Kuttner, Sci-fi and Fantasy Library
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WE GUARD THE BLACK PLANET!
Henry Kuttner
The stratoship dropped me at Stockholm, and an air-ferry took me to Thunder Fjord,
where I had been born. In six years nothing had changed. The black rocks still jutted out
into the tossing seas, where the red sails of Vikings had once flaunted, and the deep roar of
the waters came up to greet me. Against the sky Freya, my father's gerfalcon, was
wheeling. And high on the crag was the Hall, its tower keeping unceasing vigil over the
northern ocean.
On the porch my father was waiting, a giant who had grown old. Nils Esterling had always
been a silent man. His thin lips seemed clamped tight upon some secret he never told, and
I think I was always a little afraid of him, though he was never unkind. But between us was
a gulf. Nils seemed —shackled. I realized that first when I saw him watching the birds go
south before the approach of winter. His eyes held a sick longing that, somehow, made me
uneasy.
Shackled, silent, taciturn, he had grown old, always a little withdrawn from the world,
always I thought, afraid of the stars. In the daytime he would watch his gerfalcon against
the deep blue of the sky, but at night he drew the shades and would not venture out. The
stars meant something to him. Only once, I knew, he had been in space; he never ventured
beyond the atmosphere again. What had happened out there I did not know. But Nils
Esterling came back changed, with something dead inside his soul.
I was going out now. In my pocket were my papers, the result of six years of exhausting
work at Sky Point, where I had been a cadet. I was shipping tomorrow on the Martins,
Callisto bound. Nils had asked me to come home first.
So I was here, and the gerfalcon came down wheeling, dropping, its talons clamping like
iron on my father's gloved
wrist. It was like a w^lcorne. Freya was old, too, but her golden eyes were stil^ bright, her
grip still deadly.
Nils shook hands with me without rising. He gestured me to a chair. "I'm glad you came
back, Arn. So you passed. That was good to hear. You'll be in space tomorrow."
"For Callisto," I said. "How are you, Nils? I was afraid—"
His smile held no mirth. "That I was ill? Or perhaps dying. No, Arn. I've been dying for
forty years—" He looked at the gerfalcon. "It doesn't matter a great deal now. Except that I
hope it comes soon. You'll know why when I tell you about —about what happened to me
in space four decades ago. I'll try not to be bitter, but it's hard. Damned hard." Again Nils
looked at the gerfalcon.
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He went on after a moment, threading the cord through Freya's jesses. "You haven't much
time, if your ship blasts off tomorrow. What port? Newark? Well—what about food?"
"I ate on the ferry, Dad—" I seldom called him that.
He moved his big shoulders uneasily. "Let's have a drink." He summoned the servant, and
presently there were highballs before us. I could not repress the thought that whiskey was
incongruous; in the Hall we should have drunk ale from horns. Well, that was the past. A
dead past now.
Nils seemed to read my thought. "The old things linger somehow, Arn. They come down to
us in our blood. So—"
"Waes had," I said.
"Drinc hael." He drained the glass. Knots of muscle bunched at the corners of his jaw.
With a sudden, furious motion, he cast off the gerfalcon, the leash slipping through the
jesses. Freya took to the air with a hoarse, screaming cry.
"The instinct of flight is in our race," Nils said. "To be free, to fight, and to fly. In the old
days we went Viking because of that. Leif the Lucky sailed to Greenland; our ships went
down past the Tin Isles to Rome and Byzantium; we sailed even to Cathay. In the winter
we caulked our keels and sharpened our swords. Then, when the ice broke up hi the fjords,
the red sails lifted again. Ran called us—Ran of the seas, goddess of the unknown."
His voice changed; he quoted softly from an old poet.
What is woman that you forsake her,
And the hearthstone, and the home-acre,
To go -with the old gray Widow-maker ....
"Aye," said Nils Esterling, a lost sickness in his eyes. "Our race cannot be prisoned, or it
dies. And 7 have been prisoned for forty years. By all the hells of all the worlds!" he
whispered, his voice shaking. "A most damnable prison! My soul turned rotten before I'd
been back on earth a week. Even before that. And there was no way out of my prison; I
locked it with my own hands, and broke the key.
"You never knew about that, Arn. You'll know now. There's a reason why I must tell you—"
He told me, while the slow night came down, and the bo-realis flamed and shook like
spears of light in the polar sky. The Frost Giants were on the march, for a sudden chill
blew in from the fjord. Overhead the wind screamed, like the trumpet cries of Valkyries.
Far beneath us surged the sea, moving with its sliding, resistless motion, spuming against
the rocks. Above us, the stars shone brightly.
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And on Nils' wrist, where it had returned, the gerfalcon Freya rested, drowsy, stirring a
little from time to time, but content to remain there.
It had been thus forty years and more ago, Nils said, in his youth, when the hot blood went
singing through his veins, and the Viking spirit flamed within him. The seas were tamed.
The way of his ancestors was no longer open to him. But there were new frontiers open—
The gulfs between the stars held mysteries, and Nils signed as A. B. on a spaceship, a
cranky freighter, making the Great Circle of the trade routes. Earth to Venus, and swinging
outward again to the major planets.
The life toughened him, after a few years.
And in Marspole North, in a satha-divs, he ran into Captain Morse Damon, veteran of the
Asteroid War.
Damon told Nils about the Valkyries—the guardians of the Black Planet.
He was harsh and lean and gray as weathered rock, and his black stare was without
warmth. Sipping watered satha, he watched Nils Esterling, noting the leatheroid tunic
worn at cuffs and elbows, the frayed straps of the elasto sandals.
"You know my name."
"Sure." Esterling said. "I see the newstapes. But you haven't been mentioned for a while."
"Not since the Asteroid War ended, no. The pact they made left me out in the cold. I had a
guerilla force raiding through the Belt. In another year I could have turned the balance.
But after the armistice—"
Damon shrugged. "I'ttt no good for anything but fighting. I kept a ship; they owed* me
that. The Vulcan. She's a sweet boat, well found and fast. But I can't use her unless I sign
up with the big companies. Besides, I don't want to do freighting. The hell with that. I've
been at loose ends, blasting around the System, looking for—well, I don't know what. Had
a shot or two at prospecting. But it's dull, sinking assay shafts, sweating for a few tons of
ore. Not my sort of life."
"There's a war on Venus."
"Penny-ante stuff. I'm on the trail of something big now. On the trail of—" he smiled
crookedly—"ghosts. Valkyries."
"Mars isn't the place, then. Norway, on Earth—"
Damon's gaze sharpened. "Not Norway. Space. Valkyries, I said—women with wings."
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Esterling drank satha, feeling the cold, numbing liquor slide down his throat. "A new race
on some planet? I never heard of winged humans."
"You've heard of Glory Hole and Davy Jones* Locker. Mean to say you've been in space
three years and never heard of the Valkyries—the Black Planet?"
Esterling put down his glass gently. How did Damon know that he'd been a spaceman for
three years? Till now he had thought this merely a casual acquaintance, two Earthmen
drinking together on an alien world. Now—
"You mean the legend," he said. "Never paid much attention. When a ship cracks up in
space, the crew go to the Black Planet after they die. Spaceman's heaven."
"Yeah. A legend, that's all. When wrecks are found, all the bodies are found in 'em—
naturally! But the story is that there are winged women—call them Valkyries—who live in
an invisible world somewhere in the System."
"You think they exist?"
"I think there's truth behind the legend. It isn't merely a terrestrial belief. Martians,
Vesuvians, Callistans—they all have their yarns about winged space-women."
Esterling coughed hi the smoky atmosphere. "Well?"
"Here it is. Not long ago I met up with an archeologist, a guy named Beale. James Beale.
He's got a string of degrees after his name, and for ten years he's been going through the
System, checking up on the Black Planet, collecting data all over the place. He showed me
what he had, and it was plenty convincing. It added up. A scrap of information from
Venus, a story from beyond lo. Legends mostly, but there were facts too. Enough to make
me believe that there's an invisible world somewhere in space."
"How invisible?"
"I don't know. Beale says it must be a planet with a low albedo—or something of the sort It
absorbs Kgbt The winged people live on it. Sometimes they leave it Maybe they have ships,
though I can't tell about that, of course. So we have legends. Beale and I are going to the
Black Planet."
"All right," Esterling said. "It sounds crazy enough, but you could be right. Only—what do
you expect to find there?"
Damon smiled. "Dunno. Excitement, anyhow. Beale's sure there are immense sources of
power on the black world. I don't suppose well lose anything on the deal. Hell, I'm fed up
with doing nothing, knocking around the System waiting for something to happen—and it
never does. I'm not alive unless I'm fighting. This is a fight, in a way."
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"Well?"
"Want a job?"
"You short-handed?"
"Plenty. You look strong—" Damon reached across the table and squeezed the other's
biceps. His face altered, not much, but enough to convince Esterling of what he already
suspected.
"Okay, Damon." He rolled up his sleeve, revealing an arm-bracelet of heavy gold clasped
about his upper arm. "Is this what you're after?"
The captain's nostrils distended. He met Esterling's stare squarely.
"You want the cards on the table?"
"Sure."
Damon said, "I just got back from Norway, on Earth. I went there to look you up. Beale
found out about that bracelet."
Esterling nodded. "It's an heirloom. Belonged to my great-grandmother, Gudrun. I don't
know where she got it."
"It has an inscription. A copy of it was made about a hundred years ago for the Stockholm
Museum. Beale ran across that copy. He can read Runic, and the bracelet carries an
inscription—"
"I know."
"Do you know what it means?"
"Something about the Valkyries. Part of an old Edda, I suppose."
Damon made a noise deep in his throat "Not quite. It gives the location of the Black
Planet."
"The hell it does!" Esterling removed the bracelet and examined it carefully. "I thought it
was merely symbolism. The rune doesn't mean anything."
"Beale thought it did. He .saw the copy, I said, and it was incomplete. But he foun|l enough
to convince him that the complete inscription gave-the location of the Black Planet." "But
why—"
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