Mission to Universe Read online

  “Yes,” said Ben. He did not mention that in his opinion herding the animals into the area would be the least of their troubles—to say that would betray his hidden reason for setting out the explosive cables and charges. “We’ll bury the cable and charges and run the cable underground and through the wall, so that it can’t get cut by accident.”

  They did so, bringing the cable inside the wall and up to its top to the firing box. Standing by the box and looking out over the space before him, Ben noticed that the shallow basin had once more filled with grazing herbivores. There were more there now than there had been yesterday when Lee with his team had caught and slaughtered the dozen. More, in fact, than there had been in the area since the phase ship’s landing.

  Ben turned and called to the masked figure of Lee, beckoning him up on the wall. Lee waved back, finished whatever he was doing at the processing end of the digestive section of the recycler, and turned to climb the slope. He came up to stand beside Ben, who pointed out over the area.

  “Maybe we better round those up,” said Ben, “before they stray off again and leave us with just a handful around the ship.”

  “Yes,” said Lee. He nodded, his dark hair joggling forward on his forehead above his eyes and face mask. “There’s no reason we can’t run the processing through the night as well, and to do that, I’ll need twice again as much as I’ve got in the way of raw material.”

  “There ought to be that much out there,” said Ben. In fact there was. He had made a rough count of over forty herbivores. “I’ll take a crew and round them up. Oh, who’d you use before? I might as well take experienced people while I’m at it”

  “Mostly women. They make better drivers than the men—more patient.” Lee’s eyes above his mask met Ben’s and Ben understood. Lee was putting in a pitch for the women to be allowed out beyond the wall—something at which Ben had hesitated largely so far. “Ask Tessie Sorenson—she’ll get them together for you.”

  “All right,” growled Ben.

  “I'll get back to work, then,” said Lee. He turned about and went down the slope to the recycler section. Ben, after a second, followed him and cut off toward the ship. The drive worked out excellently. By midaftemoon, thirty-four more carcasses—eight hundred and fifty potential pounds of protein powder—had been added to the pile awaiting processing. Curiously enough, new herbivores were already beginning to drift into the area. Ben frowned to himself. If they had been prepared to take time, as much as a week, and had known that the herbivores would not be driven off by this kind of harvesting, they could have sat tight and not sent out the two teams to make a drive of the animals to the ship.

  But Ben reminded himself, sitting down finally in his office to examine privately the newest star charts made by Observation, he had not known. And in any case, on principle, he wanted to spend no more time on the surface of any ineligible planet than the ship had to spend there.

  He became involved in the charts and the problem of the best stellar neighborhood to investigate first, fifteen thousand light-years in toward the center. He did not notice the passage of time within the windowless walls of his office until the chart he was studying suddenly swam out of focus before his eyes. He blinked and straightened up, suddenly conscious that his neck was stiff and his back was aching from bending over the charts. He looked at his watch.

  It was five hours since they had finished the herbivore drive in the area around the ship. Midafternoon had become midevening. He had worked through the normal sunset dinner hour. For a moment he thought of going down to the lounge for food now—then decided it was sleep he needed more than nourishment. A short nap. . .

  He locked up the star charts and the notes he had made on them in his walk-in safe and went into his bedroom. He dropped on the bed there and closed his eyes.

  For a few minutes as he lay there with his eyes closed, he thought that he would not be able to sleep after all. There were too many different problems chasing each other like wildcat kittens at play in his brain. Then, somehow, without even realizing he had fallen asleep, he was being roused by someone shaking his shoulder.

  He sat bolt upright on the bed, reflexively. Walt was towering over him at the bedside.

  “What is it?” Ben asked.

  “Reports from both the driving teams,” said Walt, deeply. “They’ve been attacked.”

  “Attacked—I’ll come.” said Ben, lifting his still sleep-numb body from the bed in the same second and heading for the door. With Walt following him, he crossed his office, walked through a deserted Control Section and a deserted Computation Section into an Observation Section with half a dozen people in it, clustered around the side-by-side TV screen that connected with the portable transceivers, one of which had been carried by each team.

  Ben licked his lips, coming to a halt behind them. His mouth was cinderous and his head was like a block of wood. The collar of his white coveralls was damp where it touched his throat, sweated through in the heaviness of his slumber.

  “Do we need all these people here?” he said harshly. “Let’s have everybody not on duty out of this Section.”

  Three of the people present reluctantly abandoned their position and went out the further door to the corridor and the Lounge beyond. A fourth person defiantly stayed put. It was Polly.

  “All right, Polly,” said Ben, knowing that by making an exception he was tearing down the image of implacable authority he had tried so hard to build up for himself. He turned his attention back to the screens. Both showed the four men of a team, masked and backpacked, sitting on laid out and inflated sleeping bags on the ground, their half-guns uneasily in their hands, gleaming in the glare of the portable searchlights set up to illuminate the fifty feet of area surrounding. Before the party in the right hand screen, a dark thick shape the length of a man lay like a chunk of blackness along the moss-grass.

  “What’s that?” Ben asked Walt

  “What attacked them,” said Walt. “With Hans’ team’s case, something came out of the darkness into the light and got away again before they could get a good look at it, when they fired. But with Coop’s team—” he gestured to ther ight hand screen, “three of the things came right into the light sat down, and looked them over before one of them decided to charge. They killed that one and Coop thinks they wounded the two others.”

  “Yes,” said Ben. He leaned forward, pressed the transmit key below the right hand screen, and spoke to the group pictured on it.

  “Coop? Let me have a close-up picture of this thing you’ve killed.”

  One of the masked figures came toward the screen until it blocked out everything else. The scene swayed up into the air, approached the shape of darkness on the grass,and swung aside to let the light fall on the dead creature as the transceiver itself was set down on the grass. Ben looked at furred legs and a furred belly of pale tan color.

  “No,” said Ben, “Hold it up—so I can look down on the animal.”

  The transceiver was lifted. Ben looked from an apparent distance of two feet down at the dead body of the attacker.

  Its resemblance to the herbivores was apparent in the huge barrel-chest, and in the upright, if shorter, neck, and the eyes set side by side at the front of the head for binocular vision. But it was the differences that one noticed most.

  The body was long-bodied, shorter, and heavier-legged than that of the herbivores. It was much weightier and more powerful in appearance. The legs did not end in hooves but in three toes with soft pads and hardened or horny front edges undoubtedly serving the same purpose as claws. All in all, the body was somewhat weasel-like on a large scale, allowing for the upright neck and the skull-case, which was large and intelligent-looking—almost domed in human and anthropoid fashion. The most remarkable parts of the body, however, were two hairless appendages sprouting from the front base of the neck.

  “Let me have a closer look at one of those things on its neck,” ordered Ben. A hand reached out from beyond the screen and stretched o
ut one of the appendages. It was something like a thin, hairless whip, almost as thick as a man’s wrist at the base where it joined the neck, but tapering to what seemed to be a homy or hardened point nearly three feet from the base.

  “They seem to be able to use them the way South American monkeys use their tails—prehensile,” said someone behind Ben, having found the word he was searching for at the beginning of his comment.

  “Let me see the teeth,” ordered Ben. The hand holding the furless whip dropped it and reached down to lift the lips from the right side of the dead muzzle. Ben counted two spade-like incisors and a heavy, dagger-shaped canine in front of only three other essentially flat-topped grinding teeth. It was plainly the jaw-armament of a carnivore.

  “That’s all right. I’ve seen enough,” said Ben to whoever was holding back the lips. The fingers let go. Ben turned to Walt.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s what ordinarily feeds on our herbivores.” His voice was bitter with the inner self-reproach he was feeling. “Anyone who’d ever heard the word ecology should have known that with herbivores like this there would be plain evidence of a cursorial carnivore just around the corner.”

  The moment the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. They had all the ring of an invitation to the others to excuse him for his negligence and carelessness. It had been up to him to trust to his suspicions about the danger beneath the bucolic landscape of Old Twenty-nine. He had not done so, and beating his breast over the fault in front of the rest of the crew was not going to remedy the matter.

  “Coop!” he said harshly. “Hans!” He had reached out and was holding down the transmitter keys below both screens. A masked face filled each screen, inquiringly. “Keep someone on watch at all times until sunrise. And, as soon as there’s light at all to move by, I want you to start back. Forget the drivel”

  “But we’ve got a herd of at least fifty moving—” it was Coop’s voice.

  “Forget the drive!” Ben heard himself snapping at the screen. “Get back here to the ship as fast as you can. You understand me?”

  There was ready assent from Hans, grudging assent from Coop’s voice.

  “All right,” said Ben. “That’s all for now, then.” He let go of the transmitter keys and straightened up. He looked at Walt. “Who’ve we got standing guard out on the walls,” he asked.

  “Ralph Egan,” said Walt

  “Just one man? I want four,” said Ben. “One to each wall. Find them. I’m going out now, myself.”

  He took a pair of night glasses and went back through the sections, into his office, and opened his walk-in safe. Just inside the door was a rack holding three of the hunting rifles. He took one and a loaded clip of ammunition and locked the safe again. He went out toward the airlock, fitting the clip into the rifle.

  When he emerged from the airlock with oxygen back-pack and mask on, he found the recycler sections still at work, Julian Tyree standing in Lee’s place near the acid vat, recognizable by the dark expanse of skin above his mask. Ben went to him.

  “Anything happening outside the walls?” he asked.

  “Not so far as I know,” said Julian. His eyes were inquiring. “Lee’s getting some sleep,” he added, unnecessarily.

  “Maybe you should, too,” said Ben, recalled for a moment to other things. He had only Lee and Julian aboard who knew anything about chemistry—and in addition Julian had the same odd sort of technical genius that Lee had. He could not afford to lose either of them. “Can’t this apparatus run itself for a while?”

  “Yes . . . but,” said Julian. “I’d rather stay with it. I’ve had a good deal of sleep, you know.”

  “Well—all right,” Ben swung about and went up the ramp toward the half-gun armed figure on the wall, which turned to meet him as he came. “Ralph—everything quiet up here?”

  “Yes.” The young, blue eyes of Ralph above the mask he wore were inquiring. Ben turned to look out beyond the walls and stared at a fifty-foot searchlighted strip of ground—beyond which was darkness. “Cover your eyes,”he told Ralph Egan.

  “Cover—” Ralph began.

  “Just do it!” snapped Ben. He watched as Ralph put a hand over his eyes above the mask and then turned to call to Julian. Seeing the big figure of Walt just emerging from the airlock, he changed his mind. “Walt!” he shouted.

  Walt lifted his head.

  “When I yell at you,” Ben called, “cut all lights.”

  The figure of Walt nodded and waved an acknowledgment. Ben, shielding his eyes against the glare of lights below him, stared up at the sky. It was clear of clouds and all three of the planet’s rather dim moons were in thes ky at once. Their light should be equivalent to fairly bright moonlight, once the artificial light was out. He covered his own eyes as tightly as he could with his freehand and slowly counted to one hundred.

  “Now!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Lights out!”

  He counted to five more and uncovered his eyes. Fora moment he thought that covering them had not worked, and then he realized that he was still facing inward and down into the lightless depths of the fort. He blinked and the scene resolved out of the triple moonlight. He turned and looked outward.

  On a now-silver carpet of moss-grass there was a clump of dark shapes huddled off to his right, with the long, foolish necks and little heads of the herbivores. But, as he swept his gaze from right to left, he saw other shapes, individual dark shapes of longer, more squat outline, sitting or pacing at distances of a hundred yards from the fort on every side. Turning slowly, he counted fifteen of them.

  Slowly, he slipped the leather sling of the heavy rifle over his head and left shoulder and locked his supporting left arm with it. He took careful aim at one of the sitting figures. The triple moonlight ran down the length of the barrel and gilded the front sight. The edge of the leather sling bit hard into his forearm under the coveralls.He pressed the trigger and the seated figure leaped into the air, scrabbled about on its side, and lay still.

  The other figures raced like ghosts to the nearest vine clusters and vanished under the. outer vines, bellying down to the earth as they disappeared.

  “So that’s it,” said Walt’s voice.

  Ben turned to find Walt standing beside him on the wall.

  “That’s it,” said Walt dispassionately, “they have dens dug out among the roots of the vines underground—and as long as they came out only at night, we’d never have known they were there.”

  “I want two men to help me,” said Ben, unslinging his rifle. “The rest of you cover us from here, with the lights off.”

  They brought the body back in, not without some labor, for it weighed perhaps half again as much as one of the herbivores, and the guards patrolled the wall with all lights out. However, no other vine-tigers—the name had come to everybody’s lips seemingly out of nowhere—showed themselves. And with the coming of daylight, Ben began his dissection of the one he had shot.

  It was similar in internal structure to the herbivores. The complex nerve center at the base of the neck was no larger, but the skull-enclosed brain was surprisingly large, with a volume of over eight hundred and thirty cubic centimeters, less than a hundred cc. smaller than the brain of pithecanthropus erectus, the fossil preman of Java, and only a couple of hundred cc. short of the brain volume of the smallest-brained modern man known.

  Ben washed up in a plastic container of water brought to him outside the ship and called a conference of Lee,Nora, and Walt in his office.

  “They’re bright,” Ben told the other three, once they were seated around his desk. “I couldn’t find any sure evidence of a speech center, but they must have some means of communication. It’s interesting to note that they paid no attention to us until we started slaughtering the herbivores.”

  There was a moment in which none of the others seemed to understand. Then Walt spoke.

  “You mean the herbivores are their cattle?” Walt asked.

  “Either by conscious breeding or an
accident of parallel evolution,” said Ben. “Notice, there’s no other large carnivores to dispute the herbivores with these vine-tigers? Notice how the herbivores bunch up at night when the vine-tigers are out and let them or us get within easy charging distance—thirty feet or so—before panicking?”

  “Still,” said Lee. “Even if it’s true, what can they do you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ben. He had engaged in some private speculations on that question, but caution stopped his tongue now. If he was right, they would all find out about it anyway. If he was wrong, there was no point in mentioning it. “But we’re not going to wait around to find out. As soon as the two teams are back here, we’ll lift. Lee, how long will it take to put those recycler sections back in place on the ship?”

  Lee’s teeth flashed cheerfully in his brown face, which had almost miraculously regained a share of its original tan in these two days of Polaris sunlight

  “We can have them back on board in half an hour, ”he answered. “And reconnected and working in a couple of hours aboard ship after that—I’ve got assistants that’re used to the work, now.”

  “Fine,” said Ben. “I want you to work up to the last possible minute, but no later. Walt, I want the Observation, Computation, and Control Sections aboard ship here manned, and the ship ready to lift at a moment’s notice—” He broke off. There had been a knock at the door to Control Section. “Come in!”

  Kirk Walish opened the door and stuck his head in. “Calls from both teams,” he announced. “They’re getting crowded by herds of herbivores moving in the same direction they’re going. They may have to take shelter in vine clumps until things thin out.”

  “Get me a hand phone!” snapped Ben, getting to his feet. “Bring it to me on the wall outside. Come on!” The last two words were addressed to Walt, Lee, and Nora. They also rose and followed him out of the ship and up onto the south wall outside.

  “Look at all those herbivores!” said Kirk, whistling.