Barrington Bayley - Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus - The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

Of course, the new organism would be designed to accomplish one thing above all: escape. Eliot was curious now to see how the slipper would attempt it.

‘Might it not be dangerous?’ Abrak questioned mildly.

Eliot flipped a switch. A thick slab of dull metal slid down to occlude the window. Instead, they could continue to watch through a vidcamera.

‘I’d like to see it get through that,’ he boasted. ‘Carbon and titanium alloy a foot thick. It’s surrounded by it.’

‘You are being unsubtle,’ said Abrak. ‘Perhaps the beast will rely on trickery.’

Alanie gave a deep sigh that strained her full breasts voluptuously against the fabric of her smock. ‘Well, what now?’ she asked. ‘We’ve been here six months. I think we’ve solved the basic mystery of the place. Isn’t it time we were moving on?’

‘I’d like to stay longer,’ Eliot said thoughtfully. ‘I want to see if we can get into communication with Dominus .’

‘But how?’ she asked, sitting down at a bench and waving her hand. ‘Communication is a species-characteristic. He probably would never understand what language is.’

‘And yet already he’s given us help, so we can communicate after a fashion,’ Eliot argued.

A warning sound came from Abrak. Something was happening on the screen looking into the test chamber.

The slipper organism had decided to act. Gliding smoothly to the far side of the chamber, the one nearest the skin of the ship, it pressed its tapered end against the wall. Abruptly the toe of the slipper ignited into an intense glare too bright for the vidcamera to handle. An instant later fumes billowed up and filled the chamber, obscuring everything.

By the time the fumes cleared sufficiently for the onlookers to see anything, the slipper had made its exit through the wall of the chamber, and thence through the ship’s skin, by burning a channel whose edges were still white-hot.

‘I think,’ said Eliot sombrely, ‘it might just have been a fusion beam, or something just as good.’

He paused uncertainly. Then he flung open a cupboard and began pulling out gear. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re going after our specimen.’

‘But it will kill us,’ Alanie protested.

‘Not if Dominus helps us again. And somehow I think he will.’

Dominus is an intelligent being, he told himself. Intelligent beings are motivated by curiosity and a sense of co-operation with other intelligent beings. His hunt for the slipper was, in fact, impelled more by the desire to prompt Dominus into co-operating with them again than by any interest in regaining the slipper itself, which could well be far away by now.

‘But, once having recaptured the creature, how will you retain it?’ inquired Abrak, looking meaningfully at the gaping hole in the chamber.

‘We’ll keep it under sedation,’ Eliot said, buckling on a protective suit.

Minutes later he stood at the foot of the spaceship. Besides the protective suit he was armed with a gun that fired recently prepared sleep darts (they had worked on the slipper’s parent, following a biochemical analysis of that creature) and a cylinder that extruded a titanium mesh net.

Though evincing less enthusiasm, Alanie and Abrak had nevertheless followed him, despite his waiver to the girl. Abrak was unprotected, carried no weapons, and relied on his flimsy ship mask to take care of Five’s atmosphere.

The environment boomed, flickered and flashed all around them. To Eliot’s surprise the slipper could be seen less than a hundred yards away, lying quietly in the beams of their torches.

He glanced up towards the bulk of Dominus , then stepped resolutely forward, aware of the footsteps of the others behind him.

Up on the hill, Dominus began to move. Eliot stopped and stared up at him exultantly.

‘Eliot,’ Abrak crooned at his elbow, ‘I strongly recommend caution. Specifically, I recommend a return to the ship.’

Eliot made no answer. His mind was racing, wondering what gesture he could make to Dominus when the vast beast recaptured the slipper and returned it to them.

He was quite, quite wrong.

Dominus halted some distance away, and extended a tongue, or tentacle, travelling at ground level almost too fast for the eye to follow. In little more than a second or two it had flashed across the sandy soil and scrubby grass, seized on Alanie, lifted her bodily from the ground and whisked her away before a scream could form in her throat. Eliot noticed, blurrily, that the entire length of the tentacle was covered with wriggling wormy protuberances.

Even as Alanie was withdrawn into the body of Dominus Eliot was running forward, howling wildly and firing his dart gun. Light footsteps pattered to his rear; surprisingly strong, bony arms restrained his.

‘It is no use, Eliot. Dominus has taken her. He is not what you thought.’

Early on Dominus had perceived that the massy object, which he now accepted came from beyond the atmosphere, was not itself a life-form but a life-form’s construct. The idea was already a familiar one: artifacts were rare on his planet – biological evolution was simpler – but there had been a brief period when they had proliferated, attaining increasing orders of sophistication until they had nearly devastated the continent. Stored in his redundant genes Dominus still retained all the knowledge of his ancestors on that score.

From the construct emerged undoubtedly organic entities, and it was in this that the mystery lay: there were several of them. Dominus spent some time mulling over this inexplicable fact. Who, then, was owner of the construct? He noted that, within limits, all the foreign lifeforms bore a resemblance to one another, and reminded himself that ecological convergence was an occasional phenomenon within his own domain. Could this convergence have been carried further and some kind of ecological common action (he formed the concept with difficulty) have arisen among entities occupying the same ecological niche? He reasoned that he should entertain no preconceptions as to the courses evolution might take under unimaginably alien conditions. Some relationship even more incomprehensible to him might be the case.

So he had been patient, watching jealously as the life-forms surveyed part of his domain in a flying artifact, but doing nothing. Then they had attempted, but failed, to capture some native organisms. Wanting to see what would take place, Dominus had delivered a few to them.

When he saw the mutated life-form emerge from the construct on its escape bid, he knew it was as he had anticipated. The aliens must have made a genetic analysis of all their specimens. The massy construct was sealed against Dominus ’s mutation-damping genes, and within that isolation they had carried out an experiment, subjecting one of the specimens to a challenge situation and prompting it to reproduce.

Dominus could forbear no longer. He issued the slipper with a stern command to stay fast. It was sufficiently its father’s son to know what the consequences of disobeying him would be. Three alien lifeforms emerged in pursuit. To begin with, Dominus took one of the pair that were so nearly identical.

Alanie Leitner floated, deep within Dominus ’s body, in a sort of protein jelly. Mercifully, she was quite dead. Thousands of nerve-thin tendrils entered her body to carry out a brief but adequate somatic exploration. At the same time billions upon billions of RNA operators migrated to her gonads (there were two of them) and sifted down to the genetic level where they analysed her chromosomes with perfect completeness.