STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael Read online

  Presently another boarder joined them, one of the regulars who had rooms on the third floor, a slim, dark girl with big gray eyes behind thick-lensed round spectacles. Without a word Joshua slid a section of the paper across the table to her, and she, too, relapsed into quiet perusal. Here was another, thought Ishmael, who prized silence.

  Three-quarters of an hour later the girl rose, and padded softly into the kitchen. There was the clank of a tin pot on the stove, and the soft slurp of water from the bucket. A stove-lid rattled and ashes were stirred to life with a silken slurring.

  Josh raised his head. “Are you making tea?”

  “Do you want some?” called back the girl’s voice from the semidarkness of the kitchen.

  “If it wouldn’t be any trouble.”

  Beyond the doorway a light moved around a little, then she came back, blowing out a kitchen candle. “It should be ready soon,” she promised. “You’re—”

  “Joshua Bolt. This is Ishmael Marx. We’re from Seattle.”

  “Ah.” She smiled, and her thin, somewhat stern face flashed into brief brightness. “Sarah Gay. Thank you,” she added, as Ish handed her another section of the newspaper. A comfortable time of quiet again, as they wordlessly traded pieces of the newspaper back and forth, until the kettle in the kitchen bubbled, and she disappeared again, to return with three tin mugs on a cheap japanned tray. “It’s my tea, by the way; I keep my own canister in my room, so don’t let Mrs. O. charge you for it afterwards.”

  “Would she?” asked Josh, raising his head.

  Sarah Gay chuckled. “She’d charge you for the mud on your boots. She’s a good sort, but as she’ll tell you, life ain’t cheap. We will, however, wickedly steal her sugar, and not tell her about using her spoons and mugs.” She handed Josh a sugar bowl, with white squares of lump sugar glistening like snow, and a couple of round-backed, almost S-shaped little teaspoons.

  “Why not?” Ishmael wanted to know.

  “You want to be charged rental for the spoons?” She widened her gray eyes at him in mock dismay. Ish raised one eyebrow in reply, and cautiously tasted the sugar. He flinched in surprise from the sweetness, and the alien thought flashed through his mind, Don’t they know refined sugar is a poison?

  Evidently not. Joshua was happily putting three lumps of it into his tea. So was Sarah Gay, but neither commented when Ishmael did not. Food preferences, he had noted, were loose within certain strictly defined limits. No one had commented more than once upon his vegetarianism, the result of a vague sense of disgust at the thought of eating flesh. They seemed to take it as one with Aaron’s unobtrusive avoidance of pork. Not putting refined sugar in one’s tea seemed to come under the same heading. There were so many things to be careful of, so many traps that did not even appear to be traps.

  Joshua stirred his tea, and set the spoon down beside his section of the newspaper. Then, with a glint of mischief lurking in the back of his eye, he hit the lip of the deep-curved bowl of the spoon, flipping the implement end over end and landing it precisely between Ish’s hands.

  Ishmael looked up in surprise. Josh was innocently reading the paper. Idly, Ish positioned the spoon, calculated the angle of the curve and amount of force necessary, and tapped the end, and the spoon landed with a neat “plop” in Joshua’s tea.

  Josh looked up, startled, and Ish was leafing through the editorial page without a sign of having moved. Sarah, her head bent over the advertisements, gave no indication of having seen the interchange at all.

  Joshua regarded Ishmael narrowly for a moment. Then, with that same air of innocent doodling, he idled a lump of sugar onto the end of the spoon-handle, calculated distance and angles and vectors and force, and launched it, like a stone from a miniscule catapult, to drop smack in the middle of Ish’s newspaper.

  Ishmael considered. The game was absolutely illogical. Yet if he remembered correctly the principles of gravitational-vector gunnery—and he did, though where and how he had learned them in the first place eluded him—he could easily top Joshua’s simple trajectory acrobatics. And besides, he had no intention of allowing a human to win at this game. ...

  Far-off city clocks were chiming midnight. Fog had settled once more upon San Francisco, muffling the steps of the man who trudged up the hill toward the tall clapboard house on Filbert Street. There were no lights in the windows that Aaron could see. Humming the rags of a gaudy tune to himself, he fished in his waistcoat pocket for his latchkey, then stopped at some sound in the fog. The sidewalk at this point turned into steps up the side of Telegraph Hill—surely he had heard other footfalls than his own?

  But there were none now.

  He climbed a few more steps, and heard them again, just enough out of sync not to be an echo. He paused—they paused. He wished he had Ish’s acuteness of hearing, and then modified the wish to a desire for Ish’s company at the moment. Very little of the moonlight was able to penetrate the fog, and his world was limited to a few feet in any direction.

  Cautiously, he looked at the hillslope where it dropped away past the edge of the board steps. Rough, weedy and very steep; but if worse came to worst he could circle over the open ground and up toward the boardinghouse that way.

  That thought was foolish, he told himself. If he were being pursued by robbers it made better sense to stick to the path than to scramble around vacant lots where they could slug him and relieve him of his money in peace.

  Besides, they might not be robbers at all.

  He called out, “Is anybody there?”

  In the dining room of Mrs. O’Shaughnessy’s, Joshua and Ishmael completed their precariously-balanced chevaux-de-frise of saltshakers, forks, and a folded section of the newspaper, and were now angling two spoons and a much-battered sugarlump into position to create an elaborate double flip that would throw the sugar into Josh’s mug of now cold tea. It had taken them dozens of unsuccessful tries. Sarah, sitting on the sidelines, had refrained from comment, but as she finished each section of the newspaper she carefully exchanged it for one of the others in the barrier, making the substitutions with a mathematical neatness and timing that spoke well, in Joshua’s eyes, for her appreciation of the importance of the experiment.

  Just as Joshua was raising his finger to trigger the first spoon into flight Ish held up a hand, and said, “What was that?”

  Josh froze in mid-motion. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “That was Aaron’s voice.”

  Josh intercepted Sarah Gay’s glance of surprise, and realized the impossibility of Ishmael recognizing, or even hearing, voices in the street. But then, according to Biddy Cloom, it was only due to this man’s abnormally acute hearing that his brother was alive today. He started to speak, just as a shot cracked from somewhere outside, very close to the building. Josh snatched the lamp from the table and headed through the parlor toward the outer door at a run, Sarah and Ishmael in his wake.

  The raw cold of the inky night smote him in the face as he flung open the outer door. Holding the lamp high he yelled “Aaron?” and thought he saw two forms bulking through the foggy darkness. They seemed to have been looking out across the dark, uneven steepness of the hillside beyond the sidewalk, but as he appeared in the lighted doorway they swung around. The lamplight gleamed on a long cylinder of metal. For a split instant Joshua realized what a fool he was, to show himself up as a target, and wondered if that realization was to be his last.

  But the men plunged away into the fog. He heard the retreating thunder of their footsteps on the board stairs. Then silence, all sound muffled by the clammy mist that walled them in and ate like cold sickness into his bones. For a moment all he heard was the faint hissing of the lamp in his hand, as the cold damp of the night contacted the heated glass.

  Then, quite close, he heard the dragging limp of Ish’s footsteps in the thin dirt of the field. The dark, narrow shape appeared on the edge of the lamplight’s glowing circle. He realized Ish must have kept low and ducked out the door around and past him
while he was stupidly making a target of himself, and it crossed his mind to wonder if Stemple’s nephew had ever been an Indian scout. That kind of instinctive strategy wasn’t something you’d expect of an accountant.

  But his thoughts were broken by Ish’s quiet voice. “He’s down here. Carefully—the ground is very rough.”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what it was all about.” Aaron Stemple looked up, still a little groggily, as Ishmael shut the bedroom door on the last of the inquisitive boarders and the strident questions of Mrs. O’Shaughnessy and came back to the bed. In the hallway the boardinghouse-keeper’s voice could still be heard.

  “Whist, and I’ve run a good house all me life ...” retreated away amid a rustling of cheap chintz and curling-papers.

  “What happened?” asked Josh, holding a china wash bowl filled with cold water from which Sarah occasionally fished a cloth to add to the compresses on Stemple’s ankle.

  The mill owner shrugged. “I assume I was followed up from the gambling hall. I’d won a little—about fifty-five dollars—nothing to kill over.”

  “Mr. Stemple,” said Sarah Gay, her head still bent over his wrenched ankle and her dark hair half-unraveled from its restraining hairpins, “in this town there are men who will kill for fifty-five cents. Does that hurt?”

  Aaron’s gasp of pain made a reply unnecessary.

  “Excellent,” she said heartlessly. “Hand me another cloth, Mr. Bolt.” She pushed her specs further up her nose, and went on wrapping.

  “You think they might have been crimps?” asked Joshua doubtfully.

  “Crimps?” asked Ishmael, uncomprehending.

  “Out to shanghai him?” said Sarah thoughtfully.

  Aaron opened his mouth to explain these somewhat arcane terms, which he knew must mean nothing to the alien, but Ishmael said, “But if they were attempting to kidnap him to press him into service on a ship, why would they shoot at him? Dead he would be of no value to anyone.”

  Stemple was still trying to assimilate the realization that his nephew understood that very colloquial expression when Sarah asked, “Could it have been because you resisted them?”

  “No,” said Aaron. “In fact I never even saw them. I heard them behind me as I came up the hill. When one of them fired at me I took a dive into the field, and of course your”—he visibly cut off the word damn out of respect for a lady’s presence—“your San Francisco fields are more like taking a dive over a cliff. Maybe it was just as well, since by the time I’d rolled to the bottom they couldn’t have shot me in the fog.” He reached up gingerly to touch the cut on his forehead, under its neat bandage of torn sheet and sticking plaster.

  Standing beside the lace-curtained window, Ishmael glanced back at them with a sudden flicker of surprise. Why, he wondered, had he simply assumed that weapons could still be aimed in the zero visibility of a foggy night? These people didn’t have ... didn’t have ...

  He put his hand to his forehead, struggling to remember. Something you clipped to the barrel of a weapon, a sighting device that didn’t need light. Like the microcircuitry that operated automatic doors and the faint, characteristic hum of air conditioning, it hovered momentarily within touching distance of his mind, then retreated again into the cloudy memory of white pain.

  He shook his head, and returned to Stemple’s bedside. Aaron’s mud-smeared coat hung over the back of the room’s single wooden chair; his shirtsleeves looked very white against the mingled colors of the faded quilt upon which he lay. Sarah Gay finished tying up her work with deft fingers. Ish made a note of the treatment she had used, and asked, “It is a sprain, then, rather than a break?”

  She nodded, and pushed aside the tendrils of her hair that had fallen around her face, one hand going to the bun at the nape of her neck to locate more hairpins. “Although a bad sprain can be worse than a break. You’ll have to be off that for a week at least, Mr. Stemple.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  Joshua and Aaron both looked up at Ishmael, startled and a little taken aback by the suggestion. Ish realized he had walked into yet another unmarked trap.

  Their surprise wasn’t lost on Miss Gay. A trace of a wry smile flicked the corner of her mouth and vanished. “I do nursing at St. Brendan’s Charity Hospital,” she replied in her low voice. She got to her feet, shaking out her black skirts. “And as I begin work there at six in the morning, I had best get a little sleep if I’m to be worth anything. Goodnight, gentlemen.”

  Joshua walked with her to the door. When Ishmael slipped from the room a few minutes later the pair of them were still standing in the narrow, ill-lit hall, talking in quiet voices; neither of them looked up as he made his way down the stairs. He crossed the parlor in darkness, soundlessly unbolted the front door and stepped out into the night.

  The fog was thicker now, the last of the feeble traces of moonlight gone. Around him, the city was utterly silent, wrapped in its cotton-wool wadding of mists, like something set adrift, cut off from all space and all time. Ishmael scouted for a distance down the board sidewalk and steps, and into the field along the side. He was not certain what he was seeking, if anything. In any case he found nothing that meant anything to him. Yet he could not rid himself of that sense of something vital that he must do, of the feeling that there was something here that he ought to know. The feeling persisted as he returned to the boardinghouse, and followed him into his uneasy, unhuman dreams.

  Chapter 9

  IT WAS NOT CAPTAIN KIRK who found the first loose end of the knot of time and space whose center was Starbase Twelve, but Lieutenants Uhura and Sulu, returning to the transporter section disgracefully late from the Wonder Bar, with eight minutes to go of a twelve-hour shore leave on the base.

  “So here I am,” Sulu was saying, “completely unable to find a room for the night because everything in walking distance of the terminal is rented out to the local streetwalkers and their clients. ...”

  “Poor Sulu,” commiserated Uhura, giggling. “If you hadn’t been so virtuous ...”

  “Virtuous hell”—Sulu laughed—“I was tired. So the only thing I could do was get back on the train again. ...”

  “Oh, no ...” And she leaned against his shoulder, chuckling helplessly over the picture of a seventeen-year-old Sulu wandering through half the countries of Southeast Asia, armed only with his OmniRail Pass, vainly seeking a room for the night. “So where did you finally spend the night?”

  Sulu laughed again at the memory. “Well, that was pretty funny, too. I got back into Saigon, it is now six-thirty in the morning, I haven’t had any sleep and ... What’s that?” He raised his head, as if the scent of trouble had hit his veins like a sobriety drug. Uhura was silent, turning her head to listen.

  But the sound was not repeated, nor was any other. The corridors of the private sector of the base were never very well-lighted, no matter what the hour. Power was too expensive for private operators to waste on mere corridor-space. Even the main hallways, like this, were generally pretty dingy, and this close to the end of the third shift it was not uncommon for them to be completely deserted.

  About ten feet in front of Sulu and Uhura was a junction where one of the smaller hallways crossed the wider one in which they stood, leading away toward what Sulu presumed to be barracks or semiprivate residences of those who in another era would have been termed camp-followers—not necessarily prostitutes, but that secondary army of merchants, entertainers and purveyors of alternate food sources that attaches itself to any military establishment. Soundlessly, Sulu indicated that he would backtrack the forty or fifty feet to the last crossing and circle the block that contained Sexy Sadie’s Literature Emporium and Haircutting Establishment, and flank whatever the trouble was.

  Uhura nodded. Starbases on the whole are among the safest places in the galaxy because the control of the environment is, of necessity, so strict. Even civilians walk a little more carefully, knowing how easily they could be tracked down if need arose. Thus any danger that does
break out on a starbase is seldom petty.

  Mentally Uhura counted steps, giving Sulu time to move down the corridors, around those blind aluminum corners. She listened for any further repetition of the sound she wasn’t even certain she’d heard, a kind of thump and slur, as of suppressed struggle. She thought she heard something else—the mutter of voices, and a guttural curse. The click of metal touching the corridor wall.

  She moved forward, her sense of danger heightened by the vast quantity of alcohol she had imbibed in the course of the evening. But no troopers, even on their own ship, will get so drunk they can’t react to danger, and Uhura was no exception. A glance around the corner showed her two dark forms supporting a third, half-dragging and half-carrying it down the hallway, the dim yellowish light of cheap lumenpanels gleaming wetly on the streak of green blood in the unconscious man’s white hair.

  Uhura called out, “Halt!” and braced herself to duck back behind the corner if the people on either side turned out to be armed. No military personnel carried phasers on leave, but there was no real way of making sure the stricture was obeyed by civilians.

  The men turned. She had a confused glimpse of swarthy, bearded faces—Klingons, she thought, before they turned away again and started to run as fast as their burden would let them.

  Sulu stepped out from the next junction of corridor. “That’s far enough!” he yelled, though he hadn’t a weapon to back himself up with any more than Uhura did.

  But as he’d half-expected, his mere appearance was enough to unsettle the kidnappers. The Klingons—if they were Klingons, because out of uniform and in the bad lighting they could have been any of the mid-range brown-pigmented variants of the humanoid races—dropped their burden and ran, heading back toward Uhura under the mistaken impression that she presented the lesser threat.