Andre Norton - Postmarked the Stars

Kamil shrugged. “You can try anything—once,” was his unenthusiastic reply. “But the more you lighten her, the better. You lift; we’ll see about finding a landing down there.”

The cliff face was rough enough to provide them with hand and toe holds. Once he had swung over to join Ali in that descent, Dane discovered that it was far less cold. Perhaps the bulk of the plateau kept some of the icy emanation of the glacier from this side—which was another small point in their favor, since he was sure that the brachs could not survive long in the cold, coming as they did from the much warmer Xecho.

They reached the foot of the cliff and continued on toward the brush, seeking for an opening in the growth into which Rip might be able, with a great deal of luck besides his skill, to maneuver the LB. Dane thought the brush impenetrable directly ahead. He was close enough now to see that the leaves were a very dark blue-green, the colors mottled with sometimes one, sometimes the other, predominant. They were a thick, fleshy growth, marked by patches of gray hair, which also fringed their edges.

Not trying to push into these thickets, Ali turned left, Dane right. Rip waited on the cliff top for a signal as the LB was no hover craft to be held off ground.

The silence continued to grow more menacing as far as Dane was concerned. They had had little time for briefing on the Queen, and the instruction tapes about Trewsworld she had carried had naturally, for their purposes, dealt with the port and settlements they might visit in carrying out their duties. There had been little or no information about this wilderness.

But surely life could not be limited to vegetation—yet there were no birds, no flying things, no animals to be sighted. Perhaps the landing of the LB had driven many to cover. Yet he kept hoping to see a single track, some evidence that they were not in a deserted world.

The sound that did break that increasingly ominous silence was a whistle from Ali. He spun around to see Kamil waving to Rip, who disappeared then from sight. Dane did not at once retrace his way. The need to make sure that there was some life here pushed him on a short distance.

What he did find was a bare, black section of ground, unmistakably once the site of a fire. Stones had been set in a rough circle, and in the midst of that lay charred lengths of nearly consumed wood. Sand had been blown across the stones, so that it was plain it had been some time since this campsite had been used. Surveyors from some holding? An exploring party? There might even be a chance that, as on too many frontier worlds, there was an outlaw element here that had taken to the wilderness, though the accounts they had of Trewsworld named it a placid, hard-working, and law-abiding planet.

Dane went a little beyond the campfire and came across unmistakable evidence that the vegetation had been hacked away to clear passage for something larger than a party traveling on foot. In another bare spot that must have been soft clay and was now frozen into a sharp ridged rut, he saw the track of what could only be a crawler. The gashed growth and crushed tracks led on into the shade of the trees.

If they did need a road later on, they might use that track. But for now—

He heard the moan of displaced air and turned in time to see the LB slide from the cliff top and aim in Ali’s direction. Not for the first time he admired Rip’s skill as a pilot.

They could not hide the marks of their own landing, for the LB smashed a passage into the brush, stopping only when it nosed into the beginnings of the forest. But the growth seemed to possess unusual elasticity, and where it had not been actually broken off, it began to rise slowly and cloak a little of that backtrail.

Why Dane continued to think of some danger in their being seen, he could not explain, save that this whole affair was so bizarre and in a way menacing. And he knew that the captain thought they needed time on their side.

They did not disturb the brach nest-cage. But Ali suited up and, moving ponderously in that shielded clothing, took the box, to trudge on into the woods. When he came back later, he taped directions as to its burial spot. They could not be sure even now that there was no leakage from the outer shell so hurriedly made in the Queen’s engineering repair cabin and that the dire influence of what was inside could not spread to the surrounding territory.

“By rights we should have spaced it!” Rip declared as he brought out E-ration tubes and they sat, with their backs to the LB, sucking the contents.

“Space it and you have no chance to pick it up again,” Ali returned. “After the captain reports in, there may be a lot of big brains wanting to beam in on it.”

“There’re the brachs.” Dane had been only half listening to them, thinking along another path. “If they have degenerated, well, what’s the answer? Are we bound to use the box, or something like it, to return them to an intelligent race? There’s the code against interference—how would it work in such a case?”

“Nice legal point.” Ali squeezed the last mouthful from his tube and rolled the now flaccid container into a small ball. “If you have a station on a planet marked no I life and then you discover you can produce native I life there, thus losing your contract, are you required to do just that?”

“You mean Combine might fight any upgrading?” Dane asked. “Is Xecho worth a beam-out with the Council?”

“Xecho,” Rip answered, “is a crossroads, a way station. In itself it is not important except for its port. So if the Combine were assured they could keep that, they might not fight upgrading. But it would be chancy. Brachs have been considered harmless, but these have been hostile—”

“Suppose you suddenly woke up to the fact you were a prisoner of an alien race and you had your wife to defend and children—” Ali asked. “What would you do?”

“Just what the brach did,” Dane agreed. “So it’s up to us, the three of us now, to make contact with the brachs and induce them to see we are friends.”

“That we may be able to do. What I don’t like is that cargo of embryos,” Ali observed. “I think we had better get them out of the ship. They’re spoiled now for all purposes. And there’s this—the brach gave birth ahead of time. Suppose the radiation works the same way on the embryos, speeds up gestation? Stotz wasn’t able to rig any freeze unit to deter that.”

“We don’t decant them,” Dane replied. “If you do, in this cold they’d be finished.” But it was only token resistance on his part. With the engineer apprentice, he felt the need for getting those boxes and their nightmare cargo out of the LB. The sooner they were sure that what lay within would never develop further, the better.

It was a wearying business, pulling the boxes out the hatch, tramping among the trees to stack them between two, piling stones around them. The ground here was ankle deep in powdery skeletons of the pulpy leaves, so these must fall at some time. They dug into the dust, using it with the stones to cover the boxes lest some native life try to investigate them, though what manner of tooth, fang, or claw could break them open, Dane had no idea.

The dark had come by the time they had finished, and, tired, they dragged themselves wearily back to the LB, longing for rest in the hammocks. But Dane went first to the brach cage, lifting the lid and pulling aside some of the padding. There was a heaving, and something rose almost under his hand.

A head poked out to regard him with unblinking eyes, by its size one of the kits. However, this was no helpless youngling. He could not mistake the intelligence in that steady gaze, and the fantastic growth rate of the creature astounded him. It was half, maybe two-thirds as big as one of its parents, and might have been a year or more older by brach development. Though the time in hyper followed a different rate than that of planet time, there was nothing to explain this but the effects of radiation.