“I only have a few minutes,” Ben Frank Pertin gasped. “I don’t mind. But I’m not finished, Ben James. You have to finish for me. Destroy that probe! I don’t want it to succeed; I don’t want Sun One to get its orbiting body around Object Lambda.”
“But then we - then we’ll all have died in vain!”
“Of course it is in vain! What’s the use of it all? A chunk of useless matter - thousands of light-years from anywhere – going nowhere! Do you know how many lives it’s cost? I want you to wreck it for me, Ben James, so those fools on Sun One will know better than to try this same stunt another time!”
“But it’s not a stunt,” objected Ben James Pertin. “It’s important. That object is something special, solid but like a cloud—”
“Cloud-Cuckoo Land! It’s not worth a single life. Anyway, it’s done already, Ben James, my friends are wrecking the probe right now. I only called you here because—”
He paused, coughing terribly. The face that was so much like Ben James’s own was aged with the weary agony of radiation death.
“Because,” he gasped, I want some part of me to stay alive. If you keep the tachyon receiver you can live, Ben James. Weeks - maybe months! But once it goes there will be no more food, no more air, no more fuel. I want—”
But what he wanted to say at the last Ben James Pertin would never know. His duplicate suddenly gasped for breath, made a strangling sound and was still.
After a moment Ben James pulled the privacy screen over the face that was his own face and turned to leave.
Halfway to the launch chamber he ran into the Sheliaks. They were in pursuit of two beings, one of them the purchased people woman, the other Doc Chimp. The Sheliaks looked strange, and in a moment Pertin realized why. They were smaller than they had been; essentially they were children now, some of their mass lost when they budded. But their behaviour was childish only in its reckless disregard for consequences; it was lethal, as far as their quarry was concerned.
Pertin did not pause to speculate on issues. Doc Chimp was in danger, and he dived to the rescue.
He collided head-on with one of the Sheliaks. It was like tackling a six-foot lump of chilled, damp dough. No bones, no cushioning fat, just a great dense mass of muscular fibre. The Sheliak automatically cupped around him and, linked, they went flying into the wall. The corridor spun around him, a nightmare of blue-green light and red-black shadow and corpse-coloured beings.
“Stop!” roared Pertin. “Wait! Listen to me!” But no one wanted to talk. They were all on him, thrusting, striking, crushing, with whatever offensive weapons their mobile anatomies gave them. He fought back, using a skill he had never known he had. His hands were black and slippery with blood, no doubt much of it his own. Bravely the woman and Doc Chimp had turned back to fight, but it was three of them against more than a dozen Sheliaks, and the issue was not in doubt.
What saved them was Aphrodite, the silver pseudogirl. Her carven face remote as an angel’s, she drove towards them with great sweeps of her wings. Coronas of electrostatic fire haloed her fingers and wingtips; something gun-shaped and deadly was in her hands. The Sheliaks, all at once and in unison, turned to meet her. The gun-shaped thing hissed and a white jet crackled towards them. It passed near enough to Pertin for him to feel a breath of icy death, but it did not strike him; it grazed the Sheliak who held him, and at once the being stiffened and began to drift. Behind them, where the jet had struck, the wall was hidden with a broad patch of glittering frost. A cloud of white vapour billowed out around it.
In the haze Pertin caught sight of Doc Chimp and the purchased people woman, momentarily forgotten as the Sheliaks turned against the stronger foe. The woman was badly hurt; Doc Chimp was helping her, his hairy face turned fearfully towards the Sheliaks. Pertin joined them and the three of them moved inconspicuously away.
When they were two corridors away and the sounds of battle had diminished they paused and inspected their injuries. Pertin himself had only added a few bruises to a total that was already too large to worry about; the chimp was even more battered, but still operational. The woman was worst off of any of them. She was bleeding profusely from, among other places, a gash on the upper arm; her face was grotesquely puffed, both eyes blackened; and one leg was bent at an angle anatomically impossible to a whole bone. But she did not appear to feel pain. When Pertin spoke to her, she answered in English: “They don’t consider it important. It will not prevent moving about and performing necessary functions.”
Doc Chimp was groaning and sobbing in pain. “Those Sheliaks!” he cried, feebly trying to groom his matted fur. "They’re wholly out of control, Ben James. They tried again to wreck the probe - may have done it by now, if they’ve got enough power of concentration to remember what they were doing when we diverted their attention. And if Aphrodite hasn’t killed them all.”
Pertin said, with a confidence he didn’t feeclass="underline" “She’ll stop them. As long as we’ve got her on our side—”
“On our side!" cried Doc Chimp. “Ben James, you don’t know what you’re saying. She’s worse than they are!”
“But she tried to rescue you.”
The purchased woman said calmly, “That is wrong. She merely wanted to kill the Sheliaks.”
“That’s right, Ben James! She’s against all organic beings now. She’s not ionizable. Radiation is only an annoyance to her.
The only thing that can kill her is deprivation of energy sources, and that means the tachyon receiver; once it’s gone, she will die as soon as the fuel runs out.”
Pertin said slowly: “Is it the same with the Scorpian robot?”
The battered face nodded, the stub of the green plume jerking wildly.
“Then,” said Pertin, “that means we have to assume all non-organic beings will feel the same and try to prevent the launch.
What about the other organics?”
The purchased woman recited emotionlessly: “T’Worlies, all dead. Boaty-Bits, more than half destroyed; the remainder too few to make a collective entity intelligent enough to matter. Sirians and Core Stars races, not observed in recent hours and must be presumed dead or neutralized. Sheliaks, destructive and purposeless.”
Pertin absorbed the information without shock, without reaction of any kind, except a strange impulse to laugh. “But – but who does that leave to see that the launch occurs?”
“Nobody!” cried Doc Chimp, “Nobody at all, Ben James - except us!”
5
They reached the launch chamber ahead of the Sheliaks after all. There was no one there.
The capsule, with its tiny bright tachyon crystal at its heart lay silent and unmoving, connected to the main bulk of the ship only by a jettisonable canopy now. There had been destruction all around it, but it was still intact.
There was less than an hour until launch.
“We’ll build barricades,” said Pertin. “Anything. Those wrecked instrument boards - the spare plates and braces. Whatever we can move, we’ll put it up against the entrance. All we have to do is delay them—”
But they had barely begun when bright silver glinted in the approach corridor, and the silvery pseudogirl came towards them, followed by the tumbling form of the Scorpian robot. They brought up short at the entrance, the robot with one slim tentacle coiled caressingly around the silver girl.
Pertin put his weight behind the channel iron he had been about to emplace at the door and launched it towards the pair. The pseudogirl made a sound that was half a laugh and half the singing of a single piercing note, and the Scorpian uncoiled a long silver sting as they moved aside, easily dodging the missile.