Robert Sheckley - Alien Harvest

“Thanks, Walter,” she said.

“Hey, what are friends for?” said Walter Glint.

Gill sat at the control board, his fingers playing sensitively over the buttons. A telltale above his head gave a readout on orbit and showed a digital display of gravity vectors. Another telltale showed electromagnetic activity. AR-32, the planet itself, had come up rapidly and now filled most of another larger screen.

The planet was colored a dusty yellow and gray, with occasional black and purple markings indicating barren mountain ranges. Large livid splotches showed dead seabeds. A faint shadow darkened the upper right hand corner of the screen; it was cast by Ingo, second largest moon of AR-32, made of nearly seventy-percent telluric iron.

While Gill set up the orbiting procedure, Captain Hoban slid into a control chair beside him and ran up a readout on electrical and solar phenomena on the planet's surface. His sad face creased into a puzzled frown.

“I'm getting some strange signals,” he told Stan.

“Where are they coming from?”

“That's what's strange. I can't get a fix. They keep on shifting.”

“Can you derive any information as to their production?” Stan asked.

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“Is someone making these signals, or are they natural phenomena?”

“At this stage I can't tell,” Hoban said. “We have no definite data on any other ships in the area.”

“There's a lot of solar debris around, though,” Stan said. “No telling yet what it might be.”

Gill punched up another set of numbers. “The weather down there on the surface is even worse than you expected, Dr. Myakovsky.”

Julie came into the control room. She had already changed into a plasteel landing outfit The cobalt-blue plastic form-fitting clothing with its orange flashes looked stunning on her. Stan's heart was in his mouth as he watched her.

“Are we ready to go down?” Julie asked.

Captain Hoban said, “I wouldn't recommend it, Miss Lish. The surface phenomena are worse than we were led to believe. Perhaps if we give the weather time to settle down a little …”

Julie shook her head impatiently. “There's no time for that. If our worst peril is from the weather, Captain, we're doing very well indeed!”

“I suppose that's true,” Hoban said. He turned to Gill. “Are you ready to accompany the party, Gill?”

“I am, of course, ready,” the synthetic man said. “I have taken the liberty of asking for volunteers for this. There are five of them, and they are waiting for your orders.”

He stood up from the control panel. He was tall, and even with his mismatched features, he was good-looking. If he had been a true man, you would have said there was something haunted about his expression. Since he was only a synthetic, you had to figure there'd been something amiss with his facial mold.

“Captain Hoban,” said Stan, “can you show us our target in more detail?”

Hoban nodded and fine-tuned the controls. AR-32's surface sprang up into high magnification. Fractal-mapped shapes blew up in size and complexity. Hoban adjusted the magnification again. A tiny dot on the landscape grew quickly, until, at extreme magnification, it turned into a low dark earthen dome that rose up from the flat plain, showing up well against the rugged landscape.

“That's the hive,” Hoban said. “Not easy to miss it. It's the biggest thing in this part of the planet.”

“Looks pretty quiet,” Stan mused.

“We're still a long way from the surface,” Gill reminded him. Things could change by the time we get there.”

“True enough,” Stan said. “But what the hell, this is what we've come for. Julie? Are you ready?”

“Ready, Stan,” Julie said. “It's going to be a walk in the park.”

Stan wished he shared her confidence.

“Why are you going to the surface?” Hoban asked. “I thought we were coming to look for an orbiting wreck.”

“All in good time,” Stan said. “Right now we've got the hive below us and no sign of life around it. If we can get a load of royal jelly from there, we can take care of the freighter later.”

“Right on,” Julie said. “Let's go for all the marbles.”

Stan felt encouraged by the beautiful thief's cheerfulness and determination. Maybe this thing was going to go all right, after all.

The number-one lander was in its own bay, stacked parallel to the backup lander, just behind the big hold where Julie had made her last training run with Norbert. Now Norbert walked behind Stan and Julie, holding Mac the dog in his arms. There was something doglike about the robot's posture; in a sense he was a mechanical watchdog, ferocious when challenged, utterly loyal to his master, Stan. Behind Norbert, and keeping their distance, were the five volunteers for the landing party. They had been promised a sufficient bonus for this undertaking, enough for avarice to overcome common sense. But, of course, if they'd had common sense, they wouldn't have been in space on the Dolomite in the first place.

Captain Hoban, who was already at the number-one lander waiting for them, initiated the hatch-opening procedure. The lander, nestled in its bay, was almost a hundred feet long. It contained a miniature laboratory and was fully equipped with the telemetry needed for the mission.

Norbert was proceeding to the hatch when Mac the dog came streaking out of the corridor, the rubber hall in his jaws. He raced into the lander just ahead of Norbert.

“We'd better get that dog out of there,” Hoban said.

“Let him stay,” said Stan. “He may be of some use accompanying Norbert once we're on the surface.”

“Just as you wish, sir,” Hoban said. “I wish I were going with you.”

“I wish you were, too,” said Stan. “But we need you here on the Dolomite . If anything goes wrong, we're absolutely dependent on you for backup.”

“Don't worry, Stan, nothing's going to go wrong,” Julie said. Her smile was brilliant. “Don't you agree, Gill?”

“Optimism has not been factored into me,” Gill said. “I am constructed to understand situations, not to have feelings about them.”

“You're missing the best part,” Julie said. “Having feelings about stuff is what it's all about”

“I've often wondered about that,” Gill said.

“Maybe someday you'll find out. Are we ready?”

“After you,” Stan said.

She made a mocking little salute and stepped into the lander. The others followed. Captain Hoban waited until he heard Stan report on the voice channel that the lander was well sealed and all systems were on-line. Then he returned to the control room and initiated the takeoff procedure.

The lander fell away from the Dolomite's hull and dropped toward the swirling surface of AR-32. Stan adjusted his restraining harness and called out, “Everybody secure?”

The five volunteers from the crew were strapped down in the forward cabin. They were carrying weapons that had been issued to them by Gill: pulse rifles and vibrators. All had been given suppressors. These state-of-the-art electronic machines, about a meter long and weighing less than a pound, were clipped to their belts. The suppressors emitted a complex waveform that confused an alien's vision, rendering the wearer invisible.

Julie and Gill were lying on deceleration couches in the main cabin behind Stan. Norbert was crouched all the way in the rear, holding a stanchion in one clawed hand and cuddling Mac with the other. There was no seat aboard the lander large enough to hold the big robot alien. But his strength was such that it was likelier the stanchion would move than his grip be torn loose.

Then Captain Hoban's face appeared on the screen. “Dr. Myakovsky, are you ready for release?”