The Star Virus

IV

After he had set course for Brüde, Rodrone took a crowbar and levered open the crate to unpack his find.

Inside the splintered boards he encountered first fluffy white packing material, which he scattered impatiently about the control room until he came to a smooth, glossy surface. Then, like a man who has caught his first glimpse of gold, he broke open the remaining boards and strewed aside the packing material until the supposed Streall artifact stood revealed.

It was a flawless, crystal-clear lens about four feet in diameter and three thick, with a beautifully brilliant sheen superior to any plastic Rodrone knew, but more like ancient glass. His fascinated attention was immediately trapped, like a moth attracted to a flame, by a glowing swirl of light that occupied the central region, a blazing coruscation. At first he was fooled into thinking that it moved, but in fact it was frozen. The effect came from the impression it gave of ceaseless energy.

Rodrone blinked. Why did it amaze him so? It was only a gimcrack gadget, he told himself. Anybody could make one.

Nevertheless the impression of something remarkable and magical remained. He was about to examine the lens further when one of the men lounging about the control room and watching with interest suddenly murmured in bemusement.

“Say, look at that....”

Rodrone looked. So far, apart from the inner swirl of light, the cylindrical prism had seemed to be perfectly transparent and limpid. Now colored shadows were developing in it, growing swiftly stronger until definite pictures formed. It was as if the device was warming up, for suddenly the definitions sharpened and the images became solid. The whole outer part of the prism surrounding the central light turned into a kaleidoscope of moving pictures, each different and with no apparent relation to the others.

Could it be some kind of picture show, an alien magic lantern? Or perhaps a communicator, or instruction device? Rodrone leaned close, peering into the glass and focusing on one scene. As he did so it seemed to expand and fill his vision, though dimly he was aware that objectively it was no larger than any of the others.

He saw a flat landscape dotted with spindly trees. Stilt-like beings, tall with angular stick limbs, worked on the construction of a machine as skeletal as themselves. As Rodrone watched, an aircraft sped swiftly out of the distance, borne on wide, flat wings. The stilt-beings whirled around, tugging frantically to bring weapons to bear on the aircraft, but in vain. A splayed beam shot down at them, and everything it touched exploded. The airplane banked and swung low over the scene, surveying the broken sticks of beings and machinery that were scattered over a wide area. The picture dwindled to nothing as the plane leveled off and vanished again into the distance.

He turned his eyes to another scene. He seemed to pan in on a gleaming white city, approaching it from the air. A sparkling tower rose like a huge finger, and some distance from it a vast screen had been erected. Somehow or other the tower was projecting symbols and pictures on to the screen, visible from all over the city. A flurry of curly glyphs was followed by a foxlike face, mouthing and gesticulating angrily.

With a deep sigh Rodrone straightened. There was a varied succession of such screens, each one in its own way fascinating. They seemed to range over a dozen worlds, all unknown to him, and he had no doubt that the full repertoire would number thousands. But what was the purpose of it all?

By now all the crewmen present had clustered around the prism and were watching it avidly. Among the comments, Rodrone caught one from Clave.

“Eh, there’s a man in this one.”

He hurried around to the other side of the big lens, and saw that Clave was right—at least, he thought so. It was impossible to say whether the figure in the glass was genuinely a member of Homo sapiens because his back was turned and he was dressed in a brown robe and cowl, like the garment of a monk from ancient Earth Rodrone had once seen in a picture. But the hands, which were visible, were fully human. The monk sat brooding on a rock in some indeterminate place, his head resting on his hand.

“He’s just sitting there,” Clave said emptily.

Though surprised to see a human being included in the Streall picture show, Rodrone gave the vision barely a glance. He still could not be certain whether the lens would repay study or not, but something in him insisted that it would. Suddenly, he felt savagely possessive about it.

“Take it to my cabin,” he ordered curtly.

“What, don’t we get to see the pictures?” someone complained. “It’s boring in here.”

But Rodrone ignored the grumbles and affirmed his wishes with an irritable wave of his hand. Nobody questioned his mood. They knew when to humor him.

For the rest of the voyage, he decided, he would study the lens alone. When he got to Brüde, he would find means of tearing every secret from it; he was bent on that, after the trouble he had already taken.

But, he reflected, he would need help.

The sun was slowly traversing the western rim of the crater as Rodrone returned from his daily walk around his base. Already half the crater was in shadow, but a mellow wash of light struck the further wall and penetrated into the mouths of various openings to storage caverns, living quarters and so on.

Brüde was a warm, balmy world, well suited to the life of carefree sensuality his men liked to indulge in when they were not roaming space on the pretext of making a living. The sights and sounds of the usual evening bacchanalia on the point of warming up met his senses as he passed through a low-slung entrance.

The recreation area was the size of a small dance hall. Perfumes wafted into the air from diaphanously clad girls whose presence, however, left Rodrone cold despite his hardly having touched a woman for years. That was due to the drug he took, DPKL-59, which as a side effect to its artificial stimulation of the intellectual function also took away the sex drive. For a time he had occasionally combated this unlooked-for by-product by taking an aphrodisiac drug, L-dopa or Maire Rodex-5, but for some reason synthetically induced sex left him unsatisfied and he soon abandoned the practice.

He supposed he could also thank DPKL-59 for his not having seen his wife in the past five years. His information was that she was alive and well on Land V, where he had last left her, but he had no immediate plans to contact her. Yet, with typical ambivalence, he still regarded her as his wife and constant companion. He felt that their relationship went deeper than the need for the repeated reassurances that frequent meetings would have given. For both of them, just the knowledge that the other existed somewhere in the Hub was enough.

At the moment his wife was as far from his thoughts as she was in space from his body. He scanned the room until catching sight of the most flamboyant figure there: Redace Trudo.

Redace was the man Rodrone had invited to help him fathom the secrets of the lens, as he had come to call the mysterious Streall artifact. As Rodrone approached he looked up from his earnest conversation with a reclining girl.

“Greetings,” he offered mockingly in his broad, lilting voice. “Why, it is just too much if you think you are going to tear me away from this gorgeous creature here.”

Redace was an unashamed, outrageous dandy. Handsome to the point of caricature, he affected a foppish manner that led many, unacquainted with his enormous sexual appetites, to presume him to be homosexual. Sometimes Redace encouraged this impression for his own amusement.

He took great care over his clothes and had a taste for elaborate hats. At the moment he wore an embroidered, padded jacket in violet and silver with flaring side-skirts, and a hat constructed of a number of interleaving arcs, like the petals of a flower, topped by a jaunty feather. Slung from his waist was an old-fashioned mother-of-pearl holster. The decorated gun it carried contained specially tuned lasers to fire deadly beams in all Redace’s favorite colors—lavender, apricot, rose pink and a pale, pretty green.

Rodrone had a considerable, though unspoken admiration for the man. He was what he would have liked to be himself: a released personality in complete harmony with himself. He had two qualities rarely found in one man; he was sensual and extrovert, but he also had a mind which mastered any subject with systematic ease. His knowledge of science was wide and penetrating, and he could read any book in Rodrone’s library without the aid of DPKL-59. Yet despite his abilities, his outlook on life was unremittingly anarchistic. Scorning trade or productive enterprises, he and his raggle-taggle band lived purely by piracy, which they pursued with such enthusiasm that more than once the Merchant Houses had sent ships to destroy him, failing to winkle him out of the asteroid belt a few light-months from Brüde where he lived in a chaotic jumble of warrens.

“Have you finished the test?” Rodrone asked.

With an affected sigh Redace gestured elegantly, inviting him towards a nearby doorway.

Closing the door on the noise outside, Rodrone soaked up the already familiar scene in the workroom. The lens lay on the floor, surrounded by the equipment Redace had brought with him when his spacer thundered down into the crater. For nearly a month now they had applied every test and experiment they could think of, provided it seemed unlikely to damage the specimen.

Redace was something of an expert in vibratory techniques. Withdrawing behind soundproof baffles, he had bombarded the lens with vibrations of every frequency until the air sang and throbbed and their bodies ached with the dangerous pulsations. Then he had fed the results through a computer.

The computer’s verdict had been interesting. The material of the lens—which they still could not analyze—was doped with atoms in a peculiar state of vibration. They were what gave off the glowing swirl in the center. Just what the atoms were they couldn’t say, except that they were trans-plutonian.

Beyond that, they had discovered nothing concrete and were forced back on speculation. Redace still clung to the theory Rodrone had abandoned, that the lens was a picture device showing fictional playlets.

“But why are the Streall so desperate to have it back?” Rodrone objected.

The other shrugged. “Who knows what goes on in their outfit? Maybe it’s some big chief Streall’s kid’s favorite toy, so he’s sent out the army and the navy to find it.”

Rodrone disliked any explanation that smacked of the trivial. He was much too in awe of the lens to accept that. Hour after hour he sat gazing spellbound at the myriad shifting scenes. As he watched, his whole perspective on the universe seemed to change, twist and distort itself, so that several times he had to wing himself back to his normal way of thinking with a snap.

Only rarely did the lens show anything familiar. Most of the scenes were utterly alien. Also rare was any scene taking place in space. Almost invariably the brief dramas enacted themselves on planetary surfaces, under the sea, or sometimes deep underground. Duration varied between a few minutes and a few hours. The one exception to both this and the first rule was the picture that had begun shortly after the lens first came to life. For weeks the brown-garbed monk had sat on his hillock, head on hand, shifting position every now and then. One day he had sprung to his feet and gone walking, on and on. Eventually he met a group of ill-dressed men—thus putting an end to any doubts about his human nature—and harangued them vigorously until they turned to go. At that, the monk took a whip from his belt and lashed out at them, driving them before him like cattle.

The bizarre procession still continued, over arid hills, plains, fording sluggish rivers. Of all the stories to be seen so far in the lens, it was at once the most tedious and the most compelling.

Then, one day, Rodrone himself had jumped up as a new idea occurred to him.

“Got it. It’s a communicator!”

“Hmm? Who’s on the other end?”

“Nobody. And the scenes aren’t fiction. Somehow or other the lens picks up real happenings from all over the galaxy. It’s a sort of universal observer.”

“Not tenable,” Redace said after a moment’s thought. “Some of the pictures clearly are fictional. Their meaning is symbolic.”

Rodrone had to admit that was a flaw in his theory, but he refused to reject it on that account. The symbolic stories, he argued, could be codified versions of situations not readily comprehensible in direct form to the viewer for whom the lens was designed.

His theory suggested two tests. Firstly, there should be selective controls for the lens. Secondly, it seemed reasonable that the central swirl of light should represent the Hub of Thiswhirl, or the Milky Way, to give the galaxy its archaic name.

Even Redace had admitted himself to be knocked over by the suggestion. “Every atom a sun! But that’s incredible.”

But Rodrone urged that the avenue should be explored. The first part of their plan failed miserably. By no means could they influence or alter the kaleidoscope of pictures in the outer parts of the lens. Either its controls were beyond their reach, or it was a law unto itself. The difficulties involved even in contemplating the second part made Redace threaten to go back to his asteroids. Rodrone wanted him to map the doped atoms, not one at a time, which was impossible with their equipment, but by density and agglomeration. The intention was to compare this map with a similar one of suns in the galaxy, or failing that, in the Hub.

This latter scheme was the one that Rodrone hoped had now been completed. As soon as they entered the workroom Redace minced over to his computer-operated collator and turned to give Rodrone a teasing smile.

“Yes, our labor of love is all finished, sweetheart, and though I do say so myself it’s all been a gorgeous waste of time.”

“The maps don’t match?”

“No more than I would with a Vegan duck.”

Rodrone sat down and looked at the monk, still driving his unwilling herd, whipping them now through rain and slush. Lightning flashes crashed down on either side of them, as if daring them to go on. And indeed, one thunderbolt struck a straggler and converted him to a charred mass. Against desperate protests, the monk took no notice and lashed his slaves on.

“Well, perhaps the doped atoms aren’t meant to be a literal representation,” he suggested. “Conceivably they play no part in the working of the thing at all. They could be ornamental, just a symbol of what it’s for.”

“Could be, could be. Excuse me, love, but do you know what I think? Eventually you’ll see a picture you might have seen before. Then another one you know you’ve seen before. The whole sequence will repeat itself. There’s a record of it all in there somewhere, which you have accidentally switched on.”

“If that’s all it is, why do the Streall want it so badly?”

“Do they? You may be overestimating that, you know. Take my tip, Rodrone dear, and relax for a bit. Anyway, who knows? I didn’t say there was only one record. Maybe another one gives all the addresses where some Streall politician gets his kicks. The only copy, and very embarrassing if it falls into the wrong hands.”

The trouble with Redace, Rodrone thought, was his conviction that the sordid explanations were usually the right ones. In exasperation he stood up and gave the lens a kick.

The door opened and he glanced around irritably at the stocky, pale-faced man who entered.

“Something’s happening on the communicator, chief.”

“What do you mean, ‘something’s happening’?” Rodrone almost snarled.

“It’s—the Streall are through to us!”

Rodrone pushed him aside and went charging through the door, Redace following. The news had evidently spread, for there was consternation in the recreation area.

In the communicator room he found Clave and Kulthol. The redhead was scowling and rubbing the stubble on his chin. Clave, for all his death’s grin, looked a little stunned.

The communicator screen was blank, but odd squawks came from the speaker, breaking eventually into intelligible speech. When the Streall spoke to one another it sounded like a cat spitting; when forced to use human speech, they made grotesque gobbling noises in a travesty of the human voice.

“You will please answer.”

Rodrone noticed that the transmit key was still switched off. “Don’t answer,” he said. “Just let the signal fade.”

“It doesn’t show any sign of fading, chief,” Kulthol told him gruffly. “They seem to have an angle that keeps space-tensor contact going for as long as they like.”

“Well how in hell did they find us?” Clave shrugged. “I’d say they just tried hard.” That might be possible, he realized. Under pressure from the Streall, a Jal-Dee investigation could eventually have come up with an informed guess. “What did they say?”

“Don’t tell me you can’t guess.”

The room was beginning to fill up with curious visitors. Rodrone stepped forward and flicked the transmit key. “Repeat your message.”

The gobble voice came through again in exaggerated and weird inflections which the speaker probably imagined were human ones.

“You possess an article we desire, stolen by you while in transit to us. We desire the return to us of the article.”

“Why?”

A pause. “We will pay.”

“What do you offer?” Rodrone asked, intrigued.

“Name your price.”

“We don’t wish to sell.”

“One million tons of a material known only to us, lighter than and of a tensile strength superior to any man-made material”

“No.”

A pause. “One complete planet, uninhabited, eight thousand miles diameter, temperature, atmosphere and humidity equitable with Terra-standard, organically developed, already surveyed for minerals. Suitably placed for human trade routes.”

“No.” Rodrone was enjoying this incredible game.

“Then we offer secrets of Streall science unknown to mankind.”

Now he was interested. “Will you advance, in speculation, a full explanation of the object we hold and a set of instructions for operating it?”

“No.”

“Then there’s no trade.”

“A cluster of twenty solar systems, comprising a total of a hundred and five usable planets and assorted moons, in the Karaga region currently controlled by us. The cluster contains a number of inferior but able races amenable to manipulation. Ownership will be guaranteed to you and your descendants, with stipulations for defense against all comers?”

“Listen to that!” breathed Crule. “Our own empire!”

“No!” said Rodrone harshly.

“But how can we turn down an offer like that?”

“No!” His refusal this time was directed at his own people. At this, the gobble voice was silent for a moment. Then:

“Wait. We have new offers.”

Evidently Redace’s evaluation of the lens had been totally inadequate. These fantastic attempts to buy it could only mean that its importance was equally fantastic;

He waited attentively to hear what they would offer next. But over a minute passed with no further sound from the speaker. He began to feel restless; then he noticed that a tingling sensation was passing through his body, as though trains of unaccustomed impulses were passing along his nerves.

At the same, time a thought, a compulsion, was growing in his mind. “Make a trade,” the compulsion urged. “Strike a bargain.”

For a while the urge seemed to have the insistence of hunger or sexual desire. “All right,” he started to say, but when he opened his mouth nothing but a wailing croak came out.

Alarmed, he moved his hand to his head—or tried to. The movement produced only an uncontrolled, shuddering shake. His body no longer worked properly.

But then the trembling feelings seemed to smooth themselves out and alarm passed away. The course open to him was becoming clear: the lens was no real use to him, whereas what he could take in exchange for it surpassed his wildest dreams. His limbs and voice came under his control again, albeit shakily. It was only in the momentary transition period, when thoughts tumbled wildly, that he was still sufficiently confused to know that his mind had been interfered with.

Without stopping to think further he made a special movement with his wrist. Immediately his tiny gun was in his hand and he fired. Lagging only a bare second behind him, a rose-pink beam from Redace’s gun followed suit, and then a sizzling laser ray from Kulthol added to the destruction.

Rodrone sighed with relief. Leaving only a slight ache, his mind was clear again and his muscles functioning without tremor.

And the space-tensor communicator was a smoking ruin.

Everyone looked at the others nervously.

“That was a pretty neat trick,” Redace said finally. “They sent through sub-audible signals aimed at taking command of our nervous systems. They could have got what they wanted by remote control.”

“But why didn’t it work?” Rodrone queried, waving away black smoke from the still-hot equipment.

“If you ask me, it damn nearly did,” Kulthol said, and added a few curses. The experience seemed to have frightened him.

“That’s right,” Redace said thoughtfully. “Obviously their knowledge of the human body is imperfect—the brain command signals didn’t take hold properly. Even so, I think they might have been able to make the right adjustments if we hadn’t been quick off the mark.”

Something was tugging at Rodrone’s mind. Suddenly he had it. Ruby and her electronic organ. He knew now where the device had originated: the Streall had a hand in it somewhere. Probably the organs had been made with the help of a human scientist, that was why they worked so well. It also explained why copies made of the organ worked hardly at all: they lacked the special touch of Streall skills.

“Listen everybody,” he said out loud, “the Streall have made a psychological attack and failed. Their next attack will be physical. We have only a few hours at most before they are here, and possibly only a few minutes. We can’t fight them off because they can simply pile on more force until we break. There’s only one alternative: we have to get out.”

To some, who had lived permanently on Brüde for years, the decision came as a shock. But once Rodrone convinced them all of the urgency of the situation activity was intense. The great hangar doors opened and ship after ship trundled out into the open. Storage spaces were ransacked of equipment, stores, ammunition and valuables. There was no knowing when they would be able to return to Brüde again, or if the base would even be in existence after the Streall had called.

One by one the spaceships took off from the crater, bringing into action half a dozen different types of spacedrive. Only the fast, reliable ships were used: older and slower vessels were best discarded. A haze of smoke began to fill the crater, drifting and blazing in the arc lights that had been turned on.

The very first ships to reach orbit had already set up a space watch to scan far ahead for approaching raiders. Their warning came when only three ships, the Stond included, were still on the ground. One of them was Redace Trudo’s one-man spacer, a sleek crimson boat with a control cabin and bunk, engine and storage hold and nothing else.

Rodrone accosted his friend as the last man raced for the Stond. “Well, where are you going?” he asked. “Back to your rats’ warren?”

Redace had abandoned his billowing hat and adopted a cheeky little beret with a prowlike front. “I think not,” he replied, “that pack back there are quite competent to tear each others’ throats out without my help.”

Rodrone smiled. In fact, Redace had no regular companions, only a drifting crowd of murderous ruffians whose high turnover reflected in part his inability to keep his hands off their women.

“Besides,” he continued, “you were right about one thing. There’s something very funny indeed about the lens and I want to know more about it.”

As he spoke he was already walking towards the Stond. A minute later they were airborne, surging upwards towards space. Meanwhile Rodrone was in touch with the space watch.

“Looks like heavy stuff and plenty of it,” a matter-of-fact voice told him. “We could probably make a fight of it. But it would be a fight, no doubt about that, and there’s probably more behind. Contact about half an hour.”

Ludicrously, Rodrone’s main thought was not for the safety of the men and women in his fleet but his need to keep the lens, and keep it undamaged. He put through a general call.

“Hear this,” he said. “You all have your code calls. The regroup code is Cassius. Now scatter.”

At his command a score of ships surged into motion in a score of different directions to lose themselves amid the close-packed stars. The Stond now had a better than even chance of escaping unchallenged, and the same chance of being equally matched if she was challenged. The Streall had made a big mistake in giving him this brief breathing space. That was due, he was sure, to their miscalculation of the human mind. They had never understood that its workings were not forthright, as the workings of their minds were. They had expected that their first communication would produce results.

Redace broke into his musings. “We won’t get much further with examining this gadget ourselves,” he was saying. “We need to go where they really understand atomic physics. I think I know a place. There’s a fellow there who’s an absolute marvel.”

Rodrone nodded. He was watching the rearward detectors. Behind them, the Streall fleet was chasing vainly after an already vanished quarry. Ahead, he hoped, lay knowledge.