Page:Astounding Science Fiction (1950-01).djvu/82

 it's good fishing and if they grow grapes, we'll land."

Hippocrates knew something had been bothering him. It was the triple click of the recording receiver. Paper was coming out of it in a steady stream. Click, click, click. Emerg. Emerg. Emerg!

Ole Doc looked musingly at the Muses and slowly began to relax. That was a good satyr Joccini had done, even if it was uncomfortably like—

"United States Experimental Station on Gorgon Beta Ursus Major," said Hippocrates. "Direct call to UMS, master." He looked abstractedly at the dark port beyond which the stars flew by. Through his mind was running the "Star Pilot for Ursus Major." He never forgot anything, Hippocrates, and the eighteen thousand close-packed pages whirred by, stopped, turned back a leaf and then appeared in his mind. "It's jungle and rivers. Wild game. Swamps." And he brightened. "No women."

"What?" said Ole Doc incuriously.

"Gorgon of Beta Ursus Major. Lots of fish. Lots of them. And wine. Lots of fish and wine."

Ole Doc got up, stretched and went forward. He punched a pneumatic navigator and after divers whirs and hisses a light flashed on a screen giving him a new course departing from a point two light-years in advance of the reading. He could not turn any sooner. He settled himself under the familiar controls, disconnected the robot and yawned.

Two days later they were landing on Field 1,987,806 United States Army Engineers, Unmanned, half an hour's jaunt from United States Experimental Station 3,002.

Ole Doc let Hippocrates slide the ladder out and stood for a moment in the air lock, black kit in hand. The jungle was about three hundred feet above the edges of the field, a wild and virulent jungle, dark green with avid growing and yellow with its rotting dead. For a little space there was complete silence while the chattering gusts of the landing jets echoed out and left utter stillness. And then the jungle came awake once more with screams and catcalls and a ground-shaking aa-um.

Hippocrates skittered back up the ladder. He stopped at the top. Again sounded the aa-um and the very plates of the old ship shook with it. Hippocrates went inside and came back with a hundred and ten millimeter turret cannon cradled comfortably over his two right arms.

Ole Doc threw a switch which put an alpha force field around the ship to keep wild animals off and, with a final glance at the tumbled wrecks of buildings which had once housed a military post, descended the ladder and strolled after Hippocrates into the thick growth.

Now and then Hippocrates cocked an antenna at the towering branches overhead and stopped suspiciously. But he could see nothing threatening and he relieved his feelings occasionally by sending a big gout of fire from the 110 to sizzle them out a 82