by Andre Norton
But when he turned inland his gasp brought them all around.
They had left the star ship on an even keel. Now it listed so that its nose pointed down the valley away from the sea.
A good half hour later Kimber got to his feet, relief mirrored on his face. One of the fins had broken through the fused coating the jet heat had put on the beach. But beneath the splintered glass crust it had found rock support -it would slip no farther. The scarred sides towering above them were no longer mirror bright as they had been in the Cleft, she had too many years, too long a voyage behind her. But she was not going to fail them.
“Rock all right,” Kimber repeated the statement he had made so joyfully a few minutes before. “The ledge slants a little, which is why she canted that way. But she’ll stand. And,” he did not need to draw their attention to the darkness closing in, “maybe it’s some more luck at work again. With her nose pointing away from this breeze, she’s less likely to come a cropper, even if it turns out to be a full-sized blow.”
Dard held on to the rail of the ramp. The wind screamed around them, stirring up devils born of the powdery sand, which filled unwary eyes and any mouth that bad the misfortune to be open. The dust had already driven Kordov inside, his precious dragon in a pair of forceps. He was more interested in that and Rogan’s spiders than he now was in the ship.
“Full- sized blow?” drawled Rogan. “This has the makings of a hurricane if I’m any judge. And unless you fellas want to be buried alive in these marching sand dunes, you’d better run for cover. As long as you’re sure we’re not going to land bottom side up, I think it’s time to adjourn.”
Dard followed him up the ramp just in time to escape a miniature sandstorm through which the other two had to fight their way. There was a brushing-off party in the air lock, but, as they climbed back to the crew’s quarters Dard could still taste grit in his mouth and hear it crunch under his feet.
Kordov was not to be found in the control cabin or bunk room when Kimber and the other two sat on the bunks and Dard dropped down cross-legged on the floor. The ship was vibrating under him. Could the wind have risen to that pitch already? It was Rogan who answered that.
“Like to see what’s happening out there?” He got up and went into the control cabin.
Kimber and Dard got up to follow, but cully shook his head.
“What you don’t know, doesn’t hurt you much,” he remarked. “And I don’t see anything exciting about a sandstorm.”
It was true that when Rogan adjusted the visa-screen there was little for them to see. The storm had brought night and obscurity. With an exclamation of annoyance, the techneer clicked off the viewer and they drifted back to find Cully asleep and Kordov climbing up to join them.
“Your ’spiders,’ ” he burst out as soon as he sighted Rogan, “are plants!”
“But they moved!” protested Dard. “They had legs.”
Kordov shook his head. “Roots, not legs. And plants they are in spite of being mobile. Some form of aquatic fungi.”
“Toadstools with legs yet!” Rogan laughed. “Next, trees with arms, I suppose. What about the dragon-was he a flying cabbage?”
Kordov did not need any urging to discuss the dragon.
“Poisonous reptile-and carnivorous. We shall have to beware of them. But it was full grown, we need not worry.”
“About their coming in larger sizes?” asked the relaxed Kimber in a lazy voice. “Let us be thankful for small favors and hope that they do a lot of that screeching when they go ahunting. But now-let us think about tomorrow.”
“And tomorrow-and tomorrow—” Rogan repeated sleepily hut Cully sat up thoroughly aroused.
“When do we wake up the others?” he wanted to know.
“And are we going to stay right here?”
Kordov locked his fingers behind his head and leaned back against the wall of the cabin. “I will revive Dr. Skort - Carlee-in the morning. She can help me with the others. Do you intend to explore the immediate terrain then? We should decide soon whether to stay here or try to find semi-permanent headquarters elsewhere.”
“There is just one thing,” said Kimber, “I can lift ship again, yes. But I can’t guarantee another safe landing. The fuel—” he shrugged. “I don’t know how long our voyage here lasted, but if we hadn’t made this landfall when we did, we might not have been able to come in at all.”
“So?” Kordov’s lips shaped a soundless whistle. “Then we had better be very sure before we think of a move. What about taking out the ’sled’?”
“I’ll break it out first thing tomorrow. That is, I will if this storm blows itself out by then. I don’t propose to take that contraption up in a high wind-the bugs aren’t out of it yet,” Kimber retorted.
“And how about food?” Cully asked. “Specifically here and now for us, and objectively for the rest when they wake up.”
“Specifically,” Kordov opened one of the storage cabinets and took out five small packages which he tossed around to the company. “Concentrates. But, you’re right, supplies are not going to last forever. We shall not be able to awaken all our company until we are reasonably sure of food and shelter. But-we’ll get Harmon out of storage and have him investigate the soil up river where the vegetation is so thick. The exploration party might also hunt.”
“Not dragons, I hope,” Rogan mumbled through a mouthful of the dry concentrate cake. “I have a distinct feeling dragons will not agree with my internal arrangements! Or traveling fungi either—”
For the first time Dard ventured to break in upon his elders. “Some fungi-mushrooms-are good.” He had no desire to lunch off red spiders, but he knew what real hunger meant and if it were a question of being hungry or eating swimming mushrooms, he could close his eyes and eat.
“Just so,” Kordov beamed at him. “And we shall investigate the food value of these. I shall get the hamsters out of cold storage and try the local products on them.”
So if they don’t curl up and go blue in the face we feast,” Kimber stretched and yawned. “Since we have quite a full day before us tomorrow, suppose we hit the sack now. Toss for the bunks and the acceleration pads.”
They solemnly tossed a coin-one with a hole in it which Kimber wore on a chain about his neck as a lucky piece. Dard found that Fortune relegated him to one of the acceleration pads and did not care. To his mind the soft sponge of that support was infinitely more comfortable than any bed he could remember.
But when he curled up on it he found that he could not sleep. All the wonders of the new world whirled through his mind in a mad dance. And behind them lurked fear. Lui Skort had been a strong young man but he had not survived the passage. How many more of the boxes housed below in the star ship held death instead of life? What about Dessie?
Now that there was nothing to distract him, nothing he could give attention to, he remembered only her-the tight yellow braids sticking out at sharp angles, how she had been able to sit so quietly in the grass that birds and little animals accepted her as part of their world and had been entirely unafraid-how good and patient she had always been. Dessie!
He sat up. To lie there and sleep when Dessie might never wake to see this new land! He couldn’t!
On his hands and knees Dard crawled out of the control cabin and between the bunks. Kimber was curled in a ball on one, but the other, which had fallen to Kordov, was empty. Dard started down the stair.
The deck below showed a patch of strong light and he could hear someone moving. He ventured to the door of the laboratory where he had helped to revive Cully and Rogan The First Scientist was busy there, setting out instruments and bottles. He looked up as Dard’s shadow fell into the room.
“What is it?”
“Dessie!” the boy blurted out. “I’ve got to know about Dessie!”
“Ah, so? But it is for their own comfort and protection that our companions must continue to sleep. Until we are sure of food and shelter.”
“I know that.” But the d
esperation in Dard could not be so sensibly silenced. “But-isn’t there any way at all of telling? I have to know about Dessie-I just have to!”
Tas Kordov pulled out his lower lip with thumb and forefinger and allowed it to snap back hate place with a soft smacking sound.
“That is a thought, my, boy. We can tell whether the mechanism has in any way failed. And perhaps-just perhaps we can have other assurance. I must open that particular compartment in the morning anyway to bring out Carlee Skort. Carlee—” his face puckered with the misery of an unhappy child. “And then I must be the one to tell her about Lui. That will be a very hard thing to do. Well, we do not escape the hard things in this life. Come along.”
They went down five levels in the ship. Here the few lights were very dim, and the force of the wind against the hull could be more strongly felt. Kordov verified markings on the sealed door and at last released the fastening of a portal which came open with a faint sigh of displaced air. The chill of the room fed Dard’s unease. He edged along after Kordov, between doubled racks of the coffin boxes to the final set. The First Scientist dropped to his knees and snapped on a hand torch to read dials.
“Dessie and Lara Skort are in this one together, they were so small they could share a compartment.” The light in Kordov’s hand flashed from one dial to the next, and the next. Then he smiled up at Dard.
“These are all as they should be, son. There has been no organic or chemical change inside since this was sealed. To my honest belief they are alive and well. Soon they will be out to run about as little girls should. They shall be free-as they never could have been on Terra. Do not worry. Your Dessie shall share this world with you!”
Dard had himself under control now and he was able to answer quite levelly:
“Thanks- thanks a lot, sir.”
But Kordov had moved to another box and was reading more dials. He gave that case a slap of approbation as he straightened to his full height again.
“Carlee, too-we have been so very lucky.”
3. STORM WRACK
"GOOD LORD!”
The tone rather than the words of that horrified exclamation awoke Dard and brought him up on the acceleration pad. Kimber, Rogan, and Cully were crowded together before the visa-screen. The hour might have been in the middle of the night, or late in the morning, for inside the ship day and night had no division. But on the screen it was day.
A gray sky was patched by ragged drifts of cloud. And as Dard leaned over the back of the pilot’s seat, he saw what had so startled the others.
Where the day before there had stretched that smooth sweep of blue sand, forming a carpet clear to the base of the colorful cliffs, there was now only water, a sheet of it. Rogan set the viewer to turning so that they could see the flood completely surrounded the ship. Even the river had been swallowed up without any red stain left to betray its flow.
As the scene reached the seaside Rogan pushed the button which held it there. The beach was gone, it was the sea which had come in to enclose them.
“Surprise, surprise!” that was Rogan. “Do we now swim ashore?”
“I don’t think that it is that deep,” answered Kimber.
“The water may come in this way during every hard storm. Switch over to the cliffs again, Les.”
The picture whizzed with a dizzy speed back to the cliff. Kimber was right, already there was a stretch of sand showing at the base of that rock escarpment. The water was draining away.
They clattered down through the quiet ship, sending out the ramp so that they could venture to the water’s swirl. A weak current swilled around the fins and the bare sand at the cliff grew wider as they watched.
The flood was not clear, and caught around the fins of the ship were huge loops of weed. Some variety of fish had been beached close to the foot of the ramp, and a scaled tail beat waves as the stranded monster fought for life. Other debris showed tantalizingly now and again as the water was sullenly sucked away from the sand.
“What the-I” Cully’s start was near to a jump. Over-over to the right! What is that?”
Something was venturing out on the still-wet sand, following the retreating line of the sea. But, what it was, none of them dared guess. Kimber ran back into the ship while the rest tried vainly to see it better. The color was queer, a pale green, hardly to be distinguished from the sea water as it scurried along on four thin legs. But the outline of its head!
“Here!” Kimber skidded down the ramp, keeping himself out of the sea by a quick grab for the rail. He carried a pair of field glasses. “Is it still there-yes, I see it!” He focused the lenses in the right direction. “Great guns!”
“What is it?” demanded Rogan, plainly doing his best to keep from snatching the glasses away from the pilot.
“Yeah,” Cully, too, was shaken out of his usual calm, “pass those along, fella! We all want a look-see!”
Dard squinted, trying to make natural sight serve as well as the lenses Kimber was now passing to Rogan. At least the thing on the sand did not appear to be alarmed either by the ship or the men watching it. Maybe it would stay in sight until he, as the very junior member of the party, had the right to use the lenses too.
It stayed, digging in the wet sand, until Cully did pass the glasses. Dard adjusted them feverishly. Having met the fungi spiders and a flying dragon, he could hardly be surprised by the weird beast he saw now. Its pale green skin was entirely hairless, nor was that skin scaled-instead it resembled to a marked degree his own smooth flesh. The creature’s head was pear-shaped with ears which were hardly more than holes and large eyes set far apart so that the range of vision was probably wider than that of any Terran animal. But that pear head ended in what could only be described as a broad, duck’s bill or hard blackish substance. And just as Dard trained the glasses upon it, it folded its hind legs neatly under it, to sit up in a doglike stance and gaze mildly across the dwindling tongue of sea straight at the star ship. Sand clung to its bill and it absent-mindedly brushed that off with a foreleg.
“Duck- dog,” Kimber named it. “Doesn’t look dangerous, does it? I’ll be-! Just look at that!”
“ ’That’ was a short procession of more duck-dogs emerging from a dark crevice in the cliff to join the first. One of them, about three-quarters the size of the first, was the same pale green, but the three others were yellow, the exact yellow, Dart noted, of the strata in the diff. In fact, as they marched by a projection of that particular stratum, they faded from sight. Two of the yellow beasts were full grown but the third was very small. And halfway along the path it sat down, refusing to move on until one of the larger animals returned to butt it ahead.
“Family party,” suggested Dard, not daring to hold the glasses away from Kimber’s impatient reach any longer.
“But harmless,” the pilot suggested for the second time.
“Do you suppose they’d let us near them? The water’s gone down a lot.”
“Nothing like trying. Just let Jorge be ready with that ray gun, then if they do turn out to be first-class menaces, we’ll be prepared.” The communications techneer lowered himself cautiously into the flood, which was at knee level.
He detoured to avoid the floating weed and paused when be reached the fish still beating the air with a frenzied tail. Dard caught up with him at that point.
Save for a curiously flattened head and a huge, paunchy middle, the stranded fish was the first living thing they had seen here which did resemble a Terran product. It was a good five feet long and displayed murderous teeth. The powerful tail beat the receding water into froth but it was beyond hope of escape. Dard spoke impulsively:
“Can’t- can’t you shoot it? It won’t be able to get away and I think it knows that.”
“Unhuh.” That was Cully and as usual he wasted no words. He snapped the ray at that writhing head. With a last convulsion the fish flopped completely out of the water, to float with its huge belly up when it fell back.
“Maybe breakfast?” Rogan
asked. “Looks a little bit like a tuna-might even taste like one. We’ll let Kordov get it and see if it’s fit for us to bury the teeth in. I could do with a steak-maybe two of them! Hello-the fireworks didn’t send our duck-dogs running. I’d say they were enjoying the show.”
Rogan was right. The duck-dog family party sat in a line along the crest of the fast drying sand ridge, appreciably closer to the ship, their attention all for the men and the now limp fish.
But, as Dard tentatively splashed another step in the direction of that sand bank, the yellow members of the clan retreated, one of them nudging the smallest one in front of it. The green ones continued to stand their ground, the half-grown one running along the water’s edge hissing. Dard stopped, the flood swishing about his legs.
Cully looped a cord about the tail of the dead fish and fastened it to the ramp rail. Perhaps overcome by the sight of so much meat, the smallest duck-dog gave a tiny whimpering cry and ran between the legs of its guardian to the water. Resignedly the larger yellow beast followed the cub, turning over the loose sand with large blunt claws of a forepaw to dig out a squirming red creature which the baby pounced upon to swallow greedily. But the green boss of the party hissed angrily at the hunter and sent both scuttling back.
Then he withdrew also, with his head turned toward the men, facing the danger represented by the Terrans bravely, hissing a stern warning. When the last of the smaller duck-dogs had dodged into the break in the cliff, he disappeared there also leaving only scuffed tracks in the sand to mark their trail. But Dard sighted the tip of a dark hill still protruding from the crack.
“It’s still watching us.”
“Wary,” mused the pilot. “Which suggests that it has enemies-enemies which may look like us. But it’s curious, too. If we ignore it-maybe—”
He was interrupted by a shout from the ship Kordov had come out on the ramp and was waving vigorously to the explorer. As the others sloshed back he pulled on the cord, reeling in the fish.
