Adventures on Other Planets Anthology

by Donald A Wollheim (ed)

  His foot must have twisted in those roots, and sprained.

  As he finally realized the nature of his injuries, Jamieson braced up. He was safe. In spite of having suffered an accidental defeat of major proportions, his intense concentration on this slope, his desperate will to make this the place where he must fall, had worked out.

  He began to climb. It was easy enough on the slope, steep as it was; the ground was rough, rocky and scraggly with brush. It was when he came to the ten-foot overhanging cliff that his ankle proved what an obstacle it could be.

  Four times he slid back, reluctantly; and then, on the fifth try, his fingers, groping desperately over the top of the cliff, caught an unbreakable root. Triumphantly, he dragged himself to the safety of the tableland.

  Now that the sound of his scraping and struggling was gone, only his heavy breathing broke the silence of the emptiness. His anxious eyes studied the uneven terrain. The tableland spread before him with not a sign of a moving figure anywhere.

  To one side, he could see his lifeboat. Jamieson began to crawl toward it, taking care to stay on rock as much as possible. What had happened to the Rull he did not know. And since, for several days, his ankle would keep him inside his ship, he might as well keep his enemy guessing during that time.

  Professor Jamieson lay in his bunk, thinking. He could hear the beating of his heart. There were the occasional sounds when he dragged himself out of bed. But that was almost all. The radio, when he turned it on, was dead. No static, not even the fading in and out of a wave. At this colossal distance, even subspace radio was impossible.

  He listened on all the more active Rull wave lengths. But the silence was there, too. Not that they would be broadcasting if they were in the vicinity.

  He was cut off here in this tiny ship on an uninhabited planet, with useless motors.

  He tried not to think of it like that. “Here,” he told himself, “is the opportunity of a lifetime for an experiment.”

  He warmed to the idea as a moth to flame. Live Rulls were hard to get hold of. About one a year was captured in the unconscious state, and these were regarded as priceless treasures. But here was an even more ideal situation.

  Were prisoners, both of us. That was the way he tried to picture it. Prisoners of an environment, and, therefore, in a curious fashion, prisoners of each other. Only each was free of the conditioned need to kill himself.

  There were things a man might discover. The great mysteries—as far as men were concerned—that motivated Rull actions. Why did they want to destroy other races totally? Why did they needlessly sacrifice valuable ships in attacking Earth machines that ventured into their sectors of space —when they knew that the intruders would leave in a few weeks anyway? And why did prisoners who could kill themselves at will commit suicide without waiting to find out what fate was intended for them? Some times they were merely wanted as messengers.

  Was it possible the Rulls were trying to conceal a terrible weakness in their make-up of which man had not yet found an inkling?

  The potentialities of this fight of man against Rull on a lonely mountain exhilarated Jamieson as he lay on his bunk, scheming, turning the problem over in his mind.

  There were times during those dog days when he crawled over to the control chair, and peered for an hour at a stretch into the visiplates. He saw the tableland and the vista of distance beyond it. He saw the sky of Laertes III, bluish pink sky, silent and lifeless.

  He saw the prison. Caught here, he thought bleakly. Professor Jamieson, whose appearance on an inhabited planet would bring out unwieldly crowds, whose quiet voice in the council chambers of Earth's galactic empire spoke with final authority—that Jamieson was here, alone, lying in a bunk, waiting for a leg to heal, so that he might conduct an experiment with a Rull.

  It seemed incredible. But he grew to believe it as the days passed.

  On the third day, he was able to move around sufficiently to handle a few heavy objects. He began work immediately on the mental screen. On the fifth day it was finished. Then the story had to be recorded. That was easy. Each sequence had been so carefully worked out in bed that it flowed from his mind onto the visiwire.

  He set it up about two hundred yards from the lifeboat, behind a screening of trees. He tossed a can of food a dozen feet to one side of the screen.

  The rest of the day dragged. It was the sixth day since the arrival of the Rull, the fifth since he had sprained his ankle.

  Came the night

  A gliding shadow, undulating under the starlight of Laertes III, the Rull approached the screen the man had set up. How bright it was, shining in the darkness of the tableland, a blob of light in a black universe of uneven ground and dwarf shrubbery.

  When he was a hundred feet from the light, he sensed the food—and realized that here was a trap.

  For the Rull, six days without food had meant a stupendous loss of energy, visual blackouts on a dozen color levels, a dimness of life-force that fitted with the shadows, not the sun. That inner world of disjointed nervous system was like a run-down battery, with a score of organic “instruments” disconnecting one by one as the energy level fell. The yeli recognized dimly, but with a savage anxiety, that only a part of that nervous system would ever be restored to complete usage. And, even for that, speed was essential. A few more steps downward, and then the old. old conditioning of mandatory self-inflicted death would apply even to the high Aaish of the Yeell.

  The worm body grew quiet. The visual centei behind each eye accepted light on a narrow band from the screen. From beginning to end, he watched the story as it unfolded, and then watched it again, craving repetition with all the ardor of a primitive.

  The picture began in deep space with the man’s lifeboat being dropped from a launching lock of a battleship. It showed the battleship going on to a military base, and there taking on supplies and acquiring a vast fleet of reinforcements, and then starting on the return journey. The scene switched to the lifeboat dropping down on Laertes III, showed everything tbat had subsequently happened, suggested the situation was dangerous to them both— and pointed out the only safe solution.

  The final sequence of each showing of the story was of the Rull approaching the can, to the left of the screen, and opening it. The method was shown in detail, as was the visualization of the Rull busily eating the food inside.

  Each time that sequence drew near, a tension came over the Rull, a will to make the story real. But it was not until the seventh showing had rim its course that he glided forward, closing the last gap between himself and the can. It was a trap, he knew, perhaps even death—it didn’t matter. To live, he had to take the chance. Only by this means, by risking what was in the can, could he hope to remain alive for the necessary time.

  How long it would take for the commanders cruising up there in the black of space in their myriad ships—how long it would be before they would decide to supersede his command, he didn't know. But they would come. Even if they waited until the enemy ships arrived before they dared to act against his strict orders, they would come.

  At that point they could come down without fear of suffering from his ire.

  Until then he would need all the food he could get.

  Gingerly, he extended a sucker, and activated the automatic opener of the can.

  It was shortly after four in the morning when Professor Jamieson awakened to the sound of an alarm ringing softly.

  It was still pitch dark outside—the Laertes day was twenty-six sidereal hours long; he had set his clocks the first day to coordinate—and at this season dawn was still three hours away.

  Jamieson did not get up at once. The alarm had been activated by the opening of the can of food. It continued to ring for a full fifteen minutes, which was just about perfect. The alarm was tuned to the electronic pattern emitted by the can, once it was opened, and so long as any food remained in it. The lapse of time involved fitted with the capacity of one of the Rulls suckers in absorbing three pounds of por
k.

  For fifteen minutes, accordingly, a member of the Rull race, man’s mortal enemy, had been subjected to a pattern of mental vibrations corresponding to its own thoughts. It was a pattern to which the nervous systems of other Rulls had responded in laboratory experiments. Unfortunately, those others had killed themselves on awakening, and so no definite results had been proved. But it had been established by the ecphoriometer that the “unconscious” and not the “conscious” mind was affected.

  Jamieson lay in bed, smiling quietly to himself. He turned over finally to go back to sleep, and then he realized how excited he was.

  The greatest moment in the history of Rull-human warfare. Surely, he wasn't going to let it pass unremarked. He climbed out of bed, and poured himself a drink.

  The attempt of the Rull to attack him through his unconscious mind had emphasized his own possible actions in that direction. Each race had discovered some of the weaknesses of the other.

  Rulls used their knowledge to exterminate. Man tried for communication, and hoped for association. Both were ruthless, murderous, pitliess, in their methods. Outsiders sometimes had difficulty distinguishing one from the other.

  But the difference in purpose was as great as the difference between black and white, the absence as compared to the presence of light.

  There was only one trouble with the immediate situation.

  Now, that the Rull had food, he might develop a few plans of his own.

  Jamieson returned to bed, and lay staring into the darkness. He did not underrate the resources of the Rull, but since he had decided to conduct an experiment, no chance must be considered too great.

  He turned over finally, and slept the sleep of a man determined that things were working in his favor.

  Morning. Jamieson put on his cold-proof clothes, and went out into the chilly dawn. Again, he savored the silence and the atmosphere of isolated grandeur. A strong wind was blowing from the east, and there was an iciness in it that stung his face. Snow? He wondered.

  He forgot that. He had things to do on this morning of mornings. He would do them with his usual caution.

  Paced by defensors and the mobile blaster, he headed for the mental screen. It stood in open high ground, where it would be visible from a dozen different hiding places, and so far as he could see it was undamaged. He tested the automatic mechanism, and for good measure ran the picture through one showing.

  He had already tossed another can of food in the grass near the screen, and he was turning away when he thought: That’s odd. The metal framework looks as if it’s been poUshed.

  He studied the phenomena in a de-energizing mirror, and saw that the metal had been varnished with a clear, varnishlike substance. He felt sick as he recognized it.

  He decided in agony, If the cue is not to fire at all, I wont do it. I’U fire even if the blaster turns on me.

  He scraped some of the “varnish” into a receptacle, and began his retreat to the lifeboat. He was thinking violently:

  Where does he get all this stuff? That isn’t part of the equipment of a survey craft.

  The first deadly suspicion was on him, that what was happening was not just an accident. He was pondering the vast implications of that, narrow-eyed, when, off to one side, he saw the Rull.

  For the first time, in his many days on the tableland, he saw the Hull.

  What's the cuel

  Memory of purpose came to the Rull shortly after he had eaten. It was dim at first, but it grew stronger.

  It was not the only sensation of his returning energy.

  His visual centers interpreted more light. The starlit tableland grew brighter, not as bright as it could be for him, by a very large percentage, but the direction was up instead of down. It would never again be normal. Vision was in the mind, and that part of his mind no longer had the power of interpretation.

  He felt unutterably fortunate that it was no worse.

  He had been gliding along the edge of the precipice. Now, he paused to peer down. Even with his partial night vision, the view was breathtaking. There was distance below and distance afar. From a spaceship, the height was almost minimum. But gazing down that wall of gravel into those depths was a different experience. It emphasized how completely he had been caught by an accident. And it reminded him of what he had been doing before the hunger.

  He turned instantly away from the cliff, and hurried to where the wreckage of his ship had gathered dust for days. Bent and twisted wreckage, half-buried in the hard ground of Laertes III. He glided over the dented plates inside to one in which he had the day before sensed a quiver of anti-gravity oscillation. Tiny, potent, tremendous minutiae of oscillation, capable of being influenced.

  The Rull worked with intensity and purposefulness. The plate was still firmly attached to the frame of the ship. And the first job, the heartbreakingly difficult job was to tear it completely free. The hours passed.

  R-r-i-i-i-ppI The hard plate yielded to the slight rearrangement of its nucleonic structure. The shift was infinitesimal, partly because the directing nervous energy of his body was not at norm, and partly because it had better be infinitesimal. There was such a thing as releasing energy enough to blow up a mountain.

  Not, he discovered finally, that there was danger in this plate. He found that out the moment he crawled onto it, The sensation of power that aura-ed out of it was so dim that, briefly, he doubted if it would lift from the ground.

  But it did. The test run lasted seven feet, and gave him his measurement of the limited force he had available. Enough for an attack only.

  He had no doubts in his mind. The experiment was over. His only purpose must be to kill the man, and the question was, how could he insure that the man did not kill him while he was doing it? The varnishl

  He applied it painstakingly, dried it with a drier, and then, picking up the plate again, he carried it on his back to the hiding place he wanted.

  When he had buried it and himself under the dead leaves of a clump of brush, he grew calmer. He recognized that the veneer of his civilization was off. It shocked him, but he did not regret it.

  In giving him the food, the two-legged being was obviously doing something to him. Something dangerous. The only answer to the entire problem of the experiment of the tableland was to deal death without delay.

  He lay tense, ferocious, beyond the power of any vagrant thoughts, waiting for the man to come.

  It looked as desperate a venture as Jamieson had seen in Service. Normally, he would have handled it effortlessly. But he was watching intently—intently—for the paralysis to strike him, the negation that was of the varnish.

  And so, it was the unexpected normal quality that nearly ruined him. The Rull flew out of a clump of trees mounted on an antigravity plate. The surprise of that was so great that it almost succeeded. The plates had been drained of all such energies, according to his tests the first morning. Yet here was one alive again and light again with the special antigravity lightness which Rull scientists had brought to the peak of perfection.

  The action of movement through space toward him was, of course, based on the motion of the planet as it turned on its axis. The speed of the attack, starting as it did from zero, did not come near the eight hundred mile an hour velocity of the spinning planet, but it was swift enough.

  The apparition of metal and six-foot worm charged at him through the air. And even as he drew his weapon and fired at it, he had a choice to make, a restraint to exercise: Do not kill!

  That was hard, oh, hard. The necessity exercised his capacity for integration and imposed so stern a limitation that during the second it took him to adjust the Rull came to within ten feet of him.

  What saved him was the pressure of the air on the metal plate. The air tilted it like a wing of a plane becoming airborne. At the bottom of that metal he fired his irresistible weapon, seared it, burned it, deflected it to a crash landing in a clump of bushes twenty feet to his right.

  Jamieson was deliberately slow
in following up his success. When he reached the bushes, the Rull was fifty feet beyond it gliding on its multiple suckers over the top of a hillock. It disappeared into a clump of trees.

  He did not pursue it or fire a second time. Instead, he gingerly pulled the Rull antigravity plate out of the brush and examined it. The question was, how had the Rull de-gravitized it without the elaborate machinery necessary? And if it was capable of creating such a “parachute” for itself why hadn’t it floated down to the forest land far below where food would be available and where it would be safe from its human enemy?

  One question was answered the moment he lifted the plate. It was “normal” weight, its energy apparently exhausted after traveling less than a hundred feet. It had obviously never been capable of making the mile and a half trip to the forest and plain below.

  Jamieson took no chances. He dropped the plate over the nearest precipice, and watched it fall into distance. He was back in the lifeboat, when he remembered the “varnish.”

  Why, there had been no cue, not yet.

  He tested the scraping he had brought with him. Chemically, it turned out to be a simple resin* used to make varnishes. Atomically, it was stabilized. Electronically, it transformed light into energy on the vibration level of human thought.

  It was alive all right. But what was the recording?

  Jamieson made a graph of every material and energy level, for comparison purposes. As soon as he had established that it had been altered on the electronic level—which had been obvious, but which, still, had to be proved—he recorded the images on a visiwire. The result was a hodgepodge of dreamlike fantasies.

  Symbols. He took down his book. “Symbol Interpretations of the Unconscious,” and found the cross reference: “Inhibitions, Mental.”

  On the referred page and line, he read: “Do not kill!”

  “Well, I'll be—” Jamieson said aloud into the silence of the lifeboat interior. “That's what happened.”

  He was relieved, and then not so relieved. It had been his personal intention not to kill at this stage. But the Rull hadn't known that. By working such a subtle inhibition, it had dominated the attack even in defeat.