The Planet Killers

by Robert Silverberg

  It was more vivid than any solidofilm could possibly have been. Sometimes, in the better three-dee sollies, Storm had almost had the illusion of reality. But this was no illusion. The alien was actually reliving what had happened, and Storm, his mind joined in strange union to that of the creature from the stars, found himself participating.

  Storm saw the broad sweep of the heavens, the glittering jewels of a million stars spread against the black velvet backdrop of space. But nothing looked familiar. Certain of the constellations seemed relatively constant when viewed from Earth or from the nearby planets, but the vision of space that blossomed in Storm’s mind bore no relevance to any star-chart he had ever seen. There were constellations, yes, but they were alien configurations.

  Storm knew, without benefit of any verbalized promptings from the alien, that what he was seeing was space as it had looked untold millennia ago, and space as it appeared in the far galaxies. Earth was nowhere to be seen. Somewhere high in the blackness was a small spiral nebula, a faint, indistinct, unimportant cluster of stars, and Storm was numbedly aware that within this aggregation of stellar bodies was the sun known as Sol, and the nine planets that circled it.

  He was in a ship of some sort … or, rather, the alien was re-experiencing the thought of being in a ship, and Storm was sharing that relived sensation. The ship was not extraordinarily different in form from the spaceships Storm knew. It was roughly cylindrical, with an outer skin of some hard, gleaming, bluish metal. Storm found it perplexing and unsettling to be seeing the ship both from without and within at once, but he let the strangeness of the double vision go unremarked, and gradually he accepted it as a normal way of perceiving things.

  The ship did not seem to be of any great size. Storm could judge that by comparing its dimensions with that of the figure he had seen in the cave. That figure had been about three feet long, and using it as a yardstick he could estimate that the ship was no more than a hundred fifty feet long, its corridors seven feet high and perhaps five feet in width.

  In the cavern, the figure of the alien had been shrouded and hidden from his sight. In the vision Storm now experienced, he had a clear view of the alien, and of others like him.

  There were about twenty of them on board the ship. Storm found them bizarre, yet not repellent. Since he was seeing through the eyes and mind of the alien creature, it was impossible for him to feel disgust or shock or fright at the sight of the occupants of the star-ship.

  They stood upright, all of them just about three feet tall. Two stubby legs, ending in round sucker-pads, supported them. They had four tiny arms, looking deformed and shrunken, and two opposing pairs of ropy, coiling tentacles with prehensile tips. Their heads were large in proportion to their bodies, and their eyes, many-faceted and gleaming, were the most strange aspect of them—solemn, immense eyes taking up half their faces.

  They wore no clothes. So far as Storm’s unpracticed eye could tell, there were no distinctions of sex among them—they all looked alike, in fact—yet he was subliminally aware that in reality the aliens fell into several sharply different groups. One group, numbering almost half the total on board, was male, or male-equivalent. A second group, seven or eight in all, were female-equivalent. The other few aliens were of neither sex, yet somehow important in the reproduction of the species. Storm accepted these distinctions without understanding them at all, but there was no way of stopping the flow of images to ask for an explanation, any more than a dream could be halted for a footnote.

  The ship was traveling. It had left its own home world an enormous span of years before. There was no way for the alien to communicate the actual length of that span, for, Storm sensed, the aliens did not perceive time in a linear way, and could not put the duration of the voyage into Storm’s terms in any other way than “very long.”

  So it was a very long voyage. The ship had been away from home a very long time, and a still greater span of time was due to elapse before it would return. Storm watched, baffled and yet enthralled, enjoying his double inner and outer view of the ship as, a slim gleaming needle, it darted across the heavens on its endless journey.

  It was hard to tell why the journey was being made. For scientific research? Sightseeing, tourism, travel-for-its-own-sake? Military surveying? Storm did not know. He could not sort an intelligible motive out of the impressionistic welter of reasons the alien presented. The best Storm could conclude was that the motivating force behind the journey was beyond his comprehension, no more his to understand than the motivations behind the contours of a Beethoven symphony, a Picasso canvas. The journey was like a work of art. Storm did not press for elucidation. He knew none would be forthcoming.

  The vessel was moving at incredible velocities. Storm was granted a view of the ship’s power plant, but what he saw made no sense to him—gleaming machinery that did not seem to move or glow or function in any way—and he suspected that even if he were a propulsion engineer instead of a mining engineer he would not have understood a thing. The ship moved, covering light-years in a moment, and the force that drove it was beyond an Earthman’s comprehension.

  The alien gave Storm a capsule view of some of the ship’s ports of call.

  There was a planet of a bluish sun, a jungle-world where worms of titanic size oozed through steaming mud, where towering creatures with shimmering scales thundered over the fallen hulks of trees a thousand feet high. There was a world without land, a water-world whose cool seas abounded with life, where sleek brown mammals with fins and flippers streaked through the depths, debating points of abstract philosophy as they swam. There was a desert world, a world that made Mars look like Eden in contrast, a wind-swept, waterless world whose blazing white sun nearly filled the cloudless sky, a world where small stunted beings scrabbled out a precarious living and sped the hours with tales of a greatness long since departed from their race.

  There was a world much like Earth, too, a quiet, beautiful world of green leaves and blue seas. The air was fresh as new wine, and the animals of this world were gentle as lambs, and winter never came, and the soft golden sunshine seemed reluctant to fade from the sky. But the world was not the Earth Storm knew, for its happy people were green-skinned and tailed, and at night two glittering moons chased each other through the strangely starless skies.

  There was a world that was no longer a world, for sizzling lava pits rose where cities once had been, and clicking clouds of radioactivity drifted in the hazy atmosphere. There was another world that looked like a nightmare of the Earth that was, a world without trees, without rivers and streams, a world of fifty or a hundred billion people crammed into box-like cubicles that covered every inch of land area.

  World followed world in dizzying array. Storm followed the tour, breathless, his mind reeling under the display of unfamiliar images. Eyes closed, he dreamed of the long night of space, and of the multitude of planets out there in the darkness, a million light-years beyond Pluto.

  The journey continued.

  Miraculously, time was compressed for Storm. He came to know the people aboard the ship, and he thought of them now as people , not as “aliens” or as “creatures.” He knew which one was his , the one who was telling him all this, and he knew some of the others too, saw them as contrasting personalities. He saw a little of their hopes and fears and dreams. And, though much of what he saw was utterly incomprehensible, there were certain responses that he understood as well as he understood his own. Certain things were universal. The response to beauty was a constant, though the idea of beauty itself was not. The need to love and be loved was a constant, if not the shape of desire. The feeling of brotherhood, of kinship, of shared endeavor—all these things came through to Storm, and he perceived them readily enough.

  The journey continued.

  In the telescoping of time, millions of years passed in a handful of seconds for Storm. The ship was now approaching that part of the universe Storm knew as home .

  The star cluster that had looked so insignifica
nt before now took on presence and majesty as the slim ship needled into its midst. The heavens were blazing with glory. Somewhere in that arc of radiance, Storm knew, was the sun of Earth—a small sun, a yellow sun, a not very important sun in all this fiery splendor.

  The ship moved through the new galaxy, stopping at this world and at that. The galaxy swarmed with planets and with life. Giant red stars and searing blue ones, shrunken white dwarfs and drab little yellow and green ones—the star cluster abounded in stars, and each star had its worlds, and on many of those worlds there was life.

  And still the journey continued.

  Storm sensed the approach of familiar territory. Yes, there was Earth’s sun now, looking like a pinpoint of yellow light as the aliens viewed it from the frozen wastelands of Pluto. Inward they came, dodging from one planet to the next, slicing across orbits as it pleased them. Barren Uranus, and vast Neptune, and vaster, triple-ringed Saturn, and mighty Jupiter—the expedition landed on each world. Storm wondered at the calm way the aliens came down on planets Earthmen did not dare to tread. The crushing gravity of the three giant planets did not seem to trouble them at all. Some device, some strange instrument from their stock of baffling miracle-working things, protected them against gravity’s pull.

  Inward, still. Inward toward the small worlds where life could be detected.

  Storm saw Mars, red but green-dappled, looking younger and fresher and far more alive than he had ever seen it. Were there seas on Mars? Yes! And life … cities … intelligent creatures!

  He knew that the journey he was experiencing had taken place millions of years before, and the knowledge chilled him. Yet he was able to set at least a hazy limit on the voyage’s duration, because there was no planet between Mars and Jupiter. The explosion that had wrecked that world had already taken place. The asteroids pebbled the sky.

  Storm longed for a view of Earth as it had been in the days when Mars had seas. He wondered what he would see there? Snorting dinosaurs locked in mortal combat? Flapping sea-creatures hesitantly crawling to land? Or scurrying mammals hiding timidly in the strange underbrush?

  He never found out. He could see Earth, blue-green and inviting, hovering nearby in space. But the expedition did not reach it. The catastrophe struck while the ship was still crossing the orbit of the asteroid belt, heading inward toward sea-green Mars.

  The alien told the tale without passion, without weeping. Something had gone wrong. The miraculous mechanisms that powered the ship rebelled. Not even the super-science of the beings from the far stars could halt the runaway destruction.

  The ship exploded.

  Storm quivered and shook as the image formed itself in his mind. He saw the hideous black gash developing along the gleaming blue hull of the ship, and it was as though his own body were splitting open. He cried out, tried to halt what was happening, but there was no halting it.

  The ship split like a seed-pod that had ripened. And it hurled its strange seed outward to the untender mercies of space.

  Storm watched in horror as five small figures spurted from the interior of the wrecked ship, their bodies congealing instantly, their blood freezing in their veins. Like dolls they spun in orbit, limbs spreadeagled, around the shattered vessel.

  Another convulsion. Four more of the star creatures tumbled into space. Two of them had tried to protect themselves, had donned the masks they wore when visiting strange worlds, but they had not had enough time, and they died too. The ship’s atmosphere was gone, now. The chill of space penetrated everywhere, and even those who had remained on board died now.

  All but one.

  He had moved with instinctive reaction, donning his protective garb at the first quiver from the ship’s engine, and he alone survived the moment of destruction. Dazed, stunned, he clung to a bulkhead while explosion after explosion rocked the ship, while the sweet atmosphere he knew vanished into the void.

  The fury seemed to end. The ship was quiet again.

  Sadly, the star-being explored the ruins of the ship aboard which he had voyaged so long. He saw his comrades dead, twisted and distorted, their bodies hideous to behold. He looked through the ruined ports, saw the other corpses orbiting the dead ship. He realized, finally, after he had combed the gutted hull from end to end, that he was alone. His mind had already brought him that information, since no one answered his frantic mental calls, but he had not believed it, could not believe it until he had seen them all dead.

  He worked quickly, with the energy of complete despair. One of the lifeboats had escaped destruction. Speedily, he stocked it with everything that remained undamaged aboard the ship. He loaded the little craft with instruments whose function Storm could not even begin to guess at, and prepared to take his leave, the long voyage at its unexpected end.

  Before he could quit the ship, one final explosion racked it. He was within the lifeboat already, and when the explosion came it hurled him hard against the walls, and he lay there a long time. A trickle of blood seeping from his lips, his limbs broken in half a dozen places.

  There was silence again.

  Feebly, he activated the controls. The mother ship, he realized, had been blown to fragments. There was nothing left of it, or of the corpses of his comrades. He had been lucky to survive that final blast, though he was only barely alive himself.

  Where to go?

  While stocking the lifeboat, he had thought of heading for Mars, which looked inviting enough from a distance. But that was out of the question, now. The lifeboat, twisted and half-wrecked, could never make it across a gulf of more than a hundred million miles, a gulf that was widening with every passing instant.

  Where, then?

  Not far away, an asteroid orbited. It was nothing more than a chunk of rock, barren and forbidding, without atmosphere, without water. But it was the only landfall within reach. The star-being’s decision had been made for it.

  He forced his broken body to obey. Activating the life-boat, he guided it down, brought it to a landing in a plain on the tiny asteroid. There he rested, for a staggeringly long while, letting his body knit once again before venturing from the ship.

  A driving need to survive impelled him to feats that should have been impossible for him. Using tools from the life-boat, he carved a dwelling for himself, blasting it out of the living rock—a tunnel, and a chamber. He hauled his salvaged equipment inside. He set up a force-field to screen himself from the savagery of his environment, and within the force-field generated an atmosphere for himself.

  Then he rested.

  Recuperation was a slow process. He cast himself into a sleep beyond sleep, and for thousands of years he slept, while his body rebuilt its strength. Even at best, he had never been physically strong, and he had sustained crippling injuries in the explosion.

  His body knit together. It would never be truly whole again, but at least he could move without too much pain. He was still too weak to leave the cave, and thousands of years passed before he ventured outside.

  He was alone.

  That was the hardest fact to accept. His was not a race that enjoyed solitude. There was always contact with others, always the comforting feeling of another mind nearby, and now there was a silence that held terrors. No member of his race was within a million light-years. Not even the super-minds of his species could span such a gulf.

  He was alone, cut off from all contact with his own kind.

  Of course, he had certain resources. His memory was perfect and permanent, and he could relive happier days with complete clarity and an illusion of reality. He spun away hundreds of millennia that way. But ultimately it became a hollow pastime, and he ceased it.

  He was alone and no natural cause could kill him.

  A prisoner for all eternity!

  His only hope was to build a beacon that would reach his home world and bring a rescue party. But it was not an easy task. He had no real knowledge of such things, and he had to rack his mind, plumb his memories. Millions of years crept by as he worked on
the beacon. He cannibalized his useless lifeboat for it, so that not a shred of the boat remained.

  The years passed. The seas of Mars grew dry, and bitter winds swept the red planet, driving all life away. On Earth, a two-legged mammal came to supremacy, invented civilization for itself, built pitiful little empires. And still the castaway of the stars toiled on in lonely exile.

  He built the beacon, finally. He tested it, and it seemed to work, and he sent a message off to his home world. But he knew there was little hope of a quick rescue. His thoughts travelled at a speed that could not be measured, but his beacon wave was limited by the speed of light, and had half the heavens to cross before it reached a listening ear.

  The castaway went on waiting. Even the patience of an immortal can fray, but he lived through the dark moments of loneliness. Suspended in the force-field of his cave, snug in his nest, he slept, and rested, and husbanded his strength, and dreamed away the millennia.

  Then came an intruder.

  The alien sensed the presence of another being on the asteroid. Tentatively, timidly after so long an isolation, the star-creature sent out a faint probe, but drew back in uncertainty. It was, he knew, one of the creatures from the blue-green planet, one of the two-legged ones. The castaway hesitated and finally decided not to make contact at all. He would wait for his own people. It was safest that way.

  Almost at once, the intruder went away. But a short time later, other intruders came. Their mental vibrations jarred the alien; these were harsh, crude, greedy people, whereas the first visitor had seemed to have a kind of honesty and integrity about him. The star-wanderer had no intention of making contact with these newcomers.

  But they made contact with him.

  They stumbled on his cave by accident, and explored it with trepidation, and came upon the glowing curtain, and saw the creature that lay beyond it, surrounded by the salvaged instruments from the ship that had perished millions, of years before. They stared, and murmured in awe, and began to scheme to turn their discovery to their own use. And the alien, cringing with distaste, was helpless.