Her eyes darted suddenly to the lower left corner of the port. The edge of another building was visible there—a small house it was, also gray and very close. It would be right beside the ship!
Zamm convulsed.
“No!” she screamed. “It’s a dream!”
She was being lifted from the table and put on her feet. Her knees wobbled, then stiffened.
“They’re feeling fine, Zamm,” the voice of the gray-haired man called Bent was saying. He added: “The boy’s got pretty big.”
“She’ll be all right now,” somebody else murmured behind her. “Zamm, you know Deep Rest! We couldn’t take chances with it. We told them they’d have to wait there in the house till you woke.”
The ramp beam set her down on the sand of a path. There was hot daylight around her then—seventeen years behind her, and an open door twenty steps ahead.
Her knees began wobbling again.
Zamm couldn’t move.
For a score of scores of light-years about, Cushgar the Mighty lay on its face, howling to its gods to save it from the wrath of the ghosts and the wrath of Zamm.
But she—Zone Agent Zamman Tarradang-Pok, conqueror of space, time, and all the laws of probability—she, Free-mind Unqualified of the Free Daya-Bals—Doctor of Neuronics—Vega’s grand champion of the Galaxy:
No, she just couldn’t move!
Something put-putted suddenly by overhead. Enough of its seared and molten exterior remained to indicate that at some earlier stage of its career it might have been a fat, amiable-looking freighter. But there was nothing amiable about its appearance now! It looked like a wreck that had rolled for a century in the fires of hell, and put in another decade or two sunk deep in an acid sea. It looked, in fact, exactly as a ship might expect to look whose pilot had a weakness for withholding his fire till he was well within point-blank range.
But though it had lost its make-up, the ship was otherwise still in extra-good condition! It passed over Zamm’s head, bobbed up and down twice in cheerful greeting, and went putting off on its secondaries, across the vast hospital and toward the city beyond, dropping a bit as it went, to encourage Cushgar to howl a little louder.
Zamm gazed blankly after the beat-up, impossible warrior, and heard herself laughing. She took a step—and another step.
Why, sure, she could move!
She was running
* * *
” . . . so that’s how it was,” the Third Co-ordinator told Bropha. He swirled the contents of his nearly empty glass around gently, raised it and finished his drink. “All we’d really intended was to hold that dead-straight course, and smash their light interception all the way in. That was to make sure they’d bunch every heavy ship they had on that line, to stop us just before we reached the Cluster.
“Then we were going to pop off at an angle, streak for the place they were keeping Zamm’s folks, grab them up and get out of Cushgar again—
“But, of course,” he added, “when we discovered they’d all rolled over on their back spikes and were waving their hands in the air, we couldn’t resist taking over! You just never know what you start when you go off on an impromptu mission like that!”
He paused and frowned, and sighed. For the Third Co-ordinator was a man of method, who liked to see a job well worked out in advance, with all its angles considered and plenty of allowance made for any unforeseeable developments.
“How about a second drink?” Bropha inquired.
“No,” said his friend; “I’ve got to get back to work. They can squawk all they like”—Bropha realized he was referring to his colleagues of the Council—”but there isn’t another Department of the Confederacy that’s been jammed up by the Cushgar affair as badly as Galactic Zones is right now! That was forty-two thousand two hundred and thirty-eight individual mission-schedules we had to re-plot!” he said, still somewhat aghast at the completeness of the jam. “Only a third of it’s done! And afterwards, I’ll have time to worry about finding a replacement for Zamm. There’s nothing so scarce as a really good Peripheral Agent! That’s all I got out of it—”
Bropha looked sympathetic.
“I talked to that boy, and I’ve got some hopes for him,” the Co-ordinator added glumly. “If she keeps her promise, that is, and lets him come to Jeltad, by and by. But he’ll never be like Zamm!”
“Give him time,” Bropha said consolingly. “They grow up slowly. They’re a long-lived race, the Daya-Bals.”
“I thought of that, too!” the Co-ordinator nodded. “She’ll raise a dozen now before she’s done; and among them there might be one, or two— But, by the way she talked, I knew right then Zamm would never let any of the others go beyond fifty light-years of Betelgeuse!”
Other Stories
The Custodians
McNulty was a Rilf. He could pass for human if one didn’t see him undressed; but much of the human appearance of the broad, waxy-pale face and big hands was the result of skillful surgery. Since the Rilf surgeons had only a vague notion of what humans considered good looks, the face wasn’t pleasant, but it would do for business purposes. The other Rilf characteristic McNulty was obliged to disguise carefully was his odor—almost as disagreeable to human nostrils as the smell of humans was to him. Twice a day, therefore, he anointed himself with an effective deodorant. The human smells he put up with stoically.
Probably no sort of measures could have made him really attractive to humans. There was nothing too obviously wrong about his motions, but they weren’t quite right either. He had an excellent command of English and spoke four other human languages well enough to make himself understood, but always with an underlying watery gurgle which brought something like a giant bullfrog to mind. To some people McNulty was alarming; to others he was repulsive. Not that he cared very much about such reactions. The humans with whom he dealt professionally were not significantly influenced by them.
To Jake Hiskey, for example, captain and owner of the spaceship Prideful Sue, McNulty looked, sounded, and smelled like a million dollars. Which was approximately what he would be worth, if Hiskey managed things carefully for the next few days. Hence the skipper was smiling bemusedly as he poked the door buzzer of McNulty’s cabin.
“Who is it?” the door speaker inquired in McNulty’s sloppy voice.
“Jake. I’ve got news—good news!”
The lock snicked and the door swung open for Hiskey. As he stepped through, he saw another door at the far end of the cabin close abruptly. Beyond it were the living quarters of the other Rilf currently on the Prideful Sue, who went by the name of Barnes and whose olfactory sense was more seriously affronted by humans than McNulty’s. Barnes might be second in command of McNulty’s tribe of Rilf mercenaries, or possibly a female and McNulty’s mate. Assuming that McNulty was male, which was by no means certain. Rilfs gave out very little information about themselves, and almost all that was known of their species was that it had a dilly of a natural weapon and a strong interest in acquiring human currency with which to purchase advanced products of human technology. Hence the weapon was hired out on a temporary basis to human groups who knew about it and could afford it.
“You will excuse Barnes,” McNulty said, looking over at Hiskey from a table where he sat before a tapeviewer. “He is indisposed.”
“Of course,” said Hiskey. He added curiously, “What are you studying up on now?” McNulty and Barnes never missed an opportunity to gather information pertinent to their profession.
“Recent Earthplanet history,” replied McNulty. “The past three years. I must say the overall situation looks most favorable!”
Hiskey grinned. “It sure does! For us . . .”
McNulty shut off the tapeviewer. “During the past two ship days,” he remarked, “I have recorded news reports of forty-two of these so-called miniwars on the planet. Several others evidently are impending. Is that normal?”
“Actually it sounds like a fairly quiet period,” Hiskey said. “But we might liven it up!” He pulled out a chair, sat down. “Of course I haven’t been near Earthsystem for around eight years, and I haven’t paid too much attention to what’s been going on here. But on the planet it’s obviously the same old stuff. It’s been almost a century since the world government fizzled out; and the city states, the rural territories, the sea cities, the domes, the subterranes and what-not have been batting each other around ever since. They’ll go on doing it for quite a while. Don’t worry about that.”
“I am not worrying,” McNulty said. “The employment possibilities here appear almost unlimited, as you assured us they would be. What is this good news of which you spoke, Jake? Have your Earth contacts found a method of getting us down on the planet without further delay?”