Suddenly: “Here they come!” A bright ferocity rang in Lucille’s voice. At an eyestraining distance from the
Little Tom,
a cluster of small dots showed infinitesimal against the starry background. Our craft pulled away from the mother ship, all of the other auxiliaries taking up positions of their own in a loose sphere about the larger vessel.
“I guess we might as well let our two passengers see what we’re up against,” observed Williamson. No excitement was audible in his voice at all. Many of the dots turned to scarlet—rather more than had been immediately apparent. Hundreds of “stars” now stood revealed as an attacking fleet, growing as it approached, individual craft still too small to be discernible except as pin-pricks of blood-colored light.
“Lee,
Tom-squared,
here,” crackled a voice in the ceiling. “I’ve got ’em on instruments at twenty, closing like a revenuer on a widow’s homestead.”
Another voice, not one of ours, answered, “Acknowledge,
Tom-Tom,
twenty-thousand and closing. Hold your position and engage as you bear.”
The first voice was tinged with masculine excitement, the second serenely feminine. Rogers said,
“Tom-Tom
’s another auxiliary. He’s the closest. These bandits don’t show on radar, it’s what makes them so—”
“Bandits?” squeaked the Lieutenant, a beat ahead of me.
Blamm!
The little ship shook with the impact, our makeshift acceleration nests cushioning what must have been a titanic shock. “Where the state did he come from?” swore Williamson. The starscape reeled momentarily as
Little Tom
regained headway and maneuvered sharply. In an instant, we could see the enemy, headed straight for us again.
Peculiarly, the object resembled
Asperance,
not streamlined like
Little Tom,
yet different from our Vespuccian ship, too. With nothing to give us an idea of scale, it consisted of a central shaft, a lozenge-shaped nodule at one end. Where the shaft met the presumed crew-cabin, half a dozen hydraulic-looking landing-jacks sprouted, angled slightly outward toward the stern. Our adversary had sustained some collision damage. A couple of his legs were bent, fuselage dented badly.
But he was persistent.
As the enemy loomed nearer, its shaft-end pointed menacingly toward us. What destruction had
Little Tom
suffered? Closer ... closer ... tension filled the room until it seemed the hull would burst. The Lieutenant ground his teeth. His corporal suppressed a whimper.
“Right on, baby,” our pilot growled from his own gravelike depression, “Come and get your medicine!” A brilliant flash washed out the sky-display. The enemy fighter reappeared, damaged worse, its body charred, its legs burned away to stumps. “Son-of-a-bureaucrat! I got him!”
Williamson’s cheer was a bit premature. Despite the punishment, our adversary swiveled until we saw it base-on, swelling as it bore unstoppably closer. The heavens flashed again—an explosion, a shower of debris. “Just in time, too,” the pilot observed, “Let’s see how many of these vermin we can burn before they punch us full of holes!”
“Rogers,” demanded the Lieutenant—the tip of his nose just visible as he talked, “You said we Vespuccii were the only space-traversing—”
Flash!
He was cut off by another brilliant, frightening display. To the right, a saucer-shaped vessel, sister to our own, confronted two of the strange enemy craft. Each of them was at least three times larger, shaft-end to lozenge-tip, than the diameter of the scout. Suddenly, the smaller vessel’s underside pulsed blindingly. Energy spat from the entire surface, crashed against the alien antagonists. Both retreated, severely hurt. The saucer pursued, firing its peculiar keel-batteries again and again. One oddly-shaped attacker dissolved in a greasy cloud of scattering scrap.
Little Tom
swerved again, blasting away at an unseen opponent, losing sight of the other ship, the outcome of its battle.
“Yes, in a way,” Rogers offered from his dugout. “And then again, no.”
“What?” I beat the Lieutenant to it, this time.
BLAMMM!!
The ship shook from side to side as if hungry predators were tearing at her substance. “You guys sure have short attention-spans,” he continued, “I meant, yes, you’re the only space-traversing folks we’ve run into so far, but, looking at it another way, you’re not, exactly.”
“How informative,” the Lieutenant sneered. I paid attention to the praxeologist, rather than our impending doom. Hideous ripping-noises made it difficult. “What, in the name of everything authorized, do you mean?”
“Rog is a social scientist,” offered Williamson across the room. He should have been preoccupied, unable to hear our conversation. “It doesn’t have to mean anything!” Blinding light flared again. Another alien vanished in swarming wreckage. “Gotcha, you hyperthyroid ant-grunt!”
There was a short lull, as if between strokes of heat-lightning: “Owen’s referring to his pet Gunjj,” Couper sighed, “Nobody believes a word of it, understand, but—Bandits, Ev, two o’clock low!” The ship dipped, swerved; light again flared blindingly. “But he still burdens defenseless strangers with the story on occasion.” A low shudder ran through the fabric of
Little Tom,
threatening to shake my internal organs from their fastenings. Every centimeter of the vessel groaned—a pair of bristly-jointed alien limbs lashed briefly across the view-area.
Rogers said, “I actually meant these things—ouch! Take it easy, Ev, I’ve got a tender stomach!” For a moment, we lost our orientation. It seemed as if we were hanging from the floor, looking down at the ceiling.
“Not with your taste in clothing,” the pilot replied.
This was insane: five-sided bantering while fending off a deadly enemy. At least Lucille was keeping silent. “What are these things?” the Lieutenant contributed, “Or is that another of your precious secrets?”
“Not at all, Lieutenant,” Rogers told him. “They’re virus.”
“
What?”
“As near as we can tell,” the praxeologist said, “they evolved in deep space, out of huge clouds of formaldehyde and interstellar—oh, boy!”
Miraculously retaining my stomach contents again, through yet another violent loop, I gulped bile. “Why do you call them—‘gunge’?”
The praxeologist wrinkled what I could see of his face, then tried to shake his head. Even at this angle, I could see the sweat beading on his somewhat greenish features. “We don’t call them ... I mean, these aren’t the Gunjj.” He spelled it out. “They’re an intelligent species.”
“
Maidez, maidez!”
the communicator crackled at the limit of intelligibility. Outside, a vessel struggled with six gigantic organisms worrying her like desert scavengers.
“Tom Swift Maru
to anybody listening! They’ve penetrated my hull! It’s filling up with—Oh, yech! I’ve set autodestruct. We’re bailing out. Stand by on pickup!”
Lucille spoke: “Gotcha, TSM, relaying. We’ll—Great spirit of Osceola!”
Tom Swift Maru
exploded in a blinding ball of flame. “At least they took six of the bastards with them!” Lucille said grimly. Our ship swerved suddenly, its batteries snarled, another super-virus vanished.
More insanity: “The truth is, Whitey, until recently, we—the Confederacy, that is—never had full contact with another sapient species—nobody counts the Gunjj. We call them that because, when we first began to explore, we kept running across their ‘calling-card’. Given a nice, clean, uninhabited planet, oxygen and greenery, sooner or later we’d find, carved into a tree, or painted on a rock, a characteristic inscription.” Rogers lifted an arm above the floor like some weird insect buried in the sand, used a rubber-coated finger to trace a sign in the carpet; the pile obligingly turned contrasting blue.
“Mind you, we never found it on any occupied planet. Just what it indicated, no one had the slightest idea. Sometimes the symbol appears ancient, weathered, only about half-legible. Others are fresh, as if the grafittist just left minutes ago. It’s associated with artifacts, empty plastic containers, other kinds of refuse, occasionally a broken tool.”
Groaning loudly again, the little ship wheeled, blasting, pivoting once more for another shot. The hull
clanged!
harshly. I wondered how Rogers could go on with this lecture of his so calmly, having watched a sister ship destroyed with her entire complement aboard. Then I saw his eyes roll at the noise. This was his way of keeping his nerve.
I listened for the same reason.
“Some of the inscriptions were tiny; they could hardly be read. Others, gouged across entire continents, were naked-eye visible from orbit. Each instance was exactly like this, cursive stylized emblems appearing to spell out the word ‘Gunjj’. Of course it had to mean something else in an alien language. Except for showing up on planet after planet, I suppose it might have implied no more intelligence than the dried-up slime-track of a snail—you do know what a snail is?”
There was a screeching, tearing noise. A section of the viewing dome went black. I said nothing about snails. The praxeologist would not have heard me anyway. The poor fellow’s voice rose half an octave, increased its pace by fifty words a minute, but went on. “It was as scientifically disreputable a mystery as the Loch Ness monster or the supposedly lost planet Lucifer. It might have gone on the same way, unsolved, if it hadn’t been for a near-disastrous adolescent practical joke.
“An individual Gunjj resembles a bunch of asparagus—no asparagus on Vespucci? All right, a bundle of semi-flexible tubes, bound in the middle by a bit of string. Only they’re twelve feet tall, a sickly pale gray, and the string supports a belt pouch for personal effects and weapons. They don’t stand their full double man-height, but droop the tops of their stalks over, like the tentacles on a sea-anemone—which I can see that you don’t know anything about, either.”
The missing viewscreen sector flickered fitfully to life again. It did not present a pretty picture. The enemy virus were much reduced in number, but so were Confederate ships. The ruins of a dozen littered the void, some with tiny figures managing to escape from them, some without. I looked at the Lieutenant. Either he was more courageous than I had believed, choosing to catch up on his sack-time, or he had fainted.
“There are a number of theories,” Rogers continued, cultivatedly oblivious to the awful scene before us, “concerning extraconfederate life-forms...” He seemed to lose his place for a moment—perhaps due to a catastrophic explosion on the rim of the mother-ship. Then he went on. “Some see evolution as convergent, every intelligent species we find should resemble humans, simians, or cetaceans, because they’ll inevitably occupy similar niches in the ecologies of their respective planets ... ”
Again Rogers tapered off. For a terrible moment I was afraid that he had fainted, too. I could not bear the thought of his joining the Lieutenant in peace, leaving me alone to face this nightmare. “Yes, praxeologist,” I imitated Sermander’s peremptory tone. “The opposing theory?”
“—Er, the other position ... holds that evolution is never that convergent, not enough to make up for an isolated beginning, billions of years of independent development, on an entirely different planet. By this reasoning, which has so far been confirmed by the few glimpses we’ve had, the lowliest Terran slime-mold colony is a vastly-closer relative to us than any outsystem organism, and resembles us more nearly.”
Terran? So I was a Terran, if Rogers had actually meant to include me in his “us”. I thought about the obviously alien organisms native to Vespucci. No mistaking them for anything our ancestors had brought along.
From Terra, it would appear.
“Most praxeologists will agree that intelligence can’t differ very much, from one species to another. The parameters for its existence are just too narrow. Consequently, we’ll be able to play chess, swap horses, even tell dirty jokes, in any civilization we ever encounter. Our semi-contact with the Gunjj seems to confirm both theories—of physical difference and psychological similarity. They look weird, but they’re no more alien in outlook than, say, the Japanese seem to North Americans. Lost you again, didn’t I? But it’s true. I know, I was there.”
“It was a dark and stormy night ... ” Williamson interrupted in a melodramatic voice. He was interrupted himself, when another small squadron of giant virus zoomed toward
Little Tom,
requiring rapid action. The attack appeared to be slacking off, but it was not over yet.
Rogers snorted: “Some people just don’t appreciate a good story when they hear one. It was aboard the old
Tom Smothers Maru,
a small scout, not unlike this one. The pilot was Koko Featherstone-Haugh, before she ascended to ... call it a higher plane of existence, and I was fresh out of school, myself. We were exploring the masked region between a pair of nebulae, not looking for anything in particular except a potential profit, when the long-distance rangefinders began squawking.
“Heavy metal ahead ... ”
-2-
Captain Koko Featherstone-Haugh (Rogers pronounced it “Fanshaw”) nodded, putting the helm hard over. “Not one of ours—see what magnification the traffic will bear, will you, Rog?” Koko was an imposing individual, nearly two meters tall, almost as wide, heavily muscled. Not human. She was in charge. For a young man with the ink still wet on his diploma—even wetter on his contract—it was enough.