Galactic Patrol

by Edward E Smith

  There live upon Trenco two types of vegetation, each type having innumerable sub-divisions. One type sprouts in the mud of morning; flourishes flatly, by dint of deeply sent and powerful roots, during the wind and the heat of the day; comes to full fruit in later afternoon; and at sunset dies and is swept away by the flood. The other type is free-floading. Some of its genera are remotely like footballs, others resemble tumbleweeds, still others thistledown, hundreds of others have not their remotest counterparts upon Earth. Essentially, however, they are alike in habits of life. They can sink in the “water” of Trenco; then can burrow in its mud, from which they derive part of their sustenance; they can emerge therefrom into the sunlight; they can, undamaged float in or roll along before the ever-present Trenconian wind; and they can enwrap, entangle, or otherwise seize and hold anything with which they come in contact which by any chance may prove edible.

  Animal life, too, while abundant and diverse, is characterized by three qualities. From lowest to very highest it is amphibious, it is streamlined, and it is omnivorous. Life upon Trenco is hard, and any form of life to evolve there must of stern necessity be willing, yes, even anxious, to eat literally anything available. And for that reason all surviving forms of life, vegetable and animal, have a voracity and a fecundity almost unknown anywhere else in the galaxy.

  Thionite, the noxious drug referred to earlier in this narrative, is the sole reason for Trenco’s galactic importance. As chlorophyll is to Earthly vegetation, so is thionite to that of Trenco. Trenco is the only planet thus far known upon which this substance occurs, nor have our scientists even yet been able either to analyze or to synthesize it. Thionite is capable of affecting only the races who breathe oxygen and possess warm blood, red with hæmoglobin. However, the planets peopled by such races are legion, and very shortly after the drug’s discovery hordes of addicts, smugglers, peddlers, and out-and-out pirates were rushing toward the new Bonanza. Thousands of these adventurers died, either from each other’s ray-guns or under an avalanche of hungry Trenconian life; but, thionite being what it is, thousands more kept coming. Also came the Patrol, to curb the evil traffic at its source by flaming down ruthlessly any being attempting to gather any Trenconian vegetation.

  Thus between the Patrol and the drug syndicate there rages a bitterly continuous battle to the death. Arrayed against both factions is the massed life of the noisome planet, omnivorous as it is, eternally ravenous, and of an individual power and ferocity and a collective aggregate of numbers by no means to be despised. And eternally raging against all these contending parties are the wind, the lightning, the rain, the flood, and the hellish vibratory output of Trenco’s enormous, malignant, blue-white sun.

  This, then, was the planet upon which Kinnison had to land in order to repair his crippled Bergenholm—and in the end how well it was to be that such was the case!

  “Kinnison of Tellus, greetings. Tregonsee of Rigel IV calling from Trenco space-port. Have you ever landed on this planet before?”

  “No, but what…”

  “Skip that for a time, it is most important that you land here quickly and safely. Where are you in relation to this planet?”

  “Your apparent diameter is a shade under six degrees. We are near the plane of your ecliptic and almost in the plane of your terminator, on the morning side.”

  “That is well, you have ample time. Place your ship between Trenco and the sun. Enter the atmosphere exactly fifteen G-P minutes from the present moment, at twenty degrees after meridian, as nearly as possible on the ecliptic, which is also our equator. Go inert as you enter atmosphere, for a free landing upon this planet is impossible. Synchronize with our rotation, which is twenty six point two G-P hours. Descend vertically until the atmospheric pressure is seven hundred millimeters of mercury, which will be at an altitude of approximately one thousand meters. Since you rely largely upon that sense called sight, allow me to caution you now not to trust it. When your external pressure is seven hundred millimeters of mercury your altitude will be one thousand meters, whether you believe it or not. Stop at that pressure and inform me of the fact, meanwhile holding yourself as nearly stationary as you can. Check so far?”

  “QX—but do you mean to tell me that we can’t locate each other at a thousand meters?” Kinnison’s amazed thought escaped him. “What kind of…”

  “I can locate you, but you cannot locate me,” came the dry reply. “Everyone knows that Trenco is peculiar, but no one who has never been here can realize even dimly how peculiar it really is. Detectors and spy-rays are useless, electromagnetics are practically paralyzed, and optical apparatus is distinctly unreliable. You cannot trust your vision here—do not believe anything you see. It used to require days to land a ship at this port, but with our Lenses and my ‘sense of perception,’ as you call it, it will be a matter of minutes.”

  Kinnison flashed his ship to the designated position.

  “Cut the Berg, Thorndyke, we’re all done with it. We’ve got to build up an inert velocity to match the rotation, and land inert.”

  “Thanks be to all the gods of space for that.” The engineer heaved a sigh of relief. “I’ve been expecting it to blow its top for the last hour, and I don’t know whether we’d ever have got it meshed in again or not.”

  “QX on location and orbit,” Kinnison reported to the as yet invisible space-port a few minutes later. “Now, what about that Lensman? What happened?”

  “The usual thing,” came the emotionless response. “It happens to altogether too many Lensmen who can see, in spite of everything we can tell them. He insisted upon going out after his zwilniks in a ground car, and of course we had to let him go. He became confused, lost control, let something—possibly a zwilnik’s bomb—get under his leading edge, and the wind and the trencos did the rest. He was Lageston of Mercator V—a good man, too. What is your pressure now?”

  “Five hundred millimeters.”

  “Slow down. Now, if you cannot conquer the tendency to believe your eyes, you had better shut off your visiplates and watch only the pressure gauge.”

  “Being warned, I can disbelieve my eyes, I think,” and for a minute or so communication ceased.

  At a startled oath from vanBuskirk, Kinnison glanced into the plate and it needed all his nerve to keep from wrenching savagely at the controls. For the whole planet was tipping, lurching. spinning; gyrating madly in a frenzy of impossible motions; and even as the Patrolmen stared a huge mass of something shot directly toward the ship!

  “Sheer off, Kim!” yelled the Valerian.

  “Hold it, Bus,” cautioned the Lensman. “That’s what we’ve got to expect, you know—I passed all the stuff along as I got it. Everything, that is, except that a ‘zwilnik’ is anything or anybody that comes after thionite, and that a ‘trenco’ is anything, animal or vegetable, that lives on the planet. QX, Tregonsee—seven hundred, and I’m holding steady—I hope!”

  “Steady enough, but you are too far away for our landing beam to grasp you. Apply a little drive… Shift course to your left and down…more left…up a trifle…that’s it…slow down…QX.”

  There was a gentle, snubbing shock, and Kinnison again translated to his companions the stranger’s thoughts:

  “We have you. Cut off all power and lock all controls in neutral. Do nothing more until I instruct you to come out.”

  Kinnison obeyed; and, released from all duty, the visitors stared in fascinated incredulity into the visiplate. For that at which they stared was and must forever remain impossible of duplication upon Earth, and only in imagination can it be even faintly pictured. Imagine all the fantastic and monstrous creatures of a delirium-tremens vision incarnate and actual. Imagine them being hurled through the air, borne by a dust-laden gale more severe than any the great American dust-bowl or Africa’s Sahara Desert ever endured. Imagine this scene as being viewed, not in an ordinary, solid distorting mirror, but in one whose falsely reflecting contours were changing constantly, with no logical or intelligible rhythm, int
o new and ever more grotesque warps. If imagination has been equal to the task, the resultant is what the visitors tried to see.

  At first they could make nothing whatever of it. Upon nearer approach, however, the ghastly distortion grew less and the flatly level expanse took on a semblance of rigidity. Directly beneath them they made out something that looked like an immense, flat blister upon the otherwise featureless terrain. Toward this blister their ship was drawn.

  A port opened, dwarfed in apparent size to a mere window by the immensity of the structure one of whose entrances it was. Through this port the vast bulk of the space-ship was wafted upon the landing-bars, and behind it the mighty bronze-and-steel gates clanged shut. The lock was pumped to a vacuum, there was a hiss of entering air, a spray of vaporous liquid bathed every inch of the vessel’s surface, and Kinnison felt again the calm thought of Tregonsee, the Rigellian Lensman:

  “You may now open your air-lock and emerge. If I have read aright our atmosphere is sufficiently like your own in oxygen content so that you will suffer no ill effects from it. It may be well, however, to wear your armor until you have become accustomed to its considerably greater density.”

  “That’ll be a relief!” growled vanBuskirk’s deep bass, when his chief had transmitted the thought. “I’ve been breathing this thin stuff so long I’m getting light-headed.”

  “That’s gratitude!” Thorndyke retorted. “We’ve been running our air so heavy that all the rest of us are thick-headed now. If the air in this space-port is any heavier than what we’ve been having, I’m going to wear armor as long as we stay here!”

  Kinnison opened the, air-lock, found the atmosphere of the space-port satisfactory, and stepped out, to be greeted cordially by Tregonsee the Lensman.

  This—this apparition was at least erect, which was something. His body was the size and shape of an oil-drum. Beneath this massive cylinder of a body were four short, blocky legs upon which he waddled about with surprising speed. Midway up the body, above each leg, there sprouted out a ten-foot-long, writhing, boneless, tentacular arm, which toward the extremity branched out into dozens of lesser tentacles, ranging in size from hair-like tendrils up to mighty fingers two inches or more in diameter. Tregonsee’s head was merely a neckless, immobile, bulging dome in the center of the flat upper surface of his body—a dome bearing neither eyes nor ears, but only four equally-spaced toothless mouths and four single, flaring nostrils.

  But Kinnison felt no qualm of repugnance at Tregonsee’s monstrous appearance, for embedded in the leathery flesh of one arm was the Lens. Here, the Lensman knew, was in every essential a MAN—and probably a super-man.

  “Welcome to Trenco, Kinnison of Tellus,” Tregonsee was saying. “While we are near neighbors in space, I have never happened to visit your planet. I have encountered Tellurians here, of course, but they were not of a type to be received as guests.”

  “No, a zwilnik is not a high type of Tellurian,” Kinnison agreed. “I have often wished that I could have your sense of perception, if only for a day. It must be wonderful indeed to be able to perceive a thing as a whole, inside and out, instead of having vision stopped at its surface, as is ours. And to be independent of light or darkness, never to be lost or in need of instruments; to know definitely where you are in relation to every other object or thing around you—that, I think, is the most marvelous sense in the Universe.”

  “Just as I have wished for sight and hearing, those two remarkable and to us entirely unexplainable senses. I have dreamed, I have studied volumes, on color and sound. Color in art and in nature; sound in music and in the voices of loved ones; but they remain meaningless symbols upon a printed page. However, such thoughts are vain. In all probability neither of us would enjoy the other’s equipment if he had it, and this interchange is of no material assistance to you.”

  In flashing thoughts Kinnison then communicated to the other Lensman everything that had transpired since he left Prime Base.

  “I perceive that your Bergenholm is of standard fourteen rating,” Tregonsee said, as the Tellurian finished his story. “We have several spares here; and, while they all have regulation Patrol mountings, it would take much less time to change mounts than to overhaul your machine.”

  “That’s so, too—I never thought of the possibility of your having spares on hand—and we’ve lost a lot of time already. How long will it take?”

  “One shift of labor to change mounts; at least eight to rebuild yours enough to be sure that it will get you home.”

  “We’ll change mounts, then, by all means. I’ll call the boys…”

  “There is no need of that. We are amply equipped, and neither you humans nor the Velantians could handle our tools.” Tregonsee made no visible motion nor could Kinnison perceive a break in his thought, but while he was conversing with the Tellurian half a dozen of his blocky Rigellians had dropped whatever they had been doing and were scuttling toward the visiting ship. “Now I must leave you for a time, as I have one more trip to make this afternoon.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help you?” asked Kinnison.

  “No,” came the definite negative. “I will return in three hours, as well before sunset the wind makes it impossible to get even a ground-car into the port. I will then show you why you can be of little assistance to us.”

  Kinnison spent those three hours watching the Rigellians work upon the Bergenholm; there was no need for direction or advice. They knew what to do and they did it. Those tiny, hairlike fingers, literally hundreds of them at once, performed delicate tasks with surpassing nicety and dispatch; when it came to heavy tasks the larger digits or even whole arms wrapped themselves around the work and, with the solid bracing of the four block-like legs, exerted forces that even vanBuskirk’s giant frame could not have approached.

  As the end of the third hour neared, Kinnison watched with a spy-ray—there were no windows in Trenco spaceport—the leeward groundway of the structure. In spite of the weird antics of Trenco’s sun—gyrating, jumping, appearing and disappearing—he knew that it was going down. Soon he saw the ground-car coming in, scuttling crabwise, nose into the wind but actually moving backward and sidewise. Although the “seeing” was very poor, at this close range the distortion was minimized and he could see that, like its parent craft, the ground-car was a blister. Its edges actually touched the ground all around, sloping upward and over the top in such a smooth reverse curve that the harder the wind blew the more firmly was the vehicle pressed downward.

  The ground-flap came up just enough to clear the car’s top and the tiny craft crept up. But before the landing bars could seize her the ground-car struck an eddy from the flap—an eddy in a medium which, although gaseous, was at that velocity practically solid. Earth blasted away in torrents from the leading edge, the car leaped bodily into the air and was flung away, end over end. But Tregonsee, with consummate craftsmanship, forced her flat again, and again she crawled up toward the flap. This time the landing-bars took hold and, although the little vessel fluttered like a leaf in a gale, she was drawn inside the port and the flap went down behind her. She was then sprayed, and Tregonsee came out.

  “Why the spray?” thought Kinnison, as the Rigellian entered his control-room.

  “Trencos. Much of the life of this planet starts from almost imperceptible spores. It develops rapidly, attains considerable size, and consumes anything organic it touches. This port was depopulated time after time before the lethal spray was developed. Now turn your spy-ray again to the lee of the port.”

  During the few minutes that had elapsed the wind had increased in fury to such an extent that the very ground was boiling away from the trailing edge in the tumultuous eddy formed there, ultra-streamlined though the space-port was. And that eddy, far surpassing in violence any storm known to Earth, was to the denizens of Trenco a miraculously appearing quiet spot in which they could stop and rest, eat and be eaten.

  A globular monstrosity had thrust pseudopodia deep into the boiling dirt
. Other limbs now shot out, grasping a tumbleweedlike growth. The latter fought back viciously, but could make no impression upon the rubbery integument of the former. Then a smaller creature, slipping down the polished curve of the shield, was enmeshed by the tumbleweed. There ensued the amazing spectacle of one-half of the tumbleweed devouring the newcomer, even while its other half was being devoured by the globe!

  “Now look out farther…still farther,” directed Tregonsee.

  “I can’t. Things take on impossible motions and become so distorted as to be unrecognizable.”

  “Exactly. If you saw a zwilnik out there, where would you shoot?”

  “At him, I suppose—why?”

  “Because if you shot at where you think you see him, not only would you miss him, but the beam might very well swing around and enter your own back. Many men have been killed by their own weapons in precisely that fashion. Since we know, not only what the object is, but exactly where it is, we can correct our lines of aim for the then existing values of distortion. This is of course the reason why we Rigellians and other races possessing the sense of perception are the only ones who can efficiently police this planet.”

  “Reason enough, I’d say, from what I’ve seen,” and silence fell.

  For minutes the two Lensmen watched, while creatures of a hundred kinds streamed into the lee of the space-port and killed and ate each other. Finally something came crawling up wind, against that unimaginable gale; a flatly streamlined creature resembling somewhat a turtle, but shaped as was the ground-car. Thrusting down long, hooked flippers into the dirt it inched along, paying no attention. to the scores of lesser creatures who hurled themselves upon its armored back, until it was close beside the largest football-shaped creature in the eddy. Then, lightning-like, it drove a needle-sharp organ at least eight inches into the leathery mass of its victim. Struggling convulsively, the stricken thing lifted the turtle a fraction of an inch—and both were hurled instantly out of sight; the living ball still eating a luscious bit of prey despite the fact that it was impaled upon the poniard of the turtle and was certainly doomed.