The Getaway Special

44

The silence stretched out for long seconds. Even the twitter of communication with the tree had stopped. Then Tippet said, “That is a very big favor.”

“It’s the only thing that’ll keep them from killing one another.”

“No.”

“No, it won’t work, or no, you won’t do it?”

“Just… no. No. We left our homeworld to explore. We don’t have the authority to make war. We don’t have the desire to. We don’t have the capability, either, so the question is academic. Think of something else.”

Allen said, “Wait a minute. It could work.”

“I just said ‘No,’ ” Tippet reminded him. “I decline, dismiss, deny, refuse, reject, spurn, and veto Judy’s request.”

“But—”

“No.”

“Just listen a—”

“No.”

“—minute. You don’t have to actually fight a war. Just declare one. Rattle your saber until the U.N. pisses their pants. Once they band together to—”

“No! Your fake war could easily become real. What if one of your people finds our homeworld?”

“Oh.”

Oh indeed. Judy hadn’t thought of that angle. It was one thing to ask a single starship crew to risk themselves to save a planet, but it was another thing entirely to ask them td risk their whole race.

“So fake it,” Allen said. “You can send a video signal just as easily as audio, can’t you? Make up some slime-dripping, tentacled monster and let him send an ultimatum to Earth. Do it from out past Mars, so by the time the signal gets there, we can be hiding in the asteroid belt.”

Tippet didn’t say “No” again. He didn’t say anything at all for a few seconds, then he finally asked, “Nobody would take such a threat seriously, would they?”

Allen laughed. “They would if we dropped a couple of boulders into the Great Lakes and the Mediterranean and the Australian outback. Wouldn’t kill anybody, but it’d sure get their attention.”

“And the purpose of all this would be to allow more of your people to escape your homeworld before their governments go to war with each other. Would these governments not see through the deception?”

Judy said, “Not if we threaten to hunt down and eliminate all the colonies, too. Of course that would just strengthen people’s resolve to get away, but that’s exactly what we want.”

Tippet didn’t speak for nearly a minute. Not to Judy and Allen, anyway. The walkie-talkie began twittering to the tree again, and the hive mind was no doubt busy arguing the question as well. Finally he said, “The tree says ‘Herd them apart before the flames engulf them all.’ ”

Judy wondered how much of the situation it understood. Enough to give the right answer, at least. “What do you say?” she asked Tippet.

“We say maybe. We will take you home—provided we can even move our ship at all with your hyperdrive engine— and when we get there, we will decide whether or not to participate in this scheme of yours. Beyond that, we promise nothing.”

“Fair enough,” Judy said. “That’s as much as we could ask.”

“No,” Tippet replied. “You asked for more. But that is what we will do.”

“All right then,” Allen said. He fumbled around in the dark on his side of the tank, then cursed and reached for the flashlight. “Watch your eyes,” he warned.

“Don’t shine it outside!” Tippet warned.

“I won’t.” He held his hand over the lens while he flipped it on, then moved a single finger aside to cast a thin beam of light onto the wall beside him. After the total darkness, the bright yellow glow lit up the tank like day. He pushed aside floating debris until he found what he was looking for: the spare hyperdrive. He picked up the bundle of wires and batteries, switched out the light, and pushed himself out through the hatch.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s see how quickly we can beef up the circuitry to handle the extra field size.”

The butterflies’ engineering shop was a mad scientist’s dream. When Tippet led them inside, Allen’s eyes glittered in delight, and even Judy had to admit it was pretty cool. It was the size of a warehouse store, and packed with gadgetry of every description. Judy recognized metalworking lathes, electronic test equipment, power generators—everything a spaceship would need to keep itself in good repair during an interstellar flight. Most of the stuff was tiny, to match the butterflies’ own proportions, but some of it was on a more human scale, and some of the industrial tools dwarfed even that. Robotic arms provided control for anything too large for the butterflies to manipulate on their own.

Tippet led the way into the middle of it. They had brought the walkie-talkie with them so he could talk with them, but he hadn’t abandoned the tree; another butterfly had come into the garden to continue the conversation with a speakerphone that could produce the same frequency of sound that the tree did. Tippet was just as much a part of that conversation as the one he carried on with his human guests, but Judy was glad he had come along with them anyway. She knew it was silly, but no matter how interchangeable the individual butterflies were, she felt more comfortable with the same one she had come to know.

They quickly met more members of the hive as curious engineers came to see Allen’s invention. There were easily a dozen of them crawling around on the circuitry while he explained what each part did, and what they needed to do to make it move a ship the size of theirs.

It took them less than an hour to grasp the concepts and make the modifications. Their circuitry looked like fungus spreading tendrils through a barrel full of bread loaves, but it accepted the output from Allen’s patchwork construction and amplified the size of the jump field a thousandfold. Allen and the engineers spent another hour testing it with an automated maintenance pod—automated because none of the butterflies wanted to be cut off from the group mind— but when they were satisfied that it actually worked and that the field was large enough to take the whole starship with it, they all trooped inward to the center of the ship and mounted it on a wall there.

If there had been any doubt that the ship was alive, the deep interior removed it. The corridors were tubular and meandering, and they pulsed with constant motion. They glowed with a greenish bioluminescence that gave them a ghastly, spoiled-ham sheen, and fluids moved sluggishly through parallel tubes that pressed against the walls. Gurgling noises came from all sides, growing louder the deeper they went into the ship’s belly.

“You, uh, genetically modified all of this?” Judy asked at one point.

“That’s right,” said Tippet proudly.

“Starting with what?”

“A swssht. An eater of comets. They already use rocket propulsion, so it wasn’t that radical a change. We added extra stomachs and vessels for our own use and modified its nervous system to take our commands, but that was relatively easy.”

“For you, maybe.” She wondered if there were swsshts around the Sun. There could be all sorts of things out in the comet belt beyond Pluto that people knew nothing about. Not that it mattered now, except for curiosity. People wouldn’t need huge spaceships, even if they could be grown like fish in a hatchery. Neither would the butterflies, anymore.

Just as well, she thought as they negotiated a tight passage that reminded her just a little too much of a gullet.

At least it was warm in the heart of the ship. They finally reached the very center of it: a wet, smelly oblong chamber with three-foot-long protrusions sticking out at all angles like thin stalactites from the ceiling of a cave. A host of electronic gadgetry was already mounted to the spines; evidently more than just the hyperdrive needed to be located in the middle of things.

They found an unused stalactite and tied the modified hyperdrive engine to it, tested the remote control circuitry, then backed away a few feet. “No sense in waiting,” Allen said. “Go ahead and give it a try.”

He had already shown them where Earth was. Tippet said, “We are measuring the field axis. Correcting our aim. Translation in three… two… one… now.”

Judy felt an instant of disorientation, gone as soon as she became aware of it.

Tippet made a hissing sound, then said, “This is not going to be a popular method of travel among my kind.”

“You still got cut off from the hive mind?” Allen asked.

“Not cut off this time,” Tippet replied, “but our thoughts were… scrambled… for a moment. Perhaps it was from the sudden loss of our members on the planet.”

Judy had completely forgotten about them. They had just been doomed to die as dumb animals.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I—I hadn’t even thought about them. We should have picked them up first.”

“That would have taken more time than we have. Don’t worry; they knew they would end up alone when they left the ship. Their thoughts are still part of us. The mind goes on.”

“Did, uh, did the modifications work?” Allen asked.

“We have gone somewhere,” Tippet said. “It will take a moment to determine if we went where we intended to.”

They waited. There was no sense leaving until they were sure the drive didn’t need adjustment. But within a few seconds, Tippet said, “We are on target. Twenty-six billion of your kilometers to galactic north of your sun.”

One light-day. That was over four times Pluto’s distance and they were out of the plane of the ecliptic to boot; there was no way anybody could spot them there.

They worked their way back out to the periphery of the ship. That’s where most of the living space was, either because it was the easiest part of the organism to modify or because it let more rooms have windows; Judy didn’t know which. Whatever the reason, by the time they got there, she was glad to get back into a chamber that was cold and damp.

Tippet led them toward the communications center, which was near the nose of the ship. Judy expected a dizzying array of equipment, something like a cross between a television studio and mission control, but when they got there, it was surprisingly small and austere. It was a spherical chamber maybe twenty feet across, with a couple of dozen butterfly-sized workstations scattered around it seemingly at random. One whole side was given over to green space, and there was even a two-foot pond in the middle of it. That would be the floor during thrust, then, but for now it would make a good background for their computer-generated alien.

“Here’s what we have come up with,” Tippet said, fluttering up to the biggest of the workstations, at which another butterfly stood, his eight legs gripping the controls. There was a flat monitor about the size of her hand mounted on the wall, from which a triangular head with a face like a bat stared out at them. Judy and Allen nearly clonked their heads together getting close enough to see it, and Tippet had to cling to Judy’s collar to stay out of their way, but she supposed this was a theater-sized screen for a butterfly.

The galactic overlord had six eyes on stalks and nostrils where a bat’s eyes would be, and the mouth was a round hole with teeth all around, but it was closer to a bat than anything else Judy had seen. The hive mind had created it from her and Allen’s descriptions of their nightmare images, and embellished it from there.

“Pretty good,” Allen said, “but make it hairier.”

The technician tweaked a couple of controls, and the creature’s forehead and cheeks sprouted thick, spiky hair.

“No,” Judy said. “Now it looks like a teenager. Besides, hair is too mammalian. We need alien. How about tentacles?”

The hair morphed into thicker tendrils about half the length of the eyestalks. “Good. Now put some drool on those teeth. Make it slobber when it speaks.”

That was the work of another few seconds. Now the thing looked like it wanted to bite someone’s head off just sitting there. “What does it look like in motion?” she asked.

“If you will provide the template, we will show you,” Tippet said.

“Template?” Judy asked.

“Yes. In order to give it truly lifelike behavior, we will overlay it on a real-time image of you.”

“Oh,” she said, startled at the sudden realization that they expected her to play the actual overlord. “I… well, okay. Where do you want me?”

“Over by the pond.” Tippet took a camera from the workstation and flew out to the middle of the room.

Judy pushed herself into position, then said, “What do you want me to do?”

“Whatever you want our simulation to do.”

“Right.” She felt even more self-conscious than she had the first time Tippet got her on camera, but she took a deep breath and said, “Okay, this is just for practice, right?”

“Of course,” Tippet said.

“Okay, here goes.” She threw her head back in what she hoped was a haughty attitude and said, “People of Earth! You have intruded upon the domain of the Federation of Galactic Societies. Normally you would be welcomed with knotted tentacles—” she held up her arms and wiggled them back and forth “—but you are in violation of section forty-two, paragraph twelve, subparagraph three of the charter of member races, which strictly prohibits the construction, transport, or use of weapons of mass destruction, or the export of hostile attitudes into Federation territory. You must immediately dismantle these weapons and cease your hostilities toward one another, or we will be forced to subdue you before you disturb the galactic peace with your uncivilized behavior. This is your only warning!”

She tried to hold a stern expression on her face, but it only lasted for a second before a giggle slipped past and she burst into laughter.

“God, that was terrible!” she said.

Allen shook his head. “No, no, it was wonderful! Look!” He reached out for her and helped pull her over to float in front of the tiny screen. “Play it again,” he said.

The technician backed it up to the beginning and let the clip run. Judy shuddered when the face took on life; it suddenly looked like a real creature, mad as hell and eager to kick ass. Its lips moved in perfect synch with her speech, which had been lowered in pitch and altered with echoes and harmonics until it sounded like it came from the bottom of a mile-deep pit and out of a throat that was used to howling at the moon. “People of Yaarth!” it bellowed.

The plants in the background had all been altered, too. Perhaps taking a cue from the intelligent tree they had discovered, the technician had made them all quiver when the overlord spoke. The pond had been morphed into a nimbus of light in their midst, and it rippled with multicolored waves that varied with the intensity of the voice.

When it came to the line about “knotted tentacles,” the creature raised four sinuous arms entwined in a ball, but they slid apart as he spoke, scraping a layer of slime off one another until it dripped off their ends and out of the frame.

“Eewww! Disgusting,” Judy said.

“Did we overdo it?” Tippet asked.

“No, that’s perfect. It’ll scare the bejeezus out of practically everybody, and gross out the rest.”

They watched it through to the end, then Allen said, “That was perfect. I thought the ‘subparagraph three’ bit was particularly inspired. I don’t see any reason to do another take.”

Judy had to agree. She would never be able to match the spontaneity of that one.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go see how it plays in Peoria.”