The Fly-Dumpers

Zeek wiped his sweating neck and groaned. Really, it would be a blessing to get off this benighted planet; the greenness everywhere made him bilious, and the climate was positively fiendish!

He climbed heavily down the ladder, clumsy in protective suit and jury-rigged translator-machine. Those wretched serfs were wrangling again!

It was the usual problem. Two men from different tribes and a translator malfunction. A few minutes ago the primitive battery to which they were both attached, had gone on the blink. The blond, fur-clad giant furthest up the building had demanded more bricks, but the small, dark man lower down had taken the garbled syllables for the worst kind of insult, and now they were rolling on the ground in a writhing, biting brawl.

Wearily, Zeek called the guards.

"Can’t you get it through your heads that this is a rush job?" he demanded. "Not only do regulations demand we get out of here in the shortest possible time, leaving absolutely no traces, I’m worried about having the natives exposed to our ship’s radiations."

"Hell, they’re only natives!" The nearest guard kicked scornfully at the tangled mass of limbs, then shamefacedly remembering that Zeek was an officer, obediently helped his partner to separate the men.

Zeek unhooked the wires from the faulty battery, dumping it under a bush and replacing it with one of the spares he kept ready to hand. They were cumbersome things, but the best he could do in the circumstances. The guards drove the men back to their task, and he stood watching them with a worried frown.

The "Handbook of Regulations governing Space-exploration and possible Contact with Intelligent Life" stated categorically that planets with signs of intelligent life-forms must be avoided absolutely, except in direst emergency, and where contact was unavoidable it should leave no traces.

When sheer bad luck sent a meteor-swarm through the drive-chamber, the one kind of damage that called for immediate dirtside repairs, they had chosen the third planet out from the sun as seeming to have the most tolerable gravity, and had discovered too late that it was inhabited, albeit by primitives.

The Captain hadn’t seemed too worried. "Take a couple of skimmers and go out and fetch whatever natives look capable of work," he had directed Garos and Hakok, carelessly.

The selection of a hundred or so they brought in seemed useless at first. Not only were they half-crazed by the appearance of the Xarokians. but they had no common language.

As reserve radio-officer and general dogsbody Zeek had been given the task of rigging up translator-machines. He still shuddered to remember how several natives had sickened and died before he realised that they were affected by the radiation from the ship’s batteries, and managed to contrive primitive substitutes with native materials. He had also suggested that the workers be shielded from the engine-room emissions, and sheltered from the weather at night.

His brother-officers laughed at the idea, but when he pointed out that the makings of reasonable concrete were at hand, and that he had discovered a nearby pool of bitumen, they went along with it, if only on rather a "Humour-the-idiot-because-after-all-he-is-related-to-the-High-Commander" principle.

A whistle in his neck-phones roused him from his brooding. From all over the clearing, purple-suited figures converged on the elevator-platform.

Inside, they were directed to the ward-room, where the Captain joined them, holding up a hand for attention.

His voice over the loudspeaker sounded like the knell of doom.

"Men!" he boomed, "We have just picked up a faint emergency broadcast from Home. Our planet is in a state of Civil War! All loyal ships are begged, begged! to return immediately to the aid of our rulers.

"I know that our repairs are incomplete, but our Engineers assure me that they can hold for the journey at reduced speed. You have two hours to gather up any equipment dirt-side. Kill what natives you can, but don’t waste time on it! Those not fried by our blast, will undoubtedly die before they get back to their tribes. Now, hurry"

Zeek spent the next two hours unhitching translators from the serfs and trying to chase them into the forest. They seemed hell-bent on finishing one another off anyway, but he couldn’t bear to think of their burnt and shrivelled bodies if they stayed near the ship.

By the deadline, all the crew were aboard, the ports closed and airflow restored. Thankfully. Zeek took a deep breath and rubbed his itching whiskers.. He seemed to have lived several lifetimes since that morning. His lowly rank did not allow the place on the Bridge due to one of his breeding. Today he was glad not to be dial-watching; he was far from happy with the half-finished repairs.

Just as the final warning sounded, he remembered the defective battery, never recovered in the rush. Oh well, blast-off would undoubtedly smash it irretrievably; indeed, this whole area would probably be a desert from now on. Relaxing his muscles, he closed his eyes, trying to visualize the bright amber hills of Home.

With a roar, the ship lifted.

Somewhere out past Saturn, the makeshift repairs gave up under the strain. Zeek and his shipmates, along with their ship, became just a few more atoms in those mysterious rings.

Back on Earth, the few survivors in the area fought bitterly among themselves for a few days and then wandered away searching for their own tribes. Where they found them, strange myths grew up; of a tower reaching to the sky, and a common language which suddenly vanished.

Some thousands of years later, Zeek’s forgotten battery was dug up in the desert, and displayed in the museum in Baghdad. He needn’t have worried; nobody ever worked out where it came from, and it was quite beyond repair by then!