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

"Jamison! Bell!" he cried desperately. "We've got a broadcast due in twenty minutes! I lost track of time! We're sponsored on four continents and we damwell have to put on a show! What the devil! Why didn't somebody—"

Jamison said obviously from a blister-port where he swung a squat star-telescope from one object to another:

"Noo-o-o. That's a gas-giant. We'd be squashed if we landed there—though that big moon looks promising. I think we'd better try yonder."

"Okay," said Jones in a flat voice. "Center on the next one in, Al, and we'll toddle over."

Cochrane felt the ship swinging in emptiness. He knew because it seemed to turn while he felt that he stayed still.

"We've got a show to put on!" he raged. "We've got to fake something—."

Jamison looked aside from his telescope.

"Tell him, Bell," he said expansively.

"I wrote a script of sorts," said Bell apologetically. "The story-line's not so good—that's why I wanted a castaway narrative to put in it, though I wouldn't have had time, really. We spliced film and Jamison narrated it, and you can run it off. It's a kind of show. We ran it as a space-platform survey of the glacier-planet, basing it on pictures we took while we were in orbit around it. It's a sort of[Pg 124] travelogue. Jamison did himself proud. Alicia can find the tape-can for you."

He went back to his cameras. Cochrane saw a monstrous globe swing past a control-room port. It was a featureless mass of clouds, save for striations across what must be its equator. It looked like the Lunar Observatory pictures of Jupiter, back in the Sun's family of planets.

It went past the port, and a moon swam into view. It was a very large moon. It had at least one ice-cap—and therefore an atmosphere—and there were mottlings of its surface which could hardly be anything but continents and seas.

"We've got to put a show on!" raged Cochrane. "And now!"

"It's all set," Bell assured him. "You can transmit it. I hope you like it!"

Cochrane sputtered. But there was nothing to do but transmit whatever Bell and Jamison had gotten ready. He swam with nightmarelike difficulty back to the communicator. He shouted frantically for Babs. She and Alicia came. Alicia found the film-tape, and Cochrane threaded it into the transmitter, and bitterly ran the first few feet. Babs smiled at him, and Alicia looked at him oddly. Evidently, Babs had confided the consequence of their casting-away. But Cochrane faced an emergency. He began to check timings with far-distant Earth.

When the ship approached a second planet, Cochrane saw nothing of it. He was furiously monitoring the broadcast of a show in which he'd had no hand at all. From his own, professional standpoint it was terrible. Jamison spouted interminably, so Cochrane considered. Al, the pilot, was actually interviewed by an offscreen voice! But the pictures from space were excellent. While the ship floated in orbit, waiting to descend to pick up Babs and Cochrane, Bell had hooked his camera to an amplifying telescope and he did have magnificent shots of dramatic terrain on the planet now twenty light-years behind.

Cochrane watched the show in a mingling of jealousy and relief. It was not as good as he would have done. But fortunately, Bell and Jamison had stuck fairly close to straight travelogue-stuff, and close-up shots of vegetation and animals had been interspersed with the remoter pictures with moderate competence, if without undue imagination. An audience which had not seen many shows of the kind would be thrilled. It even amounted to a valid change[Pg 125] of pace. Anybody who watched this would at least want to see more and different pictures from the stars.

Halfway through, he heard the now-muffled noise of rockets. He knew the ship was descending through atmosphere by the steady sound, though he had not the faintest idea what was outside. He ground his teeth as—for timing—he received the commercial inserted in the film. The U. S. commercials served the purpose, of course. He could not watch the other pictures shown to residents of other than North America in the commercial portions of the show.

He was counting seconds to resume transmission when he felt the slight but distant impact which meant that the ship had touched ground. A very short time after, even the lessened, precautionary rocket-roar cut off.

Cochrane ground his teeth. The ship had landed on a planet he had not seen and in whose choice he had had no hand. He was humiliated. The other members of the ship's company looked out at scenes no other human eyes had ever beheld.

He regarded the final commercial, inserted into the broadcast for its American sponsor. It showed, purportedly, the true story of two girl friends, one blonde and one brunette, who were wall-flowers at all parties. They tried frantically to remedy the situation by the use of this toothpaste and that, and this deodorant and the other. In vain! But then they became the centers of all the festivities they attended, as soon as they began to wash their hair with Rayglo Shampoo.

Holden and Johnny Simms came clattering down from the control-room together. They looked excited. They plunged together toward the stair-well that would take them to the deck on which the airlock opened.

Holden panted,

"Jed! Creatures outside! They look like men!"

The communicator-screen faithfully monitored the end of the commercial. Two charming girls, radiant and lovely, raised their voices in grateful song, hymning the virtues of Rayglo Shampoo. There followed brisk reminders of the superlative, magical results obtained by those who used Rayglo Foundation Cream, Rayglo Kisspruf Lipstick, and Rayglo home permanent—in four strengths; for normal, hard-to-wave, easy-to-wave, and children's hair.

Cochrane heard the clanking of the airlock door.

[Pg 126]

He made for the control-room, where the ports offered the highest and widest and best views of everything outside. When he arrived, Babs and Alicia stood together, staring out and down. Bell frantically worked a camera. Jamison gaped at the outer world. Al the pilot made frustrated gestures, not quite daring to leave his controls while there was even an outside chance the ship's landing-fins might find flaws in their support. Jones adjusted something on the new set of controls he had established for the extra Dabney field. Jones was not wholly normal in some ways. He was absorbed in technical matters even more fully than Cochrane in his own commercial enterprises.

Cochrane pushed to a port to see.

The ship had landed in a small glade. There were trees nearby. The trees had extremely long, lanceolate leaves, roughly the shape of grass-blades stretched out even longer. In the gentle breeze that blew outside, they waved extravagantly. There were hills in the distance, and nearby out-croppings of gray rocks. This sky was blue like the sky of Earth. It was, of course, inevitable that any colorless atmosphere with dust-particles suspended in it would establish a blue sky.

Holden was visible below, moving toward a patch of reed-like vegetation rising some seven or eight feet from the rolling soil. He had hopped quickly over the scorched area immediately outside the ship. It was much smaller than that made by the first landing on the other planet, but even so he had probably damaged his footwear to excess. But he now stood a hundred yards from the ship. He made gestures. He seemed to be talking, as if trying to persuade some living creature to show itself.

"We saw them peeping," said Babs breathlessly, coming beside Cochrane. "Once one of them ran from one patch[Pg 127] of reeds to another. It looked like a man. There are at least three of them in there—whatever they are!"

"They can't be men," said Cochrane grimly. "They can't!" Johnny Simms was not in sight. "Where's Simms?"

"He has a gun," said Babs. "He was going to get one, anyhow, so he could protect Doctor Holden."

Cochrane glanced straight down. The airlock door was open, and the end of a weapon peered out. Johnny Simms might be in a better position there to protect Holden by gun-fire, but he was assuredly safer, himself. There was no movement anywhere. Holden did not move closer to the reeds. He still seemed to be speaking soothingly to the unseen creatures.

"Why can't there be men here?" asked Babs. "I don't mean actually men, but—manlike creatures? Why couldn't there be rational creatures like us? I know you said so but—"

Cochrane shook his head. He believed implicitly that there could not be men on this planet. On the glacier planet every animal had been separately devised from the creatures of Earth. There were resemblances, explicable as the result of parallel evolution. By analogy, there could not be exactly identical mankind on another world because evolution there would be parallel but not the same. But if there were even a mental equal to men, no matter how unhuman such a creature might appear, if there were a really rational animal anywhere in the cosmos off of Earth, the result would be catastrophic.

"We humans," Cochrane told her, "live by our conceit. We demand more than animality of ourselves because we believe we are more than animals—and we believe we are the only creatures that are! If we came to believe we were not unique, but were simply a cleverer animal, we'd be finished. Every nation has always started to destroy itself every time such an idea spread."

"But we aren't only clever animals!" protested Babs. "We are unique!"

Cochrane glanced at her out of the corner of his eye.

"Quite true."

Holden still stood patiently before the patch of reeds, still seemed to talk, still with his hands outstretched in what men consider the universal sign of peace.

There was a sudden movement at the back of the reed-patch, quite fifty yards from Holden. A thing which did look like a man fled madly for the nearest edge of woodland.[Pg 128] It was the size of a man. It had the pinkish-tan color of naked human flesh. It ran with its head down, and it could not be seen too clearly, but it was startlingly manlike in outline. Up in the control-room Bell fairly yipped with excitement and swung his camera. Holden remained oblivious. He still tried to lure something out of concealment. A second creature raced for the woods.

Tiny gray threads appeared in the air between the airlock and the racing thing. Smoke. Johnny Simms was shooting zestfully at the unidentified animal. He was using that tracer ammunition which poor shots and worse sportsmen adopt to make up for bad marksmanship.

The threads of smoke seemed to form a net about the running things. They dodged and zig-zagged frantically. Both of them reached safety.

A third tried it. And now Johnny Simms turned on automatic fire. Bullets spurted from his weapon, trailing threads of smoke so that the trails looked like a stream from a hose. The stream swept through the space occupied by the fugitive. It leaped convulsively and crashed to earth. It kicked blindly.

Cochrane swore. Between the instant of the beginning of the creature's flight and this instant, less than two seconds had passed.

The threads which were smoke-trails drifted away. Then a new thread streaked out. Johnny Simms fired once more at his still-writhing victim. It kicked violently and was still.

Holden turned angrily. There seemed to be shoutings between him and Johnny Simms. Then Holden trudged around the reed-patch. There was no longer any sign of life in the still shape on the ground. But it was normal precaution not to walk into a jungle-like thicket in which unknown, large living things had recently been sighted. Johnny Simms fired again and again from his post in the airlock. The smoke which traced his bullets ranged to the woodland. He shot at imagined targets there. He fired at his previous victim simply because it was something to shoot at. He shot recklessly, foolishly.

Alicia, his wife, touched Jamison on the arm and spoke to him urgently. Jamison followed her reluctantly down the stairs. She would be going to the airlock. Johnny Simms, shooting at the landscape, might shoot Holden. A thread of bullet-smoke passed within feet of Holden's body. He turned and shouted back at the ship.

The inner airlock door clanked open. There was the[Pg 129] sound of a shot, and the dead thing was hit again. The bullet had been fired dangerously close to Holden. There were voices below. Johnny Simms bellowed enragedly.

Alicia cried out.

There was silence below, but Cochrane was already plunging toward the stairs. Babs followed closely.

When they rushed down onto the dining-room deck they found Alicia deathly white, but with a flaming red mark on her cheek. They found Johnny Simms roaring with rage, waving the weapon he'd been shooting. Jamison was uneasily in the act of trying to placate him.

"——!" bellowed Johnny Simms. "I came on this ship to hunt! I'm going to hunt! Try and stop me!"

He waved his weapon.

"I paid my money!" he shouted. "I won't take orders from anybody! Nobody can boss me!"

Cochrane said icily:

"I can! Stop being a fool!