Perilous Planets Part 10

The monsters were backing away. Another villager, deciding it was about time, killed his wife who was standing in a door-way. The group of monsters stopped and jabbered at each other. Then they motioned to Hum.

Hum's body motion was incredulous after he had talked with them.

'If I understood right,' Hum said, 'they are ordering us not to kill any more of our women.'

'What!' Cordovir and a dozen others shouted.

'I'll ask them again.' Hum went back into conference with the monsters who were waving metal sticks in their tentacles.

'That's right,' Hum said. Without further preamble he flipped his tail, throwing one of the monsters across the village square. Immediately the others began to point their sticks while retreating rapidly.

After they were gone, the villagers found that seventeen males were dead. Hum, for some reason, had been missed.

'Now will you believe me?' Cordovir shouted. 'The creatures told a deliberate untruth. They said they wouldn't molest us and then they proceed to kill seventeen of us. Not only an amoral act - but a concerted death effort!'

It was almost past human understanding.

'A deliberate untruth!' Cordovir shouted the blasphemy, sick with loathing. Men rarely discussed the possibility of any-one telling an untruth.

The villagers were beside themselves with anger arid re-vulsion, once they realized the full concept of an untruthful creature. And, added to that was the monsters'

concerted death effort.

It was like the most horrible nightmare come true. Suddenly it became apparent that these creatures didn't kill females. Undoubtedly they allowed them to sp.a.w.n unhampered. The thought of that was enough to make a strong man retch.

The surplus females broke out of their pens and, joined by the wives, demanded to know what was happening. When they were told, they were twice as indignant as the men, such being the nature of women.

'Kill them!' the surplus females roared. 'Don't let them change our ways! Don't let them introduce immorality!'

'It's true,' Hiram said sadly. 'I should have guessed it."

'They must be killed at once,' a female shouted. Being sur-plus, she had no name at present, but she made up for that in blazing personality.

'We women desire only to live moral, decent lives, hatching eggs in the pen until our time of marriage comes. And then twenty-five ecstatic days! How could we desire more? These monsters will destroy our way of life. They will make us as terrible as they.'

'Now do you understand?' Cordovir screamed at the men. 'I warned you, I presented it to you, and you ignored me. Young men must listen to old men in time of crisis.' In this rage he killed two youngsters with a blow of his tail. The villagers applauded.

'Drive them out,' Cordovir shouted. 'Before they corrupt us!'

All the females rushed off to kill the monsters.

'They have death-sticks,' Hum observed. 'Do the females know?'

'I don't believe so,' Cordovir said. He was completely calm now. 'You'd better go and tell them.'

'I'm tired,' Hum said sulkily. 'I've been translating. Why don't you go?'

'Oh, let's both go,' Cordovir said, bored with the youngster's adolescent moodiness.

Accompanied by half the villagers they hurried off after the females.

They overtook them on the edge of the cliff that overlooked the object. Hum explained the death-sticks while Cordovir considered the problem.

'Roll stones on them!' he told the females. 'Perhaps you can break the metal of the object.'

The females started rolling stones down the cliffs with great energy. Some bounced off the metal of the object. Immedi-ately, lines of red fire came from the object and females were killed. The ground shook.

'Let's move back!' Cordovir said. 'The females have it well in hand, an4 this shaky ground makes me giddy.'

Together with the rest of the males they moved to a safe distance and watched the action.

Women were dying right and left, but they were reinforced by women of other villages who had heard of the menace. They were fighting for their homes now, their rights, and they were fiercer than a man could ever be. The object was throwing fire all over the cliff, but the fire helped dislodge more stones which rained down on the thing. Finally, big fires came out of one end of the metal object.

A landslide started, and the object got into the air just in time. It barely missed a mountain; then it climbed steadily, until it was a little black speck against the larger sun. And then it was gone.

That evening, it was discovered that fifty-three females had been killed. This was fortunate since it helped keep down the surplus female population. The problem would become even more acute now, since seventeen males were gone in a single lump.

Cordovir was feeling exceedingly proud of himself. His wife had been gloriously killed in the fighting, but he took another at once.

'We had better kill our wives sooner than every twenty-five days for a while,' he said at the evening Gathering. 'Just until things get back to normal.'

The surviving females, back in the pen, heard him and applauded wildly.

'I wonder where the things have gone,' Hum said, offering the question to the Gathering.

'Probably away to enslave some defenceless race,' Cordovir said.

'Not necessarily,' Mis.h.i.+ll put in and the evening argument was on.

Every science fiction enthusiast remembers the thrill of his first exposure to the concept of s.p.a.ce travel - the glory of man's voyaging between the planets and even between the stars. But modern adult science fiction has largely grown away from the mechanics of s.p.a.ce travel itself; the voyage is taken for granted as part of the background, and the story is focused on the results.

Here, however, one of the brighter new authors in the field shows that the story of the s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+p is not exhausted; inevitably in that remote interstellar future, there will be the Mapping Command, whose duties are never finished and whose voyages of discovery may be as exciting as that of Magellan - and as perilous.

GRENVILLE'S PLANET.

By Michael Shaara Wisher did not see the brightness because he was back aft alone. In the still s.h.i.+p he sat quietly, relaxed. He was not bored. It was just that he had no interest. After fourteen years in the Mapping Command even the strangest of the new worlds was routine to him and what little imagination he had was be-ginning to centre upon a small farm he had seen on the southern plains of Vega VII.

The brightness that Wisher did not see grew with the pa.s.s-ing moments. A pale young man named Grenville, who was Wisher's crewman, watched it for a long while absently. When the gleam took on brilliance and a blue-white, dazzling blaze Grenville was startled. He stared at the screen for a long moment, then carefully checked the distance. Still a few light minutes away, the planet was already uncommonly bright.

Pleasantly excited, Grenville watched the planet grow. Slowly the moons came out.

Four winked on and ringed the bright world like pearls in a necklace. Grenville gazed in awe. The blueness and the brightness flowed in together, it was the most beautiful thing that Grenville had ever seen.

Excited, he buzzed for Wisher. Wisher did not come.

Grenville took the s.h.i.+p in close and now it occurred to him to wonder. That a planet should s.h.i.+ne like that, like an enor-mous facet of polished gla.s.s, was incredible. Now, as he watched the light began to form vaguely into the folds of cloud. The blue grew richer and deeper. Long before he hit the first cloud layer, Grenville knew what it was. He pounded the buzzer. Wisher finally came.

When he saw the water in the screen he stopped in his tracks.

'Well I'll be d.a.m.ned!' he breathed.

Except for a few scuds of clouds it was blue. The entire world was blue. There was the white of the clouds and the ice-caps, but the rest was all blue and the rest was water.

Grenville began to grin. A world of water!

'Now how's that for a freak?' he chuckled. 'One in a million, right, Sam? I bet you never saw anything like that.'

Wisher shook his head, still staring. Then he moved quickly to the controls and set out to make a check. They circled the planet with the slow, spiralling motion of the Mapping Com-mand, bouncing radar off the dark side. When they came back into the daylight they were sure. There was no land on the planet.

Grenville, as usual, began to chatter.

'Well, naturally,' he said, 'it was bound to happen sooner or later. Considering Earth, which has a land area covering only one fourth-'

'Yep,' nodded Wisher.

'-and when you consider the odds, chances are that there are quite a number of planets with scarcely any land area at all.'

Wisher had moved back to the screen.

'Let's go down,' he said.

Grenville startled, stared at him.

'Where?'

'Down low. I want to see what's living in that ocean.'

Because each new world was a wholly new world and because experience therefore meant nothing, Wisher had decided a long while ago to follow the regs without question. For with-out the regs, the Mapping Command was a death trap. No-where in s.p.a.ce was the need for rules so great as out on the frontier where there were no rules at all. The regs were com-plex, efficient and all-embracing; it was to the regs that the men of the Mapping Command owed their lives and the rest of Mankind owed the conquest of s.p.a.ce.

But inevitably, unalterably, there were things which the regs could not have foreseen. And Wisher knew that too, but he did not think about it.

According to plan, then, they dropped down into the strato-sphere, went further down below the main cloud region and levelled off at a thousand feet. Below them, mile after rolling, billowy mile, the sea flowed out to the great bare circle of the horizon.

With the screen at full magnification, they probed the water.

It was surprising, in all that expanse of sea, to observe so little. No schools of fish of any kind, no floating ma.s.ses of sea-weed, nothing but a small fleet shape here and there and an occasional group of tiny plant organisms.

Wisher dropped only a hundred or so feet lower. In a world where evolution had been confined underwater it would be best to keep at a distance. On the other worlds to which he had come Wisher had seen some vast and incredible things.

Eight hundred feet up, he thought, is a good safe distance.

It was from that height then, that they saw the island.

It was small, too small to be seen from a distance, was barely five miles in length and less than two miles wide. A little brown cigar it was, sitting alone in the varying green-blue wash of the ocean.

Grenville began to grin. Abruptly he laughed out loud. Grenville was not the kind of man who is easily awed, and the sight of that one bare speck, that single stubby persistent b.u.t.t of rock alone in a world of water, was infinitely comical to him.

'Wait'll we show the boys this,' he chuckled to Wisher. 'Break out the camera. My G.o.d, what a picture this will make!'

Grenville was filled with pride. This planet, after all, was his a.s.signment. It was his to report on, his discovery - he gasped. They might even name it after him.

He flushed, his heart beat rapidly. It had happened before. There were a number of odd planets named after men in the Mapping Command. When the tourists came they would be coming to Grenville's Planet, one of the most spectacular wonders of the Universe.

While the young man was thus rejoicing. Wisher had brought the s.h.i.+p around and was swinging slowly in over the island. It was covered with some kind of brownish- green, stringy vegetation. Wisher was tempted to go down and check for animal life, but decided to see first if there were any more islands.

Still at a height of 800 feet, they spiralled the planet. They did not see the second island, radar picked it out for them.

This one was bigger than the first and there was another island quite near to the south. Both were narrow and elongated in the cigar-like shape of the first, were perhaps twenty miles in length and were encrusted with the same brown-green vegetation. They were small enough to have been hidden from sight during the first check by a few scattered clouds.

The discovery of them was anticlimatic and disappointing. Grenville would have been happier if there was no land at all. But he regained some of his earlier enthusiasm when he re-membered that the tourists would still come and that now at least they would be able to land.

There was nothing at all on-the night side. Coming back out into the daylight, Wisher cautiously decided to take them down.

'Peculiar,' said Wisher, peering at the dunes of the beach.

'What is?' Grenville eyed him through the fish bowls of their helmets.

'I don't know,' Wisher turned slowly, gazed around at the s.h.a.ggy, weedy vegetation. 'It doesn't feel right.'

Grenville fell silent. There was nothing on the island that could hurt them, they were quite sure of that. The check had revealed the presence of a great number of small, four-footed animals, but only one type was larger than a dog, and that one was slow and noisy.

'Have to be careful about snakes,' Wisher said absently, re-calling the regs on snakes and insects. Funny thing, that. There were very few insects.

Both men were standing in close to the s.h.i.+p. It was the rule, of course. You never left the s.h.i.+p until you were absolutely sure. Wisher, for some vague reason he could not define, was not sure.

'How's the air check?'

Grenville was just then reading the meters. After a moment he said: 'Good.'

Wisher relaxed, threw open his helmet and breathed in deeply. The clean fresh air flowed into him, exhilarating him. He unscrewed his helmet entirely, looking around.

The s.h.i.+p had come down on the up end of the beach, a good distance from the sea, and was standing now in a soft, reddish sand. It was bordered on the north by the open sea and to the south was the scrawny growth they had seen from above. It was not a jungle - the plants were too straight and stiff for that - and the height of the tallest was less than ten feet. But it was the very straightness of the things, the eerie regularity of them, which grated in Wisher's mind.

But, breathing in the cool sea air of the island, Wisher began to feel more confident.

They had their rifles, they had the s.h.i.+p and the alarm system. There was nothing here that could harm them.

Grenville brought out some folding chairs from the s.h.i.+p. They sat and chatted pleasantly until the twilight came.

Just before twilight two of the moons came out.

'Moons,' said Wisher suddenly.

'What.'

'I was just thinking,' Wisher explained.

'What about the moons?'