Collected Short Fiction, page 334
But fifteen minutes after their landing they knew this was not to be. For while the women labored to erect camp and the men hunted provisions, the Blessed Enoch Brown, son of the leader Myron, went forth in a helicopter to survey the new planet.
WHEN HE returned from his mission, his dour face was deeper than usual with woe; when he spoke, it was in a sepulchral tone. “The Lord has visited another tribulation upon us, even here in the wilderness.”
“What have you seen?” the Blessed Myron asked.
“This world is peopled!”
“Impossible! We were given every assurance that this was a virgin world, without colonists, without native life.”
“Nevertheless,” the Blessed Enoch said bitterly, “There are people here. I have seen them. Naked savages who look like Earthpeople—dancing and prancing by the light of a huge bonfire round the rotting hulk of an abandoned spaceship that lies implanted in a hillside.” He scowled. “I flew low over them. Their bodies were virtually bare, and their flesh was oiled, and they leaped wildly and coupled like animals in the open.” For a moment, the Blessed Myron Brown stared bleakly at his son, unable to speak. The blood drained from his lean face. When he finally spoke, his voice was thick with anger. “Even here the Devil pursues us.”
“Who can these people be?” The Blessed Myron shrugged. “It makes little difference. Perhaps they are desendants of a Terran colonial mission—a ship bound for a more distant world, that crashed here and sent no word to Earth.” He stared heavenward for a moment, at the dark and moonless sky, and muttered a brief prayer. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we will visit these people and speak with them. Now let us build our camp.”
THE MORNING dawned fresh and clear, the sun rising early and growing warm rapidly; and shortly after morning prayer a picked band of eleven Resurrectionist men made their way through the heavily-wooded area that separated their camp and that of the savages. The women of the Temple knelt in the clearing and prayed, while the remaining men went about their daily chores.
The Blessed Myron Brown led the party, and with him was his son Enoch, and nine others. They strode without Speaking through the woods. The Blessed Myron experienced a certain discomfort as the great yellow sun grew higher in the sky and the forest warmed; he was perspiring heavily beneath his thick gray woolen clothes. But this was merely a physical discomfort, and those he could bear with ease.
This other torment, though, that of finding people on this new world—that hurt him.
He wanted to see these people with his own eyes, look upon them.
Near noon the village the natives came in sight; the Blessed Myron was first to see it. He saw a huddle of crude low huts built around a medium-sized hill, atop which rose the snout of a corroded spaceship that had crashed into the hillside years, perhaps centuries earlier. The Blessed Myron pointed, and they went forward.
And several of the natives advanced from the village to meet them.
THERE WAS a girl, young and fair, and a man, and all the man wore was a scanty white cloth around his waist, and all the girl wore was the breechcloth and an additional binding round her breasts. The rest of their bodies—lean, tanned—were bare. The Blessed Myron offered a prayer that he would be kept from sin.
The girl stepped forward and said, “I’m the priestess Jeen of the McCaig. This is Lyle of the Kwitni, who is in charge. Who are you?”
“You—you speak English?” the Blessed Myron asked.
“We do. Who are you, and what are you doing on World? Where did you come from? What do you want here?”
The girl was openly impudent; and the sight of her sleek thighs made the muscles tighten along the Blessed Myron’s jaws. Coldly he said, “We have come here from Earth. We will settle here.”
“Earth? Where is that?”
The Blessed Myron smiled knowingly and glanced at his son and at the others. He noticed with some disapproval that Enoch was staring with perhaps too much curiosity at the lithe girl. “Earth is the planet from beyond the sky where you originally came from,” he said. “Long ago—before you declined into savagery.”
“You came from the place we came from?” The girl frowned. “We are not savages, though.”
“You run naked and perform strange ceremonies by night; this is savagery, but all this must change. We will help you regain your stature as Earthmen again; we will show you how to build houses instead of shabby huts. And you must learn to wear clothing again.”
“BUT SURELY we need no more clothing than this,” Jeen said in surprise. She reached out and plucked a section of the Blessed Myron’s gray woolen vestments between two of her fingers. “Your clothes are wet with the heat; how can you bear such silly things?”
“Nakedness is sinful,” the Blessed Myron thundered.
Suddenly the man Lyle spoke. “Who are you, to tell us these things. Why have you come to World?”
The pair of natives exchanged looks. Jeen pointed at the half-buried spaceship that gleamed in the noonday sun. “To worship with us?”
“Of course not! You worship a ship, a piece of metal; you’ve fallen into decadent ways.”
“We worship That which has brought us to World, for it is holy,” Jeen snapped hotly. “And you?”
“We, too, worship That which has brought us to the world. But we shall teach you. We . . .”
The Blessed Myron stopped. He no longer had an audience. Jeen and Lyle had whirled suddenly and both of them sprinted away, back toward the village.
The temple men waited for more than half an hour. Finally the Blessed Myron said, “They will not come back. They are afraid of us. Let us return to our settlement and decide what is to be done.”
THEY HEARD laughing and giggling coming from above. The Blessed Myron stared upward.
The trees were thick with the naked people; they had stealthily surrounded them. The Blessed Myron saw the impish face of the girl Jeen.
She called down to him: “Go back to your Lord and leave us alone, silly men! Leave World by tomorrow morning or we’ll kill you!” Engaged, the Blessed Myron shook his fist at the trees. “You chattering monkeys, we’ll make human beings of you again!”
“And make us wear thick ugly clothes and worship a false god? You’d have to kill us first—if you could!”
“Come,” the Blessed Myron said. “Back to the settlement. We cannot stay here longer.”
THAT EVENING, in the rude building that had been erected during the day, the elders of the Temple of the New Resurrection met in solemn convocation, to discuss the problem of the people of the forest.
“They are obviously descendants of a wrecked colony ship,” said the Blessed Myron, “but they make of sin a virtue. They have become as animals; in time, they will merely corrupt us to their ways.”
The Elder Blessed Solomon Kane, called for the floor—an ascetic-featured, dour man with the cold, austere mind of a master mathematician or a master theologian. “As I see it, Brother, there are three Choices facing us: we can return to Earth and apply for a new planet; or we can attempt to convert these people to our ways; or we can destroy them to the last man of them.”
The Blessed Dominic Agnello objected: “Return to Earth is impossible. We have not the fuel.”
“And,” offered the Blessed Myron, “I testify that these creatures are incorrigible and beyond aid. They are none of them among the Blessed. We do not want to inflict slavery upon them, nor can we welcome them into our numbers.”
“The alternative,” said the Blessed Solomon Kane, “is clearly our only path. We must root them out as if they were a noxious pestilence. How great are their numbers?”
“Three or four hundred, Perhaps as many as five hundred, no more. We certainly outnumber them.”
“And we have weapons. We can lay them low like weeds in the field.”
A LIGHT appeared in the eyes of the Blessed Myron Brown. “We shall perform an act of purification; we will blot the heathen from our new world. The slate must be fresh, for here will we build the New Jerusalem.” The Blessed Leonid Mark-ell, a slim mystic with flowing golden hair, smiled gently and said, “We are told, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, Brother Myron.”
The Blessed Myron whirled on him. “The commandments are given to us, but they need interpretation. Would you say, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, as the butcher raises his knife over a cow? Would you say . . .”
“The doctrine refers only to human life,” said the Blessed Leonid softly. But . . .”
“I choose to construe it differently,” the Blessed Myron said. His voice was deep and commanding, now; it was the voice of the prophet speaking, of the lawgiver. “Here on this world only those who worship the Lord may be considered human. Fleeing from the bitter scorn of our neighbors, we have come here to build a New Jerusalem in this wilderness—and we must remove every obstacle in our way. The Devil has placed these creatures here, to tempt us with their nakedness and laughter and sinful ways.”
He stared at the rest of them, no longer were they his equals round the table, but now merely his disciples, as they had been all the long journey through the stars. “Tomorrow is the Sabbath day by our reckoning, and we shall rest. But on the day following we shall go armed to the village of the idolaters, and strike them down. Is that understood by us all?”
“ ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,’ ” the Blessed Loenid quoted mildly. But when the time came for the vote, he cast in his lot with the rest, and it was recorded as a unanimous decision; after the day of the Sabbath, the mocking forest-people would be eradicated.
BUT THE people of World had laws of their own, and a religion of their own; and they too held a convocation that evening, speaking long and earnestly round the councilfire. The priestess Jeen, garbed only in the red paint of death, danced before them, and when Lyle of the Kwitni called for a decision there were no dissenters.
The long night came to an end, and morning broke over World—and the spies returned from the settlement of the strangers, reporting that the false god still stood in the clearing, and that his followers showed no signs of obeying the command to depart.
“It is death, then,” cried the priestess. And she led them in a dance round The Ship, and the knives were sharpened; then she and Lyle led them through the forest, swords that had hung in the cabin of the Captain McCaig aboard the Ship, and Jeen the other.
The strangers were sleeping when the five hundred of the people of World burst in on their encampment. They woke gradually, in confusion, as the forest slayers moved among them, slicing throats. Dozens died before anyone knew what was taking place.
Curiously the strangers made no attempt to defend themselves. Jeen saw the great bearded man—he who had commanded her to wear clothes, and who had eyed her body so strangely—and he stood in the midst of his fellows, shouting in a mighty voice, “It is the Sabbath! Lift no weapon on the Sabbath! Pray, brothers, pray!”
SO THE strangers fell to their knees and prayed; and because they prayed to a false god, they died. It was hardly yet noon when the killing was done with, and the eight hundred members of the Temple of the New Resurrection lay dead.
Jeen the priestess said strangely, “They did not fight back. They let us kill them.”
“They said it was the sabbath,” Lyle of the Kwitni remarked. “But of course it was not the Sabbath—the Sabbath is three days hence.” Jeen shrugged. “We are well rid of them, anyway, anyway. They would have blasphemed.”
There was more work to do, yet, after the bodies were carried to the sea. Fifty great trees were felled and stripped of their branches; the naked trunks were set aside while the men of the tribe climbed the cliff and caused the great ship, the false god in which the strangers had come, to topple on its side.
Then a roadway was made of the fifty great logs, and the men and women of the people of World pushed strainingly, and the great ship rolled with a groaning sound down the side of the hill, as the logs tumbled beneath it, and finally it went plunging toward the sea and dropped beneath the waves, sending up a mighty cascade of water.
THEY WERE all gone, then, the eight hundred intruders and their false god. And the people of World returned to their village and wearily danced out the praise of Their Ship.
They were not bloodthirsty people; they would have wished to welcome the eight hundred strange ones into their midst. But the strange ones were blasphemers, and so had to be killed, and their false god destroyed.
Jeen was happy, for her faith was renewed, and she danced gladly round the pitted and rusting Ship. Her god had been true, and the god of the strangers false, and what had been commanded had been done; for it had been written in the Book of the Ship, which old Lorresson the priest recited to the people of World centuries ago in the days of the first McCaig and the first Kwitni, that there were certain commandments by which the people were to live.
Now one of these commandments was, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and another was, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” These the people of World hearkened to.
But they were godly people, and the Word was most holy. They had acted in concord with the dictates of Lorresson and McCaig and Kwitni and the Ship itself when they had slain the intruders and destroyed their ship. For, first of all the commandments they revered, it was written, “Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me.”
Prison Planet
For 200 years this small planet had been the dumping ground for the galaxy’s toughest criminals. Then for 500 years it was isolated. What would be the result?
THE planet of Bardin’s Fall lay dead ahead in the visi-plate, a bluish-purple sphere bigger than Earth, here at the far end of the galaxy. Ridgeley narrowed his eyes and checked the reference points against the master chart tank. Perhaps it was the wrong planet, perhaps his little one-man ship had come out of warpdrive at the wrong spatial determinant, he hoped.
Perhaps. But a quick check left no doubt. This was Bardin’s Fall ahead, the galaxy’s one-time dumping-ground for undesirables, and within minutes he was going to make his landing.
All indecision left him. He had been specially picked for the job, after months of interviews, and he was going to do the job right.
It looks like such a peaceful world, he thought. Even at this distance he could see the great feathery clouds drifting round the world. A peaceful-looking planet. And a deadly one.
He hunched down in the cradling strands of webfoam that shielded his body against acceleration strain. He was a small man, compactly-built, with wide shoulders and immense vein-corded hands; back on Earth, they had always regarded him as a little of a freak. Hale Ridgeley, the throwback. Hale Ridgeley, the man who thinks like an ape.
Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Back of his heavy brow ridge was a well-equipped cerebrum, and the officials of Galactic Control realized it. But despite Ridgeley’s shrewdness, he had been cursed with an atavistic tendency to argue with his fists instead of with his tongue. It had cost him many a promotion in Space Service ranks—but it had also gained him this job.
The job that he, of all the galaxy’s billions, was most uniquely qualified for.
Ridgeley jabbed down on the gleaming enamelled control studs before him, and the ship tossed and pitched like a fine stallion as first the rear jets, then the side stabilizers, came into play. The landing would have to be made with care, under cover of darkness. The strategy men back at Galactic Control had dinned that into him until he knew it as well as he did his own name.
Keep your ship hidden. If the ex-cons on Bardin’s Fall get possession of your ship, it’ll be disastrous for the entire galaxy.
And: You’re being sent to Bardin’s Fall to block them from reaching space travel, not to give them a ten-year boost, Ridgeley. Hide your ship well. Destroy it, if necessary. You’re expendable.
Ridgeley thought about that as he guided his tiny ship into orbit round the blue loveliness of Bardin’s Fall. It really seemed too handsome a world to waste on convicts, he thought. But there had been plenty of worlds to waste, five hundred years ago.
He flicked sweat from the tip of his nose and increased the lateral thrust, grinning as the surge of power from the starboard jets throbbed through the ship and through him. The nameless little vessel began to turn, flipping over into landing position.
He picked what looked like an uninhabited area on the planet’s nightside. Then, feeling perfectly calm, Ridgeley punched out a tangential landing orbit, felt the answering roar of the jets, and crouched in his acceleration cradle as the ship dipped low, blazing a brief trail across the night sky of Bardin’s Fall.
The world he was going to sabotage.
THEY had taken very special care that nothing would go wrong with Ridgeley’s mission. Unique camouflaging equipment had been baked into the ceramic hull of the ship that had carried him across space.
He scanned the land below as his ship descended tail-first; the flare of his jets lit up the landscape, and he saw dark looming trees surrounding a narrow clearing, with no sign of human habitation. It was ideal. He guided the ship down with pinpoint accuracy, setting it in the midst of the clearing with only a few feet of margin at each side.
He pressed the conversion button.
Instantly, painstakingly-designed electronic circuits went into operation; he heard a faint hum, and knew that the exterior of the ship was being transformed. Projections were being extruded, plastic vines were wrapping themselves about the hull, color-changes were being effected. Quickly, he gathered up the few possessions he would need on this mission, snapped down on the airlock-control switch, and slipped through the opening gateway into the waiting darkness.
It was a ten-foot drop to the ground. Ridgeley swung out over the edge of the ship, loosed his grasp of the handhold. and dropped lightly, flexing his knees to take the shock off his ankles.
