Case and the Dreamer (20 page)

And the Man from Mars hesitated, for the very first time; and in that exceedingly brief moment, Harry had a flash of insight that cut deep into his marrow. It was this: that he had been insulated against fear by this Man; and when you have no fear, you may not be reached by anyone else’s emotion. Anger can’t reach the fearless, danger, hopelessness, despair; fear is the trigger to the healthy survival mechanisms of fight and of flight; fear also is the measure of that which is dear and cherished: fear of its loss. Never until now had Harry perceived the slightest hint of emotion from the Man; but now, in that slight hesitation, a hot wave of emotion burst from him and sliced through the barrier of fearlessness—and was gone. Harry identified it. It was compassion.

“Do you really want to know?”

Fearless again, Harry responded: “I asked you, didn’t I?”

Then it was (for the very first time) that the Man from Mars uttered something that was not a question, something that described a species rocketing up away from and above all others, using only a part of its gift, and the world that must ensue from that terrible and tragic imbalance.

“Identifying it and understanding it are not enough. The appearance of great and gifted gurus is not enough. Can the professor of speech teach a feral child?

“No, Harry; it cannot be taught. It is too late. The gift is lost. The window is closed. It closed nearly three thousand years ago.”

Then he left, and Harry went and got his notebook and began to write.

He was sleek and he was furry; he was totally amphibious, and Althair the Adventurer was what he really was. However, he was known, on his lovely planet Ceer, as Althair the Storyteller just because he did that better—better even than adventuring, at which he was a marvel.

His people called his planet “Ceer, the planet indetectable,” and that it really was. It had no smoke or factories, machines or jails or presidents; just uncommanded beauty made of waves and wilderness. It had a kind of shrub-tree plant that would yield to mental pressure and produce the living living-shelters, cupping coolness by day and hoarding heat at night.

A heavy planet, Ceer, with strong inhabitants, who had still stronger minds—so strong that with a ceremony they had linked their minds together and created an integument, a kind of shell, a shield around their worlds that bent all outside rays and gravities. Reflecting and occulting nothing, it concealed the planet’s mass, and more: concealed its absence; yet the peopled plains and oceans could see the friendly stars unhampered. The peoples’ name was Zado.

Story time! Story time! Slithering, lithe, surfing, sliding, inchworming, crackly-whiskered, beady-bright, soft, smooth and shining, came the young, the pups and pammies gathering round. Story time! Story time!

Althair, a tower in a sea excited, waited out the shouldering, scrabbling, let-me-near silenting, until at last
they
did all the waiting.

“Today, I will tell you (Althair began) of the planet Orel and the horror that happened there; but first I must tell you about a pup and pammie older than yourselves who were just about as big as me, and lived on a planet with the name Earth. Their names were Will Hawkline and Jonna Verret.…” (There was a clatter of chittering giggles
as the little Zados tried to say the funny names and could not. Althair let them try, then raised his head. They shushed.)

“Will Hawkline and Jonna Verret lived on an island renamed Avalon, which they had made beautiful and kept beautiful, and saw hardly at all for their working. Will was very important, being Coordinator of the Time Center, which means he said what to do and everybody did it. Jonna was the best test pilot he had, which means when Time Center built something, she tried it out. Way down deep Will was angry at Jonna, though he never said it and maybe didn’t know it. He wished for a test pilot bigger and older than he was, so he could tell him what to do and see him do it. Jonna was younger and smaller and she was a pammie but good is good and there’s no arguing that. So he was angry because she was a pammie and she was the best in the world at what she did.” (Althair boomed along with the chittering chuckles. It certainly was funny.)

There were lots of other people on Avalon, of course, but they’re not really in this story, except for the Little Johns. Now the Little Johns were very special. You see, Earth people were slowpokes, so they built things called computers which could logic much faster than they could. The first Little John had the strange ability to think himself into a computer, or think the computer into himself. So he could then do create/computing almost as well as a Zado—as long as he was linked to a computer. Without a computer he was just another slowpoke. So they cloned him a dozen times, creating a dozen Little Johns.

That’s what the Time Center was all about—to stop Earth from being a slowpoke. When they wanted to go to another star, they could get inside a big metal jug and fly it in real-time, which took so long they had to go to sleep until they got there a long time later. Then when they got back to Earth the same way, all their friends were long ago dead of old age.
Or
, they could get into a different kind of jug and fly to the star faster than light, and not have to go to sleep for hundreds of lifetimes; but when they got back, time had still passed on Earth and their friends had still died away. Earth time and jug time were just too different.

But Will Hawkline, with the help of his computers and his people
and the Little Johns, Will Hawkline did it! He found a way to separate time from space-time, so his little jugs could go
back
a little way in time while they went forward a long way in space—all at once! That way space travelers could go away to a star and come back again, while the people they loved were still alive to welcome them and listen to their stories. I know that’s a long funny way to solve a problem, but then they weren’t Zados, and you have to admire them. Jonna Verret tested the new little jugs—
scouts
is the Earth name for them—and they worked, and because they worked, a terrible thing happened. And now I will tell you about Mindpod, and Orel.

No one knows when or where it came from, but a great dark jug landed on the planet Orel, and in it were twenty-six
things
, alive and awful, which together are called Mindpod. Zados are not the only ones in the universe who can link minds, but unlike us, the Mindpod used their linkage as a weapon.

Orel was a wild place where the biggest animal was a meercath, a lizard with thick quick hind legs and small deft hands, bigger than me, with a toothy mouth that could take off my head, and a mind just good enough to feed and be happy. In a
blip!
the Mindpod had those meercaths’ minds, and all they would do forever after was to make weapons and go off to other worlds to kill and destroy. Nothing could ever give them back their own minds. A meercath commanded by the Mindpod is a terrible thing. And there were enough worlds within reach of the Mindpod’s big dark jug—the Earth word for it is
cruiser
—that the Mindpod itself could rest safely on Orel for a very long time, and take other worlds that take other worlds and Oh! (Oh! cried the young ones. Oh! they wept.)

The Mindpod cruiser had in it all sorts of structures and inventions that could do things that the Mindpod could not—they were rather like Earth people that way, but not at all funny. They had feeler things and listening things and find-out things so that they knew right away what had happened when Jonna tested the back-in-time jug, the little one she called a ‘scout.’ That made the Mindpod afraid. When the Mindpod was afraid it was immediately very,
very angry. It knew how to travel in zero time but it didn’t know how to travel back in time, so the Mindpod sent a cruiser toward Earth to steal and destroy.

On Avalon, in Time Center Control, Jonna had just come in from the last of her flights. She stood proud and happy, happy because she had done everything right, happy for Will too, because it was truly a great thing he had done. Will Hawkline looked at her, how she stood smiling, her hair a bright tumble, her eyes pleased and giving. Just for a moment his regret that she was a pammie and not a bigger and older pup grew smaller and he smiled and took her hand.

At that moment the very walls boomed with a terrible voice:

Will Hawkline, still holding Jonna’s hand though he had quite forgotten it, bawled “Little John!”

Immediately Little John Five stepped up—a big Earth person, strong as a Zado, with close golden hair and eyes very wide apart. Will Hawkline cried: “I have done a terrible thing, but—how could I know? Who are they? What do they want? Can they do what they say?”

The large growing eyes closed; and now the Little John was one with the big computer and its instant logic and immense memory. He said, “Subspace wake-trace indicates that they came in zero time from OREL—Orion Remote Earthtype Landbase. Who they are: No data, except that they are not indigenous to Orel. Can they do what they say: All relevant data indicate that they can, to a probability of 99.11 nines. Could you have known: You could not. What do they want: Clearly, it is the back-in-time scout device; if they had it they would have used it, and would have struck before our tests.”

“But if we don’t give it to them, they’ll blow us up anyway, and then they’ll never have it.”

“Which indicates they are afraid of it. If they can’t have it, no one will have it.”

“Then they’ve given us the answer.” When Will Hawkline made up his mind, he did it altogether. “If they’re
afraid
of it, we’ll use it. We’ll arrive on Orel before they leave and stop them.” He turned to Harper Townsend, his chief of operations. “Harper—are both scouts ready for launch?” At his nod: “Jonna—are you willing to take a Little John and go to Orel, while I take the other scout and rendezvous with you before they attack?”

Her face told him how ready and willing she was.

“Then let’s go! Harper, put every computer on the problem of destroying that cruiser—but don’t make a move until the last minute, or they’ll strike before the deadline.”

He sprinted toward the launch gate and only then realized he was still holding Jonna’s hand—he almost pulled her off her feet. “Sorry,” he said and was gone. She looked sadly at her hand. “Sorry?” she said, then turned and ran for her own scout, shouting for Little John Twelve.

And you know, by the time they were in their scouts, the Little Johns and the computers had worked out every single figuring they needed to make the trip back in time, forth in space, to Orel before the Mindpod cruiser left.

At that very moment, on the place in the dark cruiser where the devices that made it go were—the Earth word is “bridge”—a meercath left his lace of blinking lights and came to the commander. “There are stowaways, sir.” (That’s the way they talk in jugs. And a stowaway is a person who gets on a jug or whatever they call them, without anyone knowing.) “Stowaways, sir. I thought at first there were three, then it seemed like four. Anyway, it’s certainly two.”

“Start a search then,” the commander said. “Every compartment, room, pathway.” The meercath went away, and another one called out, “Small craft leaving the planet, sir.” But even as they fixed their look-at thing on it and spit fire, the scout slipped into faster-than-light and was lost to them. Just then another appeared, and a great fan of flame swept out from the Orellian cruiser and sliced off a tail
section just before this scout flung itself into faster-than-light and also escaped the attack.

None of us could possibly know what it’s like to fly out in one of those little scouts. Acceleration squeezes you backward until you can’t breathe any more and you can’t see anything right or really think straight, and all of a sudden there’s a great bloom of light, a spinning spiral, and you’re in another universe full of grey shapes that make you dizzy when you look at them. In time—how much time depends how far in real-space you are going—you’re back in this universe, blinking at a whole different set of stars, with a strange planet floating nearby. Terrifying.

But for Will Hawkline it was infinitely worse. Seconds before they slipped into faster-than-light, “We’re hit!” Little John Five cried out, and Will Hawkline said, “Too bad, but we’re counting down and we’re going out anyway!” At that, the bloom of light spiraled around them and they were in the grey place, and—
crunch-ring-blang
—things broke in the scout’s insides. Their lights went out and flared bright and dim again. “Damage report,” Will Hawkline ordered, and the Little John told him a long list of awful things. “Can you get a fix on Jonna?” And that was worst of all.

“She’s on Orel—on the surface!”

“Captured,” Will Hawkline whispered, and oh, he had a feeling inside himself he didn’t know he could feel. “She’s alive though,” he almost-said, almost asked. “She’s alive,” said the Little John. “But they are doing something to her.”

Oh yes they were doing something to her. She was flat out under a force-beam with a fearful light shining on and through her, and bending over her was one of the actual members of the Mindpod; and I can’t tell you what it looked like because no one’s told me, except that it was horrible beyond description so that even if I could I wouldn’t. And it said:

“We have placed a substance in your bloodstream which will kill you in a very special way. There is an antidote, but after a certain time it will become ineffective, and you will stay locked in a world of visions so dreadful that you will die of your own free will to escape them. So quickly now: answer my questions. What was the mission?
What kind of work was going on at your Time Center? Who were you trying to contact when we captured your scout …?”—question, question, question.

Jonna lay there and spoke only once: “Little John Twelve was right.” And then she wouldn’t explain. For when the tractor beam from Orel took them, Little John Twelve said to her quietly, talking the way Little Johns do: “The probability of escape is negligible. My ability to refuse the information they will demand, not only of me, but of the entire contents of our computer banks, is equally negligible. There is therefore only one reasonable course. It has been nice knowing you, Jonna Verret,” whereupon he smiled slightly and died.