Ellen said impatiently, “What did you find out, Dee?”
“I guessed,” Borden told her. “But I’d bet on my guesses. For one thing, the group in this vehicle was a family. One was taller and stockier than the others. I could be wrong, but I think it was the male—the father. There is a slightly smaller, slightly slenderer skeleton there, too. It has jewelry on it. And there are two smaller skeletons.” He took a deep breath. “The small skeletons were laid out neatly, comfortably. The next to largest skeleton was with them. The stocky skeleton … He’d killed himself, Jerry?”
“The weapons make holes like that, sir,” said Jerry. “I tried one on the ground. Even in the ground cars where there were no weapons, one skeleton was always like that, with a hole in the skull.”
“Yes,” said Borden. “They must have loaned the weapons to each other for that purpose.”
Ellen protested: “But Dee! What was it?”
“I’ve a pretty complete guess,” Borden said evenly. “It includes Jerry’s furry friends. They act like domestic animals, like pets with an inbred, passionate desire to be approved of by—people. Dogs are like that. You agree, Jerry?”
“Oh, yes, sir!”
“If a party of human beings, in flight from something dreadful, had come to some place in the arctic, on Earth, where they couldn’t go any farther, where the wives and families they had with them had no chance of survival because of the thing from which they fled, what would they do?”
Jerry said awkwardly, “If I may say so, sir, it does look just like that!”
Borden went on without apparent emotion, “The men of those families would know there was no escape. The odds are that they’d put their family dogs out of the ground cars, because they might live. But if the situation was absolutely hopeless they might not want their families to suffer—what they’d first tried to escape. So the children would die painlessly. So would the women and then the men would kill themselves. Possibly, anyhow. Or they might go back and fight. Here, it seems, they killed themselves.”
Ellen protested, “But what could be so hopeless? If the pets survived—”
“My guess doesn’t run to what they fled from, Ellen. But I think it’s the white spot that flung that heat ray at us. And I think that after all the people in the ground cars were dead, winter came, and covered up the vehicles with snow. Spring came, and floods washed mud along the highway and partly covered up the cars with mud. That went on for years and years and years. The pets that had been put out of the cars did survive. They were probably arctic animals to begin with, judging by their fur. And they have a language of sorts. They yearned for their masters. That was instinct. But they told their children—pups, what have you—about the masters they had lost. And one day a space ship came bumbling down out of the sky and landed with a crash—and Jerry got out of it. And he was like their masters. So they have adopted us as their masters. And so—that’s my guess. All of it.”
“Dee!” cried Ellen softly. “How terrible!”
“You think, sir,” asked Jerry, “that they were running away from something on the white spot?”
“We did,” said Borden. “We had to. Maybe they had to, too.”
“But what do you think it is?”
“That,” Borden told him,” is something I hope we don’t have to find out. Right now I suggest that we get some sleep.”
And presently there was silence inside the Danaë, while the night grew deeper and darker outside.
There was no moon on this planet, but there were many stars in the sky. In the starlight the furry bipeds waited patiently about the hull for dawn when the humans would come out again. Some of them slept. Some sat erect, blinking meditatively. One or two walked about from time to time.
Occasionally one or more seemed to think there was a sound somewhere. They would look intently in the suspected direction until assured there was nothing amiss. They were much like dogs back on Earth, waiting hopefully for their masters to get up and be ready to pay attention to them again.
Hours later, the sky to the east paled. There was a chill mist to the northward, toward the polar cap. The ground in that direction glistened with the wet of condensation when the sky grew brighter. But here, so near the desert which save for the white spot covered the planet from pole to pole, there was no such excess of moisture. The ground here was damp because of seepage.
In a little while an eerie half-light spread over this curious world. The furry creatures sat up and scratched themselves luxuriously, and stretched in human fashion. Some of them scuffled amiably, tumbling over and over each other as if to warm themselves by exercise.
A little longer, and the sun rose. And shortly after that there were clankings when Borden unfastened the airlock and came out. Immediately he was the center of a throng of the bipeds, lying flat on theii backs with their stubby trunks waving urgently in the air, waiting to be scratched.
He scratched them gravely, one by one. Then Jerry came out and the process had to be repeated. The sun was low, and Jerry’s shadow was thirty feet long on the sparsely covered ground.
Relieved of the biped’s attentions, Borden moved off to one side. He had one of the stubby, golden-colored light metal weapons in his band. He examined it carefully, again.
There was a sort of stock, and a barrel three inches in diameter with an extremely tiny opening at its end. There was a round knob on one side. Borden unscrewed the knob a little, pointed the weapon carefully away from the Danaë and the furry creatures, and shifted the knob.
There was no noise. But what seemed to be a rod of flame shot out of the tiny muzzle. Where it touched the ground there was a burst of steam and flame and smoke from the scorched vegetation.
Borden turned it off quickly and aimed at a greater distance. He could not discover any limit to its range, in which respect it was a better weapon than the blaster of human manufacture he wore at his hip. It would be decidedly undesirable for Sattell to get hold of a weapon like this!
He went into the ship and when he came out again Ellen was with him. They put the golden metal weapons in the ground car. They brought out food. Ellen looked uneasily in the back, where she had heard there were skeletons, but they were gone. A mound of loosened soil nearby told where Borden had buried them, together.
“All set, Jerry?” asked Borden. “I’ve locked the ship so Sattell can’t get in. As I told you, we’re going to disable those other wagons and track down Sattell. If we can capture him reasonably intact, we’ll put a cardiograph on him and ask him loaded questions about the ship’s log and star maps. His pulse should change enough to enable us to track it down. But first we wreck those wagons!”
Jerry made gestures to his furry friends. They gesticulated back extravagantly. He climbed in the vehicle. Borden freed its tiller and Jerry drove.
For people effectively shipwrecked on an inimical planet and with no real hope of ever returning to their home, it was hardly appropriate that they got absorbed in the operation of a local vehicle. But this vehicle, large and roomy, was not a ground car so much as it was a land cruiser. It ran with astonishing smoothness, considering that it lacked pneumatic tires. And though from the outside it seemed to lurch and sway as it covered the rough ground, inside the lurchings were not felt at all.
The bipeds ran and skipped and loped beside it. Jerry picked up a little speed. They strained themselves to keep up.
Jerry had said ten miles. Actually, the distance was nearer twelve. There was snow in patches here and there. The air grew misty. Through the mist the edge of the icecap could be seen, a wall of opaque white some sixty or seventy feet high at its rounded melting edge, and rising to greater thickness beyond. And they came to a small running stream some four or five feet wide. The first running water they had seen on this planet.
And there were the clustered vehicles, about forty of them lined up as if on a highway which had come to an end in an ice barrier now melted away.
The vehicles were partly or wholly covered with waterborne clay
which had been laid upon them by just such meltings of the icecap. They ran on into a small hillock which had formed since they had come to a stop at this place. Some were merely hummocks of clay-covered metal, barely showing above the ground. Some were what could be called only hub deep in the clay. But it was being buried in the clay which had preserved them.
“You see, sir,” Jerry explained, “I got the creatures to help me dig down to the doors, so I got into all that show. For weapons.”
But Borden did not compliment him, though a compliment was due. Instead, Borden said in a toneless voice:
“I also see that Sattell has been here. He must have trailed you. He saw where you had driven one vehicle away. So he dug out the tracks of another one—there!—and tried it. And it worked. Sattell is gone.”
It was true. Jerry, stricken, drove over to the new deep gouges in the earth which showed plainly where a way had been dug to take out another gold metal vehicle on its wheel-like treads, and that it had been backed from where it had been almost buried.
Bones on the ground showed where Sattell had savagely flung the pitiful relics of the original owners of the car. The prints of his boots were plain in the loosened dirt.
“We’ve got to chase him?” Ellen asked apprehensively.
“He has the star maps and the log,” Borden said tonelessly. “Or else he knows where he hid them.”
“But where would he go?” persisted Ellen.
“He knows we’re after him,” said Borden. “He knows we’re armed, and I doubt that he is, except for his bow and arrow. Where would he go for help, except to the place where we have enemies?”
The track of the other vehicle was clear. There had been no feet heavier than those of Jerry’s biped friends on any of this ground for many, many years. There was a deep furrow where the other ground car, the one Sattell had taken, had rolled away.
Jerry put on speed.
Borden said, “I’ll watch how you drive this thing, Jerry, and relieve you presently. Sattell can’t drive night and day. We can. And there’s a long way to go. We’ll catch him!”
But Sattell had a head start. Five miles from the beginning of the chase, the track they followed swung to the right and down a rolling hillside. They followed. And a seamless highway built of stone, patently artificial, came out of the hillside and stretched away across country.
It was forty feet wide. And here, in some dust that had drifted across it at some spots, they saw the trail of Sattell’s car. At other places, even for most of the way, the winds had kept the roadway clear.
Jerry increased his speed. Borden thought to look at the road behind them.
Ellen, understanding, said, “No, the poor creatures couldn’t keep up. They were running after us as if their hearts were breaking, but they couldn’t make it.”
Ten miles farther on, the highway was overwhelmed by wind-drifted sand. The trail of Sattell’s fleeing car went up over the sand dune. They went after it. Half a mile farther, the highway was clear again. It swung south, headed out across the desert.
They did not catch sight of Sattell or his car.
For a stretch of twenty-five miles the arrow straight road was raised above the average level of the sands, and it was windswept. Then it went into a low range of rust-colored hills. Here they saw signs again of Sattell’s passing. The streaked, rounded furrow of his vehicle’s peculiar tread in windblown sand across the road.
On the far side of the hills they thought they had overtaken him when they saw the glint of golden metal a little off the highway.
They stopped. Borden and Jerry approached the spot, weapons ready. It was a ground car, past question, one like their own, but it had not been newly wrecked. That disaster had happened generations ago. The car had literally been pulled in half. It had been gripped by something unthinkably powerful and wrenched in two. The metal, strained and stretched before it broke, showed what had happened.
There were bones nearby. Not skeletons. Bones. Individual bones. Not gnawed. Not broken. Simply separated by feet and yards of space.
CHAPTER 6
Some ten miles farther on they came to the first of the forts, a great, towering structure of rocks piled together across the road. It was a parapet sixty feet high, enclosing a square of space. In sheltered places among the rocks there was a vast amount of soot as if flames had burned here fiercely. But there was no charcoal. Here, too, were innumerable bones. There would have been thousands of skeletons in this walled area if they had been put together. But they were separate. Every bone, no matter how small, had been completely separated from every other bone.
They could be identified, however. These were the bones of people like those who once had owned this golden metal vehicle. They had died here by thousands. Weapons, bent and ruined, proved that they had died fighting. After death, each body had been exhaustively disjointed and the separate bones scattered utterly without system. And the victors had apparently done nothing else.
Borden knitted his brows as the ground car went on, having perilously skirted around the walls. Jerry seemed to feel that he had wasted time looking. He tried a higher rate of speed. The car yielded it without effort. There seemed to be no limit to the speed at which these remarkable vehicles could travel without vibration or swaying or jolting.
That first fort was perhaps fifty miles behind when Borden’s expression changed from harried bewilderment to shock. He stared ahead as the vehicle sped along the geometrically linear highway, windswept and free of dust as it was.
He said slowly, “That’s right, Jerry. Make as much speed as you can. When you’re tired, I’ll drive. We’ve got to catch Sattell before he reaches that white spot. It’s possible that more than our lives depend on it …”
They did not catch Sattell, though they drove night and day. Their speed varied from fifteen miles an hour when they crawled over occasionally drifted sand dunes which swallowed the highway, to two hundred miles an hour or better. Borden estimated grimly that they averaged more than a thousand miles per twenty-hour day.
Sattell couldn’t have kept that up, so they must have passed him, probably as he slept in some hiding place off a rocky spot in the highway where there would be no trail to guide them to him. But of course the wind might have erased his trail anywhere.
Ellen tried to rest or doze in the back while Jerry or Borden drove on, one resting while the other drove. But after the first day the actual overtaking of Sattell plainly was not Borden’s purpose. It was clear that he meant to get ahead of Sattell, to reach the white spot first.
On the second day of their journeying they found a second fort. This also was a structure across the highway, defended from attack in the direction for which they were headed. It had been more carefully built than the other one. This had been more constructed of squared stones, lifted into position by construction engines whose sand-eroded carcasses were still in place.
There also were larger instruments of warfare here, worn away by centuries of exposure to blowing sand. The fort itself had many times been filled with sand and emptied again by the wind. Only under archways were there any signs of soot, as if flames had burned terribly here. Some land cruisers such as the one in which they rode had been destroyed like the one they had seen at the first fort—pulled apart.
Like the other fort this one had not been demolished after its capture. Not even the cranes and weapons had been seized. But the defenders had been completely dismembered. No two bones were ever attached to each other. Rarely had one been broken. None had been gnawed. Some were sand-worn, but each was complete and entirely separate.
And tens of thousands—not merely thousands—had died here. Their bones proved it.
Ellen watched Borden’s face as they drove through this fortress.
“Do you know what happened, Dee?” she asked.
“I think so,” he said coldly.
“The white spot? It looks as if they had been fighting something that came from there.”
“They were
,” said Borden. “And I don’t want Sattell to encounter the thing they were fighting. He knows too much.”
She studied his expression. She knew that they were making the top possible speed toward that same white spot from which a heat ray had been thrown at them. He hadn’t explained. Jerry was too diffident to ask. Ellen was not, but something occurred to her suddenly.
“You said, the ‘thing’!” she said, startled. “Not creatures or people or anything like that! You said the thing!”
He grimaced, but did not answer her. Instead, he said, “I’ll take the tiller, Jerry. We’ve still got the talkie that Sattell sabotaged, haven’t we?”
Jerry nodded and shifted the tiller to him. They’d discovered that the steering gear could be shifted from side to side of the front of the vehicle, so that it could be driven from either the right or left side. On a planet without cities but with highways running thousands of miles to the polar icecaps, long distance driving would be the norm. Conveniences for that purpose would be logical. Drivers could relieve each other without difficulty.
“Look it over,” commanded Borden. “The logical way to sabotage a talkie would be to throw its capacitances out of balance. No visible sign of damage, but I couldn’t find a band it wasn’t tuned to. See if that was the trick.”
Jerry busied himself as Borden drove on. Here the highway wound through great hills, the color of iron rust and carved by wind and sand into incredibly grotesque shapes. A long trail of swirling dust arose behind the racing cruiser.
Borden said abruptly, “I’ve been thinking. Check me, will you two? First, I think the people who made this vehicle were much like us. The skeletons proved that. They had families and pets and they made cars like this to travel long distances on highways they’d built from pole to pole. This car uses normal electric power, and its power source is good! So they should have had radio frequency apparatus as well as power. But no radio frequency is being used on this planet. The race that built this car, then, has either changed its culture entirely, or been wiped out.”
Jerry said blankly, “You mean, the people in the white spot—”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 114
