Brennan gasped and, too late, tried to jerk away. The Outsider’s grip was like spring steel inside its glove. They were spinning away through space toward the eyeball-shaped life support system, and not a thing Brennan could do about it.
“Nick,” said the intercom.
“Here,” said Nick. He’d left it open.
“The dossier you want is labeled ‘Jack Brennan.’ ”
“How do you know?”
“We called his woman. He has only one, a Charlotte Wiggs, and two kids. We convinced her it was urgent. She finally told us he was off searching the Uranus Trojan points.”
“Uranus… that sounds right. Cutter, do me a favor.”
“Sure. Official?”
“Yes. See to it that Hummingbird is fueled and provisioned and kept that way until further notice. Fit it with strap-on boosters. Then get a com laser focused on ARM Headquarters, New York, and keep it there. You’ll need three, of course.” For relays as the Earth rotated.
“Okay. No message yet?”
“No, just hold a laser ready in case we need it.”
The situation was so damn fluid. If he needed help from Earth he’d need it quickly and badly. The surest way to convince the flatlanders would be to go himself. No First Speaker had ever touched Earth… and he didn’t expect to now; but The Perversity of the Universe Tends Toward a Maximum.
Nick began to skim Brennan’s dossier. Too bad the man had children.
Phssthpok’s first clear memories dated from the day he woke to the fact that he was a protector. He could conjure blurred memories from before: of pain, fighting, discovering new foods, experiences in sex and affection and hate and tree climbing in the valley of Pitchok; watching curiously, half a dozen times, as various female breeders bore children he could smell were his. But his mind had been vague then.
As a protector he thought sharply and clearly. At first it had been unpleasant. He had had to get used to it. There had been others to help him, teachers and such.
There was a war, and he had graduated into it. Because he had had to develop the habit of asking questions, it had been years before he understood its history:
Three hundred years earlier several hundred major Pak families had allied to refertilize a wide desert area of the Pak world. Erosion and overgrazing had produced that desert, not war, though there were mildly radioactive patches all across it. No place on the Pak world was entirely free from war.
The heartbreakingly difficult task of reforesting had been completed a generation ago. Immediately and predictably the alliance had split into several smaller alliances, each determined to secure the land for its own descendants. By now most of the earlier alliances were gone. A number of families had been exterminated, and the surviving groups changed sides whenever expedient to protect their blood lines. Phssthpok’s blood line now held with South Coast.
Phssthpok enjoyed war. Not because of the fighting. As a breeder he’d had fights, and war was less a matter of fighting than of outwitting the enemy. At its start it had been a fusion bomb war. Many of the families had died during that phase, and part of the reclaimed desert was desert once more. Then South Coast had found a damper field to prevent fissionables from fissioning. Others had swiftly copied it. Since then the war had been artillery, poison gas, bacteria, psychology, infantry, even freelance assassination. It was a war of wits. Could South Coast counteract propaganda designed to split off the Meteor Bay region? If Eastersea Alliance had an antidote to river poison Iota, would it be easier to steal it from them or invent our own? If Circle Mountains should find an innoculation for bacterial strain Zeta-Three, how likely was it that they’d turn a mutated strain against us? Should we stick with South Coast, or could we do better with Eastersea? It was fun.
As Phssthpok learned more the game grew more complex. His own Virus QQ would kill all but eight percent of breeders but would leave their protectors unharmed… unharmed and fighting with doubled fury to salvage a smaller and less vulnerable group of strain-resistant hostages. He agreed to suppress it. Aak(pop) Family had too many breeders for the local food supply; he rejected their offer of alliance but blocked their path toward Eastersea.
Then Eastersea Alliance built a pinch field generator which could set off a fusion reaction without previous fission.
Phssthpok had been a protector for twenty-six years.
The war ended within a week. Eastersea had the recultivated desert, the part that wasn’t bare and sterile from seventy years of war. And there had been a mighty flash over the Valley of Pitchok.
The infants and breeders of Phssthpok’s line had lived in the Valley of Pitchok for unremembered generations. He had seen that awful light on the horizon and known that all his descendants were dead or sterile, that he had no blood line left to protect, that all he could do was to stop eating until he was dead.
He hadn’t felt that way since. Not until now.
But even then, thirteen centuries ago in biological time, he hadn’t felt this awful confusion. What was this pressure-suited thing at the end of his arm? Its faceplate was darkened against sunlight. It looked like a breeder, as far as he could tell from the shape of the suit. But they couldn’t have built spacecraft or pressure suits.
Phssthpok’s sense of mission had held steady for more than twelve centuries. Now it was drowning in pure confusion. Now he could regret that the Pak knew nothing of other intelligent species. The biped form might not be unique to Pak. Why should it be? Phssthpok’s shape was good designing. If he could see this native without his suit… if he could smell it! That would tell the tale.
They landed next to the porthole. The Outsider’s aim was inhumanly accurate. Brennan didn’t try to fight as the Outsider reached through the curved surface, grasped something, and pulled them both inside. The transparent material resisted movement, like invisible taffy.
In quick, jerky movements, the alien stripped off its pressure suit. The suit was flexible fabric, including the transparent bubble. There were drawstrings at the joints. With its suit off, but still maintaining its iron grip on Brennan, the alien turned to look at him.
Brennan wanted to scream.
The thing was all knobs. Its arms were longer than human, with a single elbow joint in something like the right place; but the elbow was a ball seven inches across. The hands were like strings of walnuts. The shoulders and the knees and the hips bulged like cantaloupes. The head was a tilted melon on a nonexistent neck. Brennan could find no forehead, no chin. The alien’s mouth was a flat black beak, hard but not shiny, which faded into wrinkled skin halfway between mouth and eyes. Two slits in the beak were the nose. Two human looking eyes were protected by not at all human looking masses of deeply convoluted skin, and by a projecting shelf of brow. From the beak the head sloped backward as if streamlined. A bony ridge rose from the swelling skull, adding to the impression of streamlining.
It wore nothing more than a vest with big pockets, a human-seeming garment as inappropriate as a snap-brim Fedora on Frankenstein’s monster. The swollen joints on its five-fingered hand felt like a score of ball bearings pressing into Brennan’s arm.
Thus, the Outsider. Not merely an obvious alien. A dolphin was an obvious alien, but a dolphin was not horrible. The Outsider was horrible. It looked like a cross between human and… something else. Man’s monsters have always been that. Grendel. The Minotaur. Mermaids were once considered horrors: all lovely enticing woman above, all scaly monster below. And that fitted too, for the Outsider was apparently sexless, with nothing but folds of armor-like skin between its legs.