Andre Norton (ed) (17 page)

Twenty-nine
seconds later the ship, red-hot from her whirlwind swoop through the
atmosphere, fired half a square mile of grasslike plants in the approximate
middle of a smoothly rolling plain dotted with clumps of trees at intervals of
about a mile. Engelhart, whose responsibility it was, ordered out the extinguisher
sprays, and when the mist of their operation blew clear of the viewport Chang
looked out on a blue sky a little darker than that of his own planet and a sun
a little yellower than the one under which he had grown up. But the vegetation
was green and waved in the breeze like grass, and faintly on the horizon showed
low
blue mountains
. He said almost absently,
"Deeley, this is a splendid world."

"Thank
you, sir," said Deeley. He had deduced the existence of it from a distance
of ninety light-years and brought them out of hyperspace within half a million
miles of it—which was a remarkable piece of navigation—so there was reason for
congratulation.

Engelhart said, "What
are we supposed to do, sir?"

"Sit around, as usual, Engelhart—what
else? We can't be sure it was a ship Hardesty picked up, but if it was and if
it was the one we saw on the moon, then it can only be the robot on
board."

They digested that in
silence.

"In which case we can assume that the inhabitants will pay us a
call, and soon.
Maybe we were wrong in assuming that because the dome on the moon was broken
they'd had space travel and lost it. Maybe it's only temporarily out of
commission while robots see to the damage, not completely abandoned."

Keston said dryly, "Then where are the
inhabitants hiding, sir?"

Chang shrugged. He said, "This is an old
world, Keston. The race inhabiting it could be a whole lot ahead of us. Maybe
they don't build cities or roads. Maybe they live in isolated houses and fly
everywhere. Keep your men to stations, Engelhart.
Adhem!"

"Sir?" said the
medical officer.

"While
we're waiting, you can run off the usual tests—presence of viruses, bacteria,
and injurious ingredients in the air and ground, and so on."

"Right
away, sir."

They
waited. It was unlikely that there were any natives within quite a few miles,
at any rate. They had seen, as they came down, no roads, no cities, no
spaceports, and no sign of any smaller artificial construction. True, they had
had almost no time to look for them. They had come through one hundred ninety
miles of detectable atmosphere in twenty-nine seconds, and even the so-called
instantaneous cameras couldn't hold focus at that speed. But this nearly flat
and mostly bare plain seemed natural and haphazard enough, without sign of
planned layout, and if it was big enough for Spinelli to have picked it out
from a hundred thousand miles out—

Adhem's speaker burped and whispered for a
moment, and after a few curt comments the medical officer said helplessly,
"All right then." He turned to Chang.

"I
can give
this
place a clean bill of
health, sir," he said. His voice held a disapproving note.

Chang observed it,
commented, "Something's eating you."

"Yes, sir.
There is not one
single
bacterium,
virus or subvirus in any of the air, soil or vegetation samples we took. There
is no sign of any poison, either, but that doesn't worry us. But it isn't natural
for there to be
no
bacterial"

"Perhaps it isn't natural," said
Chang equably. "After all, the only bacteria aboard this ship are the ones
we use to digest our food, but that isn't natural. We saw to it
ourselves."

"But you couldn't do
that to a whole world—I"

"Why not?
I'd believe a lot of
a
race
that can afford to floor the supply lock of a complete city with
durasteel. Either way, what does it matter?
Engelhart!"

"Sir?"

"I
want a thorough survey of the immediate neighborhood from as low as your boys
can go without getting into trouble. Say within a radius of a hundred miles.
That's your pigeon. Use helis, and screen them well. Deeley, I also want a full
photographic record with wide-angle and instantaneous cameras and full color
stereo prints of the entire surface of the planet—land
and
water—from high level. You can have two of the lifeboats for that. And I
want results quicker than jump. Engelhart—one more thing: Tell your boys to pay
special attention to anything that could be a sign of habitation and report it
as soon as found."

"Right,
sir," said Engelhart, and he and Deeley turned to their control desks,
whispering orders into hanging microphones.

Chang turned to Adhem,
said, "Is this planet safe?"

"One
hundred per cent, sir—and no reservations."

"Right.
Have the verandah extended, will you? Let's go outside."

They stood leaning over the rail of the
"captain's verandah," a platform extending outside the bridge halfway
up the nose of the ship and thus about forty feet from the ground. Blue sky
shone over them and the warmth of the sun refreshed them.

After
a while Deeley and Engelhart joined them from inship, and they watched the
survey helicopters purr out from their lock like a flight of gigantic bees,
their vanes silver in the sunlight, and vanish from sight as their screens
went up. Then with a roar and a clank the two lifeboats detailed for Deeley's
planetary mapping job kicked a couple of miles into the sky of anti-grav beams
from the ship and went heavenwards on a cloud of atomic flame. There was
nothing to do but wait, warily.

Inside
the ship the crew stood to battle stations. The launchers and the mine throwers
and the energy beams and the fluorine spray jets swung evenly in their guides,
invisible behind screens that would go down at the first sign of hostility. The
radar antennae were out, poking their radiant fingers into the blue sky, and
the electron 'scopes moved in continual survey of the neighborhood. There was
small chance of them catching the approach of anything even moderately well
screened, but there was the possibility that alien-built screens might fail to
cover a band of radiation which men used. But the alarm on Keston's lapel
speaker remained silent.

EngeUiart
picked a spot to lean over the rail, said appreciatively, "This could be
Earth, couldn't it?"

Chang's
pipe smoke rose blue and straight in the still air. He said with interest,
"Have you been there, then?"

Engelhart laughed. He said, "Not I, sir.
I was bom on Beta Centauri III—Heimwelt, we call it.
One of
the few worlds to retain a second official language—Old German in our case, as
well as Anglic Terrestrial.
You been
to Earth,
sir?"

"No. In fact, I doubt if we have anyone
aboard who has, let alone anyone born there. Have we, Deeley?"

Deeley
grinned, said self-consciously, "Only myself, sir. I checked."

Chang said, "And I
didn't knowl
Is
this
like Earth—really?"

Deeley
turned and stared out across the greenness of the plain to the blue bills on
the horizon. He said softly, "Not in the slightest. It's Earth as it may
have been a thousand years ago, but there hasn't been room for this much peacefulness
and beauty on Earth for a good many centuries. That's why I emigrated—to find a
chance to be alone."

Chang
nodded, his pipe tying a knotted trail of smoke. He said, "It's gotten
that way on New Earth, too—where I was born. No place for beauty any more.
Too much overcrowding.
Too much to do and
too little time to do it."

"Uhuh,"
agreed Keston with a touch of cynicism. "But by the same token, if this
world is uninhabited our fortunes'll be made by the spill-over from those same
overcrowded planets."

"What a mess that'll
make," said Adhem seriously.

The
alarm on Keston's lapel purred softly, and the observation officer held the
speaker to his mouth. He said, "Keston listening."

"Sandiman
here," said the tiny but clear voice. "We've spotted a small animal
of some sort on the port side—just about at the edge of the burnt patch."

"Wait a moment," said Keston. He
turned to the left of the verandah. The others followed his example, searching
for some sign of the creature.

Then they saw it—a small furry beast about
the size of a wallaby and somewhat resembling one. It had blind white eyes like
tennis balls and long ears cupped forward towards the ship. It was just at the
edge of the burning.

Chang
pulled a monocle from his pocket and looked it over with care. He said finally,
"I wish they'd allow us a regular alien psychologist and semanticist
instead of leaving everything to chance."

Adhem laughed under his breath. He said,
"The argument they use, sir, is that only one planet in a thousand is
inhabited, and of those few races we do find common ground in five cases out of
six just doesn't exist. Then we run across a plum like this one and we get the
blame if anything goes wrong."

"Hello!"
Chang interrupted. "Unless my eyes are playing tricks I don't think that's
a specimen of the local intelligence."

"Why, sir?" said Keston. He had
produced a monocle of his own now and was also looking at the alien.

"Several things.
The most obvious is that the robot we found on the Moon had six limbs
and this has four, but that could be for convenience. What I do find
interesting is that this one hasn't any hands."

Keston looked at the beast's upper limbs with
care. Sure enough, they terminated in flat pads that showed little sign of
being able to grip anything, and the possession of gripping appendages was a
prime attribute of all known intelligence, whether suckerlike, tentacular,
manuform or even magneto-gravitic like the high-density Proximans who had a
small colony on Pluto. He said, "You never know, sir."

Chang
sighed slightly. He agreed, "You never know. All right, Engelhart, I'll
attempt communication. Have everything you've got ready to hit if anything goes
wrong. If you have to blast me, tell Deputy Captain Malory to come on watch and
lift for space at once. Get me some gloves, somebody, and you'd better let me
have a gravitic belt in case they shoot something at me."

Keston whispered into his lapel speaker, and
a moment later an orderly came out with a pair of steel-quilted gloves that
would stand hydrofluoric for twenty seconds and yet would let the wearer tell a
milled coin from a plain one, and a gravitic belt that would stop a high
velocity bullet aimed anywhere in head or body from more than a yard away.
Chang put them on and began to descend the ladder from the verandah to the
ground.

They watched in silence as he began to walk
cautiously through the charred vegetation, black powdery ash marking the legs
of his trousers. The alien creature did not move, except to swing its big ears
from side to side.

Twenty
yards from it he stopped, holding his hands well out at the side to show they
were empty. The creature seemed to be studying him, listening for something. He
could see now that the white, bulging eyes were not blind. Each had a black
pupil and each was turned on him. But it did not take fright and run away, and,
encouraged, he stepped nearer.

Feet
from it, he paused again, and then started slightly as it moved, but its only
action was to come up to him as if to sniff him like a dog, and then to rub
itself contentedly against his legs.

Hardly the action of an intelligent being, but certainly nothing to get
alarmed about.
He
bent down to pick it up, found it not only amenable but eager, for it jumped on
his shoulder and began to play with his ear.

Gently he turned and began
to walk towards the ship.

When he came within speaking distance of the
verandah, Adhem said, "What is it, sir?"

"Affectionate, but not
intelligent," Chang reported. "If they're all like this one, they'd
make good pets. Do you want to examine it?"