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.Hundreds of the mutated minks would awaken.In awakening, they would plunge into life with hunger, with hate, with rage and with sex; plunge against their straps; strive to kill each other, their young, themselves, her.They would fight everything and everywhere, and do everything they could to keep going.She knew this.In the middle of the room there was a tuner.The tuner was a direct, empathic relay, capable of picking up the simpler range of telepathic communications.Into this tuner went the concentrated emotions of Mother Hitton's littul kittons.The rage, the hate, the hunger, the sex were all carried far beyond the limits of the tolerable, and then all were thereupon amplified.And then the waveband on which this telepathic control went out was amplified, right there beyond the studio, on the high towers that swept the mountain ridge, up and beyond the valley in which the laboratory lay.And Mother Hitton's moon, spinning geometrically, bounced the relay into a hollow englobement.From the faceted moon, it went to the satellites—sixteen of them, apparently part of the weather control system.These blanketed not only space, but nearby subspace.The Norstrilians had thought of everything.The short shocks of an alert came from Mother Hitton's transmitter bank.A call came.Her thumb went numb.The noise shrieked.The mink wakened.Immediately, the room was full of chattering, scraping, hissing, growling and howling.Under the sound of the animal voices, there was the other sound: a scratchy, snapping sound like hail falling on a frozen lake.It was the individual claws of hundreds of mink trying to tear their way through metal panels.Mother Hitton heard a gurgle.One of the minks had succeeded in tearing its paw loose and had obviously started to work on its own throat.She recognized the tearing of fur, the ripping of veins.She listened for the cessation of that individual voice, but she couldn't be sure.The others were making too much noise.One mink less.Where she sat, she was partly shielded from the telepathic relay, but not altogether.She herself, old as she was, felt queer wild dreams go through her.She thrilled with hate as she thought of beings suffering out beyond her—suffering terribly, since they were not masked by the built-in defenses of the Norstrilian communications system.She felt the wild throb of long-forgotten lust.She hungered for things she had not known she remembered.She went through the spasms of fear that the hundreds of animals expressed.Underneath this, her sane mind kept asking, "How much longer can I take it?How much longer must I take it? Lord God, be good to your people here on this world! Be good to poor old me."The green light went on.She pressed a button on the other side of her chair.The gas hissed in.As she passed into unconsciousness, she knew that her kittons passed into instant unconsciousness too.She would waken before they did and then her duties would begin: checking the living ones, taking out the one that had clawed out its own throat, taking out those who had died of heart attacks, rearranging them, dressing their wounds, treating them alive and asleep—asleep and happy—breeding, living in their sleep—until the next call should come to waken them for the defense of the treasures which blessed and cursed her native world.6Everything had gone exactly right.Lavender had found an illegal planoform ship.This was no inconsequential accomplishment, since planoform ships were very strictly licensed and obtaining an illegal one was a chore on which a planet full of crooks could easily have worked a lifetime.Lavender had been lavished with money—Benjacomin's money.The honest wealth of the thieves' planet had gone in and had paid the falsifications and great debts, imaginary transactions that were fed to the computers for ships and cargoes and passengers that would be almost untraceably commingled in the commerce of ten thousand worlds."Let him pay for it," said Lavender, to one of his confederates, an apparent criminal who was also a Norstrilian agent."This is paying good money for bad.You better spend a lot of it."Just before Benjacomin took off Lavender sent on an additional message.He sent it directly through the Go-captain, who usually did not carry messages.The Go-captain was a relay commander of the Norstrilian fleet, but he had been carefully ordered not to look like it.The message concerned the planoform license—another twenty-odd tablets of stroon which could mortgage Viola Siderea for hundreds upon hundred of years.The captain said: "I don't have to send that through.The answer is yes." Benjacomin came into the control room.This was contrary to regulations, but he had hired the ship to violate regulations.The captain looked at him sharply."You're a passenger, get out." Benjacomin said: "You have my little yacht on board.I am the only man here outside of your people.""Get out.There's a fine if you're caught here.""It does not matter," Benjacomin said."I'll pay it.""You will, will you?" said the captain."You would not be paying twenty tablets of stroon.That's ridiculous.Nobody could get that much stroon." Benjacomin laughed, thinking of the thousands of tablets he would soon have.All he had to do was to leave the planoform ship behind, strike once, go past the kittons and come back.His power and his wealth came from the fact that he knew he could now reach it.The mortgage of twenty tablets of stroon against this planet was a low price to pay if it would pay off at thousands to one.The captain replied:"It's not worth it, it just is not worth risking twenty tablets for your being here.But I can tell you how to get inside the Norstrilian communications net if that is worth twenty-seven tablets."Benjacomin went tense.For a moment he thought he might die.All this work, all this training—the dead boy on the beach, the gamble with the credit, and now this unsuspected antagonist!He decided to face it out."What do you know?" said Benjacomin."Nothing," said the captain."You said 'Norstrilia.' ""That I did," said the captain."If you said Norstrilia, you must have guessed it.Who told you?""Where else would a man go if you look for infinite riches? If you get away with it.Twenty tablets is nothing to a man like you.""It's two hundred years' worth of work from three hundred thousand people," said Benjacomin grimly."When you get away with it, you will have more than twenty tablets, and so will your people."And Benjacomin thought of the thousands and thousands of tablets."Yes, that I know.""If you don't get away with it, you've got the card.""That's right.All right.Get me inside the net.I'll pay the twenty-seven tablets.""Give me the card."Benjacomin refused.He was a trained thief, and he was alert to thievery.Then he thought again.This was the crisis of his life.He had to gamble a little on somebody.He had to wager the card."I'll mark it and then I'll give it back to you [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]