DAW 30th Anniversary Science Fiction Part 19

"No problem," she a.s.sured him. "I would like to talk more with you about Lieutenant Ferrier and his mission, though."

"Of course," Harking said. "I go on duty in an hour, but we can talk while I take my photos if that's okay with you. Just come up whenever you're ready."

"I'll be there," she said.

"Good." Harking started to the door- "Just one more thing," she said.

He turned back, mentally bracing himself. "Yes?"

Her face was very still. "Abe Ferrier wasn't just your friend, was he? He was something more."

Harking took a deep breath. "He was my cousin," he told her. Was, the word echoed through his mind. Was. "The only family I had left."

Without waiting for a reply, he turned and left.

The motorized telescope mounts on the far side of the door could be heard humming softly as Harking sent the lens pointing toward the next spot on the grid. "So he had had some commando training, at least?" Isis asked.

"Some," Harking said, watching his screen. The view flashed through a variety of different colors as the telescope tracked across contrasting strips of farmland, then slowed and settled in on the east end of a reasonably large village twenty kilometers south of the fortress. The village seemed to be home to most of the landscape and maintenance slaves for the southern part of the Sjonntae buffer zone, and it was here that Abe had hoped to eventually end up.

Sixty kilometers inside the damper field, and under the watchful eye of the Sjonntae slave masters, he had hoped it would be the last place they would look for an enemy spy.

Had he ever made it? If so, Harking and the other photographers had never spotted him. Certainly they hadn't seen any mirror flashes or semaph.o.r.e or colored signal flags.

Or maybe he was indeed there, but was just being cautious, After all, as Isis had pointed out, the Sjonntae knew someone had infiltrated. If they hadn't caught him yet, they would still be on alert for anything out of the ordinary.A trio of Skyhawks flew across the edge of the image, underlining his thought as they pa.s.sed with lazy alertness low over the village rooftops.

Ground-hugging Skyhawk activity had definitely shown an uptick during the year since Abe had gone in. Were they still looking for the infiltrator?

Or had they already found and executed him, and all these surveillance flights were merely to make sure the upstart humans didn't try it again?

"Did you know that grommets in cheese sauce make a great appetizer?"

Harking blinked up at Isis. "What?"

"Just wanted to see if you were still paying attention," she said blandly.

Then she sobered. "I'm distracting you, aren't I? I'm sorry."

"That's okay," Harking a.s.sured her. "I'm just ... I was thinking about Abe."

"I understand." Isis shut off her recorder. "You know, I've never seen Minkta during the daytime. Even my s.h.i.+p came in from the darkside."

"That's standard procedure," Harking said. "Sjonntae get less active after dark, and Sector Command has this fond hope that they won't notice and catalog our supply runs if we sneak in during the night."

" 'Fond' and 'hope' being the operative words," Isis agreed. "But I'd still like to see it."

Harking gestured to his monitor. "Have a look."

"I was thinking more of the overall grand vista," she said, gesturing toward the room housing the telescopes. "The big picture, as it were. May I?"

Harking hesitated, then nodded. "I suppose," he told her. "Just don't touch anything."

"I won't." Crossing the room, she opened the door and stepped gingerly through.

Harking sighed as the door closed behind her. Graceful exit or not, it was pretty obvious that the only reason she'd left was to give him a chance to pull himself back together. There was certainly nothing exciting she'd be able to see from this distance that she hadn't seen a hundred times before on a hundred other blue-green worlds. Come on, Harking, get on the program here, he ordered himself viciously. If he could just push his feelings aside long enough to get this interview over with, he could then get Laura Isis off his back and off the station- Across the room, the door opened abruptly. "Can you zoom out?" Isis demanded as she hurried into the room.

Harking felt himself tense. Isis had left the room calm and soothing and professional; now, abruptly, the air around her seemed to be hissing with static electricity. "What?" he asked.

"Can you zoom these things out?" she repeated, jerking a thumb back at the telescopes. "And can you clear away cloud interference?"

"Yes, to both," Harking said cautiously.

"Do it," Isis ordered, breathing hard, her eyes flas.h.i.+ng with something he couldn't identify as she stepped to his side. "The area to the southeast of the fortress."

Harking frowned. "Why?""I saw something," she said "Or maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me."

She gestured at his panel. "Just do it."

Abe? But how could she possibly have seen a single man from this height?

"And you said to zoom out?"

Her lips compressed. "Definitely zoom out."

Silently, Harking reset the coordinates and keyed for the zoom-out. Isis was standing very close to him, her right arm almost touching his shoulder. He could hear her carefully controlled breathing, the nervous tension beneath the control, and wondered just what in the h.e.l.l was going on. The telescope settled on the designated area, and with a series of clicks began to zoom out from its close-range setting. . . .

And suddenly, he saw it.

He dived for the controls, freezing the image. "Oh, my G.o.d," he breathed.

For a long moment neither of them spoke. Then, beside him, he felt Isis stir. "The big picture," she murmured. "We've thought about it, talked about it, even argued about it. We've just never bothered to look at it."

"No," Harking said, thinking of all the photos he'd taken over the past few months as he gazed at the monitor. All those close-in, tight-range photos . . .

"But then, neither have the Sjonntae," he added. "While we've been staring down, looking for mirrors and signal flags, they've been flying low over the farms and villages, looking for the same thing."

"Yes," Isis said. "And Abe Ferrier fooled us all."

Harking nodded, gazing at the monitor. The varying colors of the fields, planted apparently randomly with their different crops, formed a subtle pattern, with no sharp or obvious lines for a pa.s.sing Skyhawk to note with interest or suspicion.

But from Defender Fifty-five, and the ability to take in a hundred thousand square kilometers at a glance, the human eye had no difficulty filling in the disguising gaps and reading the message Abe and the Minkter farmers had so painstakingly prepared for them: 204 55'52" W.

38 40'42".

"You know where that is?" Isis asked quietly.

"About thirty kilometers north of the fortress," Harking said. "Rocky area.

Even if we'd been able to get instruments close enough through all the Shadow, we'd have had a hard time spotting it."

Taking a deep breath, he keyed the intercom. "Commander Chakhaza, this is Harking in Number One Photo," he said. "You need to get up here right away."

He smiled tightly at Isis. "And," he added, "you might want to wake up the missile crews."

Frederik Pohl.

When I first met Don Wollheim I was about fourteen and he was nearly twenty-one. That wasn't the worst of it. He also was far more sophisticated and well informed on the very subjects that I most desperately wished to know about-and about which I knew almost nothing- which is to say what editors and publishers did, what the real, live ones who brought out the science fiction magazines I loved were like and, especially, what their faults were when they had any, which most of them did. I learned from Donald as much as I could, and he became an instant hero.

A little later he became instead a good friend, and remained that way-most of the time-for the next sixty-some years. [True, there were times when the friends.h.i.+p was a bit strained. How could it be otherwise, considering what kind of hairpins we both were? But the strain relaxed, and the friends.h.i.+p remained.]

-FP.

A HOME FOR THE OLD ONES.

Frederik Pohl.

(an excerpt from "From Gateway to the Core").

WHEN the guy came in, bold as bra.s.s, we were busy aversion training a leopard cub, and it was taking all our attention. The cub was a healthy little male, no more than a week old. That's a little bit young to begin the aversion training, but we'd been tracking the mother since she gave birth. When we spotted the mother this day, she had dropped off to sleep in a convenient place-at the edge of a patch of brush that wasn't large enough to conceal any other leopards. So we jumped the gun a little, doped the mother with an air gun and borrowed her cub.

It's a job that takes all three of us. Sh.e.l.ly was the one who picked up the baby, completely covered, and sweating, in a gasproof isolation suit so it wouldn't get any ideas about a friendly human smell. Brudy kept an eye on the mother so we wouldn't have any unpleasant surprises. The mother had had her own aversion training, but if she had woken and seen us messing with her cub she might have broken through it. I was the head ranger, which meant that I was the boss. (Did I mention that my name is Grace Nkroma? Well, it is.) And, as boss, I was the one who manipulated the images-3-D simulations of an Old One, a human, a Heechee, one after another-with a c.o.c.ktail of smells of each released as we displayed the images, and a sharp little electric shock each time that made the kit yowl and struggle feebly in Sh.e.l.ly's arms.

It isn't a hard job. We do it four or five times for each cub, just to make sure, but long before we're through with the training they'll do their best to runaway as fast as they can from any one of the images or smells, whether they're simulations or the real thing. I don't mind handling leopard cubs. They're pretty clean, because the mother licks them all day long. So are cheetahs. The ones that really stink are the baby hyenas; that's when whoever holds the animal is glad that the gas-proof suit works in both directions. As far as other predators are concerned, lions and wild dogs are long extinct in this part of the Rift Valley, so the leopards, hyenas, and cheetahs are the only ones the Old Ones have to worry about on their reservation. Well, and snakes. But the Old Ones are smart enough to stay away from snakes, which aren't likely to chase them anyway since the Old Ones are too big for them to eat. Oh, and I should mention the crocs, too. But we can't train crocodiles very reliably, not so you could count on their running the other way if an Old One wandered near. So what we do is train the Old Ones themselves to stay away. What helps us there is that the Old Ones are sort of genetically scared of open water, never having experienced any until they were brought here. The only reason they would ever go near any would be that they were tormented by thirst and just had to get a drink. We never let it come to that, though. We've taken care of that problem by digging wells and setting up little solar-powered drinking fountains all over their reservation. They don't produce a huge gush of water, but there's a steady flow from each fountain, a deciliter a second year in and year out, and anyway the Old Ones don't need much water. They're not very interested in bathing, for instance. You catch a really gamy Old One, which we sometimes have to do when one of them is seriously sick or injured, and you might wish you could trade it for a hyena cub.

The first indication we got that we had a visitor was when we'd given the baby leopard four or five aversion shocks, and he suddenly began to struggle frantically in Sh.e.l.ly's arms, nipping at her gas-proof clothing, even when he wasn't being shocked. That wasn't normal. "Let him go," I ordered. When a cub gets really antsy, we don't have any choice but to call it off for the day. It isn't that they'll hurt whoever's holding them, because the gasproof coveralls are pretty nearly bite-proof, too. But it's bad for the cubs themselves. Wild animals can have heart attacks, too.

We backed away, keeping an eye on the morn as her baby, whining, scooted over to her, crept under her belly, and began to nurse. What I didn't know was what had set the cub off. Then I heard it: motor and fan noises from afar, and a moment later a hovercar appeared around a copse of acacias. Leopard cubs had better hearing than people, was all. The vehicle charged right up to us and skidded to a halt, the driver digging its braking skids into the ground for a quick stop and never mind how much dam-age it did to the roadway or how much dust it raised. The man who got out when the bubble top popped open was slim, short, rather dark-complected and quite young looking-for what that's worth, since pretty much everybody is. But he was quite peculiar looking, too, because he was wearing full city clothing, long pants, long sleeves, with little ruffs of some kind of fur at the cuffs and collar. (A fur collar! In equatorial Africa!) Hegave Brudy a quick, dismissive glance, looked Sh.e.l.ly and me over more thoroughly, and ordered, "Take me to the Old Ones."

That was pure arrogance. When I sneaked a look at my indicator, it did not show a pa.s.s for his vehicle, so he had no right to be on the reservation in the first place, whoever he was. Brudy moved toward him warningly, and the newcomer stepped back a pace. The expression on Brudy's face wasn't particularly threatening, but he is a big man. We're all pretty tall, being mostly Maasai; Brudy is special. He boxes for fun whenever he can get anvbodv to go six rounds with him, and he shows it. "How did you get in?" Brudy demanded, his voice the gravely baritone of a leopard's growl. What made me think of that was that just about then the mother leopard herself did give a ragged, unfocused little growl.

"She's waking up," Sh.e.l.ly warned.

Brudy has a lot of confidence in our aversion training. He didn't even look around at the animals. "I asked you a question," he said.

The man from the hover craned his neck to see where the leopard was. He sounded a lot less self-a.s.sured when he said, "How I got in is none of your business. I want to be taken to the Old Ones as soon as possible." Then he squinted at the leopard, now trying, but failing, to get to her feet. "Is that animal dangerous?"

"You bet she is. She could tear you to shreds in a minute," I told him-not lying, either, because she certainly theoretically could if it wasn't for her own aversion training. "You'd better get out of here, mister."

"Especially since you don't have a pa.s.s in the first place," Sh.e.l.ly added.

That made him look confused. "What's a 'pa.s.s'?" he asked.

"It's a radio tag for your hover. You get them at the headquarters in Nairobi, and if you don't have one, you're not allowed on the reservation."

" 'Allowed,' " he sneered. "Who are you to 'allow' me anything?"

Brudy cleared his throat. "We're the rangers for this reservation, and what we say goes. You want to give me any argument?"

Brudy can be really convincing when he wants to be. The stranger decided to be law-abiding. "Very well," he said, turning back to his hover; he'd left the air-conditioning going and I could hear it whine as it valiantly tried to cool off the whole veldt. "It is annoying to be subjected to this petty bureaucracy, but very well. I shall return to Nairobi and obtain a pa.s.s."

"Maybe you will, and maybe you won't," Sh.e.l.ly said. "We don't disturb the Old Ones any more than we can help, so you'll need to give them a pretty good reason."

He was already climbing into the vehicle, but he paused long enough to give her a contemptuous look. "Reason? To visit the Old Ones? What reason do I need, since I own them?"2 The next morning we all had to pitch in because the food truck had arrived.

Brudy and Carlo were unloading little packets of rations from the Food Factory in the Mombasa delta while the rest of us kept the Old Ones in order.

Personally, I couldn't see why the Old Ones needed to be kept orderly. For most people that standard Food Factory stuff is the meal of last resort-that is, it is unless it's been doctored up, when you can hardly tell it from the real thing.

The Old Ones chomp the untreated stuff right down, though. Naturally enough.

It's what they grew up on, back when they were living on that first Food Factory itself, out in the Oort Cloud. They had come from all over the reservation when they heard the food bell. Now they were all pressing close to the truck, all fifty-four of them, chattering, "Gimme, gimme!" at the top of their voices as they competed for the choicest bits.

When I came to work at the reservation, I had only seen the Old Ones in pictures. I knew they all had beards, males and females alike. I hadn't known that even the babies did, or did as soon as they were old enough to grow any hair at all, and I hadn't known the way they smelled.

"The ancient female we called "Spot" was pretty nearly the smelliest of the lot, but she was also about the smartest, and the one who was as close as they had to a leader. And, well, she was kind of a friend. When she saw me, she gave me an imploring look. I knew what she wanted. I helped her scoop up half a dozen of the pink-and-white packets she liked best, then escorted her out of the crowd. I waited until she had scarfed down the first couple of packets, then tapped her on the shoulder and said, "I want you to come with me, please."

Well, I didn't say it like that, of course. All of the Old Ones have picked up a few words of English, but even Spot was a little shaky on things like grammar. What I actually said was, "You," pointing at her, "come," beckoning her toward me, "me," tapping my own chest.

She went on chewing, crumbs of greasy-looking pale stuff spilling out of the corners of her mouth, looking suspicious. Then she said, "What for?"

I said, "Because today's the day for your crocodile-aversion refresher." I said it just like that, too. I knew that she wasn't going to understand every word, but headquarters wanted us to talk to them in complete sentences as much as we could, so they'd learn. To reinforce the process, I took her by one skinny wrist and tugged her away.

She had definitely understood the word "crocodile," because she whimpered and tried to get free. That wasn't going to do her any good. I had twenty kilos and fifteen centimeters on her. I let her dally long enough to pick up a couple of extra food packets. Then I put her in our Old Ones van, the one that never stops smelling of the Old Ones, so we never use it for anything else. I picked another five of them pretty much at random and waved them in. They got in, all right. That is, they followed Spot, because she was the leader. Theydidn't like it, though, and all of them were cackling at once in their own language as I drove the van to the river.

It was a pretty day. Hot, of course, but without a cloud in the sky. When I turned off the motor, it was dead silent, too, not a sound except the occasional craaack of a pod coming in from orbit to be caught in the Nairobi Lofstrom Loop. The place where the hippos hang out is what we call the Big Bend. The stream makes pretty nearly a right-angle turn there, with a beach on the far side that gets scoured out every rainy season. There are almost always fifteen or twenty hippos doing whatever it is that they like to do in the slack water at the bend-just swimming around, sometimes underwater, sometimes surfacing to breathe, is what it looks like. And there's almost always a croc squatting patiently on the beach, waiting for one of the babies to stray far enough away from the big ones to become lunch.

This time there were three crocs, motionless in the hot African sun. They lay there with those long, toothy jaws wide open, showing the yellowish inside of their mouths-I guess that's how they try to keep from being overheated, like a pet dog in hot weather. What it looks like is that they're just waiting for something edible to come within range, which I guess is also true, and I can't help getting sort of s.h.i.+very inside whenever I see one. So did the Old Ones.

They were whimpering inside the van, and I nearly had to kick them out of it.

Then they all huddled together, as far from the riverbank as I would let them get, shaking and muttering fearfully to each other.

Fortunately they didn't have long to wait, because Geoffrey was right behind us in the truck with the goat projector. That was Geoffrey's own invention, and before I came he used to use live goats. I put a stop to that. We raise the goats for food and I'm not sentimental about slaughtering them, but I made sure the ones we used for aversion training were dead already.

While he was setting up, I gave myself a minute to enjoy the hippos. They're always fun, big ones the size of our van and little ones no bigger than a pig. The thing is, they look to me like they're enjoying themselves, and how often do you see a really happy extended family? I'm sure the big ones were aware of our presence, and undoubtedly even more aware of the crocs on the bank, but they seemed carefree.

"Okay, Grace," Geoffrey called, hand already on the trigger of the launcher.

"You may fire when ready," I said to him, and to the Old Ones: "Watch!"