Reading from The Good Stuff, edited by Gardner Dozois, 1999, SFBC, pages 19-34, first published in the late 1940s to early 1950s.
In about the year 2900, Trevor Jamieson is an earth scientist inserted in a ‘life-boat’ style space craft on an uninhabited planet in contested Rull space. The Rull are highly developed aliens who are at war with Man. On this surveying mission he came face to face with a Rull craft and they both disabled each other, marooning them both upon the table of a soaring mountain.
The Rull was 'the yeli, Meesh, the Iin of Ria, the high Aaish of Yeel'—basically a badass remorseless Fuhrer/scientist, who has come here to the planet the humans call Laertes to capture and experiment on a human, as these enemies appear to have been misjudged and need to be exterminated.
This was a good, taut, drama reminiscent of the western movie Duel in the Sun. It struck me early on that this classic novelette probably influenced the original Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk was marooned on a planet to duel with the Gorn captain.
Van Voigt predicts various types of drones and castes the Rull as genocidal eugenicists. Jamieson is part of a scientific network that has advocated human-alien diplomacy over war. Rull psychology and physiology are very well worked out. Both human and Rull combatants have been conditioned to commit suicide if captured so there has been little chance to experiment on one another.
Within the action and angst packed narrative the author has some profound moments. I will quote a portion of one below on the nature of life, time and space, “Up from darkness into the light, then down again into the blackness… In man the fateful pattern is impressed time and again into numberless ephemeral cells, but only the pattern endures.”
