In the Beginning: Tales From the Pulp Era Page 10

  “Now I remember you,” I said, as Ku Sui came toward me holding an ominous-looking collar. “Remember the Pluto Mines, and the neat slave-trade you three were running out there? I chased you out of there fast enough!”

  “You were a considerable nuisance,” Hawkins said. “But I think we have you in a better position now.”

  I nodded. “This dog-collar racket is the best thing you’ve come up with yet. And you’re just vile enough to be operating something like this. I notice you three don’t wear collars.”

  “The air-pollution does not affect us,” Hawkins said. “But I don’t intend to stand around discussing things with you.” He seemed quite distressed that the two guards who pinioned my arms were overhearing my recollections of the Pluto Mines incident. “Collar him, Ku Sui.”

  “Here you are,” the Martian said, rustling dryly like the remnant of a past age he was. “Extra large, to fit your bull neck.” He lifted the collar and brought it down around my throat. At last, I had forfeited my liberty, at least for the time being.

  The collar was cold and somehow slimy. I made up my mind not to wear it for long.

  “How does it feel, Slade?” Hawkins asked tauntingly.

  “It’s a good fit,” I said.

  “You can go now,” Hawkins said to the guards. “He’s amply under control.” They nodded and backed out, and I was free. Just the two of them, and me, in the room with the machines. As they left, the door in the back opened and Kolgar Novin, the Venusian, entered. Now they were all three together.

  Hawkins left his throne and crossed the room to a control panel. “Now you’re a taxpayer, just like the rest, Slade.”

  “I hear the price of air’s pretty high in these parts,” I said wryly, rubbing my finger around the collar.

  Hawkins nodded. “We get a good rate for it.”

  “And what if I don’t care to pay?”

  Hawkins smiled. “We have methods of persuasion,” he said. “I was just about to demonstrate one of our best.”

  He reached for a switch and nudged it down. Immediately that damnable collar tightened like a deadly hand around my neck. I felt the pressure increase.

  “How do you like that, Slade?”

  I didn’t. But I didn’t tell him that. I had decided the time had come for action. I flicked out my hands and drew the startled Martian, Ku Sui, toward me. Apparently the collar was such a foolproof protective device that they had gotten careless, for Ku Sui had been standing within my reach all the time Hawkins was talking.

  I sensed the dry alien smell of the Martian, who was gesturing wildly to Hawkins. I got my hands around the Martian’s scrawny throat.

  “Now I’ve got a collar on you!” I said, “And it doesn’t operate by remote control! How does it feel?”

  “Hawkins—increase the pressure,” Ku Sui grated brokenly. “Kill him, Hawkins. He’s…choking…me!”

  I looked up from the Martian and shouted at Hawkins, “Shut your machine off! Get the pressure down or I’ll kill Ku Sui!”

  The grip of the collar around my throat was almost unbearable. I flexed my neck muscles and tried to fight the slowly intensifying grip of the collar, but my face was fiery red and I was having trouble breathing. I could hear the sound of my blood pounding through my veins.

  “Shut it off, Hawkins! I’ll strangle the Martian!”

  It was a mistake on my part to assume that Hawkins gave the faintest damn about what happened to his partner in crime. I kept increasing my grip on Ku Sui’s throat, and Hawkins up there at his control board kept tightening his grip on mine. Everything was starting to swim around my head, and I didn’t know how much longer I could hold out.

  “Don’t…call…my…bluff,” I gasped. I wrung Ku Sui’s leathery neck and hurled the corpse across the room at the motionless Venusian standing bewildered in the back. Venusians have a way of freezing up when there’s trouble, and I was thankful Kolgar Novin wasn’t taking a hand in the action.

  I saw Hawkins through a red haze. He was obviously surprised that I still hadn’t succumbed to the choking, but he didn’t seem very disturbed about Ku Sui. I gasped in as much air as I could and began the slow, leaden-footed climb up the steps to the control panel.

  I saw Hawkins go white with fear as I approached. I was moving slowly, deliberately, my head swimming and my eyes popping from my head.

  “Why don’t you drop?” he asked in terror. “Why don’t you choke?”

  “I’m too tough for you!” I said. He started to scream for the guards, but I reached up, plucked him away from his control panel, and hurled him over the railing into the middle of the floor. He went flying heels over head like a chubby little basketball, and bounced on the concrete.

  He continued to moan loudly for his guards, and Kolgar Novin was still a statue at the far end of the room.

  Desperately, I reached for the lever he had been pushing down and I hurled it as far up as it would go. The collar opened immediately, and the air went rushing into my lungs. I reeled against the railing, trying to recover, as the blood left my head and the room tilted crazily around me.

  Then I heard footsteps outside, and the door broke open. The Guards! I made up my mind what I was going to do in an instant.

  I started smashing my fists into the delicate machinery, raging up and down the room destroying whatever I could. I ripped up the intricate wiring and watched blue sparks lick through the bowels of the giant electronic brain and the smaller computers, watched the whole edifice of terror come crashing down. I pulled out levers and used them as clubs to bash in the dials and vernier gauges, and when I was through I turned to see what the guards were doing.

  To my surprise, I saw they were struggling among themselves. They were divided—half of them, the most evil half, were still loyal to Hawkins, while the others, the native Callistans impressed into the guards, were rebelling now that they saw the overlords were destroyed, their machines of coercion in rubble. I saw one guard rip off his collar and hurl it into the ruined machines with a shout of savage glee.

  There still was a nucleus of guards clustered around Hawkins and Ku Sui, but their numbers were growing smaller as more and more of them realized the game was up for the three tyrants.

  Then the room was suddenly crowded, and I smiled happily. June and her brother had roused the people! They were coming! I leaned against the railing, weak with strain, and watched as the angry, newly-free Callistans swept the remaining guards out of the way and exacted a terrible revenge on Hawkins and Kolgar Novin and even the dead body of Ku Sui.

  The lynching was over eventually, and the guards, taking charge in the name of the people, managed to restore some semblance of order. Blankets were thrown over the mutilated bodies on the floor.

  Then, with grim methodicality, the Callistans completed the job of wrecking Hawkins’ machines. The room was a shambles by the time they were through.

  June finally made her way through the confusion to my side. She looked up in concern, and ran her fingers gently over the angry red lines the collar had left on my throat.

  “You were wonderful,” she said. She was crying from relief and gratitude, and I took her in my arms and held her.

  Then I released her. “Let’s go downstairs,” I said. “I need some fresh air after that battle.”

  We left the building and I stood in the warm artificial sunlight of Callisto City, recovering my strength.

  “I’ve heard how you overthrew them,” June said. “But I don’t understand how you survived the choking.”

  “I’m stubborn,” I said simply. I was hiding the truth from her—the bitter truth that I wanted no one to know. “I just wouldn’t let them strangle me, that’s all.” I grinned.

  She took a deep breath. “You know, I just thought of something—we’re not wearing collars, and yet we don’t mind the air! It’s not polluted any more!”

  I stopped to consider that, and then shook my head in disgust as the obvious answer came to me. “Those worms! You know what w
as causing the pollution?”

  “No,” she said.

  “It must have been maintained artificially by one of those machines up there! I remember, now—Hawkins was quite a chemist. He must have synthesized some chemical that polluted this air, and then gave your father enough leads so he could develop a filter to counteract it. It was a devilishly well-planned scheme, neatly calculated to reduce Callisto City to a state of servitude!”

  We took a few steps away. It was bright midday, but I could see the bulk of Jupiter high in the sky above the dome. In the great square in front of the capitol building, a huge golden mountain was growing—a heap of discarded collars, getting bigger and bigger by the moment as the Callistans hurled the impotent symbols of their slavery into the junkheap. For the first time, I saw smiling, happy faces on Callisto. The air was pure again, and the time of troubles was over. It didn’t cost anything to breathe on Callisto any more.

  The happiest face of all was June’s. She was beaming radiantly, glowing with pride and happiness. “I’m glad I decided to rescue you,” she said. “You looked so brave, and strong, and—lonely. So I took a chance and pulled you away.”

  I looked at her sadly, not saying anything.

  “Where will you stay?” she asked. “There’s a flat available next door to mine—”

  I shook my head. “No. I’m leaving. I must leave immediately.”

  The sunshine left her face at once, and she looked at me in surprise and shock. “Leaving?”

  I nodded. “I can’t stay here, June. I’ve done my job, and I’m going.”

  I didn’t wait for another word. I strode away, and she took a couple of steps after me and then stopped. I heard her sobbing, but I didn’t turn back. How could tell her that I loved her? How could I dare to love her? Me—an android. A laboratory creation? Sure, I was stronger than a human being—the factor Hawkins didn’t figure on. Only an android could have withstood that choking.

  I have human drives, human ambitions. When you cut me, I bleed red. You can only tell by microscopic analysis that I’m not human. But resemblance isn’t enough. I couldn’t fool myself, and I wouldn’t fool June. I couldn’t allow her to waste herself on something like me. She’d make a good mother, someday.

  I turned away, feeling bitter and empty, and made my way through the streets crowded with jubilant Callistans. In my mind’s eye I could see June’s pale, bewildered face, and my synthetic heart wept for her. She’d never understand why I was leaving.

  I looked up through the dome at the black curtain of the skies, at mighty, lonely, unapproachable Jupiter. It was a fitting challenge for me. We had a lot in common, big Jupiter and I. I knew where I was going, now, and I couldn’t wait to get there.

  CITADEL OF DARKNESS

  (1957)

  As 1956 moved along, my new career as a science-fiction writer, and all the rest of my life as well, began to expand in ways that I would scarcely have dared to fantasize only a couple of years previously. I continued selling stories at the same torrid pace, and in May succeeded in placing one with the prestigious magazine Galaxy, edited by the exceedingly difficult, tough-minded Horace Gold. Selling one to him was a big step forward for me. In June I got my Columbia degree and set up shop as a full-time writer. Randall Garrett and I spent two weeks that summer writing the novel for John W. Campbell that we had so grandly imagined selling him the year before—The Dawning Light, it was called—and he bought it in August. Later that month I married my college girlfriend, Barbara Brown, and we found a splendid five-room apartment on Manhattan’s elegant West End Avenue, a short walk from the Columbia campus but light-years distant from the squalid hotel room where I had been living for the past three years. About ten days later I attended the World Science Fiction Convention, where I was greeted as a colleague by science-fiction writers like Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson who were old enough to be my father, and where to my amazement I was given the Hugo award as that year’s most promising new author.

  It was all pretty startling. I was getting published all up and down the spectrum of science-fiction magazines, from Astounding and Galaxy at one end to Amazing and Fantastic at the other, and soon after the convention I had deals with two book publishers, Ace (for an original novel) and Gnome (for a two-volume reprint of the “Robert Randall” series from Astounding.) Everything was happening at once.

  In the midst of it all I plugged away at my Ziff-Davis obligations, visiting Paul Fairman’s midtown office two or three times a month to bring him new stories. He used “Citadel of Darkness,” which I wrote in June, 1956 a couple of days after my Columbia graduation ceremony, in Fantastic for March, 1957. Once more I turned the four-stories-in-an-issue trick, for “Citadel,” a “Ralph Burke” story, was accompanied by a story under my own name, one as “Calvin Knox,” and one as “Hall Thornton.” I wasn’t taking anything for granted, but it was pretty clear to me by this time that what was going on wasn’t likely to stop, and that, improbable as it had once seemed, I really was going to be able to earn my living as a writer.

  ——————

  The wavering green lines of the mass detector told me that there was a planet ahead where no planet ought to be, and my skin started to crawl. I checked the star-guide a second time, running down the tight-packed printed columns with deliberate care.

  Karen’s soft hand brushed lightly across my shoulder, and I glanced up. “The guide doesn’t say anything about planets in this sector of space,” I told her.

  “Have you checked the coordinates?”

  I nodded grimly. “I’ve checked everything. There’s a planet out ahead, approximately two light-months from us. And you know what it has to be.”

  Her fingers dug tightly into my neck muscles.

  “It can’t be anything else. There’s no star within sight, none supposed to be here, and yet the mass detector’s popping like sixty. The only answer is a wandering sunless world—and there’s only one of those.”

  “It’s Lanargon,” she said simply. “Lanargon. The marauder world.”

  I turned away and busied myself over the control panel. My fingers flew lightly over the computer levers, and microrelays clicked and buzzed behind the green plexilite screen.

  After a moment, Karen said, “What are you doing?”

  “Setting up a landing orbit,” I told her without looking up. “As long as we’re here, we might as well investigate. We can’t pass up a chance like this.”

  I expected opposition, but I was surprised. All she said was, “How soon before we land?” No nervousness, no hesitation. She looked a lot cooler than I felt as I went about the job of preparing for our landing on Lanargon, the galaxy’s most dreaded—and most mysterious—planet.

  It was in the year 3159 that the Terran colony on Faubia III was wiped out by armed attack, and word came to the universe that war was with us again. The worlds of mankind looked at each other in suspicion and fear. Five centuries of galactic amity had brought about the feeling that armed strife was a buried relic of antiquity—and then, without warning, came the attack on Faubia III.

  There were universal denials. A year later, Metagol II was sacked by unknown invaders, and later the same year Vescalor IX, the universe’s greatest source of antivirotic drugs, was conquered.

  The circumstances were the same each time. An army of tall men in black spacesuits would descend suddenly upon the unsuspecting planet, destroying its capital, seize control of the planet’s leaders, and carry off plunder. Then, mysteriously as they came, they would depart, always taking many prisoners with them.

  The attacks continued. The marauders struck seemingly at random here and there across the face of the galaxy. Trantor was hit in 3163, Vornak IV three years after that. In 3175, Earth itself was subjected to a raid.

  The universe recoiled in terror. The Multiworld Federation searched desperately for the answer—and found it. It made us no more comfortable to learn that the marauders were aliens from some far island universe who rode their sunless pla
net like a giant spaceship, who had crossed the great gulf of space that separated their galaxy from ours and now, under cloak of their virtual invisibility, traveled through our group of worlds, burning, pillaging, and looting as they went.

  We were helpless against an invader we could not see. And now, possibly for the first time, someone had taken Lanargon by surprise. The marauder world had crossed our orbit as we returned to Earth from Rigel VI, and it lay squarely in our path, wrapped in its cloak of darkness out there in the eternal black of space.

  I watched its bulk grow on the mass detector, and wiped away a trickle of perspiration that had started to crawl down my forehead. Two people—a man and a woman—against a world of the deadliest killers ever known.

  As an Earthman, as a member of the Multiworld Federation, it was my duty to aid in Lanargon’s destruction. And I had an idea for doing it.

  I locked the ship into automatic, watched the computer buzz twice to confirm that it had taken control, and got up. Karen was still standing behind me. Her face was pale and drawn; all the color seemed to have left it, though her eyes glowed with courage.

  She reached out and took my hand as I stepped away from the controls. I folded her hand in both of mine, and squeezed.

  “It has to be done, doesn’t it” she asked softly.

  I nodded, thinking of the home that awaited us on Earth, the friends, the children. Heroes don’t have to be born; sometimes they’re made by a trajectory-line charted between two worlds.

  “It has to be done,” I said. I drew her close. For all I knew, it was going to be the last time.

  Our ship taxied in slowly, spiraling around Lanargon in ever-narrowing circles. I could see it plainly now from the viewport, a rough, ugly-looking, barren world, boasting not even the drifts of snow that would be a frozen atmosphere. Lanargon was just a ball of rock, seen dimly in the starlight. Great leaping mountains sprang up like dragon’s teeth from the rocky plains beneath. There was no sign of life. None.