Cordwainer Smith - On the Storm Planet

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CORDWAINER SMITH •
On the Storm Planet
"At two seventy-five in the morning," said the Administrator to Casher O'Neill, "you will kill this girl with a
knife. At two seventy-seven, a fast groundcar will pick you up and bring you back here. Then the power cruiser
will be yours. Is that a deal?"
He held out his hand as if he wanted Casher O'Neill to shake it then and there, making some kind of an oath or
bargain.
Casher did not slight the man, so he picked up his glass and said, "Let's drink to the deal first!"
The Administrator's quick, restless, darting eyes looked Casher up and down very suspiciously. The warm sea-
wet air blew through the room. The Administrator seemed wary, suspicious, alert, but underneath his slight
hostility there was another emotion, of which Casher could perceive just the edge. Fatigue with its roots in
bottomless despair: despair set deep in irrecoverable fatigue?
That other emotion, which Casher could barely discern, was very strange indeed. On all his voyages back and
forth through the inhabited worlds, Casher had met many odd types of men and women. He had never seen
anything like this Administrator before—brilliant, erratic, boastful. His title was "Mr. Commissioner" and he
was an ex-Lord of the Instrumentality on this planet of Henriada, where the population had dropped from six
hundred million persons down to some forty thousand. Indeed, local government had disappeared into
limbo, and this odd man, with the tide of Administrator, was the only law and civil audiority which the
planet knew.
Nevertheless, he had a surplus power cruiser and Casher O'Neill was determined to get that cruiser as a
part of his long plot to return to his home planet of Mizzer and to unseat the usurper, Colonel Wedder.
The Administrator stared sharply, wearily at Casher and then he too lifted his glass. The green twilight
colored his liquor and made it seem like some strange poison. It was only Earth byegarr, though a little on
the strong side.
With a sip, only a sip, the older man relaxed a little. "You may be out to trick me, young man. You may
think that I am an old fool running an abandoned planet. You may even be thinking that killing this girl is
some kind of a crime. It is not a crirne at all. I am the Administrator of Henriada and I have ordered that
girl killed every year for the last eighty years. She isn't even a girl, to start with. Just an underperson.
Some kind of an animal turned into a domestic servant. I can even appoint you a deputy sheriff. Or chief
of detectives. That might be better. I haven't had a chief of detectives for a hundred years and more. You
are my chief of detectives. Go in tomorrow. The house is not hard to find. It's the biggest and best house
left on this planet. Go in tomorrow morning. Ask for her master and be sure that you use the correct title:
The Mister and Owner Murray Madigan. The robots will tell you to keep out. If you persist, she will come
to the door. That's when you will stab her through the heart, right there in the doorway. My groundcar will
race up one metric minute later. You jump in and come back here. We've been through this before. Why
don't you agree? Don't you know who I am?"
"I know perfectly well"—Casher O'Neill smiled—"who you are, Mr. Commissioner and Administrator.
You are the honorable Ran-kin Meiklejohn, once of Earth Two. After all, the Instrumentality itself gave
me a permit to land on this planet on private business. They knew who / was too, and what I wanted.
There's something funny about all this. Why should you give me a power cruiser—the best ship, you
yourself say, in your whole fleet—just for killing one modified animal which looks and talks like a girl?
Why me? Why the visitor? Why the man from off-world? Why should you care whether this particular
underperson is killed or not? If you've given the order for her death eighty times in eighty years, why
hasn't it been carried out long ago? Mind you, Mr. Administrator, I'm not saying no. I want that cruiser. I
want it very much indeed. But what's the deal? What's the trick? Is it the house you want?" "Beauregard?
No, I don't want Beauregard. Old Madigan can
rot in it for all that I care. It's between Ambiloxi and Mottile, on the Gulf of Esperanza. You can't miss it.
The road is good. You could drive yourself there."
"What is it, then?" Casher's voice had an edge of persistence to it.
The Administrator's response was singular indeed. He filled his huge inhaler glass with the potent byegarr.
He stared over the full glass at Casher O'Neill as if he were an enemy. He drained the glass. Casher knew
that that much liquor, taken suddenly, could kill the normal human being.
The Administrator did not fall over dead.
He did not even become noticeably more drunk.
His face turned red and his eyes almost popped out, as the harsh 160-proof liquor took effect, but he still
did not say anything. He just stared at Casher. Casher, who had learned in his long exile to play many
games, just stared back.
The Administrator broke first.
He leaned forward and burst into a birdlike shriek of laughter. The laughter went on and on until it seemed
that the man had hogged all the merriment in the galaxy. Casher snorted a little laugh along with the man,
more out of nervous reflex than anything else, but he waited for the Administrator to stop laughing.
The Administrator finally got control of himself. With a broad grin and a wink at Casher, he poured
himself four fingers more of the byegarr into his glass, drank it down as if he had had a sip of cream, and
then—only very slightly unsteady—stood up, came over and patted Casher on the shoulder.
"You're a smart boy, my lad. I'm cheating you. I don't care whether the power cruiser is there or not. I'm
giving you something which has no value at all to me. Who's ever going to take a power cruiser off this
planet? It's ruined. It's abandoned. And so am I. Go ahead. You can have the cruiser. For nothing. Just take
it. Free. Unconditionally."
This time it was Casher who leaped to his feet and stared down into the face of the feverish, wanton little
man.
"Thank you, Mr. Administrator!" he cried, trying to catch the hand of the administrator so as to seal the
deal.
Rankin Meiklejohn looked awfully sober for a man with that much liquor in him. He held his right hand
behind his back and would not shake.
"You can have the cruiser, all right. No terms. No conditions. No deal. It's yours. But kill that girlfirstl Just
as a favor to me. I've been a good host. I like you. I want to do you a favor. Do me one. Kill that girl. At
two seventy-five in the morning. Tomorrow."
"Why?" asked Casher, his voice loud and cold, trying to wring some sense out of the chattering man.
"Just—just—just because I say so..." stammered the Administrator.
"Why?" asked Casher, cold and loud again.
The liquor suddenly took over inside the Administrator. He groped back for the arm of hjs chair, sat down
suddenly and then looked up at Casher. He was very drunk indeed. The strange emotion, the elusive
fatigue-despair, had vanished from his face. He spoke straightforwardly. Only the excessive care of his
articulation would have shown a passerby that he was drunk.
"Because, you fool," said Meiklejohn, "those people, more than eighty in eighty years, that I have sent to
Beauregard with orders to kill the girl... Those people—" he repeated, and stopped speaking, clamping his
lips together.
"What happened to them?" asked Casher calmly and persuasively.
The Administrator grinned again and seemed to be on the edge
of one of his wild laughs.
"What happened?" shouted Casher at him.
"I don't know," said the Administrator. "For the life of me, I don't know. Not one of them ever came
back."
"What happened to them? Did she kill them?" cried Casher.
"How would I know?" said the drunken man, getting visibly more sleepy.
"Why didn't you report it?"
This seemed to rouse the Administrator. "Report that one little girl had stopped me, the planetary
Administrator? Just one little girl, and not even a human being! They would have sent help, and laughed at
me. By the Bell, young man, I've been laughed at enough! I need no help from outside. You're going in
there tomorrow morning. At two seventy-five, with a knife. And a groundcar waiting."
He stared fixedly at Casher and then suddenly fell asleep in his chair. Casher called to the robots to show
him to his room; they tended to the master as well.
II
The next morning at two seventy-five sharp, nothing happened. Casher walked down the baroque corridor,
looking into beautiful barren rooms. All the doors were open.
Through one door he heard a sick deep bubbling snore.
It was the Administrator, sure enough. He lay twisted in his bed. A small nursing machine was beside him,
her white-enameled body only slightly rusty. She held up a mechanical hand for silence and somehow
managed to make the gesture seem light, delicate and pretty, even from a machine.
Casher walked lightly back to his own room, where he ordered hotcakes, bacon and coffee. He studied a
tornado through the armored glass of his window, while the robots prepared his food. The elastic trees
clung to the earth with a fury which matched the fury of the wind. The trunk of the tornado reached like
the nose of a mad elephant down into the gardens, but the flora fought back. A few animals whipped
upward and out of sight. The tornado then came straight for the house, but did not damage it outside of
making a lot of noise.
"We have two or three hundred of those a day," said a butler robot. "That is why we store all spacecraft
underground and have no weather machines. It would cost more, the people said, to make this planet
livable than the planet could possibly yield. The radio and news are in the library, sir. I do not think that
the honorable Rankin Meiklejohn will wake until evening, say seven-fifty or eight o'clock."
"Can I go out?"
"Why not, sir? You are a true man. You do what you wish."
"I mean is it safe for me to go out?"
"Oh, no, sir! The wind would tear you apart or carry you away."
"Don't people ever go out?"
"Yes, sir. With groundcars or with automatic body armor. I have been told that if it weighs fifty tons or
better, the person inside is safe. I would not know, sir. As you see, I am a robot. I was made here, though
my brain was formed on Earth Two, and I have never been outside this house."
Casher looked at the robot. This one seemed unusually talkative. He chanced the opportunity of getting
some more information.
"Have you ever heard tif Beauregard?"
"Yes, sir. It is the best house on this planet. I have heard people say that it is the most solid building on
Henriada. It belongs to the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan. He is an Old North Australian, a
renunciant who left his home planet and came here when Henri-ada was a busy world. He brought all his
wealth with him. The underpeople and robots say that it is a wonderful place on the inside."
"Have you seen it?"
"Oh, no, sir. I have never left this building."
"Does the man Madigan ever come here?"
The robot seemed to be trying to laugh, but did not succeed. He answered, very unevenly, "Oh, no, sir. He
never goes anywhere."
"Can you tell me anything about the female who lives with him?"
"No sir," said the robot.
"Do you know anything about her?"
"Sir, it is not that. I know a great deal about her."
"Why can't you talk about her, then?"
"I have been commanded not to, sir."
"I am," said Casher O'Neill, "a true human being. I herewith countermand those orders. Tell me about
her."
The robot's voice became formal and cold. "The orders cannot be countermanded, sir."
"Why not?" snapped Casher. "Are they the Administrator's?"
"No, sir."
"Whose, then?"
"Hers," said the robot softly, and left the room.
Ill 4
Casher O'Neill spent the rest of the day trying to get information; he obtained very little.
The Deputy Administrator was a young man who hated his chief. When Casher, who dined with him—the
two of them having a poorly cooked state luncheon in a dining room which would have seated five
hundred people—tried to come to the point by asking bluntly, "What do you know about Murray
Madigan?" he got an answer which was blunt to the point of incivility. "Nothing."
"You never heard of him?" cried Casher.
"Keep your troubles to yourself, mister visitor," said the Deputy Administrator. "I've got to stay on this
planet long enough to get promoted off. You can leave. You shouldn't have come."
"I have," said Casher, "an all-world pass from the Instrumental-ity."
"All right," said the young man. "That shows that you are more important than I am. Let's not discuss the
matter. Do you like your lunch?"
Casher had learned diplomacy in his childhood, when he was the heir apparent to the dictatorship of
Mizzer. When his horrible uncle, Kuraf, lost the rulership, Casher had approved of the coup by the
Colonels Wedder and Gibna; but now Wedder was supreme and enforcing a period of terror and virtue.
Casher thus knew courts and ceremony, big talk and small talk, and on this occasion
he let the small talk do. The young Deputy Administrator had only one ambition, to get off the planet
Henriada and never to see or hear of Rankin Meiklejohn again.
Casher could understand the point.
Only one curious thing happened during dinner.
Toward the end, Casher slipped in the question, very informally: "Can underpeople give orders to robots?"
"Of course," said the young man. "That's one of the reasons we use underpeople. They have more
initiative. They amplify our orders to robots on many occasions."
Casher smiled. "I didn't mean it quite that way. Could an un-derperson give an order to a robot which a
real human being could not then countermand?"
The young man started to answer, even though his mouth was full of food. He was not a very polished
young man. Suddenly he stopped chewing and his eyes grew wide. Then, with his mouth half full, he said,
"You are trying to talk about this planet, I guess. You can't help it. You're on the track. Stay on the track,
then. Maybe you will get out of it alive. I refuse to get mixed up with it, with you, with him and his hateful
schemes. All I want to do is to leave when my time comes."
The young man resumed chewing, his eyes fixed steadfastly on his plate.
Before Casher could pass off the matter by making some casual remark, the butler robot stopped behind
him and leaned over.
"Honorable sir, I heard your question. May I answer it?"
"Of course," said Casher softly.
"The answer, sir," said the butler robot, softly but clearly, "to your question is no, no, never. That is the
general rule of the civilized worlds. But on this planet of Henriada, sir, the answer is yes."
"Why?" asked Casher.
"It is my duty, sir," said the robot butler, "to recommend to you this dish of fresh artichokes. I am not
authorized to deal with other matters." **
"Thank you," said Casher, straining a little to keep himself looking imperturbable. »
Nothing much happened that night, except that Meiklejohn got up long enough to get drunk all over again.
Though he invited Casher to come and drink with him, he never seriously discussed the girl except for one
outburst.
"Leave it till tomorrow. Fair and square. Open and aboveboard. Frank and honest. That's me. I'll take you
around Beauregard myself. You'll see it's easy. A knife, eh? A traveled young man like you would know
what to do with a knife. And a little girl too. Not
very big. Easy job. Don't give it another thought. Would you like some apple juice in your byegarr?"
Casher had taken three contraintoxicant pills before going to drink with the ex-Lord, but even at that he
could not keep up with Meiklejohn. He accepted the dilution of apple juice gravely, gracefully and
gratefully.
The little tornadoes stamped around the house. Meiklejohn, now launched into some drunken story of
ancient injustices which had been done to him on other worlds, paid no attention to them. In the middle of
the night, past nine-fifty in the evening, Casher woke alone in his chair, very stiff and uncomfortable. The
robots must have had standing instructions concerning the Administrator, and had apparently taken him
off to bed. Casher walked wearily to his own room, cursed the thundering ceiling and went to sleep again.
IV
The next day was very different indeed.
The Administrator was as sober, brisk and charming as if he had never taken a drink in his life.
He had the robots call Casher to join him at breakfast and said, by way of greeting, "I'll wager you thought
I was drunk last night."
"Well..." said Casher.
"Planet fever. That's what it was. Planet fever. A bit of alcohol keeps it from developing too far. Let's see.
It's three-sixty now. Could you be ready to leave by four?"
Casher frowned at his watch, which had the conventional twenty-four hours.
The Administrator saw the glance and apologized. "Sorry! My fault, a thousand times. I'll get you a metric
watch right away. Ten hours a day, a hundred minutes an hour. We're very progressive here on Henriada."
He clapped his hands and ordered that a watch be taken to Casher's room, along with the watch-repairing
robot to adjust it to Casher's body rhythms.
"Four, then," he said, rising briskly from the table. "Dress for a trip by groundcar. The servants will show
you how."
There was a man already waiting in Casher's room. He looked like a plump, wise ancient Hindu, as shown
in the archaeology books. He bowed pleasantly and said, "My name is Gosigo. I am a forgetty, settled on
this planet, but for this day I am your guide and driver from this place to the mansion of Beauregard."
Forgetties were barely above underpeople in status. They were
persons convicted of various major crimes, to whom the courts of the worlds, or the Instrumentality, had
allowed total amnesia instead of death or some punishment worse than death, such as the planet Shayol.
Casher looked at him curiously. The man did not carry with him the permanent air of bewilderment which
Casher had noticed in many forgetties. Gosigo saw the glance and interpreted it.
"I'm well enough now, sir. And I am strong enough to break your back if I had the orders to do it."
"You mean damage my spine? What a hostile, unpleasant thing to do!" said Casher. "Anyhow, I rather
think I could kill you first if you tried it. Whatever gave you such an idea?"
"The Administrator is always threatening people that he will have me do it to them."
"Have you ever really broken anybody's back?" asked Casher, looking Gosigo over very carefully and
rejudging him. The man, though shorter than Casher, was luxuriously muscled; like many plump men, he
looked pleasant on the outside but could be very formidable to an enemy.
Gosigo smiled briefly, almost happily. "Well, no, not exactly."
"Why haven't you? Does the Administrator always countermand his own orders? I should think that he
would sometimes be too drunk to remember to do it."
"It's not that," said Gosigo.
"Why don't you, then?"
"I have other orders," said Gosigo, rather hesitantly. "Like the orders I have today. One set from the
Administrator, one set from the Deputy Administrator, and a third set from an outside source."
"Who's the outside source?"
"She has told me not to explain just yet."
Casher stood stock still. "Do you mean who I think you mean?"
Gosigo nodded very slowly, pointing at the ventilator as though it might have a microphone in it.
"Can you tell me whafyour orders are?"
"Oh, certainly. The Administrator has told me to drive both himself and you to Beauregard, to take you to
the door, to watch you stab the undergirl, and to call the second groundcar to your rescue. The Deputy
Administrator has told me to take you to Beau-regard and to let you do as you please, bringing you back
here by way of Ambiloxi if you happen to come out of Mr. Murray's house alive."
"And the other orders?"
"To close the door upon you when you enter and to think of you no more in this life, because you will be
very happy."
"Are you crazy?" cried Casher.
"I am a forgetty," said Gosigo, with some dignity, "but I am not insane."
"Whose orders are you going to obey, then?" Gosigo smiled a warmly human smile at him. "Doesn't that
depend on you, sir, and not on me? Do I look like a man who is going to kill you soon?" "No, you don't," said
Casher.
"Do you know what you look like to me?" went on Gosigo, with a purr. "Do you really think that I would help
you if I thought that you would kill a small girl?"
"You know it!" cried Casher, feeling his face go white. "Who doesn't?" said Gosigo. "What else have we got to
talk about, here on Henriada? Let me help you on with these clothes, so that you will at least survive the ride."
With this he handed shoulder padding and padded helmet to Casher, who began to put on the garments, very
clumsily. Gosigo helped him.
When Casher was fully dressed, he thought that he had never dressed this elaborately for space itself. The
world of Henriada must be a tumultuous place if people needed this kind of clothing to make a short trip.
Gosigo had put on the same kind of clothes. He looked at Casher in a friendly manner, with an arch smile
which came close to humor. "Look at me, honorable visitor. Do I remind you of anybody?"
Casher looked honestly and carefully, and then said, "No, you don't."
The man's face fell. "It's a game," he said. "I can't help trying to find out who I really am. Am I a Lord of the
Instrumentality who has betrayed his trust? Am I a scientist who twisted knowledge into unimaginable wrong?
Am I a dictator so foul that even the Instrumentality, which usually leaves things alone, had to step in and wipe
me out? Here I am, healthy, wise, alert. I have the name Gosigo on this planet. Perhaps I am a mere native of
this planet, who has committed a local crime. I am triggered. If anyone ever did tell me my true name or my
actual past, I have been conditioned to shriek loud, fall unconscious and forget anything which might be said on
such an occasion. People told me that I must have chosen this instead of death. Maybe. Death sometimes looks
tidy to a forgetty."
"Have you ever screamed and fainted?"
"I don't even know that" said Gosigo, "no more than you know where you are going this very day."
Casher was tied to the man's mystifications, so he did not let himself be provoked into a useless show of
curiosity. Inquisitive about the forgetty himself, he asked:
"Does it hurt—does it hurt to be a forgetty?"
"No," said Gosigo, "it doesn't hurt, no more than you will."
Gosigo stared suddenly at Casher. His voice changed tone and became at least one octave higher. He clapped
his hands to his face and panted through his hands as if he would never speak again.
"But—oh! The fear—the eerie, dreary fear of being mel"
He still stared at Casher.
Quieting down at last, he pulled his hands away from his face, as if by sheer force, and said in an almost
normal voice, "Shall we get on with our trip?"
Gosigo led the way out into the bare bleak corridor. A perceptible wind was blowing through it, though there
was no sign of an open window or door. They followed a majestic staircase; with steps so broad that Casher
had to keep changing pace on them, all the way down to the bottom of the building. This must, at some time,
have been a formal reception hall. Now it was full of cars.
Curious cars.
Land vehicles of a kind which Casher had never seen before. They looked a little bit like the ancient "fighting
tanks" which he had seen in pictures. They also looked a little like submarines of a singularly short and ugly
shape. They had high spiked wheels, but their most complicated feature was a set of giant corkscrews, four on
each side, attached to the car by intricate yet operational apparatus. Since Casher had been landed right into the
palace by piano-form, he had never had occasion to go outside among the tornadoes of Henriada.
The Administrator was waiting, wearing a coverall on which was stenciled his insignia of rank.
Casher gave him a polite bow. He glanced down at the handsome metric wristwatch which Gosigo had strapped
on his wrist, outside the coverall. It read 3:93.
Casher bowed to Rankin Meiklejohn and said, "I'm ready, sir, if you are." *
"Watch him!" whispered Gosigo, half a step behind Casher.
The Administrator said, "Might as well be going." The man's voice trembled.
Casher stood polite, alert, immobile. Was this danger? Was this foolishness? Could the Administrator already
be drunk again?
Casher watched the Administrator carefully but quietly, waiting for the older man to precede him into the
nearest groundcar, which had its door standing open.
Nothing happened, except that the Administrator began to turn pale.
There must have been six or eight people present. The others must have seen the same sort of thing before,
because they showed no sign of curiosity or bewilderment. The Administrator began to tremble. Casher could
see it, even through the bulk of the trav-elwear. The man's hands shook.
The Administrator said, in a high nervous voice, "Your knife. You have it with you?"
Casher nodded.
"Let me see it," said the Administrator.
Casher reached down to his boot and brought out the beautiful, superbly balanced knife. Before he could stand
erect, he felt the clamp of Gosigo's heavy fingers on his shoulder.
"Master," s"aid Gosigo to Meiklejohn, "tell your visitor to put his weapon away. It is not allowed for any of us
to show weapons in your presence."
Casher tried to squirm out of the heavy grip without losing his balance or his dignity. He found that Gosigo was
knowledgeable about karate too. The forgetty held ground, even when the two men waged an immobile,
invisible sort of wrestling match, the leverage of Casher's shoulder working its way hither and yon against the
strong grip of Gosigo's powerful hand.
The Administrator ended it. He said, "Put away your knife . . ." in that high funny voice of his.
The watch had almost reached 4:00, but no one had yet got into the car.
Gosigo spoke again, and when he did there was a contemptuous laugh from the Deputy Administrator, who had
stood by in ordinary indoor clothes.
"Master, isn't it time for 'one for the road'?"
"Of course, of course," chattered the Administrator. He began breathing almost normally again.
"Join me," he said to Casher. "It's a local custom."
Casher had let his knife slip back into his bootsheath. When the knife dropped out of sight, Gosigo released his
shoulder; he now stood facing the Administrator and rubbed his bruised shoulder. He said nothing, but shook
his head gently, showing that he did not want a drink.
One of the robots brought the Administrator a glass, which appeared to contain at least a liter and a half of
water. The Administrator said, very politely, "Sure you won't share it?"
This close, Casher could smell the reek of it. It was pure byegarr,
and at least 160 proof. He shook his head again, firmly but also politely.
The Administrator lifted the glass.
Casher could see the muscles of the man's throat work as the liquid went down. He could hear the man
breathing heavily between swallows. The white liquid went lower and lower in the gigantic glass.
At last it was all gone. '•
The Administrator cocked his head sidewise and said to Casher in a parrotlike voice, "Well, toodle-oo!"
"What do you mean, sir?" asked Casher.
The Administrator had a pleasant glow on his face. Casher was surprised that the man was not dead after
that big and sudden a drink.
"I just mean g'bye. I'm—not—feeling—well."
With that he fell straight forward, as stiff as a rock tower. One of the servants, perhaps another forgetty,
caught him before he hit the ground.
"Does he always do this?" asked Casher of the miserable and contemptuous Deputy Administrator.
"Oh, no," said the Deputy. "Only at times like these."
"What do you mean, 'like these'?"
"When he sends one more armed man against the girl at Beaure-gard. They never come back. You won't
come back, either. You could have left earlier, but you can't now. Go along and try to kill the girl. I'll see
you here about five twenty-five if you succeed. As a matter of fact, if you come back at all, I'll try to wake
him up. But you won't come back. Good luck. I suppose that's what you need. Good luck."
Casher shook hands with the man without removing his gloves. Gosigo had already climbed into the
driver's seat of the machine and was testing the electric engines. The big corkscrews began to plunge
down, but before they touched the floor, Gosigo had reversed them and thrown* them back into the up
position.
The people in the room ran for cover as Casher entered the machine, though there was no immediate
danger in sight. Two of the human servants dragged the Administrator up the stairs, the Deputy
Administrator following them rapidly.
"Seat belt," said Gosigo.
Casher found it and snapped it closed.
"Head belt," said Gosigo.
Casher stared at him. He had never heard of a head belt.
"Pull it down from the roof, sir. Put the net under your chin."
Casher glanced up.
There was a net fitted snugly against the roof of the vehicle, just above his head. He started to pull it
down, but it did not yield. Angrily, he pulled harder, and it moved slowly downward. By the Bell and
Bank, do they want to hang me in thisl he thought to himself as he dragged the net down. There was a
strong fiber belt attached to each end of the net, while the net itself was only fifteen to twenty centimeters
wide. He ended up in a foolish position, holding the head belt with both hands lest it snap back into the
ceiling and not knowing what to do with it. Gosigo leaned over and, half impatiently, helped him adjust
the web under his chin. It pinched for a moment and Casher felt as though his head were being dragged by
a heavy weight.
"Don't fight it," said Gosigo. "Relax."
Casher did. His head was lifted several centimeters into a foam pocket, which he had not previously
noticed, in the back of the seat. After a second or two, he realized that the position was odd but
comfortable.
Gosigo had adjusted his own head belt and had turned on the lights of the vehicle. They blazed so bright
that Casher almost thought they might be a laser, capable of charring the inner doors of the big room.
The lights must have keyed the door.
V
Two panels slid open and a wild uproar of wind and vegetation rushed in. It was rough and stormy but far
below hurricane velocity.
The machine rolled forward clumsily and was out of the house and on the road very quickly.
The sky was brown, bright luminous brown, shot through with streaks of yellow. Casher had never seen a
sky of that color on any other world he had visited, and in his long exile he had seen many planets.
Gosigo, staring straight ahead, was preoccupied with keeping the vehicle right in the middle of the black,
soft, tarry road.
"Watch it!" said a voice speaking right into his head.
It was Gosigo, using an intercom which must have been built into the helmets.
Casher watched, though there was nothing to see except for the rush of mad wind. Suddenly the groundcar
turned dark, spun upside down, and was violently shaken. An oily, pungent stench of pure fetor
immediately drenched the whole car.
Gosigo pulled out a panel with a console of buttons. Light and fire, intolerably bright, burned in on them
through the windshield and the portholes on the side.
The battle was over before it began.
The groundcar lay in a sort of swamp. The road was visible thirty or thirty-five meters away.
There was a grinding sound inside the machine and the groundcar righted itself. A singular sucking noise
followed, then the grinding sound stopped. Casher could glimpse the big corkscrews on the side of the car
eating their way into the ground.
At last the machine was steady, pelted only by branches, leaves and what seemed like kelp.
A small tornado was passing over them.
摘要：

CORDWAINERSMITH•OntheStormPlanet"Attwoseventy-fiveinthemorning,"saidtheAdministratortoCasherO'Neill,"youwillkillthisgirlwithaknife.Attwoseventy-seven,afastgroundcarwillpickyouupandbringyoubackhere.Thenthepowercruiserwillbeyours.Isthatadeal?"HeheldouthishandasifhewantedCasherO'Neilltoshakeitthenandth...

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