Planet of Dread (5 page)

Burleigh said painfully;

“There’s this bessendium. If there’s more—especially if there’s more—we can leave you here with part of it. When we get far enough away, we charter a ship to come and get you. It’ll be arranged. Somebody will be listed as of that ship’s company, but he’ll slip away from the space-port and not be on board at all. Then you’re picked up and landed using his name.”

“If,” said Moran ironically, “I am alive when the ship gets here. If I’m not, the crew of the chartered ship will be in trouble, short one man on return to port. You’ll have trouble getting anybody to run that risk!”

“We’re trying to work out a way to save you!” insisted Burleigh angrily. “Harper would have been killed but for you. And—this bessendium will finance the underground work that will presently make a success of our revolution. We’re grateful! We’re trying to help you!”

“So you maroon me,” said Moran. Then he said; “But you’ve skipped the real problem! If anything goes wrong, Carol’s in it! There’s no way to do anything without risk for her! That’s the problem! I could kill all you characters, land somewhere on a colonized planet exactly as you landed here, and be gone from the yacht on foot before anybody could find me! But I have a slight aversion to getting a girl killed or killing her just for my own convenience. It’s settled. I stay here. You can try to arrange the other business if you like. But it’s a bad gamble.”

Carol was very pale. Burleigh stood up.

“You said that, I didn’t. But I don’t think we should leave you here. Up near the ice-cap should be infinitely better for you. We’ll load the rest of the bessendium tomorrow, find you a place, leave you a beacon, and go.”

He went out. Carol turned a white face to Moran.

“Is that—is that the real trouble? Do you really—”

Moran looked at her stonily.

“I like to make heroic gestures,” he told her. “Actually, Burleigh’s a very noble sort of character himself. He proposes to leave me with treasure that he could take. Even more remarkably, he proposes to divide up what you take, instead of applying it all to further his political ideals. Most men like him would take it all for the revolution!”

“But—but—.”

Carol’s expression was pure misery. Moran walked deliberately across the control-room. He glanced out of a port. A face looked in. It filled the transparent opening. It was unthinkable. It was furry. There were glistening chitinous areas. There was a proboscis like an elephant’s trunk, curled horribly. The eyes were multiple and mad.

It looked in, drawn and hypnotized by the light shining out on this nightmare world from the control-room ports.

Moran touched the button that closed the shutters.

When morning came, its
arrival was the exact reversal of the coming of night. In the beginning there was darkness, and in the darkness there was horror.

The creatures of the night untiringly filled the air with sound, and the sounds were discordant and gruesome and revolting. The creatures of this planet were gigantic. They should have adopted new customs appropriate to the dignity of their increased size. But they hadn’t. The manners and customs of insects are immutable. They feed upon specific prey—spiders are an exception, but they are not insects at all—and they lay their eggs in specific fashion in specific places, and they behave according to instincts which are so detailed as to leave them no choice at all in their actions. They move blindly about, reacting like automata of infinite complexity which are capable of nothing not built into them from the beginning. Centuries and millenia do not change them. Travel across star-clusters leaves them with exactly the capacities for reaction that their remotest ancestors had, before men lifted off ancient Earth’s green surface.

The first sign of dawn was deep, deep, deepest red in the cloud-bank no more than fifteen hundred feet overhead. The red became brighter, and presently was as brilliant as dried blood. Again presently it was crimson over all the half-mile circle that human eyes could penetrate. Later still—but briefly—it was pink. Then the sky became gray. From that color it did not change again.

Moran joined Burleigh in a survey of the landscape from the control-room. The battlefield was empty now. Of the thousands upon thousands of stinking combatants who’d rent and torn each other the evening before, there remained hardly a trace. Here and there, to be sure, a severed saw-toothed leg remained. There were perhaps as many as four relatively intact corpses not yet salvaged. But something was being done about them.

There were tiny, brightly-banded beetles hardly a foot long which labored industriously over such frayed objects. They worked agitatedly in the yeasty stuff which on this world took the place of soil. They excavated, beneath the bodies of the dead ants, hollows into which those carcasses could descend. They pushed the yeasty, curdy stuff up and around the sides of those to-be-desired objects. The dead warriors sank little by little toward oblivion as the process went on. The up-thrust, dug-out material collapsed upon them as they descended. In a very little while they would be buried where no larger carrion-eater would discover them, and then the brightly-colored sexton beetles would begin a banquet to last until only fragments of chitinous armor remained.

But Moran and Burleigh, in the
Nadine’s
control-room, could hardly note such details.

“You saw the cargo,” said Burleigh, frowning. “How’s it packed? The bessendium, I mean.”

“It’s in small boxes too heavy to be handled easily,” said Moran. “Anyhow the
Malabar’s
crew broke some of them open to load the stuff on their lifeboats.”

“The lifeboats are all gone?”

“Naturally,” said Moran. “At a guess they’d have used all of them even if they didn’t need them for the crew. They could carry extra food and weapons and such.”

“How much bessendium is left?”

“Probably twenty boxes unopened,” said Moran. “I can’t guess at the weight, but it’s a lot. They opened six boxes.” He paused. “I have a suggestion.”

“What?”

“When you’ve supplied yourselves,” said Moran, “leave some space-port somewhere with papers saying you’re going to hunt for minerals on some plausible planet. You can get such a clearance. Then you can return with bessendium coming out of the
Nadine’s
waste-pipes and people will be surprised but not suspicious. You’ll file for mineral rights, and cash your cargo. Everybody will get busy trying to grab off the mineral rights for themselves. You can clear out and let them try to find the bessendium lode. You’ll be allowed to go, all right, and you can settle down somewhere rich and highly respected.”

“Hmmm,” said Burleigh. Then he said uncomfortably; “One wonders about the original owners of the stuff.”

“After a hundred and fifty years,” said Moran, “who’d you divide with? The insurance company that paid for the lost ship? The heirs of the crew? How’d you find them?” Then he added amusedly, “Only revolutionists and enemies of governments would be honest enough to worry about that!”

Brawn came into the control-room. He said broodingly that breakfast was ready. Moran had never heard him speak in a normally cheerful voice. When he went out, Moran said;

“I don’t suppose he’ll be so gloomy when he’s rich!”

“His family was wiped out,” said Burleigh curtly, “by the government we were fighting. The girl he was going to marry, too.”

“Then I take back what I said,” said Moran ruefully.

They went down to breakfast. Carol served it. She did not look well. Her eyes seemed to show that she’d been crying. But she treated Moran exactly like anyone else. Harper was very quiet, too. He took very seriously the fact that Moran had saved his life at the risk of his on the day before. Brawn breakfasted in a subdued, moody fashion. Only Hallet seemed to have reacted to the discovery of a salvageable shipment of bessendium that should make everybody rich,—everybody but Moran, who was ultimately responsible for the find.

“Burleigh,” said Hallet expansively, “says the stuff you brought back from the wreck is worth fifty thousand credits, at least. What’s the whole shipment worth?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Moran. “It would certainly pay for a fleet of space-liners, and I’d give all of it for a ticket on one of them.”

“But how much is there in bulk?” insisted Hallet.

“I saw that half a dozen boxes had been broken open and emptied for the lifeboat voyagers,” Moran told him. “I didn’t count the balance, but there were several times as many untouched. If they’re all full of the same stuff, you can guess almost any sum you please.”

“Millions, eh?” said Hallet. His eyes glistened. “Billions? Plenty for everybody?”

“There’s never plenty for more than one,” said Moran mildly. “That’s the way we seem to be made.”

Burleigh said suddenly;

“I’m worried about getting the stuff aboard. We can’t afford to lose anybody, and if we have to fight the creatures here and every time we kill one its carcass draws others.”

Moran took a piece of bread. He said;

“I’ve been thinking about survival-tactics for myself as a castaway. I think a torch is the answer. In any emergency on the yeast surface, I can burn a hole and drop down in it. The monsters are stupid. In most cases they’ll go away because they stop seeing me. In the others, they’ll come to the hole and I’ll burn them. It won’t be pleasant, but it may be practical.”

Burleigh considered it.

“It may be,” he admitted. “It may be.”

Hallet said;

“I want to see that work before I trust the idea.”

“Somebody has to try it,” agreed Moran. “Anyhow my life’s going to depend on it.”

Carol left the room. Moran looked after her as the door closed.

“She doesn’t like the idea of our leaving you behind,” said Burleigh. “None of us do.”

“I’m touched.”

“We’ll try to get a ship to come for you, quickly,” said Burleigh.

“I’m sure you will,” said Moran politely.

But he was not confident. The laws governing space-travel were very strict indeed, and enforced with all the rigor possible. On their enforcement, indeed, depended the law and order of the planets. Criminals had to know that they could not escape to space whenever matters got too hot for them aground. For a spaceman to trifle with interstellar-traffic laws meant at the least that they were grounded for life. But the probabilities were much worse than that. It was most likely that Burleigh or any of the others would be reported to space-port police instantly they attempted to charter a ship for any kind of illegal activity. Moran made a mental note to warn Burleigh about it.

By now, though, he was aware of a very deep irritation at the idea of being killed, whether by monsters on this planet or men sent to pick him up for due process of law. When he made the grand gesture of seizing the
Nadine
, he’d known nothing about the people on board, and he hadn’t really expected to succeed. His real hope was to be killed without preliminary scientific questioning. Modern techniques of interrogation were not torture, but they stripped away all concealments of motive and to a great degree revealed anybody who’d helped one. Moran had killed a man in a fair fight the other man did not want to engage in. If he were caught on Coryus or returned to it, his motivation could be read from his mind. And if that was done the killing—and the sacrifice of his own future and life—would have been useless. But he’d been prepared to be killed. Even now he’d prefer to die here on Tethys than in the strictly painless manner of executions on Coryus. But he was now deeply resistant to the idea of dying at all. There was Carol....

He thrust such thoughts aside.

Morning was well begun when they prepared to transfer the wreck’s treasure to the
Nadine
. Moran went first. At fifteen-foot intervals he burned holes in the curd-like, elastic ground-cover. Some of the holes went down only four feet to the stone beneath it. Some went down six. But a man who jumped down one of them would be safe against attack except from directly overhead, which was an unlikely direction for attack by an insect. Carol had seen a wasp fly past the day before. She said it was as big as a cow. A sting from such a monster would instantly be fatal. But no wasp would have the intelligence to use its sting on something it had not seized. A man should be safe in such a fox-hole. If a creature did try to investigate the opening, a torch could come into play. It was the most practical possible way for a man to defend himself on this world.

Moran made more than a dozen such holes of refuge in the line between the
Nadine
and the wreck. Carol watched with passionate solicitude from a control-room port as he progressed. He entered the wreck through the lock-doors he’d uncovered. Harper followed doggedly, not less than two fox-holes behind. Carol’s voice reassured them, the while, that within the half-mile circle of visibility no monster walked or flew.

Inside the wreck, Moran placed emergency-lanterns to light the dark interior. He placed them along the particularly inconvenient passageways of a ship lying on its side instead of standing upright. He was at work breaking open a box of bessendium when Harper joined him. Harper said heavily;

“I’ve brought a bag. It was a pillow. Carol took the foam out.”

“We’ll fill it,” said Moran. “Not too full. The stuff’s heavy.”

Harper watched while Moran poured purple crystals into it from his cupped hands.

“There you are,” said Moran. “Take it away.”

“Look!” said Harper. “I owe you plenty—.”

“Then pay me,” said Moran, exasperatedly, “by shutting up! By making Burleigh damned careful about who he tries to hire to come after me! And by getting this cargo-shifting business in operation! The
Nadine’s
almost due on Loris. You don’t want to have the space-port police get suspicions. Get moving!”

Harper clambered over the side of doorways. He disappeared. Moran was alone in the ship. He explored. He found that the crew that had abandoned the
Malabar
had been guilty of a singular oversight for a crew abandoning ship. But, of course, they’d been distracted not only by their predicament but by the decision to carry part of the ship’s precious cargo with them, so they could make it a profitable enterprise to rescue them. They hadn’t taken the trouble to follow all the rules laid down for a crew taking to the boats.