Poul Anderson's Planet Stories

by Poul Anderson

He shivered.

  "We'll just have to see what develops," she said. Her voice was flat.

  Kruun went over to a cabinet and took out the energy globe. Silently, he handed it back to Fredison. The man stood holding it, looking down at the cold white shimmer of the thing. "It ought to be destroyed," he said. "I thought the world was ready for it but I was wrong."

  "You can dissolve it, then?" asked Phyllia Dale.

  "Oh, yes, quite easily. A simple keying circuit, giving it weak electrical pulses of the right frequency to build up resonance, and out come four-and-a-half-times ten to the twenty fourth ergs—enough energy to boil two or three hundred tons of water, to turn several square miles of land into molten slag." Fredison's teeth flashed in a humorless grin. "But I won't do it for you."

  "You may change your mind," she murmured.

  "It isn't right," he said, a little wildly. "I didn't ask for the job. Raihala only wanted to liberate man forever from his energy needs and I was only his helper on a worthwhile project. I didn't ask to flee through the Solar System with Doomsday in my hands."

  "You're stuck with it now." Her answer was bitter. "You and every other scientist who ever built anything men could use to create hell. You gave man atomic energy to flatten his cities, germ cultures to wipe out his children, spaceships to carry the same horror out to the great clean spaces of the other worlds. Why don't you use that big scientific brain to undo some of the harm?"

  "I suppose you'd like to be back in the Middle Ages, sitting in a mud hut and kowtowing to your feudal overlord and waiting for the Black Plague to catch up with you," he snapped. "It's society that uses these things well or badly, the society of which the scientist is only one small part. And I don't think spaceships and atomic bombs would seem so horrible if Mars had them and Earth didn't."

  "I told you I wasn't against Earth," she replied coldly.

  "I'll make your keying circuit," he offered. "I'll dissolve the globe and the ship and all of us, and then neither side will have this thing."

  "No."

  "But there's no one who's fit to use it!" he said. "Nobody on Earth can be trusted neither to misuse it nor to let it fall into the hands of those who would. And I don't think the Martians are any better."

  "Maybe not," she said, "but whose fault is that? They were a gentle race before Earthmen came. They lived in their deserts in a symbiosis with the wild life such as men will never comprehend. They wished harm to no one in the universe. And then the Earthmen came, and enslaved them and hunted them for sport and all but wiped out their race."

  "That much is past. There hasn't been Martian or Venusian slavery for fifty years now. It's as much of a crime to kill one of them as to kill a human."

  "Try and get a conviction on Mars if a human kills a native. But if it's the other way around, then off to the gas chamber."

  "Things aren't what they should be, no. But they're improving. Mars has friends on Earth, the Liberal party is pledged to improve their lot and eventually to get them Full citizenship. Kreega and his nationalist rebels are only injuring the Martian cause."

  "Mars has learned. It won't get freedom and equality till it's strong enough to stand up and demand it. Meanwhile, the Unionists and their allies are working to restore the old enslavement, spreading their propaganda, provoking incidents, enforcing the ridiculous segregation laws to the letter. Who do you think is handing out those atrocity stories about the rebels? The Unionists, to create an issue, and the big space-exploitation companies, who want their cheap slave labor back. I tell you, it's all a pack of lies! The Martians haven't attacked a human settlement since the last pacification two or three generations ago. They kill the illegal slave raiders, the army detachments sent against them, the brutal mine and planation operators, the yelping politicians. . . They leave it to Earthlings to kill the babies and the aged."

  Her blazing tones died away and she went back to look at the radarscope.

  "Falling behind," she murmured, "but that could be only an effect of different orbits. Well, Kreega has been hounded from his strongholds before this. The important thing is not to be captured."

  Fredison thought of her in a Unionist torture cell and felt a coldness within him.

  She turned back to him with more friendliness. "I'm not blaming you, Dr. Fredison . . ."

  "Lars," he said. "It looks as if we'll be pretty closely associated for awhile."

  She smiled with a curious warmth. "All right, Lars. I'd like to pry you loose from that martyr complex and make you do something constructive with this power of yours."

  "I haven't the least desire to be a martyr if it can be avoided," he said. "But show me how."

  She touched the sphere with a half frightened awe. "All that in there, like a little sun waiting to shine," she whispered. "How did you do it? How could anyone dare?"

  "Raihala worked most of a lifetime on it or on related problems," he admitted. "It's his baby, really. And honest, Phyllia, I'd like to bring the brat up right."

  "How does it work?"

  "You don't expect me to tell you that."

  "Maybe not—now. But can't you give me a general idea? The rumors said it was radiant energy enclosed in a space warp."

  "Mmm, well, that's a clumsy way of putting it. Matter is energy, you know, you might call it solid energy since it's formed into discrete subatomic particles. That's ignoring the complications introduced by wave mechanics, of course, even if those are the very crux of this business. Then if you think of ordinary radiation as being like a—gas, shall we say?—then this is a liquid state of energy. It stays in one place, like an electron or proton, but it's one continuous blob. The equations of its continuity involve certain distortions of the space-time coordinates, yes. Raihala's generator creates a field which is such that any radiant-energy quanta impinging on it remain there. You might think of this globe as being a sponge soaked full of energy, only of course the energy itself is the sponge too. It's quite stable now, in fact impervious to any ordinary force—infinite reflectivity, infinite hardness, infinite resistivity, and so on. But the keying circuit upsets the stability, and then at any disturbance the whole thing breaks up. It doesn't break up at once, but gradually, into chunks and blobs which—well —soak into neighboring matter and become kinetic energy of its atoms. And that's all I'm going to tell you."

  "That's enough, for now," said the Martian named Iggidan, and Fredison realized with a shock that he must have been the one who captured him on the bridge. "I can see the advantages, of course. It is pure energy in its most concentrated form. A little of this, fed into a turbine or a rocket's reaction chambers, would drive the machine with greater power than we have yet achieved, and without radioactivity—therefore none of this heavy, clumsy shielding and remote controlling we have to use now. It would do everything any energy source has ever done and more, neatly and efficiently. Or it could be the most powerful bomb ever created. You could make a big enough energy globe to blow up a planet."

  Fredison blinked. He was having trouble overcoming the ingrained notion that all Martians were ignorant barbarians with no natural technical aptitude.

  Slowly he said in reply, "The really wonderful thing about it, to Raihala's mind, was that any energy source would do. Sunlight, for instance, or water power—no matter how dilute the source, you could simply let it accumulate until you had enough energy in one place to do whatever you wanted. No more trouble with dwindling fuel reserves—unlimited energy, energy to reclaim whole planets and perhaps to go out to the stars." He sighed. "And the old man was right, as far as he went. But he didn't go far enough."

  "I think he did," said Phyllia. "If we use it right."

  Iggidan's amber eyes went back to the radarscope. "If we live to use it right," he said.

  IV

  Mars.

  A world of grimness and desolation, a world grown old before its time, seas drying and soil shriveling until it lay thin and wrinkled on the iron bones of the planet, a sweep of deserts and wind-scoured ocherous hi
lls out to the horizon, a few human settlements huddled beneath dusty domes under a scornful heaven.

  It was not a world for men, it had never been and it could never be. Humans had come here in the early days looking for fissionables, high-grade ores, military bases, slaves. They had stayed to keep these things streaming out toward Earth and man's other possessions, to trade with the natives, and to grow certain plants whose secretions were a valuable base for organic syntheses.

  In time there came to be humans who were born and lived and died and were buried on Mars without ever seeing Earth. But it was still not man's world, and as he saw the deserts rushing away beneath the spaceship Fredison thought that Kreega's rebellion was but an expression of something older and deeper, some great basic revolt of primitive strangeness against the invaders.

  For all that, he had to admit that it was, in certain aspects, as complex and sophisticated an uprising as history had ever seen. Thirty or forty Earth-years ago there had been nothing, a few neolithic savages skulking in the hills, living the solitary life of their kind, at sullen truce with the conquerors.

  It was Kreega who had first obtained a few workable Earth weapons and used them to arm a band that raided for more. It was Kreega who had started hidden manufacturies going, one part made in a cave in Thyle, another section in the subarctic marshes, a third in the equatorial forests. It was Kreega's generalship which had beaten off attack after attack, guerrilla fighting, hit-and-run assaults, attrition, until he held great sections where humans didn't come any more.

  Then there had been the linkage, through an occasional sympathetic trader or explorer, with humans on Earth who for one reason or another were not averse to Martian independence. There had been mining, fur-trading, jewel-hunting, the Martians selling them through their few human friends so that their organization's funds swelled.

  Martians on Earth, as workers or visitors or personal attendants, kept up contact with their Terrestrial fellows, who slowly created their own network of sympathizers and hirelings—gunmen, spacemen, on up to scientists and men in government. There were even Martian spies in the Unionist Party.

  "Oh, yes, we know pretty well what is going on," said Krunn. "We can often act to forestall our enemies, such as in your own case."

  "But why do they do it?" asked Fredison. "The humans, I mean. What motive have they?"

  "Some for gain, of course. We can pay well. Others for—oh, a variety of reasons. Adventure, the help we can give against their own opponents, a feeling that the friendship of Mars is worth having, a conviction that Martian independence is historically inevitable and the sooner and easier it is obtained the easier Earth will have it in the future. Many are Panbiotists, you know, the philosophy that all life is one and that evil done to any living and worthy creature is evil done to all. And some humans are really Martians, too."

  "Eh? Disguised? Impossible!"

  "No, I mean they have grown up there, perhaps their families have been there for generations. The landscape has entered them. They have known Martian natives intimately, had Martian nurses and playmates and comrades, absorbed as much of the Martian spirit a human can. To them Earth is another world, an alien with no more right to impose its pattern on Mars than we would have a right to come to Earth and thin its atmosphere and dry up its seas and curse you people because you have hair instead of feathers and make you live in the hills and the caves—simply because we happen to prefer that kind of life.

  "Such as Phyllia Dale, for instance. Her parents were colonials themselves, traders who befriended us. She has known more Martians more years of her life than humans. She has only been on Earth twice in her life. Kreega was like a father to her after her parents' death. Oh, yes, she is a Martian."

  "I don't understand," muttered Fredison. And he avoided personal talk with the girl for the rest of the trip.

  The other ship, invisible among the thronging stars, fell out of radar range, but the Martians still talked worriedly among themselves. Fredison felt cut off and sulked in his hammock.

  And so they came to Mars, dropped out of the night and the cold and the long dark miles and flamed over the face of the planet. Fredison saw Phyllia go by with a straining eagerness in her eyes and asked sardonically: "Are you that happy to be home?"

  "Yes," she breathed. "Oh, yes!"

  "Lord!" He thought of the raw desolation hurtling below them, hills and plains and iron valleys ringing with the rocket thunder, and grimaced. "Why'd you come to Earth at all?"

  "We needed contacts—messages to carry, people to see, things which a Martian couldn't do without being too conspicuous. Earth is a fair world, yes, Lars, but this is home."

  She sighed happily.

  He shook his head. It wasn't right. It wasn't right or normal. She was young and beautiful and full of life, she should have been on Earth, going to dances, laughing with a dozen men around her, lying on a broad yellow beach with the clean salt wind of Earth's oceans blowing her hair. And instead she longed to be back to a world of rocks and gullies and scrubby, dusty thorn-bushes, a land of flitting gray things with owl eyes where she couldn't even walk outdoors without an airsuit. Heavenly orbits, she probably took part in their ceremonies!

  Meanwhile, though, there was his own problem. Somehow he had to talk a bunch of bitter-hearted rebels into letting him go free with his secret. Mars wasn't a bad hideout for the time being. He could drift into any of the brawling mine towns under an alias and work at assaying or something of the sort but he wasn't going to hand Kreega the means of blowing up all Earth.

  They came down somewhere in the chartless interior of Syrtis, landing with a boom and a thud after which there was ringing silence. This was the secret rebel fortress, thought Fredison, this was the place whose location would be worth a cool million dollars to some Unionist-minded officer of the Mars Patrol, and what was he going to do now?

  He climbed into an airsuit, a bulky thing of tough insulated fabric, with plastic helmet and heavy boots. The heating coils and the airpump which compressed the local atmosphere to a density Earthlings could breathe ran off a powerbeam. Kreega must have an atomic generator somewhere hereabouts. And there was an emergency powerpack which would be good for a few hours. It would have been intolerably heavy on Earth, but even wearing it he was lighter here than he had been at home.

  He saw Phyllia's ivory-pale cheeks flushed, she bounded laughing ahead of him and out the airlock. The Martians followed happily, filling their lungs with the thin parched air of their planet, ruffling their feathers in the harsh cold wind of home.

  There were other natives clustered around the ship, perhaps fifty of them with a few young scampering between their long bony legs. They wore little but pouched belts but nearly all carried disc-guns. A silent crowd, greeting the newcomers with grave croaks and fleeting touches, parted a noiseless way for the two humans. Fredison felt the chill golden eyes following him, watching every step, and his spine crawled. Several natives began rolling the ship away toward some hiding place.

  One of the group stepped forward and took Phyllia's gloved hands in his own clawlike fingers. He was old, old and lean, with his feathers frost-gray and his gait stooped. But the head was held arrogantly erect, the eyes blazed, it was less the face of an owl than of a hawk. Across one shoulder hung a strange curved trumpet, old and handsome, an insigna of rank.

  Their voices hooted and croaked, his and the girl's, harsh unhuman sounds with a strange tenderness. "Welcome home, welcome home!"

  Phyllia turned and beckoned to Fredison. Her amplified voice, muffled by the thinness of the air, seemed no louder than normal, "Lars, this is Kreega."

  The man stood looking at the native for a long moment So this was Kreega, the great enemy of Earth, the fabulous and terrible figure with whom mothers frightened their children to bed even far back on the green planet of humankind.

  Even among his own long-lived species Kreega was ancient, and all his days had gone to the unrelenting war. He had fought pitilessly, brilliantly. As col
d and savage as his own deserts, he had welded his scattered and broken race into a nation of warriors, and still there was strength and will left in him. Still he could fight and think. Fredison wondered what to do or say.

  "I am glad to know you, sir," said the Martian. His English was as harsh and stiff as himself. "I trust we shall find much in common."

  "That I doubt," said Fredison bluntly. But in spite of himself, in spite of the fact that he was here against his will and these were his enemies and captors, he felt out of place—awkward, loud, an alien in the great quiet lands of Mars. "However, I would welcome a chance to discuss matters with you."

  "You will have many," said Kreega imperturbably. "But let me give you some advice, sir. You may move freely about, within limits, and act as a guest. However, your whereabouts will always be known to some of us and there will be no chance for mischief. Should the need arise it would be very simple to turn off the power to your airsuit. Please conduct yourself accordingly. Meanwhile, Miss Dale will serve as your guide. Try to make yourself as comfortable as possible."

  He bowed stiffly and walked off. Phyllia smiled and came up close to Fredison. "You mustn't mind him," she said. "He's an old darling, really."

  "I suppose so," said Fredison dryly.

  "Why don't we look around a bit? This is the closest thing to a city Mars has had for I don't know how many thousand years. It's worth seeing."

  Fredison paced at her side. "They live alone ordinarily, don't they?" he asked.

  "More or less, with the big ceremonial assemblies twice a Mars-year, the mating times. They had a civilization of towns and agriculture long ago but they gave that up in favor of something better, a symbiosis with the wild life which freed them from merely physical needs, since their tastes are very simple, and let them move ahead in their own ways. I have only the faintest idea what those ways are, I can't really comprehend all that they do just as they can't grasp many concepts which are elementary to an Earthling. But it was their own life and a good one."