Demons' World

Chapter Fifteen

“Steady, now… Steady.”

Captain Winslow Tait of the Terran Survey Corps opened his eyes and stared about him.

Everything seemed very dark and dusty; his head ached; an abominable noise tortured his eardrums; he felt like hell. That damned generator would have to cut out just as he’d been trying to impress the Samians with Terran efficiency. The Samians were a big people, though not as big as some Tait had discovered in the Galaxy, and it looked now as though he’d begun with a very bad impression. He’d crashed his single-seater scout, all right.

But how in the name of a blue-tailed baboon had he got here?

He stared about, then recoiled as though he’d touched a red-hot venturi.

He was lying beside a naked woman.

Clumsily, he stood up, to discover that his regulation green coveralls were missing and the he wore a few scraps of underclothes foreign to him. He shook his head.

What the hell?

A cloak-like garment clung narrowly to his back.

The ground shook heavily. Something pattered down from the roof like rain. A light speared from a single electric bulb, wan and pitiful. A wall of this odd room collapsed and water, steaming, boiling water, spewed out. A few drops stung his naked flesh.

Well, the woman couldn’t be left there, whoever she was. Tait flung a white smock thing about her, lifted her over one shoulder, and sprinted madly for the door opposite the swirling flood of boiling water.

Any man of the Terran Survey Corps was trained to react to the needs of the moment; Tait doubted whether any of them had met this little lot before.

Through the door he plunged, to be engulfed chaotically in a crazed, screaming, fighting bedlam of people. The cloak was about him now, covering both him and the girl.

He didn’t remember tightening it. A man shouted into his face.

“It’s no good! We’re too late! Nothing matters now! This is the end!”

Captain Winslow Tait had served a goodly time in the Terran Survey Corps, moving from one globe of space to another, discovering everything he could about them, using his flagship Cochrane as the only base and home thousands of people would know for a decade or more. The Galaxy was a stupendously wonderful place and always there extended worlds upon worlds, worlds never-ending. Homo sapiens in reaching out from the Solar System encountered many strange aliens: friendly, hostile, disinterested. When the scouter had reported the Samians, Tait had gone down personally, on the invitation of the Samian prime minister.

He now found himself engulfed in a screaming hysterical mob of human beings, in a corridor that shook itself to pieces, with the stink of fear in his nostrils and the awful stench of scalding flesh and the bubbling sound of tons of boiling water assailing him from every direction.

He wasn’t mad. That, he could never believe.

So there had to be a logical answer, that a human being from Solterra could find and understand in the alien inhumanity of the galaxy. Vague and nebulous thoughts washed through his mind. The people jostled him. He was pushed gradually along the corridor—once he narrowly missed a rock fall—going with the living tide.

The girl in his arms stirred. He looked down, then pushed his way into a shadowed alcove, his back pressed against the dirt wall.

The cloak thing moved. It writhed away from contact with the wall, adjusted itself, hung neatly at his side.

Winslow Tait’s mind crawled. His body erupted into a rash of goosepimples.

The cloak—alive!

Then the girl opened her eyes and stared up at him. Deep violet were those eyes. He looked down on her and he knew that he knew her, but he could not remember.

His first, irrational thought had been: A luscious wench. Now he saw the firmness of purpose in that beautiful face, the shadow of tragedy marking its pallor. Her short red curls were matted with sweat.

She opened her lips, soft and supple; they parted on a breath.

“Stead,” she said. “Oh, Stead!”

And Captain Winslow Tait of the Terran Survey Crops remembered. “Delia!”

Two divergent, colliding, opposing streams of thought clashed in his mind. They were like oil and water, coiling around each other in the case of his skull, refusing to mingle. First one, then the other boiled uppermost.

Now he saw the thick star-clusters of space as Cochrane drove steadily across the light years; then he saw the evilly slavering fangs of a Rang. Now he was standing in the control room of his flagship, conning his scouters down onto a new and unknown planet; then he was creeping with Thor-burn and the Foragers along dusty, Flang-skin scattered crannies behind the skirting boards of the Demons’ houses.

Demons?

Demons!

No—not Demons—Samians.

Ordinary people, living in a relatively low stage of culture, admittedly with four legs and four arms and two ordinary eyes and two atrophied eyes, but intelligent, ordinary, simple people. The Samians had welcomed the advent of alien life upon their planet. Every overture they made had been friendly. They had only recently invented wireless and the first weak signals spluttering into space had homed in Cochrane.

Ordinary, decent, law-abiding folk—albeit hundreds of feet tall—who liked to keep their houses clean and clear of pests.

Delia clung to him, demanding his attention. Further sections of the roof fell in. The Samians were doing what a man on Earth would do trying to rid himself of a plague of rats. Boiling water, poison, dig the blighters out.

The situation drove home to him then in every aspect of horror.

His fingers dug into Delia’s white shoulder.

“Delia, I’ve got my memory back! I know who I am!”

“Oh, Stead, that’s wonderful! But… but it’s too late. Simon is right. This is the end.”

He shook his head savagely. “No. There is a chance. My radio. You mentioned artifacts found with me—where is my radio?”

“Belle—”

“Belle! Yes, the radio tech! We’ve got to find her! I’ve got to talk to the ship.”

That awful overpowering stifling sensation, the impression inseparable from confinement in the earth that he was nailed down in his coffin, rose chokingly as the lurid darkness, the screaming people, the sinister bubbling of boiling water and the continuous earth tremors rocked in a mad saraband all about. He had to hold on. Had to!

“Ship?” said Delia, stupidly. “Ship?”

“You wouldn’t know. Thing your ancestors came to this planet in thousands on thousands of years ago. Probably called the Ark. Common name for colonist ships going out on the long haul.” He smiled down on her, fighting to regain sanity. “One thing you were right about, Delia. The Empire of Archon probably did descend directly from that old Ark.”

“I… I don’t know, Stead. What can we do?”

“Find Belle and my radio. Pronto! Come on!”

Heaving and struggling they fought their way through the masses of people, avoiding rock falls, ducking where the roof sagged menacingly. Dust choked everywhere. Twice they had to dodge streams of water. But, thankfully, that water now was no longer boiling; as it seeped into the earth, into the man-made runnels, its temperature dropped. But still it came, and soon splashing sounds rose eerily from the lower depths.

“The Captain and his Crew want to get out of there quick,” he said, dragging Delia after him.

Belle’s wireless lab was not too far off. They reached it, found the wall in ruins, bundled through to a familiar scene of devastation. Somehow, Simon had stayed with them. Belle rose up, ashen, disheveled, weeping, staggering amid the ruins, panic stricken.

“Belle!” snapped Tait, brutally. “Where is my radio?”

She couldn’t understand, open-mouthed, distraught.

Simon, knowing only that Stead offered some salvation, began to ransack the place.

The radio stood on a shelf in a cupboard, face down on the floor. Eagerly, Tait snatched it up. The smashed end gave him a heart-jolting second of defeated panic; then he realized that he could still use the transmission circuits; only the receiving circuits were broken.

Without a tremble his fingers span the dial, switched on. He began calling out, voice near the concealed mike to shield it from the dinning bedlam about.

“Calling Cochrane! Calling Cochrane! This is Captain Tait. This is Captain Tait. Listen carefully. I have no reception, repeat, I have no reception, repeat, I have no reception.”

He heard Simon say, “What on earth language is that?” And sorted out the language they had taught him with a feeling of relief that his mind could still function on two levels.

“I am down on Samia. Get a fix on my transmission. Tell the Samians to stop digging out the rats. Repeat. Tell the Samians to stop digging out the rats.” He repeated this over and over again as the earth shook and dust stifled eyes and nose and rock fell rumblingly.

At last he paused, said, “I hope they’re getting this. It may be a job to find the right house to tell the Demons to stop digging.”

Simon and Delia gaped.

“Yes, the Demons are a kindly, friendly people. And I… I shot one in the eye; God forgive me!”

“The Demons—friendly!” Simon blustered. “You must be mad, Stead; all this horror has broken your mind!”

“No, the Demons are a gentle people—yes, the Demons! You are a gentle man, Simon, yet you kill a rat without a second thought, knowing it to be an evil pest.”

“I… I see that,” whispered Delia. “Are you succeeding in doing… whatever it is you’re doing?”

“I don’t know.” He went on calling out, sweat running down his body his voice hoarse. He broke off to say, “I can only try. All I can do is try.”

He didn’t tell them that Cochrane might be gone. He had no real estimate of his time below here. Commander Good-wright might have spaced out, mourning the loss of a skipper and a friend. “No,” he said, fiercely. “No! Come on, Goody! You’ve got to stop the Demons—tie Samians—from digging us out! You’ve got to!”

The far roof caved in; dirt and rocks tumbled down in an avalanche of terror, and light, bright, white, cruel light, splintered through.

“Stop them, Cochrane!” he yelled into the mike. “Stop them! They’ve dug us open; they’ll be trampling all over us soon! For God’s sake, stop them!”

The roof ripped back. Brilliant, stabbing beams of actinic fire lanced down, stung his eyes, brought tears spurting. Delia screamed. Simon clapped his hands to his tortured eyes.

The noise became impossible to sustain. Hydrogen bombs and planetary volcanoes seemed to combine in one hellish cacophony. Typhoons whirled about the figures of the human beings, crouching in holes in the ground.

Up there lay nothing—up where Tait looked with something still left of the fears of Stead; a sky, a distant prospect of clouds drifting, roseate, far off, serene.

Simon, lowering his hands, looked up and… screamed. He fell writhing to the ground. Still shouting into his mike, Tait could do nothing for the old scientist struck down by rooflessness. Delia clung to him.

“Shut your eyes!” he screamed to her in a panted aside.

Against those clouds, so familiar, so awful to these people of the skirting board labyrinths, a dark shape moved. In the broken-open ground now, pitilessly exposed to the light of the Samian day, men and women ran and screamed and dropped, scuttling like ants in a nest disturbed by a probing stick.

And up there that looming monstrous shadow towered up and up and up. “My God!” said Tait, awed. “They’re big!”

Flat on the ground with one arm around Delia, the other grasping the radio, he continued to call out desperately, incoherently. The camouflage cape spread itself out over them, its sixteen legs tucking themselves neatly in at the sides. But it was puzzled by the light, by the feeling in the air, its chromatophores changed sluggishly. The cape, too, felt naked under this inconceivable nothingness above.

Face strained, muscles jumping, the cords in his throat taut with the effort of shouting into the mike, he saw a sudden shining expanse of metal appear with a crash of displaced air directly before them. Something lifted him, a brief intolerable pressure, then he was sprawling on the metal. It lifted. It swooped dizzily up into the sky.

He screamed into the mike, “The Demon’s got us! It’s put us on its shovel! For pity’s sake, Cochrane, tell them.”

A blackness whirled about him. Star-shot darkness engulfed him. Something extraordinarily hard cracked deftly down along his temple. Everything whirled away into nothingness.

Tait woke up in the sick bay aboard Cochrane.

He lay in the comfortable bed between sweet-smelling sheets, feeling the goodness in him, the drowsy after-sleep pleasantness seeping along his muscles, his whole body aglow with health.

Old Doc Hejaz must have worked overtime on him.

A sudden fluttery movement at his side brought lazily incurious eyes to focus. His camouflage cape lay in the bed with him, still, he guessed, attached to him by its twin umbilical cords; old Doc Hejaz’s eyes must have popped open at that one. But, like the sensible medico he was, he’d left the cape in situ until the skipper woke up to explain.

It felt good just to lie in the sick bay and think over what had happened. Nothing he could do now would alter what had happened. One glance had shown him Delia’s red curls on the pillow of the next bed. H’mm. She might not understand space rules and regulations.

He thought about her attempts to bring back his memory. She’d been right, too. Sex was, after all, the most potent factor in racial memory; it would have worked probably without that crack on the head. And she’d have shown him the kit Thorbum had found with him.

Thorburn! The Foragers! Honey!

Were they all right? Cursing, Cochrane’s skipper levered himself out of bed, pressing the call button.

The orderly who answered brought with her Doctor Hejaz. Hejaz, a roly-poly little man with a prim mouth, soft womanly hands of immense strength, an understanding of a man’s insides that came from par sees of spacefaring and space-doctoring, sat calmly down on the bed.

“Well, skipper. You really believe in delving into the new planet’s underworld.”

“Huh,” said Captain Tait. “Tell me what happened. But, first, there are some Foragers I want looked up.”

“If you mean Thorburn and Honey and the gang, they were brought to Cochrane an hour or so after you and Miss Hope, here.”

“What the—”

“You talked, skipper.”

“I see. Well, your conscience is like a blasted monk’s, so I don’t envisage blackmail. Now, tell me.”

“We picked up your signals loud and clear. I can say that everyone felt awful about not being able to reassure you. We found the right house—enormous places, these Samian cities—and the folks, a decent enough old couple, were busily pottering with their kettles of boiling water and their rat poison. The old chap was digging away and cursing the pilfering thieves who’d pinched all his best cheeses and like that.”

“The Corps is never going to let me forget this,” said Tait, morosely.

“I had a look at their lad. The one whose eye you messed up. I think with a spot of Terrestrial medicine and surgery, he’ll regain his sight.”

“Thank heavens for that. That was one thing that worried me, made me feel miserable.”

“Went after you with a knife as big as a picket boat, I gather. Well, can’t say I blame you, skipper.”

“But the Samians are such decent gentle people. The Demons—well, the Demons were—”

“The Demons,” said Delia’s voice, “are real, at last. I’ll giant you that, Stead.”

“You all right, Delia?”

“She’ll be fine.” Hejaz smiled. “Oh, and, Skipper, in case you’re wondering. The human people of Samia are just that Homo sapiens. They must have descended from a Solterran colonist venture.”

“A damn long time ago. Imagine how they got on in the beginning! Ugh, makes your flesh creep.”

“You mean—What do you mean?” asked Delia.

Simon, from the bed the other side, chimed in with, “I think we have more to learn than that the Demons are real, Delia.”

“Say, Doc,” said the skipper. “Bring in the Foragers, will you? If we’re to explain, I’d like to do it to an audience of friends.”

When they were all seated, Thorbum, Julia, Sims and Wallas, Vance, fierce Cardon whose revolution had been swallowed up in a world-shaking event, and even Old Chronic, clacking his dentures, Tait looked around for Honey. She stood at the foot of his bed, hesitant, shy, her silky black hair shining wonderfully now in the lights. He smiled encouragingly at her and she sat down on the bed, next to Hejaz. She hadn’t looked at Delia, and Delia’s patrician face had frowned slightly at sight of the slender girl.

Tait explained it to them, all about the Galaxy and Sol-terra and how mankind had set off on his great adventure among the stars and how their long-gone ancestors had come to this planet of Samia and hadn’t quite got off on the right foot. It took some digesting.

“That’s why the Evolutionary Theory and the Uniqueness of Man stumped you. Cats and Dogs and Men, with four limbs and a common ancestry. All the rest—alien. And that, too, I guess, is why you haven’t advanced greatly in the sciences. You have no real record of scientific progress. And all that howling you’ve been getting on your wireless, Honey. That was the Samians with their recently invented wireless fouling up the bands.”

She smiled timidly at him, her hands clasped together in her lap. She looked very lovely. But then… so did Delia, smiling at him from the next bed. Deuced awkward.

“They dug you out, skipper,” said Hejaz, unable to understand the odd language Tait spoke to these people, except for the occasional, understandable word, like “Forager” and “men” and “humanity”. “You were lifted on the old chap’s spade, and they’re so big and clumsy. He was bound to knock you both out, handing you up to us. Ensign Lewis brought you in.”

“Him! I suppose he’s found himself a girl already down there?”

Hejaz laughed. “Quite a few have, skipper. This planet is a pleasant place, light gravity, good air.”

Tait turned back to his friends from below. “You’ll go on living in Samia. But on the surface, where men belong. No rooflessness will affect you. You’ll form a valuable Sol-terran colony here, as was planned in the beginning. The Samians—the Demons—can only be your friends.”

Friends.

He looked at Delia and then at Honey. Well?

Well, he was a deep-spaceman, a rough and tough member of the Terran Survey Corps. He had a job to do. He would space out, on the next stage of man’s colonization and exploration of the galaxy.

Who knew what they’d find next?

Delia and Honey. Honey and Delia. Little people from the dank underworld beneath the feet of an alien race. People who’d lived all their lives as rats pilfering and stealing other people’s possessions for food, but still human beings.

Good people.

He wondered which of them—or perhaps none of them— would go with him out from this planet into the vasty deeps.

He turned with a joyful smile as a girl’s voice—a well-loved girl’s voice—stumbling over the unfamiliar language, said, “Skipper?”