Science Fiction - Daily Short Stories
Traders Risk - Roger Dee Aycock
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- Duration:
- 36m
- Broadcast on:
- 30 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
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Call today for more details or visit 5280exteriors.com 5280exteriors.com, a James Hardy preferred contractor, 5280 Exteriors, the Altitude of Quality. Traders Risk by Roger D. Keeping this cargo meant death, to jettison it meant to make flotsam and jetsam of a world. The cerimian ship was passing in hyperdrive through a classic three-body system, comprising in this case a fiercely white sun circled by a fainter companion and a single planet that swung in precise balance, when the canthorian zid broke out of its cage in the specimen hold. Of the ship's social quartet, chafus I and II were asleep at the moment, dreaming wistful dreams of conical cerimian cities spearing up to a soft and plum-colored sky. The zid raged into their communal rest cell, smashed them down from their gimbaled sleeping perches, and, with the ravening blood-hunger of its kind, devoured them before they could wake enough to teleport to safety. Chafus III and IV, on size shift in the forward control cubicle, might have fallen as easily if the mental screamings of their fellows had not worn them in time. As it was, they had barely time to teleport themselves to the afterhold as far as possible from immediate danger, and to consider the issue while the zid lunged about the ship in search of them, with malignant cries and a great shrieking of claws on metal. Their case was the more desperate because the chafus were professional freighters, with little experience of emergency. hauling a zid from canthorian jungles to a cerimian zoo was a prosaic enough assignment, so long as the cage held, but with the raging brutes swiftly smelling them out, they were helpless to catch and restrain it. When the zid found them, they had no other course but to teleport back to the control cubicle, and wait until the beast should snuff them down again. The zid learned quickly, so quickly that it was soon clear that its physical strength would far outlast their considerable but limited telekinetic ability. Still, they possessed their share of awlish cerimian logic, and hit soon enough upon the one practical course. The jettison the zid on the nearest world demonstrably free of intelligent life. They worked hurriedly between jumps for and aft. Chaffee three, while they were still in the control cubicle, threw the ship out of hyperdrive within scant miles of the neighboring sun's single planet. Chaffee four, on the next jump, scanned the ship's charts and identified the system through which they traveled. Luck was with them. The system had been catalogued some four cerimian generations before, and tagged, "Planet undeveloped. Tranquil marine intelligences only." The discovery relieved them greatly, for the reason that no cerimian, even to save his own feathered skin, would have set down such a monster as the zid among rational but vulnerable entities. The planet was a water-world, bare of continents, and only sparsely sprinkled with minor archipelagos. The island suited the chaffee's purpose admirably. The zid does not swim, chaffee four radiated. Marooned, it can do no harm to marine intelligences. Also, chaffee three pointed out as they dodged to the control cubicle again just ahead of the slavering zid. We may return later with a kenthorian hunting party and recover our investment. Closing their perception against the zid's distracting raginings, they set to work with perfect coordination. Chaffee three set down the ship on an island that was only one of a freckling chain of similar islands. Chaffee four projected himself first to the opened port, then, when the zid charged after him, to the herbivore crop's ward of tropical setting outside. The zid lunged out. Chaffee four teleported inside again. Chaffee three closed the port. Together they relaxed their perception shields in relief. Unaware in their consternation that they committed the barbarous laps of vocalizing, they twitted aloud when they realized the extent of their error. Of the far, murmurous whisper of expected marine seribration, there rose an uncoordinated mishmash of thought from at least two strong and relatively complex intelligences. "Gasp-breathing," Chaffee four said unbelievably. "Warm-blooded land-dwelling, mammalian!" "A Class V culture," Chaffee three agreed shakenly. Those o'er aquivered with a shock of betrayal. The catalog was wrong. Ironically, their problem was more pressing now than before. Unless checked, the zid would rapidly depopulate the island, and, to check it, they must break a prime rule of galactic protocol in asking the help of a new and untested species. But they had no choice. They teleported it once into the presence of the two nearby natives, and met with frustration beyond cerimian experience. Jeff Aubrey glimpsed the cerimian ship's landing because the morning was a one-day, and, on one-days, his mission to the island demanded that he be up and about at sunrise. For two reasons. On one-days, through some unfailing miracle of Colaxian seamanship, Old Charlie Mac sailed down in his ancient island queen, from the township that represented colonial Terran civilization in Priscinian archipelago 147, bringing supplies and gossip to last Jeff through the following ten-day. The queen would dock at Jeff's little pier at dawn. She was never late. Also on one-days, necessarily before Charlie Mac's visit, Jeff must assemble his smuggled communicator, kept dismantled and hidden from suspicious local eyes, and report to Earth interest consulate, his progress during the cycle just ended. The ungodly hour of transmission, naturally, was set to coincide with the closing of the Consul's field office halfway around the planet. So the nakriest glory of Procyon's rising was just tenting the windows of Jeff's cottage when he aligned and activated his little communicator on his breakfast table. Its three-inch screen lighted to signal, and a doer and disappointed Consul Satterfield looked at him. And Satterfield, foreshortened to no-mishness by the pickup, lurked Dr. Herman, Earth interest resident zoologist. "No progress," Jeff reported, "except that the few islanders I've met seem to be accepting me at last. A little more time, and they might let me into the township, where I can learn something. If Homicide—" "You've had seven ten days," Satterfield said, "Homeside won't wait longer, Aubrey. They need those calm crystals too badly." "They'll use force?" Jeff had considered the possibility, but its immediacy appalled him. "Sir, these colonists had been autonomous for over two hundred years, ever since the fourth war cut them off from us. Will Homicide deny their independence?" His sense of loss at Satterfield's grim nod stemmed from something deeper than sympathy for the islanders. He'd found roots in his daily rambles over the little island granted him by the township, where the painting he had begun as a blind to his assignment, and in the gossip of old Charlie Mack and the few others he had met. He had learned to appreciate the easy life of the island's well enough to be dismayed now by what must happen under E.I. pressure, to old Charlie and his handful of sun-brown fisher-folk. Unexpectedly, because Jeff had not considered that it might matter, he was disturbed by the realization that he wouldn't be seeing Jennifer, old Charlie Mack's red-haired niece, once occupation began. Jennifer, who sailed with her uncle and did a crewman's work as a matter of course, would despise the sight of him. The Consul's pessimism jolted Jeff back to the moment at hand. "Homicide will deny their autonomy, Aubrey. I've had a work-being message today ordering me to move in." The situation was desperate enough at home, Jeff had to admit. Colaxian calm crystals did what no refinement of Terran therapeutics had been able to manage. They erased the fears of the neurotic, and calmed the quiverings of the hypertensive, both an alarming majority in the shattering aftermath of the fourth war, with no adverse effects at all. Permanent benefit was slow, but cumulative, offering for the first time a real step toward ultimate stability. The medical, psychiatric, and political fields cried out for crystals and more crystals. "If the islanders would tell us their source and let us help develop it," Satterfield said peevishly, "instead of doling out a handful of crystals every ten day, there wouldn't be any need of action. Homicide feels they're just letting us have some of the surplus." "Not likely," Jeff said, "they don't use the crystals themselves." Old Dr. Herman put his chin almost on the console's shoulder to present his wisened face to the scanner. "Of course they don't," he said, "on an uncomplicated, even simple-minded world like this who would need crystals. But maybe they fear gliding the market or the domination of outside capital coming in to develop the source. In people backslide, there's no telling what's on their minds, and we have no time to waste negotiating or convincing them. In any case, how could they stop us from moving in? Abruptly, he switched to his own interest. Aubrey, have you learned anything new about the scoops? "Nothing beyond the fact that the islanders don't talk about them," Jeff said. "I've seen perhaps a dozen offshore during the seven cycles I've been here." One usually surfaces outside my harbor at about the time Old Charlie Mack's supply boat comes in. Thinking of Charlie Mack brought a forced end to his report. "Charlie's due now. I'll call back later." He cut the circuit, hurrying to have his communicator stowed away before Old Charlie's arrival. Not, he thought bitterly, that being found out now would make any great difference. Popping out into the brief colaxian dawn, he caught his glimpse of the ceramian ship's landing, before the island forest of palm-firms cut it off from sight. Home-side hadn't been bluffing, he thought, assuming as a matter of course that this was the task force Satterfield had been ordered to send. "They didn't waste any time," Jeff growled, "damn them." He ignored the inevitable glory of morning rainbow that just preceded Procyon's rising, and strode irritably down to his miniature dock. He was still scowling over what he should tell Charlie Mack when the island queen hovined a view. She was a pretty sight. There was an artist's perception in Jeff, in spite of his drab years of E.I. patrol duty. The white puff of sail on Dark Green Sea, gliding across calm water, banded with lighter and darker striae, where submerged shoals lay, struck something responsive in him. The comparison it forced between Calaxia and Earth, whose yawning fourth-war scars and heritage of anxieties made calm crystals so desperately necessary, oppressed him. Calaxia was wholly unscarred, her people without need of the calm crystals they traded. Something odd in the set of the queen's sails puzzled him, until he identified the abnormality. In spite of distance and the swift approach of the old fishing boat, he could have sworn that her sails bellied not with the wind, but against. They fell slack, however, when the queen reached his channel, and flapped lazily, reversing to catch the wind, and nose her cautiously into the shallows. Jeff dismissed it impatiently, a change of wind or some crafty maneuver of old Charlie Mack's to take advantage of the current. Jeff had just set foot on his dock when it happened. Caught as the planking itself, and all but blocking off his view of the nearing island queen, stood a six-foot owl. It was wingless, and covered smoothly with pastel blue feathers. It stood solidly on carefully manicured yellow feet, and stared at him out of square, violet eyes. And voluntarily he took a backward step, caught his heel on a sun-warped board, and sat down heavily. "Well, what the devil?" he said in aimly. The owl winced, and disappeared without a sound. Jeff got up shakily and stumbled to the dock's edge. A chill conviction of insanity gripped him when he looked down on water, lapping smooth, and undisturbed below. "I've gone mad," he said aloud. Not on the bay, another catastrophe just as improbable was in progress. Old Charlie Mack's island queen had veered sharply off course, left the darker green stripe of safe channel, and plunged into water too shallow for her draft. The boat healed on Sholesand, listed, and hung aground, with wind-filled sails holding her fast. The scoop that had surfaced just behind her was so close that Jeff wondered if its species' legendary good nature had been misrepresented. It floated like a glistening, plum-colored island, flat dorsal flippers undulating gently on the water, and its great filmy eyes all but closed against the slanting glare of morning sun. It was more than vast. The thing must weigh, Jeff thought dizzily, thousands or maybe millions of tons. He thought he understood the queen's grounding when he saw the swimmer stroking urgently toward his dock. Old Charlie had abandoned his boat and was swimming in to escape the scoop. But it wasn't Charlie. It was Jennifer, Charlie's niece. Jeff took the brown hand she put up and drew her to the dock beside him, studying her while she shook out her dripping red hair, and regained her breath. Sea water had plastered Jennifer's white blouse and knee-length dungarees to her body like a second skin, and the effect bordered on the spectacular. "Did you see it?" she demanded. Jeff wrestled his eyes away, to the scoop that floated like a purple island in the bay. "A proper monster," he said, "you got out just in time." She looked at one startled and impatient. "Not the scoop, you idiot! The owl!" It was Jeff's turn to stare. "Owl!" there was one on the dock, but I thought, "so did I!" she sounded relieved. "But if you saw one too, all of a sudden it was standing there on the deck beside me, right out of nowhere. I lost my head and grounded the queen, and it vanished. The owl I mean." "So did mine," Jeff said. While they stood marveling, the owls came back. Jeff's three and four were horribly shaken by the initial attempt at communication with the natives. Nothing in seremian experience had prepared them for creatures intelligent but illogical, individually perceptive, yet isolated from each other. "Communication by audible symbol," Chaffee three said. He ruffled his feathers in a shutter. "Barberous!" "Adivistic!" agreed Chaffee four. He could even lie to each other. But their dilemma remained. They must warn the natives before the prowling zid found them, else there would be no natives. "We must try again," three concluded, searching out and using the proper symbols for explanation. "Vocally!" said Chaffee four. They shuddered and teleported. A sudden reappearance of his hallucination, doubled, startled Jeff no more than the fact that he seemed to be holding Jennifer Mac tightly. Amazingly, his immediate problem was not the possibility of harm from the owls, but whether he should reassure Jennifer before or after releasing her. He compromised by leaving the choice to her. "They can't be dangerous," he said. "There are no land-dwelling predators on Colaxia. I read that in..." "Nothing like that ever hatched out on Colaxia," said Jennifer. She pulled free of him. "If they're real, they came from somewhere else." The implication drew a cold finger down Jeff's spine. That would mean other cultures out there, and in all our years of planet hunting, we haven't found one. Memory chilled him further. "A ship landed inland a few minutes ago," he said. "I took it for an E.I. Consulate craft, but it could have been..." The ceramians caught his mental image of the landing, and intervened while common ground offered. "The ship was ours," said Chafee Three. He had not vocalized since fledgling days, and his voice had a jarring croak of disuse. "Our zid escaped its cage, and destroyed two of us, forcing us to maroon it here for our own safety. Unfortunately, we trusted our star manual statement that the planet is unpopulated." The terrans drew together again. "Zid?" Jeff echoed. Chafee Four relieved his fellow of the strain by trying his own rusty croak. "A vicious Kentorian predator, combing the island at this moment for prey. You must help us to recapture it." "So that you may identify it," Chafee Three finished, hopefully, "the zid has this appearance." His sigh-projection of the zid appeared on the dock before them with demoniac abruptness. Crouch to leap, twin-tails lashing, and its ten-foot length bristling with glassy magenta bristles. It had a lethal pair of extra limbs that sprang from the shoulders to end in taloned, seizing hands, and its slanted red eyes burned malevolently from a snouted razor-fanged face. It was too real to bear. Jeff stepped back on suddenly unreliable legs. Jennifer fainted against him, and the unexpected wait of her sent them both sprawling to the dock. "We lean on weak reeds," Chafee Three said. Creatures who collapse with terror at the mirror projection of a zid can be of little assistance in recapturing one. Chafee Four agreed reluctantly. "Then we must seek aid elsewhere." When Jeff Aubrey pulled himself up from the planking, the apparitions were gone. His knees shook, and perspiration crawled cold on his face, but he managed to haul Jennifer up with him. "Come out of it, will you?" he yelled, ungallantly in her ear. "If a thing like that is loose on the island, we've got to get help." Jennifer did not respond, and he slapped her, until her eyes fluttered angrily. "There's an E.I. communicator in my cabin," Jeff said. "Let's go." Memory lent Jennifer a sudden vitality that nearly left Jeff behind in their dash for the cottage up the beach. "The door," Jeff panted inside. "Fasten the hurricane bolt, hurry!" While she secured the flimsy door, he ripped through his belongings, aligning his E.I. communicator again on his breakfast table. Finding out where the islanders got their calm crystals had become suddenly unimportant. Just then he wanted nothing so much as to see a well-armed patrol ship, nosing down out of the Colaxian sunrise. He was activating the screen when Jennifer, in a magnificent rage in spite of soaked blouse and dungarees, advanced on him. "You're an Earth-interest spy after all," she accused. "They said in the township you are no artist, but Uncle Charlie and I," Jeff made a pushing motion. "Keep away from me. Do you want that devil tearing the cabin down around us?" She fell quiet, remembering the zid, and he made his call. "Jambre, chain 147. Come in, Consulate!" There was a sound, a stealthy movement outside the cabin, and he flipped sweat out of his eyes with a hand that shook. "E.I. For God's sake, come in. I'm in trouble here!" The image on his three-inch screen was not Consul Satterfields, but the startled Consulate Operators. Trouble? Jeff forced stumbling words into line. The E.I. operator shook his head doubtfully. Consul's gone for the day, Aubrey. I'll see if I can reach him. He was about to send out an E.I. patrol shift to take over here in the island, Jeff said. Tell him to hurry it! He knew when he put down the microphone that the ship would be too late. E.I. might still drag the secret of the calm crystal source out of the islanders, but Jeff Aubrey and Jennifer Mack wouldn't be on hand to witness their sorry triumph. The flimsy cabin could not stand for long against the sort of brute the owls had shown him. And there was no sort of weapon at hand. They couldn't even run. "There's something outside," Jennifer said in a small voice. Her voice seemed to trigger the attack. The zid lunged against the door with a force that cracked the wooden hurricane bolt across, and opened a three-inch slit between the leading edge and lintel. Jeff had a glimpse of slanted red eyes and a white thing snout before reflex sent him headlong to shoulder the door shut again. "The bunk," he panted at Jennifer, "shove it over!" Between them they wedged the bunk against the door and held it in place. Then they stood looking palely at each other, and waiting for the next attack. It came from a different quarter. The wide double windows that overlooked the bay. The zid, rearing upright, smashed away the flimsy rattan blinds with a taloned seizing hand, and looked readily in at them. Like a man in a dream, Jeff caught up his communicator from the table and hurled it. The zid caught it deftly, sink glistening teeth into the unit, and demolished it with a single snap. Crushed, the rig's powerful little battery discharged with a muffled sputtering and flashing of sparks. The zid howled piercingly and dropped away from the window. That gave Jeff time enough to reach the storm shutters and secure them, only to rush again with Jennifer to their bunk barricade, as the zid promptly renewed its ferocious attack on the door. He flinched when Jennifer, to be heard above the zid's rajines, shouted in his ear. "My scoop should have the queen afloat by now. Can we reach her?" "Scoop!" the zid's avid cries discouraged curiosity before it was well-born. We'd never make it. We couldn't possibly outrun that beast. The zid crashed against the door and drove it inches ajar, driving back their barricade. One taloned paw slid in and slashed viciously at random. Jeff ducked and strained his weight against the bunk, momentarily pinning the zid's threshing forelim. Chaffee three chose that moment to reappear, nearly causing Jeff to let go of the bunk and admit the zid. Your female suggestion is right, the cerimian croaked. The zid does not swim. Four and I are arranging escape on that premise. The zid's talons ripped through the door, leading parallel rosa-splitted bricks. Both slanted red eyes glared in briefly. "Then you damn well better hurry!" Jeff panted. The door he estimated might, or might not, hold for two minutes more. The cerimian vanished. There was a slithering sound in the distance that sounded like a mountain in motion, and with it a sturderest grunting that all but drowned out the zid's cries. Something nudged the cottage with a force that all but knocked it flat. "My scope!" Jennifer exclaimed. She let go the barricade and ran to the window to throw open the storm shutters. "Never mind the door, this way, quick!" She scrambled to the window sill and jumped. Numbly Jeff saw her suspended there, feet only inches below the sill, apparently on empty air. Then the door sagged again under the zid's lunges, and he left the bunk to follow Jennifer. He landed on something tough and warm and slippery. A monstrous tail fluke that stretched down the beach to merge into a flat, purplish acreage of back, forested with endless rows of fins and spines and enigmatic tendrils. The scoop he saw, and only half believed it, had wallowed into the shallows alongside his dock. It had reversed its unbelievable length to keep the head submerged, and at the same time had backed out of the water until its Leviathan tail spanned the hundred-odd yards of sloping beach from surf to cabin. Just ahead of him Jennifer caught an erect fin-spine and clung with both arms. "Hang on, we're going!" The scoop contracted itself with a suddenness that yanked them yards from the cottage and all but dislodged Jeff. Beyond the surf the shallows boiled whitely where the scoop fought for traction to draw its grounded bulk into the water. Jeff looked back once to see the zid close the distance between and spring upward to the tail fluke behind him. He had an instant conviction that the brute second spring would see him torn to bits, but the scoop at the moment found water deep enough to move in earnest. The zid could only sink in all six talon blems and hold fast. The hundred-odd yards from cabin to beach passed in a blur of speed. The scoop reached deeper water and submerged, throwing a mountainous billow that sent the island queen reeling and all but founded her. Jeff was dislodged instantly and sank like a stone. He came up, spouting water and fighting for breath, to find himself a perilous twenty feet from the zid. The zid, utterly out of its element, screamed hideously and thrust water to froth. All its earlier ferocity vanished under the imminent and unfamiliar threat of drowning. Jeff sank again and churned desperately to put distance between them. He came up again, nearly strangled, to find that either he or the zid had halved the distance between them. They were all but eye to eye when Jennifer caught him and towed him away toward the doubtful safety of the island queen. Phase three and four appeared from nowhere and stood solemnly by while the zid weakened and sank with a final gout of bubbles. "We must have your friends help," Chaffee Three said to Jennifer then, "to recover our investment." Jeff wheeled on him incredulously. "Me? Go down there after that monster? Not on your—" "He means the scoop," Jennifer said. "They brought it ashore to help us out of the cabin. Why shouldn't it help them now?" The scoop came up out of the water so smoothly that the island queen hardly rocked, dangling the limp form of the zid from its great, rubbery lips like a drowned kitten. "Here," Jennifer said. The scoop touched its vast face to the queen's rail and dropped the unconscious body to the deck. The zid twitched weakly and coughed up froth and water. Jeff backed away warily. "Damn it! Are we going through all that again?" Once it gets its wind back, Chaffee Three interrupted in this time. "The crystal now. We must have it to quiet the zid until it is safely caged again." Jennifer turned suddenly firm. "No! I won't let this eat I in former know about that." The ceramians were firmer. It will not matter now. Galactic adjustment will extend aid to both Calaxia and Terra, furnishing substitutes for the crystals you deal in. There will be no loss to either faction. "No loss?" Jennifer repeated indignantly. "But then there will be any demand for our crystals. We'll lose everything we've gained." "Not so," Chaffee Three assured her. Galactic will offer satisfactory items in exchange as well as a solution to Terra's problems. The scoop, since Jennifer's surrender, slid its ponderous bulk nearer and opened its mouth, leaving half an acre of lower jaw resting flush with the island queen's deck. Without hesitation, Jennifer stepped over the rail and vanished into the yawning, pinkish cavern beyond. Appalled, Jeff rushed after her. "Jennifer, have you lost your mind?" "There is no danger," Chaffee Three assured him. Scoops are benevolent as well as intelligent, and arrived long ago at a working agreement with the islanders. This one has produced a crystal, and is ready to be relieved of it, else it would not have attached itself to a convenient human. Jeff said dizzily, "The scoops make the crystals?" "There is a nightous, just back of a fleshy process in its throat, corresponding to your own tonsils, which produces a crystal much as your teran oyster secretes a pearl." The irritation distracts the scoops from their meditations. They are a philosophical species, though not mechanically progressive, and prompts them to barter their strength for a time to be rid of it. Jennifer reappeared with a walnut-sized crystal in her hand, and vaulted across the rail. "There goes another scoop," she said, resigningly. "The queen will have to tack with the wind for a while, until another one shows up." "So that's why your sails bellied backward when you came into harbor," said Jeff. "The thing was towing you." A thin, high streak of vapor trail, needling down toward them from the sunrise rainbow, turned the channel of his thought. "That will be Satterfield in his task force," Jeff told the chaffees. "I think you're going to find yourselves in an argument over that matter of squeezing Terra out of the crystal trade." They reassured him solemnly. "Terra has no real need of the crystals. We can offer a test and genetics program that will eliminate racial anxiety within a few generations, and supply neural therapy equipment on a trade basis, of course. That will serve the crystals' purpose during the interim." There should be a flaw somewhere Jeff felt, but he failed to see one. He gave up trying when he found Jennifer eyeing him with uncharacteristic uncertainty. "You'll be glad to get back to your patrol work," she said. She had an oddly tentative sound. Somehow the predictable monotony of consulat work had never seemed less inviting. The prospect of ending his colaxian tour and going to a half-baron in jittery earth appealed to Jeff even less. "No," he said, "I'd like to stay." "There's nothing to do but fish and sail around looking for scoops ready to shed their crystals," Jennifer reminded him. Still, Uncle Charlie has talked about settling in the township and standing for council election. "Can you fish and sail, Jeff Aubrey?" The consulat rocket landed ashore, but Jeff ignored it. "I can learn," he said. End of Traders Risk by Roger D. The Dacono Music & Spirits Festival returns to Centennial Park Saturday, August 3rd from 2 to 10 p.m. and it's free! Live music from the Warren Treaty! Chris Daniels and the Kings is Cally and More. Enjoy a spirits competition, Kid Zone and fireworks presented by Oxy and the City of Dacono. Admission and parking are free! The Dacono Music & Spirits Festival brought to you by Breckenridge Brewery and City of Dacono. Go to thecityofdacono.com for more information. 5280 Exteriors James Hardy sighting is a low maintenance sighting made primarily of cement that resists flame spread and repels woodborne insects and woodpeckers. Through the month of July, you'll receive free rigid foam installation with the purchase of whole house sighting. That's installing additional insulation behind your sighting for free, but only for the month of July. Call today for more details or visit 5280exteriors.com, 5280exteriors.com, a James Hardy preferred contractor, 5280 Exteriors. The Altitude of Quality