Beyond The Farthest Star Read online

  "Because he is the brother of a friend of mine," I explained. "He was shot down behind the Kapar lines and he took the uniform from a Kapar he had killed to use as a disguise, because he knew that he was in Kapar country."

  About this time Balzo Jan crawled out of the after cockpit dressed in the blue suit, boots, and helmet of a Unisan fighting man.

  "Does he look like a Kapar?" I asked.

  "No," the chief said. "You must forgive us. My people hate the Kapars, and they are hungry."

  With Balzo Jan's help I had the engine repaired and we were ready to take off a little after noon; and when we rose into the air the starving villagers stood sad-eyed and mute, watching us fly away toward a land of plenty.

  As we rose above the mountains that lay between us and the coast I saw three ships far to our left. They were flying in a south-westerly direction towards Kapara.

  "I think they are Kapars," said Balzo Jan, who was far more familiar with the lines of Polodian ships than I, having spent most of his lifetime looking at them.

  Even as we watched, the three ships turned in our direction. Whatever they were, they had sighted us and were coming for us.

  If they were Unisans, we had nothing to fear; nor for that matter did we have anything to fear if they were Kapars, for my ship could out fly them by a hundred miles an hour. Had they been as fast as ours, they could have cut us off, for they were in the right position to do so. We had been making about four hundred miles an hour and now I opened the throttle wide, for I did not purpose taking any chances, as I felt that we wouldn't have a chance against three Kapars, with three or four guns apiece, while we only had two. I opened the throttle, but nothing happened. The engine didn't accelerate at all. I told Balzo Jan.

  "We shall have to fight, then," he said, "and I wanted to get home and get a decent meal. I have had practically nothing to eat for three days."

  I knew how Balzo Jan felt, for I had had nothing to eat myself for some time, and anyway I had had enough fighting for a while.

  "They are Kapars all right," said Balzo Jan presently.

  There was no doubt about that now; the black of their wings and fuselages was quite apparent, and we were just about going to meet them over the island off the southern tip of Unis. We were going to meet right over the last and largest of the three islands, which is called the Island of Despair, where are sent those confirmed criminals who are not to be destroyed, and those Unisans whose loyalty is suspected, but who cannot be convicted of treason.

  I had been fiddling with the engine controls, trying to step up the speed a little, when the first burst of fire whistled about us. The leading ship was coming head-on toward us, firing only from her forward gun, when Balzo Jan sent a stream of explosive projectiles into her. I saw her propeller disappear then, and she started to glide toward the Island of Despair .

  "That's the end of them," shouted Balzo Han.

  Quite suddenly and unexpectedly my motor took hold again, and we immediately drew away from the other two ships, which Balzo Jan was spraying with gunfire.

  We must have been hit fifty times, but the plastic of our fuselage and wings could withstand machine-gun fire, which could injure us only by a lucky hit of propeller or instrument-board. It is the heavier guns of combat planes and bombers that these fast, lightly armed pursuit planes have to fear.

  "I hate to run from Kapars," I shouted back to Balzo Jan. "Shall we stay and have it out with them?"

  "We have no right to throw away a ship and two men," he said, "in a hopeless fight."

  Well, that was that. Balzo Jan knew the rules of the game better than I; so I opened the throttle wide and soon left the remaining Kapars far behind, and shortly after, they turned and resumed their flight toward Kapara.

  There are two pilot seats and controls in the front cockpit, as well as the additional controls in the after cockpit. However, two men are seldom seated in the front cockpit, except for training purposes, as there is only one gun there and the Unisan military chiefs don't believe in wasting man power. However, the seat was there, and I asked Balzo Jan to come up and sit with me.

  "If you see any more Kapars," I said, "you can go back to your gun."

  "Do you know," he said, after he had crawled up into the forward cockpit and seated himself beside me, "that we have been so busy since you first discovered me climbing into your ship that I haven't had a chance to ask you who you are. I know a lot of men in the fighting service, but I don't recall ever having seen you before."

  "My name is Tangor," I said.

  "Oh," he said, "you're the man that my sister discovered without any clothes on after a raid several months ago."

  "The same," I said, "and she is mourning you for dead. I saw her at the Harkases the night before we took off for this last raid."

  "My sister would not mourn," he said proudly.

  "Well, she was mourning inwardly," I replied, "and sometimes that's worse for a woman than letting herself go. I should think a good cry now and then would be a relief to the women of Poloda."

  "I guess they used to cry," he said, "but they don't any more. If they cried every time they felt like crying, they'd be crying all the time; and they can't do that, you know, for there is work to do. It is war."

  Chapter Eleven

  IT IS WAR! That was the answer to everything. It governed their every activity, their every thought. From birth to death they knew nothing but war. Their every activity was directed at the one purpose of making their country more fit for war.

  "I should think you would hate war," I said to Balzo Jan.

  He looked at me in surprise. "Why?" he demanded. "What would we do with ourselves if there were no war?"

  "But the women," I said. "What of them?"

  "Yes," he replied, "it is hard on them. The men only have to die once, but the women have to suffer always. Yes; it is too bad, but I can't imagine what we would do without war."

  "You could come out in the sunshine, for one thing," I said, "and you could rebuild your cities, and devote some of your time to cultural pursuits and to pleasure. You could trade with other countries, and you could travel to them; and wherever you went you would find friends."

  Balzo Jan looked at me sceptically. "Is that true in your world?" he asked.

  "Well, not when I was last there," I had to admit, "but then, several of the countries were at war."

  "You see," he said, "war is the natural state of man, no matter what world he lives in."

  We were over the southern tip of Unis now. The majestic peaks of the Mountains of Loras were at our left, and at our right the great river which rises in the mountains south of Orvis emptied into the sea, fifteen hundred miles from its source. It is a mighty river, comparable, I should say, to the Amazon. The country below us was beautiful in the extreme, showing few effects of the war, for they have many buried cities here whose Labour Corps immediately erase all signs of the devastating effects of Kapar raids as soon as the enemy has departed.

  Green fields stretched below us in every direction, attesting the fact that agriculture on the surface still held its own against the Kapars on this part of the continent; but I knew at what a price they raised their crops with low flying Kapar planes strafing them with persistent regularity, and bombers blasting great craters in their fields.

  But from high above this looked like heaven to me, and I wondered if it were indeed for me the locale of that after-life which so many millions of the people of my world hope and pray for. It seemed to me entirely possible that my transition to another world was not unique, for in all the vast universe there must be billions of planets, so far removed from the ken of Earth men that their existence can never be known to them.

  I mentioned to Balzo Jan what was passing in my mind and he said, "Our people who lived before the war had a religion, which taught that those who died moved to Uvala, one of the planets of our solar system which lies upon the other side of Omos. But now we have no time for religion; we have time only for war."

/>   "You don't believe in a life hereafter, then?" I asked. "Well, I didn't either, once, but I do now."

  "Is it really true that you come from another world?" he asked. "Is it true that you died there and came to life again on Poloda?"

  "I only know that I was shot down by an enemy plane behind the enemy lines," I replied. "A machine-gun bullet struck me in the heart, and during the fifteen seconds that consciousness remained I remember losing control of my ship and going into a spin. A man with a bullet in his heart, spinning toward the ground from an altitude of ten thousand feet, must have died."

  "I should think so," said Balzo Jan, "but how did you get here?"

  I shrugged. "I don't know any more about it than you do," I replied. "Sometimes I think it is all a dream from which I must awake."

  He shook his head. "Maybe you are dreaming," he said, "but I am not. I am here, and I know that you are here with me. You may be a dead man, but you seem very much alive to me. How did it seem to die?"

  "Not bad at all," I replied. "I only had fifteen seconds to think about it, but I know that I died happy because I had shot down two of the three enemy planes that had attacked me."

  "Life is peculiar," he said. "Because you were shot down in a war on a world countless millions of miles away from Poloda, I am now alive and safe. I can't help but be glad, my friend, that you were shot down."

  It was a quiet day over Unis; we reached the mountains south of Orvis without sighting a single enemy plane, and after crossing the mountains I dropped to within about a hundred feet of the ground. I like to fly low when I can; it breaks the monotony of long flights, and we ordinarily fly at such tremendous altitudes here that we see very little of the terrain.

  As we dropped down I saw something golden glinting in the sunshine below us. "What do you suppose that is down there. I said to Balzo Jan, banking so that he could see it.

  "I don't know," he said, "but it looks amazingly like a woman lying there; but what a woman would be lying out in the open for, so far from the city, I can't imagine."

  "I am going down to see," I said.

  I spiralled down and as we circled over the figure I saw that it was indeed a woman, lying upon her face-an unmarried woman, I knew, for her suit was of golden sequins. She lay very still, as though she were asleep.

  I put the plane down and taxied up close to her. "You stay at the controls, Balzo Jan," I said, for one must always think of Kapars and be ready to run, or fight, or hide.

  I dropped to the ground and walked over to the still form. The girl's helmet had fallen off, and her mass of copper red hair spread over and hid that part of her face which was turned up. I knelt beside her and turned her over, and as I saw her face my heart leaped to my throat-it was Harkas Yamoda, little Harkas Yamoda, crushed and broken.

  There was blood on her lips, and I thought she was dead; but I didn't want to believe it, I wouldn't believe it; and so I placed my ear against her breast and listened-and faintly I heard the beating of her heart. I lifted the little form in my arms, then, and carried it to the ship.

  "It is Harkas Yamoda," I said to Balzo Jan, as I passed her up to him; "she is still alive. Put her in the after cockpit." Then I Sprang to the wing of the ship and told Balzo Jan to take the controls and bring the ship in.

  I got in with Harkas Yamoda and held her in my arms as gently as I could, while the ship bumped over the rough ground during the take– off. I wiped the blood from her lips; that was all I could do, that and pray. I had not prayed before since I was a little boy at my mother's knee. I remember wondering, if there were a God, if He could hear me, so very far away, for I had always thought of God as being somewhere up in our own heaven.

  It was only a matter of fifteen or twenty minutes before Balzo Jan set the ship down outside of Orvis and taxied down the ramp to our underground airdrome.

  There are always fleets of ambulances at every airdrome, for there are always wounded men in many of the ships that come in. Also, close by is an emergency hospital; and to this I drove with Harkas Yamoda, after telling Balzo Jan to notify her father.

  The surgeons worked over her while I paced the floor outside. They worked very quickly and she had only just been carried to her room when Harkas Yen, and Don, and Yamoda's mother came. The four of us stood around that silent, unconscious little form lying so quietly on her cot.

  "Have you any idea how it happened?" I asked Harkas Yen.

  He nodded. "Yes," he said, "she was on an outing with some of her friends when they were attacked by Kapars. The men put up a good fight and several of them were killed. The girls ran, but a Kapar overtook Yamoda and carried her away."

  "She must have jumped from the plane," said Don.

  "Planes!" said Yamoda's mother bitterly. "Planes! The curse of the world. History tells us that when they were first perfected and men first flew in the air over Poloda, there was great rejoicing, and the men who perfected them were heaped with honours. They were to bring the peoples of the world closer together. They were to break down international barriers of fear and suspicion. They were to revolutionize society by bringing all people together, to make a better and happier world in which to live. Through them civilization was to be advanced hundreds of years; and what have they done? They have blasted civilization from nine-tenths of Poloda and stopped its advance in the other tenth. They have destroyed a hundred thousand cities and millions of people, and they have driven those who have survived underground, to live the lives of burrowing rodents. Planes! The curse of all times. I hate them. They have taken thirteen of my sons, and now they have taken my daughter."

  "It is war," said Harkas Yen, with bowed head.

  "This is not war," cried the sad-faced woman, pointing at the still form upon the cot.

  "No," I said, "this is not war-it is rapine and murder."

  "What else can you expect of the Kapar's?" demanded Harkas Don. "But for this they shall pay.

  "For this they shall pay," I, too, swore.

  Then the surgeons came in and we looked at them questioningly. The senior surgeon put his hand on the shoulder of Yamoda's mother and smiled. "She will live," he said. "She was not badly injured."

  Yes; planes used in war are a curse to humankind, but thanks to a plane Balzo Maro's brother had been returned to her, and little Yamoda would live.

  Listen! The sirens are sounding the general alarm.

  Part II: TANGOR RETURNS

  Foreword

  Naturally, my imagination has been constantly intrigued by speculation as to the fate of Tangor, since his unseen, perhaps ghostly, fingers typed the story of his advent upon Poloda, that mysterious planet some 450,000 light years from Earth; typed them upon my own machine one midnight while I sat amazed, incredulous, and fascinated, with my hands folded in my lap.

  His story told of his death behind the German lines in September, 1959, when he was shot down in a battle with three Messerschmitts, and of how he had found himself, alive, uninjured, and as naked as the day he was born, in another world.

  I hung upon every line that he wrote; his description of the underground city of Orvis with its great buildings that were lowered deep beneath the surface of the ground when the Kapar bombers flew over by thousands to drop their lethal bombs in the great war that has already lasted more than a hundred years.

  I followed his adventures after he became a flier in the air corps of Unis, the Polodan country of his adoption. I grieved with him at the bedside of little Harkas Yamoda; and there were tears of relief in my eyes, as there must have been in his, when the surgeons announced that she would live.

  And then the last line that he typed: "Listen! The sirens are sounding the general alarm."

  That was all. But I have sat before my typewriter at midnight many a night since that last line was typed by unseen hands. I have wondered if Tangor ever came back from the battle to which that general alarm called him, or if he died a second death and, perhaps, a final one.

  I had about given up my midnight vigils as usel
ess, when one night recently, shortly before midnight, I was awakened by a hand upon my shoulder. It was a moonlight night. The objects in the room were faintly visible, yet I could see no one. I switched on the reading light at the head of my bed. Other than myself there was no one in the room, or at least no one I could see; and then I heard and saw the space bar of my typewriter moving up and down with something that seemed like a note of urgency.

  As I started to get out of bed, I saw a sheet of typewriter paper rise from my desk as though endowed with life and place itself in the typewriter. By the time I reached my desk and sat down before the machine, those ghostly fingers had already started to type the story which you are about to read.

  Tangor had returned!

  Chapter One

  THAT GENERAL ALARM certainly called us to a real battle. The Kapars sent over ten thousand planes, and we met them over the Bay of Hagar with fully twenty thousand. Perhaps a thousand of them got through our lines to drop their bombs over Orvis, those that our pursuit planes did not overtake and shoot down; but we drove the others out over the Karagan Ocean, into which ships plunged by the thousands.

  At last they turned and fled for home, but we pursued them all the way to Ergos, flying low over the very city, strafing them as they taxied for their ramps; then we turned back, perhaps ten thousand ships out of the twenty thousand that had flown out to meet the Kapars. We had lost ten thousand ships and perhaps fifty thousand men, but we had practically annihilated the Kapar fleet and had saved Unis from a terrific bombing; and on the way back, we met a few straggling Kapars returning, shooting down every last one of them.

  Once more all three of my gunners were killed, while I came through without a scratch. Either I have a charmed life or else, having died once, I cannot' die again.

  I saw practically nothing of Harkas Yamoda while she was convalescing, as the doctors had ordered that she have perfect rest; but a flier has to have relaxation, and he has to have girl friends-he sees altogether too much of men while he is on duty, as about half of those he does see are firing rifles or machine guns or cannons at him. It is a nerve-racking business, and the majority of us are always on edge most of the time when we are on the ground. It is a strange thing; but that restlessness and nervousness seem to leave me when I am in the air; and of course when you are in battle, you haven't time to think of such things.