‘If you say so.’
‘We can’t leave until the growths are destroyed.’
Mast was in Alexei Verednyev’s cramped private cabin. Alexei had painted the walls a metallic grey. There were only three items of furniture: a table, a hard chair on which the Sovyan was now seated, and a pallet on which he slept. His face, as always, was dour and immobile.
Mast had slipped away unnoticed from Amara Corl’s section. He was sure she was too insensitive to be able to persuade her victim to help her.
‘On this whole ship, you are the only one who has been a friend to me,’ Alexei said at last, emotion entering his accented voice. ‘I will do what you ask, since it is you who is asking.’
He rose, his arms moving in a waving motion reminiscent of the typical arm movements of a Sovyan metalloid. Mast led him out of the room. They went down to the exit bay where he explained to him what had to be done.
The doors opened. Alexei, armed with a handgun Mast had given him, ventured out.
The breeze that swept over Alexei’s skin as he emerged from the Callan was an entirely new phenomenon to him. It frightened him at first. Realto Mast had not warned him of this.
He stood on the Prossim mats, which were depressed into a shallow bowl by the ship’s weight, and gazed about him. He had seen planetary landscapes before, but only on the Callan’s external screens when she landed on some world or other. With the flowing of air on his skin, assaulting his intimate feelings, it took on a completely different aspect. The spaciousness of the land, the colour of space seen through an atmosphere – not black, but with a purple tint in this case – made him appreciate all the more the alienness of such an environment.
The cyborg world must be much like this, he thought.
The exit bay port closed with a thump behind him. The two crewmen who had preceded him were standing out of the shadow of the ship, where they had been looking up at its bulk and shouting to be let in.
On seeing Alexei they stopped shouting. His feet unsteady on the yielding surface, he made his way towards them, and they responded by moving to meet him. Their mouths were stretched in what he had been told was a facial signal called a smile. But the grace of their movements, the display of manly beauty by which Mast had explained they would try to hypnotize him, all that was lost on him. The human body was a hated object to him. It was easy to imagine that he was killing repulsive cyborgs as he let them get near enough for him to take steady aim, then kill them both with his hand beamer.
He walked on to the grav platform. Although the dead men had been crewmen on the ship which was now his own home, he felt no compunction over killing them, knowing that they had been enslaved by the malevolent force within the green vegetation. Such sacrifices came naturally to him. Sovyan society made every individual understand that he was expendable in terms of group survival.
Flying the grav platform was easy. He sent it skimming over the ground at a height of about twenty feet, until he came to where the crewmen had discarded the flamethrower. Stepping down from the flying disc, he collected together the components of one of the protective suits. Immediately upon donning it, with clumsy, unaccustomed movements, he felt a little better. To be clad in metal always brought him a slight relief from his personal agony of mind.
He picked up the flamethrower, pulling the harness over his shoulders. Feeling it in his possession also brought a marginal improvement in his spirits. He was in his element when handling pure instrumentalities, machines and the like – a fact of which the hideous female and supposed mind technician, Amara Corl, had never made any use, if it had occurred to her at all.
After outfitting himself Alexei paused, staring down at the vegetable fabric structures which comprised the blossoms of this surplanetary growth. What did his captors find to fear in these rags? He bent down, stretching out a hand to feel the front of a jacket.
His hand twitched, entirely of its own volition. Peculiar thoughts passed through his brain, a series of extraordinary images.
Quickly he pulled the hand away. It was not his own hand, he reminded himself. It was a grafted hand. A space-cave hand.
Standing erect, he triggered the flamethrower.
Atomic fire gouted from the nozzle. The roaring lateral column reached almost to the horizon, incinerating everything in its path. Alexei swivelled the long tube, cutting a blackened quadrant out of the landscape and extending it into a near-circle.
Smoke rose in masses and obscured the sky. Alexei mounted the grav platform again and flew a short distance away, surveying the ground below him. The crop of garments had by now spread to cover a patch about five miles across.
Handling the flamethrower was too awkward when controlling the grav disc as well. Alexei worked by choosing a new area for destruction and landing in the centre of it. The air shimmered and heat smote at him through the protective suit.
Barely fifteen minutes later the task was almost done. Alexei paused, standing by the platform after having employed the flamethrower yet again. He was in a fog of smoke and crackling heat, through which the shapes of the two spaceships, standing a mile apart and so far ignoring one another, bulked shiftingly like slumbering beasts.
Suddenly Alexei saw that one of those beasts had stirred to life. It had lifted itself off the ground and was surging towards him. He immediately guessed its intent. It meant to crush him, in defence of the vegetable mats.
He adjusted the nozzle of the flamethrower to its narrowest aperture. The space-cave – it was the other one, not the Callan – was approaching fast. Instinctively he backed away, stumbling in the black dust that had been Prossim, and sent a narrow jet of atomic fire hissing at the ship. The flame splashed against the hull, melting the metal and causing it to run in glowing streams down the curved side.
In a second or two the flame jet had lunged through the hull and was busy devouring the interior of the ship. But by then the hull was blotting out everything, expanding and descending on him with terrifying swiftness. For a moment the metal monster seemed almost friendly. He imagined it as a righteous Sovyan weapon that was crushing an evil cyborg – the cyborg being himself – then it was all over.
The harvester ship had come down like an avenging fist on Alexei Verednyev, with such determined force that it broke its own back in the process and lay crippled on the plain. Amara, watching from within the Callan, viewed the whole affair with satisfaction.
‘We should have thought of this ourselves,’ Estru said. ‘It’s this business of body image again. Alexei’s mind lacks a human body image. So the Prossim suits couldn’t get to him.’
‘They would have eventually,’ Peder told them. ‘If put to it those suits can control the nervous system of animals and even insects.’
‘And to think you wanted to leave Verednyev behind in the Sovyan Rings, Estru!’ Amara crowed. ‘Sometimes I think I’m the only one around here who makes the right decisions. By the way, remind me to put in a good word for Mast when we get back to Ziode. Where’s he got to?’
Mast had returned to the section to explain his ploy, but had left again following the death of the Sovyan. ‘Probably gone to sulk,’ Estru said. ‘He was quite friendly with Verednyev.’
‘Really? Well, you can’t expect a layman to have any objectivity.’ Amara was manipulating the screen controls, searching the great carpet of soot that had once been the Prossim plant’s garment beds. There were still a few garments left here and there, mostly charred or partly burned, passed over by the main force of the flamethrower’s flood. Those remnants would have to be cleared up.