The Kyben Stories

by Harlan Ellison

  Then he had the blastick in his arms, fumbling for the fire stud, and raw power was blueing out, in a wide arc, catching the remaining four members of the patrol.

  Their screams were short, and their bodies spattered the Marshes for fifty feet. Tallant stared down at the raw, pulsing husks that had been aliens a minute before, and leaned against a tree.

  God, God, God…he murmured over and over in his mind’s desertland, and felt the nausea rising again. He thought of the dust for a moment. Of the packets in his sealed jumper pocket, but felt no need for it now.

  Somehow, the fire was up in him.

  The killer instinct was rising in the coward.

  Tallant struck out again, a fresh weapon in his hands.

  By now the Earthmen were far away in their ships, and the Kyban still feared the bomb would trigger if they tried to take off; Tallant knew they had not tried to leave Deald’s World by one fact only:

  The bomb in his middle had not exploded yet.

  But time was dripping away.

  VI

  That night, Tallant killed his twentieth and thirtieth Kyban.

  The second set of five went as he left the Blue Marshes. Ambushed from behind a huge, snout-like rock, they went down bubbling.

  Single reconnaissance men died by knife and by club at Tallant’s hands as he made his way through the fields of swaying, unharvested Summerset that lay on the outskirts of Xville. They walked slowly through the fields, another five-man team, just their shoulders and heads showing above the tall burnished stalks of grain. Occasionally Tallant, from where he crouched below sight-level in the field, saw the snout of a blastick poke up from the Summerset. It was hardly difficult at all to drag each one down in his turn as the alien passed nearby.

  The first one’s skull shattered like a plastic carton, as Benno Tallant swung the end of the blastick viciously. Even as the Kyban sank down nearly atop him, the looter felt a rugged thrill course down his veins; there was a pleasure he had never known in this sort of guerrilla warfare. From the first team-member he had taken the long, scythe-shaped knife with its inlaid tile handle.

  It had worked wondrously well on the other four.

  Kyban blood was yellow. He wasn’t surprised.

  By the time dawn slid glowingly up on the horizon, Tallant knew the Kyban were aware of his presence. What it meant, who he was, what he was doing on Deald’s World…none of those answerables might have occurred to them as clearly as he phrased them, but thirty Kyban had by that time died before the blue power of his blastick or the curve of his knife. And eventually they would be found where they had fallen; they would be reported missing; they would not check in.

  Then the Kyban Command would know they were not alone on the planet.

  All through the night he had heard robot patrol scouts circling overhead, trying to track down the neutrino emission of the bomb, and several times two or three had homed in on him. But at two miles radius they merely circled, waiting to pinpoint by ground search. But before the troops could close in, he had made good his escape, and they circled helplessly, awaiting new instructions.

  It seemed about the time for them to realize the bomb was in a moving carrier. What that carrier was, and the reason thirty troops were dead, would soon show themselves to be the same: a man alive on the planet.

  The robot patrol scouts circled and buzzed overhead, and for a moment Tallant wondered how they had gotten aloft when a ship could not. Then he answered his question with the logical reason. The robots were just that—robots. Operating from mechanical means. The ships were inverspace ships, operating from warp-mechanisms. And it was obviously the warp pattern that set the bomb off.

  So he could be easily tracked, but the Kyban could not leave, to chase and destroy the Earthies.

  Tallant’s fist balled and his dirt-streaked face twisted in a new kind of hatred as he thought of the men who had left him here to die. Parkhurst and Shep and Doc Budder and the rest. They who had left him here to this!

  He was fooling them. He was staying alive!

  But wasn’t that what they had wanted? Hadn’t they chosen properly? Wasn’t he running to stay alive, allowing them to escape to warn Earth? What did he care for Earth? What had it ever given him?

  He swore then, in a voiceless certainty deeper than mere frustration and anger, that he would do more than survive. He would come out of this ahead. He wasn’t sure how…but he would.

  As the light of morning reached him through the jagged opening in the front of the building, where he lay on the floor, he vowed he would not die here on this—someone else’s—battlefield.

  He rose to his feet, and looked out through the blasted plasteel face of the building. The capital city of Deald’s World stretched below him, and to the right.

  In the center, towering higher than any building, was the command ship of the Kyban fleet.

  Somehow, in the darkness, with the newly-acquired stealth of a Marsh animal, he had passed the outgoing Kyban troop lines, and was behind their front. He was inside the circle. Now he had to take advantage of that.

  He sat down for a moment to think of his only way out.

  Before the looting Kyban soldier stepped into the room, he had arrived at the solution. He had to get to that Kyban ship, and get inside. He had to find a Kyban surgeon. It might be death, but it was a might; any other way it was a certainty.

  He stood up to go, to skulk through the alleys of Xville to the ship, when the double-chinned, muscled Kyban came up the partially-ruined stairs, and stopped cold in the entrance of the room, amazement mirrored on his puttied features. An Earthie…here on conquered ground!

  He dragged his blastick from its sheath, aimed it, and fired dead range at Tallant’s stomach.

  The shaft of blue light caught Tallant as he rocketed sideways. It seared at his flesh, and he felt an all-consuming wave of pain rip down through him. He had side-stepped partially, and the blast had taken him high on the right arm. He was horribly convulsed by agony for an instant, then…

  He could not feel his right arm.

  Tallant was moving through a fog of pain, and in a moment, before the Kyban could fire again, had grabbed the blastick with his left hand. The little man felt a strange power coursing through him, and he dimly recognized it as the power of hatred; the hatred of all other men, all other beings, that had displaced his cowardice.

  He ripped at the blastick violently, and the alien was yanked toward him, thrown off-balance.

  As the bewildered Kyban stumbled past, losing his hold on his own weapon, Tallant brought up a foot, and sent it slamming into the alien’s back.

  The yellow outworlder staggered forward, arms thrown out wildly, tripped over the rubble clogging the floor, and pitched headfirst through the rift in the wall.

  Tallant limped to the hole and watched him fall, screaming.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarghhhhh!” and the sound of it whistled back up through the city’s canyon, till it vanished with an audible thud thirty floors below. That scream, held and piercing, was more than a death knell. It was a signal. The area was a great sounding-board, and every foot of that screaming descent had been recorded on the walls and in the stones of the city.

  The Kyban would be here shortly. Their comrade could not have directed them to their goal more effectively had he planned it.

  Then Tallant realized something:

  He had only one arm.

  His eyes seemed to swing down without his willing them; he could feel no pain now; the blastick had cauterized the stump immediately. There would be no infection, there would be no more pain, but he was neatly amputated at the biceps. His eyes moved slightly and he gagged at the sight.

  With one arm, what could he hope to accomplish?

  How could he stay alive?

  Then he heard the raised voices of the Kyban coming through the building; he knew they would investigate from where their comrade had fallen. He moved with wooden legs, feeling the fight draining out of him, but moving non
etheless.

  Moving in a reflexive pattern of survival…recognizing his only chance was to get to that Kyban flagship towering in the center of Xville. He had arrived at the lone chance, the final chance available to him, after close inspection of all paths out of this situation. That chance was almost certainly death, but the almost was a shade no other chance held.

  His legs carried him out of the room, down a back flight of stairs, endlessly, endlessly down and somewhere along the way—probably in the room itself, but he could not quite remember—he carried the blastick. Then there was a time, as he wound down the interminable stairs, when he did not have the blastick. And even later, as he saw the big number 14 on the wall by the door, he had it again. As the numbers decreased, as 10 melted to 5 to 3, he realized he had come thirty flights…entirely in shock.

  When he was on the first floor, the front of the building was surrounded by Kyban, staring and motioning at the body of their comrade. Tallant looked away; he had thought himself inured to death, but the Kyban had died in a particularly unpleasant manner.

  He shifted the blastick in the crook of his arm—the one arm left—and huddled back against the wall. There were three tortuous miles of ruined city and piled rubble between him and the flagship. (And once he was there, he had no assurance that the thing he sought would even be there!) Not to mention the entire land-army of the Kyban fleet, a horde of robot patrol scouts that must surely have realized the bomb was being carried by a man, and his own wounds.

  He leaned the blastick against the wall, and felt gingerly at the stump of his arm. There was no pain, and the raw, torn end had been neatly, completely, like a bit of putty smoothed over, cauterized. He felt fine otherwise, though the night in the Blue Marshes had brought him a kink in the right leg, forcing him into an unconscious limp.

  There was still a chance to make it.

  At that moment he heard the public address system in the scout ship that circled the building. It boomed down, flooding the streets with sound, in English:

  “EARTHMAN! WE KNOW YOU ARE HERE! GIVE YOURSELF UP BEFORE YOU DIE! EVEN IF YOU CONTROL THE BOMB, WE WILL FIND YOU AND KILL YOU…FIND YOU AND KILL YOU…FIND YOU AND KILL YOU…”

  The robot scout ship moved off across the city, the same message broadcast over and over, till Tallant felt each word burning into his brain. Find you and kill you, find you and kill you…

  His breath came in short gasps, and he stumbled back against the wall, feeling its stony coolness under his hands. He closed his eyes, and drank deeply of emptiness. The path of cowardice was a twisting one. He had found that out. But though it might occasionally cross the road of bravery, it always passed back to the other path.

  Tallant was frightened. He reached for his dream-dust.

  Time was growing short and Tallant could feel it in his gut.

  He had no way of knowing whether the bomb was nearing triggering time, but there was a vague, prickling sensation throughout his body that he interpreted as danger. The bomb might go off at any second, and that would be the end of it. Benno Tallant tightened his single fist into a painful ball; his rodent-like face drew down into an expression of blind fury, and the lines about his closed eyes grew deeper as he screwed his eyes tighter. He squeezed them till he heard a muted roaring in his ears; then he swore to himself he would come out ahead in this situation! Somehow, although he knew no possible way it could come true, he was going to beat the lousy Earthies who had done this to him. He was going to get to that flagship…and when he did! He was going to win.

  Not by cutting the corners the way a coward would…the way he had been doing it for years…but the way a winner does it, the way he was going to do it.

  He hefted the blastick and turned to go.

  The Kyban knew now that the bomb was in a human’s hands. Not in a human’s stomach—that they could not know—but in a human’s hands. For their target had moved, shifted, eluded them all through the night. Obviously it was not buried or fastened down. Hidden in the best possible place…in a moving target. They were after him, and the net would be closing down. But there were a few things in his favor.

  The most important of which was the fact that he had killed a number of patrolmen out in the fields, in the Marshes, and they would center their search in that area. They would not realize he had come through the sewer system into the capital city during the night.

  He was safe for a while.

  Even as Tallant thought that, as he moved toward the basement stairs of the ruined building, a Kyban officer, resplendent in sand-white uniform and gold braid, came through the door in front of him.

  The alien was unarmed, but in an instant he had whipped out the dress knife, and was making passes in the air before Tallant’s face. That same feeling of urgency, of strength from some unknown pool within him, boiled up in Tallant. The officer was too close for Tallant to use the long blastick, but he still had the arc-shaped knife from the night before. He dropped the blastick softly into a pile of ash and slag-dust, ducked as the Kyban blade whistled past his ear, and leaped for the officer, before the other’s tentacled hand could whip back around.

  With his one hand fingers-out, Tallant reached the Kyban, drove the thin fingers deep into the alien’s eyes. The officer let out a piercing shriek as his eyeballs watered into pulp, and the prongs of Tallant’s hand went into his head. Then, before the Kyban could open his mouth to shriek again, before he could do anything but wave his hands emptily in the air, feeling his eyes running down his cheeks, Benno Tallant drew his own scythe-shaped blade from his belt, and slashed the alien’s neck with one sidearm swipe.

  The officer fell in a golden-blooded heap, and Tallant grabbed up his blastick, charging through the hall of the building, reaching the door that led to the basement, slamming it behind him, and plunging into the darkness of the building’s depths.

  Overhead he could hear the yells of Kyban foot-soldiers discovering their officer, but he didn’t wait to have them discover him. Keeping careful track of which direction he faced, he felt around the floor of the basement till he contacted the sealplug that led to the sewers. He had come up through that polluted dankness the night before, seeking momentary rest, and fresh air.

  He had climbed to the top of the building to see how the enemy was displaced, and fallen asleep—against his will. Now he was back to the sewers, and the sewers would carry him to the one lone chance for life he could imagine.

  He ran his suddenly strong fingers around the edge of the sealing strip, and pried up the heavy lid with one hand.

  He grimaced in the darkness. He had to pry it up with one hand…that was all they had left him.

  Another moment and the port sighed up, counter-balanced, and Tallant slid himself over the lip, the blastick stuck through his belt. He kept himself wedged against the side of the hole, a few feet above the darkly swirling water of the sewer, and grabbed for the lid. The sealplug sighed down, and Tallant let himself drop.

  The knife slid from his belt, fell into the water and was gone in an instant. He hit the tunnel wall as he fell, and came down heavily on one leg, tightening it, sending a pain shooting up through his left side.

  He regained his footing by clawing at the slimy walls of the tunnel, and braced himself, legs spread wide apart against the dragging tide of the sewer water.

  He kept pulling himself along the wall till he found a side-tunnel that headed in the proper direction. Just as he turned the corner, he saw the sealplug open, far back down the tunnel’s length, and a searchbeam flooded the water with a round disc of light. They had suspected his means of escape already.

  “Ssssisss sss sss kliss-isss!” He heard the sibilance of the Kyban speech being dragged down the hollowness of the tunnel to him. They were coming down into the sewers after him.

  He had to hurry. The net was tightening. He knew he had a good chance of getting away, even though they had light and he had none.

  They would have to try all the tunnels, but he would not; he would keep going
in one direction, inexorably.

  The direction that led to the gigantic Kyban flagship.

  VII

  It was a short run from the sewer plug that exited by the service entrance of what had been a department store. A short run, and he was hidden by the shadow of the monstrous spaceship fin. A guard stood by the ramp; guards stood at each ramp; Tallant circled.

  He found a loading ramp, and the guard slumped against the shining skin of the deep-space ship. Tallant took a step toward the alien, realized he’d never make it in time.

  The same strange urge to strike rose up in Benno Tallant, showing him a way he would not have considered the day before. He could not use the blastick—too noisy; he had lost the scythe-knife; he was too far away to throw a boot and hope it would stun the guard.

  So he walked out, facing the guard, coughing.

  Carefully, nonchalantly, as though he had every right to be there. And as the guard heard the coughing, looked up, and amazedly watched Tallant stalking toward him…Benno Tallant waved a greeting, and began to whistle.

  The guard watched for a second.

  The second was long enough.

  Tallant had his hand around the alien’s neck before the guard could raise an alarm. One leg behind the Kyban’s, and he was atop the guard. The butt of the blastick shattered the flat-featured face, and the way was clear.

  Tallant crouched as he walked up the ramp. Late morning light filtered across his back, and he held the cumbersome blastick with one hand on the trigger-stock, the weapon shoved under his armpit. He sprinted quickly up the ramp, slid his hand down the stock to the handle. The inside of the ship was cool and moist and dark.

  Kyba was a cooler planet, and a moister planet, and a darker planet.

  But all three congealed into a feeling of dank oppression that made Tallant wonder bleakly whether it was worth it; whether life was so important suddenly, that he should keep on moving, and not just lie down.