Arcturus Landing

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Problems however, were still bound to occur. And a first-class one occurred when out of the pale whitish green of the Venusian sky there came unexpectedly, not a planetary flyer nor a squareshaped freighter, but two hundred and twenty feet of torpedo-shaped space yacht, with the incongruous name of Betsy, which requested permission to land.

  The traffic officer cursed; and pounded the HOLD button.

  On the freshly renamed Betsy, Mal snapped on the horizontal gyros, and the Betsy slid to a smooth stop in mid-air, as the delicate machining of her precision controls responded to the call of the gyros.

  “What’s up?” asked Dirk. They were all gathered in the control room.

  “I don’t know yet—” said Mal.

  The communication screen in front of them lit up, cutting short his words. Framed on it was the traffic officer, a thin-faced, tired-looking individual in official gray.

  “Identification,” he growled.

  “Space yacht Betsy, owner Wilhelm van Tromp, out of New Bermuda.”

  The traffic officer grunted. If he was impressed by the Betsy’s obvious expensiveness and the millionaire’s resort playground from which she ostensibly hailed, he gave no sign of it.

  “Hold on gyros,” he said. “I’ll see if there’s any room for you.” And the screen on the ship went blank.

  They waited in bored idleness for an hour and a half. Finally, the screen flashed on again and the traffic officer directed them down into a little space of churned-up mud near the north edge of the plateau. Mal, who was no experienced pilot, sweated blood in the process of getting them down without a collision with the other craft surrounding the parking space. But the Betsy was equipped almost to think for herself; and they finally settled into the muck without even a scratch on her gleaming hull.

  “Well, here we are,” said Margie somewhat inadequately. They were clustered around the screen which showed the scene outside their airlock. As if by common consent, they all began to move toward the airlock.

  “Wait a minute,” said Mal, halting suddenly in the doorway. “We can’t all go out.”

  “Why not?” demanded Dirk over his shoulder. His long legs had already carried him half the way down the corridor toward the airlock. Now at Mal’s words, he reluctantly hesitated. Peep and Margie also halted and looked back at him.

  “Because somebody has to stay with the ship,” said Mal.

  “That’s fine,” said Dirk. “You stay.” He looked at Peep and Margie for approval, but failed to find it.

  There was a long, hesitant pause. As with most people unused to space travel, the three humans were definitely land hungry, even after the short three-day period which had comprised the total time of their trip from Earth. Peep, and it was a tribute to his philosophy, was the first to break the silence.

  “Young friends,” he said, “why don’t we draw lots?” Mal looked at him rather ruefully.

  “You know, Peep,” he said slowly, “I just happened to think of it. You won’t be able to go out, anyway. This plateau is nothing but mud on top. With the weight you’ve got for your size, you’d sink out of sight and we’d never find you.”

  “I? Sink?” Puffing with a touch of anger, he trotted down the corridor, activated the mechanism that operated both airlock doors, walked down to the foot of the landing ladder and touched one small foot gingerly to the surface of the ground—in the manner of a swimmer testing the temperature of the water he is about to dive into. The foot went out of sight.

  “Skevamp!” snorted Peep, drawing back. The others had followed him to the airlock.

  “Tough luck, Peep,” said Mal consolingly. “Kar e visk!” muttered Peep in a huff. Without a further word, he turned around and marched back into the ship, fuming to himself. Margie looked back over her shoulder at the corridor up which he had disappeared.

  “You two go ahead,” she said. “I think I’ll stay here with Peep.”

  “He’ll be all right,” said Mal.

  “Well, I think I’ll stay, anyway,” said Margie. And before any further protests could be voiced, she turned on one foot and disappeared back into the interior herself.

  Mal and Dirk looked at each other, shrugged and started out. The mud, which had parted like so much thick soup under Peep’s concentrated mass, merely squished and sucked around their insteps.

  “Fah!” said Dirk fastidiously, standing on one leg like an offended crane and trying to shake the ball of mud off his right boot.

  “Might as well get used to it,” said Mal. He expanded on the subject. “You eat, breathe, and roll in it here—according to the news services.” Dirk grunted ungraciously. He was not one of those people to whom dirt provided a natural environment.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A VISIT TO the New Dorado black market, however, resulted in disappointment. The local dealer in transportation units—a fat, piratical-looking gentleman by the name of Bobby whose voice squeaked and grated on their ears like a rusty hacksaw blade—informed them that there was no market for anything the size of the Betsy—but if they needed transportation and had the money to buy—

  They had not. Twenty discouraging minutes later, after plowing back through the muck and losing their way twice, Mal and Dirk emerged once more from between two ancient atmosphere flyers onto the little open space that surrounded the Betsy. This last thirty yards or so should have been clear going. Instead, they found the way blocked by a considerable crowd, from the center of which the angry thunderings of a not unfamiliar voice reached their ears in tones of violent denunciation.

  “What—?” ejaculated Dirk, bewildered.

  “Why, there’s Margie,” said Mal. And, indeed, just at that moment, Margie spotted them and came squeezing her way through the press of bodies.

  “What is it?” asked Mal, as soon as she reached them.

  “It’s Peep!” said Margie grimly. “Listen!” From the center of the crowd, and from out of sight, came Peep’s voice.

  “Brrr e yssk ta min pypp—arcomanyavak! Nark! Ta pkk yar! Spludinvesk! Burrr yi yi TTTTTT!”

  “Man, can he cuss!” said one bewhiskered miner. And this appeared to capsulize the opinion of all.

  “What’ll we do?” Margie queried. “He’s got himself stuck in the mud!”

  “How in God’s name—?” began Mal.

  “Oh, he started brooding right after you left,” answered Margie. “There was an old hatch cover with a handle on it. He got the idea that if he stood on it, he could hitch himself along, somehow. I tried to talk him out of it, but he just tucked the hatch cover under one arm and went off muttering to himself.”

  “Well, what went wrong?” asked Mal.

  “He—he put the hatch cover down,” said Margie, “on the mud. And he stepped on it. It held him. But when he tried to hitch himself forward, he slipped. There was a sort of splash—”

  “Then what?” demanded Mal impatiently. “Well, after the mud cleared out of the air, there was Peep, still holding on to the hatch cover by the handle, with just his nose out.”

  “But I thought he was right beside the airlock,” protested Dirk. “How’d he get way over there?”

  “That’s the worst part of it,” said Margie. “I tried to get him to keep quiet until I could get a rope to him. But he wouldn’t listen. He kept going kkk! And spssst! And things like that. And then he started swimming through the mud—in the wrong direction!”

  Mal glanced at the airlock of the Betsy, a good thirty feet away.

  “All that way?” he said incredulously. “He couldn’t have.”

  “It was awful!” said Margie. “He wouldn’t let go of the hatch cover and he wouldn’t stop swimming until he wore himself out. And now look at him.”

  Mal grunted and shouldered his way through the crowd. In the small area at its center, two eyes, a muddy nose and muddy whiskers stiff with indignation stared up at him. The rest of Peep, with the exception of his hands, was out of sight.

  “Cha e rak!” said Peep.

  “What’
re you doing down there?” demanded Mal angrily. “You ought to have more sense.”

  “Buk ul chagoukay R!” responded Peep furiously. The mud surged and boiled about him; and the hatch cover in the grasp of his muddy fingers bent back and forth like a piece of tinfoil.

  “What a stupid thing to do,” said Dirk, who had just shouldered his way through the crowd and now stood by Mal.

  The effect of this final criticism was too much. Peep went speechless with rage.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Margie from behind the two men. Mal scratched his head.

  “I got a winch,” spoke up an unexpected voice in the crowd. “If we bored a hole in that plate he’s holding and got the hook end of a chain through it, maybe we could drag him out.”

  Peep said something more in Atakit, which clearly conveyed the idea that no blankety-blank winch was going to haul him out of anything. He would walk. The mud went into a tidal wave around him and he progressed a good six inches further away from the Betsy.

  Mal turned and looked at the miner who had offered the use of his winch. He was a wiry little man of indeterminate age, with green, competent-looking eyes set wide apart in a leathery face.

  “Thanks,” said Mal.

  “Back in a minute,” promised the little man. He ducked away into the crowd and was back shortly with the end of a chain and a hook in one hand, and towing a winch with its power pack holding it some two meters aloft in the heavy Venusian atmosphere like some clumsy kite.

  “Stand back!” ordered the little man.

  Several other men in the crowd seemed to take his cue, pushing back the clustering observers until a sort of channel through the packed bodies was effected up to the entrance of the Betsy. Fastening the hook into the hatch cover through a hole which he made with a belt drill, the little man backed away, letting out chain as he did so, until he reached the airlock.

  “I’m going to anchor her inside,” he shouted to Mal, and disappeared inside the Betsy. There was a moment’s wait, then a clinking noise came from within the yacht and the chain suddenly tightened.

  “Ready out there?” came the little man’s voice from the interior of Betsy.

  “Ready!” called back Mal, looking anxiously down at Peep.

  The clinking noise came again, this time in a steady rhythm; and the chain began to shorten. Peep rose slowly and impressively from the mire on a long slant back toward the space yacht, like a submarine emerging from the ocean depths. Completely coated and encrusted, he rose like a ball of black dirt with only paws, nose and eyes and whiskers visible; but with those eyes and whiskers expressing furious disdain of the mechanical contrivance that was rescuing him. Amid cheers he rose back toward the Betsy and disappeared through the airlock. Mal, Margie and Dirk bolted in behind him and closed the lock.

  Peep, finding solid metal under his feet again, slammed down the hatch cover and stalked off in the direction of the showers.

  Mal turned toward the little man. “I don’t know how to thank you,” he said. “If there was some way we could pay—”

  “Don’t bother,” said the little man. From somewhere inside his tunic he had produced a very heavy and efficient-looking blaster; and he held this pointed impartially at the three of them. “Just get this can up in the air and follow the route I give you.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  IF THE REST of New Dorado was at all surprised to see the Betsy take off without letting the little miner off first, there was no evidence of it. The traffic officer in the tower merely yawned when Mal requested clearance and waved them out. The Betsy rose and left the plateau, heading south and west out over the green tangle of the Venusian lowlands two thousand feet below.

  They stayed on this course until the plateau dropped below the horizon behind them. Then, after some more or less aimless zigging and zagging about, they finally settled down into the jungle, literally diving from sight, beneath the sea of rampant greenery.

  The vegetation here in the lowlands was generally of the giant fern type. Here and there, huge squat trees with spongy trunks, half buried by creepers and vines, interspersed themselves with the overgrown ferns. None of these, however, offered any real barrier to the eight hundred tons of Venus-weight Betsy and her yacht-weight hull. She went through them on ordinary drive and they bent, swayed apart and closed behind as she passed, while quick sap bubbled forth from the crushed and broken sections of limb and vine, and the damage began to heal visibly before the yacht had even landed.

  Once down beneath the false sky of overarching green, the Betsy came at last to rest, sinking several feet deep into the spongy, moss-covered ground. She had slid into a small area where the ground was unaccountably clear of smaller vegetation, even of the white fungoid forms which could almost live without that sunlight which the larger plant forms screen off for themselves, and she lay on a moss like an emerald carpet.

  “Open the lock, grab the keys and come on,” said the little miner, gesturing with his weapon. Herded by him, Mal, Margie, and Dirk were forced to move ahead, out of the control room, down the main corridor and out through the lock on to the moss. It gave like sponge rubber under their feet so that walking on it was a little like walking on an unending stretch of innerspring mattress.

  “Your Alien friend won’t follow us on this,” said the little man with satisfaction. “Straight ahead now, and no tricks—” He broke off suddenly, eying Dirk with suspicion. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “It’s not hot!” replied Dirk bewilderedly. And, in fact, the air was cool on their faces—even cooler than the plateau had been.

  The little man chuckled.

  “Don’t go fifty yards off from here or you’ll change your mind about that,” he said. “This is a funnel area—something the meteorology boys are still talking about back on Earth. We’ve got a shaft of cool air coming down on us here almost directly from the sub-stratosphere. And don’t ask me how, because I don’t know. Every so often you run into something like this, down in the weeds here.” He gestured with his gun. “Straight ahead, now.”

  They started walking. For twenty yards they went straight ahead over the yielding moss toward one of the huge, spongy-barked trees. They reached its enormous base and halted, looking back at the little miner.

  He, in his turn, halted and looked at the tree.

  “Sorrel?” he said.

  “Right the first time, Jim,” answered the tree.

  There was a sudden, almost soundless whirring, a momentary vibration that set the teeth of the three younger people on edge; and the tree trunk between the ground and about ten feet up faded slowly into transparency, revealing a large circular room conforming to the dimensions of the tree trunk and apparently supporting most of the living tree above it while cutting it off completely from its roots. A tall, thin man in his middle forties with a scarred but cheerful face looked out at them from his seat at a bank of controls.

  “Will you walk into my parlor?” he said with a grin.

  Befuddled, Margie, Dirk and Mal stepped gingerly forward and found themselves in the room. The man called Sorrel did complicated things with the bank of controls, and blank walls reformed around them.

  Margie cast an apprehensive glance upward toward the ceiling, where by rights, the tonnage of the Venusian tree should be pressing down on them. Sorrel noticed her anxiety and grinned even wider.

  “Relax,” he said. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity—this whole area including the tree is illusion. If you knew anything about funnel spots, you’d realize they’re always bare of vegetation because of the temperature, which is too low for most of the imported Alien weeds.”

  “Oh,” said Margie.

  “But now that you’re here,” went on Sorrel, waving them to seats near his console of dials and switches, “sit down and chat.” As they seated themselves, he turned his attention to the little miner. “What’s the story, Jim?”

  “I think this is what we’re looking for,” the latter said; and he rehearsed the account
of Peep’s rescue from the mud.

  “Fair enough,” said Sorrel, when the other was done. “Then they’re the ones. There couldn’t be two groups like that.”

  “Look,” said Mal, breaking into the conversation. “What’s going on here? What’s the idea of dragging us off here? And just who are you, and your friend here, anyway? We’re Earth citizens and—”

  Sorrel laughed. “The way I hear it,” he said, “you’re all a prize package for anyone’s picking up. Do you know what the Company’s willing to pay for you—unofficially, of course?”

  “What do you mean?” challenged Mal.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” smiled Sorrel. “We’re not going to turn you over to the Company, hopper. We want you for ourselves. Guess why?”

  Mal looked at him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said in level tones.

  “Well, I’ll brief you, hopper,” said Sorrel, leaning back and looking at him quizzically. “One Malcolm K. Fletcher—that’s you—comes up with a special drive for interstellar ships. What happens? He disappears, the Worlds Council President disappears—”

  “The President!” ejaculated Mal.

  “You didn’t know that?” said Sorrel, curiously regarding him. “Worlds President Waring disappeared three days ago Earth time—just before you three pulled your own act. He vanishes. So do you, and the heir apparent to the Company’s biggest block of stock, and his personal secretary, and—to top it all—an Alien. Now do you know what I’m talking about, hopper?”

  Mal thought for a minute. “Who told you I was the man on the drive?” he asked.

  Sorrel sat up abruptly, his bantering air dropping from him.

  “That’s better,” he said. “Now, let’s get down to brass tacks. Fletcher, what you’re looking at right now is part of something called the Underground—which is what’s left of all the old human spirit of independence. And we need that drive of yours.”