were pleased at the prospect of going there.
My explorers were hardened individualists. The first day they got into violent arguments over Orzu and how best to cope with him. After three hours they’d split up into factions that weren’t on speaking terms. The man in charge of the project was me, and I was more concerned about my redhead than Orzu. Also, I’d never before been in charge of anything that involved more than one female filing clerk. It was not a pleasant trip.
On the fourteenth day I. stood with the Captain on the bridge, absorbing my first view of Arnicus. What I saw made me sick. The planet was wrapped in swirling dirty, yellow-brown clouds, and where I caught a glimpse of land I saw nothing but a hideous purple vegetation.
The captain snapped out the necessary orders to put the ship into a polar orbit. “Which continent do you want to start with?” he said.
“I’d just as soon forget the whole thing,” I said. “But as long as I can’t, take your pick. Wherever you’d prefer to land.”
“Land?” He stared at me.
“You want me to put this ship down in a swamp? Nothing doing. We stay in an orbit, and you ferry your men and supplies down by flyer.”
“Now just how am I going to get a pair of Orzus into this ship by flyer?”
“That’s your problem. But I’d suggest that you concentrate on
I hadn’t thought of that. There were, in fact, a number of things I hadn’t thought of, as I found out when I started conferring with my exploration team on the subject of what to do with Orzu if we actually caught him.
My right-hand man was a veteran explorer named Jan Garish. A small, wizened man with a leathery, wrinkled face and a drooping mustache in which he took an obnoxious pride. He had spent most of his life knocking around in various galactic hell-holes. Though he’d never been on Arnicus, he differed from the rest of us in that he was looking forward to it.
“First thing we do,” he said, “we test atmosphere. We get chemist to make some. We get engineer to make pressure cage. We get zoologist to tell us what Orzu maybe eats. Then we catch Orzu, put him in cage. He lives, we tow cage up to ship. He don’t live, we make chemist and zoologist try again, and we catch more Orzu. Simple, eh?”
Simple. I longed for the good, old, bring ’em back alive days, when a zoo only collected specimens from its own planet.
The captain gave me the ship’s chemist for my exclusive use, and that worthy individual rubbed his hands together, stroked the two or three hairs surviving on his bald head, and vowed, Space, yes, he could duplicate the Arnicus atmosphere. He could duplicate
I didn’t know, and I left it up to him.
The zoologist wasn’t so easy. He was a member of my exploration team, but he hadn’t volunteered for the job. I asked him how we’d pack back enough vegetation to keep Orzu alive. He said he didn’t know, that was my problem—and anyway, Orzu was probably carnivorous.
That possibility hadn’t occurred to me, and in my last sleep on board the cruiser I was caught in a weird nightmare in which my little redhead developed a third green eye, sprouted long red tentacles, and tried to stuff me into a food synthesizer.
The flyer spiraled down over the north pole, keeping well away from the ocean. My chemist warned that it might be one churning vat of poison, and I didn’t argue with him. Also, we wanted to keep as far from the smouldering equator as possible.
We skimmed over several hundred square miles of jungle without sighting a clearing, and finally we eased the flyer straight down through the trees. Tangled vines caught at it. Huge purple leaves flapped against the ports, and stuck there, blinding the pilot. It was raining globules of some unmentionable liquid.
We had special atmosphere suits with a built-in cooling apparatus. We climbed into them, and Jan Garish was the first man out the air lock. He begged me for the job, and I gave in with appropriate reluctance. He took one step, and sank into the slimy mud up to his hips.
“Welcome to Arnicus,” I said.
The rain left a sticky film on my face plate, and I had to keep wiping it off to see. I scrambled around Garish, found solid ground—I only sank in to my knees—and looked about. The others followed me. We stood shifting from one foot to the other, and watching each other to see if one of us would suddenly sink in over his head.
Garish floundered out of sight into the flapping vegetation, and quickly floundered back again. “We’re in a swamp,” he said.
No one denied it.
“Well,” he said, “it gets worse in that direction. Maybe it’ll get better the other way.”
A good man, Garish. We found solid ground, and I began to feel better. I’d been wondering how anything as big as Orzu could exist in a swamp. We moved the flyer, brought out our tents, and made a camp. The chemist set up a laboratory in the flyer, and gleefully went to work on the atmosphere. My explorers went back to their argument about how best to catch Orzu, if we could locate him. The locating didn’t worry me. If Orzu was around at all, he wouldn’t be easy to overlook. Nine feet high, the report had said.
While the rest of us were hacking out a clearing around the camp, Jan Garish took three men on a preliminary survey of our surroundings. “Don’t try to bring in Orzu all by yourself,” I told him.
“No,” Garish said, after giving the possibility careful consideration. “Maybe we find tracks, though.”
“I don’t even want you tracking him, yet. He might have a nasty temper. If you find a place that looks as if a battle cruiser has ploughed through the jungle, just get back here fast.”
We had the camp in order, and I was relaxing in my tent, comfortably sealed off from the sulphurous Arnicus atmosphere, when he returned. He stomped out of the air lock, pulled off his suit, and sat down glumly.
“Nothing,” he said.
“No Orzu?”
“No nothing. Don’t like the looks of this place. No birds. No animals.”
“Just be patient,” I said. “Maybe Orzu sleeps in the daytime.”
“Maybe.” He grunted, and it was not an optimistic grunt.
The following day we organized our search. We split into three parties, and combed the jungle, working out away from the swam. Nothing.
We shifted our camp, and kept moving away from the swamp until we ran into another swamp. Nothing. At the end of a week we went back to the ship to replenish our supplies, and then we tried again. Nothing.
Another week, and still a third, we stumbled and threshed our way through that putrid jungle. We slopped through swamps. We hacked our way through the thick, purple, slime-coated vegetation. We tripped over trailing vines that always looked like snakes, but never were. We chaffed in those cooled atmosphere suits, and we sweated in them, too, from sheer nervous frustration. Nothing.
The fourth week started out like the first three. Then, on the second day, I came floundering out of a swamp and found a trail—not a very big trail, to be sure, but
“Hey, take it easy,” someone called. “Maybe Orzu bites.”
I didn’t slow down. I’d stopped being afraid of Orzu. All I wanted to do was get my hands on him. I tore down that winding trail, widening the gap between myself and the others, and suddenly came to a sharp turn and blundered into…
A tent. A couple of men standing there, their atmosphere suits sticky with slime. Two, three more men
