By Furies Possessed

Book 322: Gateway Essentials

by Ted White

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Tad Dameron's assignment was routine enough: escort Bjonn, the alien from Farhome, on the final leg of his journey to Earth - and learn what he could about the alien's culture. But from the beginning Dameron realized that there was something strange and ominous about Bjonn - something in his eyes and the way he spoke, even the way he help himself, that forewarned of danger. Then Bjonn was gone, slipped away to mingle with Earth's teeming millions, and with him the beautiful Dian, Dameron's woman. When next he surfaced, Bjonn was heading a new religion - one which threatened to subvert all humanity. Dameron found himself embarked upon the most dangerous, most isolating job of his career in an attempt to halt the... ALIEN MENACE

Release date: December 21, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 203

Sample

It was a routine run. We made liftoff at 03:00 hours and were down on the Moon three meals and two naps later. I always slept well in free-fall.

Simmons was Waiting for me when we docked, and I sensed the annoyance of several of my fellow passengers when he ushered me through the VIP corridors and past Bio-Customs with a total lack of red tape. It pulled a small smile to the corners of my lips.

“Have they docked, yet?” I asked as soon as we had the corridor to ourselves.

“The Longhaul II should be down in, oh, thirty minutes,” Simmons said, glancing at his wrist-chronometer. It is standard Bureau issue—I had one identical to Simmons’ myself—with concentric faces for Greenwich Mean, local (adjustable), and local-A (which in this case was set for Luna Standard—I’d set mine on the ship). Simmons was one of those incredibly precise, fussy-clerk types who will refer to his watch for confirmation even if he last scanned it a minute earlier. He seemed to be one of those people who only know where they are in relationship to a fixed and immutable constant like Time. If the power-cell fell out of his unit, he’d probably have had heart failure the first time he noticed the sweep-second hand wasn’t moving.

But Simmons’ office was here, on the Moon. Simmons had been out to Mars once, and Ganymede once. (I know; I once looked up his file.) And my office remained on Earth. It stuck in the craw, sometimes—and sometimes when I found myself in the company of this prim-mouthed little man I really detested him.

We took a lift down to office-level, and a capsule over to his quadrant; the Longhaul II might be coming in within the half hour, but interstellar ships are not docked as casually as an Earth-shuttle, and we had some time to kill. Simmons felt it would best be occupied by another briefing.

I always felt a certain measure of satisfaction when I was in Simmons’ office. It measures exactly ten feet square and is seven feet high. I usually have to watch my step with the low ceilings because with Earth-normal muscles my walk is too bouncy; I don’t have that slouchy walk you find in a Luney. Each time I’ve been in Simmons’ office I’ve been able to endure it with equanimity for less than fifteen minutes. After that time, the confined space (every wall surface littered with the oddments of Simmons’ seven-plus years there) starts working on me. It starts at my temples with a kind of inward pressure that makes me want to jerk my head around. Then the air starts feeling close. I find myself breathing through my mouth in panting gasps. Finally, I have to stand up and start pacing.

As I say, I found a certain measure of satisfaction in that office—knowing that it was the price Simmons had paid for his deep-space clearance.

“I must say, Dameron,” Simmons said, looking up from his microfilm viewer, “I questioned the advisability of your assignment to this particular project.”

I said nothing. My first fifteen minutes were not yet up. I leaned back on the narrow couch and crossed my legs, only lightly brushing the edge of his desk with my toe.

“However,” Simmons continued, perhaps annoyed with my lack of response, “I have been assured by Geneva that you are the best man for this task. Then too, you will be escorting your subject back to Earth, where I’m sure you are more at home.”

I ran my fingers through my hair, brushing back my bangs and lightly massaging my right temple. Score one for you, you bastard.

“Perhaps I should go over the few facts we have with you,” Simmons suggested.

“Why not?” I said, shrugging and nearly boosting myself off the couch. “I can’t have gone over the entire file more than a dozen times so far. I’m sure I can benefit from your superior judgment.”

He looked up, a flash of annoyance crossing his petulant face. This game was supposed to be played by his rules. I was stepping over the line.

The Longhaul II was one of seven interstellar ships built in the last forty years, and the second to make use of the Feinberg Drive, which takes us as close to the speed of light as we’re ever likely to get. The Longhaul II was coming back from Farhome, our first colony beyond the solar system, and, more important, was the first to make the round trip since a one-way long-sleep ship left our system with the original colonists early in the last century. According to the laser-beam message sent in by the Longhaul II, from somewhere then not much beyond Pluto’s orbit, the ship was also returning with an emissary from Farhome, a man identified only as Bjonn. We didn’t have much more than that to work with; The Bureau of Non-Terran Affairs has an impressive name, but ranks low on the worldwide pecking order. Most of the ship’s message was concerned with scientific data, accumulated both from Farhome and from the trip itself. We’ve had the Feinberg Drive for forty years now, but the Longhaul II is only the third of seven ships to make its return (although The Rolling Stone has been back twice). My Bureau was interested in Mr. Bjonn—but most of the bureaus were more concerned with the physical details and data of a thirty-year round trip between the stars.

Simmons let this vast fund of information out to me with exquisitely deliberate slowness, rather like a cat playing with a catnip mouse. I think he enjoyed watching me squirm in that claustrophobic den of his. He referred often to his watch, but whether to check his schedule or to ascertain the speed with which I was reacting and exhibiting my now-classic symptoms of confinement, I couldn’t say. Perhaps both.

In due time, he checked his left wrist again, sighed, and rose to his feet. I remained seated, mostly in order to score points against him. I had manfully restrained myself from pacing, despite his obvious impatience for me to begin. If I leapt to my feet now, he might very well sit down again, his ploy a success.

Instead, he threw out a new gambit: “Well? Are you waiting for something more? We’ll be late—” and turned on his heel (a remarkably casual gesture in the low gravity) for the door.

We went through corridors, a capsule, more corridors, and then a lift for the lunar surface; we more or less retraced our earlier route. Never having had to live on the Moon, I have never tried to figure out Lunaport’s elaborate system of corridors, levels, and transit systems. Most pastel-hued concrete-walled corridors look the same to me. Each intersection is dubbed with enough letters and numbers, each in its own arcane sequence, for a city the size of Megayork—but I’m told the system was created for a much larger Lunaport than has yet been built. Rather like a twenty-square block village with 1021st Streets, and the like: hopelessly confusing to a non-native.

Eventually, we were standing in yet another room, this one perhaps twice the size of Simmons’ office, but unfurnished and sterile in appearance. We waited among various functionaries and dignitaries while media-service men moved in and out around us with their recorders and cameras, and portable laser-scanners set up in each corner of the room for hologram recordings. It seemed to take Simmons down a peg or two, waiting here among men most of whom were more important than he; he was here as representative of a Bureau which did not rank in the upper third in clout or importance. For a few moments I actually found myself identifying and sympathizing with Simmons—but only for a few moments.

The doors in the opposite side of the room slid back, and four men, fresh from Bio-Customs, walked in.

I recognized Captain Lasher immediately—and at the same moment I felt a sort of free-fall vertigo. He looked hardly a day older than he had when he’d left, almost thirty years ago. It’s one thing to speak knowledgeably of the Einsteinian Contractions and all that, and quite another to confront in the flesh a man who bears such obvious witness to their truths. Lasher had left our system when I was three. I had seen his pictures and holograms in the textbooks, on 3-D specials, and I’d even done a tape-report on him and the Longhaul II when I was in Third Form and a teenager. Hell, I’d been so space-happy in those days I’d put pinups of Lasher and the others all over the walls of my sleep-cubicle, more than once provoking my den mothers to extreme annoyance.

And here he was, back again at last, the same reddish cowlick in his eyes, the same boyish freckled grin, live and in solid color, as the saying goes, not aged more than a few months in all these years. He was smaller; he’d always struck me as a big man, but that was my boyish hero worship. He was at least a head shorter than I, and tired looking, too. The same, and yet not the same. The more I watched him—the media-service men fighting the officials to cluster around him and his group—the more small changes in detail I catalogued. But these were the details of humanity, as viewed by older, more cynical eyes than those I’d once had.

“What do you think of him?” Simmons asked in a low voice, under my ear.

“Living proof that if you want immortality, just space out,” I said, absently.

“No, no,” Simmons spoke chidingly. “Not him—your charge, the colonist!”

I really hadn’t noticed him. He stood between the other three ship’s officers, and there was absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t have noticed him first. He stood at least a foot taller than anyone else in that group, his hair (short, brushed back, looking a little like the style antiquarians affect) was only inches from the ceiling, and a startling white-blond color. His skin was dark, either deeply tanned or naturally pigmented a burnished walnut. His eyes, which seemed to be scanning the room with lighthearted thoroughness, were the palest blue. All in all, he was a very electrifying sight.

But I beg an excuse: Captain Lasher was a boyhood idol; Bjonn was just an alien.

I sensed it immediately, and it had nothing to do with his appearance. I’ve seen more outlandish-looking men in any Open City, and his clothes were so anonymous that I had to conclude (rightly, as it turned out) that they were standard ship’s issue. Part of it was his eyes: not their color, but the way they moved, the way they seemed to see, digest, correlate, and pass on—in machine-like efficiency—at the same time that they seemed to twinkle with unguessable secrets. Call it a hunch, if you will—I think of it as an intuitive assessment, and it happens to be one of my more valuable talents—but I felt a tingle, a certain feeling that this man Bjonn, with no first name, no second name, just one, all-encompassing, all-purpose cognomen, was not human in the same fashion that I was human, or indeed as anyone else in that room was human.

Alien: I sensed it, and I knew it. In some subtle, indefinable way, this man was alien. And it was my job to find out just precisely how, and why, he was whatever he was.

He moved easily through the flanking media—sensors, cameras, and mikes all pressing against him and falling away again—and the congratulating functionaries, palms all outspread in that ageless gesture of pressing flesh which every politician learns at the cradle, and reached me with his own hand outstretched.

The contact was electrical; I felt as if I had been given a brief static charge, the hairs at the nape of my neck bristling for a short moment. I’d thrust out my own hand automatically, and been prepared for the brief, automatic squeeze.

Instead he took my hand, enveloped it in his own, held it, and locked his eyes on mine. I found myself looking up at him, and my heart did something too fast and too irregular.

“You are Mr. Dameron,” he said, his voice seeming to confirm the truth of this statement. The pressure of his hand around mine was firm and unrelenting. His speech was flawless and without accent—but then he’d had some time aboard ship to lose it if he’d had one. “You will be showing me Earth. I’m pleased.”

I felt flustered. He hadn’t released my hand yet, and I wanted to extricate it without further embarrassment. I felt as though every eye in the room was on us (although a later check of the records showed they weren’t)—and I could feel Simmons, virtually ignored thus far, bristling at my side like a hostile terrier.

“Tad Dameron,” I acknowledged. I gestured with my free hand. “This is our local Bureau man, Phelps John Simmons.”

Graciously, inevitably, as if he had planned it from the start, Bjonn released my sweating hand and reached for Simmons’. “I’m very grateful,” he said, and he seemed to bow as he funneled his concentration into the short figure of my colleague. Simmons looked as though he wanted to jerk his hand away after a single touch, and I wondered if I’d shown that much anxiety myself. But Bjonn did not tarry over Simmons as he had over me, but straightened up and seemed to dismiss the man. I felt a sort of obscure triumph at that—as if Simmons and I had both been denmates, competing for the attention of the local sports champion—and it wiped away for a moment my own anxiousness.

Then the media-service men were closing in on us again, and the air was thick and heavy with questions: “What are your plans?”—”Will you be spending much time on Earth?”—”What is your itinerary?”—”How do you like our system?”—”What are his plans?”—”Can you tell us about Farhome?”—”How long will he be here?”—the same questions were asked over and over, while sensor units were covertly pressed against us and. passed over our bodies. I was grateful for the debug implanted in my chest. At least they wouldn’t have all my chemical-emotional reactions down on tape, although from the perfunctory way they scanned me, I was certain they knew, or suspected, I was debugged.

Simmons had to be debugged too, but it was fascinating to watch the way the big blond colonist handled their insinuating mechanical caresses. Moving without seeming to move, he somehow kept the sensors from ever quite contacting his clothing or skin. I wondered if he knew what they were, or if he simply moved instinctively away from them. This triggered other questions I wanted to ask: What kind of a planet was Farhome? How comfortable in the confinement of Lunaport could Bjonn be? How would he react to Earth, when he got there?

“That’s enough, gentlemen,” Simmons said, after consulting his watch. “Mr. Bjonn will be available for depth-interviews later, on Earth. Just now he is encountering us for the first time, and he must be overwhelmed”—he didn’t look overwhelmed; he looked calm and confident—”by your attentions. I must ask you to let us pass.” And, reluctantly, they did.

Simmons apparently had no plan to subject Bjonn to the tortures of his tiny office. Instead he led us into a quiet lounge, adjacent to the Earth-shuttle docking facilities. I recognized it by reputation as a V-VIP lounge into which I had never before gained admission. It was, by Lunaport standards, a vast room, and its floor was thickly carpeted and broken up into several levels offset by one or two steps. It must have been my imagination, but even the air seemed cleaner, fresher.

“Mr. Dameron will be your guide and companion during your stay on Earth,” he assured our guest. “The Bureau will act as your host. You may make any request.” He smiled a brief and wintry smile. “We may or may not be able to fulfill all requests, but you should feel free to ask.” I realized that Simmons had told what was for him a joke. I felt a sense of wonder at the good fortune involved in my presence upon such an august occasion.

“I certainly hope you will enjoy your visit with us,” Simmons continued, “and I hope you’ll find our Mr. Dameron an adequate guide through our no-doubt complex and mystifying civilization.” (I wanted to snort when he said that.)

Simmons mouthed a few more platitudes, and then consulted the time again before announcing, “I believe you may now enter the shuttle for the final leg of your epic journey. May I wish you all luck and success.” It was Simmons at his floweriest.

They gave me a better berth going back with a definitely superior menu. After checking out both berth and menu (the latter with much private pleasure), I rejoined Bjonn in the common lounge, where I instructed him on the use of his berth.

There is no privacy in a shuttle lounge, and there were many questions I wanted to ask the man but avoided, simply because of that fact. Still, we talked a bit while we awaited liftoff.

I felt ill at ease. Bjonn had a disconcerting directness to him. I had the feeling that he was totally unpracticed in the art of small talk. I was unwilling to pass beyond vague generalities here in public, and yet he seemed determined to stare directly into my eyes and ask me the most direct-questions. I answered them as best I could, but I was quite relieved when the announcement came and we had to return to our berths for liftoff.

A lunar liftoff is a gentle thing, compared to the raw and jolting waste of power one experiences on leaving Earth. There was really no reason for retiring to our berths except that of tradition. Berths are for liftsoff and eating. We liftoff from the Moon; therefore, we retire to our berths for lunar liftsoff. Quod erat demonstrandum. On this particular occasion, however, I welcomed this mindless example of bureaucratic tradition. I stepped into the berth, closed the folding door, inflated the supportive restraint cushions, and relaxed. It sometimes struck me as peculiar that I could relax as easily in a tiny closet, the dimensions of which only slightly exceeded those of my body, when a relatively much larger space like Simmons’ office hit me with such a strong wave of claustrophobia. Perhaps it was simply the difference reflected in my attitudes: Simmons’ office was intended to be moved about in, but offered little opportunity. A shuttle berth is intended for use as a sort of womblike bed, and as such is excellent.

After the warning bell I felt the gravitational shift which signaled that the shuttle rocket was being raised into vertical launching position. Soon I was lying flat on my back, when moments before I had been standing upright. We waited, and with my arms laid flat I couldn’t check my chronometer, but I knew from experience that this wait would seem the longest and be the shortest. Finally a faint vibration penetrated the inflated cushions that enveloped me. Right. Engines firing: testing. We would either abort, or lift; these were the crucial moments. I’ve never been on a shuttle that aborted, but I know it has sometimes happened. O. . .