Chapter 10

The sun rose. Cochrane noted the time, it was fourteen hours since sunset. The local day would be something more than an Earth-day in length. The manner of sunrise was familiar. There was a pale gray light in the sky. It strengthened. Then reddish colors appeared, and changed to gold, and the unnamed stars winked out one after another. Presently the nearer hillsides ceased to be black. There was light everywhere.

Alicia, white and haggard, waited to see what the light would show.

But there was heavy mist everywhere. The hill-crests were clear, and the edge of the visible woodland, and the top half of the ship’s shining hull rose clear of curiously-tinted, slowly writhing fog. But everything else seemed submerged in a sea of milk.

But the mist grew thinner as the sun shone on it. Its top writhed to nothingness. All this was wholly commonplace. Even clouds in the sky were of types well-known enough. Which was, when one thought about it, inevitable. This was a Sol-type sun, of the same kind and color as the star which warmed the planet Earth. It had planets, like the sun of men’s home world. There was a law--Bode’s Law--which specified that planets must float in orbits bearing such-and-such relationships to each other. There must also be a law that planets in those orbits must bear such-and-such relationships of size to each other. There must be a law that winds must blow under ordinary conditions, and clouds form at appointed heights and times. It would be very remarkable if Earth were an exception to natural laws that other worlds obey.

So the strangeness of the morning to those who watched from the ship was more like the strangeness of an alien land on Earth than that of a wholly alien planet.

The lower dawnmist thinned. Gazing down, Cochrane saw dark masses moving slowly past the ship’s three metal landing-fins. They were the beasts of the night, moving deliberately from their bed-ground to the vast plains inland. There were bunches of hundreds, and bunches of scores. There were occasional knots of dozens only.

From overhead and through the mist Cochrane could not see individual animals too clearly, but they were heavy beasts and clumsy ones. They moved sluggishly. Their numbers dwindled. He saw groups of no more than four or five. He saw single animals trudging patiently away.

He saw no more at all.

Then the sunlight touched the inland hills. The last of the morning mist dissolved, and there were the dead bodies of two beasts near the base of the ship. Johnny Simms had killed them with his first panicky shots of the night. There was another dead beast a quarter-mile away.

Cochrane gave orders. Jones and Al could not leave the ship. They were needed to get it back to Earth, with full knowledge of how to make other starships. Cochrane tried to leave Babs behind, but she would not stay. Bell had loaded himself with a camera and film-tape besides a weapon, before Cochrane even began his organization. Holden was needed for an extra gun. Alicia, tearless and despairing, would not be left behind. Cochrane turned wryly to Jamison.

“I don’t think Johnny was killed,” he said. “He’d gotten a long way off before it happened, anyhow. We’ve got to hunt for him. With beasts like those of last night, there’ll naturally be other creatures to prey on them. We might run into anything. If we don’t get back, you get to the lawyers I’ve had representing Spaceways. They’ll get rich off the job, but you’ll end up rich, too.”

“The best bet all around,” said Jamison in a low tone, “would be to find him trampled to death.”

“I agree,” said Cochrane sourly. “But apparently the beasts don’t stampede. Maybe they don’t even charge, but just form rings to protect their females and young, like musk-oxen. I’m afraid he’s alive, but I’m also afraid we’ll never find him.”

He marshaled his group. Jones had walkie-talkies ready, deftly removed for the purpose from space-suits nobody had used since leaving Lunar City--and Holden took one to keep in touch by. They went down in the sling, two at a time.

Cochrane regarded the two dead animals near the base of the ship. They were roughly the size of cattle, and they were shaggy like buffalo. They had branching, pointed, deadly horns. They had hoofs, single hoofs, not cloven. They were not like any Earth animal. But horns and hoofs will appear in any system of parallel evolution. It would seem even more certain that proteins and amino acids and such compounds as hemoglobin and fat and muscle-tissue should be identical as a matter of chemical inevitability. These creatures had teeth and they were herbivorous. Bell photographed them painstakingly.

“Somehow,” said Cochrane, “I think they’d be wholesome food. If we can, we’ll empty a freezing-locker and take a carcass for tests.”

Holden fingered his rifle unhappily. Alicia said nothing. Babs stayed close beside her. They went on.

They came to another dead animal a quarter-mile away. The ground was full of the scent and the hoofmarks of the departed herd. Bell photographed again. They did not stop. Johnny Simms had been this way, because of the carcass. He wasn’t here now.

They topped the next rise in the ground. They saw two other slaughtered creatures. It was wholly evident, now, that these animals did not charge but only stood their ground when alarmed. Johnny Simms had fired blindly when he blundered into their groupings.

The last carcass they saw was barely two hundred yards from the one patch of woodland visible from the ship. Cochrane said with some grimness.

“If his eyes had gotten used to the darkness, he might have seen the forest and tried to get into it to get away from those animals.”

And if Johnny Simms had not stopped short instantly he reached the woods and presumable safety, he would be utterly lost by now. There could be nothing less hopeful than the situation of a man lost on a strange planet, not knowing in what direction he had blundered on his first starting out. Even nearby, three directions out of four would be wrong. Farther away, the chance of stumbling on the way back to the ship would be nonexistent.

Alicia saw a human footprint on the trodden muck near the last carcass. It pointed toward the wood.

They reached the wood, and search looked hopeless. Then by purest chance they found a place where Johnny had stumbled and fallen headlong. He’d leaped up and fled crazily. For some fifteen yards they could track him by the trampled dried small growths he’d knocked down in his flight. Then there were no more such growths. All signs of his flight were lost. But they went on.

There were strangenesses everywhere, of which they could realize only a small part because they had been city-dwellers back on Earth. There was one place where trees grew like banyans, and it was utterly impossible to penetrate them. They swerved aside. There was another spot where giant trees like sequoias made a cathedral-like atmosphere, and it seemed an impiety to speak. But Holden reported tonelessly in the walkie-talkie, and assured Jones and Al and Jamison that all so far was well.

They heard a vast commotion of chattering voices, and they hoped that it might be a disturbance of Johnny Simms’ causing. But when they reached the place there was dead silence. Only, there were hundreds of tiny nests everywhere. They could not catch a glimpse of a single one of the nests’ inhabitants, but they felt that they were peeked at from under leaves and around branches.

Cochrane looked unhappy indeed. In cold blood, he knew that Johnny Simms had left the ship in exactly the sort of resentful bravado with which a spoiled little boy will run away from home to punish his parents. Quite possibly he had intended only to go out into the night and wait near the ship until he was missed. But he’d found himself among the unknown beasts. He’d gone into blind panic. Now he was lost indeed.

But one could not refuse to search for him simply because it was hopeless. Cochrane could not imagine doing any less than continuing to search as long as Alicia had hope. She might hope on indefinitely.

They heard the faint, distant, incisive sound of a shot.

Holden’s voice reported it in the walkie-talkie. Cochrane nodded brightly to Alicia and fired a shot in turn. He was relieved. It looked like everything would end in a commonplace fashion. The party from the ship headed toward the source of the other sound.

In half an hour Cochrane was about to fire again. But they heard the hysterical rat-tat-tat of firing. It seemed no nearer, but it could only be Johnny Simms.

Cochrane and Holden fired together for assurance to Johnny. Bell took pictures.

Again they marched toward where the shots had been fired. Again they trudged on for a long time. Seemingly, Johnny had moved away from them as they followed him. They breasted a hill, and there was a breeze with the smell of water in it, and they saw that here the land sloped very gradually toward the sea, and the sea was in view. It was infinitely blue and it reached toward the most alluring of horizons. Between them and the sea there was only low-growing stuff, brownish and sparse. There was sand underfoot--a curious bluish sand. Only here and there did the dry-seeming vegetation grow higher than their heads.

More shots. Between them and the sea. Cochrane and Holden fired again.

“What the devil’s the matter with the fool?” demanded Holden irritably. “He knows we’re coming! Why doesn’t he stand still or come to meet us?”

Cochrane shrugged. That thought was disturbing him too. They pressed forward, and suddenly Holden exclaimed. “That looks like a man! Two men!”

Cochrane caught the barest glimpse of something running about, far ahead. It looked like naked human flesh. It was the size of a man. It vanished. Another popped into view and darted madly out of sight. They did not see the newcomers.

“He shot something like that, back where we first landed,” said Cochrane grimly. “We’d better hurry!”

They did hurry. There was a last flurry of shooting. It was automatic fire. It is not wise to shoot on automatic if one’s ammunition is limited, Johnny Simms’ firearm chattered furiously for part of a second. It stopped short. He couldn’t have fired so short a burst. He was out of bullets.

They ran.

When they drew near him, a hooting set up. Things scattered away. Large things. Birds the size of men. They heard Johnny Simms screaming.

They came panting to the very beach, on which foam-tipped waves broke in absolutely normal grandeur. The sand was commonplace save for a slight bluish tint. Johnny Simms was out on the beach, in the open. He was down. He had flung his gun at something and was weaponless. He lay on the sand, shrieking. There were four ungainly, monstrous birds like oversized Cornish Game gamecocks pecking at him. Two ran crazily away at sight of the humans. Two others remained. Then they fled. One of them halted, darted back, and took a last peck at Johnny Simms before it fled again.

Holden fired, and missed. Cochrane ran toward the kicking, shrieking Johnny Simms. But Alicia got there first.

He was a completely pitiable object. His clothing had been almost completely stripped away in the brief time since his last burst of shots. There were wounds on his bare flesh. After all, the beak of a bird as tall as a man is not a weapon to be despised. Johnny Simms would have been pecked to death but for the party from the ship. He had been spotted and harried by a huntingpack of the ostrich-sized creatures at earliest dawn. A cooler-headed man would have stood still and killed some of them, then the rest would either have run away or devoured their slaughtered fellows. But Johnny Simms was not cool-headed. He had made a career of being a rich man’s spoiled little boy. Now he’d had a fright great enough and an escape narrow enough to shatter the nerves of a normal man. To Johnny Simms, the effect was catastrophic.

He could not walk, and the distance was too great to carry him. Holden reported by walkie-talkie, and Jones proposed to butcher one of the animals Johnny had killed and put it in a freezer emptied for the purpose, and then lift the ship and land by the sea. It seemed a reasonable proposal. Johnny was surely not seriously wounded.

But that meant time to wait. Alicia sat by her husband, soothing him. Holden moved along the beach, examining the shells that had come ashore. He picked up one shell more glorious in its coloring than any of the pearl-making creatures of Earth. This shell grew neither in the flat spiral nor the cone-shaped form of Earth mollusks. It grew in a doubly-curved spiral, so that the result was an extraordinary, lustrous, complex sphere. Bell fairly danced with excitement as he photographed it with lavish pains to get all the colors just right.

Cochrane and Babs moved along the beach also. It was not possible to be apprehensive. Cochrane talked largely. Presently he was saying with infinite satisfaction:

“The chemical compounds here are bound to be the same! It’s a new world, bigger than the glacier planet. Those beasts last night--if they’re good food-stuff--will make this a place like the old west, and everybody envies the pioneers! This is a new Earth! Everything’s so nearly the same--.”

“I never,” observed Babs, “heard of blue sand on Earth.”

He frowned at her. He stooped and picked up a handful of the beach stuff. It was not blue. The tiny, sea-broken pebbles were ordinary quartz and granite rock. They would have to be. Yet there was a blueness--The blue grains were very much smaller than the white and tan and gray ones. Cochrane looked closely. Then he blew. All the sand blew out of his hand except--at last--one tiny grain. It was white. It glittered greasily. Cochrane moved four paces and wetted his hand in the sea. He tried to wet the sand-grain. It would not wet.

He began to laugh.

“I did a show once,” he told Babs, “about the old diamond-mines. Ever hear of them? They used to find diamonds in blue clay which was as hard as rock. Here, blue clay goes out from the land to under the waves. This is a tiny diamond, washed out by the sea! This is the last thing we need!” Then he looked at his watch. “We’re due on the air in two hours and a half! Now we’ve got what we want! Let’s go have Holden tell Jones to hurry!”

But Babs complained suddenly,

“Jed! What sort of life am I going to lead with you? Here we are, and--nobody can see us--and you don’t even notice!”

Cochrane was penitent. In fact, they had to hurry back down the beach to join the others when the space-ship appeared as a silvery gleam, high in the air, and then came swooping down with fierce flames underneath it to settle a quarter-mile inland.

Bell had a picture of the tiny diamond by the time the ground was cool enough for them to re-enter the ship. The way he photographed it, against a background which had nothing by which its size could be estimated, the little white stone looked like a Kohinoor. It was two transparent pyramids set base to base, and he even got color-flashes from it. And Jamison, forewarned, took pictures from the air of the blue-sand areas. They showed the tint the one tiny diamond explained.

The broadcast was highly successful. It began with a four-minute commercial in which the evils of faulty elimination were discussed with infinite delicacy, and it was clearly proved--to an audience waiting to look beyond the stars--that only Greshham’s Intestinal Emollient allowed the body to make full use of vitamins, proteins, and the very newest enzymatic foundation-substances which everybody needed for really perfect health. There followed the approach shots to this planet, shots of the great beast-herds on the plains, views of luxuriant, waving foliage, the tide of shaggy animals as they came at dusk to their drinking-place, and there was an all-too-brief picturing of the blue-tinted soil which the last film-clip of all declared to be diamondiferous.

Cochrane’s direction of this show was almost inspired. The views of the animal herd were calculated to make any member of his audience think in simultaneous terms of glamour and adventure--with perfect personal safety, of course!--and of steaks, chops and roasts. The more gifted viewers back on Earth might even envision filets mignon. The infinitesimal diamond with its prismatic glitterings, of course, roused cupidity of another sort.

There were four commercials cut into these alluring views, the last was superimposed upon a view Bell had taken of the sunset-colors. And it might have seemed that the television audience would confuse the charm of the new world as pictured with the product insistently praised. But the public was pretty well toughened up against commercials nowadays. It was not deceived. As usual, it only deceived itself.

But there was no deception about the fact that there was a new and unoccupied planet fit for human habitation. That was true. And the fretting overcrowded cities immediately became places where everybody made happy plans for his neighbor to move there. But the more irritable people would begin to think vaguely that it might be worth going to, for themselves.

The ship took off two hours after the broadcast. Part of that time was taken up with astrogational conferences with astronomers on Earth. Cochrane had this conference taped for the auxiliary broadcast-program in which the audience shared the problems as well as the triumphs of the star-voyagers. Cochrane wanted to get back to Earth. So far as television was concerned, it would be unwise. The ship and its crew would travel indefinitely without a lack of sponsors. But for once, Cochrane agreed entirely with Holden.

“We’re heading back,” he told Babs, “because if we keep on, people will accept our shows as just another superior kind of escape-entertainment. They’ll have the dream quality of ‘You Win a Million’ and the lottery-shows. They’ll be things to dream about but never to think of doing anything about. We’re going to make the series disappointingly short, in order to make it more convincingly factual. We won’t spin it out for its entertainment-value until it practically loses everything else.”

“No,” said Babs. She put her hand in his. She’d found it necessary to remind him, now and then.

So the ship started home. And it would not return direct to Earth--or Lunar City--for a very definite reason. Cochrane meant to have all his business affairs neatly wrapped up before landing. They could get another show or two across, and some highly involved contracts could be haggled to completion more smoothly if one of the parties--Spaceways, Inc.--was not available except when it felt like being available. The other parties would be more anxious.

So the astrogation-conference did not deal with a direct return to Earth, but with a small sol-type star not too far out of the direct line. The Pole Star could have been visited, but it was a double star. Cochrane had no abstract scientific curiosity. His approach was strictly that of a man of business. He did the business.

There was, of course, a suitable pause not too far from the second planet--the planet of the shaggy beasts. They put out a plastic balloon with a Dabney field generator inside it. It would float in emptiness indefinitely. The field would hold for not less than twenty years. It would serve as a beacon, a highway, a railroad track through space for other ships planning to visit the third world now available to men. Ultimately, better arrangements could be made.

Jones was already ecstatically designing ground-level Dabney field installations. There would be Dabney fields extending from star to star. Along them, as along pneumatic tubes, ships would travel at unthinkable speeds toward absolutely certain destinations. True, at times they could not be used because of the bulk of planets between starting-points and landing-stations. But with due attention to scheduling, it would be a simple matter indeed to arrange for something close to commuters’ service between star-clusters. He explained all this to Cochrane, with Holden listening in.

“Oh, surely!” said Cochrane cynically. “And you’ll have tax-payers objecting because you make money. You’ll be regulated out of existence. Were you thinking that Spaceways would run this transportation system you’re planning, without cutting anybody else in on even the glory of it?”

Jones looked at him, dead-pan. But he was annoyed.

“I want some money,” he said. “I thought we could get this thing set up, and then I could get myself a ship and facilities for doing some really original work. I’d like to work something out and not have to sell the publicity-rights to it!”

“I’ll arrange it,” promised Cochrane. “I’ve got our lawyers setting up a deal right now. You’re going to get as many tricky patents as you can on this field, and assign them all to Spaceways. And Spaceways is going to assign them all to a magnificent Space Development Association, a sort of Chamber of Commerce for all the outer planets, and all the stuffed shirts in creation are going to leap madly to get honorary posts on it. And it will be practically beyond criticism, and it will have the public interest passionately at its heart, and it will be practically beyond interference and it will be as inefficient as hell! And the more inefficient it is, the more it will have to take in to allow for its inefficiency--and for your patents it has to give us a flat cut of its gross! And meanwhile we’ll get ours from the planets we’ve landed on and publicized. We’ve got customers. We’ve built up a market for our planets!”