The Potter of Firsk and Other Stories (32 page)

Avery stopped short, looked warily up the shore. “We went past pretty closely and they didn’t bother us. It must be the electricity.”

“You be careful on your way back. I can’t afford to lose any more men. Keep out of the way of those lights.”

“Yes, sir,” said Avery. He motioned to Jason. “Let’s go. We’d better skirt the water as close as possible.”

Crowding the soggy verge of the ocean, they rounded the bend in the shoreline, approached the scene of the explosion.

“Doesn’t seem to be much left of Bascomb,” said Jason in a hushed voice.

“Not much crater either,” said Avery. “It’s a funny deal.”

“Look, now there’s thousands of those light-bugs. Like bees around a hive. And look at that stuff growing out of the ledge! That wasn’t there when we went past! Talk about mushrooms…”

Avery turned his binoculars along the ledge. “Probably it’s got something to do with the light-flecks. The lights could be spores or pollen or something of the sort.”

“Anything’s possible,” said Jason. “I’ve seen vines thirty miles long, as thick around as a house, and if you jab them with a stick they quiver their whole length. They’re on Antaeus. The kids in the Earth colony tap out Morse code back and forth to each other. The vine doesn’t like it, but there’s nothing it can do.”

Avery had been watching the dancing lights over his shoulder. “They’re like eyes watching us…Before a colony’s sent out here, these damn things will have to be destroyed. They’d be dangerous flying loose around electricity.”

Jason said, “Duck! Here comes a couple of them after us!”

Avery said in a nervous voice, “Don’t get excited, kid. They’re just drifting on the breeze.”

“Drifting, hell,” said Jason, and started to run for the ship.

* * *

The unigen observed the land-worms returning along the shore, evidently seeking the sea-matter on which they fed. To guard against the accidental destruction of any more nodes, it would be wise to destroy the creatures as they appeared, and clean them from this particular section of the planet.

It dispatched two nodes toward the land-worms. They seemed to sense danger and broke into lumbering motion. The unigen accelerated the nodes; they darted forward at half-light speed, punctured the land-worms, reversed, shuttled back and forth a score of times, each time leaving a small steaming hole. The land-worms collapsed to the black pebbles, lay limp.

The unigen brought the nodes back to the uranium bank. Now to a more serious matter: the vegetation which was choking off the face of the uranium with its collars and roots.

The unigen concentrated the heat of twenty nodes on one of the spikes. A hole appeared, weakening the entire shoot. It sagged and shriveled, collapsed.

Pleasure was a quality which the structure of the unigen was incapable of expressing, the nearest approach being a calm coasting sense, an awareness of control and mastery of movement. In this state the unigen began a systematic attack on the spikes.

A second member fell over, became pale brown and a third…

Overhead appeared a flying object, similar to a land-worm except that it radiated more strongly in the infra-red.

Were the creatures everywhere?

* * *

Second Officer Dart had made the original suggestion, diffidently at first, half-expecting Captain Badt to freeze him with a stare the color of zinc. But Captain Badt stood like a statue looking into the blank magniscreen, still tuned to Avery’s band.

Dart said with somewhat more boldness, “So far we have no conclusive report to make. Is the planet habitable or not? If we leave now we haven’t proved anything.”

Captain Badt answered in a voice without resonance, “I can’t risk any more men.”

Dart rubbed at his bristling red hair. It occurred to him that Captain Badt was getting old.

“Those little lights are vicious,” Dart said emphatically. “We know that. They’ve killed three of our men. But we can handle them. An electric current blows ’em apart. Another thing, they’re like bees around a hive; they mind their own business unless they’re bothered. Bascomb, Avery, Jason—they got it because they approached that pitchblende ledge too closely. Here’s my idea, and I’ll take the risk of carrying it through. We knock together a light frame, string it with wire, and charge the strands alternately positive and negative. Then I’ll go up in the service ’copter and drift it across the ledge. They’re so thick now that we can’t help but knock out two-three hundred at a swipe.”

Captain Badt clenched and unclenched his hands. “Very well. Go ahead.” He turned his back, stared into the blank magniscreen. This would be his last voyage.

With the help of Henry, the ship’s electrician, Dart built the frame, strung it with wire, equipped it with a high-potential battery. Strapping himself into the ’copter harness, he rose straight up, dangling a mile of light cable. He became a speck on the gray-blue sky.

“That’s it,” said Henry into the communication mike. “Now I’ll make fast this fly trap affair, and then—I’ve got another idea. We want the thing to move flat-side forward, so I’ll tie on a bridle with a bit of drag at the end.”

He arranged the drag, snapped the switch on the battery. “She’s ready to go.”

A mile above, Dart moved across the sky toward the ledge of pitchblende.

Captain Badt maintained an iron grip on the hand rail in the bridge, watching Dart’s progress on the magniscreen. “Up, Dart,” he said.

“Up four feet…There…Steady. That’s about right. Take it slow…”

* * *

The unigen’s range of perception included the lowest radio waves as well as the hottest ultra-cosmics, a spectrum of a million colors. Stereoscopic vision was implicit in the fact that each node served as an organ of sight. Resolution of images was achieved by accepting only radiation normal to the surface of the node. In this manner a coarse spherical picture was received by each node, although detail as fine as the frame strung with wire was nearly invisible.

The unigen’s first warning was a pressure from the approaching electrostatic fields; then the frame swept across the ledge, full through the heaviest concentration of nodes.

The blast seared the ground, melted it into a flaming molten basin for a radius of fifty feet. The nodes which escaped the screen were flung pell-mell by the explosion out across the ocean.

Directly under the explosion, the spike-vegetation was scorched; elsewhere, little affected.

The structure of the unigen was no more capable of anger than pleasure; however, its will to survive was intense. Overhead flew the land-worm. One like it had destroyed a node through electricity; perhaps this one was somehow associated with the last catastrophic explosion. Four nodes slanted up at light speed, snapped back and forth through the land-worm like sewing-machine needles hemming a sheet. The creature fell to the ground.

The unigen assembled its nodes a hundred feet over the bank of uranium. Ninety-six nodes destroyed.

The unigen weighed the situation. The planet was rich with uranium, but it was also the home of lethal land-worms.

The unigen decided. There was uranium elsewhere in the universe, on thousands of worlds that were silent and dark and free of any kind of life. A lesson had been learned: avoid worlds inhabited by life-forms, no matter how primitive.

The nodes flashed off into the sky, dispersed into space.

* * *

Captain Badt relaxed his grip on the table. “That’s it,” he said in a flat voice. “Any world where we lose four good men in four hours—any world inhabited by swarms of crazy atomic bees—that’s no world for human beings. Four good men…”

He stood silent a moment, limp and dejected.

The cadet wandered into the bridge, stared wide-eyed. Life-long habit reasserted itself. Captain Badt filled out, became erect, rigid. His tunic and trousers hung crisp, his eyes once more shone with authority.

“Ensign, you will act as chief officer until further notice. We’re leaving the planet, returning to Earth. Please attend to all exterior ports.”

“Yes, sir,” said the new Chief Mate.

* * *

The planet was quiet. The ocean spread bright and green, the mountains rolled back into the badlands: crags, ravines, plateaus—black rock, gray rock, pockets of drifted ash.

On the pitchblende ledge the vegetation waxed tall, five, ten, twenty feet, gray spines mottled with white, ivory, silver. In each a central vein opened; the spike became a tube straight and stiff as a cannon barrel.

At the bottom of the tube, the fruit of the plant began to develop. There was a spore-case, enclosed by a jacket into which water percolated. Below the spore-case opened another compartment, globe-shaped, communicating with the base of the spike by four splayed channels.

A nub of uranium 235 accumulated in this chamber—one ounce, two ounces, three ounces, more and more diffused through the membranes of the plant by some evolutionary freak of a metabolism.

The fruit was ripe. One by one, the spikes reached a culmination. A tension within the water-jacket increased past the breaking strain. The jacket split, flooded the compartment below the spore-case, surrounded the knob of uranium.

Explosion. Steam bursting through the stern-pointing channels, back into the tube. Thrust, straight up. Sharp whipping blasts as the cases left the spikes. Up, up, up, at furious acceleration, into space…

The water dissipated, the last puff of steam left the tubes. The spore-cases floated free on momentum. The gravitational field of the planet faded to a wisp, a film. The spore-cases drifted on. Now they cooled, cracked wide. From each a thousand capsules spilled into space, and the tiny jerk of the splitting case sent them in courses slightly divergent, enough to scatter them off toward different stars.

Endless seeping of life across space.

Smite into planet, the sift of spores, the search for the hot element, the growth, the culmination, the blast, the impulse.

Then space, years of drift. Out beyond, and past beyond…

I

The bartender was the biggest man at the Hub. He had a red slab-sided face, chest and belly like a barrel of meat and bone. He bounced his drunks by butting them to the door with this same belly, dancing close, thrusting forward like an uncouth and elephantine cooch-dancer. Reliable information compared the blow to the kick of a mule. Marvin Allixter, nervously lean and on his way to forty, wanted to call him a blackguard, a double-dealing pinch-penny, but cautiously restrained his tongue.

The bartender twisted the bubble back and forth, inspecting the enclosed little creature from all sides. It glowed and glinted like a prism—sun yellow, emerald, melting mauve, bright pink—the purest of colors. “Twenty franks,” he said without enthusiasm.

“Twenty franks?” Allixter dramatically beat both fists against the bar. “Now
you’re
joking.”

“No joke,” rumbled the bartender.

Allixter leaned forward earnestly, thinking to appeal to the man’s reason. “Now, Buck, look here. The bubble is pure rock crystal, maybe a million years old. And mind you the Kickerjees dig a year and think themselves lucky to find one or two, and then only in a great chunk of quartz. They grind and polish and twist and turn and then one slip—
smash!
—the bubble breaks, the mite oozes out and dies.”

The bartender turned away to pour straight shots for a pair of grinning warehousemen. “Too fragile. If I bought it and one of these drunks busted it I’d be out of twenty franks.”

“Twenty franks?” Allixter asked in astonishment. “That’s no figure to mention in the same breath with this little jewel. Why, I’d sell my ear for twenty franks first.”

“Suits me.” Buck the bartender jocularly flourished a knife.

Allixter now thought to arouse the man’s cupidity. “This item cost me five hundred franks at the source.”

The bartender laughed in his face. “You guys on the tube gang all sing the same song. You pick up a trinket somewhere off in the stations, you smuggle it back through the tube, you spin a fancy yarn about how much it cost you and hustle the item to the first sucker who listens to you.” He drew himself a small glass of water, drank it with a wink to the warehousemen.

“Sure, I got stuck once. I bought a little varmint from Hank Evans, said it could dance, said it knew all the native dances of Kalong, and the thing looked like it could dance. I put down forty-two franks for the animal. Come to find it had sore feet in the new gravity and was just hopping from one to the other to ease the pain. That was the dancing.”

Allixter shifted uneasily, glanced over his shoulder to the door. Sam Schmitz, the dispatcher, had been buzzing him for an hour and Sam was an impatient man. He lounged back against the bar, attempting an air of nonchalance. “Look at the colors the little rascal goes through—
there!
That red! Ever see anything so bright? Think how that would look hung around some lady’s neck!”

Kitty, the sumptuous blonde hostess, said in a breathless contralto, “I think it’s lovely. I’d be proud to wear it myself.”

The bartender took up the bubble once more. “I don’t know no ladies.” He inspected it doubtfully. “It’s a pretty little trinket. Well, maybe I’ll spring twenty franks.”