The Starchild Page 4

  --A pyropod is a living rocket, flame-footed and deadly. Their chemistry is not that of Earthly air-breathers; their primeval genesis came from the same noncarbon evolutionary strain that shaped the fusorians. On their plasma jets, nuclear in temperature, fired by fusorian symbiotes, they can outrun a Plan cruiser and outfight any Terrestrial beast in search of prey. And to the pyropods, anything that moves is prey. Their jets take enormous quantities of reaction mass. Their appetites are insatiable. Scavengers of space, they will attack anything.

  Fortunately for the continuation of life on the inner planets and the Reefs of Space, atmosphere is a slow poison to the pyropods and gravity damages their reflexes. They are beasts of the interstellar void, ship-sized monstrosities at their hugest, big as cave bears even when barely mature. Standing in shock, watching the great beast, Boysie Gann stared at the red eyes pulsing in their telescopic mirrors, wheel and flash back toward him, imagined the black talons ripping metal or rock like bread ...

  And realized, almost too late, that he was the target of those monstrous talons now.

  Instinctively he raised the laser gun and fired.

  The charge was minimal, only the message setting; yet the great pyropod felt it, screamed, and soared away. Gann hurled himself to the shelter of the rock cairn, staring about. The torn green cloud of luminosity was dissolving in the night sky above him. Streamers of mist scattered and faded. And where the cloud had been, Gann could see what had brought it

  A spaceling. One of the warm-blooded, seal-like creatures that roam the space between the stars, natural prey to the pyropods, friend to man. It had brought the cloud—for it was the spaceling's ability to hold atmosphere about it, in a Ryeland-effect field, that permitted them, as oxygen-breathers, to live in space at all.

  The spaceling had been grievously wounded. Even from so far away, Gann could see the hideous slash that ripped along the whole length of its sleek, golden body as it came tumbling down. Something was clinging to its fur

  —a rider? Gann could not be sure; but what he was certain of was that the end for both the spaceling and its burden was very near.

  The pyropod that had attacked him had wheeled again and was diving on the wounded seal-like beast. A louder howling drowned out the spaceling's scream as the pyropod came out of the dark over a purple-scaled ridge, red eyes pulsing and dripping talons reaching again.

  Gann reacted without thought. He twisted the crystal of that old laser to maximal intensity, steadied the tube on the rocks of the cairn, and fired into those dreadful flashing eyes. They exploded.

  The pyropod bellowed in agony. Its eyes were gone —eyes or eyelike structures; actually, Gann knew, they were more like laser search gear. But whatever they were, they were gone now, burst like the shattered hull of a subtrain when the field of its tunnel fails and the fluid rock crushes it. The pyropod drove blindly up and away, squalling until its sound was cut off like the dropping of a curtain.

  It had passed beyond the atmosphere into space. Blind and wounded, it would not, Gann thought, be back. And a blessing that was, since an orange light was blinking on the laser gun, warning him that the fuel cell was fully exhausted.

  He knew there were other pyropods still out there, somewhere beyond the veil of air. He could see their faint red sparks circling, and the blue trails of their fiery exhausts. They veered all at once, and drove in toward the retreating comet tail of the pyropod he had wounded. There was a puff of incandescent vapor ...

  Dimly Gann realized that its mates had destroyed the wounded one, torn it open and were now wheeling and diving, fighting for their shares of the kill. But he had no time for them. The spaceling had tumbled to earth halfway across the little reeflet, and Gann stumbled and leaped across the red-scaled rocks to find it.

  It was lying at the edge of Harry Hickson's little plantation, spurting glowing yellow blood across the green moss. Beside it was its rider, bent over the terrible wound, trying with both hands to stanch the flow of blood.

  The rider was a girl. Hickson had been right. It was the girl in the photograph he had displayed.

  The spaceling moaned and shuddered as Gann drew near, its voice a faint, inarticulate sob. The girl was sobbing too.

  "Can I help?" said Boysie Gann.

  The girl, Quarla Snow, turned quickly, startled. She stared at Gann as if he were himself a pyropod, or some more fearsome monster from legend. There was fright in her eyes—and yet, queerly, thought Gann, almost relief as well, as if she had expected something even worse. It was the expression of a man who finds himself confronted by a wolf, when he expects a tiger.

  "Who are you?" she demanded. Her voice was low and controlled. She was tall and strong, but very young.

  "Boysie Gann," he said. "And you're Quarla Snow. Harry Hickson told me you'd be here."

  Her hand flew to her mouth. Her eyes widened in fear. For a moment she seemed about to run; then she shook her head in a pathetic gesture and turned back to the spaceling.

  Its golden blood had ceased to flow, its body to move. The sounds it had uttered were still.

  "Sultana's dead," the girl said softly, as if to herself.

  "I'm Sony," Boysie Gann said inadequately. He glanced aloft—the pyropods were out of sight entirely now— then back to her. Quarla Snow's face was lightly tanned, almost to match her honey-colored hair. She was nearly the color of her spaceling. Her white coveralls were splashed with that golden ichor, her hands dripping with it. Yet she was beautiful.

  For a moment a buried emotion trembled inside Boysie Gann, a memory of Julie Martinet and the taste of the fresh salt surf on her mouth when he kissed her on the beach of the little Mexican resort, Playa Blanca, long ages ago when they had said good-by. This girl did not in the least resemble Julie Martinet. She was blond where Julie had hair like night; she was tall, and Julie tiny. Her face was broad, friendly, and even hi her sorrow and fear it showed contentment and joy in life, while Julie Martinet was a girl of sad pleasures and half-expressed sorrows. Yet there was something in both of them that stirred him.

  He said hastily, "Those things may be back. We'd better do something about it."

  The girl's tears were drying on her cheeks and her expression had become more calm. She looked down at the dead gun in Gann's hands and half smiled. "Not with that, Boysie Gann. It's empty."

  "I know. We'd better get back to Hickson's cave. He may have left other charges."

  "Left them? But I thought you said he was here!" The shadow fell over her face again, her eyes bright and fearful.

  "He was, yes. But he's gone. Disappeared. I don't know where."

  The girl nodded absently, as if she were too dazed to take in what he had said. She dropped to her knees beside the dead spaceling and stroked its golden head. "Poor Sultana. I'll never forgive myself. When I got your signal I ... well, I was frightened. I didn't know what to do. Dad was gone on an emergency call. He'd taken our ship, and ... I decided to ride Sultana out here by myself."

  Her mouth set white for a moment "I didn't really think of any danger. There aren't many pyropods in these clusters any more—been hunted out years ago, though they keep straying back. But I'd outrun them on Sultana often enough before. I didn't think about the fact that she's ... that she was ... getting old."

  She stood up and touched Gann lightly on the arm, a gesture of reassurance. "But you're not to worry. We aren't marooned here; Dad will come for us in the ship as soon as he gets home. I left a message."

  Gann nodded. "So he'll wait a while," he said, comprehendingly, "and then, if you haven't returned in— what? a day or so? Then he'll come looking for you."

  But Quarla Snow shook her golden head, her expression unreadable. "No. He won't wait Not even a second. I said in my note that Harry Hickson's old distress signal had come. He'll be here as fast as his ship can bring him, to see who sent Harry's signal."

  Gann stared. "Harry did. Harry Hickson. I told you!"

  "I know you told me," the girl said, her voice calm but
with an undercurrent of wonder and of fear. "But you see, it couldn't have been Harry. I—no, wait. I'll show you."

  And she turned and led him away from the cultivated little field, back up to the red-scaled crest of rock, where he had rested his laser gun on the cairn of rocks to fire at the pyropod. "See?" she said, touching the cairn.

  He bent closer to look, and there on the lowermost rock, on one half-smoothed face of a boulder, was a faint scratching of carved letters, whittled out a line at a time with a laser gun, almost invisible unless you knew just where to look:

  Harry Hickson

  Died of a fusorian infection

  Deneb light his way

  "You see?" said the girl. "Harry could not have sent the message. He died here three years ago."

  Chapter 5

  All this was months before the Writ of Liberation. On Earth the old Planner sat in silent, joyous communion with the Planning Machine. In solarian space the great Plan cruisers arrowed from satellite to planet, from asteroid to distant Spacewall post, carrying the weapons and the orders of the Machine to all the far-flung territories of the Plan of Man. On the island of Cuba, in the Body Bank, a Nigerian ex-Technicorps man, broken for inefficiency, gave up the last of his vital organs to serve some more worthy servant of the Plan, and died. (His name had once been M'Buna. He had been captured and court-martialed for desertion.) A girl named Julie Martinet, in a dormitory hall far below the surface of the Peruvian Andes, sat with stylus in hand deciding on which letter to write—one to the man she loved "but had not heard from"; the other an application for special duty in the service of the Machine.

  And out on the Reefs, in the sprawling hundred-orbed community called Freehaven, Machine Major Boysie Gann began to understand that his greatest opportunity for service—and his greatest hope of reward!—had been handed to him on a silver platter.

  For he was at large in Freehaven, the very heart of the Reefs of Space. And he knew, or thought he knew, a way to get back to the worlds of the Plan.

  True, there were some puzzling problems. Some of them, indeed, were almost frightening.

  What could Quarla Snow hope to gain by pretending that Harry Hickson was dead? What did she think Gann had seen on the little reeflet? A ghost? It was no ghost that had fed him, healed him, taken the collar from around his neck.

  And it was no coincidence, he was coming to believe, that had brought him to Hickson's world in the first place.

  There was no proof, of course. But he was sure that M'Buna, perhaps Colonel Zafar as well, was in some way related to Hickson and the treasonable activities that were going on all around him in this unplanned, decadent, dangerous world of the Reefs. He had heard hints. An unguarded word, a look, a remark that was halted before it began. Nothing tangible, but enough to make him sure that there were links between the Reefs and the Plan worlds—links that extended even into the Technicorps, even into the vital defenses of the Spacewall itself.

  If he could get back— No! he thought. When he got back, with the proof of this spreading rot, with the names of the conspirators and the evidence that would send them to the Body Bank, then no reward in the Machine's power would be too great to give to Machine Major Boysie Gann. And Julte Martinet would be waiting... . Meanwhile there was a lot of work to do.

  Gann dared not make notes or attempt to secure tapes or photographs; but he missed no opportunity to scout and examine every part of this queer community of Free-haven. Even the name was strange and somehow disconcerting. Freehaven.

  As if "freedom" were important!

  Yet Boysie Gann could not help but notice that strangely the decadent, unruly mobs that dwelt in Freehaven seemed somehow sturdier, somehow happier, in some way more alert and even more prosperous than the billions who lived under the all-powerful and protective embrace of the Plan of Man... .

  It was confusing.

  But his duty was clear. Gann set himself to learn all there was to know.

  Freehaven consisted of a couple of thousand people, scattered over a hundred fusorian-grown rocks and a hundred thousand miles of space. Many of the rocks had been terraformed, Gann learned, with the lichenous air plant he had first seen on Harry Hickson's little reef. The rest of them were airless, but all of them supplied useful metals and minerals to the bustling economy of Freehaven.

  Gann was not sure just what he had expected—tattooed savages, perhaps, dancing to a wild tomtom—but he had surely not been prepared for this modern, busy community. There were farms and herds—of spacelings and even, in one case, a stock farm with sixty head of what seemed to be Guernsey cattle, stolen somehow from the Plan of Man and transported in some improbable manner out to this hydrogen-based worldlet twenty billion miles from the sun. On one airless reef that was mostly pure fusorian iron was a steel mill—one of the small nuclear-powered units developed by Technicorps engineers for use on the asteroids, to save the high cost of lifting terrain steel into space. Gann marveled at' it all. He admitted it to Quarla Snow and her father, with whom he was staying as guest-—or prisoner, he was never sure which—at a meal when he was served as fine a steak as he had ever tasted, with wines that bore the bouquet of French vineyards.

  Dr. Snow boomed, "It isn't only the food that is good here, young man. It is life! It has a flavor here that the Plan worlds will never taste."

  Boysie Gann said engagingly, "You may be right. I ... well, you have to excuse me. You see, I've never known anything but the Plan."

  Quarla's father nodded briskly. "Of course. None of us had, before we made our way out here. None but Quarla, at any rate, and a few others like her who were born here. They've lived in freedom all their lives."

  Gann said, with just the right inflexion of doubt, "But I don't understand. I mean, how does it work? Who tells you what you're to do?"

  "No one, boy! That's the whole point of freedom! We came here because we didn't want to live under the collar of the Machine. We work together, and as you see we work well. Prosperity and happiness! That's what we've built out of nothingness, just as the fusorians build our worlds for us out of thin gas and energy. Why, when Harry Hickson and I came here—" He broke off and tugged at his chin, frowning at Boysie Gann.

  "Yes?" said Gann. "You and Hickson ..."

  "It was different then," said Dr. Snow shortly. "Boy, do you still want us to believe that story of yours about Hickson? A man I helped to bury myself, right under the rocks of his home?"

  Gann said carefully, knowing that he was on dangerous ground, "Well, sir, of course I don't know anything about Hickson. But what I told you was true. The man who summoned Quarla said he was Harry Hickson, and I had absolutely no reason at all to doubt him at the time."

  Snow nodded somberly and said no more; but Gann noticed that he no longer seemed to enjoy his meal.

  Gann put the matter from his mind. He was thinking of something bigger. He was thinking of the gratitude of the Machine when he returned, riding one of Quarla Snow's spacelings—as she was even now teaching him to do-—bringing word of the community of Freehaven and its precious crop of several thousand splendid candidates for tissue salvage at the Body Bank!

  He rose and strolled outside with Quarla. Harry Hick-son's pet pyropod, which Quarla had insisted on rescuing from the cave when her father arrived to take them off the reeflet, hissed and slithered around the area outside the door where its staked chain permitted it to move.

  He took her hand and held it, as they looked over the green ramble of glowing vines toward the distant beacon that was the central urban area of Freehaven. "You promised to let me ride one of your spacelings," he said, squeezing her hand and grinning. "If I'm going to be a permanent inhabitant here, I'd better start learning my way around."

  She looked at him thoughtfully, then smiled. Under her golden hair her eyes were an intense blue. "Why not?" she said. "But not out of the atmosphere, Boysie. Not at first."

  “I thought the spacelings brought their air with them."

  She nodded but said firmly, "No
t out of the atmosphere. For one thing, there might be pyropods."

  He scoffed, "So close to Freehaven? Nonsense, Quarla! What's the other thing?"

  She hesitated. "Well," she began. She was saved the trouble of answering. A pale blue wash of energy brightened up the sky over their heads.

  Both of them turned to look; a spacecraft was coming in for a landing, full jets blazing to slow its racing drive. Whoever it was who was piloting the craft, he was in a hurry. In a matter of seconds the ship was down on the lichenous lawn before Dr. Snow's clinic, its lock open, a man leaping out. He glanced toward Quarla and Boysie Gann, cried, "Emergency!" and turned to receive something that was being handed to him out the lock of the ship.

  Quarla cried, "I'll get my father. Boysie, run and help them!" Gann was already in motion, hurtling across the lichenous ground, though the two men in the rocket needed little help. What was coming through the lock of the ship was a man on a stretcher, wrapped in white sheets. In the light gravity of the Reef the two of them were perfectly adequate to handle it. Gann bore a hand anyway.

  "Sick," panted one of the men. "Don't know who he is, but he collapsed in my spaceling corral. Thought it might be something dangerous—"

  Gann nodded, helped lift the stretcher on which the sick man was thrashing and babbling ...

  And almost dropped it, light gravity or not.

  He stood there, jaw hanging, eyes wide. Face streaming with perspiration, eyes vacant, head tossing from side to side in delirium, the face of the man on the stretcher was nevertheless very familiar to Boysie Gann. It was the face of Machine Colonel Mohammed Zafar.

  If ever Boysie Gann had needed all the wits and wiles that had been drummed into him in the spy school on Pluto, now was the moment. "Dangerous," the reef rat who had brought Zafar had called him. He was more than dangerous; he spelled a strong probability of disaster for Boysie Gann. Zafar of all people would know him —and if, as Gann was morally certain, Zafar and M'Buna had been joined in some anti-Plan scheme on Polaris Station, Zafar would surely now know that Gann was no simple radar tech.