Operation: Outer Space by Murray Leinster (ereader for textbooks txt) 📕

a career of it. His family let him. I"—she smiled faintly, "I'm making a career of taking care of him."

"Something can be done even with a six-year-old," growled Cochrane. "Holden—. But he wouldn't be the best one to try."

"He definitely wouldn't be the best one to try," said Alicia very quietly.

Cochrane turned away. She knew how Bill Holden felt. Which might or might not be comforting to him.

The communicator again. The pictures of foot-high furry bipeds on the glacier planet had made a sensation on television. A toy-manufacturer wanted the right to make toys like them. The pictures were copyrighted. Cochrane matter-of-factly made the deal. There would be miniature extra-terrestrial animals on sale in all toy-shops within days. Spaceways, Inc., would collect a royalty on each toy sold.

The rockets boomed, and lessened their noise, and wavered up and down again. Then there was that deliberate, crunching feel of the great landing-fins pressing into soil with all the ship's weight bearing down. The rockets ran on, drumming ever-so-faintly, for a little longer. Then they cut off.

"We're landed again! Let's see where we are!"

They went up to the control-room. Johnny Simms stood against the wall, sulking. He had managed his life very successfully by acting like a spoiled little boy. Now he had lost any idea of saner conduct. At the moment, he looked ridiculous. But Alicia had a bruised cheek and Cochrane could have been killed, and Holden had been in danger because Johnny Simms wanted to and insisted on acting like a rich man's spoiled little boy.

It occurred to Cochrane that Alicia would probably find recompense for her humiliation and pain in the little-boy penitence—exactly as temporary as any other little-boy emotion—when she and Johnny Simms were alone together.

The ship had come down close to the sunset-line of the planet. Away to the west there was the glint of blue sea.[Pg 136] Dusk was already descending here. There were smoothly contoured hills in view, and there was a dark patch of forest on one hilltop, and the trees at the woodland's edge had the same drooping, grass-blade-like foliage of the trees first seen. But there were larger and more solid giants among them. The ship had landed on a small plateau, and downhill from it a spring gushed out with such force that the water-surface was rounded by pressure from below. The water overflowed and went down toward the sea.

"I think we're all right," said Al, the pilot. But he stayed in his seat, in case the ship threatened to sway over. Cochrane inspected the outer world.

"Well?"

"We sighted what I think you want," said Jones. He looked dead-pan and yet secretly complacent. "Just watch."

The dusk grew deeper. Colorings appeared in the west. They were very similar to the sunset-colorings on Earth.

"Not many volcanoes here."

The amount of dust was limited, as on Earth. A great star winked into view in the east. It was as bright as Venus seen from Earth. It had a just-perceptible disk. Close to it, infinitely small, there was a speck of light which seemed somehow unlike a star. Cochrane squinted at it. He thought of the great gas-giant world he'd seen out a port on the way here. It had an attendant moon-world which itself had icecaps and seas and continents. He called Jamison.

"I think that's the planet," agreed Jamison. "We passed close by it. We saw it."

"It had a moon," observed Cochrane. "A big one. It looked like a world itself. What would it be like there?"

"Cooler than this," said Jamison promptly, "because it's farther from the sun. But it might pick up some heat from reflection from its primary's white clouds. It would be a fair world. It has oceans and continents and strings of foam-girt islands. But its sea is strange and dark and restless. Gigantic tides surge in its depths, drawn by the planetary colossus about which it swings. Its animal life—."

"Cut," said Cochrane dryly. "What do you really think? Could it be another inhabitable world for people to move to?"

Jamison looked annoyed at having been cut off.

"Probably," he said more prosaically. "The tides would be monstrous, though."

"Might be used for power," said Cochrane. "We'll see ..."[Pg 137]

Then Jones spoke with elaborate casualness:

"Here's something to look at. On the ground."

Cochrane moved to see. The dusk had deepened still more. The smooth, green-covered ground had become a dark olive. Where bare hillsides gave upon the sky, there were dark masses flowing slowly forward. The edges of the hills turned black, and the blackness moved down their nearer slopes. It was not an even front of darkness. There were patches which preceded the others. They did not stay distinct. They merged with the masses which followed them, and other patches separated in their places. All of the darkness moved without haste, with a sort of inexorable deliberation. It moved toward the ship and the valley and the gushing fountain and the stream which flowed from it.

"What on Earth—" began Cochrane.

"You're not on Earth," said Jones chidingly. "Al and I found 'em. You asked for buffalo or a reasonable facsimile. I won't guarantee anything; but we spotted what looked like herds of beasts moving over the green plains inland. We checked, and they seemed to be moving in this direction. Once we dropped down low and Bell got some pictures. When he enlarged them, we decided they'd do. So we lined up where they were all headed for, and here we are. And here they are!"

Cochrane stared with all his eyes. Behind him, he heard Bell fuming to himself as he tried to adjust a camera for close-up pictures in the little remaining light. Babs stood beside Cochrane, staring incredulously.

The darkness was beasts. They blackened the hillsides on three sides of the ship. They came deliberately, leisurely onward. They were literally uncountable. They were as numerous as the buffalo that formerly thronged the western plains of America. In black, shaggy masses, they came toward the spring and its stream. Nearby, their heads could be distinguished. And all of this was perfectly natural.

The cosmos is one thing. Where life exists, its living creatures will fit themselves cunningly into each niche where life can be maintained. On vast green plains there will be animals to graze—and there will be animals to prey on them. So the grazing things will band together in herds for self-defense and reproduction. And where the ground is covered with broad-leaved plants, such plants will shelter innumerable tiny creatures, and some of them will be burrowers. So rain will drain quickly into those burrowings and not make streams. And therefore the drainage[Pg 138] will reappear as springs, and the grazing animals will go to those springs to drink. Often, they will gather more densely at nightfall for greater protection from their enemies. They will even often gather at the springs or their overflowing brooks. This will happen anywhere that plains and animals exist, on any planet to the edge of the galaxy, because there are laws for living things as well as stones.

Great dark masses of the beasts moved unhurriedly past the ship. They were roughly the size of cattle—which itself would be determined by the gravity of the planet, setting a maximum favorable size for grazing beasts with an ample food-supply. There were thousands and tens of thousands of them visible in the deepening night. They crowded to the gushing spring and to the stream that flowed from it. They drank. Sometimes groups of them waited patiently until the way to the water was clear.

"Well?" said Jones.

"I think you filled my order," admitted Cochrane.

The night became starlight only, and Cochrane impatiently demanded of Al or somebody that they measure the length of a complete day and night on this planet. The stars would move overhead at such-and-such a rate. So many degrees in so much time. He needed, said Cochrane—as if this order also could be filled—a day-length not more than six hours shorter or longer than an Earth-day.

Jones and Al conferred and prepared to take some sort of reading without any suitable instrument. Cochrane moved restlessly about. He did not notice Johnny Simms. Johnny had stood sullenly in his place, not moving to look out the windows, ostentatiously ignoring everything and everybody. And nobody paid attention! It was not a matter to offend an adult, but it was very shocking indeed to a rich man's son who had been able to make a career of staying emotionally at a six-year-old level.

Cochrane's thoughts were almost feverish. If the day-length here was suitable, all his planning was successful. If it was too long or too short, he had grimly to look further—and Spaceways, Inc., would still not be as completely a success as he wanted. It would have been much simpler to have measured the apparent size of the local sun by any means available, and then simply to have timed the intervals between its touching of the horizon and its complete setting. But Cochrane hadn't thought of it at sunset.

Presently he wandered down to where Babs and Alicia[Pg 139] worked in the kitchen to prepare a meal. He tried to help. The atmosphere was much more like that in a small apartment back home than on a space-ship among the stars. This was not in any way such a journey of exploration as the writers of fiction had imagined. Jamison came down presently and offered to prepare some special dish in which he claimed to excel. There was no mention of Johnny Simms. Alicia, elaborately ignoring all that was past, told Jamison that Babs and Cochrane were now an acknowledged romance and actually had plans for marriage immediately the ship returned to Earth. Jamison made the usual inept jests suited to such an occasion.

Presently they called the others to dinner. Jones and Johnny Simms were long behind the others, and Jones' expression was conspicuously dead-pan. Johnny Simms looked sulkily rebellious. His sulking had not attracted attention in the control-room. He had meant to refuse sulkily to come to dinner. But Jones wouldn't trust him—alone in the control-room. Now he sat down, scowling, and ostentatiously refused to eat, despite Alicia's coaxing. He snarled at her.

This, also, was not in the tradition of the behavior of voyagers of space. They dined in the over-large saloon of a ship that had never been meant really to leave the moon. The ship stood upright under strange stars upon a stranger world, and all about it outside there were the resting forms of thousands upon thousands of creatures like cattle. And the dinner-table conversation was partly family-style jests about Babs' and Cochrane's new romantic status, and partly about a television broadcast which had to be ready for a certain number of Earth-hours yet ahead. And nobody paid any attention to Johnny Simms, glowering at the table and refusing to eat.

It was a mistake, probably.

Much, much later, Cochrane and Babs were again in the control-room, and this time they were alone.

"Look!" said Cochrane vexedly. "Do you realize that I haven't kissed you since we got back on the ship? What happened?"

"You!" said Babs indignantly. "You've been thinking about something else every second of the time!"

Cochrane did not think about anything else for several minutes. He began to recall with new tolerance the insane antics of people he had been producing shows about. They had reason—those imaginary people—to act unreasonably.[Pg 140]

But presently his mind was working again.

"We've got to make some plans for ourselves," he said. "We can live back on Earth, of course. We've already made a neat sum out of the broadcasts from this trip. But I don't think we'll want to live the way one has to live on Earth, with too many people there. I'd like—."

Somebody came clattering up the stairs from below.

"Johnny?" It was Bell. "Is he up here?"

Cochrane released Babs.

"No. He's not here. Why?"

"He's missing," said Bell apprehensively. "Alicia says he took a gun. A gun's gone, anyhow. He's vanished!"

Cochrane swore under his breath. A fool asserting his dignity with a gun could be a serious matter indeed. He switched on the control-room lights. He was not there. They went down and hunted over the main saloon. He was not there. Then Holden called harshly from the next deck down.

There was Alicia by the inner airlock door. Her face was deathly pale. She had opened the door. The outer door was open too—and it had not been opened since this last landing by anybody else. The landing-sling cables were run out. They swung slowly in the light that fell upon them from the inside of the ship.

A smell came in the opening. It was the smell of beasts. It was a musky, ammoniacal smell, somehow not alien even though it was unfamiliar. There were noises outside in the night. Grunting sounds. Snortings. There were such sounds as a vast concourse of grazing creatures would make in the night-time, when gathered by thousands and myriads for safety and for rest.

"He—went