Alone Against Tomorrow Part 2

Bedzyk heaved himself to his feet. He sighed. "No, I don't think it's a customs s.h.i.+p. They threw us out, but I doubt if they have the imagination or gall to extract t.i.the from us for being here. I don't know what it might be, Harmony. Hold everything and record any signals they send. I'm on my way ups.h.i.+p."

He strode quickly out of the salon, and up the cross-leveled ramps toward the drive room. Not till he had pa.s.sed the hydroponics level did he realize Samswope was behind him. "I, uh, thought I'd come along, Bed," Samswope said apologetically, wringing his small, red hands. "I didn't want to stay down there with those-those freaks." His dumb head hung off to one side, sleeping fitfully.

Bedzyk did not answer. He turned on his heel and casually strode up decks, not looking back.

There was no trouble. The s.h.i.+p identified itself when it was well away. It was an Attache Carrier from System Central in b.u.t.te, Montana, Earth. The supercargo was a SpecAttache named Curran. When the s.h.i.+p pulled alongside the Discard vessel and jockeyed for grappling position, Harmony Teat (her long gray-green hair reaching down past the spiked projections on her spinal column) threw on the attract field for that section of the hull. The Earth s.h.i.+p clunked against the Discard vessel, and the locks were synched in.

Curran came across without a suit.

He was a slim, incredibly tanned young man with a crew cut clipped so short, a patch of nearly- bald showed at the center of his scalp. His eyes were alert, and his manner was brisk and friendly, that of the professional dignitary in the Foreign Service.

Bedzyk did not bother with amenities.

"What do you want?"

"Who may I be addressing, sir, if I may ask?" Curran was the perfect model of diplomacy.

"Bedzyk is what I was called on Earth." Cool, disdainful, I-may-be-hideous-but-I-still-have-a- little-pride.

"My name is Curran, Mr. Curran, Mr. Bedzyk. Alan Curran of System Central. I've been asked to come out and speak to you about-"

Bedzyk settled against the bulkhead opposite the lock, not even offering the Attache an invitation to return to the saloon.

"You want us to get out of your sky, is that it? You stinking, lousy..." He faltered in fury. He could not finish the sentence, so steeped in anger was he. "You set off too many bombs down there, and eventually some of us with something in our bloodstreams react to it, and we turn into monsters. What do you do...you call it the Sickness and you pack us up whether we want to go or not, and you shove us into s.p.a.ce."

"Mr. Bedzyk, I-"

"You what? You d.a.m.ned well what, Mr. System Central? With your straight, clean body and your nice home on Earth, and your allocations of how many people live where to keep the balance of culture just so! You what? You want to invite us to leave? Okay, we'll go," he was nearly screeching, his face crimson with emotion, his big hands knotted at his sides in fear he would strike this emissary.

"We'll get out of your sky. We've been all the way out to the Edge, Mr. Curran, and there's no room in s.p.a.ce for us anywhere. They won't let us land even on the frontier worlds where we can pay our way. Oh no, contamination, they think. Okay, don't shove, Curran, we'll be going."

He started to turn away, was nearly down the pa.s.sageway, when Curran's solid voice stopped him: "Bedzyk!"

The wedge-chested man turned. Curran was unsticking the seam that sealed his jumper top. He pulled it open and revealed his chest.

It was covered with leprous green and brown sores. His face was a blasted thing, then. He was a man with Sickness, who wanted to know how he had acquired it-how he could be rid of it. On the s.h.i.+p, they called Curran's particular deformity "the funnies."

Bedzyk walked back slowly, his eyes never leaving Curran's face. "They sent you to talk to us?"

Bedzyk asked, wondering. Curran resealed the jumper, and nodded. He laid a hand on his chest, as though wis.h.i.+ng to be certain the sores would not run off and leave him. A terror swam brightly in his young eyes.

"It's getting worse down there, Bedzyk," he said as if in a terrible need for hurrying. "There are more and more changing every day. I've never seen anything like it-"

He hesitated, shuddered.

He ran a hand over his face, and swayed slightly, as though whatever memory he now clutched to himself was about to make him faint. "I-I'd like to sit down."

Bedzyk took him by the elbow, and led him a few steps toward the saloon. Then Dresden, the girl with the gla.s.s hands-who wore monstrous cotton-filled gloves-came out from the connecting pa.s.sage leading to the salon, and Bedzyk thought of the hundred weird forms Curran would have to face. In his condition, that would be bad. He turned the other way, and led Curran back up to the drive room. Bedzyk waved at a control chair. "Have a seat."

Curran looked collegiate-boy shook-up. He sank into the chair, again touching his chest in disbelief. "I've been like this for over two months...they haven't found out yet; I've tried to keep myself from showing it..."

He was s.h.i.+vering wildly.

Bedzyk perched on the shelf of the plot-tank, and crossed his legs. He folded his arms across his huge chest and looked at Curran. "What do they want down there? What do they want from their beloved Discards?" He savored the last word with the taste of alum.

"It's, it's so bad you won't believe it, Bedzyk." He ran a hand through his crew cut, nervously.

"We thought we had the Sickness licked. There was every reason to believe the atmosphere spray Terra Pharmaceuticals developed would end it. They sprayed the entire planet, but something they didn't even know was in the spray, and something they only half-suspected in the Sickness combined, and produced a healthier strain.

"That was when it started getting bad. What had been a hit-and-miss thing-with just a few like yourselves, with some weakness in your bloodstreams making you susceptible-became a rule instead of an exception. People started changing while you watched. I-I," he faltered again, shuddered at a memory.

"My, my fiancee," he went on, looking at his Attache case and his hands, "I was eating lunch with her in Rockefeller Plaza's Sky top. We had to be back at work in b.u.t.te in twenty minutes, just time to catch a cab, and she-she-changed while we were sitting there. Her eyes, they, they-I can't explain it, you can't know what it was like seeing them water and run down her ch-cheeks like that, it was-" his face tightened up as though he were trying to keep himself from going completely insane.

Bedzyk sharply curbed the hysteria. "We have seven people like that on board right now. I know what you mean. And they aren't the worst. Go on, you were saying?"

Such prosaic acceptance of the horror brought Curran's frenzy down. "It got so bad everyone was staying in the sterile shelters. The streets always empty; it was horrible. Then some quack physician out in Cincinnati or somewhere like that came up with an answer. A serum made from a secretion in the bloodstreams of-of-"

Bedzyk added the last word for him: "Of Discards?"

Curran nodded soberly.

Bedzyk's hard-edged laugh rattled against Curran's thin film of calm. He jerked his eyes to the man sitting on the plot-tank. A furious expression came over him.

"What are you laughing at? We need your help! We need all you people as blood donors."

Bedzyk stopped laughing abruptly. "Why not use the changed ones from down there." He jerked a thumb at the big lucite viewport where Earth hung swollen and multi-colored. "What's wrong with them-"

and he added with malice "-with you?" Curran twitched as he realized he could so easily be lumped in with the afflicted.

"We're no good. We were changed by this new mutated Sickness. The secretion is different in our blood than it is in yours. You were stricken by the primary Sickness, or virus, or whatever they call it. We have a complicated one. But the way the research has outlined it, the only ones who have what we need, are you Dis-" he caught himself "-you people who were s.h.i.+pped out before the Sickness itself mutated."

Bedzyk snorted contemptuously. He let a wry, astonished smirk tickle his lips. "You Earthies are fantastic." He shook his head in private amus.e.m.e.nt.

He slipped off the plot-tank's ledge and turned to the port, talking half to himself, half to a nonexistent third person in the drive room. "These Earthies are unbelievable! Can you imagine, can you picture it?" Astonishment rang in his disbelief at the proposal. "First they hustle us into a metal prison and shoot us out here to die alone, they don't want any part of us, go away they say. Then when the trouble comes to them too big, they run after us, can you help us please, you dirty, ugly things, help us nice clean Earthies." He spun suddenly. "Get out of here! Get off this s.h.i.+p! We won't help you.

"You have your allotments and your quotas for each world-"

Curran broke in, "Yes, that's it. If the population goes down much more, they've been killing themselves, riots, it's terrible, then the balance will be changed, and our entire System culture will bend and fall and-"

Bedzyk cut him off, finis.h.i.+ng what he had been saying, "-yes, you have your dirty little quotas, but you have no room for us. Well, we've got no room for you! Now get the h.e.l.l off this s.h.i.+p. We don't want to help you!"

Curran leaped to his feet. "You can't send me away like this! You don't speak for all of them aboard. You can't treat a Terran emissary this way-" Bedzyk had him by the jumper, and had propelled him toward the closed companionway door before the Attache knew quite what was happening. He hit the door and rebounded. As he stumbled back toward Bedzyk, the great-chested mutant s.n.a.t.c.hed the briefcase from beside the control chair and slammed it into Curran's stomach. "Here! Here's your offer and your lousy demands, and get off this s.h.i.+p! We don't want any part of y-"

The door crashed open, and the Discards were there.

They filled the corridor, as far back as the angle where cross-pa.s.sages ran off toward the salon and galley. They shoved and nudged each other to get a view into the drive room; Samswope and Harmony Teat and Dresden were in the front, and from somewhere Samswope had produced an effectively deadly little rasp-pistol. He held it tightly, threateningly, and Bedzyk felt flattered that they had come to his aid.

"You don't need that, Sam-Mr. Curran was just leav-"

Then he realized. The rasp was pointed not at Curran, but at him.

He stood frozen, one hand still clutching Curran's sleeve, as Curran bellied the briefcase to himself.

"Dresden overheard it all, Mr. Curran," Samswope said in a pathetically ingratiating tone. "He wants us to rot on this barge." He gestured at Bedzyk with his free hand as the dumb head nodded certain agreement. "What offer can you make us, can we go home, Mr. Curran...?" There was a whimpering and a pleading in Samswope's voice that Bedzyk had only sensed before.

He tried to break in, "Are you insane, Swope? Putty, that's all you are! Putty when you see a fake hope that you'll get off this s.h.i.+p! Can't you see they just want to use us! Can't you understand that?"

Samswope's face grew livid and he screamed, "Shut up! Just shut up and let Curran talk! We don't want to die on this s.h.i.+p. You may like it, you little tin G.o.d, but we hate it here! So shut up and let him talk!"

Curran spoke rapidly then: "If you allow us to send a medical detachment up here to use you as blood donors, I have the word of the System Central that you will all be allowed to land on Earth and we'll have a reservation for you so you can live some kind of normal lives again-"

"Hey, what's the matter with you?" Bedzyk again burst in, trying vainly to speak over the hubbub from the corridor. "Can't you see he's lying? They'll use us and then desert us again!"

Samswope growled menacingly, "If you don't shut up I'll kill you, Bedzyk!"

Bedzyk faltered into silence and watched the scene before him. They were melting. They were going to let this rotten turncoat Earthie blind them with false hopes.

"We've worked our allotments around so there is s.p.a.ce for you, perhaps in the new green-valleys of South America or on the veldtland in Rhodesia. It will be wonderful, but we need your blood, we need your help."

"Don't trust him! Don't believe him, you can't believe an Earthman!" Bedzyk shouted, stumbling forward to wrest the rasp-pistol from Samswope's grip.

Samswope fired point-blank. First the rasp of the power spurting from the muzzle of the tiny pistol filled the drive room, then the smell of burning flesh, and Bedzyk's eyes opened wide in pain. He screamed thinly, and staggered back against Curran. Curran stepped aside, and Bedzyk mewed in agony, and crumpled onto the deck. A huge hole had been seared through his huge chest. Huge chest, huge death, and he lay there with his eyes open, barely forming the words "Don't...you can't, can't t-trust an Earthmmm..."

with his b.l.o.o.d.y lips. The last word formed and became a forever intaglio.

Curran's face had paled out till it was a blotch against the dark blue of his jumper. "Y-y-y..." Samswope moved into the drive room and took Curran by the sleeve, almost where Bedzyk had held it. "You promise us we can land and be allowed to settle someplace on Earth?"

Curran nodded dumbly. Had they asked for Earth in its socket, he would have nodded agreement.

Samswope still held the rasp.

"All right, then...get your med detachment up here, and get that blood. We want to go home, Mr.

Curran, we want to go home more than anything!"

They led him to the lock. Behind him, Curran saw three mutants lifting the blasted body of Bedzyk, bearing it on their shoulders through the crowd. The body was borne out of sight down a cross- corridor, and Curran followed it out of sight with his eyes.

Beside him, Samswope said: "To the garbage lock. We go that way, Mr. Curran." His tones were hard and uncompromising. "We don't like going that way, Mr. Curran. We want to go home. You'll see to it, won't you, Mr. Curran?"

Curran again nodded dumbly, and entered the lock linking s.h.i.+ps.

Ten hours later, the med detachment came up. The Discards were completely obedient and tremendously helpful.

It took nearly eleven months to inoculate the entire population of the Earth and the rest of the System-strictly as preventive caution dictated-and during that time no more Discards took their lives. Why should they? They were going home. Soon the tug-s.h.i.+ps would come, and help jockey the big Discard vessel into orbit for the run to Earth. They were going home. There was room for them now, even in their condition. Spirits ran high, and laughter tinkled oddly down the pa.s.sageway in the "evenings." There was even a wedding between Arkay (who was blind and had a bushy tail) and a pretty young thing the others called Daanae, for she could not speak herself. Without a mouth that was impossible. At the ceremony in the saloon, Samswope acted as minister, for the Discards had made him their leader, in the same, silent way they had made Bedzyk the leader before him. Spirits ran high, and the constant knowledge that as soon as Earth had the Sickness under control, they would be going home.

Then one "afternoon" the s.h.i.+p came.

Not the little tugs, as they had supposed, but a cargo s.h.i.+p nearly as big as their own home.

Samswope rushed to synch in the locks, and when the red lights merged on the board, he locked the two together firmly, and scrambled back through the throng to be the first to greet the men who would deliver them.

When the lock sighed open, and they saw the first ten who had been thrust in, they knew the truth.

One had a head flat as a plate, with no eyes, and its mouth in its neck. Another had several hundred thousand slimy tentacles where arms should have been, and waddled on stumps that could never again be legs. Still another was brought in by a pair of huge empty-faced men, in a bowl. The bowl contained a yellow jelly, and swimming in the yellow jelly was the woman.

Then they knew. They were not going home. As lockful after lockful of more Discards came through, to swell their ranks even more, they knew these were the last of the tainted ones from Earth. The last ones who had been stricken by the Sickness-who had changed before the serum could save them. These were the last, and now the Earth was clean.

Samswope watched them trail in, some dragging themselves on appendageless torsos, others in baskets, still others with one arm growing from a chest, or hair that was blue and fungus growing out all over the body. He watched them and knew the man he had killed had been correct. For among the crowd he glimpsed a bare-chested Discard with huge sores on his body. Curran.

And as the cargo s.h.i.+p unlocked and swept back to Earthwith the silent warning Don't follow us, don't try to land, there's no room for you here-Samswope could hear Bedzyk's hysterical tones in his head: Don't trust them! There's no room for us anywhere! Don't trust them!

You can't trust an Earthman!

Samswope started walking slowly toward the galley, knowing he would need someone to seal the garbage lock after him. But it didn't matter who it was. There were more than enough Discards aboard now.

Deeper Than the Darkness

CHAPTER I.

THEY CAME TO ALF GUNNDERSON in the p.a.w.nee County jail.

He was sitting against the plasteel wall of the cell, hugging his bony knees. On the plasteel floor lay an ancient, three-string mandolin he had borrowed from the deputy and had been plunking with some talent off and on all that hot summer day. Under his thick b.u.t.tocks the empty trough of the mattressless bunk bowed beneath his weight. He was an extremely tall man, even hunched up that way.

He was a gaunt, empty-looking man. His hair fell lanky and drab and gray-brown in disarray over a low forehead. His eyes seemed to be peas, withdrawn from their pods and placed in a starkly white face.

Their blankness only accented the total cipher he seemed. There was no inch of expression or recognition on his face or in the line of his body. He seemed to be a man who had given up the Search long ago.

He was more than tired-looking, more than weary. His was an internal weariness. His face did not change its hollow stare at the plasteel-barred door opposite, even as it swung back to admit the two nonent.i.ties.

The two men entered, their stride as alike as the un.o.btrusive gray mesh suits they wore, as alike as the faces that would fade from memory moments after they had exited. The turnkey-a grizzled country deputy with a minus 8 rating-stared after the men with open wonder on his bearded face.

One of the gray-suited men turned, pinning the wondering stare to the deputy's face. His voice was calm and unrippled. "Close the door and go back to your desk." The words were cold and paced. They brooked no opposition. It was obvious: the men were Mindees.

The roar of a late afternoon invers.p.a.ce s.h.i.+p split the waiting moment, outside; then the turnkey slammed the door, palming its lokt.i.te. He walked back out of the cell block, hands deep in his coverall pockets. His head was lowered as though he was trying to solve a complex problem. It, too, was obvious: he was trying to block his thoughts off from those G.o.ddammed Mindees.