by Unknown
He closed the hatch, rotating the lock bar into place. Although he’d never seen a large animal, Zandro’s warning of the fierce beasts that lived in the swamp prompted the precaution. He got some fruit from one of the bins, then lay on a pallet, staring upward into the darkness. He wasn’t the only one of his kind! He felt a strange excitement. Across the gulfs of space were others like him.
His last thoughts before falling asleep were of the Golden Ram — how immense it must have been! — and of the brave man named Gordell June who had been its captain.
In the lonely, quiet hours preceding the half-light of dawn, when sleep was at its deepest, Danny felt the touch again. As if a warning signal had been triggered in his brain, he fought to awaken, yet curiously was unable to make his body obey.
“Sleep, Danny, sleep.” The familiar voice came soothingly into his mind.
“Zandro!” Danny heard the strangled cry rip from his throat as he struggled to push himself erect.
“Sleep, sleep, sleep.”
“No, Zandro!”
“Sleep, Danny, and everything will be all right.” The lulling words in his mind brought a calming effect, and his struggles ceased; suddenly he wanted nothing so much as to return to the deep slumber from which he had awakened.
“Sleep, sleep. Forget Zandro’s world, Danny. Zandro is here to help you.”
“Yes,” he murmured drowsily. Zandro was his friend — friend, protector, and teacher. Zandro was good; he had come to this lonely world to help him. A sense of peace stealing through him, all memory of his doubts about Zandro slowly vanished.
In the darkness of the ship, he slept.
The emerald sun was high in the sky when Danny took his bow and arrows and went outside. Pausing in the cool shade of the forest, he inhaled deeply, his nostrils filled with the fragrance of the tall, pink flowers that shot up each spring.
Spring! Four springs had come since that long-ago time when Zandro had explained about the seasons and how they were caused by Wenda’s axial tilt
from the vertical. Since then he’d counted each summer, each fall, each winter, waiting for spring to come again, for that was the pleasantest time of all. Spring meant tall, pink flowers, swimming in the deep pools along the blue-green stream, exploring the tall rushes and stunted trees that bordered the swamp.
It was spring, and on Wenda he was twelve springs old, which meant twelve years old. On his native planet Earth, according to Zandro, he would be more than fifteen years old. And he was growing! He could tell that by the way the lifeboat’s cabin seemed to be shrinking. Now he had to duck his head to pass through the hatch, while at night he all but filled the narrow sleeping pallet. And he was getting stronger. Last year he could scarcely bend the big bow — he’d gotten the concept from Zandro’s mind — which he’d made with the tools in the bin. Now he could pull an arrow its full length, put it into a target no larger than himself from a distance farther than he could hurl a rock.
Shouldering the bow, he ate leisurely of fruits and berries as he picked his way toward the meadow. He halted at the edge of the trees to gaze upward. Scattered clouds, fleecy against an emerald sky, promised a cool afternoon.
“Zandro?” He projected the name mentally — “telepathically” was the word Zandro used — and listened for an answer. He wasn’t surprised that none came. Zandro seldom responded when the sun was high and occasionally would remain quiet for days at a time.
He reached the stream, pausing to gaze at the strange life forms that lived in the blue-green water and in the thick rushes that grew along the banks. Swift, finned creatures with huge globular eyes furtively watched him from the depths, darting to mossy sanctuaries at his slightest move. Smooth-skinned animals sat immobile at the water’s edge, their long forked tongues occasionally flicking out to scoop in unwary insects. Other animals slithered, chirped, croaked, or uttered plaintive calls in the thick rushes.
He never tired of studying them. “Life has unending variations,” Zandro once had told him; and again, “Life is a constant battle for survival.” Here, along the stream and in the forest, Danny saw the truth of the statements. Scarcely a day passed but that he didn’t encounter a new life form; on every side he was aware of the constant struggle for food. Each creature had its prey and its predator.
At the edge of the swamp he halted, his pulses quickening. Ahead the stream emptied into a marsh filled with stunted trees and rushes that grew to great heights. An odor of decay permeated the air. “Don’t go near the swamp” - - Zandro’s warning rang in his mind. Fierce animals lived there; death lurked at every turn.
What kind of animals? Zandro had never told him. That, more than anything else, piqued his curiosity. He had been this far before, but never farther. Yet he had known all along that some day he would explore the swamp. Today’s as good as any, he decided impulsively.
His eyes swept over the scene, picking out areas where the land appeared firmer. Fitting an arrow into the bow, he moved stealthily forward. As the ground became soggier, he was forced to zigzag to avoid small pools of stagnant water.
Now and then he paused to listen. The feathery whirring of frightened birds rising from the tall rushes ahead, the rustling of small animals scurrying from his path, the hum of insects — the familiar sounds reassured him. Ahead, where the rushes opened, he glimpsed a large, dark pool.
Stealing toward it, he suddenly realized that the mud underfoot appeared to have been flattened by the passage of a heavy body. His throat constricting, he stared at it. The mud had been flattened! He could tell by its smooth surface, the lack of ridges and pitting. The reeds on either side
had been crushed. But no footprints! He raised his eyes; the flattened trail led to the edge of the dark pool.
His heart thudding, he crept forward, conscious that his body was wet with sweat. Gripping the bow tightly, be tried to still his fears. Go back! Go back! He forced the warning from his brain. At the edge of the pool he halted, gazing around. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary.
He was beginning to relax when he dropped his gaze to the water, then suddenly stiffened. Believing his vision to be playing him tricks, he peered closer. His first impression was of a gigantic eye floating beneath the surface. The eye stared back at him!
He caught his breath, trembling, and forced himself to study it. The eye appeared to rest atop a huge black blob. Thick, dark trunks, tapering to fine points, radiated out from all sides of the hideous apparition.
A monster! A monster sitting astride a nest of snakes! Terror-stricken, he turned to flee when he froze again, a warning signal flashing in his brain. He darted a quick look around. The rushes, the stunted trees, the stagnant pool — nothing appeared changed. A faint hissing came from overhead as a small shadow crossed his path.
Alarmed, he threw a glance at the sky as he leaped backward. Nothing! The sky was clear. The faint hissing came again. Attempting to locate its source, he spotted a small bird hovering above the rushes.
His eyes swept past it, then jerked back as he realized the bird had been stationary in the sky, its wings unmoving. Startled, he gazed at it with a mixture of awe and fear. Its small red eyes, fixed squarely on him, held an unidentifiable threat that caused him to shiver.
Threat from a small bird? He wanted to laugh. It was no larger than his hand. Thousands of birds just like it lived in the rushes; he saw them every day. Except that this bird didn’t move its wings! And its beady red eyes…
He retreated a dozen paces without shifting his gaze. The hissing came again as the bird moved toward him, its extended wings as motionless as before. The sight was unnerving. It halted above the rushes a short distance away.
Slowly, step by step, he edged around a stunted tree until the bird was lost to sight, then halted, wondering what it would do. Hzzzzz…The strange sound came again. This time he definitely associated it with the bird’s movements as it came into view, hovering above him at a distance of half a dozen paces.
A bird that hissed? He�
��d never seen such a strange creature. Neither had he ever seen such a monster as that in the pool. Unnerved, he wanted to turn and flee, yet was restrained by the more imperative need to know what kind of bird this was that flew without moving its wings. A bird that stalked him!
“Life has unending variations” — Zandro’s words came again. Gazing at the bird, he reached a decision. Forcing himself to steadiness, he slowly raised the bow, sighting along the arrow as he pulled back on the drawstring. The beady red eyes fixed on him took no cognizance of the threat. Holding steady, he released the arrow.
Thunk! It struck the bird a glancing blow, hurling it off to one side. Leaping forward, he searched the rushes until he found the torn form. Gingerly he picked it up, then stared at it in horror.
A metal bird! The crumpled form he held in his hand wasn’t feathers and flesh at all but was metal — twisted metal and fine wires, like those he saw behind the instrument panel in the ship. He felt his scalp prickle.
“Danny!” Zandro’s voice came suddenly alive in his mind, filling him with fear. “Get out of the swamp,” the voice thundered. “Get out! Get out!”
Terrified, he raced toward the meadow, Zandro’s command beating at his brain. Sloshing through ankle-deep mud, he suddenly became conscious that he still held the crumpled metal form in his hand. Violently, urgently, he hurled
it into the rushes, then fled to the safety of the ship.
“Sleep, Danny, sleep” — the words came to Danny as if in a dream. He twisted and turned restlessly on the narrow pallet, not knowing whether he was asleep or awake.
“Sleep, sleep, sleep,” the soothing voice in his brain said. “You are asleep, Danny.”
“Yes,” he murmured.
“You will forget today, Danny. There was no pool, no monster, no bird.”
“No pool, no monster, no bird,” he murmured.
“You will forget them, Danny.”
“I will forget…”
“Now sleep, sleep, sleep…”
2
THE LUXURIOUS offices of Sol Houston, Overlord of Space, fittingly enough occupied the entire top floor of the 200-story Space Administration Building in Gylan, capital of the planet Makal, third of the cobalt sun Apar. Makal, in turn, served as the administrative center of the 17th Celestial Sector of the Third Terran Empire — which made Sol Houston a very important man.
But Samul Smith wasn’t thinking of that as he stepped into an atomic lift and shot up to Sol Houston’s private offices. He was wondering at his abrupt summons. An emergency? Of course, otherwise Sol Houston would never have called him so peremptorily. But what kind of emergency?
Samul Smith wasn’t a worrier — far from it — but he liked to be prepared. Ordinarily a summons was a summons; but this one, from Sol Houston personally, perplexed him. As Overlord of Space, Sol Houston was answerable only to the Regent Administrator of the 17th Sector, who in turn answered directly to the Prime Administrator of the Third Terran Empire, the capital of which was on Earth. As such, the Overlord concerned himself only with problems of such moment that they could not be entrusted to any of his more than 100 immediate aides. That indicated quite an emergency.
Samul hummed happily. He liked emergencies. As a point in fact, as Sol Houston’s chief troubleshooter, that was all he got. He felt himself fortunate. Every job was different, a challenge. As a bachelor, he could put in as many hours as he liked. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, of course; the regulations governing working hours were quite strict. But he made it that way all the same. He disliked regulations.
A secretary eyed him approvingly as he stepped from the lift. Offering a smile meant to charm, she pressed a hidden button that opened the door to the inner office. “Go right in, Mr. Smith.” Her voice carried a lilt.
Samul nodded and walked past her. She’d like to get married, he thought smugly. She used her eyes and voice like nets. Not that he would fall for such transparent guile. Never! He valued his freedom too highly.
Sight of the three men seated at the long polished table confirmed his suspicion that the emergency was far from ordinary.
Altair Harbin, Master of Colonial Operations.
Benkar Redmont, Master of Alien Cultures.
Ghengin Kaan, Master of Defense.
The three represented Sol Houston’s top administrators, although Samul knew they would never have gotten there were it not for the seniority provisions of the vast civil service hierarchy that spun the wheels of empire; seniority and politics, the latter of which was largely a matter of family. In the absolutism of equality, guaranteed in the Constitution of the Third Terran
Empire, the same families somehow manipulated the same power levers.
As it was, each of the Overlord’s masters commanded a jurisdiction covering the more than 400 sun systems that comprised the 17th Celestial Sector. And himself? Samul Smith: lowly investigator to the Master Council, odd-jobman, jack-of-all-trades, and — yes ! — troubleshooter. But he worked at Sol Houston’s right hand; that made the difference.
He smiled wryly as he took a seat. Altair Harbin inclined his head in curt acknowledgment; Benkar Redmont and Ghengin Kaan appeared not to notice him. The slight didn’t bother Samul. At the age of thirty standard years, he was resented by the others, all of whom were in their seventies or eighties. Besides, his name was Smith. In an age when names held great social and political significance, a Smith was of no moment at all. Not when compared with such names as those borne by the men sitting with him. Their given names, in the male lineage, remained unchanged throughout the generations; their surnames ran like rivers through human history.
Despite his cynicism, sight of the men reminded Samul of the power of the names. He gazed at the Master of Colonial Operations. His given name, Altair for the star, and surname, Harbin for that sun’s greatest planet, gave a clear statement of his family background; a Harbin had been first to penetrate the system of that yellow-white star. The name, historically, was synonymous with colonial operations.
Benkar Redmont, Master of Alien Cultures, claimed a more potent name still, although many would challenge the fact. As every student of dark history knew, Benkar was a contraction of Benjamin Karr, the first earthling to discover an alien culture beyond the confines of the solar system — small plants on the planet Dorn, which wandered the second orbit of the bluish-white binary, Alpha Centauri. Redmonts had dominated the field of alien cultures ever since.
Ghengin Kaan’s name was equally esteemed, for it derived from a great conqueror of prehistory who was said to have invented and used the first nuclear weapon in the Battle of Waterloo, the precise site of which had never been determined.
But Sol Houston had the most prestigious name of all, for Sol was the name of the mother sun, and Houston of the great Earth city of antiquity from which men first had reached for the stars.
Samul smiled to himself. Despite legions of scholars, all that lay so deeply buried in the barbaric past that it was scarcely credible, let alone provable. But Smith! There were planets filled with them! At least no one could say that he’d attained his present position through his family name.
He glanced covertly at his companions, seeking to discern some clue to the trouble at hand. Benkar Redmont’s narrow face, showing its seventy-eight years for all the cosmetologists could do, held a speculative expression. Ghengin Kaan appeared unruffled. Altair Harbin, at seventy-six years old the youngest of the three, appeared grim. He knows, Samul thought. Then the meeting had to do with his empire — Colonial Operations.
His speculation was broken as the tall doors at the far end of the room silently swung open and as silently closed behind Sol Houston. The Overlord crossed the deep rug with a step surprisingly agile for a man of eighty-three. Olive-skinned, his high cheekbones set in a craggy face, his gray eyes as hard as the tophi pebbles found on the shores of the Wasach Sea, he wore the purple cape of his office.
As the others started to rise, he waved them down. Taking his place at the head
of the table, he announced abruptly, “The survey cruiser Nomad has been destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” It took Samul an instant to recognize Ghengin Kaan’s squeaky voice. The Master of Defense appeared dumbfounded. Well he might,
Samul thought, for the Nomad, the newest and best-equipped survey ship ever launched, also carried formidable disintegrator weapons. If he felt no surprise himself, it was because he seldom did. He long since had learned that anything was possible in an empire which spanned 6,800 sun systems, not to mention the limitless Universe beyond.
Benkar Redmont caught his voice and exclaimed, “Impossible!”
“Why?” Sol Houston stared at the Master of Alien Cultures.
“Destroyed implies an outside agency.”
“Yes?”
Redmont returned his stare. “We’ve never encountered an alien culture capable of destroying a survey ship…unless it had landed on a planetary surface,” he added uncertainly.
“It hadn’t,” the Overlord replied decisively.
“Then it’s impossible. An accident, perhaps…”
“It was destroyed by an alien power, Benkar.” Sol Houston’s words made Samul sit straighter.
“How do we know that?” Ghengin Kaan interjected. His squeaky voice had dropped to a subdued whisper.
“We’ve lost three survey ships in the last ten years — four, counting the Nomad — in the same sector.”
“That doesn’t prove…”
“Wait!” Gesturing for silence, the Overlord manipulated a button board at his side. As the room grew dim, one entire wall blazed into a magnificent display of the star field. As his fingers moved across the panel, a yellow square crossed the board, stopping when it encompassed a patch of orange suns. Samul recognized the area as across the Ebon Deeps.