Perilous Planets Part 12

After the base was once established, the brains of the party got to work. They turned the place inside out. They put it on tape and captured it within the chains of symbols they scrib-bled in their field books. They pictured it and wrote it and plotted it and reduced it to a neat a.s.sembly of keyed and sym-bolic facts to be inserted in the galactic files.

If there was life, and sometimes there was, they prodded it to get reaction.

Sometimes the reaction was extremely violent and other times it was much more dangerously subtle. But there were ways in which to handle both the violent and the subtle, for the legionnaires and their robotics were trained to a razor's edge and knew nearly all the answers.

As we were saying, there was nothing in the universe, so far known, that could stop a human survey party.

Tom Decker sat at his ease in the empty lounge and swirled the ice in the highball gla.s.s, well contented, watching the first of the robots emerge from the bowels of the cargo s.p.a.ce. They dragged a conveyor belt behind them as they emerged and Decker, sitting idly, watched them drive supports into the ground and rig up the belt.

A door clicked open back of Decker and he turned his head.

'May I come in, sir?' Doug Jackson asked.

'Certainly,' said Decker.

Jackson walked to the great curving window and looked out.

'What does it look like, sir?' he asked.

Decker shrugged. 'Another job,' he said. 'Six weeks. Six months. Depends on what we find.'

Jackson sat down beside him.

'This one looks tough,' he said. 'Jungle worlds always are a bit meaner than any of the others.'

Decker grunted at him. 'A job,' he said. 'That's all. Another job to do. Another report to file. Then they'll either send out an exploitation gang or a pitiful bunch of bleating colonists.'

'Or,' said Jackson, 'they'll file the report and let it gather dust for a thousand years or so.'

'They can do anything they want,' Decker told him. 'We turn it in. What someone else does with it after that is their affair, not ours.'

They sat quietly, watching the six robots roll out the first of the packing-cases, rip off its cover and unpack the seventh robot, laying out his various parts neatly in a row in the tramped-down, waist-high gra.s.s. Then, working as a team, with not a single fumble, they put No 7 together, screwed his brain case into his metal skull, flipped up his energizing switch and slapped the breastplate home.

No 7 stood groggily for a moment. He swung his arms un-certainly, shook his head from side to side. Then, having oriented himself, he stepped briskly forward, helped the other six heave the packing-case containing No 8 off the conyeyor belt.

'Takes a little time this way,' said Decker, 'but it saves a lot of s.p.a.ce. Have to cut our robot crew in half if we didn't pack them at the end of every job. They stow away better.'

He sipped at his highball speculatively. Jackson lit a cigarette.

'Some day," said Jackson, 'we're going to run up against something that we can't handle.'

Decker snorted.

'Maybe here,' insisted Jackson, gesturing at the nightmare jungle world outside the great curved sweep of the vision plate.

'You're a romanticist,' Decker told him shortly. 'In love with the unexpected.

Besides that, you're new. Get a dozen trips under your belt and you won't feel this way.'

'It could happen,' declared Jackson.

Decker nodded, almost sleepily. 'Maybe,' he said. 'Maybe it could, at that. It never has, but I suppose it could. And when it does, we take it on the lam. It's no part of our job to fight a last ditch battle. When we b.u.mp up against something that's too big to handle, we don't stick around. We don't take any risks.'

He had another sip.

'Nor even calculated risks,' he said.

The s.h.i.+p rested on the top of a low hill, in a small clearing masked by tall gra.s.s, sprinkled here and there with patches of exotic flowers. Below the hill a river flowed sluggishly, a broad expanse of chocolate-coloured water moving in a sleepy tide through the immense, vine-entangled forest.

As far as the eye could see the jungle stretched away, a brooding darkness that even from behind the curving quartz of the vision plate seemed to exude a heady, musty scent of danger that swept up over the gra.s.s-covered hill-top. There was no sign of life, but one knew, almost instinctively, that sentiency lurked in the buried pathways and tunnels of the great treeland.

Robot No 8 had been energized and now the eight split into two groups, ran out two packing-boxes at a time instead of one. Soon there were twelve robots and then they formed themselves into three groups.

'Like that,' said Decker, picking up the conversation where they had left it lying.

He gestured with his gla.s.s, now empty 'No calculated risks. We send the robots first.

They unpack and set up their fellows. Then the whole gang turns to and un-. crates the machinery and sets it up and gets it operating. A man doesn't even put his foot on the ground until he has a steel ring around the s.h.i.+p to give him protection.'

Jackson sighed. 'I guess you're right,' he said. 'Nothing can happen. We don't take any chances. Not a single one.'

'Why should we?' Decker asked.

He heaved himself out of the chair, stood up and stretched.

'Got a job or two to do,' he said. 'Last minute checks and so on.'

'I'll sit here for awhile,' said Jackson. 'I like to watch. I'm new to this. It is fascinating.'

'You'll get over that,' said Decker, 'in another twenty years.'

In his office, Decker lifted the sheaf of preliminary reports off his desk and ran through them slowly, checking each one carefully, filing away in his mind the basic facts of the world outside.

He worked stolidly, wetting a big, blunt thumb against his out-thrust tongue to flip the report pages off the top of the neat stack and deposit them, in not so neat a pile to his right, face downward.

Atmosphere - pressure slightly more than Earth. High in oxygen content.

Gravity - a bit more than Earth.

Temperature - hot. Jungle worlds always were. There was a breeze outside now, he thought. Maybe there'd be a breeze most of the time. That would be a help.

Rotation - thirty-six hour day.

Radiation - none of local origin, but some hard stuff getting through from the sun.

He made a mental note: Watch that!

Bacterial and virus count - as usual. Lots of it. Apparently, not too dangerous. Not with every single soul hypoed and im-munized and hormoned to his eyebrows. But you never can be sure, he thought. Not entirely sure. No calculated risks, he had told Jackson. But here was a calculated risk and one you couldn't do a single thing about. If there was a bug that picked you for a host and you weren't loaded for bear to fight him, you took him on and did the best you could.

Life factor - lot of emanations. Probably the vegetation, maybe even the soil, was crawling with all sorts of loathsome life. Vicious stuff, more than likely. But that was something that you took care of as a matter of routine. No use of taking any chances.

You went over the ground even if there was no life ... just to be sure there wasn't.

A tap came on the door and he called out for the man to enter.

It was Captain Carr, commander of the Legion unit.

Carr saluted snappily. Decker did not rise, made his answering salute a sloppy one on purpose. No use, he told himself, of letting the fellow establish any semblance of equality, for there was no such equality in fact. A captain of the Legion did not rank with the commandant of a galactic survey party.

'Reporting, sir,' said Carr. 'We are ready for a landing.'

Decker rumbled at him. 'Fine, Captain. Fine.'

What was the matter with the fool? The Legion always was ready, always would be ready - that was no more than tradi-tion. Why carry out such an empty, stiff formality?

But it was the nature of a man like Carr, he supposed. The Legion, with its rigid discipline, with its ancient pride of ser-vice and tradition, attracted men like Carr, was a perfect finis.h.i.+ng school for accomplished martinets.

Tin soldiers, Decker thought, but accomplished ones. As hard-bitten a gang of fighting men as the galaxy had ever known. They were drilled and disciplined to a razor's edge, serum and hormone-injected against all known diseases of an alien world, trained and educated in alien psychology and strictly indoctrinated with high survival characteristics which stood up under even the most adverse circ.u.mstances.

'We shall not be ready for some time, Captain,' Decker said. 'The robots have just started their uncrating.'

'Very well,' said Carr. 'We await your orders, sir.'

Thank you, Captain,' Decker told him, making it quite clear that he wished he would get out. But when Carr turned to go, Decker called him back.

'What is it, sir?' asked Carr.

'I've been wondering,' said Decker. 'Just wondering, you understand. Can you imagine any circ.u.mstance which might arise that the Legion could not handle?'

Carr's expression was a pure delight to see.

'I'm afraid, sir,' he said, 'I don't understand your question.'

Decker sighed. 'I didn't think you would,' he said.

Before nightfall the full working force of robots had been un-crated and had set up some of the machines, enough to estab-lish a small circle of alarm posts around the s.h.i.+p. A flame thrower burned a barren circle on the hill-top, stretching five hundred feet around the s.h.i.+p. A hard radiations generator took up its painstaking task, pouring pure death into the soil. The toll must have been terrific. In some spots the ground virtually boiled as the dying life forms fought moment-arily and fruitlessly to escape the death that cut them down.

The robots rigged up huge batteries of lamps that set the hill-top ablaze with a light as bright as day and the work went on.

As yet no human had set foot outside the s.h.i.+p.

Inside the s.h.i.+p the robot stewards set up a table in the lounge so that the human diners could see what was going on outside.

The entire company, except for the legionnaires, who stayed in quarters, had gathered for the meal when Decker came into the room.

'Good evening, gentlemen,' he said.

He strode to the table's head and the others ranged them-selves along the sides. He sat down and there was a sc.r.a.ping of drawn chairs as the others took their places.

He clasped his hands in front of him and bowed his head and parted his lips to say the customary words. And then he halted even as he spoke and when the words did come they were different than the ones he had said by rote a thousand times before.

'Dear Father, we are Thy servants in an unknown land and there is a deadly pride upon us. Teach us humility and lead us to the knowledge, before it is too late, that men, despite their far travelling and their mighty works, still are as children in Thy sight. Bless the bread we are about to break, we beg Thee, and keep us forever in Thy compa.s.sion. Amen.'

He lifted his head and looked down the table. Some of them, he saw, were startled.

The others were amused.

They wonder if I'm cracking, he thought. They think the Old Man's breaking up.

And that may be true, for all I know. Although I was all right until this afternoon.

All right until young Doug Jackson...

Platters and plates were being pa.s.sed up and down the table's length and there was the commonplace, homely clatter of silverware and china.

'This looks an interesting world, sir,' said Waldron, the anthropologist. 'd.i.c.kson and I were up in observation just before the sun set. We thought we saw something down by the river. Some sort of life."

Decker grunted, scooping fried potatoes out of the bowl on to his plate. 'Funny if we don't run across a lot of life here. The radiation wagon stirred up a lot of it when it went over the field today.'

'What Waldron and I saw,' and d.i.c.kson, 'looked humanoid.'

Decker squinted at the biologist. 'Sure of that?' he asked.

d.i.c.kson shook his head. 'The seeing was poor. Could not be absolutely sure.

Seemed to me there were two or three of them. Matchstick men.'

Waldron nodded. 'Like a picture a kid would draw,' he said. 'One stroke for the body. Two strokes each for arms and legs. A circle for a head. Angular. Ungraceful.

Skinny.'

'Graceful enough in motion, though,' said d.i.c.kson. 'When they moved they went like cats. Flowed, sort of.'

'We'll know plenty soon enough,' Decker told them, mildly. 'In a day or two we'll flush them.'

Funny, he thought. On almost every job someone popped up to report he had spotted humanoids. Usually, there weren't any. Usually it was just imagination.

Probably wishful think-ing, he told himself, the yen of men far away from their fellow men to find in an alien place a type of life that somehow seemed familiar.

Although the usual humanoid, once you met him in the flesh, turned out to be so repulsively alien that alongside him an octopus would seem positively human.

Franey, the senior geologist, said: 'I've been thinking about those mountains to the west of us, the ones we caught sight of when we were coming in. Had a new look about them. New mountains are good to work in. They haven't worn down, easier to get at whatever's in them.'

'We'll lay out our first survey lines in that direction,' Decker told him.

Outside the curving vision plate the night was alive with the blaze of the batteries of lights. Gleaming robots toiled in s.h.i.+ning gangs. Ponderous machines lumbered past.

Smaller ones scurried like frightened beetles. To the south great gouts of flame leaped out and the sky was painted red with the bursts of a squad of flame throwers going into action.