Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  It was his desperate bad luck that he had no time for real penetrations.

  There was death here for those who lingered.

  But even what he had to do, the bare minimum of what he had to do, would take precious time. Back and forth, back and forth; the rhythm of obedience had to be established.

  The image of the Rull on the screen was as lifelike as the original. It was three dimensional, and its movements were like an automaton. The challenger was actually irresistible. Basic nerve centers were affected. The Rull could no more help falling into step than it could resist the call of the food impulse.

  After it had followed that mindless pattern for fifteen minutes, changing pace at his direction, Jamieson started the Rull and its image climbing trees. Up, then down again, half a dozen times. At that point, Jamieson introduced an image of himself.

  Tensely, with one eye on the sky and one on the scene before him, he watched the reactions of the Rull—watched them with narrowed eyes and a sharp understanding of Rull responses to the presence of human beings. Rulls were digestively stimulated by the odor of man. It showed in the way their suckers opened and closed. When a few minutes later, he substituted himself for his image, he was satisfied that this Rull had temporarily lost its normal automatic hunger when it saw a human being.

  And now that he had reached the stage of final control, he hesitated. It was time to make his tests. Could he afford the time?

  He realized that he had to. This opportunity might not occur again in a hundred years.

  When he finished the tests twenty-five minutes later, he was pale with excitement. He thought: This is it. We’ve got it.

  He spent ten precious minutes broadcasting his discovery by means of his wrist radio—hoping that the transmitter on his lifeboat had survived its fall down the mountain, and was picking up the thready message of the smaller instrument, and sending it out through subspace.

  During the entire ten minutes, there was not a single answer to his call.

  Aware that he had done what he could, Jamieson headed for the cliff’s edge he had selected as a starting point. He looked down, and shuddered, then remembered what the Orion had said: “An entire Rull fleet cruising—”

  Hurry!

  He lowered the Rull to the first ledge. A moment later he fastened the harness around his own body, and stepped into space. Sedately, with easy strength, the Rull gripped the other end of the rope, and lowered him down to the ledge beside it.

  They continued on down and down. It was hard work although they used a very simple system.

  A long plastic “rope” spanned the spaces for them. A metal “climbing” rod, used to scale the smooth vastness of a spaceship’s side, held position after position while the rope did its work.

  ~ * ~

  On each ledge, Jamieson burned the rod at a downward slant into solid rock. The rope slid through an arrangement of pulleys in the metal as the Rull and he, in turn, lowered each other to ledges farther down.

  The moment they were both safely in the clear of one ledge, Jamieson would explode the rod out of the rock, and it would drop down ready for use again.

  The day sank towards darkness like a restless man into sleep, slowly, wearily. Jamieson grew hot and tired, and filled with the melancholy of the fatigue that dragged at his muscles.

  He could see that the Rull was growing more aware of him. It still co-operated, but it watched him with intent eyes each time it swung him down.

  The conditioned state was ending. The Rull was emerging from its trance. The process should complete before night.

  There was a time, then, when Jamieson despaired of ever getting down before the shadows fell. He had chosen the western, sunny side for that fantastic descent down a black-brown cliff the like of which did not exist elsewhere in the known worlds of space. He found himself watching the Rull with quick, nervous glances. When it swung him down onto a ledge beside it, he watched its blue eyes, its staring blue eyes, come closer and closer to him, and then as his legs swung below the level of those strange eyes, they twisted to follow him.

  The intent eyes of the other reminded Jamieson of his discovery. He felt a fury at himself that he had never reasoned it out before. For centuries man had known that his own effort to see clearly required a good twenty-five per cent of the energy of his whole body. Human scientists should have guessed that the vast wave compass of Rull eyes was the product of a balancing of glandular activity on a fantastically high energy level. A balancing which, if disturbed, would surely affect the mind itself either temporarily or permanently.

  He had discovered that the impairment was permanent.

  What would a prolonged period of starvation diet do to such a nervous system?

  The possibilities altered the nature of the war. It explained why Rull ships had never attacked human food sources or supply lines; they didn’t want to risk retaliation. It explained why Rull ships fought so remorselessly against Earth ships that intruded into their sectors of the galaxy. It explained their ruthless destruction of other races. They lived in terror that their terrible weakness would be found out.

  Jamieson smiled with a savage anticipation. If his message had got through, or if he escaped, Rulls would soon feel the pinch of hunger. Earth ships would concentrate on that one basic form of attack in the future. The food supplies of entire planetary groups would be poisoned, convoys would be raided without regard for casualties. Everywhere at once the attack would be pressed without let-up and without mercy.

  It shouldn’t be long before the Rull began his retreat to his own galaxy. That was the only solution that would be acceptable. The invader must be driven back and back, forced to give up his conquests of a thousand years.

  ~ * ~

  4:00 p.m. Jamieson had to pause again for a rest. He walked to the side of the ledge away from the Rull, and sank down on the rock. The sky was a brassy blue, silent and windless now, a curtain drawn across the black space above, concealing what must already be the greatest Rull-human battle in ten years.

  It was a tribute to the five Earth battleships and their escort that no Rull ship had yet attempted to rescue the Rull on the tableland.

  Possibly, of course, they didn’t want to give away the presence of one of their own kind.

  Jamieson gave up the futile speculation. Wearily, he compared the height of the cliff above with the depth that remained below. He estimated they had come two-thirds of the distance. He saw that the Rull was staring out over the valley. Jamieson turned and gazed with it.

  The scene which they took in with their different eyes and different brains was fairly drab and very familiar, yet withal strange and wonderful. The forest began a quarter of a mile from the bottom of the cliff, and it almost literally had no end. It rolled up over the hills and down into the shallow valleys. It faltered at the edge of a broad river, then billowed out again, and climbed the slopes of mountains that sprawled mistily in distance.

  His watch showed 4:15. Time to get going again.

  At twenty-five minutes after six, they reached a ledge a hundred and fifty feet above the uneven plain. The distance strained the capacity of the rope, but the initial operation of lowering the Rull to freedom and safety was achieved without incident. Jamieson gazed down curiously at the worm. What would it do now that it was in the clear?

  It looked up at him and waited.

  That made him grim. Because this was a chance he was not taking. Jamieson waved imperatively at the Rull, and took out his blaster. The Rull backed away, but only into the safety of a gigantic rock. Blood-red, the sun was sinking behind the mountains. Darkness moved over the land. Jamieson ate his dinner. It was as he was finishing it that he saw a movement below.

  He watched, as the Rull glided along close to the edge of the precipice.

  It disappeared beyond an outjut of the cliff.

  ~ * ~

  Jamieson waited briefly, then swung out on the rope. The descent drained his strength, but there was solid ground at the bottom. Th
ree quarters of the way down, he cut his finger on a section of the rope that was unexpectedly rough.

  When he reached the ground, he noticed that his finger was turning an odd gray. In the dimness, it looked strange and unhealthy.

  As Jamieson stared at it, the color drained from his face. He thought in a bitter anger: The Rull must have smeared it on the rope on his way down.

  A pang went through his body. It was knife sharp, and it was followed instantly by a stiffness. With a gasp, he grabbed at his blaster, to kill himself. His hand froze in midair. He fell to the ground. The stiffness held him there, froze him there, moveless.

  The will to death is in all life. Every organic cell ecphorizes the inherited engrams of its inorganic origin. The pulse of life is a squamous film superimposed on an underlying matter so intricate in its delicate balancing of different energies that life itself is but a brief, vain straining against that balance.

  For an instant of eternity, a pattern is attempted. It takes many forms, but these are apparent. The real shape is always a time and not a space shape. And that shape is a curve. Up and then down. Up from the darkness into the light, then down again into the blackness.

  The male salmon sprays his mist of milt onto the eggs of the female. And instantly he is seized with a mortal melancholy. The male bee collapses from the embrace of the queen he has won, back into that inorganic mold from which he climbed for one single moment of ecstasy. In man, the fateful pattern is repressed into quadrillions of individual cells.

  But the pattern is there. Waiting.

  Long before, the sharp-minded Rull scientists, probing for chemical substances that would shock man’s system into its primitive forms, found the special secret of man’s will to death.

  The yeli, Meeesh, gliding back towards Jamieson did not think of the process. He had been waiting for the opportunity. It had occurred. He was intent on his own purposes.

  Briskly, he removed the man’s blaster, then he searched for the key to the lifeboat. And then he carried Jamieson a quarter of a mile around the base of the cliff to where the man’s ship had been catapulted by the blast from the Rull warship.

  Five minutes later, the powerful radio inside was broadcasting on Rull wave lengths, an imperative command to the Rull fleet.

  ~ * ~

  Dimness. Inside and outside his skin. He felt himself at the bottom of a well, peering out of night into twilight. As he lay, a pressure of something swelled around him, lifted him higher and higher, and nearer to the mouth of the well.

  He struggled the last few feet, a distinct mental effort, and looked over the edge. Consciousness.

  He was lying on a raised table inside a room which had several large mouselike openings at the floor level, openings that led to other chambers. Doors, he identified, odd-shaped, alien, unhuman. Jamieson cringed with the stunning shock of recognition.

  He was inside a Rull warship.

  There was a slithering of movement behind him. He turned his head, and rolled his eyes in their sockets.

  In the shadows, three Rulls were gliding across the floor towards a bank of instruments that reared up behind and to one side of him. They pirouetted up an inclined plane and poised above him. Their pale eyes, shiny in the dusk of that unnatural chamber, peered down at him.

  Jamieson tried to move. His body writhed in the confines of the bonds that held him. That brought a sharp remembrance of the death-will chemical that the Rull had used. Relief came surging. He was not dead. Not dead. NOT DEAD. The Rull must have helped him, forced him to move, and so had broken the downward curve of his descent to dust.

  He was alive—for what?

  The thought slowed his joy. His hope snuffed out like a flame. His brain froze into a tensed, terrible mask of anticipation.

  As he watched with staring eyes, expecting pain, one of the Rulls pressed a button. Part of the table on which Jamieson was lying, lifted. He was raised to a sitting position.

  What now?

  He couldn’t see the Rulls. He tried to turn, but two head shields clamped into the side of his head, and held him firmly.

  He saw that there was a square of silvery sheen on the wall which he faced. A light sprang onto it, and then a picture. It was a curiously familiar picture, but at first because there was a reversal of position Jamieson couldn’t place the familiarity.

  Abruptly, he realized.

  It was a twisted version of the picture that he had shown the Rull, first when he was feeding it, and then with more weighty arguments after he discovered the vulnerability of man’s mortal enemy.

  He had shown how the Rull race would be destroyed unless it agreed to peace.

  In the picture he was being shown it was the Rull that urged co-operation between the two races. They seemed unaware that he had not yet definitely transmitted his knowledge to other human beings. Or perhaps that fact was blurred by the conditioning he had given to the Rull when he fed it and controlled it.

  As he glared at the screen, the picture ended—and then started again. By the time it had finished a second time, there was no doubt. Jamieson collapsed back against the table. They would not show him such a picture unless he was to be used as a messenger.

  He would be returned home to carry the message that man had wanted to hear for a thousand years. He would also carry the information that would give meaning to the offer.

  The Rull-human war was over.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  The Double-Dyed Villains

  BY POUL ANDERSON

  T

  he Premier of Luan was speaking, and over the planet his face glared into telescreens and his voice rang its anger. Before the Administration Building milled a crowd that screamed itself hoarse before the enormously magnified image on the wall, screamed and cheered and surged like a living wave against the tight-held lines of the Palanthian Guard. There was mob violence in the air, a dog would have bristled at the stink of adrenalin and sensed the tension which crackled under the waves of explosive sound. The tautness seemed somehow to be transmitted over the screens, and watchers on the other side of the world raved at the image.

  The Premier was young and dynamic and utterly sure of himself. There was steel in his tones, and his hard handsome face was vibrant with a deep inward strength. He was, thought Wing Alak, quite a superior type.

  In spite of being in the capital of the planet, Alak preferred sitting alone in his hotel room and watching the telescreen to joining the mob that yelled its hosannahs in the streets. He sat back with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, physically relaxed as the speech shouted at him:

  “…not only a matter of material gain, but of sacred Luanian honor. Lhing was ours, ours by right of our own blood and sweat and treasure, and the incredible betrayal of the League in giving it to Marhal as a political bribe shall not be permitted to succeed. We will fight for our rights and honor—if need be, we will fight the Patrol itself—fight and win!”

  The cheers rose fifty stories to rattle the windows of Alak’s room. Overhead rushed a squadron of navy speedsters, their gravitic drives noiseless but the thunder of cloven air rolling in their wake, and each of them carried bombs which could wipe out a city. Alak’s thoughts turned to a more potent menace, the monster cruisers and battleships orbiting about Luan—yes, the situation was getting out of hand. He wondered, suddenly and grimly, if it might not have gone too far to be remedied.

  “…we will not fight alone. The whole Galaxy waits only one bold leader to rise and throw off the yoke of the League. For four hundred years we have groaned under the most corrupt and cynical tyranny ever to rise in all man’s tortured history. The League government remains in power only by such an unbelievable network of intrigue, bribery, threat, terror, betrayal, and appeal to all the worst elements of society that the like has never before been imagined. This is not mere oratory, people of Luan, it is sober truth which we have slowly and painfully learned over generations. Your government has carefully compiled a list of
corrupt and terroristic acts of the Patrol which include every violation of every moral law existing on every planet in the universe, and each of these accusations has been verified in every detail. The Marhalian thievery is a minor matter in that list—but Luan has had enough!”

  Wing Alak puffed on his cigarette in nervous breaths. It was, he reflected bleakly, not exaggerated more than political oratory required, and the anger of Luan’s Tranis Voal had its counterpart on more planets than he cared to think about.

  The speech paused for cheers, and the door chime sounded in Alak’s room. He turned in his seat, scowling, to face the viewplate. It showed him a hard, unfamiliar face, and his hand stole toward his tunic pocket. Then he thought: No, you fool! Force is the most useless possible course—here!