Perilous Planets Part 20

No wonder Lelia, and later Xylla, had palled on him. No wonder none of the other mortal women he had slept with had ever been able to give him what he wanted. No wonder he had come back, after twelve futile years, to his true love.

The Virgin was matchless. There were none like her. None.

He was almost to the cheekbone now, but still no starlit sweep of blue rose up to break the monotony of the mesa. His eyes ached from strain and expectation. His hands trembled uncontrollably.

And then, suddenly, he found himself standing on the lip of a huge, waterless basin.

He stared, dumbfounded. Then he raised his eyes and saw the distant coppice of an eyebrow out-lined against the sky. He followed the line of the eyebrow to where it curved inward and became the barren ridge that once had been the gentle isthmus separating the blue lakes- Before the water had drained away. Before the subterranean pumping system had ceased to function, probably as a result of the same seismic disturbance that had created the chimney.

He had been too impetuous, too eager to possess his true, love. It had never occurred to him that she could have changed, that- No, he would not believe it! Believing meant that the whole nightmarish ascent of the chin-cliff had been for nothing. Be-lieving meant that his whole life was without purpose.

He lowered his eyes, half expecting, half hoping to see the blue water welling back into the empty socket. But all he saw was the bleak lake bottom - and its residue- And such a strange residue. Scatterings of gray, sticklike objects, curiously shaped, sometimes joined together. Almost like - like- Marten shrank back. He wiped" his mouth furiously. He turned and began to run.

But he did not .run far, not merely because his breath gave out, but because, before he ran any farther, he had to know what he was going to do. Instinctively he had headed for the chin-cliff. But would becoming a heap of broken bones on the neck- ridge be any different, basically, from drowning in one of the lakes?

He paused in the starlight, sank to his knees. Revulsion shook him. How could he have been so naive, even when he was 20, as to believe that he was the only one?

Certainly he was the only Earthman - but the Virgin was an old, old woman, and in her youth she had had many suitors, conquering her by whatever various means they could devise, and symbolic-ally dying in the blue deeps of her eyes.

Their very bones attested to her popularity.

What did you do when you learned that your G.o.ddess had feet of clay? What did you do when you discovered that your true love was a wh.o.r.e?

Marten wiped his mouth again. There was one thing that you did not do- You did not sleep with her.

Dawn was a pale promise in the east. The stars had begun to fade. Marten stood-on the edge of the chin-cliff, waiting for the day.

He remembered a man who had climbed a mountain cen-turies ago and buried a chocolate bar on the summit. A ritual of some kind, meaningless to the uninitiated.

Standing there on the mesa, Marten buried several items of his own. He buried his boyhood and he buried Rise Up, My Love! He buried the villa in California, and he buried the cottage in Connecticut. Last of all - with regret, but with finality - he buried his mother.

He waited till the false morning had pa.s.sed, till the first golden fingers of the sun reached out and touched his tired face. Then he started down.

What has universal currency but no price? A symbol.

And who earns the symbol of highest value?

THE SEEKERS.

By E. C. Tubb The head was becoming too Byzantine in the exaggerated torment of the face.

Intalgo leaned back, frowning as he studied his work. The torment belonged, certainly, the por-trait was that of a man on a cross. Any man on any cross and from what he knew crucifixion was a most agonizing form of death. But he really knew so little. He had never seen the face of a crucified man and the work lacked that certain conviction which only experience could provide. Disconsolately he leaned farther back and closed his eyes.

Around him the control room whispered its muted, mech-anical lullaby.

He heard it just beneath the level of his consciousness. It was a sound so familiar that, to him, it was silence, but, if the whisper should break, should falter, he would be immediately aware. But the whisper did not change. The ship hummed its smooth way across the void at a pace which left light crawling far behind. A mechanical bullet aimed at a distant star. Another star, another planet, another step on the path of total domina-tion.

Intalgo abruptly opened his eyes, staring at the portrait as if at an enemy, hoping to capture the missing ingredient by sheer surprise. How did a man die on a cross?

There would be the constriction of the chest, the pressure on the lungs, the terrible strain. Surely the head would fall forward or, no, the head would have to be thrown back in order to straighten the throat. But in that case the chin would be more prominent. And what about cyanosis?

The artist sighed and reached for his pigments. He wished that Delray was awake.

The doctor should know.

Delray was fighting. He strode through barbarous halls, the sword in his hand red with blood, his near-naked body dap-pled with ruby flecks. He came to the hall with the throne and halted, eyes narrowed against the leaping glare of giant flam-beaux.

The light dimmed, and from the shadows, something advanced.

It was anthropomorphic and obscene. It yammered a chal-lenge and he roared an answer, springing forward, the sword firm in his hand. Then it was a blur of cut and thrust and vicious slashing. Spurting blood filled the air with its familiar reek. And, above all, was the mad, red, exhilaration of the battle.

The thing died. The hall threw back the echoes of his foot-steps as he marched to the throne. He tensed as something moved beside it, relaxing as the woman came towards him. She was tall, proud, her mouth a ruby smear. Blonde hair trailed the floor at her feet. White flesh gleamed in the dancing light.

He laughed and heard the sword tinkle at his feet. He reach-ed towards her and laughed again as a dagger flashed in her hand. Contemptuously he knocked it aside and clamped his hands on warm, struggling flesh. His blood thrilled with the l.u.s.t for conquest.

He opened his eyes and stared at the satin finish of the ceil-ing.

He swore and rose and swore again as his forehead hit the edge of the cap. A h.e.l.l of a time for the thing to break down. His instinct was to hit out and he slammed his hand against the warm metal, furious at the disturbance of his favourite dream. A tell-tale lit with a cold, green glow and he arrested the movement of his hand poised for a second blow. Grumb-ling, he thrust his head into the field of the cap. The spool must be broken or the selector at fault, but he could fix neither. Malchus would have to do that.

The engineer sat cross-legged before the quiescent bulk of the power unit. The side- edges of his naked feet rested on the metal of the floor, the tips of his supporting fingers touched it to either side. His eyes were closed, but he was not asleep.

He sensed the vibration of the metal, the path of incan-descent particles within the pile, extrapolating from observ-able data to the logical conclusion. There was a tiny hesitancy from one of the turbines. It was almost nothing but the slight imbalance would hinder the path of the bases, deflecting them a trifle to one side. There would be excessive erosion on a certain spot and a rise in temperature. The extra heat would affect the bore of a pipe and create a minor bottleneck. Pressure would tend to build.

Eventually a repair and adjustment would have to be made.

But not now. Not for a long time yet. They would have time to finish this tour before things reached the point where to ignore the trouble would be to court disaster. Then he would oversee the work and guide the rebuilding.

The corners of his mouth lifted in a smile.

To build!

Feldman could never appreciate the beauty of the thought. But the navigator was not an engineer.

Feldman was the man who sent the ship lunging at invisible targets, who checked the radiation of suns and the atmosphere of planets, who lived by the lines of a spectroscope and the im-mutable laws of science. He worshipped the cold beauty of an equation. He was writing a book.

It was a work of love, a hobby, and would be published, if at all, under a pseudonym. He would not risk the sneers of his contemporaries. He wrote: The greatest foreseeable problem of heteros.e.xual crews, the strains and frustrations of thwarted s.e.xual desire, have apparently been overcome by use of the dream-cap in which paradoxical dreams are encouraged with the consequent re-lease of physical strain by the superimposition of erotic and exotic stimuli. A choice of dream-sequences is provided by varied tapes and, it is to be a.s.sumed, the synthetic world so provided compensates for the boredom of s.p.a.ce flight and the lack of congenial company. By congenial I mean female and not incomparable types.

Choice of crew-members is carefully governed both from the view-point of dual- attributes and...

He was wandering. He lifted the pen and sucked thought-fully at the tip. The book was to be about the s.e.xual tensions and problems in s.p.a.ce, but, for some reason, he constantly veered from the subject. Now, for example, he was about to laud the Pentarch for their wisdom in crew-selection when, of course, it wasn't really wisdom at all but plain common sense. He really must stick to the point.

And yet-?

Was it really wise to write the book at all? A man in his position couldn't be too careful, and if the book were published and a whisper of the true ident.i.ty of the author should leak out-?

He frowned and moved his hand to the release. A pressure and the surface was blank. Almost at once he regretted the total erasure - he should have printed it at least if only to make corrections. He could always destroy the thing before they landed. But perhaps if he tried a different approach?

The pen touched the surface and left a scrawl of thin lines. Hastily he jabbed the erase b.u.t.ton again. He was sweating. He hadn't really meant to write that at all.

Intalgo took a smear of pigment on the tip of his thumb and wiped it beneath the staring eyes. He brushed a thin line at the corners of the mouth and touched the contour of a lip. Leaning back he looked at the result.

He frowned his disappointment. He had tried to portray resignation, acceptance, fort.i.tude, the whole overlaid with a patina of pain. Instead he had added a new emotion. Now the face held hate.

He reached towards the erase then halted the movement of his hand. Was he so, wrong? Wouldn't a man so tormented have cause to hate his tormentors? He had tried to picture an ideal and so had tried to achieve the impossible. Art could not deny reality.

Irritably he rose and paced the control room, wondering at his sombre thoughts.

Death, torment, the ultimate in pain -why did his hands insist on creating such things? And why did that face hold a haunting tinge of familiarity?

Musing, he stared at his creation while around him the con-trol room hummed its satisfaction. The hum gave the answer. The control room was too empty - something was missing. Something which, subconsciously, he had tried to replace.

The Pentarch had flung the ship like a challenging hand to-wards the stars. But now that hand was maimed.

The captain was dead.

Intalgo had loved that lonely man. Beneath the cold exterior he had sensed a warm personality and an imagination almost equal to his own. No artist, the captain, but a trained mani-pulator of men. But he had once likened the stars to camp fires burning in the fields of eternity and Intalgo could forgive many things to a man who had held thoughts of such poetic slant.

But he found it hard to forgive the manner of his death.

Such a man should not have died in such a fashion. For him was the n.o.ble ending, the song of trumpets, the heroic pa.s.sing. Not a sharp edge drawn across a naked throat in the silence of his lonely watch. Often the artist wondered what had driven him to take his life. Had he, too, been crucified on the cross of duty and inclination?

Was that his face which looked back from the painted sheet?

Intalgo stared at it with sharpened interest, but it was not the captain. It was not anyone he knew and yet...

He sat, musing, looking at the painted face, remembering the dead.

They had often talked during the long, silent hours between the stars. They had talked of death and of life and the purpose of existence. They had talked of what they did and why they did it.

And the captain had shown his fear.

'Out here,' he'd said, 'we're irritating intruders, rats scut-tling among the granary of the stars. What may we find? Other, older races, perhaps? Strange ways and strange cus-toms and mysteries which we lack the mental equipment to solve. And yet we go on. We have no choice but to go on.' Then he would laugh without humour and his eyes would grow bleak. 'One day we will find something beyond us and, when we do, G.o.d help our ignorance.' He had not waited for that day to come.

They landed on a planet which drowsed beneath the ruddy glare of a dying sun.

The ship was an alien harshness on a rolling plain of yellow dust. An enigmatic cube thrust its squat ebony finger towards the sky. It was the only sign of life the world possessed and it was old. Old beyond their limited imagination.

But they landed to stamp the seal of the Pentarch on a new acquisition of Man.

'We must be armed,' said Delray.

'No need - the entire planet is dead,' said Feldman.

'I must get into that building,' said Malchus.

Intalgo said nothing - a recorder should not speak. But in the log he wrote: Inertia caused normal landing precautions to be taken, but from habit, not from a sense of responsibility. Neither is willing to take the orders of another - each claiming that he has equal right. I am watching the corrosive effects of Democracy and, while it is fascinating in its unexpected nuances of individualism, it can lead only to chaos. These journeys last too long.

Too long - and yet it was as easy to continue as to return and the Pentarch was stern when it came to dealing with failure. More than stern when it dealt with disobedience. Intalgo sighed and closed the log and went to breathe the alien air.

The place had a timeless, dreamlike quality as if a segment of creation had been frozen so that there could be no change, no alteration, no newness or pa.s.sing away.

The air was heavy, stagnant, flattering the echoes of their conversation. Like ants the three others wended their way to the t.i.tanic bulk of the mysterious building.

They walked with arrogance but without harmony. They were individuals, not a team.

Intalgo sighed again. Now the challenging hand was more than maimed - it was clawing itself apart.

Malchus found it first. It was almost buried in the yellow dust and he kicked it free then squatted, looking at it.

It was the part of a machine.

It was tooled and finished in a way he had never seen before but, now that he saw it, the reason was obvious. It glinted and shone with the rainbow pattern of refracted light and the scored surface was designed to eliminate friction. The eddy currents generated when the machine was in operation would keep the surfaces an atom apart.

It was - it must be - the central bearing of an engine which was - it could only be - the drive unit of a....

He blinked and settled himself more comfortably and con-centrated his attention.

A pipe would run from there and meet a shaft which had to run from there and the junction would have to be - there! Then that hollow must hold a swivel-drive leading to...

He sat immersed in the joys of construction.

Feldman found it next.

He snorted at the engineer then stooped as he saw what rested on the sand.

Squatting, he looked at it.

It was crystallized truth.

It was a model so intricate and yet so plain that it was as easy to read as a book.

There was the basic structure of the atom and there were the logical extensions of the formulae pro-pounded by Einstein and there - if he looked very close -were the equations of the three-body problem and those surely must appertain to time itself so that...

Feldman sighed with intellectual satisfaction and settled himself for his greater concentration.

Delray found it next.

He came shouting over to the others and glared at what rested between them.

It was naked satiation.

It was the euphoria of combat, the thrill of physical violence, the tease of mental struggle. It was his own deep, dark heritage of type and it opened before him like a flower within whose petals was to be found all he had ever sought. He sank into it and into an eternal enervating dream.

Intalgo found it the last of all.

He stood murmuring into the recorder, his eyes fastened on the three, distant shapes, frozen in a fresco of bone and flesh and pulsating blood. Around him the air hung like many folds of scented silk.

They have not moved for hours and are obviously unaware of any form of physical discomfort. The thing is divided between them, but it must be some kind of snare.