Short Fiction · The Devil’s Asteroid (2/4)

“This young lady⁠—miss, are you an exile? Because,” and he spoke in the same fashion that he had once employed to Parr, “then you’re our new chief. The latest comer commands.”

“Why⁠—why⁠—” stammered the girl.

“Wait a minute,” interposed Parr again. “Let’s take stock of ourselves. Haldocott and Jeffords killed⁠—and a couple of others⁠—”

Shanklin barked at him. “You don’t give orders any more. We’ve got a new chief, and you’re just one of the rabble, like me.” He made a heavily gallant bow toward the latest arrival. “May I ask your name, lady?”

“I’m Varina Pemberton,” she said. “But what’s the meaning of all this?”

Shanklin and Sadau began to explain. The others gathered interestedly around. Parr felt suddenly left out, and stooped to look at the dead Martian. The body wore several useful things⁠—a belt with ammunition and a knife-combination, shoes on the thickened ends of the tentacles, and that strange armor. As Parr moved to retrieve these, his companions called out to halt him.

“The new chief will decide about those things,” said Shanklin officiously. “Especially the gun. Can I have it?”

To avoid a crisis, Parr passed the weapon to the girl, who nodded thanks and slid it into her own waist-belt. Shanklin asked for, and received, the knife. Sadau was the only man slender enough to wear the shoes, and gratefully donned them. Parr looked once again at the armor, which he had drawn free of its dead owner.

“What’s that for?” asked Shanklin.

Parr made no answer, because he did not know. The armor was too loosely hung together for protection against weapons. It certainly was no space-overall. And it had nothing of the elegance that might make it a Martian uniform of office. Casting back, Parr remembered that the skipper had worn it at the time when he, Parr, was landed⁠—but not during the voyage out. He shook his head over the mystery.

“Let that belong to you,” the girl Varina Pemberton was telling him. “It has plates of metal that may be turned to use. Perhaps⁠—” She seemed to be on the verge of saying something important, but checked herself.

“If you’ll come with us,” Sadau told her respectfully, “we’ll show you where we live and where you will rule.”

They held council that night among the grass huts⁠—the nine that were left after the unsuccessful attack on the patroller. Varina Pemberton, very pretty in her brief sports costume, sat on the stump that was chief’s place; but Shanklin did most of the talking.

“Nobody will argue about our life and prospects being good here,” he thundered, “but there’s no use in making things worse when they’re bad enough.” He shook a thick forefinger at Fitzhugh Parr, who wore the armor he had stripped from the dead Martian. “You were chief, and what you said goes. But you’re not chief now⁠—you’re just the man who murdered four of us!”

“Mmm⁠—yes,” growled one of the lower-fallen listeners, a furry-shouldered, buck-toothed clod named Wain. “That blast almost got me, right behind Haldocott.” His eyes, grown small, gleamed nastily at Parr. “We ought to condemn this man⁠—”

“Please,” interposed Sadau, who alone remained friendly to Parr, “it’s for the chief to condemn.” He looked to Varina Pemberton, who shook her head slowly.

“I feel,” she ventured with her eyes on Parr, “that this ought to be left up to you as a voting body.”

Shanklin sprang to his feet. “Fair enough!” he bawled. “I call Parr guilty. All who think like me, say aye!”

“Aye!”

“Aye!”

“Aye!”

They were all agreeing except Sadau, who looked shrunken and sad and frightened. Shanklin smirked.

“All who think he should be killed as a murderer⁠—”

“Hold on,” put in Varina Pemberton. “If I’m chief, I’ll draw the line there. Don’t kill him.”

Shanklin bowed toward her. “I was wrong to suggest that before a woman. Then he’s to be kicked out?”

There was a chorus of approving yells, and all save Sadau jumped up to look for sticks and stones. Parr laid his hand on the club he had borne in the skirmish that day.

“Now wait,” he said clearly and harshly, and the whole party faced him⁠—Sadau wanly, the girl questioningly, the rest angrily.

“I’m to be kicked out,” Parr repeated. “I’ll accept that. I’ll go. But,” and the club lifted itself in his right hand, “I’m not going to be roughhoused. I’ve seen it happen here, and none of it for me.”

“Oh, no?” Shanklin had picked up a club of his own, and grinned fiercely.

“No. Let me go, and I leave without having to be whipped out of camp. Mob me, and I promise to die fighting, right here.” He stamped a foot on the ground. “I’ll crack a skull or two before I wink out. That’s a solemn statement of fact.”

“Let him go,” said Varina Pemberton again, this time with a ring of authority. “He wears that armor, and he’ll put up a fight. We can’t spare any more men.”

“Thank you,” Parr told her bleakly. He gave Shanklin a last long stare of challenge, then turned on his heel and walked away toward the thickets amid deep silence. Behind him the council fire made a dwindling hole in the blackness of night. It seemed to be his last hope, fading away.

He pushed in among thick, leafy stems. A voice hailed him:

“Hah!”

And a figure, blacker than the gloom, tramped close to him across a little grassy clearing.

“You! They drive you out?” a thick, unsure voice accosted him.

Parr hefted his club, wondering if this would be an enemy. “Yes. They drove me out. I’m exiled from among exiles.”

“Uh.” The other seemed perplexed over these words, as though they stated a situation too complicated. Parr’s eyes, growing used to the darkness, saw that this was a grotesque, shaggy form, one of the degenerate outcasts from the village. “Uh,” repeated his interrogator. “You come to us. Make one more in camp. Come.”

Among tall trees, thickly grown, lay a throng of sleepers. Parr’s companion led him there, and made an awkward gesture.

“You lie down. You sleep. Tomorrow⁠—boss talk. Uh!”

So saying, the beast-man curled up at the root of a tree. Parr sat down with his back against another trunk, the club across his knees, but he did not sleep.

This, plainly enough, was the outcast horde. It clung together, the gregariousness of humanity not yet winnowed out by degeneration. It had a ruler, too⁠—“Tomorrow boss talk.” Talk of what? In what fashion?

Thus Parr meditated during the long, moonless night. He also took time to examine once more his captured armor. Its metal plates, clamped upon a garment of leatheroid, covered his body and limbs, even the backs of his hands, as well as his neck and scalp. Yet, as he had decided before, it was no great protection against violence. As clothing it was superfluous on this tropical planetoid. What then?

He could not see, but he could feel. His fingers quested all over one plate, probing and tapping. The plate was hollow⁠—in reality, two saucer-shaped plates with their concave faces together. They gave off a muffled clink of hollowness when he tapped them. When he shook the armor, there was something extra in the sound, and that impelled him to hold a plate close to his ear. He heard a soft, rhythmic whirr of machinery.

“There’s a vibration in this stuff,” he summed up in his mind. “What for? To protect against what?”

Then, suddenly, he had it.

The greatest menace of the whole tiny world was the force that reversed evolution⁠—the vibration must be designed to neutralize that force!

“I’m immune!” cried Fitzhugh Parr aloud; and, in the early dawn that now crept into the grove, his sleeping companions began to wake and rise and gape at him.

He gaped back, with the shocked fascination that any intelligent person would feel at viewing such reconstructions of his ancestors. At almost the first glance he saw that the newest evolutionary thought was correct⁠—these were simian, but not apes. Ape and man, as he had often heard, sprang from the same common forefather, low-browed, muzzle-faced, hairy. Such were these, in varying degrees of intensity. None wore clothes. Grinning mouths exhibited fanglike teeth, bare chests broadened powerfully, clumsy hands with short, ineffectual thumbs made foolish gestures. But the feet, for instance, were not like hands, they were flat pedestals with forward-projecting toes. The legs, though short, were powerful. Man’s father, decided Parr, must have had something of the bear about his appearance⁠ ⁠… and the most bearlike of the twenty or thirty beast-men heaved himself erect and came slouching across toward Parr.

This thing had once been a giant of a man, and remained a giant of an animal. None of the others present were nearly as large, nor were any of the men who had driven Parr forth. Six feet six towered this hair-thicketed ogre, with a chest like a drayhorse, and arms as thick as stovepipes. One hand⁠—the thumb had trouble opposing the great cucumber fingers⁠—flourished a club almost as long as Parr’s whole body.

“I⁠—boss,” thundered this monster impressively. “Throw down stick.”

Parr had risen, his own club poised for defense. The giant’s free hand pointed to the weapon. “Throw down,” it repeated, with a growl as bearlike as the body.

“Not me,” said Parr, and ducked away from the tree-trunk against which he might be pinned. “What’s the idea? I didn’t do anything to you⁠—”

“I⁠—boss,” said his threatener again. “Nobody fight me.”

“True, true,” chorused the others sycophantically. “Ling, he boss⁠—throw down club, you new man.”

Parr saw what they meant. With the other community, the newest and therefore most advanced individual ruled. In this more primitive society, the strongest held sway until a stronger displaced him. The giant called Ling was by no means the most human-seeming creature there, but he was plainly the ruler and plainly meant so to continue. Parr was no coward, but he was no fool. As the six-foot bludgeon whirled upward between him and the sky, he cast down his own stick in token of surrender.

“No argument, Ling,” he said sensibly.

There was laughter at that, and silly applause. Ling swung around and stripped bare his great pointed fangs in a snarl. Silence fell abruptly, and he faced Parr again. “You,” he said. “You got on⁠—” And he stepped close, tapping the plates on Parr’s chest.

“It’s armor,” said Parr.

“Huh! Ah⁠—ar⁠—” The word was too much for the creature, whose brain and mouth alike had forgotten most language. “Well,” said Ling, “I want. I wear.”

He fumbled at the fastenings.

Parr jumped clear of him. He had accepted authority a moment ago, but this armor was his insurance against becoming a beast. “It’s mine,” he objected.

Solemnly Ling shook his great browless head, as big as a coal-scuttle and fringed with bristly beard. “Mine,” he said roughly. “I boss. You⁠—”

He caught Parr by the arm and dragged him close. So quick and powerful was the clutch that it almost dislocated Parr’s shoulder. By sheer instinct, Parr struck with his free fist.

Square and solid on that coarse-bearded chin landed Parr’s knuckles, with their covering of armor plate. And Ling, confident to the point of innocence because of his strength and authority, had neither guarded nor prepared. His great head jerked back as though it would fly from his shoulders. And Parr, wrenching loose, followed up the advantage because a second’s hesitation would be his downfall.

He hit Ling on the lower end of the breastbone, where his belly would be softest. Above him he heard the beast-giant grunt in pain, and then Parr swung roundabout to score on the jaw again. Ling actually gave back, dropping his immense bludgeon. A body less firmly pedestalled upon powerful legs and scoop-shovel feet would have gone down. It took a moment for him to recover.

“Aaaah!” he roared. “I kill you!”

Parr had stooped and caught up his own discarded club. Now he threw it full at the distorted face of his enemy. Ling’s hands flashed up like a shortstop’s, snatched the stick in midair, and broke it in two like a carrot. Another roar, and Ling charged, head down and arms outflung for a pulverizing grapple.

Parr sprang sidewise. Ling blundered past. His stooping head crashed against a tree, his whole body bounded back from the impact, and down he went in a quivering, moaning heap. He did not get up.

Parr backed away, gazing at the others. They stood silent in a score of attitudes, like children playing at moving statues. Then:

“Huh!” cried one. “New boss!”

A chorus of cries and howls greeted this. They gathered around Parr with fawning faces. “You boss! You fight Ling⁠—beat ’im. Huh, you boss!”

At the racket, Ling recovered a little, and managed to squirm into a sitting posture. “Yes,” he said, “you boss.”

With one hand holding his half-smashed skull, he lifted the other in salute to Parr.

It took time⁠—several days⁠—but Parr got over his first revulsion at the bestial traits of his new companions. After all, in shedding the wit and grace of man, they were recovering the honest simplicity of animals. For instance, Ling was not malicious about being displaced, as Shanklin had been. Too, there was much more real mutual helpfulness, if not so much talk about it. When one of the horde found a new crop of berries or roots or nuts, he set up a yell for his friends to come and share. A couple of oldsters, doddering and incompetent gargoyles, were fed and cared for by the younger beast-men. And all stood ready to obey Parr’s slightest word or gesture.

Thus, though it was a new thought to them, several went exploring with him to the north pole of their world. The journey was no more than fifteen miles, but took them across grassy, foodless plains which had never been worth negotiation. Parr chose Ling and another comparatively intelligent specimen who called himself Ruba. Izak, the mild-mannered one who had first met and guided Parr on the night of his banishment from the human village, also pleaded to go. Several others would have joined the party, but the deterioration of legs and feet made them poor walkers. The four went single file⁠—Parr, then big Ling, then Ruba, then Izak. Each carried, on a vine sling, a leaf-package of fruit and a melon for quenching thirst. They also carried clubs.

The plain was well-grassed, as high as Ling’s knuckled knee. Occasionally small creatures hopped or scuttled away. The beast-men threw stones until Parr told them to stop⁠—he could not help but wonder if those scurriers had once been men. The hot sun made him sweat under his plate-armor, but not for all the Solar System would he have laid it aside.

They paused for noonday lunch in a grove of ferny trees beyond the plain, then scaled some rough lava-like rocks. In the early afternoon they came to what must be the asteroid’s northern pole.

Like most of the asteroids, this was originally jagged and irregular. Martian engineers in fitting it artificially to support life, had roughed it into a sphere and pulverized quantities of the rock into soil. Here, at the apex, was a ring of rough naked hills enclosing a pit into which the sun could not look. Ling, catching up with Parr on the brow of the circular range, pointed with his great club.

“Look like mouth of world,” he hazarded. “Dark. Maybe world hungry⁠—eat us.”

“Maybe,” agreed Parr. The pit, about a hundred yards across and full of shadow, looked forbidding enough to be a savage maw. Izak also came alongside.

“Mouth?” he repeated after Ling. “Mmm! Look down. Men in there.”

There was a movement, sure enough, and a flare of something⁠—a torch of punky wood. Izak was right. Men were inside this polar depression.

“Come on,” said Parr at once, and began to scramble down the steep, gloomy inner slope. Ling grimaced, but followed lest his companions think him afraid. Ruba and Izak, who feared to be left behind, stayed close to his heels.