Space Pioneers

by Hank Davis

  Tark looked, caught sight of a medium large animal moving through the underbrush. He dropped a little lower. And then rose again.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “An animal, somewhat larger than the majority we’ve seen, probably the last of its kind. From the looks of it, I’d say it wasn’t particularly pleasant on the eyes. Its skin shows—Oh, now I see what you mean, Vascar!”

  This time he was really interested as he dropped lower, and a strange excitement throbbed through his veins. Could it be that they were going to discover intelligent life after all—perhaps the last of its kind?

  It was indeed an exciting sight the two bird-creatures from another planet saw. They flapped slowly above and a number of yards behind the unsuspecting upright beast, that moved swiftly through the forest, a black creature not unlike themselves in general structure riding its shoulder.

  “It must mean intelligence!” Vascar whispered excitedly, her brilliant red eyes glowing with interest. “One of the first requisites of intelligent creatures it to put animals lower in the scale of evolution to work as beasts of burden and transportation.”

  “Wait awhile,” cautioned Tark, “before you make any irrational conclusions. After all, there are creatures of different species which live together in friendship. Perhaps the creature which looks so much like us keeps the other’s skin and hair free of vermin. And perhaps the other way around, too.”

  “I don’t think so,” insisted his mate. “Tark, the bird-creature is riding the shoulder of the beast. Perhaps that means its race is so old, and has used this means of transportation so long, that its wings have atrophied. That would almost certainly mean intelligence. It’s talking now—you can hear it. It’s probably telling its beast to stop—there, it has stopped!”

  “Its voice is not so melodious,” said Tark dryly.

  She looked at him reprovingly; the tips of their flapping wings were almost touching.

  “That isn’t like you, Tark. You know very well that one of our rules is not to place intelligence on creatures who seem like ourselves, and neglect others while we do so. Its harsh voice proves nothing—to one of its race, if there are any left, its voice may be pleasing in the extreme. At any rate, it ordered the large beast of burden to stop—you saw that.”

  “Well, perhaps,” conceded Tark.

  They continued to wing their slow way after the perplexing duo, following slightly behind, skimming the tops of trees. They saw the white beast stop, and place its paws on its hips. Vascar, listening very closely, because she was anxious to gain proof of her contention, heard the bird-creature say,

  “Now what, Blacky?” and also the featherless beast repeat the same words: “Now what, Blacky?”

  “There’s your proof,” said Vascar excitedly. “Evidently the white beast is highly imitative. Did you hear it repeat what its master said?”

  Tark said uneasily, “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions, just from a hasty survey like this. I admit that, so far, all the proof points to the bird. It seems truly intelligent; or at least more intelligent than the other. But you must bear in mind that we are naturally prejudiced in favor of the bird—it may not be intelligent at all. As I said, they may merely be friends in the sense that animals of different species are friends.”

  Vascar made a scornful sound.

  “Well, let’s get goin’, Blacky,” she heard the bird say; and heard the white, upright beast repeat the strange, alien words. The white beast started off again, traveling very stealthily, making not the least amount of noise. Again Vascar called this quality to the attention of her skeptical mate—such stealth was the mark of the animal, certainly not of the intelligent creature.

  “We should be certain of it now,” she insisted. “I think we ought to get in touch with the bird. Remember, Tark, that our primary purpose on this expedition is to give what help we can to the intelligent races of the planets we visit. What creature could be more in need of help than the bird-creature down there? It is evidently the last of its kind. At least, we could make the effort of saving it from a life of sheer boredom; it would probably leap at the chance to hold converse with intelligent creatures. Certainly it gets no pleasure from the company of dumb beasts.”

  But Tark shook his handsome, red-plumed head worriedly.

  “I would prefer,” he said uneasily, “first to investigate the creature you are so sure is a beast of burden. There is a chance—though, I admit, a farfetched one—that it is the intelligent creature, and not the other.”

  But Vascar did not hear him. All her feminine instincts had gone out in pity to the seemingly intelligent bird that rode Tommy’s broad shoulder. And so intent were she and Tark on the duo, that they did not see, less than a hundred yards ahead, that another creature, smaller in form, more graceful, but indubitably the same species as the white-skinner, unfeathered beast, was slinking softly through the underbrush, now and anon casting indecisive glances behind her toward him who pursued her. He was out of sight, but she could hear—

  Tommy slunk ahead, his breath coming fast; for the trail was very strong, and his keen ears picked up the sounds of footsteps ahead. The chase was surely over—his terrible hunger about to end! He felt wildly exhilarated. Instincts were telling him much that his experience could not. He and this girl were the last of mankind. Something told him that now mankind could rise again—yet he did not know why. He slunk ahead, Blacky on his shoulder, all unaware of the two brilliantly colored denizens of another planet who followed above and behind him. But Blacky was not so easy of mind. His neck feathers were standing erect. Nervousness made him raise his wings up from his body—perhaps he heard the soft swish of large-winged creatures, beating the air behind, and though all birds of prey had been dead these last fifteen years, the old fear rose up.

  Tommy glued himself to a tree, on the edge of a clearing. His breath escaped from his lungs as he caught a glimpse of a white, unclothed figure. It was she! She was looking back at him. She was tired of running. She was ready, glad to give up. Tommy experienced a dizzy elation. He stepped forth into the clearing, and slowly, very slowly, holding her large, dark eyes with his, started toward her. The slightest swift motion, the slightest untoward sound, and she would be gone. Her whole body was poised on the balls of her feet. She was not at all sure whether she should be afraid of him or not.

  Behind him, the two feathered creatures from another planet settled slowly into a tree, and watched. Blacky certainly did not hear them come to rest—what he must have noticed was that the beat of wings, nagging at the back of his mind, had disappeared. It was enough.

  “No noise, Blacky!” the bird screamed affrightedly, and flung himself into the air and forward, a bundle of ebon feathers with tattered wings outspread, as it darted across the clearing. For the third time, it was Blacky who scared her, for again she was gone, and had lost herself to sight even before Tommy could move.

  “Come back!” Tommy shouted ragingly. “I ain’t gonna hurt you!” He ran after her full speed, tears streaming down his face, tears of rage and heartbreak at the same time. But already he knew it was useless! He stopped suddenly, on the edge of the clearing, and sobbing to himself, caught sight of Blacky, high above the ground, cawing piercingly, warningly. Tommy stooped and picked up a handful of pebbles. With deadly, murderous intent he threw them at the bird. It soared and swooped in the air—twice it was hit glancingly.

  “It’s all your fault, Blacky!” Tommy raged. He picked up a rock the size of his fist. He started to throw it, but did not. A tiny, sharp sound bit through the air. Tommy pitched forward. He did not make the slightest twitching motion to show that he had bridged the gap between life and death. He did not know that Blacky swooped down and landed on his chest; and then flung himself upward, crying, “Oh, Tommy, I could spank you!” He did not see the girl come into the clearing and stoop over him; and did not see the tears that began to gush from her eyes, or hear the sobs that racked her body. But Tark saw.

  Tark wrested the weapon from Vascar
with a trill of rage.

  “Why did you do that?” he cried. He threw the weapon from him as far as it would go. “You’ve done a terrible thing, Vascar!”

  Vascar looked at him in amazement. “It was only a beast, Tark,” she protested. “It was trying to kill its master! Surely, you saw it. It was trying to kill the intelligent bird-creature, the last of its kind on the planet.”

  But Tark pointed with horror at the two unfeathered beasts, one bent over the body of the other. “But they were mates! You have killed their species! The female is grieving for its mate, Vascar. You have done a terrible thing!”

  But Vascar shook her head crossly. “I’m sorry I did it then,” she said acidly. “I suppose it was perfectly in keeping with our aim on this expedition to let the dumb beast kill its master! That isn’t like you at all, Tark! Come, let us see if the intelligent creature will not make friends with us.”

  And she flapped away toward the cawing crow. When Blacky saw Vascar coming toward him, he wheeled and darted away.

  Tark took one last look at the female bending over the male. He saw her raise her head, and saw the tears in her eyes, and heard the sobs that shook her. Then, in a rising, inchoate series of bewildering emotions, he turned his eyes away, and hurriedly flapped after Vascar. And all that day they pursued Blacky. They circled him, they cornered him; and Vascar tried to speak to him in friendly tones, all to no avail. It only cawed, and darted away, and spoke volumes of disappointingly incomprehensible words.

  When dark came, Vascar alighted in a tree beside the strangely quiet Tark.

  “I suppose it’s no use,” she said sadly. “Either it is terribly afraid of us, or it is not as intelligent as we supposed it was, or else it has become mentally deranged in these last years of loneliness. I guess we might as well leave now, Tark; let the poor creature have its planet to itself. Shall we stop by and see if we can help the female beast whose mate we shot?”

  Tark slowly looked at her, his red eyes luminous in the gathering dusk. “No,” he said briefly. “Let us go, Vascar.”

  The spaceship of the creatures from Alcon left the dead planet Earth. It darted out into space. Tark sat at the controls. The ship went faster and faster. And still faster. Fled at ever-increasing speed beyond the Solar System and into the wastes of interstellar space. And still farther, until the star that gave heat to Earth was not even visible.

  Yet even this terrible velocity was not enough for Tark. Vascar looked at him strangely.

  “We’re not in that much of a hurry to get home, are we, Tark?”

  “No,” Tark said in a low, terrible voice; but still he urged the ship to greater and greater speed, though he knew it was useless. He could run away from the thing that had happened on the planet Earth; but he could never, never outrun his mind, though he passionately wished he could.

  MEN AGAINST THE STARS

  by Manly Wade Wellman

  Though nowadays, Manly Wade Wellman is best known for his fantasy, in the pulp era of the Thirties and Forties he was a prolific producer of science fiction adventure yarns, and “Men Against the Stars” is one of the best of his sf stories. Unusually for the time, in which paper spaceships crewed by fearless heroes, or even just one such specimen, roared off into the unknown with nary a malfunction, not even needing a spare fuse or two, this story paints the conquest of space as taking a terrible human toll when a technical problem in the void strikes without warning, all hands lost. Yet, the ships keep flying out, showing courage and determination that I wish I could believe are still present in the modern day world.

  In ship Number Fifty-One, halfway from Moon to Mars, four stubbled faces turned to a common, grinning regard as the pounding roar of the rockets died away at last. The skipper, the rocketman, the navigator, the spacehand.

  “So far so good,” said the skipper grimly. “We’ve reached speed. But the fuel may decide to go any minute. And that’ll be—that.”

  Even as he spoke, the fuel—frightful unstable solution of atomic hydrogen—went. Four men—the flimsy metal shell—the hopes, determination and courage that sought to conquer the stars—all were gone. For an instant, a warm, ruby glow, sprinkled with stars of incandescent metal, blossomed in space. The men did not mind. They did not know.

  Tallentyre watched Major DeWitt step through the door. DeWitt closed the door. Immediately, he slumped back against it, his body drained of some stiffening thing that had held him up. But for support of the doorframe, he would have fallen.

  “They won’t go,” DeWitt said hoarsely.

  Tallentyre looked at him with a wooden, unmoving face. If he moved his face, if he moved himself in the slightest, he felt he would shatter to dust, like a scratched Prince Rupert’s Drop. Gray, bloodshot eyes in his lean, high-boned face watched his superior motionlessly. The leathery skin of his face did not move.

  “They won’t go.” DeWitt looked up at him, his blotched face working. Tallentyre noticed it was hideous. The unshielded sunlight of space here on Luna tanned human skin black in irregular spots. The untanned spots on DeWitt’s face were white as paper and they wiggled.

  Tallentyre sighed sharply, and moved. His gray eyes were cold as fractured steel as he watched DeWitt.

  “They won’t go—and I won’t send them!” DeWitt straightened against the doorframe and glared at Tallentyre, daring him to challenge the statement. “I can’t—I won’t let them!” His voice rose to a hoarse, grating scream.

  Major John Tallentyre faced him stonily. Outside lay the rock-and-pumice-paved Luna Spaceport, black and silver under shifting sunlight and shadow. Above, the star-spattered jet of the Eternal Night. The red eye of Mars was low in the east. Tallentyre looked at it for a moment, quietly and thoughtfully. He was cold and icy as the spaceways out there. He, too, was burned to the patchy blackness of space-sun exposure. His gray eyes were startlingly light in that sun-scorched face.

  “Keep your voice down, DeWitt. Those mutineers will hear you. You won’t build up their morale by shouting that yours is shot. Straighten up.”

  DeWitt shook his head groggily. Tallentyre was his junior here. For a moment, the slap of Tallentyre’s words shot an anger into him that half-roused him, as had been intended. But it faded.

  “I,” he grated, “don’t care anymore. I want them to hear me. I won’t send—I won’t let—any more human beings go into that.” His arm gestured weakly toward the starred blackness beyond, his face working. “Fifty-One’s gone. You just saw it blow. Those—mutineers—just saw it blow. The men in Fifty-One though—they didn’t see it.

  “Sixty ships, Tallentyre. Sixty of ’em—and two hundred and forty-two men started from Earth. Fifty-six ships, and two hundred and twenty-two men reached Luna Port. Eighteen men lost on that little hop. Four ships blew their tubes—and that bloody six-man experiment first of all.

  “But fifty-six ships landed, and we warped ’em off to Mars. And how many of these fifty-six got through?” His grating scream roared in the cubbyhole office and pounded through its flimsy metal door. Tallentyre’s eyes moved toward the door.

  DeWitt’s roar dropped to a whisper as the man leaned abruptly forward, close to Tallentyre’s moveless, sun-blackened face. “Four. Four got to Mars, my friend. The rest were pretty red firecrackers in space.”

  He straightened slowly from the table, hunching his baggy, greasy uniform back over his shoulders. “I’m in command of this altar of human sacrifices they call Luna Port. And there aren’t going to be any more sacrifices!”

  Tallentyre’s eyes stared into his steadily. “You knew men were going to die when you swore to take this duty, DeWitt,” Tallentyre said steadily. “And you swore to uphold your trust. Keep your voice down, please. We’ll reason with those mutineers.”

  DeWitt shook his head. His eyes were blazing now with a new determination; the gray-and-black mottling of his face had given way to red-and-black, as willess despair gave way to a different fanaticism. “No!” he roared. “We’ll send ’em—but we’ll send ’e
m back to Earth, where men belong. Duty? Duty! I’m not, and will not be, high priest of human sacrifice. Those ships don’t go.

  “And the spineless slugs back on Earth that tell ’em to do things that can’t be done can come and try it if they want. I’m going to tell those men right now . . .”

  DeWitt swung round and started toward the thin metal door with fanatic stretch of stride. Tallentyre leaped to his feet and gripped DeWitt’s arm.

  “Wait,” said Tallentyre.

  “Wait for what?” DeWitt sneered, and threw back his head to laugh harshly.

  For an instant, Tallentyre watched him. Then his fist moved in an invisible blur. DeWitt slumped easily, tiredly, to the floor under Luna’s light pull.

  Tallentyre stood for an instant above his fallen superior, the same wooden, moveless set to his lean, leathery face. Then abruptly, he trembled, and fell awkwardly beside the fallen man to listen for an instant to his strongly beating heart.

  Shuddering, he rose to his feet and looked desperately about the room. A relaxation, from without and within, flooded over him. His eyelids fluttered; he had to bite his lip to keep it from twitching. He slumped back into the desk chair and let his arms hang limply down beside him, staring at the fallen man.

  Finally, he spoke, very softly, to himself. His eyes were fixed out beyond the double-glass window of the tiny office. Beyond, where the space-black-and-silver of the spaceport blended with the black of space and the silver of stars. Mars, a ruby on jet velvet, lay over the horizon—the cruel, jagged horizon of Luna. “Thanks, DeWitt. You—you made me hold together.

  “Altar of human sacrifice? So was Nevada Port once. But they reached the Moon. Before that—for centuries before that—the air was the altar of sacrifice. But those men that died in the air weren’t seeking air. They sought the stars beyond. They didn’t die on the way to the Moon. They died on the way to the stars. They weren’t dying now to reach Mars; again they’re seeking the stars beyond. Someone’s always had to—”