John Racham

Stephen
Query had been condemned to serve out his space enlistment on Step Two, the unknown
mudball
way station. Query had been made a mere
technician there at the enclosed domed-in base because he refused to accept automaton
status. But Query found that Step Two meant for him at least the freedom of
privacy and daydream even though one step outside the Dome without protective
clothing could mean death. Or so everyone
said
...

Until Stephen and the admiral who had ordered
him to that dark planet were thrown defenseless into the muddy misty world
beyond the Dome. There could be no hope of rescue, for Step Two's officers had
concealed the crash of the admiral's vessel and no one at the base even knew
they were
lost
.

They wandered hopeless, starving and
thirsty,
knowing there was no hope—and then, there was a
noise, there were those strange colors, there was something emerging from the
dark planet beyond all conception....

Turn
this book over for second complete novel

JOHN
RACKHAM has also written:

FLOWER
OF DORADIL THE DOUBLE INVADERS ALIEN SEA

THE
PROXIMA PROJECT IPOMOEA

TREASURE
OF TAU CETI THE ANYTHING TREE BEYOND CAPELLA

DARK
PLANET

JOHN RACKHAM

ACE BOOKS

A
Division of Charter Communications Inc.
1120
Avenue of the Americas New York, N. Y. 10036

dark planet

Copyright
©, 1971, by John Rackham All Rights Reserved.

Cover art by Jack
Gaughan
.

the
herod
men

Copyright
©, 1971,
by Ace Books

Printed
in U.S.A.

H
e
stood up to his knees
in
hot mud, the wet weight of it pressing the inert plastic of his suit warmly
against his legs. Inside the suit he was a trifle more than comfortably warm,
aware of beads of sweat that formed and trickled and stung his eyes. The
lung-pack on his back labored ceaselessly to keep that level despite the close
to boiling, steamy air outside. And that air wasn't just hot and humid, it was
alive: a seething soup of microorganisms that were perpetually hungry. The
planet surface slow-boiled constantly at the bottom of a hundred-mile blanket
of shimmering blue green, voracious air that had its own furtive glow, giving a
visibility of something under ten yards, and even that was uncertain as to edge
and color. And Stephen Query liked it, felt happy in it, as he was now.

He
knew himself to be odd and was, therefore, sane. Either a man gets to the age
of maturity believing everyone else is crazy but him, in which case he is
insane, or he realizes that it's everybody else who is normal and he's the odd
one, and he stays sane.
But alone.
Query liked to be
alone. Here, if he forgot the thin thread of plastic line that was his clue
back to the Dome, he could be alone as never before.
Alone in
a sea of mud with shimmer green walls and ceiling and the silent yet urgent
surge of alien jungle all about him.
Alone to think,
not so much about this wild environment, but about himself.

There
was enough room in his mind to feel mildly grateful for the
"bending" of Dome regulations that allowed him this escape; to recall
the words of Sergeant
Keast
: "Don't see why the
hell not, Query, on your own time! It
don't
cost
anything, and you sure as hell aren't going to run off, out there.
Where to, huh?"
And "run off" was a valid

5

point
,
for service here, on this nameless planet, at this base called, simply, Step
Two, was a form of punishment. So Query had room to feel just that small twinge
of gratitude. But for everything else to do with Space Service and what it
stood for he felt no gratitude whatever. He rejected it with the solid and
total stubbornness with which he had rejected each and every other form of
regimentation that came with being human. And that itself was a problem he
needed to think about, to reach some kind of decision on.

But
thinking, for Query, was more a process of letting his mind run where it wanted
to and following after it with interest to see what it turned up, and then to
wonder at it. Such as now, in the middle of seething life that he could feel
on all sides though it was utterly silent. No birds sang; no insects buzzed;
nothing splashed the mud with running feet. But he called back his mind from
that and brought it to the question.
To be, or not.
He
knew Hamlet's speech, admired the sonorous phrases, but his problem came to
simpler terms and in older language still. "
Humanus
sum,
et
nihil
humanum
a me
alienum
puto
." I am human, and therefore nothing human is
alien to me. But he felt alien to it, inescapably. So what to do? The prospect
of yielding, allowing
himself
to be slotted into the
structure of society just like everyone else, was terrifying. It had the feel
of living death. On the other hand, was the life he had led so far so very
wonderful? Was it worth it just for the sake of integrity? Or to refine it
right down to the basics "Who
am I
, that I can
expect everybody else to move over to make room for me?"

That
fascinating but unanswerable question went
aglim-mering
as the smooth surface of the chocolate brown mud right in front of him grew a
bump. A ripple, and up came the pale green spike of something that grew with
visible speed, thrusting up like a spear, swelling, forming a bulb on a slim
stem. He could have reached out and touched it. It shook with urgency, strained
and swayed, and even as the fattening head lifted clear of the mud, he saw
ravenous decay attacking it, saw the sudden cluster of yellow spots which
spread fast and coalesced into a whole, so that the burgeoning head drooped and
bent back.
And swelled more.
And burst to discharge a
puff of tiny white

6
specks that floated on the mud for a breath
and were
gone,
were all swallowed up like their
parent.

There
was significance here. He pondered on it. Life was that fast in this hothouse,
but the essence was the same anywhere. Fight and die. Eat and be eaten. Emerge
for a brief moment then fall back into the vast anonymity . . . that was it
Individuality was a temporary illusion in the eternity of life itself. Only the
idea itself lives on. Like Space Service itself, even. Conditions changed.
Personnel changed, officers and men came and went. Ships were built and flew,
served and fell out, or were destroyed. Everything changed except the Space
Service idea, the concept itself. "And whatever else I am," he
thought, "I am not a concept!"

Trained
caution made him squint aside at the register on his helmet wall. A little
under an hour left on the lung-pack, and it would take him half of that to get
back to the Dome, trailing back along that line. That plastic link, by itself,
was something to wonder at. Without the discovery of that virtually
indestructible, totally inert molecule this base would never have been built,
would have been out of the question. And this ball of hot, sizzling mud, dark
and jungle grown, would never have known the impact of human curiosity. It was
just a wild planet of an insignificant sun, halfway between Sigma
Draconis
and the
Alkaid
cluster
in the Great Bear.

But
then Query rethought it. The plastic had made the base possible, true, but it
had been one man's decision that had brought it into reality. And that man
symbolized for Query everything he detested about society in general and the
Space Service in particular. Gareth Evans . . . even the sound of the archaic
given name was somehow typical of the man's impossible arrogance.
Old Gravel Guts Evans, general officer commanding the whole Space
Service in its glorious hour of emergency.
Glorious?
Query knew very little of what the Service had been like in peaceful times.
Like many another, he had been ruthlessly snatched from civilian anonymity and
drilled into some skill he could handle, in his case the repair and maintenance
of instruments to do with ships and drives and flight . . . and that was it.
And the Service, under the unexpected impact of the full-blown Settlers' Revolt
in the
Alkaid

cluster
,
was a curious hodgepodge. A general officer commanding who called himself an
admiral . . . technicians . . . sergeants . . . regulations that came so fast
and changed so often that no one man could keep them all in mind. A
mess,
and all to restrain a group of people who wanted to
run their own affairs without interference from Earth. An old and stupid story,
repeated in the historical record a thousand times.
Glorious?

Query
loathed it with all his being, but he had learned the hard way to at least make
the appearance of conforming. And the job had called for very little of his
intelligence. So, as so often before, he had carefully wrapped the cloak of
camouflage about himself. Until chance had ripped it wide open. Until an
inspecting lieutenant had said, offhandedly, "You have those modules
upside down,
Instrumentman
. Correct it."

"But that's correct as
per diagram, sir!"

As simple as that.
And perversely, for Query had drawn a line, as he did occasionally,
against being screwed down out of sight He was right, the lieutenant was wrong,
and he stuck stubbornly to that. Experimental test and proof would have been
simple, but that was no longer the point at issue. Minor insubordination blew
itself up into a full-scale court-martial, in itself an index of the general
morale of the time, for the rebel Settlers were having things largely their
own way then. There was also the awful fact about courts-martial in the
military mind: you must be guilty of
something,
or
it would never have got that far!

And
then chance again. It just so happened that old Gravel Guts himself was on Moon
Base at the time and decided to sit in. And though the hard-nosed court could
find nothing specific, it was he who biased the whole outcome. He, who could
think only in terms of discipline, tradition and the rule book, brought his
influence to bear. The upshot was that Query had been shipped out from his quiet
anonymity among the instrument repair section of Moon Base, and dropped here,
on this mud ball.
The forgotten men, each and every one of
them with cause to remember Evans . . . and not in their prayers.
His
job was as it had always been, to check out, overhaul, calibrate and test,
repair and/or replace all those instruments that enable

8
ships to fly; a steady, delicate, but
noninspiring
job, no matter where it was done.

Except
that here, Step
Two
, was
a
punishment in itself for the ordinary trooper. Moon Base and all the
other bases like it weren't exactly pleasure camps, but they did have
amenities.
Video, canteen, recreation spaces . . . and women.
There was also some kind of hospital-convalescence facility for the repair of
men as well as machines. And authority had learned, the hard way, that men need
women and vice versa, so the hospitals were staffed accordingly.
But not here.
Sick men didn't stop off here, only partly
disabled ships and those in need of stores, fuel and supplies. And the staff
didn't merit kinder consideration. They weren't permanent but serving sentences
of greater or lesser duration, and that was all they thought about
When
do I get away?
There was
a
kind of black psychology about it in that it made men behave, keep
their noses clean and their eyes fixed on the goal of eventual return to
civilization.

Of
them all, Query was the only one who liked it, who had come to appreciate the
alien quality of the place as having something akin to his own nature. Not that
it detracted anything from his detestation for Admiral Evans. In his mind,
that old man served as focus for his more general detestation of the whole of
humanity. For the war itself he felt nothing at all. It was just one more
example of society eating out its own guts.

Query
flicked another glance at his register.
Ten more minutes.
He dragged his mind away from futile thoughts about Evans. The old fool thought
he had meted out punishment, whereas, in fact, he had done Query
a
service. Never in all his life
had he
imagined
such a place as this.
A whole world hidden and secret, with a
dark and wild beauty all its own.
Tangled creeper and
stem and root all writhing to survive.
And those immense blue black
columns that stood straight up into the unknown mist above.
Trees
of some kind.
Enormous and inscrutable.
Did
they have leaves and fruit, he wondered? What was it all for? Could there
properly be
a
purpose in all this life, if there was no
consciousness to understand it? Sometimes he had the acute sense that this dark
underworld was as much aware of him as he was of it . . . and that feeling came
very strongly now, of something out there on the other side of his helmet
transparency, watching him.

And
he saw it. In that instant he froze dead still.
Something—just
there, beyond that nearest great bole—staring at him.
Pale,
immobile, but with eyes that had caught a glint of light for just a moment.
Eyes.
A head, now, as
he
concentrated
on it.
He felt no fear at all, just intense curiosity. What was it? He
separated shape from shadow, slowly.
A head, with the dark
shadow of short hair, flat and moist in curls.
Nostrils
and a chin, a mouth.
Neck and shoulder and an arm.
All pale, a kind of
greeny
cream, which could be an
effect of the light. But
humanoidl
He
held his breath in amazement, astonishment and delight all at once.
Definitely a human shape as far as he could see in the deceptive light.
Cowering behind a tree and watching him.
Possibly as amazed
and astonished as he was.
Query itched in his mind with a vast wonder.
Not the wonder of how anything humanlike came to be here at all. There the
creature was, and that was enough.

But
what
kind
of creature was it. Human in shape; it moved cautiously now, an arm,
elbow and hand coming to rest on the tree bole . . . definitely a humanoid. But
what did it think
,
if anything? What dreams and hopes
and fears?

What
must
you
think
of
me,
in
this
crazy
suit?
he
thought.
I
wish
you
could
talk,
and
I
could
understand.

A
rivulet of sweat ran into his eyes, blinding him for a moment, and when he was
free of tears again—it was gone. Another mind would have sent the idea packing
as illusion, but Query never even thought about it.

I
'll
be
back,
he thought, saying it in his mind.
I
'll
be back.
We
have
to
meet
again,
somehow.
Tell
your
friends.
And
he flicked another glance at his register and swore. He had undercut his time.
Now he would have to scramble faster than ever before to get back there before
his lung-pack quit on him. It wasn't easy to hurry in this murk. He took the
line and reeled it over his left hand and elbow as he followed it back through
mud and rioting creeper, around huge boles, crashing through thick shrubs, and
in one spot stuck for several minutes while he argued with a snakelike root
that had intimately entwined itself around the line. Precious minutes went
away. He floundered on, sweat streaming into his eyes and his incoming air
growing hot and foul as the lung-pack labored through its last few resources.
The filters would be solid now, the power pack feeble. He felt the liquid of
his own sweat filling up inside the suit as he shambled on, whooping for
breath, half-blind with sweat. And then, suddenly, the mud was less and the
ground under his feet had a crust. And there was the Dome, looming
grayly
out of the mist. He hit the air lock button and
leaned against the wall, fumbled at the snap hook on his line as the hatch
cycled open and out, staggered inside and waited while it shut again, saw the
eye-twisting blue of U.V. come on and heard the air pumps kick in. A minute
more,
and he could lever his helmet back and breathe
gustily, gratefully, and then tear at the Velcro seals of his suit and peel it
off.

"That
was close!" he muttered, shivering as the dry air sucked away the sweat
from his bare body. "Too close. Sergeant
Keast
ever got to hear, he might put the ban on." And that was a sobering
thought. He turned the suit inside out to clean itself, took his one piece,
snug fit, disposable uniform suit from the hook where he'd left it, climbed
into it, grabbed the depleted lung-pack, and then leaned on the inner switch to
set the door cycling open. This would be the worst time to be forbidden his
pleasure jaunts outside, now that he had found humanoids out there. The first
thing to come through the doorway at him was noise, above all the noise of
Sergeant
Keast's
file hard voice halfway through a
familiar indoctrination speech.

. .
assigned your work details immediately after chow-time, which is five minutes
from now and lasts thirty minutes, at which time you will fall in again here,
which is known as the assembly area, and
I
'll
give you the rest of the rundown at that time, to which you will pay attention,
but hear this.
I
will be the last to arrive.
I
better be.
Dismissed!"

New arrivals.
Query wasn't curious about them or anything else to do with Sergeant
Keast
. Just the sound of that voice, with its machinelike
monotonous grind, was enough to banish forever any faint imaginings he may have
had about telling anybody what he had seen out there. He went away as
inconspicuously as possible, heading for stores.
But not
furtively enough.