Robert Silverberg: Gorgon Planet

Our troubles started the moment the stiffened corpse of Flaherty was found, standing frozen in a field half a kilometer from the ship. We had all hated the big Irishman’s guts, but finding his body, completely unharmed, stock-still and standing alone, was quite a jolt. There was no apparent sign of death—in fact, at first we thought he was sleeping on his feet. Horses do it, and Flaherty wasn’t far removed from a horse.

But he wasn’t. He was dead, dead as hell. And when the entire human population of a planet consists of eight, and one of those eight dies suddenly of unknown causes, the framework of your existence tends to sag a bit. We were scared.

“We” being the first Earth Exploratory Party (Type A-7) to Bellatrix IV in Orion. Eight men, altogether, bringing back a full report on the whole planet. Eight, of whom one, ox-like Flaherty, was stiff as a board before us.

“What did it, Joel?” asked Tavy Ramirez, our geologist.

“How the blazes do I know?” I snapped. I regretted losing my temper instantly. “Sorry, Tavy. But I know as much as you do about the whole thing. Flaherty is dead, and there’s something out there that killed him.”

“But there’s nothing out there,” protested Kai Framer, the biologist. “For three days we’ve hunted up and down and haven’t found a sign of animal life.”

Jonathan Morro, biologist, unwound his six-feet-eight and stretched. “Maybe an intelligent plant did him in, eh, Kaftan?”

I shook my head. “Doubt it, Jon. No sign of violence, no plants in the vicinity. We found him standing in the middle of a field, on his two big feet, frozen dead. Doesn’t figure.”

Over in the corner of the cabin, Steeger—medical officer—was puttering around the corpse. Steeger was an older man than most of us, one who had literally rotted in the service. He had contracted frogpox on Fomalhaut 11, and now wore two chrome-jacketed titanium legs. I looked over at him.

“Any report, Doc?”

Steeger turned watery eyes towards me. “No sign of any physical harm, Joel. But his muscles are all tensed, as if—as if—well, I can’t phrase it. He seems to have been frozen in his tracks by some strange force. I’m stuck, Joel.”

Phil Janus, our chronicler, looked up from the chess game he’d been playing with pilot Curt Holden and laughed. “Maybe he had an overdose of his own joy-juice and it hardened all his arteries.”

That was a reference to the crude still Flaherty had rigged the day we landed on Bellatrix IV. His duties as navigator had kept the big fellow pretty busy all trip, but first day down-planet and he spent his first idle hour building the still. He didn’t say a word about it to anyone, but had shown up at mess that night pretty high. He never told us where the still was, though we searched all over. The second day Janus had located a liter flask of whisky, home-brewed, and his sampling had cost him a black eye.

“No,” said Framer. “Let’s be serious a moment. One of our group is dead, and we don’t know what killed him. There’s something out there that Flaherty crossed. I move we organize a searching party to find out what.”

“Seconded,” murmured Morro.

I looked at the corpse for a moment, then at the six men around me. Framer was my solid man, I knew, the leader of the group. Morro was strong, too, but usually too bored to bother with the welfare of the group. Young Holden, the pilot, was a follower; he didn’t have any thoughts of his own, or at least he didn’t express any. Tavy Ramirez I knew: quiet, smiling, unassuming—not very strong a person. Doc Steeger was small, frightened, not at all the sort of man who’d go gallivanting around space as part of an exploratory crew. Janus was like Morro in many ways: he just didn’t care. Flaherty, thank the Lord, was dead. The big ox had threatened nasty incidents many times, and had been a constant source of dissension on-ship.

As for me—Joel Kaftan, Lieut. (Spatial)—I was scared. Plenty scared. Visible monsters on a planet are bad enough; invisible ones were hell. I looked out at the port and saw the vast, empty, tree-studded plain that was our chunk of Bellatrix IV, and looked back at the men.

“All in favor of a searching party, say aye.”

Aye it was, and we divided up. There were seven of us, now, and that made things awkward. Steeger was indispensable, as our doctor, and he was of no use outdoors anyway. Holden was theoretically dispensable—in a pinch I could probably have piloted the ship—but I would have hated to try, and so I confined him to quarters too. That left just five men for the search.

It was logical to split into two groups, one of three men and one of two. But I didn’t think too clearly for a moment, and announced we’d have three groups. I didn’t figure that one poor chap would have to go out alone.

I teamed up with Ramirez, and Framer with Morro. That left Janus as a searching party of one.

Janus didn’t mind. Phil rarely minded anything. “Looks like I’m lone wolf,” he said. “Okay, gentlemen. If you hear a loud silence from my neck of the woods, run like hell.”

The airlock was open anyway (Bellatrix IV has an atmosphere roughly that of Earth’s, which was a boon) and the five of us left.

I started out with Tavy and we headed towards the site of Flaherty’s finish, very much scared. When your life span is 150 or so years, and you’ve got a hundred of them left, you’re not too anxious to die young, even as a hero on an alien planet. Framer and Morro wandered up towards the big ridge behind the spaceship, and Janus headed for the clump of twisted red-leaved trees about two hundred meters away.

Tavy and I moved slowly, casting our eyes in all directions. As usual, there was no sign of any animal life. Bellatrix IV had an abundance of plants (not chlorophyll-based plants, but ones with some sort of iron-compound base), a temperate climate, flowing streams of real H 2O water. But no visible animals. Of course, we hadn’t covered very much territory yet, maybe two or three square kilometers.

No one dared to make a sound. Then suddenly, in about two seconds flat, we got our first taste of Bellatrician life. Poor Janus came flying out of his copse, and lumbering behind him out of nowhere came a bizarre thing about ten feet high, with non-functional wings, gleaming golden scales, and a headful of writhing, pencil-like tentacles.

We stood transfixed for a moment. I drew my rifle and put a shot into the scales, without any seeming effect. And then Janus turned and stared up at the beast for a fraction of a second as he ran.

The beast stared too, and the frantic pursuit came to an end. They glared at each other for just a moment, and then the monster wheeled and ran off in the other direction. It disappeared over the hill.

But Janus remained where he was, frozen dead.

We planted our second corpse and sat morosely in the cabin. We missed Flaherty just a bit, but not too much. But Janus, though, genial, clever, enormously capable—it was hard to believe he was dead, killed by a gorgon.

For the beast of the forest was unquestionably a gorgon, right out of the old mythology. Doc Steeger gave us the first inkling when he pointed out that death had been caused by a sudden neural blast.

Framer looked up at this. “We didn’t see any physical contact between Phil and the monster, though.”

“No,” broke in Ramirez. “Janus just looked at the thing, and then he froze stiff—”

The thought came to Morro and myself almost instantaneously.

“A gorgon,” I said. “Gorgon,” he echoed. He stood up—preposterous lanky fellow—and stared outside at the wide plain with its deadly clump of trees at one corner. “A gorgon.”