Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  “There is news,” continued the native. “Approaching from sunward is great looth. Beware, man friend!”

  Blakston thanked him, inwardly smiling at Queel’s melodramatic manner. But the warning was born of the Ootlandah’s not unfounded fear of the genus loothaguri, which might be described as an acre of animal with but one characteristic—an appetite. The factor himself felt no anxiety at the approach of one of these weird creatures, for the space-post’s electrical fences could turn aside a dozen of them.

  Then came an apprehension that made Blakston wrinkle his nose in anticipation—the fear that the looth might get on the cleared landing field and be crisped in the rocket blasts of the supply ship. That had happened once, and the odor of burned wool, feathers and flesh was still vivid in his memory; like the sulphide, it defied masks and air purifiers. During that month, more than ever before, he had come close to resigning his post.

  He frowned therefore over this remote but ghastly possibility. Hard as it was to imagine the smelly air of Dhee Minor made more obnoxious, grim experience had proven it could be done. He decided to force the ship’s crew to fence the landing field against such eventualities in the future.

  “Having reason to depart,” commented Queel, “shall now do so. But listen!”

  Blakston listened, fuming at the necessity for air-tight sound diaphragms, which always muffled sound a bit and now kept him deaf to whatever had attracted Queel’s attention.

  “Is sound of ship landing,” supplied that worthy. And indeed Blakston heard it almost that moment—the thin whistle set up by the ship’s plunge into Dhee’s atmosphere, the distant roar of its barking blast. He breathed a prayer that it might miss the looth.

  “Funny,” he said. “The supply ship’s early—it’s not due for six days.”

  “Is no supply ship,” remarked Queel positively. Blakston frowned his doubt, yet his own ears promptly confirmed the Ootlandah. The supply ship’s landing screech was of a different timbre, its rocket blasts heavier, more sonorous. Blakston tore his binoculars off their peg, ran outdoors, and leveled them on the sky just over the landing field. A faint streak of golden-red flame, dimmed by the hot globe of the sun, flashed across his field of vision. The ship was down, out of sight behind the forest fringe, where the sun itself would sink before many more minutes. Blakston went back inside.

  ~ * ~

  Five minutes passed. For the third time he polished the long counter, patiently busied himself with rearranging the oxygen tanks. The visitors would come, he told himself. Anyone who landed on Dhee Minor would come first of all to the space post. It was not only common sense, but unchanging precedent. On the opposite side of the counter Queel waited also, forgotten his announced intention of being off—for the Ootlandah was blessed with a huge share of human curiosity.

  He stiffened, whiskers quivering, as footsteps thudded swiftly on the path outside. A man materialized suddenly on the threshold, bulky in spacesuit, huge in comparison to Blakston. A second figure appeared behind him, and both, after an instant’s hesitation, entered the store. Blakston switched on his helmet phone, knowing that their suits would hardly be equipped with sound diaphragms, and offered routine greeting, to which both responded surlily.

  “We’re required to have a record of your landing,” Blakston went on. “The I. R. C. C. requests all visitors to register. After that I’m at your service.”

  “Planetary patrol,” growled the smaller man, flashing a badge on the back of one glove. “Official business. Get your men together and we’ll explain it to the lot of you.”

  “Men?” Blakston laughed. “I’m all there is, so far as the space post goes. There are a few chaps running around out there. God knows where—”

  The laugh faded before sudden, chilling suspicion. Planetary patrolmen, with a complete, space-post roster on board their ship, should know there was no staff at 291.

  “That suits us!” An unpleasant grin overspread the gross features of the bigger man. “Makes it easier. All we want is oxygen and chow—lots of it and quick. Where is it?”

  Blakston’s glance switched to the smaller man, a dark, bushy-browed individual with a face as lean and pointed as an animal’s. His hand snapped up, cradling the butt of a proton gun whose needle-slim barrel fell in line with Blakston’s chest. “You heard him,” he said. “Get the stuff.” His flat voice was expressionless —and as deadly—as the warning burr of a rattlesnake.

  Hot and cold chills of fury rippled down Blakston’s spine. To be robbed—of oxygen! The law required him to give it free of charge to anybody who lacked means of payment, and that was one thing. But to be robbed of it at the point of a gun— He trembled with impotent rage as he selected two full cylinders and thumped them down upon the counter.

  “Take them!” he said briefly, furiously. “Get out!”

  The burly man guffawed. “He doesn’t get the idea, Chet. You explain it while I show him—” He swept Blakston aside as though brushing a beetle off his suit and began pawing through the stacks of cylinders, tossing empty ones to the floor, putting full ones on the counter, until the shelves were bare.

  Blakston fumed at this treatment of his precious stock. Only the smaller man’s proton gun kept him from assaulting the other.

  “I gave you full ones,” he gritted. “It’s more than you deserve. Get out!”

  “Aw, tell him, Chet,” urged the big man as he worked. “Tell him we’re taking all of them—”

  All! The word dinned its fury and its import into Blakston’s brain, an unbelievable and ghastly nightmare. To steal a single flask of the life-sustaining gas was the one crime blacker than murder on these airless worlds. Oxygen, out here, was the common currency of humanity, priceless as life itself. Even outlaws respected the unwritten law that exempted a man’s oxygen from theft.

  “Listen to me!” He made futile, clawing efforts to stop the giant, who was now strapping the full cylinders together. “The supply ship isn’t due for a week—and there are men out there who’ll be coming here for oxygen. Sometimes their tanks are almost empty; sometimes they’re so far gone I have to hook the new tank on for them. That’s what those flasks mean to them when—”

  The giant shoved him sprawling, and began to load food into a burden net, clearing entire shelves at a sweep. The load was a tremendous one, yet no more than a strong man could carry, gravity on Dhee Minor being of the slightest.

  Blakston turned to the smaller man. Whatever the two did, this one would dictate. But even as he spoke, Blakston felt the futility of any appeal to those merciless, reptile-cold eyes.

  “Leave us four flasks at least—they’ll do if the ship comes on time. Leave four, and I swear I won’t say a word about you. But leave four—”

  The giant grinned with evil humor, “You won’t be needing no oxygen. We will. We aim to put a lot of room between us and Reinmuth before we shut off our jets.”

  Reinmuth! The word blasted all hope in one black instant These were convicts, by some incredible chance escaped from the penal colony of that tiny planetoid. That was why they had landed here, seeking food and oxygen to stock their stolen ship for a dash to the outer planets. Once beyond Jupiter, no patrol in space could lay a finger on them.

  The smaller man cursed in that queer, toneless voice of his.

  “Aw, what’s the difference if he knows?” whined the giant. “I tell you the whole lousy space-pill will go like a fistful of dry hay. That red stuff out there is like gunpowder. We dip our rockets here and there when we pull out, and nothing can put out the fireworks.”

  ~ * ~

  An uncontrollable shudder swept Blakston. They meant to fire the planet! He knew of the disasters of ‘35 and ‘87—holocausts that had swept two thirds of this tiny world and left only blazing stubble and charred death in their wake. Meteors, red-hot from their fall through the atmosphere, had started those. The planetoid’s thick growth of vegetation had done the rest—for living stuff, here on Dhee Minor, was built of inflammable oxygen compo
unds, as combustible as a match head and similarly carrying within itself the oxygen necessary to complete combustion. A fire of any kind was forbidden by law; food was precooked, or, here at the space post, electrically baked. The entire planetoid was a tinderbox.

  The convicts’ plan was simple enough—and perfect from their point of view, thought Blakston bitterly. They would create a tragedy here that would effectively cover their trail, sacrificing a world to gain their own ends. Safe in their ship, they had only to fly low and allow the flames from their ship’s jets to touch a few tree fronds here and there. Set alight in three or four places, Dhee Minor this time would burn completely, a pitiful little star ablaze for a few hours—and forever after dead. The very atmosphere would burn once the oxygen released from burning vegetation made that possible. Martians and Earthmen and Ootlandahs, every living soul on the planetoid would be doomed—Queel’s people even more swiftly than the others, for theirs was that same highly inflammable lifestuff so characteristic of this world.

  All this sped through Blakston’s mind in a moment, and it was as though it wound up a spring within him—a spring that snapped suddenly into furious action, as much out of his own control as though he were, for an instant, two individuals. He leaped suddenly at the smaller man, knocked the deadly proton gun from his hand, and in a paroxysm of fury clawed at the convict’s airsuit as though he could rip the fabric apart with his bare hands. With the advantages of surprise and weight, he might have downed his antagonist, had not huge hands grappled him from behind, closed viciously around his chest, dragged him struggling and kicking from his prey. He was jerked backward, pinned against the counter by a huge fist. The smaller man picked up his proton gun and leveled it—death in his stare.

  “Is most evil to kill man friend,” piped a voice suddenly. “Not to be allowed, I regret.”

  The convicts whirled upon Queel, whom they had ignored thus far, probably in the belief that he was some outlandish plant. The giant, recovering himself, laughed harshly.

  “Hell—it’s nothing but a native. He can’t hurt us.”

  But the ferret-faced man, his nerves lashed raw, squeezed the trigger of his weapon. A proton blast whirled hotly from the gun’s muzzle—a barrage capable of powdering steel plate at close range. Queel disintegrated instantly. Yellow dust drifted, settled swiftly to the floor.

  Almost indifferently, Blakston felt himself being trussed to a ceiling post, his hands hastily tied together behind the rough timber. He wondered dully why they troubled to secure him instead of blasting him as they had Queel, but his mind refused to ponder the question. Instead a hundred irrelevant thoughts came to remind him of events long past, of the day he had met Queel, of the many favors they had done one another, of the strange but genuine comradeship which had grown between him and the native. So compelling were the memories evoked by the settling of that handful of yellow dust there on the thurkwood floor that he scarcely felt the convict’s hands upon him.

  A sense of strangulation, a dull thudding in his temples, the rattling suck of dead air in his throat, snatched him back to the present The smaller man was gone, the giant even now leaving; he swore as he stumbled over a looth-shearer’s crook that had fallen across the threshold during Blakston’s scuffle with the other convict. Then he was gone, and Blakston faced the empty doorway, strangely blurred in his sight.

  There was a mighty singing in his ears, and his breath was quick, furiously quick, but it brought him no air. And then he knew why. His tank cock had been turned, the precious oxygen shut off from his helmet. Impossible for his hands, bound behind him as they were, to reach that all-important little handle just over his right shoulder. Even the strength to struggle was fast ebbing away from him; he was rapidly sinking into a coma from which there would be no awakening. Only as velvet fingers of blackness closed about him did that agonized retching for breath cease.

  He came to his senses with a dull booming in his ears. His skull throbbed painfully, but there was air in his helmet and he gulped it in deep, gasping breaths. With returning memory came astonishment at finding himself alive.

  He had been clumsily cut free; the cords still dangled from his wrists. Somebody had turned on the oxygen—the giant convict, perhaps? Instinctively Blakston glanced at his oxygen gauge. Less than an hour’s supply was left him; small wonder they hadn’t thought it worth while to snatch the almost-empty tank from him. An hour to live, to fight—or to die in.

  His rate of breathing settled back to normal, but the hollow booming he had first heard on awakening grew louder. Suddenly he knew it for what it was—the ceremonial drums and tambourines of the Ootlandahs, used only in solemn, secret rites or in grave crises.

  He stumbled to the doorway, almost tripped over the looth-shearer’s crook. Hesitating just an instant, he snatched it up, then ran out to stare down the steep trail that led from the commissary down to the landing field. The sky was already gray with dusk, the sun out of sight, yet a reddish glow lighted the sky ahead, and, as if to confirm its dread message, black smoke smudged the forest skyline. Fire!

  Dhee Minor’s death warrant was written in that flare of crimson light. The men from Reinmuth had kindled the forest while passing through it on their way to their ship. Blakston watched with thudding heart as a gigantic flame was sucked up into the sky, crimson as blood. Beside it another forest giant caught, blazed into a glory of green fire that writhed in virescent streamers heavenward. In Blakston’s helmet surged a growing roar as that fiery surf gained in strength and volume.

  He forsook the path in order to circle the burning area. Through the soft darkness of the forest, already flickering with fantastic colored shadows, he ran. Emerging, he overlooked the well-cleared landing field, now starkly illuminated by the prismatic radiance of the blazing forest.

  A ship lay there, lifeless and unguarded. The men from Reinmuth were nowhere visible, but farther along the forest fringe, outlined in red and green and purple of the flames, were perhaps a score of dancing, leaping Ootlandahs, tragic little clowns in motley of light and shadow. From them arose a faint hooting chorus, a thrumming of gourd drums which they beat above their heads with pipestem arms. Blakston started toward them, into the dark shadows directly ahead. Something brushed against his helmet.

  A prehensile finger of flesh rose from the earth before him, a slender living rope that instantly whipped about his waist. A second questing tentacle almost wrenched the looth-shearer’s crook from his hands. He lost his footing, screamed as the thing pulled him relentlessly into the blotch of blackness which he had mistaken for shadow.

  The looth! He was being pulled under it, under that vast fleshy blanket where a million mouths waited—toothless mouths whose corrosive digestive juices could dissolve bone, gristle, rubber, metal and glass. Not a whole squadron of proton gunners could rescue him once he was under that suffocating mass.

  His fingers tightened desperately upon the crook, found the switch and pressed it. A pale-blue electrical discharge appeared along the slender electrode. He swung it madly, lashing out against stubborn tentacles, scourging the senseless flesh of the creature with the one thing it feared and shrank from—a stinging but harmless high-tension current generated by a battery and induction coil in the handle of the crook.

  Pseudopods fell away before the electrode, dropped him on the leafless stubble of ground over which the looth had fed. He lay there gasping, sobbing for breath, his chest a vast ache where the tentacle had coiled about him. It was fully a minute before he felt able to stand.

  The looth had backed a few yards away by then, as he could tell by an occasional upflung pseudopod limned against the fire’s glare. The thumpings and the hootings of Ootlandahs seemed redoubled, and he realized that they were standing their ground, facing their traditional enemy at close quarters instead of fleeing from it as they were wont to do. But why, and under whose leadership, were the timid creatures defying the dreaded looth?

  ~ * ~

  A human cry whirled Blakston about
. From the forest, from a point midway between him and the Ootlandahs, it came. And then he saw the men from Reinmuth again, trapped there at the flaming forest’s edge by that deadly living blockade which lay between them and their ship—the looth. That was the purpose of the drumming and the hooting—to keep the great beast where it was, a wall of living flesh against which even proton guns were helpless. But how, marveled Blakston, had the Ootlandahs grasped the situation, understood the danger of letting the convicts reach their ship, and so promptly acted to prevent it? The looth had been providentially near, but only genius had turned it to this purpose, only courage defeated the traditional terror all Ootlandahs had for the beasts.

  Driven by fire behind, the convicts were running toward Blakston, intending to circle the looth and so reach the landing field. For a moment Blakston thought of intercepting them— and being blasted to death for his pains. He had no weapons— the crook was useless against proton guns. And once past the looth and in their ship, the convicts could set a dozen fires all over the planetoid.