Screaming Science Fiction (18 page)

END NOTE:—

With a population in excess of eight billion, Sol III has to be recognized as a major Haquari food source. Automated farming is not only feasible but practical, and in the light of the accelerating decline in sustainable home world resources, I recommend this world’s immediate exploitation. Under modern, managed farming procedures—processing bone as fertilizer and undesirable protein as provender for the livestock, etc.—we should enjoy at least two hundred years usage before the source of this par-ticularly nutritious comestible is exhausted….

This Being the Pronouncement of Ak’n N’Ghar XXVII,

Exobioecologist of Haquar Prime, 2731st Parallel,

on the 7138th Day of the 2nd Haquari Billennium.

I

Down in the cargo hold, Grint Pavanaz let himself out of his crate, ate a sandwich and hooked up his ’Vader to the nearest power point. An hour later and halfway through his tenth game, a hatch clanged open and crewmen came clattering with blasters drawn and primed. And they dragged him in front of Captain Cullis. The Captain—bald, fat, red-faced—was more than somewhat peeved and threatened to turn Pavanaz into flotsam. “What if we’d stowed that crate in vacuum?” he snapped through his gash of a mouth.

“You couldn’t.” Pavanaz shrugged. “I paid seven creds for that air-storage sticker.”

“Oh?” Cullis snorted. “And every air-storage sticker gets stored in air, right? Let me tell you something, Puffernuts: sometimes we vacuum
all
of our crates to kill off the roaches! Especially coming off a swamp like Gizzich IV. And sometimes we irradiate ’em too, and decon before delivery!”

Pavanaz was unrepentant; he shrugged again and said: “Wow!” but very dryly. “You irradiate seeds, yeah? And you vacuum temperate atmosphere tools? Well no wonder your freighters have a better than fifty percent ‘damaged in transit’ record!”

“Twenty-two percent on this ship, Puffernuts!” The Captain was touchy. “Or twenty-two point zero one if we jettison you!”

“Naw.” Pavanaz picked his nose. “See, I dropped a line to Earth to let people know I was coming—and aboard which scow. Also, I researched this bucket. I discovered you run a tight ship, Captain—so no more horror stories about spacing your passengers and such. Hell, you run
such
a tight ship you even monitor internal power drain! It’s how you found me: the juice my ’Vader was burning.”

“Your what?” the Captain scowled. And Pavanaz explained.

When he was through they went back down to storage and examined his machine. Pavanaz glowed. “She was the latest thing in Ozzie’s Arcade back on Gizzich IV. But at a centricred a shot you could go broke getting yourself a decent score. So I entered Ozzie’s place kind of late one night and sort of, well, rearranged the wiring. Fixing these things was my job, see—or in this case, unfixing them. So Ozzie sent for me the next day and I checked her out, and told him: “No way—she’s a goner—computer’s cracked.” He sold her to me for scrap.

“I put her right, added a few tricks, played till my fingers went flat. It took time, but now I’m the best there is.”

What Pavanaz didn’t say was that Ozzie had called round his place a week later and found him playing the machine. He’d flared up, likewise Pavanaz; somehow the latter’s razor-edged knife had contrived to cut the Arcade King’s throat. Living at the edge of one of Gizzich IV’s biggest swamps, it was no big deal. Ozzie had gone down slow but sure in a mile of mud.

The odds against anyone tagging Grint Pavanaz as a killer were in the seven figures bracket, but he’d panicked anyway. He stole a little money, crated the machine, paid for its passage to Earth, then climbed in the crate with the ’Vader….

The 1st Mate snapped his fingers. “The Game Show!” he said. “The big TV tournament, coming in three months’ time. While they watch, twenty-five billion kids match their skills alongside the best in the Federation.”

Pavanaz grinned, blew on his fingernails and polished them on his shirt.

“Is that what this is about?” said the Captain. “You stowed away to Earth to play games?”

“October, 2482,” said Pavanaz. “Eliminations for a month, the quarter- and semi-finals played off on the 29th, finally the Big Game on the 30th. I shall be there, gentlemen…you are looking at the new champion. A million creds in it, a half-million for the runner-up, and a quarter-million for—”

“We get the picture,” the Captain cut him short. “So you’re that good, eh? Care to show us?”

“Sure,” said Pavanaz. “Want to make a small wager?”

Pavanaz was a skinny twenty-one-year-old. Less meat than a mantis, short-cropped black hair that wouldn’t fall into his eyes when he played, fingers like a pianist, and a razor-honed mind. And a slant to his mouth that told of a special sort of cynicism. A brilliant kid, thought the Captain. Most kids were these days, but all wasted. In all the entire list of charted, settled systems there wasn’t enough real work to go round. Oh, plenty of farming out on the new frontiers, lots of dirty fingernail jobs, but nothing for one like Pavanaz. Except one chance in a million that he’d make a million and retire to one of the resort worlds. Cullis was more or less right, that was all Pavanaz wanted: a million credits, a beach and the latest model ’Vader. The problem was, he didn’t care how he got them. Cullis did care, but he was saving it for later.

Pavanaz climbed into the bouncing, swiveling bucket-seat of his machine and sat there with his eyes closed for a couple of seconds. ’Vaders had been around for five hundred years and more. At first they were expensive toys, then trainers for pilots on Mother Earth, finally trainers for pilots off the Earth. For when men moved out into space and found the Khuum waiting, the ’Vaders had been given a new lease on life; but updated, faster, full of tricks that the kids of the late 20th Century never even dreamed of. Trainers, yes—for the guys who lived through, died in, and at last won the Khuum wars. Since when, what with virtual reality and all, they’d evolved, and evolved, and….

“You gone to sleep, kid?” said the Captain. Pavanaz opened his eyes, switched her on, and showed them who was asleep. They didn’t have the con, but they could look round him and cop some of the excitement. And his game was exciting, indeed inspired, a virtuoso performance. Wraparound 3D made it as close to real as possible, and Pavanaz played it that way: no longer a skinny kid but a fighter pilot out among the stars, on patrol, searching for the enemy.

Out there in deep space his hands, eyes and brain were like parts of the computer he controlled, or half-controlled. No one ever “won” one of these games; the machine won; the idea was to last longer than anyone else and rack up a higher score. For no matter how many of the enemy you destroyed, the computer would conjure up bigger, faster, more powerful Khuum ships. The big ones carried the highest score, but before you could reach
them
you had to kill off all the small-fry who were trying hard to kill you! So in fact you played yourself, because your skill governed the strength of your opponent: the harder you fought, the greater the machine’s efforts against you.

A fleet of Khuum was out there; they spotted Pavanaz and began to pivot; he was into and through them, killing them off fore and aft, port and starboard. They were no match for him. He looked for bigger fish and found sharks! Behind the scattering fleet, a dozen highly conjectural vessels with all the regular Khuum tricks and then some, turned their needle snouts on him. Pavanaz launched into them, zigzagged to avoid their beams, set his bucket-seat fishtailing. Strapped in, he somehow ignored the motion to concentrate on the game in hand.

At first surprised, the aliens burst asunder, blew up in mad blasts of light and sound which were real enough to add to the reality, quickly threw up their shields. Pavanaz discharged shield-scramblers, following up with Takka Beams that homed on the scramblers, like iron filings to a magnet. And once through the disrupted alien screens, then they homed in on the ships. Pavanaz sliced through debris aware that the Khuum had regrouped and were hot on his littered trail.

His score mounted on the monitor; he dripped sweat till his clothes stuck to him; his hands moved like crazed spiders over the controls. The din of exploding ships was deafening as their beams crept ever closer. Pavanaz’s score went up and the computer compensated. A Khuum battle-cruiser swam into view, and behind it a carrier launching mines and missiles. Pavanaz tripped into hyperspace, burned the cruiser with his exhaust, threw all power to his screens and deflected the carrier’s hypermissiles. He tripped back into normal space and found his screen full of heavy metal! The carrier was dead ahead! No one had
ever
taken out a carrier before!

Pavanaz hit all of his firing buttons simultaneously and chewed a passage right through the carrier’s belly. All around him, white and yellow light blazed like the heart of hell; his earphones were full of the scream of metal warping out of existence; disintegrating debris blinded him…so that he didn’t even see the whirling, buckled girder that smashed his cockpit and ended the game….

His bucket-seat stopped gyrating; Pavanaz hung limp, drenched over the controls; the scoreboard was alive with flashing lights, and his score was 4,202,786.

“Phew!” said the 1st Mate. “Here, let me try.”

“You?” Pavanaz got down, steadied himself against a bulkhead. “You have hands like…like plates of meat!”

“Kid,” the 1st Mate glowered, “I was doing it for real when you were navigating a hole in your Ma’s tights!” He got aboard, switched on, lasted seventeen point three seconds before being blown to hell. His score was 21,002. Which didn’t say much for his war stories. The others didn’t do nearly so well, and Captain Cullis got the lowest score of all. Pavanaz sniggered somewhat, which wasn’t a good move.

“Pav,” said the Captain, “I think you could win.”

“Tell me about it,” said Pavanaz.

“But you won’t, ’cos you’re not going to Earth. Not on my ‘scow,’ anyway.”

Pavanaz looked uneasy, said, “You don’t scare me, Captain. I checked you out. You’ve made a round trip, visited a dozen worlds, picked up cargoes all destined for Earth. Your ETA is end of August, which gives me a month to enter the competition and catch up on current innovations. So…you must mean you’ll hand me over, charge me with being a stowaway. And you know what next? It will take at least three months to bring me to trial, and by then I’ll be the champion. Runner-up at worst. All the worlds love a winner, and you can buy an awful lot of freedom with half a million creds!”

“That’s your other big problem,” Captain Cullis told him. “Next to being full of shit, you don’t listen too good. Let’s try it again. I said: you’re–not–going–to–Earth.”

Pavanaz’s upper lip twitched. “I don’t follow you.”

“Exactly: you won’t follow me. Not from Shankov’s World!”

Shankov’s World, reputed to be one of the wettest planets in the Federation! It lay close by, along the route home. Pavanaz licked suddenly dry lips, shook his head, said, “Eh? But you’re fully loaded. Your manifesto doesn’t say anything about picking stuff up on Shankov’s World.”

“Who mentioned cargo?” The 1st Mate was all wide-eyed innocence.

Pavanaz glanced slack-jawed at him, then back at the Captain who told him: “You may know your fighters and your Khuum, and all the rest of the computer-generated junk in there.” He sneered at the invader. “But you’re not too hot on these big haulers, are you.” It was a statement not a question.

“Shankov’s?” Pavanaz shook his head again, a little desperately now. “Why would you want to put me down on…” The truth hit him like a thunderbolt. “Fuel!”

The 1st Mate nodded. “Show us a computer that can generate that stuff, you won’t need to play in the games tournament!”

“Meanwhile.” The captain grinned. “We’re just a day out from Shankov’s—and you’re in the brig!” As Pavanaz was led stumbling away, he added: “And kid—I hope you like rain….”

II

Pavanaz didn’t like rain.

Shankov’s World was nine-tenths water. Its sun spent its time sucking water up from one half of the planet and dumping it on the other. When it wasn’t raining it was misty, and vice versa. The other thing Shankov’s World had lots of was lowlife. And fish. Drop a bent pin in the water on Shankov’s, you’d pull out a fish. Put a small piece of something edible on the hook, the water would boil!

Because the living was easy, Shankov’s attracted bums and riffraff. The rich riffraff had greenhouses with solariums and swimming pools and rarely came out, and the bums lived how they could. The young of both sets frequented the area in the vicinity of the spaceport, where “the action” was, and a good many of them played ’Vaders. Pavanaz wasn’t through yet. There were kids here with creds, and his face wasn’t known like back on Gizzich IV. Customs passed him as Human; he paid Visitor’s Tax and a returnable import fee on his ’Vader, borrowed a fork-lift to carry the machine out of the spaceport to the doors of the nearest arcade: “Fat Bill’s Place.” Oh, Shankov’s was real class!

Fat Bill was a blob about sixty-two inches in all directions; he wheezed as Pavanaz and a handful of splashers-by half-dragged, half-carried the ’Vader into an empty corner in the arcade’s front hall. And he waited patiently while Pavanaz used the edges of his hands to squeegee the water out of his shirt and pants. It was “summer” and the rain was warm.

“I’m Bill,” he wheezed when Pav was done. “You should buy yourself a plastimac, Mac.”

“I’m Grint Pavanaz,” said Pavanaz. “And I will.”

“S’funny,” said Fat Bill, scratching his head. “I don’t recall ordering this baby.”

“You didn’t,” Pavanaz informed. “She’s mine.”

Fat Bill narrowed his eyes a little. “In my arcade?”

“Just until I can catch a ship out of here,” said Pavanaz.

Fat Bill’s eyes narrowed more yet. “See,” he said, “I don’t see much in that for me. I mean, there’s a warehouse next door where you can stable this beast. So why clutter up my place, eh?”

“I can explain,” said Pavanaz.

“Make it good,” Fat Bill told him “and fast, before this ’Vader of yours gets headed for one big oxidization problem.” He inclined his head towards the door.

Pavanaz stripped the plastic off his machine in front of a mainly disinterested crowd. They pulled faces at it and moved away. Nothing new here. Pav looked at Fat Bill. “I can pay you three creds a day just to keep her here.”