Silence is Deadly by Jr. Lloyd Biggle Read Free Book Online

opposite direction, and there his hands found a crude stairway fashioned of board steps with dirt packed under them. He climbed them and eventually figured out the trap door at the top. It was double, consisting of a sliding lower door and an upper door that was hinged and opened upward. He stepped through into a dim stone cellar. The transmitter room, a hole dug under it, constituted a secret subbasement.
    He found another flight of stairs, this time solidly built of stone. He climbed them and opened the door at the top. He was in a dark hallway, but at the end of it, through a half-open door, he saw a glimmer of light.
    Kamm’s multiple moons provided just enough illumination for Darzek to glimpse a magnificent sitting room, exquisitely paneled and ornamented with a coffered ceiling. Some of the furnishings were familiar to him from projections he had studied—the mushroom-like stools, the elaborately carved chests of drawers, the half-circle sofa of which the other half was perpendicular and formed the back. He felt his way from object to object, scrutinizing them in the dim light. Some were strange, but he quickly identified one as a sort of loom and guessed that another functioned as a spinning wheel. The thick, marvelously resilient hand-woven carpet, if made available in quantity, would have ruined Earth’s oriental rug business.
    Darzek called out again and got no answer. He continued to fumble about. Finally he chanced onto what seemed to be a candle holder complete with candle, but he had nothing to light it with.
    Windows of the other rooms did not catch the moonlight, and they were, all of them, dark. Darzek seated himself on the half-circle sofa and wondered what he should do. Obviously the agents who operated from this base were out. There was little that he could accomplish before morning, so he decided to go to bed. He didn’t feel tired, but the sooner he got his time cycle co-ordinated with that of Kamm, the better.
    He fumbled his way up the narrow stairway to the upper story. The moonlight touched one bedroom sufficiently to delineate the bed—a monstrosity that looked somewhat like a giant mushroom with an oversized stem and a flattened top. Darzek thought it symbolic of the problem of Kamm, which thus far he had seen neither head nor tail of. He went to bed and slept restlessly.
    * * * *
    On his first morning on the world of Kamm, Darzek was awakened by an execution that took place immediately below his window. The shrieks of torment brought him to the window in a bound. He opened the sash, folded the shutter aside, and looked out.
    Dawn was only the faintest figment of the new day’s imagination, and all of the moons had set. Looking down on the dim street, which Kammians called a lane, Darzek saw a solitary cart passing, and each of its two wheels was uttering screams of anguish.
    Darzek closed shutter and sash and returned to his bed, and before his eyes closed another cart passed by. And another. By the time dawn touched his window, a seemingly endless procession of carts was passing, with one following on the tailgate of another, and Darzek had managed to deduce that this Synthesis headquarters was located on one of the principal lanes, which the Kammians called surlanes, leading to the market place, and that this same excruciating cacophony would take place every market day.
    He also had grasped the fact that deafness is synonymous with silence only for the deaf. This world of Kamm, this infamous Silent Planet, was in fact the most revoltingly noisy place he had ever experienced. No New York City traffic jam, even in the days when New York City had traffic, could rival a convoy of Kammian carts on the way to market. The Kammian squeaking wheel never got the grease, because no one heard the squeaking; and the incredibly tough, ridiculously named sponge wood seemed to last forever without lubrication. Every cart and wagon on the entire world of Kamm continuously uttered the pathetic shrieks of a