Collected Short Fiction, page 474
It was just a hollow metal tube. He shrugged and tucked the tube away in his rucksack. Let the scientists back at the base puzzle out how it works, he thought. He could testify that it did work, somehow.
He grinned cynically and looked down at the dead aliens, who looked now like a pair of rag dolls. “That’s gratitude for you, isn’t it? Give them medicine and the minute they’re strong enough to walk they blow your head off.” He scowled. “But I guess I shouldn’t expect gratitude from them. Not from aliens. Maybe in their culture the proper thing to do is to kill the doctor who fixes you up.”
“There would be few doctors in such a culture.”
“Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they saw the radio operating and didn’t want you to send back word about them.”
“Or perhaps,” the girl said, they are Haters. They were so consumed with hatred for other beings that they destroyed on sight.”
“I still say you shouldn’t have killed them. Maybe there was some misunderstanding—”
She laughed scornfully. “Fool! Woman! I killed them because they deserved to be killed!”
Stunning would have been good enough,” he said, ignoring the insults. “But you were bloodthirsty, weren’t you?”
“And you are softhearted, then.”
She seemed to be regretting her moment of weakness in the ship, Massi thought. Maybe that was why she had iced up so swiftly. Well, no sense arguing with her about it. It had been hotheaded to kill instead of stun, but the aliens were dead and that was all there was to it.
She said, “Besides, my blaster is not equipped for stunning.
It can only kill. I did not know hand-blasters could do both.”
“The new models can. The new American models, anyway.”
“May I see your weapon?”
He shrugged and handed her the gun butt-first for inspection. The instant he parted with it, he knew he had made a mistake, one of the few really boneheaded goofs he had ever made. She grinned coldly at him, flipped the safety off, and said, “Put up the hands please.”
“What the hell are you pulling?”
“We are forty miles from my settlement, only a dozen from yours. In the nature of things you will reach your people many hours before I reach mine. That would not be so good for me. I would still be walking through the jungle when your men had come to view the ship. You will come with me, therefore. Or I will kill you here.”
Massi’s jaw sagged. Rage coursed through him. rage directed only at himself. Underestimation was fatal when dealing with this girl, it seemed. He hadn’t even considered the fact that the alien ship was far closer to the American settlement than the Brazilian, and that unless she stopped him he would have been able to notify his base long before she could reach hers. So she had tried a trick so old it had long white whiskers, and now she had both guns and he had none.
There was nothing for him to say. He was too choked with shame to want to speak. She had called him a fool and a woman, and she had been right. He bit down hard on his lip in impotent frustration. His eyes could not meet her dark, mocking ones. Tricked, gunless, deprived of the biggest prize in the universe by his own unaccountable stupidity, he was sick with self-reproach.
“Okay,” she said, grinning gaily. “You will walk ahead of me. We should reach my settlement in two days if we do not waste time.”
IT was mid-afternoon when they set out, Massi in the lead and the girl directing him from behind. The temperature was slowly dropping back from its noonday peak, but it was well over 100 anyway. Grimly Massi forced his bitter selfanger to subside; he was going to need his wits about him just to survive the jungle trek.
He said nothing, nor did she make conversation. At least she had the thoughtfulness not to taunt him, Massi thought.
He considered the situation. A small alien ship had wandered into the Kothgir system and had crashed. Obviously it was an advance scout of some kind. It was imperative that he got word back to his base about the landing; the Brazilians might or might not decide to let the other space-colonizing nations know about the possible peril, but he couldn’t risk that. He had to get back to his settlement and bring the news. Besides, the colony could use the metal of the ship, if nothing else. He didn’t want all that good metal to fall into the hands of the Brazilians.
So he had gone and handed his gun over to this brawny wench, and now he was on his way eastward, heading in the wrong direction for him. He cursed himself bitterly. He wondered about ways of winning back the advantage.
They covered eight miles by nightfall. It was slow work, hacking a path through the thick jungle, keeping your eyes cocked for unfriendly wildlife, taking each step slow for fear of a hidden pit. Massi was bone-tired by the time Kothgir slipped below the horizon and the pale blue moons had risen, two of them brightening the sky. Night-cries sounded in the jungle now. The bigger carnivores, having slept through the steaming day, now would prowl in search of their night’s meal.
Massi wondered what the girl was planning to do. Usually two people slept in shifts in the jungle, one standing guard at all times. But the girl would never dare relax. She would have to remain awake all night for fear Massi would seize the blasters. But if she dozed, even for a moment, he thought—
They settled down in a clearing by the bank of a small turgid stream for the night. But neither slept. They sat cross-legged ten feet apart, watching each other. For a while Massi pretended to be asleep, watching the girl through slitted lids to see if she would relax guard. She remained awake, staring at him coldly, never easing up.
The girl was superhuman, he decided. She was about as feminine as a tank, and twice as deadly. When the sun finally scattered the night, she was fresh and ready to go, seemingly not at all fatigued by her sleepless night. And Massi was perfectly willing to believe she intended to stay awake until they reached the Brazilian base.
But in that case, he thought, why doesn’t she kill me? It would be much simpler tor her that way. He could supply two possible answers: either she feared making the trip through the forest alone, or else there was some lingering sentimentality about her that kept her from cold-bloodedly shooting him.
He wondered what sort of strength lay in those lean, flat, whiplike muscles, in that wiry unwomanly body. He wondered too whether she would shoot him down as readily as she had the two aliens. By mid-morning of the second day. he was desperate enough to try her out.
They were advancing through heavily wooded flatlands, marshy and spongy underfoot, infested with snakes of all sizes from the needle-thin and deadly Little Fry to the barrel-thick Swallowers. The heat had slacked off a trifle, but it was a long way from being comfortable.
He stopped suddenly. Behind him, the girl said, “Why do you hesitate?”
“I think I hear something. Swallower, maybe. You hear a gurgling sound coming from the left?”
She was silent a moment. “No,” she said finally.
“I do. We better hold up a second.” He took a deep breath and realized to his great surprise that he was apprehensive about what he was going to do next, that though he had entered the jungle twenty times without fear he felt fear now. not for the jungle’s presence but because of the girl behind him.
He pivoted suddenly, shouting, “Here comes a Swallower on your right! Look out! Look out!”
ONE good ruse deserved another, he thought. Despite herself, the Brazilian girl glanced to the right; the drawn blaster she carried wavered hesitantly, and the hesitation was just enough. Massi sprang at her, collided heavily, and threw her to the ground. He had been right: she had weakened when it came to drilling him in the middle with the blaster.
They landed on an oozy patch of marshland, Massi on top. He was two inches taller than the girl and better than sixty pounds heavier, and he made his advantage count. One hand reached out and clamped itself round her wrist, bending it back and forcing her to release the blaster. The other snaked round her throat. Slowly he levered himself to a sitting position, his knees planted on her arms, his body astride her chest, his hands gripping her shoulders and holding her flat. The fall had gone to him hands down.
She writhed, slapping her feet up and down and trying to thrust her knee into his groin, but she was helpless. All she could do was spit. She did that. Massi grinned and slapped her, hard. A trickle of blood started to run out of the corner of her mouth. She spat again and a second time he slapped her, even harder. He felt a savage joy in what he was doing. He had never hit a woman before, but this was hardly a woman. More like a wildcat.
Gradually she accepted the fact that she was beaten. Massi leaned back cautiously, slid a hand down her thigh, and yanked the other blaster from its holster. She muttered incoherent curses at him.
“Hurts to get fooled bad, doesn’t it?” he asked. “Now you know how I felt yesterday.”
Working quickly, he undipped the blasting chamber of her gun, cracked open the power-housing, and held it against the marshtop long enough for it to be thoroughly ruined. He tossed the useless blaster into the bushes. Then, holstering his own weapon again, he released her.
She rose, rubbing her split lips and sore arms, and favored him with as murderous a glance of hatred as Massi had ever seen. Shrugging it off, he said. “I hate to leave you stranded like this without a weapon, but it’s your own damn fault. Still, even though you’re a woman—”
“I am a soldier, not a woman.”
“As you prefer. You’re on your own, Captain. I’m afraid we split up here. I’m going back the way I came. You have thirty miles to travel and I have about twenty. Want to bet on who gets there first?”
“You will. But if I ever see you again I will kill you. No man holds his body against mine and lives.”
Massi chuckled. “You’re lucky all I did was wrestle with you. Tell you what: if I ever see you again, I’ll do my best to finish the job!”
“I would kill you first.”
Suddenly she turned, as if afraid tears might come to her eyes in a moment, and dashed wildly off into the thick brush. Massi watched her go, and shook his head thoughtfully. She had put up a good fight, all right. She was a regular wildcat. But a good big man can lick a good big woman any time, lie thought. He wondered if he ever would see her again and who would walk away from the encounter alive. By whipping her. he had restored his faith in his manhood—but he wasn’t sure the man had been born who could successfully bed that girl down.
He started to cut his way through the jungle, back toward the American settlement. Moving rapidly through the path already hewn, he reached the alien spaceship by late afternoon. The ground about the area seemed different: as if it had been trampled down, it seemed. He wondered whether others had found the ship. Certainly there had been visitors recently—in the last hour, perhaps.
Shrugging, he pressed on. Only twelve miles to go; be could cover two or three more before it became too dark to walk.
HE was ten miles from the base when a sudden explosion shattered the jungle silence. He froze; a moment later a second explosion came, shaking the ground beneath him. The first explosion had come from behind him, the second from directly in front. As if raiders had bombed first the Brazilian, then the American colonies.
A flash of brilliance above caught his eye. He glanced up. Against the hard blue backdrop of the sky he saw a ship rising heavenward and vanishing, a big ship, a strange ship. And suddenly he knew what had happened.
The colony was still in flames when he reached it, late that night, after a forced march through the dark. There was nothing left but rubble. The alien ship had been very efficient. Fifty years of work blotted out in a moment; three thousand human beings dead. And he knew it was the same way fifty miles away, at the Brazilian colony.
Massi stared up at the bleak stars. From one of those stars an exploratory ship had come, and following it a larger one. The explorers had crashed; the mother ship, following its smaller companion, had landed to find both of their men dead at the hands of the planet’s inhabitants.
The Brazilian girl had been right: the aliens were Haters. In wrath they had visited flaming death on the only two settlements they could find. Perhaps the murder had been expiated, or perhaps the incident would provoke the first interstellar war.
But Massi did not worry about that possibility now. He was abruptly conscious of his position. He was alone, the only American to have escaped the holocaust. No Earth ship would call at Kothgir II for at least a year. It was a long time to spend in the jungle by yourself. And there had been another survivor. She was back there, perhaps only now first discovering what had happened to her people.
Massi wet his lips and checked his blaster charges. He was alone and he didn’t like to be alone, not while another Person yet lived on the planet. He was surprised to find this need in himself; he had always thought himself self-sufficient, but now, standing at the edge of the fiery ruins of the American colony, he saw that he wasn’t.
He didn’t have to be alone. He wondered if that Brazilian girl could possibly be tamed. Taking a deep breath, he turned his back on the blazing dead colony and headed off into the jungle again, as morning began. Maybe the girl could be tamed. Massi was going to find her and try.
THE END
House Divided
Human intervention was to upset the age-old status quo on yet another planet—this time, with surprising results
In the language of the tribe closest to the Terran settlement, the planet’s name was Hranth, which meant, expectably enough, “The World Since the planet had no name of Terran giving other than Gamma Trianguli Australis VII, which was cumbersome in the extreme, Terran Commander Lenoir decided that the world would be known to the records as Hranth—at least conditionally.
It was a fairly promising planet, Martin Lenoir thought. The civilian colonists seemed to take to it well. It was Earthlike to six places: acceptable gravity, breathable air, drinkable water. The chemical constitution of its soil was such that Terran food-plants could grow there. The local plants and animals were metabolically assimilable in Terran stomachs, too.
Hranth was inhabited by humanoids in a primitive pretechnological state. The local tribe had raised no objections when the Terran colonising force of five hundred had landed. So long as the Terrans kept their settlement ten or fifteen miles away from the borders of their village, they did not care what happened.
After all, the old chief had explained, they did not own the entire planet. Merely their own tribal area, carved out centuries before. They had no interest in what became of land belonging to no one, or even to other tribes.
Work had proceeded smoothly during the initial ten days of the colony’s existence. Lenoir was an experienced leader, and his cadre of Colonial Corps men worked hard alongside the greenhorn civilians to build the colony. They had brought plenty of prefab dwellings, of course, but those were only temporary; eventually the forest of sturdy flaky-barked trees nearby would be converted into homes for the Terran settlers. By that time, though, Lenoir and his men would have withdrawn from the operation, leaving the settlers on their own and moving on to act as midwives and godfathers to some other Terran colony on some other planet.
One of the most important jobs was learning to communicate with the natives. The O’Neill Translator was a limited device at best, capable of rendering generalities in an awkward way but utterly unable to handle the delicacies of a diplomatic relationship. For that reason, two of the civilian women and one of Lenoir’s staff linguists were at work building up a working vocabulary of Hranth words.
Since everything was going along so well, it came as a considerable jolt to Lenoir when, one morning, an alien from the nearby village showed up speaking a language no one had ever heard before.
Lenoir had been busy, sketching out plans for an irrigation system. Hranth was rather a dry world. He was in the midst of the job when Sergeant Becker of Linguistics rapped on the beam of his door and entered.
“Well? What is it, Sergeant?”
“We have a visitor, sir. Alien. From the village. Can’t understand a word he’s saying.”
Lenoir frowned and put down his stylo. He was a big man, heavy-set, bull-voiced; he swivelled slowly around and stared at the pale, slim linguistics specialist. “You can’t understand him?”
“Not a word. It’s an entirely different language. We’re setting up the O’Neill now, but we thought you’d like to hear the interview.”
“Yes,” Lenoir said thoughtfully. “I guess I do want to hear this.”
At the moment the colony consisted of a ring of prefab domes arranged in a loose open circle around a clearing. The permanent settlers had put those up under the direction of Lenoir’s staff. At the far end of the circle, temporary tents had been erected. Lenoir crossed from his tent to the one in which the linguistics interviews were being held.
He found the civilian linguists bustling around setting up the complex affair that was the O’Neill Translator, while a white-thatched withered little alien watched them mildly and with small interest. The women glanced up as he entered, followed by Lieutenant Becker.
“How long has he been here?” Lenoir asked.
Mary Delacorte said, “He came about fifteen minutes ago. We thought he was the same one who had been here yesterday—it’s so hard to tell them apart, you know, Commander.”
“Yes,” Grace Walton said. “Until he started talking. The language didn’t even faintly resemble the one we’ve been studying.”
“Are you sure this man isn’t playing some kind of joke on you?”
“I doubt that,” Becker put in. “He seemed so damned anxious to communicate. As if he would explode if he didn’t tell us what he came here to let us know.”
Almost on cue, the alien began to speak. Lenoir looked at the creature. He was humanoid, and on the scrawny side—five feet tall, five-two perhaps. His skin was a dark red, and it hung in loose leathery folds at his joints and under his throat. The alien’s arms seemed to dangle to his knees, and they terminated in seven bony four-jointed fingers that tangled nervously with each other while he spoke. He wore only a loincloth fashioned from some gray woven material, coarse and ragged.
He grinned cynically and looked down at the dead aliens, who looked now like a pair of rag dolls. “That’s gratitude for you, isn’t it? Give them medicine and the minute they’re strong enough to walk they blow your head off.” He scowled. “But I guess I shouldn’t expect gratitude from them. Not from aliens. Maybe in their culture the proper thing to do is to kill the doctor who fixes you up.”
“There would be few doctors in such a culture.”
“Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they saw the radio operating and didn’t want you to send back word about them.”
“Or perhaps,” the girl said, they are Haters. They were so consumed with hatred for other beings that they destroyed on sight.”
“I still say you shouldn’t have killed them. Maybe there was some misunderstanding—”
She laughed scornfully. “Fool! Woman! I killed them because they deserved to be killed!”
Stunning would have been good enough,” he said, ignoring the insults. “But you were bloodthirsty, weren’t you?”
“And you are softhearted, then.”
She seemed to be regretting her moment of weakness in the ship, Massi thought. Maybe that was why she had iced up so swiftly. Well, no sense arguing with her about it. It had been hotheaded to kill instead of stun, but the aliens were dead and that was all there was to it.
She said, “Besides, my blaster is not equipped for stunning.
It can only kill. I did not know hand-blasters could do both.”
“The new models can. The new American models, anyway.”
“May I see your weapon?”
He shrugged and handed her the gun butt-first for inspection. The instant he parted with it, he knew he had made a mistake, one of the few really boneheaded goofs he had ever made. She grinned coldly at him, flipped the safety off, and said, “Put up the hands please.”
“What the hell are you pulling?”
“We are forty miles from my settlement, only a dozen from yours. In the nature of things you will reach your people many hours before I reach mine. That would not be so good for me. I would still be walking through the jungle when your men had come to view the ship. You will come with me, therefore. Or I will kill you here.”
Massi’s jaw sagged. Rage coursed through him. rage directed only at himself. Underestimation was fatal when dealing with this girl, it seemed. He hadn’t even considered the fact that the alien ship was far closer to the American settlement than the Brazilian, and that unless she stopped him he would have been able to notify his base long before she could reach hers. So she had tried a trick so old it had long white whiskers, and now she had both guns and he had none.
There was nothing for him to say. He was too choked with shame to want to speak. She had called him a fool and a woman, and she had been right. He bit down hard on his lip in impotent frustration. His eyes could not meet her dark, mocking ones. Tricked, gunless, deprived of the biggest prize in the universe by his own unaccountable stupidity, he was sick with self-reproach.
“Okay,” she said, grinning gaily. “You will walk ahead of me. We should reach my settlement in two days if we do not waste time.”
IT was mid-afternoon when they set out, Massi in the lead and the girl directing him from behind. The temperature was slowly dropping back from its noonday peak, but it was well over 100 anyway. Grimly Massi forced his bitter selfanger to subside; he was going to need his wits about him just to survive the jungle trek.
He said nothing, nor did she make conversation. At least she had the thoughtfulness not to taunt him, Massi thought.
He considered the situation. A small alien ship had wandered into the Kothgir system and had crashed. Obviously it was an advance scout of some kind. It was imperative that he got word back to his base about the landing; the Brazilians might or might not decide to let the other space-colonizing nations know about the possible peril, but he couldn’t risk that. He had to get back to his settlement and bring the news. Besides, the colony could use the metal of the ship, if nothing else. He didn’t want all that good metal to fall into the hands of the Brazilians.
So he had gone and handed his gun over to this brawny wench, and now he was on his way eastward, heading in the wrong direction for him. He cursed himself bitterly. He wondered about ways of winning back the advantage.
They covered eight miles by nightfall. It was slow work, hacking a path through the thick jungle, keeping your eyes cocked for unfriendly wildlife, taking each step slow for fear of a hidden pit. Massi was bone-tired by the time Kothgir slipped below the horizon and the pale blue moons had risen, two of them brightening the sky. Night-cries sounded in the jungle now. The bigger carnivores, having slept through the steaming day, now would prowl in search of their night’s meal.
Massi wondered what the girl was planning to do. Usually two people slept in shifts in the jungle, one standing guard at all times. But the girl would never dare relax. She would have to remain awake all night for fear Massi would seize the blasters. But if she dozed, even for a moment, he thought—
They settled down in a clearing by the bank of a small turgid stream for the night. But neither slept. They sat cross-legged ten feet apart, watching each other. For a while Massi pretended to be asleep, watching the girl through slitted lids to see if she would relax guard. She remained awake, staring at him coldly, never easing up.
The girl was superhuman, he decided. She was about as feminine as a tank, and twice as deadly. When the sun finally scattered the night, she was fresh and ready to go, seemingly not at all fatigued by her sleepless night. And Massi was perfectly willing to believe she intended to stay awake until they reached the Brazilian base.
But in that case, he thought, why doesn’t she kill me? It would be much simpler tor her that way. He could supply two possible answers: either she feared making the trip through the forest alone, or else there was some lingering sentimentality about her that kept her from cold-bloodedly shooting him.
He wondered what sort of strength lay in those lean, flat, whiplike muscles, in that wiry unwomanly body. He wondered too whether she would shoot him down as readily as she had the two aliens. By mid-morning of the second day. he was desperate enough to try her out.
They were advancing through heavily wooded flatlands, marshy and spongy underfoot, infested with snakes of all sizes from the needle-thin and deadly Little Fry to the barrel-thick Swallowers. The heat had slacked off a trifle, but it was a long way from being comfortable.
He stopped suddenly. Behind him, the girl said, “Why do you hesitate?”
“I think I hear something. Swallower, maybe. You hear a gurgling sound coming from the left?”
She was silent a moment. “No,” she said finally.
“I do. We better hold up a second.” He took a deep breath and realized to his great surprise that he was apprehensive about what he was going to do next, that though he had entered the jungle twenty times without fear he felt fear now. not for the jungle’s presence but because of the girl behind him.
He pivoted suddenly, shouting, “Here comes a Swallower on your right! Look out! Look out!”
ONE good ruse deserved another, he thought. Despite herself, the Brazilian girl glanced to the right; the drawn blaster she carried wavered hesitantly, and the hesitation was just enough. Massi sprang at her, collided heavily, and threw her to the ground. He had been right: she had weakened when it came to drilling him in the middle with the blaster.
They landed on an oozy patch of marshland, Massi on top. He was two inches taller than the girl and better than sixty pounds heavier, and he made his advantage count. One hand reached out and clamped itself round her wrist, bending it back and forcing her to release the blaster. The other snaked round her throat. Slowly he levered himself to a sitting position, his knees planted on her arms, his body astride her chest, his hands gripping her shoulders and holding her flat. The fall had gone to him hands down.
She writhed, slapping her feet up and down and trying to thrust her knee into his groin, but she was helpless. All she could do was spit. She did that. Massi grinned and slapped her, hard. A trickle of blood started to run out of the corner of her mouth. She spat again and a second time he slapped her, even harder. He felt a savage joy in what he was doing. He had never hit a woman before, but this was hardly a woman. More like a wildcat.
Gradually she accepted the fact that she was beaten. Massi leaned back cautiously, slid a hand down her thigh, and yanked the other blaster from its holster. She muttered incoherent curses at him.
“Hurts to get fooled bad, doesn’t it?” he asked. “Now you know how I felt yesterday.”
Working quickly, he undipped the blasting chamber of her gun, cracked open the power-housing, and held it against the marshtop long enough for it to be thoroughly ruined. He tossed the useless blaster into the bushes. Then, holstering his own weapon again, he released her.
She rose, rubbing her split lips and sore arms, and favored him with as murderous a glance of hatred as Massi had ever seen. Shrugging it off, he said. “I hate to leave you stranded like this without a weapon, but it’s your own damn fault. Still, even though you’re a woman—”
“I am a soldier, not a woman.”
“As you prefer. You’re on your own, Captain. I’m afraid we split up here. I’m going back the way I came. You have thirty miles to travel and I have about twenty. Want to bet on who gets there first?”
“You will. But if I ever see you again I will kill you. No man holds his body against mine and lives.”
Massi chuckled. “You’re lucky all I did was wrestle with you. Tell you what: if I ever see you again, I’ll do my best to finish the job!”
“I would kill you first.”
Suddenly she turned, as if afraid tears might come to her eyes in a moment, and dashed wildly off into the thick brush. Massi watched her go, and shook his head thoughtfully. She had put up a good fight, all right. She was a regular wildcat. But a good big man can lick a good big woman any time, lie thought. He wondered if he ever would see her again and who would walk away from the encounter alive. By whipping her. he had restored his faith in his manhood—but he wasn’t sure the man had been born who could successfully bed that girl down.
He started to cut his way through the jungle, back toward the American settlement. Moving rapidly through the path already hewn, he reached the alien spaceship by late afternoon. The ground about the area seemed different: as if it had been trampled down, it seemed. He wondered whether others had found the ship. Certainly there had been visitors recently—in the last hour, perhaps.
Shrugging, he pressed on. Only twelve miles to go; be could cover two or three more before it became too dark to walk.
HE was ten miles from the base when a sudden explosion shattered the jungle silence. He froze; a moment later a second explosion came, shaking the ground beneath him. The first explosion had come from behind him, the second from directly in front. As if raiders had bombed first the Brazilian, then the American colonies.
A flash of brilliance above caught his eye. He glanced up. Against the hard blue backdrop of the sky he saw a ship rising heavenward and vanishing, a big ship, a strange ship. And suddenly he knew what had happened.
The colony was still in flames when he reached it, late that night, after a forced march through the dark. There was nothing left but rubble. The alien ship had been very efficient. Fifty years of work blotted out in a moment; three thousand human beings dead. And he knew it was the same way fifty miles away, at the Brazilian colony.
Massi stared up at the bleak stars. From one of those stars an exploratory ship had come, and following it a larger one. The explorers had crashed; the mother ship, following its smaller companion, had landed to find both of their men dead at the hands of the planet’s inhabitants.
The Brazilian girl had been right: the aliens were Haters. In wrath they had visited flaming death on the only two settlements they could find. Perhaps the murder had been expiated, or perhaps the incident would provoke the first interstellar war.
But Massi did not worry about that possibility now. He was abruptly conscious of his position. He was alone, the only American to have escaped the holocaust. No Earth ship would call at Kothgir II for at least a year. It was a long time to spend in the jungle by yourself. And there had been another survivor. She was back there, perhaps only now first discovering what had happened to her people.
Massi wet his lips and checked his blaster charges. He was alone and he didn’t like to be alone, not while another Person yet lived on the planet. He was surprised to find this need in himself; he had always thought himself self-sufficient, but now, standing at the edge of the fiery ruins of the American colony, he saw that he wasn’t.
He didn’t have to be alone. He wondered if that Brazilian girl could possibly be tamed. Taking a deep breath, he turned his back on the blazing dead colony and headed off into the jungle again, as morning began. Maybe the girl could be tamed. Massi was going to find her and try.
THE END
House Divided
Human intervention was to upset the age-old status quo on yet another planet—this time, with surprising results
In the language of the tribe closest to the Terran settlement, the planet’s name was Hranth, which meant, expectably enough, “The World Since the planet had no name of Terran giving other than Gamma Trianguli Australis VII, which was cumbersome in the extreme, Terran Commander Lenoir decided that the world would be known to the records as Hranth—at least conditionally.
It was a fairly promising planet, Martin Lenoir thought. The civilian colonists seemed to take to it well. It was Earthlike to six places: acceptable gravity, breathable air, drinkable water. The chemical constitution of its soil was such that Terran food-plants could grow there. The local plants and animals were metabolically assimilable in Terran stomachs, too.
Hranth was inhabited by humanoids in a primitive pretechnological state. The local tribe had raised no objections when the Terran colonising force of five hundred had landed. So long as the Terrans kept their settlement ten or fifteen miles away from the borders of their village, they did not care what happened.
After all, the old chief had explained, they did not own the entire planet. Merely their own tribal area, carved out centuries before. They had no interest in what became of land belonging to no one, or even to other tribes.
Work had proceeded smoothly during the initial ten days of the colony’s existence. Lenoir was an experienced leader, and his cadre of Colonial Corps men worked hard alongside the greenhorn civilians to build the colony. They had brought plenty of prefab dwellings, of course, but those were only temporary; eventually the forest of sturdy flaky-barked trees nearby would be converted into homes for the Terran settlers. By that time, though, Lenoir and his men would have withdrawn from the operation, leaving the settlers on their own and moving on to act as midwives and godfathers to some other Terran colony on some other planet.
One of the most important jobs was learning to communicate with the natives. The O’Neill Translator was a limited device at best, capable of rendering generalities in an awkward way but utterly unable to handle the delicacies of a diplomatic relationship. For that reason, two of the civilian women and one of Lenoir’s staff linguists were at work building up a working vocabulary of Hranth words.
Since everything was going along so well, it came as a considerable jolt to Lenoir when, one morning, an alien from the nearby village showed up speaking a language no one had ever heard before.
Lenoir had been busy, sketching out plans for an irrigation system. Hranth was rather a dry world. He was in the midst of the job when Sergeant Becker of Linguistics rapped on the beam of his door and entered.
“Well? What is it, Sergeant?”
“We have a visitor, sir. Alien. From the village. Can’t understand a word he’s saying.”
Lenoir frowned and put down his stylo. He was a big man, heavy-set, bull-voiced; he swivelled slowly around and stared at the pale, slim linguistics specialist. “You can’t understand him?”
“Not a word. It’s an entirely different language. We’re setting up the O’Neill now, but we thought you’d like to hear the interview.”
“Yes,” Lenoir said thoughtfully. “I guess I do want to hear this.”
At the moment the colony consisted of a ring of prefab domes arranged in a loose open circle around a clearing. The permanent settlers had put those up under the direction of Lenoir’s staff. At the far end of the circle, temporary tents had been erected. Lenoir crossed from his tent to the one in which the linguistics interviews were being held.
He found the civilian linguists bustling around setting up the complex affair that was the O’Neill Translator, while a white-thatched withered little alien watched them mildly and with small interest. The women glanced up as he entered, followed by Lieutenant Becker.
“How long has he been here?” Lenoir asked.
Mary Delacorte said, “He came about fifteen minutes ago. We thought he was the same one who had been here yesterday—it’s so hard to tell them apart, you know, Commander.”
“Yes,” Grace Walton said. “Until he started talking. The language didn’t even faintly resemble the one we’ve been studying.”
“Are you sure this man isn’t playing some kind of joke on you?”
“I doubt that,” Becker put in. “He seemed so damned anxious to communicate. As if he would explode if he didn’t tell us what he came here to let us know.”
Almost on cue, the alien began to speak. Lenoir looked at the creature. He was humanoid, and on the scrawny side—five feet tall, five-two perhaps. His skin was a dark red, and it hung in loose leathery folds at his joints and under his throat. The alien’s arms seemed to dangle to his knees, and they terminated in seven bony four-jointed fingers that tangled nervously with each other while he spoke. He wore only a loincloth fashioned from some gray woven material, coarse and ragged.
