Deathworld: The Complete Saga

by Harry Harrison

  He was being hit! Even though he expected it, wanted it, the jarring was intense and unbelievably loud. Then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and dimly, he heard a weak voice say go.

  “Blast, Kerk, blast!” he shouted as he jammed on full power.

  The suit kicked him hard, numbing him, slowing his fingers as they grappled for the intensity control on the helmet and turned it off. He winced against the glare of burning matter but could just make out the disk of the spaceship’s stern before him, the main tube staring like a great black eye. It grew quickly until it filled space and the sudden red glow of the preset radar said he had passed the eleven-hundred-meter mark. The guns couldn’t touch him here—but he could crash into the battleship and demolish himself. Then the full blast of the retrojets hit him, slamming him against the suit, stunning him again, making control almost impossible. The dark opening blossomed before him, filling his vision, blacking out everything else.

  He was inside it, the pressure lessening as the landing circuits took over and paced his rate of descent. Had Kerk made it? He had stopped, floating free, when something plummeted from above, glanced off him and crashed heavily into the end of the tube.

  “Kerk!” Jason grabbed the limp figure as it rebounded after the tremendous impact, grappled it and turned his lights on it. “Kerk!” No answer. Dead?

  “Landed . . . faster than I intended.”

  “You did indeed. But we’re here. Now let’s get to work before the computer decides to burn us out.”

  Spurred by this danger, they unshipped the molecular unbinder torch, the only thing that would affect the tough tube liners, and worked a circular line on the wall just above the injectors. It took almost two minutes of painstaking work to slowly cut the opening, and every second of the time they waited for the tube to fire.

  It did not. The circle was completed, and Kerk put his shoulder to it and fired his jets. The plug of metal and the Pyrran instantly vanished from sight—and Jason dived in right behind him into the immense, brightly lit engine room, made suddenly brighter by a flare of light behind him. Jason spun about just in time to see the flames cut off, the flames leaping from the hole they had just cut. The end of a microsecond blast. “A smart computer,” he said weakly. “Smart indeed.”

  Kerk had ignored the blast and dived into a control room to one side. Jason followed him—and met him as he emerged with a large chart in a twisted metal frame. “Diagram of the ship. Tore it from the wall. Central control this way. Go.”

  “All right, all right,” Jason muttered, working to keep pace with the Pyrran’s hurtling form. This was what Pyrrans did best, and it was an effort to keep up the pace. “Repair robots,” he said when they entered a long corridor. “They won’t bother us . . .”

  Before he had finished speaking, the two robots had raised their welding torches and rushed to the attack. But even as they moved, Kerk’s gun blasted twice, and they exploded into junk. “Good computer,” Kerk said. “Turn anything against us. Stay alert and cover my back.”

  There was no more time for talking. They changed their course often, since it was obvious that they were heading toward central control. Every machine along the way wanted to kill them. Housekeeping robots rushed at them with brooms, TV screens exploded as they passed, airtight doors tried to close on them, floors were electrified if they were touched. It was a battle, but really a one-sided one as long as they stayed alert. Their suits were invulnerable to small-scale attacks, insulated from electricity. And Pyrrans are the best fighters in the galaxy. In the end they came to the door marked CENTRA KONTROLO, and Kerk offhandedly blasted it down and floated through. The lights were lit, the room and the controls were spotlessly clean.

  “We’ve done it,” Jason said, cracking his helmet and smelling the cool air. “One billion credits. We’ve licked this bucket of bolts . . .”

  “THIS IS A FINAL WARNING!” the voice boomed and their guns nosed about for the source before they realized it was just a recording, “THIS BATTLESHIP HAS BEEN ENTERED BY ILLEGAL MEANS. YOU ARE ORDERED TO LEAVE WITHIN THE NEXT FIFTEEN SECONDS OR THE ENTIRE SHIP WILL BE DESTROYED. CHARGES HAVE BEEN SET TO ASSURE THAT THIS BATTLESHIP DOES NOT FALL INTO ENEMY HANDS. FOURTEEN . . .”

  “We can’t get out in time!” Jason shouted.

  “Shoot up the controls!”

  “No! The destruction controls won’t be here.”

  “TWELVE”

  “What can we do?”

  “Nothing! Absolutely nothing at all . . .”

  “EIGHT”

  They looked at each other wordlessly. Jason put out his armored hand and Kerk touched it with his own.

  “SEVEN”

  “Well, goodby,” Jason said, and tried to smile.

  “FOUR . . . errrk. THRE . . .”

  There was silence, then the mechanical voice spoke again, a different voice. “De-mothballing activated. Defenses disarmed. Am awaiting instructions.”

  “What . . . happened?” Jason asked.

  “De-mothballing signal received. Am awaiting instructions”

  “Just in time,” Jason said, swallowing with some difficulty. “Just in time.”

  “You should not have gone without me,” Meta said. “I shall never forgive you.”

  “I couldn’t take you,” Jason said. I wouldn’t have gone myself if you had insisted. You are worth more than a billion credits to me.”

  “That’s the nicest thing you ever said to me.” She smiled now and kissed him while Kerk looked on with great disinterest.

  “When you are through, would you tell us what happened?” Kerk said. “The computer hit the right number?”

  “Not at all. I did it.” She smiled into the shocked silence, then kissed Jason again. “I told you how interested I am now in codes and ciphers, Simply thrilling, with wartime applications too, of course. Well, Shrenkly told me about substitution ciphers and I tried one, the most simple. Where the letter A is one, B is two and so forth. And I tried to put a word into this cipher and I did, but it came out 81122021, but that was two numbers short. Then Shrenkly told me that there must be two digits for each letter or there would be transcription problems, like you have to use 01 for A instead of just the number 1. So I added a zero to the two one-digit numbers, and that made ten digits, so for fun I fed the number into the computer and it was sent and that was that.”

  “The jackpot with your first number—with your first try?” Jason asked hollowly. “Wasn’t that pretty lucky?”

  “Not really. You know military people don’t have much imagination; you’ve told me that a thousand times at least. So I took the simplest possible, looked it up in the Esperanto dictionary . . .”

  “Haltu?”

  “That’s right; encoded it and sent it and that was that.”

  “And just what does the word mean?” Kerk asked.

  “Stop,” Jason said, “just plain stop.”

  “I would have done the same thing myself,” Kerk said, nodding in agreement “Let us collect the money and go home.”