Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (15 page)

Cochrane found himself watching Babs' face. She looked enormously
relieved, but even Cochrane—who was looking for something of the sort
without realizing it—could not read anything but relief in her
expression. She did not, for example, look admiring.

"I'll borrow one of Johnny Simms' guns," said Holden, "and take a look
around. It's either perfectly safe or we're all dead anyhow. Frankly, I
think it's safe. It feels right outside, Jed! It honestly feels right!"

"I'll come with you," said Cochrane, "Jones and the pilot are necessary
if the ship's to get back to Earth. But we're expendable."

He went back to the control-room. Johnny Simms zestfully undertook to
outfit them with arms. He made no proposal to accompany them. In twenty
minutes or so, Cochrane and Holden went into the airlock and the door
closed. A light came on automatically, precisely like the light in an
electric refrigerator. Cochrane found his lips twitching a little as the
analogy came to him. Seconds later the outer door opened, and they gazed
down among the branches of tall trees. Cochrane winced. There was no
railing and the height bothered him. But Holden swung out the sling. He
and Cochrane descended, dangling, down fifty feet of unscarred, shining,
metal hull.

The ground was still hot underfoot. Holden cast off the sling and moved
toward cooler territory with an undignified haste. Cochrane followed
him.

The smells were absolutely commonplace. Scorched wood. Smokiness. There
were noises. Occasional cracklings from burned tree-trunks not wholly
consumed. High-pitched, shrill musical notes. And in and among the
smells there was an astonishing freshness in the feel of the air.
Cochrane was especially apt to notice it because he had lived in a city
back on Earth, and had spent four days in the moon-rocket, and then had
breathed the Lunar City air for eighteen days more and had just come
from the space-ship whose air was distinctly of the canned variety.

He did not notice the noise of the sling again in motion behind him. He
was all eyes and ears and acute awareness of the completely strange
environment. He was the more conscious of a general strangeness because
he was so completely an urban product. Yet he and Holden were vastly
less aware of the real strangeness about them than men of previous
generations would have been. They did not notice the oddity of croaking
sounds, like frogs, coming from the tree-tops. When they had threaded
their way among leaning charred poles and came to green stuff underfoot
and merely toasted foliage all around, Cochrane heard a sweet,
high-pitched trilling which came from a half-inch hole in the ground.
But he was not astonished by the place from which the trilling came. He
was astonished at the sound itself.

There was a cry behind them.

"Mr. Cochrane! Doctor Holden!"

They swung about. And there was Babs on the ground, just disentangling
herself from the sling. She had followed them out, after waiting until
they had left the airlock and could not protest.

Cochrane swore to himself. But when Babs joined them breathlessly, after
a hopping run over the hot ground, he said only:

"Fancy meeting you here!"

"
I—I couldn't resist it
," said Babs in breathless apology. "And you
do have guns. It's safe enough—oh, look!"

She stared at a bush which was covered with pale purple flowers. Small
creatures hovered in the air about it. She approached it and exclaimed
again at the sweetness of its scent. Cochrane and Holden joined her in
admiration.

In a sense they were foolishly unwary. This was completely strange
territory. It could have contained anything. Earlier explorers would
have approached every bush with caution and moved over every hilltop
with suspicion, anticipating deadly creatures, unparalleled monsters,
and exotic and peculiar circumstances designed to entrap the unprepared.
Earlier explorers, of course, would probably have had advice from famous
men to prepare them for all possible danger.

But this was a valley between snow-clad mountains. The river that ran
down its length was fed by glaciers. This was a temperate climate. The
trees were either coniferous or something similar, and the vegetation
grew well but not with the frenzy of a tropic region. There were fruits
here and there. Later, to be sure, they would prove to be mostly
astringent and unpalatable. They were broad-leafed, low-growing plants
which would eventually turn out to be possessed of soft-fleshed roots
which were almost unanimously useless for human purposes. There were
even some plants with thorns and spines upon them. But they encountered
no danger.

By and large, wild animals everywhere are ferocious only when desperate.
No natural setting can permanently be so deadly that human being will be
attacked immediately they appear. An area in which peril is continuous
is one in which there is so much killing that there is no food-supply
left to maintain its predators. On the whole, there is simply a limit to
how dangerous any place can be. Dangerous beasts have to be relatively
rare, or they will not have enough to eat, when they will thin out until
they are relatively rare and do have enough to eat.

So the three explorers moved safely, though their boldness was that of
ignorance, below gigantic trees nearly as tall as the space-ship
standing on end. They saw a small furry biped, some twelve inches tall,
which waddled insanely in the exact line of their progress and with no
apparent hope of outdistancing them. They saw a gauzy creature with
incredibly spindly legs. It flew from one tree-trunk to another,
clinging to rough bark on each in turn. Once they came upon a small
animal which looked at them with enormous, panic-stricken blue eyes and
then fled with a sinuous gait on legs so short that they seemed mere
flippers. It dived into a hole and vanished.

But they came out to clear space. They could look for miles and miles.
There was a savannah of rolling soil which gradually sloped down to a
swift-running river. The grass—if it was grass—was quite green, but it
had multitudes of tiny rose-colored flowers down the central rib of each
leaf. Nearby it seemed the color of Earth-grass, but it faded
imperceptibly into an incredible old-rose tint in the distance. The
mountain-scarps on either side of the valley were sheer and tall. There
was a great stony spur reaching out above the lowland, and there was
forest at its top and bare brown stone dropping two thousand feet sheer.
And up the valley, where it narrowed, a waterfall leaped out from the
cliff and dropped hundreds of feet in an arc of purest white, until it
was lost to view behind tree-tops.

They looked. They stared. Cochrane was a television producer, and Holden
was a psychiatrist, and Babs was a highly efficient secretary. They did
not make scientific observations. The ecological system of the valley
escaped their notice. They weren't qualified to observe that the flying
things around seemed mostly to be furry instead of feathered, and that
insects seemed few and huge and fragile,—and they did not notice that
most of the plants appeared to be deciduous, so indicating that this
planet had pronounced seasons. But Holden said:

"Up in Greenland there's a hospital on a cliff like that. People with
delusions of grandeur sometimes get cured just by looking at something
that's so much greater and more splendid than they are. I'd like to see
a hospital up yonder!"

Babs said, shining-eyed:

"A city could be built in this valley. Not a tall city, with gray
streets and gardens on the roofs. This could be a nice little city like
people used to have. There would be little houses, all separate, and
there'd be grass all around and people could pluck flowers if they
wanted to, to take inside.... There could be families here, and
homes—not living-quarters!"

Cochrane said nothing. He was envious of the others. They saw, and they
dreamed according to their natures. Cochrane somehow felt forlorn.
Presently he said depressedly:

"We'll go back to the ship. You can work out your woman's viewpoint
stuff with Bell, Babs. He'll write it, or you can give it to Alicia to
put over when we go on the air."

Babs made no reply. The absence of comment was almost pointed. Cochrane
realized that she wouldn't do it, though he couldn't see why.

They did go back to the ship. Cochrane sent Babs and Holden up the
sling, first, while he waited down below. It was a singular sensation to
stand there. He was the only human being afoot on a planet the size of
Earth or larger, at the foot of a cliff of metal which was the
space-ship's hull. He had a weapon in his hand, and it should defend him
from anything. But he felt very lonely.

The sling came down for him. He felt sick at heart as it lifted him. He
had an overwhelming conviction of incompetence, though he could not
detail the reasons. The rope hauled him up, swaying, to the dizzy height
of the air-lock door. He could not feel elated. He was partly
responsible for humankind's greatest achievement to date. But he had not
quite the viewpoint that would let him enjoy its contemplation.

The ground quivered very faintly as he rose. It was not an earthquake.
It was merely a temblor, such as anyone would expect to feel
occasionally with six smoking volcanic cones in view. The green stuff
all around was proof that it could be disregarded.

In the United States, some two-hundred-odd light-years away, it happened
to be Tuesday. On this Tuesday, the broadcast from the stars was
sponsored by Harvey's, the national men's clothing chain. Harvey's
advertising department preferred discussion-type shows, because
differences of opinion in the shows proper led so neatly into their
tag-line. "You can disagree about anything but the quality of a Harvey
suit! That's Superb!"

Therefore the broadcast after the landing of the ship on the volcanic
planet was partly commercial, and partly pictures and reports from the
Spaceways expedition, and partly queries and comments by big-name
individuals on Earth. Inevitably there was Dabney. And Dabney was
neurotic.

He did his best to make a shambles of everything.

The show started promptly enough at the beginning. There was a
two-minute film-strip of business-suited puppets marching row on row,
indicating the enormous popularity of Harvey's suits. Then a fast minute
hill-billy puppet-show about two feuding mountaineers who found they
couldn't possibly retain their enmity when they found themselves in
agreement on the quality of Harvey suits. "That's Superb!" The
commercial ended with a choral dance of madly enthusiastic miniature
figures, dancing while they lustily sang the theme-song, "You can
disagree, yes siree, you can disagree, About anything, indeed
everything, you and me, But you can't, no you can't disagree, About the
strictly super, extra super, Qualitee of a Har-ve-e-e-e suit! That's
superb!"

And thereupon the television audience of several continents saw the
faded-in image of mankind's first starship, poised upon its landing-fins
among trees more splendid than even television shows had ever pictured
before. The camera panned slowly, and showed such open spaces as very
few humans had ever seen unencumbered by buildings, and mountains of a
grandeur difficult for most people to believe in.

The scene cut to the space-ship's control-room and Al the pilot acted
briskly as the leader of an exploration-party just returned—though he
actually hadn't left the ship. He introduced Jamison, wearing improvised
leggings and other trappings appropriate to an explorer in wilderness.
Jamison began to extrapolate from his observations out the control-room
port, adding film-clips for authority.

Smoothly and hypnotically, he pictured the valley as the ship descended
the last few thousand feet, and told of the human colony to be founded
in this vast and hospitable area just explored. Mountainside hotels for
star-tourists would look down upon a scene of tranquility and cozy
spaciousness. This would be the first human outpost in the stars. In the
other valleys of this magnificent world there would be pasture-lands,
and humankind would again begin to regard meat as a normal and
not-extravagant part of its diet—on this planet, certainly! There were
minerals beyond doubt, and water-power. The estimate was that at least
the equivalent of the Asian continent had been made available for human
occupation. And this splendid addition to the resources of humanity ...

The second commercial cut Jamison off. Naturally. The sponsor was paying
for time. So for Jamison was substituted the other fiction about the
poor young man who found himself envied by the board of directors of the
firm which employed him. His impeccable attire caused him to be promoted
to vice-president without any question of whether or not he could fill
the job. Because, of course, he wore a Harvey suit.

Alicia Keith showed herself on the screen and gave the woman's viewpoint
as written about by Bell. She talked pleasantly about how it felt to
move about on a planet never before trodden by human beings. She was
interrupted by the pictured face of the lady editor of Joint Networks'
feminine programs, who asked sweetly:

"Tell me, Alicia, what do you think the attainment of the stars will
mean to the Average American housewife in the immediate future? Right
now?"

Then Dabney came on. His appearance was fitted into the sequence from
Lunar City, and his gestures were extravagant as anybody's gestures will
be where their hands and arms weigh so small a fraction of
Earth-normal.

"I wish," said Dabney impressively, "to congratulate the men who have so
swiftly adapted my discovery of faster-than-light travel to practical
use. I am overwhelmed at having been able to achieve a scientific
triumph which in time will mean that mankind's future stretches
endlessly and splendidly into the future!"