He said one word, but that was enough. Loaded with partially-suppressed agony, he breathed:
“Maran!” And then he began his fight for life. The ship’s commander, a tall gray-haired man whose days in the Service were almost at an end, did not reveal his thoughts as he gazed at the leaden, shrunken face.
“He’ll make it,” offered the medical officer. The commander nodded. “If he says anything else, let me know.” A youngish lieutenant burst out: “Why wasn’t there anyone in the other pod—why two of them? How could Rosario have launched two pods?”
The commander was thinking of Maran. Maran loose: free to begin that frightful series of neural operations…. “We’ll know when we reach the ES 110,” he told the young officer. He crossed to the gray metal coldly-functional console. Robotic servo-mechanisms sensed his nearness and awaited his orders. The cruisers were the only ships programmed for complete and unquestioned control by human personnel. There were those in positions of power who questioned the wisdom of risking fallible human discretion, but the members of the Service had so far persuaded the Galactic Council that the robots could not cope with the situations in which they might find themselves. They had not the resources for the kind of decision that occasionally must be made.
The commander spoke to his field man: “Link with the squadron. Try a combined submolecular field. I want the ship intact.”
Liz Deffant’s hands were steady as she pieced together the surprisingly elaborate mechanism. Several screws had to be wound into place. There was a sighting apparatus—merely a notch, but it would be adequate. The weapon had a short range. About a hundred yards, Liz guessed. A small hammer held the flint. There were springs, ratchets, a flashpan. All had to be in alignment. The propulsive force was a black powder, a mixture of easily-available chemicals. Out at the Rim, the expellees would have no difficulty in locating sources for the primary materials. Before a year or so passed, they would be able to manufacture simple tools like this for themselves. Pour the grains of powder into the upturned barrel of the weapon, she read. She split the cartridge and made a wadding from the cartridge-paper.
Prime the weapon by placing a pinch of powder in the priming-pan. Liz wondered if her fingers were sweating too much. She wiped them free of moisture. A misfire could occur; she would have only one chance, for the process of preparing the weapon for firing had already taken over a minute. Tap the projectile into the barrel, using the ramrod. Take care not to distort the shape of the projectile.
The bullet rested on the wadding. All about her, Liz sensed the interest of robot eyes. She could have wept with fear. It was an absurd situation, ridiculous. A chance encounter with a friend of Al’s had led to this distillation of terror, to this gagging range of emotions which had previously been unknown territory. She was bitterly afraid. The determination that had kept her from leaving the ES 110 was almost entirely dissipated. She could not begin to understand why her fingers continued to prepare the barrel-loading, archaic musket, for there was no directing force behind the movement.
They were a part of a pattern of events which had encompassed her. She felt as if she, too, were a part of the robotic equipment of the prison-ship, a preprogrammed and mindless complex of nerve and tissue that was a part of the spatial and temporal framework of events beginning with the sight of Tup’s dying face, and taking in the horrors of the past few hours. The situation had grown around her. She had grown into it. There was a terrible inevitability in it.
She took the heavy weapon, careful to close the priming-pan. Tears streamed down her face as she began to walk toward the wide grav-chute. It led to the clamorous horror of the cell-deck, to the puzzled low-grade servitors, to the tanks where the expellees writhed, and to the splayed, silent body of the naive crewman she had known as Tup. And, somehow, she could negotiate the silent, eerie green-lit deck. The robots had finished their work. Many tanks were empty. The dead crewmen were gone. She knew that unseen scanners reported her presence. Twice she saw groups of low-grade servitors, but they did not attempt to hinder her.
She had known at once that Maran would not be on the deck. She grasped the musket in almost nerveless fingers, feeling the smooth stock, the heavy barrel, the delicate priming mechanism. Icy sweat covered her face and hands. Maran would be on the bridge.
“Al, I wish we hadn’t parted like that,” she whispered. When she began the quick ascent to the bridge, she could recall every line of his face. She had stormed away from him filled with a bitter rage, and she could see now the poignant hurt in his eyes. The sense of loss was almost unbearable. After the green-lit half-light of the lower deck, the bridge was startlingly bright. Liz Deffant stepped out of the chute, narrowed her eyes against the flooding light, and sought out Maran. The musket almost slipped from her hand. Two things immediately impacted on her mind: two low-grade servitors were very close to her; and Maran stood squarely before her, outlined against the bulk of the robotic controller’s pedestal. He seemed to have been waiting like that for aeons. His great body was clad in black. There was a half-smile on his face, so that Liz had the feeling that he would come toward her almost indulgently. His eyes were nearly beautiful, she thought inconsequentially, more a woman’s eyes than a man’s. His eyebrows were perfectly curved above the heavy-lashed, wide-set eyes,
Liz raised the musket and, enwrapped in her strange trance, she had a prevision of a third eye opening redly above the pair that were regarding her. The projectile was heavy, round, metallic and in a tenth of a second it would smash through the large skull and Maran would be no threat to anyone. The trigger curved in a bow against her finger.
Maran made a small gesture with his large, white hands. Liz had the impression of ponderous movement. The sights of the weapon were exactly aligned on the center of Maran’s forehead. Maran said with massive calmness: “Miss Deffant, do you really know what—” The rest was lost.
She nicked the priming-pan open, noticed in a frozen moment of time that a few grains of powder had clung to her damp fingers, and then she pulled with increasing power on the trigger. The flint snapped down.
Fire blossomed, red and yellow. Smoke gushed from the priming-pan and the barrel, and Liz was hurled backward by the recoil. She did not know whether she was glad, relieved, horrified, amazed, or empty of emotion.
The smoke cleared.
Maran had not fallen.
The clear brown eyes were not glazing in death, as the young crewman’s had. And there was no third eye. Liz knew cold, clawing fear.
She stepped back half a pace, her shoulder raw and full of pain, and then she could not step back. A black tentacle carefully detached her hands from the metal of the musket. Maran came toward her, and Liz opened her mouth in pure, blind panic.
She could hear the echoes of her scream bounding back from the cheerful pastel-colored walls. When she moved, delicate tentacles restrained her. And Maran stopped.
The half-smile had gone. There was a look of sadness on his face, that of a large man who knows that, in spite of his harmless nature, the sheer physical bulk of his body inspired fear in others. Liz held onto her sanity, gagging down her bile. She realized that he was talking to her.
“Miss Deffant,” he was saying for the second or third time. “Miss Deffant—was it you who released the survival-cylinders? Miss Deffant?”
Liz repressed a shuddering sigh. He would want his revenge. The man was a merciless, obsessed psychopath. All human emotions had died within him; he lived only for some bizarre vision. And this was the man she thought could be right about the need for investigation into the nature of the only intelligent life in the Galaxy. She wondered if he would kill her now.