They are close enough to the ground now to see, even through the driving rain, that their guesses from on high were correct, that this planet is completely engulfed by an enormous webwork of gigantic woody vines, seemingly endless vines whose trunks have a diameter of at least ten meters and probably more, vines like horizontal trees that crisscross and overlap and entangle, leaving no free spaces between them anywhere.
Sonar shows the underground tunnels they had noticed from above, weaving through the vines beginning at a depth of perhaps forty meters and running both laterally and downward, in some places descending for a kilometer or more. Below the tunnel zone lies something that appears to be one great solid spongy mass, hundreds of kilometers thick, out of which all the vines seem to be sprouting. It is the mother substance, apparently, the living substructure of the entire giant organism — for it is rapidly becoming clear to them now that Planet B is occupied by one immense vegetable entity, which is this spongy subterranean mass, from which all else springs. And beneath that is the stone understructure of the planet, the hidden basalt core.
Where to land? There are no open places, no meadows, no plains.
Huw expends a little reaction mass to create one, tipping the probe up on end and flaming the upper edges of a few vines until there is a satisfactorily flat landing zone below them. There is no reaction from the vines adjacent. They do not writhe, nor do they even stir; they give no indication of any sort that Huw’s assault on this very small sector of the planetary flora has caused the slightest resentment, let alone set in motion some kind of retaliatory action.
He sets the probe down nicely. Waits a moment for it to finish rocking. The landing zone he has improvised is a little on the uneven side.
“Tests, now,” Huw tells the year-captain, unnecessarily.
They run through all the prescribed extravehicular testing routines, checking this thing and that, the acid content of the rain and the possibility of atmospheric toxins and such. Not that they have any intention of exposing themselves to direct unshielded intake of the atmosphere out there, not on an alien world that they are already almost certain will be of no avail as a place where human beings might settle happily. But they are aware that extraterrestrial chemistries might provide nasty surprises even for explorers protected by spacesuits. So they take the proper precautions.
The rain is unrelenting. It works the skin of the little spaceship over like a trillion tiny hammers.
“At this point on the last planet,” Huw says, “I was already beginning to feel strange. The queasies had started to strike before I was even out of the probe.”
“And now?”
“Nothing. You?”
“Nothing at all.”
“But let’s see how it goes for us when we’re outside, shall we?”
A little comedy surrounds their going outside the ship. The year-captain, having previously made it clear that he looks upon Huw as the leader of the party, indicates with a nod that he will defer to Huw in the matter of being the first to set foot on this planet. But Huw, who has been the first to set foot on one extrasolar planet already, is quite willing to let the year-captain have the honor on this one, and defers right back to him. Of course, there is the possibility that the first one outside the ship will be the recipient of some sort of disagreeable jolt, but each man, in his deference to the other, goes to some length to make it clear that such fear is definitely not an item in his considerations, not at all. Courtesy is the only issue.
“Goon,” the year-captain says irritably in the end.
“Well, then. Yes, if so you say.”
Huw shimmies through the hatch and cautiously steps down onto the charred, still faintly sizzling surface of the landing area that he has fashioned. There is a slight resilience, a little give, beneath his weight. He can detect no untoward psychological effects.
“Everything all right so far,” he announces.
The year-captain joins him. Together they walk toward the edge of the clearing; and then, after just a moment of hesitation, they step out together onto the upper surface of one of the unburned vines.
It is an unappealing surface. Big scrofulous leaves, blue-black and stemless, pocked with ugly blister-shaped air bladders, sprout directly from the wood at sparse intervals. Dull red streamers hang from their edges like bursts of entrails. In the bare places between the leaves the trunks of the vine have a disagreeably gluey texture.
“Well?” Huw asks.
“A little sticky, isn’t it?”
“I mean your mind.”
“Still functioning, thank you. And yours?”
“I was ready to scream by this point on Planet A. Alreadywas screaming a little, as a matter of fact. Things are different here, it seems. So much for Giovanna’s theory, let’s hope.”
“Vile place even so, isn’t it?” the year-captain says.
“Utterly repugnant. Absolute trumps, as repugnant goes. Shall we move a little farther onward, old brother?”
It is almost like being under water. By their calculations it’s the midday hour, with a medium-size sun hovering right above them just a few dozens of millions of kilometers away, and yet they are shrouded in a deep twilight gloom. There is one place in the sky where a somewhat lighter blurry patch stands out against the thick gray mantle of clouds: that’s the sun lurking back there, no doubt. The rain, falling as it does in dense sheets, is dispiriting in the extreme. It must not have stopped raining here in millions of years. The water hits the corrugated woody surfaces of the huge vines and goes slithering off into the narrow crevices between them. Perhaps some of it trickles downward from the planetary surface for hundreds of kilometers until it comes to rest in pockets of unimaginable darkness along the flat face of the rocky core; but most of the deluge simply bounces right back up in instant evaporation. All about them they can see heavy clouds of vapor climbing stubbornly through the furious vertical scything of the downpour.
The vines themselves form a virtually impenetrable covering. They lie side by side like the threads in some colossal tapestry, occasionally overlapping, each one stretching on and on for what may well be kilometers; there is not so much as a fingersbreadth of room between each one and its neighbor. Their greenish-purplish bark is sturdy and yet rubbery, yielding a little beneath the feet of the two explorers. It bears not just leaves but pulpy fungoid masses that sprout in random patches all over it, and also scabrous gray coatings of the local equivalent of lichen. These are soft as cheese, these parasites or saprophytes or symbiotes, whatever the case may be, creating a treacherously slippery surface, but it is difficult to avoid walking on them. Between these various excrescent outgrowths it is possible to see numerous large oval bodies, greenish in color and smooth in texture, set in the bark of the vines four or five meters apart from one another like a host of unblinking eyes: they appear to have a significant function for the vines, perhaps supplementary instruments that aid the strange leaves in conducting some kind of photosynthetic process in this dismal subaqueous light.
Everything here seems to be rotting, decaying, decomposing, and reconstituting itself all in the same process. This world would have made a good penal colony, maybe, in the fine old days when cruel and unusual punishment was a popular human pastime. But it doesn’t seem good for very much else.
“Have we seen enough, do you think?” Huw says.
The year-captain points straight ahead. There is a round dark place up there, like the mouth of a cave, set between two vine trunks. The entrance, it seems, to one of those long underground tunnels that had shown up on the sonar images. “Shall we take a look inside?” he asks.
“Ah. You want to go in there.”
“I want to go in there, yes,” says the year-captain in a quiet tone.
“Well, then, why not?” says Huw, not very enthusiastically. “Why not, indeed?”
The year-captain leads the way, without discussion of issues of precedence. The tunnel is wide and low-roofed, ten or twelve meters broad but scarce
ly higher than the tops of their heads in some places. It runs at a gently sloping downward angle right through the corpus of the vines, slicing casually from one to the next; its walls, which are the substance of the vines, are moist and pink, like intestines, and a kind of sickly phosphorescent illumination comes from them, a feeble glow that breaks the dense darkness but is of little help to vision. Huw and the year-captain activate their helmet lamps and step a little farther within, and then a little farther yet.
Huw says, “I wonder what could have constructed these—”
“Hush,” says the year-captain, pointing ahead once again. “Look.”
He walks forward another dozen meters or so and steps up the intensity of his beam. The tunnel appears to be blocked up ahead by a plug of some sort; but as they get closer to the blockage they can see that the “plug” is slowly retreating from them — that it is, in fact, some enormous sluggish, elongated flat-topped creature that not only is moving in wormlike fashion along the floor of the tunnel but is evidentlycreating the tunnel, or at least expanding it, by devouring the fabric of the vine through which the tunnel runs.
“Fabulous,” Huw murmurs. “What do you know, we’ve found extraterrestrial animal life at last, old brother! And what a beauty it is!”
There is no way for them to tell how long the tunnel worm is. Its front end is lost in the darkness far down the way. But they are able to see that its body is three times the width of a man’s, and rises nearly to their height. Its flesh is translucent and pink in color, a deeper pink than that of the tunnel itself, more in the direction of scarlet, and has a soft, buttery look about it. Black hairy fist-size pores are set low along the creature’s sides, every fifty centimeters or thereabouts, going forward on it as far as they can see. From these orifices comes a steady trickle of thin whitish slime that runs down the curving sides of the thing and lies puddled in rivulets and pools along the tunnel floor around it. An excretion product, no doubt. The worm seems to be nothing more than an eating machine, mindless, implacable. It is steadily munching its way through the vine and turning what it eats into a stream of slime.
Indeed they can hear the sounds of feeding coming from the other end of the creature: a snuffling noise and a harsh chomping noise, both above a constant sixty-cycle drone. All these sounds, which seem to be related, go on without letup. An eating machine, yes.
The two men creep a little nearer, taking care not to let their boots come in contact with the deposits of slime that the great worm has left in their path. When they are as close to the creature as they dare to get, it becomes possible for them to perceive curious glowing cystlike structures, dark and round and solid and about the size of a man’s head, distributed with seeming randomness within the flesh of the thing, scattered here and there at depths of a third of a meter or more. These cysts make their presence known by a bright gleam like yellow fire that emanates from them and rises up through the flesh of the worm to its pink puckered skin.
“Internal organs?” Huw asks. “Elements of its nervous system, could they be?”
“I don’t think so,” the year-captain says. “I think they may belong to this.”
Once more he points, jabbing his finger urgently forward two or three times into the pinkish gloom, and turns the beam of his helmet lamp up to its highest level.
Another creature has appeared from somewhere, a creature far smaller than the worm, and has taken up a perch atop the worm’s back just about at the farthest distance where they are able to see anything. It is a thing about the size of a large dog, vaguely insectoidal in form, with jointed pipe-stem legs, eight or maybe ten of them, and a narrow body made up of several segments. It has a savage-looking beak and a pair of huge glittering golden-green eyes like great jewels, which it turns on them for a moment in a long, baleful stare as the light of the year-captain’s lamp comes to rest on it. Then it returns to its work.
Its work consists of digging a hole deep down in the worm’s flesh and laying an egg in it.
The egg is waiting, glued to the creature’s underbelly: a many-faceted bluish-purple sphere of goodly size. The hole, it seems, is nearly finished. The insectoid-thing, standing upright and bracing itself by spreading its lowest pair of limbs, bends forward at a sharp angle until its head and the upper half of its thorax disappear within the worm. Rapid drilling movements are apparent, the visible half of the creature rocking in quick rhythms, the hidden head no doubt bobbing furiously below to send that terrible beak deeper and deeper into the soft vulnerable material that makes up the worm. The process goes on for an unpleasantly long time.
Then the creature straightens up. It appears to be satisfied with its labors. Once again it glowers warningly at the two watching humans; then it does an odd little strutting dance atop the worm, which, after a moment, can be seen not to be a dance at all, but simply a procedure by which the thing is pulling its huge egg free of its underbelly and laboriously shoving it downward, moving it from one pair of limbs to another, until the next-to-last pair is holding it. At that point the creature flops forward over its excavation, spearing the point of its beak into the skin of the worm as though to anchor itself, and the legs that grasp the egg plunge fiercely downward, jamming the egg deep into the hole that awaits it.
That is all. The creature extricates itself, throws one more huge-eyed glare at Huw and the year-captain, and goes scuttling off into the darkness beyond.
The worm has not reacted in any visible way to the entire event. The snuffling and chomping sounds, and the accompanying sixty-cycle drone, have continued unabated.
“The worm’s flesh will heal around the egg, I suppose,” the year-captain says. “A cyst will form, and there the egg will stay until it hatches, giving off that lovely yellow light. Then, I would imagine, a cheery little thing much like its mother will come forth and will find all the food it needs close at hand. And the worm will never notice a thing.”
“Lovely. Very lovely,” says Huw.
The year-captain moves forward another couple of paces to have a closer look at the opening in which the insectoid-thing has inserted its egg. Huw does not accompany him. It is necessary, the year-captain finds, to clamber up onto the worm’s back for a proper view of what he wants to see. The year-captain’s heavy boots sink a few millimeters into the worm’s yielding flesh as he mounts, but the worm does not react to the year-captain’s presence. The year-captain stares into the aperture, carefully pulling its edges apart so that he can peer into its interior.
“Watch it!” Huw yells. “Mommy is coming back!”
The year-captain looks up. Indeed the insectoid-thing has reappeared, as though its egg has sounded some sort of alarm that has summoned it back from the darker depths of the tunnel. By the light of his helmet lamp the year-captain can see the creature advancing at a startling pace, mandibles clacking, front claws waving ferociously, eyes bright with rage, clouds of what looks like venom emerging from vents along its thorax.
Hastily the year-captain jumps down from the worm and backs away. But the insectoid-thing keeps coming, and swiftly. It seems quite clear to the year-captain that the infuriated creature intends to hurl itself on him and bite him in half, and it appears quite capable of doing just that.
Both men are armed with energy guns, purely as a precautionary thing. The year-captain draws his now, raises it almost without aiming, and fires one quick bolt.
The insectoid-thing explodes in a burst of yellow flame.
“A damned close thing,” Huw says softly as he comes up beside him. “Hell hath no fury like a giant alien bug whose egg is in danger.”
“It wasn’t in any danger,” the year-captain murmurs.
“The bug didn’t know that.”
“No. No. The bug didn’t know.” The year-captain, shaken, nudges the fragments of the thing with the boot of one toe. “I’ve never killed anything before,” he says. “A mosquito, maybe. A spider. But not something like this.”
“You had no choice,” Huw says. “Two secon
ds more and it would have been going for your throat.”
The year-captain acknowledges that.
“Anyway, it was very damned ugly, old brother.”
“It may have been an intelligent life-form,” says the year-captain. “At the very least, a highly developed one. In any case, it belongs here and we don’t.” His voice is thick with anger and disgust.
He pauses beside the dead creature a little while longer. Then he turns and walks slowly from the tunnel.
Huw follows him out. For a little while they stand together outside the entrance, saying nothing, watching the viscous rain come down in thick looping sheets.
“Would you like to collect a couple of those eggs to take back to the ship for study?” Huw asks finally, goading just a little, but in what he wants to think is a pleasant way, trying to ease the tension of the moment.
The year-captain does not answer immediately.
“No,” he says at last. “I think not.”
“But the eternal quest of science, old brother, does it not require us to—”
“Let the eternal quest of science be damned just this once,” the year-captain tells him sharply. There is a sudden explosive note of anger just barely under control in his voice. “I don’t want to talk about this. Let’s just get ourselves back to the ship.”
This heat, this tone of fury being held in check with great difficulty, is altogether out of character for him. Huw gives him a quick look of surprise verging on alarm. Then, by way of defusing the situation, he lets out a long comic exhalation of relief. “And are we truly going from here, then? Oh, praises be to all the gods! I thought you would keep us poking about in this filthy place forever, my friend.”
Zed Hesper, of course, has the tempting Planet C to propose to them, and plenty of others beyond that.
The sky is full of worlds, Hesper’s instruments indicate, and he is as eager as ever for them to go zooming off in quest of them.
But the first two adventures in planetary exploration have been less than rewarding, in fact have been a bit on the crushing side — one world sending out a broadcast in the psychotic part of the spectrum and the next one populated entirely by loathsome monsters — and in the aftermath of the most recent landing a strange dark mood of negativity is emerging for the first time aboard the Wotan. The loss of contact with Earth — those chatty little bulletins from home, those trifling reminders that they once hadhad a home other than this wandering starship — has had something to do with that. And the voyagers have seen Huw and Giovanna come back pale and shaken from one planet, and Huw and the year-captain equally shaken from another. The effect on the year-captain in particular of the visit to the appalling Planet B is only too apparent even several days after his return, and it disturbs everyone to see that normally impassive man looking so rattled.
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