Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
“I can just barely stand you,” gritted Eric after a taut moment. “Don’t make it any tougher for me by your lip.”
Somewhere in space, a chrome and blue automobile raced the green light of Earth. Biddiver was quite dead now, if death is complete loss of personality, of human hopes and dreams and desires. There was another at the controls, certainly, one who moaned and gibbered and mewed at the stars spread about him, one who snatched and pawed at the sensitive, unprotesting controls before him. But it was not Biddiver, any more than the car itself was the ores and gases and fluids from which it was fabricated. The car was new, and even newer was the creature at the controls.
After those first mad moments, he quieted to stare with his new, scarlet eyes at the car, the dials and meters that now presented themselves in place of the conventional dashboard that had slid up out of sight when the car had reached the thousand-k.p.h. mark. He fingered the upholstery with an animal’s preoccupied attention, touched metal and glass and fabric with listless hands. Then he looked down at himself, snarled, and began to strip the clothes from his body. He worked slowly, systematically, from his shoes upward, ignoring clasps and slides, depending on the invariable rule that each chain has a weakest link. His flesh had a greenish cast, and it puffed tautly everywhere except near the joints, which were all simply skin on bone. When he had tossed the last tatter over his shoulder, he put both hands to his head and wiped off his frowsy mane. The hair came quite easily off the puckered skull. He giggled then, and went to sleep for three Earth days.
“Who’s The Fang?” asked Budd Arnik, a couple of weeks after he had bulldozed his way into the titular vice-presidency of Eric’s shipping firm. “I’ve seen some sweet write-ups about him in the tele-facsimiles. He’s a crazy Martian. He’s an exiled scientist from another solar system. He’s a refugee from a sunspot. Everybody has a different idea about him, except you. Seems funny, somehow,” he went on, affecting the lightly sarcastic tone which he knew infuriated his brother. “The gentleman steals a cargo which is not aboard a ship,
destroys the vessel, and leaves you with your pockets full of money. I wouldn’t be curious if I didn’t happen to know that you’ve made no big payoffs to anyone recently. If you’d hired the guy, it would have cost you plenty. If you didn’t, why should he scuttle a ship with a nonexistent, heavily insured cargo, and then announce to the Universe that he is The Fang and will be heard from again?”
“You found out about the payoff,” growled Eric. “Why bother asking me any questions at all? Figure it out for yourself.”
“I will,” promised his brother smoothly. “Which reminds me—I have an idea that’ll make us some money, if The Fang can be depended on to do a little more work for us. Can he?”
Eric hesitated and then said, “Pretty much.”
“Ah,” said Budd. “Well, you know that uranium mine on Pallas?”
“Mm.”
“Well, there’s a lot of money tied up on it. That uranium, you know, is about forty per cent 235. U-235 from Pallas supplies most of the System, since it’s so easy to refine. There’s still plenty of market for it, you know. Lucasium is more efficient, but it’s a hell of a lot more expensive. Now—here’s my idea. Just to see if The Fang has any kind of reputation as yet, we’ll have him threaten the colony. We’ll set a price—not too much; maybe they’ll pay it—and tell ’em to set it adrift in space, static, right there in the Asteroid Belt. By the time it has moved more’n a couple hundred miles toward the Sun, it’ll intersect the orbits of quite a few planetoids. One of our boys can be roosting there in a small ship to pick it up.”
Eric sent him a glance. “Is that what you meant when you said you had imagination?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I’m surprised, that’s all. It’s not bad. Let’s get going.”
In a very few days they had a ship outfitted. It was decided that Budd would take her out to the Belt. As they stood in the control room just before the take-off, Budd asked:
“You’re going to get in touch with The Fang?”
“I’m doing that right now,” said Eric. “You are The Fang.”
“I’m
what?”
For once in his life Eric Arnik actually laughed. “Certainly. The incendiary explosion of the tankship was done by time bombs.”
“But—that voice?”
“No trouble. It was recorded and transmitted from little sets set adrift in space. Any signal transmitted simultaneously from three sources widely separated makes a direction indicator run around in circles.” He chuckled. “One transmitter was dropped from the ship a day before she blew up. Another was in my office. The third was in an orbit around Eros. They were timed to transmit The Fang’s message twenty days after the explosion, just about when it would be discovered. I told you you could have figured it out for yourself. All I had to do was to give my hypothetical criminal a name like ‘The Fang’ so that the feature writers would pick it up and plaster it around. That’s what you’re doing now, dope. Just follow the course that’s in the co-ordinator over there. The automatic releases will take care of everything for you. You’ll drop atomic bombs in the path of Pallas, so that the asteroid will strike them just when its rotation will put the mines on the point of impact. The message is already recorded. Your course takes you within the gravitic field of Jupiter; one of the transmitters will swing around behind the old boy. One will be here, and one will be attached to the bombs.
Budd was aghast. “So that’s—Holy Kitt! And I was the guy who said you had no imagination!” He looked at his brother as if he had never seen him before, and then something of his cockiness returned to him. “May I ask the master some questions?”
Eric looked at the chronometer. “Fire away. You have twelve minutes.”
“How did the signal blank out all others in every ultraradio set in the System?”
“I can’t tell you exactly, because I’m not a radio man. One of my boys fixed it up. The general idea is that every wave frequency has a corresponding negating frequency—another wave that vibrates node to trough with the original, and cancels it out. My signals were transmitted in every frequency; they sounded above and below the ones that were canceled.”
“How about the time lag between all those transmitters? They
were an awful long way apart.”
“A silly question, son. You know ultraradio. Those vibrations think the speed of light is a minus quantity!”
Budd rubbed his neck. “So I’m The Fang. I can’t get over it. By the way, chum, I wouldn’t try killing two birds with one stone on this trip. You’re liable to be the other bird. I’m talking to a buddy of mine every twelve hours, until I come back. If I miss a single call, those cans of film will get to the Feds.”
“Damn it,” said Eric mildly. He walked to the bulkhead, pressed a panel. A section slid open; he lifted out a compact little piece of destruction in the form of an atomic bomb. “I was hoping you wouldn’t think of anything like that,” he said. “This was for you. Oh, well.”
Budd grinned. “Better luck next time. So long, pal. See you anon!”
When the air-lock gates had hissed to a close, he threw a master switch set into the chronometer housing, lit a cigarette and sat down to read and look at visirecordings until he had something to do. The chronometer clicked softly, and the ship hurtled away. It was only then that a certain detail occurred to Budd—namely, that whether or not the miners of Pallas and their paymasters agreed to The Fang’s terms, they were doomed, for the eggs would be laid. Their planetoid would strike the hovering nest of bombs when, in all probability, they would be looking for some sort of an attacking ship. Now, what was the good of that?
He reflected a moment, and then laughed aloud. This was all that the System needed to learn that The Fang was a force to be reckoned with! Budd had the bright ideas, but it took a brain like Eric’s to really stretch them out. After this, The Fang could dictate to the Universe!
“My own brother,” Budd chortled. “But, oh Lord, what a man!”
He had changed; he knew that. The tearing radiations that had thrust his new being into the System had left him memories of puffed green flesh, bony joints, and a bald, rough skull. The transition was complete now. Blue-white hair covered the obese body. It was a good three feet long and beautifully silky. It fell down on each side of his scarlet eyes, down from his cheeks, his chin. It mantled his whole
frame, ending in a great puff at his knees. The erstwhile chitinous structure of his fingernails was now flexible, sentient flesh, so that, from the tip of each finger and thumb a dexterous tentacle about four inches long extended.
It was a new and glorious world that this creature regarded. To him, radiant heat was a color, and electricity was a color, and every vibration between them on the electromagnetic spectrum was a shade. Thought itself was a visible, physical thing to him. Thought strikes the average telepath like a hand on the arm of a paralyzed deaf-mute, but to the creature in the Carrington it was as easy to sense as the handshake of a friend.
His interest in the interior of the car was soon exhausted, and he spent many days drinking in the immensities of space. He looked with understanding and the truest kind of appreciation on mighty Jupiter and the speckled Belt. His eyes sensed rather than saw Neptune and frozen Pluto. Then, having had his fill of infinity, he turned again to his small world and himself.
He regarded the car and its workings not with the eye of science, but with that of the most superb logic. The ape regards three turns of rope around a beam as a Gordian knot. A lay human being regards an atomic power plant as a hopelessly involved technical jumble. Not the silver-silk being in the Carrington, however. He crawled into the power compartment, and with the joy of a man who has just found a book he loved in his childhood, he followed leads, inspected coils and bars and casings. In a locker he found tools of every kind, spare parts of every description, and with them he went to work.
The powerful and delicate tentacles at his fingertips worked with a speed and precision impossible to a human hand. Here he found a busbar a few millimeters too thick for the light load it carried; there he saw a mechanical task which could be performed electrically with less drain on the power source. He looked carefully at the wheel-driving mechanism, and after an hour’s work on it, went forward to the control chair and re-calibrated the throttle indicator; for now the machine could not be operated safely on the ground unless it drew less fuel, due to its new efficiency. He regarded the antigrav apparatus with some amusement, for it seemed primitive to him. Hooking
his leg around the wheel driveshaft, he drew a set of tools equipped with spring clips toward him, shut off the unit, and rebuilt it.
The car kept him busy for some days, and then there was little else he could do to it; and so he turned his brilliant eyes inward on himself. He was a creature without precedent. Of the human basic urges, he had none. He could not know hunger, for the car supplied him with food tablets as they were needed. Fear did not exist. Wealth, power, shelter—these things were impossible conceptions, for he had been born with them all.
He remembered little or nothing about Biddiver. He sent his metrical mind back along the past few days, searching for clues as to his origin and that of the automobile. Almost all of it had been blanked out. There was, however, a recent experience—a voice had spoken to him, and he had thought it authoritative. He knew himself to be talented and superior, for had he not improved on the work of a people who manifested a high degree of scientific knowledge? Then the words he had heard from that source must be the thought-image of a Power past even his understanding. If he could only remember when—and where—
That voice had said, “Guys that don’t want to do nothin’ to nobody most generally don’t amount to nothin’. Big shots—every one of them walked up to the top on other guys’ faces. The Fang—at the top now.” There were details about The Fang; the creature suddenly found it difficult to remember whether he had heard of or been The Fang. “Arnik … Arnik brothers—” That was a recurring thought-pattern that brought with it a wondering distaste. There was more, but it was these things that were most significant. Why?
He opened his eyes and stared through the windshield. All of it had something to do with the third planet, the green one. There was a message for him in that voice from the past. He set about the problem as if it were put together with nuts and bolts.
Arnik—big shots—these, and the things about them, were somehow unpleasant thoughts. There was pleasure, however, in improvement. Unpleasant things were made pleasant by improvement. The Arniks, then—
He paused. Everything about him—the car, the stars and planets,
the food he ate and the air he breathed, each of them had a purpose. But he himself—why was he there? The speedometer was there because it had something to do—a function. Had he a function? He must have, he reasoned, or he would not be there. He regarded the green planet thoughtfully, running his pointed yellow tongue over his lips. Where it parted the long hair, two great white tusks showed. He laid his hands on the arms of his chair, and the tentacled tips curled over the ends, lightly touching the controls. He knew what he had to do.
And that is how the philosophy of a bitter bartender became a space dweller’s driving creed.
Budd Arnik found time a little heavy on his hands until his ship approached the Belt, and then he spent most of his time at the forward port. He dared not touch the controls, for his course was timed and plotted and automatically steered, and a fraction of a degree one way or the other would defeat the whole plan.
Power off, the little ship swung into the Belt and into the orbit of Pallas. Then a few gentle nudges this way and that, to brake her and steady her in that untenable position, stasis in space. The most advanced of calculating machinery had been employed to check this one tiny dot on the astro chart. She hung there for twenty-two hours, awaiting just the right split second to drop her deadly load. Budd only felt the infinitesimal lurch because he had waited so long for it—that tiny swaying as automatic grapples let the bombs go, repelled them a few feet so they would be clear of the mass of the ship. Then the artificial gravity and momentum neutralizer cut in, a relay clicked, and the ship looped over and fled back toward Earth.