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Title: Star of Panadur
Author: Albert dePina
Henry Hasse
Illustrator: Bob Lubbers
Release date: May 28, 2020 [eBook #62253]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STAR OF PANADUR ***
STAR OF PANADUR
BY ALBERT de PINA AND HENRY HASSE
On the barren wastes of Europa, two marooned
men fought, battling over an animal whose life
one had saved. There was no fear in the animal's
eyes--only the gleam of a weird unearthly knowledge
that foretold the way the fight would end.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories March 1943.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"Hugh! Hugh! There's life here ... look ... look at this! Found it in a
cavern!" The shrill voice was exultant and gleeful.
Hugh Betancourt quickly rose from the fire he tended, and turned
startled eyes on the furry bundle Jim Brannigan grasped firmly by the
scruff of its neck. At first, nothing was visible but the liquid sheen
of the thing's silvery fur; but as Jim roughly thrust it out, Hugh
gave an involuntary gasp of surprise. The creature's small, triangular
face was nothing less than beautiful! Its eyes were soft and large and
luminous, like beryls, set wide apart. Above its broad forehead a short
mane of silver fur, beginning in a widow's peak, fell back cloud-soft
and shimmering. It was about three feet tall, slim, furred to the
throat-line; a strange biped with slender arms and six-fingered hands.
"Damn it, Jim, go easy! You've all but strangled it! Here give it to
me." Hugh extended his arms.
"Don't let it get away from you, it's faster than a jack-rabbit," Jim
cautioned, extending the ham-sized hand in which he held the creature.
"Luckily, I surprised it in a sort of cave-like gully, where it
couldn't escape. It means food, Hugh! Lots of food if we can find more
of these animals!"
For a moment, the incipient madness of many days on this hellish
satellite engulfed Hugh in a wave of nausea. He remembered the
gravity-screen tearing from its pivots, and the space-ship caught in
the tremendous pull of Jupiter; the last desperate try at the controls,
and then the tiny dark bulk of Europa curving up to met them headlong.
There had been cheerless days of biting cold when the tiny satellite
faced the distant pallid sun. There had been nights that were like a
canto out of Dante, as they were bathed in Jupiter's red cold-glow.
More recently, and for more reason, Hugh remembered the dwindling food
supply which had now quite vanished.
"Yes, food," Hugh echoed Jim's words in a hoarse whisper. He grasped
the soft warm body in his hands with gentle firmness. The creature
did not try to escape, it lay limp and inert with its eyes closed.
"But--but food doesn't quite solve our problem. Unless we can find some
oxide crystal to alloy in the portable smelter, we're sunk. Jim, that
jagged hole in the prow isn't going to repair itself!"
Jim's ordinarily red face grew redder with anger, until there was no
distinguishing between the color of his hair and that of his face.
"All right," he snarled, "so we need the oxide! For days we've been
searching all over this cold hell for some, and where are we? I still
maintain our immediate problem is food!"
"Yes, yes, food," Hugh murmured. Why, he wondered vaguely, was he so
reluctant to talk about it while he held this limp warm creature in
his arms? He looked down at it again, and was startled to find himself
staring into its extraordinary eyes. Limpid, brilliant, full of a
semi-human intelligence now, they were scarcely a foot from Hugh's own
eyes--and for a single instant Hugh had the crazy idea that they were
filled with a strange fixity of purpose, almost as if it were trying to
convey something to him there in the appalling silence of Europa.
* * * * *
A sudden cold came over Hugh that was not the cold of Europa. It took
quite an effort for him to tear his own eyes away, then he laughed and
whispered inquiringly of himself, "Am I going crazy? Maybe this place
is beginning to get me at last. For a moment I thought...."
He shrugged uneasily.
"What are you mumbling?" Jim demanded irritably, his huge form bulking
against the bizarre jagged landscape. "I'd have slit that thing's
throat and skinned it already? Here, give it----"
"Wait, you fool!" Hugh's ordinarily thoughtful, hazel eyes were bright
now and hard, as he drew back from Jim's grasping hand. "We're the
first to find life on Europa, the only ones to see what inhabits it;
and all you can think of is your damned stomach. You can't be starved,
you ate this morning!"
"Yes, and that was the last of it," Jim snarled. His face was ugly now
and purposeful. "Well, I'm hungry again, and now that I've found these
Europan kangaroos I aim to be fed and kept warm. Notice how fine that
pelt is?"
Hugh had noticed, indeed. He had noticed even more, the peculiar sheen
and aliveness of it, as if it were surcharged with a definite energy.
As he held the creature close, a warm feeling of well-being slowly
diffused through him. And something, _something_ like a faint echo in
his brain was like a shadowy background to his thoughts. Yes, he knew;
here was food and here was warm fur against the eternal cold of the
satellite. But their space suits protected them in a measure against
the cold, and if necessary they could subsist a few more days without
eating. Perhaps by then they would find some of the rare crystal oxide,
enough to repair their ship and leave. Perhaps....
It was a long chance, almost an impossibility, and Hugh knew it; but
now, also, he knew what he must do.
He did it. With a distasteful glance at his now openly-belligerent
partner, he stepped forward. Then with unexpected suddenness he lurched
as if he'd lost his footing on the rough terrain. He stumbled sideways.
He twisted and fell deliberately to the ground. He opened his arms wide.
It was rather clumsily done, Hugh realized that instantly.
* * * * *
For an infinitesimal moment, the furry creature sprawled too, immobile,
where Hugh's momentum had flung it. It gazed with an uncanny intensity
into the Earthman's eyes. Then in a single, graceful leap of incredible
speed, it was gone into the growing red haze, as night came on and
Jupiter's macabre glow shattered the surrounding crags.
"You fool, you utter damned fool!" Jim Brannigan screamed, livid with
rage. "You did that deliberately!" Then his huge body was launching
at Hugh, the great heavy fists lashing out with the force of pistons.
Hugh, lighter but more lithe, had only time to roll to one side and
regain his feet. Then he was ducking the barrage of blows, evading the
murderous rushes, allowing Jim to tire out of his frantic rage. Only
once did Hugh strike a blow, a terrific lashing left into the other's
solar plexus that doubled the red giant into helpless nausea.
"That's all we need now," Hugh said with a measure of calm, "to maim or
cripple each other. We'll never get back that way. Come out of it, man!
What we've got to do is get that oxide!"
"What we've got to get is food! You let the only food go that we had!"
Jim Brannigan began to weep, in great racking sobs.
Merely nerves, temporary hysterical reaction, Hugh decided. Jim wasn't
really hungry yet; he was only anticipating the event. When he got
over this, he would sulk. When he got over that, he would start
scheming, with that unpredictable mind of his. Knowing the man, Hugh
decided to watch him carefully from now on.
He took Jim's arm and they walked over to the crippled spacer, lying
like a great silver bug with its nose smashed, in the stark hollow
of this ravine. They entered. Hugh walked forward and examined the
thin sheet of berryllium that patched the ship's wounded hull for the
night. He went astern and turned on the generators at quarter speed, to
provide a miserly warmth. On his way back to the inner cabin he stopped
and peered out of a porthole at a now familiar scene: Europa's dark mad
terrain becoming swiftly suffused with Jupiter's red.
He entered the cabin, glanced at Jim and saw that he was now in the
sulking stage. The hunger problem pressed insistently upon Hugh's own
mind. That little furry creature! In spite of hunger, he was still
glad he had let it escape; but damn it, he wished he knew why! Hugh
thrust the problem from him and glanced again at Jim. Soon Jim's mind,
bordering upon necessity, would begin scheming.
Hugh knew the man....
Despite an utter weariness, Hugh didn't sleep through the rest of
that short night. His mind, alert and hunger-clear, wrestled with the
problem of survival in this mad world of snow and silence. In the
opposite beryllium-mesh bunk, Jim snored fitfully, as though rehearsing
in his sleep some violence in his mind.
Hugh arose slowly, and donned with caution the stiff, heavy space-suit
as protection against the cold. Adjusting the helmet and oxygen tank,
he opened the airlock and ventured out into the Dantesque magnificence
of Europa's night. The red opaline haze had the quality of a waking
nightmare. The great snow crystals were drifting lazily again,
appearing now like livid blotches of ruby. Jupiter loomed like a great
gloating nemesis across the entire ragged horizon.
Hugh didn't know where he was going. No pre-determined plan guided his
footsteps. There was only a great urgency to leave the spacer and go
somewhere and seek.... Hugh stopped, brushed the brittle red snow from
his face-plate and wished he could wipe the sweat from his brow. Go
where, and seek what? Seek oxide crystals of course, he told himself;
but there was something else now, something strange and powerful that
gripped a part of his mind and urged him on like the fear of madness.
He stumbled on for hours it seemed, until he was in the fearsome
cavern country. Here the stark, heaven-rearing cliffs were honeycombed
with tortuous caves and gullies and immense grottoes. He entered a
low gallery-like cave that wound in and downward into the mass of a
gigantic cliff.
Now an unshakable inner dread plucked at his mind and gripped his
throat as he tried to check his precipitate descent, but couldn't. He
no longer seemed possessed of any volition of his own. He shrugged
fatalistically; then he felt a thrill of excitement, as he noticed a
faint luminescence of the surrounding walls. This light increased as he
descended deeper and deeper through widening passages. Then at last, at
the end of a turn a burst of radiance met his eyes.
He was in a grotto of titanic proportions. The substance of its walls
and distant ceiling gave it the gentle radiance of a sunless day. But
it was a glaucous radiance, ineffably green as the light beneath the
waters of a shallow sea.
"Holy, roaring comets!" Hugh swore aloud as he stood there quite still,
staring. "By all the Red-Tails on Venus, it's oxide--all of it!" His
voice echoed inside his helmet and beat against his eardrums.
Yes, it was berryllium oxide gleaming at his feet, crystalline and
powdery just as men had found it for the first time a century before
in the desert wastes of Arizona. The entire floor of the grotto was
covered with it as far as his widening eyes could see. He bent in a
frenzy of joy and scooped up whole handfuls. He half-babbled over it
like a delirious King Midas. He let it trickle fondly through his
fingers in a little glittering flood. Saved! Now they could repair the
ship and return! Return to Earth and tell of this!
Not until several minutes later did Hugh begin to wonder how he had
come here. With a rush of apprehension, he remembered a cold and
tenacious something that had seized a part of his mind. But now it was
gone and he felt strangely limp and tired.
He leaped to his feet. Staring around, he wondered if he could retrace
his steps back to the space-ship. And in that precise moment he felt
his mind seized again with a sort of frantic suddenness. There was no
mistaking that very clear warning of, "_Danger! Danger!_"
But he could not have acted in time. Even as he spun around he was
unaware of the shadow that lengthened behind him, until it loomed very
near and a part of it lashed out. Not until the last split second, did
Hugh glimpse wild and red-streaked eyes in vivid contrast to the grim
and purposeful face behind a helmet plate. Then the part of the shadow
that was Jim Brannigan's arm, holding something massive like a rock,
completed the swift arc and struck.
A sun exploded within Hugh's head. Livid flames engulfed him, consumed
him, he tried to cry out but couldn't; then the sun fragments cruelly
withdrew, leaving him helpless in a cold blackness through which he
fell like a plummet to ultimate extinction.
* * * * *
Jim Brannigan stood there tensely for a moment, looking at the man he
had struck down. But only for a moment. His lips quirked into a tight
smile, and his exulting keen eyes took in the cave's glittering expanse.
"A fortune in oxide crystals," he murmured, "an inexhaustible mine! And
he thought he could cheat me out of it, keep it from me! Good thing I
followed him. Serves him right if I've killed him."
He didn't seem too worried about it, and he didn't look at Hugh's body
again as he started gathering in the rare crystals.
"Europa's uncharted, I can claim-deed this whole region! And probably
there's another fortune in furs," he added as he suddenly remembered
the creature he had captured. Already, in his greedy mind's eye, he
saw himself a tycoon, the oxide king, with a corner on furs finer than
anything ever seen on Earth, Venus or Mars.
This he saw. But what he didn't see were the myriad pairs of burning
beryl eyes peering at him from concealed openings in the opaline walls.
He was not aware of the increasing energy potential being generated by
a growing legion of furred bodies in surrounding caverns, as more and
more Panadurs pressed forward to peer out at him. Around Jim Brannigan
now the frigid atmosphere began to rise. At first it was pleasantly
cool, then warm, and warmer, until it became suffocating.
Still the silvery-furred Panadurs, in utter silence, generated heat
as their mental forces grew and deliberately united into a single,
increasing potential. Their fur stood erect, an angry violet-silver
now, crackling a little with the intensity of the effort. As a single
unit, they waited, each furry Panadur now touching the other in a
living, livid chain of cumulative power.
Jim Brannigan ceased his gloating and awoke at last to an indefinable
danger. Swiftly he arose and whirled toward the entrance, peering back
over his shoulder at the danger he could feel, that he knew was there,
but could not see.
But already it was too late. Now that increasing energy potential,
grown and united into a single purposeful weapon, was being aimed. Jim
Brannigan hadn't taken three steps toward the entrance when suddenly,
silently, intangible as thought, but infinitely more devastating, it
was released! As the devastating bolt struck him, Brannigan collapsed
into a crumpled heap, shattered, silent ... inert.
* * * * *
For hours that lengthened into days, Hugh Betancourt lay unconscious.
His blanched features were lifeless and cold, there in the same cavern
where Brannigan's treacherous blow had toppled him into oblivion.
Then, as a hint of color returned to his cheeks, and a slow strength
began to course through his limbs, he regained moments of lucidness;
but they were brief and he always lapsed back into delirium.
With the wavering unreality of a mirage, vague memories of those
strange furred creatures, encircling him, surged into his mind; they
seemed to have pressed close to him, holding hands. Strange! They
were joined by a line of their fellow Panadurs to a similar circle
surrounding a huddled figure a short distance away. But that was crazy!
And Hugh's mind would slide back into the darkness again.
Once, he thought one of the Panadurs came and placed its exquisite
face against his chest, and held it there a long time, as if it were
testing the Earthman's metabolism. This seemed so very real! Hugh was
aware of an almost crackling silence and the cave ceiling's unchanging
luminescence.
Still a third time, he imagined that a silver-gray Panadur, almost
stately in his measured movements, came over to him with a gleaming
jewel in his hand. It was an inch in diameter and the same color as
the creature's eyes, a pale luscent green. Majestically, despite his
diminutive size, he placed the stone over Hugh's heart. Instantly the
gem flamed with the effulgence of a glowing star. The Panadur seemed
satisfied.
When at last Hugh Betancourt regained full consciousness, and was able
to sit up and stare around him, he realized that he had not been a prey
to delusions. Although he still felt weak, his mind was crystal clear.
Here was the circle of Panadurs still enclosing him. _But the circle
had grown_, as if a great many more creatures had joined the uncanny
circle in an ecstasy to be in close proximity to the tall earthman.
Their furry, vibrating bodies pressed close to him, and their strange,
fragile hands touched his wrists and throat and face, as they seemed to
caress him with infinite gentleness.
Waves of sheer energy seemed to envelop him and penetrate to the
deepest recesses of his being, as if by some strange alchemy, these
alien creatures of stark Europa were transmitting to him the elemental
life force itself.
But strangely enough, that other circle of Panadurs enclosing that
huddled figure over there, in the semi-gloom, was contracting as it
grew smaller and smaller, day by day. Hugh ceased to wonder about all
this as he lay back to gather his strength. He fell into a peaceful
sleep.
* * * * *
This time when he awoke, it was a profound sense of well-being far
beyond anything he'd ever known. It permeated his body with the
exhilarating glow of a rare Venusian wine.
One thing, however, still eluded him. He sat up and felt his head
where the blow had fallen. He remembered only the excruciating pain in
the microscopic instant before the rushing darkness came. There was
nothing there now. Not even a scar.
"A rock from the ceiling must have fallen," he thought. "My luck to be
standing right under it."
"_It was not a rock!_"
The thought came into his mind clear and unmistakable. Then Hugh found
himself staring into the beryl-green eyes of the stately keeper of the
jewel. Like a flash, the scene he had not witnessed, of Jim Brannigan
stalking him from the space-ship, the murderous blow and the vision of
himself lying in a pool of blood on the glittering expanse of oxide
crystals, was etched into his mind by the telepathic power of the
Panadur.
"We know you would have spared us," came the uncanny stream of thought.
"Your companion captured me when I, as the chosen leader, went to
investigate your arrival. But you deliberately let me go when it meant
your own life. But he, whose fur was like the angry spot of the greater
world, would have destroyed us. We read his thoughts."
"Telepathy, by Mercury's molten heart!" Hugh exclaimed in awe, dimly
sensing the prodigious mental power of the being. "And we were going
to eat one of them!" He stared around the cave, remembering Jim
Brannigan, and it was apparent that Hugh still didn't realize all that
had occurred. "I suppose that murdering, mercenary scum's left long ago
with the ship, and here I'm stranded! If I ever get my hands on him----"
"That you will never do."
Hugh was aware of the Panadur again, and he saw the shadowy copy of a
smile flit over its features.
"We gave you of our energy," the shimmering silver being transmitted.
"And we gave you of another life that you might have yours again. It
was but justice!"
"What? What other life?" And then Hugh tottered where he stood, swayed
sickeningly, as the entire meaning burst upon him. He remembered the
scenes in his delirium, when two circles, one of which enclosed him and
another that enclosed a huddled figure, had been formed by Panadurs,
while a living chain of the brooding creatures joined the two circles
together. He shuddered as he remembered that his own circle seemed to
expand as the other inexorably _contracted_!
"There was no choice!" The limpid thought-message from the Panadur
impinged upon Hugh's mind. "We know the secret of the release of
electronic energy by the disassociation of electronic and neutronic
balance in the atomic scale. We reverse the vibration of matter and
through magnetic means draw a steady stream of energy--pure energy
from matter in whatever state. In your case, we simply transmitted the
energy content of the red-furred one to you."
* * * * *
Hugh hardly dared to glance in the direction where the huddled figure
had been, but with an effort of will he steeled himself against the
growing nausea and resolutely walked over to the thing.
He felt his sanity reeling.
He was brought back to sanity by the Panadur, who, all along, had
communicated with him. Its fragile, six-fingered hand was extended,
palm-upwards and lying on it was a gleaming jewel.
"Take it and go!" The message came with majestic power, yet there was
a world of kindness in it. "Go back to your ship. You will find its
damage repaired. We have done that for you. With the star of Panadur
you will be guided back as my thought centers upon it. On the day when
you return to our world, gaze upon the star and you will be helped to
find again and gather the crystals you seek. _But none from your planet
must ever see us again, or even hear of us!_"
"I promise!" Hugh exclaimed fervently, remembering Jim Brannigan's
intent and that there were many men like Brannigan.
Slowly Hugh left the cave, clutching the dazzling gem through which
he could feel a directed flow of thought. He was still a little dazed
at this miracle. He wanted to laugh and to cry. But the flooding
realization that his ship, repaired and ready, awaited him; that he was
free to leave this craggy hell of crimson shadows and arctic nights,
left only a vast, singing quiet in his soul, too deep for tears.
End of Project Gutenberg's Star of Panadur, by Albert dePina and Henry Hasse
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STAR OF PANADUR ***
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