by Andre Norton
Kordov pressed a button and the topmost box came down to the floor. He freed it from the arms which had lowered it and trundled his prize to the door with Dard’s help. Together they brought the coffin into a second chamber which was a miniature laboratory. Kordov went down on his knees to read the dials. After a minute inspection he sighed with relief.
“It is well. Now we shall open—”
The lid resisted as if ages of time had applied a stiff glue.
But under continued pressure it gave at last with a faint swish of air. Crisp cold curled up about them, bringing with it chemical scents. The First Scientist examined the stiff body in the exposed hollow.
“Yes, yes! Now we must help him to live again. First-on the cot there—”
Dard helped lift the man onto the cot in the middle of the room. Under direction he rubbed the icy flesh with oils from a bottle Kordov thrust upon him, watching the First Scientist inject various fluids over the heart and in scattered veins. Warmth was coming back into the body as they worked. And when the man had fully roused, been fed, and had fallen into the sudden second sleep, Dard aided in dressing him and helped transport the body up to the control cabin to be laid out on the accelerator mat.
“Who- oh, Cully!” Kimber identified the newly revived crewman. “That’s good. Who else are you going to bring around?”
Kordov, puffing a little, took a moment to consider. “We have Santee, Rogan, and Macley there.”
“The ship’s not Santee’s sort of job, and Cully’s our engineer. Wait a minute Rogan! He’s had space training-as a tel-visor expert. We’ll need him—”
“Rogan it shall be then. But first we shall take a rest. We shall not need a tel-visor expert yet awhile, I believe?”
Kimber glanced at the timepiece set in the control board.
“Not for about five hours at least. And maybe eight-if you want to be lazy.”
“I am lazy when laziness is of advantage. Much of the troubles from which we have fled have been born of too much rushing about trying to keep busy. There is a time for working as hard as a man can work, yes. But there must also be hours to sit in the sun and think long thoughts anddo nothing at all. Too much rushing wears out the body- and maybe also the mind. We must make haste slowly if we would make it at all!”
Whether it was some lingering effect of the cold sleep they could not decide, but they all found themselves dropping off into sudden naps. Kordov believed that the condition would pass, but Kimber was uneasy as they approached the chosen planet and demanded a stimulant from the First Scientist.
“I want to be awake now,” Dard caught a scrap of conversation as he came back from a rest on one of the bunks in the other cabin. “To go off in a dream just when I take the ship into atmosphere-that’s not possible. We aren’t out of the woods yet-not by a long margin. Cully could take the controls in a pinch, so could Rogan, when you get him out of cold storage. But neither are trained pilots, and landing on unknown terrain is no job for a beginner!”
“Very well, Sim. You shall have your pill in plenty of time. But now you are to go in, lie down, and relax, not fight sleep. I promise that I shall rouse you in plenty of time. And meanwhile Cully will take your seat and watch the course—”
The tall thin engineer, who had said very little since his awakening, only nodded as he folded with loose-limbed ease into Kimber’s reluctantly vacated place. He made some small adjustment on the control board and dropped his head back on the chair rest to watch the screen.
During the past hours the points of light had altered. The ball of flame Kimber designated as Sol II had slipped away over the edge of their narrow slice of vision. But the world they had chosen filled most of the expanse now, growing larger by seconds.
Kordov sat down in one of the other chairs to watch with Dard. The sphere on the screen now had a bluish-green tinge, with patches of other color.
“Polar regions-snow.” Kordov commented.
Cully replied with a single, “Yeh!”
“And seas—”
To which Cully added the first long speech he had yet made.
“Got a lot of water. Should be picking up all land masses soon.”
“Unless it’s all water,” mused Kordov. “Then,” he grinned at Dard over his shoulder, “we shall be forced to leave it to the fish and try again.”
“One thing missing,” Culley adjusted the screen control for the second time. “No moon—”
No moon! Dard watched that enlarging sphere and for the first time since his awakening the dream-mood of passive acceptance of events cracked. To live under a sky where no silver globe ever hung. The moon gone! All the old songs men had sung, the old legends they had told and retold, the bit of history they cherished, that the moon was their first step into space, all gone. No moon-ever again!
“Then what will future poets find to rhyme with “June” in all their effusions?” rumbled Kordov. “And our nights to come-they will be dark ones. But one can not have everything-even another stepping stone to space. That was how our moon served us-a way station, a beckoning sign post which lured us on and out. If there is or ever was intelligent life down there-they lacked that.”
“No sign of space travel?” Cully wanted to know with a spark of interest.
“None. But of course, we can in no way be sure. Just because nothing has registered on our screens we can not say that it does not exist. If we were but a fraction off a well- traveled space lane we would not know it! And now, Dard, we have Rogan to rouse. I promised Sim that he would be on hand to share duty.”
Again they made that trip below, lifted out the proper box and brought back to life the man who slumbered in it.
“That is the last one ,” stated Kordov when they had established Rogan in the control cabin. “No more until after we land. Hah!”
He had turned to look at the screen and the exclamation was jolted out of him by what he saw there. Land masses, mottled green-blue-red against which seas of a brighter hue washed.
“So we do not join fish. Instead you, Dard, must go and shake Sim back to life. Now is the time for him to be on duty!”
Shortly afterward Dard crouched on one of the acceleration mats beside the unconscious Rogan while the others occupied the chairs before the controls. The atmosphere within the cabin was tense and yet Kimber alone was at ease.
“Rogan come to yet?” he asked without turning his head.
Dard gently shook the shoulder of the man on the next mat. He stirred, muttered. Then his eyes opened and he scowled up at the roof of the cabin. A second later he sat up.
“We made it!” he shouted.
“That we did!” Kordov answered cheerfully. “And now—”
“Now there’s a job waiting for you, fella,” broke in Kimber. “Come up and tell us what you think of this.”
Kordov spilled out of the third chair and helped Rogan into it. Holding tightly to the arms of the seat, as if be feared any moment to be tossed out of it, Rogan gave his full attention to the screen. He drew a deep breath of pure wonder.
“It’s- it’s beautiful!”
Dard agreed with that. The mingling of color was working on him-just as sunsets back on Terra had been able to do. There were no words he knew to describe what he now saw. But be didn’t have a chance to watch long.
“Better strap down,” came the suggestion from the pilot.”We’re going in ”
Kordov plumped down on one of the acceleration mats, pulling the harness which flanked it up over his body, and Dard did the same. He was flat on his back against the spongy stuff of the pad with his head at an angle from which he could not see the screen. They bored into atmosphere and he must have blacked out, for he never afterward remembered the last part of the furious descent.
The ship shuddered, pushing up-or was it down-upon him. He had a misty idea that this must be full gravity returning. Then there was a shock which tore at the webs holding his body and he gasped, fighting for breath. But his hands were already at the buckles
which fastened him down as he heard a voice say:
“End of the line! All out!”
And another replied-in Cully’s dry tone: “Neat, Sim, nice and neat.”
2. NEW WORLD
"ROGAN?”
The tel- visor expert had spun his seat around and was facing another section of the control panel, his fingers flying across the buttons there. Needles spun on dials, indicators moved, and Rogan’s lips shaped words silently. When he had done Kimber flicked the control of the visa-screen which had gone dead at their landing.
Slowly pictures of the immediate surroundings of the ship unrolled before their fascinated eyes.
“Late afternoon,” Rogan commented, “by the length of the shadows.”
The ship had planeted in the middle of an expanse of gray-blue gravel or sand-backed at a distance by perpendicular cliffs of reddish rock layered by strata of blue, yellow and white. As the scene changed, those in the control room saw the cliffs give way to the mouth of a long valley down the center of which curved a stream.
’That water’s red!” Dard’s surprise jolted the words out of him.
The red river was hemmed in by blue-green, low-growing vegetation which cloaked the ground within the valley itself and ran in tongues along the water into the semi-arid stretch of sand. Their viewing device was across the river, picking up more cliffs and sand. Then they were fronted by ocean shore and vivid aquamarine waves tipped with white lacy foam. Into this emptied the river, staining the sea red for some distance. Sea, air, cliffs, river-but no living creature!
“Wait!” Kimber’s order sent Rogan’s finger down on a button and the picture on the screen became fixed. “Thought I saw something-flying in the air. But guess I was wrong.”
The scene changed until they were looking at the same spot where it had begun. Kimber stretched.
“This part of the country appears unoccupied. And, Tas, we didn’t sight any signs of civilization when we came in either. Maybe our luck’s held and we have an empty world.”
“Hmm. But is it one we can venture into?” The First Scientist squeezed over to Cully’s side of the cabin. “Atmosphere, temperature-within a fraction of Terra’s. Yes, we can live and breathe here.”
Kimber freed himself from the pilot’s straps. “Suppose we have a look-see in person then.”
Dard was the last to leave the cabin. He was still a little drunk with that riot of color on the visa-screen. After the remembered drabness of his home section of Terra this was overpowering. He was halfway down the ladder when he heard that clang which announced the opening of tile hatch and the emergence of the ramp that would carry them safely over ground super-heated by their jets.
When he came out the others were strung along the ramp, breathing the warm air, air that was pungent with a fresh tang. The breeze pulled at Dard’s hair, whipping a lock across his forehead, singing in his ears. Clean air- with none of the chemical taint which clung in the ship. Around the fins of their ship the sand had been fused into a curdled milky glass which they avoided by leaping from the end of the ramp to the dunes.
Kimber and Kordov plowed straight ahead to the wave-smoothed shore. Cully merely dropped in the soft grit of the beach, lying full length, his hands pressed tight to the earth, staring bemusedly up at the sky, while Rogan was pivoting slowly, as if to verify the scene tile visa-screen had shown them.
Dard made his way to the sand. The redness of the river occupied him. Red water-why? The sea was normal enough except where it was colored by the river. He wanted to know what painted the stream and he started off determinedly to its bank.
The sand was softer, more powdery than any he had known on Terra. It shifted into his boot packs, arose in puffs and covered all but the faintest outline where he had stepped. He stooped and sifted the stuff through his fingers, knowing a strange tingle as the earth of this new world drifted away from his palm-blue sand-red river-red, yellow and white striped cliffs-color everywhere about him! Overhead that arch of cloud studded blue-or was it blue at all? Didn’t it have just the faintest shading of green? Turquoise rather than true blue! Now that he was becoming accustomed to the color he could distinguish more subtle shades among the glows of brighter tones-shades he could not name-like that pale violet which streaked the sand.
Dard went on until he was in the stone-and-pebble strewn border of the river. It was not a large stream, four strides might take him across it. There was a ripple of current but the water was opaque, dull rusty red, and it left a reddish rim about every stone it lipped in passage. He went down on one knee and was about to dip in a cautious exploratory finger when a voice called a warning:
“Don’t try that, kid. Might not be healthy.” Rogan came down the stony bank to join him. “Better be safe than sorry. Learned that myself on Venus-the hard way. See a piece of drift wood anywhere about?”
Dard searched among the rocks and found what appeared to be a very ordinary stick. But Rogan inspected it carefully before he picked it up. The stick was lowered into the flood and as cautiously withdrawn, an inch or so of it now dyed red. Together they held it close for examination.
“It’s alive!” If he had been holding that test branch, Dard thought later, he might have dropped it at the realization of what the red stain was. But Rogan kept a tight grip.
“Lively little beggars, aren’t they?” he asked. “Look like spiders. Do they float-or swim? And why so thick in the water. Now let’s just see.” He knelt and using the stick along the surface of the water skimmed off a good portion of what Dard secretly considered the extremely repulsive travelers. With the layer of “spiders” removed the water changed color becoming a clearer brownish fluid.
“So they can be scraped off,” Rogan observed cheerfully.
“With a strainer we may be able to get a drink-if this stuff is drinkable.”
Dard swallowed hastily as Rogan tapped off on a convenient boulder the greater number of creatures he had fished out of the stream; and then together they followed the water to the sea. Several times they detoured, quite widely on Dard’s part, to escape contact with patches of red marooned on shore. Not that the “spiders” appeared uncomfortable on the firmer element for they made no attempt to move away from the spots where some sudden eddy had deposited them.
A stiff breeze came in over the waves. It was heavy with the tang Rogan now identified for Dard.
“Natural sea-that’s salt air!” What he might have added was drowned out by a hideous screech.
Close on its dying echo came a very human shout. Kimber and Kordov were running along the beech just beyond the water’s edge. And above their beads twisted and darted a nightmare, a small nightmare to be sure, but still one horrible enough to have winged out of an evil dream.
If a Terran snake had been equipped with bat wings, two clawed legs, a barbed tail, and a wide fanged mouth, it might have approached in general this horror. The whole thing could not have been more than eighteen or twenty inches long, but its snapping fury was several times larger than its body and it was making power dives at the running men.
Rogan dropped his spider stick as Dard’s hand flew inside his blouse to claim the only possession he had brought from Terra. He threw the hunting knife and by some incredible luck clipped a wing, not only breaking the dragon’s dive but sending it fluttering down, end over end, screeching. It flapped and beat with the good wing, squirming across the sand until Kimber and Kordov pinned it to the shingle with hastily flung stones.
Its eyes gleamed with red hate as they gathered in a circle around it, avoiding the snapping jaws and the flipping of the barbed tail which now dripped oily yellow drops.
“Bet that’s poison,” suggested Rogan. “Nice critter- hope they don’t grow any bigger.”
“What’s the matter?” Cully came tearing down the slope, one of the green ray guns in his band. “What’s making all that racket?”
Rogan moved aside to display the injured dragon. “Native telling us off.”
“Usuall
y,” Kimber broke in, “I don’t believe in shooting first and investigating afterward. But this thing certainly hasn’t any better nature to appeal to-nearly stripped the ear off my head before I knew he was around. Can you shoot it, Jorge, without messing it up too much? Tas, here, probably will want to take it apart later to see what makes it tick.”
The biologist was squatting at a safe distance watching the convulsive struggles of the dragon with fascinated eyes.
“Yes, please do not destroy it utterly. A snake-a flying snake! But that is not
possible!”
“Maybe not on Terra,” Kimber reminded him. “What can we say is possible or impossible here? Jorge, put it out of its misery!”
The green ray clipped the top of the creature’s head and it went limp on the sand. Tas approached it gingerly, keeping as far as he could from the tail barb still exuding the yellow venom. Rogan went back down the beach to retrieve his spider collection, and Dard picked up and wiped his knife clean.
“Flying snakes and swimming spiders,” the communications techneer held out his stick for their appraisal. “I’m going to be afraid to sit down out here-anything may pop up now,”
Tas was plainly torn between the now tractable dragon and the water dwellers Rogan had brought him. “All this"- his pudgy hands indicated the world of cliffs, sand and sea -"new, unclassified.”
Gully holstered his gun. He was frowning at the ceaseless waves.
“What do you make of those, Sim?” he demanded of the pilot, pointing to a low bank of clouds slowly expanding up the rim of the sky.
“On earth, I’d say a storm.”
“Might be a bad one, too,” Rogan commented. “And we have no shelter but the ship. At least this is summer- we’re warm enough.”
“You think so?” asked Dard with some reason. The sea wind was rising, to become a wet lash with an icy bite in its flail. The temperature was dropping fast.
Kimber studied the clouds. “I’d say we better get back.”