"Fine. Take a scooter down first, and carry a guy line."
They unstrapped, and changed into pressure suits. In the airlock they
waited until the Lieutenant had touched the scooter down. Then Major
Briarton nodded, and they clamped their belts to the guy line.
One by one they leaped down toward the rock.
From a few miles out in space, the job of searching the surface had not
appeared difficult. From the rock itself, things looked very different.
There was no way, from the surface, to scan large areas, and the surface
was so rough that they had to take constant care not to damage their
boots or rip holes in their suits. There were hundreds of crevices and
caves, half concealed by the loose rock that crumbled under their feet
as they moved.
They spread out from the scooter for an hour of fruitless searching. Tom
spent most of the time pulling his boots free of surface cracks and
picking his way over heaps of jagged rock. None of them got farther than
a hundred yards from the starting place. None of them found anything
remarkable.
"We could spend weeks covering it this way," Greg said when they met at
the scooter again. "Why don't I take the scooter and criss-cross the
whole surface at about fifty feet? If I spot anything, I'll yell."
It seemed like a good idea. Greg strapped himself into the scooter's
saddle, straddling the fuel tanks, using the hand jet to guide himself
as he lifted lightly off the surface. He disappeared over the horizon of
rock, then reappeared as he moved over the surface and back.
Tom and Johnny waited with the Major. Twenty minutes later Greg brought
the tiny craft back again. "It's no good," he said. "I've scanned the
whole bright-side, came as close as I dared."
"No sign of anything?" Johnny said.
"Not a thing. The dark side looks like a sheer slab, from what my lights
show. If we only had some idea what we were looking for...."
"Maybe you weren't close enough," Tom said. "Why not drop each of us off
to take a quarter of the bright-side and work our way in?"
The others agreed. Tom waited until the Major and Johnny had been
posted; then he hopped on the scooter behind Greg and dropped off almost
at the line of darkness, where the sheer slab began. All of them had
hoped that there might be a sign, something that Roger Hunter might have
left to mark his cache, but if there was one none of them spotted it.
Tom checked with the others by the radio in his helmet, and started
moving back toward the center of the bright side.
An hour later he was only halfway to the center, and he was nearly
exhausted. At a dozen different spots he thought he had found a
promising cleft in the rock, a place where something might have been
concealed ... but exploration of the clefts proved fruitless.
And now his confidence began to fail. Supposing he had been wrong? They
knew the rock had passed very close to Roger Hunter's asteroid, the
astronomical records proved that. But suppose Dad had not used it as his
hiding place at all? He pulled himself around another jagged rock shelf,
staring down at the rough asteroid surface beyond....
At the base of the rock shelf, something glinted in the sunlight. He
leaped down, and thrust his hand into a small crevice in the rock. His
hand closed on a small metal object.
It was a gun. It felt well balanced, familiar in his hand ... the
revolver Dad had always carried in his gun case.
He had to let them know. He was just snapping the speaker switch when he
heard a growl of static in his earphones, and then Greg's voice,
high-pitched and excited. "Over here! I think I've found something!"
It took ten minutes of scrambling over the treacherous surface to reach
Greg. Tom saw his brother tugging at a huge chunk of granite that was
wedged into a crevice in the rock. Tom got there just as the Major and
Johnny topped a rise on the other side and hurried down to them.
The rock gave way, rolling aside, and Greg reached down into the
crevice. Tom leaned over to help him. Between them they lifted out the
thing that had been wedged down beneath the boulder.
It was a metal cylinder, four feet long, two feet wide, and bluntly
tapered at either end. In the sunlight it gleamed like polished silver,
but they could see a hairline break in the metal encircling the center
portion.
They had found Roger Hunter's bonanza.
* * * * *
In the cabin of the scout-ship they broke the cylinder open into two
perfect halves. It came apart easily, a shell of paper-thin but
remarkably strong metal, protecting the tightly packed contents.
There was no question what the cylinder was, even though there was
nothing inside that looked even slightly familiar at first examination.
There were several hundred very tiny thin discs of metal that fit on the
spindle of a small instrument that was packed with them. There were
spools of film, thin as tissue but amazingly strong. Examined against
the light in the cabin, the film seemed to carry no image at all ... but
there was another small machine that accepted the loose end of the film,
and a series of lenses that glowed brightly with no apparent source of
power. There was a thick block of shiny metal covered on one side with
almost invisible scratches....
A time capsule, beyond doubt. A confusing treasure, at first glance, but
the idea was perfectly clear. A hard shell of metal protecting the
records collected inside....
_Against what? A planetary explosion? Some sort of cosmic disaster that
had blown a planet and its people into the fragments that now filled the
Asteroid Belt?_
At the bottom of the cylinder was a small tube of metal. They examined
it carefully, trying to guess what it was supposed to be. At the bottom
was a tiny stud. When they pressed it, the cylinder began to expand and
unfold, layer upon layer of thin glistening metallic material that
spread out into a sheet that stretched halfway across the cabin.
They stared down at it. The metal seemed to have a life of its own,
glowing and glinting, focussing light into pinpoints on its surface.
It was a map.
At one side, a glowing ball with a fiery corona, an unmistakeable
symbol that any intelligent creature in the universe that was able to
perceive it at all would recognize as a star. Around it, in clearly
marked orbits, ten planets. The third planet had a single satellite, the
fourth two tiny ones. The sixth eleven. The seventh planet had ten, and
was encircled by glowing rings.
But the fifth planet was broken into four parts.
Beyond the tenth planet there was nothing across a vast expanse of the
map ... but at the far side was another star symbol, this one a double
star with four planetary bodies.
They stared at the glowing map, speechless. There could be no mistaking
the meaning of the thing that lay before them, marked in symbols that
could mean only one thing to any intelligence that could recognize stars
and planets.
But in the center of the sheet was another symbol. It lay halfway
between the two Solar Systems, in the depths of interstellar space. It
was a tiny picture, a silvery sliver of light, but it too was
unmistakeable.
It could be nothing else but a Starship.
* * * * *
Later, as they talked, they saw that the map had told each of them,
individually, the same thing. "They had a star-drive," Tom said.
"Whatever kind of creatures they were, and whatever the disaster that
threatened their planet, they had a star-drive to take them out of the
Solar System to another star."
"But why leave a record?" Greg wanted to know. "If nobody was here to
use it...."
"Maybe for the same reason that Earthmen bury time capsules with records
of their civilization," Major Briarton said. "I'd guess that the records
here will tell, when they have been studied and deciphered. Perhaps
there was already some sign of intelligent life developing elsewhere in
the Solar System. Perhaps they hoped that some of their own people would
survive. But they had a star-drive, so some of them must have escaped.
And with the record here...."
"We may be able to follow them," Greg said.
"If we can decipher the record," Johnny Coombs said. "But we don't have
any clue to their language."
"Did you have any trouble understanding what the map had to say?" the
Major said quietly.
"No...."
"I don't think the rest will be much more difficult. They were
intelligent creatures. The record will be understandable, all right." He
started to fold the map back into a tube again. "Maybe Roger Hunter
tried to use the film projector. We'll never know. But he must have
realized that he had discovered the secret of a star-drive. He realized
that the United Nations were the ones to explore it and use it, and he
gave his life to keep it out of the hands of Tawney and his men...."
"A pity," a cold voice said close behind them, "that he didn't succeed,
after all."
They whirled. In the hatchway to the after-cabin, Merrill Tawney was
standing, with a smile on his lips and a Markheim stunner trained
directly on Major Briarton's chest.