——————
The relief ship detached itself from the orbiting bulk of the vast mother-vessel Ariel and spiraled down through the hazy clouds to the surface of Gamma Crucis VII. A small group of three was gathered in the communications room of the relief ship: Signalman Radek, Coordinator Harrell, Medic Neale.
“Contact made, sir,” Radek murmured.
Coordinator Harrell took the mike. “Harrell of Relief Ship staff speaking. Come in, groundside base. We’re here to take over. You can go back home now.”
A prickly sputter of static was followed with: “Allenson of groundside speaking. Acknowledge. We’ll be waiting for landing. Over and out.”
Neale shook his head. The expedition’s medic was the veteran of the unit; he had spent seventeen years in the Survey Corps. He was a tall well-muscled man with the deep tan of the veteran spacer. “They didn’t sound very enthusiastic,” he said.
Harrell chuckled. “What did you want him to do? Go into ecstasies over the phone?”
“Not exactly. But he seemed so—hell, so cold. When you consider that they’re finally being relieved after a year and a half on an alien world, maybe some excitement would be in order.”
Radek said, “The phones have a way of damping emotion out of a voice. They’re probably whooping it up grand down there.”
“I hope so,” Neale said.
He left the communications room and paused outside at the viewscreen, looking down. They were close enough to the world below to make geographical features visible: rivers and hills, lakes and valleys. It was a silent world, lacking intelligent life—or so the first survey expedition had reported. But somehow Neale mistrusted the planet below. He had been in the Survey Corps too long; he had seen too many green and fertile worlds that harbored hidden alien death.
This one had been under observation only eighteen months. A Survey outfit under Allenson had landed there early in 2716, and had carried out observations for the regulation maximum length of time. Now Allenson and his crew were up for Earthside leave, and Survey Unit 1198 under Clee Harrell was replacing them.
Neale turned away from the viewscreen and headed for his office. On the way he passed through the ship’s control room; Dollinson, the team biologist, was standing watch with his wife, Marie. Neale nodded hello. The Dollinsons together formed a skilled pair of ecologists. This was probably the best outfit Neale had ever worked with, these ten people. He hoped his instinctive mistrust of the green planet below was unfounded. These were people he liked.
He worked in his office a while; then the order for strap-down came, and he set aside his records and climbed into his hammock. The long fall ended; the ship stood upright on the surface of Gamma Crucis VII.
Allenson and his crew were there to greet them.
The relief team filed quickly out of the ship. Harrell came forward and took Allenson’s hand.
“I’ll bet you thought we’d never get here.”
Allenson shrugged. He was a thin, pale, stoop-shouldered man in Coordinator’s uniform. “You are here now. We can leave?”
Harrell looked startled. “Sure—sure, you can go. As soon as you show us around and break us in on whatever projects you have working.”
Neale, standing to one side, felt his wife nudge his arm. “Mike—you look worried. Something wrong?”
Neale nodded gently. “I think so. But I don’t know what it is. Something about these men—”
Allenson was saying. “No sign of intelligent life on the planet at all. Small wildlife which we’ve used for food; there’s a supply in the camp freezer that ought to last you a couple of weeks.”
“Good. We can start the break-in period right away, if you like. The Ariel’s in a sixteen-hour orbit up above, waiting to take you all back to Earth as soon as you’re ready to turn the planet over to us.”
Allenson said, “That’s agreeable to us. We can start right now. The quicker we leave, the better.”
“Why?” Harrell asked in sudden suspicion. “Something wrong with this planet?”
“Not at all! It’s just—we’re anxious to get on to Earth, that’s all.”
That was understandable, Neale thought. What was not so understandable was what he learned when the time came to pair off for break-in. Each member of the relief crew joined up with his opposite number in the original team: biologist with biologist, botanist with botanist, zoologist with zoologist. The incumbent signalman worked with Radek, showing him the communications network that had been established. The team cook spent time with Belle Radek, showing her the way the food storage rooms were laid out, the contents of the freezers, the sort of meals necessary to keep the team healthy on this planet—it varied from planet to planet, depending on such things as gravitational constants and the sort of molecules the plants were built from. Harrell and Allenson closeted themselves in the Coordinator’s office to discuss the problems of keeping the survey unit running smoothly and efficiently. The ecologists met. The two maintenance girls met.
The only one who had no one to work with him was Mike Neale. When he asked Allenson about it, he was told: “Oh, we don’t have a medic any more. Doc Marsh was killed in an accident not long after we landed. I thought I included that in one of the quarterly reports, but I guess I forgot about it.”
Neale blinked. “You’ve managed without a medic for more than a year?”
“We’ve been lucky,” Allenson said.
But there had to be more to it than luck, he thought. A medic was close to an indispensable man on a survey outfit. There were always five or six people who could astrogate in a pinch, and almost anyone could step in and act as Coordinator if he put his mind to it—but a Medic had to be a special sort, a flexible man capable of coping with unpredictable alien diseases as well as minor ailments, broken legs, and such things. It was hard to believe that the eleven other members of Allenson’s team had come through safely for more than a year without a skilled medic among them.
He puzzled about it a while—and puzzled about it a little more when he was taken to the office of the late Dr. Marsh. It looked as if it hadn’t been entered since the day the doctor had been killed.
The antitoxin rack was in place, and each of the precious little ampoules had a considerable covering of dust. The instrument case likewise was dusty. So was the sterilizer, the diagnostitron, even the little library of medical texts. Even, he thought in bewilderment, the first-aid manual.
He turned to the man who had accompanied him here—Bryan, an ecologist. “Do you mean to tell me that none of the expedition’s medical equipment has been used in over a year?”
“If it looks that way, sir, I guess it must be so.”
Neale nervously cracked his knuckles. “Nothing used! No tourniquets, no thermospray, no antitoxins, not even a band-aid. Look at the dust!”
“Do you want me to help you remove the dust, sir?”
Neale scowled. “No, I can manage myself. You’d better get about your business, spaceman.”
Alone, Neale peered through the glassite window; outside, the members of the two expeditions were busy with the transfer of duty from one to the other. It was late afternoon; the pale yellow sun that was Gamma Crucis had dropped low over the horizon, and dark violet clouds had come up from the thick forest that surrounded them.
He glanced at the unused medical equipment. How can this be, he asked himself as he blew a year’s dust off the sterilizer. Surely in the last year someone must have skinned his knee in the forest, at least, and needed a bandage. Someone must have contracted a disease calling for antivirotic shots. Someone must have cut his finger whittling model spaceships.
The more he thought about it, the less he understood it—and the more suspicious he became of World Seven of the Gamma Crucis system. You just didn’t live happily on an alien planet with your medic dead, and you certainly didn’t survive for a year without at least some slight need for medical attention.
At least, he thought, human beings didn’t do things like
that. Then Dr. Neale shook his head and grinned self-consciously; he was reading mystery into places where mystery did not belong, and that was a sure sign that it was time for him to start thinking of retiring.
The breaking-in process took the better part of a day. In a less well-organized outfit than the Survey Corps it might have taken days or even several weeks, but in the Corps operations were standardized and a relief unit was supposed to be able to take over, if necessary, without any break-in period at all.
Neale spent the time ferrying his equipment from the relief ship to his new office, which was located in a tin-walled prefab hut at the very edge of the clearing, in the shade of a wide three-trunked tree with thick rubbery leaves. He carried over his antitoxin and antibiotic kits even though his predecessor had left him with an untouched supply; one never knew when an extra stock of neopenicillin would come in handy. But after running routine checks on the diagnostitron, the sterilizer, and the other heavy equipment in the office, Neale decided there would be no need to cart over the replacement units.
By the time he finished the job the office looked the way he believed a medical office should: clean, shining, every bit of apparatus in its place, everything where he could reach it or where laymen could find it in the event he was not there to give it to them. He finished up, flicked a little dust off the windowsill, and went out into the clearing, where the break-in session seemed to be finishing up.
Allenson was saying, “We leave everything in your hands, then, Coordinator Harrell.”
“Right. If it’s as safe a world as you say it is, this ought to be a vacation for us.”
The eleven men and women of Allenson’s unit filed one by one into the relief ship. A moment later came the blasting signal, and the small, sleek ship thrust flaming gas against the ground and rose.
It climbed out of sight. Overhead the mother ship, the Ariel, cruised serenely past. The relief ship would match velocities with the Ariel, the boarding hatch would open, and the great ship would swallow the lesser like an insect snapped up in midflight by a hawk. Allenson and his crew were on their way home.
And Gamma Crucis VII was now the responsibility of Survey Unit 1198, for the next eighteen months. Neale stared upward, trying to see the tiny relief ship against the bright shield of the late afternoon sky; a flock of bird-like creatures came by, flying in a solid dark bar, redwinged creatures with bald ugly vulture-like heads. He looked away.
“Okay,” Harrell called. “The place is ours. Everybody to quarters; camp time is now exactly 1703, and synchronize accordingly. Belle, meal time is 1800. General meeting after mess to plan procedure.”
Neale and his wife got quartered on the second floor of the three-floor housing, sharing the floor with the Dollinsons. The Radeks and the Harrells occupied the ground floor, while on the top floor lived the Grosses and the Kennedys. Six couples, twelve human beings. A Survey Corps team, and a good one.
The Corps always sent married couples out, tested for compatibility and cooperation; they worked better than teams of one sex or the other, and the theory was that sending man and wife out together increased the safety factor, for they took less risks and watched out together for unforeseeable danger. It was a tenable theory, too; accident rates in the Survey Corps were almost fantastically low, despite the hazardous nature of the work.
“I wish I understood it,” Neale growled unhappily after the procedural meeting that evening. “A solid year without a medic, and no accidents, no illnesses—Laura, it doesn’t add up!”
“They’re gone now,” his wife said, trying to soothe him. Laura Neale was a trained ecologist; he had met her at the Corps Academy, where 90% of Corps marriages had their roots. “They’re on their way back to Earth now. Why worry about them? We’ll have enough on our hands here without brooding about—”
“No. Look, Laura, how come they didn’t report the death of their medical officer?”
“Didn’t they? I thought—”
“They said they did, but I checked with Harrell and he doesn’t remember seeing anything about it in the quarterly reports Allenson sent out. You just don’t overlook a thing as big as that. And you don’t just ‘forget’ to report it, either. When any Survey Corps man gets killed on duty, that’s news. And when a team’s medic is the one who’s killed, it gets heard about back at Headquarters. Sometimes they even send a replacement medic out. They don’t ignore it, or overlook it.”
“But what possible reason would they have for concealing the medic’s death?”
Neale shrugged. “That’s the thing I can’t figure out. One of the things I can’t figure out. The other one is how they survived after Dr. Marsh’s death without using the medical supplies at all.”
He walked to the window and stared moodily out. The sun was down, now, and the moons were in the sky—two tiny chips of rock, fifteen or twenty miles in diameter that rotated around each other while they revolved around their planet.
Outside a forest creature barked, and immediately came an answering chorus. Neale scowled. An unexplored planet was by definition full of unanswered questions—but he had never met any of these before.
He was worried. It was a bad way to start off an eighteen-month stay.
He lay awake most of that night, thinking. One other thing troubled him about the survey team they had relieved, and this he had not told anyone, neither Harrell nor his wife.
There had been something about their eyes—Allenson’s and all the others. Something cold and feral, a curious narrowing of the pupils. And every one of them, all eleven, had developed some form of facial tic. Allenson twitched his left cheek uncontrollably. One of the others had acquired a compulsive left-eye blink. Still another had one side of his mouth—the left, as it happened—drawn downward in a sagging ugly sneer, which persisted even when the right side of the mouth was smiling.
Something had happened to Allenson’s team. Neale was sure of that. They did not need medical care, they had not bothered to report the death of their medic (had it really been an accident?) and they had picked up some strange somatic manifestations.
In three months the Ariel would be arriving at Earthport to discharge the off-duty survey team. Were they carrying some strange alien disease? Neale wondered.
And were the replacement team members going to contract it?
He found out early the next morning that, no matter how the last team had managed, Harrell’s team was going to need at least some medical attention. Belle Radek had been climbing a tree to secure a basketful of the blue-green apple-like fruits her predecessor said were edible, and she slipped and fell out.
Neale examined her. There were minor and negligible bruises, and also a long scrape on the inside of her right calf. Neale swabbed the abrasion with antiseptic, squirted some thermospray over it, slapped on a sterile bandage, and told her she could go about the business of preparing the noon meal.
“It won’t get infected or anything?”
“I don’t think so,” Neale said. “You won’t have any trouble with it. But be careful climbing those trees in the future, Belle.”
“I usually am careful. But this tree—well, it seemed sort of slippery. And it kind of twisted out from under me when I got up on that long branch, as if it was trying to throw me off the branch.”
Neale chuckled. “It’s just your imagination, Belle. We’ve never found an intelligent tree yet.”
But after she was gone, he thought about that new bit of information. The trees were slippery; yes. He went outside and experimentally began to climb the tree with the blue-green fruit. He moved slowly, gripping the thick branch with both hands, advancing up the tree in an ape-like sort of crouch.
Dollinson passed below. “What are you doing up there, Doc? Second childhood?”
“Scientific experiment,” Neale replied, and reached out for the shiny fruit that dangled a foot in front of his face.
The tree wriggled.
It lurched suddenly, and only because he had been prepared for it
did Neale avoid being thrown to the ground ten feet below. He braced himself in the crotch of the limb, waited a moment, then made a sudden snatch at the dangling fruit.
He ripped it loose, but in that moment the tree heaved again even more violently. Neale rocked with it, swayed, began to lose his balance, and finally had to leap to the ground; he dropped to his knees when he landed. Dollinson who had gone by, came trotting back and helped him up.
“Hurt yourself?”
“Just stung my ankles a bit,” Neale said. He rubbed them. “It’ll take a minute or two till the shock eases up. But I got what I went up there for.”
He held out the apple-like fruit. Grinning, he bit into it; it was sweet and tasty, with a pleasant tang to it. He offered some to Dollinson, who sampled it with evident delight.
“Good stuff.”
“I know. Belle tells me Allenson’s team lived on them all the time. Can’t say I blame them either.”
Dollinson chuckled and moved on. Neale stared at the tree.
It had definitely moved. Perhaps it was just a tropism, but the fact remained that when an attempt was made to remove its fruit it resisted.