by Various
He climbed down the ladder and began walking over toward the western wall. He would have to keep away from the ship for a while, and the rocks were as good a place as any to hide out.
It was dark. Fomalhaut had set, leaving the moonless planet in utter blackness, broken only by the cold gleam of the stars. The lights streaming from the portholes of the Lord Nelson gave a small degree of illumination to the valley.
The valley. It was spread out before him, calm and peaceful, rippling dunes of sand curling out toward the mountains. The valley, he knew, was a betrayer—calm and quiet above, alive with an army of hideous vermin a few feet below its surface.
He started to walk, and moistened his lips. He knew he was going to get awfully thirsty in the next few hours, but there was not the slightest help for it. There hadn't been any way to carry water from the ship.
"I can wait," he told himself. He stared back at the circular bulk of the Lord Nelson behind him, and his fingers trembled a little. He had known, when he joined the Corps, that space was full of traps like this one—but this was the first time he had actually experienced anything like this. It was foul.
Something slammed into his boot sole, and this time Wayne knew what it was.
"Persistent, aren't you!" He jerked his foot up. This monster hadn't stuck as the other one had, but he saw the tip of the needle-beak thrashing around wildly in the loose sand. Wayne thumbed the gun up to full power, and there was a piercing shriek as the gun burned into the sand. There was a sharp shrill sound, and the odor of something burning. He spat.
The little beasts must be all over the floor of the valley! Scurrying frantically, like blood-red giant crabs, sidling up and down beneath the valley, searching upward for things to strike at. How they must hate his metamagnetic boots, he thought!
He kept on walking, expecting to feel the impact of another thrust momentarily, but he was not molested again. They must be getting wise, he thought. They know they can't get through my boots, and so they're leaving me alone. That way they don't call attention to themselves.
A new, more chilling question struck him:
Just how smart are they?
He had made it to the wall and was climbing up the treacherous slope when the airlock door opened, and someone stood outlined in the bright circle of light that cut into the inky blackness. An amplified voice filled the valley and ricocheted back off the walls of the mountains, casting eerie echoes down on the lone man on the desert.
"CAPTAIN WAYNE! THIS IS COLONEL PETERSEN SPEAKING. DON'T YOU REALIZE THAT YOU'RE A SICK MAN? YOU MAY DIE OUT THERE. COME BACK. THAT'S AN ORDER, CAPTAIN. REPEAT: COME BACK. THAT'S AN ORDER!"
"I'm afraid an order from you just doesn't hold much weight for me right now, Colonel," Wayne said quietly, to himself. Silently he went on climbing the escarpment, digging into the rough rock.
He kept on climbing until he found the niche for which he had been heading. He dragged himself in and sat down, as comfortably as possible. He began to wait.
Dawn came in less than three hours, as Fomalhaut burst up over the horizon and exploded in radiance over the valley. With dawn came a patrol of men, slinking surreptitiously across the valley, probably with orders to bring him in. Wayne was ensconced comfortably in his little rock niche, hidden from the men in the valley below, but with a perfect view of everything that went on. The wind whistled around the cliffs, ceaselessly moaning a tuneless song. He felt like standing up and shouting wildly, "Here I am! Here I am!" but he repressed the perverse urge.
The patrol group stood in a small clump in the valley below, seemingly waiting for something. Moments passed, and then it became apparent what that something was. Hollingwood, the metallurgist, appeared, dragging with him the detector. They were going to look for Captain Wayne with it, just as they had searched out the double-nucleus beryllium.
Wayne frowned. It was a possibility he hadn't thought about. They could easily detect the metal in his boots! And he didn't dare take them off; he'd never make it back across that hellish stretch of sand without them. He glanced uneasily at his watch. How much longer do I have to keep evading them? he wondered. It was a wearing task.
It looked as though it would be much too long.
The muzzle of the detector began to swing back and forth slowly and precisely, covering the valley inch by inch. He heard their whispered consultations drifting up from below, though he couldn't make out what they were saying.
They finished with the valley, evidently concluding he wasn't there, and started searching the walls. Wayne decided it was time to get out while the getting was good. He crawled slowly out of the niche and wriggled along the escarpment, heading south, keeping low so the men in the valley wouldn't see him.
Unfortunately, he couldn't see them either. He kept moving, hoping they wouldn't spot him with the detector. He wished he had the metamagnetic hand grapples with him. For one thing, the sharp rock outcroppings sliced his hands like so much meat. For another, he could have dropped the grapples somewhere as a decoy.
Oh, well, you can't think of everything, Wayne told himself. He glanced at his watch. How long was it going to take?
He heard the scrape of boot leather on a rock somewhere ahead of him. He glanced up sharply, seeing nothing, and scowled. They had spotted him.
They were laying a trap.
Cautiously, he climbed over a huge boulder, making no sound. There was one man standing behind it, waiting, apparently, for Wayne to step around into view. He peered down, trying to see who it was. It seemed to be Hollingwood, the dignified, austere metallurgist.
Wayne smiled grimly, picked up a heavy rock, and dropped it straight down, square on the man's helmet. The plexalloy rang like a bell through the clear early-morning air, and the man dropped to his knees, dazed by the shock.
Knowing he had just a moment to finish the job, Wayne pushed off against the side of the rock and plummeted down, landing neatly on the metallurgist's shoulders. The man reeled and fell flat. Wayne spun him over and delivered a hard punch to the solar plexus. "Sorry, Dave," he said softly. The metallurgist gasped and curled up in a tight ball. Wayne stood up. It was brutal, but it was the only place you could hit a man wearing a space helmet.
One down, Wayne thought. Fifty-eight to go. He was alone against the crew—and, for all he knew, against all fifty-nine of them.
Hollingwood groaned and stretched. Wayne bent and, for good measure, took off the man's helmet and tapped him none too gently on the skull.
There was the sound of footsteps, the harsh chitch-chitch of feet against the rock. "He's up that way," he heard a deep voice boom.
That meant the others had heard the rock hitting Hollingwood's plexalloy helmet. They were coming toward him.
Wayne sprang back defensively and glanced around. He hoped there were only five of them, that the rule of six was still being maintained. Otherwise things could become really complicated, as they hunted him relentlessly through the twisted gulleys.
He hated to have to knock out too many of the men; it just meant more trouble later. Still, there was no help for it, if he wanted there to be any later. He thought of the bleached bones of the crew of the Mavis, and shuddered.
It was something of an advantage not to be wearing a helmet. Even with the best of acoustical systems, hearing inside a helmet tended to be distorted and dimmed. The men couldn't hear him as well as he could hear them. And since they couldn't hear themselves too well, they made a little more noise than he did.
A space boot came into view around a big rock, and Wayne aimed his needle-beam at the spot where the man's head would appear.
When the head came around the rock, Wayne fired. The man dropped instantly. Sorry, friend, Wayne apologized mentally. Two down. Fifty-seven to go. The odds were still pretty heavy.
He knew he had to move quickly now; the others had seen the man drop, and by now they should have a pretty good idea exactly where Wayne was.
He picked up a rock and lobbed it over a nearby boulder, t
hen started moving cat-like in the other direction. He climbed up onto another boulder and watched two men move away from him. They were stepping warily, their beam guns in their hands. Wayne wiped away a bead of perspiration, aimed carefully, and squeezed the firing stud twice.
Four down. Fifty-five to go.
A moment later, something hissed near his ear. Without waiting, he spun and rolled off the boulder, landing cat-like on his feet. Another crewman was standing on top of a nearby boulder. Wayne began to sweat; this pursuit seemed to be indefinitely prolonged, and it was beginning to look unlikely that he could avoid them forever.
He had dropped his pistol during the fall; it was wedged between a couple of rocks several feet away.
He heard someone call: "I got him. He fell off the rock. We'll take him back down below."
Then another voice—ominously. "He won't mind. He'll be glad we did it for him—afterwards."
"I'll go get him," said the first voice. The man stepped around the side of the boulder—just in time to have a hard-pitched rock come thunking into his midsection.
"Oof!" he grunted, took a couple of steps backwards, and collapsed.
Five down. Fifty-four to go. It could go on forever this way.
"What's the matter?" asked the man who had replied to the first one with those chilling words.
"Nothing," said Wayne, in a fair imitation of the prostrate crewman's voice. "He's heavy. Come help me."
Then he reached down and picked up the fallen man's beam gun. He took careful aim.
When the sixth man stepped around the rock, he fired. The beam went wide of the mark, slowing the other down, and Wayne charged forward. He pounded two swift punches into the amazed crewman, who responded with a woozy, wild blow. Wayne ducked and let the fist glide past his ear, then came in hard with a solid body-blow and let the man sag to the ground. He took a deep breath.
Six down and only fifty-three to go.
He crawled back to the edge of the precipice and peered down into the valley. There was no one to be seen. It was obvious that Colonel Petersen was still enforcing the six-man rule.
As he watched, he saw the airlock door open. A spacesuited figure scrambled down the ladder and sprinted across the deadly sand of the valley floor.
It was Sherri! Wayne held his breath, expecting at any moment that one of the little monsters beneath the sand would sink its vicious needle upward into Sherri's foot. But her stride never faltered.
As she neared the precipice, another figure appeared at the airlock door and took aim with a gun.
Wayne thumbed his own needle-beam pistol up to full and fired hastily at the distant figure. At that distance, even the full beam would only stun. The figure collapsed backwards into the airlock, and Wayne grinned in satisfaction.
Seven down. Fifty-two to go.
He kept an eye on the airlock door and a finger on his firing stud, waiting to see if anyone else would come out. No one else did.
As soon as Sherri was safely up to the top of the precipice, Wayne ran to meet her.
"Sherri! What the devil did you come out here for?"
"I had to see you," she said, panting for breath. "If you'll come back to the ship before they beam you down, we can prove to Colonel Petersen that you're all right. We can show them that the Masters—"
She realized suddenly what she said and uttered a little gasp. She had her pistol out before the surprised Wayne could move.
He stared coldly at the pistol, thinking bitterly that this was a hell of a way for it all to finish. "So they got you too," he said. "That little display at the airlock was a phony. You were sent out here to lure me back into the ship. Just another Judas."
She nodded slowly. "That's right," she said. "We all have to go to the Masters. It is—it—is—is—"
Her eyes glazed, and she swayed on her feet. The pistol wavered and swung in a feeble spiral, no longer pointed at Wayne. Gently, he took it from her nerveless fingers and caught her supple body as she fell.
He wiped his forehead dry. Up above, the sun was climbing toward the top of the sky, and its beams raked the planet below, pouring down heat.
He glanced at his wristwatch while waiting for his nerves to stop tingling. Sherri must have been the last one—the drug must have taken effect at last, and not a moment too soon. He decided to wait another half hour before he tried to get into the spaceship, just the same.
The huge globe of the Lord Nelson stood forlornly in the center of the valley. The airlock door stayed open; no one tried to close it.
Wayne's mouth was growing dry; his tongue felt like sandpaper. Nevertheless, he forced himself to sit quietly, watching the ship closely for the full half hour, before he picked up Sherri, tied his rope around her waist, and lowered her to the valley floor. Then he wandered around the rocks, collecting the six unconscious men, and did the same for them.
He carried them all, one by one, across the sand, burning a path before him with the needle beam.
Long before he had finished his task, the sand was churning loathsomely with the needles of hundreds and thousands of the monstrous little beasts. They were trying frantically to bring down the being that was so effectively thwarting their plans, jabbing viciously with their upthrust beaks. The expanse of sand that was the valley looked like a pincushion, with the writhing needles ploughing through the ground one after another. Wayne kept the orifice of his beam pistol hot as he cut his way back and forth from the base of the cliff to the ship.
When he had dumped the seven unconscious ones all inside the airlock, he closed the outer door and opened the inner one. There was not a sound from within.
Fifty-nine down, he thought, and none to go.
He entered the ship and dashed down the winding staircase to the water purifiers to change the water in the reservoir tanks. Thirsty as he was, he was not going to take a drink until the water had been cleared of the knockout drug he had dropped into the tanks.
After that came the laborious job of getting everyone in the ship strapped into their bunks for the takeoff. It took the better part of an hour to get all sixty of them up—they had fallen all over the ship—and nestled in the acceleration cradles. When the job was done, he went to the main control room and set the autopilot to lift the spaceship high into the ionosphere.
Then, sighting carefully on the valley far below, he dropped a flare bomb.
"Goodbye, little monsters," he said exultantly.
For a short space of time, nothing happened. Then the viewplate was filled with a deadly blue-white glare. Unlike an ordinary atomic bomb, the flare bomb would not explode violently; it simply burned, sending out a brilliant flare of deadly radiation that would crisp all life dozens of feet below the ground.
He watched the radiation blazing below. Then it began to die down, and when the glare cleared away, all was quiet below.
The valley was dead.
When it was all over, Wayne took the hypodermic gun from his pouch, filled it with the anti-hypnotic drug that he had taken from the medical cabinet, and began to make his rounds. He fired a shot into each and every one aboard. He had no way of knowing who had been injected by the small monsters and who had not, so he was taking no chances.
Then he went to the colonel's room. He wanted to be there when the Commanding Officer awoke.
The entire crew of the Lord Nelson was gathered in the big mess hall. Wayne stared down at the tired, frightened faces of the puzzled people looking up at him, and continued his explanation.
"Those of you who were under the control of the monsters know what it was like. They had the ability to inject a hypnotic drug into a human being through a normal space boot with those stingers of theirs. The drug takes effect so fast that the victim hardly has any idea of what has happened to him."
"But why do they do it?" It was Hollingwood, the metallurgist, looking unhappy with a tremendous bruise on his head where Wayne had clobbered him.
"Why does a wasp sting a spider? It doesn't kill the spider, it
simply stuns it. That way, the spider remains alive and fresh so that young wasps can feed upon it at their leisure."
Wayne glanced over to his right. "Lieutenant Jervis, you've been under the effect of the drug longer than any of us. Would you explain what really happened when the Mavis landed?"
The young officer stood up. He was pale and shaken, but his voice was clear and steady.
"Just about the same thing that almost happened here," Jervis said. "We all walked around the valley floor and got stung one at a time. The things did it so quietly that none of us knew what was going on until we got hit ourselves. When we had all been enslaved, we were ready to do their bidding. They can't talk, but they can communicate by means of nerve messages when that needle is stuck into you."
Nearly half the crew nodded in sympathy. Wayne studied them, wondering what it must have been like. They knew; he could only guess.
"Naturally," Jervis went on, "those who have already been injected with the drug try to get others injected. When everyone aboard the Mavis had been stung, they ordered me to take the ship home and get another load of Earthmen. Apparently they like our taste. I had to obey; I was completely under their power. You know what it's like."
"And what happened to the others—the eight men you left behind?" asked Colonel Petersen.
Jervis clenched his teeth bitterly. "They just laid down on the sand—and waited."
"Horrible!" Sherri said.
Jervis fell silent. Wayne was picturing the sight, and knew everyone else was, too—the sight of hordes of carnivorous little aliens burrowing up through the sand and approaching the eight Earthmen who lay there, alive but helpless. Approaching them—and beginning to feed.
Just when the atmosphere began to grow too depressing, Wayne decided to break the spell. "I'd like to point out that the valley's been completely cauterized," he said. "The aliens have been wiped out. And I propose to lead a mission out to reconnoitre for the double-nucleus beryllium."
