War Against the Rull (5 page)

Jamieson stood still, trembling with both excitement and uncertainty. He had last seen the ezwal at the mercy of the Rulls. Could this be a Rull trick, and was the ezwal perhaps working with them, after all? But why would they bother to try to lure him—
"The Rulls who captured me are all dead," the ezwal cut in impatiently. "The lifeboat they landed in is also here, undamaged. I cannot operate it; therefore, I need your help. There are no beasts between you and it at the moment, so hurry!"

Jamieson turned eagerly and began to skirt the clearing, his energy suddenly renewed. The sketchy information grudgingly imparted by the ezwal was beginning to make some sense. The Rull warship must have been forced to leave so hastily there had not been time to pick up the scouting party it had sent out. And the latter group, thinking they had an unintelligent animal in their custody, had allowed the ezwal the chance it needed to wipe them out, as Jamieson had thought they might. So now—
"I did not kill them," came the ezwal's laconic thought. "It was not necessary. You will see in a moment what did."

Jamieson broke through a last fringe of spiked fernlike growth into a larger clearing. Along one side rested the hundred-foot, dark-metal Rull lifeboat, and on the other side lay the hard-sought raft, now rendered inconsequential by the turn of events. In between, amid gray splotches of Rytt plant, were the lifeless, wormlike forms of a dozen Rulls, strange-appearing even in this alien environment. The gray creepers grew in profusion near the open door of the lifeboat, some extending even across the threshold into the dark interior, as if searching in their blind, instinctive way for more victims.

Jamieson blinked and guessed what had happened.

"Your logical processes are admirable," interposed the ezwal sardonically, "although a trifle slow. Yes, I am in the control
room of the ship, with a closed steel door between myself and the creeping vines. I suggest that you use your gun to clear a path through them immediately and get inside the ship yourself. There are several beasts quite close, and you obviously cannot depend on the killer plant to protect you again."

Jamieson made a quick decision and turned toward the raft fifty feet away, giving the gray vines a wide berth. The raft itself was in the clear, fortunately; he climbed upon it and slid a cover plate aside, exposing the rather simple control mechanism. From his weapon he removed a screw cap and dropped a small capsule into his palm. This was the heart of his weapon; he would be completely helpless until it could be replaced.

He lifted the lid of a boxlike lead compartment in the control chamber, placed the capsule in a tiny, oddly shaped holder within it and closed the lid. That was all. In ten minutes a breeder reaction, initiated by the comparatively few neutrons left in the capsule, would bring it up to full charge. But he did not intend to wait that long. Three minutes, approximately, would produce all the charge he had to have.

Jamieson squatted there in the near-darkness, ready to try if need be to snatch the all-important capsule and get it back into the gun in time to save his life. He was by no means sure this could be done, but there was no help for it. The whole ugly situation was now quite clear in his mind. And the mere fact that no denial had come from the ezwal tended to prove it.

While he waited, looking constantly into the black shadows about the clearing, he spoke aloud, softly, but with grim emphasis. "So the Rulls didn't know about the Rytt plant. That is not too surprising; it is one of the few such types in the known galaxy. But they must have blundered into it at night for it to have got them all. Is that how it happened, or were you still in a trance at the time, like the stupid animal they thought you were?"

The ezwal's response was swift and haughty. "I threw off the hypnosis before they had finished floating me into the ship on the antigravity plate they had me chained to. With all of them present and armed, I thought it best not to show them how easily I could break loose, so I pretended to remain unconscious while they locked me in the storage hold. Then I broke the chains. I was waiting to see whether they would leave the ship again when there was a noise like thunder, and they all went outside. I could tell nothing from their strange thoughts except that they were excited. All at once they got even more excited, and then after a minute or so the thoughts stopped quite suddenly. I could guess what had happened, but to make sure, I
broke out of the storage hold and looked out the main hatch. It was very dark by then, but I can see quite well in the dark. They were all dead."

Jamieson was wishing he could see that well in the dark. He fancied he saw something moving in one of the darker corners of the clearing, but he could not be sure. The three minutes must be nearly up by now. He would wait no longer. Forcing his trembling hands to move methodically, he took a small pair of tongs from their clip beside the lead box, opened the lid and carefully extracted the capsule. He inserted it in the gun, replaced the screw cap and breathed a deep sigh of relief.

He looked about the clearing once more, then stared into the suspected corner; there was nothing definite to be seen there yet. Probably only his imagination. But he continued to watch alertly as he stepped down from the raft and walked slowly toward the ship.

Again he spoke softly. "You have told me all I need to know. I think I can tell the rest of the story myself. After you saw that the Rulls were dead, you decided to spend the night in the ship. You would not trust your magnificent eyesight to protect you against all possible outcroppings of the Rytt plant. That is the one thing on this planet you truly fear. Your first encounter with it must have been an interesting one. In addition to your amazing speed and strength, I surmise that you needed a certain amount of luck to escape. And you found that the farther up the peninsula you went, the thicker it grew. You funked out completely. You decided you needed me—me and my gun. So you came back."

The first patch of gray creepers showed a little lighter against the dark ground. Jamieson pointed the gun downward, placed his other hand over his eyes and pressed the stud. There was a crackling roar as the searing beam of energy struck the ground, and though he could not see the brilliance of the flame, there was no doubt that the gun was adequately charged. He swung it from side to side as he walked forward several steps, then stopped, releasing the stud. He looked around and found that he could still see fairly well. He was standing in a wide black swath, and the next patch of gray was twenty feet ahead. "You've been in that control room for two days, haven't you?" Jamieson went on. "It must have been a tight squeeze for you to get through the door. But you had to, because the main hatch operates by machinery which you don't understand and couldn't budge, for all your strength. The next morning when you opened the control-room door, you found the Rytt plant on the other side of it. I'll bet you closed it fast and threw all the
clamps. That held back the plant, of course—its strength is not sufficiently concentrated to penetrate a hard metal door. It can clutch and stab you a hundred places at once, but it can't break down a steel door, as you can. So there you stayed."

The second patch of gray vines—a larger one—was dealt with like the first. Between Jamieson and the lifeboat now remained the largest, almost solid growth which enclosed the dead Rulls.

He talked on, in a quiet, edged tone. "For two days you have studied that control mechanism, trying to make sense out of it, and you have failed utterly. You must have reached the point where you were about to experiment blindly with the controls, no matter what happened. Then I showed up, and the situation changed. I am referring to my arrival in the vicinity,
hours ago.
You sensed that, of course. To you, it meant only a convenient alternative. You would continue to study the controls. If you couldn't figure them out before dark you would summon me, since I might not survive another night in my exhausted condition. But if you could possibly learn how to operate the ship, you would simply take off, leaving me here to die."

He paused and waited briefly, but there was still no response whatever from the ezwal, even to the final damning accusation. He was not surprised. The strange, proud creature in the ship must know full well that it could gain nothing by denial, and it was incapable of remorse.

Jamieson had now burned his way to within a few feet of the lifeboat's main hatch. Only those creepers which extended into the ship were left. He set the intensity of his gun a few notches lower, to avoid damage to the sealing material which lined the hatch. He then spoke what he hoped would be his final words to this particular ezwal. "I'm going to burn away the creepers all the way to your door. When I do, you are to come out of there and go to the storage hold, where you are to stay. To see that you do, I'm going to set up this blaster so that a photoelectric relay will make it sweep the passageway if you so much as set foot in it. If you stay put, you won't be harmed. It will take two weeks to reach the nearest base, and from there we can head for Carson's Planet, where I will be very glad to turn you loose. In the meantime, you may find something edible in the storage room, though I doubt it. You can console yourself with the thought that, without any previous knowledge of astrogation or hyper-drive, you would undoubtedly have starved to death before you could get home by yourself. In any case, you should still be alive by the time I see the last of you.

"You have lost in the attempt to keep ezwal intelligence a

secret from my government. But I shall have to report that in my opinion the average adult ezwal is just as impossible to reason with as if he were a dumb beast! And now you had better get your backside as far away from that door as you can. It's going to be hot in a minute!"

Two days out from Eristan II, Jamieson made a radio contact with a cruiser of a race friendly to man. He explained his situation and asked that the ship let him use its powerful transmitters as a relay for him to contact the nearest Earth base. This was done.

But a week passed before an Earth battleship took aboard the Rull lifeboat and agreed to transport Jamieson and the ezwal to Carson's Planet. The commander of the battleship knew nothing of the ezwal situation. He merely verified Jamieson's identification of himself and accepted that he was an authorized personnel for ezwals.

When they arrived at Carson's Planet, Jamieson received permission from the base commander to have the battleship land in an area which was uninhabited by human beings. There he had his final conversation with the ezwal.

It was a beautiful setting. Rolling hills stretched into the northern reaches. To the west was a green forest, and in the valley to the south, the sparkle of a great river. Carson's Planet was a world of green abundance and water in plenty.

The ezwal trotted easily down to the ground, turned and looked up at Jamieson—who remained in an outjut of platform from the lower surface of the ship.

Jamieson began: "Have you changed your mind in any way?"

The ezwal replied, a curt thought, "Get off our planet and take all human beings with you!"

Jamieson said, "Will you tell your fellow ezwals that we will do this if they will develop a machine civilization that can defend the planet from the Rulls?"

"Ezwals will never agree to be slaves to machines." There was so much determination in the thought that Jamieson nodded his acceptance of the other's reality. Adult ezwals were emotionally set in a pattern that was probably millions of years in the making.

The trap they were in was one from which they could not escape without assistance.

He said mildly, "Still, you're an individual. You want life for yourself as an entity. We proved that on Eristan II."

The ezwal seemed irritated and puzzled. "I gather from your mind that there are races which have a collective existence. The ezwals are separate beings who share a common goal. I sense, without clearly understanding your thought, that you regard this separateness as a weakness."

"Not weakness," said Jamieson. "Just a point of attack. If you were a collective group, our approach would be different. For instance, you don't have a name, do you?"

The ezwal's thought showed disgust. "Telepaths recognize each other without needing such an elementary means of identification, and I warn you—" anger came into the thought—"if you think you will make conformists of ezwals by the idea I detect in your mind, you are hopelessly mistaken." Again the tenor of thought changed. The anger yielded to contempt. "But of course your problem is not what will you do with us but how will you convince your fellow human beings that ezwals are intelligent. I leave you with this problem, Trevor Jamieson."

The ezwal turned and trotted away across the grass. Jamieson called after it. "Thanks for saving my life, and thank you for proving again the value of co-operation against a common danger."

"I cannot," came the answer, "honestly offer thanks to a human being, for any reason whatsoever. Goodbye, and don't bother me any more."

"Goodbye," said Jamieson softly. He had a keen sense of regret and failure as the platform on which he stood began to roll back into the interior of the ship. As it clicked into position, he felt the antigravity effect as the great ship began to lift. Within seconds, it was accelerating.

Before leaving Carson's Planet, Jamieson spoke to the ruling military council. His suggestions received a formidably cold reception. As soon as his purpose was clear, the governor of the council interrupted him. "Mr. Jamieson, there is not a human being in this room or on this planet who has not suffered the death of a family member, murdered by these monstrous ezwals."

Since the remark was scientifically and militarily irrelevant, Jamieson waited. The governor continued. "If we were to believe that these creatures are intelligent, our impulse would be to exterminate them. For once, sir, man should have no mercy
for another race, and don't expect any mercy for ezwals from the inhabitants of this planet."

There was an angry murmur of approval from the other members of the council. Jamieson glanced around that circle of hostile faces and realized that Carson's Planet was indeed a precariously held base. Only a few times in history had man found an alien race so completely antipathetic as was the ezwal. What made the problem deadly was that Carson's Planet was one of the three bases on which human beings based their defense of the galaxy. Under no circumstances could there be a withdrawal. And if necessary, an extermination policy could be justified to the convention of Alien races allied to Man.

But even the key to extermination was his knowledge, and his alone—that ezwals communicated by telepathy. As beasts, ezwals had foiled all attempts to destroy them, by one simple reality. Few people had ever seen an ezwal, and the reason was now obvious—they always had advance warning.

If he told these hate-filled people that ezwals were telepaths, human scientists on Carson's Planet would quickly devise methods of destruction. These methods, based on mechanically created mind waves, would be designed to confuse the ezwal race, the members of which were actually quite naive and vulnerable.

Standing there, Jamieson realized that this was not the time to tell about his experiences on Eristan II. Let them believe that he merely had a theory. Because of his position, most of them would believe his facts if he presented them. But they could all reject a mere theory on the grounds that they were on the scene, had tried everything, and he was merely passing by. And yet, he would have to make it clear that their rigid attitude was not acceptable.

"Gentlemen," said Jamieson, "and ladies—" he bowed to the three women members—"I cannot adequately express the sympathy and good will which motivated the Galactic Convention to send me here originally, in the hope that I might somehow help the people of Carson's Planet to resolve the ezwal problem. But I should tell you that I plan to recommend to the Convention that a plebiscite be held, the purpose of this plebiscite: to determine if the human race here will permit a rational solution to the ezwal problem."

The governor said coldly, "I think we are entitled to regard what you have just said as an insult."

Jamieson replied, "It was not intended as such. But my feeling is that the members of this council are so burdened with grief
that we have no recourse but to go to the people. Thank you for listening to me."

Jamieson sat down. The State dinner that followed was eaten in almost complete silence.

After the dinner the vice-president of the council came over to Jamieson accompanied by a young woman. She seemed to be in her early thirties and she had blue eyes and a good-looking face and figure, but there was an unfeminine firmness in her expression that detracted from what would otherwise have been great beauty.

The man was barely polite as he said, "Mrs. Whitman has asked me to introduce her to you, Dr. Jamieson."

He performed the introduction quickly and walked off, as if the brief contact was all he could tolerate. Jamieson studied the woman thoughtfully. He recalled now that he had noticed her in serious conversation with first one, then the other of her two table companions—one of whom had been the man who had made the introduction.

She said now, "You're a doctor of science, aren't you?"

He nodded. "My Ph.D. is in physics, but it includes celestial mechanics and interstellar exploration—a highly specialized subject."

"I'm sure it is," she said. "I'm a widow with one child. My husband was a chemical engineer. I always marveled at the range of his knowledge." She added, as if it were an afterthought, "He was killed by an ezwal."

Jamieson guessed that the man must have been a top-ranking chemical engineer for his wife to be moving in Council circles. But all he said was "I'm sorry for you and the child."

She stiffened at his sympathy, then relented. "The reason I asked to be introduced to you is that most of the basic decisions about Carson's Planet were made two generations ago. I'd like you to stay over for a few days and I personally would like to show you what might be an alternative solution to the terrible problem we have here. We have a habitable moon—did you know that?"

Jamieson had noticed the moon as his ship came in. He said slowly, "You're implying it should be the base?"

"You could look at it," she said. "No one has for fifty years."

It was a point, he had to admit. In this vast galactic society, the attention span of individuals and even great organizations tended to be small. Basic data was often filed away and forgotten. There were always too many current problems waiting for an authority to give his attention to them. Every problem required a sustained look, and once that look was taken, and the
decision made, the decision maker was reluctant to re-examine the data.

He doubted that she actually had a solution. But the immense antagonism of everyone had oppressed him, and so he warmed to her for actually communicating with him instead of hating him.

"Please come," she urged.

Jamieson mentally calculated his time situation. It would be some weeks yet before the "slow" freighter with the ezwal mother and her cub completed the thousands of light-years journey to Earth. He could easily take a few days and still reach Earth before the freighter.

"All right," he said, "I'll do it." He added, "Did I understand that you will be my guide?"

She laughed, showing her gleaming white teeth. "You don't think anyone else will even talk to you, do you?"

Ruefully, Jamieson saw her point.