Some ten miles farther on they came to the first of the forts, a great,
towering structure of rocks piled together across the road. It was a
parapet sixty feet high, enclosing a square of space. In sheltered
places among the rocks there was a vast amount of soot as if flames
had burned here fiercely. But there was no charcoal. Here, too, were
innumerable bones. There would have been thousands of skeletons in this
walled area if they had been put together. But they were separate.
Every bone, no matter how small, had been completely separated from
every other bone.
They could be identified, however. These were the bones of people like
those who once had owned this golden-metal vehicle. They had died here
by thousands. Weapons, bent and ruined, proved that they had died
fighting. After death, each body had been exhaustively disjoined and
the separate bones scattered utterly without system. And the victors
had apparently done nothing else.
Borden knitted his brows as the ground car went on, having perilously
skirted around the walls. Jerry seemed to feel that he had wasted
time looking. He tried a higher rate of speed. The car yielded it
without effort. There seemed to be no limit to the speed at which
these remarkable vehicles could travel without vibration or swaying or
jolting.
That first fort was perhaps fifty miles behind when Borden's expression
changed from harried bewilderment to shock. He stared ahead as the
vehicle sped along the geometrically linear highway, wind-swept and
free of dust as it was.
He said slowly, "That's right, Jerry. Make as much speed as you can.
When you're tired, I'll drive. We've got to catch Sattell before he
reaches that white spot. It's possible that more than our lives depend
on it...."
They did not catch Sattell, though they drove night and day. Their
speed varied from fifteen miles an hour when they crawled over
occasionally drifted sand dunes which swallowed the highway, to two
hundred miles an hour or better. Borden estimated grimly that they
averaged more than a thousand miles per twenty-hour day.
Sattell couldn't have kept that up, so they must have passed him,
probably as he slept in some hiding place off a rocky spot in the
highway where there would be no trail to guide them to him. But of
course the wind might have erased his trail anywhere.
Ellen tried to rest or doze in the back while Jerry or Borden drove on,
one resting while the other drove. But after the first day the actual
overtaking of Sattell plainly was not Borden's purpose. It was clear
that he meant to get ahead of Sattell, to reach the white spot first.
On the second day of their journeying they found a second fort. This
also was a structure across the highway, defended from attack in the
direction for which they were headed. It had been more carefully
built than the other one. This had been more constructed of squared
stones, lifted into position by construction engines whose sand-eroded
carcasses were still in place.
There also were larger instruments of warfare here, worn away by
centuries of exposure to blowing sand. The fort itself had many times
been filled with sand and emptied again by the wind. Only under
archways were there any signs of soot, as if flames had burned terribly
here. Some land cruisers such as the one in which they rode had been
destroyed like the one they had seen at the first fort--pulled apart.
Like the other fort this one had not been demolished after its capture.
Not even the cranes and weapons had been seized. But the defenders had
been completely dismembered. No two bones were ever attached to each
other. Rarely had one been broken. None had been gnawed. Some were
sand-worn, but each was complete and entirely separate.
And tens of thousands--not merely thousands--had died here. Their bones
proved it.
* * * * *
Ellen watched Borden's face as they drove through this fortress.
"Do you know what happened, Dee?" she asked.
"I think so," he said coldly.
"The white spot? It looks as if they had been fighting something that
came from there."
"They were," said Borden. "And I don't want Sattell to encounter the
thing they were fighting. He knows too much."
She studied his expression. She knew that they were making the top
possible speed toward that same white spot from which a heat-ray had
been thrown at them. He hadn't explained. Jerry was too diffident to
ask. Ellen was not, but something occurred to her suddenly.
"You said, the 'thing'!" she said, startled. "Not creatures or people
or anything like that! You said the thing!"
He grimaced, but did not answer her. Instead, he said. "I'll take the
tiller, Jerry. We've still got the talkie that Sattell sabotaged,
haven't we?"
Jerry nodded and shifted the tiller to him. They'd discovered that the
steering gear could be shifted from side to side of the front of the
vehicle, so that it could be driven from either the right or left
side. On a planet without cities but with highways running thousands of
miles to the polar ice-caps, long-distance driving would be the norm.
Conveniences for that purpose would be logical. Drivers could relieve
each other without difficulty.
"Look it over," commanded Borden. "The logical way to sabotage a talkie
would be to throw its capacitances out of balance. No visible sign of
damage, but I couldn't find a band it wasn't tuned to. See if that was
the trick."
Jerry busied himself as Borden drove on. Here the highway wound through
great hills, the color of iron rust and carved by wind and sand into
incredibly grotesque shapes. A long trail of swirling dust arose behind
the racing cruiser.
Borden said abruptly, "I've been thinking. Check me, will you two?
First, I think the people who made this vehicle were much like us. The
skeletons proved that. They had families and pets and they made cars
like this to travel long distances on highways they'd built from pole
to pole. This car uses normal electric power, and its power source is
good! So they should have had radio frequency apparatus as well as
power. But no radio frequency is being used on this planet. The race
that built this car, then, has either changed its culture entirely, or
been wiped out."