A Sense of Infinity Read online

  A SENSE OF INFINITY

  Howard L. Myers

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright© 2009 by Howard L. Myers

  Editors' afterword copyright2008 by Eric Flint & Guy Gordon.

  "The Infinity Sense" (writing as Verge Foray) was first published in Analog in November, 1968. "The Mind-Changer" was first published in Analog in July, 1969. "His Master'sVice" (writing as Verge Foray) was first published in Analog in May, 1968. "The Pyrophylic Saurian" was first published in Analog in January, 1970.

  "Polywater Doodle" was first published in Analog in February, 1971.

  "Ten Percent of Glory" (writing as Verge Foray) was first published in Fantastic in October, 1969. "Soul Affrighted" was first published in Amazing in January, 1971. "Bowerbird" (writing as Verge Foray) was first published in Fantastic in February, 1971. "Man Off a White Horse" was first published in Analog in July, 1972. "Cloud Chamber" was first published in 1977 by Popular Library.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

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  ISBN: 978-1-4391-3278-4

  Cover art by Alan Pollack

  First Baen paperback printing, July 2009

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  OLIVINE, RENEGADE

  His Master's Vice

  His ship roused Elmo Ixton out of deepsleep to the customary view of broad Kansas prairie, but he felt more uneasy than usual. Maybe the sleep hadn't been deep enough to keep his subconscious knocked out the entire two weeks.

  The thing to do was not think about it.

  With vigorous movements, and with cheerfulness intended to fool himself, he bounced out of the sleeptank and began exercising. "Schedule and coffee, Rollo," he said between bends.

  "Yes, sir, Proxad Ixton," the ship responded snappily.

  "Planetfall on Roseate in seventeen minutes. Coffee coming right up, sir."

  The prairie flickered and vanished from the holophane bulkheads, to be replaced by a view of nearby space with what was presumably the planet Roseate floating low to starboard.

  "NO!" Ixton yelled frantically, clutching at the back of his control chair for support. "Put the prairie back!"

  "Yes, sir," said the ship as Kansas reappeared. "Sorry, sir. Thought you would want to see the approach, sir." Ixton clung to the chair, stiffened his back to military erectness, and tried to push the terror from the spot where it nestled one inch behind his eyes. "Not this time, Rollo," he managed to say in a strangled voice. "Nothing I could see from out . . . from here . . . would be of concern to my duties on Roseate."

  "Very well, sir. Here's your coffee, sir."

  Ixton sank into the chair. With shaking hand he lifted the steaming cup from the serving pedestal that had risen out of the lounge deck. He sipped and said, "Excellent coffee, Rollo. Creamed and sugared just right." Rollo, after all, had feelings of sorts and didn't enjoy being yelled at. And of course the ship appreciated words of praise.

  "Thank you, sir," the ship responded, the words sounding a little stiff to Ixton.

  As he drank the coffee Ixton made his eyes rest on the distant Kansas horizon, past the homesteads baking under an early autumn sun. But for some reason the view lacked its usual tranquilizing effect, although he sat as solidly in his chair as he could, and tried to imagine the mass of old Mother Earth beneath him. Whether his sleep had been too shallow, or whether the toughness of his assignment on Roseate was getting to him, he didn't know. One thing he did know: he wanted down as fast as possible.

  "Are you getting landing instructions yet?" he asked.

  "No, sir."

  "Why not?" he demanded, trying to keep anxiety out of his voice.

  "I was awaiting your command, sir."

  Damn! Ixton fumed to himself. Now I've got Rollo too skittish to flip a relay on his own hook!

  "O.K.," he said, "call Port Control for instructions. And let me talk to them, please."

  "Roseate Control here!" barked a console speaker a few seconds later. "Receiving PSS Rollo. Go ahead."

  "Hello, Port Control," replied Ixton. "This is Proxad Elmo Ixton, manning PSS Rollo, coming in for landing with a TUA of twelve minutes forty seconds. Request landing instructions to ship."

  "You can come straight in, sir," responded Port Control. "We've been waiting for you! Instructions follow." As a series of blips and squawks began coming through, the speaker volume dropped to a whisper, since this was matter of no interest to Ixton. The man got up and paced the deck, feeling twitchy and wanting a cigarette, or something. Well, why not?

  "Let me have a smoke, Rollo," he directed.

  "Yes, sir." A thin white tube pushed out of the serving pedestal. Ixton grabbed the lighted cigarette and took a deep drag. This relaxed him slightly, but he resumed pacing as he smoked.

  At last he demanded, "Can't you shorten that TUA a couple of minutes, Rollo?"

  "Yes, sir. I'll get us down as swiftly as possible, sir."

  "Do that!" snapped Ixton.

  He paced some more and tried to plan a course of action to follow once he landed. But all he could really do was try to imagine the various possibilities that might confront him. Omar Olivine was far from an ordinary fugitive from justice. Not many years back Olivine had been a proxad in the Space Patrol himself—a competent proxad, and highly resourceful.

  Ixton hoped to simply sit on the situation until Patrol reinforcements arrived—if the planet's officials would stand for that. Technically and legally, Ixton's authority on Roseate would be supreme—a Space Patrolman's title of "proxad" stood for "proxy admiral," and it carried all the weight it implied. But law enforcement couldn't be divorced from politics and diplomacy, and part of Ixton's job was to avoid stirring anti-Patrol sentiment on Roseate, or any other world. And the planet had already been under total quarantine for two weeks, awaiting Ixton's arrival, and was doubtless indignant about it by now. Ixton pushed the butt of his cigarette into the wastecatcher and stared out over the prairie. There ought to be a way to make holophane scenes more realistic, he fretted. The focus was clear enough, the depth was convincing, and the colors far more accurate than they had been when he was a kid twenty years ago. But there was still a dead giveaway in the falsity of the viewer's relationship to the view: the deck of his control lounge did not actually attach itself to the prairie scene. It could be taken as a thin sheet of metal nearly flush with the ground of the prairie, or it could be the top of a tall tower, or the surface of a flying platform he was riding, or . . .

  He grabbed the back of the chair, swaying and muttering angrily at himself.

  "Pardon, sir?" asked Rollo.

  "Nothing! Never mind! Just get us down from here!"

  "Yes, sir. Only five more minutes, sir!"

  "Cigarette!"

  "Another, sir?"

  "Yes, damn it, another! Quit dawdling."

  The ship produced another cigarette for him and he sat down, glaring at the control console in front of the chair, not daring another look at the prairie scene.

  The PSS Rollo dropped toward Roseate's port swiftly enough to produce a fairly spectacular meteor trail. If any fidgety planetary officials had been watching the approach on radar, they would have been most gratified by the haste with which the Patrol was coming to take the situation in hand.

  The ship braked at the last possible second and came down with engin
es roaring. The shocktubes squealed painfully when the tripads banged on the plastcrete hardtop and the ship shivered to a halt.

  "Touchdown, sir," said the ship.

  "Touch" hardly seemed the word for it to Ixton, who had felt the thuds despite the paragravity field. But he had asked for it. He took a deep, jerky breath and said, "Very good, Rollo. Exterior view, please."

  The prairie gave way to the unpretty sight of Roseate's spaceport, a wide expanse of empty and dirty plastcrete, marked here and there with crash-depressions and cargo-spillage stains. The Port Control building stood half a mile away, and beyond it he could see in the distance the outskirts of Roseate City—the planet's principal town with some three hundred thousand souls.

  Of course the lounge deck did not attach itself to this view any more definitely than it had to the prairie, but this was unimportant. Ixton knew this scene was for real, that Rollo was squatting firmly in the middle of that ugly plastcrete. The knowledge was vastly comforting.

  "Link into local communications," he directed.

  "Yes, sir," said Rollo, and a moment later the console screen lighted to show a young woman visiphone operator. "Yes, sir?" she echoed Rollo's words.

  "I'm Proxad Elmo Ixton of the Space Patrol. Put me through to the Governor."

  "Right away, Proxad Ixton, and welcome to Roseate," she said with businesslike coquetry.

  Ixton gazed sternly at her, and she got busy. "Here's Governor Drake, sir."

  Drake had the heavy face and alertness of eye that, Ixton supposed, had been displayed by the majority of politicians since ancient Babylon. He beamed, "Welcome to Roseate, Proxad—"

  "Ixton," the Patrolman supplied. "Elmo Ixton. Thank you, Governor Drake. I want to confer with you and the planetary police chief as quickly as possible, Governor, and for a number of reasons it would be desirable to hold the meeting here, in my ship. I hope that isn't too much of an imposition . . . "

  "Oh, no!" said the governor with a quickly concealed flicker of annoyance. "Hassbruch and I will be there within an hour! As you can well imagine, Proxad Ixton, we're anxious to clear up this situation immediately, and you can count on our fullest cooperation."

  "I appreciate that, Governor. I'll be waiting."

  Ixton knew he had not handled the governor very diplomatically, but he realized, too, that he had very little talent along those lines. There was too much stiff funlessness in Ixton's makeup for people to warm to him easily. Even among his colleagues of the Patrol he was usually the man who stood silent and alone at the fringe of the crowd. Of course his fear of space and height—the reason why he spent his flight-time in the oblivion of deepsleep—made him more shy and withdrawn than he might have been. But even without that unremediable weakness, he would have remained a stiffneck, and he knew it. That was his personality, and he was stuck with it.

  But there were advantages. Perhaps he was short on friends, but people did have confidence in him. He was known as a "tough cop."

  "More coffee, sir?" asked the ship.

  "Not now, Rollo," he said. Being on firm ground he felt much better, so after a moment he added, "Rollo, I regret the way I behaved as we were coming in. I've told you the reason for it before—this unreasonable, uh, tension I sometimes experience when I'm in a high place. I'm afraid I can't explain it to you very clearly."

  "Never mind, sir," said the ship. "I understand perfectly."

  Ixton frowned at the response. That was laying it on pretty thick, after all. Rollo, with his compucortex, saying he could "understand perfectly" a human mental malfunction! Was Rollo patronizing him? But of course Rollo meant well, and it wouldn't do to take exception to the remark. But Ixton was deeply irked, nevertheless.

  "One question I would like to ask, sir," said Rollo.

  "Shoot," Ixton replied.

  "In view of this condition, sir, why do you remain on active Patrol duty rather than accept a post that would keep you on the ground?"

  "Because my work is important . . . and I can do it well. Also, except for the travel, which I can sleep through, I find the discharge of my duties most gratifying."

  The ship considered that for a moment before responding, "May I say, sir, that you are a highly courageous person to proceed with your work despite your condition."

  Definitely patronizing! Well, perhaps that was to be expected, Ixton admitted. The overt attitude of a Patrol ship to its proxad took whatever form the proxad found desirable. Since Ixton felt comfortable in a strict, semimilitary atmosphere, he had set a tone of formal courtesy with Rollo—the relationship between an officer and an enlisted man. And enlisted men were notorious for patronizing officers!

  It was a flaw in the man-ship gestalt that he would have to accept, Ixton supposed.

  "Thank you, Rollo," he said coldly. "Now let's monitor the local newscasts for any information on our quarry." But he learned nothing of importance concerning Omar Olivine before the governor and police chief arrived. He met with them in the conference chamber on Rollo's third deck.

  The perfect lie detector would be, of course, a dependable telepath, but that seemingly was a contradiction of terms. Such agencies as the Space Patrol fell back on detection equipment similar in principle to the ancient polygraph, but far more sophisticated in application. That used by Ixton could monitor, via an intricate microdar system, the slight local fluctuations of blood pressure within a subject's brain during interrogation—fluctuations that reflected closely the emotional state of the interviewee.

  The microdar monitor was highly portable. Ixton could carry it about in a small satchel. He could have taken it to the offices of the governor and the police chief to conduct his interviews. But when a man of Omar Olivine's talents and inclinations had been running loose on Roseate for over two years, Ixton could not be sure there was still an honest high official on the planet. It could be fatally indiscreet for him to step outside the protection of his ship until he had some idea of who he could trust. He seated the two officials where the unseen microdar scanners could examine them, and went behind his desk to watch the play of colors on their monitor lights.

  "Gentlemen," he began, "the Patrol's job is to apprehend Omar Olivine on this planet. It took years of gathering and sifting information to track him here. If he gets off Roseate, all that work will have to be repeated. Thus, it is essential that we keep Olivine cornered here until he is taken, or killed."

  "If he's here at all," groused Police Chief Hassbruch, "which you can't prove by me. And I think I know what's going on on this planet! It's my job to know."

  "I appreciate your attitude," said Ixton—which he did, because the deep greening of Hassbruch's monitor light showed no trace of deception. "But the Patrol's CIP system has all the conservatism of the typical heavy computer. When it finds a ninety-five per cent probability that Olivine is on your planet, you can bet the real probability is one hundred per cent. And he won't merely be hiding. He'll be up to something—with your criminal element, or your political malcontents, or . . . "

  "I question that!" broke in Governor Drake. "Chief Hassbruch knows our criminal element, and I know our political soreheads. If somebody like Olivine was stirring up the snakes, you can bet your boots one of us would be wise to it." Another honest response, Ixton noted with relief.

  "Don't be insulted, gentlemen," he said, "when I answer your doubts by saying that Olivine is cleverer than either of you. He's cleverer than I, for that matter. He's here, and he's up to something! But he's keeping his tracks covered. If he's not organizing the criminals or the malcontents, maybe he's undermining your own associates. How sure are you gentlemen that all your own men are still trustworthy?"

  Hassbruch's light glimmered purple, and his face verified his uncertainty.

  "How about it, Chief Hassbruch?" Ixton prompted.

  "Well . . . there's one man, a sergeant of the old school. I've had him on the carpet a few times. His name's Jacobsen."

  "I'd like to talk to him a little later," said Ixton.

&nb
sp; The rest of the interview was devoted mainly to Ixton's attempt to convince the planetary officials that more Patrolmen should be awaited before an effort was made to take Olivine. A cruiser, manned by three proxads, was due to arrive in five days.

  But Governor Drake blustered, and his monitor light glowed blood-red.

  "What's the Patrol trying to do, starve us?" he bellowed. "This quarantine's costing us eighty million credits a day, and that's the gross profit figure! What's more, the cost gets worse the longer it lasts! My people won't stand for another week of this waiting!"

  "I understand your position," said Ixton patiently, "and I regret the cost of the quarantine. But—"

  This was not the kind of argument Ixton was good at winning. Drake threatened political reprisals against the Patrol if the Olivine affair were dragged out, and cited the powerful Earth friends of Roseate who would take up the cudgel in the planet's behalf. He did not neglect the point that Omar Olivine was the Patrol's own rotten apple, and that he therefore should be dealt with without inconvenience to the civilian public.

  Ixton had answers to Drake's arguments, but they were not answers that would change the governor's mind. So he had to accept defeat.

  He was in a grumpy frame of mind as he rode into Roseate City with the two officials. Drake was taken to Government Center, and Ixton went on to Police Headquarters with Hassbruch. He set up shop in one of the interrogation rooms, and the chief brought Sergeant Jacobsen in for questioning.

  It took only a few minutes to determine that Jacobsen was indeed a cop of the old school—heavy-handed, but intensely loyal and genuinely concerned about his inability to understand Hassbruch's more modern philosophy of law enforcement. Though the sergeant was fifteen years older and eighty pounds heavier than Proxad Ixton, the Patrolman felt a definite sense of identification with him.

  "Do you know of any disloyalty on the police force?" Ixton asked him.

  The microdar monitor revealed the same uncertainty on Jacobsen' part that Hassbruch had shown earlier.