Collected Short Fiction, page 546
As I finished speaking the mutants turned with one accord and fled like shadows into the forest. A moment later, I heard a creaking sound behind me, coming from the wrecked ship.
I turned. A hatch was opening. And a man was climbing down to greet us. Not a mutant, but a man.
HE looked terribly old. His hair was white and fell in unkempt tangles to his shoulders; his beard, also white, fluttered in the wind. He wore faded rags and walked with a stiff arthritic limp. He came toward us unsteadily, stopped a few yards away, and said in a voice that was obviously rusty from long disuse, “Are—you—from—Earth?”
“We’re Earthmen, yes. I’m Captain Johnny Harmon of the freight-ship Mane. We stopped here for repairs and saw the wreckage from above.”
The old man smiled painfully, showing time-rotted teeth. “You’re—a little late—for rescue,” he said, and every word was an effort. “I’m the only survivor left. And I’m—not going to last—too much longer—”
He coughed suddenly and came toppling forward. Tsung caught him before he hit the ground.
“The old man passed out. What should we do with him?”
“Take him to the Marie,” I said. “He probably needs medical care. We’ll let Kryholt have a look at him.”
We carried the old man delicately aboard our ship. The crew came crowding round; they had seen the weird mutants and the old man, and they wanted to know what was going on on this planet. I shut them up and got them assigned to jobs, putting three of them to work on fixing the drive stabilizer, which was, after all, the main reason why we were here.
Taking the old man into my quarters, we laid him out on the hammock and Tom Kryholt, who doubles as our medic and as ship’s purser, had a look at him. Kryholt reported that the old fellow was in reasonably good shape, no organic diseases, but that the excitement of our landing had conked him out. An injection of lurthenosil brought him around quickly enough. And a strange story began to emerge, told in lame, halting gasps.
His name was David Matson and he said he had been born in 2401, which made him only fifty-nine; he looked at least eighty. He had just turned thirty, and newly married, when he took passage aboard the ill-fated liner EMPRESS OF SATURN.
The first two weeks of the luxury cruise had been splendid. But tragedy struck on the fifteenth day; an explosion ripped the drive compartment apart. The ship was crippled but not seriously damaged, and the officers decided to limp down on this planet and send out an S.O.S., rather than risk further travel.
But there was a second explosion while landing, and a third. As Matson told it—his face contorted with the pain of memory, even after thirty years—the ship was raked with fire from end to end. It tumbled down through the atmosphere. Hundreds of passengers died—including, Matson told us quietly, his wife of two weeks.
They landed, somehow, and there was a final explosion at landing which virtually split the ship apart and showered the survivors with atomic radiation. There was a fierce scramble to get out of the ship, which was thought to be on the verge of yet another explosion.
No explosion came. The dazed and burned survivors gathered in the forest nearby. Only about three hundred of the ship’s passenger list had survived.
The radio equipment was totally wrecked. Most of the officers and crew had perished. There was nothing to do but to settle down on this uninhabited planet and wait for rescuers, rescuers who were not to arrive for thirty years.
The survivors built crude shelters in the forest. As the days passed and their burns healed, they took stock of the situation and decided that they would have to consider themselves involuntary colonists. Couples who had survived the disaster together began to have children. Other couples were formed. Matson, out of grief for his dead bride, chose to live alone.
And then, nearly a year after the crash, the first children were born on the new world.
They were monsters. Loathsome monsters.
Many of them died at childbirth. But a good portion survived. There was not one normal birth. The hellish atomic fury that had sleeted through the exploding ship had played havoc with the genes of the passengers, and their children were hideous deformed mutants.
A number of the survivors killed themselves. Others refused to have children again. But still, the monster-children continued to be born. Their numbers mounted. Fifty, sixty, a hundred of them, no two alike in superficial detail, every one a creature out of nightmare.
A turning-point came six years after the crash, Matson said, when it was discovered that there were more of the monster-children than there were of human survivors. And the proportions mounted. By the tenth year, only a hundred eighty of the survivors remained, and there were some five hundred mutants living in the little crude village.
And, when the first mutants were twelve and thirteen, they began to reproduce themselves. A war of extermination followed, the mutated children turning on their normal parents. More than a hundred died the first week. The rest fled back to the safety of the shattered ship, using it as a fort.
During the years that followed, Matson said, the normals gradually died off or were killed, while the monsters in the forest thrived and became more numerous.
“Eight years ago,” the oldman finished, “the only remaining survivor beside myself died. Since then I’ve been alone, living in the ship. The monsters don’t seem to care about me.
“Several times they’ve come upon me while I was in the forest gathering food, and they’ve left me alone.” Matson grinned feebly. “Maybe they’re letting me live as a kind of walking souvenir,” he said. “I don’t know. But that’s the story of the EMPRESS OF SATURN. A race of monsters sprang up. There are thousands of them in the forest now—they breed fantastically fast. They die young, of course, but there are always more to take the place of the dead ones.”
OLD Matson was obviously exhausted by the telling of his story, so we let him be. I called the crew together in the galley and repeated the entire tale, just as I had heard it from the old man.
Marty Brecht nodded. “And you can see the monsters looking at us, Captain. They’re all around. Peeping out of the forest at us. Afraid to come near.”
“The sooner we get off this planet,” Danny Tsung said, “the happier I’m going to be. How long do you think we’ll be here, Captain?”
I shrugged and glanced at Hammermill. “Sid? When do you figure the stabilizer will be in shape?”
“At least another two days of work, Johnny. And I wouldn’t want to rush away without giving it a good flight test first. Make it three days altogether.”
“Three days!” Tsung cried. “And those damned things making eyes at us from the woods!”
“They’re probably more afraid of us than we are of them,” I said crisply. “Carry sidearms at all times when you’re outside the ship, and don’t stray very far. I don’t expect any trouble from those creatures.”
As I spoke, I walked to the port and peered out. Tsung hadn’t been joking: repulsive-looking heads were popping out behind every tree. I counted at least twenty mutants watching us.
But I didn’t think we were due for trouble from them. I was dead wrong.
I sent the men about their jobs and started work on my daily log entries. About an hour before mess time, Tom Kryholt came to see me. He had bad news. Old Matson was dead.
“His heart just couldn’t take all the excitement,” Kryholt said. “Eight years of absolute solitude got him out of the habit of seeing people. Our arrival got him worked up and put an overload on his heart. He died in his sleep a few minutes ago.”
“Well, at least he’ll get a decent burial from us,.” I said. “On. your way out, tell Hammermill about it, and have him send a couple of men outside to dig a grave near the wreck.”
AHERNE and Fremantle dug the grave, not far from the crumpled nose of the EMPRESS OF SATURN, and just before sundown we held the burial service. We wrapped the old man in a sheet of plastifilm, lowered him gently into the grave, and planted a cross; I didn’t know whether he would have wanted the cross or not, but I figured it was a good thing to do anyway.
I said a few words over the grave—nothing much; I’ve never been too good in the speech-making department—and we trooped back to our own ship. Long shadows were slanting across the clearing now, as the sun got lower in the sky.
The planet had no moon, and the sky was as black as I’ve ever seen anywhere, broken only by the brightness of the stars. We spent an uneasy night. There was plenty of noise in the jungle, and even though we had the ship shut up tight as a clam I couldn’t help shivering at the thought of those creatures in the forest, those degenerate sons of mankind, with their extra limbs and dappled skins and bulging heads and all the other weird deformities I had seen earlier.
They had even been watching us while we performed the burial; I had seen them lurking behind the trees, eyeing us with their piercing stares, and I was doubly glad I had ordered all men to wear side-arms outside the ship.
So far the mutants had not made a single aggressive gesture toward us, but I remembered Matson’s vivid tale of the war between the mutants and the normals—a war that had ended in almost total extermination of the normals.
When morning came, we found that Matson’s grave had been opened and the body was gone.
Hammermill made the discovery, while the rest of us were waking up. Sid had gone outside to have a look around and get some morning air. He came back to the Marie on a bound, shouting, “They’ve opened the grave! They’ve opened the grave!”
We came flocking out to see. The cross was down, and the grave had indeed been dug up—not with shovels, it seemed, but with hands and feet, the way a dog would dig up a bone. Heaps of loose soil had been sprayed all over, and the only thing in the grave was the plastifilm we had wrapped the body in.
“The filthy ghouls,” Kryholt muttered. “They must have come during the night, while we slept—”
The grisly grave-robbing episode cast a pall of gloom over us all morning. The old man had been a game fighter, and he deserved to remain at rest., Although simply to look at them was to be convinced of the hellishness of the mutants, this incident clinched in our minds the fact that they were a degraded form of life that no longer could be thought worthy of being called “human.”
Hammermill, Fremantle, and Brecht, the three men who had been assigned to repairing the drive stabilizer, worked like demons all morning. I didn’t discourage them from working hard, either. I wanted to get off this foul planet just as fast as we could get the ship safely aloft.
It was early in the afternoon when Tim Aherne came to me and reported that no one had seen Danny Tsung since lunch.
“I thought he was working with Fremantle and Brecht on the stabilizer,” Aherne said. “But when I went looking for him up front they told me they thought he’d been working with me, cleaning out the rocket tubes. And he isn’t in the radio room with Sparks, he isn’t with Kryholt, he isn’t with Mike Thorne in the control room. So where is he?”
“We’d better find out in a hurry.” I yanked down on the gong-handle that sounded a general alarm, and waited for everyone to come running. Sparks was there first, then Kryholt, then the three from the stabilizer compartment. Following Hammermill in came Mike Thorne. I counted up. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and I made the eighth. The Marie carried nine. One was missing—Tsung. Where was he?
“Anybody seen Danny?” I demanded.
“Not since lunch, skipper,” Sparks said.
“I thought he was working on the rocket tubes, Johnny,” Hammermill said.
“And I thought he was up front,” said Aherne.
“Maybe he took a walk over to the other ship,” Kryholt suggested. “Looking for a souvenir from the EMPRESS OF SATURN, or something like that.”
“Maybe,” I admitted tightly. “I think we’d better have a look. Aherne, Brecht, Come with me. The rest of you stay busy. And yell if you notice anything peculiar going on outside.”
FULLY armed, Aherne, Brecht and I left the Marie and headed for the wrecked liner. I was worried. Danny Tsung was the newest member of our crew—he had signed on voyage before last—and though he was only a fuel technician, and therefore not essential to our safety, I hated to lose him. And somehow I knew that something had happened to him—something nasty.
We reached the EMPRESS. I cupped my hands to my mouth and yelled, “Danny! Danny Tsung!”
No answer.
I yelled again, hoping to see his grinning yellow-skinned face come popping out of a porthole high up on the liner, but there was no response. Aherne and Brecht joined in, a.nd we shouted until mocking echoes drifted back from the dark forest.
No Danny. No sign of him at all.
Then Brecht bent, picked up something, and waved it in the air for us to see. “Look here!”
“What’s that?”
“A strip of leather. Torn from Danny’s jacket. It was lying here on the ground.”
I looked toward the forest. Unseen eyes seemed to be looking back at me. “I think,” I said in a quiet voice, “that we’d better organize a bigger searching party to look for Danny.”
We returned to the ship and I showed them what we had found. Then we split up to look for him. At my orders, Hammermill and Fremantle stayed behind to continue working on the stabilizer repairs; the work had to go on, no matter what, or we’d never leave here. I divided the rest of us into three teams of two: Brecht and Sparks, Aherne and Thorne, Kryholt and myself.
“Remember,” I warned them as we set out. “Keep your blasters where you can reach them, and sing out if you get into any trouble.”
We advanced into the forest, Brecht and Sparks going south of the wreck, Aherne and Thorne going north, while Doc Kryholt and I struck out westward.
We moved cautiously, staying ten to fifteen feet from each other, looking in all directions before we took each step. I kept anticipating mutants dropping from the trees or materializing out of concealed pits. We continued into the forest for nearly a quarter of a mile without seeing anything noteworthy.
Then Kryholt branched off a little, taking a side-fork to my right. I kept one eye on him, because I didn’t want to get separated.
Suddenly I heard him shout. There was the sound of a scuffle in the underbrush, the bright flare of a blaster-bolt going off, and a high-pitched, unearthly scream of pain. Then, the sound of creatures beating a hasty retreat through the vegetation.
When I reached Kryholt finally, he was doubled over, upchucking his lunch. He held up one hand. “I found him. You better not look.”
It was too late; I had already looked. It was not pretty. I have often wondered what sight there is loathsome enough to make a doctor lose his lunch, and now I know. I was quickly and unpleasantly sick.
Kryholt said, “There were four or five of the mutants crouched over him. They were—eating him. I got one and the rest escaped.”
A mutant lay sprawled some twenty feet further away, with a charred hole blown through his middle. It was a particularly ugly mutant, with a sleekskinned reptilian body covered with glossy blue scales.
I did not look at Danny’s body. One glance had been enough to imprint the image on my mind forever: the head and shoulders of Danny Tsung still intact, the face still smiling even in death—and the rest of the body a bloody mess, gnawed to the bone in some places, as though the mutants had gathered round, jostling each other away to grab up handfuls of his still-warm flesh.
“What are we going to do with the body?” I said. “If the men see it—”
“The men won’t see it. I’ll cremate it with my blaster,” Kryholt said. “It’s the best way. This isn’t a sight for sane eyes to see.”
Opening his weapon to wide-blast, Kryholt rayed the corpse to ash. “All right,” he said finally. “We can go back now.”
WE returned to the ship and I sounded the siren that meant all-hands-get-back-aboard. A few minutes later, Aherne, Brecht, Sparx, and Thorne returned from their explorations, and I told them the news.
“Killed and eaten,” Fremantle repeated. “Killed and eaten. And these things are the children of human beings!”
“How did they catch him?” Hammermill asked.
“He must have wandered away from the ship after lunch,” I said. “And the mutants were waiting—hidden behind the wreck, maybe—”
“The hellish fiends!” Thorne rumbled. He had been a close friend of Danny’s. “We ought to kill them all! Trail the ship over the jungle and blast them into atoms with our rocket-wash!”
I shook my head. “The smartest thing to do is just to finish up the repairs and get the deuce out of here. Let the Galactic Government worry about cleaning up the mutants.”
“No, dammit!” Thorne cried. “They killed Danny. I’m going to even the score.”
He started out the main hatch. I called after him, “Thorne! Thorne, get back inside here!”
“Sorry, Captain. This is personal!”
He leaped to ground level. I rushed out after him. He was racing toward the forest, his blaster out and firing. As usual, there had been mutants peering at us from behind the trees. Thorne’s wild fusillade of blaster bolts killed at least three of the beings before I could catch up with him. The rest of the mutants fled.
I slapped the blaster out of his hand. His face was white, his eyes strange.
“Have you gone nuts, Thorne? Get back in the ship on the double!”
He nodded, panting breathlessly. “Okay, Skipper. I got some of them, at least. That’s all I wanted.”
He returned to the ship. I followed him in, looking behind me—just in case.
I gave orders that nobody was to leave the ship for any reason at all. Just to make sure, I went around to each man on board and asked him privately to keep an eye on one other man; I didn’t want anybody slipping off into the forest to carry out a one-man vendetta in vengeance for Danny. I wasn’t interested in vengeance, just in getting away from this planet, and one casualty was a lot more than sufficient.
