returned. “All right, Mister Slade,” the alien said. One of his tendrils played over an object on the belt around his midsection. The corridor began to fall in on itself. A door formed in the end of it as there had been when the pair entered. “You will not feel anything. There will be no pain. I cannot tell you exactly when it will happen, though it will not be soon.”

Slade nodded. He stepped to the door. It was already opening onto the globe in which Slade had been sleeping when Stoudemeyer went berserk in the adjacent compartment.

“And Mister Slade,” continued the voice which the tanker did not turn to face, “this passage will open for you if you wish to reconsider your decision.”

“I won’t,” said Slade as he rejoined the wondering humans who called him their leader.

Slade whuffled in his sleep. The blanket covered him for its feel rather than for need of warmth in the controlled climate of the passenger globe. Slade’s hands tugged the fabric closer and his body shifted slightly. There was nothing to awaken the men snoring in darkness to either side of the tanker.

There was nothing to indicate to them that Don Slade was in Hell.