Instantly, Borden flicked off the feedback field. His eyes darted to the nearest object radar dial. They were still sixty miles high, but falling at a tremendous speed. Borden’s hands moved quickly over the controls. Lift. Full atmosphere drive on a new course.
“We won’t crash,” he said evenly, “unless we’re shot at with something that works in the dark. But that sun mirror business is odd. There’s only a certain size of sun mirror that’s economical. When they get too big there are better weapons for the money. That one was big! So maybe it’s the best weapon this planet has. In which case we’ll be nearest safety at one of the icecaps. Sun mirrors will be handicapped in polar regions!”
“They—tried to kill us!” Sattell said, panting. “They don’t like strangers! They fired on us without warning! We can’t land on this planet! We’ve got to go on!”
“If you want to know,” Borden told him, “we haven’t any fuel to go on with. And we happen to be short of food. And did you remember—”
The ship’s drive cut off. It had been burnt out and repaired by hand, with inevitable drawbacks. Since the repair, it had run steadily for as long as three days at a time. But also it had stopped four times in one hour, and it had needed tinkering with three times in one day.
It ought to be overhauled. For now it had cut off, and they were forty miles high. If it came on again they would live; if it didn’t, they wouldn’t.
After six spine-chilling seconds the drive came on again. Ten minutes later it went off for two seconds. Half an hour later it made that ominous hiccoughing which presaged immediate and final failure. But it didn’t fail.
It was not pleasant to be so close to a planet they could not afford to leave, with a drive that threatened to give up the ghost at any instant, and with something on the planet which had used a sun mirror beam to try to volatilize the Danaë without parley. Apparently the four in the small ship had the choice of dying on this planet or not too far away in space.
They needed food, and they needed fuel. Above all, if the planet was inhabited, they needed friendship, and they weren’t likely to get it.
They were only ten miles high when signs of dawn appeared ahead. Of course, if they happened to be moving with the planet’s rotation, they’d be moving into sunset from the night. They didn’t know. Not yet. But there were gray clouds ahead, to the right and below.
A little later they were five miles high and the clouds were still below. There was twilight ahead. At two miles altitude the drive hesitated for a moment, and caught again after all four in the control room had stopped breathing.
Red sunlight appeared before the ship in a spreading, sprawling thin line. At five thousand feet the ship had slowed to a bare crawl—a few hundred miles an hour. And the dawn came up like thunder.
CHAPTER 2
To the left and behind was desert, stretching away in the dawnlight, in every conceivable shade of tawny yellow and red, with blue shadows behind the hummocks in the sand, and with an utterly cloudless sky overhead. To the right and ahead was an area of straggling, stunted vegetation beneath rose-tinted cloud masses with the dazzling white of snow against the horizon. There were other clouds above the snow.
The drive burbled erratically. The ship dropped like a stone. Then the drive flickered on, and off, and on and off again so that ship’s whole fabric shook.
Borden threw the drive off and on again and the induction surge of current cleared whatever was wrong for a moment. They felt the ship fighting wind pressure that was trying to turn it end over end. Then it steadied, and nothing happened—and still nothing happened.
The crash came violently. Ellen was flung against Borden and held fast to him. Jerry collapsed to the floor. Sattell went reeling and banged against the end wall of the control room.
There was stillness.
Borden stared at the screens, then got up painfully and went to a port. The ship had landed in soil which seemed to be essentially sand. It had splashed the soil aside in coming to ground. But it was not desert sand. There was moisture here. Beyond the impact area a straggling ground cover grew. It looked like grass, but it was not.
Nearby was one greenish object which looked like a cactus without its spines. It had a silky covering like down. A little farther on Borden could see three or four things quite like stunted, barkiess trees.
The ground was gently rolling. In the distance the growing light showed a whitish haze, and clouds in the sky. All shadows were long and stretched-out. This was not far from the icecap. Indeed, it appeared that snow was nearby. But from the port on the opposite side of the ship the beginning of the planetary desert could be seen.
“We’re down,” said Borden with relief. “Now we’ve got to find out if anybody saw us land, and if so, whether they’ll insist on killing us or whether we can make friends.”
Sattell said, “You’ve got to arm me, Borden! You can’t leave me unarmed on a hostile planet!”
“I’d like to have four weapons ready instead of three, though if we have to fight a whole planet even four won’t be much good. But I can’t risk letting you have anything dangerous in your hands,” Borden said.
Sattell ground his teeth.
Jerry said apologetically, “Shall I test the air, sir?”
Borden nodded. He regarded Sattell with a weary, worried frown, while Jerry readied the test. The situation was bad, but Sattell was troublesome too.
Two months ago, while the drive was still in process of repair, Borden had heard a strangled cry from Ellen. He found her struggling to scream as she fought Sattell.
Borden’s appearance had ended the struggle, of course. Sattell had been confined to his bunk for two weeks before he was able to move about again. But Borden hadn’t been able to kill an unconscious man then, and he couldn’t kill Sattell in cold blood now. But Sattell could kill anybody. And he would, if he got the chance.
“It’s the devil, Sattell,” Borden said. “If I didn’t think you were a rat I could make a bargain to forget what’s happened until we get the ship safely home. But I don’t think you’d keep a bargain.”
Sattell snarled at him and turned away. Jerry looked up from the tiny air-testing cabinet. He’d drawn in a sample of outer air and a silent discharge had turned its oxygen to ozone, which a reagent absorbed. A hot silver wire stayed bright, and so proved the absence of chlorine or sulphur, CO2 tested negligible, and hot magnesium took up nitrogen. The remnant of the sample did not react with reagent after reagent, so it had to be noble gases.
“It seems all right, sir,” said Jerry. “If I may, I’ll go in the airlock and take a direct sniff. May I, sir?”
“Unless Sattell wants to volunteer,” Borden observed. “I would think better of you, Sattell, if you volunteered for first landing.”
Sattell laughed. “Oh, yes! I’ll walk out on a hostile planet, and let you take off and leave me! Even if you can’t leave the planet, you can come down ten thousand miles away. You’d like to do that, too!”
“Meaning,” Borden said, “that you would … All right, Jerry. Go ahead.”
“Yes, sir.” Jerry went out. They heard the inner airlock door open.
Borden said heavily, “It would be sensible to lock you up while we’re aground, Sattell. I can’t leave the ship with you inside and free. You’ve already said what you’d do if you could—take off and maroon us.”
Jerry’s voice came from the airlock through a speaker.
“Mr. Borden, sir, the air’s wonderful! You don’t realize what canned air is like until you breathe fresh again. Wonderful, sir! I’m going out.”
Borden nodded to Ellen. She moved over to watch through a port as Jerry made the first landing on this unnamed planet of an unnamed sun. She could see the straggling ground-cover vegetation, and the thing that looked like a cactus except that it wasn’t, and the trees. She saw Jerry step to the ground and look about, breathing deeply.
Behind her, Borden said bitterly,
“We were blasted at without challe
nge. But it was with a sun mirror that was not too efficient. The local race may not have any other power than sunlight. If so, they won’t be up here by the icecap! If we weren’t spotted by radar as we landed, we may make good repairs, raise food, and get back to space without our presence being known—because they should think they had wiped us out.”
Ellen gasped suddenly from the port: “Dee! Natives! They’ve seen Jerry! They’re coming close!”
Borden moved quickly to look over her shoulder. Sattell took a second port. They stared out at the strange world about the Danaë.
Jerry had kicked a hole in the sod and picked up a bit of it to examine. And, not sixty yards from him, three creatures were regarding him with intense curiosity.
They were furry bipeds. They stood as erect as penguins, not bending forward in the least. They had enormously long arms which almost reached to the ground beside them. From what should have been their chins, single tentacles drooped—like the trunk of an elephant, except that it was beneath the mouth opening instead of above it. They stared at Jerry with manifest mounting excitement, making gestures to each other with their trunks and arms.
Borden moved to warn Jerry through the outside speaker. But Jerry looked up directly at the creatures. He spoke to them in a quiet voice.
At the sound of his words their manner changed. Borden thought irrelevantly of the way a dog flattens his ears when his master speaks to him. But these creatures flattened all their fur. Jerry spoke again. He waved his hand. He glanced at the Danaë’s port and nodded reassuringly.
The three creatures moved hesitantly toward him. Two of them stopped some forty yards distant. One came on. Suddenly it wriggled with an odd effect of embarrassment. The flattening of its fur became more noticeable.
A fourth creature of the same kind came loping over a rise in the ground. It used its long arms to balance itself as an ape might do, but an ape does not run upright. This creature did. It saw Jerry and stopped short, staring.
The creature which had advanced toward Jerry appeared to be more and more embarrassed. Jerry moved to meet it. When he was ten feet away the creature lay down on the ground and rolled over on its back. It waved its trunk wildly, as if supplicating approval.
Jerry bent over and scratched the furry body as if he knew exactly what it wanted. The two others who had been its companions loped forward, plunged to the ground, rolled over on their backs and waved their trunks as wildly as the first. Jerry scratched them.
The fourth creature, which had stared wide-eyed, suddenly waved its arms and burst into a headlong rush. Its haste seemed frantic. It scuttled frenziedly, made a leap, turned over as it soared, landed on its back two yards from Jerry and slid to his feet.
When Jerry scratched it, it wriggled ecstatically. Its trunk waved as though it were experiencing infinite bliss.
Borden said slowly, “Something on this planet tried to burn us down with a heat ray not half an hour ago. We land—and this happens! What sort of place is this, anyhow?”
CHAPTER 3
It was an odd place, they soon learned. The climate was cool, but pleasant. There were no radio waves beneath a readily detectable ionosphere. Yet apparatus over an area three hundred miles by an average sixty—the white spot—had responded in seconds; in parts of seconds.
Which meant electric control. Which implied radio. But there were no radio waves, which should have been proof that there was no civilization on this planet capable of doing what certainly had been done. Which was nonsense.
On the fourth day after landing there had been no alarm, but there was a good-sized group of furry bipeds always waiting hopefully about the Danaë for one of the humans to come out and scratch them. All but Sattell. When he came out of the Danaë, the bipeds moved away. They would not go near him.
“I am not comfortable,” Borden said to Jerry. “Something drained power from us. Enough to run the ship for two years was drained out in eight seconds! But we land, and the only inhabitants are your fine furry friends whose one purpose in life seems to be to get scratched. They act more like pets than wild animals, and sometimes more like people than pets. But if they’re pets, did their masters try to kill us? What does go on on this planet, anyhow?”
Jerry said modestly, “I’m beginning to understand the furry creatures a little, sir. They’re remarkably intelligent, for animals. They want me to go somewhere with them. I’d like to. Is it all right?”
Borden said, “If you think it’s safe. Ellen has the planting well under way, and the fuel synthesizer is working after a fashion, although I’d a lot rather have it working near the equator. I’m getting along fairly well with rebuilding our drive, but there’s a long job ahead. If other planetary inhabitants don’t find us and kill us, we’re all right. Go along if you like, within reason. But I wish you could take Sattell with you.”
That couldn’t be done. The two-legged creatures hung about the ship wearing an air of happy anticipation when all the humans were inside, and flopping eagerly on their backs to be scratched, when they came out. But when Sattell tried to approach one of the creatures, they fled as if in terror. Not one had ever been knowingly within a hundred yards of him—and he hated them.
When Jerry first reported that they had some sort of language and could exchange simple facts—he didn’t know whether they could exchange ideas or not—Sattell savagely insisted that those who knew of the existence of the ship should be killed, and any others who discovered it also killed. The idea would be to keep the news of the Danaë’s landing from reaching whatever other race might inhabit the white spot of the heat ray.
But there were always some of the furry ones around. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Maybe only the same ones came to the ship. Maybe they went away and others took their places. Neither Borden nor Jerry was sure, but both demurred at killing. Besides, the news had already gone as far as such creatures were likely to take it before Sattell proposed to wipe them out.
Sattell raged when he was overruled. He was overruled on most things because he couldn’t be trusted. Borden wouldn’t let him work on the drive. He might try to make sure that if he didn’t get back to Earth, nobody else should, either.
Ellen took the dibble stick and the seed capsules and planted the crop that might supply them with food. Each seed was enclosed in a gelatine capsule with a bit of fertilizer and a spore culture of terrestrial soil microorganisms. Planted, by the time moisture reached the seed there was a bed of Earth’s own microscopic soil flora around the seed to help it grow.
But Sattell couldn’t be trusted to plant seed, either, if the others would benefit.
He couldn’t even be allowed to work the fuel synthesizer. In that apparatus plain water entered a force field in which H1 and H2 simply could not exist as molecules or ions. So the atoms frantically absorbed heat energy from their surroundings to make pseudo valence bonds and develop giant hydrogen molecules which could only be written down as being of molecular weight.
The fuel synthesizer was set up a good half-mile from the space ship and was developing a small icecap of its own. But it would be a long time before there was drive fuel to refill the ship’s tanks. Sattell might sabotage that.
So he had to be treated as the pampered guest of those who believed implicitly in his will to murder them. All arms were safely locked away. Even the airlock fastening had to be dismantled, so he couldn’t lock everybody else out of the ship.
And Borden and Ellen and Jerry went armed, and had nerve-wrackingly to be on guard at all times. But it would have been ridiculous to confine Sattell so he had the status of a nonworking guest because he was a potential murderer.
There was not much for Jerry to do either, except hold conferences with his admirers. On the fifth twenty-hour day after the Danaë’s landing, Jerry set off with an excited mob of furry, trunk-waving friends. He carried a walkie-talkie, depending on the absence of radio waves from the planet’s atmosphere to make its use safe.
Two hours after he had headed nort
h toward the ice, Borden and Ellen came back from an inspection tour of the crops and fuel synthesizer, and found that Sattell had disappeared, too. He’d taken all the food he could conveniently carry from their depressingly short supply.
Borden swore. Sattell underfoot was a nuisance and a menace. But Sattell at large might be more, and worse. There was no glamor in being castaway on this alien world, such as is shown in visi-screen plays. The Danaë was a small utility ship, suitable for small expeditions for scientific purposes, or for the staking out of private planetary estates—a common practice, these days—and the servicing of such establishments.
Her eighty-foot length now rested slightly askew in the pit her landing had made. About her was arctic flora, and the thick fur of the bipeds suggested that they were arctic animals themselves. But here close to the icecap was the only place on this planet where a man might hope to survive. It was madness for Sattell to leave the ship.
“It doesn’t make sense!” Borden said. “What has he to gain? He was afraid we’d go off and maroon him. We can’t do that with crops going, the synthesizer working, and the drive pulled down. So what can he gain by running off?”
Ellen said uneasily, “Jerry’s armed. And he won’t be suspecting anything.”
Borden scowled. “Get out the talkie and warn him. If Sattell surprises Jerry and gets his blaster, he might bushwhack us!”
Ellen brought out the talkie. She turned it on and said crisply: “Jerry, Sattell’s disappeared. Come in please.”
Jerry did not answer. Borden paced up and down, frowning and thinking of ever more disastrous possibilities.
“Bring the talkie into the ship,” he said presently. “We’ll hook it to an outside aerial. Jerry won’t be traveling with his turned on. But he’s bound to call us eventually.”
He took the talkie from her, carried it inside the ship, and plugged it in there. In minutes a speaker in the control room was emitting the nondescript hissing which was the random electronic noises made by metal objects nearby. The ship itself, for one.
“I’m going to look in Sattell’s cabin,” said Borden grimly.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 112
