The Time Trawlers Read online

  Like most of the other buildings there, Pulaski's Bar was a hole in the ground. Kearney descended the widening spiral of steps that ran down the cone-shaped walls from above, then walked across thirty feet of flat floor to the circular bar in the middle.

  Pulaski was alone. When he glanced out from under his hologlasses he merely said, "Oh, howsa."

  "Okay. What's on?"

  "Nothin' much. News." He took off the glasses, blinked. "Anverse?"

  "If it's fresh." It wasn't, but Kearney sipped the murky euphoric and stared into the holomurals. Pulaski put his glasses back on and returned to his slouch against the back of the bar. The Alps and the Pacific were superimposed to give old earth a grander scene than she was ever mother of; that was one segment of the mural. On the other was a scene from the docks of New Orleans, circa 1890. Wherever did they dig these up. The Anverse began its work, and Kearney built a lifedream around the high-breasted crinoline creature in the foreground.

  Customers came and went, one or two at a time, but Kearney dreamed on. He had a second glass and considered re-dreaming the same thing with slight changes, decided against it and ordered an anti. He was almost unbent again when Bobby Macklin and his crew rolled in. They weren't on anverse. Alky and plenty of it was what they ordered, and obviously had been ordering for some time.

  Bobby Macklin was Skipper Macklin's son. When the old skipper died, Bobby had taken over. Kearney knew the man slightly and avoided him. It was not out of malice to the father, either, but simply because the son was an unpleasant sort, not worth the time.

  Bobby, however, avoided no one. Peering across Pulaski's thin shoulder, he muttered a question thickly to one of his mates. Then, eyes widening, he answered the question himself. "Damn! It's him!" The fleshy finger pointed, and Kearney found himself looking into four pairs of slightly incredulous but very hostile eyes. As a man, the quartet got up and came around to take seats beside him.

  "Hello, Bobby."

  Thick hand on his shoulder, thick breath in his face. "Why, hi there old buddy. How's the sabotaging business, these days?" Feeling Kearney's muscles tighten under his hand, Bobby removed it quickly, sat up, went on in a louder voice. "Guess what the boys and I found out in the Grand Banks last month?"

  "I couldn't."

  "Well, we found a little old radiobuoy that was signaling 'J. S. Kearney, FGS Limper, No. Eleven.' So, I say to the boys, gee-whiz but our old buddy Kearney has staked himself a claim over there, and maybe there's others nearby. Because everybody knows what a knack old Kearney's got. That's what I said, right guys?"

  Murmurs, nods, leers. Two customers started down the stairs, took one look at what was shaping up and fled.

  "So you came over to raid my claim," Kearney said evenly. Like every other time trawler, he had claim buoys all over space, marking catches that were inconvenient to haul in or else so low in yield they might not pay their own way in skein energy. But Kearney had some others, too, special ones, forty of them.

  Bobby ignored the accusation. "Anyway, we were fishing close by when guess what?"

  Yes, it had been one of the forty, Kearney decided. "You fouled your nets?" he said, dropping his foot from the rung of the barstool to the floor.

  "Fouled?" the gross man shouted. "Fouled? Burnt to a crisp! Blew two beamguns right off my ship, punctured two lazarettes. And I said, that's just like Kearney. He did it to my old man and he'd do it to anyone. Sabotaging a buoy. A repulsor shield, a goddamn repulsor shield!"

  Kearney rose to his feet, his chin inches from Bobby's upraised face. "People who don't steal don't get into trouble." Bobby had his back to the bar, and Kearney pressed him against it lightly with the palm of his right hand, chucked him mockingly under the chin with the other. The fat man's cheeks went as red as his eyes and he was literally speechless. The pulpy mouth opened and for a second all that came out was a stammering hiss. But it ended. "Get him!"

  Kearney pushed hard, sending Bobby careening over the bar. At the same time, he swung his head down and to the left, pivoting out of the clinch on his left foot. A bottle and the edge of a knuckly hand whistled through the air where his head bad been and crashed on the table.

  But the third of Macklin's netmen stayed with him, and before Kearney could straighten up from the dodge he felt hands in his beard and saw a knee coming up toward his face. All he had time to do was turn his head, and the sledgehammer hit his ear. He exploded backward from the force of it, so hard that his opponent was left holding two handfuls of whiskers.

  Pain brings fury to some men. One must be careful when beating such a man not to hurt without maiming. Hair tearing, unfortunately, imparts maximum pain, does minimum damage. When Kearney got back on his feet, he was so incensed be wasn't even human.

  He was back at his antagonist in one step. Planting his left foot, he executed a perfect punt on the other's chin with the right. It made a messy sound and left the man with loose gravel for teeth.

  The first two were right behind, and one grabbed Kearney's foot, twisted and heaved. Kearney cartwheeled across the room and smashed into the wall. Half a breath later, Bobby's man came at him head down in a ram rush designed to spread Kearney's guts all over the flint glass mural screen. Kearney sidestepped. Bash! The man groaned when he hit; but, just to make sure, Kearney chopped twice at the thick neck before he hit the floor.

  There was one left. Kearney came at him in a storm of knuckles. The man made a high sound in the back of his throat and fled. Kearney chased him halfway up the stairs, ran out of breath, and came dizzily down. He'd had it; that first headblow was getting to him.

  Pulaski's hands appeared over the edge of the bar, followed by the upper half of his apprehensive face, a perfect Kilroy. Then they disappeared and when he re-emerged, Pulaski was hauling a still windknocked Bobby Macklin to his feet.

  "You broke four bottles," he said accusingly to Kearney, pointing to a mess of stains and broken glass on Bobby's backside.

  "I'll pay. Got any water?" He dragged Bobby back on the customer's side of the bar and propped him up on a stool. Kearney took a long gulp from the glass Pulaski offered and threw the rest in Bobby's face.

  "So you raided my buoy. What'd you do with the fish?"

  "Nothing, we couldn't bring her in."

  "You know what I'd have done if you had?" Kearney rapped him ungently on the windpipe.

  "I can guess," he wheezed.

  Kearney fought an urge to beat the man systematically to jelly. But he went over and retrieved what was left of his torn jacket from where it had come off near the wall. Then he paid Pulaski and went out.

  Forty minutes later, Kearney had ordered a shuttle load of supplies and was on his way out to the Limper. No telling what Bobby had done to biggy Eleven when he'd dropped his nets on it. Wailing in protest at the throttle Kearney fed her, Limper was on her way to the Grand Banks within the hour.

  Not surprisingly, the buoy had been destroyed, but there was considerable debris floating nearby to mark the place. Kearney grinned. He anchored and reached down the notebook.

  Inhabited system Eleven. Spatial location 473 X 492 X 845. Temporal location: August 14, 3169 -- plus 31.085,672,909. G-type, probably from Westover's Galaxy. One planet, two satellites, forty-hour day, twenty-seven month year. Natives semi-aquatic, scaled quadrupeds. IQ's around twenty. Left a complete set of plans. Give them about a quarter gigayear for development, and they should be ready.

  Kearney made another entry describing Bobby's raid. Then he coded off the rep shield that had saved his fish from Bobby and went about trawling for her himself. In two hours he was in the sled, riding his terminal orbit around Eleven-dash-one.

  Although the last time he'd been there was by local reckoning three hundred million years earlier, most of the landscape was fairly familiar. By landscape one meant topography; the scenery itself was vastly different. Eleven-one had gone from prehistoric ferns to solid city. She was just as crowded as the planets of Kearney's own time.

  The larges
t city in view had a peculiar geometry. Some powerful planner had laid a mile-broad letter K on the countryside and built his roads to suit it. True, the interplaited cross streets were rarely symmetrical, but it had a certain beauty. Kearney felt godlike. At the intersection of the K was a park, wide green, waterlaced. A swamp, in fact. He drifted the sled for it, hit somewhere near the middle.

  The woman -- or so he judged her -- who met him was greenish and reptilian, but rather pretty. Six or seven newts clustered fearfully around her as Kearney's sled settled into the tall grass, not twenty yards from their picnic table. Kearney stepped out, prepared to go through the take-me-to-your-leader bit; but she shortstopped the whole thing with four words.

  "By Kearney," she whispered. "It's Kearney."

  The ride through town to Super's palace gave him a chance to see what he'd wrought. Obviously he'd induced terrestrial evolution on what was basically an aquatic species, but they seemed none the worse for it. Doorknobs for webbed hands were the size of footballs and softly textured. Perambulators for newtlets were water filled. But everyone had the look of well-being that only a sophisticated use of science and democratic philosophy could bring about. So somehow he felt he hadn't left them too bad a legacy, three gigs earlier.

  Super had the tall careful awkwardness of a Lincoln. He was worn-scaled and gray-green, the lighter shade apparently owing to age. And like the rest of them, his completely smooth body gave no reason for him to have been other than unclad. Behind his wide wooden desk lay the shell of a seed Kearney had shown three gigayears earlier.

  "Kearney. So you're not a legend after all."

  "Oh, I'm real."

  "Well, thanks for this," Super said, waving a webbed hand at the steel capsule. "We've used it all. We've even got time trawlers of our own, now."

  "You're welcome. Ready to pay for it?"

  Super looked startled. "Pay?"

  "Look, I came across your system by time trawling myself. You could easily have been reeled back to my own time and reduced to raw materials. As a matter of fact you still can."

  Moisture glistened around Super's gill slits. "Extortion, Kearney?"

  "Mildly, yes. I want a promise. Now you're time trawling yourself. You have the same power over future systems that I've had over you. I want you to promise to treat them as I've treated you. In other words, throw back the big ones. And educate them."

  Super looked relieved.

  "In addition," Kearney began --

  Sunlight through the tall window faded, grew to double brilliance, then settled back to normal. Super cried, "What?" Kearney, smacking his forehead with a palm, said, "Murder! It must be Bobby."

  After Kearney had left him in the debris of Pulaski's bottles and his own crewmen, Bobby Macklin was a frightened man. But back on his own ship he got braver. Orestes was twenty times the size of Limper, and could eat the little ship and spit out the bones before Kearney knew what hit him. That was Bobby's plan. He was quite sure Kearney would go out to that pet biggy of his and check on things. So, not two hours after Kearney left, Bobby was hot behind him.

  "I've got him on visual, Skipper. Looks like he's got that biggy up the surface."

  "Good, he's saved us the trouble. Anchor, and get him on the Y band. Bobby settled contentedly back in the skipper's couch and leered out the port at Kearney's defenseless ship.

  "Can't raise him -- oh, wait, his autopilot's putting out a Standard Three. He's left the ship and gone diving down in the biggy."

  Bobby grinned. "And that's where he'll stay. Send a crew over and transfer the fish from his net to ours. And have them bring back his diving phone. I want to say good-bye to dear old Kearney."

  Down on Eleven-one, Kearney and Super sat in the latter's office.

  "You're sure he'll call?" the green man asked.

  "Yes, soon. It'd be his style to gloat. The blink in the sunlight was caused by his shifting us from one net to the other. Which means -- "

  "Which means, if I may quote, we're in the fire."

  "Where'd you get that expression?"

  "From the same encyclopedia that you both blessed and burdened us with willy-nilly three gigs ago."

  "Come on, Super. Until now you were grateful."

  "Until now. Agreed, you're the best of your type, Kearney; but men are a race of exploiters, pure and simple. Your friend would just as soon process us as -- "

  "My what? Now look, I have told you how this was supposed to work out. Bobby's just -- "

  "Hey, Kearney," tinned a voice inside his helmet.

  "Yeah, Bobby, hello."

  "Got you now, baby." There was a nasty snicker. "When they run you through the processor you'll probably come out looking like -- "

  "Okay, okay. Look, I want to buy my way out."

  "With what? I've already got your ship. And this biggy."

  "Peanuts. I can give you twice that."

  "From where?"

  "Let me up, and I'll tell you."

  The snicker expanded to a laugh. "Squirm, baby. You're never getting out." Bobby clicked off.

  "What now?" Super asked hopelessly. Even as they spoke the sun blinked again, indicating that their captor had shifted them to his skein.

  Kearney shrugged. "We've got -- let's see -- probably ten of your days to come up with something."

  Bobby Macklin called down into the skein in hopes of pulling a few more legs off his flies, but the flies wouldn't give him that satisfaction. He had the growing suspicion that something was brewing down there, and so he had ordered Orestes back to Port Pluto as fast as she could tow her load. The sooner he'd reduced Kearney to a handful of minerals, the better. But he wasn't quick enough. They were still four days off Pluto when his after netman called in.

  "Skipper, there's something going on out in the skein."

  Macklin rushed aft and peered out the stern bubble. There certainly was something going on. The sack of woven energy squirmed like the belly of a pregnant mare. It became bloated. Through its translucent walls Bobby and his crew saw now only one big one with her planet and moons, but four other stars.

  "Quick, try and get Kearney." He was handed the phone. "Hey, Kearney. what gives?"

  "Your skein, if you don't drop us."

  "Where're you getting . . ."

  "The future, our future. Sixty-five gigs from you. Listen, fathead, drop us or else. You know what a burst skein'll do to your ship."

  "Yeah, louse," he clicked off. "Cut the skein. He's got us."

  The beams flickered out, and Kearney, Super biggy Eleven's entire system and baggage dropped down through the eons to its own time.

  Bobby Macklin rebuilt the skein, then headed disgustedly back to the Grand Banks for four months of fishing, legitimate, this time. Consequently, when he returned to Port Pluto he found himself one of the last to hear.

  Kearney had headed for Port Pluto as soon as he'd gotten back to his ship. He'd gone to Galcouncil with a weird looking alien in tow, and made his pitch.

  It was quite simple. What one did was throw back the big ones and teach them to time trawl themselves. For this the fishermen received two percent of the big one's own catch.

  In a sense, Super had been right. Kearney's was a race of exploiters. But it took an honestly humane man like Kearney to dream up a cycle of exploitation where nobody lost. Under his plan the future did indeed open like an infinite cornucopia -- of both raw materials and manpower -- a huge cone whose base lay gigagigayears in the future. Each layer had only to go out and educate the next, then take their nominal two percent. But two percent of infinity is infinity, and each layer had more than enough supporters on the next to sustain it. Not only was it infinitely easier all around, but no big ones would ever have to be processed.

  Bobby Macklin, returning from his four-month cruise, was among the last to know. The law had been in effect just about three days when he brought in the catch of his career and had it processed. A big one, his first and his last. Anyone's last.

   

  Bert Filer, The Time Trawlers