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Title: Exploration Team

Author: Murray Leinster

Illustrator: Ed Emshwiller

Release date: August 11, 2022 [eBook #68730]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Street & Smith Publications, Inc

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPLORATION TEAM ***

                           EXPLORATION TEAM

                          BY MURRAY LEINSTER

                          Illustrated by Emsh

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                Astounding Science Fiction, March 1956.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]




                                   I


The nearer moon went by overhead. It was jagged and irregular in shape,
and was probably a captured asteroid. Huyghens had seen it often
enough, so he did not go out of his quarters to watch it hurtle across
the sky with seemingly the speed of an atmosphere-flier, occulting the
stars as it went. Instead, he sweated over paper work, which should
have been odd because he was technically a felon and all his labors on
Loren Two felonious. It was odd, too, for a man to do paper work in a
room with steel shutters and a huge bald eagle--untethered--dozing on
a three-inch perch set in the wall. But paper work was not Huyghens'
real task. His only assistant had tangled with a night-walker and the
furtive Kodius Company ships had taken him away to where Kodius Company
ships came from. Huyghens had to do two men's work in loneliness. To
his knowledge, he was the only man in this solar system.

Below him, there were snufflings. Sitka Pete got up heavily and
padded to his water pan. He lapped the refrigerated water and sneezed
violently. Sourdough Charley waked and complained in a rumbling growl.
There were divers other rumblings and mutterings below. Huyghens
called reassuringly, "Easy there!" and went on with his work. He
finished a climate report, and fed figures to a computer, and while
it hummed over them he entered the inventory totals in the station
log, showing what supplies remained. Then he began to write up the log
proper.

"_Sitka Pete_," he wrote, "_has apparently solved the problem of
killing individual sphexes. He has learned that it doesn't do to hug
them and that his claws can't penetrate their hide--not the top hide,
anyhow. Today Semper notified us that a pack of sphexes had found the
scent-trail to the station. Sitka hid down-wind until they arrived.
Then he charged from the rear and brought his paws together on both
sides of a sphex's head in a terrific pair of slaps. It must have been
like two twelve-inch shells arriving from opposite directions at the
same time. It must have scrambled the sphex's brains as if they were
eggs. It dropped dead. He killed two more with such mighty pairs of
wallops. Sourdough Charley watched, grunting, and when the sphexes
turned on Sitka, he charged in his turn. I, of course, couldn't shoot
too close to him, so he might have fared badly but that Faro Nell came
pouring out of the bear quarters to help. The diversion enabled Sitka
Pete to resume the use of his new technic, towering on his hind legs
and swinging his paws in the new and grisly fashion. The fight ended
promptly. Semper flew and screamed above the scrap, but as usual did
not join in. Note: Nugget, the cub, tried to mix in but his mother
cuffed him out of the way. Sourdough and Sitka ignored him as usual.
Kodius Champion's genes are sound!_"

The noises of the night went on outside. There were notes like organ
tones--song lizards. There were the tittering giggling cries of
night-walkers--not to be tittered back at. There were sounds like
tack hammers, and doors closing, and from every direction came noises
like hiccups in various keys. These were made by the improbable small
creatures which on Loren Two took the place of insects.

Huyghens wrote out:

"_Sitka seemed ruffled when the fight was over. He painstakingly used
his trick on every dead or wounded sphex, except those he'd killed
with it, lifting up their heads for his pile-driverlike blows from two
directions at once, as if to show Sourdough how it was done. There
was much grunting as they hauled the carcasses to the incinerator. It
almost seemed_--"

       *       *       *       *       *

The arrival bell clanged, and Huyghens jerked up his head to stare at
it. Semper, the eagle, opened icy eyes. He blinked.

Noises. There was a long, deep, contented snore from below. Something
shrieked, out in the jungle. Hiccups. Clatterings, and organ notes--

The bell clanged again. It was a notice that a ship aloft somewhere had
picked up the beacon beam--which only Kodius Company ships should know
about--and was communicating for a landing. But there shouldn't be any
ships in this solar system just now! This was the only habitable planet
of the sun, and it had been officially declared uninhabitable by reason
of inimical animal life. Which meant sphexes. Therefore no colony was
permitted, and the Kodius Company broke the law. And there were few
graver crimes than unauthorized occupation of a new planet.

The bell clanged a third time. Huyghens swore. His hand went out to
cut off the beacon--but that would be useless. Radar would have fixed
it and tied it in with physical features like the nearby sea and the
Sere Plateau. The ship could find the place, anyhow, and descend by
day-light.

"The devil!" said Huyghens. But he waited yet again for the bell to
ring. A Kodius Company ship would double-ring to reassure him. But
there shouldn't be a Kodius Company ship for months.

The bell clanged singly. The space phone dial flickered and a voice
came out of it, tinny from stratospheric distortion:

"_Calling ground! Calling ground! Crete Line ship_ Odysseus _calling
ground on Loren Two. Landing one passenger by boat. Put on your field
lights._"

Huyghens' mouth dropped open. A Kodius Company ship would be welcome.
A Colonial Survey ship would be extremely unwelcome, because it
would destroy the colony and Sitka and Sourdough and Faro Nell and
Nugget--and Semper--and carry Huyghens off to be tried for unauthorized
colonization and all that it implied.

But a commercial ship, landing one passenger by boat--There were simply
no circumstances under which that would happen. Not to an unknown,
illegal colony. Not to a furtive station!

Huyghens flicked on the landing-field lights. He saw the glare in the
field outside. Then he stood up and prepared to take the measures
required by discovery. He packed the paper work he'd been doing into
the disposal safe. He gathered up all personal documents and tossed
them in. Every record, every bit of evidence that the Kodius Company
maintained this station went into the safe. He slammed the door. He
touched his finger to the disposal button, which would destroy the
contents and melt down even the ashes past their possible use for
evidence in court.

Then he hesitated. If it were a Survey ship, the button had to
be pressed and he must resign himself to a long term in prison.
But a Crete Line ship--if the space phone told the truth--was not
threatening. It was simply unbelievable.

He shook his head. He got into travel garb and armed himself. He went
down into the bear quarters, turning on lights as he went. There
were startled snufflings and Sitka Pete reared himself very absurdly
to a sitting position to blink at him. Sourdough Charley lay on his
back with his legs in the air. He'd found it cooler, sleeping that
way. He rolled over with a thump. He made snorting sounds which
somehow sounded cordial. Faro Nell padded to the door of her separate
apartment--assigned her so that Nugget would not be under-foot to
irritate the big males.

Huyghens, as the human population of Loren Two, faced the work force,
fighting force, and--with Nugget--four-fifths of the terrestrial
nonhuman population of the planet. They were mutated Kodiak bears,
descendants of that Kodius Champion for whom the Kodius Company was
named. Sitka Pete was a good twenty-two hundred pounds of lumbering,
intelligent carnivore. Sourdough Charley would weigh within a hundred
pounds of that figure. Faro Nell was eighteen hundred pounds of female
charm--and ferocity. Then Nugget poked his muzzle around his mother's
furry rump to see what was toward, and he was six hundred pounds of
ursine infancy. The animals looked at Huyghens expectantly. If he'd had
Semper riding on his shoulder, they'd have known what was expected of
them.

"Let's go," said Huyghens. "It's dark outside, but somebody's coming.
And it may be bad!"

       *       *       *       *       *

He unfastened the outer door of the bear quarters. Sitka Pete went
charging clumsily through it. A forth-right charge was the best
way to develop any situation--if one was an oversized male Kodiak
bear. Sourdough went lumbering after him. There was nothing hostile
immediately outside. Sitka stood up on his hind legs--he reared up a
solid twelve feet--and sniffed the air. Sourdough methodically lumbered
to one side and then the other, sniffing in his turn. Nell came out,
nine-tenths of a ton of daintiness, and rumbled admonitorily at
Nugget, who trailed her closely. Huyghens stood in the doorway, his
night-sighted gun ready. He felt uncomfortable at sending the bears
ahead into a Loren Two jungle at night. But they were qualified to
scent danger, and he was not.

The illumination of the jungle in a wide path toward the landing field
made for weirdness in the look of things. There were arching giant
ferns and columnar trees which grew above them, and the extraordinary
lanceolate underbrush of the jungle. The flood lamps, set level with
the ground, lighted everything from below. The foliage, then, was
brightly lit against the black night-sky--brightly lit enough to
dim-out the stars. There were astonishing contrasts of light and shadow
everywhere.

"On ahead!" commanded Huyghens, waving. "Hup!"

He swung the bear-quarters door shut. He moved toward the landing field
through the lane of lighted forest. The two giant male Kodiaks lumbered
ahead. Sitka Pete dropped to all fours and prowled. Sourdough Charley
followed closely, swinging from side to side. Huyghens came alertly
behind the two of them, and Faro Nell brought up the rear with Nugget
following her closely.

It was an excellent military formation for progress through dangerous
jungle. Sourdough and Sitka were advance-guard and point, respectively,
while Faro Nell guarded the rear. With Nugget to look after, she was
especially alert against attack from behind. Huyghens was, of course,
the striking force. His gun fired explosive bullets which would
discourage even sphexes, and his night-sight--a cone of light which
went on when he took up the trigger-slack--told exactly where they
would strike. It was not a sportsmanlike weapon, but the creatures
of Loren Two were not sportsmanlike antagonists. The night-walkers,
for example--But night-walkers feared light. They attacked only in a
species of hysteria if it were too bright.

Huyghens moved toward the glare at the landing field. His mental state
was savage. The Kodius Company station on Loren Two was completely
illegal. It happened to be necessary, from one point of view, but
it was still illegal. The tinny voice on the space phone was not
convincing, in ignoring that illegality. But if a ship landed, Huyghens
could get back to the station before men could follow, and he'd have
the disposal safe turned on in time to protect those who'd sent him
here.

But he heard the faraway and high harsh roar of a landing-boat
rocket--not a ship's bellowing tubes--as he made his way through the
unreal-seeming brush. The roar grew louder as he pushed on, the three
big Kodiaks padding here and there, sniffing thoughtfully, making a
perfect defensive-offensive formation for the particular conditions of
this planet.

He reached the edge of the landing field, and it was blindingly bright,
with the customary divergent beams slanting skyward so a ship could
check its instrument landing by sight. Landing fields like this had
been standard, once upon a time. Nowadays all developed planets had
landing grids--monstrous structures which drew upon ionospheres for
power and lifted and drew down star ships with remarkable gentleness
and unlimited force. This sort of landing field would be found where a
survey-team was at work, or where some strictly temporary investigation
of ecology or bacteriology was under way, or where a newly authorized
colony had not yet been able to build its landing grid. Of course it
was unthinkable that anybody would attempt a settlement in defiance of
the law!

Already, as Huyghens reached the edge of the scorched open space,
the night-creatures had rushed to the light like moths on Earth.
The air was misty with crazily gyrating, tiny flying things. They
were innumerable and of every possible form and size, from the white
midges of the night and multi-winged flying worms to those revoltingly
naked-looking larger creatures which might have passed for plucked
flying monkeys if they had not been carnivorous and worse. The flying
things soared and whirred and danced and spun insanely in the glare.
They made peculiarly plaintive humming noises. They almost formed a
lamp-lit ceiling over the cleared space. They did hide the stars.
Staring upward, Huyghens could just barely make out the blue-white
flame of the space-boat's rocket through the fog of wings and bodies.

       *       *       *       *       *

The rocket-flame grew steadily in size. Once, apparently, it tilted to
adjust the boat's descending course. It went back to normal. A speck
of incandescence at first, it grew until it was like a great star, and
then a more-than-brilliant moon, and then it was a pitiless glaring
eye. Huyghens averted his gaze from it. Sitka Pete sat lumpily--more
than a ton of him--and blinked wisely at the dark jungle away from the
light. Sourdough ignored the deepening, increasing rocket roar. He
sniffed the air delicately. Faro Nell held Nugget firmly under one huge
paw and licked his head as if tidying him up to be seen by company.
Nugget wriggled.

The roar became that of ten thousand thunders. A warm breeze blew
outward from the landing field. The rocket boat hurled downward,
and its flame touched the mist of flying things, and they shriveled
and burned and were hot. Then there were churning clouds of dust
everywhere, and the center of the field blazed terribly,--and something
slid down a shaft of fire, and squeezed it flat, and sat on it,--and
the flame went out. The rocket boat sat there, resting on its tail
fins, pointing toward the stars from which it came.

There was a terrible silence after the tumult. Then, very faintly, the
noises of the night came again. There were sounds like those of organ
pipes, and very faint and apologetic noises like hiccups. All these
sounds increased, and suddenly Huyghens could hear quite normally. Then
a side-port opened with a quaint sort of clattering, and something
unfolded from where it had been inset into the hull of the space boat,
and there was a metal passageway across the flame-heated space on which
the boat stood.

A man came out of the port. He reached back in and shook hands very
formally. He climbed down the ladder rungs to the walkway. He marched
above the steaming baked area, carrying a traveling bag. He reached the
end of the walk and stepped gingerly to the ground. He moved hastily to
the edge of the clearing. He waved to the space boat. There were ports.
Perhaps someone returned the gesture. The walkway folded briskly back
up to the hull and vanished in it. A flame exploded into being under
the tail fins. There were fresh clouds of monstrous, choking dust and
a brightness like that of a sun. There was noise past the possibility
of endurance. Then the light rose swiftly through the dust cloud, and
sprang higher and climbed more swiftly still. When Huyghens' ears again
permitted him to hear anything, there was only a diminishing mutter in
the heavens and a small bright speck of light ascending to the sky and
swinging eastward as it rose to intercept the ship which had let it
descend.

The night noises of the jungle went on. Life on Loren Two did not need
to heed the doings of men. But there was a spot of incandescence in the
day-bright clearing, and a short, brisk man looked puzzledly about him
with a traveling bag in his hand.

Huyghens advanced toward him as the incandescence dimmed. Sourdough and
Sitka preceded him. Faro Nell trailed faithfully, keeping a maternal
eye on her offspring. The man in the clearing stared at the parade they
made. It would be upsetting, even after preparation, to land at night
on a strange planet, and to have the ship's boat and all links with the
rest of the cosmos depart, and then to find one's self approached--it
might seem stalked--by two colossal male Kodiak bears, with a third
bear and a cub behind them. A single human figure in such company might
seem irrelevant.

       *       *       *       *       *

The new arrival gazed blankly. He moved, startledly. Then Huyghens
called:

"Hello, there! Don't worry about the bears! They're friends!"

Sitka reached the newcomer. He went warily down-wind from him and
sniffed. The smell was satisfactory. Man-smell. Sitka sat down with the
solid impact of more than a ton of bear-meat landing on packed dirt.
He regarded the man amiably. Sourdough said "_Whoosh!_" and went on to
sample the air beyond the clearing. Huyghens approached. The newcomer
wore the uniform of the Colonial Survey. That was bad. It bore the
insignia of a senior officer. Worse.

"Hah!" said the just-landed man. "Where are the robots? What in all the
nineteen hells are these creatures? Why did you shift your station? I'm
Roane, here to make a progress report on your colony."

Huyghens said:

"What colony?"

"Loren Two Robot Installation--" Then Roane said indignantly, "Don't
tell me that that idiot skipper dropped me at the wrong place! This is
Loren Two, isn't it? And this is the landing field. But where are your
robots? You should have the beginning of a grid up! What the devil's
happened here and what are these beasts?"

Huyghens grimaced.

"This," he said politely, "is an illegal, unlicensed settlement. I'm
a criminal. These beasts are my confederates. If you don't want to
associate with criminals you needn't, of course, but I doubt if you'll
live till morning unless you accept my hospitality while I think over
what to do about your landing. In reason, I ought to shoot you."

Faro Nell came to a halt behind Huyghens, which was her proper post in
all out-door movement. Nugget, however, saw a new human. Nugget was a
cub, and, therefore, friendly. He ambled forward ingratiatingly. He was
four feet high at the shoulders, on all fours. He wriggled bashfully as
he approached Roane. He sneezed, because he was embarrassed.

His mother overtook him swiftly and cuffed him to one side. He wailed.
The wail of a six-hundred-pound Kodiak bear-cub is a remarkable sound.
Roane gave ground a pace.

"I think," he said carefully, "that we'd better talk things over.
But if this is an illegal colony, of course you're under arrest and
anything you say will be used against you."

Huyghens grimaced again.

"Right," he said. "But now if you'll walk close to me, we'll head back
to the station. I'd have Sourdough carry your bag--he likes to carry
things--but he may need his teeth. We've half a mile to travel." He
turned to the animals. "Let's go!" he said commandingly. "Back to the
station! Hup!"

Grunting, Sitka Pete arose and took up his duties as advanced point
of a combat team. Sourdough trailed, swinging widely to one side and
another. Huyghens and Roane moved together. Faro Nell and Nugget
brought up the rear. Which, of course, was the only relatively safe way
for anybody to travel on Loren Two, in the jungle, a good half mile
from one's fortress-like residence.

But there was only one incident on the way back. It was a night-walker,
made hysterical by the lane of light. It poured through the underbrush,
uttering cries like maniacal laughter.

Sourdough brought it down, a good ten yards from Huyghens. When it was
all over, Nugget bristled up to the dead creature, uttering cub-growls.
He feigned to attack it.

His mother whacked him soundly.




                                  II


There were comfortable, settling-down noises below. The bears grunted
and rumbled, but ultimately were still. The glare from the landing
field was gone. The lighted lane through the jungle was dark again.
Huyghens ushered the man from the space boat up into his living
quarters. There was a rustling stir, and Semper took his head
from under his wing. He stared coldly at the two humans. He spread
monstrous, seven-foot wings and fluttered them. He opened his beak and
closed it with a snap.

"That's Semper," said Huyghens. "Semper Tyrannis. He's the rest of the
terrestrial population here. Not being a fly-by-night sort of creature,
he didn't come out to welcome you."

Roane blinked at the huge bird, perched on a three-inch-thick perch set
in the wall.

"An eagle?" he demanded. "Kodiak bears--mutated ones you say, but still
bears--and now an eagle? You've a very nice fighting unit in the bears."

"They're pack animals, too," said Huyghens. "They can carry some
hundreds of pounds without losing too much combat efficiency. And
there's no problem of supply. They live off the jungle. Not sphexes,
though. Nothing will eat a sphex, even if it can kill one."

He brought out glasses and a bottle. He indicated a chair. Roane put
down his traveling bag. He took a glass.

"I'm curious," he observed. "Why Semper Tyrannis? I can understand
Sitka Pete and Sourdough Charley as names. The home of their ancestors
makes them fitting. But why Semper?"

"He was bred for hawking," said Huyghens. "You sic a dog on something.
You sic Semper Tyrannis. He's too big to ride on a hawking glove, so
the shoulders of my coats are padded to let him ride there. He's a
flying scout. I've trained him to notify us of sphexes, and in flight
he carries a tiny television camera. He's useful, but he hasn't the
brains of the bears."

Roane sat down and sipped at his glass.

"Interesting ... very interesting! But this is an illegal settlement.
I'm a Colonial Survey officer. My job is reporting on progress
according to plan, but nevertheless I have to arrest you. Didn't you
say something about shooting me?"

Huyghens said doggedly:

"I'm trying to think of a way out. Add up all the penalties for illegal
colonization and I'd be in a very bad fix if you got away and reported
this set-up. Shooting you would be logical."

"I see that," said Roane reasonably. "But since the point has come
up--I have a blaster trained on you from my pocket."

Huyghens shrugged.

"It's rather likely that my human confederates will be back here before
your friends. You'd be in a very tight fix if my friends came back and
found you more or less sitting on my corpse."

Roane nodded.

"That's true, too. Also it's probable that your fellow terrestrials
wouldn't co-operate with me as they have with you. You seem to have the
whip hand, even with my blaster trained on you. On the other hand, you
could have killed me quite easily after the boat left, when I'd first
landed. I'd have been quite unsuspicious. So you may not really intend
to murder me."

Huyghens shrugged again.

"So," said Roane, "since the secret of getting along with people is
that of postponing quarrels--suppose we postpone the question of who
kills whom? Frankly, I'm going to send you to prison if I can. Unlawful
colonization is very bad business. But I suppose you feel that you have
to do something permanent about me. In your place I probably should,
too. Shall we declare a truce?"

Huyghens indicated indifference. Roane said vexedly:

"Then I do! I have to! So--"

He pulled his hand out of his pocket and put a pocket blaster on the
table. He leaned back, defiantly.

"Keep it," said Huyghens. "Loren Two isn't a place where you live long
unarmed." He turned to a cupboard. "Hungry?"

"I could eat," admitted Roane.

       *       *       *       *       *

Huyghens pulled out two meal-packs from the cupboard and inserted them
in the readier below. He set out plates.

"Now--what happened to the official, licensed, authorized colony here?"
asked Roane briskly. "License issued eighteen months ago. There was
a landing of colonists with a drone fleet of equipment and supplies.
There've been four ship-contacts since. There should be several
thousand robots being industrious under adequate human supervision.
There should be a hundred-mile-square clearing, planted with food
plants for later human arrivals. There should be a landing grid at
least half-finished. Obviously there should be a space beacon to guide
ships to a landing. There isn't. There's no clearing visible from
space. That Crete Line ship has been in orbit for three days, trying
to find a place to drop me. Her skipper was fuming. Your beacon is the
only one on the planet, and we found it by accident. What happened?"

Huyghens served the food. He said dryly:

"There could be a hundred colonies on this planet without any one
knowing of any other. I can only guess about your robots, but I suspect
they ran into sphexes."

Roane paused, with his fork in his hand.

"I read up on this planet, since I was to report on its colony. A sphex
is part of the inimical animal life here. Cold-blooded belligerent
carnivor, not a lizard but a genus all its own. Hunts in packs. Seven
to eight hundred pounds, when adult. Lethally dangerous and simply too
numerous to fight. They're why no license was ever granted to human
colonists. Only robots could work here, because they're machines. What
animal attacks machines?"

Huyghens said:

"What machine attacks animals? The sphexes wouldn't bother robots, of
course, but would robots bother the sphexes?"

Roane chewed and swallowed.

"Hold it! I'll agree that you can't make a hunting-robot. A machine
can discriminate, but it can't decide. That's why there's no danger of
a robot revolt. They can't decide to do something for which they have
no instructions. But this colony was planned with full knowledge of
what robots can and can't do. As ground was cleared, it was enclosed in
an electric fence which no sphex could touch without frying."

Huyghens thoughtfully cut his food. After a moment:

"The landing was in the winter-time," he observed. "It must have
been, because the colony survived a while. And at a guess, the last
ship-landing was before thaw. The years are eighteen months long here,
you know."

Roane admitted:

"It was in winter that the landing was made. And the last ship-landing
was before spring. The idea was to get mines in operation for material,
and to have ground cleared and enclosed in sphex-proof fence before the
sphexes came back from the tropics. They winter there, I understand."

"Did you ever see a sphex?" Huyghens asked. Then added, "No, of course
not. But if you took a spitting cobra and crossed it with a wildcat,
painted it tan-and-blue and then gave it hydrophobia and homicidal
mania at once--why you might have one sphex. But not the race of
sphexes. They can climb trees, by the way. A fence wouldn't stop them."

"An electrified fence," said Roane. "Nothing could climb that!"

"No one animal," Huyghens told him. "But sphexes are a race. The smell
of one dead sphex brings others running with blood in their eyes.
Leave a dead sphex alone for six hours and you've got them around by
the dozen. Two days and there are hundreds. Longer, and you've got
thousands of them! They gather to caterwaul over their dead pal and
hunt for whoever or whatever killed him."

He returned to his meal. A moment later he said:

"No need to wonder what happened to your colony. During the winter the
robots burned out a clearing and put up an electrified fence according
to the book. Come spring, the sphexes came back. They're curious,
among their other madnesses. A sphex would try to climb the fence just
to see what was behind it. He'd be electrocuted. His carcass would
bring others, raging because a sphex was dead. Some of them would try
to climb the fence--and die. And their corpses would bring others.
Presently the fence would break down from the bodies hanging on it,
or a bridge of dead beasts' carcasses would be built across it--and
from as far down-wind as the scent carried there'd be loping, raging,
scent-crazed sphexes racing to the spot. They'd pour into the clearing
through or over the fence, squalling and screeching for something to
kill. I think they'd find it."

Roane ceased to eat. He looked sick.

"There were ... pictures of sphexes in the data I read. I suppose that
would account for ... everything."

He tried to lift his fork. He put it down again.

"I can't eat," he said abruptly.

Huyghens made no comment. He finished his own meal, scowling. He rose
and put the plates into the top of the cleaner. There was a whirring.
He took them out of the bottom and put them away.

"Let me see those reports, eh?" he asked dourly. "I'd like to see what
sort of a set-up they had--those robots."

       *       *       *       *       *

Roane hesitated and then opened his traveling bag. There was a
micro-viewer and reels of films. One entire reel was labeled
"Specifications for Construction, Colonial Survey," which would contain
detailed plans and all requirements of material and workmanship for
everything from desks, office, administrative personnel, for use of,
to landing grids, heavy-gravity planets, lift-capacity one hundred
thousand Earth-tons. But Huyghens found another. He inserted it and
spun the control swiftly here and there, pausing only briefly at index
frames until he came to the section he wanted. He began to study the
information with growing impatience.

"Robots, robots, robots!" he snapped. "Why don't they leave them where
they belong--in cities to do the dirty work, and on airless planets
where nothing unexpected ever happens! Robots don't belong in new
colonies! Your colonists depended on them for defense! Dammit, let a
man work with robots long enough and he thinks all nature is as limited
as they are! This is a plan to set up a controlled environment! On
Loren Two! Controlled environment--" He swore, luridly. "Complacent,
idiotic, desk-bound half-wits!"

"Robots are all right," said Roane. "We couldn't run civilization
without them."

"But you can't tame a wilderness with 'em!" snapped Roane. "You had a
dozen men landed, with fifty assembled robots to start with. There were
parts for fifteen hundred more--and I'll bet anything I've got that the
ship-contacts landed more still."

"They did," admitted Roane.

"I despise 'em," growled Huyghens. "I feel about 'em the way the old
Greeks and Romans felt about slaves. They're for menial work--the
sort of work a man will perform for himself, but that he won't do for
another man for pay. Degrading work!"

"Quite aristocratic!" said Roane with a touch of irony. "I take it that
robots clean out the bear quarters downstairs."

"No!" snapped Huyghens. "I do! They're my friends! They fight for me!
They can't understand the necessity and no robot would do the job
right!"

He growled, again. The noises of the night went on outside. Organ tones
and hiccupings and the sound of tack-hammers and slamming doors.
Somewhere there was a singularly exact replica of the discordant
squeaking of a rusty pump.

"I'm looking," said Huyghens at the micro-viewer, "for the record of
their mining operations. An open-pit operation wouldn't mean a thing.
But if they had driven a tunnel, and somebody was there supervising the
robots when the colony was wiped out, there's an off-chance he survived
a while."

Roane regarded him with suddenly intent eyes.

"And--"

"Dammit," snapped Roane, "if so I'll go see! He'd ... they'd have no
chance at all, otherwise. Not that the chance is good in any case!"

Roane raised his eyebrows.

"I'm a Colonial Survey officer," he said. "I've told you I'll send you
to prison if I can. You've risked the lives of millions of people,
maintaining non-quarantined communication with an unlicensed planet.
If you did rescue somebody from the ruins of the robot colony, does it
occur to you that they'd be witnesses to your unauthorized presence
here?"

Huyghens spun the viewer again. He stopped. He switched back and forth
and found what he wanted. He muttered in satisfaction: "They did run a
tunnel!" Aloud he said, "I'll worry about witnesses when I have to."

       *       *       *       *       *

He pushed aside another cupboard door. Inside it were the odds and
ends a man makes use of to repair the things about his house that he
never notices until they go wrong. There was an assortment of wires,
transistors, bolts, and similar stray items that a man living alone
will need. When to his knowledge he's the only inhabitant of a solar
system, he especially needs such things.

"What now?" asked Roane mildly.

"I'm going to try to find out if there's anybody left alive over there.
I'd have checked before if I'd known the colony existed. I can't prove
they're all dead, but I may prove that somebody's still alive. It's
barely two weeks' journey away from here! Odd that two colonies picked
spots so near!"

He absorbedly picked over the oddments he'd selected. Roane said
vexedly:

"Confound it! How can you check whether somebody's alive some hundreds
of miles away--when you didn't know he existed half an hour ago?"

Huyghens threw a switch and took down a wall panel, exposing electronic
apparatus and circuits behind. He busied himself with it.

"Ever think about hunting for a castaway?" he asked over his shoulder.
"There's a planet with some tens of millions of square miles on it.
You know there's a ship down. You've no idea where. You assume the
survivors have power--no civilized man will be without power very long,
so long as he can smelt metals!--but making a space beacon calls for
high-precision measurements and workmanship. It's not to be improvised.
So what will your shipwrecked civilized man do, to guide a rescue ship
to the one or two square miles he occupies among some tens of millions
on the planet?"

Roane fretted visibly.

"What?"

"He's had to go primitive, to begin with," Roane explained. "He cooks
his meat over a fire, and so on. He has to make a strictly primitive
signal. It's all he can do without gauges and micrometers and very
special tools. But he can fill all the planet's atmosphere with a
signal that searchers for him can't miss. You see?"

Roane thought irritably. He shook his head.

"He'll make," said Huyghens, "a spark transmitter. He'll fix its output
at the shortest frequency he can contrive--it'll be somewhere in the
five-to-fifty-meter wave-band, but it will tune very broad--and it will
be a plainly human signal. He'll start it broadcasting. Some of those
frequencies will go all around the planet under the ionosphere. Any
ship that comes in under the radio roof will pick up his signal, get
a fix on it, move and get another fix, and then go straight to where
the castaway is waiting placidly in a hand-braided hammock, sipping
whatever sort of drink he's improvised out of the local vegetation."

Roane said grudgingly:

"Now that you mention it, of course--"

"My space phone picks up microwaves," said Huyghens, "I'm shifting a
few elements to make it listen for longer stuff. It won't be efficient,
but it will pick up a distress signal if one's in the air. I don't
expect it, though."

       *       *       *       *       *

He worked. Roane sat still a long time, watching him. Down below,
a rhythmic sort of sound arose. It was Sourdough Charley, snoring.
He lay on his back with his legs in the air. He'd discovered that
he slept cooler that way. Sitka Pete grunted in his sleep. He was
dreaming. In the general room of the station Semper, the eagle, blinked
his eyes rapidly and then tucked his head under a gigantic wing and
went to sleep. The noises of the Loren Two jungle came through the
steel-shuttered windows. The nearer moon--which had passed overhead not
long before the ringing of the arrival bell--again came soaring over
the eastern horizon. It sped across the sky at the apparent speed of an
atmosphere-flier. Overhead, it could be seen to be a jagged irregular
mass of rock or metal, plunging blindly about the great planet forever.

Inside the station, Roane said angrily:

"See here, Huyghens! You've reason to kill me. Apparently you don't
intend to. You've excellent reason to leave that robot colony strictly
alone. But you're preparing to help, if there's anybody alive to need
it. And yet you're a criminal--and I mean a criminal! There've been
some ghastly bacteria exported from planets like Loren Two! There've
been plenty of lives lost in consequence, and you're risking more! Why
do you do it? Why do you do something that could produce monstrous
results to other beings?"

Huyghens grunted.

"You're only assuming there are no sanitary and quarantine precautions
taken in my communications. As a matter of fact, there are. They're
taken, all right! As for the rest, you wouldn't understand."

"I don't understand," snapped Roane, "but that's no proof I can't! Why
are you a criminal?"

Huyghens painstakingly used a screwdriver inside the wall panel. He
delicately lifted out a small electronic assembly. He carefully began
to fit in a spaghettied new assembly with larger units.

"I'm cutting my amplification here to hell-and-gone," he observed,
"but I think it'll do. I'm doing what I'm doing," he added calmly,
"I'm being a criminal because it seems to me befitting what I think I
am. Everybody acts according to his own real notion of himself. You're
a conscientious citizen, and a loyal official, and a well-adjusted
personality. You consider yourself an intelligent rational animal. But
you don't act that way! You're reminding me of my need to shoot you or
something similar, which a merely rational animal would try to make me
forget. You happen, Roane, to be a man. So am I. But I'm aware of it.
Therefore, I deliberately do things a merely rational animal wouldn't,
because they're my notion of what a man who's more than a rational
animal should do."

He very carefully tightened one small screw after another. Roane said
annoyedly:

"Oh. Religion."

"Self-respect," corrected Huyghens. "I don't like robots. They're too
much like rational animals. A robot will do whatever it can that its
supervisor requires it to do. A merely rational animal will do whatever
it can that circumstances require it to do. I wouldn't like a robot
unless it had some idea of what was befitting it and would spit in my
eye if I tried to make it do something else. The bears downstairs,
now--They're no robots! They are loyal and honorable beasts, but they'd
turn and tear me to bits if I tried to make them do something against
their nature. Faro Nell would fight me and all creation together, if I
tried to harm Nugget. It would be unintelligent and unreasonable and
irrational. She'd lose out and get killed. But I like her that way! And
I'll fight you and all creation when you make me try to do something
against my nature. I'll be stupid and unreasonable and irrational about
it." Then he grinned over his shoulder. "So will you. Only you don't
realize it."

He turned back to his task. After a moment he fitted a manual-control
knob over a shaft in his haywire assembly.

       *       *       *       *       *

"What did somebody try to make you do?" asked Roane shrewdly. "What was
demanded of you that turned you into a criminal? What are you in revolt
against?"

Huyghens threw a switch. He began to turn the knob which controlled
the knob of his makeshift-modified receiver.

"Why," he said amusedly, "when I was young the people around me
tried to make me into a conscientious citizen and a loyal employee
and a well-adjusted personality. They tried to make me into a highly
intelligent rational animal and nothing more. The difference between
us, Roane, is that I found it out. Naturally, I rev--"

He stopped short. Faint, crackling, crisp frying sounds came from the
speaker of the space phone now modified to receive what once were
called short waves.

Huyghens listened. He cocked his head intently. He turned the knob
very, very slowly. Then Roane made an arrested gesture, to call
attention to something in the sibilant sound. Huyghens nodded. He
turned the knob again, with infinitesimal increments.

Out of the background noise came a patterned mutter. As Huyghens
shifted the tuning, it grew louder. It reached a volume where it was
unmistakable. It was a sequence of sounds like discordant buzzing.
There were three half-second buzzings with half-second pauses between.
A two-second pause. Three full-second buzzings with half-second pauses
between. Another two-second pause and three half-second buzzings,
again. Then silence for five seconds. Then the pattern repeated.

"The devil!" said Huyghens. "That's a human signal! Mechanically made,
too! In fact, it used to be a standard distress-call. It was termed an
SOS, though I've no idea what that meant. Anyhow, somebody must have
read old-fashioned novels, some time, to know about it. And so someone
is still alive over at your licensed, but now smashed-up, robot colony.
And they're asking for help. I'd say they're likely to need it."

He looked at Roane.

"The intelligent thing to do is sit back and wait for a ship--either of
my friends or yours. A ship can help survivors or castaways much better
than we can. A ship can even find them more easily. But maybe time is
important to the poor devils! So I'm going to take the bears and see
if I can reach them. You can wait here, if you like. What say? Travel
on Loren Two isn't a picnic! I'll be fighting nearly every foot of the
way. There's plenty of 'inimical animal life' here!"

Roane snapped angrily:

"Don't be a fool! Of course I'm coming! What do you take me for? And
two of us should have four times the chance of one!"

Huyghens grinned.

"Not quite. You forget Sitka Pete and Sourdough Charley and Faro
Nell. There'll be five of us if you come, instead of four. And, of
course, Nugget has to come--and he'll be no help--but Semper may make
up for him. You won't quadruple our chances, Roane, but I'll be glad
to have you if you want to be stupid and unreasonable and not at all
rational--and come along."




                                  III


There was a jagged spur of stone looming precipitously over a
river-valley. A thousand feet below, a broad stream ran westward to the
sea. Twenty miles to the east, a wall of mountains rose sheer against
the sky. Its peaks seemed to blend to a remarkable evenness of height.
There was rolling, tumbled ground between for as far as the eye could
see.

A speck in the sky came swiftly downward. Great pinions spread, and
flapped, and icy eyes surveyed the rocky space. With more great
flappings, Semper the eagle came to ground. He folded his huge wings
and turned his head jerkily, his eyes unblinking. A tiny harness held a
miniature camera against his chest. He strutted over the bare stone to
the highest point. He stood there, a lonely and arrogant figure in the
vastness.

There came crashings and rustlings, and then snuffling sounds. Sitka
Pete came lumbering out into the clear space. He wore a harness too,
and a pack. The harness was complex, because it had not only to hold a
pack in normal travel, but, when he stood on his hind legs, it must not
hamper the use of his forepaws in combat.

He went cagily all over the open area. He peered over the edge of the
spur's farthest tip. He prowled to the other side and looked down. He
scouted carefully. Once he moved close to Semper and the eagle opened
his great curved beak and uttered an indignant noise. Sitka paid no
attention.

He relaxed, satisfied. He sat down untidily, his hind legs sprawling.
He wore an air approaching benevolence as he surveyed the landscape
about and below him.

More snufflings and crashings. Sourdough Charley came into view with
Huyghens and Roane behind him. Sourdough carried a pack, too. Then
there was a squealing and Nugget scurried up from the rear, impelled
by a whack from his mother. Faro Nell appeared, with the carcass of a
staglike animal lashed to her harness.

"I picked this place from a space photo," said Huyghens, "to make a
directional fix from. I'll get set up."

He swung his pack from his shoulders to the ground. He extracted an
obviously self-constructed device which he set on the ground. It had
a whip aerial, which he extended. Then he plugged in a considerable
length of flexible wire and unfolded a tiny, improvised directional
aerial with an even tinier booster at its base. Roane slipped his pack
from his shoulders and watched. Huyghens slipped headphones over his
ears. He looked up and said sharply:

"Watch the bears, Roane. The wind's blowing up the way we came.
Anything that trails us--sphexes, for example--will send its scent on
before. The bears will tell us."

He busied himself with the instruments he'd brought. He heard the
hissing, frying, background noise which could be anything at all except
a human signal. He reached out and swung the small aerial around.
Rasping, buzzing tones came in, faintly and then loudly. This receiver,
though, had been made for this particular wave band. It was much more
efficient than the modified space phone had been. It picked up three
short buzzes, three long ones, and three short ones again. Three dots,
three dashes, and three dots. Over and over again. SOS. SOS. SOS.

Huyghens took a reading and moved the directional aerial a carefully
measured distance. He took another reading. He shifted it yet again and
again, carefully marking and measuring each spot and taking notes of
the instrument readings. When he finished, he had checked the direction
of the signal not only by loudness but by phase--he had as accurate a
fix as could possibly be had with portable apparatus.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sourdough growled softly. Sitka Pete whiffed the air and arose from
his sitting position. Faro Nell whacked Nugget, sending him whimpering
to the farthest corner of the flea place. She stood bristling, facing
down-hill the way they'd come.

"Damn!" said Huyghens.

He got up and waved his arm at Semper, who had turned his head at the
stirrings. Semper squawked in a most un-eaglelike fashion and dived
off the spur and was immediately fighting the down-draught beyond it.
As Huyghens reached his weapon, the eagle came back overhead. He went
magnificently past, a hundred feet high, careening and flapping in the
tricky currents. He screamed, abruptly, and circled and screamed again.
Huyghens swung a tiny vision-plate from its strap to where he could
look into it. He saw, of course, what the little camera on Semper's
chest could see--reeling, swaying terrain as Semper saw it, though
without his breadth of field. There were moving objects to be seen
through the shifting trees. Their coloring was unmistakable.

"Sphexes," said Huyghens dourly. "Eight of them. Don't look for them to
follow our track, Roane. They run parallel to a trail on either side.
That way they attack in breadth and all at once when they catch up. And
listen! The bears can handle anything they tangle with! It's our job to
pick off the loose ones! And aim for the body! The bullets explode."

He threw off the safety of his weapon. Faro Nell, uttering thunderous
growls, went padding to a place between Sitka Pete and Sourdough.
Sitka glanced at her and made a whuffing noise, as if derisive of her
blood-curdling sounds. Sourdough grunted in a somehow solid fashion.

He and Sitka moved farther away from Nell to either side. They would
cover a wider front.

There was no other sign of life than the shrillings of the incredibly
tiny creatures which on this planet were birds, and Faro Nell's
deep-bass, raging growls, and then the click of Roane's safety going
off as he got ready to use the weapon Huyghens had given him.

Semper screamed again, flapping low above the treetops, following
parti-colored, monstrous shapes beneath.

Eight blue-and-tan fiends came racing out of the underbrush. They had
spiny fringes, and horns, and glaring eyes, and they looked as if they
had come straight out of hell. On the instant of their appearance
they leaped, emitting squalling, spitting squeals that were like the
cries of fighting tomcats ten thousand times magnified. Huyghens'
rifle cracked, and its sound was wiped out in the louder detonation
of its bullet in sphexian flesh. A tan-and-blue monster tumbled over,
shrieking. Faro Nell charged, the very impersonation of white-hot fury.
Roane fired, and his bullet exploded against a tree. Sitka Pete brought
his massive forepaws in a clapping, monstrous ear-boxing motion. A
sphex died.

Then Roane fired again. Sourdough Charley whuffed. He fell forward
upon a spitting bi-colored fiend, rolled him over, and raked with his
hind claws. The belly-hide of the sphex was tenderer than the rest.
The creature rolled away, snapping at its own wounds. Another sphex
found itself shaken loose from the tumult about Sitka Pete. It whirled
to leap on him from behind--and Huyghens fired very coldly--and two
plunged upon Faro Nell and Roane blasted one and Faro Nell disposed
of the other in truly awesome fury. Then Sitka Pete heaved himself
erect--seeming to drip sphexes--and Sourdough waddled over and pulled
one off and killed it and went back for another. And both rifles
cracked together and there was suddenly nothing left to fight.

       *       *       *       *       *

The bears prowled from one to another of the corpses. Sitka Pete
rumbled and lifted up a limp head. Crash! Then another. He went
over the lot, whether or not they showed signs of life. When he had
finished, they were wholly still.

Semper came flapping down out of the sky. He had screamed and fluttered
overhead as the fight went on. Now he landed with a rush. Huyghens
went soothingly from one bear to another, calming them with his voice.
It took longest to calm Faro Nell, licking Nugget with impassioned
solicitude and growling horribly as she licked.

"Come along, now," said Huyghens, when Sitka showed signs of intending
to sit down again. "Heave these carcasses over a cliff. Come along!
Sitka! Sourdough! Hup!"

He guided them as the two big males somewhat fastidiously lifted up
the nightmarish creatures they and the guns together had killed, and
carried them to the edge of the spur of stone. They let the dead
beasts go bouncing and sliding down into the valley.

"That," said Huyghens, "is so their little pals will gather round them
and caterwaul their woe where there's no trail of ours to give them
ideas. If we'd been near a river, I'd have dumped them in to float
down-river and gather mourners wherever they stranded. Around the
station I incinerate them. If I had to leave them, I'd make tracks
away. About fifty miles upwind would be a good idea."

He opened the pack Sourdough carried and extracted giant sized swabs
and some gallons of antiseptic. He tended the three Kodiaks in turn,
swabbing not only the cuts and scratches they'd received, but deeply
soaking their fur where there could be suspicion of spilled sphex blood.

"This antiseptic deodorizes, too," he told Roane. "Or we'd be trailed
by any sphex who passed to leeward of us. When we start off, I'll swab
the bears' paws for the same reason."

Roane was very quiet. He'd missed his first shot with a bullet-firing
weapon--a beam hasn't the stopping-power of an explosive bullet--but
he'd seemed to grow savagely angry with himself. The last few seconds
of the fight, he'd fired very deliberately and every bullet hit. Now he
said bitterly:

"If you're instructing me so I can carry on should you be killed, I
doubt that it's worth while!"

Huyghens felt in his pack and unfolded the enlargements he'd made of
the space photos of this part of the planet. He carefully oriented
the map with distant landmarks. He drew a painstakingly accurate line
across the photo.

"The SOS signal comes from somewhere close to the robot colony," he
reported. "I think a little to the south of it. Probably from a mine
they'd opened up, on the far side--of course--of the Sere Plateau.
See how I've marked this map? Two fixes, one from the station and one
from here. I came away off-course to get a fix here so we'd have two
position-lines to the transmitter. The signal could have come from the
other side of the planet. But it doesn't."

"The odds would be astronomical against other castaways," protested
Roane.

"No-o-o-o," said Huyghens. "Ships have been coming here. To the
robot colony. One could have crashed. And I have friends, too."

He repacked his apparatus and gestured to the bears. He led them beyond
the scene of combat and very carefully swabbed off their paws, so they
could not possibly leave a trail of sphex-blood scent behind them. He
waved Semper, the eagle, aloft.

"Let's go," he told the Kodiaks. "Yonder! Hup!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The party headed down-hill and into the jungle again. Now it was
Sourdough's turn to take the lead, and Sitka Pete prowled more
widely behind him. Faro Nell trailed the men, with Nugget. She kept
an extremely sharp eye upon the cub. He was a baby, still. He only
weighed six hundred pounds. And of course she watched against danger
from the rear.

Overhead, Semper fluttered and flew in giant circles and spirals, never
going very far away. Huyghens referred constantly to the screen which
showed what the air-borne camera saw. The image tilted and circled
and banked and swayed. It was by no means the best air-reconnaissance
that could be imagined. But it was the best that would work. Presently
Huyghens said:

"We swing to the right, here. The going's bad straight ahead, and it
looks like a pack of sphexes has killed and is feeding."

Roane was upset. He was dissatisfied with himself. So he said:

"It's against reason for carnivores to be as thick as you say! There
has to be a certain amount of other animal life for every meat-eating
beast! Too many of them would eat all the game and starve!"

"They're gone all winter," explained Huyghens, "which around here
isn't as severe as you might think. And a good many animals seem to
breed just after the sphexes go south. Also, the sphexes aren't around
all the warm weather. There's a sort of peak, and then for a matter
of weeks you won't see a one of them, and suddenly the jungle swarms
with them again. Then, presently, they head south. Apparently they're
migratory in some fashion, but nobody knows." He said dryly: "There
haven't been many naturalists around on this planet. The animal life
is inimical."

Roane fretted. He was a senior officer in the Colonial Survey, and
he was accustomed to arrival at a partly or completely-finished
colonial set-up, and to pass upon the completion or noncompletion of
the planned installation as designed. Now he was in an intolerably
hostile environment, depending upon an illegal colonist for his life,
engaged upon a demoralizingly indefinite enterprise--because the
mechanical spark-signal could be working long after its constructors
were dead--and his ideas about a number of matters were shaken. He was
alive, for example, because of three giant Kodiak bears and a bald
eagle. He and Roane could have been surrounded by ten thousand robots,
and they'd have been killed. Sphexes and robots would have ignored each
other, and sphexes would have made straight for the men, who'd have had
less than four seconds in which to discover for themselves that they
were attacked, prepare to defend themselves, and kill eight sphexes.

Roane's convictions as a civilized man were shaken. Robots were
marvelous contrivances for doing the expected: accomplishing the
planned; coping with the predicted. But they also had defects. Robots
could only follow instructions--if this thing happens, do this, if
that thing happens do that. But before something else, neither this
or that, robots were helpless. So a robot civilization worked only in
an environment where nothing unanticipated ever turned up, and human
supervisors never demanded anything unexpected. Roane was appalled.
He'd never encountered the truly unpredictable before in all his life
and career.

He found Nugget, the cub, ambling uneasily in his wake. The cub
flattened his ears miserably when Roane glanced at him. It occurred
to the man that Nugget was receiving a lot of disciplinary thumpings
from Faro Nell. He was knocked about physically, pretty much as Roane
was being knocked about psychologically. His lack of information and
unfitness for independent survival in this environment was being
hammered into him.

"Hi, Nugget," said Roane ruefully. "I feel just about the way you do!"

Nugget brighted visibly. He frisked. He tended to gambol. He looked
very hopefully up into Roane's face--and he stood four feet high at the
shoulder and would overtop Roane if he stood erect.

Roane reached out and patted Nugget's head. It was the first time in
all his life that he'd ever petted an animal.

He heard a snuffling sound behind him. Skin crawled at the back of his
neck. He whirled.

Faro Nell regarded him--eighteen hundred pounds of she-bear only ten
feet away and looking into his eyes. For one panicky instant Roane
went cold all over. Then he realized that Faro Nell's eyes were not
burning. She was not snarling. She did not emit those blood-curdling
sounds which the bare prospect of danger to Nugget had produced up
on the rocky spur. She looked at him blandly. In fact, after a moment
she swung off on some independent investigation of a matter that had
aroused her curiosity.

       *       *       *       *       *

The traveling party went on, Nugget frisking beside Roane and tending
to bump into him out of pure cub-clumsiness. Now and again he looked
adoringly at Roane, in the instant and overwhelming affection of the
very young.

Roane trudged on. Presently he glanced behind again. Faro Nell was
now ranging more widely. She was well satisfied to have Nugget in the
immediate care of a man. From time to time he got on her nerves.

A little while later, Roane called ahead.

"Huyghens! Look here! I've been appointed nursemaid to Nugget!"

Huyghens looked back.

"Oh, slap him a few times and he'll go back to his mother."

"The devil I will!" said Roane querulously. "I like it!"

The traveling party went on.

When night fell, they camped. There could be no fire, of course,
because all the minute night-things about would come eagerly to
dance in the glow. But there could not be darkness, equally, because
night-walkers hunted in the dark. So Huyghens set out the barrier
lamps which made a wall of twilight about their halting place, and the
staglike creature Faro Nell had carried became their evening meal. Then
they slept--at least the men did--and the bears dozed and snorted and
waked and dozed again. But Semper sat immobile with his head under his
wing on a tree limb. And presently there was a glorious cool hush and
all the world glowed in morning light diffused through the jungle by a
newly risen sun. And they arose, and traveled again.

This day they stopped stock-still for two hours while sphexes puzzled
over the trail the bears had left. Huyghens discoursed calmly on the
need for an anti-scent, to be used on the boots of men and the paws of
bears, which would make the following of their trails unpopular with
sphexes. And Roane seized upon the idea and absorbedly suggested that
a sphex-repellent odor might be worked out, which would make a human
revolting to a sphex. If that were done--why--humans could go freely
about unmolested.

"Like stink-bugs," said Huyghens, sardonically. "A very intelligent
idea! Very rational! You can feel proud!"

And suddenly Roane, very obscurely, was not proud of the idea at all.

They camped again. On the third night they were at the base of that
remarkable formation, the Sere Plateau, which from a distance looked
like a mountain-range but was actually a desert tableland. And it was
not reasonable for a desert to be raised high, while lowlands had rain,
but on the fourth morning they found out why. They saw, far, far away,
a truly monstrous mountain-mass at the end of the long-way expanse
of the plateau. It was like the prow of a ship. It lay, so Huyghens
observed, directly in line with the prevailing winds, and divided them
as a ship's prow divides the waters. The moisture-bearing air-currents
flowed beside the plateau, not over it, and its interior was pure sere
desert in the unscreened sunshine of high altitudes.

       *       *       *       *       *

It took them a full day to get halfway up the slope. And here, twice
as they climbed, Semper flew screaming over aggregations of sphexes
to one side of them or the other. These were much larger groups than
Huyghens had ever seen before--fifty to a hundred monstrosities
together, where a dozen was a large hunting-pack elsewhere. He looked
in the screen which showed him what Semper saw, four to five miles
away. The sphexes padded uphill toward the Sere Plateau in a long line.
Fifty--sixty--seventy tan-and-azure beasts out of hell.

"I'd hate to have that bunch jump us," he said candidly to Roane. "I
don't think we'd stand a chance."

"Here's where a robot tank would be useful," Roane observed.

"Anything armored," conceded Huyghens. "One man in an armored station
like mine would be safe. But if he killed a sphex he'd be besieged.
He'd have to stay holed up, breathing the smell of dead sphex, until
the odor had gone away. And he mustn't kill any others or he'd be
besieged until winter came."

Roane did not suggest the advantages of robots in other directions.
At that moment, for example, they were working their way up a slope
which averaged fifty degrees. The bears climbed without effort despite
their burdens. For the men it was infinite toil. Semper, the eagle,
manifested impatience with bears and men alike, who crawled so slowly
up an incline over which he soared.

He went ahead up the mountainside and teetered in the air-currents at
the plateau's edge. Huyghens looked in the vision-plate by which he
reported.

"How the devil," panted Roane--they had stopped for a breather, and the
bears waited patiently for them--"do you train bears like these? I can
understand Semper."

"I don't train them," said Huyghens, staring into the plate. "They're
mutations. In heredity the sex-linkage of physical characteristics
is standard stuff. But there's been some sound work done on the
gene-linkage of psychological factors. There was need, on my home
planet, for an animal who could fight like a fiend, live off the land,
carry a pack and get along with men at least as well as dogs do. In the
old days they'd have tried to breed the desired physical properties
into an animal who already had the personality they wanted. Something
like a giant dog, say. But back home they went at it the other way
about. They picked the wanted physical characteristics and bred for the
personality--the psychology. The job got done over a century ago--a
Kodiak bear named Kodius Champion was the first real success. He had
everything that was wanted. These bears are his descendants."

"They look normal," commented Roane.

"They are!" said Huyghens warmly. "Just as normal as an honest dog!
They're not trained, like Semper. They train themselves!" He looked
back into the plate in his hands, which showed the ground five and six
and seven thousand feet higher. "Semper, now, is a trained bird without
too much brains. He's educated--a glorified hawk. But the bears want
to get along with men. They're emotionally dependent on us! Like dogs.
Semper's a servant, but they're companions and friends. He's trained,
but they're loyal. He's conditioned. They love us. He'd abandon me if
he ever realized he could--he thinks he can only eat what men feed him.
But the bears wouldn't want to. They like us. I admit that I like them.
Maybe because they like me."

Roane said deliberately:

"Aren't you a trifle loose-tongued, Huyghens? I'm a Colonial Survey
officer. I have to arrest you sooner or later. You've told me something
that will locate and convict the people who set you up here. It
shouldn't be hard to find where bears were bred for psychological
mutations, and where a bear named Kodius Champion left descendants! I
can find out where you came from now, Huyghens!"

Huyghens looked up from the plate with its tiny swaying television
image, relayed from where Semper floated impatiently in mid-air.

"No harm done," he said amiably. "I'm a criminal there, too. It's
officially on record that I kidnaped these bears and escaped with
them. Which, on my home planet, is about as heinous a crime as a man
can commit. It's worse than horse-theft back on Earth in the old days.
The kin and cousins of my bears are highly thought of. I'm quite a
criminal, back home."

Roane stared.

"Did you steal them?" he demanded.

"Confidentially," said Huyghens. "No. But prove it!" Then he said:
"Take a look in this plate. See what Semper can see up at the plateau's
edge."

       *       *       *       *       *

Roane squinted aloft, where the eagle flew in great sweeps and dashes.
Somehow, by the experience of the past few days, Roane knew that Semper
was screaming fiercely as he flew. He made a dart toward the plateau's
border.

Roane looked at the transmitted picture. It was only four inches by
six, but it was perfectly without grain and in accurate color. It moved
and turned as the camera-bearing eagle swooped and circled. For an
instant the screen showed the steeply sloping mountainside, and off
at one edge the party of men and bears could be seen as dots. Then it
swept away and showed the top of the plateau.

There were sphexes. A pack of two hundred trotted toward the desert
interior. They moved at leisure, in the open. The viewing camera
reeled, and there were more. As Roane watched and as the bird flew
higher, he could see still other sphexes moving up over the edge of the
plateau from a small erosion-defile here and another one there. The
Sere Plateau was alive with the hellish creatures. It was inconceivable
that there should be game enough for them to live on. They were visible
as herds of cattle would be visible on grazing planets.

It was simply impossible.

"Migrating," observed Huyghens. "I said they did. They're headed
somewhere. Do you know, I doubt that it would be healthy for us to try
to cross the plateau through such a swarm of sphexes?"

Roane swore, in abrupt change of mood.

"But the signal's still coming through! Somebody's alive over at the
robot colony! Must we wait till the migration's over?"

"We don't know," Huyghens pointed out, "that they'll stay alive. They
may need help badly. We have to get to them. But at the same time--"

He glanced at Sourdough Charley and Sitka Pete, clinging patiently to
the mountainside while the men rested and talked. Sitka had managed to
find a place to sit down, though one massive paw anchored him in his
place.

Huyghens waved his arm, pointing in a new direction.

"Let's go!" he called briskly. "Let's go! Yonder! Hup!"




                                  IV


They followed the slopes of the Sere Plateau, neither ascending to its
level top--where sphexes congregated--nor descending into the foothills
where sphexes assembled. They moved along hillsides and mountain-flanks
which sloped anywhere from thirty to sixty degrees, and they did not
cover much distance. They practically forgot what it was to walk on
level ground. Semper, the eagle, hovered overhead during the daytime,
not far away. He descended at nightfall for his food from the pack of
one of the bears.

"The bears aren't doing too well for food," said Huyghens dryly. "A ton
of bear needs a lot to eat. But they're loyal to us. Semper hasn't any
loyalty. He's too stupid. But he's been conditioned to think that he
can only eat what men feed him. The bears know better, but they stick
to us regardless. I rather like these bears."

It was the most self-evident of understatements. This was at an
encampment on the top of a massive boulder which projected from a
mountainous stony wall. This was six days from the start of their
journey. There was barely room on the boulder for all the party. And
Faro Nell fussily insisted that Nugget should be in the safest part,
which meant near the mountain-flank. She would have crowded the men
outward, but Nugget whimpered for Roane. Wherefore, when Roane moved
to comfort him, Faro Nell contentedly drew back and snorted at Sitka
and Sourdough and they made room for her near the edge.

It was a hungry camp. They had come upon tiny rills upon occasion,
flowing down the mountain side. Here the bears had drunk deeply and the
men had filled canteens. But this was the third night, and there had
been no game at all. Huyghens made no move to bring out food for Roane
or himself. Roane made no comment. He was beginning to participate in
the relationship between bears and men, which was not the slavery of
the bears but something more. It was two-way. He felt it.

"It would seem," he said fretfully, "that since the sphexes don't seem
to hunt on their way uphill, that there should be some game. They
ignore everything as they file uphill."

This was true enough. The normal fighting formation of sphexes was
line abreast, which automatically surrounded anything which offered
to flee and outflanked anything which offered fight. But here they
ascended the mountain in long lines, one after the other, following
apparently long-established trails. The wind blew along the slopes and
carried scent only sidewise. But the sphexes were not diverted from
their chosen paths. The long processions of hideous blue-and-tawny
creatures--it was hard to think of them as natural beasts, male and
female and laying eggs like reptiles on other planets--simply climbed.

"There've been other thousands of beasts before them," said Huyghens.
"They must have been crowding this way for days or even weeks. We've
seen tens of thousands in Semper's camera. They must be uncountable,
altogether. The first-comers ate all the game there was, and the
last-comers have something else on whatever they use for minds."

Roane protested:

"But so many carnivores in one place is impossible! I know they are
here, but they can't be!"

"They're cold-blooded," Huyghens pointed out. "They don't burn food
to sustain body-temperature. After all, lots of creatures go for
long periods without eating. Even bears hibernate. But this isn't
hibernation--or estivation, either."

He was setting up the radiation-wave receiver in the darkness. There
was no point in attempting a fix here. The transmitter was on the other
side of the Sere Plateau, which inexplicably swarmed with the most
ferocious and deadly of all the creatures of Loren Two. The men and
bears would commit suicide by crossing here.

But Huyghens turned on the receiver. There came the whispering,
scratchy sound of background-noise. Then the signal. Three dots, three
dashes, three dots. Three dots, three dashes, three dots. It went on
and on and on. Huyghens turned it off. Roane said:

"Shouldn't we have answered that signal before we left the station? To
encourage them?"

"I doubt they have a receiver," said Huyghens. "They won't expect an
answer for months, anyhow. They'd hardly listen all the time, and
if they're living in a mine-tunnel and trying to sneak out for food
to stretch their supplies--why, they'll be too busy to try to make
complicated recorders or relays."

Roane was silent for a moment or two.

"We've got to get food for the bears," he said presently. "Nugget's
weaned, and he's hungry."

"We will," Huyghens promised. "I may be wrong, but it seems to me that
the number of sphexes climbing the mountain is less than yesterday
and the day before. We may have just about crossed the path of their
migration. They're thinning out. When we're past their trail, we'll
have to look out for night-walkers and the like again. But I think they
wiped out all animal life on their migration-route."

       *       *       *       *       *

He was not quite right. He was waked in darkness by the sound of
slappings and the grunting of bears. Feather-light puffs of breeze beat
upon his face. He struck his belt-lamp sharply and the world was hidden
by a whitish film which snatched itself away. Something flapped. Then
he saw the stars and the emptiness on the edge of which they camped.
Then big white things flapped toward him.

Sitka Pete whuffed mightily and swatted. Faro Nell grunted and swung.
She caught something in her claws. She crunched. The light went off as
Huyghens realized. Then he said:

"Don't shoot, Roane!" He listened, and heard the sounds of feeding in
the dark. It ended. "Watch this!" said Huyghens.

The belt-light came on again. Something strangely-shaped and pallid
like human skin reeled and flapped crazily toward him. Something else.
Four. Five--ten--twenty--more....

A huge hairy paw reached up into the light-beam and snatched a flying
thing out of it. Another great paw. Huyghens shifted the light and the
three great Kodiaks were on their hind legs, swatting at creatures
which flittered insanely, unable to resist the fascination of the
glaring lamp. Because of their wild gyrations it was impossible to see
them in detail, but they were those unpleasant night-creatures which
looked like plucked flying monkeys but were actually something quite
different.

The bears did not snarl or snap. They swatted, with a remarkable air
of businesslike competence and purpose. Small mounds of broken things
built up about their feet.

Suddenly there were no more. Huyghens snapped off the light. The bears
crunched and fed busily in the darkness.

"Those things are carnivores _and_ blood-suckers, Roane," said
Huyghens calmly. "They drain their victims of blood like vampire
bats--they've some trick of not waking them--and when they're dead the
whole tribe eats. But bears have thick furs, and they wake when they're
touched. And they're omnivorous--they'll eat anything but sphexes, and
like it. You might say that those night-creatures came to lunch. But
they stayed. They are it--for the bears, who are living off the country
as usual."

Roane uttered a sudden exclamation. He made a tiny light, and blood
flowed down his hand. Huyghens passed over his pocket kit of antiseptic
and bandages. Roane stanched the bleeding and bound up his hand. Then
he realized that Nugget chewed on something. When he turned the light,
Nugget swallowed convulsively. It appeared that he had caught and
devoured the creature which had drawn blood from Roane. But Roane had
lost none to speak of, at that.

In the morning they started along the sloping scarp of the plateau once
more. During the morning, Roane said painfully:

"Robots wouldn't have handled those vampire-things, Huyghens."

"Oh, they could be built to watch for them," said Huyghens, tolerantly.
"But you'd have to swat for yourself. I prefer the bears."

He led the way on. Here their jungle-formation could not apply. On a
steep slope the bears ambled comfortably, the tough pads of their feet
holding fast on the slanting rock, but the men struggled painfully.
Twice Huyghens halted to examine the ground about the mountains' bases
through binoculars. He looked encouraged as they went on. The monstrous
peak which was like the bow of a ship at the end of the Sere Plateau
was visibly nearer. Toward midday, indeed, it looked high above the
horizon, no more than fifteen miles away. And at midday Huyghens called
a final halt.

"No more congregations of sphexes down below," he said cheerfully, "and
we haven't seen a climbing line of them in miles." The crossing of a
sphex-trail meant simply waiting until one party had passed, and then
crossing before another came in view. "I've a hunch we've crossed their
migration-route. Let's see what Semper tells us!"

He waved the eagle aloft. And Semper, like all creatures other than
men, normally functioned only for the satisfaction of his appetite, and
then tended to loaf or sleep. He had ridden the last few miles perched
on Sitka Pete's pack. Now he soared upward and Huyghens watched in the
small vision-plate.

Semper went soaring--and the image on the plate swayed and turned and
turned--and in minutes was above the plateau's edge. And here there was
some vegetation and the ground rolled somewhat, and there were even
patches of brush. But as Semper towered higher still, the inner desert
appeared. But nearby it was clear of beasts. Only once, when the eagle
banked sharply and the camera looked along the long dimension of the
plateau, did Huyghens see any sign of the blue-and-tan beasts. There
he saw what looked like masses amounting to herds. But, of course,
carnivores do not gather in herds.

"We go straight up," said Huyghens in satisfaction. "We cross the
plateau here--and we can edge down-wind a bit, even. I think we'll find
something interesting on our way to your robot colony."

He waved to the bears to go ahead uphill.

       *       *       *       *       *

They reached the top hours later--barely before sunset. And they saw
game. Not much, but game at the grassy, brushy border of the desert.
Huyghens brought down a shaggy ruminant which surely would not live on
a desert. When night fell there was an abrupt chill in the air. It was
much colder than night-temperatures on the slopes. The air was thin.
Roane thought confusedly and presently guessed at the cause. In the lee
of the prow-mountain the air was calm. There were no clouds. The ground
radiated its heat to empty space. It could be bitterly cold in the
nighttime, here.

"And hot by day," Huyghens agreed when he mentioned it. "The sunshine's
terrifically hot where the air is thin, but on most mountains there's
wind. By day, here, the ground will tend to heat up like the surface
of a planet without atmosphere. It may be a hundred and forty or fifty
degrees on the sand at midday. But it should be cold at night."

It was. Before midnight Huyghens built a fire. There could be no danger
of night-walkers where the temperature dropped to freezing.

In the morning the men were stiff with cold, but the bears snorted and
moved about briskly. They seemed to revel in the morning chill. Sitka
and Sourdough Charley, in fact, became festive and engaged in a mock
fight, whacking each other with blows that were only feigned, but would
have crushed in the skull of any man. Nugget sneezed with excitement as
he watched them. Faro Nell regarded them with female disapproval.

They went on. Semper seemed sluggish. After a single brief flight he
descended and rode on Sitka's pack, as on the previous day. He perched
there, surveying the landscape as it changed from semi-arid to pure
desert in their progress. His air was arrogant. But he would not fly.
Soaring birds do not like to fly when there are no winds to make
currents of which to take advantage. On the way, Huyghens painstakingly
pointed out to Roane exactly where they were on the enlarged photograph
taken from space, and the exact spot from which the distress-signal
seemed to come.

"You're doing it in case something happens to you," said Roane. "I
admit it's sense, but--what could I do to help those survivors even if
I got to them, without you?"

"What you've learned about sphexes would help," said Huyghens. "The
bears would help. And we left a note back at my station. Whoever
grounds at the landing field back there--and the beacon's working
again--will find instructions to come to the place we're trying to
reach."

Roane plodded alongside him. The narrow non-desert border of the Sere
Plateau was behind them, now. They marched across powdery desert sand.

"See here," said Roane, "I want to know something! You tell me you're
listed as a bear-thief on your home planet. You tell me it's a lie--to
protect your friends from prosecution by the Colonial Survey. You're on
your own, risking your life every minute of every day. You took a risk
in not shooting me. Now you're risking more in going to help men who'd
have to be witnesses that you were a criminal. What are you doing it
for?"

Huyghens grinned.

"Because I don't like robots. I don't like the fact that they're
subduing men--making men subordinate to them."

"Go on," insisted Roane. "I don't see why disliking robots should make
you a criminal. Nor men subordinating themselves to robots, either!"

"But they are," said Huyghens mildly. "I'm a crank, of course. But--I
live like a man on this planet. I go where I please and do what I
please. My helpers, the bears, are my friends. If the robot colony had
been a success, would the humans in it have lived like men? Hardly!
They'd have to live the way the robots let them! They'd have to stay
inside a fence the robots built. They'd have to eat foods that robots
could raise, and no others. Why--a man couldn't move his bed near a
window, because if he did the house-tending robots couldn't work!
Robots would serve them--the way the robots determined--but all they'd
get out of it would be jobs servicing the robots!"

Roane shook his head.

"As long as men want robot service, they have to take the service that
robots can give. If you don't want those services--"

"I want to decide what I want," said Huyghens, again mildly, "instead
of being limited to choose among what I'm offered. On my home planet
we halfway tamed it with dogs and guns. Then we developed the bears,
and we finished the job with them. Now there's population-pressure
and the room for bears and dogs--and men--is dwindling. More and more
people are being deprived of the power of decision, and being allowed
only the power of choice among the things robots allow. The more we
depend on robots, the more limited those choices become. We don't want
our children to limit themselves to wanting what robots can provide!
We don't want them shriveling to where they abandon everything robots
can't give--or won't! We want them to be men--and women. Not damned
automatons who live _by_ pushing robot-controls so they can live _to_
push robot-controls. If that's not subordination to robots--"

"It's an emotional argument," protested Roane. "Not everybody feels
that way."

"But I feel that way," said Huyghens. "And so do a lot of others. This
is a big galaxy and it's apt to contain some surprises. The one sure
thing about a robot and a man who depends on them is that they can't
handle the unexpected. There's going to come a time when we need men
who can. So on my home planet, some of us asked for Loren Two, to
colonize. It was refused--too dangerous. But men can colonize anywhere
if they're men. So I came here to study the planet. Especially the
sphexes. Eventually, we expected to ask for a license again, with proof
that we could handle even those beasts. I'm already doing it in a mild
way. But the Survey licensed a robot colony--and where is it?"

Roane made a sour face.

"You picked the wrong way to go about it, Huyghens. It was illegal. It
is. It was the pioneer spirit, which is admirable enough, but wrongly
directed. After all, it was pioneers who left Earth for the stars.
But--"

       *       *       *       *       *

Sourdough raised up on his hind legs and sniffed the air. Huyghens
swung his rifle around to be handy. Roane slipped off the safety-catch
of his own. Nothing happened.

"In a way," said Roane vexedly, "you're talking about liberty and
freedom, which most people think is politics. You say it can be more.
In principle, I'll concede it. But the way you put it, it sounds like a
freak religion."

"It's self-respect," corrected Huyghens.

"You may be--"

Faro Nell growled. She bumped Nugget with her nose, to drive him closer
to Roane. She snorted at him. She trotted swiftly to where Sitka and
Sourdough faced toward the broader, sphex-filled expanse of the Sere
Plateau. She took up her position between them.

Huyghens gazed sharply beyond them and then all about.

"This could be bad!" he said softly. "But luckily there's no wind.
Here's a sort of hill. Come along, Roane!"

He ran ahead, Roane following and Nugget plumping heavily with him.
They reached the raised place--actually a mere hillock no more
than five or six feet above the surrounding sand, with a distorted
cactuslike growth protruding from the ground. Huyghens stared again. He
used his binoculars.

"One sphex," he said curtly. "Just one! And it's out of all reason
for a sphex to be alone! But it's not rational for them to gather in
hundreds of thousands, either!" He wetted his finger and held it up.
"No wind at all."

He used the binoculars again.

"It doesn't know we're here," he added. "It's moving away. Not another
one in sight--" He hesitated, biting his lips. "Look here, Roane! I'd
like to kill that one lone sphex and find out something. There's a
fifty per cent chance I could find out something really important.
But--I might have to run. If I'm right--" Then he said grimly, "It'll
have to be done quickly. I'm going to ride Faro Nell--for speed. I
doubt Sitka or Sourdough would stay behind. But Nugget can't run fast
enough. Will you stay here with him?"

Roane drew in his breath. Then he said calmly:

"You know what you're doing. Of course."

"Keep your eyes open. If you see anything, even at a distance, shoot
and we'll be back--fast! Don't wait until something's close enough to
hit. Shoot the instant you see anything--if you do!"

Roane nodded. He found it peculiarly difficult to speak again. Huyghens
went over to the embattled bears. He climbed up on Faro Nell's back,
holding fast by her shaggy fur.

"Let's go!" he snapped. "That way! Hup!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The three Kodiaks plunged away at a dead run, Huyghens lurching and
swaying on Faro Nell's back. The sudden rush dislodged Semper from his
perch. He flapped wildly and got aloft. Then he followed effortfully,
flying low.

It happened very quickly. A Kodiak bear can travel as fast as a race
horse on occasion. These three plunged arrow-straight for a spot
perhaps half a mile distant, where a blue-and-tawny shape whirled to
face them. There was the crash of Huyghens' weapon from where he rode
on Faro Nell's back--the explosion of the weapon and the bullet was one
sound. The somehow unnatural spiky monster leaped and died.

Huyghens jumped down from Faro Nell. He became feverishly busy at
something on the ground--where the parti-colored sphex had fallen.
Semper banked and whirled and came down to the ground. He watched, with
his head on one side.

Roane stared, from a distance. Huyghens was doing something to the
dead sphex. The two male bears prowled about. Faro Nell regarded
Huyghens with intense curiosity. Back at the hillock, Nugget whimpered
a little. Roane patted him roughly. Nugget whimpered more loudly. In
the distance, Huyghens straightened up and took three steps toward Faro
Nell. He mounted. Sitka turned his head back toward Roane. He seemed
to see or sniff something dubious. He reared upward. He made a noise,
apparently, because Sourdough ambled to his side. The two great beasts
began to trot back. Semper flapped wildly and--lacking wind--lurched
crazily in the air. He landed on Huyghens' shoulder and his talons
clung there.

Then Nugget howled hysterically and tried to swarm up Roane, as a cub
tries to swarm up the nearest tree in time of danger. Roane collapsed,
and the cub upon him--and there was a flash of stinking scaly hide,
while the air was filled with the snarling, spitting squeals of a sphex
in full leap. The beast had over-jumped, aiming at Roane and the cub
while both were upright and arriving when they had fallen. It went
tumbling.

Roane heard nothing but the fiendish squalling, but in the distance
Sitka and Sourdough were coming at rocketship speed. Faro Nell let
out a roar and fairly split the air. And then there was a furry
cub streaking toward her, bawling, while Roane rolled to his feet
and snatched up his gun. He raged through pure instinct. The sphex
crouched to pursue the cub and Roane swung his weapon as a club. He was
literally too close to shoot--and perhaps the sphex had only seen the
fleeing bear-cub. But he swung furiously.

And the sphex whirled. Roane was toppled from his feet. An
eight-hundred-pound monstrosity straight out of hell--half wildcat and
half spitting cobra with hydrophobia and homicidal mania added--such a
monstrosity is not to be withstood when in whirling its body strikes
one in the chest.

That was when Sitka arrived, bellowing. He stood on his hind legs,
emitting roars like thunder, challenging the sphex to battle. He
waddled forward. Huyghens arrived, but he could not shoot with Roane
in the sphere of an explosive bullet's destructiveness. Faro Nell
raged and snarled, torn between the urge to be sure that Nugget was
unharmed, and the frenzied fury of a mother whose offspring has been
endangered.

Mounted on Faro Nell, with Semper clinging idiotically to his shoulder,
Huyghens watched helplessly as the sphex spat and squalled at Sitka,
having only to reach out one claw to let out Roane's life.




                                   V


They got away from there, though Sitka seemed to want to lift the
limp carcass of his victim in his teeth and dash it repeatedly to
the ground. He seemed doubly raging because a man--with whom all
Kodius Champion's descendants had an emotional relationship--had
been mishandled. But Roane was not grievously hurt. He bounced and
swore as the bears raced for the horizon. Huyghens had flung him up
on Sourdough's pack and snapped for him to hold on. He bumped and
chattered furiously:

"Dammit, Huyghens! This isn't right! Sitka got some deep scratches!
That horror's claws may be poisonous!"

But Huyghens snapped, "Hup! Hup!" to the bears, and they continued
their race against time. They went on for a good two miles, when Nugget
wailed despairingly of his exhaustion and Faro Nell halted firmly to
nuzzle him.

"This may be good enough," said Huyghens. "Considering that there's
no wind and the big mass of beasts is down the plateau and there were
only those two around here. Maybe they're too busy to hold a wake,
even! Anyhow--"

He slid to the ground and extracted the antiseptic and swabs.

"Sitka first," snapped Roane. "I'm all right!"

Huyghens swabbed the big bear's wounds. They were trivial, because
Sitka Pete was an experienced sphex-fighter. Then Roane grudgingly let
the curiously-smelling stuff--it reeked of ozone--be applied to the
slashes on his chest. He held his breath as it stung. Then he said
dourly:

"It was my fault, Huyghens. I watched you instead of the landscape. I
couldn't imagine what you were doing."

"I was doing a quick dissection," Huyghens told him. "By luck, that
first sphex was a female, as I hoped. And she was just about to lay her
eggs. Ugh! And now I know why the sphexes migrate, and where, and how
it is that they don't need game up here."

He slapped a quick bandage on Roane. He led the way eastward, still
putting distance between the dead sphexes and his party. It was a crisp
walk, only, but Semper flapped indignantly overhead, angry that he was
not permitted to ride again.

"I'd dissected them before," said Huyghens. "Not enough's been known
about them. Some things needed to be found out if men were ever to be
able to live here."

"With bears?" asked Roane ironically.

"Oh, yes," said Huyghens. "But the point is that sphexes come to the
desert here to breed--to mate and lay their eggs for the sun to hatch.
It's a particular place. Seals return to a special place to mate--and
the males, at least don't eat for weeks on end. Salmon return to their
native streams to spawn. They don't eat, and they die afterward. And
eels--I'm using Earth examples, Roane--travel some thousands of miles
to the Sargasso to mate and die. Unfortunately, sphexes don't appear to
die, but it's clear that they have an ancestral breeding place and that
they come here to the Sere Plateau to deposit their eggs!"

Roane plodded onward. He was angry: angry with himself because he
hadn't taken elementary precautions; because he'd felt too safe, as a
man in a robot-served civilization forms the habit of doing; because
he hadn't used his brain when Nugget whimpered, in even a bear-cub's
awareness that danger was near.

"And now," Huyghens added, "I need some equipment that the robot colony
had. With it, I think we can make a start toward making this a planet
that men can live like men on!"

Roane blinked.

"What's that?"

"Equipment," said Huyghens impatiently. "It'll be at the robot colony.
Robots were useless because they wouldn't pay attention to sphexes.
They'd still be. But take out the robot-controls and the machines will
do! They shouldn't be ruined by a few months' exposure to weather!"

Roane marched on and on. Presently he said:

"I never thought you'd want anything that came from that colony,
Huyghens!"

"Why not?" demanded Huyghens impatiently. "When men make machines do
what they want, that's all right. Even robots--when they're where they
belong. But men will have to handle flame-casters in the job I want
them for. There have to be some, because there was a hundred-mile
clearing to be burned off. And Earth-sterilizers--intended to kill the
seeds of any plants that robots couldn't handle. We'll come back up
here, Roane, and at the least we'll destroy the spawn of these infernal
beasts! If we can't do more than that--just doing that every year will
wipe out the race in time. There are probably other hordes than this,
with other breeding places. But we'll find them, too. We'll make this
planet into a place where men from my world can come--and still be men!"

Roane said sardonically:

"It was sphexes that beat the robots. Are you sure you aren't planning
to make this world safe for robots?"

Huyghens laughed shortly.

"You've only seen one night-walker," he said. "And how about those
things on the mountain-slope--which would have drained you of blood and
then feasted? Would you care to wander about this planet with only a
robot bodyguard, Roane? Hardly! Men can't live on this planet with only
robots to help them--and stop them from being fully men! You'll see!"

       *       *       *       *       *

They found the colony after only ten days more of travel and after many
sphexes and more than a few staglike creatures and shaggy ruminants
had fallen to their weapons and the bears. But first they found the
survivors of the colony.

There were three of them, hard-bitten and bearded and deeply
embittered. When the electrified fence went down, two of them were away
at a mine-tunnel, installing a new control-panel for the robots who
worked in it. The third was in charge of the mining operation. They
were alarmed by the stopping of communication with the colony and went
back in a tank-truck to find out what had happened, and only the fact
that they were unarmed saved them. They found sphexes prowling and
caterwauling about the fallen colony, in numbers they still did not
wholly believe. And the sphexes smelled men inside the armored vehicle,
but couldn't break in. In turn, the men couldn't kill them, or they'd
have been trailed to the mine and besieged there for as long as they
could kill an occasional monster.

The survivors stopped all mining--of course--and tried to use
remote-controlled robots for revenge and to get supplies for them.
Their mining-robots were not designed for either task. And they had no
weapons. They improvised miniature throwers of burning rocket-fuel,
and they sent occasional prowling sphexes away screaming with scorched
hides. But this was useful only because it did not kill the beasts.
And it cost fuel. In the end they barricaded themselves and used the
fuel only to keep a spark-signal going against the day when another
ship came to seek the colony. They stayed in the mine as in a prison,
on short rations, waiting without real hope. For diversion they could
only contemplate the mining-robots they could not spare fuel to run and
which could not do anything but mine.

When Huyghens and Roane reached them, they wept. They hated robots and
all things robotic only a little less than they hated sphexes. But
Huyghens explained, and armed them with weapons from the packs of the
bears, and they marched to the dead colony with the male Kodiaks as
point and advance-guard, and with Faro Nell bringing up the rear. They
killed sixteen sphexes on the way. In the now overgrown clearing there
were four more. In the shelters of the colony they found only foulness
and the fragments of what had been men. But there was some food--not
much, because the sphexes clawed at anything that smelled of men, and
had ruined the plastic packets of radiation-sterilized food. But there
were some supplies in metal containers which were not destroyed.

And there was fuel, which men could dispense when they got to the
control-panels of the equipment. There were robots everywhere, bright
and shining and ready for operation, but immobile, with plants growing
up around and over them.

They ignored those robots. But lustfully they fueled tracked
flame-casters--adapting them to human rather than robot operation--and
the giant soil-sterilizer which had been built to destroy vegetation
that robots could not be made to weed out or cultivate. And they headed
back for the Sere Plateau, burning-eyed and filled with hate.

But Nugget became a badly spoiled bear-cub, because the freed men
approved passionately of anything that would even grow up to kill
sphexes. They petted him to excess, when they camped.

And they reached the plateau by a sphex-trail to the top. And Semper
scouted for sphexes, and the giant Kodiaks disturbed them and the
sphexes came squalling and spitting to destroy them--and while Roane
and Huyghens fired steadily, the great machines swept up with their
special weapons. The Earth-sterilizer, it was found, was deadly against
animal life as well as seeds, when its diathermic beam was raised and
aimed. But it had to be handled by a man. No robot could decide just
when it was to be used, and against what target.

Presently the bears were not needed, because the scorched corpses
of sphexes drew live ones from all parts of the plateau even in
the absence of noticeable breezes. The official business of the
sphexes was presumably finished, but they came to caterwaul and seek
vengeance--which they did not find. Presently the survivors of the
robot colony drove machines--as men needed to do, here--in great
circles around the hugest heap of slaughtered fiends, destroying new
arrivals as they came. It was such a killing as men had never before
made on any planet, but there would not be many left of the sphex-horde
which had bred in this particular patch of desert. There might be other
hordes elsewhere, and other breeding places, but the normal territory
of this mass of monsters would see few of them this year.

Or next year, either. Because the soil-sterilizer would go over the
dug-up sand where the sphex-spawn lay hidden for the sun to hatch. And
the sun would never hatch them.

But Huyghens and Roane, by that time, were camped on the edge of
the plateau with the Kodiaks. They were technically upwind from the
scene of slaughter--and somehow it seemed more befitting for the men
of the robot colony to conduct it. After all, it was those men whose
companions had been killed.

       *       *       *       *       *

There came an evening when Huyghens amiably cuffed Nugget away from
where he sniffed too urgently at a stag-steak cooking on the campfire.
Nugget ambled dolefully behind the protecting form of Roane and
sniveled.

"Huyghens," said Roane painfully, "we've got to come to a settlement of
our affairs. I'm a Colonial Survey officer. You're an illegal colonist.
It's my duty to arrest you."

Huyghens regarded him with interest.

"Will you offer me lenience if I tell on my confederates," he asked
mildly, "or may I plead that I can't be forced to testify against
myself?"

Roane said vexedly:

"It's irritating! I've been an honest man all my life, but--I don't
believe in robots as I did, except in their place. And their place
isn't here. Not as the robot colony was planned, anyhow. The sphexes
are nearly wiped out, but they won't be extinct and robots can't handle
them. Bears and men will have to live here or--the people who do will
have to spend their lives behind sphex-proof fences, accepting only
what robots can give them. And there's much too much on this planet for
people to miss it! To live in a robot-managed controlled environment on
a planet like Loren Two wouldn't ... it wouldn't be self-respecting!"

"You wouldn't be getting religious, would you?" asked Huyghens dryly.
"That was your term for self-respect before."

Semper, the eagle, squawked indignantly as Sitka Pete almost stepped on
him, approaching the fire. Sitka Pete sniffed, and Huyghens spoke to
him sharply, and he sat down with a thump. He remained sitting in an
untidy lump, looking at the steak and drooling.

"You don't let me finish!" protested Roane querulously. "I'm a Colonial
Survey officer, and it's my job to pass on the work that's done on a
planet before any but the first-landed colonists may come there to
live. And of course to see that specifications are followed. Now--the
robot colony I was sent to survey was practically destroyed. As
designed, it wouldn't work. It couldn't survive."

Huyghens grunted. Night was falling. He turned the meat over the fire.

"Now, in emergencies," said Roane carefully, "colonists have the right
to call on any passing ship for aid. Naturally! So--I've always been
an honest man before, Huyghens--my report will be that the colony as
designed was impractical, and that it was overwhelmed and destroyed
except for three survivors who holed up and signaled for help. They
did, you know!"

"Go on," grunted Huyghens.

"So," said Roane querulously, "it just happened--just happened,
mind you--that a ship with you and Sitka and Sourdough and Faro
Nell on board--and Nugget and Semper, too, of course--picked up the
distress-call. So you landed to help the colonists. And you did. That's
the story. Therefore it isn't illegal for you to be here. It was only
illegal for you to be here when you weren't needed. But we'll pretend
you weren't."

Huyghens glanced over his shoulder in the deepening night. He said
calmly:

"I wouldn't believe that if I told it myself. Do you think the Survey
will?"

"They're not fools," said Roane tartly. "Of course they won't! But when
my report says that because of this unlikely series of events it is
practical to colonize the planet, whereas before it wasn't--and when
my report proves that a robot colony alone is stark nonsense, but that
with bears and men from your world added, so many thousand colonists
can be received per year--And when that much is true, anyhow--"

Huyghens seemed to shake a little as a dark silhouette against the
flames. A little way off, Sourdough sniffed the air hopefully. With a
bright light like the fire, presently naked-looking flying things might
appear to be slapped down out of the air. They were succulent--to a
bear.

"My reports carry weight," insisted Roane. "The deal will be offered,
anyhow! The robot colony organizers will have to agree or they'll have
to fold up. It's true! And your people can hold them up for nearly what
terms they choose."

Huyghens' shaking became understandable. It was laughter.

"You're a lousy liar, Roane," he said, chuckling. "Isn't it
unintelligent and unreasonable and irrational to throw away a lifetime
of honesty just to get me out of a jam? You're not acting like a
rational animal, Roane. But I thought you wouldn't, when it came to the
point."

Roane squirmed.

"That's the only solution I can think of. But it'll work."

"I accept it," said Huyghens, grinning. "With thanks. If only
because it means another few generations of men living like men on
a planet that is going to take a lot of taming. And--if you want to
know--because it keeps Sourdough and Sitka and Nell and Nugget from
being killed because I brought them here illegally."

Something pressed hard against Roane. Nugget, the cub, pushed urgently
against him in his desire to get closer to the fragrantly cooking meat.
He edged forward. Roane toppled from where he squatted on the ground.
He sprawled. Nugget sniffed luxuriously.

"Slap him," said Huyghens. "He'll move back."

"I won't!" said Roane indignantly from where he lay. "I won't do it!
He's my friend!"

                                THE END



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