Deathworld (6 page)

Complete mastery would come with time, but he could already understand why the Pyrrans never removed their guns. It would be like removing a part of your own body. The movement of gun from holster to hand was too fast for him to detect. It was certainly faster than the neural current that shaped the hand into the gun-holding position. For all apparent purposes it was like having a lightning bolt in your fingertip. Point the finger and
blamm
, there’s the explosion.

* * * *

Brucco had left Jason to practice alone. When his aching hand could take no more, he stopped and headed back towards his own quarters. Turning a corner he had a quick glimpse of a familiar figure going away from him.

“Meta! Wait for a second — I want to talk to you.”

She turned impatiently as he shuffled up, going as fast as he could in the doubled gravity. Everything about her seemed different from the girl he had known on the ship. Heavy boots came as high as her knees, her figure was lost in bulky coveralls of some metallic fabric. The trim waist was bulged out by a belt of canisters. Her very expression was coldly distant.

“I’ve missed you,” he said. “I hadn’t realized you were in this building.” He reached for her hand but she moved it out of his reach.

“What is it you want?” she asked.

“What is it I want!” he echoed with barely concealed anger. “This is Jason, remember me? We’re friends. It
is
allowed for friends to talk without ‘wanting’ anything.”

“What happened on the ship has nothing to do with what happens on Pyrrus.” She started forward impatiently as she talked. “I have finished my reconditioning and must return to work. You’ll be staying here in the sealed buildings so I won’t be seeing you.”

“Why don’t you say ‘with the rest of the children’ — that’s what your tone implies. And don’t try walking out, there are some things we have to settle first —”

Jason made the mistake of putting out his hand to stop her. He didn’t really know what happened next. One instant he was standing — the next he sprawled suddenly on the floor. His shoulder was badly bruised, and Meta had vanished down the corridor.

Limping back to his own room he cursed women in general and Meta in particular. Dropping onto his rock-hard bed he tried to remember the reasons that had brought him here in the first place. And weighed them against the perpetual torture of the gravity, the fear-filled dreams it inspired, the automatic contempt of these people for any outsider. He quickly checked the growing tendency to feel sorry for himself. By Pyrran standards he
was
soft and helpless. If he wanted them to think any better of him, he would have to change a good deal.

He sank into a fatigue-drugged sleep then, that was broken only by the screaming fear of his dreams.

In the morning Jason awoke with a bad headache and the feeling he had never been to sleep. As he took some of the carefully portioned stimulants that Brucco had given him, he wondered again about the combination of factors that filled his sleep with such horror.

“Eat quickly,” Brucco told him when they met in the dining room. “I can no longer spare you time for individual instruction. You will join the regular classes and take the prescribed courses. Only come to me if there is some special problem that the instructors or trainers can’t handle.”

The classes — as Jason should have expected — were composed of stern faced little children. With their compact bodies and no-nonsense mannerisms they were recognizably Pyrran. But they were still children enough to consider it very funny to have an adult in their classes. Jammed behind one of the tiny desks, the red-faced Jason did not think it was much of a joke.

All resemblance to a normal school ended with the physical form of the classroom. For one thing, every child — no matter how small — packed a gun. And the courses were all involved with survival. The only possible grade in a curriculum like this was one hundred per cent and students stayed with a lesson until they mastered it perfectly. No courses were offered in the normal scholastic subjects. Presumably these were studied after the child graduated survival school and could face the world alone. Which was a logical and cold-hearted way of looking at things. In fact, logical and cold-hearted could describe any Pyrran activity.

Most of the morning was spent on the operation of one of the medikits that strapped around the waist. This was a poison analyzer that was pressed over a puncture wound. If any toxins were present, the antidote was automatically injected on the site. Simple in operation but incredibly complex in construction. Since all Pyrrans serviced their own equipment — you could then only blame yourself if it failed — they had to learn the construction and repair of all the devices. Jason did much better than the child students, though the effort exhausted him.

In the afternoon he had his first experience with a training machine. His instructor was a twelve year old boy, whose cold voice didn’t conceal his contempt for the soft off-worlder.

“All the training machines are physical duplicates of the real surface of the planet, corrected constantly as the life forms change. The only difference between them is the varying degree of deadliness. This first machine you will use is of course the one infants are put into —”

“You’re too kind,” Jason murmured. “Your flattery overwhelms me.” The instructor continued, taking no notice of the interruption.

“. . . Infants are put into as soon as they can crawl. It is real in substance, though completely deactivated.”

* * * *

Training machine was the wrong word, Jason realized as they entered through the thick door. This was a chunk of the outside world duplicated in an immense chamber. It took very little suspension of reality for him to forget the painted ceiling and artificial sun high above and imagine himself outdoors at last. The scene
seemed
peaceful enough. Though clouds banking on the horizon threatened a violent Pyrran storm.

“You must wander around and examine things,” the instructor told Jason. “Whenever you touch something with your hand, you will be told about it. Like this —”

The boy bent over and pushed his finger against a blade of the soft grass that covered the ground. Immediately a voice barked from hidden speakers.

“Poison grass. Boots to be worn at all times.”

Jason kneeled and examined the grass. The blade was tipped with a hard, shiny hook. He realized with a start that every single blade of grass was the same. The soft green lawn was a carpet of death. As he straightened up he glimpsed something under a broadleafed plant. A crouching, scale-covered animal, whose tapered head terminated in a long spike.

“What’s
that
in the bottom of my garden?” he asked. “You certainly give the babies pleasant playmates.” Jason turned and realized he was talking to the air, the instructor was gone. He shrugged and petted the scaly monstrosity.

“Horndevil,” the impersonal voice said from midair. “Clothing and shoes no protection. Kill it.”

A sharp
crack
shattered the silence as Jason’s gun went off. The horndevil fell on its side, keyed to react to the blank charge.

“Well . . . I
am
learning,” Jason said, and the thought pleased him. The words
kill it
had been used by Brucco while teaching him to use the gun. Their stimulus had reached an unconscious level. He was aware of wanting to shoot only after he had heard the shot. His respect for Pyrran training techniques went up.

Jason spent a thoroughly unpleasant afternoon wandering in the child’s garden of horror. Death was everywhere. While all the time the disembodied voice gave him stern advice in simple language. So he could do unto, rather than being done in. He had never realized that violent death could come in so many repulsive forms.
Everything
here was deadly to man — from the smallest insect to the largest plant.

Such singleness of purpose seemed completely unnatural. Why was this planet so alien to human life? He made a mental note to ask Brucco. Meanwhile he tried to find one life form that wasn’t out for his blood. He didn’t succeed. After a long search he found the only thing that when touched didn’t elicit deadly advice. This was a chunk of rock that projected from a meadow of poison grass. Jason sat on it with a friendly feeling and pulled his feet up. An oasis of peace. Some minutes passed while he rested his gravity-weary body.

“ROTFUNGUS — DO NOT TOUCH!”

The voice blasted at twice its normal volume, and Jason leaped as if he had been shot. The gun was in his hand, nosing about for a target. Only when he bent over and looked closely at the rock where he had been sitting, did he understand. There were flaky gray patches that hadn’t been there when he sat down.

“Oh you tricky devils!” he shouted at the machine. “How many kids have you frightened off that rock after they thought they had found a little peace!” He resented the snide bit of conditioning, but respected it at the same time. Pyrrans learned very early in life that there was no safety on this planet — except that which they provided for themselves.

While he was learning about Pyrrus he was gaining new insight into the Pyrrans as well.

Days turned into weeks in the school, cut off from the world outside. Jason almost became proud of his ability to deal death. He recognized all the animals and plants in the nursery room and had been promoted to a trainer where the beasts made sluggish charges at him. His gun picked off the attackers with dull regularity. The constant, daily classes were beginning to bore him as well.

Though the gravity still dragged at him, his muscles were making great efforts to adjust. After the daily classes he no longer collapsed immediately into bed. Only the nightmares got worse. He had finally mentioned them to Brucco, who mixed up a sleeping potion that took away most of their effect. The dreams were still there, but Jason was only vaguely aware of them upon awakening.

By the time Jason had mastered all the gadgetry that kept the Pyrrans alive, he had graduated to a most realistic trainer that was only a hair-breadth away from the real thing. The difference was just in quality. The insect poisons caused swelling and pain instead of instant death. Animals could cause bruises and tear flesh, but stopped short of ripping off limbs. You couldn’t get killed in this trainer, but could certainly come very close to it.

Jason wandered through this large and rambling jungle with the rest of the five-year-olds. There was something a bit humorous, yet sad, about their unchildlike grimness. Though they still might laugh in their quarters, they realized there was no laughing outside. To them survival was linked up with social acceptance and desirability. In this way Pyrrus was a simple black-and-white society. To prove your value to yourself and your world, you only had to stay alive. This had great importance in racial survival, but had very stultifying effects on individual personality. Children were turned into like-faced killers, always on the alert to deal out death.

Some of the children graduated into the outside world and others took their places. Jason watched this process for a while before he realized that all of those from the original group he had entered with were gone. That same day he looked up the chief of the adaptation center.

“Brucco,” Jason asked, “how long do you plan to keep me in this kindergarten shooting gallery?”

“You’re not being ‘kept’ here,” Brucco told him in his usual irritated tone. “You will be here until you qualify for the outside.”

“Which I have a funny feeling will be never. I can now field strip and reassemble every one of your blasted gadgets in the dark. I am a dead shot with this cannon. At this present moment, if I had to, I could write a book on the Complete Flora and Fauna of Pyrrus, and How to Kill It. Perhaps I don’t do as well as my six-year old companions, but I have a hunch I do about as good a job now as I ever will. Is that true?”

Brucco squirmed with the effort to be evasive, yet didn’t succeed. “I think, that is, you know you weren’t born here, and —”

“Come, come,” Jason said with glee, “a straight-faced old Pyrran like you shouldn’t try to lie to one of the weaker races that specialize in that sort of thing. It goes without saying that I’ll always be sluggish with this gravity, as well as having other inborn handicaps. I admit that. We’re not talking about that now. The question is — will I improve with more training, or have I reached a peak of my own
development
now?”

Brucco sweated. “With the passage of time there will be improvement of course —”

“Sly devil!” Jason waggled a finger at him. “Yes or no, now. Will I improve
now
by more training
now
?”

“No,” Brucco said, and still looked troubled. Jason sized him up like a poker hand.

“Now let’s think about that. I won’t improve — yet I’m still stuck here. That’s no accident. So you must have been ordered to keep me here. And from what I have seen of this planet, admittedly very little, I would say that Kerk ordered you to keep me here. Is that right?”

“He was only doing it for your own sake,” Brucco explained, “trying to keep you alive.”

“The truth is out,” Jason said, “so let us now forget about it. I didn’t come here to shoot robots with your offspring. So please show me the street door. Or is there a graduating ceremony first? Speeches, handing out school pins, sabers overhead —”

“Nothing like that,” Brucco snapped. “I don’t see how a grown man like you can talk such nonsense all the time. There is none of that, of course. Only some final work in the partial survival chamber. That is a compound that connects with the outside — really is a part of the outside — except the most violent life forms are excluded. And even some of those manage to find their way in once in a while.”

“When do I go?” Jason shot the question.

“Tomorrow morning. Get a good night’s sleep first. You’ll need it.”

* * * *

There was one bit of ceremony attendant with the graduation. When Jason came into his office in the morning, Brucco slid a heavy gunclip across the table.

“These are live bullets,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll be needing them. After this your gun will always be loaded.”

They came up to a heavy air lock, the only locked door Jason had seen in the center. While Brucco unlocked it and, threw the bolts a sober-faced eight-year-old with a bandaged leg limped up.

“This is Grif,” Brucco said. “He will stay with you, wherever you go, from now on.”

“My personal bodyguard?” Jason asked, looking down at the stocky child who barely reached his waist.

“You might call him that.” Brucco swung the door open. “Grif tangled with a sawbird, so he won’t be able to do any real work for a while. You yourself admitted that you will never be able to equal a Pyrran, so you should be glad of a little protection.”

“Always a kind word, that’s you Brucco,” Jason said. He bent over and shook hands with the boy. Even the eight-year-olds had a bone-crushing grip.

The two of them entered the lock and Brucco swung the inner door shut behind them. As soon as it was sealed the outer door opened automatically. It was only partly open when Grif’s gun blasted twice. Then they stepped out onto the surface of Pyrrus, over the smoking body of one of its animals.

Very symbolic, Jason thought. He was also bothered by the realization that he hadn’t remembered to look for something coming in. Then, too, he couldn’t even identify the beast from its charred remains. He glanced around, hoping he would be able to fire first himself, next time.

This was an unfulfilled hope. The few beasts that came their way were always seen first by the boy. After an hour of this, Jason was so irritated that he blasted an evil looking thorn plant out of existence. He hoped that Grif wouldn’t look too closely at it. Of course the boy did.

“That plant wasn’t close. It is stupid to waste good ammunition on a plant,” Grif said.

There was no real trouble during the day. Jason ended by being bored, though soaked by the frequent rainstorms. If Grif was capable of carrying on a conversation, he didn’t show it. All Jason’s gambits failed. The following day went the same way. On the third day, Brucco appeared and looked Jason carefully up and down.

“I don’t like to say it, but I suppose you are as ready to leave now as you ever will be. Change the virus filter noseplugs every day. Always check boots for tears and metalcloth suiting for rips. Medikit supplies renewed once a week.”

“And wipe my nose and wear my galoshes. Anything else?” Jason asked.

Brucco started to say something, then changed his mind. “Nothing that you shouldn’t know well by now. Keep alert. And . . . good luck.” He followed up the words with a crushing handshake that was totally unexpected. As soon as the numbness left Jason’s hand, he and Grif went out through the large entrance lock.