This is my farm, now. And I’m going to defend it until I’m dead. That’s what Brian would have wanted.
She waited, eyes narrowed, peering at the horizon. Minutes passed—and then they started to come, the gray-clad horde, sweeping down out of the hills. They rode bareback on the riding-beasts, and even at this distance their savage war-cries could be heard. They rode in single file, coming down now out of the hills and across the plain. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Coming, now, to exterminate the sky-men who had taken part of their land.
Five minutes went by, and Mae saw them riding across the flat farmlands. They carried hatchets of some kind, she saw, and spears; scout reports had been right when they said that the aliens did not have the use of firearms. Mae watched them swarm around the distant Jesperson farm that lay nearest the hills. They had swept through the unfinished stockade as if it had never been built. She saw a cluster of them around the Jesperson house, saw angry blue bursts of flame darting from the upper windows. Aliens fell; more swept into the breach, while others continued the eastward ride across the plain.
They were close enough for her to see within ten more minutes. A party of eleven came riding toward the isolated Elson farmhouse. She counted them with care. Eleven, with a beribboned war-chief leading them, riding in a wedge-shaped formation. With great care she extended the rifle and started to aim.
She stared at them. Maybe one of these killed Brian, she thought.
They were squat ugly gray creatures, practically neckless, with leathery jointed hides that gleamed dully in the late-afternoon sunlight. They rode clinging to their mounts, legs wrapped desperately around the beast’s underbelly. They were naked except for paint and ribbons. Guttural cries filled the air.
I’ve never killed before, Mae thought. When butchering had to be done, it had always been Brian who did it; she had never been able even to look. But this was no time for squeamishness now.
Slowly she squeezed the trigger. A bright burst of fiery blue sprang from the muzzle of the blaster, leaped across the air, buried itself in the dirt a hundred feet before the advancing group of aliens. Mae was angry; she had misjudged the range. And the aliens were scattering.
They rode toward her now in eleven different paths. She took aim again and loosed a bolt; it caught one of the aliens square in the belly and for an instant the savage creature stood upright on his steed, gray body outlined in a glaring nimbus of blue flame. Then he toppled backward, and was charred ash before hitting the ground.
One down, Mae thought. And ten left.
They were outside the house now, only a hundred feet away. Mae heard the dog yowling. She fired again and killed a mount; a second shot killed the rider before he knew what was happening. Mae felt perspiration coursing down her body. She began to tremble, but rigidly forced herself back under control.
She fired again, missing, and sending a shower of sparks over the ground. Her next shot was better; it ripped an alien in half. Three dead now.
She heard the sound of stocky bodies pounding against the bolted door.
No! They mustn’t come in! Pulling the window wide, she leaned out and looked down. Three of them had dismounted and were methodically dashing themselves against the main door; it creaked and groaned on its hinges. She aimed the gun downward and fired. A blue splash of radiance rewarded her; two of the aliens dropped, the third leaped back. And in the same moment a hatchet came spiraling through the air from another alien off to the left. It cracked into the side of the building inches above the window, embedding itself.
There are only six of them now, Mae told herself. The sound of cracking timber came to her ears. The back door! They had split into two groups, now, and were assaulting the building at its most vulnerable places.
Brian, she thought for the thousandth time. Brian! She leaned out and drew a bead on one of the survivors. He looked up at her, snarled, glared with blazingly bright yellow eyes. His hatchet went back, his arm cocked, and she fired. Man and hatchet melted away. Five left.
She fired again, missing, and followed it immediately with a successful shot. Four left. Three, on the next burst. The back door yielded suddenly with a tortured shriek of splintering wood.
They can come in, now, she thought quietly. She closed the window and turned to face the door of the room, drawing the hand-blaster. She waited.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs. A lump grew in her throat. Heavy footsteps, bestial-sounding footsteps. The door crashed open.
She caught a glimpse of gray, hulking bodies hurtling through the door, and squeezed the trigger twice without aiming. Energy-flares blinded her; she heard animal-like grunts of agony. When she could see again she saw a charred body lying almost at her feet, and a second alien staggering sightlessly toward her across the room.
Her hand was quivering so hard she could barely aim. She fired once. The alien fell.
There was one more of them somewhere in the house, she knew. Somehow in the excitement she had kept a rigid count of the corpses, and there was an eleventh yet at large. She tensed; footsteps in the hall again. Grunts. Taking a deep breath, she fired through the open door.
That was the last of them, then. They were all dead. Numbly, she walked to the window. She had killed eleven intelligent beings; outside, all was calm. In the distance she saw the men of the village banded together now, putting the surviving aliens to rout. The war-party had been a fiasco.
She waited for the hysteric reaction to set in, but oddly none came. She remained calm. Maybe I’m the pioneer type after all, she thought strangely.
She forced herself to smile. She had talked of going back to Earth—but that was impossible now. She was bound to this planet by ties of blood. There was a world to conquer here, savages to drive back, a wilderness to open. And despite herself, she had shown she could stand the place.
As she stared out the window, she frowned suddenly, thinking she had heard a sound.
Yes. Footsteps.
Another one, she thought. She cocked the gun.
“Mae!” a voice called. “Mae, are you all right? God, I must be too late—”
Dumbstruck, she ran to the door, skirting round the dead aliens, and out onto the landing.
“Brian!”
He was coming wearily up the stairs, a ragged figure with bloodstains reddening one arm, with sweat darkening his clothes. But he was smiling.
“I saw the bodies,” he said. “I thought—”
“And you were in the hills,” she said. “I thought—”
“They came sweeping right past me,” he said. “I must have killed fifty of them. I was in a tree, picking them off. They got tired of trying to hit me with their hatchets after a while.”
Tears of relief forced themselves to the edges of her eyes. “I—killed all these,” she said. She stared levelly at him.
“I made a promise,” he said. “If there was an attack, and we survived—”
“No,” she said suddenly. “I don’t want to go back to Earth any more.”
“You—what?”
She smiled feebly. “Let’s go wash those scratches of yours off. There’s time to talk later.”
Yes, she thought. There was time to explain everything, later—about the child, and about the world waiting to be won, and the work that needed to be done. Of how she had matured suddenly in those few moments of bloodshed when she thought herself a widow.
There was time to explain all that later, she thought. Right now Brian needed bandaging, and the house had to be tidied, the corpses removed. The back door repaired, the cows milked, the dog fed. And after that came fifty more chores before nightfall. It was a busy life. It was a good life.
The phone rang. Mae sped downstairs, lifted it off the hook. “Yes?”
“Claude Merriam speaking, Mae. The alarm’s over for the time being. Just checking to see how things are down at your end of the settlement.”
She smiled warmly. “Just fine,” she said. “Just fine!”
THE ALIENS WERE HAT
ERS
(1958)
As I moved along into 1958 I was just as productive as ever, but the publishing environment I found myself in was starting to get a little difficult. 1958 was going to turn out to be a bad year for the science-fiction magazines. Their sales had been dropping ever since the peak year of 1953, when an all-time record 39 different titles were published (and thus succeeded in killing each other off by overcrowding the newsstands). Some of them came and went so fast that their names are mere blips in the history of science-fiction publishing: Vortex, Cosmos, Orbit Science Fiction, Rocket Stories, Fantasy Fiction, all of which came and went during that one year. In 1958 the huge American News Company, the primary distributor of fiction magazines, abruptly went out of business, taking with it a lot of titles that it had been covertly financing through advances against earnings. And the continued boom in paperback publishing was squeezing the surviving all-fiction magazines into a marginal existence.
During the year many of the s-f magazines I had been writing for in the previous four years began to shut up shop or to cut back drastically on frequency of publication, and I was beginning to feel uneasy about my ability to earn a living through the sort of mass production of stories that had carried me through those years. What I had wanted to be all along was a science-fiction writer, and I looked askance at writing anything that took me away from that vocation, but my ledger for the first half of 1958 shows that I was starting to find all sorts of new markets, some of them in fields very far from s-f indeed. A radio program called “Exploring Tomorrow” hired me to do a bunch of science-fiction scripts adapted from my own work, and I did a couple of paperback s-f novels for Ace Books, which carried me through as some of my regular magazine markets began to disappear, but also I see an increasing number of crime stories for Trapped and Guilty, horror stories for a new title called Monster Parade, non-fiction items for such magazines as Exotic Adventures, Fury, Outdoor Magazine, and Your Health.
I was worried about losing W.W. Scott’s Super-Science, of course, which had become my mainstay. It was a poky little magazine at best, which probably had never shown much of a profit, and I wondered how much longer I was going to be able to sell it all those lovely $240 novelets. But Super-Science was unaffected by the American News Company collapse—if anything, it was helped by the vanishing of so many of its competitors—and throughout the year I went on writing copiously for it. In March, 1958 I sold Scott a short story called “The Aliens Were Haters” and a novelet called “The Traders,” and a little while later I brought him “You Can’t Go Back,” a short story that I had written the previous fall and had tried unsuccessfully to sell to two of the higher-quality magazines. He ran all three of them in the December, 1958 issue of Super-Science, “The Aliens Were Haters” under my own name, “The Traders” under the byline of Calvin M. Knox (and adorned with the gaudy new title, “The Unique and Terrible Compulsion”), and “You Can’t Go Back,” retitled “Exiled from Earth,” under the pseudonym of Richard F. Watson.
“The Aliens Were Haters” starts off as a standard Super-Science number—explorers from Earth land on an alien planet and get into a terrible mess—but, as you will discover, this time I deviated a bit from the formula.
——————
It was the third day out from the settlement that Massi found the alien spaceship in the jungle, and by that time he was the only member of his team who was still alive. There had been four of them when they started out from the American settlement on Kothgir II, and probability had it that one of the four would meet death in the jungle on the trip. Probability was wrong. Three out of four were gone; and, thought Massi, he himself had a long way to go before he got home safe.
Massi had half a million dollars’ worth of raw weed in his rucksack, though—latimeria stems, which were shipped back to Earth to be processed into pain-killing drugs. Latimeria grew only in the rain-jungles of Kothgir II, where the temperature never dipped below 100 and where the stingbugs went for your eyes if you didn’t watch sharp. Once a month, a team from the settlement came out into the jungle to gather the weed. Massi didn’t stop to wonder why it should be that three men had to lose their lives picking plants for Earth; it was his job, and so he did it. And Lurton, Weber, and Collins, who had all been alive three days ago, were dead now. Stingbugs had gotten Lurton. Weber had dropped suddenly into a covered pit in the road, and had been half digested by the inhabitants of the pit before anyone missed him. As for Collins, he’d been finished by a golden-eyed scissor-hawk swooping down.
That left Massi. He was on his way back through the jungle to the American settlement. He had twelve miles to cover on foot, and with luck he’d make it—if he avoided getting in the way of the local wildlife, and if none of the snipers from the rival Brazilian colony shot him down from behind. Massi wasn’t worrying. This was his twentieth trip into the jungle, and he figured he had the game beat.
Just lift one foot after the other, keep going, and know what’s happening all around you. That was all. Massi was a big square blocky man, thick-muscled but not thick-headed, with a shock of unruly brown hair gradually turning yellowish-white from too much alien sunshine. He was about thirty and was a native of Earth—St. Louis. Since the age of nine he’d been working in the out-worlds. Kothgir II was his fourth job. He had come here three years back, in 2187. He intended to stay a while.
He kept picking one foot up and putting it down ahead of the other, and by noon of the third day his pocketscope told him he was only a dozen miles from the American post. The rival Brazilian outpost was forty miles back the other way. Since it was noon, Kothgir was right overhead, pouring out its yellow radiance. Kothgir was a young sun, full of life. And Kothgir II was a young planet, tropical in its temperate zones and unbearable in its tropical zones. Massi shook a dribble of sweat out of his eyebrows and kept going. And at two minutes past noon he found the ship in the middle of a clump of tanglers.
It was lying on its side, a conical tube thirty-five feet long. Whoever had brought it down had made a lousy landing. The tailfins were crumpled for good, and the ship itself was bent in the middle like a broken cigar. There was writing on the side of the ship in flowing dark-green letters, and the writing was in no Earthly alphabet Massi had ever seen, not Arabic nor Hebrew nor Greek nor Cyrillic.
The ship could only be alien, from some other intelligent civilization. The thought sent a ripple of surprise through the normally stolid Massi. If his guess were right, it meant the first contact between Earthmen and another intelligent species. Although mankind had reached seventy worlds of other stars by now, not once had sign or trace of intelligent aliens been found.
Until now. Massi wondered who or what was inside that crumpled little spaceship.
Then he stopped wondering for a moment. His keen ears picked up the twig-breaking sound of footsteps behind him. He turned quickly, one hand sliding to the blaster at his belt. Three men and a girl were coming toward him, and they had blasters too. Massi waited for their arrival.
They were Brazilians, from the other settlement. The conquest of space hadn’t been any unified global effort; it was strictly on an each-nation-grab-what-it-can basis. A Brazilian ship and an American one had landed on Kothgir II just about simultaneously, and since neither would retreat they had shared the world between them ever since. Little love was lost between the rival settlers.
“Hello,” the girl called to him.
“Hello yourself,” Massi answered. He stood his ground, facing them, between them and the ship.
He looked at them. The girl seemed to be the leader. She was tall and rugged, heavily tanned, with wide mannish shoulders and coarse features. Thick black hair tumbled untidily over her shoulders. She wasn’t any beauty, Massi thought. Girls who went spacing never were.
The men were in their twenties, and all looked like brothers: slim olive-skinned youths with big noses and dark curly hair. They all carried blasters.
The girl smiled, showing crooked teeth, and said, “You
are minding our ship for us, American?”
“Your ship? Damned funny design for a ship homing in Brazil. And that stuff on the side is the new Brazilian alphabet, I suppose. Yeah.”
“You make the mistake. We did not build the ship. We only claim it. We watched it fall from the skies two nights ago. It is ours.”
Massi saw the setup. He shook his head quickly. “You got the wrong idea. I found that ship and I own salvage rights.”
Two of the men began shouting and gesticulating, hurling a stream of rapid-fire Portuguese at him. Massi understood about every fifth word, but he got the general drift. His speaking vocabulary included some fifty Portuguese words, ten of them obscene and eight of them profane. He used each one, loudly and singly, and the Brazilians were so astonished by the performance that they shut up.
“Okay,” Massi said in the sudden silence. “Now look here. I found this ship. I got here first. The ship is mine.”
“We saw the ship land. We have come here to examine it,” said the girl sullenly. Her English was passable. “The ship is not yours but ours.”
“The law says first finder can claim.”
The biggest of the three Brazilian men chuckled amiably. “You Americans like to vote. Let us vote. We vote the ship is ours. You vote the ship is yours. We win, four to one, no? Democratic process!”
Massi glowered angrily at them. Overhead birds wheeled and screeched. Remembering the way Collins had died, he glanced up to make sure no scissor-hawks lurked up there. Then he looked at the Brazilians again. Sweat was rolling down his body, and he felt tension starting to mount inside him. Four against one was a hopeless struggle. Maybe he had found the ship first, but that didn’t matter if they decided to take it away from him. He wanted the ship now so bad he could reach out and touch the yearning. It was his ship, dammit! They weren’t going to steal it!