Explorers of Space Read online

  “Well, that’s that.” he said cheerfully. “Now let’s sit down and have a drink to forget all this unpleasantness, shall we?”

  I pointed indignantly at the clock.

  “Have you gone crazy!” I yelled. “He’s already halfway to Jupiter!”

  young. I see no cause at all for hasty action.”

  Marianne spoke for the first time; she now looked really Professor Forster looked at me disapprovingly, scared.

  “Impatience.” he said, “is a common failing in the “Certainly not. Everything I told you was perfectly true. “But you promised,” she whispered.

  The Professor suddenly capitulated. He had had his little “Do you mean that you lied to me?”

  You simply jumped to the wrong conclusions. When I said joke, and didn’t want to prolong the agony.

  “I can tell you at once, Miss Mitchell—and you too, Jack—that Mays is in no more danger than we are. We can go and collect him whenever we like.” that a body would take ninety-five minutes to fall from here to Jupiter, I omitted—not, I must confess, accidentally—a rather important phrase. I should have added ‘a body at rest with respect to Jupiter.’ Your friend Mr. Mays was sharing the orbital speed of this satellite, and he’s still got it. A little matter of twenty-six kilometers a second, Miss Mitchell.

  “Oh, yes, we threw him completely off Five and toward Jupiter. But the velocity we gave him then was trivial. He’s still moving in practically the same orbit as before. The most he can do—I’ve got Captain Searle to work out the figures—is to drift about a hundred kilometers inward. And in one revolution—twelve hours—he’ll be right back where he started, without our bothering to do anything at all.”

  There was a long, long silence. Marianne’s face was a study in frustration, relief, and annoyance at having been fooled. Then she turned on Captain Hopkins.

  “You must have known all the time! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Hopkins gave her a wounded expression.

  “You didn’t ask me,” he said.

  We hauled Mays down about an hour later. He was only twenty kilometers up, and we located him quickly enough by the flashing light on his suit. His radio had been disconnected, for a reason that hadn’t occurred to me. He was intelligent enough to realize that he was in no danger, and if his set had been working he could have called his ship and exposed our bluff. That is, if he wanted to. Personally, I think I’d have been glad enough to call the whole thing off even if I had known that I was perfectly safe. It must have been awfully lonely up there.

  To my great surprise, Mays wasn’t as mad as I’d expected. Perhaps he was too relieved to be back in our snug little cabin when we drifted up to him on the merest fizzle of rockets and yanked him in. Or perhaps he felt that he’d been worsted in fair fight and didn’t bear any grudge. I really think it was the latter.

  There isn’t much more to tell, except that we did play one other trick on him before we left Five. He had a good deal more fuel in his tanks than he really needed, now that his payload was substantially reduced. By keeping the excess ourselves, we were able to carry “The Ambassador” back to Ganymede after all. Oh, yes, the Professor gave him a check for the fuel we’d borrowed. Everything was perfectly legal.

  There’s one amusing sequel I must tell you, though. The day after the new gallery was opened at the British Museum I went along to see “The Ambassador,” partly to discover if his impact was still as great in these changed surroundings. (For the record, it wasn’t—though it’s still considerable and Bloomsbury will never be quite the same to me again.) A huge crowd was milling around the gallery, and there in the middle of it were Mays and Marianne.

  It ended up with us having a very pleasant lunch together in Holborn. I’ll say this about Mays—he doesn’t bear any grudges. But I’m still rather sore about Marianne.

  And, frankly, I can’t imagine what she sees in him.

  COLLECTING TEAM

  Robert Silverberg

  If there is life on other worlds, no doubt explorers from Earth will go forth to collect specimens of it for the zoos of tomorrow. But Earthmen may not be the only zoologists in the universe . . .

  FROM FIFTY thousand miles up, the situation looked promising. It was a middle-sized, brown-and-green, inviting-looking planet, with no sign of cities or any other such complications. Just a pleasant sort of place, the very sort we were looking for to redeem what had been a pretty futile expedition.

  I turned to Clyde Holdreth, who was staring reflectively at the thermocouple.

  “Well? What do you think?”

  “Looks fine to me. Temperature’s about seventy down there—nice and warm, and plenty of air. I think it’s worth a try.”

  Lee Davison came strolling out from the storage hold, smelling of animals, as usual. He was holding one of the blue monkeys we picked up on Alpheraz, and the little beast was crawling up his arm. “Have we found something, gentlemen?”

  “We’ve found a planet,” I said. “How’s the storage space in the hold?”

  “Don’t worry about that. We’ve got room for a whole zoo-full more, before we get filled up. It hasn’t been a very fruitful trip.”

  “No,” I agreed. “It hasn’t. Well? Shall we go down and see what’s to be seen?”

  “Might as well,” Holdreth said. “We can’t go back to Earth with just a couple of blue monkeys and some anteaters, you know.”

  “I’m in favor of a landing too,” said Davison. “You?”

  I nodded. “I’ll set up the charts, and you get your animals comfortable for deceleration.”

  Davison disappeared back into the storage hold, while Holdreth scribbled furiously in the logbook, writing down the coordinates of the planet below, its general description, and so forth. Aside from being a collecting team for the zoological department of the Bureau of Interstellar Affairs, we also double as a survey ship, and the planet down below was listed as unexplored on our charts.

  I glanced out at the mottled brown-and-green ball spinning slowly in the viewport, and felt the warning twinge of gloom that came to me every time we made a landing on a new and strange world. Repressing it, I started to figure out a landing orbit. From behind me came the furious chatter of the blue monkeys as Davison strapped them into their acceleration cradles, and under that the deep, unmusical honking of the Rigelian anteaters noisily bleating their displeasure.

  The planet was inhabited, all right. We hadn’t had the ship on the ground more than a minute before the local fauna began to congregate. We stood at the viewport and looked out in wonder.

  “This is one of those things you dream about,” Davison said, stroking his little beard nervously. “Look at them! There must be a thousand different species out there.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Holdreth.

  I computed how much storage space we had left and how many of the thronging creatures outside we would be able to bring back with us. “How are we going to decide what to take and what to leave behind?”

  “Does it matter?” Holdreth said gaily. “This is what you call an embarrassment of riches, I guess. We just grab the dozen most bizarre creatures and blast-off—and save the rest for another trip. It’s too bad we wasted all that time wandering around near Rigel.”

  “We did get the anteaters,” Davison pointed out. They were his finds, and he was proud of them.

  I smiled sourly. “Yeah. We got the anteaters there.” The anteaters honked at that moment, loud and clear. “You know, that’s one set of beasts I think I could do without.”

  “Bad attitude,” Holdreth said. “Unprofessional.”

  “Whoever said I was a zoologist, anyway? I’m just a spaceship pilot, remember. And if I don’t like the way those anteaters talk—and smell—I see no reason why I—”

  “Say, look at that one,” Davison said suddenly.

  I glanced out the viewport and saw a new beast emerging from the thick-packed vegetation in the background. I’ve seen some fairly strange creat
ures since I was assigned to the zoological department, but this one took the grand prize.

  It was about the size of a giraffe, moving on long, wobbly legs and with a tiny head up at the end of a preposterous neck. Only it had six legs and a bunch of writhing snakelike tentacles as well, and its eyes, great violet globes, stood out nakedly on the ends of two thick stalks. It must have been twenty feet high. It moved with exaggerated grace through the swarm of beasts surrounding our ship, pushed its way smoothly towards the vessel, and peered gravely in at the viewport. One purple eye stared directly at me, the other at Davison. Oddly, it seemed to me as if it were trying to tell us something.

  “Big one, isn’t it?” Davison said finally.

  “I’ll bet you’d like to bring one back, too.”

  “Maybe we can fit a young one aboard,” Davison said. “If we can find a young one.” He turned to Holdreth. “How’s that air analysis coming? I’d like to get out there and start collecting. God, that’s a crazy-looking beast!”

  The animal outside had apparently finished its inspection of us, for it pulled its head away and, gathering its legs under itself, squatted near the ship. A small doglike creature with stiff spines running along its back began to bark at the big creature, which took no notice. The other animals, which came in all shapes and sizes, continued to mill around the ship, evidently very curious about the newcomer to their world. I could see Davison’s eyes thirsty with the desire to take the whole kit and caboodle back to Earth with him. I knew what was running through his mind. He was dreaming of the umpteen thousand species of extraterrestrial wildlife roaming around out there, and to each one he was attaching a neat little tag: Something-or-other davisoni.

  “The air’s fine,” Holdreth announced abruptly, looking up from his test-tubes. “Get your butterfly nets and let’s see what we can catch.”

  There was something I didn’t like about the place. It was just too good to be true, and I learned long ago that nothing ever is. There’s always a catch someplace.

  Only this seemed to be on the level. The planet was a bonanza for zoologists, and Davison and Holdreth were having the time of their lives, hipdeep in obliging specimens.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Davison said for at least the fiftieth time, as he scooped up a small purplish squirrel-like creature and examined it curiously. The squirrel stared back, examining Davison just as curiously.

  “Let’s take some of these,” Davison said. “I like them.”

  “Carry ’em on in, then,” I said, shrugging. I didn’t care which specimens they chose, so long as they filled up the storage hold quickly and let me blast off on schedule. I watched as Davison grabbed a pair of the squirrels and brought them into the ship.

  Holdreth came over to me. He was carrying a sort of a dog with insect-faceted eyes and gleaming furless skin. “How’s this one, Gus?”

  “Fine,” I said bleakly. “Wonderful.”

  He put the animal down—it didn’t scamper away, just sat there smiling at us—and looked at me. He ran a hand through his fast-vanishing hair. “Listen, Gus, you’ve been gloomy all day. What’s eating you?”

  “I don’t like this place,” I said.

  “Why? Just on general principles?”

  “It’s too easy, Clyde. Much too easy. These animals just flock around here waiting to be picked up.”

  Holdreth chuckled. “And you’re used to a struggle, aren’t you? You’re just angry at us because we have it so simple here!”

  “When I think of the trouble we went through just to get a pair of miserable vile-smelling anteaters, and—”

  “Come off it, Gus. We’ll load up in a hurry, if you like. But this place is a zoological gold mine!”

  I shook my head. “I don’t like it, Clyde. Not at all.”

  Holdreth laughed again and picked up his faceted-eyed dog. “Say, know where I can find another of these, Gus?”

  “Right over there.” I said, pointing. “By that tree. With its tongue hanging out. It’s just waiting to be carried away.”

  Holdreth looked and smiled. “What do you know about that!” He snared his specimen and carried both of them inside.

  I walked away to survey the grounds. The planet was too flatly incredible for me to accept on face value, without at least a look-see, despite the blithe way my two companions were snapping up specimens.

  For one thing, animals just don’t exist this way—in big miscellaneous quantities, living all together happily. I hadn’t noticed more than a few of each kind, and there must have been five hundred different species, each one stranger-looking than the next. Nature doesn’t work that way.

  For another, they all seemed to be on friendly terms with one another, though they acknowledged the unofficial leadership of the giraffe-like creature. Nature doesn’t work that way, either. I hadn’t seen one quarrel between the animals yet. That argued that they were all herbivores, which didn’t make sense ecologically.

  I shrugged my shoulders and walked on.

  Half an hour later, I knew a little more about the geography of our bonanza. We were on either an immense island or a peninsula of some sort, because I could see a huge body of water bordering the land some ten miles off. Our vicinity was fairly flat, except for a good-sized hill from which I could see the terrain.

  There was a thick, heavily-wooded jungle not too far from the ship. The forest spread out all the way towards the water in one direction, but ended abruptly in the other. We had brought the ship down right at the edge of the clearing. Apparently most of the animals we saw lived in the jungle.

  On the other side of our clearing was a low, broad plain that seemed to trail away into a desert in the distance; I could see an uninviting stretch of barren sand that contrasted strangely with the fertile jungle to my left. There was a small lake to the side. It was, I saw, the sort of country likely to attract a varied fauna, since there seemed to be every sort of habitat within a small area.

  And the fauna! Although I’m a zoologist only by osmosis, picking up both my interest and my knowledge second-hand from Holdreth and Davison, I couldn’t help but be astonished by the wealth of strange animals. They came in all different shapes and sizes, colors and odors, and the only thing they all had in common was their friendliness. During the course of my afternoon’s wanderings a hundred animals must have come marching boldly right up to me, given me the once-over, and walked away. This included half a dozen kinds that I hadn’t seen before, plus one of the eye-stalked, intelligent-looking giraffes and a furless dog. Again, I had the feeling that the giraffe seemed to be trying to communicate.

  I didn’t like it, I didn’t like it at all.

  I returned to our clearing, and saw Holdreth and Davison still buzzing madly around, trying to cram as many animals as they could into our hold.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “Hold’s all full,” Davison said. “We’re busy making our alternate selections now.” I saw him carrying out Holdreth’s two furless dogs and picking up instead a pair of eight-legged penguinish things that uncomplainingly allowed themselves to be carried in. Holdreth was frowning unhappily.

  “What do you want those for, Lee? Those dog-like ones seem much more interesting, don’t you think?”

  “No,” Davison said. “I’d rather bring along these two. They’re curious beasts, aren’t they? Look at the muscular network that connects the—”

  “Hold it, fellows,” I said. I peered at the animal in Davison’s hands and glanced up. “This is a curious beast,” I said. “It’s got eight legs.”

  “You becoming a zoologist?” Holdreth asked, amused.

  “No—but I am getting puzzled. Why should this one have eight legs, some of the others here six, and some of the others only four?”

  They looked at me blankly, with the scorn of professionals.

  “I mean, there ought to be some sort of logic to evolution here, shouldn’t there? On Earth we’ve developed a four-legged pattern of animal life; on Venus,
they usually run to six legs. But have you ever seen an evolutionary hodgepodge like this place before?”

  “There are stranger setups,” Holdreth said. “The symbiotes on Sirius Three, the burrowers of Mizar—but you’re right, Gus. This is a peculiar evolutionary dispersal. I think we ought to stay and investigate it fully.”

  Instantly I knew from the bright expression on Davison’s face that I had blundered, had made things worse than ever. I decided to take a new tack.

  “I don’t agree,” I said. “I think we ought to leave with what we’ve got, and come back with a larger expedition later.”

  Davison chuckled. “Come on, Gus, don’t be silly! This is a chance of a lifetime for us—why should we call in the whole zoological department on it?”

  I didn’t want to tell them I was afraid of staying longer. I crossed my arms. “Lee, I’m the pilot of this ship, and you’ll have to listen to me. The schedule calls for a brief stopover here, and we have to leave. Don’t tell me I’m being silly.”

  “But you are, man! You’re standing blindly in the path of scientific investigation, of—”

  “Listen to me, Lee. Our food is calculated on a pretty narrow margin, to allow you fellows more room for storage. And this is strictly a collecting team. There’s no provision for extended stays on any one planet. Unless you want to wind up eating your own specimens, I suggest you allow us to get out of here.”

  They were silent for a moment. Then Holdreth said, “I guess we can’t argue with that, Lee. Let’s listen to Gus and go back now. There’s plenty of time to investigate this place later when we can take longer.”

  “But—oh, all right,” Davison said reluctantly. He picked up the eight-legged penguins. “Let me stash these things in the hold, and we can leave.” He looked strangely at me, as if I had done something criminal.

  As he started into the ship, I called to him.

  “What is it, Gus?”

  “Look here, Lee. I don’t want to pull you away from here. It’s simply a matter of food,” I lied, masking my nebulous suspicions.