chair. The boat had settled on its own tail-fins, and his feet were
higher than his head. He felt ridiculous. He saw the engineer at work
unstrapping himself, and 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 was a 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 mountain-sides 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--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 space-port
city of Timbuk.
So it was natural for Aletha to look at this wind-carved wilderness
otherwise than as Bordman did. Her racial kin 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-beam 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 stone tepee, and the best horses known to men
were raised by ranchers with bronze skins and high cheek-bones 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.
"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 breechclout 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.
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
dessicated. 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, and held out his gloved
hand.
"I'm Bordman," he said. "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. "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
gravity stresses. 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 month's voyage from Trent to here. No repairs or overhaulings
were needed. There was no maintenance work to speak of. There would
be only standby watches until something happened, and 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--five
diameters out--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 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 about 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 ten
degrees. Africans could do steel construction work in the open,
protected only by insulating shoes and gloves. But Bordman could not
venture out-of-doors except in a heat-suit. He could not 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, 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.
"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, "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, so 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 colonist's 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 drily 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, in that astonishingly deep-toned voice of his,
"I'd say 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 deliberate gravity:
"Of course wind had something to do with it."
Bordman fumed.
"I think you know," he said, "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
still 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.
"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 and 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 Doctor 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. He donned the heat-suit that had
not protected him adequately before, but had certainly saved his life,
and 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.
"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 head-dress 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 was like a blow. 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. "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 cargos, 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--was the 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
surfaces 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
hobby-horse. Under the sunshade it was infuriatingly like a horse on
a carrousel. 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, makes 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."