Gordon Dickson - The Human Edge

“You jammed in there?”

“I think my leg’s broke.”

“You say you saw something?”

“I thought I saw something. I don’t know. I guess that alarm had me seeing things—there’s nothing on the belt now. Help me out of here, will you!”

“Give me a hand, Corry.”

“Easy—take it easy! ”

“All right… All right. We’ll get you in to the doctor.”

Kator clung, listening, as the two who had come up later lifted their hurt companion out of wherever he had fallen, and carried him out of the building. Then there was nothing but silence; and in that silence, Kator drew a deep breath. It was hardly believable; but for this, too, the Morahnpa had had a saying— Perfection attracts the Random Factor—favorably as well as unfavorably.

Quietly, Kator began to climb back toward the conveyor belt. Now that he could move with less urgency, he saw a clearer route to it. He clambered along and spotted a straight climb along a sideways-sloping, three-foot-wide strip of metal filling the gap between what seemed to be the high side of a turbine and a narrow strip of darkness a foot wide alongside more ductwork. The strip led straight as a road to the open area where the conveyor belt began, and there was the door where Kator had originally entered.

Perfection attracts the Random Factor…. Kator slipped out on the strip of metal and began to scuttle along it. His claws scratched and slipped. It was slicker than he had thought. He felt himself sliding. Grimly, in silence, he tried to hold himself back from the edge of darkness. Still blunting his claws ineffectually on the polished surface, he slid over the edge and fell—

To crashing darkness and oblivion.

When he woke, he could not at first remember where he was. It seemed that he had been unconscious for some time but far above him the light still streamed through the high windows of the building at the same angle, almost, as when he had emerged from the platform on his way out. He was lying in a narrow gap between two vertical surfaces of metal. Voices suddenly struck strongly on his ear—the voices of two natives standing in the open space up ahead between Kator and the door.

“Not possible,” one of the voices was saying. “We’ve looked everywhere.”

“But you left the place to carry Rogers to the infirmary?”

“Yes, sir. But I took him in myself. Corry stood guard outside the door there. Then, when I came back we searched the whole place. There’s no one here.”

“Sort of a funny day,” said the second voice. “First, that short or whatever it was, downstairs, and then Rogers thinking he saw someone and breaking his leg.” The voice moved off toward the door. “Well, forget it, then. I’ll write it up in my report and we’ll lock the building behind us until an inspector can look it over.”

There was the sound of the small door in the big truck door opening.

“What’s anybody going to steal, anyway?” said the first voice, following the other through the door. “Put a half million tons of spaceship under one arm and carry it out?”

“Regulations…” the second voice faded away into the outdoors as the door closed.

Kator stirred in his darkness.

For a moment he was afraid he had broken a limb himself. But his leg appeared to be bruised, rather than broken. He wriggled his way forward between the two surfaces until some other object blocked his way. He climbed up and over this—more ductwork yet, it seemed—and emerged a second later into the open area.

The local sun was well up in the center of the sky as he slipped out of the building. No one was in sight. At a half-speed, limping run, Kator dodged along in the shade of an adjoining building; and a couple of minutes later he was safely through the gate of the complex and into the safe shelter of the trees paralleling the dirt road—headed back toward his ship.

The native fisherman was no longer beside the creek. No one at all seemed to be in sight in the warm day. Kator made it back to his ship; and, only when he was safely inside its camouflaged entrance, did he allow himself the luxury of a feeling of safety. For—at that—he was not yet completely safe. He simply had a ship in which to make a run for it, if he was discovered now. He throttled the feeling of safety down. It would be nightfall before he could risk taking off. And that meant that it must be nightfall before he took the final step in securing his kingdom.

He got rid of the loathsome mufflings he had been forced to wear and tended to his wrenched leg. It was painful, but it would be all right in a week at most. And he could use it now for any normal purpose. The recorder he had been carrying was smashed—that must have happened when he had the fall in the building. However, the record of everything he had done up to that moment would be still available within the recording element. No more was needed back Home. Now, if only night would fall!

Kator limped restlessly back and forth in the restricted space of the small ship as the shadows lengthened. At last, the yellow sun touched the horizon and darkness began to flood in long shadows across the land. Kator sat down at the communications board of his small ship and keyed in voice communication alone with the Expedition Headquarters on the moon.

The speaker crackled at him.

“Keysman?”

He said nothing.

“Keysman? This is the Captain. Can you hear us?”

Kator held his silence, a slight smile on his Ruml lips.

“Keysman!”

Kator leaned forward to the voice-collector before him. He whispered into it.

“No use—” he husked brokenly, “natives… surrounding me here. Captain—”

Kator paused. There was a moment’s silence, and then the Captain’s voice broke in.

“Keysman! Hold on. We’ll get ships down to you and—”

“No time—” husked Kator. “Destroying self and ship. Get Home…”

He reached out to his controls and sent the little ship leaping skyward into the dark. As it rose, he fired a cylindrical object back into the ground where it had lain. And, three seconds later, the white, actinic glare of a phase-shift explosion lighted the landscape.

But by that time, Kator was drilling safely upward through the night darkness.

He took upwards of four hours, local time, to return to the Expedition Headquarters. There was no response as he approached the surface above the hidden ship and its connected network of rooms excavated out of the undersurface. He opened the passage that would let his little ship down in, by remote control, and left the small ship for the big one.

There was no one in the corridors or in the outer rooms of the big ship. When Kator got to the gathering room, they were all there, lying silent. As he had expected, they had not followed his orders to return to the Ruml Homeworld. Indeed, with the ship locked and the keys lost with their Keysman, they could not have raised ship except by an extreme butchery of their controls, or navigated her once they had raised her. They had assumed, as Kator had planned, that their Keysman—no doubt wounded and dying on the planet below—had been half-delirious and forgetful of the fact he had locked the ship and taken her keys.

With a choice between a slow death and a fast, they had taken the reasonable choice; and suicided politely, with the lesser ranks first and the Captain last.

Kator smiled, and went to examine the ship’s recorder. The Captain had recited a full account of the conversation with Kator, and the Expedition’s choice of action. Kator turned back to the waiting bodies. The Expedition’s ship had cargo space. He carried the dead bodies into it and set the space at below freezing temperature so that the bodies could be returned to their families—that in itself would be a point in his favor when he returned. Then he unlocked the ship, and checked the controls.