Agent of Vega and Other Stories by James H. Schmitz

Jake Hiskey’s face was a smiling red mask as he leaned against the doorframe at the end of the room. There was a gun in his hand too, and he fired before Harold did. The charge shuddered into the transmitter stand behind Harold and crept quickly down. Harold pulled the trigger then, and Hiskey was flung back and fell beyond the doorframe, out of sight. Harold sucked air back into lungs that seemed tight as a clenched fist in his chest. Spent gun . . . or the hit where he’d taken it should have killed him outright. Jake had been too groggy to check that detail. Not that it was going to make very much difference.

Well, Jake, he thought, perhaps that wasn’t really the worst solution.

The big room swung in circles overhead as he pulled himself against the stand and sat up. Then a voice was crying his name. Elisabeth.

“It’s all right,” Harold announced thickly, idiotically. “I stopped a hit, that’s all.”

Questions.

“Captain Hiskey wasn’t quite as dead as I believed,” he explained. “He’s dead enough now.”

The voices grew blurred. Harold decided he was, definitely, finished. It might take a while. But the charge, spent though it had been, would start him hemorrhaging. In an hour or two heart and lungs should be dying mush. Wicked guns, thorough guns—

” . . . Immediate medical attention . . .”

Oh, sure.

But he was listening now to what they were telling him, and abruptly he became alarmed. “No one can come in here,” he said. “I told you why. Not even in armor. Lift the screens anywhere while the toziens are alive, and they’ll pour through. They’re too fast to stop. You’ll have to wait till you know they’re dead.”

Then there was, they said, another way. Between this section and the next was a small emergency personnel lock—if he could follow their instructions, if he could reach it. A suit of armor couldn’t pass through it, but Harold could. And once he was inside the lock, sensing devices would establish with complete reliability whether any Rilf toziens had entered it with him.

Harold considered that. It seemed foolproof.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll see if it works.” He began struggling up to his feet. “Just keep those screens down.”

Some while later he reached the main entry to the control room, glanced down at Jake Hiskey and turned to the right, as they’d said. Toziens went with him, drawn towards the only thing that still moved in the section. There came a passage, and another one, and a door and, behind the door, a small room. Harold entered the room and looked around. “I think I’m there,” he said aloud.

“Yes, you’re in the right room,” Alston’s voice told him. “You won’t see the lock until it opens, but it’s in the center of the wall directly opposite the door.”

“Don’t open it yet,” Harold said. “They’re here, too.”

He got across the room. As Alston had told him, there was nothing in the smooth bare wall to suggest an emergency lock behind it, but he was lined up with the center of the door on the other side, as well as he could make it out; and he should be within a few feet, at most, of the lock.

“Professor Alston,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I’m in front of the lock now. Wait till I give you the word. Then open it fast.”

“We’re ready,” Alston said. “We’ll know when you’re inside.”

Harold fished the two guns from his pockets, took them by their barrels in one hand, turned around. Supporting himself against the wall with his other hand, he lifted the guns and began waving them about. Tozien droning drew in towards the motion, thickening, zigzagging back and forth above and in front of him. Then he pitched the guns towards the far corner of the room. The droning darted off with them. They hit the wall with a fine crash, went clattering to the floor. The air seethed noisily above them there.

“Now!” Harold said.

He saw the narrow dark opening appear in the wall two feet away, stumbled into it. After that, he seemed to go on stumbling down through soft darkness.

* * *

At first there was nothing. Then came an occasional vague awareness of time passing. A great deal of time . . . years of it, centuries of it . . . seemed to drift by steadily and slowly. Shadows began to appear, and withdrew again. Now and then a thought turned up. Some thoughts attracted other thoughts, clusters of them. Finally he found he had acquired a few facts. Facts had great value, he realized; they could be fitted together to form solid structures.

Carefully, painstakingly, he drew in more facts. His thoughts took to playing about them like schools of fish, shifting from one fact to another. Then there came a point at which it occurred to him that he really had a great many facts on hand now, and should start lining them up and putting them in order.

So he started doing it.

The first group was easy to assemble. In the process, he remembered suddenly having been told all this by one of the shadows:

The men left on the Prideful Sue had elected to put up a fight when the System Police boats arrived, and they’d put up a good one. (They should have, a stray thought added as an aside; he’d trained them.) But in the end the Prideful Sue was shot apart, and there’d been no survivors.

The Rilf ship, edging into Earthsystem, turned sullenly back when challenged. By the time it faded beyond the instrument range of its SP escort, it was a quarter of a light-year away from the sun, traveling steadily out.

That seemed to clear up one parcel of facts.

Other matters were more complex. He himself, for example—first just lying there, then riding about on one of the small brown cattle which had once been a wild species of Earth, finally walking again—remained something of a puzzle. There were periods when he was present so to speak, and evidently longer, completely vacant periods into which he dropped from time to time. When he came out of them, he didn’t know where he’d been. He hadn’t noticed it much at first; but then he began to find it disturbing.

“Well,” Elisabeth said gently—she happened to be there when he started thinking seriously about this odd practice he’d developed—”the doctor said that, aside from more obvious physical damage, your nervous system got quite a bad jolt from that gun charge. But you are recovering, Harold.”

So he was recovering. He decided to be satisfied with that. “How long has it been?” he asked.

“Not quite four weeks,” said Elisabeth. She smiled. “You’re really doing very well, Harold. What would you like me to show you today?”

“Let’s look at some more of the things they’re doing downstairs,” Harold said.

Professor Derek Alston’s asteroid also remained something of an enigma. In Mars Underground, and in the SP Academy’s navigation school, the private asteroids had been regarded much as they were on Earthplanet, as individually owned pleasure resorts of the very rich which maintained no more contact with the rest of humanity than was necessary. Evidently they preferred to have that reputation. Elisabeth had told him it wasn’t until she’d been a Solar U student for a few years that she’d learned gradually that the asteroids performed some of the functions of monasteries and castles in Earth’s Middle Ages, built to preserve life, knowledge, and culture through the turbulence of wars and other disasters. They were storehouses of what had become, or was becoming, now lost on Earth, and their defenses made them very secure citadels. The plants and animals of the surface levels were living museums. Below the surface was a great deal more than that. In many respects they acted as individual extensions of Solar U, though they remained independent of it.

All of which seemed true, from what he had seen so far. But the thought came occasionally that it still mightn’t be the complete picture. There were the projects, for one thing. This miniature planet, for all that it was an insignificant speck of cosmic debris, had, on the human scale, enormous quantities of cubic space. Very little of the space was in practical use, and that was used in an oddly diffused manner. There were several central areas which in their arrangement might have been part of a residential section of Mars Underground. Having lived mainly on an interstellar ship for the past eight years, Harold found himself reflecting on the fact that if the asteroid’s population had been around a hundred times its apparent size, it would not have been unduly crowded. Elsewhere were the storerooms; and here Elisabeth loved to browse, and Harold browsed with her, though treasures of art and literature and the like were of less interest to him. Beautiful things perhaps, but dead.

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