Gefty slumped a little. He rubbed his hands slowly down his face and muttered a few words. Then he shook his head.
“Gefty,” Kerim whispered, “what is it? Where are we?”
Gefty looked at her.
“After we got hauled into that time current,” he said hoarsely, “I tried to find out which way in space we were headed. The direction indicators over there seemed to show we were trying to go everywhere at once. You remember. Maulbow’s control unit wasn’t working right, needed adjustments . . . Well, all those little impulses must have pretty well canceled out because we weren’t taken really far. In the last hour and a half we’ve covered roughly the distance the Queen could have gone on her own in, say, thirty days.”
“Then where . . . ”
“Home,” Gefty said simply. “It’s ridiculous! Other side of the Hub from where we started.” He nodded at the plate. “Eastern Hub Quadrant Section Six Eight. The G2 behind the green dot—that’s the Evalee system. We could be putting down at Evalee Interstellar three hours from now if we wanted to.”
Kerim was laughing and crying together. “Oh, Gefty! I knew you would . . . ”
“A fat lot I had to do with it!” Gefty leaned forward suddenly, switched on the transmitter. “And now let’s pick up a Evalee newscast. There’s something else I . . . ”
His voice trailed off. The transmitter screen lit up with a blurred jumble of print, colors, a muttering of voices, music and noises. Gefty twisted a dial. The screen cleared, showed a newscast headline sheet. Gefty blinked at it, glanced sideways at Kerim, grimaced.
“The something else,” he said, his voice a little strained, “was something I was also worried about. Looks like I was more or less right.”
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing really bad,” Gefty assured her. He added, “I think. But take a look at the Federation dateline.”
Kerim peered at the screen, frowned. “But . . . ”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why, that . . . that’s almost . . . ”
“That,” Gefty said, “or rather this is the day after we started out from the Hub, headed roughly Galactic west. Three weeks ago. We’d be just past Miam.” He knuckled his chin. “Interesting thought, isn’t it?”
Kerim was silent for long seconds. “Then they . . . or we . . . ”
“Oh, they’re us, all right,” Gefty said. “They’d have to be, wouldn’t they?”
“I suppose so. It seems a little confusing. But I was thinking. If you send them a transmitter call . . . ”
Gefty shook his head. “The Queen’s transmitter isn’t too hot, but it might push a call as far as Evalee. Then we could arrange for a ComWeb link-up there, and in another ten minutes or so . . . but I don’t think we’d better.”
“Why not?” Kerim demanded.
“Because we got through it all safely, so we’re going to get through it safely. But if we receive that message now and never go on to Maulbow’s moon . . . you see? There’s no way of knowing just what would happen.”
Kerim looked hesitant, frowned. “I suppose you’re right,” she agreed reluctantly at last. “So Mr. Maulbow will have to stay dead now. And that janandra.” After a moment she added pensively, “Of course, they weren’t really very nice—”
Gefty shivered. One of the things he’d learned from Maulbow’s ravings was the real reason he and Kerim had been taken along on the trip. He didn’t feel like telling Kerim about it just yet, but it had been solely because of Maulbow’s concern for his master’s creature comforts. The janandra could go for a long time without food, but after fasting for several years on the moon, a couple of snacks on the homeward run would have been highly welcome.
And the janandra was a gourmet. It much preferred, as Maulbow well knew, to have its snacks still wriggling-fresh as it started them down its gullet.
“No,” Gefty said, “I couldn’t call either of them really nice.”
The Machmen
The fauna traps set up the previous day in the grasslands east of the Planetary Survey Station on Lederet had made a number of catches; but all of them represented species with which the two biologists of the survey team already were sufficiently familiar. Jeslin removed the traps, revived the captured animals from a safe distance with a stimulant gun, and shifted to a point a hundred and eighty miles northwest of the station, where he set the traps up again, half a mile apart. Here a tall forest spread over rolling hills, with stretches of dense undergrowth below; and the animal population could be expected to be of a somewhat different type.
Around midday, Jeslin had completed his preparations. He checked the new location of the traps on his charts, and turned the Pointer back toward the station. He was a stocky, well-muscled man, the youngest member of the team, who combined the duties of wildlife collector with those of the team’s psychologist. Privately, he preferred the former work, enjoying his frequent encounters with curious and beautiful beasts on his way to and from the trap areas. And if the beasts were of a new variety, there would be a quick, stimulating chase in the Pointer, a versatile vehicle equally capable of hunting down game through thickest growth and of flying up to five times its own weight in captured specimens back to the station in undamaged condition.
Today was uneventful in that respect. There was game afoot but Jeslin was in a reflective mood, inclined to observe rather than pursue it. The station’s cages were well supplied, and the traps, in their new location, would fill them up again before the biologists had completed their studies of the present occupants. He covered much of the stretch skimming over the forest at treetop level, emerged from it finally at a point twelve miles north of the station.
This was arid bush country, the ground below dotted with thorny growth. The Pointer flew across it, small things darting away from its shadow, vanishing with a flick into the thickets. Presently, Jeslin turned on the communicator, tapped the station’s call button. Lederet was nearly a month’s travel away from the nearest, civilized world; and small groups working on such remote out-worlds observed certain precautions as a matter of course. One of them was having every incoming vehicle identify itself before it arrived.
The screen lit up and the round-cheeked, freckled face of a middle-aged woman appeared in it. It was Ald, the team’s dietician. She smiled pleasantly, said in an even voice, “Hello, Jeslin,” went on in the same quiet, unemphasized tone, “Crash, machmen—”
The screen went blank.
Jeslin instantly reached out, grasped the Pointer’s chase controls, spun the machine about and sent it racing back toward the forest. Flicking on the full set of ground and air-search screens, he studied them briefly in turn. His heart was pounding.
There was nothing in sight at the moment to justify Ald’s warning. But the word “crash,” used under such circumstances, had only one meaning. The station had been taken . . . he was to keep away from it, avoid capture and do whatever he could to help.
Machmen—Ald had been able to bring in that one additional word before they shut her off. Jeslin knew the term. Human beings surgically modified, equipped with a variety of devices to permit them to function freely in environments which otherwise would be instantly deadly to a man lacking the protection of a spacesuit or ship. They were instrumented men: machine men—machmen. Jeslin had not heard of recent experiments of the kind, but there were fairly numerous records of transitions to the machman condition, carried out with varying degrees of success.
His mind shifted back for an instant to a report received several days before from the Navy patrol boat assigned to Lederet for the protection of the survey station and its personnel. The boat had been contacted by a small I-Fleet vessel, requesting permission to carry out limited mining operations on the planet. After checking with the station, permission had been given. The I-Fleets were space vagrants, ordinarily harmless; and the mining party might be able to provide valuable information about the planet, with which they were evidently quite familiar.
The mining ship had begun its operations in a dry lakebed approximately a thousand miles from the station. Presumably, if machmen had captured the station, they had come over from the ship. With a heavily armed patrol boat circling the planet, it seemed an incredibly bold thing to do. Unless—
At that moment, Jeslin saw the figure in the search screen. It was human, appeared naked at first glance. Stretched out horizontally in the air about a hundred feet above the ground, arms laid back along its sides like a diver, it was approaching from the right, evidently with the intention of heading off the Pointer before the machine reached the forest.