Broken weapon still tightly in his grip, its jagged blade still dangerous, Mesthles maintained his calm, and showed more agility than his appearance suggested. For some time he avoided being pinned against the side of the fighting ring. Neither he nor any of the other fighters ever seemed to consider stepping across that simple line and outside the ring, any more than they would consider jumping through a wall.
The axe now came after Mesthles in what looked like a continuous blur, seeming to pull its giant owner after it. It struck Mesthles at last, full in the back, as he twisted his body in trying to dodge it yet again. His fallen body continued jerking, twitching, moving. A slave limped forward with a maul and dealt the finishing blow.
Suomi’s gut worked suddenly, labored wretchedly, rejected in a spasm what remained of the little he had taken for his breakfast. I should have tranquilized myself, he thought. It was too late now. He faced away from the ring but could do nothing more before the vomit came. If he was desecrating holy ground, well, they would have to kill him for it. But when he straightened up it seemed that no one was paying him any attention at all. Whether it was delicacy or lack of interest he could not tell.
“Polydorus the Foul—Rahim Sosias.”
Suomi found that he could watch. Polydorus, looking no more foul than his competitors, brandished a battered sword with obvious strength and energy. Sosias was paunchy and short, yet he somehow managed to draw first blood with his scimitar, making an ugly slice among Polydorus’s left shoulder. Polydorus was galvanized rather than weakened by the injury, and pressed an attack so hard that for a few moments it seemed he might prevail. But then he aimed a long thrust poorly, and stood looking down at his own right hand and forearm where he had just stepped on it. He grimaced and spat toward Sosias before the scimitar came back to take his life.
The white-clad priest was in the ring again, and it appeared there was going to be another recess. Not that it mattered to Suomi. He turned away, deliberately this time. He had found out that he could watch whatever further maiming might occur; but still he much preferred not to watch.
He stepped closer to Schoenberg and Athena, managed to catch the eye of the former but not the latter, and said: “I’m going back to the ship.” He glanced at Celeste, but she only gave him a bored look and moved a little closer to Schoenberg.
Suomi turned away from them all and trudged back among the trees. It was good to be briefly alone again, but here in this alien forest was no place to stop and think.
When he got back to the foot of the mesa, he found that the climbing rope had been pulled up. Not in the mood to try the ascent without it, Suomi called out. A few seconds later De La Torre’s head and bare shoulders appeared at the top of the slope. “What’s up?” he called down.
“I’ve seen enough. Throw down the rope.”
“All right.” In a moment the rope came snaking down.
WHEN Suomi got to the top he saw that Barbara lay naked on a foam mattress so close to the climbing path that De La Torre could sit on the mattress beside her and do acceptable sentry duty. Suomi noticed also that a pair of binoculars had been set up on a tripod beside the mattress in such a way that a man lying there, perhaps with a woman beneath him, could observe uninterruptedly what was going on in the fighting ring.
De La Torre apparently was finished for the time being with binoculars, mattress, and girl; he had pulled on a pair of shorts already and was continuing to dress. His voice was mild and lazy. “I’ll turn the rifle back to you, then, Carlos, and go down again myself.”
Before Suomi had gotten the rifle’s still-unfamiliar strap adjusted to fit his shoulder, De La Torre was gone again. Suomi watched him out of sight, then said to Barbara, who still lay curled up tiredly on her mattress: “And how are things with you?”
She moved a little, and said in a small voice: “Life appears possible.” Never had he seen Barbara so obviously depressed before. He had lain with her a couple of times on the long trip out, and with Celeste a couple of times. Not with Athena, though, on the trip out he could no longer be casual with her. Now perhaps he could.
Barbara was the only one of them who had refused to watch the tournament at all. So of course the sadist De La Torre had had to pick her for his object, his receptacle . . . Suomi wanted to say something good to her but could think of nothing. Tomorrow her nakedness might arouse his own lust again but right now it only made her seem defenseless and pitiable, lying there face down. So, she had wanted to come along on a luxurious space voyage with a billionaire, and her wish had been granted. She was earning her passage.
No need to walk a sentry’s route around the ship; there was only the one route by which one could ascend. Standing at the head of the path, looking out over the treetops without binoculars, Suomi could see De La Torre arriving at the side of the fighting ring. The next duel had still not gotten underway, evidently; there were still four men waiting to fight, if Suomi was reading the arrangement of the distant figures correctly. The binoculars were handy but he did not care enough to pick them up. Perhaps he did not want to acknowledge their present positioning by moving them.
It promised to be a long few days ahead, until the Tournament slaughtered itself into extinction, and then a very long trip home. But there were compensations. It had been made clear that whatever had seemed to be growing between him and Athena had no real existence. It was not over—it had never been.
Barbara was sitting up and doing things with her fingers to her hair, not yet in a mood to talk. Suomi, turning to look to the north from this high place, saw or thought he saw the mountainous glaciers of hunting country looming just over the horizon there, like unsupported clouds.
What was that sound, just now? The path was clear. Some small animal or flying creature, then. Never mind.
Well, things were no doubt going to be socially uncomfortable on the trip home, but it was well worth it to have settled the thing between them, that might otherwise have dragged on much longer. You had to consider this a favorable conclusion. If they had . . .
Did they have woodpeckers here? He couldn’t see the bird anywhere but still the sound came almost continuously. Must be down under the treetops somewhere. There was also a faint polyphonic roar from the direction of the Tournament, what must have been a loud yell to be audible this far away, but he did not try to see what had happened there.
Barbara was standing up, her clothes in hand. “I’m going in for a shower, Carlos.”
“All right.” He watched her walk away. Women. Magnificent, but who could understand them?
And then, while on the subject of magnificence, there had been the animal, the glacier-beast, whose power and beauty had frozen Suomi in awe and terror as it charged down upon him. He now felt, surprisingly, some small regret that he had not killed it. Better, of course, if it had been allowed to live . . . yet, what was it Thoreau had written? There is a time in the lives of nations, as of individuals, when the best hunters are the best men. Something like that. The nation of interstellar man had presumably long since passed that stage, of course. And so had Carlos Suomi in his individual life. Or he should have. Schoenberg, on the other hand, though something more than a mere sadist—
IN HIS mind the perception of the nagging tapping sound clicked suddenly into place with a remembered visual image, that of stone being worked by hard metal, more precisely that of steps being cut in the side of the mesa by Schoenberg, hanging on the rope with mountaineers’ implements in hand. Suomi had not made the connection before because the sounds he was now hearing were too rapid. No one could wield a hammer at such a speed. And at the same time they sounded too irregular to be made by an automatic tool.
The climbable face of rock was still unoccupied. Suomi had started around the ship to check the other sides of the mesa when he beheld in front of him someone, something, climbing carefully up over the rim and into sight. A huge head of wild, coarse, dark hair, bound by a silver band. Beneath the head a massive wrestler’s body coming up over the
edge of the cliff, clothed in rough furs under a swirling dark cloak. On second look the figure was so huge the mind wanted to refuse belief.
TO BE CONTINUED
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE
CARLOS SUOMI, interior designer with pacifist inclinations, has accompanied tycoon and big-game hunter, OSCAR SCHOENBERG, on a clandestine expedition to Hunters’ Planet, There, once every fifteen standard years, the best hunting in the known galaxy can be found, though outworlders’ trips such as SCHOENBERG’S are frowned on by the Interstellar Authority.
Also, five hundred years before, in the solar system of which Hunters’ is a part, the great commander JOHANN KARLSEN led a human-manned fleet to victory over the berserkers. Berserkers are automated warships and auxiliary machines built during some interstellar war between long-vanished races, and at the time of the story will ravaging the galaxy, their programmed purpose being the destruction of all life.
One berserker survived the war on Hunters’ Planet, and was hidden by a cult of humans who worshipped it as Death personified. This intelligent machine has worked with generations of human aides until its secret cult has become the most powerful group on the planet, challenged only by the shadowy organization called the Brotherhood. The berserker’s goal is to obtain a starship and carry out its programmed tasks of depopulating the planet and—killing the berserkers’ great enemy KARLSEN.
The plan to seize a starship involves luring some outworld craft to land at Godsmountain, where the cultists now openly manage the planet-wide worship of Thorun, god of war and of the hunt, and the chief object of worship on this planet of hunters and warriors. In the Hunterian pantheon, KARLSEN has also become a demigod. Outworlders are to be lured by the prospect of watching a Tournament of warriors fighting to the death in single combat. The winner and sole survivor of the Tournament is promised a place of eternal honor at Thorun’s right hand, while even the losers are assured of god hood.
SCHOENBERG, fascinated by the intensity of life attainable during moments of extreme danger, and by heroic deeds (he and SUOMI have both made recordings of KARLSEN’S battle messages, which are still radiating through interstellar space) wants to watch the Tournament, and lands his ship on a small mesa on Godsmountain’s flank. Aboard as his guests, besides SUOMI, are GUS DE LA TORRE, who turns out to be a sadist; ATHENA POULSON, who is SCHOENBERG’S private secretary and the chief reason for SUOMI’S coming on the trip; and CELESTE SERVETUS and BARBARA HURTADO, playgirls who were brought along for male consumption like the cigars and the wine.
ANDREAS, head of the secret berserker cult and also High Priest of Thorun, sends the demigod Mjollnir (really a robot designed by the berserker and utilizing some berserker components, but built by Hunterian craftsmen) with some picked warriors to seize the ship while SUOMI is on guard and most of the other Earth people are watching the Tournament.
BARBARA is taking a shower inside the ship when SUOMI hears the attacking party climbing the mesa’s sheerest side.
THE climber rolled the great length of his frame out onto the horizontal surface of the mesa and raised his gigantic head to look straight at Suomi. The impassive face, its lower half masked by wild dark beard and mustache, was of the right size to fit the head, and yet it was subtly wrong. Not that it was scarred, or intrinsically deformed. Though it was no mask in the ordinary sense, it was yet artificial. Too skillfully artificial, like the work of some mad artist, convinced he could fool people into thinking that this robot, this dummy, was a man.
The figure rose gracefully to its feet and Suomi saw something that its body had obscured.-At the very edge of the cliff a climber’s piton had been hammered into the rock. The end of a line was knotted to an eye in the piton and the line went tautly back out of sight over the cliff. Now the face of a second climber, this one of normal stature, indubitably human, rose into view.
Meanwhile the trailblazing giant had risen to his full height. He was taller than anyone Suomi had ever seen. As he stood up he thrust a mountaineer’s hammer into a pouch at his waist and with the same motion of his arm unsheathed an enormous sword.
Suomi had come to a dead stop, not paralyzed with fear as he had been by the glacier-beast, but simply unable to form any satisfactory explanation for what his senses were recording.
The first answer to cross his mind was that this was all some ugly and elaborate practical joke arranged by Schoenberg or De La Torre but he realized even before the idea was fully formed that they would hardly think it necessary to go to so much trouble to scare him. And Schoenberg, at least, would have too much sense to yell boo at a nervous man with a loaded weapon.
The second explanation to pop into Suomi’s head was that there must be hooligans on Hunters’ planet the same as everywhere else, and some of these had come to see what they might steal from the outworlders’ ship.
But the marauders’ giant leader was not covered by either of these hypotheses. The mind stopped and boggled at the sight, then tried to go around it and proceed.
With some vague idea of scaring off bandits, Suomi began to unsling the rifle from his back. As he did so the incredible giant took two steps toward him with its sword upraised, then halted as if satisfied with its position.
By this time the second climber, a Hunterian warrior, young and tough-looking, was completely up on the cliff-top and proceeding with drawn sword toward the open hatchway of the ship. The third, also of normal size, was right behind him.
“Halt,” said Suomi, conscious even as he spoke of the uncertainty in his own voice. He felt foolish when no one halted even though the rifle was now in his hands.
Now there were two human invaders on top of the mesa besides the man-shaped giant, and another armed man was climbing into sight. The ship’s hatch stood open and—except for Suomi—unprotected. And Barbara was in there.
He had not leveled the rifle at them yet, but now he did, and shouted “Halt!”, this time with conviction. Instantly the huge figure lunged toward him, faster than any human could conceivably move. The man-slicing sword was held high, ready to strike. Suomi squeezed the trigger, realized when it failed to move that he had failed to release the safety. Instinctively he stepped back from the onrushing sword and felt his foot move into empty air. His left hand, grabbing wildly for support, caught hold of the climbing rope and saved him from a killing fall. The misstep dropped him only a short distance down from the edge of the mesa, but still his heel came down on rock with an impact that jarred his leg and spine. His arm twisted with the fall and the rope slipped from his grip. He lost all footing, tumbled and rolled on gravel, and stopped when he came up with a breathtaking slam against an outcropping of rock. Still he was only about halfway down the path, the steepest part of which was just below him.
With his back against the rock that had stopped him, he half sat, half lay there, facing up the hill. Dazedly he realized that he was not seriously injured, and that his right hand still held the rifle. Now his finger found the small safety lever beside the breech and turned it back. Somehow he even remembered to set it for full automatic fire.
The giant man-thing with its sword upraised reared into view above. When it saw Suomi it dropped itself onto the steep slope with the grace of a dancer. With sword leveled at him now it descended upon him, moving under perfect control, one long bounding stride, two . . .
THE rifle stuttered in Suomi’s hands. The sword-brandishing golem’s left arm erupted in a spray of dry-looking particles and smoke as the man-thing spun in an incredible pirouette, more graceful by far than any wounded animal. Knocked off balance and deflected from its course by the shock of the rifle’s force-packets, the towering shape slid past Suomi and on down the slope.
But it did not fall. In another moment, near the bottom, it had regained full control and stopped its slide. Then it turned and was calmly climbing, like a mountain goat, at a fast run. The sword, whirling and gleaming, came toward him once again, the face below it a mask of insane serenity.
Suomi uttered a sobbing noi
se, a compound of terror and frustration. In his hands the rifle leaped and kicked, firing continuously while he struggled to keep it aimed. The fur-clad monster, face still without expression beneath the silver headband, was stopped in its tracks. Puffs of fur flew from it under the barrage, and splinters and streaks of unidentifiable debris. Then it was hurled back down the hill, still staggering to keep its feet, black cloak alternately furling and flying. Far at the bottom Suomi’s continuing mad fusillade pinned it like an insect, leaping and convulsing wildly, against an immovable tree trunk.
A force-packet dissolved the silver headband and half the monster’s face in a gray bloodless smear. The sword flew from its hand. With a final, awkward, uphill lunge, the figure fell. It rolled over on the ground and lay inert. At last Suomi released the trigger.
Suddenly all was quiet. The sky, the mesa, seemed to be whirling around Suomi’s head. He realized that he was sprawled precariously on the steep slope, his head considerably lower than his feet. One false move and he would go plunging down. He was breathing in little sobbing gasps. Moving very carefully, still clutching the precious rifle, he got his feet more or less beneath him. Now he could feel a dozen cuts and bruises from the fall.
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