Chthon (9 page)

At first the device was not recognized as anything more than a perpetual-motion machine. It was bald and corpulent and tended to run around in circles while emitting angry squeals. An inquiry to Professor Feetle brought a furious suit for character assassination. Tested in space, it accelerated from an initial impetus of something less than an inch per second to something less than a foot per second in the course of an hour. During the second hour it attained a velocity several times as great. Eventually it caromed with such vigor that only instruments could track it. Finally it disappeared: although it had never left its self-determined orbit, it was gone.

Almost gone: the instruments picked up strange trace radiation—Cherenkov rays, the wake left by an impulse that exceeds the speed of light through a given medium. In this case the medium was a virtually perfect vacuum.

Professor Feetle withdrew his suit and took an active interest in his creation. But after that, the legend continued less benignly, censorship cast its mantle over the proceedings. It was rumored that the § device, once activated, drew its power from some unknown source—some power limitless in nature; that ships were constructed around large § devices and sent into some limbo that light itself was too coarse to penetrate; that not all of these ships returned; that there were malignant ghosts in far space, or nonspace.

Out of all this emerged the standard § ship; a full-sized vessel with a crew of thousands and a drive that could take it anywhere. Such a ship was the
Jocasta
; her velocity was governed by logarithmic ratio. The number of hours in which she accelerated could be taken as the exponent of that power of 10 required to express her speed in miles per hour. Thus when the ship’s § clock registered 2, it meant that the drive had been functioning for two hours and that the speed of the ship relative to her starting point was 10
²
, or one hundred miles per hour.

Oh, yes, Aton thought, as his capsule banked and spun, the § ships started slowly. But 8.83 on the ship’s clock was faster than the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. Thirteen on the clock represented a full light-year per hour, and 16 was the signal to begin deceleration, since the drive could not be disengaged while any number showed on the clock and higher speed would fling the ship out of the galaxy.

A day and a half, objective Earth time, could take such a ship anywhere in the galaxy.

The capsule slowed, bringing Aton’s mind back to practical matters. It pushed through the seal, re-entering normal pressure. His journey, whether of rods or of lightyears, was over.

Five

Captain Moyne was waiting impatiently for him. He had never met her before in person, but it was not possible to mistake her. She was a handsome woman of indeterminate age, sleek and severe in the merchant service uniform. Her lips were almost colorless; her hair was bound in a tight skullcap and hidden under her helmet. Her face showed no trace of the ravage of twenty-four years in space. She was cordially disliked by the crew: a dislike she cultivated assiduously.

Why was she alone? An emergency should have the officers of the ship Socking impotently about her. And what was she doing in an obscure cargo hold?

“Five,” she said without preamble. “Seven’s refrigerant has broken down. We have thirty minutes, no more.”

Aton followed her to the hold. “Captain, I think you ordered the wrong man. I’m a machinist.”

She broke open a locker with practiced competence and removed a set of space suits. “I have the right man.”

“Look, I can’t fix a cooling system with press and die—”

The Captain whirled and caught his shirt with a slender hand. She yanked the fastenings open, reached inside, flipped out a thin booklet hidden in an inside pocket. “Is this not an illegal copy of the ship’s lay roster?” she asked.

She had him. Prosecution on that score would net him two years in prison and a lifetime proscription against space employment. The lay roster of a merchant ship was a classified document.

“You’re the captain, Captain,” he said.

She flung a suit at him. “Put this on.”

He hesitated. His heavy coveralls would not fit inside the light suit.

The Captain caught his thought immediately. “Strip. We can’t spare the time for modesty.” Matching action to word, she stepped out of her own uniform, the scant underclothing revealing an astonishingly well-proportioned figure, and climbed efficiently into her space suit.

Aton followed, still uncertain what was to be required. She did not leave him long in doubt.

“Our margin may be twenty minutes, but we can’t take the chance. We’ve got to move this cargo in Seven over to Eight, where the cooling mechanism is functioning. We’ll work together as long as possible; then I’ll cover you with the hydrant. Don’t waste any time at all, but don’t shake up the caskets any more than necessary. Let’s get to work.”

“Cover me with the—
what’s in that hold?
”

She picked up one of the boxes and marched out of the room. “Turlingian Aphids.”

The box in his hands quivered as her meaning sank in. The Taphids! The eaters of spaceships!

Captain Moyne explained the situation in snatches as they worked. “They’re insects, grubs. Considered a delicacy on a number of planets. Have to be shipped live, but the low temperature keeps them in hibernation. When it warms, they begin feeding. First their own casing, then the cargo. Then anything else, including the crew. Can’t stop them; they’ll bore through metal, in time. Have to keep them cold and quiet. Clock’s at 13 now. We can’t bail out.”

That was a considerable understatement. It was not physically possible to leave a ship traveling beyond the speed of light. The outside universe simply did not exist for it. Five hours deceleration could drop them into sublight—if the hunger of the Taphids could wait that long. And the economic and political consequences—

“Is this a legal cargo?”

“Don’t be naïve. Why do you think I sent for you?”

Why, indeed. The Captain, it appeared, was a ruthless businesswoman. Strictly speaking, no interstellar commerce could be considered illegal, since no planet could enforce its laws beyond its immediate sphere of influence and no jurisprudence existed formally on a larger scale. But a certain body of common law had grown up and gained steadily in power, and individual policies were similar enough to encourage travel and trade, particularly among those planets which took pride in reputation. Sector law and the sector police force existed in name only; the idea of such power alarmed the fiercely independent colonies far more than that of criminal behavior.

But violation of the common-law code was apt to blacklist the offender on many prosperous worlds. No merchant ship could afford that. The Captain had reason for secrecy.

Half the caskets were moved without event. Then it began. The box Aton was carrying bulged. Pinpricks speckled the surface, then nail holes. His heavy gloves transmitted unmistakable motion from within; then horny white maggots spewed out. The Taphid menace had awakened.

Aton stared at the sandpaper-surfaced arthropods for a perilous moment, then dropped the box. It burst open immediately and foamed with slimy bodies. The maggots sensed him unerringly and advanced across the floor in a white wave.

“Faceplate!” the Captain snapped behind him. He fastened it barely in time; a stream of freezing foam was already on the way. She had turned the hydrant on him. Now he understood the reason for the suits. The foam would have killed him in minutes if it had caught him without protection.

The creatures on the floor curled and subsided, reflexing into hibernation. But already the remaining caskets were writhing. “Hurry!” the Captain’s voice came in his earphone, over the sigh of the suit’s air circulation. “I can only cover one at a time.”

His mind and body recoiled from the contact, but Aton understood too well the consequence of delay. He picked up the burst container and carried it into the refrigerated hold. The Captain stood in the doorway and sprayed him intermittently with foam, alternating with shots at the stacked boxes in Seven. The Taphid was not dangerous while frozen—but the margin was thin. If the hydrant failed—

Aton hurried. 

•    •    •

He cleaned up in the Captain’s apartments. He could not afford to be questioned about the nature of his duty at Hold Seven, and his uniform, forgotten in the rush, had been soaked in foam. There were also certain other matters to discuss before they parted company.

He emerged from the lavatory to discover the Captain reclining in a simple dress. Her hair was unbound and hung in dull-brown tresses. She looked young, too young to be capable of the nerve and power he had seen. Appearance was illusion; she was tough, and there was a battle to come. It would be fatal to let her pose undermine him.

Aton evaluated his assets: he had done her a service that could very well have saved the ship, and he had information that could force her resignation from the merchant service. But she was still the captain, with a captain’s powers, and had similar goods on him. Stalemate, unless one of them made a mistake. Or lost his nerve.

“Sit down, Aton,” she said, indicating a place on the couch beside her. Her voice was soft, almost musical. She was, he realized with a start, playing up to him. Was she in search of more than a handyman? Or had she coolly elected to use sex appeal to improve her position? What were her limits?

“The lay system,” she said, beginning the fencing, “is a most convenient method for the arrangement of equitable remuneration for the members of a merchant voyage.”

It was. The system had been borrowed from the practice of ancient whaling and sealing ships on old Earth. The members of the crew received, in lieu of pay, a certain share of the profits. Fiftieth lay represented one fiftieth of the total, and so on. Even a two-thousandth lay could come to an attractive figure, if the voyage was good. Every crewman had an interest in the economic welfare of the enterprise.

Aton nodded and applied the precept of best defense. “Shipment of Taphids must remunerate well indeed.”

She smiled. “The owners, of course, take second lay—half the profit.”

“What lay does the Taphid take?”

The Captain refused to give way. The
Jocasta’s
lays go on down to four-thousandth for the recruit crewman—”

“Two-thousandth, for experienced machinists,” Aton said, moving closer. “But sometimes there are hazardous duties—”

“Fractional lays have to be figured at every port—”

“And the refrigeration checked—”

“In case a crewman resigns and demands his share—”

“Or his next-of-kin demands it—”

Her eyes were gray, almost green. “Therefore the lay roster is a comprehensive manual identifying every person on the ship.”

“And all legal cargo.” Her hair seemed brighter, coppery.

“Possession by unauthorized persons is felonious—”

“As is shipment of the maggot,” Aton finished.

Her lips were firm and close. “However—” she said.

Aton kissed her.

He moved into it shrewdly, conscious of his power over this woman, prepared to complete the tacit understanding by whatever token was required. He knew that something more than mutual liability was in order; neither one could allow the other to go forth with damning intent. But this was no more than the intellectual machination of survival. On the emotional level his heart was weighed by the disappointing search for the minionette—if, indeed, she existed as such. The Captain interested him only as a complication, not as a woman.

But a strange fire took him as his lips touched hers. What had been calculated art became guileless reality. He wanted her as the woman.

She twisted free. “Why did you do it?” she asked.

Aton suppressed the frustration of sudden rejection and chose to interpret the question as business. “The lay roster? Call it the same reason you smuggle Taphids.” The debate had no interest for him now. He was angry, angry that he could be aroused and cut off so readily. But what he had said to her was the truth: their understanding did not require that their deeper motives be advertised. The two of them had a balance of a sort. It had to remain.

She leaned toward him, applying the lure again. What was the matter with her? He had to admit it was effective; already the yearning for her was reappearing. This was no woman to trifle with. He had never been subjected to such a campaign, never been susceptible to it. He declined to play the game, this time; he would not kiss her again.

“What is it that you wear,” she asked, “in your hair?” There was a slight pause in her question that disturbed him. She had been intending to say something else, or perhaps to say it in a different way. He had assumed that the slight affectation in her speech was a function of rank—but she was not playing Captain with him now, and it remained.

He took down the plant. “This is my hvee. It lives on air and love—its love for its companion. If it were to be taken from me, it would die.”

She lifted it from his hand. “I have heard of the hvee fable,” she murmured, studying it. “Charming.”

Again Aton was angry, unreasonably. He had thought the Taphid a fable, until this day. It was not surprising that others did not give credence to the unique property of the hvee. “I’ll demonstrate,” he said, taking it back. He set it on a table across the cabin and stepped back.

The hvee held its bloom for a moment. Then its leaves began to wilt. Aton returned quickly and picked it up, and strength came back to it, making the plant green and fresh and whole again. “No fable.”

The Captain’s eyes were bright. “What an enchanting liaison,” she said. “Your mother gave it to you.”

Aton’s jaw tightened. “No.”

She touched his hand, smiling. “I hurt you.”

“No!” But beneath her understanding gaze, he felt the need to justify himself.

“My father,” he said, “married a girl of the Family of Ten. She lived with him two years, and the hvee flourished as never since. She was kind and she was loving and she died in childbirth.”