There had been no sign of gigantosaurus or any other animal. Once he’d seen something flying in the far distance, birdlike or batlike. Laura had cocked a sharp eye at it but betrayed no undue interest. Right now she was more concerned with a new fruit. Steve sat in the rim of the outer lock door, his legs dangling, and watched her clambering over a small tree thirty yards away. The gun lay in his lap; he was ready to take a crack at anything which might be ready to take a crack at Laura.
The bird sampled the tree’s fruit, a crop resembling blue-shelled lychee nuts. She ate one with relish, grabbed another. Steve lay back in the lock, stretched to reach a bag, then dropped to the ground and went across to the tree. He tried a nut. Its flesh was soft, juicy, sweet and citrous. He filled the bag with the fruit, slung it into the ship.
Nearby stood another tree, not quite the same, but very similar. It bore nuts like the first except that they were larger. Picking one, he offered it to Laura who tried it, spat it out in disgust. Picking a second, he slit it, licked the flesh gingerly. As far as he could tell, it was the same. Evidently he couldn’t tell far enough: Laura’s diagnosis said it was not the same. The difference, too subtle for him to detect, might be sufficient to roll him up like a hoop and keep him that shape to the unpleasant end. He flung the thing away, went back to his seat in the lock, and ruminated.
That elusive, nagging feature of Oro’s plants and bugs could be narrowed down to these two nuts. He felt sure of that. If he could discover why—parrotwise—one nut was a nut while the other nut was not, he’d have his finger right on the secret. The more he thought about those similar fruits the more he felt that, in sober fact, his finger was on the secret already—but he lacked the power to lift it and see what lay beneath.
Tantalizingly, his mulling-over the subject landed him the same place as before; namely, nowhere. It got his dander up, and he went back to the trees, subjected both to close examination. His sense of sight told him that they were different individuals of the same species. Laura’s sense of whatchamacallit insisted that they were different species. Ergo, you can’t believe the evidence of your eyes. He was aware of that fact, of course, since it was a platitude of the spaceways, but when you couldn’t trust your optics it was legitimate to try to discover just why you couldn’t trust ‘em. And he couldn’t discover even that!
It soured him so much that he returned to the ship, locked its doors, called Laura back to his shoulder and set off on a tailward exploration. The rules of first landings were simple and sensible. Go in slowly, come out quickly, and remember that all we want from you is evidence of suitability for human life. Thoroughly explore a small area rather than scout a big one—the mapping parties will do the rest. Use your ship as a base and centralize it where you can live—don’t move it unnecessarily. Restrict your trips to a radius representing daylight-reach and lock yourself in after dark.
Was Oro suitable for human life? The unwritten law was that you don’t jump to conclusions and say, “Of course! I’m still living, aren’t I?” Cameron, who’d plonked his ship on Mithra, for instance, thought he’d found paradise until, on the seventeenth day, he’d discovered the fungoid plague. He’d left like a bat out of hell and had spent three sweaty, swearing days in the Lunar Purification Plant before becoming fit for society. The authorities had vaporized his ship. Mithra had been taboo ever since. Every world a potential trap baited with scenic delight. The job of the Probe Service was to enter the traps and jounce on the springs. Another dollop of real estate for Terra—if nothing broke your neck.
Maybe Oro was loaded for bear. The thing that walked in the night, Steve mused, bore awful suggestion of nonhuman power. So did a waterspout, and whoever heard of anyone successfully wrestling with a waterspout? If this Oro-spout were sentient, so much the worse for human prospects. He’d have to get the measure of it, he decided, even if he had to chase it through the blank avenues of night. Plodding steadily away from the tail, gun in hand, he pondered so deeply that he entirely overlooked the fact that he wasn’t on a pukka probe job anyway, and that nothing else remotely human might reach Oro in a thousand years. Even space-boys can be creatures of habit. Their job: to look for death; they were liable to go on looking long after the need had passed, in bland disregard of the certainty that if you look for a thing long enough, ultimately you find it!
The ship’s chronometer had given him five hours to darkness. Two and a half hours each way; say ten miles out and ten back. The water had consumed his time. On the morrow, and henceforth, he’d increase the radius to twelve and take it easier.
Then all thoughts fled from his mind as he came to the edge of the vegetation. The stuff didn’t dribble out of existence with hardy spurs and offshoots fighting for a hold in rocky ground. It stopped abruptly, in light loam, as if cut off with a machete, and from where it stopped spread a different crop. The new growths were tiny and crystalline.
He accepted the crystalline crop without surprise, knowing that novelty was the inevitable feature of any new locale. Things were ordinary only by Terrestrial standards. Outside of Terra, nothing was supernormal or abnormal except insofar as they failed to jibe with their own peculiar conditions. Besides, there were crystalline growths on Mars. The one unacceptable feature of the situation was the way in which vegetable growths ended and crystalline ones began. He stepped back to the verge and made another startled survey of the borderline. It was so straight that the sight screwed his brain around. Like a field. A cultivated field. Dead straightness of that sort couldn’t be other than artificial. Little beads of moisture popped out on his back.
Squatting on the heel of his right boot, he gazed at the nearest crystals and said to Laura, “Chicken, I think these things got planted. Question is, who planted ‘em?”
“McGillicuddy,” suggested Laura brightly.
Putting out a finger, he flicked the crystal sprouting near the toe of his boot, a green, branchy object an inch high.
The crystal vibrated and said, “Zing!” in a sweet, high voice.
He flicked its neighbor, and that said, “Zang!” in lower tone.
He flicked a third. It emitted no note, but broke into a thousand shards.
Standing up, he scratched his head, making Laura fight for a claw-hole within the circle of his arm. One zinged and one zanged and one returned to dust. Two nuts. Zings and zangs and nuts. It was right in his grasp if only he could open his hand and look at what he’d got.
Then he lifted his puzzled and slightly ireful gaze, saw something fluttering erratically across the crystal field. It was making for the vegetation. Laura took off with a raucous cackle, her blue and crimson wings beating powerfully. She swooped over the object, frightening it so low that it dodged and sideslipped only a few feet above Steve’s head. He saw that it was a large butterfly, frill-winged, almost as gaudy as Laura. The bird swooped again, scaring the insect but not menacing it. He called her back, set out to cross the area ahead. Crystals crunched to powder under his heavy boots as he tramped on.
Half an hour later he was toiling up a steep, crystal-coated slope when his thoughts suddenly jelled and he stopped with such abruptness that Laura spilled from his shoulder and perforce took to wing. She beat round in a circle, came back to her perch, made bitter remarks in an unknown language.
“One of this and one of that,” he said. “No twos or threes or dozens. Nothing I’ve seen has repeated itself. There’s only one gigantosaurus, only one Scarabaeus Anderii, only one of every other danged thing. Every item is unique, original, and an individual creation in its own right. What does that suggest?”
“McGillicuddy,” offered Laura.
“For Pete’s sake, forget McGillicuddy.”
“For Pete’s sake, for Pete’s sake,” yelled Laura, much taken by the phrase. “The great black—”
Again he upset her in the nick of time, making her take to flight while he continued talking to himself. “It suggests constant and all-pervading mutation. Everything breeds something quite different
from itself and there aren’t any dominant strains.” He frowned at the obvious snag in this theory. “But how the blazes does anything breed? What fertilizes which?”
“McGilli—,” began Laura, then changed her mind and shut up.
“Anyway, if nothing breeds true, it’ll be tough on the food problem,” he went on. “What’s edible on one plant may be a killer on its offspring. Today’s fodder is tomorrow’s poison. How’s a farmer to know what he’s going to get? Hey-hey, if I’m guessing right, this planet won’t support a couple of hogs.”
“No, sir. No hogs. Laura loves hogs.”
“Be quiet,” he snapped. “Now, what shouldn’t support a couple of hogs demonstrably does support gigantosaurus—and any other fancy animals which may be mooching around. It seems crazy to me. On Venus or any other place full of consistent fodder, gigantosaurus would thrive, but here, according to my calculations, the big lunk has no right to be alive. He ought to be dead.”
So saying, he topped the rise and found the monster in question sprawling right across the opposite slope. It was dead.
The way in which he determined its deadness was appropriately swift, simple and effective. Its enormous bulk lay draped across the full length of the slope and its dragon-head, the size of a lifeboat, pointed toward him. The head had two dull, lackluster eyes like dinner plates. He planted a shell smack in the right eye and a sizable hunk of noggin promptly splashed in all directions. The body did not stir.
There was a shell ready for the other eye should the creature leap to frantic, vengeful life, but the mighty hulk remained supine.
His boots continued to desiccate crystals as he went down the slope, curved a hundred yards off his route to get around the corpse, and trudged up the farther rise. Momentarily, he wasn’t much interested in the dead beast. Time was short and he could come again tomorrow, bringing a full-color stereoscopic camera with him. Gigantosaurus would go on record in style, but would have to wait.
This second rise was a good deal higher, and more trying a climb. Its crest represented the approximate limit of this day’s trip, and he felt anxious to surmount it before turning back. Humanity’s characteristic urge to see what lay over the hill remained as strong as on the day determined ancestors topped the Rockies. He had to have a look, firstly because elevation gave range to the vision, and secondly because of that prowler in the night—and, nearly as he could estimate, the prowler had gone down behind this rise. A column of mist, sucked down from the sky, might move around aimlessly, going nowhere, but instinct maintained that this had been no mere column of mist, and that it was going somewhere.
Where?
Out of breath, he pounded over the crest, looked down into an immense valley, and found the answer.
The crystal growths gave out on the crest, again in a perfectly straight line. Beyond them the light loam, devoid of rock, ran gently down to the valley and up the farther side. Both slopes were sparsely dotted with queer, jellylike lumps of matter which lay and quivered beneath the sky’s golden glow.
From the closed end of the valley jutted a great, glistening fabrication, flat-roofed, flat-fronted, with a huge, square hole gaping in its mid-section at front. It looked like a tremendous oblong slab of polished, milk-white plastic half-buried endwise in a sandy hill. No decoration disturbed its smooth, gleaming surface. No road led to the hole in front. Somehow, it had the new-old air of a house that struggles to look empty because it is full—of fiends.
Steve’s back hairs prickled as he studied it. One thing was obvious—Oro bore intelligent life. One thing was possible—the golden column represented that life. One thing was probable—fleshly Terrestrials and hazy Orons would have difficulty in finding a basis for friendship and cooperation.
Whereas enmity needs no basis.
Curiosity and caution pulled him opposite ways. One urged him down into the valley while the other drove him back, back, while yet there was time. He consulted his watch. Less than three hours to go, within which he had to return to the ship, enter the log, prepare supper. That milky creation was at least two miles away, a good hour’s journey there and back. Let it wait. Give it another day and he’d have more time for it, with the benefit of needful thought betweentimes.
Caution triumphed. He investigated the nearest jellyblob. It was flat, a yard in diameter, green, with bluish streaks and many tiny bubbles hiding in its semitransparency. The thing pulsated slowly. He poked it with the toe of his boot, and it contracted, humping itself in the middle, then sluggishly relaxed. No amoeba, he decided. A low form of life, but complicated withal. Laura didn’t like the object. She skittered off as he bent over it, vented her anger by bashing a few crystals.
This jello dollop wasn’t like its nearest neighbor, or like any other. One of each, only one. The same rule: one butterfly of a kind, one bug, one plant, one of these quivering things.
A final stare at the distant mystery down in the valley, then he retraced his steps. When the ship came into sight he speeded up like a gladsome voyager nearing home. There were new prints near the vessel, big, three-toed, deeply-impressed spoor which revealed that something large, heavy and two-legged had wandered past in his absence. Evidently an animal, for nothing intelligent would have meandered on so casually without circling and inspecting the nearby invader from space. He dismissed it from his mind. There was only one thingumbob, he felt certain of that.
Once inside the ship, he relocked the doors, gave Laura her feed, ate his supper. Then he dragged out the log, made his day’s entry, had a look around from the dome. Violet streamers once more were creeping upward from the horizon. He frowned at the encompassing vegetation. What sort of stuff had bred all this in the past? What sort of stuff would this breed in the future? How did it progenerate, anyway?
Wholesale radical mutation presupposed modification of genes by hard radiation in persistent and considerable blasts. You shouldn’t get hard radiation on lightweight planets—unless it poured in from the sky. Here, it didn’t pour from the sky, or from any place else. In fact, there wasn’t any.
He was pretty certain of that fact because he’d a special interest in it and had checked up on it. Hard radiation betokened the presence of radioactive elements which, at a pinch, might be usable as fuel. The ship was equipped to detect such stuff. Among the junk was a cosmiray counter, a radium hen, and a gold-leaf electroscope. The hen and the counter hadn’t given so much as one heartening cluck, in fact the only clucks had been Laura’s. The electroscope he’d charged on landing and its leaves still formed an inverted V. The air was dry, ionization negligible, and the leaves didn’t look likely to collapse for a week.
“Something’s wrong with my theorizing,” he complained to Laura. “My think-stuff’s not doing its job.”
“Not doing its job,” echoed Laura faithfully. She cracked a pecan with a grating noise that set his teeth on edge. “I tell you it’s a hoodoo ship. I won’t sail. No, not even if you pray for me. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t. Nope. Nix. Who’s drunk? That hairy Lowlander Mc—”
“Laura!” he said sharply.
“Gillicuddy,” she finished with bland defiance. Again she rasped his teeth. “Rings bigger’n Saturn’s. I saw them myself. Who’s a liar? Yawk! She’s down in Grayway Bay, on Tethis. Boy, what a torso!”
He looked at her hard and said, “You’re nuts!”
“Sure! Sure, pal! Laura loves nuts. Have one on me.”
“O.K.,” he accepted, holding out his hand.
Cocking her colorful pate, she pecked at his hand, gravely selected a pecan and gave it to him. He cracked it, chewed on the kernel while starting up the lighting-set. It was almost as if night were waiting for him. Blackness fell even as he switched on the lights.
With the darkness came a keen sense of unease. The dome was the trouble. It blazed like a beacon and there was no way of blacking it out except by turning off the lights. Beacons attracted things, and he’d no desire to become a center of attraction in present circumstances. That is t
o say, not at night.
Long experience had bred fine contempt for alien animals, no matter how whacky, but outlandish intelligences were a different proposition. So filled was he with the strange inward conviction that last night’s phenomenon was something that knew its onions that it didn’t occur to him to wonder whether a glowing column possessed eyes or anything equivalent to a sense of sight. If it had occurred to him, he’d have derived no comfort from it. His desire to be weighed in the balance in some eerie, extrasensory way was even less than his desire to be gaped at visually in his slumbers.
An unholy mess of thoughts and ideas was still cooking in his mind when he extinguished the lights, bunked down and went to sleep. Nothing disturbed him this time, but when he awoke with the golden dawn his chest was damp with perspiration and Laura again had sought refuge on his arm.
Digging out breakfast, his thoughts began to marshal themselves as he kept his hands busy. Pouring out a shot of hot coffee, he spoke to Laura.
“I’m durned if I’m going to go scatty trying to maintain a three-watch system single-handed, which is what I’m supposed to do if faced by powers unknown when I’m not able to beat it. Those armchair warriors at headquarters ought to get a taste of situations not precisely specified in the book of rules.”
“Burp!” said Laura contemptuously.
“He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day,” Steve quoted. “That’s the Probe Law. It’s a nice, smooth, lovely law—when you can run away. We can’t!”
“Burrup!” said Laura with unnecessary emphasis.
“For a woman, your manners are downright disgusting,” he told her. “Now I’m not going to spend the brief remainder of my life looking fearfully over my shoulder. The only way to get rid of powers unknown is to convert ‘em into powers known and understood. As Uncle Joe told Willie when dragging him to the dentist, the longer we put it off the worse it’ll feel.”
The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology Page 36