Watching from the Ecology ship, Brett heard the report that the radar beacon on Chios wasn’t working, and he watched as the ship found Firing Plaza Number One and the ruined refugee-settlement nearby, and hovered there to make quite sure of its position before it descended gently at the landing place the exploring ship had advised for later visitors.
It was a pleasant savannah, and the stream ran as clear as crystal. But the Ecology Bureau ship had been grudgingly loaned, and it had urgent business elsewhere. Its cargo ports opened and the Expedition’s supplies went out to ground in a swiftly flowing stream. They piled up mountainously, so it seemed, and at that they weren’t too complete. The biggest crates were two atmosphere fliers and a short range rocket. The fuel for the rocket made a bigger heap than all the rest of the equipment together. There were plastic tarpaulins to cover everything. There were houses to be unloaded and braced back—but at least they weren’t inflatable shelters!—and there was a spare beacon. But there wasn’t much else but food. The unloading took less than two hours.
Then the skipper of the Ecology Bureau ship asked politely if there were anything else. Minutes later the cargo ports closed and the personnel lock shut, and the ship’s repulsors began to drone. It heaved up slowly until it was a few thousand feet up and then went into interplanetary drive and plummeted toward the sky. It would come back in six months, most likely, or another ship would come in its stead. And the Expedition would have to be ready to leave.
That was when Brett Carstairs realized the silence on Thalassia. The Expedition’s members set to work to make camp. There was a breeze and the vegetation was reasonably familiar in smell, at least—chlorophyl and its associated compounds are found on the oxygen planets of all sol-type stars—and the tree leaves rustled naturally enough. The small stream at the landing place made pleasant liquid sounds. But that was all. No insect stirred or whirred or stridulated. No bird sang. No squirrel barked. No reasonable facsimile of any noise made by any living creature came to the ears of the Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition. The only noises were the voices of the Expedition members themselves, and the bumpings they made with the boxes and crates, and the breeze and the dull booming of the mountainous surf to the westward. Brett caught himself listening uneasily.
“I didn’t realize,” he said ruefully to Kent, on the other end of a crate that would be a chair presently, “that it was going to sound so lonely.”
“It’s been lonely here for a good many thousand years,” said Kent phlegmatically, “since the race on this planet and the characters on the other one killed each other off.”
He put down his end of the crate. He and Brett opened it. They began to assemble the furnishings of the Expedition’s housing. All about them was jungle. The clearing in which they worked had a ground cover like ivy running on the ground. It was broad-leaved instead of narrow-leaved as grasses are, and Brett had a feeling that there should be crawling things under it.
But there weren’t. The report of the exploring ship was explicit. There bad been a very high civilization here, once. And another on the from-here-invisible twin planet Aspasia. Some eight thousand years ago they’d fought each other terribly across the half million miles of space that separated them. Fission bombs with cobalt cases poisoned the air of Thalassia, at the same time that fusion bombs from Thalassia blasted the oasis cities of its twin world to lakes of molten glass. There wasn’t a single, air-breathing creature left alive on Thalassia. Not any more.
The air was clean of radioactivity now, to be sure. Carbon-14 and Cobalt-60 determinations timed the deadly war at very close to eight thousand years before. Now there was vegetation and the ocean swarmed with marine organisms from plankton to fish. But there was no moving creature left on the land of the nearly Earth-sized world.
Brett labored on. The atmosphere on Thalassia was depressing. It was a dead world despite its forests and jungles. Everything that had wings or a throat—even teeth to bite or stings to sting with—had died millennia ago with the doomed creatures whose friable skeletons the exploring ship had found about the firing plaza. They’d died of the bombs from the other planet, which was forever invisible from here. They’d been murdered. Butchered. The forests had no purpose with no animals to live in them. There was a feeling of grief in the air, as if even the trees mourned.
Brett wanted to go over to the firing plaza and see where at least there had been living things, even if the only sure knowledge about them was that they had died in the act of firing giant rockets to avenge the extermination of their race. When they died, Thalassia was already a charnel house. Now—
There was quiet. A terrible quiet. The Expedition members braced their houses, moved the laboratory equipment inside, uncrated their fliers and tied them down, ran their power lines, dug their refrigeration pits, put in sanitary equipment and set their water recovery plant to work. It was safer to condense water from the air than to use the local water supplies which might still carry undesirable trace elements. Brett began to worry that it would be too late to go to the firing plaza before dark. Then he remembered. He looked up at the sky. It was mostly blue, but it was speckled. There was a dull red pinpoint of light near the horizon. That wasn’t Elektra, the sun and center of gravity of this system. It was Rubra, the red dwarf, the satellite sun the size of Earth’s Jupiter, which shared an orbit with the twin planets. They were in Trojan relationship to it, sixty degrees behind as it sped sullenly about its primary. Elektra itself was not visible. But there was no night.
Off to what ought to be the west there was a spotty bright luminosity in the sky. It was the star cluster Canes Venatici, on whose fringe this solar system lay. The multiple suns of the cluster swarmed so closely and shone so brightly at the cluster’s heart that even thirty light years away they gave Thalassia more light than its own and proper sun.
There would be no night on Thalassia.
Brett had known it, of course, but nevertheless he was relieved. A dead planet is gloomy enough in the daytime, with all its vegetation grieving that it has no purpose. At night it would be intolerable. Even in the daytime it would be hard to keep one’s mind busy.
Brett worked at it. He had driven pegs and was tying down the tarpaulin over a mound of crates when he saw the heap of dirt. It did not have any ground cover plants on it. It was piled up. It had been rained on, but it was freshly dug. Brett pounded two more pegs and double-knotted the ropes that would hold the tarpaulin in any wind. Then he jumped. Kent, by that time, was pounding in more pegs on the other side of the pile of stores.
Brett stared at the piled-up dirt. It was surprisingly Earthlike. The top of the ground was dark humus from rotted vegetation, and six or eight inches down it turned to clay, very much like a freshly dug hole on Earth. But there shouldn’t be any freshly dug hole on Thalassia! Nothing lived here! Nothing!
But there was a freshly dug hole in the ground, with clay on top of the thrown out humus.
Brett stopped driving pegs and went to make sure. He stared down. He felt himself growing queasy—sickish and pale. There were scraps of human-made paper at the bottom of the hole. There were traces of the rotted debris any group of humans will discard, but which humans automatically put out of sight before they leave any stopping place. This savannah had been the berthing place of the exploring ship Franklin. This was where the explorers had buried their trash. Something had dug it up.
More, something had very carefully sorted it out, as human scientists sort out the rubbish heaps—the kitchen middens—of a forgotten culture to find out what made it tick.
Something had carefully examined an exploring ship’s kitchen midden to find out what sort of beings human beings might be. Men from Earth wouldn’t have needed to do that. They knew.
Something intelligent and curious, but not from Earth, had wanted to know about men, on a planet where there had been nothing even breathing, much less intelligent, for eight millennia. But something had been alive on the dead planet Thalassia. It had wanted to know about the
men who’d camped here from the exploring ship two years before.
Brett was pale when he called Kent to look. Kent looked phlegmatically down into the hole and said:
“That’s the Franklin’s garbage pit. Why’d they dig it up again?”
Brett said:
“They didn’t. Somebody not on the Franklin dug it up. Lately. It’s been rained on, but nothing’s grown over it. In two years it would have been washed flat and covered over. This was dug long after the Franklin left. Lately. Probably within days. Just before we arrived.”
He shouted, and the trees nearby echoed back his voice with a hair-raising resonance. Halliday, the official head of the Expedition, came fretfully to see what was the matter. Brett showed him. Halliday stared blankly for a second. He even began to frown because Brett had called him for nothing. But then the breath went out of him with a curious whooshing sound. His face went quite gray.
“And the ship’s gone!” he said irritably. “It can’t take word back! There is life here after all! Intelligent life! We’re at its mercy!”
Which was absolutely true. Because Thalassia was dead, and below-the-horizon Aspasia with it. There could be no animals to hunt or need defense from: no birds or small creatures to collect. This was strictly an archaeological expedition to work on two worlds which had committed suicide together. So there were no defense weapons in the Expedition’s equipment. Heat guns, yes. They were handy for lighting fires. There were some explosives for shifting rock. But there were no more weapons capable of defending men against really dangerous creatures than a man will take on a camping trip in a national park on Earth. And the Expedition could not communicate with other humans for at least six months. They were hundreds of light years from help.
Brett said slowly:
“On the ship, just before we landed, I heard it said that the radar-beacon on the ground here wasn’t working. I think, sir, we’d better go over to the firing plaza and find out the worst.”
They went to the firing plaza. There had been a beacon there, left to notify Earth ships where the first exploring ship had landed. It would also notify any other intelligent race which dealt in such things as radar. There were a dozen men who went uneasily to see if anything had happened to make their landing unfortunate. They were defenseless, and more isolated from their kind than any humans had ever been before.
There was no sound anywhere save the wind in the trees. No bird song. No insect cry. Nothing but the ominous dull booming of the gigantic surf to the west. The ship that had brought them was long since in overdrive and unreachable by any means until it came back to normal space again.
They found where the beacon had been. It was gone. It had been a complex mechanism, powered by a pinch of atomic pile residue. It should have sent out its signal, on a standard frequency, for years to come. It had been mounted on a solid concrete pillar, according to custom.
The concrete pillar was there, but the radar beacon was not. It had been cut from its anchorage with something like a torch which cut the metal smoothly. There was as yet no oxidation on the severed surfaces.
The first landing plaque had been removed from the same column. It was the plaque which recited that the exploring ship Franklin had made a first landing on this planet on such and such a day and year, Earth Calendar. Close by the column there was a rocket blast crater in the ground—a small one, perhaps six or seven feet across. It was fresh. A rocket had landed here and removed the man-made objects after studying a human refuse pit. Within days. Certainly within weeks.
It had left something of its own behind, though. There was a metal tripod set up on the ground. It was about man-height high, with a box at its top shaped like an inverted cone. There were round holes on four sides of the box. It was not placed on any foundation—simply set up on the ground for some temporary purpose. And left behind.
Kent, his face blankly curious, moved to approach it. “Hold up!” said Brett, very pale. “That could be a thing to collect specimens!”
Kent stopped. Halliday, the Expedition head, turned his face to Brett.
“Specimens?”
“Us,” said Brett harshly. “We set traps to collect specimens for study when we’re making an ecology study of a planet! It would be logical for something intelligent to want to see specimens of the creatures that make garbage pits and radar beacons and landing plaques!”
There was a long pause. Then Halliday said in a flat voice:
“Yes. There are eyes in the thing, too. Or lenses. It could be a collection trap. Or it could be transmitting pictures of us to somewhere, on a frequency our ship wasn’t set to detect. We will—go back to the camp and think it over.”
He moved to go back, and the others with him. The alien tripod glittered in the peculiar dead-white light which did not come from the sun. Brett stared at it as he moved to follow the others. This was a singularly unsatisfactory state of affairs. Humans do not like to feel defenseless. Brett hated the tripod he was afraid for anybody to touch. He did not even feel that his specialty of paleotechnology qualified him to guess what it was. It could be a trap, or a beacon, or a transmitter. It could be anything.
His foot caught in something as he moved away from it. His heart jumped into his throat. It could be a trip wire …
But it wasn’t. It was a tiny golden chain, very humanlike in manufacture. It had broken. Brett picked it up very cautiously. A locket started to slither off. He picked that up, too. It had the feel of a human artifact. It was. It had been made by hand.
There was a picture of a girl in it, under a protecting sheet of plastic. She was a human girl, though her costume was like none that Brett had ever seen or heard of. The picture was black-and-white—an ancient process—but it was unfaded, which meant that it had been made recently …
This, of course, was starkly impossible. One does not find a picture of a human girl in the ruins of an eight-thousand-year-old culture, on a planet hundreds of light years from Earth. Not a picture in an antiquated medium, long forgotten, and with a background neither this planet nor of Earth. It was so completely impossible that Brett knew he wouldn’t dare show it to any of his companions. They wouldn’t believe he’d found it. It couldn’t be!
CHAPTER TWO
“…The Elektran solar system displays certain anomalies, not only in the existence of a satellite sun Rubra, no larger than a gas-giant planet … (but in) the twin worlds Thalassia and Aspasia, each nearly seven thousand miles in diameter, which revolve about each other at a distance of only 250,000 miles. Tidal strains have long since ended their diurnal rotation and they turn the same faces toward each other during their period of revolution of not quite twenty-five days. This nearness and the development of intelligent races on both planets led to the development of interplanetary communication between them some time between 7000 and 11,000 years ago. The tragic results of this communication …
Astrographic Bureau Publication 11297,
Appendix to Space Pilot Vol. 460, Sector XXXIV. P. 56.
* * * *
A TRENCHING machine with its buckets removed went toiling painfully up to the alien tripod some six hours later. It was under remote control. It skirted the elongated opening of a concrete tunnel, made by the long dead six-fingered race of which the exploration ship had found skeletal remains. There were thirty or more of those tunnels, which of course no member of the Expedition had yet entered. But the Franklin’s report said that they had been launching tubes for giant rockets. The rockets had gone roaring out over the ocean, rising steadily, until they swept round the curve of the planet to blast across space and loose destruction upon the sister world Aspasia. The firing plaza took its name from these tunnels. The refugee settlement—still-roofed houses of lignin plastic—had obviously been the shelter in which the dying, despairing Thalassians lived while they took their revenge for the destruction of their race.
The trench-digger ground and rumbled and blundered on its way. Once a side tread slipped and it stalled in a thicket of t
rees it could not push down. It backed out and went bumbling on toward the bright new metal of the tripod.
Back at the camp, the vision screen which showed what the trenching machine saw pictured the firing plaza as looking like an abandoned area of Earth, with long slanting shadows and stark contrasts of illumination.
The robot machine went on. It was taller than a man, and its outline from the front was not dissimilar. It approached the glistening three-legged object with the inverted cane on top. At the camp, the members of the Expedition watched the screen. Brett Carstairs felt acutely uncomfortable. He’d been suspicious because his training in technical processes naturally made him suspect ancient psychological processes in all unfamiliar objects. But of course the tripod could be completely harmless and incapable of doing damage—
It wasn’t.
The trenching machine drew nearer. Twenty yards. Ten. Five yards. Ten feet, and the round holes in the conical box looked more than ever like eyes. The trenching machine bumped the tripod. The tripod toppled over.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 103
