Darkover Landfall

Chapter THREE

Some time before dawn he roused, hearing Camilla stirring, and saw across the dark tent that she was struggling into her uniform. He slid quietly from his sleeping bag, and asked softly, "What is it?"

"The rain's stopped and the sky's clear; I want some sky-sightings and spectrograph readings before the fog comes in."

"Right. Need any help?"

"No, Marco can help carry the instruments:"

He started to protest, then shrugged and crawled back into his sleeping bag. It wasn't entirely up to him. She knew her business and didn't need his careful watchfulness. She'd made that amply clear.

Some undefined apprehension, however, kept him from sleeping again; he lay in an uneasy doze, hearing around him the noises of the waking forest. Birds called from tree to tree, some harsh and raucous, some soft and chirping. There were small croakings and stirrings in the underbrush, and somewhere a distant sound not unlike the barking of a dog.

And then the silence was shattered by a horrible yell--a shriek of unquestionably human agony, a harsh scream of anguish, repeated twice and breaking off in a ghastly babbling moan, and silence.

MacAran was out of his sleeping bag and out of the tent, half dressed, Ewen less than half a step behind him, and all the others crowding after, sleepy, bewildered, frightened. He ran up the slope toward the sound, hearing Camilla cry out for help.

She had set her equipment in a clearing near the summit, but now it was knocked over; nearby Marco Zabal lay on the ground, writhing and moaning incoherently. He was swollen and his face had a hideous congested look; Camilla was brushing frantically with her glovedhands. Ewen dropped by the writhing man, with a quick demand to Camilla:

"Quick--what happened!"

"Thing--like insects," she said, shaking as she held out her hands. On the gloved palm lay a small crushed thing, less than two inches long, with a curved tail like a scorpion and a wicked fang at the front; it was bright orange and green in color. "He stepped on that mound there, and I heard him scream, and then he felt down--"

Ewen had his medical kit out, and was quickly moving his hands over Zabal's heart. He gave quick directions to Heather, who had dropped beside him, to curt away the man's clothes; the wounded man's face was congested and blackening, and his arm swollen immensely. Zabal was unconscious now, moaning deliriously.

A powerful nerve poison, Ewen thought; his heart is slowing down and his breathing depressed. All he could do now was to give the man a powerful stimulant and stand by in case he needed artificial respiration. He didn't even dare give him anything to ease the agony--almost all narcotics were respiratory depressants. He waited, hardly breathing himself, his stethoscope on Zabal's chest, while the man's faltering heart began to beat a little more regularly; he raised his head to look briefly at the mound, to ask Camilla if she had been bitten--she hadn't, although two of the hideous insects had begun to crawl up her arm--and to demand that everybody stay a good long distance from the mound, or anthill, or whatever it was. Just dumb luck we didn't camp on top of it in the dark! MacAran and Camilla might have stumbled right into it-or maybe they're dormant in snow!

Time dragged. Zabal began to breathe again more regularly and to moan a little but he did not recover consciousness The great red sun, dripping fog, slowly lifted itself up over the foothills surrounding them.

Ewen sent Heather back to the tent for the rest of his medical equipment; Judy and MacLeod began to fix some breakfast. Camilla stoically calculated the few astronomical readings she had been able to take before the attack of the scorpion-ants--MacLeod, after examining the dead one, had temporarily christened them that. MacAran came and stood beside the unconscious man and the young doctor who knelt beside him.

"Will he live?"

"I don't know. Probably. I never saw anything like it since I treated my one and only case of rattlesnake bite. But one thing's certain--he won't be going anywhere today, probably not tomorrow either."

MacAran asked, "Shouldn't we carry him down to the tent? Could there be more of those things crawling around?"

"I'd rather not move him now. Maybe in a couple of hours."

MacAran stood, looking down in dismay, at the unconscious man. They shouldn't delay--and yet, their party had been rigidly calculated for size and there was no one to spare to send back to the ship for help. Finally he said, "We've got to go on. Suppose we move Marco back to the tent, when it's safe, and you stay to look after him. The others can do their exploration work here as well as anywhere, check out soil, plant, animal samples. But I have to survey what I can from the peak, and Lieutenant Del Rey has to take her astronomical sightings from as high up as possible. We'll go on ahead, as far as we can. If the peak turns out to be unclimbable we won't try, just take what readings we can and come back."

"Wouldn't it be better to wait and see whether we can go on with you? We don't know what kind of dangers there are in the forests here."

"It's a matter of time," Camilla said tautly. "The sooner we know where we are, the sooner we have a chance--" she didn't finish.

MacAran said, 'We don't know. The dangers might even be less for a very small party, even for a single person. It's even odds, either way. I think we're going to have to do it that way."

They arranged it like that, and since in two hours Zabal had shown no signs of recovering consciousness, MacAran and the other two men carried him, on an improvised stretcher, down to the tent. There was some protest about the splitting of the party, but no one seriously disputed it, and MacAran realized that he had already become their leader whose word was law. By the time the red sun stood straight overhead they had divided the packs and were ready to go, with only the small emergency shelter-tent, food for a few days, and Camilla's instruments.

They stood in the shelter tent, looking down at thesemi-conscious Zabal. He had begun to stir and moan but showed no other signs of returning consciousness. MacAran felt desperately uneasy about him, but all he could do was leave him in Ewen's hands. After all, the important business here was the preliminary estimate of this planet--and Camilla's observations as to where in the Galaxy they were!

Something was nagging at his mind. Had he forgotten anything? Suddenly Heather Stuart pulled off her uniform coat and drew off the fut-knit jacket she was wearing under it. "Camilla, it's warmer than yours," she said in a low voice, "please wear it. It snows so here. And you're going to be out with only the small shelter!"

Camilla laughed, shaking her head. "It's going to be cold here too."

"But--" Heather's face was taut and drawn. She bit her lip and pleaded, "Please, Camilla. Call me a silly fool, if you like. Say I'm having a premonition, but please take it!"

"You too?" MacLeod asked dryly. "Better take it, Lieutenant. I thought I was the only one having freaked-out second sight. I've never taken ESP very seriously, but who knows, on a strange planet it just might turn out to be a survival quality. Anyhow, what can you lose to take a few extra warm clothes?"

MacAran realized that the nagging at his mind had been somehow concerned with weather. He said, "Take it, Camilla, if it's extra warm. I'll take Zabal's mountain parka, too, it's heavier than mine, and leave mine for him. And some extra sweaters if you have them. Don't deprive yourselves, but it's true that if it snows you will have more shelter than we do, and it sometimes gets pretty cold on the heights." He was looking at Heather and MacLeod curiously; as a general rule he had no faith in what he had heard about ESP, but if two people in the party both felt it, and he too had some inkling of it well, maybe it was just a matter of unconscious sensory clues, something they couldn't add up consciously. Any way, you didn't need ESP to predict bad weather on the mountain heights of a strange planet with a freakishly bad climates! "Take all the clothes anyone can spare, and an extra blanket--we have extras," he ordered, "and then let's get going."

While Heather and Judy were packing, he made time for

a word alone with Ewen. "Wait here for at least eight days for us," he said, "and we'll signal every night at sunset if we can. If there's no word or signal by that time, get back to the ship. 1f we make it back, no sense disturbing everyone else with this--but if something happens to us, you're in charge."

Ewen felt reluctant to see him go. "What shall I do if Zabal dies?"

"Bury him," MacAran said harshly, "what else?" He turned away and motioned to Camilla. "Let's go, Lieutenant."

They strode away from the clearing without looking back, MacAran setting a steady pace, not too fast, not too slow.

As they climbed higher the land changed, the ground under foot becoming less overgrown, with more bare rocks and sparser trees. The slope of the foothills was not acute, but as they neared the crest of the slope where they had camped, MacAran called a halt to rest and swallow a mouthful of rations. From where they stood they could see the small orange square of the shelter tent, only a flyspeck at this height, through the heavy trees.

"How far have we come, MacAran?" the woman asked, putting back the fur-lined hood of her jacket.

"I've no way of knowing. Five, six miles perhaps; about two thousand feet of altitude. Headache?"

"Only a little," the girl lied.

"That's the change in air pressure; you'll get used to it presently," he said. "Good thing we have a fairly gradual rise in land."

"It's hard to realize that's really where we slept last night--so far down," she said a little shakily.

"Over this ridge it will be out of sight. If you want to chicken out, this is your last chance. You could make it down in an hour, maybe two."

She shrugged. "Don't tempt me;"

"Are you frightened?"

"Of course. I'm not a fool. But I won't panic, if that's what you mean."

MacAran rose to his feet, swallowing the last of his ration. "Let's go, then. Watch your step--here are rocks above us."

But to his surprise she was sure-footed on the piled rocks near the peak, and he did not need to help her,or hunt for an easier pass. From the top of the hill they could see a long panorama beneath them, behind them; the valley where they had camped, with its long plain, the further valley where the starship lay--although even with his strong binoculars MacAran could only make out a tiny dark streak that might be the ship. Easier to see was the ragged clearing where they had cut trees for shelters. Passing the glasses to Camilla, he said, "Man's fast mark on a new world."

"And last, I hope," she said. He wanted to ask her, put it up to her straight, could the ship be repaired? But that wasn't the time for thinking about that. He said, "There are streams among the rocks, and Judy tested the water days ago. We can probably find all the water we need to refill our canteens, so don't ration yourself too much."

"My throat feels terribly dry. Is it just the altitude?"

"Probably. On Earth we couldn't come much higher than this without oxygen, but this planet has a higher oxygen content." MacAran took one last look at the orange tent below them; stowed the glasses and slung them over his shoulder. "Well, the next peak will be higher. Let's get on, then." She was looking at some small orange flowers that grew in the crannies of the rock. "Better not touch them. Who knows what might bite, here?"

She turned around, a small orange flower in her fingers. "Too late now;" she said with wry grin. "If I'm going to drop dead when I pick a flower, better find it out now than later. I'm not so sure I want to go on living if it's a planet where I can't touch anything." She added, more seriously, "We've got to take some risks, Rafe--and even then, something we never thought of might kill us. Seems to ma that all we can do is take the obvious precautions--and then take our chances."

It was the first time since the crash that she had called him by his first name, and unwillingly he softened. He said, "You're right of course; short of going around in space suits we haven't any real protection, so there's no point in being paranoid. If we were a First Landing Team we'd know what risks not to take, but as it is I guess all we can do is take our chances:" It was growing hot, and he stripped off his outer layer of clothing. "I wonder how much stock to put in Heather's premonitions of bad weather?"

They started down the other side of the ridge.

Halfway down the slope, after two or three hours of searching for a path, they discovered a small crystal spring gushing from a split rock, and refilled their canteens; the water tasted sweet and pure, and at MacAran's suggestion they followed the stream down; it would certainly take the shortest way.

At dusk heavy clouds began to scud across the lowering sun. They were in a valley, with no chance to signal the ship or the other camp of their party. While they were setting up the tiny shelter-tent, and MacAran was making fire to heat their rations, a thin fine rain began falling; swearing, he moved the small fire under the flap of the tent, trying to shield it a little from the rain. He managed to get water heated, but not hot, before the gusting sleet put it out again, and he gave up and dumped the dried rations into the barely warm water. "Here. Not tasty but edible--and nourishing, I hope."

Camilla made a face when she tasted it, but to his relief said nothing. The sleet whipped around them and they crawled inside and drew the flap tight. Inside there was barely room enough for one of them to lie at full length while the other sat up--the emergency tents were really only meant for one. MacAran started to make some flippant remark about nice cozy quarters, looked at her drawn face and didn't. He only said, as he wriggled out of his storm parka and pack, and started unrolling his sleeping bag, "I hope you don't suffer from claustrophobia:"

"I've been a spaceship officer since I was seventeen. How could I get along with claustrophobia?" In the dark he imagined her smile. "On the contrary."

Neither of them had much to say after that. Once she asked into the darkness, "I wonder how Marco is?" but MacAran had no answer for her, and there was no point in thinking how much better this trip would have been with Marco Zabal's knowledge of the high Himalaya. He did ask, once, just before he dropped off to sleep, "Do you want to get up and try for some star-sights before dawn?"

"No. I'll wait for the peak, I guess, if we get that far:" Her breathing quieted into soft exhausted sighs and he knew she slept. He lay awake a little, wondering what lay ahead. Outside, the sleet lashed the branches of the trees and there was a rushing sound which might have been wind or some animal making a rush through the undergrowth. He slept lightly, alert for unexpected sounds. Once or twice Camilla cried out in .her sleep and he woke, alert and listening. Had she a touch of altitude sickness? Oxygen content or no oxygen content, the peaks were pretty high and each successive one left their general altitude a little higher. Well, she'd get acclimated, or else she wouldn't. Briefly, on the edge of sleep, MacAran reflected that it was the stuff of entertainment---media, a man alone with a beautiful woman on a strange planet full of dangers. He was conscious of wanting her--hell, he was human and male--but in their present circumstances nothing was further from his mind than sex. Maybe I'm just too civilized. In the very thought, exhausted by the day's climbing, he fell asleep.

The next three days were replays of that day, except that on the third night they reached a high pass at dusk and the night's rain had not yet begun. Camilla set up her telescope and made a few observations. He could not forbear, as he set up the shelter-tent in the dark, to ask, "Any luck? Where are we, do you know?"

"Not sure. I knew already that this sun is none of the charted ones, and the only constellations I can spot, from central co-ordinates, are all skewed to the left. I suspect we're right out of the Spiral Arm of the Galaxy--note how few stars there are, compared even to Earth, let alone any centrally located colony planet! Oh, we're a good long way from where we were supposed to be going!" Her voice sounded taut and drawn, and as he moved closer he saw in the darkness that there were tears on her cheeks.

He felt a painful urge to comfort her. "Well, at least when we're on our way again, we'll have discovered a new habitable planet. Maybe you'll even get part of the finder's fee."

"But it's so far--" she broke off. "Can we signal the ship?,.

"We can try. We're at least eight thousand feet higher than they are; maybe we're in a line-of-sight. Here, take the glasses, see if you can find any sign of a flash. But of course they could be behind some fold of the hills."

He put his arm around her, steadying the glasses. She did not draw away. She said, "Do you have the bearing for the ship?"

He gave it to her; she moved the glasses slightly, compass in hand.

"I see a light--no, I think it's lightning. Oh, what difference does it make?" Impatiently she put the glasses aside. He could feel her trembling. "You like these wide open spaces, don't you?"

"Why, yes," he said, slowly, "I've always loved the mountains. Don't you?"

In the darkness she shook her head. Above them the pale violet light of one of the four small moons gave a faint tremulous quality to the dimness. She said, faintly, "No. I'm afraid of them."

"Afraid?"

"I've been either on a satellite or training ship since I was picked for space at fifteen. "You" her voice wavered, "you get kind of agoraphobic."

"And you volunteered to come on this trip!" MacAran said, but she mistook his surprise and admiration for criticism. "Who else was there?" she said harshly, turned away and went into the tiny tent.

Once again, after they had swallowed their food--hot tonight, since there was no rain to put out their fire--MacAran lay awake long after the girl slept. Usually at eight there was only the sound of blowing rain and creak lag, lashing branches: tonight the forest seemed alive with strange sounds and noises, as if, on the rare snowless night, all its unknown life came alive. Once there wan a faraway howling that sounded like a tape he had heard, once, on Earth, of the extinct timber wolf; once an almost feline snarl, low and hoarse, and the terrified cry of some small animal, and then silence. And then, toward midnight, there was a high, eerie scream, a long wailing cry that seemed to freeze the very marrow of his bones. It sounded so uncannily like the scream Marco had given when attacked by the scorpion-ants that for a dreaming moment MacAran, shocked awake, started to leap to his feet; then as Camilla, roused by his movement, sat up is fright, it came again, and he realized nothing human could possibly have made it. It was a shrill, ululating cry that went on, higher and higher, into what seemed like ultrasonic; he seemed to hear it long after it had died away.

"What is it?" Camilla whispered, shaking.

"God knows. Some kind of bird or animal, I suppose."

They listened in silence to the ear-shattering scream again. She moved a little closer to him, and murmured, "It sounds as if it were in agony."

"Don't be imaginative. That may be its normal voice, for all we know."

"Nothing has a normal voice like that," she said firmly.

"How can we possibly know that?"

"How can you be so matter of fact? Oooh--" she flinched as the long shrilling sound came again. "It seems to freeze the marrow of my bones'!'

"Maybe it uses that sound to paralyze its prey," MacAran said. "It scares me too, damn it! If I were on Earth--well, my people were Irish, and I'd imagine the old Arran banshee had come to carry me off!"

"We'll have to name it banshee, when we find out what it is," Camilla said, and she wasn't laughing. The hideous sound came again, and she clapped her hands over her ears, screaming, "Stop it! stop it!"

MacAran slapped her, not very hard. "Stop it yourself, damn you! For all we know it might be prowling around outside and big enough to eat up both of us and the tent too! Let's keep quiet and just lie low until it goes away!"

"That's easier said than done," Camilla murmured, and flinched as the eerie banshee cry came again. She crept closer to him in the crowded quarters of the tent and said, in a very small voice, "Would you--hold my hand?"

He searched for her fingers in the dark. They felt cold and stiff, and he began to chafe them softly between his own. She leaned against him, and he bent down and kissed her softly on the temple. "Don't be afraid. The tent's plastic and I doubt if we smell edible. Let's just hope

whatever-it-is, the banshee if you like, catches itself a nice dinner soon and shuts up."

The howling scream sounded again, further away this time and without the ghastly bone-chilling quality. He felt the girl sag against his shoulder and eased her down again, letting her head rest against him. "You'd better get some sleep," he said gently.

Her whisper was almost inaudible. "Thanks, Rafe."

After he knew, by the sound of her steady breathing, that she slept again, he leaned over and kissed her softly. This was one hell of a time to start something like that, he told himself, angry at his own reactions, they had a job to do and there was nothing personal about it. Or shouldn't be. But still it was a long time until he slept.

They came out of the tent in the morning to a world transformed. The sky was clear and unstained by cloud or fog, and underfoot the hardy colorless grass had been suddenly carpeted by quick-opening, quick-spreading colored flowers. No biologist, MacAran had seen something like this in deserts and other barren areas and he knew that places with violent climates often developed forms of life which could take advantage of tiny favorable changes in temperature or humidity, however brief. Camilla was enchanted with the multicolored low-growing flowers and with the bee-like creatures who buzzed among them, although she was careful not to disturb them.

MacAran stood surveying the land ahead. Across one more narrow valley, crossed by a small running stream, lay the last slopes of the high peak which was their destination.

"With any luck we should be near the peak tonight, and tomorrow, just at noon, we can take our survey readings. You know the theory--triangulate the distance between here and the ship, calculate the angle of the shadow, we can estimate the size of the planet. Archimedes or somebody like that did it for Earth, thousands of years before anyone ever invented higher mathematics. And if it doesn't rain tonight you may be able to get some clearer sightings from the heights."

She was smiling. "Isn't it wonderful what just a little change in the weather can do? Will it be much of a climb?"

"I don't think so. It looks from here as if we could walk straight up the slope--evidently the timberline on this planet is higher than most worlds. There's bare rock and no trees near the peak, but only a couple of thousand feet below there's vegetation. We haven't reached the snowline yet."

On the higher slopes, in spite of everything, MacAran recovered his old enthusiasm. A strange world perhaps, but still, a mountain beneath him, the challenge of a climb. An easy climb it was true, without rocks or icefalls, but that simply freed him to enjoy the mountain panorama, the high clear air. It was only Camilla's presence, the knowledge that she feared the open heights, that kept him in touch with reality at all. He had expected to resent this, the need to help an amateur over easy stretches which he could have climbed with one leg in a cast, the waiting for her to find footing on the stretches of steep rocky scree, but instead he found himself curiously in rapport with her fear, her slow conquest of each new height. A few feet below the high peak he stopped.

"Here. We can run a perfectly good line of sight from here, and there's a flat spot to set up your equipment. We'll wait here for noon."

He had expected her to show relief; instead she looked at him, with a certain shyness, and said, "I thought you'd like to climb the peak, Rafe. Go ahead, if you want to, I don't mind."

He started to snap at her that it would be no fun at all with a frightened amateur, then realized this was no longer true. He pulled his pack off his shoulder and smiled at her, laying a hand on her arm. "That can wait," he said gently, "this isn't a pleasure trip, Camilla. This is the best spot for what we want to do. Did you adjust your chronometer so that we can catch noon?"

They rested side by side on the slope, looking down across the panorama of forests and hills spread out below them. Beautiful, he thought, a world to love, a world to live in.

He asked idly, "Do you suppose the Coronis colony is this beautiful?"

"How would I know? I've never been there. Anyway, I don't know all that much about planets. But this one is beautiful. I've never seen a sun quite this color, and the shadows--" she fell silent, staring down at the pattern of greens and dark-violet shade in the valleys.

"It would be easy to get used to a sky this color," MacAran said, and was silent again.

It was not long until the shortening shadows marked the approach of the meridian. After all the preparation, it seemed a curious anticlimax; to unfold the hundred-foot-high aluminum rod, to measure the shadows exactly, to the millimeter. When it was finished and he was refolding the rod, he said as much, wryly:

"Forty miles and an eighteen-thousand-foot climb for a hundred and twenty seconds of measurements."

Camilla shrugged. "And God-knows-how-many light-years to come here. Science is all like that, Rafe."

"Nothing to do now but wait for the night, so you can take your observations." Rafe folded the rod and sat down on the rocks, enjoying the rare warmth of the sunlight. Camilla went on moving around their campsite for a little,

then came back and joined him. He asked, "Do you really think you can chart this planet's position, Camilla?"

"I hope so. I'm going to try and observe known Cepheid variables, take observations over a period of time, and if I can find as many as three that I can absolutely identify, I can compute where we are in relation to the central drift of the Galaxy."

"Let's pray for a few more clear nights, then," Rafe said, and was silent.

After some time, watching him study the rocks less than a hundred feet above them, she said, "Go on, Rafe. You know you want to climb it. Go ahead, I don't mind."

"You don't? You won't mind waiting here?"

"Who said I'd wait here? I think I can make it. And--" she smiled a little, "I suppose I'm as curious as you are--to get one glimpse of what's beyond it!

He rose with alacrity. "We can leave everything but the canteens here," he said. "It is an easy enough climb--not a climb at all, really; just a steep sort of scramble." He felt light-hearted, joyous at her sudden sharing of his mood. He went ahead, searching out the easiest route. showing her where to set her feet. Common sense told him that this climb, based only on curiosity to see what lay beyond and not on their mission's needs, was a little foolhardy--who could risk a broken ankle?--but he could not contain himself. Finally they struggled up the last few feet and stood looking out over the peak. Camilla cried out in surprise and a little dismay. The shoulder of the mountain on which they stood had obscured the real range which lay beyond; an enormous mountain range which lay, seemingly endless and to the very edge of their sight, wrapped in eternal snow, enormous and jagged and covered with glaciated ridges and peaks below which pale clouds drifted, lazily and slow.

Rafe whistled. "Good God, it makes the Himalayas look like foothills," he muttered.

"It seems to go on forever! I suppose we didn't see it before because the air wasn't so clear, with clouds and fog and rain, but--" Camilla shook her head in wonder. "It's like a wall around the world'!'

"This explains something else," Rafe said slowly. "the freak weather. Flowing over a series of glaciers like that, no wonder there's almost perpetual rain, fog, snow--you name it! And if they are really as high as they look--I can't tell how far away they are, but they could easily be a hundred miles on a clear day like this--it would also explain the tilt of this world on its axis. They call the Himalayas, on Earth, a third pole. This is a real third pole! A third icecap, anyway."

"I'd rather look the other way," Camilla said, and faced back toward the folds and folds of green-violet valleys and forests. "I prefer my planets with trees and flowers--and sunlight, even if the sunlight is the color of blood."

"Let's hope it shows us some stars tonight and some moons."