Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley by Robert Sheckley

Author:Robert Sheckley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781590175088
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Published: 2012-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

DAWN INVADER

THERE were eleven planets in that system, and Dillon found that the outer ones contained no life whatsoever. The fourth planet from the sun had once been populated, and the third would someday be. But on the second, a blue world with a single moon, intelligent life existed, and to this planet Dillon directed his ship.

He approached stealthily, slipping through the atmosphere under cover of darkness, descending through thick rain clouds looking much like a cloud himself. He landed with that absolute lack of commotion possible only for an Earthman.

When his ship finally settled it was an hour before dawn, the safe hour, the time when most creatures, no matter what planet has spawned them, are least alert. Or so his father had told him before he left Earth. Invading before dawn was part of the lore of Earth, hard-won knowledge directed solely toward survival on alien planets.

“But all this knowledge is fallible,” his father had reminded him. “For it deals with that least predictable of entities, intelligent life.” The old man had nodded sententiously as he made that statement.

“Remember, my boy,” the old man went on, “you can outwit a meteor, predict an ice age, outguess a nova. But what, truthfully, can you know about those baffling and constantly changing entities who are possessed of intelligence?”

Not very much, Dillon realized. But he believed in his own youth, fire, and cunning, and he trusted the unique Terran invasion technique. With that special skill, an Earthman could battle his way to the top of any environment, no matter how alien, no matter how hostile.

From the day he was born, Dillon had been taught that life is incessant combat. He had learned that the galaxy is large and unfriendly, made up mostly of incandescent suns and empty space. But sometimes there are planets, and on these planets are races, differing vastly in shape and size, but alike in one respect: their hatred for anything unlike themselves. No cooperation was possible between these races. For an Earthman to live among them called for the utmost in skill, stamina, and cunning. And even then, survival would be impossible without Earth’s devastating technique of invasion.

Dillon had been an apt student, eager to face his destiny in the great galaxy. He had enlisted for the Exodus, not waiting to be drafted. And finally, like millions of young men before him, he had been given his own spaceship and sent out, leaving small, overcrowded Earth forever behind. He had flown to the limit of his fuel. And now his destiny lay before him.

His ship rested in a clump of jungle near a thatch-roofed village, almost invisible in dense underbrush. He waited, tense behind his controls, until the dawn came up white, with red hints of sunrise in it. But no one came near, no bomb fell, no shells burst. He had to assume that he had landed undetected.

When the planet’s yellow sun touched the rim of the horizon, Dillon emerged and sized up his physical surroundings.

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