Read Ebook: Reign of the telepuppets by Galouye Daniel F Birmingham Lloyd Illustrator

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Ebook has 611 lines and 25070 words, and 13 pages

Bigboss was by far the most magnificent member of the clan--if indeed, he should condescend to regard himself as belonging to the set at all. Fully twice the size of any of the others, he reared pompously erect on four stout appendages. Through its ports, his central section offered glowing evidence of the nuclear processes within. Majestic in stance, he swung a pair of formidable members--the auxiliary blaster and a massive, extensible vise.

Bigboss reacted abruptly to the realization that Minnie was watching him. No longer was his digital subsystem receiving her stream of telemetric signals. Relays clicked within his control section and video gain brought intensified visual awareness in all four quadrants. Immediately he spotted Minnie, immobile and ungainly as gyros balanced her elongated metal form on six jointed legs.

Her drill head, held high above the outcropping on which she had been working, glinted in the light of a shimmering, golden sun. Her single, wide-angle lens, set like a Cyclopean eye in its chrome-plated forehead, was focused intently on him.

Interrupting his subliminal correlation of data from the other workers, he sent Minnie an indignant "back-to-work" impulse. Reluctantly, she sank her bit into the rock.

But she had ingested only a slotful of fragments when the ground bulged beside her. Displaced soil slid away and Screw Worm erupted, carrying in his thread pouches mineral specimens for her analyzers.

Bigboss generated more easily as he watched Worm at work. Not that the menial helper, who occupied the lowest rung on the ladder, was worthy of speculative attention. But a laboring borer meant Minnie was pre-occupied with her limited supervisory function and couldn't be plotting to supplant him.

Working near Minnie, Seismo squatted at his sedentary task. Sensor rod sunk to bedrock, he was proudly purring an encoded disclosure of distant rumblings beneath the surface. Less than a hectometer away, Sky Watcher's tripodal locomotive system was bringing him carefully up a rise. Arriving, he assumed the location Sun Watcher had only recently abandoned. He adjusted himself on dead level, then thrust out a number of lensed tubes that locked on a referent star, three distant planets and a smaller satellite.

At that moment came an excited eureka impulse from Breather, posted outside a cave and briskly inflating and deflating the external pouches that bracketed his long, cylindrical form. The impulse proudly told of his detection of oxygen traces.

Nearby, Scraper diligently shoveled soil into his scoop in an endless search for micro-organisms and DNA molecules. Grazer munched on a growth already identified as lichen. Peter the Meter sat on a knoll scanning the sky with his battery of inferometers, radiometers and bolometers.

Of the distant workers, Bigboss was most sensitively aware of the volant signals from Maggie. Kilometers away, she was covering the ground in great, leaping strides of abandon as she sought out and traced down each fascinating isomagnetic line of variation.

His master timer peaked in its four hundred-cycle sine wave, reminding him of the chore at hand. The sun had set and the huge, pink planet had already laid claim to the night sky. Just below it was the special grouping of stars that matched, point for point, the referent pattern on his orientation drum.

Programmed functions took over. Sensors hunted out the bright central star and aimed his parabolic antenna at the designated spot seven degrees southeastward. Then he loosed his transmission into subspace. Data stored over long hours of tedious sequencing surged from the tape, bringing a euphoria of relief.

Eventually telemetric transmission ended and Bigboss, as had become his custom, automatically turned his thoughts to the Totem.

Yes, it was time for Pilgrimage to Totem. And a fitting reward it would be, as always, for successful transmission.

He mustered the volition required to break functional compulsion. Then he sent the "fall-in" impulse to his subjects. Eventually the line of march took shape, with Bigboss leading his analyzers up the first hill and calling for the proper reverential attitude.

Behind him lumbered Minnie, her thick neck weighted by the bulky drill and swinging awkwardly with the sway of her six-legged stride. Seismo, encumbered with a faulty, dragging sensor rod, was having some difficulty maintaining a straight course.

Sky Watcher came along in lunging motions, a natural consequence of his tripodal system. Immediately to his rear, Sun Watcher, who held the fifth rung on the ladder, moved smoothly ahead with all his instruments retracted except the solar plasma detector.

Then there was a break in the line for Maggie, who could now be seen galloping along on an interceptive course. Peter the Meter, lurching from the imbalance of an extended boom-and-ball sensor, appeared somewhat like a many-spiked sphere on spindly legs.

Farther down the file, no deference was extended in the form of gaps for those missing workers who had yet to join the march.

Bringing up the rear were the diminutive Scraper and Grazer, resembling a pair of scurrying crabs, and Screw Worm, using his blade-edge jets to propel himself in a rolling, transverse motion.

Aware of commotion behind him, Bigboss continued unconcernedly up the rise. Sky Watcher, interpreting Seismo's faulty motions as an opportunity for his own forced ascendancy, had drawn back a photo-multiplier tube and sent it crashing into the other's rear plate.

The attack, though, was only self-thwarting, since it jarred a servo unit into retracting Seismo's dangling sensor rod. His locomotive integrity restored, he kicked out with a pedal pad and sent Sky Watcher flailing back into Sun Watcher. The latter rammed forward with his plasma detector's boom-and-ball shield, managing to knock Sky Watcher back into his proper position.

Finally fearful of damage to instruments, Bigboss gruffly radioed "cut-the-comedy" impulses, then trained his rearward lens on Minnie. She had inched furtively forward and was now menacing his upper section with her drill head.

He considered wielding his blaster but rejected that expedient as an excessive and unnecessary ostentation. Instead he countered by raising his extensible vise. The lesser show of strength sufficed to discourage Minnie's ambition, for the moment at least.

How foolish she was to imagine she could supplant Him as the Supreme Being!

Let her try.

Even if she succeeded, he would merely deny her a place at the trough next feeding period.

Stewart reflected that rare indeed were the occasions on which Mortimer came anywhere near the nasal target. Conceding the loss of nearly an entire day, he waited for Director Randall's permissive nod, then joined Mortimer in cutting the new navigation tapes.

It took two hours to process all data and feed them into the SCC-772. When the computer burped out the new heading, Stewart threaded the tape into the control programmer and decided to spend the uneventful period of subspace travel in his bunk.

Sleep came swiftly, but it was shallow and restless. More than once over the next several hours, as he plummeted down a chasm of nightmares, he regretted having left the control compartment.

First his dreams brought him back to the Hyadean Cluster, as they had on so many occasions during recent weeks. And, for a while, he drank in the blue-green beauty of the seven--or, was it eight?--worlds that seemed to beckon with all their irresistible allure.

They were incredibly splendrous, these planets that would soon embrace man and feed and clothe and shelter him. But, as he admired them in his dream, a sort of astronomical surrealism bunched them together--all in orbit around a central, massive sun--until it seemed they were occupying so compact an area that they must surely crumble under the weight of their mutual attraction.

And, as though upon his suggestion, crumble they did. Only, it was no pulverizing force that scattered them into fragmented rings, such as those around Sol's Saturn. Instead, each planet cracked like a hatching egg, its crust stripping away and exposing beneath a gruesome Harpy that was all razor-sharp talons and vicious beak and slime-filmed, ruffled feathers.

Stewart tried to scream himself awake but couldn't. He only flailed helplessly in the void while monstrous wings thrashed space into a frenzy, producing great currents that set the stars themselves to eddying and swirling.

They dived at him, but before their talons could sink into his flesh he awoke trembling and cold in his twisted, moist clothes.

When he returned to the control compartment, the ship was back in normal space and within Aldebaran Four-B's gravitational field.

He joined Carol Cummings in the forward section, hooking his arm through a view-port strap and mooring himself against null gravity.

"You suppose we're home free?" she asked uncertainly.

Her normally effusive smile, he noticed, had moderated considerably. "If McAllister doesn't louse up his landing."

"I take it he's not very efficient."

"Pure and simple understatement. Last time out he missed an entire continent. It was a case for Search and Rescue."

Carol pressed forward and soft light from Aldebaran Four, off the port bow, warmed her sculpturesque features with primrose high lights. "I should imagine he would have been cashiered."

He busied himself with frequency adjustment on his portable transmitter. With it he would be able to tell, soon after landing, whether the Operations Co-ordinator could still be reached orally through its command discriminator circuit.

He flicked on the power switch, positioned the microphone comfortably against his larynx and sharply intoned a series of numerals. An oscilloscope faithfully traced the amplitude pattern, verifying effective transmission.

Down the companionway in the pilot's compartment, he could see McAllister anchored in his acceleration couch. He was drifting back and forth between padding and slack restraining straps, vicariously lost in the blood-and-guts action of a dramatape feeding into the view slot of his helmet.

Stewart read the label on the empty container--"The Kowalski Bros. in the Korean War."

"Always has his head buried in one of those escapist tapes, hasn't he?" Carol observed, still staring out the port.

"I don't think he ever grew up," Stewart agreed. But, again, even the Bureau seemed to contain its share of coasters who had never quite reached maturity, he remembered.

"Even in the Bureau," Carol observed thoughtfully, "you'll find coasters who've never reached maturity."

Intuitively, he tensed. Was it just coincidence that she had repeated, almost word for word, his own thoughts?

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