Perilous Planets Part 27

'No, Thorana, there'll be no one to welcome me as close as you two are, but they'll be my own kind. I'll see to them, and you see to your own breed here so that when my grandchildren and yours meet again out there in the desert, there'll be no nonsense of Sky-Beasts and cages between them!'

As the days followed the nights, the road climbed above the rift-line and went winding through the low hills which closed in the polar basin. It came out at last high on a bare hillside, and there before them were the great dams and the ice.

Only scattered white patches of upland snow were left where the polar cap had been lying across the dark hills like the clouds of Erth that were in Jim's book. At their base was the dark network of swampland, green with new life, and far be-low where the waters reached the plain was the black line of the dam.

When the ancients knew that water and air were leaving Mur, they built their chain of dams at either pole to hold back the water of the melting frosts until, through the great sluices that run deep under the gorges, they could be pumped to every part of the dying planet. Korul remembered it as a place of solemn stillness, brooding with the lost wisdom of the past - but now the curving wall of the giant dam was swarming with the tiny black shapes of men, and steel flickered in the autumn sunlight. A dark wave surged up and broke against the breast of the dam, rose halfway to its crest, then dropped away as a net of s.h.i.+mmering silver wavered over it.

It was war!

Jim-Berk came out of his revery. 'What's happening?' he demanded.

Korul told him. "Torkul, who keeps the sluices, is my friend. We wanted to bring back the old ways gently, with the help of the Searchers - not by killing and hate.

And Karak is no man to stand differences of opinion among his leaders.'

'With Torkul holding the gates, Mur will go without water for half a year if he chooses,' Thorana pointed out. 'If Tatok is with him, in the South, and Karak cannot break their de-fense, they hold Mur in the hollow of their palm.'

'If your Torkul has the men and the will, he can hold that wall against an army,'

the t.i.tan said. 'Korul - if you're with him, and Karak knows it, there'll be more of the fear of the Lord in his black heart. Have you been here? How does the land lie?'

Korul pointed. 'The plain is a maze of shallow gullies and ravines. You can see them as dark lines against the red, be-cause the water follows them and plants grow there. They should give me cover enough to creep up in Karak's rear, then run for the dam when he next attacks.'

'And be picked off by Torkul's best bowman, I have no doubt,' the t.i.tan said grimly. 'Is there any signal that will let them know who you are?'

'By the G.o.ds, there is! Torkul and I used a cry when we were boys together that made the levels ring. "Mur! Murata! Mur!" G.o.ds, how the Masters hated it. He'll know it still.'

'Come on then,' the giant rumbled. 'Keep to cover, and when I shout, run for the dam.'

Thorana seized his sleeve. 'Wait!' she cried. 'You can't go with us! We may be penned up there for days, and you have barely time to get back to your s.h.i.+p. We owe you enough now, Jim-Berk - go back to Erth while you still can. This is our affair.'

He shook her gently off. 'But for that little tussle with the ullas, I've not had a good fight for upward of forty years,' he said grandly. 'I owe your friend Karak something from all three of us, and I have a little toy here at my hip that may come as a surprise to him. If it's the s.h.i.+p that's bothering you, it's well hidden and another year more or less won't matter to it. I'd like to see what your scientists make of me, anyway, now they know what they're looking at. Come on - if we wait much longer the sun will be down on us, and a day wasted is a day lost.'

The t.i.tan The sun was well down in the west when they crept up through the scarred plain behind Karak's camp. All day they had been hammering the wall with those savage attacks, trying by brute force to break through Torkul's defense. Now they were gathering for what would be a last attack before night closed down and they took cover from the cold.

Karak himself led them. Peering from behind a pinnacle of crumbling clay, Korul decided that he looked less omnipotent than on the day when he had begged for Thorana's life. He was ranging back and forth among his men, bunching them into some sort of order. As the ranks took shape, his plan became evident. Swordsmen would charge under a barrage of arrows, and the bowmen would attack when the first wave fell back.

And then - they.

The gabble of Karak's forces faded away into deathly still-ness, then with a shout the big man leaped forward toward the dam. With the tw.a.n.g of steel cross-bows behind them and the whistle of bolts over their heads, his swordsmen sprang after him.

It was as though two waves flowed together. Down from the top of the dam came Torkul's men to meet the advancing swordsmen. A little above the center they met with a clang of steel. The thin line of defenders held, perched on the sheer face where Karak's men must claw their way upward block by block. They held, then the attackers broke and fled - and at Karak's shout, out of the gullies poured his bowmen, their squat bows hurling buzzing death at the men who stood in a huddled ma.s.s halfway up the face of the great dam.

Up the black wall, striking a shower of fire from the stone, beat the hail of steel bolts, with Torkul's line retreating slowly before it. Higher they were driven - higher - then with a shout the bowmen drew their swords, and at the same moment Torkul and his men fell flat against the rock-face, while over them hurtled a barrage of flickering steel from hidden archers at the crest.

The black wave faltered - slowed - and tumbled back in wild confusion while Torkul and his swordsmen leaped behind them bringing quick death to the laggards. And at Jim-Berk's cry the three sprang from their shelter and raced toward the milling host.

One of the fugitives saw them, pounding through the half-light, and recognized the t.i.tan's giant shape.

'The Beast!' he screamed. The Beast!'

A startled hush fell over the fighters; then out of it came the t.i.tan's roaring voice, thundering their battle-cry: 'Mur! Murata! Mur!'

Korul's voice echoed it, and Thorana's shrilled above them both. And from where Torkul's men stood, puzzled, at the dam-front the answer came: 'Mur!Mur!MUR!'

Then they were at them.

In the t.i.tan's hand appeared a squat weapon of blued steel with a stubby muzzle.

As Karak's men turned on them, it roared with a battering death that tore into their bodies and sent them reeling out of the path. Into the gap raced the t.i.tan, Korul behind him with Thorana close at his back. Then as Karak's howl of rage went up, they closed in with ready swords on every side.

There is a saying among the Givers: A dead man's sword will make more dead men. Korul and Thorana armed them-selves, and as the t.i.tan's weapon failed and he began to push new projectiles into its magazine, they raised a s.h.i.+eld of darting steel behind him. Then the gun roared again over their heads, and Karak's men fell back.

They could not go far. The weight of rus.h.i.+ng men behind them drove them on.

Unable to retreat, they had to fight. With a shout of rage the t.i.tan scooped up the two Murians, one under each arm, and plunged headlong at the line of steel that separated them from the dam.

The utter fury of it took them through. Torkul's defenders closed in around them, but hot on their heels pounded Karak's howling, cursing host in one irresistible bolt of certain death.

Over the din thundered the Star-Beast's voice: 'Run! Up the dam if you like your life!'

And they ran, Jim-Berk clambering ponderously after them. They reached the line of the first stand, pa.s.sed it, spilled over Torkul's barricades into a clamoring host that at Torkul's word sprang to their places and loosed a hail of steel on the attackers.

Korul looked around him. The t.i.tan was not there!

His cry checked the bowmen and brought Torkul to his side at the top of the barricade. Halfway down the slope Jim-Berk was holding Karak's wedge of steel.

He had stopped behind the line of dead. Piling their bodies into a human breastwork, he loaded his weapon - then was up again, gigantic in the twilight, flame spitting from his roaring death-frail, crumpling them up in agony, choking the narrow ledges of the dam-face with lifeless bodies. Close-packed as through body after body, bringing them down in swaths.

Three times he rose and drove them back. The fourth time his gun roared twice and stopped. He hurled it in their faces, then dropped on his haunches behind his wall of dead while over him sang the steel hail of Karak's bows, sweeping the rock face and cutting off his retreat.

There in the shelter of the dead Jim-Berk garnered a sheaf of swords. Again they rushed the dam, and as Karak's barage lifted to let them through he sprang to his feet and with deadly accuracy hurled them, one by one, into the faces of the attack-ing men. Ten men he brought down, spitted by ten swords: the last he kept, and with it charged down the dam-face at the climbing foe.

He was a giant, and his sword seemed to blaze with the white fire of Death itself, but they outnumbered him by hundreds. Thorana was screaming in his own strange tongue, and his own voice roared back in gleeful laughter. s.n.a.t.c.hing a sword Korul was over the top of the dam, Torkul at his side, the defenders screaming after them.

They were too late. Streaming, panic-stricken, Karak's men broke and fled from the attack of the Star-Thing, with the t.i.tan, a b.l.o.o.d.y, grinning spectre of destruction at their heel.

Behind them Karak stood with his bowmen, and as his swords-men broke they swept the slope with a hail of death that beat fiercely about the giant figure of the t.i.tan.

They saw the blood spurt where the heavy bolts plowed into his body. They saw his ma.s.sive frame quiver as each bolt struck. But still he laughed, and still the momentum of his charge carried him after the fleeing swordsmen, slashed at them with a sword that ran red to the hilt.

Thorana screamed. The t.i.tan's charge had stopped. He stood towering over the frightened faces of Karak's bowmen then slowly, like a falling monolith, he went down among them, dead.

They ran. Korul and Torkul left them scattered over the plain, hiding like rats in the gullies, s.h.i.+vering in the deepening night. As the cold deepened they crept out, whimpering for mercy, and got it or the sword according to the humor of the guard whom they approached.

Karak had escaped. His own men told how he had run from the last wild charge of the dying Star-Beast. They would help hunt him down. The fear of the t.i.tan, and the memory of his awful laughter, lay on them like death.

They carried him back to the shelter of Torkul's barricade, his bearded lips still grinning at the sky where Ulra - his Erth -swam bright and clear among the cold, far stars. They watched beside him through the night, as was the old custom, while the greater moon of Mur rose out of the dying sky-glow and raced in silent fear across the wan river of the galaxy.

Above the black wall of the hills, a meteor burned and went out. Thorana snuggled close to Korul's side.

'That should have been he,' she murmured. 'Jim-Berk, go-ing home to the Erth he loved. We must have been monsters to him, Korul as he was to us. How did he see us - dwarfed, hairless, saucer-eyed, hideous things out of a fevered dream. But he, the Star-Beast whom we mocked and imprisoned and tormented for more than half his life, saw us and understood. He could have gone back, but he stayed to help us. We must be like that, Korul, when the new race grows strong. We must be ready when the t.i.tans come again in their stars.h.i.+ps.

'They may have forgotten you on Erth. Jim-Berk, as you said they would. But Mur remembers you, and the people-the one People - of Mur will build truth into your dream. If they do not come to us, then some day we will go to Erth.

'How did he say it, Korul? "Flocking down out of the skies to you - and you to us."

That is how it must be, for the t.i.tan's sake.'

Section 5

Becoming More Alien

A Universal Home Truth Four in one by Damon Knight The age of invention by Norman Spinrad The snowmen by Frederik Pohl Schwartz between the galaxies by Robert Silverberg There are times when you are at an impressionable age when science fiction can scare the living daylights out of you.

On the last occasion that that happened to me, I was reading The Possessors, by an author for whom I have considerable respect. John Christopher. The Possessors, in case you have not had the pleasure of reading it, is a grand working out of the theme of aliens who can take over or exactly simulate human beings for their own malign ends. It is one of the most com-pelling of all sf themes, with a high terror quota.

A Freudian interpretation of the theme, would be interest-ing; the idea implies, after all, a paranoid mistrust of one's fellow men. But such interpretation would be beside the point unless it was remembered that the height of the theme's popularity coincided with the depths of the Cold War - when, in fact, one half of mankind hated and sought to destroy the other half without actually resorting to outright war.

Many themes which find popular expression in sf share the same mixture of inwardness and outwardness; neither one is particularly effective without the other.

Sf writers and readers work on each other by stating and restating themes. There is now a clearer realization than ever before of man himself being no less strange than the guy on the next planet. The old Us and Them situation has softened into something much more ambivalent. It too has its rewards for a writer.

Hence the inclusion here of Bob Silverberg's most beautiful story, 'Schwartz Between the Galaxies'. A sort of dissolving has gone on. The modernity of the story holds great appeal for us now; I have no doubt that time will work its transformations on the story, as on 'Brightside Crossing', for example; so that in another ten years we shall see it from another perspective - and undoubtedly still find it good.

Schwartz - oh yes, Schwartz is cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan and alienated. The power of the story derives from Schwartz's feelings on the subject. I must apologize for the planet on which Frederik Pohl's cameo is set; I hope it is perilous enough to satisfy all tastes. Those dreadful people, Tandy and Howard are not at all cosmopolitan, not at all alienated. They un-complicatedly enjoy life. And that's what makes 'The Snow-men' a powerful story.

Some more awful people inhabit the narrow wastes of Spinrad's tale. You could claim that it takes place on Earth, and consequently should find no place here. But think, as you laugh, that there is something terribly universal about its home-truths.

Is that yet another definition of science fiction: a universal home truth? I leave the question with others, hastening to say of Damon Knight's 'Four in One' that it contains a planet where the wild life is odd indeed. Yet the wild life functions much like society on Earth; it can digest you, make you, break you, or ultimately excrete you. The message is much more fun when set in Knight's madly imaginative terms.

Home truths are often more amusing when not at home.

'Four in One' comes from the same epoch as Simak's 'Beachhead'. The situation is roughly the same. Simak's characters are dead ducks if they move outside the rugged military posture; Knight's, on the other hand, find salvation simple by moving out. Or falling out, one should say.

From this you may make your own deductions.

Just don't venture too far from the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p.

George realized he was lucky. He fell into something scientists dream of- he was able to become completely absorbed in his work!

FOUR IN ONE.

By Damon Knight I.

George Meister had once seen the nervous system of a man -a display specimen, achieved by coating the smaller fibers until they were coa.r.s.e enough to be seen, then dissolving all the un-wanted tissue and replacing it by clear plastic. A marvelous job; that fellow on Torkas III had done it. What was his name? ... At any rate, having seen the specimen, Meister knew what he himself must look like at the present moment.

Of course, there were distortions. For example, he was almost certain that the distance between his visual center and his eyes was now at least thirty centimeters.

Also, no doubt the system as a whole was curled up and spread out rather oddly, since the musculature it had originally controlled was gone; and he had noticed certain other changes which might or might not be reflected by gross structural differences. The fact remained that he - all that he could still call himself - was nothing more than a brain, a pair of eyes, a spinal cord, and a spray of neurons.

George closed his eyes for a second. It was a feat he had learned to do only recently and he was proud of it. That first long period, when he had had no control whatever, had been very bad. He had decided later that the paralysis had been due to the lingering effects of some anesthetic - the agent, whatever it was, that had kept him unconscious while his body was- Well.

Either that or the neuron branches had simply not yet knit-ted firmly in their new positions. Perhaps he could verify one or the other supposition at some future time.

But at first, when he had only been able to see and not to move, knowing nothing beyond the moment when he had fallen face-first into that mottled green and brown puddle of gelatin . . . that had been upsetting.

He wondered how the others were taking it. There were others, he knew, because occasionally he would feel a sudden acute pain down where his legs used to be, and at the same instant the motion of the landscape would stop with a jerk. That could only be some other brain, trapped like his, trying to move their common body in another direction.

Usually the pain stopped immediately, and George could go on sending messages down to the nerve-endings which had formerly belonged to his fingers and toes, and the gelatinous body would go on creeping slowly forward. When the pains continued, there was nothing to do but stop moving until the other brain quit - in which case George would feel like an un-willing pa.s.senger in a very slow vehicle - or try to alter his own movements to coincide, or at least produce a vector with the other brain's.

He wondered who else had fallen in. Vivian Bellis! Major Gumbs? Miss McCarty?

All three of them? There ought to be some way of finding out.

He tried looking down once more and was rewarded with a blurry view of a long, narrow strip of mottled green and brown, moving sluggishly along the dry stream bed they had been crossing for the last hour or more. Twigs and shreds of dry vegetable matter were stuck to the dusty, translucent surface.

He was improving; the last time, he had only been able to see the thinnest possible edge of his new body.

When he looked up again, the far side of the stream bed was perceptibly closer.

There was a cl.u.s.ter of stiff-looking, dark-brown vegetable shoots just beyond, on the rocky shoulder George was aiming slightly to the left of it. It had been a plant very much like that one that he'd been reaching for when he lost his balance and got himself into this situation.

He might as well have a good look at it, anyhow.

The plant would probably turn out to be of little interest. It would be out of all reason to expect every new life-form to be a startling novelty; and George Meister was convinced that he had already stumbled into the most interesting organism on this planet. Something-or-other meisterii, he thought, named after him, of course.

He had not settled on a generic term - he would have to learn more about it before he decided -but meisterii certainly. It was his discovery and n.o.body could take it away from him. Or, unhappily, him away from it. Ah, well!

It was a really lovely organism, though. Primitive - less struc-ture of its own than a jellyfish, and only on a planet with light surface gravity like this one could it ever have hauled itself up out of the sea. No brain, no nervous system at all, apparently.

But it had the perfect survival mechanism. It simply let its rivals develop highly organized nervous tissue, sat in one place (looking exactly like a deposit of leaves and other clutter) until one of them fell into it, and then took all the benefit.

It wasn't parasitism, either. It was a true symbiosis, on a higher level than any other planet, so far as George knew, had ever developed. The captive brain was nourished by the captor; wherefore it served the captive's interest to move the captor toward food and away from danger. You steer me, I feed you. It was fair.

They were close to the plant, almost touching it. George in-spected it. As he had thought, it was a common gra.s.s type.

Now his body was tilting itself up a ridge he knew to be low, although from his eye- level it looked tremendous. He climbed it laboriously and found himself looking down into still another gully. This could probably go on indefinitely. The question was - did he have any choice?

He looked at the shadows cast by the low-hanging sun. He was heading approximately northwest, directly away from the encampment. He was only a few hundred meters away; even at a crawl, he could make the distance easily enough ...

if he turned back, He felt uneasy at the thought and didn't know why. Then it struck him that his appearance was not obviously that of a human being in distress. The chances were that he looked like a monster which had eaten arid partially digested one or more people.