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                           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, a
scarred and evil leer. Outside the smoking circle our landing-jets had
sterilized, it was a hideous veil of hairy black tentacles and huge
sallow blooms, hiding the riddle of its sinister genes.

On most worlds that we astronauts have found, the life is vaguely like
our own. Similar nucleotides are linked along similar helical chains of
DNA, carrying similar genetic messages. A similar process replicates
the chains when the cells divide, to carry the complex blue-prints for
a particular root or eye or wing accurately down across ten thousand
generations.

But even the genes were different here--enormously complicated. Here
the simplest-seeming weed had more and longer chains of DNA than
anything we had seen before. What was their message?

We had come to read it, with our new genetic micro-probe. A hundred
precious tons of microscopic electronic gear, it was designed to
observe and manipulate the smallest units of life. It could reach even
those strange genes.

That was our mission.

Ours was the seventh survey ship to approach the planet. Six before us
had been lost without trace. We were to find out why.

Our pilot was Lance Llandark. A lean hard man, silent and cold as the
gray-cased micro-probe. We hated him--until someone learned why he had
volunteered to come.

His wife had been pilot of the ship before us. When we knew that, we
began to hear the hidden tension in his tired voice, monotonously
calling 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 had
dug. The charred stumps. The jungle beyond--the visible mask of those
monstrous 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-marks
on that scowling wilderness, where our ships must have landed.

We dropped into the newest crater, where black stumps jutted like
broken teeth out of queerly bare red muck. A yellow-scummed stream
oozed across it. By the stream we found a fine-boned human skeleton.

A nightmare plant stood guard beside the bones. Its thick leaves were
strangely streaked, twisted with vegetable agony, half poison spine and
half blighted bloom. Shapeless blobs of rotting fruit were falling from
it over those slender bones.

Lance Llandark stood up.

"Her turquoise thunderbird." He showed us the bit of blackened silver
and blue-veined stone. "Back on Terra.... Back when we were student
pilots.... We bought it from an Indian in an old, old town called Sante
Fe."

He bent again.

"Lilith?" he whispered. "Lilith, what killed you?"

We found no other bones, nothing even to tell us what force or poison
kept the creeping jungle back from that solitary plant. We left at
dusk. Tenderly, Lance Llandark brought the gathered bones. Carefully we
carried a few leaves and dried pods from that crazy sentinel plant. We
found no other clue.

Patiently, day by forty-hour day, we searched the other sites. We found
jet marks and stumps and teeming weeds, but nothing like that tormented
nightmare over Lilith Llandark's skeleton. We found no wreckage.
Nothing to show how the planet had murdered the lost expeditions.

Day by eternal day, the unknown leered from the secret places of its
genes. It was all vegetable. We saw no animal movement, heard no cry or
insect hum. The silence became suffocating.

Day after desperate day, we returned to the micro-probe.

"The answer's in the genes," Lance Llandark whispered grimly. "We've no
other chance."

He kept the probe running on the strangest genes of all; those from the
plant nightmare that had grown beside his wife. They were like nothing
else on the planet. The double-stranded chains of DNA were monstrously
long; many of the nucleotide links held copper or arsenic atoms.

"Queer!" Lance kept muttering. "No copper or arsenic in other plants
here. I'd like to know why."

       *       *       *       *       *

He was running when we heard the woman scream. In that stifling quiet,
her cry unnerved us all. We crowded down to the lock.

Tattered, stained with blood-colored juices, she slipped through those
coiled, constricting creepers. She splashed out into the open ditch,
waving a filthy rag. Halfway to the ship, she fell into the mud.

Lance Llandark led three of us to bring her in. She whimpered and
looked up. Tears streaked the grime on her wasted face.

"Lance!" she gasped. "My dear."

"Lilith--" But he shrank back suddenly. "I found Lilith dead!"

"I am nearly dead." She tried weakly to get up. "You see, we're all
marooned out there in the bush. Emergency landing, when we tried to get
off. Wrecked our astrogation gear. Need your spare astro-pilot--"

"Back." He swung on us. "Back aboard!"

"What's wrong?" We were stunned, "She's your wife--"

"Aboard! Instanter!"

We obeyed his deadly voice.

"Help--" she whispered faintly behind us in the mud. "Survivors--need
astro-pilot-to plot our way home--"

The clanging lock cut off her voice.

Angrily we turned on Lance Llandark.

"Hold it!" he snapped. "I'm not crazy--the planet is. Come along to the
micro-probe. I'm probing a seed from the plant we found by Lilith's
bones. It puzzled me. So much of it was--"

In spite of the tension, he had to grope for a word to express meaning.

"Arbitrary! Those shapeless leaves, twisted stalk, that sterile seed.
The copper and arsenic in those needless links. Too many genes had no
function. No use at all!

"I'd just got the key, when that thing screamed. The copper and arsenic
atoms are not genetic instructions to the plant. They're a message to
us--words replicated a trillion times, and concealed in every cell of
the plant!"

"Words?" someone whispered blankly. "Words in the atoms?"

"Written in binary code." His scowl was bleakly triumphant. "That
weed's a mutant, you see. The real Lilith formed the first cell with
her micro-probe. She left it--I suppose in her own body--as a message
that no pseudo-Lilith could intercept."

Outside that something screamed again.

"Call each copper atom a dot," he whispered. "Call each arsenic a dash.
Taken in order along the chains of DNA, they do encode a message. The
computer's decoding it now."

He punched a button, and the printer whirred.

TO WHOEVER COMES.... GIVE NO AID TO ANYONE.... GET OFF THIS PLANET....
ITS LIFE IS PSEUDOMORPHIC.... DON'T LET IT LEAVE.... JUST TAKE MY
LOVE TO LANCE LLANDARK.... FROM LILITH, HIS WIFE.... AND GET OFF THIS
PLANET, FAST....

Outside, it uttered a frantic, bubbling screech.

We did get off the planet, and we expect to stay away.

END