by E. C. Tubb
There was no night or day upon Thalassia. In theory, at this particular part of its year the sun Elektra rose from somewhere along its southeastern horizon and for not quite one hundred and fifty hours crept upward in the eastern sky, and then for the same length of time descended slowly toward the northeast. As it set, the star cluster Canes Venatici rose in the southwest and rose for a similar number of hours and declined for the same to the northwest. At other seasons these directions were reversed, and there was also a time when the sun rose due south and set due north. Then there were eclipses. All of which resulted from the fact that Thalassia and Aspasia revolved about each other once in twenty-five days (Earth measurement) with their common axis in the plane of the ecliptic, and had no diurnal rotation at all. But the important thing was that Thalassia had no clear-cut day and night.
Wherefore time passed confusingly. The twelve who had come to study the fallen civilization of the planet had become fugitives, without hope. They had no shelter, only such food supplies as nourished without satisfying them, and no prospects of any improvement.
They did know of some few coarse fruits which could be eaten, and there were half a dozen varieties of fresh water fish that were not unwholesome. The absence of fruit-eating birds or animals had resulted in eight thousand years of lack of natural selection and had produced part of this situation. The fresh water fish were mostly recent adaptations of marine forms which had moved into the ecological niches left when the brooks and rivers of Chios ran deadly poison down to the sea. Eating grew monotonous for the twelve who hid.
There was no alternation of day and night. It seemed to Brett that their purposeless migration went on for years. They marched until they were tired, and lay down and slept, and got up and marched again until they were tired. They grew whiskery and unkempt, they loathed the food they had to eat, and all ideas of time lapsed in the unending day.
Objectively, they crossed a wide valley and came to an inland mountain chain, and followed that southward. Nothing of any consequence happened at any time. Once they saw a spot where an obvious bomb crater had been blasted into the side of a mountain. It made a gigantic scar which even eight thousand years had not healed over. But that discovery, like all others, had no meaning.
Then, one day—one march—one period in which they were all awake—they came to a broad valley which would surely have made a perfect location for a city. And it had been. The center was gone, blasted flat and covered with jungle. But about the edges of the obliterated blast area there were crumbling structures of stone. There were tumbling walls, and terraces distorted by tree roots, and other matters of that kind. The Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition could not resist the lure of it. They carefully did not talk about the complete hopelessness of their position, but here were ruined artifacts and structures, and they yearned over them.
They stopped to dig, and poke, and pry, and measure, and zestfully to dispute with each other over the meaning of this architectural feature and that. It was not a reasonable thing to do, but there was no purpose in being reasonable.
Brett Carstairs could not join them. He could deduce the technical processes of former years, but there was nothing for him to work on. He tended to brood over the futility of all things. He brooded also over the danger to humankind if the ship that would come presently for the Expedition were smashed by the crew that had driven the Expedition into the wilds. And there was the girl. Her existence was patently impossible, and definitely undeniable. She must be fiercely rejoicing in the conviction that he had been killed. And Brett looked at her picture and did not rejoice.
They hadn’t seen a living thing since leaving the coastline. They never should, unless they were discovered. Then they might see the Aspasians who would destroy them. But Brett brooded, while the rest of the Expedition climbed and crawled and zestfully investigated the ruins of a shattered suburb of an obliterated city of Thalassia.
The second day of that pastime, they saw a ship of the enemy. It was a new type ship, and it was evidently hunting for signs of living things to be killed. It was not a rocket, this time. Rockets move fast, but in atmosphere they are not economical of fuel, and on Thalassia all fuel had to be brought across space. So this was a new type ship.
Brett discovered it as he sat drearily brooding and wondering how on Thalassia Halliday could imagine making friends with creatures who considered them devils out of hell, or worse, who must be killed at any cost. The ship came into sight above the mountains.
It was melon-shaped, with pointed ends. Its round sides glinted silver. It moved very deliberately indeed, almost hovering. There were ports along its bottom, but not elsewhere. It moved by occasional jettings of rocket fuel from astern.
Brett called sharply, and men passed the word. Within seconds the personnel of the Expedition were invisible, hiding behind bushes and trees. Brett slipped down to join them where they stared at the vessel hungrily. They were a disreputable crew, now. Nobody shaved. They did not look like a scientific group. Not at all.
“It’s a space ship all right,” said Kent phlegmatically. “But is it ours? Is there an Earth type like that?” Halliday snapped:
“Human spacecraft aren’t streamlined. No sense in streamlining for emptiness. That’s an Aspasian ship. Hunting us!”
Something teasing and vague and annoying tickled the back of Brett’s mind. He knew something, but he didn’t know what it was.
“Now why,” asked Janney, “does it use rockets? Rockets won’t move a mass like that! It must be two hundred feet long! Thousands of tons!”
The rockets of the ship flared again. Brett saw a long cord dangling from its forward end. Why should a space ship have a cord dangling from its bow? It moved visibly faster when its rockets did fire. No rocket could visibly stir a mass of thousands of tons, such as a two hundred foot space ship. No such small rockets as this, anyhow! The ship approached the mountains.
Its bow suddenly whipped around all of ten degrees, and then slowly swung back. Then Brett noticed that the ship was not moving along the line of its own axis. It did not progress precisely where it pointed. It also moved a trifle sidewise, as if something pushed laterally against it while it forged ahead. Which was impossible in a space ship weighing thousands of tons.
Then the fact clicked in Brett’s mind. He cried out. “They are twentieth century technologists! That’s no space ship. That’s a dirigible!”
Halliday blinked. Brett’s words almost tumbled over each other:
“It’s a balloon, Halliday! It’s a bag filled with helium, and pushed by a rocket! An old, forgotten way of traveling by air! It was in use for less than half a century! They don’t need motors to stay aloft! They float! The Aspasians have sent for them because they don’t have fliers! They use these dirigible balloons at home, and rockets for space travel! Now they need to make an exhaustive hunt, they sent for these! I have lived to see the day when a balloon was used again…”
Things fitted together with precision. Aspasia was a desert planet. Fliers would never be developed in a desert area, of course. Their motors would be unreliable, at first, and over desert a failed motor would mean a dead passenger. But balloons would float on, even if their motors failed, until some inhabited area was reached. Of course! On Aspasia fliers would never get through their primitive stage. Balloons would be preferred, not because they could be carried closer to perfection, but because they were safer while still very far from it! Of course! To make a painstaking, inch-by-inch search of a continent, the Aspasians would import these balloons, and they would be effective.
The silvery, melon-shaped object rose and fell in a wind gust past a mountain peak. The rockets jetted furiously and it climbed against the wind and went over the mountains and away. Brett racked his brains for details of this forgotten mode of transportation.
Next mealtime his idea came to him. The food was even less appetizing than usual. There would be food in that dirigible balloon. It would be the only palatable foodstuff in hundreds of miles.<
br />
He led Halliday aside.
“I propose a gamble,” he told the Expedition’s leader. “It could get us all killed. Or it could get us something we could probably eat. Or—it might be a way to make friends. Do you want to take a chance?”
“Probably,” said Halliday, frowning. “What is the idea?”
Halliday was emaciated, now. The food and the journeying on foot had not been good for him. But he was still the leader.
“The firing plaza was booby-trapped,” said Brett persuasively, “and the cave. So this city’s probably booby-trapped too! Now, if we can only make sure…”
It was a hare-brained scheme. It was not at all the sort of project that would be authorized in a sombre policy conference before an expedition set out from Earth. One had to be desperate and half-starved and practically without hope in order to conceive of it. But Brett made it sound remarkably plausible. At that, however, Halliday pointed out that it might not work but simply lead to an unbearable concentration of search just where they were.
But he approved it.
So Belmont abandoned archeology and went over the center of the city with his Geiger counters. The man who’d brought insulated wire with him, because he wanted to, made investigations. Eventually he contrived an induction balance. With that and knowledge learned from the booby-trap in the cavern which had not gone off, he determined facts about arrangements under the ground that had not been disturbed for many centuries. There were four bombs underground. It should be possible to set them off.
The Expedition became feverishly busy up on a mountainside. The electronicist constructed an object of wire strung on sticks cut from small trees with pocket knives. He proudly detailed the mathematical principles involved in the reflection of a tight beam of high frequency electricity. A communications man magnificently took a hand-light—brought nobody knew why through the perpetual day of Thalassia—and used stray objects from the pockets of the others to make a generator of microwaves out of iron particles in vegetable oil. It strongly resembled the apparatus with which Hertz first demonstrated the existence of electromagnetic radiation, in the nineteenth century. The hand-lamp battery, of course, would give some hundreds of watts power for a few seconds only.
Then the Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition devoted itself to the project of building the largest possible stock of dry branches and brushwood. Twelve men worked at it for three days. They planned, indeed, as if for a forest fire.
When the time came, Brett set light to the key area and made for the mountainside. He was halfway there before the brush fuse burned to produce an appreciable quantity of smoke. Then it abruptly began to pour out thick, curling masses of brown vapor which was not supposed to rise from the surface of Thalassia, because there should be nobody living there.
When he reached the ledge on the mountainside where the Expedition waited, the whiskery and disreputable-seeming characters were fairly dancing with excitement. But for a long, long time nothing happened. Smoke rose up in a column toward the sky. It was visible for a very great distance indeed. But nobody came. For two hours.
Then Halliday fairly squealed in agitation:
“There’s a ship!” he cried. “They saw it! It’s coming!”
From far over the mountains a ship was coming with jets of rocket fumes behind it. It bounced in the wind currents of the mountains. It came nearer, and nearer and nearer. It arrived at a point five miles from the brushwood fire. It swept around to see it from upwind, nearer where the Expedition hopped and squirmed in its agitation. It was four miles from the mountain flank and still coming. It was midway between the Expedition and the blaze which now covered half a square mile of jungle.
“Try Booby-trap One,” commanded Brett eagerly. “If it misses try the rest in turn! And don’t look—”
The members of the Expedition sank down behind sheltering boulders. Brett, himself, ducked to where he was sheltered from direct sight of the booby-trap area, but where he could still see the bobbing airship. Brett shielded his eyes with his hands against possible flashing of light.
The electronicist at the tight beam projector ducked his head and stabbed twin wires together. There was a sharp, harsh, buzzing sound. Down in the valley where the induction balance had said a bomb lay buried, a beam of high frequency radio waves hit hard. They were very much like the waves a tripod beacon had given off at Firing Plaza One. They induced high frequency currents underground.
There was the fierce bright light of the dawn of time, with all the cosmos turned incandescent for an instant. The ground rose up and bumped Brett fiercely. Then there was a sound as of doomsday, and rocks and pebbles rolled and clattered down the mountain flank.
Brett saw the shock wave of the explosion hit the dirigible. It was not a sound wave, but an expanding sphere of pure compression. He saw the silvery, seemingly solid metal but actual cloth bag dent in, exactly as if pushed inward by a giant thumb.
Then the balloon popped like a rubber toy.
The atom bomb cloud rose and rose to the high heavens. It formed a mushroom shape. But the tradewinds blew over the mountain tops as over Thalassia’s sea. The cloud curled and curved, and lightnings flashed and thunder rolled in it. But it would go away inland, too.
The Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition plunged down the mountainside in a yelling small horde before the balloon had reached the ground. It was a remarkable descent for the balloon, at that. Its bag had been burst in a single monstrous rip, but it did not crash headlong. As the whole object plummeted, the bag material caught in the stiffening framework inside its former hull. It acted, though inadequately, to check the fall. The balloon reeled and swayed because of that parachuting action, and it crashed into the branches of a great tree, and after a fashion skidded out of them, then landed in a tangle of splintering brace members on the ground.
Brett lost sight of it as he plunged down with the reproduction of an antique bazooka in his hand. He used the bazooka as a staff, in his haste. Then he ran, and so did all the others until, panting, they came in sight of the debris.
But they saw something more than debris. There was the brightly clad figure of one of the ship’s crew on the ground. Another figure worked furiously, not at the spilled-out body but at something caught in the splintered framework. It came clear. It was a ball of considerable size. It loosened and came free as if it had been designed to be dropped. The straining figure pushed it fiercely until it was near the prone figure on the ground. Then the laboring stopped, and that crew member stared desperately at the sky, and then fiercely all around.
Halliday groaned between pantings.
“An atomic bomb!” he gasped. “They’ll set it off—to take us with them—”
Brett raged. Then he heard his own voice shouting: “Spread out, everybody! Show yourselves but don’t go closer!”
The figure heard his shout. It whirled upon him. It saw him and his companions. But they stayed behind. Brett would have shouted again, but that his breath had left him.
He walked on, swallowing, his reproduction of an ancient bazooka dangling in his hand. The figure by the object that must be a bomb—was a girl. It was the girl whose picture he had in his pocket, or at the least her identical twin. She regarded him with a terrible fierceness.
Brett walked forward, trying to get his breath back and his mind straight. He’d thought of food, but now he thought of something else. The figure on the ground stirred feebly. It turned its head. It was a man. Human. Bearded. Bearded! This particular situation was agonizing. In inherited, acquired, instinctive, legendary, and religious hatred of all things Thalassian—because of what Thalassia had done to her world aeons since—this girl was hungrily ready to set off that atom bomb. She would die in its flame, but so would Brett. At the moment, the other eleven members of the Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition might not. She waited in a terrible impatience for them to come closer.
Brett stopped. She moved toward the bomb, turning only to regard him with eyes that seemed to flame. She reached
out her hand.
And Johnny did the only possible, the only obvious and inevitable thing. She was about to detonate the atomic bomb that had been the ship’s sole armament. Because in so doing she would surely kill one individual she considered a Thalassian. Her own life was a cheap price to pay for that achievement, and she might bag the others too. She moved to detonate the bomb.
Brett blew it up.
His action was instinct, but also it was sound sense. Because an atomic bomb contains remarkably little explosive. It is different from all other bombs in that what explosive it contains exists only to move slugs of fissionable material into a critical mass which then detonates. There is no atomic explosive unless there is a critical mass. Until it is actually fired, an atomic bomb is a rather delicate piece of mechanism only.
Brett’s bazooka-shell hit the case. The rocket fuel in the shell blew. It smashed in the case. It jammed the delicate mechanism. The actual explosive in the bomb flared smokily, but it was not even enough to singe the girl beside it. Brett plunged forward and grabbed her before she could take any further measures.
* * * *
There was great confusion, then Kent came to Brett and said phlegmatically:
“That whiskered man’s got a broken leg. Better set it, eh?”
“I would,” agreed Brett. He stared at the girl, both of whose wrists he held firmly. She returned his gaze with eyes which had ceased to burn as flames, and now were filled with an absolute, stunned astonishment.
Halliday came up a little later.
“Carstairs!” he said irritably. “That man with a beard—He is a man, isn’t he?”
“I hope so!” said Brett with deep earnestness.
He continued to look at the girl. She opened her mouth to catch her breath in purest bewilderment.
“He’s been pulling our beards!” said Halliday angrily. “He seemed astonished when we set his leg. He almost fainted when he counted our fingers. I can see that! We’ve got five fingers and the Thalassians had six. But why the devil should he want to pull beards? Every one of us, separately! He can’t seem to get over the fact that we have five fingers and grow whiskers! He’s got a beard!”
