Damon Knight - Beyond the Barrier

Something seemed to compress his lungs; a band of pain clamped around his forehead.

Shouts of excitement echoed in his ears. All across the vast space, men and women in gaudy costumes were swirling about each other in rapid motion.

“How many Uglies left?” the old woman cried. “How many, I say how many?”

“None, Highborn!” a man called triumphantly. In the screen, every green light had winked out.

Glancing across the hall, Naismith saw many drifting greenskinned corpses, but not one living servant.

“And how many Zugs?” called the old woman.

A hush fell. In the second screen, one ruddy light was still burning.

“One,” said the nearest man reluctantly. “One Zug left alive, Highborn.”

“Fool!” she screamed at Pendell. “Fool, fool! How could you be so careless? Why didn’t your Barrier kill them all?”

“I don’t know, Highborn,” the gnome said. His face twitched; he blinked, rubbed his thin arms with his hands. “In theory it is impossible, but—”

“But there it is!” she shouted. “Well, what are you going to do? How can we be safe if there’s a Zug still alive? Where is that Shefth? I say where is he?”

Several hands thrust Naismith forward. “Here, Highborn.”

“Well?” she demanded, whirling, her mad eyes staring into his. “Well? Are you going to kill it? What are you waiting for?”

Naismith tried to speak, and failed. His body was on fire with pain; he could barely see.

“What’s the matter with him?” the old woman squalled. “I say what’s the matter?”

Hands probed his body. Dimly he heard the hawk-nosed man’s voice: “Are you ill?”

Naismith managed to nod.

“Look at him, just look!” the old woman shouted. “What good is he now? Put a death collar on him and be done with it!”

“But the Zug, Highborn!” called an anxious voice. “Who will kill the Zug?”

“Put the collar on him, I say!” the woman’s hysterical voice railed on. “I can’t stand the sight of him. Put the collar on him—kill him, kill him!”

Naismith felt a moment of intolerable tension, then a sudden release. He was afloat in darkness, safe, protected.

The woman’s shout seemed to echo from a distance. “Well, why don’t you put the collar on?”

A pause. Another voice answered: “Highborn, this man is dead.”

In the darkness, the being who knew himself as Naismith awakened. Memory returned. He knew where he was, and what he was.

He was alive, though the rapidly cooling body in which he lay was not. He could remember, now, with utter clarity, all the things it had been necessary for “Naismith” to forget.

He remembered killing Wells. Earlier, he remembered standing beside the wreckage of a bomber, and coolly selecting the dog tags of one of its crewmen, the one who most resembled him in age and height: dog tags that read “NAISMITH, GORDON.”

He remembered stripping the body, carrying it on his shoulders to a ravine, throwing it in and covering it with boulders….

Earlier still, he remembered his first grublike awareness—

warmth, protection, motion. He had put out pseudoganglions, first cautiously, then with gathering sureness and skill. He had linked his own nervous system with that of his host, a Shefthi warrior returning belatedly from a Zug hunt.

Then he could see, feel, hear, with his host’s human senses.

He was inside the Shefth: he was the Shefth….

With grim satisfaction, he realized that the game was over, the long-maturing plan had been successful. His knowledge of his own kind came only from human sources, but logic alone made it certain that he represented his species’ counterblow to the humans’ Barrier. Encysted in a human body, his mind radiations mingled with those of a human brain, he alone of all his kind could pass through that Barrier. He was the one surviving Zug: he himself was the monster he had been sent to kill.

Now, as his strength returned, he was aware of motion. The host-body was being towed off out of the way, probably by a robot. He waited, tensely, until the motion was arrested and the sounds of voices diminished. It was evident that he had been taken out of the great hall, into some smaller chamber.

He waited again, to make sure, but there was no further movement.

Ever since the host-body died, he had been injecting desic-cants into it to harden it and make it brittle along the center line of the torso. Now he stretched himself, applied pressure: and the body split. Light came into his prison.

For the first time, he saw with his own eyes; and he was dazzled. The world was so much more brilliant and beautiful than human senses could convey!

Now he saw that he was floating in a small, bare cubicle, among the corpses of dozens of greenskins.

Carefully he drew himself out of the hollow he had made in the body of his host. He felt his limbs and wings stretching in the air, hardening.

A fresh babble of voices came from outside the cubicle. He gripped the empty host-body and drew it quickly to the back of the room, hiding it behind the other floating bodies. A moment later, there was a commotion: a body crashed heavily into the room, followed by another. The first was babbling in a thin, terrified voice, “No, no, no…”

He risked a glance. A robot, as he watched, was affixing a death collar to the scrawny neck of a technician. Its task done, the robot turned and floated away. It was carrying a cluster of the metal collars, which jangled faintly as it moved.

The technician, left behind, tugged vainly at his collar. Tears glittered in the little man’s eyes. With a choked sound, after a moment, he turned and followed the robot.

The being who called himself Naismith waited grimly. Now that the Shefthi and the greenskins were gone, the City’s rulers were evidently making sure of the technicians—perhaps of the Entertainers as well. However that might be, Naismith waited because he had to. -

During these first few minutes, he was vulnerable and weak, easy prey for any determined man with a weapon.

At intervals, cautiously, he tested his wings. The curved ribs were hardening, the membranes drying. He flexed his grasping members, watching the armored segments slide in their casings.

Strength and alertness began to flow into his body. Soon—

His thoughts broke off abruptly as another robot entered the chamber. Naismith felt a tug, and saw the greenskinned bodies around him bob and wheel, as they followed the robot out into the corridor.

Naismith went along, caught in the same web of force. Outside, he saw that his small group of bodies was being joined to a much larger one. All the greenskinned corpses, evidently, were being brought together for disposal. Naismith could have broken free of fee weak attraction that held him, but he ran less chance of detection in staying where he was. Besides, if his idea of bis whereabouts was correct, the procession was headed where he wanted to go.

Other groups of bodies were added as they went, but always at the head of the procession, and it was not until they crossed a large spherical hall that anyone noticed Naismith.

“Look—a Zug, isn’t it?” an effete voice remarked. “How frightening, even dead as it is!”

“Yes, and imagine that we aren’t even seeing its true form,”

another voice replied. The sound faded as the procession moved on. “If we had a viewer to look at it with—” A pause. “But, Willot, what is a dead Zug doing here, in the New City?”

Naismith waited no longer. With a surge of his wings, he was out of the cluster of bodies, darting straight across the hall toward the nearest doorway.

Shouts echoed behind him as he gathered speed. Ahead, a little group of gorgeously dressed fat men blundered squarely into his path. He burst through them like a rocket, sending them flying with bruised limbs and broken bones.