"He thinks we're dead weight on the expedition," Gerhardt insisted.
"What better way to get rid of us?"
The halftrack breasted a hump in the desert. I kept wishing a vulture
would squeal somewhere, but there was not even that. Life had left
this world ages ago. I said, "Mattern doesn't have much use for _us_,
sure. But would he blast off and leave three perfectly good halftracks
behind? Would he?"
It was a good point. Gerhardt grunted agreement after a while. Mattern
would _never_ toss equipment away, though he might not have such
scruples about five surplus archaeologists.
We rode along silently for a while longer. By now we had covered twenty
miles through this utterly barren land. As far as I could see, we might
just as well have stayed at the ship. At least there we had a surface
lie of building foundations.
But another ten miles and we came across our city. It seemed to be of
linear form, no more than half a mile wide and stretching out as far
as we could see--maybe six or seven hundred miles; if we had time, we
would check the dimensions from the air.
Of course it wasn't much of a city. The sand had pretty well covered
everything, but we could see foundations jutting up here and there,
weathered lumps of structural concrete and reinforced metal. We got out
and unpacked the power-shovel.
An hour later, we were sticky with sweat under our thin spacesuits and
we had succeeded in transferring a few thousand cubic yards of soil
from the ground to an area a dozen yards away. We had dug one devil of
a big hole in the ground.
And we had nothing.
Nothing. Not an artifact, not a skull, not a yellowed tooth. No spoons,
no knives, no baby-rattles.
Nothing.
The foundations of some of the buildings had endured, though whittled
down to stumps by a million years of sand and wind and rain. But
nothing else of this civilization had survived. Mattern, in his
scorn, had been right, I admitted ruefully: this planet was as
useless to us as it was to them. Weathered foundations could tell
us little except that there had once been a civilization here. An
imaginative paleontologist can reconstruct a dinosaur from a fragment
of a thigh-bone, can sketch out a presentable saurian with only a
fossilized ischium to guide him. But could we extrapolate a culture, a
code of laws, a technology, a philosophy, from bare weathered building
foundations?
Not very likely.
We moved on and dug somewhere else half a mile away, hoping at least
to unearth one tangible remnant of the civilization that had been. But
time had done its work; we were lucky to have the building foundations.
All else was gone.
"_Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away_," I
muttered.
Gerhardt looked up from his digging. "Eh? What's that?" he demanded.
"Shelley," I told him.
"Oh. Him."
He went back to digging.
* * * * *
Late in the afternoon we finally decided to call it quits and head back
to the base. We had been in the field for seven hours, and had nothing
to show for it except a few hundred feet of tridim films of building
foundations.
The sun was beginning to set; Planet Four had a thirty-five hour day,
and it was coming to its end. The sky, always somber, was darkening
now. There was no moon to be still as bright. Planet Four had no
satellites. It seemed a bit unfair; Three and Five of the system each
had four moons, while around the massive gas giant that was Eight a
cluster of thirteen moonlets whirled.
We wheeled round and headed back, taking an alternate route three miles
east of the one we had used on the way out, in case we might spot
something. It was a forlorn hope, though.
Six miles along our journey, the truck radio came to life. The dry,
testy voice of Dr. Leopold reached us:
"Calling Trucks Two and Three. Two and Three, do you read me? Come in,
Two and Three."
Gerhardt was driving. I reached across his knee to key in the response
channel and said, "Anderson and Gerhardt in Number Three, sir. We read
you."
A moment later, somewhat more faintly, came the sound of Number
Two keying into the threeway channel, and I heard Marshall saying,
"Marshall and Webster in Two, Dr. Leopold. Is something wrong?"
"I've found something," Leopold said.
From the way Marshall exclaimed "_Really!_" I knew that Truck Number
Two had had no better luck than we. I said, "That makes one of us,
then."
"You've had no luck, Anderson?"
"Not a scrap. Not a potsherd."
"How about you, Marshall?"
"Check. Scattered signs of a city, but nothing of archaeological value,
sir."
I heard Leopold chuckle before he said, "Well, I've found something.
It's a little too heavy for me to manage by myself. I want both outfits
to come out here and take a look at it."
"What is it, sir?" Marshall and I asked simultaneously, in just about
the same words.
But Leopold was fond of playing the Man of Mystery. He said, "You'll
see when you get here. Take down my coordinates and get a move on. I
want to be back at the base by nightfall."
* * * * *
Shrugging, we changed course to head for Leopold's location. He was
about seventeen miles southwest of us, it seemed. Marshall and Webster
had an equally long trip to make; they were sharply southeast of
Leopold's position.
The sky was fairly dark when we arrived at what Leopold had computed as
his coordinates. The headlamps of the halftrack lit up the desert for
nearly a mile, and at first there was no sign of anyone or anything.
Then I spotted Leopold's halftrack parked off to the east, and from
the south Gerhardt saw the lights of the third truck rolling toward us.
We reached Leopold at about the same time. He was not alone. There was
an--object--with him.
"Greetings, gentlemen." He had a smug grin on his whiskery face. "I
seem to have made a find."
He stepped back and, as if drawing an imaginary curtain, let us take
a peek at his find. I frowned in surprise and puzzlement. Standing in
the sand behind Leopold's halftrack was something that looked very much
like a robot.
It was tall, seven feet or more, and vaguely humanoid: that is, it had
arms extending from its shoulders, a head on those shoulders, and legs.
The head was furnished with receptor plates where eyes, ears, and mouth
would be on humans. There were no other openings. The robot's body
was massive and squarish, with sloping shoulders, and its dark metal
skin was pitted and corroded as by the workings of the elements over
uncountable centuries.
It was buried up to its knees in sand. Leopold, still grinning smugly
(and understandably proud of his find) said, "Say something to us,
robot."
From the mouth-receptors came a clanking sound, the gnashing of--what?
gears?--and a voice came forth, oddly high-pitched but audible. The
words were alien and were spoken in a slippery singsong kind of
inflection. I felt a chill go quivering down my back. The Age of Space
Exploration was three centuries old--and for the first time human ears
were hearing the sounds of a language that had not been spawned on
Earth.
"It understands what you say?" Gerhardt questioned.
"I don't think so," Leopold said. "Not yet, anyway. But when I address
it directly, it starts spouting. I think it's a kind of--well, guide to
the ruins, so to speak. Built by the ancients to provide information
to passersby; only it seems to have survived the ancients and their
monuments as well."
I studied the thing. It _did_ look incredibly old--and sturdy; it was
so massively solid that it might indeed have outlasted every other
vestige of civilization on this planet. It had stopped talking, now,
and was simply staring ahead. Suddenly it wheeled ponderously on its
base, swung an arm up to take in the landscape nearby, and started
speaking again.
I could almost put the words in its mouth: "--_and over here we have
the ruins of the Parthenon, chief temple of Athena on the Acropolis.
Completed in the year 438 B.C., it was partially destroyed by an
explosion in 1687 while in use as a powder magazine by the Turks_--"
"It does seem to be a sort of a guide," Webster remarked. "I get the
definite feeling that we're being given an historical narration now,
all about the wondrous monuments that must have been on this site once."
"If only we could understand what it's saying!" Marshall exclaimed.
"We can try to decipher the language somehow," Leopold said. "Anyway,
it's a magnificent find, isn't it? And--"
I began to laugh suddenly. Leopold, offended, glared at me and said,
"May I ask what's so funny, Dr. Anderson?"
"Ozymandias!" I said, when I had subsided a bit. "It's a natural!
Ozymandias!"
"I'm afraid I don't--"
"Listen to him," I said. "It's as if he was built and put here for
those who follow after, to explain to us the glories of the race that
built the cities. Only the cities are gone, and the robot is still
here! Doesn't he seem to be saying, '_Look on my works, ye Mighty, and
despair!_'"
"_Nothing besides remains_," Webster quoted. "It's apt. Builders and
cities all gone, but the poor robot doesn't know it, and delivers his
spiel nonetheless. Yes. We ought to call him Ozymandias!"