[Jan Darzek 03] - This Darkening Universe

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  "I'll take those," a voice said.

  Darzek nodded his assent. These corpses seemed undamaged by the rampaging insects, probably because of the low temperature at the high altitude. Perhaps the cold also inhibited bacterial activity, though no knowledgeable scientist would have been willing to guess in advance what might inhibit the organisms of a strange world.

  The ship's captain snapped an order. Darzek kept his eyes on the viewing screen, knowing that no further instructions from him would be necessary. He was accustomed to having his plans carried out automatically, just as his casual nod of assent was obeyed implicitly. He was Gul Darr, galactic trader of considerable notoriety, importance, and wealth, who frequently was entrusted with sensitive governmental missions. Further, he owned the ship. No one present was aware of the fact that he also was ONE, the First Member of the Council of Supreme, which was the galactic government.

  Formerly he had been private detective Jan Darzek, citizen of the United States of the planet Earth, but that was long ago and in another galaxy. Besides, on the planet Earth, private detective Jan Darzek was considered officially dead.

  The captain threw on maximum magnification and began the touchy job of putting down a transmitter frame by point transmission. When he succeeded, the pathologists aboard would transmit down to the planet, select their specimens for study, and transmit themselves and the specimens to a sealed laboratory compartment already prepared for them. There, in conditions of meticulous sterility and stringent quarantine, they would attempt to determine the cause of death. Whether or not they succeeded, they probably were doomed to a lengthy confinement. No risk could be taken of carrying a plague of this virulence to another world - or another galaxy.

  The pathologists seemed cheerfully indifferent to the danger implicit in the removal of specimens from a death world. There were five of them, experienced professionals from as many worlds, and they brilliantly epitomized a galaxy's diversity of life forms and talents. They were making jokes at the captain's expense because he had miscalculated his first point transmission and smashed a transmitter frame, and they expressed their glee with waving tentacles, or modulating pseudopods, or flapping ears, or curling noses, or ruffled scales. The captain, himself a multi-limbed Kaglogg, was good - naturedly preparing for his second attempt.

  There was nothing further for Darzek to do, and he refused on principle to encumber an expert with unneeded assistance. He turned, signaled with a jerk of his head, and stepped through the interior communications transmitter to his own compartment. URSGworl, who in the absence of URSDwad served as his chief assistant, turned at once and followed him. He had been watching the screen intently and could not have seen Darzek's signal unless he possessed organs of vision in his protruding spinal column. As far as Darzek knew he didn't, but with a random selection of galactic life forms, anything was possible.

  Darzek seated himself in an easy chair of his own design, waved URSGworl to another, and leaned back to contemplate a large model of the triple galactic system that filled the center of the compartment. He had begun the search with two questions: how and why.

  This world of Balubda would be the hundred and forty-third they had examined and the first where they had found victims in a condition that made autopsies feasible. Even now Darzek had no idea how wide a swath the Unidentified Death Force had cut through this Small Magellanic Cloud, called the Lesser Galaxy by his colleagues. Their search had been a straight - line pursuit, and they traveled in leaps and inspected only those habitable worlds near their base course.

  They found no signs of warfare, either chemical or nuclear; no indication of the use of weapons of any kind; no destruction except to the living; no evidence of natural catastrophe. As they moved along their line of search they traced the dead through a spectrum of stages from crumbling bones to corpses in ever lessening degrees of decomposition.

  Two questions remained: how and why.

  Darzek said suddenly, "What about psychic violence?"

  URsGworl stared at him. “A psychic weapon? But that's - " "Nothing," Darzek said firmly, "is impossible. Are the teams ready? I want to go the moment the scientists have finished."

  URSGworl went to inspect the teams, leaving Darzek to his meditations.

  He had no expectations concerning this, their first complete scientific study of the victims. He was incapable of believing that a moving catastrophe of such magnitude could have its cause delineated by anything as simple as a pathologist's scalpel. The destroyed worlds must number in the thousands.

  Had it been done - was it being done - deliberately? He asked himself what rapacious conqueror's blood lust would require that many worlds to satiate it. There were no signs of looting, no indications of a terrible victory horribly exploited. The dead lay where they had fallen, their bodies molested only by vermin. Their valuables were untouched; their abandoned dwellings and buildings, as far as a casual search could determine, were undisturbed.

  Darzek postulated a technologically advanced but morally degenerate life form on a rampage, destroying one world population after another from space with some kind of death ray, unaffected by the horrors it created because it struck from afar and left without a backward glance in search of its next victim. But it seemed to him that even this kind of conqueror would return eventually, either to loot the planet or to claim it as his own. Darzek failed utterly in his attempt to posit a villain who would wreak this measure of merciless destruction for no reason but the pleasure he derived from it.

  "How?" he asked himself. "And why?"

  A signal light flashed. URSGworI's flat voice announced, "There is extensive brain damage in all the specimens. They found no indication of disease. They don't think disease could have caused the brain damage, but they won't certify that. Of course they refuse to comment on anything but the medical evidence."

  "It's a wise expert that restricts his expert opinions to matters he's expert in," Darzek observed. "Have they got as much as they think they'll get? Then let's go down."

  First they searched an urban area, carrying their humming recorders along streets and through buildings, pausing to touch or investigate closely only items of unusual interest. Darzak found no indication anywhere of anything but panicky flight. An entire population had fled from buildings to die in the open. Mothers had snatched up young children, and because of that brief delay, mothers with young children lay nearest the exits. There had been no attempt to save property. There had been no looting, and only vermin had touched the bodies after they fell.

  There was no clue anywhere as to what they had been fleeing from. The teams scattered for wide - ranging investigations all across the day side of the planet. Then, after passing through three decontamination chambers and discarding a layer of protective clothing in each, they returned to their compartments. The scientists considered these precautions sufficient for the search teams. They had merely moved among the dead; they hadn't dissected them.

  Darzek retired to his own compartment to face a perilous decision.

  If he pursued this death force with reasonable caution, he might never come close enough to learn what he had to know. If he pursued it energetically, he would be in grave danger of overtaking it. The problem was to come close enough to observe and study without joining the victims. Only in that way could they hope to discover a means of combating it.

  URsGworI burst in on him, eyes staring, face pink with excitement.

  "The death force!" he gasped.

  Darzek bounded through the transmitter. In the control room, the duty watch was gathered about the navigational screens gazing awesomely at a myriad of pinpoints that seemed to be converging on them.

  "A fleet of ships," Darzek said instantly. "An enormous fleet. No wonder it cuts a wide swath."

  He sounded the general alarm and alerted his other ship, setting both captains to plotting a complicated transmission escape course. He asked the communications technicians to prepare message beacons to warn UR
SDwad and, eventually, their own galaxy. The entire Milky Way Galaxy did not possess such a thing as a space warship, so they had no weapon except flight, and no armament except fervent prayers to any receptive gods that the converging fleet lacked the technology to track them through an intricate series of transmitting leaps.

  Moments before they made their first leap, a message arrived. It was from URSDwad. In his haste to overtake them he had overshot their position and had to return. The ships converging on them were Darzek's own thousand - ship fleet.

  While Darzek's captain, now promoted to grand admiral, was briefing the newly arrived captains and working out search formations, and his scientists were organizing schools so their newly arrived colleagues could review the little that had been learned and the much that they needed to know, Darzek took URSDwad to his compartment for a complete report.

  He listened in silence until URSDwad mentioned the world of Montura. "Is it the capital of the Greater Galaxy?" he asked.

  "Supreme described it as a trading center. I tried to learn something about it, but the public referencers on Primores don't list it, and when I applied directly to Supreme, the answer was, 'A trading center of the Greater Galaxy.'"

  _ "No doubt it's an important communications center. What does Rok WlIon propose to do about it?"

  "He has asked E-Wusk to take charge of a trading mission to Montura. And because there might be problems that have nothing to do with trade, he intends to invite Gula Schlu to join E-Wusk."

  Darzek stared at him. Then he burst into laughter. "She's been home long enough to become thoroughly bored. She just might do it." URSDwad hesitated and then added apologetically, "Rok Wllon thought her abilities were not given their proper scope in your service."

  Darzek laughed again. "Wait until he finds out what scope her activities will have in his service! I'm sorry I won't be there to see it!"

  "Rok Wllon intends to go to Montura himself and supervise E-Wusk and Gula Schlu and any other specialists Supreme might recommend. He has invited you to come to Montura and join his staff when you have completed your explorations."

  "The conceited ass! But what the devil has Montura to do with our Udef, if anything? My inclination is to study a thing where it is, not where it isn't. I think we'll save Montura as a last resort."

  Darzek approved the search formation the captains recommended, and they translated it into navigational instructions: a line of search, with 800 ships; a reserve line, with 150; and - far in the rear - a base line of 50 widespread ships that would serve as rear guard, receive and file reports from all ships of the fleet, and in the event of overwhelming catastrophe be distant enough to survive and preserve the expedition's records. The ships would rotate between the three lines in order to give crews and scientists some respite from the tension that would increase steadily as they overtook the Udef.

  Then came the tedious process of moving ships into position, testing communications, jockeying to establish the maximum practical distance between ships. Finally all was ready. Darzek's captain announced, "First transmission!"

  The throb was barely perceptible. Darzek recorded the leap on his model of the Lesser Galaxy, moving their position ahead by a pinprick. They came out of transmission with another throb, and the captain's voice sounded again. "We have an inhabited planet on the screen." He paused and then corrected himself. "It was inhabited."

  A thousand ships could not begin to explore a galaxy adequately; the 800 ships of Darzek's line of search did not even span the swath of destruction. The captains had laid out a zigzag course designed to probe its outer dimensions, and as a result they failed to gain on the Udef. The ill - fated inhabitants of the world of Balubda remained the most recently murdered that they had found.

  Darzek's tediously compiled record of destroyed worlds suddenly acquired a thousand additions in a single day - highly urbanized and industrialized civilizations, worlds of pastoral nomads, agricultural worlds, even worlds where no intelligent life form had gained ascendancy. All were victims of identical orgies of slaughter.

  They finished a leg of their zigzag course, pivoted, and started off anew. Immediately there was a startling discovery: vandalism. A world of small agricultural communities lay devastated as though by a rampaging army. Darzek led a ground search himself, pondering the fact that this society's apparently low - grade technology had produced a magnificent cloth of spun glass - of which every windowpane in the village had been punched to shreds - and a system of broadcast electrical power that was still functioning. Interiors and exteriors of buildings were smashed; fragments of broken household goods lay in the streets where they had been flung. Items of obvious value had been hurled about with the same careless indifference accorded worthless trivia. It made no sense until the pathologists filed their reports.

  Then Darzek understood: these victims were physiologically much less susceptible than other life forms they had autopsied. The death force worked slowly enough on their brains so that they had time to go insane before they died. In their tormented delirium they ravished their own property until they dropped dead.

  They found a blood world. Darzek had seen blood in many colors, but on this particular world its vivid redness, even when dried, seemed singularly apt. Here most of the victims had died inside, and the interiors of their dwellings were drenched with blood. It seemed to Darzek that no horde of rampaging barbarians had ever indulged a blood lust so viciously, but the pathologists quickly exorcised that fantasy.

  This life form wore its brain in a tough membrane sack, a near evolutionary goof probably made necessary by the fact that the brain continued to grow throughout the creature's life. A non - flexible brain case, such as a skull, would have resulted in death at an early age or an overbalancing cranial edifice that would have immobilized the creature. Evolution's answer had been the expandable membrane, and it had worked - until the Udef struck. These brains had literally exploded, ripping the membrane case asunder and splattering the surroundings with blood and cellular matter.

  - And still they did not gain on the Udef. Darzek discarded the zigzag course in favor of a straight - line search, and he labored to keep his inventory up to date as from the entire front of their advance came reports of new horrors.

  On world after world after world.

  They measured their progress in the freshness of the dead they encountered, but this provided a fantastically complex and uncertain method of calculation. Putrefaction worked at different rates on different worlds, with fluctuations affected by a multitude of factors, including the types of microorganisms and the drastic variations in the cellular structures they fed on. But Darzek felt confident that they were coming closer. Definitely, they were coming much closer.

  He had long since lost track of time. He slept when tired, and then only in fitful naps while data were being compiled, and his dreams were of freshly dead civilizations: of walled and castellated cities defenseless against a menace from above; of graceful villas and crystal - windowed palaces from which the inhabitants had fled to die in gardens of iridescent, hauntingly perfumed blooms; of dead piled high among massive, neolithic like structures of piled rock; of lonely dead scattered about fragile, solitary wind - swept farmhouses. When the significant discovery finally happened, he had no personal awareness of whether it had taken months to achieve, or weeks, or only days.

  They had completed another transmitting leap, and his own ship jockeyed toward the nearest habitable world. As the viewer began its searching telescopic probe, those watching uttered a unison cry of amazement.

  The nearest habitable world was inhabited.

  Its flourishing civilization was still flourishing. Its inhabitants went methodically about their business of living; their machines functioned; their world was untouched.

  While the scientists watched and marveled, Darzek began to monitor reports from ships nearby. These constituted a tedious inventory of uninhabited worlds until a ship broke in excitedly to report anothe
r intact civilization. It was dictating a description, and Darzek was meditating the problem of whether they should backtrack in search of the Udef or remain there and let it overtake them, when the voice transmission became a shattering scream that went on, and on, until it lapsed into a silence more wracked with torment than the sound.

  Before the scream had ended, Darzek sent out the prearranged order that scattered the fleet. Then he ordered his own ship to investigate. They found a silent ship orbiting a world so newly dead that it seemed to be still dying. The victims lay in the open about their dome - shaped conclaves, their liquid life substance still oozing from body orifices.

  Everyone aboard the ship was dead. Several crew members had leaped into space in a vain effort to flee their tormentor, and their exploded bodies slowly orbited the orbiting ship. From his own ship, Darzek formed an emergency crew to operate the death ship. He placed half of his scientific contingent aboard and told it to study the ship and its dead crew meticulously and compile every scrap of information it could. Then he ordered the death ship to the base line.