Sword of the Seven Suns: Gardner F. Fox SF Collection (Illustrated). Gardner F. Fox

      When Kohonnes Screamed

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      The spaceship was changing shape all around him. The curving walls sloped inward at crazy angles, and the glassine windows bulged like giant bubbles. The floor was an unending series of little waves, and the ceiling melted to drop liquid pellets.

      "This is it!" exulted Grim Thorssen, slamming the levers of his control board, striving to slip his ship into the tug of the little planet looming through the starboard window. "Whatever kidnapped our trading vessels, whatever happened to the Fleet cruisers sent after them—here it is."

      His tawny hair, long uncut, looped over his hard blue eyes as he stared at the instruments in front of him. Even the hard steeliscite cones and rods were altering subtly, their shapes fading to reform in different, twisted patterns. Grim felt a quick stab of fear. Sudden pain changed his grin to a spasmodic grimace of agony.

      "Pirates I don't mind," he gasped, his body jerking suddenly as the force that bent his spaceship reached inside his body. "I—I'd take on Black Randolph as quick as down a cup of yassallel right now. But this thing—"

      His head whipped back as spasms tore his chest. Laboring, sweat standing out on his high forehead, he thought, 'Matter isn't matter here—not as I know it. A ceiling starts crying steel tears and a heatlite floor develops a permanent.'

      The force was tearing him apart with pain. It came like iron fingers in his belly and across his ribs. It bent him over so that his face went purple.

      No wonder the Trader Unions lost their big Caravans, packed to their rivets as they were with priceless radium and korse-210 from Tanit and the other planets of the suns Deneb and Achernar! The Council thought at first that it was Black Randolph looting, so the Unions Council ordered out the cruisers from the Interstellar Fleet to hunt him down. The cruisers, like the big Caravans, never came back.

      Then they sent for Grim Thorssen.

      The big Viking throwback was the spot trouble-tripper of the Fleet. He'd been decorated—and paid in credits—from Antares to Kruger-60 for a brash bravery that ran close to the margins of foolhardiness. But what looked like recklessness in some men was planned daring with the blond Nordic. He could think faster and shoot straighter than any other three men in the Fleet. He had the highest I.Q. that the books provided for, and black spots on his chest from friendly duels with his fellow officers using black disintegrater charges. He was smart and he was crazy and his brother Commanders loved him. They said to each other, "If anybody can do it, Grim will. He'll find out what grabs the Caravans and the cruisers."

      Well, now he knew. Tortured and strained, bent in a thousand positions in a matter of minutes, he was sobbing out the thought that he wished he hadn't. There wasn't anything you could do to a force that turned your ship into a fantastic nightmare and cut you in two with lancets of agony.

      The planet loomed in the forward window. A faint light hazed its outlines, as though a private sun of its own shone beyond it. Grim bit his lip until it bled, fighting the nausea and the throbbing in him. He had to land his ship. He had to find out what the force was, and what it wanted. He had to fight the tough luck that had hounded the Trader Unions ever since old Jasper Jones had retired. He had to—

      The spacer grated on a ledge of rocks, its keel cracking and folding back and ripping off on the underside of the hull. A gigantic thin needle rising from a boulder towered before him. Grim yanked back on the power-brakes, but it was no use.

      The blunt rock cliff loomed up. The nose of his vessel went ploughing into it with a force that snapped his leather safeties and skyrocketed him into the forward port....

      * * * * *

      There was a sun! Grim felt it beating hot into his closed eyes. Muscles ached and pain pounded through his big frame. His eyes came open to what was left of his ruined Corsair.

      There was only one half that was recognizable. That was the front section accordioned against the black cliffside. The back section was queerly warped and sculped into a caricature of a gaunt, metallic tree. Grim shook his head dazedly and lifted his eyes.

      The landscape was riotous, mad. Things that looked like trees and bushes lifted branches bent and swollen attached to trunks that looped in bulbous curves. Tiny animals with seven horns and eight legs loped past. A gigantic beast with the hairy head of a mastodon, but with three long trunks, stared at him over the top of a blue bush; trumpeted, and was gone. And high above, a great yellow orb blazed heat and light.

      Grim pulled himself up onto a gnarled rock. He squinted upward under a shading hand. He grunted, "Looks synthetic. Something about it—"

      Leather rasped on rock, above him. Grim whirled, right hand going for the orris-nut handles of his disintegrator.

      A girl stood on a ledge above him. Both hands were raised to the mass of rich black hair tumbling about her cape-hung shoulders. She was almost as tall as Grim, her long legs encased in tight golden skirts, her midriff bare below an ornate bolero that hugged her breasts. Seeing him, she brought her arms down fast, slant dark eyes widening.

      Grim chuckled. "If I thought you could understand me, I'd ask you what kind of a crazy place this is."

      The girl went back two steps, still staring at him. Her brow wrinkled. She said, "I do not understand you. Please—go away! If you are one of Althaya's men—"

      Grim stared in amazement. He had spoken in the space patois that was used by the Fleet and the Caravan crews from Mars on outward. But the girl had spoken to him in the pure, almost archaic mother tongue! He had to stop and recall the idioms and phraseology that men still used on Tellura. Grim, like most others of his breed, had never been on the Earth. They were born and bred among