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

"I wish we had a helicopter," Cochrane repeated. "The look of the mountains as we came down, with glaciers between the smoking cones—that was good show-stuff! We could have held interest here until we worked that naming contest. We could use the extra capital that would bring in! As it is, we've got to move on with practically nothing accomplished. The trouble is that I didn't think we would succeed as we have! Heaven knows I could have gotten helicopters!"

He helped her up a small steep incline, where rock protruded from a hillside.

The ground trembled again. Not alarmingly, but Babs' hold of his hand tightened a little. They continued to climb. They came out atop a small bare prominence which rose above the forest. Here they could see over the treetops in a truly extensive view. The mountains all about were clearly visible. Some were ten and some twenty miles away. Some, still farther, were barely visible in the thin haze of distance. But there was a thick pall of smoke hovering about one of the farthest. It was mushroom-shaped. At one time in human history, it would have seemed typically a volcanic cloud. To Cochrane and Babs, it was typically the cloud of an atomic explosion.

The ground shook sharply underfoot. Babs staggered.

Flying things rose from the forests in swarms. They hovered and darted and flapped above the tree-tops. Temblors did not alarm the creatures of the valley. But ground-shocks like this last were another matter.

A great tree, rearing above its fellows, toppled slowly. With ripping, tearing noises, it bent sedately toward the smoking, far-away mountain. It crashed thunderously down upon smaller trees. There were other rending noises. The flying things rose higher, seeming agitated. Echoes sounded in the ears of the two atop the hill.

There was another sharp shock. Babs gave a little, inarticulate cry. She pointed.

There was much smoke in the distance. Over the far-away cone, which was indistinct in the smoke of its own making—over the edge of the distant mountains a glare appeared. It was a thin line of bright white light. With[Pg 107] infinite deliberation it began to creep down the slanting, blessedly remote mountainside.

The ground seemed to shift abruptly, and then shift back. Across and down the valley, five miles away, a portion of the stony wall detached itself and slid downward in seeming slow motion. Two more great trees made ripping sounds. One crashed. There was an enormous darkness above one part of the sky. Its under side glowed from fires as of hell, in the crater beneath it. There were sparkings above the mountaintop.

Very oddly indeed, the sky overhead was peacefully blue. But at the horizon a sheet of fire rolled down mile-long slopes. It seemed to move with infinite deliberation, but to move visibly at such a distance it must have been traveling like an express-train. It must have been unthinkably hot, glaring-white molten stone, thin as water, pouring downward in a flood of fire.

There was no longer a sensation of the ground trembling underfoot. Now the noticeable sensation was when the ground was still. Temblors were practically continuous. There were distinct sharp impacts, as of violent blows nearby.

Babs stared, fascinated. She glanced up at Cochrane. His skin was white. There were beads of sweat on his forehead.

"We're safe here, aren't we?" she asked, scared.

"I think so. But I'm not going to take you through falling trees while this is going on! There's another tree down! I'm worrying about the ship! If it topples—."

She looked at the nose of the space-ship, gleaming silver metal, rising from the trees about the landing-spot it had burned clear. A third of its length was visible.

"If it topples," said Cochrane, "we'll never be able to take off. It has to point up to lift."

Babs looked from the ship to him, and back again. Then her eyes went fearfully to the remote mountain. Rumblings came from it now. They were not loud. They were hardly more than dull growlings, at the lower limit of audible pitch. They were like faint and distant thunder. There were flashings like lightning in the cloud which now enveloped the mountain's top.

Cochrane made an indescribable small sound. He stared at the ship. As explosion-waves passed over the ground, a faint, unanimous movement of the treetops became visible.[Pg 108] It seemed to Cochrane that the space-ship wavered as if about to fall from its upright position.

It was not designed to stand such violence as a fall would imply. Its hull would be dented or rent. It was at least possible that its fuel-store would detonate. But even if its fall were checked by still-standing trees about it, it could never take off again. The eight humans of its company could never juggle it back to a vertical position. Rocket-thrust would merely push it in the direction its nose pointed. Toppled, its rocket-thrust would merely shove it blindly over stones and trees and to destruction.

The ship swayed again. Visibly. Ground-waves made its weight have the effect of blows. Part of its foundation rested on almost-visible stone, only feet below the ground-level. But one of the landing-fins rested on humus. As the shocks passed, that fin-foot sank into the soft soil. The space-ship leaned perceptibly.

Flying creatures darted back and forth above the tree-tops. Miles away, insensate violence reigned. Clouds of dust and smoke shot miles into the air, and half a mountainside glowed white-hot, and there was the sound of long-continued thunder, and the ground shook and quivered....

There were movements nearby. A creature with yellow fur and the shape of a bear with huge ears came padding out of the forest. It swarmed up the bare stone of the hill on which Babs and Cochrane stood.

It ignored them. Halfway up the unwooded part of the hill, it stopped and made plaintive, high-pitched noises. Other creatures came. Many had come while the man and girl were too absorbed to notice. Now two more of the large animals came out into the open and climbed the hill.

Babs said shakily:

"Do you—think they'll—do you think—"

There was a nearer roaring. The space-ship leaned, and leaned.... Cochrane's lips tensed.

The space-ship's rockets bellowed and a storm of hurtling smoke flashed up around it. It lifted, staggering as its steering-jets tried frantically to swing its lower parts underneath its mass. It lurched violently, and the rockets flamed terribly. It lifted again. Its tail was higher than the trees, but it did not point straight up. It surged horribly across the top of the forest, leaving a vast flash of flaming vegetation behind it. Then it steadied, and aimed skyward and climbed....

Then it was not. Obviously the Dabney field booster[Pg 109] had been flashed on to get the ship out to space. The ship had vanished into emptiness.

The Dabney field had flicked it some hundred and seventy-odd light-years from Earth's moon in the flicker of a heart-beat. It might have gone that far again. Whoever was in it had had no choice but to take off, and no way to take off without suicidal use of fuel in any other way.

Cochrane looked at where the ship had vanished. Seconds passed. There came the thunderclap of air closing the vacuum the ship's disappearance had left.

There were squealings behind the pair on the hilltop. Eight of the huge yellow beasts were out in the open, now. Tiny, furry biped animals waddled desperately to get out of their way. Smaller creatures scuttled here and there. A sinuous creature with fur but no apparent legs writhed its way upward. But all the creatures were frightened. They observed an absolute truce, under the overmastering greater fear of nature.

Far away, the volcano on the skyline boomed and flashed and emitted monstrous clouds of smoke. The shining, incandescent lava on its flanks glared across the glaciers.

Babs gasped suddenly. She realized the situation in which she and Cochrane had been left.

Shivering, she pressed close to him as the distant black smoke-cloud spread toward the center of the sky.

[Pg 110]

Before sunset, they reached the area of ashes where the ship had stood. Cochrane was sure that if anybody else had been left behind besides themselves, the landing-place was an inevitable rendezvous. Only three members of the ship's company had been inside when Babs and Cochrane left to stroll for the two hours astronomers on Earth had set as a waiting-period. Jones had been in the ship, and Holden, and Alicia Simms. Everybody else had been exploring. Their attitude had been exactly that of sight-seers and tourists. But they could have gotten back before the take-off.

Apparently they had. Nobody seemed to have returned to the burned-over space since the ship's departure. The blast of the rockets had erased all previous tracks, but still there was a thin layer of ash resettled over the clearing. Footprints would have been visible in it. Anybody remaining would have come here. Nobody had. Babs and Cochrane were left alone.

There were still temblors, but the sharper shocks no longer came. There was conflagration in the wood, where the lurching ship had left a long fresh streak of forest-fire. The two castaways stared at the round, empty landing-place. Overhead, the blue sky turned yellow—but where the smoke from the eruption rose, the sky early became a brownish red—and presently the yellow faded to gold. Unburned green foliage all about was singularly beautiful in that golden glow. But it was more beautiful still as the sky turned rose-pink and then carmine in turn, and then crimson from one horizon to the other save where the volcanic smoke-cloud marred the color. Then the east darkened, and became a red so deep as to be practically black, and unfamiliar bright stars began to peep through it.

Before darkness was complete, Cochrane dragged burning branches from the edge of the new fire—the heat was[Pg 111] searing—and built a new and smaller fire in the place where the ship had been.

"This isn't for warmth," he explained briefly, "but so we'll have light if we need it. And it isn't likely that animals will be anything but afraid of it."

He went off to drag charred masses of burnable stuff from the burned-out first forest fire. He built a sort of rampart in the very center of the clearing. He brought great heaps of scorched wood. He did not know how much was needed to keep the fire going until dawn.

When he finished, Babs was silently at work trying to find out how to keep the fire going. The burning parts had to be kept together. One branch, burning alone, died out. Two red-hot brands in contact kept each other alight.

"I'm sorry we haven't anything to eat," Cochrane told her.

"I'm not hungry," she assured him. "What are we going to do now?"

"There's nothing to do until morning." Unconsciously, Cochrane looked grim. "Then there'll be plenty. Food, for one thing. We don't know, actually, whether or not there's anything really edible on this planet—for us. It could be that there are fruits or possibly stalks or leaves that would be nourishing. Only—we don't know which is which. We have to be careful. We might pick something like poison ivy!"

Babs said:

"But the ship will come back!"

"Of course," agreed Cochrane. "But it may take them some time to find us. This is a pretty big planet, you know."

He estimated his supply of burnable stuff. He improved the rampart he had made at first. Babs stared at him. After four or five minutes he stepped back.

"You can lean against this," he explained. "You can watch the fire quite comfortably. And it's a sort of wall. The fire will light one side of you and the wall will feel comforting behind you when you get sleepy."

Babs nodded. She swallowed.

"I—think I see what you mean when you say they may have trouble finding us, because this planet is so large."

Cochrane nodded reluctantly.

"Of course there's this burned-off space for a marker," he observed cheerfully. "But it could take several days for them to see it."

Babs swallowed again. She said carefully:[Pg 112]

"The—ship can't hover like a helicopter, to search. You said so. It doesn't have fuel enough. They can't really search for us at all! The only way to make a real search would be to go back to Earth and—bring back helicopters and fuel for them and men to fly them.... Isn't that right?"

"Not necessarily. But we do have to figure on a matter of—well—two or three days as a possibility."

Babs moistened her lips and he said quickly:

"I did a show once about some miners lost in a wilderness. A period show. In it, they knew that part of their food was poisoned. They didn't know what. They had to have all their food. And of course they didn't have laboratories with which to test for poison."

Babs eyed him oddly.

"They bandaged their arms," said Cochrane, "and put scraps of the different foodstuffs under the bandages. The one that was poisonous showed. It affected the skin. Like an allergy-test. I'll