Perilous Planets

by Brian Aldiss

  Decker grunted, scooping fried potatoes out of the bowl on to his plate. ‘Funny if we don’t run across a lot of life here. The radiation wagon stirred up a lot of it when it went over the field today.’

  ‘What Waldron and I saw,’ and Dickson, ‘looked humanoid.’

  Decker squinted at the biologist. ‘Sure of that?’ he asked.

  Dickson shook his head. ‘The seeing was poor. Could not be absolutely sure. Seemed to me there were two or three of them. Matchstick men.’

  Waldron nodded. ‘Like a picture a kid would draw,’ he said. ‘One stroke for the body. Two strokes each for arms and legs. A circle for a head. Angular. Ungraceful. Skinny.’

  ‘Graceful enough in motion, though,’ said Dickson. ‘When they moved they went like cats. Flowed, sort of.’

  ‘We’ll know plenty soon enough,’ Decker told them, mildly. ‘In a day or two we’ll flush them.’

  Funny, he thought. On almost every job someone popped up to report he had spotted humanoids. Usually, there weren’t any. Usually it was just imagination. Probably wishful thinking, he told himself, the yen of men far away from their fellow men to find in an alien place a type of life that somehow seemed familiar.

  Although the usual humanoid, once you met him in the flesh, turned out to be so repulsively alien that alongside him an octopus would seem positively human.

  Franey, the senior geologist, said: ‘I’ve been thinking about those mountains to the west of us, the ones we caught sight of when we were coming in. Had a new look about them. New mountains are good to work in. They haven’t worn down, easier to get at whatever’s in them.’

  ‘We’ll lay out our first survey lines in that direction,’ Decker told him.

  Outside the curving vision plate the night was alive with the blaze of the batteries of lights. Gleaming robots toiled in shining gangs. Ponderous machines lumbered past. Smaller ones scurried like frightened beetles. To the south great gouts of flame leaped out and the sky was painted red with the bursts of a squad of flame throwers going into action.

  ‘Chewing out a landing field,’ said Decker. ‘A tongue of forest juts out there. Absolutely level ground. Like a floor. Won’t take a great deal of work to turn it into a field.’

  The stewards brought coffee and brandy and a box of good cigars. Decker and his men settled back in their chairs, taking life easy, watching the work going on outside the ship.

  ‘I hate this waiting,’ Franey said, settling down comfortably to his cigar.

  ‘Part of the job,’ said Decker. He poured more brandy into his coffee.

  ==========

  By dawn the last machines were set up and either had been moved out to their assigned positions or were parked in the motor pool. The flamers had enlarged the burned-over area and three radiation wagons were busy on their rounds. To the south the airfield had been finished and the jets were lined up and waiting, in a plumb-straight line.

  Some of the robots, their work done for the moment, formed themselves in solid ranks to shape a solid square, neat and orderly and occupying a minimum of space. They stood there in the square, waiting against the time when they would be needed, a motor pool of robots, a reservoir of manpower.

  Finally the gang-plank came down and the legionnaires marched out in files of two, with clank and glitter and a remorseless precision that put all machines to shame. There were no banners and there were no drums, for these were useless things and the Legion, despite its clank and glitter, was an organization of ruthless efficiency.

  The column wheeled and became a line and the line broke up and the platoons moved out toward the planet-head perimeter.

  There machine and legionnaire and robot manned the frontier Earth had set up on an alien world.

  Busy robots staked out and set up an open-air pavilion of gaudy striped canvas that rippled in the breeze, set up tables and chairs beneath the shading canvas, moved out a refrigerator filled with refreshments, with extra ice compartments.

  It was finally safe and comfortable for ordinary men to leave the shelter of the ship.

  Organization, Decker told himself—organization and efficiency and leaving not a thing to chance. Plug every loophole before it was a loophole. Crush possible resistance before it could become resistance. Gain absolute control over a certain number of square feet of planet and operate from there.

  Later, of course, there were certain chances taken; you couldn’t eliminate them all. There would be field trips and even with all precautions that robot and machine and legionnaire could offer, there would be certain risks. There would be aerial mapping and surveys, and these, too, would have elements of chance, but with those elements reduced to the very minimum.

  And always there would be the base—an absolutely safe and impregnable base to which a field party or a survey flight could retreat, from which reinforcements could be sent out or counter-action taken.

  Foolproof, he told himself, as foolproof as it could be made.

  He wondered, briefly, what had been the matter with him the night before. It had been that young fool, Jackson, of course—a capable biochemist, possibly, but certainly the wrong kind of man for a job like this. Something had slipped up; the screening board should have stopped a man like Jackson, should have spotted his emotional instability. Not that he could do any actual harm, of course, but he could be upsetting. An irritant, said Decker. That’s what he is—just an irritant.

  Decker laid an armful of paraphernalia on the long table underneath the gay pavilion. From it he selected a rolled-up sheet of map paper, unrolled it, spread it flat and thumb-tacked it at four corners. On it a portion of the river and the mountains to the westward had been roughly penciled in. The base was represented by a crossed-through square—but the rest of it was blank. But it would be filled in; as the days went by it would take on shape and form.

  From the field to the south a jet whooshed up into the sky, made a lazy turn and straightened out to streak toward the west. Deeker walked to the edge of the pavilion’s shade and watched it as it dwindled out of sight. That would be Jarvis and Donnelly, assigned to the preliminary survey of the southwest sector between the base and the western mountains.

  Another jet rose lazily, trailing its column of exhaust, gathered speed and sprang into the sky. Freeman and Johns, he thought.

  Decker went back to the table, pulled out a chair and sat down. He picked up a pencil and tapped it idly on the almost-blank map paper. Behind his back he heard another jet whoom upward from the field.

  He let his eyes take in the base. Already it was losing its raw, burned-over look. Already it had something of the look of Earth about it, of the efficiency and common sense and get-the-job-done attitude of the man of Earth.

  Small groups of men stood about the base talking. One of them, he saw, was squatted on the ground, talking things over with three squatting robots. Others of them walked about, giving orders, planning, sizing up the situation.

  Decker grunted with satisfaction. A capable gang of men, he thought. Most of them would have to wait around to really get down to work until the first surveys came in, but even while they waited they would not be idle.

  They’d take soil samples and test them. The life that swarmed in the soil would be captured and brought in by grinning robots and the squirming, vicious things would be pinned down and investigated—photographed, X-rayed, dissected, analysed, observed, put through reaction tests. Trees and plant and grasses would be dug for a look at soil strata. The river’s water would be analysed Seines would dredge up some of the life it held. Wells would be driven to establish water tables.

  All of this here, at the moment, while they waited for the first preliminary flights to bring back data that would pinpoint other areas worthy of investigation.

  Once those reports were in, the work would be started in dead earnest. Geologist and mineral men would probe into the planet’s hide. Weather observation points would be set up. Botanists would take far-ranging check samples. Each man would do the
work for which he had been trained. Field reports would pour back to the base, there to be correlated and fitted into the picture.

  Work then, work in plenty. Work by day and night. And all the time the base would be a bit of Earth, a few square yards held inviolate against all another world might muster.

  Decker sat easily in his chair and felt the breeze that came beneath the canvas, a gentle breeze that ruffled through his hair, rattled the papers on the table and twitched the tacked-down map. It was pleasant here, he thought. But it wouldn’t stay pleasant long. It almost never did.

  Some day, he thought, I’ll find a pleasant planet, a paradise planet where the weather’s always perfect and there’s food for the picking of it and natives that are intelligent to talk with and companionable in other ways—and I will never leave it. I’ll refuse to leave when the ship is ready to cast off. I’ll live out my days in a fascinating corner of a lousy galaxy—a galaxy that is gaunt with hunger and mad with savagery and lonely beyond all that can be said of loneliness. He looked up from his reverie and saw Jackson standing at the pavilion’s edge, watching him.

  ‘What’s the matter, Jackson?’ Decker asked with sudden bitterness. ‘Why aren’t you…’

  ‘They’re bringing in a native, sir,’ said Jackson, breathlessly. ‘One of the things Waldron and Dickson saw. The robots caught him, sir.’

  The native was humanoid, but he was not human.

  As Waldron and Dickson had said, he was a match-stick man, a flesh and blood extension of a drawing a four-year-old might make. He was black as the ace of spades and he wore no clothing, but the eyes that looked out of the pumpkin-shaped head at Decker were bright with a light that might have been intelligence.

  Decker tensed as he looked into those eyes. Then he looked away, saw the men standing silently around the pavilion’s edge, silent and waiting, tense as he was.

  Slowly, Decker reached out his hand to one of the twin headsets of the mentograph. His fingers closed over it and for a moment he felt a vague, but forceful reluctance to put it on his head. It was disturbing to contact, or attempt to contact, an alien mind. It gave one a queasy feeling in the pit of the stomach. It was a thing, he thought, that man never had been intended to do—an experience that was utterly foreign to any human background.

  He lifted the headset slowly, fitted it over his skull, made a sign toward the second set.

  For a moment the alien eyes watched him, the creature standing erect and motionless.

  Courage, thought Decker. Raw and naked courage, to stand here in this suddenly unfamiliar environment that had blossomed almost overnight on familiar ground, to stand here motionless and erect, surrounded by creatures that must look as if they had dropped from some horrific nightmare.

  The humanoid took one step closer to the table, reached out a hand and took the headset. Fumbling with its unfamiliarity, he clamped it on his head. And, never for a moment, did the eyes waver from Decker’s eyes, always alert and watchful.

  Decker forced himself to relax, tried to force his mind into an attitude of peace and calm. That was a thing you had to be careful of. You couldn’t scare the critters—you had to lull them, quiet them down, make them feel your friendliness. They would be upset and humpy—a sudden thought, even a suggestion of human brusqueness would wind them up tighter than a drum.

  There was intelligence here, he told himself, being careful to keep his mind unruffled—a greater intelligence than one would think looking at the creature. Intelligence enough to know that he should put on the headset—guts enough to do it.

  He caught the first faint mental whiff of the match-stick man and the pit of his stomach contracted suddenly and there was an ache around his belly. There was nothing in the thing he caught, nothing that could be put in words, but there was an alienness, as a smell is alien. There was a non-human connotation that set one’s teeth on edge. He fought back the gagging blackness of repulsive disgust that sought to break the smooth friendliness he held within his mind.

  ‘We are friendly,’ Decker forced himself to think. ‘We are friendly. We are friendly. We are friendly. We are friendly. We are

  ‘You should not have come,’ said the thought of the match-stick man.

  ‘We will not harm you,’ Decker thought. ‘We are friendly. We will not harm you. We will not harm you…’

  ‘You will never leave,’ said the humanoid.

  ‘Let’s be friends,’ thought Decker. ‘Let’s be friends. We have gifts. We will help you. We will…’

  ‘You should not have come,’ said the match-stick thought. ‘But since you are here, you can never leave.’

  Humour him, Decker told himself. Humour him. Humour him.

  ‘All right, then,’ he thought. ‘We will stay. We will stay and we will be friendly. We will stay and teach you. We will give you the things we have brought for you and we will stay with you.’

  ‘You will not leave,’ said the match-stick man’s thought, and there was something so cold and logical and matter-of-fact about the way the thought was delivered that Decker suddenly was cold.

  The humanoid meant it… meant every word of the thing he said. He was not being dramatic, nor was he blustering… and neither was he bluffing. He actually thought that the humans would not leave, that they would not live to leave the planet.

  Decker smiled softly to himself.

  ‘You will die here,’ said the humanoid thought.

  ‘Die?’ asked Decker. ‘What is die?’

  The match-stick man’s thought was pure disgust. Deliberately, he reached up and took off the headset, laid it carefully back upon the table.

  Then he turned and walked away and not a man made a move to stop him.

  Decker took off his headset, slammed it on the table top.

  ‘Jackson,’ he said, ‘pick up a phone and tell the Legion to let him through. Let him leave. Don’t try to stop him.’ ,

  He sat limply in his chair and looked at the ring effaces that was watching him.

  Waldron asked, ‘What is it, Decker?’

  ‘He sentenced us to death,’ said Decker. ‘He said he would not allow us to leave the planet. He said that we would die here.’

  ‘Strong words,’ said Waldron.

  ‘He meant them,’ Decker said.

  He lifted a hand, flipped it wearily. ‘He doesn’t know, of course,’ he said. ‘He really thinks that he can stop us leaving. He thinks that we will die.”

  It was an amusing situation, really. That a naked humanoid should walk out of the jungle and threaten to kill a human survey party. That he should really think that he could do it. That he should be positive about it.

  But there was not a single smile on any of the faces that looked at Decker.

  ‘We can’t let it get us,’ Decker said.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Waldron declared, ‘we should take all precautions.’

  Decker nodded. ‘We’ll go on emergency alert immediately,’ he said. ‘We’ll stay that way until we’re sure… until we’re…’

  He halted angrily. Sure of what? Sure that an alien savage who wore no clothing, who had not a sign of culture about him could wipe out a group of humans protected by a ring of steel, held within a guard of machine and robots and a group of fighting men who knew all there was to know concerning the refinement of dealing out swift and merciless extermination to anything that moved against them?

  Ridiculous?

  Of course it was ridiculous!

  And yet the eyes had held intelligence. The being had had not only intelligence, but courage. He had stood within a circle of what to him were alien beings and he had not flinched. He had faced the unknown and said what there was to say and then had walked away with a dignity any human would have been proud to wear. He had known that the alien beings within the confines of the base were not of his own planet, for he had said they should not have come and his thought had implied that he was aware they were not of this world of his. He had understood that he was supposed to put on the headset, b
ut whether that was an act more of courage than of intelligence one would never know—for you could not know if he had realized what the headset had been for. Not knowing, the naked courage of clamping it to his head was of an order that could not be measured.

  ‘What do you think?’ Decker asked Waldron.

  ‘We’ll have to be careful,’ Waldron told him evenly. ‘We’ll have to watch our step. Take all precautions now that we are warned. But there’s nothing to be scared of, nothing we can’t handle.’

  ‘He was bluffing,’ Dickson said. ‘Trying to scare us into leaving.’

  Decker shook his head. ‘I don’t think he was,’ he said. ‘I tried to bluff him and it didn’t work. He’s just as sure as we are.’

  ==========

  The work went on.

  There was no attack.

  The jets roared out and thrummed away, mapping the land. Field parties went out, cautiously. They were flanked by robots and by legionnaires and preceded by lumbering machines that knifed and tore and burned a roadway through even the most stubborn of the terrain they went up against. Radio weather stations were set up at distant points and at the base the weather tabulators clicked off the data that the stations sent back.

  Other field parties were flown into the special areas pinpointed for more extensive exploration and investigation.

  And nothing happened.

  The days went past.

  The weeks went past.

  The machines and robots watched and the legionnaires stood ready and the men hurried with their work to get off the planet.

  A bed of coal was found and mapped. An iron range was discovered. One area in the mountains to the west crawled with radioactive ores. The botanists found twenty-seven species of edible fruits. The base swarmed with animals that had been trapped as specimens and remained as pets.

  And a village of the match-stick men was found.

  It wasn’t much of a place. Its huts were primitive. Its sanitation was non-existent. Its people were peaceful.

  Decker left his chair under the striped pavilion to lead a party to the village.