In the Beginning

by Robert Silverberg

  The plasticloth blackened and charred. He let it drop, and the “water” quickly finished the job. Pool? No; he thought. Concentrated sulphuric acid, or something else as destructive.

  Grinning grimly at his narrow escape, he wiped his perspiration with another strip torn from his sleeve, and kept going. Several hours, at least, had passed since he had entered the strange world within the alien’s mind.

  That meant one of two things: either the time-scale in here was different, somehow, from that outside, or that his half-hour limit had elapsed in the outer world and Dr. Phelps was unsuccessful in bringing him back.

  That was a nice thought. Suppose he was stuck here indefinitely, inside the mind of an alien being, in this muggy jungle full of sulphuric-acid brooks? A nice fate that was.

  Well, he thought, I asked for it.

  The stalemate couldn’t continue indefinitely. If he had swallowed some of the acid he thought was water, that would have ended the contest without doubt; he wouldn’t have had time to cope with the searing fluid.

  The answer lay there—surprise. Both he and the alien were mental entities who could do battle as they pleased—but in this conflict, it was necessary to take the opponent by surprise, before he could counterthrust or vanish.

  He began to see a solution.

  Up ahead lay the castle—unreachable, through some trick of the alien’s. Very well. Harrell’s brows drew together in concentration for a moment; his mind formed a strategy—and formed men to carry it out.

  There were six of him, suddenly.

  ***

  Six identical Harrells—identical in size, shape, form, purpose. They would attack the Dimellian simultaneously. Or, at least, five of them would, creating a diversionary action while the sixth—Harrell-original—made a frontal assault on the castle.

  Harrell-original faced his five duplicates and briefly instructed each in his job. They were like puppets.

  “Harrell-one, you’ re to attack in conjunction with Harrell-two, on the mental level. Take turns heaving mental bolts at the alien. While one of you is recharging, the other is to unload. That won’t give him time to get any sort of defense organized, and certainly no counter-attack.

  “Harrell-three and Harrell-four, you’re to attack physically, one armed with sword and one with blaster, from opposite sides at once. That ought to keep him busy, while he’s fighting off the rest of you.

  “Harrell-five, your job is to serve as frontrunner—to find the Dimellian and engage him in conversation while the other four are getting ready to attack. Make him angry; get him concerned about what you’re saying. And the second his defenses drop an inch, the other four of you jump in. All of you got that?”

  They nodded in unison.

  “Good. Meantime I’ll make an assault on the castle, and maybe I can get through with you five running interference for me.”

  He dismissed them, and they set out in different directions. He didn’t want the Dimellian to find out what was up; if the alien saw the strategy and had time to create duplicates of its own, the conflict would end in stalemate almost certainly.

  Harrell waited, while his five duplicates went into action.

  Through the mental link with Harrell-five, he listened as his duplicate said, “The time has come to finish you off, alien. I’m glad I found you. That acid trick almost got me, but not quite.”

  “A pity,” the alien replied. “I was hoping the ruse would finish you. It’s becoming quite irritating, having you in here. You’re starting to bore me.”

  “Just you wait, you overstuffed wart-hog. I’ll have those tentacles of yours clipped soon enough.”

  “Empty words, Earthman. You’ve run out of strategies; your best course is to get out of my mind and forget this entire silly affair.”

  “Oh, no. I’ll have those secrets pried out of you quicker than you think.”

  “How?”

  “I’m not giving away my secrets, alien. I’m here after yours.”

  Harrell readied himself. He gave the signal: now.

  Harrell-one and Harrell-three appeared. Harrell-one loosed a bombardment of mental force that shook the alien; Harrell-three dashed forward, wielding a machete.

  Harrell-two and Harrell-four went into action, Harrell-two following up with a second mental bolt, Harrell-four firing a blaster. The bedeviled alien looked from side to side, not knowing where to defend himself first.

  The scenery began to rock. The alien was going down.

  Harrell took to the air.

  Levitating easily above the jungle, he found the castle and zeroed in on it. As he dropped downward, it changed—from a vaulting proud collection of spires and battlements to a blocky square building, and from that into an armored box with a padlock.

  The Dimellian stood before it, struggling with the five duplicate Harrells.

  Harrell stepped past—through—the writhing group. The Dimellian’s defenses were down. The secrets were unguarded.

  He wrenched the padlock off with a contemptuous twist of his hand. The box sprang open. Inside lay documents, neatly typed, ready for his eye.

  The alien uttered a mighty howl. The forest dissolved; the universe swirled around Harrell’s head. The last thing he heard was the terrible shrieking of the alien.

  ***

  He woke. It seemed to be months later.

  Dr. Phelps stood by his side, staring at him solicitously. The alien, still bound, sat slumped over, heavy head lolling against one shoulder.

  Harrell took two or three deep breaths, clearing his head. He grinned. “I’ve got them,” he said. “Information on troop movements, plan of battle, even the line of journey across space. This was a top-flight officer we captured—and a rugged battler.”

  “Good work,” the psychman said. “I was worried at first. You had some expressions of real terror on your face when you put the helmet on. But then the alien let out an awful scream and slumped over.”

  “Dead?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Harrell grinned weakly. “I guess I was just too many for him. The shock of having the core of his mind penetrated—” Tiredly he said, “Doc, how come you didn’t get me out at the half-hour mark?”

  “Eh?”

  “I told you to pull me out after half an hour had gone by. Why didn’t you? I was in there half a day at least—and I might have stayed there forever.”

  The psychman was looking at him strangely. “Half a day, you say? No, Lieutenant Harrell. The total time elapsed, from the moment you donned the helmet to the instant the alien screamed—why, it was less than ten seconds!”

  Castaways of Space

  (1958)

  Typical W.W. Scott material: an exotic world, some disreputable characters engaged in interstellar hanky-panky, a bit of a twist ending. I wrote it in January, 1958 and gave it the rather flat-footed title of “Pursuit,” which Scottie changed to the more vivid “Castaways of Space,” and so be it. It ran in the October, 1958 issue of Super-Science Fiction under the byline of “Dan Malcolm,” which I had begun using frequently for Scottie now. There were two other items of mine in the same issue, one under my more familiar pseudonym, “Calvin M. Knox,” and the other under my own name. That one was “Gorgon Planet,” the very first short story I had ever sold (to the Scottish magazine, Nebula, in 1954), which I dug out now and sold again to Scottie for five times as much as Nebula had paid. He didn’t like my title and put what he thought was a much better one on it: “The Fight With the Gorgon.” Sometimes Scottie was right about title changes, and sometimes, well, not.

  Lieutenant McDermott was having a couple of drinks in the Nine Planets Bar on Albireo XII when his wristband bleeped, telling him to report to Patrol headquarters for assignment. McDermott scowled. This was his time off and he didn’t give a damn what Headquarters said. He cupped his hand tightly around the drinkflask and took a long slug. The wristband bleeped again, impatiently.

  McDermott waited a minute or two and finished his drink. Then he sw
itched the band to audio and said in a sour tone, “McDermott reporting. What is it?”

  The thin, edgy voice of the Officer of the Day said, “Job for you, Mac. There’s been a kidnapping and we want you to do the chasing.”

  “I’m off duty. Get Squires.”

  “Squires is in sick-bay having his head sewed back on,” was the acid reply. “Get out of that bar and get yourself down here in five minutes or—”

  The threat was unvoiced, but McDermott didn’t need much persuasion. He knew his status as a Galaxy Patrol Corpsman was shaky enough, and a couple more black marks would finish him completely. He didn’t like that idea. Getting booted out of the crime-prevention unit would mean he would have to go back to working for a living, and at his age that wasn’t nice to think about.

  “Okay,” he rumbled. “Be right there.”

  He pulled a platinoid five-credit coin from his pocket, fingered its embossed surface lovingly for a moment, and spun it down on the counter. The bartender slid two small coppers back at him in change. Pocketing them, McDermott grinned apologetically at the gray-skinned Denebian floozie he had been making plans about until the call to HQ, and shouldered his way out of the bar. He walked pretty well, considering there was nearly five credits’ worth of straight Sirian rum under his belt.

  McDermott held his liquor pretty well. He was a big man, six-three and two hundred sixty pounds, and there was plenty of alcohol-absorbing bulk there to gobble up the stuff as he poured it down his throat.

  His car, with the official nova-emblem of the Galaxy Patrol Corps, was sitting outside the bar. He tumbled into it, jabbed the start-button fiercely, and shot away from the curb. The trip to Headquarters took him twenty minutes, which was pretty good time considering that the building was halfway across town.

  Sergeant Thom was at the night desk, a wizened little Aldebaranian who looked up as McDermott came through the door and said, “Better leg it upstairs, Mac. Davis is on tonight and he wants you fast.”

  “He’s waited this long,” McDermott said. “He can wait a little longer. No sense rushing around.”

  ***

  McDermott took the gravtube upstairs and entered the Officer of the Day’s cubbyhole without knocking. The O.D. was Captain Davis, a forty-year veteran of the Corps who lived a model life himself and who had several times expressed himself rather harshly on the subject of McDermott’s drinking.

  Now he looked at McDermott with an expression of repugnance on his face and said in his tight little voice, “I’m sorry to have found it necessary to pull you off your free time, Lieutenant.”

  McDermott said nothing. Davis went on, “A matter has come up and at the moment you’re the only man at this base who can handle it. A girl named Nancy Hollis has been kidnapped—an Earthgirl, visiting this world on a tour with her parents. The father is a big-wheel diplomat making a galactic junket. She was plucked out of her hotel room and carted away in a Model XV-108 ship by a man identified only as Blaine Hassolt of this city. Know him?”

  McDermott shook his head.

  Davis shrugged. “Well, no matter. The girl left a scribbled note and we got on the trail pretty fast after the snatch. Hassolt was heading outsystem with her and we slapped a spy-vector on the ship. We followed it as far as we could. It disappeared pretty fast and as far as we can compute it crashlanded on Breckmyer IV. We saw the ship in orbit around that world and we saw a small lifeship detach from the main and skedaddle down to the planetary surface. Lifeships land but they don’t take off. That means Hassolt and the girl are somewhere on Breckmyer IV. Get out there and find them, Mac.”

  Moistening his lips, McDermott said, “You’re sure it’s Breckmyer IV?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  McDermott knew that planet. It was a stinking hot one, whose moderate zones were intolerable and whose tropical zones were sheer hell. It was inhabited by primitive humanoids and there were no Terran settlements anywhere on the planet. He was being handed a lousy job, maybe even a suicide job. But the kidnapped girl’s father was a big-wheel diplomat, and policy dictated making at least a token effort to get her off Breckmyer IV, if she had survived the landing. The Corps had to send someone down there to look around—and the least valuable member of the local base was a rumsoaked Corpsman named McDermott.

  “You’ll leave at once,” Davis told him. “You won’t stop at your bar for booze. You won’t stop to take a shave. You won’t stop to do any old damn thing.”

  “Yes, sir,” McDermott said stonily.

  “We’re fueling up a ship for you at the Corps port. It’ll be ready for blasting in fifteen minutes. Heaven help you if you’re late.”

  “I’ll be there on time, sir.”

  “You’d better be.”

  ***

  McDermott got to the spaceport in time for the blasting. He had made one tiny stop, at an all-night package store just outside the spaceport area, but Davis didn’t have to know that. And the mass margin of the ship was a thousand pounds; nobody would mind if he brought a small brown bag containing a couple of bottles on board.

  The ship was all ready for him. Under the floodlights the service flunkies bustled around, piping in fuel and checking the instruments. McDermott wondered why they were going to so much trouble. This was a sacrifice flight anyway; he wasn’t going to find that girl in the jungle, and he’d be damned lucky if he ever got back alive after making a landing on Breckmyer IV.

  But he didn’t say anything. The groundside flunkies looked at him with the worship and wonder in their eyes, the way they looked at any full-fledged Corpsman no matter how seedy he was, how disreputable. As far as they were concerned, McDermott was a Corpsman, and the glamor of that rank eclipsed completely any incidental. deficiencies of personality he might possibly have.

  He climbed into the control cabin of the ship. It was an XV-110, a four-man ship with auxiliary boost. That would make landing and taking off on rough terrain easier, and there would be room for him to bring back both Hassolt and the girl if he could find them.

  McDermott stowed his three bottles of rum in the gravholder near the pilot’s chair, headed to the galley, and found a nipple-top in the galley stores. He opened one of the bottles, fastened the nipple to it, and took a quick slug. Then he strapped himself in for blastoff position while the count-down went on outside.

  “Ready for blast, Lieutenant McDermott.”

  “Ready,” he snapped back.

  The automatic pilot was ready to function too. A glittering metallic tape dangled loosely from the mouth of the computer. McDermott knew that the tape would guide him faithfully through the hyperwarp across the eighteen light-years that separated him at the moment from Breckmyer IV. The trip would take a day and a half, ship time. If he budgeted himself properly, those three rum bottles would see him through the round trip.

  If there was a round trip.

  “Blasting in eight seconds, Lieutenant.”

  “Check.”

  He touched his fingers to the control board and switched on the activator for the autopilot. From here on he was just so much baggage. The ship would fly itself without any help from him.

  Reaching out, he made sure his precious rum was secure against blastoff. He leaned back, waiting. He knew no one gave much of a damn whether he reached Breckmyer IV safely or not, whether he found the girl safe and sound, whether he got back to the Albireo base. He was being sent out just for the sake of appearances. The Corps was making a gesture. Look here, Mr. Hollis, we’re trying to rescue your daughter.

  McDermott scowled bitterly. The last number of the count-down sounded. The ship rocked back and forth a moment and shot away into space. Eleven seconds after the moment of blastoff, the autopilot activated the spacewarp generator, and so far as observers on Albireo XII were concerned McDermott and his ship had ceased to exist.

  ***

  A day and a half later, the autopilot yanked the ship out of warp, and in full color on the ship’s screen was the system of Breckm
yer—the big golden-yellow sun surrounded by its thirteen planets. McDermott had finished one full bottle of his rum, and the benippled second bottle was drained almost to its Plimsoll line, but he had had time to look up the Breckmyer system in the ship’s ephemeris anyhow.

  Of the thirteen planets, only one was suitable for intelligent life, and that was the fourth. The first three were far too hot; the fifth through eighth were too big, and the outer planets were too cold.

  The fourth, though, was inhabited—by tribal-organized humanoids of a Class III-a civilization. There were no cities and no industries. It was a primitive hunting-and-agricultural world with a mean temperature of 85 in the temperate zones and 120 in the tropics. McDermott meant to avoid the tropics. If Hassolt and the girl had landed there, McDermott didn’t intend to search very intensely for them. Not when the temperature was quite capable of climbing to 150 or 160 in the shade—and a hot, muggy, humid 160 at that.

  He guided the ship on manual into an orbit round the fourth planet at a distance of three hundred thousand feet. That far up, the mass-detector would function. He could vector in on the crashed ship and find its whereabouts.

  Snapping on the detector, he threw the ship into a steady orbit and waited. An hour later came the beep-beeping of a find; and, tuning the fine control on his detector plate, he discovered that he had indeed located the kidnap ship.

  It had crashed in the temperate zone, for which McDermott uttered fervent blessings. The little lifeship had landed no more than a couple of miles from the stolen vessel. Presumably Hassolt and Nancy Hollis were somewhere in the neighborhood.

  His subradio came to life and Captain Davis’ thin voice said, “Come in, McDermott. Come in.”

  “McDermott here, sir.”

  “Any luck? Are you in orbit around the planet yet?”

  “I’m in orbit,” McDermott confirmed. “And I’ve found the ship, all right. It’s down below me. I’m making ready for a landing now.”

  “Good luck,” Davis said, and there wasn’t much friendliness in his voice. “The girl’s father sends his best wishes to you. He says he’ll take good care of you if you bring his daughter back safely.”