Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  “Bring me a live human being!” The command echoed to the ends of Riatic space.

  It produced a dull survivor of an Earth cruiser, a sailor of low degree with an I.Q. of ninety-six, and a fear index of two hundred and seven. The creature made vague efforts to kill himself, and squirmed on the laboratory tables, and finally escaped into death when the scientists were still in the beginning of the experiments which he had ordered to be performed before his own eyes.

  “Surely, this is not the enemy.”

  “Sire, we capture so few that are alive. Just as we have conditioned our own loved-ones, so do they seem to be conditioned to kill themselves in case of capture.”

  ‘The environment is wrong. We must create a situation where the captured does not know himself to be prisoner. Are there any possibilities?”

  “The problem will be investigated.”

  He had come, as the one who will conduct the experiment, to the sun where a man had been observed seven periods before— “in a small craft that fell from a point in space, obviously dropped by a warship. And so we have a new base possibility.

  “No landings have yet been made, as you instructed; no traces of our presence. It may be assumed that there was an earlier human landing on the third planet. A curious mountain top. Will be an ideal area for our purposes.”

  A battle group patrolled the space around the sun. But he came down in a small ship; and because he had contempt for his enemy, he flew in over the mountain, fired his disabling blast at the ship on the ground—and then was struck by a surprisingly potent return blast, that sent his machine spinning to a crash.

  Almost, in those seconds, death came. But he crawled out of his control chair, shocked but still alive. With thoughtful eyes, he assessed the extent of the disaster that had befallen him.

  He had issued commands that he would call when he needed help. But he could not call. The radio was shattered beyond repair. He had a strange, empty sensation when he discovered that his food was poisoned.

  Swiftly, he stiffened to the necessities of the situation.

  The experiment would go on, with one proviso. When the need for food became imperative, he would kill the man, and so survive until the commanders of the ships grew alarmed, and came down to see what had happened.

  Part of the sunless period, he spent exploring the cliff’s edge. Then he hovered on the perimeter of the man’s defensor energies, studying the lifeboat, and pondering the possible actions the other might take against him.

  Finally, with a tireless patience he examined the approaches to his own ship. At key points, he drew the lines that-could-seize-the-minds-of-men. There was satisfaction, shortly after the sun came up, in seeing the enemy “caught” and “compelled.” The satisfaction had but one drawback.

  He could not take the advantage of the situation that he wanted.

  The difficulty was that the man’s blaster had been left focused on his main air lock. It was not emitting energy, but the Rull did not doubt that it would fire automatically if the door opened.

  What made the situation serious was that, when he tried the emergency exit, it was jammed.

  It hadn’t been. With the forethought of his kind, he had tested it immediately after the crash. Then it opened.

  Now, it didn’t. The ship, he decided, must have settled while he was out during the sunless period. Actually, the reason for what had happened didn’t matter. What counted was that he was locked in just when he wanted to be outside.

  It wasn’t as if he had definitely decided to destroy the man immediately. If capturing him meant gaining control of his food supply, then it would be unnecessary to give him death. It was important to be able to make the decision, however, while the man was helpless; and the further possibility that the elled fall might kill him made the yeli grim. He didn’t like accidents to disturb his plans.

  ~ * ~

  From the beginning the affair had taken a sinister turn. He had been caught up by forces beyond his control, by elements of space and time which he had always taken into account as being theoretically possible, but he had never considered them as having personal application.

  That was for the deeps of space where the Leard ships fought to extend the frontiers of the perfect ones. Out there lived alien creatures that had been spawned by Nature before the ultimate nervous system was achieved. All those aliens must die because they were now unnecessary, and because, existing, they might accidently discover means of upsetting the balance of Yeellian life. In civilized Ria accidents were forbidden.

  The Rull drew his mind clear of such weakening thoughts.

  He decided against trying to open the emergency door. Instead, he turned his blaster against a crack in the hard floor. The frustrators blew their gases across the area where he had worked, and the suction pumps caught the swirling radioactive stuff and drew it into a special chamber. But the lack of an open door as a safety valve made the work dangerous. Many times he paused while the air was cleansed, and the counter needles shook themselves toward zero, so that he could come out again from the frustrating chamber to which he retreated whenever the heat made his nerves tingle—a more reliable guide than any instrument that had to be watched.

  The sun was past the meridian when the metal plate finally lifted clear, and gave him an opening into the gravel and rock underneath. The problem of tunneling out into the open was easy except that it took time and physical effort. Dusty and angry and hungry, the Rull emerged from the hole near the center of the clump of trees beside which his craft had fallen.

  His plan to conduct an experiment had lost its attraction. He had obstinate qualities in his nature, but he reasoned that this situation could be reproduced for him on a more civilized level. No need to take risks or to be uncomfortable. Kill the man and use him as food until the ships came down to rescue him.

  With hungry gaze, he searched the ragged, uneven east cliff, peering down at the ledges, crawling swiftly along until he had virtually circumvented the tableland. He found nothing he could be sure about. In one or two places the ground looked lacerated as by the passage of a body, but the most intensive examination failed to establish that anyone had actually been there.

  Somberly, the Rull glided towards the man’s lifeboat. From a safe distance, he examined it. The defense screens were up, but he couldn’t be sure they had been put up before the attack of the morning, or had been raised since then, or had come on automatically at his approach.

  He couldn’t be sure. That was the trouble. Everywhere, on the tableland around him, was a barrenness, a desolation unlike anything else he had ever known. The man could be dead, his smashed body lying at the remote bottom of the mountain. He could be inside the ship badly injured; he had, unfortunately, had time to get back to the safety of his craft. Or he could be waiting inside, alert, aggressive, and conscious of his enemy’s uncertainty, determined to take full advantage of that uncertainty.

  The Rull set up a watching device, that would apprise him when the door opened. Then he returned to the tunnel that led into his ship, laboriously crawled through it, and settled himself to wait out the emergency.

  The hunger in him was an expanding force, hourly taking on a greater urgency. It was time to stop moving around. He would need all his energy for the crisis.

  The days passed.

  ~ * ~

  Jamieson stirred in an effluvium of pain. At first it seemed all-enveloping, a mist of anguish that bathed him in sweat from head to toe. Gradually, then, it localized in the region of his lower left leg.

  The pulse of the pain made a rhythm in his nerves. The minutes lengthened into an hour, and then he finally thought: Why, I’ve got a sprained ankle! He had more than that, of course. The pressure that had driven him here clung like a gravitonic plate. How long he lay there, partly conscious, was not clear, but when he finally opened his eyes, the sun was still shining on him, though it was almost directly overhead.

  He watched it with the mindlessness of a dreamer as it withdrew s
lowly past the edge of the overhanging precipice. It was not until the shadow of the cliff suddenly plopped across his face that he started to full consciousness with a sudden memory of deadly danger.

  It took a while to shake the remnants of the elled “take” from his brain. And, even as it was fading, he sized up, to some extent, the difficulties of his position. He saw that he had tumbled over the edge of a cliff to a steep slope. The angle of descent of the slope was a sharp fifty-five degrees, and what had saved him was that his body had been caught in the tangled growth near the edge of the greater precipice beyond.

  His foot must have twisted in those roots, and sprained.

  As he finally realized the nature of his injuries, Jamieson braced up. He was safe. In spite of having suffered an accidental defeat of major proportions, his intense concentration on this slope, his desperate will to make this the place where he must fall, had worked out.

  He began to climb. It was easy enough on the slope, steep as it was; the ground was rough, rocky and scraggly with brush. It was when he came to the ten-foot overhanging cliff that his ankle proved what an obstacle it could be.

  Four times he slid back, reluctantly; and then, on the fifth try, his fingers, groping desperately over the top of the cliff, caught an unbreakable root. Triumphantly, he dragged himself to the safety of the tableland

  Now that the sound of his scraping and struggling was gone, only his heavy breathing broke the silence of the emptiness. His anxious eyes studied the uneven terrain. The tableland spread before him with not a sign of a moving figure anywhere.

  To one side, he could see his lifeboat. Jamieson began to crawl toward it, taking care to stay on rock as much as possible. What had happened to the Rull he did not know. And since, for several days, his ankle would keep him inside his ship, he might as well keep his enemy guessing during that time.

  ~ * ~

  Professor Jamieson lay in his bunk, thinking. He could hear the beating of his heart. There were the occasional sounds when he dragged himself out of bed. But that was almost all. The radio, when he turned it on, was dead. No static, not even the fading in and out of a wave. At this colossal distance, even sub-space radio was impossible.

  He listened on all the more active Rull wave lengths. But the silence was there, too. Not that they would be broadcasting if they were in the vicinity.

  He was cut off here in this tiny ship on an uninhabited planet, with useless motors.

  He tried not to think of it like that. “Here,” he told himself, “is the opportunity of a lifetime for an experiment.”

  He warmed to the idea as a moth to flame. Live Rulls were hard to get hold of. About one a year was captured in the unconscious state, and these were regarded as priceless treasures. But here was an even more ideal situation.

  We’re prisoners, both of us. That was the way he tried to picture it. Prisoners of an environment, and, therefore, in a curious fashion, prisoners of each other. Only each was free of the conditioned need to kill himself.

  There were things a man might discover. The great mysteries —as far as men were concerned—that motivated Rull actions. Why did they want to destroy other races totally? Why did they needlessly sacrifice valuable ships in attacking Earth machines that ventured into their sectors of space—when they knew that the intruders would leave in a few weeks anyway? And why did prisoners who could kill themselves at will commit suicide without waiting to find out what fate was intended for them? Some times they were merely wanted as messengers.

  Was it possible the Rulls were trying to conceal a terrible weakness in their make-up of which man had not yet found an inkling?

  The potentialities of this fight of man against Rull on a lonely mountain exhilarated Jamieson as he lay on his bunk, scheming, turning the problem over in his mind.

  There were times during those dog days when he crawled over to the control chair, and peered for an hour at a stretch into the visiplates. He saw the tableland and the vista of distance beyond it. He saw the sky of Laertes III, bluish pink sky, silent and lifeless.

  He saw the prison. Caught here, he thought bleakly. Professor Jamieson, whose appearance on an inhabited planet would bring out unwieldy crowds, whose quiet voice in the council chambers of Earth’s galactic empire spoke with final authority—that Jamieson was here, alone, lying in a bunk, waiting for a leg to heal, so that he might conduct an experiment with a Rull.

  It seemed incredible. But he grew to believe it as the days passed.

  On the third day, he was able to move around sufficiently to handle a few heavy objects. He began work immediately on the mental screen. On the fifth day it was finished. Then the story had to be recorded. That was easy. Each sequence had been so carefully worked out in bed that it flowed from his mind onto the visiwire.

  He set it up about two hundred yards from the lifeboat, behind a screening of trees. He tossed a can of food a dozen feet to one side of the screen.

  The rest of the day dragged. It was the sixth day since the arrival of the Rull, the fifth since he had sprained his ankle.

  Came the night

  A gliding shadow, undulating under the starlight of Laertes III, the Rull approached the screen the man had set up. How bright it was, shining in the darkness of the tableland, a blob of light in a black universe of uneven ground and dwarf shrubbery.

  When he was a hundred feet from the light, he sensed the food —and realized that here was a trap.

  For the Rull, six days without food had meant a stupendous loss of energy, visual blackouts on a dozen color levels, a dimness of life-force that fitted with the shadows, not the sun. That inner world of disjointed nervous system was like a run-down battery with a score of organic “instruments” disconnecting one by one as the energy level fell. The yeli recognized dimly, but with a savage anxiety, that only a part of that nervous system would ever be restored to complete usage. And, even for that, speed was essential. A few more steps downward, and then the old, old conditioning of mandatory self-inflicted death would apply even to the high Aaish of the Yeell.

  The worm body grew quiet. The visual center behind each eye accepted light on a narrow band from the screen. From beginning to end, he watched the story as it unfolded, and then watched it again, craving repetition with all the ardor of a primitive.

  The picture began in deep space with the man’s lifeboat being dropped from a launching lock of a battleship. It showed the battleship going on to a military base, and there taking on supplies and acquiring a vast fleet of reinforcements, and then starting on the return journey. The scene switched to the lifeboat dropping down on Laertes III, showed everything that had subsequently happened, suggested the situation was dangerous to them both—and pointed out the only safe solution.

  The final sequence of each showing of the story was of the Rull approaching the can, to the left of the screen, and opening it. The method was shown in detail, as was the visualization of the Rull busily eating the food inside.

  Each time that sequence drew near, a tenseness came over the Rull, a will to make the story real. But it was not until the seventh showing had run its course that he glided forward, closing the last gap between himself and the can. It was a trap, he knew, perhaps even death—it didn’t matter. To live, he had to take the chance. Only by this means, by risking what was in the can, could he hope to remain alive for the necessary time.

  How long it would take for the commanders cruising up there in the black of space in their myriad ships—how long it would be before they would decide to supersede his command, he didn’t know. But they would come. Even if they waited until the enemy ships arrived before they dared to act against his strict orders, they would come.

  At that point they could come down without fear of suffering from his ire.

  Until then he would need all the food he could get.

  Gingerly, he extended a sucker, and activated the automatic opener of the can.

  ~ * ~

  It was shortly after four in the morning when Prof
essor Jamie-son awakened to the sound of an alarm ringing softly. It was still pitch dark outside—the Laertes day was twenty-six sidereal hours long; he had set his clocks the first day to co-ordinate— and at this season dawn was still three hours away.

  Jamieson did not get up at once. The alarm had been activated by the opening of the can of food. It continued to ring for a full fifteen minutes, which was just about perfect. The alarm was tuned to the electronic pattern emitted by the can, once it was opened, and so long as any food remained in it. The lapse of time involved fitted with the capacity of one of the Rull’s suckers in absorbing three pounds of pork.

  For fifteen minutes, accordingly, a member of the Rull race, man’s mortal enemy, had been subjected to a pattern of mental vibrations corresponding to its own thoughts. It was a pattern to which the nervous systems of other Rulls had responded in laboratory experiments. Unfortunately, those others had killed themselves on awakening, and so no definite results had been proved. But it had been established by the ecphoriometer that the “unconscious” and not the “conscious” mind was affected.