Barrington Bayley - Empire of Two Worlds

The guys were all nervous and expectant as Bec let up the shutters.

For a long time they sat staring at the scenery.

Then Bec opened the sloop’s big door.

“Come on, you guys, you’re not paralysed,” he complained. “Get down and tread the new world.”

We were all reluctant to move. We felt safe inside the sloop. Exasperated, Bec started grabbing at us and shoving us through the door. Grale picked up a repeater before he would go. Breezes tugged at our skin as we climbed to the ground, and we felt awkward and uneasy in the newly-made goggles. In an instinctive gesture of protection we stood with our backs to the sloop and gazed about us.

“It’s weird,” Reeth murmured.

The Big Egg loomed faintly some distance off, the sloop having rolled nearly two miles before it stopped. I had to look hard to see it at all; it was much less noticeable than on Killibol and was no more than a patch of mist in the air. If you didn’t know where to look you’d never find it at all.

The green growth was spongy underfoot. Skywards, the sun, although it was much smaller than the big, pale Killibol sun, was still too bright to look at directly, even with the goggles. Also in the sky was another, much larger body: a huge yellow globe covered with various darker markings. Another planet, hanging close to Earth in space.

Tone the Taker had noticed it, too, and was staring upwards with rapt attention.

“Beautiful,” he murmured. “Like a pop dream.”

None of the others, Harmen possibly excepted, had the equipment to see anything artistic in the scene. To them it was just fact, as the streets and buttresses of Klittmann were facts. True, as I looked longer at the eerie, strangely living landscape I felt a yearning for that vast towering pile of stone, steel and concrete; for falling dust, for dives and joints and the incessant babble of clipped Klittmann speech. But I knew none of us were going to crack up over it. We’d already gone through all our traumas that day we fled through Klittmann’s portal.

Suddenly I jerked as Grale raised his repeater and yanked back the trigger. The gun juddered continuously until he had emptied a whole clip into thin air, sending it spraying out all over the empty landscape.

He turned back to us grinning, mouth slack, eyes hidden behind the dark goggles.

“Feel better?” Bec asked acidly.

“Sure. Just making myself at home. I like to feel I can lick this place.”

Bec grimaced and turned to the rest of us. “Well, boys, we made it. Here it is. No bare rock anywhere. Protein just waiting to be picked up. Food.”

Dumbly we stared at the ground. The green carpet of organics was the hardest thing to get used to. People from Killibol have a reverence for organics and we didn’t know where to put our feet.

Hassmann was the first to try it (sometimes it’s an advantage not to be hampered by an over-active imagination). Wonderingly he knelt on one knee and pulled up a handful of the green stuff that grew in long, thin blades. Later Harmen found from a book that the old Earth word for it was grass. Hassmann sniffed it, ran it between his fingers, then reluctantly put some of it in his mouth. He chewed for nearly a minute, making a sourer face all the while, until he finally spat it out.

“It don’t taste good, boss. We’ve got a bum steer.”

Bec cropped some of the grass himself, feeling it and tasting it. He looked questioningly at Harmen. The alchemist shook his head.

“I know nothing of Earth food.”

Doubtfully Bec looked towards the trees. “O.K.,” he decided after a while, “maybe you have to look around for the right stuff. But there’s food here all right. Everybody knows that.”

We were all glad to get back aboard the sloop. An air of indecision had suddenly come over the gang. We all felt reluctant to move away from the gateway. Bec realised he had to squash this feeling right away.

He put the sloop in motion, talking to us as he drove. “Planet Earth is a big place, boys. It might take us a while to case this joint. Meanwhile keep your eyes open but don’t get nervy. Get used to the eye-shades because you’re going to be wearing them for a long, long time. And don’t get trigger-happy because we’ve only got so much ammunition and we’ll probably need it. This sloop is our ace card, boys, just like it was in Klittmann. So don’t shoot without an order — hear that, Grale?”

Grale grunted.

But it was Hassmann who forgot Bec’s instruction and let out a long panicky burst on the Jain he was nursing before we’d gone three miles. Bec pulled up fast and turned to face us furiously.

“What did I just say to you?” he stormed, his eyes blazing.

We all looked at the landscape. There was nothing there.

“Something was coming at us, boss!” Hassmann objected. “A bomb or a missile. I had to shoot! Look, there it is right out there!” He pointed to the black object he had expertly shot down, lying in the grass.

In the end it was Reeth who ventured out to inspect it. He brought it back for us to see: it was a flying animal. He spread out the feathered wings. Blood dripped on to the floor from where the Jain bullets had hit it.

“Say, look up there,” Grale said. A mate to the dead bird was soaring over us, wheeling with wings outspread.

“I don’t get it,” Grale said, puzzled. “How does it stay up?” Flying animals, and flying machines, were unknown on Killibol.

Wordlessly Bec went back to the driving seat. We saw more birds after that.

As we travelled Bec drew a map, using surrounding hills as landmarks so we could always find our way back to the gateway again. The sloop rolled bumpily over the uneven turf, clambering awkwardly up and down slopes, but the Earth day is considerably longer than the Killibol day and we covered about a hundred miles per rotation period. During the night we could dispense with our eye-shades; but Bec insisted on travelling by day so as to acclimatise ourselves. He also insisted on everybody getting out of the sloop at each stop we made; otherwise most of us would have been happier huddling in our own artificial little world.

We passed through grassland, past forest, lakes and rivers. We spent some time arguing whether animals as well as plants might constitute food. So far we had found nothing that we could regard as even remotely eatable. On one of our stops Hassmann entered a forest and shot a small animal he found there, after hearing Harmen and Reeth both assert that animal tissue contains more protein than does vegetable tissue. Actually the food we were used to always came in processed slabs or cakes differing only in flavour and texture. That was why we didn’t think of the idea of eating flesh straight away. Hassmann peeled off the creature’s fur and cut a piece off it with a hacksaw. Blood was running all over his hands and on to the ground where we sat in the shadow of the sloop. He sniffed at the chunk of meat, which was red and soggy.

My gorge rose. We all shook our heads. Disgusted, Hassmann flung the dead animal away with all his strength and wiped his hands on the grass.

“Like trying to eat your own arm!”

Grale swallowed the last of his protein bar. The rations were low: none of us had had a full belly for a long time.

He stood up and moved around restlessly. “I’ll bet there’s nothing to eat on the whole of this Goddamned planet. We should have stayed in Klittmann and died fighting.”

Bec stared at him with interest. “I never knew a guy so unhappy to be alive.”

“What’s the good of being alive walking around like a crazy alk?” He tapped his eye-shades. “When are we gonna find what we came for?”

“He’s got something there, boss,” Reeth put in mildly. “It don’t look good.”