"But nothing, Mattern. We're here. We've spent a good chunk of American
cash in getting here. I insist that we spend the minimum time allotted
for scientific research, as long as we _are_ here."
Mattern scowled, looking down at the table, supporting his chin in
his thumbs and digging the rest of his fingers in hard back of his
jawbone. He was annoyed, but he was smart enough to know he didn't have
much of a case to make against Leopold.
The rest of us--four archaeologists and seven military men; they
outnumbered us a trifle--watched eagerly as our superiors battled. My
eyes strayed through the porthole and I looked at the dry windblown
plain, marked here and there with the stumps of what might have been
massive monuments millennia ago.
Mattern said bleakly, "The world is of utterly no strategic
consequence. Why, it's so old that even the vestiges of civilization
have turned to dust!"
"Nevertheless, I reserve the right granted to me to explore any world
we land on, for a period of at least one hundred sixty-eight hours,"
Leopold returned implacably.
Exasperated, Mattern burst out, "Dammit, _why_? Just to spite me? Just
to prove the innate intellectual superiority of the scientist to the
man of war?"
"Mattern, I'm not injecting personalities into this."
"I'd like to know what you are doing, then? Here we are on a world
that's obviously useless to me and probably just as useless to you. Yet
you stick me on a technicality and force me to waste a week here. Why,
if not out of spite?"
"We've made only the most superficial reconnaissance so far," Leopold
said. "For all we know this place may be the answer to many questions
of galactic history. It may even be a treasure-trove of superbombs, for
all--"
"Pretty damned likely!" Mattern exploded. He glared around the
conference room, fixing each of the scientific members of the committee
with a baleful stare. He was making it quite clear that he was trapped
into a wasteful expense of time by our foggy-eyed desire for Knowledge.
Useless knowledge. Not good hard practical knowledge of the kind _he_
valued.
"All right," he said finally. "I've protested and I've lost, Leopold.
You're within your rights in insisting on remaining here one week. But
you'd damned well better be ready to blast off when your time's up!"
* * * * *
It had been foregone all along, of course. The charter of our
expedition was explicit on the matter. We had been sent out to comb a
stretch of worlds near the Galactic Rim that had already been brushed
over hastily by a survey mission.
The surveyors had been looking simply for signs of life, and, finding
none (of course), they had moved on. We were entrusted with the task
of investigating in detail. Some of the planets in the group had
been inhabited once, the surveyors had reported. None bore present
life. None of the planets we had ever visited had been found to hold
intelligent life, though many had in the past.
Our job was to comb through the assigned worlds with diligence.
Leopold, leading our group, had the task of doing pure archaeological
research on the dead civilizations; Mattern and his men had the more
immediately practical job of looking for fissionable material, leftover
alien weapons, possible sources of lithium or tritium for fusion, and
other such militarily useful things. You might argue that in a strictly
pragmatic sense our segment of the group was just dead weight, carted
along for the ride at great expense, and you would be right.
But the public temper over the last few hundred years in America
has frowned on purely military expeditions. And so, as a sop to
the nation's conscience, five archaeologists of little empirical
consequence so far as national security mattered were tacked onto the
expedition.
Us.
Mattern made it quite clear at the outset that _his_ boys were the
Really Important members of the expedition, and that we were simply
ballast. In a way, we had to agree. Tension was mounting once again
on our sadly disunited planet; there was no telling when the Other
Hemisphere would rouse from its quiescence of a hundred years and
decide to plunge once more into space. If anything of military value
lay out here, we knew we had to find it before They did.
The good old armaments race. Hi-ho! The old space stories used to talk
about expeditions from Earth. Well, we _were_ from Earth, abstractly
speaking--but in actuality we were from America, period. Global unity
was as much of a pipedream as it had been three hundred years earlier,
in the remote and primitive chemical-rocket era of space travel. Amen.
End of sermon. We got to work.
* * * * *
The planet had no name, and we didn't give it one; a special commission
of what was laughably termed the United Nations Organization was
working on the problem of assigning names to the hundreds of worlds
of the galaxy, using the old idea of borrowing from ancient Terran
mythologies in analogy to the Mercury-Venus-Mars nomenclature of our
own system.
Probably they would end up saddling this world with something like
Thoth or Bel-Marduk or perhaps Avalokitesvara. We knew it simply as
Planet Four of the system belonging to a yellow-white F5 IV Procyonoid
sun, Revised HD Catalog #170861.
It was roughly Earthtype, with a diameter of 6100 miles, a gravity
index of .93, a mean temperature of 45 degrees F. with a daily
fluctuation range of about ten degrees, and a thin, nasty atmosphere
composed mostly of carbon dioxide with wisps of helium and nitrogen
and the barest smidgeon of oxygen. Quite possibly the air had been
breathable by humanoid life a million years ago--but that was a million
years ago. We took good care to practice our breathing-mask drills
before we ventured out of the ship.
The sun, as noted, was an F5 IV and fairly hot, but Planet Four was a
hundred eighty-five million miles away from it at perihelion and a good
deal farther when it was at the other swing of its rather eccentric
orbit; the good old Keplerian ellipse took quite a bit of punishment
in this system. Planet Four reminded me in many ways of Mars--except
that Mars, of course, had never known intelligent life of any kind, at
least none that had troubled to leave a hint of its existence, while
this planet had obviously had a flourishing civilization at a time when
Pithecanthropus was Earth's noblest being.
* * * * *
In any event, once we had thrashed out the matter of whether or not
we were going to stay here or pull up and head for the next planet
on our schedule, the five of us set to work. We knew we had only a
week--Mattern would never grant us an extension unless we came up with
something good enough to change his mind, which was improbable--and we
wanted to get as much done in that week as possible. With the sky as
full of worlds as it is, this planet might never be visited by Earth
scientists again.
Mattern and his men served notice right away that they were going to
help us, but reluctantly and minimally. We unlimbered the three small
halftracks carried aboard ship and got them into functioning order. We
stowed our gear--cameras, pick-&-shovels, camel's-hair brushes--and
donned our breathing-masks, and Mattern's men helped us get the
halftracks out of the ship and pointed in the right direction.
Then they stood back and waited for us to shove off.
"Don't any of you plan to accompany us?" Leopold asked. The halftracks
each held up to four men.
Mattern shook his head. "You fellows go out by yourselves today and let
us know what you find. We can make better use of the time filing and
catching up on back log entries."
I saw Leopold start to scowl. Mattern was being openly contemptuous;
the least he could do was have his men make a token search for
fissionable or fusionable matter! But Leopold swallowed down his anger.
"Okay," he said. "You do that. If we come across any raw veins of
plutonium I'll radio back."
"Sure," Mattern said. "Thanks for the favor. Let me know if you find a
brass mine, too." He laughed harshly. "Raw plutonium! I half believe
you're serious!"
* * * * *
We had worked out a rough sketch of the area, and we split up into
three units. Leopold, alone, headed straight due west, toward the dry
riverbed we had spotted from the air. He intended to check alluvial
deposits, I guess.
Marshall and Webster, sharing one halftrack, struck out to the hilly
country southeast of our landing point. A substantial city appeared
to be buried under the sand there. Gerhardt and I, in the other
vehicle, made off to the north, where we hoped to find remnants of yet
another city. It was a bleak, windy day; the endless sand that covered
this world mounted into little dunes before us, and the wind picked
up handfuls and tossed it against the plastite dome that covered our
truck. Underneath the steel cleats of our tractor-belt, there was a
steady crunch-crunch of metal coming down on sand that hadn't been
disturbed in millennia.
Neither of us spoke for a while. Then Gerhardt said, "I hope the ship's
still there when we get back to the base."
Frowning, I turned to look at him as I drove. Gerhardt had always been
an enigma: a small scrunchy guy with untidy brown hair flapping in his
eyes, eyes that were set a little too close together. He had a degree
from the University of Kansas and had put in some time on their field
staff with distinction, or so his references said.