Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “Just this,” said engineer Vayne, holding up an inch of corroded blade without a handle.

  “Better than nothing,” Jensen said. “How about you, Wilks?”

  The navigator shrugged his shoulders. “Just photographs of the landscape.”

  “OK,” Jensen said. “Dump everything into the sterilizer and let’s get going.”

  Wilks looked mournful. “Captain, one quick sweep to the north might turn up something really—”

  “Not a chance,” Jensen said. “Fuel, food, water, everything was calculated for a ten-day stay. That’s three days longer than Polaris had.

  We’re taking off this evening.”

  The men nodded. They had no reason to complain. As the second to land on Mars, they were sure of a small but respectable footnote in the history books. They put their equipment through the sterilizer vent, sealed it, and climbed the ladder to the lock. Once they were inside, Vayne closed and dogged the hatch, and started to open the inside pressure door. “Hold it!” Jensen called out. “What’s the matter?”

  “I thought I saw something on your boot,” Jensen said. “Something like a big bug.”

  Vayne quickly ran his hands down the sides of his boots. The two men circled him, examining his clothing.

  “Shut that inner door,” the captain said. “Wilks, did you see anything?”

  “Not a thing,” the navigator said. “Are you sure, Cap? We haven’t found anything that looks like animal or insect life here. Only a few plants.”

  “I could have sworn I saw something,” Jensen said. “Maybe I was wrong . . . Anyhow, we’ll fumigate our clothes before we enter the ship proper. No sense taking any chance of bringing back some kind of Martian bug.”

  The men removed their clothing and boots and stuffed them into the chute. They searched the bare steel room carefully.

  “Nothing here,” Jensen said at last. “OK, let’s go inside.”

  Once inside the ship, they sealed off the lock and fumigated it. The Quedak, who had crept inside earlier through the partially opened pressure door, listened to the distant hiss of gas. After a while he heard the jets begin to fire.

  The Quedak retreated to the dark rear of the ship. He found a metal shelf and attached himself to the underside of it near the wall. After a while he felt the ship tremble.

  THE QUEDAK clung to the shelf during the long, slow flight through space. He had forgotten what spaceships were like, but now memory revived briefly. He felt blazing heat and freezing cold. Adjusting to the temperature changes drained his small store of vitality, and the Quedak began to wonder if he was going to die.

  He refused to die. Not while there was still a possibility of accomplishing the Quedak mission.

  In time he felt the harsh pull of gravity, and felt the main jets firing again. The ship was coming down to its planet.

  AFTER a routine landing, Captain Jensen and his men were taken to Medic Checkpoint, where they were thumped, probed and tested for any sign of disease.

  Their spaceship was lowered to a flatcar and taken past rows of moonships and ICBMs to Decontamination Stage One. Here the sealed outer hull was washed down with powerful cleansing sprays. By evening, the ship was taken to Decontamination Stage Two.

  A team of two inspectors equipped with bulky tanks and hoses undogged the hatch and entered, shutting the hatch behind them.

  They began at the bow, methodically spraying as they moved toward the rear. Everything seemed in order; no animals or plants, no trace of mold such as the first Luna expedition had brought back.

  “Do you really think this is necessary?” the assistant inspector asked. He had already requested a transfer to Flight Control.

  “Sure it is,” the senior inspector said. “Can’t tell what these ships might bring in.”

  “I suppose so,” the assistant said. “Still, a Martian whoosis wouldn’t even be able to live on Earth. Would it?”

  “How should I know?” the senior inspector said. “I’m no botanist. Maybe they don’t know, either.”

  “Seems like a waste of—hey!”

  “What is it?” the senior inspector asked.

  “I thought I saw something,” the assistant said. “Looked a little like a palmetto bug. Over by that shelf.”

  The senior inspector adjusted his respirator more snugly over his face and motioned to his assistant to do the same. He advanced slowly toward the shelf, unfastening a second nozzle from the pressure tank on his back. He turned it on, and a cloud of greenish gas sprayed out.

  “There,” the senior inspector said. “That should take care of your bug.” He knelt down and looked under the shelf. “Nothing here.”

  “It was probably a shadow,” the assistant said.

  Together they sprayed the entire interior of the ship, paying particular attention to the small box of Martian artifacts. They left the gas-filled ship and dogged the hatch again.

  “Now what?” the assistant asked.

  “Now we leave the ship sealed for three days,” the senior inspector said. “Then we inspect again. You find me the animal that’ll live through that.”

  THE Quedak, who had been clinging to the underside of the assistant’s shoe between the heel and the sole, released his hold. He watched the shadowy biped figures move away, talking in their deep, rumbling, indecipherable voices. He felt tired and unutterably lonely.

  But buoying him up was the thought of the Quedak mission. Only that was important. The first part of the mission was accomplished. He had landed safely on an inhabited planet. Now he needed food and drink. Then he had to have rest, a great deal of rest to restore his dormant faculties. After that he would be ready to give this world what it so obviously needed—the cooperation possible only through the Quedak mind.

  He crept slowly down the shadowy yard, past the deserted hulls of spaceships. He came to a wire fence and sensed the high-voltage electricity running through it. Gauging his distance carefully, the Quedak jumped safely through one of the openings in the mesh.

  This was a very different section. From here the Quedak could smell water and food. He moved hastily forward, then stopped.

  He sensed the presence of a man. And something else. Something much more menacing.

  “WHO’S THERE?” the watchman called out. He waited, his revolver in one hand, his flashlight in the other. Thieves had broken into the yards last week; they had stolen three cases of computer parts bound for Rio. Tonight he was ready for them.

  He walked forward, an old, keeneyed man holding his revolver in a rock-steady fist. The beam of his flashlight probed among the cargoes. The yellow light flickered along a great pile of precision machine tools for South Africa, past a water-extraction plant for Jordan and a pile of mixed goods for Rabaul.

  “You better come out,” the watchman shouted. His flashlight probed at sacks of rice for Shanghai and power saws for Burma. Then the beam of light stopped abruptly.

  “I’ll be damned,” the watchman said. Then he laughed. A huge and red-eyed rat was glaring into the beam of his flashlight. It had something in its jaws, something that looked like an unusually large cockroach.

  “Good eating,” the watchman said. He holstered his revolver and continued his patrol.

  A large black animal had seized the Quedak, and he felt heavy jaws close over his back. He tried to fight; but, blinded by a sudden beam of yellow light, he was betrayed by total and enervating confusion.

  The yellow light went off. The black beast bit down hard on the Quedak’s armored back. The Quedak mustered his remaining strength, and, uncoiling his long, scorpion-jointed tail, lashed out.

  He missed, but the black beast released him hastily. They circled each other, the Quedak hoisting his tail for a second blow, the beast unwilling to turn loose this prey.

  The Quedak waited for his chance. Elation filled him. This pugnacious animal could be the first, the first on this planet to experience the Quedak mission. From this humble creature a start could be made.

  The be
ast sprang and its white teeth clicked together viciously. The Quedak moved out of the way and its barb-headed tail flashed out, fastening itself in the beast’s back. The Quedak held on grimly while the beast leaped and squirmed. Setting his feet, the Quedak concentrated on the all-important task of pumping a tiny white crystal down the length of his tail and under the beast’s skin.

  But this most important of the Quedak faculties was still dormant Unable to accomplish anything, the Quedak released his barbs, and, taking careful aim, accurately drove his sting home between the black beast’s eyes. The blow, as the Quedak had known, was lethal.

  The Quedak took nourishment from the body of its dead foe; regretfully, for by inclination the Quedak was herbivorous. When he had finished, the Quedak knew that he was in desperate need of a long period of rest. Only after that could the full Quedak powers be regained.

  He crawled up and down the piles of goods in the yard, looking for a place to hide. Carefully he examined several bales. At last he reached a stack of heavy boxes. One of the boxes had a crack just large enough to admit him.

  The Quedak crawled inside, down the shiny, oil-slick surface of a machine, to the far end of the box. There he went into the dreamless, defenseless sleep of the Quedak, serenely trusting in what the future would bring.

  PART TWO

  I

  THE big gaff-headed schooner was pointed directly at the reef-enclosed island, moving toward it with the solidity of an express train. The sails billowed under powerful gusts of the northwest breeze, and the rusty Allison-Chambers diesel rumbled beneath a teak grating. The skipper and mate stood on the bridge deck and watched the reef approach.

  “Anything yet?” the skipper asked. He was a stocky, balding man with a perpetual frown on his face. He had been sailing his schooner among the uncharted shoals and reefs of the Southwest Pacific for twenty-five years. He frowned because his old ship was not insurable. His deck cargo, however, was insured. Some of it had come all the way from Ogdensville, that transshipment center in the desert where spaceships landed.

  “Not a thing,” the mate said. He was watching the dazzling white wall of coral, looking for the gleam of blue that would reveal the narrow pass to the inner lagoon. This was his first trip to the Solomon Islands. A former television repairman in Sydney before he got the wanderlust, the mate wondered if the skipper had gone crazy and planned a spectacular suicide against the reef.

  “Still nothing!” he shouted. “Shoals ahead!”

  “I’ll take it,” the skipper said to the helmsman. He gripped the wheel and watched the unbroken face on the reef.

  “Nothing,” the mate said. “Skipper, we’d better come about.”

  “Not if we’re going to get through the pass,” the skipper said. He was beginning to get worried. But he had promised to deliver goods to the American treasure-hunters on this island, and the skipper’s word was his bond. He had picked up the cargo in Rabaul and made his usual stops at the settlements on New Georgia and Malaita. When he finished here, he could look forward to a thousand-mile run to New Caledonia.

  “There it is!” the mate shouted.

  A thin slit of blue had appeared in the coral wall. They were less than thirty yards from it now, and the old schooner was making close to eight knots.

  AS the ship entered the pass, the skipper threw the wheel hard over. The schooner spun on its keel.

  Coral flashed by on either side, close enough to touch. There was a metallic shriek as an upper mainmast spreader snagged and came free. Then they were in the pass, bucking a six-knot current.

  The mate pushed the diesel to full throttle, then sprang back to help the skipper wrestle with the wheel. Under sail and power the schooner forged through the pass, scraped by an outcropping to port, and came onto the placid surface of the lagoon.

  The skipper mopped his forehead with a large blue bandanna. “Very snug work,” he said.

  “Snug!” the mate cried. He turned away, and the skipper smiled a brief smile.

  They slid past a small ketch riding at anchor. The native hands took down sail and the schooner nosed up to a rickety pier that jutted out from the beach. Lines were made fast to palm trees. From the fringe of jungle above the beach a white man came down, walking briskly in the noonday heat.

  He was very tall and thin, with knobby knees and elbows. The fierce Melanesian sun had burned out but not tanned him, and his nose and cheekbones were peeling. His horn-rimmed glasses had broken at the hinge and been repaired with a piece of tape. He looked eager, boyish, and curiously naive.

  One hell-of-a-looking treasure-hunter, the mate thought.

  “Glad to see you!” the man called out. “We’d about given you up for lost.”

  “Not likely,” the skipper said. “Mr. Sorensen, I’d like you to meet my new mate, Mr. Willis.”

  “Glad to meet you, Professor,” the mate said.

  “I’m not a professor,” Sorensen said, “but thanks anyhow.”

  “Where are the others?” the skipper asked.

  “Out in the jungle,” Sorensen said. “All except Drake, and he’ll be down here shortly. You’ll stay a while, won’t you?”

  “Only to unload,” the skipper said. “Have to catch the tide out of here. How’s the treasure-hunting?”

  “We’ve done a lot of digging,” Sorensen said. “We still have our hopes.”

  “But no doubloons yet?” the skipper asked. “No pieces of eight?”

  “Not a damned one,” Sorensen said wearily. “Did you bring the newspapers, Skipper?”

  “That I did,” Sorenson replied. “They’re in the cabin. Did you hear about that second spaceship going to Mars?”

  “Heard about it on the short wave,” Sorensen said. “It didn’t bring back much, did it?”

  “Practically nothing. Still, just think of it. Two spaceships to Mars, and I hear they’re getting ready to put one on Venus.”

  The three men looked around them and grinned.

  “Well,” the skipper said, “I guess maybe the space age hasn’t reached the Southwest Pacific yet. And it certainly hasn’t gotten to this place. Come on, let’s unload the cargo.”

  THIS place was the island of Vuanu, southernmost of the Solomons, almost in the Louisade Archipelago. It was a fair-sized volcanic island, almost twenty miles long and several wide. Once it had supported half a dozen native villages. But the population had begun to decline after the depredations of the blackbirders in the 1850s. Then a measles epidemic wiped out almost all the rest, and the survivors emigrated to New Georia. A ship-watcher had been stationed here during the Second World War, but no ships had come this way. The Japanese invasion had poured across New Guinea and the upper Solomons, and further north through Micronesia. At the end of the war Vuanu was still deserted. It was not made into a bird sanctuary like Canton Island, or a cable station like Christmas Island, or a refueling point like Cocos-Keeling. No one even wanted to explode alphabet bombs on it Vuanu was a worthless, humid, jungle-covered piece of land, free to anyone who wanted it.

  William Sorensen, general manager of a chain of liquor stores in California, decided he wanted it.

  Sorensen’s hobby was treasure-hunting. He had looked for Lafitte’s treasure in Louisiana and Texas, and for the Lost Dutchman Mine in Arizona. He had found neither. His luck had been better on the wreck-strewn Gulf coast, and on an expedition to Dagger Cay in the Caribbean he had found a double handful of Spanish coins in a rotting canvas bag. The coins were worth about three thousands dollars. The expedition had cost very much more, but Sorensen felt amply repaid.

  For many years he had been interested in the Spanish treasure galleon Santa Teresa. Contemporary accounts told how the ship, heavily laden with bullion, sailed from Manila in 1689. The clumsy ship, caught in a storm, had run off to the south and been wrecked. Eighteen survivors managed to get ashore with the treasure. They buried it, and set sail for the Phillipines in the ship’s pinnacle. Two of them were alive when the boat reached Manila.

&nb
sp; The treasure island was tentatively identified as one of the Solomons. But which one?

  No one knew. Treasure-hunters looked for the cache on Bougainville and Buka. There was a rumor about it on Malaita, and even Ontong Java received an expedition. But no treasure was recovered.

  Sorensen, researching the problem thoroughly, decided that the Santa Teresa had sailed completely through the Solomons, almost to the Louisades. The ship must have escaped destruction until it crashed into the reef at Vuanu.

  His desire to search for the treasure might have remained only a dream if he hadn’t met Dan Drake. Drake was also an amateur treasure-hunter. More important, he owned a fifty-five-foot Hanna ketch.

  Over an evening’s drinks the Vuanu expedition was born.

  Additional members were recruited. Drake’s ketch was put into seagoing condition, equipment and money saved or gathered. Several other possible treasure sites in the Southwest Pacific were researched. Finally, vacation time was synchronized and the expedition got under way.

  They had put in three months’ work on Vuanu already. Their morale was high, in spite of inevitable conflicts between members. This schooner, bringing in supplies from Sydney and Rabaul, was the last civilized contact they would have for another six months.

  WHILE Sorensen nervously supervised, the crew of the schooner unloaded the cargo. He didn’t want any of the equipment, some of it shipped over six thousand miles, to be broken now. No replacements were possible; whatever they didn’t have, they would have to do without. He breathed out in relief when the last crate, containing a metals detector, was safely hoisted over the side and put on the beach above the high-water mark.

  There was something odd about that box. He examined it and found a quarter-sized hole in one end. It had not been properly sealed.

  Dan Drake, the co-manager of the expedition, joined him. “What’s wrong?” Drake asked.

  “Hole in that crate,” Sorensen said. “Salt water might have gotten in. We’ll be in tough shape if this detector doesn’t work.”

  Drake nodded. “We better open it and see.” He was a short, deeply tanned, broad-chested man with close-cropped black hair and a straggly mustache. He wore an old yachting cap jammed down over his eyes, giving his face a tough bulldog look. He pulled a big screwdriver from his belt and inserted it into the crack.