Wall Around a Star

FOUR

A sweet electronic voice urged Jen Babylon to stand still. He closed his eyes on the studded walls and then, even through closed lids, saw a brilliant flash of searing blue light. His skin tingled. He heard one sharp crack, like a jumping spark. There was a moment of strain and vertigo, and then a door opened and he pushed through into the— Into a place where he had never been! No time had transpired for him. He felt no sense of change. The thought in his mind was, Ah, well, that's done, now I can call Sheryl about that dinner with the dean—

And then he saw where he was; the thought perished, and something trapped in terror inside his mind screamed, Dear loving God, what have You done? This is mel A harsh flood of light stung his eyes. He tasted a dry, sour tang at the back of his throat. He was floating! There was nothing under his feet, nothing but air. He felt a terrifying sense of falling. As any .organism will when first deprived of the comforting anchor of its home gravity, his body spasmed in panic. He flailed wildly. His glasses went flying. One hand struck something light and fragile, and a sharp reek of vinegar struck his nostrils. He bounced against some sort of machine, caught an edge of it, and stared around. A creature with filmy wings and the tiny, hideous face of a bat was twittering shrilly at him. The creature was too tiny to be frightening, no larger than a crow, but it was furious. "Did I hit you? Sorry," he said. It stared angrily at him out of an excessive number of eyes and flew out of sight.

He caught his breath. The truth was all beginning to penetrate. Good-bye Sheryl. Good-bye comfortable little apartment, good-bye hopes of becoming dean. All those things now belonged to the life of someone named Jen Babylon; but he was not that Jen Babylon. He never would be again.

He shifted position, lost his grip, and floated, tumbling, out into the room again. It was disorienting, but his mind was too full of sudden rage to care. It was a fraud! He had been cheated! It was not some disposable duplicate that was condemned to live out the sorry tatters of a useless life on Cuckoo—

It was himself!

From just outside his range of vision a voice spoke:

"Ah, welcome, dear fellow Earthman! Allow me to assist you."

Long, dry, leathery fingers gripped his shoulder and stopped his tumble, and Babylon saw his rescuer. At first he thought it was an organ-grinder's monkey, escaped from some antiquarian zoo: red vest, hat with a bright green feather, bright shoe-button eyes. A chimpanzee!

But the creature lacked the broad, protruding lips of the circus animal, and it spoke in easy English. "You did, I'm afraid, upset the T'Worlie," it chattered, "and we're both a little bit in the way here. Allow me to assist you. Your first experience in free-fall, no doubt? Yes, I remember the feel­ing. But we don't bother much with gravity here. Not here," it chattered, courteously tugging Babylon toward a corridor lined with handholds, "and not anywhere around here. Not even on that great clumsy ball out the window— Oh, of course; there's no window in the tachyon chamber, is there? But not to worry. You'll see all you want of Cuckoo, I promise. And more."

He clapped a skinny black hand to his unsimian high forehead. "My manners! I'm Napoleon Chimsky, Dr. Baby­lon. You can call me Doc Chimp. Now we'd better move along. Have you got everything?"

"I didn't bring anything," Babylon said bitterly. "Some stuff was sent on ahead—and, oh, yes!" He clapped his hand to the bridge of his nose. "My glasses. They came off when I came out of that machine—"

He stopped, suddenly aware that, for the first time in a score of years, he was seeing clearly without them. The chimpanzee chuckled. "You've notice^ eh?"

"I can see!" Babylon cried.

The chimpanzee bobbed his high-domed head. "A little service of the management," he said largely. "As long as you were being coded for transmission it was easy enough to make some, ah, minor improvements. It's called editing. Things like eye readjustments, minor circulatory problems, even malignancies—they can all be edited out automati­cally. I think you'll find there's not a plaque of cholesterol anywhere in your system, Dr. Babylon." His stare became thoughtful. "It's little enough to do for us, everything con­sidered," he said obscurely, and then, "But please come along! It's really not a good idea to stay here."

With one hand dexterously catching at handholds, the other tugged Babylon gently down a corridor. Babylon in­voluntarily shrank back at the entrance. There was neither up nor down, and the corridor looked like an endless deep well dropping away beneath him. "Disconcerting? But you'll get used to it!"

The T'Worlie flew past them, chattering angrily. "Mimmie's a bit annoyed with you, I'm afraid," Doc Chimp chuckled. "We're all at sixes and sevens here, right now, because of the large shipment coming in and all the com­plications."

"You mean those prisoners who were being sent?"

The chimpanzee nodded disdainfully. "The Purchased People, yes. And the legal problems. They should have been out of the tachyon-transporter long ago, but we've had orders to keep their codes stored for a while . . . And, of course, there's worse than that." He sighed, then bright­ened. "Well, just go through that door, Dr. Babylon. There's somebody waiting for you. I'll go back and soothe Mimmie a bit." And he turned and was gone, launching himself back down the corridor with an amazing thrust of his skinny arms.

Babylon pulled himself carefully through the doorway, and looked around.

"Jen! Jen Babylon! Is it really you?" And Ben Pertin came off the wall toward him, arm outstretched.

Babylon hardly heard what Pertin was saying to him, hardly knew what he was responding. This person was not the Ben Pertin he had gone to school with, wasn't even the copy who had visited him in his apartment only days ear­lier. The pleasant face was lined and bloated; the grip was flabby, the breath a clear sign of heavy and recent drink­ing. Pertin was not only unkempt, he was hardly even clean. His hair had not been cut in many months, and had not even been washed in a good long time. It swung behind him in two snarled tails as he moved. When the copy ar­rived on Earth, it had no doubt taken time to wash and dress and get a haircut before Babylon saw it; but this was the real Ben Pertin.

But the flabby face was split in a grin of incredulous joy. "You made it! I didn't really hope you'd be in time. Did anyone see you?"

"In time for what?" Babylon demanded.

"Going down to the surface! It's all fixed. There's a ro­bot ship going to pick up mass for the tachyon plasma tanks, and we'll be on it—but what about it? Were you seen?"

"A T'Worlie, I guess," Babylon said.

"Old Mimmie! That's all right. He's on our side ... or I think he is," Pertin mused. "It's the Sheliaks you have to worry about, and Valeria, and the damn Sirians—and worst of all the Scorpians. Well! I'll be ready in an hour, and the ship boosts ten minutes after that. So all we have to do is hide you until then."

"What am I hiding from?" Babylon demanded. "Look, Pertin—what have you got me into?"

The smile faded, and the worn, bloated face sagged into lines of misery. "I guess I played a pretty shabby trick on you, Jen," Pertin admitted. "But it's important. Look, let me show you." He dived back to the console where he had been loosely lashed to the wall, and struck a series of but­tons. The blank wall—or floor, or ceiling—toward Baby­lon's left hand dissolved in a silvery mist, shrinking ab­ruptly into the sharp image of a steel-colored ball hanging in emptiness. "That's it, Jen," said Pertin. "That's Cuckoo. Wait while I wipe off the cloud cover—there." The silvery shine disappeared from the globe as Pertin made adjust­ments. "That's it, Jen. The whole big damn balloon. Bigger than a billion Earths. Oceans. Continents. Jen, there are rivers that are a thousand kilometers wide!"

"I don't see any rivers," Babylon objected.

"Because they're too small to show at this magnification. Look closely. Do you see those little dots, here and there— that one in the lower-right-hand quadrant? Those are the parts we've explored. The biggest of them is about the size of Australia—and all together, we've mapped less than a millionth of the surface. It's as if we'd explored the Boston Common, and that was all we knew of Earth."

"And you've been doing this how long?"

Pertin shrugged morosely. "Ten years and a bit," lie said. He shook his head angrily. "Not much progress, right? But it's not our fault! If we had the support— If we could get our requisitions filled for high-velocity scan­ners— If we could launch ten thousand satellites, with all the instrumentation we need— If anybody just cared! But we get nothing. Not even from Earth. Not even replace­ments. We're all worn out here, Jen. The ones of us who still care are tired. We've all died a dozen times—and there're plenty of beings here who don't believe we ought to do even as much as we're doing!"

"Hey, slow down!" Babylon said, rubbing his head. "You're giving me more than I can handle. What do you mean about dying a dozen times?"

"Oh, you know. Transmitter copies." Pertin was staring angrily at the great sphere. "There's dead Ben Pertins there"—he flashed a red arrow at one of the dots—"and there, and there. And a couple that aren't dead, quite, but might as well be for all the purpose their lives have—if we don't solve this thing." He made some adjustments and all the red arrows winked out but one. "Anyway," he said, continuing to stare at the wall, "Doc Chimp's going to come back for you in a minute, so we can hide you until the ship's ready. I'll explain all the rest of it as we go."

"No, wait," Babylon objected. "Where are we going— and why?"

"To check out that abandoned spaceship, naturally," Pertin said impatiently. "Why do you think I got you here—so you could make a chess partner? You're here be­cause I think you're the only one who can help out." He glanced sharply at the door, as there was a distant sound of chatter. "That's Doc now," he said.

"You didn't tell me where!"

"Oh, that part's easy enough," said Ben Pertin, pointing to the globe on the wall. "That red arrow there, where one of the dead Ben Pertins is. That's where we're going."

The place where Jen Babylon found himself was an enormous hollow polyhedron, orbiting around the great bubble that was called Cuckoo. Doc Chimp whispered to him as they skulked through the corridors, stopping in sud­den fright at every noise, and Babylon gleaned that each face of the figure was designed for beings of a different race. "There's hundreds of them here, Dr. Babylon," he hissed, towing Babylon with one long, skinny arm as he guided them through the passages with the other. "And most of 'em crazy! But I guess Ben Line's told you all about that."

"Ben who?"

"Sssh! Not so loud. Oh, that's your old friend Ben Per­tin. This Ben Pertin, that is. He gives himself a different middle name each time he replicates—me, I'm just old Doc Chimp, no matter how many of me there are. And there're plenty now, believe me. Here we are!"

The enormous strength in those skinny limbs stopped them without a jar, and he hurled Babylon into a small chamber. "Got here without being spotted!" the chimpan­zee crowed as he followed. "Hope this place is all right," he added anxiously. "It's only a little hole in the wall. Used to belong to the T'Worlies, they used it mostly for nesting, I think. Smells like it, too. But it's not so bad, and anyway it'll only be for a little while. Let me close the door," he added nervously, pushing himself back to the entrance. "There. Now, let's see if you've got the names straight. That's Ben Lincoln Pertin you just saw. There's another one around somewhere, Ben Yale, but I don't get along with him so well. Neither does Ben Line."

"It must be pretty confusing."

"Oh," the chimp said, considering, "not really. You can always tell Ben Line by—" The bright monkey eyes nar­rowed evasively.

"By what?"

"Oh, well, Dr. Babylon, I guess it's no secret. He drinks."

Babylon burst out in laughter. "No, that's no secret."

Doc Chimp looked aggrieved. "He's my friend, Dr. Babylon. He's got a lot on his mind, and I'm really glad you're here, for his sake."

"Well," said Babylon, considering, "I'm glad to be here—I think."

"That," giggled the chimpanzee, "I doubt. I'd be a liar if I said that myself. I've been here eleven years, two months, and a week, and that's a bunch of days and nights, Dr. Babylon, especially as I've never been able to get them to tachtran a pretty little girl chimp out here for company."

Babylon said, "I didn't think—I mean, it never occurred to me—"

"You didn't think I was interested in that? Or capable of it, maybe? Really, Dr. Babylon! I guess you've never been at Yerkes or the Max-Planck Institute. There's whole colo­nies of us back on Earth. They made us, you know. Loos­ened up the skull so the brain could grow, changed around our face structure and throat musculature so we could make words—I make them pretty well, don't I? They used to think we'd come in handy for getting into small places where human beings couldn't go. And we did. We came in even handier in free-fall, though. So," he said wistfully, "where I wound up was Sun One. Or one of me did. Heaven knows how many of me there are, scattered around the Galaxy—and not a girl chimp among the lot of us. Now," he said, stealing a glance at the tiny watch face almost hidden in the fur of his wrist, "I'd best go out and scout the territory. You just make yourself comfortable, Dr. Babylon. I won't be long—and then we're off!"

The lander was shaped something like an earthly gar­bage truck, square and equipped with hatches and endless- belt buckets to load up with whatever was at hand. It didn't matter what. All the tachyon receiver's plasma tanks needed was nuclear particles to engineer and shape into whatever elements were needed to reform the objects trans­mitted. The best substance was the densest, which was why the lander descended clear to the surface for solid matter instead of scooping up gases anywhere in Cuckoo's atmo­sphere.

But the lander was a great deal bigger than any earthly garbage truck. Jen Babylon saw it through a port as they crept furtively through the empty corridors, and he decided it had to be a hundred meters in length, more than half of that in its other dimensions. They did not enter the main cargo section; there was a small built-in control section at one end, like the cab on a truck, and that was their destina­tion.

Ben Pertin was waiting for them as they arrived, and sprang forward to grasp Babylon's hand. "You know," he confessed, "I was beginning to think that I'd dreamed you being here—wishful thinking, you know! I've had so much of it these years—but it's true, you're here. And just in time!"

"In time for what?"

Pertin looked surprised. He pulled at one of his greasy pigtails in exasperation. "Why, to go and get some lan­guage samples, of course, and bring them back for proces­sing."

"Processing how? With what? In Boston I had a ten- million-dollar lab—what do I do here?"

Pertin said irritably, "Oh, hell, Jen, we have equipment! Pmals and integrators—we've got the farlink computer that taps into almost anything in the Galaxy, although I admit it's hard to get time on it. Anyway, you can always tachtran data back to yourself in Boston, you know!"

"But—"

"Now, that's enough 'but,' Jen!" Pertin snarled. "We don't have time to argue. This thing's going to take off in about five minutes. It's under robot control, but Doc's tin­kered with the programing. It will bring us right down to where the other party was lost—"

"Hey," said Babylon. " 'Lost'? What do you mean, lost?"

"Oh, that's all right," Pertin said reassuringly. "We didn't know what we were up against- that time. Now we're warned. We'll be okay, Jen."

"You're sure of that?" Babylon demanded.

Pertin hesitated, then grinned weakly. "How can you be really sure of anything?" he asked. "We've got a real good chance, though, and of course if worse comes to worst we all just hop in the tachyon transmitter and we're right back here in the orbiter. Now, look, there isn't much time. This is a robot lander, and it uses more G-forces than most of them, so you'll have to strap yourself in. Doc? Help him out, will you?" He was fastening straps around himself as he spoke. "Next time you go down," he said, crisscrossing webbing across his chest, "you'll go de luxe. We've got land­ers that'll let you down easy as a nesting dove—have to, you know, so we can fly the autochthones around. They're built so flimsily that a good sneeze will wreck them. Not much gravity on the surface of Cuckoo, you know."

He rambled on, while the chimpanzee secured Babylon's harness and sprang into a niche of his own. Pertin didn't bother to fasten himself; evidently he had enough confi­dence in those simian arms to dispense with assistance. And then they waited.

Pertin said, with a note of alarm, "Hey, we should have left before this. Doc? Did you screw the program up?"

"Not a chance, Ben Line! You know me better than that!" the ape protested.

"Then what the devil's holding us up? I'd better take a look myself." And, aggrieved, Pertin began to unsnap his harness.

Before he got out, Doc Chimp flung himself across the room to the door. "Wait," he snapped, his monkey face contorted in worry. "Somebody's coming!"

Somebody was. Now even Jen Babylon could hear the sound from outside, faint, staccato hissing like malfunc­tioning air brakes.

"It's a damn Scorpian," Pertin whispered, his face woebegone. "We've had it!"

A discolored metal cube sailed in through the door and halted itself in midair with a rush of steam. Metallic optics tilted themselves toward Jen Babylon, and a drumroll of sound struck his ears. Babylon recognized it as language, but it was not one of the galactic tongues he knew. Doc Chimp came to the rescue. "Here, take my Pmal," he said. "Didn't think you'd need one for this, but—" He shrugged.

The robot rattled peremptorily again, and the Pmal translator echoed in Babylon's ear: "Jen Babylon. You were notified. You were not to come to Cuckoo. The con­sequences are grave."

The words had an eerie familiarity for Babylon: of course, it was the same message he had received on Earth. Perhaps even the same robot. "What are you going to do?" he asked apprehensively.

"I am going to take action," the robot thundered. "Since you would not remain on your foul damp planet, events must take their course. I propose to join you in this expedi­tion to discover for myself the nature of this wrecked spaceship. Then we will see."

"We'll see that you're going to blow Cuckoo up!" Pertin flared defiantly.

"That is one of the available options," the robot acknowl­edged. "It is strange and worrisome. It presents a threat to our orderly existence, and that cannot be permitted. But that decision has not yet been reached."

"I suppose you're going to try to prevent us from going there now," Pertin said. "Well, you won't get away with it!"

"I have no such intention," the robot declared. "I have merely revised the programing to allow a short delay. I sug­gest you frail organics restrain yourselves; this lander will boost within fifty-five seconds 1"