That eerie feature had Steve stumped. Whatever it was, he couldn’t nail it down. There was something stranger than the mere strangeness of new forms of plant life, and that was all. He dismissed the problem with a shrug. Time enough to trouble about such matters after he’d dealt with others more urgent such as, for example, the location and purity of the nearest water supply.
A mile away lay a lake of some liquid that might be water. He’d seen it glittering in the sunlight as he’d made his descent, and he’d tried to land fairly near to it. If it wasn’t water, well, it’d be just his tough luck and he’d have to look someplace else. At worst, the tiny fuel reserve would be enough to permit one circumnavigation of the planet before the ship became pinned down forever. Water he must have if he wasn’t going to end up imitating the mummy of Rameses the Second.
Reaching high, he grasped the rim of the port, dexterously muscled himself upward and through it. For a minute he moved around inside the ship, then reappeared with a four-gallon freezocan which he tossed to the ground. Then he dug out his popgun, a belt of explosive shells, and let down the folding ladder from lock to surface. He’d need that ladder. He could muscle himself up through a hole seven feet high, but not with fifty pounds of can and water.
Finally, he locked both the inner and outer air lock doors, skipped down the ladder, picked up the can. From the way he’d made his landing the lake should be directly bow-on relative to the vessel, and somewhere the other side of those distant trees. Laura took a fresh grip on his shoulder as he started off. The can swung from his left hand. His right hand rested warily on the gun. He was perpendicular on this world instead of horizontal on another because, on two occasions, his hand had been ready on the gun, and because it was the most nervous hand he possessed.
The going was rough. It wasn’t so much that the terrain was craggy as the fact that impeding growths got in his way. At one moment he was stepping over an ankle-high shrub, the next he was facing a burly plant struggling to become a tree. Behind the plant would be a creeper, then a natural zareba of thorns, a fuzz of fine moss, followed by a giant fern. Progress consisted of stepping over one item, ducking beneath a second, going around a third, and crawling under a fourth.
It occurred to him, belatedly, that if he’d planted the ship tail-first to the lake instead of bow-on, or if he’d let the braking rockets blow after he’d touched down, he’d have saved himself much twisting and dodging. All this obstructing stuff would have been reduced to ashes for at least half the distance to the lake—together with any venomous life it might conceal.
That last thought rang like an alarm bell within his mind just as he doubled up to pass a low-swung creeper. On Venus were creepers that coiled and constricted, swiftly, viciously. Macaws played merry hell if taken within fifty yards of them. It was a comfort to know that, this time, Laura was riding his shoulder unperturbed—but he kept the hand on the gun.
The elusive peculiarity of the planet’s vegetation bothered him all the more as he progressed through it. His inability to discover and name this unnamable queerness nagged at him as he went on. A frown of self-disgust was on his lean face when he dragged himself free of a clinging bush and sat on a rock in a tiny clearing.
Dumping the can at his feet, he glowered at it and promptly caught a glimpse of something bright and shining a few feet beyond the can. He raised his gaze. It was then he saw the beetle.
The creature was the biggest of its kind ever seen by human eyes. There were other things bigger, of course, but not of this type. Crabs, for instance. But this was no crab. The beetle ambling purposefully across the clearing was large enough to give any crab a severe inferiority complex, but it was a genuine, twenty-four-karat beetle. And a beautiful one. Like a scarab.
Except that he clung to the notion that little bugs were vicious and big ones companionable, Steve had no phobia about insects. The amiability of large ones was a theory inherited from schoolkid days when he’d been the doting owner of a three-inch stag-beetle afflicted with the name of Edgar.
So he knelt beside the creeping giant, placed his hand palm upward in its path. It investigated the hand with waving feelers, climbed onto his palm, paused there ruminatively. It shone with a sheen of brilliant metallic blue and it weighed about three pounds. He jogged it on his hand to get its weight, then put it down, let it wander on. Laura watched it go with a sharp but incurious eye.
“Scarabaeus Anderii,” Steve said with glum satisfaction. “I pin my name on him—but nobody’ll ever know it!”
“Dinna fash y’rsel’!” shouted Laura in a hoarse voice imported straight from Aberdeen. “Dinna fash! Stop chunnerin’, wumman! Y’ gie me a pain ahint ma sporran! Dinna—”
“Shut up!” Steve jerked his shoulder, momentarily unbalancing the bird. “Why d’you pick up that barbaric dialect quicker than anything else, eh?”
“McGillicuddy,” shrieked Laura with ear-splitting relish. “McGilli-Gilli-Gillicuddy! The great black—!” It ended with a word that pushed Steve’s eyebrows into his hair and surprised even the bird itself. Filming its eyes with amazement, it tightened its claw-hold on his shoulder, opened the eyes, emitted a couple of raucous clucks, and joyfully repeated, “The great black—”
It didn’t get the chance to complete the new and lovely word. A violent jerk of the shoulder unseated it in the nick of time and it fluttered to the ground, squawking protestingly. Scarabaeus Anderii lumbered out from behind a bush, his blue armor glistening as if freshly polished, and stared reprovingly at Laura.
Then something fifty yards away released a snort like the trumpet of doom and took one step that shook the earth. Scarabaeus Anderii took refuge under a projecting root. Laura made an agitated swoop for Steve’s shoulder and clung there desperately. Steve’s gun was out and pointing northward before the bird had found its perch. Another step. The ground quivered.
Silence for awhile. Steve continued to stand like a statue. Then came a monstrous whistle more forceful than that of a locomotive blowing off steam. Something squat and wide and of tremendous length charged headlong through the half-concealing vegetation while the earth trembled beneath its weight.
Its mad onrush carried it blindly twenty yards to Steve’s right, the gun swinging to cover its course, but not firing. Steve caught an extended glimpse of a slate-gray bulk with a serrated ridge on its back which, despite the thing’s pace, took long to pass. It seemed several times the length of a fire ladder.
Bushes were flung roots topmost and small trees whipped aside as the creature pounded grimly onward in a straight line which carried it far past the ship and into the dim distance. It left behind a tattered swathe wide enough for a first-class road. Then the reverberations of its mighty tonnage died out, and it was gone.
Steve used his left hand to pull out a handkerchief and wipe the back of his neck. He kept the gun in his right hand. The explosive shells in that gun were somewhat wicked; any one of them could deprive a rhinoceros of a hunk of meat weighing two hundred pounds. If a man caught one, he just strewed himself over the landscape. By the looks of that slate-colored galloper, it would need half a dozen shells to feel incommoded. A seventy-five millimeter bazooka would be more effective for kicking it in the back teeth, but probe ship boys don’t tote around such artillery. Steve finished the mopping, put the handkerchief back, picked up the can.
Laura said pensively, “I want my mother.”
He scowled, made no reply, set out toward the lake. Her feathers still ruffled, Laura rode his shoulder and lapsed into surly silence.
The stuff in the lake was water, cold, faintly green and a little bitter to the taste. Coffee would camouflage the flavor. If anything, it might improve the coffee since he liked his Java bitter, but the stuff would have to be tested before absorbing it in any quantity. Some poisons were accumulative. It wouldn’t do to guzzle gayly while building up a death-dealing reserve of lead, for instance. Filling the freezocan, he lugged it to the ship in hundred yard stages. The swathe helped; it m
ade an easier path to within short distance of the ship’s tail. He was perspiring freely by the time he reached the base of the ladder.
Once inside the vessel, he relocked both doors, opened the air vents, started the auxiliary lighting-set and plugged in the percolator, using water out of his depleted reserve supply. The golden sky had dulled to orange, with violet streamers creeping upward from the horizon. Looking at it through the transpex dome, he found that the perpetual haze still effectively concealed the sinking sun. A brighter area to one side was all that indicated its position. He’d need his lights soon.
Pulling out the collapsible table, he jammed its supporting leg into place, plugged into its rim the short rod which was Laura’s official seat. She claimed the perch immediately, watched him beadily as he set out her meal of water, melon seeds, sunflower seeds, pecans and unshelled oleo nuts. Her manners were anything but ladylike and she started eagerly, without waiting for him.
A deep frown lay across his brown, muscular features as he sat at the table, poured out his coffee and commenced to eat. It persisted through the meal, was still there when he lit a cigarette and stared speculatively up at the dome.
Presently, he murmured, “I’ve seen the biggest bug that ever was. I’ve seen a few other bugs. There were a couple of little ones under a creeper. One was long and brown and many-legged, like an earwig. The other was round and black, with little red dots on its wing cases. I’ve seen a tiny purple spider and a tinier green one of different shape, also a bug that looked like an aphid. But not an ant.”
“Ant, ant,” hooted Laura. She dropped a piece of oleo nut, climbed down after it. “Yawk!” she added from the floor.
“Nor a bee.”
“Bee,” echoed Laura, companionably. “Bee-ant. Laura loves Steve.”
Still keeping his attention on the dome, he went on, “And what’s cockeyed about the plants is equally cockeyed about the bugs. I wish I could place it. Why can’t I? Maybe I’m going nuts already.”
“Laura loves nuts.”
“I know it, you technicolored belly!” said Steve rudely.
And at that point night fell with a silent bang. The gold and orange and violet abruptly were swamped with deep, impenetrable blackness devoid of stars or any random gleam. Except for greenish glowings on the instrument panel, the control room was stygian, with Laura swearing steadily on the floor.
Putting out a hand, Steve switched on the indirect lighting. Laura got to her perch with the rescued titbit, concentrated on the job of dealing with it and let him sink back into his thoughts.
“Scarabaeus Anderii and a pair of smaller bugs and a couple of spiders, all different. At the other end of the scale, that gigantosaurus. But no ant, or bee. Or rather, no ants, no bees.” The switch from singular to plural stirred his back hairs queerly. In some vague way, he felt that he’d touched the heart of the mystery. “No ant—no ants,” he thought. “No bee—no bees.” Almost he had it—but still it evaded him.
Giving it up for the time being, he cleared the table, did a few minor chores. After that, he drew a standard sample from the freezocan, put it through its paces. The bitter flavor he identified as being due to the presence of magnesium sulphate in quantity far too small to prove embarrassing. Drinkable—that was something! Food, drink and shelter were the three essentials of survival. He’d enough of the first for six or seven weeks. The lake and the ship were his remaining guarantees of life.
Finding the log, he entered the day’s report, bluntly, factually, without any embroidery. Partway through, he found himself stuck for a name for the planet. Ander, he decided, would cost him dear if the million-to-one chance put him back among the merciless playmates of the Probe Service. O.K. for a bug, but not for a world. Laura wasn’t so hot, either—especially when you knew Laura. It wouldn’t be seemly to name a big, gold planet after an oversized parrot. Thinking over the golden aspect of this world’s sky, he hit upon the name of Oro, promptly made the christening authoritative by entering it in his log.
By the time he’d finished, Laura had her head buried deep under one wing. Occasionally she teetered and swung erect again. It always fascinated him to watch how her balance was maintained even in her slumbers. Studying her fondly, he remembered that unexpected addition to her vocabulary. This shifted his thoughts to a fiery-headed and fierier-tongued individual named Menzies, the sworn foe of another volcano named McGillicuddy. If ever the opportunity presented itself, he decided, the educative work of said Menzies was going to be rewarded with a bust on the snoot.
Sighing, he put away the log, wound up the forty-day chronometer, opened his folding bunk and lay down upon it. His hand switched off the lights. Ten years back, a first landing would have kept him awake all night in dithers of excitement. He’d got beyond that now. He’d done it often enough to have grown phlegmatic about it. His eyes closed in preparation for a good night’s sleep, and he did sleep—for two hours.
What brought him awake within that short time he didn’t know, but suddenly he found himself sitting bolt upright on the edge of the bunk, his ears and nerves stretched to their utmost, his legs quivering in a way they’d never done before. His whole body fizzed with that queer mixture of palpitation and shock which follows narrow escape from disaster.
This was something not within previous experience. Sure and certain in the intense darkness, his hand sought and found his gun. He cuddled the butt in his palm while his mind strove to recall a possible nightmare, though he knew he was not given to nightmares.
Laura moved restlessly on her perch, not truly awake, yet not asleep, and this was unusual in her.
Rejecting the dream theory, he stood up on the bunk, looked out through the dome. Blackness, the deepest, darkest, most impenetrable blackness it was possible to conceive. And silence! The outside world slumbered in the blackness and the silence as in a sable shroud.
Yet never before had he felt so wide awake in this, his normal sleeping time. Puzzled, he turned slowly round to take in the full circle of unseeable view, and at one point he halted. The surrounding darkness was not complete. In the distance beyond the ship’s tail moved a tall, stately glow. How far off it might be was not possible to estimate, but the sight of it stirred his soul and caused his heart to leap.
Uncontrollable emotions were not permitted to master his disciplined mind. Narrowing his eyes he tried to discern the nature of the glow while his mind sought the reason why the mere sight of it should make him twang like a harp. Bending down, he felt at the head of the bunk, found a leather case, extracted a pair of powerful night glasses. The glow was still moving, slowly, deliberately, from right to left. He got the glasses on it, screwed the lenses into focus, and the phenomenon leaped into closer view.
The thing was a great column of golden haze much like that of the noonday sky except that small, intense gleams of silver sparkled within it. It was a shaft of lustrous mist bearing a sprinkling of tiny stars. It was like nothing known to or recorded by any form of life lower than the gods. But was it life?
It moved, though its mode of locomotion could not be determined. Self-motivation is the prime symptom of life. It could be life, conceivably though not credibly, from the Terrestrial viewpoint. Consciously, he preferred to think it a strange and purely local feature comparable with Saharan sand-devils. Subconsciously, he knew it was life, tall and terrifying.
He kept the glasses on it while slowly it receded into the darkness, foreshortening with increasing distance and gradually fading from view. To the very last the observable field shifted and shuddered as he failed to control the quiver in his hands. And when the sparkling haze had gone, leaving only a pall over his lenses, he sat down on the bunk and shivered with eerie cold.
Laura was dodging to and fro along her perch, now thoroughly awake and agitated, but he wasn’t inclined to switch on the lights and make the dome a beacon in the night. His hand went out, feeling for her in the darkness, and she clambered eagerly onto his wrist, thence to his lap. She was fussy and d
emonstrative, pathetically yearning for comfort and companionship. He scratched her poll and fondled her while she pressed close against his chest with funny little crooning noises. For some time he soothed her and, while doing it, fell asleep. Gradually he slumped backward on the bunk. Laura perched on his forearm, clucked tiredly, put her head under a wing.
There was no further awakening until the outer blackness disappeared and the sky again sent its golden glow pouring through the dome. Steve got up, stood on the bunk, had a good look over the surrounding terrain. It remained precisely the same as it had been the day before. Things stewed within his mind while he got his breakfast; especially the jumpiness he’d experienced in the nighttime. Laura also was subdued and quiet. Only once before had she been like that—which was when he’d traipsed through the Venusian section of the Panplanetary Zoo and had shown her a crested eagle. The eagle had stared at her with contemptuous dignity.
Though he’d all the time in his life, he now felt a peculiar urge to hasten. Getting the gun and the freezocan, he made a full dozen trips to the lake, wasting no minutes, nor stopping to study the still enigmatic plants and bugs. It was late in the afternoon by the time he’d filled the ship’s fifty-gallon reservoir, and had the satisfaction of knowing that he’d got a drinkable quota to match his food supply.
The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology Page 35