The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (90 page)

“Then translate my words!”

Deirut grew conscious that he had been speaking aloud and the natives were following his words and the movements of his mouth with a rapt intensity.

“Translate,” Autoga said. “That would be
chtsuyop,
no?”

“You must speak subvocally,” the computer said. “They are beginning to break down your language.”

“They're doing it in their heads, you stupid pile of electronic junk,” Deirut said. “I have to use you! And you think I can pose as a god with these people?”

“I will translate because you command it and my override circuits cannot circumvent your command,” the computer said.

“A computer!” Autoga said. “He has a translating computer in his vehicle! How quaint.”

“Translate,” Deirut said.

Sounds issued from the lingua pack.

“I am vindicated,” Autoga said. “And you will note that I did it on nothing more than the design of the vehicle and the cut of his clothing plus the artifacts, of course.”

“This is why you are in command,” Choon said. “I suffer your correction and instruction abysmally.”

Autoga looked at Deirut. “What will you require other than the repair of your vehicle?”

“Don't you want to know where I'm from?” Deirut asked.

“You are from somewhere,” Autoga said. “It has been theorized that other suns and worlds might exist beyond the hydrogen cloud from which we were formed. Your presence suggests this theory is true.”

“But … but don't you want contact with us … trade, exchange ideas?”

“It is not apparent,” Autoga said, “that the empty universe theory has been disproved. However, a primitive such as yourself, even you must realize such interchange would be pointless.”

“But we…”

“We well know that the enclosure of our universe has forced us in upon ourselves,” Choon said. “If that's what you were going to say?”

“He was going into boring detail about what he has to offer us,” Autoga said. “I suggest we get about doing what has to be done. Spispi, you and Tura take care of the computer in his vehicle. Choon and I will…”

“What're you doing?” Deirut asked. He leaped to his feet. At least, he thought he leaped to his feet, but in a moment he grew conscious that he was still sitting on the ground, the five natives facing him, staring.

“They are erasing some of my circuits!” the computer wailed. “A magneto-gravitic field encloses me and the … aroo, tut-tut, jingle bells, jingle bells.”

“This is very interesting,” Autoga said presently. “He has made contact with a civilization of our level at some previous time. You will note the residual inhibition against lengthy travel away from his home. We'll make the inhibition stronger this time.”

Deirut stared at the chattering natives with a sense of déjà vu. The speaker in his neck remained silent. His lingua pack made no sound. He felt movement in his mind like spiders crawling along his nerves.

“Who do you suppose he could've contacted?” Choon asked.

“Not one of our groups, of course,” Autoga said. “Before we stay out in the light of s'Chareecha and plant ourselves for the next seeding, we must start a flow of inquiry.”

“Who will talk to us about such things?” Choon asked. “We are mere herdsmen.”

“Perhaps we should listen more often to the entertainment broadcasts,” Spispi said. “Something may have been said.”

“We may be simple herdsmen whose inquiry will not go very far,” Autoga said, “but this has been an experience to afford us many hours of conversation. Imagine having the empty universe theory refuted!”

Deirut awoke in the control seat of his ship, smelled in the stink of the place his own sweat touched by the chemistry of fear. A glance at the instrument panel showed that he had succumbed to the push and turned ship. He was headed back out of the cloud without having found anything in it.

An odd sadness came over Deirut.

I'll find my planet some day,
he thought.
It'll have alabaster buildings and sheltered waters for sailing and long stretches of prairie for game animals.

The automatic log showed turning-around at ninety-four days.

I stood it longer than Bingaling,
he thought.

He remembered the conversation with Bingaling then and the curious reference to a previous attempt at the cloud.
Maybe I did,
he thought.
Maybe I forgot because the push got so tough.

Presently, his mind turned to thoughts of Capella Base, of going home. Just the thought of it eased the pressures of the push which was still faintly with him. The push … the push—it had beaten him again. Next trip out, he decided, he'd head the opposite direction, see what was to be found out there.

Almost idly then Deirut wondered about the push.
Why do we call it the push?
he wondered.
Why don't we call it the pull?

The question interested him enough to put it to the computer.

“Tut-tut,” the computer said.

 

BY THE BOOK

You will take your work seriously. Infinite numbers of yet-unborn humankind depend upon you who keep open the communications lines through negative space. Let the angle-transmission networks fail and Man will fail.

“You and the Haigh Company” (Employees Handbook)

He was too old for this kind of work even if his name was Ivar Norris Gump, admittedly the best troubleshooter in the company's nine-hundred-year history. If it'd been anyone but his old friend Poss Washington calling for help, there'd have been a polite refusal signed “Ing.” Semiretirement gave a troubleshooter the right to turn down dangerous assignments.

Now, after three hours on duty in a full vac suit within a Skoarnoff tube's blank darkness, Ing ached with tiredness. It impaired his mental clarity and his ability to survive and he knew it.

You will take your work seriously at all times,
he thought.
Axiom: A troubleshooter shall not get into trouble.

Ing shook his head at the handbook's educated ignorance, took a deep breath and tried to relax. Right now he should be back home on Mars, his only concerns the routine maintenance of the Phobos Relay and an occasional lecture to new 'shooters.

Damn that Poss,
he thought.

The big trouble was in here, though—in the tube, and six good men had died trying to find it. They were six men he had helped train—and that was another reason he had come. They were all caught up in the same dream.

Around Ing stretched an airless tubular cave twelve kilometers long, two kilometers diameter. It was a lightless hole, carved through lava rock beneath the moon's Mare Nectaris. Here was the home of the “Beam”—the beautiful, deadly, vitally
serious
beam, a tamed violence which suddenly had become balky.

Ing thought of all the history which had gone into this tube. Some nine hundred years ago the Seeding Compact had been signed. In addition to its Solar System Communications duties, the Haigh Company had taken over then the sending out of small containers, their size severely limited by the mass an angtrans pulse could push. Each container held twenty female rabbits. In the rabbit uteri, dormant, their metabolism almost at a standstill, lay two hundred human embryos nestled with embryos of cattle, all the domestic stock needed to start a new human economy. With the rabbits went plant seeds, insect eggs and design tapes for tools.

The containers were rigged to fold out on a planet's surface to provide a shielded living area. There the embryos would be machine-transferred into inflatable gestation vats, brought to full term, cared for and educated by mechanicals until the human
seed
could fend for itself.

Each container had been pushed to trans-light speed by angtrans pulses—“Like pumping a common garden swing,” said the popular literature. The life mechanism was controlled by signals transmitted through the “Beam” whose tiny impulses went “around the corner” to bridge in milliseconds distances which took matter centuries to traverse.

Ing glanced up at the miniature beam sealed behind its quartz window in his suit. There was the hope and the frustration. If they could only put a little beam such as that in each container, the big beam could home on it. But under that harsh bombardment, beam anodes lasted no longer than a month. They made-do with reflection plates on the containers, then, with beam-bounce and programmed approximations. And somewhere the programmed approximations were breaking down.

Now, with the first Seeding Compact vessel about to land on Theta Apus IV, with mankind's interest raised to fever pitch—beam contact had turned unreliable. The farther out the container, the worse the contact.

Ing could feel himself being drawn toward that frail cargo out there. His instincts were in communion with those containers which would drift into limbo unless the beam was brought under control. The embryos would surely die eventually and the dream would die with them.

Much of humanity feared the containers had fallen into the hands of alien life, that the human embryos were being taken over by something
out there.
Panic ruled in some quarters and there were shouts that the SC containers betrayed enough human secrets to make the entire race vulnerable.

To Ing and the six before him, the locus of the problem seemed obvious. It lay in here and in the anomaly math newly derived to explain how the beam might be deflected from the containers. What to do about that appeared equally obvious. But six men had died following that obvious course. They had died here in this utter blackness.

Sometimes it helped to quote the book.

Often you didn't know what you hunted here—a bit of stray radiation perhaps, a few cosmic rays that had penetrated a weak spot in the force-baffle shielding, a dust leak caused by a moonquake, or a touch of heat, a hot spot coming up from the depths. The big beam wouldn't tolerate much interference. Put a pinhead flake of dust in its path at the wrong moment, let a tiny flicker of light intersect it, and it went whiplash wild. It writhed like a giant snake, tore whole sections off the tube walls. Beam auroras danced in the sky above the moon then and the human attendants scurried.

A troubleshooter at the wrong spot in the tube died.

Ing pulled his hands into his suit's barrel top, adjusted his own tiny beam scope, the unit that linked him through a short reach of angspace to beam control. He checked his instruments, read his position from the modulated contact ripple through the soles of his shielded suit.

He wondered what his daughter, Lisa, was doing about now. Probably getting the boys, his grandsons, ready for the slotride to school. It made Ing feel suddenly old to think that one of his grandsons already was in Mars Polytechnic aiming for a Haigh Company career in the footsteps of his famous grandfather.

The vac suit was hot and smelly around Ing after a three-hour tour. He noted from a dial that his canned-cold temperature balance system still had an hour and ten minutes before red-line.

It's the cleaners,
Ing told himself.
It has to be the vacuum cleaners. It's the old familiar cussedness of inanimate objects.

What did that handbook say?
“Frequently it pays to look first for the characteristics of devices in use which may be such that an essentially pragmatic approach offers the best chance for success. It often is possible to solve an accident or malfunction problem with straight-forward and uncomplicated approaches, deliberately ignoring their more subtle aspects.”

He slipped his hands back into his suit's arms, shielded his particle counter with an armored hand, cracked open the cover, peered in at the luminous dial. Immediately, an angry voice crackled in the speakers:

“Douse that light! We're beaming.”

Ing snapped the lid closed by reflex, said: “I'm in the backboard shadow. Can't see the beam.” Then: “Why wasn't I told you're beaming?”

Another voice rumbled from the speakers: “It's Poss here, Ing. I'm monitoring your position by sono, told them to go ahead without disturbing you.”

“What's the supetrans doing monitoring a troubleshooter?” Ing asked.

“All right, Ing.”

Ing chuckled then: “What're you doing, testing?”

“Yes. We've an inner-space transport to beam down on Titan, thought we'd run it from here.”

“Did I foul the beam?”

“We're still tracking clean.”

Inner-space transmission open and reliable,
Ing thought,
but the long reach out to the stars was muddied.
Maybe the scare mongers were right. Maybe it was outside interference, an alien intelligence.

“We've lost two cleaners on this transmission,” Washington said. “Any sign of them?”

“Negative.”

They'd lost two cleaners on the transmission, Ing thought. That was getting to be routine. The flitting vacuum cleaners—supported by the beam's field, patrolling its length for the slightest trace of interference, had to be replaced at the rate of about a hundred a year normally, but the rate had been going up. As the beam grew bigger, unleashed more power for the long reach, the cleaners proved less and less effective at dodging the angtrans throw, the controlled whiplash. No part of a cleaner survived contact with the beam. They were energy-charged in phase with the beam, keyed for instant dissolution to add their energy to the transmission.

“It's the damned cleaners,” Ing said.

“That's what you all keep saying,” Washington said.

Ing began prowling to his right. Somewhere off there the glassite floor curved gradually upward and became a wall—and then a ceiling. But the opposite side was always two kilometers away, and the Moon's gravity, light as that was, imposed limits on how far he could walk up the wall. It wasn't like the little Phobos beam where they could use a low-power magnafield outside and walk right around the tube.