Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (13 page)

Television audiences back on Earth viewed the new planet nearly as soon
as did those in the ship. The time-lag was roughly three seconds for a
distance of 203.7 light-years.

The surface of the planet was wild and dramatic beyond belief. There
were valleys where vegetation grew luxuriantly. There were ranges of
snow-clad mountains interpenetrating the equatorial strip, and there
were masses of white which, as the ship descended, could be identified
as glaciers moving down toward the vegetation.

But as the ship sank lower and lower—and the sound of its rockets
became thunderous because of the atmosphere around it—a new feature
took over the central position in one's concept of what the planet was
actually like.

The planet was volcanic. There were smoking cones everywhere—in the
snow-fields, among the ice-caps, in between the glaciers, and even among
the tumbled areas whose greenness proved that here was an environment
which might be perilous, but where life should thrive abundantly.

The ship continued to descend toward a great forest near a terminal
moraine.

Jamison declaimed, wearing a throat-mike as Bell zestfully panned his
camera and the ship swung down. It was an impressive broadcast. The
rockets roared. With the coming of air about the ship, they no longer
made a mere rumbling. They created a tumult which was like the growl of
thunder if one were in the midst of the thunder-cloud. It was a numbing
noise. It was almost a paralyzing noise. But Jamison talked with
professional smoothness.

"This planet," he orated, while pictures from Bell's camera went direct
to the transmitter below, "this planet is the first world other than
Earth on which a human ship has landed. It is paradoxic that before men
have walked on Mars' red iron-oxide plains and breathed its thin cold
air, or fought for life in the formaldehyde gales of Venus, that they
should look upon a world which welcomes them from illimitable
remoteness. Here we descend, and all mankind can watch our descent upon
a world whose vegetation is green; whose glaciers prove that there is
air and water in plenty, whose very smoking volcanoes assure us of its
close kinship to Earth!"

He lifted the mike away from his throat and framed words with his lips.
"
Am I still on?
" Cochrane nodded. Cochrane wore headphones carrying
what the communicator carried, as this broadcast went through an angled
Dabney field relay system back to Lunar City and then to Earth. He spoke
close to Jamison's ear.

"Go ahead! If your voice fades, it will be the best possible sign-off.
Suspense. Good television!"

Jamison let the throat-mike back against his skin. The roaring of the
rockets would affect it only as his throat vibrated from the sound. It
would register, even so.

"I see," said Jamison above the rocket-thunder, "forests of giant trees
like the sequoias of Mother Earth. I see rushing rivers, foaming along
their rocky beds, taking their rise in glaciers. We are still too high
to look for living creatures, but we descend swiftly. Now we are level
with the highest of the mountains. Now we descend below their smoking
tops. Under us there is a vast valley, miles wide, leagues long. Here a
city could be built. Over it looms a gigantic mountain-spur, capped with
green. One would expect a castle to be built there."

He raised his eyebrows at Cochrane. They were well in atmosphere, now,
and it had been an obvious defect—condition—necessity of the Dabney
field that both of its plates should be in a vacuum. One was certainly
in air now. But Cochrane made that gesture which in television
production-practice informs the actors that time to cutting is measured
in tens of seconds, and he held up two fingers. Twenty seconds.

"We gaze, and you gaze with us," said Jamison, "upon a world that future
generations will come to know as home—the site of the first human
colony among the stars!"

Cochrane began to beat time. Ten, nine, eight—.

"We are about to land," Jamison declaimed. "We do not know what we shall
find—What's that?" He paused dramatically. "A living creature?—A
living creature sighted down below! We sign off now—from the stars!"

The ending had been perfectly timed. Allowing for a three-second
interval for the broadcast to reach the moon, and just about two more
for it to be relayed to Earth, his final word, "Stars!" had been uttered
at the precise instant to allow a four-minute commercial by Intercity
Credit, in the United States, by Citroen in Europe, by Fabricanos Unidos
in South and Central America, and Near East Oil along the Mediterranean.
At the end of that four minutes it would be time for station
identification and a time-signal, and the divers eight-second flashes
before other programs came on the air.

The rockets roared and thundered. The ship went down and down. Jamison
said:

"I thought we'd be cut off when we hit air!"

"That's what Jones thought," Cochrane assured him. He bellowed above the
outside tumult, "Bell! See anything alive down below?"

Bell shook his head. He stayed at the camera aimed out a blister-port,
storing up film-tape for later use. There was the feel of gravitation,
now. Actually, it was the fact that the ship slowed swiftly in its
descent.

Cochrane went to a port. The ship continued its descent.

"Living creature? Where?"

Jamison shrugged. He had used it as a sign-off line. An extrapolation
from the fact that there was vegetation below. He looked somehow
distastefully out the port at a swiftly rising green ground below. He
was a city man. He had literally never before seen what looked like
habitable territory of such vast extent, with no houses on it. In a
valley easily ten miles long and two wide, there was not a square inch
of concrete or of glass. There was not a man made object in view. The
sky was blue and there were clouds, but to Jamison the sight of
vegetation implied rooftops. There ought to be parapets where roofs
ended to let light down to windows and streets below. He had never
before seen grass save on elevated recreation-areas, nor bushes not
arranged as landscaping, and certainly not trees other than the
domesticated growths which can grow on the tops of buildings. To Jamison
this was desolation. On the moon, absence of structures was
understandable. There was no air. But here there should be a city!

The ship swayed a little as the rockets swung their blasts to balance
the descending mass. The intended Mars-ship slowed, and slowed, and
hovered—and there was terrifying smoke and flame suddenly all
about—and then there was a distinct crunching impact. The rockets
continued to burn, their ferocity diminished. They slackened again. And
yet again. They were reduced to a mere faint murmur.

There was a remarkable immobility of everything. It was the result of
gravity. Earth-value gravity, or very near it. There was a distinct
pressure of one's feet against the floor, and a feeling of heaviness to
one's body which was very different from Lunar City, and more different
still from free flight in emptiness.

Nothing but swirling masses of smoke could be seen out the ports. They
had landed in a forest, of sorts, and the rocket-blasts had burned away
everything underneath, down to solid soil. In a circle forty yards about
the ship the ground was a mass of smoking, steaming ash. Beyond that
flames licked hungrily, creating more dense vapor. Beyond that still
there was only coiling smoke.

Cochrane's headphones yielded Babs' voice, almost wailing:

"
Mr. Cochrane! We must have landed! I want to see!
"

Cochrane pressed the hand-mike button.

"Are we still hooked up to Lunar City?" he demanded. "We can't be, but
are we?"

"
We are
," said Babs' voice mutinously. "
The broadcast went through
all right. They want to talk to you. Everybody wants to talk to you!
"

"Tell them to call back later," commanded Cochrane. "Then leave the beam
working—however it works!—and come up if you like. Tell the moon
operator you'll be away for ten minutes."

He continued to stare out the window. Al, the pilot, stayed in his
cushioned seat before the bank of rocket-controls. The rockets were
barely alight. The ship stayed as it had landed, upright on its triple
fins. He said to Jones:

"It feels like we're solid. We won't topple!"

Jones nodded. The rocket-sound cut off. Nothing happened.

"I think we could have saved fuel on that landing," said Jones. Then he
added, pleased, "Nice! The Dabney field's still on! It has to be started
in a vacuum, but it looks like it can hold air away from itself once
it's established. Nice!"

Babs rushed up the stairs. She gazed impassionedly out of a vision-port.
Then she said disappointedly:

"It looks like—"

"It looks like hell," said Cochrane. "Just smoke and steam and stuff. We
can hope, though, that we haven't started a forest fire, but have just
burned off a landing-place."

They stared out. Presently they went to another port and gazed out of
that. The smoke was annoying, and yet it could have been foreseen. A
moon-rocket, landing at its space-port on Earth, heated the tarmac to
red-hotness in the process of landing. Tender-vehicles had to wait for
it to cool before they could approach. Here the ship had landed in
woodland. Naturally its flames had seared the spot where it came down.
And there was inflammable stuff about, which caught fire. So the ship
was in the situation of a phoenix, necessarily nesting in a
conflagration. Anywhere it landed the same thing would apply, unless it
tried landing on a glacier. But then it would settle down into a lake of
boiling water, amid steam, and could expect to be frozen in as soon as
its landing-place cooled.

Now there was nothing to do. They had to wait. Once the whole ship
quivered very slightly, as if the ground trembled faintly under it. But
there was nothing at which to be alarmed.

They could see that this particular forest was composed mainly of two
kinds of trees which burned differently. One had a central trunk, and it
burned with resinous flames and much black and gray-black smoke. The
other was a curious growth—a solid, massive trunk which did not touch
ground at all, but was held up by aerial roots which supported it aloft
through very many slender shafts widely spread. Possibly the heavier
part was formed on the ground and lifted as its air-roots grew.

It was irritating, though, to be unable to see from the ship so long as
the fire burned outside. The pall of smoke lasted for a long time. In
three hours there were no longer any fiercely blazing areas, but the
ashes still smouldered and smoke still rose. In three hours and a half,
the local sun began to set. There were colorings in the sky, beyond all
comparison glorious. Which was logical enough. When Krakatoa, back on
Earth, blew itself to bits in the eighteen hundreds, it sent such
volumes of dust into the air that sunsets all around the globe were
notably improved for three years afterward. On this planet, smoking
cones were everywhere visible. Volcanic dust, then, made nightfall
magnificent past description. There was not only gold and crimson in the
west. The zenith itself glowed carmine and yellow, and those in the
space-ship gazed up at a sky such as none of them could have imagined
possible.

The colors changed and changed, from yellow to gold all over the sky,
and still the glory continued. Presently there was a deep, deep red,
deep past imagining, and presently faint bluish stars pierced it, and
they stared up at new strange constellations-some very bright
indeed—and all about the ship there was a bed of white ash with glowing
embers in it, and a thin sheet of white smoke still flowed away down the
valley.

It was long after sunset when Cochrane got up from the communicator.
Communication with Earth was broken at last. There was a balloon out in
space somewhere with an atomic battery maintaining all its surface as a
Dabney field plate. The ship maintained a field between itself and that
plate. The balloon maintained another field between itself and another
balloon a mere 178.3 light-years from the solar system. But the
substance of this planet intervened between the nearer balloon and the
ship. Jones made tests and observed that the field continued to exist,
but was plugged by the matter of this newly-arrived-at world. Come
tomorrow, when there was no solid-stone barrier to the passage of
radiation, they could communicate with Earth again.

But Cochrane was weary and now discouraged. So long as talk with Earth
was possible, he'd kept at it. There was a great deal of talking to be
done. But a good deal of it was extremely unsatisfactory.

He found Bill Holden having supper with Babs, on the floor below the
communicator. Very much of the recent talk had been over Cochrane's
head. He felt humiliated by the indignation of scientists who would not
tell him what he wanted to know without previous information he could
not give.

When he went over to the dining-table, he felt that he creaked from
weariness and dejection. Babs looked at him solicitously, and then
jumped up to get him something to eat. Everybody else was again watching
out the ship's ports at the new, strange world of which they could see
next to nothing.

"Bill," said Cochrane fretfully, "I've just been given the dressing-down
of my life! You're expecting to get out of the airlock in the morning
and take a walk. But I've been talking to Earth. I've been given the
devil for landing on a strange planet without bringing along a
bacteriologist, an organic chemist, an ecologist, an epidemiologist, and
a complete laboratory to test everything with, before daring to take a
breath of outside air. I'm warned not to open a port!"

Holden said:

"You sound as if you'd been talking to a biologist with a reputation.
You ought to know better than that!"