Z-Sting Read online

  “Essential man! Level nine sinecure! If you aren’t expendable, who is?”

  He screamed above the vent whine: “Cool the velocity, Meda! Look, no other cars on the road, everybody else is smart enough to stay home today—”

  She smile-snarled like a female satyr. “Good! With no competition, I can do a hundred, and we’re sneaking up on that—”

  All the world was filled with cosmic rumbling. Possibly Vanis yelled a warning, his mouth was wide open. Meda’s foot hit the forward jet brake.

  The highway vanished.

  Their car did a slow-rolling over-and-over thing through empty space, and kept rolling, and accelerated the space-roll . . .

  Utilizing the mind-sensors which he had been laboriously redeveloping during the years of growing consciousness, the desiccated ancient heard all the angry high-speed conversation between terrified Vanis and snarling Meda.

  More than renewed survival drive was activating the mummy. During the past few months he had listen-learned about a developing Erthworld urgency, and he was more than a parsec away from it here on Rab . . .

  Thrusting his sensors far ahead of the speeding car, the mummy felt the seismic forewarning of the rabquake; saw (without eyes) the highway start to fall away a hundred meters before the car got there; readied a desperate and previously untried tactic.

  The car went over the edge and began an accelerated space-roll, following the falling away of the bedrock, but at a lethal distance above it. When the rock would stop falling and the car would smash into it, the drop would have been at least a thousand meters.

  The mummy calculated the roll; and as the car came around vents down, he acted.

  The car, without changing its own spatial position, up-timed to an instant when the falling rock surface was only a meter below its vents. Using then an accelerating downtime technique, he held the car approximately at that distance from the falling surface until he felt the surface begin to decelerate; he then slowed the downtiming of the car until, as the rock groaned into terminal equilibrium, the car was two meters above it—and the car, with all ten vents whining, cushion-fell and hit the rock with about the same shock as a parachute drop.

  Instantly he returned them to actuality, reflecting self-instructively that he had just successfully brought off his first act of will in seventy-five years.

  Meda recovered. She was seated askew in the car after some kind of accident, she was in deep shadow. Quickly she took stock: Vanis unconscious and askew, the old man normally useless, the car seemingly undamaged. Situation: car resting on a shelf at the bottom of an abyss with sky kilometers above and rockwalls all around . . .

  . . . Except in the water direction. They were shelved in a canyon with a river far beneath.

  Hideously she remembered what had happened.

  Unbuckling, she hurried to check her husband: he was breathing rapidly but he seemed unhurt, and he was beginning to mutter. Leaving him, she examined the old man: the skull-face was the same; he displayed the usual deathly quiescence except for an occasional minute half-breath; and all his tube connections—tracheal clearance, intravenous absorption feeding, and so on—were undisturbed.

  She went back to her seat, trying to remember details. How could they have escaped death? What to do now?

  Having telepathically watched and appreciated all this, the sightless mummy turned his attention from Meda and Vanis. He too was concerned about what to do next—but for reasons broader than personal survival.

  His distance-sensors were growing interested in an approaching kilometers-away flying object . . .

  Vanis, awakening, demanded creatively: “What happened?”

  “We fell,” snapped Meda. “What do we do now?”

  “You got us here, you get us out. How’s the old man?”

  “Normal. We should all be dead. I don’t get it—”

  The flying object was much closer. The mummy hit Vanis with an idea. Vanis unbuckled, exploded out of the car, searched the sky, spotted the object: a tramp freighter at an altitude of two kilometers. He pointed: “There’s help—how do we get its attention?”

  Both of them began to wave arms frantically. The mummy threw a thought at the aircraft. It slowed, circled. Accelerated arm action with screaming . . .

  The aircraft entered the new ravine and descended, touching down a little distance away. Vanis and Meda, working their way toward it across broken rock surface, were met by a rough-looking graybeard out of the aircraft. Vanis clutched his arm: “I’m a government official, and we have a very old invalid. You have got to get us back to the city.”

  Graybeard moved massively to the roadrunner, ignoring Vanis’s proffered ID card. Gaping at the practically dead skeleton on the elaborate airvent couch, he gasped: “Jesus, he is old, ain’t he?”

  Vanis got his mouth open; Meda punched his kidney and pleaded: “The poor old man will die unless we soon get him back to our house where all his facilities are. Please help us; we can pay—”

  Graybeard faced her, arms akimbo. “I can’t turn back, I’m on a three-day run. Put him aboard, I’ll drop you at the end of it. Don’t worry, I have facilities. It will cost you ten thou—plus facilities.”

  High above a perpetuity of dentine mountains the aircraft moved leisurely for a full day and night; these mountains jagged a third of the planet Rab. The mummy, in moments that he could spare from his inward self-reconstruction, appreciated these far-below contours, the infinity of their extent, their phantasmagoria of colors and shapes and shadows, the brute tangible simplicity of the psychovisual field that they provided for his intricate gyrations in convolute privacy.

  His mind, at prolonged last, was beginning to regain practical objectivity with respect to his own brain. He was in mind-process of exploring and reconstructing his brain, dissolving the masses of cholesterol which had accumulated around his neural spark gaps, clearing his own brain as one might shovel mud out of a river-flooded house. And with each cleaned up spark gap, he found a new source of energy to send flowing down into his wasted body . . .

  In the morning, Meda cried with distress: “His I-V is all gone!”

  The captain grunted: “Hungry old cuss, ain’t he? Looks a little better, too, this morning. We’re loaded with I-V, I’ll send in some bottles; keep that glucose coming, Ma’am—his vein is lapping it up!”

  Low the freighter swooped over an ocean. Mountains walled this ocean. The aircraft stayed close to mountains and ocean, far lower than the mountain peaks, gloom-shrouded by the mountains; and although their speed was so high that the waves of the ocean were blurred into glistening smoothness, Vanis and Meda and the mummy were oppressed by a pervasive sense of slow motion along the oily wave-washed cliffs, as though they were passing eternity cruising purgatorial waters . . .

  “Vanis!” called Meda. “His eyes are open! When were his eyes last open?”

  Startled, Vanis came to look. The eyes had lost none of their original sea blue, but they were glazed and clouded, the corneas wrinkled by reason of lost fluid turgescence. Vanis waved a hand in front of the eyes: there was no response. “Oddball reflex,” he judged. “He isn’t seeing a thing—the eyelids just happened to go up.”

  After a bit, Meda commented: “He’s breathing faster. In the past four minutes he has breathed eight times—and stronger than before.”

  Graybeard ventured: “It’s the extra I-V. Let’s keep it coming.”

  The mummy’s eyes, now, were eye-seeingly turned toward the Hell-cliffs which flanked the freighter. His eyes were better than the thalamic radar sensors on which he had depended before his eyes had come back to life. Nevertheless, while he scanned the basalt, he kept his other sensors out; for his other sensors partially penetrated the rock, and he had a growing feeling that there was something within.

  Vanis and Meda and Graybeard watched awed. The old man was breathing almost normally, his lips were filling out and had closed over his teeth, his corneas were regaining turgescence and he was blinking occasion
ally; once in a while he cleared his own throat and swallowed, and the I-V was going very fast . . .

  Meda uttered: “He’s getting younger!”

  They stared at him . . .

  He vanished. From them, forever.

  Although long ago he had learned to make dice and some larger things roll the way he wished, teleportation—instantaneous spatial transfer of a body, oneself or another—was not as yet one of the mummy’s talents, nor anybody else’s talent as far as he knew. He doubted its theoretical possibility. Nevertheless, physically helpless on his couch aboard the aircraft with three people intently guarding him, while the craft swiftly approached an increasingly electrical node of contact kilometers ahead along the basalt cliff wall, teleportation was the only recourse that he seemed to have.

  Except, of course, temportation. But how could uptiming serve him in this impasse?

  Well . . .

  If the node were really as electrical as all that, in the past there had been craft which had not merely approached this node, but had flown into it—seeming to any chance incredulous observer to be entering solid rock.

  His tentacular mind searched the uptime neighborhood. And presently he found another aircraft whose course for the node, executed about seven months ago, would in about three minutes intersect the spatial course of this craft, so that apart from the time-separation the two flyers would have collided and merged.

  His mind catalogued every incident peril to himself. There were two major perils:

  First, either going uptime or returning downtime to actuality, he might materialize in a mass. In uptime, as he had pre-theorized and then gingerly tested, stripped atomic nuclei coalesce into a non-reonic rigidity which increases with each passing instant. Massive inertia approaches infinity; whereas the past-invading body (himself, for instance) holds reonic resilience and perishes trapped in the mass. Such a coincidence would be instantly fatal to the mummy, even if the mass should be no more than another human body.

  Second, he might be unable to downtime back to actuality fast enough, and he might suffocate. Atmospheric molecules become scattered nuclei in uptime, unbreathable. So uptime was like spacing without a suit. (He supposed you could uptime with a suit, but he didn’t have one.) However, during his early tentative time excursions, he had begun to notice that in uptime he wasn’t breathing anyway. Part of the mid-brain mechanism which he had learned to use was an automatic shutting off of the breathing reflexes. And with the reduced metabolism of ancientness, it hadn’t mattered during his cautious trial excursions in past months. But now, with his metabolism on its way back up to normal, the peril was grave. He recalled that his maximum time holding breath under water, even in his prime, had been about eight minutes.

  He reviewed a thin-chancy defense for each peril and got ready.

  When the two aircraft merged (same space, different times), the mummy, couch and half-used I-V bottle and all, uptimed into the other one.

  He had hit it lucky. He was on the bridge, and only a corner of his couch was caught in a mass—the captain.

  He watched the captain move about containing the piece of the couch, leaving an out-bitten corner. The busy-mobile captain almost immediately threatened to move through the mummy en route to another part of the bridge: you had to be alert, all the time: the mummy nimbly downtimed two seconds, and the captain was safely on the other side of him.

  Now the recumbent mummy concentrated on the scene ahead, his vein absently sipping at the I-V. At the top of the curved picture window of the bridge, a bit of sky was still visible above the cliffs, enough to show that the two major suns among the three conjointly called Toliman were at this date parted from each other, barely disparate. Then sky disappeared, and all was black basalt—smooth-ugly, then crevasse-ugly, then jagged threatening planetoid solidity . . .

  Automatic doors, evidently: two hundred meters high and wide. They rolled apart like mighty coconut shells, and the aircraft rushed in; and his subvisual sensors caught the doors closing behind, shutting them within the rock.

  The mummy whistled noiselessly. None of his Rab diamond mines had ever been like this! And yet, he had a feeling that he was not far from the place where three generations ago he had hidden his experimental invisiradio . . .

  Almost instantaneously, yet softly, the craft braked in midair and floated in what seemed a vast theater with tier on tier of unrailed loges. Gradually the ship approached a loge and found berth.

  The mummy was not far from suffocation. He judged that he had been six minutes in uptime. Poor condition had reduced his tolerance, but his depressed metabolism had compensated: the balanced limit was maybe seven minutes—he had perhaps a minute of consciousness remaining.

  His backmind was thinking: Must be ways to extend this. Might learn to store fat in buttocks, break it down, feed the oxygen into bloodstream. Better: might learn to break down my own CO2 output and recirculate the freed oxygen . . .

  Simultaneously his foremind was calculating tactics. Fast downtiming would risk no masses enroute but might land him in a mass at actuality. Or, he could downtime swiftly to just short of actuality and then feather his way in; but just short of actuality could equally land him in a mass. Or, he could feather his way the whole distance; but he had less than a minute of consciousness. It would be a long downtime jump, actuality being seven months in the future: he might land in the nose of another ship; if he didn’t, if the berth were then empty, there would be a nine-meter drop, couch and all, from this bridge level to the hangar deck that the bridge overhung . . .

  Shoot crap!

  He downtimed. And at the same instant, telekinetically he activated the airvents of his couch to ease the drop which he hoped would come . . .

  Three jogging stevedores nearly fell over the materializing couch: one of them actually bumped it.

  The mummy savored the profane chorale that followed their shocked silence.

  As it died away, he spoke his first weak aloud words in seventy-five years—mouthed them with care, timing them around the rhythmic soughing of his tracheal vacuum cleaner:

  “This is an airvent couch.

  “Watch out for the sharp-bitten corner.

  “Float me to your leader.”

  Herod bit thumbs in his throne room. It wasn’t really a throne room, although in the Centauri System it amounted to that, but rather a sort of extraterrestrial Oval Office for the chief of a brace of planets. And this Herod was neither Sinite nor Ramian, was not even an erthling; Herod was a native of Rab, scion of an indigenous species which was indistinguishable (when clothed) from the Caucasian variety of Erth’s Homo sapiens. The thumb-biting signified the anxiety of uncertainty-with-momentary-event-impotence on the part of a physically frail player of four-dimensional political chess, whose intellect habitually ran far ahead of the problems that were soluble while recognizing accurately and avoiding the problems that were insoluble.

  In his thirties, Herod was lean and bead-eyed, darkhaired and fair-skinned, competent and nervous. He was Chairman of the Board for Galactic, Ltd., the corporation which governed Rab and neighboring Vash with executive responsibility to the popular wills of Rab and Vash. Galactic prided itself on hewing cleanly to the political ethos projected more than a century ago by Dr. Thoth Evans who now tragically was a just-alive corpse here on Rab under the care of a married couple whose names Herod never could quite remember. Evans had fathered Mare Stellarum which currently ran Erth under Marta Evans and was expected to dominate the burgeoning Interplanetary Union involving some thirty star-systems. Herod, assuming Galactic chairmanship as a boy genius seven years earlier, had purified galactic after the Thoth Evans concepts and was now an unlikely contender against Marta for the Union control spot.

  The nervousness of Herod, not unusual for him, was just now intensified by new evidence that the old corrupt Mare Stellarum, under aging-weary Marta, was not the corporation to govern even Erth, let alone the Interplanetary Union. Herod’s intelligence continually monitored Erth, an
d with extreme difficulty semi-monitored also Marta’s headquarters which was located not on Erth but on Nereid, a satellite of Neptune. Intelligence was telling Herod that COMCORD was now registering a 0•9 grievance imbalance against the Constellation of Senevendia, and that Marta’s government appeared quite inattentive to this unusually awkward index.

  This inattention was inconceivable to Herod. It was elementary that the perfect COMCORD balance was 0•0, and that normal imbalances would range between -0•2 and +0•2. Marta had to be disturbed by a 0•9; and yet, apparently she wasn’t . . .

  When his female secretary entered to announce that a man named Croyd wished to see him, it took Herod about five seconds to return from the cloud castle that he had been tenanting (beat out that creaky Mare Stellarum, give Marta come-uppance, impossibly command this galaxy) . . . Once back, he demanded: “What does Mr. Croyd want?”

  “I can’t tell. I’m confused. He’s on an airvent couch.”

  “How does that confuse you?”

  “Sir, I do not know why a man alone on a couch would get this far.”

  “Is he alone now?”

  “No, sir. General Sherman pushed him in. But the general says he does not know exactly why.”

  Croyd? Unusual name; but a small hintermind bell was tinkling . . . “Did the general explain to you why this thing had got to the point where it was a general who was pushing this Croyd?”

  “No, sir. But General Sherman said that a general has to depend on his staff work, that Mr. Croyd had been pushed into his office by Sherman’s number-one colonel.”

  “Does General Sherman know why his colonel felt impelled to push this Croyd?”

  “Sir, you would have to ask the general.”

  “Why didn’t you ask the general?”

  “Sir, he is a general.”

  The nimbus that had been padding at the back of Herod’s mind abruptly took shape and lost shape again. He probed further: “Did Mr. Croyd give his first name?”