In the Beginning

by Robert Silverberg

  “Members of the Corps are not allowed to accept emoluments in the course of duty,” McDermott recited tiredly, knowing that Davis was just testing him. “If I can find the girl I’ll bring her back.”

  “You’d better,” Davis said coldly. “There’ll be all kinds of trouble if Senator Hollis’ daughter doesn’t get found.”

  The contact died. McDermott shrugged his shoulders and took another quick pull of the rum. It warmed his insides and buoyed him with confidence. Moving rapidly, he set up a landing orbit that would put his ship down not far from the crashed vessel.

  He threw the relays back. Slowly his ship left its orbit and began to head groundward.

  ***

  The landing was a good one. McDermott had been in the Corps for fifteen years, and in that tine you learned how to make a good landing in a spaceship. You have to learn, because the ones who didn’t learn didn’t last for fifteen years.

  He fined the ship into a pinpoint area a mile or so broad, which is pretty much of a pinpoint from three hundred thousand feet up. Then he brought her down, aiming for the flattest spot, and by skilful use of the auxiliary boost managed to land the ship smoothly without crisping. more than a few thousand square feet of the jungle with the exhaust of his jets.

  His jungle kit was all ready for him—medications, a Turner blastgun, a machete, a compass, and such things. He slung it over his back and slithered down the dragwalk to ground level. He leaned against the ship and pushed, but it didn’t rock. It was standing steady, its weight cutting a few inches into the ground. Good landing, he told himself. Hope takeoff is just as good.

  The thermometer in his wrist-unit read 94 degrees, humidity 89 percent. It was clammily moist as he started out on his mission. His mass-detector told him that the crashed spaceship lay two and a half miles to the west, and he figured he had better start out from there in his search for Hassolt and Nancy Hollis. The lifeship was somewhere further to the west; his portable detector was not powerful enough to locate it more definitely.

  He began to walk.

  McDermott was wearing regulation alien-planet costume: high boots and leatheroid trousers, thick teflon jacket, sun helmet. Because Breckmyer IV was a reasonably Earthtype planet, he did not need a breathing-mask.

  The jungle all about was thick and luxurious. The plants went in for color here. Stout corrugated-boled palmtrees rose all about him, and their heavy fronds, dangling almost to the ,jungle floor, were a blue-green hue ringed with notches of red. Creeping and clinging yellow vines writhed from tree to tree, while a carpet of flaming red grass was underfoot. The vegetation seemed to be sweating; beaded drops of moisture lay quivering on every succulent leaf.

  McDermott walked. He had to cut his way through the overhanging thicket of vines with backhand sweeps of his machete every five or six steps, and though he was a big man and a powerful one he was covered with sweat himself before he had travelled a quarter of a mile through the heavy vegetation. He resisted the temptation to strip away his jacket and shirt. The forest was full of droning, buzzing insects with hungry little beaks, and the less bare skin he exposed the better.

  He had seen what jungle insects could do to a man. He had seen swollen and bloated corpses, victims of the cholla-fly of Procyon IX, killed by a single sting. And though it was oven-hot here, McDermott kept his uniform on until it stuck to his body in a hundred places. Dead men didn’t perspire, but he preferred to perspire.

  Jungle creatures hooted mocking cries all around. Once, twice he thought he saw a lithe figure shaped like a man peer at him from between two trees and slip silently off into the darkness, but he wasn’t sure. He shrugged his shoulders and kept going. He wasn’t interested in the native life. They were pretty skilled with poisoned blowdarts on Breckmyer IV, he had been told. He felt an uncomfortable twitch between his shoulderblades, and pressed grimly on, cursing the man who had sent him out here to sweat.

  An hour later he reached the wrecked spaceship. It had oxidized pretty badly in the atmosphere on the way down, and there wasn’t much left of it. Certainly it could never take off. Hassolt would probably beg him to take him back to civilization, if he was still alive.

  The lifeship had landed a mile further west, and that meant nearly thirty minutes of weary slogging. McDermott’s breath was coming fast and he had to stop every few minutes to rest and mop the sticky sweat out of his eyes; it rolled down into his thick brows and dripped maddeningly onto his cheeks.

  The lifeship sat on its tail in a little clearing. It had landed well. McDermott looked at it. The lifeships were hardly bigger than bathtubs—rocket-equipped bathtubs. They were big enough for two people, three if they were willing to crowd together, and they were capable of coming down through a planetary atmosphere and making a safe landing. That was all. They could not be used for taking off again, but they would get their occupants safely down.

  McDermott stood by the lifeship a moment, looking around. The grass was pretty well trampled here; a good sign of a village in the neighborhood. Most likely Hassolt and the girl were in the village.

  He started to walk again. In ten minutes the village appeared, a nest of randomly-arranged huts on high stilts, circling loosely around the banks of a jungle stream. Advancing cautiously, McDermott saw a few of the natives, slim catlike humanoid creatures whose bodies were covered with a soft yellow fur. He made sure his blastgun was where he could reach it, and activated his verbal translator.

  He stepped forward into the village.

  ***

  Two or three of the natives edged out from their huts and came to meet him, padding silently over the beaten-down grass. There was no fear in their gleaming blue eyes, only curiosity.

  McDermott started to say, “I’m looking for a couple of my people who crashlanded here.”

  Then he stopped.

  An Earthman was coming out of the biggest and most magnificent hut in the village. He was grinning. He was a tall man, though not as tall as McDermott was, and his face was very thin, with hard angling cheekbones. He was wearing lustrous robes made from the hide of some jungle animal, thick, handsome robes. On his head he wore a kind of crown made from ivory.

  “Are you Blaine Hassolt?” McDermott demanded.

  The other nodded with easy familiarity. He spoke in a pleasant drawling voice. “I’m Hassolt, yes. And you’ve come to get me and bring me back?”

  McDermott nodded.

  Hassolt laughed. “How thoughtful of you!”

  McDermott said, scowling, “I don’t give a damn if you rot here or not, Hassolt. I’m here to get the girl. You can come back and stand trial or you can stay here in the jungle.”

  One of Hassolt’s eyebrows rose quizzically. “I take it you’re a Corpsman?”

  “You take it right.”

  “Ah. How nice. There was a time when I was actually praying that we were being followed by a Corpsman—that was the time when the controls blanked out, and I had to crashland. I was very worried then. I was afraid we’d be cast away forever on some dangerous planet.”

  “You like it this hot?” McDermott asked.

  “I don’t mind. I live a good life here,” Hassolt stretched lazily. “The natives seem to have made me their king, Lieutenant. I rather like the idea.”

  McDermott’s eyes widened. “And how about the girl—Nancy Hollis?”

  “She’s here too,” Hassolt said. “Would you like to see her?”

  “Where is she?”

  Instead of answering Hassolt turned and whistled at the big hut. “Nancy! Nancy, come out here a moment! We’ve got a visitor.”

  A moment passed; then, a girl appeared from the hut. She, too, wore robes and a crown; underneath the robes her body was bare, oddly pale, and she made ineffectual attempts to conceal herself as she saw McDermott. She was about nineteen or so, pretty in a pale sort of way, with short-cropped brown hair and an appealing face.

  “I’m Lieutenant McDermott of the Corps, Miss Hollis,” McDermott said. “We put a spy-vector on
Hassolt’s ship and traced you here. I’ve come to take you back.”

  “Oh, have you?,” Hassolt said before the girl could speak. “You haven’t consulted me in this matter. You realize you propose to rob this tribe of its beloved queen.”

  McDermott’s scowl tightened. He gestured with the blastgun and raised it to firing level. “I have a ship about three miles from here,” he said. “Suppose you start walking now. In an hour or two we can be there, and in a day and a half we’ll all be back safe and sound on Albireo XII.”

  “I don’t want to be rescued,” Hassolt said deliberately. “I like it here.”

  “What you like doesn’t matter. Miss Hollis, this man forcibly abducted you, didn’t he?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay,” McDermott said. He nodded over his shoulder in the direction of the ship. “Let’s go, Hassolt.”

  “Put the gun down, McDermott,” Hassolt said quietly.

  “Don’t make trouble or I’ll gun you down right now,” McDermott snapped. “I’m more interested in rescuing Miss Hollis than I am in dragging you back to court.”

  “Miss Hollis will stay right here. So will I. Put the gun down. McDermott, there are four natives standing in a ring, thirty feet behind you, and each one is holding a blowdart pipe. All I have to do is lift my hand and you’ll be riddled with darts. It’s a quick death, but it isn’t a nice one.”

  McDermott’s broad back began to itch. Sweat rolled in rivers down his face. He cautiously glanced around to his left.

  Hassolt was right. Four slim catlike beings stood in a semicircle behind him, blowpipe poised at lips. McDermott paused a moment, sweating, and then let his gun drop to the ground.

  “Kick it toward me,” Hassolt ordered.

  McDermott shoved it with his foot toward the other. Hassolt hastily scooped it up, stowed it in his sash, and gestured to the aliens. Two of them slipped up behind McDermott and relieved him of his machete. He was now unarmed. He felt like an idiot.

  Hassolt grinned and said, “Make yourself at home and keep out of trouble, McDermott. And remember that my bodyguards will be watching you all the time.”

  He turned and walked away, heading back toward the hut.

  ***

  McDermott stared after him; finally he muttered a brief curse and looked at the girl.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this,” she said.

  “It’s not your fault, Miss. It’s mine. My fault for joining the Corps and my fault for taking this assignment and my fault for not shooting Hassolt the second I saw him.”

  “It would have done no good. The natives would have killed you immediately.”

  He looked around at the village. Two or three natives skulked in the distance, ready to transfix him with darts if he showed any sign of trouble.

  He said, “How did all this happen? I mean, Hassolt being king and everything?”

  She shrugged. “I hardly know. I met him one afternoon at the Terran Club and he bought me a couple of drinks—I thought he was interesting, you know. So we went for a drive in his car, and next thing I knew he was forcing me aboard a ship and blasting off.”

  McDermott looked at her. “With what purpose in mind?”

  “Ransom,” she said. “He told me all about it as soon as we were in space. He was heading for the Aldebaran system, where he’d cable my father for money. If Dad came through, he was going to turn me over to the authorities and vanish. If Dad refused to pay, he’d—take me with him as his mistress. But we were only a little distance from Albireo when I grabbed control of the ship and tried to head it back. I didn’t succeed.”

  “But you did foul up the controls so thoroughly that Hassolt had to abandon his original idea and crashland the ship here?”

  “Yes. We came down in the lifeship and the natives found us. Hassolt had a translator with him, and it turned out they wanted us to be their king and queen, or something like that. So we’ve been king and queen for the past few days. The natives do everything Hassolt says.”

  “Do they obey you, too?”

  “Sometimes. But I’m definitely second-fiddle to him.”

  McDermott chewed at his lip and wished he had brought his remaining bottle of rum along. It was a nasty position. Far from being anxious to be rescued, Hassolt was probably delighted to live on Breckmyer IV. He wasn’t willing to leave, and he wasn’t willing to let Nancy Hollis go either. Nor was he going to let McDermott escape alive and possibly bring a stronger Corps force to rescue the girl.

  He eyed the blowpipers speculatively. Unarmed as he was, he didn’t dare risk trying to escape, with or without the girl. The ship was too far from the village, and beyond a doubt the natives would know shortcuts and could easily head him off at Hassolt’s command.

  Sneaking up behind Hassolt was equally impossible. As king, Hassolt was thoroughly guarded. Belting him from behind and making a run for the ship with the girl would be sheer suicide.

  McDermott sat down by a grassy rise in the turf.

  “What are you going to do?” the girl asked. She was looking at him in the starry-eyed way that teenage girls were likely to look at Corpsmen who came to rescue them from alien planets. She didn’t seem to realize that this particular Corpsman was average, overweight, and didn’t have the foggiest idea of how to rescue either her or himself.

  “Nothing,” McDermott said. “Nothing but wait. Maybe some other ship will come after me. But I doubt it.”

  ***

  McDermott spent the next few hours wandering around the village. Evidently some sort of council meeting was going on in Hassolt’s hut; McDermott heard the sounds of alien words from time to time.

  The blowpipers ringed in the village. There was no way out. He wondered if Hassolt intended to keep him prisoner indefinitely.

  No, that was unlikely. McDermott, as a Corpsman, was a potential danger to Hassolt at all times. Hassolt undoubtedly would get rid of him as soon as the business at hand was taken care of.

  And the girl was looking at him so damned hopefully. As if she pegged her life on a serene inner confidence that the Corpsman was going to engineer her rescue somehow:

  Somehow.

  The afternoon was growing late and the big golden sun was sinking in the distance when one of the aliens came noiselessly up to them, and proferred each of them a bowl of some sort of liquid.

  “What is it?” McDermott asked, sniffing the contents of the bowl suspiciously.

  “Something alcoholic,” she said. “They make it out of fermented vegetable mash. Hassolt drinks it and says it’s okay.”

  McDermott grinned and sampled it. It was sweet and musky-tasting, not at all bad. And potent. Two bowlsful this size could probably keep a man in a pleasant alcoholic stupor half a day.

  He finished the bowl off hurriedly and realized that the girl was looking at him in surprise and—was that disgust? Her image of him as a super-boyscout was fading fast, he thought. He had guzzled the liquor just a bit too greedily.

  “Good,” he said.

  “Glad you like it.”

  He started to make some reply, but he heard an approaching footfall behind him, and turned. It was Hassolt. He was holding McDermott’s blastgun tightly in his hand and his face had lost the sophisticated, mocking look it had had earlier. He seemed drained of blood now, a pale, white sickly color. It was pretty plain that Hassolt had just had a considerable shock. Something that had rippled him to the core.

  He said, in a voice that was harsh and breathy, “McDermott, how far is your ship from here?”

  McDermott grinned. “Three miles. Three and a half, maybe. More or less due east.”

  Hassolt waggled the blastgun. “Come on: Take me to it.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  McDermott stared levelly at the kidnapper for an instant, and let some of the euphoria induced by the alien drink leave his mind. Narrowing his eyes in unbelief, he said, “Are you serious?”

  “Stop wasting time. I want you to take me t
o the ship now.”

  The girl was staring in bewilderment at him. McDermott said, “You sure got tired of the kinging business fast, Hassolt. You loved it here two hours ago.”

  “I didn’t know two hours ago what I know now. You know what they do to their king and queen at the end of the year? They throw them into a live volcano! It’s their way of showing thanks to the volcano-god for having brought them safely through the year. Then they pick a new king and queen.”

  McDermott started to chuckle. “So it’s the old savage story, huh? Treat you like a king for a year and chuck you to the lava!”

  “I happened to come along a few days after the old king and queen had been sacrificed,” Hassolt said. “Usually they choose the new ones from their tribe, but they prefer to have strangers. Like the girl and me.”

  McDermott continued chuckling. “But what’s your hurry? If the new year’s only a few days old, you have plenty of time.”

  “I don’t care to stick around. Take me to your ship now, McDermott.”

  “Suppose I don’t?”

  Hassolt stared meaningfully at the gun. McDermott said calmly, “If you shoot me, I can’t guide you to the ship, can I?”

  Tightly Hassolt said, “In that case I’d find it myself. You can either take me there and stay alive, or refuse and die. Take your choice.”

  McDermott shrugged. “You have me there. I’ll take you.”

  “Let’s go, then. Now.”

  “It’s late. Can’t you wait till morning? It’ll be dark by the time we get there.”

  “Now,” Hassolt said.

  “How about the girl?”

  “She stays here,” Hassolt said. “I just want to get away myself. The two of you can stay here. I’m not going to take any more chances. That she-devil wrecked the other ship.”

  “So I guide you to my ship and let you blast off, and I stay here and face the music?”

  “You’ll have the girl. Come on now,” Hassolt said. His face was drawn and terror-pale.

  “Okay,” McDermott said. “I’ll take you to the ship.”