Nopalgarth

by Jack Vance

"It's my property," said Farr. "Who's head is it growing in?"

  Kirdy shook his head. "You better all come with me."

  "I'll go nowhere unless I'm under arrest," said Penche with great dignity. He pointed. "I told you—arrest the Iszic. They wrecked my house."

  "Come along, all of you," said Kirdy. He turned. "Bring down the wagon."

  Omon Bozhd made his decision. He rose proudly to his full height, the white bands glowing in the darkness. He looked at Farr, reached under his cloak, and brought out a shatter-gun.

  Ducking, Farr fell flat.

  The shatter-bolt sighed over his head. Blue fire came from Kirdy's gun. Omon Bozhd glowed in a blue aureole. He was dead, but he fired again and again. Farr rolled over the dark ground. The other Iszic fired at him, ignoring the police guns, flaming blue figures, dead, acting under command-patterns that outlasted their lives. Bolts struck Farr's legs. He groaned, and lay still.

  The three Iszic collapsed.

  "Now," said Penche, with satisfaction, "I will take care of Farr."

  "Easy, Penche," said Kirdy.

  Farr said, "Keep away from me."

  Penche halted. "I'll give you ten million for what you've got growing in your hair."

  "No," said Farr wildly. "I'll grow it myself. I'll give seeds away free…"

  "It's a gamble," said Penche. "If it's male, it's worth nothing."

  "If it's female," said Farr, "it's worth—" he paused as a police doctor bent over his leg.

  "—a great deal," said Penche dryly. "But you'll have opposition."

  "From who?" gasped Farr.

  Orderlies brought a stretcher.

  "From the Iszic. I offer you ten million. I take the chance."

  The fatigue, the pain, the mental exhaustion overcame Farr. "Okay… I'm sick of the whole mess."

  "That constitutes a contract," cried Penche in triumph. "These officers are witnesses."

  They lifted Farr onto the stretcher. The doctor looked down at him and noticed a sprig of vegetation in Farr's hair. Reaching down, he plucked it out.

  "Ouch!" said Farr.

  Penche cried out. "What did he do?"

  Farr said weakly, "You'd better take care of your property, Penche."

  "Where is it?" yelled Penche in anguish, collaring the doctor.

  "What?" asked the doctor.

  "Bring lights!" cried Penche.

  Farr saw Penche and his men seeking among the debris for the pale shoot which had grown in his head, then he drifted off into unconsciousness.

  Penche came to see Farr in the hospital. "Here," he said shortly. "Your money." He tossed a coupon to the table. Farr looked at it. "Ten million dollars."

  "That's a lot of money," said Farr.

  "Yes," said Penche.

  "You must have found the sprout."

  Penche nodded. "It was still alive. It's growing now… It's male." He picked up the coupon, looked at it, then put it back down. "A poor bet."

  "You had good odds," Farr told him.

  "I don't care for the money," said Penche. He looked off through the window, across Los Angeles, and Farr wondered what he was thinking.

  "Easy come, easy go," said Penche. He half-turned, as if to leave.

  "Now what?" asked Farr. "You don't have a female house; you don't deal in houses."

  K. Penche said, "There's female houses on Iszm. Lots of them. I'm going after a few."

  "Another raid?"

  "Call it anything you like."

  "What do you call it?"

  "An expedition."

  "I'm glad I won't be involved."

  "A man never knows," Penche remarked. "You might change your mind."

  "Don't count on it," said Farr.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  I

  IXAX AT THE BEST of times was a dreary planet. Winds roared through the jagged black mountains, propelling jets of rain and sleet which, rather than softening the landscape, tended to wash what soil existed into the ocean. Vegetation was scant: a few drab forests of brittle dendrons; wax-grass and tube-wort bunching out of crevices; lichens in sullen splotches of red, purple, blue and green. The ocean however, supported extensive beds of kelp and algae; these, with a fairly abundant catalogue of marine animalculae, conducted the greater part of the planet’s photo-synthetic process.

  In spite of, or because of, the challenge of the environment, the original amphibian animal, a type of ganoid batrachian, evolved into an intelligent andromorph. Assisted by an intuitive awareness of mathematical justness and harmony, with a visual apparatus that presented the world in tactile three-dimensional style rather than as a polychrome set of two-dimensional surfaces, the Xaxans were almost preordained to build a technical civilization. Four hundred years after their advent into space they discovered the nopal—apparently through the workings of sheer chance—and so involved themselves in the most terrible war of their history.

  The war, lasting over a century, devastated the already barren planet. Scum crusted the oceans; the few sparse pockets of soil were poisoned by yellowish-white powder sifting out of the sky. Ixax had never been a populous world; the handful of cities now were rubble: heaps of black stone, liver-brown tile, chalk-white shards of fused talc, wads of rotting organic stuff, a chaos which outraged the Xaxan compulsion for mathematical exactness and nicety. The survivors, both Chitumih and Tauptu (so to transcribe the clicks and rattlings of the Xaxan communicative system), dwelt in underground fortresses. Distinguished by Tauptu awareness and Chitumih denial of the nopal, they nourished toward each other an emotion akin to but a dozen times more intense than Earthly hate.

  After the first hundred years of war the tide of battle ran in favor of the Tauptu. The Chitumih were driven to their stronghold under the Northern Mountains; the Tauptu battle-teams inched forward, blasting the surface defense-ports one by one, dispatching atomic moles against the mile-deep citadel.

  The Chitumih, although aware of defeat, resisted with a fervor corresponding to their more-than-hate for the Tauptu. The rumble of approaching moles sounded ever louder; the outlying mole-traps collapsed, then the inner-ring of diversion-tunnels. Looping up from a burrow ten miles deep, an enormous mole broke into the dynamo chamber, destroying the very core of Chitumih resistance. The corridors went pitch-dark; the Chitumih tumbled forth blindly, prepared to fight with hands and stones. Moles gnawed at the rock; the tunnels reverberated with grinding sound. A gap appeared, followed by a roaring metal snout. The walls broke wide apart; there was a blast of anaesthetic gas, and the war was over.

  The Tauptu climbed down across the broken rock, search-lights glowing from their heads. The able-bodied among the Chitumih were pinioned and sent to the surface; the crushed and mangled were killed where they lay.

  War-Master Khb Tachx returned to Mia, the ancient capitol, flying low through a hissing rain-storm across a dingy sea, over a foreland pocked with great craters in the shape of earth-colored star-bursts, over a range of black mountains, and the charred rubble of Mia lay before him.

  There was a single whole building in evidence, a long squat box of gray rock-melt, newly erected.

  Khb Tachx landed his air-car, and ignoring the rain, walked toward the entrance of the building. Fifty or sixty Chitumih huddling in a pen slowly turned their heads, sensing him with the perceptors which fulfilled the function of eyes. Khb Tachx accepted the impact of their hate with no more attention than he gave the rain. As he approached the building a frantic rattle of torment sounded from within, and again Khb Tachx paid no heed. The Chitumih were more affected. They shrank back as if the pain were their own, and in clenched dull vibrations reviled Khb Tachx, defying him to do his worst.
>
  Khb Tachx strode into the building, dropped to a level a half-mile below the surface, proceeded to the chamber reserved for his use. Here he removed his helmet, his leather cloak, wiped the rain from his gray face. Divesting himself of his other garments he scrubbed himself with a stiff-bristled brush, removing dead tissue and minute surface scales from his skin.

  An orderly grated his finger-tips across the door. “You are awaited.”

  “I will come at once.”

  With a passionless economy of motion he dressed in fresh garments, an apron, boots, a long cape smooth as a beetle-shell. It so happened that these garments were uniformly black, although this was a matter of indifference to the Xaxans who differentiated surfaces by texture rather than color. Khb Tachx took up his helmet, a casque of striated metal, crowned by a medallion symbolizing the word tauptu—“purged”. Six spikes rose from the keel, three corresponding to the inch-high knuckles of bone along his cranial crest, the remaining three denoting his rank. After a moment’s reflection Khb Tachx detached the medallion, then pulled the helmet down over his bare gray scalp.

  He left his chamber, walked deliberately along the corridor to a door of fused quartz, which slid soundlessly aside at his approach. He entered a perfectly circular room with vitreous walls and a high paraboloid dome. Insofar as the Xaxans derived pleasure from the contemplation of inanimate objects, they enjoyed the serene simplicity of these particular conformations. At a round table of polished basalt sat four men, each wearing a six-spike helmet. They immediately noticed the absence of the medallion from Khb Tachx’s helmet, and derived the import he meant to convey: that with the collapse of the Great Northern Fortress the need for distinction between Tauptu and Chitumih had ended. These five governed the Tauptu as a loose committee, without clear division of responsibility except in two regards: War-Master Khb Tachx directed military strategy; Pttdu Apiptix commanded those few ships remaining to the space-fleet.

  Khb Tachx seated himself, and described the collapse of the Chitumih stronghold. His fellows apprehended him impassively, showing neither joy nor excitement, for they felt none.

  Pttdu Apiptix dourly summed up the new circumstances. “The nopal are as before. We have won only a local victory.”

  “Nevertheless, a victory,” Khb Tachx remarked.

  A third Xaxan countered what he considered an extreme of pessimism. “We have destroyed the Chitumih; they have not destroyed us. We started with nothing, they everything: still we have won.”

  “Immaterial,” responded Pttdu Apiptix. “We have been unable to prepare for what must come next. Our weapons against the nopal are makeshift; they harass us almost at will.”

  “The past is past,” Khb Tachx declared. “The short step has been taken; now we will take the long one. The war must be carried to Nopalgarth.”

  The five sat in contemplation. The idea had occurred many times to all of them, and many times they had drawn back from the implications.

  A fourth Xaxan remarked abruptly, “We have been bled white. We can wage no more war.”

  “Others now will bleed,” Khb Tachx responded. “We will infect Nopalgarth as the nopal infected Ixax, and do no more than direct the struggle.”

  The fourth Xaxan reflected. “Is this a practical strategy? A Xaxan risks his life if he so much as shows himself on Nopalgarth.”

  “Agents must act for us. We must employ someone not instantly recognizable as an enemy—a man of another planet.”

  “In this connection,” Pttdu Apiptix remarked, “there is a first and obvious choice …”

  II

  A VOICE WHICH QUAVERED from fright or excitement —the girl at the ARPA switchboard in Washington could not decide which—asked to speak to “someone in charge.” The girl inquired the caller’s business, explaining that ARPA consisted of many departments and divisions.

  “It’s a secret matter,” said the voice. “I gotta talk to one of the higher-ups, somebody connected with the top science projects.”

  A nut, decided the girl, and started to switch the call to the public relations office. At this moment Paul Burke, an assistant director of research, walked through the foyer. Burke, loose-limbed, tall, with a reassuringly nondescript appearance, was thirty seven, once-married, once-divorced. Most women found Burke attractive; the switchboard operator, no exception, seized the opportunity to attract his attention. She sang out, “Mr. Burke, won’t you speak to this man?”

  “Which man?” asked Burke.

  “I don’t know. He’s quite excited. He wants to talk to someone in authority.”

  “May I ask your position, Mr. Burke?” The voice evoked an instant image in Burke’s mind: an elderly man, earnest and self-important, hopping from one foot to the other in excitement.

  “I’m an assistant director of research,” said Burke.

  “Does that mean you’re a scientist?” the voice asked cautiously. “This is business that I can’t take up with underlings.”

  “More or less. What’s your problem?”

  “Mr. Burke, you’d never believe me if I told you over the phone.” The voice quavered. “I can’t really believe it myself.”

  Burke felt a trace of interest. The man’s voice communicated its excitement, aroused uneasy prickles at the nape of Burke’s neck. Nevertheless, an instinct, a hunch, an intuition told him that he wanted nothing to do with this urgent old man.

  “I’ve got to see you, Mr. Burke—you or one of the scientists. One of the top scientists.” The man’s voice faded, then strengthened as if he had turned his head away from the mouth-piece as he spoke.

  “If you could explain your problem,” said Burke cautiously, “I might be able to help you.”

  “No,” said the man. “You’d tell me I was crazy. You’ve got to come out here. I promise you you’ll see something you’ve never imagined in your wildest dreams.”

  “That’s going pretty far,” said Burke. “Can’t you give me some idea what it’s all about?”

  “You’d think I was crazy. And maybe I am.” The man laughed with unnecessary fervor. “I’d like to think so.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Are you coming out to see me?”

  “I’ll send someone out.”

  “That won’t do. You’ll send the police, and then—there’ll —be—trouble!” He almost whispered these last words.

  Burke spoke aside to the operator, “Get a tracer on this call.” Into the phone he said, “Are you in trouble yourself? Anyone threatening you?”

  “No, no, Mr. Burke! Nothing like that! Now tell me the truth: Can you come out to see me right now? I got to know!”

  “Not unless you give me a better reason than you have.”

  The man took a deep breath. “Okay. Listen then. And don’t say I didn’t warn you. I—” The line went dead.

  Burke looked at the telephone in mingled disgust and relief. He turned to the operator. “Any luck?”

  “I didn’t have time, Mr. Burke. He hung up too soon.” Burke shrugged. “Crack-pot, probably … But still …” He turned away, neck still tingling eerily. He went to his office, where presently he was joined by Dr. Ralph Tarbert, a mathematician and physicist dividing his time between Brookhaven and ARPA. Tarbert, in his middle fifties, was a handsome lean-faced man, nervously muscular, with a shock of electric white hair of which he was very proud. In contrast to Burke’s rather rumpled tweed jackets and flannel slacks, Tarbert wore elegant and conservative suits of dark blue or gray. He not only admitted but boasted of intellectual snobbery, and affected a cynicism which Burke sometimes found frivolous enough to be irritating.

  The unfinished telephone call still occupied Burke’s mind. He described the conversation to Tarbert who, as Burke had expected, dismissed the incident with an airy wave of the hand.

  “The man was scared,” mused Burke, “no question about that.”

  “The devil looked up from the bottom of his beer mug.”

  “He sounded stone-sober. You know, Ralph, I
’ve got a hunch about this thing. I wish I’d gone to see the man.”

  “Take a tranquilizer,” suggested Tarbert. “Now, let’s talk about this electron-ejection thing …”

  Shortly after noon a messenger brought a small package to Burke’s office. Burke signed the book, examined the package. His name and address had been printed with a ballpoint pen; there was also an inscription: OPEN IN ABSOLUTE PRIVACY.

  Burke ripped open the parcel. Inside he found a cardboard box, containing a dollar-size disk of metal, which he shook out into his hand. The disk seemed at the same time light and heavy; massive but weightless. With a soft exclamation Burke opened his hand. The disk floated in midair. Slowly, gently, it began to rise.

  Burke stared, reached. “What the devil,” he muttered. “No gravity?”

  The telephone rang. The voice asked anxiously, “Did you get the package?”

  “Just this minute,” said Burke.

  “Will you come to see me now?”

  Burke took a deep breath. “What’s your name?”

  “You’ll come alone?”

  “Yes,” said Burke.

  III

  SAM GIBBONS was a widower, two years retired from a prosperous used-car business in Buellton, Virginia, sixty-five miles from Washington. With his two sons at college, he lived alone in a big brick house two miles from town, on the crest of a hill.

  Burke met him at the gate—a pompous man of sixty, with a pear-shaped body, an amiable pink face now mottled and trembling. He verified that Burke was alone, made sure that Burke was both a recognized scientist—“up on all that space and cosmic ray stuff”—and in a position of authority.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said Gibbons nervously. “It’s gotta be this way. You’ll see why in a few minutes. Thank God I’m out of it.” He blew out his cheeks, looked up toward his house.