Adventures on Other Planets Read online

  ADVENTURES ON OTHER PLANETS

  Edited by DONALD A. WOLLHEIM

  ACE BOOKS, INC.

  THE OBLIGATION

  Roger Dee

  The Kornephorian robot-ship came in low over the raging sea. Arrowing down against the full sweep of Venusian hurricane, it dropped toward the supply dome in obedience to the Surveyors will. It settled gently to the bare rocky escarpment, and its long bulk blocked from its waiting masters sight the rain-lashed dome and the man shouting incoherencies from the dome s open lower port.

  The ships airlock opened. The Surveyor flowed inside with a multi-legged rush, discarded its limp human burden and set automatic controls that would send the ship arrowing back to Komephoros. Its thought touched delicate receptor mechanisms, filing the report it had compiled during the brief and catastrophic period of its survey.

  Cseth Abrii of Pselpha, deferring Galactic Canvass 12953 to rectify injury resulting from intervention in native affairs under investigation. . . .

  There was no lagging process of sequential transcription. The report in its entirety was filed instantaneously beginning with the moment when the Surveyor, chart-ship safely hidden in sea-bottom ooze, first swam up to investigate this latest unexplored world . . .

  For minutes after surfacing, the Surveyor had maintained a wary shapelessness, adopting the soft gray hue of the water while it probed with senses keener than sight for possible danger. The sea swarmed with a myriad of improbable life forms whose rudimentary mentalities radiated nothing but terror against an imminent climatic disturbance; the Surveyor ignored them, searching for conscious intelligence and finding none.

  The water was warm and pleasantly saline, vibrant with a faint premonitory quivering that traveled ahead of the approaching storm. The Surveyor extended its perception toward the sunspot hurricane raging in the east and dis—

  missed the threat to itself as negligible, an insignificant squall to one bom on a planet whose fantastic extremes of climate made perfect adaptability the first necessity of existence. The howling tempests of Pselpha, when the double suns Komephoros stood so, were something else again.

  Satisfied, the Surveyor flowed sinuously and fashioned itself to a squid-like shape that drove it swiftly toward shore.

  Probing ahead, it discovered a fog-hung coastal marshland that sloped gently up to bleak mountains whose peaks were invisible in mist. On a dark promontory that jutted far into the surf was a building, a hemispherical shelter joined to the sea by a long, smooth incline clearly intended to bear a vehicle of some sort.

  A flat-bottomed craft emerged from the dome while the Kornephorian watched and shot down the incline, driven by crude reaction engines. The alien waited, understanding that the creature controlling the machine was intelligent and that it was coming out to investigate the survey ship's plunge into the sea. The Surveyor reached out across the intervening distance and touched the pilot’s mind, cautiously at first and then with assurance when it found that the creature had neither ability to sense the probing nor power to resist it.

  The pilot was a mammal, bipedal and moderately intelligent. It thought of itself as a man, and it was the dominant species not only of this colonial world but of another. The discovery interested the Kornephorian; this creature’s kind, patently a young and clumsy race, still had achieved the beginning of interplanetary flight.

  The man's mind housed a surprising welter of conflicting emotions: fear of the approaching sunspot storm, hope that he might rescue some survivor of the ship he had seen fall, and a desperate anxiety for another of his kind remaining in the dome ashore. Sexless itself, the Surveyor had some difficulty in grasping the relationship between the two— this other was subtly different and idealized, a female and mate to the one approaching.

  The boat made a wide sweep and returned; its pilot, sighting the floating alien, registered consternation. At that instant the storm struck, and with its impact the Kome-phomian understood for the first time that the man had gambled his life and that he had failed.

  The roaring water-wall capsized the boat instantly, plunging its pilot helpless into the sea.

  The Surveyors first intent was to let him drown. To tamper even fractionally with the course of native life under observation was contrary to Galactic policy; moreover, the man’s death presented an excellent opportunity to enter the dome and study his fellows at first hand. (The duplication of simple life forms, complete with memory and personality, was standard procedure in survey work—to mingle with them in masquerade followed logically and usually without difficulty.)

  The drowning man’s final thought before unconsciousness came deterred the alien, however; it was charged with an altruism so powerful that it awoke in the Surveyor a seldom-felt sense of kinship and shamed it from its inaction.

  Dying, the man was tom by an agony of regret, not for himself but for the woman he had failed.

  Above its professional interest the Kornephorian felt a strong compassion, a sympathy compounded equally of respect and understanding. It intervened on the instant, in direct disregard of Galactic policy.

  Extruding a tentacle ending in a powerful seven-fingered hand, the alien caught the drowning man by the shoulder and hauled him clear of the bellowing water. With the I ouch it completed a total mental linkage that permitted it to exist for the time as a dual entity—as Cseth Abrii of Pselpha from the binary suns Komephoros, and as Bruce Lowry, dome-keeper of a Venusian Fisheries supply station.

  Lowry had been standing in the front entrance of the supply dome when the ship came down. He had been watching the bobbing lights of the Pascals’ eight-wheeled crawler hurrying up from the coastal flatland toward the safety of the dome, and the meteoric arc of the falling ship’s exhaust jarred him badly by its unexpectedness.

  There was nothing in its brief actinic glare to tell him whether it was a government freighter from Earth or a Venusian Fisheries cargo collector in trouble. Certainly there was nothing about its steaming plunge into the plankton beds offshore to tell him that it was neither of these but an alien.

  “Gaill" Lowry called. The static-blurred squawking of the stations radio drowned his voice, and he stepped inside to call again.

  His wife came at once, her dark hair touseled above its confining ribbon, her gray eyes anxious. She had been winching down the retractable communications antenna at the domes top against the coming sunspot storm, and her simple one-piece garment was smudged with oil and rust. A faint shine of perspiration glistened on her forehead.

  “That will be Marvin and Nadine,” she said, catching sight of the machine climbing the rocky slope toward them. “They got the storm warning in time, then . . . Bruce, they'll be here ahead of the howler, won't they?”

  “They'll make it," Lowry said. He liked and respected Nadine Pascal, but the prospect of being cooped up with her surly, unsocial husband for a week of fifty-hour Venusian days brought a frown to his face.

  “There's another crawlerl” Gail said, her voice rising in surprise. She had turned away from the Pascals' crawler and was looking upcoast; a crawler, tiny in the distance,

  was moving along the marshy beach. As they watched, it turned up the slope. “Who—Bruce, do you suppose Walt Griswold has changed his mind about leaving Venus?"

  “I wish he had,” Lowry said. “But he left his dome for

  Sea City a week ago, if you remember. He's taking the next ship to Earth."

  Gail gave him a troubled look. “He went because of Nadine, didn't he?"

  Lowry shook himself, forcing personal concerns aside.

  “A ship just crashed out there in the plankton beds,” he said. “And it didn't come up. Til have to take the skimmer out and see if there are any survivors
.”

  She cried out sharply and caught his arm. “Bruce, you can't! There isn’t time—the howler is due any minute!”

  He disengaged himself gently.

  “I’m not trying to play the grim-jawed hero,” he said. “But someone may have bailed out at the last minute. I’ll have to give them a hand, Gail.”

  She stood biting her lip helplessly while Lowry went down the outside personnel ladder and let the big flat-bottomed craft slide out of its port at the dome’s base. From their elevation the skimmer chute dropped steeply to the dark water of the bay, as still and glassy at the moment as a pool of molten lead.

  "Don’t worry,” Lowry said. “Ill be back.”

  I hope, he added silently, and released the brake.

  He went down the incline in a mounting rush of speed, not glancing back because he knew exactly how Gail would look. Gail was thirty-one, four years younger than himself, not particularly pretty but infinitely comfortable and satisfying. They had been married for eight years, the last ihree spent with Venusian Fisheries, and the intimacy between them had long ago grown past any consideration of convention or reticence. It was characteristic of their relations that Gail had not argued against his present decision, because she had known that nothing she could say would stop him. And he had gone without displaying sentiment, because the closeness between them made demonstration unnecessary.

  Lowry looked back once, just before the skimmer left the chute and shot across the bay. Gale was looking after him, one hand shading her eyes against the dome lights, her slender figure outlined against the open port,

  “Good girl,” he said aloud, and waved.

  The bobbing lights of the first crawler rounded the dome while he watched. The second was only minutes behind it, beating its way upward more rapidly now that it had left I he boglands. Sight of them brought a measure of relief to I.owry; at least Gail would not wait for him alone.

  The skimmer picked up speed, orange fingers of jet exhaust churning the water. Lowry looked toward the eastern horizon where the storm gathered blackly and felt the skin tighten between his shoulders.

  An ominous glow of sunspot radiation stained the darkness there, driving sullen red streamers of light flickering downward. There was a feel of strain in the air, an electric uneasiness that breathed along the water ahead of the approaching howler.

  Ten minutes, Lowry thought. Maybe a little less. VU have to hurry. . . .

  Half a mile out he slowed the skimmer, searching for traces of the sunken ship and finding none. There were no dying ripples, no prismatic shine of oil slick. No sea-beast disturbed the still surface.

  The first booming drone of the storm sounded then, a deep bass howling that gave the sunspot hurricane its name. The horizon vanished, folded over upon itself in a titanic wall of rushing gray water. Spume flew before it in driving white clouds, ripped and tom by the wind. The water about Lowry trembled, stippled and laced by a million fantastic vibration patterns.

  He swept the skimmer about, knowing already that he was too late, and heeled the power lever all the way down. The boat leaped forward, half out of the water under its boiling jet thrust.

  The water wall was looming over him when he saw the thing keeping pace beside the skimmer.

  He had a fleeting impression of red eyes watching him contemplatively from a blank, tendriled face, a suggestion of tentacles spread web-fashion upon the water and a squid-shaped body beneath dwindling into the gray depths. Then the howler struck with a cataclysmic confusion of screaming wind and chill water. The skimmer heaved skyward, swept up on the water wall and whirled end over end.

  Lowry was flung overside. He went down like a stone, salt water burning his throat and choking back the breath in his lungs. His last thought was a curious mingling of deep regret for Gail and an irrelevant conviction that the thing in the water beside him was neither unintelligent nor unfriendly.

  Consciousness came back to Lowry slowly, between alternate sieges of pain and numbness. His right shoulder ached dully, as if it had been struck a heavy blow. His lungs were on fire. He coughed violently, drawing each breath with an effort.

  He should be dead, and he knew it. From the moment the vast bass drone of the howler sounded he had known that he would never reach shore. He had not really tried.

  For a time he lay with the wind and rain tearing at him and nursed an improbable conviction that he had not come ashore by his own efforts; but the howl of the storm banished the thought. Nothing could have helped him through that.

  He struggled to hands and knees, trying to orient himself, and found that he had somehow reached the fused-rock ramp leading to the vehicle entrance at the rear of the dome. The double metal doors of the port curved vaguely up before him, not six feet away.

  Their presence stunned him with the utter impossibility of his being where he was.

  He had not only escaped the sea. Miraculously, he had worked his way through the full force of the hurricane to collapse in the comparative calm of the domes leeward side.

  Light glowed from the personnel port at the second level above him, outlining dimly the steel ladder that dropped away from the curved glass panel of the lock. He turned from it, knowing that he could never fight his way up the rungs against the wind, and set himself instead to crawl to the wider haven of the vehicle port.

  Beyond it lay a service garage for crawlers, and past that the storage level, a circular hundred-foot vault tiered with plankton freezing tanks and rows of barrels and boxes and bales of supplies for the dome and for outlying stations.

  If he could pull himself erect against the storm long enough to open the doors, the rest was assured. In the second-level living quarters the alarm bell over his communications desk would clang out, and a warning light under it would call attention to the opening of the rear port. Gail and the others would come down for him, and he would be safe.

  He dragged himself upright against the wind and found the lever that controlled the port doors. Water poured down from the rounded slope of the dome above and drenched him icily. The wind all but tore him away before he could tug the lever down.

  Machinery took over inside, powerful gears inching the doors open against the storm. He clung to the lever for support, and released it only when the opening loomed large enough to admit him.

  He released his hold then and let the wind fling him headlong inside.

  For a time he lay quietly, weak and panting with reaction. The gears that drove the doors reversed themselves and closed the port, and their reversal told him that those upstairs had understood and had taken over. They would be down soon.

  With the closing of the port the insulated quiet of the storage level settled upon him, a tangible weight of silence that made his ears ring. Sensation came back slowly to his chilled body; with the last of wind and water gone, the place seemed suddenly hot and close.

  For what seemed an eternity he lay waiting and listening to the storm building up outside, the violence of it beating up through the cold stone floor and vibrating inward from the wall beside his head. He knew that it might go on for as long as ten days—dragging, endless fifty hour Venusian days—before it reached its peak and subsided.

  He heard them coming, a quick rush of feet and Gails sudden incredulous cry rising above a babble of lesser voices. He tried to sit up, and exhaustion turned his bones to wax.

  It did not matter. Gail clung to him with warm arms, laughing and crying together.

  He blacked out for the second time with the feel of her hair brushing against his face. . . .

  And woke to find himself stretched out on a pneumatic lounge in the domes common room, a 30-foot chamber fitted out with an approximation of Earthside comfort designed to make its off-duty occupants forget the smell of fuel oil and fish.

  Without opening his eyes he could picture the setting perfectly, every item of its furnishings made familiar by the three years of his and GaiTs possession. There would be another couch under the wide-curving front port wher
e Gail spent a large part of her time with binoculars, watching him while he worked the skimmer back and forth across the bay and dragged with spiral metal nets for plankton. A tiny bar stood along one wall beside a glass-fronted case that held a worn miscellany of books; a miniature piano filled a comer, and a phonovision console with one door standing open to show its racks of wire spools.

  One door led to the kitchen, a neat cubbyhole shining with shelves of unbreakable chinaware. Another led to his and Gails bedroom. Others, sealed until needed, waited for visitors forced periodically here for shelter against the inevitable howlers.

  There was no wasted space. Access to the transmitter and beacon room on the cramped third level was gained by a staircase spiraling upward about the main supporting column at the center of the room. Another stairwell, dropping steeply from the rear of the common quarters, led to the storage level and garage space below.

  There was a warm haze of light and security about him when he opened his eyes. Gail was kneeling beside him anxiously, waiting for him to show signs of consciousness. He drew her down beside him, laughing, and for the moment they were alone, the two of them apart from the rest of the world.

  “Somehow I knew you’d come back,” Gail said. ‘T don’t know how—maybe because 1 couldn’t give you up even to a howler."

  “I was a fool to take a risk like that,” Lowry said. He roleased her, sighing. Tm glad that’s over with!”

  Someone put a drink into Lowiy’s hand. It was whisky and hot water, a fiery combination that burned his throat and sent a glow of strength through him. He sat up and swore softly when he saw that it was not one of the Pascals but Walt Griswold who had brought the drink.

  “I thought you were leaving us/’ Lowry said. “What happened? Lose your taste for the Earthside fleshpots?” Walt laughed and took back the glass. He was a Jean, pleasant man in his late twenties, slighter of build than Lowry and as blond as the other was dark. Lowry had known him for three years as a competent fisher and an unfailing friend.