ACROSS THE LOCK of the panel was the seal set in
place by Van Rycke before the spacer had lifted from Sargol. Under
Dane’s inspection it showed no crack. To all evidences the
hatch had not been opened since they left the perfumed planet. And
yet the hunting Hoobat was sure that the invading pests were
within.
It took only a second for Dane to commit an act which, if he
could not defend it later, would blacklist him out of space. He
twisted off the official seal which should remain there while the
freighter was space borne.
With Ali’s help he shouldered aside the heavy sliding
panel and they looked into the cargo space, now filled with the red
wood from Sargol. The red wood! When he saw it Dane was struck with
their stupidity. Aside from the Koros stones in the stone box, only
the wood had come from the Salariki world. What if the pests had
not been planted by I-S agents, but were natives of Sargol being
brought in with the wood?
The men remained at the hatch to allow the Hoobat freedom in its
hunt. And Sinbad crouched behind them, snarling and giving voice to
a rumbling growl which was his negative opinion of the
proceedings.
They were conscious of an odor—the sharp,
unidentifiable scent Dane had noticed during the loading of the
wood. It was not unpleasant—merely different. And it—or
something—had an electrifying effect upon Queex. The blue hunter
climbed with the aid of its claws to the top of the nearest pile of
wood and there settled down. For a space it was apparently
contemplating the area about it.
Then it raised its claws and began the scraping fiddle which
once before had drawn its prey out of hiding. Oddly enough that dry
rasp of sound had a quieting effect upon Sinbad, and Dane felt the drag of the harness lessen as the cat
moved, not toward escape, but to the scene of action, humping
himself at last in the open panel, his round eyes fixed upon the
Hoobat with a fascinated stare.
Scrape-scrape—the monotonous noise bit into the ears of
the men, gnawed at their nerves.
“Ahhh—” Ali kept his voice to a whisper, but
his hand jerked to draw their attention to the right at deck level.
Dane saw that flicker along a log. The stowaway pest was now the
same brilliant color as the wood, indistinguishable until it moved,
which probably explained how it had come on board.
But that was only the first arrival. A second flash of movement
and a third followed. Then the hunted remained stationary, able to
resist for a period the insidious summoning of Queex. The Hoobat
maintained an attitude of indifference, of being so wrapped in its
music that nothing else existed. Rip whispered to Weeks:
“There’s one to the left—on the very end of
that log. Can you net it?”
The small oiler slipped the coiled mesh through his calloused
hands. He edged around Ali, keeping his eyes on the protruding bump
of red upon red which was his quarry.
“—two—three—four—five—”
Ali was counting under his breath but Dane could not see that many.
He was sure of only four, and those because he had seen them
move.
The things were ringing in the pile of wood where the Hoobat
fiddled, and two had ascended the first logs toward their doom.
Weeks went down on one knee, ready to cast his net, when Dane had
his first inspiration. He drew his sleep rod, easing it out of its
holster, set the lever on “spray” and beamed it at
three of those humps.
Rip, seeing what he was doing, dropped a hand on Weeks’
shoulder, holding the oiler in check. A hump moved, slid down the
rounded side of the log into the narrow aisle of deck between two
piles of wood. It lay quiet, a bright scarlet blot against the
gray.
Then Weeks did move, throwing his net over it and jerking the draw string tight, at the same time pulling the captive
toward him over the deck. But, even as it came, the scarlet of the
thing’s body was fast fading to an ashy pink and at last
taking on a gray as dull as the metal on which it lay—the complete
camouflage. Had they not had it enmeshed they might have lost it
altogether, so well did it now blend with the surface.
The other two in the path of the ray had not lost their grip
upon the logs, and the men could not advance to scoop them up. Not
while there were others not affected, free to flee back into
hiding. Weeks bound the net about the captive and looked to Rip for
orders.
“Deep freeze,” the acting-commander of the Queen
said succinctly. “Let me see it get out of that!”
Surely the cold of the deep freeze, united to the sleep ray,
would keep the creature under control until they had a chance to
study it. But, as Weeks passed Sinbad on his errand, the cat was so
frantic to avoid him that he reared up on his hind legs, almost
turning a somersault, snarling and spitting until Weeks was up the
ladder to the next level. It was very evident that the ship’s
cat was having none of this pest.
They might have been invisible and their actions nonexistent as
far as Queex was concerned. For the Hoobat continued its siren
concert. The lured became more reckless, mounting the logs to
Queex’s post in sudden darts. Dane wondered how the Hoobat
proposed handling four of the creatures at once. For, although the
other two which had been in the path of the ray had not moved, he
now counted four climbing.
“Stand by to ray—” that was Rip.
But it would have been interesting to see how Queex was
prepared to handle the four. And, though Rip had given the order to
stand by, he had not ordered the ray to be used. Was he, too,
interested in that?
The first red projection was within a foot of the Hoobat now and
its fellows had frozen as if to allow it the honor of battle with the feathered enemy. To all appearances Queex did
not see it, but when it sprang, with a whir of speed which would
baffle a human, the Hoobat was ready and its claws, halting their
rasp, met around the wasp-thin waist of the pest, speedily cutting
it in two. Only this time the Hoobat made no move to unjoint and
consume the victim. Instead it squatted in utter silence, as
motionless as a tri-dee print.
The heavy lower half of the creature rolled down the pile of
logs to the deck and there paled to the gray of its background.
None of its kind appeared to be interested in its fate. The two
which had been in the path of the ray continued to be humps on the
wood, the others faced the Hoobat.
But Rip was ready to waste no more time. “Ray them!”
he snapped.
All three of their sleep rods sprayed the pile, catching in
passing the Hoobat. Queex’s pop eyes closed, but it showed no
other sign of falling under the spell of the beam.
Certain that all the creatures in sight were now relatively
harmless, the three approached the logs. But it was necessary to
get into touching distance before they could even make out the
outlines of the nightmare things, so well did their protective
coloring conceal them. Wearing gloves, Ali detached the little
monsters from their holds on the wood and put them for temporary
safekeeping—during a transfer to the deep freeze—into
the Hoobat’s cage. Queex, they decided to leave where it was
for a space, to awaken and trap any survivor which had been too
wary to emerge at the first siren song. As far as they could tell
the Hoobat was their only possible protection against the pest and
to leave it in the center of infection was the wisest course.
Having dumped the now metal colored catch into the freeze, they
held a conference.
“No plague—” Weeks breathed a sigh of
relief.
“No proof of that yet,” Ali caught him up short.
“We have to prove it past any reasonable doubt.”
“And how are we going to do—?” Dane began when
he saw what the other had brought in from Tau’s stores. A lancet and the upper half of the creature Queex had killed in
the cargo hold.
The needle pointed front feet of the thing were curled up in its
death throes and it was now a dirty white shade, as if the ability
to change color had been lost before it matched the cotton on which
it lay. With the lancet Ali forced a claw away from the body. It
was oozing the watery liquid which they had seen on the one in the
hydro.
“I have an idea,” he said slowly, his eyes on the
mangled creature rather than on his shipmates, “that we might
have escaped being attacked because they sheered off from us. But
if we were clawed we might take it too. Remember those marks on the
throats and backs of the rest? That might be the entry point of
this poison—if poison it is—”
Dane could see the end of that line of reasoning. Rip and
Ali—they couldn’t be spared. The knowledge they had
would bring the Queen to earth. But a Cargo-master was excess
baggage when there was no reason for trade. It was his place to try
out the truth of Ali’s surmise.
But while he thought another acted. Weeks leaned over and
twitched the lancet out of Ali’s fingers. Then, before any of
them could move, he thrust its contaminated point into the back of
his hand.
“Don’t!”
Both Dane’s cry and Rip’s hand came too late. It had
been done. And Weeks sat there, looking alone and frightened,
studying the droop of blood which marked the dig of the
surgeon’s keen knife. But when he spoke his voice sounded
perfectly natural.
“Headache first, isn’t it?”
Only Ali was outwardly unaffected by what the little man had
just done. “Just be sure you have a real one,” he
warned with what Dane privately considered real callousness.
Weeks nodded. “Don’t let my imagination work,”
he answered shrewdly. “I know. It has to be real. How long do
you suppose?”
“We don’t know,” Rip sounded tired, beaten.
“Meanwhile,” he got to his feet, “we’d better set a
course home—”
“Home,” Weeks repeated. To him Terra was not his own
home—he had been born in the polar swamps of Venus. But to
all Solarians—no matter which planet had nurtured them—Terra was home.
“You,” Rip’s big hand fell gently on the
little oiler’s shoulder, “stay here with
Thorson—”
“No,” Weeks shook his head. “Unless I black
out, I’m riding station in the engine room. Maybe the bug
won’t work on me anyway.”
And because he had done what he had done they could not deny him
the right to ride his station as long as he could during the
grueling hours to come.
Dane visited the cargo hold once more. To be greeted by an irate
scream which assured him that Queex was again awake and on guard.
Although the Hoobat was ready enough to give tongue, it still
squatted in its chosen position on top of the log stack and he did
not try to dislodge it. Perhaps with Queex planted in the
enemies’ territory they would have nothing to fear from any
pests not now confined in the deep freeze.
Rip set his course for Terra—for that plague spot on their
native world where they might hide out the Queen until they could
prove their point—that the spacer was not a disease ridden
ship to be feared. He kept to the control cabin, shifting only
between the Astrogator’s and the pilot’s station. Upon
him alone rested the responsibility of bringing in the ship along a
vector which crossed no well traveled space lane where the Patrol
might challenge them. Dane rode out the orbiting in the
Com-tech’s seat, listening in for the first warning of
danger—that they had been detected.
The mechanical repetition of their list of crimes was now stale
news and largely off-ether. And from all traces he could pick up,
they were lost as far as the authorities were concerned. On the
other hand, the Patrol might indeed be as far knowing as its
propaganda stated and the Queen was running headlong into a trap.
Only they had no choice in the matter.
It was the ship’s inter-com bringing Ali’s voice
from the engine room which broke the concentration in the control
cabin. “Weeks’ down!”
Rip barked into the mike. “How bad?”
“He hasn’t blacked out yet. The pains in his head
are pretty bad and his hand is swelling—”
“He’s given us our proof. Tell him to report
off—”
But the disembodied voice which answered that was Weeks’.
“I haven’t got it as bad as the others. I’ll ride
this out.”
Rip shook his head. But short-handed as they were he could not
argue Weeks away from his post if the man insisted upon staying. He
had other, and for the time being, more important matters before
him.
How long they sweated out that descent upon their native world
Dane could never afterwards have testified. He only knew that hours
must have passed, until he thought groggily that he could not
remember a time he was not glued in the seat which had been
Tang’s, the earphones pressing against his sweating skull,
his fatigue-drugged mind being held with difficulty to the duty at
hand.
Sometime during that haze they made their landing, He had a dim
memory of Rip sprawled across the pilot’s control board and
then utter exhaustion claimed him also and the darkness closed in.
When he roused it was to look about a cabin tilted to one side. Rip
was still slumped in a muscle cramping posture, breathing heavily.
Dane bit out a forceful word born of twinges of his own, and then
snapped on the visa-plate.
For a long moment he was sure that he was not yet awake. And
then, as his dazed mind supplied names for what he saw, he knew
that Rip had failed. Far from being in the center—or at least
well within the perimeter of the dread Big Burn—they must
have landed in some civic park or national forest. For the massed
green outside, the bright flowers, the bird he sighted as a
brilliant flash of wind coasting color—those were not to be found in the twisted horror
left by man’s last attempt to impress his will upon his
resisting kind.
Well, it had been a good try, but there was no use expecting
luck to ride their fins all the way, and they had had more than
their share in the E-Stat affair. How long would it be before the
Law arrived to collect them? Would they have time to state their
case?
The faint hope that they might aroused him. He reached for the
com key and a second later tore the headphones from his appalled
ears. The crackle of static he knew—and the numerous strange
noises which broke in upon the lanes of communication in
space—but this solid, paralyzing roar was something totally
new—new, and frightening.
And because it was new and he could not account for it, he
turned back to regard the scene on the viewer with a more critical
eye. The foliage which grew in riotous profusion was green right
enough, and Terra green into the bargain—there was no
mistaking that. But—Dane caught at the edge of the Com-unit
for support. But—What was that liver-red blossom which had
just reached out to engulf a small flying thing?
Feverishly he tried to remember the little natural history he
knew. Sure that what he had just witnessed was
unnatural—un-Terran—and to be suspected!
He started the spy lens on its slow revolution in the
Queen’s nose, to get a full picture of their immediate
surroundings. It was tilted at an angle—apparently they had
not made a fin-point landing this time—and sometimes
it merely reflected slices of sky. But when it swept earthward he
saw enough to make him believe that wherever the spacer had set
down it was not on the Terra he knew.
Subconsciously he had expected the Big Burn to be barren
land—curdled rock with rivers of frozen quartz, substances
boiled up through the crust of the planet by the action of the
atomic explosives. That was the way it had been on Limbo—on
the other “burned-off” worlds they had discovered where
those who had preceded mankind into the Galaxy—the mysterious, long vanished “Forerunners”—had
fought their grim and totally annihilating wars.
But it would seem that the Big Burn was altogether
different—at least here it was. There was no rock sterile of
life outside—in fact there would appear to be too much life.
What Dane could sight on his limited field of vision was a teeming
jungle. And the thrill of that discovery almost made him forget
their present circumstances. He was still staring bemused at the
screen when Rip muttered, turned his head on his folded arms and
opened his sunken eyes:
“Did we make it?” he asked dully.
Dane, not taking his eyes from that fascinating scene without,
answered: “You brought us down. But I don’t know
where—”
“Unless our instruments were ’way off, we’re
near to the heart of the Burn.”
“Some heart!”
“What does it look like?” Rip sounded too tired to
cross the cabin and see for himself. “Barren as
Limbo?”
“Hardly! Rip, did you ever see a tomato as big as a melon—At least it looks like a tomato,” Dane halted the spy
lens as it focused upon this new phenomena.
“A what?” There was a note of concern in
Shannon’s voice. “What’s the matter with you,
Dane?”
“Come and see,” Dane willingly yielded his place to
Rip but he did not step out of range of the screen. Surely that did
have the likeness to a good, old fashioned earthside tomato—but it was melon size and it hung from a bush which was close to a
ten foot tree!
Rip stumbled across to drop into the Com-tech’s place. But
his expression of worry changed to one of simple astonishment as he
saw that picture.
“Where are we?”
“You name it,” Dane had had longer to adjust, the
excitement of an explorer sighting virgin territory worked in his
veins, banishing fatigue. “It must be the Big
Burn!”
“But,” Rip shook his head slowly as if with that
gesture to deny the evidence before his eyes, “that
country’s all bare rock. I’ve seen
pictures—”
“Of the outer rim,” Dane corrected, having already
solved that problem for himself. “This must be farther in
than any survey ship ever came. Great Spirit of Outer Space, what
has happened here?”
Rip had enough technical training to know how to get part of the
answer. He leaned halfway across the com, and was able to flick
down a lever with the very tip of his longest finger. Instantly the
cabin was filled with a clicking so loud as to make an almost
continuous drone of sound.
Dane knew that danger signal, he didn’t need Rip’s
words to underline it for him.
“That’s what’s happened. This country is pile
‘hot’ out there!”
ACROSS THE LOCK of the panel was the seal set in
place by Van Rycke before the spacer had lifted from Sargol. Under
Dane’s inspection it showed no crack. To all evidences the
hatch had not been opened since they left the perfumed planet. And
yet the hunting Hoobat was sure that the invading pests were
within.
It took only a second for Dane to commit an act which, if he
could not defend it later, would blacklist him out of space. He
twisted off the official seal which should remain there while the
freighter was space borne.
With Ali’s help he shouldered aside the heavy sliding
panel and they looked into the cargo space, now filled with the red
wood from Sargol. The red wood! When he saw it Dane was struck with
their stupidity. Aside from the Koros stones in the stone box, only
the wood had come from the Salariki world. What if the pests had
not been planted by I-S agents, but were natives of Sargol being
brought in with the wood?
The men remained at the hatch to allow the Hoobat freedom in its
hunt. And Sinbad crouched behind them, snarling and giving voice to
a rumbling growl which was his negative opinion of the
proceedings.
They were conscious of an odor—the sharp,
unidentifiable scent Dane had noticed during the loading of the
wood. It was not unpleasant—merely different. And it—or
something—had an electrifying effect upon Queex. The blue hunter
climbed with the aid of its claws to the top of the nearest pile of
wood and there settled down. For a space it was apparently
contemplating the area about it.
Then it raised its claws and began the scraping fiddle which
once before had drawn its prey out of hiding. Oddly enough that dry
rasp of sound had a quieting effect upon Sinbad, and Dane felt the drag of the harness lessen as the cat
moved, not toward escape, but to the scene of action, humping
himself at last in the open panel, his round eyes fixed upon the
Hoobat with a fascinated stare.
Scrape-scrape—the monotonous noise bit into the ears of
the men, gnawed at their nerves.
“Ahhh—” Ali kept his voice to a whisper, but
his hand jerked to draw their attention to the right at deck level.
Dane saw that flicker along a log. The stowaway pest was now the
same brilliant color as the wood, indistinguishable until it moved,
which probably explained how it had come on board.
But that was only the first arrival. A second flash of movement
and a third followed. Then the hunted remained stationary, able to
resist for a period the insidious summoning of Queex. The Hoobat
maintained an attitude of indifference, of being so wrapped in its
music that nothing else existed. Rip whispered to Weeks:
“There’s one to the left—on the very end of
that log. Can you net it?”
The small oiler slipped the coiled mesh through his calloused
hands. He edged around Ali, keeping his eyes on the protruding bump
of red upon red which was his quarry.
“—two—three—four—five—”
Ali was counting under his breath but Dane could not see that many.
He was sure of only four, and those because he had seen them
move.
The things were ringing in the pile of wood where the Hoobat
fiddled, and two had ascended the first logs toward their doom.
Weeks went down on one knee, ready to cast his net, when Dane had
his first inspiration. He drew his sleep rod, easing it out of its
holster, set the lever on “spray” and beamed it at
three of those humps.
Rip, seeing what he was doing, dropped a hand on Weeks’
shoulder, holding the oiler in check. A hump moved, slid down the
rounded side of the log into the narrow aisle of deck between two
piles of wood. It lay quiet, a bright scarlet blot against the
gray.
Then Weeks did move, throwing his net over it and jerking the draw string tight, at the same time pulling the captive
toward him over the deck. But, even as it came, the scarlet of the
thing’s body was fast fading to an ashy pink and at last
taking on a gray as dull as the metal on which it lay—the complete
camouflage. Had they not had it enmeshed they might have lost it
altogether, so well did it now blend with the surface.
The other two in the path of the ray had not lost their grip
upon the logs, and the men could not advance to scoop them up. Not
while there were others not affected, free to flee back into
hiding. Weeks bound the net about the captive and looked to Rip for
orders.
“Deep freeze,” the acting-commander of the Queen
said succinctly. “Let me see it get out of that!”
Surely the cold of the deep freeze, united to the sleep ray,
would keep the creature under control until they had a chance to
study it. But, as Weeks passed Sinbad on his errand, the cat was so
frantic to avoid him that he reared up on his hind legs, almost
turning a somersault, snarling and spitting until Weeks was up the
ladder to the next level. It was very evident that the ship’s
cat was having none of this pest.
They might have been invisible and their actions nonexistent as
far as Queex was concerned. For the Hoobat continued its siren
concert. The lured became more reckless, mounting the logs to
Queex’s post in sudden darts. Dane wondered how the Hoobat
proposed handling four of the creatures at once. For, although the
other two which had been in the path of the ray had not moved, he
now counted four climbing.
“Stand by to ray—” that was Rip.
But it would have been interesting to see how Queex was
prepared to handle the four. And, though Rip had given the order to
stand by, he had not ordered the ray to be used. Was he, too,
interested in that?
The first red projection was within a foot of the Hoobat now and
its fellows had frozen as if to allow it the honor of battle with the feathered enemy. To all appearances Queex did
not see it, but when it sprang, with a whir of speed which would
baffle a human, the Hoobat was ready and its claws, halting their
rasp, met around the wasp-thin waist of the pest, speedily cutting
it in two. Only this time the Hoobat made no move to unjoint and
consume the victim. Instead it squatted in utter silence, as
motionless as a tri-dee print.
The heavy lower half of the creature rolled down the pile of
logs to the deck and there paled to the gray of its background.
None of its kind appeared to be interested in its fate. The two
which had been in the path of the ray continued to be humps on the
wood, the others faced the Hoobat.
But Rip was ready to waste no more time. “Ray them!”
he snapped.
All three of their sleep rods sprayed the pile, catching in
passing the Hoobat. Queex’s pop eyes closed, but it showed no
other sign of falling under the spell of the beam.
Certain that all the creatures in sight were now relatively
harmless, the three approached the logs. But it was necessary to
get into touching distance before they could even make out the
outlines of the nightmare things, so well did their protective
coloring conceal them. Wearing gloves, Ali detached the little
monsters from their holds on the wood and put them for temporary
safekeeping—during a transfer to the deep freeze—into
the Hoobat’s cage. Queex, they decided to leave where it was
for a space, to awaken and trap any survivor which had been too
wary to emerge at the first siren song. As far as they could tell
the Hoobat was their only possible protection against the pest and
to leave it in the center of infection was the wisest course.
Having dumped the now metal colored catch into the freeze, they
held a conference.
“No plague—” Weeks breathed a sigh of
relief.
“No proof of that yet,” Ali caught him up short.
“We have to prove it past any reasonable doubt.”
“And how are we going to do—?” Dane began when
he saw what the other had brought in from Tau’s stores. A lancet and the upper half of the creature Queex had killed in
the cargo hold.
The needle pointed front feet of the thing were curled up in its
death throes and it was now a dirty white shade, as if the ability
to change color had been lost before it matched the cotton on which
it lay. With the lancet Ali forced a claw away from the body. It
was oozing the watery liquid which they had seen on the one in the
hydro.
“I have an idea,” he said slowly, his eyes on the
mangled creature rather than on his shipmates, “that we might
have escaped being attacked because they sheered off from us. But
if we were clawed we might take it too. Remember those marks on the
throats and backs of the rest? That might be the entry point of
this poison—if poison it is—”
Dane could see the end of that line of reasoning. Rip and
Ali—they couldn’t be spared. The knowledge they had
would bring the Queen to earth. But a Cargo-master was excess
baggage when there was no reason for trade. It was his place to try
out the truth of Ali’s surmise.
But while he thought another acted. Weeks leaned over and
twitched the lancet out of Ali’s fingers. Then, before any of
them could move, he thrust its contaminated point into the back of
his hand.
“Don’t!”
Both Dane’s cry and Rip’s hand came too late. It had
been done. And Weeks sat there, looking alone and frightened,
studying the droop of blood which marked the dig of the
surgeon’s keen knife. But when he spoke his voice sounded
perfectly natural.
“Headache first, isn’t it?”
Only Ali was outwardly unaffected by what the little man had
just done. “Just be sure you have a real one,” he
warned with what Dane privately considered real callousness.
Weeks nodded. “Don’t let my imagination work,”
he answered shrewdly. “I know. It has to be real. How long do
you suppose?”
“We don’t know,” Rip sounded tired, beaten.
“Meanwhile,” he got to his feet, “we’d better set a
course home—”
“Home,” Weeks repeated. To him Terra was not his own
home—he had been born in the polar swamps of Venus. But to
all Solarians—no matter which planet had nurtured them—Terra was home.
“You,” Rip’s big hand fell gently on the
little oiler’s shoulder, “stay here with
Thorson—”
“No,” Weeks shook his head. “Unless I black
out, I’m riding station in the engine room. Maybe the bug
won’t work on me anyway.”
And because he had done what he had done they could not deny him
the right to ride his station as long as he could during the
grueling hours to come.
Dane visited the cargo hold once more. To be greeted by an irate
scream which assured him that Queex was again awake and on guard.
Although the Hoobat was ready enough to give tongue, it still
squatted in its chosen position on top of the log stack and he did
not try to dislodge it. Perhaps with Queex planted in the
enemies’ territory they would have nothing to fear from any
pests not now confined in the deep freeze.
Rip set his course for Terra—for that plague spot on their
native world where they might hide out the Queen until they could
prove their point—that the spacer was not a disease ridden
ship to be feared. He kept to the control cabin, shifting only
between the Astrogator’s and the pilot’s station. Upon
him alone rested the responsibility of bringing in the ship along a
vector which crossed no well traveled space lane where the Patrol
might challenge them. Dane rode out the orbiting in the
Com-tech’s seat, listening in for the first warning of
danger—that they had been detected.
The mechanical repetition of their list of crimes was now stale
news and largely off-ether. And from all traces he could pick up,
they were lost as far as the authorities were concerned. On the
other hand, the Patrol might indeed be as far knowing as its
propaganda stated and the Queen was running headlong into a trap.
Only they had no choice in the matter.
It was the ship’s inter-com bringing Ali’s voice
from the engine room which broke the concentration in the control
cabin. “Weeks’ down!”
Rip barked into the mike. “How bad?”
“He hasn’t blacked out yet. The pains in his head
are pretty bad and his hand is swelling—”
“He’s given us our proof. Tell him to report
off—”
But the disembodied voice which answered that was Weeks’.
“I haven’t got it as bad as the others. I’ll ride
this out.”
Rip shook his head. But short-handed as they were he could not
argue Weeks away from his post if the man insisted upon staying. He
had other, and for the time being, more important matters before
him.
How long they sweated out that descent upon their native world
Dane could never afterwards have testified. He only knew that hours
must have passed, until he thought groggily that he could not
remember a time he was not glued in the seat which had been
Tang’s, the earphones pressing against his sweating skull,
his fatigue-drugged mind being held with difficulty to the duty at
hand.
Sometime during that haze they made their landing, He had a dim
memory of Rip sprawled across the pilot’s control board and
then utter exhaustion claimed him also and the darkness closed in.
When he roused it was to look about a cabin tilted to one side. Rip
was still slumped in a muscle cramping posture, breathing heavily.
Dane bit out a forceful word born of twinges of his own, and then
snapped on the visa-plate.
For a long moment he was sure that he was not yet awake. And
then, as his dazed mind supplied names for what he saw, he knew
that Rip had failed. Far from being in the center—or at least
well within the perimeter of the dread Big Burn—they must
have landed in some civic park or national forest. For the massed
green outside, the bright flowers, the bird he sighted as a
brilliant flash of wind coasting color—those were not to be found in the twisted horror
left by man’s last attempt to impress his will upon his
resisting kind.
Well, it had been a good try, but there was no use expecting
luck to ride their fins all the way, and they had had more than
their share in the E-Stat affair. How long would it be before the
Law arrived to collect them? Would they have time to state their
case?
The faint hope that they might aroused him. He reached for the
com key and a second later tore the headphones from his appalled
ears. The crackle of static he knew—and the numerous strange
noises which broke in upon the lanes of communication in
space—but this solid, paralyzing roar was something totally
new—new, and frightening.
And because it was new and he could not account for it, he
turned back to regard the scene on the viewer with a more critical
eye. The foliage which grew in riotous profusion was green right
enough, and Terra green into the bargain—there was no
mistaking that. But—Dane caught at the edge of the Com-unit
for support. But—What was that liver-red blossom which had
just reached out to engulf a small flying thing?
Feverishly he tried to remember the little natural history he
knew. Sure that what he had just witnessed was
unnatural—un-Terran—and to be suspected!
He started the spy lens on its slow revolution in the
Queen’s nose, to get a full picture of their immediate
surroundings. It was tilted at an angle—apparently they had
not made a fin-point landing this time—and sometimes
it merely reflected slices of sky. But when it swept earthward he
saw enough to make him believe that wherever the spacer had set
down it was not on the Terra he knew.
Subconsciously he had expected the Big Burn to be barren
land—curdled rock with rivers of frozen quartz, substances
boiled up through the crust of the planet by the action of the
atomic explosives. That was the way it had been on Limbo—on
the other “burned-off” worlds they had discovered where
those who had preceded mankind into the Galaxy—the mysterious, long vanished “Forerunners”—had
fought their grim and totally annihilating wars.
But it would seem that the Big Burn was altogether
different—at least here it was. There was no rock sterile of
life outside—in fact there would appear to be too much life.
What Dane could sight on his limited field of vision was a teeming
jungle. And the thrill of that discovery almost made him forget
their present circumstances. He was still staring bemused at the
screen when Rip muttered, turned his head on his folded arms and
opened his sunken eyes:
“Did we make it?” he asked dully.
Dane, not taking his eyes from that fascinating scene without,
answered: “You brought us down. But I don’t know
where—”
“Unless our instruments were ’way off, we’re
near to the heart of the Burn.”
“Some heart!”
“What does it look like?” Rip sounded too tired to
cross the cabin and see for himself. “Barren as
Limbo?”
“Hardly! Rip, did you ever see a tomato as big as a melon—At least it looks like a tomato,” Dane halted the spy
lens as it focused upon this new phenomena.
“A what?” There was a note of concern in
Shannon’s voice. “What’s the matter with you,
Dane?”
“Come and see,” Dane willingly yielded his place to
Rip but he did not step out of range of the screen. Surely that did
have the likeness to a good, old fashioned earthside tomato—but it was melon size and it hung from a bush which was close to a
ten foot tree!
Rip stumbled across to drop into the Com-tech’s place. But
his expression of worry changed to one of simple astonishment as he
saw that picture.
“Where are we?”
“You name it,” Dane had had longer to adjust, the
excitement of an explorer sighting virgin territory worked in his
veins, banishing fatigue. “It must be the Big
Burn!”
“But,” Rip shook his head slowly as if with that
gesture to deny the evidence before his eyes, “that
country’s all bare rock. I’ve seen
pictures—”
“Of the outer rim,” Dane corrected, having already
solved that problem for himself. “This must be farther in
than any survey ship ever came. Great Spirit of Outer Space, what
has happened here?”
Rip had enough technical training to know how to get part of the
answer. He leaned halfway across the com, and was able to flick
down a lever with the very tip of his longest finger. Instantly the
cabin was filled with a clicking so loud as to make an almost
continuous drone of sound.
Dane knew that danger signal, he didn’t need Rip’s
words to underline it for him.
“That’s what’s happened. This country is pile
‘hot’ out there!”