Sand Doom Read online

shipsneither took off nor landed under their own power. It was too costly offuel they would have to carry. So landing grids used local power--whichdid not have to be lifted--to heave ships out into space, and again usedlocal power to draw them to ground again. Therefore ships carried fuelonly for actual space-flight, which was economy. Yet landing grids hadno moving parts, and while they did have to be monstrous structures theyactually drew power from planetary ionospheres. So with no moving partsto break down and no possibility of the failure of a powersource--landing grids couldn't fail! So there couldn't be an emergencyto make a ship ride orbit around a planet which had a landing grid!

  The engineer came back. He carried a mail sack full of letter-reels. Hewaved his hand. Aletha crawled into the landing-boat port. Bordmanfollowed. Four people, with a little crowding, could have gotten intothe little ship. Three pretty well filled it. The engineer followed themand sealed the port.

  "Sealed off," he said into the microphone before him.

  The exterior-pressure needle moved halfway across the dial. Theinterior-pressure needle stayed steady.

  "All tight," said the engineer.

  The exterior-pressure needle flicked to zero. There were clankingsounds. The long halves of the boat-blister stirred and opened, andabruptly the landing boat was in an elongated cup in the hull-plating,and above them there were many, many stars. The enormous disk of anearby planet floated into view around the hull. It was monstrous andblindingly bright. It was of a tawny color, with great, irregular areasof yellow and patches of bluishness. But most of it was the color ofsand. And all its colors varied in shade--some places were lighter andsome darker--and over at one edge there was blinding whiteness whichcould not be anything but an ice cap. But Bordman knew that there was noocean or sea or lake on all this whole planet, and the ice cap was morenearly hoarfrost than such mile-deep glaciation as would be found at thepoles of a maximum-comfort world.

  "Strap in," said the engineer over his shoulder. "No-gravity coming, andthen rocket-push. Settle your heads."

  Bordman irritably strapped himself in. He saw Aletha busy at the sametask, her eyes shining. Without warning, there came a sensation of acutediscomfort. It was the landing boat detaching itself from the ship andthe diminishment of the ship's closely-confined artificial-gravityfield. That field suddenly dropped to nothingness, and Bordman had themomentary sickish dizziness that flicked-off gravity always produces. Atthe same time his heart pounded unbearably in the instinctive,racial-memory reaction to the feel of falling.

  Then roarings. He was thrust savagely back against his seat. His tonguetried to slide back into his throat. There was an enormous oppression onhis chest. He found himself thinking panicky profanity.

  Simultaneously the vision ports went black, because they were out of theshadow of the ship. The landing boat turned--but there was no sensationof centrifugal force--and they were in a vast obscurity with merely adim phantom of the planetary surface to be seen. But behind them ablue-white sun shone terribly. Its light was warm--hot--even though itcame through the polarized shielding ports.

  "Did ... did you say," panted Aletha happily--breathless because of theacceleration--"that there weren't any adventures?"

  Bordman did not answer. But he did not count discomfort as an adventure.

  * * * * *

  The engineer did not look out the ports at all. He watched the screenbefore him. There was a vertical line across the side of the lighteddisk. A blip moved downward across it, showing their height in thousandsof miles. After a long time the blip reached the bottom, and thevertical line became double and another blip began to descend. Itmeasured height in hundreds of miles. A bright spot--a square--appearedat one side of the screen. A voice muttered metallically, and suddenlyseemed to shout, and then muttered again. Bordman looked out one of theblack ports and saw the planet as if through smoked glass. It was aghostly reddish thing which filled half the cosmos. It had mottlings.Its edge was curved. That would be the horizon.

  The engineer moved controls and the white square moved. It went acrossthe screen. He moved more controls. It came back to the center. Theheight-in-hundreds blip was at the bottom, now, and the vertical linetripled and a tens-of-miles-height blip crawled downward.

  There were sudden, monstrous plungings of the landing boat. It had hitthe outermost fringes of atmosphere. The engineer said words it was notappropriate for Aletha to hear. The plungings became more violent.Bordman held on--to keep from being shaken to pieces despite thestraps--and stared at the murky surface of the planet. It seemed to befleeing from them and they to be trying to overtake it. Gradually, verygradually, its flight appeared to slow. They were down to twenty miles,then.

  Quite abruptly the landing boat steadied. The square spot bobbed aboutin the center of the astrogation screen. The engineer worked controls tosteady it.

  The ports cleared a little. Bordman could see the ground below moredistinctly. There were patches of every tint that mineral coloring couldproduce. There were vast stretches of tawny sand. A little while more,and he could see the shadows of mountains. He made out mountain flankswhich should have had valleys between them and other mountain flanksbeyond, but they had tawny flatnesses between, instead. These, he knew,would be the sand plateaus which had been observed on this planet andwhich had only a still-disputed explanation. But he could see areas ofglistening yellow and dirty white, and splashes of pink and streaks ofultramarine and gray and violet, and the incredible red of iron oxidecovering square miles--too much to be believed.

  The landing-boat's rockets cut off. It coasted. Presently the horizontilted and all the dazzling ground below turned sedately beneath them.There came staccato instructions from a voice-speaker, which theengineer obeyed. The landing boat swung low--below the tips of giantmauve mountains with a sand plateau beyond them--and its nose went up.It stalled.

  Then the rockets roared again--and now, with air about them and after amomentary pause, they were horribly loud--and the boat settled down anddown upon its own tail of fire.

  There was a completely blinding mass of dust and rocket fumes which cutoff all sight of everything else. Then there was a crunching crash, andthe engineer swore peevishly to himself. He cut the rockets again.Finally.

  * * * * *

  Bordman found himself staring straight up, still strapped in his chair.The boat had settled on its own tail fins, and his feet were higher thanhis head, and he felt ridiculous. He saw the engineer at workunstrapping himself. He duplicated the action, but it was absurdlydifficult to get out of the chair.

  Aletha managed more gracefully. She didn't need help.

  "Wait," said the engineer ungraciously, "till somebody comes."

  So they waited, using what had been chair backs for seats.

  The engineer moved a control and the windows cleared further. They sawthe surface of Xosa II. There was no living thing in sight. The grounditself was pebbles and small rocks and minor boulders--all apparentlytumbled from the starkly magnificent mountains to one side. There weremonstrous, many-colored cliffs and mesas, every one eaten at in theunmistakable fashion of wind-erosion. Through a notch in the mountainwall before them a strange, fan-shaped, frozen formation appeared. Ifsuch a thing had been credible, Bordman would have said that it was aflow of sand simulating a waterfall. And everywhere there was blindingbrightness and the look and feel of blistering sunshine. But there wasnot one single leaf or twig or blade of grass. This was pure desert.This was Xosa II.

  Aletha regarded it with bright eyes.

  "Beautiful!" she said happily. "Isn't it?"

  "Personally," said Bordman, "I never saw a place that looked lesshomelike or attractive."

  Aletha laughed.

  "My eyes see it differently."

  Which was true. It was accepted, nowadays, that humankind might be onespecies but was many races, and each saw the cosmos in its own fashion.On Kalmet III there was a dense, predominantly Asiatic population whichterraced its mountain
sides for agriculture and deftly mingled moderntechniques with social customs not to be found on--say--Demeter I, wherethere were many red-tiled stucco towns and very many olive groves. Inthe llano planets of the Equis cluster, Amerinds--Aletha'skin--zestfully rode over plains dotted with the descendants of buffaloand antelope and cattle brought from ancient Earth. On the oases ofRustam IV there were date palms and riding camels and much argumentabout what should be substituted for the direction of Mecca at the timesfor prayer, while wheat fields spanned provinces on Canna I and highlycivilized emigrants from the continent of Africa on Earth stored junglegums and lustrous gems in the warehouses of their spaceport city ofTimbuk.

  So it was natural for Aletha to look at this wind-carved wildernessotherwise than as Bordman did. Her racial kindred were the pioneers ofthe stars, these days. Their heritage made them less than appreciativeof urban life. Their inborn indifference to heights made them