Then she ducked down and scuttled between the creature's legs, catching it by surprise, and escaping with nothing more than a shallow scratch on her right shoulder.
She was up to her full speed in two bounds, and for a moment she thought she had gained on it. But Norbert had learned something, too. He ignored her dodging run and came galloping up alongside her. His mouth, impossibly crowded with needle-tipped teeth, snarled and opened wide. From his jaw, and protruding through his mouth, came the hateful small replica of these jaws, composed of a small rectangular body part like a tongue, which ended in a mouth filled with white sharp teeth.
This was it. There was no place to go.
The creature moved in for the kill.
“Julie!” Stan screamed. “For God's sake!”
At that final moment Julie screamed at the creature, “Cancel predation functions!”
Norbert froze in midmovement. His feeding tube withdrew into his mouth. His jaws closed.
Julie then said, “Return to standard program.”
She turned away from the creature, who stood frozen in position, and walked through the connecting passageway to Stan, who was still in the control room, sitting numbly in the big command chair near the computer.
21
In the control room, where he had been watching her progress on a TV monitor, Stan heaved a sigh of relief. He knew Julie would join him soon, after she had showered and changed. He just had time to check the condition of the men in hypersleep, and then he and Julie would be able to go over their plans.
He walked through a dilating door, down a short corridor, and into the long gray egg-shaped room that was devoted to hypersleep. The lights were low, leaving the place in an eternal twilight. The only sound Stan heard was the occasional short click of a circuit breaker.
The men lay in rows in what looked like large coffins with glass tops. Pipes and electrical lines connected all of the coffins and ran to power boxes on the walls. All this maze of equipment was run through instruments that measured output and indicated sudden anomalous changes, checking for heart rate, respiration, and for the electrical brain activity. Every hour, samples were taken of the sleepers' blood and stomach contents. Trace chemicals could set up strange chain reactions. It was necessary to keep the crew's internal environments very stable. Other meters on the wall showed dream activity; it was important for the crew members to dream as they slept. Dreaming too long suppressed can lead to psychosis.
For now, all was well. The men lay in their gray coffins. Most had their hands at their sides, some had crossed them on their chests. In one or two cases, the fingers pulled at each other. This was not abnormal. Events were occurring on deep levels of the brain that the dials and gauges couldn't read.
It was to be a journey of almost two weeks' duration. Not a long one, as space trips go. The men could have stayed awake throughout without harm. But it was policy on most ships to put the crew into hypersleep for anything longer than a week. For one thing, it saved on food and water — critical things on a spaceship. For another, it kept the men out of mischief. There was little to do on the outward leg of a deep-space voyage. The ship shuttled noiselessly through space, and time seemed to flow like invisible treacle.
Stan was pleased that there was no crew to contend with at the moment. He was somewhat less pleased that Captain Hoban had elected to take the hypersleep with his men. Stan would have enjoyed conversations with Hoban on the long outward journey.
“I'd like it, too,” Hoban had said. “But frankly, I need the sleep. I'm badly in need of reintegration.”
Hoban had come under severe pressure after being relieved of his ship's command. The charge that he had been drunk while on duty, though untrue, had been tough to fight. Even with all the recording instruments that were continuously running on the ship, it was unclear exactly how drunk he had been, or if indeed he had been drunk at all. There were matters of individual alcohol tolerance to consider. Even witnesses, the ship's officers, had been of two minds about what had really happened and to what extent Hoban bore responsibility.
If all this was upsetting to the investigating authorities, it was even more so to Hoban. He didn't know exactly himself what had happened in that fateful hour when the accident had occurred. His own defense mechanisms blocked his memory, preventing him from seeing a truth that might be damaging to him.
Hoban knew that, and so he couldn't help but wonder what his defenses were trying to block.
The hypersleep was known to enhance psychic integration. It gave you a chance to drop out of the world of actions and judgments, into a timeless place beyond questions of morality. Hoban had welcomed that.
Now Stan looked forward to resuscitating Hoban. It was a little limiting for him, having only Julie and Gill to talk to. Julie was a darling, of course, and he was absolutely mad about her. At the same time he couldn't help but recognize her limitations.
Although abundantly educated in the school of hard knocks, she had little formal training in the sciences. Worse, she had little interest in the arts and humanities. She tended to assume that material things were always the most desirable ones. This was an error in Stan's judgment, for how do you price a sunset or a mountain at dawn? How much for the song of the swallow? Still, he realized that he himself was no doubt guilty of the typical human error of overvaluing what he liked and undervaluing what others liked.
Talking with Gill was also limiting. Gill had formidable training in the sciences and knew a great deal about history and philosophy. This didn't give him judgment and compassion, however. For Gill, the proposition that the unexamined life was not worth living had no more relevance than E=mc2. He wasn't equipped to examine the emotional dimension, though Stan thought he saw signs of promise.
After showering and changing, Julie fluffed her hair and rejoined Stan in the main control room. “How'd I do, Stan?” she asked.
Stan pulled himself together. In a voice that strove to be casual he said, “Quite well, Julie. You shaved fifteen seconds off yesterday's time. Keep on like this and you'll soon break your old mark of three minutes in the hold with Norbert.”
“Norbert's getting too good,” Julie said. “He's learning faster than I am. I'm sure he's smarter than the real thing.”
The real thing, in this case, was the aliens Norbert so resembled, and who had caused such strange and deadly events on Earth.
Despite his appearance, however, Norbert was not an alien. He was a perfectly simulated robot model of an alien, equipped with a number of computer-driven programs, among which was the predator mode that Julie had been testing out. At the moment Norbert was in the control room with them, showing no sign of his former ferocity.
“How are you, Norbert?” Stan asked.
“I am fine, Doctor, as always.”
“That was quite a little run you gave Julie. Did you think you were going to catch her this time?”
“I do not anticipate such things,” Norbert replied.
“What would you have done if you had caught her?”
“What my programming told me to do,” Norbert said.
“You would have killed her?”
“I cannot anticipate. I would have done what I had to do. Without feeling, I might add. But let me further add, if remorse were possible for a creature like myself, I would have felt it. Is there an analogue of remorse that does not involve feeling?”
“You have a complicated way of expressing yourself,” Stan said.
Norbert nodded. “These matters require considerable thought and recalculation. And when they are expressed in words, they sometimes come out differently from what was intended.”