Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  Hague watched the bright insects coalesce into one agitated mass of vermilion, azure, metallic green, and sulphur yellow twenty feet overhead. The pulsating mass of hues resolved itself into single insects, with wings large as dinnerplates, and they streamed out of sight over the forest roof.

  “What were they?” he grinned at Balistierri. “Going to name them after Bormann?”

  The slight zoologist still watched the spot where they’d vanished.

  “Does it matter much what I call them? Do you really believe anyone will ever be able to read this logbook I’m making?” He eyed the gunnery officer bleakly, then, “Well, come on. We’d better skin these monks. They’re food anyway.”

  Hague followed Balistierri, and they stood looking down at the golden furred primates. The zoologist knelt, fingered a bedraggled white crest, and remarked, “These blast cartridges don’t leave much meat, do they? Hardly enough for the whole party.” He pulled a tiny metal block, with a hook and dial, from his pocket, loped the hook through a tendon in the monkey’s leg and lifted the dead animal.

  “Hmmm. Forty-seven pounds. Not bad.” He weighed each in turn, made measurements, and entered these in his pocket notebook.

  The circle around Sewell, who presided over the cook unit, was merry that night. The men’s eyes were bright in the heater glow as they stuffed their shrunken stomachs with monkey meat and the fruits the monkeys had been eating when Hague and Balistierri surprised them. Swenson and Crosse and Whitcomb, the photographer, overate and were violently sick; but the others sat picking their teeth contentedly in a close circle. Bormann pulled his harmonica from his shirt pocket, and the hard, silvery torrent of music set them to singing softly. Hague and Blake, the bacteriologist, stood guard among the trees.

  At dawn, they were marching again, stepping more briskly over tiny creeks, through green-tinted mud, and the wet heat. At noon, they heard the horn again, and Clark ordered silence and a faster pace. They swung swiftly, eating iron rations as they marched. Hague leaned into his cart harness and watched perspiration staining through Bormann’s shirted back just ahead of him. Behind, Sergeant Brian tugged manfully, and growled under his breath at buzzing insects, slapping occasionally with a low howl of muted anguish. Helen, the skin bird, rode on Bormann’s shoulder, staring back into Hague’s face with questioning chirps; and Hague was whistling softly between his teeth at her, when Bormann stopped suddenly and Hague slammed into him. Helen took flight with a startled squawk, and Clark came loping back to demand quiet. Bormann stared at the two officers, his young-old face blank with surprise.

  “I’m, I’m shot,” he stuttered, and stared wonderingly at the thing thrusting from the side opening in his chest armor. It was one of the fragile bronze arrows, gleaming metallically in the forest gloom.

  Hague cursed, and jerked free of the cart harness.

  “Here, I’ll get it free.” He tugged at the shaft, and Bormann’s face twisted. Hague stepped back. “Where’s Sewell? This thing must be barbed.”

  “Back off the trail! Form a wide circle around the cart, bat stay under cover! Fight ‘em on their own ground!” Clark was yelling, and the men clustered about the cart faded into forest corridors.

  Hague and Sewell, left alone, dragged Bormann’s limp length beneath the metal cart. Hague leaped erect again, manhandled the pneumatic gun off the cart and onto the trail, spun the charger crank, and lay down in firing position. Behind him, Sewell grunted, “He’s gone. Arrow poison must have paralyzed his diaphragm and chest muscles.”

  “Okay. Get up here and handle the ammunition.” Hague’s face was savage as the medical technician crawled into position beside him and opened an ammunition carrier.

  “Watch the trail behind me,” Hague continued, slamming up the top cover plate and jerking a belt through the pneumatic breech. “When I yell charge, spin the charger crank; and when I yell off a number, set the meter arrow at that number.” He snapped the cover plate shut and locked it.

  “The other way! They’re coming the other way!” Sewell lumbered to his knees, and the two heaved the gun around. A blow-gun arrow rattled off the cart body above them, and gobbling yells filtered among the trees with an answering crack of explosive cartridges. A screaming knot of grey figures came sprinting down on the cart. Hague squeezed the pneumatic’s trigger, the gun coughed, and the blue-fire-limbed lizard-men crumpled in the trail mud.

  “Okay, give ‘em a few the other way.”

  The two men horsed the gun around and sent a buzzing flock of explosive loads down the forest corridor opening ahead of the cart. They began firing carefully down other corridors opening off the trail, aiming delicately less their missiles explode too close and the concussion kill their own men; but they worked a blasting circle of destruction that smashed the great trees back in the forest and made openings in the forest roof. Blue fire flashed in the shadows and froze weird tableaus of screaming lizard-men and hurtling mud, branches, and great splinters of wood.

  An exulting yell burst behind them. Hague saw Sewell stare over his shoulder, face contorted, then the big medical technician sprang to his feet. Hague rolled hard, pulled his belt knife, and saw Sewell and a grey man-shape locked in combat above him, saw leathery grey claws drive a bronze knife into the medic’s unarmored throat; and then the gunnery officer was on his feet, knife slashing, and the lizard-man fell across the prone Sewell. An almost audible silence fell over the forest, and Hague saw rocketeers filtering back onto the cart trail, rifles cautiously extended at ready.

  “Where’s Clark?” he asked Lenkranz. The grey-haired metals man gazed back dully.

  “I haven’t seen him since we left the trail. I was with Swenson.”

  The others moved in, and Hague listed the casualties. Sewell, Bormann, and Lieutenant Clark. Gunnery Officer Clarence Hague was now in command. That the Junior Lieutenant now commanded Ground Expeditionary Patrol Number One trickled into his still numb brain; and he wondered for a moment what the Base Commander would think of their chances if he knew. Then he took stock of his little command.

  There was young Crosse, his face twitching nervously. There was Blake, the tall, quiet bacteriologist; Lenkranz, the metals man; Hirooka, the Nisei; Balistierri; Whitcomb, the photographer, with a battered Hasselbladt still dangling by its neck cord against his armored chest. Swenson was still there, the big Swede crewman; and imperturbable Sergeant Brian, who was now calmly cleaning the pneumatic gun’s loading mechanism. And, Helen, Bormann’s skin bird, fluttering over the ration cart, beneath which Bormann and Sewell lay in the mud.

  “Crosse, Lenkranz, burial detail. Get going.” It was Hague’s first order as Commander. He thought the two looked most woebegone of the party, and figured digging might loosen their nerves.

  Crosse stared at him, and then sat suddenly against a tree bole.

  “I’m not going to dig. I’m not going to march. This is crazy. We’re going to get killed. I’ll wait for it right here. Why do we keep walking and walking when we’re going to die anyway?” His rising voice cracked, and he burst into hysterical laughter. Sergeant Brian rose quietly from his gun cleaning, jerked Crosse to his feet, and slapped him into quiet. Then he turned to Hague.

  “Shall I take charge of the burial detail, sir?”

  Hague nodded; and suddenly his long dislike of the iron-hard Sergeant melted into warm liking and admiration. Brian was the man who’d get them all through.

  The Sergeant knotted his dark brows truculently at Hague. “And I don’t believe Crosse meant what he said. He’s a very brave man. We all get a little jumpy. But he’s a good man, a good Rocketeer.”

  ~ * ~

  Three markers beside the trail, and a pile of dumped equipment marked the battle ground when the cart swung forward again. Hague had dropped all the recording instruments, saving only Whitcomb’s exposed films, the rations, rifle ammunition, and logbooks that had been kept by different members of the science section. At his command, Sergeant Brian reluctantly smashed the pneumatic gun’
s firing mechanism, and left the gun squatting on its tripod beside charger and shell belts. With the lightened load, Hague figured three men could handle the cart, and he took his place with Brian and Crosse in the harness. The others no longer walked in the trail, but filtered between great root-flanges and tree boles on either side, guiding themselves by the Sonar’s hum.

  They left no more trail markers, and Hague cautioned them against making any unnecessary noise.

  “No trail markers behind us. This mud is watery enough to hide footprints in a few minutes. We’re making no noise, and we’ll drop no more refuse. All they can hear will be the Sonar, and that won’t carry far.”

  On the seventy-first day of the march, Hague squatted, fell almost to the ground, and grunted, “Take ten.”

  He stared at the stained, ragged scarecrows hunkered about him in forest mud.

  “Why do we do it?” he asked no one in particular. “Why do we keep going, and going, and going? Why don’t we just lie down and die? That would be the easiest thing I could think of right now.” He knew that Rocket Service officers didn’t talk that way, but he didn’t feel like an officer, just a tired, feverish, bone-weary man.

  “Have we got a great glowing tradition to inspire us?” he snarled “No, we’re just the lousy rocketeers that every other service arm plans to absorb. We haven’t a Grant or a John Paul Jones to provide an example in a tough spot. The U.S. Rocket Service has nothing but the memory of some ships that went out and never came back; and you can’t make a legend out of men who just plain vanish.”

  There was silence, and it looked as if the muddy figures were too exhausted to reply. Then Sergeant Brian spoke.

  ‘The Rocketeers have a legend, sir.”

  “What legend, Brian?” Hague snorted.

  “Here is the legend, sir. ‘George Easy Peter One.’ “

  Hague laughed hollowly, but the Sergeant continued as if he hadn’t heard.

  “Ground Expeditionary Patrol One—the outfit a planet couldn’t lick. Venus threw her grab bag at us, animals, swamps, poison plants, starvation, fever, and we kept right on coming. She just made us smarter, and tougher, and harder to beat. And we’ll blast through these lizard-men and the jungle, and march into Base like the whole U.S. Armed Forces on review.”

  “Let’s go,” Hague called, and they staggered up again, nine gaunt bundles of sodden, muddy rags, capped in trim black steel helmets with cheek guards down. The others slipped off the trail, and Hague, Brian, and Crosse pulled on the cart harness and lurched forward. The cart wheel hub jammed against a tree bole, and as they strained blindly ahead to free it, a horn note drifted from afar.

  “Here they come again,” Crosse groaned.

  “They—won’t be—up—with us—for days,” Hague grunted, while he threw his weight in jerks against the tow line. The cart lurched free with a lunge, and all three shot forward and sprawled raging in the muddy trail.

  They sat wiping mud from their faces, when Brian stopped suddenly, ripped off his helmet and threw it aside, then sat tensely forward in an attitude of strained listening. Hague had time to wonder dully if the man’s brain had snapped, before he crawled to his feet.

  “Shut up, and listen,” Brian was snarling. “Hear it! Hear it! It’s a klaxon! Way off, about every two seconds!”

  Hague tugged off his heavy helmet, and strained every nerve to listen. Over the forest silence it came with pulse-like regularity, a tiny whisper of sound.

  He and Brian stared bright-eyed at each other, not quite daring to say which they were thinking. Crosse got up and leaned like an empty sack against the cartwheel with an inane questioning look.

  “What is it?” When they stared at him without speaking, still listening intently, “It’s the Base. That’s it, it’s the Base!”

  Something choked Hague’s throat, then he was yelling and firing his rifle. The rest came scuttling out of the forest shadow, faces breaking into wild grins, and they joined Hague, the forest rocking with gunfire. They moved forward, and Hirooka took up a thin chant:

  “Oooooooh, the Rocketeers

  have shaggy ears.

  They’re dirty-

  The rest of their lyrics wouldn’t look well in print; but where the Rocketeers have gone, on every frontier of space, the ribald song is sung. The little file moved down the trail toward the klaxon sound. Behind them, something moved in the gloom, resolved itself into a reptile-headed, man-like thing, that reared a small wooden trumpet to fit its mouth, a soft horn note floated clear; and other shapes became visible, sprinting forward, flitting through the gloom . . .

  ~ * ~

  When a red light flashed over Chapman’s desk, he flung down a sheaf of papers and hurried down steel-walled corridors to the number one shaft. A tiny elevator swept him to Odysseus’ upper side, where a shallow pit had been set in the ship’s scarred skin, and a pneumatic gun installed. Chapman hurried past the gun and crew to stand beside a listening device. The four huge cones loomed dark against the clouds, the operator in their center was a blob of shadow in the dawnlight, where he huddled listening to a chanting murmur that came from his headset. Blake came running onto the gun-deck; Bjornson, and the staff officers were all there.

  “Cut it into the Address system,” Chapman told the Listener operator excitedly; and the faint sounds were amplified through the whole ship. From humming Address amplifiers, the ribald words broke in a hoarse melody.

  “The rocketeers have shaggy ears,

  They’re dirty-”

  The rest described in vivid detail the prowess of rocketeers in general.

  “How far are they?” Chapman demanded

  The operator pointed at a dial, fingered a knob that altered his receiving cones split-seconds of angle. ‘They’re about twenty-five miles, sir.”

  Chapman turned to the officers gathered in an exultant circle behind him.

  “Branch, here’s your chance for action. Take thirty men, our whippet tank, and go out to them. Bjornson, get the ‘copters aloft for air cover.”

  Twenty minutes later, Chapman watched a column assemble beneath the Odysseus’ gleaming side, and march into the jungle, with the ‘copters buzzing west a moment later, like vindictive dragon flies.

  Breakfast was brought to the men clustered at Warnings equipment, and to Chapman at his post on the gundeck. The day ticked away, the parade ground vanished in thickening clots of night; and a second dawn found the watchers still at their posts, listening to queer sounds that trickled from the speakers. The singing had stopped; but once they heard a note that a horn might make, and several times gobbling yells that didn’t sound human. George One was fighting, they knew now. The listeners picked up crackling of rifle fire, and when that died there was silence.

  The watchers heard a short cheer that died suddenly, as the relief column and George One met; and they waited and watched. Branch, who headed the relief column communicated with the mother ship by the simple expedient of yelling, the sound being picked up by the listeners.

  “They’re coming in, Chapman. I’m coming behind to guard their rear. They’ve been attacked by some kind of lizard-men. I’m not saying a thing—see for yourself when they arrive.”

  Hours rolled past, while they speculated in low tones, the hush that held the ship growing taut and strained.

  “Surely Branch would have told us if anything was wrong, or if the records were lost,” Chapman barked angrily. “Why did he have to be so damned melodramatic?”

  “Look, there—through the trees. A helmet glinted!” The laconic Bjornson had thrown dignity to the winds, and capered like a drunken goat, as Rindell described it later.

  Chapman stared down at the jungle edging the parade ground and caught a movement

  A man with a rifle came through the fringe and stood eying the ship in silence, and then came walking forward across the long, cindered expanse. From this height, he looked to Chapman like a child’s lead soldier, a ragged, muddy, midget scarecrow. Another stir in the trees, and one mo
re man, skulking like an infantry flanker with rifle at ready. He, too, straightened and came walking quietly forward A file of three men came next, leaning into the harness of a little metal cart that bumped drunkenly as they dragged it forward. An instant of waiting, and two more men stole from the jungle, more like attacking infantry than returning heroes. Chapman waited, and no more came. This was all.

  “My God, no wonder Branch wouldn’t tell us. There were thirty-two of them.” Rindell’s voice was choked.

  “Yes, only seven.” Chapman remembered his field glasses and focused them on the seven approaching men. “Lieutenant Hague is the only officer. And they’re handing us the future of the U.S. Rocket Service on that little metal cart.”

  The quiet shattered and a yelling horde of men poured from Odysseus’ hull and engulfed the tattered seven, sweeping around them, yelling, cheering, and carrying them toward the mother ship.

  Chapman looked a little awed as he turned to the officers behind him. “Well they did it. We forward these records, and we’ve proven that we can do the job.” He broke into a grin. “What am I talking about? Of course we did the job. We’ll always do the job. We’re the Rocketeers, aren’t we?”