Poul Anderson's Planet Stories

by Poul Anderson

  Dust was thick on the corroded floor, and the air was cold and had a metallic reek. There must have been about five hundred men swarming hopelessly around after the barred door clanged shut on us.

  Windows existed between the two great cells. We made a rush for them, crying out, pushing and crowding and snarling at each other for first chance to see if our women still lived.

  I was large and strong. I shouldered my way through the mob up to the nearest window. A man was there already, flattened against the wall by the sweating bodies behind, reaching through the bars to the three hundred women who swarmed on the other side.

  “Agnes!” he shrieked. “Agnes, are you there? Are you alive?”

  I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him away. He turned with a curse, and I fed him a mouthful of knuckles and sent him lurching back into the uneasy press of men. “Kathryn!” I howled.

  The echoes rolled and boomed in the hollow metal caves, crying voices, prayers and curses and sobs of despair thrown back by the sardonic echoes till our heads shivered with it. “Kathryn! Kathryn!”

  Somehow she found me. She came to me and the kiss through those bars dissolved ship and slavery and all the world for that moment. “Oh, John, John, John, you’re alive, you’re here. Oh, my darling—”

  And then she looked around the metal-gleaming dimness and said quickly, urgently: “We’ll have a riot on our hands, John, if these people don’t calm down. See what you can do with the men. I’ll tackle the women.”

  It was like her. She was the most gallant soul that ever walked under Terran skies, and she had a mind which flashed in an instant to that which must be done. I wondered myself what point there was in stopping a murderous panic. Those who were killed would be better off, wouldn’t they? But Kathryn never surrendered, so I couldn’t either.

  We turned back into our crowds, and shouted and pummeled and bullied, and slowly others came to our aid until there was a sobbing quiet in the belly of the slave ship. Then we organized turns at the windows. Kathryn and I both looked away from those reunions, or from the people who found no one. It isn’t decent to look at a naked soul.

  The engines began to thrum. Under way, outward bound to the ice mountains of Gorzun, no more to see blue skies and green grass, no clean salt smell of ocean and roar of wind in tall trees. Now we were slaves and had nothing to do but wait.

  II

  There was no time aboard the ship. The few dim fluoros kept our hold forever in its uneasy twilight. The Gorzuni swilled us at such irregular intervals as they thought of it, and we heard only the throb of the engines and the asthmatic sigh of the ventilators. The twice-normal gravity kept most of us too weary even to talk much. But I think it was about forty-eight hours after leaving Terra, when the ship had gone into secondary drive and was leaving the Solar System altogether, that the man with the iron collar came down to us.

  He entered with an escort of armed and wary Gorzuni who kept their rifles lifted. We looked up dull-eyed at the short stocky figure. His voice was almost lost in the booming vastness of the hold.

  “I’m here to classify you. Come one at a time and tell me your name and training, if any. I warn you that the penalty for claiming training you haven’t got is torture, and you’ll be tested if you do make such claims.”

  We shuffled past. A Gorzuni, the drunken doctor, had a tattoo needle set up and scribbled a number on the palm of each man. This went into the human’s notebook, together with name, age, and profession. Those without technical skills, by far the majority, were shoved roughly back. The fifty or so who claimed valuable education went over into a corner.

  The needle burned my palm and I sucked the breath between my teeth. The impersonal voice was dim in my ears: “Name?”

  “John Henry Reeves, age twenty-five, lieutenant in the Commonwealth navy and nuclear engineer before the wars.” I snapped the answers out, my throat harsh and a bitter taste in my mouth. The taste of defeat.

  “Hmmm.” I grew aware that the pale chill eyes were resting on me with an odd regard. Suddenly the man’s thick lips twisted in a smile. It was a strangely charming smile, it lit his whole dark face with a brief radiance of merriment. “Oh, yes, I remember you, Lieutenant Reeves. You called me, I believe, a filthy bastard.”

  “I did,” I almost snarled. My hand throbbed and stung. I was unwashed and naked and sick with my own helplessness.

  “You may be right at that,” he nodded. “But I’m in bad need of a couple of assistants. This ship is a wreck, she may never make Gorzun without someone to nurse the engines. Care to help me?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Be reasonable. By refusing you only get yourself locked in the special cell we’re keeping for trained slaves. It’ll be a long voyage, the monotony will do more to break your spirit than any number of lashings. As my assistant you’ll have proper quarters and a chance to move around and use your hands.”

  I stood thinking. “Did you say you needed two assistants?” I asked.

  “Yes. Two who can do something with this ruin of a ship.”

  “I’ll be one,” I said, “if I can name the other.”

  He scowled. “Getting pretty big for the britches you don’t have, aren’t you?”

  “Take it or leave it,” I shrugged. “But this person is a hell of a good technician.”

  “Well, nominate him, then, and I’ll see.”

  “It’s a her. My fiancee, Kathryn O’Donnell.”

  “No.” He shook his dark curly head. “No woman.”

  “No man, then.” I grinned at him without mirth.

  Anger flamed coldly in his eyes. “I can’t have a woman around my neck like another millstone.”

  “She’ll carry her own weight and more. She was a j.g. in my own ship, and she fought right there beside me till the end.”

  The temper was gone without leaving a ripple. Not a stir of expression in the strong, ugly, olive-skinned face that looked up at me. His voice was as flat. “Why didn’t you say so before? All right, then, Lieutenant. But the gods help you if you aren’t both as advertised!”

  It was hard to believe it about clothes—the difference they made after being just another penned and naked animal. And a meal of stew and coffee, however ill prepared, scrounged at the galley after the warriors had messed, surged in veins and bellies which had grown used to swilling from a pig trough.

  I realized bleakly that the man in the iron collar was right. Not many humans could have remained free of soul on the long, heart-cracking voyage to Gorzun. Add the eternal weariness of double weight, the chill dark grimness of our destination planet, utter remoteness from home, blank hopelessness, perhaps a touch of the whip and branding iron, and men became tame animals trudging meekly at the heels of their masters.

  “How long have you been a slave?” I asked our new boss.

  He strode beside us as arrogantly as if the ship were his. He was not a tall man, for even Kathryn topped him by perhaps five centimeters, and his round-skulled head barely reached my shoulder. But he had thick muscular arms, a gorilla breadth of chest, and the gravity didn’t seem to bother him at all.

  “Going on four years,” he replied shortly. “My name, by the way, is Manuel Argos, and we might as well be on first name terms from the start.”

  A couple of Gorzuni came stalking down the corridor, clanking with metal. We stood aside for the giants, of course, but there was no cringing in Manuel’s attitude. His strange eyes followed them speculatively.

  We had a cabin near the stern, a tiny cubbyhole with four bunks, bleak and bare but its scrubbed cleanliness was like a breath of home after the filth of the cell. Wordlessly, Manuel took one of the sleazy blankets and hung it across a bed as a sort of curtain. “It’s the best privacy I can offer you, Kathryn,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  He sat down on his own bunk and looked up at us. I loomed over him, a blond giant against his squatness. My family had been old and cultured and wealthy before the wars, and he wa
s the nameless sweeping of a hundred slums and spaceports, but from the first there was never any doubt of who was the leader.

  “Here’s the story,” he said in his curt way. “I knew enough practical engineering in spite of having no formal education to get myself a fairly decent master in whose factories I learned more. Two years ago he sold me to the captain of this ship. I got rid of the so-called chief engineer they had then. It wasn’t hard to stir up a murderous quarrel between him and a jealous subordinate. But his successor is a drunken bum one generation removed from the forests.

  “In effect, I’m the engineer of this ship. I’ve also managed to introduce my master, Captain Venjain, to marijuana. It hits a Gorzuni harder than it does a human, and he’s a hopeless addict by now. It’s partly responsible for the condition of this ship and the laxness among the crew. Poor leadership, poor organization. That’s a truism.”

  I stared at him with a sudden chill along my spine. But it was Kathryn who whispered the question: “Why?”

  “Waiting my chance,” he snapped. “I’m the one who made junk out of the engines and equipment. I tell them it’s old and poorly designed. They think that only my constant work holds the ship together at all: but I could have her humming in a week if I cared to. I can’t wait too much longer. Sooner or later someone else is going to look at that machinery and tell them it’s been deliberately haywired. So I’ve been waiting for a couple of assistants with technical training and a will to fight. I hope you two fit the bill. If not—” He shrugged. “Go ahead and tell on me. It won’t free you. But if you want to risk lives that won’t be very long or pleasant on Gorzun, you can help me take over the ship?”

  I stood for some time looking at him. It was uncanny, the way he had sized us up from a glance and a word. Certainly the prospect was frightening. I could feel sweat on my face. My hands were cold. But I’d follow him. Before God, I’d follow him!

  Still—“Three of us?” I jeered. “Three of us against a couple of hundred warriors?”

  “There’ll be more on our side,” he said impassively. After a moment’s silence he went on: “Naturally, we’ll have to watch ourselves. Only two or three of them know Anglic. I’ll point them out to you. And of course our work is under surveillance. But the watchers are ignorant. I think you have the brains to fool them.”

  “I—” Kathryn stood, reaching for words. “I can’t believe it,” she said at last. “A naval vessel in this condition—”

  “Things were better under the old Baldic conquerors,” admitted Manuel. “The kings who forged the League out of a hundred planets still in barbaric night, savages who’d learned to build spaceships and man atomblasts and little else. But even they succeeded only because there was no real opposition. The Commonwealth society was rotten, corrupt, torn apart by civil wars, its leadership a petrified bureaucracy, its military forces scattered over a thousand restless planets, its people ready to buy peace rather than fight. No wonder the League drove everything before it!

  “But after the first sack of Terra fifteen years ago, the barbarians split up. The forceful early rulers were dead, and their sons were warring over an inheritance they didn’t know how to rule. The League is divided into two hostile regions now, and I don’t know how many splinter groups. Their old organization is shot to hell.

  “Sol didn’t rally in time. It was still under the decadent Commonwealth government. So one branch of the Baldics has now managed to conquer our big planets. But the fact that they’ve been content to raid and loot the inner worlds instead of occupying them and administering them decently shows the decay of their own society. Given the leadership, we could still throw them out of the Solar System and go on to overrun their home territories. Only the leadership hasn’t been forthcoming.”

  It was a harsh, angry lecture, and I winced and felt resentment within myself. “Damn it, we’ve fought,” I said.

  “And been driven back and scattered.” His heavy mouth lifted in a sneer. “Because there hasn’t been a chief who understood strategy and organization, and who could put heart into his men.”

  “I suppose,” I said sarcastically, “that you’re that chief.”

  His answer was flat and calm and utterly assured. “Yes.”

  In the days the followed I got to know more about Manuel Argos. He was never loath to talk about himself.

  His race, I suppose, was primarily Mediterranean-Anatolian, with more than a hint of Negro and Oriental, but I think there must have been some forgotten Nordic ancestor who looked out of those ice-blue eyes. A blend of all humanity, such as was not uncommon these days.

  His mother had been a day laborer on Venus. His father, though he was never sure, had been a space prospector who died young and never saw his child. When he was thirteen he shipped out for Sirius and had not been in the Solar System since. Now, at forty, he had been spaceman, miner, dock walloper, soldier in the civil wars and against the Baldics, small-time politician on the colony planets, hunter; machinist, and a number of darker things.

  Somewhere along the line, he had found time to do an astonishing amount of varied reading, but his reliance was always more on his own senses and reason and intuition than on books. He had been captured four years ago in a Gorzuni raid on Alpha Centauri, and had set himself to study his captors as cold-bloodedly as he had studied his own race.

  Yes, I learned a good deal about him but nothing of him. I don’t think any living creature ever did. He was not one to open his heart. He went wrapped in loneliness and dreams all his days. Whether the chill of his manner went into his soul, and the rare warmth was only a mask, or whether he was indeed a yearning tenderness sheathed in armor of indifference, no one will ever be sure. And he made a weapon out of that uncertainty. A man never knew what to await from him and was thus forever strained in his presence, open to his will.

  “He’s a strange sort,” said Kathryn once, when we were alone. “I haven’t decided whether he’s crazy or a genius.”

  “Maybe both, darling,” I suggested, a little irritably. I didn’t like to be dominated.

  “Maybe. But what is sanity, then?” She shivered and crept close to me. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  The ship wallowed on her way, through a bleak glory of stars, alone in light-years of emptiness with her cargo of hate and fear and misery and dreams. We worked, and waited, and the slow days passed.

  The laboring old engines had to be fixed. Some show had to be made for the gray-furred giants who watched us in the flickering gloom of the power chambers. We wired and welded and bolted, tested and tore down and rebuilt, sweltering in the heat of bursting atoms that rolled from the radiation shields, deafened by the whine of generators and thud of misadjusted turbines and the deep uneven drone of the great converters. We fixed Manuel’s sabotage until the ship ran almost smoothly. Later we would on some pretext throw the whole thing out of kilter again. “Penelope’s tapestry,” said Manuel, and I wondered that a space tramp could make the classical allusion.

  “What are we waiting for?” I asked him once. The din of the generator we were overhauling smothered our words. “When do we start our mutiny?”

  He glanced up at me. The light of our trouble lamp gleamed off the sweat on his ugly pockmarked face. “At the proper time,” he said coldly. “For one thing, it’ll be while the captain is on his next dope jag.”

  Meanwhile two of the slaves had tried a revolt of their own. When an incautious guard came too near the door of the mens’ cell one of them reached out and snatched his gun from the holster and shot him down. Then he tried to blast the lock off the bars. When the Gorzuni came down to gas him his fellow battled them with fists and teeth till the rebels were knocked out. Both were flayed living in the presence of the other captives.

  Kathryn couldn’t help crying after we were back in our cabin. She buried her face against my breast and wept till I thought she would never stop weeping. I held her close and mumbled whatever foolish words came to me.

  “They had it
coming,” said Manuel. There was contempt in his voice. “The fools. The blind stupid fools! They could at least have held the guard as a hostage and tried to bargain. No, they had to be heroes. They had to shoot him down. Now the example has frightened all of the others. Those men deserved being skinned.”

  After a moment, he added thoughtfully, “Still, if the fear-emotion aroused in these slaves can be turned to hate it may prove useful. The shock has at least jarred them from their apathy.”

  “You’re a heartless bastard,” I said tonelessly.

  “I have to be, seeing that everyone else chooses to be brainless. These aren’t times for the tender-minded, you. This is an age of dissolution and chaos, such as has often happened in history, and only a person who first accepts the realities of the situation can hope to do much about them. We don’t live in a cosmos where perfection is possible or even desirable, We have to make our compromises and settle for the goals we have some chance of attaining.” To Kathryn, sharply: “Now stop that snuffling. I have to think.”

  She gave him a wide-eyed tear-blurred look.

  “It gives you a hell of an appearance.” He grinned nastily. “Nose red, face swollen, a bad case of hiccoughs. Nothing pretty about crying, you.”

  She drew a shuddering breath and there was anger flushing her cheeks. Gulping back the sobs, she drew away from me and turned her back on him.

  “But I stopped her,” whispered Manuel to me with a brief impishness.

  III

  The endless, meaningless days had worn into a timelessness where I wondered if this ship were not the Flying Dutchman, outward bound forever with a crew of devils and the damned. It was no use trying to hurry Manuel, I gave that up and slipped into the round of work and waiting. Now I think that part of his delay was on purpose, that he wanted to grind the last hope out of the slaves and leave only a hollow yearning for vengeance. They’d fight better that way.