Colonial Survey Page 15

  Bordman 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, with even a bear-cub’s awareness that danger was near.

  “And now,” Huyghens added, “I need some equipment that the robot colony has. With it, I think we can make a start toward turning this into a planet that man can live like men on!”

  Bordman 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!”

  Bordman 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 for the colony. And earth-sterilizers, intended to kill the seeds of any plants that robots couldn’t handle. We’ll come back up here, Bordman, and at the 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!”

  Bordman 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.

  “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? Would you care to wander about this planet with only a robot body-guard, Bordman? Hardly! Men can’t live on this planet with only robots to help them. You’ll see!”

  They found the colony after only ten days’ more travel and after many sphexes and more than a few stag-like creatures and shaggy ruminants had fallen to their weapons and the bears. And they found survivors.

  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. 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, 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 Bordman reached them, they wept. They hated robots and all things robotic only a little less than they hated sphexes. But Huyghens explained, and, armed with weapons from the packs of the bears, 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 use 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, and instead fueled tracked flame-casters—after 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. Then they headed back for the Sere Plateau.

  As time passed 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.

  Finally they reached the plateau by a sphex-trail to the top and sphexes came squalling and spitting to destroy them. While Bordman and Huyghens fired steadily, the great machines swept up with their special weapons. The earth-sterilizer, it developed, was deadly against animal life as well as seeds, when its diathermic beam was raised and aimed.

  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. After a while the survivors of the robot colony drove the machines in great circles around the huge heap of slaughtered fiends, destroying new arrivals as they came. It was such a killing as men had never before made on any planet, and there would be very few left of the sphex-horde which had bred in this particular patch of desert.

  Nor would more grow up, 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.

  Huyghens and Bordman, by that time, were camped on the edge of the plateau with the Kodiaks. Somehow it seemed more befitting for the men of the robot colony to conduct the slaughter. After all, it was those men whose companions had been killed.

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

  “Huyghens,” said Bordman, “we’ve got to come to a settlement of our affairs. You’re an illegal colonist, and 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, “or may I plead that I can’t be forced to testify against myself?”

  Bordman said:

  “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 else 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 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 before.”

  “You don’t let me finish!” protested Bordman. “It’s my job to pass on the work that’s done on a planet before any but the first-landed colonists may c
ome 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.

  “In emergencies,” said Bordman, “colonists have the right to call on any passing ship for aid. Naturally! So 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 Bordman, “it just happened—just happened, mind you—that a ship with you and the bears and the eagle on board picked up the distress-call. So you landed to help the colonists. 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:

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

  “They’re not fools,” said Bordman 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.

  “My reports carry weight,” insisted Bordman. “The deal will be offered, anyhow! The robot colony organizers will have to agree or they’ll have to fold up. 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, Bordman,” he said. “Isn’t it unintelligent and unreasonable to throw away a lifetime of honesty just to get me out of a jam? You’re not acting like a rational animal, Bordman. But I thought you wouldn’t, when it came to the point.”

  Bordman squirmed.

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

  “I accept it,” said Huyghens, grinning. “With thanks. If only because it means another few generations of men can live 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 Bordman. Nugget, the cub, pushed urgently against him in his desire to get closer to the fragrantly cooking meat. He edged forward. Bordman 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 Bordman indignantly from where he lay. “I won’t do it. He’s my friend!”

  It was ironic that, after all, Bordman found that he couldn’t afford to retire. His pay, of course, had been used to educate his children and maintain his home. And Lani III was an expensive world to live on. It was now occupied by a thriving, bustling population with keen business instincts, and the vapor-curtains about it were commonplaces, now, and few people remembered a time when they hadn’t existed,—when it was a world below habitability for anybody. So Bordman wasn’t a hero. As a matter of history he had done such and such. As a matter of fact he was simply a citizen who could be interviewed for visicasts on holidays, but hadn’t much that was new to say.

  But he lived on Lani III for three years, and he was restless. His children were grown and married, now,—and they hadn’t known him too well, anyhow. He’d been away so much! He didn’t fit into the world whose green fields and oceans and rivers he was responsible for. But it was infinitely good to be with Riki again. There was so much that each remembered, to be shared with the other, that they had plenty to talk about.

  Three years after his official retirement, he was asked to take on another Survey job on which there was no other qualified man free to work on. He talked to his wife. On retirement pay, life was not easy. In retirement, it wasn’t satisfactory. And Riki was free too, now. Her children were safely on their own. Bordman would always need her. She advised him for both their sakes. And he went back to Survey duty with the stipulation that he should have quarters and facilities for his wife as well as himself on all assignments.

  They had five wonderful years. Bordman was near the top of the ladder, then. His children wrote faithfully. He was busy on Kelmin IV, and his wife had a garden there, when he was summoned to Sector Headquarters with first priority urgency.

  THE SWAMP

  WAS UPSIDE DOWN

  Bordman knew the Survey ship had turned end for end, because though there was artificial gravity, it does not affect the semicircular canals of the human ear. He knew he was turning head-over-heels, even though his feet stayed firmly on the floor. It was not a normal sensation, and he felt that queasy, instinctive tightening of the muscles with which one reacts to the abnormal, whether in things seen or felt.

  But the reason for turning the ship end-for-end was obvious. It had arrived very near its destination, and was killing its Lawlor-drive momentum. Just as Bordman was assured that the turning motion was finished, young Barnes—the ship’s lowest-ranking commissioned officer—came into the wardroom and beamed at him.

  “The ship’s not landing, sir,” he said, like one explaining something to somebody under ten years old. “Our orders are changed. You’re to go to ground by boat. This way, sir.”

  Bordman shrugged. He was a Senior Officer of the Colonial Survey, grown old in the Service, and this was a Survey ship that had been sent especially to get him from his last and still unfinished job. It was a top-urgency matter. This ship had had no other business for some months except to go after him and bring him to Sector Headquarters, down on Canna III, which must be somewhere near. But this young officer was patronizing him!

  Bordman rather regretfully recognized that he didn’t know how to be impressive. He was not a good salesman of his own importance. He didn’t even get the respect due his rank.

  Now the young officer waited, brisk and alert. Bordman reflected wrily that he could pin young Barnes’ ears back easily enough. But he remembered when he’d been a junior Survey ship’s officer. Then he’d felt a bland condescension toward all people of whatever rank who did not spend their lives in the cramped, skimped quarters of a Survey patrol-ship. If this young Lieutenant Barnes were fortunate, he’d always feel that way. Bordman could not begrudge him the cockiness which made the tedium and hardships of the Service seem to him a privilege.

  So he obediently followed Barnes through the wardroom door. He ducked his head under a ventilation-slot and sidled past a standpipe with bristling air-valve handles. It almost closed the way. There was the smell of oil and paint and ozone which all proper Survey ships maintain in their working sections.

  “Here, sir,” said Barnes. “This way.”

  He offered his arm for Bordman to steady himself. Bordman ignored it. He stepped over a complex of white-painted pipes, and arrived at an almost clear way to a boat-blister.

  “And your luggage, sir,” added the young man reassuringly, “will follow you down immediately, sir. With the mail.”

  Bordman nodded. He moved toward the blister door. He sidled past constrictions due to new equipment. The Survey ship had been designed a long time ago, and there were no funds for rebuilding when improved devices came along. So any Survey ship was apt to be cluttered up with afterthoughts in metal.

  A speaker from the wall said sharply:

  “Hear this! Hold fast! Gravity going off!”

  Bordman caught at a nearby pipe, and snatched his hand away again—it was hot—and caught on to another and then put his other hand below. He applied a trifle of pressure. The young officer said kindly:

&nb
sp; “Hold fast, sir. If I may suggest—”

  The gravity did go off. Bordman grimaced. There’d been a time when he was used to such matters, but this time the sudden outward surge of his breath caught him unprepared. His diaphragm contracted as the weight of organs above it ceased to be. He choked for an instant. He said evenly:

  “I am not likely to go head-over-heels, Lieutenant. I served four years as a junior swot on a ship exactly like this!”

  He did not float about. He held onto a pipe in two places, and he applied expert pressure in a strictly professional manner, and his feet remained firmly on the floor. He startled young Barnes by the achievement, which only junior swots think only junior swots know about.

  Barnes said, abashed:

  “Yes, sir.” He held himself in the same fashion.

  “I even know,” said Bordman, “that the gravity had to be cut off because we’re approaching another ship on Lawlor drive. Our gravity-coils would blow if we got into her field with our drive off, or if her field pressed ours inboard.”

  Young Barnes looked extremely uncomfortable. Bordman felt sorry for him. To be chewed, however delicately, for patronizing a senior officer could not be pleasant. So Bordman added:

  “And I also remember that, when I was a junior swot I once tried to tell a Sector Chief how to top off his suit-tanks. So don’t let it bother you!”

  The young officer was embarrassed. A Sector Chief was so high in the table of Survey organization that one of his idle thoughts was popularly supposed to be able to crack a junior officer’s skull. If Bordman, as a young officer, had really tried to tell a Sector Chief how to top his suit-tanks…Why…