Fear That Man

Ye shall know antiquity floating dragon-head on new waters…

I

“We will be arriving in eleven minutes, Mr. Penuel,” the hostess said, smiling white-white teeth and sparkling blue eyes. “We drop from hyperspace in three minutes.”

“Thank you,” Sam managed to say between yawns.

She smiled, turned and walked up the aisle, trim legs flashing tan and smooth in the dim light of the passenger cabin.

Penuel… Penuel… It had been ten months now since Hurkos had destroyed the pink grub in Breadloaf’s office. Ten months since the empty tank beyond the wall had poured forth cold air like the maw of a frozen reptile giant. Still, he was not used to his name. Often, he never thought to answer to “Mr. Penuel.” It had been Breadloaf’s suggestion. Penuel was Hebrew for “the face of God,” and Alex was fascinated by the pun.

Penuel… Without Alex, he would still be just plain Sam — and just plain lost. He was still lost, surely, but a little less than he had been that night ten months ago. It had been Alex Breadloaf’s encouragement and camaraderie that had saved him in his direst moment. It had been Alex Breadloaf’s concern and influence that had gotten him the position as Congressman Horner’s aide, a position that swamped him with work and forced him to forget about all the problems plaguing him. He had answers now. Temporary answers, but answers good enough to let him live comfortably with himself as long as he didn’t get morbid or melancholy and start recalling his previous funk.

There was a subtle whining and a stiff, prolonged bumping as the giant liner slipped from hyperspace into the real thing.

Sam flipped the switch on the viewer in front of him and stared at the picture embedded in the back of the other seat. Blackness of space, everywhere… then, slowly, the ship’s cameras tilted down and to the left, catching the green haze-covered sphere that was Chaplin I, an Earth-type, advanced colony. It looked normal from this altitude, but there had been no radio report from either of Chaplin I’s cities. Three and a quarter million people were either sleeping, in dire distress and dispossessed of their broadcasting stations, or dead. The government on Hope wanted to rule out the last thing. Common sense ruled out the first. That left only the middle, and this ship had been rushed to the rescue.

What sort of rescue, no one knew.

It was generally believed that some new sort of Beast had mutated on Chaplin I, since it had been a nuclear target during the last war a thousand and more years ago. With this ugly possibility in mind, one of the top bounty hunting teams had been brought along, complete with a huge, armored, multi-weaponed floater provided by the government. Sam had not seen the bounty hunters, for they had been busy the entire trip checking out their equipment and making trial tests with the functioning of the floater instruments. Aside from them, the only other passengers were two reporters who, when they had discovered that he was merely a representative of Horner there only on a political mission in a political year, lost interest in him rather quickly. And, of course, there were thousands of tons of food, water, medicines, and fifty-five robodocs complete with hypodermic hands and two giant mother-system disease analyzers.

The cloud-shrouded planet spun below, holding menace.

“Unable to raise response,” the pilot said, his voice booming along the aisle.

Sam was just about ready to turn the screen off when a thin silver needle detached itself from the clouds below and spun up at them, lazily. It was much too thin for a spaceship. A moment’s observation told him it was an ancient, deadly, and accurate missile…

II

Raceship, ponderous, vast, worldship by any other name, vibrated and was alive with activity. Its corridors were its veins, throbbing wildly with the blood that was its crew, its charge, its slavemen. Slug-forms moved rapidly down the winding hallways, their yellow-white bodies stretching at their segments as if their insides wanted to move faster than their skins could manage. All this for the tune of the Racesong. Slug-forms foamed in and out of portals in the honeycomb structure of the great metal walls as they were called to various points to take another duty, perform yet another task. Seek on the tune of the Racesong. Crews of disposal workers pushed down the snaking corridors, regularly clearing the deck of those slugs who had been pushed to their ultimate point of tolerance and had folded over when their double hearts had burst under the strain of the push- push-push of their existence. The disposal crew heaped bodies-mangled by the tramp of other slugs who had not stopped or gone around the warm obstacle of their dead comrade — on magnetic powered carts that floated silently behind them, unloading the carts later at disposal chutes, dumping the stacks of slugs into the grinning mouth of the fire-bellied dragon furnace that would take care of them quite rapidly. All the while, slugs hurried by, slugs dropped and died. Even members of the disposal crew, to keep with their task, were pushed to great extremes and collapsed to become fodder for the dragon furnace themselves. All of this madness, all of this costly rush was a burden they gladly bore in chaos. They gained a strange solace in the fact that, though they might die, generations upon generations lay in the nests, constantly hatching — hatching faster, in fact, than the tremendous death rate could deplete their numbers. And when a surplus built up, Raceship would send off a Spoorship under its direction, and the empire would grow and be greater. There was joy in knowing each death contributed to the goal. This made them wildly happy, this feeling of a united goal to strive and die for.

And this maddening devotion was carefully structured and fostered by the Being in Ship’s Core.

III

The rocket had been non-apocalyptic, but it had torn a hole in the bottom of the ship that spelled certain death to everyone inside. Had it been a meteor, the ship could have evaded or destroyed it; but modern vessels were not equipped to defend themselves against seeker missiles, just as they were not equipped to fight in a peaceful world. They would crash now, spiraling downard to smash onto Chaplin I. Unless…

Unless, as Sam realized, they could reach the floater in the cargo hold, back where the bounty hunters were. If they could get into that and get it out of the ship before it crashed, they would save themselves. The floater could operate separately and bring them down safely.

A crackling, unclear and unintelligible, snapped through the shipcom as the pilot tried to say something the instruments would not let him say.

The ship spun faster and faster — down.

The ship screamed in expectation of the end.

Sam unbelted himself, gripped the seat in front, and pulled upward with a great deal of difficulty. He gained his feet and turned into the aisle when the ship took a more violent slant and almost knocked him down again. The hull moaned like a thousand banshees. The terrific stress of the multi-mile fall would start popping rivets shortly.

It was going to be an uphill fight — literally and figuratively. He had to grapple up the incline and reach the cargo-room hatch. Even there, it was not a certainty that he could open it under the vast pressures working against