The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert Page 10

  “I’d like a pass permitting Dr. Anso-Anso to visit my kennel,” said Trent. “Not being an Earth-human, he does not carry the virus and it will be quite safe to…”

  “Why?”

  “You have, perhaps, heard of the Vegan skill in bio-physics,” said Trent. “Dr. Anso-Anso is assisting me in a line of research. He needs to take several blood and culture samples from…”

  “Couldn’t a robot do it?”

  “The observations depend on highly specialized knowledge and there are no robots with this training.”

  “Hmmm.” Commander Makaroff considered this. “I see. Well, if you vouch for him, Dr. Trent, I’m sure he’s all right.” His tone suggested that Dr. Trent could be mistaken. He took a pad from a drawer, scrawled a pass, handed it to Trent. “I’ll have a police ’copter take you in.”

  “We have a specially sterilized ’copter with our lab equipment,” said Trent. “Robotics International is servicing it right now.”

  Commander Makaroff nodded. “I see. Then I’ll have an escort ready for you whenever you say.”

  * * *

  The summons came the next day on a pink sheet of paper:

  “Dr. Varley Trent is ordered to appear tomorrow before the special sub-committee of the Federated Senate Committee on Health and Sanitation at a hearing to be conducted at 4 P.M. in the office building of the Federated Senate.” It was signed, “Oscar Olaffson, special assistant to Sen. Gilberto Nathal.”

  Trent accepted the summons in his lab, read it, took it up to Hans-Meers’ office.

  The professor read the order, handed it back to Trent. “Nothing is said about charges, Varley. Where were you yesterday?”

  Trent sat down. “I got my Vegan friend into the preserve so he could snatch the three puppies. He’s half way home with them by this time.”

  “They discovered it on the morning count, of course,” said Han-Meers. “Ordinarily, they’d have just hauled you off to jail, but there’s an election coming up. Nathal must be cozy with your Commander Makaroff.”

  Trent looked at the floor.

  “The Senator will crucify you in spite of your virus discovery,” said Han-Meers. “I’m afraid you’ve made powerful enemies. Dr. Flores is the brother-in-law of Senator Grapopulus of the Appropriations Committee. They’ll bring in Flores Clinic people to claim that the virus carrier could have been discovered without you.”

  “But they’re my dogs! I can…”

  “Not since the emergency census and quarantine act,” said Han-Meers. “You’re guilty of sequestering government property.” He pointed a finger at Trent. “And these enemies you’ve made will…”

  “I’ve made! You were the one had to pull the grandstand act with Flores.”

  “Now, Varley. Let’s not quarrel among ourselves.”

  Trent looked at the floor. “Okay. What’s done is done.”

  “I have a little idea,” said Han-Meers. “The college survey ship, the Elmendorff, is out at Hartley Field. It has been fueled and fitted for a trip to Sagittarius.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The ship is well guarded, of course, but a known member of the staff with a forged note from me could get aboard. Could you handle the Elmendorff alone?”

  “Certainly. That’s the ship we took to Vega on the bio-physical survey.”

  “Then run for it. Get that ship into hyper-drive and they’ll never catch you.”

  Trent shook his head. “That would be admitting my guilt.”

  “Man, you are guilty! Senator Nathal is going to discover that tomorrow. It’ll be big news. But if you run away, that will be bigger news and the senator’s screaming will be just so much more background noise.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “People are tired of his noises, Varley.”

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “Varley, the senator is desperate for vote-getting news. Give him a little more time, a little more desperation, he’ll go too far.”

  “I’m not worried about the senator. I’m worried about…”

  “The dogs,” said Han-Meers. “And if you escaped to Vega you could give them the benefit of your knowledge of terrestrial biology. You’d have to do it by remote control, of course, but…” He left the idea dangling there.

  Trent pursed his lips.

  “Every minute you waste makes your chances of escape that much slimmer.” Han-Meers pushed a pad toward Trent. “Here’s my letterhead. Forge your note.”

  Twenty minutes after Trent’s ’copter took off for Hartley Field, a government ’copter settled to the campus parking area. Two men emerged, hurried to Han-Meers’ office, presented police credentials. “We’re looking for a Dr. Varley Trent. He’s charged with violating the dog-restriction act. He’s to be held in custody.”

  Han-Meers looked properly horrified. “I think he went home. He said something about not feeling well.”

  * * *

  Senator Nathal raged. His plump body quivered. His normally red face became redder. He shouted, he screamed. His fuming countenance could be seen nightly on video. Just when he was reaching a fine climax, warning people against unbridled science, he was pushed aside by more important news.

  The last dog in an isolation preserve—a brindle chow—died from virus infection. Before the senator could build up steam for a new attack, the government announced the discovery of an Arctic wolf pack of twenty-six animals untouched by virus. A day later, robot searchers turned up a live twelve-year-old mongrel on Easter Island and five cocker spaniels on Tierra del Fuego. Separate preserves for dogs and wolves were prepared on the west slope of the Olympic Mountains, all of the animals transported there.

  Wolves, cockers, mongrel and hounds—they were the world’s pets. Excursions in sealed ’copters were operated from Aberdeen to a point five kilometers from the dog-wolf preserve. There, powerful glasses sometimes gave a glimpse of motion which imagination could pad into a dog or wolf.

  About the time Senator Nathal was getting ready to launch a new blast, pointing out that Trent’s hounds were not necessarily important, that there had been other canine survivors, the twelve-year-old mongrel died of old age.

  Dog lovers of the world mourned. The press took over and all the glory of mongreldom was rehashed. Senator Nathal again was background noise.

  * * *

  Trent headed for Vega, hit hyper-drive as soon as he had cleared the sun’s area of warp. He knew that the Vegans would have to quarantine him to protect the dogs, but he could follow the experiments on video, help with his knowledge of terrestrial biology.

  Professor Han-Meers, protesting ill health, turned his college duties over to an assistant, went on a vacation tour of the world. First, he stopped at the capital, met Senator Nathal, apologized for Dr. Trent’s defection and praised the politician’s stand.

  In Geneva, Han-Meers met a pianist whose pet Dalmatians had been among the first to die in the epidemic. At Cairo, he met a government official who had bred wolf hounds, also among the first deceased. In Paris, he met the wife of a furrier whose pet airdale, Coco, had died in the third wave of the epidemic. In Moscow, in Bombay, in Calcutta, in Singapore, in Peking, in San Francisco, in Des Moines, in Chicago, he met others in like circumstances. To all he gave notes of introduction to Senator Nathal, explaining that the senator would see they received special treatment if they wanted to visit the Olympic preserve. Han-Meers expected at least one of these people to become a scandalous nuisance sufficient to insure the senator’s political embarrassment.

  The wife of the Paris furrier, Mme. Estagién Couloc, paid off, but in a manner Han-Meers had not anticipated.

  * * *

  Mme. Couloc was a slim woman of perhaps forty-five, chic in the timeless French fashion, childless, with a narrow, haughty face and a manner to match it. But her grandmother had been a farm wife and underneath the surface of pampered rich woman, Mme. Couloc was tough. She came to Aberdeen complete with two maids, a small Alp of luggage and a note from
Senator Nathal. She had convinced herself that all of this nonsense about humans carrying the disease couldn’t possibly apply to her. A few simple sanitary precautions and she could have a dog of her own.

  Mme. Couloc meant to have a part-beagle dog, no matter the cost. The fact that there were no dogs to be had, made her need all the more urgent. Cautious inquiries at Aberdeen convinced her this would have to be a lone-handed job. Amidst the tangled psychological desperation which filled her mind, she worked out a plan which had all of the evasive cunning characteristic of the mentally ill.

  From the air, on one of the daily excursions, Mme. Couloc surveyed the terrain. It was rugged enough to discourage a less determined person. The area had been maintained in its natural slate for seven hundred years. Thick undergrowth of salal, devil club and huckleberry crowded the natural avenues of access to the interior. Rivers were full of the spring snow melt. Ridgetops were tangles of windfalls, wild blackberries in the burns, granite outcroppings. After the rough terrain there was a double fence—each unit sixteen meters high, a kilometer between.

  Mme. Couloc returned to Aberdeen, left her maids at the hotel, flew to Seattle where she bought tough camping clothes, a rope and grappling hook, a light pack, concentrated food and a compass. A map of the preserve was easy to obtain. They were sold as souvenirs.

  Then she went fishing in the Straits of Juan de Fuca, staying at Neah Bay. To the south towered the Olympics, remote snow caps.

  For three days it rained; five days Mme. Couloc fished with a guide. On the ninth day she went fishing alone. The next morning, the Federated Coast Guard picked up her overturned boat off Tatoosh Light. By that time she was nineteen kilometers south of Sequim, two kilometers inside the prohibited area which surrounded the fences. She slept all day in a spruce thicket. Moonlight helped her that night, but it took the entire night for her to come within sight of the fence. That day she crouched in a tangle of Oregon grape bushes, saw two tripod-legged robot patrols pass on the other side of the fence. At nightfall she moved forward, waited for a patrol to pass and go out of sight. The grapple and rope took her over the top. The kilometer between fences was cleared of trees and underbrush. She crossed it swiftly, scaled the final barrier.

  The robotics patrols had counted too heavily on the forbidding terrain and they had not figured a psychotic woman into their plans.

  Two kilometers inside the preserve, Mme. Couloc found a cedar copse in which to hide. Her heart racing, she crouched in the copse, waiting for the dawn in which to find her dog. There were scratches on her face, hands and legs; her clothes were torn. But she was inside!

  Several times that night she had to dry her perspiring palms against her khaki hiking trousers. Toward morning, she fell asleep on the cold ground. Bess and Eagle found her there just after dawn.

  Mme. Couloc awoke to the scraping of a warm, damp tongue against her cheek. For a moment, she thought it was her dead Coco. Then she realized where she was.

  And the beautiful dogs!

  She threw her arms around Bess, who was as starved for human affection as was Mme. Couloc.

  Oh, you beautifuls!

  The robotics patrol found them there shortly before noon. The robots were counting dogs with the aid of the tiny transmitters they had imbedded in the flesh of each animal. Mme. Couloc had been waiting for nightfall in which to escape with a dog.

  Bess and Eagle ran from the robots. Mme. Couloc screamed and raged as the impersonal mechanicals took her away.

  That afternoon, Eagle touched noses with a wolf female through the fence separating their enclosures.

  Although the robots put each dog in isolation, they were too late. And nobody thought to bother with the wolves in their separate preserve.

  In seven weeks the dog-wolf preserves were emptied by Virus D-D. Mme. Couloc was sent to a mental hospital in spite of the pleas of an expensive lawyer. The news services made much of Senator Nathal’s note which had been found in her pocket.

  * * *

  Earth officials sent a contrite message to Vega. It was understood, said the message, that one Dr. Varley Trent had given Earth dogs to a Vegan bio-physicist. Were there, by any chance, some dogs still alive?

  Back came the Vegan reply: We have no dogs. We do not know the present whereabouts of Dr. Trent.

  * * *

  Trent’s ship came out of hyper-drive with Vega large in the screens. The sun’s flaming prominences were clearly visible. At eight hundred thousand kilometers, he increased magnification, began scanning for the planet. Instead, he picked up a Vegan guard ship arrowing toward him. The Vegan was only six thousand kilometers off when it launched a torpedo. The proximity explosion cut off Trent’s quick leap for the transmitter to give his identity. The ship buckled and rocked. Emergency doors slammed, air hissed, warning lights came on, bells clanged. Trent scrambled to the only lifeboat remaining in his section. The tiny escape craft was still serviceable, although its transmitter was cracked open.

  He kept the lifeboat in the shadow of his ship’s wreckage as long as he could, then dove for the Vegan planet which loomed at two o’clock on his screen. As soon as his driver tubes came alight, the Vegan sped after him. Trent pushed the little boat to its limit, but the pursuer still gained. They were too close to the planet now for the Vegan to use another torpedo.

  The lifeboat screamed into the thin edge of the atmosphere. Too fast! The air-cooling unit howled with the overload. A rear surface control flared red, melted, fused. Trent had time to fire the emergency nose rockets, cut in automatic pilot before he blacked out. The ship dived, partly out of control, nose rockets still firing. Relays clicked—full alarm!—circuits designed to guard human life in an emergency came alive. Some worked, some had been destroyed.

  * * *

  Somewhere, he could hear running water. It was dark where he was, or perhaps lighted by a faint redness. His eyelids were stuck tightly. He could feel folds of cloth around him. A parachute! The robot controls of the lifeboat had ejected him in the chute-seat as a last resort.

  Trent tried to move. His muscles refused to obey. He could sense numbness in his hips, a tingling loss of specific perception in his arms.

  Then he heard it—the baying of a hound—far and clear. It was a sound he had never again expected to hear. The bugling note was repeated. It reminded him of frosty nights on Earth, following Bess and Eagle and …

  The baying of a hound!

  Panic swept through him. The hound mustn’t find him! He was Earth-human, loaded with deadly virus!

  Straining at his cheek muscle, Trent managed to open one eye, saw that it was not dark, but a kind of yellow twilight under the folds of the parachute. His eyelids had been clotted with blood.

  Now he could hear running feet, a hound’s eager sniffing.

  Please keep him away from me! he begged.

  An edge of the chute stirred. Now there was an eager whining. Something crept toward him under the cloth.

  “Go away!” he croaked.

  Through the blurred vision of his one eye, Trent saw a brown and white head—very like Eagle’s. It bent toward something. With a sick feeling, Trent realized that the something was one of his own outstretched, virus-filled hands. He saw a pink tongue come out, lick the hand, but could not feel it. He tried to move and unconsciousness overwhelmed him. One last thought flitted through his mind before the darkness came—

  “Each man kills the thing he…”

  * * *

  There was a bed beneath him—soft, sleep-lulling. In one part of his mind he knew a long time had passed. There had been hands, needles, wheeled carts taking him places, liquids in his mouth, tubes in his veins. He opened his eyes. Green walls, glaring white sunshine partially diffused by louvre shutters, a glimpse of blue-green hills outside.

  “You are feeling better?” The voice had the peculiar whistling aspiration of the Vegan vocals.

  Trent shifted his gaze to the right. Ger! The Vegan stood beside the bed, deceptively Earth-human in appearance
. His shutter-like eye membranes were opened wide, the double crest of feathery hair retracted. He wore a yellow robe belted at the waist.

  “How long…”

  The Vegan put a seven-fingered hand on Trent’s wrist, felt the pulse. “Yes, you are feeling much better. You have been very ill for almost four of your months.”

  “Then the dogs are all dead,” said Trent, his voice flat.

  “Dead?” Ger’s eye membranes flicked closed, opened.

  “I killed them,” said Trent. “My body’s loaded with dormant virus.”

  “No,” said the Vegan. “We gave the dogs an extra white blood cell—more predatory. Your puny virus could not survive it.”

  Trent tried to sit up, but Ger restrained him. “Please, Varley. You are not yet recovered.”

  “But if the dogs are immune to the virus…” He shook his head. “Give me a shipload of dogs and you can name your own price.”

  “Varley, I did not say dogs are immune. They … are … not like dogs exactly. We cannot give you a shipload of your animals because we do not have them. They were sacrificed in our work.”

  Trent stared at him.

  “I have unfortunate news, my friend. We have made our planet restricted to humans. You may live out your life here, but you may not communicate with your fellows.”

  “Is that why your ship fired on me?”

  “We thought it was an Earth Vessel coming to investigate.”

  “But…”

  “It is regrettable that yourself must be kept here, Varley, but the pride of our peoples is at stake.”

  “Pride?”

  The Vegan looked at the floor. “We, who have never failed a bio-physical alteration…” He shook his head.

  “What happened?”

  The Vegan’s face went blue with embarrassment.

  Trent recalled his first awakening on this planet. “When I recovered consciousness I saw a dog. At least I saw its head.”