After a long time, he managed to take up some of the slack of the rope; to bind himself and his possessions more closely to the column which rose into the smother overhead. Later still, he was able to take up more. In an hour, he was bound tightly to the pillar and was no longer flung to and fro by the wind. Then he dozed off again. It was uneasy slumber. It gave him little rest. Once a swirling sand devil gouged away the sand beneath him so that he and his gear hung an unguessable distance above solidity, perhaps no more than a yard or so, but perhaps much more. Later he woke to find the sand piling up swiftly about him, so that he had to loosen his rope and climb wearily as tons of fine, abrasive stuff—it would have been strangling had he needed to breathe it direct—were flung upon him. But he did sleep from time to time.
Then night fell. The winds died down from hurricane intensity to no more than gale force. Then to mere frantic gusts. Then—the sun had set on the farther side of the huge structure to which he had tied himself—then there was a period when a fine whitish mist seemed to obscure all the stars. It gradually faded, and he realized that it contained particles of so fine a dust that it hung in the air long after the heavier stuff had settled.
He released himself from the rope about the pillar. He stood, a tiny figure beside the gargantuan columns of black metal which rose toward the stars. The stars themselves shone down brightly, brittly, through utterly clear air. There were no traces of cloud formation following the storm of the day. It was obvious that this was actually the normal weather of this planet. By day, horrific winds and hurricanes. By night, a vast stillness. The small size and indistinctness of the icecap he had seen was assurance that there was nowhere on the planet any sizable body of water to moderate the weather. With such storms, inhabitants were unthinkable. Life of any sort was out of the question. But if there were anything certain in the cosmos, it was that the structure at whose base he stood was artificial!
He flicked on his suit radio. Static only. Sand particles in dry air, clashing against each other, would develop changes to produce just the monstrous hissing sounds his earphones gave off. He flicked off the radio and opened his face plate. Cold dry air filled his lungs.
There were no inhabitants. There could not be any. But there was this colossal artifact of unguessable purpose. There was no life on this planet, but early during today’s storm—and he suspected at other times when he could neither see nor hear—huge areas of the roof plates had turned together to dump down their accumulated loads of sand. As he breathed in the first breaths of cold air, he heard a roaring somewhere within the forest of pillars. At a guess, it was another dumping of sand from the roof. It stopped. Another roaring, somewhere else. Yet another. Section by section, area by area, the sand that had piled on the roof at the top of the iron columns was dumped down between the columns’ bases.
Stan flicked on the tiny instrument lights and looked at the motor of the space skid. The needle was against the pin at zero. He considered, and shrugged. Rob Torren would come presently to fight him to the death. But it would take the Stallifer ten days or longer to reach Earth, then three or four days for the microscopic examination of every part of the vast ship in grim search for him. Then there’d be an inquiry. It might last a week or two weeks or longer. The finding would be given after deliberation which might produce still another delay of a week or even a month. Rob Torren would not be free to leave Earth before then. And then it would take him days to obtain a space yacht and—because a yacht would be slower than the Stallifer—two weeks or so to get back here. Three months in all perhaps. Stan’s food wouldn’t last that long. His water supply wouldn’t last nearly as long at that. If he could get up to the icecap there would be water, and on the edge of the ice he could plant some of the painstakingly developed artificial plants whose seeds were part of every abandon ship kit. They could live and produce food under almost any set of planetary conditions. But he couldn’t reach the polar cap without power the skid didn’t have.
He straddled the little device. He pointed it upward. He rose sluggishly. The absurd little vehicle wabbled crazily. Up, and up, and up toward the uncaring stars. The high thin columns of steel seemed to keep pace with him. The roof of this preposterous shed loomed slowly nearer, but the power of the skid was almost gone. He was ten feet below the crest when diminishing power no longer gave thrust enough to rise. He would hover here for seconds, and then drift back down again to the sand, for good.
He flung his kit of food. Upward. It sailed over the sharp edge of the roof and landed there. The skid was thrust down by the force of the throw, but it had less weight to lift. It bounced upward, soared above the roof, and just as its thrust dwindled again, Stan landed it.
He found—nothing.
To be exact, he found the columns were joined by massive girders of steel fastening them in a colossal open grid. Upon those girders which ran in a line due north and south—reckoning the place of sunset to be west—huge flat plates of metal were slung, having bearings which permitted them to be rotated at the will of whatever unthinkable constructor had devised them. There were small bulges which might contain motors for the turning. There was absolutely nothing but the framework and the plates and the sand some three hundred feet below. There was no indication of the purpose of the plates or the girders or the whole construction. There was no sign of any person or creature using or operating the slabs. It appeared that the grid was simply a monotonous, featureless, insanely tedious construction which it would have taxed the resources of Earth to build—it stretched far, far beyond the horizon—but did nothing and had no purpose save to gather sand on its upper surfaces and from time to time dump that sand down to the ground. It did not make sense.
Stan had a more immediate problem than the purpose of the grid, though. He was three hundred feet above ground. He was short of food and hopelessly short of water. When day come again, this place would be the center of a hurricane of blown sand. On the ground, lashed to a metal column, he had been badly buffeted about even in his spacesuit. Up here the wind would be much stronger. It was not likely that any possible lashings would hold him against such a storm. He could probably get back to the ground, of course, but there seemed no particular point to it.
As he debated, there came a thin, shrill whistling overhead. It came from the far south, and passed overhead, descending, and—going down in pitch—it died away to the northward. The lowering of its pitch indicated that it was slowing. The sound was remarkably like that of a small spacecraft entering atmosphere incompletely under control, which was unthinkable, of course, on the solitary unnamed planet of Khor Alpha. Stan felt very, very lonely on a huge plate of iron thirty stories above the ground, on an alien planet under unfriendly stars, and with this cryptic engineering monstrosity breaking away to sheer desert on one side and extending uncounted miles in all others. He flicked on his suit radio, without hope.
There came the loud, hissing static. Then under and through it came the humming carrier wave of a low power transmitter sending on emergency power.
“Help call! Help call! Space yacht Erebus grounded on planet of Khor Alpha, main drive burned out, landed in darkness, outside conditions unknown. If anyone hears, p-please answer! M-my landing drive smashed when I hit ground, too! Help call! Help call! Space yacht Erebus grounded on planet of Khor Alpha, main drive burned out, landed in darkness—”
Stan Buckley had no power. He could not move from this spot. The Erebus had grounded somewhere in the desert which covered all the planet but this one structure. When dawn came, the sandstorm would begin again. With its main drive burned out, its landing drive smashed—when the morrow’s storms began it would be strange indeed if the whirlwinds did not scoop away sand from about the one solid object they’d encounter, so that the little craft would topple down and down and ultimately be covered over; buried under perhaps hundreds of feet of smothering stuff.
He knew the Erebus. Of course. It belonged to Esther Hume. The voice from it was Esther’s, the girl he was to h
ave married, if Rob Torron hadn’t made charges disgracing him utterly. Tomorrow she would be buried alive in the helpless little yacht, while he was unable to lift a finger to her aid.
CHAPTER 3
He was talking to her desperately when there was a vast, labored tumult to the west. It was the product of ten thousand creakings. He turned, and in the starlight he saw great flat plates—they were fifty feet by a hundred and more—turning slowly. An area a mile square changed its appearance. Each of the flat plates in a hundred rows of fifty plates had turned sidewise, to dump its load of settled sand. A square mile of plates turned edges to the sky, and turned back again. Creakings and groanings filled the air, together with the soft roaring noise of the falling sand. A pause. Another great section of a mile each way performed the same senseless motion. Pure desperation made Stan say sharply:
“Esther! Cut off for half an hour! I’ll call back! I see the slimmest possible chance, and I’ve got to take it! Half an hour, understand?”
He heard her unsteady assent. He scrambled fiercely to the nearest of the huge plates. It was, of course, insane to think of such a thing. The plates had no purpose save to gather loads of sand and then to turn and dump them. But there were swellings at one end of each plate—where the girders to which they clung united to form this preposterous elevated grid. Those swellings might be motors. He dragged a small cutting torch from the tool kit. He snapped its end. A tiny, savage, blue-white flame appeared in mid-air half an inch from the torch’s metal tip.
He turned that flame upon the rounded swelling at the end of a monster slab. Something made the slabs turn. By reason, it should be a motor. The swellings might be housing for motors. He made a cut across such a swelling. At the first touch of the flame something smoked luridly and frizzled before the metal grew white-hot and flowed aside before the flame. There had been a coating on the iron. Even as he cut, Stan realized that the columns and the plates were merely iron. But the sandblast of the daily storms should erode the thickest of iron away in a matter of weeks, at most. So the grid was coated with a tough, elastic stuff—a plastic of some sort—which was not abraded by the wind. It did not scratch because it was not hard. It yielded, and bounced sand particles away instead of resisting them. It would outwear iron, in the daily sandblast, by a million times, on the principle by which land vehicles on Earth use rubber tires instead of metal for greater wear.
He cut away a flap of metal from the swelling. He tossed it away with his space-gloved hands. His suit flash illuminated the hollow within. There was a motor inside, and it was remarkably familiar, though not a motor such as men made for the purpose of turning things. There was a shaft. There were four slabs of something that looked like graphite, rounded to fit the shaft. That was all. No coils. No armature. No signs of magnets. Man use this same principle, but for a vastly different purpose. Men used the reactive thrust of allotropic graphite against an electric current in their space ships. The Bowdoin-Hall field made such a thrust incredibly efficient, and it was such graphite slabs that drove the Stallifer—though these were monsters weighing a quarter of a ton apiece, impossible for the skid to lift. Insulated cables led to the slabs in wholly familiar fashion. The four cables joined to two and vanished in the seemingly solid girders which formed all the monster grid.
Almost without hope, Stan slashed through two cables with his torch. He dragged out the recharging cable of the skid. He clipped the two ends to the two cut cables. They sparked! Then he stared. The meter of the skid showed current flowing into its power bank. An amazing amount of current. In minutes, the power storage needle stirred from its pin. In a quarter of an hour it showed half charge. Then a creaking began all around.
Stan leaped back to one of the cross girders just as all the plates in an area a mile square about him began to turn. All but the one whose motor housing he had cut through. All the other plates turned so that their edges pointed to the stars. The sand piled on them by the day storm poured down into the abyss beneath. Only the plate whose motor housing Stan had cut remained unmoving. Sparks suddenly spat in the metal hollow, as if greater voltage had been applied to stir the unmoving slab. A flaring, lurid, blue-white are burned inside the hollow. Then it cut off.
All the gigantic plates which had turned their edges skyward went creaking loudly back to their normal position, their flat sides turned to the stars. Nothing more happened. Nothing at all.
In another ten minutes, the skid’s meter showed that its power bank was fully charged. Stan, with plenty to think about, straddled the little object and went soaring northward like a witch on a broom, sending a call on his suit radio before him.
“Coming, Esther! Give me a directional and let’s make it fast! We’ve got a lot to do before daylight!”
He had traveled probably fifty miles before her signal came in. Then there was a frantically anxious time until he found the small helpless space yacht, tumbled on the desert sand, with Esther peering hopefully out of the airlock as he swooped down to a clumsy landing. She was warned and ready. There was no hope of repairing the drive. A burned out drive to operate in a Bowdoin-Hall field calls for bars of allotropic graphite,—graphite in a peculiar energy state as different from ordinary graphite as carbon diamond is from carbon coal. There were probably monster bars of just such stuff in the giant grid’s motors, but the skid could not handle them. For tonight, certainly repair was out of the question. Esther had hooked up a tiny, low power signaling device which gave out a chirping wave every five seconds. She wore a spacesuit, had two abandon ship kits, and all the water that could be carried.
The skid took off again. It was not designed to work in a planet’s gravitational field. It used too much power, and it wobbled erratically, thus for sheer safety Stan climbed high. With closed face plates the space suited figures seemed to soar amid the stars. They could speak only by radio, near as they were.
“Wh-where are we going, Stan?”
“Icecap,” said Stan briefly. “North pole. There’s water there,—or hoar frost, anyhow. The day storms won’t be so bad—if there are storms at all. In the tropics on this planet the normal weather is a typhoon-driven sandstorm. We’ll settle down in the polar area and wait for Rob Torren to come for us. It may be three months or more.”
“Rob Torren—”
“He helped me escape,” said Stan briefly. “Tell you later. Watch ahead.”
He’d had no time for emotional thinking since his landing, and particularly since the landing of the little space yacht now sealed up and abandoned to be buried under the desert sand. But he knew how Esther came to be here. She’d had news of the charges Rob Torren had brought against him. She hadn’t believed them. Not knowing of his embarcation for Earth for courtmartial,—the logical thing would have been a trial at advanced base—she’d set out desperately to assure him of her faith. She couldn’t get a liner direct, so she’d left alone in her little space yacht. In a sense, it should have been safe enough. Craft equipped with Bowdoin-Hall drive were all quite capable of interstellar flight. Power was certainly no problem any more, and with extra capacitors to permit low frequency pulsations of the drive field, and mapped dwarf white stars as course markers, navigation should be simple enough. The journey, as such, was possibly rash but it was not foolhardy. Only—she hadn’t fused her drive when she changed its pulsation frequency. When she was driving past Khor Alpha, her Bowdoin-Hall field had struck the space skid on which Stan was trying to make this planet-and the field had drained his power. The short circuit blew the skid’s fuse, but it burned out the yacht’s more delicate drive. Specifically, it overloaded and ruined the allotropic carbon blocks which made the drive work. Esther’s predicament was caused not only by her solicitude for Stan, but by the drive of the skid on which he’d escaped from the Stallifer.
He blamed himself. Bitterly, but even more he blamed Rob Torren. Hatred surged up in him again for the man who had promised to come here and fight him to the death. He said quietly:
“Rob’s comin
g here after me. Talk about that later. He didn’t guess this place would be without water and with daily hurricanes everywhere except—I hope!—the poles. He thought I’d be able to make out until he could come back. We’ve got to! Watch out ahead for the sunset line. We’ve got to follow it north until we hit the polar cap. With water and our kits we should be able to survive indefinitely.”
The spacesuited figures were close together—in fact, in contact. But there was no feeling of touching each other through the insulating, almost inflexible armor of their suits. Sealed as they were in their helmets and communicating only by phone in the high stratosphere, neither could feel the situation suitable for romance. Esther was silent for a time. Then she said:
“You told me you were out of power—”
“I was,” he told her. “I got some from the local inhabitants,—if they’re local.”
“What—”
He described the preposterous, meaningless structure on the desert. Thousands of square miles in extent. Cryptic and senseless and of unimaginable significance.
“Every slab has a motor to turn it. I cut into a housing and there was power there. I loaded up with it. I can’t figure the thing out. There’s nowhere that a civilized or any other race could live. There’s nothing those slabs could be for!”
There was a thin line of sunlight far ahead. Traveling north, they drove through the night and overtook the day. They were very high indeed, now, beyond atmosphere and riding the absurd small skid that meteor miners use. They saw the dwarf white sun Khor Alpha. Its rays were very fierce. They passed over the dividing line between day and night, and far, far ahead they saw the hazy whitishness which was the polar cap of this planet.
It was half an hour before they landed, and when they touched ground they came simply to a place where wind blown sand ceased to be powdery and loose, and where there was plainly dampness underneath. The sun hung low indeed on the horizon. On the shadow side of sand hillocks there was hoar frost. All the moisture of the planet was deposited in the sand at its poles, and during the long winter nights the sand was frozen so that even during the summer season unthinkable frigidity crept out into every shadow.
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 54
