Deathworld (41 page)

One of the technicians was running and screaming. The magter knocked
him down and beat him into silence. Seeing this, the other two men
returned to work with shaking hands. Even if all life on the surface
of the planet was dead, this would have no effect on the magter.
They would go ahead as planned, without emotion or imagination
enough to alter their set course.

As the technicians worked, their attitude changed from shocked
numbness to anger. Right and wrong were forgotten. They had been
killed—the invisible death of radiation must already be penetrating
into the caves—but they also had the chance for vengeance. Swiftly
they brought their work to completion, with a speed and precision
they had concealed before.

"What are those offworlders doing?" Ulv asked.

Brion stirred from his lethargy of defeat and looked across the
cavern floor. The men had a wheeled handtruck and were rolling one
of the atomic warheads onto it. They pushed it over to the
latticework of the jump-field.

"They are going to bomb Nyjord now, just as Nyjord bombed Dis. That
machine will hurl the bombs in a special way to the other planet."

"Will you stop them?" Ulv asked. He had his deadly blowgun in his
hand and his face was an expressionless mask.

Brion almost smiled at the irony of the situation. In spite of
everything he had done to prevent it, Nyjord had dropped the bombs.
And this act alone may have destroyed their own planet. Brion had it
within his power now to stop the launching in the cavern. Should he?
Should he save the lives of his killers? Or should he practice the
ancient blood-oath that had echoed and destroyed down through the
ages:
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
It would be so
simple. He literally had to do nothing. The score would be even, and
his and the Disans' death avenged.

Did Ulv have his blowgun ready to kill Brion with, if he should try
to stop the launchings? Or had he misread the Disan entirely?

"Will
you
stop them, Ulv?" he asked.

How large was mankind's sense of obligation? The caveman first had
this feeling for his mate, then for his family. It grew until men
fought and died for the abstract ideas of cities and nations, then
for whole planets. Would the time ever come when men might realize
that the obligation should be to the largest and most encompassing
reality of all—mankind? And beyond that to life of all kinds.

Brion saw this idea, not in words but as a reality. When he posed
the question to himself in this way he found that it stated clearly
its inherent answer. He pulled his gun out, and as he did he
wondered what Ulv's answer might be.

"Nyjord is
medvirk
," Ulv said, raising his blowgun and sending a
dart across the cavern. It struck one of the technicians, who gasped
and fell to the floor.

Brion's shots crashed into the control board, shorting and
destroying it, removing the menace to Nyjord for all time.

Medvirk
, Ulv had said. A life form that cooperates and aids other
life forms. It may kill in self-defense, but it is essentially not
a killer or destroyer. Ulv had a lifetime of knowledge about the
interdependency of life. He grasped the essence of the idea and
ignored all the verbal complications and confusions. He had
killed the magter, who were his own people, because they were
umedvirk
—against life. And he had saved his enemies because
they were
medvirk
.

With this realization came the painful knowledge that the planet
and the people that had produced this understanding were dead.

In the cavern the magter saw the destruction of their plans, and
the cave mouth from which the bullets had come. Silently they rushed
to kill their enemy—a concerted wave of emotionless fury.

Brion and Ulv fought back. Even the knowledge that he was doomed no
matter what happened could not resign Brion to death at the hands
of the magter. To Ulv, the decision was much easier. He was simply
killing
umedvirk
. A believer in life, he destroyed the anti-life.

They retreated into the darkness, still firing. The magter had
lights and ion rifles, and were right behind them. Knowing the
caverns better than the men they chased, the pursuers circled.
Brion saw lights ahead and dragged Ulv to a stop.

"They know their way through these caves, and we don't," he said.
"If we try to run they'll just shoot us down. Let's find a spot
we can defend and settle into it."

"Back here"—Ulv gave a tug in the right direction—"there is a cave
with only one entrance, and that is very narrow."

"Let's go!"

Running as silently as they could in the darkness, they reached
the deadend cavern without being seen. What noise they made was lost
in other footsteps that sounded and echoed through the connecting
caves. Once inside, they found cover behind a ridge and waited.
The end was certain.

The magter ran swiftly into their cave, flashing his light into all
the places of concealment. The beam passed over the two hidden men,
and at the same instant Brion fired. The shot boomed loudly as the
magter fell—a shot that would surely have been heard by the others.

Before anyone else came into the cave, Brion ran over and grabbed
the still functioning light. Propping it on the rocks so it shone on
the entrance, he hurried back to shelter beside Ulv. They waited for
the attack.

It was not long in coming. Two magter rushed in, and died. More were
outside, Brion knew, and he wondered how long it would be before
they remembered the grenades and rolled one into their shelter.

An indistinct murmur sounded outside, and sharp explosions. In their
hiding place, Brion and Ulv crouched low and wondered why the attack
didn't come. Then one of the magter came in the entrance, but Brion
hesitated before shooting.

The man had
backed
in, firing behind him as he came.

Ulv had no compunctions about killing, only his darts couldn't
penetrate the magter's thick clothing. As the magter turned, Ulv's
breath pulsed once and death stung the back of the other man's hand.
He collapsed into a crumpled heap.

"Don't shoot," a voice called from outside the cave, and a man
stepped through the swirling dust and smoke to stand in the beam
from the light.

Brion clutched wildly at Ulv's arm, dragging the blowgun from
the Disan's mouth.

The man in the light wore a protective helmet, thick boots and
a pouch-hung uniform.

He was a Nyjorder.

The realization was almost impossible to accept. Brion had heard
the bombs fall. Yet the Nyjord soldier was here. The two facts
couldn't be accepted together.

"Would you keep a hold on his arm, sir, just in case," the soldier
said, glancing warily at Ulv's blowpipe. "I know what those darts
can do." He pulled a microphone from one of his pockets and spoke
into it.

More soldiers crowded into the cave, and Professor-Commander Krafft
came in behind them. He looked strangely out of keeping in the dusty
combat uniform. The gun was even more incongruous in his blue-veined
hand. After giving the pistol to the nearest soldier with an air of
relief, he stumbled quickly over to Brion and took his hand.

"It is a profound and sincere pleasure to meet you in person,"
he said. "And your friend Ulv as well."

"Would you kindly explain what is going on?" Brion said thickly. He
was obsessed by the strange feeling that none of this could possibly
be happening.

"We will always remember you as the man who saved us from ourselves,"
Krafft said, once again the professor instead of the commander.

"What Brion wants are facts, Grandpa, not speeches," Hys said. The
bent form of the leader of the rebel Nyjord army pushed through the
crowd of taller men until he stood next to Krafft. "Simply stated,
Brion, your plan succeeded. Krafft relayed your message to me—and
as soon as I heard it I turned back and met him on his ship. I'm
sorry that Telt's dead—but he found what we were looking for. I
couldn't ignore his report of radioactive traces. Your girl friend
arrived with the hacked-up corpse at the same time I did, and we all
took a long look at the green leech in its skull. Her explanation of
what it is made significant sense. We were already carrying out
landings when we had your call about something having been stored
in the magter tower. After that it was just a matter of following
tracks—and the transmitter you planted."

"But the explosions at midnight?" Brion broke in. "I heard them!"

"You were supposed to," Hys laughed. "Not only you, but the magter
in this cave. We figured they would be armed and the cave strongly
defended. So at midnight we dropped a few large chemical explosive
bombs at the entrance. Enough to kill the guards without bringing
the roof down. We also hoped that the magter deeper in would leave
their posts or retreat from the imagined radiation. And they did. It
worked like a charm. We came in quietly and took them by surprise.
Made a clean sweep—killed the ones we couldn't capture."

"One of the renegade jump-space technicians was still alive,"
Krafft said. "He told us about your stopping the bombs aimed
at Nyjord, the two of you."

None of the Nyjorders there could add anything to his words, not
even the cynical Hys. But Brion could empathize their feelings, the
warmth of their intense relief and happiness. It was a sensation he
would never forget.

"There is no more war," Brion translated for Ulv, knowing that the
Disan had understood nothing of the explanation. As he said it, he
realized that there was one glaring error in the story.

"You couldn't have done it," Brion said. "You landed on this planet
before
you had my message about the tower. That means you still
expected the magter to be sending their bombs to Nyjord—and you
made the landings in spite of this knowledge."

"Of course," Professor Krafft said, astonished at Brion's lack
of understanding. "What else could we do? The magter are sick!"

Hys laughed aloud at Brion's baffled expression. "You have to
understand Nyjord psychology," he said. "When it was a matter of war
and killing, my planet could never agree on an intelligent course.
War is so alien to our philosophy that it couldn't even be
considered correctly. That's the trouble with being a vegetable
eater in a galaxy of carnivores. You're easy prey for the first one
that lands on your back. Any other planet would have jumped on the
magter with both feet and shaken the bombs out of them. We fumbled
it so long it almost got both worlds killed. Your mind-parasite drew
us back from the brink."

"I don't understand," Brion said.

"A simple matter of definition. Before you came we had no way to
deal with the magter here on Dis. They really were alien to us.
Nothing they did made sense—and nothing we did seemed to have the
slightest effect on them. But you discovered that they were
sick
,
and that's something we know how to handle. We're united again; my
rebel army was instantly absorbed into the rest of the Nyjord forces
by mutual agreement. Doctors and nurses are on the way here now.
Plans were put under way to evacuate what part of the population we
could until the bombs were found. The planet is united again, and
working hard."

"Because the magter are sick, infected by a destructive life form?"
Brion asked.

"Exactly so," Professor Krafft said. "We are civilized, after all.
You can't expect us to fight a war—and you surely can't expect us
to ignore the plight of sick neighbors?"

"No ... you surely can't," Brion said, sitting down heavily.
He looked at Ulv, to whom the speech had been incomprehensible.
Beyond him, Hys wore his most cynical expression as he considered
the frailties of his people.

"Hys," Brion called out, "you translate all that into Disan and
explain to Ulv. I wouldn't dare."

Dis was a floating golden ball, looking like a schoolroom globe in
space. No clouds obscured its surface, and from this distance it
seemed warm and attractive set against the cold darkness. Brion
almost wished he were back there now, as he sat shivering inside the
heavy coat. He wondered how long it would be before his confused
body-temperature controls decided to turn off the summer adjustment.
He hoped it wouldn't be as sudden or as drastic as turning it on
had been.

Delicate as a dream, Lea's reflection swam in space next to the
planet. She had come up quietly behind him in the spaceship's
corridor, only her gentle breath and mirrored face telling him
she was there. He turned quickly and took her hands in his.

"You're looking infinitely better," he said.

"Well, I should," she said, pushing back her hair in an unconscious
gesture with her hand. "I've been doing nothing but lying in the
ship's hospital, while you were having such a fine time this last
week. Rushing around down there shooting all the magter."

"Just gassing them," he told her. "The Nyjorders can't bring
themselves to kill any more, even if it does raise their own
casualty rate. In fact, they are having difficulty restraining the
Disans led by Ulv, who are happily killing any magter they see as
being pure
umedvirk
."

"What will they do when they have all those frothing magter madmen?"

"They don't know yet," he said. "They won't really know until they
see what an adult magter is like with his brain-parasite dead and
gone. They're having better luck with the children. If they catch
them early enough, the parasite can be destroyed before it has done
too much damage."

Lea shuddered delicately and let herself lean against him. "I'm not
that sturdy yet; let's sit down while we talk." There was a couch
opposite the viewport where they could sit and still see Dis.