There was no answer from the ground when breakout came and Calhoun drove
the Med Ship to a favorable position for a call. He patiently repeated,
over and over again, that Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty notified its arrival
and requested coordinates for landing. There should have been a crisp
description of the direction from the planet's center at which, a
certain time so many hours or minutes later, the force-fields of the
grid would find it convenient to lock onto and lower the Med Ship. But
the communicator remained silent.
"There is a landing-grid," said Calhoun, frowning, "and if they're using
it to load fresh meat for Dara, from the herds I'm told about, it should
be manned. But they don't seem to intend to answer. Maybe they think
that if they pretend I'm not here I'll go away."
He reflected, and his frown deepened.
"If I didn't know what I do know, I might. So if I land on
emergency-rockets the blueskins down below may decide that I come from
Weald. And in that case it would be reasonable to blast me before I
could land and unload some fighting men. On the other hand, no ship from
Weald would conceivably land without impassioned assurance that it was
safe. It would drop bombs." He turned to the girl. "How many Darians
down below?"
She shook her head.
"You don't know," said Calhoun, "or won't tell, yet. But they ought to
be told about the arrival of that ship at Weald, and what Weald thinks
about it! My guess is that you came to tell them. It isn't likely that
Dara gets news direct from Weald. Where were you put ashore from Dara,
when you set out to be a spy?"
Her lips parted to speak. But she compressed them tightly. She shook her
head again.
"It must have been plenty far away," said Calhoun restlessly. "Your
people would have built a ship, and made fine forged papers for it, and
they'd travel so far from this part of space that when they landed
nobody would think of Dara. They'd use makeup to cover the blue spots,
but maybe it was so far away that blueskins had never been heard of!"
Her face looked pinched, but she did not reply.
"Then they'd land half a dozen of you, with a supply of makeup for the
blue patches. And you'd separate, and take ships that went various
roundabout ways, and arrive on Weald one by one, to see what could be
done there to...." He stopped. "When did you find out positively that
there wasn't any plague any more?"
She began to grow pale.
"I'm not a mind-reader," said Calhoun. "But it adds up. You're from
Dara. You've been on Weald. It's practically certain that there are
other, agents, if you like that word better, on Weald. And there hasn't
been a plague on Weald so you people aren't carriers of it. But you
knew it in advance, I think. How'd you learn? Did a ship in some sort of
trouble land there, on Dara?"
"Y-yes," said the girl. "We wouldn't let it go again. But the people
didn't catch--they didn't die--they lived--."
She stopped short.
"It's not fair to trap me!" she cried passionately, "It's not fair!"
"I'll stop," said Calhoun.
He turned to the control-board. The Med Ship was only planetary
diameters from Orede, now, and the electron telescope showed shining
stars in leisurely motion across its screen. Then a huge, gibbous
shining shape appeared, and there were irregular patches of that muddy
color which is sea-bottom, and varicolored areas which were plains and
forests. Also there were mountains. Calhoun steadied the image and
squinted at it.
"The mine," he observed, "was found by members of a hunting-party,
killing wild cattle for sport."
* * * * *
Even a small planet has many millions of square miles of surface, and a
single human installation on a whole world will not be easy to find by
random search. But there were clues to this one. Men hunting for sport
would not choose a tropic nor an arctic climate to hunt in. So if they
found a mineral deposit, it would have been in a temperate zone. Cattle
would not be found deep in a mountainous terrain. The mine would not be
on a prairie. The settlement on Orede, then, would be near the edge of
mountains, not far from a prairie such as wild cattle would frequent,
and it would be in a temperate climate. Forested areas could be ruled
out. And there would be a landing-grid. Handling only one ship at a
time, it might be a very small grid. It need be only hundreds of yards
across and less than half a mile high. But its shadow would be
distinctive.
Calhoun searched among low mountains near unforested prairie in a
temperate zone. He found a speck. He enlarged it many-fold, and it was
the mine on Orede. There were heaps of tailings. There was something
which cast a long, lacy shadow. The landing-grid.
"But they don't answer our call," observed Calhoun, "so we go down
unwelcomed."
He inverted the Med Ship and the emergency-rockets boomed. The ship
plunged planetward.
A long time later it was deep in the planet's atmosphere. The noise of
its rockets had become thunderous, with air to carry and to reinforce
the sound.
"Hold on to something, Murgatroyd," commanded Calhoun. "We may have to
dodge some ack."
But nothing came up from below. The Med Ship again inverted itself, and
its rockets pointed toward the planet and poured out pencil-thin,
blue-white, high-velocity flames. It checked slightly, but continued to
descend. It was not directly above the grid. It swept downward until
almost level with the peaks of the mountains in which the mine lay. It
tilted again, and swept onward over the mountain-tops, and then tilted
once more and went racing up the valley in which the landing-grid was
plainly visible. Calhoun swung it on an erratic course, lest there be
opposition.
But there was no sign. Then the rockets bellowed, and the ship slowed
its forward motion, hovered momentarily, and settled to solidity outside
the framework of the grid. The grid was small, as Calhoun reasoned. But
it reached interminably toward the sky.
The rocket cut off. Slender as the flame had been, they'd melted and
bored thin drill-holes deep into the soil. Molten rock boiled and
bubbled down below. But there seemed no other sound. There was no other
motion. There was absolute stillness all around. But when Calhoun
switched on the outside microphones a faint, sweet melange of
high-pitched chirpings came from tiny creatures hidden under the
vegetation of the mountainsides.
Calhoun put a blaster in his pocket and stood up.
"We'll see what it looks like outside," he said with a certain grimness.
"I don't quite believe what the visionscreens show."
* * * * *
Minutes later he stepped down to the ground from the Med Ship's
exit-port. The ship had landed perhaps a hundred feet from what once had
been a wooden building. In it, ore from the mines was concentrated and
the useless tailings carried away by a conveyor-belt to make a monstrous
pile of broken stone. But there was no longer a building. Next to it
there had been a structure containing an ore-crusher. The massive
machinery could still be seen, but the structure was fragments. Next to
that, again, had been the shaft-head shelters of the mine. They also
were shattered practically to match-sticks.
The look of the ground about the building-sites was simply and purely
impossible. It was a mass of hoofprints. Cattle by thousands and tens of
thousands had trampled everything. Cattle had burst in the wooden sides
of the buildings. Cattle had piled themselves up against the beams
upholding roofs until the buildings collapsed. Then cattle had gone
plunging over the wrecked buildings until there was nothing left but
indescribable chaos. Many, many cattle had died in the crush. There were
heaps of dead beasts about the metal girders which were the foundation
of the landing-grid. The air was tainted by the smell of carrion.
The settlement had been destroyed, positively, by stampeded cattle in
tens or hundreds of thousands charging blindly through and over and upon
it. Senselessly, they'd trampled each other to horrible shapelessnesses.
The mine-shaft was not choked, because enormously strong timbers had
fallen across and blocked it. But everything else was pure destruction.
Calhoun said evenly;
"Clever! Very clever! You can't blame men when beasts stampede! We
should accept the evidence that some monstrous herd, making its way
through a mountain pass, somehow went crazy and bolted for the plains
and this settlement got in the way and it was too bad for the
settlement. Everything's explained, except the ship that went to Weald.
A cattle stampede, yes. Anybody can believe that! But there was a
man-stampede! Men stampeded into the ship as blindly as the cattle
trampled down this little town. The ship stampeded off into space as
insanely as the cattle. But a stampede of men _and_ cattle, in the same
place,--that's a little too much at one time!"
"How," asked Calhoun directly, "do you intend to get in touch with your
friends here?"
"I--I don't know," she said distressedly. "But if--the ship stays here,
they're bound to come and see why. Won't they? Or will they?"
"If they're sane, they won't," said Calhoun. "The one undesirable thing,
here, would be human footprints on top of cattle-tracks. If your friends
are a meat-getting party from Dara, as I believe, they should cover up
their tracks, get off-planet as fast as possible, and pray that no signs
of their former presence are ever discovered. That would be their best
first move, certainly!"
"What should I do?" she asked helplessly.
"I'm far from sure. At a guess, and for the moment, probably nothing.
I'll work something out ... I've got the devil of a job before me,
though. I can't spend too much time here."
"You can--leave me here...."
He grunted and turned away. It was naturally unthinkable that he should
leave another human being on a supposedly uninhabited planet, with the
knowledge that it might actually be uninhabited, and the further
knowledge that any visitors would have the strongest of possible reasons
to hide themselves away.
He believed that there were Darians here, and the girl in the Med
ship--so he also believed--was a Darian. But any who might be hiding had
so much to lose if they were discovered that they might be hundreds or
even thousands of miles from anywhere a space-ship would normally
land--if they hadn't fled after the incident of the space-ship's
departure with its load of doomed passengers.
Considered detachedly, the odds were that there was again a
food-shortage on Dara. That blueskins, in desperation, had raided or
were raiding or would raid the cattle-herds of Orede for food to carry
back to their home planet. That somehow the miners on Orede had found
that they had blueskin neighbors, and died of the consequences of their
terror. It was a risky guess to make on such evidence as Calhoun
considered he had, but no other guess was possible.
If his guess was right, he was under some obligation to do exactly what
he believed the girl considered her mission, to warn all blueskins that
Weald would presently try to find them on Orede, when all hell must
break loose upon Dara for punishment. But if there were men here, he
couldn't leave a written warning for them in default of friendly
contact. They might not find it, and a search-party of Wealdians might.
All he could possibly do was try to make contact and give warning by
such means as would leave no evidence behind that he'd done so. Weald
would consider a warning sure proof of blueskin guilt.
It was not satisfactory to be limited to broadcasts which might not be
picked up, and were unlikely to be acknowledged. But he settled down
with the communicator to make the attempt.
* * * * *
He called first on a GC wave-length and form. It was unlikely that
blueskins would use general-communication bands to keep in touch with
each other, but it had to be tried. He broadcast, as broadly tuned as
possible, and went up and down the GC spectrum, repeating his warning
painstakingly and listening without hope for a reply. He did find one
spot on the dial where there was re-radiation of his message, as if from
a tuned receiver. But he could not get a fix on it, and nobody might be
listening. He exhausted the normal communication pattern. Then he
broadcast on old-fashioned amplitude modulation which a modern
communicator would not pick up at all, and which therefore might be used
by men in hiding.
He worked for a long time. Then he shrugged and gave it up. He'd
repeated to absolute tedium the facts that any Darians--blueskins--on
Orede ought to know. There'd been no answer. And it was all too likely
that if he'd been received, that those who heard him took his message
for a trick to discover if there were any hearers.
He clicked off at last and stood up, shaking his head. Suddenly the Med
Ship seemed empty. Then he saw Murgatroyd staring at the exit-port. The
inner door of that small airlock was closed. The tell-tale said the
outer was not locked. Someone had gone out, quietly. The girl. Of
course. Calhoun said angrily;
"How long ago, Murgatroyd?"
"_Chee!_" said Murgatroyd indignantly.
It wasn't an answer, but it showed that Murgatroyd was vexed that he'd
been left behind. He and the girl were close friends, now. If she'd left
Murgatroyd in the ship when he wanted to go with her, she wasn't coming
back.
Calhoun swore. Then he made certain. She was not in the ship. He flipped
the outside-speaker switch and said curtly into the microphone;
"Coffee! Murgatroyd and I are having coffee. Will you come back,
please?"
He repeated the call, and repeated it again. Multiplied as his voice was
by the speakers, she should hear him within a mile. She did not appear.
He went to a small and inconspicuous closet and armed himself. A Med
Ship man was not ever expected to fight, but there were blast-rifles
available for extreme emergency.
When he'd slung a power-pack over his shoulder and reached the airlock,
there was still no sign of his late stowaway. He stood in the airlock
door for long minutes, staring angrily about. Almost certainly she
wouldn't be looking in the mountains for men of Dara come here for
cattle. He used a pair of binoculars, first at low-magnification to
search as wide an area down-valley as possible, and then at highest
power to search the most likely routes.
He found a small, bobbing speck beyond a far-away hillcrest. It was her
head. It went down below the hilltop.
He snapped a command to Murgatroyd, and when the _tormal_ was on the
ground outside, he locked the port with that combination that nobody but
a Med Ship man was at all likely to discover or use.
"She's an idiot!" he told Murgatroyd sourly. "Come along! We've got to
be idiots too!"
He set out in pursuit.
The girl had a long start. Twice Calhoun came to places where she could
have chosen either of two ways onward. Each time he had to determine
which she'd followed. That cost time. Then the mountains ended,
abruptly, and a vast undulating plain stretched away to the horizon.
There were at least two large masses and many smaller clumps of what
could only be animals gathered together. Cattle.
But here the girl was plainly in view. Calhoun increased his stride. He
began to gain on her. She did not look behind.
Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" in a complaining tone.
"I should have left you behind," agreed Calhoun dourly, "but there was
and is a chance I won't get back. You'll have to keep on hiking."
He plodded on. His memory of the terrain around the mining settlement
told him that there was no definite destination in the girl's mind. But
she was in no such despair as to want deliberately to be lost. She'd
guessed, Calhoun believed, that if there were Darians on the planet,
they'd keep the landing-grid under observation. If they saw her leave
that area and could see that she was alone, they should intercept her to
find out the meaning of the Med Ship's landing. Then she could identify
herself as one of them and give them the terribly necessary warning of
Weald's suspicions.
"But," said Calhoun sourly, "if she's right, they'll have seen me
marching after her now, which spoils her scheme. And I'd like to help
it, but the way she's going is too dangerous!"
* * * * *
He went down into one of the hollows of the uneven plain. He saw a clump
of a dozen or so cattle a little distance away. The bull looked up and
snorted. The cows regarded him truculently. Their air was not one of
bovine tranquility.
He was up the farther hillside and out of sight before the bull worked
himself up to a charge. Then Calhoun suddenly remembered one of the
items in the data about cattle he'd looked into just the other day. He
felt himself grow pale.
"Murgatroyd!" he said sharply. "We've got to catch up! Fast! Stay with
me if you can, but ..." He was jog-trotting as he spoke--"even if you
get lost I have to hurry!"
He ran fifty paces and walked fifty paces. He ran fifty and walked
fifty. He saw her, atop a rolling of the ground. She came to a full
stop. He ran. He saw her turn to retrace her steps. He flung to the
safety of the blast-rifle and let off a roaring blast at the ground for
her to hear.
Suddenly she was fleeing desperately, toward him. He plunged on. She
vanished down into a hollow. Horns appeared over the hillcrest she'd
just left. Cattle appeared. Four--a dozen--fifteen--twenty. They moved
ominously in her wake. He saw her again, running frantically over
another upward swell of the prairie. He let off another blast to guide
her. He ran on at top speed with Murgatroyd trailing anxiously behind.
From time to time Murgatroyd called "_Chee-chee-chee!_" in frightened
pleading not to be abandoned.
More cattle appeared against the horizon. Fifty or a hundred. They came
after the first clump. The first-seen group of a bull and his harem were
moving faster, now. The girl fled from them, but it is the instinct of
beef-cattle on the open range--Calhoun had learned it only two days
before--to charge any human they find on foot. A mounted man to their
dim minds is a creature to be tolerated or fled from, but a human on
foot is to be crushed and stamped and gored.
* * * * *
Those in the lead were definitely charging now, with heads bent low. The
bull charged furiously with shut eyes, as bulls do, but the
many-times-more-deadly cows charged with their eyes wide open and
wickedly alert, and with a lumbering speed much greater than the girl
could manage.
She came up over the last rise, chalky-white and gasping, her hair
flying, in the last extremity of terror. The nearest of the pursuing
cattle were within ten yards when Calhoun fired from twenty yards
beyond. One creature bellowed as the blast-bolt struck. It went down and
others crashed into it and swept over it, and more came on. The girl saw
Calhoun, now, and ran toward him, panting, and he knelt very
deliberately and began to check the charge by shooting the leading
animals.
He did not succeed. There were more cattle following the first, and more
and more behind them. It appeared that all the cattle on the plain
joined in the blind and senseless charge. The thudding of hooves became
a mutter and then a rumble and then a growl. Plunging, clumsy figures
rushed past on either side. But horns and heads heaved up over the mound
of animals Calhoun had shot. He shot them too. More and more cattle came
pounding past the rampart of his victims, but always, it seemed, some
elected to climb the heap of their dead and dying fellows, and Calhoun
shot and shot.
But he split the herd. The foremost animals had been charging a sighted
human enemy. Others had followed because it is the instinct of cattle to
join their running fellows in whatever crazed urgency they feel. There
was a dense, pounding, horrible mass of running bulls and cows and
calves; bellowing, wailing, grunting, puffing, raising thick and
impenetrable clouds of dust which had everything but galloping beasts
going past on either side.
It lasted for minutes. Then the thunder of hooves diminished. It ended
abruptly, and Calhoun and the girl were left alone with the gruesome
pile of animals which had divided the charging herd into two parts. They
could see the rears of innumerable running animals, stupidly continuing
the charge--hardly different, now, from a stampede--whose original
objective none now remembered.
Calhoun thoughtfully touched the barrel of his blast-rifle and winced at
its scorching heat.
* * * * *
"I just realized," he said coldly, "that I don't know your name. What is
it?"
"M-maril," said the girl. She swallowed. "Th-thank you--."
"Maril," said Calhoun, "you are an idiot! It was half-witted at best to
go off by yourself! You could have been lost! You could have cost me
days of hunting for you, days badly needed for more important matters!"
He stopped and took breath. "You may have spoiled what little chance
I've got to do something about the plans Weald's already making!"
He said more bitterly still;
"And I had to leave Murgatroyd behind to get to you in time! He was
right in the path of that charge!"
He turned away from her and said dourly;
"All right! Come on back to the ship. We'll go to Dara. We'd have to,
anyhow. But Murgatroyd--"
Then he heard a very small sneeze. Out of a rolling wall of
still-roiling dust, Murgatroyd appeared forlornly. He was dust-covered,
and draggled, and his tail drooped, and he sneezed again. He moved as if
he could barely put one paw before another, but at the sight of Calhoun
he sneezed yet again and said, "_Chee!_" in a disconsolate voice. Then
he sat down and waited for Calhoun to pick him up.
When Calhoun did so, Murgatroyd clung to him pathetically and said,
"_Chee-chee!_" and again "_Chee-chee!_" with the intonation of one
telling of incredible horrors and disasters endured.
Calhoun headed back for the valley, the settlement and the Med Ship.
Murgatroyd clung to his neck. The girl Maril followed visibly shaken.
Calhoun did not speak to her again. He led the way. A mile back toward
the mountains, they began to see stragglers from the now-vanished herd.
A little further, those stragglers began to notice them. And it would
have been a matter of no moment if they'd been domesticated
dairy-cattle, but these were range-cattle gone wild. Twice, Calhoun had
to use his blast-rifle to discourage incipient charges by irritated
bulls or even more irritated cows. Those with calves darkly suspected
Calhoun of designs upon their offspring.
It was a relief to enter the valley again. But it was two miles more to
the landing-grid with the Med Ship beside it and the reek of carrion in
the air.
They were perhaps two hundred feet from the ship when a blast-rifle
crashed and its bolt whined past Calhoun so close that he felt the
monstrous heat. There had been no challenge. There was no warning. There
was simply a shot which came horribly close to ending Calhoun's career
in a completely arbitrary fashion.