The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (87 page)

*   *   *

MacPreston stopped a good six feet from where Ob was working. He stared at the square brown figure, noting the intense concentration in every line of her back, the play of muscles. Swimmer and Levinsky stopped behind him.

Crack!

Crack!

The Professor advanced on Swimmer. “There's been the most dreadful confusion,” he said.

“In heaven's name, Rumel, stop her!” MacPreston rasped.

“I've tried,” the Professor said. “She pays no attention to me.”

“Not you!” MacPreston roared.

Crack!

The Professor drew himself up, stared at MacPreston. “And who,” he asked, “might you be?” He turned oddly pleading eyes on Swimmer. It was obvious that MacPreston had remembered about the four-hundred-pound bench being lifted with one hand.

Swimmer tried to find his voice. His throat felt as though it had been seared with a hot poker. Slowly he brushed past MacPreston, touched Ob's arm.

Ob dropped mallet and wedge, whirled on Swimmer with a glare that sent him retreating one quick step. At sight of him, though, a smile stretched her mouth. The smile held a radiant quality that transfixed Swimmer.

“Ob, you can stop the work now,” Swimmer whispered.

Still smiling, she moved close to him, put a calloused forefinger to his cheek in the silent invitation of the cave, testing the emotion she read on his face. There were no scars on the cheek to count his years—and the skin was so sweetly, excitingly soft … like one of the Cave Mother's babies. Still, he appeared to understand the fingerplay. He drew her aside, brushed a lock of hair away from her cheek, touched her ears.

Ob wanted to take his hand, lead him to the bench and show him the work, but she feared to break the spell.

“Even with the bullets flying around,” Professor Rumel said, “she paid no attention. Just went right on, as though—” His voice trailed off. Presently he said: “Dear me. She wouldn't know about bullets.”

Swimmer heard the voice as though it came from a dream. Part of him was aware that MacPreston and Levinsky had gone to the bench, that they were bent over it muttering. What he read on Ob's face made all of that unimportant.

The words of the Cave Mother came back to Ob:
“It's all right to play with the males and sample them, but when the time comes for permanent mating, my magic will tell you which one to choose. You'll know at once.”

How wise the Cave Mother had been to know such a thing, Ob thought. How potent was the Cave Mother's magic!

*   *   *

Swimmer felt that he had come alive, been reborn here in this room, that behind him lay a whole misplaced segment of non-existence. He wanted to hug Ob, but suspected she might respond with painful vigor. She'd have to be cautioned about her strength before she broke his ribs. He sensed also that she might not have the inhibitions dictated by current culture. He could imagine her reacting with complete abandon if he should kiss her.

Slowly he pulled away.

Ob saw his reluctance, thought:
He thinks of the devil-gods. We must distract the devil-gods, occupy them with other things. Then perhaps they'll take their thunder-magic elsewhere, and leave mortals to the things which interest mortals.

But Swimmer had just begun to think about consequences. He found himself filled with wonder that he had never before worried about the legal consequences of his actions. The Mars diamond had attracted him, he realized, because it was a romp, a lark, a magnificent joke. But after what had happened to the rock, MacPreston and Levinsky would have to throw him to the Russians. They couldn't just hand over a mess of chips and say: “Sorry, fellows … it came apart.” Everything had come apart—and Swimmer was struck speechless by fear of what might happen to Ob.

Consequences no longer could be ignored. Levinsky and MacPreston were engaged in a heated argument.

“This is a catastrophe, I tell you!” MacPreston said.

“Wally, you're being an ass,” Levinsky said.

“But what can we tell the Russians?”

Exactly,
Swimmer thought.
What can we tell the Russians?

“That's just it,” Levinsky said. “This prehistoric female has solved that problem for us. She's made us a
propaganda
weapon we can parade before the whole world!”

“You'd just—”

“Certainly! There isn't a person in the world who'll fail to get the point.” Levinsky lowered his voice. “The uncuttable diamond, don't you see? And we can say we planned it this way. We give 'em the Jepson gang and—” He pointed to something hidden by MacPreston's body. “… and an object lesson.”

*   *   *

Swimmer found himself overcome by curiosity. He headed for the bench, but Ob darted ahead, shouldered MacPreston aside and turned with something glistening in her hands.

“Ob. Work,” she said. “For … you.”

With a sense of shock and awe, Swimmer accepted the object from her, understanding then what Levinsky had meant by “object lesson.”

The thing Ob had fashioned from the Mars diamond was a spearhead—delicately balanced and with exquisite workmanship. It lay in Swimmer's hands, warm and glittering.

“You … want?” Ob asked.

 

ESCAPE FELICITY

“An escape-proof prison cannot be built,” he kept telling himself.

His name was Roger Deirut, five feet tall, one hundred and three pounds, crewcut black hair, a narrow face with long nose and wide mouth and space-bleached eyes that appeared to reflect rather than absorb what they saw.

Deirut knew his prison—the D-Service. He had got himself rooted down in the Service like a remittance man half asleep in a hammock on some palm-shaded tropical beach, telling himself his luck would change some day and he'd get out of there.

He didn't delude himself that a one-man D-ship was a hammock, or that space was a tropical beach. But the sinecure element was there and the ships were solicitous cocoons, each with a climate designed precisely for the lone occupant.

That each pilot carried the prison's bars in his mind had taken Deirut a long time to understand. Out here aimed into the void beyond Capella Base, he could feel the bars where they had been dug into his psyche, cemented and welded there. He blamed the operators of Bu-psych and the deep-sleep hypnotic debriefing after each search trip. He told himself that Bu-psych did something to the helpless pilots then, installed this compulsion they called the
Push.

Some young pilots managed to escape it for a while—tougher psyches, probably, but sooner or later Bu-psych got them all. It was a common compulsion that limited the time a D-ship pilot could stay out before he turned tail and fled for home.

“This time I'll break away,” Deirut told himself. He knew he was talking aloud, but he had his computer's vocoders turned off and his absent mumblings would be ignored.

The gas cloud of Grand Nuage loomed ahead of him, clearly defined on his instruments like a piece of torn fabric thrown across the stars. He'd come out of subspace dangerously close, but that was the gamble he'd taken.

Bingaling Benar, fellow pilot and sometime friend, had called him nuts when Deirut had said he was going to tackle the cloud. “Didn't you do that once before?” Bingaling asked.

“I was going to once, but I changed my mind,” Deirut had said.

“You gotta slow down, practically crawl in there,” Bingaling had said. “I stood it eighty-one days, man. I had the push for real—couldn't take any more and I came home. Anyway, it's nothing but cloud, all the way through.”

Bingaling's
endless
cloud was growing larger in the ship's instruments now.

But the cloud enclosed a mass of space that could hide a thousand suns.

Eighty-one days,
he thought.

“Eighty, ninety days, that's all anyone can take out there,” Bingaling had said. “And I'm telling you, in that cloud it's worse. You get the push practically the minute you go in.”

Deirut had his ship down to a safe speed now, nosing into the first tenuous layers. There was no mystery about the cloud's composition, he reminded himself. It was hydrogen, but in a concentration that made swift flight suicidal.

“They got this theory,” Bingaling had said, “that it's an embryo star like. One day it's just going to go fwoosh and compress down into one star mass.”

Deirut read his instruments. He could sense his ship around him like an extension of his own nerves. She was a pinnace class for which he and his fellow pilots had a simple and obscene nickname—two hundred and fifty meters long, crowded from nose to tubes with the equipment for determining if a planet could support human life. In the sleep-freeze compartment directly behind him were the double-checks—two pairs of rhesus monkeys and ten pairs of white mice.

D-ship pilots contended they'd seeded more planets with rhesus monkeys and white mice than they had with humans.

Deirut switched to his stern instruments. One hour into the cloud and already the familiar stars behind him were beginning to fuzz off. He felt the first stirrings of unease; not the push … but disquiet.

He crossed his arms, touching the question-mark insignia at his left shoulder. He could feel the ripe green film of corrosion on the brass threads.
I should polish up,
he thought. But he knew he wouldn't. He looked around him at the pilot compartment, seeing unracked food cannisters, a grease smear across the computer console, dirty fatigues wadded under a dolly seat.

It was a sloppy ship.

Deirut knew what was said about him and his fellow pilots back in the top echelons of the D-Service.

“Rogues make the best searchers.”

It was an axiom, but the rogues had their drawbacks. They flouted rules, sneered at protocol, ignored timetables, laughed at vector search plans … and kept sloppy ships. And when they disappeared—as they often did—the Service could never be sure what had happened or where.

Except that the man had been prevented from returning … because there was always the push.

Deirut shook his head. Every thought seemed to come back to the push. He didn't have it yet, he assured himself. Too soon. But the thought was there, aroused. It was the fault of that cloud.

He reactivated the rear scanners. The familiar stars were gone, swallowed in a blanket of nothingness. Angrily, he turned off the scanner switch.

I've got to keep busy,
he thought.

For a time he set himself to composing and refining a new stanza for the endless D-ship ballad: “I Left My Love on Lyra in the Hands of Gentle Friends.” But his mind kept returning to the fact that the stanza might never be heard … if his plans succeeded. He wondered then how many such stanzas had been composed never to be heard.

The days went by with an ever-slowing, dragging monotony.

Eighty-one days,
he reminded himself time and again.
Bingaling turned back at eighty-one days.

By the seventy-ninth day he could see why. There was no doubt then that he was feeling the first ungentle suasions of the push. His mind kept searching for logical reasons.

You've done your best. No shame in turning back now. Bingaling's undoubtedly right—it's nothing but cloud all the way through. No stars in here … no planets.

But he was certain what the Bu-psych people had done to him and this helped. He watched the forward scanners for the first sign of a glow. And this helped, too. He was still going some place.

The eighty-first day passed.

The eighty-second.

On the eighty-sixth day he began to see a triple glow ahead—like lights through fog; only the fog was black and otherwise empty.

By this time it was taking a conscious effort to keep his hands from straying, toward the flip-flop controls that would turn the ship one hundred eighty degrees onto its return track.

Three lights in the emptiness.

Ninety-four days—two days longer than he'd ever withstood the push before—and his ship swam free of the cloud into open space with three stars lined out at a one o'clock angle ahead of him—a distant white-blue giant, a nearby orange dwarf and in the center … lovely golden sol-type to the fifth decimal of comparison.

Feverishly, Deirut activated his mass-anomaly scanners, probing space around the golden-yellow sun.

The push was terrible now, insisting that he turn around. But this was the final convincer for Deirut. If the thing Bu-psych had done to him insisted he go back now, right after discovering three new suns—then there could be only one answer to the question “Why?” They didn't want a D-Service rogue settling down on his own world. The push was a built-in safeguard to make sure the scout returned.

Deirut forced himself to study his instruments.

Presently the golden star gave up its secret—a single planet with a single moon. He punched for first approximation, watched the results stutter off the feedout tape: planetary mass .998421 of Earth norm … rotation forty plus standard hours … mean orbital distance 243 million kilometers … perturbation nine degrees … orbital variation thirty-eight plus.

Deirut sat bolt upright with surprise.

Thirty-eight plus! A variation percentage in that range could only mean the mother star had another companion—and a big one. He searched space around the star.

Nothing.

Then he saw it.

At first he thought he'd spotted the drive flare of another ship—an alien. He swallowed, the push momentarily subdued, and did a quick mental review of the alien-space contact routine worked out by Earth's bigdomes and which, so far as anyone knew, had never been put to the test.

The flare grew until it resolved itself into the gaseous glow of another astronomical body circling the golden sun.