Dead Man's Planet
Date: 2020-04-24T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; Short stories; Asteroids -- Fiction

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Title: Dead Man's Planet

Author: R. R. Winterbotham

Illustrator: Hall

Release date: April 24, 2020 [eBook #61919]
Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61919

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEAD MAN'S PLANET ***

DEAD MAN'S PLANET

By R. R. WINTERBOTHAM

For unmarked ages a dead man kept his ghostly
vigil on that barren, frozen asteroid.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1941.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"A life-saver!" Mick said, bringing the space freighter down with a gentle bump on the huge, shapeless mass of rock and iron that floated between Mars and Jupiter.

The term huge was purely relative, for the asteroid was scarcely ten miles in diameter at its thickest point, and its axis could not have been more than twelve miles long.

Mick switched off the rockets, opened a locker and pulled forth a suit of heavy, furlined, airtight garments which he slipped over his uniform.

The communication speaker buzzed.

"Hey, Mick! Are you still on the bridge?"

Alf Rankin was calling from the charting room.

"Yes, Alf. What's the trouble." Mick Conner was sealing his space suit.

"This isn't an ordinary asteroid, Mick. It isn't barren. There's stuff growing on it."

"That's nothing to get goggle-eyed about, Alf. There's moss on Eros which is smaller than this. And there are 142 different kinds of plants and one intermediate—animal-vegetable—organism on Juno."

"Hm-m!"

Of course this was a surprise to Alf, who had never made a landing on the asteroids before. Science had rather neglected the asteroids during the rapid development of interplanetary flight, yet there were many interesting sights to be seen on the 4,000 minor planets that floated between Jupiter and Mars.

"Get on your space togs and oxygen helmet and we'll fix that broken jet," Mick said. "We'll be ready to go in three hours."

Mick sealed his helmet and stepped into the automatic lock leading from the control bridge to the roof of the streamlined rocket.

He held tightly to the rail of the observation platform, knowing that the gravity of this nameless planet was next to zero. A man might jump one thousand feet into the sky without exertion and, if he wasn't careful, he might fling himself so high that he would be unable to land—he might become a satellite of this grain of cosmic dust.

Mick hooked the lifeline from his belt to the rail of the platform and stepped over the side. Instead of falling, he floated a few inches a second downward to the ground. In gravity like this a man might jump off Mt. Everest—if there were an Everest—and land without injury.

Alf, the square-jawed giant who manned the engines of the rocket ship, emerged from the lower locks and fastened his lifeline to the iron ladder extending to the ground.

"Look at that stuff, Mick," Alf spoke into his radio telephone. He pointed to a dense growth, barely visible in Jupiter's light, just north of the ship. "It looks like corn. Good old American maize!"

Mick who had been examining the damaged portion of the starboard rockets, glanced in the direction Alf was pointing. In even, nicely cultivated rows, stood tasseled stalks.

"You don't suppose this place is inhabited by men!" Alf's voice was awed.

"It can't be. There's no air," Mick replied. "Anyhow, it isn't corn. It must be something else. You know there are doubles all over the system. The Martian pumpkins aren't even vegetables, but they're a species of mollusk. Even if this is corn, it's different, because corn depends on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."

"Maybe there's carbon dioxide in the rocks."

"Then this wouldn't be like terrestrial maize. Its leaves would serve some other purpose."

"Mick! Look!"

As Alf spoke the rows of corn seemed to move. Bright phosphorescent beads seemed to pop from the tassels and float toward the two human beings.

Like a rain of meteors, the brilliant specks came floating through the sky. But the brilliant shower fell with tantalizing slowness. Then one of the sparks dropped short, twenty feet from the feet of the spacemen. As it touched the ground, there was a bluish spark, and the rock beneath it glowed with heat.

"Look out!" Mick cried. His hand unsnapped the lifeline. His legs doubled beneath his body and he shot upward into the air. Suddenly he plunged into daylight. The corona-crowned sun was sticking its head over the horizon.

As Alf shot into the sky beside him, Mick noted that the ground was still dark, and that the terminator line that delineated night and day, still was a mile or so to the eastward, floating rapidly toward them.

There were other things about this weird planet that also struck Mick's eyes. It was filled with growing things. Most of these were single stalks, crowned with a bluish bud. But there was a terrestrial note to some of the plants that clung to the rocks and sand of the asteroid.

To the south was a huge tree, with gnarled branches and leaves. Tucked away in a small gully were reddish flowers that looked like roses in the distance. There were vines clinging to the rocks. The corn that had first attracted attention of the spacemen, occupied a small, rectangular patch and the stalks were so evenly spaced that the field suggested artificial cultivation.

Slowly they came back toward the ground. Below was one of the budded stalks which slowly nodded its tip toward the terrestrials as their feet came in contact with the soil.

Mick was ready this time. His gun was in his hand as the little white bead emerged from the tip of the bud. The gun sent a streak of flame into the middle of the stalk, and the plant was sliced as neatly as a knife could have cut through a stem.

"It's not nearly as pleasant here as I expected," Alf panted into the phone of his space suit. "Who ever thought we'd have to fight plants on an asteroid?"

Mick did not answer. Still clutching his gun, he was walking toward a little path that led into a gully in the rocks. He moved cautiously, halting at each turn in the little path, searching the gully ahead of him. The path indicated animals, for plants do not walk.

Alf trailed behind, keeping his eyes peeled for fire-shooting plants, and carefully gauging his steps to keep himself from sailing high into the sky.

In the steep places along the path, there were steps carved into the rock.

"It looks—almost human," came from Mick, "but why would a human being need steps in this gravity?"

At the end of the gully was a cliff, fully one hundred feet high flanked by a mound of sand. The path led toward this mound and in the center was an iron door, looking all the world like the outer locks of a space ship.

Toward this door the two men walked. Whatever doubts they had of a human touch on this asteroid vanished at the sight of the door. It was possible for nature to duplicate her works on two different planets. The physiology of Martians, Venusians and terrestrials had much in common. The processes of biochemistry are limited and living types are always similar to some degree. Even on earth many species of animals and plants which have no direct relationship may possess resemblances—the fish and the whale, or certain reptiles and amphibians.

But the airlocks of space ships were human inventions. There was small likelihood that another race in the universe would mark its doors with the Roman letters:

UNIVERSAL LOCK COMPANY
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

The two spacemen stared speechlessly at the evidence of human habitation. Then slowly the door swung open.

They waited for someone to emerge, but the silence of space remained unbroken. The locks were empty, yet they had opened. Was someone watching them from inside? If so, why didn't he hail them?

"Hello there!" Mick spoke on the universal wavelength into his microphone.

No answer came.

"Maybe his radio's out of whack," Alf said. "Shall we go in?"

Alf started forward, but Mick seized his arm.

"Look!" he whispered. "Up there, above the door!"

Just above the door was a ledge, which neither man had noticed at first. On this ledge stood a human figure. He wore no space suit, no oxygen helmet and his head was bare.

An empty pistol holster dangled at his side and his hands were on his hips. He was standing motionless in the cold of space watching the two terrestrials below him.

"Great guns!"

The figure didn't move. He didn't even blink his eyes. He only stared. Not a flicker of movement crossed his face.

"He's dead," Mick said. He bent his legs and shot up to the ledge beside the man. "Dead and turned to stone!"

"Stone?"

"Ice, rather. He's frozen hard as a rock. Probably he's been here for years. Not enough heat to thaw him out."

"But why hasn't he fallen down?" Alf asked.

"Why should he? There's hardly enough gravity to pull him down; there's no wind to blow him down. There are no earthquakes on a planet as small as this."

"How did he get there?"

Mick shrugged his shoulders. It was a puzzle, certainly; but there were possible solutions. The first and most logical was that this fellow had exposed himself, rather than to die a lingering death from starvation or lack of oxygen.

"Let's take a look at his quarters," Mick suggested.

He dropped lightly to the ground and entered the lock. He quickly inspected the lock control apparatus, making sure that the outer doors would function properly. Then he closed the locks and opened the inner doors.

The glass of Mick's space helmet frosted as warm air from the interior struck its surface.

Wiping away the mist he stepped aside.

Standing in the center of the room, smiling at them, was an exact replica of the man they had seen on the ledge. But this one was alive!

"Welcome to Dead Man's planet!" the faint human voice drifted to the ears of the men. "You may remove your helmets. The air here is pure and there is plenty of it." The man's greenish eyes drifted down over the figures of the human beings facing him. "But you needn't point your guns at me."

The welcome was not as warm as the two spacemen might have expected from an exile on the asteroid. There was a note in the pale-faced man's voice that sounded false. It was not distrust that Mick felt, nor a sense of danger, for there was nothing to indicate that this lonely man intended to harm his visitors; but some subconscious reasoning in the spaceman's brain seemed to detect an uncanny sort of insincerity. Mick could not forget the grisly object on the ledge above the doorway. Why hadn't the dead man been buried?

The pallid host watched the spacemen skin themselves of their airtight suits and sniff the warm, sweet air of the buried spaceship.

"You're men," he said. "Men!"

"My name's Michael Conner, a space pilot; this is Alf Rankin, co-pilot and engineer. We fused and blew a rocket on the earth-Jupiter orbit and we landed here to make repairs."

The pallid man smiled. There was the cunning of the fox and the savage craft of a spider in his expression.

"Call me Ghor," he said.

Mick's eyes cruised over the pointed face. Ghor was a strange name. It wasn't terrestrial and it didn't sound like any of the Martian dialects. Ghor might be a criminal, preferring exile to a life in prison.

"You're a strange man, Ghor," Mick said. "You present a mystery. Are you from Mars? How does it happen you live on this Godforsaken bit of rock?"

"I was born here," Ghor said.

"Oh!" There was an awkward pause after this unexpected answer. Mick's eyes unconsciously lifted toward the roof, above which stood the frozen human figure.

"He was my father." Ghor spoke simply. His words were carefully and slowly enunciated. Mick supposed that Ghor was unused to talking and his brain worked slowly in the matter of words. But that brain was keen. It seemed to read Mick's thoughts, answering an unspoken question about the Dead Man.

"You must have an interesting history," Alf suggested.

"I have," Ghor replied. "But so have you. Tell me how you happened to find my home. You might have repaired your ship and gone on, without discovering me."

"There was a field of queer acting plants—they looked like maize, except that they tried to kill us."

"Oh! My cornfield! I forgot the nasty habit the cornstalks have."

"You mean that stuff was corn?" Alf asked. "Real roasting ears?"

"Well, almost." Ghor's lips cracked into another of his nerve-racking smiles. "You see the plants are really native of Dead Man's planet, but I modified them into something quite close to terrestrial maize."

"By grafting and cross fertilization?"

"Oh no. There is a much different process of propagation of the species here, much simpler. My corn was regenerated."

Ghor hobbled across the room toward an ultra-violet lamp beneath which were two pots of flowers, both looking much like American beauty roses. Ghor returned, with the same mincing steps, walking as if a leg injury had limited the use of his knees.

"These flowers are beautiful," Ghor said, like a doctor of philosophy announcing the first premise of a step in mathematics.

"Yes," Mick replied. "We noticed numbers of them growing in the rocks."

"I know. I placed them there, to make Dead Man's planet beautiful. But they are quite useless."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that."

"I know what I am talking about. On earth, roses serve many purposes aside from beauty. They help maintain the atmosphere by exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen; they fertilize the soil; they supply insects, such as bees, with food. These roses extract carbon from the rocks and give nothing in return, except their beauty. The soil is not fertilized. There are no insects to feed. This flower has no pollen, for it is purely ornamental, developed by myself for beauty's sake."

He took his fingers and pinched off the rose. As it dropped to the floor, a whitish, gleaming pellet half emerged from the flower, but Ghor quickly ground it underfoot.

"You see? That little projectile might have killed me. The flower is vicious. Like other plants on this planet it utilizes organic radioactivity to destroy other living plants."

"So that was what it was." Mick said. "Organic radioactivity!"

Ghor did not reply. His eyes were on the stem of the plant. It was swaying gently, as if it possessed muscles. A little green bubble formed on the end of the stem.

"Watch!" Ghor whispered.

The bubble enlarged and suddenly burst. There, in full bloom, was another rose, just like the first that Ghor had broken from the stem.

"You see, gentlemen, your planet is not the only one that might have the legend of the Hydra! You cut off the head of any plant and another grows in its place. Sometimes two heads grow and by the process of division—analogous with cell division—a new plant individual is formed. The botanical life of Dead Man's planet carries regeneration forward to such a degree that even the loss of a leaf, or of a thorn is replaced in a few minutes, often in a few seconds. The plant life is so hardy that when my father, whose name I never knew, attempted to clear this space with fire, he found he had twice the growth of plants after the fire."

"It's clear now," Alf said. "How did he do it?"

"By transplanting and controlled regeneration," Ghor said, smiling. "He carried his experiments far. Most of the trees here were developed by him. He found that certain injections transformed cell structures so that he could cause the regenerated parts to assume almost any shape he desired. My father's trees are nothing but Ngye stalks—mere weeds—so transformed that they resemble the oaks, the elms, and the chestnuts of the earth."

"And the corn, I suppose is merely a synthetic product?" Mick asked.

"It is a triumph of my own. The product is quite edible and tastes, I assume, much like terrestrial maize, which I have never eaten. The cells possess the same number of genes and chromosomes as Indian maize and it is, therefore, biologically related, although the two types have never been in contact."

"But there must be some difference. Maize doesn't throw radioactive particles at cornhuskers!"

"That," smiled Ghor, "is probably an environmental factor. And it is possible some of the genes are not exactly like maize genes."

Ghor and the two earthmen talked for hours. He showed off his little establishment, buried to conserve heat, under the sand of the asteroid. It was equipped with air purifying apparatus, electrical devices and heaters, all supplied with plant generated power. Ghor cooked a meal, entirely vegetarian, that tasted little different from its terrestrial counterpart. The bread was indistinguishable from that made from wheat flour, the potatoes had exactly the same taste as terrestrial tubers—in fact every item had its counterpart on earth, yet it was supplied from carefully developed plants of the asteroid.

Ghor told other facts about his home.

Dead Man's planet turned on its axis once every nine and one-half hours. Its average temperature was about forty degrees below zero and this temperature remained fairly constant because of the small diameter and surface of the asteroid.

Mick's perplexity over the degree of trust to be placed in Ghor wavered as the conversation continued through the day. Ghor's actions did not appear suspicious. Ghor himself, pale and weak and a product of zero gravity, was hardly to be feared, except through trickery. But there were words, sentences and phrases dropped by the exile from time to time that indicated deep mystery and hidden horror. There were certain unanswered questions that were clues to questions that were not asked.

Behind this mystery, Mick noted a beseeching look that appeared from time to time on Ghor's pinched face. It was the air of a man asking pardon for a crime. Yet, what crime had been committed? Ghor's experiments were contribution to universal knowledge. On earth they would be hailed as discoveries and Ghor would be honored and rewarded for his work. Surely Ghor had committed no crime in his development of alien plants into terrestrial forms.

Ghor's work had been done in the same manner that an experienced airplane pilot flies blind in a fog. He had never seen corn and potatoes, yet he had created them. His sole guides were books in the library and sound motion pictures bearing on botany that had been left behind by Ghor's nameless father. Ghor was more than a Robinson Crusoe; he was a Tarzan in the jungle of space.

The only unseemly exhibit in this island of the sky was the frozen body of Ghor's father on the ledge above the buried space ship. This, however, could be considered in the light of environment. On an airless bit of rock, where nothing decayed, burial in the ground was like offering the human body as food for the roots of millions of obscene plants. Burial seemed more of a sacrilege than the placing of the body on a rock as a flesh and blood monument.

After a rest during the short, five-hour night, Ghor offered to take the spacemen back to their ship to make repairs.

"It isn't that I wish to hurry your departure," he said, "but I realize that my life here is very dull. Except to tell you of my work, I have nothing to offer in the way of entertainment."

"Wouldn't you want to go back to Terra with us?" Mick asked.

Again that cunning, deceptive expression crossed Ghor's face.

"No," he said. He did not elaborate.

Ghor's method of avoiding the radioactive pellets cast from the buds of the weird plants of the asteroid, was akin to the degaussing process used by ships in mine-infested waters. The plants sensed their enemies through the minute electrical currents that are present in all living organisms, Ghor explained. They cast their pellets at all alien organisms that came near.

"You mean grow near?"

"There are a few mobile plants on Dead Man's planet." Ghor explained.

They had emerged from the locks of the ship and they were moving down the gulley. Ghor walked in his usual stiff-legged stride and clad as he was in a spacesuit, he appeared to be some sort of mechanical monster.

As they emerged from the gulley and came to the place where Mick had slashed down the budded stalk with his ray gun, Ghor halted. The shriveled burned bud lay on the ground, but the stalk had disappeared.

The earphones in Mick's spacesuit caught Ghor's startled gasp:

"Ngye!"

"It attacked us yesterday after we jumped out of the corn patch," Alf was explaining. "Mick knocked it over with his ray gun."

"It is the first one that has ventured on this side of the planet in several years," Ghor explained. "It's one of the mobile plants I was speaking of. You see, the stem has regenerated a new bud and has moved on."

"We saw several of them—"

"Several!" Ghor seemed to stiffen. "Gentlemen. It is not safe here. We must go back to my cabin. The Ngye is one plant that is deadly."

"I thought your father made trees out of them," Mick said.

"At first they were docile. My father developed many kinds of plants from them and I myself created the corn from hybrid Ngye plants, but the process of survival played a curious prank by developing in the untouched plants a sense of hatred for these new variations, as well as an everlasting enmity for my father and myself. It was as if these plants resented being made over into alien forms. My father developed a poisonous substance which he spread on the soil which drove the Ngye plants to the other side of the planet. Apparently they have come back. It means, my friends, that mankind must go to war to save himself and his products."

Ghor already was walking rapidly back toward the gully.

"Couldn't you make some other poison to get rid of them again?" Alf asked.

"I might, but it would take time. And—" Ghor seemed to choke, "—it was the poison that killed my father."

As Ghor reached the first turn in the gulley, he halted and then sprang back. A gleaming spark landed at his feet and heated the rock to incandescense.

"Trapped!" he groaned. "There's a forest of Ngyes in the path ahead of us."

Mick pushed forward, his ray gun in hand. He caught a glimpse of a forest of leafless stems, surmounted by ugly, bulging bulbs. Ghor tugged Mick back, just as a shower of sparks shot from the stalks.

"How do they know where we are?" Mick asked. "Doesn't our degaussing equipment work?"

"The Ngye has more sensitive perception than most plants. You forget the radio waves from our phones. The plants are able to find us by those."

"Maybe we can rush them," Mick suggested. "Alf and I can use our ray guns to burn a path through to the cabin—"

Ghor shook his head.

"No. Before we seared half of them, the rest would have melted us into grease. Besides, fire won't work with them. It will only multiply our enemies."

A warning cry came from Alf.

"They're behind us, too!"

Mick glanced down the gulley. A moving forest was circling the bend. The Ngyes seemed to progress with an amoebic motion, as if their roots tugged them along over the loosely packed soil.

"Quick, Alf! Take Ghor's arm. We can jump for it!"

As Mick shouted, he seized Ghor's right arm. Alf took the left arm of the asteroid man. The three shot upward into the air, propelled by the earth-born strength of the spacemen. The ground where they stood a moment before turned red beneath a shower of tiny radioactive pellets.

As they shot into the sunlit sky, their eyes saw Ngyes on all sides. They lined the valley. The cornfield was ablaze with light as the budded plants and hybrid maize battled for existence. Even the rocks above the gulley sprouted hundreds of the swaying stems.

"We're in for it," Mick said. "Wherever we land, we'll be in a patch of them. We'd better shut off our telephones and try to slip through—"

"No! Our steps on the soil will be sensed by the roots. We'd never walk a dozen yards. But you might make it by jumping—"

Ghor broke off suddenly. His head turned toward a grove of the enemy stalks directly below. Two of the stalks had bent close to the ground, placing their bulbs beneath the roots of a third. Suddenly the bent stalks straightened, catapulting the third stalk into the air, like an arrow toward the three floating men.

Mick's gun blasted the stalk and it withered in flame in mid-air.

But other stalks were shooting toward them now.

Ghor was struggling desperately.

"Let me go!" he whispered. "Turn loose of my arm. Remember, the gravity here will not let me fall faster than you."

Ghor suddenly wrenched loose. From a pocket of his spacesuit flashed a knife.

"Stop!" It was Alf who first sensed Ghor's intention, but his action was too slow to stop what followed.

The knife slashed through the fabroid spacesuit, deep into the neck of the asteroid man. A spray of red blood shot into the airless sky.

A curious sort of tremor seemed to shake the stalks below. The reddish spray seemed to strike fear into the waving buds. The living forest pushed back away from the spray of human blood.

When the men dropped to the ground the Ngyes were retreating.

But Ghor lay lifeless beside them.

"That was the poison that killed the Ngyes—and that killed his father," Mick said. "Human blood! It's ghastly."

"We'll put him on the ledge," Alf said. "I think he'd like that. Lord! To think that we didn't trust him at first. He's a hero, Mick! A hero as great as any in the history of mankind!"

A day later the two terrestrials, protected by the degaussers, completed the repairs on their space ship.

"I think we ought to go back to the cabin, Alf," Mick suggested.

"Yeah. We ought to pay our respects to Ghor. We owe him more than he'll ever know."

Once more they stumbled up the gulley. They kicked aside a few dead Ngye stalks that had been killed by the lifeblood of Ghor as they followed the turns of the pathway. At last they reached the locks.

"Mick!"

Alf was pointing to the ledge above the locks. Only one human figure, its arms akimbo, eyes staring down the gulley, stood on the ledge. Ghor was gone.

Slowly the locks opened. Through the door, unhelmeted, unprotected by a spacesuit, came Ghor.

"He's alive!"

Ghor smiled—that same crooked, half mysterious smile. He lifted his hand and held a microphone close to his lips.

"I hoped you wouldn't come back. I didn't want you to know I was a failure."

"A failure! Man, you're a hero!" Mick said.

"I'm not a man. If I had been a man, I would have died. But, you see, I am not a man. I am a product of my father's botany. You see, I, like all of the things that look like terrestrial things on this planet, was developed from the lowly Ngye. It had been my hope that I was no longer a plant, but a man. I had read men's books; studied his pictures; learned his arts. But I am not a man. I am a failure."

From the door came another being—an identical image of Ghor.

"This," Ghor said, "is my son. The result of my wound yesterday."

Mick walked forward and took the hands of the two asteroid men.

"If you're not men," he said, "you're something greater."

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEAD MAN'S PLANET ***

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