Every science fiction enthusiast remembers the thrill of his first exposure to the concept of space travel - the glory of man’s voyaging between the planets and even between the stars. But modern adult science fiction has largely grown away from the mechanics of space travel itself; the voyage is taken for granted as part of the background, and the story is focussed on the results. Here, however, one of the brighter new authors in the field shows that the story of the space ship is not exhausted; inevitably in that remote interstellar future, there will be the Mapping Command, whose duties are never finished and whose voyages of discovery may be as exciting as that of Magellan - and as perilous.
GRENVILLE’S PLANET
by Michael Shaara
Wisher did not see the brightness because he was back aft alone. In the still ship he sat quietly, relaxed. He was not bored. It was just that he had no interest. After fourteen years in the Mapping Command even the strangest of the new worlds was routine to him and what little imagination he had was beginning to centre upon a small farm he had seen on the southern plains of Vega VII.
The brightness that Wisher did not see grew with the passing moments. A pale young man named Grenville, who was Wisher’s crewman, watched it for a long while absently. When the gleam took on brilliance and a blue-white, dazzling blaze Grenville was startled. He stared at the screen for a long moment, then carefully checked the distance. Still a few light minutes away, the planet was already uncommonly bright.
Pleasantly excited, Grenville watched the planet grow. Slowly the moons came out. Four winked on and ringed the bright world like pearls in a necklace. Grenville gazed in awe. The blueness and the brightness flowed in together, it was the most beautiful thing that Grenville had ever seen.
Excited, he buzzed for Wisher. Wisher did not come.
Grenville took the ship in close and now it occurred to him to wonder. That a planet should shine like that, like an enormous facet of polished glass, was incredible. Now, as he watched the light began to form vaguely into the folds of cloud. The blue grew richer and deeper. Long before he hit the first cloud layer, Grenville knew what it was. He pounded the buzzer. Wisher finally came.
When he saw the water in the screen he stopped in his tracks.
‘Well I’ll be damned!’ he breathed.
Except for a few scuds of clouds it was blue. The entire world was blue. There was the white of the clouds and the icecaps, but the rest was all blue and the rest was water.
Grenville began to grin. A world of water!
‘Now how’s that for a freak?’ he chuckled. ‘One in a million, right, Sam? I bet you never saw anything like that.’
Wisher shook his head, still staring. Then he moved quickly to the controls and set out to make a check. They circled the planet with the slow, spiralling motion of the Mapping Command, bouncing radar off the dark side. When they came back into the daylight they were sure. There was no land on the planet.
Grenville, as usual, began to chatter.
‘Well, naturally,’ he said, ‘it was bound to happen sooner or later. Considering Earth, which has a land area covering only one fourth—’
‘Yep,’ nodded Wisher.
‘—and when you consider the odds, chances are that there are quite a number of planets with scarcely any land area at all.’
Wisher had moved back to the screen.
‘Let’s go down,’ he said.
Grenville startled, stared at him.
‘Where?’
‘Down low. I want to see what’s living in that ocean.’
* * * *
Because each new world was a wholly new world and because experience therefore meant nothing, Wisher had decided a long while ago to follow the regs without question. For without the regs, the Mapping Command was a death trap. Nowhere in space was the need for rules so great as out on the frontier where there were no rules at all. The regs were complex, efficient and all-embracing; it was to the regs that the men of the Mapping Command owed their lives and the rest of Mankind owed the conquest of space.
But inevitably, unalterably, there were things which the regs could not have foreseen. And Wisher knew that too, but he did not think about it.
According to plan, then, they dropped down into the stratosphere, went further down below the main cloud region and levelled off at a thousand feet. Below them, mile after rolling, billowy mile, the sea flowed out to the great bare circle of the horizon.
With the screen at full magnification, they probed the water.
It was surprising, in all that expanse of sea, to observe so little. No schools of fish of any kind, no floating masses of seaweed, nothing but a small fleet shape here and there and an occasional group of tiny plant organisms.
Wisher dropped only a hundred or so feet lower. In a world where evolution had been confined underwater it would be best to keep at a distance. On the other worlds to which he had come Wisher had seen some vast and incredible things. Eight hundred feet up, he thought, is a good safe distance.
It was from that height then, that they saw the island.
It was small, too small to be seen from a distance, was barely five miles in length and less than two miles wide. A little brown cigar it was, sitting alone in the varying green-blue wash of the ocean.
Grenville began to grin. Abruptly he laughed out loud. Grenville was not the kind of man who is easily awed, and the sight of that one bare speck, that single stubby persistent butt of rock alone in a world of water, was infinitely comical to him.
‘Wait’ll we show the boys this,’ he chuckled to Wisher. ‘Break out the camera. My God, what a picture this will make!’
Grenville was filled with pride. This planet, after all, was his assignment. It was his to report on, his discovery - he gasped. They might even name it after him.
He flushed, his heart beat rapidly. It had happened before. There were a number of odd planets named after men in the Mapping Command. When the tourists came they would be coming to Grenville’s Planet, one of the most spectacular wonders of the Universe.
While the young man was thus rejoicing. Wisher had brought the ship around and was swinging slowly in over the island. It was covered with some kind of brownish-green, stringy vegetation. Wisher was tempted to go down and check for animal life, but decided to see first if there were any more islands.
Still at a height of 800 feet, they spiralled the planet. They did not see the second island, radar picked it out for them.
This one was bigger than the first and there was another island quite near to the south. Both were narrow and elongated in the cigar-like shape of the first, were perhaps twenty miles in length and were encrusted with the same brown-green vegetation. They were small enough to have been hidden from sight during the first check by a few scattered clouds.
The discovery of them was anticlimatic and disappointing. Grenville would have been happier if there was no land at all. But he regained some of his earlier enthusiasm when he remembered that the tourists would still come and that now at least they would be able to land.
There was nothing at all on the night side. Coming back out into the daylight, Wisher cautiously decided to take them down.
‘Peculiar,’ said Wisher, peering at the dunes of the beach.
‘What is?’ Grenville eyed him through the fish bowls of their helmets.
‘I don’t know,’ Wisher turned slowly, gazed around at the shaggy, weedy vegetation. ‘It doesn’t feel right.’
Grenville fell silent. There was nothing on the island that could hurt them, they were quite sure of that. The check had revealed the presence of a great number of small, four-footed animals, but only one type was larger than a dog, and that one was slow and noisy.
‘Have to be careful about snakes,’ Wishe
r said absently, recalling the regs on snakes and insects. Funny thing, that. There were very few insects.
Both men were standing in close to the ship. It was the rule, of course. You never left the ship until you were absolutely sure. Wisher, for some vague reason he could not define, was not sure.
‘How’s the air check?’
Grenville was just then reading the meters. After a moment he said:
‘Good.’
Wisher relaxed, threw open his helmet and breathed in deeply. The clean fresh air flowed into him, exhilarating him. He unscrewed his helmet entirely, looking around.
The ship had come down on the up end of the beach, a good distance from the sea, and was standing now in a soft, reddish sand. It was bordered on the north by the open sea and to the south was the scrawny growth they had seen from above. It was not a jungle - the plants were too straight and stiff for that - and the height of the tallest was less than ten feet. But it was the very straightness of the things, the eerie regularity of them, which grated in Wisher’s mind.
But, breathing in the cool sea air of the island, Wisher began to feel more confident. They had their rifles, they had the ship and the alarm system. There was nothing here that could harm them.
Grenville brought out some folding chairs from the ship. They sat and chatted pleasantly until the twilight came.
Just before twilight two of the moons came out.
‘Moons,’ said Wisher suddenly.
‘What.’
‘I was just thinking,’ Wisher explained.
‘What about the moons?’
‘I wasn’t thinking exactly about them, I was thinking about the tide. Four good-sized moons in conjunction could raise one heck of a tide.’
Grenville settled back, closing his eyes.
‘So?’
‘So that’s probably where the land went.’
Grenville was too busy dreaming about his fame as discoverer of Grenville’s Planet to be concerned with tides and moons.
‘Let the techs worry about that,’ he said without interest.
But Wisher kept thinking.
The tide could very well be the cause. When the four moons got together and started to pull they would raise a tremendous mass of water, a grinding power that would slice away the continent edges like no erosive force in history. Given a billion years in which to work - but Wisher suddenly remembered a peculiar thing about the island.
If the tides had planed down the continents of this planet, then these islands had no right being here, certainly not as sand and loose rock. Just one tide like the ones those moons could raise would be enough to cut the islands completely away. Well maybe, he thought, the tides are very far apart, centuries even.
He glanced apprehensively at the sky. The two moons visible were reassuringly far apart.
He turned from the moons to gaze at the sea. And then he remembered the first thought he had had about this planet - that uncomfortable feeling that the first sight of land had dispelled. He thought of it now again.
Evolution.
A billion years beneath the sea, with no land to take the first developing mammals. What was going on, right now as he watched, beneath the placid rolling surface of the sea?
It was a disturbing thought. When they went back to the ship for the night Wisher did not need the regs to tell him to seal the airlock and set the alarm screens.
The alarm that came in the middle of the night and nearly scared Wisher to death turned out to be only an animal. It was one of the large ones, a weird bristling thing with a lean and powerful body. It got away before they were up to see it, but it left its photographic image.
In spite of himself, Wisher had trouble getting back to sleep, and in the morning was silently in favour of leaving for the one last star they would map before returning to base. But the regs called for life specimens to be brought back from all livable worlds whenever possible, whenever there was no ‘slight manifestation of danger’. Well, here it was certainly possible. They would have to stay long enough to take a quick sampling of plants and animals and of marine life too.
Grenville was just as anxious to get back as Wisher was, but for different reasons. Grenville, figured Grenville, was now a famous man.
Early in the morning, then, they lifted ship and once more spiralled the planet. Once the mapping radar had recorded the size and shape and location of the islands, they went in low again and made a complete check for life forms.
They found as before, very little. There were the bristling things, and - as Wisher had suspected - a great quantity of snakes and lizards. There were very few observable fish. There were no birds.
When they were done they returned to the original island. Grenville, by this time, had a name for it. Since there was another island near it, lying to the south, Grenville called that one South Grenville. The first was, of course, North Grenville. Grenville chuckled over that for a long while.
* * * *
‘Don’t go too near the water.’
‘All right, mama,’ Grenville chirped, grinning. ‘I’ll work the edge of the vegetation.’
‘Leave the rifle, take the pistol. It’s handier.’
Grenville nodded and left, dragging the specimen sack. Wisher, muttering, turned toward the water.
It is unnatural, he thought, for a vast warm ocean to be so empty of life. Because the ocean, really, is where life begins. He had visions in his mind of any number of vicious, incredible, slimy things that were alive and native to that sea and who were responsible for the unnatural sterility of the water. When he approached the waves he was very cautious.
The first thing he noticed, with a shock, was that there were no shellfish.
Not any. Not crabs or snails or even the tiniest of sea beings. Nothing. The beach was a bare, dead plot of sand.
He stood a few yards from the waves, motionless. He was almost positive, now, that there was danger here. The shores of every warm sea he had ever seen, from Earth on out to Deneb, had been absolutely choked with life and the remnants of life. There were always shells and fish scales, and snails, worms, insects; bits of jellyfish, tentacles, minutiae of a hundred million kinds, cluttering and crowding every square inch of the beach and sea. And yet here, now, there was nothing. Just sand and water.
It took a great deal of courage for Wisher to approach those waves, although the water here was shallow. He took a quick water sample and hurried back to the ship.
Minutes later he was perched in the shadow of her side, staring out broodingly over the ocean. The water was Earth water as far as his instruments could tell. There was nothing wrong with it. But there was nothing much living in it.
When Grenville came back with the floral specimens Wisher quietly mentioned the lack of shellfish.
‘Well, hell,’ said Grenville, scratching his head painfully, ‘maybe they just don’t like it here.’
And maybe they’ve got reason, Wisher said to himself. But aloud he said: ‘The computer finished calculating the orbits of those moons.’
‘So?’
‘So the moons conjunct every 112 years. They raise a tide of 600 feet.’
Grenville did not follow.
‘The tide,’ said Wisher, smiling queerly, ‘is at least 400 feet higher than any of the islands.’
When Grenville started, still puzzled, Wisher grunted and kicked at the sand.
‘Now where in hell do you suppose the animals came from?’
‘They should be drowned,’ said Grenville slowly.
‘Right. And would be, unless they’re amphibian, which they’re not. Or unless a new batch evolves every hundred years.’
‘Um.’ Grenville sat down to think about it.
‘Don’t make sense,’ he said after a while.
Having thoroughly confounded Grenville, Wisher turned away and paced slowly in the sand. The sand, he thought distractedly, that’s another thing. Why in heck is this island here at all?
Artificial.
The word po
pped unbidden into his brain.
That would be it. That would have to be it.
The island was artificial, was - restored. Put here by whoever or whatever lived under the sea.
* * * *
Grenville was ready to go. He stood nervously eyeing the waves, his fingers clamped tightly on the pistol at his belt, waiting for Wisher to give the word.
Wisher leaned against the spaceship, conveniently near the airlock. He regretted disturbing Grenville.
‘We can’t leave yet,’ he said calmly. ‘We haven’t any proof. And besides, there hasn’t been any “manifestation of danger”.’