Part 1

Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

the earthman

BY IRVING COX, JR.

_The four survivors were sitting ducks surrounded by barbaric savages. And they were doubly handicapped, because they knew that one of them was a traitor!_

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The robot supply ship came every Thursday at seven minutes after noon. It was an unfortunate hour for the personnel of the Nevada station, who happened to be in the commissary at lunch. Out of fourteen hundred assigned to the post, only four escaped--two guards on noon duty in the watch tower; the Commander's wife, who had skipped lunch and stayed in her cottage; and Captain Tchassen.

The Captain was on a hill south of the station making a Tri-D shot of the range of mountains west of the camp. He took his amateur photography seriously and, like any tourist, he was fascinated by the rugged scenery; there was nothing comparable to this on any world in the civilized galaxy. To get the back lighting that he wanted, Tchassen would cheerfully have given up any number of meals. As a matter of fact, he wasn't aware that it was noon until he heard the jet blast of the supply ship as it came in on the transit beam.

Tchassen saw the ship spin out of control as the beam went haywire. The robot plunged into the heart of the station and the earth shook in the catastrophic explosion of the nuclear reactor. The commissary, the communication center, the supply sheds and the row of patrol ships vanished in the rising, mushroom cloud. Concussion threw Tchassen violently to the ground. His camera was smashed against a boulder.

The Captain picked himself up unsteadily. He took a capsule from his belt pouch and swallowed it--a specific against shock and radiation sickness. In a remarkably short time, Tchassen's mind cleared. He saw the prisoners pouring through the gap torn in the compound fence and running for the hills. But that did not alarm him particularly. They were unarmed and for the moment they represented no real danger.

Tchassen began to run toward the ruined administrative center. He had to find out if there were any other survivors and he had to make emergency contact with the occupation base on the coast. He ran with considerable difficulty. After less than a hundred yards, he was gasping for breath. He slowed to a walk. He could feel the hammering of his heart; his throat was dry and ice cold.

To the escaped prisoners, watching from beyond the camp, the Captain's weakness was unbelievable--for Tchassen, in his twenties, had a magnificent build. Typical of the occupation army, he wore the regulation military uniform, knee-high boots and tight-fitting, silver colored trousers. Above the waist he was naked, except for the neck-chain which carried the emblem of his rank. His body was deeply tanned. His hair was a bristling, yellow crown. Yet, despite his appearance, his sudden exhaustion was very real; Captain Tchassen had been on Earth only five days and he was still not adjusted to the atmospheric differences.

As he passed the row of officers' cottages, he fell against a wall, panting for breath. The flat-roofed buildings were nearly a mile from the crater of the explosion, yet even here windows had been broken by concussion. A cold, arid wind whipped past the dwellings; somewhere a door, torn loose from its frame, was banging back and forth.

Then Tchassen heard a muffled cry. In one of the officer's cottages he found Tynia. She had been thrown from her bed and the bed was overturned above her. It was a fortunate accident; the mattress had protected her from the flying glass.

Tchassen helped her to her feet. She clung to him, trembling. He was very conscious of her sensuous beauty, as he had been since he first came to the Nevada station. Tynia was the wife of the commanding officer: Tchassen kept reminding himself of that, as if it could somehow build a barrier against her attractiveness. She was strikingly beautiful--and thirty years younger than her husband. It was common gossip that she had been flirting with most of the junior officers assigned to the station. Tchassen was, in fact, a security investigator sent to probe the potential scandal and recommend a means for heading it off.

He gave Tynia a shock pill from his pouch. Her hysteria subsided. She became suddenly modest about the semi-transparent bedgown she was wearing, and she zipped into a tight coverall, made from the same silver-hued material as the Captain's trousers. They went outside. She stood a foot shorter than Tchassen. Her dark hair framed her face in graceful waves; make-up emphasized the size of her eyes and the lush, scarlet bow of her lips.

Tynia glanced toward the crater, shielding her face from the noon sun. "What happened, Captain?"

"The flight beam failed; the supply ship exploded."

"And killed them all." She said it flatly, without feeling--but Tchassen doubted that she would have mourned the loss of her husband in any case.

"I'll have to get word through to the coast. We'll need a rescue helio and--"

"I know how to use the emergency transmitter," Tynia volunteered. "There may be other survivors, Captain Tchassen; they'll need your help."

"I don't want to leave you alone, Tynia." It was the first time he spoke her given name, though the informality was commonplace among the junior officers on the post. "The prisoners are out of the compound. We may have trouble."

"Not yet, Captain; they're still unarmed. I'll be all right." She nodded toward the crater. "We have to make sure there's no one else alive down there."

* * * * *

He left her reluctantly. She went toward the emergency communications room, buried in a metal-walled pillbox which had been intentionally located far from the center of the station. Tchassen walked across the scarred earth in the direction of the crater. None of the important buildings had survived. Concussion had torn up the fence around the prison compound, but the cell block, half a mile from the explosion and built of concrete and steel, was still standing. The watch tower, beyond the prison building, stood askew on bent metal pillars, but it was otherwise undamaged.

The Captain knew that at least two guards were on watch duty at all hours; they might still be alive. He crossed the crater and pulled himself up the battered stairs to the top of the tower. The door was jammed. Using a broken piece of railing as a lever, he pried it open. He found the two guards unconscious, slumped across their observation console.

He gave them shock capsules, but the men regained consciousness slowly. While he waited, Tchassen read their identity disks. The Corporal, Gorin Drein, was a three-year draftee, serving a six month tour of duty on Earth. He was a fair-haired, blue-eyed boy, probably no more than twenty years old. Sergeant Briggan was an army career man, in his fifties and only a few years away from retirement. Yet the only physical indication of his age was the touch of gray in his bristling mane of dark hair.

When their erratic breathing steadied and they opened their eyes, the Captain explained what had happened. Both men were still groggy; the shock pills inhibited their normal emotional reactions. Neither Briggan nor Drein had much to say until Tchassen helped them down from the tower and they stood looking at the hole blasted in the earth.

"The supply rocket," Sergeant Briggan said slowly, "couldn't have done this; the beam landings are foolproof. The prisoners must have pulled it off, though I don't see--"

"How?" Tchassen broke in. "The compound fence didn't go down until after the blast; there was no way any of them could get out."

"Robot ships just don't get off the beam," Corporal Drein declared stubbornly.

Briggan nodded toward the empty cell block. "It worked out nicely--for the prisoners. A single explosion wipes out most of us; but the prisoners are far enough away from the blast center to escape."

"Surely there isn't any danger of revolution," Tchassen asked, unconsciously mocking the optimism of the security bulletins. "Not any longer."

Briggan grinned. "You've only been here five days, sir; you don't know how thoroughly our indoctrination has failed. The Earth people hate us more than ever."

"Even so, how could one of the prisoners have brought the robot down?"

"By tampering with the beam."

"But that means they had a subversive--that means one of us must be--"

"An Earthman, yes. We encourage them to apply for citizenship. If we had an Earthman on the post masquerading as an officer, how would we know it--unless he told us? They're no different from our own people, Captain."

On the other side of the crater Tynia staggered out of the communications pillbox. Tchassen saw her waving frantically and he knew something was wrong--very wrong. He began to run toward her. Briggan and Drein followed close behind him. Almost immediately the Captain staggered and gasped for breath; he motioned for the Sergeant and the Corporal to go on without him.

Briggan waited long enough to say, "So far we've located four survivors, sir--only four. And one of the four is very probably an Earthman. The transit beams don't fail of their own accord. It's not a very nice thing to think about, is it, sir?"

* * * * *

The two men left him and Tchassen walked slowly, alone across the barren land. The wind whispered against his naked chest; it felt suddenly cold and forbidding. The ragged peaks piled on the western horizon were no longer simply photogenic curiosities of an alien world, but symbols of undefined terror.

Why had the supply robot crashed? Why had the prisoners been able to get away without a casualty? Had it been planned by an officer of the station? If so, where was he now--with the prisoners, dead in the commissary, or among the four survivors? The tide of questions hammered at Tchassen's mind, but he came up with no workable answers. His real trouble stemmed from the fact that he knew so little about the Earth people. Their reasoning was beyond rational analysis. They were physically identical to normal human beings, and it was almost impossible not to assume that their thinking would be normally human, too.

When Tchassen reached the communications pillbox, the Sergeant, the Corporal, and Tynia were inside. In the gloomy half-light he saw the others silently trying to patch together the broken wires of the transmitter. It was hopeless; Tchassen saw that at once. Only a master technician could have made sense out of that jumbled maze. The other three knew that, too. They stopped when they saw Tchassen and looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to tell them what to do. With something of a shock, he realized that he now ranked as station commander.

"I don't believe the explosion wrecked the transmitter," Tchassen decided uncertainly.

"It was torn up like this when I first came in," Tynia told him.

"So we couldn't get in touch with the occupation base. Obviously one of the prisoners did it. They must have had--" The Captain licked his lips. "They must have had outside help."

"What do we do now?" Tynia's voice was shrill with rising hysteria. "We can't radio for a rescue ship. How do we get away?"

"It's up to us to find something else."

She moved close to Sergeant Briggan, reaching for his hand. "The Earth people are outside somewhere, waiting to kill us. We can't escape, Captain! And you start talking nonsense--"

Very deliberately Tchassen slapped the back of his hand against her cheek. The pillbox was abruptly very still. She stared at him, her eyes wide. Slowly she raised her hand and touched the reddening mark on her face. She shrank against Briggan and the Sergeant put his arm around her shoulders.

"You didn't have to do that, Captain," he bristled.

"Don't quarrel," Tynia whispered. "Not on my account."

Tchassen's muscles tensed. This was the way Tynia had created tension on the post; he had seen it happen to her husband. Yet could he honestly blame her? It wasn't her fault; just the irony of circumstance. And Tchassen knew that his anger now was primarily envy, because she had turned to the Sergeant for protection and not to him.

He made himself relax. "Hysteria," he said, "is a luxury none of us can afford."

"You're right," Tynia answered. "Absolutely right. I was very foolish."

She moved away and Briggan muttered, "Sorry, sir. I didn't think--"

"We must get back to the coast," Tchassen said briskly, "through territory occupied by the enemy. We can scrape together all the weapons we'll need and the roads are supposed to be passable. Our only problem, then, is transportation."

"Maybe we'd better stay here," Tynia suggested.

"Sitting ducks for the Earthmen to attack?"

"You said we have weapons."

"Not enough to hold out indefinitely."

"Sir," Corporal Drein intervened, "there's an old, enemy vehicle in the prison building. We used it sometimes for field inspections."

"Let's look it over."

Captain Tchassen had seen the instructional films which were made immediately after the occupation. He could identify the sedan--an inefficient, petroleum-burning machine, typical of a primitive people who had just reached the threshhold of the Power Age. The original beauty of design had long since disappeared. Only one window and the windshield were unbroken; the body paint was peeling away in spreading patches of rust; the pneumatic tires were in shreds and the vehicle moved noisily on bent, metal rims.

They fueled the car with gasoline confiscated long ago and stored in drums in the prison warehouse; Corporal Drein volunteered to do the driving. In the officers' cottages they found weapons--a portable heat beam, half a dozen dispersal rays, and a box of recharge cartridges. In terms of Tchassen's technology such weapons were minor sidearms, but they were superior to anything yet produced by the Earth people. Tchassen was sure he had the power to beat off any attack.

The survivors were handicapped in only one respect: all the food on the post had been destroyed with the commissary. However, Tchassen did not consider that a serious problem. He was sure they could reach the coast by the following morning.

Shortly before three o'clock--nearly two hours after the supply robot crashed--the survivors left the station. They headed west on a highway unused since the conquest. Tchassen and Tynia sat together in back. The Captain kept all the weapons. Briggan's warning couldn't be ignored; one of the other three might be an Earthman. Unless they faced an actual emergency, Tchassen did not intend to let any of the others carry arms.

* * * * *

The sedan lumbered over cracked and crumbling asphalt. The tireless rims made a nerve-wracking din that prevented all conversation. Tchassen was unused to any sort of surface transportation. The civilized galaxy had outgrown it centuries ago; the flight beam, safe and inexpensive, was universally used. With equal ease the beam could move a one-man runabout or a cargo freighter over any distance--a few feet or the light years gapping between planets. Twice Tchassen revised his estimate of the sedan's speed. At this rate, it would be twenty-four hours or more before they reached the coast. That made their shortage of food far more significant.

Through the shattered side window Tchassen scanned the arid soil. It was remotely possible that they might stumble across a native food cache, but he couldn't count on that. He wasn't even sure the caches existed, although the theory was a basic factor in the occupation policy.

The galactic council of scientists estimated that one-tenth of the Earth people had never been rounded up and resettled in the prison compounds; bandit raids increased that number steadily. How the rebels survived no one knew, for any large scale food production would have been spotted by the patrols and wiped out. One or two crackpot theorists said the bandits fed themselves by hunting wild game, but that was absurd. It was common fact throughout the civilized galaxy that any culture which evolved as far as the Power Age would, in the normal process of growth, eliminate all planetary animal life. The accepted explanation was the food cache theory. According to it, the Earthmen--sometime after the conquest and before the prison compounds were set up--had raided their own cities and hidden the packaged food in remote mountain areas. The supply was decidedly limited. When it was gone, the rebels faced starvation unless they returned voluntarily to the compounds.

The Sierra range between the Nevada station and the coast had become a haven for so many escaped Earthmen that the region was marked "enemy territory" on the occupation maps. Although Tchassen was aware of that, he knew he could not assume that, because the four survivors had to pass through a rebel area, they would discover a cache of food. Far too many organized expeditions, sent out expressly for that purpose, had returned empty handed.

* * * * *

As the afternoon shadows lengthened and the sedan seemed to be moving no closer to the snow-capped peaks, the air became colder. Tchassen's naked chest was studded with gooseflesh. Drein and Briggan were rubbing their arms to keep warm. Tchassen was accustomed to the controlled temperatures on the civilized worlds and the comforts of the beam ships. It hadn't occurred to him that the regular military uniform might be inadequate.

He felt the subtle pulsing of fear, the crushing loneliness of a stranger on an alien world. He fingered the barrel of a dispersal ray, but the weapon gave him no sense of security. He had a terrible sensation of psychological nakedness. The weapons could drive off bandits, but what protection did Tchassen have against the unknown elements of a savage world? We've failed; we have no right to be here: the words lashed at his mind like an insinuating poison. He could feel sweat on his face and chest, sweat turning cold in the icy wind.

Now the sedan entered a decaying village nestled close to the mountains. It was in an amazingly good state of repair--undoubtedly because it was located so far from the coastal cities that it had escaped destruction during the invasion. Then, too, the village was too close to the Nevada compound for the Earth people to have looted it. Tchassen tapped on Drein's shoulder and ordered him to stop the sedan.

"We need warmer clothing," the Captain explained, "before we start up the grade."

"I suppose we might pick up something here," Sergeant Briggan conceded. "This place is called Reno. It was one of the few communities still intact after the invasion."

"I'm scared," Tynia said. "The prisoners may be hiding here, waiting for us."

"They have better sense than to face a dispersal ray without any protection." Tchassen's tone was crisp with an assurance he didn't feel, but it satisfied her. Drein opened the door and stood on the sidewalk, waiting for Tchassen to hand out one of the weapons. But Tchassen couldn't be sure Drein was not an Earthman; nor, on the other hand, could he ask the Corporal to explore an enemy town unarmed. As a sort of compromise, Tchassen said,

"We'll stick together; I'll carry all the weapons, Corporal."

It wasn't satisfactory, but both Drein and Briggan were too well-disciplined to protest. Tchassen felt foolish with six dispersal rays and a heat beam slung over his shoulders, but he couldn't risk leaving anything in the sedan, either.

* * * * *

The survivors spent a good part of an hour searching the downtown stores, but Reno had been stripped of native artifacts; the buildings were empty shells filled with dust. The only chance they had of finding clothing was to look in the private homes closer to the outskirts. They went back to the sedan and drove to a residential street. By that time the sun was setting. Tchassen did not relish the prospect of being caught in an enemy town after dark, but the search could be speeded up only if they separated.

For a second time the Captain compromised. He issued dispersal rays to the others, but insisted that they work in pairs. If one of them was an enemy, that arrangement would more or less tie his hands. Tynia volunteered to go with Drein; Tchassen felt a pang of envy and jealousy, but he had better sense than to use his authority to force her to come with him.

Tchassen and the Sergeant searched through half a dozen houses before they found one that had not been looted. Their luck was unbelievable, for they found shelves of canned food as well as clothing sealed in plastic bags. From an open window the Captain fired a dispersal ray toward the sky, a signal prearranged with the others. As the needle of light arched above the village, Tchassen heard a distant blast of explosions and Tynia's shrill scream of terror.

"It's a bandit raid!" Briggan cried. He turned to run toward the street. Tchassen's hand shot out and caught the Sergeant's shoulder.

"Not so fast. I said we'd stay in pairs."

"But Tynia's in trouble! The Earth people are barbarians, sir. They give no quarter. They--"

"I'm still in command, Sergeant."

Briggan stiffened. "Yes, sir."

The two men walked toward the source of the sound. Tchassen couldn't allow himself to run, even to help Tynia; the exertion would have been too much for him. There was another clatter of shots and Tchassen recognized the gunfire of the primitive Earth weapons. In the darkness it was vaguely disturbing, but not frightening. Both Tynia and Drein were armed with dispersal rays; they would have no trouble defending themselves.

Sudden footsteps pelted toward them. Tynia ran from a dark side street and threw herself into the Captain's arms. She clung to him, trembling and panting for breath.

"Where's Drein?" he demanded.

"The Corporal--he took my gun. He tried to kill me!"

"Tynia, do you understand what you're saying? The accusation--"

"You told us to stay together. I did my best. I was going through a house when I realized suddenly that I was alone. I saw Drein outside; I thought he was talking to someone. I ran out and--" She bit her lip and hid her eyes against his shoulder.

In a flat, emotionless voice, Tchassen asked, "Drein was with Earthmen?"

"I don't know! Someone sprang at me and knocked the ray out of my hands. I saw people--I thought I saw people--in the shadows behind Corporal Drein. I began to run. I don't want to accuse him of--of anything, Captain. I can't be sure. If he's an Earthman, we have to--we have to dispose of him, and I wouldn't want--"

Her voice trailed off in a gasp of terror as they heard a new burst of gunfire, very close. Tchassen dodged aside, pulling Tynia behind a tree. Sergeant Briggan fired blindly into the night. His dispersal beam danced across the face of a frame building and the house exploded into flame. In the red glare of the fire, Tchassen saw a band of savages, dressed in animal hides--no that was impossible!--fleeing into the darkness beyond the village.

Corporal Drein staggered toward them. Blood spilled from a gash torn in his chest. He saw Tchassen, Tynia and the Sergeant standing together. Like a man in a daze, he began to raise his dispersal ray.

In Tchassen's mind there was no longer any room for doubt; the truth was clear. Drein was an Earthman; Drein had betrayed the station; Drein now intended to kill off the only survivors. The Captain acted with military decision. He pressed the firing stud of his weapon. Drein screamed in agony as he died.