This planet was nearer the sun, and even from space it looked hot. It was partly covered with low clouds, indicating that water was plentiful, but there were no signs of any oceans. Nor was there any sign of intelligence; they circled the planet twice without glimpsing a single artifact of any kind. The entire globe, from poles down to the equator, was clothed with a blanket of virulent green.
«I think we should be very careful here,» said Hilvar. «This world is alive-and I don’t like the color of that vegetation. It would be best to stay in the ship, and not to open the air lock at all.»
«Not even to send out the robot?»
«No, not even that. You have forgotten what disease is, and though my people know how to deal with it we are a long way from home and there may be dangers here which we cannot see. I think this is a world that has run amok. once it may have been all one great garden or park, back when it was abandoned Nature took over again. It could never have been like this while the system was inhabited.»
Alvin did not doubt that Hilvar was right. There was some thing evil, something hostile to all the order and regularity on which Lys and Diaspar were based, in the biological an . archy below. Here a ceaseless battle had raged for a billion years; it would be well to be wary of the survivors.
They came cautiously down over a great level plain, so uniform that its flatness posed an immediate problem. The plain was bordered by higher ground, completely cover with trees whose height could only be guessed-they were so tightly packed, and so enmeshed with undergrowth, that their trunks were virtually buried. There were so many winged creatures flying among their upper branches, though they moved so swiftly that it was impossible to tell whether the were birds or insects-or neither.
Here and there a forest giant had managed to climb a few scores of feet above its battling neighbors, who had formed a brief alliance to tear it down and destroy the advantage it had won. Despite the fact that this was a silent war, fought, too slowly for the eye to see, the impression of merciless, im placable conflict was overwhelming.
The plain by comparison, appeared placid and uneventful. It was flat, to within a few inches, right out to the horizon; and seemed to be covered with a thin, wiry grass. Though they descended to within fifty feet of it, there was no sign of any animal life, which Hilvar found somewhat surprising. Perhaps, he decided, it had been scared underground by their approach.
They hovered just above the plain while Alvin tried to convince Hilvar that it would be safe to open the air lock, and Hilvar patiently explained such conceptions as bacteria, fungi, viruses, and microbes-ideas which Alvin found hard to visualize, and harder still to apply to himself. The argument had been in progress for some minutes before they noticed peculiar fact. The vision screen, which a moment ago ha been showing the forest ahead of them, had now becom blank.
«Did you turn that off?» said Hilvar, his mind, as usu just one jump ahead of Alvin’s.
«No,» replied Alvin, a cold shiver running down his spin as he thought of the only other explanation. «Did you turn it off?» he asked the robot.
«No,» came the reply, echoing his own.
With a sigh of relief, Alvin dismissed the idea that t robot might have started to act on its own volition-then he might have a mechanical mutiny on his hands.
«Then why is the screen blank?» he asked.
«The image receptors have been covered.»
«I don’t understand,» said Alvin, forgetting for a m ment that the robot would only act on definite orders or questions. He recovered himself quickly and asked: «What’s covered the receptors?»
«I do not know.»
The literal-mindedness of robots could sometimes be as exasperating as the discursiveness of humans. Before Alvin could continue the interrogation Hilvar interrupted.
«Tell it to lift the ship-slowly,» he said, and there was a note of urgency in his voice.
Alvin repeated the command. There was no sense of motion; there never was. Then, slowly, the image reformed on the vision screen, though for a moment it was blurred and distorted. But it showed enough to end the argument about landing.
The level plain was level no longer. A great bulge had formed immediately below them-a bulge which was ripped open at the top where the ship had torn free. Huge pseudopods were waving sluggishly across the gap, as if trying to recapture the prey that had just escaped from their clutches. As he stared in horrified fascination, Alvin caught a glimpse of a pulsing scarlet orifice, fringed with whiplike tentacles which were beating in unison, driving anything that came into their reach down into that gaping maw.
Foiled of its intended victim, the creature sank slowly into the ground-and it was then that Alvin realized that the plain below was merely the thin scum on the surface of a stagnant sea.
«What was that-thing?» he gasped.
«I’d have to go down and study it before I could tell you that,» Hilvar replied matter-of-factly. «It may have been some form of primitive animal-perhaps even a relative of our friend in Shalmirane. Certainly it was not intelligent, or it would have known better than to try to eat a spaceship.»
Alvin felt shaken, though he knew that they had been in no possible danger. He wondered what else lived down there beneath that innocent sward, which seemed to positively invite him to come out and run upon its springy surface.
«I could spend a lot of time here,» said Hilvar, obviously fascinated by what he had just seen. «Evolution must have produced some very interesting results under these conditions. Not only evolution, but devolution as well, as higher forms of life regressed when the planet was deserted. By now equilibrium must have been reached and-you’re not leaving already?» His voice sounded quite plaintive as the landscape receded below them.
«I am,» said Alvin. «I’ve seen a world with no life, and a world with too much, and I don’t know which I dislike more.»
Five thousand feet above the plain, the planet gave them one final surprise. They encountered a flotilla of huge, flabby balloons drifting down the wind. From each semitransparent envelope clusters of tendrils dangled to form what was virtually an inverted forest. Some plants, it seemed, in the effort to escape from the ferocious conflict on the surface had learned to conquer the air. By a miracle of adaptation, they had managed to prepare hydrogen and store it in bladders, so that they could lift themselves into the comparative peace. of the lower atmosphere.
Yet it was not certain that even here they had found security. Their downward-hanging stems and leaves were infested with an entire fauna of spidery animals, which must! spend their lives floating far above the surface of the globe, continuing the universal battle for existence on their lonely aerial islands. Presumably they must from time to time have some contact with the ground; Alvin saw one of the great balloons suddenly collapse and fall out of the sky, its broken, envelope acting as a crude parachute. He wondered if this was an accident, or part of the life cycle of these strange entities.
Hilvar slept while they waited for the next planet to approach. For some reason which the robot could not explain to them, the ship traveled slowly-at least by comparison with its Universe-spanning haste-now that it was within a Solar System. It took almost two hours to reach the world that Alvin had chosen for his third stop, and he was a little surprised that any mere interplanetary journey should last so long.
He woke Hilvar as they dropped down into the atmosphere.
«What do you make of that?» he asked, pointing to the vision screen.
Below them was a bleak landscape of blacks and gray, showing no sign of vegetation or any other direct evidence of life. But there was indirect evidence; the low hills an shallow valleys were dotted with perfectly formed hemispheres, some of them arranged in complex, symmetrical patterns.