First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  Huyghens advanced toward him as the incandescence dimmed. Sourdough and Sitka preceded him. Faro Nell trailed faithfully, keeping a maternal eye on her offspring. The man in the clearing stared at the parade they made. It would be upsetting, even after preparation, to land at night on a strange planet, to have the ship’s boat and all links with the rest of the cosmos depart, and then to find oneself approached—it might seem stalked—by two colossal male Kodiak bears, with a third bear and a cub behind them. A single human figure in such company might seem irrelevant.

  The new arrival gazed blankly. He moved back a few steps. Then Huyghens called:

  “Hello, there! Don’t worry about the bears! They’re friends!”

  Sitka reached the newcomer. He went warily downwind from him and sniffed. The smell was satisfactory. Man-smell. Sitka sat down with the solid impact of more than a ton of bear-meat landing on packed dirt, and regarded the man. Sourdough said “Whoosh!” and went on to sample the air beyond the clearing. Huyghens approached. The newcomer wore the uniform of the Colonial Survey. That was bad. It bore the insignia of a senior officer. Worse.

  “Hah!” said the just-landed man. “Where are the robots? What in all the nineteen hells are these creatures? Why did you shift your station? I’m Bordman, here to make a progress-report on your colony.”

  Huyghens said:

  “What colony?”

  “Loren Two Robot Installation—” Then Bordman said indignantly, “Don’t tell me that that idiot skipper can have dropped me at the wrong place! This is Loren Two, isn’t it! And this is the landing field. But where are your robots? You should have the beginning of a grid up! What the devil’s happened here and what are these beasts?”

  Huyghens grimaced.

  “This,” he said, “is an illegal, unlicensed settlement. I’m a criminal. These beasts are my confederates. If you don’t want to associate with criminals you needn’t, of course, but I doubt if you’ll live till morning unless you accept my hospitality while I think over what to do about your landing. In reason, I ought to shoot you.”

  Faro Nell came to a halt behind Huyghens, which was her proper post in all out-door movement. Nugget, however, saw a new human. Nugget was a cub, and therefore friendly. He ambled forward. He wriggled bashfully as he approached Bordman. He sneezed, because he was embarrassed.

  His mother overtook him and cuffed him to one side. He wailed. The wail of a six-hundred-pound Kodiak bear-cub is a remarkable sound. Bordman gave ground a pace.

  “I think,” he said carefully, “that we’d better talk things over. But if this is an illegal colony, of course you’re under arrest and anything you say will be used against you.”

  Huyghens grimaced again.

  “Right,” he said. “But now if you’ll walk close to me, we’ll head back to the station. I’d have Sourdough carry your bag—he likes to carry things—but he may need his teeth. We’ve half a mile to travel.” He turned to the animals. “Let’s go!” he said commandingly. “Back to the station! Hup!”

  Grunting, Sitka Pete arose and took up his duties as advanced point of a combat-team. Sourdough trailed, swinging widely to one side and another. Huyghens and Bordman moved together. Faro Nell and Nugget brought up the rear.

  There was only one incident on the way back. It was a night-walker, made hysterical by the lane of light. It poured through the underbrush, uttering cries like maniacal laughter.

  Sourdough brought it down, a good ten yards from Huyghens.

  When it was all over, Nugget bristled up to the dead creature, uttering cub-growls. He feigned to attack it.

  His mother whacked him soundly.

  There were comfortable, settling-down noises below, as the bears grunted and rumbled, and ultimately were still. The glare from the landing field was gone. The lighted lane through the jungle was dark again. Huyghens ushered the man from the space-boat up into his living quarters. There was a rustling stir, and Semper took his head from under his wing. He stared coldly at the two humans, spread monstrous, seven-foot wings, and fluttered them. He opened his beak and closed it with a snap.

  “That’s Semper,” said Huyghens. “Semper Tyrannis. He’s the rest of the terrestrial population here. Not being a fly-by-night sort of creature, he didn’t come out to welcome you.”

  Bordman blinked at the huge bird, perched on a three-inch-thick perch set in the wall.

  “An eagle?” he demanded. “Kodiak bears—mutated ones, but still bears—and now an eagle? You’ve a very nice fighting unit in the bears—”

  “They’re pack animals too,” said Huyghens. “They can carry some hundreds of pounds without losing too much combat efficiency. And there’s no problem of supply. They live off the jungle. Not sphexes, though. Nothing will eat a sphex.”

  He brought out glasses and a bottle and indicated a chair. Bordman put down his traveling bag, took a glass, and sat down.

  “I’m curious,” he observed. “Why Semper Tyrannis? I can understand Sitka Pete and Sourdough Charley as fighters. But why Semper?”

  “He was bred for hawking,” said Huyghens. “You sic a dog on something. You sic Semper Tyrannis. He’s too big to ride on a hawking-glove, so the shoulders of my coats are padded to let him ride there. He’s a flying scout. I’ve trained him to notify us of sphexes, and in flight he carries a tiny television camera. He’s useful, but he hasn’t the brains of the bears.”

  Bordman sat down and sipped at his glass.

  “Interesting, very interesting!—Didn’t you say something about shooting me?”

  “I’m trying to think of a way out,” Huyghens said. “Add up all the penalties for illegal colonization and I’d be in a very bad fix if you got away and reported this set-up. Shooting you would be logical.”

  “I see that,” said Bordman reasonably. “But since the point has come up—I have a blaster trained on you from my pocket.”

  Huyghens shrugged.

  “It’s rather likely that my human confederates will be back here before your friends. You’d be in a very tight fix if my friends came back and found you more or less sitting on my corpse.”

  Bordman nodded.

  “That’s true, too. Also it’s probable that your fellow-terrestrials wouldn’t cooperate with me as they have with you. You seem to have the whip hand, even with my blaster trained on you. On the other hand, you could have killed me quite easily after the boat left, when I’d first landed. I’d have been quite unsuspicious. Therefore you may not really intend to murder me.”

  Huyghens shrugged again.

  “So,” said Bordman, “since the secret of getting along with people is that of postponing quarrels, suppose we postpone the question of who kills whom? Frankly, I’m going to send you to prison if I can. Unlawful colonization is very bad business. But I suppose you feel that you have to do something permanent about me. In your place I probably should, too. Shall we declare a truce?”

  Huyghens indicated indifference.

  “Then I do,” Bordman said. “I have to! So—”

  He pulled his hand out of his pocket and put a pocket blaster on the table. He leaned back.

  “Keep it,” said Huyghens. “Loren Two isn’t a place where you live long unarmed.” He turned to a cupboard. “Hungry?”

  “I could eat,” admitted Bordman.

  Huyghens pulled out two meal-packs from the cupboard and inserted them in the readier below. He set out plates.

  “Now, what happened to the official, licensed, authorized colony here?” asked Bordman briskly. “License issued eighteen months ago. There was a landing of colonists with a drone-fleet of equipment and supplies. There’ve been four ship-contacts since. There should be several thousand robots being industrious under adequate human supervision. There should be a hundred-mile-square clearing, planted with food-plants for later human arrivals. There should be a landing-grid at least half-finished. Obviously there should be a space-beacon to guide ships to a landing. There isn’t. There’s no clearing visible from space. That Cre
te Line ship has been in orbit for three days, trying to find a place to drop me. Her skipper was fuming. Your beacon is the only one on the planet, and we found it by accident. What happened?”

  Huyghens served the food. He said drily:

  “There could be a hundred colonies on this planet without any one knowing of any other. I can only guess about your robots, but I suspect they ran into sphexes.”

  Bordman paused, with his fork in his hand.

  “I read up on this planet, since I was to report on its colony. A sphex is part of the inimical animal life here. Cold-blooded belligerent carnivore, not a lizard but a genus all its own. Hunts in packs. Seven to eight hundred pounds, when adult. Lethally dangerous and simply too numerous to fight. They’re why no license was ever granted to human colonists. Only robots could work here, because they’re machines. What animal attacks machines?”

  Huyghens said:

  “What machine attacks animals? The sphexes wouldn’t bother robots, of course, but would robots bother the sphexes?”

  Bordman chewed and swallowed.

  “Hold it! I’ll agree that you can’t make a hunting-robot. A machine can discriminate, but it can’t decide. That’s why there’s no danger of a robot revolt. They can’t decide to do something for which they have no instructions. But this colony was planned with full knowledge of what robots can and can’t do. As ground was cleared, it was enclosed in an electrified fence which no sphex could touch without frying.”

  Huyghens thoughtfully cut his food. After a moment:

  “The landing was in the winter time,” he observed. “It must have been, because the colony survived a while. And at a guess, the last ship-landing was before thaw. The years are eighteen months long here, you know.”

  “It was in winter that the landing was made,” Bordman admitted. “And the last ship-landing was before spring. The idea was to get mines in operation for material, and to have ground cleared and enclosed in sphex-proof fence before the sphexes came back from the tropics. They winter there, I understand.”

  “Did you ever see a sphex?” asked Huyghens. Then he said, “No, of course not. But if you took a spitting cobra and crossed it with a wild-cat, painted it tan-and-blue and then gave it hydrophobia and homicidal mania at once, you might have one sphex. But not the race of sphexes. They can climb trees, by the way. A fence wouldn’t stop them.”

  “An electrified fence,” said Bordman. “Nothing could climb that!”

  “No one animal,” Huyghens told him. “But sphexes are a race. The smell of one dead sphex brings others running with blood in their eyes. Leave a dead sphex alone for six hours and you’ve got them around by dozens. Two days and there are hundreds. Longer, and you’ve got thousands of them! They gather to caterwaul over their dead pal and hunt for whoever or whatever killed him.”

  He returned to his meal. A moment later he said:

  “No need to wonder what happened to your colony. During the winter the robots burned out a clearing and put up an electrified fence according to the book. Come spring, the sphexes come back. They’re curious, among their other madnesses. A sphex would try to climb the fence just to see what was behind it. He’d be electrocuted. His carcass would bring others, raging because a sphex was dead. Some of them would try to climb the fence, and die. And their corpses would bring others. Presently the fence would break down from the bodies hanging on it, or a bridge of dead beasts’ carcasses would be built across it—and from as far downwind as the scent carried there’d be loping, raging, scent-crazed sphexes racing to the spot. They’d pour into the clearing through or over the fence, squalling and screeching for something to kill. I think they’d find it.”

  Bordman ceased to eat. He looked sick.

  “There were pictures of sphexes in the data I read. I suppose that would account for—everything.”

  He tried to lift his fork. He put it down again.

  “I can’t eat,” he said abruptly.

  Huyghens made no comment. He finished his own meal, scowling. He rose and put the plates into the top of the cleaner.

  “Let me see those reports, eh?” he asked dourly. “I’d like to see what sort of a set-up they had, those robots.”

  Bordman hesitated and then opened his traveling bag. There was a microviewer and reels of films. One entire reel was labeled “Specifications for Construction, Colonial Survey,” which would contain detailed plans and all requirements of material and workmanship for everything from desks, office, administrative personnel, for use of, to landing-grids, heavy-gravity planets, lift-capacity 100,000 Earth-tons. But Huyghens found another. He inserted it and spun the control swiftly here and there, pausing only briefly at index-frames until he came to the section he wanted. He began to study the information with growing impatience.

  “Robots, robots, robots!” he snapped. “Why don’t they leave them where they belong—in cities to do the dirty work, and on airless planets where nothing unexpected ever happens! Robots don’t belong in new colonies. Your colonists depended on them for defense! Dammit, let a man work with robots long enough and he thinks all nature is as limited as they are! This is a plan to set up a controlled environment—on Loren Two! Controlled environment—” He swore. “Complacent, idiotic, desk-bound half-wits!”

  “Robots are all right,” said Bordman. “We couldn’t run civilization without them.”

  “But you can’t tame a wilderness with ’em,” snapped Huyghens. “You had a dozen men landed, with fifty assembled robots to start with. There were parts for fifteen hundred more, and I’ll bet anything I’ve got the ship-contacts landed more still!”

  “They did,” admitted Bordman.

  “I despise ’em,” growled Huyghens. “I feel about ’em the way the old Greeks felt about slaves. They’re for menial work—the sort of work a man will perform for himself, but that he won’t do for another man for pay. Degrading work!”

  “Quite aristocratic!” said Bordman with a touch of irony. “I take it that robots clean out the bear-quarters downstairs.”

  “No!” snapped Huyghens. “I do. They’re my friends. They fight for me. No robot would do the job right!”

  He growled, again. The noises of the night went on outside. Organ-tones and hiccoughings and the sound of tack-hammers and slamming doors. Somewhere there was a singularly exact replica of the discordant squeakings of a rusty pump.

  “I’m looking,” said Huyghens at the microviewer, “for the record of their mining operations. An open-pit operation would not mean a thing. But if they had driven a tunnel, and somebody was there supervising the robots when the colony was wiped out, there’s an off-chance he survived a while.”

  Bordman regarded him with suddenly intent eyes.

  “And—”

  “Dammit,” snapped Bordman, “if so I’ll go see! He’d—they’d have no chance at all, otherwise. Not that the chance is good in any case.”

  Bordman raised his eyebrows.

  “I’ve told you I’ll send you to prison if I can,” he said. “You’ve risked the lives of millions of people, maintaining non-quarantined communication with an unlicensed planet. If you did rescue somebody from the ruins of the robot colony—does it occur to you that they’d be witnesses to your unauthorized presence here?”

  Huyghens spun the viewer again. He stopped, switched back and forth, and found what he wanted. He muttered in satisfaction: “They did run a tunnel!” Aloud he said, “I’ll worry about witnesses when I have to.”

  He pushed aside another cupboard door. Inside it were the odds and ends a man makes use of to repair the things about his house that he never notices until they go wrong. There was an assortment of wires, transistors, bolts, and similar stray items.

  “What now?” asked Bordman mildly.

  “I’m going to try to find out if there’s anybody left alive over there. I’d have checked before if I’d known the colony existed. I can’t prove they’re all dead, but I may prove that somebody’s still alive. It’s barely two weeks’ jo
urney away from here. Odd that two colonies picked spots so near!”

  He picked over the oddments he’d selected.

  “Confound it!” Bordman said. “How can you check somebody’s alive some hundreds of miles away?”

  Huyghens threw a switch and took down a wall-panel, exposing electronic apparatus and circuits behind. He busied himself with it.

  “Ever think about hunting for a castaway?” he asked over his shoulder. “Here’s a planet with some tens of millions of square miles on it. You know there’s a ship down. You’ve no idea where. You assume the survivors have power—no civilized man will be without power very long, so long as he can smelt metals!—but making a space-beacon calls for high-precision measurements and workmanship. It’s not to be improvised. So what will your shipwrecked civilized man do, to guide a rescue-ship to the one or two square miles he occupies among some tens of millions on the planet?”

  “What?”

  “He’s had to go primitive, to begin with,” Huyghens explained. “He cooks his meat over a fire, and so on. He has to make a strictly primitive signal. It’s all he can do without gauges and micrometers and special tools. But he can fill all the planet’s atmosphere with a signal that searchers for him can’t miss. You see?”

  Bordman thought irritably. He shook his head.

  “He’ll make,” said Huyghens, “a spark transmitter. He’ll fix its output at the shortest frequency he can contrive, somewhere in the five-to-fifty-meter wave-band, but it will tune very broad—and it will be a plainly human signal. He’ll start it broadcasting. Some of those frequencies will go all around the planet under the ionosphere. Any ship that comes in under the radio roof will pick up his signal, get a fix on it, move and get another fix, and then go straight to where the castaway is waiting placidly in a hand-braided hammock, sipping whatever sort of drink he’s improvised out of the local vegetation.”

  Bordman said grudgingly:

  “Now that you mention it, of course…”

  “My space-phone picks up microwaves,” said Huyghens. “I’m shifting a few elements to make it listen for longer stuff. It won’t be efficient, but it will catch a distress-signal if one’s in the air. I don’t expect it, though.”