Explorers of Space Read online

  After the base was once established, the brains of the party got to work. They turned the place inside out. They put it on tape and captured it within the chains of symbols they scribbled in their field books. They pictured it and wrote it and plotted it and reduced it to a neat assembly of keyed and symbolic facts to be inserted in the galactic files.

  If there was life, and sometimes there was, they prodded it to get reaction. Sometimes the reaction was extremely violent, and other times it was much more dangerously subtle. But there were ways in which to handle both the violent and the subtle, for the legionnaires and their robots were trained to a razor’s edge and knew nearly all the answers.

  There was nothing in the galaxy so far known that could stop a human survey party.

  Tom Decker sat at ease in the empty lounge and swirled the ice in the highball glass, well contented, watching the first of the robots emerge from the bowels of the cargo space. They dragged a conveyor belt behind them as they emerged, and Decker, sitting idly, watched them drive supports into the ground and rig up the belt.

  A door clicked open back of Decker and he turned his head.

  “May I come in, sir?” Doug Jackson asked.

  “Certainly,” said Decker.

  Jackson walked to the great curving window and looked out. “What does it look like, sir?” he asked.

  Decker shrugged. “Another job,” he said. “Six weeks. Six months. Depends on what we find.”

  Jackson sat down beside him. “This one looks tough,” he said. “Jungle worlds always are a bit meaner than any of the others.”

  Decker grunted at him. “A job. That’s all. Another job to do. Another report to file. Then they’ll either send out an exploitation gang or a pitiful bunch of bleating colonists.”

  “Or,” said Jackson, “they’ll file the report and let it gather dust for a thousand years or so.”

  “They can do anything they want,” Decker told him. “We turn it in. What someone else does with it after that is their affair, not ours.”

  They sat quietly watching the six robots roll out the first of the packing cases, rip off its cover and unpack the seventh robot, laying out his various parts neatly in a row in the tramped-down, waist-high grass. Then, working as a team, with not a single fumble, they put No. 7 together, screwed his brain case into his metal skull, flipped up his energizing switch, and slapped the breastplate home.

  No. 7 stood groggily for a moment. He swung his arms uncertainly, shook his head from side to side. Then, having oriented himself, he stepped briskly forward and helped the other six heave the packing box containing No. 8 off the conveyor belt.

  “Takes a little time this way,” said Decker, “but it saves a lot of space. Have to cut our robot crew in half if we didn’t pack them at the end of every job. They stow away better.”

  He sipped at his highball speculatively. Jackson lit a cigarette.

  “Someday,” said Jackson, “we’re going to run up against something that we can’t handle.”

  Decker snorted.

  “Maybe here,” insisted Jackson, gesturing at the nightmare jungle world outside the great curved sweep of the vision plate.

  “You’re a romanticist,” Decker told him shortly. “In love with the unexpected. Besides that, you’re new. Get a dozen trips under your belt and you won’t feel this way.”

  “It could happen,” insisted Jackson.

  Decker nodded, almost sleepily, “Maybe,” he said, “Maybe it could, at that. It never has, but I suppose it could. And when it does, we take it on the lam. It’s not part of our job to fight a last-ditch battle. When we bump up against something that’s too big to handle, we don’t stick around. We don’t take any risks.”

  He took another sip. “Not even calculated risks,” he added.

  The ship rested on the top of a low hill, in a small clearing masked by tall grass, sprinkled here and there with patches of exotic flowers. Below the hill a river flowed sluggishly, a broad expanse of chocolate-colored water moving in a sleepy tide through the immense vine-entangled forest.

  As far as the eye could see, the jungle stretched away, a brooding darkness that even from behind the curving quartz of the vision plate seemed to exude a heady, musty scent of danger that swept up over the grass-covered hilltop. There was no sign of life, but one knew, almost instinctively, that sentiency lurked in the buried pathways and tunnels of the great tree-land.

  Robot No. 8 had been energized, and now the eight, split into two groups, ran out two packing cases at a time instead of one. Soon there were twelve robots, and then they formed themselves into three working groups.

  “Like that,” said Decker, picking up the conversation where they had left it lying. He gestured with his glass, now empty. “No calculated risks. We send the robots first. They unpack and set up their fellows. Then the whole gang turns to and uncrates the machinery and sets it up and gets it operating. A man doesn’t even put his foot on the ground until he has a steel ring around the ship to give him protection.”

  Jackson sighed. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “Nothing can happen. We don’t take any chances. Not a single one.”

  “Why should we?” Decker asked. He heaved himself out of the chair, stood up and stretched. “Got a thing or two to do,” he said. “Last-minute checks and so on.”

  “I’ll sit here for a while,” said Jackson. “I like to watch. It’s all new to me.”

  “You’ll get over it,” Decker told him. “In another twenty years.”

  In his office, Decker lifted a sheaf of preliminary reports off his desk and ran through them slowly, checking each one carefully, filing away in his mind the basic facts of the world outside.

  He worked stolidly, wetting a big, blunt thumb against his outthrust tongue to flip the report pages off the top of the next stack and deposit them, in not so neat a pile, to his right, face downward.

  Atmosphere—pressure slightly more than Earth. High in oxygen. Gravity—a bit more than Earth. Temperature—hot. Jungle worlds always were. There was a breeze outside now, he thought. Maybe there’d be a breeze most of the time. That would be a help. Rotation—thirty-six-hour day.

  Radiation—none of local origin, but some hard stuff getting through from the sun. He made a mental note: Watch that.

  Bacterial and virus count—as usual. Lots of it. Apparently not too dangerous. Not with every single soul hypoed and immunized and hormoned to his eyebrows. But you never can be sure, he thought. Not entirely sure. No calculated risks, he had told Jackson. But here was a calculated risk, and one you couldn’t do a single thing about. If there was a bug that picked you for a host and you weren’t loaded for bear to fight him, you took him on and did the best you could. Life factor—lot of emanation. Probably the vegetation, maybe even the soil, was crawling with all sorts of loathsome life. Vicious stuff, more than likely. But that was something you took care of as a matter of routine. No use taking any chances. You went over the ground even if there was no life—just to be sure there wasn’t.

  A tap came on the door and Decker called out for the man to enter.

  It was Captain Carr, commander of the Legion unit.

  Carr saluted snappily. Decker did not rise. He made his answering salute a sloppy one on purpose. No use, he told himself, letting the fellow establish any semblance of equality, for there was no such equality in fact. A captain of the Legion simply did not rank with the commandant of a galactic survey party.

  “Reporting, sir,” said Carr. “We are ready for a landing.”

  “Fine, Captain. Fine.” What was the matter with the fool? The Legion always was ready, always would be ready—that was no more than tradition. Why, then, carry out such an empty, stiff formality?

  But it was the nature of a man like Carr, he supposed. The Legion, with its rigid discipline, with its ancient pride of service and tradition, attracted men like Carr, was a perfect finishing school for accomplished martinets.

  Tin soldiers, Decker thought, but accomplished o
nes. As hard-bitten a gang of fighting men as the galaxy had ever known. They were drilled and disciplined, serum- and hormone-injected against all known diseases of an alien world, trained and educated in alien psychology and strictly indoctrinated with high survival characteristics which stood up under even the most adverse circumstances.

  “We shall not be ready for some time, Captain,” Decker said. “The robots have just started their uncrating.”

  “Very well,” said Carr. “We await your orders, sir.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Decker told him, making it quite clear that he wished he would get out. But when Carr turned to go, Decker called him back.

  “What is it, sir?” asked Carr.

  “I’ve been wondering,” said Decker. “Just wondering, you understand. Can you imagine any circumstances which might arise that the Legion could not handle?”

  Carr’s expression was a pure delight to see. “I’m afraid, sir, that I don’t understand your question.”

  Decker sighed. “I didn’t think you would,” he said.

  Before nightfall, the full working force of robots had been uncrated and had set up some of the machines, enough to establish a small circle of alarm posts around the ship.

  A flame thrower burned a barren circle on the hilltop, stretching five hundred feet around the ship. A hard-radiations generator took up its painstaking task, pouring pure death into the soil. The toll must have been terrific. In some spots the ground virtually boiled as the dying life forms fought momentarily and fruitlessly to escape the death that cut them down.

  The robots rigged up huge batteries of lamps that set the hilltop ablaze with a light as bright as day, and the work went on.

  As yet, no human had set foot outside the ship.

  Inside the ship, the robot stewards set up a table in the lounge so that the human diners might see what was going on outside the ship.

  The entire company, except for the legionnaires, who stayed in quarters, had gathered for the meal when Decker came into the room.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said.

  He strode to the table’s head and the others ranged themselves along the side. He sat down and there was a scraping of drawn chairs as the others took their places.

  He clasped his hands in front of him and bowed his head and parted his lips to say the customary words. He halted even as he was about to speak, and when the words did come they were different from the ones he had said by rote a thousand times before.

  “Dear Father, we are Thy servants in an unknown land and there is a deadly pride upon us. Teach us humility and lead us to the knowledge, before it is too late, that men, despite their far traveling and their mighty works, still are as children in Thy sight. Bless the bread we are about to break, we beg Thee, and keep us forever in Thy compassion. Amen.”

  He lifted his head and looked down the table. Some of them, he saw, were startled. The others were amused.

  They wonder if I’m cracking, he thought. They think the Old Man is breaking up. And that may be true, for all I know. Although I was all right until this afternoon. All right until young Doug Jackson . . .

  “Those were fine words, lad,” said Old MacDonald, the chief engineer. “I thank you for them, sir, and there is them among us who would do well to take some heed upon them.”

  Platters and plates were being passed up and down the table’s length and there was the commonplace, homely clatter of silverware and china.

  “This looks an interesting world,” said Waldron, the anthropologist. “Dickson and I were up in observation just before the sun set. We thought we saw something down by the river. Some sort of life.”

  Decker grunted, scooping fried potatoes out of a bowl onto his plate. “Funny if we don’t run across a lot of life here. The radiation wagon stirred up a lot of it when it went over the field today.”

  “What Waldron and I saw,” said Dickson, “looked humanoid.”

  Decker squinted at the biologist. “Sure of that?” he asked.

  Dickson shook his head. “The seeing was poor. Couldn’t be absolutely sure. Seemed to me there were two or three of them. Matchstick men.”

  Waldron nodded. “Like a picture a kid would draw,” he said. “One stroke for the body. Two strokes each for arms and legs. A circle for a head. Angular. Ungraceful. Skinny.”

  “Graceful enough in motion, though,” said Dickson. “When they moved, they went like cats. Flowed, sort of.”

  “We’ll know plenty soon enough,” Decker told them mildly. “In a day or two we’ll flush them.”

  Funny, he thought. On almost every job someone popped up to report he had spotted humanoids. Usually there weren’t any. Usually it was just imagination. Probably wishful thinking, he told himself, the yen of men far away from their fellow men to find in an alien place a type of life that somehow seemed familiar.

  Although the usual humanoid, once you met him in the flesh, turned out to be so repulsively alien that alongside him an octopus would seem positively human.

  Franey, the senior geologist, said, “I’ve been thinking about those mountains to the west of us, the ones we caught sight of when we were coming in. Had a new look about them. New mountains are good to work in. They haven’t worn down. Easier to get at whatever’s in them.”

  “We’ll lay out our first survey lines in that direction,” Decker told him.

  Outside the curving vision plate, the night was alive with the blaze of the batteries of lights. Gleaming robots toiled in shining gangs. Ponderous machines lumbered past. Smaller ones scurried like frightened beetles. To the south, great gouts of flame leaped out, and the sky was painted red with the bursts of a squad of flame throwers going into action.

  “Chewing out a landing field,” said Decker. “A tongue of jungle juts out there. Absolutely level ground. Like a floor. Won’t take a great deal of work to turn it into a field.”

  The stewards brought coffee and brandy and a box of good cigars. Decker and his men settled back into their chairs, taking life easy, watching the work going on outside the ship.

  “I hate this waiting,” Franey said, settling down comfortably to his cigar.

  “Part of the job,” said Decker. He poured more brandy into his coffee.

  By dawn the last machines were set up and had either been moved out to their assigned positions or were parked in the motor pool. The flamers had enlarged the burned-out area and three radiation wagons were busy on their rounds. To the south, the airfield had been finished and the jets were lined up and waiting in a plumb-straight row.

  Some of the robots, their work done for the moment, formed themselves in solid ranks to form a solid square, neat and orderly and occupying a minimum of space. They stood there in the square, waiting against the time when they would be needed, a motor pool of robots, a reservoir of manpower.

  Finally the gangplank came down and the legionnaires marched out in files of two, with clank and glitter and a remorseless precision that put machines to shame. There were no banners and there were no drums, for these are useless things and the Legion, despite its clank and glitter, was an organization of ruthless efficiency.

  The column wheeled and became a line, and the line broke up and the platoons moved out toward the planet-head perimeter. There machines and legionnaires and robots manned the frontier that Earth had set up on an alien world.

  Busy robots staked out and set up an open-air pavilion of gaudily striped canvas that rippled in the breeze, placed tables and chairs beneath its shade, moved in a refrigerator filled with beer and with extra ice compartments.

  At last it was safe and comfortable for ordinary men to leave the shelter of the ship.

  Organization, Decker told himself—organization and efficiency and leaving not a thing to chance. Plug every loophole before it becomes a loophole. Crush possible resistance before it develops as resistance. Gain absolute control over a certain number of square feet of planet and operate from there.

  Later, of course, there were certain
chances taken; you just couldn’t eliminate them all. There would be field trips, and even with all the precautions that robot and machine and legionnaire could offer, there would be certain risks. There would be aerial survey and mapping, and these, too, would have elements of chance, but with these elements reduced to the very minimum.

  And always there would be the base, an absolutely safe and impregnable base to which a field party or a survey flight could retreat, from which reinforcements could be sent out or counteraction taken.

  Foolproof, he told himself. As foolproof as it could be made.

  He wondered briefly what had been the matter with him the night before. It had been that young fool, Jackson, of course—a capable biochemist, possibly, but certainly the wrong kind of man for a job like this. Something had slipped up: the screening board should have stopped a man like Jackson, should have spotted his emotional instability. Not that he could do any actual harm, of course, but he could be upsetting. An irritant, thought Decker, that is what he is. Just an irritant.

  Decker laid an armload of paraphernalia on the long table underneath the gay pavilion. From it he selected a rolled-up sheet of map paper, unrolled it, spread it flat and thumbtacked it at four corners. On it a portion of the river and the mountains to the west had been roughly penciled in. The base was represented by an X’ed-through square—but the rest of it was blank.

  But it would be filled in—as the days went by it would take shape and form.

  From the field to the south a jet whooshed into the sky, made a lazy turn and straightened out to streak toward the west. Decker walked to the edge of the pavilion’s shade and watched it as it dwindled out of sight. That would be Jarvis and Donnelly, assigned to the preliminary survey of the southwest sector between the base and the western mountains.

  Another jet rose lazily, trailing its column of exhaust, gathered speed and sprang into the sky. Freeman and Johns, he thought.