Jamison declaimed, wearing a throat-mike as Bell zestfully panned his
camera and the ship swung down. It was an impressive broadcast. The
rockets roared. With the coming of air about the ship, they no longer
made a mere rumbling. They created a tumult which was like the growl of
thunder if one were in the midst of the thunder-cloud. It was a numbing
noise. It was almost a paralyzing noise. But Jamison talked with
professional smoothness.
"This planet," he orated, while pictures from Bell's camera went direct
to the transmitter below, "this planet is the first world other than
Earth on which a human ship has landed. It is paradoxic that before men
have walked on Mars' red iron-oxide plains and breathed its thin cold
air, or fought for life in the formaldehyde gales of Venus, that they
should look upon a world which welcomes them from illimitable
remoteness. Here we descend, and all mankind can watch our descent upon
a world whose vegetation is green; whose glaciers prove that there is
air and water in plenty, whose very smoking volcanoes assure us of its
close kinship to Earth!"
He lifted the mike away from his throat and framed words with his lips.
"_Am I still on?_" Cochrane nodded. Cochrane wore headphones carrying
what the communicator carried, as this broadcast went through an angled
Dabney field relay system back to Lunar City and then to Earth. He spoke
close to Jamison's ear.
"Go ahead! If your voice fades, it will be the best possible sign-off.
Suspense. Good television!"
Jamison let the throat-mike back against his skin. The roaring of the
rockets would affect it only as his throat vibrated from the sound. It
would register, even so.
"I see," said Jamison above the rocket-thunder, "forests of giant trees
like the sequoias of Mother Earth. I see rushing rivers, foaming along
their rocky beds, taking their rise in glaciers. We are still too high
to look for living creatures, but we descend swiftly. Now we are level
with the highest of the mountains. Now we descend below their smoking
tops. Under us there is a vast valley, miles wide, leagues long. Here a
city could be built. Over it looms a gigantic mountain-spur, capped with
green. One would expect a castle to be built there."
He raised his eyebrows at Cochrane. They were well in atmosphere, now,
and it had been an obvious defect--condition--necessity of the Dabney
field that both of its plates should be in a vacuum. One was certainly
in air now. But Cochrane made that gesture which in television
production-practice informs the actors that time to cutting is measured
in tens of seconds, and he held up two fingers. Twenty seconds.
"We gaze, and you gaze with us," said Jamison, "upon a world that future
generations will come to know as home--the site of the first human
colony among the stars!"
Cochrane began to beat time. Ten, nine, eight--.
"We are about to land," Jamison declaimed. "We do not know what we shall
find--What's that?" He paused dramatically. "A living creature?--A
living creature sighted down below! We sign off now--from the stars!"
The ending had been perfectly timed. Allowing for a three-second
interval for the broadcast to reach the moon, and just about two more
for it to be relayed to Earth, his final word, "Stars!" had been uttered
at the precise instant to allow a four-minute commercial by Intercity
Credit, in the United States, by Citroen in Europe, by Fabricanos Unidos
in South and Central America, and Near East Oil along the Mediterranean.
At the end of that four minutes it would be time for station
identification and a time-signal, and the divers eight-second flashes
before other programs came on the air.
The rockets roared and thundered. The ship went down and down. Jamison
said:
"I thought we'd be cut off when we hit air!"
"That's what Jones thought," Cochrane assured him. He bellowed above the
outside tumult, "Bell! See anything alive down below?"
Bell shook his head. He stayed at the camera aimed out a blister-port,
storing up film-tape for later use. There was the feel of gravitation,
now. Actually, it was the fact that the ship slowed swiftly in its
descent.
Cochrane went to a port. The ship continued its descent.
"Living creature? Where?"
Jamison shrugged. He had used it as a sign-off line. An extrapolation
from the fact that there was vegetation below. He looked somehow
distastefully out the port at a swiftly rising green ground below. He
was a city man. He had literally never before seen what looked like
habitable territory of such vast extent, with no houses on it. In a
valley easily ten miles long and two wide, there was not a square inch
of concrete or of glass. There was not a man made object in view. The
sky was blue and there were clouds, but to Jamison the sight of
vegetation implied rooftops. There ought to be parapets where roofs
ended to let light down to windows and streets below. He had never
before seen grass save on elevated recreation-areas, nor bushes not
arranged as landscaping, and certainly not trees other than the
domesticated growths which can grow on the tops of buildings. To Jamison
this was desolation. On the moon, absence of structures was
understandable. There was no air. But here there should be a city!
The ship swayed a little as the rockets swung their blasts to balance
the descending mass. The intended Mars-ship slowed, and slowed, and
hovered--and there was terrifying smoke and flame suddenly all
about--and then there was a distinct crunching impact. The rockets
continued to burn, their ferocity diminished. They slackened again. And
yet again. They were reduced to a mere faint murmur.
There was a remarkable immobility of everything. It was the result of
gravity. Earth-value gravity, or very near it. There was a distinct
pressure of one's feet against the floor, and a feeling of heaviness to
one's body which was very different from Lunar City, and more different
still from free flight in emptiness.
Nothing but swirling masses of smoke could be seen out the ports. They
had landed in a forest, of sorts, and the rocket-blasts had burned away
everything underneath, down to solid soil. In a circle forty yards about
the ship the ground was a mass of smoking, steaming ash. Beyond that
flames licked hungrily, creating more dense vapor. Beyond that still
there was only coiling smoke.
Cochrane's headphones yielded Babs' voice, almost wailing:
"_Mr. Cochrane! We must have landed! I want to see!_"
Cochrane pressed the hand-mike button.
"Are we still hooked up to Lunar City?" he demanded. "We can't be, but
are we?"
"_We are_," said Babs' voice mutinously. "_The broadcast went through
all right. They want to talk to you. Everybody wants to talk to you!_"
"Tell them to call back later," commanded Cochrane. "Then leave the beam
working--however it works!--and come up if you like. Tell the moon
operator you'll be away for ten minutes."
He continued to stare out the window. Al, the pilot, stayed in his
cushioned seat before the bank of rocket-controls. The rockets were
barely alight. The ship stayed as it had landed, upright on its triple
fins. He said to Jones:
"It feels like we're solid. We won't topple!"
Jones nodded. The rocket-sound cut off. Nothing happened.
"I think we could have saved fuel on that landing," said Jones. Then he
added, pleased, "Nice! The Dabney field's still on! It has to be started
in a vacuum, but it looks like it can hold air away from itself once
it's established. Nice!"
Babs rushed up the stairs. She gazed impassionedly out of a vision-port.
Then she said disappointedly:
"It looks like--"
"It looks like hell," said Cochrane. "Just smoke and steam and stuff. We
can hope, though, that we haven't started a forest fire, but have just
burned off a landing-place."
They stared out. Presently they went to another port and gazed out of
that. The smoke was annoying, and yet it could have been foreseen. A
moon-rocket, landing at its space-port on Earth, heated the tarmac to
red-hotness in the process of landing. Tender-vehicles had to wait for
it to cool before they could approach. Here the ship had landed in
woodland. Naturally its flames had seared the spot where it came down.
And there was inflammable stuff about, which caught fire. So the ship
was in the situation of a phoenix, necessarily nesting in a
conflagration. Anywhere it landed the same thing would apply, unless it
tried landing on a glacier. But then it would settle down into a lake of
boiling water, amid steam, and could expect to be frozen in as soon as
its landing-place cooled.
Now there was nothing to do. They had to wait. Once the whole ship
quivered very slightly, as if the ground trembled faintly under it. But
there was nothing at which to be alarmed.
They could see that this particular forest was composed mainly of two
kinds of trees which burned differently. One had a central trunk, and it
burned with resinous flames and much black and gray-black smoke. The
other was a curious growth--a solid, massive trunk which did not touch
ground at all, but was held up by aerial roots which supported it aloft
through very many slender shafts widely spread. Possibly the heavier
part was formed on the ground and lifted as its air-roots grew.
It was irritating, though, to be unable to see from the ship so long as
the fire burned outside. The pall of smoke lasted for a long time. In
three hours there were no longer any fiercely blazing areas, but the
ashes still smouldered and smoke still rose. In three hours and a half,
the local sun began to set. There were colorings in the sky, beyond all
comparison glorious. Which was logical enough. When Krakatoa, back on
Earth, blew itself to bits in the eighteen hundreds, it sent such
volumes of dust into the air that sunsets all around the globe were
notably improved for three years afterward. On this planet, smoking
cones were everywhere visible. Volcanic dust, then, made nightfall
magnificent past description. There was not only gold and crimson in the
west. The zenith itself glowed carmine and yellow, and those in the
space-ship gazed up at a sky such as none of them could have imagined
possible.
The colors changed and changed, from yellow to gold all over the sky,
and still the glory continued. Presently there was a deep, deep red,
deep past imagining, and presently faint bluish stars pierced it, and
they stared up at new strange constellations-some very bright
indeed--and all about the ship there was a bed of white ash with glowing
embers in it, and a thin sheet of white smoke still flowed away down the
valley.
It was long after sunset when Cochrane got up from the communicator.
Communication with Earth was broken at last. There was a balloon out in
space somewhere with an atomic battery maintaining all its surface as a
Dabney field plate. The ship maintained a field between itself and that
plate. The balloon maintained another field between itself and another
balloon a mere 178.3 light-years from the solar system. But the
substance of this planet intervened between the nearer balloon and the
ship. Jones made tests and observed that the field continued to exist,
but was plugged by the matter of this newly-arrived-at world. Come
tomorrow, when there was no solid-stone barrier to the passage of
radiation, they could communicate with Earth again.
But Cochrane was weary and now discouraged. So long as talk with Earth
was possible, he'd kept at it. There was a great deal of talking to be
done. But a good deal of it was extremely unsatisfactory.
He found Bill Holden having supper with Babs, on the floor below the
communicator. Very much of the recent talk had been over Cochrane's
head. He felt humiliated by the indignation of scientists who would not
tell him what he wanted to know without previous information he could
not give.
When he went over to the dining-table, he felt that he creaked from
weariness and dejection. Babs looked at him solicitously, and then
jumped up to get him something to eat. Everybody else was again watching
out the ship's ports at the new, strange world of which they could see
next to nothing.
"Bill," said Cochrane fretfully, "I've just been given the dressing-down
of my life! You're expecting to get out of the airlock in the morning
and take a walk. But I've been talking to Earth. I've been given the
devil for landing on a strange planet without bringing along a
bacteriologist, an organic chemist, an ecologist, an epidemiologist, and
a complete laboratory to test everything with, before daring to take a
breath of outside air. I'm warned not to open a port!"
Holden said:
"You sound as if you'd been talking to a biologist with a reputation.
You ought to know better than that!"
Cochrane protested:
"I wanted to talk to somebody who knew more than I did! What could I do
but get a man with a reputation?"
Holden shook his head.
"We psychiatrists," he observed, "go around peeping under the corners of
rugs at what people try to hide from themselves. We have a worm's-eye
view of humanity. We know better than to throw a difficult problem at a
man with an established name! They're neurotic about their reputations.
Like Dabney, they get panicky at the idea of anybody catching them in a
mistake. No big name in medicine or biology would dare tell you that of
course it's all right for us to take a walk in the rather pretty
landscape outside."
"Then who will?" demanded Cochrane.
"We'll make what tests we can," said Holden comfortingly, "and decide
for ourselves. We can take a chance. We're only risking our lives!"
Babs brought Cochrane a plate. He put food in his mouth and chewed and
swallowed.
"They say we can't afford to breathe the local air at all until we know
its bacteriology; we can't touch anything until we test it as a possible
allergen; we can't."
Holden grunted.
"What would those same authorities have told your friend Columbus? On a
strange continent he'd be sure to find strange plants and strange
animals. He'd find strange races of men and he ought to find strange
diseases. They'd have warned him not to risk it. _They_ wouldn't!"
Cochrane ate with a sort of angry vigor. Then he snapped:
"If you want to know, we've got to land! We're sunk if we don't go
outside and move around! We'll spoil our story-line. This is the
greatest adventure-serial anybody on Earth ever tuned in to follow! If
we back down on exploration, our audience will be disgusted and
resentful and they'll take it out on our sponsors!"
Babs said softly, to Holden:
"That's my boss!"
Cochrane glared at her. He didn't know how to take the comment. He said
to Holden:
"Tomorrow we'll try to figure out some sort of test and try the air.
I'll go out in a space-suit and crack the face-plate! I can close it
again before anything lethal gets in. But there's no use stepping out
into a bed of coals tonight. I'll have to wait till morning."
Holden smiled at him. Babs regarded him with intent, enigmatic eyes.
Neither of them said anything more. Cochrane finished his meal. Then he
found himself without an occupation. Gravity on this planet was very
nearly the same as on Earth. It felt like more, of course, because all
of them had been subject only to moon-gravity for nearly three weeks.
Jones and the pilot had been in one-sixth gravity for a much longer
time. And the absence of gravity had caused their muscles to lose tone
by just about the amount that the same time spent in a hospital bed
would have done. They felt physically worn out.
It was a healthy tiredness, though, and their muscles would come back
to normal as quickly as one recovers strength after illness--rather
faster, in fact. But tonight there would be no night-life on the
space-ship. Johnny Simms disappeared, after symptoms of fretfulness akin
to those of an over-tired small boy. Jamison gave up, and Bell, and Al
the pilot fell asleep while Jones was trying to discuss something
technical with him. Jones himself yawned and yawned and when Al snored
in his face he gave up. They retired to their bunks.
There was no point in standing guard over the ship. If the bed of hot
ashes did not guard it, it was not likely that an individual merely
sitting up and staring out its ports would do much good. There were
extremely minor, practically unnoticeable vibrations of the ship from
time to time. They would be volcanic temblors--to be expected. They were
not alarming, certainly, and the forest outside was guarantee of no
great violence to be anticipated. The trees stood firm and tall. There
was no worry about the ship. It was perfectly practical, and even
necessary simply to turn out the lights and go to sleep.
But Cochrane could not relax. He was annoyed by the soreness of his
muscles. He was irritated by the picture given him of the expedition as
a group of heedless ignoramuses who'd taken off without star-charts or
bacteriological equipment--without even apparatus to test the air of
planets they might land on!--and who now were sternly warned not to make
any use of their achievement. Cochrane was not overwhelmed by the
achievement itself, though less than eighteen hours since the ship and
all its company had been aground on Luna, and now they were landed on a
new world twice as far from Earth as the Pole Star.
It is probable that Cochrane was not awed because he had a
television-producer's point of view. He regarded this entire affair as a
production. He was absorbed in the details of putting it across. He
looked at it from his own, quite narrow, professional viewpoint. It did
not disturb him that he was surrounded by a wilderness. He considered
the wilderness the set on which his production belonged, though he was
as much a city man as anybody else. He went back to the control-room.
With the ship standing on its tail that was the highest point, and as
the embers burned out and the smoke lessened it was possible to look out
into the night.
He stared at the dimly-seen trees beyond the burned area, and at the
dark masses of mountains which blotted out the stars. He estimated them,
without quite realizing it, in view of what they would look like on a
television screen. When light objects in the control-room rattled
slightly, he paid no attention. His rehearsal-studio had been rickety,
back home.
Babs seemed to be sleepless, too. There was next to no light where
Cochrane was--merely the monitor-lights which assured that the Dabney
field still existed, though blocked for use by the substance of a
planet. Babs arrived in the almost-dark room only minutes after
Cochrane. He was moving restlessly from one port to another, staring
out.
"I thought I'd tell you," Babs volunteered, "that Doctor Holden put some
algae from the air-purifier tanks in the airlock, and then opened the
outer door."
"Why?" asked Cochrane.
"Algae's Earth plant-life," explained Babs. "If the air is poisonous, it
will be killed by morning. We can close the outer door of the lock, pump
out the air that came from this planet, and then let air in from the
ship so we can see what happens."
"Oh," said Cochrane.
"And then I couldn't sleep," said Babs guilelessly. "Do you mind if I
stay here? Everybody else has gone to bed."
"Oh, no," said Cochrane. "Stay if you like."
He stared out at the dark. Presently he moved to another port. After a
moment he pointed.
"There's a glow in the sky there," he said curtly.
She looked. There was a vast curving blackness which masked the stars.
Beyond it there was a reddish glare, as if of some monstrous burning.
But the color was not right for a fire. Not exactly.
"A city?" asked Babs breathlessly.
"A volcano," Cochrane told her. "I've staged shows that pretended to
show intellectual creatures on other planets--funny how we've been
dreaming of such things, back on Earth--but it isn't likely. Not since
we've actually reached the stars."
"Why since then?"
"Because," said Cochrane, half ironically, "man was given dominion over
all created things. I don't think we'll find rivals for that dominion. I
can't imagine we'll find another race of creatures who could
be--persons. Heaven knows we try to rob each other of dignity, but I
don't think there's another race to humiliate us when we find them!"
After a moment he added:
"Bad enough that we're here because there are deodorants and cosmetics
and dog-foods and such things that people want to advertise to each
other! We wouldn't be here but for them, and for the fact that some
people are neurotics and some don't like their bosses and some are crazy
in other fashions."
"Some crazinesses aren't bad," argued Babs.
"I've made a living out of them," agreed Cochrane sourly. "But I don't
like them. I have a feeling that I could arrange things better. I know I
couldn't, but I'd like to try. In my own small way, I'm even trying."
Babs chuckled.
"That's because you are a man. Women aren't so foolish. We're realists.
We like creation--even men--the way creation is."
"I don't," Cochrane said irritably. "We've accomplished something
terrific, and I don't get a kick out of it! My head is full of business
details that have to be attended to tomorrow. I ought to be uplifted. I
ought to be gloating! I ought to be happy! But I'm worrying for fear
that this infernal planet is going to disappoint our audience!"
Babs chuckled again. Then she went to the stair leading to the
compartment below.
"What's the matter?" he demanded.
"After all, I'm going to leave you alone," said Babs cheerfully. "You're
always very careful not to talk to me in any personal fashion. I think
you're afraid I'll tell you something for your own good. If I stayed
here, I might. Goodnight!"
She started down the stairs. Cochrane said vexedly:
"Hold on! Confound it, I didn't know I was so transparent! I'm sorry,
Babs. Look! Tell me something for my own good!"
Babs hesitated, and then said very cheerfully:
"You only see things the way a man sees them. This show, this trip--this
whole business doesn't thrill you because you don't see it the way a
woman would."
"Such as how? What does a woman see that I don't?"
"A woman," said Babs, "sees this planet as a place that men and women
will come to live on. To live on! You don't. You miss all the real
implications of people actually living here. But they're the things a
woman sees first of all."
Cochrane frowned.
"I'm not so conceited I can't listen to somebody else. If you've got an
idea--"
"Not an idea," said Babs. "Just a reaction. And you can't explain a
reaction to somebody who hasn't had it. Goodnight!"
She vanished down the stairs. Some time later, Cochrane heard the
extremely minute sound of a door closing on one of the cabins three
decks down in the space-ship.
He went back to his restless inspection of the night outside. He tried
to make sense of what Babs had said. He failed altogether. In the end he
settled in one of the over-elaborately cushioned chairs that had made
this ship so attractive to deluded investors. He intended to think out
what Babs might have meant. She was, after all, the most competent
secretary he'd ever had, and he'd been wryly aware of how helpless he
would be without her. Now he tried painstakingly to imagine what changes
in one's view the inclusion of women among pioneers would involve. He
worked out some seemingly valid points. But it was not a congenial
mental occupation.
He fell asleep without realizing it, and was waked by the sound of
voices all about him. It was morning again, and Johnny Simms was
shouting boyishly at something he saw outside.
"Get at it, boy!" he cried enthusiastically. "Grab him! That's the
way--"
Cochrane opened his eyes. Johnny Simms gazed out and down from a
blister-port, waving his arms. His wife Alicia looked out of the same
port without seeming to share his excited approval. Bell had dragged a
camera across the control-room and was in the act of focussing it
through a particular window.
"What's the matter?" demanded Cochrane.
He struggled out of his chair. And Johnny Simms' pleasure evaporated
abruptly. He swore nastily, viciously, at something outside the ship.
His wife touched his arm and spoke to him in a low tone. He turned
furiously upon her, mouthing foulnesses.
Cochrane was formidably beside him, and Johnny Simms' expression of fury
smoothed out instantly. He looked pleasant and amiable.
"The fight stopped," he explained offhandedly. "It was a good fight. But
one of the creatures wouldn't stay and take his licking."
Alicia said steadily:
"There were some animals there. They looked rather like bears, only they
had enormous ears."
Cochrane looked at Johnny Simms with hot eyes. It was absurd to be so
chivalrous, perhaps, but he was enraged. After an instant he turned away
and went to the port. The burned-over area was now only ashes. At its
edge, charcoal showed. And now he could see trees and brushwood on
beyond. The trees did not seem strange, because no trees would have
seemed familiar. The brush did not impress him as exotic, because his
experience with actual plants was restricted to the artificial plants on
television sets and the artificially arranged plants on rooftops. He
hardly let his eyes dwell on the vegetation at all. He searched for
movement. He saw the moving furry rumps of half a dozen unknown
creatures as they dived into concealment as if they had been frightened.
He looked down and could see the hull of the ship and two of the three
take-off fins on which it rested.
The airlock door was opening out. It swung wide. It swung back against
the hull.
"Holden's making some sort of test of the air," Cochrane said shortly.
"The animals were scared when the outside door swung open. I'll see what
he finds out."
He hurried down. He found Babs standing beside the inner door of the
airlock. She looked somehow pale. There were two saucers of greenish
soup-like stuff on the floor at her feet. That would be, of course, the
algae from the air-purifying-system tanks.
"The algae were alive," said Babs. "Dr. Holden went in the lock to try
the air himself. He said he'd be very careful."
For some obscure reason Cochrane felt ashamed. There was a long, a
desperately long wait. Then sounds of machinery. The outer door closing.
Small whistlings--compressed air.
The inner door opened. Bill Holden came out of the lock, his expression
zestfully surprised.
"Hello, Jed! I tried the air. It's all right! At a guess, maybe a little
high in oxygen. But it feels wonderfully good to breathe! And I can
report that the trees are wood and the green is chlorophyll, and this
is an Earth-type planet. That little smoky smell about is completely
familiar--and I'm taking that as an analysis. I'm going to take a walk."
Cochrane found himself watching Babs' face. She looked enormously
relieved, but even Cochrane--who was looking for something of the sort
without realizing it--could not read anything but relief in her
expression. She did not, for example, look admiring.
"I'll borrow one of Johnny Simms' guns," said Holden, "and take a look
around. It's either perfectly safe or we're all dead anyhow. Frankly, I
think it's safe. It feels right outside, Jed! It honestly feels right!"
"I'll come with you," said Cochrane, "Jones and the pilot are necessary
if the ship's to get back to Earth. But we're expendable."
He went back to the control-room. Johnny Simms zestfully undertook to
outfit them with arms. He made no proposal to accompany them. In twenty
minutes or so, Cochrane and Holden went into the airlock and the door
closed. A light came on automatically, precisely like the light in an
electric refrigerator. Cochrane found his lips twitching a little as the
analogy came to him. Seconds later the outer door opened, and they gazed
down among the branches of tall trees. Cochrane winced. There was no
railing and the height bothered him. But Holden swung out the sling. He
and Cochrane descended, dangling, down fifty feet of unscarred, shining,
metal hull.
The ground was still hot underfoot. Holden cast off the sling and moved
toward cooler territory with an undignified haste. Cochrane followed
him.
The smells were absolutely commonplace. Scorched wood. Smokiness. There
were noises. Occasional cracklings from burned tree-trunks not wholly
consumed. High-pitched, shrill musical notes. And in and among the
smells there was an astonishing freshness in the feel of the air.
Cochrane was especially apt to notice it because he had lived in a city
back on Earth, and had spent four days in the moon-rocket, and then had
breathed the Lunar City air for eighteen days more and had just come
from the space-ship whose air was distinctly of the canned variety.
He did not notice the noise of the sling again in motion behind him. He
was all eyes and ears and acute awareness of the completely strange
environment. He was the more conscious of a general strangeness because
he was so completely an urban product. Yet he and Holden were vastly
less aware of the real strangeness about them than men of previous
generations would have been. They did not notice the oddity of croaking
sounds, like frogs, coming from the tree-tops. When they had threaded
their way among leaning charred poles and came to green stuff underfoot
and merely toasted foliage all around, Cochrane heard a sweet,
high-pitched trilling which came from a half-inch hole in the ground.
But he was not astonished by the place from which the trilling came. He
was astonished at the sound itself.
There was a cry behind them.
_"Mr. Cochrane! Doctor Holden!"_
They swung about. And there was Babs on the ground, just disentangling
herself from the sling. She had followed them out, after waiting until
they had left the airlock and could not protest.
Cochrane swore to himself. But when Babs joined them breathlessly, after
a hopping run over the hot ground, he said only:
"Fancy meeting you here!"
"_I--I couldn't resist it_," said Babs in breathless apology. "And you
do have guns. It's safe enough--oh, look!"
She stared at a bush which was covered with pale purple flowers. Small
creatures hovered in the air about it. She approached it and exclaimed
again at the sweetness of its scent. Cochrane and Holden joined her in
admiration.
In a sense they were foolishly unwary. This was completely strange
territory. It could have contained anything. Earlier explorers would
have approached every bush with caution and moved over every hilltop
with suspicion, anticipating deadly creatures, unparalleled monsters,
and exotic and peculiar circumstances designed to entrap the unprepared.
Earlier explorers, of course, would probably have had advice from famous
men to prepare them for all possible danger.
But this was a valley between snow-clad mountains. The river that ran
down its length was fed by glaciers. This was a temperate climate. The
trees were either coniferous or something similar, and the vegetation
grew well but not with the frenzy of a tropic region. There were fruits
here and there. Later, to be sure, they would prove to be mostly
astringent and unpalatable. They were broad-leafed, low-growing plants
which would eventually turn out to be possessed of soft-fleshed roots
which were almost unanimously useless for human purposes. There were
even some plants with thorns and spines upon them. But they encountered
no danger.
By and large, wild animals everywhere are ferocious only when desperate.
No natural setting can permanently be so deadly that human being will be
attacked immediately they appear. An area in which peril is continuous
is one in which there is so much killing that there is no food-supply
left to maintain its predators. On the whole, there is simply a limit to
how dangerous any place can be. Dangerous beasts have to be relatively
rare, or they will not have enough to eat, when they will thin out until
they are relatively rare and do have enough to eat.
So the three explorers moved safely, though their boldness was that of
ignorance, below gigantic trees nearly as tall as the space-ship
standing on end. They saw a small furry biped, some twelve inches tall,
which waddled insanely in the exact line of their progress and with no
apparent hope of outdistancing them. They saw a gauzy creature with
incredibly spindly legs. It flew from one tree-trunk to another,
clinging to rough bark on each in turn. Once they came upon a small
animal which looked at them with enormous, panic-stricken blue eyes and
then fled with a sinuous gait on legs so short that they seemed mere
flippers. It dived into a hole and vanished.
But they came out to clear space. They could look for miles and miles.
There was a savannah of rolling soil which gradually sloped down to a
swift-running river. The grass--if it was grass--was quite green, but it
had multitudes of tiny rose-colored flowers down the central rib of each
leaf. Nearby it seemed the color of Earth-grass, but it faded
imperceptibly into an incredible old-rose tint in the distance. The
mountain-scarps on either side of the valley were sheer and tall. There
was a great stony spur reaching out above the lowland, and there was
forest at its top and bare brown stone dropping two thousand feet sheer.
And up the valley, where it narrowed, a waterfall leaped out from the
cliff and dropped hundreds of feet in an arc of purest white, until it
was lost to view behind tree-tops.
They looked. They stared. Cochrane was a television producer, and Holden
was a psychiatrist, and Babs was a highly efficient secretary. They did
not make scientific observations. The ecological system of the valley
escaped their notice. They weren't qualified to observe that the flying
things around seemed mostly to be furry instead of feathered, and that
insects seemed few and huge and fragile,--and they did not notice that
most of the plants appeared to be deciduous, so indicating that this
planet had pronounced seasons. But Holden said:
"Up in Greenland there's a hospital on a cliff like that. People with
delusions of grandeur sometimes get cured just by looking at something
that's so much greater and more splendid than they are. I'd like to see
a hospital up yonder!"
Babs said, shining-eyed:
"A city could be built in this valley. Not a tall city, with gray
streets and gardens on the roofs. This could be a nice little city like
people used to have. There would be little houses, all separate, and
there'd be grass all around and people could pluck flowers if they
wanted to, to take inside.... There could be families here, and
homes--not living-quarters!"
Cochrane said nothing. He was envious of the others. They saw, and they
dreamed according to their natures. Cochrane somehow felt forlorn.
Presently he said depressedly:
"We'll go back to the ship. You can work out your woman's viewpoint
stuff with Bell, Babs. He'll write it, or you can give it to Alicia to
put over when we go on the air."
Babs made no reply. The absence of comment was almost pointed. Cochrane
realized that she wouldn't do it, though he couldn't see why.
They did go back to the ship. Cochrane sent Babs and Holden up the
sling, first, while he waited down below. It was a singular sensation to
stand there. He was the only human being afoot on a planet the size of
Earth or larger, at the foot of a cliff of metal which was the
space-ship's hull. He had a weapon in his hand, and it should defend him
from anything. But he felt very lonely.
The sling came down for him. He felt sick at heart as it lifted him. He
had an overwhelming conviction of incompetence, though he could not
detail the reasons. The rope hauled him up, swaying, to the dizzy height
of the air-lock door. He could not feel elated. He was partly
responsible for humankind's greatest achievement to date. But he had not
quite the viewpoint that would let him enjoy its contemplation.
The ground quivered very faintly as he rose. It was not an earthquake.
It was merely a temblor, such as anyone would expect to feel
occasionally with six smoking volcanic cones in view. The green stuff
all around was proof that it could be disregarded.