Wish I had more like him, thought Warren. Bat Ears, the ancient planet-checker; Peabody, an old army man, and Gilmer, the grizzled supply officer. Those are the ones to count on. The rest of them are punks.
Falkner tried to stand stiff and straight.
“You see, sir,” he told Warren, “it was like this: I thought I saw an outcropping…”
Warren interrupted him. “You know, of course, Mr. Falkner, that it is an expedition rule you are never to go out by yourself; that under no circumstances is one to go off by himself.”
“Yes, sir,” said Falkner, “I know that…”
“You are aware,” said Warren, “that you are alive only by some incredible quirk of fate. You would have frozen before morning if the natives hadn’t got you first.”
“I saw a native, sir. He didn’t bother me.”
“You are more than lucky, then,” said Warren. “It isn’t often that a native hasn’t got the time to spare to slit a human’s throat. In the five expeditions that have been here before us, they have killed a full eighteen. Those stone knives they have, I can assure you, make very ragged slitting.”
Warren drew a record book in front of him, opened it and made a very careful notation.
“Mr. Falkner,” he said, “you will be confined to camp for a two-week period for infraction of the rules. Also, during that time, you shall be attached to Mr. Brady.”
“Mr. Brady, sir? The cook?”
“Precisely,” said Warren. “He probably shall want you to hustle fuel and help with the meals and dispose of garbage and other such light tasks.”
“But I was sent on this expedition to make geologic observations, not to help the cook.”
“All very true,” admitted Warren. “But, likewise, you were sent out under certain regulations. You have seen fit to disregard those regulations and I see fit, as a result, to discipline you. That is all, Mr. Falkner.”
Falkner turned stiffly and moved toward the tent flap.
“By the way,” said Warren, “I forgot to tell you. I’m glad that you got back.”
Falkner did not answer.
Warren stiffened for a moment, then relaxed. After all, he thought, what did it matter? Within another few weeks nothing would matter for him and Falkner, nor for any of the rest.
The chaplain showed up the first thing in the morning. Warren was sitting on the edge of his cot, pulling on his trousers, when the man came in. It was cold and Warren was shivering despite the sputtering of the little stove that stood beside the desk.
The chaplain was very precise and businesslike about his visit.
“I thought I should talk with you,” he said, “about arranging services for our dear departed friend.”
“What dear departed friend?” asked Warren, shivering and pulling on a shoe.
“Why, Dr. Morgan, of course.”
“I see,” said Warren. “Yes, I suppose we shall have to bury him.”
The chaplain stiffened just a little.
“I was wondering if the doctor had any religious convictions, any sort of preference.”
“I doubt it very much,” said Warren. “If I were you, I’d hold it down to minimum simplicity.”
“That’s what I thought,” said the chaplain. “A few words, perhaps, and a simple prayer.”
“Yes,” said Warren. “A prayer by all means. We’ll need a lot of prayer.”
“Pardon me, sir?”
“Oh,” Warren told him, “don’t mind me. Just wool-gathering, that’s all.”
“I see,” said the chaplain. “I was wondering, sir, if you have any idea what might have made him do it.”
“Who do what?”
“What made the doctor commit suicide.”
“Oh, that,” said Warren. “Just an unstable character, I guess.”
He laced his shoes and stood up.
“Mr. Barnes,” he said, “you are a man of God, and a very good one from what I’ve seen of you. You may have the answer to a question that is bothering me.”
“Why,” said Mr. Barnes, “why I …”
“What would you do,” asked Warren, “if you suddenly were to find out you had no more than two months to live?”
“Why,” said Mr. Barnes, “I suppose that I would go on living pretty much the way I always have. With a little closer attention to the condition of my soul, perhaps.”
“That,” said Warren, “is a practical answer. And, I suppose, the most reasonable that anyone can give.”
The chaplain looked at him curiously. “You don’t mean, sir …”
“Sit down, Barnes,” said Warren. “I’ll turn up the stove. I need you now. To tell you the solemn truth, I’ve never held too much with this business of having you fellows with the expedition. But I guess there always will be times when one needs a man like you.”
The chaplain sat down.
“Mr. Barnes,” said Warren, “that was no hypothetical question I asked. Unless God performs some miracle we’ll all be dead in another two months’ time.”
“You are joking, sir.”
“Not at all,” said Warren. “The serum is no good. Morgan waited to check it until it was too late to get word to the ship. That’s why he killed himself.”
He watched the chaplain closely and the chaplain did not flinch.
“I was of a mind,” said Warren, “not to tell you. I’m not telling any of the others—not for a while, at least.”
“It takes a little while,” said Mr. Barnes, “to let a thing like that soak in. I find it so, myself. Maybe you should tell the others, let them have a chance…”
“No,” said Warren.
The chaplain stared at him. “What are you hoping for, Warren? What do you expect to happen?”
“A miracle,” said Warren.
“A miracle?”
“Certainly,” said Warren. “You believe in miracles. You must.”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Barnes. “There are certain miracles, of course—one might call them allegorical miracles, and sometimes men read into them more than was ever meant.”
“I am more practical than that,” said Warren, harshly. “There is the miracle of the fact that the natives of this place are humanoid like ourselves and they don’t need any booster shots. There is a potential miracle in the fact that only the first humans who landed on the planet ever tried to live on Landro without the aid of booster shots.”
“Since you mention it,” said the chaplain, “there is the miracle of the fact that we are here at all.”
Warren blinked at him. “That’s right,” he said. “Tell me, why do you think we’re here? Divine destiny, perhaps. Or the immutable performance of the mysterious forces that move Man along his way.”
“We are here,” said Barnes, “to carry on the survey work that has been continued thus far by parties here before us.”
“And that will be continued,” said Warren, “by the parties that come after us.”
“You forget,” the chaplain said, “that all of us will die. They will be very wary of sending another expedition to replace one that has been wiped out.”
“And you,” said Warren, “forget the miracle.”
The report had been written by the psychologist who had accompanied the third expedition to Landro. Warren had managed, after considerable digging in the file of quadruplicates, to find a copy of it.
“Hog wash,” he said and struck the papers with his fist.
“I could of told you that,” said Bat Ears, “before you ever read it. Ain’t nothing one of them prissy punks can tell an old-timer like me about these abor … abor … abor …”
“Aborigines,” said Warren.
“That’s the word,” said Bat Ears. “That’s the word I wanted.”
“It says here,” declared Warren, “that the natives of Landro have a keen sense of dignity, very delicately tuned—that’s the very words it uses—and an exact code of honor when dealing among themselves.”
Bat Ears snorted and reached fo
r the bottle. He took a drink and sloshed what was left in the bottom discontentedly.
“You sure,” he asked, “that this is all you got?”
“You should know,” snapped Warren.
Bat Ears wagged his head. “Comforting thing,” he said. “Mighty comforting.”
“It says,” went on Warren, “that they also have a system of what amounts to protocol, on a rather primitive basis.”
“I don’t know about this proto-whatever-you-may-call-it,” said Bat Ears, “but that part about the code of honor gets me. Why, them dirty vultures would steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes. I always keep a shovel handy and when one of them shows up…”
“The report,” said Warren, “goes into that most exhaustively. Explains it.”
“Ain’t no need of explanation,” insisted Bat Ears. “They just want what you got, so they sneak in and take it.”
“Says it’s like stealing from a rich man,” Warren told him. “Like a kid that sees a field with a million melons in it. Kid can’t see anything wrong with taking one melon out of all that million.”
“We ain’t got no million melons,” said Bat Ears.
“It’s just an analogy,” said Warren. “The stuff we have here must look like a million melons to our little friends.”
“Just the same,” protested Bat Ears, “they better keep out of my cook tent …”
“Shut up,” said Warren savagely. “I get you here to talk with you and all you do is drink up my liquor and caterwaul about your cook tent.”
“All right,” said Bat Ears. “All right. What do you want to know?”
“What are we doing about contacting the natives?”
“Can’t contact them,” said Bat Ears, “if we can’t find them. They were around here, thicker than fleas, before we needed them. Now that we need them, can’t find hide nor hair of one.”
“As if they might know that we needed them,” said Warren.
“How would they know?” asked Bat Ears.
“I can’t tell you,” Warren said. “It was just a thought.”
“If you do find them,” asked Bat Ears, “how you going to make them talk?”
“Bribe them,” said Warren. “Buy them. Offer them anything we have.”
Bat Ears shook his head. “It won’t work. Because they know all they got to do is wait. If they just wait long enough, it’s theirs without the asking. I got a better way.”
“Your way won’t work, either.”
“You’re wasting your time, anyhow,” Bat Ears told him. “They ain’t got no cure. It’s just adap … adap …”
“Adaptation.”
“Sure,” said Bat Ears. “That’s the word I meant.”
He took up the bottle, shook it, measured it with his thumb and then, in a sudden gesture, killed it.
He rose quickly to his feet. “I got to sling some grub together,” he said. “You stay here and get her figured out.”
Warren sat quietly in the tent, listening to his footsteps going across the compound of the camp.
There was no hope, of course. He must have known that all along, he told himself, and yet he had postponed the realization of it. Postponed it with talk of miracles and hope that the natives might have the answer—and the native answer, the native cure, he admitted now, was even more fantastic than the hope of a miracle. For how could one expect the little owl-eyed people would know of medicine when they did not know of clothing, when they still carried rudely-chipped stone knives, when their campfire was a thing very laboriously arrived at by the use of stricken flint?
They would die, all twenty-five of them, and in the days to come the little owl-eyed natives would come boldly marching in, no longer skulking, and pick the camp to its last bare bone.
Collins was the first to go. He died hard, as all men die hard when infected by the peculiar virus of Landro. Before he was dead, Peabody had taken to his bed with the dull headache that heralded the onset of the malady. After that the men went down like tenpins. They screamed and moaned in delirium, they lay as dead for days before they finally died, while the fever ate at them like some ravenous animal that had crept in from the moors.
There was little that anyone could do. Make them comfortable, keep them bathed and the bedding washed and changed, feed them broth that Bat Ears made in big kettles on the stove, be sure there was fresh, cold water always available for the fever-anguished throats.
At first the graves were deep and wooden crosses were set up, with the name and other information painted on the cross bar. Then the graves were only shallow holes because there were less hands to dig them and less strength within the hands.
To Warren it was a nightmare of eternity—a ceaseless round of caring for his stricken men, of helping with the graves, of writing in the record book the names of those who died. Sleep came in snatches when he could catch it or when he became so exhausted that he tottered in his tracks and could not keep his eyelids open. Food was something that Bat Ears brought and set in front of him and he gulped without knowing what it was, without tasting what it was.
Time was a forgotten thing and he lost track of days. He asked what day it was and no one knew nor seemed to care. The sun came up and the sun went down and the moors stretched to their gray horizons, with the lonely wind blowing out of them.
Vaguely he became aware of fewer and fewer men who worked beside him, of fewer stricken men upon the cots. And one day he sat down in his tent and looked across at another haggard face and knew it was nearly over.
“It’s a cruel thing, sir,” said the haggard face.
“Yes, Mr. Barnes,” said Warren. “How many are there left?”
“Three,” said the chaplain, “and two of them are nearly gone. Young Falkner seems to be better, though.”
“Any on their feet?”
“Bat Ears, sir. Just you and I and Bat Ears.”
“Why don’t we catch it, Barnes? Why are we still here?”
“No one knows,” the chaplain told him. “I have a feeling that we’ll not escape it.”
“I know,” said Warren. “I have that feeling, too.”
Bat Ears lumbered into the tent and set a pail upon the table. He reached into it and scooped out a tin cup, dripping, and handed it to Warren.
“What is it, Bat Ears?” Warren asked.
“Something I cooked up,” said Bat Ears. “Something that you need.”
Warren lifted the cup and gulped it down. It burned its way clear into his stomach, set his throat afire and exploded in his head.
“Potatoes,” said Bat Ears. “Spuds make powerful stuff. The Irish found that out, years and years ago.”
He took the cup from Warren, dipped it again and handed it to Barnes.
The chaplain hesitated.
Bat Ears shouted at him. “Drink it, man. It’ll put some heart in you.”
The minister drank, choked, set the cup back on the table empty.
“They’re back again,” said Bat Ears.
“Who’s back?” asked Warren.
“The natives,” said Bat Ears. “All around us, waiting for the end of us.”
He disdained the cup, lifted the pail in both his hands and put it to his lips. Some of the liquor splashed out of the corners of his mouth and ran darkly down his shirt.
He put the pail back on the table, wiped his mouth with a hairy fist.
“They might at least be decent about it,” he declared. “They might at least keep out of sight until it is all over. Caught one sneaking out of Falkner’s tent. Old gray buck. Tried to catch him, but he outlegged me.”
“Falkner’s tent?”
“Sure. Snooping around before a man is dead. Not even waiting till he’s gone. Didn’t take nothing, though, I guess. Falkner was asleep. Didn’t even wake him.”
“Asleep? You sure?”
“Sure,” said Bat Ears. “Breathing natural. I’m going to unsling my gun and pick off a few of them, just for luck. I’ll teach them…”
“Mr. Br
ady,” asked Barnes, “you are certain Falkner was sleeping naturally? Not in a coma? Not dead?”
“I know when a man is dead,” yelled Bat Ears.
Jones and Webster died during the night. Warren found Bat Ears in the morning, collapsed beside his stone-cold stove, the empty liquor pail beside him. At first he thought the cook was only drunk and then he saw the signs upon him. He hauled him across the floor and boosted him onto his cot, then went out to find the chaplain.
He found him in the cemetery, wielding a shovel, his hands red with broken blisters.
“It won’t be deep,” said Mr. Barnes, “but it will cover them. It’s the best that I can do.”
“Bat Ears has it,” Warren told him.
The chaplain leaned on his shovel, breathing a little hard from digging.
“Queer,” he said. “Queer, to think of him. Of big, brawling Bat Ears. He was a tower of strength.”
Warren reached for the shovel.
“I’ll finish this,” he said, “if you’ll go down and get them ready. I can’t…I haven’t the heart to handle them.”
The chaplain handed over the shovel. “It’s funny,” he said, “about young Falkner.”
“You said yesterday he was a little better. You imagined it?”
Barnes shook his head. “I was in to see him. He’s awake and lucid and his temperature is down.”
They stared at one another for a long time, each trying to hide the hope that might be upon his face.
“Do you think …”
“No, I don’t,” said Barnes.
But Falkner continued to improve. Three days later he was sitting up. Six days later he stood with the other two beside the grave when they buried Bat Ears.
And there were three of them. Three out of twenty-six.
The chaplain closed his book and put it in his pocket. Warren took up the shovel and shoveled in the dirt. The other two watched him silently as he filled the grave, slowly, deliberately, taking his time, for there was no other task to hurry him—filled it and mounded it and shaped it neat and smooth with gentle shovel pats.
Then the three of them went down the slope together, not arm in arm, but close enough to have been arm in arm—back to the white tents of the camp.
Still they did not talk.
It was as if they understood for the moment the dedicatory value of the silence that lay upon the land and upon the camp and the three that were left out of twenty-six.
Space, Space, Space - Stories about the Time when Men will be Adventuring to the Stars Page 15