HUNGRY WORLD

Imaginative Tales – March 1957

(1957)

Randall Garrett

As an Earth colony the planet left much to be desired. It had a tyrant running it, the natives were fearful, and no food made it a HUNGRY WORLD.

-

MIKE RATH LAY on the floor of the back seat of the swamp tractor and kept his eyes closed. He didn’t want the man who was watching him to know he was conscious, now that he had managed to free his hands and was working on his feet. So far, in the dark interior of the swamp tractor, the watcher hadn’t even seen Mike’s slight movements.

The driver in the front seat said, “How much farther you wanta go, Sam?”

The man in the back said: “A few more miles. We want to make sure this bird’s body is never found. The boss said he doesn’t want any slip-ups.”

Mike clenched his teeth in anger. No, Zamenkov wouldn’t want any slip-ups. For over a year, now, Zamenkov had been ruling the colonists at Rigel City with an iron hand— and he didn’t want the

Interstellar Colonial Commission to find out about it.

Mike was a biologist. For three years, he and his wife had been out in the swamps and forests of Rigel VI, classifying and recording the characteristics of the alien plants and animals of the planet.

He and Marsha had established a small base camp and taken supplies enough for three years. When they ran low, Mike had taken the jet-copter back to Rigel City— and immediately found himself in a jam.

He had been arrested by Zamenkov’s police as soon as he climbed out of his copter,. He had tried to identify himself, but it had been obvious that they hadn’t believed him. In spite of his identity card, they had taken him to Norman Zamenkov himself.

Zamenkov was a great, broad-shouldered, grossly fat man with pale skin and pale blond hair that clung damply to his pink scalp. His blue eyes—so light they almost looked white—peered out from wreaths of flesh that surrounded them, giving him a piggish squint.

“You claim you’ve been living in the jungles for three years, eh? That’s impossible. The natives hate Earthman. They’d have killed you on sight.”

“But—”

Mike had tried to explain that the natives didn’t kill an Earthman unless they were molested, but the harsh voice of Zamenkov had cut him off.

“None of that; we know better.

Now—who are you?”

“Michael Rath, as I told you. I’m a biologist, and—”

Zamenkov had reached out a hamlike hand and slapped Mike across the face. Bound though he was, Mike had tried to lunge at the fat swine who ruled Rigel City, but the guards had pushed him to the floor.

“Don’t lie,” Zamenkov had said coldly. “I know you’re an agent for the Interstellar Colonial Commission. Where is your ship hidden?”

It hadn’t done any good to try to tell Zamenkov that he didn’t have a ship. The guards moved in and batted him around for an hour before they gave up.

Finally, Zamenkov had said: “Never mind. It isn’t worth it. We’ll find his ship; interstellar drive energies can’t be hidden from • a Vidor detector.” He waved a fat hand contemptuously. “Take him out in the swamp and get rid of him. We won’t want his body around in case an ICC ship lands here.”

And now, here he was—lying in the bottom of a swamp tractor while he waited for ‘Zamenkov’s men to kill him.’

Only he wasn’t waiting hopelessly. They had bound him with heavy plasticords, but they’d made one little mistake. After they had carried him to the tractor, he had managed to slip a jungle knife out of his jacket. They had searched him for a gun, but they hadn’t noticed the knife.

And now he was almost free.

“Pull her up,” said the man who had been addressed as Sam.

The turbomotor of the tractor hummed a little as the clutch was released and the vehicle rolled to a stop.

The driver turned on a searchlight and pointed it off to one side. “How about that? There’s a fairly deep pond, down that way. We can toss him in there, and( the marsh-lobsters will have taken care of the corpse by tomorrow.”

“Good idea, Harry,” Sam said.

“Let’s go.”

Harry, the driver, climbed out of the front seat and came around to open the rear door. Sam reached down to lift Mike up from the floor.

As the door opened, Mike exploded into action. He slammed his fist up into Sam’s face and leaped out the door, bowling Harry over into the mud of the swamp. Then he took a long, diving leap into the waters of the shallow swamp pond.

He hit the water in a flat dive, gliding across it, just underwater, on his own momentum.

He came up for breath under the protection of a lush spread of heavy grass, his head hidden by the tall blades. Warily, he looked back at the tractor.

Neither of the men was out of action. Harry was shouting and aiming the searchlight while Sam fired bolts of energy from his heat-pistol at the spot where Mike had disappeared. The water boiled furiously for a second each time the searing rays touched it. After three or four shots, he stopped.

“Play that light around, Harry. He still may have gotten away.”

Mike held his breath. He hoped they wouldn’t start firing into the grass; he couldn’t possibly stand up and run.

And then his attention was attracted by a ripple in the water. It was only a dark bulge in the pond, but Mike recognized it for what it was —an aquasaur, a water-lizard. Like the Earth crocodile, it was viciously carnivorous, and, even worse, it could breathe both air and water. It had obviously been aroused by Mike’s plunge into the swamp— and it was coming straight for him!

-

FOR A FEW SECONDS, Mike was not sure what to do. If he stood up to run, Zamenkov’s men would shoot him— but if he staved crouched in the stagnant swamp water, the aquasaur would get him.

But the matter was taken out of his hands. Harry, guiding the spotlight, suddenly shouted, “There he is!”

The heat-beam was pointed directly at the aquasaur’s head. Almost instantly, two heat beams lashed out at the moving head of the monster. There was an odor of scorched flesh and a strangely human cry as the aquasaur vanished beneath the boiling water.

Then there was silence for a moment.

At last, Sam said: “Well, that got him. Come on — let’s go report back to Zamenkov.”

As the swamp tractor pulled away from the pond and slowed off into the distance, Mike pulled himself, dripping, from the reeds and stood up on a fairly firm section of ground. What was he to do now? His wife was several hundred miles away, running dangerously short of supplies. The native plants weren’t edible, and she had no means of transportation, now that Zamenkov had confiscated Mike’s ‘copter.

He stood there indecisively for a moment—and felt something probe at his back. He froze. He was able to recognize a spear-point when he felt one.

There was a chattering hiss from behind him. It was, Mike knew, the sibilant language of the Rigellian natives. The being was saying, “If you value your life, Skyman, do not move.”

Skyman—the native term for Earthman. Mike wished to heaven he was up in the sky right now, going back to Marsha in his jet-copter.

“I will not move,” he hissed back. “I value my life as I respect yours.”

There was a slight lessening of the pressure of the spear against his back. “You speak our language well. I heard the odd barkings of those others as they spoke in your barbaric tongue. It is queer that the same mouth can utter our own beautiful language as well.”

“I have lived with your people for a long time,” Mike said. “I am the Hunter of Everything.”

Again the pressure lessened. “The Skyman Who Hunts All Animals? Ah. I have heard of you if it is truly you. I would have slain you instantly if it had not been for the fact that I saw our enemies try to kill you with the Light That Burns.”

“Enemies? Why should the Skyman be our enemies?”

“It is only in the last year that it is so,” the Rigellian said. “These new rulers of the Skymen’s village drove out all our people’s women and enslaved the men for their mines.”

So that was it! The mines! Vodium, an ultrahard isotope of tungsten, had been discovered on Rigel VI several years before. But . until machinery—robot-operated tools—could be brought in, it couldn’t be mined; vodium was too radioactive for it to be possible for any human to work in the mines, even with a radiation suit. So Zamenkov was forcing the natives to do the work— and reaping the profit for himself.

No wonder he was afraid of the Interstellar Colonial Commission, Mike thought. Slavery was a capital offense under the Interstellar Agreement!,

“May I turn around?” Mike asked.

“Yes. You may turn, Skyman.”

He turned slowly and saw, not one, but five of the Rigellians. The others had remained silent. They stood half a head. taller than Mike, who was an inch over six feet. Their blue skins were dark in the faint moonlight, but their luminous red-orange eyes glowed like live coals.

“Come,” said the Rigellian, pointing through the swamps. “We will go to our Wise Old One. We will see whether you are he whom you claim to be.”

-

THE WISE OLD ONE of the village was more wrinkled than the younger men, and his skin had faded slightly from the normal royal blue which blended so well with the Rigellian vegetation, but he was still strong, and held himself erect as a leader should.

“The Skyman Who Hunts All Animals, eh?” He stood there, the firelight from the community fire-pit flickering over his wrinkled face. “If that is so, where is your lady?”

“At my camp to the west, Wise One. As you know, we Skymen cannot eat your food; it makes us ill and does not nourish us. I went to the City of the Skymen to get more food and equipment, but I left her behind.” He went on to explain what had Happened in Rigel City.

“Ah,” said the old man, “then this new leader is a criminal! We are glad to hear that. We have respected your people for many years, and it pained us to see that you had betrayed us.”

“We hadn’t. Zamenkov has all the guns. My people fear him too.”

The Wise One nodded. “We will check on your story,” he said.

All that night, the drums of the Rigellian swamp people throbbed in the damp air, beating out a message that travelled westward, from village to village, over the hundreds of miles that separated Mike from his wife. Not until late the next morning was the answer received. And by then, Mike himself was getting hungry.

The Wise One came to the hut where Mike had been guarded through the night and said, “We have received word from our brothers that your story is true. Forgive us for doubting.”

Mike grinned. “Forget it. It was only natural.” Then he frowned uneasily. He could still hear the throbbing of the drums. “What’s going on?”

The Wise One drew himself up proudly. “Skyman Who Hunts All, for a long time you have befriended our people. You have showed us how to make better traps and how to make better points ,for our spears. You have been good to our sick and our injured. You have helped us when we were in need. Your fame has spread all over the world.

“And now it is you who need help. You and your lady need food—the food of Skymen. We will help you get it.”

Mike’s frown grew deeper. “Help me? How?”

The old Rigellian gestured toward the throbbing drum.

“We have decided. We will attack the city and get food for you. And at the same time we will avenge ourselves for our brothers who have been enslaved.”

Mike shot to his feet. “No! you wouldn’t stand a chance! Zamenkov’s heat beams would cut you down by the hundreds —by the thousands! Many of your people would die, and many of the innocent Skymen would die. No, that isn’t the way, Wise One.”

“Have you a better plan?”

Mike rubbed his jaw. “I think so. Listen—”

-

RIGEL CITY, like the ancient cities of medieval Earth, was walled. The walls had originally been built to keep out wild beasts and the jungle. The site of the city had been marshland, originally, but the colonists had used pumps and Jenkins inversion driers to take the water out of the mud and convert what was left to solid ground, doing on a small scale what the Netherlands had been doing for a thousand years. But now the walls served another purpose. They were manned by Zamenkov’s men, armed/to repel any native uprising.

The spaceport was several miles from the city itself; accidents can happen when a ship lands or takes off, and spaceports aren’t good places to construct cities around.

With a group of tough, jungle-bred natives, Mike Rath headed for the spaceport as soon as the fuzzy red globe of Rigel had set beneath the horizon.

The spaceport, too, was walled, but it wasn’t guarded. Why guard a square mile of flat, hard cement-alloy? No Rigellian plant could grow there, no animal could find anything to kill, and no native would bother to take revenge on an empty, plain.

Of course, it wasn’t completely empty; Mike knew that. There was always a man on duty in the blockhouse. In the unlikely event that a spaceship should land, there had to be someone on duty to turn on the landing beams and the lights to illuminate the field at night.

Quietly, Mike and the ten Rigellians boosted each other over the wall. Mike hauled the last man up with a grass rope.

In absolute silence, they walked to the blockhouse, a great, thick walled structure designed to protect its occupants against accidental mishaps such as out-of-control spaceships.

Keeping well in the shadows, the Rigellians surrounded the structure. Then Mike Rath walked . boldly up to the heavy, transparent plexisteel door. His clothing was muddy and he looked as though he’d been going through hell which he had. He actually was almost as tired and hungry as he looked.

He slammed his hand against the door. The man inside looked up, startled. He peered into the darkness and then turned on the intercom that allowed him to speak through the door.

“What do you want?”

“I got locked, out of the city gates,” Mike said, hoping his voice sounded desperate enough. “Let me in.”

The guard was unsuspicious. The only thing he had to fear was the natives, and it would never occur to him that any Earthman would be in league with the blue-skinned Rigellians. He opened the door.

And the room was suddenly filled with natives.

. Taking care of the guard was the work of a moment. Mike exchanged clothes with him and said, “All right. Now we’ll take the tunnel to the city.”

-

THE LONG UNDERGROUND tunnel that led* to the city from the spaceport was wide and well-lighted. As they reached the ramp that led up to the terminal at Rigel City, Mike signalled the Rigellians to be silent. Then he strode up the ramp.

The guard at the top of the ramp was half-dozing as Mike stepped into view. He blinked sleepily and said: “What’s the matter, Ed? You ain’t—hey!”

He had seen, suddenly, that it wasn’t his friend, but by then it was much too late; Mike had slugged him with a rabbit punch to the neck.

He gestured to the Rigellians. “Okay. You know what to do.” They nodded and left the terminal building, disappearing into the darkness while Mike, alone, headed for the Government Building.

He walked straight up to one of the gates in the high fence that surrounded the building. The man on duty paid absolutely no attention— and an accurately-thrown rock made sure he wouldn’t pay attention for a long time.

Mike took the man’s gun, trussed him with his own belt, and dumped him in the shadows behind the guard shack.

Then he waited.

It was nearly five minutes later that a siren wailed over the city. The phone in the guard shack rang.

Mike picked it up. “Yeah”?

“Something’s happened,” said a voice from the other end. “The natives have opened the main gate to the city! Keep your eyes open!” There was a click as the - circuit was-broken.

This was it! With the soldiers distracted by the uprising at the gate, no one would notice that there was an extra man moving around. Within a few seconds, there were uniformed men running all around the building. Mike found it ridiculously easy to trot over to the main entrance, take an elevator up to Zamenkov’s suite, and step in.

Zamenkov was alone. He was barking orders into a visophone, and he snapped it off and looked up at Mike in irritation. “What are you—”

Then his eyes widened as he saw the gun levelled at him and recognized the face.

Neither man said a word as Mike walked over to the screen and changed the code signals. He was going to put a call through on the interstellar radio to the ICC.

He took his eyes off Zamenkov for just a fraction of a second to check the frequency indicator—and that was just a fraction of a second too long. Zamenkov’s hamlike hand picked up a heavy paperweight and threw it with the accuracy of a baseball pitcher, knocking the gun from Mike’s hand.

Then he charged.

Zamenkov was big and slow on his feet, but quick with his fists. His first punch knocked Mike back against the wall, but Mike dodged agiley around and clubbed down on the back of Zamenkov’s head. The big man whirled heavily, only to meet a desperate assault. Mike’s fists tattoed his chest and stomach, then smashed upward at his face, Zamenkov sagged backward, out cold.

Mike reached for the Visophone again. “Give me ICC,” he said crisply. While he waited, he glanced longingly at the huge refrigerator that the fat man had installed in his office. He hoped it had plenty in it— he was starving.

The End