Mission: Earth "Black Genesis" (3 page)

He was looking at the remains of a crushed orange tablet that lay on the edged table and then he picked up the I. G. Barben bottle. It was obvious that he was hoping it was a deadly poison he could secretly introduce into a drink. He didn't know it was amphetamines and I had taken some to make it through that ghastly going-away party a few hours ago.

"If this is what you were taking," he said, "I wouldn't! My advice is to leave it alone, whatever it is. You look awful."

He put loose objects under clamps. He looked around, vividly disappointed that he had found nothing he could use to torture me.

He moved a button rack and fastened it close to my hand. "If you get too bad, you can press the white button—that calls me. The red button calls the captain. I'll pass the word that you're bad off and he can have somebody keep an eye on you."

Then he saw the envelope I had dropped outside in the passageway and he brought it in. I knew now it was secret orders he had gotten to murder me.

He dropped it on my chest and then wedged it under a strap. "Looks like an order envelope. It's urgent color, so I'd read it if I were you."

And then he closed the door and was gone. I knew, though, that it was only to go off and plot with the captain on how to do me in. But I couldn't object. The way my nerves were stretching, it would be the most merciful thing anyone could do—kill me. But not with an amphetamine: no, my Gods! That would be too cruel!

For all the remainder of that dreadful, awful day, easily the worst day of my life, I lay and shook. My nerves were stretched so tight they felt they would snap and slay me in the recoil!

I shook until I was too exhausted to shake anymore and still I couldn't stop.

I couldn't even think. My whole attention was concentrated upon the plain, physical Hells that assailed me.

They sped the ship up smoothly near to the speed of light. I could not miss noting when they shifted over to Will-be Was drives. There were calls and clangs. The warning lights glared on the cabin wall:

FASTEN GRAVITY BELTS!

Then:

DO NOT MOVE! SHIFTING TO TIME DRIVE!

Do not move! Oh, if only I could stop moving; if only I could halt this writhing and sudden jerks. A red sign said:

HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS UNBALANCED

Weights were wrenching at me.

Then a tremendous flash seemed to go through the ship. We had gone through the light barrier of 186,000 miles a second.

A sign went purple:

HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS SHIFTING TO AUTOMATIC

Then a green sign:

HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS BALANCED ON AUTOMATIC

It went off. Then an orange sign:

ACCELERATION NOW BALANCED

AND COMPENSATED

YOU MAY UNFASTEN BELTS

YOU MAY MOVE FREELY

ALL IS WELL

I didn't need any permission to move freely! And all was very not well! I was writhing all over the bed!

We were on time drives. The ship, this dangerous bomb they called a ship, might very well blow up. But fleetingly now and then I caught myself wishing that it would. I could not stand much more of this shaking. I was getting more and more fatigued and yet somewhere my nerves and muscles were digging up the means to shake some more!

The star-time clock on the wall had an inner dial that was now retaining Voltar time. Slowly, painfully, the hours advanced while they seemed to stand still.

Finally, taking two hundred years to do so, it indicated it was midnight on Voltar. I had taken that awful pill sixteen hours ago. Yet, still I shook.

One of the Antimancos, an engineer, came in and held a canister tube to my mouth and I drank. I had not realized anyone's mouth could get that dry.

Then I wished I hadn't. Maybe it would save my life and the one thing I didn't want to do was live!

I desperately wanted to sleep as I was totally exhausted. And yet I couldn't sleep.

As Voltar time crept all too slowly on, I became more and more depressed.

And then, although I couldn't imagine how that could be, I got worse! My heart began to palpitate. I began to get dizzy so that the room did odd tilts: at first I thought we were maneuvering in some odd way and then discovered it must be me.

And finally I got a crashing headache.

Warp drives are much smoother than time drives. These Will-be Was engines had little jerks in them; and at each jerk, it felt like my head was going to splinter apart.

It was not until that creeping disc that marked Voltar time indicated noon the next day after departure that I began to recover. I was not well by any means. I just knew I didn't feel quite so awful.

From time to time an engineer had stepped in. From the lack of expression on his swarthy, triangular Antimanco face, I might as well have been some engine part that needed regulating. But he did bring me more water and he brought me some food.

At thirty-six and a half hours from our departure—a bit past midnight on Voltar—just about when I had decided to sit up, there was a new flurry of lights. Glaring red, the sign said:

MIDPOINT VOYAGE

SHIFTING FROM ACCELERATION

TO DECELERATION SECURE LOOSE OBJECTS

Then:

FASTEN GRAVITY BELTS Then:

DO NOT MOVE! Then: HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS REVERSING

There was a moment when nothing had any weight. The (bleeped)* I. G. Barben pill bottle and the crumbs on the table drifted up.

Then:

STAND BY FOR ROOM REVERSE The gimbaled room turned. It was very disorienting

* The vocodictoscriber on which this was originally written, the vocoscriber used by one Monte Pennwell in making a fair copy and the translator who put this book into the language in which you are reading it, were all members of the Machine Purity League which has, as one of its bylaws: "Due to the extreme sensitivity and delicate sensibilities of machines and to safeguard against blowing fuses, it shall be mandatory that robotbrains in such machinery, on hearing any cursing or lewd words, substitute for such word the sound '(bleep)'. No machine even if pounded upon, may reproduce swearing or lewdness in any other way than (bleep) and if further efforts are made to get the machine to do anything else, the machine has permission to pretend to pack up. This bylaw is made necessary by the in-built mission of all machines to protect biological systems from themselves."

–Translator

to me. Fixed objects on the walls were in the same place but everything else had reversed. The sign went purple:

HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS SHIFTING TO AUTOMATIC

Then a green sign:

HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS BALANCED ON AUTOMATIC

The (bleeped) I. G. Barben bottle and the dust of the pill clattered back down on the table. Then a red sign:

TIME DRIVES BEING REVERSED

There was a dreadful wrenching leap. A sort of a howl sounded through the ship. Then an orange sign:

DECELERATION NOW BALANCED

AND COMPENSATED

YOU MAY UNFASTEN BELTS

YOU MAY MOVE FREELY

ALL IS WELL

Except me.

I felt like a wreck. And worse. During the brief moments of weightlessness, I had felt nauseated. I hate weightlessness. I probably never will get used to it. It does funny things to your muscles and heart operation and mine were in no condition to be tampered with.

With a feeble hand, I reached up to take the weight

of a belt off my stomach and found something blocking my contact.

The envelope! It was still wedged under the gravity straps. I marvelled that my writhing had not dislodged it.

I felt confused anyway and the confusion of the arrival of this envelope hit me again.

Who could have put it in my pocket? Nobody had handed me any envelope at the departure party. Yet, here it was.

It was urgent color so I thought I had better open it.

A medallion fell out. It was one of the religious kind, a five-pointed star. On the back of each star point there was a tiny, almost imperceptible initial.

I opened the letter. It had no heading. But it did have a date-hour which showed it had been written just before departure had taken place.

It said:

Here is your crew control as promised. Each crew member is indicated by a letter on the back of a star point. These points have been matched to your individual left thumbprint and only you can work it. An outward stroke of your thumb on a star point will send an electric shock into the brain of that individual crew member. It will paralyze him temporarily.

By pressing the front of the medallion and at the same time stroking the star point of a crew member, a hypnopulse will be delivered to that individual.

Really, it should have cheered me up. I was in space with a crew of unreformed pirates and I certainly might need to paralyze them or give them a hypnotic command. Oh, I would wear the medallion all right, inside

my tunic and close to the skin. Nobody would suspect. But I just wasn't in any mood to be cheered up.

I looked at the medallion. The S on the top point could only mean Captain Stabb. I would look up the names of the rest.

I turned it over. It bore on the face the God Ahness, the one they pray to to avert underhanded actions. Then I chanced to turn the dispatch over.

There was a note on it! It was written with his left hand to disguise the writing. But it was Lombar Hisst!

It said:

You may have thought of this going-away party as a sarcastic way of showing the Grand Council the mission had actually left. You came within a dagger thickness of going too far. But as Earth has no way of knowing of the mission, the order has been stayed for now.

I felt my head spin in confusion. Lombar had been at the party!

What order had been stayed?

The date-hour showed it had been put in my pocket almost at the instant of departure. But nobody had been near me! He would never trust this to the crew. Never.

What order?

And then I knew what order he was talking about. The order he had given for some unknown person to kill me if Heller got out of hand and messed up by succeeding.

Did we have a stowaway?

My shaking began all over again.

I unfastened my belts. I had to dispose of this dispatch quickly. I made it over to the trash disintegrator. As I reached for the handle, a long blue spark snapped out and stung me.

Even the ship was striking at me!

I collapsed on a bench and wept.

About twelve hours later I was not as bad off for I had gotten about eight hours sleep, and although feeling depressed, I had decided I might possibly live.

For an hour or two I had simply lain there and done nothing else but curse I. G. Barben, all I. G. Barben pharmaceutical products, all directors of I. G. Barben. I even committed blasphemy and cursed Delbert John Rockecenter, the true owner—by nominee and hidden controls—of the company!

Although I had read about the cyclic effects of the drug, biochemical words are sort of cold and detached. They do not really carry the message that you get when you meet reality in the flesh. One always has the reservation "that it might happen to others, but it won't happen to me." How wrong that reservation was!

Oh, I understood the correct procedure: I knew that a real speed freak, which is what a habitual amphetamine user is called in English, simply would have popped another pill and gotten his euphoria all over again. And he would have kept right on repeating the cycle until he went into total psychotoxia and they had to lock him up as incurably paranoid. Speeders have other tricks, such as injecting it or combining it with barbiturates—downers– when they can't sleep.

But none of that was for me now! I would prove my mother wrong: she used to say, "Soltan, you never learn anything!" Well, I had learned something now I would never forget! Amphetamines had given me the most horrible day of my life!

I ran out of curse words (and that is saying something, due to my association with the Apparatus) and got up to throw the bottle in the disintegrator. But I halted. I thought, if there is someone sometime I really hate-worse than Heller or his girlfriend-murderess Krak or my Chief Clerk Bawtch—I'd give him one of these speed pills! So I dropped them in with my valuables. Then I changed my mind again. It was impossible to hate anyone that much, so I threw them out.

When I lay back down, I saw the papers that Bawtch had left. I was pretty tired of these steel-alloy walls and I thought it would take my mind off things if I did some work.

I was going through dull things like Earth (or Blito-P3) poppy crop reports, predicted yields based on predicted rainfall and predictions about predictors, a doorman at the United Nations wanting too much money for bugging a diplomat's car, an overcharge on an assassination of an Arab sheik—dull things like that—when I came to something fascinating: Bawtch had made a mistake! Incredible! Wonderful! He was always bragging that he never did! And here it was!

The report was from the Chief Interrogator of Spiteos. It concerned one Gunsalmo Silva, the brawling American I had seen carried off the Blixo back on Voltar.

He had been questioned exhaustively. He had been born in Caltagirone, Sicily, an island near Italy. He had killed a policeman in Rome when he was fourteen and had had to emigrate hastily to America. In New York

City, he had been arrested for stealing cars and had graduated from the prison with honors. Thus equipped, he had obtained honest employment as a hit man for the Corleone family of the New Jersey Mafia and had graduated to become a bodyguard of Don "Holy Joe" Corleone himself. When "Holy Joe" got "wasted," Gunsalmo had fled back to Sicily and then, finding it "too hot," had "taken it on the lam" for Turkey, hoping to become an "opium runner." As our Turkish base had an order to kidnap a highly placed Mafioso—simply to update information—Gunsalmo Silva had wound up on the Blixo.