Six Blind Men & an Alien Read Free Page B

screamed and fell to the ground, spurting blood, but he made it to the ship unscathed. A figure stood in the hatch, telling him not to come any closer. He fired the gun before the ship’s owner finished his warning, stood aside as the body tumbled down to the ground, raced into the ship, and ordered the hatch to close and lock behind him.
        It took him less than thirty seconds to break the ship’s security code. (That was, after all, his specialty.) The ship asked for his name. He knew he couldn’t use his real name, that any ship on the planet would shut down all systems the instant he uttered it, so he thought back to his childhood and used the name of a youthful friend, one he hadn’t seen in twenty years.
        "My name," he said, "is Machti."
        "Destination?"
        He looked at the viewscreen and saw that the security guards would reach him in about thirty seconds.
        "What’s the nearest world with an oxygen content similar to ours?"
        "Define similar," said the ship.
        "Within ten percent."
        "The third planet in the Sol system."
        "Take off immediately."
        The ship made no verbal response, but he could feel the gravitational force as it shot up to the stratosphere and then beyond.
        "Do you have any of the planet’s languages in your data bank?" he asked as the ship began approaching light speeds.
        "No. I have never been there."
        "But you knew the oxygen content," said the being that was now Machti.
        "The atmospheric content is in my data bank; the native languages are not," said the ship. "It is entirely possible that no ship has ever landed there." While Machti was considering that answer, the ship announced that they were being pursued.
        "Wonderful," muttered Machti. "By how many ships?"
        "Two."
        "Can they overtake us?"
        "Eventually."
        "Before we reach Sol’s system?"
        "No."
        "All right," said Machti. "We’ll land there, and I’ll stay in hiding for as long as it takes for them to forget about me or at least decide I’m not worth the trouble, and then we’ll find a more hospitable world." He paused. "How long will it take to get there?"
        "Through normal space, seven years and-"
        " Not through normal space," he interrupted.
        "Via the Jaxtoplin Wormhole, three days."
        "Go that way."
        "That is three of our days," continued the ship. "Based on the destination world’s rotation speed, it will be 3.4983 of their days."
        "Just do it!" snapped Machti.
        The ship headed for the wormhole, and Machti spent the next hour experimenting with the remains of the shackles until he found the code that unlocked the right one. Try as he might, he couldn’t make the one on his left leg open; the chip had been damaged when he’d destroyed the chain. He explored the small interior of the ship, found a laser pistol, and turned it on his shackle. The shackle became hotter and hotter still. He screamed in pain, but kept the laser trained on it, weakening its structure. He finally was able to pry it off with one of the galley’s eating tools.
        He limped to the ship’s medical stores, found some ointments to rub on his ankle, and spent the next fifteen hours sleeping. When he awoke he found out that the police ships were still in hot pursuit and had entered the wormhole only a minute or two after his own ship.
        "Go faster!" he ordered.
        "Speed is meaningless inside a wormhole, where the laws of the universe do not apply," responded the ship.
        "Can they catch us?"
        "Not unless the wormhole wishes them to."
        "Wormholes don’t think or wish," said Machti irritably.
        "My conceptual vocabulary is limited," replied the ship. "There is no reason to assume they can catch us within the wormhole. Similarly, there is no reason for them not to catch us in a timeless and spaceless area