CHAPTER 3
There was no answer from the ground when breakout came and Calhoun drovethe Med Ship to a favorable position for a call. He patiently repeated,over and over again, that Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty notified its arrivaland requested coordinates for landing. There should have been a crispdescription of the direction from the planet's center at which, acertain time so many hours or minutes later, the force-fields of thegrid would find it convenient to lock onto and lower the Med Ship. Butthe communicator remained silent.
"There is a landing-grid," said Calhoun, frowning, "and if they're usingit to load fresh meat for Dara, from the herds I'm told about, it shouldbe manned. But they don't seem to intend to answer. Maybe they thinkthat 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 onemergency-rockets the blueskins down below may decide that I come fromWeald. And in that case it would be reasonable to blast me before Icould land and unload some fighting men. On the other hand, no ship fromWeald would conceivably land without impassioned assurance that it wassafe. It would drop bombs." He turned to the girl. "How many Dariansdown below?"
She shook her head.
"You don't know," said Calhoun, "or won't tell, yet. But they ought tobe told about the arrival of that ship at Weald, and what Weald thinksabout it! My guess is that you came to tell them. It isn't likely thatDara 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 herhead again.
"It must have been plenty far away," said Calhoun restlessly. "Yourpeople would have built a ship, and made fine forged papers for it, andthey'd travel so far from this part of space that when they landednobody 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 theblue patches. And you'd separate, and take ships that went variousroundabout ways, and arrive on Weald one by one, to see what could bedone there to...." He stopped. "When did you find out positively thatthere 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 fromDara. You've been on Weald. It's practically certain that there areother, agents, if you like that word better, on Weald. And there hasn'tbeen a plague on Weald so you people aren't carriers of it. But youknew it in advance, I think. How'd you learn? Did a ship in some sort oftrouble land there, on Dara?"
"Y-yes," said the girl. "We wouldn't let it go again. But the peopledidn'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 planetarydiameters from Orede, now, and the electron telescope showed shiningstars in leisurely motion across its screen. Then a huge, gibbousshining shape appeared, and there were irregular patches of that muddycolor which is sea-bottom, and varicolored areas which were plains andforests. Also there were mountains. Calhoun steadied the image andsquinted 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 asingle human installation on a whole world will not be easy to find byrandom search. But there were clues to this one. Men hunting for sportwould not choose a tropic nor an arctic climate to hunt in. So if theyfound a mineral deposit, it would have been in a temperate zone. Cattlewould not be found deep in a mountainous terrain. The mine would not beon a prairie. The settlement on Orede, then, would be near the edge ofmountains, not far from a prairie such as wild cattle would frequent,and it would be in a temperate climate. Forested areas could be ruledout. And there would be a landing-grid. Handling only one ship at atime, it might be a very small grid. It need be only hundreds of yardsacross and less than half a mile high. But its shadow would bedistinctive.
Calhoun searched among low mountains near unforested prairie in atemperate zone. He found a speck. He enlarged it many-fold, and it wasthe mine on Orede. There were heaps of tailings. There was somethingwhich cast a long, lacy shadow. The landing-grid.
"But they don't answer our call," observed Calhoun, "so we go downunwelcomed."
He inverted the Med Ship and the emergency-rockets boomed. The shipplunged planetward.
A long time later it was deep in the planet's atmosphere. The noise ofits rockets had become thunderous, with air to carry and to reinforcethe sound.
"Hold on to something, Murgatroyd," commanded Calhoun. "We may have tododge some ack."
But nothing came up from below. The Med Ship again inverted itself, andits rockets pointed toward the planet and poured out pencil-thin,blue-white, high-velocity flames. It checked slightly, but continued todescend. It was not directly above the grid. It swept downward untilalmost level with the peaks of the mountains in which the mine lay. Ittilted again, and swept onward over the mountain-tops, and then tiltedonce more and went racing up the valley in which the landing-grid wasplainly visible. Calhoun swung it on an erratic course, lest there beopposition.
But there was no sign. Then the rockets bellowed, and the ship slowedits forward motion, hovered momentarily, and settled to solidity outsidethe framework of the grid. The grid was small, as Calhoun reasoned. Butit reached interminably toward the sky.
The rocket cut off. Slender as the flame had been, they'd melted andbored thin drill-holes deep into the soil. Molten rock boiled andbubbled down below. But there seemed no other sound. There was no othermotion. There was absolute stillness all around. But when Calhounswitched on the outside microphones a faint, sweet melange ofhigh-pitched chirpings came from tiny creatures hidden under thevegetation 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'sexit-port. The ship had landed perhaps a hundred feet from what once hadbeen a wooden building. In it, ore from the mines was concentrated andthe useless tailings carried away by a conveyor-belt to make a monstrouspile of broken stone. But there was no longer a building. Next to itthere had been a structure containing an ore-crusher. The massivemachinery could still be seen, but the structure was fragments. Next tothat, again, had been the shaft-head shelters of the mine. They alsowere shattered practically to match-sticks.
The look of the ground about the building-sites was simply and purelyimpossible. It was a mass of hoofprints. Cattle by thousands and tens ofthousands had trampled everything. Cattle had burst in the wooden sidesof the buildings. Cattle had piled themselves up against the beamsupholding roofs until the buildings collapsed. Then cattle had goneplunging over the wrecked buildings until there was nothing left butindescribable chaos. Many, many cattle had died in the crush. There wereheaps of dead beasts about the metal girders which were the foundationof the landing-grid. The air was tainted by the smell of carrion.
The settlement had been destroyed, positively, by stampeded cattle intens or hundreds of thousands charging blindly through and over and uponit. Senselessly, they'd trampled each other to horrible shapelessnesses.The mine-shaft was not choked, because enormously strong timbers hadfallen across and blocked it. But everything else was pure destruction.
Calhoun said evenly;
"Clever! Very clever! You can't blame men when beasts stampede! Weshould accept the evidence that some monstrous herd, making its waythrough a mountain pass, somehow went crazy and bolted for the plain
sand this settlement got in the way and it was too bad for thesettlement. Everything's explained, except the ship that went to Weald.A cattle stampede, yes. Anybody can believe that! But there was aman-stampede! Men stampeded into the ship as blindly as the cattletrampled down this little town. The ship stampeded off into space asinsanely as the cattle. But a stampede of men _and_ cattle, in the sameplace,--that's a little too much at one time!"
"How," asked Calhoun directly, "do you intend to get in touch with yourfriends 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 friendsare a meat-getting party from Dara, as I believe, they should cover uptheir tracks, get off-planet as fast as possible, and pray that no signsof their former presence are ever discovered. That would be their bestfirst 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 shouldleave another human being on a supposedly uninhabited planet, with theknowledge that it might actually be uninhabited, and the furtherknowledge that any visitors would have the strongest of possible reasonsto hide themselves away.
He believed that there were Darians here, and the girl in the Medship--so he also believed--was a Darian. But any who might be hiding hadso much to lose if they were discovered that they might be hundreds oreven thousands of miles from anywhere a space-ship would normallyland--if they hadn't fled after the incident of the space-ship'sdeparture with its load of doomed passengers.
Considered detachedly, the odds were that there was again afood-shortage on Dara. That blueskins, in desperation, had raided orwere raiding or would raid the cattle-herds of Orede for food to carryback to their home planet. That somehow the miners on Orede had foundthat they had blueskin neighbors, and died of the consequences of theirterror. It was a risky guess to make on such evidence as Calhounconsidered he had, but no other guess was possible.
If his guess was right, he was under some obligation to do exactly whathe believed the girl considered her mission, to warn all blueskins thatWeald would presently try to find them on Orede, when all hell mustbreak loose upon Dara for punishment. But if there were men here, hecouldn't leave a written warning for them in default of friendlycontact. 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 bysuch means as would leave no evidence behind that he'd done so. Wealdwould consider a warning sure proof of blueskin guilt.
It was not satisfactory to be limited to broadcasts which might not bepicked up, and were unlikely to be acknowledged. But he settled downwith the communicator to make the attempt.
* * * * *
He called first on a GC wave-length and form. It was unlikely thatblueskins would use general-communication bands to keep in touch witheach other, but it had to be tried. He broadcast, as broadly tuned aspossible, and went up and down the GC spectrum, repeating his warningpainstakingly and listening without hope for a reply. He did find onespot on the dial where there was re-radiation of his message, as if froma tuned receiver. But he could not get a fix on it, and nobody might belistening. He exhausted the normal communication pattern. Then hebroadcast on old-fashioned amplitude modulation which a moderncommunicator would not pick up at all, and which therefore might be usedby men in hiding.
He worked for a long time. Then he shrugged and gave it up. He'drepeated to absolute tedium the facts that any Darians--blueskins--onOrede ought to know. There'd been no answer. And it was all too likelythat if he'd been received, that those who heard him took his messagefor a trick to discover if there were any hearers.
He clicked off at last and stood up, shaking his head. Suddenly the MedShip seemed empty. Then he saw Murgatroyd staring at the exit-port. Theinner door of that small airlock was closed. The tell-tale said theouter was not locked. Someone had gone out, quietly. The girl. Ofcourse. 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'dbeen left behind. He and the girl were close friends, now. If she'd leftMurgatroyd in the ship when he wanted to go with her, she wasn't comingback.
Calhoun swore. Then he made certain. She was not in the ship. He flippedthe 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 wasby 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 MedShip man was not ever expected to fight, but there were blast-riflesavailable 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 airlockdoor for long minutes, staring angrily about. Almost certainly shewouldn't be looking in the mountains for men of Dara come here forcattle. He used a pair of binoculars, first at low-magnification tosearch as wide an area down-valley as possible, and then at highestpower to search the most likely routes.
He found a small, bobbing speck beyond a far-away hillcrest. It was herhead. It went down below the hilltop.
He snapped a command to Murgatroyd, and when the _tormal_ was on theground outside, he locked the port with that combination that nobody buta Med Ship man was at all likely to discover or use.
"She's an idiot!" he told Murgatroyd sourly. "Come along! We've got tobe idiots too!"
He set out in pursuit.
The girl had a long start. Twice Calhoun came to places where she couldhave chosen either of two ways onward. Each time he had to determinewhich 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 whatcould only be animals gathered together. Cattle.
But here the girl was plainly in view. Calhoun increased his stride. Hebegan 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 wasand 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 settlementtold him that there was no definite destination in the girl's mind. Butshe was in no such despair as to want deliberately to be lost. She'dguessed, Calhoun believed, that if there were Darians on the planet,they'd keep the landing-grid under observation. If they saw her leavethat area and could see that she was alone, they should intercept her tofind out the meaning of the Med Ship's landing. Then she could identifyherself as one of them and give them the terribly necessary warning ofWeald's suspicions.
"But," said Calhoun sourly, "if she's right, they'll have seen memarching after her now, which spoils her scheme. And I'd like to helpit, but the way she's going is too dangerous!"
* * * * *
He went down into one of the hollows of the uneven plain. He saw a clumpof a dozen or so cattle a little distance away. The bull looked up andsnorted. The cows regarded him truculently. Their air was not one ofbovine tranquility.
He was up the farther hillside and out of sight before the bull workedhimself up to a charge. Then Calhoun suddenly remembered one of theitems in the data about cattle he'd looked into just the other day. Hefelt himself grow pale.
"Murgatroyd!" he said sharply. "We've got to catch up! Fast! Stay withme if you can, but ..." He was jog-trotti
ng as he spoke--"even if youget lost I have to hurry!"
He ran fifty paces and walked fifty paces. He ran fifty and walkedfifty. He saw her, atop a rolling of the ground. She came to a fullstop. He ran. He saw her turn to retrace her steps. He flung to thesafety of the blast-rifle and let off a roaring blast at the ground forher to hear.
Suddenly she was fleeing desperately, toward him. He plunged on. Shevanished down into a hollow. Horns appeared over the hillcrest she'djust left. Cattle appeared. Four--a dozen--fifteen--twenty. They movedominously in her wake. He saw her again, running frantically overanother upward swell of the prairie. He let off another blast to guideher. He ran on at top speed with Murgatroyd trailing anxiously behind.From time to time Murgatroyd called "_Chee-chee-chee!_" in frightenedpleading not to be abandoned.
More cattle appeared against the horizon. Fifty or a hundred. They cameafter the first clump. The first-seen group of a bull and his harem weremoving faster, now. The girl fled from them, but it is the instinct ofbeef-cattle on the open range--Calhoun had learned it only two daysbefore--to charge any human they find on foot. A mounted man to theirdim minds is a creature to be tolerated or fled from, but a human onfoot is to be crushed and stamped and gored.
* * * * *
Those in the lead were definitely charging now, with heads bent low. Thebull charged furiously with shut eyes, as bulls do, but themany-times-more-deadly cows charged with their eyes wide open andwickedly alert, and with a lumbering speed much greater than the girlcould manage.
She came up over the last rise, chalky-white and gasping, her hairflying, in the last extremity of terror. The nearest of the pursuingcattle were within ten yards when Calhoun fired from twenty yardsbeyond. One creature bellowed as the blast-bolt struck. It went down andothers crashed into it and swept over it, and more came on. The girl sawCalhoun, now, and ran toward him, panting, and he knelt verydeliberately and began to check the charge by shooting the leadinganimals.
He did not succeed. There were more cattle following the first, and moreand more behind them. It appeared that all the cattle on the plainjoined in the blind and senseless charge. The thudding of hooves becamea mutter and then a rumble and then a growl. Plunging, clumsy figuresrushed past on either side. But horns and heads heaved up over the moundof animals Calhoun had shot. He shot them too. More and more cattle camepounding past the rampart of his victims, but always, it seemed, someelected to climb the heap of their dead and dying fellows, and Calhounshot and shot.
But he split the herd. The foremost animals had been charging a sightedhuman enemy. Others had followed because it is the instinct of cattle tojoin their running fellows in whatever crazed urgency they feel. Therewas a dense, pounding, horrible mass of running bulls and cows andcalves; bellowing, wailing, grunting, puffing, raising thick andimpenetrable clouds of dust which had everything but galloping beastsgoing past on either side.
It lasted for minutes. Then the thunder of hooves diminished. It endedabruptly, and Calhoun and the girl were left alone with the gruesomepile of animals which had divided the charging herd into two parts. Theycould see the rears of innumerable running animals, stupidly continuingthe charge--hardly different, now, from a stampede--whose originalobjective none now remembered.
Calhoun thoughtfully touched the barrel of his blast-rifle and winced atits scorching heat.
* * * * *
"I just realized," he said coldly, "that I don't know your name. What isit?"
"M-maril," said the girl. She swallowed. "Th-thank you--."
"Maril," said Calhoun, "you are an idiot! It was half-witted at best togo off by yourself! You could have been lost! You could have cost medays of hunting for you, days badly needed for more important matters!"He stopped and took breath. "You may have spoiled what little chanceI'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 wasright 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 ofstill-roiling dust, Murgatroyd appeared forlornly. He was dust-covered,and draggled, and his tail drooped, and he sneezed again. He moved as ifhe could barely put one paw before another, but at the sight of Calhounhe sneezed yet again and said, "_Chee!_" in a disconsolate voice. Thenhe 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 onetelling 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 towardthe mountains, they began to see stragglers from the now-vanished herd.A little further, those stragglers began to notice them. And it wouldhave been a matter of no moment if they'd been domesticateddairy-cattle, but these were range-cattle gone wild. Twice, Calhoun hadto use his blast-rifle to discourage incipient charges by irritatedbulls or even more irritated cows. Those with calves darkly suspectedCalhoun of designs upon their offspring.
It was a relief to enter the valley again. But it was two miles more tothe landing-grid with the Med Ship beside it and the reek of carrion inthe air.
They were perhaps two hundred feet from the ship when a blast-riflecrashed and its bolt whined past Calhoun so close that he felt themonstrous heat. There had been no challenge. There was no warning. Therewas simply a shot which came horribly close to ending Calhoun's careerin a completely arbitrary fashion.