Planet of the Damned

  X

  "It's suicide," the taller guard grumbled.

  "Mine, not yours, so don't worry about it," Brion barked at him."Your job is to remember your orders and keep them straight.Now--let's hear them again."

  The guard rolled his eyes up in silent rebellion and repeated in atoneless voice: "We stay here in the car and keep the motor runningwhile you go inside the stone pile there. We don't let anybody inthe car and we try and keep them clear of the car--short of shootingthem, that is. We don't come in, no matter what happens or what itlooks like, but wait for you here. Unless you call on the radio, inwhich case we come in with the automatics going and shoot the placeup, and it doesn't matter who we hit. This will be done only asa last resort."

  "See if you can't arrange that last resort thing," the other guardsaid, patting the heavy blue barrel of his weapon.

  "I meant that _last_ resort," Brion said angrily. "If any guns gooff without my permission you will pay for it, and pay with yournecks. I want that clearly understood. You are here as a rear guardand a base for me to get back to. This is my operation and minealone--unless I call you in. Understood?"

  He waited until all three men had nodded in agreement, then checkedthe charge on his gun--it was fully loaded. It would be foolish togo in unarmed, but he had to. One gun wouldn't save him. He put itaside. The button radio on his collar was working and had a strongenough signal to get through any number of walls. He took off hiscoat, threw open the door and stepped out into the searingbrilliance of the Disan noon.

  There was only the desert silence, broken by the steady throb ofthe car's motor behind him. Stretching away to the horizon in everydirection was the eternal desert of sand. The keep stood nearby,solitary, a massive pile of black rock. Brion plodded closer,watching for any motion from the walls. Nothing stirred. Thehigh-walled, irregularly shaped construction sat in a ponderoussilence. Brion was sweating now, only partially from the heat.

  He circled the thing, looking for a gate. There wasn't one at groundlevel. A slanting cleft in the stone could be climbed easily, but itseemed incredible that this might be the only entrance. A completecircuit proved that it was. Brion looked unhappily at the slantingand broken ramp, then cupped his hands and shouted loudly.

  "I'm coming up. Your radio doesn't work any more. I'm bringing themessage from Nyjord that you have been waiting to hear." This wasa slight bending of the truth without fracturing it. There was noanswer--just the hiss of wind-blown sand against the rock and themutter of the car in the background. He started to climb.

  The rock underfoot was crumbling and he had to watch where he puthis feet. At the same time he fought a constant impulse to look up,watching for anything falling from above. Nothing happened. When hereached the top of the wall he was breathing hard; sweat moistenedhis body. There was still no one in sight. He stood on an unevenlyshaped wall that appeared to circle the building. Instead of havinga courtyard inside it, the wall was the outer face of the structure,the domed roof rising from it. At varying intervals dark openingsgave access to the interior. When Brion looked down, the sand carwas just a dun-colored bump in the desert, already far behind him.

  Stooping, he went through the nearest door. There was still no onein sight. The room inside was something out of a madman's funhouse.It was higher than it was wide, irregular in shape, and more like ahallway than a room. At one end it merged into an incline thatbecame a stairwell. At the other it ended in a hole that vanishedin darkness below. Light of sorts filtered in through slots andholes drilled into the thick stone wall. Everything was built of thesame crumble-textured but strong rock. Brion took the stairs. Aftera number of blind passages and wrong turns he saw a stronger lightahead, and went on. There was food, metal, even artifacts of theunusual Disan design in the different rooms he passed through. Yetno people. The light ahead grew stronger, and the last passagewayopened and swelled out until it led into the large central chamber.

  This was the heart of the strange structure. All the rooms,passageways and halls existed just to give form to this giganticchamber. The walls rose sharply, the room being circular in crosssection and growing narrower towards the top. It was a truncatedcone, since there was no ceiling; a hot blue disk of sky cast lighton the floor below.

  On the floor stood a knot of men who stared at Brion.

  Out of the corner of his eyes, and with the very periphery of hisconsciousness, he was aware of the rest of the room--barrels,stores, machinery, a radio transceiver, various bundles and heapsthat made no sense at first glance. There was no time to lookcloser. Every fraction of his attention was focused on the muffledand hooded men.

  He had found the enemy.

  Everything that had happened to him so far on Dis had beenpreparation for this moment. The attack in the desert, the escape,the dreadful heat of sun and sand. All this had tempered andprepared him. It had been nothing in itself. Now the battle wouldbegin in earnest.

  None of this was conscious in his mind. His fighter's reflexes benthis shoulders, curved his hands before him as he walked softly inbalance, ready to spring in any direction. Yet none of this wasreally necessary. All the danger so far was nonphysical. When he didgive conscious thought to the situation he stopped, startled. Whatwas wrong here? None of the men had moved or made a sound. How couldhe even know they were men? They were so muffled and wrapped incloth that only their eyes were exposed.

  No doubt, however, existed in Brion's mind. In spite of muffledcloth and silence, he knew them for what they were. The eyes wereempty of expression and unmoving, yet were filled with the samenegative emptiness as those of a bird of prey. They could look onlife, death, and the rending of flesh with the same lack of interestand compassion. All this Brion knew in an instant of time, withoutwords being spoken. Between the time he lifted one foot and walked astep he understood what he had to face. There could be no doubt, notto an empathetic.

  From the group of silent men poured a frost-white wave of unemotion.An empathetic shares what other men feel. He gets his knowledge oftheir reaction by sensing lightly their emotions, the surges ofinterest, hate, love, fear, desire, the sweep of large and smallsensations that accompany all thought and action. The empatheticis always aware of this constant and silent surge, whether he makesthe effort to understand it or not. He is like a man glancing acrossthe open pages of a tableful of books. He can see that the type, words,paragraphs, thoughts are there, even without focusing his attentionto understand any of it.

  Then how does the man feel when he glances at the open books andsees only blank pages? The books are there--the words are not. Heturns the pages of one, of the others, flipping the pages, searchingfor meaning. There is no meaning. All of the pages are blank.

  This was the way in which the magter were blank, without emotions.There was a barely sensed surge and return that must have beenneural impulses on a basic level--the automatic adjustments of nerveand muscle that keep an organism alive. Nothing more. Brion reachedfor other sensations, but there was nothing there to grasp. Eitherthese men were without emotions, or they were able to block themfrom his detection; it was impossible to tell which.

  Very little time had passed while Brion made these discoveries. Theknot of men still looked at him, silent and unmoving. They weren'texpectant, their attitude could not have been called one ofinterest. But he had come to them and now they waited to find outwhy. Any questions or statements they spoke would be superfluous,so they didn't speak. The responsibility was his.

  "I have come to talk with Lig-magte. Who is he?" Brion didn't likethe tiny sound his voice made in the immense room.

  One of the men gave a slight motion to draw attention to himself.None of the others moved. They still waited.

  "I have a message for you," Brion said, speaking slowly to fill thesilence of the room and the emptiness of his thoughts. This had tobe handled right. But what was right? "I'm from the Foundation inthe city, as you undoubtedly know. I've been talking to the peopleof Nyjord. They have a message for you."

  The sil
ence grew longer. Brion had no intention of making this amonologue. He needed facts to operate, to form an opinion. Lookingat the silent forms was telling him nothing. Time stretched taut,and finally Lig-magte spoke.

  "The Nyjorders are going to surrender."

  It was an impossibly strange sentence. Brion had never realizedbefore how much of the content of speech was made up of emotion.If the man had given it a positive emphasis, perhaps said it withenthusiasm, it would have meant, "Success! The enemy is going tosurrender!" This wasn't the meaning.

  With a rising inflection on the end it would have been a question."Are they going to surrender?" It was neither of these. The sentencecarried no other message than that contained in the simplestmeanings of the separate words. It had intellectual connotations,but these could only be gained from past knowledge, not from thesound of the words. There was only one message they were preparedto receive from Nyjord. Therefore Brion was bringing the message.If that was not the message Brion was bringing the men here werenot interested.

  This was the vital fact. If they were not interested he could haveno further value to them. Since he came from the enemy, he was theenemy. Therefore he would be killed. Because this was vital to hisexistence, Brion took the time to follow the thought through. Itmade logical sense--and logic was all he could depend on now. Hecould be talking to robots or alien creatures, for all the humanresponse he was receiving.

  "You can't win this war--all you can do is hurry your own deaths."He said this with as much conviction as he could, realizing at thesame time that it was wasted effort. No flicker of response stirredin the men before him. "The Nyjorders know you have the cobaltbombs, and they have detected your jump-space projector. They can'ttake any more chances. They have pushed the deadline closer by anentire day. There are one and a half days left before the bombs falland you are all destroyed. Do you realize what that means--"

  "Is that the message?" Lig-magte asked.

  "Yes," Brion said.

  Two things saved his life then. He had guessed what would happen assoon as they had his message, though he hadn't been sure. But eventhe suspicion had put him on his guard. This, combined with thereflexes of a Winner of the Twenties, was barely enough to enablehim to survive.

  From frozen mobility Lig-magte had catapulted into headlong attack.As he leaped forward he drew a curved, double-edged blade from underhis robes. It plunged unerringly through the spot where Brion's bodyhad been an instant before.

  There had been no time to tense his muscles and jump, just the spaceof time to relax them and fall to one side. His reasoning mindjoined the battle as he hit the floor. Lig-magte plunged by him,turning and bringing the knife down at the same time. Brion's footlashed out and caught the other man's leg, sending him sprawling.

  They were both on their feet at the same instant, facing each other.Brion now had his hands clasped before him in the unarmed man'sbest defense against a knife, the two arms protecting the body,the two hands joined to beat aside the knife arm from whicheverdirection it came. The Disan hunched low, flipped the knife quicklyfrom hand to hand, then thrust it again at Brion's midriff.

  Only by the merest fractional margin did Brion evade the attack forthe second time. Lig-magte fought with utter violence. Every actionwas as intense as possible, deadly and thorough. There could be onlyone end to this unequal contest if Brion stayed on the defensive.The man with the knife had to win.

  With the next charge Brion changed tactics. He leaped inside thethrust, clutching for the knife arm. A burning slice of pain cutacross his arm, then his fingers clutched the tendoned wrist. Theyclamped down hard, grinding shut, compressing with the tighteningintensity of a closing vise.

  It was all he could do simply to hold on. There was no science init, just his greater strength from exercise and existence on aheavier planet. All of this strength went to his clutching hand,because he held his own life in that hand, forcing away the knifethat wanted to terminate it forever. Nothing else mattered--neitherthe frightening force of the knees that thudded into his body northe hooked fingers that reached for his eyes to tear them out. Heprotected his face as well as he could, while the nails tore furrowsthrough his flesh and the cut on his arm bled freely. These wereonly minor things to be endured. His life depended on the grasp ofthe fingers of his right hand.

  There was a sudden immobility as Brion succeeded in clutchingLig-magte's other arm. It was a good grip, and he could hold the armimmobilized. They had reached stasis, standing knee to knee, theirfaces only a few inches apart. The muffling cloth had fallen fromthe Disan's face during the struggle, and empty, frigid eyes staredinto Brion's. No flicker of emotion crossed the harsh planes of theother man's face. A great puckered white scar covered one cheek andpulled up a corner of the mouth in a cheerless grimace. It wasfalse; there was still no expression here, even when the pain mustbe growing more intense.

  Brion was winning--if none of the watchers broke the impasse.His greater weight and strength counted now. The Disan would haveto drop the knife before his arm was dislocated at the shoulder.He didn't do it. With sudden horror Brion realized that he wasn'tgoing to drop it--no matter what happened.

  A dull, hideous snap jerked through the Disan's body and the armhung limp and dead. No expression crossed the man's face. The knifewas still locked in the fingers of the paralyzed hand. With hisother hand Lig-magte reached across and started to pry the bladeloose, ready to continue the battle one-handed. Brion raised hisfoot and kicked the knife free, sending it spinning across the room.

  Lig-magte made a fist of his good hand and crashed it into Brion'sgroin. He was still fighting, as if nothing had changed. Brionbacked slowly away from the man. "Stop it," he said. "You can't winnow. It's impossible." He called to the other men who were watchingthe unequal battle with expressionless immobility. No one answeredhim.

  With a terrible sinking sensation Brion then realized what wouldhappen and what he had to do. Lig-magte was as heedless of his ownlife as he was of the life of his planet. He would press the attackno matter what damage was done to him. Brion had an insane vision ofhim breaking the man's other arm, fracturing both his legs, and thelimbless broken creature still coming forward. Crawling, rolling,teeth bared, since they were the only remaining weapon.

  There was only one way to end it. Brion feinted and the Lig-magte'sarm moved clear of his body. The engulfing cloth was thin andthrough it Brion could see the outlines of the Disan's abdomen andrib cage, the clear location of the great nerve ganglion.

  It was the death blow of kara-te. Brion had never used it on a man.In practice he had broken heavy boards, splintering them instantlywith the short, precise stroke. The stiffened hand moving forwardin a sudden surge, all the weight and energy of his bodyconcentrated in his joined fingertips. Plunging deep into theother's flesh.

  Killing, not by accident or in sudden anger. Killing because thiswas the only way the battle could possibly end.

  Like a ruined tower of flesh, the Disan crumpled and fell.

  Dripping blood, exhausted, Brion stood over the body of Lig-magteand stared at the dead man's allies.

  Death filled the room.