by Jerry
“They claim that our coming here upsets things enough so the whole system could collapse—so they want to get rid of us, by foul means if not fair.” He added wryly, “And they have the gall to hint they’d like to know our secrets of interstellar flight!” Kirlatsu, his radio voice crackly even with the new long-distance equipment, asked, “How about the folks back home? Did the Tsulan take the plague there?”
Ngasik shut his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure how easy or hard that would be. But the tsapeli have hinted that they wouldn’t mind exterminating the Reska altogether—to be very sure we give them no more trouble.”
Kirlatsu said nothing, but Ngasik heard his slow, heavy breathing and knew nothing more to say to him. He broke contact.
As he tried to get back to sleep, an idea began to form in his mind—and then a decision.
Thirteen of the original hundred Reska were still alive in the sirla camp when the warp ship landed. Kirlatsu looked at it, puzzled, as it settled down, nearly filling the clearing, and became silent. He had figured the Tsulan might return eventually—though by the time it could get back there might be nobody alive to meet it—but certainly not this soon. And a warp ship was a surprise in any case.
He watched to see who would come out of it. In a few minutes Dzukarl emerged and walked slowly toward the camp, carrying a key to let him inside the dome. As he came close, Kirlatsu saw with a sinking sensation that he was thin and covered with the white spots that came in a late stage of the plague.
Dzukarl stopped near Kirlatsu and said, “I want to talk to Tsardong-li.” His voice was weak, but had the old air of authority.
Kirlatsu said, “Tsardong-li is dead.”
“I’m sorry.” Brief pause. “I bring orders to remove Sirla Tsardong from Slepo IV. If possible, I am to attempt also to rescue the man who was taken prisoner. We are prepared to fight the tsapeli—”
“Don’t you know when you’re licked?” Kirlatsu interrupted bitterly. “Oh, we’ll be glad to go back with you. All thirteen—” Then he was interrupted by the longdistance radio.
“What’s going on?” Ngasik demanded anxiously. His voice was distorted by the noise filters, but Kirlatsu had little trouble understanding it. “I thought I heard a ship going over a little while ago. Is somebody—”
“This is Dzukarl,” the Arbiter broke in. “I came back with a warp ship to take you all off the planet. Can you tell me where to bring a rescue party?”
“No,” Ngasik answered promptly. “And you can’t afford to try to find me. You went back to Reslaka. Did the plague—”
“Yes.” Dzukarl nodded glumly. “It’s spreading wildly over Reslaka—and the colonies, carried by ships which left port before we knew the Tsulan was contagious. I would never have believed a disease could spread so fast—and work so fast. I’m half afraid it could wipe us out before we find a cure.”
“It could,” Ngasik said bluntly. “That’s what it’s supposed to do.”
Kirlatsu saw Dzukarl turn pale. The Arbiter said weakly, “What?”
“The tsapeli developed the plague to exterminate the Reska. Naturally they would want to make it fast-working. Otherwise we might be able to discover a cure before it had finished its job.”
Dzukarl said fiercely, “O.K., they may wipe us out, but at least we can take them with us! I brought along weapons and troops. A lot of them are sick, but not too sick to go down fighting!”
“Where’s the point in that?” Ngasik asked very quietly. It suddenly seemed to Kirlatsu, somehow, that the quiet in his friend’s voice now was more suggestive of new-found strength than of defeat. “Suppose you bomb the whole planet—which you probably aren’t equipped to do anyway. You destroy all the tsapeli. But that doesn’t save the Reska—because only the tsapeli know how to cure the plague!
“Face it, Dzukarl—the chance of our medics finding a cure in time to stop something that works that fast is infinitesimal. If you exterminate the tsapeli, you may soothe your sense of honor—but you practically guarantee our extinction.”
“Does it really matter?” Dzukarl asked. “Aren’t we doomed either way?”
“No!” Ngasik practically shouted. “I’ve been living among the tsapeli, starting to learn about them. I know what their reason for doing this is. All they really want is to keep Reska off this planet—for reasons which make sense to them. Their purpose will be served if the Reska just leave and never come back. It doesn’t really matter if you go away cured, just so you go away. If you come back, you can be hit with a fresh plague.”
“You mean,” Dzukarl asked, confused, “they’re willing to just give us the cure?”
“Of course not. We’ve made them angry and distrustful. But there is something we have and they want. They want it badly enough to risk giving you the cure in return for it. I’ve made a deal with them.”
“You’ve what?”
“They want to know how to build starships—and they claim they can work one alien into their ecology, under close supervision. I’ve agreed to stay and teach them.” There was a numb silence at Kirlatsu’s end of the line. Ngasik added, “I warned them there’s a lot to learn, and it will take a long time. After all, they’re starting from nothing.”
“But,” Dzukarl spluttered, “but . . . but, that’s treason!”
“No!” Kirlatsu shouted, suddenly understanding. “No, it isn’t, really. And under the circumstances, I can’t see that we have any choice—except nonsurvival.”
“Neither can I,” Ngasik said. “The cure will work much as the disease. Your camp and ships will be ‘infected,’ and the effects should start showing up very shortly. Then you leave, fast, to show good faith. When you go home, the cure will spread just as the disease did. If they don’t keep their word—if any trickery shows up—I’ve made it clear to the tsapeli that you can get word to me without even entering the atmosphere here. In which case I’ve promised to kill myself, which they emphatically don’t want. Otherwise, surviving Reska can be cured and stay far away fromSlepo.” Kirlatsu was full of an odd mixture of hope, relief, and gratitude—and concern. “But, Ngasik,” he said, “have you thought of what you’re letting yourself in for? The danger, the loneliness—”
“I’ll manage,” Ngasik assured him, sounding almost cheerful. “I’ll keep alive; I may even find small pleasures in learning what makes these characters tick. In any case, if I can save a few billion lives it’s worth it. Good-bye, Kirlatsu.”
“Good-bye, Ngasik.” Kirlatsu broke contact and went straight to his hut. Dzukarl was still confused, but he could wait a while for an explanation. Right now Kirlatsu wanted to start remembering what it felt like to have a future.
“They kept their part of the bargain,” Kirlatsu finished, “and we checked the plague before it wiped us out—but not before it killed forty-one percent of the race. With damage so great and widespread, the Overgovernment of Reslaka decided—virtually without opposition—that extreme precautions were necessary in the future.”
“To prevent more trouble with the plague?” Carla asked. “Or the tsapeli?” She shuddered, remembering some of the gorier details of Kirlatsu’s story.
Kirlatsu shook his head. “No. That was the least of our worries. Slepo IV was put strictly off limits, of course. The radical precautions were just those laws you were wondering about—to guard against trouble with races not yet imagined. You see, the really deadly thing about the tsapeli wasn’t that they could start plagues.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No. If we’d known they had a highly technical culture, we wouldn’t have tangled with them. If we had, Dzukarl could have forced us off even under the puny laws we had then. What we learned from the tsapeli—and it came as a terrible shock to all of us—was that a highly developed and dangerous culture might be very far from obvious . . . until it’s too late. We were most anxious to see that we never fell into that trap again.”
Carla suddenly seemed to understand. She murmured an apology to Kirlat
su for what she had said earlier. And I thought of something Kirlatsu had not cleared up.
“But were you really out of this trap?” I asked. “Weren’t you—aren’t you—afraid of what the tsapeli will do when Ngasik teaches them, and they come into space after you?”
Kirlatsu smiled slyly. “Not terribly,” he said. “You see, Ngasik was just a cook—with a gift of gab.”
MINOS
Maurice Whitta
The men on board the spaceship ‘Lancelot’ were hardy pioneers, prepared to do battle with whatever perils the world of Amor VII had to offer. But the colonists faced a totally unexpected enemy, which was altogether more than they’d bargained for!
‘All the women are dead!’
Screeching, Perry began to tremble, and Bors Wendl was glad to steady the man’s shoulder with a grip that held down his own terror too. Desperately calm, he turned his blue eyes to Needle Champin. ‘Go on, Needle.’
‘There are no women, Captain,’ Needle repeated. ‘The crash killed a hundred women and forty-one men. We’ve fifty-nine survivors out of two hundred: fifty-nine men.’ He moved his feet to brace himself on the Lancelot’s tilted bridge. Even the rosy daylight of Amor VII left him pale.
Bors stood firm as though he had lived his thirty years in his three-months-new captain’s uniform. Tim, his cobber, a strip of golden fur on his shoulder, fidgeted, sensing the strain in its master. He made his hope into dogma: ‘Perry, there’ll be enough women from the Guinevere to get the colony started.’
‘If there are any,’ Perry moaned. ‘They must have crashed too. How do we know any of them are alive?’
Bors froze with fear for Barbara on the sister ship, alive or dead, where, and how far away? The cobber yelped.
‘We’ll know as soon as the radio’s fixed,’ Bors said. ‘Let’s see how it’s going.’ He steered Perry down the corridor.
In the communications room technicians worked in chaos. The communications had been ruined when last night’s storm caught the ships in their landing curves and smashed them down on Amor VII. As Bors steered Perry in, one of the technicians looked up from a patched circuit. ‘This is the last bit, Captain.’
‘Good,’ Bors nodded. As soon as they got in touch with Guinevere, he would ask for a roll-call. That way he’d learn if Barbara was . . . well. Certainly he couldn’t just ask for her. The women were supposed to be strangers to the men on the Lancelot until the computer paired everyone after landing. The future of the colony depended on the marriages, and the computer was programmed to bring together couples whose marriages were likely to succeed. Bors couldn’t tell two ships that in defiance of the law he had plans for a particular girl; or that he had arranged for her to be included in the expedition he commanded . . .
‘How long before the check ship gets here?’ asked Perry, calmer, and starting to think out consequences.
‘Fifty years,’ Bors told him. For a moment Barbara faded. If there were no women, his fifty-nine men would live out their lives fruitlessly on Amor’s fertile soil, tilling land they couldn’t populate, dying without heirs . . .
‘Testing,’ a technician said, and touched the send switch.
Five mouths breathed out relief as the monitor tape showed the call going out. GUINIEVERE ANSWER LANCELOT? GUINEVERE ANSWER . . .
‘We have you, Lancelot,’ the speaker said.
Over the gasps of the others, Bors asked, ‘What shape are you in?’
‘Hundred and nine dead. Engines intact, but all our fuel’s lost. Life plant and defences are intact.’
‘How many women?’
The room stopped breathing until the speaker offered ‘All survivors except three arc women . . .’ and stopped.
Relief howled bedlam. ‘It’s incredible,’ Needle said. ‘The probability is only about . . .’, but Bors lost the rest in his own calculations. One hundred and nine dead out of the two hundred Guinevere had carried left ninety-one, three of them men. So eighty-eight of the hundred women lived. Barbara had nine chances in ten of being alive . . .
The urge to ask for her by name was so strong that he sweated and trembled keeping it back.
‘We’re in bad shape,’ Perry broke in, ‘We’ve lost all our women . . .’
In her sexless, mechanical voice, Guinevere gasped.
‘We have no serviceable aircraft or trucks,’ Bors said. ‘Can you get to us?’
‘Yes, Lancelot. We have transport. We’ll . . .’ The voice stopped.
‘Get it back!’
A technician pointed to green tell-tale lights. ‘We’re working. They’ve stopped sending.’
Perry moaned.
‘It’s just that their radio’s failed,’ said Bors, holding down fear. ‘Where are they?’
‘Twenty-four point four two kilometres, bearing two three oh.’
‘We can make it on foot in three hours,’ burst out Needle.
‘They can make it by air in five minutes,’ Bors said. ‘You know what the old bull said to the young bull.’
Needle grinned. ‘I s’pose so.’
‘Captain Wendl!’ A big colonist loomed through the door, filling the room to the brim. ‘There’s an aircraft coming.’
‘They must have taken off straight away,’ Perry said. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Too soon,’ Needle murmured. ‘I make it only three minutes since they started talking.’
‘Let’s look, Needle.’
Outside the breach in the hull, the few colonists who were not afraid of the open air had broken off burying bodies and salvaging spilled cargo. They watched the southern sky. A dark bird hung low.
‘That’s no aircraft,’ said Needle.
‘What are they doing?’ blurted Perry.
‘Just taking care,’ Bors said. He raised his voice to reach the staring colonists. ‘Gentlemen, the thing up there is a watchbird. It’s part of the defences of our sister ship. They’ve put it out, and probably others too, to keep an eye on things. Naturally, there’s no danger on a well-surveyed world like this. But ladies like to make sure.’
They were all facing him now, so he went on. ‘You’ll be glad to know that most of the survivors there are women: eighty-eight of them.’
He waited until the tired men had finished shouting a relief which he didn’t feel; Barbara’s chances were still only eighty-eight in a hundred. ‘They have vehicles and should reach us soon. Meanwhile, let’s get on clearing up.’
Minutes later, seated in the common room, he told the story to men who huddled in the safety of purified air, away from the open space and strange breaths of the world of Amor.
They cheered hysterically. In the tunnels of Earth, where bread, circuses, and work, were rationed, only sex was free. These men had learned to need women almost as badly as they needed air conditioning.
‘They’re the best,’ said Needle. ‘These are the pioneers, the few in every million who have enough spark to answer the ads.’
‘Freedom, adventure, lots of room,’ quoted Bors. ‘Find romance and excitement in the stars.’ Then he remembered the themes for women: ‘Be a mother on a new world. There’s room for babies out there.’ Tim moaned in despair for Barbara.
At nightfall no one had come from Guinevere, and no calling could draw an answer.
In his cabin, Bors finished Salter exercises, and stood up from his chair with his agony for Barbara quietened. He had lowered his anxiety and got back control of his thoughts so she would not interrupt him as he tried to do his duty.
‘Captain!’ the intercom barked. ‘C deck. We’ve some madmen here trying to get out through the breach.’
‘Coming. You stay here, Tim.’ The little cobber settled back to drowsing on the bunk.
On C deck Needle and a guard held at gun point two colonists in trek kit. ‘We know what we’re doing,’ the smaller of the two said, before Bors could speak. ‘There’s something wrong at Guinevere or they would have reached us by now. Tomorrow might be too late.’
‘I want to go, too,’ said Bor
s, ‘but there’s twenty-four kilometres of strange country between us; really strange, not just unfamiliar. It’s supposed to be safe, but we can’t be sure, and I won’t risk the few lives we have trying to cross it in the dark. There’s no reason to think anything’s wrong with Guinevere. Her radio’s broken down, but she’s in better shape than we are, and her defences are working. We’ll go at first light.’
He hoped neither of them would ask why no truck or aircraft had come.
‘Captain,’ Needle said. ‘We might also tell these heroes that the watchbirds would collect a pair of men as soon as they got within eight kilometres of her.’
Bors frowned.
‘We got our watchbird control circuit fixed a little while ago and questioned them. Accidentally or not, they’ve been set to attack any number of men more than one. I was on my way to tell you when I ran into these.’
‘Did you try to control the birds?’
‘Guinevere has them. We can’t do anything unless she lets them go.’
Bors saw the breach in the hull suddenly fill with a huge body. ‘Get back!’
Needle jumped aside as a long horn, with the weight of a big head behind it, punched through the guard’s chest.
Needle fired and missed, fired again and knocked blood and flesh from the huge intruder. Both colonists were firing;. Bors ran in under a sweeping horn, felt hot breath, grabbed the guard’s gun and fired a shot up into the beast’s belly. The bulk surged—he leaped back, and it rolled dead.
Another beast shoved past it, bellowing at the fire which met it.
Bors saw the dead guard smashed by a wild shot, and a third beast looming in the breach. He fired, and it sagged from sight.
A ricochet yipped past his head, and the ship’s alarm yelled wildly. More men clattered into the compartment, but there were no more beasts.
The two lying dead on the deck were demon bulls, each as big as four men. Tiger claws and teeth helped their horns and weight.