Back at the camp, there was a flash of light and the members of the Expedition looked at a blistered, blackened, peeling screen. The sound of the detonation came seconds later, and it was like a blow in the chest. At the same instant the ground bucked violently. There was a light brighter than the sun.
There was simply no virtue in running away. Brett said numbly to himself, though he didn’t hear the words as formed:
“Atomic explosion. We’re dead, now.”
He got up stiffly from his seat. He went outside the hut. He looked toward the firing plaza two miles away. There was a hill between, but he saw a gigantic smoke ring spinning toward the sky. There was a horrible, incandescent, two-branched fountain in the air. Flame poured up and poured up and poured up skyward, while Brett did not realize that he was deafened and hardly perceived the incredible roar.
Others came out of the hut. Belmont, the nuclear man of the Expedition, very absurdly carried something from his laboratory, at which he looked intently without raising his eyes to the sky. Halliday looked at the fountain of flame with an expression of embittered indignation. Jannings, the meteorologist, stared and stared and then ridiculously wetted his finger and held it up, his air one of complete absorption.
One flame suddenly began to diminish. It failed rapidly in intensity. In seconds it had lessened to a mere glow to be seen over the hillcrest between. The other flame burned more and more luridly—and abruptly stopped. But the rising smoke ring still hurtled upward, expanding as it rose. It was ten thousand feet up. Fifteen thousand. Jannings watched it with his head thrown back and his wetted finger still absurdly held aloft. His lips moved, but Brett did not hear anything at all.
People did unreasonable things. Brett saw the Expedition’s official flier pilot very solemnly take a cigarette from his pocket and very solemnly tap it against the back of his hand and put it in his mouth and puff on it. He very carefully blew a smoke ring of his own, staring blankly where the fountains of flame had risen. There was steam rising there now.
Then Jannings’ voice came, very faintly, like a remembered sound rather than like an actual noise.
“There’s a wind from the ocean,” said Jannings thinly. “It’s blowing the atom cloud inland. There’s a wind from the ocean. It’s blowing the atom cloud inland. There’s a wind from the ocean—”
He repeated the words over and over, like an automaton. His voice grew stronger as Johnny’s hearing came back. And suddenly, it seemed, they were all released from a sort of hypnosis of shock, and Belmont looked up from his radiation counter and said in a sort of mild astonishment:
“Ten more seconds and we’d have had a burning exposure!”
Then a babbling of voices. There was a crazy confusion all around. Voices cried, “We’ve got to move camp!” Voices asked imploringly, “Are we burned? Are we burned?” Then Halliday displayed unsuspected leadership and bellowed at them in a shaking voice and took matters in hand.
The first requisite was information. But an even greater need was action. It is not healthy to camp within two miles of a recent atomic explosion site. Wind blowing from it to one’s camp will hardly be salubrious. Halliday crackled orders. While Brett helped loose one of the two fliers from its tie-down ropes, Halliday had other men dragging out emergency rations and canteens and the rolled-up inflatable shelters that could be used to live in. As he snapped instructions, Halliday interjected odd fragments of thought as if everything that came into his head also came out of his mouth.
The flier took off vertically and swept toward the ocean, on shouted last minute instructions from Belmont to stay upwind. Halliday stopped his stream of feverish instruction as Brett came back from the takeoff spot.
“Good work, Carstairs!” said Halliday. His thinning white hair blew erratically about his head. “Your suspicions made that tripod go off with us two miles away instead of right on top of it.”
Brett wetted his lips. He’d had time to begin to feel shaky, now, but the churning up of all his emotions somehow made his mind work feverishly. He said abruptly:
“The tripod didn’t explode. There were three things going off. One atomic explosion and two fizz-offs. Where the bomb went off there couldn’t have been anything left behind to make those flames!” Brett heard himself saying: “The firing plaza was booby-trapped!”
Halliday had opened his mouth to shout an order, but he stopped short.
“Wha-a-a-at?”
“There were three bombs,” said Brett shakily, “and only one went off properly. The two fizz-offs—they didn’t make critical mass fast enough. Their active material vaporized instead of detonating. At a guess, they were too old to work right.”
“Too old—”
Brett made a helpless gesture.
“I know it sounds crazy! But new bombs should blow! And there was a war on this planet once. The people died. But they were getting even while they died. Wouldn’t it be reasonable that if they knew they were going to be wiped out, by radiation that poisoned the air they breathed but which would die out in time, wouldn’t it be reasonable that they should set booby-traps to kill their enemies if any of them lived and their descendants came here later?”
The flier, circling two thousand feet up and to windward of the atom column, came streaking down toward the Expedition’s camp. Halliday opened his mouth, closed it, and came to a rational decision.
“That will have to be discussed later. You fly? Take the second flier and scout a camping place not less than fifty miles up the coast. Pick a place that should not have any artifacts about. Then come back. We will shift camp to avoid possible radiation in case the wind changes. We don’t know whether it will or not, but we have to be out of range in any event.”
He made a pushing motion at Brett and turned back to the work at hand. Brett went to the second flier and loosened it.
He was aloft before the first flier had landed, and he headed north. An idea occurred to him, and he dropped lower. The planet Thalassia might be dead, but something other than men from Earth had been here very recently. Flying high would make him invisible to eyes on the ground, but would make him visible indeed to detection radar. If there were intelligent creatures on Thalassia now, they would take precautions against unexpected encounters with other creatures who dug garbage pits and set up radar beacons and first landing plaques. Very probably the tripod had been a device to give notice if these strange creatures returned. So it would be wise to fly low.
He flew slowly—slowly enough to estimate distance and examine the shoreline. It was incredible. There were places where highlands ended abruptly at the shore. At those places mountainous masses of spray and foam shot upward where the breakers struck. There was one place where the beach matched the human exploring ship’s first beach touching. There was shining sand and boulders for a full mile inland. The breakers themselves rolled in like rows of skyscrapers and crashed with even more catastrophic sounds. On Earth, in the South Pacific, winds could blow completely around the Antarctic continent and build up waves with seventy foot crests. But Thalassia was all ocean save for the one continent and a few dependent, nearby islands. Trade winds blowing would have a twenty-thousand-mile reach in which to make these waves. The gravity here, too, was a little less than on Earth. They should be monstrous!
So Brett Carstairs flew at five hundred feet above the ground, a mile inshore from the breaker line, and saw waves not less than three hundred feet high and often higher come roaring in toward him, and he saw them fling spume in masses higher than he flew. Sometimes he thought he saw living things in the water, but he was not sure. Once he did see a stranded sea monster, frayed and tattered by corruption, but that was not his present business.
Just at the distance Halliday had named, he found a running stream winding down into the ocean, only to be lost in its surf. He followed it inland for some miles. He saw an adequate place of refuge for the Expedition. He landed. He made sure. The river was fresh and ran a hundred yards wide between steep cliffs, yet the
re was some clear ground and at least one spot where giant trees almost met above the water. The Expedition would be undetectable from the air, under the shelter of an overhanging shelf. Its fliers could be hidden under the leafy screen. It would do.
It was on the way back that it occurred to Brett that the ship which would come to pick up the Expedition six months from now would not know where to look for it. And—it would be highly vulnerable to whatever had placed that metal tripod on the firing plaza.
Then he thought to wonder what would happen if a ship landed on a firing plaza. Or in the ruins of a city. The exploring ship had not spotted any cities undestroyed by bombs. But just suppose …
He landed, feeling an extremely queasy sensation at the pit of his stomach. When he saw the pictures of the plaza as it looked now, he was even less comfortable. The entire group of ancient rocket launching tunnels had been nearly two miles in extent. There was a half-mile crater where an atom bomb had gone off underground. It was a cleanly blasted hollow, lined with glass. It was nowhere near the spot where the tripod had been. There were two other incandescent holes, gaping wide and still pouring out clouds of steam. They were irregularly shaped and twenty feet or more across. There had been other bombs underground at those places, too, but instead of blasting in the millionth of a second they had gone off slowly, disintegrating in seconds and vaporizing most of their own material before it could disintegrate. The critical mass hadn’t been achieved quickly enough to blow them. It was exactly the kind of failure that could be expected of a brilliantly designed booby-trap that happened not to be sprung for some thousands of years. The location of these bombs, also, had no relationship to the position of the tripod.
The blast had not been the tripod, but bombs buried by the long-exterminated inhabitants of Thalassia, to destroy any creature landing on their world after its air was sweet and clean again.
Brett reported his choice of a new camping place. He found his guesses about the booby-trapping of the plaza accepted as verified. They were. But Halliday said querulously:
“What the devil was the tripod?”
“It could have been a beacon,” said Brett, “with variations. The exploring ship set up a beacon to guide Earth ships to its landing place, so they wouldn’t need to repeat all the work it had done. But suppose—well—people not from Earth wanted to find out if all the Thalassians were really dead? There was a beacon. Life had been around, recently. They might have dozens of these tripods at different places. Anything alive would go up to them and examine them. The eyes might modify the signal they sent. Anything intelligent and alive would be reported, either by a change in the tripod’s signal, or by the fact that its signal stopped.”
Brett had worked out the notion during his flight to the north and back. Halliday blinked. He turned and barked at somebody. Emergency equipment was being loaded into both fliers. He turned back to Brett:
“What set off the booby trap?”
“The toppling of the tripod, most likely,” suggested Brett. “It would be sending a tight beam straight up. When it fell over, it would send that beam at the ground. High frequency surges would be induced. They could set off an electronic trigger that was designed to blow the bombs when a ship landed nearby. The creatures who were wiped out might want to kill their enemies whenever they turned up, even after thousands of years.”
Then Halliday said in a flat voice:
“But something did land! It took the human beacon, set up the tripod, and we saw its rocket crater where it took off.”
“It wasn’t big,” said Brett. “If the Thalassians were pleasant enough, they might scheme so a scout ship could land and take off unharmed, but a passenger liner bringing colonists would be wiped out.”
Halliday nodded sourly.
“A nice thought! If you’re right, then that tripod might have been set up by the creatures the Thalassians set their booby-traps for! And if Aspasians are beginning to explore this planet again, they’ll take us for Thalassians! They’ll try to murder us.” Then he said bitterly: “How can we do our work if bloodthirsty creatures are trying to hunt us down and kill us? How can we do our work?”
Brett offered no ideas. He helped load his flier, conferred briefly with the pilot of the other, and they took off together. He led the way to the campsite he’d chosen. He left his load and two passengers. The other flier did the same. They went back. Fifty miles along the coast. They loaded up. They returned. They went back again. Nobody thought of relaxing. At the new campsite a biologist was at work on nearby fruits, and someone was fishing. Fish, too, would be tested for edibility. Brett flew and flew and flew. One trip after another. The two fliers ferried supplies in quantity. Equipment was another matter. Once the route was established, the work grew tedious. Half an hour to load up. Ten minutes to fly fifty miles. Half an hour to unload.
Because there was no night, exhaustion came upon Brett before he realized it. He had no time to examine the handmade golden locket in detail. He had it tucked carefully away and he almost resented it because it was so simply and starkly impossible. The girl was pretty enough. But she could not exist! And there was something more urgent on hand than speculations upon the reality of the impossible. The Expedition had to survive. Brett wearily applied his mind to make that practical.
But weariness hit him suddenly. He nearly flubbed a landing on the river, at last. Halliday snapped at him:
“We can’t move everything, Carstairs, but it is urgent that we get all possible supplies to this new site. You must be more careful!”
Brett said tiredly:
“It might be a good idea to leave behind as much as we can.”
“What?” fumed Halliday. “Leave supplies we need?” Brett yawned uncontrollably.
“Whoever or whatever left the tripod,” he said drearily, “will probably go back when it—they—find it has stopped reporting. There’ll be a bomb crater and the fizz off holes. If we’ve left a lot of stuff, houses and all the rest, they may think we simply went to the firing plaza to look at their tripod and didn’t come back. Because the bomb blew. That might be useful to us.”
Halliday fumed again.
“You irritate me,” he said peevishly. “I should think of such things, not you! But it is sound thinking. Go get some rest!”
Brett got out of the flier. He stumbled up to the encampment under its shelf of stone. He heard the sound of chopping. There were cave mouths here, but the caves were shallow. Somebody was hacking at the back wall of one of them. It was a wall—an artificial wall. After eight thousand years it was not a solid barrier, and it had been hastily constructed. It was Kent who was hacking at the tiers of stones.
“Looks like a sealed-up cave,” he told Brett phlegmatically. “It could be anything—even a place where Thalassians tried to seal themselves in with air-renewal apparatus to last out the time the air was poisoned. It wouldn’t work, of course. The air could’ve been deadly for five or fifty or five hundred years, depending on the amount of radioactivity in it. But if there’s any size to this, it might make a good shelter for us, and we ought to find some stuff in it.”
Johnny nodded sleepily. He thought to look at his wrist chronometer. It was some thirty-eight hours since the Expedition’s landing. He’d worked steadily for all that length of time.
Kent’s pick went through the wall. Nothing in particular happened. Kent pulled rocks away. Crumbled mortar came with them. He enlarged the hole in a matter-of-fact fashion. Presently it was of a size to permit easy entrance. No particular smell came out. The inside air was cooler. That was all. Kent went and got a hand-light. He cast its fierce glare inside. He nodded his head, put down the light, and went away.
Brett picked up the light and threw it through the opening. He saw shining wet walls, and stalactites and stalagmites. There was an artificial curved ramp leading away somewhere between a pair of limestone cave formations. There was a curious small heap on the artificially flattened floor. He focused the light on it.
Bones. They looked human. They were cemented to the floor by an aeons-old layer of glistening, almost transparent mineral.
Brett entered, blinking. The skeletons were well-enough preserved to be tragic, but he remembered that the ancient race had had six fingers and other not-quite-usual features. He looked. Yes. The interior of this place was squared and leveled. It had been worked into shape. There was a tunnel leading off to the left and he glanced in. A low-ceiling room, crowded with objects in rows. Machines. More skeletons. He stood rocking on his feet with weariness. He thought: “Now we’ll know something about a civilization that was killed while our ancestors were still hunting mammoths.” He should have been excited, but somehow he wasn’t. Then he realized why.
The objects so neatly arranged in rows were not machines. They had been, but they weren’t any longer. They were heaps of rust. Swollen, nodular distorted heaps of oxide of iron and copper and—yes—even aluminum. They were old! They were mineralized. But they had been mineralized after they had been destroyed.
He heard voices. Kent was bringing the rest of the Expedition inside. Lights flickered and flashed. He heard shoutings. Men crowded past the compartment he stared at, exclaimed exultantly, and went on. Voices echoed eerily. The mood of the Expedition was the excited rejoicing of children with a newly discovered playground. But what they were exploring was a tomb. Here despairing six-fingered creatures had walled themselves in from the light and air of their own world to try to outlive its poisoning. They had expected perhaps a thousand years of entombment. But it was forever.
Brett was too tired for any emotional reaction. He found himself mumbling:
“They forgot that there’s always some water in caves. Water makes them. And water seeping down would be radioactive. So they died.”
He made his way heavily back toward the opening Kent had made. He went to the outer cave, where there were sleeping bags. Halliday met him. Halliday carried more hand-lights.
“Ah, Carstairs!” he said exuberantly. “You picked a lucky place! When I learned the firing plaza had been booby-trapped I was really in despair! I thought any other site would be booby-trapped too. I thought we might be unable to work at all! But here we’ve got a bolt hole they tried to make use of! Artifacts! Skeletons! We can get a marvelous picture of their civilization under stress! Marvelous!”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 104
