The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (60 page)

CHAPTER 8

Bregg sighed. He caught Paula in those fine small hands that seemed to have amazing strength and held her, at arm’s length. “Doctor Ray,” he said. He shook her. “Doctor Ray.” She stopped screaming. “I don’t wish to administer a sedative because then you will say that I drugged you. But I will if I must.”

Kieran said, “I’ll keep her quiet.”

He took her from Bregg. She collapsed against him and began to cry. “Murderers,” she whispered. “That little girl, those old people—”

Webber said, “You could exterminate those beasts. You don’t have to let them hunt the people like that. It’s—it’s—”

“Unhuman is the word you want,” said Bregg. His voice was exceedingly weary. “Please get into the car.”

They climbed in. The car churned around and sped back toward the building. Paula shivered, and Kieran held her in his arms. Webber said after a moment or two, “How did you happen to be here, Bregg?”

“When we caught the flitter and found it empty, it was obvious that you were with the people, and it became imperative to find you before you came to harm. I remembered that the trail ran close by this old outpost building, so I had the patrol ship drop us here with an emergency vehicle.”

Kieran said, “You knew the people were coming this way?”

“Of course.” Bregg sounded surprised. “They migrate every year at the beginning of the dry season. How do you suppose Webber found them so easily?”

Kieran looked at Webber. He asked, “Then they weren’t running from the Sakae?”

“Of course they were,” Paula said. “You saw them yourself, cowering under the trees when the ship went over.”

“The patrol ships frighten them,” Bregg said. “Sometimes to the point of stampeding them, which is why we use them only in emergencies. The people do not connect the ships with us.”

“That,” said Paula flatly, “is a lie.”

Bregg sighed. “Enthusiasts always believe what they want to believe. Come and see for yourself.”

She straightened up. “What have you done to them?”

“We’ve caught them in a trap,” said Bregg, “and we are presently going to stick needles into them—a procedure necessitated by your presence, Doctor Ray. They’re highly susceptible to imported viruses, as you should remember—one of your little parties of do-gooders succeeded in wiping out a whole band of them not too many years ago. So—inoculations and quarantine.”

Lights had blazed up in the area near the building. The car sped toward them.

Kieran said slowly, “Why don’t you just exterminate the hunters and have done with them?”

“In your day, Mr. Kieran—yes, I’ve heard all about you—in your day, did you on Earth exterminate the predators so that their natural prey might live more happily?”

Bregg’s long muzzle and sloping skull were profiled against the lights.

“No,” said Kieran, “we didn’t. But in that case, they were all animals.”

“Exactly,” said Bregg. “No, wait, Doctor Ray. Spare me the lecture. I can give you a much better reason than that, one even you can’t quarrel with. It’s a matter of ecology. The number of humans destroyed by these predators annually is negligible but they do themselves destroy an enormous number of small creatures with which the humans compete for their food. If we exterminated the hunters the small animals would multiply so rapidly that the humans would starve to death.”

The car stopped beside the hill, at the edge of the lighted area. A sort of makeshift corral of wire fencing had been set up, with wide wings to funnel the people into the enclosure, where a gate was shut on them. Two Sakae were mounting guard as the party from the car approached the corral. Inside the fence Kieran could see the people, flopped around in positions of exhaustion. They did not seem to be afraid now. A few of them were drinking from a supply of water provided for them. There was food scattered for them on the ground.

Bregg said something in his own language to one of the guards, who looked surprised and questioned him, then departed, springing strongly on his powerful legs. “Wait,” said Bregg.

They waited, and in a moment or two the guard came back leading one of the black hunting beasts on a chain. It was a female, somewhat smaller than the ones Kieran had fought with, and having a slash of white on the throat and chest. She howled and sprang up on Bregg, butting her great head into his shoulder, wriggling with delight. He petted her, talking to her, and she laughed doglike and licked his cheek.

“They domesticate well,” he said. “We’ve had a tame breed for centuries.”

He moved a little closer to the corral, holding tight to the animal’s chain. Suddenly she became aware of the people. Instantly the good-natured pet turned into a snarling fury. She reared on her hind legs and screamed, and inside the corral the people roused up. They were not frightened now. They spat and chattered, clawing up sand and pebbles and bits of food to throw through the fence. Bregg handed the chain to the guard, who hauled the animal away by main force.

Paula said coldly, “If your point was that the people are not kind to animals, my answer is that you can hardly blame them.”

“A year ago,” Bregg said, “some of the people got hold of her two young ones. They were torn to pieces before they could be saved, and she saw it. I can’t blame her, either.”

He went on to the gate and opened it and went inside. The people drew back from him. They spat at him, too, and pelted him with food and pebbles. He spoke to them, sternly, in the tone of one speaking to unruly dogs, and he spoke words, in his own tongue. The people began to shuffle about uneasily. They stopped throwing things. He stood waiting.

The yellow-eyed girl came sidling forward and rubbed herself against his thigh, head, shoulder and flank. He reached down and stroked her, and she whimpered with pleasure and arched her back.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Kieran, “let’s get out of here.”

Later, they sat wearily on fallen blocks of cement inside a dusty, shadowy room of the old building. Only a hand-lamp dispelled the gloom, and the wind whispered coldly, and Bregg walked to and fro in his curious prance as he talked.

“It will be a little while before the necessary medical team can be picked up and brought here,” he said. “We shall have to wait.”

“And then?” asked Kieran.

“First to—” Bregg used a word that undoubtedly named a city of the Sakae but that meant nothing to Kieran, “—and then to Altair Two. This, of course, is a council matter.”

He stopped and looked with bright, shrewd eyes at Kieran. “You are quite the sensation already, Mr. Kieran. The whole community of starworlds is already aware of the illegal resuscitation of one of the pioneer spacemen, and of course there is great interest.” He paused. “You, yourself, have done nothing unlawful. You cannot very well be sent back to sleep, and undoubtedly the council will want to hear you. I am curious as to what you will say.”

“About Sako?” said Kieran. “About—them?” He made a gesture toward a window through which the wind brought the sound of stirring, of the gruntings and whufflings of the corralled people.

“Yes. About them.”

“I’ll tell you how I feel,” Kieran said flatly. He saw Paula and Webber lean forward in the shadows. “I’m a human man. The people out there may be savage, low as the beasts, good for nothing the way they are—but they’re human. You Sakae may be intelligent, civilized, reasonable, but you’re not human. When I see you ordering them around like beasts, I want to kill you. That’s how I feel.”

Bregg did not change his bearing, but he made a small sound that was almost a sigh.

“Yes,” he said. “I feared it would be so. A man of your times—a man from a world where humans were all-dominant—would feel that way.” He turned and looked at Paula and Webber. “It appears that your scheme, to this extent, was successful.”

“No, I wouldn’t say that,” said Kieran.

Paula stood up. “But you just told us how you feel—”

“And it’s the truth,” said Kieran. “But there’s something else.” He looked thoughtfully at her. “It was a good idea. It was bound to work—a man of my time was bound to feel just this way you wanted him to feel, and would go away from here crying your party slogans and believing them. But you overlooked something—”

He paused, looking out the window into the sky, at the faint vari-colored radiance of the cluster.

“You overlooked the fact that when you awoke me, I would no longer be a man of my own time—or of any time. I was in darkness for a hundred years—with the stars my brothers, and no man touching me. Maybe that chills a man’s feelings, maybe something deep in his mind lives and has time to think. I’ve told you how I feel, yes. But I haven’t told you what I think—”

He stopped again, then said, “The people out there in the corral have my form, and my instinctive loyalty is to them. But instinct isn’t enough. It would have kept us in the mud of Earth forever, if it could. Reason took us out to the wider universe. Instinct tells me that those out there are my people. Reason tells me that you—” he looked at Bregg, “—who are abhorrent to me, who would make my skin creep if I touched you, you who go by reason—that you are my real people. Instinct made a hell of Earth for millennia—I say we ought to leave it behind us there in the mud and not let it make a hell of the stars. For you’ll run into this same problem over and over again as you go out into the wider universe, and the old parochial human loyalties must be altered, to solve it.”

He looked at Paula and said, “I’m sorry, but if anyone asks me, that is what I’ll say.”

“I’m sorry, too,” she said, rage and dejection ringing in her voice. “Sorry we woke you. I hope I never see you again.”

Kieran shrugged. “After all, you did wake me. You’re responsible for me. Here I am, facing a whole new universe, and I’ll need you.” He went over and patted her shoulder.

“Damn you,” she said. But she did not move away from him.

THE SARGASSO OF SPACE

C aptain Crain faced his crew calmly. “We may as well face the facts, men,” he said. “The ship’s fuel-tanks are empty and we are drifting through space toward the dead-area.”

The twenty-odd officers and men gathered on the middle-deck of the freighter
Pallas
made no answer, and Crain continued:

“We left Jupiter with full tanks, more than enough fuel to take us to Neptune. But the leaks in the starboard tanks lost us half our supply, and we had used the other half before discovering that. Since the ship’s rocket-tubes cannot operate without fuel, we are simply drifting. We would drift on to Neptune if the attraction of Uranus were not pulling us to the right. That attraction alters our course so that in three ship-days we shall drift into the dead-area.”

Rance Kent, first-officer of the
Pallas
, asked a question: “Couldn’t we, raise Neptune with the radio, sir, and have them send out a fuel-ship in time to reach us?”

“It’s impossible, Mr. Kent,” Crain answered. “Our main radio is dead without fuel to run its dynamotors, and our auxiliary set hasn’t the power to reach Neptune.”

“Why not abandon ship in the space-suits,” asked Liggett, the second-officer, “and trust to the chance of some ship picking us up?”

The captain shook his head. “It would be quite useless, for we’d simply drift on through space with the ship into the dead-area.”

The score of members of the crew, bronzed space-sailors out of every port in the solar system, had listened mutely. Now, one of them, a tall tube-man, stepped forward a little.

“Just what is this dead-area, sir?” he asked. “I’ve heard of it, but as this is my first outer-planet voyage, I know nothing about it.”

“I’ll admit I know little more,” said Liggett, “save that a good many disabled ships have drifted into it and have never come out.”

“The dead area,” Crain told them, “is a region of space ninety thousand miles across within Neptune’s orbit, in which the ordinary gravitational attractions of the solar system are dead. This is because in that region the pulls of the sun and the outer planets exactly balance each other. Because of that, anything in the dead-area, will stay in there until time ends, unless it has power of its own. Many wrecked spaceships have drifted into it at one time or another, none ever emerging; and it’s believed that there is a great mass of wrecks somewhere in the area, drawn and held together by mutual attraction.”

“And we’re drifting in to join them,” Kent said. “Some prospect!”

“Then there’s really no chance for us?” asked Liggett keenly.

Captain Crain thought. “As I see it, very little,” he admitted. “If our auxiliary radio can reach some nearby ship before the
Pallas
enters the dead-area, we’ll have a chance. But it seems a remote one.”

He addressed himself to the men: “I have laid the situation frankly before you because I consider you entitled to the truth. You must remember, however, that while there is life there is hope.

“There will be no change in ship routine, and the customary watches will be kept. Half-rations of food and water will be the rule from now on, though. That is all.”

As the men moved silently off, the captain looked after them with something of pride.

“They’re taking it like men,” he told Kent and Liggett. “It’s a pity there’s no way out for them and us.”