Sand Doom by Murray Leinster (read full novel .txt) 📖

Out a filter-window, he saw that men with skins as dark as Dr. Chuka’s were at work on a ground car. They were equipping it with a sunshade and curious shields like wings. Somebody pushed a sort of caterwheel handtruck toward it. They put big, heavy tanks into its cargo space. Dr. Chuka had disappeared, but Aletha was back at work making notes from the loose-leaf volume on the desk.

“May I ask,” asked Bordman with some irony, “what your work happens to be just now?”

She looked up.

“I thought you knew,” she said in surprise. “I’m here for the Amerind Historical Society. I can certify coups. I’m taking coup-records for the Society. They’ll go in the record-cache Ralph and Dr. Chuka are arranging, so no matter what happens to the colony, the record of the coups won’t be lost.”

“Coups?” demanded Bordman. He knew that Amerinds painted feathers on the key-posts of steel structures they’d built, and he knew that the posting of such “coup-marks” was a cherished privilege and undoubtedly a survival or revival of some American Indian tradition [20] back on Earth. But he did not know what they meant.

“Coups,” repeated Aletha matter-of-factly. “Ralph wears three eagle-feathers. You saw them. He has three coups. Pinions, too! He built the landing grids on Norlath and—Oh, you don’t know!”

“I don’t,” admitted Bordman, his temper not of the best because of what seemed unnecessary condescensions on Xosa II.

Aletha looked surprised.

“In the old days,” she explained, “back on Earth, if a man scalped an enemy, he counted coup. The first to strike an enemy in a battle counted coup, too—a lesser one. Nowadays a man counts coups for different things, but Ralph’s three eagle-feathers mean he’s entitled to as much respect as a warrior in the old days who, three separate times, had killed and scalped an enemy warrior in the middle of his own camp. And he is, too!”

Bordman grunted.

“Barbarous, I’d say!”

“If you like,” said Aletha. “But it’s something to be proud of—and one doesn’t count coup for making a lot of money!” Then she paused and said curtly: “The word ‘snobbish’ fits it better than ‘barbarous.’ We are snobs! But when the head of a clan stands up in Council in the Big Tepee on Algonka, representing his clan, and men have to carry the ends of the feather headdress with all the coups the members of his clan have earned—why one is proud to belong to that clan!” She added defiantly, “Even watching it on a vision-screen!”

Dr. Chuka opened the outer door. Blinding light poured in. He did not enter—and his body glistened with sweat.

“Ready for you, Mr. Bordman!”

Bordman adjusted his goggles and turned on the motors of his heat-suit. He went out the door.

The heat and light outside were oppressive. He darkened the goggles again and made his way heavily to the waiting, now-shaded ground car. He noted that there were other changes beside the sunshade. The cover-deck of the cargo space was gone, and there were cylindrical riding seats like saddles in the back. The odd lower shields reached out sidewise from the body, barely above the caterwheels. He could not make out their purpose and irritably failed to ask.

“All ready,” said Redfeather coldly. “Dr. Chuka’s coming with us. If you’ll get in here, please——”

Bordman climbed awkwardly into the boxlike back of the car. He bestrode one of the cylindrical arrangements. With a saddle on it, it would undoubtedly have been a comfortable way to cover impossibly bad terrain in a mechanical carrier. He waited. About him there were the squatty hulls of the space-barges which had been towed here by a colony ship, each one once equipped with rockets for landing. Emptied of their cargoes, they had been huddled together into the three separate, [21] adjoining communities. There were separate living quarters and mess halls and recreation rooms for each, and any colonist lived in the community of his choice and shifted at pleasure, or visited, or remained solitary. For mental health a man has to be assured of his free will, and over-regimentation is deadly in any society. With men psychologically suited to colonize, it is fatal.

Above—but at a distance, now—there was a monstrous scarp of mountains, colored in glaring and unnatural tints. Immediately about there was raw rock. But it was peculiarly smooth, as if sand grains had rubbed over it for uncountable aeons and carefully worn away every trace of unevenness. Half a mile to the left, dunes began and went away to the horizon. The nearer ones were small, but they gained in size with distance from the mountains—which evidently affected the surface-winds hereabouts—and the edge of seeing was visibly not a straight line. The dunes yonder must be gigantic. But of course on a world the size of ancient Earth, and which was waterless save for snow-patches at its poles, the size to which sand dunes could grow had no limit. The surface of Xosa II was a sea of sand, on which islands and small continents of wind-swept rock were merely minor features.

Dr. Chuka adjusted a small metal object in his hand. It had a tube dangling from it. He climbed into the cargo space and fastened it to one of the two tanks previously loaded.

“For you,” he told Bordman. “Those tanks are full of compressed air at rather high pressure—a couple of thousand pounds. Here’s a reduction-valve with an adiabatic expansion feature, to supply extra air to your heat-suit. It will be pretty cold, expanding from so high a pressure. Bring down the temperature a little more.”

Bordman again felt humiliated. Chuka and Redfeather, because of their races, were able to move about nine-tenths naked in the open air on this planet, and they thrived. But he needed a special refrigerated costume to endure the heat. More, they provided him with sunshades and refrigerated air that they did not need for themselves. They were thoughtful of him. He was as much out of his element, where they fitted perfectly, as he would have been making a degree-of-completion survey on an underwater project. He had to wear what was practically a diving suit and use a special air supply to survive!

He choked down the irritation his own inadequacy produced.

“I suppose we can go now,” he said as coldly as he could.

Aletha’s cousin mounted the control-saddle—though it was no more than a blanket—and Dr. Chuka mounted beside Bordman. The ground car