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

out," said Alicia desperately. "He meant to punish us. He's a spoiled little boy. We weren't nice to him. And—he was afraid of us too! So he ran away to make us sorry!"

Cochrane went to look out of the lock and to call Johnny Simms back. He gazed into absolute blackness on the ground. He felt a queasy giddiness because there was no hand-railing at the outer lock door and he knew the depth of the fall outside. He raged, within himself. Johnny Simms would feel triumphant when he was called. He would require to be pleaded with to return. He would pompously set terms for returning before he was killed....

Cochrane saw a flash of fire and the short streak of a tracer-bullet's patch before it hit something. He heard the[Pg 141] report of the gun. He heard a bellow of agony and then a scream of purest terror from Johnny Simms.

Then, from the ground, arose a truly monstrous tumult. Every one of the creatures below raised its voice in a horrible, bleating cry. The volume of sound was numbing—was agonizing in sheer impact. There were stirrings and clickings as of horns clashing against each other.

Another scream from Johnny Simms. He had moved. It appeared that he was running. Cochrane saw more gun-flashes, there were more shots. He clenched his hands and waited for the thunderous vibration that would be all this multitude of animals pounding through the night in blind stampede.

It did not come. There was only that bleating, horrible outcry as all the beasts bellowed of alarm and created this noise to frighten their assailants away.

Twice more there were shots in the night. Johnny Simms fired crazily and screamed in hysterical panic. Each time the shots and screaming were farther away.

There were no portable lights with which to make a search. It was unthinkable to go blundering among the beasts in darkness.

There was nothing to do. Cochrane could only watch and listen helplessly while the strong beast-smell rose to his nostrils, and the innumerable noises of unseen uneasy creatures sounded in his ears.

Inside the ship Alicia wept hopelessly. Babs tried in vain to comfort her.

[Pg 142]

CHAPTER TEN

The sun rose. Cochrane noted the time, it was fourteen hours since sunset. The local day would be something more than an Earth-day in length. The manner of sunrise was familiar. There was a pale gray light in the sky. It strengthened. Then reddish colors appeared, and changed to gold, and the unnamed stars winked out one after another. Presently the nearer hillsides ceased to be black. There was light everywhere.

Alicia, white and haggard, waited to see what the light would show.

But there was heavy mist everywhere. The hill-crests were clear, and the edge of the visible woodland, and the top half of the ship's shining hull rose clear of curiously-tinted, slowly writhing fog. But everything else seemed submerged in a sea of milk.

But the mist grew thinner as the sun shone on it. Its top writhed to nothingness. All this was wholly commonplace. Even clouds in the sky were of types well-known enough. Which was, when one thought about it, inevitable. This was a Sol-type sun, of the same kind and color as the star which warmed the planet Earth. It had planets, like the sun of men's home world. There was a law—Bode's Law—which specified that planets must float in orbits bearing such-and-such relationships to each other. There must also be a law that planets in those orbits must bear such-and-such relationships of size to each other. There must be a law that winds must blow under ordinary conditions, and clouds form at appointed heights and times. It would be very remarkable if Earth were an exception to natural laws that other worlds obey.

So the strangeness of the morning to those who watched from the ship was more like the strangeness of an alien land on Earth than that of a wholly alien planet.

The lower dawnmist thinned. Gazing down, Cochrane[Pg 143] saw dark masses moving slowly past the ship's three metal landing-fins. They were the beasts of the night, moving deliberately from their bed-ground to the vast plains inland. There were bunches of hundreds, and bunches of scores. There were occasional knots of dozens only.

From overhead and through the mist Cochrane could not see individual animals too clearly, but they were heavy beasts and clumsy ones. They moved sluggishly. Their numbers dwindled. He saw groups of no more than four or five. He saw single animals trudging patiently away.

He saw no more at all.

Then the sunlight touched the inland hills. The last of the morning mist dissolved, and there were the dead bodies of two beasts near the base of the ship. Johnny Simms had killed them with his first panicky shots of the night. There was another dead beast a quarter-mile away.

Cochrane gave orders. Jones and Al could not leave the ship. They were needed to get it back to Earth, with full knowledge of how to make other starships. Cochrane tried to leave Babs behind, but she would not stay. Bell had loaded himself with a camera and film-tape besides a weapon, before Cochrane even began his organization. Holden was needed for an extra gun. Alicia, tearless and despairing, would not be left behind. Cochrane turned wryly to Jamison.

"I don't think Johnny was killed," he said. "He'd gotten a long way off before it happened, anyhow. We've got to hunt for him. With beasts like those of last night, there'll naturally be other creatures to prey on them. We might run into anything. If we don't get back, you get to the lawyers I've had representing Spaceways. They'll get rich off the job, but you'll end up rich, too."

"The best bet all around," said Jamison in a low tone, "would be to find him trampled to death."

"I agree," said Cochrane sourly. "But apparently the beasts don't stampede. Maybe they don't even charge, but just form rings to protect their females and young, like musk-oxen. I'm afraid he's alive, but I'm also afraid we'll never find him."

He marshaled his group. Jones had walkie-talkies ready, deftly removed for the purpose from space-suits nobody had used since leaving Lunar City—and Holden took one to keep in touch by. They went down in the sling, two at a time.

Cochrane regarded the two dead animals near the base[Pg 144] of the ship. They were roughly the size of cattle, and they were shaggy like buffalo. They had branching, pointed, deadly horns. They had hoofs, single hoofs, not cloven. They were not like any Earth animal. But horns and hoofs will appear in any system of parallel evolution. It would seem even more certain that proteins and amino acids and such compounds as hemoglobin and fat and muscle-tissue should be identical as a matter of chemical inevitability. These creatures had teeth and they were herbivorous. Bell photographed them painstakingly.

"Somehow," said Cochrane, "I think they'd be wholesome food. If we can, we'll empty a freezing-locker and take a carcass for tests."

Holden fingered his rifle unhappily. Alicia said nothing. Babs stayed close beside her. They went on.

They came to another dead animal a quarter-mile away. The ground was full of the scent and the hoofmarks of the departed herd. Bell photographed again. They did not stop. Johnny Simms had been this way, because of the carcass. He wasn't here now.

They topped the next rise in the ground. They saw two other slaughtered creatures. It was wholly evident, now, that these animals did not charge but only stood their ground when alarmed. Johnny Simms had fired blindly when he blundered into their groupings.

The last carcass they saw was barely two hundred yards from the one patch of woodland visible from the ship. Cochrane said with some grimness.

"If his eyes had gotten used to the darkness, he might have seen the forest and tried to get into it to get away from those animals."

And if Johnny Simms had not stopped short instantly he reached the woods and presumable safety, he would be utterly lost by now. There could be nothing less hopeful than the situation of a man lost on a strange planet, not knowing in what direction he had blundered on his first starting out. Even nearby, three directions out of four would be wrong. Farther away, the chance of stumbling on the way back to the ship would be nonexistent.

Alicia saw a human footprint on the trodden muck near the last carcass. It pointed toward the wood.

They reached the wood, and search looked hopeless. Then by purest chance they found a place where Johnny had stumbled and fallen headlong. He'd leaped up and fled crazily. For some fifteen yards they could track him by the[Pg 145] trampled dried small growths he'd knocked down in his flight. Then there were no more such growths. All signs of his flight were lost. But they went on.

There were strangenesses everywhere, of which they could realize only a small part because they had been city-dwellers back on Earth. There was one place where trees grew like banyans, and it was utterly impossible to penetrate them. They swerved aside. There was another spot where giant trees like sequoias made a cathedral-like atmosphere, and it seemed an impiety to speak. But Holden reported tonelessly in the walkie-talkie, and assured Jones and Al and Jamison that all so far was well.

They heard a vast commotion of chattering voices, and they hoped that it might be a disturbance of Johnny Simms' causing. But when they reached the place there was dead silence. Only, there were hundreds of tiny nests everywhere. They could not catch a glimpse of a single one of the nests' inhabitants, but they felt that they were peeked at from under leaves and around branches.

Cochrane looked unhappy indeed. In cold blood, he knew that Johnny Simms had left the ship in exactly the sort of resentful bravado with which a spoiled little boy will run away from home to punish his parents. Quite possibly he had intended only to go out into the night and wait near the ship until he was missed. But he'd found himself among the unknown beasts. He'd gone into blind panic. Now he was lost indeed.

But one could not refuse to search for him simply because it was hopeless. Cochrane could not imagine doing any less than continuing to search as long as Alicia had hope. She might hope on indefinitely.

They heard the faint, distant, incisive sound of a shot.

Holden's voice reported it in the walkie-talkie. Cochrane nodded brightly to Alicia and fired a shot in turn. He was relieved. It looked like everything would end in a commonplace fashion. The party from the ship headed toward the source of the other sound.

In half an hour Cochrane was about to fire again. But they heard the hysterical rat-tat-tat of firing. It seemed no nearer, but it could only be Johnny Simms.

Cochrane and Holden fired together for assurance to Johnny. Bell took pictures.

Again they marched toward where the shots had been fired. Again they trudged on for a long time. Seemingly, Johnny had moved away from them as they followed him.[Pg 146] They breasted a hill, and there was a breeze with the smell of water in it, and they saw that here the land sloped very gradually toward the sea, and the sea was in view. It was infinitely blue and it reached toward the most alluring of horizons. Between them and the sea there was only low-growing stuff, brownish and sparse. There was sand underfoot—a curious bluish sand. Only here and there did the dry-seeming vegetation grow higher than their heads.

More shots. Between them and the sea. Cochrane and Holden fired again.

"What the devil's the matter with the fool?" demanded Holden irritably. "He knows we're coming! Why doesn't he stand still or come to meet us?"

Cochrane shrugged. That thought was disturbing him too. They pressed forward, and suddenly Holden exclaimed. "That looks like a man! Two men!"

Cochrane caught the barest glimpse of something running about, far ahead. It looked like naked human flesh. It was the size of a man. It vanished. Another popped into view and darted madly out of sight. They did not see the newcomers.

"He shot something like that, back where we first landed," said Cochrane grimly. "We'd better hurry!"

They did hurry. There was a last flurry of shooting. It was automatic fire. It is not wise to shoot on automatic if one's ammunition is limited, Johnny Simms' firearm chattered furiously for part of a second. It stopped short. He couldn't have fired so short a burst. He was out of bullets.

They ran.

When they drew near him, a hooting set up. Things scattered away. Large things. Birds the size of men. They heard Johnny Simms screaming.

They came panting to the very beach, on which foam-tipped waves broke in absolutely normal grandeur. The sand was commonplace save for a slight bluish tint. Johnny Simms was out on