‘We have proof enough for me,’ Grenville said quickly.
Wisher nodded absently.
‘It’s easy to understand. Evolution kept right on going, adapting and changing just as it does everywhere else in the Universe. Only here, when the mammals began coming up onto the land, they had no room to expand. And they were all being washed away every hundred years, as the tides rose and fell and the continents wore down below tide level.
‘But evolution never stopped. It continued beneath the sea. Eventually it came up with an intelligent race.
‘God knows what they are, or how far they’ve progressed. They must be pretty highly-evolved, or they couldn’t have done something like this’ - he broke off, realizing that the building of the islands was no clue. The ancient Egyptians on Earth had built the pyramids, certainly a much harder job. There was no way of telling how far evolved this race was. Or what the island was for.
Zoo?
No. He shook that out of the confusion of his mind. If the things in the sea wanted a zoo they would naturally build it below the surface of the water, where they themselves could travel with ease and where the animals could be kept in airtight compartments. And if this was a zoo, then by now there should have been visitors.
That was one more perplexing thing. Why had nothing come? It was unbelievable that an island like this should be left completely alone, that nothing had noticed the coming of their ship.
And here his thought broke again. They would not be just fish, these things. They would need . . . hands. Or tentacles. He pictured something like a genius squid, and the hair on his body stiffened.
He turned back to Grenville.
‘Did you get the animal specimens?’
Grenville shook his head. ‘No. Just plants. And a small lizard.’
Wisher’s face, lined with the inbred caution of many years, now at last betrayed his agitation. ‘We’ll have to get one of those things that set off the alarm last-night. But to heck with the rest. We’ll let HQ worry about that.’ He stepped quickly into the airlock, dragging the bag of specimens. ‘I’ll pack up,’ he said, ‘you go get that thing.’
Grenville turned automatically and struck off down the beach.
He never came back.
* * * *
At the end of the third hour after Grenville had gone, Wisher went to the arms locker and pulled out a heavy rifle. He cursed the fact that he had no small scout sled. He could not take the ship. She was too big and unwieldy for low, slow flying and he could not risk cracking her up.
He was breaking the regs, of course. Since Grenville had not come back he must be considered dead and it was up to Wisher to leave alone. A special force would come back for Grenville, or for what was left of him. Wisher knew all that. He thought about it while he was loading the rifle. He thought about the vow he had made never to break the regs and he went right on loading the rifle. He told himself that he would take no chances and if he didn’t find Grenville right away he would come back and leave, but he knew all along that he was breaking the regs. At the same time he knew that there was nothing else to do. This was the one reg he had never faced before and it was the one reg he would always break. For Grenville or for anyone else. For a skinny young fool like Grenville, or for anyone else.
Before he left he took the routine precautions concerning the ship. He set the alarm screens to blast anything that moved within two hundred feet of her. If Grenville came back before him it would be all right because the alarm was set to deactivate when it registered the sound pattern of either his or Grenville’s voice. If Grenville came back and didn’t see him, he would know that the alarm was on.
And if no one came back at all, the ship would blow by itself.
The beach was wide and curved on out of sight. Grenville’s deep heel prints were easy to follow.
Stiffly, in the wind, the stalks of the brown vegetation scratched and rustled. Wisher walked along Grenville’s track. He wanted to call, but stopped himself. No noise. He must make no noise.
This is the end of it, he kept saying to himself. When I get out of this I will go home.
The heel prints turned abruptly into the alien forest. Wisher walked some distance farther on, to a relatively clear space. He turned, stepping carefully, started to circle the spot where Grenville had gone in. The wood around him was soggy, sterile. He saw nothing move. But a sharp, shattering blast came suddenly to him in the still air.
The explosion blossomed and Wisher perked spasmodically. The ship. Something was at the ship. He fought down a horrible impulse to run, stood quiet, gun poised, knowing that the ship could take care of itself. And then he stepped slowly forward. And fell.
He fell through a soft light mat of bushes into a hole. There was a crunching snap and he felt a metal rip into his legs, tearing and cracking the bones. He went up to his shoulders. He knew in a flash, with a blast of glacial fear, what it was. Animal trap.
He reached for his rifle. But the rifle was beyond him. A foot past his hand, it lay on the floor of the wood near him. His legs, his legs ... he felt the awful pain as he tried to move.
It blazed through his mind and woke him. Out of his belt he dragged his pistol, and in a sea of pain, held upright by the trap, he waited. He was not afraid. He had broken the regs, and this had happened, and he had expected it. He waited.
Nothing came.
Why, Why?
This had happened to Grenville, he knew. Why?
It had happened to him now, and for a moment he could not understand why he did not seem to care, but was just . . . curious. Then he looked down into the hole and saw the hot redness of his own blood, and as he watched it bubble he realized that he was dying.
He had very little time. He was hopeful. Maybe something would come and at least he would see what they were. He wanted awfully for something to come. In the red mist which was his mind he debated with himself whether or not to shoot it if it came, and over and over he asked himself why, why? Before something came, unfortunately, he died.
The traps had been dug in the night. From out the sea they had come to dig in the preserve - for a preserve was what the island was, was all that it could have been - and then returned to the sea to wait.
For the ship had been seen from the very beginning, and its purpose understood. The best brains of the sea had gathered and planned, the enormous, manta-like people whose name was unpronounceable but whose technology was not far behind Earth’s, met in consultation and immediately understood. It was necessary to capture the ship. Therefore the Earthmen must be separated from it, and it was for this reason that Wisher had died.
But now, to the astonishment of the things, the ship was still alive. It stood silent and alone in the whiteness of the beach ticking and sparking within itself, and near it, on the bloodied sand, were the remains of the one that had come too close. The others had fled in terror.
Time was of no importance to the clever, squid-like beings. They had won already, could wait and consider. Thus the day grew late and became afternoon, and the waves - the aseptic, sterile waves which were proof in themselves of the greatest of all oceanic civilizations - crumbled whitely on the beach. The things exulted. The conquest of space was in their hands.
Within the ship, of course, there was ticking, and a small red hand moved toward zero.
In a little while the ship would blow, and with it would go the island, and a great chunk of the sea. But the beings could not know. It was an alien fact they faced and an alien fact was unknowable. Just as Wisher could not have known the nature of the planet, these things could not now foresee the nature of the ship and the wheel had come full circle. Second by second, with the utter, mechanical loyalty of the machine, the small red hand crept onward.
The waves near the beach were frothy and white.
A crowd was forming.
Michael Shaara, Grenville's Planet
(Series: # )
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