In the Beginning: Tales From the Pulp Era

by Robert Silverberg

  They headed forward, moving cautiously now, guns drawn and ready. The thrumming of the toads grew more intense. Brannon saw landmarks he had seen before. The village was not far. They were virtually at the point now where he had been attacked by the toads, before Lethii had rescued him.

  Thrum…thrum…

  The sudden croaking sounds were loud—and a toad burst from the underbrush, a Nurillin mounted astride the ugly creature. Brannon stared at the Nurillin but did not recognize him.

  “That one’s mine,” Napoli said before anyone else of the group was aware of what was happening. The burly huntsman lowered his rifle and pumped one shot through the Nurillin’s heart.

  Brannon winced. That was the first one.

  The Nurillin dropped from his mount, a look of astonishment frozen on his face. The toad uttered three defiant bellows and waddled forward, mouth opening, deadly tongue coiling in readiness as Napoli went to claim his kill.

  “Watch out for the frog,” Brannon warned.

  Napoli laughed. And then the tongue flicked out and wrapped itself around the big man’s bull-like neck and throat. Napoli gagged and clawed at his throat, trying to say the word “Help” and failing.

  Brannon’s first shot severed the outstretched pink tongue, breaking the link between the toad and Napoli. His second shot ripped a gaping hole in the toad’s pouting throat. Napoli reeled away, gasping for air, and ripped the tongue away from his skin. It came away bloody; a line of red circled his neck like the mark of a noose.

  “I thought I could outmaneuver him,” Napoli said. “But that tongue moved like lightning.”

  “I warned you,” Brannon said. Napoli knelt by the dead Nurillin.

  “This one’s mine,” he repeated. “I got mine.”

  They moved on, rounding a bend in the path, coming now to the outskirts of the village itself. Four male Nurillins were coming toward them, their green eyes sharp with accusation. Again, Brannon did not know any of them. He was thankful for that much.

  “What were those shots?” asked one of them, in the Nurillin tongue. Brannon was the only one who could understand, and he could make no reply.

  It was Marshall’s wife who spoke first. “Why, they’re just like people!” she said in wonderment.

  “Of course,” her husband snapped dourly. “That’s why we’re here.” He lowered his gun to firing level and sent the rightmost Nurillin sprawling with a quick shot. The other three turned to flee, but were dropped rapidly with bullets from the guns of Rhawn, his wife, and—of all people—grandmotherly Mrs. Damon.

  That makes five, Brannon thought. Five corpses.

  Four more and it would all be over.

  Trickles of alien blood stained the forest sand now. The four dead Nurillins lay with limbs grotesquely tangled, and the four successful huntsmen were beaming with pride.

  And more Nurillins were coming. Many of them. Brannon shuddered.

  “Here comes a batch of them,” Murdoch shouted. “Be ready to move fast.”

  “They won’t hurt you,” said Brannon. “They don’t understand violence. That’s why they ran away.”

  They came, though, to see what the disturbance was. Brannon turned and saw Llewellyn levelling for a distance shot, his mild face bright with killing fever, his eyes fixed. He fired, and brought down Darhuing the musician. The Nurillin toppled out of the front row of the advancing aliens.

  “I’d like another one,” Napoli said. “Let me get another one.”

  “No!” Brannon said.

  “He’s right,” said Murdoch. “Just one each. Just one.”

  Marshall’s wife picked off her trophy before the aliens reached the glade. The second to die was a stranger to Brannon. The others scattered, ducking into the underbrush on both sides of the road—but not before Leopold Damon had fired. His shot caught a Nurillin slightly above the heart and sent the alien spinning backward ten feet.

  Eight were dead, now. And only one Nurillin had not sought hiding.

  Lethii.

  She came forward slowly, staring without comprehension at the little knot of gunbearing Earthmen.

  “Brannon,” she said. “Brannon. What are you doing?” The liquid syllables of the alien tongue seemed harsh and accusing.

  “I—I—”

  She stood slim and unafraid near two fallen Nurillins and stared bitterly at Brannon. “You have come back…but your friends kill!”

  “I had to do it,” Brannon said. “It was for your sake. For your tribe’s sake. For my sake.”

  “How can that be? You brought these people here to kill us—and you say it’s good?”

  She doesn’t understand, Brannon thought drearily. “I can’t explain,” he said.

  “Listen! He’s speaking her language!” Mrs. Damon exclaimed.

  “Watch out, Brannon,” said Marya Llewellyn suddenly. She laughed in derision.

  “No,” Brannon said. But for once his foresight failed him. Before he could turn, before he could deflect Marya’s aim, she had fired, still laughing.

  Lethii stared at him gravely, reproachfully, for a fragment of a second. Then she put her hand to her chest and fell, headlong into the dust.

  The journey back to the settlement seemed to take forever. Brannon led the way, eyes fixed ahead of him, never looking back, never speaking. Behind came the nine, each with a trophy, each with the deep satisfaction of knowing he had murdered an intelligent being and would go scot-free.

  Brannon was remembering. Remembering the look on nine Nurillin faces as they fell to the ground, remembering especially that of the ninth victim. Lethii. It had had to be her, of course. Her, out of the three thousand. That was necessarily part of the betrayal.

  It took a day and a half to reach the main settlement again; Brannon did not sleep in the tent with the others, but remained outside, sitting near the fire with his hands locked across his knees, thinking. Just thinking.

  It was late in the afternoon when the group stumbled out of the edge of the jungle and found themselves back in civilization. They stood together in a nervous little group.

  Murdoch said, “I want to thank you, Brannon. You got us there, and you got us back, and that’s more than I sometimes thought you were going to do.”

  “Don’t thank me, Murdoch. Just get going. Get off Cutwold as fast as you can, and take your nine killers with you.”

  Murdoch flinched. “They weren’t people, those aliens. You still can’t understand that. The Treaty doesn’t say anything about them, and so they’re just animals.”

  “Go on,” Brannon said hoarsely. “Go. Fast.”

  He looked at them—puffed up with pride they were, at having gone into the jungle and come out alive. It would have been so easy to kill them in the jungle, Brannon thought wearily. Marya Llewellyn was looking blackly at him, her body held high, inviting him. She had known about Lethii. That was why she had waited, and fired last, killing her.

  “We want to say goodbye, Mr. Brannon,” gushed Mrs. Damon. “You were just wonderful.”

  “Don’t bother,” Brannon said. He spat at their feet. Then he turned and slowly ambled away, not looking back.

  He came into Vuornik’s Bar. They were all there, Vuornik, and Barney Karris, and the eight or nine other regular barflies. They were all staring at him. They knew, all of them. They knew.

  “Hello, Judas,” Karris said acidly. A knife glinted in his belt. He was ready to defend himself.

  But Brannon didn’t feel like fighting. He slouched down next to the bar and said, “Give me the usual, Vuornik. Double khalla, straight.”

  “I don’t know as I want to serve you in my place, Brannon. I don’t know.”

  Brannon took one of Murdoch’s bills from his back pocket and dropped it on the bar. “There’s my money. My money’s good. Give me that drink, Vuornik!”

  His tone left little doubts. Vuornik said nervously, “Okay, Brannon. Don’t fly up in an uproar.” He poured the drink.

  Brannon sipped it numbly, hoping it would
wipe away the pain and the guilt. It didn’t. Judas, he thought. Judas.

  He wasn’t any Judas. He had done what was right.

  If he hadn’t led Murdoch to the Nurillins, Murdoch would have gone himself. Sooner or later he would have found them. He would have destroyed them all…not just these nine.

  But now there had been a hunt. Nine trophies had been brought back. Murdoch’s nine hunters would boast, and the Nurillins would no longer be a secret. Soon, someone high in government circles would learn that there was a species in the galaxy still unprotected from hunters. Survey ships would come, and the Nurillins would be declared untouchable.

  It had had to happen. But there would be no more hunting parties to the interior of Cutwold, now that the galaxy knew the Nurillins existed. They would be safe from now on, Brannon hoped. Safe at the cost of nine lives…and one man’s soul.

  No one would ever forgive him on Cutwold. He would never forgive himself. But he had done the right thing. He hadn’t had any choice.

  He finished his drink and scooped up his change and walked slowly across the barroom, out into the open. The sun was setting. It was a lovely sight—but Brannon couldn’t appreciate it now.

  “So long, Judas,” came Karris’ voice drifting after him out of the bar. “So long, Judas.”

  COME INTO MY BRAIN

  (1958)

  This was practically the last story I wrote under my monthly contract deal for Bill Hamling’s Imagination. I turned it in in March, 1957—it was called “Into the Unknown,” then, and the byline I put on it was “Ray McKenzie”—but Hamling, who was gradually working off his inventory all through 1957 as he wound down his magazines, didn’t find a slot for it until the June, 1958 number, the third issue from the end. It was Hamling who gave it the title it bears here, and he replaced my “McKenzie” pseudonym with the time-honored monicker of “Alexander Blade.”

  ——————

  Dane Harrell held the thought-helmet tightly between his hands, and, before putting it on, glanced over at the bound, writhing alien sitting opposite him. The alien snarled defiantly at him.

  “You’re sure you want to go through with this?” asked Dr. Phelps.

  Harrell nodded. “I volunteered, didn’t I? I said I’d take a look inside this buzzard’s brain, and I’m going to do it. If I don’t come up in half an hour, come get me.”

  “Right.”

  Harrell slipped the cool bulk of the thought-helmet over his head and signaled to the scientist, who pulled the actuator switch. Harrell shuddered as psionic current surged through him; he stiffened, wriggled, and felt himself glide out of his body, hover incorporeally in the air between his now soulless shell and the alien bound opposite.

  Remember, you volunteered, he told himself.

  He hung for a moment outside the alien’s skull; then he drifted downward and in. He had entered the alien’s mind. Whether he would emerge alive, and with the troop-deployment data—well, that was another matter entirely.

  The patrol-ships of the Terran outpost on Planetoid 113 had discovered the alien scout a week before. The Dimellian spy was lurking about the outermost reaches of the Terran safety zone when he was caught.

  It wasn’t often that Earth captured a Dimellian alive, and so the Outpost resolved to comb as much information from the alien as possible. The Earth-Dimell war was four years old; neither side had succeeded in scoring a decisive victory over the other. It was believed that Dimell was massing its fleets for an all-out attack on Earth itself; confirmation of this from the captured scout would make Terran defensive tactics considerably more sound.

  But the Dimellian resisted all forms of brainwashing, until Phelps, the Base Psych-man, came forth with the experimental thought-helmet. Volunteers were requested; Harrell spoke up first. Now, wearing the thought-helmet, he plunged deep into the unknown areas of the Dimellian’s mind, hoping to emerge with high-order military secrets.

  His first impression was of thick grey murk—so thick it could be cut. Using a swimming motion, Harrell drifted downward, toward the light in the distance. It was a long way down; he floated, eerily, in free-fall.

  Finally he touched ground. It yielded under him spongily, but it was solid. He looked around. The place was alien: coarse crumbly red soil, giant spike-leaved trees that shot up hundreds of feet overhead, brutal-looking birds squawking and chattering in the low branches.

  It looked just like the tridim solidos of Dimell he had seen. Well, why not? Why shouldn’t the inside of a man’s mind—or an alien’s, for that matter, resemble his home world?

  Cautiously, Harrell started to walk. Mountains rose in the dim distance, and he could see, glittering on a mountaintop far beyond him, the white bulk of an armored castle. Of course! His imaginative mind realized at once that there was where the Dimellian guarded the precious secrets; up there, on the mountain, was his goal.

  He started to walk.

  Low-hanging vines obscured his way; he conjured up a machete and cut them down. The weapon felt firm and real in his hand—but he paused to realize that not even the hand was real; all this was but an imaginative projection.

  The castle was further away than he had thought, he saw, after he had walked for perhaps fifteen minutes. There was no telling duration inside the alien’s skull, either. Or distance. The castle seemed just as distant now as when he had begun, and his fifteen-minute journey through the jungle had tired him.

  Suddenly demonic laughter sounded up ahead in the jungle. Harsh, ugly laughter.

  And the Dimellian appeared, slashing his way through the vines with swashbuckling abandon.

  “Get out of my mind, Earthman!”

  The Dimellian was larger than life, and twice as ugly. It was an idealized, self-glorified mental image Harrell faced.

  The captured Dimellian was about five feet tall, thick-shouldered, with sturdy, corded arms and supplementary tentacles sprouting from its shoulders; its skin was green and leathery, dotted with toad-like warts.

  Harrell now saw a creature close to nine feet tall, swaggering, with a mighty barrel of a chest and a huge broadsword clutched in one of its arms. The tentacles writhed purposefully.

  “You know why I’m here, alien. I want to know certain facts. And I’m not getting out of your mind until I’ve wrung them from you.”

  The alien’s lipless mouth curved upward in a bleak smile. “Big words, little Earthman. But first you’ll have to vanquish me.”

  And the Dimellian stepped forward.

  Harrell met the downcrashing blow of the alien’s broadsword fully; the shock of impact sent numbing shivers up his arm as far as his shoulder, but he held on and turned aside the blow. It wasn’t fair; the Dimellian had a vaster reach than he could ever hope for—

  No! He saw there was no reason why he couldn’t control the size of his own mental image. Instantly he was ten feet high, and advancing remorselessly toward the alien.

  Swords clashed clangorously; the forest-birds screamed. Harrell drove the alien back…back…

  And the Dimellian was eleven feet high.

  “We can keep this up forever,” Harrell said. “Getting larger and larger. This is only a mental conflict.” He shot up until he again towered a foot above the alien’s head. He swung downward two-handedly with the machete—

  The alien vanished.

  And reappeared five feet to the right, grinning evilly. “Enough of this foolishness, Earthman. Physical conflict will be endless stalemate, since we’re only mental projections, both of us. You’re beaten; there’s no possible way you can defeat me, or I defeat you. Don’t waste your time and mine. Get out of my mind!”

  Harrell shook his head doggedly. “I’m in here to do a job, and I’m not leaving until I’ve done it.” He sprang forward, sword high, and thrust down at the grinning Dimellian.

  Again the Dimellian sidestepped. Harrell’s sword cut air.

  “Don’t tire yourself out, Earthman,” the alien said mockingly, and vanished.

  Harrell
stood alone in the heart of the steaming jungle, leaning on his sword. Maybe they were only mental projections, he thought, but a mental projection could still get thoroughly drenched with its own mental sweat.

  The castle still gleamed enigmatically on the distant mountain. He couldn’t get there by walking—at least, it hadn’t seemed to draw any nearer during his jaunt through the jungle. And hand-to-hand combat with the alien was fruitless, it appeared. A fight in which both participants could change size at will, vanish, reappear, and do other such things was as pointless as a game of poker with every card wild.

  But there had to be a way. Mental attack? Perhaps that would crumble the alien’s defenses.

  He sent out a beam of thought, directed up at the castle. Can you hear me, alien?

  Mental laughter echoed mockingly back. Of course, Earthman. What troubles you?

  Harrell made no reply. He stood silently, concentrating, marshalling his powers. Then he hurled a bolt of mental energy with all his strength toward the mocking voice.

  The jungle shuddered as it struck home. The ground lurched wildly, like an animal’s back; trees tumbled, the sky bent. Harrell saw he had scored a hit; the alien’s concentration had wavered, distorting the scenery.

  But there was quick recovery. Again the mocking laughter. Harrell knew that the alien had shrugged off the blow.

  And then the counterblow.

  It caught Harrell unawares and sent him spinning back a dozen feet, to land in a tangled heap beneath a dangling nest of vines. His head rocked, seemed ready to split apart. He sensed the alien readying a second offensive drive, and set up counterscreens.

  This time he was ready. He diverted the attack easily, and shook his head to clear it. The score was even: one stunning blow apiece. But he had recovered, and so had the alien.

  Harrell aimed another blow, and felt the alien sweep it aside. Back came the answering barrage of mental force; Harrell blocked it.

  Stalemate again, the alien said.