Empire of Two Worlds Read online

  Gradually things quietened down. All the shutters were in place and we were in pitch blackness.

  Bec switched on the inside lights. We sat staring at one another inside our steel cocoon, sweating and trying to get back the use of our sight.

  What was out there? What had we dropped in the middle of? Grale jumped up again and made for one of the Hackers. Bec pushed him back down.

  “You think we got all the ammunition in the world?”

  “We’re sitting here blind doing nothing!” Grale near-screamed. “Anything could be out there — we could be wiped out!”

  “SHUT UP!” Bec bellowed.

  It was like Grale to get hysterical when he was scared, but in this case he was speaking for all of us. We were all scared scared of the unknown, or what might lie on the other side of the sloop’s armoured hull. Even Bec, I could see, was far from calm.

  “Nothing’s happened yet, has it?” he snapped. He glared at each of us in turn. “You punks handled that like a bunch of knock-kneed virgins.”

  There was a long pause.

  “In the old days they called Killibol the Dark World,” Bec said at last. “That’s right, isn’t it, Harmen? Maybe they called it that because Earth is so bright.”

  Harmen was squatting in a corner, electing himself out of the proceedings as usual. “Undoubtedly,” he replied in a sonorous voice. “It would appear that the light here is so bright as to be unbearable to us. Over the centuries our eyes have presumably become accustomed to Killibol’s dimness.”

  “Then we’re as good as blind,” Reeth said.

  “Naw.” Bec waved his hand. Harmen rose and disappeared muttering into the storage hold. He returned with a pair of dark goggles I had last seen on his workbench back home.

  “Brilliant light is a frequent by-product of alchemical operations,” he said. “These filters provide adequate protection.”

  He began to fit the goggles over his lined brow. “Open the shutter and let me view the world of our forebears,” he ordered imperiously.

  “Here, gimme those.” Bec charged over and snatched the goggles from him. Quickly he adjusted them to his own head.

  “Better hide your eyes, boys. I’m going to take a look.”

  We obeyed. I heard a shutter open. There was silence for some moments. Then Bec grunted.

  “Come over here, Klein,” he said.

  I groped my way forward and met Bec’s outstretched arm. He handed the goggles to me, I put them on, pulling the headband tight. Cautiously I opened my eyes and stared out of the window, ignoring Bec’s turned back.

  So there it was. All the fears my imagination had invented, like our having fallen into a furnace, melted away.

  The light was so strong that it warmed my skin, a sensation that I found oddly pleasant. A peaceful landscape stretched out before me. Instead of the flat, grey expanse of rock I had been staring at for the past twenty days or so, I saw a terrain that, though flat hereabouts, broke up into undulating hills in the mid-distance and was covered with a carpet of a green growth that at first I thought was some sort of plastic or artificial fibre. Then I told myself that it couldn’t be, and I felt a sense of excitement as I realised what the green growth was.

  Further off I saw a clump of column-like structures crowned with masses that moved slightly. They had to be trees, I thought to myself after a while.

  Even when wearing the goggles the light was unnaturally brilliant and enhanced the scene with an eerie, dream-like quality. Overhead, the sky was a vivid blue and was studded with clouds of white water-vapour.

  I took a careful look at it all, then closed the shutter and removed the goggles. I turned to face the others. Bec was grinning.

  “The panic’s over,” I said. “There’s nothing moving out there. We’re alone.”

  “What’s it like?” Hassmann asked eagerly. “Is there food?”

  “There’s food,” Bec announced proudly. “It’s like I said it would be. Organics growing underfoot.”

  Grale began grumbling again. “That’s just fine. But how do we see to pick it up?”

  Bec looked at Harmen. “Have you got any more of these goggles? Or can you make any?”

  “I think so,” the alk said. “I believe we have the requisite materials.”

  Reeth and myself helped Harmen make the light-filters. It didn’t take long. In the hold was a sheet of dark-coloured barely-transparent material which we cut into strips and fastened into rims of foam plastic, fastening on headbands. In an hour we had a set for everybody, even Tone the Taker.

  The guys were all nervous and expectant as Bec let up the shutters.

  For a long time they sat staring at the scenery.

  Then Bec opened the sloop’s big door.

  “Come on, you guys, you’re not paralysed,” he complained. “Get down and tread the new world.”

  We were all reluctant to move. We felt safe inside the sloop. Exasperated, Bec started grabbing at us and shoving us through the door. Grale picked up a repeater before he would go. Breezes tugged at our skin as we climbed to the ground, and we felt awkward and uneasy in the newly-made goggles. In an instinctive gesture of protection we stood with our backs to the sloop and gazed about us.

  “It’s weird,” Reeth murmured.

  The Big Egg loomed faintly some distance off, the sloop having rolled nearly two miles before it stopped. I had to look hard to see it at all; it was much less noticeable than on Killibol and was no more than a patch of mist in the air. If you didn’t know where to look you’d never find it at all.

  The green growth was spongy underfoot. Skywards, the sun, although it was much smaller than the big, pale Killibol sun, was still too bright to look at directly, even with the goggles. Also in the sky was another, much larger body: a huge yellow globe covered with various darker markings. Another planet, hanging close to Earth in space.

  Tone the Taker had noticed it, too, and was staring upwards with rapt attention.

  “Beautiful,” he murmured. “Like a pop dream.”

  None of the others, Harmen possibly excepted, had the equipment to see anything artistic in the scene. To them it was just fact, as the streets and buttresses of Klittmann were facts. True, as I looked longer at the eerie, strangely living landscape I felt a yearning for that vast towering pile of stone, steel and concrete; for falling dust, for dives and joints and the incessant babble of clipped Klittmann speech. But I knew none of us were going to crack up over it. We’d already gone through all our traumas that day we fled through Klittmann’s portal.

  Suddenly I jerked as Grale raised his repeater and yanked back the trigger. The gun juddered continuously until he had emptied a whole clip into thin air, sending it spraying out all over the empty landscape.

  He turned back to us grinning, mouth slack, eyes hidden behind the dark goggles.

  “Feel better?” Bec asked acidly.

  “Sure. Just making myself at home. I like to feel I can lick this place.”

  Bec grimaced and turned to the rest of us. “Well, boys, we made it. Here it is. No bare rock anywhere. Protein just waiting to be picked up. Food.”

  Dumbly we stared at the ground. The green carpet of organics was the hardest thing to get used to. People from Killibol have a reverence for organics and we didn’t know where to put our feet.

  Hassmann was the first to try it (sometimes it’s an advantage not to be hampered by an over-active imagination). Wonderingly he knelt on one knee and pulled up a handful of the green stuff that grew in long, thin blades. Later Harmen found from a book that the old Earth word for it was grass. Hassmann sniffed it, ran it between his fingers, then reluctantly put some of it in his mouth. He chewed for nearly a minute, making a sourer face all the while, until he finally spat it out.

  “It don’t taste good, boss. We’ve got a bum steer.”

  Bec cropped some of the grass himself, feeling it and tasting it. He looked questioningly at Harmen. The alchemist shook his head.

  “I know nothing o
f Earth food.”

  Doubtfully Bec looked towards the trees. “O.K.,” he decided after a while, “maybe you have to look around for the right stuff. But there’s food here all right. Everybody knows that.”

  We were all glad to get back aboard the sloop. An air of indecision had suddenly come over the gang. We all felt reluctant to move away from the gateway. Bec realised he had to squash this feeling right away.

  He put the sloop in motion, talking to us as he drove. “Planet Earth is a big place, boys. It might take us a while to case this joint. Meanwhile keep your eyes open but don’t get nervy. Get used to the eye-shades because you’re going to be wearing them for a long, long time. And don’t get trigger-happy because we’ve only got so much ammunition and we’ll probably need it. This sloop is our ace card, boys, just like it was in Klittmann. So don’t shoot without an order — hear that, Grale?”

  Grale grunted.

  But it was Hassmann who forgot Bec’s instruction and let out a long panicky burst on the Jain he was nursing before we’d gone three miles. Bec pulled up fast and turned to face us furiously.

  “What did I just say to you?” he stormed, his eyes blazing.

  We all looked at the landscape. There was nothing there.

  “Something was coming at us, boss!” Hassmann objected. “A bomb or a missile. I had to shoot! Look, there it is right out there!” He pointed to the black object he had expertly shot down, lying in the grass.

  In the end it was Reeth who ventured out to inspect it. He brought it back for us to see: it was a flying animal. He spread out the feathered wings. Blood dripped on to the floor from where the Jain bullets had hit it.

  “Say, look up there,” Grale said. A mate to the dead bird was soaring over us, wheeling with wings outspread.

  “I don’t get it,” Grale said, puzzled. “How does it stay up?” Flying animals, and flying machines, were unknown on Killibol.

  Wordlessly Bec went back to the driving seat. We saw more birds after that.

  As we travelled Bec drew a map, using surrounding hills as landmarks so we could always find our way back to the gateway again. The sloop rolled bumpily over the uneven turf, clambering awkwardly up and down slopes, but the Earth day is considerably longer than the Killibol day and we covered about a hundred miles per rotation period. During the night we could dispense with our eye-shades; but Bec insisted on travelling by day so as to acclimatise ourselves. He also insisted on everybody getting out of the sloop at each stop we made; otherwise most of us would have been happier huddling in our own artificial little world.

  We passed through grassland, past forest, lakes and rivers. We spent some time arguing whether animals as well as plants might constitute food. So far we had found nothing that we could regard as even remotely eatable. On one of our stops Hassmann entered a forest and shot a small animal he found there, after hearing Harmen and Reeth both assert that animal tissue contains more protein than does vegetable tissue. Actually the food we were used to always came in processed slabs or cakes differing only in flavour and texture. That was why we didn’t think of the idea of eating flesh straight away. Hassmann peeled off the creature’s fur and cut a piece off it with a hacksaw. Blood was running all over his hands and on to the ground where we sat in the shadow of the sloop. He sniffed at the chunk of meat, which was red and soggy.

  My gorge rose. We all shook our heads. Disgusted, Hassmann flung the dead animal away with all his strength and wiped his hands on the grass.

  “Like trying to eat your own arm!”

  Grale swallowed the last of his protein bar. The rations were low: none of us had had a full belly for a long time.

  He stood up and moved around restlessly. “I’ll bet there’s nothing to eat on the whole of this Goddamned planet. We should have stayed in Klittmann and died fighting.”

  Bec stared at him with interest. “I never knew a guy so unhappy to be alive.”

  “What’s the good of being alive walking around like a crazy alk?” He tapped his eye-shades. “When are we gonna find what we came for?”

  “He’s got something there, boss,” Reeth put in mildly. “It don’t look good.”

  “It don’t look good to you because you can’t see any further than the end of a gun barrel.” Bec’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “You want it all handed to you. Sure I don’t know what we’re going to find, or when. I do know that whatever it is, we’ve got to be ready to handle it. If we don’t find food we’ll find people. Where there’s people there are angles — and then there’ll be food. You’ll see Klittmann again: we’ll break it open like a mud pie and drown the bosses in their own tanks,”

  Grale’s florid face became dangerous. “What are you trying to pull, Bec?” he raged. “There’s five of us! We’ve got no mob to back us up. We’re finished, washed out! How are we gonna take Klittmann, Bec? How?”

  “Quit squalling like a kid and shut up.”

  Grale stormed into the sloop to clean his guns, which he always did when he was feeling moody.

  Everybody avoided saying anything. Even Harmen looked pensive.

  Later Bec sent Reeth and me to climb a hill to spy out the land. All we saw of interest was a lake glinting in the distance. I stood there on top of the hill, under an open blue sky, trying not to feel naked and vulnerable (even now I still can’t stand under an open sky without feeling naked) and trying not to think of close-packed, grey Klittmann where everything was machinery, artificial and familiar.

  “Tell me,” Reeth said in a dry, matter-of-fact voice, looking into the distance, “do you think Bec’s cracking up?”

  “Why should he be?”

  “Well, he talks about going back to Klittmann. About taking it over as if nothing had happened. Grale’s right — we’ve been knocked out of the game. Bec’s ravings don’t make sense.”

  I glanced thoughtfully at Reeth’s narrow, sharp face. He had buck teeth that puckered up his features and made him appear shrewd, which he was. He was also nimble-minded and cool-headed. I could never understand why Bec had always ranked him below Grale.

  “What I mean is,” Reeth went on calmly, “I would feel like some kind of dummy following a guy who’s flipped in the head.”

  “That sounds reasonable,” I said, “but I don’t think you need worry. I think Bec was getting interested in Earth a long time before we got hit. Ever since he met Harmen. He always seemed to reckon we would find something useful there.”

  Reeth gave an open-handed gesture, shrugging hopelessly. “But let’s face it. We’re mobsters. We’re way out of our element here. Bec talks as if we’re going to find cities here just the same as on Killibol. We’re not. It’s all different here.”

  “Bec has a theory about that,” I told him confidentially. “He banks on there being a civilisation here. Where there’s a civilisation there has to be mobsters. Once we contact them we can learn how they operate, what the angles are. Then we move in.”

  Simple. It takes a genius like Bec to see things that simple.

  Reeth snorted delightedly. “And what if these other mobsters don’t like us, if they wipe us out?”

  “Bec has an angle there too,” I said, grinning ruefully. “I hope he’s right. He reckons we should be smarter than they are. Life here on Earth is a lot easier than where we come from. In Klittmann we were struggling for survival since we were born. It’s a law of evolution that we’ll be better in the survival business than they are.”

  “Well, maybe,” Reeth sighed. “It all sounds pretty theoretical to me. I trust facts, not theories.”

  “You can trust Bec. Who else could have got us out of that jam in Klittmann?”

  “Who else could have got us into that jam? Klein, I’m wondering what will happen if we don’t find any food. How long will this mob hang together if we don’t find some action soon? If you ask me Bec’s dipping into a pack and hoping to draw a card that isn’t even there.”

  He sighed and indicated the stretching prairie. “I don’t understand
why we can’t eat this stuff.”

  “Maybe it’s like raw protein straight out of the tank,” I surmised. “It could be that it has to be processed.”

  “But that needs factories and skilled technicians. If life’s like that on Earth too then we’ve got it all wrong.”

  Regardless of my secret oath of loyalty to Bec, I couldn’t think of an answer.

  We went back down the hill to report. Hassmann, Grale and Bec were playing cards. Tone the Taker sat skulking by himself some yards away. He had a miserable existence on the sloop; none of the mob deigned to notice him, apart from Bec, and Bec was too busy to bother with him. Now he sat clutching his box of pop, which he almost never put down. He was trying hard to ration himself, but the supply was dwindling day by day and his situation was pretty desperate. Lately his twitches had become more pronounced, which made the others despise him all the more despite that their fortunes in Klittmann had been partly founded on pop.

  Only Harmen treated him like a human being, and now the alk also sat by himself, apparently contemplating.

  As the sun went down everybody disappeared one by one into the sloop to get some sleep, until I was alone with Bec again. I told him about Reeth’s misgivings, and added my own for good measure.

  Bec was just finishing a tube of weed. He threw the stub down.

  He said: “When a bullet is fired from a gun, sometimes it hits its target, and sometimes it misses. Whether it hits or not, it carries the same force. It can’t do anything else. I’m that bullet.”

  “So that’s all there is to it,” I said dully. “We missed.”

  “Not at all. I’m a bullet with a name written on it. You know the old saying: sooner or later the bullet’s going to hit the guy with that name. In other words, I’ve got a destination. Maybe it looks hopeless to you. But not to me, or to Harmen either.”

  “Harmen?”

  Bec smiled, “You ought to talk to Harmen some time, Klein. He’s got quite an outlook. I get inspiration from listening to him. He makes everything sound like a big machine that just has to keep on working. And the laws of the machine are the same on Killibol, on Earth, or anywhere in the universe.”