The Planet Explorer Read online

  There were sudden, monstrous plungings of the landing boat. It had hit the outermost fringes of atmosphere. The engineer said words it was not appropriate for Aletha to hear. The plungings became more violent. Bordman held on, to keep from being shaken to pieces despite the straps, and stared at the murky surface of the planet. It seemed to be fleeing from them and they to be trying to overtake it. Gradually, very gradually, its flight appeared to slow. They were down to twenty miles, then.

  Quite abruptly the landing boat steadied. The square spot bobbled about in the center of the astrogation-screen. The engineer worked controls to steady it.

  The ports cleared a little. Bordman could see the ground below more distinctly. There were patches of every tint that mineral coloring could produce, and vast stretches of tawny sand. A little while more, and he could see the shadows of mountains. He made out mountain-flanks which should have had valleys between them and other mountain-flanks beyond, but they were joined by tawny flatness instead. These, he knew, would be the sand-plateaus which had been observed on this planet and which had only a still-disputed explanation. But he could see areas of glistening yellow and dirty white, and splashes of pink and streaks of ultramarine and gray and violet, and the incredible red of iron oxide covering square miles—too much to be believed.

  The landing boat's rockets cut off. It coasted. Presently the horizon tilted and all the dazzling ground below turned sedately beneath them. Then came staccato instructions from a voice-speaker, which the engineer obeyed. The landing boat swung low—below the tips of giant mauve 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, they were horribly loud—and the boat settled down and down upon its own tail of fire.

  A blinding mass of dust and rocket-fumes cut off all sight of everything else. Then a crunching crash, and the 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 than his head. He felt ridiculous. He saw the engineer at work unstrapping himself, and duplicated the action, but it was absurdly difficult 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 saw the surface of Xosa II. There was no living thing in sight. The ground itself was pebbles and small rocks and minor boulders—all apparently tumbled from the starkly magnificent cliffs and mesas, every one eaten at in the unmistakable fashion of wind erosion. Through a notch in the mountain wall before them a strange, fan-shaped, frozen formation appeared. If such a thing had been credible, Bordman would have said that it was a flow of sand simulating a waterfall. And everywhere was a blinding brightness and the look and feel of blistering sunshine. But there was not 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 less homelike or attractive."

  Aletha laughed.

  “My eyes see it differently."

  Which was true. It was accepted, nowadays, that humankind might be one species but was many races, and each saw the cosmos in its own fashion. On Kalmet III there was a dense predominantly Asiatic population which terraced its mountainsides for agriculture and deftly mingled modern techniques with social customs not to be found on—say—Demeter I, where there were many red tiled stucco towns and very many olive groves. In the llano planets of the Equis cluster, Amerinds—Althea's kin—rode over plains dotted with the descendants of buffalo and antelope and cattle brought from ancient Earth. On the oases of Rustam IV there were date palms and riding camels and much argument about what should be substituted for the direction of Mecca at the times for prayer, while wheat-fields spanned provinces on Canna I and highly civilized emigrants from the continent of Africa on Earth stored jungle-gums and lustrous gems in the warehouses of their space-port city of Timbuk.

  So it was natural for Aletha to look at this wind-carved wilderness otherwise than as Bordman did. Her racial kin were the pioneers of the stars, these days. Their heritage made them less than appreciative of urban life. Their inborn indifference to heights made them the steel construction men of the cosmos, and more than two thirds of the landing-beam grids in the whole galaxy had their coup-feather symbol on the key posts. But the planet government on Algonka V was housed in a three-thousand-foot stone teepee, and the best horses known to men were raised by ranchers with bronze skin and high cheekbones on the llano planet Chagan.

  Now, here, in the Warlock's landing boat, the engineer snorted. A vehicle came around a cliff wall, clanking its way on those eccentric caterwheels that new-founded colonies find so useful. The vehicle glittered. It crawled over tumbled boulders, and flowed over fallen scree. It came briskly toward them.

  “That's my cousin Ralph!” said Aletha in pleased surprise.

  Bordman blinked and looked again. He did not quite believe his eyes. But they told the truth. The figure controlling the ground car was Indian—Amerind—wearing a breechcloth and thick-soled sandals and three streamlined feathers in a band about his head. Moreover, he did not ride the seat. He sat astride a semi-cylindrical part of the ground car, over which a gaily colored blanket had been thrown.

  The ship's engineer rumbled disgustedly. But then Bordman saw how sane this method of riding was—here. The ground vehicle lurched and swayed and rolled and pitched and tossed as it came over the uneven ground. To sit in anything like a chair would have been foolish. A back rest would throw one forward in a frontward lurch, and give no support in case of a backward one. A sidewise tilt would tend to throw one out. Riding a ground car as if in a saddle was sense!

  But Bordman was not so sure about the costume. The engineer opened the port and spoke hostilely out of it:

  “D'you know there's a lady in this thing?"

  The young Indian grinned. He waved his hand to Aletha, who pressed her nose against the viewport. And just then Bordman did understand the costume or lack of it. Air came in the open exit-port. It was hot and desiccated. It was furnace-like!

  “How, ‘Letha,” called the ride on the caterwheel steed. “Either dress for the climate or put on a heat-suit before you come out of there!"

  Aletha chuckled. Bordman heard a stirring behind him. Then Aletha climbed to the exit-port and swung out. Bordman heard a dour muttering from the engineer. Then he saw her greeting her cousin. She had slipped out of the conventionalized Amerind outfit to which Bordman was accustomed. Now she was clad as Anglo-Saxon girls dressed for beaches on the cool-temperature planets.

  For a moment Bordman thought of sunstroke, with his own eyes dazzled by the still partly-filtered sunlight. But Aletha's Amerind coloring was perfectly suited to sunshine even of this intensity. Wind blowing upon her body would cool her skin. Her thick, straight black hair was at least as good protection against sunstroke as a heat-helmet. She might feel hot, but she would be perfectly safe. She wouldn't even sunburn. But he, Bordman....

  He grimly stripped to underwear and put on the heat-suit from his bag. He filled its canteens from the boat's water tank. He turned on the tiny, battery-powered motors. The suit ballooned out. It was intended for short periods of intolerable heat. The motors kept it inflated—away from the skin—and cooled its interior by evaporation of sweat plus water from its canteen tanks. It was a miniature air-conditioning system for one man, and it should enable him to endure temperatures otherwise lethal to someone with his skin and coloring. But it would use a lot of water.

  He climbed to the exit port and went clumsily down the exterior ladder to the tail fin. He adju
sted his goggles. He went over to the chattering young Indians, young man and girl, and held out his gloved hand.

  “I'm Bordman,” he said. “Here to make a degree-of-completion survey. What's wrong that we had to land by boat?"

  Aletha's cousin shook hands cordially.

  “I'm Ralph Redfeather,” he said. “Project engineer. About everything's wrong. Our landing-grid's gone. We couldn't contact your ship in time to warn it off. It was in our gravity field before it answered, and its Lawlor drive couldn't take it away—not working because of the gravity stresses. Our power, of course, went with the landing-grid. The ship you came in can't get back, and we can't send a distress message anywhere, and our best estimation is that the colony will be wiped out—thirst and starvation—in six months. I'm sorry you and Aletha have to be included."

  Then he turned to Aletha and said amiably:

  “How's Mike Thundercloud and Sally Whitehorse and the gang in general, ‘Letha?"

  The Warlock rolled on in her newly-established orbit about Xosa II. The landing boat was aground, having removed the two passengers. It would come back. Nobody on the ship wanted to stay around, because they knew the conditions and the situation below—unbearable heat and the complete absence of hope. But nobody had anything to do. The ship had been maintained in standard operating condition during its two months’ voyage from Trent to here. No repairs or overhaulings were needed. There would be only standby watches until something happened, and nothing to do on those watches. There would be off-watch time for twenty-one out of every twenty-four hours, and no purposeful activity to fill even half an hour of it. In a matter of—probably—years, the Warlock should receive aid. She might be towed out of her orbit to space—five diameters out—in which the Lawlor drive could function, or the crew might simply be taken off. But meanwhile, those on board were as completely frustrated as the colony. They could not do anything at all to help themselves.

  In one fashion the crewmen were worse off than the colonists. The colonists had at least the colorful prospect of death before them. They could prepare for it in their several ways. But the members of the Warlock's crew had nothing ahead but tedium. The skipper faced the future with extreme distaste.

  * * * *

  The ride to the colony was torment. Aletha rode behind her cousin on the saddle blanket, and apparently suffered little if at all. But Bordman could only ride in the ground car's cargo space, along with the sack of mail from the ship. The ground was unbelievably rough and the jolting intolerable. The heat was literally murderous. In the metal cargo space, the temperature reached a hundred and sixty degrees in the sunshine—and given enough time, food would cook in no more heat than that. Of course a man had been known to enter an oven and stay there while a roast was cooked, and to come out alive. But the oven wasn't throwing him violently about or bringing sun heated—blue-white-sun heated—metal to press his heat-suit about him. The suit did make survival possible, but that was all. The contents of its canteens gave out just before arrival, and for a short time Bordman had only sweat for his suit to work with. It kept him alive by forced ventilation, but he arrived in a state of collapse. He drank the iced salt water they gave him and went to bed. He'd get back his strength with a proper sodium level in his blood. But he slept for twelve hours straight.

  When he got up, he was physically normal again, but abysmally ashamed. It did no good to remind himself that Xosa II was rated minimum-comfort class D—a blue-white sun and a mean temperature of one hundred ten degrees. Africans could do steel construction work in the open, protected only by insulating shoes and gloves. But Bordman could not venture out-of-doors except in a heat-suit. He could not stay long then. It was not a weakness. It was a matter of genetics. But he was ashamed.

  Aletha nodded to him when he found the Project Engineer's office. It occupied one of the hulls in which colony-establishment materials had been lowered by rocket power. There were forty of the hulls, and they had been emptied and arranged for inter-communication, so that an individual could change his quarters and ordinary associates from time to time and colony-fever—frantic irritation with one's companions—was minimized.

  Aletha sat at a desk, busily making notes from a loose-leaf volume before her. The wall behind the desk was fairly lined with similar volumes.

  “I made a spectacle of myself!” said Bordman.

  “Not at all!” Aletha assured him. “It could happen to anybody. I wouldn't do too well on Timbuk."

  There was no answer to that. Timbuk was essentially a jungle planet, barely emerging from the carboniferous stage. Its colonists thrived because their ancestors had lived on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea, on Earth. But Anglos did not find its climate healthful, nor would many other races. Amerinds died there quicker than most.

  “Ralph's on the way here now,” added Aletha. “He and Dr. Chuka were out picking a place to leave the records. The sand-dunes here are terrible, you know. When an explorer ship does come to find out what's happened to us, these buildings could be covered up completely. Any place could be. It isn't easy to pick a record cache that's quite sure to be found."

  “When,” said Bordman, “there's nobody left alive to point it out. Is that it?"

  “That's it,” agreed Aletha. “It's pretty bad all around. I didn't plan to die just yet."

  Her voice was perfectly normal. Bordman snorted. As a Senior Colonial Survey Officer, he'd been around. But he'd never yet known a human colony to be extinguished when it was properly equipped and after a proper pre-settlement survey. He'd seen panic, but never real cause for a matter-of-fact acceptance of doom.

  There was a clanking noise outside the hulk which was the Project Engineer's headquarters. Bordman couldn't see clearly through the filtered port, so he reached over and opened the door. The brightness outside struck his eyes like a blow. He blinked them shut instantly and turned away. But he'd seen a glistening, caterwheel ground car stopping not far from the doorway.

  He stood wiping tears from his light-dazzled eyes as footsteps sounded outside. Aletha's cousin came in, followed by a huge man with remarkably dark skin. The dark man wore eyeglasses with a curiously thick corklike nosepiece to insulate the necessary metal of the frame from his skin. It would blister if it touched bare flesh.

  “This is Dr. Chuka,” said Redfeather pleasantly. “Mr. Bordman. Dr. Chuka's the director of mining and mineralogy here."

  Bordman shook hands with the ebony-skinned man. He grinned, showing startlingly white teeth. Then he began to shiver.

  “It's like a freeze-box in here,” he said in a deep voice. “I'll get a robe and be with you."

  He vanished through a doorway, his teeth chattering audibly. Aletha's cousin took a half a dozen deliberate deep breaths and grimaced.

  “I could shiver myself,” he admitted, “but Chuka's really acclimated to Xosa. He was raised on Timbuk."

  Bordman said curtly:

  “I'm sorry I collapsed on landing. It won't happened again. I cane here to do a degree-of-completion survey that should open the colony to normal commerce, let the colonists’ families move in, tourists, and so on. But I was landed by boat instead of normally, and I am told the colony is doomed. I would like an official statement to the degree of completion of the colony's facilities and an explanation of the unusual points I have just mentioned."

  The Indian blinked at him. Then he smiled faintly. The dark man came back, zipping up an indoor warmth-garment. Redfeather dryly brought him up to date by repeating what Bordman had just said. Chuka grinned and sprawled comfortably in a chair.

  “I'd say,” he remarked, in that astonishing deep-toned voice of his, “I'd say sand got in your hair. And our colony. And the landing-grid. There's a lot of sand on Xosa. Wouldn't you say that was the trouble?"

  The Indian said with deliberate gravity:

  “Of course wind had something to do with it."

  Bordman fumed.

  “I think you know,” he said, “that as a Senior Colonial Survey Officer, I
have authority to give any orders needed for my work. I give one now. I want to see the landing-grid, if it is still standing. I take it that it didn't fall down?"

  Redfeather flushed beneath the bronze pigment of his skin. It would be hard to offend a steelman more than to suggest that his work did not still stand up.

  “I assure you,” he said politely, “that it did not fall down."

  “Your estimate of its degree of completion?"

  “Eighty percent,” said Redfeather.

  “You've stopped work on it?"

  “Work on it has been stopped,” agreed the Indian.

  “Even though the colony can receive no more supplies until it is completed?"

  “Just so,” said Redfeather without expression.

  “Then I issue a formal order that I be taken to the landing-grid site immediately!” said Bordman angrily. “I want to see what sort of incompetence is responsible! Will you arrange it—at once?"

  Redfeather said in a completely emotionless voice:

  “You want to see the site of the landing-grid. Very good. Immediately."

  He turned and walked out into the incredible, blinding sunshine. Bordman blinked at the momentary blast of light, and then began to pace up and down the office. He fumed. He was still ashamed of his collapse from the heat during the travel from the landed rocket-boat to the colony. Therefore he was touchy and irritable. But the order he had given was strictly justifiable.

  He heard a small noise and whirled. Dr. Chuka, huge and black and spectacled, rocked back and forth in his seat, suppressing laughter.

  “Now, what the devil does that mean?” demanded Bordman suspiciously. “It certainly isn't ridiculous to ask to see the structure on which the life of the colony fully depends!"

  “Not ridiculous,” said Dr. Chuka. “It's—hilarious!"

  He boomed laughter in the office with the rounded ceiling of a remade robot hull. Aletha smiled with him, though her eyes were grave.

  “You'd better put on a heat-suit,” she said to Bordman.