A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Pegleg kicked the jeep into gear. It was a perfect replica of a 1945 model, but, naturally, with certain improvements. Like the timonium power pill Pegleg has been using since 2107. That’s six years now, and he claims he’ll get another hundred thousand miles out of it. There’s the force field, too, that he can set up for a couple of yards in any direction around the jeep. It’ll foil any primitive, raw power. No end handy, like the mastodon stampede we got caught in on the massive, steaming second planet off Aldebaran.

  We simply sat in the open jeep while the thirty-ton monsters slammed into our invisible force capsule time after time. Some broke legs and were trampled to bloody mush by the huge feet of the pressing thousands behind them. Some merely tripped on us, as though we were a transparent boulder, and were filing ears over appetite, to land with a crash that rattled the beer cans in the jeep’s cooler. All we had to do was to take pictures, make notes, and exchange observations for two hours, while half the time the huge hairy bodies over us blotted out the red light of Aldebaran. No worries about self-preservation. We were as safe as in church. Maybe safer.

  But one thing about that jeep hadn’t been improved a bit. It still rode like a log wagon. We bounced and jounced and clung as Pegleg tore across that cellophane prairie at forty-five miles an hour.

  “Five miles due north of the Stardust, at least the way us Johnny Rebs reckon north,” Pegleg said. “That’ll take us beyond the first rise yonder and out of sight of the ship. Then we can lay out our square mile and get down to cases, each in his or her own crude, primitive fashion.”

  “We’ll never make it,” Lindy said. Her teeth were rattling, and her curly red hair was twining and untwining itself in the down draft that came over the top of the jeep’s windshield. “A hundred light-years in the Stardust can’t compare with a mile in this thing!”

  “You would like, perhaps, to rocket around the planet in scoutboats like the geographers are doing, making photomaps, and incidentally scaring the pants off the animate life, if any?” Pegleg inquired sarcastically. He rode like a cowboy on a fractious bronc.

  “I would like to go to my work as unbruised as possible,” Lindy groaned. “That isn’t unreasonable, especially in a girl.”

  “Furthermore,” I put in, “what makes you think we aren’t spooking more wildlife than any scoutship ever hatched from forge and die? It’d take a strong set of nerves for any critter to face up to this galactic menace!”

  “AH right! All right!” Pegleg brought the jeep to a standstill on the crest of the first little rise of ground. Our talky-talk was just killing time. We had been doing it as a team for more than eighteen earth months, and now we slipped from nonsense to sense so smoothly you couldn’t hear the gears mesh. Pegleg waved a hand.

  “How’s that look for you, Roscoe?”

  It looked good. Good, but remarkably empty. From the slight ridge where we sat the terrain dropped away again into a gently molded valley, maybe seven or eight miles across, and swooping away to the limits of vision at either end. A little stream threaded the valley. We could see the water ripple at every meander, but that was the only movement under our eyes. The whole thing looked more like a painting than a landscape.

  I looked back toward the Stardust. There, at least, I could see a little activity. The ship lay full length like a great glittering sausage, all nine hundred feet of her, and from our vantage point a mile away she seemed like some great creature alive, basking in the warm yellow sunlight. Some of the crew were out and about, doing the variety of things that Cap’n Jules Griffin thinks have to be done if a ship is to stay trustworthy in space.

  I can’t talk to Cap’n Jules. He’s an ass, and he bores me stiff. No matter where he goes, he doesn’t change worlds. One place is as good as another to him, because his world is his ship. But so far we’ve always got where we started to go, so I’ve got no complaints. I can go elsewhere for my social contacts.

  II

  Out on the open prairie beyond the end of the Stardust’s nose I could see a little red dot. I didn’t need the binoculars to tell me it was Ursula Pott’s red umbrella. The rest of us surveyed, collected, photographed and mapped, but Ursula’s job was to paint. If you saw that skinny old freak with her easel, red umbrella, and cartload of paraphernalia set up in Central Park, you’d wonder why the cops didn’t run her in. She always wore bright colored shorts, and the results didn’t fascinate anybody. She always wore a floppy gray sweater, hot planet or cold. Her long and really luxuriant hair she rolled up into a big gray bun on the back of her head. There were never less than half a dozen paint brushes thrust handle-end through it, the brushes sticking out in all directions.

  But Ursula belonged. She was as important as any staff member of the explorer ship Stardust. Somehow, she saw things we couldn’t. And when the final results of a look-see were being pulled together, it was usually Ursula’s paintings that put on the finishing touches, that showed us the significant, sometimes the determinative little things we’d missed.

  “I see Ursula’s painting,” I said inanely.

  “Of course she’s painting, dear,” Lindy said. “And Cap’n Jules is spittin’ and polishin’ and tightening bolts, and the map boys are miles away making maps. They’re working. In fact, just about everybody is working but us.”

  “Well, shame on us!” I said sourly. “Spur up your thousand horses, Pegleg, and let’s stake out our square mile. I’d like a piece of the stream down there, and that little knoll, and—blimey, I think I see a newly dug hole down there! Let’s take that in. Might even be an animal of some sort. It will be a change from counting the leaves of this miserable lettuce.”

  “Maybe it’ll be a monster,” Lindy said gaily. “A nice skinny monster, one foot thick and forty-seven feet long. Jolly!”

  “I’ll kill it for you,” Pegleg promised. “For your sake, I hope it’ll have germs all over it.”

  All this horseplay was a cover-up, of course. This planet was a queer one. We had orbited it for a week, dropping in very slowly, and getting complete 3D records of all features from a thousand miles up. This is routine with us. We get a good picture of what the job is going to be like, and some inklings of the life complexes, culture levels and possible hazards.

  The puzzler was, this time there were none of these things. No life but the green ground cover, and apparently no hazards. The planet was in geological recession. There were a couple of mountain range systems that must, at their time of greatest uplift, have been pretty awesome. But now they were eroded to rolling hills and ridges. There was only one ocean, but it covered both poles and occupied maybe two thirds of the planet surface. The land mass had a number of big, slow rivers, much lowland, and plenty what would have been marsh, if there had been plants to fit.

  There was a second land mass, but so isolated from the mainland that we called it the Island. In effect, that’s what it was, even though it was more than a thousand miles long and averaged three hundred wide. We promised it a good going-over later, after we had spot-checked the mainland well.

  This, then was the enigma, the paradox of this new world. Its sun was warm, its air fine and earthlike, a bit leaner on the oxygen than earth and with better than two per cent argon. Don’t ask me why. In two days of sampling, Lindy had found no organisms at all in it. No pollens, no spores, no bacteria; nothing detectably alive.

  Geologically, Pegleg wasn’t having any better luck. The soil was duffy, almost like leafmold in the forests at home. The cellophane lettuce must have been growing, dying, and decaying there for a million years, though how it decayed without organisms was a good question.

  The broken-down rock particles in the soil were obviously of igneous beginnings, deriving from a mica schist of sorts. And probably the thing that disturbed him most was the soil’s amazing uniformity. Pegleg loved to make surface maps, but here there was no point to it. There were no surface rocks, no outcrops, and one sample of soil was almost exactly like another. It looked like he would have to get out his dri
lls and start taking deep cores if he was to be anything but a jeep driver.

  If the geologist and the microbiologist were stymied, you can imagine how the ecologist felt. The ecologist, that’s me. By every physical indication, life should have been abundant. There should have been competition for every foot of land, for every stream habitat, for space in the air above them both. And there wasn’t. There just plain wasn’t anything alive except the lettuce.

  Well, we quit being frustrated and went to work. A snap of the mapping camera recorded the valley and stream. We made a two-foot print, marked our square mile, and Pegleg and I staked it. Lindy set out a string of culture plates, then strolled off down the slope to look at the hole with raw soil around it.

  When next I noticed her, she was waving like an old-time Boy Scout practicing with flags, so I dropped what I was doing and hustled down the hill.

  “Roscoe,” she whispered and held a finger to her lips as I came pounding down. “Quiet, you clumsy thing! You’re going love me for this.

  I think I’ve got an animal for you in this hole. It really is freshly dug.”

  “I love you anyhow,” I said. “A nice, animate bit of fauna won’t do your chances any harm, though. Did you see anything?”

  “No-o,” she admitted, “but this was done this morning.”

  I examined the hole and began to get a little excited myself. It looked like a skid track that seemed to get deeper and deeper as it sloped down into the soil, as though a spinning Wheel had gouged it out. It was about eight inches wide, but better than two feet in its long dimension. I could have rolled one of the jeep wheels down it, and on out of sight.

  At the lip of the skid the soil was rucked up like it is at the mouth of a woodchuck burrow. I picked up a handful. It was moist and crumbly.

  “If Providence hasn’t played us a dirty trick,” I said, “this is the end of the string. All we have to do is pull, and the whole story of life on this planet will ravel right out.”

  “Neatly put,” Lindy said. “Very picturesque. Now, how do you propose to get him out of there?”

  “Depends on what ‘he’ is.” I flopped down on my belly and peered down the hole. No eyes shone. It was as black as the inside of a goat down there. I unclipped the magnaflash from my belt and pressed the button.

  For a moment I thought I detected movement. I knew I couldn’t have, though. The magnaflash illumined the tunnel with a white light brighter than day. And the puzzle deepened.

  I’ve said that the tunnel could have been gouged out by a wheel.

  Well, that’s what was down there. A wheel.

  I motioned to Lindy.

  “You look,” I said.

  She did.

  Then, very simply, she said, “I don’t believe it.”

  In a way, I didn’t either, but there it was. I jiggled the flash back and forth, but since the illumination was perfect to begin with, that didn’t help any. It was still a fifteen-foot slit tunnel, with what looked like an old-fashioned millstone leaning against the wall at the end of it. I couldn’t see the side of the wheel, but I would have bet that there was a square axle-hole in the center. The rolling edge looked roughened, as though it were made of granular gray sandstone.

  “Well,” I said finally. “Artifact for the anthropologist, a sample of stone for Pegleg. That’s something, anyway.”

  “Don’t quibble,” Lindy said. “What dug the hole?”

  “If I were taking a final exam,” I said, “I’d say the wheel did it. Knowing full well that this isn’t possible, I’ll simply say, ma’am, I ain’t got the faintest idea.”

  We stood, then, and looked at each other. We had done the same thing against a lot of backgrounds. I saw a tall, spectacularly proportioned young woman with red curls, wearing a brown halter embroidered with yellow suns and just barely adequate for the tremendous responsibility it carried, a short brown skirt that only came halfway down her perfect thighs, and leather sandals laced on with wide crossed thongs that tied just above the curve of her calves. She wore a wide plastic belt. Even the variety of pouches and other objects dipped to it didn’t disguise the fact that it encircled a waist astonishingly small. In short, Lindy was a dish.

  She wasn’t having such good viewing, but it didn’t seem to bother her. I know I’m wide rather than high. The color of the hair on my head doesn’t matter because it’s mostly gone, but there’s more than enough and my barrel chest and thick arms and legs to make up for that. The stuff is black and matted like fur, and the rumors that I comb it are perfectly true. I have to. When the weather permits, and it has to be rough not to, I usually wear plastic shorts, sandals, and a wide clip belt onto which I hang anything from an atomic blaster and magnaflash to a coil of rope. Over the years I’ve generally looked worse than anything we’ve found. But I’ve been told I have beautiful eyes.

  “Let’s get a hook and an extension rod and drag out the millstone,” I proposed. “Maybe we’ll learn something from examining it.”

  We started up the slope. Pegleg’s yell came down to us.

  “Find!” he whooped. “Hurry up!”

  III

  He was sitting on a stone as we trotted up. That seemed all right until I realized that we hadn’t seen a stone on the whole blasted planet, unless the wheel was a stone. He was grinning all over his narrow face. Then he got up and made a sweeping gesture toward the Object, and we could see that it wasn’t a stone at all. Not a fieldstone, anyway.

  “How we missed this I’ll never know,” Pegleg said. “It sort of stands out, doesn’t it?”

  It did. It looked like a building block, a cube of very delicate rose-pink, and large, maybe two feet on a side. It had evidently been very carefully cut. Every surface seemed absolutely true, every corner perfect. There were no scratches, no striations on the carefully polished planes. And no evidence of how it might possibly have gotten there.

  “What do you think, Roscoe?”

  I looked at the surface with a lens. The stone, if stone it was, was new to me. It had no visible texture.

  “Let’s turn it over.”

  We did, but not without some trouble. That thing was heavy. The lettuce underneath it was squashed practically out of existence. But it hadn’t been there long. The plant juice was still fresh.

  The bottom surface was exactly like all the others. Nothing clung to it. No plant juice stained it.

  Pegleg hefted his geological hammer speculatively, then shook his head.

  “Be a shame to spoil it by chipping.” he said. “I’ll wait till I get it into the shop and use a band saw. Think we can lift it into the jeep, Roscoe?”

  “Bet you two beers I can do it alone,” I said. These arms of mine are not thick for nothing.

  Pegleg unsnapped the remote-control switch from his belt, held it up on the palm of his hand. From far up the slope the jeep woke up, turned in a wide circle, and came rolling toward us at a cautious ten miles an horn. It acts like it’s got more sense when Pegleg’s not in it.

  The jeep came alongside. Pegleg shoved stuff around to make room for the specimen. I tilted the block up on an edge so I could get my fingers under it.

  “Wait, boys!”

  Lindy was pointing.

  It was maybe thirty feet away, and it couldn’t possibly have been there before. It was another cube.

  I let the pink cube settle back into place. We all stood where we were and stared at the new one. It was black, a glittering onyx that picked up the sun’s rays and fairly bounced them about. In size there wasn’t much to choose between it and the pink.

  Pegleg broke the silence.

  “And that, boys and girls, teaches us that no world is ever as empty as it seems. Something or somebody, is having fun with us. We are being diddled, but good. How much does that block weigh, Roscoe?”

  “Two-fifty, three hundred pounds,” I said.

  “How far could you throw it?” Pegleg asked.

  I ignored him. When encouraged, Pegleg loves soliloquies. He can go o
n for minutes and minutes, and you wonder where all the words come from. I strode over to the new cube. Lindy followed me.

  The pink cube was merely perfect, but this black was a magnificent thing. We walked around it, ran our fingers over its satin surface. I tilted it. It was solid and heavy.

  “I know my Mother Goose,” Pegleg began again. “Things like this don’t fly through the air, even if the cow did jump over the moon. Energy is involved here, partners, lots of it, perfectly controlled. Be funny, wouldn’t it, if we turn out to be here at all purely because of the tolerance of the local Mogul?”

  “You jump at conclusions,” I said shortly. I slipped my geological hammer out of my belt, and before anyone was aware of my intention I hit the cube a terrific dip with it.

  That chop would have taken the corner off any granite block ever cut, but all that happened was that the hammer bounced back and almost hit me in the eye. I examined the cube closely. There wasn’t a blemish on its perfect surface. Whatever it appeared to be, it wasn’t stone.

  When I straightened up, it wasn’t necessary to say anything. The plot had thickened. Straight down the slope from me I could see three more cubes. Beyond the jeep, a couple more. And only a few feet from the black one, behind Pegleg, a smaller one, delicate in color, had appeared on the lettuce.

  Now I’ve faced things too grim to belong in any respectable person’s nightmares. I’ve felt all kinds of hot breaths on my neck. But I don’t remember coming any closer to panic than I did right then, when the cubes began to multiply up and down that lettuce-sheathed slope.

  Not that they did anything. They didn’t. They just sat there. Not that they were frightening in appearance. They weren’t. They were rarely beautiful things. Each was a different color, and some of the shadings were so delicate that I caught myself wondering how Ursula was going to meet the challenge, if she ever got a chance to paint them.