When the overlander arrived out of the ship, he took over the wheel from Tim Anderson and gunned her hard as Craig scrambled aboard.
As Barney had said, it was quiet. From an ecologist’s point of view, that could be bad. They drove across a gently undulating plain toward a ridge of high ground. Bright flowers grew in the grass, birds sang overhead. Occasional groves of graceful trees added variety to the landscape. Coming in to land in the spaceship, they had noted how this same gentle landscape filled most of Lancelyn II.
‘Evolution must have been sitting on its haunches not to raise a dominant species in a likely spot like this,’ Tim commented. If he felt slightly unsure, this was only his second trip with PEST.
Craig said nothing. As chief ecologist, he did not waste words but sat alertly looking out.
As they began to climb the high ground, more of the peaceful country was revealed on either side. Then they came across the first corpses.
Without fuss, Tim slid his express rifle onto his knee. The corpses rapidly became more frequent. They lay everywhere, silent in the waving grass. Barney braked the overlander; it was impossible to go further without running over the carcasses. The ecologists sat there with the engine barely turning, looking out of the windows, each with his private speculations.
Now there could be no doubt about the quiet everywhere. It was not peaceful; it was sinister.
The corpses belonged to creatures like centaurs, with bodies the size of Shetland ponies and, in place of a horse’s head and neck, a head and torso which looked – as far as one could judge, considering the corpses’ advanced state of decomposition – remarkably human. The torso was covered with a thick brown coat which extended over the rest of the body; there were no signs of arms or hands.
Their coats, once glossy, were now bedraggled and slimed with putrescence. The flesh had rotted or been torn from their faces to reveal skull and cheekbones. Their chests appeared to have been savaged; black and green traceries of putrescence grew in the mutilated skin, flowering outward like tar. Only their feet, which were hoofless, showed no sign of corruption.
‘Not a pretty sight,’ Craig remarked.
‘There must be at least two hundred head of them lying here,’ Barney said. ‘All killed at the same time. Been dead a week maybe.’
‘But what could have struck down a whole herd of them at once like this?’ Tim demanded.
‘It’s a problem right up our alley, isn’t it?’ Craig said dryly. ‘Back her out, Barney, and let’s get back to the ship. The sooner the three of us start work as planned, the better.’
Bumping back the way they had come, they soon lost sight of the rotting bodies, lying peacefully on their sides as if in life they had never done anything better. The thought of them was not so easily lost.
‘They must have been surrounded by a pack of fast-running predators,’ Tim said. This was his first field job; it appalled him to think that in an hour the three of them would go their separate ways. That was the way PEST set its teams to work.
‘Predators, no doubt,’ Barney replied. ‘Wolves maybe. Yet I fancy they would not need to be as fast-moving as you think to catch up with our dead friends back there. Though their lower bodies were shaped roughly like ponies, I doubt whether they could cover ground as rapidly as a pony. Their limbs were too clumsy, their feet too spongy. I’d say they were plodders all.’
‘Whatever killed them,’ Craig said, in his unemphatic way, ‘did not do it for food. Those bodies were not eaten. The slaughter, for my money, was carried out for pleasure …’
Back at the spaceship, they drove out the other two overlanders. PEST procedure was observed, based on centuries of investigation of strange planets. The ancient idea of a primary exploration party, which battered its way across the new world, giving all concerned warning of its coming, had long ago been abandoned. Nowadays, the three ecologists simply established three points eighty miles apart, the ship at one of the points of the equilateral triangle so formed; they then sat tight and observed the network of life about them, disturbing as little as possible. That way, it rarely took an experienced team more than one day to find trouble – or three to lick it!
As usual on these occasions, lots were drawn to see who remained in the vicinity of the ship. Barney Brangwyn won.
‘Lucky devil!’ Tim remarked enviously. ‘All home comforts for you, while Craig and I rough it in the bush. Well, don’t forget to keep the radio watch open.’
As Barney saw the others into their overlanders, which were already loaded with supplies, Craig turned to him.
You knew instinctively that Craig Hodges was a man to be reckoned with. A specialist in parasitology, he was of average height, solidly built, without much neck; thin hair emphasized the massiveness of his skull. His appearance suggested physical power; but when he moved – even if only to take a cigarette or lace his boots – when he looked at you, and above all when he spoke, you were conscious of a controlling mind as muscular as his body.
‘I’m sorry to be leaving this interesting strip of country,’ he said. ‘Eighty miles away, there may only be butterflies to look at. The key to Lancelyn lies here, to my way of thinking.’
‘Sure, these are the happy hunting grounds – God’s little acre!’ Barney exclaimed, grinning. ‘I hereby christen this neck of the woods Carrion Country.’
Barney Brangwyn was alone.
He selected a hollow in the ground on the edge of a small wood, parking his vehicle and inflating his ‘igloo’ in it. He sawed down small trees for light camouflage, and settled in peacefully to observe. It was an ideal site. The ship was only some five hundred yards away, easily visible from the overlander’s observation blister. In the mild afternoon sun it looked surprisingly at home with the gentle surroundings.
Barney’s way of working was simple. Zipping on a warm oversuit, he strapped himself into a harness of specimen containers, buckled on his blaster and belt, and commenced a tour of a small adjacent area of ground. Carefully, he noted all it contained. This was his Plot.
The Plot, not more than half an acre in extent, contained the hollow in one corner, a slender stream gurgling among stones, a number of trees which at one spot merged into a thicket, shrubs, broken ground, tall and short grass, small boulders, a rotting log. To a non-specialist there would have been nothing particular about the Plot. They might have failed to observe the moss growing all around the boles of the trees, indicating lack of any strong prevailing wind; or the ivy-type climber whose end-tendrils, fine as a spider’s thread, lifted on a light breeze and enabled it to climb from tree to tree; or, among the bush roots, a line of assorted gravel which suggested a moraine, which in its turn suggested a past ice age.
Barney noticed these and other details, and would later make a tape-report on them, with his observations. But what chiefly interested him was the Plot’s content of insect and animal life.
To him, the Plot was a microcosm of Lancelyn II. As a good PEST man, he believed that the only way to find out anything valuable about a whole planet was to look carefully at one acre of its ground.
Accordingly, when he had made the superficial survey, Barney settled himself on the bank of the little stream with all the excitement of a big-game hunter stalking a rogue elephant. Yet Barney expected to see nothing bigger than a frog.
As an ecologist whose knowledge had been drawn from practical PEST work on thousands of worlds, Barney knew that, given time, the whole structure of animate life on a planet could be deduced from its humblest members. His very first discovery of minute life was a thread-like creature, not an inch long, worming its way under a flat stone. Barney levered it up with a spatula, examining it under a magnifying glass before dropping it into a specimen box. It was a green and grey leech which looked as if it had been sprinkled with black pepper. Undoubtedly, protoclepsis tesselata of the family Glossiphonidae, a duck-leech which established the presence of ducks on Lancelyn, for these birds are the leech’s only hosts.
The grass o
n which he lay was short where it should have been long; that meant that herbivores were about. Poking in the rubbish of a water-side burrow, he turned up the tiny remains of eyeless fleas, indicating that the water-going creature (he suspected a rat, from the formation of the nest) on which the fleas lived was very probably nocturnal in its habits. Bit by bit, a picture of the vast, multi-faceted existence of Lancelyn II grew in Barney’s mind. He was engrossed.
He was so engrossed that the centaur was nearly on him before he chanced to look up and see it.
Jumping up with a cry of surprise, Barney caught his heel on loose gravel, slipped, and fell backwards. When he scrambled up again, the centaur had gone.
‘Hi! Come back! I’m not going to hurt you!’ Barney shouted. His reaction, when he had overcome his shock, was pleasure to think that his Plot had this large mammalian life form on or near it. He stood there waiting, stroking his beard with one hand and his bruised posterior with the other.
‘It can’t have gone far,’ Barney muttered, remembering his notion about the centaur’s poor turn of speed.
With his blaster in his hand for safety’s sake, he went forward, wondering if the centaur were crouching behind the dead tree trunk at the edge of the Plot. Barney jumped on top of it and looked down. Nothing there. Then, a few yards to one side, he saw something.
Beneath a thick, oleander-like bush, lay a dead and decaying centaur.
It looked just like the bodies the PEST party had found previously on the high ground. But around this one – and not only because Barney was now alone – lurked the authentic tang of fear.
Barney had been afraid before; the sensation, it can be said without paradox, did not frighten him. He stood on the log, a light breeze ruffling his beard, trying to analyse just why the new corpse scared him. Finally, he decided his reasons stemmed from divergent facts which hardly seemed to make sense together.
This corpse had not been here an hour ago, when Barney had surveyed the Plot. It must therefore be connected in some way with the live centaur, who had now vanished. To Barney’s scientifically trained, connection making mind, this implied human motivation – and consequently human intelligence – in the centaurs. What animal would drag a putrifying member of its own species about?
The motivation implied was either that the living centaur had been undergoing, or was about to undergo, some sort of religious rite with the dead creature, or that the two were murderer and murdered. Barney had a momentary picture of the wrongdoer with the putrifying corpse on its back, galloping about looking for a place to dispose of the evidence.
None of these thoughts pleased him.
‘Bloodthirsty centaurs!’ he exclaimed to himself. ‘Perhaps the dead herd we saw on the hill killed each other in battle.’
He rejected this idea as soon as it occurred to him. The nasty chest wounds on the other bodies had hardly looked like the kind of injury a centaur could inflict. He wanted to examine the corpse under the oleanders, to see if its pads concealed claws, to determine by the teeth whether the beasts were carnivorous or not. Seized by a belated caution, however, he would not go near the carcass, just in case it was intended as a decoy for him.
Dropping down onto hands and knees on the other side of the log, Barney prepared to wait to see if anything happened. Nursing the blaster, he looked cautiously about him.
The peaceful, parklike country seemed to have changed its character. Evening was creeping on; Lancelyn was low behind thick cloud. The hush had malevolence in it. Barney scratched one hairy arm and sniffed. He knew of old how one hint of the strange, one suspicion that hostile intelligence might be lurking near, was sufficient to change one’s whole attitude to a new environment. That subconscious safeguard, handed down from prehistoric ancestors, had been one of man’s great aids on alien planets.
It helped Barney now.
He saw the puma as soon as it broke from the woods and headed in his direction.
Apart from a grey tuft at the end of its tail, the puma was all black.
Its head was feline, but the rest of it lacked any such grace. It most resembled a stubby-legged ox. It might have been laughable, but for its formidable armoury of teeth and claws. As it slunk forward in predatory fashion, Barney rose to his feet, keeping the blaster ready.
The puma had already seen him. Its yellow eyes bored at him.
When it ran at Barney, its comparatively slow turn of speed lent it a disconcerting air of confidence.
‘Sorry to do this!’ Barney said, and fired.
Taking the faint blue bolt smack in the chest, the creature heeled over, kicked vigorously with its hindpaws, and lay still. Barney went over to it, shaking his head; he hated taking life, but even more he hated losing his own. Standing near – but not too near – to the body, he produced from his equipment a long-armed scoop with automatic shutter, and began to collect the puma’s parasites as they left their cooling refuge. He would study them later. Of all the sciences, parasitology offers the space ecologist the quickest ‘Open Sesame’ to a new planet’s mysteries.
When the body was clear of its fellow-travellers, Barney threw a loop of webbed rope around its neck and dragged it over to his HQ for examination. Then, struck by another thought, he ran back to where he had been crouching by the log. The decomposing body of the centaur had gone; confused footprints by the oleander bush told him nothing.
Swearing colourfully, using esoteric terms picked up in taverns on a dozen planets, Barney returned to the overlander and shut himself in.
It was dark. A scintillating chip of icy moon rose in the east, filling Lancelyn II with arabesques of mystery.
Barney Brangwyn had worked for two hours dissecting the puma. He had paused only once to go to the window and watch a herd of centaurs gallop by about half a mile away.
The sight had been curiously stirring. Outlining themselves against the sky, the creatures, about fifty in number, had poured over a ridge, down a disused waterway, and disappeared into a sparse wood. As they went, they called to each other in high, cat voices.
The light had been too poor for Barney to discern any details. One thing was clear: their turn of speed was mediocre. Their fastest pace appeared to be a rather shambling trot. This made them natural prey for the puma, who, although no record-breaker, had done better than that.
The puma would never have been a fleet-footed Mercury. Barney found that its cardio-vascular system was primitive, its lung capacity small. Apart from that, it had only one peculiarity to set it markedly apart from a terrestrial mammal. It had no sense of smell. Its nose consisted of a pair of simple breathing tubes, without olfactory nerves. For a beast of prey this was odd, but its eyes, particularly adapted to far sight, were a compensation; they had developed a type of long-range binocular vision Barney had not seen before.
Retaining its eyes in preserving fluid, Barney shot the rest of the carcass into the disposal chute, disinfected his hands and arms, and went to get himself supper.
He ate slowly and pleasurably, sipping an Aldebaran wine between mouthfuls, although without allowing his enjoyment to interrupt his thinking. Particularly, he was interested in the puma’s lack of a sense of smell, for he knew some such apparently insignificant fact might relate to the larger problem of what had killed the centaurs, and why.
Barney had observed, before he was interrupted, that the small flowers growing on his Plot were brightly coloured but lacking perfume. That might well be relevant, even though pumas did not go about smelling flowers. Smell … Scent …
‘My God!’ Barney exclaimed, slopping wine into his lap. ‘I’m a prize idiot! Why did I not note that consciously before? The centaur carrion did not stink! It should have been strong enough to knock over an ox. Yet I was standing down-wind of that last carcass and could not smell a thing …’
Finishing his meal, he lit a cheroot and sat back abstractedly until nine o’clock, the time of the PEST group call.
Craig Hodges’ voice came up first, slow and reassuring. Without w
asting time on pleasantries, he asked for Barney’s situation report.
Barney had played this game with Craig many times before. As experienced men, both knew what to report, what to hold back. Succinctly, Barney related all that had happened to him, without mentioning anything about smells or lack of them.
‘I’ve been observing these pumas in action,’ Craig said. ‘They follow the centaurs. They move inefficiently. On Earth, they would not have survived for long at any period. Evolution moves at a kindlier, slower pace here on Lancelyn. What did you find in the belly of the puma you dissected? Any beetles?’
‘That’s the diet it would be condemned to on Earth; it’d be too slow to catch anything else,’ Barney said, smiling. ‘But it feeds on the centaurs all right. They are even slower-witted and slower-footed than it is. What’s been happening with you, Craig?’
The leader paused for a moment, as if to collect his thoughts.
‘I am established on the west side of a river forty yards wide,’ he stated. ‘There is plenty of cover all around me, mainly waist-high brush on this bank of the river. I have seen no centaurs since I arrived here, although I have heard them calling nearby. I also shot a puma which was stalking them, and have collected an amount of minute wild life from its body, which I shall soon investigate. I have trapped fish in the river, only two species so far, but the night nets are out. I have trapped birds, which have some interesting structural characteristics; I will tell you more when I have collated a few more facts. Suffice it to say for the present that I suspect that a form of winged life might well be cock of the evolutionary walk here.’
‘Interesting,’ Barney commented. ‘Anything else?’
‘One thing. There’s an island downstream, just a small one. Between trees, I can see primitive buildings of some sort, carved out of rock, by the look of things. I shall be investigating tomorrow.’
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 51