by E. C. Tubb
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 trees 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.
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.
