Kohonnes breathed out across his little
world and made the waters back up and the
stones crawl and the trees writhe abominably.
Why couldn't he distort men's souls also?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The spaceship was changing shape all around him. The curving walls
sloped inward at crazy angles, and the glassine windows bulged like
giant bubbles. The floor was an unending series of little waves, and
the ceiling melted to drop liquid pellets.
"This is _it_!" exulted Grim Thorssen, slamming the levers of his
control board, striving to slip his ship into the tug of the little
planet looming through the starboard window. "Whatever kidnapped our
trading vessels, whatever happened to the Fleet cruisers sent after
them--here it is."
His tawny hair, long uncut, looped over his hard blue eyes as he stared
at the instruments in front of him. Even the hard steeliscite cones and
rods were altering subtly, their shapes fading to reform in different,
twisted patterns. Grim felt a quick stab of fear. Sudden pain changed
his grin to a spasmodic grimace of agony.
"Pirates I don't mind," he gasped, his body jerking suddenly as the
force that bent his spaceship reached inside his body. "I--I'd take on
Black Randolph as quick as down a cup of _yassallel_ right now. But
this thing--"
His head whipped back as spasms tore his chest. Laboring, sweat
standing out on his high forehead, he thought, 'Matter isn't matter
here--not as I know it. A ceiling starts crying steel tears and a
heatlite floor develops a permanent.'
The force was tearing him apart with pain. It came like iron fingers in
his belly and across his ribs. It bent him over so that his face went
purple.
No wonder the Trader Unions lost their big Caravans, packed to their
rivets as they were with priceless radium and korse-210 from Tanit and
the other planets of the suns Deneb and Achernar! The Council thought
at first that it was Black Randolph looting, so the Unions Council
ordered out the cruisers from the Interstellar Fleet to hunt him down.
The cruisers, like the big Caravans, never came back.
Then they sent for Grim Thorssen.
The big Viking throwback was the spot trouble-tripper of the Fleet.
He'd been decorated--and paid in credits--from Antares to Kruger-60
for a brash bravery that ran close to the margins of foolhardiness.
But what looked like recklessness in some men was planned daring with
the blond Nordic. He could think faster and shoot straighter than any
other three men in the Fleet. He had the highest I.Q. that the books
provided for, and black spots on his chest from friendly duels with his
fellow officers using black disintegrater charges. He was smart and
he was crazy and his brother Commanders loved him. They said to each
other, "If anybody can do it, Grim will. He'll find out what grabs the
Caravans and the cruisers."
Well, now he knew. Tortured and strained, bent in a thousand positions
in a matter of minutes, he was sobbing out the thought that he wished
he hadn't. There wasn't anything you could do to a force that turned
your ship into a fantastic nightmare and cut you in two with lancets of
agony.
The planet loomed in the forward window. A faint light hazed its
outlines, as though a private sun of its own shone beyond it. Grim bit
his lip until it bled, fighting the nausea and the throbbing in him. He
had to land his ship. He had to find out what the force was, and what
it wanted. He had to fight the tough luck that had hounded the Trader
Unions ever since old Jasper Jones had retired. He had to--
The spacer grated on a ledge of rocks, its keel cracking and folding
back and ripping off on the underside of the hull. A gigantic thin
needle rising from a boulder towered before him. Grim yanked back on
the power-brakes, but it was no use.
The blunt rock cliff loomed up. The nose of his vessel went ploughing
into it with a force that snapped his leather safeties and skyrocketed
him into the forward port....
* * * * *
There _was_ a sun! Grim felt it beating hot into his closed eyes.
Muscles ached and pain pounded through his big frame. His eyes came
open to what was left of his ruined Corsair.
There was only one half that was recognizable. That was the front
section accordioned against the black cliffside. The back section was
queerly warped and sculped into a caricature of a gaunt, metallic tree.
Grim shook his head dazedly and lifted his eyes.
The landscape was riotous, mad. Things that looked like trees and
bushes lifted branches bent and swollen attached to trunks that looped
in bulbous curves. Tiny animals with seven horns and eight legs
loped past. A gigantic beast with the hairy head of a mastodon, but
with three long trunks, stared at him over the top of a blue bush;
trumpeted, and was gone. And high above, a great yellow orb blazed heat
and light.
Grim pulled himself up onto a gnarled rock. He squinted upward under a
shading hand. He grunted, "Looks synthetic. Something about it--"
Leather rasped on rock, above him. Grim whirled, right hand going for
the _orris_-nut handles of his disintegrator.
A girl stood on a ledge above him. Both hands were raised to the mass
of rich black hair tumbling about her cape-hung shoulders. She was
almost as tall as Grim, her long legs encased in tight golden skirts,
her midriff bare below an ornate bolero that hugged her breasts. Seeing
him, she brought her arms down fast, slant dark eyes widening.
Grim chuckled. "If I thought you could understand me, I'd ask you what
kind of a crazy place this is."
The girl went back two steps, still staring at him. Her brow wrinkled.
She said, "I do not understand you. Please--go away! If you are one of
Althaya's men--"
Grim stared in amazement. He had spoken in the space _patois_ that was
used by the Fleet and the Caravan crews from Mars on outward. But the
girl had spoken to him in the pure, almost archaic mother tongue! He
had to stop and recall the idioms and phraseology that men still used
on Tellura. Grim, like most others of his breed, had never been on the
Earth. They were born and bred among the stars and there they usually
died.
"What is your name?" he said haltingly, remembering lessons in the
Fleet school. "What is this place? And what in the name of Hades makes
all--this?"
He waved his hand at the distorted trees, at the little animals, at the
oddly humped ground. The girl did not look at his gesturing hand. Her
sloe eyes were fastened to his face; in fright, he thought.