The Best of Lester del Rey

He coughed up the beer, forcing some measure of calmness into his mind. The pieces began to fit, even though there was still no explanation.

They could draw water across space, without letting it freeze or evaporate—or even grow chilled in its passage. The only answer to that had to be some form of nearly instantaneous teleportation!

“You!” he said thickly. “Your people! It was you who threw my Waraok all the way to Sirius. And you were the ones who threw part of the Sepelora somewhere else this time!”

Skora nodded. “That was a mistake. When I learned about your ship and the others with it, I’d never worked through a field like the one around your ship, and had little time in which to operate. Yours was the first ship I tried to handle alone, and I bungled it. But no harm was done. I put your crew on a livable planet and set the other ships beside them—the battleships, too. Working with a tool which wasn’t made for just that use was quite tiring, or I’d have landed you with the others instead of letting you nearly crack up here. After you saw us, it was too late to move you, of course. I’m sorry, Derek, but we had to do it that way.”

The bottle dropped to the floor and smashed as Derek stared at the old man. He should have guessed. With his type of luck, it was inevitable. He’d chased out after the enemy and been caught—by this! He staggered to his feet with shock waves of pure fear rippling through his shoulders and chest. One man against. a whole flight of ships! One solitary old man…

5

His memory was unclear the next morning. He’d been nearly raving when he’d sworn and pleaded with Skora to send them back. He could remember being denied by the suddenly worried and unhappy old man, but the reasons were no longer clear. All that was left was a picture of the priest putting his rain-making amulet aside and pulling down another, before taking Derek’s arms in firm, strong hands.

“You’re sick,” Skora had said. “I had no idea. I should have known you weren’t ready to discover the truth. Well, I hope your psychologist is a better doctor than healer of minds!”

And suddenly Derek had been in his own bed here, with his clothes following him out of nowhere to drape themselves over a chair. The covers had come up over him and the door had opened itself. He had been shouting something. Siryl had come in a few seconds later , and there had been a shot of some drug….

He gave up trying to remember, knowing it was safer not to think on it now. He had been too close to insanity. After all the years of fighting against the jinx, he had developed more strength than most of his people, but there were limits. Maybe he should have let them drive him insane! What was the use…

The door opened and Siryl came in, carrying another hypo. She grabbed his arm and he felt the bite of a needle. For a moment his heart pounded and cold sweat popped out all over him. Then some of the misery lifted. Whatever she had used the night before must have been a depressant that had needed counteracting.

“Pull the covers up!” She had been staring at him with a mixture of shock and concern, but some of the worry was leaving her. “Have you no sense of shame?”

“No strength. You pull them up.” The drug was nearing the end of its first physical impact, but he could barely talk. “Didn’t you ever see a nude man before?”

She made a face of disgust. “I—we didn’t take that kind of medical course. And I’m—I’m not defiled, if that’s what you’re thinking!” She bent slowly and forced herself to cover him, carefully avoiding all contact with his body. She winced as he laughed.

Her reactions had done him more good than the drug. The thing he had learned went back into its proper place in his mind. There was nothing horrible about the teleporting of a ship across a quintillion miles of space; he’d accepted the fact when it had happened to the Waraok. If Skora had shown him a huge machine using megawatts of power, he could have accepted that. The shock had come from discovering that it had been done with nothing but a piece of clay for power. Also, he’d been sent to find an enemy secret and had found the secret where he had least expected it. That was all.

“I’m all right now,” he told her. “But I wonder if you can take it. Call Kayel in here.” He swung out of the bed and grinned as she began backing out of the room, unable to tear her eyes off him until she blundered into the edge of the door.

He was dressed when the two came back. Ferad had declared his citizenship here, and he could rot in it! But the other two had to know. He gave it to them as fully as he could.

“Tommyrot!” Siryl said automatically, though her voice was uncertain, as if she were trying to remember how he’d returned to his room. “You were just delirious. Some disease here…”

Once, Derek thought, men had developed a science of psychology, according to the old reports. But it had been lost during the Collapse, with only the mechanical tricks for relieving neuroses remaining. No wonder the worlds were filled with sick minds, if Siryl was typical of her profession.

Kayel emptied his pipe, looking at her as if he were thinking the same, with the woman-adulation gone from his eyes for the moment. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing grotesquely. But his voice was as clear as when he discussed physics. “It fits. Oh, not the stuff about the god. That’s probably mumbo-jumbo to cover some master power source and the men who run it. Maybe it’s a’ mechanical educator, too, with a library saved from before the Collapse. The machine must have prevented the Collapse here, and they’ve gone right ahead while we fell back. We’re just working on theories about immense fields of energy in space that can be tapped for antigravity, identity exchange control—all that. They use it already! Derek, we’ve got to get this back to the Federation.”

“But the way they live?” Siryl protested.

“Why not?” Derek asked. “With power like that, they don’t need the usual heavy science and gadgetry. There’s no reason not to live the simple life.”

Kayel was pacing about, sucking on an empty pipe, and wearing a flush of excitement. Normally, it was easy to overlook his mental powers, but a good physicist had to have mental flexibility; he was supposed to be one of the best. “We can’t conquer them—not when one man can handle a fleet. But we look enough like them to pass among them, once we know what to expect. We’ll drop a few small fliers into the wastelands. With any luck, they’ll find the god machine. Derek, do you think they’ll still let us work on the Sepelora, now that you know?”

It had been bothering the captain. He shrugged uncertainly.

“I told you not to break their taboos!” Siryl reminded them. “I also told you this had to be a homogenous culture! Now maybe you’ll listen to me. They have to have some neuroses; any isolated group has. What we’ve got to do is to find their weakness. Kayel, they think you’re smarter than they are. Let’s…”

Derek had heard enough. She still had a genius for remembering only when she’d been right and assuming she always would be infallible. He turned toward the door. “Coming, Kayel?”

The little man hesitated, obviously swayed by the chance to work closely with her. Then he smiled apologetically at her and followed Derek.

She sat in offended dignity through breakfast. Luckily, Wolm was there and Lari kept up a steady stream of talk, trying to get Ferad to join the boy in some project or other. Nothing was noticed by the two natives. And nobody tried to stop the two men as they headed toward the ship.

Michla was busy seeding something on the harrowed field. He’d already added nitrates and other fertilizer—probably from the same planet as the water, carefully selected and dissolved in it. He called out a greeting as they passed, and they waved back. It was all friendly and normal. Derek breathed a sigh of relief as they swung around a pile of boulders.

Where the space ship had rested there was nothing but a depression in the ground. And coming toward them from that was the graybearded priest, the serape over his shoulders whipping about him in the breeze that was blowing. His face was serious as he drew near them.

Derek stepped toward him, trying to force anger to replace the fear that was thick in him. “Where’s our ship, Skora?”

“Safe. Up there.” The old man pointed toward the sky above them. “In an orbit around Vanir.”