It was a queer place, they soon learned. The climate was cool, but
pleasant. There were no radio waves beneath a readily detectable
ionosphere. Yet apparatus over an area three hundred miles by an
average sixty--the white spot--had responded in seconds; in parts of
seconds.
Which meant electric control. Which implied radio. But there were
no radio waves, which should have been proof that there was no
civilization on this planet capable of doing what certainly had been
done. Which was nonsense.
On the fourth day after landing there had been no alarm, but there was
a good-sized group of furry bipeds always waiting hopefully about the
_Danaë_ for one of the humans to come out and scratch them. All but
Sattell. When he came out of the _Danaë_, the bipeds moved away. They
would not go near him.
"I am not comfortable," Borden said to Jerry. "Something drained power
from us. Enough to run the ship for two years was drained out in eight
seconds! But we land, and the only inhabitants are your fine furry
friends whose one purpose in life seems to be to get scratched. They
act more like pets than wild animals, and sometimes more like people
than pets. But if they're pets, did their masters try to kill us? What
does go on on this planet, anyhow?"
Jerry said modestly, "I'm beginning to understand the furry creatures a
little, sir. They're remarkably intelligent, for animals. They want me
to go somewhere with them. I'd like to. Is it all right?"
Borden said, "If you think it's safe. Ellen has the planting well under
way, and the fuel synthesizer is working after a fashion, although I'd
a lot rather have it working near the equator. I'm getting along fairly
well with rebuilding our drive, but there's a long job ahead. If other
planetary inhabitants don't find us and kill us, we're all right. If
they do find us, what you do won't matter. Go along if you like, within
reason. But I wish you could take Sattell with you."
That couldn't be done. The two-legged creatures hung about the ship
wearing an air of happy anticipation when all the humans were inside,
and flopping eagerly on their backs to be scratched, when they came
out. But when Sattell tried to approach one of the creatures, they fled
as if in terror. Not one had ever been knowingly within a hundred
yards of him--and he hated them.
When Jerry first reported that they had some sort of language and could
exchange simple facts--he didn't know whether they could exchange ideas
or not--Sattell savagely insisted that those who knew of the existence
of the ship should be killed, and any others who discovered it also
killed. The idea would be to keep the news of the _Danaë's_ landing
from reaching whatever other race might inhabit the white spot of the
heat-ray.
But there were always some of the furry ones around. Sometimes more,
sometimes less. Maybe only the same ones came to the ship. Maybe they
went away and others took their places. Neither Borden nor Jerry was
sure, but both demurred at killing. Besides, the news had already gone
as far as such creatures were likely to take it before Sattell proposed
to wipe them out.
* * * * *
Sattell raged when he was overruled. He was overruled over most things
because he couldn't be trusted. Borden wouldn't let him work on the
drive. He might try to make sure that if he didn't get back to Earth,
nobody else should, either.
Ellen took the dibble stick and the seed capsules and planted the crop
that might supply them with food. Each seed was enclosed in a gelatine
capsule with a bit of fertilizer and a spore culture of terrestrial
soil micro-organisms. Planted, by the time moisture reached the seed
there was a bed of Earth's own microscopic soil-flora around the seed
to help it grow.
But Sattell couldn't be trusted to plant seed, either, if the others
would benefit.
He couldn't even be allowed to work the fuel synthesizer. In that
apparatus plain water entered a force-field in which H^1 and H^2 simply
could not exist as molecules or ions. So the atoms frantically absorbed
heat energy from their surroundings to make pseudo valence-bonds and
develop giant hydrogen molecules which could only be written down as
being of molecular weight.
The fuel synthesizer was set up a good half-mile from the space-ship
and was developing a small ice-cap of its own. But it would be a long
time before there was drive fuel to refill the ship's tanks. Sattell
might sabotage that.
So he had to be treated as the pampered guest of those who believed
implicitly in his will to murder them. All arms were safely locked
away. Even the air-lock fastening had to be dismantled, so he couldn't
lock everybody else out of the ship.
And Borden and Ellen and Jerry went armed, and had nerve-rackingly to
be on guard at all times. But it would have been ridiculous to confine
Sattell so he had the status of a nonworking guest because he was a
potential murderer.
There was not much for Jerry to do either, except hold conferences with
his admirers. On the fifth twenty-hour day after the _Danaë's_ landing,
Jerry set off with an excited mob of furry, trunk-waving friends. He
carried a walkie-talkie, depending on the absence of radio waves from
the planet's atmosphere to make its use safe.
Two hours after he had headed north toward the ice, Borden and Ellen
came back from an inspection tour of the crops and fuel synthesizer,
and found that Sattell had disappeared, too. He'd taken all the food he
could conveniently carry from their depressingly short supply.
Borden swore bitterly. Sattell underfoot was a nuisance and a menace.
But Sattell at large might be more, and worse. There was no glamor in
being cast-away on this alien world, such as is shown in visi-screen
plays. The _Danaë_ was a small utility ship, suitable for small
expeditions for scientific purposes, or for the staking out of private
planetary estates--a common practice, these days--and the servicing of
such establishments.
Her eighty-foot length now rested slightly askew in the pit her landing
had made. About her was arctic flora, and the thick fur of the bipeds
suggested that they were arctic animals themselves. But here close to
the ice-cap was the only place on this planet where a man might hope to
survive. It was madness for Sattell to leave the ship.
"It doesn't make sense!" Borden said. "What has he to gain? He was
afraid we'd go off and maroon him. We can't do that with crops going,
the synthesizer working, and the drive pulled down. So what can he gain
by running off?"
Ellen said uneasily, "Jerry's armed. And he won't be suspecting
anything."
Borden scowled. "Get out the talkie and warn him. If Sattell surprises
Jerry and gets his blaster, he might bushwhack us!"
* * * * *
Ellen brought out the talkie. She turned it on and said crisply:
"Jerry, Sattell's disappeared. Come in please."
Jerry did not answer. Borden paced up and down, frowning and thinking
of ever more disastrous possibilities.
"Bring the talkie into the ship," he said presently. "We'll hook it to
an outside aerial. Jerry won't be traveling with his turned on. But
he's bound to call us eventually."
He took the talkie from her, carried it inside the ship, and plugged
it in there. In minutes a speaker in the control room was emitting the
nondescript hissing which was the random electronic noises made by
metal objects nearby. The ship itself, for one.
"I'm going to look in Sattell's cabin," said Borden grimly.
That was drastic action. On a space journey privacy is at once so
difficult and so essential that nobody on a space expedition ever
enters another's private cabin. To look in Sattell's cabin was a great
violation of normal rules of conduct. But it had to be done now.
Borden went in the cabin and through Sattell's possessions. He came out
looking sick.
"I found something," he told Ellen. "When we were coming in I looked
at that white spot through a telescope. I didn't see anything worth
noting, but I snapped the telecamera out of pure habit. Then I forgot
it. But Sattell didn't. He made this."
He showed her a photographic print. Sattell had made it from the infra
red image on the full color photograph. It was an enlargement, showing
more detail than Borden had seen with the naked eye. There were shadows
on this print, the shadows of structures. There were buildings rising
from the white. There were towers. There was a city on the white spot
from which a heat-ray had been projected at the _Danaë_ out in space!
Quite as important, the threadlike lines they had noticed were
here plainly highways leading away from it. One led north, judging
directions from the shadows. It reached toward the polar ice-cap near
which the small space-ship was grounded.
"If Sattell really expects us to kill him," said Borden, "he could
have headed for that highway. He might expect to make a deal with our
enemies by selling us out. Even if they killed him out of hand, the
fact that he was an alien would make them hunt for us. So he could
figure that he might make friends, but even if he didn't he would be
sure to ruin us. A win for him either way."