Chalker, Jack L. – The Web of the Chozen

Did I say walk? Well, they hopped. Damnedest thing anybody ever saw. They would kick off with those hind legs and go real fast across the plain like a kangaroo, then settle on those forelegs. They couldn’t walk as such—while the forelegs were independent of each other, the rear ones were locked together, obviously had to move together.

Their genitals looked to be oversized versions of the human type, but the females had no sign of breasts—although two large breastplates on both males and females suggested that they might once have had them. Both sexes also had large pouches below those plates, both carried young in them. Their bodies

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were covered by a greenish-blue fur, their faces a dark brown.

They were herbivores for sure—they would kneel and start chomping with great appetite on various plants. Flat teeth, a side-to-side chewing motion, and large, flat tongues.

I stared at them for what must have been hours, wondering what could possibly produce such things. What conditions would develop them that way?

They had no hands, no tentacles, so they had no tools—yet they did have artifacts of a sort. I caught a frame of something weird and blew it up.

It was a village.

Yes, a village, huts and all. All made out of something white and milky, like spider’s web but looking much, much tougher and stronger. These things lived in them.

And as I watched, fascinated, I saw how they built them. There seemed to be a flap in the tongue. They’d pucker their mouths, and stick out the tongue, and out would come stuff with the consistency of rope, but like paste. They could build with it—very quickly, too, I noted—and I couldn’t imagine where the material to make the stuff was coming from. A byproduct of the grasses they ate, maybe?

Reluctantly I turned my attention to other animal life. It was there, of course—some of it as strange-looking as the herbivores, but much of it more conventional. All around were birds, and insects, and smaller animals of various kinds. None looked quite right, but none looked as wrong as the chief creatures of the plains.

The air check I’d made at the beginning showed the world to be more humid than Terranonn, but that was about it. Nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen there in nice balance, just below normal—most of the deviation be-ing extra hydrogen, which accounted for the wetter climate—and inert gasses in essentially meaningless fractional percentiles.

The Web of the Chozen

I could breathe the stuff without discomfort, except that it would probably feel like a wet blanket. No deserts of more than a few thousand kilometers, all on the lee side of mountains or on a few very high plateaus.

I dropped the probe for a complete sample, then sterilized it except for the little specimen compart-ment. Once back, it was put through its paces in a vacuum chamber, probed, prodded, and analyzed much as the colonists must have done.

The usual types of microorganism. Nothing looked threatening.

Next came the search for the colony itself. I sent the probe back out, and did a complete habitation survey. I found lots and lots of those web villages, and lots and lots of herbivores, but no indication of any human habitation whatsoever. After almost a day and night in probe status, I hadn’t uncovered the slightest sign that human beings had ever landed on the planet.

Suddenly that scrawled word crept back into my conscious mind.

I was about to scoot back to the nearest relay station and get some advice—and maybe some heavy scientific artillery—when I suddenly remembered that twenty-first-century ships used nuclear fuel. Well, there was a lot of uranium and such here, but if their ship had landed, repeatedly landed, in a single spot I could find it. I ran one last probe on that guess, and hit pay-dirt.

The patterns were there, all right—big overlapping circles of weak radiation, and an indication of a small amount of something hot that was just about what their power pack would be.

But no sign of people around anywhere, and no sign of the ship that power pack should belong to.

I decided to get some sleep and continue when I was refreshed. A mystery was here, deep and unusual, and I knew that the odds were that I shouldn’t try it myself. Even so, it’s in my nature to try any problem.

The Web of the Chozen

If I could solve this one I would have more Seiglein feathers to add to my cap. Here was a challenge, and

I never could resist challenges.

I knew I’d go down in full suit and armor to take

a look.

But why did my mind insist on flashing that con-tradictory scrawled message to me as I made that

decision? Don’t, it said.

The next day I sent down the bioprobe with a nurd inside. A nurd is a small organism from one of the Altarian planets that resembles nothing so much as a little rubber ball. That’s about all it is, too—oh, not rubber, but it’s biochemistry, while strange, is sim-ple and the variables can be easily isolated. The things store in the deep freeze, too, and are susceptible to al-most all diseases that might affect people—just about

the perfect lab specimen.

The probe landed near the radiation zone and picked up some soil and air samples. The probe also let the nurd drop, bounce, and then neatly caught it again and popped it back inside. I immediately triggered the takeoff sequence, and while the liftoff friction sterilized the outside I ran the inner sterilization sequence so that only the tiny biological chamber, now suspended in a vacuum, remained from the

planet.

Once back aboard, the automatic lab analyzed,

probed, and poked here and there. It took about an

hour to give some results.

The place was filthy with microorganisms, of course, but none of them seemed able to survive in the nurd. Nice. And normal. Rarely do the organisms of one world have any real effect on those of another, unless it’s a lethal one. Only one organism, which was almost unnoticed it was so microscopic, seemed to have any compatibility factor at all with the nurd or with peo-ple, and that was a very primitive virus of some sort.

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Blown up several million times, it barely showed on the screens. It didn’t die or run from the nurd’s cells, but neither did it seem to have any effect on the little ball-like creature. Like most of its type, it resembled a small honeycomb. It did seem to be a fast grower—I could see little sprouts off the ends of the colony slowly inch their way up what might have been a fraction of a micron—yes, it was that minute—and slowly form a new little protocell. This was much more rapid than anything I’d observed before—usually you can’t see it happening, you just come back later and more of them have shown up—but after a few hours it seemed to reach the limits of its growth in the nurd and turned dormant. There was no effect on the nurd’s temperature, biochemistry, or other vital functions, so it was probably safe for me as well.

But then, that Communard colony would have done much the same thing, been just as careful, and yet— where was it?

Everything checked out, and so now came the last-resort decision—turn for home and help, or go on down myself. Something in me said repeatedly that I should get out, but my stubborn, adventuring streak took over. I had been challenged here—somewhere down there should be a colony, thousands of people by this time, maybe farms, roads, and the like. Even if something unforeseen had wiped them out, there should be artifacts—shuttle ships were tough. Anything that could totally destroy one would be so damned obvious nobody would land.

Well, they’d landed. Down there. On that spot. Were they hidden, perhaps? Underground? I’d have to go down to find out.

I surveyed the area again. A broad, flat plain at the base of low, rolling mountains. There, two rivers formed valleys, came together in high grasslands, then still shallow and rocky, began to meander into a flood plain.

A large herd of the impossible herbivores was graz—

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ing on the plains, and the area was rich in other wild-life as well. I decided that I would not try the patience of those weird-looking, grass-eaters; their legs had tremendous muscles, and could probably break every bone in my body without any trouble.

The creatures continued to bother me; they had no right or justification in this setting. Something nagged at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t bring it forward;

something I’d seen that related to all this. I had to let it sit, hoping it would come out when it was ready.

I still had a mystery here, and I didn’t want to chance those microorganisms no matter what they did or didn’t do to the nurd, so I suited up and took an eight-hour supply of air—it was all recirculated but the size of the initial supply and the filtration made the limits—and my portapack, which would link me with the computer on the ship and its analytical facilities.

I touched down on the plain near the spot where

the last of the mountains met the river. Animals scattered, probably fearing the whine of the large object settling down among them more than the object it-self. I shut off the drive and moved to the air lock, feeling my usual extreme discomfort at suddenly hav-ing full gravity again after a long period at balf-G.

Here it was one G—no, not exactly. A little more, but close enough. It was always a shock to my sys-tem, though, to remember suddenly how much weight

it had been carrying for so long.

The outer lock opened with a whirring sound and I lowered the little steps to the ground. There was no danger in leaving the door open; the inner door was solidly shut, and the computer would respond only

to my own codes.

The ground was soft, slightly muddy, probably from

a recent rain. It rained quite often around here, and the grass, a blue-green, was extremely tall and vibrant-looking.

I immediately saw why the native animal life had

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such tough skins, though—the grass blades were very sharp, and would be a problem to anything without protection. Near the base of the adult grass were several slightly munched tubers or growths the consistency of potato or apple inside. Although they were hard and not easily crushed, they were apparently another part of the diet of the herbivores.

I stopped and looked around carefully. The instruments said that their shuttle had landed, not once but many times, near this very spot—yet there wasn’t a sign of a ship that had to be a great deal larger than my own not inconsiderable craft.

Nothing.

Some of the animals had ventured back into my landing zone. Their curiously humanoid faces were up-lifted, and some were sitting upright on their bushy tails staring at me with those strange, all-black, glassy eyes of theirs. They didn’t make a sound other than when moving around, but their long ears were obviously turned to me and the funny membranes on top of their horns quivered slightly.

I had the distinct impression that I was being watched.

Suddenly feeling a bit nervous and overexposed, I checked my pistol for full charge. I made my way cautiously to the river, which broke the grasslands with a line of trees and an orange-brown, sandy soil.

The river itself rushed and gurgled along, perhaps a kilometer wide but only fifteen or twenty centimeters deep.

The feeling of being watched persisted; and I had been around enough to trust my instincts. I whirled around and saw that the creatures of the plain were following me, still looking at me with rather too much intelligence and still maintaining about a fifty-meter distance.

Near the river were other, more normal-seeming animals. One looked like a tiny mule, another looked