Three Survived: A Science Fiction Novel Page 6

  Dombey spoke calmly. He didn’t seem to have any doubts that he was right. He didn’t look very impressed with himself, either, for having guessed that deadly beasts were nearby. But how had he known it would be dangerous to stay on the path?

  Another wild hunch that wasn’t so wild?

  Could be, Rand thought. Whatever the reason, Dombey’s hunches had saved them twice today from death in the jungle. The other time his hunch hadn’t been right. But it hadn’t been wrong by much, for the wolf-beasts had showed up right after lunch.

  Dombey said, “I think you better let me walk first, boss. I think you better let me be the one to say when we stop, when we go on.”

  “What you’re saying is, you want to take charge.”

  “That’s right, boss.”

  It hurt Rand’s pride to be pushed aside like this. He had been calling the shots up till now, ever since they first boarded the lifeship. And he thought he had done a pretty good job.

  But now they were in the jungle. And Dombey seemed to understand the jungle, in some weird way. Maybe he didn’t have much of an education, but book-learning didn’t count for much here.

  Dombey knew the jungle the way Rand knew machinery and electronic gear.

  Maybe Dombey deserves to be running the expedition, from here on in, Rand thought.

  It was a little like putting a child in charge. An overgrown child. A child who might just be the best leader in this jungle, though.

  Rand knew he didn’t have much choice, anyway. Dombey had the muscle to take over, whether Rand liked it or not. He had just shown that, back by the path. The smart thing to do was to give in gracefully.

  “All right, Dombey. You’re the top man, now,” Rand said. “You lead the way. Get us to the beacon.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  “You better not call me boss any more. You’re the boss now.”

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

  Dombey turned and looked through the thick underbrush. Without glancing back, he signaled to Rand and Leswick with his hand.

  “Come on,” he called. “Animals are gone. Back to the path, now. You can leave all that fruit here,” he said to Leswick. “We’ll find plenty more.”

  He led them in cautious single file through the thicket to the main path. Rand brought up the rear, taking the position that Dombey had had.

  They walked a little way. Then Rand began to feel funny. He broke out in a strange sweat and his stomach started to complain.

  The heat’s getting me, he told himself.

  But the heat didn’t seem to bother Leswick or Dombey. Rand was uneasy about that. Maybe it’s because of the fight, he thought. But I shouldn’t get sick to my stomach from a fight.

  He walked on another hundred feet. Suddenly he was shivering. His legs felt wobbly.

  He stopped and called to the others. “Wait a minute. I’m feeling kind of —”

  Rand doubled up with cramps. His head was spinning and his skin felt as if it had caught fire. He dropped to his knees and realized he was going to be very sick.

  His lunch left him in a hurry.

  When he was finished throwing up, he didn’t feel quite so bad. He got up slowly, shaking a little. Dombey handed him a canteen and he took a deep pull of water.

  “Better now, boss?”

  “Better,” Rand said hoarsely.

  “I guess you should have left them berries alone, back there. I had a hunch that place wasn’t no good.”

  “Is that what your hunch was? That the berries were bad to eat?”

  “Sort of,” Dombey admitted.

  Angrily Rand said, “Then why didn’t you speak up? You saw me eat them! You could have said something!”

  “Gosh, boss, you were sore at me for telling you not to stop there! I figured I better stop buttin’ in!”

  “Okay,” Rand said sourly. “Okay. I guess I had that coming to me. But from now on, when you see trouble coming, don’t keep the news to yourself.”

  “I won’t, any more,” Dombey said.

  Rand didn’t feel very proud of himself. Dombey had really fixed him! Letting him eat those berries when his hunch told him they were bad! Well, I can’t blame him, Rand told himself. I laughed at his hunches. So he let me find out about that clearing my own way.

  The sickness had gone. It was a lucky thing he had only eaten a handful of berries. More than that might have really made him sick. Or poisoned him, maybe.

  Rand kept quiet, now, as they marched along. He admired the graceful way Dombey moved through the dense forest. Dombey’s size didn’t cause any troubles for him. He always seemed to find the right opening in the curtain of hanging vines that blocked the way.

  That nickname of “Tarzan” was the right one, Rand saw. Dombey was really at home here in the jungle. It seemed as natural to him as water was for a fish.

  Rand found out why, toward nightfall. Dombey picked a place to stop for the night, and they pitched camp. Using gestures more than words, Dombey showed them the safest places to put their sleeping bags.

  Leswick said, “Where did you pick up all this jungle lore, Dombey? You didn’t learn it on a spaceship.”

  “Learned it before I went to space,” he said. “Grew up on Hothouse. That planet, it’s got some pretty good jungles too.”

  “Why did you leave?” Rand asked.

  Dombey grinned. “Got tired of jungle,” he said. “Signed up as a spacehand.”

  “You should have told me you were an expert on jungle life,” Rand said.

  “You didn’t ask,” Dombey told him.

  They had a good dinner that night. Dombey climbed a tree and caught half a dozen little squirrel-like animals. Then he discovered a plant with fat, fleshy roots that turned out to make tasty eating. After they ate, they crawled into their sleeping bags beside the fire. Rand took a reading on the detector before sacking out.

  The jungle noises were as loud that night as they had been the night before. Somehow Rand didn’t mind them as much, though. He was too tired to worry about anything. He closed his eyes and drifted off into deep sleep.

  Not without some bad dreams, though. Dreams of long green arms rising from a brook. Dreams of ugly, snorting animals with long teeth parading through the jungle. Dreams of monsters far more nightmarish than those.

  He woke up a couple of times, imagining that they were being attacked. He lay awake for a while, listening to the grunts and growls and hisses and screeches coming from every direction. Then he fell asleep once more.

  CHAPTER 11

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

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

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

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

  Then things started getting a little messy.

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

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

  Something was scratching in his knapsack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Something wrong?” Leswick asked.

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

  “What happened?”

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

  “We’ll find it,” Dombey said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Dombey turned in a good job again that day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Strange ones. Dangerous.”

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

  “Buzzbuzzbuz. Clickclickclick.”

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

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

  “Buzzclick! Clickbuzz!”

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER 12

  THE ALIENS hadn’t budged from their places. They still stood in a half circle, facing the Earthmen. But they were starting to look restless. Some of them were swinging their swords back and forth impatiently.

  It looked as though they might charge at any moment. And that cry of “KILL. KILL. KILL.” coming out of the converter wasn’t exactly encouraging.

  Rand saw that Dombey looked pretty restless too. The big jetmonkey seemed to be getting ready for a fight. His huge hands were clenching into fists, unclenching, clenching again.

  Shutting off the converter for a moment, Rand said, “Relax, Tarzan. Stop looking so fierce.”

  “We got to defend ourselves.”

  “They have swords and we don’t,” Rand said. “And they outnumber us ten or fifteen to one. Muscle won’t help us now, Dombey. This is something we have to talk our way out of.”

  The aliens were starting to move closer.

  Rand turned the converter on again. “We are heading east to find our friends,” he said desperately. He pointed to the east. “When we find them, we will leave your world and never return. Do you understand? We want nothing from you. We’re not hostile. We want to leave as soon as we find our friends. We want to leave. We are not your enemies.”