Cluster Page 10

B:::1 turned to Flint. "In this matter we are as Slaves, glimpsing portents whose wider significance we do not comprehend. Hence the opinion of a Slave has relevance. It is possible that the possessed ¢le cooperates only because of the punishment-box, and will turn against you when given opportunity. It is also possible that she is indeed of Sol or allied to Sol, and suspects that we have tortured you to gain your compliance with our own designs. We leave the decision of her disposition in your hands; we do not wish to become involved in Spherical intrigues."

  "Ship her back to Sol with me," Flint said. "If her original body is human, that is the only place she can go." Then he reconsidered. "No—ship her one day later. I will have a thorough investigation made. If she is false, we will be ready for her when she arrives."

  "If she is not of your Sphere, where will she arrive?" the Master inquired.

  Flint shrugged. "If she has no host-body available in our Sphere, she probably won't transmit at all. There has to be somewhere to go, or the process doesn't work. So if she does not transfer when you attempt to send her, you'll know she's no friend of ours."

  "Your Sphere would not then object if we interrogated her?"

  Flint knew it would be an extremely thorough interrogation. "We would not object."

  B:::1 faced Φiw. "We have acquainted you with private matters of galactic scope. Return to your position, suffering no further stricture than this: If ever you overhear anything relating to this subject, make immediate report to me."

  "Master," Φiw said, relieved.

  Flint nodded thoughtfully. This was Φiw's true penance. He was now in effect a spy for the Masters. Yet the assignment had been couched in such manner as to make it seem that the Slave had been promoted to the level of political counselor. No torture, not even any overt reprimand—yet a thorough job had been done. This was supreme skill in management.

  After the Slave departed, B:::1 said: "In view of this development, and our uncertainty of decision, we feel we can no longer maintain our prior policy of disengagement. We shall participate in your coalition."

  Flint's jaw dropped in a purely human reaction. "Because Sol sent another transfer agent, you've changed your minds?"

  "One such visit is an anomaly. Two suggest a pattern. Were we certain that both emanate from Sphere Sol, we would not be concerned. But we cannot ignore the possibility that a third, possibly inimical Sphere has chosen to participate, perhaps competitively. There may well be others, in an expanding effort. We therefore choose to control to some extent the manner of our interaction with other Spheres by officially committing ourselves to this effort. We shall make a thorough search of our region of space in quest of aliens. Thus it will not be necessary for any other Spheres to seek us out to urge participation."

  Just like that, success! Flint did not delude himself that any special competence on his part had been responsible. The Masters of Canopus had seen the way to cut their losses and maintain much of their isolation, so they had acted. Flint had blundered his way into it.

  He did not belong in this business; if he ever transferred from Sphere Sol again, the odds were against his success or even survival. What a comedy of accident! At least he had discovered his inadequacy in a nonfatal fashion.

  The end was routine. ¢le's knowledge sufficed; the technicians were able to convert the Canopian mattermitter for transfer, invoking fairly minor but critical modifications of detail. The settings were arranged for the center of Sphere Sol. ¢le was held under guard with the punishment-box, scheduled for later transfer.

  Flint stepped into the transfer chamber.

  4

  Lake of Dreams

  *notice initial mission destroy 200 intensity threat entity failed*

  —detail?—

  *own agent 200 intensity dispatched contact made owing to suspicions of natives of canopus unable to eliminate sol transferee necessary to provide transfer information to sphere canopus in order to*

  —WHAT?!—

  *to protect identity of agent origin and allay suspicion per directive judgment call on part of operative we intercepted agent at time of retransfer from canopus*

  —judgment call? more likely operative stunned by allure of equivalent aura and lost imperative for mission what sex agent?—

  *female*

  —precisely and target entity male route her through spot reorientation to ensure next time duty before pleasure and reassign for next available intercept unfortunate we have to work through these high-kirlian types never can be quite certain of their loyalties—

  *POWER*

  —CIVILIZATION—

  Flint hopped rapidly over the surface of Luna, Planet Earth's huge moon, putting the mining station at Posidonius Crater behind him. The hopper's single plunger smacked into the bleak surface of the crater floor, compressing like a pogo stick, then thrusting him upward in a broad arc. He was only a fraction of his normal weight because of the reduced gravity, but the old-fashioned heavy-duty mining suit was twice his mass. The net result was a jumping weight of about two-thirds his nude-body normal. He needed the powered hopper to make real progress.

  He bore west, searching out the gap in the crater wall. The station was inside a subcrater within Posidonius, capped over and pressurized. Nature had excavated the pit; now men used it as convenient access to the high concentrations of aluminum, titanium, magnesium, silicon, and iron there. It had cost a lot, a century or three ago, to emplace the first Lunar mines; they had paid their way many times over. Posidonius Mine was about worked out, as were most of the digs of this quadrant, and in fact the moon itself, but as long as the diminishing ores were worth more than the cost of operation, the mines continued to function. Today the planet Mercury of Sol and the larger moons of the outer Solar System—Ganymede, Titan, and Triton—were more important resources. Luna was largely forgotten.

  Security was slack, which was why Flint had been able to pose as an itinerant miner and steal a suit and hopper to make a much better chase of it. By the time Imperial Earth traced him this far, he would be impossible to trace further. The Lunar surface was so pocked with the marks of other hoppers—and each mark was permanent the instant made, since there was no weather, no air to erase it—that his trail was not discernible. Once he got beyond the crater, beyond direct visual range, he would be lost. Bless that jagged rim!

  He made it. The crater itself was fifty to seventy-five miles in diameter, depending on which way it was measured, and the mine was off-center, so he had about twenty miles to go. The hopper enabled him to do it in just about an hour without getting winded. Time enough; his next on-shift would not be for another two hours.

  The crater rim, so fragile-looking from telescopic distance, was actually a phenomenal mountain ring several miles thick, though not tall. It had been formed millions or even billions of years ago by the impact of a large meteor, the material of the crater center scooped out and dumped in that circle. Not volcanic; there was very little volcanic activity on the moon. Here at the western pass the wall was broken, and he navigated the rubble without difficulty. It was against Sphere law to deface the visible landscape of Luna, but anonymous miners had blasted out an ascending channel at the narrowest part to facilitate passage from the central depression. It was too small to show up on most photographs taken from Earth, so no investigation had been made. Anyway, that had been in the heyday of the mine, when metals worth millions of Sphere dollars had been extracted every few hours. Miners were tough, ornery men and women; even the Imperium tended to let them alone, as long as they produced. The profession of mining, freed from the cave-ins and black-lung threats of ancient times, had become the stuff of adolescent fancy. Miners were heroes, prized and well paid and bold, and planet lubbers sought them avidly.

  Now he emerged onto the broad Mare Serenitatis, the Sea of Serenity, an expanse of almost-level rock some four hundred miles across. The early Solarians, staring at their great moon from the vantage of misty Earth, had pictured these lava plains (here in the mare there had been
volcanism!) as oceans and seas and bays, and named them accordingly. The illusion had been banished when Luna was physically explored, and perhaps even before then, but the intriguing names had remained. "Hope I don't get my feet wet," Flint muttered. His suit radio was turned off, of course; he would be a fool to let them trace him through his broadcast emissions.

  His feet did not get wet, though the hopper made little splashes in the dust that disappeared almost instantly. With no air to hold the substance up, it collapsed without billowing. On the apex of each glide he could see over the Serpentine Wrinkle Ridge, an arm of which approached quite close to the rim of Posidonius. Had he been able to bound high enough, he might have been able to see all the way across the western edge of the Sea of Serenity to where its vast crater wall parted to give access to the even vaster Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Rains. His line of sight would give him a glimpse of one of that sea's craters, probably Archimedes. Flint had studied, and therefore had an exact visual memory of, the map of the adjacent geography of Luna—but this would be a narrow line-of-sight view between the encroaching mountain ranges of the Caucasus to the north and the Apennines to the south. Mountains on Earth were named after these—or maybe it was the other way around. There were three craters in that vicinity, so he couldn't be quite certain which one he would see from five hundred miles away. It really didn't matter, since the tight curvature of the moon put the whole area out of sight and he was not going there anyway.

  He veered north, changing direction by shifting his weight to make the hopper lean. He skirted Posidonius, now shielded from observation by its rim. Ahead of him was Lacus Somniorum, the Lake of Dreams. Primitive that he was, he loved that imagery. Flint had dreams—of escape, of freedom, of eventual return to Outworld and his green darling Honeybloom. Pnotl of Sphere Knyfh, that alien transferee from the inner galaxy, had dazzled him into undertaking the mission, but in Sphere Canopus reality had caught up with fancy. He had encountered no high-Kirlian natives there, and had suffered torture and the constant threat of death. The one high-Kirlian entity he had met had turned out to be another transferee. He was unfit for this type of work; the edge was off. He hadn't even been able to complete his mission; the girl transferee had had to bail him out. Let her initiate the next mission! The Imps would not search for him long; they would know his suit-air could last no more than a day, so could assume he had perished. There was nothing like dying to avoid being pestered.

  But he was not the suicidal type. He had a destination in mind, barely three hundred miles to the north. Burg Crater—where an abandoned mine shaft still had leftover stores of oxygen, water, and food. It was one of a number of craters within reach. By the time they checked them all—if they ever did—he would be gone again. They had little chance to catch up with him.

  It was a fair distance. Even with the hopper it would take him about fifteen hours. He had picked a site near the limit of his range—but not too near it—so as to make it that more difficult for them to locate him quickly. But the marvels of the Lunar landscape soon palled. He was traversing a dull, seemingly endless plain, in the confined silence of his suit.

  He remembered more of the bits of information the Shaman had given him. Flint had supposed they were mere stories, intended for entertainment or for dealing with immediate needs, such as the hunting of dinosaurs, but now he understood their true relevance.

  Before mattermission, Earth had been in desperate need of new sources of supply and living room for its horrendously teeming population. Lifeship colonization had been inadequate and too expensive. So they had tried desperate measures, such as colonization of near space. The first settlers went to Luna, drawing most of the construction substance from its crust. Then space itself was claimed, drawing on what was there: the particles of rock and ice in orbit, the planetoids. It was much easier to collect materials from there than to bring them up out of Earth's gravitational well, and a number of the orbiting rocks were big enough to become homes themselves.

  Gardens were planted, within shells of air, rotating slowly so that the light of the sun struck them half of every day, Earth-time. That same rotation provided gravity via centrifugal force. Flint had never really understood that concept when the Shaman explained it, but his recent experience on the space shuttle from Earth to Luna had brought it into sharp focus, along with a spot of "spin sickness." The rotation provided weight in a small craft, but the head was nearer to the center than the feet, and so became slightly lighter. The body reacted to this unbalance by becoming uncomfortably ill. Flint had never been ill before in his life, and it was a horrendous experience. So he had learned about practical centrifugal gravity the hard way. Knowing and comprehending were different things! Flint had known much, understood little. But he was mastering his background knowledge now, right down into his gut.

  The Ministers of Imperial Earth had relied too much on his presumed naiveté, falling into the trap of supposing that ignorance equated with stupidity, though they knew better. (No one was immune from the know-comprehend dichotomy!) They had given him cram courses in the most advanced technology of the galaxy—that of matter-mission and transfer—by relying heavily on his eidetic memory. He could now repeat paragraphs of complex formulas whose meaning he would never understand. He could now read—just enough to get by. In conversation he sounded like a highly educated ignoramus, which he was. But they had also trained him in multiple combat and escape techniques... and never supposed he might employ these more practical skills against them. It had been child's play to escape the Ministry of Alien Spheres, buy a black-market tourist's pass, switch places with a disgruntled miner on furlough, and land at Posidonius Mine.

  One transfer experience sufficed; he was going back home to Honeybloom. The only mountains and depressions he cared to explore hereafter were hers. All he had to do was figure out a way to get mattermitted back.

  That might take some figuring. It would cost about two trillion dollars postage to jump from Earth to Outworld. But he would have time to mull over that challenge, here on the moon. There had to be some way available to a bright primitive....

  The barren landscape continued. It was dusk here, with his long sharp shadow extending to the east, leaping far away as he went high, zooming back to meet him as he landed. The shadow was always barely in time for the bounce. Would it ever miscalculate, play it too close, and miss the connection? Flint smiled, half-believing it could happen. Nothing was perfect!

  He was well north of Posidonius Crater now, in the Lake of Dreams. Two hundred miles to the east the curve of Luna's surface shrouded the craters in darkness. He had progressed north of small Crater Daniell, coming up parallel to Crater Grove. He could see these only when he was high; the horizon was so much closer than that of Outworld, Earth, or the Canopian slave planet, because Luna was so much smaller. On the other hand there was no atmosphere to cloud vision. But he "saw" as much by means of the picture in his mind as with his eyes. His photographic mental image merged with the reality, greatly extending his perception. As, perhaps, his Kirlian aura extended his perception of life.

  He kept going, hour after hour. As a Paleolithic hunter he had developed endurance—but never before had he hopped the whole distance. The machine provided the thrust, but the little balancing mechanisms of his body were becoming fatigued. Now he was approaching the ill-defined depressions of Plana and Mason—old, worn craters, perhaps, though what was there to wear them down? On the map they lay together with their center nipples like the breasts of a woman, but there was no such resemblance now. He was through the Lake of Dreams, traversing rougher surface. His imagination had ceased to conjure fun-visions of Outworld and Honeybloom, and not even these twin circles could bring them back with any force. Fatigue diminished the enthusiasm of dreams.

  His hopper gave a despairing half-thrust, and failed. It was out of power.

  Flint came to rest in the crater of Plana, aware that he was in trouble. The hoppers were supposed to be kept fully charged between uses, but they we
re old machines, not as efficient as when new. This one had taken him about 260 miles, which might have been enough had he been able to proceed directly north from the station. But his jog to the west to get out of Posidonius, and necessary deviations around roughness La the terrain, had left him with still around fifty miles to go.

  Well, he would walk it. He had to; there was no other way, and no closer respite, now. It would enable him to use different muscles, anyway.

  Flint progressed vigorously, achieving a kind of running, jumping stride that carried him bounding forward at a speed of six to eight miles per hour. He was light, even with the suit, and strong, but the arms and legs of this thing were not adequately flexible for this, and they chafed.

  He continued for an hour, crossing out of Plana and into the great doughnut-shaped plain of Lacus Mortis, the Lake of Death. Burg was in the center of it, a small crater compared to its neighbors Hercules and Atlas to the east, and Aristoteles and Eudoxus to the west. Oh, he had his mental map right before him, brilliantly clear as if illuminated by the slowly setting sun. Farther to the north was the large, long Mare Frigoris, the Sea of Cold. All he had to do was proceed from this point on that map to that point. So easy to know, so hard to do.

  He plowed on, his speed slowing as he tired. His elbows and knees were raw from constant abrasion against the rigid joints of the suit. His air tasted bad, though he should still have several hours' margin—unless it, like the hopper, no longer performed at the original specs. Suit failure—that was all he needed now!

  Strange yet fitting, how he had started in such nicely named terrain: the Sea of Serenity, the Lake of Dreams. Now that he was in trouble, the dream was turning to nightmare, the Lake of Death. What would have happened had he gone east toward the Sea of Crises, or west to the Ocean of Storms? Better south to the Sea of Tranquility and Sea of Nectar!

  But repeating the sweet names could hot extract him from the grim reality. There was no longer any doubt: his air was turning foul, and he had not covered half the distance to the station since the hopper failed. He could not even see Burg Crater yet. His presumed demise was about to become an actuality.