Andre Norton - Time Traders

“Pounding, I think.” He realized that the messages in helmet coms could not reach the ears of lurkers below. “But why?”

“Trying to hole the ship?” Ross hung over the other two. “They’ve no chance of getting through the hull—or have they?” His concluding flash of anxiety was shared by the rest. What did they know of the resources of the natives?

Coiled beside Travis was the ladder. Dare he push that out, climb over to see what the night creepers were doing below? The thud of the pounding appeared to him to be taking on both speed and intensity. Suppose by some miracle, or the use of some unknown tool, the hairy things could pierce the outer skin of the globe? Then there would be no possible hope of escape from this forgotten desert.

He began to edge the ladder forward. Ashe made a grab which the younger man fended away.

“We have to see,” he said, “we have to!”

Ross and Ashe moved together and in that narrow space blocked each other long enough for Travis to squeeze through the door, swing over the lip and climb down the length of his own body. Then he felt the ladder catch tight and knew that the other two were preventing its descent to ground level.

Gripping the rungs tightly, holding his body as close as he could to the surface of the ship, Travis looked down. The play of red flashes against the sky furnished a weird light for the activity below, for there was activity. He had been right. The hairy things had crept in unseen from behind the ship, and a group of them were now clustered about the base of the globe. But what they were doing he could not make out in the constant flickering of the light. Then one reared from its usual quadrupedal stance, and raised its forearms over its hump of head. The appendages at its midsection gave a twist, writhed out in a manner which suggested bonelessness, and clasped tight to the ship.

The creature gave a bound into the air and then hung, its hind feet now a foot or so off the ground. Apparently it held on by the grip of waist tentacles against the globe, while the fists or paws on its forelimbs pounded vigorously against that surface. There was something about that hitching climb, squirming upward as Travis watched, that spelled purposeful malevolence.

Now a second creature had hitched itself to the hull by midsection tentacles and was beginning to ascend. Travis could sight no weapons, nothing but those steadily pounding fists. But neither did he have any wish to battle the slow climbers. He reported to Ashe and was ordered back into the ship. They closed the port, took the precaution of sealing it as if making ready for flight, and then loosened their helmets.

Neither the pounding nor the sound of the climbers could reach them now. But Travis did not believe that the creatures had ceased their efforts to win into the ship, futile as those efforts might seem. The humans climbed to the control cabin to watch the outer world on the limited view of the screen. Renfry looked puzzled.

“I don’t get it. I still say that I’m sure this isn’t the end of the flight. But I can’t tell you why, or the why of this port, either. If the answer lies in that building, you’ll have to crack it open. But we may have a better cracker than just those hand weapons.”

Ross caught his meaning first. “The ship’s guns!”

“Might be.”

“ Can we use them?” Ashe wanted to know.

“Well, they’re less a top secret than the rest of the stuff around here. Remember this?” He pressed a lever. Lights winked, that word from a vanished language spoke out of the thin air. It was all as it had been on their exploration of the ship.

“And you can fire them?”

“The chief—my chief—doped out that this does that”—Renfry fingered another switch he did not depress. “As far as I deduce, one of those king-sized blasters should just about clip across the roof of your strongbox. We can try it on for size any time you’re ready.”

But Ashe was rubbing his jaw in that absent-minded way which meant he had not yet come to a decision. “Too much guessing in all of this. We don’t know that we have to crack that place open in order to lift ship again. In fact, if we did crack it and couldn’t find what we needed—we wouldn’t be any better off. These natives must depend upon that shelter for their lives. Break it open and they’re just as dead as if we mowed them down with guns. They may not be anything or anybody we’d care to live with, but this is their world and we’re intruders. I’d like to wait a little before I try anything as drastic as blowing up the place.”

None of them was inclined to push him into action. Outside the flames beat into the night sky, and the white of the moon they had noted the night before was marred by a more yellow gleam from a smaller satellite trailing behind the larger. But of the activity of the dune skulkers the screen gave them no clue.

That came not by sight but by a startling shifting of the ship itself. How had the creatures outside achieved that movement? Perhaps, Travis imagined, by the sheer weight of many creeping bodies plastered to the hull. The globe canted from its landing position. And maybe that triggered the flying controls. For the now-familiar warnings of a take-off alerted them all.

“No!” Renfry protested, “we can’t—not yet—not until we know why.”

But the engines the humans did not understand, and could not hope to control, had no ears for that feeble defiance. Perhaps only a time limit had governed their visit, a full day and night of planetary time. Or maybe it was the strange attack of the hairy things.

And those creatures—would they free themselves in time, drop to the ground as the ship lifted, warned by the vibrations? Or would they cling in stupid concentration upon their attack, to be carried out into the freezing blackness of the eternal night?

The unwilling crew of the ship followed the old routine of strap down and wait for the wrench of blast-off, the break into hyperspace. Again they were being carried into the unknown with perhaps a long voyage ahead.

But it was not to be the same this time. Travis noticed the first departure from the usual routine. The take-off was not so severe—or else he had adjusted to it far better than he ever had before. He did not black out completely, nor did he have to undergo that terrible inner twisting. And he heard Renfry’s voice exclaim in wonder:

“I don’t think we went into hyper! What happened?”

They were up and about, watching the screen of the ship. Renfry’s guess was right. For instead of the complete blackness which closed in upon them when they made a big inter-system jump, they saw now the receding orb of the desert planet, its face a mass of shifting color as they withdrew from it.

“Must be heading for another planet in this same system,” Ashe supplied one answer. And, as the hours wore on, they believed that was the right one. The ship now appeared to be on course for the third planet of that unknown sun.

“Do we visit them all?” inquired Ross with some of his old flippancy. “If so—why? Parcel delivery?”

Three days went by, four. They ate the alien food and moved restlessly about the ship, unable to pay attention for any length of time to anything but the screen in the control cabin. Then on the sixth day, came the signals of an approaching landing.

On the screen the goal showed a vivid blue-green, patched here and there with orange-red under clouds. They had drawn lots for the occupancy of the three seats in the control cabin, and the odd man to be relegated to the bunk below. So Travis now lay alone and unseeing in the heart of the throbbing globe, wondering what new future they must confront.

The ship set down this time in the planet’s day. The Apache freed himself from his straps, stumbled in the return clutch of gravity to the ladder and climbed up to share the others’ view of the new world.