The Planet Explorer

by Murray Leinster

  He fumed again, tempted to defy all common sense because its dictates were not the same for everybody. But he marched away, back to the cubbyhole in which he had awakened. He donned the heat-suit that had not protected him adequately before, but had certainly saved his life, and filled the canteens topping full—he suspected he hadn't done so the last time. He went back to the Project Engineer's office with a feeling of being burdened and absurd.

  Out a filter-window, he saw that men with skins as dark as Dr. Chuka's were at work on a ground car. They were equipping it with a sunshade and curious shields like wings. Somebody pushed a sort of caterwheel handtruck toward it. They put big, heavy tanks into its cargo space. Dr. Chuka had disappeared, but Aletha was back at work making notes from the loose-leaf volume on the desk.

  “May I ask,” asked Bordman with some irony, “what your work happens to be just now?"

  She looked up.

  “I thought you knew!” she said in surprise. “I'm here for the Amerind Historical Society. I can certify coups. I'm taking coup-records for the Society. They'll go in the record cache Ralph and Dr. Chuka are arranging, so no matter what happens to the colony, the record of coups won't be lost."

  “Coups?” demanded Bordman. He knew that Amerinds painted feathers on the key posts of steel structures they'd build, and he knew that the posting of such “coup-marks” was a cherished privilege and undoubtedly a survival or revival of some American Indian tradition back on Earth. But he did not know what they meant.

  “Coups,” repeated Aletha matter-of-factly. “Ralph wears three eagle-feathers. You saw them. He has three coups. Pinions, too! He built the landing-grids on Norlath and—Oh, you don't know!"

  “I don't,” admitted Bordman, his temper not of the best because of what seemed unnecessary condescension on Xosa II.

  Aletha looked surprise.

  “In the old days,” she explained, “back on Earth, if a man scalped an enemy, he counted coup. The first to strike an enemy in battle counted coup, too—a lesser one. Nowadays a man counts coups for different things, but Ralph's three eagle-feathers mean he's entitled to as much respect as a warrior in the old days who, three separate times, had killed and scalped an enemy warrior in the middle of his own camp. And he is, too!"

  Bordman grunted.

  “Barbarous, I'd say!"

  “If you like,” said Aletha. “But it's something to be proud of—and one doesn't count coup for making a lot of money!” Then she paused and said curtly: “The word ‘snobbish’ fits it better than ‘barbarous.’ We are snobs! But when the head of a clan stands up in Council in the Big Teepee on Algonka, representing his clan, and men have to carry the ends of the feather headdress with all the coups the members of his clan have earned—why—one is proud to belong to that clan!” She added defiantly, “Even watching it on a vision-screen!"

  Dr. Chuka opened the outer door. Blinding light poured in. He did not enter, and his body glistened with sweat.

  “Ready for you, Mr. Bordman!"

  Bordman adjusted his goggles and turned on the motors on his heat-suit. He went out the door.

  The heat and light outside was like a blow. He darkened the goggles again and made his way heavily to the waiting, now-shaded ground car. He noted that there were other changes beside the sunshade. The cover deck of the cargo space was gone, and there were cylindrical riding seats like saddles in the back. The odd lower shields reached out sidewise from the body, barely above the caterwheels. He could not make out their purpose and irritably failed to ask.

  “All ready,” said Redfeather. “Dr. Chuka's coming with us. If you'll get in here, please..."

  Bordman climbed awkwardly into the boxlike back of the car. He bestrode one of the cylindrical arrangements. With a saddle on it, it would undoubtedly have been a comfortable way to cover impossibly bad terrain in a mechanical carrier. He waited. About him there were the squatty hulls of the space barges which had been towed here by a colony ship, each one once equipped with rockets for landing. Emptied of their cargos, they had been huddled together into the three separate, adjoining communities. There were separate living-quarters and mess-halls and recreation-rooms for each, and any colonist lived in the community of his choice and shifted at pleasure, or visited, or remained solitary. For mental health a man has to be assured of his free will, and over-regimentation is deadly in any society. With men psychologically suited to colonize, it is fatal.

  Above—but at a distance, now—was the monstrous strip of mountains, colored in glaring and unnatural tints. Immediately about there was raw rock. But it was peculiarly smooth, as if sand-grains had rubbed over it for uncountable aeons and carefully worn away every trace of unevenness. Half a mile to the left, dunes began and went away to the horizon. The nearer ones were small, but they gained in size with distance from the mountains—which evidently affected the surface-winds, hereabouts—and the edge of seeing was visibly not a straight line. The dunes yonder must be gigantic. But of course on a world the size of Earth, and which was waterless save for snow-patches at its poles, the size to which sand-dunes could grow had no limit. The surface of Xosa II was a sea of sand, on which islands and small continents of wind-swept rock were merely minor features.

  Dr. Chuka adjusted a small metal object in his hand. It had a tube dangling from it. He climbed into the cargo space and fastened it to one of the two tanks previously loaded.

  “For you,” he told Bordman. “Those tanks are full of compressed air at rather high pressure—a couple of thousand pounds. Here's a reduction valve with an adiabatic expansion feature, to supply extra air to your heat-suit. It will be pretty cold, expanding from so high a pressure. Bring down the temperature a little more."

  Bordman again felt humiliated. Chuka and Redfeather, because of their races, were able to move about nine-tenths naked in the open air on this planet, and they thrived. But he needed a special refrigerated costume to endure the heat. More, they provided him with sunshades and refrigerated air they did not need themselves. They were thoughtful of him. He was as much out of his element where they fitted perfectly, as he would have been making a degree-of-completion survey on an underwater project. He had to wear what was practically a diving suit and use a special air-supply to survive!

  He choked down the irritation his own inadequacy produced.

  “I suppose we can go now,” he said as coldly as he could.

  Aletha's cousin mounted the control saddle—though it was no more than a blanket—and Dr. Chuka mounted beside Bordman. The ground car got under way. It headed for the mountains.

  The smoothness of the rock was deceptive. The caterwheel car lurched and bumped and swayed and rocked. It rolled and dipped and wallowed. Nobody could have remained in a normal seat on such terrain, but Bordman felt hopelessly undignified riding what amounted to a hobbyhorse. Under the sunshade it was infuriatingly like a horse on a carrousel. That there were three of them together made it look even more foolish. He stared about him, trying to take his mind from his own absurdity. His goggles made the light endurable, but he felt ashamed.

  “Those side-fins,” said Chuka's deep voice pleasantly, “the bottom ones, makes things better for you. The shade overhead cuts off direct sunlight, and they cut off the reflected glare. It would blister your skin even if the sun never touched you directly."

  Bordman did not answer. The caterwheel car went on. It came to a patch of sand—tawny sand, heavily mineralized. There was a dune here. Not a big one for Xosa II, no more than a hundred feet high. But they went up its leeward, steeply slanting side. All the planet seemed to tilt insanely as the caterwheels spun. They reached the dune's crest, where it tended to curl over and break like a water-comber, and here the wheels struggled with sand precariously ready to fall, and Bordman had a sudden perception of the sands of Xosa II as the oceans that they really were. The dunes were waves which moved with infinite slowness, but the irresistible force of storm-seas. Nothing could resist them. Nothing!

  They traveled over si
milar dunes for two miles. Then they began to climb the approaches to the mountains. And Bordman saw for the second time—the first had been through the ports of the landing boat—where there was a notch in the mountain wall and sand had flowed out of it like a waterfall, making a beautifully symmetrical cone-shaped heap against the lower cliffs. There were many such falls. In one place there was a sand-cascade. Sand had poured over a series of rocky steps, piling up on each in turn to its very edge, and then spilling again to the next.

  They went up a crazily slanting spur of stone, whose sides were too steep for sand to lodge on, and whose narrow crest had a bare thin coating of powder.

  The landscape looked like a nightmare. As the car went on, wobbling and lurching and dipping, the heights on either side made Bordman tend to dizziness. The coloring was impossible. The aridness, the desiccation, the lifelessness of everything about was somehow shocking. Bordman found himself straining his eyes for the merest, scrubbiest of bushes and for however stunted and isolated a wisp of grass.

  The journey went on for an hour. Then there came a straining climb up a now-windswept ridge of eroded rock, and then the attainment of its highest point—and then the ground car went onward for a hundred yards and stopped.

  They had reached the top of the mountain range, and there was doubtless another range beyond. But they could not see it. Here, at the place to which they had climbed so effortfully, there were no more rocks. There was no valley. There was no descending slope. There was sand. This was one of the sand-plateaus which were a unique feature of Xosa II. And Bordman knew, now, that the disputed explanation was the true one.

  Winds, blowing over the mountains, carried sand as on other worlds they carried moisture and pollen and seeds and rain. Where two mountain ranges ran across the course of long-blowing winds, the winds eddied above the valley between. They dropped sand into it. The equivalent of trade winds, Bordman considered, in time would fill a valley to the mountain tops, just as trade winds provide moisture in equal quantity on other worlds, and civilizations have been built upon them. But—

  “Well?” said Bordman challengingly.

  “This is the site of the landing-grid,” said Redfeather.

  “Where?"

  “Here,” said the Indian. “A few months ago there was a valley here. The landing-grid had eighteen hundred feet of height built. There was to be four hundred feet more—the lighter top construction justifies my figure of eighty percent completion. Then there was a storm."

  It was hot. Horribly, terribly hot, even here on a plateau at mountain top height. Dr. Chuka looked at Bordman's face and bent down in the vehicle. He turned a stopcock on one of the air tanks brought for Bordman's needs. Immediately Bordman felt cooler. His skin was dry, of course; the circulated air dried sweat as fast as it appeared. But he had the dazed, feverish feeling of a man in an artificial fever box. He'd been fighting it for some time. Now the coolness of the expanded air was almost deliriously refreshing.

  Dr. Chuka produced a canteen. Bordman drank thirstily. The water was slightly salted to replace salt lost in sweat.

  “A storm, eh?” asked Bordman, after a time of contemplation of his inner sensations as well as the scene of disaster before him. There'd be some hundreds of millions of tons of sand in even a section of this plateau. It was unthinkable that it could be removed except by a long-time sweep of changed trade winds along the length of the valley. “But what has a storm to do—?"

  “It was a sandstorm,” said Redfeather curtly. “Probably there was a sunspot flare-up. We don't know. But the pre-colonization survey spoke of sandstorms. The survey team even made estimates of sandfall in various places as so many inches per year. Here all storms drop sand instead of rain. But there must have been a sunspot flare because the storm blew for—” his voice went flat and deliberate because it was stating the unbelievable—"this storm blew for two months. We did not see the sun in all that time. And we couldn't work, naturally. So we waited it out. When it ended, there was a sand plateau where the survey had ordered the landing-grid to be built. The grid was under it. It is still under it. The top of eighteen hundred feet of steel is buried two hundred feet down in the sand you see. Our fabricated building-steel is piled ready for erection—under two thousand feet of sand. Without anything but stored power it is hardly practical"—Redfeather's tone was sardonic—"for us to try to dig it out. There are hundreds of millions of tons of stuff to be moved. If we could get the sand away, we could finish the grid. If we could finish the grid, we'd have power enough to get the sand away—in a few years, and if we could replace the machinery that wore out handling it. And if there wasn't another sandstorm."

  He paused. Bordman took deep breaths of the cooler air. He could think more clearly.

  “If you will accept photographs,” said Redfeather, “you can check that we actually did the work."

  Bordman saw the implications. The colony had been formed of Amerinds for the steel work and Africans for the labor. The Amerinds were congenitally averse to the handling of complex mining-machinery underground and the control of modern high speed smelting operations. Both races could endure this climate and work in it, provided that they had cooled sleeping-quarters. But they had to have power. Power not only to work with, but to live by. The air cooling machinery that made sleep possible also condensed from the cool air that minute trace of water-vapor it contained and that they needed for drink. But without power they would thirst. Without the landing-grid and the power it took from the ionosphere, they could not receive supplies from the rest of the universe. So they would starve.

  Bordman said:

  “I'll accept the photographs. I even accept the statement that the colony will die. I will prepare my report for the cache Aletha tells me you're preparing. And I apologize for any affront I may have offered you."

  Dr. Chuka nodded. He regarded Bordman with benign warmth. Ralph Redfeather said cordially enough:

  “That's perfectly all right. No harm done."

  “And now,” said Bordman, “since I have authority to give any orders needed for my work, I want to survey the steps you've taken to carry out those parts of your instructions dealing with emergencies. I want to see right away what you've done to beat this state of things. I know they can't be beaten, but I intend to leave a report on what you've tried!"

  * * * *

  A fist-fight broke out in the crew's quarters within two hours after the Warlock had established its orbit—a first reaction to their catastrophe. The skipper went though the ship and painstakingly confiscated every weapon. He locked them up. He, himself, already felt the nagging effect of jangling nerves. There was nothing to do. He didn't know when there would ever be anything to do. It was a condition to produce hysteria.

  It was night. Outside and above the colony there were uncountable myriads of stars. They were not the stars of Earth, of course, but Bordman had never been on Earth. He was used to unfamiliar constellations. He stared out a port at the sky, and noted that there were no moons. He remembered, when he thought, that Xosa II had no moons. There was a rustling of paper behind him. Aletha Redfeather turned a page in the loose-leaf volume and made a note. The wall behind her held many more such books. From them could be extracted the detailed history of every bit of work that had been done by the colony-preparation crews. Separate, tersely-phrased items could be assembled to make a record of individual men.

  There had been incredible hardships, at first, and heroic feats. There had been an attempt to ferry water-supplies down from the pole by aircraft. It was not practical, even to build up a reserve of fluid. Winds carried sand particles here as on other worlds they carried moisture. Aircraft were abraded as they flew. The last working flier made a forced landing five hundred miles from the colony. A caterwheel expedition went out and brought the crew in. The caterwheel trucks were armored with silicone plastic, resistant to abrasion, but when they got back they had to be scrapped. Men had been lost in sudden sand squalls, and heroic searches made for them, and
once or twice rescues. There had been cave-ins in the mines, and other accidents.

  Bordman went to the door of the hull which was Ralph Redfeather's office. He opened it, and stepped outside.

  It was like stepping into an oven. The sand was still hot from the sunshine just ended. The air was so utterly dry that Bordman instantly felt it sucking at the moisture of his nasal passages. In ten seconds his feet—clad in indoor footwear—were uncomfortably hot. In twenty the soles of his feet felt as if they were blistering. He would die of the heat even at night here! Perhaps he could endure the outside near dawn, but he raged a little. Here Amerinds and Africans lived and throve, but he could live unprotected for no more than an hour or two—and that at one special time of the planet's rotation!

  He went back in, ashamed of the discomfort of his feet and angrily letting them scorch rather than admit to it.

  Aletha turned another page.

  “Look here!” said Bordman. “No matter what you say, you're going to go back on the Warlock before—"

  She raised her eyes.

  “We'll worry about that when the time comes. But I think not. I'd rather stay here."

  “For the present, perhaps,” snapped Bordman. “But before things get too bad you go back to the ship! They've rocket fuel enough for half a dozen landings of the landing boat. They can lift you out of here."

  Aletha shrugged.

  “Why leave here to board a derelict? The Warlock's practically that. What's your honest estimate of the time before a ship equipped to help us gets here?"

  Bordman would not answer. He'd done some figuring. It had been a two-month journey from Trent, the nearest Survey base, to here. The Warlock had been expected to remain aground until the smelter it brought could load it with pig-metal. Which could be as little as two weeks, but would surprise nobody if it was two months instead. So the ship would be considered overdue for at least two months. It would be six months before anybody seriously wondered why it wasn't back with its cargo. There'd be a wait for lifeboats to come in, should there have been a mishap in space. Eventually a report of non-communication would be made to the Colonial Survey headquarters on Canna III. But it would take three months for that report to be received, and six more for a confirmation—even if ships made the voyages exactly at the most favorable intervals—and then there should at least be a complaint from the colony. There were lifeboats around on Xosa II, for emergency communication, and if a lifeboat didn't bring news of a planetary crisis, no crisis would be considered to exist. Nobody could imagine a landing-grid failing.