Storm Over Warlock | Page 6

vicious as the wolverines when they
were aroused to rage.
Then there were the "dreams," which had afforded the prime source of
camp discussion and dispute. Shann brushed coarse sand from his boots
and thought about the dreams. Did they or did they not exist? You
could start an argument any time by making a definite statement for or
against the peculiar sort of dreaming reported by the first scout to set
ship on this world.

The Circe system, of which Warlock was the second of three planets,
had first been scouted four years ago by one of those explorers
traveling solo in Survey service. Everyone knew that the First-In
Scouts were a weird breed, almost a mutation of Terran stock--their
reports were rife with strange observations.
So an alarming one concerning Circe (a yellow sun such as Sol) and her
three planets was not so rare. Witch, the world nearest in orbit to Circe,
was too hot for human occupancy without drastic and too costly
world-changing. Wizard, the third out from the sun, was mostly bare
rock and highly poisonous water. But Warlock, swinging through space
between two forbidding neighbors, seemed to be just what the
settlement board ordered.
Then the Survey scout, even in the cocoon safety of his well-armed
ship, began to dream. And from those dreams a horror of the apparently
empty world developed, until he fled the planet to preserve his sanity.
There had been a second visit to Warlock in check; worlds so well
adapted to human emigration could not be lightly thrown away. And
this time there was a negative report, no trace of dreams, no registration
of any outside influence on the delicate and complicated equipment the
ship carried. So the Survey team had been dispatched to prepare for the
coming of the first pioneers, and none of them had dreamed either--at
least, no more than the ordinary dreams all men accepted.
Only there were those who pointed out that the seasons had changed
between the first and second visits to Warlock. That first scout had
planeted in summer; his successors had come in fall and winter. They
argued that the final release of the world for settlement should not be
given until the full year on Warlock had been sampled.
But the pressure of Emigrant Control had forced their hands, that and
the fear of just what had eventually happened--an attack from the
Throgs. So they had speeded up the process of declaring Warlock open.
Only Ragnar Thorvald had protested that decision up to the last and had
gone back to headquarters on the supply ship a month ago to make a
last appeal for a more careful study.

Shann stopped brushing the sand from the tough fabric above his knee.
Ragnar Thorvald ... He remembered back to the port landing apron on
another world, remembered with a sense of loss he could not define.
That had been about the second biggest day of his short life; the biggest
had come earlier when they had actually allowed him to sign on for
Survey duty.
He had tumbled off the cross-continent cargo carrier, his kit--a very
meager kit--slung over his thin shoulder, a hot eagerness expanding
inside him until he thought that he could not continue to throttle down
that wild happiness. There was a waiting starship. And he--Shann
Lantee from the Dumps of Tyr, without any influence or
schooling--was going to blast off in her, wearing the brown-green
uniform of Survey!
Then he had hesitated uncertainly, had not quite dared cross the few
feet of apron lying between him and that compact group wearing the
same uniform--with a slight difference, that of service bars and
completion badges and rank insignia--with the unconscious
self-assurance of men who had done this many times before.
But after a moment that whole group had become in his own shy
appraisal just a background for one man. Shann had never before
known in his pinched and limited childhood, his lost boyhood, anyone
who aroused in him hero worship. And he could not have put a name to
the new emotion that added so suddenly to his burning desire to make
good, not only to hold the small niche in Survey which he had already
so painfully achieved, but to climb, until he could stand so in such a
group talking easily to that tall man, his uncovered head bronze-yellow
in the sunlight, his cool gray eyes pale in his brown face.
Not that any of those wild dreams born in that minute or two had been
realized in the ensuing months. Probably those dreams had always been
as wild as the ones reported by the first scout on Warlock. Shann
grinned wryly now at the short period of childish hope and
half-confidence that he could do big things.