by E. C. Tubb
Brett shot up from the heaving water at full acceleration, emergency lift, reckless of the fuel cost and with his face dead white and dazed.
He had a picture of that girl in his pocket.
CHAPTER FOUR
“…The arid utterly monotonous desolation of Aspasia seems to negate at once any idea of surviving inhabitants, though the possibility cannot be entirely ruled out. The Franklin cruised overall probable areas without making contact with intelligent life forms. Yet civilization did exist here. Highways still in good repair remain. It seems likely, however, that its former culture was developed in oases in its deserts, in concentrated population centers. The previously mentioned lakes of blue glass may be considered to cover the sites of such oases, melted down by fusion bombs from Thalassia…After this disaster it would be expected that any survivors would live only in caves or other inconspicuous places, and would hand down legends of destruction coming from the sky. The Franklin, indeed, could have been hidden from…
Astrographic Bureau Publication 11297,
Appendix to Space Pilot Vol. 460, Sector XXXIV. Page 61.
* * * *
Brett descended from a rainstorm to the small river before the camp cave. He’d been in the cloudbank for a period that had no particular meaning because there was never any real night on Thalassia, and he came down in a downpour that was like the heavens opening, except that he’d been up where it started. He got the flier under the overhanging trees a mile downstream from the cave, lifted it to the river bank, tied it securely and walked through the more-than-tropical downpour to where the camp had been set up.
Kent peered at him phlegmatically over a barricade of stones. He put away a heat gun.
“Oh,” he said calmly. “It’s you. Halliday was talking about you yesterday.”
Brett rummaged for dry clothing. He toweled and shifted to other garments. He asked over his shoulder:
“Everything all right?”
“This cave was booby-trapped too,” said Kent. “We should have been blown to hell when I broke down that stone wall.” He paused and added. “We weren’t.”
“Odd,” said Brett, with irony. “Halliday’s in the cave?”
He was. Brett went in through the opening Kent had made. The interior was brightly lighted now. It was illuminated as effectively and as thoroughly as a museum on Earth. Cables ran along the passageways. Just inside the first entrance generators hummed. It was remarkable how the members of the Expedition had made a researcher’s dream of this camp site. All archeologists have dreamed of finding an ancient city intact and of making their camp among the objects of their study. All have had wistful fantasies of laboratory facilities at the very spots where their study material exists.
Here there was exactly that atmosphere. The doubtless irregular original cave system had been worked over by the Thalassians who tried to make it a refuge for the ages. The walls and ceilings were sound. The passageways were neatly chiseled. The larger chambers were cleared of lime formations and the walls made smooth. The debris from such workings had been used for fills. It was startling to find a perfect small city underground. Hundreds of human beings could have lived here. There were open spaces hundreds of feet across. There were halls with sixty-foot ceilings. There were even small cubicles as if for families. With bright lights and ample space and the remains of ancient occupation right at hand, this was close to an archeologist’s dream of paradise.
But without any inconsistency at all, it was also a charnel house. The air was sweet and clean, now, but manlike creatures had died by hundreds when the radioactive poison reached them even here. Seeping, lime-burdened water oozed everywhere. The smooth flat floors were covered with a glistening incrustation with minor ripples frozen upon it. The walls reflected light like glass. Nothing that had been part of the civilization of Thalassia remained intact. There were mounds on the floors, now covered with the glassy calcium-carbonate coating, or completely impregnated with it. Sometimes brightly glazed bones appeared among these mounds. Sometimes there were the brightly colored rusted tints of metal objects long since vanished. Sometimes there was no clue at all to what the vanished objects had been.
There had been no such water seepage when the cave was occupied, of course. Cracks in the stone may have come from earthquakes—or Thalassia-quakes—during the ages since the time of death. Certainly the lime incrustation preserved everything, but only after it had been destroyed by time.
Halliday was seated by a desk which once had been packing cases. He had half a dozen ceramic objects on the desk, used as paperweights against air currents which did not exist underground. He was writing exuberantly when Brett came in.
Halliday beamed.
“Ah, Carstairs!” he said happily. “You are our lucky member! We do our work under absolutely perfect conditions, and it is your doing even if it was an accident. There are accident prone individuals, and they are Jonas on an expedition like this! But you are a favorable-coincidence-prone! I congratulate you!”
Brett sat down on a box which served well enough as a seat.
“I hear this cave was booby-trapped too.”
“Yes,” agreed Halliday blandly. “We smelled smoke. It was disturbing. We traced it, and there was a bomb made ready to bring down the cave about our ears. But the chemical explosive intended to bring the priming bomb slugs to critical mass had deteriorated. Unstable compounds, you know. It merely smouldered, instead of blowing us up. The Thalassians were not a forgiving type! They meant that if they couldn’t live on this planet, nobody else should!”
Brett said grimly:
“The Aspasians aren’t a forgiving type either. I think it’s certain the other recent visitors are Aspasians. I found a base on the other side of the world. It would be logical for them to make a base there. Nobody else.”
Halliday’s eyebrows almost met in the center of his forehead.
“No! What are they like?”
“Technology about late twentieth century, apparently,” said Brett. “But I’m not sure. They’ve rockets, chemical explosive, missile weapons, artificial fabrics and know electronics fairly well. They have good radars. Their females have high social standing,—they adventure and take risks as the men.”
“Evidently the base was not occupied,” said Halliday briskly. “In any case, we have our work—and plenty to work with! This was really an incredible, find, Carstairs! I’ve completed the restoration of a skull, by the way, to the way the Thalassians must have looked in life. I’ll show you.”
He swung about to a shelf behind him and lifted down what appeared to be a portrait bust. He put it proudly on his desk.
“They had six fingers,” he observed zestfully,” and were quite stocky of build. But they were bipeds, a little shorter than we are, they wore clothing…”
Brett looked. He said wryly:
“You’ve made the ears pointed. They were like ours. And prognathous jaw or no prognathous jaw, we’d pass for them.”
“How do you know?” demanded Halliday.
“An Aspasian girl saw me,” said Brett unhappily. “And she screamed.”
He carefully related the affair of the island. Halliday protested:
“But the exploring ship saw no sign of life on Aspasia!”
“Maybe they hid,” said Brett tiredly. “Maybe they thought the Franklin was a Thalassian ship, built by some who’d managed to live through, as they did. Maybe for that exact reason they came over to Thalassia to fight it out here: to end the danger to their race forever. It looks like that. I thought they’d be even more anxious to track me home than to kill me, so I found a storm cloud and stayed in it till it came ashore, and I came down to camp here with the rain.”
Halliday winced. But then he said hopefully:
“Very wise! Very! But we are very well hidden, and this is a very large world. And we’ve not much to fear from creatures with no more than a twentieth century technology.”
“Unless,” said Brett, “they’ve got twentiet
h century desperation. I suspect they are desperate. I think they’re ready to fight to the last creature among them to kill every one of us. I think they’ll hunt us as we’d hunt the devil himself—which is what they think we are!”
There was a shouting at the entrance to the cave. It was Kent’s voice. Among the echoes, the words were indistinct, but Brett thought he might have called something about a rocket. He shouted again. Halliday got up and walked briskly toward the sound.
The floor of the cave bounced violently. The lights went out. There was a crash like the end of the world, which lasted for a long half minute. In the cave, things fell. Walls creaked. Sections of roof plunged down with thunderous impacts.
Then Kent’s voice sounded in the abysmal blackness.
“I heard a rocket blast in the rain. I yelled. Then the bomb went off.” His voice, usually toneless, quavered a little. Then he got it under control. “It was downstream, about where we keep the fliers, around the curve in the river bank. Lucky there is high ground between. But I saw the light. Atom bomb.” Then he added calmly, “The shelf of rock fell down. We’re buried in here.”
Halliday rose to the emergency in his own manner.
“Somebody bring hand-lights and a counter,” he snapped. “See if anyone’s hurt!” Then he said irritably, “If they’re Aspasians, they used cobalt bombs once. I hope they haven’t used one now!”
But they had. Hand-lights came from the place where the supplies were piled. The spreading shelf outside the camp, which had sheltered the cave entrance like a remarkably deep portico, had cracked from the ground shock and its outer edge tilted down into the water of the river. There was a rill which ran underneath it from its upper edge, and ran out again down below. A Geiger counter showed radioactivity. Not much yet, but some screens between the counters and the water identified the radioactive material. Cobalt-60.
Halliday’s voice cracked with exasperation. A cobalt-based bomb had been dropped within a mile of the cave entrance. Obviously, Brett’s idea of hiding in a storm-cloud hadn’t been good enough. When he landed, a bomb dropped. It indicated much better than twentieth century technique. It even looked as if it hadn’t been intended to shoot him down when he approached the island, but only to scare him back home. But when he’d seemed to crash they tried to learn something from the wreck. Yet they’d been pleased when he got away. This was the result.
“We seal up the cave entrance,” snapped Halliday angrily. “We cannot go outside! But there is air within which will not be contaminated immediately. We will think it over.”
Brett helped shovel wet earth to fill the solitary entrance to the cavern with an airtight plug. He raged to himself at the disaster he’d brought on the expedition. He’d been sure that he’d evaded all possible trailing. There had been no radar! Could they have trailed him with infrared? It was late twentieth century too. There was no way to frustrate that sort of trailing.
The Expedition was doomed. Much worse, in six months a ship would come from Earth for its members. That ship would not expect attack. It would be an easy target for the creatures whose ancestors had destroyed all air-breathing life on his planet, and whose descendants were bent upon extermination of the Expedition. They’d smash the Earth-ship. They’d study it. They’d make a fleet of interstellar ships themselves. And, having fought one interplanetary war, they would never risk war against a warned adversary. They’d strike with absolute ruthlessness and ferocity at any other race that could endanger them.
When there was a completely adequate seal filling the cave entrance, Brett reflected with a sort of sickish cynicism that history assuredly repeated itself upon Thalassia. Eight thousand years ago, humanoid creatures had sealed themselves in this same cavern, hopelessly wanting to secure life for their descendants. They’d failed, and their bones lay all about its corridors. Now a dozen humans had sealed themselves in, making the same foredoomed gestures. But they’d have no descendants to try to avenge with booby-traps.
He leaned against a passage wall. That girl would rejoice fiercely if she knew. Maybe she’d been in the rocket that had dropped the bomb. Whatever her ancestry, she came from Aspasia and she had imbibed hatred of Thalassia with her mother’s milk. Thalassians, for that matter, set booby-traps to implement their hatred even after their deaths. The two races had the unforgivable to avenge—near extermination and eons of hiding in the one case. Extinction in the other. There was no way to parley, to explain. There was no way to do anything but die.
Because, of course, outside this sealed cave the rain poured down, washing the deadly radioactives of this last bomb down into the earth itself. Already, to take two breaths above-ground was to die. But presently deadly ground water would come down to this ancient shelter and this cave would again become a lethal chamber.
But it was a large one. After a little, Brett went heavily to the futile conference Halliday was holding. The cave lights were still out, and only hand-lights illuminated the scene. Halliday gesticulated, his thinning white hair stirring as he moved.
“Where’s your floor plan, Morton?” he cried angrily. “The floor plan of the entire cavern! You should have brought it! This is irritating enough, without members of the Expedition acting like helpless school girls! Go get it! Janney! What is the weather outside?” He raised his hand peevishly. “I know it is raining! What is the wind-direction and speed?”
Janney said heavily:
“The wind’s onshore. Naturally! I told you yesterday that a trade wind blows! Of course in a rainstorm it loses force. It probably blows fifteen miles an hour, with gusts up to thirty or more.”
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.
