The Planet Killers

by Robert Silverberg

  “No,” said Sadhig bleakly. “According to the law, I’m supposed to resist such coercion—even at the cost of my life. I’m ruined, damn it! Why did you have to pull me aboard your accursed lifeship?”

  “Because,” remarked the other Morilaru female sweetly, “we wanted to live. And we weren’t sure we could pilot this ship ourselves.”

  “How far are we from civilization?” Royce asked.

  Sadhig shrugged. “It’s impossible to tell until I’ve had a go with the computer.”

  “But we can’t be very far,” objected one of the Morilaru women. “It was still the first night of the trip. We should still be close to Morilar.”

  Sadhig shook his head. “I’m afraid you don’t understand how the nulldrive works. The ship’s generators thrust us into a fivespace continuum, and when the computer says so we return to normal space. But points in nullspace don’t have a one-to-one correlation with points in normal space. There’s no matching referent. We might be a billion light-years from Morilar—or we might be just next door.”

  The explanation flew over the heads of the women. They merely looked dazed.

  Royce said, “Very well, young man. Suppose, as you seem to be the only spaceman among us, you find out just where we are , then.”

  The Morilaru rose and made his way through the crowded single cabin to the control section up front. Catton, sitting in the farthest corner of the cabin, scowled darkly at the floor. Lifeships were all well and good, but this business of traveling in nullspace did have its drawbacks. He had heard of lifeship survivors beached on the far shores of the universe, returning to civilization only in extreme old age.

  Suddenly the problems of Skorg, Morilar, and Arenadd seemed very unimportant to him. If they emerged from the warp continuum far enough away, he would be stranded long enough so that the current crisis became so much galactic ancient history.

  The cabin was silent while the Morilaru made his computations; the only sound was the steady rasping breathing of the Arenaddin. The bulky creature did not enjoy the artificially sustained gravity of the lifeship, which was set for Skorg-norm, or about 1.7 times the pull on Arenadd. Catton was mildly discomforted by the gravity—it was also 1.4 Earthnorm, too. The difference added some seventy pounds to his weight, better than two hundred to the Arenaddin’s; small wonder the alien was uncomfortable.

  At length the Skorg crewman returned from the computer, wearing an unreadable expression—Skorg facial expressions seemed morose at their most cheerful, and grew darker from there.

  “Well?” Royce demanded. “What’s the bad news?”

  “It isn’t as bad as it might have been,” Sadhig said. “But it isn’t very good, either.”

  “Where are we?” asked Catton.

  “We’re five hundred light-years from Morilar,” said the crewman.

  “Is that within the range of this ship?” Royce asked.

  “Unfortunately, no. We have a limited range—about a hundred light-years in radius. And, also unfortunately, there seems to be only one planet within our immediate access.”

  “What’s its name?” asked one of the Morilaru women.

  The Skorg gestured unhappily. “It has none. It’s listed on the charts as DX 19083. It’s a small jungle world, claimed by Morilar but never settled. The chart says there’s a rescue beacon erected there, so we can call for help once we land.”

  “Doesn’t this ship have a radio?”

  “Yes,” the Skorg said. “An ordinary radio. It doesn’t have a generator big enough to power a nullspace communicator. So we could send out a message, but it would take five hundred years for it to reach Morilar. We don’t have quite that much time, I’m afraid.”

  “So we’ll have to make a landing on this jungle planet,” Catton said. “And use the rescue beacon communicator to get ourselves picked up.”

  “What if the rescue beacon is out of order?” asked Royce.

  “There’s small chance of that,” said the Skorg crewman. “The beacons are built to last, and they are service-checked every ten years. The greater danger is that we will not be able to find the beacon, once we land. But we must risk it. I will begin immediately to compute a course taking us to DX 19083, unless there are objections.”

  There were none. Sadhig returned to the control cabin and busied himself with the relatively simple job of targeting the lifeship toward the uninhabited world.

  Catton prowled uneasily around the cabin. It was crowded enough, even with less than capacity aboard. He opened a cabinet and found a considerable food supply and an elaborate medical kit. A second cabinet yielded tools—blasters, electrohatchets, bubbletents, a collapsible canoe no bigger than a bastketball when folded.

  They were well provided for. But the delay would be a nuisance. And in case they had any kind of survival problems, most of the lifeship passengers would be drags on the group. The two Morilaru women, Catton thought, would be less than useless in any kind of situation of hardship. And the Arenaddin was obviously not accustomed to roughing it. Catton figured that Sadhig and Royce could be counted on to do their share of work. That left two Morilaru men—Woukidal, his adjutant, and the other man, the one who had released the lifeship from its parent vessel, and who had not spoken a word since.

  Catton made his way forward. Sadhig was bent over the computer, tapping out course indications.

  “Any difficulties?” Catton asked in Skorg.

  Sadhig looked up. “Of course not. A child could operate this lifeship. But those women had to drag me aboard—”

  “Still brooding about that?”

  “I shall be in disgrace when I return to Skorg. My father will never forgive me. Do you know who my father is, Earthman?”

  Catton shook his head.

  The Skorg said, “My father is Thunimon eSadhig, Earthman. First Commander of the Skorg Navy. How will he feel when he learns that his eldest son escaped from a damaged ship in a lifeship?”

  Sadhig’s face was cold and tightly drawn. Catton realized that within the Skorg ethic, it was undoubtedly a humiliation for a crewman to escape alive while passengers died, no matter what the circumstances. He pitied the Skorg.

  “What position did you hold on the Silver Spear? ” Catton asked.

  “Flight Consultant First Class. I was the eighth ranking officer—assistant to the astrogator.”

  “Those women sure picked the right man when they collared you, then!”

  “They seized blindly,” Sadhig said without looking up from his work. “For all they knew, they were snaring one of the cooks. But a cook could have piloted this craft as well as I do.” Bitterly, Sadhig snapped down the courselock and rose from the controls. “There,” he said. “It is done. We will make landing in two days absolute time, Earthman. And then we must find the rescue beacon, or we will die. I do not greatly care.”

  “If it’s a disgrace to leave a ship and let passengers remain behind,” Catton said, “it must be equally disgraceful to be cast away with passengers and not expend every effort to ensure their survival.”

  The Skorg nodded. “You are right. I intend to help all I can. Your lives are important to me; mine no longer matters.”

  Catton felt that the conversation was taking an uncomfortable turn. To change it he said, “Just what happened aboard the Silver Spear? There was some kind of explosion in the drive compartment, wasn’t there?”

  The Skorg’s cold eyes glinted sardonically. “Yes, there was ‘some kind of explosion,’ all right.”

  “I thought such accidents were so rare as to be just about mathematically nonexistent.”

  “Statistically,” said the Skorg, “you’re correct. But this was not an accident. Nor, strictly speaking, was it an explosion.”

  “Not an accident? What do you mean?”

  “I had little time to gather information before I was forced into this lifeship. But as I was told by my superior, five implosion bombs had been concealed in the drive compartment before the voyage. One would have been enough
to disable the ship. Five destroyed it completely. Hundreds must have died.”

  Catton was taken sharply aback. “Implosion bombs—you mean, sabotage?”

  “What else? The ship was deliberately destroyed. I have no idea who would do such a thing.”

  Shrugging, Catton returned to the rest of the group in the main segment of the ship. “We’re landing in two days,” he told Royce in Terran. “Everything’s under control, according to the Skorg.”

  “I heard part of your conversation. What were you saying about implosion bombs?”

  “Sadhig told me that the ship was blown up deliberately. Five bombs went off in the drive compartment.”

  “What? Eight hundred passengers, aboard, and—”

  “Quiet,” Catton said. “There’s no point letting everyone know. There’ll be enough hysteria if we have trouble finding that beacon.”

  Sadhig’s words had greatly disturbed Catton. There were many reasons why someone would want to destroy a luxury liner in transit—to collect insurance, to gain notoriety, to dispose of some important figure, even to provoke a war. Catton’s thoughts kept coming back to the assassination possibility. Suppose, he thought, it had been decided to get rid of him before his investigation proceeded further. Blowing up a ship to accomplish his murder was on the drastic side, he admitted. But these were alien beings. Their innermost reactions were not necessarily the same as a Terran’s. Their values differed from Earth’s at the most basic levels.

  Of course, he realized he might be greatly exaggerating the situation. There had been other important people on the Silver Spear —Royce, for one, a major figure in interstellar commerce. No doubt the cream of Skorg society had been aboard. He had no right to assume that an act that killed hundreds of innocent people had been aimed directly at him. But it was something to consider, in any event, when and if he finally reached Skorg.

  Life on the small ship was not pleasant in the two days that followed. Privacy was impossible, sanitation difficult. Tempers sharpened. Royce complained privately that he found the Skorg pilot’s odor almost unbearable, but that he was struggling to ignore it. Catton was thankful for the sensory block that prevented him from undergoing such difficulties.

  The Morilaru women seemed interested only in eating; Catton compelled them to abide by a rationing system, and unofficially established a watch rotation so that an eye would be kept on the food cabinet at all times; he, Sadhig, and Royce took turns at the job.

  The Arenaddin was in considerable pain; the relatively high gravity was troubling him, and he was not concealing the fact. Catton and Sadhig spent some time trying to get at the mechanism that controlled the artificial gravity on the lifeship, but the box was hermetically sealed and welded too carefully for opening by amateurs. The idea was to keep passengers from tinkering with the lifeship’s gravity and perhaps inadvertently squashing themselves flat under a twenty-gee pull. Since there was no other way of alleviating the Arenaddin’s difficulties, Catton went prowling through the medical supplies for a sedative. He found one whose label was printed in Skorg, Morilaru, and Arenaddin, and which was presumably, therefore, suitable for use by members of all three species. Catton injected an entire ampoule into the Arenaddin’s arm after considerable trouble locating the proper vein beneath the insulation of fat; the Arenaddin slept soundly for the rest of the trip.

  At the end of the second day, Sadhig reported that the mass-detector showed them within reach of their destination. The landing would have to be made on manual deceleration, since there was no spaceport below to supply a landing-beam as guide. It was impossible to wake the Arenaddin, so he was strapped down securely, and the other passengers clambered into the deceleration cradles and waited for the landing.

  There was an instant of transition as the lifeship left nullspace and re-entered the normal universe. A planet burst into view on the viewscreen, green except for the blueness of its seas. Up front, Sadhig caressed the controls of the manual-landing keyboard.

  The landing itself took better than an hour. The tiny ship swung down on the uninhabited planet in ever-narrowing circles. Catton felt the jounce as the ship cracked into the thickening atmosphere. Gravity dragged at him; the ship began to drop.

  It touched down gently. Catton glanced out the single port in the passenger cabin. The landscape that greeted him was profuse with vegetation. The scene had the fierce grandeur of prehistory.

  Chapter Ten

  They ran the usual tests before leaving the ship. The lifeship’s instruments indicated an atmosphere of breathable oxygen-nitrogen-plus-inerts-and-carbon-dioxide constitution, though both the oxygen and the CO2 were on the high side for Catton’s tastes—34% oxygen, 1% carbon dioxide. It was a rich mixture for an Earthman to breathe, even more so for the hapless Arenaddin; the Skorg and the four Morilaru would not be bothered by the high oxygen content. Gravity, Catton was pleased to note, was .5 Skorg-norm, which was about three-quarters of a gee by Terran standards; the Arenaddin would enjoy the respite from Skorg gravitation, while Sadhig and the Morilaru, all accustomed to the fairly stiff gravitation of their native worlds, were apt to feel a bit light-footed and queasy-stomached for a while. Atmospheric pressure at sea-level was—as best as Catton could translate it from Skorg terms—18.5 psi, which was something on the soupy side.

  One important fact remained to be determined before they left the ship.

  “How far are we from the rescue beacon?” Catton asked.

  Sadhig’s lean face was puckered into one immense frown. “I’m still trying to get a fix,” the Skorg said. “I’m picking up the carrier beam intermittently, but until I get the directional fix I can’t—ah—there!” Sadhig began to scribble computations in the involved squiggles that were Skorg script. He chewed on the stylus for a moment, added up a column, fed the results into the lifeship’s miniature computer, and waited for confirmation. It came, a moment later.

  “Well?” Catton asked.

  “It’s better than I hoped for, considering I didn’t have any idea where that damned beacon was located. We hit the right continent—our luck’s with us. We’re only about five hundred miles due south of the beacon. It could have been a lot worse.”

  “Five hundred miles!” Catton exclaimed.

  Sadhig nodded. “By forced marches, we ought to get there in a month’s time. We don’t have a month’s food, of course, but we ought to be able to find something edible in the jungle.”

  Catton peered through the viewscreen. He saw close-packed vegetation, beady with moisture. This was a young planet, only seventy million miles from its Sol-type yellow sun. The temperature out there, according to the instruments, was about 310 degrees on the Skorg scale, which was reckoned up from Absolute Zero. Sadhig informed him that the mean temperature on Morilar was about 305 in Skorg degrees; juggling the figures hastily, Catton decided that the temperature outside was in the neighborhood of 110 Fahrenheit. Hiking for a month on a damp, humid, world like this wasn’t going to be any Boy Scout jaunt.

  When Catton returned to the rest of the group, he found them stirring uneasily; none of them had any basic scientific understanding of the problems involved in landing on an unexplored world, and they regarded Catton and Sadhig with some suspicion.

  “Well?” Royce asked. “What have you two been figuring out?”

  “The planet’s livable,” Catton said. “We can all breathe the air, the gravity is fairly low, and the temperature isn’t much hotter than that of Morilar. We won’t be comfortable, but we’ll survive. The rescue beacon is five hundred miles north of here. If there aren’t any large bodies of water in between to give us trouble, we ought to reach it in a month.”

  “A month?” gasped the older and more talkative of the two Morilaru women. “You mean we’re going to walk for a month in that jungle?”

  “You don’t have to accompany us. You can stay behind,” Catton said. He could just as well do without the women on the trek. “We’ll leave you a blaster and your pro rata share of the food, an
d you can live in the ship. When the rescue ship arrives, we’ll have him pick you up—if he can find you in this jungle.”

  “I don’t like that idea. But why can’t we fly this ship to the beacon?”

  “Two reasons,” said Sadhig crisply. “The first is that we have very little fuel, possibly not enough for a blastoff. The second is that this lifeship is not a precision vessel. It is virtually a toy. If we attempted a new blastoff and landing, there is no guarantee we will not come down even further from the beacon.”

  “Oh,” she said faintly. “Well, in that case—I guess we walk!”

  The trek began an hour later. The ship was stripped of everything that was portable and might have some conceivable use. Catton, who had taken charge of the group without any nomination or intention, parceled the food out equally for each to carry, for the reason (which he did not voice) that in case of the sudden disappearance of one member of the party he did not want the entire supply of a given item to be lost. Similarly, he distributed the blasters and other weapons and tools.

  When the outfitting was done, they set out—Catton and Royce in the lead, followed by Woukidal and the other male Morilaru, then the two Morilaru women, with Sadhig and the Arenaddin bringing up the rear. Catton set a jaunty pace for the party. The air was thick and rich, invigorating almost to the point of intoxication; after a few hundred yards the Earthman realized that he would burn himself out quickly at this pace, and he slowed up. With air that was more than a third oxygen to breathe, it was easy to overlook the bothersome heat and humidity; between the low gravity and the richness of the air, Catton felt an exuberance he had never known before.

  The vegetation consisted largely of gigantic trees, thirty or forty feet thick at the base, towering far into the sky. The trees had no limbs for at least their first hundred feet of height; far above the ground they branched heavily, and their crowns intermingled, with a thick mesh of vines to provide a virtual roof for the forest. Evidently the ceiling two hundred feet above blocked most of the rainfall from the jungle floor; it was sparsely vegetated except for occasional seedlings and man-high ferns. A soft red-brown carpet of dead leaves lay underfoot. Compass in hand, Catton doggedly led his little band on a steady northward path, pausing every ten minutes or so to make sure that no stragglers were falling behind.