Free Killdozer! by Theodore Sturgeon

said, and when I did, I was sorry I’d made the effort. “You are sane,” and “You have been subjected to psychic forces that are sufficient to drive a normal man quite mad” might easily be totally different things. I’d been cocky enough to assume that they meant the same thing. Well, face it. Was I crazy? I didn’t feel crazy. Neither did Harry Voight. He thought he was going crazy, but he was sure he hadn’t got there yet. And whatwas “crazy,” anyway? It was normal, on this ship, to hate Xantippe so much that you felt sick and sweated cold when you thought of it. Paranoia—persecution. Did I feel persecuted? Only by the thought of our duty toward Xantippe, and the persecution was Xantippe, not the duty. Did I have delusions of grandeur? Of course not; and yet—hadn’t I blandly assumed that Voight had such delusions because he thought
he
was the one sane man aboard?
    What was the idea of that, anyway? Why had the board put one sane man aboard—if it had? Perhaps to be sure that one man reacted differently to the others at the field, so that he could command. Perhaps merely to make each man feel that he was sane, even though he wasn’t. My poor tired brain gave it up and I slept.
    We had two casualties before we reached the field. Harry Voight cut his throat in the washroom, and my gentle old buddy, Seabiscuit, crushed in the back of Hoch McCoy’s head. “He was an Insurrectionist spy,” he said mildly, time and again, while we were locking him up.
    After that we kept away from each other. I don’t think I spoke ten words to anyone outside of official business, from that day until we snapped into galactic stasis near Betelgeuse. I was sorry about Hoch, because he was a fine lad. But my sorrow was tempered by the memory of his visit to the captain. There had been a pretty fine chance of his doing that to me!
    In normal space once more, we maneuvered our agile little craft into an orbit about the huge sun and threw out our detectors. These wouldn’t tell us much when the time came, for their range wasn’t much more than the radius of the field.
    The mad planet swam up onto the plates and I stared at it as I buzzed for the skipper. Xantippe was a strangely dull planet, even this close to her star. She shone dead silver, like a moonlit corpse’s flesh. She was wrinkled and patched, and—perhaps it was an etheric disturbance—she seemed to pulsate slowly from pole to pole. She wasn’t quite round; more nearly an ovoid, with the smaller end toward Betelgeuse. She was between two and three times the size of Luna. Gazing at her, I thought of the thousands of men of my ownservice who had fallen prey to her, and of the fine ships of war that had plunged into the field and disappeared. Had they crashed? Had they been tucked into some weird warp of space? Were they captives of some strange and horrible race?
    Xantippe had defied every type of attack so far. She swallowed up atomic mines and torpedoes with no appreciable effect. She was apparently impervious to any rayed vibration known to man; but she was matter, and should be easy meat for an infragun—if you could get an infragun close enough. The gun’s twin streams of highly charged particles, positrons on one side, mesatrons on the other, would destroy anything that happened to be where they converged. But an infragun has an effective range of less than five hundred miles. Heretofore, any ship which carried the weapon that close to Xantippe carried also a dead or mindless crew.
    Captain Parks called the crew into the control room as soon as he arrived. No one spoke much; they didn’t need any more information after they had glanced at the viewplate which formed the forward wall of the chamber. Bort Brecht, the swarthy engineer, wanted to know how soon we’d engage the field.
    “In about two hours,” said the captain glibly. I got a two-handed grip on myself to keep from yapping. He was a cold-blooded liar—we’d hit it in half an hour or less,