Nine by Laumer Read online

  When the process was finished, and the alien mind had absorbed the techniques demonstrated, the Yanda mind paused.

  It is finished.

  I AM READY TO RE-ESTABLISH THE CONSCIOUS MIND IN OVERT CONTROL.

  Remember your promise.

  I WILL REMEMBER.

  The Yanda mind began its withdrawal. Troublesome instinct was served. Now it could rest until the end.

  WAIT. I’VE GOT A BETTER IDEA, YANDA… .

  “Two weeks down and fourteen to go,” Gault said. “Why don’t you break down and tell me what happened back there?” “How’s Malpry?” Pantelle asked.

  “He’s all right. Broken bones knit, and you only broke a few.” “The book was wrong about the Yanda spores,” Pantelle said. “They don’t have the power in themselves to reconstruct the host-creature—”

  “The what?”

  “The infected animal; the health and life span of the host is improved. But the improvement is made by the tree, at the time of propagation, to insure a good chance for the spores.”

  “You mean you—”

  “We made a deal. The Yanda gave me this—” Pantelle pressed a thumb against the steel bulkhead. The metal yielded.

  “—and a few other tricks. In return, I’m host to the Yanda spores.”

  Gault moved away.

  “Doesn’t that bother you? Parasites—”

  “It’s an equitable deal. The spores are microscopic, and completely dormant until the proper conditions develop.”

  “Yeah, but you said yourself this vegetable brain has worked on your mind.”

  “It merely erased all the scars of traumatic experience, corrected deficiencies, taught me how to use what I have.”

  “How about teaching me?”

  “Sorry, Gault.” Pantelle shook his head. “Impossible.”

  Gault considered Pantelle’s remarks.

  “What about these ‘proper conditions’ for the spores?” he asked suddenly. “You wake up and find yourself sprouting some morning?”

  “Well,” Pantelle coughed. “That’s where my part of the deal comes in. A host creature transmits the spores through the normal mating process. The offspring gets good health and a long life before the metamorphosis. That’s not so bad—to live a hundred years, and then pick a nice spot to root and grow and watch the seasons turn …”

  Gault considered. “A man does get tired,” he said. “I know a spot, where you can look for miles out across the Pacific …”

  “So I’ve promised to be very active,” Pantelle said. “It will take a lot of my time, but I intend to discharge my obligation to the fullest.”

  Did you hear that, Yanda? Pantelle asked silently.

  I did, came the reply from the unused corner he had assigned to the Yanda ego-pattern. Our next thousand years should be very interesting.

  END AS A HERO

  I

  In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire. The dream went on and on; and then I was awake—and the fire was still there, fiercely burning at me.

  I moved to get away from the flames, and the real pain hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and conscious.

  I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to an unpadded acceleration couch—the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm installs in seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasn’t easy but, by applying a lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it. I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare, but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst …

  There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I tried my right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation that transcended pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with the charred arm. The crawl to the cabinet dwarfed Hillary’s trek up Everest, but I reached it after a couple of years, and found the microswitch on the floor that activated the thing, and then I was fading out again …

  I came out of it clear-headed but weak. My right leg was numb, but reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up a hand and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a fracture. The left arm—well, it was still there, wrapped to the shoulder and held out stiffly by a power truss that would keep the scar tissue from pulling up and crippling me. The steady pressure as the truss contracted wasn’t anything to do a sense-tape on for replaying at leisure moments, but at least the cabinet hadn’t amputated. I wasn’t complaining.

  As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the Gool—if I survived.

  I was still a long way from home, and I hadn’t yet checked on the condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at work.

  I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition—with a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull—I shouldn’t have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip from Belshazzar’s CCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was here—and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.

  I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before. It was almost five minutes before the “acknowledge” came through from the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle’s face swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the haggard look.

  “Granthan!” he burst out. “Where are the others? What happened out there?” I turned him down to a mutter.

  “Hold on,” I said. “I’ll tell you. Recorders going?” I didn’t wait for an answer—not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on:

  “Belshazzar was sabotaged. So was Gilgamesh—I think. I got out. I lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the Med people the drinks are on me.”

  I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle’s reply. On the screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would get his reaction to my report. I dozed off— and awoke with a start. Kayle was talking.

  “—your report. I won’t mince words. They’re wondering at your role in the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?”

  “How the hell do I know?” I yelled—or croaked. But Kayle’s voice was droning on:

  “… you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may have some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You’ve told me yourself that you blacked out during the attack—and came to on the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there.

  “This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the possibility of—what’s that term you use?—hyper-cortical invasion. You know better than most the risk I’d be running if you were allowed to pass the patrol line.

  “I’m sorry, Granthan. I can’t let you land on Earth. I can’t accept the risk.”

  “What do I do now?” I stormed. “Go into orbit and eat pills and hope you think of something? I need a doctor!”

  Presently Kayle replied. “Yes,” he said. “You’ll have to enter a parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make it possible to … ah … restudy the situation.” He didn’t meet my eye. I knew what he was thinking. He’d spare me the mental anguish of knowing what was coming. I couldn’t really blame him; he was doing what he thought was the right thing. And I’d have to go along and pretend—right up unt
il the warheads struck—that I didn’t know I’d been condemned to death.

  II

  I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn’t survive my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn’t take the chance that I was acting under Gool orders.

  I wasn’t, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan, psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan’s fleet six weeks earlier. The thoughts I was having weren’t brilliant, but they were mine, all mine …

  But how could I be sure of that?

  Maybe there was something in Kayle’s suspicion. If the Gool were as skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of their tampering—not at a conscious level.

  But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I wasn’t just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the mind—and I had been prepared for just such an attack.

  Now was the time to make use of that training. It had given me one resource. I could unlock the memories of my subconscious—and see again what had happened.

  I lay back, cleared my mind of extraneous thoughts, and concentrated on the trigger word that would key an auto-hypnotic sequence …

  Sense impressions faded. I was alone in the nebulous emptiness of a first-level trance. I keyed a second word, slipped below the misty surface into a dreamworld of vague phantasmagoric figures milling in their limbo of sub-conceptualization. I penetrated deeper, broke through into the vividly hallucinatory third level, where images of mirror-bright immediacy clamored for attention. And deeper …

  The immense orderly confusion of the basic memory level lay before me. Abstracted from it, aloof and observant, the monitoring personality-fraction scanned the pattern, searching the polydimensional continuum for evidence of an alien intrusion.

  And found it.

  As the eye instantaneously detects a flicker of motion amid an infinity of static detail, so my inner eye perceived the subtle traces of the probing Gool mind, like a whispered touch deftly rearranging my buried motivations.

  I focused selectively, tuned to the recorded gestalt.

  “It is a contact, Effulgent One!”

  “Softly, now! Nurture the spark well. It hut trembles at the threshold . .

  “It is elusive, Master! It wriggles like a gorm-worm in the eating trough!”

  A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the voices—yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought against the intruding stimuli—then yielded under the relentless thrust of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me—and then the hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg. My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought— and the world-ending impact as I fell.

  At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudopersonality lashed out again—fighting the invader.

  “Almost it eluded me then, Effulgent Lord. Link with this lowly one!”

  “Impossible! Do you forget all my teachings? Cling, though you expend the last filament of your life-force!”

  Free from all distraction, at a level where comprehension and retention are instantaneous and total, my monitoring basic personality fraction followed the skillful Gool mind as it engraved its commands deep in my subconscious. Then the touch withdrew, erasing the scars of its passage, to leave me unaware of its tampering—at a conscious level.

  Watching the Gool mind, I learned.

  The insinuating probe—a concept regarding which psycho-dynamicists had theorized—was no more than a pattern in emptiness …

  But a pattern which I could duplicate, now that I had seen what had been done to me.

  Hesitantly, I felt for the immaterial fabric of the continuum, warping and manipulating it, copying the Gool probe. Like planes of paper-thin crystal, the polyfinite aspects of reality shifted into focus, aligning themselves.

  Abruptly, a channel lay open. As easily as I would stretch out my hand to pluck a moth from a night-flower, I reached across the unimaginable void—and sensed a pit blacker than the bottom floor of hell, and a glistening dark shape.

  There was a soundless shriek. “Effulgence! It reached out-touched me!”

  Using the technique I had grasped from the Gool itself, I struck, stifling the outcry, invaded the fetid blackness and grappled the obscene gelatinous immensity of the Gool spy as it spasmed in a frenzy of xenophobia—a ton of liver writhing at the bottom of a dark well.

  I clamped down control. The Gool mind folded in on itself, gibbering. Not pausing to rest, I followed up, probed along my channel of contact, tracing patterns, scanning the flaccid Gool mind …

  I saw a world of yellow seas lapping at endless shores of mud. There was a fuming pit, where liquid sulphur bubbled up from some inner source, filling an immense natural basin. The Gool clustered at its rim, feeding, each monstrous shape heaving against its neighbors for a more favorable position.

  I probed farther, saw the great cables of living nervous tissue that linked each eating organ with the brain-mass far underground. I traced the passages through which tendrils ran out to immense caverns where smaller creatures labored over strange devices. These, my host’s memory told me, were the young of the

  Gool. Here they built the fleets that would transport the spawn-to the new worlds the Prime Overlord had discovered, worlds where food was free for the taking. Not sulphur alone, but potassium, calcium, iron and all the metals—riches beyond belief in endless profusion. No longer would the Gool tribe cluster—those who remained of a once-great race—at a single feeding trough. They would spread out across a galaxy—and beyond.

  But not if I could help it.

  The Gool had evolved a plan—but they’d had a stroke of bad luck.

  In the past, they had managed to control a man here and there, among the fleets, far from home, but only at a superficial level. Enough, perhaps, to wreck a ship, but not the complete control needed to send a man back to Earth under Gool compulsion, to carry out complex sabotage.

  Then they had found me, alone, a sole survivor, free from the clutter of the other mindfields. It had been their misfortune to pick a psychodynamicist. Instead of gaining a patient slave, they had opened the fortress door to an unseen spy. Now that I was there, I would see what I could steal.

  A timeless time passed. I wandered among patterns of white light and white sound, plumbed the deepest recesses of hidden Gool thoughts, fared along strange ways examining the shapes and colors of the concepts of an alien mind.

  I paused at last, scanning a multi-ordinal structure of pattern within pattern; the diagrammed circuits of a strange machine.

  I followed through its logic-sequence; and, like a bomb-burst, its meaning exploded in my mind.

  From the vile nest deep under the dark surface of the Gool world in its lonely trans-Plutonian orbit, I had plucked the ultimate secret of their kind.

  Matter across space.

  “You’ve got to listen to me, Kayle,” I shouted. “I know you think I’m a Gool robot. But what I have is too big to let you blow it up without a fight. Matter transmission! You know what that can mean to us. The concept is too complex to try to describe in words. You’ll have to take my word for it. I can build it, though, using standard components, plus an infinite-area antenna and a moebius-wound coil—and a few other things… .”

  I harangued Kayle for a while, and then sw
eated out his answer. I was getting close now. If he couldn’t see the beauty of my proposal, my screens would start to register the radiation of warheads any time now.

  Kayle came back—and his answer boiled down to “no.”

  I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the ego-complex.

  I might have saved my breath.

  “I don’t understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan,” he snapped. “It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to you well enough. I’m sorry.”

  I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the problem at hand.

  I keyed the chart file, flashed pages from the standard index on the reference screen, checking radar coverages, beacon ranges, monitor stations, controller fields. It looked as though a radarnegative boat the size of mine might possibly get through the defensive net with a daring pilot, and as a condemned spy, I could afford to be daring.

  And I had a few ideas.

  III

  The shrilling of the proximity alarm blasted through the silence. For a wild moment I thought Kayle had beaten me to the punch; then I realized it was the routine DEW line patrol contact.

  “Z four-oh-two, I am reading your IFF. Decelerate at 1.8 gee preparatory to picking up approach orbit …”

  The screen went on droning out instructions. I fed them into the autopilot, at the same time running over my approach plan. The scout was moving in closer. I licked dry lips. It was time to try.