22

A door slid open and Captain Hoban walked through. He had a dazed look in his eyes, and Stan knew he could not have been awake for long.

“You’re early out of the hypersleep, Captain:”

“Yes, sir. I had my dial set to get me up before the crew so I could pull myself together and have a talk with you.”

“I suppose it is time we had that,” Stan said. “I want to thank you again for throwing in your lot with me. I don’t know where this will end up, but I’m glad to be on this adventure with you.”

“Yes, sir. Could you tell me what it is exactly we are going to tell the crew?”

Julie, seated nearby, said, “Yes, Stan, I’d like to know myself.”

Stan nodded. “We’ll give a slightly altered version of what’s going on.”

“Are we on course, then?” Hoban asked.

“Yes. I fed the coordinates for AR-32 into the navigational computer.”

“AR-32? I think I’ve heard of the place,” Hoban said. “Wasn’t there some trouble there a while back?” “There was.”

“Then why are we going there, sir?”

“We’re pretty sure there’s an alien super-hive on that planet, which apparently won’t support anything else. A Bio-Pharm ship has been in orbit around AR-32, and my information is that they have been illegally harvesting royal jelly.”

“Yes, sir. I understand. But what does that have to do with us?”

“I have a right to my share in that matter,” Stan said. “Julie and I are going to relieve them of some of their plunder. Royal jelly is like pirate’s gold, Hoban. It belongs to whoever takes it.”

“Yes, sir. I don’t have much trouble with that concept, though Gill might. But what bothers me, sir, is, does that mean we’ll have to kill bugs?”

“It could come to that,” Stan said, “though it is not the primary intention of our expedition.”

“And might it not involve killing Bio-Pharm people, if we have to?”

Stan stared at him. “Yes, it could come to that. I don’t expect them to be too happy about our taking what they have come to regard as their own, but frankly, I don’t much care what they feel. No one gives up pirate’s gold easily. If they insist on making a fight of it… Well, we’ll take care of ourselves.”

Hoban nodded, though he didn’t look happy. “I suppose that follows, sir. But I wish you had told me all this beforehand.”

“Would you not have come?” Stan said. “Would you seriously have preferred to stay down-and-out in that crummy boardinghouse I found you in?”

“No, I don’t wish to be back there,” Hoban said. “I’m just considering the situation.”

“Then think about this,” Stan said. “This situation could make you rich. Julie and I intend to share our profits with you and the crew. They’ll get a small percentage for the dangers they’ll run. It won’t be much out of our shares, but it’ll be more money than they ever saw before.”

“Sounds good, sir,” Hoban said. But he was still worried. What good was it to be rich if you were also dead?

The time was nearing to wake the crew from hypersleep. The flight was almost at an end. Their destination, the planet AR-32, was coming up on the screens, a glowing dot in the dark sky. June knew this would be her last time alone with Stan for a long time.

There was a lot to do, a lot of last-minute details to attend to, and she didn’t know when she and Stan would get some quiet time alone. Maybe not until they had finished the expedition—or to call it by its true name, their raid. And that could take time. And if everything didn’t go just right…

Julie shook her head irritably. There was no sense thinking about failure. Hadn’t Shen Hui instilled that much in her?

23

When Julie came into the control room, Stan was still seated in the big, padded command chair. He had taken an ampoule of royal jelly from a dozen that were nested in the padded box on the nearby worktable. He was holding the ampoule up to one of the arc lights, twirling it between his fingers and admiring its bluish glow in the light.

As usual, Julie was both attracted and repelled by the liquid and what it could do to Stan. Yet she had been hoping they could spend this evening together, doing things together instead of thinking about them. Sometimes she thought Stan allowed himself to have real experiences only for the pleasure of reliving them later, as he was able to do with the royal jelly.

Why did he love that stuff so much? She knew it eased the pain of his disease. But it was more than just a remedy: he was using it as a drug. And Julie didn’t approve of taking drugs.

She hadn’t tried the stuff herself. A well-trained thief allows nothing to dull her senses. Shen Hui and life itself had taught her this lesson. And yet, much as she missed him when he launched himself into the unknown regions that the drug brought him to, a part of her went with him, because she knew how Stan felt about her.

Returning the ampoule to its case, Stan asked, “What did you think about Norbert’s performance?”

“He’s ready,” she said. “You’ve done an amazing thing, Stan. Created a robot alien good enough to fool the real ones.”

“Except for the pheromones,” Stan pointed out.

“You’ve taken care of that, too. With the short-range zeta fields you’ve developed, plus the pheromone-altering qualities of the royal jelly, the aliens will think Norbert is one of them.”

Stan nodded. “Just like it was with Ari.” Stan was referring to how his cybernetic ant, Ari, had been programmed to enter the colony of a similar-looking ant species, where the other ants accepted him as the real thing.

“How close are we now, Stan?” Julie asked.

Stan punched up the computer screen in front of him. Numbers flowed across it, and lines weaved in and out and then held firm.

“We’re nearing the vicinity of AR-32,” Stan told her. “It’s time to get the crew out of hypersleep.”

“The adventure begins,” Julie said softly.

“That’s right.” Stan took out the ampoule of royal jelly again. “We need a lot more of this stuff, and AR-32 has it for us. It’s funny how a single substance can be both more valuable than diamonds and more necessary for life than water. More necessary for my life, anyhow.”

He swirled the little glass tube and watched the liquid flow. Then he looked at Julie.

“You look very lovely tonight.”

She smiled back mockingly. “Pretty as a shot glass, as they’d say in the Old West.”

“No, I really mean it,” Stan said. “You know how I feel about you, don’t you?”

“Maybe I do,” Julie said. “But it’s not because you ever talk about it.”

“I’ve always been shy,” Stan said. Abruptly he swallowed the ampoule. I’m going to go lie down now, Julie. Let’s talk more later.”

Without waiting for her answer, Stan shambled off to his small office just to the right of the main control-room entrance. Within it a folding cot was built into the wall. He lay down on it now, without bothering to take off his glasses.

With Xeno-Zip there was no habituation. Each time was like the first. It always amazed him just how quickly the stuff took effect. It was like no other drug he had ever tried, neither medicinal nor recreational, and Stan had tried them all. Alien royal jelly was neither a stimulant nor a soporific, though it had effects similar to both. Primarily it was a way of gaining instant access to all parts of your own brain, a royal road to your own dreams and memories. With royal jelly you could zoom in on your past like a skilled photographer zooming in on a detail, readjusting focus to bring up those images that had faded out You could freeze the frame on what seemed like reality. You could see what you wanted to see, as often as you liked, and then step outside the frame and watch yourself in the act of seeing. Nor was that all it did. Royal jelly was a painkiller, too, relieving the throb of the cancer that was shattering his life.

The vial dropped from his fingers. It fell to the floor, taking no more than a fraction of a second to shatter on the deck. And in that microsecond, Stan watched it all happen again.

24

First came the rush. It seemed to move along his arteries, and Stan pictured himself, a tiny man in a canoe adrift on the great red waters of his bloodstream. The vision exploded into a thousand fragments, and in each fragment the scene was repeated. The fragments of his vision came together, like millions of diamond particles striving to become a diamond, and then exploded outward again like firework displays arcing in all directions. He could hear a sound that was accompanying this, and he couldn’t tell what it was at first, a deep-throated roar that could have come from no human source. At first he thought it was the gods singing, great choruses of ancient gods wearing strange headdresses, some with the heads of ducks and turtles, some jaguars, some foxes. And near them, suspended in shining space, were other choirs of women-gods, full-breasted Brunhildes and slender Naiads, and their song was full of sorrow and promise.

As the ampoule fell to the floor, Stan was already dozing fitfully. Tiny muscles in his eyelids jerked and twitched: REM sleep, but of a previously unheard-of intensity. Dream sleep, but with awareness. Blue-green lights played across his face. It was a broad face, with the beginning of a double chin. Light glinted off his glasses and threw a shadow on his small chin. He looked far younger than his twenty-eight years; like a schoolboy again, coming back to the big old house where he had lived with his parents before the devastation wrought by the aliens. Again he saw his stern father, the scholar, always with an ironic little Greek or Latin phrase on his lips; and his mother, with her high forehead, flinty gray eyes, and hastily pinned-up mass of dark blond hair.

Then he seemed to be walking down a long corridor. On either side, standing in niches like statues, were replicas of his parents at every age and in every mood. Stan could, in his imagination, freeze the frame, stop his parents in midtrack, and walk around them, inspecting them from every angle, and then start the tape of memory running again. All this while the ampoule was in midair.

The ampoule was still falling from his hand, and he could segue instantly from where he was to another memory, himself after class in high school, walking along beside the little brook that ran behind his home, thinking about everything under the sun except his homework assignments. Stan looked down on the work given him by his teachers. He thought it was beneath his intellectual level, unworthy of his efforts. So disdainful was he of school that his parents feared he would not graduate. But he did graduate—there he was at his own graduation, wearing an English schoolboy’s suit his parents had bought him while they were attending a seminar in London. He had always hated that suit; he had looked damned silly next to the casual attire of the other boys.

There were many scenes like that, ready for him to step into, but Stan wasn’t in the mood for childhood memories. There were other things he wanted to look at. Other times. Other people, places, things.

And so he moved, the ampoule still falling, moved as a spiritual presence, down the spiraling, faintly glowing corridors of the years. And now he was a man, in his twenties, already a well-known scientist, and he was in the doctor’s office, buttoning his shirt, listening dumbly as Dr. Johnston said, “I might as well give it to you straight, Dr. Myakovsky. You were correct in your surmise about those black marks on your chest and back. They are indeed cancers.”

“Is my condition terminal?”

“Yes.” The doctor nodded gravely. “In fact, you don’t have much time left. The condition, as I’m sure you know, is incurable. But its progress can be slowed, and we can ease some of the symptoms. You already have the medicine we prescribe for such cases. And there is also this.”

The doctor held out a small plastic box. Within it, packed in foam rubber, were a dozen ampoules of a bluish liquid.

“This is royal jelly. Have you heard of it?”

Stan nodded. “If memory serves, it is produced by the aliens.”

“That is correct,” Dr. Johnston said. “I must tell you it’s no cure. But it should relieve the symptoms. It could be just what you’re looking for.”

“Does it have much in the way of side effects?”

The doctor smiled grimly. “It has indeed. That’s why it hasn’t received government approval yet, though many people use it. Indeed, it has become the most-sought-after consciousness-altering substance in existence. It gives some an intense feeling of well-being and competence. Others experience levels of their own being not normally perceived. Still others have an orgasm that seems to go on forever.” “At least I’m going to die happy,” Stan said.

But of course there were also the bad side effects. Some people had been known to go berserk on the drug, or to undergo personality changes so great that their own families didn’t recognize them. Could that be happening in his case?

And then he forgot his concern as the images swept him up again. There was so much to look at! So many memories, all nicely staged and lighted, waiting for him, the sole audience, to put them into motion. It was like owning all of the theaters in the world, and in each of them a different movie was playing, and each movie starred himself, Stan Myakovsky, in all the scenes of his life. He glided past them, a ghostly presence in his own memories.

25

Red Badger was one of the first crewmen revived from hypersleep. He stretched and yawned, then carefully unplugged the leads that connected him to the central sleep inducer. He looked around. The rest of the crew was starting to revive. Cheerful music was playing over the PA system. There were sounds of coughing and spitting as men cleared their throats for the first time in almost a month.

Coffee was available at a little table. Crew were always given coffee mixed with a new amphetamine upon first awakening. It was needed to help them throw off the effects of hypersleep.

Badger sipped at a black sweetened cup of coffee and felt his head clear.

“You okay, Red?” It was Walter Glint, his sidekick.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Min ?”

The Laotian hill woman grunted her assent.

“Connie?”

“I’m great, Badger,” Connie Mindanao said. “You figure this might be a bonus run?” “For extra-hazardous duty? They haven’t said yet.” “I hope so.” “Why?”

“I’ve got a ranch house in Bangio I’m trying to pay off.”

“There just might be easier ways,” Badger said. He looked around. “That’s funny.”

“What’s that, Red?”

“They usually post the ship’s destination in the crew quarters. But look for yourself—the board’s empty.”

“Yeah, that is funny,” Glint said. “But there’s a notice there.”

Badger said, “I can see it, dummy. General assembly in twenty minutes. The captain and the owner’s gonna talk to us.”

Glint said, “You’ve been on these ships longer than I have. That’s not the way they usually do it, is it, Red?”

“Nope.” Badger scratched his jaw. “I’ll bet they’re up to something. This might be interesting, Glint.”

The loudspeaker said, “All crew! Assemble at once in the main theater.”

Stan and Julie walked out onto the raised stage. The crewmen looked up attentively when he rapped a pointer on the lectern to get their attention.

“Our destination is not far away now,” Stan said. “It is a small O-type star named AR-32 in the standard catalog. Around it revolves a single planet, with several good-sized moons to keep it company. These moons create violent and unpredictable weather currents on the planet, which has been named Vista. Captain Hoban, do you know anything about this planet?”

Hoban had been sitting to one side of the stage. He cleared his throat now and said, “I have heard of the place, sir. They used to call it the Festerhole, back when there were still a lot of pirates and privateers operating in the space lanes. There was once a jelly-gathering operation there involving one of the bionationals. That was some years ago. To the best of my knowledge it has been deserted since.”

Stan thought, “Good old honest Hoban telling the crew more than they need to know!” Still, they’d have to find out sometime what this mission really involved.

The crew stirred and looked at each other. This talk of the Festerhole was making them uneasy. What was this assignment, anyhow? What was it the powers wanted them to do this time? No one had spoken about a bug-hunting expedition. That called for extra pay!

There was a rising murmur of protest from the crew. The greatest menace of recent times were the aliens, those big black monsters who had been pushed off Earth with difficulty, and elsewhere continued to show their murderous abilities in the face of everything Earth had been able to throw against them.

Badger rose to his feet and said, “Sir, this wouldn’t by any chance be a bug-hunting expedition, would it?”

“Not exactly,” Stan said.

“Then what exactly is it… sir?”

Stan ignored the red-haired crewman’s insolent tone. “This is basically a salvage operation,” he said. “We’ll be taking a load of royal jelly off a wrecked freighter.”

“Yes, sir,” Badger said. “And aren’t the bugs going to have something to say about that?”

“Our information is that there are no bugs on the wreck. We’ll go in fast, take what we need, and be out of there again. There’s also the possibility we’ll find an abandoned hive on the planet. The jelly in that could be worth millions.”

Walter Glint said, “Nothing was said about bugs when we volunteered, sir.”

“Of course not,” Stan said. “My information is secret. If I told you back on Earth, half the freelance salvagers from Earth and the colonies would be there now.” “Bugs can be dangerous,” Glint said.

“Not when you take precautions,” Stan quickly put in. “You were warned that this was hazardous duty. You’re not getting time off your sentences for sitting around in some holiday spot. And remember, there’s bonus pay in this for all of you. It could come to quite a lot, if the salvage is as rich as I think it is.”

“How much?” Badger asked.

That’s impossible to calculate before we have it,” Stan said. “Don’t worry, there is a standard formula for crew shares. I intend to double it.”

The men cheered. Even Badger smiled and sat down. This was interesting, he thought. He wondered what would come next.

26

Stan rapped for attention. But before he could get started again, a door opened and a man came in. He moved rapidly and with a strange grace, a cross between a glide and a lope. His face was expressionless. Although all of his individual features were human, the total result was not human at all. The crew knew at once, even before the introduction, that this man was a synthetic. Captain Hoban’s introduction clinched the matter.

“People, this is Gill, an artificial man from the Valparaiso People Factory. He’s the second-in-command.”

“Sorry to be late, Dr. Myakovsky,” Gill said. “I just finished the energy readings.”

“No problem, Mr. Gill. Take a seat.”

Gill sat down by himself in the back of the room.

Gill was a solitary. In recent years the People Factory in Valparaiso, Chile, where many of the better synthetics were produced, had been doing an improved job on skin colors and texturing. Gone was that old look of damp putty that had once characterized synthetic people and had provided a basis for so many jokes by bad comedians. Now the only reliable visual gauge for detection of an android was the speed of their comprehension responses. That and a certain mechanical jerkiness to their movements, since the final stage of fairing the input levels and ranges of the synthetics’ operating systems was a slow, expensive process, and many employers didn’t care if a synthetic’s hand trembled as long as he didn’t drop the test tube or light stylus—or whatever.

Despite their artificial origins, synthetic men were full-fledged members of human society, with voting rights and a sexual program.

Stan was about to go on. But just at that moment, from an outer corridor, Mac the dog came trotting into the room. He had a bright blue rubber ball in his mouth, and he looked around expectantly.

Someone in the crew laughed. “Fetch it here, boy!”

And then something else came into the room behind the dog.

It came loping in on all fours, and at first glance it looked like a beetle the size of a rhinoceros. It was colored a shiny, unrelieved black. Its skull was very long and curved back over its shoulders. It was toothed like a fiend and taloned like the devil itself. It was Norbert. And he looked like he had just come from hell.

There was silence for one long straining moment.

And then pandemonium broke loose.

The crew scrambled to their feet and started running for the exits. Their work boots clattered on the metal deck as they surged toward the exit door, trying to push each other out of the way.

Stan grabbed the microphone and shouted, “Just stay where you are! Do not make any aggressive movements! Norbert will not harm you, but he is programmed to resist aggression. Just stay calm!”

It was not a calm-making situation. Yet even now catastrophe could have been averted. The crew was quieting down, coming out of its panic, starting to make jokes. Norbert was just standing there, making no sign that he was going to attack anyone. And then he was bending, slowly picking up the dog’s rubber ball, throwing it back to him.

It could have ended right there. But there was always a wise guy around, someone who had to push things a little too far.

This time it was a crewman known as Steroid Johnny, an overmuscled hunk in a skimpy T-shirt, tight jeans, and lineman’s boots, who carried an unlicensed pressor rod in his boot and liked to cause trouble.

Steroid Johnny saw his chance now. “Come on, Harris,” he said to a lean, grinning blond man lounging beside him. “Let’s take this sucker down. Shouldn’t be no aliens here anyhow.”

The two men advanced on the motionless robot alien. Steroid Johnny winked at Harris, who went slinking around to the right, picking up a crowbar from a toolbox as he went The robot’s head swiveled, keeping both men under surveillance. Johnny feinted to his left, then went straight in at Norbert. Five feet away he stopped and turned on his pressor beam. He directed it at Norbert’s back-sloping head.

Norbert was pushed back hard—for a moment.

Then the big robot shrugged his way around the pressor beam, ducked under it, and was moving toward Johnny. Johnny backed up and tried to get the pressor beam into a blocking position, but Norbert moved faster, lunged forward, his jaws opened, the inner jaws shooting out of his mouth. The pressor beam fell to the deck. Johnny tried to get out of the way, but Norbert already had one big hooked claw clamped on his left shoulder.

Johnny screamed as he was lifted straight into the air by the skin of his shoulder. He hung there in Norbert’s grip, screaming, struggling to break free. Norbert’s inner jaws, impelled with all the energy of his powerful crysteel-mesh throat muscles, drove through Johnny’s chest, splitting him like a side of beef. Norbert dropped the red dripping thing to the deck and turned, ready for the next one.

Harris, seeing the way things were going as he ran to attack Norbert, tried to pull up in midstride. Too late. Norbert swung around like a grotesque yet graceful ballet dancer and struck out with one of his taloned feet. The blow landed high on Harris’s sternum. Norbert’s talons made an audible hissing sound as they cut through the air, driven by the force of his heavy shoulder muscles. The talons ripped Harris apart from the left shoulder blade to his right hipbone. Harris opened his mouth to scream, but no sounds came out. His lungs had been punctured in the blow. He made an ugly squishing sound as he fell to the deck.

The rest of the crew took this in and froze in position. They had never seen anything move as fast as Norbert, when he was aroused.

Norbert halted, looking around. He seemed about to attack again. Just in time, Stan shouted out the shutdown order: “Priority override! Code Myrmidon!”

Norbert froze in position, awaiting further orders.

It was a moment of balanced possibilities. The crew seemed on the verge of panic, ready to run out of the control room screaming.

Captain Hoban gulped hard and felt nausea at the back of his throat, but he knew he had to control the men. He got hold of himself and said coldly, “Two of you there, get pails and mops and clean up that mess. See what comes of not following orders? This didn’t have to happen. Now get a move on…”

There was an awkward, sullen moment, and then the crew obeyed. And the ship Dolomite hurtled on toward its rendezvous with AR-32.

27

Subdued, the crew returned to their quarters. The men seemed dazed, unsure of what to think. All of them except Min Dwin, the Laotian hill woman. She went directly to her bunk and pulled out her spacebag. From it she took out a long object in a flat leather sheath. She pulled it free. It was a machete, sharpened to a razor edge.

Badger said, “What are you up to, Min?”

“Those bastards killed Johnny,” Min said. “I’m going to get me some officer meat”

“With that? They’ll cut you down before you get within ten feet of them.”

“Maybe I can pick up a gun. One of those that fires the softslugs. I’d like to see that weird doctor with the glasses take one in the gut.” She started toward the passageway leading back to the main ship’s stations.

“Hold on a minute, Min,” Badger said.

She stopped and turned. “Yeah, what is it?”

“Johnny was your man, huh?”

“Yeah. It was a recent thing. Now it’s over. What about it?”

“Come over here and sit down,” Badger said. Reluctantly she complied, sitting on a locker with the machete balanced on her knees.

“Min, I understand you’re plenty pissed off. I am, too. I wasn’t all that fond of Steroid Johnny, or his friend Harris, but I wouldn’t have wanted what happened to them.”

“Right. So?”

“So this. It was Johnny’s own fault, Min.”

“It would never have happened if that professor guy hadn’t brought that thing along.”

“Sure. That thing he calls Norbert is obviously dangerous. But so what? We work around dangerous stuff all the time. That’s what we volunteered for.”