How Bright the Stars
LEIGH BRACKETT
It was a hellish world to be wandering on, this second planet of Barnard’s Star. In fact it looked almost exactly as Jerry Baird had always pictured hell. The sun was red and angry, capable of intense heat. There were volcanoes and fumaroles, pits of bubbling mud, geysers, and great plumes of steam that smelled of sulphur. It was a restless, bad-tempered world, at least in these parts, and Jerry had no good feeling about it.
The PPS (Preliminary Planetary Study) team had spent more than a year encamped on this sparsely populated world, by a Grllan village called Beautiful Water because of the incredibly clear, cool lake that was there, with ferntrees leaning over it and green hills all around. The Grllan lived partly in brush shelters and partly in dens hollowed out beneath the twisty roots of the trees. They were almost, or not quite, human, depending on how you looked at it, but they were friendly, and the team had learned a lot from them about life on Barnard II.
They learned some more on that subject when a fiercer and more predatory clan came down from the hills. Trouble began almost at once and ended with the team camp and almost all of its equipment in ashes. The folk of Beautiful Water had hidden the Earthmen in the deep bush until their wild cousins went away. After that, with the everpresent danger of the predators’ return, with no radio and no means of getting help, and with no prospect of continuing their work, the team had decided to trek out.
The decision was not taken lightly. Earth Base was 500 miles away.
. . .
