Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  The ground was less than a. hundred feet below, turning, tilting, expanding and rushing up at them, before she flung herself into a spasm of furious activity. She heard the Nachief’s angry shout, felt them sway and jerk as his arm tightened with punishing, rib-cracking intensity about her. Then they struck.

  Lane stood up presently, looked about dazedly and went limping over to the Nachief. He lay face down two hundred feet away. The chutes were entangled in a cluster of stubby trees, but they had dragged him that far first. He was breathing. He wasn’t dead; but he was unconscious! She stared down at him incredulously, briefly close to hysterical laughter. She couldn’t have done it intentionally; the Nachief kept his slaves under a repression to attempt no physical harm against him. She was free, for the moment anyway, only because she had tried to kill herself! Her glance went to a rock near his head, but a sense of weakness, a heavy dread, swept through her instantly. The tiling to do was to get. out of the vicinity immediately! If she could reach the station before he did, she might warn its occupants what, they were up against—provided they didn’t, kill her first. The Nachief’s hunting gun lay almost at the point, where she had. fallen. It; was too heavy for her use; but she paused long enough to thrust it hurriedly into a tangle of dry brush which should hide it from him for a while. Then she set off in the general direction of the station.

  Only five hundred yards away, she had an unexpected glimpse of the crashed bubble in open ground far below her and stopped to stare at it with a sensation of horrified remorse. Grant and Sean hadn’t had a chance after she had told them what she knew about the Nachief; in a way, she was responsible for their deaths. Hurrying on, she dismissed the thought with an effort, because it was more important just now that somebody might be coming out from the station to investigate the crash. But she couldn’t risk waiting here; the station must be more than three miles away; and her fear of the Nachief actually still seemed to be growing! Out of sight and sound, the illusion of humanity he presented was dropping away. What remained was an almost featureless awareness of a creature as coldly and savagely alien as a monstrous spider—

  Suddenly breathless and shaking, Lane stopped long enough to fight down that feeling. When site set off again, it was at a pace designed to carry her all the way to the station, if nobody came to meet her.

  Ten minutes later, she heard the sharp crack of a missile-gun and a whistling overhead, followed by a distant shout. It wasn’t the Nachief’s gun; and she turned to look for her challenger, a vast relief flooding through her.

  THE TALL, brown-skinned man who stepped out of a little gravity-rider a few dozen feet away held a gun In his hands, bur. looked at Lane with no particular indication of anything but self-confident wariness and some curiosity. A sharp-snouted, sinuous, streamlined animal, something like a heavy, shortlegged dog, flowed, out of the rider’s door behind him, sat up on muscular haunches and regarded Lane with gleaming black eyes. The man said, “Unh-uh, Sally!” warningly.

  “Any other survivors?” His voice was not loud but carried the same self-assurance as his attitude.

  “Only one!” Lane hadn’t missed the by-play. That animal, whatever it was, needed only a gesture to launch itself at her throat; its lean brown form was that of a natural killer, and the command could easily be given! “Look,” she hurried on, “will you just listen to me for thirty seconds, without interrupting—without any questions?”

  “Thirty seconds?” He almost smiled. “Why not?”

  “This other survivor—he’s armed and dangerous! He’s the one who tried to destroy your station—”

  She hesitated and swallowed, realizing for the first time how preposterous her story would sound. “He’s not a human being!” she said flatly, almost sullenly.

  The man’s eyes might have become a trifle more wary, but he only nodded. And suddenly something seemed to break in Lane, She heard herself babbling it out—how Frome was a small human colony on a franchised world; how they had gone out there in a group from, the Hub Systems a year before. That the Nachief, Bruce Sinclair Frome, had organized the emigration, the trip, everything. She’d been his secretary—

  The station man kept on nodding and listening, noncommittally.

  “I found out a few days ago that he’s a “man-eater! A blood-drinker—like a vampire—That was why he had set-up the colony of Frome. He had eight hundred people under hypnotic control, and he was using ultrasonic signals to keep the controls in force. He’s got instruments for that!” Lane said, her voice going shrill suddenly, “And he’s been living on our blood all along, and. nobody knew, and—”

  “Take it easy!” It was a crisp though level-toned interruption, and it checked her effectively. She was sweating and shivering, “You don’t believe me, of course! Hell—”

  “I might believe you!” the man said amazingly. “You think he’s after you now?”

  “Of course, he’s after me! He’ll want to keep me from telling anyone! He brought us out here to kill us, the three who knew. The other two crashed in the bubble.

  He studied her another moment and motioned toward the gravity rider. “Better get in there!”

  The brown animal he’d called Sally slipped, into the back of the rider ahead of Lane. It had a pungent, catty odor—the smell of a. Wild thing. The man came in last, and the rider rose from the ground. Seconds later, it was tracing a swift, erratic course at a twenty-foot height among the trees, soundless as a shadow.

  “We’re retreating a bit until we get this straightened out,” the station man explained. “My name’s Frazer. Yours?”

  “Lane. Lane Rawlings.”

  “Well, Lane, we’ve a problem here! You see, I’m manning the station alone at present—unless you count Sally! There’s a mining outfit five space-days away; they’re the closest I know of. But they’re not too cooperative! They might send an armed party over if I gave them an urgent enough call; and. they might not. Five days is too long to wait anyway. We’ll have to handle this ourselves!”

  “Oh, no!” she cried, stunned. “He—you don’t: realize how dangerous he is!”

  “There’ll be less risk,” Frazer continued bluntly, “in going after firm how, before he gets his bearings, so to speak, than to wait till he comes after us! We’re oil an island, here, and it’s not even, a very big island. If he’s—well, a sort of ogre, as you describe him—he’ll find precious little to live on! The Bureau cleaned the animal life off the island quite a while ago. We’re using it as an experimental ranch.”

  “Why can’t we lock ourselves up in the station?” Fear was pounding in her again, a quick, hot tide.

  Frazer brought the rider around in a slowing turn, halting it in mid-air.

  “There’s some sixty years of experimental work involved!” he explained patiently. “And some of some of our cultures, some of the stuff we’re growing here, becomes impossibly dangerous if it’s not constantly controlled, The Bureau could get out a relief crew within two weeks, but we’d be obliged to raze the island from one end. to the other by that time. That’s getting rid of your Nachief of Frome the hard way!”

  Lane realized in abrupt dismay that she wouldn’t be able to shake this man’s hard self-confidence. And recalling suddenly the speed and effectiveness with which he had countered the Nachief’s space-attack, she admitted that he might have some justification for it.

  “He’s got a long-range hunting gun!” she warned shakily. “I suppose you know what you’re doing—”

  “Sure I know!” Frazer smiled down at her. “Now, I’ll drop you off at the station; and then Sally and I will go after your friend—”

  “No!” she interrupted, terrified again at the prospect of being trapped alone on an island with the Nachief of Frome—if Frazer failed. “I’ll go with you! I can help.”

  Frazer seemed surprised but pleased. “You could be a help at that!” he admitted “Particularly since you know all Ills little ways! And we’ve got the rider—that should give us about the advantage we need
. . .”

  “WHAT MAKES you so sure,” Lane inquired a while later, “that he’ll come to the bubble? He may suspect it’s being watched!”

  They sat side by side hidden by shrubbery, a half mile from the wreck of the escape bubble, on somewhat higher ground. The gravity rider stood among bushes thirty feet behind them; and a few hundred yards behind that was a great, rugged cliff face, bare of vegetation, which curved away to their left until, in the hazy distance, it dipped toward the sea.

  “I imagine he does suspect it,” Frazer conceded. “If he’s anywhere around, he may even have seen us touch ground here!” They had lifted high into the air to scan the area but had made sure of only one thing: that the Nachief: of Frome was no longer where Lane had left him. On the other hand, there were a great many places where he could be fay now. This part of the island was haphazardly forested; thickets of trees alternated with stretches of rocky soil which seemed to support only a straw-colored reed; and zigzagging dense lines of hedgelike growths, almost black, seemed to follow? concealed water-courses. Except for the towering cliff front, it was a place without distinguishing features of any kind whose one could get lost very easily. It also provided, Lane realized uncomfortably, an ideal sort of background for the deadly game of hide-and-seek in which she was involved.

  “He hasn’t much choice though!” Frazer was saying. “As I told you, the island’s bare of all sizable animal life, he’ll get hungry eventually.”

  Staring at the bubble, Tine felt herself whitening. Frazer went On, unaware of the effect he’d produced or unconcerned about it. “The other thing he might try is to get into the station, but his gun won’t help him there. So he’ll be back—” His eyes shifted past Lane to the wide spread of scrub growth beyond her. “Just Sally!” he said in a low voice, as if reassuring himself.

  Sally came gliding into view a moment later, raised her head to gaze at them impersonally and vanished again with an undulating smoothness of motion that reminded Lane of a snake. It was as if the creature had slipped without a ripple into a gray-green sea.

  “Trapped Sally on the mainland four years ago,” Frazer remarked conversationally, still in low tones. “A seventy-pound killer and more brains than you’d believe! In bush like this, the average armed man wouldn’t stand a chance against Sally. She knows pretty well what we’re here for by now!”

  Lane shivered. Something about the cool, unhurried manner of Frazer as he talked and acted gave her, for minutes at a time, a sense of security she knew was false and highly dangerous. He seemed actually incapable of understanding the uncanny deadliness of this situation! She felt almost sorry for Frazer.

  “You’re wondering why I’m so afraid of him, aren’t you?” she said slowly.

  Frazer didn’t answer immediately. Gun across his knees, a small knapsack he’d taken out of the rider strapped to his hip, he was studying her, pleasantly enough, but not without an obvious appreciation of what he saw, even a touch of calculation. A tall, sun-darkened, competent man who felt capable of handling this or any other problem that might come his way to his complete satisfaction!

  “Irrational fear of him could have been part of that hypnotic treatment he gave you!” he told her, almost absently.

  Lane shrugged, aware of a wave of sharp irritation.

  In the year since she’d known Bruce Sinclair Frome., she had almost forgotten the attraction the strong, clean lines of her body had for other men; she was being reminded of it now. And, perhaps because o! that, she was realizing that part of her hatred for the Nachief was based in the complete shattering of her vanity in being discarded by him. She had a moment of unpleasant speculation as to what her reaction would have been if she had found out the truth about him—but had found out also that he still wanted her, nevertheless . . .

  She drove the thought away. The Nachief would die, she could abet it. But the chances were that lie regarded her and this overgrown boy scout beside her as not much more of a menace than Sean and Grant had been! She sat silent, fingering the small Been nerve-gun Frazer had given her to pocket—“just in case!” She’d warned him she probably wouldn’t be able to force herself to use it—

  “I just had the pleasant notion,” Frazer remarked, “that your Nachief might ramble into one of our less hospitable cultures around here! That’s what happened to the last two assistants they gave me, less than six months ago—and it would settle the problem, all right!” He paused, thinking, “But I suppose any reasonably alert outworlder would be able to spot most of those things.”

  “I’m afraid,” Lane agreed coolly, “that he’ll be quite alert!”

  HE LOOKED at her again, digesting that in silence. “You really believe he isn’t human, don’t you?”

  “I know he isn’t human! He’s different biologically. He actually needs blood to live on!”

  “Frome was his farm, and you colonists were his livestock, eh?”

  “Something like that,” she said, displeased at a description that was accurate enough to jolt her.

  “The three of you he brought out here—‘what was his purpose in that?”

  “To turn us loose, hunt us down, and eat us!” Lane said, all in a breath. And there was a momentary, tremendous relief at having been able to put it into so many words, finally.

  Frazer blinked at her in thoughtful silence, “That gives us. a sort of special advantage!” he grinned then. “There’s a group of primitive little humanoids along the mainland coast the Nachief could live on, if he got over there. But he doesn’t know about them. So he’ll be pretty careful not to blast us to pieces with that big gun you told me about.”

  Lane twisted her hands hard together, “He’d prefer that . . .” she agreed tonelessly.

  “Now there’s the gravity rider!” Frazer turned a glance in the direction of the half-hidden vehicle behind them. “It gives its the greater mobility. If I were the Nachief, I’d wreck the rider before I tried to close in!”

  “And what do we do then?”

  “Why, then we’ll have a few tricks to play!” He gave her his quick grin. “The rider’s our bait. Until the Nachief takes it—or shows himself at the bubble—we can’t do much: about him. But after he’s taken it, he’ll try to move in on us.”

  Lane shook her head resignedly. She didn’t particularly like Frazer; but she had a feeling now that he wasn’t bluffing. He was decidedly of A different and more dangerous breed than the colonists of Frome. “You’re in charge!” she said.

  “Still afraid of him?” lie challenged.

  “Plenty! But in a way this is better than I’d hoped for, I thought III told anyone here about the Nachief, they’d think I was crazy—until it was too late!”

  Frazer scratched his chin, squinting at the distant bubble, as if studying some motion site couldn’t see. “If he isn’t human;” he said, “what do you think he is?”

  “I don’t know!” she admitted, with the surge of superstitious terror that speculation always aroused in her.

  “I might have thought you were crazy,” Frazer went on, smiling at her, “except—it seems you’ve never heard of the Nalakians?”

  She shook her head.

  “It was a colony of Earth people. Not too far from the Hub System, but not much of a. colony either—everybody seems to have forgotten about it for about eight generations after it was started. When it was rediscovered, the descendants of the original colonists had changed into something more or less like you describe your Nachief! There were internal physiological modifications—short intestines like a cat or weasel; I forget the details, Those new Nalakians showed a cannibalistic interest in other human beings, which may have been mainly psychological; and they’re supposed to have been muscled like tigers, with a tiger’s reactions. In short, a perfect human carnivore type!”

  He had her interest now—because it fitted! She sat up excitedly. “What happened to them?”

  Frazer grinned, “What a tiger can expect to happen, when he draws too much attention to himself!
They raided a colony in another system, got tracked back to their own planet, and were pretty thoroughly exterminated. All that was about eighty years ago. But there may have been survivors in space at the time, you see; and those survivors may have had descendants who were clever enough to camouflage themselves as ordinary human beings! I thought of that when you first told me about your Nachief.”

  It gave her a curious sense of relief. The Nachief of Frome had become somewhat less terrifying, seemed much more on a par with themselves. “It could be.”

  “It could very much be!” Frazer nodded. “Aside front wanting to play cat-and-mouse with you, he didn’t tell you of any special motive for bringing you to this particular world, did lie?”

  “No,” Lane said puzzled. “He was taking us away from Frome, so he could make it look like an accident. What other special motive should he have?”

  “Probably not a very sane one,” Frazer said, “but it checks, all right; I was born on this station, you see, and I know the area pretty well. This planet is Nalakia, and the original Nalakian colony was on the mainland, only eight hundred miles from here! They even, used animals like Sally there in their hunting!”

  They stared at each other in. speculative silence; and Lane shivered.

  “They’re not here now!” Frazer said positively. “Not one of them—or I would have spotted their traces. But what was his purpose? A sort of blood-sacrifice to his lamented ancestors, or to planetary gods? I almost wish we could take him alive, to find out—”

  He stopped suddenly. Lane stiffened, wondering what he’d seen or heard, and he made a tiny gesture with one hand, motioning her to silence. In the stillness, she became aware of something moving into her range of vision to the left and becoming quiet again; and she realized Sally had. joined them.