News From Elsewhere (6 page)

Captain Lukas stood up and grabbed Duluth unceremoniously by the collar. “Give me a hand with the body, Tony.” He turned to Alsdorf. “Don’t be softhearted, Kurt. Tumble me out if anything unusual crops up.” With Chirico’s help, he maneuvered the still unconscious Duluth toward the doorway.

Three minutes later Duluth was installed in his bunk, and Mike Lukas headed for his own cubicle. Curiously, he had lost a great deal of his tiredness. As he settled himself luxuriously on his narrow mattress, he reached for a book and a packet of cigarettes.

Chirico watched him, amazed. “You’ve been awake all this time, Mike, and you want to read? You’re crazy. Why don’t you take a nice pill?”

“On your way, nursie. I’m just relaxing. I’ll doze off in a while.”

The small Italian made an economical gesture signifying a verdict of insanity and returned to the mess deck. He found Alsdorf intently studying a pocket slide rule and a scrap of paper on which were a rough pencil sketch of the hemisphere of Fomalhaut Three and a sequence of calculations.

“I’m beginning to think Mike takes his Buddhism seriously,” remarked Chirico, helping himself to another sandwich.

Alsdorf looked up and raised an eyebrow. The Italian took a large bite of his sandwich, then continued. “He’s been awake for fifty-six hours, and now he’s busy reading 
The Way to Nirvana.
. *. Seems to me he’s halfway there already.”

The geophysicist registered a superior smile. “Overtired, Tony. . . . But I have noticed that most of these professional space pilots affect some sort of religion. A convenient safety valve for irrational fears.”

Tony thought it over for a few seconds. “In the last analysis, I’m a Catholic,” he said finally. “We all need something.”

Alsdorf picked up his slide rule. “Not all of us, Tony. I’m with the mechanists. The universe is clockwork, all cause and effect. Frankly, I don’t know how you people ever reconcile superstition with science. You and Mike must be intellectual schizoids.”

Chirico smiled. “You’re a computer, Kurt. Computers don’t go to heaven.”

The geophysicist stood up. “At the moment, I’m more interested in going to the navigation deck. And so are you, you taboo-ridden primitive. There’s work to be done. The sooner it’s done, the sooner we climb a little higher in Trans-Solar Chemicals.”

Chirico said suddenly, “Kurt, what do you want out of life?”

“Power,” said Alsdorf calmly. “And you?”

“I don’t know. I’m still thinking about it. Maybe I just want a sense of direction—to do something that’s worth doing.”

“You want power,” said Alsdorf confidently. “Everybody does. It’s the life force—the mainspring of dynamic evolution.

The Italian beamed. “O.K., Mr. Mephistopheles, let’s go and be dynamic about the landing site.”

They went out into the alleyway and along to the navigation deck, the magnetic bars of their shoes clanking eerily through the silent ship.

The survey, conducted in Olympian remoteness three hundred and fifty kilometers over Fomalhaut Three, proceeded with almost startling efficiency. Visibility was excellent, and it was the first time in Kurt Alsdorf’s experience that none of the delicate probing instruments broke down at the critical moment. Presently a stereo-
radar, vegetometer, and other probe instruments united their findings to give a clear and detailed assessment of conditions in the Tropical Zone. It was even possible to do some useful work with the manual telescope.

After fourteen hours, Chirico looked up from his con-tourgrams and said, “This place is better than Earth, by damn!”

Even die impassive Alsdorf could not screen his excitement. “Tony, it’s the best yet. . . . Near-terrestrial temperatures, a one-to-six. oxygen ratio, a four-thousand-kilometer vegetation belt—why, with these conditions we can—”

“If I were you, I’d sit on the hysteria long enough to find out whether anyone is already squatting on Fomalhaut Three.”

The two men turned around to find that Lukas had quietly appeared through the companion hatch.

Alsdorf grinned sheepishly. “Hello, Mike. Still thinking in terms of supermen?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

Chirico said, “By all the laws, you should still be unconscious.”

Lukas walked over to the chart bench and began to inspect the fruits of research. “My, my,” he said dryly. “Just like Earth before we remodeled it with the hydrogen bombs. Now we’ll have to start all over again.”

Alsdorf waved a large telephoto print in front of his face. “Here’s the landing area—as from an altitude of three thousand meters. What do you
think
of that?”

“Looks fine.”

“It’s got everything, Mike,” said Chirico eagerly. “It’s the classic survey block—a hundred square kilometers of desert, foothills, river, and seaboard. Everything from dense vegetation to bare rockface. Think of the ecology.”

“Ton think of it. I’ll concentrate on getting us down there. . . . When will you be ready to move, Kurt?”

The geophysicist put the telephoto print down on the bench and watched Lukas speculatively. “What’s the matter, Mike? Is this trip going sour on you? Maybe you need a tonic.”

“Don’t we all?” Lukas gazed moodily through the observation panel. “Me, you, and
Homo sapiens.
We need 
a new perspective, a revitalized set of values. Space travel arrived when we were getting mentally and emotionally flabby. We reacted to it as to a shot in the arm. But so far, all we’ve done is get nowhere—a lot quicker. . . . We’ve found seventeen new planets, and we haven’t learned a thing. We just grab what we want and push on to the next Garden of Eden. We’re a bunch of traveling snakes in the grass.”

Alsdorf shrugged. “You mix a nice line in metaphors, but they don’t mean anything.”

“There’s one consolation,” said Chirico with a grin. “None of us space snakes has come across any Adam and Eve setup yet.”

“No,” said Lukas somberly. “But we will—and then, God help ’em.”

Alsdorf climbed up into the astrodome and began to readjust the manual telescope. “I’ll have the rest of the data ready in about six hours, Mike—if you can drop the Garden of Eden motif long enough to plan the touchdown.” His tone was heavy with sarcasm.

“On with the good work,” said Lukas. “I’ll go and kick Duluth out of bod and get him to check the volatility tubes.”

He disappeared down the companion ladder.

“Do you think Mike is off his trolley?” asked Chirico thoughtfully.

Alsdorf squinted down the telescope. “Not yet. He’s just got an ingrowing conscience. Space pilots don’t last very long, you know.”

The Italian began to reset the stereo-radar. “What the hell,” he said softly. “We’re all expendable.”

Nine hours later, the
Henri Poincare
swung slowly out of orbit into the first vast circuit of an oblique descent spiral. After fifteen minutes it hit the outer fringes of the stratosphere, and the four occupants, each strapped in a contour berth on the navigation deck, prepared to endure an agonizing switchback as the ship reduced its velocity by frictional impact on the thin layers of air.

Lukas, relieved of all responsibility by the automatic decisions of the electronic touch-down phot, managed to achieve some degree of indifference to the tremendous pressures set up by deceleration. Long experience had 
enabled him to develop a kind of mental block against the worst discomforts of a bouncy touch-down maneuver. His head lay on the pillow facing an observation panel, and during the odd moments when the G forces eased sufficiently to let him use his eyes, he could see an expanding arc of Fomalhaut Three swinging crazily against the jet backcloth of space.

In spite of having a respectable number of voyages behind him, Duluth always took the touch-down drop badly. He would strain instinctively and uselessly against the relentless forces that crushed him down. As the
Henri Poincare
ploughed jerkily into the thicker layers of air, Duluth felt the deadly ache of resistance tearing at his muscles, and impotently muttered a broken stream of obscenities.

Alsdorf and Chirico, both comparative novices of the touch-down ordeal, had taken the sensible precaution of putting themselves completely to sleep. But even though they were unconscious, their bodies sagged and contorted as if they were twitched by invisible strings.

Presently the ship hit the atmosphere proper. This time the pressure was unendurable. Lukas and Duluth blacked out simultaneously. When they next opened their eyes, the pain was already fading from their bodies. They became conscious of a luxurious feeling of peace. The
Henri Poincare
had made a perfect touch-down.

Duluth shook his head in momentary bewilderment. “I almost swallowed my bloody tongue,” he remarked hoarsely. He looked around and saw that Lukas was already unbuckling his straps. Alsdorf and Chirico had stopped twitching, but they were still unconscious. “Look at the sleeping beauties,” added Duluth, feeling better. “How long does that lullaby stuff last?”

Lukas stood up and stretched. He winced suddenly as his back muscles, still unaccustomed to the release of tension, gave a sharp twinge.

“They should be with us inside half an hour. . . . Come on, Joe, let’s take a look around the next stamping ground of the Trans-Solar Chemicals.”

He scrambled up into the observation dome and took his first close look at the new planet.

“What’s it like?” called Duluth as he struggled impatiently with the network of safety belts. “Anything startling?”

Lukas was amazed. “Holy smoke! Apart from the colors, this could be South America or the African coast!” His voice shook with excitement.

“Jesus,” said Duluth. “Maybe we took the wrong turning and blasted ourselves back into the System.” He hurried up the short ladder and stood by Lukas’s side.

From their observation point in the nose of the ship, more than seventy meters above ground level, they commanded a panoramic view of the landing area.

The
Henri Poincare
had come to rest on a broad sand belt. About five kilometers to the planetary east, the calm emerald-green ocean lay flat as a mirror under a misty, somewhat yellowish sky. On the opposite side of the ship, a kilometer or so to the west, a bright blue-green forest line rose abruptly from the red sand. Nothing moved anywhere, but far away on the sand belt was a colony of dark spots that proved, on inspection by the telescope, to be a flock of resting birds—something like terrestrial gulls.

High above, the noon sun contrived to filter its oddly relaxing light through the even layer of cloud. The star, Fomalhaut, was a thousand million miles away, but its intense radiation bathed the third planet with sunlight almost equal to the tropical brilliance found on Earth.

“Well, what do you know,” exclaimed Duluth after several seconds of fascinated silence. “Isn’t that something! What’s the atmosphere like, anybody find out?”

“Tony says we can use it, but better be careful than sorry. . . . How about letting the ladder down while Kurt and Tony are finishing their beauty sleep?”

“I’m on my way,” said Duluth. “Think I’ll jump into a pressure suit and stroll around.”

“You’ll be all right with a respiration mask,” Lukas assured him. “The pressure is only slightly under one atmos.”

Duluth climbed down from the observation dome, kissed his fingers archly to the unconscious scientists, and disappeared down the companion ladder. Presently Lukas heard him manipulating the airlock.

Lukas stayed in the dome for a while, gazing around 
him. The vague uneasiness he had felt about Fomalhaut Three intensified. He was not normally a superstitious man, or given to premonitions, and his uneasiness was hard to analyze.

As a veteran of three other planetary investigations, he was mentally prepared for any reasonable physical hazards that might be expected. But although Lukas sensed some kind of threat hidden in the almost conventional landscape of Fomalhaut Three, he felt oddly confident that it wasn’t physical.

As his eyes strayed idly over the forest line, he thought he detected some kind of movement; but by the time he got the telescope focused, there was nothing to be seen. Probably, he told himself, it was some trick of the peculiar yellow light.

Somnolent groans from down below indicated that Alsdorf and Chirico were returning to consciousness. He went down the ladder to help them with their straps.

“Devil take it,” grumbled the small Italian, blinking painfully, “I have the mother and father of all hangovers.”

“Swallow a pill. You’ll feel better.”

With a hand on his forehead, Alsdorf gently worked his head up and down. He seemed surprised when it didn’t fall off. “What’s the situation?” he asked.

Lukas jerked a thumb toward the observation dome. “Too good to be true. See for yourself.”

“Any signs of life?”

“Birds, I think. . . . But too far away for detail to show up.”

“Well, well. That’s an excellent start. Maybe we’ll find something better than a three-legged pseudo-wolf, eh, Mike?”

“Maybe.”

The two scientists went up into the observation dome. Lukas watched them, then said, “Joe’s already stretching his legs. Can you see him?”