Chapter 2

They went back to the Nadine for weapons more adequate for encountering the local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not effective against such creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons but they killed. Blast-rifles did not. And Harper needed to pull himself together again, too. Also, neither Moran nor any of the others wanted to go back to the still un-entered wreck while the skinny, somehow disgusting legs of the thing still kicked spasmodically--quite separate--on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked such creatures in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.

It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should painstakingly be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds men settled on. But it had been found to be necessary. The ecological system in which human beings belonged had turned out to be infinitely complicated. It had turned out, in fact, to be the ecological system of Earth, and unless all parts of the complex were present, the total was subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind distastefully ferried pests as well as useful creatures to its new worlds as they were made ready for settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes of the Rim Stars. Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of the Coal-sack. Dogs on Antares had fleas, and scratched their bites, and humanity spread through the galaxy with an attendant train of insects and annoyances. If they left their pests behind, the total system of checks and balances which make life practical would get lopsided. It would not maintain itself. The vagaries that could result were admirably illustrated in and on the landscape outside the Nadine. Something had been left out of the seeding of this planet. The element--which might be a bacterium or a virus or almost anything at all--the element that kept creatures at the size called “normal” was either missing or inoperable here. The results were not desirable.

Harper drank thirstily. Carol had watched from the control-room. She was still pale. She looked strangely at Moran.

“You’re sure it didn’t get through your suit?” Burleigh asked insistently of Harper.

Moran said sourly;

“The creatures have changed size. There’s no proof they’ve changed anything else. Beetles live in tunnels they make in fungus growths. The beetles and the tunnels are larger, but that’s all. Inchworms travel as they always did. They move yards instead of inches, but that’s all. Centipedes--”

“It was--” said Carol unsteadily. “It was thirty feet long!”

“Centipedes,” repeated Moran, “catch prey with their legs. They always did. Some of them trail poison from their feet. We can play a blowtorch over Harper’s suit and any poison will be burned away. You can’t burn a space-suit!”

“We certainly can’t leave Moran here!” said Burleigh uneasily.

“He kept Harper from being killed!” said Carol. “Your blast-rifles weren’t any good. The--creatures are hard to kill.”

“Very hard to kill,” agreed Moran. “But I’m not supposed to kill them. I’m supposed to live with them! I wonder how we can make them understand they’re not supposed to kill me either?”

“I’ll admit,” said Burleigh, “that if you’d let Harper get killed, we’d have been forced to let you take his identity and not be marooned, to avoid questions at the space-port on Loris. Not many men would have done what you did.”

“Oh, I’m a hero,” said Moran. “Noble Moran, that’s me! What the hell would you want me to do? I didn’t think! I won’t do it again. I promise!”

The last statement was almost true. Moran felt a squeamish horror at the memory of what he’d been through over by the wrecked ship. He’d come running out of the excavation he’d made. He had for weapon a four-foot blue-white flame, and there was a monstrous creature running directly toward him, with Harper lifted off the ground and clutched in two gigantic, spidery legs. It was no less than thirty feet long, but it was a centipede. It travelled swiftly on grisly, skinny, pipe-thin legs. It loomed over Moran as he reached the surface and he automatically thrust the flame at it. The result was shocking. But the nervous systems of insects are primitive. It is questionable that they feel pain. It is certain that separated parts of them act as if they had independent life. Legs--horrible things--sheared off in the flame of the torch, but the grisly furry thing rushed on until Moran slashed across its body with the blue-white fire. Then it collapsed. But Harper was still held firmly and half the monster struggled mindlessly to run on while another part was dead. Moran fought it almost hysterically, slicing off legs and wanting to be sick when their stumps continued to move as if purposefully, and the legs themselves kicked and writhed rhythmically. But he bored in and cut at the body and ultimately dragged Harper clear.

Afterward, sickened, he completed cutting it to bits with the torch. But each part continued nauseatingly to move. He went back with the others to the Nadine. The blast-rifles had been almost completely without effect upon the creature because of its insensitive nervous system.

“I think,” said Burleigh, “that it is only fair for us to lift from here and find a better part of this world to land Moran in.”

“Why not another planet?” asked Carol.

“It could take weeks,” said Burleigh harassedly. “We left Coryus three days ago. We ought to land on Loris before too long. There’d be questions asked if we turned up weeks late! We can’t afford that! The space-port police would suspect us of all sorts of things. They might decide to check back on us where we came from. We can’t take the time to hunt another planet!”

“Then your best bet,” said Moran caustically, “is to find out where we are. You may be so far from Loris that you can’t make port without raising questions anyhow. But you might be almost on course. I don’t know! But let’s see if that wreck can tell us. I’ll go by myself if you like.”

He went into the airlock, where his suit and the others had been sprayed with a corrosive solution while the outside air was pumped out and new air from inside the yacht admitted. He got into the suit. Harper joined him.

“I’m going with you,” he said shortly. “Two will be safer than one, --both with torches.”

“Too, too true!” said Moran sardonically.

He bundled the other suits out of the airlock and into the ship. He checked his torch. He closed the inner lock door and started the pump. Harper said;

“I’m not going to try to thank you--.”

“Because,” Moran snapped, “you wouldn’t have been on this planet to be in danger if I hadn’t tried to capture the yacht. I know it!”

“That wasn’t what I meant to say!” protested Harper.

Moran snarled at him. The lock-pump stopped and the ready-for exit light glowed. They pushed open the outer door and emerged. Again there was the discordant, almost intolerable din. It made no sense. The cries and calls and stridulations they now knew to be those of insects had no significance. The unseen huge creatures made them without purpose. Insects do not challenge each other like birds or make mating-calls like animals. They make noises because it is their nature. The noises have no meaning. The two men started toward the wreck to which Moran had partly burned a passageway. There were clickings from underfoot all around them. Moran said abruptly;

“Those clicks come from the beetles in their tunnels underfoot. They’re practically a foot long. How big do you suppose bugs grow here, --and why?”

Harper did not answer. He carried a flame-torch like the one Moran had used before. They went unsteadily over the elastic, yielding stuff underfoot. Harper halted, to look behind. Carol’s voice came in the helmet-phones.

“We’re watching out for you. We’ll try to warn you if--anything shows up.“

“Better watch me!” snapped Moran. “If I should kill Harper after all, you might have to pass me for him presently!”

He heard a small, inarticulate sound, as if Carol protested. Then he heard an angry shrill whine. He’d turned aside from the direct line to the wreck. Something black, the size of a fair-sized dog, faced him belligerently. Multiple lensed eyes, five inches across, seemed to regard him in a peculiarly daunting fashion. The creature had a narrow, unearthly, triangular face, with mandibles that worked from side to side instead of up and down like an animal’s jaws. The head was utterly unlike any animal such as breed and raise their young and will fight for them. There was a small thorax, from which six spiny, glistening legs sprang. There was a bulbous abdomen.

“This,” said Moran coldly, “is an ant. I’ve stepped on them for no reason, and killed them. I’ve probably killed many times as many without knowing it. But this could kill me.”

The almost yard-long enormity standing two and a half feet high, was in the act of carrying away a section of one of the legs of the giant centipede Moran had killed earlier. It still moved. The leg was many times the size of the ant. Moran moved toward it. It made a louder buzzing sound, threatening him.

Moran cut it apart with a slashing sweep of the flame that a finger-touch sent leaping from his torch. The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.

“I killed this one,” said Moran savagely, “because I remembered something from my childhood. When one ant finds something to eat and can’t carry it all away, it brings back its friends to get the rest. The big thing I killed would be such an item. How’d you like to have a horde of these things about us? Come on!”

Through his helmet-phone he heard Harper breathing harshly. He led the way once more toward the wreck.

Black beetles swarmed about when he entered the cut in the mould-yeast soil. They popped out of tunnels as if in astonishment that what had been subterranean passages suddenly opened to the air. Harper stepped on one, and it did not crush. It struggled frantically and he almost fell. He gasped. Two of the creatures crawled swiftly up the legs of Moran’s suit, and he knocked them savagely away. He found himself grinding his teeth in invincible revulsion.

They reached the end of the cut he’d made in the fungus-stuff. Metal showed past burned-away soil. Moran growled;

“You keep watch. I’ll finish the cut.”

The flame leaped out. Dense clouds of smoke and steam poured out and up. With the intolerably bright light of the torch overwhelming the perpetual grayness under the clouds and playing upon curling vapors, the two space-suited men looked like figures in some sort of inferno.

Carol’s voice came anxiously into Moran’s helmet-phone;

“Are you all right?“

“So far, both of us,” said Moran sourly. “I’ve just uncovered the crack of an airlock door.”

He swept the flame around again. A mass of undercut fungus toppled toward him. He burned it and went on. He swept the flame more widely. There was carbonized matter from the previously burned stuff on the metal, but he cleared all the metal. Carol’s voice again;

“There’s something flying ... It’s huge! It’s a wasp! It’s--monstrous!“

Moran growled;

“Harper, we’re in a sort of trench. If it hovers, you’ll burn it as it comes down. Cut through its waist. It won’t crawl toward us along the trench. It’d have to back toward us to use its sting.”

He burned and burned, white light glaring upon a mass of steam and smoke which curled upward and looked as if lightning-flashes played within it.

Carol’s voice;

“It--went on past ... It was as big as a cow!“

Moran wrenched at the port-door. It partly revolved. He pulled. It fell outward. The wreck was not standing upright on its fins. It lay on its side. The lock inside the toppled-out port was choked with a horrible mass of thread-like fungi. Moran swept the flame in. The fungus shriveled and was not. He opened the inner lock-door. There was pure blackness within. He held the torch for light.

For an instant everything was confusion, because the wreck was lying on its side instead of standing in a normal position. Then he saw a sheet of metal, propped up to be seen instantly by anyone entering the wrecked space-vessel.

Letters burned into the metal gave a date a century and a half old. Straggly torch-writing said baldly;

“_This ship the Malabar crashed here on Tethys II a week ago. We

cannot repair. We are going on to Candida III in the boats. We are

carrying what bessendium we can with us. We resign salvage rights

in this ship to its finders, but we have more bessendium with us.

We will give that to our rescuers._

“Jos. White, Captain.“

Moran made a peculiar, sardonic sound like a bark.

“Calling the Nadine!” he said in mirthless amusement. “This planet is Tethys Two. Do you read me? Tethys II! Look it up!”

A pause. Then Carol’s voice, relieved;

“Tethys is in the Directory! That’s good!“ There was the sound of murmurings in the control-room behind her. “Yes! ... Oh, --wonderful! It’s not far off the course we should have followed! We won’t be suspiciously late at Loris! Wonderful!“

“I share your joy,” said Moran sarcastically. “More information! The ship’s name was the Malabar. She carried bessendium among her cargo. Her crew went on to Candida III a hundred and fifty years ago, leaving a promise to pay in more bessendium whoever should rescue them. More bessendium! Which suggests that some bessendium was left behind.”

Silence. The bald memorandum left behind the vanished crew was, of course, pure tragedy. A ship’s lifeboat could travel four light-years, or possibly even six. But there were limits. A castaway crew had left this world on a desperate journey to another in the hope that life there would be tolerable. If they arrived, they waited for some other ship to cross the illimitable emptiness and discover either the beacon here or one they’d set up on the other world. The likelihood was small, at best. It had worked out zero. If the lifeboats made Candida III, their crews stayed there because they could go no farther. They’d died there, because if they’d been found this ship would have been visited and its cargo salvaged.

Moran went inside. He climbed through the compartments of the toppled craft, using his torch for light. He found where the cargo-hold had been opened from the living part of the ship. He saw the cargo. There were small, obviously heavy boxes in one part of the hold. Some had been broken open. He found scraps of purple bessendium ore dropped while being carried to the lifeboats. A century and a half ago it had not seemed worth while to pick them up, though bessendium was the most precious material in the galaxy. It couldn’t be synthesized. It had to be made by some natural process not yet understood, but involving long-continued pressures of megatons to the square inch with temperatures in the millions of degrees. It was purple. It was crystalline. Fractions of it in blocks of other metals made the fuel-blocks that carried liners winging through the void. But here were pounds of it dropped carelessly...

Moran gathered a double handful. He slipped it in a pocket of his space-suit. He went clambering back to the lock.

He heard the roaring of a flame-torch. He found Harper playing it squeamishly on the wriggling fragments of another yard-long ant. It had explored the trench burned out of the fungus soil and down to the rock. Harper’d killed it as it neared him.

“That’s three of them I’ve killed,” said Harper in a dogged voice. “There seem to be more.”

“Did you hear my news?” asked Moran sardonically.

“Yes,” said Harper. “How’ll we get back to the Nadine?”