Chapter 3

There was no answer from the ground when breakout came and Calhoun drove the Med Ship to a favorable position for a call. He patiently repeated, over and over again, that Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty notified its arrival and requested coördinates for landing. There should have been a crisp description of the direction from the planet’s center at which, a certain time so many hours or minutes later, the force-fields of the grid would find it convenient to lock onto and lower the Med Ship. But the communicator remained silent.

“There is a landing-grid,” said Calhoun, frowning, “and if they’re using it to load fresh meat for Dara, from the herds I’m told about, it should be manned. But they don’t seem to intend to answer. Maybe they think that if they pretend I’m not here I’ll go away.”

He reflected, and his frown deepened.

“If I didn’t know what I do know, I might. So if I land on emergency-rockets the blueskins down below may decide that I come from Weald. And in that case it would be reasonable to blast me before I could land and unload some fighting men. On the other hand, no ship from Weald would conceivably land without impassioned assurance that it was safe. It would drop bombs.” He turned to the girl. “How many Darians down below?”

She shook her head.

“You don’t know,” said Calhoun, “or won’t tell, yet. But they ought to be told about the arrival of that ship at Weald, and what Weald thinks about it! My guess is that you came to tell them. It isn’t likely that Dara gets news direct from Weald. Where were you put ashore from Dara, when you set out to be a spy?”

Her lips parted to speak. But she compressed them tightly. She shook her head again.

“It must have been plenty far away,” said Calhoun restlessly. “Your people would have built a ship, and made fine forged papers for it, and they’d travel so far from this part of space that when they landed nobody would think of Dara. They’d use makeup to cover the blue spots, but maybe it was so far away that blueskins had never been heard of!”

Her face looked pinched, but she did not reply.

“Then they’d land half a dozen of you, with a supply of makeup for the blue patches. And you’d separate, and take ships that went various roundabout ways, and arrive on Weald one by one, to see what could be done there to...” He stopped. “When did you find out positively that there wasn’t any plague any more?”

She began to grow pale.

“I’m not a mind-reader,” said Calhoun. “But it adds up. You’re from Dara. You’ve been on Weald. It’s practically certain that there are other, agents, if you like that word better, on Weald. And there hasn’t been a plague on Weald so you people aren’t carriers of it. But you knew it in advance, I think. How’d you learn? Did a ship in some sort of trouble land there, on Dara?”

“Y-yes,” said the girl. “We wouldn’t let it go again. But the people didn’t catch--they didn’t die--they lived--.”

She stopped short.

“It’s not fair to trap me!” she cried passionately, “It’s not fair!”

“I’ll stop,” said Calhoun.

He turned to the control-board. The Med Ship was only planetary diameters from Orede, now, and the electron telescope showed shining stars in leisurely motion across its screen. Then a huge, gibbous shining shape appeared, and there were irregular patches of that muddy color which is sea-bottom, and varicolored areas which were plains and forests. Also there were mountains. Calhoun steadied the image and squinted at it.

“The mine,” he observed, “was found by members of a hunting-party, killing wild cattle for sport.”

Even a small planet has many millions of square miles of surface, and a single human installation on a whole world will not be easy to find by random search. But there were clues to this one. Men hunting for sport would not choose a tropic nor an arctic climate to hunt in. So if they found a mineral deposit, it would have been in a temperate zone. Cattle would not be found deep in a mountainous terrain. The mine would not be on a prairie. The settlement on Orede, then, would be near the edge of mountains, not far from a prairie such as wild cattle would frequent, and it would be in a temperate climate. Forested areas could be ruled out. And there would be a landing-grid. Handling only one ship at a time, it might be a very small grid. It need be only hundreds of yards across and less than half a mile high. But its shadow would be distinctive.

Calhoun searched among low mountains near unforested prairie in a temperate zone. He found a speck. He enlarged it many-fold, and it was the mine on Orede. There were heaps of tailings. There was something which cast a long, lacy shadow. The landing-grid.

“But they don’t answer our call,” observed Calhoun, “so we go down unwelcomed.”

He inverted the Med Ship and the emergency-rockets boomed. The ship plunged planetward.

A long time later it was deep in the planet’s atmosphere. The noise of its rockets had become thunderous, with air to carry and to reinforce the sound.

“Hold on to something, Murgatroyd,” commanded Calhoun. “We may have to dodge some ack.”

But nothing came up from below. The Med Ship again inverted itself, and its rockets pointed toward the planet and poured out pencil-thin, blue-white, high-velocity flames. It checked slightly, but continued to descend. It was not directly above the grid. It swept downward until almost level with the peaks of the mountains in which the mine lay. It tilted again, and swept onward over the mountain-tops, and then tilted once more and went racing up the valley in which the landing-grid was plainly visible. Calhoun swung it on an erratic course, lest there be opposition.

But there was no sign. Then the rockets bellowed, and the ship slowed its forward motion, hovered momentarily, and settled to solidity outside the framework of the grid. The grid was small, as Calhoun reasoned. But it reached interminably toward the sky.

The rocket cut off. Slender as the flame had been, they’d melted and bored thin drill-holes deep into the soil. Molten rock boiled and bubbled down below. But there seemed no other sound. There was no other motion. There was absolute stillness all around. But when Calhoun switched on the outside microphones a faint, sweet melange of high-pitched chirpings came from tiny creatures hidden under the vegetation of the mountainsides.

Calhoun put a blaster in his pocket and stood up.

“We’ll see what it looks like outside,” he said with a certain grimness. “I don’t quite believe what the visionscreens show.”

Minutes later he stepped down to the ground from the Med Ship’s exit-port. The ship had landed perhaps a hundred feet from what once had been a wooden building. In it, ore from the mines was concentrated and the useless tailings carried away by a conveyor-belt to make a monstrous pile of broken stone. But there was no longer a building. Next to it there had been a structure containing an ore-crusher. The massive machinery could still be seen, but the structure was fragments. Next to that, again, had been the shaft-head shelters of the mine. They also were shattered practically to match-sticks.

The look of the ground about the building-sites was simply and purely impossible. It was a mass of hoofprints. Cattle by thousands and tens of thousands had trampled everything. Cattle had burst in the wooden sides of the buildings. Cattle had piled themselves up against the beams upholding roofs until the buildings collapsed. Then cattle had gone plunging over the wrecked buildings until there was nothing left but indescribable chaos. Many, many cattle had died in the crush. There were heaps of dead beasts about the metal girders which were the foundation of the landing-grid. The air was tainted by the smell of carrion.

The settlement had been destroyed, positively, by stampeded cattle in tens or hundreds of thousands charging blindly through and over and upon it. Senselessly, they’d trampled each other to horrible shapelessnesses. The mine-shaft was not choked, because enormously strong timbers had fallen across and blocked it. But everything else was pure destruction.

Calhoun said evenly;

“Clever! Very clever! You can’t blame men when beasts stampede! We should accept the evidence that some monstrous herd, making its way through a mountain pass, somehow went crazy and bolted for the plains and this settlement got in the way and it was too bad for the settlement. Everything’s explained, except the ship that went to Weald. A cattle stampede, yes. Anybody can believe that! But there was a man-stampede! Men stampeded into the ship as blindly as the cattle trampled down this little town. The ship stampeded off into space as insanely as the cattle. But a stampede of men and cattle, in the same place, --that’s a little too much at one time!”

“How,” asked Calhoun directly, “do you intend to get in touch with your friends here?”

“I--I don’t know,” she said distressedly. “But if--the ship stays here, they’re bound to come and see why. Won’t they? Or will they?”

“If they’re sane, they won’t,” said Calhoun. “The one undesirable thing, here, would be human footprints on top of cattle-tracks. If your friends are a meat-getting party from Dara, as I believe, they should cover up their tracks, get off-planet as fast as possible, and pray that no signs of their former presence are ever discovered. That would be their best first move, certainly!”

“What should I do?” she asked helplessly.

“I’m far from sure. At a guess, and for the moment, probably nothing. I’ll work something out ... I’ve got the devil of a job before me, though. I can’t spend too much time here.”

“You can--leave me here...”

He grunted and turned away. It was naturally unthinkable that he should leave another human being on a supposedly uninhabited planet, with the knowledge that it might actually be uninhabited, and the further knowledge that any visitors would have the strongest of possible reasons to hide themselves away.

He believed that there were Darians here, and the girl in the Med ship--so he also believed--was a Darian. But any who might be hiding had so much to lose if they were discovered that they might be hundreds or even thousands of miles from anywhere a space-ship would normally land--if they hadn’t fled after the incident of the space-ship’s departure with its load of doomed passengers.

Considered detachedly, the odds were that there was again a food-shortage on Dara. That blueskins, in desperation, had raided or were raiding or would raid the cattle-herds of Orede for food to carry back to their home planet. That somehow the miners on Orede had found that they had blueskin neighbors, and died of the consequences of their terror. It was a risky guess to make on such evidence as Calhoun considered he had, but no other guess was possible.

If his guess was right, he was under some obligation to do exactly what he believed the girl considered her mission, to warn all blueskins that Weald would presently try to find them on Orede, when all hell must break loose upon Dara for punishment. But if there were men here, he couldn’t leave a written warning for them in default of friendly contact. They might not find it, and a search-party of Wealdians might. All he could possibly do was try to make contact and give warning by such means as would leave no evidence behind that he’d done so. Weald would consider a warning sure proof of blueskin guilt.

It was not satisfactory to be limited to broadcasts which might not be picked up, and were unlikely to be acknowledged. But he settled down with the communicator to make the attempt.