Off in the night, the Qul-En operating the mountain-lion shape caused the vehicle to put down the sheep and start back toward the flock. It would want at least four specimens besides the biped and the dog. But the dog was already on the alert. The Qul-En had not been able to kill the dog, because the mouth of the vehicle was closed on the sheep. It would probably be wisest to secure the dog and biped first—the biped with due caution—and then complete the choice of sheep for dissection.
The mountain-lion shape came noiselessly back toward the flock. The being inside it felt a little thrill of pleasure. Scientific exploration was satisfying, but rarely exciting. One naturally protected oneself adequately when gathering specimens. But it was exciting to have come upon a type of animal which would dare to offer battle. The Qul-En in the mountain-lion shape reflected that this was a new source of pleasure—to do battle with the fauna of strange planets in the forms native to these planets.
The padding vehicle went quietly in among the woolly sheep. It saw the tiny blossom of flame that was Antonio’s campfire. Another high-temperature oxidation process…It would be interesting to see if the biped was burning another carcass, this time of its own killing…
The shape was two hundred yards from the fire when Salazar scented it. It was upwind from the dog. Its own smell was purely that of metals and plastics, but its fur now was bedabbled with the blood of the sheep that had been its first specimen of the night. Salazar growled. His hackles rose. His every instinct was for the defense of his flock. He had smelled that blood when the thing which wasn’t a mountain lion left him behind with impossible leapings.
He went stiff-legged toward the shape. Antonio followed in a sort of despairing calm born of utter hopelessness.
A sheep uttered a strangled noise. The Qul-En had come upon a second specimen. It left the dead sheep behind for the moment while it went to look at the fire. It peered into the flames, trying to see if Antonio—the biped—had another carcass in the flames as seemed to be his habit. It looked—
Salazar leaped for its blood-smeared throat in utter silence and absolute ferocity. He would not have dreamed of attacking a real mountain lion with such utter lack of caution. But this was not a mountain lion. His weight and the suddenness of his attack caught the operator by surprise. The shape toppled over. And then there was a crazy uproar that was scared bleatings from sheep nearby and bloodthirsty snarlings from Salazar. He had the salty taste of sheep-blood in his mouth and a yielding plastic throat between his teeth.
The synthetic lion struggled absurdly. Its weapon, of course, was a ray-gun which was at once aimed and fired when its jaws opened wide. The being inside tried to clear and use that weapon. It would not bear upon Salazar. And the operator of the mountain lion was certain to win the fight, of course, in any case. Only it would have to think to make the device lie down, double up its mechanical body and claw Salazar loose from its mechanical throat with the mechanical claws on its mechanical hind legs. At first the Qul-En inside concentrated on getting its steed back on its feet.
That took time, because whenever Salazar’s legs touched ground, he used the purchase to shake the throat savagely. In fact, Antonio was within twenty yards when the being from the ship got its vehicle upright. It held the mechanical head high, then, to keep Salazar dangling while it considered how to dislodge him.
And it saw Antonio. For an instant, perhaps, the Qul-En was alarmed. But Antonio did not kneel. He made no motion which the pilot—seeing through infrared-sensitive photo-cells in the lion’s eyeballs—could interpret as offensive. So the machine moved boldly toward him. The dog dangling from its throat could be disregarded for the moment. The killing-ray was absolutely effective, but it did spread, and it did destroy the finer anatomical features of tissues it hit. Especially, it destroyed nerve tissue outright.
The being inside the mountain lion was pleasantly excited and very much elated. The biped stood stock-still, frozen by the spectacle of a mountain lion moving toward it with a snarling dog hanging disregarded at its throat. The biped would be a most interesting subject for dissection, and its means of offense would be most fascinating to analyze…
Antonio’s fingers contracted spasmodically as the shape from the ship moved toward it. Quite without intention they pulled the trigger of the rifle. The deeply cross-cut bullet scarred Salazar’s flank, removing a quarter-inch patch of skin. It went on into the plastic and metal shape and hit a foreleg. What metal the vehicle contained was mostly magnesium, for lightness. But there were steel wires imbedded for magnetic purposes. The bullet smashed through plastic and magnesium. It struck a spark upon the steel.
There was a flaring, sun-bright flash of flame. There was a dense cloud of smoke. The mountain-lion shape leaped furiously. The jerk dislodged a slightly singed Salazar and sent him rolling. The mountain-lion vehicle landed and rolled over and over, one leg useless and spouting monstrous, white, actinic fire. The being inside knew an instant’s panic. Then it felt yielding sheep bodies below it and thrashed about violently and crazily, and at last the Qul-En jammed the flame-spurting limb deep into soft earth. The fire went out. But that leg of its vehicle was almost useless.
For an instant deadly rage filled the tiny occupant of the cabin where a mountain lion’s lungs should have been. It almost turned and opened the mouth of its steed and poured out the killing-beam. Almost. The flock would have died instantly, and the man and the dog, and all things in the wild for miles. But that would not have been scientific. After all, this mission should be secret. And the biped…
The Qul-En ceased the thrashings of its vehicle. It thought coldly. Salazar raced up to it, barking with a shrillness that told of terror valorously combatted. He danced about, barking.
The Qul-En found a solution. Its vehicle rose on its hind legs and raced up the hillside. It was an emergency method of locomotion for which this particular vehicle was not designed, and it required almost inspired handling of the controls to achieve it. But the Qul-En inside was wholly competent. It guided the vehicle safely over the hilltop while Salazar made only feigned dashes after it. Safely away, the Qul-En stopped and deliberately experimented until he developed the process of running on three legs. Then the mountain lion which was not a mountain lion went bounding through the night toward its hidden ship.
Within an hour it clawed away the brush from the exit-port, crawled inside and closed the port after it. As a matter of pure precaution, it touched the “take-off” control before it even came out of its vehicle.
The ventilation-opening closed—very nearly. The ship rose quietly and swiftly toward the skies. Its arrival had not been noted. Its departure was quite unsuspected.
It wasn’t until the Qul-En touched the switch for the ship’s system of internal illumination to go on that anything appeared to be wrong. There was a momentary arc—and darkness. There was no interior illumination. Ants had stripped insulation from essential wires. The lights were shorted. The Qul-En was bewildered. It climbed back into the mountain-lion shape to use the infrared-sensitive scanning cells.
The interior of the ship was a crawling mass of insect life. There were ants and earwigs and silverfish and mites and spiders and centipedes and mantises and beetles. There were moths and larvae and grubs and midges and gnats and flies. The recording instrument was shrouded in cobwebs and hooded in dust that was fragments of the bodies of the spiders’ tiny victims. The air-refresher chemicals were riddled with the tunnels of beetles. Crickets, even, devoured plastic parts of the ship and chirped loudly. And the controls—ah! the controls—insulation stripped off here. Brackets riddled or weakened or turned to powder there. The ship could rise, and it did. But there were no controls at all.
The Qul-En went into a rage deadly enough to destroy the insects or itself. The whole future of its race depended on the discovery of an adequate source of a certain hormone. That source had been found. Only the return of this one small ship—fifteen feet in diameter—was needed to secure the future of a hundred-thousan
d-year-old civilization. And it was impeded by the insect life of the planet left behind! Insect life so low in nervous organization that the Qul-En had ignored it!
The ship was twenty thousand miles out from Earth when the occupant of the mountain lion used its ray-beam gun to destroy all the miniature enemies of its race. The killing-beam swept about the ship. Mites, spiders, beetles, larvae, silverfish and flies—everything died. Then the Qul-En crawled out and began furiously to make repairs. The technical skill needed was not lacking. In hours, this same being had made a perfect counterfeit of a mountain lion to serve it as a vehicle. Tracing and replacing gnawed-away insulation would be merely a tedious task. The ship would return to its home planet. The future of the Qul-En race would be secure. Great ships, many times the size of this, would flash through emptiness and come to this planet with instruments especially designed for collecting specimens of the local fauna. The cities of the civilized race would be the simplest and most ample sources of the so-desperately-needed hormone, no doubt. The inhabitants of even one city would furnish a stop-gap supply. In time—why, it would become systematic. The hormone would be gathered from this continent at this time, and from that continent at that, allowing the animals and the civilized race to breed for a few years in between collections. Yes…
The Qul-En worked feverishly. Presently it felt a vague discomfort. It worked on. The discomfort increased. It could discover no reason for it. It worked on, feverishly…
Back on Earth, morning came. The sun rose slowly, and the dew lay heavy on the mountain grasses. Far-away peaks were just beginning to be visible through the clouds that had lain on them overnight. Antonio still trembled, but Salazar slept. When the sun was fully risen he arose, shook himself and stretched elaborately, then scratched thoroughly and shook himself again and was ready for a new day. When Antonio tremblingly insisted that they drive the flock back toward the lowlands, Salazar assisted. He trotted after the flock and kept them moving. That was his business.
Out in space the silvery ship suddenly winked out of existence. Enough of its circuits had been repaired to put it in overdrive. The Qul-En was desperate by that time. It felt itself growing weaker, and it was utterly necessary to reach its own race and report the salvation it had found for them. The record of the flickering flame was ruined. The Qul-En felt that it itself was dying. But if it could get near enough to any of the planetary systems inhabited by its race, it could signal them and all would be well.
Moving ever more feebly, the Qul-En managed to get lights on within the ship again. Then it found what it considered the cause of its increasing weakness and spasmodic, gasping breaths. In using the killing-ray it had swept all the interior of the ship. But not the mountain-lion shape. Naturally! The mountain-lion shape had killed specimens and carried them about. While its foreleg flamed, it had even rolled on startled, stupid sheep. It had acquired fleas—perhaps some from Salazar—and ticks. The fleas and ticks had not been killed. They happily inhabited the Qul-En.
The Qul-En tried desperately to remain alive until a message could be given to its people. But it was not possible. There was a slight matter the returning explorer was too much wrought up to perceive, and the instruments that would have reported it were out of action because of destroyed insulation. When the ventilation-slit was closed as the ship took off, it was not closed completely. There was a large beetle in the way. There was a continuous, tiny leakage of air past the crushed chitinous armor. The Qul-En in the ship died of oxygen-starvation without realizing what had happened, just as human pilots sometimes black out from the same cause before they know what is the matter. So the little silvery ship never came out of overdrive. It went on forever, not reporting its discovery.
The fleas and ticks, too, died in time. They died very happily, very full of Qul-En body-fluid. But they never had a chance to report to their fellows that the Qul-En were very superior eating.
The only one who could report was Antonio. And he told his story and was laughed at. Only his cronies, ignorant and superstitious men like himself, could believe in the existence of a thing not of earth, in the shape of a mountain lion that leaped hundreds of feet at a time, which dissected wild creatures and made magic over them, but fled from bullets marked with a cross and bled flame and smoke when such a bullet wounded it.
Such a thing, of course, was absurd.
PIPELINE TO PLUTO
Far, far out on Pluto, where the sun is only a very bright star and a frozen, airless globe circles in emptiness; far out on Pluto, there was motion. The perpetual faint starlight was abruptly broken. Yellow lights shone suddenly in a circle, and men in spacesuits waddled to a space tug—absurdly marked Betsy-Anne in huge white letters. They climbed up its side and went in the airlock. Presently a faint, jetting glow appeared below its drivetubes. It flared suddenly and the tug lifted, to hover expertly a brief distance above what seemed an unmarred field of frozen atmosphere. But that field heaved and broke. The nose of a Pipeline carrier appeared in the center of a cruciform opening. It thrust through. It stood half its length above the surface of the dead and lifeless planet. The tug drifted above it. Its grapnel dropped down, jetted minute flames, and engaged in the monster towring at the carrier’s bow.
The tug’s drivetubes flared luridly. The carrier heaved abruptly up out of its hiding place and plunged for the heavens behind the tug. It had a huge classmark and number painted on its side, which was barely visible as it whisked out of sight. It went on up at four gravities acceleration, while the space tug lined out on the most precise of courses and drove fiercely for emptiness.
A long, long time later, when Pluto was barely a pallid disk behind, the tug cast off. The carrier went on, sunward. Its ringed nose pointed unwaveringly to the sun, toward which it would drift for years. It was one of a long, long line of carriers drifting through space, a day apart in time but millions of miles apart in distance. They would go on until a tug from Earth came out and grappled them and towed them in to their actual home planet.
But the Betsy-Anne, of Pluto, did not pause for contemplation of the two-billion-mile-long line of ore-carriers taking the metal of Pluto back to Earth. It darted off from the line its late tow now followed. Its radio-locator beam flickered invisibly in emptiness. Presently its course changed. It turned about. It braked violently, going up to six gravities deceleration for as long as half a minute at a time. Presently it came to rest and there floated toward it an object from Earth, a carrier with great white numerals on its sides. It had been hauled off Earth and flung into an orbit which would fetch it out to Pluto. The Betsy-Anne’s grapnel floated toward it and jetted tiny sparks until the towring was engaged. Then the tug and its new tow from Earth started back to Pluto.
There were two long lines of white-numbered carriers floating sedately through space. One line drifted tranquilly in to Earth. One drifted no less tranquilly out past the orbits of six planets to reach the closed-in, underground colony of the mines on Pluto.
Together they made up the Pipeline.
The evening Moon-rocket took off over to the north and went straight up to the zenith. Its blue-white rocket-flare changed color as it fell behind, until the tail-end was a deep, rich crimson. The Pipeline docks were silent, now, but opposite the yard the row of flimsy eating and drinking-places rattled and thuttered to themselves from the lower-than-sound vibrations of the Moon-ship.
There was a youngish, battered man named Hill in the Pluto Bar, opposite the docks. He paid no attention to the Moon-rocket, but he looked up sharply as a man came out of the Pipeline gate and came across the street toward the bar. But Hill was staring at his drink when the door opened and the man from the dock looked the small dive over. Besides Hill—who looked definitely tough, and as if he had but recently recovered from a ravaging illness—there was only the bartender, a catawheel-truck driver and his girl having a drink together, and another man at a table by himself and fidgeting nervously as if he were waiting for someone. Hill’s eyes flickered again to the man i
n the door. He looked suspicious. But then he looked back at his glass.
The other man came in and went to the bar.
“Evenin’, Mr. Crowder,” said the bartender.
Hill’s eyes darted up, and down again. The bartender reached below the bar, filled a glass, and slid it across the mahogany.
“Evenin’,” said Crowder curtly. He looked deliberately at the fidgety man. He seemed to note that the fidgety man was alone. He gave no sign of recognition, but his features pinched a little, as some men’s do when they feel a little, crawling unease. But there was nothing wrong except that the fidgety man seemed to be upset because he was waiting for someone who hadn’t come.
Crowder sat down in a booth, alone. Hill waited a moment, looked sharply about him, and then stood up. He crossed purposefully to the booth in which Crowder sat.
“I’m lookin’ for a fella named Crowder,” he said huskily. “That’s you, ain’t it?”
Crowder looked at him, his face instantly masklike. Hill’s looks matched his voice. There was a scar under one eye. He had a cauliflower ear. He looked battered, and hard-boiled—and as if he had just recovered from some serious injury or illness. His skin was reddened in odd patches.
“My name is Crowder,” said Crowder suspiciously. “What is it?”
Hill sat down opposite him.
“My name’s Hill,” he said in the same husky voice. “There was a guy who was gonna come here tonight. He’d fixed it up to be stowed away on a Pipeline carrier to Pluto. I bought ’em off. I bought his chance. I came here to take his place.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Crowder coldly.
First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster Page 17
