M. Harrison - THE CENTAURI DEVICE

Standing where John Truck now stood (smashed and overwhelmed by the Device), Doctor Grishkin, Gadaffi ben Barka and, later, General Gaw — all paid-up members of what they liked to call the human race — had seen what they wanted most, grasped, and in grasping proved beyond doubt their genealogy. They would never see anything else.

While Truck, that mongrel of highly suspect lineage and scruffy demeanor, simply gazed a bit stupidly at what was offered and couldn't make up his mind. When he failed to grab at something with both hands (or even to show any exclusive preference — possibly because of his Centauran heritage, possibly because being a spacer and a loser he desired all and none of it), the Device pulled out its probes and let go. He was a borderline case, but blood will out, and old Annie's genes had done their work.

Truck measured his length on the concrete, twitching and whimpering. After a while, he crawled up to the thing and had a look. It had tested him and passed him, he saw it as its makers had seen it, and he knew he could operate it

He still didn't know what it did — but then, he had his father's eyes, too.

He fell asleep out of pure physiological relief, and was woken he didn't know how much later by the sound of Chambers fire echoing down the transit lanes outside. He put the Centauri Device under his arm and left the bunker at a run.

He went through the antechamber blind and panicking, careening off the walls and trying to arm his remaining pistol one-handed. The last thing he needed was to be caught with the Device. His mouth tasted filthy, sweat crawled between his plastic suit and his skin. When he got to the outer door he slowed up and listened, stuck his head around hoping no one would blow it off. Pitch black in the transit lane. The fluorescents were dead. Nothing was moving out there.

A low crooning noise started up somewhere off to his left

He peered into the darkness, seeing only slow violet patterns slipping aimlessly across the surface of his own eye. The noise again, bubbling up out of a wet place in the ground. His dark-adaption was slow in coming after the pounding taken by his CNS in the bunker. He cursed and blinked, cold premonitions burrowing through his head. He shivered; held his breath; released it in a great shout and leaped into the passage, gun first.

He found Tiny Skeffern a few feet down the corridor, lying with his face to the wall.

'Truck, oh Truck — '

Tiny was crying and sniffling with it, his blunt little fingers sidling up to the edge of the pit in his chest then scuttling away again like small terrified annuals.

'Truck, it's huge. I want to be sick — ' He curled up, rocking himself to and fro. 'Where've you been , Truck?' He moaned with horror, looking at his wet fingers. 'Christ, bloody Christ, bloody — '

Truck carefully turned him over onto his damaged side to give the unpunctured lung a chance — there was nothing else he could do but wait for the breathing to stop.

'It'll be all right, Tiny,' he murmured. 'There were other things to say, but he couldn't say them. 'It'll be all right.'

'But there's a hole !' Tiny shuddered and wept. 'Oh, why did I come down here? I'm hurt now — ' His blue lips slid back off his teeth, every muscle in his body tensed and quivered. 'Cloak!' he screamed suddenly, eyes wide: 'Cloak! Cloak!' It was meaningless and eerie. He was silent for a long time. Then he said: 'I'm always losing damn guitars,' gave a great retching cough and relaxed.

Truck sat down beside the corpse and dropped the Centauri Device. It rolled away from him. He kicked out at it feebly in the dark. He was alone in a desert of entrails and greed, while another Tiny Skeffern chased the Vulpeculan melon down Ruth Berenici's staircase, on Earth a million years before. He put his hands over his face. A noise came from between them.

'Captain?'

A huge, dun apparition with a bulbous, snouted head stepped out of one of the equipment bays that lined the corridor.

Grishkin the mad priest had come to collect, diabolical in his plum-colored cloak and black radiation suit, his whole vast bulk heaving with the after-effects of some mysterious exertion or compulsion. He stood staring at John Truck, his eyes enigmatic behind the smoky panes of his goggles. His respirator hissed evenly. Had Stomach been only another postponement?

'I kept coining back to the same place,' he confided suddenly.

His voice was thick and clotted. 'You know, I surveyed this place. I was never lost in it before.' He advanced a few paces, still gazing hard at Truck. His arm whipped out, he clutched one of Truck's wrists with the energy of an ambition near-fulfilled. 'I knew you wouldn't fail me, my son. The Ark has a special gravity, a — ' He put his other arm around Truck's shoulders. 'You must help me. There are ' — his grip tightened — 'others in the bunker.'

He saw the Centauri Device.

He rubbed his fingers, clumps of raw white sausage, over his goggles: they left faint beads of perspiration on the blank lenses. Then, quivering and collapsing like a pig in a midden, he knelt before it. One fat hand fumbled at the neck of his coverall, pulled, unzipped it to expose his plastic windows. Things swam there, ferocious and triumphant. Head bowed, he revealed the processes of his soul.

Truck laughed nervously. 'You're off your head, Grishkin,' Then he remembered something. 'Oh my God,' he whispered:

' "Cloak!" '

He pivoted on one foot and with every ounce of force he could muster drove the toe of the other into Grishkin's neck.

'You foul old bastard!' he raged. 'Why'd you kill him?'

Grishkin keeled over, still in a votive crouch; he swayed about, struggling to get up, but Truck was on him like a snake, full of poison and death, and had one hand fastened in the soft flesh at the nape of his neck. They fought for a moment in the echoing dark. Truck won — lugged him bodily over to Tiny's corpse. He was absurdly heavy. 'You disgusting sod! Open your dirty head to him ! Go on, look at him !' And he gave the Opener's right arm a savage twist.

Grishkin squealed and tore himself loose. He knelt over the Device again. 'No,' he said. 'Forgive me,' he begged it. 'I didn't know what I was doing.' He looked furtively over his shoulder at Truck, advancing with steely hooked fingers.

A grotesque ballet ensued, danced out in the depths of a dead planet to the accompaniment of animal grunts and howls: time and again, Truck forced Grishkin to face the dead musician, while on his part the priest, squealing and groaning with fervor, flailed his way back to the Device. His respirator fell off. He tried to pray, but Truck kept kicking him in the side of the head, shouting, 'Pray to him !' and 'You're not God!' Soon, both of them were covered in blood and filth, panting and incoherent. Neither could get the upper hand: and Tiny Skeffern stared indifferently up at both.

'We made a bargain, Captain! We made a bargain!'

Finally, Grishkin's cloak came off; he lay there, fat and dripping, his radiation suit in tatters. Truck saw only a great white slug, full of something neither human nor animal. He choked disgustedly and gave up.

'I should kill you, Grishkin.'

Grishkin chuckled. 'Too late for that, Captain.' He came up off the ground with a Chambers pistol aimed at Truck's head.

Truck, abruptly calm, almost disinterested (understanding that Stomach had been a postponement, that all along there had only been one way to end the dialogue begun on Bread Street, Sad al Bari), shot him in the window of his belly.

'Captain,' said Grishkin.

Truck pulled the Device from beneath the body while the sound of the shot was still echoing through the bunkers and wiped the stinking fluids off it with a corner of the Opener's cloak. He stared down at Tiny, shook his head. There was nothing to do then but make his way back to the bottom of Omega Shaft: for him, at least, the confusion or curse had been lifted, and he found it easily. He got into the lift and returned to the surface of Centauri, his mind such a howling waste that even Gadaffi ben Barka might have felt uncomfortable in it.