Doomstar

by Edmond Hamilton

  23

  The pilot of the lifeboat, a grim-faced and joyless man in a vicious hurry, landed them at the place Kettrick had designated and barely gave them time to scramble clear of his jets before he was away again. Kettrick did not blame him. The small personal counter he had taken from the lifeboat's supplies showed radiation still well within limits. Yet the sunlight seemed to sting and burn on his skin, and he remembered his dreams, and was afraid.

  They stood at the very knife edge of a vast desert, blinding white in the fierce glare. It was only about three hours after sunrise here, and already the air was parched and hot. Far off in the sand was the upside down reflection of a bitter lake, rimmed with white bands of alkali.

  In the other direction, beyond the knife edge, was a deep and fertile sink many miles in breadth that wound with the windings of a river across half a continent. Beyond the sink was another knife edge and more desert, with a loft of mountains at the end of it. To the west, downstream, the sink curved out of sight around the base of a series of buttes like ancient battleships sailing in line ahead. To the east, upstream, it curved the other way around the broken cone of a small volcano, long dead, and the land there was stained black with lava. Smoke and dust darkened much of the horizon,

  "Well," said Boker, "and here we are, exactly where we planned to be. And how easy it was, after all."

  Hurth gave him an answer that made the air seem cool. And Glevan said, "Our lifetimes are short enough. Let us not waste the minutes."

  They gathered up the things they had brought from the lifeboat, chiefly anything that would serve as gifts, along with sidearms, rations, capsules for purifying water…hopeful precaution!..and the contents of Boker's bottles transferred to canteens. They had also brought a minipak field radio, which Kettrick carried on his back; a slender link with the feverish activity going on far up in the sky.

  They began the descent of the escarpment, along a steep path treacherous with loose rock and sliding sand, that led to the green floor of the sink something more than a thousand feet below. And as he went, Kettrick thought to himself that they…all of them, below and aloft…were going to need more than mere good luck. They were going to need a miracle.

  Given time, there would be no problem. Reconnaissance techniques were so good that practically nothing escaped them. Given time. But there was no time.

  The cruiser and the lifeboat between them would sweep the globe from daybreak to the edge of night, covering every mile of every latitude where human life might survive, with special attention to the high probability areas. They would use every aid possible for visual sighting and instrument detection. Yet their chances of spotting the launcher were very slight.

  The powerful sunlight would drown the flare of a rising missile, unless it were very close. Vast clouds of sand, volcanic dust, and smoke made any kind of sightings difficult over large areas, and there were always the random distractions present everywhere to make things tough for the radarman. The small, ultra-high-velocity missiles would be difficult to detect unless they were ejected in a sufficiently steady stream to form a recognizable pattern, and the best guess was that they were not. Interval of delivery for the seeding warheads was estimated at slightly over an hour.

  Given time, all these obstacles could be overcome. Careful scanning, endless streams of data running through the computers, endless comparisons, endless study of photographs…But there was no time for all this technical proficiency. They had, like savages or children, to do it the simple way.

  There was one bright hope, and that was that Seri and his friends might have been sufficiently careless, sufficiently sure that they were safe, to neglect to camouflage the launcher. The glint of metal carries a long way, and on this metalless world would be an instant revelation.

  Once or twice on the blistering descent Kettrick switched on the radio. The cruiser was out of his range now, away south over the bulge of the equator, but the lifeboat was still receiving her and Kettrick could hear the lifeboat. The talk was brief and negative. He switched it off quickly.

  They passed into the heavier, moister air of the sink and there began to be vines and creepers along the path. Kettrick was watching for the Krinn, but it was Chai who saw them first, or smelled them. She growled and pointed.

  There were trees below, tall things with shiny trunks and limber branches weighed down by leaves as big as carpets, all glossy green. There was movement underneath them, in the dim aisles that ran through a sweating undergrowth of ferns and saw-toothed grasses. A second later a wooden spear stuck quivering in the middle of the path ahead of them.

  Kettrick went ahead of his companions. He stood by the spear and called out, in the grunts and clicks of a speech almost as primitive as Chai's, "Djunn will make talk with Ghnak. He will give presents to Ghnak, and to the People of the River."

  He held up both hands, palms out, and waited. It was a long time since he had been here, and the Krinn had short memories. Ghnak might be dead and eaten long since. Or he might just be in a bad mood today and give the sign to spear them all.

  He waited. And the sun appeared to race toward the zenith. The needle of his small counter had inched closer to the red. His skin prickled. He yearned, childishly, for the illusory shelter of the trees.

  Ghnak stepped out into the path and retrieved the spear.

  "We make talk," he said.

  They followed him into the shade of the forest.

  The village of the Krinn was dirty. Rude shelters made of branches and the huge leaves kept off the rains after a fashion. They were scattered anyhow under the trees, but there was a wide central space with all the undergrowth cleared out and here the sacred fire burned in a pit and the god had a house of leaves with bones piled in front of it. The god was a log set upright, the top hacked into the suggestion of a head. It was daubed with bright colors and hung with heartstones. Kettrick had once counted fifty of them in its necklace and girdle. Few peoples in the Cluster had such a wealthy deity.

  The men sat in the visitor's side of the clearing, farthest from the god's house, and Kettrick kept Chai close to him, forbidding her to growl. She was obedient, but her neckhairs stood up even so. There was a second fire here, and the Krinn crouched around it facing them, hairy, bristling, hump-shouldered creatures out of ancestral nightmare, or worse; the Krinn had kept their tails, and their antecedents were apelike only in that they were not birdlike or fishlike. The terms were relative to the worlds of their origin.

  The Krinn had teeth, large and strong for tearing. Their hands were strong and clever for the making of weapons and simple tools. They stank with a vile, strong smell as human as it was animal. The hair that clothed their powerful bodies ranged in color from black to brindled red and they did not bother with other garments, except that the dominant males ornamented themselves with heartstones according to the order of their dominance. Ghnak had as many as he had fingers and toes, more than any other man but significantly less than the god. The others scaled down to a single gem. They had not the skill to pierce them. The women wove strands of tough fibre around them and made them fast to collars of hide, and even through the fibre webs and the dirt the stones burned with their beautiful inner light. They were the reason why the Krinn were so rigidly protected.

  According to Krinn protocol, beginning with the one-gem men, Kettrick served out the gifts he had brought, a weird assortment raided from the lifeboat's supplies, anything that was shiny or important-looking. He was sick with impatience, but he knew it was no good trying to hurry. At the very last he handed Ghnak the showiest item, a spare helmet, and said, "I give this to the god, who has called me."

  There was some astonished grunting. Ghnak took the helmet and laid it on top of the bones in front of the god's house, and came back again, peering very sharply at Kettrick.

  "The god makes talk only to Ghnak," he said.

  'True," said Kettrick. "So he has told you why we come." And he thought, Oh lord, you stupid apeling, I have to go through all th
is to get it into your bean-brained head that your sun is going to run amok and kill you.

  "The god is powerful, like Ghnak. He can make his voice very loud. He can call across between the stars. He said to me, 'Evil spirits in the shape of men have come. They stand upon my high places. They make magic. Ghnak the great chief, my brother, has seen this. He knows the magic they make. He knows what they mean to do.'"

  Ghnak's small eyes were now very bright but also puzzled and uncertain. If the god had indeed said these things he did not wish to deny them, nor to admit to his tribe that he was ignorant of them. So he grunted and thumped his chest and said, "Ghnak is brother to the god. He knows."

  Gracefully yielding him the ploy, Kettrick said, "Ghnak knows that the man-things came to kill the sun."

  Ghnak's eyes opened wide. A burst of grunting ran through the males. Behind them and apart, the hairy women and the young made shriller noises. Automatically, every face turned upward.

  "They kill the sun!" Kettrick shouted. "They stab it with their magic." He pulled Flay's knife from his belt and struck it into the dirt before him. "They stab it as I stab the ground. They wound the sun with magic!"

  He thrust the knife again and again into the ground, and because what he said was true, the conviction and the fear carried over to his audience. Ghnak stared at the blade, appalled.

  Kettrick dropped it and sprang to his feet. "Ghnak and his brother the god will save the sun. They have called us here to help, because we know the ways of the Tailless Ones and can use their own magic against them." His voice rang in the hot green shadows under the trees, over the ranks of stunned, half-terrified, half-uncomprehending faces, snouted and toothed and hairy faces with perpetually angry eyes.

  "Ghnak will save the sun! Lead us, strong chief! Make talk with all the People of the River, so the god can quickly tell you where to find the Tailless Ones and kill them." He made the Krinn kow-tow before Ghnak. "Lead us, Ghnak, to where the evil spirits make magic with flame and thunder, with big noises, with coming and going from the sky. Hurry, oh chief, and save the sun!"

  Ghnak continued to stare at Kettrick, his mouth open like that of a man winded by a sudden blow. Kettrick held the pose. Behind him Boker, who understood the Krinn speech, nudged Hurth and Glevan and they bent their foreheads to the ground. Then a sub-chief of ten heartstones bent and cried out, "Lead us, Ghnak!" and the rest of the men followed, shouting, "Ghnak! Ghnak!"

  Pride swelled Ghnak's chest and brought his tail up in a stiff arc until the tip almost touched his shoulderblades. He still did not quite understand what he was about. But it is the business of a chief to lead his people, and the magnitude of the idea set his ego afire. He stamped his feet and pounded himself and roared.

  "Ghnak will save the sun!"

  He moved away quickly, with half the tribe at his heels, adding, "The god will speak through the talking logs."

  "Suppose he doesn't," said Boker under his breath to Kettrick. "Suppose the People of the River don't have a thing to say about big noises and comings from the sky."

  "You won't live past morning, anyway," said Kettrick, "What difference does a few hours make?"

  "Because of the vanity of man," said Glevan, "I will make a large prayer for a miracle."

  The flat rattling voices of the talking logs began to speak, calling up and down the river to the scattered tribes of the Krinn. Kettrick understood very little of the drum talk. He switched on the radio, but the lifeboat now seemed to be out of range and all he got was static. He turned it off.

  The sun was higher. The heat increased. The needle of the counter crept toward the red. The clack of the primeval jungle telegraph halted and stuttered. A feeling of unreality came over Kettrick, a detachment psychotic in its cheerfulness. He was no longer afraid. He no longer worried. He looked across at the god who sat in his house beyond the sacred fire, and he said, "If you let your brother down, friend, there will be no more offerings for you."

  In a semistupor he sat and waited and listened to the drums.

  Boker shook him. "Wake up," he said. "I think they've heard something."

  24

  Kettrick started up. He could hear Ghnak's deep grunting bass crying out that the god had spoken. Other voices shouted "Ghnak! Ghnak!" Women began to howl shrilly. There was a lot of stamping about, and the drums were still.

  Kettrick and the others ran.

  They met Ghnak between walls of fern and sawgrass, on the trail that led to the talking place and the bank of the river.

  "The god my brother has told me," he said. "The tribe of Hhurr beyond the Many Hills has seen the magic of the sun-slayers."

  Kettrick said, "Ghnak will lead us." He looked at his companions, seeing their faces as blank as he knew his own must be. They did not believe it. He did not believe it.

  They did not dare believe it.

  "A volcanic upheaval," said Hurth. "Or an earthquake."

  Glevan said nothing. His lips moved without sound.

  Ghnak was chanting. The tribesmen answered him. They stamped their feet and performed ritual obscenities of a defiant sort, their tails erect and quivering. In a moment there would be a rush to pick up weapons and then a surge back to the river bank. Kettrick stepped aside into the clearing where the talking log lay on its supports. It was hollow and had a long slit on its flattened top surface. The sticks were hung beside it. Kettrick switched on his radio and called the lifeboat.

  After what seemed a moderate eternity the copilot answered, sounding very distant and rather peevish.

  "Negative so far," he said. "Nothing but dust and volcanoes. This is a hell of a world. I've lost the cruiser now but her last transmission was negative."

  "I may have something," Kettrick said, and explained rapidly, leaving out the supernatural embellishments. "The Many Hills are the line of buttes west of where you dropped us. How far beyond them this tribe lives I don't know. The country is a mess seen from the air…"

  "I know. I saw it this morning. We'll give it a closer look when we reach it." Kettrick heard him talking to the pilot, and then he added, "That will be our next westward sweep. We're almost at the terminus now and about to head east."

  Kettrick said, "You don't think it would be worth your while to go a little bit out of your way."

  "We were assigned to a definite sweep pattern, Kettrick. We can't just drop out a few thousand miles of it because one of your apes down there saw a thunderstorm or an…"

  "Volcanic upheaval," said Kettrick. "Sure. Suit yourself."

  He cut the switch. He was angry, though he knew he had no right to be. The copilot was completely correct.

  The tribe came streaming back down the trail with their weapons slung over their shoulders, following Ghnak. Kettrick and the others joined them. At the edge of the water the tribe's two river craft were pulled up onto the mud. The Krinn, quite nonapelike, were fearless and expert in the water. They swam, hunting the aquatic mammals with great skill. For long voyages they built a kind of rude catamaran out of two long buoyant logs sharpened at both ends and lashed together with cross branches about four feet apart. The river was the great highway, and from it other rivers branched, and the Krinn traveled for astonishing distances, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of desire for conquest or sheer curiosity. They were a gutty, energetic breed. In another million years or so they might amount to something. If they lived.

  The craft were pushed off. Holding long paddles, a dozen or so Krinn bestrode each log. The men found places among them and Chai, holding herself rigidly in check, climbed obediently up behind Kettrick. The Krinn had found it convenient to ignore her, but she was finding it not so easy to ignore them. Kettrick laid his head back against her and said, "Soon over now. Be patient."

  The Krinn began to churn the water, one of them on each craft calling out, "Ough! Ough! Ough!" rhythmically to mark the time. They picked up the beat and the logs shot away downstream, toward the Many Hills and the tribe of Hhurr who had seen the magic.

&nbs
p; And here we go, thought Kettrick, a brave little band with our tails in the air, to save the sun.

  Once more the strange feeling of unreality came over him, but this time the comfortable detachment was lacking. I have done this before, he thought. And he had. He had ridden a smooth log in the midst of a line of Krinn rowers, watching their hairy backs bend and the paddles swing, flashing in the sun. He had seen the banks of the river gliding past and felt the warm suck of the water on his legs and smiled at the way the tails of his fellow sailors were carried daintily aloft out of the wet.

  Yet after a while he understood that this was not what he meant.

  He understood that at last he was living the dream.

  They went downriver with the current. They moved swiftly, but not so swiftly as the sun that hastened to reach its zenith, rushing toward its doom. A sick sun, a dying sun, and to Kettrick it seemed that a strangeness came into the light and turned all the landscape into such a place as one might see in fever. Dim shapes flopped and floundered and swirled in the tainted waters. The great buttes reared high, their flanks torn to the bleeding red rock, their foreheads shattered by lightning. The forest crept darkly along the banks, full of sounds and furtive motion, and far on the other side of the sink, atop the desert wall, the yellow curtain of a sandstorm blew and trailed its raggedness down and down across the treetops. The rowers, humped and fanged, churned tirelessly from nowhere into nothing, under the shining of the Doomstar.

  The lifeboat, its delta wings extended, appeared high in the western sky.

  The Krinn broke their rhythm, shouting that the sun-slayers had come. Kettrick, shaking off his daze, cried out that this was some of the help that the god and his brother Ghnak had sent for. He clawed at the radio.

  The copilot still sounded peevish. But he said, "We decided to come back this way, just to break the monotony. It is a high probability area. You said west of that line of buttes? And north of the river. How large an area do you suggest?"