THE MASKED WORLD
BY JACK WILLIAMSON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of Tomorrow October 1963
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The planet hid itself from the Earthmen—and
what lay behind the mask was fierce and deadly!
The planet wore a mask.
At ten million miles, it was a sullen yellow eye. At one million, ascarred and evil leer. Outside the smoking circle our landing-jets hadsterilized, it was a hideous veil of hairy black tentacles and hugesallow blooms, hiding the riddle of its sinister genes.
On most worlds that we astronauts have found, the life is vaguely likeour own. Similar nucleotides are linked along similar helical chains ofDNA, carrying similar genetic messages. A similar process replicatesthe chains when the cells divide, to carry the complex blue-prints fora particular root or eye or wing accurately down across ten thousandgenerations.
But even the genes were different here—enormously complicated. Herethe simplest-seeming weed had more and longer chains of DNA thananything we had seen before. What was their message?
We had come to read it, with our new genetic micro-probe. A hundredprecious tons of microscopic electronic gear, it was designed toobserve and manipulate the smallest units of life. It could reach eventhose strange genes.
That was our mission.
Ours was the seventh survey ship to approach the planet. Six before ushad been lost without trace. We were to find out why.
Our pilot was Lance Llandark. A lean hard man, silent and cold as thegray-cased micro-probe. We hated him—until someone learned why he hadvolunteered to come.
His wife had been pilot of the ship before us. When we knew that, webegan to hear the hidden tension in his tired voice, monotonouslycalling on every band: "Come in, Six.... Come in Six...."
Six never came in.
For two days, we watched the planet. The shallow ditch our jets haddug. The charred stumps. The jungle beyond—the visible mask of thosemonstrous genes—rank, dark, utterly alien.
At the third dawn, Lance Llandark took two of us out in a 'copter.Flying a grid over the landing area, we mapped six shallow pock-markson that scowling wilderness, where our ships must have landed.
We dropped into the newest crater, where black stumps jutted likebroken teeth out of queerly bare red muck. A yellow-scummed streamoozed across it. By the stream we found a fine-boned human skeleton.
A nightmare plant stood guard beside the bones. Its thick leaves werestrangely streaked, twisted with vegetable agony, half poison spine andhalf blighted bloom. Shapeless blobs of rotting fruit were falling fromit over those slender bones.
Lance Llandark stood up.
"Her turquoise thunderbird." He showed us the bit of blackened silverand blue-veined stone. "Back on Terra.... Back when we were studentpilots.... We bought it from an Indian in an old, old town called SanteFe."
He bent again.
"Lilith?" he whispered. "Lilith, what killed you?"
We found no other bones, nothing even to tell us what force or poisonkept the creeping jungle back from that solitary plant. We left atdusk. Tenderly, Lance Llandark brought the gathered bones. Carefully wecarried a few leaves and dried pods from that crazy sentinel plant. Wefound no other clue.
Patiently, day by forty-hour day, we searched the other sites. We foundjet marks and stumps and teeming wee