But in that case, he thought, why doesn’t she kill me? It would be much simpler for her that way. He could supply two possible answers: either she feared making the trip through the forest alone, or else there was some lingering sentimentality about her that kept her from cold-bloodedly shooting him.
He wondered what sort of strength lay in those lean, flat, whiplike muscles, in that wiry unwomanly body. He wondered too whether she would shoot him down as readily as she had the two aliens. By mid-morning of the second day, he was desperate enough to try her out.
They were advancing through heavily wooded flatlands, marshy and spongy underfoot, infested with snakes of all sizes from the needle-thin and deadly Little Fry to the barrel-thick Swallowers. The heat had slacked off a trifle, but it was a long way from being comfortable.
He stopped suddenly. Behind him, the girl said, “Why do you hesitate?”
“I think I hear something. Swallower, maybe. You hear a gurgling sound coming from the left?”
She was silent a moment. “No,” she said finally.
“I do. We better hold up a second.” He took a deep breath and realized to his great surprise that he was apprehensive about what he was going to do next, that though he had entered the jungle twenty times without fear he felt fear now, not for the jungle’s presence but because of the girl behind him.
He pivoted suddenly, shouting, “Here comes a Swallower on your right! Look out! Look out!”
One good ruse deserved another, he thought. Despite herself, the Brazilian girl glanced to the right; the drawn blaster she carried wavered hesitantly, and the hesitation was just enough. Massi sprang at her, collided heavily, and threw her to the ground. He had been right: she had weakened when it came to drilling him in the middle with the blaster.
They landed on an oozy patch of marshland, Massi on top. He was two inches taller than the girl and better than sixty pounds heavier, and he made his advantage count. One hand reached out and clamped itself round her wrist, bending it back and forcing her to release the blaster. The other snaked round her throat. Slowly he levered himself to a sitting position, his knees planted on her arms, his body astride her chest, his hands gripping her shoulders and holding her flat. The fall had gone to him hands down.
She writhed, slapping her feet up and down and trying to thrust her knee into his groin, but she was helpless. All she could do was spit. She did that. Massi grinned and slapped her, hard. A trickle of blood started to run out of the corner of her mouth. She spat again and a second time he slapped her, even harder. He felt a savage joy in what he was doing. He had never hit a woman before, but this was hardly a woman. More like a wildcat.
Gradually she accepted the fact that she was beaten. Massi leaned back cautiously, slid a hand down her thigh, and yanked the other blaster from its holster. She muttered incoherent curses at him.
“Hurts to get fooled bad, doesn’t it?” he asked. “Now you know how I felt yesterday.”
Working quickly, he undipped the blasting chamber of her gun, cracked open the power-housing, and held it against the marshtop long enough for it to be thoroughly ruined. He tossed the useless blaster into the bushes. Then, holstering his own weapon again, he released her.
She rose, rubbing her split lips and sore arms, and favored him with as murderous a glance of hatred as Massi had ever seen. Shrugging it off, he said, “I hate to leave you stranded like this without a weapon, but it’s your own damn fault. Still, even though you’re a woman—”
“I am a solider, not a woman.”
“As you prefer. You’re on your own, Captain. I’m afraid we split up here. I’m going back the way I came. You have thirty miles to travel and I have about twenty. Want to bet on who gets there first?”
“You will. But if I ever see you again I will kill you. No man holds his body against mine and lives.”
Massi chuckled. “You’re lucky all I did was wrestle with you. Tell you what: if I ever see you again, I’ll do my best to finish the job!”
“I would kill you first.”
Suddenly she turned, as if afraid tears might come to her eyes in a moment, and dashed wildly off into the thick brush. Massi watched her go, and shook his head thoughtfully. She had put up a good fight, all right. She was a regular wildcat. But a good big man can lick a good big woman any time, he thought. He wondered if he ever would see her again—and who would walk away from the encounter alive. By whipping her he had restored his faith in his manhood—but he wasn’t sure the man had been born who could successfully bed that girl down.
He started to cut his way through the jungle, back toward the American settlement. Moving rapidly through the path already hewn, he reached the alien spaceship by late afternoon. The ground about the area seemed different: as if it had been trampled down, it seemed. He wondered whether others had found the ship. Certainly there had been visitors recently—in the last hour, perhaps.
Shrugging, he pressed on. Only twelve miles to go: he could cover two or three more before it became too dark to walk.
He was ten miles from the base when a sudden explosion shattered the jungle silence. He froze: a moment later a second explosion came, shaking the ground beneath him. The first explosion had come from behind him, the second from directly in front. As if raiders had bombed first the Brazilian, then the American colonies.
A flash of brilliance above caught his eye. He glanced up. Against the hard blue backdrop of the sky he saw a ship rising heavenward and vanishing, a big ship, a strange ship. And suddenly he knew what had happened.
The colony was still in flames when he reached it, late that night, after a forced march through the dark. There was nothing left but rubble. The alien ship had been very efficient. Fifty years of work blotted out in a moment; three thousand human beings dead. And he knew it was the same way fifty miles away, at the Brazilian colony.
Massi stared up at the bleak stars. From one of those stars an exploratory ship had come, and following it a larger one. The explorers had crashed; the mother ship, following its smaller companion, had landed to find both of their men dead at the hands of the planet’s inhabitants.
The Brazilian girl had been right: the aliens were Haters. In wrath they had visited flaming death on the only two settlements they could find. Perhaps the murder had been expiated, or perhaps the incident would provoke the first interstellar war.
But Massi did not worry about that possibility now. He was abruptly conscious of his position. He was alone, the only American to have escaped the holocaust. No Earth ship would call at Kothgir II for at least a year. It was a long time to spend in the jungle by yourself. And there had been another survivor. She was back there, perhaps only now first discovering what had happened to her people.
Massi wet his lips and checked his blaster charges. He was alone and he didn’t like to be alone, not while another person yet lived on the planet. He was surprised to find this need in himself; he had always thought himself self-sufficient, but now, standing at the edge of the fiery ruins of the American colony, he saw that he wasn’t.
He didn’t have to be alone. He wondered if that Brazilian girl could possibly be tamed. Taking a deep breath, he turned his back on the blazing dead colony and headed off into the jungle again, as morning began. Maybe the girl could be tamed. Massi was going to find her and try.
THE TRADERS
(1958)
The second of my three stories for the December, 1958 Super-Science Stories, the “Calvin M. Knox” one, was the novelet “The Traders,” on which Scottie stuck the typically flatfooted W.W. Scott title of “The Unique and Terrible Compulsion.” That phrase comes from the story itself, but it has always struck me as a trifle melodramatic for a story title, and so I have taken advantage of this opportunity to restore my original title after a lapse of almost six decades.
It follows the familiar pattern for a Super-Science novelet: Earthman isolated on a jungle world, a trading-post story with something of a debt to Somerset Maugham’s Malaysian stories an
d, very likely, Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” Fancy antecedents for a pulp science-fiction story, but I was just a couple of years out of my Ivy League college, putting my high-priced education to uses that probably would have surprised my dignified Columbia professors.
——————
Dave Garth was an honorable man. He had entered the Interstellar Merchant Service at the age of 23 in 2406, and by the time he was 28 he had risen high in the ranks of the organization. He had a reputation for impeccable honesty, and he was an advocate of fair dealings between Earthmen and the hundreds of native races of other planets with which Earth dealt.
In his first five years Garth had served the usual jobs on the Merchant Service circuit, ending up with a minor administrative post on Lorphar in the Semmelweis System. He was in his second year on the Lorphar job, and already beginning to speculate on how long it would be until he had risen to the top job at the Lorphar outpost, when he was called to his superior’s office and was told that a subradio-gram had just arrived for him from the central office on Earth.
He had been reassigned. He was to leave Lorphar immediately and return to Earth for briefing on his new job.
“We’re sorry to lose you,” his superior told him. “You did a fine job here, Garth.”
In a way, Garth was a trifle disappointed at being yanked from Lorphar. He was working out well there, with his job under control and going smoothly, and he liked the planet, its people, and the men he worked with. Still, if the Merchant Service thought he would be more useful somewhere else, it was not his duty to question their decision. He returned to Earth on the next ship that blasted out of Lorphar.
Earthfall took place early in April of 2412, and Garth reported immediately to the central office in Buenos Aires for reassignment. The main computer processed him through, and within half an hour he was in the office of one Martin Kingsley, a District Supervisor.
Kingsley turned out to be a slim pale man in his forties, who offered Garth a chair, a drink, and a cigar, and then plunged immediately into the matter at hand.
“Mr. Garth, do you know anything about the planet called Danneroi?”
“No, sir.” Garth shook his head. There were thousands of worlds in the galaxy, and he had nothing to gain by pretending he knew them all. Garth always believed in honesty as a guiding rule, and so far in his life it had worked out well.
Kingsley leaned forward and puffed at his cigar. “Danneroi is a Plus Point Two world in the Murchison System—it’s Murchison IV, I believe. We have a single outpost in the hotlands of Danneroi; they mine a good grade of thorium there, and we have big plans for Danneroi in the next few decades. The outpost is run by a single operator, and he’s been there for thirty years. His name is Lidman—Anton Lidman. He’s done a good job for us, or so we’ve been thinking all along. But now we get some strange reports about him.”
Garth stared solemnly at the well-dressed supervisor, and picked up his cue. “What sort of report, Mr. Kingsley?”
“A pickup ship touches down on Danneroi every three months to bring new trading goods for Lidman and to pick up the thorium he’s bought. I have the reports of the ship captains right here.” He displayed a sheaf of mini lac sheets. “I don’t think it’s news to you, Mr. Garth, that every time a ship touches down on a world to deal with one of our trading posts, we request a report on the behavior of our representative. Well, over the last three years or so we’ve had increasingly dismaying reports about Lidman—he’s uncooperative, cranky, secretive, that sort of thing. We began to suspect he might be too old for the post. But this last report here claims that Lidman’s been distributing drugs to the natives.”
“No!”
“That’s what the report says. I don’t believe it either—dammit, I don’t want to believe it. But according to the captain, Lidman’s been taking stuff from the medical stores, harmless stuff by our reckoning but viciously narcotic to the aliens. And I’ve checked back through Lidman’s requisition sheets of the last few years, and damned if he hasn’t been requesting particularly heavy supplies of medical goods.”
Garth moistened his lips nervously. The idea of a company man doing a thing like that was almost unbelievable to him. He was aware of the gulf between Earthman and alien, a gulf that should never be bridged by any kind of criminal action.
Kingsley went on. “So this is where you enter the picture, Garth. You’re being shipped out to Danneroi on the next pickup vessel.”
“As Lidman’s replacement?”
“Ah—no. As his assistant.”
“Assistant, sir?”
“That’s right. We can’t fire Lidman on mere suspicion; we need proof. So we’re sending you out as an observer, to keep an eye on Lidman and report back to us. Lidman has been notified that his planet has been upgraded from a one-man to a two-man post, and that an assistant will be on the way soon.”
“And what if I find he’s actually guilty of giving drugs to the natives?”
“You’ll notify us, and we’ll remove him from his post. You’ll replace him as our Danneroi man. It’ll involve a substantial salary raise, you understand.”
“And I’ll get an assistant?”
“Ah—no. You’ll be on your own out there, just as Lidman is now.”
“But I thought you said the planet was being upgraded to two-man status,” Garth protested mildly.
Kingsley shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s simply the excuse we’re giving Lidman for sending you to him. The planet isn’t quite in the two-man class yet. It won’t be for another five or ten years, perhaps.”
“So if Lidman’s guilty I’ll be out there on my own all that time,” Garth said thoughtfully.
Kingsley looked suspicious. “Do you object to taking on a one-man assignment, Mr. Garth?”
“No—not at all,” Garth said hastily. “Not really, that is. It’s simply that—coming from Lorphar, a ten-man planet—I hadn’t considered the possibility that my next assignment would be—”
“I see. I wish this company had enough money to make every world of the galaxy a ten-man station. It can’t be done, though.”
“Of course.” A new thought occurred to Garth. “What happens to me if Lidman isn’t guilty?”
“If you think he’s fit to continue operations,” Kingsley said, “he’ll be left on duty and you’ll be transferred elsewhere. With a bonus and a promotion, let me add.”
Garth nodded. He did not question the company’s plans for him. The loneliness of a one-man station was not quite what he had hoped to gain, but others had done such jobs before him, and if the company asked it of him he would comply. And though he didn’t care to serve as a company spy, still, drugging the natives was a despicable act that deserved punishment.
Dave Garth was an honorable man. He was loyal to his company and to the greater case of Terran civilization; besides, running a one-man station would be a challenge to him. Perhaps in the course of time he could build Danneroi up into a commercial center of two-man or even three-man status—with himself as top man, of course. It was a distinct possibility. Although Lidman had been out there thirty years, and in all that time he had failed to increase Danneroi’s status beyond one-man rank.
Garth stood up. “When do I leave, sir?”
Garth left Earth four days later, aboard the merchant cargoman China Coast, a ten-tube subwarp ship bound for the Sorgal System, but stopping off first for the quarterly pickup on Danneroi.
The network of interstellar trade relations was fantastically complex. Presiding over the whole enterprise was the monstrous computer at Buenos Aires, which filled three cubic miles of Argentinian soil with its rows of cryotronic elements, and which plotted the course of star-to-star trade like a giant spider brooding over its web. Earth was the core of the trade system. It sent scouts to each planet to determine what, if anything, that planet had that another world might use. Then trading posts were set up, pickup ships routed, trade relations established.
And so the raw thorium mi
ned on Danneroi was shipped on to the Sorgal System, to be purified and worked into tiny power-sources, and other Terran ships would carry the power-sources to still other worlds which lacked natural radioactives themselves.
The Danneroi inhabitants would be paid for their thorium in goods from some other world; the Sorgal craftsmen extracted their profit too.
But in each transaction the real beneficiary was Earth, which took a minute fraction of the price as its share. That minute fraction, multiplied by the thousands of worlds of the universe, made the whole vast operation worthwhile; it turned Earth into the wealthiest world in the galaxy, growing wealthier with each passing instant.
But the essence of such an operation was impeccable honesty. Men like Dave Garth were needed for the job, men who had a code of honor and lived by it. There was no room in the Interstellar Merchant Service for the likes of an Anton Lidman.
The journey to Danneroi lasted ten days, by subwarp drive. The China Coast ducked into the blank void that was the subuniverse, threaded a Riemannian geodesic through the distorted and inconceivably alien dimensions of that sub-universe, and emerged in the “real” universe several thousand light-years away.
The mathematics of interstellar travel had taken four generations of solid work; even the giant computers had nearly given the job up as impossible.
Still, it had been worked out at last—and since Earth was the only world that had ever been able to solve the intricacies of subuniverse travel, Earth held a monopoly on interstellar commerce.
It was more than a monopoly, thought Garth. It was a sacred trust. That was why men like Anton Lidman had to be rooted out.
The China Coast carried a cargo of items desired by the Danneroians: revolving mirrors, sewing kits, cosmetics, and the like. There was no use paying the aliens for their thorium in money, for they had no use for money. But gadgetry? That was something else altogether. They were a technologically undeveloped race, and valued such things highly.