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[Illustration: Cover Page]
[Illustration]
SAND DOOM
BY MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrated by Freas
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| _The problem was as neat a circle as one could ask for; |
| without repair parts, they couldn't bring in the ship that |
| carried the repair parts!_ |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
Bordman knew there was something wrong when the throbbing, acutely
uncomfortable vibration of rocket blasts shook the ship. Rockets were
strictly emergency devices, these days, so when they were used there was
obviously an emergency.
He sat still. He had been reading, in the passenger lounge of the
_Warlock_--a very small lounge indeed--but as a senior Colonial Survey
officer he was well-traveled enough to know when things did not go
right. He looked up from the bookscreen, waiting. Nobody came to explain
the eccentricity of a spaceship using rockets. It would have been
immediate, on a regular liner, but the _Warlock_ was practically a
tramp. This trip it carried just two passengers. Passenger service was
not yet authorized to the planet ahead, and would not be until Bordman
had made the report he was on his way to compile. At the moment, though,
the rockets blasted, and stopped, and blasted again. There was something
definitely wrong.
The _Warlock's_ other passenger came out of her cabin. She looked
surprised. She was Aletha Redfeather, an unusually lovely Amerind.
It was extraordinary that a girl could be so self-sufficient on a
tedious space-voyage, and Bordman approved of her. She was making the
journey to Xosa II as a representative of the Amerind Historical
Society, but she'd brought her own bookreels and some elaborate
fancywork which--woman-fashion--she used to occupy her hands. She
hadn't been at all a nuisance. Now she tilted her head on one side
as she looked inquiringly at Bordman.
"I'm wondering, too," he told her, just as an especially sustained and
violent shuddering of rocket-impulsion made his chair legs thutter on
the floor.
There was a long period of stillness. Then another violent but much
shorter blast. A shorter one still. Presently there was a half-second
blast which must have been from a single rocket tube because of the mild
shaking it produced. After that there was nothing at all.
Bordman frowned to himself. He'd been anticipating groundfall within a
matter of hours, certainly. He'd just gone through his specbook
carefully and re-familiarized himself with the work he was to survey on
Xosa II. It was a perfectly commonplace minerals-planet development, and
he'd expected to clear it FE--fully established--and probably TP and NQ
ratings as well, indicating that tourists were permitted and no
quarantine was necessary. Considering the aridity of the planet, no
bacteriological dangers could be expected to exist, and if tourists
wanted to view its monstrous deserts and infernolike wind
sculptures--why they should be welcome.
But the ship had used rocket drive in the planet's near vicinity.
Emergency. Which was ridiculous. This was a perfectly routine sort of
voyage. Its purpose was the delivery of heavy equipment--specifically a
smelter--and a senior Colonial Survey officer to report the completion
of primary development.
Aletha waited, as if for more rocket blasts. Presently she smiled at
some thought that had occurred to her.
"If this were an adventure tape," she said humorously, "the loudspeaker
would now announce that the ship had established itself in an orbit
around the strange, uncharted planet first sighted three days ago, and
that volunteers were wanted for a boat landing."
Bordman demanded impatiently:
"Do you bother with adventure tapes? They're nonsense! A pure waste of
time!"
Aletha smiled again.
"My ancestors," she told him, "used to hold tribal dances and make
medicine and boast about how many scalps they'd taken and how they did
it. It was satisfying--and educational for the young. Adolescents became
familiar with the idea of what we nowadays call adventure. They were
partly ready for it when it came. I suspect your ancestors used to tell
each other stories about hunting mammoths and such. So I think it would
be fun to hear that we were in orbit and that a boat landing was in
order."
Bordman grunted. There were no longer adventures. The universe was
settled; civilized. Of course there were still frontier planets--Xosa II
was one--but pioneers had only hardships. Not adventures.
* * * * *
The ship-phone speaker clicked. It said curtly:
"_Notice. We have arrived at Xosa II and have established an orbit about
it. A landing will be made by boat._"
Bordman's mouth dropped open.
"What the devil's this?" he demanded.
"Adventure, maybe," said Aletha. Her eyes crinkled very pleasantly when
she smiled. She wore the modern Amerind dress--a sign of pride in the
ancestry which now implied such diverse occupations as interstellar
steel construction and animal husbandry and llano-planet colonization.
"If it were adventure, as the only girl on this ship I'd have to be in
the landing party, lest the tedium of orbital waiting make the"--her
smile widened to a grin--"the pent-up restlessness of trouble-makers in
the crew----"
The ship-phone clicked again.
"_Mr. Bordman. Miss Redfeather. According to advices from the ground,
the ship may have to stay in orbit for a considerable time. You will
accordingly be landed by boat. Will you make yourselves ready, please,
and report to the boat-blister?_" The voice paused and added, "_Hand
luggage only, please._"
Aletha's eyes brightened. Bordman felt the shocked incredulity of a man
accustomed to routine when routine is impossibly broken. Of course
survey ships made boat landings from orbit, and colony ships let down
robot hulls by rocket when there was as yet no landing grid for the
handling of a ship. But never before in his experience had an ordinary
freighter, on a routine voyage to a colony ready for its final
degree-of-completion survey, ever landed anybody by boat.
"This is ridiculous!" said Bordman, fuming.
"Maybe it's adventure," said Aletha. "I'll pack."
She disappeared into her cabin. Bordman hesitated. Then he went into his
own. The colony on Xosa II had been established two years ago. Minimum
comfort conditions had been realized within six months. A temporary
landing grid for light supply ships was up within a year. It had
permitted stock-piling, and it had been taken down to be rebuilt as a
permanent grid with every possible contingency provided for. The eight
months since the last ship landing was more than enough for the building
of the gigantic, spidery, half-mile-high structure which would handle
this planet's interstellar commerce. There was no excuse for an
emergency! A boat landing was nonsensical!
But he surveyed the contents of his cabin. Most of the cargo of the
_Warlock_ was smelter equipment which was to complete the outfitting of
the colony. It was to be unloaded first. By the time the ship's holds
were wholly empty, the smelter would be operating. The ship would wait
for a full cargo of pig metal. Bordman had expected to live in this
cabin while he worked on the survey he'd come to make, and to leave
again with the ship.
Now he was to go aground by boat. He fretted. The only emergency
equipment he could possibly need was a heat-suit. He doubted the urgency
of that. But he packed some clothing for indoors, and then defiantly
included his specbook and the volumes of definitive data to which
specifications for structures and colonial establishments always
referred. He'd get to work on his report immediately he landed.
He went out of the passenger's lounge to the boat-blister. An engineer's
legs projected from the boat port. The engineer withdrew, with a strip
of tape from the boat's computer. He compared it dourly with a similar
strip from the ship's figurebox. Bordman consciously acted according to
the best traditions of passengers.
"What's the trouble?" he asked.
"We can't land," said the engineer shortly.
He went away--according to the tradition by which ships' crews are
always scornful of passengers.
* * * * *
Bordman scowled. Then Aletha came, carrying a not-too-heavy bag. Bordman
put it in the boat, disapproving of the crampedness of the craft. But
this wasn't a lifeboat. It was a landing boat. A lifeboat had Lawlor
drive and could travel light-years, but in the place of rockets and
rocket fuel it had air-purifiers and water-recovery units and
food-stores. It couldn't land without a landing grid aground, but it
could get to a civilized planet. This landing boat could land without a
grid, but its air wouldn't last long.
"Whatever's the matter," said Bordman darkly, "it's incompetence
somewhere!"
But he couldn't figure it out. This was a cargo ship. Cargo ships
neither took off nor landed under their own power. It was too costly of
fuel they would have to carry. So landing grids used local power--which
did not have to be lifted--to heave ships out into space, and again used
local power to draw them to ground again. Therefore ships carried fuel
only for actual space-flight, which was economy. Yet landing grids had
no moving parts, and while they did have to be monstrous structures they
actually drew power from planetary ionospheres. So with no moving parts
to break down and no possibility of the failure of a power
source--landing grids couldn't fail! So there couldn't be an emergency
to make a ship ride orbit around a planet which had a landing grid!
The engineer came back. He carried a mail sack full of letter-reels. He
waved his hand. Aletha crawled into the landing-boat port. Bordman
followed. Four people, with a little crowding, could have gotten into
the little ship. Three pretty well filled it. The engineer followed them
and sealed the port.
"Sealed off," he said into the microphone before him.
The exterior-pressure needle moved halfway across the dial. The
interior-pressure needle stayed steady.
"All tight," said the engineer.
The exterior-pressure needle flicked to zero. There were clanking
sounds. The long halves of the boat-blister stirred and opened, and
abruptly the landing boat was in an elongated cup in the hull-plating,
and above them there were many, many stars. The enormous disk of a
nearby planet floated into view around the hull. It was monstrous and
blindingly bright. It was of a tawny color, with great, irregular areas
of yellow and patches of bluishness. But most of it was the color of
sand. And all its colors varied in shade--some places were lighter and
some darker--and over at one edge there was blinding whiteness which
could not be anything but an ice cap. But Bordman knew that there was no
ocean or sea or lake on all this whole planet, and the ice cap was more
nearly hoarfrost than such mile-deep glaciation as would be found at the
poles of a maximum-comfort world.
"Strap in," said the engineer over his shoulder. "No-gravity coming, and
then rocket-push. Settle your heads."
Bordman irritably strapped himself in. He saw Aletha busy at the same
task, her eyes shining. Without warning, there came a sensation of acute
discomfort. It was the landing boat detaching itself from the ship and
the diminishment of the ship's closely-confined artificial-gravity
field. That field suddenly dropped to nothingness, and Bordman had the
momentary sickish dizziness that flicked-off gravity always produces. At
the same time his heart pounded unbearably in the instinctive,
racial-memory reaction to the feel of falling.
Then roarings. He was thrust savagely back against his seat. His tongue
tried to slide back into his throat. There was an enormous oppression on
his chest. He found himself thinking panicky profanity.
Simultaneously the vision ports went black, because they were out of the
shadow of the ship. The landing boat turned--but there was no sensation
of centrifugal force--and they were in a vast obscurity with merely a
dim phantom of the planetary surface to be seen. But behind them a
blue-white sun shone terribly. Its light was warm--hot--even though it
came through the polarized shielding ports.
"Did ... did you say," panted Aletha happily--breathless because of the
acceleration--"that there weren't any adventures?"
Bordman did not answer. But he did not count discomfort as an adventure.
* * * * *
The engineer did not look out the ports at all. He watched the screen
before him. There was a vertical line across the side of the lighted
disk. A blip moved downward across it, showing their height in thousands
of miles. After a long time the blip reached the bottom, and the
vertical line became double and another blip began to descend. It
measured height in hundreds of miles. A bright spot--a square--appeared
at one side of the screen. A voice muttered metallically, and suddenly
seemed to shout, and then muttered again. Bordman looked out one of the
black ports and saw the planet as if through smoked glass. It was a
ghostly reddish thing which filled half the cosmos. It had mottlings.
Its edge was curved. That would be the horizon.
The engineer moved controls and the white square moved. It went across
the screen. He moved more controls. It came back to the center. The
height-in-hundreds blip was at the bottom, now, and the vertical line
tripled and a tens-of-miles-height blip crawled downward.
There were sudden, monstrous plungings of the landing boat. It had hit
the outermost fringes of atmosphere. The engineer said words it was not
appropriate for Aletha to hear. The plungings became more violent.
Bordman held on--to keep from being shaken to pieces despite the
straps--and stared at the murky surface of the planet. It seemed to be
fleeing from them and they to be trying to overtake it. Gradually, very
gradually, its flight appeared to slow. They were down to twenty miles,
then.
Quite abruptly the landing boat steadied. The square spot bobbed about
in the center of the astrogation screen. The engineer worked controls to
steady it.
The ports cleared a little. Bordman could see the ground below more
distinctly. There were patches of every tint that mineral coloring could
produce. There were vast stretches of tawny sand. A little while more,
and he could see the shadows of mountains. He made out mountain flanks
which should have had valleys between them and other mountain flanks
beyond, but they had tawny flatnesses between, instead. These, he knew,
would be the sand plateaus which had been observed on this planet and
which had only a still-disputed explanation. But he could see areas of
glistening yellow and dirty white, and splashes of pink and streaks of
ultramarine and gray and violet, and the incredible red of iron oxide
covering square miles--too much to be believed.
The landing-boat's rockets cut off. It coasted. Presently the horizon
tilted and all the dazzling ground below turned sedately beneath them.
There came staccato instructions from a voice-speaker, which the
engineer obeyed. The landing boat swung low--below the tips of giant
mauve mountains with a sand plateau beyond them--and its nose went up.
It stalled.
Then the rockets roared again--and now, with air about them and after a
momentary pause, they were horribly loud--and the boat settled down and
down upon its own tail of fire.
There was a completely blinding mass of dust and rocket fumes which cut
off all sight of everything else. Then there was a crunching crash, and
the engineer swore peevishly to himself. He cut the rockets again.
Finally.
* * * * *
Bordman found himself staring straight up, still strapped in his chair.
The boat had settled on its own tail fins, and his feet were higher than
his head, and he felt ridiculous. He saw the engineer at work
unstrapping himself. He duplicated the action, but it was absurdly
difficult to get out of the chair.
Aletha managed more gracefully. She didn't need help.
"Wait," said the engineer ungraciously, "till somebody comes."
So they waited, using what had been chair backs for seats.
The engineer moved a control and the windows cleared further. They saw
the surface of Xosa II. There was no living thing in sight. The ground
itself was pebbles and small rocks and minor boulders--all apparently
tumbled from the starkly magnificent mountains to one side. There were
monstrous, many-colored cliffs and mesas, every one eaten at in the
unmistakable fashion of wind-erosion. Through a notch in the mountain
wall before them a strange, fan-shaped, frozen formation appeared. If
such a thing had been credible, Bordman would have said that it was a
flow of sand simulating a waterfall. And everywhere there was blinding
brightness and the look and feel of blistering sunshine. But there was
not one single leaf or twig or blade of grass. This was pure desert.
This was Xosa II.
Aletha regarded it with bright eyes.
"Beautiful!" she said happily. "Isn't it?"
"Personally," said Bordman, "I never saw a place that looked less
homelike or attractive."
Aletha laughed.
"My eyes see it differently."
Which was true. It was accepted, nowadays, that humankind might be one
species but was many races, and each saw the cosmos in its own fashion.
On Kalmet III there was a dense, predominantly Asiatic population which
terraced its mountainsides for agriculture and deftly mingled modern
techniques with social customs not to be found on--say--Demeter I, where
there were many red-tiled stucco towns and very many olive groves. In
the llano planets of the Equis cluster, Amerinds--Aletha's
kin--zestfully rode over plains dotted with the descendants of buffalo
and antelope and cattle brought from ancient Earth. On the oases of
Rustam IV there were date palms and riding camels and much argument
about what should be substituted for the direction of Mecca at the times
for prayer, while wheat fields spanned provinces on Canna I and highly
civilized emigrants from the continent of Africa on Earth stored jungle
gums and lustrous gems in the warehouses of their spaceport city of
Timbuk.
So it was natural for Aletha to look at this wind-carved wilderness
otherwise than as Bordman did. Her racial kindred were the pioneers of
the stars, these days. Their heritage made them less than appreciative
of urban life. Their inborn indifference to heights made them the
steel-construction men of the cosmos, and more than two-thirds of the
landing grids in the whole galaxy had their coup-feather symbols on the
key posts. But the planet government on Algonka V was housed in a
three-thousand-foot white stone tepee, and the best horses known to men
were raised by ranchers with bronze skins and high cheekbones on the
llano planet Chagan.
* * * * *
Now, here, in the _Warlock's_ landing boat, the engineer snorted. A
vehicle came around a cliff wall, clanking its way on those eccentric
caterwheels that new-founded colonies find so useful. The vehicle
glittered. It crawled over tumbled boulders, and flowed over fallen
scree. It came briskly toward them. The engineer snorted again.
"That's my cousin Ralph!" said Aletha in pleased surprise.
Bordman blinked and looked again. He did not quite believe his eyes. But
they told the truth. The figure controlling the ground car was
Indian--Amerind--wearing a breechcloth and thick-soled sandals and three
streamlined feathers in a band about his head. Moreover, he did not ride
in a seat. He sat astride a semi-cylindrical part of the ground car,
over which a gaily-colored blanket had been thrown.
[Illustration]
The ship's engineer rumbled disgustedly. But then Bordman saw how sane
this method of riding was--here. The ground vehicle lurched and swayed
and rolled and pitched and tossed as it came over the uneven ground. To
sit in anything like a chair would have been foolish. A back rest would
throw one forward in a frontward lurch, and give no support in case of a
backward one. A sidewise tilt would tend to throw one out. Riding a
ground car as if in a saddle was sense!
But Bordman was not so sure about the costume. The engineer opened the
port and spoke hostilely out of it:
"D'you know there's a lady in this thing?"
The young Indian grinned. He waved his hand to Aletha, who pressed her
nose against a viewport. And just then Bordman did understand the
costume or lack of it. Air came in the open exit port. It was hot and
desiccated. It was furnace-like!
"How, 'Letha," called the rider on the caterwheel steed. "Either dress
for the climate or put on a heat-suit before you come out of there!"
Aletha chuckled. Bordman heard a stirring behind him. Then Aletha
climbed to the exit port and swung out. Bordman heard a dour muttering
from the engineer. Then he saw her greeting her cousin. She had slipped
out of the conventionalized Amerind outfit to which Bordman was
accustomed. Now she was clad as Anglo-Saxon girls dressed for beaches on
the cool-temperature planets.
For a moment Bordman thought of sunstroke, with his own eyes dazzled by
the still-partly-filtered sunlight. But Aletha's Amerind coloring was
perfectly suited to sunshine even of this intensity. Wind blowing upon
her body would cool her skin. Her thick, straight black hair was at
least as good protection against sunstroke as a heat-helmet. She might
feel hot, but she would be perfectly safe. She wouldn't even sunburn.
But he, Bordman----
He grimly stripped to underwear and put on the heat-suit from his bag.
He filled its canteens from the boat's water tank. He turned on the
tiny, battery-powered motors. The suit ballooned out. It was intended
for short periods of intolerable heat. The motors kept it inflated--away
from his skin--and cooled its interior by the evaporation of sweat plus
water from its canteen tanks. It was a miniature air-conditioning system
for one man, and it should enable him to endure temperatures otherwise
lethal to someone with his skin and coloring. But it would use a lot of
water.
He climbed to the exit port and went clumsily down the exterior ladder
to the tail fin. He adjusted his goggles. He went over to the chattering
young Indians, young man and girl. He held out his gloved hand.
"I'm Bordman," he said painfully. "Here to make a degree-of-completion
survey. What's wrong that we had to land by boat?"
Aletha's cousin shook hands cordially.
"I'm Ralph Redfeather," he said, introducing himself. "Project engineer.
About everything's wrong. Our landing grid's gone. We couldn't contact
your ship in time to warn it off. It was in our gravity field before it
answered, and its Lawlor drive couldn't take it away--not working
because of the field. Our power, of course, went with the landing grid.
The ship you came in can't get back, and we can't send a distress
message anywhere, and our best estimate is that the colony will be wiped
out--thirst and starvation--in six months. I'm sorry you and Aletha have
to be included."
Then he turned to Aletha and said amiably:
"How's Mike Thundercloud and Sally Whitehorse and the gang in general,
'Letha?"
* * * * *
The _Warlock_ rolled on in her newly-established orbit about Xosa II.
The landing boat was aground, having removed the two passengers. It
would come back. Nobody on the ship wanted to stay aground, because they
knew the conditions and the situation below--unbearable heat and the
complete absence of hope. But nobody had anything to do! The ship had
been maintained in standard operating condition during its two-months'
voyage from Trent to here. No repairs or overhaulings were needed. There
was no maintenance-work to speak of. There would be only stand-by
watches until something happened. There would be nothing to do on those
watches. There would be off-watch time for twenty-one out of every
twenty-four hours, and no purposeful activity to fill even half an hour
of it. In a matter of--probably--years, the _Warlock_ should receive
aid. She might be towed out of her orbit to space in which the Lawlor
drive could function, or the crew might simply be taken off. But
meanwhile, those on board were as completely frustrated as the colony.
They could not do anything at all to help themselves.
In one fashion the crewmen were worse off than the colonists. The
colonists had at least the colorful prospect of death before them. They
could prepare for it in their several ways. But the members of the
_Warlock_'s crew had nothing ahead but tedium.
The skipper faced the future with extreme, grim distaste.
* * * * *
The ride to the colony was torment. Aletha rode behind her cousin on the
saddle-blanket, and apparently suffered little if at all. But Bordman
could only ride in the ground-car's cargo space, along with the sack of
mail from the ship. The ground was unbelievably rough and the jolting
intolerable. The heat was literally murderous. In the metal cargo space,
the temperature reached a hundred and sixty degrees in the sunshine--and
given enough time, food will cook in no more heat than that. Of course a
man has been known to enter an oven and stay there while a roast was
cooked, and to come out alive. But the oven wasn't throwing him
violently about or bringing sun-heated--blue-white-sun heated--metal to
press his heat-suit against him.
The suit did make survival possible, but that was all. The contents of
its canteens gave out just before arrival, and for a short time Bordman
had only sweat for his suit to work with. It kept him alive by forced
ventilation, but he arrived in a state of collapse. He drank the iced
salt water they gave him and went to bed. He'd get back his strength
with a proper sodium level in his blood. But he slept for twelve hours
straight.
When he got up, he was physically normal again, but abysmally ashamed.
It did no good to remind himself that Xosa II was rated minimum-comfort
class D--a blue-white sun and a mean temperature of one hundred and ten
degrees. Africans could take such a climate--with night-relief quarters.
Amerinds could do steel construction work in the open, protected only by
insulated shoes and gloves. But Bordman could not venture out-of-doors
except in a heat-suit. He couldn't stay long then. It was not a
weakness. It was a matter of genetics. But he was ashamed.
Aletha nodded to him when he found the Project Engineer's office. It
occupied one of the hulls in which colony-establishment materials had
been lowered by rocket power. There were forty of the hulls, and they
had been emptied and arranged for inter-communication in three separate
communities, so that an individual could change his quarters and
ordinary associates from time to time and colony fever--frantic
irritation with one's companions--was minimized.
Aletha sat at a desk, busily making notes from a loose leaf volume
before her. The wall behind the desk was fairly lined with similar
volumes.
"I made a spectacle of myself!" said Bordman, bitterly.
"Not at all!" Aletha assured him. "It could happen to anybody. I
wouldn't do too well on Timbuk."
There was no answer to that. Timbuk was essentially a jungle planet,
barely emerging from the carboniferous stage. Its colonists thrived
because their ancestors had lived on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea,
on Earth. But Anglos did not find its climate healthful, nor would many
other races. Amerinds died there quicker than most.
"Ralph's on the way here now," added Aletha. "He and Dr. Chuka were out
picking a place to leave the records. The sand dunes here are terrible,
you know. When an explorer-ship does come to find out what's happened to
us, these buildings could be covered up completely. Any place could be.
It isn't easy to pick a record-cache that's quite sure to be found."
"When," said Bordman skeptically, "there's nobody left alive to point it
out. Is that it?"
"That's it," agreed Aletha. "It's pretty bad all around. I didn't plan
to die just yet."
Her voice was perfectly normal. Bordman snorted. As a senior Colonial
Survey officer, he'd been around. But he'd never yet known a human
colony to be extinguished when it was properly equipped and after a
proper pre-settlement survey. He'd seen panic, but never real cause for
a matter-of-fact acceptance of doom.
* * * * *
There was a clanking noise outside the hulk which was the Project
Engineer's headquarters. Bordman couldn't see clearly through the
filtered ports. He reached over and opened a door. The brightness
outside struck his eyes like a blow. He blinked them shut instantly and
turned away. But he'd seen a glistening, caterwheel ground car stopping
not far from the doorway.
He stood wiping tears from his light-dazzled eyes as footsteps sounded
outside. Aletha's cousin came in, followed by a huge man with remarkably
dark skin. The dark man wore eyeglasses with a curiously thick, corklike
nosepiece to insulate the necessary metal of the frame from his skin. It
would blister if it touched bare flesh.
"This is Dr. Chuka," said Redfeather pleasantly, "Mr. Bordman. Dr.
Chuka's the director of mining and mineralogy here."
Bordman shook hands with the ebony-skinned man. He grinned, showing
startlingly white teeth. Then he began to shiver.
"It's like a freeze-box in here," he said in a deep voice. "I'll get a
robe and be with you."
He vanished through a doorway, his teeth chattering audibly. Aletha's
cousin took half a dozen deliberate deep breaths and grimaced.
"I could shiver myself," he admitted "but Chuka's really acclimated to
Xosa. He was raised on Timbuk."
Bordman said curtly:
"I'm sorry I collapsed on landing. It won't happen again. I came here to
do a degree-of-completion survey that should open the colony to normal
commerce, let the colonists' families move in, tourists, and so on. But
I was landed by boat instead of normally, and I am told the colony is
doomed. I would like an official statement of the degree of completion
of the colony's facilities and an explanation of the unusual points I
have just mentioned."
The Indian blinked at him. Then he smiled faintly. The dark man came
back, zipping up an indoor warmth-garment. Redfeather dryly brought him
up to date by repeating what Bordman had just said. Chuka grinned and
sprawled comfortably in a chair.
"I'd say," he remarked humorously, in that astonishingly deep-toned
voice of his, "sand got in our hair. And our colony. And the landing
grid. There's a lot of sand on Xosa. Wouldn't you say that was the
trouble?"
The Indian said with elaborate gravity:
"Of course wind had something to do with it."
Bordman fumed.
"I think you know," he said fretfully, "that as a senior Colonial Survey
officer, I have authority to give any orders needed for my work. I give
one now. I want to see the landing grid--if it is still standing. I take
it that it didn't fall down?"
Redfeather flushed beneath the bronze pigment of his skin. It would be
hard to offend a steelman more than to suggest that his work did not
stand up.
"I assure you," he said politely, "that it did not fall down."
"Your estimate of its degree of completion?"
"Eighty per cent," said Redfeather formally.
"You've stopped work on it?"
"Work on it has been stopped," agreed the Indian.
"Even though the colony can receive no more supplies until it is
completed?"
"Just so," said Redfeather without expression.
"Then I issue a formal order that I be taken to the landing-grid site
immediately," said Bordman angrily. "I want to see what sort of
incompetence is responsible! Will you arrange it--at once?"
Redfeather said in a completely emotionless voice:
"You want to see the site of the landing grid. Very good. Immediately."
He turned and walked out into the incredible, blinding sunshine. Bordman
blinked at the momentary blast of light, and then began to pace up and
down the office. He fumed. He was still ashamed of his collapse from the
heat during the travel from the landed rocket-boat to the colony.
Therefore he was touchy and irritable. But the order he had given was
strictly justifiable.
He heard a small noise. He whirled. Dr. Chuka, huge and black and
spectacled, rocked back and forth in his seat, suppressing laughter.
"Now, what the devil does that mean?" demanded Bordman suspiciously. "It
certainly isn't ridiculous to ask to see the structure on which the life
of the colony finally depends!"
"Not ridiculous," said Dr. Chuka. "It's--hilarious!"
He boomed laughter in the office with the rounded ceiling of a remade
robot hull. Aletha smiled with him, though her eyes were grave.
"You'd better put on a heat-suit," she said to Bordman.
He fumed again, tempted to defy all common sense because its dictates
were not the same for everybody. But he marched away, back to the
cubbyhole in which he had awakened. Angrily, he donned the heat-suit
that had not protected him adequately before, but had certainly saved
his life. He filled the canteens topping full--he suspected he hadn't
done so the last time. He went back to the Project Engineer's office
with a feeling of being burdened and absurd.
* * * * *
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.
[Illustration]
"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 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,
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 got under
way. It headed for the mountains.
* * * * *
The smoothness of the rock was deceptive. The caterwheel car lurched
and bumped and swayed and rocked. It rolled and dipped and wallowed.
Nobody could have remained in a normal seat on such terrain, but Bordman
felt hopelessly undignified riding what amounted to a hobbyhorse. Under
the sunshade it was infuriatingly like a horse on a carousel. That there
were three of them together made it look even more foolish. He stared
about him, trying to take his mind from his own absurdity. His goggles
made the light endurable, but he felt ashamed.
"Those side-fins," said Chuka's deep voice pleasantly, "the bottom ones,
make things better for you. The shade overhead cuts off direct sunlight,
and they cut off the reflected glare. It would blister your skin even
if the sun never touched you directly."
Bordman did not answer. The caterwheel car went on. It came to a patch
of sand--tawny sand, heavily mineralized. There was a dune here. Not a
big one for Xosa II. It was no more than a hundred feet high. But they
went up its leeward, steeply slanting side. All the planet seemed to
tilt insanely as the caterwheels spun. They reached the dune's crest,
where it tended to curl over and break like a water-comber, and here the
wheels struggled with sand precariously ready to fall, and Bordman had a
sudden perception of the sands of Xosa II as the oceans that they really
were. The dunes were waves which moved with infinite slowness, but the
irresistible force of storm-seas. Nothing could resist them. Nothing!
They traveled over similar dunes for two miles. Then they began to climb
the approaches to the mountains. And Bordman saw for the second
time--the first had been through the ports of the landing-boat--where
there was a notch in the mountain wall and sand had flowed out of it
like a waterfall, making a beautifully symmetrical cone-shaped heap
against the lower cliffs. There were many such falls. There was one
place where there was a sand-cascade. Sand had poured over a series of
rocky steps, piling up on each in turn to its very edge, and then
spilling again to the next.
They went up a crazily slanting spur of stone, whose sides were too
steep for sand to lodge on, and whose narrow crest had a bare thin
coating of powder.
The landscape looked like a nightmare. As the car went on, wabbling and
lurching and dipping on its way, the heights on either side made Bordman
tend to dizziness. The coloring was impossible. The aridness, the
desiccation, the lifelessness of everything about was somehow shocking.
Bordman found himself straining his eyes for the merest, scrubbiest of
bushes and for however stunted and isolated a wisp of grass.
The journey went on for an hour. Then there came a straining climb up a
now-windswept ridge of eroded rock, and the attainment of its highest
point. The ground car went onward for a hundred yards and stopped.
They had reached the top of the mountain range, and there was
doubtlessly another range beyond. But they could not see it. Here, at
the place to which they had climbed so effortfully, there were no more
rocks. There was no valley. There was no descending slope. There was
sand. This was one of the sand plateaus which were a unique feature of
Xosa II. And Bordman knew, now, that the disputed explanation was the
true one.
Winds, blowing over the mountains, carried sand as on other worlds they
carried moisture and pollen and seeds and rain. Where two mountain
ranges ran across the course of long-blowing winds, the winds eddied
above the valley between. They dropped sand into it. The equivalent of
trade winds, Bordman considered, in time would fill a valley to the
mountain tops, just as trade winds provide moisture in equal quantity on
other worlds, and civilizations have been built upon it. But----
* * * * *
"Well?" said Bordman challengingly.
"This is the site of the landing grid," said Redfeather.
"Where?"
"Here," said the Indian dryly. "A few months ago there was a valley
here. The landing grid had eighteen hundred feet of height built. There
was to be four hundred feet more--the lighter top construction justifies
my figure of eighty per cent completion. Then there was a storm."
[Illustration]
It was hot. Horribly, terribly hot, even here on a plateau at
mountaintop height. Dr. Chuka looked at Bordman's face and bent down in
the vehicle. He turned a stopcock on one of the air tanks brought for
Bordman's necessity. Immediately Bordman felt cooler. His skin was dry,
of course. The circulated air dried sweat as fast as it appeared. But he
had the dazed, feverish feeling of a man in an artificial-fever box.
He'd been fighting it for some time. Now the coolness of the expanded
air was almost deliriously refreshing.
Dr. Chuka produced a canteen. Bordman drank thirstily. The water was
slightly salted to replace salt lost in sweat.
"A storm, eh?" asked Bordman, after a time of contemplation of his inner
sensations as well as the scene of disaster before him. There'd be some
hundreds of millions of tons of sand in even a section of this plateau.
It was unthinkable that it could be removed except by a long-time sweep
of changed trade winds along the length of the valley. "But what has a
storm to do----"
"It was a sandstorm," said Redfeather coldly. "Probably there was a
sunspot flare-up. We don't know. But the pre-colonization survey spoke
of sandstorms. The survey team even made estimates of sandfall in
various places as so many inches per year. Here all storms drop sand
instead of rain. But there must have been a sunspot flare because this
storm blew for"--his voice went flat and deliberate because it was
stating the unbelievable--"for two months. We did not see the sun in all
that time. And we couldn't work, naturally. The sand would flay a man's
skin off his body in minutes. So we waited it out.
"When it ended, there was this sand plateau where the survey had ordered
the landing grid to be built. The grid was under it. It is under it. The
top of eighteen hundred feet of steel is still buried two hundred feet
down in the sand you see. Our unfabricated building-steel is piled ready
for erection--under two thousand feet of sand. Without anything but
stored power it is hardly practical"--Redfeather's tone was
sardonic--"for us to try to dig it out. There are hundreds of millions
of tons of stuff to be moved. If we could get the sand away, we could
finish the grid. If we could finish the grid, we'd have power enough to
get the sand away--in a few years, and if we could replace the machinery
that wore out handling it. And if there wasn't another sandstorm."
He paused. Bordman took deep breaths of the cooler air. He could think
more clearly.
"If you will accept photographs," said Redfeather politely, "you can
check that we actually did the work."
* * * * *
Bordman saw the implications. The colony had been formed of Amerinds for
the steel work and Africans for the labor the Amerinds were congenitally
averse to--the handling of complex mining-machinery underground and the
control of modern high-speed smelting operations. Both races could
endure this climate and work in it--provided that they had cooled
sleeping quarters. But they had to have power. Power not only to work
with, but to live by. The air-cooling machinery that made sleep possible
also condensed from the cooled air the minute trace of water vapor it
contained and that they needed for drink. But without power they would
thirst. Without the landing grid and the power it took from the
ionosphere, they could not receive supplies from the rest of the
universe. So they would starve.
And the _Warlock_, now in orbit somewhere overhead, was well within the
planet's gravitational field and could not use its Lawlor drive to
escape with news of their predicament. In the normal course of events it
would be years before a colony ship capable of landing or blasting out
of a planetary gravitational field by rocket-power was dispatched to
find out why there was no news from Xosa II. There was no such thing as
interstellar signaling, of course. Ships themselves travel faster than
any signal that could be sent, and distances were so great that mere
communication took enormous lengths of time. A letter sent to Earth from
the Rim even now took ten years to make the journey, and another ten for
a reply. Even the much shorter distances involved in Xosa II's
predicament still ruled out all hope. The colony was strictly on its
own.
Bordman said heavily:
"I'll accept the photographs. I even accept the statement that the
colony will die. I will prepare my report for the cache Aletha tells me
you're preparing. And I apologize for any affront I may have offered
you."
Dr. Chuka nodded approvingly. He regarded Bordman with benign warmth.
Ralph Redfeather said cordially enough:
"That's perfectly all right. No harm done."