by Anthology
"Dale ... what's the matter?"
"But I thought--" He swallowed with difficulty. "I thought you meant that I was the--"
Something struck the top of his head; this time, for certain, the concussion shock of a blaster beam passing close above it. There was a vicious crack as the beam split the tree beyond, then a crash and explosion of wood fragments as a second beam followed the first.
He rolled from the log; taking Lyla with him. The arrow bushes shielded them briefly, long enough for them to reach the temporary safety of a small swale.
"Dale!" Her dark eyes were wide with puzzled surprise and one small foot was bare from the loss of a sandal. "Someone shot at us!"
He thought, So Narf got his pictures, after all.
"Rootenant!" Alonzo came running. "They are that way--awr spread out to be sure to kirr you."
Alonzo motioned with his nose, a movement that seemed to cover all the high ground beyond them. At least, the enemy was not between them and camp. Not yet.
A distant shout came, an order from Narf to his men:
"All of you--down that ridge! Get between Hunter and camp!"
"It's him!" Her fingers gripped his arm. "He wants them to kill you!"
They had fired from a distance too great for his own blaster. He could not defy them from where he now stood.
"I'll have to try to get within range of them," he said. "I'll go back--"
"No!" Her grip on his arm tightened. "Don't leave me, Dale--don't let him find me here."
He looked down the length of the swale. At its lower end the ghost tree forest began, dense and concealing--but all down the length of the swale the snarevines lay in thick, viciously barbed entanglements, overlying a bed of sharp rocks and boulders. She could never get to the safety of the ghost trees in time.
Narf had his pictures, now. What would he do to her in the insanity of his hatred and triumph when he reached her?
"All right, Lyla," he said. "I'll see that you get to the trees--"
* * * * * * * * *
There was a crashing of explosions and debris leaped skyward behind them and along both sides of the swale. The firing continued, scattered but very effectively consistent, and he said as he drew his blaster, "I guess they don't want us to go away."
He set the regulator of the blaster at lowest intensity so that the beam would not clip dangerous flying fragments from the boulders. The green, tough vines disintegrated reluctantly while the precious minutes sped by; while the unhindered assassins would be hurrying to the point where the entire swale would be visible to them and under their fire.
Alonzo was following along near the top of the swale's side, ignoring the danger as he watched the progress of the enemy and reported it to Hunter: "Now they are halfway, Rootenant, hurrying faster--"
They reached the lower end of the swale. The last of the vines disintegrated and the ghost tree forest lay before them.
He touched her cheek in farewell. "Get on to camp, as fast as you can run."
The firing abruptly ceased as he spoke. There was an ominous silence. Alonzo came running, his tone almost a yelp in its urgency:
"They are awrmost where they can see us! We got to get her out of here, Rootenant--awrfur quick!"
* * * * *
"Lyla!"
It was the voice of Val, sharp with concern for her. He came running out of the ghost trees, all his cold impassiveness gone. "Are you hurt, Honey--are you hurt?"
"You came for me!" She whispered the words, her face radiant. Then she ran to meet him, her arms outstretched, crying, "Val ... oh, Val...."
Their arms went around each other.
Then the woods erupted as ten blasters laid down a barrage to block any escape to camp.
"I'll try to give you a chance to get through," Hunter said quickly. "Be ready for it when it comes."
He ran toward the firing line, taking advantage of the concealment afforded by the first fringe of ghost trees. They should be almost within range of his own weapon, now--
Again, the firing abruptly ceased, as though by some signal. There came the furious raving of Narf:
"It's that Boran she wants! Kill him, too!"
Sonig cursed with bitter rage. "Jardeen is lost to Verdam if any witness escapes--and we'll all hang, besides."
There was a second of silence, and then Narf's command:
"Kill the woman, too!"
There was a roar like thunder as the firing began. The ground trembled and debris filled the air with flying fragments. Hunter, still running toward the enemy under cover of the trees, saw Val trying to get Lyla to safety and saw them both hurled to the ground as a tree exploded in front of them. They would never live to rise and run again--
* * * * *
He saw Rockford's plan, at last, and what his own duty would now have to be. He knew why Rockford had said of this day, "If you can live through it, you will have it made."
And he had a cold feeling inside him that he was not going to have it made.
He took a deep breath and ran toward the enemy, out of the concealment of the ghost trees and in the open where they could not fail to see him, his blaster firing a continuous beam that fell only a little short of the enemy, that showed them he would be close enough to kill them within seconds if he was not stopped.
The fire concentrated upon him, giving Lyla and Val their chance for escape. He ran through an inferno of crashing explosions, twisting and dodging on ground that trembled and heaved under his feet, while razor-sharp rock shrapnel filled the air with shrill, deadly screaming sounds.
Something ripped through his shoulder, to spin him around and send him rolling. He scrambled up, firing as he did so, and ran drunkenly on.
Something struck the side of his head and he went down again. He tried to rise and fell back, a blackness sweeping over him that he could not hold away despite his efforts to do so.
It seemed to him that the firing had suddenly stopped, that in its place was the hoarse buzz of a police stun-beam. It seemed he saw helicopters overhead, bearing the bright blue insignia of the Royal Guard and then there was nothing but the blackness.
* * * * *
There was a brief, dreamlike return to consciousness. He was in a Royal Guard helicopter and Alonzo was beside him, grinning, and saying, "You be O.K.--I grad! And my Princess Ryra--rook at her now, Rootenant!"
He saw Lyla, her hand in Val's, and her face was glowing and beautiful in its new-found happiness. Then she was bending down, kissing him, and saying, "Dale ... Dale ... how can we ever thank you for what you did?"
* * * * *
When the blackness lifted the second time he was lying, bandaged, on a cot in the meeting hall and the voice of Rockford was saying, "... Ready to go in just a minute."
The hall was filled with members of the royal court who had come for the wedding. He saw the white robes of Church of Vesta dignitaries who had come to officiate at the wedding. Then he saw the seven grim old men seated at the far end of the table.
The Royal Council--with the judicial power to give even death sentences in crimes committed against royalty.
Sonig, his face white and staring, was being half led, half carried, away from them.
Narf, in the grip of another Guardsman, was standing before the Council and saying in a tone both incredulous and sneering:
"Is that my sentence?"
"There is a qualification to it," one of the Council said. "It seems only just, in view of your crime, that you be tortured until death--"
The rest of the words were lost as the blackness swept back. But before unconsciousness was complete, when all else in the hall was gone from him, he heard Narf's cry; an animal-like bawl of protest, raw and hoarse with anguish....
* * * * *
"Ah ... you're coming out of it, my boy."
Rockford was standing over him. "They gave you a Restoration shot on Vesta forty-eight hours ago. It will be wearing off in a minute and your head will clear."
He sat up, and
the dizziness faded swiftly away. He saw that he was in the compartment of an interstellar ship and he knew that it was Earthbound.
And that Vesta, and brown-eyed Lyla, were now part of the past....
"Don't look so sad, my boy," Rockford said. "You'll get due credit and promotion for the invaluable part you played in my plan."
"But--"
"I know. But she was never yours. You'll find life is full of heartbreaks like that, son.
"And we accomplished our mission. Narf's crime neatly invalidated the proxy marriage. Then Lyla set a new precedent by marrying Val that very day. Earth has never had two such loyal and grateful friends as Val and Lyla."
"You knew all about them, didn't you?" he asked.
"Strategic Service has to know everything. And I knew they were still in love even though each was too proud to admit it. That's why I had to insist on Val coming to Vesta. After that, it was only a matter of using you to awaken Val to the fact that she did not love Narf. And of taking care of various little details, such as faking an official request for the helicopters to come out two hours ahead of time, getting Val off to find her at the proper time, and so on."
Rockford smiled at him, "And you learned that an old man's mind can be mightier than the space fleets of the Verdam empire--and that the line of duty that produces the best results can sometimes be very devious."
He thought of the white-faced Sonig, and the anguished bawl he had heard from Narf.
"I suppose they were going to hang Narf and Sonig at once."
"The Council would have, no doubt. But Lyla was so happy that she begged the Council to give them very light sentences--or just let them go free. So I suggested a compromise. The Royal Council regarded it as very fitting."
"What was it?"
"For Sonig, no punishment. The murder attempt, being news of public interest, will be broadcast upon Vesta and other worlds, including a factual, unbiased account of Sonig's participation in it. Shortly afterward, Sonig will be taken to Verdam and turned over to his own benevolent government. Vesta will file no charges."
"But Sonig lost Jardeen for his government. They'll execute him for that!"
"Yes. I'm afraid so. Shall we call it poetic justice?"
"What about Narf?"
"His sentence was life-long exile on his Sea Island estate. He will be provided with all the luxuries to which he has been accustomed, including a full staff of servants. He will continue to enjoy all his possessions there, including his gallery of nude paintings, his risqué films, his pornographic library, and so on. In fact, since he is so fascinated by pornography and such a collector thereof, any pornographic material which might become available on Vesta in the future will be sent to him."
"That's not right ... I mean, they were going to torture him to death."
"Not 'to death'. It was 'until death'. There's a difference."
"But that bawling noise he made--"
"Ah ... that was due to the one restrictive qualification to the benign terms of his exile. Every woman on his estate was to be removed before he reached there, leaving men servants only. Patrol boats will see to it that for so long as he lives no woman shall ever set foot on the Sea Islands."
Rockford smiled again. "Lord Narf succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in keeping his boyhood vow of being always a man among men."
* * *
Contents
CRY FROM A FAR PLANET
By Tom Godwin
The problem of separating the friends from the enemies was a major one in the conquest of space as many a dead spacer could have testified. A tough job when you could see an alien and judge appearances; far tougher when they were only whispers on the wind.
A smile of friendship is a baring of the teeth. So is a snarl of menace. It can be fatal to mistake the latter for the former.
Harm an alien being only under circumstances of self-defense.
TRUST NO ALIEN BEING UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
--From Exploration Ship's Handbook.
He listened in the silence of the Exploration ship's control room. He heard nothing but that was what bothered him; an ominous quiet when there should have been a multitude of sounds from the nearby village for the viewscreen's audio-pickups to transmit. And it was more than six hours past the time when the native, Throon, should have come to sit with him outside the ship as they resumed the laborious attempt to learn each other's language.
The viewscreen was black in the light of the control room, even though it was high noon outside. The dull red sun was always invisible through the world's thick atmosphere and to human eyes full day was no more than a red-tinged darkness.
He switched on the ship's outside floodlights and the viewscreen came to bright white life, showing the empty glades reaching away between groves of purple alien trees. He noticed, absently, that the trees seemed to have changed a little in color since his arrival.
The village was hidden from view by the outer trees but there should have been some activity in the broad area visible to him. There was none, not even along the distant segment of what should have been a busy road. The natives were up to something and he knew, from hard experience on other alien worlds, that it would be nothing good. It would be another misunderstanding of some kind and he didn't know enough of their incomprehensible language to ask them what it was--
* * * * *
Suddenly, as it always came, he felt someone or something standing close behind him and peering over his shoulder. He dropped his hand to the blaster he had taken to wearing at all times and whirled.
Nothing was behind him. There never was. The control room was empty, with no hiding place for anything, and the door was closed, locked by the remote-control button beside him. There was nothing.
The sensation of being watched faded, as though the watcher had withdrawn to a greater distance. It was perhaps the hundredth time within six days that he had felt the sensation. And when he slept at night something came to nuzzle at his mind; faceless, formless, utterly alien. For the past three nights he had not let the blaster get beyond quick reach of his hand, even when in bed.
But whatever it was, it could not be on the ship. He had searched the ship twice, a methodical compartment-by-compartment search that had found nothing. It had to be the work of the natives from outside the ship. Except....
Why, if the natives were telepathic, did the one called Throon go through the weary pretense of trying to learn a mutually understandable form of communication?
There was one other explanation, which he could not accept: that he was following in the footsteps of Will Garret of Ship Nine who had deliberately gone into a white sun two months after the death of his twin brother.
He looked at the chair beside his own, Johnny's chair, which would forever be empty, and his thoughts went back down the old, bitter paths. The Exploration Board had been wrong when they thought the close bond between identical twins would make them the ideal two-man crews for the lonely, lifetime journeys of the Exploration Ships. Identical twins were too close; when one of them died, the other died in part with him.
They had crossed a thousand light-years of space together, he and Johnny, when they came to the bleak planet that he would name Johnny's World. He should never have let Johnny go alone up the slope of the honey-combed mountain--but Johnny had wanted to take the routine record photographs of the black, tiger-like beasts which they had called cave cats and the things had seemed harmless and shy, despite their ferocious appearance.
"I'm taking them a sack of food that I think they might like," Johnny had said. "I want to try to get some good close-up shots of them."
Ten minutes later he heard the distant snarl of Johnny's blaster. He ran up the mountainside, knowing already that he was too late. He found two of the cave cats lying where Johnny had killed them. Then he found Johnny, at the foot of a high cliff. He was dead, his neck broken by the fall. Scattered all around him from the torn sack was the food he had wanted to give to the cats.
He b
uried Johnny the next day, while a cold wind moaned under a lead-gray sky. He built a monument for him; a little mound of frosty stones that only the wild animals would ever see--
* * * * *
A chime rang, high and clear, and the memories were shattered. The orange light above the hyperspace communicator was flashing; the signal that meant the Exploration Board was calling him from Earth.
He flipped the switch and said, "Paul Jameson, Exploration Ship One."
The familiar voice of Brender spoke:
"It's been some time since your preliminary report. Is everything all right?"
"In a way," he answered. "I was going to give you the detailed report tomorrow."
"Give me a brief sketch of it now."
"Except for their short brown fur, the natives are humanoid in appearance. But there are basic differences. Their body temperature is cool, like their climate. Their vision range is from just within the visible red on into the infrared. They'll shade their eyes from the light of anything as hot as boiling water but they'll look square into the ship's floodlights and never see them."
"And their knowledge of science?" Brender asked.
"They have a good understanding of it, but along lines entirely different from what our own were at their stage of development. For example: they power their machines with chemicals but there is no steam, heat, or exhaust."
"That's what we want to find--worlds where branches of research unknown to our science are being explored. How about their language?"
"No progress with it yet." He told Brender of the silence in the village and added, "Even if Throon should show up I could not ask him what was wrong. I've learned a few words but they have so many different definitions that I can't use them."
"I know," Brender said. "Variable and unrelated definitions, undetectable shades of inflection--and sometimes a language that has no discernibly separate words. The Singer brothers of Ship Eight ran into the latter. We've given them up as lost."