World without Stars (4 page)

We had too much velocity to kill in what time remained. But we got rid of some of it, in those few minutes before we struck
atmosphere; and we didn’t flash directly down, we entered at a low angle.

With such speed, we skipped, as a stone is skipped across a river. Shock after shock slammed into us. Metal shrieked. The
viewscreens filled with incandescence. This ungainly I hulk of a vessel was never meant to land. She was supposed to lie in
orbit while our two ferries served her. But now she had to come down!

Somehow, Bren and Galmer operated the pilot board. Somehow they kept the drive going, resisting our plunge, bringing us groundward
in a fury that only sufficed to boil
away our outer plates. When the main drive was ruined and quit, they used the steering units. When those went out, one by
one, they used what was left. Finally nothing remained and we fell. But then we were so low, our speed so checked, that a
man had some chance.

I heard the bellowings, the protest and the breaking of steel. I felt the furnace heat from the inner bulkheads, through and
through my spacesuit until lips cracked open and nasal passages were tubes of anguish. I saw the water below, and braced myself,
and remembered I must not. Relax, float free, let harness and suit and flesh absorb the shock.

We hit.

I crawled back to awareness. My mouth was full of blood, which had smeared my faceplate so that it was hard to see out. One
eye being swollen shut didn’t help. Hammers beat on every cell of me, and my left arm wouldn’t respond. I thought in a dull,
vague way,
My skull can’t really be split open …
.

The men!

Nothing sounded except my own rattling breath. But surely, I cried, this was because the comsystem had been knocked out.
Got to go see. Got to unstrap and find my men
.

I didn’t set my teeth against the pain of movement. That would have taken more control than I had, in my present state. I
whimpered through the many minutes of fumbling. At last I slid free, onto the canted, buckled deck. I lay there a while before
being able to get up and feel my way aft.

The ship was dead. No screens functioned, no ventilators whispered, no lights glowed except the evershine panels spotted along
the corridors. By their dim greenishness I stumbled and slipped, calling out names.

After some part of eternity a human shape met me in the passage. Not quite human, a two-legged bulk with a grotesque
glassy head; but the radio voice was Hugh Valland’s. “That you, skipper?” I clung to him and sobbed.

“We’re lucky,” he told me. “I’ve been lookin’ us over. If we’d crashed in a sea we’d be done. The whole after section’s flooded.
We’ve sunk. But the nose seems to be pokin’ out into air.”

“How are the others?” I dared ask.

“Can’t find anyone in the engine compartment,” he said grimly. “I took a flash and went into the water, but no trace, just
a big half-melted hole in the side. They must’ve been carried out with the main reactor. So there’s two gone.” (Let me record
their names here: Morn Krisnan and Roli Blax, good men.) Valland sighed. “Don’t seem like young Smeth’ll last long either.”

Seven men
, I thought,
in poor shape, wrecked on a planet that every probability says is lethal for them
.

“I came through fairly well, myself,” Valland went on. “Suppose you join the rest. They’re in the saloon. I want to gander
out of a lock. I’ll report to you.”

The room where we met was a cave. One evershine, knocked out of its frame, had been brought in for light. It threw huge misshapen
shadows across crumpled walls. Snags of girders protruded like stalactites. The men slumped in their armor. I called the roll:
Bren, Galmer, Urduga, Rorn. And Smeth, of course. He hadn’t left us yet.

He was even conscious, more or less. They had laid him out on a bench as well as might be. I peered into his helmet. The skin
looked green in what light we had, and the blood that bubbled from his mouth was black. But the eyeballs showed very white.
I tuned up his radio for him and heard the harsh liquidity of his breathing.

Rorn joined me. “He’s done,” he said without tone. “His harness ripped loose from the stanchions when they gave way, where
he was, and he got tossed against a bulkhead. So his ribs are stove through his lungs and the spine’s broken.”

“How do you know?” I challenged. “His suit’s intact, isn’t it?”

Teeth gleamed in the murk that was Rorn’s face. “Captain,” he said, “I helped carry the boy here. We got him to describe how
he felt, when he woke, and try to move his arms and legs. Look at him.”

“Mother, mother,” said the gurgle in my earplugs.

Valland came back. “The ferryboats are smashed too,” he said. “Their housin’s took the main impact. We won’t be leavin’ this
planet soon.”

“What’s outside?” I asked.

“We’re in a lake. Can’t see the oppsite edge. But the waters fairly shallow where we are, and there’s a shore about two kilometers
off. We can raft to land.”

“For what?” Rorn flared.

“Well,” Valland said, “I saw some aquatic animals jump. So there’s life. Presumably our kind of life, proteins in water solution,
though of course I don’t expect we could eat it.”

He stood a while, brooding in gloom, before he continued: “I think I can guess what happened. You remember the Yonderfolk
said their system included a planet in the liquid-water thermal zone. The innermost one, with a mass and density such that
surface gravity ought to be two-thirds Earth standard. Which feels about right, eh?”

Only then did I notice. Every motion had hurt so much that nothing except pain had registered. But, yes, I was lighter than
before. Maybe that was the reason I could keep my feet.

“The Yonderfolk gave us information on each planet of this star,” Valland went on. “I don’t know exactly who made the big
mistake. There was that language problem; and the the factor on Zara was in a hurry to boot. So my guess is, the Yonderfolk
misunderstood him. They thought we wanted to land here first, it bein’ more comfortable for us; they even thought we had the
means to land directly. So they
supplied figures and formulas for doin’ just that. And we assumed they were tellin’ us how to find a nice, safe, convenient
point way off from the sun, and cranked the wrong stuff into our computer.”

He spread his hands. “I could be wrong,” he said. “Maybe the factor’s to blame. Maybe some curdbrain in the home office is.
Fact remains, though, doesn’t it, that you don’t blindly jump toward a point in space—because you have to allow for your target
star movin’. You use a formula. We got the wrong one.”

“What do we do about it?” Rorn snapped.

“We survive,” Valland said.

“Oh? When we don’t even know if the air is breathable? We could light a fire, sure, and test for oxygen. But how about other
gases? Or spores or—Argh!” Rorn turned his back.

“There is that,” Valland admitted.

He swung about and stared down at Smeth. “We have to unsuit him anyway, to see if we’ve got a chance to help him,” he said
finally. “And we haven’t got time—he hasn’t—for riggin’ an Earth-atmosphere compartment. So—”

He bent onto one knee, his faceplate close to the boy’s. “Enver,” he said gently. “You hear me?”

“Yes … yes … oh, it hurts—” I could scarcely endure listening.

Valland took Smeth’s hand. “Can I remove your suit?” he asked.

“I’ve only had thirty years,” Smeth shrieked. “Thirty miserable years! You’ve had three thousand!”

“Shut up.” Valland’s tone stayed soft, but I’ve heard less crack in a bullwhip. “You’re a man, aren’t you?”

Smeth gasped for seconds before he replied, “Go ahead, Hugh.”

Valland got Urduga to help. They took the broken body out of its suit, with as much care as its mother would have
given. They fetched cloths and sponged off the blood and bandaged the holes. Smeth did not die till three hours later.

At home, anywhere in civilization—perhaps aboard this ship, if the ship had not been a ruin—we might have saved him. We didn’t
have a tissue regenerator, but we did have surgical and chemical apparatus. With what we could find in the wreckage, we tried.
The memory of our trying is one that I plan to wipe out.

Finally Smeth asked Valland to sing to him. By then we were all unsuited. The air was thin, hot and damp, full of strange
odors, and you could hear the lake chuckle in the submerged compartments. Valland got his omnisonor, which had come through
unscathed while our biogenic stimulator shattered. “What would you like to hear?” he asked.

“I like … that tune … about your girl at home.”

Valland hesitated barely long enough for me to notice. Then: “Sure,” he said. “Such as it is.”

I crouched in the crazily tilted and twisted chamber, in shadows, and listened.

“
The song shall ride home on the surf of the starlight and leap to the shores of the sky
,

Take wing on the wind and the odor of lilies and Mary O’Meara-ward fly
.

And whisper your name where you lie
.”

He got no further than that stanza before Smeth’s eyes rolled back and went blind.

We sank the body and prepared to leave. During the past hours, men who were not otherwise occupied had taken inventory and
busied themselves. We still had many tools, some weapons, clothes, medicines, abundant freeze-dried rations, a knockdown shelter,
any number of useful oddments. Most important, our food unit was intact. That was no coincidence. Not expecting to use it
at once on Yonder, nor at all
if our stay wasn’t prolonged, we had stowed it in the recoil-mounted midsection. With the help of torches run off the capacitors,
as long as they lasted, the work gang assembled a pontoon raft. We could ferry our things ashore.

“We’ll live,” Hugh Valland said.

I gazed out of the lock, across the waters. The sun was low but rising, a huge red ember, one degree and nineteen minutes
across, so dull that you could look straight into it. The sky was deep purple. The land lay in eternal twilight, barely visible
to human eyes at this distance, an upward-humping blackness against the crimson sheen on the lake. A flight of creatures with
leathery wings croaked hoarsely as they passed above us. The air was dank and tropical. Now that my broken arm was stadered,
I could use it, but those nerves throbbed.

“I’m not sure I want to,” I muttered.

Valland spoke a brisk obscenity. “What’s a few years? Shouldn’t taken us any longer to find some way off this hell-ball.”

I goggled at him. “Do you seriously believe we can?”

He lifted his tawny head with so much arrogance that he wasn’t even aware of it, and answered: “Sure. Got to. Mary O’Meara’s
waitin’for me.”

T
HE SUN
crept down almost too slowly to notice. We had days of daylight. But because the night would be similarly long and very dark,
we exhausted ourselves getting camp established.

Our site was a small headland, jutting a few meters above the shore and thus fairly dry. Inland the country ran toward a range
of low hills. They were covered with trees whose broad leaves were an autumnal riot of bronzes and yellows, as far as we could
identify color in this sullen illlumination. The same hues prevailed in those tussocky growths which seemed to correspond
to grass, on the open stretch between woods and water, and in the reedy plants along the mud beach. But this was not due to
any fall season; the planet had little axial tilt. Photosynthesis under a red dwarf star can’t use chlorophyll.

We saw a good deal of wild life; and though the thin air deadened sound, we heard much more, off in the swamps to the north.
But having only the chemical apparatus left to make a few primitive tests—which did show certain amino acids, vitamins and
so forth missing, as you’d expect—we never ventured to eat local stuff. Instead we lived off packaged supplies until our food
plant was producing.

To get that far was our most heartbreaking job. In theory it’s quite simple. You fit together your wide, flat tanks, with
their pumps and irradiator coils; you sterilize them, fill them with distilled water, add the necessary organics and minerals;
you put in your cultures, filter the air intake, seal off the
whole thing against environmental contamination, and sit back. Both phyto- and zooplankton multiply explosively till equilibrium
is reached. They are gene-tailored to contain, between them, every essential of human nutrition. As needed, you pump out several
kilos at a time, return the water, cook, flavor, and eat. (Or you can dispense with flavors if you must; the natural taste
is rather like shrimp.) You pass your own wastes back through a processor into the tank so that more plankton can grow. The
cycle isn’t one hundred percent efficient, of course, but comes surprisingly close. A good construction only needs a few kilos
of supplementary material per year, and we had salvaged enough for a century, blessing the Guild law that every spaceship
must be equipped fail-safe.

Simple. Sure. When there are machines to do the heavy work, and machines to control quality, and it isn’t raining half the
time, and you’re acclimated to air and temperature, and your nerves aren’t stretched wire-thin with looking for the menaces
that instinct says must lurk all around, and you don’t keep wondering what’s the use of the whole dismal struggle.
We
had to assemble a small nuclear generator to supply current, and level a site for the tanks with hand shovels, and put up
our shelter and a stockade, and learn about the planet faster than it could find new ways to kill us, simultaneously.

About hazards: No carnivores attacked. A few times we glimpsed web-arctoid giants. They kept their distance; doubtless we
smelled inedible to them and doubtless we were. But a horned thing, thrice the mass of a human, charged from the brush at
Rorn and Galmer as they went surveying. They gave it the full blast of two heavy torchguns, and it didn’t die and didn’t die,
it kept on coming till it collapsed a meter away, and then as they left it crawled after them for a long while …. Bren almost
drowned in a mudhole. The ground was full of them, concealed by plants growing on their surface …. Urduga came near a sort
of vine, which
grabbed him. The sucker mouths couldn’t break his skin, but he couldn’t get loose either. I had to chop free; naturally we
never left camp alone …. Though we had portable radios and gyrocompasses, we dreaded losing our way in these featureless marshlands
…. From time to time we noticed bipedal forms skulk in the distant brush. They disappeared before we could bring optical aids
to bear, but Galmer insisted he had glimpsed a spear carried by one of them. And without the main reactor, the ship’s heavy
weapons were inert. We had a few sidearms, nothing else.