The Planet Savers Including the Waterfall

Chapter

ONE

       The landing gear was almost the least of their worries; but it made a serious problem in getting in and out. The great starship lay tilted at a forty-five degree angle with the exit ladders and chutes coming nowhere near the ground, and the doors going nowhere. All the damage hadn't been assessed yet--not nearly--but they estimated that roughly half the crew's quartets and three-fourths of the passenger sections were uninhabitable.

       Already half a dozen small rough shelters, as well as the tent like field hospital, had been hastily thrown up in the great clearing. They'd been made, mostly out of plastic sheeting and logs from the resinous local trees, which had been cut with buzz-saws and timbering equipment from the supply materials for the colonists. All this had taken place over Captain Leicester's serious protests; he had yielded only to a technicality. His orders were absolute when the ship was in space; on a planet the Colony Expedition Force was in charge.

       The fact that it wasn't the
right
planet was a technicality that no one had felt able to tackle... yet.

       It was, reflected Rafael MacAran as he stood on the low peak above the crashed spaceship, a beautiful planet. That Is, what they could see of it, which wasn't all that much. The gravity was a little less than Earth's, and the oxygen content a little higher, which itself meant a certain feeling of web-being and euphoria for anyone born and brought up on Earth. No one reared on Earth in the twenty-first century, lie Rafael MacAran, had ever smelled arch sweet and resinous air, or seen faraway hdlg through such a clean bright morning.

       The hills and the distant mountains rose amend them in an apparently endless panorama, fold beyond fold,

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gradually losing color with distance, turning first dim green, then dimmer blue, and finally to dimmest violet and purple. The great sun was deep red, the color of spilt blood; and that morning they had seen the four moons, like great multicolored jewels, hanging off the horns of the distant mountains.

       MacAran set his pack down, pulled out the transit and began to set up its tripod legs. He bent to adjust the instrument, wiping sweat from his forehead. God, how hot it seemed after the brutal ice-cold of last night and the sudden snow that had swept from the mountain range so swiftly they had barely had time to take shelter! And now the snow lay in melting runnels as he pulled off his nylon parka and mopped his brow.

       He straightened up, looking around for convenient horizons. He already knew, thanks to the new-model altimeter which could compensate for different gravity strengths, that they were about a thousand feet above sea level--or what would be sea level if there were any seas on this planet which they couldn't yet be sure of. In the stress and dangers of the crash-landing no one except the Third Officer had gotten a clear look at the planet from space, and she had died twenty minutes after impact while they were still digging bodies out of the wreckage of the bridge.

       They knew that there were three planets in this system: one an oversized, frozen-methane giant, the other a small barren rock, more moon than planet except for its solitary orbit, and this one. They knew that this one was what Earth Expeditionary Forces called a Class M planet --roughly Earth-type and probably habitable. And now they knew they were on it. That was just about all they knew about it, except what they had discovered in the last seventy-two hours. The red sun, the four moons, the extremes of temperature, the mountains all had been discovered in the frantic intervals of digging out and identifying the dead, setting up a hasty field hospital and drafting every able-bodied person to care for the injured, bury the dead, and set up hasty shelters while the ship was still inhabitable.

       Rafael MacAran started pulling his surveying instruments from his pack but he didn't attend to them. He had needed this brief interval alone more than he had realized; a little time to recover from the repeated and terrible

6

shocks of the last few hours-the crash, and a concussion which would have put him into a hospital on crowded, medically hypersensitive Earth. Here the medical officer, harried from worse injuries, tested his reflexes briefly, handed him some headache pills, and went on to the seriously hurt and the dying. His head still felt like an oversized toothache although the visual blurring had cleared up after the first night's deep. The next day he had been drafted, with all the other able-bodied men not on the medical staff or the engineering crews in the ship, to dig mass graves for the dead. And then there had been the mind-shaking shock of finding Jenny among them.

       Jenny. He had envisioned her safe and well, too busy at her own job to hunt him up and reassure him. Then among the mangled dead, the unmistakable silver-bright hair of his only sister. There hadn't even been time for tears. There were too many dead. He did the only thing he could do. He reported to Camilla Del Rey, deputizing for Captain Leicester on the identity detail, that the name of Jenny MacAran should be transferred from the lists of unlocated survivors to the list of definitely identified dead.

       Camilla's only comment had been a terse, quiet `Thank you, MacAran.' There was no time for sympathy, no time for mourning or even humane expressions of kindness. And yet Jenny had been Camilla's close friend, she'd really loved that damned Del Rey girl like a sister--just why, Rafael had never known, but Jenny had, and there must have been some reason. He realized somewhere below the surface, that he had hoped Camilla would shed for Jenny the tears he could not manage to weep. Someone ought to cry for Jenny, and he couldn't. Not yet.

       He turned his eyes on his instruments again. If they had known their definite latitude on the planet it would have been easier, but the height of the sun above the horizon would give them some rough idea.

       Below him in a great bowl of land at least five miles across filled with low brushwood and scrubby trees, the crashed spaceship lay. Rafael, looking at it from this distance, felt a strange sinking feeling Captain Leicester was supposed to be working with the crew to assess the damage and estimate the time needed to make repairs. Rafael knew nothing about the workings of starships--his

7

own field was geology. But it didn't look to him as if that ship was ever going anywhere again.

       Then he turned off the thought. That was for the engineering crews to say. They knew, and he didn't. He'd seen some near-miracles done by engineering these days. At worst this would be an uncomfortable interval of a few days or a couple of weeks, then they'd be on their way again and a new habitable planet would be charted on the Expeditionary Forces star maps for colonization. This one, despite the brutal cold at night, looked extremely habitable. Maybe they'd even get to share some of the finder's fees, which would go to improve the Coronis Colony where they'd be by then.

       And they'd ail have something to talk about when they were Old Settlers in the Coronis Colony, fifty or sixty years from now.

       But if the ship never did get off the ground again... .

       Impossible. This wasn't a charted planet, okayed for colonizing, and already opened up. The Coronis Colony--Phi Coronis Delta--was already the site of a flourishing mining settlement. There was a functioning spaceport and a crew of engineers and technicians had been working there for ten years preparing the planet for settlement and studying its ecology. You couldn't set down, raw and unhelped by technology, on a completely unknown world.

It couldn't be done.

       Anyway, that was somebody else's job and he'd better do his own now. He made all the observations he could, noted them in his pocket notebook, and packed up the tripod starting down the hill again. He moved easily across the rock-strewn slope through the tough underbrush and trees carrying his pack effortlessly in the light gravity. It was cleaner and easier than a hike on Earth, and he cast a longing eye at the distant mountains. Maybe if their stay stretched out more than a few days, he could be spared to take a brief climb into them. Rock samples and some geological notations should be worth something to Earth Expeditionary and it would be a lot better than a climbing trip on Earth, where every National Park from Yellowstone to Himalaya was choked with jet-brought tourists three hundred days of the year.

       He supposed it was only fair to give everyone a chance at the mountains, and certainly the slidewalks and lifts installed to the top of Mount Rainier and Everest and

8

Mount Whitney had made it easier for old women and children to get up there and have a chance to see the scenery. But still, MacAran thought longingly, to climb an actual wild mountain--one with no slidewalks and not even a single chairlift! He'd climbed on Earth, but you felt silly struggling up a rock cliff when teen-agers were soaring past you in chairlifts on their effortless way to the top and giggling at the anachronist who wanted to do it the hard way!

       Some of the nearer slopes were blackened with the scars of old forest fires, and he estimated that the clearing where the ship lay was second-growth from some such fire a few years before. Lucky the ship's fire-prevention systems had prevented any fire on impact-otherwise if anyone had escaped alive, it might have been quite literally from a frying pan into a raging forest fire. They'd have to be careful in the woods. Earth people had lost their old woodcraft habits and might not be aware any more of what forest fires could do. He made a mental note of it for his report.

       As he re-entered the area of the crash, his brief euphoria vanished. Inside the field hospital, through the semi-transparent plastic of the shelter material, he could see rows and rows of unconscious or semiconscious bodies. A group of men were trimming breaches from tree trunks and another small group was raising a dymaxion dome--the kind, based on triangular bracings, which could be built in half a day. He began to wonder what the report of the Engineering crew had been. He could see a crew of machinists crawling around on the crumpled bracings of the starship but it didn't look as if much had been accomplished. In fact, it didn't look hopeful for getting away very soon.

       As he passed the hospital, a young man in a stained and crumpled Medic uniform came out and called.

       "Rafe! The Mate said report to the First Dome as soon as you get back--there's a meeting there and they want you. I'm going over there myself for a Medic report --I'm the most senior man they can spare." He moved slowly beside MacAran. He was slight and small, with light-brown hair and a small curly brown beard, and he looked weary, as if he had had no sleep. MacAran asked, hesitatingly, "How are things going in the hospital?"