Walton The Green Dream and three more stories

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-98744-649-8
Verlag: OTB eBook publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 104 Seiten

Reihe: Classics To Go

This is a great collection of action short stories by Bryce Walton from The Golden Age of Science Fiction. Featured here: The Green Dream, Design For Doomsday, The Barrier, and Victorious Failure.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Walton, Bryce

Leseproben

The Green Dream
Owen Baarslag had brought terror to the swamp
people. Joha, the little Venusian maid, was
determined that he should not leave without it. Joha, who was part Venusian, twined her translucent fingers through the Earthman's matted hair. She smiled. Strangely, from her light green face, red eyes shone with a terrible hatred and a malignant purpose. But the man asleep on the couch of lizard-skin softened with layers of wing-feathers from the Kuh-Kuri Swampbird, was unaware of that evil, almost lustful hate—for it blazed outward from her delicate face only while he slept. The greenish glow from her body seeming to alienate her from anything human, she squatted cross-legged on the damp tamped-earth floor beside him. His body was long and gaunt, his face angular with deeply sunken eyes which were closed in exhausted sleep. Only a slight twitching of his facial muscles and an occasional jerking of his body signified the horror of his growing nightmare. She withdrew her hand. Her eyes blazed more brightly like evil jewels into his, piercing the closed lids with invisible beams of malignant and gloating resolve. Her voice was very soft. "You do not sleep well, do you, Owen Baarslag? Every terrible thing you have done to my people here in the swamps—the torture, the slavery, the subjection and the terror—it haunts your dreams. Your blighted conscience crawls, doesn't it, Owen?" The sleeping man didn't answer. He was deep, deep down in the dark fastnesses of his nightmare, trying to escape, trying to awake. Outside the synthetic shell of the hut, in the fetid heart of the Venusian swamp Sector 5, a serpent hissed as it raised its pointed head from the slime and sank back again. A gigantic flying Gruoon gurgled overhead as it fell on its prey and flapped upward into the thick mist. Beyond these more abrupt sounds was the unceasing dreeing of millions of insects and the loud croaking of the bloated albino tree-toads that sagged heavily from the five-hundred foot crinoids. Now she looked with even greater intensity into his nightmare-twisted face, probed far behind the lids covering his black Tellurian eyes. The cold light from the captured still-living Shnug-fly which dangled from the low raftered ceiling molded a weird shadow on the walls of the tiny hut. Joha's red eyes blazed brighter, brighter still. Her slightly webbed hands gripped together with a tremendous tension of mental effort. Owen Baarslag screamed. He sat up with a sudden heaving motion of agonized fear. His eyes were wide and horror-filled as he stared at the half breed creature beside him. Sweat streamed from his face made pallid by five years in the sunless swamp. His hands trembled over his bearded jaw. "Stith!" he choked harshly. "Get me Stith, quickly!" He raised an arm to strike her, but she weaved away. She brought him a box of the Stith tablets crystallized from the fermented juices of the Venusian aukweed. He tremblingly swallowed three of them. He got to his feet and stood there, shuddering, eyes wild with the memory of the terror-dream. He stared at her for a long time from fear-glazed eyes while the fear gradually died into clouds of suspicion. He suspected her ability to probe his mind during sleep and implant the seeds of nightmare there, she knew that. But it was only an intangible suspicion. He needed her. She was his only companionship in the vast global rain-forest of Venus. And he wouldn't let the suspicion grow to the stage where he would have to kill her or worse. Her hold over him was a strong one. If he lost her, he would be alone. To the Tellurian colonists scattered minutely through the rich area of Sector 5, Owen Baarslag was an unspeakable obscenity. A degenerate derelict; an abnormal who had "gone native" and things even more despicable. A Stith addict who eeked out a precarious existence in the most polluted occupation known: that of forcing the timid Venusian swamp natives to harvest the meager crops of aukweed from the lake bottoms. The vile drug brought fabulous credits when Baarslag managed to get it into the hands of secret agents on the space liners that docked at the Vencity spaceport twice a year. And the Venusians themselves hated Baarslag with a helpless cowed fear. He beat, tortured and killed them whenever they refused to obey. And the necessity of probing the great depths of the lakes after the aukweed twisted and deformed those it didn't kill, dooming them to a life of incurable pain. Shaking as with dohl-fever, Owen staggered to the door, peering through the insect-proof netting into the writhing tendrils coming up from the phosphorescent bogs. He kicked Joha aside as though she were some crude form of vermin. They considered him a despised abnormality, the authorities. There was a price on his head just the same, he mused proudly. Five thousand credits for his capture—alive. Dead, they wouldn't care for him particularly. His brain was abnormal in an age when advanced psychometry had made abnormality a rare exception. They needed his brain for analysis. Five thousand credits—that was the price they placed on his brain in the massive Chrome laboratories in Vencity. The labs in which his twin, Professor Albert Baarslag, held his exalted position as Chief of Psychometry! The insidious influence of the euphoric stith burned into his mind, fogged his eye with delusions of grandeur. He saw himself as a martyr, a persecuted victim, sacrificed on the altars of socialization. He slumped down on the kuh-kuri couch again, and looked at the sinuous outline of the Venusian creature who took care of him as though love could exist between an Earthman and a half Venusian fish. "I wasn't always what I am now," he said. "You know that, Joha!" She nodded. Yes. She knew. She had heard various phases of Owen's life history many times. She liked to listen. The more she found out about his twisted past the more horrible she could make his nightmare by employing her powers of suggestion. That power was common among her people—she still considered herself a Venusian in spite of her Tellurian blood—but the fact that she was part Tellurian enabled her to exercise that power on the Earthman better than a pure blooded Venusian could. She knew that Owen had only a slight subconscious realization of that power which she possessed, and which she had been using for the past year to sow those insidious seeds of nightmare in Owen's mind. To admit that she held such power over him was to admit that this green-skinned creature was superior to him—and that Owen Baarslag could never admit. No one was superior to Owen Baarslag. The whole world of science had been jealous and envious of him. That was why they had banned him, made an outlaw of him! "I could have been the greatest cosmologist ever known," he said. "You know that, Joha!" "Yes," she said in that strange slurred tongue that seemed to hold such emotion, yet held no tangible meaning. "I know that, Owen." Owen's pale face that had been buried in the sunless mist clouded, darkened. "My own brother," he said. "He betrayed me to the Scientific Council. Think of it, Joha! My own brother—my twin brother! Now it's time for him to die." "You have found a way to kill him?" She backed away, eyes wide. "Yes! And it is all perfect. Perfect. One would think Albert had prepared everything for my benefit, so that I might kill him. Everything is perfect. His experiment is finished. It is a great success. And he deserves to die. You know that, don't you, Joha? Don't you?" "Yes. I know it," she said. Owen glared into the mist. "Fifteen years of study. My record was undeniably the highest in my study section. I might have graduated from World Tech this year, Joha! I might be in those Labs right now—instead of rotting here in the slime-pit! I took the final psychotic tests, weeks of mental probing with those damnable scanners digging into my brain. And Albert—my own twin brother—with his hypocritical love for me—he was the one who turned in the negative report! As Chief of the Psychometric Council he could have passed me. It was because he was my zygotic twin—because he knew me more intimately than even the scanners—that he was able to deny me entrance into the Labs! Now, Joha, doesn't he deserve to die?" And Joha, who had heard this countless times before, made the customary reply. "Yes, Owen." And then added. "You have been waiting five years for him to perfect his Time-Encystment principle. This—suspended animation. You have said you would murder him, and take his place in the encystment chamber. But, Owen, are you sure you can escape detection long enough to get to him in order to kill him?" "Yes, yes! It is all arranged. I can't fail. I must get to him. All these years of hell in this cesspool—they mustn't be wasted, Joha. They can't be wasted, can they?" "No," she said softly. "They can't be. But—but I love you so much, Owen. When you leave, I shall be so lonely. I will probably die of loneliness." He laughed. It was a broken, bitter laugh. It was the laughter of a mad man. The paranoiac who is guided by a strange genius for planned destruction. The laughter died, and he seemed to have forgotten her. He paced back and forth across the tiny damp hut. "Now. Now it is time. Five years in hell—then paradise. Albert has perfected his time-encystment chamber. He has insisted, bless him, on undergoing the experiment himself. He insists against the will of the Tellurian Government, the Council, everyone. He is noble. 'It would not be fair,' he says, 'to allow another to take the chance. It is my experiment; and it is only right that I must be the guinea pig.' Ah, my brother is so noble, so fair, as are...