"My guess doesn't run to what they fled from, Ellen. But I think it's
the white spot that flung that heat-ray at us. And I think that after
all the people in the ground cars were dead, winter came, and covered
up the vehicles with snow. Spring came, and floods washed mud along
the highway and partly covered up the cars with mud. That went on for
years and years and years. The pets that had been put out of the cars
did survive. They were probably arctic animals to begin with, judging
by their fur. And they have a language of sorts. They yearned for their
masters. That was instinct. But they told their children--pups, what
have you--about the masters they had lost. And one day a space-ship
came bumbling down out of the sky and landed with a crash--and Jerry
got out of it. And he was like their masters. So they have adopted us
as their masters. And so--that's my guess. All of it."
"Dee!" cried Ellen softly. "How terrible!"
"You think, sir," asked Jerry, "that they were running away from
something on the white spot?"
"_We_ did," said Borden. "We had to. Maybe they had to, too."
"But what do you think it is?"
"That," Borden told him, "is something I hope we don't have to find
out. Right now I suggest that we get some sleep."
And presently there was silence inside the _Danaë_, while the night
grew deeper and darker outside.
There was no moon on this planet, but there were many stars in the sky.
In the starlight the furry bipeds waited patiently about the hull for
dawn when the humans would come out again. Some of them slept. Some sat
erect, blinking meditatively. One or two walked about from time to time.
Occasionally one or more seemed to think there was a sound somewhere.
They would look intently in the suspected direction until assured there
was nothing amiss. They were much like dogs back on Earth, waiting
hopefully for their masters to get up and be ready to pay attention to
them again.
Hours later, the sky to the east paled. There was a chill mist to the
northward, toward the polar cap. The ground in that direction glistened
with the wet of condensation when the sky grew brighter. But here, so
near the desert which save for the white spot covered the planet from
pole to pole, there was no such excess of moisture. The ground here was
damp because of seepage.
In a little while an eerie half-light spread over this curious world.
The furry creatures sat up and scratched themselves luxuriously, and
stretched in human fashion. Some of them scuffled amiably, tumbling
over and over each other as if to warm themselves by exercise.
A little longer, and the sun rose. And shortly after that there
were clankings when Borden unfastened the air-lock and came out.
Immediately he was the center of a throng of the bipeds, lying flat
on their backs with their stubby trunks waving urgently in the air,
waiting to be scratched.
He scratched them gravely, one by one. Then Jerry came out and the
process had to be repeated. The sun was low, and Jerry's shadow was
thirty feet long on the sparsely covered ground.
Relieved of the bipeds' attentions, Borden moved off to one side.
He had one of the stubby, golden-colored light metal weapons in his
hand. He examined it carefully, again. There was a sort of stock, and
a barrel three inches in diameter with an extremely tiny opening at
its end. There was a round knob on one side. Borden unscrewed the knob
a little, pointed the weapon carefully away from the _Danaë_ and the
furry creatures, and shifted the knob.
There was no noise. But what seemed to be a rod of flame shot out of
the tiny muzzle. Where it touched the ground there was a burst of steam
and flame and smoke from the scorched vegetation.
Borden turned it off quickly and aimed at a greater distance. He could
not discover any limit to its range, in which respect it was a better
weapon than the blaster of human manufacture he wore at his hip. It
would be decidedly undesirable for Sattell to get hold of a weapon like
this!
He went into the ship and when he came out again Ellen was with him.
They put the golden-metal weapons in the ground car. They brought out
food. Ellen looked uneasily in the back, where she had heard there were
skeletons, but they were gone. A mound of loosened soil nearby told
where. Borden had buried them, together.
"All set, Jerry?" asked Borden. "I've locked the ship so Sattell can't
get in. As I told you, we're going to disable those other wagons and
track down Sattell. If we can capture him reasonably intact, we'll put
a cardiograph on him and ask him loaded questions about the ship's log
and star maps. His pulse should change enough to enable us to track it
down. But first we wreck those wagons!"
Jerry made gestures to his furry friends. They gesticulated back
extravagantly. He climbed in the vehicle. Borden freed its tiller and
Jerry drove.
* * * * *
For people effectively shipwrecked on an inimical planet and with no
real hope of ever returning to their home, it was hardly appropriate
that they got absorbed in the operation of a local vehicle. But this
vehicle, large and roomy, was not a ground car so much as it was a land
cruiser. It ran with astonishing smoothness, considering that it lacked
pneumatic tires. And though from the outside it seemed to lurch and
sway as it covered the rough ground, inside the lurchings were not felt
at all.
The bipeds ran and skipped and loped beside it. Jerry picked up a
little speed. They strained themselves to keep up.
Jerry had said ten miles. Actually, the distance was nearer twelve.
There was snow in patches here and there. The air grew misty. Through
the mist the edge of the ice-cap could be seen, a wall of opaque white
some sixty or seventy feet high at its rounded melting edge, and rising
to greater thickness beyond. And they came to a small running stream
some four or five feet wide, the first running water they had seen on
this planet.
And there were the clustered vehicles, about forty of them lined up as
if on a highway which had come to an end in an ice barrier now melted
away.
The vehicles were partly or wholly covered with water-borne clay which
had been laid upon them by just such meltings of the ice-cap. They ran
on into a small hillock which had formed since they had come to a stop
at this place. Some were merely hummocks of clay-covered metal, barely
showing above the ground. Some were what could be called only hub-deep
in the clay. But it was being buried in the clay which had preserved
them.
"You see, sir," Jerry explained, "I got the creatures to help me dig
down to the doors, so I got into all that show. For weapons."
But Borden did not compliment him, though a compliment was due.
Instead, Borden said in a toneless voice:
"I also see that Sattell has been here. He must have trailed you. He
saw where you had driven one vehicle away. So he dug out the tracks of
another one--there!--and tried it. And it worked. Sattell is gone."
It was true. Jerry, stricken, drove over to the new deep gouges in the
earth which showed plainly where a way had been dug to take out another
gold-metal vehicle on its wheel-like treads, and that it had been
backed from where it had been almost buried.
Bones on the ground showed where Sattell had savagely flung the pitiful
relics of the original owners of the car. The prints of his boots were
plain in the loosened dirt.
"We've got to chase him?" Ellen asked apprehensively.
"He has the star maps and the log," Borden said tonelessly. "Or else he
knows where he hid them."
"But where would he go?" persisted Ellen.
"He knows we're after him," said Borden. "He knows we're armed, and I
doubt that he is, except for his bow and arrow. Where would he go for
help, except to the place where we have enemies?"
The track of the other vehicle was clear. There had been no feet
heavier than those of Jerry's biped friends on any of this ground for
many, many years. There was a deep furrow where the other ground car,
the one Sattell had taken, had rolled away.
Jerry put on speed.
Borden said, "I'll watch how you drive this thing, Jerry, and relieve
you presently. Sattell can't drive night and day. We can. And there's a
long way to go. We'll catch him!"
But Sattell had a head start. Five miles from the beginning of the
chase, the track they followed swung to the right and down a rolling
hillside. They followed. And a seamless highway built of stone,
patently artificial, came out of the hillside and stretched away across
country.
It was forty feet wide. And here, in some dust that had drifted across
it at some spots, they saw the trail of Sattell's car. At other places,
even for most of the way, the winds had kept the roadway clear.
Jerry increased his speed. Borden thought to look at the road behind
them.
Ellen, understanding, said, "No, the poor creatures couldn't keep up.
They were running after us as if their hearts were breaking, but they
couldn't make it."
Ten miles farther on, the highway was overwhelmed by wind-drifted sand.
The trail of Sattell's fleeing car went up over the sand dune. They
went after it. Half a mile farther, the highway was clear again. It
swung south, headed out across the desert.
They did not catch sight of Sattell or his car.
For a stretch of twenty-five miles the arrow-straight road was raised
above the average level of the sands, and it was wind-swept. Then it
went into a low range of rust-colored hills. Here they saw signs again
of Sattell's passing. The streaked, rounded furrow of his vehicle's
peculiar tread in wind-blown sand across the road.
On the far side of the hills they thought they had overtaken him when
they saw the glint of golden metal a little off the highway.
They stopped. Borden and Jerry approached the spot, weapons ready. It
was a ground car, past question, one like their own, but it had not
been newly wrecked. That disaster had happened generations ago. The car
had literally been pulled in half. It had been gripped by something
unthinkably powerful and wrenched in two. The metal, strained and
stretched before it broke, showed what had happened.
There were bones nearby. Not skeletons. Bones. Individual bones. Not
gnawed. Not broken. Simply separated by feet and yards of space.