Robert Silverberg: Citadel of Darkness

I was at the heart of it now—the center of life of the race that set itself against all mankind. I clenched and unclenched my fists in anticipation as I traversed the long span of steps.

I handed over Karen. The priest took her and in one swift motion ripped away her thin gown, revealing her naked to the crowd. She began to cry. I muttered a silent curse. Hatred was a red haze before my eyes.

He took her in his giant hands and grasped her around the waist with those two slimy tentacles. The gong sounded furiously, and he responded to it with booming incantations. He lifted Karen’s unprotesting body high over his head, prepared to hurl it into the open abyss—

And I charged forward and snatched her from him just as he was about to release her. We stood there, he and I, on the dais, while a shocked multitude waited for him to strike me dead.

I saw him lower his arm to his side and press a button in his robe—presumably the button that would activate the death-dealing device embedded in my body. Only I wore no such thing. He stared at me in an agony of exasperation as I unbelievably refused to die.

Then I advanced toward him. No one dared move. He bellowed something, and guards broke from their lethargy and started racing up the dais—but it was a long way to go.

He shouted and leaped at me. I felt his powerful hands encircling me and shoving me toward the abyss. I broke loose, hearing Karen’s screaming as a dim noise in the background, and shoved backward. He reeled and groped for the blaster at his side. Before he could use it, I dropkicked it from his hand and sent it flying in a gleaming arc up, out, and into the pit.

He turned in utter dismay and watched it disappear. His face was a mask of despair and sheer horror. The guards were drawing near us, now.

I moved in close and unleashed a barrage of punches. He countered with wild swipes of his tentacles. I could hear Karen yelling clearly now, “They’re coming! They’re coming!”

With coolness born of complete desperation, I reached out and seized him around the waist. I strained to lift the three-hundred pound body from the ground, pulled, yanked, and heaved him high out over the abyss, a pinwheeling figure of arms and legs and tentacles. He screamed all the way down.

I turned and saw Karen crouching behind me, scooped her up, and we began to run. “This way!” I heard a slave cry, and he pushed the guard nearest him down into the abyss as well. A moment later he had crumpled into death himself, but he had saved us—whoever he was. We plunged through the door and out into the corridor.

Everywhere we saw slaves battling with the alien masters. They were dying, of course—as fast as the aliens could kill them—but they were clearing a path to the elevator for us. Andrews was waiting there.

Tears were in his eyes. “Great,” he said, “Wonderful! But now get into your ship and get out of here fast!”

We made our way through a confused mob of aliens and slaves. The stunned aliens seemed helpless with their High Priest dead. We pushed through them, the three of us, and cut through to the ship. We paused for a moment at the base of the catwalk. I glanced at Andrews.

“I’m not coming,” he said, forestalling my question. “There’s no point to it. I’m a dead man the second I leave the Dome. Go on—get going.”

“We’ll never forget you,” I said. I boosted Karen up the catwalk and followed behind her. We made it inside safely, and the hatch clanged closed.

“Get into your acceleration cradle,” I shouted, and leaped for the control panel. I set up a manual pattern for blastoff.

Out the viewport I could see the aliens coming to life, moving toward us in a mighty horde. I finished fumbling with the controls and heaved downward on the blasting stud just as a couple of them began to scale the fins of the ship.

The ship leaped skyward in an instant. In three seconds, we burst through the dome and out into space. Acceleration hit me like a gigantic fist, and I slumped over and blacked out.

The next thing I knew Karen was bending over me and lifting me to my feet. “We’re safe,” she said.

I rubbed my head and nodded. “And we took them all with us. It must have been something down there when the ship broke through the dome and sent their atmosphere whipping out into space. It’s a lousy way to die—but they deserved it. All but those poor slaves. They were dead either way, though.”

“Come look out the port,” Karen said.

I did. I stared down at the bright, boiling radioactive fury that lit up the blackness of space where the dark planet should have been.

“It must have been that blaster,” I said after a long pause. “The one I kicked into the radiation lake. When it reached the reactor at the bottom, it must have blown the roof off.”

“They must have been destroyed in an instant.”

I looked at the beacon outside the viewport. “It’s the end of the dark planet,” I said slowly. “We’ve touched off a chain reaction that will last forever.”

“Forever,” she repeated. “It’s all over now.”

“I don’t think we’ll ever forget Lanargon,” I said. “But I’d like to know what the galaxy’s astronomers are going to say when they notice a brand-new sun in this part of the cosmos.”

“They’ll have all sorts of wild guesses. But we can tell them the right answer, can’t we?”

“Yes,” I said. I glanced once more at the fissioning hell that had been Lanargon, shuddered, and set our course for Earth.