The Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  In half an hour Cochrane was about to fire again. But they heard the hysterical rat-tat-tat of firing. It seemed no nearer, but it could only be Johnny Simms.

  Cochrane and Holden fired together for assurance to Johnny. Bell took pictures.

  Again they marched toward where the shots had been fired. Again they trudged on for a long time. Seemingly, Johnny had moved away from them as they followed him. They breasted a hill, and there was a breeze with the smell of water in it, and they saw that here the land sloped very gradually toward the sea, and the sea was in view. It was infinitely blue and it reached toward the most alluring of horizons. Between them and the sea there was only low-growing stuff, brownish and sparse. There was sand underfoot—a curious bluish sand. Only here and there did the dry-seeming vegetation grow higher than their heads.

  More shots. Between them and the sea. Cochrane and Holden fired again.

  “What the devil’s the matter with the fool?” demanded Holden irritably. “He knows we’re coming! Why doesn’t he stand still or come to meet us?”

  Cochrane shrugged. That thought was disturbing him too. They pressed forward, and suddenly Holden exclaimed. “That looks like a man! Two men!”

  Cochrane caught the barest glimpse of something running about, far ahead. It looked like naked human flesh. It was the size of a man. It vanished. Another popped into view and darted madly out of sight. They did not see the newcomers.

  “He shot something like that, back where we first landed,” said Cochrane grimly. “We’d better hurry!”

  They did hurry. There was a last flurry of shooting. It was automatic fire. It is not wise to shoot on automatic if one’s ammunition is limited, Johnny Simms’ firearm chattered furiously for part of a second. It stopped short. He couldn’t have fired so short a burst. He was out of bullets.

  They ran.

  When they drew near him, a hooting set up. Things scattered away. Large things. Birds the size of men. They heard Johnny Simms screaming.

  They came panting to the very beach, on which foam-tipped waves broke in absolutely normal grandeur. The sand was commonplace save for a slight bluish tint. Johnny Simms was out on the beach, in the open. He was down. He had flung his gun at something and was weaponless. He lay on the sand, shrieking. There were four ungainly, monstrous birds like oversized Cornish Game gamecocks pecking at him. Two ran crazily away at sight of the humans. Two others remained. Then they fled. One of them halted, darted back, and took a last peck at Johnny Simms before it fled again.

  Holden fired, and missed. Cochrane ran toward the kicking, shrieking Johnny Simms. But Alicia got there first.

  He was a completely pitiable object. His clothing had been almost completely stripped away in the brief time since his last burst of shots. There were wounds on his bare flesh. After all, the beak of a bird as tall as a man is not a weapon to be despised. Johnny Simms would have been pecked to death but for the party from the ship. He had been spotted and harried by a huntingpack of the ostrich-sized creatures at earliest dawn. A cooler-headed man would have stood still and killed some of them, then the rest would either have run away or devoured their slaughtered fellows. But Johnny Simms was not cool-headed. He had made a career of being a rich man’s spoiled little boy. Now he’d had a fright great enough and an escape narrow enough to shatter the nerves of a normal man. To Johnny Simms, the effect was catastrophic.

  He could not walk, and the distance was too great to carry him. Holden reported by walkie-talkie, and Jones proposed to butcher one of the animals Johnny had killed and put it in a freezer emptied for the purpose, and then lift the ship and land by the sea. It seemed a reasonable proposal. Johnny was surely not seriously wounded.

  But that meant time to wait. Alicia sat by her husband, soothing him. Holden moved along the beach, examining the shells that had come ashore. He picked up one shell more glorious in its coloring than any of the pearl-making creatures of Earth. This shell grew neither in the flat spiral nor the cone-shaped form of Earth mollusks. It grew in a doubly-curved spiral, so that the result was an extraordinary, lustrous, complex sphere. Bell fairly danced with excitement as he photographed it with lavish pains to get all the colors just right.

  Cochrane and Babs moved along the beach also. It was not possible to be apprehensive. Cochrane talked largely. Presently he was saying with infinite satisfaction:

  “The chemical compounds here are bound to be the same! It’s a new world, bigger than the glacier planet. Those beasts last night—if they’re good food-stuff—will make this a place like the old west, and everybody envies the pioneers! This is a new Earth! Everything’s so nearly the same—.”

  “I never,” observed Babs, “heard of blue sand on Earth.”

  He frowned at her. He stooped and picked up a handful of the beach stuff. It was not blue. The tiny, sea-broken pebbles were ordinary quartz and granite rock. They would have to be. Yet there was a blueness—The blue grains were very much smaller than the white and tan and gray ones. Cochrane looked closely. Then he blew. All the sand blew out of his hand except—at last—one tiny grain. It was white. It glittered greasily. Cochrane moved four paces and wetted his hand in the sea. He tried to wet the sand-grain. It would not wet.

  He began to laugh.

  “I did a show once,” he told Babs, “about the old diamond-mines. Ever hear of them? They used to find diamonds in blue clay which was as hard as rock. Here, blue clay goes out from the land to under the waves. This is a tiny diamond, washed out by the sea! This is the last thing we need!” Then he looked at his watch. “We’re due on the air in two hours and a half! Now we’ve got what we want! Let’s go have Holden tell Jones to hurry!”

  But Babs complained suddenly,

  “Jed! What sort of life am I going to lead with you? Here we are, and—nobody can see us—and you don’t even notice!”

  Cochrane was penitent. In fact, they had to hurry back down the beach to join the others when the space-ship appeared as a silvery gleam, high in the air, and then came swooping down with fierce flames underneath it to settle a quarter-mile inland.

  Bell had a picture of the tiny diamond by the time the ground was cool enough for them to re-enter the ship. The way he photographed it, against a background which had nothing by which its size could be estimated, the little white stone looked like a Kohinoor. It was two transparent pyramids set base to base, and he even got color-flashes from it. And Jamison, forewarned, took pictures from the air of the blue-sand areas. They showed the tint the one tiny diamond explained.

  The broadcast was highly successful. It began with a four-minute commercial in which the evils of faulty elimination were discussed with infinite delicacy, and it was clearly proved—to an audience waiting to look beyond the stars—that only Greshham’s Intestinal Emollient allowed the body to make full use of vitamins, proteins, and the very newest enzymatic foundation-substances which everybody needed for really perfect health. There followed the approach shots to this planet, shots of the great beast-herds on the plains, views of luxuriant, waving foliage, the tide of shaggy animals as they came at dusk to their drinking-place, and there was an all-too-brief picturing of the blue-tinted soil which the last film-clip of all declared to be diamondiferous.

  Cochrane’s direction of this show was almost inspired. The views of the animal herd were calculated to make any member of his audience think in simultaneous terms of glamour and adventure—with perfect personal safety, of course!—and of steaks, chops and roasts. The more gifted viewers back on Earth might even envision filets mignon. The infinitesimal diamond with its prismatic glitterings, of course, roused cupidity of another sort.

  There were four commercials cut into these alluring views, the last was superimposed upon a view Bell had taken of the sunset-colors. And it might have seemed that the television audience would confuse the charm of the new world as pictured with the product insistently praised. But the public was pretty well toughened up against commercials nowadays. It was not deceived. As usual, it
only deceived itself.

  But there was no deception about the fact that there was a new and unoccupied planet fit for human habitation. That was true. And the fretting overcrowded cities immediately became places where everybody made happy plans for his neighbor to move there. But the more irritable people would begin to think vaguely that it might be worth going to, for themselves.

  The ship took off two hours after the broadcast. Part of that time was taken up with astrogational conferences with astronomers on Earth. Cochrane had this conference taped for the auxiliary broadcast-program in which the audience shared the problems as well as the triumphs of the star-voyagers. Cochrane wanted to get back to Earth. So far as television was concerned, it would be unwise. The ship and its crew would travel indefinitely without a lack of sponsors. But for once, Cochrane agreed entirely with Holden.

  “We’re heading back,” he told Babs, “because if we keep on, people will accept our shows as just another superior kind of escape-entertainment. They’ll have the dream quality of ‘You Win a Million’ and the lottery-shows. They’ll be things to dream about but never to think of doing anything about. We’re going to make the series disappointingly short, in order to make it more convincingly factual. We won’t spin it out for its entertainment-value until it practically loses everything else.”

  “No,” said Babs. She put her hand in his. She’d found it necessary to remind him, now and then.

  So the ship started home. And it would not return direct to Earth—or Lunar City—for a very definite reason. Cochrane meant to have all his business affairs neatly wrapped up before landing. They could get another show or two across, and some highly involved contracts could be haggled to completion more smoothly if one of the parties—Spaceways, Inc.—was not available except when it felt like being available. The other parties would be more anxious.

  So the astrogation-conference did not deal with a direct return to Earth, but with a small sol-type star not too far out of the direct line. The Pole Star could have been visited, but it was a double star. Cochrane had no abstract scientific curiosity. His approach was strictly that of a man of business. He did the business.

  There was, of course, a suitable pause not too far from the second planet—the planet of the shaggy beasts. They put out a plastic balloon with a Dabney field generator inside it. It would float in emptiness indefinitely. The field would hold for not less than twenty years. It would serve as a beacon, a highway, a railroad track through space for other ships planning to visit the third world now available to men. Ultimately, better arrangements could be made.

  Jones was already ecstatically designing ground-level Dabney field installations. There would be Dabney fields extending from star to star. Along them, as along pneumatic tubes, ships would travel at unthinkable speeds toward absolutely certain destinations. True, at times they could not be used because of the bulk of planets between starting-points and landing-stations. But with due attention to scheduling, it would be a simple matter indeed to arrange for something close to commuters’ service between star-clusters. He explained all this to Cochrane, with Holden listening in.

  “Oh, surely!” said Cochrane cynically. “And you’ll have tax-payers objecting because you make money. You’ll be regulated out of existence. Were you thinking that Spaceways would run this transportation system you’re planning, without cutting anybody else in on even the glory of it?”

  Jones looked at him, dead-pan. But he was annoyed.

  “I want some money,” he said. “I thought we could get this thing set up, and then I could get myself a ship and facilities for doing some really original work. I’d like to work something out and not have to sell the publicity-rights to it!”

  “I’ll arrange it,” promised Cochrane. “I’ve got our lawyers setting up a deal right now. You’re going to get as many tricky patents as you can on this field, and assign them all to Spaceways. And Spaceways is going to assign them all to a magnificent Space Development Association, a sort of Chamber of Commerce for all the outer planets, and all the stuffed shirts in creation are going to leap madly to get honorary posts on it. And it will be practically beyond criticism, and it will have the public interest passionately at its heart, and it will be practically beyond interference and it will be as inefficient as hell! And the more inefficient it is, the more it will have to take in to allow for its inefficiency—and for your patents it has to give us a flat cut of its gross! And meanwhile we’ll get ours from the planets we’ve landed on and publicized. We’ve got customers. We’ve built up a market for our planets!”

  “Eh?” said Jones in frank astonishment.

  “We,” said Cochrane, “rate as first inhabitants and therefore proprietors and governments of the first two planets ever landed on beyond Earth. When the Moon-colony was formed, there were elaborate laws made to take care of surviving nation prides and so on. Whoever first stays on a planet a full rotation is its proprietor and government—until other inhabitants arrive. Then the government is all of them, but the proprietorship remains with the first. We own two planets. Nice planets. Glamorized planets, too! So I’ve already made deals for the hotel-concessions on the glacier world.”

  Holden had listened with increasing uneasiness. Now he said doggedly:

  “That’s not right, Jed! I don’t mind making money, but there are things that are more important! Millions of people back home—hundreds of millions of poor devils—spend their lives scared to death of losing their jobs, not daring to hope for more than bare subsistence! I want to do something for them! People need hope, Jed, simply to be healthy! Maybe I’m a fool, but the human race needs hope more than I need money!”

  Cochrane looked patient.

  “What would you suggest?”

  “I think,” said Holden heavily, “that we ought to give what we’ve got to the world. Let the governments of the world take over and assist emigration. There’s not one but will be glad to do it…”

  “Unfortunately,” said Cochrane, “you are perfectly right. They would! There have been resettlement projects and such stuff for generations. I’m very much afraid that just what you propose will be done to some degree somewhere or other on other planets as they’re turned up. But on the glacier planet there will be hotels. The rich will want to go there to stay, to sight-see, to ride, to hunt, to ski, and to fly in helicopters over volcanoes. The hotels will need to be staffed. There will be guides and foresters and hunters. It will cost too much to bring food from Earth, so farms will be started. It will be cheaper to buy food from independent farmers than to raise it with hired help. So the farmers will be independent. There will have to be stores to supply them with what they need, and tourists with what they don’t need but want. From the minute the glacier planet starts up as a tourist resort, there will be jobs for hundreds of people. It won’t be long before there are jobs for thousands. There’ll be a man-shortage there. Anybody who wants to can go there to work, and if he doesn’t go there expecting a certified, psychologically conditioned environment, but just a good job with possible or probable advancement…That’s the environment we humans want! Presently the hotels won’t even be tourist hotels. They’ll just be the normal hotels that exist everywhere that there are cities and people moving about among them! Then it won’t be a tourist-planet, and tourists will be a nuisance. It’ll be home for one hell of a lot of people! And they’ll have made every bit of it themselves!”

  Holden said uncomfortably:

  “It’ll be slow…”

  “It’ll be sure!” snapped Cochrane. “The first settlements in America were failures until the people started to work for themselves! Look at this planet we’re leaving! How many people will come to work that silly diamond mine! How many will hunt to supply them with meat? How many will farm to supply the hunters and the miners with other food? And how many others will be along to run stores and manufacture things…” He made an impatient gesture. “You’re thinking of encouraging people to move to the stars to make more room on Earth. Yo
u’d get nice passive colonists who’d obediently move because the long-hairs said it was wise and the government paid for it. I’m thinking of colonists who’ll fight and quite possibly cheat and lie a little to get jobs where they can take care of their families the way they want to! I want people to move to get what they want in spite of any discouragement anybody throws at them. Now shoo! I’m busy!”

  Jones asked mildly:

  “At what?”

  “The latest proposed deal,” said Cochrane impatiently, “is for rights to bore for oil. The uranium concessions are farmed out. Water-power is pending—not for cash, but a cut—and—.”

  Holden said uneasily:

  “There’s one other thing, Jed. All your plans and all your scheming could still be blocked if back on Earth they think we might bring plagues back to Earth. Remember Dabney suggested that? And some biologist or other agreed with him?”

  Cochrane grinned.

  “There’s a diamond-mine. There are herds of what people will call cattle. There’s food and riches. There’s scenery and adventure. There’s room to do things! Nobody could keep political office if he tried to keep his constituents from food and cash and adventure—even by proxy when they send expendable Cousin Albert out to see if he can make a living there. We’ve got to take reasonable precautions against germs, of course. We’ll have trouble enforcing them. But we’ll manage!”

  Al called down from the control-room. The ship was sufficiently aligned, he thought, for their next stopping-place. He wanted Jones to charge the booster-circuit and flash it over. Jones went.

  A little later there was the peculiar sensation of a sound that was not a sound, but was felt all through one. The result was not satisfactory. The ship was still in empty space, and the nearest star was still a star. There was a repetition of the booster-jump. Still not too good. Thereafter the ship drove, and jumped, and jumped, and drove.