“Hardly,” said Caxton. “No matter how fine his adjustments were, he couldn’t time his explosions to make us crack up on Aiolo. He could know, though, that he’d make it in the lifeboat.”
“But who’d want to make it here—”
Caxton looked at the flowers speculatively.
“Maybe he had friends waiting.” He paused. “There’s that twelve million stellars’ worth of iridium in the ship, yonder.”
The four men looked at one another. One of them got to his feet and swore at the aches and pains which beset him. He went into the ship while Caxton went on evenly:
“Nobody can pirate a ship in space, on overdrive. You can’t find it! And nobody can be kept from going on overdrive if he’s scared or suspicious. So there’s never been real piracy in space. But Slade smashed the Copernicus close to this planet and this sun. He made the ship a hopeless wreck, and went on to join his friends. They’ll have a ship, and they’ll wait with detector screens out for a derelict to float past—”
Then he got up and dived into the interior of the ship. He entered through a great rent in her plating. There was one huge tear where thirty feet of her inwards were exposed to view. There were sudden, violent crashings inside the hulk.
~ * ~
Caxton came out again, very pale. The other man who’d been inside came out with three or four quite useless objects in his hands.
“There was a Bridewell automatic sender in action,” said Caxton briefly. “That would have helped them find her! I smashed it, but probably too late.”
Palmer said bitterly:
“I went lookin’ for somethin’ to fight with. All I could find was torches.” He threw them disgustedly away. “Weldin’ torches against guns!”
Hannet growled:
“We don’t have to hang around to be killed, of course. They wouldn’t bother to track us—but they’ll know somebody lived through the crash. They’ll prob’ly bake the ship just to make sure—”
The four men clenched their hands. It was bad enough to be hopelessly marooned upon a planet inhabited only by flowers with an irritating habit of always staring at one. But it was infuriating to feel sure of the near presence of a ship on which they could return to humanity, save for the slight fact that the crew of that ship would murder them on sight to prevent it. It was most enraging of all to be unarmed.
“The most we can do,” said Caxton, “is to hide the iridium. It won’t do much good, but at least it’ll bother them.”
Burton stared around the featureless plain.
“Where you goin’ to hide it?” he demanded sourly. “They could track us anywhere. Turn up any dirt an’ it’d show from overhead.”
“We might bury it in the furrow or under the Copernicus said Caxton. “They’d expect us to cart it away. So we won’t.”
There was a sudden wavering motion of the plants about them. The flower faces turned, in small, jerky movements. They faced to the southeast. All of them. As far as the eye could see, every flower over miles and miles of plain turned and faced in the one direction—which was not the direction of the little blue-white sun.
Then, very faintly at first, there came a roaring noise far away. It was accurately in the direction toward which all the flowers had turned. It moved swiftly along the horizon, and all the flowers turned their blossoms in tiny jerks as it moved. When the roaring noise died out again to nothingness, all the flowers over all the plain were facing to the northeast.
“That’s them!” said Palmer furiously. “Let’s get that stuff hidden! Not that we want it, but so they won’t get it!”
But Caxton was staring at the flowers. As he looked, with many tiny jerkings the blooms which faced away from him turned about again. And again the wrecked Copernicus and the four men were surrounded by staring flower faces, which watched them with an air of charmed attention.
The men set savagely to work to hide the treasure, for which the Copernicus had been wrecked, forty-three men murdered, and they themselves hopelessly marooned upon Aiolo.
~ * ~
Toward sundown, Caxton had an idea. He rummaged in shattered cabins until he came upon a tiny picturescope. Men who travel far afield in space have usually some personal pictures they like to look at from time to time. Picturescopes run off such records untiringly, without power supply. Caxton found one with a seemingly full record. He tucked it under his arm and walked off among the plants. It was amazing, once he was among them, to notice that though there was no pattern in their growth—they did not grow in rows or any recognizable arrangement—there was a strict and startling equality in the amount of moist bare earth about their stalks. Each one had as much clear space as would roughly fill a two-foot square. They were not overcrowded. Each had an equal allotment of ground from which to draw its nourishment. And they had no competition. He bent down and fingered the soil. Its top was a closely-matted tissue of roots. There could be no erosion nor could there be any dust-cloud arising from wind blowing over such terrain.
He walked away from the Copernicus. Flower faces turned to regard him as he moved. He walked between the stalks, and every flower stared at him. There was a concerted movement to regard him. At a hundred yards from the ship, he could see that he was surrounded by staring blossoms. Even those in his rear had turned away from the ship to stare after him.
Two hundred yards away, he set up the picturescope and touched its button. It began to function. There were two children waving out of it—evidently the children of the murdered man to whom the picturescope had belonged. The scene changed, and a woman smiled and spoke. That went on for a space, and there was the interior of a living room, with the woman and the children moving about—
Caxton cast side wise glances at the flowers about him. A few had turned from their fascinated contemplation of himself to look at the picturescope. Others turned twitchily as he watched. A blossom drooped jerkily to approach the screen. Others drooped to join it. They crowded to contemplate it. They almost jostled each other.
Caxton went back toward the wrecked ship. Three times he stopped to survey the scene behind him. The plants paid no attention to his retreat. Every one within hundreds of yards of the picturescope turned and faced it. Within ten yards, they drooped and seemed to strain toward it. Caxton reached the great furrow, his expression very queer indeed.
“These flowers are conscious!” he said abruptly, to the others. “They’ve got intelligence of a sort. Look at them looking at that picturescope!”
Burton said sourly:
“What good’s that?”
There was a simultaneous movement of all the blossoms within sight. They stirred and by tiny twitching movements faced to the northwest. Unanimously. The men held their breaths. Presently the thin air brought them a faint, faint sound which was the deep-throated roar of a space drive in atmosphere. But it was very faint, and after only seconds it died away.
“They heard that before we did,” said Caxton calmly, “or else they knew it—another way.”
Then he looked where he’d left the picturescope. The flowers about it had straightened up and turned to face the inaudible sound. But as he watched, those about the busily working small machine turned again, and those nearest it dropped toward it until there was a small depression, about the picture-scope, in the otherwise perfectly level field of flower heads.
~ * ~
The small white sun was very low upon the horizon. It drooped down and was not. Night fell. Hannet built up the fire with more litter from inside the Copernicus. Palmer began to cook.
“Slade’s pals know the ship crashed, now,” said Burton, seething. “They had trouble believin’ it at first, maybe. Odds too big against it. But they know it now! And now they’re huntin’ it, cussin’ because the Bridewell’s stopped sendin’. They’ll find us, though! They’re quarterin’—”
Hannet said bitterly:
“And we haven’t got a thing to fight with when they do catch up on us!”
Palmer snapped:
<
br /> “You think we don’t know that? Even if we go off an’ hide, they’ll know somebody was alive around here! So they’ll bake the ship just to spoil our grub, an’ there’s nothin’ to eat on the whole planet except what’s in the ship.”
Caxton said meditatively:
“I think we’ve got to ask for some help.”
The others blinked at him. He waved his hand around, at the white-fringed flower faces now again regarding the fire and the men with an effect of captivated interest.
“These things are intelligent after a fashion. I don’t know how intelligent, but—”
“Huh!” snapped Burton. “You’re goin’ to get a pack o’ flowers to help fight off a gang of murderers?”
“I don’t know,” said Caxton. “But it’s the only chance we’ve got.”
Hannet grunted. Palmer said belligerently:
“What could flowers do—even if they had brains?”
He poured out barely-warm coffee and Caxton said:
“I don’t know what they can do. But I can guess what they’ve done.”
Men grunted skeptically.
“They’ve wiped out every other life-form on the planet,” Caxton pointed out. “They haven’t bothered us, to be sure, but we haven’t bothered them. In landing, we killed a good many, but it was an accident. We couldn’t help it. Maybe they know it. Anyhow they wiped out all competitors before us. There’s no other sort of plant and there are no animals and not even an insect. You can’t tell me there was never but the one line of evolution! These plants are highly organized. They’re specialized! If they’d had no competition, they’d have stayed primitive. But they’ve developed to what they are because they did have competition which they’ve now wiped out! They’ve even arranged to divide up what’s left among themselves. Every one has the same amount of space—no more, no less. They’re the dominant race on this planet. They have senses—hearing, at least, and certainly sight, and I insist that I had those queer dreams of having the flowers tell me that Slade was here—and he is.”
Burton snorted scornfully. The feeling of utter helplessness and hopelessness made all their tempers short. They would be found tomorrow by the ship they’d heard, which was hunting for the Copernicus to loot it of twelve million stellars’ worth of iridium. Forty-three men had already died for that iridium. Four more would die tomorrow because, whether the pirate ship killed them in cold blood, or merely turned a heat ray on the wreck and turned all their food to charcoal, they would die. Almost any argument would be maintained to avoid thinking of their infuriating helplessness.
“How’d those flowers fight animals, if there was any?” demanded Burton.
“How did men fight them?” asked Caxton. “Was there ever any single way? Men used their brains. Man specialized on intelligence, and became dominant on Earth. These plants may have done the same thing. At least they’re dominant here!”
“O.K.,” said Burton in heavy sarcasm. “Talk to ‘em, then. Tell ‘em we’ll bring ‘em a load of fertilizer if they’ll wipe out Slade an’ his gang so we can go home in his ship!”
“That,” said Caxton meditatively, “is just about what I’ve got to try.”
“Crazy!” rasped Burton.
“Quite likely,” admitted Caxton, “but I can’t think of anything with sense to it that gives us a chance.”
~ * ~
The stars on Aiolo were very bright. The air was very thin and very cold. The men in their sleeping bags lay still, and the campfire burned brightly until there were only embers left, and those embers glowed with the brightness of coals in almost pure oxygen. One by one they went out, leaving only ash. But all the men were not in the gouged-out earthen furrow behind the shattered Copernicus. One man lay among the flowers, twenty yards and more from the ship.
It was easy to locate him, even in the starlight, though he could not be seen among the flowers. For many feet around him, every flower stalk was bent toward him. His sleeping bag was almost hidden by hovering blossoms—most of which were clustered as close as possible to his head.
The ground was utterly flat, and it reached out to a horizon utterly without break or projection. It was a monstrous plain, completely filled with the omnipresent flowers. Nearby one could see between white-petaled blooms to reedy stalks and stringy leaves below. But at a distance the absolutely level sea of blossoms formed a sheet of snowy white.
At what would correspond to ten o’clock in the morning, the look of the vast expanse of flowers changed. From one horizon to the other, the plants stirred. They moved in tiny jerkings. They faced in one direction.
“This will be it,” said Caxton evenly. “They’ll find us now.”
There was yet no sign of the pirate ship, neither of sight nor of sound. Three of the four men clenched their fists, raging. They might be killed. They might be mocked and left to die. They were filled with an impotent rage at their inability even to offer battle.
Caxton waited with an odd expression on his face. A dull roaring came from very far away. It grew louder. It grew thunderous. They saw the spaceship as a tiny speck of light; a moving mote of brightness which was the reflection of the sun from its chromium-bright outer plating. They regarded it in suffocating fury. It went hurtling onward—and suddenly shifted its course. Its momentum carried it on, but it swung toward the crashed Copernicus. It turned again. It made a wide half-circle and headed back toward the wreck and the great furrow in the earth, descending as it came. It was a small ship, much less than the freighter it had come to loot. Concealed ports opened in its bow and guns peered out.
Caxton ran back in the furrow and waved violently, trying to cause it to land where there were no plants. It ignored him. One of the bow guns flashed briefly. An acre of flowers exploded in steam, and only blackened stalks and seared earth remained behind. There was a strange, tiny, extraordinarily shrill sound which ran all over the plain of blossoms, as if the flowers themselves had uttered it in rage or horror. All the way to the horizon there was the seeming of commotion, of the agitated twitchings of reedy stalks.
The strange space vessel landed. It had the swollen, obese look of a space tug. It settled heavily upon the newly-charred ground. It was still. Then the gun muzzle swiveled. Another brief flare. Another burst of steam and thin shrill screaming noise. A path of charred emptiness opened from the space tug to the battered, broken wreck. Figures in spacesuits appeared carrying weapons. They walked negligently toward the Copernicus.
Caxton went to meet them. The first face he saw in a space helmet was strange to him. The second was Slade’s.
“Hello, Slade,” said Caxton coldly. “We figured you were responsible.”
Slade grinned.
“Neat job, eh? How’d it miss you?”
“Cabin,” said Caxton evenly. “Off duty. The self-sealing door worked.”
“Any others?” asked Slade negligently. He raised a weapon very casually.
“Three,” said Caxton. He added, “We hid the iridium.”
Slade lowered the weapon.
“Yeah? What for?”
“To make a bargain,” Caxton told him. “We want transportation to some place where we’ll have a chance of being picked up. Promise that and we tell you where the iridium is. Otherwise—look for it!”
“We can get it outa you with a pencil beam,” he said amusedly. “One thing I do wanna know, though. The flowers don’t bother you. Why?”
“Why should they?”
“Maybe this’s a different kind,” said Slade. “Where we were waitin’ for the Copernicus to come along, they made some kinda smell or somethin’ that put a guy to sleep. That’s why we got on spacesuits now. O.K.— Where’s the other three?”
Silently, Burton and Palmer and Hannet came into view, their eyes sullenly defiant. Slade grinned at them.
“We came for the iridium,” he said in mocking politeness. “I wanna volunteer to tell me where it is, or else the first one to take the pencil beam test. Who’s gonna be nice?”
<
br /> “I’ll show you,” said Caxton, without intonation. “It was silly to hide it, anyhow.”
He led the way. He pointed to where they had dug deep under the Copernicus’ plating to bury the precious metal for which their shipmates had died.
“Fine!” said Slade. “You men buried it. Now dig it out!”
Silently, the four men took shovels and began to dig. Slade stood over them with a blaster held negligently in his hand. Those with him explored the ship cautiously. They found no one else in hiding. They began to loot. One man carried a load of personal possessions back to the pirate ship, moving along the lane of charred, destroyed plants. Two men came back with him. More loads of loot. A shattered box of Bynarth lace had spilled half its contents in a broken-open hold. More men came from the pirate ship. The last three came without spacesuits, having been informed that since the four survivors of the wreck had had no trouble, there was no need of spacesuits here.
Men Against the Stars - [Adventures in Science Fiction 01] Page 27