Short Fiction by Poul Anderson (free ebook novel .txt) 📕

“The colonists seem to like it,” said the mate.

“They would,” snorted the captain. “Worst bunch of clannish provincials I ever saw. Why, they hardly ever leave the planet, except maybe for a year or so at a time on essential business, and they won’t be friendly with anybody. Takes a crazy man to stand that world in the first place.”

He pointed to a tall man who was half leading, half supporting a young woman along the deck. She would have been beautiful had she not been badly underweight. She smiled at the man, but her eyes were haunted, and his answering smile was faraway. It went no deeper than his lips.

“That fellow Langdon is the only longtime colonist I ever heard of who left Tanith for good,” said the captain. “He must have been there for years. Maybe he was born there, but he’s coming back to Sol now. His wife couldn’t take the place.”

“I think I remember her from a year or so ago,” nodded the mate. “Didn’t we carry her out with a few other colonists? Pretty as a picture then, and full of life and fun⁠—now look at her. Tanith did that to her.”

“Uh-huh,” agreed the captain. “I heard a little of the story down by the spaceport. She nearly went crazy⁠—finally had a miscarriage. It was all they could do to save her life and sanity. Only then would that Langdon take her back. He let her go on that way for months.” The captain’s mouth twisted with contempt. “Holy sunspots, what a cold-blooded devil!”

The night whispered the message. Over the many miles of loneliness it was borne, carried on the wind, rustled by the half-sentient lichens and the dwarfed trees, murmured from one to another of the little creatures that huddled under crags, in caves, by shadowy dunes. In no words, but in a dim pulsing of dread which echoed through Kreega’s brain, the warning ran⁠—

They are hunting again.

Kreega shuddered in a sudden blast of wind. The night was enormous around him, above him, from the iron bitterness of the hills to the wheeling, glittering constellations light-years over his head. He reached out with his trembling perceptions, tuning himself to the brush and the wind and the small burrowing things underfoot, letting the night speak to him.

Alone, alone. There was not another Martian for a hundred miles of emptiness. There were only the tiny animals and the shivering brush and the thin, sad blowing of the wind.

The voiceless scream of dying traveled through the brush, from plant to plant, echoed by the fear-pulses of the animals and the ringingly reflecting cliffs. They were curling, shriveling and blackening as the rocket poured the glowing death down on them, and the withering veins and nerves cried to the stars.

Kreega huddled against a tall gaunt crag. His eyes were like yellow moons in the darkness, cold with terror and hate and a slowly gathering resolution. Grimly, he estimated that the death was being sprayed in a circle some ten miles across. And he was trapped in it, and soon the hunter would come after him.

He looked up to the indifferent glitter of stars, and a shudder went along his body. Then he sat down and began to think.

It had started a few days before, in the private office of the trader Wisby.

“I came to Mars,” said Riordan, “to get me an owlie.”

Wisby had learned the value of a poker face. He peered across the rim of his glass at the other man, estimating him.

Even in Godforsaken holes like Port Armstrong one had heard of Riordan. Heir to a million-dollar shipping firm which he himself had pyramided into a System-wide monster, he was equally well known as a big game hunter. From the firedrakes of Mercury to the ice crawlers of Pluto, he’d bagged them all. Except, of course, a Martian. That particular game was forbidden now.

He sprawled in his chair, big and strong and ruthless, still a young man. He dwarfed the unkempt room with his size and the hard-held dynamo strength in him, and his cold green gaze dominated the trader.

“It’s illegal, you know,” said Wisby. “It’s a twenty-year sentence if you’re caught at it.”

“Bah! The Martian Commissioner is at Ares, halfway round the planet. If we go at it right, who’s ever to know?” Riordan gulped at his drink. “I’m well aware that in another year or so they’ll have tightened up enough to make it impossible. This is the last chance for any man to get an owlie. That’s why I’m here.”

Wisby hesitated, looking out the window. Port Armstrong was no more than a dusty huddle of domes, interconnected by tunnels, in a red waste of sand stretching to the near horizon. An Earthman in airsuit and transparent helmet was walking down the street and a couple of Martians were lounging against a wall. Otherwise nothing⁠—a silent, deadly monotony brooding under the shrunken sun. Life on Mars was not especially pleasant for a human.

“You’re not falling into this owlie-loving that’s corrupted all Earth?” demanded Riordan contemptuously.

“Oh, no,” said Wisby. “I keep them in their place around my post. But times are changing. It can’t be helped.”

“There was a time when they were slaves,” said Riordan. “Now those old women on Earth want to give ’em the vote.” He snorted.

“Well, times are changing,” repeated Wisby mildly. “When the first humans landed on Mars a hundred years ago, Earth had just gone through the Hemispheric Wars. The worst wars man had ever known. They damned near wrecked the old ideas of liberty and equality. People were suspicious and tough⁠—they’d had to be, to survive. They weren’t able to⁠—to empathize the Martians, or whatever you call it. Not able to think of them as anything but intelligent animals. And Martians made such useful slaves⁠—they need so little food or heat or oxygen, they can even live fifteen minutes or so without breathing at all. And the wild Martians made