Blood's a Rover Page 2

  “Lang here,” he told the Fleetman. “Kindly point that thing the other way.”

  “Identification, please.”

  Lang sighed and handed it over. The man should know him by now; after all, the ship was on his mission, and he was hardly a subversive character. Still, orders were orders—a principle that covered a multitude of sins. And they couldn’t afford to take chances, not any chances.

  “All right, sir,” the Fleetman said, returning the identification. “Sorry to bother you.”

  “Forget it,” said Conan Lang. “Keep your eye peeled for space pirates.”

  The guard smiled. “Who’d want to steal space, sir?” he asked. “It’s free and I reckon there’s enough to go around.”

  “Your inning,” acknowledged Conan Lang, moving into the afterhold. The kid was already there.

  “Hello, sir,” said Andrew Irvin.

  “Hi, Andy—and cut the ‘sir,’ what do you say? You make me feel like I should be extinct or embalmed or something.”

  The kid smiled almost shyly. Conan Lang had half expected to find him there in the hold; Andy was always poking around, asking questions, trying to learn. His quick brown eyes and alert carriage reminded Conan of a young hunting dog, frisking through the brush, perpetually on the verge of flushing the grandfather of all jack rabbits.

  “It doesn’t seem possible, does it?” asked the kid.

  Conan Lang raised his eyebrows.

  “All this, I mean,” Andy Irvin said, gesturing at the neat brown sacks stacked row upon row in the brightly lighted hold. “To think that a couple of sacks of that stuff can remold a planet, change the lives of millions of people—”

  “It’s not just the sacks, Andy. It took man a good many hundreds of thousands of years to learn what to do with those sacks.”

  “Yes, sir,” the kid said, hanging on every word.

  “No ‘sir,’ remember? I’m not giving you a lecture, and you don’t have to look attentive. I’m sure that elementary anthropology isn’t too dumfounding to a guy who took honors at the Academy.”

  “Well—”

  “Never mind.” Conan Lang eyed him speculatively. The kid reminded him, almost too much, of someone else—a kid named Conan Lang who had started out on a great adventure himself too many years ago. “I… um-m-m… guess you know you’re going to work with me on Ten.”

  Andy looked like Conan had just handed him a harem on a silver platter. “No, sir,” he said. “I didn’t know. Thank you, sir.”

  “The name is Conan.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hellfire,” said Conan Lang. How did you go about telling a kid that you were happy to have someone around with stars in his eyes again? Without sounding like a fool? The answer was simple—you didn’t.

  “I can’t wait,” Andy said. “To really do something at last—it’s a great feeling. I hope I’ll do O.K.”

  “It won’t be long now, Andy. Twenty-four hours from now you and I go to work. The buggy ride is about over.”

  The two men fell silent then, looking at the neat brown rows of sacks, feeling the star ship tremble slightly under them with the thunder of her great atomics.

  It was night on Sirius Ten—a hot, humid night with a single moon hanging like frozen fire in the darkness. A small patrol craft from the cruiser floated motionless in the night sky, her batteries pouring down a protective screen around the newly-cleared field. Conan Lang wiped the sweat from his forehead and washed his hands off in the clean river water that gurgled through the trench at his feet.

  “That about does it, Andy,” he said wearily. “Toss ’em a Four signal.”

  Andy Irvin turned the rheostat on his small control board to Four and flipped the switch. They waited, listening to the faint murmur of the night breeze off the river. There was no change, nothing that they could see, but they could almost feel the intense radiation pounding into the field from the patrol ship, seeping into the ground, accelerating by thousands of times the growth factor in the seeds.

  “That’s got it,” said Conan Lang. “Give ’em release.”

  Andy shot the patrol craft the release signal and shut off his control board. The little ship seemed to hover uncertainly. There was a humming sound and a spot of intense white light in the sky. That was all. The ship was gone and they were alone.

  “It’s been a long night, kid,” yawned Conan Lang. “We’d better get some sack time—we’re liable to need it before morning.”

  “You go ahead,” Andy Irvin said. “I’m not sleepy; the sunrise here ought to be something.”

  “Yeah,” said Conan Lang. “The sunrise ought to be something.”

  He walked across the field and entered a structure that closely resembled a native hut in appearance but was actually quite, quite different. Too tired even to undress, he piled into bed with his clothes on and rested quietly in the darkness.

  The strange, haunting, familiar-with-a-difference sounds of an alien world whispered around the hut on the soft, moist breeze from the sluggish river. Far away, an animal screamed hoarsely in the clogging brush. Conan Lang kept his eyes closed and tried not to think, but his mind ignored him. It went right on working, asking questions, demanding answers, bringing up into the light many memories that were good and some that were better forgotten.

  “Kit,” he said, very softly.

  Tired as he was, he knew there would be no sleep for him that night.

  The sunrise was a glory. The blue-white inferno of Sirius hung in the treetops across the field and then climbed into the morning sky, her white dwarf companion a smaller sun by her side. The low cumulus clouds were edged with flame—fiery red, pale blue, cool green. The fresh morning winds washed the field with air and already the young plants were out of the ground, thirsty for the sun. The chuckling water in the trenches sparkled in the light.

  With the morning, the natives came.

  “They’re all around us,” Conan Lang said quietly.

  “I can’t see them,” whispered Andy Irvin, looking at the brush.

  “They’re there.”

  “Do you… expect trouble, sir?”

  “Not yet, assuming we’ve got this deal figured right. They’re more afraid of us than we are of them.”

  “What if we don’t have it figured right?”

  Conan Lang smiled. “Three guesses,” he said.

  The kid managed a wry grin. He was taking it well, Lang thought. He remembered how he’d felt the first time. It didn’t really hit you until that first day, and then it upped and kicked you in the teeth. Quite suddenly, it was all a very different proposition from the manuals and the viewers and the classrooms of the Academy. Just you, all alone, the alien breeze sighed in your ear. You’re all alone in the middle of nowhere, the wind whispered through the trees. Our eyes are watching you, our world is pressing you back, waiting. What do you know of us really? What good is your knowledge now?

  “What next?” Andy asked.

  “Just tend the field, kid. And try to act like a ghost. You’re an ancestor of those people watching us from the brush, remember. If we’ve got this figured wrong—if those survey reports were haywire somewhere, or if someone’s been through here who didn’t belong—you should have a little warning at least. They don’t use blowguns or anything—just spears, and they’d prefer a hatchet. If there’s trouble, you hightail it back to the hut at once and man the projector. That’s all.”

  “I’m not so sure I care to be an ancestor,” Andy Irvin muttered, picking up his hoe. “Not yet, anyhow.” He moved off along a water trench, checking on the plants.

  Conan Lang picked up his own hoe and set to work. He could feel the natives watching him, wondering, whispering to themselves. But he was careful not to look around him. He kept his head down and dug at the plants with his hoe, clearing the water channels. The plants were growing with astonishing rapidity, thanks to the dose of radiation. They should be mature in a week. And then—

  The sun blazed down on his treated
skin and the sweat rolled off his body in tiny rivulets. The field was strangely silent around him; there was only the gurgle of the water and the soft sigh of the humid breeze. His hoe chopped and slushed at the mud and his back was tired from bending over so long. It was too still, unnaturally still.

  Behind that brush, back in the trees—a thousand eyes.

  He did not look around. Step by step, he moved down the trench, under the hellish sun, working with his hoe.

  The fire-burned days and the still, hushed nights alternated rapidly. On the morning of the third day, Andy Irvin found what they had been waiting for.

  In the far corner of the field, placed on a rude wood platform about four feet high, there were three objects. There was a five-foot-square bark mat, neatly woven. There was a small animal that closely resembled a terrestrial pig, face down, its throat neatly slashed. And there was a child. It was a female baby, evidently not over a week old. It had been strangled to death.

  “It’s… different… when you see it for yourself,” Andy said quietly, visibly shaken.

  “You’ll get used to it,” said Conan Lang, his voice purposely flat and matter-of-fact. “Get the pig and the mat—and stop looking like a prohibitionist who just found a jug of joy water in the freezer. This is old stuff to ancestors.”

  “Old stuff,” repeated Andy without conviction.

  They carried the contents of the platform back to their hut and Conan Lang wrapped the body of the child in a cloth.

  “We’ll bury her tonight after dark,” he said. “The pig we eat. It won’t do any harm to sit on the mat where they can see us while we’re eating it, either.”

  “Well,” Andy muttered. “Glad to see you’re not going to eat the baby, too.”

  “You never can tell,” smiled Conan Lang. “We anthropologists are all crazy, or hadn’t you heard?”

  “I’ve heard,” agreed Andy Irvin, getting his nerves under control again. “Where’s the hot sauce?”

  Conan Lang stepped back outside and picked up his hoe. The blazing double sun had already produced shimmering heat waves that danced like live things in the still air over the green field. The kid was going to be all right. He’d known it all along, of course—but you could never be sure of a man until you worked with him under field conditions. And a misfit, an unstable personality, was anything but a joke on an alien planet where unknowable forces hung in the balance.

  “Let’s see if I’ve got this thing figured straight,” Andy said, puffing away on one of Conan’s pipes. “The natives are afraid of us, and still they feel that they must make us an offering because we, as their supposed ancestors, control their lives. So they pick a system of dumb barter rather than sending out the usual contact man to ferret out kinship connections.”

  “You’re O.K. so far,” Conan Lang said. “I guess you’ve studied about the dumb barter systems used on Earth in the old days; it was used whenever trade took place between groups of markedly unequal strength, such as the African pygmies and trading vessels from the west. There’s a fear factor involved.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Forget the ‘sir.’ I didn’t mean to lecture. I think I’ll start calling you Junior.”

  “Sorry. The bark mat is a unit in a reciprocal trade system and the pig is a sacred animal—I get that part of it. But the baby—that’s terrible, Conan. After all, we caused that death in a way—”

  “Afraid not,” Conan Lang corrected him. “These people practice infanticide; it’s part of their religion. If the preliminary reports were correct—and they’ve checked out so far—they kill all the female children born on the last three days of alternate months. There’s an economic reason, too—not enough food to go around, and that’s a pretty effective method of birth control. The baby would have been killed regardless—we had nothing to do with it.”

  “Still—”

  “I know. But maybe she was the lucky one after all.”

  “I don’t quite follow you there.”

  “Skip it—you’ll find out soon enough.”

  “What are you going to leave them tonight?”

  “Not sure yet,” Conan Lang said. “We’ll have to integrate with their value system, of course. We brought some mats, and I guess a good steel knife won’t hurt things any. We’ll worry about that later. Come on, farmer—back to work.”

  Andy Irvin picked up his hoe and followed Conan Lang into the field. The clear water bubbled softly as it flowed through the trenches. The growing plants sent their roots thirstily into the ground and the fresh green shoots stretched up like tentacles into the humid air of Sirius Ten.

  That night, under the great yellow moon that swam far away and lonesome among the stars, they placed exchange gifts of their own on the platform. Next morning, the invisible traders had replaced them with four mats and another dead pig.

  “No babies, anyhow,” Andy Irvin said, puffing industriously on one of Conan’s pipes. They had decided that cigarettes, as an unfamiliar cultural trait to the natives, were out. Now, with Andy taking with unholy enthusiasm to pipe smoking, Conan Lang was threatened with a shortage of tobacco. He watched the smoke from the kid’s pipe with something less than ecstasy.

  “We can have smoked ham,” he observed.

  “It was your idea,” Andy grinned.

  “Call me ‘sir.’ ”

  Andy laughed, relaxed now, and picked up the pig. Conan gathered up the somewhat cumbersome mats and followed him back into the hut. The hot, close sun was already burning his shoulders. The plants were green and healthy looking, and the air was a trifle fresher in the growing field.

  “Now what?” Andy asked, standing outside the hut and letting the faint breeze cool him off as best it could.

  “I figure we’re about ready for an overt contact,” Conan Lang said. “Everything has checked out beautifully so far, and the natives don’t seem to be suspicious or hostile. We might as well get the ball rolling.”

  “The green branch, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  They still did not get a glimpse of the natives throughout the steaming day, and that night they placed a single mat on the platform. On top of the mat they put a slim branch of green leaves, twisted around back on itself and tied loosely to form a circle. The green branch was by no means a universal symbol of peace, but, in this particular form, it chanced to be so on Sirius Ten. Conan Lang smiled a little. Man had found many curious things among the stars, and most of them were of just this unsensational but very useful sort.

  By dawn, the mat and the circle branch were gone and the natives had left them nothing in return.

  “Today’s the day,” Conan Lang said, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “They’ll either give us the works or accept our offer. Nothing to do now but wait.”

  They picked up their hoes and went back into the field. Waiting can be the most difficult of all things, and the long, hot morning passed without incident. The two men ate their lunch in silence, thankful for the odorless injection that kept the swarming insects away from them. Late in the afternoon, when the long blue shadows of evening were already touching the green plants and the clean, flowing water, the natives came.

  There were five of them and they appeared to be unarmed. One man walked slightly in advance of the others, a circular branch of green leaves in his hand. Conan Lang waited for them, with Andy standing by at his side. It was moments like this, he thought, that made you suddenly realize that you were all alone and a long, long way from friends. The natives came on steadily. Conan felt a surge of admiration for the young man who led them. From his point of view, he was walking into a situation filled with the terror of the supernatural, which was a very real part of his life. His steps did not falter. He would, Conan supposed, be the eldest son of the most powerful chief.

  The natives stopped when they were three paces away. Their leader extended the circular green branch. “We would serve you, fathers from the mountains,” the native said in his own tongue.

&nbsp
; Conan Lang stepped forward and received the branch. “We are brothers,” he replied in the same language, “and we would be your friends.”

  The native smiled, his teeth very white. “I am Ren,” he said. “I am your brother.”

  Conan Lang kept his face expressionless, but deep within him a dark regret and sadness coursed like ice through his veins.

  It had begun again.

  III.

  For many days, Conan Lang listened to the Oripesh natives preparing for the feast. Their small village, only a quarter of a mile from the field, was alive with excitement. The women prepared great piles of the staple rice-fruit and broiled river fish in great green leaves on hot coals. The men chanted and danced interminably, cleansing the village by ritual for the coming visitation, while the children, forgotten for once, played on the banks of the river. On the appointed day, Conan Lang walked into the village with Andy Irvin at his side.

  It was a crude village, necessarily so because of its transient nature. But it was not dirty. The natives watched the two men with awe, but they did not seem unfriendly. The supernatural was for them always just on the other side of the hill, hidden in the night, and now it was among them, in the open. That was all. And what, after all, thought Conan Lang, could have seemed more supernatural to them than a silver ship that dropped out of the stars? What was supernatural depended on one’s point of view—and on how much one happened to know about what was natural.

  The box he carried was heavy, and it took both arms to handle it. He watched Andy puffing at his side and smiled.

  “Stick with it, kid,” he said, walking steadily through the watching natives. “You may earn your pay yet.”

  Andy muttered something under his breath and blinked to get the sweat out of his eyes.

  When they reached the clearing in the center of the village, they stopped and put their boxes down. Ren, the eldest son of the chief Ra Renne, approached them at once and offered them a drink from a large wooden bowl. Conan drank and passed the container on to Andy, who grinned broadly and took a long swallow of the warm fluid. It was sweet, although not too sweet, and it burned pleasantly on the way down. It was, Conan decided instantly, a great improvement over some native fermented horrors he had been subjected to in times past.