Ascent Page 9

  Isaac’s eyes narrowed, and, pushing past Latt, he ran to his wife’s sleep room door. It slid up – slowly, or so it seemed, now he was in a hurry – and he ducked underneath it while it was still in motion. A moment later he was leaning low over Ruth’s figure, trying to feel her breathe.

  Terry followed him in, kneeled and picked up her hand, checking for a pulse. He turned on one knee and glared at Latt, standing in the doorway. “She’s still alive!” he insisted.

  “No move… no breathe… no live,” Latt declared, woodenly.

  Isaac stared at Latt, trying to absorb the meaning of his halting, cryptic words, and then at his Ruth, dying, lost – with him – somewhere in the immense tracts of space. He got up and started to walk slowly towards the alien, his eyes clouded with rage.

  “No! Wait!” Terry cried to Isaac, his years of negotiating skills unconsciously affecting his response. “I think he means she’s paralyzed; it must be the side effects of the drugs or whatever they used to knock us out.” He jumped up, turning towards the alien, and stepped between his friend and the strange, grim grey-green figure. “Whatever you want, you won’t get it from Isaac if Ruth dies.” He found that he was looking slightly down into Latt’s eyes. He noticed that they were brilliant blue, and seemed quite incongruous in the alien’s otherwise corpse-like face. Latt looked back blankly for what seemed like an eternity, then he side-stepped fluidly and moved over to Ruth’s motionless body.

  Isaac made as if he would stop him, but his friend gently restrained him. They both watched tensely as Latt folded her legs at the knees and curled them up to her chest, then extended them straight again.

  Isaac watched him repeat this a few times, then he pushed him out of the way fiercely and took over, continuing the process, but at an accelerated pace. After he had watched for a moment, Terry also started to help.

  ***

  Ruth dreamed she was running away from a black thundercloud, but as is the case in most dreams, she found she was not in control. The cloud got closer and closer; the wind blew and the lightning struck all around her until she could see nothing at all because of the blinding flashes, and she was scared that she would collide with something. She tried to stop, but found that her legs were out of her control; struggling, she finally managed to stop the incessant movement and shrank down to cower behind a rock as waves of heat swept over her.

  Isaac and Terry collapsed, exhausted. They had worked on Ruth for something in excess of an hour without any visible result. They sank to the floor. A sound from behind him made Terry look at the door. Latt was standing motionless in the doorway, staring at Ruth’s still form.

  Isaac reached for his wife’s hand. It still felt warm. His eyes started to blur and he unconsciously increased the pressure he was applying to her hand.

  The darkness dissipated and Ruth realized she was lying down on her back. Abruptly she sat up. Opening her eyes, she found herself staring at a shadowy face with strangely slanted eyes.

  “Rrruth breathezzz,” Latt said, his voice tinged with the slightest hint of relief.

  Ruth was momentarily mesmerised, then movement at the periphery of her vision distracted her and an instant later she found herself in Isaac’s arms.

  ***

  “But what can they hope to get from you that they didn’t develop years ago on their own planet?” Ruth asked as she looked around the large domed room from her seat on one of the low benches, right next to Isaac.

  “I wondered that, but you’ll understand if I tell you that I didn’t voice my thoughts to him.”

  Ruth smiled at her husband. Latt had left them without a word sometime during their happy reunion. It was only when Isaac turned to point out the alien to Ruth after their long embrace that they discovered his absence.

  “I always knew you were exceptional, ‘Zac, but this is not what I had in mind to prove it.” Terry leaned against the equipment on the table or work surface directly across from his friends and watched them with a feeling of shared happiness and just a shade of his familiar friend: jealousy. “You can’t do this for them!”

  “What if they’re listening?” Ruth interjected urgently, in a half-strangled hiss.

  “I thought of that when Latt left after my first meeting with him.” Isaac replied in a normal tone. “So I tested it out. I said I would slash my wrists, and found this,” he held up a short but dangerous-looking metal sliver, “to do it with. No one came back to stop me. As for your question, Terry, do you think I haven’t told myself that? You know the kind of guy I am; I kept away from the military, even though they offered me first-rate laboratories and better funding than I could ever get in civilian facilities.” Isaac got up and paced around, his frustration at being held prisoner mounting with every step he took in his unearthly cage. “We have to get away. We have to warn the government. But we need to know more before we can hope to succeed in that venture. We need to know how many ‘Controllers’ there are on that home planet of theirs – and more importantly, how many are on their ship, what kind of weapons they have, and what we can do to defeat them.”

  Terry looked at his friend with renewed respect. “That could take some time.”

  “And we don’t know how much time we have. It’s not something I felt I should ask.”

  “Perhaps we can deduce something about them from the fact that they chose you,” Ruth began, thoughtfully.

  “Yes, there must be something in my published theories which would explain why the aliens chose me from the millions of scientists on Earth,” Isaac mused. “I understand a little of some of the more obscure facets of theoretical physics, and that relational matrix theory of mine may have some bearing.”

  “Perhaps it’s that paper you wrote on the theory of nuclear forces, or whatever you called it,” Ruth suggested. She had hardly taken her eyes off him since she had recovered, but now she glanced over at Terry and smiled.

  “I wondered if I’d ever see you do that again,” he said quietly as he shifted himself awkwardly on the low bench and kicked idly at the nearest leg of the adjacent work surface. “They may build great spaceships, but they sure don’t know anything about ergonomics,” he complained, changing the subject hastily and gesturing at the surface he was sitting on. “This is far too low, and the table top extends rearwards so far you can’t reach the back without climbing onto it.” He turned to Isaac. “What do we do next?”

  “You’d need arms like a gorilla to reach the back while sitting down on these ridiculous benches,” Isaac murmured quietly to himself.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing, just a thought,” the professor replied absently. He looked up, dismissing the problem from his mind. “We look around the ‘lab’, try to figure out what each item of equipment is, and what it implies about their technology. Other than that, we wait until Latt comes back,” Hardy explained.

  Terry and Ruth walked around with Isaac, leaning over the ‘acres’ of bench to reach the terminals or computers, and various other, indeterminate objects scattered around the lab. After a while, Ruth picked up a spherical device with coloured dots across its surface. The thing fitted easily into her hand, and strangely, the dots changed from a deep green to a pale blue as she held it.

  “Look!” She exclaimed. “This is quite pretty.”

  Terry took it as she proffered it to him, and started to check the weight of it by shaking it up and down gently. The dots went back to green almost immediately.

  “Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to like me!”

  Isaac chuckled.

  “Pass it here!” He caught it easily as his friend lobbed it to him, and held it still, staring at the pattern of dots intently and then raising it carefully over his head. “They move. There’s none underneath now.”

  “So, what is it?” Terry grabbed it back and turned it over, determined to catch the dots in their migration. Instead, the entire pattern disappeared.

  “Oh, you’ve broken it!” Ruth complained, and she took it back lik
e a mother fox would a straying cub. Presently the colours returned, starting again with deep green and progressing through the spectrum to pale blue and on to purple this time. “Isaac, do you have any idea?”

  “When I looked at it earlier, I thought it was a timepiece of some kind. The dots are in patterns of four, then four groups of four.”

  “What’s so special about four?” Ruth pondered out loud.

  “What do we think is so special about ten?” Isaac countered.

  So, you don’t really know what it does?” Terry concluded.

  “No, but I will.”

  Ruth put the sphere back on a work surface and observed that it did not roll.

  There was a brief period of silence as each speculated on possibilities.

  Terry tried to read the display on one of the computer-like screens. Isaac noted that pyramids closer to the curved wall of the laboratory, as he now thought of it, gave out more heat than the ones in the interior.

  Ruth sat on a bench and tried to smooth the wrinkles out of the fabric that covered her legs.

  “So, when you guys woke up, you were lying on those plinth things?” Ruth fingered her rough outfit some more, then pulled the stretchy top away from her neck and peered down inside. An expression of horror grew, like the arrival of Death personified. “Who dressed me?”

  “Either Latt or the Controllers.” This deduction came from her Professor-husband with little or no hesitation.

  Ruth could see that a slightly less coarse undergarment covered her chest, and continued down to the middle of her thighs. (She could feel the edge of it, like a ridge around each leg.) She realised it must have been Latt who had changed her clothing, as the Controllers left their ‘care’ to him, and she shivered at the thought of such a cold, alien human handling her limp body to take off her one-piece swim suit, seeing her nakedness, and covering her again with this sad substitute for clothing, these cheap, or at least poor quality, badly fitting outfits.

  Contemplating her situation made her realise that it had been a long time – exactly how long she did not of course know – since she had used the facilities on Getaway.

  “’Zac, is there a…?”

  Her husband got the idea immediately, and took her back to her sleeping dome to explain how it worked.

  “I think I’ll test out my one, too!” Terry announced as they stepped through the doorway.

  A few minutes later, suitably relieved, they gathered in the laboratory dome again. Having one necessity addressed led naturally to other physical requirements:

  Isaac’s stomach rumbled, and he realised they had been waiting for a long time.

  “When he comes back, we ask him if there’s anything to eat around here!”

  At the mention of food, Ruth and Terry both realized they felt ravenous. Isaac’s watch had been taken away also, so they had no way of knowing how long they had been unconscious. Isaac said that he believed that it had only been a few hours, but admitted that he had no real data on which to base his hunch other than the length of the slight stubble on his face.

  “Hunch… lunch!” Ruth exclaimed hopefully as a compartment opened in the side of a grey, slab-like construction on the table next to her low bench. Sure enough, when she looked inside, a large tray was revealed, on which were several square plates of unfamiliar vegetables and a large square-sided bucket of reddish liquid.

  “This will sussstain you.”

  Terry whirled around to see Latt standing by the open door that led out of the laboratory. Beyond the alien, a stack of what looked like crates could be seen along one wall. Terry gestured at the tray.

  “What is this, anyway?” he looked at the food doubtfully.

  “Eat. Drink. It iss the food of the ‘Controllerss’. It iss what I eat. There iss nothing more.” He turned to leave.

  “Wait! Latt!” Isaac called.

  The alien stopped and turned around, revealing his expressionless face once more.

  “You serve the ‘Controllers’, don’t you?” Professor Hardy continued.

  A slight nod was the only response.

  “Why do you serve them?”

  “‘Controller’ sssay: Latt do.” He paused as if searching for the right words. “Latt do not: Latt breathe not.” His blue eyes examined each one of them in turn, then he pivoted soundlessly on the smooth floor and was gone.

  After several minutes of dismal silence, Ruth picked up one of the small brown servings of pasty-looking vegetables and deposited it on the table in front of her. She reached out and tentatively touched one of the tubers. “It’s not hot. What do you think?” she turned to the two men. “Is it safe to eat?”

  “Latt says he eats it, and – look how healthy he is!” Terry stated in tones of soberness suitable for a state funeral.

  “We have to eat something.” Isaac walked over and picked up one of the pale vegetables and sniffed it. “Doesn’t really have a smell.” He bit off a small piece and rolled it around on his tongue. “Tastes bitter.” He chewed it up. “I guess they wouldn’t gain much by poisoning us –that would make no sense at all.”

  “Hire a brilliant scientist to make the ultimate doomsday weapon, then kill him off before he can complete it?” Ruth pondered out loud.

  “There is that…” Terry picked up another square dish and sampled the unfamiliar food, grimacing at the tart tang. “I hope you’re right.” He dipped a smaller, similarly square but empty container into the liquid and sipped cautiously and a little awkwardly at the edge of it. “It isn’t exactly raspberry, but”... He left the sentence unfinished and sat down with his friends to his first meal of alien food, hoping all the while that it would not be his last.

  Chapter Eight

  Savour battle memories! – Jarkader, Narlav warrior

  Bradley Hawk extricated himself gingerly from the cracked vinyl of the pilot’s seat, successfully avoiding any further damage to the brittle material, climbed out of his venerable Bell 206B while the rotor blades were still spinning and ducked automatically as he walked over to a little shack with a faded sign a few yards from the edge of the cracked tarmac. The sign hung at a crazy angle from a bent and rusty piece of mild steel above the door; it read ‘Hawk Helicopter Service’. He leaned against the door and kicked it hard, once, in the bottom corner. It sprang open with a vibration like the shudder of a mortally wounded beast, and he brushed past it, suppressing a sigh.

  Closing the door (at least most of the way) behind him, he flopped down in the moth-eaten armchair by the battered and stained desk, being careful not to tip it over. He leaned forward to reach the cluttered desktop, resisting the temptation to move the armchair closer, as it was supported on one side by a row of old bricks, where the legs had broken off some years earlier.

  Lean and well-muscled, at first glance Brad looked a lot younger than his actual age of sixty-two years – there were only a few tell-tale grey hairs and his hairline had receded so little as to be imperceptible. His upper lip sported an almost black western-style moustache somewhat atypical of a native of New Hampshire, and his head was topped with a slightly lighter shade of wavy brown hair that he brushed absently back to restore the damage done by his breezy exit from the old Bell. Alone as he was now, however, his eyes told a different story; they looked as if they were haunted by something, and were bloodshot due to lack of sleep.

  Why am I still flying? Every time I sit in a ‘copter I hear the sound of small-arms fire, and see blood splattering on the instrument panel. I should quit before I do something really crazy. The return of his Viet-Nam war memories had been unexpected – of course, he had had nightmares quite frequently for the first year after he came home, but these had faded away after a while, until he had had just a couple a year. That he could handle, but starting about four years back the recollections had started in his waking hours, and, although they were rare at first, now they seemed to come almost every day, and the strain was really beginning to show.

  He pulled a vintage car calendar out from und
erneath a pile of unpaid bills and checked the note scrawled in red below the photo of the nineteen forty-seven Cadillac: ‘7:30 p.m. Tracy’s house - across from the run-down green bungalow on Rupert Street’.

  Had to ask her for directions. Didn’t remember much about my first visit there, last week. His hand shook slightly as he lifted up the calendar and he clenched his fist until it stopped, creasing the edge of the thick paper slightly. Doctor Tracy Wilde... I could do a lot worse! He thought about the day he had crashed his car into the back of another when it had stopped unexpectedly in front of him on a comparatively straight and seemingly hazard-less stretch of country road. Best accident I ever had!

  ***

  Steam billowed out of the ruptured radiator of his significantly less-than-perfect old Ford, and he climbed out to face the owner of the previously immaculate new Buick. “What the –”

  “Don’t start that with me, if you’d been watching you’d never have rear-ended my car!” the woman interrupted, her hands on her hips as she responded to his anger with her own indignation.

  “Fine! I’ll remember not to blink the next time I’m behind you. Everyone stops without reason on a straight section of highway; I do it all the time. It keeps the other drivers awake.”

  “There was a reason,” she insisted. “I had to avoid–” then she blushed and discontinued her explanation.

  Brad looked interested. “Oh, no. You can’t stop now.” He leaned on the roof of his old car. “What was it?”

  “If a deer had run across the road, you’d understand?”

  He hesitated, then nodded. “So, was there a deer?”

  “No, it wasn’t a deer,” the woman announced reluctantly.