Explorers of Space Read online

  Then Nugget howled hysterically and tried to swarm up Roane, as a cub tries to swarm up the nearest tree in time of danger. Roane collapsed, and the cub upon him—and there was a flash of stinking scaly hide, while the air was filled with the snarling, spitting squeals of a sphex in full leap. The beast had over-jumped, aiming at Roane and the cub while both were upright and arriving when they had fallen. It went tumbling.

  Roane heard nothing but the fiendish squalling, but in the distance Sitka and Sourdough were coming at rocketship speed. Faro Nell let out a roar and fairly split the air. And then there was a furry cub streaking towards her, bawling, while Roane rolled to his feet and snatched up his gun. He raged through pure instinct. The sphex crouched to pursue the cub and Roane swung his weapon as a club. He was literally too close to shoot—and perhaps the sphex had seen the fleeing bear cub. But he swung furiously.

  And the sphex whirled. Roane was toppled from his feet. An eight-hundred-pound monstrosity straight out of hell—half wildcat and half spitting cobra with hydrophobia and homicidal mania added—such a monstrosity is not to be withstood when in whirling its body strikes one in the chest.

  That was when Sitka arrived, bellowing: He stood on his hind legs, emitting roars like thunder, challenging the sphex to battle. He waddled forward. Huyghens arrived, but he could not shoot with Roane in the sphere of an explosive bullet’s destructiveness. Faro Nell raged and snarled, torn between the urge to be sure that Nugget was unharmed and the frenzied fury of a mother whose offspring has been endangered.

  Mounted on Faro Nell, with Semper clinging idiotically to his shoulder, Huyghens watched helplessly as the sphex spat and squalled at Sitka, having only to reach out one claw to let out Roane’s life.

  5

  They got away from there, though Sitka seemed to want to lift the limp carcass of his victim in his teeth and dash it repeatedly to the ground. He seemed doubly raging because a man—with whom all Kodius Champion’s descendants had an emotional relationship—had been mishandled. But Roane was not grievously hurt. He bounced and swore as the bears raced for the horizon. Huyghens had flung him up on Sourdough’s back and snapped for him to hold on. He bumped and chattered furiously:

  “Dammit, Huyghens! This isn’t right! Sitka got some deep scratches! That horror’s claws may be poisonous!”

  But Huyghens snapped “Hup! Hup!” to the bears, and they continued their race against time. They went on for a good two miles, when Nugget wailed despairingly of his exhaustion and Fargo Nell halted firmly to nuzzle him.

  “This may be good enough,” said Huyghens. “Considering that there’s no wind and the big mass of beasts is down the plateau and there were only those two around here. Maybe they’re too busy to hold a wake, even! Anyhow—”

  He slid to the ground and extracted the antiseptic and swabs.

  “Sitka first,” snapped Roane. “I’m all right!”

  Huyghens swabbed the big bear’s wounds. They were trivial, because Sitka Pete was an experienced sphex-fighter. Then Roane grudgingly let the curiously smelling stuff—it reeked of ozone—be applied to the slashes on his chest. He held his breath as it stung. Then he said dourly:

  “It was my fault, Huyghens. I watched you instead of the landscape. I couldn’t imagine what you were doing.”

  “I was doing a quick dissection,” Huyghens told him. “By luck, that first sphex was a female, as I hoped. And she was just about to lay her eggs. Ugh! And now I know why the sphexes migrate, and where, and how it is that they don’t need game up here.”

  He slapped a quick bandage on Roane. He led the way eastwards, still putting distance between the dead sphexes and his party. It was a crisp walk, only, but Semper flapped indignantly overhead, angry that he was not permitted to ride again.

  “I’d dissected them before,” said Huyghens. “Not enough’s been known about them. Some things needed to be found out if men were ever to be able to live here.”

  “With bears?” asked Roane ironically.

  “Oh, yes,” said Huyghens. “But the point is that sphexes come to the desert here to breed—to mate and lay their eggs for the sun to hatch. It’s a particular place. Seals return to a special place to mate—and the males, at least, don’t eat for weeks on end. Salmon return to their native streams to spawn. They don’t eat, and they die afterwards. And eels—I’m using Earth examples, Roane—travel some thousands of miles to the Sargasso to mate and die. Unfortunately, sphexes don’t appear to die, but it’s clear that they have an ancestral breeding place and that they come here to the Sere Plateau to deposit their eggs!”

  Roane plodded onward. He was angry: angry with himself because he hadn’t taken elementary precautions; because he’d felt too safe, as a man in a robot-served civilization forms the habit of doing; because he hadn’t used his brain when Nugget whimpered, in even a bear cub’s awareness that danger was near.

  “And now,” Huyghens added, “I need some equipment that the robot colony had. With it, I think we can make a start towards making this a planet that men can live like men on!”

  Roane blinked.

  “What’s that?”

  “Equipment,” said Huyghens impatiently. “It’ll be at the robot colony. Robots were useless because they wouldn’t pay attention to sphexes. They’d still be. But take out the robot controls and the machines will do! They shouldn’t be ruined by a few months’ exposure to weather!”

  Roane marched on and on. Presently he said:

  “I never thought you’d want anything that came from that colony, Huyghens!”

  “Why not?” demanded Huyghens impatiently. “When men make machines do what they want, that’s all right. Even robots—when they’re where they belong. But men will have to handle flame-casters in the job I want them for. There have to be some, because there was a hundred-mile clearing to be burned off. And Earth-sterilizers—intended to kill the seeds of any plants that robots couldn’t handle. We’ll come back up here, Roane, and at least we’ll destroy the spawn of these infernal beasts! If we can’t do more than that—just doing that every year will wipe out the race in time. There are probably other hordes than this, with other breeding places. But we’ll find them, too. We’ll make this planet into a place where men from my world can come—and still be men!”

  Roane said sardonically:

  “It was sphexes that beat the robots. Are you sure you aren’t planning to make this world safe for robots?”

  Huyghens laughed shortly.

  “You’ve only seen one night-walker,” he said. “And how about those things on the mountain-slope—which would have drained you of blood and then feasted? Would you care to wander about this planet with only a robot bodyguard, Roane? Hardly! Men can’t live on this planet with only robots to help them—and stop them from being fully men! You’ll see!”

  They found the colony after only ten days more of travel and after many sphexes and more than a few staglike creatures and shaggy ruminants had fallen to their weapons and the bears. But first they found the survivors of the colony.

  There were three of them, hard-bitten and bearded and deeply embittered. When the electrified fence went down, two of them were away at a mine-tunnel, installing a new control panel for the robots who worked in it. The third was in charge of the mining operation. They were alarmed by the stopping of communication with the colony and went back in a tank-truck to find out what had happened, and only the fact that they were unarmed saved them. They found sphexes prowling and caterwauling about the fallen colony, in numbers they still did not wholly believe. And the sphexes smelled men inside the armored vehicle, but couldn’t break in. In turn, the men couldn’t kill them, or they’d have been trailed to the mine and besieged there for as long as they could kill an occasional monster.

  The survivors stopped all mining—of course—and tried to use remote-controlled robots for revenge and to get supplies for them. Their mining-robots were not designed for either task. And they had no weapons. They improvised miniature throwers
of burning rocket fuel, and they sent occasional prowling sphexes away screaming with scorched hides. But this was useful only because it did not kill the beasts. And it cost fuel. In the end they barricaded themselves and used the fuel only to keep a spark-signal going against the day when another ship came to seek the colony. They stayed in the mine as in a prison, on short rations, waiting without real hope. For diversion they could only contemplate the mining-robots they could not spare fuel to run and which could not do anything but mine.

  When Huyghens and Roane reached them, they wept. They hated robots and all things robotic only a little less than they hated sphexes. But Huyghens explained, and armed them with weapons from the packs of the bears, and they marched to the dead colony with the male Kodiaks as point and advance guard, and with Faro Nell bringing up the rear. They killed sixteen sphexes on the way. In the now overgrown clearing there were four more. In the shelters of the colony they found only foulness and the fragments of what had been men. But there was some food—not much, because the sphexes clawed at anything that smelled of men, and had ruined the plastic packets of radiation-sterilized food. But there were some supplies in metal containers which were not destroyed.

  And there was fuel, which men could dispense when they got to the control panels of the equipment. There were robots everywhere, bright and shining and ready for operation, but immobile, with plants growing up, around, and over them.

  They ignored those robots. But lustfully they fueled tracked flame-casters—adapting them to human rather than robot operation—and the giant soil-sterilizer, which had been built to destroy vegetation that robots could not be made to weed out or cultivate. And they headed back for the Sere Plateau, burning-eyed and filled with hate.

  But Nugget became a badly spoiled bear cub, because the freed men approved passionately of anything that would even grow up to kill sphexes. They petted him to excess, when they camped.

  And they reached the plateau by a sphex-trail to the top. And Semper scouted for sphexes, and the giant Kodiaks disturbed them and the sphexes came squalling and spitting to destroy them—and while Roane and Huyghens fired steadily, the great machines swept up with their special weapons. The Earth-sterilizer, it was found, was deadly against animal life as well as seeds, when its diathermic beam was raised and aimed. But it had to be handled by a man. No robot could decide just when it was to be used, and against what target.

  Presently the bears were not needed, because the scorched corpses of sphexes drew live ones from all parts of the plateau even in the absence of noticeable breezes. The official business of the sphexes was presumably finished, but they came to caterwaul and seek vengeance—which they did not find. Presently the survivors of the robot colony drove machines—as men needed to do, here—in great circles around the huge heap of slaughtered finds, destroying new arrivals as they came. It was such a killing as men had never before made on any planet, but there would not be many left of the sphex-horde which had bred in this particular patch of desert. There might be other hordes elsewhere, and other breeding places, but the normal territory of this mass of monsters would see few of them this year.

  Or next year, either. Because the soil-sterilizer would go over the dug-up sand where the sphex-spawn lay hidden for the sun to hatch. And the sun would never hatch them.

  But Huyghens and Roane, by that time, were camped on the edge of the plateau with the Kodiaks. They were technically upwind from the scene of slaughter—and somehow it seemed more befitting for the men of the robot colony to conduct it. After all, it was those men whose companions had been killed.

  There came an evening when Huyghens amiably cuffed Nugget away from where he sniffed too urgently at a stag-steak cooking on the camp-fire. Nugget ambled dolefully behind the protecting form of Roane and sniveled.

  “Huyghens,” said Roane painfully, “we’ve got to come to a settlement of our affairs. I’m a Colonial Survey officer. You’re an illegal colonist. It’s my duty to arrest you.” Huyghens regarded him with interest.

  “Will you offer me lenience if I tell on my confederates,” he asked mildly, “or may I plead that I can’t be forced to testify against myself?”

  Roane said vexedly:

  “It’s irritating! I’ve been an honest man all my life, but—I don’t believe in robots as I did, except in their place. And their place isn’t here. Not as the robot colony was planned, anyhow. The sphexes are nearly wiped out, but they won’t be extinct and robots can’t handle them. Bears and men will have to live here or—the people who do will have to spend their lives behind sphex-proof fences, accepting only what robots can give them. And there’s much too much on this planet for people to miss it! To live in a robot-managed controlled environment on a planet like Loren Two wouldn’t . . . it wouldn’t be self-respecting!”

  “You wouldn’t be getting religious, would you?” asked Huyghens drily. “That was your term for self-respect.” Semper the eagle squawked indignantly as Sitka Pete almost stepped on him, approaching the fire. Sitka Pete sniffed and Huyghens spoke to him sharply, and he sat down with a thump. He remained sitting in an untidy lump, looking at the steak and drooling.

  “You don’t let me finish!” protested Roane querulously. “I’m a Colonial Survey officer, and it’s my job to pass on the work that’s done on a planet before any but the first-landed colonists may come there to live. And of course to see that specifications are followed. Now—the robot colony I was sent to survey was practically destroyed. As designed, it wouldn’t work. It couldn’t survive.”

  Huyghens grunted. Night was falling. He turned the meat over the fire.

  “Now, in emergencies,” said Roane carefully, “colonists have the right to call on any passing ship for aid. Naturally! So—I’ve always been an honest man before, Huyghens—my report will be that the colony as designed was impractical, and that it was overwhelmed and destroyed except for three survivors who holed up and signaled for help. They did, you know!”

  “Go on,” grunted Huyghens.

  “So, said Roane querulously, “it just happened—just happened, mind you—that a ship with you and Sitka and Sourdough and Faro Nell on board—and Nugget and Semper, too, of course—picked up the distress call. So you landed to help the colonists. And you did. That’s the story. Therefore it isn’t illegal for you to be here. It was only illegal for you to be here when you were needed. But we’ll pretend you weren’t.”

  Huyghens glanced over his shoulder in the deepening night. He said calmly:

  “I wouldn’t believe that if I told it myself. Do you think the Survey will?”

  “They’re not fools,” said Roane tartly. “Of course they won’t! But when my report says that because of this unlikely series of events it is practical to colonize the planet, whereas before it wasn’t—and when my report proves that a robot colony alone is stark nonsense, but that with bears and men from your world added, so many thousand colonists can be received per year—And when that much is true, anyhow—” Huyghens seemed to shake a little as a dark silhouette against the flames. A little way off, Sourdough sniffed the air hopefully. With a bright light like the fire, presently naked-looking flying things might appear to be slapped down out of the air. They were succulent—to a bear.

  “My reports carry weight,” insisted Roane. “The deal will be offered, anyhow! The robot colony organizers will have to agree or they’ll have to fold up. It’s true! And your people can hold them up for nearly what terms they choose.” Huyghens’ shaking became understandable. It was laughter.

  “You’re a lousy liar, Roane,” he said, chuckling. “Isn’t it unintelligent and unreasonable and irrational to throw away a lifetime of honesty just to get me out of a jam? You’re not acting like a rational animal, Roane. But I thought you wouldn’t, when it came to the point.”

  Roane squirmed.

  “That’s the only solution I can think of. But it’ll work.”

  “I accept it,” said Huyghens, grinning. “With thanks. If only because it means ano
ther few generations of men living like men on a planet that is going to take a lot of taming. And—if you want to know—because it keeps Sourdough and Sitka and Nell and Nugget from being killed because I brought them here illegally.”

  Something pressed hard against Roane. Nugget, the cub, pushed urgently against him in his desire to get closer to the fragrantly cooking meat. He edged forward. Roane toppled from where he squatted on the ground. He sprawled. Nugget sniffed luxuriously.

  “Slap him,” said Huyghens. “He’ll move back.”

  “I won’t!” said Roane indignantly from where he lay. “I won’t do it! He’s my friend!”

  BEACHHEAD

  Clifford D. Simak

  Cliff Simak’s stories tend to be quiet, warmhearted, intelligent, and thoughtful—and anyone looking for ways to describe Simak himself would probably use much the same terms. This gentle Minnesotan has enjoyed two careers side by side: in daily life an editor for the Minneapolis Tribune, and after hours a writer of science fiction, one of the great figures of the genre. His novels include such classics as City, Time and Again, and Ring Around the Sun; he has written one Hugo-winning shorter story, “The Big Front Yard”; in 1971 he was guest of honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston. The theme of interplanetary exploration is a frequent one in Simak’s works; the story chosen here, not nearly as well-known as it should be, is one of his most moving examinations of the collision between Earthmen and the natives of a distant world.

  THERE WAS nothing, absolutely nothing, that could stop a human planetary survey party. It was a specialized unit created for and charged with one purpose only—to establish a bridgehead on an alien planet, to blast out the perimeters of that bridgehead and establish a base where there would be some elbow room. Then hold that elbow room against all comers until it was time to go.