said Huyghens calmly. "They drain their victims of blood like
vampire-bats--they've some trick of not waking them--and when they're
dead the whole tribe eats. But bears have thick fur, and they wake
when they're touched. And they're omnivorous. They'll eat anything but
sphexes, and like it. You might say that those night-creatures came
to lunch. They _are_ it, for the bears, who are living off the
country as usual."
Bordman uttered a sudden exclamation. He made a tiny light, and blood
flowed down his hand. Huyghens passed over his pocket kit of antiseptic
and bandages. Bordman stanched the bleeding and bound up his hand. Then
he realized that Nugget chewed on something. When he turned the light,
Nugget swallowed convulsively. It appeared that he had caught and
devoured the creature which had drawn blood from Bordman. But he'd lost
none to speak of, at that.
In the morning they started along the sloping scarp of the plateau once
more. After marching silently for a while, Bordman said:
"Robots wouldn't have handled those vampire-things, Huyghens."
"Oh, they could be built to watch for them," said Huyghens, tolerantly.
"But you'd have to swat for yourself. I prefer the bears."
He led the way on. Twice Huyghens halted to examine the ground about
the mountains' bases through binoculars. He looked encouraged as they
went on. The monstrous peak which was like the bow of a ship at the
end of the Sere Plateau was visibly nearer. Toward midday, indeed, it
loomed high above the horizon, no more than fifteen miles away. And at
midday Huyghens called a final halt.
"No more congregations of sphexes down below," he said cheerfully, "and
we haven't seen a climbing line of them in miles." The crossing of a
sphex-trail had meant simply waiting until one party had passed, and
then crossing before another came in view. "I've a hunch we've left
their migration-route behind. Let's see what Semper tells us!"
He waved the eagle aloft. Like all creatures other than men, the bird
normally functioned only for the satisfaction of his appetite, and then
tended to loaf or sleep. He had ridden the last few miles perched on
Sitka Pete's pack. Now he soared upward and Huyghens watched in the
small vision-plate.
Semper went soaring. The image on the plate swayed and turned, and in
minutes was above the plateau's edge. Here there were some patches of
brush and the ground rolled a little. But as Semper towered higher
still, the inner desert appeared. Nearby, it was clear of beasts.
Only once, when the eagle banked sharply and the camera looked along
the long dimension of the plateau, did Huyghens see any sign of the
blue-and-tan beasts. There he saw what looked like masses amounting to
herds. Incredible, of course; carnivores do not gather in herds.
"We go straight up," said Huyghens in satisfaction. "We cross the
Plateau here, and we can edge down-wind a bit, even. I think we'll
find something interesting on our way to your robot-colony."
He waved to the bears to go ahead uphill.
They reached the top hours later, barely before sunset. And they saw
game. Not much, but game at the grassy, brushy border of the desert.
Huyghens brought down a shaggy ruminant which surely would not live
on a desert. When night fell there was an abrupt chill in the air. It
was much colder than night temperatures on the slopes. The air was
thin. Bordman thought and presently guessed at the cause. In the lee of
the prow-mountain the air was calm. There were no clouds. The ground
radiated its heat to empty space. It could be bitterly cold in the
night-time, here.
"And hot by day," Huyghens agreed when he mentioned it. "The sunshine's
terrifically hot where the air is thin, but on most mountains there's
wind. By day, here, the ground will tend to heat up like the surface
of a planet without atmosphere. It may be a hundred and forty or fifty
degrees on the sand at midday. But it should be cold at night."
It was. Before midnight Huyghens built a fire. There could be no danger
of night-walkers where the temperature dropped to freezing.
In the morning the men were stiff with cold, but the bears snorted and
moved about briskly. They seemed to revel in the morning chill. Sitka
and Sourdough Charley, in fact, became festive and engaged in a mock
fight, whacking each other with blows that were only feigned, but would
have crushed the skull of any man. Nugget sneezed with excitement as he
watched them. Faro Nell regarded them with female disapproval.
They started on. Semper seemed sluggish. After a single brief flight he
descended and rode on Sitka's pack, as on the previous day. He perched
there, surveying the landscape as it changed from semi-arid to pure
desert in their progress. He would not fly. Soaring birds do not like
to fly when there are no winds to make currents of which they can take
advantage.
Once Huyghens stopped and pointed out to Bordman exactly where they
were on the enlarged photograph taken from space, and the exact spot
from which the distress-signal seemed to come.
"You're doing it in case something happens to you," said Bordman. "I
admit it's sense, but--what could I do to help those survivors even if
I got to them, without you?"
"What you've learned about sphexes would help," said Huyghens. "The
bears would help. And we left a note back at my station. Whoever
grounds at the landing-field back there--and the beacon's working--will
find instructions to come to the place we're trying to reach."
They started walking again. The narrow patch of non-desert border of
the Sere Plateau was behind them, now, and they marched across powdery
desert sand.
"See here," said Bordman. "I want to know something. You tell me you're
listed as a bear-thief on your home planet. You tell me it's a lie, to
protect your friends from prosecution by the Colonial Survey. You're on
your own, risking your life every minute of every day. You took a risk
in not shooting me. Now you're risking more in going to help men who'd
have to be witnesses that you were a criminal. What are you doing it
for?"
Huyghens grinned.
"Because I don't like robots. I don't like the fact that they're
subduing men, making men subordinate to them."
"Go on," insisted Bordman. "I don't see why disliking robots should
make you a criminal! Nor men subordinating themselves to robots,
either."
"But they are," said Huyghens mildly. "I'm a crank, of course. But--I
live like a man on this planet. I go where I please and do what I
please. My helpers are my friends. If the robot-colony had been a
success, would the humans in it have lived like men? Hardly. They'd
have to live the way robots let them! They'd have to stay inside a
fence the robots built. They'd have to eat foods that robots could
raise, and no others. Why, a man couldn't move his bed near a window,
because if he did the house-tending robots couldn't work! Robots would
serve them--the way the robots determined--but all they'd get out of it
would be jobs servicing the robots!"
Bordman shook his head.
"As long as men want robot service, they have to take the service that
robots can give. If you don't want those services--"
"I want to decide what I want," said Huyghens, again mildly, "instead
of being limited to choose what I'm offered. In my home planet we
half-way tamed it with dogs and guns. Then we developed the bears,
and we finished the job with them. Now there's population-pressure and
the room for bears and dogs--and men!--is dwindling. More and more
people are being deprived of the power of decision, and being allowed
only the power of choice among the things robots allow. The more we
depend on robots, the more limited those choices become. We don't want
our children to limit themselves to wanting what robots can provide!
We don't want them shriveling to where they abandon everything robots
can't give, or won't. We want them to be men and women. Not damned
automatons who live _by_ pushing robot-controls so they can
live _to_ push robot-controls. If that's not subordination to
robots--"
"It's an emotional argument," protested Bordman. "Not everybody feels
that way."
"But I feel that way," said Huyghens. "And so do a lot of others. This
is a damned big galaxy and it's apt to contain some surprises. The one
sure thing about a robot and a man who depends on them is that they
can't handle the unexpected. There's going to come a time when we need
men who can. So on my home planet, some of us asked for Loren Two, to
colonize. It was refused--too dangerous. But men can colonize anywhere
if they're men. So I came here to study the planet. Especially the
sphexes. Eventually, we expected to ask for a license again, with proof
that we could handle even those beasts. I'm already doing it in a mild
way. But the Survey licensed a robot-colony--and where is it?"
Bordman made a sour face.
"You took the wrong way to go about it Huyghens. It was illegal. It
is. It was the pioneer spirit, which is admirable enough, but wrongly
directed. After all, it was pioneers who left Earth for the stars.
But--"
Sourdough raised up on his hind legs and sniffed the air. Huyghens
swung his rifle around to be handy. Bordman slipped off the
safety-catch of his own. Nothing happened.
"In a way," said Bordman, "you're talking about liberty and freedom,
which most people think is politics. You say it can be more. In
principle, I'll concede it. But the way you put it, it sounds like a
freak religion."
"It's self-respect," corrected Huyghens.
"You may be--"
Faro Nell growled. She bumped Nugget with her nose, to drive him
closer to Bordman. She snorted at him, and trotted swiftly to where
Sitka and Sourdough faced toward the broader, sphex-filled expanse of
the Sere Plateau. She took up her position between them.
Huyghens gazed sharply beyond them and then all about.
"This could be bad!" he said softly. "But luckily there's no wind.
Here's a sort of hill. Come along, Bordman!"
He ran ahead, Bordman following and Nugget plumping heavily with
him. They reached the raised place, actually a mere hillock no more
than five or six feet above the surrounding sand, with a distorted
cactus-like growth protruding from the ground. Huyghens stared again.
He used his binoculars.
"One sphex," he said curtly. "Just one! And it's out of all reason
for a sphex to be alone. But it's not rational for them to gather in
hundreds of thousands, either!" He whetted his finger and held it up.
"No wind at all."
He used the binoculars again.
"It doesn't know we're here," he added. "It's moving away. Not another
one in sight...." He hesitated, biting his lips. "Look here, Bordman!
I'd like to kill that one lone sphex and find out something. There's
a fifty per cent chance I could find out something really important.
But--I might have to run. If I'm right...." Then he said grimly, "It'll
have to be done quickly. I'm going to ride Faro Nell, for speed. I
doubt Sitka or Sourdough will stay behind. But Nugget can't run fast
enough. Will you stay here with him?"
Bordman drew in his breath. Then he said calmly:
"You know what you're doing, I hope."
"Keep your eyes open. If you see anything, even at a distance, shoot
and we'll be back, fast! Don't wait until something's close enough to
hit. Shoot the instant you see anything, if you do!"
Bordman nodded. He found it peculiarly difficult to speak again.
Huyghens went over to the embattled bears and climbed up on Faro Nell's
back, holding fast by her shaggy fur.
"Let's go!" he snapped. "That way! Hup!"
The three Kodiaks plunged away at a dead run, Huyghens lurching and
swaying on Faro Nell's back. The sudden rush dislodged Semper from his
perch. He flapped wildly and got aloft. Then he followed effortfully,
flying low.
It happened very quickly. A Kodiak bear can travel as fast as a
race-horse on occasion. These three plunged arrow-straight for a spot
perhaps half a mile distant, where a blue-and-tawny shape whirled to
face them. There was the crash of Huyghens' weapon from where he rode
on Faro Nell's back; the explosion of the weapon and the bullet was one
sound. The monster leaped and died.
Huyghens jumped down from Faro Nell. He became feverishly busy at
something on the ground. Semper banked and whirled and landed. He
watched, with his head on one side.
Bordman stared. Huyghens was doing something to the dead sphex. The
two male bears prowled about, while Faro Nell regarded Huyghens with
intense curiosity. Back at the hillock, Nugget whimpered a little, and
Bordman patted him. Nugget whimpered more loudly. In the distance,
Huyghens straightened up and mounted Faro Nell's back. Sitka looked
back toward Bordman. He reared upward. He made a noise, apparently,
because Sourdough ambled to his side. The two great beasts began to
trot back. Semper flapped wildly and--lacking wind--lurched crazily
in the air. He landed on Huyghens' shoulder and clung there with his
talons.
Then Nugget howled hysterically and tried to swarm up Bordman, as a
cub tries to swarm up the nearest tree in time of danger. Bordman
collapsed, and the cub upon him--and there was a flash of stinking
scaly hide, while the air was filled with the snarling, spitting
squeals of a sphex in full leap. The beast had over-jumped, aiming at
Bordman and the cub while both were upright and arriving when they had
fallen. It went tumbling.
Bordman heard nothing but the fiendish squalling, but in the distance
Sitka and Sourdough were coming at rocket-ship speed. Faro Nell let out
a roar that fairly split the air. And then there was a furry streaking
toward her, bawling, while Bordman rolled to his feet and snatched up
his gun. He raged through pure instinct. The sphex crouched to pursue
the cub and Bordman swung his weapon as a club. He was literally
too close to shoot--and perhaps the sphex had only seen the fleeing
bear-cub. But he swung furiously--
And the sphex whirled. Bordman was toppled from his feet. An
eight-hundred-pound monstrosity straight out of hell--half wild-cat and
half spitting cobra with hydrophobia and homicidal mania added--such a
monstrosity is not to be withstood when in whirling its body strikes
one in the chest.
That was when Sitka arrived, bellowing. He stood on his hind legs,
emitting roars like thunder, challenging the sphex to battle. He
waddled forward. Huyghens approached, but he could not shoot with
Bordman in the sphere of an explosive bullet's destructiveness. Faro
Nell raged and snarled, torn between the urge to be sure that Nugget
was unharmed, and the frenzied fury of a mother whose offspring has
been endangered.
Mounted on Faro Nell, with Semper clinging idiotically to his shoulder,
Huyghens watched helplessly as the sphex spat and squaulled at Sitka,
having only to reach out one claw to let out Bordman's life.
* * * * *
They got away from there, though Sitka seemed to want to lift the
limp carcass of his victim in his teeth and dash it repeatedly to
the ground. He seemed doubly raging because a man--with whom all
Kodius Champion's descendants had an emotional relationship--had been
mishandled. But Bordman was not grievously hurt. He bounced and swore
as the bears raced for the horizon. Huyghens had flung him up on
Sourdough's pack and snapped for him to hold on. He shouted:
"Damn it, Huyghens! This isn't right! Sitka got some deep scratches!
That horror's claws may be poisonous!"
But Huyghens snapped "Hup! Hup!" to the bears, and they continued their
race against time. They went on for a good two miles, when Nugget
wailed despairingly of his exhaustion and Faro Nell halted firmly to
nuzzle him.
"This may be good enough," said Huyghens. "Considering that there's no
wind and the big mass of beasts is down the plateau and there were only
those two around here. Maybe they're too busy to hold a wake, even.
Anyhow--"
He slid to the ground and extracted the antiseptic and swabs. "Sitka
first," snapped Bordman. "I'm all right!"
Huyghens swabbed the big bear's wounds. They were trivial, because
Sitka Pete was an experienced sphex-fighter. Then Bordman grudgingly
let the curiously-smelling stuff--it reeked of ozone--be applied to the
slashes on his chest. He held his breath as it stung. Then he said:
"It was my fault, Huyghens. I watched you instead of the landscape. I
couldn't imagine what you were doing."
"I was doing a quick dissection," Huyghens told him. "By luck, that
first sphex was a female, as I hoped. And she was about to lay her
eggs. Ugh! And now I know why the sphexes migrate, and where, and how
it is that they don't need game up here."
He slapped a quick bandage on Bordman then led the way eastward, still
putting distance between the dead sphexes and his party.
"I'd dissected them before," said Huyghens. "Not enough's been known
about them. Some things needed to be found out if men were ever to be
able to live here."
"With bears?" asked Bordman ironically.
"Oh, yes," said Huyghens. "But the point is that sphexes come to the
desert here to breed, to mate and lay their eggs for the sun to hatch.
It's a particular place. Seals return to a special place to mate--and
the males, at least, don't eat for weeks on end. Salmon return to their
native streams to spawn. They don't eat, and they die afterward. And
eels--I'm using Earth examples, Bordman--travel some thousands of miles
to the Sargasso to mate and die. Unfortunately, sphexes don't appear to
die, but it's clear that they have an ancestral breeding-place and that
they come to the Sere Plateau to deposit their eggs!"
Bordman plodded onward. He was angry; angry with himself because he
hadn't taken elementary precautions; because he'd felt too safe, as a
man in a robot-served civilization forms the habit of doing; because
he hadn't used his brain when Nugget whimpered, with even a bear-cub's
awareness that danger was near.
"And now," Huyghens added, "I need some equipment that the robot-colony
has. With it, I think we can make a start toward turning this into a
planet that man can live like men on!"
Bordman blinked.
"What's that?"
"Equipment," said Huyghens impatiently. "It'll be at the robot-colony.
Robots were useless because they wouldn't pay attention to sphexes.
They'd still be. But take out the robot-controls and the machines will
do! They shouldn't be ruined by a few months' exposure to weather!"
Bordman marched on and on. Presently he said:
"I never thought you'd want anything that came from that colony,
Huyghens!"
"Why not?" demanded Huyghens impatiently. "When men make machines do
what they want, that's all right. Even robots, when they're where
they belong. But men will have to handle flame-casters in the job I
want them for. There have to be some, because there was a hundred-mile
clearing to be burned off for the colony. And earth-sterilizers,
intended to kill the seeds of any plants that robots couldn't handle.
We'll come back up here, Bordman, and at the least we'll destroy
the spawn of these infernal beasts! If we can't do more than that,
just doing that every year will wipe out the race in time. There are
probably other hordes than this, with other breeding-places. But we'll
find them too. We'll make this planet into a place where men from my
world can come and still be men!"
Bordman said sardonically:
"It was sphexes that beat the robots. Are you sure you aren't planning
to make this world safe for robots?"
Huyghens laughed.
"You've only seen one night-walker," he said. "And how about those
things on the mountain-slope, which would have drained you of
blood? Would you care to wander about this planet with only a robot
body-guard, Bordman? Hardly! Men can't live on this planet with only
robots to help them. You'll see!"
* * * * *
They found the colony after only ten days' more travel and after many
sphexes and more than a few stag-like creatures and shaggy ruminants
had fallen to their weapons and the bears. And they found survivors.
There were three of them, hard-bitten and bearded and deeply
embittered. When the electrified fence went down, two of them were away
at a mine-tunnel, installing a new control panel for the robots who
worked in it. The third was in charge of the mining operation. They
were alarmed by the stopping of communication with the colony and went
back in a tank-truck to find out what had happened, and only the fact
that they were unarmed saved them. They found sphexes prowling and
caterwauling about the fallen colony, in numbers they still did not
wholly believe. The sphexes smelled men inside the armored vehicle, but
couldn't break in. In turn, the men couldn't kill them, or they'd have
been trailed to the mine and besieged there for as long as they could
kill an occasional monster.
The survivors stopped all mining, of course, and tried to use
remote-controlled robots for revenge and to get supplies for them.
Their mining-robots were not designed for either task. And they had
no weapons. They improvised miniature throwers of burning rocket-fuel,
and they sent occasional prowling sphexes away screaming with scorched
hides. But this was useful only because it did not kill the beasts.
And it cost fuel. In the end they barricaded themselves and used the
fuel only to keep a spark-signal going against the day when another
ship came to seek the colony. They stayed in the mine as in a prison,
on short rations, without real hope. For diversion they could only
contemplate the mining-robots they could not spare fuel to run and
which could not do anything but mine.
When Huyghens and Bordman reached them, they wept. They hated robots
and all things robotic only a little less than they hated sphexes.
But Huyghens explained, and, armed with weapons from the packs of the
bears, they marched to the dead colony with the male Kodiaks as point
and advance-guard, and with Faro Nell bringing up the rear. They killed
sixteen sphexes on the way. In the now overgrown clearing there were
four more. In the shelters of the colony they found only foulness and
the fragments of what had been men. But there was some food--not much,
because the sphexes clawed at anything that smelled of men, and had
ruined the plastic packets of radiation-sterilized food. But there were
some supplies in metal containers which were not destroyed.
And there was fuel, which men could use when they got to the
control-panels of the equipment. There were robots everywhere, bright
and shining and ready for operation, but immobile, with plants growing
up around and over them.
They ignored those robots, and instead fueled tracked
flame-casters--after adapting them to human rather than robot
operation--and the giant soil-sterilizer which had been built to
destroy vegetation that robots could not be made to weed out or
cultivate. Then they headed back for the Sere Plateau.
As time passed Nugget became a badly spoiled bear-cub, because the
freed men approved passionately of anything that would even grow up to
kill sphexes. They petted him to excess when they camped.
Finally they reached the plateau by a sphex-trail to the top and
sphexes came squalling and spitting to destroy them. While Bordman and
Huyghens fired steadily, the great machines swept up with their special
weapons. The earth-sterilizer, it developed, was deadly against animal
life as well as seeds, when its diathermic beam was raised and aimed.
Presently the bears were not needed, because the scorched corpses
of sphexes drew live ones from all parts of the plateau even in
the absence of noticeable breezes. The official business of the
sphexes was presumably finished, but they came to caterwaul and seek
vengeance--which they did not find. After a while the survivors of
the robot-colony drove the machines in great circles around the huge
heap of slaughtered fiends, destroying new arrivals as they came. It
was such a killing as men had never before made on any planet, and
there would be very few left of the sphex-horde which had bred in this
particular patch of desert.
* * * * *
Nor would more grow up, because the soil-sterilizer would go over the
dug-up sand where the sphex-spawn lay hidden for the sun to hatch. And
the sun would never hatch them.
Huyghens and Bordman, by that time, were camped on the edge of the
plateau with the Kodiaks. Somehow it seemed more befitting for the men
of the robot-colony to conduct the slaughter. After all, it was those
men whose companions had been killed.