Read Ebook: Poison Planet by Oberfield William Vestal Herman B Illustrator

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Ebook has 163 lines and 9271 words, and 4 pages

Flaunders was a man all washed out, a man badly stung. How hard for an optimist to face defeat!

"Ten years," he said reflectively. "That's what it seems like. Thirteen since we crashed. Lucky number."

"A week since we've had anything to eat," said McBride. "Or has it been two? Anyway, it's too late to think about a garden. And if you and Thompson can't find a way to make this stuff fit to eat--" There was no need to complete that sentence.

Flaunders said nothing, seemingly absorbed in thought.

"Why don't you stop trying?" McBride said suddenly.

Flaunders looked up as if he thought he hadn't heard right. "Why in the world should I do that?"

"Because as long as you try the rest of us have hope." McBride's sunken cheeks burned red. He was somehow ashamed of his thoughts, but still determined to voice them. "Without that hope we wouldn't go on waiting and starving. There wouldn't be anything to wait for. Maybe there isn't anyway. Do you actually think there is any hope?"

Flaunders stared for a moment, considering the suicide tendency behind McBride's words. He turned away, hardly disturbed by the morbid idea. "I don't really know," he replied at last. "I don't even think any more. I just keep going like an automaton, not hoping and not giving up. That's my responsibility. Mine and Thompson's. Maybe we will find a way and maybe not. The only thing to do is to keep dogging it till we drop."

"No need to blame yourself for that," McBride said. "God knows you tried. With all the generators of this and that, the sprayers and fires and wires strung all over, we looked like we were fighting a real war instead of one against plants."

These were two skeletons, speaking of starvation under a tree loaded down with plump, ripe fruit, watching small animals scamper. The easy way out was all around them. They thought about it.

All together there had been ten men. Now ten skeletons. Now ten scarecrows with faces unshaven and dirty, with clothing hanging in tattered strips and extra holes punched in belts. They were slowly starving to death in the Garden of Paradise, in the land of plenty. And nothing, you would think, could be worse than that.

But there was something worse. It came shortly. The real Hell started with a gun.

The gaunt men were sitting around in a circle, pow-wow fashion, pretending to work out an answer and all feeling that there wasn't any, when McBride noticed Heinie, the cook, handling his automatic. It wasn't the mere fact that he was handling the weapon that deserved notice. It was the way he was handling it.

Heinie sat with a faraway look in his eye that was now glistening and now lackluster, fondling the gun in a way that suggested something. Black words not spoken, but safety off, a damp brow and moody reflections.

"Heinie," said McBride. "Anything wrong?"

Heinie's eyes came back from that far place with a start. He laughed bitterly. "Anything wrong! Two weeks without a damned thing to eat, and the man wants to know if anything's wrong!"

No respect for rank now. No more tin-soldier discipline. What penalty can you impose upon a man mere days from death?

"You'd better put away the gun, Heinie."

Heinie stared back at McBride with a sort of thoughtful defiance. He didn't put away the gun.

"Then hand it over," McBride said, and started getting up.

"Stay where you are! All of you!"

Heinie's sunken eyes were suddenly glaring at the others over the muzzle of his gun. The others settled back, a little afraid but not caring much.

"As cook," Heinie was saying, "it's my place to prepare meals. I haven't been doing my job. Now I'm going to."

"Don't let it get you down, man," McBride cautioned. "It's not your fault if we haven't--"

"Listen to me!" Heinie cut in sharply. "I happened to be in the Navy when I was only a kid, and three other guys and myself were once in a fix a lot like this. Only we were adrift on the open sea in a life-raft. Three of us kept from starving to death, but we had to draw straws to do it. The one who got the short one--well, I've been having nightmares about it ever since. God! We didn't even have a fire--"

His voice trailed off, his eyes drawing inward with some shocking memory. McBride edged toward him.

"Hold it!" Heinie ordered, coming out of the daze.

McBride stopped, half inclined not to. He wavered, drew back, and decided to try and argue it out.

"You're--sick," he said. "Say you do kill one of us; do you think you could go through that 'life-raft thing' again? Do you actually think any of us, starving or not, could bring ourselves to do what you suggest?"

"I'm not going to go through it," said Heinie. "But if I could be around to collect, I'd lay you ten to one that you will."

McBride shook his head negatively. "Stop being foolish. You need a rest."

Heinie did it then. He did it quickly, before anyone had a chance to stop him. He jerked the muzzle of the automatic up to his own temple.

"So long, suckers!" he shouted, and pulled the trigger.

McBride saw it and understood. "Good Lord, no!" he said. He tried to keep saying it, thinking it.

But he was as near death as the others. The mutual thought bloomed in his mind like some evil flower. It made him tremble. Sweat suddenly stung his eyes, ran into his mouth.

Food! Slow miserable death on one side and food on the other! A chance to live a little longer. Maybe Flaunders would find something in another week, and one meal might make the difference between seeing that and not seeing it. One wanted to live! You couldn't bring Heinie back anyway, so why not live? Heinie had wanted it that way. A human is an animal as much as a pig or a cow. A chance to live, to hope again!

Some part of his mind screamed at him. "Cannibal!"

"The only chance!" cried another part.

"Vulture!" said the soul-part with unnerving keening. "Will you have loin? Or perhaps the rump?"

His flesh prickled, the sweat flowed in streams. Unheard murmurings distorted his mind.

"Only this once, for a little more time!--Maggot! Dungworm!--Only another week and maybe the Venus II, months ahead of time--Fool! Not a chance! Die now, quickly!--No, no, no! Still some hope! Never give up. Never say die! Oh, God, Heinie! Why did you suggest it?"

Gibbering conflict, a trend to insanity. The voices inside beat his brain against his temple and raged. The civilized man went to his knees and drew back. The beast man thumped his chest and screamed.

"Alright!" McBride shouted, wondering why his voice sounded so angry, why his face felt distorted. He drew his feelings within himself. His voice grew flat and quiet with bitter irony.

"Alright," he said. "Go ahead. Undress the main course."

When the meal ended the Hell came. Full stomachs restore sanity. The beast man lay down, well fed and sleeping, to leave the civilized man awake with his thoughts. A new kind of Hell, this one that started with a gun. You could see the fires of it burning the face of every man.

Like the extra-animated Henry Higgins. He sat with unnaturally red cheeks puffed out beneath his beard, eyes glassy wet, looking at McBride as if harboring some question too awful to ask. There was something of the frightened, wild animal about him as his eyes left McBride and jerked around from one face to another. Then he was up and awkwardly running in among the trees.

The men got up from the rough table that had been set up outside the ship. They got up and went away, slinking, like a sex maniac leaving the scene of his crime when his reason returns and he knows his insanity. They went away by themselves--those not too sick to walk--and hid from one another.

But a man can't hide from himself. That was the Hell. This was not a life-raft on the open sea, every man told himself. This was a green, smiling world with the smell of flowers on the air, with plenty of glistening, tempting fruit growing wild and enough game to make an Indian hunter call it the Happy Hunting Ground. Like a camping trip back on Earth. Like a picnic where you get drunk and start eating and then sober up with the smell of blood in your nostrils to find yourself chewing the hair off the detached leg or arm of your best friend.

What did every man tell himself? That it wouldn't happen again, ever, this terrible thing. When they found the strength and courage to go back and clean up the remains of a meal, knowing it to be the remains of a meal, when they had put what was left of Heinie in a hole and covered it with dirt and set up a stone marker, they promised one another it would never ever happen again.

The next day they put it on paper, in black and white. An agreement. On the third day they thought about it, and on the fourth day they began wondering why they had done it. And on the fifth day--

On the fifth day they found Thompson, the chemist, hanging from a tree a short distance from the ship. Quite dead, of course, and no one had to ask why he had done it.

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