The Man Who Lost the Sea (11 page)

Something golden flashed across the screen.

Deeming grunted and slapped at a control. He caught them, lost them, caught and hung on to them—three Angels, flying in V formation close to the ground, with their backpack geo-gravs. They were swiftly covering the ground in a most efficient area search looking for—well, something concealed down there, small enough to justify that close scrutiny, sitting mum enough to justify a visual hunt. Something, say, about the size of his boat.

On impulse he cut in the ship detectors. The picture reeled and steadied and reeled again as the detectors scanned and selected, and then gave him a quick rundown of everything it had found, in order of closest estimated arrival time at a collision point with him.

To the north and north-east, two small golden ships converging.

To the east, another, and directly above it, another, apparently maneuvering to fly cover on its partner.

To the south, a large—no, that was nothing, just a freighter minding its own business. But no—it was launching boats. He zoomed the video on them. Fighter boats streaking towards him.

To the south-east … The hell with the south-east! He pawed the Revelo coin out of the rack and banged it down on the slot of the coin box. It bounced out of his fingers and fell to the deck. He pounced on it and scrabbled it wildly into his hand.

A luminescent pink cloud bloomed suddenly to his right, another just behind him. Its significance: stand by for questioning, or else.

His hull began to hum, and, impressed on this vibration as a signal
on a carrier, his whole craft spoke hoarsely to him: “Halt in the name of Angels. Stand by for tow beam.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Deeming, and this time got the coin to the slot. He banged the button, and the scene through ports and video alike disappeared.

He switched off everything he didn’t need and lay back, sweating.

He wouldn’t even glance at the remote, wanly hopeful possibility that they had mistaken him for someone else. They knew who he was, all right. And how long had it taken them to draw a bead on him on a planet to which they could not possibly have known he was going? Thirty minutes?

He found himself staring out of the port, and became shockingly aware that he was still in hyperspace. He had never been in the grey so long before; where in time was this Revelo place anyway?

He began to sweat again. Was something wrong with the field generator? According to the tell tales on the control panel, no; it seemed all right.

Still the queasy, deeply frightening grey. He blanked out the ports and shivered in his seat, hugging himself.

What had made him pick Revelo anyhow?

Only an unconfirmed guess that one man had managed to stay alive there. The other Proscribed planets were death for humans in one form or another; he had no idea which. Revelo probably was too, for that matter, but Don Rockhard would hardly have chanced it if it was certain death.

And then maybe—just barely maybe—the new flicker coil really would work so well in the Revelo death-field that he could slip through without detection. Maybe, for a while, for a very little while, he could be in a sheltered place where he could think.

There was a shrill rushing sound from the hull. He stared at the ports but could see nothing. He switched on the detector and then remembered the port blanks. He opened them and let the light of Revelo flood in.

He had never seen a sky like this. Masses of color, blue, blue-green, pink, drifted above him. The dim zenith was alive with shooting sparks. A great soft purple flame reached from the eastern horizon
and wavered to invisibility almost directly overhead. It pulsed hypnotically.

Deeming shuddered. He set the detector to the task of finding Don Rockhard’s boat and let it cruise. He started the exterior air analyzer and sat back to wait.

Since the missing boat was so small and the planet so large, he had to set his detector’s discriminator very wide and its sensitivity high. And it found all sorts of things for him—great shining lumps of metallic copper and molybdenum jutting from the ragged hills, a long wavering row of circular pools of molten lead, and even the Angel’s warning beacon and death-field generator. It was obviously untended, and understandably so; it was self-powered, foolproof, and set in a case that a hydrogen explosion wouldn’t nick.

He had to sleep after a while, so he set the buzzer to its loudest and lay back to sleep. It seemed that each time he slept he dreamed and each time he dreamed, no matter how it began, it always ended with his coming face to face with a smiling Angel, unarmed, pleasant, just sitting waiting for him. Each time the buzzer sounded, he leaped frantically to see what it was reporting. The need to spend a moment with someone else beside himself, someone else’s ideas besides his turgid miasmas of flight and dead smiles and kind relentless Angels became urgent, hysterical, frantic. Each time the buzzer sounded it was rich ore or a strange electrical fog between two iron crags, or nothing at all, and, at last, Donald Rockhard’s lifeboat.

By the time he found it he was in a numb and miserable state, the retreat which lives on the other side of hysteria. He was riding a habit pattern of sleep and dream, wake and stare; hear the buzzer, lurch at the screen, get the disappointment, slap the reject button, and go on. He actually rejected the other lifeboat twice before he realized it, but his craft began to circle it and the strong fix made it impossible for the buzzer to be silent. He switched it off at last and hovered, staring dully at the tiny bronze ball below, and pulling himself back to reality.

He landed. The craziest thing of all about this crazy place was that the atmosphere at ground level was Earth normal, though a bit warm for real comfort. He buttoned the canopy and climbed stiffly out.

There was no sign of Donald Rockhard.

He walked over to the other boat and stooped to look in. The canopy was closed but not locked. He opened it and leaned inside. There were only three course-coins in the rack, Earth and Bootes II and Cabrini in Beta Centauri. He fumbled behind the rack and his fingers found a flat packet. He opened it.

It contained a fortune—a real fortune in large notes. And a card. And a course-coin.

The card was of indestructible hellenite, and bore the famous symbol of the surgeons of Grebd, and in hand script, by some means penetrating all the way through the impenetrable plastic, like ink through a paper towel, the legend:
Class A. Paid in full. Accept bearer without interrogation
. It was signed by an authoritative squiggle and over-stamped with the well-known pattern of the Grebdan Surgical Society.

The coin was, of course, to Grebd.

Deeming clutched the treasure into his lap and bent over it, hugging it, and then laughed until he cried—which he did almost immediately.

To Grebd, for a new face, a new mind if he wanted it—a tail, wings, who cares? The sky’s the limit.

(The sky—your sky—has always been the limit.)

And then, new face and all, with that packet of loot, to any place in the cosmos that I think is good enough for me.

“Hey! Who are you? What do you think you’re doing? Get out of my boat! And drop those things!”

Deeming did not turn. He put up his hands and stopped his ears like a little child in the birdhouse at the zoo.

“Out, I said!”

Deeming lifted the treasure in shaking hands, rumpling and spilling it. “Out!” barked the voice, and out he came, not attempting to pick anything up. He turned tiredly with his hands raised somewhat less than shoulder height, as if they were much, much too heavy for him.

He faced a hollow-cheeked, weather-beaten young man with the wide-set frosty eyes of Richard Rockhard. At his feet a cloth sack
lay where he had dropped it on seeing someone in his boat. In his hand, steady as an I-beam, rested a sonic disrupter aimed at Deeming’s midsection.

Deeming said, “Donald Rockhard.”

Rockhard said, “So?”

Deeming put down his hands, and croaked, “I’ve come to paint your belly blue.”

Rockhard was absolutely motionless for a long moment, and then as if they were operated from the same string, his gun arm slowly lowered while slowly his smile spread. “Well, damn me up and back!” he said. “Father sent you!”

“Man,” said Deeming exhaustedly, “I’m sure glad you ask questions first and shoot later.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t’ve shot you, whoever you were. I’m so glad to see another face that I … Who are you, anyway?”

Deeming told him his name. “Your father found out that when a boat like yours busts through the Angel’s death-field, it turns it inside out. Or some such. Anyway, if you’d coined out of here you never would have come down anywhere.”

Donald Rockhard looked up into the mad sky, paling. “You don’t say.” He wet his lips and laughed nervously. It was not a funny sound. “And now that you’ve come to tell me, how do you get out?”

“Don’t look at me like no hero,” said Deeming with the shade of a grin. “It’s only a matter of plugging in a new freak coil. That’s what I was doing when I bumped into all that cabbage. I know I had no business looking it over, but then how often do you bump into four million in negotiable good cash money?”

“Can’t blame you, at that,” Rockhard admitted. “I suppose you saw what else was in there.”

“I saw it.”

“The theory is that if you plan to go to Grebd, no living soul should know about it.”

Deeming glanced at the disrupter hanging from the young man’s hand. The hand was slack, but then, he hadn’t pulled the weapon away either. He said, “That’s up to you. Your father trusted me with the information, though; you ought to know that.”

“Well, all right,” said Rockhard. He put the gun away. “How is he?”

“Your father? Not so good. I’d say he needs you about now.”

“Needs me? Why, if I showed up in the same solar system and the Angels found out, it’d cost him.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” said Deeming. He told him what had happened to the old man’s towering structure of businesses. “Not that a lousy four million’d do much good.”

Rockhard bit his lip. “What do you think I could get for the card?”

Deeming closed his eyes. “That might help,” he nodded.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” said young Rockhard. “You finished with that coil?”

“Just got the old one out.”

“Finish it up, will you? I’ll just sort out one or two of these.” He dumped the contents of his sack on the ground and hunkered down over them.

“That what you’re looking for?” asked Deeming, going to his own boat for the coil.

The other snorted. “Who knows? They might be potsherds and then again they might be fossilized mud puddles. I’ll just take the best of ’em for analysis. You think archaeologists are crazy, Deeming?”

“Sure,” said Deeming from the other boat. “But then, I also think everybody’s crazy.” He lay belly down on the seat of Rockhard’s boat and began picking up money. He got it all and the card and stacked them neatly and slipped them into their packet. Rockhard glanced in at him.

“You taking some of that for yourself?”

Deeming shook his head. He put the packet on its shelf behind the coin rack. “I’ve been taken care of.” He got out of the boat.

Rockhard got in, and looked up over his shoulder at him. “You better take some. A lot.”

“I won’t be needing it,” said Deeming tiredly.

“You’re a funny guy, Deeming!”

“Yuk, yuk.”

“Will I see you again?”

“No.”

When Rockhard had no answer to that flat syllable Deeming said, “I’ll swing your canopy.” Under cover of reaching for the canopy, he got out his needler and concealed it in his sleeve, with the snout just protruding between the fingers of his closed fist. His little finger rested comfortably on the stud. He leaned on the fist, resting on the cowling right back of Rockhard’s ear.

He said, “Goodbye, Rockhard.”

Rockhard didn’t say anything.

Deeming stood for a long time looking down at the needler in a kind of dull astonishment.
Why didn’t I shoot?
Then, when Rockhard’s ship had flickered and gone, he let his shoulders hang and he slogged through the hot sand to his boat.

God he was tired.

“Why didn’t you shoot?”

Deeming stopped where he was, not even finishing a stride; one foot forward, the other back. Slowly he raised his head and faced the golden giant who leaned casually, smiling, against his boat.

Deeming took a deep breath and held it and let it out painfully. Then in a harsh flat voice he said, “By God, I can’t even say I’m surprised.”

“Take it easy,” said the Angel. ‘You’re going to be all right now.”

“Oh sure,” said Deeming bitterly. They’d scrape out his brains and fill his head with cool delicious yogurt, and he’d spend the rest of his placid life mopping out the Angels’ H.Q., wherever that might be. “Here,” he said, “I guess you won this fair and square,” and he tossed his needler to the Angel, who waved a negligent hand. The weapon ceased to exist in mid-air halfway between them. Deeming said, “You have a whole bag of tricks.”

“Sure,” said the Angel agreeably. “Why didn’t you shoot young Rockhard?”

“You know,” said Deeming, “I’ve been wondering about that myself. I meant to. I was sure I meant to.” He raised hollow, bewildered eyes to the Angel. “What’s the matter with me? I had it made, and I threw it away.”

“Tell me some more things,” said the Angel. “When you shot that
Angel on Ybo and he fell with his head underwater, why did you take the trouble to drag him out and stretch him on the bank?”

“I didn’t.”

“I saw you. I was right there watching you!”

“The hell you were,” said Deeming, looked at the Angel’s eyes, and knew that the Angel meant what he said. “Well, I—I don’t know. I just did it, that’s all.”

“Now tell me why you knocked out that girl with your fist instead of killing her and covering your tracks.”

“Her name was Tandy,” said Deeming reflectively. “That’s all I remember about it.”

“Let’s go way back,” said the Angel easily. “When you left old Rockhard’s place for an evening to clean up your affairs, you put a watch in a package and put it in the mail. Who’d you send it to?”