CHAPTER II
Vegan World
The engine room was crammed to the roof with machinery. The bulkedhousings of the atomics, their heavy screens shutting off the deadlyradiations generated in the heart of energy seething within the twindomes, were at the front. They looked like two blast furnaces that hadsomehow wandered into a space ship by mistake and hadn't been able tofind their way out again. The fires of hell, hotter than any blastfurnace had ever been, seethed within them.
Behind the atomics were the Kruchek drivers, twin brawny giants chainedto the treadmill they pushed through the skies. Silent now. Notgrumbling at their task. Loafing. Like lazy slaves conscious of theirpower, they worked only when the lash was on them.
Between the drivers was the control panel. Ninety-nine percentautomatic, those controls. They needed little human attention, and gotlittle. There were never more than three men on duty here. This engineroom almost operated itself.
It had ceased to operate itself, Jed Hargraves saw, as he forced openthe last stubborn air-tight door separating the engine room from therest of the ship. Ceased because--Involuntarily he cried out.
He could see the sky.
A great V-shaped notch straddled the back of the ship. Something,striking high on the curve of the hull, had driven through inches ofmagna steel, biting a gigantic chunk out of the ship. The beam from thesphere! That flashing streak of light that had driven through thedefense screen. It had struck here.
"Jed! They're dead!"
That was Ron Val's voice, choking over the radio. One of the men in thisengine room had been Hal Sarkoff, a black-browed giant from somewhere inMontana. Engines had behaved for Sarkoff. Intuitively he had seemed toknow mechanics.
He and Ron Val had been particular friends.
"The air went," Hargraves said. "When that hole was knocked in the hull,the air went. The automatic doors blocked off the rest of the ship. Thepoor devils--"
The air had gone and the cold had come. He could see Sarkoff's bodylying beside one of the drivers. The two other men were across the room.A door to the stern compartment was there. They were crumpled againstit.
Hargraves winced with pain. He should have ordered everyone into spacesuits. The instant Nielson reported the approach of the sphere,Hargraves should have shouted, "Space suits" into the mike. He hadn't.
The receiver in his space suit crisped with sound.
"Jed! Have you got into that engine room yet? For cripes sake, Jed,we're falling."
That was Nielson, on the bridge. He sounded frantic.
Sixteen feet the first second, then thirty-two, then sixty-four. Theyhad miles to fall, but their rate of fall progressed geometrically. Theyhad spent many minutes fighting their way through the air tight doors.One hundred and twenty-eight feet the fourth second. Jed's mind wasracing.
No, by thunder, that was acceleration under an earth gravity. Theydidn't know the gravity here. It might be less.
It might be more.
Ron Val had run forward and was kneeling beside Sarkoff.
"Let them go," Hargraves said roughly. "Ron Val, you check the drivers.You--" Swiftly he assigned them tasks, reserving the control panel forhimself.
* * * * *
They were specialists. Noble, the blond youth, frantically examining theatomics, was a bio-chemist. Ushur, the powerfully built man who hadstood at Ron Val's right hand on the negatron, was an archeologist.
They were engineers now. They had to be.
"Nothing seems to be wrong here." That was Ron Val, from the drivers.
"The atomics are working." That was Noble reporting.
"Then what the hell is wrong?" At the control panel, Hargraves saw whatwas wrong. The damned controls were automatic, with temperature and airpressure cut-offs. When the air had gone from the engine room, thatmeant something was wrong. The controls had automatically cut off thedrivers. The ship had stopped moving.
A manual control was provided. Hargraves shoved the switch home. Anoil-immersed control thudded. The loafing giants grunted as the lashstruck them, roared with pain as they got hastily to work on theirtreadmill.
The ship moved forward.
"We're moving!" That was Red Nielson shouting. The controls on thebridge were responding now. "I'm going to burn a hole in space gettingus away from here."
"No!" said Hargraves.
"What?" There was incredulous doubt in Nielson's voice. "That damnedsphere came from this planet."
"Can't help it. We've got to land."
"Land here, now!"
"There's a hole as big as the side of a house in the ship. No air in theengine room. Without air, we can't control the temperature. If we gointo space, the engine room temperature will drop almost to absolutezero. These drivers are not designed to work in that temperature, andthey won't work in it. We have to land and repair the ship before wedare go into space."
"But--"
"We land here!"
There was a split second of silence. "Okay, Jed," Nielson said. "But ifwe run into another of those spheres--"
"We'll know what to do about it. Ron Val. Ushur. Back to the bridge andman the negatron. If you see anything that even looks suspicious, beamit."
Ron Val and Usher dived through the door that led forward.
"Stern observation post. Are you alive back there?"
"We heard you, Jed. We're alive all right."
Back of the engine room, tucked away in the stern, was another negatron.
"Shoot on sight!" Hargraves said.
The Third Interstellar Expedition was coming in to land--with her fangsbared.
Jed Hargraves called a volunteer to hold the switch--it had to be heldin by hand, otherwise it would automatically kick out again--and wentforward to the bridge. Red Nielson gladly relinquished the controls tohim.
"The sphere crashed over there," Nielson said, waving vaguely to theright.
* * * * *
Not until he stepped on the bridge did Jed Hargraves realize how close acall they had had. The fight had started well outside the upper limitsof the atmosphere. They were well inside it now. Another few minutes andthey would have screamed to a flaming crash here on this world and theThird Interstellar Expedition would have accomplished only half itsmission, the least important half.
He shoved the nose of the ship down, the giants working eagerly at theirtreadmill now, as if they realized they had been caught loafing on thejob and were trying to make amends. The planet swam up toward them. Hebarely heard the voice of Noble reporting a chemical test of the airthat was now swirling around the ship. "--oxygen, so much; water vapor;nitrogen--" The air was breathable. They would not have to attemptrepairs in space suits, then.
Abruptly, as they dropped lower, the contour of the planet seemed tochange from the shape of a ball to the shape of a cup. The eyes didthat. The eyes were tricky. But Jed knew his eyes were not tricking himwhen they brought him impressions of the surface below them.
A gently rolling world sweeping away into the distance, moving leagueafter league into dim infinities, appeared before his eyes. Nomountains, no hills, even. Gentle slopes rolling slowly downward intoplains. No large rivers. Small streams winding among trees. Almostimmediately below them was one of the lakes Ron Val had seen throughhis telescope. The lake was alive with blue light reflected fromthe--No, the light came from Vega, not Sol. They were light years awayfrom the warming rays of the friendly sun.
Jed lowered the ship until she barely cleared the ground, sent herslowly forward seeking what he wanted. There was a grove of giant treesbeside the lake. Overhead their foliage closed in an arch that would cutout the sight of the sky. This was what he wanted. He turned the shiparound.
"Hey!" said Nielson.
"I'm going to back her out of sight among those trees," Hargravesanswered. "I'm hunting a hole to hide in while we lie up and lick ourwounds."
Overhead, boughs crashed as the ship slid out of sight. Gently herelaxed the
controls, let her drop an inch at a time until she rested onthe ground. Then he opened the switches, and grunting with relief, thegiants laid themselves down on their treadmill and promptly went tosleep. For the first time in months the ship was silent.
"Negatron crews remain at your posts. I'm going to take a look."
The lock hissed as it opened before him. Hargraves, Nielson, Noble,stepped out, the captain going first. The ground was only a couple offeet away but he lowered himself to it with the precise caution that atwenty-foot jump would have necessitated. He was not unaware of theimplications of this moment. His was the first human foot to tread thesoil of a planet circling Vega. The great-grand-children of hisgreat-grand-children would tell their sons about this.
The soil was springy under his feet, possessing an elasticity that hehad not remembered as natural with turf. Opening his helmet, he sniffedthe air. It was cool and alive with a heady fragrance that came fromgrowing vegetation, a quality the ship's synthesizers, for all theingenuity incorporated in them, could not duplicate. Tasting the air,the cells of his lungs eagerly shouted for more. He sucked it in, andthe tensions that kept his body all steel springs and whipcord relaxed alittle. A breeze stirred among the trees.
"Sweet Pete!" he gasped.
"That's what I was trying to tell you as we landed," Nielson said. "Thisis not a forest. This is a grove. These trees didn't just grow here instraight orderly lines. They were _planted_! We are hiding in what maybe the equivalent of somebody's apple orchard."
The trees were giants. Twenty feet through at the butt, they rose ahundred feet into the air. Diminishing in the distance, they moved inregular rows down to the shore of the lake, forming a pleasant grovemiles in extent. A reddish fruit, not unlike apples, grew on them.
If this was an orchard, where was the owner?
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