War Against the Rull (6 page)

His eyes ached. He kept blinking them as he flew, striving to keep in sight the glitter of hurtling metal that was the power-driven spacesuit of his guide.

Already he regretted keenly making the trip to this strange moon of Carson's Planet. En route from the planet to the Moon, in a great battleship he had commandeered, he had studied the Interstellar Encyclopedia, and there were stark facts. There were enormous temperature changes from day to night. Such planetary bodies simply could not be used to support the millions of people needed to back up a major military base.

The woman was desperately hard to see against the blazing brilliance of the sun, rising higher and higher from the fantastic horizon of Carson's Satellite. It was almost, Jamieson told himself, as if his guide were deliberately holding herself into the glare of the morning sun to distract his wearying mind and dull his strength.

More than a mile below, a scatter of forest spread unevenly over a grim, forbidding land. Pock-marked rock, tortured gravel and occasionally a sparse, reluctant growth of grass that showed as brown and uninviting as the bare straggle of forest—and was
gone into distance as they sped far above, two shining things of metal, darting along with the speed of shooting stars.

Several times he saw herds of the tall, dapple-gray grasseaters below; and once, far to the left, he caught the sheeny glint of a scale-armored, bloodsucker gryb.

It was hard to see his speedometer, which was built into the transparent headpiece of his flying space armor—hard because he had on a second headpiece underneath, attached to his electrically heated clothes; and the light from the sun split dazzling through the two barriers. But now that his suspicions were aroused, he strained his eyes against that glare until they watered and blurred. What he saw tightened his jaw into a thin, hard line. He snapped into his communicators; his voice was as cold and hard as his thoughts. "Hello, Mrs. Whitman."

"Yes, Doctor Jamieson!" The woman's voice sounded in his communicators; and it seemed to Jamieson's alert hearing that the accent on the "Doctor" held the faintest suggestion of a sneer and a definite hostility. "What is it, Doctor?"

"You told me this trip would be five hundred and twenty-one miles or—"

"Or thereabouts!" The reply was swift, but the hostility more apparent, more intentional.

Jamieson's eyes narrowed to steely gray slits. "You said five hundred and twenty-one miles. The figure is odd enough to be presumed exact, and there is no possibility that you would not know the exact distance from the Five Cities to the platinum mines. We have now traveled six hundred and twenty-nine miles—more every minute—since leaving the Five Cities over two hours ago, and—"

"So we have!" interrupted the young woman with unmistakable insolence. "Now isn't that too bad, Doctor Trevor Jamieson."

He was silent, examining the situation for its potential menace. His first indignant impulse was to pursue the unexpected arrogance of the other, but his brain, suddenly crystal-clear, throttled the desire and leaped ahead in a blaze of speculation.

There was murderous intent here. His mind ticked coldly, with a sense of something repeated, for the threat of death he had faced before, during all the tremendous years when he had roamed the farthest planets. It was icily comforting to remember that he had conquered in the past. In murder, as in everything else, experience counted.

Jamieson began to decelerate against the fury of built-up velocity. It would take time—but perhaps there still was time, though the other's attitude suggested the crisis was dangerously
near. There was no more he could do till he had slowed considerably.

Jamieson quieted his leaping pulses and said gently, "Tell me, is the whole Council in on this murder? Or is it a scheme of your own?"

"There's no harm in telling you now," the woman retorted. "We decided you're not going to make any such recommendation about ezwals to the Galactic Convention. Of course we knew this moon would never be accepted as a substitute base."

Jamieson laughed, a hard, humorless but understanding laugh that hid the slow caution with which he slanted toward the ground. The strain of the curving dive racked his body, tore at his lungs, but he held to it grimly. He was alone in the sky now; the shining spacesuit of his guide had vanished into the dim distance. Evidently she had not turned her head or noticed the deviation on her finder. Anxious for the discovery to be as long delayed as possible, Jamieson said, "And how are you going to kill me?"

"In about ten seconds," she began tautly, "your engine—" She broke off. "Oh, you're not behind me any more. So you're trying to land. Well, it won't do you any good. I'll be right back that way—"

Jamieson was only fifty feet from the bleak rock when there was a sudden grinding in the hitherto silent mechanism of his motor. The deadly swiftness of what happened then left no time for more than instinctive action. He felt a pain against his legs, a sharp, tearing pain, a dizzy, burning sensation that staggered his reason. Then he struck the ground, and with a wild, automatic motion jerked off the power that was being so horribly short-circuited, that was burning him alive. Darkness closed over his brain like an engulfing blanket.

The blurred world of rock swaying and swirling about him— that was Jamieson's awakening! He forced himself to consciousness and realized after a moment of mental blankness that he was no longer in his spacesuit. And when he opened his eyes he could see without a sense of dazzle, now that.he had only the one helmet—the one attached to his electrically heated clothes. He grew aware of something—an edge of rock—pressing painfully into his back. Dizzily, but with sane eyes, he looked up at the determined young woman who was kneeling beside him. She returned his gaze with unsmiling hostility and said curtly, "You're lucky to be alive. Obviously you shut off the motor just in time. It was being shorted by lead grit and burned your legs a little. I've put some salve on, so you won't feel any pain; and you'll be able to walk."

She stopped and climbed to her feet. Jamieson shook his head to clear away the black spots and then gazed up at her questioningly, but he said nothing. She seemed to realize what was on his mind. "I didn't think I'd be squeamish with so much at stake," she confessed almost angrily, "but I am. I came back to kill you, but I wouldn't kill even a dog without giving him a chance. Well, you've got your chance, if it's worth anything."

Jamieson sat up. His eyes narrowed on her face inside her helmet. He had met hard women before but never anyone who seemed more sincere and honest about her intentions, now that she was out in the open.

Frowning with thought, Jamieson looked around; and his eyes, trained for detail, saw a lack in the picture.

"Where's your spacesuit?"

The woman nodded her head skyward. Her voice held no quality of friendliness as she said, "If your eyes are good, you'll see a dark spot, almost invisible now, to the right of the son. I chained your suit to mine, then gave mine power. They'll be falling into the sun about three hundred hours from now."

He pondered that matter-of-factly. "You'll pardon me if I don't quite believe that you've decided to stay and die with me. I know that people will die for what they believe to be right. But I can't quite follow the logic of why you should die. No doubt you have made arrangements to be rescued."

The woman flushed, her face growing dark with the turgid wave of angry color. "There'll be no rescue," she said. "I'm going to prove to you that, in this matter, no individual in our community thinks of himself or herself. I'm going to die here with you because, naturally, we'll never reach the Five Cities on foot, and as for the platinum mines, they're even farther away."

"Pure bravado!" Jamieson said. "In the first place your staying with me proves nothing but that you're a fool; in the second, I am incapable of admiring such an action. However, I'm glad you're here with me, and I appreciate the salve on those burns."

Jamieson climbed gingerly to his feet, testing his legs, first the right, then the left, and felt a little sickening surge of dizziness that he fought back with an effort. "Hm-m-m," he commented aloud in the same matter-of-fact manner as before. "No pain, but weak. That salve ought to have healed the burns by dark."

"You take it very calmly," said Barbara Whitman acridly.

He nodded. "I'm always glad to realize I'm alive and I feel that I can convince you that the course which I plan to recommend for Carson's Planet is a wise solution."

She laughed harshly. "You don't seem to realize our predic
ament. We're at least twelve days from civilization—that's figuring sixty miles a day, which is hardly possible. Tonight the temperature will fall to a hundred below freezing, at least, though it varies down to as low as a hundred and seventy-five below, depending on the shifting of the satellite core, which is very hot, you know, and very close to the surface at times. That's why human beings—and other life—can exist on this moon at all. The core is jockeyed around by the Sun and Carson's Planet, with the Sun dominating, so that it's always fairly warm in the daytime and why also, when the pull is on the other side of the planet, it's so devilish cold at night. I'm explaining this to you so you'll have an idea of what it's all about"

"Go on," Jamieson said without comment. "Well, if the cold doesn't kill us, we're bound to run into at least one bloodsucker gryb every few days. They can smell human blood at an astounding distance, and blood, for some chemical reason, drives them mad with hunger. Once they corner a human being it's all up. They tear down the largest trees or dig into caves through solid rock. The only protection is an atomic blaster, and ours went up with our suits. We've got only my hunting knife. Besides all that, our only possible food is the giant grasseater, which runs like a deer at the first sight of anything living and which, besides, could kill a dozen unarmed men if it were cornered. You'll be surprised how hungry it is possible to get within a short time. Something in the air—and, of course, we're breathing filtered air—speeds up normal digestion. We'll be starving to death in a couple of hours."

"It seems to give you a sort of mournful satisfaction," Jamieson said dryly.

She flashed, "I'm here to see that you don't get back alive to the settlement, that's all."

Jamieson scarcely heard her. His face was screwed into a black frown. "I'm sorry that you came back. I regret keenly that a woman is in such a dangerous situation. Your friends are scoundrels to have permitted it. But I'll get back safely."

She laughed contemptuously. "Impossible. You try living off the soil of this barren moon; try killing a gryb with your bare hands."

"Not my hands," replied Jamieson grimly. "My brains and my experience. We're going to get back to the Five Cities in spite of these natural obstacles, in spite of you!"

In the silence that followed, Jamieson examined their surroundings. He felt his first real chill of doubt as his eyes and mind took in that wild and desolate hell of rock that stretched
to every horizon. No, not every! Barely visible in the remote distance of the direction they would have to go was a dark mist of black cliff. It seemed to swim there against the haze of semi-blackness that was the sky beyond the horizon. In the near distance the piling rock showed fantastic shapes, as if frozen in a state of writhing anguish. And there was no beauty in it, no sweep of grandeur, simply endless, desperate miles of black, tortured
deadness
—and silence!

He grew aware of the silence with a start that pierced his body like a physical shock. The silence seemed suddenly alive. It pressed unrelentingly down upon that flat stretch of rock where they stood. A malevolent silence that kept on and on, without echoes, without even a wind now to whistle and moan over the billion caves and gouged trenches that honeycombed the bleak, dark, treacherous land around them. A silence that seemed the very spirit of this harsh and deadly little world, here under that cold, brilliant sun. ""Oppressive isn't it?"

Jamieson stared at her without exactly seeing her. His gaze was far away. "Yes," he said thoughtfully. "I'd forgotten what it felt like; and I hadn't realized how much I'd forgotten. Well, we'd better get started."

As they leaped cautiously over the rock, assisted by the smaller gravitation of the moon, the woman said, "What do you think you've found out about ezwals?"

"I can't tell you that," Jamieson replied. "If you knew what I know, hating them, you'd destroy them."

"Why didn't you tell the Council you had specific information instead of merely offering what seemed to be an hypothesis? They're sensible people."

"Sensible!" echoed Jamieson, and his tone of voice was significant with irony.

"I don't believe you have anything but a theory," said Barbara Whitman flatly. "So stop pretending."

Two hours later the Sun was high in those dark, gloomy heavens. It had been two hours of silence; two hours while they tramped precariously along thin stretches of rock between fantastic valleys that yawned on either side, while they skirted the edges
of caves whose bleak depths sheered straight down into the restless bowels of the Moon; two hours of desolation.

The great black cliff, no longer misted by distance, loomed near and gigantic. As far as the eye could see it stretched to either side; and from where Jamieson toiled and leaped ever more wearily, its wall seemed to rear up abrupt and glassy and unscalable.

He gasped, "I hate to confess it, but I'm not sure I can climb that cliff."

The woman turned a face toward him that had lost its brown healthiness in a gray, dull fatigue.' A hint of fire came into her eyes. "It's hunger!" she said curtly. "I told you what it would be like. We're starving."

Jamieson pressed on, but after a moment slackened his pace and said, "This grasseater—it also eats the smaller branches of trees, doesn't it?"

"Yes. That's what its long neck is for. What about it?"

"Is that all it eats?"

"That and grass."

"Nothing else?" Jamieson's voice was sharp with question, his face drawn tight with insistence. "Think."

Barbara bridled. "Don't take that tone to me," she said. "What's the use of all this anyway?"

"Sorry—about the tone, I mean. What does it drink?"

"It likes ice. They always stay near the rivers. During the brief melting periods each year, all the water from the forests runs into the rivers and freezes. The only other thing it eats or drinks is salt. Like so many animals, they absolutely have to have salt, and it's pretty rare."

"Salt! That's it!" Jamieson's voice was triumphant. "We'll have to turn back. We passed a stretch of rock salt about a mile back. We'll have to get some."

"Go back! Are you crazy ? "

Jamieson stared at her, his eyes gray pools of steely glitter. "Listen, Barbara, I said a while ago that I didn't think I could climb those cliffs. Well, don't worry, I'll climb them. And I'll last through all today, and all tomorrow and the other twelve or fifteen or twenty days. I've put on about twenty-five pounds during the last ten years that I've been an administrator. Well, damn it, my body'll use that as food, and by Heaven, I'll be alive and moving and going strong—and I'll even carry you if necessary. But if we expect to kill a grasseater and live decently, we've got to have salt. I saw some salt, and we can't take a chance on passing it up. So back we go."

They glared at each other with the wild, tempestuous anger

of two people whose nerves are on ultimate edge. Then Barbara drew a deep breath and said, "I don't know what your plan is, but it sounds crazy to me. Have you ever seen a grasseater? Well, it looks something like a giraffe, only its bigger and faster on its feet. Maybe you've got some idea of tempting it with salt and then killing it with a knife. I tell you, you can't get near it, but I'll go back with you. It doesn't matter, because we're going to die, no matter what you think. What I'm hoping is that a gryb sees us. It'll be quick that way."

"There is something," said Jamieson, "pitiful and horrible about a beautiful woman who is determined to die."

"You don't think I want to die!" she flashed. Her passionate voice died abruptly, but Jamieson knew better than to let so much fierce feeling die unexplored.

"What about your child?"

He saw by the wretched look on her face that he had struck home. He felt no compunction. It was imperative that Barbara Whitman develop a desire to live. In the crisis that seemed all too near now, her assistance might easily be the difference between life and death.

It was odd, the fever of talk that came upon Jamieson as they laboriously retraced their steps to the salt rock. It was as if his tongue, as if all of his body, had become intoxicated; and yet
his
words, though swift, were not incoherent but reasoned and calculated to convince her. He spoke of the problem of man landing on inhabited planets and of the many solutions that had been achieved by reason. Human beings often did not realize how deeply attached life was to its own planet and how desperately each race fought against intruders.

"Here's your salt!" Barbara interrupted him finally.

The salt rock composed a narrow ledge that protruded like a long fence which ran along in a startlingly straight line and ended abruptly at a canyon's edge, the fence rearing up, as if cringing back in frank dismay at finding itself teetering on the brink of an abyss.

Jamieson picked up two pieces of salt rubble and slipped them into the capacious pockets of his plainsmanlike coat—and started back toward the dark wall of cliff nearly three miles away. They trudged along in silence. Jamieson's body ached in every muscle, and every nerve pulsed alarms to his brain. He clung with a desperate, stubborn strength to each bit of rock projecting from the cliff wall, horribly aware that a slip meant death. Once he looked down, and his brain reeled in dismay from the depths that fell away behind him.

Through blurred vision he saw the woman's figure a few feet
away, the tortured lines of her face a grim reminder of the hunger weakness that was corroding the very roots of their two precariously held lives.

"Hang on!" Jamieson gasped. "It's only a few more yards."

They made it and collapsed on the edge of that terrific cliff, too weary to climb the gentle slope that remained before they could look over the country beyond, too exhausted to do anything but lie there, sucking the life-giving air into their lungs. At last Barbara whispered, "What's the use? If we had any sense we'd jump off this cliff and get it over with."

"We can jump into a deep cave any time," Jamieson retorted. "Let's get going."

He rose shakily to his feet, took a few steps, then stiffened and flung himself down with a hissing intake of his breath. His fingers grabbed her leg and jerked her back brutally to a prone position.

"Down for your life. There's a herd of grasseaters half a mile away. And they
mean
life for us."

Barbara crawled up beside him, almost eagerly; and the two peered cautiously over the knob of rock out onto a grassy plain. The plain was somewhat below them. To the left, a scant hundred yards away, like a wedge driven into the grassland, was the pointed edge of a forest. The grass beyond seemed almost like a projection of the forest growth. It, too, formed a wedge that petered out in bleak rock. At the far end of the grass was a herd of about a hundred grasseaters.

"They're working this way!" Jamieson said. "And they'll pass close to that wedge of trees."

A faint air of irony edged his companion's voice as she said, "And what will you do—run out and put salt on their tails? I tell you, Doctor Jamieson, we haven't got a thing that—"

"Our first course," said Jamieson, unheeding, seeming to think out loud, "is to get into that thick belt of trees. We can do that by skirting along this cliff's edge and putting the trees between us and the animals. Then you can lend me your knife."

"Okay," she agreed in a tired voice. "If you won't listen, you'll have to learn from experience. I tell you, you won't get within a quarter of a mile of those things."

"I don't want to," Jamieson retorted. "You see, Barbara, if you had more confidence in
life,
you'd realize that this problem of killing animals by cunning has been solved before. It's absolutely amazing how similarly it has been solved on different worlds and under widely differing conditions. One would almost suspect a common evolution, but actually it is only a parallel situation producing a parallel solution. Just watch me."

"I'm willing," she said. "There's almost any way I'd rather die than by starving. A meal of cooked grasseater is tough going, but it'll be pure heaven. Don't forget, though, that the bloodsucker grybs follow grasseater herds, get as near as possible at night, then kill them in the morning when they're frozen. Right now with darkness near, a gryb must be out there somewhere, hiding, sneaking nearer. Pretty soon he'll smell us, and then
hell—
"We'll come to the gryb when he comes for us," said Jamieson

calmly-
"I'm
sorry I never visited this moon in my younger days; these problems would all have been settled long ago. In the meantime, the forest is our goal."

Jamieson's outer calmness was but a mask for his inner excitement. His body shook with hunger and eagerness as they reached the safety of the forest. His fingers were trembling violently as he took her knife and began to dig at the base of a great, bare, brown tree.

"It's the root, isn't it," he asked unsteadily, "that's so tough and springy that it's almost like fine tempered steel, and won't break even if it's bent into a circle? They call it eurood on Earth, and it's used in industry."

"Yes," she said doubtfully. "What are you going to do—make a bow? I suppose you could use a couple of grass blades in place of catgut. The grass is pretty strong and makes a good rope."

"No," said Jamieson. "I'm not making a bow and arrow. Mind you, I can shoot a pretty mean arrow. But I'm remembering what you said about not being able to get within a quarter of a mile of the beasts."

He jerked out a root, which was about an inch in thickness, cut off a generous two-foot length and began to sharpen, first one end, then the other. It was hard going, harder than he had expected, because the knife skidded along the surface almost as if it were metal. Finally it obtained a cutting hold. "Makes a good edge and point," he commented. "And now, give me a hand in bending this double, while I tie some grass blades around to keep it this way."

"Oh-oh!" she said wonderingly. "I see-e-e! That is clever. It'll make a mouthful about six inches in diameter. The grasseater that gets it will gobble it up in one gulp to prevent any of the others' getting the salt you're going,to smear on it. His digestive juices will dissolve the grass string, the points will spring apart and tear the wall of his stomach, producing an internal hemorrhage."

"If s a method," said Jamieson, "used by the primitives of various planets, and our own Eskimo back on Earth uses it on
wolves. Naturally, they all use different kinds of bait, but the principle is the same."

He made his way cautiously to the edge of the forest. From the shelter of a tree he flung the little pieces of bent wood with all his strength. It landed in the grass a hundred and fifty feet away.

"We'd better make some more," Jamieson said. "We can't depend on one being found."

The eating was good; the cooked meat tough but tasty; and it was good, too, to feel the flow of strength into his body. He sighed at last and stood up, glanced at the sinking Sun, an orange-sized ball of flame in the western sky.

"We'll have to carry sixty Earth pounds of meat apiece; that's four pounds a day for the next fifteen days. Eating meat alone is dangerous; we may go insane, though it really requires about a month for that. We've got to carry the meat because we can't waste any more time killing grasseaters."

Jamieson began to cut into the meaty part of the animal, which lay stretched out on the tough grass, and in a few minutes had tied together two light bundles. By braiding grass together, he made himself a pack sack and lifted the long shank of meat until it was strapped to his back. There was a little adjustment necessary to keep the weight from pressing his electrically heated clothes too tightly against him; when he looked up finally, he saw that Barbara was looking at him peculiarly.

"You realize, of course," she said, "that you're quite insane now. It's true that, with these heated suits, we may be able to live through the cold of tonight, provided we find a deep cave. But don't think for a second that, once a gryb gets on our trail, we'll be able to throw it a piece of sharpened wood and expect it to have an internal hemorrhage."

"Why not?" Jamieson asked, and his voice was sharp.

"Because it's the toughest creature ever spawned by a crazy evolution, the main reason I imagine why no intelligent form of life evolved on this moon. Its claws are literally diamond hard; its teeth can twist metals out of shape; its stomach wall can scarcely be cut with a knife, let alone with crudely pointed wood."

Her voice took on a note of exasperation. "I'm glad we've had this meal; starving wasn't my idea of a pleasant death. I want the quick death that the gryb will give us. But for heaven's sake, get it out of your head that we shall live through this. I tell you, the monster will follow us into any cave, cleverly enlarge it wherever he has difficulty, and he'll get us because eventually we'll reach a dead end. They're not normal caves, you
know, but meteor holes, the result of a cosmic cataclysm millions of years ago, and they're all twisted out of shape by the movement of the planet's crust. As for tonight, we'd better get busy and find a deep cave with plenty of twists in it, and perhaps a place where we can block the air currents from coming in. The winds will be arriving about a half an hour before the sun goes down, and our electric heaters won't be worth anything against those freezing blasts. It might pay us to gather some of the dead wood lying around, so we can build a fire at the really cold part of the night."

Getting the wood into the cave was simple enough. They gathered great armfuls of it and tossed it down to where it formed a cluttering pile at the first twist in the tunnel. Then, having gathered all the loose wood in the vicinity, they lowered themselves down to the first level, Jamieson first in a gingerly fashion, the young woman—Jamieson noticed—with a snap and spring. A smile crinkled his lips. The spirit of youth, he reflected, would not be suppressed.