Aliens from Analog

by Stanley Schmidt (ed)

  And with the shining silver thing in his hand he wandered over to the window and stood looking out into the night. It was dusk out and the rain had stopped.

  A high-stepping horse clop-clopped by and the bell of a bicycle jangled. Somebody across the street was strumming a guitar and singing. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  The scent of spring was soft and wet in the moist air. Peace and dusk.

  Distant rolling thunder.

  God damn it, he thought, if only there was a bit of lightning.

  He missed the lightning.

  The ship arced out of a golden sky and landed with a whoop and a wallop that cut down a mile of lush vegetation. Another half mile of growths turned black and drooped to ashes under the final flicker of the tail rocket blasts. That arrival was spectacular, full of verve, and worthy of four columns in any man’s paper. But the nearest sheet was distant by a goodly slice of a lifetime, and there was none to record what this far comer of the cosmos regarded as the pettiest of events. So the ship squatted tired and still at the foremost end of the ashy blast-track and the sky glowed down and the green world brooded solemnly all around.

  Within the transpex control dome, Steve Ander sat and thought things over. It was his habit to think things over carefully. Astronauts were not the impulsive daredevils so dear to the stereopticon-loving public. They couldn’t afford to be. The hazards of the profession required an infinite capacity for cautious, contemplative thought. Five minutes consideration had prevented many a collapsed lung, many a leaky heart, many a fractured frame. Steve valued his skeleton. He wasn’t conceited about it and he’d no reason to believe it in any way superior to anyone else’s skeleton. But he’d had it a long time, found it quite satisfactory, and had an intense desire to keep it—intact.

  Therefore, while the tail tubes cooled off with their usual creaking contractions, he sat in the control seat, stared through the dome with eyes made unseeing by deep preoccupation, and performed a few thinks.

  Firstly, he’d made a rough estimate of this world during his hectic approach. As nearly as he could judge, it was ten times the size of Terra. But his weight didn’t seem abnormal. Of course, one’s notions of weight tended to be somewhat wild when for some weeks one’s own weight has shot far up or far down in between periods of weightlessness. The most reasonable estimate had to be based on muscular reaction. If you felt as sluggish as a Saturnian sloth, your weight was way up. If you felt as powerful as Angus McKittrick’s bull, your weight was down.

  Normal weight meant Terrestrial mass despite this planet’s tenfold volume. That meant light plasma. And that meant lack of heavy elements. No thorium. No nickel. No nickel-thorium alloy. Ergo, no getting back. The Kingston-Kane atomic motors demanded fuel in the form of ten-gauge nickel-thorium alloy wire fed directly into the vaporizers. Denatured plutonium would do, but it didn’t occur in natural form, and it had to be made. He had three yards nine and a quarter inches of nickel-thorium left on the feed-spool. Not enough. He was here for keeps.

  A wonderful thing, logic. You could start from the simple premise that when you were seated your behind was no flatter than usual, and work your way to the inevitable conclusion that you were a wanderer no more. You’d become a native. Destiny had you tagged as suitable for the status of oldest inhabitant.

  Steve pulled an ugly face and said, “Dam!”

  The face didn’t have to be pulled far. Nature had given said pan a good start. That is to say, it wasn’t handsome. It was a long, lean, nutbrown face with pronounced jaw muscles, prominent cheekbones, and a thin, hooked nose. This, with his dark eyes and black hair, gave him a hawklike appearance. Friends talked to him about tepees and tomahawks whenever they wanted him to feel at home.

  Well, he wasn’t going to feel at home any more; not unless this brooding jungle held intelligent life dopey enough to swap ten-gauge nickel-thorium wire for a pair of old boots. Or unless some dopey search party was intelligent enough to pick this cosmic dust mote out of a cloud of motes, and took him back. He estimated this as no less than a million-to-one chance. Like spitting at the Empire State hoping to hit a cent-sized mark on one of its walls.

  Reaching for his everflo stylus and the ship’s log, he opened the log, looked absently at some of the entries.

  “Eighteenth day: The spatial convulsion has now flung me past rotalrange of Rigel. Am being tossed into uncharted regions.

  “Twenty-fourth day: Arm of convulsive now tails back seven parsecs. Robot recorder now out of gear. Angle of throw changed seven times today.

  “Twenty-ninth day: Now beyond arm of the convulsive sweep and regaining control. Speed far beyond range of the astrometer. Applying braking rockets cautiously. Fuel reserve: fourteen hundred yards.

  “Thirty-seventh day: Making for planetary system now within reach.”

  He scowled, his jaw muscles lumped, and he wrote slowly and legibly, “Thirty- ninth day: Landed on planet unknown, primary unknown, galactic area standard reference and sector numbers unknown. No cosmic formations were recognizable when observed shortly before landing. Angles of offshoot and speed of transit not recorded, and impossible to estimate. Condition of ship: workable. Fuel reserve: three and one quarter yards.”

  Closing the log, he scowled again, rammed the stylus into its desk-grip, and muttered, “Now to check on the outside air and then see how the best girl’s doing.”

  The Radson register had three simple dials. The first recorded outside pressure at thirteen point seven pounds, a reading he observed with much satisfaction. The second said that oxygen content was high. The third had a bi-colored dial, half white, half red, and its needle stood in the middle of the white.

  “Breathable,” he grunted, clipping down the register’s lid. Crossing the tiny control room, he slid aside a metal panel, looked into the padded compartment behind. “Coming out, Beauteous?” he asked.

  “Steve loves Laura?” inquired a plaintive voice.

  “You bet he does!” he responded with becoming passion. He shoved an arm into the compartment, brought out a large, gaudily colored macaw. “Does Laura love Steve?”

  “Hey-hey!” cackled Laura harshly. Climbing up his arm, the bird perched on his shoulder. He could feel the grip of its powerful claws. It regarded him with a beady and brilliant eye, then rubbed its crimson head against his left ear. “Hey-hey! Time flies!”

  “Don’t mention it,” he reproved. “There’s plenty to remind me of the fact without you chipping in.”

  Reaching up, he scratched her poll while she stretched and bowed with absurd delight. He was fond of Laura. She was more than a pet. She was a bona fide member of the crew, issued with her own rations and drawing her own pay. Every probe ship had a crew of two: one man, one macaw. When he’d first heard of it, the practice had seemed crazy—but when he got the reasons, it made sense.

  “Lonely men, probing beyond the edge of the charts, get queer psychological troubles. They need an anchor to Earth. A macaw provides the necessary companionship—and more! It’s the space-hardiest bird we’ve got, its weight is negligible, it can talk and amuse, it can fend for itself when necessary. On land, it will often sense dangers before you do. Any strange fruit or food it may eat is safe for you to eat. Many a man’s life has been saved by his macaw. Look after yours, my boy, and it’ll look after you!”

  Yes, they looked after each other, Terrestrials both. It was almost a symbiosis of the space way s. Before the era of astronavigation nobody had thought of such an arrangement, though it had been done before. Miners and their canaries.

  Moving over to the miniature air lock, he didn’t bother to operate the pump. It wasn’t necessary with so small a difference between internal and external pressures. Opening both doors, he let a little of his higher-pressured air sigh out, stood on the rim of the lock, jumped down. Laura fluttered from his shoulder as he leaped, followed him with a flurry of wings, got her talons into his jacket as he staggered upright.

  The pair went around the sh
ip, silently surveying its condition. Front braking nozzles O.K., rear steering flares O.K., tail propulsion tubes O.K. All were badly scored but still usable. The skin of the vessel likewise was scored but intact. Three months supply of food and maybe a thousand yards of wire could get her home, theoretically. But only theoretically. Steve had no delusions about the matter. The odds were still against him even if given the means to move. How do you navigate from you-don’t-know- where to you-don’t-know-where? Answer: you stroke a rabbit’s foot and probably arrive you-don’t-know-where-else.

  “Well,” he said, rounding the tail, “it’s something in which to live. It’ll save us building a shanty. Way back on Terra they want fifty thousand smackers for an allmetal, streamlined bungalow, so I guess we’re mighty lucky. I’ll make a garden here, and a rockery there, and build a swimming pool out back. You can wear a pretty frock and do all the cooking.”

  “Yawk!” said Laura derisively.

  Turning, he had a look at the nearest vegetation. It was of all heights, shapes and sizes, of all shades of green with a few tending toward blueness. There was something peculiar about the stuff but he was unable to decide where the strangeness lay. It wasn’t that the growths were alien and unfamiliar—one expected that on every new world—but an underlying something which they shared in common. They had a vague, shadowy air of being not quite right in some basic respect impossible to define.

  A plant grew right at his feet. It was green in color, a foot high, and monocoty- ledonous. Looked at as a thing in itself, there was nothing wrong with it. Near to it flourished a bush of darker hue, a yard high, with green, firlike needles in lieu of leaves, and pale, waxy berries scattered over it. That, too, was innocent enough when studied apart from its neighbors. Beside it grew a similar plant, differing only in that its needles were longer and its berries a bright pink. Beyond these towered a cactuslike object dragged out of somebody’s drunken dreams, and beside it stood an umbrella- frame which had taken root and produced little purple pods. Individually, they were acceptable. Collectively, they made the discerning mind search anxiously for it knew not what.

  That eerie feature had Steve stumped. Whatever it was, he couldn’t nail it down. There was something stranger than the mere strangeness of new forms of plant life, and that was all. He dismissed the problem with a shrug. Time enough to trouble about such matters after he’d dealt with others more urgent such as, for example, the location and purity of the nearest water supply.

  A mile away lay a lake of some liquid that might be water. He’d seen it glittering in the sunlight as he’d made his descent, and he’d tried to land fairly near to it. If it wasn’t water, well, it’d be just his tough luck and he’d have to look some place else. At worst, the tiny fuel reserve would be enough to permit one circumnavigation of the planet before the ship became pinned down forever. Water he must have if he wasn’t going to end up imitating the mummy of Rameses the Second.

  Reaching high, he grasped the rim of the port, dexterously muscled himself upward and through it. For a minute he moved around inside the ship, then reappeared with a four-gallon freezocan which he tossed to the ground. Then he dug out his popgun, a belt of explosive shells, and let down the folding ladder from lock to surface. He’d need that ladder. He could muscle himself up through a hole seven feet high, but not with fifty pounds of can and water.

  Finally, he locked both the inner and outer air lock doors, skipped down the ladder, picked up the can. From the way he’d made his landing the lake should be directly bow-on relative to the vessel, and somewhere the other side of those distant trees. Laura took a fresh grip on his shoulder as he started off. The can swung from his left hand. His right hand rested warily on the gun. He was perpendicular on this world instead of horizontal on another because, on two occasions, his hand had been ready on the gun, and because it was the most nervous hand he possessed.

  The going was rough. It wasn’t so much that the terrain was craggy as the fact that impeding growths got in his way. At one moment he was stepping over an ankle-high shrub, the next he was facing a burly plant struggling to become a tree. Behind the plant would be a creeper, then a natural zareba of thorns, a fuzz of fine moss, followed by a giant fern. Progress consisted of stepping over one item, ducking beneath a second, going around a third, and crawling under a fourth.

  It occurred to him, belatedly, that if he’d planted the ship tail-first to the lake instead of bow-on, or if he’d let the braking rockets blow after he’d touched down, he’d have saved himself much twisting and dodging. All this obstructing stuff would have been reduced to ashes for at least half the distance to the lake—together with any venomous life it might conceal.

  That last thought rang like an alarm bell within his mind just as he doubled up to pass a low-swung creeper. On Venus were creepers that coiled and constricted, swiftly, viciously. Macaws played merry hell if taken within fifty yards of them. It was a comfort to know that, this time, Laura was riding his shoulder unperturbed—but he kept the hand on the gun.

  The elusive peculiarity of the planet’s vegetation bothered him all the more as he progressed through it. His inability to discover and name this unnamable queerness nagged at him as he went on. A frown of self-disgust was on his lean face when he dragged himself free of a clinging bush and sat on a rock in a tiny clearing.

  Dumping the can at his feet, he glowered at it and promptly caught a glimpse of something bright and shining a few feet beyond the can. He raised his gaze. It was then he saw the beetle.

  The creature was the biggest of its kind ever seen by human eyes. There were other things bigger, of course, but not of this type. Crabs, for instance. But this was no crab. The beetle ambling purposefully across the clearing was large enough to give any crab a severe inferiority complex, but it was a genuine, twenty-four-karat beetle. And a beautiful one. Like a scarab.

  Except that he clung to the notion that little bugs were vicious and big ones companionable, Steve had no phobia about insects. The amiability of large ones was a theory inherited from schoolkid days when he’d been the doting owner of a three-inch stag-beetle afflicted with the name of Edgar.

  So he knelt beside the creeping giant, placed his hand palm upward in its path. It investigated the hand with waving feelers, climbed onto his palm, paused there ruminatively. It shone with a sheen of brilliant metallic blue and it weighed about three pounds. He jogged it on his hand to get its weight, then put it down, let it wander on. Laura watched it go with a sharp but incurious eye.

  “Scarabaeus Anderii.” Steve said with glum satisfaction. “I pin my name on him—but nobody’ll ever know it!”

  “Dinna fash y’rsel’!” shouted Laura in a hoarse voice imported straight from Aberdeen. “Dinna fash! Stopchunnerin’, wumman! Y’gie me a pain ahintma sporran! Dinna—”

  “Shut up!” Steve jerked his shoulder, momentarily unbalancing the bird. “Why d’you pick up that barbaric dialect quicker than anything else, eh?”

  “McGillicuddy,” shrieked Laura with ear-splitting relish. “McGilli-Gilli-Gilli- cuddy! The great black—!” It ended with a word that pushed Steve’s eyebrows into his hair and surprised even the bird itself. Filming its eyes with amazement, it tightened its claw-hold on his shoulder, opened the eyes, emitted a couple of raucous clucks, and joyfully repeated, “The great black—”

  It didn’t get the chance to complete the new and lovely word. A violent jerk of the shoulder unseated it in the nick of time and it fluttered to the ground, squawking protestingly. Scarabaeus Anderii lumbered out from behind a bush, his blue armor glistening as if freshly polished, and stared reprovingly at Laura.

  Then something fifty years away released a snort like the trump of doom and took one step that shook the earth. Scarabaeus Anderii took refuge under a projecting root. Laura made an agitated swoop for Steve’s shoulder and clung there desperately. Steve’s gun was out and pointing northward before the bird had found its perch. Another step. The ground quivered.

  Silence
for awhile. Steve continued to stand like a statue. Then came a monstrous whistle more forceful than that of a locomotive blowing off steam. Something squat and wide and of tremendous length charged headlong through the half-concealing vegetation while the earth trembled beneath its weight.

  Its mad onrush carried it blindly twenty yards to Steve’s right, the gun swinging to cover its course, but not firing. Steve caught an extended glimpse of a slate-gray bulk with a serrated ridge on its back which, despite the thing’s pace, took long to pass. It seemed several times the length of a fire ladder.

  Bushes were flung roots topmost and small trees whipped aside as the creature pounded grimly onward in a straight line which carried it far past the ship and into the dim distance. It left behind a tattered swathe wide enough for a first-class road. Then the reverberations of its mighty tonnage died out, and it was gone.

  Steve used his left hand to pull out a handkerchief and wipe the back of his neck. He kept the gun in his right hand. The explosive shells in that gun were somewhat wicked; any one of them could deprive a rhinoceros of a hunk of meat weighing two hundred pounds. If a man caught one, he just strewed himself over the landscape. By the looks of that slate-colored galloper, it would need half a dozen shells to feel incommoded. A seventy-five-millimeter bazooka would be more effective for kicking it in the back teeth, but probe ship boys don’t tote around such artillery. Steve finished the mopping, put the handkerchief back, picked up the can.

  Laura said pensively, “I want my mother.”

  He scowled, made no reply, set out toward the lake. Her feathers still ruffled, Laura rode his shoulder and lapsed into surly silence.

  The stuff in the lake was water, cold, faintly green and a little bitter to the taste. Coffee would camouflage the flavor. If anything, it might improve the coffee since he liked his java bitter, but the stuff would have to be tested before absorbing it in any quantity. Some poisons were accumulative. It wouldn’t do to guzzle gavly while building up a death-dealing reserve of lead, for instance. Filling the freezocan, he lugged it to the ship in hundred-yard stages. The swathe helped; it made an easier path to within short distance of the ship’s tail. He was perspiring freely by the time he reached the base of the ladder.