The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales

by Edmond Hamilton

  CHAPTER 4

  It was ridiculous to be flying the stars with a bad hangover, but Kieran had one. His head ached dully, he had an unpleasant metallic taste in his mouth, and his former ebullience had given way to a dull depression. He looked sourly around.

  He sat in a confined little metal coop of a cabin, hardly enough in which to stand erect. Paula Ray, in a chair a few feet away was sleeping, her head on her breast. Webber sat forward, in what appeared to be a pilot-chair with a number of crowded control banks in front of it. He was not doing anything to the controls. He looked as though he might be sleeping, too.

  That was all—a tiny metal room, blank metal walls, silence. They were, presumably, flying between the stars at incredible speeds but there was nothing to show it. There were no screens such as the one he had seen in the ship, to show by artful scanning devices what vista of suns and darknesses lay outside.

  “A flitter,” Webber had informed him, “just doesn’t have room for the complicated apparatus that such scanners require. Seeing is a luxury you dispense with in a flitter. We’ll see when we get to Sako.”

  After a moment he had added, “If we get to Sako.”

  Kieran had merely laughed then, and had promptly gone to sleep. When he had awakened, it had been with the euphoria all gone and with his present hangover.

  “At least,” he told himself, “I can truthfully say that this one wasn’t my fault. That blasted spray—”

  He looked resentfully at the sleeping woman in the chair. Then he reached and roughly shook her shoulder.

  She opened her eyes and looked at him, first sleepily and then with resentment.

  “You had no right to wake me up,” she said.

  Then, before Kieran could retort, she seemed to realize the monumental irony of what she had just said, and she burst into laughter.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Go ahead and say it. I had no right to wake you up.”

  “Let’s come back to that,” said Kieran after a moment. “Why did you?”

  Paula looked at him ruefully. “What I need now is a ten-volume history of the last century, and time enough for you to read it. But since we don’t have either—” She broke off, then after a pause asked, “Your date was 1981, wasn’t it? It and your name were on the tag of your pressure-suit.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, then. Back in 1981, it was expected that men would spread out to the stars, wasn’t it?”

  Kieran nodded. “As soon as they had a workable high-speed drive. Several drives were being experimented with even then.”

  “One of them—the Flournoy principle—was finally made workable,” she said. She frowned. “I’m trying to give you this briefly and I keep straying into details.”

  “Just tell me why you woke me up.”

  “I’m trying to tell you.” She asked candidly, “Were you always so damned hateful or did the revivification process do this to you?”

  Kieran grinned. “All right. Go ahead.”

  “Things happened pretty much as people foresaw back in 1981,” she said. “The drive was perfected. The ships went out to the nearer stars. They found worlds. They established colonies from the overflowing population of Earth. They found human indigenous races on a few worlds, all of them at a rather low technical level, and they taught them.

  “There was a determination from the beginning to make it one universe. No separate nationalistic groups, no chance of wars. The governing council was set up at Altair Two. Every world was represented. There are twenty-nine of them, now. It’s expected to go on like that, till there are twenty-nine hundred starworlds represented there, twenty-nine thousand—any number. But—”

  Kieran had been listening closely. “But what? What upset this particular utopia?”

  “Sako.”

  “This world we’re going to?”

  “Yes,” she said soberly. “Men found something different about this world when they reached it. It had people—human people—on it, very low in the scale of civilization.”

  “Well, what was the problem? Couldn’t you start teaching them as you had others?”

  She shook her head. “It would take a long while. But that wasn’t the real problem. It was— You see, there’s another race on Sako beside the human ones, and it’s a fairly civilized race. The Sakae. The trouble is—the Sakae aren’t human.”

  Kieran stared at her. “So what? If they’re intelligent—”

  “You talk as though it was the simplest thing in the world,” she flashed.

  “Isn’t it? If your Sakae are intelligent and the humans of Sako aren’t, then the Sakae have the rights on that world, don’t they?”

  She looked at him, not saying anything, and again she had that stricken look of one who has tried and failed. Then from up forward, without turning, Webber spoke.

  “What do you think now of Vaillant’s fine idea, Paula?”

  “It can still work,” she said, but there was no conviction in her voice.

  “If you don’t mind,” said Kieran, with an edge to his voice, “I’d still like to know what this Sako business has to do with reviving me.”

  “The Sakae rule the humans on that world,” Paula answered. “There are some of us who don’t believe they should. In the Council, we’re known as the Humanity Party, because we believe that humans should not be ruled by nonhumans.”

  Again, Kieran was distracted from his immediate question—this time by the phrase “Nonhuman”.

  “These Sakae—what are they like?”

  “They’re not monsters, if that’s what you’re thinking of,” Paula said. “They’re bipeds—lizardoid rather than humanoid—and are a fairly intelligent and law-abiding lot.”

  “If they’re all that, and higher in development than the humans, why shouldn’t they rule their own world?” demanded Kieran.

  Webber uttered a sardonic laugh. Without turning he asked, “Shall I change course and go to Altair?”

  “No!” she said. Her eyes flashed at Kieran and she spoke almost breathlessly. “You’re very sure about things you just heard about, aren’t you? You know what’s right and you know what’s wrong, even though you’ve only been in this time, this universe, for a few hours!”

  Kieran looked at her closely. He thought he was beginning to get a glimmer of the shape of things now.

  “You—all you who woke me up illegally—you belong to this Humanity Party, don’t you? You did it for some reason connected with that?”

  “Yes,” she answered defiantly. “We need a symbol in this political struggle. We thought that one of the oldtime space pioneers, one of the humans who began the conquest of the stars, would be it. We—”

  Kieran interrupted. “I think I get it. It was really considerate of you. You drag a man back from what amounts to death, for a party rally. ‘Oldtime space hero condemns nonhumans’—it would go something like that, wouldn’t it?”

  “Listen—,” she began.

  “Listen, hell,” he said. He was hot with rage, shaking with it. “I am glad to say that you could not possibly have picked a worse symbol than me. I have no more use for the idea of the innate sacred superiority of one species over another than I had for that of one kind of man over another.”

  Her face changed. From an angry woman, she suddenly became a professional psychologist, coolly observing reactions.

  “It’s not the political question you really resent,” she said. “You’ve wakened to a strange world and you’re afraid of it, in spite of all the pre-awakening preparation we gave your subconscious. You’re afraid, and so you’re angry.”

  Kieran got a grip on himself. He shrugged. “What you say may be true. But it doesn’t change the way I feel. I will not help you one damned bit.”

  Webber got up from his seat and came back toward them, his tall form stooping. He looked at Kieran and then at the woman.

  “We have to settle this right now,” he said. “We’re getting near enough to Sako to go out of drive. Are we goin
g to land or aren’t we?”

  “Yes,” said Paula steadily. “We’re landing.”

  Webber glanced again at Kieran’s face. “But if that’s the way he feels—”

  “Go ahead and land,” she said.

  CHAPTER 5

  It was nothing like landing in a rocket. First there was the business referred to as “going out of drive”. Paula made Kieran strap in and she said, “You may find this unpleasant, but just sit tight. It doesn’t last long.” Kieran sat stiff and glowering, prepared for anything and determined not to show it no matter how he felt. Then Webber did something to the control board and the universe fell apart. Kieran’s stomach came up and stuck in his throat. He was falling—up? Down? Sideways? He didn’t know, but whichever it was not all the parts of him were falling at the same rate, or perhaps it was not all in the same direction, he didn’t know that either, but it was an exceptionally hideous feeling. He opened his mouth to protest, and all of a sudden he was sitting normally in the chair in the normal cabin and screaming at the top of his lungs.

  He shut up.

  Paula said, “I told you it would be unpleasant.”

  “So you did,” said Kieran. He sat, sweating. His hands and feet were cold.

  Now for the first time he became aware of motion. The flitter seemed to hurtle forward at comet-like speed. Kieran knew that this was merely an ironic little joke, because now they were proceeding at something in the range of normal velocity, whereas before their speed had been quite beyond his comprehension. But he could comprehend this. He could feel it. They were going like a bat out of hell, and somewhere ahead of them was a planet, and he was closed in, blind, a mouse in a nose-cone. His insides writhed with helplessness and the imminence of a crash. He wanted very much to start screaming again, but Paula was watching him.

  In a few moments that desire became academic. A whistling shriek began faintly outside the hull and built swiftly to a point where nothing could have been heard above it. Atmosphere. And somewhere under the blind wall of the flitter a rock-hard world-face reeling and rushing, leaping to meet them—

  The flitter slowed. It seemed to hang motionless, quivering faintly. Then it dropped. Express elevator in the world’s tallest building, top to bottom—only the elevator is a bubble and the wind is tossing it from side to side as it drops and there is no bottom.

  They hung again, bounding lightly on the unseen wind.

  Then down.

  And hang again.

  And down.

  Paula said suddenly, “Webber. Webber, I think he’s dying.” She began to unstrap.

  Kieran said faintly, “Am I turning green?”

  She looked at him, frowning. “Yes.”

  “A simple old malady. I’m seasick. Tell Webber to quit playing humming-bird and put this thing down.”

  Paula made an impatient gesture and tightened her belt again.

  Hang and drop. Once more, twice more. A little rocking bounce, a light thump, motion ceased. Webber turned a series of switches. Silence.

  Kieran said, “Air?”

  Webber opened a hatch in the side of the cabin. Light poured in. It had to be sunlight, Kieran knew, but it was a queer color, a sort of tawny orange that carried a pleasantly burning heat. He got loose with Paula helping him and tottered to the hatch. The air smelled of clean sun-warmed dust and some kind of vegetation. Kieran climbed out of the flitter, practically throwing himself out in his haste. He wanted solid ground under him, he didn’t care whose or where.

  And as his boots thumped onto the red-ochre sand, it occurred to him that it had been a very long time since he had had solid ground underfoot. A very long time indeed—

  His insides knotted up again, and this time it was not seasickness but fear, and he was cold all through again in spite of the hot new sun.

  He was afraid, not of the present, nor of the future, but of the past. He was afraid of the thing tagged Reed Kieran, the stiff blind voiceless thing wheeling its slow orbit around the Moon, companion to dead worlds and dead space, brother to the cold and the dark.

  He began to tremble.

  Paula shook him. She was talking but he couldn’t hear her. He could only hear the rush of eternal darkness past his ears, the thin squeak of his shadow brushing across the stars. Webber’s face was somewhere above him, looking angry and disgusted. He was talking to Paula, shaking his head. They were far away. Kieran was losing them, drifting away from them on the black tide. Then suddenly there was something like an explosion, a crimson flare across the black, a burst of heat against the cold. Shocked and wild, the physical part of him clawed back to reality.

  Something hurt him, something threatened him. He put his hand to his cheek and it came away red.

  Paula and Webber were yanking at him, trying to get him to move.

  A stone whizzed past his head. It struck the side of the flitter with a sharp clack, and fell. Kieran’s nervous relays finally connected. He jumped for the open hatch. Automatically he pushed Paula ahead of him, trying to shield her, and she gave him an odd startled look. Webber was already inside. More stones rattled around and one grazed Kieran’s thigh. It hurt. His cheek was bleeding freely. He rolled inside the flitter and turned to look back out the hatch. He was mad.

  “Who’s doing it?” he demanded.

  Paula pointed. At first Kieran was distracted by the strangeness of the landscape. The flitter crouched in a vastness of red-ochre sand laced with some low-growing plant that shone like metallic gold in the sunlight. The sand receded in tilted planes lifting gradually to a range of mountains on the right, and dropping gradually to infinity on the left. Directly in front of the flitter and quite literally a stone’s throw away was the beginning of a thick belt of trees that grew beside a river, apparently quite a wide one though he could not see much but a tawny sparkling of water. The course of the river could be traced clear back to the mountains by the winding line of woods that followed its bed. The trees themselves were not like any Kieran had seen before. There seemed to be several varieties, all grotesque in shape and exotic in color. There were even some green ones, with long sharp leaves that looked like spearheads.

  Exotic or not, they made perfectly adequate cover. Stones came whistling out of the woods, but Kieran could not see anything where Paula was pointing but an occasional shaking of foliage.

  “Sakae?” he asked.

  Webber snorted. “You’ll know it when the Sakae find us. They don’t throw stones.”

  “These are the humans,” Paula said. There was an indulgent softness in her voice that irritated Kieran.

  “I thought they were our dear little friends,” he said.

  “You frightened them.”

  “I frightened them?”

  “They’ve seen the flitter before. But they’re extremely alert to modes of behavior, and they knew you weren’t acting right. They thought you were sick.”

  “So they tried to kill me. Nice fellows.”

  “Self-preservation,” Webber said. “They can’t afford the luxury of too much kindness.”

  “They’re very kind among themselves,” Paula said defensively. To Kieran she added, “I doubt if they were trying to kill you. They just wanted to drive you away.”

  “Oh, well,” said Kieran, “in that case I wouldn’t dream of disappointing them. Let’s go.”

  Paula glared at him and turned to Webber. “Talk to them.”

  “I hope there’s time,” Webber grunted, glancing at the sky. “We’re sitting ducks here. Keep your patient quiet—any more of that moaning and flopping and we’re sunk.”

  He picked up a large plastic container and moved closer to the door.

  Paula looked at Kieran’s cheek. “Let me fix that.”

  “Don’t bother,” he said. At this moment he hoped the Sakae, whoever and whatever they were, would come along and clap these two into some suitable place for the rest of their lives.

  Webber began to “talk”.

  Kieran stared at him, fascinated. He had
expected words—primitive words, perhaps resembling the click-speech of Earth’s stone-age survivals, but words of some sort. Webber hooted. It was a soft reassuring sound, repeated over and over, but it was not a word. The rattle of stones diminished, then stopped. Webber continued to make his hooting call. Presently it was answered. Webber turned and nodded at Paula, smiling. He reached into the plastic container and drew forth a handful of brownish objects that smelled to Kieran like dried fruit. Webber tossed these out onto the sand. Now he made a different sound, a grunting and whuffling. There was a silence. Webber made the sound again.

  On the third try the people came out of the woods.

  In all there were perhaps twenty-five of them. They came slowly and furtively, moving a step or two at a time, then halting and peering, prepared to run. The able-bodied men came first, with one in the lead, a fine-looking chap in early middle age who was apparently the chief. The women, the old men, and the children followed, trickling gradually out of the shadow of the trees but remaining where they could disappear in a flash if alarmed. They were all perfectly naked, tall and slender and large-eyed, their muscles strung for speed and agility rather than massive strength. Their bodies gleamed a light bronze color in the sun, and Kieran noticed that the men were beardless and smooth-skinned. Both men and women had long hair, ranging in color from black to tawny, and very clean and glistening. They were a beautiful people, as deer are a beautiful people, graceful, innocent, and wild. The men came to the dried fruits which had been scattered for them. They picked them up and sniffed them, bit them, then began to eat, repeating the grunt-and-whuffle call. The women and children and old men decided everything was safe and joined them. Webber tossed out more fruit, and then got out himself, carrying the plastic box.

  “What does he do next?” whispered Kieran to Paula. “Scratch their ears? I used to tame squirrels this way when I was a kid.”

  “Shut up,” she warned him. Webber beckoned and she nudged him to move out of the flitter. “Slow and careful.”

  Kieran slid out of the flitter. Big glistening eyes swung to watch him. The eating stopped. Some of the little ones scuttled for the trees. Kieran froze. Webber hooted and whuffled some more and the tension relaxed. Kieran approached the group with Paula. There was suddenly no truth in what he was doing. He was an actor in a bad scene, mingling with impossible characters in an improbable setting. Webber making ridiculous noises and tossing his dried fruit around like a caricature of somebody sowing, Paula with her brisk professionalism all dissolved in misty-eyed fondness, himself an alien in this time and place, and these perfectly normal-appearing people behaving like orang-utans with their fur shaved off. He started to laugh and then thought better of it. Once started, he might not be able to stop.