The Garments of Caean

9

Castor, immediately on waking, jumped out of bed and pulled on the suit with savage speed. It was always that way now. The suit didn’t like him to be awake and not wearing it; sometimes he was even obliged to sleep in it.

But Castor didn’t mind. He didn’t care what the suit did, as long as it helped him to get the one thing he really wanted above all.

As long as it got him to Caean.

He sat on the edge of his bed, stretching his greasy face into a yawn. Then he jumped up and began to jerk his body in an awkward parody of physical exercise. That done, he wiped his face with a wet cloth, got rid of his stubble with some shaving cream, and devoured a scanty breakfast of blue milk and germ bread.

Feeling better, he stepped from the shack where he had been living for the past week. The shack stood on waste ground at the edge of Kass, a ragged town on Vence, a tattered planet on the fringe of Ziode where the star cluster straggled off into the Tzist Gulf. To one side of him were the domes and humps of Kass. To the other the flat terrain was punctuated by spear trees: tall, straight masts, lacking branch or leaf, that stood out against the whorl-like, bluish-tinted sunrise.

Castor had done a considerable amount of wandering since stealing the suit. But Vence was to be his last stop in Ziode. If all went well, today he would plunge into the Gulf towards Caean.

What he would do when he got to Caean was something his mind had not dwelled on with any clarity. The suit did not encourage that degree of deliberation. It amused him, though, to think that in traversing the Gulf he would be passing – at a distance of some light years, of course – the prison planet of Ledlide where both Peder Forbarth and Realto Mast were incarcerated. Castor smiled every time he recalled how neatly he had tricked Forbarth, locking him in the hideout and alerting the authorities as to his whereabouts. The one-time sartorial was on Ledlide for life, which in a way was surprising because Mast himself had only drawn twenty years.

Castor had to admit that his act was an unprincipled one, but tying up loose ends was a matter of simple prudence, after all.

He stumbled once or twice as he crossed the waste ground, as though his nervous system was not firing in proper sequence. The Frachonard suit fitted him badly. At first he had simply pinned it up to take out some of the slack and shorten the limbs, intending to have it tailored later. After a while he had been puzzled to find that the suit seemed to have shrunk; if he wasn’t fussy about his appearance (and Castor wasn’t fussy) he could wear it without pins, even though the suit still flopped and hung askew on him, making him look as if he was being moved like a puppet, on strings. Castor wasn’t fussy.

It had other strange effects on him, too. Made for a man of Peder Forbarth’s type, it was badly attuned to him – or he to it. It caused him to break into fits of nervous tics and twitches, and to undergo deranged mental episodes. Castor, accustomed to following his impulses without enquiring where they came from, scarcely noticed.

The bizarre and infelicitous relationship between himself and his apparel might in other circumstances have led to the suit’s abandoning him for a more compatible wearer, but for the moment he answered its limited programme. And so Castor had wandered through Ziode, delighted with the bursts of jangling erratic talent the suit gave him, and making full use of his new-found power to influence others.

Like Mast had said, it was like being a hypnotist. And that had meant money. But he could never keep the money he made. The suit gave excessive self-confidence, but events did not always deliver on that confidence. Castor was always sure to pour everything he gained on to the gaming tables and lose it.

On Zenda and Arraseos he had operated a quack practice making use of his one-time medical training. That always meant one had to move on quickly, of course, especially if any of his patients died as a result of treatment. On Julio he had simply pimped. On the Harriet circuit of worlds he had worked a type of con he found delightfully easy, known as switchback steering. It was on Kaylo, one of the Harriet planets, that he had finally become entirely ruled by a passionate urge to get to Caean by any means, and he had selected his present partners.

Kass’s space field lay some distance from Castor’s shack. To get there he had to walk through the empty dawn streets, passing between wax-coloured buildings. ‘Beehive Town’, some people called the place. All the buildings were rounded in shape, to ward off the two-hundred-miles-per-hour winds that came racing across Vence’s plains during spring and autumn. At least half the town, in fact, was underground.

The Little Planet was one of half a dozen spacecraft parked on the space field. Vence, on the periphery of Ziode, was not a route to anywhere and received very little traffic, being very much the terminus of a minor branch as far as interstellar commerce went. The Little Planet had been parked for twenty days, watching other ships arrive and return whence they had come, while Castor tried to wheedle what he wanted out of the local governor.

He undogged the hatch and pulled himself through into a smelly corridor whose grey-painted walls were dimpled with rivets. The Little Planet, he had to admit, was a step down from the Costa. She was an out-of-service short-haul freighter that had spent forty years plying between two adjacent stars. But, with extra fuel, Castor was confident she could make it to Caean.

He squeezed through the inner door and climbed a ladder to the crew compartment. His partners were still sleeping on beds against the walls. Leecher and Rabbish both were snoring. Gadzha slept soundly, pressing the body of his girl possessively up against the bulkhead. Raincoat, who never slept without a weapon, had come adrift from his bedding and was sprawled on the bare floor, the stock of his gun protruding from under the vacated pillow.

The stale odours and clogging air went unnoticed by Castor. He began kicking his partners awake. Raincoat (Castor had never found out whether it was a nickname or a real one; they had once tried to dub Castor ‘Eyes’, but he had soon squashed that) came awake with a start, groping for his missing gun before he oriented himself. The others stirred resentfully.

They all hated him, and all with reason. Gadzha chiefly because Castor had raped three of his girl-friends in the months they had known one another. It was surprising he had risked bringing his current girl along on this jaunt, but the truth was he simply didn’t like to be without a woman. The others hated Castor because he had cheated them, robbed them, insulted them. But that hadn’t stopped them from putting up the money for the Little Planet. Violent and dangerous men, they were nevertheless under Castor’s spell; he had baited them with his tale of the riches to be picked up from the crashed Caeanic spaceship on Kyre. They could take everything he owed them out of his share, he had promised, and there would still be plenty.

But they were growing impatient with the delay, not to say with Castor’s company. For that reason Castor had moved out of the Little Planet to the shack on the edge of town.

‘C’mon,’ Castor urged. ‘This is it. Today.’

Gadzha squinted at him blearily. ‘Sod off. You’ve been telling us that all along.’ He turned back, clamping himself to the girl.

Castor kicked him again. ‘Get up. Ready the ship for take-off. I’ll be back today with the pass.’

Grudgingly they stirred while Castor made them a rough breakfast. Afterwards he spent two hours helping them check the ship. It was all routine, but Castor was being careful.

Eventually he left and trudged across Kass to the Governor’s office. The sun had risen in the sky and the streets had come to life, or what passed for life on Vence. Men in drab coveralls, mostly gem miners, blended like phantoms against the uninspiring background. There were few women: Vence was more a workplace than a colony.

The official residence of the Governor was underground, but he maintained an administrative office in the centre of Kass: a modestly sized building shaped like a long lozenge. At the moment all its slats were open, letting air and nearly horizontal sunlight into the interior compartments.

The Governor sighed as Castor was shown into his office, and gave a smile that was half embarrassed, half resigned. ‘Hello, old chap. You’re early today.’

‘Thought I’d drop in ahead of the queue, and collect what you promised.’

The Governor frowned. ‘Now I didn’t exactly promise…’

Castor threw himself into a chair and stared fixedly. ‘C’mon, we resolved all our difficulties, didn’t we?’

‘Well, I still feel I need more assurance…’ The Governor lowered his head and tucked his short goatee beard into his throat, tailing off.

‘Where’s the risk?’ Castor said reasonably. ‘You are the Governor of a gem-bearing world. We are gem prospectors who know of another world out in the Gulf, and you are giving us permission to check it out. You’re entitled to do that, almost. Even if we’re lying about this world you’re not to know: okay, we deceived you. What’ll they do, demote you? There’s nowhere to demote you to after this dump! Anywhere else has to be better! So that’s the worst that can happen, but it won’t because when we come back we’ll simply report there are no gems there and you close the file.’ He pulled out a plastic bank account card, idly fingering it and whistling suggestively. ‘This is untraceable, after all.’

The Governor took the card from his fingers and looked at the figures on it, smiling. ‘You don’t suppose there are any gems on this planet of yours, do you?’ he asked. ‘Maybe you could bring back a few samples or something.’

Castor laughed explosively. ‘Of course we’ll be bringing back some rocks and soil samples for your records, Governor. We are not amateurs.’

Castor had been working for the past twenty days on the Governor, who had been aghast at the first suggestion that he connive in Castor’s putative scheme. Yet without the pass he could provide it would be impossible to get past the government patrols. Castor was certain that this would be the day; by now the Governor knew in his heart that he would yield eventually.

Before long he was handing Castor the travel pass in the form of a coded tape. ‘Transmit this continually on the specified waveband,’ he instructed. ‘The patrols will let you through.’

In return Castor erased his own odour signature from the bank card and replaced it with the Governor’s, putting his thumb print on the transfer square and thus activating it into the identity of its new owner. The bank deposit represented by the card, had there been anything genuine about it, was now legally the Governor’s.

‘It will run like a dream,’ Castor lied.

Just after midday the Little Planet took off for the Gulf.

The chips rattled through the randomizer and Castor ejected them around the table. Leecher, Rabbish and Raincoat looked at the numbers. ‘Mine takes it,’ said Raincoat. Pieces of paper, written IOUs, passed to him.

‘I’ll stake a thousand,’ Raincoat said excitedly. ‘Who’ll put up a thousand?’

‘Me,’ Castor replied in a flat, uninterested voice. He pushed papers into the centre of the table. Leecher followed suit. Only the gaunt Rabbish dithered, then hung on to his notes.

Raincoat won again.

It was the worst possible habit: gambling with joint proceeds that were yet to be gained. Castor didn’t care. It was no part of his policy to foment harmony among his following.

They were three days out from Vence, and Castor’s relations with his partners had deteriorated still further. He had grown more openly contemptuous, had quarrelled and jeered at every opportunity, giving orders in a coarse, insulting manner. Not even his inadvertent largesse – for he had gambled wantonly, making no effort to win – had softened his companions’ view; for Castor was growing day by day almost inhumanly repugnant. He seemed to be turning into a bizarre travesty of a human being, his movements becoming increasingly unco-ordinated so that he flapped and jerked about the ship like a demented bat. Only the peculiar fascination he exerted prevented his companions from turning on him and, probably, killing him.

‘Hey, Castor,’ Raincoat taunted, ‘how much you got left?’

‘Plenty,’ Castor scowled. ‘I told you, there’s plenty.’

‘Plenty for me, all right,’ Raincoat crowed. He had benefited most from Castor’s recklessness.

Suddenly Gadzha’s voice broke through the communicator from the bridge. ‘Hey, we’re being challenged.’

‘Who by?’ Castor snapped.

‘Defence patrol.’

At a run, Castor went charging up to the bridge, hotly followed by the others. The face of a patrol ship captain stared at them on the comvidplate.

‘Who’s in command there?’ he demanded.

Castor leaned over the vidplate. ‘Me!’

The patrol captain flinched slightly. He seemed puzzled and displeased to see the disarray aboard the Little Planet. ‘You are in a closed area. Return to Ziode.’

‘Your coder bust or something?’ Castor burst out. ‘We’re showing a pass signal issued by the Governor of Vence!’

‘My orders don’t come from Vence.’ The captain’s expression changed to one of cold distaste as he inspected the faces of each of them in turn. ‘Return to Ziode.’

Castor persisted. ‘You’re out of order. The Governor is empowered to issue passes for travel to specified destinations. Examine the co-ordinates on our signal if you want to know more about it.’

The captain paused. ‘Okay,’ he said at length, ‘I’ll refer back to Vence. Check your velocity and proceed no farther.’

‘How long will that take?’

‘Oh, three, four days.’

Behind Castor, Gadzha was muttering. ‘No good,’ Castor said. ‘That throws our schedule off. Our pass has a time limit. It would run out before we’ve finished our business here.’

‘That’s your problem,’ the captain answered. ‘Take it up with the Governor.’ His face relaxed and he became a fraction more affable. ‘Tell you what, I’ll channel through a request for an extension for you. Meantime heave to so I can keep you in range – that’s an order.’

‘Stuff it!’ Castor half-shrieked, his face swelling. He killed the screen, then moved to the guidance board and before anyone could stop him he had turned the engines on to emergency boost. The Little Planet shot ahead, temporarily doubling its trans-C velocity.

‘You goddamned crazy loon!’ Rabbish raved. ‘What in hell do you think you’re doing? He’ll fire on us!’

‘Nah. He’s just a pipsqueak defence officer. He won’t risk an inquiry by firing on a ship that has a legit pass. We’re in the right.’

‘Like hell we are,’ Gadzha said tersely. ‘Things have tightened up. There’s going to be a war with Caean. We’re right out on a limb.’

‘He suspects us,’ Leecher said dully.

Castor spoke placatingly. ‘Fringe planets are full of rough types, always nosing out into the Gulf. The patrols are used to it.’

‘Maybe, but now they’re certain to board us on our way back in,’ Gadzha reasoned slowly. ‘Why did you do it? You’ve finished us.’

Castor ignored him, watching the drive indicators. The ship would soon be coming out of boost and back to cruising speed. The engines couldn’t keep up the extra strain for long.

Gadzha took a step forward. ‘Something funny is going on,’ he announced. ‘Why should Castor get us in trouble with the patrol for no reason, when everything was running smooth? There’s something about this jaunt he hasn’t told us. I’ve suspected it before.’

Castor turned and found himself staring into Gadzha’s broad, unfriendly face. He huffed his shoulders aggressively. ‘Maybe I didn’t feel like hanging around,’ he jeered, his mouth turned down in an ugly sneer. Then he sidled away from Gadzha, pulling himself into the oversize jacket of his suit like a crab.

Now they were all interested. Surrounding Castor, they all eyed him speculatively, but as yet still keeping a respectful distance.

‘You know something? Castor owes us all,’ Rabbish pointed out. ‘That’s how he got me interested in this project in the first place. How about you, Gadzha? Didn’t he say he knew a way to clear his account with you?’

‘What he owed me would be a drop in the ocean, the way he put it,’ Gadzha agreed.

‘Me too. It certainly saved his skin for a while, leading us out here.’

Leecher spoke up. ‘Well how about it, Castor? What have you got to say for yourself?’

‘So worried about your money,’ Castor muttered contemptuously. ‘You’re all dirt.’

‘There’d better be a Caeanic freighter out there, that’s all. With everything on board like you said.’

‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ Gadzha interjected. ‘What about this ship?’

Castor didn’t answer for a moment. ‘The Governor will keep the patrols off our backs,’ he said. ‘It’s just as bad for him as it is for us if they come on board. Worse. You should have worked that out for yourselves, you poor schmooks.’

He turned to confront them, glaring into one face after another. ‘The ship’s there all right, I guarantee it. What do you think? I came all the way out here just for the view?’

He shoved his way through them and went to the door.

Leisurely he went below and sauntered along the corridor that ran the length of the Little Planet. Rabbish had nearly guessed the method he had used to set up the operation. He had intentionally got into debt with them all, then when they came to collect had dangled the carrot of the crashed Caeanic ship in front of them.

But Rabbish’s observation would do them no good, not unless they could imagine some more substantive reason why Castor should want to visit the Gulf.

The door to the sleeping compartment was ajar. Castor peered in and saw that Gadzha’s girl was there, alone, lying on a palliasse, either asleep or drowsing.

He gazed at her long black hair and pale skin. He had heard her name several times, but he didn’t remember it. She was no beauty, but appealing in a sluttish kind of way – like all Gadzha’s girls.

Softly he stepped inside, a leering grin on his lips. His eyes almost sparkled in the dim light.

Formerly Castor had always been obliged to pay for sex, which had lessened the pleasure he took in the act. Since acquiring the suit he had learned a new facility in obtaining it: he simply raped women. They found the experience revolting, but in some perverse way oddly fascinating; they never talked about it afterwards. Even if, by chance or sheer lack of precaution, Castor was discovered by a husband or boyfriend, the spell seemed to extend to them also, inflicting on them a kind of paralysis of the will. Gadzha had already suffered this effect a number of times.

When Castor was nearly upon the girl she came suddenly awake and started up. With a grunt he fell on the palliasse, bearing her down under him, his hands clutching and snatching inside her clothing.

She twisted her head to escape his fetid breath. Squirming and kicking, she tried to claw his face. He sniggered. She gave a loud, squealing cry, and then merely panted.

After a minute or two her struggles subsided to slow spasmodic movements of protest. He had her legs apart and was humping away with regularity when Gadzha came into the room.

With a low-throated growl Gadzha pounced. He seized Castor by the collar, lifting him bodily off the girl and throwing him across the chamber. Somehow or other Castor landed in a crouch, more or less on his feet. He slouched against the bulkhead, his face slack, his flies open and his still-erect penis exposed. The front of his trousers was stained.

Raincoat and Leecher appeared at the door, staring at him. The girl gave a moan and turned her face to the wall.

For the remainder of the journey to Kyre, Castor kept to himself. Their course was pre-programmed and on the coded pass-tape, so to change course before they were out of the area covered by Ziodean patrols might have been to invite trouble.

Two days after his fourth rape of Gadzha’s successive girlfriends he heard Raincoat tap on the door of the store cupboard he now used to sleep in. Lying sprawled among the junk of the cupboard like a rag doll, he pushed the door outward with his foot. He had abandoned all thought for his appearance, yet it was amazing how much charisma he still carried.

‘We’re in orbit,’ Raincoat announced. ‘Kyre’s below.’

‘Big deal,’ Castor grunted. He hunched himself to his feet, pushed Raincoat aside and made for the bridge.

His arrival there was greeted with excitement, if also with ill-concealed revulsion. Kyre was spread out on the main vidplate, a fair-looking world of blue oceans and fluffy white clouds. He took one glance at it and walked to the guidance board.

‘Do you know exactly where to find the freighter?’ Leecher asked anxiously, following him. ‘Which continent is it on?’

‘I know where it is,’ Castor said. ‘I’ve been here before, remember?’

‘Where is it?’

‘It’s on the pear-shaped continent.’

Castor’s hands moved over the board. But instead of descending towards the planet’s atmosphere the Little Planet gathered velocity and left orbit, heading even deeper into the Gulf.

Castor turned and looked at his companions with a sneer of triumph.

‘What are you doing?’ screeched Leecher in alarm. ‘We’re leaving Kyre!’

Gadzha sprang forward and examined the controls. ‘Where are you taking us?’ he demanded angrily.

Hatred shone from Castor’s face. ‘I’m taking you to Caean, you fools!’ he screeched, mimicking Leecher. Then he spat. ‘Caean!’

This turn of events perplexed them. They looked at one another.

‘But why?’ Gadzha asked. ‘What about the freighter?’

Castor smiled malevolently. ‘Bait, you poor pigeons! I needed a ship to take me to Caean. I could have off-loaded you all on Vence, but I thought I’d enjoy seeing your faces when the crunch comes.’ Contemptuously he turned to the board again, leaving his back undefended.

But this time they were not overawed. Gadzha shouldered him away from the guidance board. The ship lurched as he cancelled some of its acceleration. Guided by the instructions he fed into its computer, it entered a flat, fast ellipse that once again orbited the planet below them.

Castor, however, ignored this and turned to face the others, who were edging menacingly towards him. He had been looking forward to this moment. His gimmicked eyes blazed and glittered. His lips jutted out with maniacal ferocity. He flung out his arms in a gesture of repulse, and at the same time imagined himself to be swelling up to an enormous size. It was a technique he had used before, and one which apparently involved some deformation of the senses, for he seemed in reality to expand, the bridge and its occupants dwindling to toy-like insignificance. The phenomenon, whatever it was, affected the others, too; after only a couple of steps they halted and stared at him as if at a vision.

‘Quieten down, scum, I’m taking over this ship,’ he said in a rasping voice. ‘Just accept the fact that you’re dirt. If you want to live –’

Castor had always been confident of his power at this point. He had believed that no matter how much his victims detested him he could always turn them into frightened rabbits as long as he wore his suit. But now the unexpected happened. The bubble of his mental expansion suddenly seemed to burst. He staggered. His arms flapped wildly. A convulsive tic seized one side of his face and he grimaced and jerked.

His partnership with the Frachonard suit, fragile at the best of times, was breaking down. His nervous system had been interfered with too much, and for too long.

‘Ugh,’ he grunted. ‘Ugh – ugh – ugh –’

A pathetic, helpless object, he cringed and twitched in front of the men he had tricked.

‘He’s flipped!’ Rabbish said, amazed.

‘He’s a Caeanic agent,’ Leecher grated. ‘That has to be it.’

‘That would explain it all right,’ Raincoat muttered. ‘Him being so weird, I mean.’

This interpretation of events was cause for added disgust. They forced the helpless Castor into a chair. Gadzha stood over him, legs apart. Castor breathed deeply, in gasps.

‘So there never was a Caeanic ship on Kyre.’

‘There’s a ship there all right. We already took one load from it.’

Gadzha spoke to Raincoat. ‘We’ll give it a try. Take us down.’

‘Hold it!’ Castor giggled weakly. ‘You can’t go down there. Kyre’s an infra-sound planet. The atmosphere’s full of subsonic.’

‘Subsonic?’

‘Low-frequency vibrations. You’ve heard of infrasound, haven’t you? Put a ship down there and she breaks up in minutes.’

Gadzha paused uncertainly. ‘What are you trying to sell us? I never heard of any infra-sound planet.’

Briefly Castor tried to explain about Kyre’s unique fauna and flora. ‘What do you think happened to the Caeanic ship in the first place? Try going down there if you like. See what the hell I care.’

‘You’ve already been there, you told us. How did you do it, if we can’t?’

‘We had a special suit. A baffle suit, to cancel out the infra-sound. Mast had it made. It cost a fortune.’ Castor sighed deeply. He felt abandoned, shrivelled.

‘Mast?’

‘My boss.’

Gadzha glanced at his companions. ‘Looks like we teamed up with the wrong partner. Where’s this Mast now?’

‘On Ledlide.’ Castor attempted to grin, but failed.

There was a long silence. Leecher snorted. ‘This is ridiculous. We’ve been gulled by this Caeanic spy, might as well face up to it. Nothing for it now but to go home.’

Raincoat gestured to Castor. ‘What about him?’

‘Leave him on Kyre.’

‘You can’t,’ Castor insisted. ‘The ship will break up if you go down there.’

‘Do what you like with him,’ Leecher said. ‘But let’s not hang around here any longer. I’ll set course for Ziode.’

He moved to the guidance board. The Little Planet swung away from Kyre and began to traverse the tiny solar system.

The others sat down and glared at Castor with hatred.

‘Let’s just shove him through the lock into space,’ Rabbish said.

‘I forgot to tell you,’ Castor said with a smile. ‘There was nothing for you down on Kyre anyway. The ship’s probably still there, but with the cargo gone. Last time we were here we saw a Caeanic salvage ship making for it.’

They ignored him, making further suggestions for the disposal of his person.

After a while Leecher joined them. ‘Why don’t we give him a shot of something?’ he suggested. ‘Something that would leave him conscious and suffering for a long time. Like succinyl.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You’re fully conscious but you can feel yourself dying of pain and suffocation. They reckon there’s nothing like it. It’s an interrogation drug. I don’t like people who mess me around the way this creep has.’

Castor had been spending the last quarter of an hour trying to get his charismatic powers back, knowing that if he did he would be able to command the situation again. But the suit seemed quiescent, and he began to grow worried that his verve would not return.

When Leecher made his malignant suggestion he acted on his own initiative. Surreptitiously he eased a sliver-knife from inside his jacket and jumped up, the knife waving in the air, to make a dash for the door.

It was Leecher who stepped into his path, unaware of the extremely thin, near-invisible blade. Castor’s lips jutted out again in determined savagery. The sliver-knife sliced through cloth, bone and lung tissue. Leecher coughed, a choked, barely audible sound, blood foaming from his chest, and slid to the floor.

Castor gestured triumphantly with the knife, easily visible now as a shining line of blood. His eyes blazed and sparkled. ‘Get out of it! Get out of it! Get out of it!—’

Gadzha was on him. He clamped an immensely strong hand on Castor’s wrist, forcing the fist down until the fingers opened. The sliver-knife hit the floor and broke into a dozen fragments.

He flung Castor back in the chair. ‘That does it,’ he rumbled. ‘That just does it. Have we got any of that succinyl, Raincoat?’

Rabbish was bending over the blood-soaked Leecher, who was barely conscious but was giving out tortured moaning sounds. ‘What’ll we do?’ he appealed helplessly. ‘He’s in a bad way.’

Gadzha looked down at the injured man. ‘Give him a shot from the medikit,’ he said briefly, then turned back to Raincoat.

Raincoat seemed uninterested in the fate of his comrade. He had stepped to the guidance board and was studying it.

‘No, we wouldn’t have any succinyl,’ he said after a moment. ‘Anyway, a dose of poetic justice is what’s in order. He’s brought us all this way for nothing – let’s just leave him here.’

‘We’ve already left Kyre. You mean push him into space?’

‘No. There’s a second planet; we’re close to it now.’ He peered at the chart. ‘“The Planet of the Flies”. Peculiar name. Let’s see if it makes a suitable place to dump our friend.’

He killed the overdrive, turned the ship and instructed the auto pilot to land on the inner planet. Castor was appalled. He shivered.

Then, at long last, he felt the suit’s guiding influence beginning to return slightly. He let the support flow into him, soothing his disharmonized nerves.

When he spoke it was the voice of a smoother, suaver persona that came through his mouth. He laughed in almost friendly fashion.

‘You won’t maroon me here, you know – that would be simply too inhuman. You don’t know why they call it “the Planet of the Flies”, do you?’

They all ignored him. Gadzha watched while Rabbish inexpertly gave Leecher a spray injection.

Soon Leecher stopped breathing. ‘What was it, a metabolic stop shot?’ Gadzha asked.

Rabbish checked the words on the capsule. ‘No, it was a death shot,’ he explained.

‘You damned fool, why did you do that?’ Gadzha shouted hoarsely. ‘We might have got him to a doctor!’

Rabbish looked hurt. ‘Well, he shouldn’t have got stabbed,’ he complained peevishly. ‘It was you who told me to give him a shot.’

‘Flies,’ Castor interrupted desperately. ‘Flies.’

The ship descended through the planet’s atmosphere. At a height of a mile it began to settle into the black sludge of flies, sinking as if into a swamp. From the hull came a faint thrumming noise.

They all stared in fascination at the main vidplate as the ship found a solid surface.

Gadzha spoke in a choked voice. ‘God!’

‘Awful, isn’t it?’ Castor commented lightly. He looked about him hopefully, with raised eyebrows. ‘Oh well, let’s be up and on our way.’

Raincoat was staring glassily at the plate. ‘It’s perfect,’ he intoned in a shaky voice. ‘Just what we need. He’s nothing but an insect himself.’

Castor stood up as Raincoat turned to him. The suit at this point made a brief attempt to invest him with grace and beauty, but his fractured nervous system interpreted the impulses so badly that he merely leaped up and down like a mad puppet, baring his teeth in a weird grimace and uttering animal-like sounds. The horrid spectacle goaded Raincoat, Gadzha and Rabbish into action. They dragged him kicking and screaming from the bridge and down to the package ejector port at ground level. Castor’s screams became increasingly terrified as the import of events came home to him, but only in the last minute or so did he plead, and then it was to no avail. They locked him in the ejector chamber and worked the ramrod that pushed its contents into the open air.

Afterwards they looked at one another, gasping.

Castor ceased to scream once the outer hatch was opened. Foolishly he had tried to breathe; the flies, which had already flooded in to clog his nasal cavities, had evaded all his apertures and formed a layer between his skin and his garments, in seconds filled his lungs and stomach.

In spite of that he was still alive when the ramrod ejected him from the chamber. He staggered and floundered in the dense atmosphere of living, buzzing flies, which clustered around him like iron filings on a magnet, creating a manshaped blotch of near-solid consistency.

The flies were voracious: they lived by eating a semi-organic rock-like substance that rumbled up constantly from beneath the surface of the planet. In an astonishingly short time they had devoured Castor. Tissue, blood, bone, and all trace of undergarments entirely disappeared.

They did not, however, eat the Frachonard suit.

Over the past year it had gained much experience in the monitoring of sentient activity. It had reached the point where it could, if need be, control living systems directly, wherever they stood on the evolutionary scale. What was more, the primitive nervous systems of the flies offered no problems of incompatibility, as had the advanced human one possessed by Castor. The suit, despite its setback, had not abandoned its mission and was in no way faltering or reticent.

It did not collapse or even become slack when Castor disappeared. Instead, it filled itself up with flies, organizing them into a collective pseudo-body which powered it in a stiff mimicry of human action. Falteringly it turned to the closed hatch of the ejector port, and directed the combined efforts of thousands of flies to push loose the dogs. That done, it floated from the ground, entering the chamber and allowing in only as many flies as suited its purpose, leaving the rest to cover the open hatch like a black wall.

Behind it the hatch closed automatically prior to takeoff. The Little Planet swayed into the air to rise rapidly above the fly layer. Minutes later, after opening the inner door of the package ejector port with difficulty, the suit was free and walking the passages of the ship by means of its humming pseudo-body.

In the long corridor beneath the level of the bridge it encountered Gadzha’s girl. She stopped and stood stock-still with a petrified snarl of fear on her face, staring at the apparition: at the suit recently worn by her rapist Castor, but worn now by a body of flies. The head, hands and feet were each composed of a black fuzzy mass. The legs, even though they floated a foot above the floor, persisted in striding slowly in walking fashion as the monster came slowly towards her.

A breathy sound from the girl’s throat signalled her vain attempt to scream. Then, recovering her power of movement, she turned and fled in the direction of the bridge.

The Frachonard suit arrived there scarcely half a minute behind her. Gadzha, Raincoat and Rabbish all froze to see this phantom return, as, for the second time, did the girl.

In the seconds remaining to them only Raincoat had the presence of mind to reach for his gun, a futile gesture he did not even complete.

He did not complete it because the suit released its hold on the flies, sending them exploding in all directions to fill the interior of the bridge. While it collapsed neatly on the floor, the flies began to feast on their victims; but shortly, with the bodies only partly devoured, the suit recalled them again. They streamed back, causing the suit to rise up from the floor as if lifted by a string.

It floated over to the guidance board. The pseudo-hands hovered over the controls; clumsily, exerting all their puny force, the flies began to manipulate them.

The Little Planet changed course and went hurtling obliquely through the Gulf.

The Frachonard suit was in search of its property.

And that property was Peder Forbarth.