“I—”
“Perhaps I can help you repair it.”
Later, after the poet had heard the story of the missing trade names, the amnesia, the memory blank, the strange voices in Sam’s head, he rubbed his hands together and said, “You’ll not get rid of me until we discover the roots of this thing. What a helluva mystery! It’s almost worth an epic poem already!”
“Then you aren’t angry?” Sam asked.
“Angry? But whatever for? If you’re referring to the unfortunate collision of our hyperspace fields, please let us forget it. It was very obviously not your fault, and there are far more important things to discuss.”
Sam sighed again, heavily.
“Well,” Hurkos said, “what do you make of it?” He was hunched forward, as they all were, sitting on the floor like a small boy at his father’s knee.
Gnossos rolled his tongue over his wide, perfect teeth, thought a moment. His eyes were crystal blue and, when he stared, it seemed as if he were looking directly through — not at — whatever his gaze fell upon. “It sounds,” he said at length, “as if someone is trying to overturn the galaxy — or the order of the galazy, at least.”
Hurkos looked at him blankly. Sam shifted, waited for more, shifted again. “What do you mean?”
“Consider the weapons. Weapons have been illegal — except for sport, Beast hunting and collecting — for a thousand years. You say these weapons are obviously not for sporting because of their terrific power, and yet no one collects explosives or new and gleaming guns. Someone, it seems painfully clear to me, means to use them on humans.”
Sam shuddered. Hurkos blanched. The thought had been hanging in the rear of their minds, but neither had allowed it to gain perspective out in the light of the conscious. Now it was looming there — to be feared.
“The trade names,” Gnossos continued, “are missing because this ship and its contents were designed to provide secrecy for their owner and manufacturer. Sam here is being used by someone. He seems to be a tool to overthrow the current order of things.”
“Then he could get orders at any time to kill both of us!”
Sam was perspiring.
“I don’t think so,” the poet said.
“But the order to hyperspace—” Hurkos protested.
“Was a posthypnotic suggestion.” Gnossos waited for a reaction. When their facial expressions registered a modicum of relief, he continued. “Sam here was kidnapped, taken somewhere to have his memory removed. Then they — whoever They may be — implanted a series of hypnotic commands, a sequence of orders. When that was done, they shipped him off to do whatever they had ordered. The first order was designed to be triggered by… oh, let’s say that meal you ate earlier.”
“The food didn’t affect me,” Hurkos said.
“But you had no hypnotic suggestions implanted in your mind. Sam did. The food triggered the first, let’s say. Now, perhaps the remaining orders will come at measured intervals. Every sixth hour or something like that. Or perhaps they will be irregularly spaced but with planned intervals.”
“So whoever gave him the orders would not be aware of our presence.”
“Correct.”
Sam interrupted the dialogue. “That’s a relief. I like you both too much to kill.”
“One thing I’ve been wondering about,” Gnossos said. “Why didn’t you acknowledge my radio message just after the collision?”
“We didn’t receive any,” Sam said, perplexed. “We tried to get through to you, but you didn’t answer.”
“A broken radio?” Hurkos offered.
Sam forced himself to his feet, walked to the console. “Report on the condition of the radio/receiver.”
WORKING PROPERLY.
“That shoots that theory.”
“But how could my secret master control the radio if he doesn’t even know what’s going on here?” Sam traced his fingers over the seams of the console chair.
Gnossos shrugged, got to his feet. “Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe they do know that Hurkos and I are here and they’re just waiting for the best moment to knock us off. But that’s a question we’ll leave till later. Right now, let’s check out your laboratory. I have an idea.”
The three of them stood looking up at the robosurgeons. Sam shivered at the sight of them: men-talented but not men. He hated every machine he came in contact with, though he was not sure why.
“Someone could have machined the cases for these,” the poet said. “But there are only a few companies that have the facilities to produce the delicate interiors. No one could make his own robosurgeon from scrap without billions in equipment and hundreds of trained minds. Whoever put this together would have had to purchase the factory-made workings.”
Sam flicked the control knob that lowered the machines out of the ceiling. Ponderously, they came. When the underslung arms had spread to the sides and the machines were almost to the top of the table, he stopped them. Then he caused the main component to revolve so that the access plate faced them.
Gnossos rubbed his palms together: sand on stone. “Now we’ll find a few clues.” He threw back the latches that held the plate on, dropped the cover to the floor. “Every company carries a list of purchases and customers. With one little serial number, we can find the buyer and, consequently, the constructor of this tub.” He bent over and peered into the dark interior of the globe. He looked puzzled.
“Awful dark in there,” Hurkos said.
Gnossos put a hand inside, reached in… and in, in, in up to his elbow.
“There’s nothing in it!” Sam said.
“Oh yes there is!” Gnossos shouted painfully. “And it has hold of my hand!”
V
Gnossos tore his hand out of the machine, rubbed it against his chest. It was red and raw and bleeding in a few spots.
“What the hell is in there?” Hurkos asked, leaning away from the open machine.
Sam stifled some low-keyed scream he felt twisting up toward his lips.
As if in answer to Hurkos’ question, a jelly-mass began dripping onto the table from the open access plate. It collected there, amber spotted with areas of bright orange. It trembled there, quivered. Piercing, low-scale hummings bathed its convulsing form. There was something like a skin forming over it, the amber and orange changing to a pinkish-tan hue that made it look amazingly like human skin — too much like human skin. The skin expanded, contracted, and there were pseudopods pulling the mass across the table toward the warmth of their bodies.
They had backed nearly to the door. “There were no mechanical insides!” Gnossos said, rubbing his hand.
“But it moved,” Sam argued. “It operated like a machine. How could it do that without moving parts?”
The jelly-mass burst in places as bubbles of something reached its surface, flopped open and left pocks. But the pocks were healed rapidly, and the skin was returned to normal.
“That — that thing was its insides, its working parts,” Gnossos said. “The jelly-mass operated the shell like a machine.”
The last of the mess dropped from the bowl of the main component. There was more than could have been contained in the main sphere; apparently all the sections had been filled and were now drained empty. The jelly-mass, shapeless, plunged over the end of the table, struck the floor with a sickening sloshing noise, and moved toward them, arms of simulated flesh lashing out for purchase on the cold floor.
“The armory!” Sam shouted, turning into the hall and flinging the door to the other room wide. Perhaps it had been the hypnotic training with the weapons that had made him think of guns so quickly. He knew how to kill; he could stop the amoeba, the super-cell. He stepped back into the hall with a rifle in his hands, brought it up, sighted. “Move away!”