He had been going three hours and had covered eleven miles before the enemy showed the first signs of activity. With the moorland on his right and the forest on his left, he was trudging along when a black dot soared above the horizon, swelled in size, shot silently overhead and was followed some seconds later by a shrill scream.
Going at that height and at that speed the jetplane’s pilot could not possibly have seen him. Unperturbed, he stepped into the shadow of a tree, turned to watch the machine as it diminished northward. It was again a mere dot when suddenly it swept around in a wide circle, spiralled upward and continued circling. As nearly as Leeming could judge it was turning high above the crater.
It was an easy guess that the jetplane had come in response to a telephone or radio call telling about a spaceship in distress and a following explosion. Having found the scene of disaster, it was zooming above the spot while summoning help. No doubt there’d be great activity at the base from which it had come; receiving confirmation that a ship had indeed been lost, the authorities would assume it to be one of their own and start checking by radio to find which one was missing. With luck it might be quite a time before they accepted the fact that a vessel of unknown origin, probably hostile, had reached this far.
In any case, from now on they’d keep a sharp watch for survivors. Leeming decided that this was the time to leave the forest’s fringe and progress under cover. His rate of movement would be slowed but at least he’d travel unobserved. There were two dangers in taking to the woods but they’d have to be accepted as lesser evils.
For one, unless he was mighty careful he could lose his sense of direction and wander in a huge curve that eventually would take him back to the crater and straight into the arms of whoever was waiting there. For another, he ran the risk of encountering unknown forms of wild life possessed of unimaginable weapons and unthinkable appetites.
Against the latter peril he had a defence that was extremely effective but hateful to use, namely a powerful compressed-air pistol that fired breakable pellets filled with a stench so foul that one whiff would make anything that lived and breathed vomit for hours—including, as often as not, the user.
Some Terran genius had worked it out that the real king of the wilds is not the lion nor the grizzly bear but a kittenish creature named Joe Skunk whose every battle is a victorious rearguard action, so to speak. Some other genius had synthesized a horrible liquid seventy-seven times more revolting than Joe’s—with the result that an endangered spaceman could never make up his mind whether to run like hell and chance being caught oar whether to stand firm, shoot, and subsequently puke himself to death.
Freedom is worth a host of risks, so he plunged deep into the forest and kept going. After about an hour’s steady progress he heard the whump-whump of many helicopters passing overhead and travelling toward the north: By the sound of it there were quite a lot of them but none could be seen crossing the few patches of sky visible between the tree-tops.
He made a guess that they were a squadron of troop carriers transporting a search party to the region of the crater. Some-time later a solitary machine crept above with a loud humming noise while a downward blast of air made the trees rustle and wave their topmost branches. It was low and slow moving and sounded like a buoyant fan that probably was carrying one observer. He stopped close by a gnarly trunk until it had passed.
Soon afterward he began to feel tired and decided to rest awhile upon a mossy bank. Reposing at ease, he pondered this exhaustion, realised that although his survey had shown this world to be approximately the same size at Terra it must in fact be a little bigger or had slightly greater mass. His own weight was up perhaps by as much as ten per cent, though he had no way of checking it.
True, after a long period of incarceration in a ship he must be out of condition but he was making full allowance for that fact. He was undoubtedly heavier than he’d been since birth, the rucksack was heavier, so were the blankets, so were his feet. Therefore his ability to cover mileage would be cut down in proportion and, in any emergency, so would his ability to run.
It then struck him that the day must be considerably longer than Earth’s. The sinking sun was now about forty degrees above the horizon. In the time since he’d landed the arc it had covered showed that the day was somewhere between thirty and thirty-two hours in length. He’d have to accomodate himself to that with extended walks and prolonged sleeps and it wouldn’t be easy. Wherever they may be, Terrans have a natural tendency to retain their own time-habits.
Isolation in space is a hell of a thing, he thought, as idly, he toyed with the flat, oblong-shaped lump under the left-hand pocket of his jacket. The lump had been there so long that he was only dimly conscious of its existence and, even when reminded of it, tended to suppose that all jackets were made lumpy for some perverse reason known only to members of the International Garment Workers’ Union. Now it struck him with what was approximate to a flash of pure genius that in the long, long ago someone had once mentioned this lump and described it as “the built-in emergency pack.”
Taking out his pocketknife, he used its point to unpick the lining of his jacket. This produced a flat, shallow box of brown plastic. A hair-thin line ran around its rim but there was no button, keyhole, grip or any other visible means of opening it Pulling and pushing it in a dozen different ways had no effect whatever. He tried to insert the knife-blade in the hairline and pry the whole thing open; that failed and the knife slipped and he nicked his thumb. Sucking the thumb, he shoved his other hand through the slit lining and felt all around his jacket in the hope of discovering written instructions of some sort. All he got for his pains was fluff in his fingernails.
Reciting several of the nine million names of God, he, kicked the box with aggravated vim. Either the kick was the officially approved method of dealing with it or some of the names were potent, for the box snapped open. At once he commenced examining the contents which, in theory, should assist him toward ultimate salvation.
The first was a tiny, bead-sized vial of transparent plastic ornamented with an embossed skull and containing an oily, yellowish liquid, Presumably this was the death pill to be taken as a last extreme. Apart from the skull there was nothing to distinguish it from a love-potion.
Next came a long, thin bottle filled with what looked like diluted mud and marked with a long, imposing list of vitamins, proteins and trace elements. What one took it for, how much was supposed to be taken at a time, and how often, were left to the judgement of the beneficiary—or the victim.
After this came a small sealed can bearing no identifying markings and no can-opener to go with it. For all he knew it might be full of boot polish, sockeye salmon or putty. He wouldn’t put it past them to thoughtfully provide some putty in case he wanted to fix a window someplace and thus save his life by ingratiating himself with his captors. If, back home, some genius got it into his head that no lifeform known or unknown could possibly murder a window fixer, a can of putty automatically became a must.
Dumping it at one side, he took up the next can. This was longer, narrower and had a rotatable cap. He twisted the cap and uncovered a sprinkler. Shaking it over his open palm he got a puff of fine powder resembling pepper. Well, that would come in very useful for coping with a pack of bloodhounds, assuming that there were bloodhounds in these here parts. Cautiously he sniffed at his palm. The stuff smelled exactly pepper.