Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (23 page)

"Somehow," said Cochrane, "I think they'd be wholesome food. If we can,
we'll empty a freezing-locker and take a carcass for tests."

Holden fingered his rifle unhappily. Alicia said nothing. Babs stayed
close beside her. They went on.

They came to another dead animal a quarter-mile away. The ground was
full of the scent and the hoofmarks of the departed herd. Bell
photographed again. They did not stop. Johnny Simms had been this way,
because of the carcass. He wasn't here now.

They topped the next rise in the ground. They saw two other slaughtered
creatures. It was wholly evident, now, that these animals did not charge
but only stood their ground when alarmed. Johnny Simms had fired blindly
when he blundered into their groupings.

The last carcass they saw was barely two hundred yards from the one
patch of woodland visible from the ship. Cochrane said with some
grimness.

"If his eyes had gotten used to the darkness, he might have seen the
forest and tried to get into it to get away from those animals."

And if Johnny Simms had not stopped short instantly he reached the woods
and presumable safety, he would be utterly lost by now. There could be
nothing less hopeful than the situation of a man lost on a strange
planet, not knowing in what direction he had blundered on his first
starting out. Even nearby, three directions out of four would be wrong.
Farther away, the chance of stumbling on the way back to the ship would
be nonexistent.

Alicia saw a human footprint on the trodden muck near the last carcass.
It pointed toward the wood.

They reached the wood, and search looked hopeless. Then by purest chance
they found a place where Johnny had stumbled and fallen headlong. He'd
leaped up and fled crazily. For some fifteen yards they could track him
by the trampled dried small growths he'd knocked down in his flight.
Then there were no more such growths. All signs of his flight were lost.
But they went on.

There were strangenesses everywhere, of which they could realize only a
small part because they had been city-dwellers back on Earth. There was
one place where trees grew like banyans, and it was utterly impossible
to penetrate them. They swerved aside. There was another spot where
giant trees like sequoias made a cathedral-like atmosphere, and it
seemed an impiety to speak. But Holden reported tonelessly in the
walkie-talkie, and assured Jones and Al and Jamison that all so far was
well.

They heard a vast commotion of chattering voices, and they hoped that it
might be a disturbance of Johnny Simms' causing. But when they reached
the place there was dead silence. Only, there were hundreds of tiny
nests everywhere. They could not catch a glimpse of a single one of the
nests' inhabitants, but they felt that they were peeked at from under
leaves and around branches.

Cochrane looked unhappy indeed. In cold blood, he knew that Johnny Simms
had left the ship in exactly the sort of resentful bravado with which a
spoiled little boy will run away from home to punish his parents. Quite
possibly he had intended only to go out into the night and wait near the
ship until he was missed. But he'd found himself among the unknown
beasts. He'd gone into blind panic. Now he was lost indeed.

But one could not refuse to search for him simply because it was
hopeless. Cochrane could not imagine doing any less than continuing to
search as long as Alicia had hope. She might hope on indefinitely.

They heard the faint, distant, incisive sound of a shot.

Holden's voice reported it in the walkie-talkie. Cochrane nodded
brightly to Alicia and fired a shot in turn. He was relieved. It looked
like everything would end in a commonplace fashion. The party from the
ship headed toward the source of the other sound.

In half an hour Cochrane was about to fire again. But they heard the
hysterical rat-tat-tat of firing. It seemed no nearer, but it could only
be Johnny Simms.

Cochrane and Holden fired together for assurance to Johnny. Bell took
pictures.

Again they marched toward where the shots had been fired. Again they
trudged on for a long time. Seemingly, Johnny had moved away from them
as they followed him. They breasted a hill, and there was a breeze with
the smell of water in it, and they saw that here the land sloped very
gradually toward the sea, and the sea was in view. It was infinitely
blue and it reached toward the most alluring of horizons. Between them
and the sea there was only low-growing stuff, brownish and sparse. There
was sand underfoot—a curious bluish sand. Only here and there did the
dry-seeming vegetation grow higher than their heads.

More shots. Between them and the sea. Cochrane and Holden fired again.

"What the devil's the matter with the fool?" demanded Holden irritably.
"He knows we're coming! Why doesn't he stand still or come to meet us?"

Cochrane shrugged. That thought was disturbing him too. They pressed
forward, and suddenly Holden exclaimed. "That looks like a man! Two
men!"

Cochrane caught the barest glimpse of something running about, far
ahead. It looked like naked human flesh. It was the size of a man. It
vanished. Another popped into view and darted madly out of sight. They
did not see the newcomers.

"He shot something like that, back where we first landed," said Cochrane
grimly. "We'd better hurry!"

They did hurry. There was a last flurry of shooting. It was automatic
fire. It is not wise to shoot on automatic if one's ammunition is
limited, Johnny Simms' firearm chattered furiously for part of a second.
It stopped short. He couldn't have fired so short a burst. He was out of
bullets.

They ran.

When they drew near him, a hooting set up. Things scattered away. Large
things. Birds the size of men. They heard Johnny Simms screaming.

They came panting to the very beach, on which foam-tipped waves broke in
absolutely normal grandeur. The sand was commonplace save for a slight
bluish tint. Johnny Simms was out on the beach, in the open. He was
down. He had flung his gun at something and was weaponless. He lay on
the sand, shrieking. There were four ungainly, monstrous birds like
oversized Cornish Game gamecocks pecking at him. Two ran crazily away at
sight of the humans. Two others remained. Then they fled. One of them
halted, darted back, and took a last peck at Johnny Simms before it fled
again.

Holden fired, and missed. Cochrane ran toward the kicking, shrieking
Johnny Simms. But Alicia got there first.

He was a completely pitiable object. His clothing had been almost
completely stripped away in the brief time since his last burst of
shots. There were wounds on his bare flesh. After all, the beak of a
bird as tall as a man is not a weapon to be despised. Johnny Simms would
have been pecked to death but for the party from the ship. He had been
spotted and harried by a huntingpack of the ostrich-sized creatures at
earliest dawn. A cooler-headed man would have stood still and killed
some of them, then the rest would either have run away or devoured their
slaughtered fellows. But Johnny Simms was not cool-headed. He had made a
career of being a rich man's spoiled little boy. Now he'd had a fright
great enough and an escape narrow enough to shatter the nerves of a
normal man. To Johnny Simms, the effect was catastrophic.

He could not walk, and the distance was too great to carry him. Holden
reported by walkie-talkie, and Jones proposed to butcher one of the
animals Johnny had killed and put it in a freezer emptied for the
purpose, and then lift the ship and land by the sea. It seemed a
reasonable proposal. Johnny was surely not seriously wounded.

But that meant time to wait. Alicia sat by her husband, soothing him.
Holden moved along the beach, examining the shells that had come ashore.
He picked up one shell more glorious in its coloring than any of the
pearl-making creatures of Earth. This shell grew neither in the flat
spiral nor the cone-shaped form of Earth mollusks. It grew in a
doubly-curved spiral, so that the result was an extraordinary, lustrous,
complex sphere. Bell fairly danced with excitement as he photographed it
with lavish pains to get all the colors just right.

Cochrane and Babs moved along the beach also. It was not possible to be
apprehensive. Cochrane talked largely. Presently he was saying with
infinite satisfaction:

"The chemical compounds here are bound to be the same! It's a new world,
bigger than the glacier planet. Those beasts last night—if they're good
food-stuff—will make this a place like the old west, and everybody
envies the pioneers! This is a new Earth! Everything's so nearly the
same—."

"I never," observed Babs, "heard of blue sand on Earth."

He frowned at her. He stooped and picked up a handful of the beach
stuff. It was not blue. The tiny, sea-broken pebbles were ordinary
quartz and granite rock. They would have to be. Yet there was a
blueness—The blue grains were very much smaller than the white and tan
and gray ones. Cochrane looked closely. Then he blew. All the sand blew
out of his hand except—at last—one tiny grain. It was white. It
glittered greasily. Cochrane moved four paces and wetted his hand in the
sea. He tried to wet the sand-grain. It would not wet.

He began to laugh.

"I did a show once," he told Babs, "about the old diamond-mines. Ever
hear of them? They used to find diamonds in blue clay which was as hard
as rock. Here, blue clay goes out from the land to under the waves. This
is a tiny diamond, washed out by the sea! This is the last thing we
need!" Then he looked at his watch. "We're due on the air in two hours
and a half! Now we've got what we want! Let's go have Holden tell Jones
to hurry!"

But Babs complained suddenly,

"Jed! What sort of life am I going to lead with you? Here we are,
and—nobody can see us—and you don't even notice!"

Cochrane was penitent. In fact, they had to hurry back down the beach to
join the others when the space-ship appeared as a silvery gleam, high in
the air, and then came swooping down with fierce flames underneath it to
settle a quarter-mile inland.

Bell had a picture of the tiny diamond by the time the ground was cool
enough for them to re-enter the ship. The way he photographed it,
against a background which had nothing by which its size could be
estimated, the little white stone looked like a Kohinoor. It was two
transparent pyramids set base to base, and he even got color-flashes
from it. And Jamison, forewarned, took pictures from the air of the
blue-sand areas. They showed the tint the one tiny diamond explained.

The broadcast was highly successful. It began with a four-minute
commercial in which the evils of faulty elimination were discussed with
infinite delicacy, and it was clearly proved—to an audience waiting to
look beyond the stars—that only Greshham's Intestinal Emollient allowed
the body to make full use of vitamins, proteins, and the very newest
enzymatic foundation-substances which everybody needed for really
perfect health. There followed the approach shots to this planet, shots
of the great beast-herds on the plains, views of luxuriant, waving
foliage, the tide of shaggy animals as they came at dusk to their
drinking-place, and there was an all-too-brief picturing of the
blue-tinted soil which the last film-clip of all declared to be
diamondiferous.

Cochrane's direction of this show was almost inspired. The views of the
animal herd were calculated to make any member of his audience think in
simultaneous terms of glamour and adventure—with perfect personal
safety, of course!—and of steaks, chops and roasts. The more gifted
viewers back on Earth might even envision filets mignon. The
infinitesimal diamond with its prismatic glitterings, of course, roused
cupidity of another sort.

There were four commercials cut into these alluring views, the last was
superimposed upon a view Bell had taken of the sunset-colors. And it
might have seemed that the television audience would confuse the charm
of the new world as pictured with the product insistently praised. But
the public was pretty well toughened up against commercials nowadays. It
was not deceived. As usual, it only deceived itself.

But there was no deception about the fact that there was a new and
unoccupied planet fit for human habitation. That was true. And the
fretting overcrowded cities immediately became places where everybody
made happy plans for his neighbor to move there. But the more irritable
people would begin to think vaguely that it might be worth going to, for
themselves.

The ship took off two hours after the broadcast. Part of that time was
taken up with astrogational conferences with astronomers on Earth.
Cochrane had this conference taped for the auxiliary broadcast-program
in which the audience shared the problems as well as the triumphs of the
star-voyagers. Cochrane wanted to get back to Earth. So far as
television was concerned, it would be unwise. The ship and its crew
would travel indefinitely without a lack of sponsors. But for once,
Cochrane agreed entirely with Holden.

"We're heading back," he told Babs, "because if we keep on, people will
accept our shows as just another superior kind of escape-entertainment.
They'll have the dream quality of 'You Win a Million' and the
lottery-shows. They'll be things to dream about but never to think of
doing anything about. We're going to make the series disappointingly
short, in order to make it more convincingly factual. We won't spin it
out for its entertainment-value until it practically loses everything
else."

"No," said Babs. She put her hand in his. She'd found it necessary to
remind him, now and then.

So the ship started home. And it would not return direct to Earth—or
Lunar City—for a very definite reason. Cochrane meant to have all his
business affairs neatly wrapped up before landing. They could get
another show or two across, and some highly involved contracts could be
haggled to completion more smoothly if one of the parties—Spaceways,
Inc.—was not available except when it felt like being available. The
other parties would be more anxious.