In the Beginning (13 page)

There still was a nucleus of guards clustered around Hawkins and Ku Sui, but their numbers were growing smaller as more and more of them realized the game was up for the three tyrants.

Then the room was suddenly crowded, and I smiled happily. June and her brother had roused the people! They were coming! I leaned against the railing, weak with strain, and watched as the angry, newly-free Callistans swept the remaining guards out of the way and exacted a terrible revenge on Hawkins and Kolgar Novin and even the dead body of Ku Sui.

***

The lynching was over eventually, and the guards, taking charge in the name of the people, managed to restore some semblance of order. Blankets were thrown over the mutilated bodies on the floor.

Then, with grim methodicality, the Callistans completed the job of wrecking Hawkins’ machines. The room was a shambles by the time they were through.

June finally made her way through the confusion to my side. She looked up in concern, and ran her fingers gently over the angry red lines the collar had left on my throat.

“You were wonderful,” she said. She was crying from relief and gratitude, and I took her in my arms and held her.

Then I released her. “Let’s go downstairs,” I said. “I need some fresh air after that battle.”

We left the building and I stood in the warm artificial sunlight of Callisto City, recovering my strength.

“I’ve heard how you overthrew them,” June said. “But I don’t understand how you survived the choking.”

“I’m stubborn,” I said simply. I was hiding the truth from her—the bitter truth that I wanted no one to know. “I just wouldn’t let them strangle me, that’s all.” I grinned.

She took a deep breath. “You know, I just thought of something—we’re not wearing collars, and yet we don’t mind the air! It’s not polluted any more!”

I stopped to consider that, and then shook my head in disgust as the obvious answer came to me. “Those worms! You know what was causing the pollution?”

“No,” she said.

“It must have been maintained artificially by one of those machines up there! I remember, now—Hawkins was quite a chemist. He must have synthesized some chemical that polluted this air, and then gave your father enough leads so he could develop a filter to counteract it. It was a devilishly well-planned scheme, neatly calculated to reduce Callisto City to a state of servitude!”

We took a few steps away. It was bright midday, but I could see the bulk of Jupiter high in the sky above the dome. In the great square in front of the capitol building, a huge golden mountain was growing—a heap of discarded collars, getting bigger and bigger by the moment as the Callistans hurled the impotent symbols of their slavery into the junkheap. For the first time, I saw smiling, happy faces on Callisto. The air was pure again, and the time of troubles was over. It didn’t cost anything to breathe on Callisto any more.

The happiest face of all was June’s. She was beaming radiantly, glowing with pride and happiness. “I’m glad I decided to rescue you,” she said. “You looked so brave, and strong, and—lonely. So I took a chance and pulled you away.”

I looked at her sadly, not saying anything.

“Where will you stay?” she asked. “There’s a flat available next door to mine—”

I shook my head. “No. I’m leaving. I must leave immediately.”

The sunshine left her face at once, and she looked at me in surprise and shock.
“Leaving?”

I nodded. “I can’t stay here, June. I’ve done my job, and I’m going.”

I didn’t wait for another word. I strode away, and she took a couple of steps after me and then stopped. I heard her sobbing, but I didn’t turn back. How could tell her that I loved her? How could I dare to love her? Me—an android. A laboratory creation? Sure, I was stronger than a human being—the factor Hawkins didn’t figure on. Only an android could have withstood that choking.

I have human drives, human ambitions. When you cut me, I bleed red. You can only tell by microscopic analysis that I’m not human. But resemblance isn’t enough. I couldn’t fool myself, and I wouldn’t fool June. I couldn’t allow her to waste herself on something like me. She’d make a good mother, someday.

I turned away, feeling bitter and empty, and made my way through the streets crowded with jubilant Callistans. In my mind’s eye I could see June’s pale, bewildered face, and my synthetic heart wept for her. She’d never understand why I was leaving.

I looked up through the dome at the black curtain of the skies, at mighty, lonely, unapproachable Jupiter. It was a fitting challenge for me. We had a lot in common, big Jupiter and I. I knew where I was going, now, and I couldn’t wait to get there.

Citadel of Darkness

(1957)

As 1956 moved along, my new career as a science-fiction writer, and all the rest of my life as well, began to expand in ways that I would scarcely have dared to fantasize only a couple of years previously. I continued selling stories at the same torrid pace, and in May succeeded in placing one with the prestigious magazine
Galaxy,
edited by the exceedingly difficult, tough-minded Horace Gold. Selling one to him was a big step forward for me. In June I got my Columbia degree and set up shop as a full-time writer. Randall Garrett and I spent two weeks that summer writing the novel for John W. Campbell that we had so grandly imagined selling him the year before—
The Dawning Light,
it was called—and he bought it in August. Later that month I married my college girlfriend, Barbara Brown, and we found a splendid five-room apartment on Manhattan’s elegant West End Avenue, a short walk from the Columbia campus but light-years distant from the squalid hotel room where I had been living for the past three years. About ten days later I attended the World Science Fiction Convention, where I was greeted as a colleague by science-fiction writers like Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson who were old enough to be my father, and where to my amazement I was given the Hugo award as that year’s most promising new author.

It was all pretty startling. I was getting published all up and down the spectrum of science-fiction magazines, from
Astounding
and
Galaxy
at one end to
Amazing
and
Fantastic
at the other, and soon after the convention I had deals with two book publishers, Ace (for an original novel) and Gnome (for a two-volume reprint of the “Robert Randall” series from
Astounding.)
Everything was happening at once.

In the midst of it all I plugged away at my Ziff-Davis obligations, visiting Paul Fairman’s midtown office two or three times a month to bring him new stories. He used “Citadel of Darkness,” which I wrote in June, 1956 a couple of days after my Columbia graduation ceremony, in
Fantastic
for March, 1957. Once more I turned the four-stories-in-an-issue trick, for “Citadel,” a “Ralph Burke” story, was accompanied by a story under my own name, one as “Calvin Knox,” and one as “Hall Thornton.” I wasn’t taking anything for granted, but it was pretty clear to me by this time that what was going on wasn’t likely to stop, and that, improbable as it had once seemed, I really was going to be able to earn my living as a writer.

The wavering green lines of the mass detector told me that there was a planet ahead where no planet ought to be, and my skin started to crawl. I checked the star-guide a second time, running down the tight-packed printed columns with deliberate care.

Karen’s soft hand brushed lightly across my shoulder, and I glanced up. “The guide doesn’t say anything about planets in this sector of space,” I told her.

“Have you checked the coordinates?”

I nodded grimly. “I’ve checked everything. There’s a planet out ahead, approximately two light-months from us. And you know what it has to be.”

Her fingers dug tightly into my neckmuscles.

“It can’t be anything else. There’s no star within sight, none supposed to be here, and yet the mass detector’s popping like sixty. The only answer is a wandering sunless world—and there’s only one of those.” 

“It’s Lanargon,” she said simply. “Lanargon. The marauder world.”

I turned away and busied myself over the control panel. My fingers flew lightly over the computer levers, and microrelays clicked and buzzed behind the green plexilite screen.

After a moment, Karen said, “What are you doing?”

“Setting up a landing orbit,” I told her without looking up. “As long as we’re here, we might as well investigate. We can’t pass up a chance like this.”

I expected opposition, but I was surprised. All she said was, “How soon before we land?” No nervousness, no hesitation. She looked a lot cooler than I felt as I went about the job of preparing for our landing on Lanargon, the galaxy’s most dreaded—and most mysterious—planet.

***

It was in the year 3159 that the Terran colony on Faubia III was wiped out by armed attack, and word came to the universe that war was with us again. The worlds of mankind looked at each other in suspicion and fear. Five centuries of galactic amity had brought about the feeling that armed strife was a buried relic of antiquity—and then, without warning, came the attack on Faubia III.

There were universal denials. A year later, Metagol II was sacked by unknown invaders, and later the same year Vescalor IX, the universe’s greatest source of antivirotic drugs, was conquered.

The circumstances were the same each time. An army of tall men in black spacesuits would descend suddenly upon the unsuspecting planet, destroying its capital, seize control of the planet’s leaders, and carry off plunder. Then, mysteriously as they came, they would depart, always taking many prisoners with them.

The attacks continued. The marauders struck seemingly at random here and there across the face of the galaxy. Trantor was hit in 3163, Vornak IV three years after that. In 3175, Earth itself was subjected to a raid.

The universe recoiled in terror. The Multiworld Federation searched desperately for the answer—and found it. It made us no more comfortable to learn that the marauders were aliens from some far island universe who rode their sunless planet like a giant spaceship, who had crossed the great gulf of space that separated their galaxy from ours and now, under cloak of their virtual invisibility, travelled through our group of worlds, burning, pillaging, and looting as they went.

We were helpless against an invader we could not see. And now, possibly for the first time, someone had taken Lanargon by surprise. The marauder world had crossed our orbit as we returned to Earth from Rigel VI, and it lay squarely in our path, wrapped in its cloak of darkness out there in the eternal black of space.

I watched its bulk grow on the mass detector, and wiped away a trickle of perspiration that had started to crawl down my forehead. Two people—a man and a woman—against a world of the deadliest killers ever known.

As an Earthman, as a member of the Multiworld Federation, it was my duty to aid in Lanargon’s destruction. And I had an idea for doing it.

I locked the ship into automatic, watched the computer buzz twice to confirm that it had taken control, and got up. Karen was still standing behind me. Her face was pale and drawn; all the color seemed to have left it, though her eyes glowed with courage.

She reached out and took my hand as I stepped away from the controls. I folded her hand in both of mine, and squeezed.

“It has to be done, doesn’t it” she asked softly.

I nodded, thinking of the home that awaited us on Earth, the friends, the children. Heroes don’t have to be born; sometimes they’re made by a trajectory-line charted between two worlds.

“It has to be done,” I said. I drew her close. For all I knew, it was going to be the last time.

***

Our ship taxied in slowly, spiralling around Lanargon in ever-narrowing circles. I could see it plainly now from the viewport, a rough, ugly-looking, barren world, boasting not even the drifts of snow that would be a frozen atmosphere. Lanargon was just a ball of rock, seen dimly in the starlight. Great leaping mountains sprang up like dragon’s teeth from the rocky plains beneath. There was no sign of life. None.

I glanced over at Karen, who was strapped securely in her acceleration cradle at my side. She was smiling.

“We’ll be there soon,” I said.

“Good. This suspense is starting to get me. I’d like to get down there and get it over with—whatever it is we’re going to do.”

“I’ve got bad news for you, if you’re in a hurry,” I said. “We may need months before we get through.”

“Why? What will happen?”

“We’re going to tell the universe about Lanargon,” I said. “Where it is, where it may be going, how to come get it. We’re in a pretty empty part of space, though. Even by subradio, it may take weeks before we get within range of some other world.”

“You mean we’re going to stay on Lanargon until you make radio contact with some other planet?”

I nodded. “We’re going to turn ourselves into living signal buoys. We’re going to ride on Lanargon like fleas on a gorilla’s back for a while. I hope they don’t notice us, and just keep on moving until they come close enough to some inhabited planet for us to get out an SOS.”

“And then?”

“Then we get out of here as fast as we can, and wait for the Multiworld Fleet to home in on the coordinates we’ve given and blast Lanargon to the fate it so thoroughly deserves,” I said. “The only problem is staying unfound long enough to give the message. At the moment, we’re well out of range of anyone who could pick it up.”

I leaned back and moistened my dry lips. “Hold tight, kid. We’re almost there.”

***

Within the hour, we had approached Lanargon’s surface and were hovering no more than a hundred miles above, moving into the final stage of our landing. Minutes later, our ship dropped gently down and touched ground.

I was the first one up, and was half into my spacesuit before Karen had climbed out of her acceleration cradle. She followed me into the airlock when she was ready, and together we stepped outside.

It was a dead world. Perhaps it once had had a sun and an atmosphere and the warmth of life, but now it was but the corpse of a planet—inhabited, who know where, by the merciless aliens who had terrorized the universe.