by Earl
“No, the loans, living in this and perhaps similar unit cities, could fear no mortal enemy. Electronic screens, which they must have had to repel meteors, are proof against man-made weapons. Any possible warfare destroying these people should at the same time have razed this city to the ground anyway.
“I wish I could decipher the written records of that column. There surely would be important clues. But that would be impossible. There is no key to the script. I even doubt a key could be devised. For what basis of comparison could link their thought with ours, living as we did, separate lives on separate worlds?”
RENOLF jabbed viciously at the controls. He muttered added words that Dora could barely catch: “Maybe after all it is impossible to fathom such a great mystery—the mystery of the dooms to the solar system’s various civilizations.”
During his free periods, Vincent would talk over excitedly with Dora what things they had observed. The shadow of the superman had again fallen over him heavily. Perhaps it would be so the rest of his life. Dora quailed at the thought. Married to a man whom she loved eternally, but who was dominated by an other self. All his life Vincent would be thus imposed upon. The superman would step from one great project to another. First it had been reform of Earth. Now it was prying into the solar system’s secrets. What would it be next?
But something goaded the super-Renolf more, secretly, than his lust for knowledge. It was the mystery of the menace. That menace which had made itself known to Dr. Hartwell. Had whispered to him in unintelligible tones of threat. Had perhaps caused his death!
This was another of those inexplicable intuitions that had no shred of proof behind them. Like the collapse of the cliff on Iapetus. Somehow it seemed there might be a whole chain of events connected to the presence of a menace in the solar system. Renolf felt—and cursed his insufficiency, superman though he was—that he was missing a vital link in that chain. Where—where could he find it?
X.
CALLISTO, a satellite of Jupiter’s as large as Mercury, proved to have an appreciable atmosphere, largely oxygen. In the past it must have had an envelope of air comparable to Earth’s. For the first time in their jaunt among planet corpses, the travelers found the ruins of underground habitations. The Callistoans had evidently found it more economical or less troublesome to burrow into rock and there take a stand against oblivion. Perhaps they had been mole creatures, always living in the ground. The problem was unsolvable, for they had left no records, as the loans had.
Meteors had again wrought a tremendous havoc in the ages, as they must on any world with a thin air blanket to protect its face. They had laid bare a complex system of honeycombed labyrinths. Exploring down one meteor shaft, the Earthlings were astounded at the endless ramifications of its catacombs. It was like a multiple beehive. A glorified termite hill. The numbering system alone must have been of a sort to stagger human understanding.
Imbedded in the solid rock, ribbed with a metal that showed no appreciable sign of corrosion, the strange subterranean dwellings—there were many over the planet—defied the inexorable hand of time. Yet they were empty. Devoid of life. Devoid even of signs of life. All the contents had long since swirled to dust.
There were huge chambers at the bottom, miles below. These might have once throbbed and hummed to mighty machines. Now there was but an even layer of fine particles over the adamant flooring. The cabin of the Comet again became infused with a haunting sadness. The million-fold sadness of a globe trotter returning home to find his abode a dilapidated ruin, tenantless.
“Another item in the great mystery,” Renolf said as he headed the ship for Ganymede. Ganymede, the giant among satellites—so large that it could have exchanged places with Mars without seriously disturbing the balance of the solar system.
There was something Earthlike about it at first glance. A dead seed of the void, true—but it subtly hinted that in former glories it had been like green Earth. Green oceans, luscious vegetation, snaking rivers, vast prairies—it had had them in eons gone. And its peoples had been startlingly Earthlike.
This they found out from the numerous carved relief works in their ancient ruins. The ultimate in Ganymedian living quarters seemed to have been strangely impermanent dwellings. The ruins were ruins in every sense of the word. Every wall, every partition, every roof, was down. Flat and eroded to crumbly sections that were vanishing slowly, age by age. None of the ruins was extensive, but their number was legion. They had not congregated as closely as had, for instance, the Callistoans in their subsurface beehives.
FROM a number of related phenomena, Renolf deduced that the civilization of Ganymede had also reached that peak where they had been independent of Nature. One thing alone indicated that they must have had a comparatively long-lived existence. Their bas-reliefs had, among representations of all the solar system’s various worlds, carved pictures of Earth, showing oceans and continents very like those existing in the present.
“Ganymede,” elaborated Renolf, “along with Mars, due to its size, had a period of propitiousness to organic life not far removed from our Earth-Venus era. Perhaps only a few hundred thousand years ago these people thrived! Certainly the carving of Earth, distorted though the land and water areas are, shows they must have observed our home planet not so long ago. Long, indeed, after Earth’s crust had cooled and taken on a semblance of its present configuration.
“Their cities, so flimsy that today they are dust, must have in their age been protected by shields of force alone. Not domes or roofs of time-defying materials like on the other worlds. So then they, too,” he concluded in perplexed vexation, “reached a deathless state. And they, too, like the others, succumbed to oblivion at the last. With a science grown greater than their every living need—they died away!”
“Is it possible,” asked Dora, “that there is some little thing without which organic life cannot survive, and which even science could not give them?”
“Nothing,” said Renolf with firm conviction. “Why, even on Earth today, if mankind were suddenly forced to live independently of Nature, it could be done. Not with Earthly science, no. But with the science I have at my command, yes. Atomic power solves the heat and light problem. Voluntary transmutation would give food and water from the very rock atoms. Air to breathe, the biggest problem of all—I could devise automatic machinery for that, too.”
“But you are a superman,” reminded Dora. “Perhaps your science is even above——”
Renolf chuckled. “Unthinkable. True, a composite of ten of Earth’s most brilliant minds, I am a supermind. But I cannot represent more than a few thousand years of human evolution. These alien scientists—they could have taught me many a trick, never fear.”
“Then what answer is there?” asked Dora in sudden vexation. “You claim they must have had a superscience, greater than yours. And yours, you say, is adequate to make mankind supreme from Nature. Yet the fact remains that these civilizations do vanish!”
But Dora had simply voiced the enigma to which Renolf struggled to find an answer. “We have yet Venus, Mars, Mercury, and Earth’s Moon to visit,” returned Renolf calmly. “Perhaps on one of them we will find an answer.”
But Renolf neglected to tell her what for some time had been in his mind—that there was some connection between these lost civilizations and the menace! Despite his seeming calmness, he was in a turmoil. Each time the dreaded sibilance pounded at his brain—which happened at periodic intervals—Renolf sprang to special instruments and tried to trace back the signal to its source.
Each time some inexplicable force knocked the workings of his apparatus awry. As though the menace knew what was being done and resented being traced. No trick of Renolf’s mighty science sufficed to change that inevitable result. He spent long hours in his small laboratory devising new types of tracer cages to trap the incoming radiation and orientate it in space. It seemed unavailing labor.
VENUS being somewhat closer at the time than Mars, Renolf took the long jump fro
m Jupiter to Earth’s sister planet.
It was no different than any other part of their travels, except for one thing. While passing the asteroid belt, flying high above it to avoid collision amid its crowded area, the Comet very nearly blundered into a jet-black planetoid. Only lightning action on the part of Renolf had saved them from disaster at their terrific pace.
Renolf insisted his instruments had not been wrong—that the black planetoid had come up to them out of its prescribed orbit! Not an error in astronautics, but a slip of the laws of nature. That explanation was all he could give Dora. Yet within himself he was confronted with another explanation no less fantastic. The menace had moved again! As though this were some cosmic chess game in which Renolf was not a player but a pawn!
Venus—ever clothed in cloudy veils.
What could lie beneath? Despite their soul-awing trip out to distant Saturn and Jupiter, Dora felt more interest in Venus than any before. Those other worlds had been dead. The well-known evening star of Earth’s skies should be alive.
And alive it proved to be. Under its tepid, moisture-laden atmosphere thrived an organic life more varied than Earth’s. There were immense jungles, turbulent oceans, sparkling blue lakes. There were myriads of animals, birds, insects. There was rain and thunder, storms and lightning. And there were living, intelligent creatures.
A civilization in the making. But not yet as high as Earth’s. The coasting space ship hovered over water-drenched villages of thatch and wood. Awed denizens of the primeval landscape stared aloft in fear. They were repulsively amphibian in structure, halfseal, half-beast. Yet they had large, well-shaped craniums. And they had weapons, clothing, household paraphernalia.
Renolf did not attempt to land anywhere and communicate with the inhabitants. There could be no profit in it. It could solve no part of the great mystery. But he did—after carefully analyzing the air—swing open the side port. The two space travelers reveled for a day in the breath of a rainy, pungent atmosphere. Artificial air was so stale in comparison. And with this taste of things natural, Dora insisted that they land somewhere and walk for the first time in months on something besides the Comet’s metal floors. Vincent enjoyed the adventure as much as she, although they were soaked to the skin. Dora even wondered how fresh meat would taste, but Renolf vetoed the idea firmly.
“There is something about primitive things,” said the girl, just before they reluctantly reentered the ship, “that warms one’s whole spirit. Now those artificial civilizations—I wonder if those people could have been happy. Everything artificial. No fresh food, no exhilarating breath of pine-scented air, no freedom to roam—I wonder.”
Vincent agreed with her, but Renolf did not—later. “Mere animal happiness. A joy of living that is fragile and unlasting. Rational life grows to a point where happiness lies in the mind. Those artificial civilizations had mental happiness inconceivable to persons of this sort of world. Your scientist of Earth—he knows of that. I have felt it time and again. It is not lasting, but then no joy is. Your father—he knew a moment of divine ecstasy: When he saw me, a superman of his creation, sit up with a new knowledge in my eyes.”
“A divine joy,” murmured the girl sorrowfully, “that brought him to his death!”
“He paid the price gladly,” said Renolf calmly. And for a moment Dora hated him—the super-Renolf—for the words. Then, realizing it was woman’s weakness, she stilled her anger. After all, it was atavistic instinct to grudge mental attainment. An atavistic instinct only too rampant on Earth. Her father had, after all, done a great thing. Had shaped a superman from crude human clay. And in the doing he had been supremely happy—that Dora knew.
They left the steaming hothouse that was Venus.
DESPITE Renolf’s misgivings—for the chances were even either way—Mercury proved to have signs of former civilization. A civilization comparable to any of the others. But only on the night side. The other side, always facing the Sun, was an inferno of blinding radiance and smothering heat. Almost from the first, apparently, the people had taken measures to protect their race from oblivion. They had burrowed into the sides of stupendous mountains. Rock-ribbed and beamed with enormously thick metal pillars, their cavelike cities had withstood the pounding and wearing of eons. Somber in eternal starlight, the night side of Mercury had once teemed with a great civilization.
The Earthlings gazed with awe upon the ramifications of one city whose heart was revealed through a long-past catastrophe which had shorn away the entire side of the mountain site. The bewildering maze of corridors and conduits, bored through the mountain in hundreds of cross rows, like a tree stump invaded by burrowing insects.
Outjutting from the intact cliff faces were great flat platforms. Landings for air craft. Or if not air craft, then space craft. The apexes of the mountain were adorned with hemispherical, adamant domes, as though they had been crowned king.
“An astronomical station,” remarked Renolf, sending the Comet close. “In a way, Mercury is ideal for stellar observation. It being closest to the Sun. from it would be seen all the planets at full and at their nearest. The Mercurians must have been eager astronomers, must have gazed wonderingly at the sister planets from the first.
“What with the eternal night, a thin atmosphere, and perfect oppositions, they were perhaps the first of intelligent life in the solar system to conjecture as to other civilizations. And if those big landings are of a late period—when air was unnavigable—then they must have had interplanetary commerce. And as they were practically contemporary with Jupiter’s two largest moons, those three worlds may have for centuries exchanged mutually beneficial products, inventions, and knowledge.”
Renolf sighed then. “But as with the subterranean beehive dwellings of Callisto, and the surface web works of Ganymede, so with these supermodern caves—dead! Void of life. Dusted with the particles of long-decayed organic bodies.”
And now even Dora faintly wondered at the age-old significance of civilizations that the worms had left. Having looked upon seven planetary tombs, she, too, found reason to wonder why they had all given up the ghost. In their long trips from body to body, Renolf had itemized for her the duration scale of the solar system. Had inculcated patiently the time sense.
Dora was now able to reckon with eons and millenniums as though they were days of the week. And, knowing that the infinitely slow progress of organic evolution took something like a half billion years to result in humanlike intelligence, Dora was able to appreciate the mystery of civilized life dying away in less than half that time. The earliest civilization, probably that of little, quickly cooling Rhea of Saturn, expounded Renolf, could not have been further removed in time than a paltry ten million years.
“Really,” Renolf had elaborated, “the length of time needed for evolution to progress from a cell spark to a thinking being is far greater than the difference between the crust formations of the various planets and satellites. In fact, all organic life in the solar system is contemporary.
“But Rhea and Europa preceded Io, Titan, and Earth’s Moon by some two to three million years, in culminating in intelligence. They, in turn, preceded Callisto and Mercury by a few million years. They, in their turn, were some million years ahead of Ganymede and Mars. These last two were that much ahead of Earth and Venus. And we are some few million years ahead of Saturn and Jupiter. But, of course, on their somewhat steamy island crusts at present, as we saw on Saturn, are species of animal life that will eventually evolve rational creatures. In brief, with a comprehensive time sense, one expects each civilization to endure for those few million years separating them. Why, in the name of reason, should they not?”
RENOLF speared the Comet close to Mars. He was both desperate and eager. This planet had been the last, perhaps, to develop intelligence in the cosmic time scale. Then, too, Mars had always been the apple of Earth’s imaginative eye. From the time of Kepler on, human minds—and great ones—had gazed on the garnet planet, and wondered. The mystery of its c
anals was perhaps the oldest of astronomy’s many unanswered queries.
“I don’t know why,” said Dora, “but I feel more excited about this than any of the others. Maybe there’s even—even people here. Living people, I mean!”
“There should be,” answered Renolf. “The Neolithic Age of this planet could not have been remoter than two million years. The race should have survived that tiny interval, considering the half billion or so years that organic life survived before that.”
But——
That “but” came true. It hung unvoiced in the cabin of the Comet as Renolf plunged the ship downward with belching fore jets. Surprisingly, the cabin had become warm. Renolf had had to use a dozen blasts of deceleration to check speed. Mars had still an appreciable atmosphere. Then the hull had cooled—and the cabin—and Renolf had changed to diamagnetic control. Below was desolation, barrenness, desert waste. Sad and lonely. A soil that had once teemed with myriads of germ life, now glinted sterile in a small sun’s gentle glare.
But the Earthlings were not concerned over this. Rational life, if there were any, would not be a part of the desolation. Intelligence had risen above planetary death on those other worlds. So it must be on Mars.
Then Dora pointed, trembling uncontrollably. Just peeping over the clear-cut horizon was a man-made something. The Comet sped toward it like a bloodhound on a fresh spoor. Before arriving, they could see that it was some sort of city. It was at the intersection of two unending lines of white. At the crossroads of two canals. A city of slim spires upreared in countless confusion, like a bunch of saw grass. Many of the spires were broken short. For a moment, from the distance, it looked like a comb with many teeth out.
Then the “but” fulfilled itself. Hovering a hundred feet above the tallest towers, they saw it to be a city of ghosts. Unless even they had left. Over it was a half-egg-shaped transparent dome, like the domes of Titan. Dead and lifeless. A man-shaped husk. An unwitting tombstone for the race that had once inhabited it, made it ring with the boisterous noises of warm life.
