Frontier of the Dark

by A Bertram Chandler

  “What’s wrong? They can’t do any harm out there.”

  “But they can! They can! Cannot you see where they are?”

  She dragged the man to one of the viewports, pointed.

  “Look!” she screamed.

  There was the blimp, riding at its stubby mooring mast. There were the pale figures, kangaroolike, leaping up and trying to reach the fat, silvery sausage with their foreclaws. It made no sense at all. Why should flesh-eating beasts be so intent upon destroying a lifeless construction of metal and plastic? But whether it made sense or not, they seemed determined to vent their animal fury upon the airship.

  The Lady Mother joined them at the window. She was carrying a pair of binoculars, raised the glasses to her eyes.

  “This must be stopped!” she said. “Lady Pansir, sound the general alarm, then tell the Lady Carlin to unseal the after air-lock door at once! Tell the Lady Prenta to go out with an armed party to kill the things!”

  “With your permission. Gracious Lady, I would go out. It is my ship that they are attacking.”

  “As you will. But sound the alarm. Now!”

  Bells sounded throughout the ship, shrilling and clanging. There was a high clamor of frightened voices. Officers tumbled up into the control room like disturbed, angry ants pouring out of their nest. The Lady Mother was issuing short, sharp orders.

  Somehow, almost without volition, Falsen was caught up in the flurry of events. He was riding down to the stern in the elevator, crammed into the cage with Pansir and five crewwomen whom he did not know. With them he piled out into the air-lock vestibule, where the acridity of burned metal mingled with other, organic scents — of fear, of anger, of excitement. Carlin was there, the welding torch with which she had unsealed the door still in hand. Prenta was there, handing out belts, each with a holstered hand laser attached. Surprisingly, Linda was there, an expression of wolfish anticipation on her face.

  Prenta operated the manual controls of the outer door. It opened, and damp air gusted in, its swampy reek mingling with all the other scents. Pansir ran out first, her hand laser already out of its holster. Falsen and Linda followed close behind. He was conscious of others crowding after him. They clattered down the ramp into the artificially bright night. The searchlights were no longer sweeping, and such of them as could be brought to bear were concentrated upon the blimp, their harsh glare reflected from the silvery lattice of the mooring mast, from the condensation-slick envelope. It was reflected too, although less dazzlingly, from those pale, leaping bodies, the savage animals that were either unaware or contemptuous of the commotion they had initiated.

  Pansir ran, easily outdistancing all the others save for the two Terrans. She still had breath to scream. Falsen wondered what she was yelling but was sure that it was bloodthirsty imprecations. She was firing already, wasting the charge of her weapon at this extreme range. A low shrub, caught by the slashing beam, burst into smoky incandescence.

  They were ugly beasts, these things that were attacking the airship, tailless but with heavy, oddly jointed hindlegs almost like those of a Terran kangaroo. Their forelegs were short, but only relatively so, terminating in handlike claws, their heads round, vaguely feline but with long, protruding fangs.

  “Them … ” panted Linda. “It’s them … ”

  Surely they must be within range now. Falsen pulled his pistol and fired. He must have missed, although he did not think that his aim was all that bad. Others were firing. He winced as a poorly directed beam scorched his back. People were screaming, things were screaming. Here and there the vegetation underfoot was smoldering, the thick, evil-smelling smoke adding to the confusion.

  Pansir flung herself at one of the animals just as it launched itself in a fresh leap aimed at the vulnerable underbelly of the blimp. Freakishly, she caught not a leg but the brute’s sex organ, her hand gripping its penis and testicles. It squawled like an enraged tomcat, fell heavily and clumsily to the ground with the airship pilot sprawled under it, still hanging on desperately. It brought its viciously clawed hind feet up to slash and to disembowel, but Falsen flung himself on it, got his own hands about the thick neck. He almost … reverted; that way he would have been better able to fight, to use his teeth as well as his other merely human equipment. But even in the confusion somebody would be sure to see.

  He wrestled with the animal, trying to choke it. Pansir at last had relaxed her grip, and together, man and beast, they rolled off her, away from her. Falsen was conscious of the outcry all about him, the screams and the bestial snarls. He caught confused glimpses of laser beams blaring as they explosively ignited smoke particles, of leaping and pouncing carnivores, of female bodies half-naked and completely so. The scent of newly shed blood was thick in the air. It was like some medieval painter’s vision of hell.

  Suddenly there was darkness.

  Something must have happened aboard the spaceship, perhaps nothing worse than a temporary power failure. Falsen hoped that this was all that it was. When the lights went out he was taken unawares, relaxed his grip. His enemy broke away from him, threw him off. He staggered to his feet, looked wildly about. He could see little; nobody yet had thought of switching a laser pistol to wide beam.

  From the ship came a vastly amplified voice, the Lady Mother’s.

  “Divenoo … Divenoo … ” Then, concerned even now for the welfare of those whom she regarded as her guests, “Return … Return … ”

  Falsen could see the space vessel now, but dimly. A circle of faint illumination must be the open air-lock door; another glow, high up, must be the control room. There was power of some kind for emergency lighting and for the loud hailer.

  “Divenoo … Divenoo … ”

  Which was all very well, as long as the predators allowed them to break off the engagement.

  But they, too, had stopped fighting, must have run back to wherever it was that they had come from. Laser pistols were now being used as torches, and the beams showed nothing but Doralans — the living, and two or three dead. Falsen feared that Pansir was among these latter but, when the light fell upon her, she put up a hand to shield her eyes. She tried to get to her feet. Falsen helped her.

  But she refused to leave the scene of the fight until she was sure that her precious little dirigible was undamaged.

  CHAPTER 41

  Power had been restored and all services were now operating normally. A heavily armed party had gone out from the ship to the scene of the fight, had brought the bodies of those killed back to the vessel. The air-lock door had been shut, but the welding had not been renewed; soon it would be necessary to open it again.

  All officers, with the exception of the few with important duties, had been summoned to one of the general rooms. On a low platform to one side of it stood the Lady Mother. Behind her was a screen, a square of black emptiness, and to one side of this an almost featureless control box. A junior officer, holding a bundle of slides, was standing by.

  The Doralan captain could have been a university professor about to give a lecture, the long pointer that she was holding adding to the illusion. But, thought Falsen, no academic about to address her students would have looked so weighted down by tragedy, would have been so burdened by the responsibilities of command. She gravely surveyed her audience, then rapped sharply on the platform with the butt of her pointer. The twittering whispers of the officers suddenly ceased.

  “Ladies,” she began. “Ladies, and Mr. Falsen. I shall address you in English, which language most of you know. I shall pause frequently so that translations may be made for the benefit of those few of you who have no English … .”

  “Why talk to us in a foreign tongue. Gracious Lady?” demanded Prenta.

  “Lady Prenta, I hardly need to tell you that the Lady Linda and Mr. Falsen are, to all practical intents and purposes, members of our crew. They have shared our perils.”

  She paused to allow the voluntary translators to do their work.

  “I am not going to ask you to d
ecide what must now be done,” she went on. “I have made my decision. But I want you all to know what is to be done, and why. I have heard the reports of most of you; the written reports I have yet to receive.” She looked sternly at Carlin. “I especially require yours, Lady Carlin. The failure of the ship’s power supply might well have have resulted in an even greater disaster than it did.”

  Carlin stared back at the Lady Mother. Defiantly? Insolently? Looking at her, Falsen could not be sure.

  The captain looked at a list that she was holding in her left hand.

  “The dead,” she announced gravely. “Junior Powermistress Delai. Senior Spacewoman Adar. Tank Attendant Goren. And one unidentified person. No doubt the Lady Prenta, after making a more careful check of the crew list, will be able to tell me who she is.”

  “Everybody has been accounted for, Gracious Lady,” said Prenta sourly.

  “Nonetheless, Lady Prenta, a mistake or an omission must have been made. But its rectification can wait until matters have been brought to a satisfactory conclusion.

  “And now I shall show to you the photographs taken from the control room, using a telephoto lens, during the action. You will all agree, I think, that they are evidence of a most remarkable case of parallel evolution. The similarities, of course, may be no more than superficial. Mr. Falsen will tell you that in the seas of his planet there are creatures that even from a short distance look remarkably alike, the sharks and the dolphins. The shark is a very primitive, almost brainless fish, the dolphin a highly evolved mammal, now recognized by Man as a fellow intelligent being … .”

  She should have been a schoolmistress, thought Falsen admiringly.

  The junior officer inserted a slide into a slot at the side of the control box. The screen was no longer black, had the appearance of a brightly lit tank in which was standing a ferocious beast in an attitude suggesting that it was about to leap. Its mother, thought Falsen, must have been a kangaroo that couldn’t run as fast as a saber-toothed tiger — or, perhaps, it had been the other way around. It was a short-haired animal with a dappled hide.

  He had seen the things, of course, had grappled with them, but all the time they had been in violent motion. Now, looking at this frozen presentation, he could appreciate what he had been up against.

  A second slide was inserted, this one showing an animal in mid-jump. It was indubitably male.

  “These,” said the Lady Mother, “could almost be pictures of the simbor.“ She looked at Falsen and Linda. “The simbor is one of our greater carnivores. It is almost extinct, save for a few specimens in zoos and reserves. But these … things, of course, cannot possibly be simbors, tens of light-years from their native habitat. There can be no simbors here … .”

  Or if there are, thought Falsen, reviving in his mind a tired old joke, you brought ‘em here yourself.

  A note of fanaticism was becoming evident in her voice.

  “Some of you,” she said, “believe as I do, that every world is a living being with its own soul, a spirit that is a dimly intelligent yet enormously powerful deity. The god of this planet, the god that is this planet, hates us. It has thrown against us the storm that wrecked the big airship and has attacked us with its armies of vicious beasts. Perhaps their resemblance to the simbor is not coincidental. Perhaps it had foreknowledge of our coming, and bred especially, over many years, simulacra of the animals most feared and detested in our history and mythology … .”

  She paused for breath and to allow the translators to do their work.

  “Ladies, and Mr. Falsen, this is my intention. I shall hit back, and hard, before I shake the dust of this world forever off my feet.” She was not entirely humorless, even now. “Perhaps I should have said ‘wipe the mud of this world forever off my feet.’ As some of you know, we carry aboard this ship two — if I may employ the Terran euphemism — nuclear devices. Bombs.” She looked at Falsen. “They were manufactured on Earth, as a matter of fact. I am going to use them. If I had more than two I would use them all. No more than a gesture, perhaps, but one that must be made if we are to lift off from this planet with our honor intact.

  “We know little about these simborlike beasts — but this we do know. They are nocturnal in their habits. They seem, unlike our own simbors, to be of an aquatic nature. They have been traced to the cave and to the lake connected with it by tunnels.

  “Shortly after dawn, when the predators will be sleeping, we shall attack. Two helicopters, sharing the load, will carry one of the bombs. This they will drop in the lake. The airship will carry the other one, together with a party who will take it down through the tunnels into the big cavern. Each bomb will be fitted with a time fuse and these fumes will be synchronized, set so that the explosion will take place when the aircraft are well clear.”

  She spoke briefly to the young officer in charge of the projection apparatus. Another slide was inserted into the box.

  “Some of you,” said the Lady Mother, “may think that I am being vicious. But I ask you to look at these pictures.”

  In the tanklike screen a body appeared, that of a woman with her throat torn out, her belly ripped open.

  “Your shipmate,” said the Lady Mother softly. “Junior Powermistress Delai.” The presentation faded, was replaced by one almost identical. “Senior Spacewoman Adar.” Then there was the third one. “And Tank Attendant Goren.” Goren, in addition to her other injuries, was lacking her right hand. It seemed to have been bitten off. “And now,” went on the captain, “we have the unfortunate whom the Lady Prenta has not yet been able to identify … .”

  Apart from the torn-out throat, the unidentified Doralan’s wounds were different from those of her fellow victims. Where the face should have been was just raw flesh, and the skin, together with the nipples, had been ripped off the chest. Between the legs was a gaping, bloody cavity. It looked more like the work of a homicidal sex maniac than that of a wild animal, however vicious. A gasp of horror went up from most of the assembled officers.

  “Look!” declaimed the Lady Mother. “Look! And if you have held doubts until now, you must surely lose them. These people, my women, our women, must be avenged!”

  Somebody had come into the big room, a long white laboratory coat over her uniform, a garment with stains and spatterings upon it, some of them blood.

  She spoke urgently to the captain, who said, “Please speak in English, Doctor, out of courtesy to Mr. Falsen and the Lady Linda.”

  “Very well, Gracious Lady.” The medical officer cast a baleful glare in the direction of the two Terrans. “I have made the … autopsy … ”

  “Surely,” said the Lady Mother, “the causes of death were obvious in all four cases.”

  “They are. But … ” The doctor pointed dramatically at the three-dimensional picture in the screen. “But that is not the body of a woman. That is the body of a man!”

  The captain broke the shocked silence.

  She said at last, “Once we have lifted off from the surface of this accursed planet a full enquiry will be made. Somebody — officer, petty officer or enlisted woman — must have been harboring a stowaway, her” — the voice oozed contempt — “playmate. But we must not be uncharitable. He was loyal. Clad in a borrowed uniform, he rushed out at the side of his mistress to fight alongside her. He died. He has paid the penalty for his presence. And I promise you that whoever brought him on board will also pay.

  “My apologies, Mr. Falsen, for having spoken unkindly of your sex. But Terran men are different from ours. You are more than mere strutting phalluses. And now, ladies, you have heard what I have had to say. I will leave the details of organization to department heads. I wish the punitive expedition to be ready as soon after dawn as possible.

  “That is all.”

  CHAPTER 42

  “It must have been one of the stowaways,” she said. “One of those tomcats the tabbies brought along to satisfy them. But what was it — he — doing outside the ship?”

  “Getting killed,
” said Falsen.

  “Answer my question properly, please.”

  “All right. I go along with the Lady Mother’s theory. But why the mutilations?” He looked at Linda suspiciously. “It wasn’t … you?”

  “It was not. I had my hands full fighting the local beasts. Oh, I admit that after the lights went out I slipped out of my uniform so I could change. I fight better that way. I did rip the throat out of one of the simbors, if that’s what they are. And then when Her High and Mightiness started screaming for us to return, I wiped my mouth on the rags of somebody’s tunic, found my own shirt and shorts and made myself respectable.”

  “What happened to the simbor’s body?” asked Falsen.

  “How should I know? One moment the things were there, the next moment they weren’t. They must have taken the dead one with them. After all, it’s meat … . I should have taken more of it while I had the chance.”

  “A pity,” agreed Falsen. “The last chance you’ll be getting, probably. When we’re on Dorala we shall have to watch our step. If there’s anything suspicious about us, somebody is bound to run screaming to the Terran Embassy — and once they get into the act there’ll be urgent correspondence with Earth, and records will be checked, and everybody will know who and what we are.”

  “Oh, all right, all right. I’ll be a good girl all the voyage to Dorala and all the time that we’re there.” She stared at the deck of her cabin sulkily, then raised her head to look at Falsen. “Being a good girl has its drawbacks, though. When you’re a good girl people expect you to do things for them. Why did she insist that we accompany the punitive expedition, as she calls it, to help to plant the bomb in the cave?”

  “We’ve been there before, you know.”

  “Why not Carlin?”

  “The Lady Mother thinks that she’ll be better employed making sure that all the machinery works properly on lift-off.”

  “She has something there. But why are we supposed to lug that bomb into the bowels of the earth?”