Empire of Two Worlds

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.”

“It don’t look good to you because you can’t see any further than the end of a gun barrel.” Bec’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “You want it all handed to you. Sure I don’t know what we’re going to find, or when. I do know that whatever it is, we’ve got to be ready to handle it. If we don’t find food we’ll find people. Where there’s people there are angles — and then there’ll be food. You’ll see Klittmann again: we’ll break it open like a mud pie and drown the bosses in their own tanks,”

Grale’s florid face became dangerous. “What are you trying to pull, Bec?” he raged. “There’s five of us! We’ve got no mob to back us up. We’re finished, washed out! How are we gonna take Klittmann, Bec? How?”

“Quit squalling like a kid and shut up.”

Grale stormed into the sloop to clean his guns, which he always did when he was feeling moody.

Everybody avoided saying anything. Even Harmen looked pensive.