More Strums appeared. They must, I thought, have been piling out from the black ship. Now there were at least twenty opposed to the three defenders and two robot shield-carriers. Four to one odds, whichever way you looked at it.
Strumbermians blasted at the advancing shield, and it showed white where struck. At the shield’s weapon-port Fuzzpuff fired bolts of blue incandescence now, picking off enemy robots.
But there were too many raiders. From behind the ruined copter two Strums sent a heavy freight handler. Arachnid legs carried the mechanical creature up and over one of the falling packing cases. It dropped in front of the shield, raised dull black forelegs and began striking the barrier.
The transparency dented. In vain did Captain Fuzzpuff attempt to align his weapon. Other robots charged.
The Devian at the captain’s right opened a higher weapon-port. Aiming point-blank, it released a deep purple blast. The freight-handler dropped, lay still, turned dark gray and dissolved at last into a lead-colored powder. The shield advanced over the dust. But even as it did, two more robots leaped barriers to ram pointed forelegs into the open muzzles of the defender’s weapons. Unlike the carrying mechanisms, these robots were equipped with red glowing axes. The Strums had probably adapted them specially for this sort of close work. They wrestled the gun muzzles aside and raised the axes.
I gripped Nancy’s hand. It was horrible to be so helpless. If only I could be out there helping, doing something—if only I hadn’t been so ready to capitulate myself—
But at the same time I knew that my ignorance would already have killed me—and Nancy—ten times over out there. The best way I could help was to stay well out of the way—as I was doing. Still, I did not feel proud.
From the Comet’s Tail’s inner lock came another defender. It wore a tall, tall spacesuit and could only be one of the giraffe-necked passengers I had seen.
Axes split the shield. Captain Fuzzpuff and the Devians leaped back, but not Giraffe-Neck. Clutching something oblong that it suddenly pushed forward, it leaped with long, ungainly strides for the rent in the barrier.
Giraffe-Neck hit the shield and there was an explosion. Bits of flesh, metal and other debris shot outward. As the smoke cleared Captain Fuzzpuff and one Devian were all I could see moving among the shambles. The Devian had one arm twisted, another missing.
Getting to his feet, the tough little beetle-captain grabbed an ax from the disintegrated limb of a robot. He scuttled to the connecting tube. The Devian followed, shooting bursts of blue ahead of the captain.
Strumbermians fell like monster weeds before a scythe, but continued to charge the Pmpermian. Fuzzpuff would not be stopped. At the end of his mad charge he braced himself on short, wide-spread insect-legs, raised his ax and brought it down again and again upon the end of the transparent shaft where it bonded to the open port.
“He’s trying to chop it through!” Nancy whispered.
So he was. At first nothing happened. Then the area of his blows took on a light copper tinge. Slowly the color deepened from deep brass to apricot.
Then, with a visible explosion of released air, the Comet’s Tail parted its dreadful company with the Strumbermian raider. The entire end of the tube shattered, and I saw robots, bodies and other objects sucked out from both locks to spray into the vacuum between the ships.
We were stranded.
Chapter 9
There were stars outside our port. The near ones passed rapidly behind, the far ones seemed hardly to move. I was reminded of land features as seen from a speeding car: perspective made things nearest at hand seem to pass most swiftly. Here it reinforced the three-dimensional effect; the view was phenomenally impressive.
But one of the stars was moving out of phase with the others. It blinked on and off like a spaceborne traffic light, and I wondered about brave Captain Fuzzpuff and the Devian and the open airlock.
A larger dot came into view; then a row of dots rotated into evidence. No stars—those lights represented the Comet’s Tail! I had thought it was gone, but it was traveling alongside of the pirate, since the Strums had matched velocities for the raid. Now the cargo vessel was falling behind, crippled, losing the phase. The lights blurred, became a Solarpool comet in an infinitely expanded gametable, dwindled and were gone.
Nancy sighed. “I hope all those heroics weren’t in vain. I hope those spacesuits. . . .”
“The captain and the Devian will have gotten inside,” Qumax said almost confidently. “But they could have saved themselves the trouble. Did you see the way that tube shattered? The Strums were starting to accelerate without drawing in the umbilical cord. It would have cracked off anyway in a few more moments, under that stress.”
Nancy trembled. “All those poor crewmen. W-will the Strumbermians blow up the Comet’s Tail?”
“No. They might like to, since they’re outlaws and killers, but if they violate the code of space that blatantly they’ll have the entire space force down on them, and that would be the end.”
“Isn’t pirating a ship in high space a crime?” Nancy asked.
“Not enough of one to warrant full-scale action. Oh, there’ll be a couple more police ships assigned to this locale, and the Strums will feel the pinch. But nothing like the pinch they’d feel if they wiped out an entire cargo ship. So they—”
Something slammed us. I was thrown to the floor along with Nancy and Qumax. Lying on my side, I saw a bright green dart flash by the port. I knew that this was a strange vessel and that our ship was being fired on.
“Galactic police ship already!” Qumax cried. “No wonder the Strums started moving out so fast. We’re saved, if we’re not destroyed along with the raiders.”
“They wouldn’t shoot down a ship with hostages aboard,” I said, somewhat feebly.
“They don’t know I’m aboard, and you don’t count,” Qumax said. He didn’t seem very happy.
I wasn’t very happy either. I hoped the raider would not be blasted out of space while we were aboard, but I didn’t see much future for us if it escaped, either.
The ship shivered and shrugged. Overwhelming disorientation took hold. I imagined I was lying on the floor with my feet over my head. I was! I looked at the others. Qumax, poor worm, was rolled into something resembling a green pool ball, bouncing this way and that. Nancy was fortunate to be wearing coveralls, though these were beginning to tear again. Her heels, like mine, seemed directed ceiling-ward.
“That’s a police cruiser all right,” Qumax said. “Probably the latest equipment aboard. New tracking stuff. If they can get locked on and . . .”
WHAM! I thought my insides were splashed all over the Strumbermian stateroom. They weren’t. Too bad. It would have been simpler.
“Were the police keeping an eye on the Comet’s Tail?” Nancy asked. “Maybe they do know about you . . .”
A ball bounced and Oumax’s face emerged. “Farewell, Harold Prodkins! Farewell, Nancy Dilsmore! Farewell. Farewell, Captain Fuzzpuff. Farewell, Swarm Tyrant. Farewell, life—”
“Qumax! For Heaven’s sake!” said Nancy.
“I hear them coming,” Qumax said in direful tones. Big tears formed in his eyes.
“Can’t you use your power to control them one at a time, send them away?” I asked. “If you were able to break us out of Lucifernia—”
“Not the Strums! They have awful minds!”
Heavy footsteps thumped up to our door and stopped. I didn’t dare discuss escape with Qumax now, even if the worm had the spine for it, which he didn’t.
The door crashed open. Facing us were three stony-faced Strumbermians, one an officer with a star branded on his forehead.
The huge finger of the officer pointed. First to me, then Qumax. COME! CONTROL ROOM!
I pushed my feet off the wall and got my legs under me. Groggily I stood. I looked at the blank porthole, then at Nancy.
NOW! the Strum ordered mind-deafeningly.
“Nancy,” I cried. “Remember, death before dis—”
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YOU DEFY ME, MOBILE-FACED CREATURE?! A quarter ton of meat-muscle loomed over me.
I had a vision of a smoky medieval hell, the devil challenging me. I defy you! I thought. You and all your ilk! I—
It seemed that a large ax split my skull and drove downward to the crotch, leaving me twain. Streaks of red exploded outward from my eyeballs. I was picked up and shaken until my teeth fell out and splatted against the deck like hail-stones. I had the impression of dirt rammed up my nostrils and packed by the shovelful into my ears. There were rat-snouts and rat-squeals and rat scurryings, outside or inside of my skull.
Whatever held me dropped my feet. I was yanked to a standing position and jerked around to face whatever my handler had it in mind for me to face. My teeth, it developed, were still in my mouth and my body was intact, but my eyesight was not so good yet. There was some dirt in my ear.
Something flickered like the image on a mistuned trebvee set. Something like a face on Mt. Rushmore, or maybe a posterior—but the features were all haze to me.
Things began, unfortunately, to clear. I saw silhouettes in a fog of my mind’s own making. There were Strumbermians and there was Qumax. I tried in vain to distinguish the trebvee image. Qumax was speaking to it, begging it, wheedling it in a strange tone and language.
Something the size of a rat zipped across the floor. A big Strum foot came up, and down. There was a rat-like squeal and spray of red. Qumax started and knocked against the trebvee. The set blinked and the image changed to a confusing light-pattern.
Reacting as to a blow, Qumax jerked away. He careened into a control bank. A Strumbermian roared mentally and started for him. Qumax screeched as the rat had screeched, and rumpled farther into the nest of gauges, levers and controls. His tentacles leaped about at random—pulling, turning, jerking. Click, snap, zap.
Then several bright flashes amid the alien instruments, and a light like an aerial-display fire-work.
Something slammed me.
Agony. Floor. Qumax’s mind screams.
*
From a pain-shot void came the sweetest words I’d heard in at least an eternity. They lanced in at me, tickled my consciousness, and finally registered intelligence. “Harold, oh, Harold— why did you have to be such a fool?”
I forced blistered eyelids open and saw the face of Nancy Dilsmore. She was looking down at me from no more than two feet away. I saw beauty in those features and I found that the tears on those smooth cheeks were infinitely precious to me. I wondered . . . and then I began remembering.
“Harold, oh, Harold. You poor, poor fool, Harold.”
Never before had such precious, original words come to me. “Nancy,” I grunted eloquently.
Blue eyes blinked. A drop hung on her nose until she raised an ungloved hand to brush it off. “You should have known better than to start trouble,” she said.
“I start trouble?”
“In the control room. You and Qumax.”
“I—” Had there been a mind-itch in the middle of that session? I didn’t even know why we had been taken there. Probably only to broadcast our pictures to Jamborango, so that the Swarm Tyrant would have to pay ransom. But Qumax had fouled it up by his tantrum . . . No, let her think it was I. “What—what about Qumax?”
“He—he’s in the lavatory,” she said.
Sure enough, I saw his tail. It was limp. “Badly hurt?”
“Not too badly. Nothing permanent, I think. His face is swollen and he has some ugly bruises, but otherwise—”
“Otherwise still the ornery worm,” I said unkindly. “How about you?” I hated myself for saying it, but knew I had to ask.
“Me?”
“While we were gone.”
“Ohhh . . . nothing,” she said.
Was she lying? Probably. Yet there were no bruises, no scratches, no blood, no sundered coveralls. She had even repatched the rips from the capture and transfer. She was claiming that she had not been molested—yet how could I be sure, after that Prunian episode I had seen?
“They didn’t,” she said. “Really.”
I sat up. I was sure then that this was true. She really would have died first. I took her in my arms. I kissed her lips. I felt Qumax’s scratchiness.
Angry, I looked around to see the worm, one eye closed, antenna drooping. Obviously he was playing possum, listening in on my mental processes and ready to make me do something at an inopportune moment. I wondered how I could enforce privacy. I glanced again at Nancy and knew that she was seeing Qumax and guessing about the scratchiness. There was no privacy for such as us, not under these circumstances.
And I knew she’d rather die than do anything with that kind of publicity.
“They’re coming again, Harold Prodkins!”
Qumax’s agonized warning caught me staring at the stars. We had come out of hyperspace, or whatever it was. The raider had long since lost the cruiser. Either the police had realized who was aboard and had to desist, or they had not been very good hunters.
The worm was cringing again. He certainly lost his obnoxious composure in the presence of these Strums!
I looked once more at Nancy, regretting what had not passed between us. Her golden hair, her unbagged form, her smile—I wanted to photograph it all in my memory. Before—
With chilling abruptness the door flew back. In strode the Strumbermian with the red star burned into the waxy flesh of his flat expanse of forehead. Straight to me he walked, stopped, pointed that finger and thought: COME! Evidently these creatures never communicated in less than a blast.
“Harold—”
“Good-bye Nancy,” I said. I stood up rapidly to make the parting easier.
Once more tears stood in her eyes. “You be careful, Harold.”
I tried to say something manly, but got choked up. The Strum officer nudged me with a mountainous hand and I stumbled ignominiously out. That was my noble leave-taking. I hadn’t even asked Qumax to look out for her, though that would have done little good anyway. When the brat wasn’t making mischief, he was cowering abjectly.
We marched down the unadorned, rat-infested corridors again. At one intersection I saw the food troughs—metal dikes filled with flowing, greasy meal-synthetic that reminded me of hog slop. We had been offered a bucketful, but hadn’t touched it.
I was boosted into a large, luxurious office, free of rats. The door slammed behind me.
Another Strumbermian officer peered at me through eyes that were even deader than most Strum orbs. The star on his forehead was larger and redder than the others I had seen. His skin was even more ghastly pallid. Obviously sunbathing was not popular on Strumbermia. He was sitting on a low stool that kept his knees raised almost to his square hairless chin. He motioned me to a similar stool. SQUAT! he thought.
I looked at the stool, waist-high on me and fraught with great splinters. “May I stand?” I asked hesitantly. I couldn’t really make things much worse for myself.
SUIT SELF, MOBILE-FACED ONE. The officer’s eyes were an unpleasant purple bloodshot despite their deadness. It was as though they had bled and rotted some after expiring. From where he squatted he could gaze directly into my face. I decided to take a seat after all.
YOUR NAME HAROLD PRODKINS, EARTHIAN, telepathed the Strumbermian with the usual power. YOU REPRESENTATIVE OF YOUR WORLD. I CROG. I BIG SHOT LEADER. The force of his mind-talk threatened to give me a headache.
“What do you want?” I asked. I felt no bravado; I knew he would get whatever he wanted, whether I resisted or not.
WANT TO KNOW ABOUT EARTH. CLIMATE, NATURAL RESOURCES.
“I’ll think about that,” I said, meaning it literally. I launched into a mental description of the worst barely habitable planet I had ever read about in science fiction. I conjured a vision of flowing lakes of lava; tried to remember the composition of a corrosive atmosphere hostile to most known life-forms; pictured hothouse cities that moved about the planet on huge off-center rollers that were buffeted here and there b
y multiple hurricanes. Metallic-based lifeforms with twelve-inch teeth that sucked blood by the quart; unpredictable but frequent and devastating meteoric showers; an unstable orbit that made lava lakes freeze and crack jaggedly every few years, then melt and bubble and flow across the land; horrendous earthquakes and elephant-gobbling pitcher-plants. The national gourmet delicacy that resembled my first attempt to make a synthetic meal aboard the Comet’s Tail. I was working up some research about the imminence of the sun going nova and the frantic efforts to suppress the bone-crunching sea monsters when Crog reached out and tapped me crushingly with a stonehard finger.
YOU LIE, MOBILE-FACE!
I gasped. Not only had that finger-blow nearly dislocated my ribcage, I had distinctly felt an electric shock.
YOU HUMANOID. HUMANOIDS ALL BRAG ABOUT HOME PLANETS!
So old stoneface didn’t swallow it. It had been worth the try, still. Certainly I would not voluntarily tell the truth. “Maybe I’m different,” I said.
NO. YOU LIE. YOUR PLANET NOT GOOD AS THAT!
“Not as—” I felt my face hang open.
Crog opened his cavernous mouth in what could have been either a smile or open mockery of my astonishment. His teeth were not human at all—they were sharp and pointed, like those of a tyrannosaur. He leaned forward and almost disabled me with another finger tap.
YOU TRY TO IMPRESS BIG SHOT LEADER. CROG NOT MIND YOU LIE. IMPLIES YOU TRUE HUMANOID.
“True human—” I really had felt the shock this time.
“We speak with sound if you like, now,” Crog said, surprising me again. “Now I know you one of us.”
“I am?” I couldn’t think fast enough to adjust to this.
“You not bug. You not worm or other vermin. You humanoid!”
“I suppose so, that way.” Maybe if he stayed out of my thoughts—
“Very good!” Crog agreed. “You realize that Strumbermians and Earthians have common interest; try to impress Crog how much courage you have and how much help you be. Now I not have to use mind-probe.”
“You’re very smart,” I lied. Mind-probe—ugh! I could guess what that would do to my brain-tissue.