Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (22 page)

Cochrane stared with all his eyes. Behind him, he heard Bell fuming to
himself as he tried to adjust a camera for close-up pictures in the
little remaining light. Babs stood beside Cochrane, staring
incredulously.

The darkness was beasts. They blackened the hillsides on three sides of
the ship. They came deliberately, leisurely onward. They were literally
uncountable. They were as numerous as the buffalo that formerly thronged
the western plains of America. In black, shaggy masses, they came toward
the spring and its stream. Nearby, their heads could be distinguished.
And all of this was perfectly natural.

The cosmos is one thing. Where life exists, its living creatures will
fit themselves cunningly into each niche where life can be maintained.
On vast green plains there will be animals to graze—and there will be
animals to prey on them. So the grazing things will band together in
herds for self-defense and reproduction. And where the ground is covered
with broad-leaved plants, such plants will shelter innumerable tiny
creatures, and some of them will be burrowers. So rain will drain
quickly into those burrowings and not make streams. And therefore the
drainage will reappear as springs, and the grazing animals will go to
those springs to drink. Often, they will gather more densely at
nightfall for greater protection from their enemies. They will even
often gather at the springs or their overflowing brooks. This will
happen anywhere that plains and animals exist, on any planet to the edge
of the galaxy, because there are laws for living things as well as
stones.

Great dark masses of the beasts moved unhurriedly past the ship. They
were roughly the size of cattle—which itself would be determined by the
gravity of the planet, setting a maximum favorable size for grazing
beasts with an ample food-supply. There were thousands and tens of
thousands of them visible in the deepening night. They crowded to the
gushing spring and to the stream that flowed from it. They drank.
Sometimes groups of them waited patiently until the way to the water was
clear.

"Well?" said Jones.

"I think you filled my order," admitted Cochrane.

The night became starlight only, and Cochrane impatiently demanded of Al
or somebody that they measure the length of a complete day and night on
this planet. The stars would move overhead at such-and-such a rate. So
many degrees in so much time. He needed, said Cochrane—as if this order
also could be filled—a day-length not more than six hours shorter or
longer than an Earth-day.

Jones and Al conferred and prepared to take some sort of reading without
any suitable instrument. Cochrane moved restlessly about. He did not
notice Johnny Simms. Johnny had stood sullenly in his place, not moving
to look out the windows, ostentatiously ignoring everything and
everybody. And nobody paid attention! It was not a matter to offend an
adult, but it was very shocking indeed to a rich man's son who had been
able to make a career of staying emotionally at a six-year-old level.

Cochrane's thoughts were almost feverish. If the day-length here was
suitable, all his planning was successful. If it was too long or too
short, he had grimly to look further—and Spaceways, Inc., would still
not be as completely a success as he wanted. It would have been much
simpler to have measured the apparent size of the local sun by any means
available, and then simply to have timed the intervals between its
touching of the horizon and its complete setting. But Cochrane hadn't
thought of it at sunset.

Presently he wandered down to where Babs and Alicia worked in the
kitchen to prepare a meal. He tried to help. The atmosphere was much
more like that in a small apartment back home than on a space-ship among
the stars. This was not in any way such a journey of exploration as the
writers of fiction had imagined. Jamison came down presently and offered
to prepare some special dish in which he claimed to excel. There was no
mention of Johnny Simms. Alicia, elaborately ignoring all that was past,
told Jamison that Babs and Cochrane were now an acknowledged romance and
actually had plans for marriage immediately the ship returned to Earth.
Jamison made the usual inept jests suited to such an occasion.

Presently they called the others to dinner. Jones and Johnny Simms were
long behind the others, and Jones' expression was conspicuously
dead-pan. Johnny Simms looked sulkily rebellious. His sulking had not
attracted attention in the control-room. He had meant to refuse sulkily
to come to dinner. But Jones wouldn't trust him—alone in the
control-room. Now he sat down, scowling, and ostentatiously refused to
eat, despite Alicia's coaxing. He snarled at her.

This, also, was not in the tradition of the behavior of voyagers of
space. They dined in the over-large saloon of a ship that had never been
meant really to leave the moon. The ship stood upright under strange
stars upon a stranger world, and all about it outside there were the
resting forms of thousands upon thousands of creatures like cattle. And
the dinner-table conversation was partly family-style jests about Babs'
and Cochrane's new romantic status, and partly about a television
broadcast which had to be ready for a certain number of Earth-hours yet
ahead. And nobody paid any attention to Johnny Simms, glowering at the
table and refusing to eat.

It was a mistake, probably.

Much, much later, Cochrane and Babs were again in the control-room, and
this time they were alone.

"Look!" said Cochrane vexedly. "Do you realize that I haven't kissed you
since we got back on the ship? What happened?"

"You!" said Babs indignantly. "You've been thinking about something else
every second of the time!"

Cochrane did not think about anything else for several minutes. He began
to recall with new tolerance the insane antics of people he had been
producing shows about. They had reason—those imaginary people—to act
unreasonably.

But presently his mind was working again.

"We've got to make some plans for ourselves," he said. "We can live back
on Earth, of course. We've already made a neat sum out of the broadcasts
from this trip. But I don't think we'll want to live the way one has to
live on Earth, with too many people there. I'd like—."

Somebody came clattering up the stairs from below.

"Johnny?" It was Bell. "Is he up here?"

Cochrane released Babs.

"No. He's not here. Why?"

"He's missing," said Bell apprehensively. "Alicia says he took a gun. A
gun's gone, anyhow. He's vanished!"

Cochrane swore under his breath. A fool asserting his dignity with a gun
could be a serious matter indeed. He switched on the control-room
lights. He was not there. They went down and hunted over the main
saloon. He was not there. Then Holden called harshly from the next deck
down.

There was Alicia by the inner airlock door. Her face was deathly pale.
She had opened the door. The outer door was open too—and it had not
been opened since this last landing by anybody else. The landing-sling
cables were run out. They swung slowly in the light that fell upon them
from the inside of the ship.

A smell came in the opening. It was the smell of beasts. It was a musky,
ammoniacal smell, somehow not alien even though it was unfamiliar. There
were noises outside in the night. Grunting sounds. Snortings. There were
such sounds as a vast concourse of grazing creatures would make in the
night-time, when gathered by thousands and myriads for safety and for
rest.

"He—went out," said Alicia desperately. "He meant to punish us. He's a
spoiled little boy. We weren't nice to him. And—he was afraid of us
too! So he ran away to make us sorry!"

Cochrane went to look out of the lock and to call Johnny Simms back. He
gazed into absolute blackness on the ground. He felt a queasy giddiness
because there was no hand-railing at the outer lock door and he knew the
depth of the fall outside. He raged, within himself. Johnny Simms would
feel triumphant when he was called. He would require to be pleaded with
to return. He would pompously set terms for returning before he was
killed....

Cochrane saw a flash of fire and the short streak of a tracer-bullet's
patch before it hit something. He heard the report of the gun. He heard
a bellow of agony and then a scream of purest terror from Johnny Simms.

Then, from the ground, arose a truly monstrous tumult. Every one of the
creatures below raised its voice in a horrible, bleating cry. The volume
of sound was numbing—was agonizing in sheer impact. There were
stirrings and clickings as of horns clashing against each other.

Another scream from Johnny Simms. He had moved. It appeared that he was
running. Cochrane saw more gun-flashes, there were more shots. He
clenched his hands and waited for the thunderous vibration that would be
all this multitude of animals pounding through the night in blind
stampede.

It did not come. There was only that bleating, horrible outcry as all
the beasts bellowed of alarm and created this noise to frighten their
assailants away.

Twice more there were shots in the night. Johnny Simms fired crazily and
screamed in hysterical panic. Each time the shots and screaming were
farther away.

There were no portable lights with which to make a search. It was
unthinkable to go blundering among the beasts in darkness.

There was nothing to do. Cochrane could only watch and listen helplessly
while the strong beast-smell rose to his nostrils, and the innumerable
noises of unseen uneasy creatures sounded in his ears.

Inside the ship Alicia wept hopelessly. Babs tried in vain to comfort
her.

The sun rose. Cochrane noted the time, it was fourteen hours since
sunset. The local day would be something more than an Earth-day in
length. The manner of sunrise was familiar. There was a pale gray light
in the sky. It strengthened. Then reddish colors appeared, and changed
to gold, and the unnamed stars winked out one after another. Presently
the nearer hillsides ceased to be black. There was light everywhere.

Alicia, white and haggard, waited to see what the light would show.

But there was heavy mist everywhere. The hill-crests were clear, and the
edge of the visible woodland, and the top half of the ship's shining
hull rose clear of curiously-tinted, slowly writhing fog. But everything
else seemed submerged in a sea of milk.

But the mist grew thinner as the sun shone on it. Its top writhed to
nothingness. All this was wholly commonplace. Even clouds in the sky
were of types well-known enough. Which was, when one thought about it,
inevitable. This was a Sol-type sun, of the same kind and color as the
star which warmed the planet Earth. It had planets, like the sun of
men's home world. There was a law—Bode's Law—which specified that
planets must float in orbits bearing such-and-such relationships to each
other. There must also be a law that planets in those orbits must bear
such-and-such relationships of size to each other. There must be a law
that winds must blow under ordinary conditions, and clouds form at
appointed heights and times. It would be very remarkable if Earth were
an exception to natural laws that other worlds obey.

So the strangeness of the morning to those who watched from the ship was
more like the strangeness of an alien land on Earth than that of a
wholly alien planet.

The lower dawnmist thinned. Gazing down, Cochrane saw dark masses
moving slowly past the ship's three metal landing-fins. They were the
beasts of the night, moving deliberately from their bed-ground to the
vast plains inland. There were bunches of hundreds, and bunches of
scores. There were occasional knots of dozens only.

From overhead and through the mist Cochrane could not see individual
animals too clearly, but they were heavy beasts and clumsy ones. They
moved sluggishly. Their numbers dwindled. He saw groups of no more than
four or five. He saw single animals trudging patiently away.

He saw no more at all.

Then the sunlight touched the inland hills. The last of the morning mist
dissolved, and there were the dead bodies of two beasts near the base of
the ship. Johnny Simms had killed them with his first panicky shots of
the night. There was another dead beast a quarter-mile away.

Cochrane gave orders. Jones and Al could not leave the ship. They were
needed to get it back to Earth, with full knowledge of how to make other
starships. Cochrane tried to leave Babs behind, but she would not stay.
Bell had loaded himself with a camera and film-tape besides a weapon,
before Cochrane even began his organization. Holden was needed for an
extra gun. Alicia, tearless and despairing, would not be left behind.
Cochrane turned wryly to Jamison.

"I don't think Johnny was killed," he said. "He'd gotten a long way off
before it happened, anyhow. We've got to hunt for him. With beasts like
those of last night, there'll naturally be other creatures to prey on
them. We might run into anything. If we don't get back, you get to the
lawyers I've had representing Spaceways. They'll get rich off the job,
but you'll end up rich, too."

"The best bet all around," said Jamison in a low tone, "would be to find
him trampled to death."

"I agree," said Cochrane sourly. "But apparently the beasts don't
stampede. Maybe they don't even charge, but just form rings to protect
their females and young, like musk-oxen. I'm afraid he's alive, but I'm
also afraid we'll never find him."

He marshaled his group. Jones had walkie-talkies ready, deftly removed
for the purpose from space-suits nobody had used since leaving Lunar
City—and Holden took one to keep in touch by. They went down in the
sling, two at a time.

Cochrane regarded the two dead animals near the base of the ship. They
were roughly the size of cattle, and they were shaggy like buffalo. They
had branching, pointed, deadly horns. They had hoofs, single hoofs, not
cloven. They were not like any Earth animal. But horns and hoofs will
appear in any system of parallel evolution. It would seem even more
certain that proteins and amino acids and such compounds as hemoglobin
and fat and muscle-tissue should be identical as a matter of chemical
inevitability. These creatures had teeth and they were herbivorous. Bell
photographed them painstakingly.