“Yes,” I replied sadly. “It had to be, Marsha. And
you have to eat. You must.”
“She took a blood sample for me,” George put in. “I managed to grab a syringe box in my mouth and gave it to her. She got the idea.”
I nodded. “Good. If only she’d start! This is getting to me!”
“She’s had a bad time all around,” George pointed out. “Lord! What willpower she must have!”
“We could use it,” I said. “I’d hate to see it go out the waste chute.” I hooked into the computer again.
“Marsha, come on!” I prodded. “Suicide’s not in your makeup! I can tell that!”
She was quiet a minute, then looked up at me again.
“The smaller green onethe one with the straight horns. That’s a female?”
I nodded. “My daughter, Eve.”
“I’llI’ll look like her?” she asked hesitantly.
“Sort of,” I replied.
“It’s all so unreal, like some Creatovision horror!” she exclaimed. “I can’t believe it.”
“Did you know Nadya long?” I asked.
“No, not at all. We didn’t really get along. She was twenty years senior and you knew it every moment.”
“That’s what you’d have turned into, after a while,” I pointed out. “Milk runs, back and forth, the better runs, the bigger rewards, the gold stars on the company chart. Dull, monotonous. You’d have killed yourself or dulled your mind to her level. Now you have a chance, a way out. A chance to be in on something new, something exciting. Join us, woman! Don’t kill yourself
now!”
She reached down and picked up a tuber, looking at
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it oddly. She turned it over and over, peeled back the thin, dark skin.
“Oh, God! I’m so hungry!” she wailed, and she bit into it.
Once started, as I remembered all too well, you were committed. She had held out a long time; maybe I would have, too, if I’d known beforehand what it would do to me.
I watched, amazed, at the transformation in her. No, not the physical onethat was only beginning. It was the raw animalism in her, the sudden, frantic pull-ing up of the tubers, the sloppy, almost manic way she stuffed them into her mouth and swallowed, only half chewing. I wondered what kept her from choking to death, but, though she coughed many times in the process that didn’t happen.
Finally, she reached her limit, that point at which the stuff was practically running out of your mouth. She lay back then, breathing hard, totally exhausted. She’d been terribly weakened by her holdout, and I was concerned for her.
She gave a sudden, long sigh and went limp, breathing more shallowly.
George nodded, and went over to his workbench. “She’s on the way now,” he said cheerfully. “Want to give me a hand with the blood sample?”
“Later,” I told him. “I want to gather up Ham and Eve and see what we have on our prize ship. First things first.”
I entered the Nijinsky and called out to the kids.
Getting no reply, I started to worry, and moved on down the corridor slowly, toward the bridge. Every few paces I’d call out.
Finally I heard Eve’s voice answer my call.
“Bar! Come quick! You’ll never believe what we foundl”
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Fifteen
I was somewhat apprehensive as I made my way to-ward Eve, cursing myself for leaving them alone in a strange environment, imagining all sorts of dire disasters the two curious kids could get into. It was hard to remember how young and how inexperienced they were.
I rounded a comer but still couldn’t see them.
“Down here!” she called, and I found a narrow and fairly difficult ramp twisting down. I did a quick scan of the bottom, but could tell nothing. Just rampway, really.
Almost breaking my neck getting down, I made it to (he bottom and saw them. They were just sitting, staring into a large, open doorway.
“I thought I told you not to go into the cargo bays,” I scolded.
Ham shrugged. “So? What are cargo bays?”
Feeling outfoxed and foolish, I went up to see what they were looking at so intently.
It was a garden.
No, more accurately, it was a cargo bay, circular, about two hundred meters across.
The floor was a teeming jungle; none of it reflected the food color, but there were vegetative colors galore, a riot of them. Flowerslots of flowers and shrubs and small trees, in rich, moist soil.
I just stared.
“Is this their food garden?” Eve asked innocently. I
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thought of the plastic cubes that the robokitchens served up for food on L-ships and chuckled.
“No,” I replied. “Not hardly. More likely a hothouse for use in testing areas of the new planet to see what will grow best where. It’s an incredible stroke of luck, thoughit’ll serve us well.”
Ham shook his head. “I think it’s food for the big animals.”
I whirled on him. “What big animals? Where?” I demanded.
He was somewhat taken aback by the vehemence of my response, brought about more by fear than anything else. Animal seeding was not unknown in certain circumstances, and not all of the creatures were nice.
“There,” they both responded in unison, gesturing with pointer beams of sound.
I followed the beams, and almost stepped back a bit.
There were two of them. They looked like spiders huge spiders, with round bodies almost perfectly smooth and eight long, looping legs, tentacles really.
And they were five meters across if they were a mili-meter. I’d missed them in the first scanone had still been on the ground, the other clinging high overhead.
And they had no color or aura, so they were hidden by the growths.
No color or aura, I thought suddenly. Then they weren’t organic.
That suited me; I had not wanted to believe in five-meter-wide spiders, let alone share a ship with them.
“They’re robots,” I told the kids. “See? No color.”
“What’s a robot?” Eve asked.
“A mechanical creature. Like the ship’s computers, only smaller, built by men to do work they didn’t want to do or couldn’t do themselves.”
“You mean built like the virus is building the woman?” Ham asked, curious.
I shook my head. “No, not really. They aren’t peo-ple. Not life, really. They’re machineslike this spaceship.”
The Web of the Chozen
“They move,” Eve insisted. “They are more like us than the ship. Do you mean they can’t think?”
I considered this. “I don’t know. They’re obviously gardeners, programmed to care for this place. They may be able to think, at least a little. Maybe talk, although they don’t look like it.”
“They’ve ignored us,” Ham pointed out.
I nodded. “That probably means they’re programmed only for the garden itself. Let’s see if they notice me now. Stand backl” Carefully I stepped over the ledge, stopping as soon as my tail cleared the hatch.
The one overhead noticed me all right. It whirled, twirled, and, faster than I’d have believed possible, moved over close to me. It stood there, on the ceiling, pulsating slowly up and down on its legs, and, although I could detect no head or sensory apparatus as such, I knew it was looking at me. I stood dead still.
It was a crazy tableau, and I knew prolonging it would gain nothing. The thing could wait longer than I
could.
“Robot!” I called out, hoping it could receive the high-frequency content of my voice. “Robot, do you
hear me?” The thing barely twitched, but I could feel something
looking me over suspiciously, like a slightly warm ray
of the sun.
“Insect, insect, insect in garden,” it suddenly said in a sizzling electronic monotone.
“No! Not insect!” I called back at it, but it reared back and let fly with the foulest-smelling spray I could remember ever breathing. It was sticky, and wet, and unpleasant, and it came at me as a lead-colored fog.
I moved fast, whirling and jumping for the door. I felt a cold tentacle strike me hard on the back, and I cried out in pain; now it had hold of my hind legs, and I struggled for the door. Ham and Eve, alarmed, moved just inside.
“No!” I screamed. “Stay back!”
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Suddenly I felt the grip loosen. “Swarm! Swarm!” said the robot, and I leaped painfully for the open hatch and made it. Eve turned to follow me. Ham covering the rear.
Then, suddenly, it was back againthat high-pitched, awful screech of the Choz sonic defense mechanism.
Checking to see that Eve got out, I nursed bruised legs and a nasty welt on my back and looked at the scene inside.
“Ham!” I yelled. “Get out of there if you can!”
The sound had confused the robot. It stopped, and whirled around, the screech’s echo doubling against the walls of the garden. The other robot, which up to now had played no part in th” cirana, also reacted, trying first to come to the aid of its partner, then, like it, whirling in confusion.
I made it to the hatchway, knowing that Ham was safe as long as he continued the tone, but would be nabbed the moment he turned to run. I didn’t know what to do or how to do it. Tension and fear for him welled up inside of me, and, suddenly, I too was broadcasting the tone into the garden.
The robots stopped, whirled, changed position to meet this new threat, which was as puzzling as the first. Ham didn’t need any cueshe turned and almost landed on top of me in one giant leap.
Just as suddenly the tone disanoeared.
The robots continued to whirl for a few moments, then slowed, moving first a little one way, then another, in a confused, almost dazed manner. It was clear what had happened; they had faced a phenomenon that their programming wasn’t prepared for.
“Bridge! Bridge!” I heard them call. “Bridge! Bridge!”
“Come on!” I called to the kids, and we moved forward, toward the bridge area. It was extremely painful for me, and that sticky feeling and terrible odor were all-pervasive, but I made it.
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Entering the bridge, I heard what I’d hoped to hear. The tinny, voices of the two robots calling the bridge.
Quickly I located an intercom, hoping still that my voice wasn’t outside the range of transmission or reception.
With great difficulty, I turned the little lever, linking the bridge with the transceiver in the robots.
“This is the bridge,” I said as calmly as I could. Actually, I was out of breath, panting, tongue hanging.
There was a sudden silence at the other end. They had received at least the carrier, some kind of response.
“Gardeners 41 and 42 in Hold K,” came the robot’s monotone. “We have been infested with large insects beyond our capability to handle. They are now loose within the ship. We suggest an immediate search and fumigation under Section XXIV, title 6, subsection 3 a of the Interplanetary Convention Health Codes, and stand by to assist.”
“Negative, Gardeners 41 and 42,” I responded with as much intensity as I could manage. “Negative. Do
you read?”
There was silence for a moment, then they repeated their message.
Clearly, the transmission equipment just wasn’t up to carrying sounds in the forty-thousand-plus-cycles- per-second range. Frantically, I looked around the control room. The kids stood back, not knowing what to do. I cursed the fact that I couldn’t use my own ship’s computer voice to transmit to the local intercom.