The Alien MEGAPACK®

by Talmage Powell

  “No,” he said. “I’d like to stay.”

  “There’s nothing to do but fish and sail around looking for Scoops ready to shed their crystals,” Jennifer reminded him. “Still, Uncle Charlie has talked about settling in the Township and standing for Council election. Can you fish and sail, Jeff Aubray?”

  The consulate rocket landed ashore, but Jeff ignored it.

  “I can learn,” he said.

  UTTER SILENCE, by Edward Wellen

  Originally published in Infinity Science Fiction, February 1957.

  “Otto Rajpepna!” he shouted at the challenging emptiness. The shout and its shadow registered in his mind as magnificent showerings of fireworks, and for once he liked his own name. “Captain Rajpepna is on the job!” That ironic shout made a pleasing flowering of light. “Rajpepna, Otto! Present and accounted for!” He delighted in the wonderful sparkling pinwheel of the last shout until it spun into nothingness.

  He whirled, suddenly feeling foolish. He sighed an orange sigh of relief. There was no one watching him make a damn fool of himself. He sighed a two-tone gray sigh of ruefulness and near-despair. There was no one watching him make a damn fool of himself—because there was no one. He was alone on Rotanev IX.

  Looking up, he met the vibrant sky. Somewhere out there, beyond the bronze gong of Rotanev, his spaceship—his spaceship—was returning to Tellus. Returning without him. Returning from the colony on Sualocin II with a precious cargo of upalenal—the hard-to-come-by-ripe type. But the upalenal would never reach Tellus. And he of the fireworks would never reach Tellus. Captain Otto Rajpepna would die on this waste planet where the mutineers had marooned him.

  They would curve well out of Tellurian lanes to deliver the upalenal to a fencing trust, in whose hands it was even more precious as contraband. They would then go on to Tellus—if the fencing trust didn’t double-cross them—and lay the loss of the upalenal to a hijacking. They would tell the board of inquiry that Captain Otto Rajpepna had bravely but vainly resisted the hijackers and that his dust now mingled with the dust of stars.

  Looking back, he flagellated himself for failing to make soundings. He should have been more aware of what was going on in his ship, of what was going on in the minds of his crew. He must have drifted out of touch with his men. Even so, there’s always a stink to the plotting of betrayal—he should have smelled it out. The mutiny had come as a great shock.

  He unshouldered his pack—with its precious cargo of food pills, hydroponic seedlings, and air-wringer—and let it drop to the sand with a brown thunk. He gazed across the wearying monotone. He almost wished now that the mutineers had scattered him in space. Not that he was looking forward to oblivion, that Great Zero inviting one to sink into its all-obliterating. But incredible time and a chance ray of light might have joined in driving one atom of his dust home to Tellus.

  Again a gray sigh. Tellus was loud ties and blue notes and chicken cacciatore. Sualocin II was synthetic loud ties and synthetic blue notes and synthetic chicken cacciatore. Rotanev IX was—what?

  So far, Rotanev IX was sand and sand and sand—and crazy gravitational stress that caused a sort of red shift of the senses. You could go mad if you dwelt on one thing too long. And Rotanev IX was one thing—sand—and any time on Rotanev IX was too long.

  He shouldered his pack again and pressed on, hoping to find something new. Guiding himself by the sun and by scooping sand into small mounds at regular intervals, he spiraled out from the spot where they had dumped him. The days passed, all alike, until the day came when his tracks began to close in around him. And that inspiraling told him that he had covered one hemisphere; soon he would be done with paring his apple. And still there was nothing but the smoothly curving horizon of level sand, save where his mounds showed.

  Before his food pills ran out he would have to set up the seedlings. It would take a while to wring enough water out of the air to mold and fill an adobe trough. And he would have to raise, brick by brick, an overshadowing building to keep evaporation losses down. He would have to make camp for good, and soon.

  But he pressed on, desperately hoping to find something new. Time was running out, not sand. Dawn was thundering up for the 168th time when he found something new.

  It was more sand. But it was more sand in one place than he had come upon so far. Much higher than his own heapings. A real dune.

  His mouth twisted in a smile; a bitter taste took the place of kinesthetic sensation. According to his reckoning, his ship was knifing through Pluto’s orbit right about now, toward the glint of Tellus. While just over the horizon nothing awaited him but the signs of his own marching. Here, there would be times when by standing on the crest of the dune he would be nearest home. Be grateful for crumbs of stone. Well, here he would found his oasis.

  He rounded the dune to seek rest from the brazen note of Rotanev. A clang halted him as he was letting his burden fall. The dune’s lee stood sheer. And in it—He thought he had adapted to the confusing shiftings of perception, but what confronted him now was so unlikely that he wondered if his senses were playing tricks even more fiendish. He sniffed and touched and tasted to make sure. And he convinced himself that he beheld what he beheld—a door. A door of no metal he knew, in the middle of nothing.

  Was the sand shawling a vault? Was this a cache? A tomb? A time capsule? What brooded in this blank sphinx?

  Only one way to find out. His fingers ran over the door until they met the sticky sweetness of a button. He hesitated, then gave a wry shrug. What did he have to lose? He pressed the button.

  The door slid open.

  He didn’t know what he had looked forward to finding beyond the door, but it certainly wasn’t the thing that he saw—nothing. The vault, as he called it in his mind, was dark and empty.

  He was fairly sure of that, but he wanted to make absolutely sure. It was important to know. And he was too impatient to wait for Rotanev to strike noon or later, when he would know by the sun’s resounding through the vault if there was anything at all inside. He stretched his pack across the threshold to hold an opening if the door decided to slide shut. He shoved one foot slowly across. Nothing happened. He ventured his weight on it, then pulled the other foot across. Nothing happened.

  He breathed an orange sigh. He reached out through air like felt and began to probe the chamber, starting with the wall on his left. Even if the vault proved to be fully void, even if he never divined its reason for being, it would be better housing than he could have built for himself. It was the right size, solid—and empty.

  With a start, he turned toward the opening. The blurred touch of indigo scraped across his vision. The door was closing.

  It took him by surprise but it didn’t worry him. Placing the sack across the threshold had been a sound move. The casing of the pack was of light but strong alloy. It would hold against any possible pressure of the door.

  Without slowing in the least, the door sheared the pack and sealed the opening. With a sinking feeling Rajpepna wondered if the vault’s reason for being was to trap. If so, where were the remains of the last victim? Were they the dust he stood on? Or did the trapper make regular rounds? He would never know; how long before the air in the chamber clotted?

  Something terrible, and terribly familiar, was happening to him. There was something out of childhood nightmare in what was happening to him and it outraged him that it should be happening again and that it should be happening now.

  He raised his hands and bailed them, then slowly let them fall and unclench. It would be worse than useless to beat blindly against the mute walls. It would be madness.

  A whisper of green grew overt. A sudden slackening of the crazy gravitational stress shifted his senses—for a flash—back to normal. In that flash, he recognized the feeling of near-weightlessness. The room was falling.

  This was another something out of childhood nightmare. In spite of his deepening
sense of outrage, which urged him to trembling stiffness, he went limp to lessen any impact. The room was a long time falling. He grew weary of remaining inarticulate, but just as he was going tense he slipped instead into a dreaming state. Smiling strangely, he waited. The room kept failing, as if the shaft it shot through wormholed straight to the core of the planet. He waited, smiling strangely. It was no more of a drop than the one he had made from the stream of being of man, when the mutineers had dropped him out.

  The end came between one expecting of it and the next. And as his new full weight settled on the floor of the elevator the gravitational stress, feeding on its own inwards, pounded him with new force. He leaned against the wall, tasting vertigo.

  The door slid open.

  With an untwisting of guts he straightened. He took in with amazement what lay outside. Not sand, but phosphorescent pavement. A walk, leading to buildings. Huge buildings. A city!

  In his hurry to get out and enter the city he stumbled over the half of the pack that had remained in the vault, but righted himself in time. Things rolled out. He gave them brief attention. The precious seedlings, for the most part crushed. Too bad, but in a city like this there was sure to be food. He stood on the pavement and wonderingly trained his senses on what unfolded before him.

  Behind him, a blurred touch. He turned, more quickly in the spirit than in the flesh owing to the heavying cross-currents of this crazy planet. The door was sliding shut, sliding shut, shut.

  He reached for and found sticky sweetness. He pressed it. The door remained shut.

  Well, this would seem to commit him. He turned again to the city. The rock wall in which the door fitted swept up with what seemed to him a wail, swept up and over and down behind the buildings. He stared at the city, waiting.

  What, no welcoming committee? Then it struck him that there was not even any traffic. Nothing was moving.

  Nothing was moving in all the metallic city. Far as he could tell, nothing but his own passing was sending disturbing waves through the leaden air. Yet, he had the haunting feeling he wasn’t alone, and he glanced around, nervously, as he went. To throw off the feeling, he shouted. Down here, the answering fireworks exploded fuzzily and only added to the haunting feeling. Still, he shouted. But it was a ghost town. Every room of every building he entered was as bare as the elevator. It was on his second time around that he noticed the door. Strange he hadn’t noticed it the first time. It was the only door—apart from the one to the elevator—that he had come upon, and so he should have noticed it the first time.

  He found a sticky sweetness. Another elevator! How far down would this one take him? He pressed the button.

  The door slid open.

  This was no elevator. The door opened on a kind of courtyard. Strange he hadn’t seen it from one of the windows in the buildings ringing it. He felt sure he had looked out of every window in every building, and every window had seemed to give on a street.

  There was something at the far end of the courtyard. An opening. And running out of it, coming directly toward; him, twenty-odd figures. To welcome him—or to fall upon him?

  He halted, but not too abruptly, and was careful to make no move, for even a reassuring gesture of his might seem hostile to them. He halted, but a red drumming went on—as though inertia felt it had to fill in his untaken footsteps.

  Odd the figures most certainly were—some vaguely manlike, some not remotely manlike. But what seemed oddest about them was their manner of running. They would keep running forever. They were frozen in midstride, some of them at angles seemingly impossible to maintain.

  “Ah, statues!” he said, and the beating quieted. And feeling free to examine them critically he began closing the space. They won his admiration even at a distance, not so much for themselves as for their makers. “What art!” And his admiration increased as the distance decreased and the running seemed increasingly real. “Well, boys,” he said, giving one or two figures the benefit of the doubt, “what’s the rush?”

  He froze, himself, as they answered his question. They represented wildly varying life forms but they had one thing in common. All had the attitude of fear. They weren’t running toward him, save as he happened to stand in the line of flight They were running from something. And though they were only statues their look of terror infected him. That look whispered a warning. Fear, breeding by mere breathing in the ear, made him strain beyond the figures to learn what was pursuing.

  He shook himself. “What’s wrong with me?” he said, laughing half-angrily. Beyond the figures was only the silent opening. He could have sworn that their eyes followed him as he made for the opening, though when he turned suddenly and stared back they still impaled their eyes not on him but on fear.

  “Well,” he said, “let’s find out what the hue and cry is all about.” And he drew a blue breath and moved between the wild flutings of the columns flanking the opening and so passed inside.

  He closed his eyes. But, for a ringing moment, the sound of what had struck his vision continued its reverberating, some invisible orchestra lagging behind some hyper-baton. The sound transposed itself like a negative after-image, then the moment ended.

  Utter silence.

  Now there’s a moronic imperative, he thought, going slightly mad out of relief. Utter silence!

  He opened his eyes. It took some doing, but at last he willed himself to open his eyes and end the soothing purple hush. And he scanned again the ringing walls.

  More precisely, his eyes ran the gamut of a frieze. It was easy to divine its purpose. Clearly, the frieze recorded a phase, of the history of the ruling beings of Rotanev IX. He was able to trace the saddening diminuendo of a once-great race degenerating.

  That race’s last artist, with an echo of the golden spark still glimmering in his darkening brain, had sculpted for all time the decline and fall of his kind. There whipped past Rajpepna’s gaze the whizzing of vehicles, the whirring of dynamos; then, a clashing of cymbals, a devastating time of warring; lastly, a sinking back into slime and silence.

  Allowing for a bit of chauvinistic boasting—he caught a hint of an unbelievable means of journeying in space—these beings had once attained a high degree of culture. Apart from the material, he grasped a sense of the ethical values of that culture. At their peak of greatness these beings, with dispassionate justice, had returned good will for good will, bad will for bad will. And it was this last that had turned upon them—had turned them upon themselves—with a vengeance.

  He sighed greyly. The frieze touched him, though he wasn’t able to tell why. It announced its message of doom and reverberated it through a medium of its own, reaching beyond the senses, beyond sense.

  Suddenly a great burden fell upon him. He could hear it getting night, a chilling night when every last unique grouping of shifting atoms was no more. He shivered, seeing a dizzying vision of a time without coordinates, a time without time.

  This crazy planet had been doing things to his way of responding to his surroundings. Now he realized it was doing things to his thinking. Stresses seemed to be breaking down the compartmentalizing of his mind, seemed to be buckling the bulkheads holding his id, ripping the seams, flooding it out.

  He had an urge to destroy. Deface the frieze! Desecrate the building! Demolish the city! And why not? Wasn’t the individual born to die? Wasn’t the universe itself born to die? If races reach greatness only to decline and fall, then why not help the process along? If all was for the purpose of purposelessness, then why not hurry the end of all?

  There were signs he wasn’t the only one to feel this way. Littering the floor were fragments of objects of art. Plainly, they hadn’t of themselves fallen to pieces. Someone had dashed them. Someone—

  It came to him—those figures outside were real. They had been alive. Might even be living, in stasis. Like himself, they were alien to this planet. Each in turn had landed, had found
the door in the dune, had descended to the city, had confronted the frieze, had struck out in despair and fear.

  Had the dying race of Rotanev IX—wishing to return bad will for bad will—built in a curse? By that he didn’t mean anything supernatural. He meant, say, a paralyzing ray that the aura of the will to destroy would set off.

  He turned and gazed at the fleeing figures. And all at once his heart stilled. He couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to him one of the running figures was missing. Had it—served its time?

  Ah, that was a lot of nonsense! He turned back savagely. The urge to destroy was overwhelming.

  Impatiently he tried to explain it to his feebly protesting conscience. Listen, when you think of the vast intra-and inter-atomic spaces nothing has solidity. Really, he would be smashing nothing. To carry it farther, nothing would be smashing nothing against nothing.

  He laughed a rainbow. He didn’t give a damn whether or not his conscience was listening to his reasoning. He scooped up a shard. He wound up to hurl it at the frieze.

  A sharp thought came to him and he held his hand. Let me take one more look at the frieze. It took all his will to hold back and he felt a whining coldness in his bones. The air he breathed had the texture of pain. But he held his hand.

  And he was barely in time, for even as his hand fell to his side and let the shard drop to the floor with a rose thunk and even as the echoing of his new look was dying away—a second sweep of the frieze, this one a counterclockwise one that revealed the frieze to be a gladdening crescendo—there came a new clangor and the great beings of Rotanev IX materialized around him.

  * * * *

  When the mutineers landed on Tellus he was waiting there with a detail of spaceport police to welcome them.