by Perry Rhodan
"Right, buddy! Now I think we're getting into the swing! You know, I feel so good that I could hug the whole world!"
Bell made a grand, inviting gesture with a sweep of his hand. "You just be my guest, baby! But I get dibs on some when you're through. Hey, did I ever tell you about my hobby, John? It's a real ball, you'll see when I—"
"Hello... Reggie," came a gentle whisper from the entrance to the Command Center. It was Thora, who winked warmly at Bell.
"Thora my angel! What can I do for you?" Bell called. He tucked Hannibal under an arm and got leisurely to his feet.
Thora beamed her sweetest smile at him. "I was thinking, Chubby dear... how about having a big shipboard party, with singing and dancing? Wouldn't you like that?"
Bell's Hannibal was now on his master's shoulder, from which vantage point he stuck his tongue out at Thora. Which seemed to be a signal for Marshall's pet to emerge from under the latter's coat and squeak like a parrot: "One, two and three, my dear... and who is going to bring the beer? One, two and three—"
Thora's little female bear sat on her shoulder and squeaked its enthusiasm, while tumbling her hair-do loose. Bell sauntered over to her, still laughing. "They make a lot of racket but who cares? We're all having fun! You know, that party idea is so great, Thora, I think you deserve a little kiss!"
This was a cue for her little bear, who parroted: "Little kiss! Little kiss!"
Thora gaily emitted a peal of laughter. "Haven't you heard who gets my little kisses? Only Ladolfina gets them! Isn't she adorable? But your little Hannibal is a pretty little boy. And what's your friend's name, John?"
"Tannhauser, Thora. Don't you think he has the Tannhauser look?"
"I'm sorry!" objected Bell with mock severity. "But he doesn't look like a car. Wasn't Tannhauser a Ford make or was it Dusenberg?" Seeing that this gag lost a bit of momentum in the rising mood of gaiety, he decided to improve the general morale and shouted: "Kids, I tell you what! Lees all take a vote over the ship's P.A.—to everybody! Let's see who's in favor of a real bash of a party on board, okay? Hold on... stand by now...!" He contacted the Com Central and laughed into the mike as he made his proposition. "Hey, fellas!" he called in English. "Make a general announcement that we want to know who all is for a real super party on board. Patch it to the outside speakers, too. Inform the rest of the boys out there!"
The Com crew response was immediate. "A party, Fats? Hey, that's great! We'll round 'em all up in a minute—or can you wait that long?"
"You better believe it!" laughed Bell and scratched Hannibal happily. "But hurry it up, boys! We want this fiesta in full swing when Perry walks in. Man! Is he ever in for a surprise...!"
• • •
"A what, sir?" said Julian Tifflor in confusion. He widened his eyes incredulously when he realized that this was actually Reginald Bell who had just invited him over the radio to a dance festival on board the Titan.
"Chief!" begged Pucky, tugging at Rhodan's arm. "Can't I take a fast jump over there?"
Rhodan stabbed at him in his mind with an emphatic no!
Pucky, slightly embarrassed, let go of Rhodan's sleeve and waddled into a comer. The Gazelle still needed half an hour to get to the Titan and dock in hangar 7.
Rhodan handed the controls over to Tifflor. "Take it, Tiff!"
Without a word, Tifflor moved into the pilot's seat and, without a word, Khrest and Rhodan exited from the control room. The sliding hatch slid into place in the bulkhead behind them. This type of ship was built for one purpose only: utility. There was no cozy wardroom or lounging comer. Perry and Khrest seated themselves in a couple of gun-crew cradles.
"Why don't you want to send Pucky into the Titan?" asked Khrest, discouraged.
"So that he can get infected, too? Shall I lose him along with all the rest?" Perry's retort was unusually fraught with emotion.
"You relate the euphoric conditions in the Titan to an infection?"
"You call it euphoria, Khrest—it's acting like a disease! We don't know which analysis is correct but one thing is sue: Bell has lost all rational awareness of his condition and is now blindly reveling in some sort of induced rapture."
"You're still pretty close to a medical definition of euphoria," said Khrest. "Perry, may I add something to that?"
"Khrest, what else is there to add—if you consider the skeletons in those spaceships?"
Perry Rhodan saw himself in the place of the famous king of Troy, who fell victim to the noble 'gift' of the Greeks—a large wooden horse. When the horse was opened, out poured the conquering Greeks. The planet of Honur had presented him with a lethal gift and thus defeated him. The cemetery of spaceships at the southern pole had shown him the destiny of his crew. Soon the Titan would be one of those wrecks and in the Titan would he 700 skeletons!
While at this very moment the doomed Titan rang with the sounds of merriment and celebration...
"The Dance of Death!" muttered Rhodan. "And Bell named his grave the Valley of Death. This is it!" His words contained the whole story, this he knew full well. He stood on the ruins of his own Troy. A dream of universal conquest was lost.
He had lost the Titan.
Khrest echoed his words, "Dance of Death..." His eyes were moist.
"Perry, I beg you to let me jump!" pleaded Pucky again. "It's much too dangerous for you to go there!"
Perry had Tifflor land the Gazelle within about 900 feet of the Titan. Radio ship's intercom brought no answer from the larger ship's Com Central. After the general invitation to the party, the Titan's communications and P.A. went dead. Perry finally stood on the shore of the lake, looking up at the giant sphere. Up there behind the impervious skin of Arkon steel was his Command Center. He felt impotent, helpless, deprived of all power. It was out of reach... too far... too high...
"Dance of Death!" There was a tremor in his voice as he repeated the phrase.
Pucky, the little mouse-beaver, sat forlornly beside him. Pucky, the telepathic, telekinetic teleporter. Heaven knew what other abilities might lie undeveloped within him! Pucky had never ceased imploring Rhodan to let him teleport into the Titan.
Again and again he was refused.
Again and again he begged.
"No! No! A hundred times no, Pucky! What do you want in the ship? Do you want to get infected too? I have to go myself! I have to find out what made them sick. Otherwise we will only find them as skeletons. Do you want to see them all dead?"
"Does old Fatso have to die, too?" the mouse-beaver asked. He sounded like a frightened child, openly betraying his strong fraternal feelings for Reginald Bell.
"Yes—Reggie, too." Perry stroked Pucky's head, looked down into his honest, intelligent mouse eyes and said, "You stay here. Keep locked in on my thought-train. Do the right thing, Pucky—whatever it is—do it fast and well. If you let me down today, our last hope is buried."
In all these years Pucky had never been spoken to before by Perry in quite this tone. He penetrated Rhodan's inner thoughts and found only despair. "Is it really as bad as that?" he asked but received no reply.
A little mouse-beaver in a suit of fur. Pucky, born on a planet called Vagabond, was a miracle among the stars. He might call himself an animal but he was really a class unto himself. His character was one step beyond that of humans. Pucky was good by nature, while humans must wage continuous battle against themselves.
"On your toes, Pucky!" With these words, Perry departed in the direction of the Titan.
"Sure thing, Perry!" the mouse-beaver called after him and sat in tense concentration.
When still at a distance, Perry could hear the laughter and howling of his crew. In these tragic sounds a sane man could detect the unmistakable artificiality of the ecstatic merrymaking. In a sharp contrast to this, the 'Approved' people squatted motionlessly among the landing struts of the mighty spherical spacer and ignored the joyous abandon of the crew. They stared with absolute lethargy into the sand. Some of them gently pressed the comical little bears
against their chests, utterly lost to the world.
Perry had taken note of the presence of the Honos while the Gazelle was landing. They had filled him with resentful suspicion, as they had Khrest. Both men in their own minds had independently come to a conclusion that these 'Approved Ones' were the cause of the epidemic that now gripped the Titan's crew.
Rhodan slowly approached the nearest one, while the awful, macabre laughter kept on roaring through the one ramp-gate that still remained lower.
The Hono was holding onto his little bear. He seemed to be asleep but when Perry came to a stop in front of him he lifted his head, then held out the bear to him and said in his broken Arkonide, "Take my small gift, Your Excellency! Bless me by accepting my offer!"
In spite of his grim preoccupation, Perry suddenly recalled the sneering statement that Pucky had made concerning these bears: that to his supersensitive snout they stank! Perry stepped back involuntarily, surprised at his own reaction. Thus rebuked, the Hono retracted his little beast and stared at the distant horizon. His thin lips seemed to be mumbling prayers. The deep-set eyes of the 'Approved One' overflowed softly in sorrow. Indistinctly Perry thought he caught a murmur of something pertaining to 'gods'.
Rhodan flinched at the new burst of howling and wild shouts of exultation from his men inside the ship. He turned toward the ramp, still evading the Hono. But a new thought was emerging: he and Khrest had been in contact with the Honos and had even received flowers from the first delegation. But neither of them had been affected by the disease. Nor had any of the men in the Gazelle become sick.
He suddenly shouted it. "The BEARS —!"
He didn't realize that he stood between two of the 'Approved' and the Titan with his mouth wide open and shouting. The Titan appeared to spin around before him... faster and faster...
There was a buzzing in his ears.
He, Perry Rhodan, who had dreamed the dream of conquering the Universe, the man with the incredibly quick reactions, he who had welded the Earth into a single state without using brute force—here he almost broke down at the terrible realization of what he had let slip by him—when he finally recognized what had carried the plague aboard the Titan!
"Your Worthiness... bless me by accepting my offering!" A very young, almost pretty Approved girl stood before him imploringly. She had eyes only for Rhodan as she held up the small bear in trembling expectation.
Rhodan was just emerging from the most terrible shock of his life. He gripped his hypno-raygun. "Get back!" He brushed the girl aside, ignoring her desperate eyes.
The little bears, that was it! He kept repeating this to himself as he hurried toward the ramp. The animals had been the carriers of the disease and had brought it with them on board! Through those little creatures, all those spacers at the cemetery had been burned out from within. But then what? Who had flown all these ships to the pole? Who had cannibalized them? Who! These stupid, emaciated figures? These dull-witted, degenerate Arkonides?
Suddenly the scales fell from his eyes.
They called themselves the 'Approved'. The import of it struck him. The Approved Ones were immune to the plague carried by the harmless-appearing little animals! They were the descendants of those original settlers who had lived through this deadly rapturous disease. To what avail those Arkonides had outlived the sickness 14,000 years ago was sadly obvious now in these poor, decrepit, dim-witted descendants.
At the ramp he raised the hypno-gun high. "Stand back!" he ordered and aimed the gun at his men.
At the vanguard of these men was Kitai Ishibashi his best hypno. He shouted frantically as he ran to meet Perry. His little pet sat on his shoulder. On his face was a distorted grin as his slanted eyes sparkled. "Perry, what can I do for you? You can have everything except my little Shiguti. But where's your pet, old boy? Wait now and I'll just get you one! Perry, wait! Why do you run away? Come back!"
Perry had made a fast retreat, leaping from the ramp. He passed the pillars of the landing struts, evading the clustered groups of the Approved and ran back to Pucky. Only in his vicinity did he slow his pace, the hypno-gun still in his hand. Pucky gave him a hopelessly demoralized look.
• • •
They had tried once more, all three together, to enter the Titan. Again they had been received by the celebrating and dancing men. All were holding out their little deadly bears to them for petting. And once more the hypno-rayguns were of no avail.
"Fire!" Perry had shouted to Khrest and Tifflor. He had drawn his own gun and started to beam the hypno-rays against Ras Tschubai.
The big black teleporter registered no reaction from it. Khrest's and Tiffs rayguns did not show any effect, either. At the last moment, Rhodan ordered a retreat, just in time to escape the wild, howling mob and their animals.
Now they were gathered in a depressed huddle in the scoutship's control room. They sat together, brooding in silence. Wuriu Sengu hung his head, afraid to look up, because Perry had squelched him with icy tones and told him to shut up when he suggested making a third try using shock weapons.
"I cannot shoot at my men and I will not shoot at them as long as there is a spark of hope for another solution!"
Khrest was completely enmeshed in a web of despair. Perry felt it and it added to his own hopelessness. The Wooden Horse that had destroyed his Troy was comical teddy beard
He struggled to collect himself.
He thought of the Mooffs, the methane-breathing creatures who had been used by the Unknowns in an attempt to topple the Arkonide Empire. He had discovered them on Zalit and he and his men had destroyed them in fierce fighting. Could it be that these Unknowns who had imported the Mooffs were the same unknown pirates of the spaceships down there at the southern pole of the planet?
He turned to the Arkonide. "Khrest, when will they come?"
The Arkonide was aroused from his brooding. "Who? You mean help from Arkon?"
"Help from Arkon!" echoed Rhodan surprised. "Khrest, have you forgotten the Arkonide law that prohibits any help to a spacer that lands on a forbidden planet and runs into trouble, under pain of death and the rescuing ship's destruction in outer space? Have you really forgotten that law, Khrest?"
The great scientist asked with a halting voice, "Terry, does it really pay to remember anything, instead of forgetting everything?"
I think, perhaps, this time you are right, Khrest!"
Perry's fit of dejection seemed to be the final downfall.
But it served to stir the Arkonide to a resuscitation of his stubbornness—he whose kin had fallen prey to decadence, who could no longer compete with the will and energy of the human race.
"Perry, have you forgotten the Ganymede ? And there is still the Stardust II, the interceptors, the Terra, the Solar System and the Centurion!"
Here, certainly, was the brave music of distant drums but it found no echo...
"There is only one other model of the Titan class, Khrest, and that stands on Arkon. There it will remain to eternity, because your Empire cannot produce men capable of manning and operating such a spherical spacer. And I?—I will be condemned and prosecuted by the Empire. These Unknowns will of course see to it that Arkon will be informed of my disaster on Honur. And then, Khrest—what...!?"
"Rhodan, you torture yourself!" retorted the Arkonide. "Until today you have always found a solution in every desperate situation. Why should there be none in our present dilemma?"
"Have I ever lost the most faithful of all dedicated men, Khrest? What is the loss of the Titan? Nothing! I can be completely indifferent to that. But can you realize what it means to lose Reginald Bell, to know that in a few days, maybe hours, my friend will be dead? And with Reggie go 700 others! Each one of them a thousand times more precious than the entire Titan. Life can't be replaced and I have the death of 700 men on my conscience—not to mention Thora! All this drives me out of my mind! Khrest, I've simply had it!"
"Perry, my friend, what you're saying can't be true!" the Arkonide protested bitterly,
in his face an expression of pleading desperation.
"They'll all die, Khrest. Don't forget the skeletons in those rotted spacers we saw—in that graveyard of the damned!"
Khrest struggled desperately in his mind against this logic. He sought to change the subject. "Perry, you started to ask a question. Who is supposed to arrive? What do you mean?"
"The vultures, Khrest! The scavengers who will penetrate the Titan after all life is extinguished. The bandits who will fly the Titan to that Death Valley of a cemetery and take out her entrails! They are the ones I am waiting for—only for them alone!"
"And then what?"
"Do I have to answer that, Khrest? Don't you know me better? I'll be thinking of Bell and Thora and all the others. I will make a clean sweep of the vultures and enjoy it until I am snuffed out and atomized!"
"I will be at your side," said Khrest, solemnly. "You can count on that..."
• • •
Night fell over Honur. The temperature dropped but not indefinitely. The Approved Ones continued to squat lethargically between the giant landing struts of the Titan. Occasionally the night breeze would carry the sound of laughter and singing from the senselessly enraptured crew.
The Gazelle was immersed in total silence. The night hours crept by. Finally dawn broke as the sun Thatrel appeared on the horizon and began to raise the temperature again. Between the struts sat the Honos. The euphorically maddened drunks of the Titan danced on, affectionately clutching death to their bosoms, oblivious to the fact they were about to die.
700 people, overtaken by an incredible delirium of joyfulness, danced and sang, forgot eating and drinking, didn't feel hunger or thirst... were compelled to give away the best that they owned, to cater to the other fellow's whims, to make everyone's life a bed of roses—this urge became overwhelming, lunatic—lethal!
By now many of them were stumbling in exhaustion from deck to deck or riding aimlessly up and down in the grav-lifts, unable to croak a single sound because of over-strained vocal chords—which they didn't even notice. The world was too chromatic and gorgeous, too psychedelically wonderful. The rapture streamed and pulsated continuously in their veins. Everyone had 700 friends and the desire to make 700 friends ecstatically happy.