“Starship Pegasus speaking. We are currently in your sector and are headed for the Empty Planet but we can’t even spot the star.”
“Give me your co-ordinates.” The woman’s voice answered. “I’ll recheck it for you.”
We called the bridge and Poloskov gave us the coordinates. We passed them along per instructions.
“It’s all clear.” The woman’s voice answered. “There is a cloud of cosmic dust between you and the star, so of course you can’t see it. Your next jump should take you through the cloud.”
“Enormous thanks.” I said to the unknown ship. “We were given the coordinates of the planet on the Three Captains’ World, but our source was not an astronaut but a museum administrator, and we were afraid he erred.”
“Doctor Verkhovtseff?” Then woman’s voice asked.
“Yes. You know him then?”
“I know him very well.” The woman answered. “He’s a marvelous old man. Simply wonderful. If only we had met earlier; I have a letter to pass on to him but there’s no way I can stop in there. Not for a while. Any chance you will be heading back that way?”
“None.” I answered. “From here we go on to Blooke, to Palaputra. We’re biologists looking for rare animals.”
“So am I.” The woman answered. “We may very well have met, but there’s no time for that now. I have to be off in a hurry. I’m hunting a living cloud.”
“One last question.” I said. “Have you ever been on the Empty Planet yourself?”
“I certainly have.” The woman answered. “The seas were overflowing with fish, but there wasn’t a single animal on dry land. Good luck.”
Then all that came out of the speakers was the meaningless hum of static.
“She’s accelerating at full speed.” Zeleny said. “She’s heading off somewhere. What’s this about a living cloud?”
“There are no such things as living clouds.” I said. “I met this woman at some conference or other and told her that she was utterly mistaken. You heard her opinion of Doctor Verkhovtseff? A ‘marvelous old man.’“
“Well, I still don’t trust him.” Zeleny grumbled. “If he was so marvelous and wonderful why did he lie to us? Why is he writing a novel and then not writing it? Why does he swear that he hasn’t been to Arcturus Minor for six months? And why didn’t he want to show us the Three Captains’ notebooks?”
Zeleny went back to the receiver.
The woman was right. The next day after the jump we spotted a small star on our sensors around which orbited but a single planet. Judging from everything we had been told, that had to be the Empty Planet.
We set down toward sunset on the shores of a large lake, at the edge of an endless plain overgrown to fearturelessness by a yellowing grass. A light rain, long and boring, kept us on the ship in front of the ports through which we saw neither beasts nor birds. What if this place was in fact devoid of animal forms?
Alice and Zeleny headed to the lake for water. They were a while in returning, but I did not become alarmed as I could clearly see them occupied with something along the shore through the ship’s ports.
Then Zeleny returned’ he headed not for the bridge, but for his own cabin.
“What have you looking for?” I asked him through his com unit.
“Fishing tackle.” Zeleny answered. “There’s so many fish in that lake they turn the water black! We started to scoop water into the bucket and it was full of fish. Don’t you want fresh fish soup, Professor?”
“No.” I answered. “And I must advise you against eating what you find here too. There are poisonous fish even on earth, and adding anything found on another planet to your diet without a lot of tests is just plain thoughtless.”
“Ah weel….” Zeleny said. “Then I’ll just have to add to your collection the hard way.”
Zeleny ran back to the shore, and I grabbed Alice’s rain coat to keep her from catching acold, grabbed a net, and headed for the lake.
Zeleny disdained the net for catching fish, declaring that it was not sporting, and he was a sportsman. But Alice and I filled the whole bucket. We carried our fish back to the ship. A sodden Zeleny followed after us, his catch in a fish tank.
“Don’t forget to close the ship for the night.” I said; we left the containers with our hauls in the main airlock.
“Of course I won’t!” Zeleny’s excited voice came back; he was so entranced with the local fishing he would have stayed at the lake all night, except it had become dark.
In the morning the first thing I did was look out the ports. The sun was shining brightly and multitudes of birds circled overhead
“That’s the ‘Empty Planet.’“ I said aloud and went to awaken my friends. “Come look at the Empty Planet.” I repeated. “Yesterday we caught fish, today the birds are circling overhead in monstrous flocks.”
I awakened Alice and Poloskov, but Zeleny had already gotten up ahead of me. He had lain out his assorted lures and other types of fishing tackle.
“I have to get ready for the big one.” He told me. “I can feel in my bones there are pikes as long as I am tall.”
“Just be careful.” I answered. “Watch out that no pike catches you.”
Then I went down to the airlock to take a closer look at the birds. I noticed one distressing detail; it turns out that, intoxicated with the joy of reel and tackle, our Engineer forgot to close the Pegasus’s outer airlock door for the night. No animals had managed to get inside, but we had lost every last one of our fish. Evidently the birds had noticed the open airlock and had dropped by for and early morning snack, claiming all our catch from the night before.
“This is a very serious violation of space discipline.” Poloskov said over breakfast when he heard of Zeleny’s blunder. “But I am guilty of it to
o, as is the Professor. We both were required to check the airlocks for the night.”
“But nothing really happened.” Alice said. “ Zeleny and I can fill a dozen buckets with fish. You can’t imagine how many fish there are in that lake!”
“That is not the point.” Poloskov sighed. “If such an incident happens again we might as well turn around and go back home, because it means we are all far too thoughtless to be running around in space.”
“I’m sorry, Captain.” Zeleny said. He understood, of course, that he had made a mess of things, but thoughts of fishing had so overcome him that a moment later he was off for the lake.
I prepared the nets for catching birds and pulled out the air powered rifles with the anaesthetic darts. Then I steeled myself for hunting birds. Zeleny sat on the shore of the lake, and I watched him out of the corners of my eyes. I was surprised that he appeared so downcast. “Now why would he be upset?” I wondered.
Then the weather unexpectedly grew worse. A strong wind came up; it drove the birds from the sky and raised whitecaps on the lake. In a few minutes there wasn’t a single bird left in the sky. They had gone and taken refuge elsewhere.
Zeleny got to his feet and headed back to the ship.
I decided to return the nets to the ship out the bad weather and the return of the birds.
“How did it go?” I asked Zeleny. “Care to show me your catch?”
“There is no catch.” Zeleny answered. “Not a bite.”
“How come? Didn’t you yourself say the lake was literally overflowing with fish?”
“Yesterday it was. But now, evidently, all the fish have gone to the bottom.”
“And my birds have dispersed.” I said. “So it looks like both of us are out of luck. We can wait a while until the weather clears. Care to drop by the lake in the evening? Maybe that’s the only time they bite.”
“I don’t know. I don’t believe in this planet.” Zeleny said mournfully. “They certainly didn’t call it the Empty Planet without reason. There were fish, but they’re not here now. There were birds, but the birds have flown.”