It was Leecher who stepped into his path, unaware of the extremely thin, near-invisible blade. Castor’s lips jutted out again in determined savagery. The sliver-knife sliced through cloth, bone and lung tissue. Leecher coughed, a choked, barely audible sound, blood foaming from his chest, and slid to the floor.
Castor gestured triumphantly with the knife, easily visible now as a shining line of blood. His eyes blazed and sparkled. ‘Get out of it! Get out of it! Get out of it!—’
Gadzha was on him. He clamped an immensely strong hand on Castor’s wrist, forcing the fist down until the fingers opened. The sliver-knife hit the floor and broke into a dozen fragments.
He flung Castor back in the chair. ‘That does it,’ he rumbled. ‘That just does it. Have we got any of that succinyl, Raincoat?’
Rabbish was bending over the blood-soaked Leecher, who was barely conscious but was giving out tortured moaning sounds. ‘What’ll we do?’ he appealed helplessly. ‘He’s in a bad way.’
Gadzha looked down at the injured man. ‘Give him a shot from the medikit,’ he said briefly, then turned back to Raincoat.
Raincoat seemed uninterested in the fate of his comrade. He had stepped to the guidance board and was studying it.
‘No, we wouldn’t have any succinyl,’ he said after a moment. ‘Anyway, a dose of poetic justice is what’s in order. He’s brought us all this way for nothing – let’s just leave him here.’
‘We’ve already left Kyre. You mean push him into space?’
‘No. There’s a second planet; we’re close to it now.’ He peered at the chart. ‘“The Planet of the Flies”. Peculiar name. Let’s see if it makes a suitable place to dump our friend.’
He killed the overdrive, turned the ship and instructed the auto pilot to land on the inner planet. Castor was appalled. He shivered.
Then, at long last, he felt the suit’s guiding influence beginning to return slightly. He let the support flow into him, soothing his disharmonized nerves.
When he spoke it was the voice of a smoother, suaver persona that came through his mouth. He laughed in almost friendly fashion.
‘You won’t maroon me here, you know – that would be simply too inhuman. You don’t know why they call it “the Planet of the Flies”, do you?’
They all ignored him. Gadzha watched while Rabbish inexpertly gave Leecher a spray injection.
Soon Leecher stopped breathing. ‘What was it, a metabolic stop shot?’ Gadzha asked.
Rabbish checked the words on the capsule. ‘No, it was a death shot,’ he explained.
‘You damned fool, why did you do that?’ Gadzha shouted hoarsely. ‘We might have got him to a doctor!’
Rabbish looked hurt. ‘Well, he shouldn’t have got stabbed,’ he complained peevishly. ‘It was you who told me to give him a shot.’
‘Flies,’ Castor interrupted desperately. ‘Flies.’
The ship descended through the planet’s atmosphere. At a height of a mile it began to settle into the black sludge of flies, sinking as if into a swamp. From the hull came a faint thrumming noise.
They all stared in fascination at the main vidplate as the ship found a solid surface.
Gadzha spoke in a choked voice. ‘God!’
‘Awful, isn’t it?’ Castor commented lightly. He looked about him hopefully, with raised eyebrows. ‘Oh well, let’s be up and on our way.’
Raincoat was staring glassily at the plate. ‘It’s perfect,’ he intoned in a shaky voice. ‘Just what we need. He’s nothing but an insect himself.’
Castor stood up as Raincoat turned to him. The suit at this point made a brief attempt to invest him with grace and beauty, but his fractured nervous system interpreted the impulses so badly that he merely leaped up and down like a mad puppet, baring his teeth in a weird grimace and uttering animal-like sounds. The horrid spectacle goaded Raincoat, Gadzha and Rabbish into action. They dragged him kicking and screaming from the bridge and down to the package ejector port at ground level. Castor’s screams became increasingly terrified as the import of events came home to him, but only in the last minute or so did he plead, and then it was to no avail. They locked him in the ejector chamber and worked the ramrod that pushed its contents into the open air.
Afterwards they looked at one another, gasping.
Castor ceased to scream once the outer hatch was opened. Foolishly he had tried to breathe; the flies, which had already flooded in to clog his nasal cavities, had evaded all his apertures and formed a layer between his skin and his garments, in seconds filled his lungs and stomach.
In spite of that he was still alive when the ramrod ejected him from the chamber. He staggered and floundered in the dense atmosphere of living, buzzing flies, which clustered around him like iron filings on a magnet, creating a manshaped blotch of near-solid consistency.
The flies were voracious: they lived by eating a semi-organic rock-like substance that rumbled up constantly from beneath the surface of the planet. In an astonishingly short time they had devoured Castor. Tissue, blood, bone, and all trace of undergarments entirely disappeared.
They did not, however, eat the Frachonard suit.
Over the past year it had gained much experience in the monitoring of sentient activity. It had reached the point where it could, if need be, control living systems directly, wherever they stood on the evolutionary scale. What was more, the primitive nervous systems of the flies offered no problems of incompatibility, as had the advanced human one possessed by Castor. The suit, despite its setback, had not abandoned its mission and was in no way faltering or reticent.
It did not collapse or even become slack when Castor disappeared. Instead, it filled itself up with flies, organizing them into a collective pseudo-body which powered it in a stiff mimicry of human action. Falteringly it turned to the closed hatch of the ejector port, and directed the combined efforts of thousands of flies to push loose the dogs. That done, it floated from the ground, entering the chamber and allowing in only as many flies as suited its purpose, leaving the rest to cover the open hatch like a black wall.
Behind it the hatch closed automatically prior to takeoff. The Little Planet swayed into the air to rise rapidly above the fly layer. Minutes later, after opening the inner door of the package ejector port with difficulty, the suit was free and walking the passages of the ship by means of its humming pseudo-body.
In the long corridor beneath the level of the bridge it encountered Gadzha’s girl. She stopped and stood stock-still with a petrified snarl of fear on her face, staring at the apparition: at the suit recently worn by her rapist Castor, but worn now by a body of flies. The head, hands and feet were each composed of a black fuzzy mass. The legs, even though they floated a foot above the floor, persisted in striding slowly in walking fashion as the monster came slowly towards her.
A breathy sound from the girl’s throat signalled her vain attempt to scream. Then, recovering her power of movement, she turned and fled in the direction of the bridge.
The Frachonard suit arrived there scarcely half a minute behind her. Gadzha, Raincoat and Rabbish all froze to see this phantom return, as, for the second time, did the girl.
In the seconds remaining to them only Raincoat had the presence of mind to reach for his gun, a futile gesture he did not even complete.
He did not complete it because the suit released its hold on the flies, sending them exploding in all directions to fill the interior of the bridge. While it collapsed neatly on the floor, the flies began to feast on their victims; but shortly, with the bodies only partly devoured, the suit recalled them again. They streamed back, causing the suit to rise up from the floor as if lifted by a string.