Andre Norton (ed) (25 page)

Cusat, stretched out on the sand nearby, opened
one eye to look at her. "Dream on, little one!" he muttered and let
the eye fall shut again.

The
others were off on another subject. There had been an alien awareness, Grevan
gathered, which had followed the five swimmers about in the water. Not a hostile
one, but one that wondered about them—recognized them as a very strange sort of
new life, and was somewhat afraid. "They were thinking they were so
very—edible!" Eliol said and laughed. "Perhaps they knew the swim was
making us hungry! Anyway they kept warning one another to stay out of our
sight!"

"Plankton eaters," Lancey added
lazily, "but apparently very fast swimmers. Anyone else get anything on
them?"

"Cave
builders," said Freckles, from behind Weyer, only a few feet from Grevan.
She propped herself up on an elbow to point across the fire.
"That
big drop-off to the west!
They've tunneled it out below the surface. I
don't think they're phosphorescent themselves, but they've got some method of
keeping light in the caves. Bacterial, possibly—
And
they
cultivate some form of plankton inside."

"Sounds
as if they might be intelligent enough to permit direct contact," Grevan
remarked, and realized in the moment of silence that followed that it must have
been an hour since he'd last said a word.

"They're easily that," Freckles
agreed. Her small face, shaded by the rather shapeless white hat she favored,
turned to him. "If Klim hadn't been cooking, I'd have called her to give
it
a
try. I was afraid of frightening them off
myself."

"I'll
do it tomorrow," promised Klim, who had much the deftest touch of them all
for delicate ambassadorial work.

There
was another pause then—it might have been the word "tomorrow."

"Going
to make contact tomorrow, Grevan?" Freckles inquired in a light, clear
voice, as if it had just occurred to her.

"Unless," nodded
Grevan, "somebody has a better idea."

It
seemed nobody did until Muscles grumbled: "It's CG who's likely to have
the ideas. If it were up to me, I'd just smash that set, tonight!"

Grevan
looked at him thoughtfully. "Anybody else feel the same way?"

They shook their heads. "You go ahead,
Grevan." That was Weyer's calm voice. "We'll just see what happens.
Think there's a chance of jolting any worth-while information out of them at
this stage?"

"Not
if they're on guard," Grevan admitted. "But I think it will be safest
for us if we're right there when it dawns on CG that this Exploration Group has
resigned from its service! And it might prod them into some kind of informative
reaction—"

"Well,
I still think," Muscles began, looking worriedly at Klim, "that we .
. . oh, welll"

"Vote's eight to one," Klim said
crisply.

"I know it,"
growled Muscles and shut up.

The
rest seemed to have become disinterested in the matter again—a flock of not
quite human cubs, nearly grown and already enormously capable of looking out
for themselves. They'd put themselves into the best possible position to face
the one enemy they'd never been able to meet on his own ground.

And until things started happening, they
weren't going to worry about them.

A few of them had drifted off to the beach
below, when Grevan saw Klim stop beside Cusat and speak to him. Cusat opened
both eyes and got to his
feet,
and Klim followed him
over to Grevan.

"Klim thinks Albert is
beginning to look puny again," Cusat announced. "Probably nothing
much to it, but how about coming along and helping us diagnose?"

The
Group's three top biologists adjourned to the ship, with Muscles, whose
preferred field was almost-pure mathematics, trailing along just for company.
They found Albert II quiescent in vitro—as close a thing to a self-restoring
six-foot sirloin steak as ever had been developed.

"He's
quite assimilating, and he's even a shade off-color," Klim pointed out, a
little anxiously.

They
debated his requirements at some length. As a menu staple, Albert was hard to
beat; but unfortunately he was rather dainty in his demands. Chemical balances,
temperatures, radiations, flows of stimulant and nutritive currents—all had to
be just so; and his notions of what was just so were subject to change without
notice. If they weren't catered to regardless, he languished and within the
week perversely died. At least, the particular section of him that was here
would die. As an institution, of course, he might go on growing and nourishing
his Central Government clients immortally.

Muscles might have been of help in working
out the delicate calculations involved in solving Albert's current problems;
but when they looked round for him, they found him blinking at a steady flow of
invisible symbols over one wall of the tank room, while his lips moved in a
rapid, low muttering; and they knew better than to interrupt. He had gone off
on impromptu calculations of his own, from which he would emerge eventually
with some useful bit of information or other; though ten to one it would have
nothing to do with Albert. Meanwhile, he would be grouchy and useless if roused
to direct his attention to anything below the level of an emergency.

They reset the currents finally and, at
Cusat's suggestion, trimmed Albert around the edges. Finding himself growing
lighter, he suddenly began to absorb nourishment again at a very satisfactory
rate.

"That did it, I guess," Cusat said
pleased. He glanced at the small pile of filets they'd sliced off. "Might
as well have a barbecue now—"

"Run along and get it started,"
Grevan suggested. "I'll be with you as soon as I get Albert buttoned
up."

Klim
regarded Muscles reflectively. "Just nudge my genius awake when you're
ready to come," she instructed Grevan. "He looks so happy right now I
don't want to disturb him—"

It was some minutes later, while Grevan was
carefully tightening down a seal valve, that Muscles suddenly yawned and
announced: "Thirty-seven point oh two four hours! Checks either way, all
right, boss. Say—where's Klim gone?"

"Down
to the beach, I suppose." Grevan didn't look up. He could find out later
what Muscles was referring to. "Drowned dead by now, for all you seem to
care!" he added cruelly.

Muscles
left in the perturbed hurry that was his normal reaction to the discovery that
Klim had strayed out of sight; and Grevan continued buttoning up Albert,
undistracted by further mathematical mutterings. The cubs had finished sorting
themselves out a year or so ago, and who was to be whose seemed pretty well
settled by now. There had been a time when he'd thought it would have been a
nice gesture on CG's part to have increased their membership by a double for
Klim or Eliol or Vernet or Freckles—depending more or less on which of them he
was looking at at the moment—though preferably somebody three or four years
older. Of late, however, he had developed some plans of his own for rounding
out the Group. If the question of getting and staying beyond CG's range could
be satisfactorily settled-He shrugged off an uncomfortably convincing notion
that any plans he might consider had been discounted long ago by the branch of
Central Government which had developed the Group for its own purpose.
Speculative eyes seemed to be following every move he made as he wished Albert
pleasant dreams and a less temperamental future, closed the door to the tank
room and went to the ramp. Halfway down it, he stopped short. For an endless
second, his heart seemed to turn over slowly and, just as slowly then, to come
right side up again.

The
woman
who stood at the foot of the ramp, looking up at him, was someone he knew—and
he also knew she couldn't possibly be there! The jolting recognition was
almost crowded out by a flash of hot fright: obviously she wasn't really there
at all. At a distance of thirty feet, the starlight never could have showed him
Priderell's pale-ivory face so clearly—or the slow stirring of her long, clever
dancer's body under its red gown, and the sheen of the short red cloak she wore
over it, clasped at her throat by a stone's green glitter.

Afterwards, Grevan could not have said how
long he stood there with his thoughts spinning along the edge of sheer panic.
In actual time it might have been a bare instant before he became aware of
a-familiar distant voice:

"Hey, boss!
Grevan!"

The sound seemed tiny and very far away. But
he heard himself make some kind of an answer and suddenly realized then that
the image had vanished.

"Do you want barbecued Albert, or don't
you?" Klim shouted again from the direction of the fire. T can't keep
these pigs away from your share much longer!"

He drew a deep breath.
"Coming right now!"

But it was another minute or two before he
showed himself at the fire, and he had arranged his thoughts carefully into
other lines before he did. The cubs couldn't actually tell what he was
thinking—unless he made a deliberate effort to let them; and they weren't too
accurate then—but they were very quick to trace the general trend and coloring
of one's reflections.

And his reflections had been that his
visualization of Priderell might have been something more than some momentary
personal derangement. That it might be the beginning of a purposefully directed
assault on the fortress of the Group's sanity, backed by a power and knowledge
that laughed at their hopes of escape.

Fortunately
his companions seemed to feel that the barbecue had been exactly the right way
of ending the day. A short while later they were stretched out on blankets here
and there in the sand, fully relaxed and asleep, as far as Grevan could see,
though never more than that small fraction of a second away from complete and
active wakefulness which experienced travelers learn to regard as the margin
that leaves them assured of awakening at all.

But Grevan sat aside for a while, and looked
out at the sea and the stars.

There were a lot of stars to look at around
here, and big ones. They had come within twenty-eight light-years of the center
of a globular cluster near the heart of the Milky Way, where, so far as they
knew, no humanly manned ship had ever gone before. In every direction the skies
were hung, depth on depth, with the massed frozen flows of strange
constellations. Somewhere, in that huge shining, four small moons wandered
indistinguishably— indistinguishable, at any rate, if you didn't know just
where to look for them, and Grevan hadn't bothered to find out.

Something stirred softly,
off to his left.

"Hello,
Freck," he said quietly. "Come to help me plot against CG?"

The four little moons couldn't have raised a
tide in a barrel between them; but there was a big one at work below the horizon,
and water had crept in to cover the flat stretches of shore. By now it was
lapping at the base of the higher rocks that bordered their camp area.
Freckles sat on the edge of one of the rocks, a few yards off, the white hat
pushed to the back of her head and her feet dangling over the ripples below.

"Just
being companionable," she said. "But if you think you need any help
in your plotting, fire awayl
This
is one place where
CG couldn't possibly have its long ears stuck out to listen."

He played for a moment then with the notion
of telling her about his green-eyed hallucination.
Freckles
was the Group's unofficial psychologist.
The youngest and smallest of
the lot, but equipped with what was in some ways the boldest and most subtle
mind of them all. The secret experiments she had conducted on herself and the
others often had put Grevan's hair on end; but the hard-won reward of that
rocky road of research had been the method of dealing effectively with CG's
restraints.

"What kind of psychological
triggers," he said instead, "could CG still pull on us out here—aside
from the ones we know?"

Freckles
chuckled. "You're asking the wrong kind of question."

He frowned a little, that
being one of his pet phrases.

"All
right," he said. "Then do you think we might still be carrying around
a few compulsions that we simply don't remember?"

"No," Freckles said promptly.
"You can install things like that in ordinary-human, because they're half
asleep to start with. I've done it myself. But you'd have to break any one of
us
down almost
to
mindless-controlled before you
could knock out our memory to that extent. We wouldn't be much good to CG afterwards."