Early Days: More Tales From the Pulp Era
He decided to play along. He knew the jungle might have a way of reducing the odds, if he waited long enough.
“Okay,” he said, letting his tongue run around the rim of his dry mouth once. “It’s too damn hot to argue. Let’s open the ship up and see what’s inside. Then afterward we can decide who gets it.”
“No agreement is necessary,” the girl said evenly. “The ship belongs to us.”
“We can settle that later.”
“It is settled now.”
Massi scowled. He realized that loudmouthed stubbornness would only land him a burned gut. He was outnumbered, and maybe soon the Brazilians would realize he had a fortune in weed on his back. That would give them a double motive for killing him, and he was sure they wouldn’t hesitate. Better a live liar, he thought, than a dead hero.
“The ship is yours,” he said. “I just want the right to stick around and see what’s inside it.”
“Okay,” the girl said. “All right. You are wiser than I thought you were.”
She stepped forward, walking around Massi, and made her way up the little ramp of dirt that the ship had ploughed up in crashing. There was an empty hatch halfway up the side of the ship.
Massi watched the girl. She was wearing tight shorts and a man’s shirt. From the back she didn’t look bad at all. It was only when you saw her face, with its rough skin and beaked nose, its sprawling black eyebrows meeting at midpoint, that you realized why she had gone to the outworlds, where men have different standards of beauty.
She leaned over and pushed at the hatch. It didn’t give. It was part way open, having buckled when the ship landed, and she grabbed the upjutting flange and tugged. Muscles stood out on the surface of her gleaming sweaty skin, but the hatch refused to budge.
Massi came up alongside her and peered into the dark ship through the opening in the hatch. Nothing but darkness showed.
“You’ll have to cut the hatch away,” he said. “It’s the only way to get in.”
She looked up, eyes fiery. “I thank you for the advice! I would never have known!”
Glaring angrily at him, she spun around and gestured to one of the three men waiting below. She crackled some Portuguese at him and he responded by tossing her a small hand torch. Clicking it on with obvious skill, she began to cut a rectangular opening in the side of the ship. The job took about five minutes. Finally she nodded in approval and tossed the torch casually back to the man below. A neatly squared opening, its edges still cherry-red, had been cut where the hatch had been.
She looked at Massi and for an instant a kind of challenge passed between them; she was saying without words, This is a ship from another star. Do you have the guts to go in and have a look?
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s go in.”
He stepped around her and started to lift one jackbooted leg into the ship. She gripped his shoulder and pulled him back.
“Ladies first. You may follow.”
“Your pleasure.”
He followed her into the ship.
If there had originally been some alien kind of atmosphere within the ship, it was gone now. The air of Kothgir II, which was Earthlike air but for the presence of helium instead of nitrogen, had entered when the wall of the ship had ruptured. There was a faint mustiness in the ship, as of some lingering gas.
Massi and the girl moved cautiously. The ship was tilted, which made movement difficult, and to complicate things the single passageway was not high enough for either of them to stand upright. They shuffled up the corridor, half-crouching, moving step by step as if fearing an alien booby-trap.
Jungle cries came from outside, breaking the silence within. A dim reddish light glimmered in the ship. Massi’s eyes adjusted to it quickly. He could see a kind of control panel further ahead, at the uppermost end of the ship, and some sort of cabinet facing it. Gradually they worked their way along the 45-degree slope of the floor to the front of the ship.
There they saw the aliens.
“Children!” the girl breathed in surprise, with a tenderness Massi had not thought her capable of.
Indeed the aliens did look like children, but nightmare children. There were two of them, lying in some sort of acceleration cradle, floating on a liquid bath like two enwombed fetuses. They were no more than three feet long, naked, their bodies covered with glistening green scales. Small legs terminated in splayed three-toed feet; the arms seemed almost boneless. Their eyes, protuberant, were covered by transparent lids. A strut of the cradle had broken loose in the crash and had fallen across them, apparently breaking the arm of the leftmost alien. They both seemed to be alive, but badly jarred by the crash, unconscious, and probably suffering from internal injuries. Massi heard the sound of soft moans.
“The poor ones,” the girl murmured. “They are hurt!”
Massi eyed her strangely. It was odd that this strapping ugly six-footer of a girl should feel so moved by the sight of a couple of froglike green aliens. But perhaps it wasn’t so odd after all, he decided. Perhaps somewhere in that well-muscled breast beat a woman’s heart, sensitive to the plight of two pathetic creatures from some other star.
For a moment all considerations of national rivalry seemed to fade. The argument over who owned salvage rights to the ship was forgotten. The girl looked at Massi and said, “We must help them.”
“How? I’m no doctor.”
“We will radio for a doctor. But meanwhile—they are in pain.”
Massi stared at the wide slack mouths, the floppy forearms. These two pitiful creatures had piloted this ship from what unknown star, he wondered? Deneb? Betelgeuse? Rigel?
He was starting to get cramped from bending over so long. The ship’s musty air bothered him. And he did not share the girl’s maternal sympathy for the aliens. They were spacemen who had cracked up. Too bad; but why weep over them? Nobody was weeping for Weber, eaten alive by a swarming pitful of acid-tongued insects. Nor for Collins, sliced in half by the beak of a swooping bird.
These were alien beings. For all he knew, the advance scouts of an invasion. But yet the big rawboned girl was looking at him sharply, and possibly for the first time in her life her eyes were misting with tears. Massi felt a sudden inexplicable gush of compassion—for her, for the two battered little aliens, for the three dead men back in the jungle, for the whole damned universe.
He said, “I’ve got a batch of latimeria-weeds in my rucksack. Maybe it’ll ease their pain a little. Or maybe it’ll kill them. We could try it.”
She nodded. “Si. It would ease their pain.”
Frowning at himself and wondering why he was doing this, he hunched around and said to the girl, “Undo the straps and take out one of the stems. Just one.”
She fumbled with the thick straps, pulled the rucksack open, and lifted out a stem. Turning, he took it from her. It was thick and succulent, dripping with the sap from which drugs could be made. The stem he was holding had a market value of $1000, cash down. Three men had died so he could bring it back. And now he was giving it away.
Shaking off the thoughts, he broke the stem in half and, bending, thrust one half into each of the drooping alien mouths. He pinched the outer end of the stalk to start the sap running downward. Raw, the sap was strong stuff, but it did afford relief from pain.
As the first drops of the fluid fell into their gullets, the aliens emitted small sighing noises. Massi nodded. The treatment would soothe them.
“Let us go,” the girl whispered. “We shall radio for a doctor. These beings must not be allowed to die.”
Massi raised an eyebrow.
“Do we radio for an American doctor or a Brazilian one? We haven’t settled that matter yet.”
Her look was venomous. “You agreed to relinquish your claim!”
“So I did. But at least we ought to notify both settlements. You Brazilians have no right to keep this thing a secret. Not when it’s as big as finding a couple of live extraterrestrials.”
As they climbed through the opening in the side of t
he ship she said, “Perhaps you are right. You may notify your base—a little later.”
Two minutes after they had quitted the ship, the three Brazilian men were setting up a midget radio transmitter, while the girl stood to one side and snapped orders and what Massi took to be coruscating insults. She was definitely the boss. She knew it and her three men knew it, without question.
Massi had run across her sort often enough in the outworlds. They were the women who were too big and plain to be attractive to most men, and too rough to admit to themselves that they didn’t like the situation. They were as strong as men in most ways, and out here in the pioneer worlds they did men’s work.
Massi was willing to bet this specimen had never let a man lay a hand on her—or, if she had, she had made the man crawl for it first.
At another time, Massi thought, taming this girl might be an interesting challenge. Now he was just interested in getting out of the jungle alive and in letting the American outfit know what was lying here in the jungle.
He watched while they rigged up the transmitter. When it was ready, a minute or two later, the girl snatched at the microphone and shouted harshly into it:
“Allo! Allo! Capitan Jacopetti here. Are you there?”
That was as far as the conversation got. Captain Jacopetti never had a chance to find out whether the people at the other end heard her or not. For suddenly one of the men gasped and said, “Quick! Look over there!”
Whirling, Massi looked over his shoulder in the direction the panicky Brazilian was indicating. He saw the two alien beings standing at the lip of the cut-away entry hatch. They were surveying the scene with big glittering froggy eyes, clinging weakly to the ship to support themselves with one hand. In the other they held stubby metal tubes that looked like weapons.
Massi didn’t wait to find out whether they actually were. He sprang forward, bowling over Captain Jacopetti, knocking her away from the transmitter. Together they rolled over into a cluster of foul-smelling shrubbery. The three Brazilians weren’t so fortunate. They remained standing, one pointing in fright at the alien, the other two fumbling for their weapons.
The aliens held out the metal tubes. Abruptly a sheet of bluish radiance came fanning out from them, and swiftly and noiselessly the Brazilians evaporated above the waists. For one weird moment three trunkless pairs of legs stood erect; then they crumbled.
Hidden in the underbrush, Massi knew he had a moment or two before the aliens fired again. Yanking out his blaster, he adjusted the aperture to wide-beam, stepped down the intensity to a stun-bolt, and lifted the weapon to fire. He was too late. Before he could fire the woman at his side had squeezed her own weapon twice. Charred patches the size of baseballs appeared in the throats of the aliens. Like marionettes with their strings suddenly cut, the diminutive creatures went limp and toppled forward, falling from their perch in the hatchway and landing sprawled on the ground.
Angrily Massi snapped, “You shouldn’t have done that. I was just going to stun them!”
“How could I know what you intended? Killing them was best!”
“If we had stunned them we could have brought them back alive. Questioned them, find out where they were from. But no. You had to kill them.”
“They murdered Riccardo and Paolo and Carlo. They deserved to die.” Anger made her voice quiver. Flecks of spittle appeared on her chin. “I wish I could have killed them slower!”
She rose from the underbrush, and Massi followed her. The three dead Brazilians weren’t pleasant to look at; the blue radiance had simply sheared off the upper halves of their body, demolecularized them in an instant. Massi noticed that the beam had also destroyed the radio transmitter.
The girl was inspecting the aliens, prodding them roughly with her booted toes to see if they lived. It was hard to believe that this girl was the same one who had called the aliens children fifteen minutes ago and who had, misty-eyed, implored Massi to ease their pain. She stooped and pried one of the metal tubes from a dead alien hand. Massi snatched up the other, and together they examined the weapon.
“Better be careful,” he cautioned. “No telling which way you’re pointing that thing.”
“It is not pointing at you. Fear nothing.”
Indeed the danger of an accidental discharge seemed slim. The tube he held seemed to be hollow and open at both ends. Holding it gingerly, he explored its surface, finding no triggering device of any sort. It was just a hollow metal tube. He shrugged and tucked the tube away in his rucksack. Let the scientists back at the base puzzle out how it works, he thought. He could testify that it did work, somehow.
He grinned cynically and looked down at the dead aliens, who looked now like a pair of rag dolls. “That’s gratitude for you, isn’t it? Give them medicine and the minute they’re strong enough to walk they blow your head off.” He scowled. “But I guess I shouldn’t expect gratitude from them. Not from aliens. Maybe in their culture the proper thing to do is to kill the doctor who fixes you up.”
“There would be few doctors in such a culture.”
“Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they saw the radio operating and didn’t want you to send back word about them.”
“Or perhaps,” the girl said, “they are Haters. They were so consumed with hatred for other beings that they destroyed on sight.”
“I still say you shouldn’t have killed them. Maybe there was some misunderstanding—”
She laughed scornfully. “Fool! Woman! I killed them because they deserved to be killed!”
“Stunning would have been good enough,” he said, ignoring the insults. “But you were bloodthirsty, weren’t you?”
“And you are softhearted, then.”
She seemed to be regretting her moment of weakness in the ship, Massi thought. Maybe that was why she had iced up so swiftly. Well, no sense arguing with her about it. It had been hotheaded to kill instead of stun, but the aliens were dead and that was all there was to it.
She said, “Besides, my blaster is not equipped for stunning. It can only kill. I did not know hand-blasters could do both.”
“The new models can. The new American models, anyway.”
“May I see your weapon?”
He shrugged and handed her the gun butt-first for inspection. The instant he parted with it, he knew he had made a mistake, one of the few really boneheaded goofs he had ever made. She grinned coldly at him, flipped the safety off, and said, “Put up the hands, please.”
“What the hell are you pulling?”
“We are forty miles from my settlement, only a dozen from yours. In the nature of things you will reach your people many hours before I reach mine. That would not be so good for me. I would still be walking through the jungle when your men had come to view the ship. You will come with me, therefore. Or I will kill you here.”
Massi’s jaw sagged. Rage coursed through him, rage directed only at himself. Under-estimation was fatal when dealing with this girl, it seemed. He hadn’t even considered the fact that the alien ship was far closer to the American settlement than the Brazilian, and that unless she stopped him he would have been able to notify his base long before she could reach hers. So she had tried a trick so old it had long white whiskers, and now she had both guns and he had none.
There was nothing for him to say. He was too choked with shame to want to speak. She had called him a fool and a woman, and she had been right. He bit down hard on his lip in impotent frustration. His eyes could not meet her dark, mocking ones. Tricked, gunless, deprived of the biggest prize in the universe by his own unaccountable stupidity, he was sick with self-reproach.
“Okay,” she said, grinning gaily. “You will walk ahead of me. We should reach my settlement in two days if we do not waste time.”
It was mid-afternoon when they set out, Massi in the lead and the girl directing him from behind. The temperature was slowly dropping back from its noonday peak, but it was well over 100 anyway. Grimly Massi forced his bitter self-anger to subside; he was going to need
his wits about him just to survive the jungle trek.
He said nothing, nor did she make conversation. At least she had the thoughtfulness not to taunt him, Massi thought.
He considered the situation. A small alien ship had wandered into the Kothgir system and had crashed. Obviously it was an advance scout of some kind. It was imperative that he got word back to his base about the landing; the Brazilians might or might not decide to let the other space-colonizing nations know about the possible peril, but he couldn’t risk that. He had to get back to his settlement and bring the news. Besides, the colony could use the metal of the ship, if nothing else. He didn’t want all that good metal to fall into the hands of the Brazilians.
So he had gone and handed his gun over to this brawny wench, and now he was on his way eastward, heading in the wrong direction for him. He cursed himself bitterly. He wondered about ways of winning back the advantage.
They covered eight miles by nightfall. It was slow work, hacking a path through the thick jungle, keeping your eyes cocked for unfriendly wildlife, taking each step slow for fear of a hidden pit. Massi was bone-tired by the time Kothgir slipped below the horizon and the pale blue moons had risen, two of them brightening the sky. Night-cries sounded in the jungle now. The bigger carnivores, having slept through the steaming day, now would prowl in search of their night’s meal.
Massi wondered what the girl was planning to do. Usually two people slept in shifts in the jungle, one standing guard at all times. But the girl would never dare relax. She would have to remain awake all night for fear Massi would seize the blasters. But if she dozed, even for a moment, he thought—
They settled down in a clearing by the bank of a small turgid stream for the night. But neither slept. They sat cross-legged ten feet apart, watching each other. For a while Massi pretended to be asleep, watching the girl through slitted lids to see if she would relax guard. She remained awake, staring at him coldly, never easing up.
The girl was superhuman, he decided. She was about as feminine as a tank, and twice as deadly. When the sun finally scattered the night, she was fresh and ready to go, seemingly not at all fatigued by her sleepless night. And Massi was perfectly willing to believe she intended to stay awake until they reached the Brazilian base.