Operation: Outer Space by Murray Leinster (best short novels of all time TXT) 📖

commonplace. Scorched wood. Smokiness. There were noises. Occasional cracklings from burned tree-trunks not wholly consumed. High-pitched, shrill musical notes. And in and among the smells there was an astonishing freshness in the feel of the air. Cochrane was especially apt to notice it because he had lived in a city back on Earth, and had spent four days in the moon-rocket, and then had breathed the Lunar City air for eighteen days more and had just come from the space-ship whose air was distinctly of the canned variety.

He did not notice the noise of the sling again in motion behind him. He was all eyes and ears and acute awareness of the completely strange environment. He was the more[Pg 94] conscious of a general strangeness because he was so completely an urban product. Yet he and Holden were vastly less aware of the real strangeness about them than men of previous generations would have been. They did not notice the oddity of croaking sounds, like frogs, coming from the tree-tops. When they had threaded their way among leaning charred poles and came to green stuff underfoot and merely toasted foliage all around, Cochrane heard a sweet, high-pitched trilling which came from a half-inch hole in the ground. But he was not astonished by the place from which the trilling came. He was astonished at the sound itself.

There was a cry behind them.

"Mr. Cochrane! Doctor Holden!"

They swung about. And there was Babs on the ground, just disentangling herself from the sling. She had followed them out, after waiting until they had left the airlock and could not protest.

Cochrane swore to himself. But when Babs joined them breathlessly, after a hopping run over the hot ground, he said only:

"Fancy meeting you here!"

"I—I couldn't resist it," said Babs in breathless apology. "And you do have guns. It's safe enough—oh, look!"

She stared at a bush which was covered with pale purple flowers. Small creatures hovered in the air about it. She approached it and exclaimed again at the sweetness of its scent. Cochrane and Holden joined her in admiration.

In a sense they were foolishly unwary. This was completely strange territory. It could have contained anything. Earlier explorers would have approached every bush with caution and moved over every hilltop with suspicion, anticipating deadly creatures, unparalleled monsters, and exotic and peculiar circumstances designed to entrap the unprepared. Earlier explorers, of course, would probably have had advice from famous men to prepare them for all possible danger.

But this was a valley between snow-clad mountains. The river that ran down its length was fed by glaciers. This was a temperate climate. The trees were either coniferous or something similar, and the vegetation grew well but not with the frenzy of a tropic region. There were fruits here and there. Later, to be sure, they would prove to be mostly astringent and unpalatable. They were[Pg 95] broad-leafed, low-growing plants which would eventually turn out to be possessed of soft-fleshed roots which were almost unanimously useless for human purposes. There were even some plants with thorns and spines upon them. But they encountered no danger.

By and large, wild animals everywhere are ferocious only when desperate. No natural setting can permanently be so deadly that human being will be attacked immediately they appear. An area in which peril is continuous is one in which there is so much killing that there is no food-supply left to maintain its predators. On the whole, there is simply a limit to how dangerous any place can be. Dangerous beasts have to be relatively rare, or they will not have enough to eat, when they will thin out until they are relatively rare and do have enough to eat.

So the three explorers moved safely, though their boldness was that of ignorance, below gigantic trees nearly as tall as the space-ship standing on end. They saw a small furry biped, some twelve inches tall, which waddled insanely in the exact line of their progress and with no apparent hope of outdistancing them. They saw a gauzy creature with incredibly spindly legs. It flew from one tree-trunk to another, clinging to rough bark on each in turn. Once they came upon a small animal which looked at them with enormous, panic-stricken blue eyes and then fled with a sinuous gait on legs so short that they seemed mere flippers. It dived into a hole and vanished.

But they came out to clear space. They could look for miles and miles. There was a savannah of rolling soil which gradually sloped down to a swift-running river. The grass—if it was grass—was quite green, but it had multitudes of tiny rose-colored flowers down the central rib of each leaf. Nearby it seemed the color of Earth-grass, but it faded imperceptibly into an incredible old-rose tint in the distance. The mountain-scarps on either side of the valley were sheer and tall. There was a great stony spur reaching out above the lowland, and there was forest at its top and bare brown stone dropping two thousand feet sheer. And up the valley, where it narrowed, a waterfall leaped out from the cliff and dropped hundreds of feet in an arc of purest white, until it was lost to view behind tree-tops.

They looked. They stared. Cochrane was a television producer, and Holden was a psychiatrist, and Babs was a[Pg 96] highly efficient secretary. They did not make scientific observations. The ecological system of the valley escaped their notice. They weren't qualified to observe that the flying things around seemed mostly to be furry instead of feathered, and that insects seemed few and huge and fragile,—and they did not notice that most of the plants appeared to be deciduous, so indicating that this planet had pronounced seasons. But Holden said:

"Up in Greenland there's a hospital on a cliff like that. People with delusions of grandeur sometimes get cured just by looking at something that's so much greater and more splendid than they are. I'd like to see a hospital up yonder!"

Babs said, shining-eyed:

"A city could be built in this valley. Not a tall city, with gray streets and gardens on the roofs. This could be a nice little city like people used to have. There would be little houses, all separate, and there'd be grass all around and people could pluck flowers if they wanted to, to take inside.... There could be families here, and homes—not living-quarters!"

Cochrane said nothing. He was envious of the others. They saw, and they dreamed according to their natures. Cochrane somehow felt forlorn. Presently he said depressedly:

"We'll go back to the ship. You can work out your woman's viewpoint stuff with Bell, Babs. He'll write it, or you can give it to Alicia to put over when we go on the air."

Babs made no reply. The absence of comment was almost pointed. Cochrane realized that she wouldn't do it, though he couldn't see why.

They did go back to the ship. Cochrane sent Babs and Holden up the sling, first, while he waited down below. It was a singular sensation to stand there. He was the only human being afoot on a planet the size of Earth or larger, at the foot of a cliff of metal which was the space-ship's hull. He had a weapon in his hand, and it should defend him from anything. But he felt very lonely.

The sling came down for him. He felt sick at heart as it lifted him. He had an overwhelming conviction of incompetence, though he could not detail the reasons. The rope hauled him up, swaying, to the dizzy height of the[Pg 97] air-lock door. He could not feel elated. He was partly responsible for humankind's greatest achievement to date. But he had not quite the viewpoint that would let him enjoy its contemplation.

The ground quivered very faintly as he rose. It was not an earthquake. It was merely a temblor, such as anyone would expect to feel occasionally with six smoking volcanic cones in view. The green stuff all around was proof that it could be disregarded.

[Pg 98]

CHAPTER SEVEN

In the United States, some two-hundred-odd light-years away, it happened to be Tuesday. On this Tuesday, the broadcast from the stars was sponsored by Harvey's, the national men's clothing chain. Harvey's advertising department preferred discussion-type shows, because differences of opinion in the shows proper led so neatly into their tag-line. "You can disagree about anything but the quality of a Harvey suit! That's Superb!"

Therefore the broadcast after the landing of the ship on the volcanic planet was partly commercial, and partly pictures and reports from the Spaceways expedition, and partly queries and comments by big-name individuals on Earth. Inevitably there was Dabney. And Dabney was neurotic.

He did his best to make a shambles of everything.

The show started promptly enough at the beginning. There was a two-minute film-strip of business-suited puppets marching row on row, indicating the enormous popularity of Harvey's suits. Then a fast minute hill-billy puppet-show about two feuding mountaineers who found they couldn't possibly retain their enmity when they found themselves in agreement on the quality of Harvey suits. "That's Superb!" The commercial ended with a choral dance of madly enthusiastic miniature figures, dancing while they lustily sang the theme-song, "You can disagree, yes siree, you can disagree, About anything, indeed everything, you and me, But you can't, no you can't disagree, About the strictly super, extra super, Qualitee of a Har-ve-e-e-e suit! That's superb!"

And thereupon the television audience of several continents saw the faded-in image of mankind's first starship, poised upon its landing-fins among trees more splendid than even television shows had ever pictured before. The camera panned slowly, and showed such open spaces[Pg 99] as very few humans had ever seen unencumbered by buildings, and mountains of a grandeur difficult for most people to believe in.

The scene cut to the space-ship's control-room and Al the pilot acted briskly as the leader of an exploration-party just returned—though he actually hadn't left the ship. He introduced Jamison, wearing improvised leggings and other trappings appropriate to an explorer in wilderness. Jamison began to extrapolate from his observations out the control-room port, adding film-clips for authority.

Smoothly and hypnotically, he pictured the valley as the ship descended the last few thousand feet, and told of the human colony to be founded in this vast and hospitable area just explored. Mountainside hotels for star-tourists would look down upon a scene of tranquility and cozy spaciousness. This would be the first human outpost in the stars. In the other valleys of this magnificent world there would be pasture-lands, and humankind would again begin to regard meat as a normal and not-extravagant part of its diet—on this planet, certainly! There were minerals beyond doubt, and water-power. The estimate was that at least the equivalent of the Asian continent had been made available for human occupation. And this splendid addition to the resources of humanity ...

The second commercial cut Jamison off. Naturally. The sponsor was paying for time. So for Jamison was substituted the other fiction about the poor young man who found himself envied by the board of directors of the firm which employed him. His impeccable attire caused him to be promoted to vice-president without any question of whether or not he could fill the job. Because, of course, he wore a Harvey suit.

Alicia Keith showed herself on the screen and gave the woman's viewpoint as written about by Bell. She talked pleasantly about how it felt to move about on a planet never before trodden by human beings. She was interrupted by the pictured face of the lady editor of Joint Networks' feminine programs, who asked sweetly:

"Tell me, Alicia, what do you think the attainment of the stars will mean to the Average American housewife in the immediate future? Right now?"

Then Dabney came on. His appearance was fitted into the sequence from Lunar City, and his gestures were extravagant as anybody's gestures will be where their hands and arms weigh so small a fraction of Earth-normal.[Pg 100]

"I wish," said Dabney impressively, "to congratulate the men who have so swiftly adapted my discovery of faster-than-light travel to practical use. I am overwhelmed at having been able to achieve a scientific triumph which in time will mean that mankind's future stretches endlessly and splendidly into the future!"

Here there was canned applause. Dabney held up his hand for attention. He thought. Visibly.

"But," he said urgently, "I admit that I am disturbed by the precipitancy of the action that has been taken. I feel as if I were like some powerful djinni giving gifts which the recipients may use without thought."

More canned applause, inserted because he had given instructions for it whenever he paused. The communicator-operator at Luna City took pleasure in following instructions exactly. Dabney held up his hand again. Again he performed feats of meditation in plain view.

"At the moment," he said anxiously, "as the author of this truly magnificent achievement, I have to use the same intellect which produced it, to examine the possibility of its ill-advised use. May not explorers—who took off without my having examined their plans and precautions—may not over-hasty users of my