In the Beginning: Tales From the Pulp Era Read online

  “An Earthman,” I said. “You can help me.”

  Quickly I explained the course of events from the time Lanargon first had showed up in the mass detector to Karen’s kidnapping.

  “I’ve heard about that,” he said. “I saw the girl and the ship arrive.”

  “Where are they?” I asked immediately.

  “The girl’s been taken to the Central Temple. I’m a slave there. The ship’s been brought into the dome too, and it’s not far from the Temple either. The Lanargon scientists want to study it and see if they’re missing any wrinkles.”

  “What Temple? What are they going to do to Karen?”

  The slave looked at me pityingly for a long moment. “The Temple is the place all the power of the dome comes from. The aliens worship it as a shrine. They’re going to sacrifice your wife to their god. Their god’s a pool of live radiation.”

  “What?”

  He nodded. “They do it every year, usually with a female slave. I heard them talking. I’m in the High Priest’s retinue, and I found about it. The ceremony’s scheduled to take place this afternoon.”

  I gripped his hand. “Fellow, I don’t even know your name, but I love you. Can you get me there? We don’t have much time.” I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I was going to do something. I was sure of that.

  He glanced uneasily up and down the street. “It’s worth a try,” he said. “This hellhole deserves to be blasted wide open. And I think I see the man who’s going to do it.”

  He led me along at a rapid pace toward the heart of the city. After a while, I saw a huge conical building loom up before me. And—outside it—was my ship!

  “There it is!” I said. “That must be the Temple.”

  “That’s right. And your ship. Now, if there were only some way of finding your wife and getting clear—”

  I looked at him. “Wait a minute,” I said. “There are thousands, maybe millions of you slaves on Lanargon. Innocent people. Suppose I do succeed? Suppose I blasted the dome down? You’d all die.”

  The slave smiled bitterly. “Don’t get guilt-feelings over that,” he said. He lifted his arm and showed me a metallic bulge along his side. “See this? It’s a compact transistor wave-generator embedded in my flesh. Removing it means death. And if we get further than a dozen miles from the Dome, it kills us automatically. It’s very efficient—and it means that no slave can ever leave Lanargon alive.”

  The enormity of it chilled me. “That helps to keep you in line neatly, doesn’t it?” I said.

  He nodded. “They can also kill us within the city. If a slave steps out of line, it’s the easiest thing to raise the frequency generated by this device to a lethal pitch. They’ll allow a slave to go almost anywhere, because he can’t possibly do any harm—not when his life can be snuffed out by any master in an instant.”

  A sudden burst of thought illuminated my mind. “If that’s true, I think I know how I can carry this thing off. Let’s go someplace where I can get out of all these spacesuits and into a slave’s loincloth!”

  The slave—his name was Dave Andrews—took me to his quarters, a miserable room not far from the Temple. There, I stripped out of both spacesuits and donned one of his loincloths.

  “You look a little pale,” he commented. “But otherwise I guess you can pass, if no one looks too closely for the generator that isn’t planted in your side.”

  I looked ruefully at my discarded blaster. “I’m going to feel lonely without that thing on my hip.”

  Andrews shrugged. “No slave would dare carry one. You’ll just have to do without until this is all over.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s get going. The sacrifice should be starting soon, shouldn’t it?” The image of Karen’s body plummeting into a lake of neutrons drifted into my mind, and I winced.

  “Within the hour,” he said.

  Together we crossed the plaza that led to the massive Temple. No one seemed to notice us; apparently slaves were utterly beneath contempt in Lanargon. At the Temple door, a cross-hatched alien face confronted us, saw that we were slaves, and let us through.

  “I’ll have to help out at the ceremony,” Andrews said. “You can come along. It’ll give you your chance of getting close to the High Priest. And remember the way you came. You’ll have to get out of here and into your ship later.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said stolidly. “I’ll manage. I’ve never wanted to destroy anything so much before in my life.”

  We entered an elevator which was already occupied by a gigantic alien in luminescent yellow robes. I saw Andrews bend and touch his forehead to the floor without a moment’s hesitation, and, much as it went against the grain, I did the same.

  “The High Priest,” he explained softly.

  I nodded. I had guessed as much.

  We rode the elevator to the sixty-first floor. As we got out, the priest said, “Bring the sacrifice to the Hall of the God, slaves.”

  We bowed again, and turned off down a long aisle. My heart leaped as Andrews entered a room guarded by two aliens and said, “High Priest requests delivery of the sacrifice to the Hall of the God.”

  One of the aliens nodded curtly and pointed toward an inner door. Andrews opened it and said quickly, “Prisoner, we have come to take you to the God.” He stepped inside and clapped a hand over her mouth, stifling the cry than broke from her as she recognized me in the guise of a slave.

  We closed the door, shutting out the alien guards.

  “Karen,” I said.

  Andrews turned away and I folded her in my arms. She was quivering from anxiety and terror, though I saw her making an effort to recover her nerves. She couldn’t. I didn’t blame her as she broke down and started to sob.

  A gong sounded loudly.

  Gently, Andrews said, “We’ll have to go.”

  “Mike? Mike—are they going to do this thing to me?”

  I looked at her. She was wearing what was probably the sacrificial gown, a clinging, translucent thing through which I could easily see her naked body beneath. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get us out of it.”

  We led her along the hall, Andrews grasping one arm and I the other, while one of the alien guards walked before us and one behind. We walked for what seemed to be miles through the temple building, until we reached a door some twenty feet high. It swung open as we approached.

  I gasped. We stood at the entrance to a great amphitheater, with an immense dais and rows of seats stretching off into the misty distance. And—between the dais and the seats—there was an open pit that seemed to reach down into the bowels of the planet. I looked down and reeled dizzily at the sight of that bright lake of radiation hundreds of feet below—the lake into which Karen’s naked body was soon to be hurled.

  “You lead her up there,” Andrews whispered to me. “Give her to the High Priest. From there it’s up to you. I’m going to go back and get an elevator ready in case you do get out of it alive. Move as fast as you can when you get away.”

  I nodded imperceptibly and marched forward with Karen. The great hall was filled—packed with row on row of uncountable aliens, sitting in quiet anticipation of the sacrifice to be performed before their eyes. Television cameras blinked down like unmoving eyes, telling me that the rest of the aliens were undoubtedly watching too.

  I saw the robed figure of the High Priest, stark and majestic on the dais. He was intoning prayers to which the aliens responded antiphonally. A gong sounded repeatedly somewhere in the distance, and flames licked up from the abyss below.

  He gestured for the sacrifice to be brought forward. I tightened my grip on Karen’s arm and started to walk up the long row of steps that led to the dais. The chanting of the multitude rose to an agonizing volume, a savage beat of barbaric fury echoing round and round the great hall.

  I was at the heart of it now—the center of life of the race that set itself against all mankind. I clenched and unclenched my fists in anticipation as I traversed the long span of
steps.

  I handed over Karen. The priest took her and in one swift motion ripped away her thin gown, revealing her naked to the crowd. She began to cry. I muttered a silent curse. Hatred was a red haze before my eyes.

  He took her in his giant hands and grasped her around the waist with those two slimy tentacles. The gong sounded furiously, and he responded to it with booming incantations. He lifted Karen’s unprotesting body high over his head, prepared to hurl it into the open abyss—

  And I charged forward and snatched her from him just as he was about to release her. We stood there, he and I, on the dais, while a shocked multitude waited for him to strike me dead.

  I saw him lower his arm to his side and press a button in his robe—presumably the button that would activate the death-dealing device embedded in my body. Only I wore no such thing. He stared at me in an agony of exasperation as I unbelievably refused to die.

  Then I advanced toward him. No one dared move. He bellowed something, and guards broke from their lethargy and started racing up the dais—but it was a long way to go.

  He shouted and leaped at me. I felt his powerful hands encircling me and shoving me toward the abyss. I broke loose, hearing Karen’s screaming as a dim noise in the background, and shoved backward. He reeled and groped for the blaster at his side. Before he could use it, I dropkicked it from his hand and sent it flying in a gleaming arc up, out, and into the pit.

  He turned in utter dismay and watched it disappear. His face was a mask of despair and sheer horror. The guards were drawing near us, now.

  I moved in close and unleashed a barrage of punches. He countered with wild swipes of his tentacles. I could hear Karen yelling clearly now, “They’re coming! They’re coming!”

  With coolness born of complete desperation, I reached out and seized him around the waist. I strained to lift the three-hundred pound body from the ground, pulled, yanked, and heaved him high out over the abyss, a pinwheeling figure of arms and legs and tentacles. He screamed all the way down.

  I turned and saw Karen crouching behind me, scooped her up, and we began to run. “This way!” I heard a slave cry, and he pushed the guard nearest him down into the abyss as well. A moment later he had crumpled into death himself, but he had saved us—whoever he was. We plunged through the door and out into the corridor.

  Everywhere we saw slaves battling with the alien masters. They were dying, of course—as fast as the aliens could kill them—but they were clearing a path to the elevator for us. Andrews was waiting there.

  Tears were in his eyes. “Great,” he said, “Wonderful! But now get into your ship and get out of here fast!”

  We made our way through a confused mob of aliens and slaves. The stunned aliens seemed helpless with their High Priest dead. We pushed through them, the three of us, and cut through to the ship. We paused for a moment at the base of the catwalk. I glanced at Andrews.

  “I’m not coming,” he said, forestalling my question. “There’s no point to it. I’m a dead man the second I leave the Dome. Go on—get going.”

  “We’ll never forget you,” I said. I boosted Karen up the catwalk and followed behind her. We made it inside safely, and the hatch clanged closed.

  “Get into your acceleration cradle,” I shouted, and leaped for the control panel. I set up a manual pattern for blastoff.

  Out the viewport I could see the aliens coming to life, moving toward us in a mighty horde. I finished fumbling with the controls and heaved downward on the blasting stud just as a couple of them began to scale the fins of the ship.

  The ship leaped skyward in an instant. In three seconds, we burst through the dome and out into space. Acceleration hit me like a gigantic fist, and I slumped over and blacked out.

  The next thing I knew Karen was bending over me and lifting me to my feet. “We’re safe,” she said.

  I rubbed my head and nodded. “And we took them all with us. It must have been something down there when the ship broke through the dome and sent their atmosphere whipping out into space. It’s a lousy way to die—but they deserved it. All but those poor slaves. They were dead either way, though.”

  “Come look out the port,” Karen said.

  I did. I stared down at the bright, boiling radioactive fury that lit up the blackness of space where the dark planet should have been.

  “It must have been that blaster,” I said after a long pause. “The one I kicked into the radiation lake. When it reached the reactor at the bottom, it must have blown the roof off.”

  “They must have been destroyed in an instant.”

  I looked at the beacon outside the viewport. “It’s the end of the dark planet,” I said slowly. “We’ve touched off a chain reaction that will last forever.”

  “Forever,” she repeated. “It’s all over now.”

  “I don’t think we’ll ever forget Lanargon,” I said. “But I’d like to know what the galaxy’s astronomers are going to say when they notice a brand-new sun in this part of the cosmos.”

  “They’ll have all sorts of wild guesses. But we can tell them the right answer, can’t we?”

  “Yes,” I said. I glanced once more at the fissioning hell that had been Lanargon, shuddered, and set our course for Earth.

  COSMIC KILL

  (1957)

  In the 1950s magazine covers were printed well ahead of the interiors of the magazines, done in batches of, I think, four at a time. This was a matter of economics—using one large plate to print four covers at once was much cheaper than printing them one by one. But sometimes the practice created problems.

  For example, the April, 1957 cover of Amazing Stories was printed in the fall of 1956 with a group of others, well ahead of its publication date, bearing this announcement above the name of the magazine:

  BEGINNING—COSMIC KILL—2-part serial of thundering impact

  “Cosmic Kill” was supposed to be a sequel to a short novel that Amazing had published six years before—“Empire of Evil,” by Robert Arnette. The readers had supposedly been clamoring for a follow-up to that great story all that time, and now, finally, it was going to be published.

  The trouble was that the actual author behind the “Arnette” pseudonym on “Empire of Evil” was Paul W. Fairman, and Fairman, having recently become the editor of Amazing and Fantastic, suddenly found that he didn’t have time to write a two-part serial of thundering impact. By December, 1956 publication day was nearing, though, for the April issue, due out in February, and a serial had to be found for it. So Paul Fairman phoned me one December morning and asked if I would mind very much writing a two-part serial called “Cosmic Kill,” a sequel to something of his from 1951—and deliver it the following week, because it had to be on the newsstands two months from then.

  Sure, I said. Nothing to it.

  That night I dug out the January, 1951 Amazing and read “Empire of Evil,” which turned out to be a wild and woolly thing starring blue Mercurians with green blood, savage Martian hill men that had nasty tusks, and Venusians with big black tails. Even back then we knew that there weren’t any Mercurians, Martians, or Venusians, of course. That didn’t really matter to me at the moment. What did matter was that I had to put together a story of some sort, more or less overnight, that was in some way connected to its predecessor, and Fairman had either killed off or married off nearly all the characters in the original piece.

  Well, never mind that, either. He had left one or two surviving villains, and I invented a couple of new characters to set out after them, and in short order I had put together a plot. It wasn’t going to be a literary masterpiece; it was just going to be a sequel, written to order, to Fairman’s slapdash space-opera, which had been goofy to the point of incoherence. But—what the hell—no one was going to know I had written it, after all. And I reminded myself that plenty of my illustrious colleagues had written pulp-magazine extravaganzas just as goofy in their younger days. Here was my revered Henry Kuttner’s novelet from Marvel Science Stories of 1939, “The Time Tr
ap,” with this contents-page description: “Unleashed atomic force hurled Kent Mason into civilization’s dawn-era, to be wooed by the Silver Princess who’d journeyed from 2150 A.D., and to become the laboratory pawn of Greddar Klon—who’d been projected from five hundred centuries beyond Mason’s time sector!” Kuttner had put his own name on that one. And here in the same issue was future Grand Master Jack Williamson with “The Dead Spot”—“With his sigma-field that speeded evolution to the limit imposed by actual destruction of germ cells, plus his technique of building synthetic life, Dr. Clyburt Hope set out to create a new race—and return America’s golden harvest land into a gray cancer of leprous doom!”

  The reputations of Kuttner and Williamson had survived their writing such silly stories. So would mine. But would I survive writing a 20,000-word novella in two days, which is what Fairman was expecting me to do?

  Here my collaborator Randall Garrett came to my aid. I have never been much of a user of stimulants—I don’t even drink coffee. Garrett, though, said that my predicament could be solved with the help of something called benzedrine—we would call it “speed,” today—which he happened to take to control his weight. A little benzedrine would hop up my metabolism to the point where writing 40 pages in a one-day sitting would be no problem at all.

  So he came over to my West End Avenue place and gave me a few little green pills, and the next day I wrote the first half of “Cosmic Kill,” and the day after that I wrote the second half. I went out of my way to mimic the style of the original story, using all sorts of substitutes for “he said” that were never part of my own style—“he snapped,” “he wheezed,” “she wailed” and peppering the pages with adverbial modifiers—“he continued inexorably,” “he said appreciatively,” “he remarked casually.” The next day I took the whole 80-page shebang down to Paul Fairman’s office and it went straight to the printer. It was just in time for serialization in the April and May, 1957 issues of Amazing, my one and only appearance under the byline of Robert Arnette. And on the seventh day I rested, you betcha.