"Very tempting," said Hound. "But you better come home!"
I broke all speed records getting back to the estate. And what did I run into? Oh, reader, you should appreciate what I've had to go through to get this story finished for you!
The air-wagon, pretty scruffy, was on the pad all right. But so were my mother and Corsa and her brother and Hound. The latter three were dressed in outing clothes!
"Oh, I think it's so romantic," my mother said. "There will be two moons tonight."
"I got you guns," said Hound. "Corsa's brother has them by the ton."
Shafter was in the driving seat. "I can't trust you with this old wreck, young Monte. I'll probably have to overhaul the drives in midair."
We took off, my mother waving hopefully. Corsa cuddled up.
It wasn't going quite as I planned. I doubted that Bob Hoodward could have unseated any presidents if he'd been mired down in family.
"Where we going?" asked Shafter. I sort of glared at him. I had wanted to drive to see if I could do it like Heller, with one knee. But I would make the best of it.
"Go over these hills and head out across the Great Desert," I said.
"Oh, we're going to the Blike Mountains," said Hound. "I'd better call the Earl of Mok. That's his hunting preserve. He'll want game wardens to meet us."
"No, no!" I said. "We're not going there. We're heading for Spiteos."
"Never heard of it," said Shafter, reaching for a button to turn on the panel map screen.
"You won't have," I said proudly. "It's a huge black castle left over from primitive times. It's two hundred miles straight west. You can't miss it. It's an enormous ruin, I think."
"I don't like ruins," said Corsa. "On Modon we build everything shiny new. In fact, I have some architects working on our house."
I felt a little ill. This sort of thing could go too far and it was certainly going too fast!
Her brother thought he'd better educate me on how you handled lepertiges with cannons so I wouldn't get hurt the first time out. And Corsa informed me at considerable length what you had to do about worms getting into the crops.
I felt I had received a Royal reprieve when Shatter said suddenly, "If that's it, there it is!"
I looked ahead and down. Through a dancing column of wind and dust, like purple diamonds in the slanting sun, I saw a gash that rent the ground, deadly and awful deep. Just beyond it seemed to be an area of black stone sprawled upon the desert floor. ,., "I don't see any castle," said Corsa.
"I thought you said there was a castle," said her brother. • - There was green grass along the chasm rim and some grazing animals dotted the area.
"A herder!" cried Corsa. "Land down there so I can ask him about his flock!"
Shatter promptly landed.
I got out and before Corsa could get to him, I ran to the rustic and said, "Is this the castle of Spiteos?"
He hunched the blanket he wore as a cloak so it wouldn't fall off and looked where I was pointing. "Them black rocks?" He was chewing on a leaf and he spat liquidly in that direction. "I heard my great-grandfather call it 'Castle Rocks' once. And maybe they did look like a castle once. But there's been earthquakes, you know, and things get tumbled around."
I looked at the yawning chasm. "You ever been down into that?"
"What?" he said, aghast. "You must think I'm crazy. I had an animal fall there once and you could hear him scream for half an hour and he never did hit bottom."
Corsa had come up and she wanted to know all about the crop value of his animals and did he ever have to treat them for colic.
I went over and sat down on a large black boulder and looked at this scene. From the Gris manuscript, I could get a pretty good idea of where Camp Endurance—or Camp Kill as they called it— had been. I didn't want to go near that chasm where the Countess Krak apparently had fallen to her death. I wondered if there were still dungeons and bones underneath this sprawl of enormous basalt.
Unable to resist the urge, since it was singing in my head, I whipped out a pad of paper and wrote:
AN ODE TO SPITEOS Oh, grandeur fallen in decay, You fill my soul with dread dismay. Your broken, ruined stones that fell, Many a dismal tale could tell. Oh, in your blackness did you spring Up, like some demented thing, From some foul, fetid, screaming Hell? ,Oh, Spiteos, you who speak of dead Forgotten men fill me with dread! ,I'm glad your bones again will wed The ground on which your evil bled. " The cry of mourning is the moan Of desert wind. Not mine!
I looked at it. Pretty good, I thought. You're in fine form, Monte.
Footsteps behind me. It was Corsa and her brother and Hound. I couldn't resist reading it to them.
RAUCOUS LAUGHTER!
When she could catch her breath, and holding her side, Corsa said, "Oh, Monte! It will be such a relief when I can cure you of this obsession with writing. I honestly don't think my stomach muscles could stand too much of this."
From that moment, I hated her with enduring passion!
I hardly heard Hound's comment, "You promised not to read me another one of them things. Shows I got to work harder impressing on you the value of keeping one's word!"
I sternly repressed the urge to write "An Ode to Those Who Have No Souls."
Very well aware that I had been born in the wrong time and the wrong place, I went over to the air-wagon.
"Get out the instruments," I told Shafter.
"Well, you didn't say what kind. But I got everything here you can analyze any motor with that's made."
"I'm not trying to analyze motors. I'm trying to detect metal under the ground."
"Metal?" he said. "You don't have to detect metal to fix a drive. That's all they're made of. Every detector I brought detects currents."
The possibility of any current still running in anything after a century or more, unless it was a black hole or something, was too remote.
Feeling defeated, I went away and sat down.
If my search dead-ended and I never got the uncover-up book written, my fate was sealed. Faced with clerks' desks or exile to Modon, the only possible solution seemed to be to throw myself into the chasm and have done. I sat there in the sunset, getting bluer by the moment. I didn't have enough material. All I had was an old chart I didn't keep, a ship's log, an intelligence report and the Gris confession. They did not comprise any real evidence of or reason for such a vast cover-up. I wondered what Bob Hoodward would have done. Shafter came over. "Oh, don't just sit there pouting. I hear you spouting and that poem wasn't that bad. Besides, I've had an idea. If you want to find metal under the ground, I can take a spare fuel rod and push it into the dirt and tap it and if there's any metal around, it will polarize the current and one of these analyzers will spot it. What you looking for, buried treasure?"
"Oh, indeed so!" I said. And priceless treasure it would be. It would buy me out of total, degraded slavery if I could find evidence I needed!
"Then," he said, "let's get to work."
Chapter 7
I could see at once that there was going to be an awful lot of digging.
Hound said, "No, no, no! You can't dig in that suit you're wearing and if you think Shatter and I are going to do all the digging, you've got another think coming, young Monte." He called to the herdsman. "Haven't you got a village around here?"
The herdsman spat liquidly in a northerly direction. "Just on the other side of them biggest black rocks."
I asked Corsa's brother to unload the camping equipment and set it up and then scrambled after Hound, who had gone lumbering off in the indicated direction. With many an admonition to not scuff my shoes and not fall in any obviously gaping holes, Hound led me around the mammoth pile of stones, and after about fifteen minutes of walking we came to the "village."
It wasn't a village at all. The rocks seemed to have a lot of holes in them that could be said to be caves and there were women and kids visible.
Hound, with a lot of questions to blank or wide-eyed faces, located the headman in a c
avity that was mainly furnished with odors. He was gnarled and twisted and toothless, 190 if he was a day.
Aha! I thought. These were some of the prisoners that escaped during the earthquake and they stayed around!
"This tribe?" said the old man. "We're herders. We drifted in here about fifty year ago, found grass and settled down." No, he didn't know this had once been a castle.
Hound said to me, "How many holes are you going to dig?"
"How should I know how many holes I'm going to dig?"
"Well, I better make plans for a lot of holes if your record in Kid Sandpiles is any gauge. How much money have you got on you?"
I said, "Why should I have any money on me?"
Hound said, "Because I'm going to hire these men to do the digging."
"Oh."
He struck up some kind of a crass commercial bargain in which the fifty men of the village would dig.
Cautioned numerous times not to catch the cuffs of my pants on thorns, we got back to the air-wagon.
There was no sign of any pitched shelters. A bang in the distance told me that Corsa's brother was utilizing the remaining light to shoot songbirds. Corsa was busy discussing animal husbandry with the herdsman.
Hound said, "I'm going to take the air-wagon back to town and get an advance on your next month's allowance. And I'm going to get you some digging clothes. You should have told me what you were up to. Sit right there on that rock until I come back."
He and Shafter threw the camping gear out and Hound took off. I sat on the rock and wondered what it would be like to live an unmanaged life. I was certain that Bob Hoodward didn't ever have such obstacles to overcome. Shafter was going around pushing a fuel rod in the ground and tapping it. Finally he said to me, "Young Monte, I can't tap the rod and read a meter at the same time. When I tap the rod, you walk around me fifteen or twenty feet away and watch the meter."
I did as he suggested. Almost at once I got a huge surge. Excitedly I began to tear out grass by the roots and scoop away sand. Shafter was right with me. We looked like a couple of sporting animals going down a varmint hole for the kill. Grass tufts were flying through the moonlight in one direction and sand in another.
"What are you doing?" said Corsa.
"We're going after buried treasure," said Shatter.
"Well, you shouldn't be digging this grassland up like that. You'll ruin their pasturage. Fill that hole up at once and replace the turf."
"Oh, we will, we will," I said. "Let's see what's down here first."
"Monte," she said severely, "I can see right now that you have a terrible amount to learn. When you dig up pasturage that way, you get erosion. I really sigh when I realize the terrible time I will have making an acceptable farmer out of you. You have no finer sensibilities. Cease and desist at once!"
Of course we had to stop. I went back and sat down on the rock, mourning. What the Devils had been down underneath there, giving that read on the analyzer?
The moons were well up when Hound came back. He had brought two footmen, a cook and a maid for Corsa. I got scolded because my lounge suit was now turf-stained.
They found a spring, erected inflatable shelters and belatedly we had a dinner they had brought from town.
But I was very cunning. You are lucky that I was, dear reader, for we never would have found out what happened after the Gris narrative left us in midair.
I waited until everybody was asleep. I crept out of my shelter and went back to the hole and began to dig. I was very quiet. I dug and scraped and brushed and wore my fingers to the bone.
And then, there in the green moonlight, I knelt there looking at it.
A CANNON WHEEL!
It was corroded and twisted. The rim was partially melted as from a flaming blast.
Clearly there had been a battle here!
My hopes soared.
Clearly I could put an end to the overmanagement of my life. Fame beckoned!
I came out of my trance. I rolled it over onto flat ground. I carefully filled the hole in although I couldn't find the turf.
I rolled the clumsy, battered wheel into my shelter and at last went to sleep. A blasting bustle awoke me. I couldn't find out what it was right away because Hound had to shave me and get me into some sport clothes and proper boots and even insisted I have breakfast. At last I got out of the shelter. The area was teeming with men from the village. They all had digging tools. They were standing around Corsa. My hopes soared. Maybe she was on my side. Then I overheard what she was saying.
She was telling them that the grazing area could be quadrupled ! if they dug certain trenches that would stop erosion and enlarge the spring. Certain actions, it seemed, would then create ponds from the occasional runoff of the rains.
"There's far too much spill into that chasm," she told them. "So here is your map. Now get to work."
They all went trudging off and she came over to me. "Now, I've , taken care of that for you, Monte. Why don't you go find my brother and help him shoot these songbirds. They're terrible for crops."
It was my turn to raise my eyes to the sky but, of course, I didn't. Not in front of her. Shafter and I had no choice but to follow the diggers about and hope they would hit something by accident. Almost at once we began to hit paydirt! (That's a mining term.) A digger threw some dirt aside and Shafter saw something glitter and was in there like a shot. He picked up something round and then said, "Blast, I thought it was a coin!" He threw it away and I picked it up quickly. A button! It had a symbol on it that looked like a bottle—no, a fat paddle with an upside-down handle! , THE APPARATUS!
Aha! The Gris confession was no myth! All that day I tagged around collecting things. Odds and ends of metal were evidently not unusual in this place. One of the men said they appeared on the ground every time it rained. This had been a vast encampment!
By evening I had a hoard that even included the remains of an electric whip!
Oh, I was getting warm. I didn't even mind a lecture by Corsa's brother, as he sorted out a mound of plumage, on what kind of songbird you had to get rid of first if you ever expected to get a wink of sleep. I wondered sourly to myself if Gris' ancestors had come from Modon. I wondered if my sanity could stand up to much more association with this pair. About midnight the conspiratorial voice of Shafter woke me up. "If we're ever going to find any buried treasure," he whispered, "we're going to have to work at night. Come along. I need somebody to read the meter."
We stealthily crept out of camp. "Now, today when I went into town to get a load of grass seed," he said, "I took a look at this place from the air. If this was ever a castle, when the earthquake knocked it over, it fell due west. There's a pattern of fallen stone that looks just like a tower when you see it from above. My hunch is that if you root around over there and if it ever had a strongroom, it would lie in that mess. So let's go."
We clambered over shattered piles of black basalt under the bright green moons. This was more like the kind of thing I thought Bob Hoodward would do. A wind had come up and it was moaning through the tumbled stones. The beginning lines of "An Ode to the Homeless Ghost" began to run through my head. I wasn't watching where I was going.
I FELL STRAIGHT DOWN!
Fifteen feet below I fetched up with a horrible thud!
Shafter's voice out in the night. "Hey, where'd you go?"
"I'm down here!" I yelled.
I could see his head above in the hole, silhouetted against the moon-hazed sky. "You shouldn't go running off that way! You could get hurt!"
"Could get hurt?" I wailed. "I'm smashed! Get me out of here!"
He shined a light down into the place. "Hey!" he said. "Good going! You found a room!"
I stopped feeling for broken bones and looked around. Yes, I was in what might have been a room.
Shafter got out a line but instead of hauling me up, he came down. "What's that you're lying on?" he said.
I looked.
A DOOR!
It was made out of im
pervious alloy and had been so covered with dust that it had taken my fall to expose it.
We uncovered it. Shafter used a disintegrator drill to remove the hinges and we managed to lay it aside. There was a gaping hole under it and when we shined in the torch, we were looking at a room lying on its side.
It had the collapsed remains of some furniture in it. We dropped down a rope into it. I righted a chair. It was an ornate antique. I thought maybe that we had gotten into some old tomb. I looked around for signs of a coffin or burial artifacts. There were only a lot of shards of glass.
"Let's see if there's any buried treasure back of these walls," said Shafter. "You read the meter. I'll get on some insulator gloves and bang this fuel rod."
Shortly the sparks were flying as he went along the walls. It made the air smell like ozone.
I was passing the meter along one wall. I got a tremendous read. Shafter rushed over to me. "Crashing cogwheels!" he said. "There must be metal back of there by the millions of tons!"
We went down the wall and found, under a cascade of stone, another door. We unburied it, disintegrated the hinges and removed it.
We were in another room.
I shined my torch. Just behind the place where I had gotten my read was the remains of a COMPUTER BANK!
"Oh, blast," said Shafter. "That isn't any treasure. My current was just energizing the electromagnetic coils. We been had!"
"No, we haven't!" I cried. I suddenly knew where we were. That antique throne chair in the other office, this door, the desks tumbled about, all compared with the Gris confession!
WE WERE IN THE TOWER OFFICES Of LOMBAR
HISST!
THAT WAS HIS COMPUTER CONSOLE!
Oh, the very thing I had hoped to find!
"Quick, Shatter!" I said. "Can you get power into that thing?"
He looked at it. When the tower had crashed, the retaining bolts had held. But it was a sorry-looking mess.
"Well, why?" said Shafter.
"To get the information out of it, of course!"
"Well, Monte, I hate to have to tell you this but if there had been anything left on those recordings, it's gone now."
Mission Earth 8: Disaster Page 18
