And it was moving fast enough to do it . . .
Jeslin stared at the apparition for an instant, more in amazement than alarm. He saw now that the fellow was wearing trunks and boots and held some dark object in his left hand. Possibly the last was a flight device of some kind. Jeslin could make out nothing else to explain this headlong rush through the air. What did seem explained, he thought, was the manner in which the station had been taken. A handful of half-naked I-Fleet miners approaching on foot, apparently not even armed, would have aroused no concern there. The visitors would have been invited inside.
Jeslin glanced at the forest ahead, checked the search screens again. In the air far to the left were three tiny dots, which might be similar figures approaching. If so, it would take them several minutes to get here, and the Pointer would be lost in the forest by then. The machman moving up on the right apparently intended to attack by himself to prevent the escape—and that, Jeslin thought, was something he might turn to his advantage.
He drew a pack of plastic contact fetters out of a compartment, peeled off an eighteen-inch length, thrust it into his pocket. He patted another pocket on the right side of his jacket to make sure the gun he carried for last-ditch protection against overly aggressive Lederet wildlife was inside, then switched on the Pointer’s stungun and turned the vehicle in a wide, swift curve toward the approaching machman.
The figure shot up at a steep slant before the gun could straighten out on it. In the screens, Jeslin watched it dart by perhaps two hundred yards overhead, come arcing down again behind the machine. He swung the Pointer’s nose back to the forest, not more than a quarter of a mile ahead now, went rushing toward it, watching the machman close the gap between them, coming level with the ground a hundred yards away . . . then eighty . . . sixty . . .
The machman brought his left hand sweeping forward, the dark object held out in it. Jeslin braked hard. The Pointer, designed to change direction instantly to match the tactics of elusive game, pivoted end for end within its own length. As the stungun came around to the left of the pursuing figure, Jeslin pulled the trigger.
Caught by the outer fringe of the stunfield, the machman swerved sideways. The dark object—not a flight mechanism, after all, but some weapon—dropped from his hand. He went rolling limply on through the air, settling toward the ground.
The Pointer picked him up before he got there.
“My name,” the machman said presently, “is Hulida. I’m aware of yours. It’s quite possible, incidentally, that we’ve met before.”
Jeslin glanced over at him. He’d fastened the fellow in the seat next to his own, wrists locked behind his back by a contact fetter, another fetter clamping a cloth blindfold over his eyes, seat belt drawn tight. For the past minute or two, he had been giving indications of recovering from stunshock, and it was no surprise to hear him speak. But a casually polite introduction, Jeslin thought, was hardly what he’d expected to hear.
“If we have,” he said dryly, “I don’t remember the occasion.”
The blindfolded head of the man who called himself Hulida turned briefly toward him. He was not large; beside Jeslin, he seemed almost slight. But the olive-skinned body was firmly muscled, gave an impression of disciplined strength.
“It’s only a possibility,” Hulida said. “We happen to have been graduated from the University of Rangier in the same year. My degree was in medicine.”
“It seems regrettable that you didn’t continue your professional career,” Jeslin told him.
“Oh, but I did. I’m one of the results of a machman experiment, but I also had a considerable part in bringing that experiment to its remarkably successful conclusion.”
Jeslin grunted, returned his attention to the search screens. Successful the experiment certainly seemed to have been. When he went out to free Hulida from the Pointer’s snaring tentacles, he had expected to find at least some indications of the profound changes worked on a human body to enable it to pursue him through the air. But whatever the changes might be, they weren’t outwardly visible. A hasty search of the man’s few articles of clothing had revealed no instrument to explain such an ability either; but until Hulida acknowledged the fact, Jeslin hadn’t been certain that Ald’s description of the nature of the station’s attackers was correct. Earlier work of that kind had produced shapes in which functional plastic and metal was obviously united with the necessary proportion of living flesh.
He looked at the clock in the instrument panel, checked the screens once more, swung the Pointer around toward a chart section due west of his present location, some three hundred miles away. Not once during the past twenty minutes while he was pursuing a constantly changing, randomly erratic course through the forest had one of the flying men appeared in the search screens. He could assume that for the present he had lost them. Meanwhile he had a prisoner who seemed willing to give him at least part of the information he wanted.
He said, “How many machmen are there on Lederet?”
“At the moment, about forty,” Hulida said promptly. “The rest of our group—there are a hundred and ninety-five of us in all—are on a spaceship which is approaching the planet and will reach it shortly.”
“That hundred and ninety-five,” Jeslin asked, “is the total number of those who were transformed into machmen in your experiment?”
“Not entirely. There were a number of deaths at first, before we learned to perfect our methods.”
“What will the spaceship do when it runs into our patrol boat?”
Hulida laughed. “It will simply take the crew on board, Jeslin. What else? Naturally, we captured the boat before we attempted to capture the station.”
Jeslin already had been almost sure of it. Three times during his flight through the forest he had attempted to signal the patrol boat, had received no response.
“How was it done?”
“We took the mining ship up and sent them a distress message,” Hulida said. “There had been an accident—we had injured men on board. Obligingly, they came to our help at once. When they set up a locktube, we released gas bombs in both ships. We don’t breathe normally, of course. It was very simple.”
He added, “But you need feel no concern for either the crew or your colleagues at the station. None of them has been harmed. That was not our intention.”
“Glad to hear it,” Jeslin said. “Now what’s the purpose of this business? Apparently, your experiment resulted in an important scientific achievement. If it had been conducted openly, I would have heard of it. Why the secrecy? And why—” He checked himself. “How many deaths were there in the first stage of the experiment, while you were still perfecting your methods?”
The machman hesitated, said, “Fifty-two.”
“I see. You weren’t working strictly with volunteers.”
“Of course not,” Hulida said. “We were—and are still—a small group. The work was obviously dangerous, and none of us could be spared as subjects until the element of danger had been removed. But that was not the reason we worked secretly, published nothing after results were assured, and eventually left civilization together. After all, we need not have recorded those early failures.”
“Then what was the reason?” Jeslin asked.
“Our realization that the machmen we were creating and presently would become is a higher order of being than the merely human one. At one stroke, he is rid of four-fifths of the body’s distresses and infirmities. He can expect a vastly lengthened life span. He thinks more clearly, is less subject to emotional disturbances. He is tremendously more efficient on the physical level . . . independent of environmental circumstances as no ordinary human ever could be. And we are only at the beginning of this, the pioneers . . .
“Jeslin, we did not become machmen in order to be better able to toil on airless worlds or in space for our benefit or that of others. We made the choice because it is the greater manner of living. We are Homo Superior, the mankind of the future. And the ranks of Homo Superior are not to be opened to any low-grade fool who can pay to have the transformation carried out on him. Neither do we intend to subject our plans to the manipulations of government. We are a select group and shall remain it. That is why we detached ourselves from the Federation.”
“And that,” Jeslin asked, “adds up to a justification of piracy? One would think a couple of hundred of machmen geniuses might find it no more difficult to make a living in space than an ordinary I-Fleet composed of ordinarily competent human beings.”