Three Survived

Chapter 11

A day and a night went by, and all was well. During the day they walked until they were exhausted. At night they camped, built a fire and rested. Rand let Dombey run the whole show. He was still unhappy over the way Dombey had pushed him aside. But he had to admit that the big jetmonkey was doing a good job so far.

They were making better time now. One reason was that Dombey had decided to dump much of the gear Rand had insisted on carrying. They just didn’t need all those pots and pans. They didn’t even need the water purifier. Rand hadn’t used it at all. There were plenty of streams here, and nobody had gotten sick from drinking from them.

It was a lot easier to march, now that they were down to nothing but essentials.

Dombey was staying on course. They were still heading east, and they were still going toward the beacon. A couple of times that day, Rand checked the detector he had rigged, to make sure of that.

Then things started getting a little messy.

When Rand woke up the next morning he heard a funny sound coming from nearby. It sounded like something scratching around in his knapsack.

He opened his eyes, rolled over, had a look.

Something was scratching in his knapsack.

It was a long, skinny animal, not much bigger than a cat. Rand saw its furry back half sticking out of the knapsack. The animal had thick greenish fur that looked a bit moldy, and a long pink tail without any fur on it at all.

“Hey,” Rand said quietly. “Get out of there!” The animal didn’t pay any attention. It was deep in the knapsack, munching on something.

Rand tugged on the long pink tail. The animal went on munching. He tugged harder. Nothing happened. He tugged even harder than that.

This time, the animal must have felt annoyed. Slowly, tail first, it wriggled its way out, turned around, and gave Rand a cold, fishy stare.

Its head was long and narrow, with a lean snout sticking forward in front for about six inches. Its ears were huge and stood straight up. It had four eyes, arranged in two rows of two just back of the snout. Each of the eyes moved by itself. Each of the eyes looked at Rand from a slightly different angle.

Electronic gear was dangling out of the creature’s mouth. Resistors, capacitors, leads, plugs. It had been making a nice meal out of—

“The detector!” Rand shouted, waking up Leswick and Dombey. “Hey, you thing, you’ve been eating the detector!”

In sudden anger he grabbed for the animal. Nothing doing: the creature slithered back, threw Rand one more sad look, and vanished into the jungle. Rand saw the bare rat-like tail give a final wriggle as it disappeared.

He yanked the detector out of the knapsack. The instrument was in ruins. The animal had pushed it open, somehow—maybe with that long snout—and had chewed up half the components inside. Rand stared at the torn-up circuits in horror.

“Something wrong?” Leswick asked.

“Nothing much, We’ve lost our detector, that’s all.”

“What happened?”

Rand explained. He also explained that they didn’t have any equipment to replace what had been chewed up. “From here on in,” he said, “we’ve got to travel by guesswork. We don’t have any way of finding out where the rescue beacon is exactly. We just know it’s somewhere east of here.”

“We’ll find it,” Dombey said.

“Sure,” Rand said. “Maybe it’ll take us three hundred years, but we’ll find it. If we have to march back and forth over this planet forever, we’ll find it. Great!”

“Was the detector really that important?” Leswick asked.

Rand shrugged. “Without it, I think we’ll still come within twenty miles or so of the beacon. After that, I don’t know. We’ll have to search every square foot of the jungle and trust to our luck.”

“We been having pretty good luck so far,” Dombey said. “We’ll make out okay.”

“I wish I felt as sure about that as you do,” said Rand.

But there was no way to fix the detector, and nothing to do except hit the road and trust to their luck. They had breakfast and got moving.

Dombey turned in a good job again that day.

He proved once more that he was a genius at finding food. He discovered fruits, nuts, roots, and shoots for them to eat. Sometimes he picked something that turned out not to taste so good, but not often. He caught small animals for their dinners. It was amazing to see how quick he was with his hands.

He led them around some nasty dangers, too. Dombey seemed to have some magic knack of knowing how to stay out of trouble in the jungle. Rand tried to look carefully, but he never saw half the things Dombey noticed.

Such as the almost invisible spiderwebs stretching across the path—put there by giant spiders as big as rabbits, lurking in wait. Such as armies of hungry little animals no bigger than ants, able to devour creatures of any size. Such as dangling vines that weren’t vines at all, but snakes.

Dombey spotted these perils and others, before anything serious could happen. And so Rand didn’t begrudge him the leadership. Rand kept quiet and did whatever Dombey told him to do.

But on the third day they ran into a situation that was too tricky for Dombey to handle.

On the third day they met the natives of the planet called Tuesday.

Dombey had been leading them all morning through a part of the jungle where the path was narrow and overgrown with vines. It was an unusually hot and sticky day. The frequent light showers of rain didn’t do anything to cool the three men off.

They came to a place where the path widened into a broad grassy clearing. Dombey took a couple of steps into the clearing. Then he stopped short.

“What is it?” Rand called after him. “What do you see?”

Dombey turned and walked back toward Rand and Leswick. He looked puzzled. He didn’t say a word. But he seemed to be telling Rand silently, “This is something for you to handle.”

Rand came forward so he could see what lay ahead. A group of strange beings stood in the clearing. They were alien beings, very different from Earthmen in every way.

They looked like walking barrels. Their bodies, a shiny light brown in color, were short and wide. They were flat on top and bottom, without separate heads or necks. Near the upper end of each barrel were three round, staring eyes. Below the eyes was a slit for breathing, and under that was a wide mouth whose corners turned downward in a permanent frown.

The aliens had short arms covered with thick hair, and six long fingers on each hand. Their legs were big and powerful, like the hind legs of kangaroos. Each of the aliens was holding a broad-bladed sword whose edges were jagged with many sharp barbs.

The strangest thing about these beings, Rand thought, was that they were all alike. It wasn’t just a very close resemblance. They were absolutely identical to one another. They could all have been stamped out from the same mold.

He looked around the circle. There were thirty or forty of the aliens, each one the twin of the one next to it. Rand couldn’t see how they could tell each other apart.

They seemed excited about the arrival of the three Earthmen. They were talking to each other in a great hubbub, waving their arms about. Their voices were dull and droning, like buzzsaws that needed to be oiled.

Quickly Rand turned and unstrapped some of the gear from Dombey’s pack. He burrowed through the knapsack-load of pots and pans. Finally he found what he was looking for: the Thorson thought-converter.

The Thorson converter was tremendously valuable to space explorers. It held the key to all unknown languages. The converter was a translating machine that could solve almost any riddle of speech, no matter how alien.

It looked like a long, slim radio receiver. But within it was a highly intelligent electronic brain. The brain studied the sounds of a language and guessed at meanings for certain words that were repeated often. Then it guessed at other words that were less commonly spoken. It was able to put its guesses together so the wrong guesses could be corrected.

A human being might have been able to figure out an alien language that way if he studied it for fifty or eighty years. The Thorson converter needed only a couple of minutes. And it would do a better job in those few minutes than the human being could do in a whole lifetime of years.

Rand switched the converter on and pointed it toward the aliens. “Say a few words, friends,” he told them. “Give us some talk-talk, so we can analyze what you’re telling us.”

The aliens didn’t understand what he was saying, of course. The converter hadn’t learned their language yet. But they replied to Rand’s words with a series of loud buzzes and clicks and booms.

“That’s it,” Rand said. “Keep chattering, fellows!”

He made rapid adjustments on the dial of the Thorson converter as they spoke. He slid the guide panel up and down the indicator until he hit the right range. The converter’s speaker was giving forth the alien language without a translation. But the converter was starting to figure out some meanings now.

In mid-buzz, the alien language came clear. The converter said:

“Buzzbuz mumbleclick danger hostile-animal stranger-type buzzbuz clickmumble surround with many swords buzzbuz if hostile KILL.”

Rand chewed uneasily at his lip. Into the mouthpiece of the converter he said, “We are not hostile. We are friends.”

The converter translated that for the alien. “Buzz-click mumble-mumble mumblemumble?”

The aliens looked puzzled. They didn’t sound any more peaceful. They kept on saying, “Surround with swords. Do they threaten us? Strange creatures. We kill?”

Rand searched his mind for some way to prove to the drum-shaped creatures that he and Dombey and Leswick meant no harm. He said, pointing to the sky, “We are from up there. We have fallen from above.”

“Strange ones. Dangerous.”

“We have no weapons. See, we are without swords!”

“Buzzbuzzbuz. Clickclickclick.”

The converter couldn’t translate that one. But it sounded unfriendly.

Rand said, “We were riding a great shining bird. The bird died. We fell from the sky. We want to go back to our homes.”

“Buzzclick! Clickbuzz!”

“We mean no harm to you,” Rand went on. “Buzz! Click! Boom! BOOM!”

Rand twisted the converter’s dial. He tuned it in a little better.

He said, “We come in peace! We are your friends from Earth!”

“Hostile. Threat. Danger. KILL. KILL. KILL.”