The Planet Explorer

by Murray Leinster

  He found Nugget, the cub, ambling uneasily in his wake. The cub flattened his ears miserably when Bordman glanced at him. It occurred to the man that Nugget was receiving a lot of disciplinary thumpings from Faro Nell. He was knocked about psychologically. His lack of information and unfitness for independent survival in this environment was being hammered into him.

  “Hi, Nugget,” said Bordman ruefully. “I feel just about the way you do!"

  Nugget brightened visibly. He frisked. He tended to gambol. He looked hopefully up into Bordman's face.

  The man reached out and patted Nugget's head. It was the first time in his life that he'd ever petted an animal.

  He heard a snuffling sound behind him. Skin crawled at the back of his neck. He whirled.

  Faro Nell regarded him—eighteen hundred pounds of she-bear only ten feet away and looking into his eyes. For one panicky moment Bordman went cold all over. Then he realized that Faro Nell's eyes were not burning. She was not snarling, nor did she emit those blood-curdling sounds which the bare prospect of danger to Nugget had produced up on the rocky spur. She looked at him blandly. In fact, after a moment she swung off on some independent investigation of a matter that had aroused her curiosity.

  The traveling-party went on, Nugget frisking beside Bordman and tending to bump into him out of pure cub-clumsiness. Now and again he looked adoringly at Bordman, in the instant and overwhelming affection of the very young.

  Bordman trudged on. Presently he glanced behind again. Faro Nell was now ranging more widely. She was well satisfied to have Nugget in the immediate care of a man. From time to time he got on her nerves.

  A little while later Bordman called ahead.

  “Huyghens! Look here! I've been appointed nursemaid to Nugget!"

  Huyghens looked back.

  “Oh, slap him a few times and he'll go back to his mother."

  “The devil I will!” said Bordman. “I like it!"

  The traveling-party went on.

  When night fell, they camped. There could be no fire, of course, because all the minute night-things about would come to dance in the glow. But there could not be darkness, equally, because night-walkers hunted in the dark. So Huyghens set out barrier-lamps which made a wall of twilight around their halting-place, and the stag-like creature Faro Nell had carried became their evening meal. Then they slept—at least the men did—and the bears dozed and snorted and waked and dozed again. Semper sat immobile with his head under his wing on a tree limb. Presently there was a glorious cool hush and all the world glowed in morning-light diffused through the jungle by a newly risen sun. Then they arose and pushed on.

  This day they stopped stock-still for two hours while sphexes puzzled over the trail the bears had left. Huyghens discoursed on the need of an anti-scent, to be used on the boots of men and the paws of bears, which would make the following of their trails unpopular with sphexes. Bordman seized upon the idea and suggested that a sphex-repellent odor might be worked out, which would make a human revolting to a sphex. If that were done, humans could go freely about, unmolested.

  “Like stink-bugs,” said Huyghens, sardonically. “A very intelligent idea! Very rational! You can feel proud!"

  And suddenly Bordman was not proud of the idea at all.

  They camped again. On the third night they were at the base of that remarkable formation, the Sere Plateau, which from a distance looked like a mountain range but was actually a desert table-land. It was not reasonable for a desert to be raised high, while lowlands had rain, but on the fourth morning they found out why. They saw, far, far away, a truly monstrous mountain-mass at the end of the long expanse of the plateau. It was like the prow of a ship. It lay, so Huyghens observed, directly in line with the prevailing winds, and divided them as a ship's prow divides the waters. The moisture-bearing air-currents flowed beside the plateau, not over it, and its interior was desert in the unscreened sunshine of the high altitudes.

  It took them a full day to get halfway up the slope. And here, twice, as they climbed, Semper flew screaming over aggregations of sphexes to one side of them or the other. These were much larger groups than Huyghens had ever seen before, fifty to a hundred monstrosities together, where a dozen was a large hunting-pack elsewhere. He looked in the screen which showed him what Semper saw, four to five miles away. The sphexes padded uphill toward the Sere Plateau in a long line. Fifty—sixty—seventy tan-and-azure beasts out of hell.

  “I'd hate to have that bunch jump us,” he said candidly to Bordman. “I don't think we'd stand a chance."

  “Here's where a robot tank would be useful,” Bordman observed.

  “Anything armored,” conceded Huyghens. “One man in an armored station like mine would be safe. But if he killed a sphex he'd be besieged. He'd have to stay holed up, breathing the smell of the dead sphex, until the odor'd gone away. And he mustn't kill any others or he'd be besieged until winter came."

  Bordman did not suggest the advantages of robots in other directions. At that moment, for example, they were working their way up a slope which averaged fifty degrees. The bears climbed without effort despite their burdens. For the men it was infinite toil. Semper, the eagle, manifested impatience with bears and men alike, who crawled so slowly up an incline over which he soared.

  He went ahead up the mountainside and teetered in the air-currents at the plateau's edge. Huyghens looked in the vision-plate by which he reported.

  “How the devil,” panted Bordman, panting—they had stopped for a breather, and the bears waited patiently for them—"how do you train bears like this? I can understand Semper."

  “I don't train them,” said Huyghens, staring into the plate. “They're mutations. In heredity the sex-linkage of physical characteristics is standard stuff. There's also been some sound work done on the gene-linkage of psychological factors. There was need, on my home planet, for an animal who could fight like a fiend, live off the land, carry a pack and get along with men at least as well as dogs do. In the old days they'd have tried to breed the desired physical properties in an animal who already had the personality they wanted. Something like a giant dog, say. But back home they went at it the other way about. They picked the wanted physical characteristics and bred for the personality, the psychology. The job got done over a century ago. The Kodiak bear named Kodius Champion was the first real success. He had everything that was wanted. These bears are his descendants."

  “They look normal,” commented Bordman.

  “They are!” said Huyghens warmly. “Just as normal as an honest dog! They're not trained, like Semper. They train themselves!” He looked back into the plate in his hands, which showed the ground six or seven thousand feet higher. “Semper, now, is a trained bird without too much brain. He's educated—a glorified hawk. But the bears want to get along with men. They're emotionally dependent on us. Like dogs. Semper's a servant, but they're companions and friends. He's trained, but they're loyal. He's conditioned. They love us. He'd abandon me if he ever realized he could; he thinks he can only eat what men feed him. But the bears wouldn't want to. They like us. I admit I like them. Maybe because they like me."

  Bordman said deliberately:

  “Aren't you a trifle loose-tongued, Huyghens? You've told me something that will locate and convict the people who set you up here. It shouldn't be hard to find where bears were bred for psychological mutations. I can find out where you came from now, Huyghens!"

  Huyghens looked up from the plate with its tiny swaying television image.

  “No harm done,” he said amiably. “I'm a criminal there, too. It's officially on record that I kidnapped these bears and escaped with them. Which, on my home planet, is about as heinous a crime as a man can commit. It's worse than horse-theft back on Earth in the old days. The kin and cousin of my bears are highly thought of. I'm quite a criminal, back home."

  Bordman stared.

  “Did you steal them?” he demanded.

  “Confidentially,” said Huyghens. “No. But prove
it!” Then he said: “Take a look in this plate. See what Semper can see up at the plateau's edge."

  Bordman squinted aloft, where the eagle flew in great sweeps and dashes. Somehow, by the experience of the past few days, Bordman knew that Semper was screaming fiercely as he flew. He made a dart toward the plateau's border.

  Bordman looked at the transmitter picture. It was only four inches by six, but it was perfectly without grain and accurate in color. It moved and turned as the camera-bearing eagle swooped and circled. For an instant the screen showed the steeply sloping mountainside, and off at one edge the party of men and bears could be seen as dots. Then it swept away and showed the top of the plateau.

  There were sphexes. A pack of two hundred trotted toward the desert interior. They moved at leisure, in the open. The viewing camera reeled, and there were more. As Bordman watched and as the bird flew higher, he could see still other sphexes moving up over the edge of the plateau from a small erosion-defile here and another one there. The Sere Plateau was alive with the hellish creatures. It was inconceivable that there should be game enough for them to live on. They were visible as herds of cattle would be visible on grazing planets.

  It was simply impossible.

  “Migrating,” observed Huyghens. “I said they did. They're headed somewhere. Do you know, I doubt that it would be healthy for us to try to cross the Plateau through such a swarm of sphexes!"

  Bordman swore, in abrupt change of mood.

  “But the signal's still coming through. Somebody's alive over at the robot colony. Must we wait till the migration's over?"

  “We don't know,” Huyghens pointed out, “that they'll stay alive. They may need help badly. We have to get to them. But at the same time—"

  He glanced at Sourdough Charley and Sitka Pete, clinging patiently to the mountainside while the men rested and talked. Sitka had managed to find a place to sit down, one massive paw anchoring him in place.

  Huyghens waved his arms, pointing in a new direction.

  “Let's go!” he called briskly. “Let's go! Yonder! Hup!"

  They followed the slopes of Sere Plateau, neither ascending to its level top—where the sphexes congregated—nor descending into the foothills where sphexes assembled. They moved along hillsides and mountain-flanks which sloped anywhere from thirty to sixty degrees, and they did not cover much territory. They practically forgot what it was to walk on level ground.

  At the end of the sixth day, they camped on top of a massive boulder which projected from a mountainous stony wall. There was barely enough room on the boulder for all the party. Faro Nell fussily insisted that Nugget should be in the safest part, which meant near the mountain-flank. She would have crowded the men outward, but Nugget whimpered for Bordman. Wherefore, when Bordman moved to comfort him, Faro Nell drew back and snorted at Sitka and Sourdough and they made room for her near the edge.

  It was a hungry camp. They had come upon tiny rills upon occasion, flowing down the mountainside. Here the bears had drunk deeply and the men had filled canteens. But this was the third night on the mountainside, and there had been no game at all. Huyghens made no move to bring out food for Bordman or himself. Bordman made no comment. He was beginning to participate in the relationship between bears and men, which was not the slavery of the bears but something more. It was two-way. He felt it.

  “You'd think,” he said, “that since the sphexes don't seem to hunt on their way uphill, there should be some game. They ignore everything as they file up."

  This was true enough. The normal fighting formation of sphexes was line abreast, which automatically surrounded anything which offered to flee and outflanked anything which offered fight. But here they ascended the mountain in long files, one after the other, apparently following long-established trails. The wind blew along the slopes and carried scent sideways. But the sphexes were not diverted from their chosen paths. The long processions of hideous blue-and-tawny creatures—it was hard to think of them as natural beasts, male and female and laying eggs like reptiles on other planets—the long processions simply climbed.

  “There've been other thousands of beasts before them,” said Huyghens. “They must have been crowding this way for days or even weeks. We've seen tens of thousands in Semper's camera. They must be uncountable, altogether. The first-comers ate all the game there was, and the last-comers have something else on whatever they use for minds."

  Bordman protested:

  “But so many carnivores in one place is impossible! I know they are here, but they can't be!"

  “They're cold-blooded,” Huyghens pointed out. “They don't burn food to sustain body-temperature. After all, lots of creatures go for long periods without eating. Even bears hibernate. But this isn't hibernation—or estivation, either."

  He was setting up the radiation-wave receiver in the darkness. There was no point of attempting a fix here. The transmitter was on the other side of the sphex-crowded Sere Plateau. The men and bears would commit suicide by crossing here.

  Even so, Huyghens turned on the receiver. There came the whispering, scratchy sound of background-noise, and then the signal. Three dots, three dashes, three dots. Huyghens turned it off. Bordman said:

  “Shouldn't we have answered that signal before we left the station? To encourage them?"

  “I doubt they have a receiver,” said Huyghens. “They won't expect an answer for months, anyhow. They'd hardly listen all the time, and if they're living in a mine-tunnel and trying to sneak out for food to stretch their supplies, they'll be too busy to try to make complicated records or relays."

  Bordman was silent for a moment or two.

  “We've got to get food for the bears,” he said presently. “Nugget's weaned, and he's hungry."

  “We will,” Huyghens promised. “I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the number of sphexes climbing the mountain is less than yesterday and the day before. We may have just about crossed the path of their migration. They're thinning out. When we're past their trail, we'll have to look out for night-walkers and the like again. But I think they wiped out all animal life on their migration-route."

  He was not quite right. He was waked in darkness by the sound of slapping and the grunting of bears. Feather-light puffs of breeze beat upon his face. He struck his belt-lamp sharply and the world was hidden by a whitish film which snatched itself away. Something flapped. Then he saw the stars and the emptiness on the edge of which they camped. Then big white things flapped toward him.

  Sitka Pete whuffed mightily and swatted. Faro Nell grunted and swung. She caught something in her claws.

  “Watch this!” said Huyghens.

  More things strangely-shaped and pallid like human skin reeled and flapped crazily toward him.

  A huge hairy paw reached up into the light-beam and snatched a flying thing out of it. Another great paw. The three great Kodiaks were on their hind legs, swatting at creatures which flittered insanely, unable to resist the fascination of the glaring lamp. Because of their wild gyrations it was impossible to see them in detail, but they were those unpleasant night-creatures which looked like plucked flying monkeys but were actually something quite different.

  The bears did not snarl or snap. They swatted, with a remarkable air of business-like competence and purpose. Small mounds of broken things built up about their feet.

  Suddenly there were no more. Huyghens snapped off the light. The bears crunched and fed busily in the darkness.

  “Those things are carnivores and blood-suckers, Bordman,” said Huyghens calmly. “They drain their victims of blood like vampire-bats—they've some trick of not waking them—and when they're dead the whole tribe eats. But bears have thick fur, and they wake when they're touched. And they're omnivorous. They'll eat anything but sphexes, and like it. You might say those night-creatures came to lunch. They are it, for the bears, who are living off the country as usual."

  Bordman uttered a sudden exclamation. He made a tiny light, and blood flowed down his hand. Huyghens pas
sed over his pocket kit of antiseptic and bandages. Bordman stanched the bleeding and bound up his hand. Then he realized that Nugget chewed on something. When he turned the light, Nugget swallowed convulsively. It appeared that he had caught and devoured the creature which had drawn blood from Bordman. But he'd lost none to speak of, at that.

  In the morning they started along the sloping scarp of the plateau once more. After marching silently for awhile, Bordman said:

  “Robots wouldn't have handled those vampire-things, Huyghens."

  “Oh, they could be built to watch for them,” said Huyghens, tolerantly. “But you'd have to swat for yourself. I prefer the bears."

  He led the way on. Twice Huyghens halted to examine the ground about the mountains’ bases through binoculars. He looked encouraged as they went on. The monstrous peak which was like the prow of a ship at the end of the Sere Plateau was visibly nearer. Toward midday, indeed, it loomed high above the horizon, no more than fifteen miles away. And at midday Huyghens called a final halt.

  “No more congregations of sphexes down below,” he said cheerfully, “and we haven't seen a climbing line of them in miles.” The crossing of sphex-trail had meant simply waiting until one party had passed, and then crossing before another came into view. “I've a hunch we've left their migration route behind. Let's see what Semper tells us!"

  He waved the eagle aloft. Like all creatures other than men, the bird normally functioned only for the satisfaction of his appetite, and then tended to loaf or sleep. He had ridden the last few miles perched on Sitka Pete's pack. Now he soared upward and Huyghens watched in the small vision-plate.

  Semper went soaring. The image on the plate swayed and turned, and in minutes was above the plateau's edge. Here there were some patches of brush and the ground rolled a little. But as Semper towered higher still, the inner desert appeared. Nearby, it was clear of beasts. Only once, when the eagle banked sharply and the camera looked along the long dimension of the plateau, did Huyghens see any sign of the blue-and-tan beasts. There he saw what looked like masses amounting to herds. Incredible, of course; carnivores do not gather in herds.