The Planet Killers Read online

  It was difficult to tell when the day was actually ending, because the close-knit forest roof kept most sunlight from penetrating anyway. After three hours—Catton’s watch was calibrated in Galactic Absolute Time, whose minute was arbitrarily pegged to Morilaru time and whose day lasted twenty-six and a fraction Terran hours—Catton called a rest halt.

  “And about time we stopped, too,” sighed the younger of the Morilaru women. “We’ve been walking forever !”

  “We’ve covered about seven miles,” Catton said. “That’s a pretty fair stint for people who aren’t trained hikers. We’ll rest for a while and then go on until nightfall hits us.”

  He distributed anti-fatigue tablets—the medical kit held a packet of five hundred tablets, which would be ample for the entire month if they were parceled out with prudence. After half an hour of resting, they continued on. Twilight overtook them within another hour.

  They made camp by the side of a small stream that had accompanied them northward for more than a mile. Woukidal and Royce inflated four bubble-tents—one to be shared by the two women, one to be used by the Morilaru who had ejected the ship and the Arenaddin, and a third to be shared by Catton, Royce, and Woukidal. The Skorg was permitted to sleep alone.

  While Royce and Woukidal busied themselves with the tents, the women were sent out to gather wood for a fire, and Catton and Sadhig budgeted out food for the evening meal. The Arenaddin was still groggy from sedation, and Catton gave him no task.

  Night fell quickly. The little planet had no moon, but through the breaks in the jungle roof could be seen the bright dots of unfamiliar constellations. The temperature dropped considerably during the night.

  A watch system was instituted. Catton stood the first three hours himself, then woke Sadhig, who passed the duty along to Woukidal after three more hours. Night was nine hours long. The entire day, Catton discovered, was slightly more than one Galactic Absolute day in length—about thirty hours by Terran reckoning. His body was quick to adjust to variations in its schedule. Only the Arenaddin, accustomed to a day that was nearly twice that of a Terran one, would experience any particular disorientation, and before many days he would be fully adjusted to the new schedule of living.

  Three days passed without significant incident. The local fauna made itself evident quickly enough, but nothing of an unpleasant size appeared: the animals that showed themselves were no bigger than Terran sheep, at best, and showed no hostile intentions. The animals were constructed on the standard four-limbed pattern of most oxygen-breathing life-forms; they appeared to be marsupial mammals, judging from those who came close enough to be studied. Several looked as though they might be useful when the regular food supply ran out, as it would probably do in another seven or eight days.

  There were a few annoying flurries of rain; the castaways could hear the water pounding the jungle roof, and enough rainwater trickled down to make life uncomfortable below. The moist clothes began to mildew rapidly. Insects became a nuisance, too; they came big on this planet, some of them ugly beasts with wingspreads of a foot. The big ones did not seem to sting—Catton imagined it would be a nasty experience to be stung by one—but some of the smaller kinds did. Why is it, Catton wondered, that mosquitoes happened to evolve on 95 percent of the worlds of the universe?

  At the mid-day break on the fourth day, however, when they had covered better than fifty miles since leaving the ship, the Arenaddin suddenly declared he could go no further.

  The massive creature was seated on a tree stump. Rolls of fat sagged around his middle, and his breathing was rough and irregular. The Arenaddin’s orange skin was wet with perspiration. He pointed to his swollen feet. The six splayed toes were designed to support three hundred pounds of bulk without collapsing, but they had never been intended to take their owner on extended hikes through a forest.

  “Go on without me,” the Arenaddin insisted. “I’m slowing you all up. And I can’t last much longer—I’m not built for this kind of strain.”

  “We’ll build a litter,” Catton said. “We ought to be able to manage you.”

  The Arenaddin shook his great globe of a head sadly from side to side. “It is not worth your trouble. I consume too much food, and I do no work. Let me remain behind.”

  But Catton would not hear of it. While the others ate, he started to plan out the most efficient sort of litter to carry the Arenaddin. Two sturdy branches about six feet long, he decided, with one of the duriplast ponchos swung between them. The Arenaddin could ride in the poncho as if he were in a hammock. Two men between them should be able to support his weight for short stretches; Royce was a little old for that kind of a strain, but there were still four able-bodied men who could take turns at it.

  Catton began to scout around for a tree whose branches were low enough for cutting down. It took a while; the adult trees were bare for a hundred feet, while most of the seedlings were too spindly. He found one at last—a young tree no more than thirty feet high, with forking branches thick enough to hold the Arenaddin’s weight. Catton turned, meaning to call to Woukidal and Sadhig to help him with the logging operation.

  He heard the swift sizzling sound made by a blaster fired on narrow beam.

  As a matter of reflex, Catton flung himself to the jungle floor. But no second shot came. Deciding that it had not been aimed at him, Catton rose and returned to the group.

  The Arenaddin was dead. He lay sprawled grotesquely in the middle of the clearing, a blaster still in his hand. He had fired one narrow-beam shot upward into his mouth; it was an instantaneous death.

  Royce was staring in blank-faced horror. Neither the Skorg nor the four Morilaru seemed particularly moved by the suicide.

  Catton glared at them. He, Royce, and Sadhig were the only ones armed with blasters.

  Royce was pointing at the Skorg. “It—it was his gun!” Royce said in a shaky voice.

  Catton wheeled on Sadhig. “Is this true? Did you let him take your gun away?”

  “No,” the Skorg said calmly. “I gave it to him.”

  “ Gave it? Why’d you do a mad thing like that?”

  “He asked me for it,” Sadhig replied. “He saw that you refused to honor his request to be left behind, and he was determined to remove himself rather than become a burden to the group.”

  Catton goggled. “You knew he was going to commit suicide—and yet you gave him the blaster?”

  “Of course,” the Skorg said with some surprise. “It was the least I could do for him. He was in physical pain, and he felt a necessity to do away with himself. Would you refuse a fellow being the means of death?”

  Catton could not answer. Once again it was a conflict of values; the Skorg saw nothing ethically wrong with handing a weapon to a declared suicide, and no amount of debate would ever produce agreement on the point. Catton turned away. The Arenaddin had, after all, acted in the best interests of the group. Carrying a cripple would have meant a delay of many days in reaching the beacon. But as an Earthman Catton held certain ideas about the sanctity of life that left him chilled by the matter-of-factness of the Arenaddin’s decision.

  In accordance with Arenadd traditions, they cremated the corpse and scattered the ashes. With that task out of the way, they donned their gear and moved on northward. Catton realized an hour later that they had never even known the dead Arenaddin’s name.

  Chapter Eleven

  On the fourteenth day of the trek—Catton estimated they had journeyed better than two hundred miles northward, by virtue of unflagging discipline—Woukidal, the adjutant appointed by the Interworld Commission on Crime to aid Catton during his investigations on Skorg, fell ill of some jungle fever.

  They had no choice but to pitch camp and treat him. A Morilaru would not commit suicide as lightheartedly as the Arenaddin had done, merely to ease the burden on the others; in any event, Woukidal was beyond consciousness, unable to make any such decisions.

  They rigged a tent for the ailing Morilaru and decided to wait until the
fever broke before moving on. Woukidal lay twisting and tossing in the tent, his eyes puffed shut, his face swollen, sweat-beaded, skin paled almost to a light ultramarine. He had alternate spells of chills and perspiration; half the time he was racked by shivers, the rest he lay drenched in sweat.

  Catton found a drug in the medical kit which claimed to be an antipyretic; it was labelled in Skorg and Morilaru, but not in any other language. Evidently Skorg metabolic systems and Morilaru ones were similar enough for the same drugs to be effective for both. Catton wondered bleakly what would happen if he or Royce came down with the fever. They would die, no doubt.

  He injected an ampoule of the antipyretic into the big vein at the side of the Morilaru’s throat, and within an hour the fever had dropped two degrees. Woukidal was reading five degrees above that figure, and unless the fever broke soon it would kill him.

  That evening, after Catton had administered a second dose of the drug, he wandered off to his own tent and sprawled out on his back to rest. The jungle air, hot and moist, pressed down clammily. He thought back over the two weeks they had spent in the jungle.

  First there had been the Arenaddin’s suicide. Then, on the seventh day, the near-mutiny of the older Morilaru woman, who demanded to rest a full day—not for any reasons of sabbath, but simply because she was tired. Catton had granted her four hours during the hottest part of the day, and then had forced her to get up and begin walking.

  On the ninth day they had come to the lake—better than a mile wide, and extending so far in either direction that it might as easily have been a slow-moving river. They had inflated the coracle and made it across, gear and all, in four trips. Catton shuddered as he remembered the clashing teeth of the water reptile that rose from the depths to spear the bottom of their coracle on the final trip. It had filled with water in minutes, and they had just made it across. If they encountered another body of water between here and the beacon, they were in trouble.

  On the eleventh day, Catton thought, they had met the Monster. It had been fairly harmless, at that—an amiable dinosaur-type, ninety or a hundred feet long with half an ounce of brain. But it had damned near put one of its huge feet down squarely on Sadhig as it blundered across their path. The incident, at the time, had been funny to all but the Skorg—but it would not be very amusing if they chanced to encounter a carnivorous beast of the same size. Which they might very well do, with three hundred more miles of jungle between them and the rescue beacon, Catton thought darkly.

  And now, on the fourteenth day, Woukidal was down with some nuisance of a fever. The Morilaru was rather a cold fish, obviously instructed by Pouin Beryaal to keep a close watch on his superior and probably told to report back if Catton stumbled over anything important on Skorg. Catton had doubts of the man’s loyalty—but, dammit, the Morilaru was a sentient being, and Catton was going to do everything he could to help him recover.

  The flickering campfire just outside the opening of Catton’s tent revealed a tall figure standing at the tent mouth. It was Royce.

  “What is it?” Catton asked. “Did Woukidal’s condition change?”

  “He’s talking,” Royce said.

  “Rationally?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come listen,” Royce replied.

  Catton followed the older man across the clearing to the tent where Woukidal lay. The Morilaru women were sprawled near the fire; Sadhig and the other Morilaru were asleep. Catton could hear low moaning and muttering coming from Woukidal’s tent.

  The sick Morilaru seemed to be a little better, but not very much; his face still had the flushed, moist look of fever. He was talking to himself deliriously. Catton leaned close, but failed to make any sense out what Woukidal was saying.

  “It’s just so much gibberish,” Catton said.

  “He was talking sense before. Ask him—ask him about matter duplicators,” Royce said.

  Catton looked up, startled. “Matter duplicators?”

  “He was mumbling about them before. Ask him.”

  Catton bent low over the feverish face. “Woukidal! Can you hear me?”

  The muttering continued with no apparent response to Catton’s question.

  Catton groped for the medicine kit on the ground near Woukidal’s cot. He pulled out an antipyretic ampoule, knocked the safety cap off with his thumb, and pressed the syringe against Woukidal’s throat vein. There was a faint hiss as the sonic spray drove the drug into the Morilaru’s bloodstream. Catton waited a few moments; as the drug began to take effect, Woukidal’s fever visibly abated.

  “What’s this about matter duplicators, Woukidal?” Catton asked quietly.

  “Duplicators … being built. Sent to Earth.”

  Catton’s eyes widened. Matter duplicators had been discovered in the galaxy hundreds of years ago. They were long since under strict ban on every world; it was death to manufacture one or even own one, since a matter duplicator could wreck a world’s economy overnight.

  “Who’s building matter duplicators?” Catton asked.

  Evidently the Morilaru’s tongue had been loosened by the fever and the drugs. He tossed restlessly, eyes still tight shut, and said, “We are. To finish off Earth. We’ll send hundreds.”

  “Where are the duplicators coming from?”

  “Beryaal can get them,” Woukidal murmured. “Beryaal!”

  “He’s—he’s in charge. And eMerikh, the Skorg. To crush Earth. Send hundreds of duplicators to Earth. I—I—”

  Woukidal’s words trailed off into meaningless nonsense. Despite the evening heat, Catton felt chilled. He glanced up at Royce.

  “Do you think he’s serious? Or is it just some kind of fantasy he was having because of the drugs?”

  “It’s a pretty improbable fantasy to have,” Royce said. “I’m inclined to believe him. There’ve been stories drifting around that Morilar and Skorg are cooking up some kind of maneuver against Earth.”

  Catton nodded tightly. “I’ve heard the stories too. But matter duplicators—that violates every code these aliens have!” He bent over the Morilaru again. “Woukidal! Can you hear me?”

  “It’s no use,” Royce said. “He won’t be coherent any more. The drug’s putting him to sleep.”

  They left the tent. Catton swatted at the insects that droned annoyingly around his head. Woukidal’s unintentional revelation opened many corridors of possibility. Beryaal in charge of the plot! Beryaal, head of the Crime Commission, himself violating the most basic agreement of the galaxy, an agreement arrived at centuries before Earth ever sent a ship into space!

  That explained many things. If Beryaal were the leading figure in the conspiracy against Earth, and Beryaal had somehow discovered that Catton’s true purpose here in the outworlds was to uncover that conspiracy, then it was altogether likely that the Silver Spear had been blown up at Beryaal’s orders, for the express purpose of disposing of Catton. Men who would dump matter duplicators on a civilized world would hardly draw any ethical line at destroying a space liner to kill one man.

  But how would Beryaal have found out Catton’s true purpose? Catton had told only one person of his real motive for visiting the outworlds.

  He had told Nuuri Gryain.

  Was the girl linked with Beryaal? It was hard to believe; but Beryaal had found out about Catton some way, and perhaps Nuuri had sold him the information for purposes of her own. Catton moistened his lips. He was caught up in a net of intrigue, and every alien seemed his enemy just now.

  Catton swung round to face Royce.

  “I’ll have to place you under secrecy restrictions on this matter duplicator business,” Catton told him. “If word ever got out that anyone knows about this plot, there’ll be war in the galaxy overnight.”

  “Are you going to stand by and let Earth be ruined?” Royce demanded.

  “I’m going to do my best to uncover the rest of the plot, once we get out of this damned jungle,” Catton said. “But I don’t want Earth flying off the handle, and
I don’t want Morilar or Skorg to realize the secret’s out. Give me some time to work, Royce.”

  “I have important commercial interests at stake in this thing, Catton.”

  Catton took a deep breath. “I’m cognizant of that. But there’s more at stake than your commercial interests, Royce. Will you give me a pledge of silence?”

  “Suppose I don’t?”

  “I’d have to kill you, I guess,” Catton said evenly. “But I don’t want to have to do that. I don’t like killing, and I especially don’t like killing Earthmen. But unless I get a guarantee that you’ll keep mum about what you’ve heard tonight, I’ll have to make sure you keep mum.”

  Royce was silent for a long moment. Then he shrugged. “All right,” he said finally. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear a thing.”

  “Thanks,” Catton said.

  Royce turned away and headed toward his tent. After a moment, Catton returned to the sick man’s tent. Woukidal was knotted up in a fetal ball, groaning. Catton sat down to wait, in case the Morilaru’s delirious ramblings became intelligible again. But they never did. Despite the drugs, Woukidal’s fever mounted steadily during the next two hours, until his forehead felt blazing to the touch. He died shortly after midnight without speaking again, and Catton returned to his tent after waking Sadhig, who was scheduled for the first watch that night. He told the Skorg of Woukidal’s death. Sadhig merely shrugged. “His pain ended,” the Skorg said, and squatted down by the fire.

  In the morning they held a brief interment ceremony; the three surviving Morilaru uttered the ritual prayer for the dead, and Royce and Catton lowered the body, shrouded in the fabric of a bubbletent, into the grave that had been prepared. They broke camp immediately afterward and moved on.

  There were no further fever attacks on the trip northward. On the seventeenth day, Catton was stung by a tiny golden-green insect, and his left arm ballooned grotesquely, swollen with fluid from shoulder to wrist. The pain kept him from doing any work for two days, but the swelling subsided rapidly and there were no aftereffects.