by Jerry
The subthird suddenly swore, like a man tormented beyond endurance.
“What in the name of seventeen blasted space devils did he do?” he roared.
Ames took a deep draw, enjoying the moment. “He wasn’t yellow, lying off Rhea like that. Just smart. He cleaned all the tubes so he’d be able to take-off without any risk. Then he landed on Rhea—exactly two hundred thirty hours after I had.”
“I was still five hours out from Rhea on my second trip then, never dreaming what he was up to. He landed nice as you please, swapped his cargo for all the bismullah the Rheans had worked up since I’d been there, and took off. Wasn’t a scrap of bismullah for me when I landed a couple of hours later. The Rheans just looked kind of funny at us and crawled off. All we could do was service the beacon. Then we couldn’t ground on Rhea again for two hundred thirty hours, and anyway the contract called for us to come two hundred forty hours later. Rodgers made his second landing two hundred thirty hours later and loaded bismullah again. We came—and serviced the beacon.”
“Mean to say you never got cargo after that?” asked the subthird.
“Not once. That was the story from then on. I serviced the beacon, lost twenty percent of my expenses each trip, and Rodgers got the bismullah. The government wouldn’t touch him—said the bismullah was none of their business and they couldn’t interfere with free trade. But they wouldn’t let me change schedule. Told me to work it out with Rodgers. Finally I went and offered him the contract for free. He wouldn’t take it without my Comet “
Ames frowned at his pipe. “It still burns me up. He gave me a fair price, and I might still have a small ship if I hadn’t run into bad luck in a hot spot on Luna. All’s fair, as I’ll admit, and I’d have done just what he did.
“But it burns me up all the same. Because why, of all the jobs he could have found for her, did he have to put my Comet on the Japetus run—hauling fertilizer?”
THE END.
FATAL THOUGHTS
Leslie Northern
James Warder uses a new and terrible weapon on Rigel’s distant planet when a stubborn beast proves menacing!
THE enormous black beast sat at the mouth of its burrow watching James Warder draw near. It sat with nine yards of cubic rock and tumbled red sand between its segmented legs and the reeling Earthman, its long tapering snout buried in the loose folds of its body pouch.
The heat was intolerable and it beat down upon Warder in orange-colored waves, blistering his flesh beneath his skin-tight oversuit, almost making his eyeballs crawl.
Warder didn’t know what the monstrous creature was thinking. He only knew that it feared and mistrusted him, and that he’d have to overcome that mistrust if he wanted to stay alive.
Hunger he could have endured, for his meager supply of concentrates was sufficiently rich in the essential vitamins to keep the flame of life burning at a just-above-deficiency level. He’d lost weight, he was gaunt and emaciated, but since he prided himself on being something of a stoic there was no reason why he could not have endured the pangs of hunger till the stars fell out of the sky.
Thirst was another matter.
On Earth there was tormenting mirages to add to the sufferings of thirsty men marooned in a wilderness of sand. On the Rigel sun planets there were no mirages and yet—the torment seemed a thousand times worse because of that very fact.
A shining lake in the sky could cause torment, yes. But it could also stir hopes and evoke memories. But water deep underground, water never emerging anywhere on the planet, never bursting forth in a shining torrent and striking down to the sea between high, white cliffs gleaming in the sunlight—that idea was ghastly!
It seemed to Warder that his jumping nerves were imposing a heavier penalty than he could bear. He was almost sure that the strange beast was wondering whether the impulse which had brought him from the shelter of the wreck into the open desert would carry him within reach of its claws.
The fact that it could read his thoughts did not mean, of course, that it could gage the strength of his impulses, or anticipate his every act. But unfortunately during the first day and night, when he’d yielded up his thoughts in delirious babblings, the monstrous creature had discovered just how desperate his plight was.
It knew that he had come to the planet on an exploring mission in a chartered roto-cruiser which was resting now on a sloping bank of red sand about three miles from its burrow.
It knew that the ship was a charred and twisted mass of wreckage and that only a single small compartment—the airlock chamber—had survived the crash and was capable of sheltering Warder from the blinding glare of the sun.
WARDER’S lips twisted in a savage grimace. That much the beast certainly knew. It had never been inside the ship, however, or explored the half-telescoped corridors. Did it know that a little sickbay had also survived, dismal with spilled antiseptics and blood-caked bandages?
Well, it knew enough—it knew more than it had any right to know. It knew that, sitting in the airlock chamber with her head cradled in her arms, a torturing dryness in her throat, was a girl, Warder’s “mate.”
There were times when the creature’s thoughts impinged so strongly that the Earthman seemed to be regarding himself through the eyes of the creature. But now there was a barrier, for the great beast was warning him not to come any closer without revealing his thoughts.
For a moment Warder was tempted to heed the warning. Fortunately there had been episodes in his experience which had taught him not to under-estimate the deadliness of mental weapons. Before interstellar flight had brought humanity into close and dangerous contact with alien races, few men had realized that telepathy could be as deadly as massive doses of cobra venom instilled into a vein.
Failure to realize this had been a strange blindness, an incredible blindness, for it should have been obvious to a child that thoughts could not be projected into the mind without influencing the mind, and that a mind which could be influenced could be—controlled.
The strange beast here was hideously different from all the life forms with which Warder was familiar. Superficially it bore a certain resemblance to a terrestrial mammal of the tapir family, but there was nothing on Earth or any of the solar planets which could rear itself to such a height, or move with such a bending, twisting, crinkling of its entire bulk.
There was something about the creature that tore at the foundations of Warder’s sanity, and affected his senses like a drug. Upon a body so immense as to seem almost columnar was set a head that was all bulging cranium and tapering snout. The snout was thirty feet in length, and when the great beast was in motion the snout went questing.
It slithered down into the soil ahead of the gigantic body, and tossed loose dirt to right and left. Or writhing up into the air, moved erratically about. The snout was in constant motion, for the Rigel beast absorbed nourishment continuously from soil and air by sucking in small microscopic particles with its every breath.
The action was instinctive, and it did not interfere with the strange creature’s mental processes or its ability to concentrate. It did not interfere, and it could not be stopped. Even when the beast buried its snout in the loose folds of its stomach pouch, the incredible organ remained an extensible dry vacuum into which mineral salts and organic matter could be drawn at any angle from mediums light or dense.
Now as it watched the man’s angular shadow lengthen over the reddish soil at the mouth of its burrow, it fastened its eyes on a point just a little ahead of the shadow, and moved slowly backward, its snout in furious motion.
It was directly over the burrow when Warder spoke to it for the first time.
“You have warned me not to come any closer!” he called out, “But I am coming closer! I must!”
Warder halted as he spoke, knowing that the beast would reply if he did not accompany the words with a hostile gesture. Now he stood very still waiting for a message to reach him.
“I do not want to hurt you,” he added, almost pl
eadingly. “But I must have water!”
The strange creature raised its eyes and looked directly at him.
Its reply was implacable.
“Without water you will die. You must die.”
Warder moistened his dry lips. “Why do you hate me?” he asked hoarsely.
“I do not hate you,” the beast telepathized. “But there is nothing but hate in your mind. If you could you would kill me.”
The creature paused, as though to give emphasis to its thoughts. “You would if you could. But you can’t.”
Suddenly the beast’s twelve segmented legs were no longer straddling the burrow.
Warder did not see it vanish. He only knew that it had vanished—so swiftly that the mouth of the burrow seemed still to be filled with a faint, luminous swirling, as though the strange creature had plunged from view with twice the rapidity of light.
In sick despair Warder stumbled forward, and fell to his knees on the edge of a yawning blackness. It might have been better if he hadn’t, for the instant he stared down a whiff of something came out that drove him backwards with his hands pressed to his face.
CROUCHING in darkness fifty feet underground the beast relaxed its will, lowered it snout and resumed its feasting. In the sixtieth cycle of its youngness it had discovered that even instinctive movements could be controled, the suction within a vacuum reversed.
The dread loathsomeness of the something in the man’s mind which it could hardly endure was impinging even more virulently now. There was a red, killing rage in the man’s mind, and the great creature shivered, and retreated still further into the darkness.
When Warder dragged himself back to the burrow his lips were twitching, and his thirst was such that the tortures of the rack would have seemed trivial to him, and to relieve his thirst he would have quite willingly stretched himself on a bed of coals.
He lowered one foot into the burrow, pulled his hand-blaster from his belt.
“There is water down there!” he said loudly in a voice he hardly recognized as his own.
“Yes, there is water,” the beast telepathized.
“I will climb down and drink then. The burrow is wide enough.”
“My home is too narrow for such a guest as you,” came back. “There is nothing but hate in your mind.”
Warder’s lips opened, but no sound came out. He swallowed and had another try.
“No, it is not really hate. You infuriate me, but I do not hate you.”
“You have no love for me!” came instantly.
“You could hardly expect me to love you.” Warder’s voice cracked despite his effort to control it. “You are barring my way. For no reason at all you are barring my way, and there are some things a man cannot endure. You cannot build a trap for a man. You cannot bar the way either, which is the same as building a trap. I warn you I will kill you if you do not move aside.”
Almost it seemed as though the strange beast pounced on the threat, so quickly did it reply.
“If you come into my home and use that weapon in my home you will set a trap for yourself. A trap can kill, can’t it? A trap can sever a limb, draw—blood? I would not need to build a trap or set a trap. My home is so narrow I could make a wave in your brain which would kill you. Would not that be a trap? An animal trap—rat trap? Would you not catch yourself instead of the rat?”
It was hideously like a nightmare and yet Warder knew he was staring down into the blackness with his eyes wide open, and a flood of brightness in front of his pupils and behind them, as though a thousand candle power light had come into being in the depths of his mind.
“I am coming down!” he called out.
Almost at once there was a barrier of some sort that hadn’t been there an instant before. It grew stronger the instant he lowered himself into the burrow and started downward.
He was twenty feet below the mouth of the burrow when the beast struck at him with its mind.
For an instant he felt—nothing at all.
Then he began to feel it. It was like a something tipped by a long thin nail or claw moving around deep inside his head, and stopping at ten second intervals like the hands of a clock.
When the claw stopped, there was pain. It wasn’t a sharp pain, not a stabbing pain such as a claw would make if there had been anything physical inside his head. But the claw feeling was there. It was peculiarly horrible because the feeling was of a great delicacy of structure threatened by something that could tear.
It was as though every time the something stopped the claw began dissecting out a moist, quivering filament from the most sensitive part of Warder’s brain.
When he felt he could endure it no longer he turned about, and crawled back up the sloping floor of the burrow on his hands and knees, his breath coming in choking gasps.
A half hour later Warder was lying stretched out on the sand, his hands cupped around a pair of penetrative-ray binoculars. The binoculars were half-buried in the sand, and he was staring down through them with the tormented absorption. He was suffering as if someone were applying a lighted torch to his toes.
It wasn’t the first time Warder had tortured himself in a vain, half-insane attempt to draw a little solace from an instrument of science that could dissolve a visual barrier forty feet thick. Beneath the thin subsoil there stretched a barrier of solid rock, but so intense were the cathodic radiations excited by the compact little instrument in Warder’s clasp that even substances opaque to ordinary Rontgen rays could be pierced by the X-ray action of its powerful focusing tubes.
The rays passed completely through the rock strata beneath the sand, so that Warder could see straight down into the cavernous world beneath.
EVERY pebble on the sloping bank of the stream stood out with a startling clarity. But though the very shadows on the water seemed to be beckoning to Warder and inviting him to drink just staring down increased his despair a thousandfold.
The stream was not a mirage, but a limpid, smooth-flowing ribbon of water meadering in and out between towering fungus growths a hundred feet beneath his tortured gaze. It was not a mirage, but how could there be any solace in staring when the rock-piercing rays which poured from the binoculars could not bring a single drop of that water an inch nearer to his lips?
There was nothing in Warder’s experience which could have inured his mind to the emotional impact of a subterranean world of lush vegetation and crystal clear streams beneath a hot blistering wilderness of sand where just one monstrous creature held sway.
There was only one creature, and one burrow leading down to water cool and bubbling, and suddenly as Warder lay groaning he saw his enemy plain again. The gigantic beast was advancing between the focus growths directly beneath him, was moving on its twelve segmented legs directely toward the stream.
With an inward shrieking he watched it, knowing that in a moment its long tapering snout would descend to the ground and go slithering down into the water.
Oh, he was torturing himself needlessly!
Even if the beast drank noisly, greedily, even if bubbles collected in a sparkling circle about its snout, no sound could arise to torment him. He couldn’t hear it drinking. He couldn’t hear it, and a beast slacking its thirst was not as tormenting a sight as a man plunging his whole head into the water, sobbing as the dryness left his throat!
Warder was suddenly aware that the monstrous creature had halted, and was staring up at him through the murk, as though resenting the fact that he was staring down at it through a barrier it was powerless to pierce.
“When I find a spoiled fruit in my burrow I bury it,” the beast telepathized. “When you die I shall bury you. Burial customs. You bury your dead, don’t you?”
“Curse you!” Warder groaned.
“There is a wrongness about you,” the creature telepathized. “Your lives are too brief and you have too many younglings. We mate but once and live until we are ripe with wisdom, thousands of years as you measure time.”
The creature p
aused, as though aware that it had the power to crush Warder mentally as well as physically.
“We do not live in colonies as you do, but ripen slowly in solitude. A hundred miles, as you measure distance, separates my home from the home of my mate. Beyond the red distances there are other homes, but they would be too narrow for such a guest as you. There is nothing but hate in your mind.”
Up to that instant Warder had felt like a man holding a stop watch, and timing his chances for survival, hoping against hope despite his torment. But now, suddenly, there was nothing left for him to hope for. He could not have dragged himself across ten miles of desert, let alone a hundred. He could not drag himself to another burrow leading downward because the red distances were choked with swirling dust, and a hundred miles of emptiness and glare would have taxed the endurance of a giant in seven league boots.
In the vicinity of the ship there were no fissures in the rock strata, no openings into the subterranean world except the tunnel that was ocupied by the beast. Even had he possessed the strength, the tools, the engineering skill to hew another tunnel through sand and rock the beast would have stopped him with its mind. Before he could have raised a magneto-drill to his shoulders, before he could have cleared away the sand, he would be stopped.
Perhaps desperation gave him the courage to act on a sudden impulse that was charged with danger for himself as well as for the beast. Or it may not have been a deliberately-willed act at all, since he hardly thought about it, or dared to think about it.
The beast could read his thoughts, but it could not prevent a sudden, almost instinctive contraction of his fingers on the binoculars in his clasp. Neither could it leap back in time to avoid the searing, blinding burst of flame which erupted in its path.
For one awful instant the great creature clawed at its face and its enormous body took on the appearance of a blazing comet. Then the light dimmed, and Warder was clasping a burnt-out instrument of science that could not have pierced the skin of a gnat.