The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (40 page)

The men moved about the fire with stiff and painful motions as if badly bruised and shaken. Around them the round flower faces turned toward the flames or the men or both. They made an effect of innumerable marveling listeners. The men had found their stalks too tough to be readily brushed aside, and they camped in the cleared furrow for convenience.

“After thinkin’ it over,” said one of the men ironically, “an’ even allowin’ for the fact that we’re still alive, I still say we’re in a fix! Slade musta been crazy!”

A second man—Caxton—said meditatively, “No-o-o, Burton. He planned it too carefully. Some of his explosives must have been set before we left port. And he pushed off in the lifeboat before they went off. They were exactly calculated to wreck the
Copernicus
from stem to stern. He had some scheme in mind, but just what—”

“It was just murder!” said Burton stubbornly. “He was a killin’ lunatic. There were forty-eight men in the ship, countin’ him. Forty-three of ’em died right off. We shoulda died, too. He just meant to kill everybody. What’d he gain by wreckin’ the old ship fifty light-years from anywhere?”

A third man, Palmer, said heavily, “There’s twelve million stellars worth of iridium on board. If he figured he could get away with that somehow—he might figure on coming back to loot it. He’d have the
Copernicus
’ course and speed.”

“Yeah?” said Burton scornfully. “How’d he reach any place to come back from? All he had was a lifeboat! An’ what’d the ship’s course an’ speed be by the time he did get back?”

Caxton nodded. “I agree on that, Burton. If you don’t find a wreck pretty quick you don’t find it. But still I think Slade had some scheme in mind. He wasn’t just a maniac killing people. A maniac likes to see people die, and he left hours ahead of time.”

They ate as they talked, but the food was not really cooked. The boiling point of water in the thin air of Aiolo was well below two hundred and twelve Fahrenheit. The food was hardly more than well-warmed, save where it was burnt. The coffee could be drawn straight from the boiling pot without scorching one’s tongue.

Presently they fell silent gazing into the fire. Their situation was completely without hope of betterment. The hull and drive of the
Copernicus
was shattered far past patching. The ship’s fuel was gone to the last ounce. The wrecking of the ship in midspace had been a triumph of ingenuity and skill. At one instant the freighter had been droning along comfortably at cruising speed on overdrive, taking a direct line between Algol IV and the Briariades. And then, without warning, there was one shattering explosion, then two more, and then a monstrous blast which seemed like the end of all things. Within seconds the
Copernicus
changed from a well-found, space-worthy vessel to a riddled, airless, powerless hunk, its overdrive off, and therefore next to no forward velocity.

The four men beside the campfire on Aiolo were the only survivors beside the man who had set off the blasts by machinery. They had happened to be off watch in the only two compartments of the ship which were neither cracked open by the explosions nor emptied of air by the jamming of self-sealing doors. Their situation had seemed hopeless then.

Even now it was hardly better, though something like a miracle was responsible for their being still alive. No possible astrogator could have calculated a landing such as they had made, nor could any wreck have grounded approximately in one piece on any planet less featureless than Aiolo. The derelict had hit the atmosphere traveling west to east at the flattest of conceivable angles. Moreover, it had overtaken the planet in its orbit so that both orbital speed and the speed of rotation could be subtracted from the relative motion of hulk and planet. It had hit within an impossibly small margin of the incredible, at a rate which would allow the atmosphere to slow it without burning it up, and at an angle which allowed it to reach ground like a skipping stone. It bounced twice, ploughed a huge ditch in soft earth, and came to rest.

But the four men who still survived the shaking-up were in no enviable position, at that. They were marooned on Aiolo, which had been visited by men exactly once before in all galactic history. They had no hope whatever of ever leaving it. And their situation was the work of a shipmate who had caused it and then set out, seemingly, to travel fifty light-years in a lifeboat powered for seven.

The night grew chill, even beside the fire. It would be horribly cold presently. Horribly! But in the bright starlight the plants stayed erect and the flowers open, their round faces staring at the fire and the men.

“We might as well turn in,” said Caxton presently. “We’ll think of something we can do, sooner or later.”

The statement was a lie. There was nothing to think of but endless chilly days and endless frigid nights to come, on a planet on which every square mile seemed to be exactly like every other square mile. They would live here, and grow old, and die. Perhaps in a thousand or a million years another cosmographic expedition would land on Aiolo and find the rusted wreckage of their ship. But that was all they could look forward to.

They had sleeping bags ready. They crawled into them and zipped the flaps shut. The fire died down and died down—

* * * *

Starlight shone on the broken hulk, and on the four sleeping bags; and on the plants. The flowers stirred subtly. They made tiny, quite imperceptible sounds. Presently those nearest the gouged-out furrow leaned toward the sleeping men. They drooped in tiny jerkings; not at all like the smooth movement of muscle, but they moved. Three of the four men were far beyond their reach, though the nearest flowers strained toward them, but Caxton had happened to sleep with his head quite near to undisturbed ground. Hannet was fairly close to some flower stalks, and one leaned far over and out to approach him, but it could not. Half a dozen or more, however, could hover over Caxton. Their blooms bent down and bent down until they almost touched the cloth of the sleeping bag above his head.

Beyond that, nothing happened at all. When dawn broke and the men waked, the flowers were all erect again.

* * * *

But, next morning, as the castaways prepared their necessarily half-cooked breakfast, Caxton said suddenly, “Look here! Slade left the
Copernicus
with fuel for at most seven light-years. It’s fifty to the nearest inhabited solar system. We thought he was crazy! But—where are we?”

“Right here,” said Palmer gloomily. “And likely to stay, too!”

“Well then—where’d Slade be if he had sense?”

“If he had sense,” snapped Burton, “he wouldn’t ha’ wrecked the ship. But if he wanted to stay alive—”

Then Burton stopped short, his mouth open. Palmer swore suddenly. Hannet growled.

“He’d be here, too,” said Burton angrily. “He’d have made for this place and landed! He’s somewhere on this planet!” Caxton nodded. His expression was queer.

“It came to me in my sleep,” he said slowly. “I had odd dreams, all mixed up with these flowers. Somehow I had a feeling in my sleep that they were telling me Slade is here. But it makes sense.”

He looked uneasily at the flowers, all of which seemed to regard the man and the hulk of the spaceship with a round-eyed curiosity. It was particularly odd that all of them faced the men, because some were on the north and some on the south and east and west. The ground went on to the horizon, completely flat and completely monotonous. As far as the eye could reach, there was nothing in view but these flowers. They were all the same variety. There was no grass underfoot. They were spaced without regularity, but with an amazing equality of space between them.

“Flowers told you? Huh!” snapped Burton. “But that’s it, all right. He smashed up the ship and landed here and—” Again his mouth dropped open.

“But he couldn’t ha’ figured the ship ’ud land here,” he protested. “Nobody coulda calculated the landing we made!”

“Hardly,” said Caxton. “No matter how fine his adjustments were, he couldn’t time his explosions to make us crack up on Aiolo. He could know, though, that he’d make it in the lifeboat.”

“But who’d want to make it here—”

Caxton looked at the flowers speculatively.

“Maybe he had friends waiting.” He paused. “There’s that twelve million stellars’ worth of iridium in the ship, yonder.”

The four men looked at one another. One of them got to his feet and swore at the aches and pains which beset him. He went into the ship while Caxton went on evenly:

“Nobody can pirate a ship in space, on overdrive. You can’t find it! And nobody can be kept from going on overdrive if he’s scared or suspicious. So there’s never been real piracy in space. Bit Slade smashed the
Copernicus
close to this planet and this sun. He made the ship a hopeless wreck, and went on to join his friends. They’ll have a ship, and they’ll wait with detector screens out for a derelict to float past—”

Then he got up and dived into the interior of the ship. He entered through a great rent in her plating. There was one huge tear where thirty feet of her inwards were exposed to view. There were sudden, violent crashings inside the hulk.

* * * *

Caxton came out again, very pale. The other man who’d been inside came out with three or four quite useless objects in his hands.

“There was a Bridewell automatic sender in action,” said Caxton briefly. “That would have helped them find her! I smashed it, but probably too late.”

Palmer said bitterly, “I went lookin’ for somethin’ to fight with. All I could find was torches.” He threw them disgustedly away. “Weldin’ torches against guns!”

Hannet growled, “We don’t have to hang around to be killed, of course. They wouldn’t bother to track us—but they’ll know somebody lived through the crash. They’ll prob’Iy bake the ship just to make sure—”

The four men clenched their hands. It was bad enough to be hopelessly marooned upon a planet inhabited only by flowers with an irritating habit of always staring at one. But it was infuriating to feel sure of the near presence of a ship on which they could return to humanity, save for the slight fact that the crew of that ship would murder them on sight to prevent it. It was most enraging of all to be unarmed.

“The most we can do,” said Caxton, “is to hide the iridium. It won’t do much good, but at least it’ll bother them.”

Burton stared around the featureless plain.

“Where you goin’ to hide it?” he demanded sourly. “They could track us anywhere. Turn up any dirt an’ it’d show from overhead.”

“We might bury it in the furrow or under the
Copernicus
,” said Caxton. “They’d expect us to cart it away. So we won’t.”

There was a sudden wavering motion of the plants about them. The flower faces turned, in small, jerky movements. They faced to the southeast. All of them. As far as the eye could see, very flower over miles and miles of plain turned and faced in the one direction—which was not the direction of the little blue-white sun.

Then, very faintly at first, there came a roaring noise far away. It was accurately in the direction toward which all the flowers had turned. It moved swiftly along the horizon, and all the flowers turned their blossoms in tiny jerks as it moved. When the roaring noise died out again to nothingness, all the flowers over all the plain were facing to the northeast.

“That’s them!” said Palmer furiously. “Let’s get that stuff hidden! Not that we want it, but so they won’t get it!”

But Caxton was staring at the flowers. As he looked, with many tiny jerkings the blooms which faced away from him turned about again. And again the wrecked
Copernicus
and the four men were surrounded by staring flower faces, which watched them with an air of charmed attention.

The men set savagely to work to hide the treasure, for which the
Copernicus
had been wrecked, forty-three men murdered, and they themselves hopelessly marooned upon Aiolo.

* * * *

Toward sundown, Caxton had an idea. He rummaged in shattered cabins until he came upon a tiny picturescope. Men who travel far afield in space have usually some personal pictures they like to look at from time to time. Picturescopes run off such records untiringly, without power supply. Caxton found one with a seemingly full record. He tucked it under his arm and walked off among the plants. It was amazing, once he was among them, to notice that though there was no pattern in their growth—they did not grow in rows or any recognizable arrangement—there was a strict and startling equality in the amount of moist bare earth about their stalks. Each one had as much clear space as would roughly fill a two-foot square. They were not overcrowded. Each had an equal allotment of ground from which to draw its nourishment. And they had no competition. He bent down and fingered the soil. Its top was a closely-matted tissue of roots. There could be no erosion nor could there be any dust-cloud arising from wind blowing over such terrain.

He walked away from the
Copernicus
. Flower faces turned to regard him as he moved. He walked between the stalks, and every flower stared at him. There was a concerted movement to regard him. At a hundred yards from the ship, he could see that he was surrounded by staring blossoms. Even those in his rear had turned away from the ship to stare after him.