Star Song and Other Stories Part 4

Hive Mind Weakness Number Three: injure a part and you injure the whole. "That's it!"

I snapped, standing up and slamming my helmet against the one behind me.

"Fire to injure, everyone, not to kill. Go for the arms and legs-try and take the bodies out of the fight without killing them. Pa.s.s the word-we're going to see if we can overload the Drymnu with pain."

For a wonder, they understood, and by the time Waskin and I were back in the game ourselves it was already becoming clear that we indeed had a chance. It was far easier to injure the bodies than to kill them-far easier and far quicker-and as the incapacitated bodies fell to the deck, their agonized thrashing hindered the advance of those behind them. The air-blast cannon continued its attacks for a while, but while all of us got painfully pincushioned by the flying shrapnel, Waskin's remained the only seriously life-threatening injury. We kept firing, and the bodies kept charging, and I gritted my teeth waiting for the Drymnu to switch tactics on us.

But he didn't. I'd been right, all along: for all his sophistication and alien intelligence, the Drymnu had no concept of warfare beyond the brute-force numbers game he'd latched onto. Even now, when it was clearly failing, he could come up with no alternative to it, and with each pa.s.sing minute I could feel the attack becoming more sluggish or more erratic in turn as the Drymnu began to lose his ability to focus on us. Eventually, it reached the point where I knew there would be no more surprises. The Drymnu, agonized probably beyond anything he had ever felt before, and with more pain coming in faster than it could be dealt with, had literally become unable to think straight.

Approximately five minutes later, the attacking waves finally began to retreat back down the corridor; and even as we began to give chase, the radio jamming abruptly ceased and the Drymnu surrendered.

The full story-or at least the official story-didn't surface from the dust for nearly two months, but it came out pretty nearly as we on the Volga had already expected it to. The Drymnu-either the total thing or some large fraction of it-had apparently decided that having a fragmented race out among the stars was both an abomination of nature and highly dangerous besides, and had taken it upon himself to see whether humanity could indeed be destroyed. Point man-or point whatever-in a war that was apparently already over. The Drymnu, defeated by a lowly unarmed freighter, had clearly learned his lesson.

And I was left to meditate once more on the frustrations of my talent.

Sure, we won. Better than that, the Volga was actually famous, at least among official circles. To be sure, our medals were given to us at a private ceremony and we were warned gently against panicking the general public with stories about what had happened, but it was still fame of a sort. And we did save humanity from having to fight a war of survival. At least this time.

And yet....

If I hadn't been standing there next to Waskin-hadn't decided to take the time to repair his air tube-we would very likely all have been killed... and I would have been spared the humiliation of having to sit around the Volga and listen to Waskin tell everyone over and over again how it had been his last-minute inspiration that had saved the day.

The wrong place at the wrong time.

Hitmen-See Murderers

It had been a long, slow, frustrating day, full of cranky machines, crankier creditors, and not nearly enough customers. In other words, a depressingly typical day. But even as Radley Grussing slogged up the last flight of stairs to his apartment he found himself whistling a little tune to himself. From the moment he'd pa.s.sed the first landing-had looked down the first-floor hallway and seen the yellow plastic bag leaning up against each door-he'd known there was hope. Hope for his struggling little print shop; hope for his life, his future, and-with any luck at all-for his chances with Alison. Hope in double-ream lots, wrapped up in a fat yellow bag and delivered to his door.

The new phone books were out.

"Let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages." He sang the old Bell Telephone jingle to himself as he scooped up the bag propped up against his own door and worked the key into the lock. Or, rather, that was what he tried to sing. After four flights of stairs, it came out more like, "Let your...

fingers do the... walking through... the Yellow... Pages."

From off to the side came the sound of a door closing, and with a flush of embarra.s.sment Radley realized that whoever it was had probably overheard his little song. "Shoot," he muttered to himself, his face feeling warm. Though maybe the heat was just from the exertion of climbing four flights of stairs.

Alison had been bugging him lately about getting more exercise; maybe she was right.

He got the door open, and for a moment stood on the threshold carefully surveying his apartment. TV and VCR sitting on their woodgrain stand right where they were supposed to be. Check. The doors to kitchen and bedroom standing half-open at exactly the angles he'd put them before he'd left for work that morning. Check.

Through his panting Radley heaved a cautious sigh of relief. The existence of the TV showed no burglars had come and gone; the carefully positioned doors showed no one had come and was still there.

At least, no one probably was still there....

As quietly as he could, he stepped into the apartment and closed the door, turning the doork.n.o.b lock but leaving the three deadbolts open in case he had to make a quick run for it. On a table beside the door stood an empty pewter vase.

He picked it up by its slender neck, left the yellow plastic bag on the floor by the table and tiptoed to the bedroom door. Steeling himself, panting as quietly as was humanly possible, he nudged the door open and peered in. No one. Still on tiptoe, he repeated the check with the kitchen, with the same result.

He gave another sigh of relief. Alison thought he was a little on the paranoid side, and wasn't particularly hesitant about saying so. But he read the papers and he watched the news, and he knew that the quiet evil of the city was nothing to be ignored or scoffed at.

But once more, he'd braved the evil-braved it, and won, and had made it backto his own room and safety. Heading back to the door, he locked the deadbolts, returned the vase to its place on the table, and retrieved the yellow bag.

It was only as he was walking to the kitchen with it, his mind now freed from the preoccupations of survival in a hostile world, that his brain finally registered what his fingers had been trying to tell him all along.

The yellow bag was not, in fact, made of plastic.

"Huh," he said aloud, raising it up in front of his eyes for a closer look.

It looked like plastic, certainly, like the same plastic they'd been delivering phone books in for he couldn't remember how many years. But the feel of the thing was totally wrong for plastic.

In fact, it was totally wrong for anything.

"Well, that's funny," he said, continuing on into the kitchen. Laying the bag on the table, he pulled up one of the four more-or-less-matching chairs and sat down.

For a minute he just looked at the thing, rubbing his fingers slowly across its surface and digging back into his memory for how these bags had felt in the past. He couldn't remember, exactly; but it was for sure they hadn't felt like this. This wasn't like any plastic he'd ever felt before. Or like any cloth, or like any paper.

"It's something new, then," he told himself. "Maybe one of those new plastics they're making out of corn oil or something."

The words weren't much comfort. In his mind's eye, he saw the thriller that had been on cable last week, the one where the spy had been blown to bits by a shopping bag made out of plastic explosive....

He gritted his teeth. "That's stupid," he said firmly. "Who in the world would go to that kind of trouble to kill me? Period; end of discussion," he added to forestall an argument. Alison had more or less accepted his habit of talking to himself, especially when he hadn't seen her for a couple of days. But even she drew the line at arguing aloud with himself. "End of discussion," he repeated.

"So. Let's quit this nonsense and check out the ad."

He took a deep breath, exhaled it explosively like a shotputter about to go into his little loop-de-spin. Taking another deep breath, he reached into the bag and, carefully, pulled the phone book out.

Nothing happened.

"There-you see?" he chided himself, pushing the bag across the table and pulling the directory in front of him. "Alison's right; there's paranoia, and then there's para-noi-a. Gotta stop watching those late cable shows. Now, let's see here..."

He checked his white-pages listings first, both his apartment's and the print shop's. Both were correct. "Great," he muttered. "And now"-he hummed himself a little trumpet flourish as he turned to the Yellow Pages-"the piece de resistance. Let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages, dum dum de dum..." He reached the L's, turned past to the P's...And there it was. Blazing out at him, in full three-color glory, the display ad for Grussing A-One-Excellent Printing And Copying.

"Now that," he told himself proudly, "is an ad. You just wait, Radley old boy-an ad like that'll get you more business than you know what to do with. You'll see-there's nowhere to go but up from now on."

He leafed through the pages, studying all the other print-shop ads and trying hard not to notice that six of his compet.i.tors had three-color displays fully as impressive as his own. That didn't matter. His ad-and the business it was going to bring in-would lift him up out of the hungry pack, bring him to the notice of important people with important printing needs. "You'll see," he told himself confidently. The Printers heading gave way to Printers-Business Forms, and then to Printing Equipment and Printing Supplies. "Huh; Steven's has moved," he noted with some surprise. He hadn't bought anything from Steven's for over a year-probably about time he checked out their prices again. Idly, he turned another page- And stopped. Right after the short listing of Prosthetic Devices was a heading he'd never seen before.

Prost.i.tutes.

"Well, I'll be D-double-darned," he muttered in amazement. "I didn't know they could advertise."

He let his eyes drift down the listings, turned the page. There were a lot of names there-almost as many, he thought, as the attorney listings at the other end of the Yellow Pages, except that unlike the lawyers, the prost.i.tutes had no display ads. "Wonder when the phone company decided to let this go in." He shook his head. "Hoo, boy-the egg's gonna hit the fan for sure when the Baptists see this."

He scanned down the listing. Names-both women's and a few men's-addresses, phone numbers-it was all there. Everything anyone so inclined would need to get themselves some late-night companionship.

He frowned. Addresses. Not just post office boxes. Real street addresses.

Home addresses.

"Wait just a minute, here," he muttered. "Just a D-double-darned minute."

Nevada, he'd heard once, had legal prost.i.tution; but here-"This is nuts," he decided. The cops could just go right there and arrest them. Couldn't they? I mean, even those escort and ma.s.sage places usually just have phone numbers.

Don't they?"

With the phone book sitting right in front of him, there was an obvious way to answer that question. Sticking a corner of the yellow bag in to mark his place, he turned backwards toward the E's. Excavating Contractors, Elevators -oops; too far- He froze, finger and thumb suddenly stiff where they gripped a corner of the page. A couple of headings down from Elevators was another list of names, shorter than the prost.i.tutes listing but likewise distinguished by the absence of display ads. And the heading here...Embezzlers.

His lips, he suddenly noticed, were dry. He licked them, without noticeable effect. "This," he said, his words sounding eerie in his ears, "is nuts.

Embezzlers don't advertise. I mean, come on now."

He willed the listing to vanish, to change to something more reasonable, like Embalmers. But that heading was there, too... and the Embezzlers heading didn't go away.

He took a deep breath and, resolutely, turned the page. "I've been working too hard," he informed himself loudly. "Way too hard. Now. Let's see, where was I going... right-escort services."

He found the heading and its page after page of garish and seductive display ads. Sure enough, none of them listed any addresses. Just for completeness, he flipped back to the M's, checking out the ma.s.sage places. Some had addresses; others-the ones advertising out-calls only-had just phone numbers.

"Makes sense," he decided. "Otherwise the cops and self-appointed guardians of public morals could just sit there and scare all their business away. So what gives with this?" He started to turn back to the prost.i.tute listing, his fingers losing their grip on the slippery pages and dropping the book open at the end of the M's- And again he froze. There was another listing of names and addresses there, just in front of Museums. Shorter than either the prost.i.tute or embezzler lists; but the heading more than made up for it.

Murderers.

He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head. "This is crazy," he breathed. "I mean, really crazy." Carefully, he opened his eyes again. The Murderers listing was still there. Almost unwillingly, he reached out a finger and rubbed it across the ink. It didn't rub off, like cheap ink would, or fade away, like a hallucination ought to.

It was real.

He was still staring at the book, the sea of yellow dazzling his eyes, when the knock came at his front door.

He fairly jumped out of the chair, jamming his thigh against the underside of the table as he did so. "It's the FBI," he gasped under his breath. It was their book-their book of the city's criminals. It had been delivered here by mistake, and they were here to get it back.

Or else it was the mob's book- "Radley?" A familiar voice came through the steel-cored wood panel. "You home?"

He felt a little surge of relief, knees going a little shaky. "There's paranoia," he chided himself, "and then there's para-noi-a." He raised his voice. "Coming, Alison," he called.

"Hi," she said with a smile as he opened the door, her face just visible over the large white bag in her arms. "Got the table all set?"

"Oh-right," he said, taking the bag from her. The warm scent of fried chicken rose from it; belatedly, he remembered he was supposed to have made a salad, too. "Uh-no, not yet. Hey, look, come in here-you've got to see this."

He led her to the kitchen, dropping the bag on the counter beside the sink and sitting her down in front of the phone book. The yellow bag still marked the page with the Prost.i.tutes heading; turning there, he pointed. "Do you see what I.

see?" he asked, his mouth going dry. If she didn't see anything, it had suddenly occurred to him, it would mean his brain was in serious trouble....

"Huh," she said. "Well, that's new. I thought prost.i.tution was still illegal."

"Far as I know, it still is," he agreed, feeling another little surge of relief.

So he wasn't going nuts. Or at least he wasn't going nuts alone. "Hang on, though-it gets worse."

She sat there silently as he flipped back to the Embezzlers section, and then forward again to point out the Murderers heading. "I don't know what else is here," he told her. "This is as far as I got."

She looked up, an odd expression on her face. "You do realize, I hope, that this is nothing but an overly elaborate practical joke. This stuff can't really be in a real phone book."

"Well... sure," he floundered. "I mean, I know that the phone company wouldn't-"

She was still giving him that look. "Radley," she said warningly. "Come on, now, let's not slide off reality into the cable end of the channel selector. No

one.

makes lists of prost.i.tutes and embezzlers and murderers. And even if someone did, they certainly wouldn't try to hide them inside a city directory."

"Yes, I know, Alison. But-well, look here." He pulled the yellow bag over and slid it into her hand. "Feel it. Does it feel like plastic to you? Or like anything else you've ever touched?"

Alison shrugged. "They make thousands of different kinds of plastics these days-"

"All right then, look here." He cut her off, lifting up the end of the phone book. "Here-at the binding. I'm a printer-I know how binding is done. These pages haven't just been slipped in somehow-they were bound in at the same time as all the others. How would someone have done that?"

"It's a joke, Radley," Alison insisted. "It has to be. All the phone books can't have-Well, look, it's easy enough to check. Let me go downstairs and get mine while you get the salad going."

Her apartment was just two floors down, and he'd barely gotten the vegetables out of the fridge and lined them up on the counter by the time she'd returned.

"Okay, here we go," she said, sitting down at the table again and opening her copy of the phone book. "Prost.i.tutes... nope, not here. Embezzlers... nope.

Murderers... still nope." She offered it to him.

He took it and gave it a quick inspection of his own. She was right; none of the strange headings seemed to be there. "But how could anyone have gotten the extra pages bound in?" he demanded putting it down and gesturing to his copy. "I mean, all you have to do is just look at the binding."

"I know." Alison shook her head, running a finger thoughtfully across the lower edge of the binding. "Well... I said it was overly elaborate. Maybe someone who knows you works where they print these things, and he got hold of the orig-oh, my G.o.d!"

Radley jumped a foot backwards, about half the distance Alison and her chair traveled. "What?" he snapped, eyes darting all around.

She was panting, her breath coming in short, hyperventilating gasps. "The...

the page. The listing..."

Radley dropped his eyes to the phone book. Nothing looked any different.

"What?