by E. C. Tubb
“Well.…” Artrui looked at Marya. “It’s not such a bad idea at that. It would be novel, and might turn out to be amusing. Does the idea appeal to you, Marya?”
She yawned.
“We could ask Chendis and Ardella,” continued Bulem desperately. “They would be pleased to join us, and both are amusing company. Please say yes, Marya.”
* * * *
The Warden was an old man from the Cappellian system and he had a proper awe of the stellar aristocrats. He received them in his office and awaited their pleasure as they wrangled among themselves.
“Well make this a proper expedition,” said Chendis. He was a coarse type and held peculiar theories of his own.
He consistently refused to wear nail varnish and accepted his social inferiority with a blatant carelessness which irritated rather than amused.
“That is why we are here,” said Marya coldly. She stared at the Warden. “Your advice?”
“I would suggest the hunting grounds close to the lodge.” He bowed as he spoke. Titles weren’t necessary when dealing with the stellar aristocrats, but abject politeness was. “There is easy sport there, small animals without fang or claw. They are harmless and easily killed. The grounds are within easy flying distance so that you could reside at the lodge during your stay.”
“We want none of that,” snapped Chendis decisively. “We came here for proper sport, not the emasculated version of your target ranges.” He looked at the others. “I suggest that we take some provisions and attendants, and have a heli drop us where there is some real game.” He bared his teeth.
“Big game. I want to hear something yell when I pull the trigger.”
“How revolting!” Marya accentuated a yawn with her ringed fingers. “Really, Chendis, must you be so primitive?”
“Why not? The whole idea behind a hunt is to go primitive.” He leered at her as he spoke. As he was not in the same composite as Marya, he saw no reason to pander to her whims, and he knew that he was too far down the social scale for his discourtesy to make the slightest difference.
He even winked at Velenda and she, responding to his friendship, winked back. They smiled at each other to Ardella’s annoyance and the pleased approval of the other two men.
With any sort of luck at all they might be able to persuade Chendis to take Velenda off their hands. Ardella, while no great acquisition, couldn’t possibly be as boring as Velenda.
Artrui mentally decided to sound Chendis out on the subject as soon as possible.
“I suppose that it would be safe enough,” said Bulem dubiously. As the hunt had originally been his suggestion, he was eager to see it work out to everyone’s satisfaction. “As you say, Chendis, half the fun is in getting away from luxury and really roughing it. You agree, Artrui?”
“What?” Artrui blinked. “Oh, yes. Yes, of course.”
“That’s settled then.” Bulem glanced at the Warden. “See to it.”
“At once.” The man hesitated. “You would have no objection to one of the attendants carrying weapons?”
Chendis looked annoyed. “Is that necessary?”
“The beasts are dangerous, sir. They have been especially bred so, for the benefit of seasoned hunters. The man, a warrior he is called, will be armed for the sole purpose of protecting you from harm.”
“I don’t like it,” said Chendis. “As the hunters, we should be the only ones to carry weapons.”
“It is merely a precaution, sir,” the Warden explained. He hesitated. “A party similar to yourselves went out shortly before my arrival here. They refused to take a warrior with them and were severely mauled. Two women died and two men are still undergoing plastic surgery. Naturally, the Warden responsible has been immolated, but the damage was done.”
“I see.” Chendis smiled with a touch of cruelty. “If we insisted, would you permit us to go out without this man, this warrior as you call him?”
“I could not prevent you, sir.” Sweat glistened on the Warden’s forehead. “But if anything should happen to you.…”
“Oh, leave the man alone,” snapped Velenda impatiently. “He’s only doing his job.” She ignored the Warden’s look of gratitude.
Among the rest of the party, the warrior looked like a crow in the midst of a flock of birds of paradise. Even the soft-footed attendant androids wore bright colors, usually to match the tints of their skins, but he alone wore somber black, relieved only by a simple golden insignia. He set up a small tent close to the sleeping quarters, and spent much time checking his equipment and odd-shaped weapon.
Chendis, always rather peculiar when it came to dealing with inferior races, found him a fascinating subject for study.
He waited until the others had retired and then went outside to talk to the warrior. He found him busy cleaning his weapon.
“Do you often do that?”
“Clean my gun? Sure.”
“Why?”
“So that it will work when I want it to.” The man stared at Chendis. “You aren’t a regular hunter, are you?”
“I’m a stellar aristocrat,” said Chendis. He was amused. “Do you realize what that means?”
“No.”
“It means that I and my race own almost the entire galaxy. It means that we have over two thousand subject races working solely for our benefit.”
“That’s nice.”
“You are supposed to call mc ‘sir’ when you address me,” reminded Chendis. He sighed. “Nice? Well, I suppose that it is, in a way. We don’t have to work because we can have anything we want when we want it. We have nothing to do but amuse ourselves and, because of that, we are bored all the time. Can you understand that?”
“I think so. Are the rest of you Aristocrats, too, sir?”
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. Do all your menfolk paint their faces and hands? Sir.”
“You object?”
“Not me. We just don’t do it back home, that’s all. But you’d know about that, wouldn’t you?”
“Sir,” reminded Chendis. He shrugged. “I suppose that it is in the records somewhere. Naturally, we can’t possibly remember the details of every new world we conquer.”
“Earth.”
“Earth?” Chendis frowned. “Did I hear something interesting about the conquest of that planet?” His face cleared. “Yes, I remember now. A backward world, but the resistance to our fleets was incredible. Incredibly stupid, that is. Naturally, you couldn’t possibly avoid conquest and assimilation.”
“You pretty near wiped us out,” said the warrior. “At least, so my great-Grandfather used to tell me.” There was no resentment in his voice. The conditioning he had received made it impossible for him ever to hate those with whom he came into contact. His idiom had been left as an amusing peculiarity. Chendis looked surprised.
“As long ago as that? I had the impression that the incident occurred only a short while ago. Probably you have an extremely short life span.” He yawned and moved towards his tent.
* * * *
Hunting started at mid-morning and continued without a pause until mid-day. It was slaughter. The weapons used didn’t make a sound, but they killed just the same, and their silence was more than compensated for by the screams of disrupted animals.
The androids, emotionless flesh and blood robots, moved quietly about as they collected the bag. Once there was an argument between Ardella and Velenda as to who had killed a certain animal. And once Marya screamed with rage as she shot a careless android who had spattered the hem of her robe with blood. Other than that, the morning passed without incident.
Over the mid-day meal, Artrui talked about it. “This is real fun,” he said. “I never thought that killing things could be so amusing. Did you see how Bulem blew the back legs off that funny creature and it tried to run away?” He chuckled at the memory.
Chendis nodded.
“I’ve often thought that we miss a lot in not going primitive more often than we do. The feel of
the wind against one’s face, the smooth precision of a weapon, the cunning needed to hit the target.” He sighed. “Our ancestors must have been great fighters to have left us such a heritage.”
“There is nothing clever about living in dirt,” snapped Marya. She had changed her robe, but the incident of the blood had annoyed her. “Surely even our ancestors knew that. They conquered other races and then made those races fight for them.” She yawned. “Must we talk of such things? History can be so tiresome.”
“History is what has made us,” reminded Chendis. He looked up as the somber figure of the warrior came towards them. “Yes? What is it?”
“I thought that I’d better warn you, sir,” said the warrior easily. “All that noise the animals have been making is going to attract some company. There are large animals in this forest, as well as small.”
“So?”
“So, I’d suggest that you give up hunting for the day, sir.”
“Insolence!” Artrui was on his feet before Chendis could reply. “How dare you address us so? I shall complain to the Warden! I.…” He broke off, his mouth still open. “What was that?”
“One of the big animals I was telling you about, sir.” The warrior unslung his weapon. “Hear it?”
They did. It was a kind of hissing roar coupled with the sound of a great body crashing through the undergrowth. All fell silent and, with the exception of the warrior, all seemed paralyzed with terror.
“No need to be scared,” said the warrior calmly. “Just get those guns of yours and shoot when you see it.” He paused, listening. “It’s getting close. You’d better hurry if you want to kill it.”
“Let’s get out of here.” Artrui, without waiting to see if anyone followed his example, turned and ran from the sound. Bulem followed him, knocking down Marya in his frantic hurry, closely followed by Ardella. Chendis stared wildly at Velenda, and Marya, who had regained her feet, screamed.
The cause was just before them. It was the largest animal they had faced, and yet it was little more than the height of a man. It had a round, furred head, glistening with fangs and, as it crouched ready to spring, its claws dug furrows in the ground. It hissed, staring at them with cold, yellow eyes, then tensed itself to charge.
The warrior shot it dead.
He lowered his weapon and stared somberly at the headless body before him. Next to him, Chendis was busy being very ill, and the two women had fainted at the sight of the beast. The others, human and android, were not to be seen.
Chendis, slowly recovering from his retching fear, knew that if it hadn’t been for the warrior the beast would have killed them all. “Thank you,” he said. “You saved our lives.”
“Nothing to it,” said the warrior calmly. “All you had to do was to stand and fire those guns of yours.” He seemed to remember something. “Sir.”
“We couldn’t.” For some reason Chendis felt it necessary to explain to this member of a conquered race why that was so. “We are a long way from the primitive,” he said, “and aren’t used to violence. The thought of death, our death, is horrible to us. We can’t help it. At the prospect of personal danger we suffer from a peculiar numbness that affects our reactions. I don’t know what it is.”
“Cowardice.”
“What?” The word was strange to Chendis. “What was that you said?”
“Nothing.” For a long moment the warrior stood and stared at Chendis. “You don’t have to explain. I understand all right…sir.” He slung his weapon and moved away from the dead beast. Chendis stared after him.
It was nothing really, nothing at all, and yet it disturbed him. Chendis, a Stellar Aristocrat, had met the members of many subject races during his long life, but never before had he met one with the expression this man of Earth had in his eyes.
Contempt.
He wondered why.
EMERGENCY EXIT, by E. C. Tubb
It came like a gentle benison from heaven upon the place beneath, a soft yet steady downpour, drumming with a thousand fingers on the shattered rubble above and seeping through cracked brick and moldy plaster, splintered beams and twisted steel as it sought the soft, rich loam far below the mountains of man-made debris.
Ron Prentice liked the sound of the rain. He liked it even when it wet his tattered clothing and turned the inside of his shelter into a streaming, wet-walled cavern. He liked to lie on the heap of rotting sacks and salvaged paper which served as a bed and listen to it and, in imagination, he thought of it washing away the dirt and destruction littering the face of the earth and restoring it to its primeval beauty.
It never did, of course. It would take more than rain to sweep aside the jumble of geared concrete and war-tom brick. That would take time, eons of passing years, the heat of summer and the freezing chill of winter. It would take wind and blown soil, humus and wind-borne seeds. It might take a thousand years, more than that, and sometimes, in idle imagery, Ron wished that he could live so long.
He wouldn’t, of course, and he knew it, but dreams were cheap and there was little else to do but dream. And so he lay, staring at the trickling water until the dim light filtering through a dozen crevasses faded and died into the soft velvet of night then, painfully, he rose.
The pains weren’t so bad tonight. Not as they had been three nights ago when he hadn’t eaten for a week, and not as bad as they had been two nights ago when he had gorged his stomach full, but they were there, with him as his breath was with him, as his skin, as the hair on his head and the fingers on his hands. He lived with pain, slept with it, ate with it. He had long forgotten what it was to be without pain. Sometimes, when they were too bad, he would rise from his apology of a bed and stride about his scooped-out cave in the mountain of rubble, biting his wrists and slamming his hands against the jagged stone. Sometimes he would curse himself and all those before him and once, but only once, he had actually left his cave and wandered for hours in the cold light of a winter’s day. But that had only happened once, when the pains were more than he could bear, and he had been very lucky then.
He had not done it again.
Now he waited, mastering his impatience as he had done a thousand times before, adjusting his clothing and making certain that his weapons were to hand. There were two of them. A long, razor-edged, needle-pointed knife and a short, lead-weighted club. One day perhaps he would get a gun, eyen one of the air pistols would be valuable, but until then he had to make do with what he had.
After a while, when he was sure that the cloak of night was tightly drawn about the world, he wriggled his way out into the open air.
It was still raining, the water splashing as it rebounded from the twisting lane of cracked cement writhing between the heaped rubble, and the sound of it as it trickled in a hundred streams from the torn ruins mingled with the splashing and filled the night with the hint of fairy bells and elfin chiming. He was glad of the sound for rain meant that the streets would be almost deserted and there would be few eyes to mark his passage and follow his trail. Moving with silent caution, a shadow among shadows, he made his way towards the center of the city.
Lights blazed there, smoking animal-fat lamps suspended from high poles, and the streets were clear of rubble. Houses lined the streets, the lower floors of once tall buildings, their shattered tops looking like a row of splintered teeth and candle light and lamp light shone from their papered’ windows. A few shops were still open, glassless windows displayed salvaged clothing, weapons, some of the rare cans of food, articles of metal and plastic, coils of wire and even some country produce, potatoes, greens, dried meat and shapeless mounds of butter and cheese.
Between the shops and houses, light spilling from their oiled paper windows and doors, were the taverns and gambling houses. As usual they were crowded with men and women, hard-faced and hard-eyed, dressed in an assortment of clothing and bearing an assortment of weapons. Noise spilled from them, laughter and ribald mirth, the razor-edged mirth that could change in a flash to snarling hate
and savage violence, and from one tavern came the incredible sound of a mechanical jukebox playing scratched and discordant jazz.
A cart creaked down the street, a late arrival from the country districts, a dozen men straining at the shafts and a bearded carter cracking at naked backs with the thong of a rawhide whip. It rumbled towards the stables and the carter yelled savage anger as one of the haulers slipped and fell.
“Get up, you swine! Up I say!” The whip drew blood from a heaving back. “Get up or I’ll strip the skin from your back and feed you to the dogs!”
Painfully the man struggled to his feet and leaned against the ropes. Blood ruled from the gaping wounds on his scrawny back, washed by the rain into a pink film, and his bare feet left red tracks as they thrust at the broken stone.
Silently Ron watched, standing in the darkness until the cart had creaked its slow passage down the narrow street. As usual he felt afraid. But as usual the pains fought against his fear with the agony of grim necessity, and he knew that there could be no running back, no hiding in his hidden place, no escape from reality. He had to go on.
Avoiding the brightly-lit main street he slipped through the shadows and walked cautiously down the less frequented areas. There were lights here too, smoking torches sizzling in the rain, but fewer, the patches of shadow deeper and more frequent. He did not avoid the lighted areas, to do that would be dangerous, but he strode through them with a kind of defiance, feeling the tug of fear at the nape of his neck and glad when darkness closed around him again. He halted with trained abruptness as his foot struck against something soft and yielding.
“Mister,” the beggar stared up at him in the dimness, “give me the price of a bed, will you?”
Ron said nothing, but his eyes flickered as he stared down the street.
“I’m an old man,” whined the beggar. “Ill, starving, and this rain’s killing me.” He licked his lips and his claw-like hand trembled as he thrust it, palm upwards, towards the tall man. “Just a coin or two, a crust of bread even, anything.”