Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (21 page)

"What happened?" demanded Holden.

"Our little psychopath," said Cochrane in a grating voice, "put on an
act. He threatened me with a rifle. He hit Alicia first. Jamison, trace
that bullet-hole. See if it got through to the skin of the ship."

He started for the stairs again. Then he was startled by the frozen
immobility of Holden. Holden's face was deadly. His hands were clenched.
Johnny Simms said with a fine boyish frankness:

"I'm sorry, Cochrane! No hard feelings?"

"Yes," Cochrane snapped. "Hard feelings! I've got them!"

He took Holden's arm. He steered him up the steps. Holden resisted for
the fraction of a second, and Cochrane gripped his arm tighter. He got
him up to the deck above.

"If I'd been here," said Holden, unsteadily, "I'd have killed him—if he
hit Alicia! Psychopath or no psychopath—"

"Shut up," said Cochrane firmly. "He shot at me! And in my small way I'm
a psychopath too, Bill. My psychosis is that I don't like his kind of
psychosis. I am psychotically devoted to sense and my possibly quaint
idea of decency. I am abnormally concerned with the real world—and
you'd better come back to it! Look here! I'm pathologically in revolt
against such imbecilities as an overcrowded Earth and people being
afraid of their jobs and people going crackpot from despair. You don't
want me to get cured of that, do you? Then get hold of yourself!"

Bill Holden swallowed. He was still white. But he managed to grimace.

"You're right. Lucky I was outside. You're not a bad psychologist
yourself, Jed."

"I'm better," said Cochrane cynically, "at putting on shows with scrap
film-tape and dream-stuff. So I'm going to look at the films Bell took
as we landed on this planet, and work out some ideas for broadcasts."

He went up another flight, and Holden went with him in a sort of stilly,
unnatural calm. Cochrane ran the film-tape through the reversed camera
for examination.

Outside, there waved long green tresses of extraordinarily elongated
leaves. The patches of reed-like stuff stirred in the breeze. Jamison
appeared in the control-room. He began to question Holden hopefully
about the ground-cover outside. It was not grass. It was broad-leaved.
There would be, Jamison decided happily, an infinitude of under-leaf
forms of life. They would most likely be insects, and there would be
carnivorous other insects to prey upon them. Some species would find it
advantageous to be burrowing insects. There must be other kinds of birds
than the giant specimens that looked like men at a distance, too. On the
glacier planet there had been few birds but many furry creatures.
Possibly the situation was reversed here, though of course it need not
be ...

"Hm," said Cochrane when the films were all run through. "Ice-caps and
land and seas. Plenty of green vegetation, so presumably the air is
normal for humans. Since you're alive, Holden, we can assume it isn't
instantly fatal, can't we? The gravity's tolerable—a little on the
light side, maybe, compared to the glacier planet."

He was silent, staring at the blank wall of the control-room. He
frowned. Suddenly he said:

"Does anybody back on Earth know that Babs and I were castaways?"

"No," said Holden, still very quiet indeed. "Alicia ran the
control-board. She told everybody you were too busy to be called to the
communicator. It was queer with you away! Jamison and Bell tied
themselves in chairs and spliced tape. Johnny, of course"—his voice was
very carefully toneless—"wouldn't do anything useful. I was space-sick
a lot of the time. But I did help Alicia figure out what to say on the
communicator. There must be hundreds of calls backed up for you to
take."

"Good!" said Cochrane. "I'll go take some of them. Jones, could we make
a flit to somewhere else on this planet?"

Jones said negligently,

"I told you we've got fuel to reach the Milky Way. Where do you want to
go?"

"Anywhere," said Cochrane. "The scenery isn't dramatic enough here for a
new broadcast. We've got to have some lurid stuff for our next show.
Things are shaping up except for the need of just the right scenery to
send back to Earth."

"What kind of scenery do you want?"

"Animals preferred," said Cochrane. "Dinosaurs would do. Or buffalo or a
reasonable facsimile. What I'd actually like more than anything else
would really be a herd of buffalo."

Jamison gasped.

"Buffalo?"

"Meat," said Cochrane in an explanatory tone. "On the hoof. The
public-relations job all this has turned into, demands a careful
stimulation of all the basic urges. So I want people to think of steaks
and chops and roasts. If I could get herds of animals from one horizon
to another—."

"Meat-herds coming up," said Jones negligently. "I'll call you."

Cochrane did not believe him. He went down to the communicator again. He
prepared to take the calls from Earth that had been backed up behind the
emergency demand for an immediate broadcast-show that he'd met while the
ship came to its landing. There was an enormous amount of business piled
up. And it was slow work handling it. His voice took six seconds to pass
through something over two hundred light-years of space in the Dabney
field, and then two seconds in normal space from the relay in Lunar
City. It was twelve seconds between the time he finished saying
something before the first word of the reply reached him. It was very
slow communication. He reflected annoyedly that he'd have to ask Jones
to make a special Dabney field communication field as strong as was
necessary to take care of the situation.

The rockets growled and roared outside. The ship lifted. Johnny Simms
came storming up from below.

"My trophy!" he cried indignantly. "I want my trophy!"

Cochrane looked up impatiently from the screen.

"What trophy?"

"The thing I shot!" cried Johnny Simms fiercely. "I want to have it
mounted! Nobody else ever killed anything like that! I want it!"

The ship surged upward more strongly. Cochrane said coldly:

"It's too late now. Get out. I'm busy."

He returned his eyes to the screen. Johnny Simms raced for the stairs. A
little later Cochrane heard shoutings in the control-room. But he was
too busy to inquire.

The ship drifted—with all the queasy sensation of no-weight—and lifted
again, and then there was a fairly long period of weightlessness. At
such times Holden would be greenish and sick and tormented by
space-sickness. Which might be good for him at this particular time. For
a long time, it seemed, there were alternating periods of lift and free
fall, which in themselves were disturbing. Once the free fall lasted
until Cochrane began to feel uneasy. But then the rockets roared once
more and boomed loudly as if the ship were leaving the planet
altogether.

But Cochrane was talking business. In part he bluffed. In part, quite
automatically, he demanded much more than he expected to get, simply
because it is the custom in business not to be frank about anything.
Whatever he asked, the other man would offer less. So he asked too much,
and the other man offered too little, each knowing in advance very
nearly on what terms they would finally settle. Considering the cost of
beam-phone time to Lunar City, not to mention the extension to the
stars, it was absurd, but it was the way business is done.

Presently Cochrane called Babs and Alicia and had them witness a
tentative agreement, which had to be ratified by a board of directors of
a corporation back on Earth. That board would jump at it, but the
stipulation for possible cancellation had to be made. It was
mumbo-jumbo. Cochrane felt satisfyingly competent at handling it.

While the formalities were in progress, the ship surged and fell and
swayed and surged again. Cochrane said ruefully:

"I hate to ask you to work under conditions like this, Babs."

Babs grinned. He flushed a little.

"I know! When you were working for me I wasn't considerate."

"Who am I working for now?"

"Us," said Cochrane. Then he looked guiltily at Alicia. He felt
embarrassment at having said anything in the least sentimental before
her. Considering Johnny Simms, it was not too tactful. Her cheek, where
it had been red, now showed a distinct bruise. He said: "Sorry,
Alicia—about Johnny."

"I got into it myself," said Alicia. "I loved him. He isn't really bad.
If you want to know, I think he simply decided years ago that he
wouldn't grow up past the age of six. He was a rich man's spoiled little
boy. It was fun. So he made a career of it. His family let him. I"—she
smiled faintly, "I'm making a career of taking care of him."

"Something can be done even with a six-year-old," growled Cochrane.
"Holden—. But he wouldn't be the best one to try."

"He definitely wouldn't be the best one to try," said Alicia very
quietly.

Cochrane turned away. She knew how Bill Holden felt. Which might or
might not be comforting to him.

The communicator again. The pictures of foot-high furry bipeds on the
glacier planet had made a sensation on television. A toy-manufacturer
wanted the right to make toys like them. The pictures were copyrighted.
Cochrane matter-of-factly made the deal. There would be miniature
extra-terrestrial animals on sale in all toy-shops within days.
Spaceways, Inc., would collect a royalty on each toy sold.

The rockets boomed, and lessened their noise, and wavered up and down
again. Then there was that deliberate, crunching feel of the great
landing-fins pressing into soil with all the ship's weight bearing down.
The rockets ran on, drumming ever-so-faintly, for a little longer. Then
they cut off.

"We're landed again! Let's see where we are!"

They went up to the control-room. Johnny Simms stood against the wall,
sulking. He had managed his life very successfully by acting like a
spoiled little boy. Now he had lost any idea of saner conduct. At the
moment, he looked ridiculous. But Alicia had a bruised cheek and
Cochrane could have been killed, and Holden had been in danger because
Johnny Simms wanted to and insisted on acting like a rich man's spoiled
little boy.

It occurred to Cochrane that Alicia would probably find recompense for
her humiliation and pain in the little-boy penitence—exactly as
temporary as any other little-boy emotion—when she and Johnny Simms
were alone together.

The ship had come down close to the sunset-line of the planet. Away to
the west there was the glint of blue sea. Dusk was already descending
here. There were smoothly contoured hills in view, and there was a dark
patch of forest on one hilltop, and the trees at the woodland's edge had
the same drooping, grass-blade-like foliage of the trees first seen. But
there were larger and more solid giants among them. The ship had landed
on a small plateau, and downhill from it a spring gushed out with such
force that the water-surface was rounded by pressure from below. The
water overflowed and went down toward the sea.

"I think we're all right," said Al, the pilot. But he stayed in his
seat, in case the ship threatened to sway over. Cochrane inspected the
outer world.

"Well?"

"We sighted what I think you want," said Jones. He looked dead-pan and
yet secretly complacent. "Just watch."

The dusk grew deeper. Colorings appeared in the west. They were very
similar to the sunset-colorings on Earth.

"Not many volcanoes here."

The amount of dust was limited, as on Earth. A great star winked into
view in the east. It was as bright as Venus seen from Earth. It had a
just-perceptible disk. Close to it, infinitely small, there was a speck
of light which seemed somehow like a star. Cochrane squinted at it. He
thought of the great gas-giant world he'd seen out a port on the way
here. It had an attendant moon-world which itself had icecaps and seas
and continents. He called Jamison.

"I think that's the planet," agreed Jamison. "We passed close by it. We
saw it."

"It had a moon," observed Cochrane. "A big one. It looked like a world
itself. What would it be like there?"

"Cooler than this," said Jamison promptly, "because it's farther from
the sun. But it might pick up some heat from reflection from its
primary's white clouds. It would be a fair world. It has oceans and
continents and strings of foam-girt islands. But its sea is strange and
dark and restless. Gigantic tides surge in its depths, drawn by the
planetary colossus about which it swings. Its animal life—."

"Cut," said Cochrane dryly. "What do you really think? Could it be
another inhabitable world for people to move to?"

Jamison looked annoyed at having been cut off.

"Probably," he said more prosaically. "The tides would be monstrous,
though."

"Might be used for power," said Cochrane. "We'll see ..."

Then Jones spoke with elaborate casualness:

"Here's something to look at. On the ground."

Cochrane moved to see. The dusk had deepened still more. The smooth,
green-covered ground had become a dark olive. Where bare hillsides gave
upon the sky, there were dark masses flowing slowly forward. The edges
of the hills turned black, and the blackness moved down their nearer
slopes. It was not an even front of darkness. There were patches which
preceded the others. They did not stay distinct. They merged with the
masses which followed them, and other patches separated in their places.
All of the darkness moved without haste, with a sort of inexorable
deliberation. It moved toward the ship and the valley and the gushing
fountain and the stream which flowed from it.

"What on Earth—" began Cochrane.

"You're not on Earth," said Jones chidingly. "Al and I found 'em. You
asked for buffalo or a reasonable facsimile. I won't guarantee anything;
but we spotted what looked like herds of beasts moving over the green
plains inland. We checked, and they seemed to be moving in this
direction. Once we dropped down low and Bell got some pictures. When he
enlarged them, we decided they'd do. So we lined up where they were all
headed for, and here we are. And here they are!"