tiny creatures which on this planet were birds, and Faro Nell's
deep-bass, raging growls, and then the click of Bordman's safety going
off as he got ready to use the weapon Huyghens had given him.
Semper screamed again, flapping low above the tree-tops, following
parti-colored, monstrous shapes beneath.
Eight blue-and-tan fiends came racing out of the underbrush. They had
spiny fringes, and horns, and glaring eyes, and they looked as if they
had come straight out of hell. On the instant of their appearance
they leaped, emitting squalling, spitting squeals that were like the
cries of fighting tom-cats ten thousand times magnified. Huyghens'
rifle cracked, and its sound was wiped out in the louder detonation
of its bullet in Sphexian flesh. A tan-and-blue monster tumbled over,
shrieking. Faro Nell charged, the very impersonation of white-hot
fury. Bordman fired, and his bullet exploded against a tree. Sitka
Pete brought his massive forepaws in a clapping, monstrous ear-boxing
motion. A sphex died.
Then Bordman fired again. Sourdough Charley whuffed. He fell forward
upon a spitting bi-colored fiend, rolled him over, and raked with his
hind-claws. The belly-hide of the sphex was tenderer than the rest.
The creature rolled away, snapping at its own wounds. Another sphex
found itself shaken loose from the tumult about Sitka Pete. It whirled
to leap on him from behind, and Huyghens fired. Two plunged upon Faro
Nell, and Bordman blasted one and Faro Nell disposed of the other in
awesome fury. Then Sitka Pete heaved himself erect--seeming to drip
sphexes--and Sourdough waddled over and pulled one off and killed it
and went back for another.... Then both rifles cracked together and
there was suddenly nothing left to fight.
The bears prowled from one to another of the corpses. Sitka Pete
rumbled and lifted up a limp head. Crash! Then another. He went
over the lot, whether or not they showed signs of life. When he had
finished, they were wholly still.
Semper came flapping down out of the sky. He had screamed and fluttered
overhead as the fight went on. Now he landed with a rush. Huyghens
went soothingly from one bear to another, calming them with his voice.
It took longest to calm Faro Nell, licking Nugget with impassioned
solicitude and growling horribly as she licked.
"Come along, now," said Huyghens, when Sitka showed signs of intending
to sit down again. "Heave these carcasses over a cliff. Come along!
Sitka! Sourdough! Hup!"
He guided them as the two big males somewhat fastidiously lifted up
the nightmarish creatures and carried them to the edge of the spur of
stone. They let the beasts go bouncing and sliding down into the valley.
"That," said Huyghens, "is so their little pals will gather round them
and caterwaul their woe where there's no trail of ours to give them
ideas. If we'd been near a river I'd have dumped them in to float
down-stream and gather mourners wherever they stranded. Around the
station I incinerate them. If I had to leave them, I'd make tracks
away. About fifty miles upwind would be a good idea."
He opened the pack Sourdough carried and extracted giant-sized swabs
and some gallons of antiseptic. He tended the three Kodiaks in turn,
swabbing not only the cuts and scratches they'd received, but deeply
soaking their fur where there could be suspicion of spilled sphex-blood.
"This antiseptic deodorizes, too," he told Bordman. "Or we'd be trailed
by any sphex who passed to leeward of us. When we start off, I'll swab
the bears' paws for the same reason."
Bordman was very quiet. He'd missed his first shot, but, the last few
seconds of the fight he'd fired very deliberately and every bullet hit.
Now he said bitterly:
"If you're instructing me so I can carry on should you be killed, I
doubt that it's worth while!"
Huyghens felt in his pack and unfolded the enlargements he'd made of
the space-photos of this part of the planet. He carefully oriented the
map with distant landmarks, and drew a line across the photo.
"The SOS signal comes from somewhere close to the robot-colony," he
reported. "I think a little to the south of it. Probably from a mine
they'd opened up, on the far side of the Sere Plateau. See how I've
marked this map? Two fixes, one from the station and one from here. I
came away off-course to get a fix here so we'd have two position-lines
to the transmitter. The signal could have come from the other side of
the planet. But it doesn't."
"The odds would be astronomical against other castaways," protested
Bordman.
"No," said Huyghens. "Ships have been coming here. To the robot-colony.
One could have crashed. And I have friends, too."
He repacked his apparatus and gestured to the bears. He led them beyond
the scene of combat and carefully swabbed off their paws, so they could
not possibly leave a train of sphex-blood scent behind them. He waved
Semper, the eagle, aloft.
"Let's go," he told the Kodiaks. "Yonder! Hup!"
The party headed down-hill and into the jungle again. Now it was
Sourdough's turn to take the lead, and Sitka Pete prowled more widely
behind him. Faro Nell trailed the men, with Nugget. She kept a sharp
eye upon the cub. He was a baby, still; he only weighed six hundred
pounds. And of course she watched against danger from the rear.
Overhead, Semper fluttered and flew in giant circles and spirals, never
going very far away. Huyghens referred constantly to the screen which
showed what the air-borne camera saw. The image tilted and circled
and banked and swayed. It was by no means the best air-reconnaissance
that could be imagined, but it was the best that would work. Presently
Huyghens said:
"We swing to the right, here. The going's bad straight ahead, and it
looks like a pack of sphexes has killed and is feeding."
Bordman said:
"It's against reason for carnivores to be as thick as you say! There
has to be a certain amount of other animal life for every meat-eating
beast. Too many of them would eat all the game and starve."
"They're gone all winter," explained Huyghens, "which around here
isn't as severe as you might think. And a good many animals seem to
breed just after the sphexes go south. Also, the sphexes aren't around
all the warm weather. There's a sort of peak, and then for a matter
of weeks you won't see one of them, and suddenly the jungle swarms
with them again. Then, presently, they head south. Apparently they're
migratory in some fashion, but nobody knows." He said drily: "There
haven't been many naturalists around on this planet. The animal life's
inimical."
Bordman fretted. He was accustomed to arrival at a partly or
completely finished colonial set-up, and to pass upon the completion
or non-completion of the installation as designed. Now he was in an
intolerably hostile environment, depending upon an illegal colonist for
his life, engaged upon a demoralizingly indefinite enterprise--because
the mechanical spark-signal could be working long after its
constructors were dead--and his ideas about a number of matters were
shaken. He was alive, for example, because of three giant Kodiak bears
and a bald eagle. He and Huyghens could have been surrounded by ten
thousand robots, and they'd have been killed. Sphexes and robots would
have ignored each other, and sphexes would have made straight for the
men, who'd have had less than four seconds in which to discover for
themselves that they were attacked, prepare to defend themselves, and
kill the eight sphexes.
Bordman's convictions as a civilized man were shaken. Robots were
marvelous contrivances for doing the expected, accomplishing the
planned, coping with the predicted. But they also had defects. Robots
could only follow instructions. If this thing happens, do this, if
that thing happens, do that. But before something else, neither this
or that, robots were helpless. So a robot civilization worked only in
an environment where nothing unanticipated ever turned up, and human
supervisors never demanded anything unexpected. Bordman was appalled.
He found Nugget, the cub, ambling uneasily in his wake. The cub
flattened his ears miserably when Bordman glanced at him. It occurred
to the man that Nugget was receiving a lot of disciplinary thumpings
from Faro Nell. He was knocked about psychologically. His lack of
information and unfitness for independent survival in this environment
was being hammered into him.
"Hi, Nugget," said Bordman ruefully. "I feel just about the way you do!"
Nugget brightened visibly. He frisked. He tended to gambol. He looked
hopefully up into Bordman's face.
The man reached out and patted Nugget's head. It was the first time in
all his life that he'd ever petted an animal.
He heard a snuffling sound behind him. Skin crawled at the back of his
neck. He whirled.
Faro Nell regarded him--eighteen hundred pounds of she-bear only ten
feet away and looking into his eyes. For one panicky instant Bordman
went cold all over. Then he realized that Faro Nell's eyes were not
burning. She was not snarling, nor did she emit those blood-curdling
sounds which the bare prospect of danger to Nugget had produced up on
the rocky spur. She looked at him blandly. In fact, after a moment
she swung off on some independent investigation of a matter that had
aroused her curiosity.
The travelling-party went on, Nugget frisking beside Bordman and
tending to bump into him out of pure cub-clumsiness. Now and again he
looked adoringly at Bordman, in the instant and overwhelming affection
of the very young.
Bordman trudged on. Presently he glanced behind again. Faro Nell was
now ranging more widely. She was well satisfied to have Nugget in the
immediate care of a man. From time to time he got on her nerves.
A little while later, Bordman called ahead.
"Huyghens! Look here! I've been appointed nursemaid to Nugget!"
Huyghens looked back.
"Oh, slap him a few times and he'll go back to his mother."
"The devil I will!" said Bordman querulously. "I like it!"
The travelling-party went on.
When night fell, they camped. There could be no fire, of course,
because all the minute night-things about would come to dance in the
glow. But there could not be darkness, equally, because night-walkers
hunted in the dark. So Huyghens set out barrier-lamps which made a
wall of twilight about their halting-place, and the stag-like creature
Faro Nell had carried became their evening meal. Then they slept--at
least the men did--and the bears dozed and snorted and waked and dozed
again. Semper sat immobile with his head under his wing on a tree-limb.
Presently there was a glorious cool hush and all the world glowed in
morning-light diffused through the jungle by a newly risen sun. Then
they arose and pushed on.
This day they stopped stock-still for two hours while sphexes puzzled
over the trail the bears had left. Huyghens discoursed on the need of
an anti-scent, to be used on the boots of men and the paws of bears,
which would make the following of their trails unpopular with sphexes.
Bordman seized upon the idea and suggested that a sphex-repellant odor
might be worked out, which would make a human revolting to a sphex. If
that were done, humans could go freely about, unmolested.
"Like stink-bugs," said Huyghens, sardonically. "A very intelligent
idea! Very rational! You can feel proud!"
And suddenly Bordman was not proud of the idea at all.
They camped again. On the third night they were at the base of that
remarkable formation, the Sere Plateau, which from a distance looked
like a mountain range but was actually a desert table-land. It was
not reasonable for a desert to be raised high, while lowlands had
rain, but on the fourth morning they found out why. They saw, far, far
away, a truly monstrous mountain-mass at the end of the long expanse
of the plateau. It was like the prow of a ship. It lay, so Huyghens
observed, directly in line with the prevailing winds, and divided them
as a ship's prow divides the waters. The moisture-bearing air-currents
flowed beside the plateau, not over it, and its interior was desert in
the unscreened sunshine of the high altitudes.
It took them a full day to get half-way up the slope. And here, twice,
as they climbed, Semper flew screaming over aggregations of sphexes
to one side of them or the other. These were much larger groups than
Huyghens had ever seen before, fifty to a hundred monstrosities
together, where a dozen was a large hunting-pack elsewhere. He looked
in the screen which showed him what Semper saw, four to five miles
away. The sphexes padded uphill toward the Sere Plateau in a long line.
Fifty--sixty--seventy tan-and-azure beasts out of hell.
"I'd hate to have that bunch jump us," he said candidly to Bordman. "I
don't think we'd stand a chance."
"Here's where a robot tank would be useful," Bordman observed.
"Anything armored," conceded Huyghens. "One man in an armored station
like mine would be safe. But if he killed a sphex he'd be besieged.
He'd have to stay holed up, breathing the smell of dead sphex, until
the odor'd gone away. And he mustn't kill any others or he'd be
besieged until winter came."
Bordman did not suggest the advantages of robots in other directions.
At that moment, for example, they were working their way up a slope
which averaged fifty degrees. The bears climbed without effort despite
their burdens. For the men it was infinite toil. Semper, the eagle,
manifested impatience with bears and men alike, who crawled so slowly
up an incline over which he soared.
He went ahead up the mountainside and teetered in the air-currents at
the plateau's edge. Huyghens looked in the vision-plate by which he
reported.
"How the devil," panted Bordman, panting--they had stopped for a
breather, and the bears waited patiently for them--"how do you train
bears like these? I can understand Semper."
"I don't train them," said Huyghens, staring into the plate, "They're
mutations. In heredity the sex-linkage of physical characteristics
is standard stuff. There's also been some sound work done on the
gene-linkage of psychological factors. There was need, on my home
planet, for an animal who could fight like a fiend, live off the land,
carry a pack and get along with men at least as well as dogs do. In the
old days they'd have tried to breed the desired physical properties
in an animal who already had the personality they wanted. Something
like a giant dog, say. But back home they went at it the other way
about. They picked the wanted physical characteristics and bred for the
personality, the psychology. The job got done over a century ago. The
Kodiak bear named Kodius Champion was the first real success. He had
everything that was wanted. These bears are his descendants."
"They look normal," commented Bordman.
"They are!" said Huyghens warmly. "Just as normal as an honest dog!
They're not trained, like Semper. They train themselves!" He looked
back into the plate in his hands, which showed the ground six or seven
thousand feet higher. "Semper, now, is a trained bird without too much
brain. He's educated--a glorified hawk. But the bears want to get along
with men. They're emotionally dependent on us. Like dogs. Semper's a
servant, but they're companions and friends. He's trained, but they're
loyal. He's conditioned. They love us. He'd abandon me if he ever
realized he could; he thinks he can only eat what men feed him. But
the bears wouldn't want to. They like us. I admit I like them. Maybe
because they like me."
Bordman said deliberately:
"Aren't you a trifle loose-tongued, Huyghens? You've told me something
that will locate and convict the people who set you up here. It
shouldn't be hard to find where bears were bred for psychological
mutations, and where a bear named Kodius Champion left descendants. I
can find out where you came from now, Huyghens!"
Huyghens looked up from the plate with its tiny swaying television
image.
"No harm done," he said amiably. "I'm a criminal there, too. It's
officially on record that I kidnapped these bears and escaped with
them. Which, on my home planet, is about as heinous a crime as a man
can commit. It's worse than horse-theft back on Earth in the old days.
The kin and cousins of my bears are highly thought of. I'm quite a
criminal, back home."
Bordman stared.
"Did you steal them?" he demanded.
"Confidentially," said Huyghens. "No. But prove it!" Then he said:
"Take a look in this plate. See what Semper can see up at the plateau's
edge."
Bordman squinted aloft, where the eagle flew in great sweeps and
dashes. Somehow, by the experience of the past few days, Bordman knew
that Semper was screaming fiercely as he flew. He made a dart toward
the plateau's border.
Bordman looked at the transmitted picture. It was only four inches
by six, but it was perfectly without grain and accurate in color. It
moved and turned as the camera-bearing eagle swooped and circled. For
an instant the screen showed the steeply sloping mountainside, and off
at one edge the party of men and bears could be seen as dots. Then it
swept away and showed the top of the plateau.
There were sphexes. A pack of two hundred trotted toward the desert
interior. They moved at leisure, in the open. The viewing camera
reeled, and there were more. As Bordman watched and as the bird flew
higher, he could see still other sphexes moving up over the edge of the
plateau from a small erosion-defile here and another one there. The
Sere Plateau was alive with the hellish creatures. It was inconceivable
that there should be game enough for them to live on. They were visible
as herds of cattle would be visible on grazing planets.
It was simply impossible.
"Migrating," observed Huyghens. "I said they did. They're headed
somewhere. Do you know, I doubt that it would be healthy for us to try
to cross the Plateau through such a swarm of sphexes!"
Bordman swore, in abrupt change of mood.
"But the signal's still coming through. Somebody's alive over at the
robot-colony. Must we wait till the migration's over?"
"We don't know," Huyghens pointed out, "that they'll stay alive. They
may need help badly. We have to get to them. But at the same time--"
He glanced at Sourdough Charley and Sitka Pete, clinging patiently to
the mountainside while the men rested and talked. Sitka had managed to
find a place to sit down, one massive paw anchoring him in place.
Huyghens waved his arm, pointing in a new direction.
"Let's go!" he called briskly. "Let's go! Yonder! Hup!"
They followed the slopes of the Sere Plateau, neither ascending to its
level top--where sphexes congregated--nor descending into the foothills
where sphexes assembled. They moved along hillsides and mountain-flanks
which sloped anywhere from thirty to sixty degrees, and they did not
cover much territory. They practically forgot what it was to walk on
level ground.
At the end of the sixth day, they camped on the top of a massive
boulder which projected from a mountainous stony wall. There was
barely room on the boulder for all the party. Faro Nell fussily
insisted that Nugget should be in the safest part, which meant near
the mountain-flank. She would have crowded the men outward, but Nugget
whimpered for Bordman. Wherefore, when Bordman moved to comfort him,
Faro Nell drew back and snorted at Sitka and Sourdough and they made
room for her near the edge.
It was a hungry camp. They had come upon tiny rills upon occasion,
flowing down the mountainside. Here the bears had drunk deeply and
the men had filled canteens. But this was the third night on the
mountainside, and there had been no game at all. Huyghens made no move
to bring out food for Bordman or himself. Bordman made no comment. He
was beginning to participate in the relationship between bears and
men, which was not the slavery of the bears but something more. It was
two-way. He felt it.
"You'd think," he said, "that since the sphexes don't seem to hunt on
their way uphill, there should be some game. They ignore everything as
they file up."
This was true enough. The normal fighting formation of sphexes was line
abreast, which automatically surrounded anything which offered to flee
and outflanked anything which offered fight. But here they ascended
the mountain in long files, one after the other, apparently following
long-established trails. The wind blew along the slopes and carried
scent sidewise. But the sphexes were not diverted from their chosen
paths. The long processions of hideous blue-and-tawny creatures--it was
hard to think of them as natural beasts, male and female and laying
eggs like reptiles on other planets--the long processions simply
climbed.
"There've been other thousands of beasts before them," said Huyghens.
"They must have been crowding this way for days or even weeks. We've
seen tens of thousands in Semper's camera. They must be uncountable,
altogether. The first-comers ate all the game there was, and the
last-comers have something else on whatever they use for minds."
Bordman protested:
"But so many carnivores in one place is impossible! I know they are
here, but they can't be!"
"They're cold-blooded," Huyghens pointed out. "They don't burn food
to sustain body-temperature. After all, lots of creatures go for
long periods without eating. Even bears hibernate. But this isn't
hibernation--or estivation, either."
He was setting up the radiation-wave receiver in the darkness. There
was no point in attempting a fix here. The transmitter was on the other
side of the sphex-crowded Sere Plateau. The men and bears would commit
suicide by crossing here.
Even so, Huyghens turned on the receiver. There came the whispering,
scratchy sound of background-noise, and then the signal. Three dots,
three dashes, three dots. Huyghens turned it off. Bordman said:
"Shouldn't we have answered that signal before we left the station? To
encourage them?"
"I doubt they have a receiver," said Huyghens. "They won't expect an
answer for months, anyhow. They'd hardly listen all the time, and if
they're living in a mine-tunnel and trying to sneak out for food to
stretch their supplies, they'll be too busy to try to make complicated
recorders or relays."
Bordman was silent for a moment or two.
"We've got to get food for the bears," he said presently. "Nugget's
weaned, and he's hungry."
"We will," Huyghens promised. "I may be wrong, but it seems to me that
the number of sphexes climbing the mountain is less than yesterday
and the day before. We may have just about crossed the path of their
migration. They're thinning out. When we're past their trail, we'll
have to look out for night-walkers and the like again. But I think they
wiped out all animal life on their migration-route."
He was not quite right. He was waked in darkness by the sound of
slappings and the grunting of bears. Feather-light puffs of breeze beat
upon his face. He struck his belt-lamp sharply and the world was hidden
by a whitish film which snatched itself away. Something flapped. Then
he saw the stars and the emptiness on the edge of which they camped.
Then big white things flapped toward him.
Sitka Pete whuffed mightily and swatted. Faro Nell grunted and swung.
She caught something in her claws.
"Watch this!" said Huyghens.
More things strangely-shaped and pallid like human skin reeled and
flapped crazily toward him.
A huge hairy paw reached up into the light-beam and snatched a flying
thing out of it. Another great paw. The three great Kodiaks were on
their hind legs, swatting at creatures which flittered insanely, unable
to resist the fascination of the glaring lamp. Because of their wild
gyrations it was impossible to see them in detail, but they were those
unpleasant night-creatures which looked like plucked flying monkeys but
were actually something quite different.
The bears did not snarl or snap. They swatted, with a remarkable air
of business-like competence and purpose. Small mounds of broken things
built up about their feet.
Suddenly there were no more. Huyghens snapped off the light. The bears
crunched and fed busily in the darkness.