The War Against the Rull (1959)

The War Against the Rull is a science fiction novel by American writer A. E. van Vogt, first published in 1959 by Simon & Schuster. The novel is a fixup made from six (after 1999, seven) short stories and two newly-written connecting chapters.

Contents

The novel consists mainly of six short stories, all originally published in Astounding Science Fiction:

Chapters 1-4: "Co-Operate - Or Else!" (April 1942)

Chapter 5: new material, bridging the gap between the first and second stories

Chapters 6-7: "Repetition" (also known as "The Gryb": April 1940)

Chapters 8-13: "The Second Solution" (October 1942)

Chapters 14-16: "The Green Forest" (June 1949)

Chapters 17-19: "The Sound" (February 1950)

Chapter 20: new material, bridging the gap between the fifth and sixth stories

Chapters 21-25: "The Rull" (May 1948)

A seventh story, "The First Rull" (first published in the 1978 collection Pendulum), was included as a 26th chapter in the 1999 reprint and all subsequent editions.

Plot

1-4: Dr. Trevor Jamieson is stranded on the deadly jungle planet Eristan II with an ezwal, a 3-ton, six-legged, telepathic saurian-like creature that dislikes humans. Having bailed out of a crashing spaceship, Jamieson and the hostile and contemptuous ezwal - whose goal is to drive human colonists off his homeworld of Carson's Planet - must cross hundreds of miles of jungle to make their way to the ship's wreckage. The two need each other to survive, but the ezwal cannot allow Jamieson to leave Eristan II alive, as he is the only human to knows that ezwals are sapient. Their journey is interrupted by the appearance of a warship belonging to the Rull, worm-like creatures who are implacably hostile to all intelligent life. A Rull landing party capture the ezwal, who gives up on his plan of enlisting them against humans after meeting them face to face. An Earth battleship appears and destroys the Rull cruiser; after the Rull landing party is killed by a semi-intelligent carnivorous plant, Jamieson allows the ezwal to join him in their shuttle and flies them to safety.

5: Jamieson returns the ezwal to Carson's Planet, vital as a base to the human war effort. As they part, the ezwal rejects Jamieson's request that the ezwals develop a mechanical civilization capable of fending off the Rull. Jamieson finds a similar intransigence in the human settlers, all of whom have had family members killed by ezwals, and who are angered by his suggestion that the planet be returned to its native species. One young woman tells him that Carson's Planet's habitable moon could be used as a base instead, and offers to take him to see it.

6-7: On Carson's Satellite, Barbara Whitman instead attempts to kill Jamieson, leaving them stranded in hostile wilderness. During the hike back to safety, Jamieson uses his wilderness-survival skills to obtain food for them and save them from a blood-sucking gryb. Several days later, his battleship finds and rescues them.

8-13: Jamieson had ordered a female ezwal and her cub to be taken to Earth. Damaged in battle, the ship carrying the ezwals crashes in Alaska; a crewman kills the mother ezwal, who kills him in turn before dying. The cub manages to escape and is pursued over the landscape by men who believe he is merely an animal. Jamieson arrives as the men are closing in and manages to convince the young ezwal that he needs to cooperate with humans in order to make them understand that ezwals are intelligent beings.

14-16: On Earth, Jamieson heads a project to develop a bioweapon against the Rull from lifeforms native to the jungles of the planet Mira 23. Kidnaped by Rull agents, he is taken to Mira and left in the jungle as prey for the planet's lethal fauna. The Rull plan is to frame the project's local leader for his murder, but their agents are instead killed by a native creature, and Jamieson is rescued.

17-19: In Solar City on Earth, a giant spaceship is being built in a highly-secure shipyard. The city's children sometimes spend the night exploring the shipyard, hoping to find the source of a mysterious sound. Jamieson's nine-year-old son Diddy leaves home for his first all-night quest, but is waylaid by Rull spies and saboteurs, who use him to gain access to sections of the shipyard protected from Rulls by the biological weapons obtained from Mira 23. With the aid of counterintelligence agents - who are communicating with him telepathically via the ezwal cub - Diddy manages to lure the Rulls into a building in which they cannot use their organic weapons, and kills them with a gun provided to him.

20: With the ezwal cub accompanying him, Jamieson goes to the planet Ploia to capture one of the natives. Made up entirely of electromagnetic fields, the Ploian causes electrical systems to fail, so Jamieson must use purely mechanical devices to control his ship. Through the ezwal's telepathic ability, he makes contact with the Ploian, which agrees to help him in return for a promise to return it home.

21-25: Jamieson travels directly from Ploia to Laertes III, to make a preliminary survey of the planet as a base of operations against the Rull. A Rull survey craft disables his lifeboat, but is itself shot down. Jamieson engages the Rull pilot in a battle of wits; after ten days, he manages to condition the Rull with a subconscious belief that the war is futile. The Rull manages to capture Jamieson, but the Ploian frees him, and they escape together in a Rull lifeboat. The Rull Jamieson had subverted turns out to have been a Prime Leader of his species and does, indeed, move to de-escalate the conflict.

26: At an Earth university before the outbreak of the war, a Rull infiltrator works to retrieve a piece of lost Rull technology while also sabotaging experiments, murdering students, and generally sowing chaos and confusion, before departing the planet with a low opinion of humanity in general and college life in particular.