The Kyben Stories

by Harlan Ellison

  He saw what must have been a freight shaft, and stepped into it. There was no drag, and he pressed a button on the inner wall of the hollow tube. The suck was immediately generated, drawing him up through the ship.

  He let himself slow by scraping his heels against the inner wall, at each layer of the ship, seeking the one escape factor he hoped was on board.

  He saw no one. The ship’s complement had been cut to the dregs, obviously. Every able-bodied Kyban sent planetside to search for the bomb.

  Here was the bomb…walking through the mother ship.

  Tallant began to sweat as he rose in the shaft; if he had figured incorrectly, if what he thought was aboard, was not aboard, he was doomed. He was…he saw what he wanted!

  The Kyban was walking down a hall, directly in Tallant’s line of sight as he peered from the freight tube. He wore a long white smock, and though Tallant had no way of knowing for certain, he was sure the apparatus hanging about the alien’s neck was the equivalent of an electrostethoscope.

  This Kyban was a doctor.

  Tallant propelled himself from the shaft, landed on the plasteel deck of the ship with legs spread, the blastick wedged between body and armpit, his hand tight to the trigger-stock.

  The Kyban doctor stopped dead, staring at this man who had come from nowhere. The alien’s eyes roved up and down Tallant’s body, stopping for a long moment at the stump of the right arm.

  Tallant moved toward the doctor, and the Kyban backed up warily.

  “English,” Tallant asked roughly. “You speak English?”

  The doctor stared silently at Tallant, and the Earthman squeezed a bit harder on the trigger-stock, till his knuckles went white with the strain of not firing.

  The Kyban doctor nodded simply.

  “There’s got to be an operating room around here,” Tallant went on, commandingly. “Take me there. Now!”

  The doctor watched the man silently, till Tallant began to advance. Then he suddenly realized—Tallant could see the dawning realization in alien eyes—that this desperate creature must need him for something, and would not—under any circumstances—shoot. Tallant saw the realization on the alien’s flat-featured face, and an instant reciprocal fury possessed him.

  He backed the alien to the wall, and gripped the blastick farther down its length. Then he swung it, hard!

  The muzzle cracked across the Kyban’s shoulder, and he let out a muted moan. Tallant hit him again, in the stomach; a third time across the face, opening a gash that ran to the temple. Had the Kyban not been nearly bald, his hair would have been matted with blood.

  The alien sank back against the wall, began to slide down. Tallant kicked him just below the double-jointed knee, straightening the doctor up.

  “You’ll stay alive, Doc…but don’t try your stamina against mine. I’ve been up all night, running from your foot-soldiers. And right along now I’m getting pretty edgy. So you just walk ahead of me, and we’ll see that operating room of yours.”

  The golden-skinned outworlder hesitated a fraction of a second, and Tallant brought his knee up with a snap. The medic screamed, then. High and piercing. Tallant knew the sound would carry through the ship, so he kicked out at the alien, driving him before the blastick.

  “Now you get this straight, fella,” Tallant snarled. “You’re going to walk ahead of me, right straight to that operating room, and you’re going to do a little surgery on me…and one move, so help me God, one move that seems unlikely, and I take off the top of your yellow skull. Now move it!”

  He jabbed the blastick hard into the Kyban’s back, and the medic tottered off down the hall.

  They were passing a utility rack—loaded with leg chains and head braces and manacles, used by the Kyban to keep prisoners in tow—when the Kyban sergeant struck. He had heard the scream, come out of the wardroom, and positioned himself in the alcove behind the utility rack, waiting for Tallant and the doctor to come his way. The attack was too hurried, however; and as the sergeant lunged for Tallant, and wrenched the blastick from his hand to ensure the medic’s safety, Tallant whirled away, and smashed the glass of the utility rack.

  In a moment his reflexes had taken over, and he bore no slightest resemblance to the quivering Benno Tallant who had cried to Parkhurst for his life. Now he was an avenging devil. His hand closed about a long, heavy-link leg chain, and brought it whistling free from its pincers and through the air with a snap.

  The chain caught the Kyban sergeant along the base of the skull, and the outworlder choked out a sibilant nothing as his brain was smashed in its case.

  He fell frontwards, crashing against the medic who had been reaching for the dropped blastick, and they tumbled to the plasteel floor together.

  The chain was imbedded in the Kyban’s head.

  Tallant took a short step and brought his booted foot down with a crunch on the medic’s hand. Hard enough to discourage the alien’s reaching…but not hard enough to impair his surgical ability.

  Tallant spotted a service revolver halfway drawn from its snugger on the Kyban sergeant’s belt, and he drew the sleek little sliver-nosed pistol, pointing it at the medic.

  “This is better.

  “Let’s go.”

  The medic got to his feet with difficulty, groaning as he rose. He knew now that Tallant was more dangerous than an entire army. The Earthman was desperate, really desperate, and he knew why: this must be the one who had the bomb. The Commandant had been talking about this man the night before, when they had realized a man was still alive on Deald’s World.

  He had taken a great deal of punishment, and he knew the Earthie would continue to deal it out; not enough to kill him, but the pain would be very great.

  The Kyban doctor was no hero.

  The operating room was inevitable.

  “And take your comrade with you,” Tallant added.

  The medic grabbed up the sergeant’s feet and dragged him behind as he walked toward the operating room. The trail of blood was faintly golden against the plasteel floor plates. Tallant kicked the blastick into the alcove. They might not come down through this corridor too soon, still looking as they were for him, outside the city.

  The operating room was inevitable.

  Tallant refused to take even a local anesthetic. He sat propped up on the operating table, the silver-shaft revolver pointed directly at the medic. The Kyban stared at the cylinder of the gun, saw the little capsules in their chambers, thought of how they were fired through the altering mechanism, how they came out as raw energy, and he wielded the electroscalpel with care.

  Tallant’s face became beaded with sweat as the incisions were made; though he hardly felt the electric beam cut through the flesh.

  But as the layers of flesh that had been the scar peeled back, and he again saw his innards, wet and pulsing, he remembered the first time.

  Things had changed, he had changed since Doc Budder had put the bomb in his belly. Now he was nearing the end of the path…starting a new one.

  In twenty minutes it was over.

  Tallant had guessed correctly.

  The bomb could not be set off under cautious operating conditions. Parkhurst had made great mention of the inverspace drive’s warp field setting it off, and of the bomb detonating of its own accord when the time came. But when it had come to mention of the Kyban removing it, he had threatened Tallant only with being cut to ribbons. Perhaps it had been Parkhurst’s subconscious way of offering Tallant a chance; perhaps it had just been an oversight in the Resistance leader’s explanation…but in either case, the operation had been completed successfully, and the bomb was out.

  Tallant watched carefully as the Kyban put an alien version of an epidermizer on the wound. He watched steadily for a half-hour as the scar built up.

  Then he was whole again, and the danger had been extracted from his belly.

  He stared at the medic carefully, said in level tones:

  “Graft the bomb to my stump.”

  The med
ic’s dark eyes opened wider; he blinked rapidly, and Tallant repeated what he had said. The medic backed away, knowing what purpose Tallant had in mind—or thinking he knew, which was the same thing as far as Tallant was concerned.

  It took ten minutes of pistol-whipping for Tallant to realize the medic would go only so far, and no farther. The physician would not graft the total destruction sun-bomb to the stump of Tallant’s right arm.

  …at least…not under his own will.

  The idea dawned slowly, but when formed was clear and whole and practicable. Tallant reached into his jumper pocket, extracted one of the last two packets of dream-dust. He bent down, and under pressure, made the half-conscious Kyban sniff it. He got the entire packet, the full, demolishing dose into the alien’s nostrils. Then he settled back to wait, remembering the first time he had met the dream-dust.

  The memory flooded back, and he recalled that the first, imprudent whiffing had made him a confirmed addict; it was powerful that way.

  When the medic awoke, he would be an addict…would do anything for that last packet nestling in Tallant’s jumper pocket.

  The Earthman knew he would never again be God—or at least till he could locate more dust—but it was worth it, for what he had in mind. More than worth it.

  He waited, knowing they would not be disturbed. The Kyban were out looking for him, and the emissions of the ship around him would confuse the robot scouts; he was safe for the time being. And when the medic awoke, he would do anything Tallant wanted.

  Tallant wanted only one thing.

  The sun-bomb grafted to his arm, where he could detonate it in an instant.

  There had been no pain. The same force that had ripped Tallant’s arm to atoms, had deadened the nerve ends. The bomb was set into the flesh slightly, a block at the end of the stump. With a simple wire hookup that would detonate under several circumstances:

  If Tallant consciously triggered the bomb.

  If anyone tried to remove the bomb against his will.

  If he died, and his heart stopped.

  The Kyban doctor had done his work well. Now he huddled, shaking under the effects of total dust addiction, moaning, begging Tallant for the last packet.

  “Sure, mister, you can have the snuff.” He held the clear plastic packet between two fingers, so the Kyban could see both the revolver and the dust at once. “But first, first. First you take me updecks to meet your Commandant.”

  The Kyban’s eyes were golden slits, but they widened now as he tried to comprehend what the Earthie meant. He had thought he knew what the man was after…to get rid of the bomb and leave Deald’s World. But now…

  He was confused, terrified. What was this insatiable hunger that clawed at him, and made his every nerve a burning wire? The Earthman had done it to him, and somehow, he knew that little white packet held the end of his hunger.

  He hardly realized he had led the Earthman to the bridge, but when he looked again, they were there, and the Commandant was staring wide-eyed at them, demanding an explanation. Needing none, really.

  Then, as the doctor watched, Tallant raised the revolver and fired. The shot took away half the Commandant’s face, and he spun sidewise, spraying himself across the port. The body tumbled to the floor and rolled a few inches, to the edge of the dropshaft. Tallant walked past the doctor, and calmly nudged the body over with his boot. The body hung there a split instant, then dropped out of sight as quickly as a stone down a well.

  There was only one more step to take.

  Tallant walked over to the doctor, examining him carefully as he came nearer. The man was a typical Kyban…a bit shorter than most, with a protruding stomach, and a head that would be quite bald in a few years.

  His skin was the aging off-gold of the Kyban race, and his face was strong. Strong, that is—Tallant noted—with the exception of the infinitesimal tic in the cheek and lower lip, the hunger lines about the mouth and eyes. The good doctor was now an addict, and that suited Tallant just fine.

  He found a weird pleasure in having bent this man so simply to his design. He found the events of the past day invigorating, now that they were over.

  And as the face of the doctor grew larger in his eyes, Benno Tallant took stock of himself. The bad in him—and he was the first to admit it was there, festering deeper than any superficial nastiness—had not changed one bit. It had not become good, it had not tempered him into mellow thoughts through his trials, it had left him only harder. It had matured itself.

  For years, as he skulked and begged, as he weaseled and cheated, his strength of amorality had been going through an adolescence. Now it was mature. Now he had direction, and he had purpose. Now he was no longer a coward, for he had faced all the death the world could throw at him, and had bested it. He had outsmarted the Earthmen, he had outmaneuvered the Kyban. He had bested the foot-soldiers in the field, and the mathematicians in the bunkers. He had lived through the bomb, and the attack of the aliens, and the night of terror and all it held otherwise. He had come through the Marshes, and the fields, and the city, to this final place.

  To this cabin of the fleet ship.

  But he was not the Benno Tallant the Earthmen had found the day before, looting a dead shopkeeper. He was another man entirely. A man whose life had taken the one possible turn it could…for the other turn—death—was a stranger to him.

  Benno Tallant shoved the doctor ahead of him, to the banks of controls.

  He paused, turning the shaking addict to him. He stared into the golden slits, and the golden face, and realized with consummate pleasure that he did not hate these aliens who had tried to find him and cut out his belly; he admired them, for they were engaged in taking what they wanted.

  No, he didn’t hate them.

  “What is your name, my good old friend?” he asked cheerily.

  The doctor’s hand, tentacle-ended, came up quivering, to beg for the last packet. Tallant slapped the hand away; he did not hate the outworlders, but he had no room for sympathy. All of that decency and compassion was gone—burned away by the blast of hell in the bombed-out building, eaten away by the cruelty of his fellow Earthmen. He was hard now, and reveled in it.

  “Your name!”

  The doctor’s tongue quivered over the word: “Norghese.”

  “Well, Doctor Norghese, you and I are going to be ever such good friends, you know that? You and I are going to do big things together, aren’t we?”

  In the quivering, chill-raked body of the little doctor, Tallant knew he had a slave from this time on. He clapped the alien about the shoulders.

  “Find me the communications rig in this mess, Doc.”

  The alien pointed it out, and on command, threw the switch that connected Tallant to the troops in the field, to the ships that were settled all across Deald’s World, to the skeleton crew of the ship in which he stood.

  He lifted the speak-stick, and stared at it for a moment. He had considered blowing up the fleet, ordering it to return home, a number of things.

  But that had been the day before when he had been Tallant the Trembling.

  This was today.

  And he was a new Benno Tallant.

  He spoke sharply and shortly.

  “This is the last man on Deald’s World, my Kyban friends. I’m the man your superiors have finally realized carried the sun-bomb.

  “Hear me now!

  “I still carry it. But now I control it. I can set it off at any moment, and kill us all…even in space. Believe that the power of this bomb is incalculable. If you doubt me, I will let you speak to Doctor Norghese of the mother ship, in a few moments, and he will verify what I’ve said.

  “But you have no reason to fear me…or what I can do. I’m going to offer you a deal far superior to anything you had as mere Kyban soldiers on conquest missions for your home world.

  “I offer you the chance to become conquerors in your own right. Now that you’ve been away from home for years, and are weary of battle, I’ll offer you the chan
ce to come home not just as tin heroes, but as warriors with money and worlds at your command.

  “Does it matter to you who leads this fleet? As long as you conquer the galaxies? I don’t think it does!”

  He paused, knowing they would see it his way. They would have to see it that way. Planetary allegiance only went so far, and he could turn this home-hungry planetful of foot-soldiers into the greatest conquering force ever known.

  “Our first destination is…” he paused, knowing he was hewing a destiny he could never escape, “…Earth!”

  He handed the speak-stick to the doctor, shoved him once to indicate he wanted verification of what he had said, listened for a moment to make sure the doctor’s sibilant monotone in English was appropriate.

  Then he walked to the viewport, and stared out as the dusk fell again across the city of Xville, and the fields of slowly ripening Summerset, and beyond them the Marshes and the Faraway Mountains.

  He watched it all…Deald’s World…and made a vow that his revenge would be long and detailed.

  Then something Parkhurst had said, oddly enough, leaped to mind as appropriate for this time and this place and his new life:

  I don’t hate you. But this has to be done. It has to be done, and you will have to do it. But I don’t hate you.

  He thought the thoughts, and knew they were true.

  He didn’t hate anyone now. He was above that; he was Benno Tallant, and now there was no need for the dust; he was cured.

  He turned away from the port and looked about at the ship that would mold his destiny, knowing he was free of Deald’s World, free of the dust. He needed neither now.

  Now he was God on his own.

  THE HUMAN OPERATORS

  A. E. Van Vogt and Harlan Ellison

  [To be read while listening to Chronophagie, ’The Time Eaters”: Music of Jacques Lasry, played on Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet (Columbia Masterworks Stereo MS 7314).]

  Ship: the only place.

  Ship says I’m to get wracked today at noon. And so I’m in grief already.