Тэлмидж Пауэлл - Beulah

Originally published in Amazing Stories, July 1977.

The one-man scout car separated from Capricorn, the mother ship, like a wee thistle expelled by a gtiant pod. Smithson endured the brief G-stress of acceleration matter-of-factly, and when Capricorn was a planetoidal pinpoint of light behind him, he reached from his harness, punched the green button that turned the scout car over to CompNec system, and watched Beulah waltz closer in the visi-screen.

A soft whistle brushed Smitty’s teeth as Beulah flaunted her details. Such a lovely and fragile looking little planet! A swirl of pink, gold, and lavender. A crystal ball splashed with joyous colors by a happily uninhibited artist.

Like the raiment of the expensive prostitutes of Maumaut-One (Smitty had the second thought) where spacemen who violated off-limits regulations sometimes paid for a night’s indescribable pleasure with their sanity.

He heard the faint click as CompNec triggered the Faran detector for the first pass around planet Beulah. A tall, lean, blond offshoot of the rugged stock so carefully chosen to colonize Mars more than a century ago, Smitty stripped his mind of vagrant musings of Maumaut-One and Beulah’s enticing beauties. His objective was frightful in its Gordian-knot simplicity: locate the starcraft — Zenith — which had disappeared without forewarning or protest on Beulah’s bosom.

Impossible, of course, such a disappearance.

Thorough probes by unmanned drones were routine when a new celestial body was discovered. Beulah was given full treatment. Before a single human being approached her, she was carefully mapped, measured, sampled, stripped of all her secrets. The detailed results of the unmanned scrutiny were a cause for rejoicing. Beulah sounded almost too good to be real. As planets go, she was barely out of her teens, born a mere two billion earth-years ago. Her gravity, mean temperature, and atmosphere rivaled the environmental pleasantries of an expensive Earthside resort. She was spotlessly virginal, samples from her surface ruling out the possible threat from any life form, animal, vegetal, viral. And being young, she was voluptuously rich in heavy elements, an untapped treasure for an always-energy-hungry race.

Drawing the first manned assignment to Beulah, Zenith had set out as if on a lark, the envy of every starcraft in the galaxy. In a single warp step, Zenith shortcut the parsecs to a point beyond Ursa Major, orbiting Beulah to once more re-affirm the data of the unmanned probes, and then setting down with a touch that wouldn’t have trembled a leaf in the hydroponic tanks.

Zenith’s crew burst out to work in the delightful warmth of a small sun with lazy blue tints, in the complete safety of conditions rivaling the most sterile laboratory.

Then silence.

Earth days passed with a growing sense of urgency and mystification. At last the million-in-one conclusion was reached: Zenith’s communications systems, including the backups, had simultaneously broken down.

The Capricorn was ordered to the vicinity of Beulah’s sun, where she would orbit safely distant from Beulah. Earth Center was unwilling to risk a second starcraft at this stage of the game — but not a one-man scout car.

Which meant Smitty.

Which is hell on ego, even if a man never really thought of himself as indispensible, Smitty thought as the first pass around Beulah came to fruitless conclusion. Smitty had the vagrant wish that the planet’s discoverer, Beulah Csweickerzski, had been born in a much earlier era when genius-I.Q. females hadn’t had macrocabs and sub-spatial radtrons to play around with.

Smitty spoke in his coffin-like confines: “Pass one. Faran results zero.”

“Declinate,” ordered the cultivated baritone of Carruthers, in command of the Capricorn.

“Declinating,” Smitty acknowledged.

The equatorial regions of Beulah filled the visi-ports. The closer view separated the colors and made them even more vivid. Beulah’s mountain ranges were crystalline and pink spires tinted by the blueish sun. Her canyons and valleys were dainty puckers. Her plains and plateaus were gently undulating waves of golden soil where breezes playfully lifted feathers of sand. Toward the southern polar region, as the car hurtled to dark side, a miniature volcano geysered, as if Beulah had noted Smitty’s presence with a saucy wink of fire.

The car swung from the dark side, and Smitty was caressed with a multi-hued dawn of auroreal beauty. Before he could fully appreciate the vista, a beep from the Faran broke the silence.

A click told him that the Faran, even as it located the missing Zenith, had fed the coordinate information into the CompNec.

Smitty started to speak. But an unaccountable shiver passed over him. A too-warm sweat greased his forehead.

Nerves? Friend, he assured himself, I was born without them.

He moistened his lips with his tongue. “Faran activated.”

“Condition?” said Carruthers from the Capricorn.

Smitty’s gaze raced over the instrument panel, “Go. All the way go.”

CompNec delayed landing for two more orbits before it was satisfied with every minute condition below. During the orbital period, the scout was a clicking, whining, humming cocoon with every device aboard at CompNec’s command putting Beulah through the wringer.

On each pass, Smitty kept the Zenith in sight through the ports as long as possible. The giant craft rested on a vast golden plain like a silver egg slightly more than a mile in diameter at its girth. It appeared undamaged. It suggested that its crew and the two thousand technicians it had ferried here as a primary work force were busy at normal tasks on the two hundred levels of its interior.

But Zenith had arrived for outdoors work, geological surveys, the erection of basic structures around which mining towns would grow. And surely the scout car’s presence would have been detected. How come there was no show of interest in the arrival of a fresh human presence?

Smitty wondered if CompNec was hesitating because of the dead stillness down there.

Even as the thought formed, it broke off. It seemed to Smitty that a faint new sound had slipped into the activity of the scout. Not a sound, really. Something akin to a whisper heard only in the core of his brain. A coy, coaxing suggestion to trip the manual, by-pass CompNec, and plunge the scout manually into the beautiful golden sands.

His breath was throttled, his throat dry. He shook off the feeling of slimy fear. Imagination again, he told himself, and I thought it toughened with age. He managed a grin. Maybe I’m younger than the calendar says. Just a frequently horny, always happy kid at heart, that’s me.

While the scout was traversing the dark side, CompNec made its decision. The CD panel began clicking off the minutes and seconds to touchdown.

Smitty watched blue-hued early morning burst through the ports and went through the discomfort of deceleration with his usual stoicism, nevertheless expelling a breath of relief when the scout bumped to rest.

A glance through the left port revealed to him that the scout had landed within fifty yards of Zenith’s gleaming mass.

Once more the strange hesitancy quivered through him. He experienced it for a long moment before a stubborn set came to his jaw. Come off it, Smitty, he thought, or I’m going to get sore as hell at you.

With an uncalled-for shortness, he spoke aloud; “Am beginning EVA.”

“Condition yellow,” Carruthers replied from the distant Capricorn. It meant that every resource within the vast hollow globe was geared to Smitty’s personal safety.

Shucking out of his harness, Smitty suddenly froze in a half-erect, very awkward attitude. He tilted his head as if listening.