Asgard's Conquerors

5

The best-laid plans of mice and men, so the poet assures us, gang aft agley. The worst-laid plans can hardly be expected to fare much better. You will understand, therefore, that the four hours which stretched ahead of Finn and myself while we waited for our getaway ship to be brought back to dock was not a comfortable prospect.

“You don’t suppose they’re going to let us get away with this, do you?” I asked of Finn.

“Got a better idea?” he spat back at me. He still had his sterile suit on, but he’d unfastened the helmet so he could talk. I hadn’t bothered to put mine on.

I didn’t have a better idea. In fact, I didn’t have any ideas at all. But I had completely lost confidence in Finn’s ideas. He seemed to me to have an over-ripe imagination, which obviously had a tendency to run away with him. Not for the first time I cursed my luck in running into him. Of all the people I had known in my life who might conceivably be found on a microworld orbiting Uranus, he was probably the only one who could have compounded my problems to this degree. Everybody else would have had sufficient sanity and kindness to leave me alone.

“Why exactly are you calling yourself Jack Martin these days?” I asked him.

He favoured me with a sour expression. “Because I’m a Star Force deserter,” he told me. “Among other things.”

It didn’t come as a tremendous surprise.

“What other things?”

“Nothing serious. Theft.” He paused, then went on: “Was drafted when I got back after my stay on Asgard. If I’d stayed out there, I’d have been okay, but I couldn’t stick the place. Creepy humanoids, cold, dark caves—like hell frozen over. Came back, pulled a couple of software frauds, set up the fake identity. Wasn’t too difficult. But you can’t move about on Earth or Mars these days without leaving a trail like an electronic skunk. Australia got too hot. Had to go back to the belt; had to get out of there, too. Been here for a year. Ayub Khan’s on to me, but hasn’t turned me in. Not because of his innate generosity, you understand. I’m not even particularly useful to him, in spite of my special skills—but it would be inconvenient to get a replacement. Isn’t just the law, either. Got other people looking for me. When you’re being hunted from both sides . . . I’d give a lot to get back to Asgard, even if it is hell frozen over. Or a colony world, maybe. Never been to a colony. You?”

“You’re quite the little Napoleon of crime, aren’t you?” I said. “I always knew you’d go to the bad, even in the old days. Mickey must be turning in his grave.”

“I’m not the only one here who’s wanted for desertion, am I?”

“You’re the only one who’s guilty.”

“Sure. You’re a real war hero, Rousseau. You really did your bit for dear old Mother Earth, piddling around in absolute zero out on the galactic rim. Is it true that your bosses there were peddling android super-soldiers to the Salamandrans?”

These were low blows, but I could see his point of view. The Tetrax had sold war-materials to the Salamandrans, including technics they’d developed as a result of our researches on Asgard. Maybe somewhere along the line, one of my discoveries had contributed a little. I wondered, though, whether the Tetrax had been selling stuff to our side too. It would be logical. The fact that humans aren’t supposed to be biotech-minded probably made Tetrax systems all the more attractive as items of purchase.

“Okay,” I said to Finn, “I guess neither of us is Robin Hood. But it looks like we’re outlaws from here on in— unless we change our minds and surrender.”

“Ho ho,” he said, humourlessly.

“I’m serious,” I told him. “You could zap me with the mud gun and claim to be a hero. Tell them I blackmailed you into it because I knew your real name. Or I could zap you with the mud gun and tell them I only just found out what a ruthless desperado you are.”

He wasn’t amused. “What did you find on Asgard?” he asked, changing the subject back to something less worrying.

I decided that talking was preferable to silence, given the mood we were in. “I found out that the levels go a long way down,” I said, without much enthusiasm. “There are thousands of them. There could be more surface area down there than on the homeworlds and colonies of all the galactic humanoids put together. If they were all populated there’d be an awful lot of people inside that world.”

“Know what I think it is?” he asked.

“Probably,” I told him. “I’ve heard just about every theory there is. Hot favourite, by a wide margin, is that it’s an interstellar Noah’s Ark fleeing from some cosmic disaster which took place unimaginable aeons ago in the black galaxy.”

I could tell by his face that I’d guessed it in one. Desperately, he cast around for some other notion, so that he could pretend I was wrong.

“It could be a zoo,” he said. “Or it could be that they’re refugees from our own galaxy, from the time before any of the present-day humanoids went into space. They say it couldn’t possibly be coincidence that all the civilizations in the galactic arm should be approximately the same age, and all the humanoid races look so very similar. The guys on Goodfellow think we all have common ancestors—that all our worlds may have been terraformed in the distant past by some kind of parent species.”

“I’ve heard people argue along those lines,” I admitted.

“So what do you think, genius?” he demanded, with a hint of a sneer in his voice.

“I don’t know,” I told him, truthfully. “But I do think we might find the answers to more questions than we ever dared to ask if anyone does get to the centre of Asgard. I saw enough down there to convince me that there are people in the deeper layers who make the Tetrax look primitive. The Tetrax suspect it too. They worry about it—they really like being the neighbourhood superstars. They love to call the rest of us barbarians, and I don’t imagine they’d like to be shoved into that category themselves. They’re very keen to find out what Asgard really is, but I’m not so sure they’ll like the answers.”

“Like the rest of us to do their spade-work for them, don’t they? God, I hated working for them—though I have to admit that they taught me a thing or two about security systems. If it hadn’t been for the damned war I’d really have been in a position to make it big back here. Learned some neat tricks on Asgard. They may be monkey-faced bastards, but they’re prepared to share what they know when it suits them. Or did they only open up Asgard to the rest of us so saps like you and me could take their risks for them?”

“That’s only part of it,” I told him. “If they’d been able to keep Asgard a secret, they probably would have. But they weren’t the only ones who knew about it when they began building the first base there. It serves their interests better to encourage multi-species research, and to do their own spade-work behind the scenes. They are genuinely committed to the idea of a peaceful and harmonious galactic community. They think it’s the only way to ensure that any of us are going to survive. Those biotechnics they sold the Salamandrans—I don’t believe that was just profiteering; it was also an attempt to change the way the war was being fought, to quiet it down. They’re afraid of firepower, because of the way whole planets can get smashed up. Genetic time-bombs and subtle biotechnics are much more their style, because weapons like that don’t cause ecocatastrophes.”

My heart wasn’t really in the conversation. I’d spent too much time on Asgard concocting fanciful stories about the possible story behind the artefact, and puzzling over the other mysteries of the galactic status quo. I’d discussed such matters with cleverer men than John Finn, and I wasn’t in the mood to go over old ground for the sake of what I still believed—despite all his claims of expertise—to be a crude and unfurnished mind. I reckoned that if he wanted to be educated, he ought to use his telescreen.

I wondered whether there would be any telescreens where we were going.

If we were going anywhere at all.

“Tell me about these bacteria and viruses orbiting Uranus,” I said, deciding that if we were going to talk, we might as well talk about something that intrigued me. “Surely it can’t be more than thirty K out there.”

“About that,” he confirmed. “Gets up to one-twenty K in the outer atmosphere.”

“Nothing can live at that sort of temperature!”

“Nope,” he said laconically. “Bugs are deep frozen. Just like being in a freezer, though—when we thaw ’em out, they’re as good as new. Some of them, anyhow.”

“How long have they been frozen? Where the hell are they supposed to have come from?”

“That’s what these boys are trying to find out. Asgard’s not the only mystery in the universe, you know. You didn’t have to go chasing off to the galactic rim to find something strange. There are great enigmas even on your own doorstep. We’ve had Tetrax out here, you know. Was a Tetron bioscientist on Goodfellow a couple of years ago, while the war was still hot. Went on out to the halo afterwards.”

“Don’t tell me the dust in the cometary halo is also full of bugs,” I said, sarcastically.

“Not exactly full,” he said. “No more’n a few. Now here, so they say, we’ve got more biomass than the Earth. Crazy, huh?”

I shook my head in bewilderment. The idea that Uranus had life more abundant than Earth, all of it deep-frozen, was a little difficult to take in. “But where were these bugs before they got deep-frozen?” I asked, again.

I could tell Finn was enjoying this. “Right here,” he said, with an air of great condescension. “At least, that’s the fashionable idea.”

I couldn’t work it out. I just stared at him, and waited.

“Wasn’t always this cold around here,” he said. “Only since the sun stabilized. A few billion years ago, when the solar system was still forming, the sun was super-hot. Was a balmy three hundred K in these parts. Hot and wet, plenty of carbon and nitrogen. Not exactly fit for people, but okay for bugs.”

“Jesus!” I said, impressed in spite of the fact that it gave Finn such satisfaction to see it. “There was life out here before the Earth cooled down? DNA and everything?”

“Sure,” he said, cockily. “Where’d you think life on Earth came from?”

When I was small, somebody had spun me a yarn about the molecules of life evolving in hot organic soup. They’d implied that the soup was slopping around in the oceans of primeval Earth. Obviously, the story had been updated in the light of more recent news. It didn’t take much imagination to push the story back still further. How had the parent bacteria got into the hot organic soup floating around the early Uranus?

From elsewhere, presumably.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise. As Finn had been reminding me only a few minutes earlier, the fact that all the galactic humanoids have an effectively identical biochemistry does strongly suggest a common point of origin. I’d already known—without quite being fully conscious of it— that the story had to go back billions of years. Asgard, apparently, had been deep-frozen for a long time. While studying the ecology that had run wild in one of the lower levels, I’d hazarded the guess that Asgard must be several millions of years old. Now, that guess didn’t seem so very wild. Perhaps, if I worked hard enough, I could make up a story which would let Asgard be billions of years old. Was it possible, I wondered, that all the DNA in the galactic arm had originally come from Asgard?

I thought about it. After all, I had nothing better to do.

All through the four hours, I expected some nasty little surprise package to pop up from somewhere. I thought that the heroes of the Star Force were bound to spring out from some unexpected hiding-place, flame-pistols blazing. After all, Ayub Khan might care far more about the possibility of losing the produce of years of careful research than about the possibility of two Star Force deserters getting away, but the likes of Trooper Blackledge could hardly be expected to give a tuppenny damn about Uranian bugs. And what I knew about the Star Force suggested that they wouldn’t worry too much about the priorities of intellectual microworlders.

But nothing happened.

I should have realised that that was the most suspicious thing of all, but somehow I just couldn’t put it together.

Anybody can be stupid, once in a while. I was having a bad week.

When the four hours were finally up the phone warbled again, and we were told that a ship would be docking momentarily. Finn issued his instructions with all the imperiousness of a man whose right to command is secure. He specified that the men from the cargo-ship should come out of the umbilical one by one, unarmed and unsuited. He told Ayub Khan that he’d have his hands on the precious tanks, ready to let the beasties out at the least sign of anything wrong. We watched the instrument-panels in the docking- bay, following the progress of the ship’s approach and the connection of the umbilical. Everything looked absolutely fine.

Finn and I waited patiently, mud guns at the ready. Finn was so confident by now that he still had his helmet unsealed, so that he could talk. Obviously, he thought he’d have time to zip it up with one hand while he was letting the bugs out of the tank with the other. I had my suit on by now, but I left my helmet unsealed too. I wasn’t feeling terribly happy, but I saw no immediate cause for alarm.

Finn told me to take up a position beside the hatchway, so I’d be behind whoever came through. I didn’t like his giving me orders, but I followed his instructions anyhow. It did seem like the sensible place to be.

We didn’t know exactly who was going to appear at the hatchway, becausc we didn’t know who’d been given the job of piloting the shuttle with my ship in its cargo-hold. We were half-expecting a Star Force uniform, though, so I wasn’t unduly surprised by the fact that when the lock swung open, the person who stepped through was wearing a trim black suit with fancy braid.

What did surprise me was the fact that it was a woman. She had an amazing halo of silvery-blonde hair, and though her back was to me, so I couldn’t see her face, an awful suspicion began to dawn even before she spoke.

She wasn’t carrying a gun. In fact, she had her hands on her hips: a posture suggesting total carelessness. I could easily imagine the look of utter contempt that must be on her face as she stared at John Finn.

“Put the gun down,” she said, “and stand away from that tank. Open that valve, and I’ll personally see to it that every moment of the rest of your life is utterly miserable. The same goes for you, Rousseau, if you’re stupid enough to hit me from behind.”

It dawned on me that the ship whose docking we’d so calmly followed on the instruments wasn’t the shuttle at all. It was the Leopard Shark. Ayub Khan had simply asked us to wait around until the reinforcements arrived.

And we had.

“Small universe, isn’t it?” I remarked, with a depressingly feeble attempt at wit. “Mr. Finn, I’d like you to meet Star-Captain Susarma Lear.”

“Bastard!” said Finn. I charitably assumed that he was referring to Ayub Khan. I saw him reach out to open the valve, to flood the docking bay with vile Uranian bugs. He didn’t even bother to seal his helmet.

There was only one thing I could do.

I shot him in the face. He must have got a mouthful of the stuff, because he folded up with hardly a moment’s delay. The tank remained inviolate. As he collapsed, the expression of shocked surprise on his face turned gradually to a look of venomous hatred. There was no mistaking the fact that it was aimed at me.

Susarma Lear turned round and relieved me of the gun.

“That’s what I like about you, Rousseau,” she said. “When the chips are down, you always come through.”