“Ben James!” cried a familiar voice. “I told you Aphrodite would get you here all right!”
Doc Chimp, thin lips grinning widely, scrambled over to help the silvery girl put him down, propping him against a sloping bulkhead so he could look around. They were worth looking at, a nightmare crew if he ever saw one. Besides the pseudogirl and the mutated chimp, there was a Sheliak in its high-G mode, looking like a flattened baker’s bun on the deck, another web of plastic foam that hid an apparently human-sized figure, and a row of small cocoons. Two were empty; the third contained a T’Worlie. From a speaker outside the cocoon a T’Worlie voice whistled a greeting and Pertin’s Pmal translated: “I recognize your identity, Ben James Pertin. It is advantageous to all of us that you are here.”
Thanks, Nummie,” said Pertin, but he was staring at the other plastic wrappings. A human being seemed to be concealed in them; but apart from himself he knew of only one human being on the Aurora, one he didn’t really want to think about.
He said aside, “Doc, who’s over there?”
Doc Chimp said, “Who? Her? Oh, I don’t know her name. She’s purchased people for some low-G type or other. But she’s on our side.” The web stirred and a face peered out. It was human enough as far as features went, but the emptiness in the eyes told Pertin that Doc Chimp was right. “Anyway,” chattered the chimp, “I better fill you in. Hell’s really broken loose, Ben James. A bunch of beings tried to wreck the telescope. Not sure but what they’ve done it, too; the Scorpian’s trying to see how much can be salvaged. If it and Aphrodite here hadn’t come along, we’d be out of business until they could send new instruments through - and by then it would likely be too late.”
The thuuud-screech was a lot closer here; apart from everything else, it was making Pertin’s head pound. “What beings?” he managed to croak.
“Didn’t see them. I just saw somebody disappearing into a passage, and then the Sheliak here came hell-fire fast after him and saw me. For a minute he thought I was them.” Doc Chimp cocked his head ruefully. “You could’ve found yourself short a monkey right there, Ben James, if I hadn’t talked fast. Then the Sheliak commandeered me to help, and we came down here to hold the fort. Oh, how sore my soles and knuckles are, Ben James, against the pounding of those rockets! But I did my duty. Then we got the observatory deck sealed off - they’d used a chemical explosive on the telescope and sprung a port – and then I happened to think of my human master, off there watching The Belle of Bellatrix without a care, and I persuaded Aphrodite to fetch you.”
Pertin frowned. “I don’t quite see why,” he objected. “I Can’t help.”
“You can stay alive,” declared the chimp. “I didn’t tell you all of it. When they came for the telescope they had to get past the T’Worlies here. Well, you know T’Worlies Can’t do much against any being that can operate in high-G. But they tried to do what they could. And two of them got killed.”
That was a shocker if ever there was one; the one cardinal rule among the races of the Galaxy was that no race could ever kill or seriously maim a member of another. Even on Sun One, what disciplinary problems arose were handled within the delegation of the race that produced the problem; there was some provision for a body of other races sitting in judgement if the offending race failed to deal with the problem, but that law had never had to be invoked. Pertin would hardly have believed the chimp if Nummie hadn’t confirmed it.
“They’re crazy, then,” said Pertin. “All right. We’ll have to get a report back to Sun One. Nummie, is your stereo stage operating?”
“Confirm that it is operative,” sang the Pmal in his ear. “State that such a transmission has already been sent.”
“Good. I’ll have to send one too, and I think the rest of us should; but that can wait.” Pertin tried to shift position as the floor surged particularly viciously, suppressed a groan and thought, “Since we’re here, they probably won’t try anything right away.” Then he said, “What we need is a comb-out. Get every being on board to account for his whereabouts and try to identify the ones who did it. For that we need a little free-fall. Can we arrange that?”
The silvery girl spoke at last. Apparently she had heard everything, had simply seen no need to comment. “We can have a little free-fall. We can have a little comb-out. But we probably won’t need to arrange it right away as the next observation period is only—” A meaningless squawk, but Doc Chimp filled in:
“She means about fifteen minutes away.”
It took a moment for Pertin to realize that the girl’s words had been in English. He looked at her curiously, but there was no time to think about that. Tine,” he said. “How many were involved in the bombing?”
“Not less than three nor more than eight,” piped the Pmal translator, responding to the T’Worlie’s whistle, “Out of how many in the crew?”
The T’Worlie hesitated. “There are in excess of three hundred thousand beings at present existing within the ship’s hull. Of these, a large number are collective creatures.”
“Not counting the Boaty-Bits, I mean how many individuals?”
“There are not less than two hundred forty nor more than two hundred fifty.”
Pertin said, “So the troublemakers are a tiny fraction. That’s good. Well broadcast a ship wide alarm. Most of the crew will cooperate—”
He stopped, staring at the silver pseudogirl. “What’s the matter?”
She had stretched out her fingertips towards the entrance port, almost in the traditional pose of a human sleepwalker.
“The matter,” she said in her incongruous colloquial English, the tones as deep as Pertin’s own, “is that the tiny fraction of troublemakers is coming back.”
A moment later no one needed the silvery girl’s fingers to hear for them; the sound of a rush grew rapidly louder: a crackling electrical sound, like the patter of a collapsing charge field. Into the room burst what looked at first like a single huge blue eye.
“Sirian!” howled Doc Chimp in terror, and tried to leap out of the way. But not even his simian muscles had the strength to leap, and the surging G-force of the rockets made him stumble and fall heavily on his side against the silvery girl. At one stroke, two-thirds of the beings able to move at all in the high-G field were immobilized; the T’Worlie, the purchased person and Ben Pertin himself were wholly useless while the rockets were on. The Sirian, moving by electrostatic forces, was immune to mere ten and twelve-G thrusts; and he bore with him something that glittered, carried under the great forward eye in a pair of crablike pincers, tiny and almost invisible.