4
Eureka and I saw Topaz, and after that Greu and Poylon and Trie and Pandache’s World and the Three Moons. Along the way, I learned the ins and outs of an ion-pulse drive and a stressed-field generator; and I served my time in vac suits, working outside under the big black sky that wrapped all the way around and seemed to pull at me like a magnet that would suck me away into its deepest blackest depths, every hour I spent out on a hull.
And I had my head pounded by a few forecastle strong-arm types, until an oak-tough old tube-man who’d almost been fleet champion once in his home-world’s navy showed me a few simple tricks to keep from winding up on the short end of every bout. His method was effective: he pounded me harder than the bully-boys until I got fast enough to bloody his nose one night, and graduated.
I learned to pull duty three on, three off, to drink the concoctions that space-faring men seemed to always be able to produce no matter how far they were from the last port, and to play seventy-one different games with hundred-and-four card decks whose history was lost in antiquity. And at every world I asked, and got the same answer: No such animals as the midgets had been seen in five thousand years and probably not then.
On a world called Unriss, in a library that was a museum relic itself, I found a picture of a midget—or a reasonable facsimile. I couldn’t read the text, but the librarian could make out a little of the old language. It said the thing was called a H’eeaq, that it was a denizen of a world of the same name, and that it was extinct. Where H’eeaq was located, it neglected to say.
My small bankroll, which would have kept me in modest circumstances on Inciro, didn’t last long. I spent it carefully, item by item outfitted my ship chest, including a few luxuries like a dreamer and a supply of tapes, a good power gun, and shore clothes. I studied astrogation and power section maintenance whenever I was able to get hold of a tape I hadn’t seen before. By the time two years had passed, I had been promoted to power chief, second class, meaning I was qualified to act as standby chief on vessels big enough to have a standby complement. That was a big step forward—like jumping from Chinese junks to tramp steamers. It meant I could ship on bigger, faster vessels, with longer range.
I reached a world called Lhiza after a six months’ cruise on a converted battle cruiser, and spent three months on the beach there, spending my back pay on new training tapes and looking for a berth that would take me into the edge of the sector of the Galaxy known as the Bar. It wasn’t easy; few of the older, slower hulls that worked the Eastern Arm had business there. But the Bar was where Zeridajh was, still thousands of light-years away, but getting closer.
The vessel I finally shipped on was a passenger liner, operating under a contract with the government of a world called Ahax, hauling immigrant labor. I didn’t much like the idea; it was my first time nursemaiding a shipload of Flatlanders. But I was offered a slot as first powerman, and the tub was going a long way, and in the right direction. So I signed on.
She was an old ship, like most of the hulls operating in the Arm, but she had been a luxury job in her day. I had a suite to myself, with room for Eureka, so for the first time aboard ship the old cat got to sleep across my feet, the way he did ashore. The power section was a massive, old-fashioned stressed-field installation; but after the first few weeks of shakedown and impressing my ideas on my crew I had the engines running smoothly. Everything settled down then to the quiet, slightly dull, sometimes pleasant, always monotonous routine that all long cruises are.
My first shift chief, Ommu, was a big-muscled, square-faced fellow with the faint greenish cast to his skin that said he was from a high C1 world. He listened to my story of the midgets, and told me that once, many years before, he’d seen a similar ship, copper-colored. It had drifted into a cometary orbit around a world in the Guree system, in the Bar. She was a navigational hazard and he’d been one of the crew assigned to rendezvous with her and set vaporizing charges. Against standing orders, he and another sapper had crawled in through a hole in her side to take a look around. The ship had been long dead, and there wasn’t much left of the crew; but he had picked up a souvenir. He got it from his ship chest and laid it on the mess table in front of me. It looked like a stack of demitasse cups, dull silver, with a loop at the base and a short rod projecting from the open end.
“Yeah,” I said, and felt my scalp prickle, just looking at it. It wasn’t identical with the guns that had shot me up, back on Gar 28, but it was a close enough relative.
I had him tell me all about the ship, everything he could remember. There wasn’t much. We went up to the ship’s psychologist and after a lot of persuasion and a bottle of crude stuff from the power-section still, he agreed to run a recall on Ommu under hypnosis. I checked with the purser and located a xenologist among the passengers, and got him to sit in on the session.
In a light trance, Ornmu relived the approach to the ship, described it in detail as he came up on it from sun-side. We followed him inside, through the maze of compartments; we were with him as he stirred the remains of what must have been a H’eeaq and turned up the gun.
The therapist ran him back through it three times, and he and the xenologist took turns firing questions at him. At the end of two hours, Ommu was soaking wet and I had the spooky feeling I’d been aboard that derelict with him.
The xenologist wanted to go back to his quarters and pore over his findings, but I talked him into giving us a spot analysis of what he’d gotten.
“The vessel itself appears a typical artifact of what we call the H’eeaq Group,” he said. “They are an echinodermoid form, originating far out in Fringe Space, or, as some have theorized, representing an incursion from a neighboring stellar assemblage, presumably the Lesser Cloud. Their few fully documented contacts with Man, and with other advanced races of the Galaxy, reveal a cultural pattern of marked schizoid-accretional character—”
“Maybe you could make that a little plainer,” Ommu suggested.
“These are traits reflecting a basic disintegration of the societal mechanism,” he told us, and elaborated on that for a while. The simplified explanation was as bad as the regular one, as far as my vocabulary was concerned. I told him so.
“Look here,” he snapped. He was a peppery little man. “You’re asking me to extrapolate from very scanty data, to place my professional reputation in jeopardy—”
“Nothing like that, sir,” I soothed him. “I’d just like to have a little edge the next time I meet those types.”
“Ummm. There’s their basic insecurity, of course. I’d judge their home-world has been cataclysmically destroyed, probably the bulk of their race along with it. What this might do to a species with a strong racial-survival drive is anyone’s guess. If I were you, I’d look for a complex phobia system: Fear of heights or enclosed spaces, assorted fetish symbologies. And of course, the bully syndrome. Convince them you’re stronger, and they’re your slaves. Weaker, and they destroy you.”
That was all I got from him. Ommu gave me the teacup gun. I disassembled it and examined its workings, but it didn’t tell me much. The routine closed in again then. I fine-tuned the generators, and put the crew on polishing until the section gleamed from one end to the other. I won some money playing tikal, lost it again at revo. And then one offshift I was shocked up out of a deep sleep to find myself lying on the floor, with Eureka yowling over me and every alarm bell on the ship screaming disaster.
5
By the time I reached the power section, the buffeting was so bad that I had to grab a rail to stay on my feet.
“I’ve tried to get through to Command for orders,” Ommu yelled over the racket, “but no contact!”
I tried the interdeck screen, raised a young plotman with blood on his face who told me the whole forward end of the ship had been carried away by a collision, with what, he didn’t know. That was all he told me before the screen blanked in the middle of a word.