Perilous Planets

by Brian W Aldiss

  Grenville turned automatically and struck off down the beach.

  He never came back.

  ==========

  At the end of the third hour after Grenville had gone, Wisher went to the arms locker and pulled out a heavy rifle. He cursed the fact that he had no small scout sled. He could hot take the ship. She was too big and unwieldy for low, slow flying and he could not risk cracking her up.

  He was breaking the regs, of course. Since Grenville had not come back he must be considered dead and it was up to Wisher to leave alone. A special force would come back for Grenville, or for what was left of him. Wisher knew all that. He thought about it while he was loading the rifle. He thought about the vow he had made never to break the regs and he went right on loading the rifle. He told himself that he would take no chances and if he didn’t find Grenville right away he would come back and leave, but he knew all along that he was breaking the regs. At the same time he knew that there was nothing else to do. This was the one reg he had never faced before and it was the one reg he would always break. For Grenville or for anyone else. For a skinny young fool like Grenville, or for anyone else.

  Before he left he took the routine precautions concerning the ship. He set the alarm screens to blast anything that moved within two hundred feet of her. If Grenville came back before him it would be all right because the alarm was set to deactivate when it registered the sound pattern of either his or Grenville’s voice. If Grenville came back and didn’t see him, he would know that the alarm was on.

  And if no one came back at all, the ship would blow by itself.

  The beach was wide and curved on out of sight. Grenville’s deep heel prints were easy to follow.

  Stiffly, in the wind, the stalks of the brown vegetation scratched and rustled. Wisher walked along Grenville’s track. He wanted to call, “but stopped himself. No noise. He must make no noise.

  This is the end of it, he kept saying to himself. When I get out of this I will go home.

  The heel prints turned abruptly into the alien forest. Wisher walked some distance farther on, to a relatively clear space. He turned, stepping carefully, started to circle the spot where Grenville had gone in. The wood around him was soggy, sterile. He saw nothing move. But a sharp, shattering blast came suddenly to him in the still air.

  The explosion blossomed and Wisher perked spasmodically. The ship. Something was at the ship. He fought down a horrible impulse to run, stood quiet, gun poised, knowing that the ship could take care of itself. And then he stepped slowly forward. And fell.

  He fell through a soft light mat of bushes into a hole. There was a crunching snap and he felt a metal rip into his legs, tearing and cracking the bones. He went up to his shoulders. He knew in a flash, with a blast of glacial fear, what it was. Animal trap.

  He reached for his rifle. But the rifle was beyond him. A foot past his hand, it lay on the floor of the wood near him. His legs, his legs… he felt the awful pain as he tried to move.

  It blazed through his mind and woke him. Out of his belt he dragged his pistol, and in a sea of pain, held upright by the trap, he waited. He was not afraid. He had broken the regs, and this had happened, and he had expected it. He waited.

  Nothing came.

  Why, Why?

  This had happened to Grenville, he knew. Why?

  It had happened to him now, and for a moment he could not understand why he did not seem to care, but was just… curious. Then he looked down into the hole and saw the hot redness of his own blood, and as he watched it bubble he realized that he was dying.

  He had very little time. He was hopeful. Maybe something would come and at least he would see what they were. He wanted awfully for something to come. In the red mist which was his mind he debated with himself whether or not to shoot it if it came, and over and over he asked himself why, why? Before something came, unfortunately, he died.

  The traps had been dug in the night. From out the sea they had come to dig in the preserve—for a preserve was what the island was, was all that it could have been—and then returned to the sea to wait.

  For the ship had been seen from the very beginning, and its purpose understood. The best brains of the sea had gathered and planned, the enormous, manta-like people whose name was unpronounceable but whose technology was not far behind Earth’s, met in consultation and immediately understood. It was necessary to capture the ship. Therefore the Earthmen must be separated from it, and it was for this reason that Wisher had died.

  But now, to the astonishment of the things, the ship was still alive. It stood silent and alone in the whiteness of the beach ticking and sparking within itself, and near it, on the bloodied sand, were the remains of the one that had come too close. The others had fled in terror.

  Time was of no importance to the clever, squid-like beings. They had won already, could wait and consider. Thus the day grew late and became afternoon, and the waves—the aseptic, sterile waves which were proof in themselves of the greatest of all oceanic civilizations—crumbled whitely on the beach. The things exulted. The conquest of space was in their hands.

  Within the ship, of course, there was ticking, and a small red hand moved toward zero.

  In a little while the ship would blow, and with it would go the island, and a great chunk of the sea. But the beings could not know. It was an alien fact they faced and an alien fact was unknowable. Just as Wisher could not have known the nature of the planet, these things could not now foresee the nature of the ship and the wheel had come full circle. Second by second, with the utter, mechanical loyalty of the machine, the small red hand crept onward.

  The waves near the beach were frothy and white.

  A crowd was forming.

  * * *

  The base was foolproof, unconquerable. ‘Yet the Captain was right to start praying. Simak has a story about that…

  BEACHHEAD

  by Clifford D. Simak

  ==========

  There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could stop a human planetary survey party. It was a highly specialized unit created for and charged with one purpose only… to establish a bridgehead on an alien planet, to blast out the perimeters of that bridgehead and establish a base where there would be some elbow-room. Then hold that elbow-room against all comers until it was time to go.

  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 scribbled in their field books. They pictured it and wrote it and plotted it and reduced it to a neat assembly of keyed and symbolic 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 glass, well contented, watching the first of the robots emerge from the bowels of the cargo space. 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 grunt
ed 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 grass. 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 uncertainly, 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 conveyor belt.

  ‘Takes a little time this way,’ said Decker, ‘but it saves a lot of space. 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 bump 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 ship rested on the top of a low hill, in a small clearing masked by tall grass, 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 grass-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 glass, 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 ship 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 immunized 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 tradition. 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 service and tradition, attracted men like Carr, was a perfect finishing 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 circumstances.

  ‘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 circumstance 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 establish a small circle of alarm posts around the ship. A flame thrower burned a barren circle on the hill-top, stretching five hundred feet around the ship. A hard radiations generator took up its painstaking task, pou
ring pure death into the soil. The toll must have been terrific. In some spots the ground virtually boiled as the dying life forms fought momentarily 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 ship.

  Inside the ship 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 themselves along the sides. He sat down and there was a scraping 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 traveling 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 compassion. 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 passed 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. ‘Dickson and I were up in observation just before the sun set. We thought we saw something down by the river. Some sort of life.”