by Andre Norton
“And that, you know,” Kordov added, “is common sense. Let us explore the valley-if it is promising, make a place there for our people. But at the same time an exploring team can operate to map the district. Only, let us not make contact with any race we find, until we know its attitude.”
“Or what manner of creature,” Carlee said softly to herself.
"What manner of creature.” Dard had caught that. Carlee most likely believed that the intelligence which might share this world was nonhuman. Man’s old fear of the unknown, the not-understood, would again haunt them. This was an alien world, could they ever make it home?
“These- these are beautiful!” Trude Harmon had knelt beside him in the sand to see the small carvings he was mechanically unwrapping.
The one he held represented an animal which was a weird cross between horse and deer-possessing flowing mane, tail and horns. Presented as rearing, with snorting nostrils, it was a miniature of savage fury. Tiny gems were set in the eye sockets and the hooves were plated with a contrasting metal. Some master-craftsman had endowed it with life.
“All these things-they are so wonderful!”
“They loved beauty,” Dard answered her. “But I think that these"-he picked up a second carving, representing quite a different creature-a manikin with webbed feet, a monkey face and hands lacking a thumb-"are all pieces to be used in a game. See, here’s another horned horse, but made of a different color, and another webfooted monkey. Chessmen?”
“And a little tree!” She freed a third piece from its wrappings. “A tree of golden apples!”
True enough, on the branches of the tone shaped tree there were round gems of a glowing yellow. Golden apples! That story Lars used to tell Dessie about the apples of the sun!
“Huh?” Harmon squatted down by his wife to see what held her attention. “Apples? What’s that about apples, Trude?”
She held out her hand with the small tree standing on its flattened palm. “Golden apples! See, Tim?”
“Looks more like some kind of a pine to me.” But he took the tree gently. “Fruit-that’s what those are supposed to be all right.” His eyes went past the star ship to the open mouth of the valley where the blue-green of growing things beckoned. “Might find us a pine growin’ apples at that, Trude. After them there flyin’ snakes, and floatin’ spider-plants, and them green and yellow duck-dogs what keep peekin’ at us from holes yonder-well, I can believe that we’re gonna pick us apples offa pine trees, too. Only we’d better get about the business of goin’ to hunt them trees pretty soon.”
The business of hunting their future settlement began the next morning. Kimber with Rogan and Santee took off in the sled to make a circuit of the inner valley. When they signaled that they viewed nothing disturbing there, a second exploring party set off on foot. Gully, Harmon and Dard, with packets of supplies, stun rifles and water-filled canteens progressed slowly up the river.
At the entrance to the inner valley the sand was broken by patches of soil shading from red-yellow to a dark brown. In this earth grew tufts and clumps of thin-bladed, very tough-stemmed grass which in its turn gave way to small bushes, clothed with ragged blue-green leaves.
All three of the explorers stopped short as the grass before them swayed, masking the progress of some living thing. Dard was the first to move forward with his silent woodsman’s tread. Cautiously he parted the tall stalks to see below him a real path, as well marked as a Terran game trail, but in miniature. As the swaying still continued he stood waiting, hardly daring to breathe.
Around the roots of a low bush a small red-brown head, almost indistinguishable from the bare earth of the trail, showed. Dard waited. With a hop the traveler came into plain sight.
Close to the size of a Terran rat it hopped on large, over-developed hind legs, between which bobbed a fluff of tail. Small handlike paws hung down across its darker belly fur. The ears were large, fan shaped, and fringed with the same fluff as the tail. Black buttons of eyes showed neither pupil nor iris, and a rounded muzzle ended in a rodent’s prominent teeth. But Dard did not have long to catalogue such physical points. It sighted him. Then it gave a wild bound, making an about-face turn while in the air-disappearing in a second. Dard was left to pick up from the center of the trail the object it had just dropped in its flight.
“Rabbit?” Harmon wondered, “or squirrel, or rat? How’re we gonna know? What did that critter drop, boy?”
Dard held a pod about three inches long, dark blue and shiny. He surrendered it to Harmon who slit the outer covering with thumbnail and shook out a dozen dark-blue seeds.
“Pears, beans, wheat?” Harmon’s bewilderment showed signs of irritation. “It grows, ripens this way, and it may be good to eat. But,” he turned to his companions and ended with an explosive, “how’re we ever gonna know?”
“Take ’em back and try ’em on the hamsters,” Cully returned laconically. “But that hopper sure could go, couldn’t he?” Thus he unconsciously christened the third type of fauna they had discovered in the new world.
Harmon stowed seeds and pod away in a zipper closed pocket, before they moved on through grass which arose waist high about them. Here and there in it they spotted more of the seed pods.
In fact shortly the pod-headed plants were so thick around them that they might have been swishing through a field of ripened grain. Harmon broke silence:
“This remind you of anything?”
They regarded the expanse of blue doubtfully and shook their heads.
“Well, it does me. This here looks jus’ like a wheatfield all ready t’ be reaped! I tell you I’m athinkin’ we’re walkin’ over somebody’s farm!”
“But there’s no fences,” protested Dard.
“No, but you take a farm that’s not been touched for a good long time-this stuff coulda jus’ kept seedin’ itself and spread out a lot. I gotta feelin’ this is part of a farm!”
With that Harmon took the lead, cutting across the narrowest section of the ripe crop to a line of bushes. Now that his attention had been stimulated by Harmon’s theory Dard thought that that clump of taller vegetation was strung out as if it might provide a barrier for the grain, a fence for the field.
They worked their way around this line of brush to discover Harmon’s instinct right. For there was no disguising the artificiality of the large dome flanked by several smaller ones which stood surmounted and surrounded by rank vines, tall grass and long unpruned shrubbery.
But it was not those domes which held the explorers’ attention. A constant murmur of sound and a flash of flying things drew them to a tree standing in what once must have been the front yard-if Those Others cultivated front yards.
“The golden apples!” Dard identified the tree from the carved piece he had seen the night before.
Its symmetrical cone shape of blue-green provided the right background for the yellow globes which dragged down branches with their weight. And the air and grass about the tree were alive with feasters.
The Terrans watched the wheeling birds-or were they oversized butterflies-that settled and squabbled for a chance to sink beaks into those ripened orbs. While, on the ground, there was a steady coming and going of hoppers harvesting the soft fallen fruit. And from that scene of activity the breeze wafted a scent which set the watchers’ mouths watering-semi-intoxicating with its promise of juicy delights.
As the men advanced, the busy feeders displayed no signs of alarm. One hopper ran straight between Cully’s feet, a quarter section of dripping fruit clasped in its arms. And a bird-butterfly skimmed Dard’s head on its way to the banquet.
“Well- for-!” Cully caught himself in midstride to avoid stepping on a furry red-brown mass. He picked up one of the hoppers in a completely comatose state. Harmon gave a bark of laughter.
“Dead drunk,” he commented. “Seen chickens-pigs, too-get that way on cider leavin’s. Lookit here-this bird can’t fly straight neither!”
He was right. A lavender creature, whose wings
were banded with pale green and gray, flapped an erratic course to a nearby bush and clung there as if it did not trust its powers for a farther flight.
Cully laid down the limp hopper and picked one of the golden apples. It snapped away easily, and he held it out for their closer examination. The skin was firm over the pulp, and radiating out from the stem were tiny rosy freckles. And the enticing scent was a temptation hard to withstand. Dard wanted to snatch the fruit from the engineer, to sink his teeth in that smooth skin and prove to himself that it tasted as good as it smelled.
“Pity we ain’t got a hamster with us to try it on. But we can take some back. Iffen they’re good,” Harmon swallowed visibly, “we can have us some real eatin’! Needn’t let the critters take ’em all. The fella what lived here, I bet he set a store by them there things. Golden apples, yeah, that’s jus’ what they be. But they ain’t gonna run away, and me, I’d kinda like to see the house and barns.”
The house and barns, if those were the correct designations for the domes, were half buried in twisting vines and rank growth. When they broke their way through to what must have been the front door of the largest dome, Cully let out his breath in a low whistle.
“Fight here. This door was smashed in from the outside.”
Dard, accustomed to the violence of the raiding parties of Pax, noted the broken scraps of metal on the portal and agreed. They edged into a scene of desolation. The place had been looted long ago, tough grass grew through a crack in the wall, and the litter underfoot went to powder when their boots touched it. Dard picked up a shred of golden glass which held a fairy tracery of white pattern. Rut there was nothing whole left.
“Raiding party, all right,” Harmon agreed, conditioned by his Terran past. “Could be that they had them some Peacemen here too. But it was a long time ago. We’d better let Kordov and the brains prospect around in here. Maybe they can learn what really happened. Wonder if the barn took a beatin’.”
But what they did discover in the larger of the two remaining domes brought a steady stream of curses from Harmon and made Dard’s skin crawl with its suggestion of wanton and horrible rapine. A line of white skeletons lay along the wall, each in what seemed a stall. Harmon tried to pick up an oddly shaped skull which went to dust in his fingers.
“Left ’em to die of thirst and starvation!” gritted the farmer. “Knocked off the people and jus’ left the rest. They-they were worse’n Peacemen-them what did this!”
“And they must have been the winners, too,” observed Cully. “Not too pleasant to think about.”
All three started at a shout, and Dard swung his stun rifle around at the entrance of that tragic barn. What if"they” were returning? Then he forced imagination under control. This horror had occurred years ago-its perpetrators were long since dead. But had they left descendants- with the same characteristics?
Kimber came into the dome. “What’re you doing in here?” he wanted to know. “We’ve been watching you from the sled. What-what in blue blazes is this?”
“Warning left by some very nasty people,” Dard spoke up. “This farm was raided and whoever did it left the animals penned up to starve to death!”
Kimber waned slowly along that pitiful line of hones. His face was very sober indeed.
“It’s been a long time since this happened.” It appeared to Dard that the pilot was reassuring himself by that statement.
“Yeah,” Harmon agreed. “A good long time. And they ain’t bin back since. Guess we can move down here and take over, Sire. This was a good farm once, no reason why it can’t be one agin.”
5: WAR RUIN
FOR THE NEXT five days they were well occupied. An extensive exploration of the inner valley, on foot and in the air, revealed no other evidences of the former civilization. And the Terrans decided against inhabiting the farm. About those domes there dung the shreds of ancient fear and disaster, and Dard was not the only one to feel uneasy within their walls.
The tree of golden apples was one of their best finds. The hamsters relished the fruit and, so encouraged, the humans raided along with the valley’s furred and feathered inhabitants, because the globes were as good as they looked and smelled-though their intoxicating effect did not hold with the Terrans. The grain also proved to be useful, and Harmon took the risk of rousing one of the two heifer calves, carried in the ship, and feeding it in the forsaken fields where it lived and grew fat.
On the other hand a bright green berry with a purplish blush was almost fatal to a hamster and had to be shunned by the Terrans, although the hoppers and the birds gorged upon it.
Quarters were established, not outside the cliffs which walled the valley, but within them. The second day’s exploration had located a cave which led in turn to an inner system of galleries, through one of which the rivers wove a way. Habituated to such a dwelling from their years in the Cleft, they seized upon this discovery eagerly. More of the adult passengers were awakened and put to work assembling machines, laboring to make the caves into a new home which could not be easily detected. For the threat kept before them by the ruined farm was always in their minds.
Three more bodies were carried from the star ship to be interred beside Lui Skort, still encased in the boxes which had held them during the voyage. But Kordov continued to insist that they had been very lucky. There were fifteen men at work now, and ten women added their strength to harvesting the strange grain and making habitable the cave dwelling.
“Blast it!” Kimber drew out of the motor section of the sled and made a grab at thin air.
“What’s the matter?” Dard began. Then he caught sight of what had brought the pilot to the exploding point.
A hopper bounded toward the tall grass, something shiny between its front paws. Stealing again!
Dard dived, and his fingers closed about the small, frantically kicking body, while a squeak which approached a scream rent the quiet of their outdoor workshop. The boy freed his captive to nurse a bitten hand, but the hopper had also dropped the bolt it had stolen. Now it retired empty pawed into the bushes uttering impolite remarks concerning Dard’s destination and ancestry.
“Better go and have that bite looked after,” Kimber ordered with resignation as he accepted the rescued bolt.
“I don’t know what we are going to do about those little beasts. They’d carry off everything they could lug if we didn’t watch them all the time. Regular pack rats.”
Dard cradled the bitten hand in the other. “I’d like to find one of their burrows, or nests, or whatever they build to keep their loot in. It should be a regular curiosity shop.”
“If any one can-you will,” Cully spoke from the cylinder he was dismantling. “Ever notice, Sim,” he continued, “how this kid gets around? I’ll wager he could walk through the grain field and not make a sound or leave a trail another could follow. How’d you ever learn that useful trick, fella?”
Dard was sober. “The hard way, living as an outlaw. You know, those hoppers are awful pests, but I can’t help admiring them.”
Kimber snorted. “Why? Because they know what they want and go after it? They are single-minded, aren’t they? Only I wish they were a little more timid. They should be more like the duck-dogs, willing to watch us, but keeping their distance. Cut along, kid, and get that finger seen to right away. Working hours aren’t over yet.”
Dard traced Carlee Skort to where she was busy fitting up the small dispensary, a niche in the wall of the second cave, and had his bite sterilized and bandaged with plasta-skin.
“Hoppers!” She shook her head. “I don’t know what we’re going to do to discourage them. They stole Trude’s little paring knife yesterday and three spools of thread.”
He could understand her dismay over these losses. Little things, yes-but articles which could not be replaced.
“Luckily they appear to be afraid to come into the caves. So far we haven’t caught any of them inside. But they are the most persistent and accomplished thieves I have ever seen. Dar
d, when you go out, stop in the kitchen and pick up a lunch for your working crew. Trude should have the packets made up by now.
He obediently made his way past work gangs into the other small cave room where Trude Harmon with an assistant was setting out stacks of plastic containers. The rich scent which filled the air tickled Dard’s nose and made him very aware of hunger. It had been hours and hours since breakfast!
“Oh, it’s you,” Trude greeted him. “How many in your gang?”
“Three.”
Her lips moved, counting silently, as she apportioned the containers and set them in a carrier.
“Mind you bring those back. And don’t, don’t you dare leave them where any hoppers can put paw on them!”
“No, ma’am. Something sure smells good.”
She smiled proudly. “Those golden apples. We stewed some up into a kind of pudding. Just you wait ’til you taste it, young man. Which reminds me-where is that queer leaf, Petra?”
The dark- haired girl who had been stirring the largest pot on the stove pulled a glossy green leaf from one of her pockets. It was an almost perfect triangle in shape-green, threaded by bright red and yellow veins.
“Ever see one like that before, Dard?” Trude asked.
He took it and examined it curiously before he answered with a shake of his head.
“Pinch it and give a sniff!” Trude suggested.
He did and the good odor of cooking was nullified by another aromatic, clean fragrance, a mixture of herb and flower-of all the pleasant scents he had ever known.
