Jeremy Pick was on the screen a little over three hours later. He was a tall man with a high-bridged nose and light gray eyes that shifted warily as he talked. He said, “General, I don’t know exactly how to describe this place. It’s too quiet. And for some reason we feel even more uneasy inside the ship than out.”
Wilforce said, “You didn’t find any survivors in that destroyer?”
“Not a one. We’ve found nine skeletons, and that’s all. Outside, there’s scattered weapons and equipment. Apparently, the men were overrun in a rush before they had a chance to act.”
“Overrun by what?”
“To judge by the tracks, by carnivores measuring around twelve feet between the fore and hind limbs, and weighing up to thirty-five hundred pounds.”
“Have you seen any of these animals?”
“No. We’ve seen some herbivores that aren’t mentioned in the survey reports; but they might be the young of these ‘croppers.’ We haven’t seen a single carnivore of any size yet.”
Wilforce scowled. “Is there any place they could hide? Or could the carnivores be nocturnal animals?”
Pick shrugged. “It isn’t dark here yet, so I don’t know. Maybe they’ll emerge from somewhere. But I’ve had clouds of small reconnaissance probes buzzing all over this section of the planet since we landed. If there’s any carnivore that big around, it’s either invisible, or else it’s hugging the mud on a river bottom.”
“Do you have any idea how the destroyer came to be taken by surprise?”
“Well, they had one of the big gravitors partly spread out outside, so I suppose they were spreading the parts out in the sun to dry. We checked and found where a section of coolant line had burst in the gravitor, so that much makes sense. Other crewmen were relining the ship’s drive tubes. Some of the maintenance hatches were open in the aft section of the ship, along with the loading hatch, so it must have been easy for anything to get in. As nearly as we can figure out from the remains of the log, they had scoured this section of the planet, found nothing dangerous, and weren’t worried.”
Wilforce said, “You say, ‘remains of the log’?”
“The log is partly eaten up, as if by mice.”
“Have you seen any mice?”
“None. And we haven’t found any droppings.”
Wilforce said exasperatedly, “That’s a peculiar planet, Pick.”
“It’s peculiar, all right. The more we find out, the less sense it makes.”
“If those giant carnivores can show up by surprise once, they may do it again. Are the hatches shut now?”
“The hatches are dogged tight. No one goes in or out except through the air lock. I’ve got half-a-dozen Bats cruising around outside waiting for any carnivore to so much as raise its snout. All the same, I don’t exactly feel at home in this place.”
Wilforce thought a moment. “Listen, why not move one of the communicators into some part of the ship where we can watch what you’re doing, and then leave it on. If anything happens unexpectedly, we’ll know about it.”
Pick said, “Good idea.” They talked a little longer, then went back to work.
While still about a day out from the planet, Wilforce was in the flagship’s command center studying the computer’s suggested deployment. A call from the task force commander was relayed to him, and the man appeared on the screen with a look of alarm and uncertainty. “Sir, we’ve got something here, but I don’t know what.”
“What do you mean?”
“About fifteen minutes ago, our detectors picked up an object roughly the size of a destroyer. We were standing by off Bemus III, and the object passed between us and the planet, moving at about two miles a second. It stayed on the detectors a little under three seconds, and then it vanished. We can’t locate it. There was no sign of it before, and there’s been no sign of it since. But we’ve checked, and the detectors of every ship in a position to pick it up did pick it up.”
Wilforce looked away a moment, then said, “How far from the planet was this object?”
“About twenty thousand miles, sir. It was moving as if it was in orbit.”
“It sounds as if it’s in orbit. Calculate its projected course as well as you can, and have a ship trail it. If it comes in sight again, learn all you can, but for now don’t interfere with it. Just watch it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wilforce had just finished this call, when Rybalko came over. “Sir, Mr. Pick was just on the screen. I didn’t want to interrupt your call, so I took it myself.”
“What did Pick want?”
“Reinforcements, sir. He’s run into a peculiar situation. He’s lost several men. One of them was carried off by a carnivore about the size of a tiger, that was apparently lying in wait in a ruined cabin. A probe was overhead, and had the carnivore in sight as it vanished in a patch of thick brush. The animal had no time to get out of the brush before other probes had it in view. Pick and a crew of Pioneers took the brush patch apart bush-by-bush. No carnivore came out. No carnivore was in there.”
“You mean, this tiger went in. It didn’t come out. And when they looked, it wasn’t there?”
“That’s what he says, sir.”
Wilforce frowned. “How did Pick seem?”
“Jumpy. He had a fusion gun in his hand and kept glancing around all the time. But he sounded rational enough.”
“All right. Send the combat group down to back him up. And have Pick send up reproductions of the visual records from the probes that had this in view.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rybalko went out. Wilforce turned to look at a large three-dimensional image of Bemus System, his planned deployment outlined on it. The computer had helped perfect the details of this deployment, but Wilforce was now thinking that the most accurately detailed plan is questionable if based on questionable information. With a vanishing ship flitting through space near the planet, and disappearing animals on the planet, how was he to make a satisfactory plan?
Bit-by-bit, allowing for large uncertainties, he began to revise the plans.
Rybalko came in when Wilforce was part way through, and stood watching the symbols on the big three-dimensional image.
Wilforce looked up and Rybalko said, “Sir, the records of the probes watching that carnivore are starting to come in.”
“Good. I’ll take a look at them later, if I have time. Have Evaluation go over them and see what they think.”
“Yes, sir.” Rybalko hesitated, looked at the projected plan, then said, “Did you think we should make a more gradual approach, sir?”
Wilforce nodded. “When you’re locked up in a dark cellar with some one who may be an enemy, let him make the first big move. Of course, you can always toss out something small and see if he jumps for it when he hears the clatter.”
Wilforce’s fleet was normally organized in five divisions. The fast ships of one division made up the task force that had gone ahead. Wilforce now took the remaining ships of this division, plus his own center division, out of subspace toward Bemus III. Behind him in subspace lay sixty percent of his striking force, ready to attack at a moment’s notice.
In the command center’s big, three-dimensional battle screen, Wilforce could now see the first stages of his deployment working out as planned.
The bright lines arcing closer to the sun Bemus showed the paths of fast transports carrying mobile racks of the disks that would be sowed in long rows, each to exude a puff of loose silvery material that could expand at a given signal to a wide thin doughnut with a dazzling film of silver stretching across its center. And that could, at another signal, contract, turn together through specified angles, and again expand, to focus an unendurable blaze of solar energy in a selected region nearby or far away.
Wilforce watched the bright lines that marked the transports slowly separate as they raced to their separate positions. He glanced at the asteroid belt, represented in the battle screen as a stream of green-colored dots. Any abrupt change of speed or direction would cause the dots involved to turn red. So far, they remained green.
Toward the sun from the planet Bemus III, were the four pale blue spheres that represented the four sections of his diminished fleet. These spheres were grouped as at the four corners of a huge tetrahedron. From them, a spray of fine lines reached out toward the planet like the fingers of a giant fist. These were the advance scouts, that would scour the planet from pole to pole, to provide a picture in which Wilforce hoped to find some pattern that would give a clue to past events.
As the transports approached their final positions, and as the scouts let loose their clouds of probes, Wilforce waited, tensely alert.