Halliday clapped his hands sharply:
“Understand, everyone! We cannot stay here. We cannot go out of the ordinary exit. We have to find a new exit, or make one. I believe the rock-strata slant down toward the coast. Am I right, Simpson? Yes! It is probable that some of the sealed-off branches of this cave system may reach the surface—or near it—upwind of the bomb crater. They would have been sealed off because they communicated with the air. The seals are to be broken and radioactivity checked in the air coming in …”
Kent spoke, phlegmatic as always:
“Make up packs to carry?”
“Naturally!” snapped Halliday. “This is a most irritating occurrence! We had a perfect site for examination with all conveniences. Now it must be abandoned and it will not be possible to examine it again for years! Everyone should carry his written notes, but artifacts will have to be left behind to leave room for food. It is infuriating!”
He fumed, but Brett found himself admiring Halliday.
The dark and echoing caverns resounded to strange noises, after that. The strangeness was largely due to the blackness which is not normal anywhere on Thalassia. Men examined carefully drawn maps, and found sealing-off walls which blocked extensions of the cave system. All limestone caverns are somewhat similar. One passage might have been blocked off because of a pothole leading to the surface. Another because of an underground stream which would bring radioactivity in its waters. The Geiger counters gave grim news as one after another of the seals were broken. There had probably been only one rocket at a time trailing Brett’s flier, from so great an altitude that he could not detect it. A rocket has not an indefinite flying life. There must have been a relay system to keep on Brett’s track. But there’d been a cobalt-based bomb handy to drop when he went to ground. It would normally have made a continuous lethal fallout over a strip of ground many miles long. In a rainstorm like this, the fallout should be shorter, but vastly more intense.
It was. Air coming in the pierced walls that closed off unknown winding passages showed an intensity of radiation that made Belmont whistle softly.
“Right now,” he told Brett, “the air outside is just about as breathable as so much straight chlorine. It wouldn’t be as painful to the lungs, but the results would be identical.”
Brett helped close up another small opening with mud. Twelve men from Earth, hundreds of light-years from home, were sealed in a cave that had been a tomb for eight thousand years. Unknown stars made speckles of light in the thin blue sky above the rain clouds. At one place a nearby star cluster made a mottled illumination brighter than the local sun. They were on a world of water with but a single continent of land and that was empty of moving life. There was life only in that hopeless cavern underground—and high in the air overhead, hovering until more hovering things should come to drop more death.
Beyond the atmosphere there was nothing at all. From a sufficient distance the globe which was Thalassia could be seen to be distorted, bulging noticeably toward its similarly deformed twin world Aspasia, only a quarter million miles away. They revolved about each other in implacable enmity, turning always the same faces toward each other.
“On Thalassia plants no longer seek to attract insects by bright colors or scent or nectar, because there are no insects. Plants which depended upon insects for fertilization have become extinct. Berry-bearing and fruit-bearing trees no longer compete for the carrying of their seeds by offering fragrance or taste. There are no birds. Even species which formerly found it advantageous to grow thorns for the discouragement of herbivorous animals no longer find the practice serviceable … The flowers have lost their scent and the fruit its savor and even the thorns their sharpness, because there are no animals to take notice …”
A long, long way away there was the yellow sun Elektra, spinning in space, less bright than Sol but nearly as large. Nearer, and rolling sullenly about its primary was the red dwarf satellite-star Rubra. The twin worlds followed it perpetually in its orbit in the Trojan position. From space the dark carbon clouds could be seen upon its surface, forming in perpetual storms through which the fiery red of hell flame could be seen. Further out were more planets, Lucifer and Titan and Argos, giant gas worlds where life had never been. And spinning brilliantly in the glare of Elektra, close in toward it, blazed the little planet Melissa on its erratically inclined orbit, circling Elektra in a year of less than a dozen weeks.
But there was not quite a sameness and a staleness in all the happenings of empty space. Where the twin planets spun about each other there was motion. It was tiny by comparison with the vastness all about. But from the seared and sandy surface of Aspasia small white threads appeared. They stretched toward Thalassia across the gulf. There were many of those threads. They were rocket trails.
The enmity between the planets had not ended. A war fleet roared toward the world that robot rockets had killed before. Life had been found on it again. That life must be destroyed.
The strange, incurious stars watched without emotion.
CHAPTER FIVE
“On Thalassia plants no longer seek to attract insects by bright colors or scent or nectar, because there are no insects. Plants which depended upon insects for fertilization have become extinct. Berry-bearing and fruit-bearing trees no longer compete for the carrying of their seeds by offering fragrance or taste. There are no birds. Even species which formerly found it advantageous to grow thorns for the discouragement of herbivorous animals no longer find the practice serviceable … The flowers have lost their scent and the fruit its savor and even the thorns their sharpness, because there are no animals to take notice …”
Astrographic Bureau Publication 11297,
Appendix to Space Pilot Vol. 460, Sector XXXIV, Page 75.
* * * *
THE SOUND of the surf gave them hope—that and the Geiger counter readings. They climbed and crawled and wormed their way through channels and around glistening-wet bulges of stone. They had ropes around their waists like mountain-climbers, so that no one would fall alone into the sometimes gaping depths they encountered. Once Brett, in the lead, crawled upon his belly for more than a hundred feet with rock touching his back all the way. He could not have done it but for the assurance of the rope that he could be pulled back. Once they had to use a small charge of explosive to break down a mass of calcite which barred the way. They spent hours in the journey. But they went on because to stop or turn backward was to die. And for the last half hour they did have the encouragement of the thunderous sound of surf.
Then they came out quite undramatically from a hole in which there were many brushwood sticks, in the space between the roots of a giant tree. They heard the surf clearly, then. They had crawled more than five miles underground, and were almost at the edge of the beach when they reached the open air.
The jungle which here crowded the shoreline was saturated, but the rain had stopped. They moved in the direction that by convention was called south. A magnetic compass pointed somewhere, and steadily, but it bore no relationship to any astronomical phenomenon and they could not take it seriously. When they moved south, they moved along the shoreline toward their first camp and the shattered Firing Plaza Number One. It was not an especially sensible direction to choose, but they happened to have come out on that side of the river which ran before their late cavern. They needed to get away from there. It was doubtful whether it would be wise to wade a stream that ran through cobalt-contaminated ground.
“If I read our enemies right, now,” said Brett grimly to Halliday, “after underestimating them before, they’ll blast all the area around my landing place as soon as they can get bombs here. But it’s been a long time already.”
Then he considered, and said more grimly still:
“I imagine that I had a rocket with a bomb on board, trailing me all the time, all the way back from the island. The rocket changed from time to time, but always there was a bomb ready. Yet after I did land, the pilot had to putter around in the rainstorm
a while before he could find out just where to drop the bomb in order to have it land accurately without endangering his own craft. If they went to all that trouble to track me home, they’ll really go to town on the place I landed! Right?”
Halliday was hiking, with all the others after him, to get away from the neighborhood of the camp. Well away.
“They’ll bomb the surface of the ground,” added Brett, “to knock in any caves or other installations we may hide in. Then I think they’ll use some waterburst bombs to make sure that everything dies—nothing being supposed to be alive—in the biggest area they can imagine us as being in. It sounds extreme, but I think they’ll do it. They mean business!”
Halliday nodded and continued to hike. Janney, behind him, said:
“There’s no day and no night, and the trades blow all the time. But the trades should pick up a little after Elektra rises. More heat. If they want maximum spread of their radioactives, they’ll wait for that. They ought to think us pretty well smashed.”
“We will move slanting inland,” said Halliday, irritably. “There are mountains. There could be updrafts on the slopes to carry even atomic fallout over our heads.”
Brett said no more. They toiled through the forest. There were places where the underbrush was thick, and they moved at a snail’s pace or worse. But there were other places where gigantic solemn tree-trunks rose from shadows so deep that there was heavy twilight and no undergrowth at all. The rain had ended so recently that all trees still dripped. But there was one variety of tree which seemed somehow to gather up water in its broad leaves as if they were cups, then released it all at once. Brett never knew the mechanism, but there were times when water plunged down in coherent masses of gallons. When such a mass of water hit a man, it could knock him down. Sometimes it did. At all times the ground in such shadowed places was practically mud, which clung to their feet and made walking heavy.
Brett found Kent struggling along beside him, phlegmatic as always. Brett said dispassionately:
“If they land and try to track us down on foot they’ll have an easy job of it! Look at the trail we’re leaving! If they have dogs, we’ll be finished! They’ll find us!”
Kent’s features lighted up. Brett had never seen him so animated before.
“Dog,” said Kent pleasedly, “that’s something I know something about! Look here! You say it’s desert on Aspasia where these creatures after us come from?”
“That’s right,” said Brett.
“Then they’ll have dogs or something similar!” said Kent in happy authority. “That I know about! You take a savage who hunts with weapons—he’ll have to start as a hunter to get the idea of weapons with tools coming later. When he lives in a jungle, he lives by stalking. A dog’s no good for stalking! You can’t train an animal to keep quiet while his prey blunders nearer and nearer and then changes his mind and walks away. A dog’s for open-country hunting. You see? He’s to run ahead and bring the hunted creature to bay, and dance about him, barking, until the man comes up and kills the beast. Where you find open country you find dogs. Deserts, too! The Arabs used to have wonderful dogs! So the creatures of Aspasia would need dogs before they got civilized, and they’d keep them after. We did!”
Brett went through a pool of water. Everybody had to wade through that pool.
“Suppose the Aspasians run faster than their—ah—dogs?” he asked drily, though he knew better. He was not able to believe that the girl he’d seen on the island, and whose picture was in his pocket, was an Aspasian. The evidence was past questioning, but he couldn’t accept it. “Suppose they could run as fast as their prey?”
“Then they’d never get civilized,” said Kent promptly, beaming, “Nobody gets civilized unless he gains by it. Unless he needs to! If our ancestors had been able to run down the creatures they hunted, they’d never have bothered with more than clubs. We’d be trotting after rabbits back on Earth, you and I, instead of being here. Eh?”
“I never thought—” Brett stopped.
The ground quivered underfoot. A distinct, unsettled quivering. A tree branch snapped somewhere and came crashing to the ground. The marching party of twelve men stopped and listened. Long seconds later the sound came. It was a crashing, horrific roar. The leaves quivered overhead and a shower of water fell down from among the boughs.
“A bomb,” acknowledged Halliday, looking up from his wrist chronometer. “But well away.” He added firmly, “A solid ground burst. They will bracket their first bomb crater on all sides. Then they’ll drench the area with radioactives from sea water. We will go on.”
He led on. Brett trudged after him. Half an hour later there was another bomb. The delay was almost proof that Halliday had been right about the solid ground aspect. A bomb to be aimed for a particular spot had to wait for the radiation cloud from a previous bomb to clear away, so it could be aimed.
Four times, as they struggled through the forest, they heard the detonations. If some Thalassian hideaway had brought survivors through the years of poisoned atmosphere, and if descendants of its original occupants had at long last come out to the light of day—why—that bombing should end any chance of further emergings. If in addition an area miles wide and deep were made uninhabitable by spray—then all danger of the return of the life to Thalassia at that place would become unthinkable.
The men marched on. Hours passed. They began to lag and stumble when they reached the foothills inland. There Halliday allowed a halt. They had come fifteen miles, nearly, from the place where the cave branch ended. They were worn out.
“But we do not know,” said Halliday precisely, “what our enemies’ plan will be. I expect the cobalt contamination of a considerable area. It has not happened yet. But we must go on.”
Yet he allowed a rest. Brett regarded the packs each man had made up from himself. There were oddities. Belmont carried four Geiger counters and their power packs. The packs were negligible in weight, but the utility of Geiger counters to fugitives on Thalassia was debatable. Janney had his thermometers and his barograph—Brett saw him winding it—besides a heavy notebook and his food. Another pack included two cameras and an absurd load of film. There was a neat assortment of insulated wire strapped to another pack still, and a tiny pick and whisk for uncovering archeological specimens … Every man in the Expedition had brought along something representative of his specialty. But Brett doubted that there was a saw or an axe or a good-sized knife in the company.
He himself was carrying his reproduction of an ancient bazooka, and his pockets were stuffed with the one-inch plastic rocket shells he’d made for it to fire. Since there were no living animals on the planet, and their enemies were armed with atomic bombs, he was no more rational than the rest.
After a time, Brett moved up to where Halliday sat limply on the ground. Halliday was probably the oldest man of the dozen, but he had forced the pace until even the younger men were weary.
“I still feel disgraced,” said Johnny, “but I wanted to ask you something.”
Halliday said sharply:
“I authorized your journey to the island, and I told you that I considered the manner of your return quite sound. If there was a mistake—and there was!—I share in it. But what do you want to ask?”
Brett hesitated, and shrugged.
“I suppose it is, whither are we drifting? We’ve got six months to wait before a ship comes for us. When it comes, it will probably be attacked, and we’ve no way to warn it. We haven’t more than a ghost of a chance of living six months, for that matter. I’d just like to know if you have any plans for our survival and ultimate rescue.”
Halliday sputtered. Then he said, in irritation:
“Carstairs, there is a time to act and a time to plan! At the moment, we need to act simply to gain time to plan! I have no plans for survival for the moment. I do not have plans as yet for contact with the rescue ship when it comes. But I have months in which to think them out! I shall deal with it in due order of importance
. The essential thing at this moment is to get out of the area those Aspasians are going to drench with sea spray! We have, to be precise, to get them off our tails so we can take measures for the future!”
Brett smiled warmly at the older man. Halliday was bluffing, but it was a good bluff. Brett liked it. He said:
“I was just talking to Kent. Putting myself in the enemy’s place.”
Halliday’s eyebrows rose.
“Well?”
“If Earth’s old civilization had been smashed from a planet as—say—Thalassia,” said Brett, “and we’d managed, we thought, to wipe out the Thalassians: and we’d built up our culture again but were still scared of them, so we made a journey across space to make sure … If we found creatures on the planet that we thought were our old enemies, we’d do exactly what the Aspasians have done. We’d hate them like the devil! After we’d trailed one home and bombed him, we’d drench the place with radioactive sea spray. But just to make sure, we’d do one thing more.”
Halliday said irritably:
“Come to the point! What would we do?”
“We’d send home for dogs,” said Brett. “And we’d go around the outside of the area we’d made deadly, and make sure that our enemies hadn’t come out on foot. We’d know they hadn’t flown out. But the dogs would tell us if they’d walked out.”
Halliday stared. Then he groaned.
“Carstairs! You drive me mad! You think of things! There is no reason to suspect the Aspasians of having dogs! But it is so infernally possible that they have! It would be like them to poison the air of a world, and then go home and play happily with pet animals! Of course!”
Brett said hurriedly:
“The only thing is that since Aspasia is mostly desert, it’s not likely they’d have much experience of following a scent that was faulted by running water.”
“Go away!” snapped Halliday. “And don’t come talking to me unless you think of something else.”
In ten minutes more he rose and summoned the party to further journeying. The pause had seemed to stiffen unaccustomed muscles, but they started off. In twenty minutes they came to a small stream. Halliday faced back.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 107
