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There was no answer from the ground when breakout came and Calhoundrove the Med Ship to a favourable position for a call. He patientlyrepeated, over and over again, that the Med Ship _Aesclipus Twenty_notified its arrival and requested coordinates for landing. He addedthat its mass was fifty standard tons and that the purpose of itsvisit was a planetary health inspection.
But there was no reply. There should have been a crisp description ofthe direction from the planet's center at which, a certain time somany hours or minutes later, the force-fields of the grid would findit convenient to lock onto and lower the Med Ship. But thecommunicator remained silent.
"There is a landing-grid," said Calhoun, frowning, "and if they'reusing it to load fresh meat for Dara, from the herds I'm told about,it should be manned. But they don't seem to intend to answer. Maybethey think that if they pretend I'm not here I'll go away."
He reflected, and his frown deepened.
"If I didn't know what I know, I might. So if I land on emergencyrockets the blueskins down below may decide that I come from Weald.And in that case it would be reasonable to blast me before I couldland and unload some fighting men. On the other hand, no ship fromWeald would conceivably land without impassioned assurance that itwas safe. It would drop bombs." He turned to the girl. "How manyDarians down below?"
She shook her head.
"You don't know," said Calhoun, "or won't tell, yet. But they ought tobe told about the arrival of that ship at Weald, and what Weald thinksabout it! My guess is that you came to tell them. It isn't likely thatDara gets news directly from Weald. Where were you put ashore fromDara, when you set out to be a spy?"
Her lips parted to speak, but she compressed them tightly. She shookher head again.
"It must have been plenty far away," said Calhoun restlessly. "Yourpeople would have built a ship, and made fine forged papers for it,and they'd travel so far from this part of space that when they landednobody would think of Dara. They'd use make-up to cover the bluespots, but maybe it was so far away that blueskins had never beenheard of!"
Her face looked pinched, but she did not reply.
"Then they'd land half a dozen of you, with a supply of make-up forthe blue patches. And you'd separate, and take ships that went variousroundabout ways, and arrive on Weald one by one, to see what could bedone there to--" He stopped. "When did you find out positively thatthere wasn't any plague any more?"
She began to grow pale.
"I'm not a mind reader," said Calhoun. "But it adds up. You're fromDara. You've been on Weald. It's practically certain that there areother ... agents, if you like that word better, on Weald. And therehasn't been a plague on Weald so you people aren't carriers of it. Butyou knew it in advance, I think. How'd you learn? Did a ship in somesort of trouble land there, on Dara?"
"Y--yes," said the girl. "We wouldn't let it go again. But the peopledidn't catch--they didn't die. They lived--"
She stopped short.
"It's not fair to trap me!" she cried passionately. "It's not fair!"
"I'll stop," said Calhoun.
He turned to the control board. The Med Ship was only planetarydiameters from Orede, now, and the electron telescope showed shiningstars in leisurely motion across its screen. Then a huge, gibbousshining shape appeared, and there were irregular patches of that muddycolor which is seabottom, and varicolored areas which were plains andforests. Also there were mountains. Calhoun steadied the image, andsquinted at it.
"The mine," he observed, "was found by members of a hunting party,killing wild cattle for sport."
Even a small planet has many millions of square miles of surface, anda single human installation on a whole world will not be easy to findby random search. But there were clues to this one. Men hunting forsport would not choose a tropic nor an arctic climate to hunt in. Soif they found a mineral deposit, it would have been in a temperatezone.
Cattle would not be found deep in a mountainous terrain. The minewould not be on a prairie. The settlement on Orede, then, would benear the edge of mountains, not far from a prairie such as wild cattlewould frequent, and it would be in a temperate climate.
Forested areas could be ruled out. And there would be a landing-grid.Handling only one ship at a time, it might be a very small grid. Itcould be only hundreds of yards across and less than half a mile high.But its shadow would be distinctive.
Calhoun searched among low mountains near unforested prairie in atemperate zone. He found a speck. He enlarged it manyfold. It was themine on Orede. There were heaps of tailings. There was something whichcast a long, lacy shadow: the landing-grid.
"But they don't answer our call," observed Calhoun, "so we go downunwelcomed."
He inverted the Med Ship and the emergency rockets boomed. The shipplunged planetward.
A long time later it was deep in the planet's atmosphere. The noise ofits rockets had become thunderous, with air to carry and to reinforcethe sound.
"Hold on to something, Murgatroyd," commanded Calhoun. "We may have tododge some ack."
But nothing came up from below. The Med Ship again inverted itself,and its rockets pointed toward the planet and poured out pencil-thin,blue-white, high-velocity flames. It checked slightly, but continuedto descend. It was not directly above the grid.
It swept downward until almost level with the peaks of the mountainsin which the mine lay. It tilted again, and swept onward over themountaintops, and then tilted once more and went racing up the valleyin which the landing-grid was plainly visible. Calhoun swung it on anerratic course, lest there be opposition.
But there was no sign. Then the rockets bellowed, and the ship slowedits forward motion, hovered momentarily, and settled to solidityoutside the framework of the grid. The grid was small, as Calhounreasoned. But it reached interminably toward the sky.
The rockets cut off. Slender as the flames had been, they'd melted andbored thin drill-holes deep into the soil. Molten rock boiled andbubbled down below. But there seemed no other sound. There was noother motion. There was absolute stillness all around. But whenCalhoun switched on the outside microphones a faint, sweet melange ofhigh-pitched chirpings came from tiny creatures hidden under thevegetation of the mountainsides.
Calhoun put a blaster in his pocket and stood up.
"We'll see what it looks like outside," he said with a certaingrimness. "I don't quite believe what the vision screens show."
Minutes later he stepped down to the ground from the Med Ship's exitport. The ship had landed perhaps a hundred feet from what once hadbeen a wooden building. In it, ore from the mines was concentrated andthe useless tailings carried away by a conveyer belt to make amonstrous pile of broken stone. But there was no longer a building.
Next to it there had been a structure containing an ore-crusher. Themassive machinery could still be seen, but the structure was infragments. Next to that, again, had been the shaft-head shelters ofthe mine. They also were shattered practically to matchsticks.
The look of the ground about the building sites was simply and purelyimpossible. It was a mass of hoofprints. Cattle by thousands and tensof thousands had trampled everything. Cattle had burst in the woodensides of the buildings. Cattle had piled themselves up against thebeams upholding roofs until the buildings collapsed.
Then cattle had gone plunging over the wrecked buildings until therewas nothing left but indescribable chaos. Many, many cattle had diedin the crush. There were heaps of dead beasts about the metal girderswhich were the foundation of the landing-grid. The air was tainted bythe smell of carrion.
The settlement had been destroyed, positively by stampeded cattle intens or hundreds of thousands charging blindly through and over andupon it. Senselessly, they'd trampled each other to horribleshapelessness. The mine shaft was not choked, because enormouslystrong timbers had fallen across and blocked it. But everything elsewas pure destruction.
Calhoun said evenly, "Clever! Very clever! You can't blame men whenbeasts stampede. We should accept the evide
nce that some monstrousherd, making its way through a mountain pass, somehow went crazy andbolted for the plains. This settlement got in the way and it was toobad for the settlement! Everything's explained, except the ship thatwent to Weald.
"A cattle stampede, yes. Anybody can believe that! But there was a manstampede. Men stampeded into the ship as blindly as the cattletrampled down this little town. The ship stampeded off into space asinsanely as the cattle. But a stampede of men and cattle, in the sameplace? That's a little too much!"
"But what--"
"How," asked Calhoun directly, "do you intend to get in touch withyour friends here?"
"I--I don't know," she said, distressed. "But if the ship stays here,they're bound to come and see why. Won't they? Or will they?"
"If they're sane, they won't," said Calhoun. "The one undesirablething, here, would be human footprints on top of cattle tracks. Ifyour friends are a meat-getting party from Dara, as I believe, theyshould cover up their tracks, get off-planet as fast as possible, andpray that no signs of their former presence are ever discovered. Thatwould be their best first move, certainly!"
"What should I do?" she asked helplessly.
"I'm far from sure. At a guess, and for the moment, probably nothing.I'll work something out. I've got the devil of a job before me,though. I can't spend but so much time here."
"You can leave me here...."
He grunted and turned away. It was naturally unthinkable that heshould leave another human being on a supposedly uninhabited planet,with the knowledge that it might actually be uninhabited, and thefuture knowledge that any visitors would have the strongest ofpossible reasons to hide themselves away.
He believed that there were Darians here, and the girl in the Medship, so he also believed, was also a Darian. But any who might behiding had so much to lose if they were discovered that they might behundreds or even thousands of miles from anywhere a space ship wouldnormally land--if they hadn't fled after the incident of thespaceship's departure with its load of doomed passengers.
Considered detachedly, the odds were that there was again a foodshortage on Dara; that blueskins, in desperation, had raided or wereraiding or would raid the cattle herds of Orede for food to carry backto their home planet; that somehow the miners on Orede had found thatthey had blueskin neighbors, and died of the consequences of theirterror. It was a risky guess to make on such evidence as Calhounconsidered he had, but no other guess was possible.
If his guess were right, he was under some obligation to do exactlywhat he believed the girl considered her mission--to warn allblueskins that Weald would presently try to find them on Orede, whenall hell must break loose upon Dara for punishment. But if there weremen here, he couldn't leave a written warning for them in default offriendly contact.
They might not find it, and a search party of Wealdians might. All hecould possibly do was try to make contact and give warning by suchmeans as would leave no evidence behind that he'd done so. Wealdwould consider a warning sure proof of blueskin guilt.
It was not satisfactory to be limited to broadcasts which might ormight not be picked up, and were unlikely to be acknowledged. But hesettled down with the communicator to make the attempt.
He called first on a GC wave length and form. It was unlikely thatblueskins would use general communication bands to keep in touch witheach other, but it had to be tried. He broadcast, tuned as broadly aspossible, and went up and down the GC spectrum, repeating his warningpainstakingly and listening without hope for a reply.
He did find one spot on the dial where there was re-radiation of hismessage, as if from a tuned receiver. But he could not get a fix onit: nobody might be listening. He exhausted the normal communicationpattern. Then he broadcast on old-fashioned amplitude modulation whicha modern communicator would not pick up at all, and which thereforemight be used by men in hiding.
He worked for a long time. Then he shrugged and gave it up. He'drepeated to absolute tedium the facts that any Darians--blueskins--onOrede ought to know. There'd been no answer. And it was all too likelythat if he'd been received, that those who heard him took his messagefor a trick to discover if there were any hearers.
He clicked off at last and stood up, shaking his head. Suddenly theMed Ship seemed empty. Then he saw Murgatroyd staring vexedly at theexit port. The inner door of that small airlock was closed. Thetelltale light said the outer door was not locked. Someone had goneout quietly. The girl. Of course.
Calhoun said angrily, "How long ago, Murgatroyd?"
"_Chee!_" said Murgatroyd indignantly.
It wasn't an answer, but it showed that Murgatroyd was vexed that he'dbeen left behind. He and the girl were close friends, now. If she'dleft Murgatroyd in the ship when he wanted to go with her, then shewasn't coming back.
Calhoun swore. He made certain she was not in the ship. He flipped theoutside-speaker switch and said curtly into the microphone, "Coffee!Murgatroyd and I are having coffee. Will you come back, please?"
He repeated the call, and repeated it again. Multiplied as his voicewas by the speakers, she should hear him within a mile. She did notappear. He went to a small and inconspicuous closet and armed himself.A Med Ship man was not ever expected to fight, but there wereblast-rifles available for extreme emergency.
When he'd slung a power-pack over his shoulder and reached theairlock, there was still no sign of his late stowaway. He stood in theairlock door for long minutes, staring angrily about. Almost certainlyshe wouldn't be looking in the mountains for men of Dara come here forcattle. He used a pair of binoculars, first at low-magnification tosearch as wide an area down-valley as possible, and then at highestpower to search the most likely routes.
He found a small, bobbing speck beyond a faraway hill crest. It washer head. It went down below the hilltop.
He snapped a command to Murgatroyd, and when the _tormal_ was on theground outside, he locked the port with that combination that nobodybut a Med Ship man was at all likely to discover or use.
"She's an idiot!" he told Murgatroyd sourly. "Come along! We've got tobe idiots too!"
He set out in pursuit.
There was blue sky overhead, as was inevitable on anyoxygen-atmosphere planet of a Sol-type yellow sun. There weremountains, as is universal in planets whose surface rises and fallsand folds and bends from the effects of weather or vulcanism. Therewere plants, as has come about wherever microorganisms have brokendown rock to a state where it can nourish vegetation. And naturallythere were animals.
There were even trees of severely practical design, and underbrush andground-cover equivalent to grass. There was, in short, a perfectlypredictable ecological system on Orede. The organic molecules involvedin life here would be made up of the same elements in the samecombinations as elsewhere where the same conditions of temperature andmoisture and sunshine obtained.
It was a distinctly Earthlike world, as it could not help but be, andit was reasonable for cattle to thrive and increase here. Only men'sminds kept it from being a place where humans would thrive, too.
But only Calhoun would have considered the splintered settlement aproof of that last.
The girl had a long start. Twice Calhoun came to places where shecould have chosen either of two ways onward. Each time he had todetermine which she'd followed. That cost time. Then the mountainsabruptly ended and a vast undulating plain stretched away to thehorizon. There were at least two large masses and many smaller clumpsof what could only be animals gathered together. Cattle.
But here the girl was plainly in view. Calhoun increased his stride.He began to gain on her. She did not look behind.
Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" in a complaining tone.
"I should have left you behind," agreed Calhoun dourly, "but there wasand is a chance I won't get back. You'll have to keep on hiking."
He plodded on. His memory of the terrain around the mining settlementtold him that there was no definite destination in the girl's mind.But she was in no such despair as to want deliberately to be lost.She'
d guessed, Calhoun believed, that if there were Darians on theplanet, they'd keep the landing-grid under observation.
If they saw her leave that area and could see that she was alone, theyshould intercept her to find out the meaning of the Med Ship'slanding. Then she could identify herself as one of them and give themthe terribly necessary warning of Weald's suspicions.
"But," said Calhoun sourly, "if she's right, they'll have seen memarching after her now, which spoils her scheme. And I'd like to helpit, but the way she's going is too dangerous!"
He went down into one of the hollows of the uneven plain. He saw aclump of a dozen or so cattle a little distance away. The bull lookedup and snorted. The cows regarded him truculently. Their air was notone of bovine tranquility.
He was up the farther hillside and out of sight before the bull workedhimself up to a charge. Then Calhoun suddenly remembered one of theitems in the data about cattle he'd looked into just the other day. Hefelt himself grow pale.
"Murgatroyd!" he said sharply. "We've got to catch up! Fast! Stay withme if you can, but--" he was jog-trotting as he spoke--"even if youget lost I have to hurry!"
He ran fifty paces and walked fifty paces. He ran fifty and walkedfifty. He saw her, atop a rolling of the ground. She came to a fullstop. He ran. He saw her turn to retrace her steps. He flung off thesafety of the blast-rifle and let off a roaring blast at the groundfor her to hear.
Suddenly she was fleeing desperately, toward him. He plunged on. Shevanished down into a hollow. Horns appeared over the hillcrest she'djust left. Cattle appeared. Four, a dozen fifteen, twenty! They movedominously in her wake.
He saw her again, running frantically over another upward swell ofthe prairie. He let off another blast to guide her. He ran on at topspeed with Murgatroyd trailing anxiously behind. From time to timeMurgatroyd called "_Chee-chee-chee!_" in frightened pleading not to beabandoned.
More cattle appeared against the horizon. Fifty or a hundred. Theycame after the first clump. The first group of a bull and his haremwere moving faster, now. The girl fled from them, but it is theinstinct of beef-cattle on the open range--Calhoun had learned it onlytwo days before--to charge any human they find on foot. A mounted manto their dim minds is a creature to be tolerated or fled from, but ahuman on foot is to be crushed and stamped and gored.
Those in the lead were definitely charging now, with heads bent low.The bull charged furiously with shut eyes, as bulls do, but the cows,many times more deadly, charged with their eyes wide open and wickedlyalert, and with a lumbering speed much greater than the girl couldmanage.
She came up over the last rise, chalky-white and gasping, her hairflying, in the last extremity of terror. The nearest of the pursuingcattle were within ten yards when Calhoun fired from twenty yardsbeyond. One creature bellowed as the blast-bolt struck.
It went down and others crashed into it and swept over it, and morecame on. The girl saw Calhoun now, and ran toward him, panting. Heknelt very deliberately and began to check the charge by shooting theleading animals.
He did not succeed. There were more cattle following the first, andmore and more behind them. It appeared that all the cattle on theplain joined in the blind and senseless charge. The thudding of hoofsbecame a mutter and then a rumble and then a growl.
Plunging, clumsy figures rushed past on either side. But horns andheads heaved up over the mound of animals Calhoun had shot. He shotthem too. More and more cattle came pounding past the rampart of hisvictims, but always, it seemed, some elected to climb the heap oftheir dead and dying fellows, and Calhoun shot and shot....
But he split the herd. The foremost animals had been charging asighted human enemy. Others had followed because it is the instinct ofcattle to join their running fellows in whatever crazed urgency theyfeel. There was a dense, pounding, wailing, grunting, puffing, raisingthick and impenetrable clouds of dust which hid everything butgalloping beasts going past on either side.
It lasted for minutes. Then the thunder of hoofs diminished. It endedabruptly, and Calhoun and the girl were left alone with the gruesomepile of animals which had divided the charging herd into two parts.They could see the rears of innumerable running animals, stupidlycontinuing the charge, hardly different, now, from a stampede, whoseoriginal objective none now remembered.
Calhoun thoughtfully touched the barrel of his blast-rifle and wincedat its scorching heat.
"I just realized," he said coldly, "that I don't know your name. Whatis it?"
"Maril," said the girl. She swallowed. "Th--thank you."
"Maril," said Calhoun, "you are an idiot! It was half-witted at bestto go off by yourself! You could have been lost! You could have costme days of hunting for you, days badly needed for more importantmatters!"
He stopped and took breath. "You may have spoiled what little chanceI've got to do something about the plans Weald's already making! Youhave just acted with the most concentrated folly, and the mostmagnificent imbecility that you or anybody else could manage!"
He said more bitterly still, "And I had to leave Murgatroyd behind toget to you in time! He was right in the path of that charge!"
He turned away from her and said dourly, "All right! Come on back tothe ship. We'll go to Dara. We'd have to, anyhow. But Murgatroyd--"
Then he heard a very small sneeze. Out of a rolling wall ofstill-roiling dust, Murgatroyd appeared forlornly. He wasdust-covered, and draggled, and his tail dropped, and he sneezedagain. He moved as if he could barely put one paw before another, butat sight of Calhoun he sneezed yet again and said "_Chee!_" in adisconsolate voice. Then he sat down and waited for Calhoun to comeand pick him up.
When Calhoun did so, Murgatroyd clung to him pathetically and said"_Chee-chee!_" and again "_Chee-chee!_" with the intonation of onetelling of incredible horrors and disasters endured. And as a matterof fact the escape of a small animal like Murgatroyd was remarkable.He'd escaped the trampling hoofs of at least hundreds of charginganimals. Luck must have played a great part in it, but an hystericalagility in dodging must have been required, too.
Calhoun headed back for the valley where the settlement had been, andthe Med Ship was. Murgatroyd clung to his neck. The girl Marilfollowed discouragedly. She was at that age when girls--and men ofcorresponding type--can grow most passionately devoted to ideals orcauses in default of a promising personal romance. When concerned withsuch causes they become splendidly confident that whatever they decideto do is sensible if only it is dramatic. But Maril was shaken, now.
Calhoun did not speak to her again. He led the way. A mile back towardthe mountains, they began to see stragglers from the now-vanishedherd. A little farther, those stragglers began to notice them. Itwould have been a matter of no moment if they'd been domesticateddairy cattle, but these were range cattle gone wild. Twice, Calhounhad to use his blast-rifle to discourage incipient charges byirritated bulls or even more irritated cows. Those with calves darklysuspected Calhoun of designs upon their offspring.
It was a relief to enter the valley again. But it was two miles moreto the landing-grid with the Med Ship beside it and the reek ofcarrion in the air.
They were perhaps two hundred feet from the ship when a blast-riflecrashed and its bolt whined past Calhoun so close that he felt themonstrous heat. There had been no challenge. There was no warning.There was simply a shot which came horribly close to ending Calhoun'scareer in a completely arbitrary fashion.
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