Let there be Night
by Robert F. Young
©2020 Positronic Publishing
Let There Be Night is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, locales or institutions is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.
ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-4596-8
Table of Contents
Let there be Night
Which answers mankind’s problems better: a stern god or a tolerant one? And what do you do if you have the power to decide it either way?
Deep-space undertows are rare, but when you get caught in one you may as well say farewell to your family and your friends, because you’re never going to see any of them again. The deep-space undertow that grabbed my one-man projectile-torpedo boat during the 2324 space maneuvers off Procyon 16 must have dragged the craft halfway across the galaxy. At any rate, when I re-emerged in normal space I couldn’t spot so much as a single familiar constellation. For the record, my N.E.S.N. serial number is 44B-6507323, my rank is PT-boat pilot, second class, and my name is Benjamin Hill. Once upon a time I was a schoolteacher.
My undertow must have had a conscience of sorts, for it had permitted the PT-boat to surface near a star with a family of six planets. For lack of a better designation I dubbed the system “System X,” and homed in on it in hopes of finding an amenable world on which I could live out the remainder of my years. X-4 looked pretty good. It had an inclination of 2.3 degrees, which meant seasons, and a spectroanalysis revealed an earth-type atmosphere. There was a moon, too—a great big one that moved in an orbit similar to the one maintained by Old Earth’s moon. However, I wasn’t interested in moons, and after a cursory glance at this one I dropped the PT-boat down closer to the planet in order to get a better look at my potential home-to-be.
Seas covered about four-fifths of the surface, and there was only one habitable continent a small land-mass with four long promontories stretching out from its main body somewhat in the manner of arms and legs. The other continents if you want to call them that—were distributed in the arctic and the anarctic regions, and except for their northern and southern littorals were about as hospitable to warm-blooded life as a bunch of icebergs.
Well, one continent was better than none. I began orbiting in. Almost as though it had been waiting for me to come to my decision, the ion drive burned out.
Apparently my undertow had not had a conscience after all.
All that saved me were my retros and my drag chute. The retros enabled me to bring the PT-boat down on the habitable planet, albeit on a rugged mountainside, and the chute enabled me to bring the boat down gently enough to avert an accidental detonation of my payload of projectiles. Planetfall took place in the twilight belt, and when I stepped through the locks, the moon was just beginning to rise.
DID I say “moon”? I shouldn’t have, because even though the term is technically correct it wasn’t the word that came into my mind when the satellite rose above the horizon. “Man” was the word. Or maybe “god.” Thinking back now, it’s hard to tell.
“The man in the moon!’ is a familiar enough phenomenon to anyone who has ever visited Old Earth, and satellites with “faces” in them are no more unusual than comets with “tails.” If a person looks hard enough and long enough, he can find a face in anything. But this face wasn’t in the moon it was the moon. Or, more accurately, it was that hemisphere which had been hidden from me during my approach and which I have been too preoccupied to notice while orbiting in for a landing. The moon, in toto, was a “head.”
Unlike Old Earth’s famed satellite, this satellite was young; its face, however, was anything but. It was the face of an old, old man—a cantankerous old man who hated planets, who hated people, who hated light and laughter; who hated, in short, just about anything or anyone you could think of. The frown embodied in that countenance was so intense that it was almost tangible, and it pervaded the very moonlight in which I stood.
I re-entered the PT-boat and aligned and focused one of the telescopic projectile-sights. The “forehead” was a vast plateau. The “eyebrows” were forested littorals. The “eyes” were seas. The “nose” was a mountain range. The “lips” were a pair of barren ridges. The “bearded cheeks” were forested lowlands. The “chin” was a tundra. The “ears” were mesas, while the plateau that constituted the “forehead” extended up and back into a gleaming, “hairless” pate. The atmosphere softened the visage somewhat, but not nearly enough appreciably to affect its austerity.
A plateau, a pair of seas, a mountain range, two ridges, two mesas, a Paleozoic forest, and a tundra interesting topography, certainly, but nothing to get particularly excited about for all its realistic physiognomic pattern. Nothing for a member of sophisticated society to get particularly excited about, that is. But how about a member of a naive society? Specifically, how about the race of people that had built the primitive village I had glimpsed in the distance while coming down on the mountainside? What would be, or rather, what had been, its reaction to such a phenomenon?
It was a discomfiting question, the more so because I couldn’t answer it. Presently I gave up trying and went to bed. All through the night I lay half awake and half asleep, trying to put the life I once had known, and would never know again, behind me. In the morning I got together the few essentials I would need to see me to the village, pocketed a small ion pistol just in case, secured the PT-boat’s locks, and started down the mountainside. There are some people who do not need the presence of other people in order to live a rich and satisfying life. I am not one of them.
Like Zarathustra, I went down my mountain alone, meeting no one. In the forest below, however, I did not come upon an old man looking for roots. I came upon a girl bathing in a brook.
This is considerably simpler in the telling than it was in the actual doing. The half trek-half climb down that mountainside had taken me three days twenty-six hour ones and I had been in the forest the better part of the fourth.
The girl had long auburn hair that looked darker than it really was because it was wet. She had big, almost luminous, gray eyes, an attractive nose, and rather full lips. A dimple dotted the center of her chin. There had been some doubt in my mind whether the natives of X-4 would turn out to be human there are some recorded cases of planets of the genus Old Earth giving birth to nonhuman intelligences but as I watched the girl, the doubt was dispelled. If anything, she was more than human, physically at least, and glimpsing the flash of her long symmetrical legs and the white gleamings of her graceful arms and shoulders I felt like Adonis spying on Venus. If the analogy doesn’t quite come off, I alone am to blame, because while I failed to qualify as Adonis, the girl in the brook was on a par with Venus, and then some.
I made myself comfortable in the underbrush and waited till such time as she should come out of the water, dress, and start for home. At length I saw her climb dripping up on the bank and start drying herself with a coarse cotton towel, shivering all the while in the cold spring wind that wafted through the forest. The drying operation completed, she slipped into several cotton undergarments, after which she spread out a rug-like length of some indeterminate material, lay down, and rolled herself up in it in such a way that only her arms, shoulders, and head protruded from one end, and her legs, from the knees down, from the other. When she stood up she was about as sexy as an animated stovepipe, and you would have thought that no further affront to her feminine dignity was possible. It was, though. The gray dress she proceeded to get into