Chapter I: Front Matter

SWORD OF FIRE

By EMMETT McDOWELL

Jupiter Jones, naked and helpless in the slime of
that vile world, cursed the space warp that had
flung him down among its groveling mutants. For
their rising, excited whispers proclaimed him a
knight in shining armor--the bright weapon in his
hands their only hope against the terrible octopods!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Winter 1949.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The Mizar, a glittering needle with stubby, backswept wings, hurtled out of deep space, arced into orbital flight a thousand kilometers above the surface of the planet. The starship had approached from the night side. Now, as it decelerated rapidly, it flashed into the raw orange daylight of the planet's K1 type sun, angled downward into the stratosphere.

Inside the Mizar's control blister, Jupiter Jones lifted red-rimmed eyes to the fuel gauge. It showed only a few centigrams left. Little more than enough to land.

He swore under his breath, hunched lower over the controls, a long, loose-framed man with a shock of red hair and vivid green eyes. The olive uniform of the Galactic Colonization Board was wrinkled as if it had been slept in, and he had allowed his beard to grow. The bushy orange-red mass of it hid his face almost to the eyes.

He was alone in the ship. He'd been alone, operating the Mizar single-handed since Briggs, his co-pilot, had gone crazy and killed himself.

It had been a damned inconsiderate thing for Briggs to do, Jones felt. Not that he could altogether blame the co-pilot.

They had blundered into a space warp beyond Alpha Centaurus. The Mizar had been flung into an uncharted region of the cosmos, hundreds, perhaps thousands of parsecs from Sol. Hopelessly lost, the chance of ever finding their way back to Earth had been slimmer than trying to locate one certain atom of oxygen in Earth's envelope of air. Briggs had cracked under the strain.

When the co-pilot had failed to relieve him at the end of his watch, Jupiter Jones had switched the controls over to "George," the robot pilot, and had gone in search of him. He'd found Briggs dead in his bunk. An analysis of his stomach had revealed that he'd taken cyanide. There had been no note. Nothing.

He had recorded the tragedy in the log along with a biting opinion of the Psychiatric Board for allowing a man with a flaw in his psychosis to be assigned to advance exploration. Then he'd heaved the body out the refuse port.

Well, he was still lost, Jupiter Jones reflected savagely. Fortunately though, he'd discovered this huge K1 type sun with its system of seven planets while he still had fuel enough to reach it.

Spectroscopic observations had revealed that the second planet possessed an atmosphere high in oxygen and showing traces of water vapor. It was a small world about the size of Mars and uncomfortably close to its flaming orange sun, but it had been his only bet.

He glanced obliquely at the fuel gauge again. His lips thinned, and he dropped his eyes to the scanner.

Immediately, the surface seemed to bounce up at him. Dense jungles. The sheen of an inland sea. The terrain flowed past like an immense relief map.

Then he saw the city.

* * * * *

It rose at the edge of the sea, all turrets and spires and battlements like a walled medieval town. He caught a glimpse of quays with ships warped against them, of cultivated fields like a vast checkerboard. Then the Mizar had flashed past. The city seemed to dwindle and vanish, only the sparkle of orange sunlight on the spires lingering an instant longer.

Jupiter Jones blew out his breath. His first reaction had been to swing the Mizar around, but caution prevailed. He was too old a hand at Galactic exploration to burst unannounced on an alien culture.

The terrain below had been growing progressively rougher. Just ahead a range of mountains reared saw-edged peaks into the clouds. He nursed the Mizar along until the gorges fell away beneath him like blue-green troughs. There was no sign of habitation anywhere.

He braked and banked, spiraling lower and lower, dropping into a deep valley with a river cutting through it like a silver thread. At the last moment, he frantically buckled himself down and cut in "George".

Flame bellowed around the Mizar as the automatic landing jets burst into life. With a fierce crackling roar the star ship sliced through the tangled vegetation, came to rest a hundred meters from the river.

Jupiter Jones threw off the safety straps, stood up, feeling a tingle of excitement take hold of him.

He was down, the ship resting on the crust of a strange world. A world that might well be his home for the rest of his natural life.

It was a dismaying thought.

With gravity dragging at his feet once more, he moved to the transparent rind of the thermoplas blister and stared out.

The landing jets had charred a huge swathe in the vegetation, charred it to the finest ash and baked the ground like brick, leaving a wall of jungle hemming the ship in.

Nothing moved.

He flicked on the outside amplifiers, but the silence was tomb-like. The thunder of his descent must have frightened off all the wild life.

He was conscious of a cumulative weariness like an ache. Experience had taught him the necessity of being fresh before venturing into an alien environment. He entered his landing in the log, switched on the electronic alarm.

"Let 'George' keep watch," he thought. "George's" senses were keener than any human's, and "George" could be depended on!

With a last glance at the dark mass of jungle, he climbed down the ladder to the cabin, flung himself into his bunk.

He was awakened by the wild ringing of the alarm bell.

* * * * *

Jupiter Jones sprang from his bunk. It seemed as if his head had barely touched the pillow; but as he yanked himself through the well to the control blister above, he saw that night had fallen.

The bluish pallor of the riding lights illuminated the instruments. Through the skin of the blister, he could see the black vault of the heavens sparkling with unfamiliar constellations. But that was all. The Mizar, itself, seemed to be lying in a vale of tar-like darkness.

The clamor of the bell never abated. It drowned out any sound that might be coming through the amplifiers.

He shut it off. As the ringing fell silent, he could hear coughing grunts. The hair on the nape of his neck rose like the hackles of a dog and he switched on the floodlights.

Instantly the burn blazed with a fierce white illumination. He caught a glimpse of a dozen startled figures at the edge of the jungle!

They were human--in shape at least--tall, kilted men with long red hair and copper colored features. Blinded by the light they stood in postures of frozen surprise.

Staring out from the darkened blister, Jupiter Jones thought he'd never seen such feral savagery as was reflected in their expressions. Like--like mad wolves! They were armed with bows. Swords dangled from harness over their backs. Two of them carried a litter.

A frown clouded Jupiter's face.

The litter-bearers belonged to a different race. They were squat, naked, powerful brutes, their slick hides tinged a greenish cast. But it wasn't altogether that. The pair had a passive, resigned look like oxen.

Like the beasts of burden they appeared to be, he thought. Probably a slave race. Then his whole attention was focused on the fantastic creature in the litter.

It was no bigger than a large monkey. Eight spidery arms sprouted from its grotesque body which was covered with a glittering purple shell like a huge mollusk. Jupiter Jones noted these details almost before the creatures recovered from their surprise at the blinding light. His first impression of the purple-shelled octopod in the litter had been that it must be a captive.

Then the octopod raised a silver tube to an orifice in its head, blew a single, piercing note.

The two slate-green porters wheeled and bore the thing off into the jungle. The half dozen naked, copper-skinned warriors followed hard on their heels for all the world like a pack of fox hounds.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead.

Lord, he thought; what was that thing? Could it have been the dominant life form?

He switched out the floodlights, reset the alarm. His first exultation at finding a habitable and inhabited world began to give way to a gnawing distrust.

Suddenly the darkness appeared malignant, concealing hosts of savage brute-men, unguessable horrors. There was the feel of movement out there. He heard something grunt and thrash in the underbrush followed by a squealing noise like a stuck pig.

He shivered, glanced at the photo-electric chronometer.

The sun had set at nine hours, Earth time, he saw. It was fifteen o'clock now. He had ascertained the rotation of the planet while still out in space and knew it wouldn't be light for three hours yet.

He set himself to the task that had occupied him during every leisure moment since the warp had hurled the Mizar beyond the known regions of space--charting the stars in an effort to locate himself.

But he couldn't concentrate. He kept listening subconsciously for any untoward sound of the world outside.

* * * * *

His real name was Jones RV860-09-34271. The Jupiter had been pinned on because he had been marooned once on that planet for three months and had lived to tell about it.

There were two things which Jupiter especially didn't like. He didn't like men; and he didn't like women.

He prided himself on being self-sufficient and tough--and he was tough, morally tough, and physically and intellectually tough. He had grown up in the stews of Venusport, fending for himself since the age of nine. Because he'd never seen the stars, he'd had one consuming ambition--to go to space.

He had studied, worked and fought his way through the Galactic Colonization Board's Institute of Technology. The Institute was a hard school. The men of the advance exploratory units, the special corpsmen, had to be well versed in all sciences from astro-physics to zoomorphology.

No one had believed that Jupiter could make it. Briggs, who had been an upper classman, had ridden him unmercifully. All of which had merely crystallized his determination. In the end he'd graduated with top honors.

It was the same sort of determination that sustained him at this moment.

Jupiter had long since reached the dismaying conclusion that the Mizar had been swept entirely beyond the local system, even beyond any of the adjacent star clusters. That was the final straw that had caused Briggs to crack.

At the thought of Briggs, Jupiter Jones spat into the waste chute and arranged his lank frame before the powerful electronic telescope with which all the ships of advance exploration were equipped. But he didn't use it right away. Instead, he gazed upward at the star-encrusted heavens.

The milky way, he saw, began down near the horizon, though it climbed less than a third of the way up into the sky. The rest of that tremendous path was blotted out by an inky blackness.

He tugged at his beard. There was something familiar about that black pall, and he turned to the star charts again.

Sure enough the "rift", a dark nebula, split the milky way from the constellations of Centaurus to Cygnus!

He must be very close to it, perhaps within a few light years, for it to blot out so much of the super galaxy. But was it the same one? There were hundreds of these dark nebulae. And even if it was, on what side of it was he in relation to Earth?

His elation slowly ebbed.

Pulling out his notes, he recommenced the endless task of mapping the universe. He kept hard at it until the giant orange sun had suffused the sky with a saffron light, blotting out the stars.

The Mizar was only one of many such units probing the local star system in search of habitable worlds. Their role in the long Galactic Colonization plan was to make a superficial examination: vegetation, atmosphere, dominant life form if any and report their findings. Later, depending on the reports of these advance units, the real exploration by staffs of specialists commenced.

Although Jupiter was sure the planet was too many light years off ever to be colonized, he entered the composition of the air in the log from force of habit.

He broke out the emergency pack, selected a semi-automatic carbine from the Mizar's arsenal. He added electroscope, geiger counter, ultra violet ray lamp and prospecting tools to the load. If he ever were to lift the Mizar from the surface again, he must find a deposit of uranium or thorium bearing minerals.

Then he shaved off his great red beard, revealing a hard face, bold featured with a wide, thin-lipped mouth. He slung the load to his shoulders, opened the main port.

A strong saffron sunlight beat into his eyes as he let himself to the ground. He stood still a moment, feeling the dirt press against the soles of his feet, examining the blank hostile wall of jungle, tasting the moist warm air.

Bird-like creatures flitted through the foliage. The vegetation looked mesozoic with its great pulpy stems and fern-like fronds. One of the bird things sailed overhead. It was apple green and appeared as if it might be some freakish symbiosis of plant and animal.

Damn Briggs, he thought for the hundredth time. It was suicidal to attempt the exploration of a strange world alone!