Authors: Murray Leinster
Harper spoke from the direction-finder;
“The signal’s coming from that mound, yonder.”
There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the
Nadine’s
course in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which anything could be seen at all.
The
Nadine
checked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that at some places they quivered persistently.
There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it stirred.
Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.
There were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away, there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....
“This sounds and looks like a nice place to live,” said Moran with fine irony.
Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.
“What’s that stuff there, the ground?” he demanded. “We burned it away in landing. I’ve seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the place of grass!”
“That,” said Moran as if brightly, “that’s what I’m to make a garden in. Of evenings I’ll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the delightful sounds of nature.”
Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.
“The signal still comes from that hillock yonder,” he said with finality.
Moran said bitingly;
“That ain’t no hillock, that’s my home!”
Then, instantly he’d said it, he recognized that it could be true. The mound was not a fold in the ground. It was not an up-cropping of the ash-covered stone on which the
Nadine
rested. The enigmatic, dirty-yellow-dirty-red-dirty-blue-and-dirty-black ground-cover hid something. It blurred the shape it covered, very much as enormous cobwebs made solid and opaque would have done. But when one looked carefully at the mound, there was a landing-fin sticking up toward the leaden skies. It was attached to a large cylindrical object of which the fore part was crushed in. The other landing-fins could be traced.
“It’s a ship,” said Moran curtly. “It crash-landed and its crew set up a signal to call for help. None came, or they’d have turned the beacon off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived as I’m expected to live until they died as I’m expected to die.”
Burleigh said angrily;
“You’d do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!”
“Sure,” said Moran, “but a man can gripe, can’t he?”
“You won’t have to live here,” said Burleigh. “We’ll take you somewhere up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we’ll give you everything we can spare. And meanwhile we’ll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be something in it of use to you, too. You’d better come along when we explore.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Moran with irony. “Very kind of you, sir. You’ll go armed, sir?”
Burleigh growled;
“Naturally!”
“Then since I can’t be trusted with a weapon,” said Moran, “I suggest that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff to get in the ship.”
“Right,” growled Burleigh again. “Brawn and Carol, you’ll keep ship. The rest of us wear suits. We don’t know what that stuff is outside.”
Moran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a suit. Modern space-suits weren’t like the ancient crudities with bulging metal casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took the place of metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical nowadays. A man could move about in a late-model space-suit almost as easily as in ship-clothing. The others of the landing-party donned their special garments with the brisk absence of fumbling that these people displayed in every action.
“If there’s a lifeboat left,” said Carol suddenly, “Moran might be able to do something with it.”
“Ah, yes!” said Moran. “It’s very likely that the ship hit hard enough to kill everybody aboard, but not smash the boats!”
“Somebody survived the crash,” said Burleigh, “because they set up a beacon. I wouldn’t count on a boat, Moran.”
“I don’t!” snapped Moran.
He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can’t be an active poison if it can’t dissolve.
They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance which had been ground before the
Nadine
landed. Moran moved scornfully forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char. The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with small holes.
Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings. It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the stone on which the
Nadine
rested. Agitatedly, it spread its wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and squeaks which seemed to fill the air.
“What the devil—.”
Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in obvious panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent that the top of the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over the whitish stuff. The black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels under it.
Carol’s voice came over the helmet-phones.
“
They’re—bugs!
“ she said incredulously. “
They’re beetles! They’re twenty times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around the galaxy, but that’s what they are!
“
Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a colony was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory food. So an elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet before native and terrestrial living things settled down together. It wasn’t impossible that the scuttling things were truly beetles, grown large and monstrous under the conditions of a new planet. And the ground....
“This ground stuff,” said Moran distastefully, “is yeast or some sort of toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn’t have any life on it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for plants and animals eventually. But nobody’s come back to finish up the job.”
Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn’t surprising; not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.
“Suppose we go look at the ship?” said Moran unpleasantly. “Maybe you can find out where you are, and I can find out what’s ahead of me.”
He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of springs.
“We’d better spread out,” added Moran, “or else we’ll break through that skin and be floundering in this mess.”
“I’m giving the orders, Moran!” said Burleigh shortly. “But what you say does make sense.”
He and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.
The ground was not as level as it appeared from the
Nadine’s
control-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.
Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish stuff that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The thing that appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was a foot thick and ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its fore end—where there were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like growths—and another set of feet at its tail end. It progressed sedately by reaching forward with its fore-part, securing a foothold, and then arching its middle portion like a cat arching its back, to bring its hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It was of a dark olive color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was insane but somehow sedate.
Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to speak. Carol’s voice came anxiously;
“
What’s the matter? What do you see?
“
Moran said with savage precision;
“We’re looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so. It’s not an inch-worm any longer. It’s a yard-worm.” Then he said harshly to the men with him; “It’s not a hunting creature on worlds where it’s smaller. It’s not likely to have turned deadly here. Come on!”
He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed. It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless creature more widely than most.
They reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch. He said sardonically;
“This ship won’t do anybody any good. It’s old-style. That thick belt around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more.” There was an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing everywhere. “We’re going to find that this wreck has been here a century at least!”
Without orders, he turned on the torch. A four-foot flame of pure blue-white leaped out. He touched its tip to the fungoid soil. Steam leaped up. He used the flame like a gigantic scalpel, cutting a square a yard deep in the whitish stuff, and then cutting it across and across to destroy it. Thick fumes arose, and quiverings and shakings began. Black creatures in their labyrinths of tunnels began to panic. Off to the right the blanket-like surface ripped and they poured out. They scuttled crazily here and there. Some took to wing. By instinct the other men—the armed ones—moved back from the smoke. They wore space-helmets but they felt that there should be an intolerable smell.
Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born. Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened. But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not altogether blame the others. They couldn’t land at any colonized world with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as fugitives. They would be returned to it. They’d be executed.
Then Carol’s voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;
“
Look out! It’s coming! Kill it! Kill it—.
“
He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on his way out of the hollow he’d carved when he heard Harper cry out horribly.