Poul Anderson's Planet Stories

by Poul Anderson

  "Halt! Halt!"

  A gun cracked behind him. Casting a backward glance, he saw that the strange car was disgorging passengers with weapons in their hands. A human, a woman with long hair tossing wildly around her shoulders, and a crew of Martians.

  Martians!

  Another bullet whanged past his ear. He rounded the block and went clattering up the street, running, running.

  The energy globe bobbed in his tunic pocket, dense and heavy, its mass threatening to rip the fabric. It would swing out and then hit back against his hip with bruising force. Breath sobbing in raw lungs, he heard the mounting thunder of his overtaxed heart loud in his ears.

  Another turn, and another. . . He'd lose them yet. Let them fight it out there in the street, Martians and Unionists, let the two murderous gangs wipe each other off the earth. He meant to get away.

  He slowed to a rapid jog. It was quiet here, so quiet, no one else stirred in the long shadowy street, no light showed in the many-eyed windows of the blank dreary walls hemming him in. The street lamps glared down the length of the street, far apart, one-eyed skeletal giants with the night creeping between them. He was alone and hunted.

  Far behind him, infinitely far it seemed, he heard the wail of sirens. The gendarmes would be on their way to the gun-fight. But it wouldn't be any help to him, they couldn't save him. He stepped up his pace a little, the breath whistling through his nostrils.

  A lighted window shone ahead, an upstairs window with a man leaning in it looking out into the night. He was smoking a cigar, a dull red glow waxing and waning against the shadow which was his face. He followed Fredison with eyes that —observed?

  Farther along the way there was a little girl. She was perhaps ten years old and she was skipping rope by herself under a street lamp. He passed her, and her eyes were on him too, remembering the hurried figure in the polar clothes. And what was she doing, out by herself in the deepest hour of the night? Was she one of their watchers.

  He went on, and the darkness and loneliness swallowed her again.

  Where to go? They'd be watching Astier's, they'd pick him up the minute he came near. He didn't know anyone else in Paris. His money, what he had, was hardly enough to buy a hotel room, and his clothes and stubbled beard marked him as with a brand. Where to go? Where to hide. What to do?

  A dank breath blew from the night ahead of him. The Seine. He must be coming to a bridge, then. He slowed to a leg-trembling walk.

  The bridge was narrow, as dingy and empty as the street. Fredison went out to its middle and halted. Leaning on the low guardrail he looked down to the tunnel of darkness which was the river.

  Why not? he thought, and there was little emotion in him. He was too exhausted.

  Why not, indeed? What else to do, in all the threatening universe? He had escaped by some fantastic freak, some providential collision between Security and Martian nationalists. That sort of luck didn't come twice, and he couldn't hope to remain at large very long. They said death by drowning was easy. All you had to do was open your mouth. And once dead he was forever safe from them. The small dense globe would sink deep, lie far down in mud and sand, and it did not respond to detectors. They would have little chance of finding it even if they thought that the object alone could tell them anything about its manufacture.

  He sighed with the weariness of it and the lapping murmur of the river took up the little sound and smothered it in darkness. So that was all there was to it. You jumped over the parapet and kept your mouth open, and then goodbye sun and moon and stars and laughter of girls, goodbye Lars Fredison. You wasted Raihala's patient lifetime because you couldn't trust anyone. Not anyone in the whole immense loneliness of the universe.

  He looked up and down the street on either side of the river. It was a cavern of blackness spotted with the glare of the lamps. It was an echoing aloneness, dead and silent above the muttering river. Best to jump now, before his resolution weakened, before anyone came along. That man who had leaned in the window and watched him pass...

  He threw one leg over the parapet.

  "No."

  The croak came out of the night with a shattering impact. He whirled about, gasping.

  The Martian seemed to have risen out of darkness, out of nowhere. He stood on the opposite side of the bridge, limned against the dark by a bar of light from some lamp, and there was a needle gun in his hand.

  "If you try to jump," he said, "I will have to paralyze you and that would be awkward. You have already cost two Martian lives tonight. Please be a little more cooperative."

  "Cost—I—" It was no use. The shock to his wire-taut nerves had completely unmanned him. He stood shaking and staring.

  "We knew, from various sources of ours, that you were bound here and due to be arrested," said the Martian conversationally. "We had our agents here and there on the field—perhaps you noticed one? He was out of normal hearing range but our race has better ears than yours in this thick atmosphere. So we assembled our available forces and trailed the police car and attacked it at the right moment. Our notion was simply to capture you, but you eluded us, so we disposed of the Earth-agents—that cost us our losses—and then set out after you. It seemed quite likely that you would try to commit suicide so we sent a man to wait for you under each of the nearest bridges. Shortrange wrist radio, you know; I was only a few blocks away from here—I live there—when they called me and told me to await you."

  Fredison shook his head. His tongue was thick and dry. "What is it now?" he whispered, "what do you want of me?"

  "I think you know," said the Martian coldly.

  Fredison tried to gather himself, tried to gauge the distance. One leap. . . The owlie was slow in Earth's heavy gravity. . . But not that slow. It would be no use to get himself anesthesized.

  He looked his captor up and down. Typical Martian, you couldn't tell one from another though he supposed that all humans looked alike to them. Not much over four feet tall, skinny, covered only by his gray feathers. He had clawed bird-like feet, bony four-fingered hands, round owl-face with feather-tuft ears and hooked beak, great slit-pupilled eyes with an unwinking, unhuman stare. The Martian's English was good, it came out with the guttural accent of his people and he did indescribable things to labial sounds—but good and clear, perfectly clear in its simplicity and deadliness.

  "I have already called them, of course." he said. "Another car has picked them up and is on its way now." He nodded. "Yes, here it comes."

  Fredison could not hear the whisper of engine and tires until the sleek black vehicle had rounded a corner and pulled up on the bridge. Two Martians with pistols in hand got out of the rear seat and gestured him curtly to enter. He obeyed, his spirit sagging with defeat, and one of the owlies got in on either side of him. His first captor got into the front with another Martian and the human driver. A door slammed softly shut and the car got under way again.

  The driver was the woman who had been in the gang fight, Fredison saw. He'd know that shining ice-blond hair anywhere in the Solar System. She didn't turn around. The Martians in front were watching him too with their heads swiveled uncannily about, but she drove with a slowly mounting speed and an unswerving purposefulness.

  Fredison sighed and relaxed. Out of the frying pan into the furnace? Even the Unionists might be preferable to Martian rebels. But he couldn't do anything for the time being. He might as well rest. It had been a good try he'd made, a hell of a good try. His chance might come again.

  "Where are we going?" he asked dully.

  The woman's voice was young, low, with a musical accent that he couldn't place haunting its English. "To Mars, of course."

  Fredison woke with a start at the elbow in his ribs. The Martian voice seemed to come from very far away: "We are here. Step out now."

  He shook his head, groping back to reality. After the long ride from the Antarctic, hunger and exhaustion had lulled him to sleep with the monotonous purring of the car. He climbed stiffly out and looked around him.


  They were somewhere south of Paris, in the country on the banks of the Seine, and it was close to dawn. The eastern sky was paling, light glimmered on the broad surface of the river, birds twittered drowsily from darkling trees. A cool breath of wind, wet with dew, kissed his face. Before them, hugging the shore, was a house, a French peasant's cottage like any of a million in the land, and a man in a grimy smock stood outside it. He had a disc-rifle in one hand.

  The four Martians moved heavily. Earth dragged at them, the dampness tormented their sinuses, the oxygen-rich atmosphere was like fire in their lungs. But the phosphorescent eyes glowed unwinkingly and their weapons were held ready.

  Fredison turned to the woman. She was tall, young and slender and lithe, she wore the slacks and open-collared blouse of any Europo-American girl dressed for some formal occasion.

  Very informal! he thought wryly, noting the pistol holstered at her waist and the small competent hand resting on its butt. In the thin pale dawn-light, her face was still half a mystery, but he saw that it was high of cheekbone and square of jaw, strong beautiful structure under the clear skin. Her eyes were big, night-black, brilliant between long sooty lashes, an elfin hint of obliquity under brows that had the lovely curve of a gull's wing. And what was she doing with these creatures that hated all humanity?

  The peasant spoke in rapid-fire French and the girl responded as easily. Fredison couldn't catch more than half a dozen words—something about a spaceship. They went into the house.

  Clean, ordinary, the home of any well-to-do peasant, with a plump middle-aged housewife setting breakfast out. Fredison realized anew how hungry he was. He didn't bother to speak until he had had two servings.

  Then he looked up, to catch a hint of amusement in the girl's eyes. An early sunbeam slanted through the window and ran down her hair. "Have you a cigarette?" he asked.

  "Certainly." She held out a pack and lit her own with his.

  "Life isn't so bad now, is it?" she asked;

  "Could be worse," admitted Fredison, "Right now."

  "Oh, you don't have—much—to fear from us. Not if you behave yourself. You do owe us your life, you know. Your sanity, at the very least." She shivered. "I've seen them come out of Clinton's cells."

  A Martian stuck his head in the kitchen door and hooted a few syllables. The girl replied in the same language. She couldn't manage some of the sounds, they came more softly from her throat than from the owlish beak, but she spoke swiftly and easily.

  "Quite the linguist, aren't you?" said Fredison.

  "It's my business." She stood up. "Come on, we have to get out of hese."

  He glanced around him, wondering what the chances were of making a break for it, of getting to the car. The gun clanked free of her belt. "Don't try it," she said coldly.

  With enormous casualness he nodded. One hand was in his tunic pocket, closed on the energy sphere. He took it out, slowly, letting the fist swing loose at his side. If he could ditch it somewhere, toss it among the reeds, then they wouldn't have it, and not all the hellishness they could inflict on him would make him create another.

  A hard hand slipped into his. The Martian took the sphere away. A faint smile played over the girl's wide firm mouth. They went out behind the house and down toward the river.

  The spaceship had been rolled from a shed. It was small, one of the superfast General Atomic jobs with room for about six passengers on a short voyage, and in that ship a voyage to Mars would be short. To the casual eye it could hardly be told from an ordinary large rocketplane. The neighbors would have little to gossip about, save that Pierre or Jacques or whoever he was had entertained some wealthy tourists who kept a Martian entourage and went back home after awhile.

  Good stunt. Bold, too, thus to maintain a base under the very nose of the enemy. But where in all the planetary hells had they gotten that kind of money and organization? He had thought of Martians as primitives but they seemed not so simple now.

  III

  He went through the narrow airlock, down a short passageway of gleaming metal, to the acceleration hammock which a Martian pointed out to him. Wordlessly, he let them strap him in and took the hypo of anti-drug—anti-acceleration, anti-vertigo, anti everything which had made early space travel such an endurance contest. Men flew swiftly and easily between the stars these days, if they had the money to pay for the best, but were their errands any the better for that?

  Two of the other Martians strapped in close to him. The third went aft toward the engines, the fourth forward with the girl. Presently the engines rumbled, a thunder voice shaking the ship, shaking their bones and muscles and brains, blurring vision with its bass command. Fredison tried to relax.

  Acceleration slammed him back, a giant's hand ramming into his belly, grabbing him by the throat and reaching down to yank at his heart. The roar and boom of the engines resounded in his head, crash, bang, whooom. He lay and waited for what seemed a very long time.

  Slowly, the acceleration dropped until they were running at about one gee. If they kept that up, he estimated, then with Mars' present position they should get there in some three days. There wouldn't be much to do enroute, such a vessel all but ran itself. So now they could have plenty of time to work over their prisoner.

  The girl came back and stood looking down at him. There was an odd, indefinable expression on her face, something at once grim and sorrowful, a touch of the reaching loneliness which had entered Fredison's heart.

  She said at last in the low sweet voice he liked to hear, "Listen Fredison. You are our captive, and we are a determined group. But we aren't brutes. I want you to understand that. We don't torture and we don't kill except when we must."

  He forced himself to coldness. "I've heard differently."

  "Oh, you've been fed the same lies that all Earth is gorged with, the stories of Martian fiendishness, the myth that they want only to wipe out all our species." The disgust in her tones became something gentler. "Is my presence here evidence for that? Could the Martians have accomplished all they have done without help from plenty of Earthlings?" Earnestly, "And we aren't turncoats, Fredison. We have our rewards, yes, but we are working for the good of our own race as well as that of all intelligent life.

  "We're going to Kreega's lair in the Syrtis country, and there you can see for yourself. But I hope we can persuade you a little even before we arrive. Persuade you to help us."

  "That'll take a hell of a lot of persuading."

  "At least we can talk. You aren't among morons and fanatics now. We can talk like intelligent beings. But I'd rather not keep you tied up or under guard all the time. If you'll give your parole to behave on the voyage you may go free."

  "How do you know I'd keep my word?" he challenged. "This is a hell of a big cause."

  She shrugged, "I don't. But all you could do is make trouble. You could use your Terrestrial strength to some advantage in this acceleration, yes. But you couldn't take anyone by surprise. Even a sleeping Martian has keener senses than you do, and reacts quicker. We might have to shoot you, and naturally we'd rather avoid the necessity."

  Fredison thought for a minute. "All right," he said. "I promise." And, his mind added, I'll keep the promise unless a really good chance appears.

  Her sudden smile was warm and dazzling. "Good! Thank you! You won't regret it." She began unbuckling him. "And my name is Phyllia Dale."

  "Glad to know you." He shook hands. Her grip was as firm and frank as a man's, but the fingers were cool and slender within his. A beautiful woman could go a long ways toward reconciling you to anything. "Miss Dale, I hope?"

  She nodded impersonally. "You'll want to wash up," she said. "The bathroom is down there. Come back to the bridge afterward and we can talk."

  He found hot water and a razor in the tiny cubicle. There was no shower but he cleaned with a sponge. A wordless Martian handed him a fresh suit of clothes—the one-piece woolen garment which could serve as underclothing for a spacesuit should that need arise—and follo
wed him up to the bridge.

  It was near the bows, a cramped little room with two pilot chairs before the flashing instrument panel and a Martian in each. The girl stood by the door, nodded to the Earthman, and said, "This is Kruun, here with you. Dakka is down with the engines. And here are the brothers Iggidan and Hraestoh."

  Fredison smiled. "I'll settle for Ike and Mike," he said. "How the devil do you even pronounce those names, let alone remember them?"

  "I am a Martian too," she answered gravely.

  "Hm?"

  "I was born and raised there."

  Hraestoh—Mike—turned around and gabbled harshly at her. She took a long step over to him and stood frowning at the radarscope.

  "What's the trouble?" asked Fredison.

  "Another ship—somewhere behind us— see." She pointed to the pip, flickering and dancing on the impersonal scope face. "Roughly a parallel course, too."

  Fredison looked uneasily around him, as if he could pierce the metal walls and a hundred thousand miles of vacuum. "Coincidence," he suggested.

  "I hope so," she said bleakly. "But this isn't any regular flight, I'm sure of that, and private ships aren't very common..."

  Are they hunting again?

  It was suddenly very quiet on the bridge. The muffled roar of the rockets was a steady drone up here, an underlying vibration which hardly counted as sound, lost and smothered in the reaching stillness of space. The forward port was now "up" when the ship was accelerating, a round hole in the wall yawning with an immense darkness, black and cold and spattered with a million cruel stars. He couldn't see Earth but the Moon's great crescent was a scarred brilliance to one side. Hugeness and quietness and the vast lonely night between the worlds—