Read Ebook: The missionary by Bone Jesse F Jesse Franklin Emshwiller Ed Illustrator

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Ebook has 167 lines and 12025 words, and 4 pages

Release date: January 4, 2024

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1960

THE MISSIONARY

ILLUSTRATOR EMSH

My leg itched. The knitting fracture beneath the cast was letting me know in no uncertain terms that a simple fracture is simple in name only. There is nothing like a nagging, unscratchable itch. It doesn't really hurt, but after awhile it can become unadulterated torture,--and all you can do is grin and bear it. Ultimately you stop grinning.

To make matters worse, I had Wolverton for company. Zard knows, I despised the man enough before I saw him and contact had only served to change my dislike to active loathing.

He sat across from me, draped bonelessly in the contoured comfort of a Varkhide chair fashioned for him by one of his Halsite retainers--a tall, angular man of indeterminate age, sandy-haired, lean-cheeked, beak-nosed, with piercing yellow eyes that flashed golden under tufted brows. His face was leathery and hatched with innumerable fine wrinkles, but his eyes and voice were young.

To give the devil his due, he had a wonderful voice--cajoling, persuasive, domineering and demanding. He could use it with all the skill and passionate conviction of a Bearer of the Word. His tongue was a weapon--a club and a rapier--and I had been pounded and pierced with it for nearly two weeks. I hated it, but I had to listen for I was literally a captive audience.

"As I was saying last time," Wolverton continued, "rabbits have nothing on the human race. Given a halfway favorable opportunity and sufficient time, humanity can make a planet look like the Australian bush. Men don't understand it until it's too late--and then, stifled by their own swarm, they either degenerate or strike out to find a new world where a man can breathe. Always they go in pairs--male and female--and pretty soon another world becomes another rabbit warren."

"What's a rabbit?" I asked.

Wolverton looked at me and laughed. "It's obvious you've never been on the Inner Worlds, have you?"

I shook my head. "I am an Adept," I said. "I am satisfied here in Promised Land."

"Thought so. You wouldn't be asking about rabbits if you had. The early colonists took them along as food animals,--and it's touch and go whether men or rabbits are the dominant species on some planets."

He didn't explain any further, but I got the general idea.

"But that isn't the point," Wolverton went on, his voice mellow and persuasive. "Rabbits maintain a fairly balanced ecology because they're more subject to natural forces which we humans ignore or circumvent. We change environment to meet our needs--and in those rare instances where environment changes us, we adapt to it and change ourselves. Take Samar for example, normally a human being is monogamous either by nature or by law--but what happens when women outnumber men?"

I stiffened. I had heard of Samar from traders and from the Word itself. "Samar," I said, "is a disgrace--a sink of iniquity--a foul blot upon the face--"

"Oh stop it," he said wearily. "You can't blame environmental forces. Nor can you blame men for adapting to them. Sure, you can point with holy horror at Samarian social customs, but even so, they aren't as bad as your ancestors'. They don't murder excess girls."

"They should," I retorted brutally. "The old days were harsh, but they were necessary. One man must cleave to one mate. The Word demands it. Polygamy must be stamped out at the source if Faith is to survive.

"But it did no good population-wise," Wolverton said. "You're now exceeding safe growth limits for your territories. That's why you want mine."

"Lies," I muttered.

"Back in the Dark Ages on a planet known as Earth," Wolverton went on inexorably, "a man named Malthus predicted our birth rate would fight a losing battle with famine. So far we have managed to avoid it by laws, by finding new frontiers, and by improving food technology. But laws and technology can only retard the growth, and frontiers are getting even harder to find. Time is catching up with us."

"I don't see--", I said. Wolverton looked at me grimly. "I know you don't," he said. "I haven't made the slightest impression."

"You've made an impression, all right," I assured him with equal grimness.

He shrugged. "There are all kinds of impressions," he commented wryly, "and not all of them are good."

"Yours has not been," I said boldly. "I place my trust in Zard, not in the voice of Evil."

"That blank, sanctimonious stare!" he said acidly. "You Worders--gah! You're so filled with catechism and cant that you won't see a fact if it hits you in the face. Of all the possibilities on this benighted planet, the one with all the proper qualities turns out to be mentally defective." He glared at me. "I don't know why I waste my time. Ordinarily I'd condition you and let it go at that."

"But you won't," I said confidently.

He winced and I smiled. It wasn't often that I won an advantage over him, and the taste of it was sweet in my mouth.

"The power of Faith," I said sententiously, "is the greatest force in the universe. It even restrains you."

He looked at me with the pitying contempt an adult has for a not-too-bright child. "What you need is an education," he said slowly. "You've never had a chance."

Wolverton with his machines could contain my powers--but that was all. He could not capture my soul. And that was what he wanted. My body was useless to him. He had many bodies of flesh and metal to serve him, but none had my powers to seek into the hearts of men, to know their inmost thoughts, to bring things to me by the power Zard had given. To kill, if need be.

It was because of my powers that I was here, nursing a broken leg, helpless in the house of the Father of Evil, a prisoner of a primitive idol worshipper who exalted his machines above the Word.

I laughed at him and rejoiced in the black anger which came to his face. Then the lines smoothed and the hard glitter vanished from his golden eyes--and again I was afraid. Not for myself, but for my soul.

"Well, let's try again," Wolverton said with forced cheerfulness.

But Wolverton was not dead. He survived and prospered. His Halsite mercenaries guarded his island Holding--and the broad reaches of his lands, innocent of the plow, were as lush and untamed as they had been in the days of the first-comers.

The followers of the Word could gain no foothold on his lands--for behind Wolverton was the might of his machines, which men could neither influence nor withstand. Wolverton's ancestor had found this world, and therefore the Holding was his--half a million square miles of island kingdom that cried in darkness for the Word. The fierce Halsites Wolverton employed and the hidden telltales scattered through his lands inevitably found trespassers and most of these were promptly and urgently returned to Promised Land. But not all. Adepts who tried to kill him never returned.

It was infuriating. It was a disgrace to our world. It was intolerable. And so it was that I had volunteered to kill Wolverton with an ancient weapon of horrid power, and in the bright cleansing flame of the explosion purge our world forever of the face of Evil.

But Evil, it seemed, was not defenseless. High as I was--I was seen from below and a flaming lance of power reached up from the forest to touch me,--and I fell. In shameful cowardice I dropped the Weapon without setting the detonator.

Hurtling down to certain death, I berated myself and swore a mighty oath on Zard's bones never again to give way to weakness of the flesh if I were permitted to survive. For it was borne upon me as I fell toward the rocky ground below that I had never really expected to die despite my proud boasts of sacrifice.

And Zard heard my prayer and was merciful--yet tempered his mercy with a stern reminder of his power. For although I recovered enough control to break the force of my descent, I did not escape completely. I did not die on the cruel rocks, but as punishment for my sins of pride and cowardice, my right leg was snapped between ankle and knee--a reminder that while Zard was merciful, he was also just and meted out punishment when it was deserved.

A Halsite found me an hour later--faint and weak with pain and shock. I could not reach him as he advanced upon me warily. But his fierce crest flattened back upon his head when he saw my helplessness and his yellow fangs bared in a travesty of a human grin as he came forward with gliding steps, lifted me in his huge arms, and ran with catlike leaps down the mountainside. My weight was nothing to him, nor was the pain of my broken leg. At the third dizzy leap and jarring landing, I fainted and knew no more until I opened my eyes and saw Wolverton.

I was lying on a couch in a small inner courtyard. Around me towered his fabulous stronghold--a mighty pile of metal and stone anchored to the top of a hill, bristling with structures of metal and weird spiderwork fabrications that rotated endlessly on gimbals. My head was filled with buzzings and dizzy pinwheels of color as he bent over me and examined my torn and dirty sacramental robe. "Hmm--an Adept," he said--"Wonder what you're adept at?" He chuckled. "You're lucky that my boy obeyed orders and brought you in. You had no business over my land. And judging from that bomb you were towing, you were loaded for bear."

I looked at him curiously. "What's a bear?" I asked.

"It's a--" he stopped abruptly and scowled. "You're pulling my leg," he accused.

He winced. "I asked for that," he said. "I mean, you were carrying an Atomic."

I nodded. "I was," I said calmly, "and if it hadn't been for that Halsite--"

"You wouldn't have done anything except destroy yourself," he interrupted. "This place is shielded like a Base Fortress. But I didn't want you dead," he chuckled. "You're more useful alive."

I choked back a gasp of pain.

He noticed it. "Well," he said, "let's have a look at you." He gestured at the Halsite. The humanoid produced a long knife, and slit through my tight underdrawers, exposing my leg from ankle to thigh. The shame of it was almost more than I could bear. Wolverton looked, whistled through his teeth, and turned to the Halsite.

"Fetch doctor," he said.

The humanoid grinned, flapped his ears in acknowledgment, and disappeared into the dark interior of the pile with a catlike bound.

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