Perilous Planets Part 11

'I wasn't thinking exactly about them, I was thinking about the tide. Four good- sized moons in conjunction could raise one heck of a tide.', Grenville settled back, closing his eyes.

'So?'

'So that's probably where the land went.'

Grenville was too busy dreaming about his fame as dis-coverer of Grenville's Planet to be concerned with tides and moons.

'Let the techs worry about that,' he said without interest.

But Wisher kept thinking.

The tide could very well be the cause. When the four moons got together and started to pull they would raise a tremendous ma.s.s of water, a grinding power that would slice away the continent edges like no erosive force in history. Given a billion years in which to work - but Wisher suddenly remem-bered a peculiar thing about the island.

If the tides had planed down the continents of this planet, then these islands had no right being here, certainly not as sand and loose rock. Just one tide like the ones those moons could raise would be enough to cut the islands completely away. Well maybe, he thought, the tides are very far apart, centuries even.

He glanced apprehensively at the sky. The two moons visible were rea.s.suringly far apart.

He turned from the moons to gaze at the sea. And then he remembered the first thought he had had about this planet -that uncomfortable feeling that the first sight of land had dis-pelled. He thought of it now again.

Evolution.

A billion years beneath the sea, with no land to take the first developing mammals.

What was going on, right now as he watched, beneath the placid rolling surface of the sea?

It was a disturbing thought. When they went back to the ship for the night Wisher did not need the regs to tell him to seal the airlock and set the alarm screens.

The alarm that came in the middle of the night and nearly scared Wisher to death turned out to be only an animal. It was one of the large ones, a weird bristling thing with a lean and powerful body. It got away before they were up to see it, but it left its photographic image.

In spite of himself, Wisher had trouble getting back to sleep, and in the morning was silently in favour of leaving for the one last star they would map before returning to base. But the regs called for life specimens to be brought back from all livable worlds whenever possible, whenever there was no 'slight manifestation of danger'. Well, here it was certainly possible. They would have to stay long enough to take a quick sampling of plants and animals and of marine life too.

Grenville was just as anxious to get back as Wisher was, but for different reasons. Grenville, figured Grenville, was now a famous man.

Early in the morning, then, they lifted ship and once more spiralled the planet.

Once the mapping radar had recorded the size and shape and location of the islands, they went in low again and made a complete check for life forms.

They found as before, very little. There were the bristling things, and - as Wisher had suspected - a great quant.i.ty of snakes and lizards. There were very few observable fish. There were no birds.

When they were done they returned to the original island. Grenville, by this time, had a name for it. Since there was another island near it, lying to the south, Grenville called that one South Grenville. The first was, of course, North Grenville.

Grenville chuckled over that for a long while.

'Don't go too near the water.'

'All right, mama,' Grenville chirped, grinning. Til work the edge of the vegetation.'

'Leave the rifle, take the pistol. It's handier.'

Grenville nodded and left, dragging the specimen sack. Wisher, muttering, turned toward the water.

It is unnatural, he thought, for a vast warm ocean to be so , empty of life. Because the ocean, really, is where life begins. He had visions in his mind of any number of vicious, incredi-ble, slimy things that were alive and native to that sea and who were responsible for the unnatural sterility of the water. When he approached the waves he was very cautious.

The first thing he noticed, with a shock, was that there were no sh.e.l.lfish.

Not any. Not crabs or snails or even the tiniest of sea beings. Nothing. The beach was a bare, dead plot of sand.

He stood a few yards from the waves, motionless. He was almost positive, now, that there was danger here. The sh.o.r.es of every warm sea he had ever seen, from Earth on out to Deneb, had been absolutely choked with life and the remnants of life.

There were always sh.e.l.ls and fish scales, and snails, worms, insects; bits of jellyfish, tentacles, minutiae of a hundred million kinds, cluttering and crowding every square inch of the beach and sea. And yet here, now, there was nothing. Just sand and water.

It took a great deal of courage for Wisher to approach those waves, although the water here was shallow. He took a quick water sample and hurried back to the ship.

Minutes later he was perched in the shadow of her side, staring out broodingly over the ocean. The water was Earth water as far as his instruments could tell. There was nothing wrong with it. But there was nothing much living in it.

When Grenville came back with the floral specimens Wisher quietly mentioned the lack of sh.e.l.lfish.

'Well, h.e.l.l,' said Grenville, scratching his head painfully, 'maybe they just don't like it here.'

And maybe they've got reason, Wisher said to himself. But aloud he said: 'The computer finished calculating the orbits of those moons.'

'So?'

'So the moons conjunct every 112 years. They raise a tide of 600 feet.'

Grenville did not follow.

'The tide,' said Wisher, smiling queerly, 'is at least 400 feet higher than any of the islands.'

When Grenville started, still puzzled, Wisher grunted and kicked at the sand.

'Now where in h.e.l.l do you suppose the animals came from?'

'They should be drowned,' said Grenville slowly.

'Right. And would be, unless they're amphibian, which they're not. Or unless a new batch evolves every hundred years.'

'Um.' Grenville sat down to think about it.

'Don't make sense,' he said after a while.

Having thoroughly confounded Grenville, Wisher turned away and paced slowly in the sand. The sand, he thought dis-tractedly, that's another thing. Why in heck is this island here at all?

Artificial.

The word popped unbidden into his brain.

That would be it. That would have to be it.

The island was artificial, was - restored. Put here by who-ever or whatever lived under the sea.

Grenville was ready to go. He stood nervously eyeing the waves, his fingers clamped tightly on the pistol at his belt, waiting for Wisher to give the word.

Wisher leaned against the s.p.a.ceship, conveniently near the airlock. He regretted disturbing Grenville.

'We can't leave yet,' he said calmly. 'We haven't any proof. And besides, there hasn't been any "manifestation of danger".'

'We have proof enough for me,' Grenville said quickly.

Wisher nodded absently.

'It's easy to understand. Evolution kept right on going, adapting and changing just as it does everywhere else in the Universe. Only here, when the mammals began coming up onto the land, they had no room to expand. And they were all being washed away every hundred years, as the tides rose and fell and the continents wore down below tide level.

'But evolution never stopped. It continued beneath the sea. Eventually it came up with an intelligent race.

'G.o.d knows what they are, or how far they've progressed. They must be pretty highly-evolved, or they couldn't have done something like this' - he broke off, realizing that the building of the islands was no clue. The ancient Egyptians on Earth had built the pyramids, certainly a much harder job. There was no way of telling how far evolved this race was. Or what the island was for.

Zoo?

No. He shook that out of the confusion of his mind. If the things in the sea wanted a zoo they would naturally build it below the surface of the water, where they themselves could travel with ease and where the animals could be kept in air-tight compartments. And if this was a zoo, then by now there should have been visitors.

That was one more perplexing thing. Why had nothing come? It was unbelievable that an island like this should be left completely alone, that nothing had noticed the coming of their ship.

And here his thought broke again. They would not be just fish, these things. They would need . . . hands. Or tentacles. He pictured something like a genius squid, and the hair on his body stiffened.

He turned back to Grenville.

'Did you get the animal specimens?'

Grenville shook his head. 'No. Just plants. And a small lizard.'

Wisher's face, lined with the inbred caution of many years, now at last betrayed his agitation. 'We'll have to get one of those things that set off the alarm last night. But to heck with the rest. We'll let hq worry about that.' He stepped quickly into the airlock, dragging the bag of specimens. 'I'll pack up,' he said, 'you go get that thing."

Grenville turned automatically and struck off down the beach.

He never came back.

At the end of the third hour after Grenville had gone, Wisher went to the arms locker and pulled out a heavy rifle. He cursed the fact that he had no small scout sled. He could hot take the ship. She was too big and unwieldy for low, slow flying and he could not risk cracking her up.

He was breaking the regs, of course. Since Grenville had not come back he must be considered dead and it was up to Wisher to leave alone. A special force would come back for Grenville, or for what was left of him. Wisher knew all that. He thought about it while he was loading the rifle. He thought about the vow he had made never to break the regs and he went right on loading the rifle. He told himself that he would take no chances and if he didn't find Grenville right away he would come back and leave, but he knew all along that he was breaking the regs. At the same time he knew that there was nothing else to do. This was the one reg he had never faced before and it was the one reg he would always break. For Grenville or for anyone else. For a skinny young fool like Grenville, or for anyone else.

Before he left he took the routine precautions concerning the ship. He set the alarm screens to blast anything that moved within two hundred feet of her. If Grenville came back before him it would be all right because the alarm was set to deacti-vate when it registered the sound pattern of either his or Grenville's voice. If Grenville came back and didn't see him, he would know that the alarm was on.

And if no one came back at all, the ship would blow by itself.

The beach was wide and curved on out of sight. Grenville's deep heel prints were easy to follow.

Stiffly, in the wind, the stalks of the brown vegetation scratched and rustled.

Wisher walked along Grenville's track. He wanted to call, "but stopped himself. No noise. He must make no noise.

This is the end of it, he kept saying to himself. When I get out of this I will go home.

The heel prints turned abruptly into the alien forest. Wisher walked some distance farther on, to a relatively clear s.p.a.ce. He turned, stepping carefully, started to circle the spot where Grenville had gone in. The wood around him was soggy, sterile. He saw nothing move. But a sharp, shattering blast came suddenly to him in the still air.

The explosion blossomed and Wisher perked spasmodically. The ship. Something was at the ship. He fought down a horrible impulse to run, stood quiet, gun poised, knowing that the ship could take care of itself. And then he stepped slowly forward.

And fell.

He fell through a soft light mat of bushes into a hole. There was a crunching snap and he felt a metal rip into his legs, tear-ing and cracking the bones. He went up to his shoulders. He knew in a flash, with a blast of glacial fear, what it was. Animal trap.

He reached for his rifle. But the rifle was beyond him. A foot past his hand, it lay on the floor of the wood near him. His legs, his legs ... he felt the awful pain as he tried to move.

It blazed through his mind and woke him. Out of his belt he dragged his pistol, and in a sea of pain, held upright by the trap, he waited. He was not afraid. He had broken the regs, and this had happened, and he had expected it. He waited.

Nothing came.

Why, Why?

This had happened to Grenville, he knew. Why?

It had happened to him now, and for a moment he could not understand why he did not seem to care, but was just . . . curious. Then he looked down into the hole and saw the hot redness of his own blood, and as he watched it bubble he realized that he was dying.

He had very little time. He was hopeful. Maybe something would come and at least he would see what they were. He wanted awfully for something to come. In the red mist which was his mind he debated with himself whether or not to shoot it if it came, and over and over he asked himself why, why? Before something came, unfortunately, he died.

The traps had been dug in the night. From out the sea they had come to dig in the preserve - for a preserve was what the island was, was all that it could have been - and then returned to the sea to wait.

For the ship had been seen from the very beginning, and its purpose understood.

The best brains of the sea had gathered and planned, the enormous, manta-like people whose name was unp.r.o.nounceable but whose technology was not far be-hind Earth's, met in consultation and immediately understood. It was necessary to capture the ship. Therefore the Earthmen must be separated from it, and it was for this reason that Wisher had died.

But now, to the astonishment of the things, the ship was still alive. It stood silent and alone in the whiteness of the beach ticking and sparking within itself, and near it, on the bloodied sand, were the remains of the one that had come too close. The others had fled in terror.

Time was of no importance to the clever, squid-like beings. They had won already, could wait and consider. Thus the day grew late and became afternoon, and the waves - the aseptic, sterile waves which were proof in themselves of the greatest of all oceanic civilizations - crumbled whitely on the beach. The things exulted. The conquest of s.p.a.ce was in their hands.

Within the ship, of course, there was ticking, and a small red hand moved toward zero.

In a little while the ship would blow, and with it would go the island, and a great chunk of the sea. But the beings could not know. It was an alien fact they faced and an alien fact was unknowable. Just as Wisher could not have known the nature of the planet, these things could not now foresee the nature of the ship and the wheel had come full circle. Second by second, with the utter, mechanical loyalty of the machine, the small red hand crept onward.

The waves near the beach were frothy and white.

A crowd was forming.

The base was foolproof, unconquerable. 'Yet the Captain was right to start praying. Simak has a story about that...

BEACHHEAD.

By Clifford D. Simak There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could stop a human planetary survey party. It was a highly specialized unit created for and charged with one purpose only ... to establish a bridgehead on an alien planet, to blast out the perimeters of that bridgehead and establish a base where there would be some elbow-room. Then hold that elbow-room against all comers until it was time to go.