Мюррей Лейнстер: Operation: Outer Space

Cochrane regarded the two dead animals near the base of the ship. They were roughly the size of cattle, and they were shaggy like buffalo. They had branching, pointed, deadly horns. They had hoofs, single hoofs, not cloven. They were not like any Earth animal. But horns and hoofs will appear in any system of parallel evolution. It would seem even more certain that proteins and amino acids and such compounds as hemoglobin and fat and muscle–tissue should be identical as a matter of chemical inevitability. These creatures had teeth and they were herbivorous. Bell photographed them painstakingly.

"Somehow," said Cochrane, "I think they'd be wholesome food. If we can, we'll empty a freezing–locker and take a carcass for tests."

Holden fingered his rifle unhappily. Alicia said nothing. Babs stayed close beside her. They went on.

They came to another dead animal a quarter–mile away. The ground was full of the scent and the hoofmarks of the departed herd. Bell photographed again. They did not stop. Johnny Simms had been this way, because of the carcass. He wasn't here now.

They topped the next rise in the ground. They saw two other slaughtered creatures. It was wholly evident, now, that these animals did not charge but only stood their ground when alarmed. Johnny Simms had fired blindly when he blundered into their groupings.

The last carcass they saw was barely two hundred yards from the one patch of woodland visible from the ship. Cochrane said with some grimness.

"If his eyes had gotten used to the darkness, he might have seen the forest and tried to get into it to get away from those animals."

And if Johnny Simms had not stopped short instantly he reached the woods and presumable safety, he would be utterly lost by now. There could be nothing less hopeful than the situation of a man lost on a strange planet, not knowing in what direction he had blundered on his first starting out. Even nearby, three directions out of four would be wrong. Farther away, the chance of stumbling on the way back to the ship would be nonexistent.

Alicia saw a human footprint on the trodden muck near the last carcass. It pointed toward the wood.

They reached the wood, and search looked hopeless. Then by purest chance they found a place where Johnny had stumbled and fallen headlong. He'd leaped up and fled crazily. For some fifteen yards they could track him by the trampled dried small growths he'd knocked down in his flight. Then there were no more such growths. All signs of his flight were lost. But they went on.

There were strangenesses everywhere, of which they could realize only a small part because they had been city–dwellers back on Earth. There was one place where trees grew like banyans, and it was utterly impossible to penetrate them. They swerved aside. There was another spot where giant trees like sequoias made a cathedral–like atmosphere, and it seemed an impiety to speak. But Holden reported tonelessly in the walkie–talkie, and assured Jones and Al and Jamison that all so far was well.

They heard a vast commotion of chattering voices, and they hoped that it might be a disturbance of Johnny Simms' causing. But when they reached the place there was dead silence. Only, there were hundreds of tiny nests everywhere. They could not catch a glimpse of a single one of the nests' inhabitants, but they felt that they were peeked at from under leaves and around branches.

Cochrane looked unhappy indeed. In cold blood, he knew that Johnny Simms had left the ship in exactly the sort of resentful bravado with which a spoiled little boy will run away from home to punish his parents. Quite possibly he had intended only to go out into the night and wait near the ship until he was missed. But he'd found himself among the unknown beasts. He'd gone into blind panic. Now he was lost indeed.

But one could not refuse to search for him simply because it was hopeless. Cochrane could not imagine doing any less than continuing to search as long as Alicia had hope. She might hope on indefinitely.

They heard the faint, distant, incisive sound of a shot.

Holden's voice reported it in the walkie–talkie. Cochrane nodded brightly to Alicia and fired a shot in turn. He was relieved. It looked like everything would end in a commonplace fashion. The party from the ship headed toward the source of the other sound.

In half an hour Cochrane was about to fire again. But they heard the hysterical rat–tat–tat of firing. It seemed no nearer, but it could only be Johnny Simms.

Cochrane and Holden fired together for assurance to Johnny. Bell took pictures.

Again they marched toward where the shots had been fired. Again they trudged on for a long time. Seemingly, Johnny had moved away from them as they followed him. They breasted a hill, and there was a breeze with the smell of water in it, and they saw that here the land sloped very gradually toward the sea, and the sea was in view. It was infinitely blue and it reached toward the most alluring of horizons. Between them and the sea there was only low–growing stuff, brownish and sparse. There was sand underfoot—a curious bluish sand. Only here and there did the dry–seeming vegetation grow higher than their heads.

More shots. Between them and the sea. Cochrane and Holden fired again.

"What the devil's the matter with the fool?" demanded Holden irritably. "He knows we're coming! Why doesn't he stand still or come to meet us?"

Cochrane shrugged. That thought was disturbing him too. They pressed forward, and suddenly Holden exclaimed. "That looks like a man! Two men!"

Cochrane caught the barest glimpse of something running about, far ahead. It looked like naked human flesh. It was the size of a man. It vanished. Another popped into view and darted madly out of sight. They did not see the newcomers.

"He shot something like that, back where we first landed," said Cochrane grimly. "We'd better hurry!"

They did hurry. There was a last flurry of shooting. It was automatic fire. It is not wise to shoot on automatic if one's ammunition is limited, Johnny Simms' firearm chattered furiously for part of a second. It stopped short. He couldn't have fired so short a burst. He was out of bullets.

They ran.

When they drew near him, a hooting set up. Things scattered away. Large things. Birds the size of men. They heard Johnny Simms screaming.

They came panting to the very beach, on which foam–tipped waves broke in absolutely normal grandeur. The sand was commonplace save for a slight bluish tint. Johnny Simms was out on the beach, in the open. He was down. He had flung his gun at something and was weaponless. He lay on the sand, shrieking. There were four ungainly, monstrous birds like oversized Cornish Game gamecocks pecking at him. Two ran crazily away at sight of the humans. Two others remained. Then they fled. One of them halted, darted back, and took a last peck at Johnny Simms before it fled again.

Holden fired, and missed. Cochrane ran toward the kicking, shrieking Johnny Simms. But Alicia got there first.

He was a completely pitiable object. His clothing had been almost completely stripped away in the brief time since his last burst of shots. There were wounds on his bare flesh. After all, the beak of a bird as tall as a man is not a weapon to be despised. Johnny Simms would have been pecked to death but for the party from the ship. He had been spotted and harried by a huntingpack of the ostrich–sized creatures at earliest dawn. A cooler–headed man would have stood still and killed some of them, then the rest would either have run away or devoured their slaughtered fellows. But Johnny Simms was not cool–headed. He had made a career of being a rich man's spoiled little boy. Now he'd had a fright great enough and an escape narrow enough to shatter the nerves of a normal man. To Johnny Simms, the effect was catastrophic.