by James White
"We are doing the best we can with the situation here," he continued more quietly. "We are better qualified to understand it, since we are on the spot, and we are convinced that we are doing the right thing. A tape containing much valuable new information has been prepared. This will be placed in a Two-proof storage cabinet and played back to you while we head for the hull to repair the damaged generator. While this is being done, Twos permitting, we shall make contact with the surviving intelligent members, or more likely member, of the Ship's crew.
"In the meantime, General, lay off Walters! What you're doing to him is criminal and stupid. He is not responsible for our actions inside the Ship. He is all alone, cut off from radio contact with us for days on end, not knowing whether we are alive or dead and now believing that you don't care what happens to him. If you can't appreciate his position, ask your space medics -- he must be clinging to sanity by his fingernails!
"You might also consider our position. There are only two functioning spacesuits left to us, we're constantly under attack or being forced to hide from Twos and some of us haven't slept for three days. Now you have turned against us and are threatening to turn the supply vehicles off course. At best your remarks, if indeed you meant them, are totally unstatesmanlike; at worst, criminally irresponsible. We're a long way from home and you've literally got us outnumbered billions to one. If those replacement suits don't arrive, we can never leave this Ship . . ."
McCullough broke off. He was beginning to whine and the realization made him angry. He could see the weary despair in the expressions of the others as they watched him, and hear the Twos stepping up their attack on the door. But this was not the reason why he raised his voice.
"If you maroon us here, either by accident or design, there is something you should bear in mind. We have lived on e-t food and recycled water since the last supply vehicle went wide. The food is palatable if one is hungry enough and the taste of the water is due only to our thinking too much about its original source. So we can stay here if necessary. We can go back with the Ship to its home planet and -- and see things that nobody in all of human history has seen before. an wyatt pin up
"So you can't reject us, General," he ended furiously. "Or cast us off or do anything at all to us, because we damn well quit!"
A few minutes later they left by the other exit, moving in what they hoped was the direction of the hull and the generator blister. From the suit radios of Berryman and Hollis, McCullough's voice came as a tinny, stereophonic duet as they monitored the tape transmission. Should it cease, that would mean that the storage cabinet containing the linked radio and recorder was not as Two-proof as they had hoped.
". . . Already treated design and structural philosophy in detail," the voice was saying, "and our deductions regarding the home planet's gravity, atmospheric conditions and environment have been supported by pictures on living quarters walls and in illustrated literature. Regarding these living quarters, however . . ."
"Which way?" said Berryman. "I don't know whether we're headed forward, outboard or aft . . ."
McCullough could hear the Twos breaking their way out of the compartment they had just vacated -- the things were like extraterrestrial bloodhounds! He said, "Right, I think . . ."
". . . Construction personnel lived on board and vacated their quarters, which are rather stark, when the project was complete. The large number of empty storage compartments, living quarters and, most of all, the fact that entry hatches and lighting circuits tend to be on local rather than centralized control, and that there are no indications of permanent communication lines between compartments, makes us sure that they were used only by the construction gang.
"The strongest probability is that the large size of the Ship was dictated by the operating requirements of its hyperdrive generators and that in this, its first flight, it has been operating as an interstellar probe containing automatic guidance and sensory equipment and a number of animals being tested for survival in space conditions together with a small crew who were little more than intelligent specimens undergoing the same testing. Indications are that the 'crew' have virtually no control over the operation of the Ship, and that initially they numbered only two . . ."
They were in a long corridor which seemed to be going in the wrong direction. Every Two in the Ship seemed to be after them, but just out of sight.
". . . We assumed the Two life-form to be unintelligent because they showed no indication of possessing an organized language, no manual dexterity in opening and closing doors or operating light switches and no inclination to communicate. Here we must mention our belief that an intelligent species making contact for the first time would make allowances for a certain amount of, to them, unconventional behavior and would not react with such continual and violent hostility. In the light of this assumption we will consider the situation in the animal enclosure . . ."
"If we were moving outboard there should be more intersections," said Hollis. "One at every deck level, in fact."
The Twos were in sight behind them again, boiling along the corridor like tumbleweeds in a hurricane, bouncing from wall net to wall net as their tentacles hurled them on. Unlike the humans, they did not worry about hurting themselves or protecting the two remaining usable spacesuits, so they were gaining steadily.
". . . obvious that the Twos broke out and virtually exterminated all other animal life-forms, with the exception of the Threes which, although nonhostile where we and the intelligent e-t life-form are concerned, can defend themselves against the Twos. The Twos bred unrestrained, living off the automatic food dispensers and any other experimental animal which had escaped the initial slaughter, their numbers controlled by their habit of fighting and eating each other.
"One of the half-eaten carcasses in the animal enclosure belonged to a large, caterpillar-like life-form which was quite obviously unsuited to the cage in which it was found. Around it were the bodies of Twos which, in addition to being cannibalized, showed numerous punctured wounds in musculature and bone structure of the kind made by a solid projectile-firing weapon.
"It is now obvious that this caterpillar life-form, which later data proves to be intelligent, was killed trying to contain the original breakout. The weapon may have been used by this being against the Twos and later retrieved by the second intelligent e-t from its body, or the second e-t used it in an attempt to rescue or avenge the first one . . ."
"No good," said Hollis breathlessly as he ducked out of yet another useless compartment. "Only one door."
The room might have given them indefinite protection if they could have defended the door against Twos, but there were no wall nets inside storage and dormitory compartments and no means of bracing themselves against attack. If the Twos succeeded in battering their way in, the result would be a shambles of twisting, spinning bodies and stabbing, slashing spears and tentacles and most of the casualties would be on the human side.
If they had to fight Twos, it was better done in a corridor.
". . . Before listing the data and reasoning which leads us to believe that there were only two intelligent e-t's crewing the Ship, and that one of them still survives in a physically and mentally damaged condition, we must deal with what is known and deduced about their home planet's environment and culture . . ."
At McCullough's signal they checked themselves against the wall net, faced inward and laced their feet and legs through the strands so as not to be torn free during the attack. The butts of their spears were jammed against the net's supporting brackets or any other convenient projection and they waited, McCullough thought, for all the world like a bunch of medieval foot soldiers about to soak up a cavalry charge.
"Since we left the crew's quarters -- " began Hollis, then finished with a rush, "I think we picked up some kind of scent in there. It's driving them mad -- I recognize Twos we wounded a couple of weeks ago, and every blasted Two in the Ship must be after us. This is a good chance for us to wipe them out completely . . ."
"Sixteen," said Drew.
". . . whose gravity, pressure and atmospheric composition is similar to Earth's -- which is probably the chief reason for the Ship's presence here. Observation of pictures of planetary flora and fauna suggest a world subject to frequent or perhaps constant high winds . . ."
The leading Twos were only yards and split seconds away.
chapter twenty-two
They could not be sure where exactly the Threes and Ones fitted into the picture, but the position of the intelligent caterpillars and the Twos was now plain. The scarcity of Ones indicated that most of their number had succumbed to the carnivorous instincts of the Twos.
The tentacled animal with the single, underslung horn was a carnivore, of course, and the natural enemy of the intelligent e-t's. They had adapted well to weightless conditions, but on the home planet their normal method of locomotion was to use the large, curved horn as a sort of skid while propelling themselves with their tentacles. The skid also served as a weapon when jumping onto their prey or, when plunged into soft ground during periods of high wind, as an anchor which allowed the Two to seize smaller animals with its tentacles as they blew helplessly past.
The plant life was uniformly alien.
Smaller plants consisted of a long, flexible stem which, because of the wind, lay on or close to the ground. The stem carried a number of large, thick leaves with thorns or rootlets on their undersides and seemed to combine the process of photosynthesis with the digestion of ground-burrowing insects. At the other end of the scale were the giant trees towering hundreds of feet into the air, with trunks fifty feet in diameter and massive, stubby branches in proportion.
Because of their tremendous thickness, the trunks and branches bent only slightly in the wind. Their leaves were enormous aerofoils controlled either by the vegetable nervous system of the tree or by some automatic stabilizer system in the leaf itself, so that they streamed out to leeward while maintaining a formation which kept every leaf in sunshine.
The leaves were the only opaque parts of the trees. Trunk and branches were translucent except for dark areas occurring at irregular intervals which could have been parasitic growths or caused by small animals being dashed against the trunk by the wind. Other dark patches were various forms of animal life existing inside the trees.
Another growth or structure which had puzzled them until pictures became available which gave a true indication of its size, was the heap of varicolored, translucent spaghetti. This mass appeared flexible and open enough for the wind to blow through it without putting too much strain on the individual tubes, which divided and subdivided at intervals and contained hundreds of bulbous swellings along their length before rejoining into a single stem again or linking up with another stem. From the top of this squirming and strangely beautiful mass, hundreds of metallic blooms on ridiculously thin stems trailed in the wind. Eventually they realized that they were seeing an alien city, a great, artificial tree with trailing windmill blooms supplying power to a structure which must extend a considerable depth below the surface.
The wind was such an integral part of the aliens' lives that on the Ship the sounds it made were played like background music.
". . . Originally the intelligent e-t's must have developed from a species of burrowing tree dweller. Physically they resemble outsize, leathery caterpillars, whose heads are very well supplied with teeth which now show signs of advanced atrophication, and they have four mandibles terminating in flexible digits which appear both strong and highly sensitive . . ."
The first one came at them along the center of the corridor, shell first like a tentacled cannonball. Their spears were useless against that bony carapace, so they flattened themselves against the net and let it sail past. The next one came spinning at them edge on and tentacles flailing, close to the wall occupied by Drew. He guided his spear into the soft area below the edge of the shell and between the tentacles, and the momentum of the Two's dive did the rest. He pitchforked the dying animal down the corridor, and then they were all very busy.
". . . this deeply rooted racial agoraphobia -- they are burrowers, after all, even if they do burrow through nearly transparent trees. The murals, illustrations and especially the close-fitting hammocks support this.
"It could be argued that the process of overcoming this agoraphobia and achieving the level of technology evident here was a slow one, which means that they could be much farther advanced in the sociological sciences than we are, and a peaceful first contact would be possible if it wasn't for the suspected mental damage . . ."
They came at them two and three at a time, seeming to fill the corridor from wall to wall with flailing tentacles and long, twitching, obscene horns. McCullough got his spear to a vital spot, but in the act of pushing the furiously dying thing away he felt a tentacle crash excruciatingly against his legs. When he could see again, there was a Two crawling up his legs and he had too long a hold on his weapon for it to bear. He twisted frantically to the side, pulled one leg out of the net and drew it up until the knee touched his chin, then stamped down hard on the base of the Two's horn. Reaction from the blow dislodged his other foot from the net, but the kick must have inflicted severe internal damage because the Two went into violent convulsions and died.
"Dirty fighting, sir," said Drew, who had just finished off another by more conventional methods. "I must remember that trick . . ."
Both his legs were sticking out into the corridor and before McCullough could swing them back, another Two grabbed his foot. This time the spear would bear all right, but he jabbed himself in the leg before he was able to kill it. Strangely the only pain he felt was one of loss -- there was only one functioning spacesuit left now. But there was no time to think about that for long. The corridor was a solid mass of struggling alien and human bodies, a nightmare of tentacles, legs, arms, furry carpets, stabbing horns and spears. And over the high-pitched gobblings and furious voices of the combatants there was the quiet voice of McCullough expounding his theories regarding alien psychology . . .
". . . So far as we can tell, the Two life-form is the enemy of everything which lives and moves, but particularly of the intelligent e-t's who made up the crew of the Ship. It is small wonder, then, that the single remaining alien refuses to come out of its quarters, and that a high level of fear must be added to the loneliness and lack of support from its fellows which it is suffering -- feelings which we ourselves are in a very good position to appreciate. If we also assume them to belong to a bisexual race -- and there is no evidence against this -- then the crew were probably mated . . ."
McCullough fended off a violently dying alien with a Three on its back and saw that Drew was in serious trouble. He had lost his spear and a Two had its tentacles wrapped around his hips and waist. He was trying frantically to push it off him, both hands flat against its underbelly and arms stiffened. This was how Morrison had died, McCullough thought sickly as he swung up his spear and took careful aim so as not to stab Drew.
But before he could do anything, a second Two landed on Drew's back and drove its horn in deep. Drew's arms went limp and he was caught, sandwiched and impaled between the two of them. For an instant he looked appealingly at McCullough, his face yellow-white with shock, and tried to say something. But only blood came out and McCullough killed both Twos without worrying about jabbing Drew.
Then suddenly the corridor was clear. The Twos had dived and spun and blundered their way past and the half dozen or so that had survived were clinging to the netting a short distance along the corridor, preparing to attack again.
". . . If the crew member has lost its mate, especially if the survivor is the weaker or less technically qualified of the two, this would further aggravate its emotionally disturbed condition as well as explain the lack of interference during our exploration.
"There is also a strong possibility that the survivor is physically as well as mentally damaged, but it
is, of course, the mental aspect which concerns us at the present time . . ."
"Here they come," said Berryman in a voice which was too weary to show emotion. McCullough dragged his eyes away from the gruesome three-body problem which was Drew, and tried desperately to pretend that none of this was happening, that soon he would wake up somewhere, anywhere, else.