A. E. Van Vogt - The Rull

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A E Van Vogt

The Rull

Trevor Jamieson saw the other space boat out of the corner of his

eye. He was sitting in a hollow about a dozen yards from the edge of

the precipice, and some score of feet from the doorway of his own

lifeboat. He had been intent on his survey book, annotating a comment

beside the voice graph, to the effect that Laertes III was so close to the

invisible dividing line between Earth-controlled and Rull-controlled

space that its prior discovery by man was in itself a major victory in the

Rull-human war.

He had written: “The fact that ships based on this planet could

strike at several of the most densely populated areas of the galaxy,

Rull or human, gives it an AA priority on all available military

equipment. Preliminary defense units should be set up on Mount

Monolith, where I am now, within three weeks

It was at that point that he saw the other boat, above and

somewhat to his left, approaching the tableland. He glanced up at it,

and froze where he was, torn between two opposing purposes. His first

impulse, to run for the lifeboat, yielded to the realization that the

movement would be seen instantly by the electronic reflexes of the

other ship. For a moment, then, he had the dim hope that, if he

remained quiet enough, neither he nor his ship would be observed.

Even as he sat there, perspiring with indecision, his tensed eyes

noted the Rull markings and the rakish design of the other vessel. His

vast knowledge of things Rull enabled him to catalogue it instantly as a

survey craft.

A survey craft. The Rulls had discovered the Laertes sun.

The terrible potentiality was that, behind this small craft, might be

fleets of battleships, whereas he was alone. His own lifeboat had been

dropped by the Orion nearly a parsec away, while the big ship was pro-

ceeding at antigravity speeds. That was to insure that Rull energy

tracers did not record its passage through this area of space. The

Orion was to head for the nearest base, load up with planetary defense

equipment, and then return. She was due in ten days.

Ten days. Jamieson groaned inwardly and drew his legs under him

and clenched his hand about the survey book. But still the possibility

that his ship, partially hidden under a clump of trees, might escape

notice if he remained quiet, held him there in the open. His head tilted

up, his eyes glared at the alien, and his brain willed it to turn aside.

Once more, while he waited, the implications of the disaster that could

be here struck deep.

The Rull ship was a hundred yards away now and showed no

signs of changing its course. In seconds it would cross the clump of

trees, which half hid the lifeboat.

In a spasm of movement, Jamieson launched himself from his

chair. With complete abandon, he dived for the open doorway of his

machine. As the door clanged behind him, the boat shook as if it had

been struck by a giant. Part of the ceiling sagged; the floor heaved

under him, and the air grew hot and suffocating. Gasping, Jamieson

slid into the control chair and struck the main emergency switch. The

rapid-fire blasters huzzaed into automatic firing positions and let go

with a hum and a deepthroated ping. The refrigerators whined with

power; a cold blast of air blew at his body. The relief was so quick that

a second passed before Jamieson realized that the atomic engines had

failed to respond. And that the lifeboat, which should have already

been sliding into the air, was still lying inert in an exposed position.

Tense, he stared into the visiplates. It took a moment to locate the

Rull ship. It was at the lower edge of one plate, tumbling slowly out of

sight beyond a clump of trees a quarter of a mile away. As he watched,

it disappeared; and then the crash of the landing came clear and

unmistakable from the sound board in front of him.

The relief that came was weighted with an awful reaction.

Jamieson sank into the cushions of the control chair, weak from the

narrowness of his escape. The weakness ended abruptly as a thought

struck him. There had been a sedateness about the way the enemy

ship fell. The crash hadn’t killed the Rulls aboard. He was alone in a

damaged lifeboat on an impassable mountain with one or more of the

most remorseless creatures ever spawned. For ten days he must fight

in the hope that man would still be able to seize the most valuable

planet discovered in half a century.

Jamieson opened the door and went out onto the tableland. He

was still trembling with reaction, but it was rapidly growing darker and

there was no time to waste. He walked quickly to the top of the nearest

hillock a hundred feet away, taking the last few feet on his hands and

knees. Cautiously, he peered over the rim. Most of the mountaintop

was visible. It was a rough oval some eight hundred yards wide at its

narrowest, a wilderness of scraggly brush and upjutting rock,

dominated here and there by clumps of trees. There was not a

movement to be seen, and not a sign of the Rull ship. Over everything

lay an atmosphere of desolation, and the utter silence of an

uninhabited wasteland.

The twilight was deeper now that the sun had sunk below the

southwest precipice. And the deadly part was that, to the Rulls, with

their wider vision and more complete equipment, the darkness would

mean nothing. All night long he would have to be on the defensive

against beings whose nervous systems outmatched his in every

function except, possibly, intelligence. On that level, and that alone,

human beings claimed equality. The very comparison made him realize

how desperate his situation was. He needed an advantage. If he could

get to the Rull wreck and cause them some kind of damage before it

got pitch-dark, before they recovered from the shock of the crash, that

alone might make the difference between life and death for him.

It was a chance he had to take. Hurriedly, Jamieson backed down

the hillock and, climbing to his feet, started along a shallow wash. The

ground was rough with stone and projecting edges of rock and the

gnarled roots and tangle of hardy growth. Twice he fell, the first time

gashing his right hand. It slowed him mentally and physically. He had

never before tried to make speed over the pathless wilderness of the

table-land. He saw that in ten minutes he had covered a distance of no

more than a few hundred yards. He stopped. It was one thing to be

bold on the chance of making a vital gain. It was quite another to throw

away his life on a reckless gamble. The defeat would not be his alone

but man’s.

As he stood there he grew aware of how icy cold it had become. A

chilling wind from the east had sprung up. By midnight the temperature

would be zero. He began to retreat. There were several defenses to rig

up before night; and he had better hurry. An hour later, when the

moonless darkness lay heavily over the mountain of mountains,

Jamieson sat tensely before his visiplates. It was going to be a long

night for a man who dared not sleep. Somewhere about the middle of

it, Jamieson saw a movement at the remote perimeter of his all-wave

vision plate. Finger on blaster control, he waited for the object to come

into sharper focus. It never did. The cold dawn found him weary but still

alertly watching for an enemy that was acting as cautiously as he

himself. He began to wonder if he had actually seen anything.

Jamieson took another antisleep pill and made a more definite

examination of the atomic motors. It didn’t take long to verify his earlier

diagnosis. The basic gravitation pile had been thoroughly frustrated.

Until it could be reactivated on the Orion, the motors were useless. The

conclusive examination braced him. He was committed irrevocably to

this deadly battle of the tableland. The idea that had been turning over

in his mind during the night took on new meaning. This was the first

time in his knowledge that a Rull and a human being had faced each

other on a limited field of action, where neither was a prisoner. The

great battles in space were ship against ship and fleet against fleet.

Survivors either escaped or were picked up by overwhelming forces.

Unless he was bested before he could get organized, here was a

priceless opportunity to try some tests on the Rulls—and without delay.

Every moment of daylight must be utilized to the uttermost limit.

Jamieson put on his special “defensive” belts and went outside.

The dawn was brightening minute by minute; and the vistas that

revealed themselves with each increment of light-power held him, even

as he tensed his body for the fight ahead. Why, he thought, in sharp,

excited wonder, this is happening on the strangest mountain ever

known.

Mount Monolith stood on a level plain and reared up precipitously

to a height of eight thousand two hundred feet. The most majestic pillar

in the known universe, it easily qualified as one of the hundred nature

wonders of the galaxy.

He had walked the soil of planets a hundred thousand light-years

from Earth, and the decks of great ships that flashed from the eternal

night into the blazing brightness of suns red and suns blue, suns yellow

and white and orange and violet, suns so wonderful and different that

no previous imaginings could match the reality.

Yet, here he stood on a mountain on far Laertes, one man

compelled by circumstances to pit his cunning against one or more of

the supremely intelligent Rull enemy.

Jamieson shook himself grimly. It was time to launch his attack—

and discover the opposition that could be mustered against him. That

was Step One, and the important point about it was to insure that it

wasn’t also Step Last. By the time the Laertes sun peered palely over

the horizon that was the northeast cliff’s edge, the assault was under

way. The automatic defensors, which he had set up the night before,

moved slowly from point to point ahead of the mobile blaster. He

cautiously saw to it that one of the three defensors also brought up his

rear. He augmented that basic protection by crawling from one

projecting rock after another. The machines he manipulated from a tiny

hand control, which was connected to the visiplates that poked out

from his headgear just above his eyes. With tensed eyes, he watched

the wavering needles that would indicate movement or that the

defensor screens were being subjected to energy opposition.

Nothing happened. As he came within sight of the Rull craft,

Jamieson halted, while he seriously pondered the problem of no resis-

tance. He didn’t like it. It was possible that all the Rulls aboard had

been killed, but he doubted it.

Bleakly he studied the wreck through the telescopic eyes of one of

the defensors. It lay in a shallow indentation, its nose buried in a wall of

gravel. Its lower plates were collapsed versions of the original. His

single energy blast of the day before, completely automatic though it

had been, had really dealt a smashing blow to the Rull ship.

The over-all effect was of lifelessness. If it were a trick, then it was

a very skillful one. Fortunately, there were tests he could make, not

final but evidential and indicative.

The echoless height of the most unique mountain ever discovered

hummed with the fire sound of the mobile blaster. The noise grew to a

roar as the unit’s pile warmed to its task and developed its maximum

kilo-curie of activity. Under that barrage, the hull of the enemy craft

trembled a little and changed color slightly, but that was all. After ten

minutes, Jamieson cut the power and sat baffled and indecisive.

The defensive screens of the Rull ship were full on. Had they gone

on automatically after his first shot of the evening before? Or had they

been put up deliberately to nullify just such an attack as this? He

couldn’t be sure. That was the trouble; he had no positive knowledge.

The Rull could be lying inside dead. (Odd, how he was beginning

to think in terms of one rather than several, but the degree of caution

being used by the opposition—if opposition existed—matched his own,

and indicated the caution of an individual moving against unknown

odds.) It could be wounded and incapable of doing anything against

him. It could have spent the night marking up the tableland with nerve

control lines— he’d have to make sure he never looked directly at the

ground—or it could simply be waiting for the arrival of the greater ship

that had dropped it onto the planet.

Jamieson refused to consider that last possibility. That way was

death, without qualification of hope. Frowning, he studied the visible

damage he had done to the ship. All the hard metals had held together,

so far as he could see, but the whole bottom of the ship was dented to

a depth that varied from one to four feet. Some radiation must have got

in, and the question was, what would it have damaged? He had

examined dozens of captured Rull survey craft, and if this one ran to

the pattern, then in the front would be the control center, with a sealed-

off blaster chamber. In the rear the engine room, two storerooms, one

for fuel and equipment, the other for food and— For food. Jamieson

jumped, and then with wide eyes noted how the food section had

suffered greater damage than any other part of the ship. Surely, surely,

some radiation must have got into it, poisoning it, ruining it, and

instantly putting the Rull, with his swift digestive system, into a deadly

position.

Jamieson sighed with the intensity of his hope and prepared to re-

treat. As he turned away, quite incidentally, accidentally, he glanced at

the rock behind which he had shielded himself from possible direct fire.

Glanced at it and saw the lines on it. Intricate lines, based on a

profound and inhuman study of human neurons. He recognized them

for what they were and stiffened in horror. He thought, Where—where

am I being directed?

That much had been discovered after his return from Mira 23, with

his report of how he had been apparently, instantly, hypnotized; the

lines impelled movement to somewhere. Here, on this fantastic

mountain, it could only be to a cliff. But which one?

With a desperate will, he fought to retain his senses a moment

longer. He strove to see the lines again. He saw, briefly, flashingly, five

wavering verticals and above them three lines that pointed east with

their wavering ends. The pressure built up inside him, but still he fought

to keep his thoughts self-motivated. Fought to remember if there were

any wide ledges near the top of the east cliff. There were. He recalled

them in a final agony of hope. There, he thought, that one, that one. Let

me fall on that one. He strained to hold the ledge image he wanted and

to repeat, many times, the command that might save his life. His last

dreary thought was that here was the answer to his doubts. The Rull

was alive. Blackness came like a curtain of pure essence of night.

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摘要：

AEVanVogtTheRullITrevorJamiesonsawtheotherspaceboatoutofthecornerofhiseye.Hewassittinginahollowaboutadozenyardsfromtheedgeoftheprecipice,andsomescoreoffeetfromthedoorwayofhisownlifeboat.Hehadbeenintentonhissurveybook,annotatingacommentbesidethevoicegraph,totheeffectthatLaertesIIIwassoclosetotheinvis...

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