The fauna traps set up the previous day in the grasslands east of the Planetary Survey Station on Lederet had made a number of catches; but all of them represented species with which the two biologists of the survey team already were sufficiently familiar. Jeslin removed the traps, revived the captured animals from a safe distance with a stimulant gun, and shifted to a point a hundred and eighty miles northwest of the station, where he set the traps up again, half a mile apart. Here a tall forest spread over rolling hills, with stretches of dense undergrowth below; and the animal population could be expected to be of a somewhat different type.
Around midday, Jeslin had completed his preparations. He checked the new location of the traps on his charts, and turned the Pointer back toward the station. He was a stocky, well-muscled man, the youngest member of the team, who combined the duties of wildlife collector with those of the team's psychologist. Privately, he preferred the former work, enjoying his frequent encounters with curious and beautiful beasts on his way to and from the trap areas. And if the beasts were of a new variety, there would be a quick, stimulating chase in the Pointer, a versatile vehicle equally capable of hunting down game through thickest growth and of flying up to five times its own weight in captured specimens back to the station in undamaged condition.
Today was uneventful in that respect. There was game afoot but Jeslin was in a reflective mood, inclined to observe rather than pursue it. The station's cages were well supplied, and the traps, in their new location, would fill them up again before the biologists had completed their studies of the present occupants. He covered much of the stretch skimming over the forest at treetop level, emerged from it finally at a point twelve miles north of the station.
This was arid bush country, the ground below dotted with thorny growth. The Pointer flew across it, small things darting away from its shadow, vanishing with a flick into the thickets. Presently, Jeslin turned on the communicator, tapped the station's call button. Lederet was nearly a month's travel away from the nearest, civilized world; and small groups working on such remote out-worlds observed certain precautions as a matter of course. One of them was having every incoming vehicle identify itself before it arrived.
The screen lit up and the round-cheeked, freckled face of a middle-aged woman appeared in it. It was Ald, the team's dietician. She smiled pleasantly, said in an even voice, "Hello, Jeslin," went on in the same quiet, unemphasized tone, "Crash, machmen—"
The screen went blank.
Jeslin instantly reached out, grasped the Pointer's chase controls, spun the machine about and sent it racing back toward the forest. Flicking on the full set of ground and air-search screens, he studied them briefly in turn. His heart was pounding.
There was nothing in sight at the moment to justify Ald's warning. But the word "crash," used under such circumstances, had only one meaning. The station had been taken . . . he was to keep away from it, avoid capture and do whatever he could to help.
Machmen—Ald had been able to bring in that one additional word before they shut her off. Jeslin knew the term. Human beings surgically modified, equipped with a variety of devices to permit them to function freely in environments which otherwise would be instantly deadly to a man lacking the protection of a spacesuit or ship. They were instrumented men: machine men—machmen. Jeslin had not heard of recent experiments of the kind, but there were fairly numerous records of transitions to the machman condition, carried out with varying degrees of success.
His mind shifted back for an instant to a report received several days before from the Navy patrol boat assigned to Lederet for the protection of the survey station and its personnel. The boat had been contacted by a small I-Fleet vessel, requesting permission to carry out limited mining operations on the planet. After checking with the station, permission had been given. The I-Fleets were space vagrants, ordinarily harmless; and the mining party might be able to provide valuable information about the planet, with which they were evidently quite familiar.
The mining ship had begun its operations in a dry lakebed approximately a thousand miles from the station. Presumably, if machmen had captured the station, they had come over from the ship. With a heavily armed patrol boat circling the planet, it seemed an incredibly bold thing to do. Unless—
At that moment, Jeslin saw the figure in the search screen. It was human, appeared naked at first glance. Stretched out horizontally in the air about a hundred feet above the ground, arms laid back along its sides like a diver, it was approaching from the right, evidently with the intention of heading off the Pointer before the machine reached the forest.
And it was moving fast enough to do it . . .
Jeslin stared at the apparition for an instant, more in amazement than alarm. He saw now that the fellow was wearing trunks and boots and held some dark object in his left hand. Possibly the last was a flight device of some kind. Jeslin could make out nothing else to explain this headlong rush through the air. What did seem explained, he thought, was the manner in which the station had been taken. A handful of half-naked I-Fleet miners approaching on foot, apparently not even armed, would have aroused no concern there. The visitors would have been invited inside.
Jeslin glanced at the forest ahead, checked the search screens again. In the air far to the left were three tiny dots, which might be similar figures approaching. If so, it would take them several minutes to get here, and the Pointer would be lost in the forest by then. The machman moving up on the right apparently intended to attack by himself to prevent the escape—and that, Jeslin thought, was something he might turn to his advantage.
He drew a pack of plastic contact fetters out of a compartment, peeled off an eighteen-inch length, thrust it into his pocket. He patted another pocket on the right side of his jacket to make sure the gun he carried for last-ditch protection against overly aggressive Lederet wildlife was inside, then switched on the Pointer's stungun and turned the vehicle in a wide, swift curve toward the approaching machman.
The figure shot up at a steep slant before the gun could straighten out on it. In the screens, Jeslin watched it dart by perhaps two hundred yards overhead, come arcing down again behind the machine. He swung the Pointer's nose back to the forest, not more than a quarter of a mile ahead now, went rushing toward it, watching the machman close the gap between them, coming level with the ground a hundred yards away . . . then eighty . . . sixty . . .
The machman brought his left hand sweeping forward, the dark object held out in it. Jeslin braked hard. The Pointer, designed to change direction instantly to match the tactics of elusive game, pivoted end for end within its own length. As the stungun came around to the left of the pursuing figure, Jeslin pulled the trigger.
Caught by the outer fringe of the stunfield, the machman swerved sideways. The dark object—not a flight mechanism, after all, but some weapon—dropped from his hand. He went rolling limply on through the air, settling toward the ground.
The Pointer picked him up before he got there.
"My name," the machman said presently, "is Hulida. I'm aware of yours. It's quite possible, incidentally, that we've met before."
Jeslin glanced over at him. He'd fastened the fellow in the seat next to his own, wrists locked behind his back by a contact fetter, another fetter clamping a cloth blindfold over his eyes, seat belt drawn tight. For the past minute or two, he had been giving indications of recovering from stunshock, and it was no surprise to hear him speak. But a casually polite introduction, Jeslin thought, was hardly what he'd expected to hear.
"If we have," he said dryly, "I don't remember the occasion."
The blindfolded head of the man who called himself Hulida turned briefly toward him. He was not large; beside Jeslin, he seemed almost slight. But the olive-skinned body was firmly muscled, gave an impression of disciplined strength.
"It's only a possibility," Hulida said. "We happen to have been graduated from the University of Rangier in the same year. My degree was in medicine."
"It seems regrettable that you didn't continue your professional career," Jeslin told him.
"Oh, but I did. I'm one of the results of a machman experiment, but I also had a considerable part in bringing that experiment to its remarkably successful conclusion."
Jeslin grunted, returned his attention to the search screens. Successful the experiment certainly seemed to have been. When he went out to free Hulida from the Pointer's snaring tentacles, he had expected to find at least some indications of the profound changes worked on a human body to enable it to pursue him through the air. But whatever the changes might be, they weren't outwardly visible. A hasty search of the man's few articles of clothing had revealed no instrument to explain such an ability either; but until Hulida acknowledged the fact, Jeslin hadn't been certain that Ald's description of the nature of the station's attackers was correct. Earlier work of that kind had produced shapes in which functional plastic and metal was obviously united with the necessary proportion of living flesh.
He looked at the clock in the instrument panel, checked the screens once more, swung the Pointer around toward a chart section due west of his present location, some three hundred miles away. Not once during the past twenty minutes while he was pursuing a constantly changing, randomly erratic course through the forest had one of the flying men appeared in the search screens. He could assume that for the present he had lost them. Meanwhile he had a prisoner who seemed willing to give him at least part of the information he wanted.
He said, "How many machmen are there on Lederet?"
"At the moment, about forty," Hulida said promptly. "The rest of our group—there are a hundred and ninety-five of us in all—are on a spaceship which is approaching the planet and will reach it shortly."
"That hundred and ninety-five," Jeslin asked, "is the total number of those who were transformed into machmen in your experiment?"
"Not entirely. There were a number of deaths at first, before we learned to perfect our methods."
"What will the spaceship do when it runs into our patrol boat?"
Hulida laughed. "It will simply take the crew on board, Jeslin. What else? Naturally, we captured the boat before we attempted to capture the station."
Jeslin already had been almost sure of it. Three times during his flight through the forest he had attempted to signal the patrol boat, had received no response.
"How was it done?"
"We took the mining ship up and sent them a distress message," Hulida said. "There had been an accident—we had injured men on board. Obligingly, they came to our help at once. When they set up a locktube, we released gas bombs in both ships. We don't breathe normally, of course. It was very simple."
He added, "But you need feel no concern for either the crew or your colleagues at the station. None of them has been harmed. That was not our intention."
"Glad to hear it," Jeslin said. "Now what's the purpose of this business? Apparently, your experiment resulted in an important scientific achievement. If it had been conducted openly, I would have heard of it. Why the secrecy? And why—" He checked himself. "How many deaths were there in the first stage of the experiment, while you were still perfecting your methods?"
The machman hesitated, said, "Fifty-two."
"I see. You weren't working strictly with volunteers."
"Of course not," Hulida said. "We were—and are still—a small group. The work was obviously dangerous, and none of us could be spared as subjects until the element of danger had been removed. But that was not the reason we worked secretly, published nothing after results were assured, and eventually left civilization together. After all, we need not have recorded those early failures."
"Then what was the reason?" Jeslin asked.
"Our realization that the machmen we were creating and presently would become is a higher order of being than the merely human one. At one stroke, he is rid of four-fifths of the body's distresses and infirmities. He can expect a vastly lengthened life span. He thinks more clearly, is less subject to emotional disturbances. He is tremendously more efficient on the physical level . . . independent of environmental circumstances as no ordinary human ever could be. And we are only at the beginning of this, the pioneers . . .
"Jeslin, we did not become machmen in order to be better able to toil on airless worlds or in space for our benefit or that of others. We made the choice because it is the greater manner of living. We are Homo Superior, the mankind of the future. And the ranks of Homo Superior are not to be opened to any low-grade fool who can pay to have the transformation carried out on him. Neither do we intend to subject our plans to the manipulations of government. We are a select group and shall remain it. That is why we detached ourselves from the Federation."
"And that," Jeslin asked, "adds up to a justification of piracy? One would think a couple of hundred of machmen geniuses might find it no more difficult to make a living in space than an ordinary I-Fleet composed of ordinarily competent human beings."
Hulida said, "Our purpose goes beyond looting the survey station, Jeslin. Its equipment and personnel, of course, are valuable prizes in themselves, and so, to a lesser extent, are the patrol boat and its crew."
Jeslin looked over at him. "The personnel—"
"The personnel," Hulida explained, "and the crew will be transformed into machmen, naturally. They have highly trained minds, experience and skills which we can use to good advantage. Their consent isn't required. Not all of those who are machmen now underwent the transformation willingly, but their objections vanished as their experiences made its advantages fully apparent to them. They are as loyal to the group and its goals now as any of the others. And so will you be."
Jeslin felt a surge of cold anger. Mind-conditioning, of course. And it could be done . . .
"But our plan goes much farther than that," the machman was continuing. "This is a matter which has been very carefully investigated and prepared, Jeslin. The immediate consequence of your transformation will be that you will resume your work here as if nothing had happened—and, in fact, nothing else will have happened. You will continue to return favorable reports on Lederet to your department in the Hub. Within a year, the decision will be made to open precolonial operations on the planet.
"That is what we want. Equipment and supplies will be moved out here on a scale otherwise unobtainable by a small group such as ours. And with it will come technicians and scientists from whom we can select further recruits to round out our ranks. We will work carefully and quietly, but when we leave the planet, it will be to go forever beyond the Federation's reach with everything we need to found our own machman colony."
Jeslin was silent a moment, asked, "Why are you telling me all this?"
"To make it clear," the machman said, "that we simply cannot allow someone who knows about us to remain at large here. The possibility that you would still be alive and in a position to interfere with our plans when the Hub shipments begin to arrive may be slight, but we aren't ignoring it. Every other member of the survey team was accounted for during the morning. If necessary, we could turn all our resources now for months on end to the single purpose of hunting you down."
"You're inviting me to surrender?"
Hulida said, "I'm appealing to your reason. You have the opportunity of participating voluntarily in one of mankind's greatest adventures. If you reject it, it may not be possible to avoid killing you."
"At the moment," Jeslin said mildly, "it seems that I have one of the group's more important members as my hostage."
Hulida shook his blindfolded head. "No one of us is important enough to stand in the way of the group's goals. The fact that I'm your prisoner will be given every consideration, of course. But if it becomes necessary, we will both die."
Jeslin's gaze shifted to the course chart above the panel. He studied it a moment.
"I won't argue," he remarked, "with your claim that being transformed into a machman is a better way to live or the coming way to live. Possibly it's both. It's your methods I object to."
"They are our methods out of necessity," Hulida said.
"Perhaps. I'll think about it. And since you seem to have presented your case completely now, I'll appreciate it if you keep quiet for a while."
The machman smiled, shrugged, remained silent. After some minutes, Jeslin slowed the Pointer's advance. There was a valley ahead, a wide, sandy riverbed winding along it. His route led across the river. At this point, there was forest again on the other side, but there was no way he could avoid coming out from under the shelter of the trees for a distance of at least half a mile.
He had been watching the search screens constantly and did not think he was being followed. It would have been almost impossible for even a single machman to keep the fleeing Pointer in sight in the forest without coming into view occasionally in the screens. The sky was a different matter. Jeslin could not check for them there without showing himself above the forest. For all he knew, there were machmen directly overhead at the moment.
But he had to get over the river before the hunt for him became organized, and this was his best opportunity to do it. Now he could see sunlit patches of the valley ahead, between the trunks and undergrowth and he slowed the Pointer again. Prowl up to the edge of the open ground, he thought; then if there were no pursuers immediately in sight, make a quick dash across. It would be too bad if he was seen, but once he reached the forest on the other side of the valley, he should be able to lose them again . . .
He heard a sound from Hulida, an abrupt, soft intake of breath, looked over at him and saw the knotted jaw muscles, the tight, fixed grin of the machman's mouth. Immediately, almost before he could form a conscious thought of why he should do it, Jeslin was spinning the Pointer away from the valley, back into the forest, and slamming on speed.
Behind him, the forest crashed. In the rear search screen, he saw the thing sweep after him . . . a vertical torrent, fifteen feet across, composed of earth, brush, uprooted and shattered trees rushing into the air, sucked up by a tractor beam. Beyond it, a group of flying figures darted into the forest, fanned out.
In thick growth, Jeslin turned the Pointer left again, raced on, hugging the ground, for a hundred yards, swung sharply to the right. For perhaps a minute, he saw nothing in the screens except the thickets the machine was slashing through. Then there was a glimpse of two machmen weaving around tree trunks above the undergrowth. The roar of the tractor beam had lessened, now grew stronger again. The Pointer flashed into another thicket.
"Useless, Jeslin!" Hulida was shouting. "They've found you and you can't shake them off!"
For a while, it seemed Hulida was right. The fliers couldn't match the Pointer's speed in the forest. They would be there for instants, coming down through the crowns, fall behind as Jeslin swerved off, and vanish again. But they could rise back up through the trees and overtake him in the open air, and were doing it. He didn't know how many they were in all, but half the time he seemed to be in momentary view of one or the other of them.
And the tractors followed the fliers. There must be at least two of the machines moving across the forest after him, guided by the flying scouts. Suddenly the roar of the beam would arise, shredding the growth as it rushed in towards him; sometimes a second one appeared almost simultaneously from the other side. Once he nearly ran the Pointer directly into one of the dark, hurtling columns of forest debris; as he slewed away from it, the vehicle shuddered as if it were being shaken apart, and Hulida uttered a short, hoarse cry.
And then everything was quiet again. The Pointer rushed on—a minute, two minutes, three, four; and no pursuer appeared in the screens. Jeslin saw a gully ahead, a narrow, dry water bed, dropped into it, moved along it a quarter of a mile until it turned into a deep, rocky ravine almost enclosed by dense undergrowth above. There he stopped the machine.
The time display in the instrument panel told him twelve minutes had passed since he reached the edge of the valley. He would have said he had been running from the tractors for nearly an hour.
He rubbed his sweating palms along his thighs, looked over at Hulida's slumped form. There was no particular satisfaction in knowing that the chase had unnerved the machman more than it had him.
"Now talk," he said unsteadily, "if you care to go on living. What happened?"
Hulida straightened slowly but did not answer at once. Then he said, speaking carefully and obviously struggling to recover his self-possession, "Several of the survey team members were given truth drugs and questioned as soon as we secured the station. They told us of the long-range transmitter which was to be used to call for help if the station was disabled or overwhelmed by a hostile force. When you were warned off and escaped, it was assumed that that was where you would try to go. The transmitter has been located and is, of course, being guarded. We ran into the group which was watching the route you were most likely to take."
Jeslin had a sense of heavy, incredulous dismay. He hadn't expected that particular piece of information to get to the machmen so quickly. It had been the one way left open now to defeat their plans.
After a moment, he asked, "Where did those tractors come from?"
"They are part of our ship's equipment. The machines were sent ahead to help in your capture."
Jeslin grunted. "If one of the beams had touched us," he said, "there's a good chance we would have been torn apart before they made a capture! You're right about your group not caring who stands in the way when they're out to do something." He saw Hulida's cheeks go gray below the blindfold, added, "Just before they jumped us, you knew it was coming. You machmen have a built-in communication system of some kind—"
Hulida hesitated, said, "Yes, we do."
"How does it operate?"
"I could attempt to describe it to you," Hulida said, "but the description would have meaning only to another machman. The use of the system cannot be taught until it can be experienced."
"At any rate," Jeslin said, "your friends know we have stopped running and have settled down somewhere."
Hulida shook his head.
"I have not told them that." He managed a brief, shaky grin. "After all, Jeslin, I prefer to go on living . . . and there is no reason why either of us should die. You can do nothing more, and you've had a demonstration of what your life as a fugitive would be like. The group won't give up the hunt until they have you. You can calculate your final odds for yourself. But surrender to me—now—and all will still be well."
There had been a growing urgency in his voice. Jeslin watched him, not answering. The machman's mouth worked. Fear, Jeslin thought. More fear than Hulida should be feeling at the moment. His own skin began to crawl. Here at the bottom of the ravine, the search screens showed him nothing.
He reached out quietly, switched on the Pointer's stungun.
"Jeslin . . . "
Jeslin remained silent.
"Jeslin, there is no time to lose!" Hulida's voice was harsh with desperation. "I did not tell you the truth just now. I can conceal nothing from the group. There are multiple direct connections between the brains, the nervous systems, of all of us. Our communication is not wholly a mechanical process—we function almost as units of a group mind. They know you are hiding in the area and have been searching for you. At any instant—"
Jeslin turned the Pointer's nose upward, triggered the gun. The stunfield smashed up out of the ravine, the machine following it. Man-shapes swirled about limply among the trees like drifting leaves, and something came thundering along the floor of the gully toward the place where the Pointer had been hiding.
Then the nightmare chase began again . . .
An endless period later, Jeslin realized he was clear of the pursuit for a second time. He kept the Pointer hurtling forward on a straight line, staying below the trees where he could, but flicking through open stretches and over streambeds without pausing. Once the screen showed him two figures wheeling high against the sky; he thought they were machmen but was under cover again before he could be sure.
Then something smashed against the Pointer's engine section in the rear. Jeslin swung the machine about, saw a figure gliding away behind a massive tree trunk, sent it spinning with the stungun, turned again and rushed on. A minute later, there was a distant crashing in the forest; then silence.
The Pointer began to vibrate heavily, and presently the speed indicator dropped. Jeslin looked at the location chart, chewing his lip. His arm muscles ached; he was trembling with tension and fatigue. He found himself trying to urge the machine onward mentally, made a snorting sound of self-derision.
Then there was warm, golden sunlight ahead among the trees. Jeslin brought a folded black hood out from under the instrument panel, laid it beside him. He reached over and unfastened Hulida's seat belt. The machman sagged sideways on the seat. His mouth moved as if he were speaking, but he seemed dazed.
Jeslin brought the Pointer to the ground, turned off the laboring engine. He picked up the black hood, dropped it over his head, its lower folds resting on his shoulders. From within, it seemed transparent, showing a glassy glitter around the edges of objects.
He took his gun from his pocket, hauled open the side door and stepped out. Ahead something slid quickly through a sunlit opening in the treetops. Jeslin sent two bolts ripping through the foliage behind it, reached back into the Pointer and hauled Hulida out by the arm. He swung the staggering machman around, started at a half-run toward the area of open ground fifty yards away, thrusting Hulida ahead of him.
"Jeslin—" It was a hoarse gasp.
"Keep moving! They'll have a tractor on our machine in a moment." He felt the figure lighten suddenly, warned, "Don't try to leave me! I'll blow your head off before you're ten feet away."
"You're insane! You can't escape now!"
Tractor beams roared suddenly among the trees behind them, and Hulida screamed. They stumbled through a thicket, out into the sunlight of a wide glade. Machman figures darted above the treetops of the far side, two hundred yards away. Jeslin ripped the blindfold from Hulida's face, seized his arm again, ran forward with him into the glade.
From the center of the open area came a single deep bell note, a curiously attention-binding sound. Jeslin stopped, hurled Hulida forward, away from him. The machman rolled over, came swaying almost weightlessly to his feet. The bell note sounded again. Hulida's head turned toward it. He went motionless.
Here it comes, Jeslin thought . . .
And it came. Under the shielding hood, he was experiencing it, as he had many times before, as a pulsing, dizzying, visual blur. Outside, wave after wave of radiation was rushing out from the animal trap concealed in the center of the clearing, a pounding, numbing pattern of confusion to any mind within its range, increasing moment by moment in intensity.
After ten seconds, it stopped.
Hulida slumped sideways, settled slowly to the ground.
A man-shape streaked down out of the sky, turning over and over, crashed into the treetops beyond the glade.
Something else passed through the thickets behind Jeslin, sucking noisily at the earth, and moved off into the distance, dirt and other debris cascading back down into the trees behind it. A similar din was receding through the forest to the south. The tractors were continuing on their course, uncontrolled.
Overhead, Jeslin saw other machman fliers drifting gradually down through the air.
He moved forward, picked up Hulida and drew back with him out of the trap's range. It would reset itself automatically now for any moving thing of sufficient size to trigger its mechanisms.
He wasn't sure he would find anything left of the Pointer, but the beams hadn't come within fifty feet of it. As he came up, he heard the communicator signal inside. He put Hulida down hastily, climbed in and switched on the instrument.
The face of Govant, the team's geophysicist, appeared in the screen.
"Jeslin, what the devil's happened?" he demanded. "The machmen who took over the station all collapsed at the same instant just now! Ald says she's sure you caused it in some manner. They're alive but unconscious."
"I know," Jeslin said. "I suggest you disarm them and dump them into one of the cages."
"That's being done, of course!" Govant said irritably. "We're not exactly stupid. But—"
"You're yelling for help from any navy units around?"
"Naturally." Govant looked aside, away from the screen, added, "Apparently, we've just had a response! But it may be weeks before help arrives, and the machmen said they had a spaceship which—"
"Their ship won't be a problem," Jeslin said. "Get a few airtrucks over here, will you? I'll give you my location. In a rather short time, I'm going to have a great many machmen around to transport back to the station's cages."
Govant stared at him. "What did you do to them?"
"Well," Jeslin said, "for all practical purposes, I've blown out their cortical fuses. I walked one of them into a hypnoshock trap here, and it hit the others through him. I'll give you the details when I get back. At present, they're simply paralyzed. In a few hours, they'll be able to move again; but for days after that, they won't make any move that somebody hasn't specifically told them to make. By that time, we should have the last of them locked up."
He stepped out of the Pointer after Govant had switched off and went back to Hulida, mentally shaping the compulsive suggestions which presently would shut off the wandering tractors, round up the tranced fliers, and bring the captured patrol boat and the machman spaceship gliding obediently down to the planet.