Microcosmic God (45 page)

Budd slipped into the pilot’s chair with a sigh. This leg of the trip would be a little more exciting. Although the automatic pilot would take him unerringly back to his starting point, the explosion on Pallas would occur long before he got there, and space would be crawling with Tri-planet Patrol ships. He knew he could outmaneuver and outrun any of the ships, but he knew he wouldn’t have a chance against an ultraradio torpedo or a sleep-destroying field. Particularly the latter, for the range of the field was tremendous, and the penalty of being snared in one was agonizing death from lack of sleep. He
had to rely on his detector beams to warn him of any approaching ship.

He slept frequently for lack of anything else to do, woke for a few minutes, checked over his gauges, and dozed off again. And in one of these periods he dreamed.

He dreamed that a hollow, insistent voice, just like that of The Fang on Eric’s recordings, was calling him insistently. “Arnik! Arnik! Arnik!” He was conscious of his own effort to rouse himself, and found he could not. “Arnik!” said the voice. “Answer! What are you doing? What was the meaning of those bombs dropped in the path of Pallas?”

And he dreamed that he was bound down by gentle but irresistible forces, so that he could only cry out against them; but the only cry he could make was the truth. “We are bombing the mines.”

“Why?” The voice was a glittering steel probe, picking away at his brain.

“To create fear of The Fang. To make The Fang’s commands law.”

Question by remorseless question he was forced to tell the whole story. And then, suddenly, he found himself free to awaken. He sat bolt upright, streaming sweat, sputtering profanity, and carrying the most terrific headache in the memory of man.

“I’m gettin’ the crawlin’ willies,” he muttered, and then realized that the detector alarm signal was shrilling. He glanced at the dial. It had been ringing for two hours and twenty-seven minutes. He shook his head, nearly shrieked at the pain, and snapped the switch. The signal cut itself off. From another dial he read the bearing and distance. He swiveled about, unlimbered a short-range visiscope, and turned it on. Sharp and clear, the image of the offending vessel showed up on the screen.

Only it wasn’t a vessel. It was an automobile—an iridescent blue Carrington ’78.

Budd Arnik grunted, looked again and grinned. “Well, well,” he chuckled. “Imagine meeting you here!” It was a one-in-a-quadrillion chance, he thought. That ugly-looking lug who had accidentally swiped his car had probably gone nuts and died when he broke
through the Layer. By some fluke the car had quit with a corpse at the controls and must now be caught in somebody’s orbit—probably old Jupiter. And of all people in the Universe, he, Budd Arnik, had to be the one to find it!

He cut off the automatic pilot and took over, swerving toward the car. It was traveling in the same direction but in a slightly different plane. He focused the visiscope and read off the range from the gauge. The car was nineteen kilometers ahead. He put on a burst of speed, overtook and circled the automobile. As far as he could see, it was totally unharmed. He grinned happily, edged closer, and reached for the magnetic grapple control. But before he could touch it, the car suddenly faded away from the screen. Budd swore and fiddled with the controls, bringing it quickly back into focus. It had jumped four kilometers when he came close. He crept in again, watching carefully. When the range closed to one kilometer, the car jumped again. Budd frowned. Was that dope still alive in there?

He lifted his ship above the car and began to settle down toward it. And again the car jumped away. “What the hell,” growled Budd. “If he don’t like me, why don’t he turn tail and run?”

He tried it again, and only then did he think of a repellor field. He hadn’t known that the car possessed one, but then there were probably half a hundred gadgets on that wagon that he knew nothing about. Most big spacecraft carried such fields in case of emergency repairs in space, to guard the hull against small meteorites when the ship was not able to navigate clear of them.

Budd shrugged. “There’s more ways of killing a cat than stuffing it in a knee boot,” he growled. He took some sights, punched cards with the results, and fed them into the co-ordinator. When he had his position, he lined his ship up with the car on his course, and moved forward. The car leaped away, and Budd followed grimly, the car preceding him exactly a kilometer ahead. The two crafts soon attained their terminal velocity, and Budd turned the controls over to the mike.

He walked over to the ultraradio, noticing that he was an hour or so late for his usual communiqué to Eric. That gentleman’s face flashed furiously on the screen. Budd smiled back at it.

“Well?” roared Eric. “What the hell have you got to be so happy about? Why you double-crossing rat!”

“Easy, pal,” soothed Budd. “I been busy. I’ve got a present for you.”

“Take your present and ram it up—”

“Tsk, tsk,”
tsked Budd. “All this excitement over a little tardiness! Listen, goon. Remember that car we had swiped from us at the Purple Pileus?”

“Yes, I remember and I don’t give a damn about it.”

“No? Well, give a look!” Budd walked away from the radio, switched on the visiscope. “Can you see what I’ve got in tow?”

“No, I can’t. Now stop your hogwash and tell me what sort of monkey business you’re up to!”

Budd sobered. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play innocent,” snarled Eric. “What was the idea of blanketing
my
signal?”

“When? What signal?”

“The F—” Eric stopped apoplectically, remembering that he was on the air and that the System was full of ears. “The signals we arranged,” he said, as if talking to a four-year-old. “Remember?”

“Yeah—”

“They were blanked! The one in my office, I—Hey! You don’t really mean to tell me that you actually
don’t
know what happened?” He peered out of the screen at Budd’s amazed face, rubbed his ear, and went on with a desperate sort of patience. “O.K. then. My transmitter was blanked, and so were the others, apparently. Instead of that, I got
this!”
His face disappeared, and a recording screen was shoved up against the transmitter. “Now watch!” said his voice, and the recorder glowed. It showed a typical radio show, a dancing chorus, a vapid female singing dourly. Suddenly the scene disappeared and a truly terrible voice rasped forth.

“I am The Fang,” it said melodramatically. “I have come again to warn the world. But not, as was expected, to warn you of myself, but of my masters.”

There was a long, significant pause. Budd’s throat felt very dry.

“I was ordered to destroy the mines on Pallas. I have disobeyed, for my masters want power they cannot control. I also warn my
masters that I will not rest until they are as I am!” With the last two words, the screen came alive with a picture.

“God!” said Budd, his eyes bulging.

The screen went dead and was moved away. Eric’s face reappeared. “There’s something for you to look forward to,” he said snidely. “Hurry home, babe.” He signed off.

“The son,” growled Budd. “He looks almost happy about it. Great sweet sidesway what a face!” He slumped into a fearful heap in the pilot’s chair.

As Budd expected, the car’s repellors cut out when it had been shoved well within Earth’s gravitic field. He grappled it to his ship’s side and landed neatly on the stage in front of the Arnik Shipping Co. His first act on alighting was to release the car and try the door. It opened readily. He recoiled a little at the heap of rags that littered the stained control seat, and then he shrugged and climbed in, kicking them out the rags, and the odd bones they covered. Budd Arnik wasn’t picky. As the ground crew disposed of the spaceship, Budd tested the controls. They seemed to be all right. He waved to the foreman and the car slid smoothly down the ramp.

He could have taken a solenoid car out to Eric’s place and saved twenty minutes, but he was too tickled at having got his car back. He swept out of the city, lulled by the whispering speedometer; and when he had the highway to himself, he leaned over to the conventional radio switch and then pulled back on the arms. The car soared up effortlessly. He put it down again and raced to his brother’s place.

Eric was waiting fretfully at the door. “Dammit, why didn’t you take the solenoid?”

“Brother,” said Budd easily, “when you’ve spent as many weeks as I have being toted around by a machine that did your thinking for you, you’ll be glad of the chance to be the boss for a change.”

Eric stared over his shoulder at the house, shrugged nervously and climbed into the car. “Place gives me the jitters,” he complained. “Go ahead then—drive. I want to talk to you.”

Budd wheeled the Carrington around in its own length and rolled onto the highway. Drifting along at a hundred and eighty, he turned
to Eric. “What’s this about jitters? Something new for you, isn’t it?”

Eric looked sheepish. “Yes. No.” He swore fluently. “Budd, you’re a phony. You’re in this up to your neck.” He sent a glance Buddward from the corners of his eyes. “And I don’t know that that isn’t the silver lining they told me about in school, come to think of it. If I get it, you’ll get it, too. Anyway, you’re a phony. You’re up against something you can’t laugh off, this trip.”

“You’re talking a lot of nonsense,” said Budd. “You’re all shot, man. I’ve never heard you go on like this. What’s under your skin?”

Eric began in a low voice that got increasingly higher and hoarser, until he wound up in a piping whisper. “We create, for our own ends, one master criminal. Said master criminal consists in ultraradio transmitters set adrift in space and in time bombs. We do one little job with our hypothetical criminal’s aid. We start another one. Our make-believe monster promptly goes on strike because he doesn’t like our greed. And you ask what’s under my
skin!”
He gasped for breath, then went on, in a crazed monotone, “And I’ve been having dreams. Dreaming with my ears and my eyes while I’m wide awake. I hear that … that
thing
laughing. I keep seeing that face. That’s what’s going to happen to us, you damn fool; don’t you see?”

Budd went right on grinning; then Eric suddenly realized that the grin was frozen there. Budd said hoarsely, “Yeah. I know. I heard things, too. Merciful heavens!” he burst out. “We can’t let it get us! Shut up about it!”

Eric’s gaze dropped between his feet. He clamped them nervously, held it there. “If it was anything we could understand, we’d know what to do … but you can’t tell about those things. It might hit you one way, me another, and yet we’re brothers. You just can’t tell. Anything might happen—” Eric, due to his morbid attention to his feet, and to the artificial gravity in the car, did not notice Budd’s turning on the radio, or the swift leap of the machine off the road. “Who can tell what it did to that ugly Biddiver fellow? How can we know what he is now? You can’t predict anything, you can’t even guess—”

“What are you talking about?” snapped Budd.

“Biddiver—the guy that swiped your fancy car by mistake. Biddiver—The Fang.”

Budd’s face turned a sick gray. “Biddiver is—The Fang?”

“Certainly. That was easy enough to find out. He’s altered—God, yes; but it’s him all right. Didn’t I tell you? I guess I forgot. I’m shot to hell.” He shook his head, and sweat flung from his forehead. “The card-selector—you know, the one we used on that barkeep. It gave us a portrait and a description. With The Fang I reversed the process. He’s slightly changed, but underneath all that … that fur—he has the same bone structure. It clicks … it couldn’t be anyone else. Somewhere he’s cruising around in that damned automobile. Sooner or later, he’ll get us.”

“Not ‘that’ damned automobile,” said Budd, and laughed hysterically.
“ ‘This’
damned automobile. I tried to tell you about it when I was out there in space. I thought I picked it up and brought it back. I see now—it brought me.”

Eric raised his head, stared out of the side window, and screamed. The Carrington was a thousand kilometers up and going higher. Budd forced the control arms downward violently; the nose of the car tipped up instead. He sat like a statue, blood pouring from where he had bitten through his lip. Eric dove for his gun, snatched it out, put it to his temple.

A white-furred arm reached almost casually from behind them, lifted the gun out of Eric’s hand. “Don’t do that,” said The Fang gently. “Not at this stage. I want you changed. I want you made like me. That,” he added, “is what I am for.”

They turned slowly and faced the creature. “Do not be frightened,” droned The Fang. He was regal, magnificent as he stood there, in front of the door to the power compartment where he had been hiding. His luminous eyes were separately articulated, and one fixed on each of the men, held them. His long face hair was swept away on each side from his chrome-yellow mouth, baring the great tusks.

He held them there while the machine swept up and outward, the whine of air outside growing fainter as the air thinned. Stratosphere—ionosphere—and the Heaviside. The Fang watched with puzzlement growing in his eyes as Eric shrieked and died, as Budd groveled in pain and then hung limply on the back of his seat. The Fang picked him up carefully and laid him on the deck. Something
was happening to the man. He tried to scream, and his legs kicked out. He tried to strike out with an arm, and his head whipped back against the floor. His eyes widened, the flesh between them thinning, the eyeballs beginning to fuse. He died, then, for no human being can live when his medial division starts to go to pieces. Humans are built to operate with two sets of limbs, two eyes, two ears, two nostrils—the radiations found that the path of least resistance in Budd Arnik was to do away with that medial line, and it couldn’t work.

So The Fang was left, keening over the twisted bodies, mourning that he had not done it the right way, horrified because he had been mistaken—for he only wanted to help. Perhaps one day he will find his function.

W
HEN TIME ITSELF
was half its present age, and at an unthinkable distance, and in an unknowable dimension, he was born.