the Dark Light Years (19 page)

True, it soon became obvious from planetary sweeps that Pestalozzi
harbored
only a few hundred thousand of the large sexipeds, congregating round wallows and artificially created swamps; and these began to show evidence that they resented the old Adam in their Eden. But several specimens were captured and penned aboard the Gansas; Mrs. Warhoon's statue was likewise collected, and a number of artifacts of a miscellaneous nature, and specimens of plant life.

Disappointingly, there were few other lifeforms on the planet; several varieties of bird, six-legged rodents, lizards, armor plated flies, fish and Crustacea in the rivers and oceans, an interesting shrew discovered in the Arctic regions that seemed to be an exception to the rule that small warm-blooded animals could not survive in such conditions.
Little else. Methodically, the Exo Section stocked up the ship.

They were ready to embark on the next leg of their reconnaissance.

Mrs. Warhoon went with the ship's padre, the ship's adjutant, Lattimore. and Quilter (who had just been promoted to a new post as Lattimore's assistant) to say good-bye to Samuel Melmoth, alias Aylmer Ainson, in his stockade.

"I just hope he's going to be all right," Mrs. Warhoon said.

"Stop worrying. He's got enough ammunition here to shoot every living thing on the planet," Lattimore said. He was irritated by his new success with the woman. Ever since the first day of Pestalozzi when she had
suddenly
become chummy and climbed into his bed, Hilary had been weepy and unsettled.

Lattimore reckoned he was easy-going enough where women were concerned, but he like some token that his attentions had a benevolent effect.

He stood by the gate of the stockade, resting on his thigh crutches and feeling vaguely aggrieved with the universe. The others could say farewell to young Ainson. Speaking for himself, he had had enough of the Ainsons.

The stockade was of reinforced wire net. It formed a wall eight feet high about two square acres of ground. A stream ran through the ground.
Some damage had been done in the way of trampling down vegetation and shattering trees by the labor force detailed to erect the stockade, but apart from that the area represented a typical bit of Pestalozzi country.
By the rivulet was a wallow which led to one of the low native houses. Salad and vegetable beds lay by the wallow, and the whole patch was sheltered rather delightfully by the outrageous trees.

Beyond the trees stood the automatic observation post. its radio mast rising gracefully into the air. Next to it was the eight-roomed building designed from prefabricated parts for Ainson's residence.
Two of the rooms constituted his living space; the others contained all the apparatus he would need for recording and interpreting the alien language, an armory, medical and other supplies, the power plant, and the food synthesizer, which could be fed water, soil.
rock, anything, and would turn them into nourishment.

Beyond the works of man, keeping apart and considerably abashed, sat an adult female alien and her off-spring.
Both had all limbs retracted. Good luck to the lot of them. Lattimore thought, and let's get to hell out of here.

"May you find peace here, my son." said the padre, taking Ainson's hand and jogging it up and down between his own. "Remember that in your year of isolation you will always be in God's presence.”

"Good luck in your work, Melmoth," said the adjutant. "We'll be seeing you in a year's time.”

"Adios, Sam, and I'm sorry about that black eye 1 gave you," Quilter said, clapping Ainson on the back.

"Are you sure there's nothing else you need?" asked Mrs. Warhoon.

Responding as adequately as possible to their words, Aylmer turned and
hobbled
into his new home.

They had rigged him ingenious crutches to combat the gravity, but he had yet to get accustomed to them.

He went and lay down on his bed, put his hands behind his head, and listened to them departing.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Gansas, or the various men working in teams on it. found many
marvelous
things. Science had rarely had such a spread.

Before the ship blasted off, the team that worked with Navigator Marcel Gleet finished computations that revealed the extraordinary eccentricity of Pestalozzi's orbit Night was a gay affair on Pestalozzi at this period. When the saffron-
colored
sun sank towards the western horizon, the lengthening shadows split in twain and a bright yellow star was revealed to the south.

This star, though it showed no perceptible disc to the naked eye, shone almost as brightly as a full moon on Earth. And before it in its turn could be carried by the ride of the world below the horizon, another star rose to champion the cause of light This was a welcome white star that burnt till morning, fading from view only when the saffron sun was again strong enough to take over its recurrent duties.

What Gleet, his comrades, and his computers found was this: that the white, yellow, and saffron suns formed a triple system, and revolved about one another.
And once in every so many years, they came close enough to interfere with the orbit of Pestalozzi.
Attracted by the mass of the other two suns, the planet would break loose from its sun's attraction and take up an orbit around one of the rivals. When the same juxtaposition occurred again, many years later, the planet would pass to the third sun, and so eventually back to its first partner. like a flirt in an "Excuse me" dance.

The discovery gave cause for wonder as well as
mathematics
. Among other things, it explained the hardihood of the aliens, for the range of temperatures they would have to withstand, to say nothing of the cataclysmic nature of the upheaval of changing suns, was something that a man could only contemplate with awe.

As Lattimore remarked, this astronomic fact by itself went a long way towards explaining the stolidity of temperament and the imperviousness to pain of the aliens.
They had developed under conditions that would have put a check to terrestrial life almost at its inception.

The Gansas, continuing its reconnaissance, touched down on fourteen other planets in the six-sun cluster. On four of them, man could live comfortably, and on three of those four ideal conditions were found.
These were plainly planets of the greatest potential value to man; they were named (the padre finally swung it on the captain) Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers (since it was con-ceded that nobody would tolerate a planet called Leviticus).

On these planets, and on four others where the climate or the atmosphere was intolerable to man, the aliens were found. Though their numbers were comparatively few, their toughness was effectively established.

Unhappily, there were incidents. On Genesis, a group of wrinkled-hided aliens were allowed aboard the Gansas.
At Mrs., Warhoon's insistence, they were taken to the communications deck, and there she attempted to speak to them, partly with sounds and signs, partly with visipictures which Lattimore and Quilter showed upon a screen.
She imitated alien sounds, and they imitated her voice. The omens were promising, when by ill luck the aliens captive on the deck below made themselves heard.

What was said could only be imagined, but at once the aliens began determinedly to escape. Quilter bravely tried to get in their way. He was knocked down and received a broken arm for his trouble.

The aliens stuck in the elevator and had to be
exterminated
. The disappointment at this misadventure was general.

On one of the rougher planets, where it was generally conceded that man would have a thin time surviving, something worse happened.

This planet was named Gansas. It was the last to be visited, and one might have fancied that word of man's coming had preceded him.

In the remote and rocky plateau of the northern hemi-sphere lived a savage lifeform informally christened a chitin bear. It resembled a small polar bear, but was clad in a pelt of alternating bands of chitin and long white hair. It was fleet of foot, sharp of fang, and ill-natured. Though its natural prey was the small horned whale of the temperate Gansas seas, it was partial to the sexiped aliens that had invaded its home.

No doubt this opposition, not encountered elsewhere in the family of planets, had encouraged a little pugnacity in the aliens.
At all events, the first group of terrestrials to fire on a band of investigating aliens was met with answering fire.
The Gansas, all unprepared, found itself under bombardment from a fortified position set in a cliff.

A direct hit was sustained in one of the open personnel hatches before the enemy was obliterated.

It took five days of all-watch shift work on the part of Engineering to repair the obvious damage, and then a further week of patient and laborious inspection and patching to ensure that all the plates of the hull were un-harmed by the shock.

By the end of that time. Mrs. Warhoon had cheered enormously.

"Whatever it was I thought I saw when I ran into that statue must have been a kind of brainstorm." she said, cuddling against Bryant Lattimore's knees. "You know, I was all overwrought that day. I really felt - oh, I had the queerest feeling that man had taken the wrong turning somewhere along the evolutionary line or something.”

"Never disregard your first impressions." Lattimore advised her. He could afford a joke, now that she bad adjusted.

"Once we get these aliens back to Earth and teach them English. I won't feel so bad. I take my profession too seriously; it's a sign of immaturity, I suppose. But we shall have so much knowledge to exchange.... Oh, Bryant... I talk too much, don't I?”

"I love to hear you.”

"It's so
cozy
here on this rug." Luxuriously she felt the rug, luxuriously let her finger-tips trail over the alternating bands of fur and chitin.

Lattimore watched her with a detached greed. She had pretty and
dexterous
fingers. He said, "We hit vacuum to-morrow for Earth. I don't wish to lose sight of you when we get back, Hilary. Do you mind telling me just how emotionally involved you are with Sir Mihaly Pasztor?'“

She looked uncomfortable; perhaps she was just trying to blush; but before she could reply, there was a rap on Lattimore's door and Quilter entered, carrying
Lattimore's
0.5 rifle. He nodded in friendly fashion as Mrs. Warhoon rose from the chitin rug and adjusted her shoulder strap.

"She's all cleaned and ready for the next spot of action." he said, laying the rifle on the table, though his gaze rested on Mrs. Warhoon. "Talking of action, there's going to be trouble down on the men's decks unless something's done soon.”

"What sort of trouble?" Lattimore asked lazily, putting on his spectacles and offering them both mescahales.

"Same sort of trouble we had on the Mariestopes" Quilter said. "All these rhinomen we got aboard, they make quite a lot of droppings. The men are refusing to clear it away without dirty pay. Guess what really annoyed them is that the food synthesizer on Deck H broke down this morning and they were given real old-fashioned meat-of-animal instead. The slobs of cooks thought nobody would notice, but several of the guys are in Sick Bay right now with cholesterol poisoning.”

"What a way to run a ship!" Lattimore exclaimed, not displeased, for the more he heard of other people's deficiencies, the more highly he valued his own efficiency. Mrs. Warhoon. on the other hand, was displeased, chiefly because she resented the easy comradeship that had sprung up between Bryant and Quilter.

"Meat-of-animal is not poisonous," she said. "In the backward parts of Earth it is still eaten regularly.”

She had not quite enough courage to say how much she had enjoyed it herself, dining in seclusion with Pasztor at his flat.

"Yeah, only we happen to be civilized, not backward," Quilter said, drawing the mescahale dust into his lungs. "That's why the guys are going on strike against having to swab up these droppings.”

Mrs. Warhoon saw the sardonic grins on their faces; the same expression sat with some regularity on Mr. War-boon's face. Like a revelation, she saw how much she hated this simian male superiority; and the memory of that gentle and superb statue on Pestalozzl helped her to hate it.

"You're all the same, you men!" she cried. "You're all cut off from the basic realities of life in a way a woman could never be. For good or ill, we're a species of flesh-eaters, and always have been, Meat-of-animal is not poisonous - if you're sick after eating it, it's your mind that has poisoned you.
And all this fear of excreta - can't you see that to these poor unfortunate beings we have captured, their waste products are a sign of fertility, that they ceremonially offer their rejected mineral salts back to their earth when they have done with them?
My God, what's so repulsive about that? Is it any more repulsive than the terrestrial religions where living human sacrifices are offered up to various supposed deities? The trouble with our culture is that it is based on a fear of dirt, of poison, of excreta. You think excreta's bad, but it's the fear of it that's bad!”

She threw her mescahale down and ground it under-foot, as if to reject all artificiality. Lattimore raised an eyebrow at her.