none (4 page)

He lined them up, leading the way, placing Dr. Lovat and Heather immediately behind him with Ewen so that he would know if the pace he set was too hard for them, Camilla next with MacLeod, andthe mountain-trained Zabal to bring up the rear. As they moved away from the ship and through the smallclutter of roughly-made build-ings and shelters, the great red sun began to lift above the line of farawayhills, like an enormous, inflamed, bloodshot eye. Fog lay thick in the bowl of land where the ship lay, butas they began to climb up out of the valley it thinned and shredded, and in spite of himself' MacAran'sspirits began to lift. It was, after all, no small thing to be leading a party of exploration' perhaps the

22

only party of exploration for hundreds of years, on a wholly new planet.

They walked in silence; there was plenty to see. As they reached the lip of the valley, MacAran

paused and waited for them to come up with him.

"I have very little experience with alien planets," he said. "But don't blunder into any strange underbrush, look where you step, and I hope I don't have to warn you not to drink the water or eat anything until Dr. Lovat has given it her personal okay. You two are the specialists." he indicated Zabal and MacLeod, "anything to add to that?"

"Just general caution," MacLeod said. "For all we know this planet could be alive with poisonous snakes and reptiles but our surface uniforms will protect us against most dangers we can't see. I have a handgun for use is extreme emergencies--if a dinosaur or huge carnivore comes along and rushes us--but is general it would be better to run away than shoot. Remember this is preliminary observation, and don't get carried away in classifying and sampling--the next team that comes here can do that."

"If there is a next team," Camilla murmured. She had spoken under her breath, but Rafael heard her and gave her a sharp look. All he said was, "Everybody, take a com-pass reading for the peak, and be sure to mark every time we move off that reading because of rough ground. We can see the peak from here; once we get further into the foothills we may not be able to see anything but the neat hilltop, or the trees."

At first it was easy, pleasant walking, up gentle slopes between tall, deeply rooted coniferous trunks,surprisingly small in diameter for their height, with long blue-green needles on their narrow branches. Except for the dimness of the red sun, they might have beep in a forest preserve on Earth. Now andagain Marco Zabal fell out of line briefly to Inspect some tree or leaf or root pattern, and once a small

Page 15

animal scooted away in the woods. Lewis MacLeod watched it regretfully and said to Dr. Lovat, "One

thing--there are furred mammals here. Probably marsupials, but I'm not sure."

The woman said, "I thought you were going to take specimens."

"I will, on the way back. I've no way to keep live

23

specimens on the way, how would I know what to feed them? But if you're worried about food supply, I should say that so far every mammal on any planet without exception, has proved to be edible and wholesome. Some aren't very tasty, but milk-secreting animals are all evi-dently alike in body chemistry."

Judith Lovat noted that the fat little zoologist was puffing with effort, but she said nothing. She couldun-derstand perfectly well the fascination of being the first to see and classify the wildlife of a completelystrange planet, a job usually left to highly specialized First Land-ing teams' and she supposed MacAranwouldn't have accepted him for the trip unless he was physically capable of it.

The same thought was on Ewen Ross's mind as he walked beside Heather, neither of them wastingtheir breath in talk. He thought, Rafe isn't setting a very hard pace, but just the same I'm not too sure howthe women will take it. When MacAran called a halt, a little more than an hour after they had set out, heleft the girl and moved over to MacAran's side.

"Tell me, Rafe, how high is this peak?"

"No way of telling, as far off as I saw it, but I'd esti-mate eighteen-twenty thousand feet."

Ewen asked, "Think  the women can handle it?"

"Camilla will have to; she's got to take astronomical observations. Zabal and I can help her if we

have to, and the rest of you can stay further down on the slopes if you can't make it."

"I can make it," Ewen said, "Remember, the oxygen content of this air is higher than earth's; anoxia won't set in quite so low." He looked around the group of men and women, seated and resting, except for Heather Stuart, who was digging out a soil sample and putting it into one of her tubes. And Lewis MacLeod had flung himself down full length and was breathing hard, eyes closed. Ewen looked at him with some disquiet, his trained eyes spotting what even Judith Lovat had not seen, but he did not speak. He couldn't order the man sent back at this dis-tance--not alone, in any case.

It seemed to the young doctor that MacAran was fol-lowing his thoughts when the other man said

abruptly, "Doesn't this seem almost too easy, too good? There has to

24

be a catch to this planet
 
somewhere.
 
It's too much like a picnic in a forest preserve."

Page 16

Ewen thought, some
picnic, with fifty-odd dead and over a hundred hurt to the crash,
 
but hedidn't say it, remembering Rafe had lost his sister. "Why not, Rafe? Is there some law that says anunexplored planet
 
has
 
to be dangerous? Maybe we're just so conditioned to a life on Earth without risksthat we're afraid to step one inch out-side our nice, safe technology." He smiled. "Haven't I heard youbitching because on Earth you said that all the mountains, and even the ski slopes, were so smoothed outthere wasn't any sense of personal conquest? Not that I'd know--I never went in for danger sports."

"You may have something there," MacAran said, but he still looked somber. "If that's so, though,

why do they make such a fuss about First Landing teams when they send them to a new planet?-

"Search me. But maybe on a planet where man never developed, his natural enemies didn't develop

either?"

It should have comforted MacAran, but instead he felt a cold chill. If man didn't
 
belong
 
here, couldhe
 
survive
 
here? But he didn't say it. "Better get moving again. We've got a long way to go, and I'd liketo get on the slopes before dark."

He stopped by McLeod as the older man struggled to his feet. "You all right, Dr. MacLeod?"

"Mac," the older man said with a faint smile, "we're not under ship discipline now. Yes, I'm fine

"You're the animal specialist. Any theories why we haven't seen anything larger than a squirrel?"

"Two," MacLeod said with a round grin, "the first, of course, being that there aren't any. The second, the one I'm committed to, is that with six, no, seven of us crashing along through the underbrush this way, anything with a brain bigger than a squirrel's keeps a good long way off !"

MacAran chuckled, even while he revised his opinion of the fat little man upward by a good many

notches. "Should we try to be quieter?"

"Don't see how we can manage it. Tonight will be a better test. Larger carnivores--if there's any

analogy to Earth--will come out then, hoping to catch their natural prey sleeping."

MacAran said, "Then we'd better make it our business

25

that we don't get crunched up by mistake," but as he watched the others sling their packs and get into forma-tion, he thought silently that this was one thing he had forgotten. It was true; the overwhelming attention to safety on Earth had virtually eliminated all but man-made dangers. Even Jungle safaris were undertaken in glass--sided trucks, and it wouldn't have occurred to him that night would be dangerous in that way.

They had walked another forty minutes, through thick-ening trees and somewhat heavier underbrush,where they had to push branches aside, when Judith stopped, rubbing her eyes painfully. At about thesame time, Heather lifted her hands and stared at them in horror; Ewen, at her side, was instantly alert.

"What's wrong!"

Page 17

"My hands--" Heather held them up, her face white. Ewen called, "Rafe, hold up a minute," and the straggling line came to a halt. He took Heather's slim fingers gingerly between his own, carefully examining the erupting green-ish dots; behind him Camilla cried out:

"Judy! Oh, God' look at her face!"

Ewen swung around to Dr. Lovat. Her cheeks and eye-lids were covered with the greenish dots,which seemed to spread and enlarge and swell as he looked at them. She squeezed her eyes shut. Camilla caught her hands gently as she raised them to her face.

"Don't touch your face, Judy--Dr. Ross, what is it?"

"How the hell do I know?" Ewen looked around as the others gathered around them.

"Anybody else turning green?" He added, "All right, then. This is what I'm here for, and everybody else keep your distance until we know just what we've got. Heather!" He shook her shoulder sharply. "Stop that! You're not going to drop dead, as far as I can tell your vital signs are all just fine:,

With an effort, the girl controlled herself. "Sorry."

"Now. Exactly what do you feel? Do those spots hurt?"

"No, dammit, they itch!" She was flushed, her face red, her copper hair falling loose around her shoulders; she raised a hand to brush it back, and Ewen caught her wrist, careful to touch only her uniform sleeve. "No, don't touch your face," he said, "that's what Dr. Lovat did. Dr. Lovat, how do you feel?"

26

"Not so good," she said with some effort, "My face bums, and my eyes--well, you can see."

"Indeed I can." Ewen realized that the lids were swell-ing and turning greenish; she looked grotesque

Secretly Ewen wondered if he looked as frightened as he felt. Like everyone there, he had beenbrought up on stories of exotic plagues to be found on strange worlds. But he was a doctor and this washis job. He said, mak-ing his voice as firm as he could' "All right' everyone else stand back; but don'tpanic, if it was an airborne plague we'd all have caught it, and probably the night we landed here. Dr. Lovat, any other symptoms?"

Judy said, trying to smile, "None--except I'm scared."

Ewen said, "We won't count that--yet." Pulling rubber gloves from a steri-pac in his kit, he quickly

took her pulse. "No tachycardia, no depressed breathing. You, Heather?"

"I'm fine, except for the damned itching."

Page 18

Ewen examined the small rash minutely. It was pinpoint at first, but each papule quickly swelled to a

vesicle. He said, "Well, let's start eliminating, What did you and Dr. Lovat do that nobody else did?"

"I took soil samples," she said, "looking for soil bac-teria and diatoms."

"I was studying some leaves," Judy said' "trying to see if they had a suitable chlorophyll content."

Marco Zabal turned back his uniform cuffs. "I'll play Sherlock Holmes," he said. "There's youranswer." He extended his wrists, showing one or two tiny green dots. "Miss Stuart, did you have to moveaway any leaves to dig up your samples?"

"Why, yes, some flat reddish ones," she said, and he nodded. "There's your answer. Like any good xenobotanist, I handle any plant with gloves until I'm sure what's in it or on it, and I noticed the volatile oil at the time, but took it for granted. Probably some distant relative of urushiol--
 
rhus toxicodendron--
 
poison ivy to you. And it's my guess that if it comes out this quickly, it's simple contact dermatitis and there aren't any serious side ef-fects." He grinned, his long narrow face amused. "Try an antihistamine ointment, if you have any, or give Dr. Lovat a shot, since her eyes are swollen so much it's going to be hard for her to see where she's going. And

27

from now on don't go admiring any pretty leaves until I pass on them., all right?"

Ewen followed his instructions, with a relief so great it was almost pain. He felt totally unable to copewith any alien plagues. A massive hypo of antihistamines quickly shrunk Judith Lovat's swollen eyes tonormal, although the green color remained. The tall Basque showed them all his specimen leaf, encased ina transparent plastic sample case. "The red menace that turns you green," he said dryly. "Learn to stayaway from alien plants, if you can."

MacAran said, "If everyone's all right, let's move along," but as they gathered up their equipment, hefelt half sick with relief, and renewed fear. What other dangers could be lurking in an innocent-lookingtree or flower? He said half-aloud to Ewen, "I knew this place was too good to be true."

Zabal heard him and chuckled. "My brother was on the First Landing team that went to the Coroniscolony. That's one reason I was heading out there. That's the only rea-son I happen to know all this. The Expedition Force doesn't care to publicize how tricky planets can be, be-cause no one on our nice, safe Earth would dare go out to them. And of course by the time the major colonizing groups get there, likeus, the technological crews have removed the obvious dangers and, shall we say, smoothed things downa bit."