Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03]
Page 5
Don smiled and turned a corner of the corridor. There were two very small windows in the wall.
“That,” Don said, indicating the nearest, “contains a six-inch high being who claims his entire race lives in space ships scattered around the galaxy, with their home planet long since vanished. (Pic. N)
“And that,” indicating the other window, “is an inch-high fellow suspected of being more plant than animal. All the way from one of the Messier galaxies. (Pic. O)
“But here,” he said dramatically, pointing to a metal case in the center of the floor, “is the smallest intelligent being known. You’ve got to peer at him through the eyepiece of that microscope at the top.” (Pic. P)
After his mother had finished her inspection, he lifted his sister so she could see too.
“With such a small being as he,” Mrs. Murray said, “perhaps there are many more such races which we terrestrials haven’t yet noticed.”
Don finally lowered Harriet back to the floor. The girl grasped her mother’s hand firmly as they started toward the exit.
“I know what I want to be when I grow up, Momma,” she said.
“What, dear?”
“In a zoo. In a zoo on another world!”
Don laughed, but Mrs. Murray didn’t—the idea intrigued her woman’s vanity.
<
~ * ~
The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears
BY KEITH BENNETT
T
he commander’s voice went droning on, but Hague’s fatigued brain registered it as mere sound with no words or meaning. He’d been dazed since the crash. Like a cracked phonograph, his brain kept playing back the ripping roar of jet chambers blowing out with a sickening lurch that had thrown every man in the control room to the floor. The lights had flickered out, and a sickening elevator glide began as Patrol Rocket One smashed down through the Venusian rainforest roof, and crashed in a clearing blasted by its own hurtling passage.
Hague blinked hard and tried to focus his brain on what hard-faced Commander Devlin was saying, something about the Base and Odysseus, the mother ship.
“We’ve five hundred miles before we’ll be in their vicinity, and every yard of it we walk. Hunting parties will shoot food animals. All water is to be boiled and treated with ultra-violet by my section. The photographers will march with the science section, which will continue classifying and writing reports. No actual specimens will be taken. We can’t afford the weight.”
To Hague, the other five men seated around the little charting table appeared cool, confidently ready to march through five hundred, or a thousand miles of dark, unexplored, steaming Hell that is Venusian rainforest. Their faces tightset, icily calm, they nodded in turn as the Commander looked at each one of them; but Hague wondered if his own face wasn’t betraying the fear lurking within him. Suddenly Commander Devlin grinned, and pulled a brandy bottle from his pocket, uncorking it as he spoke: “Well, Rocketeers, a short life and a merry one. I never did give a damn for riding in these tin cans.” The tension broke, they were all smiling, and saying they’d walk into the base camp with some kind of a Venusian female under each arm for the edification of Officers’ Mess.
Leaden doubt of his own untried abilities and nerve lay icy in Hague’s innards, and he left after one drink The others streamed from the brightly lighted hatch a moment later. The Commander made a short speech to the entire party. Then Navigator Clark, a smiling, wiry little man, marched out of the clearing with his advance guard. Their voices muffled suddenly as they vanished down a forest corridor that lay gloomy between giant tree holes.
Commander Devlin slapped Hague cheerfully on the shoulder as he moved past; and the second section, spruce and trim in blue-black uniforms, with silver piping, followed him. Crewmen Didrickson and Davis followed with rifles and sagging bandoliers of explosive bullets crossing their chests; and then Arndt, the lean craggy geologist, his arm in a sling, and marching beside him was rotund, begoggled Gault, the botanist. The little whippet tank clattered by next with Technician Whittaker grinning down at Hague from the turret.
“It pains me somethin’ awful to see you walkin’ when I’m ridin’,” Whittaker piped over the whippet’s clanking growl.
Hague grinned back, then pinched his nose between two fingers in the ageless dumb show of disgust, pointed at the tank, and shook his head sadly. The two carts the whippet towed swayed by, and the rest of the column followed; Bachmann, the doctor and Sewell, his beefy crotchety assistant; the two photographers staggered past under high-piled equipment packs, and Hague wondered how long they would keep all of it. Lenkranz, Johnston, Harker, Szachek, Hirooka, Ellis—each carried a pack full of equipment. The rest filed by until finally Swenson, the big Swede technician, passed and the clearing was empty.
Hague turned to look over his own party. In his mind’s eye bobbed the neatly typed “Equipment, march order, light field artillery” lists he’d memorized along with what seemed a thousand other neatly typed lists at Gunnery School.
The list faded, and Hague watched his five-man gun-section lounge against their rifles, leaning slightly forward to ease the heavy webbing that supported their marching packs and the sectioned pneumatic gun.
“All right,” Hague said brusquely. He dredged his brain desperately then for an encouraging speech, something that would show the crew he liked them, something the Commander might say, but he couldn’t think of anything that sounded witty or rang with stirring words. He finally muttered a disgusted curse at his own blankheadedness, and said harshly, “All right, let’s go”
The six men filed silently out of the clearing battered in the forest by Patrol Rocket One, and into damp gloom between gargantuan trunks that rose smoothly out of sight into darkness. Behind them a little rat-like animal scurried into the deserted slot of blasted trees, its beady black eyes studying curiously the silver ship that lay smashed and half-buried in the forest floor.
~ * ~
Base Commander Chapman shuffled hopelessly through the thick sheaf of onion-skin papers, and sank back sighing. Ammunition reports, supply reports, medical reports, strength reports, reconnaissance reports, radio logs, radar logs, sonar logs, bulging dossiers of reports, files full of them, were there; and elsewhere in the ship efficient clerks were rapping out fresh, crisp battalions of new reports, neatly typed in triplicate on onion-skin paper.
He stared across his crowded desk at the quiet executive officer.
“Yes, Blake, it’s a good picture of local conditions, but it isn’t exploration. Until the Patrol Rocket gets in, we can send only this local stuff, and it just isn’t enough.”
Blake shrugged.
“It’s all we’ve got. We can send parties out on foot from the base here, even if we do lose men, but the dope they’d get would still be on a localized area.”
The Commander left his desk, and stared through a viewport at the plateau, and beyond that at the jungled belt fringing an endless expanse of rainforest lying sullenly quiet under the roof of racing grey clouds.
“The point is we’ve got to have more extensive material than this when we fire our robot-courier back to earth. This wonderful mountain of papers—what do they do, what do they tell? They describe beautifully the physical condition of this Base and its complement. They describe very well a ten mile area around the Base—but beyond that area they tell nothing. Ifs wonderful as far as it goes, but it only goes ten miles, and that isn’t enough.”
Blake eyed the snowy pile of papers abstractedly. Then he jumped up nervously as another bundle shot into a receiving tray from the pneumatic message tube. He began pacing the floor.
“Well, what can we do? Suppose we send the stuff we have here, get it microfilmed and get it off—what then?”
The Commander swore bitterly, and turned to face his executive.
“What then?” he demanded savagely. “Are we going into that again? Why, the minute every other branch of the services realize that we haven’t got any kind of thorough preli
minary report on this section of Venus, they’ll start pounding the war drums. The battleship admirals and the bayonet generals will get to work and stir up enough public opinion to have the United States Rocket Service absorbed by other branches—the old, old game of military politics.”
Blake nodded jerkily. “Yes, I know. We’d get the leftovers after the battleships had been built, or new infantry regiments activated, or something else. Anyway we wouldn’t get enough money to carry on rocket research for space explorations.”
“Exactly,” the Commander cut in harshly. “These rockets would be grounded on earth. The generals or admirals would swear that the international situation demanded that they be kept there as weapons of defense; and that would be the end of our work.”
“We’ve got to send back a good, thorough report, something to prove that the Rocket Service can do the job, and that it is worth the doing. And, until the Patrol Rocket gets back, we can’t do it.”
“Okay, Commander,” Blake called as he went through the steel passage opening onto the mother ship’s upper corridor, “I’ll be holding the Courier Rocket until we get word.”
~ * ~
Seven hours later it lightened a little, and day had come. Hague and the Sergeant had pulled the early morning guard shift and began rolling the other four from their tiny individual tents.
Bormann staggered erect, yawned lustily, and swore that this was worse than spring maneuvers in Carolina.
“Shake it,” Brian snarled savagely. “That whistle will blow in a minute.”
When it did sound, they buckled each other into pack harness and swung off smartly, but groaning and muttering as the mud dragged at their heavy boots.
At midday, four hours later, there was no halt, and they marched steadily forward through steaming veils of oppressive heat, eating compressed ration as they walked. They splashed through a tiny creek that was solidly slimed, and hurried ahead when crawling things wriggled in the green mass. Perspiration ran in streams from each face filing past on the trail, soaked through pack harness and packs; and wiry Hurd began to complain that his pack straps had cut through his shoulders as far as his navel. They stopped for a five minute break at 1400, when Hurd stopped fussing with his back straps and signalled for silence, though the other five had been too wrapped in their own discomfort to be talking.
“Listen! Do you hear it, Lieutenant? Like a horn?” Hurd’s wizened rat face knotted in concentration. “Way off, like.”
Hague listened blankly a moment, attempted an expression he fondly hoped was at once intelligent and reassuring, then said, “I don’t hear anything. You may have taken too much fever dope, and it’s causing a ringing in your ears.”
“Naw,” with heavy disgust. “Listen! There it goes again!”
“I heard it.” That was Sergeant Brian’s voice, hard and incisive, and Hague wished he sounded like that, or that he would have heard the sound before his second in command. All of the six were hunched forward, listening raptly, when the Lieutenant stood up.
“Yes, Hurd. Now I hear it.”
The whistle blew then, and they moved forward. Hague noticed the Sergeant had taken a post at the rear of the little file, and watched their back trail warily as they marched.
“What do you think it was, sir?” Bucci inquired in the piping voice that sounded strange coming from his deep chest.
“The Lord knows,” Hague answered, and wondered how many times he’d be using that phrase in the days to come. “Might have been some animal. They hadn’t found any traces of intelligent life when we left the Base Camp.”
~ * ~
But in the days that followed there was a new air of expectancy in the marchers, as if their suspicions had solidified into a waiting for attack. They’d been moving forward for several days.
Hague saw the pack before any of his men did, and thanked his guiding star that for once he had been a little more alert than his gun-section members.
The canvas carrier had been set neatly against one of the buttressing roots of a giant tree bole and, from the collecting bottles strapped in efficient rows outside, Hague deduced that it belonged to Bernstein, the entomologist. The gunnery officer halted and peered back into the gloom off the trail, called Bernstein’s name; and when there was no reply moved cautiously into the hushed shadows with his carbine ready. He sensed that Sergeant Brian was catfooting behind him.
Then he saw the ghostly white bundle suspended six feet above the forest floor, and moved closer, calling Bernstein’s name softly. The dim bundle vibrated gently, and Hague saw that it hung from a giant white lattice radiating wheel-like from the green gloom above. He raised his hand to touch the cocoon thing, noted it was shaped like a man well-wrapped in some woolly material; and on a sudden hunch pulled his belt knife and cut the fibers from what would be the head.
It was Bernstein suspended there, his snug, silken shroud bobbing gently in the dimness. His dark face was pallid in the gloom, sunken and flaccid of feature, as though the juices had been sucked from his corpse, leaving it a limp mummy.
The lattice’s stick white strands vibrated—something moved across it overhead, and Hague flashed his lightpak up into the darkness. Crouched twenty feet above him, two giant legs delicately testing the strands of its lattice-like web, Hague saw the spider, its bulbous furred body fully four feet across, the monster’s myriad eyes glittering fire-like in the glow of Hague’s lightpak, as it gathered the great legs slightly in the manner of a tarantula ready to leap.
Brian’s sharp yell broke Hague from his frozen trance. He threw himself down as Brian’s rifle crashed, and the giant arachnid was bathed in a blue-white flash of explosive light, its body tumbling down across the web onto Hague where he lay in the mud. The officer’s hoarse yells rang insanely while he pulled himself clear of the dead spider-beast, but he forced himself to quiet at the sound of the Sergeant’s cool voice.
“All clear, Lieutenant. It’s dead.”
“Okay, Brian. I’ll be all right now.” Hague’s voice shook, and he cursed the weakness of his fear, forcing himself to walk calmly without a glance over his shoulder until they were back on the trail. He led the other four gunners back to the spider and Bernstein’s body, as a grim object lesson, warned them to leave the trail only in pairs. They returned their weary footslogging pace down the muddy creek marked by Clark’s crew. When miles had sweated by at the same steady pace, Hague could still feel in the men’s stiff silence their horror of the thing Brian had killed.
~ * ~
Hours, and then days, rolled past, drudging nightmares through which they plowed in mud and steamy heat, with punctually once every sixteen hours a breathtaking, pounding torrent of rain. Giant drops turned the air into an aqueous mixture that was almost unbreathable, and smashed against their faces until the skin was numb. When the rain stopped abruptly the heat came back and water vapor rose steaming from the mud they walked through; but always they walked, shoving one aching foot ahead of the other through sucking black glue. Sometimes Bormann’s harmonica would wheedle reedy airs, and they would sing and talk for a time, but mostly they swung forward in silence, faces drawn with fatigue and pale in the forest half light. Hague looked down at his hands, swollen, bloody with insect bites, and painfully stiff; and wondered if he’d be able to bend them round his ration pan at the evening halt.
Hague was somnambulating at the rear of his little column, listening to an ardent account from Bormann of what his girl might expect when he saw her again. Bucci, slowing occasionally to ease the pneumatic gun’s barrel assembly across his shoulder, chimed in with an ecstatic description of his little Wilma. The two had been married just before the Expedition blasted Venus-ward out of an Arizona desert. Crosse was at the front end, and his voice came back nasally.
“Hey, Lieutenant, there’s somebody sitting beside the trail.”
“Okay. Halt.” The Lieutenant swore tiredly and trotted up to Crosse’s side. “Where?”
“There. Against the big root.”
Hague moved forward, carbine at ready, and knew without looking that Sergeant Brian was at his shoulder, cool and self-sufficient as always.
“Who’s there?” the officer croaked.
“It’s me, Bachmann.”
Hague motioned his party forward, and they gathered in a small circle about the Doctor, seated calmly beside the trail, with his back against a root flange.
“What’s the matter, Doc? Did you want to see us?”
“No. Sewell seems to think you’re all healthy. Too bad the main party isn’t as well off. Quite a bit of trouble with fever. And, Bernstein gone of course.”
Hague nodded, and remembered he’d reported Bernstein’s death to the Commander three nights before.