The Planet Killers

by Robert Silverberg

  Well, who wouldn’t be? Gardner asked himself. Living for six months on a planet you’ve been told to blow up. It’s amazing that he’s as stable as he is .

  Gardner wondered what he would be like if it took another six months or more before a full destruction team could be assembled. He began to hope fervently that Leopold and Archer and Weegan would get here on time, without delays that might necessitate replacement of personnel.

  “Are you planning to stay on this continent?” Smee asked suddenly.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing, I guess. Except that in the original setup, this was my area. And we can’t all be in the same place, of course. We have to be separated by the proper distances.”

  “Naturally,” Gardner said. “One of us will have to move elsewhere.”

  “You’re the boss. Do you want to stay here, or should I?”

  Gardner puckered his lip indecisively. Smee obviously did not want to be shifted. But Gardner knew that that was unhealthy; perhaps Smee, in his six months, had developed fixed habits, had involved himself with drinking cronies and the like. For the good of the mission, Smee would have to be pried loose from any such impairers of efficiency.

  “I’ll stay here,” Gardner said. “You know this planet better than I do, so it’s easier for you to move around. Take Continent East as your position.”

  Smee sighed. “Very well. I’ll be there when the time comes.”

  Chapter Four

  A very special geographical distribution was necessary if the generator were to produce its desired effect. Lines of force had to be drawn through the planet, pole to pole, hemisphere to hemisphere. The Five would be together only at the very end, after the generators had been activated, when they fled to safety in Gardner’s ship.

  Gardner began to regret having decided to meet Smee personally. The plan was so established that there was no real need for the five conspirators to have actual personal contact. When the indicator band would glow on all five wrists in all five colors, the time would have come, and each man would know where he was to be and what he was to do.

  Gardner looked at the rings under Smee’s deep-set, sad eyes and shivered. Six months of waiting, and Smee was still here; but how much damage had this hellishly prolonged assignment done to his soul?

  “I think I’ll be going,” Gardner said. “You woke me up. I haven’t slept in a while. And we’ve covered all the ground we need to cover.”

  Smee’s hand shot out and caught Gardner’s wrist with a surprisingly powerful grip.

  “Why not wait? I asked you to come here for a specific reason. There’s a floor show starting in ten minutes. You may find it interesting.”

  “I’d rather—”

  “ Please wait,” Smee said strangely. He was half cajoling, half commanding. “The floor show here is quite unique. I … find it healthy to watch it.”

  “Healthy?”

  “You’ll understand. I’m sure that watching it will benefit you as it does me.”

  “What kind of benefit?”

  “Remain and watch.”

  Gardner shrugged. Smee seemed almost desperately insistent. And he was wide awake now anyway. “All right,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

  Leaning back, he took another sip of the khall . He could see how Davis had grown so fond of it. Its taste was insidious, growing in intensity as one kept on drinking it, and it could easily become compulsive. Probably, Gardner thought, it even had mild narcotic qualities. All in all, it was a good drink to stay away from, except when being sociable.

  A few minutes passed, and then three burly-looking Lurioni appeared and began to clear to one side the tables in the front of the room. At the touch of a button, the streetfront windows were opaqued, to keep outsiders from getting free looks.

  “It’s starting,” Smee murmured. “Be prepared for something nasty.”

  Gardner waited tensely. A sphincter in the wall just to his right irised open. There was a silent hush in the bar.

  A beam of blue light wriggled through the opening in the wall, spun dizzyingly across the opposite wall in wild circles, and came to rest finally in sharp focus. A bolt of bright yellow followed, spearing into the blue. The colors twined, moved snakily along the wall, suddenly blanked out.

  Then two Lurioni stepped through.

  They came to the center of the floor and stood there, bathed in light, unmoving, while from the regular patrons there arose a rhythmic stamping of the feet that was the local variety of applause. Gardner noticed that Smee, too, was pounding the floor.

  The Lurioni were a man and a woman wearing only the briefest of loincloths. A harsh red light shot down from the ceiling and illuminated their thin, knobby-jointed bodies. Gardner studied them with interest.

  They were particularly lean specimens of their race, thin and bony, extremely tall. The man was near seven feet in height, Gardner estimated, while the woman was at least a six-footer. They stood quite still, moving not a muscle, until the stamping of feet died away.

  Then the two in the center of the floor began to dance to the accompaniment of grave music that came piping from a grille set high on one wall near the ceiling. Their motions were stiff, precise, jerky. Gardner winced a little at the music; he had a delicate sense of pitch, and the excruciating quarter-tone intervals and the jarring, totally unpredictable discordancies affected him strongly.

  The music accelerated, and so did the dancers. The off-stage instruments struck a clashing chord so oddly tonal that it seemed wildly misplaced in that symphony of dissonances, and the female dancer went into an awkward pirouette.

  She spun for a moment, spidery arms akimbo, one long leg drawn up so her foot touched her other knee. Then, breaking the pose, she fumbled at the belt of her loincloth. Long arms whirled. A knife flashed in the red spotlight, and red line of blood traced itself down the golden chest of the male dancer.

  Gardner caught his breath sharply. “What sort of unholy dance is this?”

  Smee smiled mellowly, sitting back with his thumbs hooked into his belt. “Entertainment here runs to the morbid side,” he said. “If we’re lucky, maybe the management was able to afford to hire a kill tonight. There hasn’t been one here in weeks.” Smee took another drink, grinning complacently.

  Gardner felt cold. It seemed to him that Smee relished the weird dance taking place, that he had insisted on Gardner’s seeing it only because he wanted the company of his own kind.

  The dance continued, unwinding inexorably. The unseen musicians spun out their mercilessly complicated nonmelodies, and the dancers kept pace with the tempo, moving now at a frenzied pace. Their dark bodies were glistening with sweat.

  The male dancer had a knife, too, Gardner saw; it flickered momentarily in the seven-fingered hands as he struck, and a line of blood appeared between the girl’s breasts. Another tonal chord echoed in the room! The dancers separated, gliding, as if on bearings to opposite ends of the area. Polarized there, they spun in tight circles and glided back, coming together again under the red spotlight.

  They passed by each other on tiptoe, taking little mincing steps, and the girl’s knife slit the man’s arm from elbow to shoulder. Each of the knife-strokes was precise, delicate, not a crude butcher-swing; Gardner guessed that none of the cuts penetrated very much deeper than the outer layers of the skin.

  But even skin cuts are painful, and by now the bodies of both dancers were crisscrossed and streaked with slashes. And, as Gardner looked around, he saw the patrons—Lurioni, chiefly, with a thin sprinkling of outworlders—staring eagerly at the pair, waiting eagerly for the climax of the dance.

  An invisible drum began beating a numbing tattoo. A flute wailed atonally.

  Blood mingled with sweat. The dancers closed, danced lightly apart, rejoined. Each time they passed one another, a cut was inflicted. They seemed to be outdoing each other in the attempt to make the delivery and placing of the wound as artistic as possible. Their faces remained as rigidly emotionless as those of m
asks in a museum cabinet. Gardner wondered if the dancers saw the knife coming before the moment of pain, and whether the kiss of the blade had any effect at all.

  “Don’t they feel the cuts?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” Smee said. “It would ruin the dance. They’re doped to the eyebrows and hardly know what’s going on. It’s the customers who feel it vicariously.”

  Looking around, Gardner saw that Smee had told the truth. Total empathy had been achieved. The Lurioni patrons sat stiffly, rocking back and forth, grunting a little each time a wound was inflicted, grinning fiercely, swaying and murmuring. They seemed to be participating in some blasphemous rite. Gardner found himself falling into the wild, chaotic rhythm of the music, and nervously checked himself lest some dark impulse take hold of him.

  The dancers were moving jerkily and lamely now, their former angular grace utterly transformed into a marionette-like parody. The male dancer was soaked with blood and perspiration, and he gleamed under the lights. The female had come off slightly better. Gardner suddenly realized that there was going to be a kill tonight, and that it would be the male who would die. The girl had been setting him up, taking wounds herself as a matter of ritual, but inflicting more than she took, and maintaining control at all times.

  The music swung deafeningly upward. The girl, eyes agleam, moved inward, coming to life, dancing bouncily on the outer edges of her feet, lifting the knife, bending to circle and display it to the watchers, letting it sparkle in the dimmed spotlight. The hapless victim danced too, but it was the death-dance of a cocooned fly twitching at the end of his silken cord while waiting for the spider who had snared him to suck him dry.

  Gardner clenched his teeth. He had seen death before, but never death administered so casually, so brutally.

  The killing of an individual , he thought, is tragic murder. But the killing of a planet …

  The girl came forward, knife held high, preparing now for the final moment, the climax, the moment of truth—

  Then the lights went on.

  Gardner felt the wrench back into reality with a painful, jarring tug. It was like being abruptly awakened, and even awakening from a nightmare can be a wrench. He knew that the impact on the others, who had been so closely bound up in the bloody little drama, must have been even more violent.

  The dancers were frozen in midfloor, looking merely naked and no longer nude. Their eyes were vacant, their arms dangled limply, their shoulders slumped. Blood trickled in little runnels down their skin. They seemed totally bewildered at all around them, as though they had been transported here in the twinkling of an eye from some far-off cosmos where only the two of them had existed.

  After the first frozen moment, Gardner reacted, glancing toward the door.

  Four uniformed Lurioni stood there.

  It’s a raid , he thought wildly. He was right. Once the immediate instant of surprise was over, the patrons of the bar came to life, jumping up, making a scrambling dash for the rear doors, the windows, any available exit they could find.

  “Don’t panic,” Smee said quietly. “Come with me and we’ll get out of here.”

  Gardner felt Smee’s powerful hand gripping his wrist once again, this time not holding him down but lifting him up, pulling him bodily from his seat. Gardner looked back and saw the four policemen marching into the bar, laying about them in vicious glee with heavy wooden truncheons. Half a dozen of the bar’s Lurioni patrons lay sprawled unconscious on the floor, blood welling from their scalps. The two dancers stood grotesquely together in the dance area, covered with their own blood. They were holding hands, joining forces in their mute, bewildered way against the sudden and violent encroachment of the outer world.

  Then Gardner felt a sharp, socket-wrenching tug on his arm.

  “Come on,” Smee whispered harshly. “Don’t stand around gawking. I know the way out.”

  They darted toward the rear of the bar, and Smee put his shoulder to a door that led to the kitchen. Someone had bolted the door from within, but it gave way, with a great splintering of wood, after the fourth blow from the burly little man’s shoulder. Smee rushed through, beckoning behind him for Gardner to follow.

  Breathless, Gardner raced along at Smee’s heels. He heard shouting behind him, but did not stop to see who was protesting. They passed through a small, incredibly dirty kitchen, made a sharp turn, then thundered down a dark flight of stairs.

  Another locked door confronted them. Smee grabbed the handle, wrenched, pushed inward. The door gave way. He yanked it open and they stepped outside.

  They found themselves in a deserted-looking alley. From behind them came the sounds of shouted pain, and rising above that the keen, piercing shrieks of Lurioni laughter.

  For a moment they stood still, catching their breaths. Gardner felt himself trembling from the exertion, and impatiently stiffened in a half successful attempt to regain control.

  “We’re safe here,” Smee said. “But we can’t stay here. Someone from one of the adjoining buildings might see us down here and telephone the police.”

  “How do we get out?”

  “Just follow me.”

  Smee led him along the alleyway in a direction that traveled away from the raided building. As they walked, Gardner demanded angrily, “Why didn’t you tell me that you were taking me to an illegal place? What would have happened if the police had caught us and given us some kind of truth-check? You could have wrecked the whole project.”

  Smee turned around and stared at him blandly. “I assure you I had no idea we were going to be raided.”

  “But you took the chance.”

  “I did not. The place isn’t illegal. Besides the police never arrest anyone.”

  “Huh? But why did they come busting in there, then? It looked like a raid to me.”

  The short man snickered. “The police must have been bored tonight,” Smee said. “They felt like having a raid, so they had one. The place was breaking no law. Those knife-dancers are perfectly permissible.”

  “What was the excuse for the raid, then?”

  “Preventive discipline, I think they call it here. It means that a pack of policemen break into a place and bang people around with truncheons just to show them that there is some law on Lurion, and that they enforce it strictly.”

  “That’s a lovely law enforcement system.”

  “It’s the way this planet works,” Smee said. “That was why I wanted you to stay for the show.”

  “You knew it was going to be raided?”

  “No. I knew there was a chance of a raid. There always is, wherever you go on Lurion. I simply wanted you to see the dance, to see the forms of entertainment that pass for good clean fun on this world. You were lucky enough to see how they keep the law here, too.”

  “It was risky. Suppose one of us got beaten to death by the police?”

  Smee shrugged. “You risk your life every time you step outside your room. What do you want to do, hibernate until the team is complete?”

  Gardner shook his head. “No, no, you’re right. It’s good to see what sort of a world this is.”

  “I keep going,” Smee said. “I need constant reassurance. But every day I prove to myself again that this planet is evil; that nothing worthwhile will be destroyed when this planet is destroyed.” He shouldered his way out of the alley and into the street. “I wish I didn’t have to keep thinking about it. But you don’t snuff out a world as calmly as you’d cap a candle.”

  “I know,” Gardner said hollowly. “I’m learning that a hundred times a day.”

  A light late-evening drizzle was falling, now; the air was warm and muggy, and his clothing clung stickily to his skin. But, inside, Gardner felt chilled. Smee looked completely sober now.

  “We’d better not see each other again,” Smee said. “Not until the time comes. We’ll only depress each other otherwise.”

  “All right. Not until the time comes.”

  “I’ll leave for Continent East at the end
of the week.”

  “Don’t rush about it,” Gardner said. “Good night, Smee. And thanks for letting me see that show tonight. It makes me feel easier about what we have to do.”

  “Good night,” Smee said.

  Chapter Five

  They parted, going in separate directions. Smee trudged off wearily to the left and Gardner headed the other way. After a while he paused, standing alone in the rainy Lurioni night. The night was moonless, and the mugginess even hid the stars behind a purplish haze.

  Oddly, the strange exhibition of sadism and vicarious cruelty that he had just witnessed had calmed and soothed, rather than upset him. It was the kind of unmitigatedly evil entertainment that he had hoped to find flourishing on Lurion.

  Gardner knew he was groping for rationalizations, for reasons that would justify the destruction of Lurion. Actually, it was sheer softheadedness, of course; no reason was necessary, said Karnes, beyond that of mere-commonsense precaution. The computer said that Lurion, if left unchecked, would destroy Earth in the course of time. Therefore Earth was acting out of the most basic law of self-preservation in reaching out to destroy Lurion. It was simple precaution.

  But precaution was an abstraction, and Gardner operated best from concretes. He wanted to be able to see himself as an executioner, not as a cold-blooded amoral murderer.

  Okay , he thought. A world that thrives on this sort of senseless cruelty deserves everything that it’s going to get .

  But the answer was dissatisfying. False piety , a mocking voice within him said.

  He kept walking, stiff-legged, stiff-minded, trying not to think.

  The city’s name was City, a surprising bluntness for the usually devious Lurioni. Gardner’s hotel was situated in South City. He was in North City, now.

  He realized that the night was not moonless after all, but that the three tiny, splinter-sized moons had merely been obscured by the haze. Now he could make them out, dotted in a vaguely equilateral triangle in the sky, looking like stray teeth that someone had hurled up into the heavens. They cast a feeble and confusing light, as Gardner made his way through the untidy streets. He wanted to walk, to keep walking in this stiff, mechanical, unthinking way, to walk the tension and fear completely out of his system. Only then, when he was calm once again, could he find a cab and return to his hotel on the other side of the city.