Chaining the Lady (15 page)

The magnet still hovered in place. “Not this way either? Slammer, I don't understand, and I really
do
want to, is there a—a secret door here? Another route?”

The sidewise shake: no.

Melody brightened. “You want to rest right here, where it is so pretty and peaceful!”

But again it was no. Slammer jerked forward, pointing out the way he wanted to go—but
didn't
go.

“Yael, do you understand this?” Melody asked.

“It's a mystery to me,” Yael answered. “Maybe he doesn't like wood.”

Startled, Melody stared at the hall with new understanding. “Wood! Not metal. This must be a solid wood section, not mere paneling.”

“Yes, it's pretty,” Yael agreed.

“Don't you see: the magnet
can't
go in here!” Melody said. “Wood is nonmagnetic. The force of magnetism is very strong, but it fades rapidly with distance. The wood must extend so deeply that Slammer has no purchase.”

“Hey, like skidding on ice!” Yael exclaimed.

Melody fathomed her analogy: ice was cold, solidified water that had a greatly reduced surface friction. Entities that propelled themselves by means of frictive application against available surfaces, such as the Solarians aboard a spaceship, could suffer loss of efficiency on frozen water. In fact they might become almost helpless, or even be injured by a fall. Skidding on ice: the inexplicable became explicable. “Yes, the magnet is unable to propel himself through this region,” Melody agreed. “Yet he wishes to go there.”

“Why doesn't he just
roll
?”

“There's a bend in the hall. He would be stalled, powerless, until some frictive entity carried him out.”

“Well,
we
could carry him,” Yael pointed out.

“So we could! Child, at times you are brilliant!”

“I'm not a child. Not after what I did with Captain Boyd.” Yael spoke with a certain rueful pride.

“I had no facetious intent about either your age or your intelligence. Sometimes the simplistic way is best.” Melody was unable to comment on the culmination with the Captain; she had blanked out. But from Yael's memory she gathered it had been quite a performance. The man
was
an excellent lover.

She approached the magnet. “Slammer, I'll carry you, if you're not too heavy. May I put my arms around you?”

Slammer nodded. At last they understood each other.

Melody reached around him and drew him into her body. The magnet's surface was warm and he was vibrating. She had of course held Slammer before, but that had been out in space, and she had never actually directly touched his surface. Probably that space episode was the main reason he trusted her now. Magnets did not give their trust casually, she knew.

Slammer's powerful magnetic field phased through her aura, making her slightly dizzy. She had been right: the intensity of its field varied exponentially with distance, so that even a few feet brought it too low to be useful for propulsion. A magnet an inch away from metal could not be resisted; six feet away it was helpless. “Now let go slowly, so I'll know if I can handle your weight.”

The magnet grew heavy. But when he was about half her host-body's weight, it leveled off. The host-body was young and strong; this burden could be handled.

“We're on our way,” Melody said aloud, feeling the tingle of incipient adventure. It seemed she was acquiring the taste for this sort of thing. “I hope it isn't far.”

She marched forward into the wooden hall. At the turn she swung about—and was baffled. For the passage immediately reversed to pick up on the other side of the barrier wall. It had no likely purpose, except to inhibit the progress of magnets. “But you know, Slammer,” she gasped, for she was tiring already, “You could get through here if you had to. All you have to do is get up speed in the metal section, and cannonball right through this obstruction. You'd have enough impetus left over to roll the rest of the way, I should think.”

The magnet's field flexed momentarily. He understood. Like Yael back on her farm, he had been balked by appearance as much as by fact. He had lacked the ingenuity to devise an alternative.

But Melody wondered how intelligent the magnet was. Slammer understood every word she said, and since he was a nonlinguistic creature, that suggested a very adaptable intellect. Limited by silence and by dependency on metal, the magnets seemed like animals; but granted the resources of the sapient creatures of the galaxy, why wouldn't they be comparable?

Yes, they could be smart enough. If a magnet slammed through the wooden barrier, his act would soon be known. So he would not do any such breaking without excellent reason. How could anyone be sure the magnets were
not
linguistic? They could have their own magnetic language that no human had bothered to learn. Also, it would be the least intelligent magnets who would be lured into spaceship duty; the smart ones would stay clear. Unless they chase to come, and play dumb, until they knew enough to build and operate their own spaceships.

All speculation, probably without foundation. But she would keep working on it. She had to understand the magnets if she wanted to win them over.

They came to a second detour in the wooden hall. This one incorporated dips and rises on the floor, so that a magnet trying to roll through would be trapped. Melody's arms were hurting now, and she staggered along; she would have to exercise more to build up the human tissues. “Next time, I'll
roll
you,” she gasped. The magnet could not roll himself up a slope, but she could push him.

Then the metal hall resumed, to her relief. As they came into it, Slammer's weight abated. Finally she loosened her grip, and he floated free. “We made it!” Yael exclaimed, as if it had been a great adventure. “But oh, my arms!”

Now Slammer led the way with impetuous haste. He moved up a ramp, the another. The passage branched, but the magnet seemed to know exactly where he was going. Melody had to run to keep up.

Abruptly Slammer stopped. Melody drew up, her chest heaving in a fashion she knew would have been an impregnation hazard in the presence of a male Solarian, and looked about.

They were in a storage chamber. Cartons of supplies marked in code were stacked in tall columns. They appeared to contain military hardware. This was deep within the ship, several levels above their starting point. The gravity had diminished slightly as they moved nearer the center. This made it good for storage, as the boxes could be stacked higher with less danger of breakage, were easier to move, and could be delivered to other parts of the ship readily by chute. So this was a well-protected spot, suitable for bombs, laser guns, and such. And isolated from magnets.

Now Slammer hovered nervously. When placid, he was unmoving; here he was doing little spins about a tight axis. What was bothering him? Surely he couldn't be afraid!

Then another magnet appeared. “Uh-oh,” Yael said, suddenly worried. “If magnets can't get in here, how come–?”

Melody wondered the same. “Slammer, are we in danger?”

But Slammer had already shot out to meet the strange magnet. They two banged together resoundingly, flew apart, and clanged together again. The sonics were deafening.

Melody covered her ears. Not since leaving Sphere Mintaka had she experienced clangor of this magnitude. It hurt the less-sophisticated human auditory apparatus.

“They're fighting!” Yael cried. “We'd better get out of here!”

At first Melody was inclined to agree. But several things nagged at her. If Slammer were protecting his human companion, it would not be politic to desert him. If no magnet could cross the wooden barrier, what was the other magnet doing here? Slammer had evidently known where he was going, and expected to be met like this. But why would he go to all this trouble for a fight? What was so precious that he had to search it out and fight for it?

“That other magnet did not attacks us,” Melody pointed out. “It's smaller, and not brightly painted. Not a warrior type, I think. This is a magnet-magnet affair; we're probably safe.” She was hardly sure of that, but she also doubted her human body could get away fast enough to escape an aggressive magnet. “And I want to see exactly what they're fighting
about.
It might be important.”

“And you say you don't like adventure!” Yael said admiringly. “You've got nerves of steel.”

“All Mintakans
do.
Oh—you meant that figuratively. No, I'm extremely uncomfortable. But I honestly don't think we're in immediate danger. Slammer can protect us, and he would not have gone to this trouble to lead us into danger.”

So she poked around while the noises of the clashing magnets became even more intense. The ship must be sound-conditioned, otherwise the commotion would already have attracted attention, even from off-shift officers. The two globes were striking each other faster now, and with unerring accuracy, though they moved so swiftly they were only blurs. What a battle!

Suddenly Melody froze. She had peeked into an alcove in which some electronic equipment had been set up.

It was the retransfer unit, supposedly destroyed in the shuttle sabotage blast. She had been instructed in its use, back on Planet Outworld, because of the importance of her mission. There was no question about its identity; there was only one such unit in the fleet.

Captain Boyd had to have known the unit was safe. Why had he deceived her? Had he also salvaged the mattermitter?

Abruptly the noise stopped. Melody looked around nervously. Had one of the magnets destroyed the other?

Slammer shot into view. His colors were dulled, but he seemed to be in reasonable health. “So you outbanged our opponent,” Melody said. “Congratulations. What next?”

The magnet dodged toward the hall through which they had come.

“Time to go home, it seems,” Melody remarked. “Didn't seem like much of a relaxation for you, though.”

They returned through the passages, Melody verifying her memory of the route. Now she had a special reason to know the way. The other magnet must have been assigned to guard the retransfer unit, which was certainly valuable enough to warrant that, and somehow Slammer had known. And had shown her.

Why? Why should tho magnet
care
? It didn't quite make sense. A Solarian or Mintakan might have done it because of her interest, in appreciation for what she had done in the hullside fiasco, but the magnets had evinced no signs of such sentiments.

Could Slammer have acted on the Captain's orders? But Dash could have told her directly. Why go through the charade of deceiving her?

Melody shook her head as they arrived back at her cabin. It was tempting to draw easy conclusions, but she was too old and experienced to do that. She lacked sufficient information.

But it certainly made for marvelous speculations.

* * *

Melody reassembled the manual Cluster Tarot deck thoughtfully. She did not use the elegant cubic deck Dash had given her; that was too precious to share with strangers, and there was always the risk of breaking the delicate mechanism. Suppose some dolt dropped it on the deck while shake-shuffling?

The manual deck sufficed. She had just identified yet another hostage. That brought the total to nine—of nine tested.

Was the entire upper-officer cadre of the ship hostage, except for the high-Kirlian Captain himself? What a nest of subversion she had shuttled into! And back on Imperial Outworld
they didn't know
.

So many hostages! Could one of them have salvaged the retransfer unit, planted the sabotage bomb, and then made a false report to the Captain? That seemed likely. But that meant the retransfer unit was under the control of the hostages. Hardly a reassuring situation.

Could the hostages know about her? No, for if they had been aware of the threat she posed to them, they would have acted against her before this.

Slammer moved closer to her, now that she was alone. It was his way of asking for attention. That provided her with one reason she had not been bothered: she had a very able bodyguard.

Melody was becoming more adept at playing the game of twenty questions, as Yael described it. In moments she had identified the magnet's concern.

He needed to take another walk.

They used a different route, but ran into the same type of wooden barrier. She rolled Slammer through it with dispatch. She was getting a fair picture of the geography of the inner labyrinth of the ship, though that seemed to be regarded as a military secret.

An before, this was the off-shift for the majority of the officers, so there were few circulating. Also, she now realized, Slammer selected the route to avoid people. His mission, such as it was, was his own secret.

The other magnet was hovering at the far side of the wooden passage. “Ouch!” Melody said, rendering the human equivalent of a chord of alarm. “Must we go through this again?” But she decided not to interfere. If Slammer and the other magnet got their kicks by bashing each other...

But this time there was no banging. Instead, Slammer moved aside, and the smaller magnet came close. Melody concealed her alarm. “What can I do for you, Slimmer?” she inquired brightly of the stranger.

A much smaller object circled the strange magnet, like a satellite around its primary. It hovered right before Melody.

Suddenly, like a splendid symphony of meaning, it burst upon her: a baby magnet! Slammer had had a tryst with his lady-friend, Slimmer, and now they had offspring. “Hello, Beanball,” she said.

The mother-magnet withdrew. Slammer indicated the barrier.

“So you just wanted to see your bud,” Melody murmured. “Well, I'm glad I was able to help, even if it was contrary to regulation. Here I thought you two were
fighting
!”

Yael laughed. “Slimmer got banged up!”

Again, Melody had to delve for the interpretation. A Solarian bang or bash was an old-style party at which too-free leeway was fostered by consumption of mind-affecting substances. The kind of thing she might have been involved in, had the hullside emergency not interrupted it. Thus a female could get impregnated: banged up. With magnets, the banging was literal; it was their mode of copulation.