The Best of AE van Vogt Part 10

The time had come to end this madness, or someone might be killed. Cemp acted on his evaluation that for some reason that was not clear, this Silkie was not properly trained and was therefore vulnerable to a nonlethal attack by a technique involving a simple version of levels of logic.

He wouldn't even have to use the secret ability he had learned from the Kibmadine the year before.

The moment he made up his mind, he did a subtle energy thing. He modified a specific set of low-energy force lines pa.s.sing through his brain and going in the direction of U-Brem.

Instantly, there was manifested a strange logic implicit in the very structure and makeup of life. The logic of levels! The science that had been derived by human scientific methods from the great Silkie ability for changing form.

Each life cell had its own rigidity. Each gestalt of cells did a specific action, could do no other. Once stimulated, the "thought" in that particular nerve bundle went through its exact cycle, and if there was an accompanying motion or emotion, that also manifested itself precisely and exactly and without qualification.

Even more meaningful, more important-a number of cell colonies could be joined together to form a new gestalt, and groups of such cl.u.s.ters hadtheir special action. One such colony gestalt was the sleep center in human beings.

The method Cemp used wouldn't work on a Silkie in his cla.s.s-C form. Even a B Silkie could fight off sleep. But this Silkie in human form began to stagger. His eyes were sud-denly heavy lidded, and the uncontrolled appearance of his body showed that he was asleep on his feet.

As the man fell, Cemp stepped forward and caught his body, preventing an injurious crash to the concrete side-walk. Simultaneously, he did a second, subtle, thing. On another force line, he put a message that manipulated the unconsciousness gestalt in the other's brain. It was an attempt at complete control. Sleep cut off U-Brem's per-ception of his environment. Cemp's manipulation of his unconsciousness mechanism eliminated those messages from the brain's stored memory which would normally stimulate to wakefulness someone who was not really sleepy.

Cemp was congratulating himself on his surprisingly easycapture-when the body he held stiffened.

Cemp, sensing an outside force, drew back. To his complete astonishment, the unconscious man rose straight up into the sky.

In his human form, Cemp was not able to determine the nature of the energy that could accomplish such an im-probable feat. He should he realized, transform to Silkie. He found himself hesitating. There was a rule against changing in full view of human beings. Abruptly, he recog-nized that this situation was unique, a never-before-encoun-tered emergency. He transformed to Silkie and cut off gravity.

The ten-foot body, shaped a little like a projectile, rose from the ground at missile speed. Most of his clothes, com-pletely torn away, fell to the ground. A few tattered remnants remained but were swept away by the gale winds created by his pa.s.sage.

Unfortunately, all of five seconds had gone by while he made the transformation, and since several seconds had already pa.s.sed before he acted, he found himself pursuing a speck that was continuing to go straight up.

What amazed him anew was that even with his Silkie perception, he could detect no energy from it, below it, or around it. Yet its speed was as great as anything he could manage. Accordingly, after only moments, he realized that his pursuit was not swift enough to overtake the man and that the body of U-Brem would reach an atmosphere height too rarefied for human survival unless he acted promptly. He therefore mercifully removed the pressure from the sleep and unconsciousness center of the other's body.

Moments later, he was disappointed, but not surprised, he sensed from the other a s.h.i.+ft to Silkie form; proof that he had awakened and could now be responsible for himself.

U-Brem continued straight up, as a full-grown Silkie now, and it was presently obvious that he intended to risk going through the Van Allen belt. Cemp had no such fool-hardy purpose.

As the two of them approached the outer limits of the atmosphere, Cemp put a thought on a beam to a manned Telstar unit in orbit around Earth. The thought contained simply the data about what had happened.

The message sent, he turned back. Greatly disturbed by his experience-and being without clothes for human wear-he flew straight to the Silkie Authority.

2.

Cemp, descending from the sky down to the vast building complex that comprised the central administration for deal-ing with Silkies, saw that other Silkies were also coming in. He presumed, grimly, that they were there for the same reason as he was.

As the realization came, he scanned the heavens behind him with his Silkie senses and perceived that scores more of black spots were out there, hurtling closer. Divining im-minent confusion, he slowed and stopped. Then, from his position in the sky, he telepathed Charley Baxter, proposing a special plan to handle the emergency.

Baxter was in a distracted state, but presently his return thought came. "Nat, yours is just about the best idea we've had. And you're right. This could be dangerous."

There was a pause. Baxter must have got his message through to other of the Special People, for Cemp began to record a general Silkie warning. "To all Silkies: It would be unwise for too many of you to concentrate at one time in one place. So divide into ten groups on the secret-number system, plan G.

Group One only, approach and land. All others disperse until called."

In the sky near Cemp, Silkies began to mill around. Cemp, who, by the designated number system, was in group three, veered off, climbed to the upper atmosphere, and darted a thousand miles over, to his home in Florida.

En route, he talked mentally to his wife, Joanne. And so by the time he walked naked into the house, she had clothes laid out for him and knew as much as he about what had happened.

As Cemp dressed, he saw that she was in a womanly state of alarm, more concerned than he. She accepted that there was a Silkie nation and that this meant there would also be Silkie women.

"Admit it!" she said tearfully. "That thought has already crossed your mind, hasn't it?"

"I'm a logical person," Cemp defended. "So I've had fleet-ing thoughts about all possibilities. But being sensible, I feel that a lot of things have to be explained before I can reject what we know of Silkie history. And so until we have proof of something different, I shall go on believing that Silkies are the result of biological experiments with DNA and DNP and that old Sawyer did it there on Echo Island."

"What's going to become of our marriage?" Joanne said in an anguished voice.

"Nothing will change."

She sobbed. "I'm going to seem to you like a native woman of three hundred years ago who is married to a white man on a South Sea Island-and then white women begin arriving on the island."

The wildness of her fantasying astounded Cemp. "It's not the same," he said. "I promise complete loyalty and devotion for the rest of our lives."

"n.o.body can promise anything in personal relations," she said. But his words seemed to rea.s.sure her after a moment. She dried her eyes and came over to him and allowed herself to be kissed.

It was an hour before a phone call came from Charley Baxter. The man was apologetic for the delay but explained that it was the result of a conference on Cemp's future actions.

"It was a discussion just about you in all this," Baxter said.

Cemp waited.

The final decision was to continue to not let Cemp intermingle with, other Silkies-"for reasons that you know," Baxter said significantly.

Cemp surmised that the reference was to the secret know-ledge he had gained from the Kibmadine Di-isarinn and that this meant they would continue to send him on special missions that kept him away from other Silkies.

Baxter now produced the information that only four hundred Silkies had been approached by alter egos.

"The number actually reported in," he said, "is three hundred and ninety-six."

Cemp was vaguely relieved, vaguely contemptuous. U-Brem's claim that all Silkies were targets was now proved to be propaganda. He had already shown himself to be an inept Silkie. The lie added one more degrading touch.

"Some of them were pretty poor duplicates," said Baxter. "Apparently, mimicking another body is not a great skill with them."

However, he admitted, even four hundred was more than enough to establish the existence of a hitherto unknown group of Silkies.

"Even if they are untrained," he said, "we've absolutely got to find out who they are and where they come from."

"Is there no clue?" Cemp asked.

No more than he already knew.

"They all got away?" Cemp said, astounded. "No one did any better than I did?"

"On the average, not as well," said Baxter.

It seemed that most Silkies had made no effort to hold the strange Silkies who confronted them; they had simply reported in and asked for instructions.

"Can't blame them," said Baxter.

He continued, "But I might as well tell you that your fight and your reasons for fighting make you one of the two dozen Silkies we feel we can depend on in this matter. So here are your instructions ..."

He talked for several minutes and concluded, "Take Joanne with you, but go at once!"

The sign said,ALL THEMUSICINTHISBUILDINGISSILKIEMUSIC .

Cemp, who had never listened for long to any other kind, saw the faint distaste come into his wife's face.

She caught his look and evidently his thought, for she said, "All right, so it sounds dead level to me, as if it's all the same note-well, anyway, the same few notes, close together, repeated in various sickening combinations."

She stopped, shook-her beautiful blonde head, and said, "I guess I'm tense and afraid and need something wild and clashy."

To Cemp, who could hear harmonies in the music that were beyond the reach of ordinary human ears, her outburst was but a part of the severe emotional reactions to things that Silkies married to human women had to become accustomed to. The wives of Silkies had a hard time making their peace with the realities of the relations.h.i.+p.

As Joanne had put it more than once, "There you are with this physically perfect, beautiful male. But all the time you're thinking, "This is not really a man. It's a monster that can change in a flash into either a fishlike being or a creature of s.p.a.ce. But of course, I wouldn't part with him for any-thing."

The music sign was soon behind them, and they walked on into the interior of the museum. Their destination was the original laboratory, in which the first Silkie was supposed to have been produced.

The lab occupied the center of the building; it had been moved there from the West Indies a hundred and ten years before, according to a date on a wall plaque at the entrance.

It had seemed to Baxter that a sharper study should be made of the artifacts of Silkie history. The entire structure of that history was now being questioned for the very first time.

This task, of reevaluating the past data, had been a.s.signed to Cemp and Joanne.

The lab was brightly lighted. It had only one visitor; a rather plain young woman with jet-black hair but no makeup, wearing ill-fitting clothes, was standing at one of the tables beside the far doorway.

As Cemp came in, a thought not his own touched his mind. He started to turn to Joanne, taking it for granted that she had communicated with him on that level. He took it for granted, that is, for several seconds.

Belatedly, realization came that the thought had arrived on a magnetic carrier wave-Silkie level.

Cemp swung around and stared at the black-haired woman. She smiled at him, somewhat tensely, he noted, and then her thought came, unmistakably: "Please don't give me away. I was stationed here to convince any doubting Silkie."

She didn't have to explain what she meant. The thunder of it was pouring through Cemp's mind.

According to his knowledge, there had never been any female Silkies. All Silkies on Earth were males, married to women of the Special People-like Joanne.

But this black-haired, farm-woman type was a female Silkie! That was what she was letting him know by her presence. In effect, by being here, she was saying, "Don't bother to search dusty old files. I'm living proof that Silkies were not produced in somebody's laboratory two hundred and thirty years ago."

Suddenly Cemp was confused. He was aware that Joanne had come up beside him, that she must have caught his thought, that she was herself dismayed. The one glimpse he had of her face showed that she had become very pale.

"Nat!" her voice came sharply. "You've got to capture her!"

Cemp started forward, but it was a half-hearted move-ment. Yet in spite of the uncertainty in his actions, he was already having logical thoughts.

Since only hours had gone by since the moment he first saw U-Brem, she must have been stationed here in advance. She would therefore have had no contact with the others. And so she wouldn't know that to a trained Silkie like him-self, she was as vulnerable as an unarmed civilian opposed by a soldier.

The black-haired woman must have suddenly had some doubt of her own. Abruptly she stepped through the door near which she had been-standing and closed it after her.

"Nat!" Joanne's voice, high-pitched, sounded mere inches behind him. "You can't let her get away!"

Cemp, who had emerged from his brief stasis, projected a thought after the female Silkie. "I'm not going to fight you, but I'm going to stay close to you until I have all the infor-mation we want."

"Too late!" A magnetic carrier wave, human-Silkie level, brought her thought. "You're already too late."

Cemp didn't think so. He arrived at the door through which she had disappeared, was slightly disconcerted to find that it was locked, smashed it with a single jagged lightning thrust of electrical force, stepped through its smoking remains-and saw the woman in the act of entering a gap in the wall made by a sliding door.

She was not more than three dozen feet away, and she had half-turned to look back in his direction.

What she saw was evidently a surprise, for a startled look came into her face.

Hastily, her hand came up to something inside the aper-ture, and the door slid shut. As it closed, Cemp, who was running toward it, had a glimpse of a gleaming corridor beyond. The existence of such a secret pa.s.sageway had too many implications for Cemp to consider immediately.

He was at the wall, fumbling for the hidden door. When he could not find it after several long moments, he stepped back and burned it down with the two energy flows from his brain, which, when they came together outside his body, created an intense electrical arc. It was the only energyweapon available to him as a human being, but it was enough.

A minute later, he stepped through the smoking opening into a narrow corridor.

3.

The corridor in which Cemp found himself was made of concrete and slanted gently downward. It was dimly lighted and straight, and he could see the young woman in the near distance ahead-about two hundred feet away.

She was running, but as a woman wearing a dress runs-not very fast. Cemp broke into his own high-speed lope and in a minute had cut the distance between them in half. Abruptly, the concrete ended.

Ahead was a dirt cave, still lighted, but the lights were set farther apart.

As she reached this point, the young woman sent him a message on a magnetic force line. "If you don't stop chasing me, I'll have to use the (something not clear to Cemp) power."

Cemp remembered the energy that had lifted U-Brem into the sky. He took the threat seriously and instantly modified a magnetic wave to render her unconscious.

It was not so cruel an act as it would have been earlier. Now she fell like a stone-which was the unfortunate characteristic of the unconsciousness gestalt-but she fell on dirt and not on cement. The motion of her body was such that she pitched forward on her knees, then slid down on her right shoulder.

It didn't look too severe for her-so it seemed to Cemp as he came closer to where she was lying.

He had slowed to a walk. Now, still wary, he approached the prostrate body, determined not to let any special "power" remove her from him. He felt only slightly guilty at the violent method he had used. His reasoning had permit-ted no less control over her. The "sleep" shut-off on U-Brem had not prevented that individual from turning on the forcefield-so Cemp considered it to be-that had saved him. Quite simply, he couldn't let her get away.