Orbit Unlimited

by Poul Anderson

  This I’ve had to leave. Because I’ve never had the courage to admit I’m haunted.

  Am I really, anymore? That wasn’t too bad a nightmare last sleep-time, and my first in years.

  The eon ahead of him needn’t be unbearable, he told himself. Honestly, it needn’t. This trip, he had a strong, experienced boss, radio links to the human world, proper food and clothing and gear, a quick flit home as soon as the job was done, the promise of good pay and the chance of an even better bonus. All I’ve got to do is get through some strenuous, uncomfortable days. No more than that. No more. Why, the experience ought to help me shake off what’s left of my old terrors.

  Not that I’ll ever return!

  He settled into his chair and harness, and fought to relax.

  The vehicle, a bulky cargo bus, almost filled the open space on which it had set down. Tall, finely fronded blue-green stalks—plants of that varied and ubiquitous family which the colonists misnamed “grass”—hid the wheels and much of the pontoons. Trees made a wall around. They were mostly ruddy-barked goldwood, but among them stood slim feathery soartop, murky fake-pine, crouched ant thorny gnome. Between the trunks, brush and vines crowded like a mob waiting to attack. A few meters inward, the lightlessness amidst all those leaves seemed total, as if to make up for the lack of any noticeable shadows elsewhere. Insectoids glittered across that dusk. Wings beat overhead, some huge in this upbearing pressure. None of life closely resembled what dwelt on High America, and much was altogether unlike it. Those environments were too foreign to each other.

  The air hung windless, hot and heavy. It was full of odors, pungent, sweet, rank, bitter, none recalling home. Sounds came loud—a background of trills, whispers, buzzes, rustles, purling water; footfalls; above everything else, the first incautious words of human speech.

  Danny took a breath, and another. His neck felt stiff, but he made himself stare around. No matter how horrible a bush looks, it won’t jump out and bite me. I’ve got to remember that. It helped a little that they’d let their craft pressurize gradually before venturing forth. Danny had had a chance to get used to the feel of it in lungs and bloodstream.

  Jack O’Malley had not. He could endure the gas concentration for a while if he must, with no consequences afterward worse than a bad headache. But let him breathe the stuff too long and carbon dioxide acidosis would make him ill, nitrogen narcosis blur his brain, over-much oxygen begin slowly searing his tissues. Above his coverall, sealed at the neck, rose a glassite helmet with a reduction pump, an awkward water tube and chowlock for his nourishment, a heavy desiccator unit to prevent fogging from the sweat which already studded his face.

  And yet he’s spent his years on Rustum exploring the lowlands, Danny thought. What could make a man waste that much life?

  “Okay, let’s unload our stuff and saddle up.” O’Malley’s voice boomed from a speaker, across the mutterings. “At best, we won’t get where we’re bound before dark.”

  “Won’t we?” Danny asked, surprised. “But you said it was about fifty kilometers, along a hard-packed game trail. And we must have, uh, twenty hours of daylight left. Even stopping to sleep, there shouldn’t be any problem.”

  O’Malley’s smile flickered, wistful. “Not for you maybe. I’m not young anymore. Worse, I’ve got this thing on my head and torso. The pump’s powered by my chest expansion when I breathe, you know. You’d be surprised how the work in that adds up, if you weren’t so lucky you’ll never need the gadget yourself.”

  Lucky!

  “However.” O’Malley continued, “we can hike on after nightfall, and I guess we’ll arrive with plenty of time for preliminary jobs before daybreak.”

  Danny nodded. Sometimes he wondered if men wouldn’t do best to adapt to the slow turning of Rustum. Whatever the medics said, he felt it should be possible to learn to stay active for forty hours, then sleep for twenty. Could it be that efficient electric lanterns were the single reason the effort had never been made?

  “Come dawn, then, we can start constructing what we need to haul the salvage back here,” O’Malley said.

  “If we can,” Danny mumbled.

  He hadn’t intended to be heard, but was. Blast the dense atmosphere! O’Malley frowned disapproval.

  After a moment the man shrugged. “Maybe we will have to give up on the heaviest stuff, like the engine,” he conceded. “Maybe even on the biggest, bulkiest instruments, if my idea about the wagon doesn’t work out. At a minimum, though, we are going to bring back those tapes—Huh? What’s wrong?”

  Danny hugged the metal of a pontoon to himself. “N-n-nothing,” he pushed forth, around the shriek that still struggled to escape him. He couldn’t halt the shudders of his body.

  Above the meadow soared a spearfowl, not the big raptor of the highlands but its truly immense cousin, eight meters from wingtip to wingtip, with power to carry a little boy off and devour him.

  Yet boughs overarched the trail. Nothing flew beneath that high, high ceiling of bronze, amber, and turquoise except multitudinous small volants like living rainbows. And when a flock of tarzans went by, leaping from branch to branch, chattering and posturing, Danny found himself joining O’Malley in laughter.

  Astonishing, too, was the airiness of the forest. “Jungle” was a false word. Roxana wasn’t in the tropics, and no matter how much energy Rustum got from its nearby sun, the Ardashir coast was cooled by sea breezes. The weather was not so much hot as warm, actually: a dry warmth, at that. Brush grew riotously only where openings in the woods provided ample light. Elsewhere, between the boles, were simply occasional shrubs. The ground was soft with humus; it smelled rich.

  Nor was the forest gloomy. That appearance had merely been due to contrast. Pupils expanded, the human eye saw a kind of gentle brightness which brought out infinite tones and shadings of foliage, then faded away into mysterious cathedral distances.

  Cathedral? Danny had seen pictures and read descriptions from Earth. He’d always thought of a big church as hushed. If so, that didn’t qualify this wilderness, which hummed and sang and gurgled—breezes in the leaves, wings and paws, eager streams, a call, a carol. Where was the brooding cruelty he remembered?

  Maybe the difference was that he wasn’t lost; he had both a friend and a gun at his side. Or maybe his dread had not been so deep-rooted after all; maybe, even what he had feared was not the thing in itself, but only memories and bad dreams which for some years had plagued a child who no longer existed.

  The trail was easy, broad, beaten almost into a pavement. He scarcely felt the considerable load on his back. His feet moved themselves, they carried him afloat, until he must stop to let a panting O’Malley catch up.

  Higher oxygen intake, of course. What an appetite he was building, and wouldn’t dinner taste good? What separated him from his chief, besides age, was that for him this atmosphere was natural. Not that he was some kind of mutant: no such nonsense. If that had been the case, he couldn’t have stood the highlands. But his genes did put him at the far end of a distribution curve with respect to certain biochemical details.

  I don’t have to like this country, he told himself. It’s just that, well, Mother used to say we should always listen to the other fellow twice.

  When they camped, he had no need to follow O’Malley into sleep immediately after eating. He lay in his bag, watched, listened, breathed. They had established themselves off the trail, though in sight of it. The man’s decision proved right, because a herd of the pathmaking animals came by.

  Danny grabbed for his rifle. The plan was to do pothunting, wild meat being abundant. Rustumite life didn’t have all the nutrients that humans required, but supplemental pills weighed a lot less than even freeze-dried rations—

  He let the weapon sink, unused. It wouldn’t be possible to carry off more than a fraction of one of those bodies; and it would be a mortal sin to waste so towering-horned a splendor.

  After a while he slept. He fell back into a tomb silence of trees and tree
s, where the spearfowl hovered on high. He woke strangling on a scream. Although he soon mastered the terror, for the rest of his journey to the wreck he walked amidst ghastliness.

  The last several kilometers went slowly. Not only did compass, metal detector, and blaze marks guide the travelers off the game path, while a starless night had fallen, but many patches were less thickly wooded than elsewhere, thus more heavily brushcovered. None were sufficiently big or clear for a safe landing. O’Malley showed Danny how to wield the machetes they carried, and the boy got a savage pleasure from it. Take that, you devil! Take that! When they reached the goal, he too could barely stay on his feet long enough to make camp, and this time his rest was not broken.

  Later they studied the situation. The slender shape of the car lay crumpled and canted between massive trees. Flashbeams picked out a torn-off wing still caught among the limbs above. There went a deep, changeable pulsing through the odorous warmth. It came from the south, where the ground sloped evenly, almost like a ramp, four or five kilometers to the sea.

  Danny had studied aerial photographs taken from the rescue car. In his troubled state, he had not until now given them much thought. Now he asked, “Sir, uh, why’d you head inland, you and Mr. Herskowitz? Why not just out onto the beach to get picked up?”

  “Haven’t got a beach here,” O’Malley explained. “I know; went and looked. The bush continues right to the edge of a whacking great salt marsh, flooded at high tide and otherwise mucky. Wheels or pontoons would too damn likely stick fast in that gumbo. If you waited for flood, you’d find the water churned, mean and tricky, way out to the reefs at the bay mouth—nothing that a pilot would want to risk his car on, let alone his carcass.”

  “I see.” Danny pondered a while. “And with Mr. Herskowitz injured, you couldn’t swim out to where it’d be safe to meet you. … But can’t we raft this stuff to calm water, you and me?”

  “Go see for yourself, come morning, and tell me.

  Danny had to force himself to do so. Alone again in the wilderness! But O’Malley still slept, and would want to start work immediately upon awakening. This might be Danny’s one chance to scout a quicker way of getting the cursed job done. He set teeth and fists, and loped through the thin fog of sunrise.

  At the coast he found what O’Malley had described. Of the two moons, Raksh alone raised significant tides; but those could rise to several times the deep-sea height of Earth’s. (Earth, pictures, stories, legends, unattainable, one tiny star at night and otherwise never real.) Nor was the pull of the sun negligible.

  From a treetop he squinted across a sheet of glistening mud. Beyond it, the incoming waters brawled gunmetal, white-streaked, furious. Rocks reared amidst spume and thunder. The low light picked out traces of cross-currents, rips, sinister eddies where sharpness lurked already submerged. Afar, the bay widened out in a chop of waves and finally reached a line of skerries whereon breakers exploded in steady rage. Past these, the Gulf of Ardashir glimmered more peaceful.

  No doubt at slack water and ebb the passage would be less dangerous than now. But nothing would be guaranteed. Certainly two men couldn’t row a sizeable, heavily laden raft or hull through such chaos. And who’d want to spend the fuel and cargo space to bring a motorboat here, or even an outboard motor? The potential gain in salvage wasn’t worth the risk of losing still another of Rustum’s scarce machines.

  Nor was there any use reconnoitering elsewhere. The photographs had shown that eastward and westward, kilometer after kilometer, the coastline was worse yet: cliffs, bluffs, and banks where the savage erosive forces of this atmosphere had crumbled land away.

  Above, the sky arched colorless, except where the sun made it brilliant or patches where the upper clouds had drifted apart for a while. Those showed so blue that homesickness grabbed Danny by the throat.

  He made his way back. Since he’d gotten a proper rest, again the country did not seem out and out demonic. But Lord, how he wanted to leave!

  O’Malley was up, had the teakettle on a fire and was climbing about the wreck making more detailed investigations. “Satisfied?” he called. “Okay, you can rustle us some breakfast. Did you enjoy the view?”

  “Terrible,” Danny grumbled.

  “Oh? I thought it was kind of impressive, even beautiful in its way. But frustrating, I admit. As frustrating as wanting to scratch my head in my helmet.

  “—I’m afraid we’ll accomplish less than I hoped.”

  Danny’s heart leaped to think they might simply make a few trips between here and the bus, backpacking data tapes and small instruments. The voice dashed him:

  “It’s bound to be such slow going at best, you see, especially when I’m as handicapped as I am. We won’t finish our wagon in a hurry. Look how much work space we’ll have to clear before we can start carpentering.” They had toted in lightweight wheels and brackets, as well as tools for building the rest of the vehicle from local timber and cannibalized metal. “Then it’ll be harder cutting a road back to our game trail than I guessed from what I remembered. And the uphill gradient is stiffer, too. We’ll spend some days pushing and hauling our loot along.”

  “Wh-what do you expect we’ll be able to carry on the wagon?”

  “Probably no more than the scientific stuff. Damn! I really did hope we could at least cut the jets and powerplant free, and block-and-tackle them onto the cart. They’re in perfectly good shape.”

  Danny felt puzzled. “Why didn’t we bring more men? Or a small tractor, or a team of mules?”

  “The College couldn’t afford that, especially now in planting season. Besides, a big enough bus would cost more to rent than the salvage is worth, there’s such a shortage of that kind and such a demand elsewhere. What we have here is valuable, all right, but not that valuable.” O’Malley paused. “Anyway, I doubt the owner of a really big vehicle would agree to risk it down here for any price.”

  “It’s only okay to risk us,” Dannny muttered. I’m not afraid, he told himself. I’m not! However … all the reward I could win doesn’t counterbalance the chance of my dying this young in this hell.

  O’Malley heard and, unexpectedly, laughed. “That’s right. You and I are the most society can afford to gamble for these stakes. God never promised man a free ride.”

  And Father always says, “The laborer is worthy of his hire,” came to Danny. In his mind, it means the laborer must be.

  Day crept onward. The work was harsh—with machete, ax, cutting and welding torches, drill, wrench, hammer, saw, and tools less familiar to the boy. Nevertheless he found himself quite fascinated. O’Malley was a good instructor. More: the fact that they were moving ahead, that they were on their way to winning even a partial victory over the low country, was heart-lifting, healing.

  Danny did object to being stuck with trail clearance while the other went off to bag them some meat. He kept quiet, but O’Malley read it on his face and said, “Hunting hereabouts isn’t like on High America. Different species; whole different ecology, in fact. You’d learn the basic tricks fast, I suppose. But we don’t want to spend any extra time, do we?”

  “No,” Danny replied, though it cost him an effort.

  And yet the man was right. Wasn’t he? The more efficiently they organized, the sooner they’d be home. It was just that—well, a hunt would have been more fun than this toil. Anything would be.

  Slash, chop, hew, haul the cut brush aside and attack what stood beyond, in a rain and mist of sweat, till knees grew shaky and every muscle yelled forth its separate aches. It was hard to believe that this involved less total effort than simply clearing a landing space for the cargo bus. That was true, however. A field safe to descend on, in so thick a forest, would have been impossible to make without a lot of heavy equipment, from a bulldozer onward. A roadway need not be more than passable. It could snake about to avoid trees, logs, boulders, any important obstacle. When it meant a major saving of labor, Danny allowed himself to set off a small charge of fulgurite.

&nb
sp; Returning, O’Malley was gratified at the progress. “I couldn’t have gotten this far,” he said. “You couldn’t yourself, up in thinner air.” He estimated that in two days and nights they would link their path to the game trail. Then remained the slogging, brutal forcing of the loaded wagon upward to the bus.

  At midday dinner, O’Malley called his superiors in Anchor. The communicator in that distant cargo carrier had been set to amplify and relay signals from his little transceiver. Atmospherics were bad; you couldn’t very well use FM across those reaches. But what words straggled through squeals, buzzes, and whines were like the touch of a friendly hand. Wherever we go on Rustum, Danny thought, we’ll belong, and was wearily surprised that he should think this.

  Rain fell shortly after he and his companion awoke at midafternoon, one of the cataracting lowland rains which left them no choice but to relax in their tent, listen to the roar outside, snack off cold rations, and talk. O’Malley had endless yarns to spin about his years of exploration, not simply deeds and escapes but comedies and sudden, startling lovelinesses. Danny realized for the first time how he had avoided, practically deliberately, learning more than he must about this planet which was his.

  The downpour ended toward evening and they crawled out of the shelter. Danny drew a breath of amazement. It was likewise a breath of coolness, and an overwhelming fragrance of flowers abruptly come to bloom. Everywhere the forest glistened with raindrops, which chimed as they fell onto wet grass and eastward splintered the light into diamond shards. For heaven had opened, lay clear and dizzyingly high save where a few cloudbanks like snowpeaks flung back the rays of the great golden sun. Under that radiance, leaf colors were no longer sober, they flamed and glowed. In treetops a million creatures jubilated.