Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

Riuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice’s thoughts calmed, swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn’t I pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe. Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The Restricted Area….

“Pete.”

“Yeah, baby?”

“How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can’t even go over in the Restricted Area?”

“Whatever made you think of that?” He laughed suddenly. He turned to her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. “Voltage loose… oh, baby, baby. Don’t you know what that is?”

“No. What?”

“That’s the control panel for one of the weapons, silly. It’s only a duplicate, actually—a monitor station. But it’s tuned to the frequencies of all the ships in this sector and—”

She listened. She wanted to listen. She had to want to listen, now.

“Nagor, I’m getting it,” Riuku called. “I’ll bring it all back with me. Just a minute and I’ll have it.”

“How does it work, honey?” Alice Hendricks said.

“You really want to know? Okay. Now the Corcoran field is generated between the ships and areas like that one, only a lot more powerful, by—”

“It’s coming through now, Nagor.”

“—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh, oh!” He grabbed her arm. “Duck, Alice!”

A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily.

“Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane.”

The police.

Police. Fear, all the way through Alice’s thoughts, all the way through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he’d been discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the Shielding….

“Nagor! I’ve been discovered!”

“Come away then, you fool!”

He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice’s fear, away from the integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn’t push her thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened. The bond held.

“Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?”

He didn’t answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. “But officer, what’s the matter?”

Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow’s papers, and her picture, and she wasn’t really photogenic, either…. And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh.

“Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don’t you?”

“Susan!”

“You didn’t expect me to follow you, did you? Didn’t it ever occur to you that detectives could put a bug in your copter? My, what we’ve been hearing!”

“Yeah,” the detective who was driving said. “And those pictures we took last night weren’t bad either.”

“Susan, I can explain everything….”

“I’m sure you can, Pete. You always try. But as for you—you little—”

Alice ducked down away from her. Pictures. Oh God, what it would make her look like. Still, this hag with the pinched up face who couldn’t hold a man with all the cosmetics in the drugstore to camouflage her—she had her nerve, yelling like that.

“Yeah, and I know a lot about you too!” Alice Hendricks cried.

“Why, let me get my hands on you….”

“Riuku!”

Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You’re not gaining anything this way. Calm down, so I can get out of here….

Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.

“That’s better,” Susan said. “Pete, your taste in women gets worse each time. I don’t know why I always take you back.”

“I can explain everything.”

“Oh, Pete,” Alice Hendricks whispered. “Petey, you’re not—”

“Sure he is,” Susan Ganley said. “He’s coming with me. The nice detectives will take you home, dear. But I don’t think you’d better try anything with them—they’re not your type. They’re single.”

“Pete….” But he wouldn’t meet Alice’s eyes. And when Susan took his arm, he followed her.

“How could you do it, Petey….” Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.

Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren’t for your ridiculous reproductive habits I’d have found out everything. As it is…. “Nagor, I’m coming! I didn’t get anything. This woman—”

“Well, come on then. We’re leaving. Right now. There’ll be other systems.”

Petey, Petey, Petey….

Contact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free, break free….

“What’s the matter, Riuku? Why don’t you come? Have the police caught you?”

The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to Nagor’s call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel communication fading.

“Riuku, if you don’t come now….”

He fought, but Alice’s thoughts were still with him; Alice’s tears still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.

“Riuku!”

“I—I can’t!”

The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice Hendricks, would never let him go.

“Oh, Petey, I’ve lost you….”

And Nagor’s sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him alone, with her.

The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth’s now unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding machine, at Tommy.

“How’s the love life?”

“You really interested in finding out, Alice?”

“Well—maybe—”

And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.

I was asleep when our danger was discovered, but I knew the instant the attention signal sounded that the situation was serious. Kincaide, my second officer, had a cool head, and he would not have called me except in a tremendous emergency.

“Hanson speaking!” I snapped into the microphone. “What’s up, Mr. Kincaide?”

“A field of meteorites sweeping into our path, sir.” Kincaide’s voice was tense. “I have altered our course as much as I dared and am reducing speed at emergency rate, but this is the largest swarm of meteorites I have ever seen. I am afraid that we must pass through at least a section of it.”

“With you in a moment, Mr. Kincaide!” I dropped the microphone and snatched up my robe, knotting its cord about me as I hurried out of my stateroom. In those days, interplanetary ships did not have their auras of repulsion rays to protect them from meteorites, it must be remembered. Two skins of metal were all that lay between the Ertak and all the dangers of space.

I took the companionway to the navigating room two steps at a time and fairly burst into the room.

Kincaide was crouched over the two charts that pictured the space around us, microphone pressed to his lips. Through the plate glass partition I could see the men in the operating room tensed over their wheels and levers and dials. Kincaide glanced up as I entered, and motioned with his free hand towards the charts.

One glance convinced me that he had not overestimated our danger. The space to right and left, and above and below, was fairly peppered with tiny pricks of greenish light that moved slowly across the milky faces of the charts.

From the position of the ship, represented as a glowing red spark, and measuring the distances roughly by means of the fine black lines graved in both directions upon the surface of the chart, it was evident to any understanding observer that disaster of a most terrible kind was imminent.