Andre Norton (ed) (15 page)

think
, inside ship. Ship over there—maybe five
miles." Joe grinned.

Far off I saw the burnished hull gleaming in
the sunshine. "How do you live, Joe?" I demanded.

"Had my supplies.
Had space-tent," Joe answered.
"Now eat hard fruit. And big slow bugs. Taste good when hungry. No game.
Plenty gold ornaments though—and stuff for houses.
Vases—very
nice.
 
Maybe now we start
business, eh, Dave?"

"You're crazy, Joe," I growled.

Under
Joe's guidance, we dug for water. Twice we got nothing. But the third time,
fourteen feet down, we got a muddy swirl of brackish stuff that widened to a
pool. It was all that we needed. Distillation could get the mineral out of it,
if we weren't squeamish about what we drank.

By radio we learned that Kopplin's party was
still looking. They hadn't found anything.

Little
Vasiliev laughed gleefully. "I guess there are neglected branches of
science," he said. "About hunches—that is what you call them, is it
not?
About pigeons finding their way home.
About your
friend 'smelling' water . . ."

Sure.
Joe Whiteskunk is an Indian—probably not quite an ordinary one. Maybe this
story is mostly about him. Maybe it's about those deeper sciences.
Or about fate and destiny and luck.
Or
about pride and humbleness.
Or how simple life reaches out, sometimes
winning, sometimes losing. Or about high romance . . .

I know how Joe managed to live alone on Mars.
But I don't know how his mind stood it—how he escaped going mad. Maybe, like a
primitive thing, he just didn't realize where he was—and that saved him. Maybe
his luck was just a matter of being part of nature.

Nature
is a word that covers a lot of ground.
An atom, an amoeba, a
galaxy—and everything in between.
But they all must be joined together
someway, be in sympathy and understanding. And maybe Joe's flesh is part of
that understanding. That's why he always seems to know.

After our misfortunes most of us were fed up
with Mars. The romance thinned. We wanted to go home to rest and brag. We could
fix up our ship now—or maybe even use the Martian one, refitting it to be a
little more comfortable for human occupation.

On my fourth day on Mars I said,
"Joe—how would you like to be back on the ranch for a while?"

Joe
thought about it. Then he answered, "No go. Stay here. Nice place. Plenty
room. You go, Dave." His black eyes were on the distance. "Got plenty
business here," he added.

None of us left for over seven months. By
then we had a little camp set up—not much different, though far smaller, than
Camp Copernicus. Maybe it'll be our first Martian city before long.

I left with the ship—I had to. But Frank
stayed, and Vasiliev and a few others. I took Joe's "trade stuff' along.
Golden ornaments, plaques, vases, strange carvings, stuff worth an emperor's
ransom—because civilized people love high romance and call it beautiful. Does
Joe really understand? I wonder.

I've
brought Joan, my wife, back to Mars with me. Life goes on. Joe doesn't show up
here much anymore. He's browner and more withered than ever. But with the help
of decent food he's a lot spryer than he used to be. And his eyes are young.
Has he found something like the fountain of youth too? Or is it just that the
thirty-eight-percent-of-Earth-norm gravity of Mars is easy on old muscles?
Search me.

Yesterday I saw him trudge off again toward
the desert. He seems to belong here as much as the tattered Martian plants. I
couldn't have believed that possible, once. Joe's a real trail-blazer. He
doesn't understand galaxies. Stars are still just little specks in the sky to
him.

But there must be a drive and an
understanding in his blood and bone and nerves. Perhaps it's a vast primitive
yearning. It's the kind of thing that will lead us out to the farthest
galaxies, maybe a thousand years from now, if our luck holds. But it's not
distance alone. It's grandeur, dimly seen. It's mind, com-

prehension
, mystery. Maybe it's a matter of becoming
demigods. Who knows? And don't ask me. Dream it up yourself.

Maybe we of Earth will be the ones to do
it—though the Martians and the Asteroidians failed.

Ot
/T
BEYOND
the
farthermost
planet
of
SoTs
system— toward
the
heart
of
the
galaxy
where
rich
worlds
revolve slowly
or
swiftly
about
other
suns,
waiting
for
the
foot of
man
and
the
weight
of
his
ambition
to
change
them. What
if
an
explorer
discovers
a
too
perfect
world? Such
a
gift
from
fortune
arouses
suspicion,
not gratitude.
Where
was
the
hidden
trap,
Captain Chang
wondered.

Thou Good and Faithful

K.
HOUSTON
BRUNNER

The big ship eased leisurely out of
hyperspace, solidified into reality, and settled with a few prim puffs from its
steering jets into an orbit around the planet.

"There it is,
captain," said Deeley with pardonable pride.

The captain nodded, pipe clenched between his
teeth, and said, T
wonder
what we'll find here."

In
seventy years of wandering he had grown to expect the unexpected.

Around him in the big cabin that tradition
insisted on calling the bridge the four senior officers under his command sat
at their control desks, from which each co-ordinated the information provided
by his particular department. Officially, Deeley's title was Nav; Spinelli's,
Engines; Engelhart, Personnel; Adhem, Biological, and Keston, Observation. In
practice, these names were pretty elastic.

The
planet filled nearly half of the direct viewport with blue-green radiance,
dimmed in patches by the presence of two atmosphereless moons which lay like
dark stones in a shallow shining pool. Beyond it hung the curtain of ten
million stars— a mass of dusky gold, the very center of the galaxy.
102

It didn't yet seem right that there should be
stars packed so thick in any planet's sky.

The
captain's name was Chang—a good terrestrial name-but he had been raised on New
Earth, Alpha Centauri IV, way out towards the rim of the galaxy, where the
stars were no more than occasional flecks of gold in the dark velvet of the
sky. Here in the neighborhood of the Hub it was different. Here it was the
black that pitted the bright.

The
world below looked to be a good world, though it was maybe twice as old as
Earth. This was an older part of the universe. There were a few brilliant
clouds in its atmosphere, and there were wide seas, but not so wide as Earth's,
being less than half the surface of the planet. And chlorophyll green shone
bright on the spectroscopes.

There were no deserts and
no ice-packs.

Behind
him, Keston of Observation cleared his throat and said, "Captain, here's
the data on the planet."

"Let's have," said
Chang.

"Density,
mass and surface grav are so close to Earth normal we can't differentiate them.
Air's a little thin—about thirteen point six pounds at sea level, I guess—and
high on
C0
₂
and low on oxygen, but only
about a per cent each way. Plenty of water vapor—in short, breathable.
Forty-five per cent of the surface is ocean.
Has
a
twenty-nine-hour day and about an eleven-month year. It's an older world than
Earth,
and the pull of the moons and the sun have
respectively lengthened the day and shortened the year."

Chang nodded, said,
"Is that all?"

"Just about.
We haven't made out any evidence of
habitation yet, but that'll come if it exists. There's a lot of
vegetation-chlorophyll vegetation—both in and out of the sea."

Chang took his pipe out of his mouth and blew
smoke. He said, "Good. Tell me if you get anything else, will you."

"Right,
sir."

He sucked on his pipe ruminatively, relaxing
in his chair before the viewport. A planet matching Earth this close was a find
in a million, literally, for an oxygen-high atmosphere was the second most
unstable of all possible atmospheres and rarely survived, whereas
chlorine-high, hydrogen-high and methane-high were all too common. It could
mean retirement and ease for them when the colonists came. They could ask their
own price for an acre of ground.

Assuming it was uninhabited and theirs by
right of prior discovery, that was, and he felt it might be. This close to the
Hub, where the ships that had been so far might be numbered on your fingers, a
previous discovery was unlikely, and as for indigenous races, oxygen reactions
seemed to build unstable life forms which died quickly. A world twice as old as
Earth might once have been inhabited—

But he was basing his judgments on data
gathered far away.
Too far away.
 
Here, everything might very well be new.

From
behind him, Keston said: "Sir, Sandiman thinks he's found signs of
habitation on the inner moon."

"Indigenous or
planted?" said Chang.

"Can't tell, sir, but
I'd advise investigation."

"We'll take a look at it, then,"
said Chang with decision.
"Engines!"

"Sir?" said a quiet voice with a
lilting Romance accent. Spinelli had inherited that from an ancestor more than
half a millennium ago, back in the days before the races merged.

"Shift us over to the
nearer moon," said Chang.

"Sir," said
Spinelli.

The viewport changed. For an instant there
was the golden glory of stars. Then the barren, airless, pitted face of the
inner moon began to show clearly, lit by the reflected light of its primary,
and at last hung steady, almost filling the viewport, while they played off its
attraction against an antigrav beam. Chang looking it over, said, "Keston,
have someone put a 'scope on this port, will you?"

The
image blanked for a second before a small section of it reappeared,
fantastically bloated, as if it were scant yards away instead of two hundred
miles. Keston volunteered, "Sandiman reported something in the crater with
its ringwall in three sections—see it?"

"I see," nodded
Chang.

Deeley
had got up from his chair and come over to stand behind him. Shortly, he
uttered a muffled exclamation and said, "Sir, what's that hut?"

Chang
permitted himself a slight smile. "It's rather more than a hut," he
said. "From the way it shows up you could put this ship inside it and have
room to spare. Looks to me like the top dome—supply lock, maybe—of a
pressurized city."

Deeley
said, with the disappointment in his voice partly masked by his interest in
contacting a new culture, "Then that means a non-indigenous race, doesn't
it?"

"Looks
like it," nodded Chang, leaning closer to the port. He said in a curious
tone, "Keston, have the magnification stepped up, and tell me what's odd
about that dome."

The
picture again swelled enormously, and Keston said, with more than a hint of
relief in his voice, "Locks are open, sir, inner and outer, and there are
a number of meteor rents in the roof."

"I
thought it looked odd. That means we needn't expect much trouble from that
quarter. Is it the only one on the moon?"

After
a pause, "Yes, sir," reported Keston. "And we haven't found any
signs of habitation on the planet, either. Hardesty thinks he's found a city
site, but it's so overgrown it equally well could be a natural formation. No
sign of cities or even roads."

"Good,"
grunted Chang. "Spinelli, put us down within shouting distance of that
dome,
will
you?"

"Right, sir,"
Spinelli answered.

His viewport blanked for a moment as they
took the 'scope off it, and then relit to show the distant moon rising rapidly
to meet them. At this range he could quite easily make out the dome with his
naked eye.

Then
the crater with the triply split wall filled the port, and the big ship settled
with hardly a jolt on a level surface fused and scarred by the hot jets of
rockets landing and taking off.

The image in the port stilled, and was that
of the ringwall outlined against the stars.

A
searchlight sprang up, began a methodical sweep across the floor of the crater,
and they waited with interest for what it might show.

After
a while, Keston said, "Sir, we've picked up a rocket in the shadow of the
far ringwall.
I
have it on my screen."

Chang
got up and came across the bridge to survey the harsh black and white image in
front of Keston. The rocket was a small one, perhaps even an individual job,
and its hull shone unblink-ingly in the glare of the searchlight.

"Locks
wide, you notice," commented Chang after a while. "Looks like it got
left behind when they quit. Put the building on the screen, will you?"

The
screen flickered and then went blank except for the jagged line of the ringwall
silhouetted against the stars. It was a matter of two or three seconds before
the searchlight swept around and showed a tall building, tall with the
fantastic flying tallness of low gravity, that looked like the main hall at
Grand Central Spaceport made aesthetically acceptable. You could have put the
ship inside it with no trouble at all.

Chang
studied it with considerable interest. It was plainly the work of a race versed
in architecture, for it was superbly designed to waste no more than necessary
on resisting gravity, yet to maintain an atmosphere at fourteen pounds to the
square inch without risk.

But
it was open and deserted.

They stood looking at it in silence, except
for the very quiet humming of the generators and the
creak-crack
of the hull that was the ship talking to
itself
.
Finally Chang straightened with a grunt.

"Engelhart!"

"Sir?"

"Are your men standing
to battle stations?"

"Of course, sir,"
said Engelhart with injured dignity.

"They needn't. There
won't be a reception committee. But detail me a couple of men to come on over
and take a gander at this place before we go downstairs, will you? You can come
yourself if you like."

"Glad
to, sir," said Engelhart. "What do I tell the men we've got?"

"Looks like a plum cake, but tell them
not to count their chickens. Say we've struck an Earth-type world which looks
like
it's
uninhabited, but emphasize that bit about
the
looking."

"Good enough, sir.
When do we start?"

"As
soon as you're ready," said Chang. He knocked out his pipe and went
towards the door, paused before going out to look at the scene in the viewport.
So many
stars,
and no knowing what you'd find among
them—