Rudemacher had made it. Graduation. Assignment to space vessel. Three promotions. Finally a starcraft. Rudemacher had made it all the way to planet Beulah before flunking out. All the way to the insanity that had caused those aboard Zenith to butcher each other until none was left. How had the last one died? Of wounds? Or by his or her own hand when nothing else remained to kill?
Level Central vanished.
“Do you understand, Pupil Smithson?”
“I think so, sir.”
“I think so, I think so,” Professor Gwaltney mimicked. He seemed even more miserable today than usual. “Try to understand, Pupil. Planets are endowed by the Creator with certain powers to nurture life in one form or another, however bizarre the form may appear to us. Mother Earth is a most meaningful connotation, Pupil Smithson. Without earth, you could not have been, even though you are a step-child of Mother Mars. You will never know earth, however long you may go there, as I know her. I was born there.” Gwaltney seemed about to weep. “You were not. And for that you are to be pitied...”
Gwaltney spiraled off to limbo, and Smitty was once more on Level Central, Zenith starcraft. A soft smile came to his lips. He began moving about, freely now. The lovely golden light of Beulah was filtering through the very substance of Zenith, touching each magnificently rotten face, every beautifully ripped abdomen and slashed torso.
Death... Gossamer and golden, like the light of Beulah.
It had remained for Beulah, childless mother, to reveal the fullness of truth to his once-cluttered mind. Even old Gwaltney was beautiful now, being long since dead.
With robot precision, Smitty departed the Zenith, climbed into the scout car, punched out CompNec, took manual control, and lifted from Beulah’s warm bosom.
He reached escape velocity on the third orbit. At the moment when he broke Beulah’s gravitational grip, he punched the activator that unsheathed the belly-mounted laser. The weapon made the scout car, pound for pound, one of the deadliest antagonists in the universe.
Then Smitty turned on full power and aimed the scout on direct collision course with Capricorn...
“I think he’d coming around now,” the familiarity of the voice nagged Smitty. Through a wall of pain, he struggled to place it. Scoville. Of course. Doctor Scoville.
Smitty groaned. “My head... what a headache!”
He felt a needle bite his arm. “Another half-CC of wequerin should help that,” Scoville’s voice said.
Smitty was just managing to hang on second by second, never so sick or miserable in his entire life. He felt the hardness of a surgical or examination table beneath his back, the restraint of webbing across his body. Sick bay. Scoville. It all added up. He was back aboard the Capricorn. In sick bay. And he was going to vomit all over the place any moment now.
Then the wequerin settled his stomach and wiped away the headache in one gentle stroke. He opened his eyes. Scoville’s big, round face was hovering above him on one side, while on the other Carruthers’ thinner more ascetic features were regarding him with deep concern.
When he saw Smitty’s eyes open, Carruthers exhaled a breath of relief. “You gave us a very bad moment, punching out the CompNec as you did,” Carruthers said. Even in criticism, the commander’s voice was pleasant and polite. “We had to hit you with long-range temporary neural implosion to take command of the scout car away from you.”
“Thanks, boss,” Smitty said. “It was even worth the headache.”
“I didn’t have much choice,” Carruthers smiled. Dark, suave, he glanced at the doctor. “De-briefing? While Smitty’s fresh on it?”
Scoville shrugged. “The wequerin will leave him wobbly for a few minutes. Otherwise, he seems no worse for wear. Sometimes I think even a Jupiterian ice slide couldn’t kill these colonial Martians.”
“For which we re all most grateful,” Carruthers said.
Ten minutes later, Smitty was standing at a tall visi-port in a debriefing room. He was sipping a glass of port, which Carruthers always included in his Earthside requisitions.
Smitty lowered the glass slowly from his lips, studying the breathtaking round beauty of Beulah hovering safely in the far distance.
“To begin with, Commander, we’re all going to have trouble believing this one, like the ancients had trouble with Galileo’s telescope and Louis Pasteur’s invisible bugs. But I think we’ve just come across our first extremely sentient planet... and she is having none of this motherhood bit. Absolutely. Positively. She wants no brats digging life out of her breasts and lousing up her virginal purity with flotsam and junk and sewerage. No little stinkers scarring her with pain when they yield to senseless emotion and kill each other. No snot-noses contemptuous of her even as they draw life from her.”
Smitty paused, still intently looking at Beulah. “None of the headaches of motherhood for that one, Commander, even if she has to practice abortion...”
Smitty gave a long sigh. “Of course, that’s her side of it. But from our point of view... how could anything so lovely be such a double-dyed bitch?