The Watcher's laser had found its mark after all.
As Redlaw and the girl came running up, Babe fumbled out to touch the boy with his shuddering trunk. The voice that mimicked Org Rider's own said, "Babe go. Babe go . .
The light went out of the great eyes, and the org was dead.
Org Rider sat mourning with the great head in his lap, Redlaw and the girl standing helplessly by, until at last Redlaw rumbled, "Sorry, boy, but we've got to get out of here. The Watchers'll be after us any time now."
Org Rider looked up and nodded somberly. "I know." He got up, reaching a hand to the girl. "Are you all right?" She smiled, in both reassurance and compassion; he needed no translator to understand that, or the look of sympathy in her eyes.
There was a sudden scream of high speed from the sky, and all three of them looked upward in instant reawakened fear.
"Too late!" Redlaw raged. "Friends of hell! There's the Watcher ship on us, while we're standing around like fools! We can't get away now. We'll have to fight—and we've nothing to fight with but the Watcher's own lance!" He dove to the side of the decapitated beast, choking in fury as much as the evil cloud of its deathweed stink.
The girl stopped him.
Her clear voice, repeated through the translator on her arm, said: '"It's all right. It's not a Watcher ship. Look."
Unbelieving, Redlaw and the boy craned their necks to stare upward.
The vehicle that was settling down on them was far larger than any Watcher ship either had ever seen. Even the colors were different: bright silver, crisp black, a flare of yellow-white gas from its underjets.
"They've come to rescue us," Zara said. "We're safe now. All of us."
SIXTEEN
In the orbiter Ben Line Pertin watched in a fever of excitement as the survey ship picked up Zara and her two companions. He stared at her image in pain and wonder. So tall and thin she was, in her edited version! So worn and pale, with the stresses of her battle with the Watchers! He wanted desperately to talk to her, to say words of love and welcome; but although he was hard pressed with grief and loneliness he was not mad, and he understood that their relationship would have to mature in its own way. To him she was his loved and missed wife. To her, coming from an earlier Zara Doy, he was a stranger.
And then there was the solved puzzle of why she called herself "Zara Doy Gentry." She had married someone else! He had scarcely felt that shock when he learned that that husband was dead, fodder for the maws of the Watchers. Shock again! This time a different kind of shock, a reprieve, even if purchased at the cost of a man's life—who could not have been a bad man, Ben Line told himself with one reasoning part of his mind, for Zara to meet and marry him. But another part of his mind was bursting with joy. How strange for his wife to be a widow and a wooable stranger, all at once!
And suddenly he was exhausted. He had stayed by the communicator for twenty-two hours, past the time of his regular duty, through the new Zara's cry for help, up to the moment of rescue and for some time beyond. Now he had to sleep. He decided against attempting if even to leave a message for this to-be-won Zara, and headed for his cocoon. There would be time. It was a long voyage up from Cuckoo and around to where the orbiter swung, nearly half a billion miles now. It seemed even longer in the urgency of his anticipation.
Yet there was no way to shorten it. Even with nuclear rockets, the acceleration of the survey ship was limited to what its rescued passengers could stand. That was not much. Redlaw and Org Rider had lived all their lives in the gentle pull of Cuckoo, and even Zara and Ben Yale Pertin, in their edited versions, could hardly stand a single gravity of acceleration. For Ben Yale even that much was dangerous; he had been swept from the jungle into full medical cocooning, instantly.
Ben Line fell asleep, thinking of Ben Yale coming up from Cuckoo, battered and foul with the ulcers of the blue slime . . . and of that other Ben Pertin, Replicate 5160, lost somewhere at the transmitter of the tachyon interference, at a point unknown inside the Galaxy . . . and, above all, of the sweet and smiling face of Zara Doy, now Zara Gentry, who might sometime soon be Zara Pertin again . . .
He woke to Doc Chimp screaming in his ear:
"Ben! Ben Line! Wake up! You've been found, you're still alive. Oh, wake up, Ben Line Pertin, there's a signal from you coming in!"
Heavy with sleep, Ben Line Pertin stumbled after Doc Chimp to the terminal dome. His mind was fuzzed with visions of himself in all his myriad guises. Sometimes he was not sure which he was: the innocent back on Earth who had never left, the one on Sun One who was still happily married to Zara Doy and happy father of her child, any of the dead ones ... all of them . . .
But one dead one was not dead!
In the dome, the huge image of a haggard human face was repeated on half a hundred screens, all around the curve. Half of the face was haggard with dirt and grime, the other half caked with dark blood; a ragged wound on the scalp still oozed, untended.
It took Ben Pertin a moment to recognize himself: Replicate 5160.
"See!" Doc Chimp chirped in his ear. "It's you, Ben! Not dead! The message started coming in a few minutes ago. But it's awful bad, Ben Line; you can't understand a word of it, without the Pmal translators."
Ben Line was still stupid with sleep. "You mean I'm—he's speaking some other language?"
"Not that, Ben Line," the chimpanzee said gently. "Look at him! He can hardly talk in any language. The Pmal has to put it into words we can understand. Even then—well, it's in symbol-script, not sounds. He must have had some bad times, Ben Line."
And it was so: the soiled and battered mouth was moving, but no audible sound came through the wall speakers. Instead bright computer symbols were dancing under each screen:
". . . INCOMPLETELY EXPLORED. IN SHAPE, THIS OBJECT I FOUND MYSELF ON IS A LARGE, FLAT DISK, ROTATING SLOWLY. MAYBE A THOUSAND FEET ACROSS. IT'S SOME SORT OF SPACECRAFT, BUT IT DOES NOT APPEAR TO BE UNDER POWER NOW—MAYBE NOT FOR A VERY LONG TIME.
"THE LEVELS TOWARD THE RIM ARE SEALED AND COLD. VERY COLD. I BELIEVE THE CREW IS HIBERNATING THERE TO WAIT FOR THE NEXT PLANET. ONE PLACE LOOKS LIKE A CONTROL FORM. SPHERICAL. STARS IMAGED ON ITS INSIDE SURFACE, AND A POD HUNG IN THE
CENTER FOR THE PILOTS BUT THERE ARE NO PILOTS
THERE. HIBERNATING, I GUESS. I COULD NOT IDENTIFY THE STAR IMAGES, BUT I DID SEE WHAT LOOKED LIKE A REPRESENTATION OF CUCKOO. ONLY IT WAS STRANGE. IT WAS ALL MADE OF METAL. NO SOIL, ROCKS, SEAS, MOUNTAINS—JUST A GREAT SPHERE OF METAL.
"I THINK—"
The bloodied head turned suddenly and vanished from the screen.
For an instant the screens were dark; then shapeless blotches of color flickered over them, FARLINK interposed its own message, in all the tongues of the viewers:
"TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED, STAND BY."
There was a sudden rush of squeal, cry, shout, and roar from the beings in the terminal room, as each one chattered to its neighbor about the message. Ben Line, sick at the sight of his destroyed self, muttered, "I don't understand. What is it?"
Venus floated over toward him and filled him in quickly. "Your replicate reported in a few minutes ago, Ben Line. He was in a ship, but some sort of mechanical device—a robot, but not a fully sentient one, I'm sure—attacked him as he came out of the receiver, and it is only now that he has been able to report."
"Ship?" Ben Line shook his head, trying to clear it. The source of the distant unidentified tachyon transmission that they had actually intercepted en route to Cuckoo—a ship? There were no ships equipped with tachyon facilities that could possibly have a link with Cuckoo, not anywhere in the known Universe . . .