Alice: The Girl From Earth

by Kir Bulychev

  “Get out of here! Run!” I shouted at Alice. “I won’t be able to hold them off for long!”

  The bushes were resolute, with strong branches they clutched at the mop and tried to tear it out of my hands. I backed off.

  “Hold on, pop!” Alice said, and ran off.

  At least Alice is safe, I thought. My own situation continued to remain perilous. The bushes were trying to force me into a corner, and I couldn’t even move the mop.

  “Why does Zeleny want the flamethrower?” I heard Captain Poloskov’s voice over the loudspeaker. “What’s going on.”

  “The bushes are attacking.” I answered. “But don’t give Zeleny the flamethrower. I’m trying to contain them in their section. As soon as I can get them back through the lock I’ll let you know and we can seal the cargo section.”

  “You’re not in any danger, are you?” Poloskov asked.

  “Not at the moment.” I answered.

  And at that very moment the nearest bush had yanked on the mop and pulled it out of my hands. The mop flew to the furthest end of the corridor, and the bushes, as though buoyed by my now by my now unarmed state, moved toward me in close order.

  At that moment I heard rapid steps approaching from behind.

  “Get away, Alice!” I shouted. “Get back this instant! They’re as strong as lions!”

  But Alice crawled beneath my legs and threw herself at the bushes.

  She had something large and shining in her hands. I tried to grab her as she passed but lost my balance and fell. The last thing I saw was Alice surrounded by the threatening branches of the moving bushes.

  “Poloskov!” I shouted. “I need help now!’

  And at that very instant the bushes singing stopped! It turned into low humming and a sigh.

  I got to my feet and surveyed a picture of absolute tranquility.

  Alice was standing in a thicket of bushes and was watering them from a garden can.

  The bushes had their leaves turned into little cups, trying not to loose a single drop of moisture, and sighed blissfully.

  When we moved the bushes back into the hold we found the broken mop and wiped the floor, and I asked Alice:

  “But how did you guess it?”

  “It wasn’t all that special, Pop. The bushes are plants, aren’t they? That means they have to be watered. Like carrots. And we did dig them out of the ground, we moved them into plastic pots filled with sand, and we forgot to water them. When Zeleny grabbed me to try and save me, it gave me a chance to think: at home they live right at the edge of a spring. The Third Captain only found them and the water because of their singing, and they only sing when there’s a sand storm coming, that is when the wind is moving and drying out the air and pulls water from the sand. That’s when they’re agitated because they don’t have enough water. “

  “Why didn’t you say so immediately?”

  “Would you have believed me. You were fighting them like they were tigers. You completely forgot they were just ordinary bushes who have to be watered.”

  “Not at all ordinary!” The Engineer Zeleny cut in. “Ordinary bushes do not go hunting for water down the corridors of a space ship!”

  Then it was my turn, as the biologist, to have the last word.

  “That’s just how these bushes engage in the struggle for existence.” I said. “There’s little water in the desert, the springs dry up periodically, and to stay alive the bushes are forced to move to where the water is.”

  Since then the bushes have lived peacefully in their pots of sand. Only one of them, the smallest and least settled in, often pulls its roots out of the pot and lies in wait for us in the corridors of the ship, rustling its branches, singing and asking for water. I asked Alice not to reward the young scamp the roots drip onto the floor but Alice took pity on him and kept bringing him glasses of water. That was really nothing we couldn’t live with, but once she watered him with fruit juice instead of water and now the little bush has become such a pest you can’t walk down the ship without him getting in your way; he traipses around the ship leaving wet root marks behind, stupidly jabbing at people’s legs with his leaves.

  There wasn’t a penny’s worth of intelligence in him, but he loves fruit juice more than a million dollars.

  Chapter Seven

  The Mystery of the Empty Planet

  “Where to first?” Poloskov asked.

  He was examining the space map. The course to Palaputra, where we would find the market in animals, was laid out on it. At the same time a dotted line noted our course toward the Empty Planet described to us by Doctor Verkhovtseff.

  “We can always go to Palaputra.” I answered, “But the Empty Planet isn’t noted in a single guide to space. Why not take the risk?”

  “But even doctor Verkhovtseff himself said all the animals had vanished. Maybe they all died and we’ll just be wasting our time.”

  “And our fuel is getting tight.” Zeleny interjected himself into the conversation. “Whatever else Palaputra has, we can replenish our fuel supplies there. Can we do that on the Empty Planet? We could find ourselves there, out of fuel, and waiting until someone else passes by.”

  But we ignored Zeleny. He is simply a pessimist. We were both certain that we had more than enough fuel to last us. He just wanted to be doubly careful.

  “So I say,” I said, “Let’s look in on the Empty planet. It’s a mystery, and there’s nothing more interesting on any world than figuring out a mystery.”

  So we set course for the Empty Planet.

  Unfortunately, after two days’ flight it appeared that Doctor Verkhovtseff’s coordinates had been less than precise. We should have been able to see the star around which this planet orbited after our last jump, but before us was emptiness.

  What could we do? We decided to continue on course for yet one more day, and if nothing had changed then, to abandon the search for the planet.

  We reached that decision toward evening, before supper, and after supper Zeleny headed for the com center to inform Earth that our flight was proceeding normally and that everything was in order. I followed after Zeleny.

  When Zeleny turned on the receiver and listened to Space I liked being there, listening when uninhabited emptiness came alive. We could hear distant ships and bases communicating, ships acknowledging each other and automatic buoys transmitting information from uninhabited planets and asteroids about local conditions, space ‘weather’ reports about meteorite swarms and pulsar stars.

  While Zeleny prepared the transmission I flipped the receiver switch.

  Suddenly I heard a female voice come in weakly.

  “Located in sector 16-2, have noted previously unknown meteorite stream in the Blooke system. In three days time the stream will intersect the Blooke to Fyxx passenger lane. Please advise all ships.”

  “We’re right in that sector.” I told Zeleny.

  “I heard.” Zeleny answered; he had already jotted the transmission down and begun to enter the information from the unknown ship into the log.

  “And since that ship is in our sector, let’s ask it about the Empty Planet.” I said to Zeleny. “It could be we’ve gone off course.”

  Zeleny said the ship had to be too far from us to pick us up, that our transmitter would undoubtedly fail, that the woman who was warning of meteors would know less than nothing about the planet, because the planet did not exist, as he grumbled and at the same time twisted the control knobs of the transmitter and, when the unknown ship took our call, he said:

  “Starship Pegasus speaking. We are currently in your sector and are headed for the Empty Planet but we can’t even spot the star.”

  “Give me your co-ordinates.” The woman’s voice answered. “I’ll recheck it for you.”

  We called the bridge and Poloskov gave us the coordinates. We passed them along per instructions.

  “It’s all clear.” The woman’s voice answered. “There is a cloud of cosmic dust between you and the star, so of course you can’
t see it. Your next jump should take you through the cloud.”

  “Enormous thanks.” I said to the unknown ship. “We were given the coordinates of the planet on the Three Captains’ World, but our source was not an astronaut but a museum administrator, and we were afraid he erred.”

  “Doctor Verkhovtseff?” Then woman’s voice asked.

  “Yes. You know him then?”

  “I know him very well.” The woman answered. “He’s a marvelous old man. Simply wonderful. If only we had met earlier; I have a letter to pass on to him but there’s no way I can stop in there. Not for a while. Any chance you will be heading back that way?”

  “None.” I answered. “From here we go on to Blooke, to Palaputra. We’re biologists looking for rare animals.”

  “So am I.” The woman answered. “We may very well have met, but there’s no time for that now. I have to be off in a hurry. I’m hunting a living cloud.”

  “One last question.” I said. “Have you ever been on the Empty Planet yourself?”

  “I certainly have.” The woman answered. “The seas were overflowing with fish, but there wasn’t a single animal on dry land. Good luck.”

  Then all that came out of the speakers was the meaningless hum of static.

  “She’s accelerating at full speed.” Zeleny said. “She’s heading off somewhere. What’s this about a living cloud?”

  “There are no such things as living clouds.” I said. “I met this woman at some conference or other and told her that she was utterly mistaken. You heard her opinion of Doctor Verkhovtseff? A ‘marvelous old man.’“

  “Well, I still don’t trust him.” Zeleny grumbled. “If he was so marvelous and wonderful why did he lie to us? Why is he writing a novel and then not writing it? Why does he swear that he hasn’t been to Arcturus Minor for six months? And why didn’t he want to show us the Three Captains’ notebooks?”

  Zeleny went back to the receiver.

  The woman was right. The next day after the jump we spotted a small star on our sensors around which orbited but a single planet. Judging from everything we had been told, that had to be the Empty Planet.

  We set down toward sunset on the shores of a large lake, at the edge of an endless plain overgrown to fearturelessness by a yellowing grass. A light rain, long and boring, kept us on the ship in front of the ports through which we saw neither beasts nor birds. What if this place was in fact devoid of animal forms?

  Alice and Zeleny headed to the lake for water. They were a while in returning, but I did not become alarmed as I could clearly see them occupied with something along the shore through the ship’s ports.

  Then Zeleny returned’ he headed not for the bridge, but for his own cabin.

  “What have you looking for?” I asked him through his com unit.

  “Fishing tackle.” Zeleny answered. “There’s so many fish in that lake they turn the water black! We started to scoop water into the bucket and it was full of fish. Don’t you want fresh fish soup, Professor?”

  “No.” I answered. “And I must advise you against eating what you find here too. There are poisonous fish even on earth, and adding anything found on another planet to your diet without a lot of tests is just plain thoughtless.”

  “Ah weel….” Zeleny said. “Then I’ll just have to add to your collection the hard way.”

  Zeleny ran back to the shore, and I grabbed Alice’s rain coat to keep her from catching acold, grabbed a net, and headed for the lake.

  Zeleny disdained the net for catching fish, declaring that it was not sporting, and he was a sportsman. But Alice and I filled the whole bucket. We carried our fish back to the ship. A sodden Zeleny followed after us, his catch in a fish tank.

  “Don’t forget to close the ship for the night.” I said; we left the containers with our hauls in the main airlock.

  “Of course I won’t!” Zeleny’s excited voice came back; he was so entranced with the local fishing he would have stayed at the lake all night, except it had become dark.

  In the morning the first thing I did was look out the ports. The sun was shining brightly and multitudes of birds circled overhead

  “That’s the ‘Empty Planet.’“ I said aloud and went to awaken my friends. “Come look at the Empty Planet.” I repeated. “Yesterday we caught fish, today the birds are circling overhead in monstrous flocks.”

  I awakened Alice and Poloskov, but Zeleny had already gotten up ahead of me. He had lain out his assorted lures and other types of fishing tackle.

  “I have to get ready for the big one.” He told me. “I can feel in my bones there are pikes as long as I am tall.”

  “Just be careful.” I answered. “Watch out that no pike catches you.”

  Then I went down to the airlock to take a closer look at the birds. I noticed one distressing detail; it turns out that, intoxicated with the joy of reel and tackle, our Engineer forgot to close the Pegasus’s outer airlock door for the night. No animals had managed to get inside, but we had lost every last one of our fish. Evidently the birds had noticed the open airlock and had dropped by for and early morning snack, claiming all our catch from the night before.

  “This is a very serious violation of space discipline.” Poloskov said over breakfast when he heard of Zeleny’s blunder. “But I am guilty of it to

  o, as is the Professor. We both were required to check the airlocks for the night.”

  “But nothing really happened.” Alice said. “ Zeleny and I can fill a dozen buckets with fish. You can’t imagine how many fish there are in that lake!”

  “That is not the point.” Poloskov sighed. “If such an incident happens again we might as well turn around and go back home, because it means we are all far too thoughtless to be running around in space.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain.” Zeleny said. He understood, of course, that he had made a mess of things, but thoughts of fishing had so overcome him that a moment later he was off for the lake.

  I prepared the nets for catching birds and pulled out the air powered rifles with the anaesthetic darts. Then I steeled myself for hunting birds. Zeleny sat on the shore of the lake, and I watched him out of the corners of my eyes. I was surprised that he appeared so downcast. “Now why would he be upset?” I wondered.

  Then the weather unexpectedly grew worse. A strong wind came up; it drove the birds from the sky and raised whitecaps on the lake. In a few minutes there wasn’t a single bird left in the sky. They had gone and taken refuge elsewhere.

  Zeleny got to his feet and headed back to the ship.

  I decided to return the nets to the ship out the bad weather and the return of the birds.

  “How did it go?” I asked Zeleny. “Care to show me your catch?”

  “There is no catch.” Zeleny answered. “Not a bite.”

  “How come? Didn’t you yourself say the lake was literally overflowing with fish?”

  “Yesterday it was. But now, evidently, all the fish have gone to the bottom.”

  “And my birds have dispersed.” I said. “So it looks like both of us are out of luck. We can wait a while until the weather clears. Care to drop by the lake in the evening? Maybe that’s the only time they bite.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t believe in this planet.” Zeleny said mournfully. “They certainly didn’t call it the Empty Planet without reason. There were fish, but they’re not here now. There were birds, but the birds have flown.”

  “Look!” Alice called; she had been standing close by and listening to our conversation. “It’s a rabbit. See!”

  Some sort of small animal was jumping through the grass. Another animal, a little larger, was chasing the first. We weren’t able to get a very good look at them, and then both vanished; only the grass rustled in the wind.

  “There you are!” I said. “This is not an ‘empty planet.’ There are animals here.”

  “And the animals will vanish too in their turn.” Zeleny said. “Remember what Verkhovtseff said? Of course I don’t believe anything
Verkhovtseff says but…”

  “Zeleny,” I said, “Let’s a check to see where your fish have gone. I’ll send a bioscout into the lake. I’ll program it to search for fish; as soon as it catches sight of one it will signal us.”

  “Whatever you want.” Zeleny said. “Only there are no fish in that lake now. I’m a fisherman from way back; I know when a lake is empty.”

  I carted a bioscout from the Pegasus and released it into the lake. The bioscout had a waterproof casing and its own engine and power supplies. I put on the earphones and waited for a signal. The instruments showed that the bioscout had reached the very bottom of then lake, then went further from shore toward the middle. But no signal came. After half an hour I was forced to end the search. The bioscout would not err, and there was not a single fish in the lake.

  If I had not dragged fish from the water yesterday with my own hands I would never have believed that such a thing could happen, I had to admit. Verkhovtseff was right; this planet was strange.

  “I’d say the same.” Zeleny added, folded up his fishing rod, and went into the ship.

  “There’s an enormous herd of antelope like critters on the horizon.” The loudspeaker said.

  That was Poloskov from up top in the command section

  But even without him scouting I already knew that the plains were flooded with animals. Things like field mice ran through the grass, a suslik was crawling all over a bush not far from where I stood, and some sort of creature very similar to a little bear was walking along the shore of the lake.

  “Nothing all that terrible.” I said. “Let’s ready the ATV and catch some critters.”

  But as soon as we had gotten the All Terrain Vehicle from the Pegasus it began to pour. The rain pounded down from the heavens far fiercer than it had the day before; it struck without warning and pounded the ATV’s roof like a mad drummer. Alice and I crawled inside and, ignoring the drumbeat of the rain, headed off for the plains where Poloskov had spotted the herd of antelope.