First Lensman by E. E. Smith (epub e ink reader .TXT) 📕

spaceship⁠ ⁠… cargo⁠ ⁠…” Then came a clause which fairly leaped from the paper and smote his eyes: “when in command of a detail outside the hull of said spaceship he shall enforce, by the infliction of death or such other penalty as he deems fit.⁠ ⁠…”

The Lensman was rocked to the heels, but did not show it. Instead, he took the captain’s pen⁠—his own, as far as Willoughby was concerned, could have been filled with vanishing ink⁠—and wrote George Olmstead’s name in George Olmstead’s bold, flowing script.

Willoughby then took him aboard the good ship Virgin Queen and led him to his cabin.

“Here you are, Mr. Olmstead. Beyond getting acquainted with the supercargo and the rest of your men, you will have no duties for a few days. You have full run of the ship, with one exception. Stay out of the control room until I call you. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.” Willoughby turned away and Samms, after tossing his space-bag into the rack, took inventory.

The room was of course very small; but, considering the importance of mass, it was almost extravagantly supplied. There were shelves, or rather, tight racks, of books; there were sunlamps and card-shelves and exercisers and games; there was a receiver capable of bringing in programs from almost anywhere in space. The room had only one lack; it did not have an ultra-wave visiplate. Nor was this lack surprising. “They” would scarcely let George Olmstead know where “they” were taking him.

Samms was surprised, however, when he met the men who were to be directly under his command; for instead of one, or at most two, they numbered exactly forty. And they were all, he thought at first glance, the dregs and sweepings of the lowest dives in space. Before long, however, he learned that they were not all space-rats and denizens of Skid Rows. Six of them⁠—the strongest physically and the hardest mentally of the lot⁠—were fugitives from lethal chambers; murderers and worse. He looked at the biggest, toughest one of the six⁠—a rock-drill-eyed, red-haired giant⁠—and asked:

“What did they tell you, Tworn, that your job was going to be?”

“They didn’t say. Just that it was dangerous, but if I done exactly what my boss would tell me to do, and nothing else, I might not even get hurt. An’ I was due to take the deep breath the next week, see? That’s just how it was, boss.”

“I see,” and one by one Virgil Samms, master psychologist, studied and analyzed his motley crew until he was called into the control room.

The navigating tank was covered; no charts were to be seen. The one “live” visiplate showed a planet and a fiercely blue-white sun.

“My orders are to tell you, at this point, all I know about what you’ve got to do and about that planet down there. Trenco, they call it.” To Virgil Samms, the first adherent of Civilization ever to hear it, that name meant nothing whatever. “You are to take about five of your men, go down there, and gather all the green leaves you can. Not green in color; sort of purplish. What they call broadleaf is the best; leaves about two feet long and a foot wide. But don’t be too choosy. If there isn’t any broadleaf handy, grab anything you can get hold of.”

“What is the opposition?” Samms asked, quietly. “And what have they got that makes them so tough?”

“Nothing. No inhabitants, even. Just the planet itself. Next to Arisia, it’s the God damndest planet in space. I’ve never been any closer to it than this, and I never will, so I don’t know anything about it except what I hear; but there’s something about it that kills men or drives them crazy. We spend seven or eight boats every trip, and thirty-five or forty men, and the biggest load that anybody ever took away from here was just under two hundred pounds of leaf. A good many times we don’t get any.”

“They go crazy, eh?” In spite of his control, Samms paled. But it couldn’t be like Arisia. “What are the symptoms? What do they say?”

“Various. Main thing seems to be that they lose their sight. Don’t go blind, exactly, but can’t see where anything is; or, if they do see it, it isn’t there. And it rains over forty feet deep every night, and yet it all dries up by morning. The worst electrical storms in the universe, and wind-velocities⁠—I can show you charts on that⁠—of over eight hundred miles an hour.”

“Whew! How about time? With your permission, I would like to do some surveying before I try to land.”

“A smart idea. A couple of the other boys had the same, but it didn’t help⁠—they didn’t come back. I’ll give you two Tellurian days⁠—no, three⁠—before I give you up and start sending out the other boats. Pick out your five men and see what you can do.”

As the boat dropped away, Willoughby’s voice came briskly from a speaker. “I know that you five men have got ideas. Forget ’em. Fourth Officer Olmstead has the authority and the orders to put a half-ounce slug through the guts of any or all of you that don’t jump, and jump fast, to do what he tells you. And if that boat makes any funny moves I blast it out of the ether. Good harvesting!”

For forty-eight Tellurian hours, taking time out only to sleep, Samms scanned and surveyed the planet Trenco; and the more he studied it, the more outrageously abnormal it became.

Trenco was, and is, a peculiar planet indeed. Its atmosphere is not air as we know air; its hydrosphere does not resemble water. Half of that atmosphere and most of that hydrosphere are one chemical, a substance of very low heat of vaporization and having a boiling point of about seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit. Trenco’s days are intensely hot; its nights are bitterly cold.

At night, therefore, it rains: and by comparison a Tellurian downpour of one inch per hour is scarcely a drizzle. Upon Trenco it really