Mission to Universe

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “A green planet?” said Ben before Lee could speak. Lee’s grin slipped and he stared in astonishment. He could not guess that Ben was used now to reading the expressions of almost everyone aboard. “I’ll come,” added Ben, getting up and following Lee back into the Control Section.

  “Prepare to shift,” he ordered as the door closed behind him. The chant and procedure of shifting ran its course around him. They shifted—and every eye in the room came up.

  Full on the TV screen on the wall there was a world the color of vegetation—lacking any large oceans, but with well-defined cold masses sliding at good altitudes above its surface.

  Everyone was cheering.

  “All right,” said Ben, with deliberate flatness of tone. “Begin an intensive survey of this planet from orbit, Captain Ruiz.” He turned and went back into the office.

  It took two ship’s days of sixteen hours each to make a complete examination of the newly found world from orbit.When it was completed, Ben called a conference and Lee brought the full report of Observation Section to it. Ben sat reading the report, while Lee, Nora, and Walt waited in chairs around his desk.

  “Well,” said Ben, putting the report down at last, “the planet’s clearly not habitable. Not in our sense. Not enough oxygen.”

  “It’s not an impossible world, though,” said Lee, diffidently. “Almost park-like. No oceans or any large lakes, you notice, not even any mountain ranges. Just that moss-like ground cover, the local herbivores grazing on it, and those clumps of big vines spreading out in the sun.” He smiled at Ben almost shyly. “Almost a rest camp. And the surface temperature and gravity are only a little less than Earth’s.”

  “A rest camp for all of us aboard this ship, is that it?” said Ben, ironically.

  “We could wear oxygen packs and masks,” said Lee eagerly. “And we could take precautions—”

  “The way we did Achemar One,” Ben said harshly.

  . Lee looked crestfallen, and Ben felt a tinge of sympathy for him—but Lee was stuck with his role as spokesman for the crew as Ben was stuck with his as iron-willed commander of the ship.

  “I’d like to make it perfectly plain,” said Ben, tapping with a forefinger hard on the desk top before him, “that any unknown factor or area represents an unknown danger as far as this ship is concerned, and we aren’t going to run into any unknown dangers just to give those of us aboard a chance to stretch our legs.”

  “Of course not,” said Lee. “But there’s the matter of the shortage in the food stores.”

  Ben looked at him.

  “You’re not thinking of slaughtering those animals down there for meat?” Ben said. “We couldn’t risk eating alien flesh.”

  “No,” there was a suspicion of a grin at the comers of Lee’s mouth. “But whatever those giant vines are, that ground cover down there is chlorophyllous vegetation. There’s a stage of the recycler we can use to engage in some chemica lcookery. "We ought to be able to reduce that vegetation to a solution and treat it with a process of hydrolysis to get glucose.”

  Ben blinked.

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Well—actually I’d have to try a sample,” said Lee. “But I don’t see why not.” Ben looked from Lee to Walt and Nora. It was clear they had already had the scheme broached to them by Lee.

  “All right,” said Ben, abruptly. “But we’ll build a wall around the ship the minute we touch down—and stay inside it.”

  “A wall?” asked Walt. “Against herbivores no bigger than dogs?”

  “Big dogs,” said Ben grimly. “But also in any case against what we don’t know is down there—and because it’s our duty to stay alive until we’ve found the world we’re after.”

  This time they went down slowly and with the caution of a wild animal approaching the area of a possible trap. And as soon as they were down, Ben had armed guards out around the ship and they proceeded to fortify themselves.

  The spot Walt had chosen for the landing was a shallow basin of open ground ringed with hummocks too low to be called hills. This open area was about a mile by half a mile in extent, and the tough, half-moss, half-sawgrass ground cover was everywhere except where the tangles of monster vines, eighty to a hundred yards across, dotted the slopes of the hummocks.

  Under the ground cover an explosive charge echo-sounding, fired before the phase ship touched down, had revealed half a foot of gravelly earth and under that a bed of gray limestone. It was this bed that the phase ship crew attacked with oxygen packs on their backs and protective anti sun-burn cream on all exposed areas of skin.

  With ultra-high-temperature cutting torches, the exposed limestone was quarried up into blocks from a trench encircling the ship. Then, using a power-lift operated on electric current running through a cable from the drive unit inside the ship, the blocks were fitted and raised into a ten-foot-high wall along the inside edge of the ditch and banked by a slope of earth on the wall’s inner side. Before night fell six hours later, there was about the ship a small open area some sixty feet from wall to wall, then a slope to the top of the ten-foot barrier of quarried stone, and a six-foot-deep, twelve-foot-wide trench beyond the sheer outer face of the wall.

  With the sinking of Polaris, yellow and small as a lemon against the hummocked horizon, Ben had powerful lights mounted to illuminate not only the enclosure, but a good distance beyond the walls.

  These burned throughout the night, while a team of four people stood guard at all times, armed with the new Weyer-lander half-gun with which the phase ship had been supplied. This was a rifle-pistol with adjustable stock, convertible to full automatic fire, with a hundred and forty grain bulletin what was known as a half-cartridge, in a clip of fifty. It was a trifle cumbersome as a hand weapon and had little accuracy over ranges beyond a couple of hundred yards, but Ben had chosen it as ideal for close-up defense by amateur shooters against unknown inimical elements. There were light and heavy, long-range hunting rifles aboard, as well, for those who might know how to use them.

  The rising of Polaris the next morning after all these preparations was almost an anticlimax. The early rays of that star showed the grazing herbivores, the vine clumps, the ground cover of the little area as peaceful as it had the night before.

  “Just like a park,” said Lee, with mild triumph to Ben, as they mounted the wall the following morning.

  “Too much like a park,” growled Ben. It could be that he was merely obeying a human impulse to defend himself, he thought, sweeping the area outside the fort with wide-angle binoculars, but he did not think so. The excavated limestone had turned up a generous supply of fossils, up to and including something like a small crocodile. That such evolutionary development should end with a single species of herbivore as the planet-wide dominant life form, bothered Ben. “We’ll send teams out to gather the moss-grass,” he said now, “but I want them to stay close and I want armed guards with them.”

  “All right,” said Lee, agreeably. “I’ll start dismantling the recycler again and moving the sections outside that I’ll want”

  So, as Polaris climbed in the sky, Ben stood on the wall with the mask attached to his oxygen backpack pressing hard against the skin of his face and the curve of the binoculars above them bumping his eyebrow ridge, as he watched the teams from the ship gathering the local herbage. But there were no incidents. The herbivores shied and galloped off when they were approached, and the teams, investigating the vine clumps from a distance, reported that the big vine stems, a foot or more in diameter farther back toward their roots, became so tangled just beyond the edge that no animal much larger than a squirrel could crawl through them.

  By noon of the next day, Lee had in operation what everyone was already beginning to call the glucose factory. The moss-grass yielded not only this, but a surplus of sorted water, which, distilled out, went to replenish the water stores of the phase ship. This relieved Ben, who had foreseen the problem of sending out a team to the nearest small lake just beyond the wester
n hummocks, out of sight of the ship, for water.

  On the morning of the third day, as he was standing on the wall, he heard footsteps behind him and turned to seethe masked figure of Lee, recognizable by the way he walked,and carrying a glass-covered container.

  “Look at that,” said Lee, hollowly, but triumphantly,through the voice-box diaphragm of his mask.

  Ben took the box and looked. Under the glass cover, he saw what 'looked like a mass of fine reddish-black grains.

  “You remember those two herbivores we killed for specimens yesterday?” asked Lee. “Guess what you’re holding?” Behind Lee, the massive figure of Walt climbed onto the wall, followed by the tall, thin figure of Coop.

  “What?” asked Ben.

  “An artificial protein,” Lee said, excitedly. “I reduced some of the herbivore flesh to its constituent amino acids and recombined those into this—we can eat it, Ben. It’s as nourishing as freeze-dried steak, dry weight, ounce for ounce. And the amount of flesh we have to process to get it is less than two to one by weight as opposed to over twelve to one of the moss-grass we’re processing to get glucose!”

  Walt spoke over Lee’s shoulder, his deep voice vibrating in the diaphragm of his mask.

  “We can send out a couple of teams,” said Walt, “and drive enough herbivores into this area in two days to supply us with all the native flesh we can process.”

  “They drive easily—” put in Coop, eagerly.

  “Yes,” said Ben. It all seemed too good to be true—but that, he told himself, was bending over backward to find fault. Among all the kinds of worlds there must be in the galaxy, some worlds had to be park-like and completely harmless and bountiful. He gazed out over the peaceful landscape and the innocently grazing forms of the herbivores. It would be unthinkable to pass up the chance of storing up on as desirable a foodstuff as this artificial protein. He put the niggling doubts in the back of his mind firmly aside.

  “Yes,” he said decisively. “Two teams. I’ll make up a list of who’s to go.”

  Chapter 6

  Early the following morning, two teams of four men each, one led by Hans Clogh and the other one led by Coop, left the fort, hiking east and west. As Coop had said, the herbivores were not hard to drive, provided you did not hurry them. They would let anyone approach to within a critical distance of about thirty feet. Closer than that and they would move off about another thirty feet at a trot,provided the one approaching stood still. If he tried to follow the herbivore, all others close to it would go into a panic-stricken, stampeding flight. They Would gallop in all directions,not stopping until they were tired.

  It would therefore be necessary, Ben reminded himself, standing on the wall beside Polly Neigh, that the drive be made slowly and patiently. The two teams were to circle to the south and make a half day’s march in that direction. Then they were to start back, driving herbivores before them. Night would fall before they were more than halfway back, but it had been observed that the herbivores did not stray far during the dark hours. In fact, they had a tendency to cluster together. The next day should see the two teams joining the herds they were driving and bringing them in together to the fort.

  Ben was aware that Polly had lowered the binoculars with which she had been watching Coop’s team disappear over the hummock horizon. He lowered his own binoculars and turned to meet her gaze.

  “You’re responsible for them,” she said. Turning, she went,a little awkwardly with her artificial leg, back down the inner slope leading to the wall top. Ben stared after her for a second, startled. It was quite true that he was responsible, but Polly had not meant that, clearly. She had meant that she was holding Ben personally responsible for the safety of Coop. Ben did not know whether to be pleased that, there was at least one person who shared his misgivings about Old Twenty-nine, or disturbed by this evidence of the intensity of Polly’s feelings. This was still the shake-down cruise. If, when they came to their real task, thousands of light-years from home, he should be faced with Polly putting Coop’s safety before the welfare of the ship and the rest of those aboard—he filed the thought for future reference.

  Both teams were out of sight now. He turned and left the wall himself and went down the slope into the enclosed area surrounding the ship.

  Already it looked like a slaughterhouse. The previous day,they had killed and brought into the fort some twelve of the beasts. Each animal yielded about fifty pounds of usable flesh that could be turned into half its weight in edible protein grains. Three hundred pounds of grains—it was a good beginning.

  The phase ship, the shutters drawn back over its observation window on top, gleamed in the bright-yellow light of distant Polaris, looking hardly larger than the Sun from Earth’s surface. Below the ship, a dismounted section of the recycler chugged away, extracting and freezing oxygen from the small amount in the native atmosphere to replenish ship and back-pack supplies. Up beyond this section was the so-called digestive section of the recycler at work on the soup-like liquid Lee was producing in a large plastic vat of diluted acids from herbivore flesh.

  The stench was undoubtedly abominable—to judge by the small amount of it that had clung to equipment and clothing and so gotten into the ship’s air, which was also recycled with oxygen in the backpacks to let the crew members breathe outside the ship. Given time, the whole inner atmosphere of the phase ship could be flushed and the odor removed from it—but there was no time now. On the verge of working up a resentment against the odors he was breathing, Ben remembered that the two teams out driving herbivores would be facing the fact of living with the same odors, carried in their backpacks for the next two days.

  Thought of the driving teams recalled him to the reason that had brought him down to the slaughterhouse area.He had wanted another look at one of the herbivore carcasses. Working on a table set up outside the ship the day before, he had made a general dissection of one of the bodies, but it had just now occurred to him that he might have overlooked the forest on examining its trees, so to speak. He found a whole carcass in the pile of unprepared flesh and pulled it out on top of the heap to examine it.

  It came out stiff with rigor mortis. Ben laid it out on its side and ran his eye over it.

  It was a slightly-furred animal, four-legged, barrel-bodied,somewhat resembling the small camel-like llama of South America, back home. The differences were a neck mounting almost vertically from the shoulders, a huge chest, and a literally tiny head with black eyes facing forward to give binocular vision, instead of the wide angle of single-eye vision typical of Earth’s wild herbivores who must keep steadily on the watch for predators.

  All told, the herbivore would have weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds on Earth and would have been easy prey for just about anything large enough to pull it down.

  It was, for one thing, practically brainless. The tiny skull contained a sort of primitive end-brain, possibly housing the flight, feeding, and breeding reflex patterns of the creature. At the far end of the nerve cable leading down the long neck, however, there was buried between the shoulders a large, complex nerve center that probably took over some of the instinctual reflexes and duties ordinarily housed in the brain case of Earthly mammals. Any shock to this buried nerve center seemed to kill the herbivores immediately.

  Ben stooped to examine the hooves. They were split, two-toed, like the hooves of the Artiodactyla of Earth; and like the hooves of deer in particular, their edges were razor sharp. Ben ran his finger along the sharp edge of one of the forehooves before him, and made up his mind. He had seen an incautious biology lab attendant back on Earth badly slashed by a buck deer who had just had its horns removed, a deer that the attendant had mistakenly thought was therefore harmless.

  Lee was busy with his protein cookery. Walt was occupied with his duties as Duty Officer, a job he was now holding down around the clock to free Lee for the other work. Accordingly, Ben hunted up Kirk Walish and told him to get together a working party of at least three other off-duty
people—preferably men only. Then he went in search of Nora, finding her also off-duty and engaged in the feminine occupation of washing her hair, and therefore unavailable beyond the door of showers and washroom on the women’s side of the ship. Informed of what Ben needed, however, she sent out Tessie Sorenson with directions and the storeroom keys. Ben led his crew down and broke out some twenty small explosive packages and two hundred yards of cable explosive—of the type developed by underwater demolition teams twenty years before.

  “All right” said Ben to Kirk and Kirk’s three drafted assistants, when they were out beyond the wall. “We’re going to lay out two lines of explosive cable, with charges at ten-yard intervals along them.”

  “Can I ask why?” inquired Kirk, dryly.

  His black eyes met Ben’s—but without the smoldering anger Ben had used to find there before Achemar One. It was hard to decide whether Kirk had decided not to be a rebel, or just to stop advertising the fact he was one. Ben decided to give him the benefit of the doubt—particularly since the other three crew members were listening intently.

  "I'm going to set up a slaughter pen,” he answered. “Shooting those twelve beasts yesterday was one thing. But when the two teams under Coop and Hans get here, they ought to be driving at least a hundred animals in front of them. Killing them one by one while the others mill around isn’t going to be either safe or efficient. So, we’ll do it this way.”

  Kirk nodded. And, under Ben’s directions, the five of them laid out the two lines of explosive cable thirty feet apart and running from the wall around the phase ship almost to the vine clump at the base of one of the surrounding hummocks. The explosives packages, each with a killing /circle twenty feet in diameter, were attached at their proper intervals. So spaced, the killing circles of the two lines overlapped to make a long rectangle.

  “Well,” said Kirk, with apparent satisfaction when they were done, “that’ll take care of a hundred herbivores—or more. The only trick will be herding them inside the area.”