Planet of Dread (6 page)

Moran made good their omission. He was back in the cargo-hold when Brawn arrived. Burleigh came next. Then Harper again. Hallet came last of the four men of the yacht. They did not make a continuous chain of men moving back and forth between the two ships. Three men came, and loaded up, and went back. Then three men came again, one by one. There could never be a moment when a single refuge-hole in the soil could be needed by two men at the same time.

Within the first hour of work at transferring treasure, the bolt-holes came into use. Carol called anxiously that a gigantic beetle neared the ship and would apparently pass between it and the yacht. At the time, Brawn and Harper were moving from the
Malabar
toward the
Nadine
, and Hallet was about to leave the wreck’s lock.

He watched with wide eyes. The beetle was truly a monster, the size of a hippopotamus as pictured in the culture-books about early human history. Its jaws, pronged like antlers, projected two yards before its huge, faceted eyes. It seemed to drag itself effortfully over the elastic surface of the ground. It passed a place where red, foleated fungus grew in a fantastic absence of pattern on the surface of the ground. It went through a streak of dusty-blue mould, which it stirred into a cloud of spores as it passed. It crawled on and on. Harper popped down into the nearest bolt-hole, his torch held ready. Brawn stood beside another refuge, sixty feet away.

Carol’s voice came to their helmet-phones, anxious and exact. Hallet, in the lock-door, heard her tell Harper that the beetle would pass very close to him and to stay still. It moved on and on. It would be very close indeed. Carol gasped in horror.

The monster passed partly over the hole in which Harper crouched. One of its clawed feet slipped down into the opening. But the beetle went on, unaware of Harper. It crawled toward the encircling mist upon some errand of its own. It was mindless. It was like a complex and highly decorated piece of machinery which did what it was wound up to do, and nothing else.

Harper came out of the bolt-hole when Carol, her voice shaky with relief, told him it was safe. He went doggedly on to the
Nadine
, carrying his bag of purple crystals. Brawn followed, moodily.

Hallet, with a singularly exultant look upon his face, ventured out of the airlock and moved across the fungoid world. He carried a king’s ransom to be added to the riches already transferred to the yacht.

Moving the bessendium was a tedious task. One plastic box in the cargo-hold held a quantity of crystals that three men took two trips each to carry. In mid-morning the bag in Hallet’s hand seemed to slip just when Moran completed filling it. It toppled and spilled half its contents on the cargo-hold floor, which had been a sidewall. He began painstakingly to gather up the precious stuff and get it back in the bag. The others went on to the
Nadine
. Hallet turned off his helmet-phone and gestured to Moran to remove his helmet. Moran, his eyebrows raised, obeyed the suggestion.

“How anxious,” asked Hallet abruptly, gathering up the dropped crystals, “how anxious are you to be left behind here?”

“I’m not anxious at all,” said Moran.

“Would you like to make a deal to go along when the
Nadine
lifts?—
If
there’s a way to get past the space-port police?”

“Probably,” said Moran. “Certainly! But there’s no way to do it.”

“There is,” said Hallet. “I know it. Is it a deal?”

“What is the deal?”

“You do as I say,” said Hallet significantly. “Just as I say! Then ...”

The lock-door opened, some distance away. Hallet stood up and said in a commanding tone;

“Keep your mouth shut. I’ll tell you what to do and when.”

He put on his helmet and turned on the phone once more. He went toward the lock-door. Moran heard him exchange words with Harper and Brawn, back with empty bags to fill with crystals worth many times the price of diamonds. But diamonds were made in half-ton lots, nowadays.

Moran followed their bags. He was frowning. As Harper was about to follow Brawn, Moran almost duplicated Hallet’s gestures to have him remove his helmet.

“I want Burleigh to come next trip,” he told Harper, “and make some excuse to stay behind a moment and talk to me without the helmet-phones picking up everything I say to him. Understand?”

Harper nodded. But Burleigh did not come on the next trip. It was not until near midday that he came to carry a load of treasure to the yacht.

When he did come, though, he took off his helmet and turned off the phone without the need of a suggestion.

“I’ve been arranging storage for this stuff,” he said. “I’ve opened plates between the hulls to dump it in. I’ve told Carol, too, that we’ve got to do a perfect job of cleaning up. There must be no stray crystals on the floor.”

“Better search the bunks, too,” said Moran drily, “so nobody will put aside a particularly pretty crystal to gloat over. Listen!”

He told Burleigh exactly what Hallet had said and what he’d answered. Burleigh looked acutely unhappy.

“Hallet isn’t dedicated like the rest of us were,” he said distressedly. “We brought him along partly out of fear that if he were captured he’d break down and reveal what he knows of the Underground we led, and much of which we had to leave behind. But I’ll be able to finance a real revolt, now!”

Moran regarded him with irony. Burleigh was a capable man and a conscientious one. It would be very easy to trust him, and it is all-important to an Underground that its leaders be trusted. But it is also important that they be capable of flint-like hardness on occasion. To Moran, it seemed that Burleigh had not quite the adamantine resolution required for leadership in a conspiracy which was to become a successful revolt. He was—and to Moran it seemed regrettable—capable of the virtue of charity.

“I’ve told you,” he said evenly. “Maybe you’ll think it’s a scheme on my part to get Hallet dumped and myself elected to take his identity. But what happens from now on is your business. Beginning this moment, I’m taking care of my own skin. I’ve gotten reconciled to the idea of dying, but I’d hate for it not to do anybody any good.”

“Carol,” said Burleigh unhappily, “is much distressed.”

“That’s very kind,” said Moran sarcastically. “Now take your bag of stuff and get going.”

Burleigh obeyed. Moran went back to the business of breaking open the strong plastic boxes of bessendium so their contents could be carried in forty-pound lots to the
Nadine
.

Thinking of Carol, he did not like the way things seemed to be going. Since the discovery of the bessendium, Hallet had been developing ideas. They did not look as if they meant good fortune for Moran without corresponding bad fortune for the others. Obviously, Moran couldn’t be hidden on the
Nadine
during the space-port sterilization of the ship which prevented plagues from being carried from world to world. Hallet could have no reason to promise such a thing. Before landing here, he’d urged that Moran simply be dumped out the airlock. This proposal to save his life....

Moran considered the situation grimly while the business of ferrying treasure to the yacht went on almost monotonously. It had stopped once during the forenoon while a giant beetle went by. Later, it stopped again because a gigantic flying thing hovered overhead. Carol did not know what it was, but its bulging abdomen ended in an organ which appeared to be a sting. It was plainly hunting. There was no point in fighting it. Presently it went away, and just before it disappeared in the circular wall of mist it dived headlong to the ground. A little later it rose slowly into the air, carrying something almost as large as itself. It went away into the mist.

Again, once a green-and-yellow caterpillar marched past upon some mysterious enterprise. It was covered with incredibly long fur, and it moved with an undulating motion of all its segments, one after another. It seemed well over ten yards in length, and its body appeared impossibly massive. But a large part of the bulk would be the two-foot-long or longer hairs which stuck out stiffly in all directions. It, too, went away.

But continually and constantly there was a bedlam of noises. From underneath the yielding skin of the yeast-ground, there came clickings. Sometimes there were quiverings of the surface as if it were alive, but they would be the activities of ten and twelve-inch beetles who lived in subterranean tunnels in it. There were those preposterous noises like someone rattling a stick along a picket fence—only deafening—and there were baritone chirpings and deep bass boomings from somewhere far away. Moran guessed that the last might be frogs, but if so they were vastly larger than men.

Shortly after what was probably midday, Moran brushed off his hands. The bessendium part of the cargo of the wrecked
Malabar
had been salvaged. It was hidden between the twin hulls of the yacht. Moran had, quite privately, attended to a matter the wreck’s long-dead crew should have done when they left it. Now, in theory, the
Nadine
should lift off and take Moran to some hastily scouted spot not too far from the ice-cap. It should leave him there with what food could be spared, and the kit of seeds that might feed him after it was gone, and weapons that might but probably wouldn’t enable him to defend himself, and with a radio-beacon to try to have hope in. Then,—that would be that.

“Calling,” said Moran sardonically into his helmet-phone. “Everything’s cleaned up here. What next?”

“
You can come along
,” said Hallet’s voice from the ship. It was shivery. It was gleeful. “
Just in time for lunch!
“

Moran went along the disoriented passages of the
Malabar
to the lock. He turned off the beacon that had tried uselessly during six human generations to call for help for men now long dead. He went out the lock and closed it behind him. It was not likely that this planet would ever become a home for men. If there were some strangeness in its constitution that made the descendents of insects placed upon it grow to be giants, humans would not want to settle on it. And there were plenty of much more suitable worlds. So the wrecked space-ship would lie here, under deeper and ever deeper accumulations of the noisesome stuff that passed for soil. Perhaps millenia from now, the sturdy, resistant metal of the hull would finally rust through, and then—nothing. No man in all time to come would ever see the
Malabar
again.

Shrugging, he went toward the
Nadine
. He walked through bedlam. He could see a quarter-mile in one direction, and a quarter-mile in another. He could not see more than a little distance upward. The
Nadine
had landed upon a world with tens of millions of square miles of surface, and nobody had moved more than a hundred yards from its landing-place, and now it would leave and all wonders and all horrors outside this one quarter of a square mile would remain unknown....

He went to the airlock and shed his suit. He opened the inner door. Hallet waited for him.

“Everybody’s at lunch,” he said. “We’ll join them.”

Moran eyed him sharply. Hallet grinned widely.

“We’re going to take off to find a place for you as soon as we’ve eaten,” he said.

There was mockery in the tone. It occurred abruptly to Moran that Hallet was the kind of person who might, to be sure, plan complete disloyalty to his companions for his own benefit. But he might also enjoy betrayal for its own sake. He might, for example, find it amusing to make a man under sentence of death or marooning believe that he would escape, so Hallet could have the purely malicious pleasure of disappointing him. He might look for Moran to break when he learned that he was to die here after all.

Moran clamped his lips tightly. Carol would be better off if that was the answer. He went toward the yacht’s mess-room. Hallet followed close behind. Moran pushed the door aside and entered. Burleigh and Harper and Brawn looked at him, Carol raised her eyes. They glistened with tears.

Hallet said gleefully;

“Here goes!”

Standing behind Moran, he thrust a hand-blaster past Moran’s body and pulled the trigger. He held the trigger down for continuous fire as he traversed the weapon to wipe out everybody but Moran and himself.

Moran responded instantly. His
hands flew to Hallet’s throat, blind fury making him unaware of any thought but a frantic lust to kill. It was very strange that Moran somehow noticed Hallet’s hand insanely pulling the trigger of the blast-pistol over and over and over without result. He remembered it later. Perhaps he shared Hallet’s blank disbelief that one could pull the trigger of a blaster and have nothing at all happen in consequence. But nothing did happen, and suddenly he dropped the weapon and clawed desperately at Moran’s fingers about his throat. But that was too late.

There was singularly little disturbance at the luncheon-table. The whole event was climax and anticlimax together. Hallet’s intention was so appallingly murderous and his action so shockingly futile that the four who were to have been his victims tended to stare blankly while Moran throttled him.

Burleigh seemed to recover first. He tried to pull Moran’s hands loose from Hallet’s throat. Lacking success he called to the others. “Harper! Brawn! Help me!”

It took all three of them to release Hallet. Then Moran stood panting, shaking, his eyes like flames.

“He—he—” panted Moran. “He was going to kill Carol!”

“I know,” said Burleigh, distressedly. “He was going to kill all of us. You gave me an inkling, so while he was packing bessendium between the hulls, and had his space-suit hanging in the airlock, I doctored the blaster in the space-suit pocket.” He looked down at Hallet. “Is he still alive?”

Brawn bent over Hallet. He nodded.

“Put him in the airlock for the time being,” said Burleigh. “And lock it. When he comes to, we’ll decide what to do.”

Harper and Brawn took Hallet by the arms and hauled him along the passageway. The inner door of the lock clanged shut on him.

“We’ll give him a hearing, of course,” said Burleigh conscientiously. “But we should survey the situation first.”