It is better one hundred guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer.
Sounds like a good principle of justice, and really it is—in theory. So much so that most of the time we pozzies try to hold to it. That’s probably what Makrow 34 was counting on when he decided to escape through a docking module full of bodies in shock, each of which could make a perfectly good hostage if things went badly for him.
Except that he was the one particular guilty person for whom I was likely to make a big exception. For the Cetian Gaussical I was strangely willing to sacrifice two or three innocents just to be sure he didn’t wriggle out again. I’d sacrifice even more if need be. I don’t know if I would have gone so far as to invert the saying completely and let a hundred innocents suffer to keep one guilty party from escaping, but I was more than open to an intermediate compromise solution. Say fifty innocents, more or less—more if they were aliens—if it meant trapping these three sons of bitches once and for all.
We had no time to clear out the module or call for reinforcements. Anyway, Vasily didn’t want to (neither did I). So we used a simple but effective technique:
We came in running, guns in hand. If the three suspect paramedics reacted, it was them. If not—we’d have to risk a nasty diplomatic incident and oblige them to take off their helmets and submit to DNA scans.
It wasn’t necessary. The metabolic bomb guy wasn’t Weekman, after all.
It was Weekman who recognized us the instant we stepped out of the elevator. I knew it was Giorgio when I saw him pull an ultrasonic blaster from one of the pockets of his white uniform: he was too small to be the Colossaur, and if he had been Makrow 34 his shot wouldn’t have gone so wide of the mark. I get it: he was nervous, oozing adrenaline. Things would have gone better for him if, instead of reacting like a cowboy in an old Western, he’d spent another fraction of a second trying to aim—or more so, if he’d warned his pals before squeezing the trigger.
Even so, the impact of his sonic-wave weapon knocked the hat off my head. But it told me what I needed to know, giving me time to roll aside and dodge the second shot before firing back. Not at Weekman (I wanted to leave him to Vasily—after all, those two had an old score to settle) but at the hulking mass that had to be the Colossaur—unquestionably the most dangerous opponent in an encounter of this nature.
I missed him, firing like a rank beginner. They had realized by then that they’d been discovered, and so I learned that Makrow was now using his powers.
But even the Cetian’s abilities had limits. Warding off simultaneous attacks on both of his henchmen was probably pushing it. Evidently he considered the Colossaur more useful in a fight like the one that had just broken out—or rather, I suspect, he allowed Vasily his just revenge on his former human partner, now that Weekman was becoming more of a burden than a help.
In any case, El Afortunado flung himself to the floor and, sliding along it while firing two of his masers without bothering to aim, reached the still unconscious body of a fallen human, which he used as an improvised shield.
Not that he really needed the protection. Whether it was his Gaussical powers or simply his good aim, my partner’s first shot tore the visored hood off Weekman’s blindingly white bioprotection suit.
With Weekman’s head still inside, of course.
I hoped with all my strength it had hurt him. A lot.
Of the three criminals, he was the one I worried about the least. But still: one less. So now things were close to even. Two on two.
Except in the meantime the Colossaur had managed to embed his imposing bulk behind a customs counter, and he was now firing at me from that vantage point with a weapon that no other species would consider a sidearm. The cannon must have weighed over a hundred pounds and measured nearly a foot wide.
I tried to respond with my own comparatively diminutive maser. Powerful as it had looked when I grabbed it, it couldn’t do much damage compared to the Colossaur’s portable artillery piece. Especially if I couldn’t aim straight. Under a constant rain of high-power microwaves, it was risky even to stick my arm out and fire, let alone take time to aim. The first time I tried, the cloth of my precious English trench coat caught fire and I had to turn up my thoracic bellows to blow it out.
By the time his blasts had melted a good portion of the titanium crossbeam I had taken refuge behind, woken up three of the unconscious bombing victims (two of them fainted again when they saw what a hopeless mess they were in; the third, a Grodo, showed a surprising amount of common sense for one of his kind and didn’t attempt to join the brawl, scuttering away instead on his six appendages as fast and as far from there as he could), and set fire to my trench coat three more times, I realized that I was never going to get him like this. If I insisted on continuing to play his game, I’d only be making more victims of those who hadn’t scooted out of there yet.
I was like a guy facing off with a slingshot against a tank. In an elementary school playground. During recess.
I analyzed the situation as coolly as I could in the middle of roaring flames. What else should I try? In the old gangster movies, when the good guy finds himself cornered in a warehouse basement or in some cheap hotel, he always leaps out, turns a somersault or two, and runs off with both pistols blazing, saving himself. But I wasn’t too sure the Colossaur had watched those movies, so I decided not to try. Most likely he wouldn’t know that he was supposed to miss me when he fired his gun, and given the perfect aim he’d shown so far it seemed more like a suicide plan than a solution.
I took a slightly desperate peek at Vasily. The fact that he hadn’t washed his hands of the affair, after settling accounts with Giorgio Weekman once and for all, spoke very much in his favor. I decided to thank him—if we ever got out of there.
At the moment, he seemed kind of busy. He and Makrow were trying to part each other’s hair with gunfire. But all the time, their own curious Psi powers were at play, and the results were much more spectacular than in my duel with the Colossaur and his microwave cannon.
To start with, they each seemed to be affected by implausibly persistent bad aim. The microwave beams, the lasers, the various classes of projectiles ricocheted all over the place at unbelievable angles, none coming within a few feet of their intended targets.
Now, one stray maser blast did hit the metal counter that the Colossaur was using for cover. The furious roar he let out made it plain that he did not appreciate the heat wave.
A moment later it was my turn for a close shave. A hail of poisoned darts hit within inches of me. The toxin obviously couldn’t have harmed my inorganic body, but the closeness of the call told me my position was precarious. Next time it could be something truly destructive, like a thermal tracking missile. I had already noticed that Makrow 34, like Vasily, didn’t rely on a single type of weapon. The Cetian Psi was carrying a whole arsenal around with him.
Finally they both decided simultaneously to get smart, shift strategies, and aim anywhere but at their opponent. After this they each had slightly better luck, but only slightly. Gaussical powers to the max. Almost involuntarily I recalled that first Grodo Gaussical fifteen years ago, and I looked around for the two-headed centaurs that some had claimed to see. But fortunately I didn’t see anything equine circling us—just one tiny orange Pegasus flitting around in terror, dodging the web of maser and laser fire.
I did notice, however, a whole bunch of other stuff—what my friend Einstein might have called the collateral effects of a binaural disruption of the probability curve, something like that. In plain language: the results of a desperate encounter between two Gaussicals using all their powers without restraint. I suppose a physicist could have discovered some very interesting phenomena, such as the multicolored fluorescence around the ceiling, which would have made the brightest aurora borealis seem like a parlor trick. Or the hail that had started falling around us, contrary to all the laws of meteorology and thermodynamics. Or the restless scampering of a troop of little gnome-like creatures that had apparently been asexually reproduced by budding (or by fission; cellular biology was never my strong point) from one of the fallen humans, in Olympic disregard of evolution and its precepts.
As for me, a simple pozzie, I didn’t find any of that particularly interesting—much less reassuring. All it did was remind me of the magnitude of the psychic powers at play. And also that Makrow 34’s powers were, unfortunately, thought to be much stronger than Vasily’s. My human friend wouldn’t hold out much longer.
I must admit that even then, except for the occasional microwave beam rebounding a little too close, I didn’t feel frightened or even very worried. The situation was deadlocked, true, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, at least not for us. We couldn’t move from where we were, but neither could they. Time was now on the good guys’ side for a change. Vasily and I only had to hold on until the cavalry showed up with the heavy weaponry, all the pozzies in the world. Then it wouldn’t matter how many guns Makrow 34 and his stinking Colossaur had, or how formidable and Gaussical they were; they’d be forced to yield to our superior numbers and firepower.
Unfortunately, they weren’t exactly stupid, and they quickly realized that if they didn’t escape and right away, they’d never get out at all.
It’s funny how time passes when you’re under pressure. It felt like I had spent hours playing that game of firing and ducking, but my internal timer reported that we’d been exchanging fire for only three minutes, from the moment we burst into the docking module with guns blazing to the point when the villains were certain that they still had the upper hand and decided to force the situation.
My Colossaur was the first to make a run for it. With an impressive roar, he abandoned his fortress and headed straight at me in tremendous bounds. Imagine a two-ton rhinoceros leaping like a kangaroo. You’d never have expected such agility from his enormous bulk; he must have been buzzed on some exotic class of combat drug. Makrow was quite a fan of such concoctions.
I stole another glance at Vasily and Makrow. The Cetian lowlife must have made the same decision: he had also moved out into the open while firing his guns, which he kept pointed well away from Vasily. But unlike the Colossaur, he moved at his own majestic, leisurely pace, not troubling to run or jump. My friend El Afortunado was doing the same. They both ignored the continual rain of fire each hurled at the other. They looked like a pair of mythical warriors or antagonistic deities confronting one another in a ritual challenge. I saw that they were so focused on the duel, there was no reason for me to expect any danger to come from their direction—or any help, either.
So it was just me and Mama Reptile’s supersized son, all alone together.
While he was still bounding toward me, I tried to take advantage of my momentary cover to sharpen my aim. Now that my adversary was out in the open, I should (theoretically) have a better chance of hitting him and, if not knocking him down, at least slowing his charge.
But have you ever tried to hit an enraged rhinoceros that’s racing toward you? One that’s sentient, war-loving, drugged up the scaly wazoo, leaping like a kangaroo, and firing a portable cannon?
Anyway, I don’t think I did too bad. I got him once in a leg and once in a shoulder. But it was like trying to stop a charging tyrannosaurus with a .22.
I could’ve shot off one of his legs and he wouldn’t have noticed. Who knows what sort of drug cocktail Makrow had stuffed into him? As if that weren’t bad enough, Colossaur endocrine systems seem to be purposely designed to make them battle to the death. When they fight, their lymph becomes so saturated with endorphins that there have been cases where they have continued rushing forward with enough momentum to crush their enemy’s skull between their three-fingered hands even after their own heads have been shot clean off. This case was no exception. The scratches I put on him didn’t even throw him off his aim. Quite the contrary, in fact. Or maybe it was Makrow’s superior Gaussical powers finally spilling over, even as he concentrated on defeating Vasily.
The weirdest thing was that even while leaping, the elephantine reptiloid had such good aim that he hit me. With that minicannon of his, the logical result was that the blast tore off my entire right arm, almost from the shoulder. Normally this wouldn’t have been anything serious—we pozzies don’t feel anything you could properly call pain, and of course there was no risk of bleeding out—but wouldn’t you know it, that was the hand I had been using to hold my maser.
I watched my weapon sail through the air, still gripped tight by one of my favorite appendages, and found myself disarmed in every sense of the word while my express train of an enemy continued roaring and waving his armored arms and running me down, too close now to need to fire a second shot.
Gulp.
Blessed be the imperfect rationality with which the aliens endowed us. Knowing quite well by a simple comparison of our body masses that I’d already lost our one-on-one before it began, and even being well aware that I’d never be able to grab my maser with my left before being trampled like a daisy under a herd of mammoths, I still insisted on bending down to pick it up.
Had Vasily’s powers given me a nudge, or was it merely the absurdity of my action that saved me? The fact is, this time I was the one who caught him by surprise. My naïve mastodon apparently expected me to stand up to him.
One of my attacker’s immense lower extremities crashed into my torso, and it was like being swiped by the tail of a titanium dinosaur. I rolled several meters (farther and farther from my maser, by the way) until a wall was kind enough to stop my rolling cold.
It was a steel glass bulkhead. For an instant I saw nothing, then I saw everything black, then blue. Of course, that rainbow was much better that getting hit directly by one of his punches, which would have smashed me absolutely to pieces.
We both began to get back to our feet. I only got halfway up, then stubbornly dragged myself again toward my ripped-off right arm and my gun. What else could I do? He leaped straight back to his feet, getting all inexorable about it, more determined than ever to reduce me to plastimetal pozzie scraps. And as man is the only animal who trips twice over the same stone, he now moved deliberately enough to avoid the risk of slipping or anything so unpleasant as that.
I think I broke the galactic speed record for quadrupeds, but even so I never got within five feet of the trigger. A three-fingered hand the size of a baseball glove closed like a snare around my left ankle, and….
And then it let go. When I turned around, not understanding why he had freed me, I saw that the monster had much more urgent things for his right hand to do than tear me in half.
Such as, for example, helping his left hand keep his own two halves from splitting all along his giant body’s axis of symmetry. The reason? Nearly a foot of broad, razor-sharp steel jutting out of his stomach, like it was the most natural thing in the world, right around the spot where a mammal would keep its navel. And all along the straight path that the blade had taken through his tough flesh to reach that spot from the top of his massive skull, the monster was beginning to split into an enormous, fatal V, the edges of which were taking on an exotic turquoise hue.
I couldn’t help wondering what that blade was made of. Most likely it only looked like steel and was actually made from a power field or some sort of monomolecular invention. Few known alloys can cut through the osseo-scale armor of a Colossaur.
If I’ve ever been able to decipher the expression on a Colossaur’s reptilian face, it was that day. It was shocked but absolute concentration on the complicated attempt to keep the two cloven halves of his anatomy together—plus his rather fervent hope that if he could do so, the halves would stay together.
For an endless second I too waited anxiously to see what would happen to him—and even hoped in solidarity for him to succeed, when it seemed he might manage the trick. But an instant later, the sword (I had already figured out what kind of weapon it was and was wondering what sort of madman would attack a Colossaur with a simple steel blade—and win) withdrew from the tremendous slash, slipping out gracefully, almost tenderly. The eruption of bluish lymph that was unleashed then sent the titan tumbling.
No living creature, no matter how resilient, can do much after being almost surgically bisected through its brain and spinal cord.
When the giant body fell at length, I finally got a good look at the swordmaster responsible for his defeat—and I admit to feeling shocked. As if emerging from a nightmare about medieval Japan, a thirteen-foot-tall suit of samurai armor was meticulously wiping an interminable blade with a handkerchief, cleaning off its enemy’s blue lymph.
It appeared that the blade really was steel, after all.
My eyes were incongruously focused on the twisted expression of sorrowful ferocity on the Japanese warrior’s masklike face. It seemed to be saying, “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” Not the most reassuring message to be sending. Just in case, I began to reach with my one remaining hand for my gun….
“Shit, that animal nicked my blade,” I heard him say, and then I relaxed, though in disbelief. The mysterious samurai was none other than Old Man Slovoban. No one else could have made himself comfortable in armor of those dimensions. I put aside for later the inevitable question of how he’d rescued himself from the massacre of the Estrella Rom. “A work by Masamune himself, a dai-katana worth more than its weight in platinum, and to bring it here and mess up the blade like an idiot on the spine of a creature like this… ” and he kicked the fallen Colossaur with fury. Only then did he seem to notice my presence. He bent down, picked up my detached arm, which still grasped the maser in its hand, and passed it to me with his own hand, long and fine as the claw of a bird of prey despite the armor in which it was encased. “Are you all right, pozzie? You couldn’t have thought I’d miss the final showdown with Makrow. I’m sorry I didn’t get here earlier. I was so close, in Module 15, but Makrow’s and Vasily’s powers made things… a little difficult for me. That must be what’s slowing down your friends now, I suspect. Anyway”—and he kicked the defeated Colossaur again—“one less. I’m afraid we’ll never even learn his name. Now we’re three against one. Things are looking up, aren’t they, buratino? I admit, my idea had been to help El Afortunado first, but since you seemed to be in deeper trouble…. Besides, for now the kid looks like he’s holding up pretty well, don’t you think?” He calmly pointed over his shoulder. “In any case, I don’t think it would be easy to get close enough to lend a hand. Honestly, pozzie, don’t you notice anything odd?”
I took the hand he offered me and stood up—after first prying back my own fingers (not a very pleasant experience) and retrieving my weapon. The ancient Romani’s hand turned out not to be the limp squidlike thing I had expected; on the contrary, it seemed to be pure bone and tendon. I understood then that the samurai suit was not mere armor but a full exoskeleton. Without the help of servomotors, with his jellied bones and almost complete lack of muscles the Old Man would have found it impossible not only to handle a sword as expertly as he had done, but even to walk under gravity.
Makrow and Vasily were still facing off. But now they had abandoned any illusion of taking cover and stood literally face to face. Neither was firing at the other anymore, however. Either they had finally realized that it made no sense to try, regardless of how they aimed, or else they had mutually disabled each other’s arsenals with their Psi powers.
I had seen a couple of holovideos of duels between Psis, and what we saw here did look a little like a battle between telepaths. If you squinted, you could also catch a glimpse of the tremendous mental energies at play—something like thin colored veils swirling around the contenders. Psi fields.
It looked to me like Vasily’s field was navy blue, almost black, while Makrow’s was pinkish white—which for some reason I found almost shocking. Wasn’t the purest color supposed to be for the good guy? It’s hard to put any credit in archetypes after a surprise like that.
It also reminded me a little of a battle between psychokinetics. All sorts of objects were flying around the two rivals: broken boxes, an arm torn off from a victim of the human-bombing, a number of hats (including my own badly damaged fedora). None of it ever so much as touched either of them, though.
But the real, absolute novelty was the other thing. And I mean, a genuinely new thing. New to me, to Slovoban, and I imagine to almost every living creature in this universe. After all, it isn’t every day that two such statistically rare Psis fight face to face.
Revolving slowly around Makrow and Vasily and spreading out over the veils of their Psi fields, a structure of translucent blades was spreading, widening as the blades grew from the double center where they were being generated. And on those blades….
No. It wasn’t anything you’d like to watch. I don’t know what sort of effect it had on the hardened old Romani, but as for me, for once in my existence I felt that if I had any hair, it would be standing on end.
Destruction. Crowds of wrathful Grodos scuttling about the Burroughs destroying everything in sight. War. A contingent of Colossaurian assault troops disembarking on Earth. Chaos. A hail of missiles annihilating a Cetian ship on approach to the hyperspace portal. Mind-boggling visions of a space station falling to pieces, abandoned, a thousand years in the future. A depopulated Earth. The perfect, cerulean, malevolently inexpressive face of Makrow on a thousand holograms throughout the galaxy. Fierce unfamiliar monsters with insectoidal spikes and mandibles taking over interstellar trade. My own end, torn apart by the claws and mandibles of a kinsman of the criminal Colossaur that Slovoban had just carved in two.
What kind of shit was all that?
A terrible thought came to mind. I didn’t know much about the effect of Psi synergy between two dueling Gaussicals (of course, neither did anyone else), but it wasn’t written anywhere that it couldn’t produce a sort of collateral clairvoyance. So were these visions glimpses of the future? Advance notices of our inexorable defeat and Makrow’s victory, in spite of it all?
I hesitated, I admit. For one terrible instant, everything I had been fighting for seemed stripped of meaning and the cold tentacles of defeat and dismay gripped me tight. Nothing but chaos, destruction, war, death? Was there no way out? After all we’d been through? After Slovoban’s last-second lifesaving intervention, after he’d kept himself alive through I don’t know what miracle?
Then I noticed that, emerging from the whirling blades, between scenes of chaos and death were other images, less distinct: a human delegation touching down on a planet that I knew from its heavy, rough landscape and overwhelming illumination to be Colossa, even though I’d never seen it before; a string of megastations like the Burroughs spread across the entire Solar System, all operated and occupied by humans; my own gilded face in a silver holographic frame; the Trade Confederation Council awarding a recognition to Old Man Slovoban, who wore a dress uniform that must have consumed more fabric than the sails of a brigantine.
Perhaps all was not lost yet.
“I know what you’re thinking, Raymond.” For the first time, the Old Man had called me by my name. “I also think those are possible futures,” he said thoughtfully, verbalizing my intuition. “In fact, though I’m no expert in Psi, I’d dare to hypothesize that a Gaussical’s power consists in being able to select among them all through some unconscious means, or something of the sort. Take a good look, buratino. If we survive, we’ll have been eyewitnesses to one of the most mysterious forces in the galaxy.” He lifted his mask, his wizened and misshapen face twisted into a caricature of attentiveness. “But really look. I think things are changing. Maybe Vasily isn’t getting the best of it after all. What do you think?”
Silently, I had to agree: judging from the simple proportion between visions of hypothetical bright tomorrows in which we were triumphant and dark ones where Makrow had won, the Cetian was prevailing. In the blades of light, the alternatives in which Vasily, Slovoban, and I managed to muddle through somehow grew progressively smaller and fainter, while there were more and more visions of chaos, death, war, Makrow as emperor of the universe, the end of the Trade Confederation and of life on Earth, the bizarre spiny insect-lizard creatures laying waste to the universe….
“Yes, it looks like Makrow will win after all,” I had to admit at last, and it depressed me to do so. But hope dies hard. “If the cavalry doesn’t arrive first, of course.” Then another terrible certainty began to emerge in my positronic circuits. How had I missed it earlier? If Slovoban had taken so long to get here from as nearby as Module 15, it meant that….
“Well, that’s was I wanted to talk to you about. I don’t think Vasily can expect help from anyone but us.” The Old Man’s words fell like a bucket of ice water on the flickering embers of my optimism. “Haven’t you figured out yet that something very weird is going on with time? I was less than a hundred yards away when the bomb went off, and I ran straight here with all the strength of my suit. But by my watch, it took me more than two hours to arrive. The funny thing is that I never had the impression that I had slowed my pace at all. And look at these two—”
“You mean they’re generating some kind of… temporal discontinuity? That’s nonsense! Outside of a hyperspace portal, it’s theoretically impossible. Time is relativistic,” I started to say, quite sure about the small bit of physics I knew. But when I looked where he was pointing, I shut up immediately: not at Makrow 34 and Vasily, but at one of the side entrances to the module’s transit hall.
Two survivors of the white-robed human-bomb were just about to leave the module, looking exactly like people who were running as fast as their legs could carry them.
Except that, from my perspective, they were practically motionless; one of them was even suspended impossibly in midair. Only with my acute electronic vision could I perceive that his legs and arms were indeed moving, infinitesimally.
I shouldn’t have been surprised—not after seeing the orange Pegasus, the hail, the flying ants, and all the rest, right? But all the same, it simply floored me.
“You’re right. This is a time acceleration zone. Time is passing at least ten thousand times faster than normal, and those two are the epicenter,” I heard myself say, in the pedantic, neutral tone I’ve always hated. “Remarkable. Very interesting.”
“Maybe, for a physicist. For us, and especially for Vasily, it’s terrible.” Looking at me sidelong, Old Man Slovoban again unsheathed his long sword and lowered the fierce Japanese war mask over his already masklike face. “Okay, buratino, what are you planning to do? This means that if we don’t help him ourselves… ” His voice was distorted by the metal sounding board inside the mask. “I still think we most likely have a bit of a chance, though. There’s a possible future which, from what I can tell, neither of them has taken into consideration.”
It took me nearly a second, but at last I understood what he was talking about.
Wow.
But I didn’t reply. There was no need.
All right, it seemed we had no choice. Everything for the good guys to win. To be on the winning side, even if we wouldn’t be around to enjoy it.
I wondered if Old Man Slovoban was also a chess player. Probably….
I drew my maser, checked the charge level, examined the few half-melted joints remaining in the shoulder of my detached right arm—all the little delaying maneuvers one does before facing up to the only possible course of action.
And then, together, with a savage war cry, the Romani and I went after Makrow 34.