Torren's rage flared.
"Do you think I'm not as anxious to kill you as you are to kill me?"
For an instant the two tensed, as if for a struggle to the death there
between the two skins of the space ship. Then Torren turned away.
"Get in your suit," he said curtly. "I'll get a private flyer and come
after you as soon as the hearing about your disappearance is over. Push
off at two-two even. Make it exact!"
He went angrily away, and Stan Buckley stared after him, hating him,
and then grimly turned to the apparatus that lay in an untidy heap
beside the air-lock door.
Five minutes later he opened the outer door of the lock. He was clad
in space armor and carried with him a small pack of supplies--the
standard abandon-ship kit--and the little space-drive unit. The unit
was one of those space skids used by meteor miners--merely a shaft
which contained the drive and power unit, a seat, and a cross-shaft by
which it was steered. It was absurdly like a hobby-horse for a man in
a space suit, and it was totally unsuitable for interplanetary work
because it consumed too much power when fighting gravity. For Stan,
though, starting in mid-space and with only one landing to make, it
should be adequate.
He locked the chrono where he could see it on the steering bar. He
strapped the supply kit in place. He closed the air-lock door very
softly. He waited, clinging to the outer skin of the ship with magnetic
shoes.
The cosmos seemed very small and quite improbable. The specks of light
which were suns seemed to crawl here and there. Because of their motion
it was impossible to think of them as gigantic balls of unquenchable
fire. They moved! To all appearances, the _Stallifer_ flowed onward in
a cosmos perhaps a dozen miles in diameter, in which many varicolored
fireflies moved with a vast deliberation.
The hand of the chrono moved, and moved, and moved. At two-two
exactly, Stan pressed the drive stud. At one instant he and his
improbable space steed rested firmly against a thousand-foot hill of
glistening chrom-steel. The waverings of the Bowdoin-Hall field were
imperceptible. The cosmos was small and limited and the _Stallifer_ was
huge. Then the skid's drive came on. It shot away from the hull--and
the ship vanished as utterly as a blown-out candle flame. And the
universe was so vast as to produce a cringing sensation in the man who
straddled an absurd small device in such emptiness, with one cold white
sun--barely near enough to show a disk--and innumerable remote and
indifferent stars on every hand.
On the instant when the ship's field contracted and left him outside,
Stan had lost the incredible velocity the field imparts. In the
infinitesimal fraction of a second required for the field to finish
its contraction after leaving him, the ship had traveled literally
thousands of miles. In the slightly greater fraction of a second
required for it to expand again, it had moved on some millions of
miles. By the time Stan's mind had actually grasped the fact that he
was alone in space, the ship from which he had separated himself was
probably fifty or sixty millions of miles away.
He was absolutely secure against recapture, of course. If his escape
went unnoticed for even half a minute, it would take all the ships of
all the Space Guard a thousand years to search the volume of space in
which one small space-suited figure might be found. And it was unlikely
that his escape would be noticed for hours.
He was very terribly alone. A dwarf white sun glowed palely, many, many
millions of miles away. Stars gazed at him incuriously, separated by
light-centuries of space.
He started the minute gyroscopes that enabled him to steer the skid.
He started in toward the sun. He had a planet to find and land on. Of
course, Rob Torren could simply have contrived his escape to emptiness
so that he might die and shrivel in the void, and never, never, never
through all eternity be found again. But somehow, Stan had a vast faith
in the hatred which existed between the two of them.
* * * * *
It was two days later when he approached the solitary planet of Khor
Alpha. The air in his space suit had acquired that deadly staleness
which is proof that good air is more than merely a mixture of oxygen
and nitrogen. He felt the sluggish discomfort which comes of bottled,
repurified breathing-mixture. And as the disk of the planet grew large,
he saw little or nothing to make him feel more cheerful.
The planet rotated as he drew near, and it seemed to be absolutely
featureless. The terminator--the shadow line as sunlight encroached
on the planet's night side--was a perfect line. There were, then, no
mountains. There were no clouds. There seemed to be no vegetation.
There was, though, a tiny polar icecap--so small that at first he
did not discover it. It was not even a dazzling white, but a mere
whitishness where a polar cap should be, as if it were hoarfrost
instead of ice.
He went slanting down to match the planet's ground speed in his
approach. Astride the tiny space skid, he looked rather like an
improbable witch astride an incredible broomstick. And he was very,
very tired.
Coming up in a straight line, half the planet's disk was night. Half
the day side was hidden by the planet's bulge. He actually saw no more
than a quarter of the surface at this near approach, and that without
magnification.
Any large features would have been spotted from far away, but he had
given up hope of any variation from monotony when--just as he was about
to enter the atmosphere--one dark patch in the planet's uniformly
dazzling white surface appeared at the very edge of day. It was at the
very border of the dawn belt. He could be sure only of its existence,
and that it had sharp, specifically straight edges.
He saw rectangular extensions from the main mass of it. Then he hit
atmosphere, and the thin stuff thrust at him violently because of his
velocity, and he blinked and automatically turned his head aside, so
that he did not see the dark patch again before his descent put it
below the horizon.
Even so near, no features, no natural formations appeared. There was
only a vast brightness below him. He could make no guess as to his
height nor--after he had slowed until the wind against his body was not
detectable through the space suit--of his speed with relation to the
ground. It was extraordinary. It occurred to him to drop something to
get some idea, even if a vague one, of his altitude above the ground.
He did--an oil-soaked rag from the tool kit. It went fluttering down
and down, and abruptly vanished, relatively a short distance below him.
It had not landed. It had been blotted out.
Tired as he was, it took him minutes to think of turning on the
suit-microphone which would enable him to hear sounds in this
extraordinary world. But when he flicked the switch he heard a dull,
droning, moaning noise which was unmistakable. Wind. Below him there
was a sandstorm. He was riding just above its upper surface. He could
not see the actual ground because there was an opaque wall of sand
between. There might be five hundred feet between him and solidity, or
five thousand, or there might be no actual solid, immovable ground at
all. In any case, he could not possibly land.
He rose again and headed for the dark area he had noted. But a space
skid is not intended for use in atmosphere. Its power is great, to be
sure, when its power unit is filled. But Stan had come a very long way
indeed since his departure from the _Stallifer_. And his drive had
blown a fuse, once, which cost him some power.
Unquestionably, the blown fuse had been caused by the impinging of
a Bowdoin-Hall field upon the skid. Some other space ship than the
_Stallifer_, using Khor Alpha as a course guide, had flashed past
the one-planet system at many hundred times the speed of light. The
pulsations of its drive field had struck the skid and drained its drive
of power, and unquestionably had registered the surge. But it was not
likely that it would be linked with Stan's disappearance. The other
ship might be headed for a star system light-centuries from Earth, and
a minute--relatively a minute--joggle of its meters would not be a
cause for comment. The real seriousness of the affair was that the skid
had drained power before its fuse blew.
That property of a Bowdoin-Hall field, incidentally--its trick of
draining power from any drive unit in its range--is the reason that
hampers its use save in deep space. Liners have to be elaborately
equipped with fuses lest in shorting each other's drives they wreck
their own. In interplanetary work, fuses are not even practical because
they might be blown a hundred times in a single voyage. Within solar
systems high-frequency pulsations are used, so that no short can last
more than the hundred-thousandth of a second, in which time not even
allotropic graphite can be ruined.
Stan, then, was desperately short of power and had to use it in a
gravitational field which was prodigally wasteful of it. He had to
rise high above the sandstorm before he saw the black area again
at the planet's very rim. He headed for it in the straightest of
straight lines. As he drove, the power-gauge needle flickered steadily
over toward zero. A meteor miner does not often use as much as one
earth-gravity acceleration, and Stan had to use that much merely to
stay aloft. The black area, too, was all of a hundred-odd miles away,
and after some millions of miles of space travel, the skid was hard put
to make it.
He dived for the black thing as it drew near, and on his approach it
appeared simply impossible. It was a maze, a grid, of rectangular
girders upholding a seemingly infinite number of monstrous dead-black
slabs. There was a single layer of those slabs, supported by
innumerable spidery slender columns. Here, in the dawn belt, there was
no wind and Stan could see clearly. Sloping down, he saw that ten-foot
columns of some dark metal rose straight and uncompromising from a
floor of sand to a height of three hundred feet or more. At their top
were the grid and the slabs, forming a roof some thirty stories above
the ground. There were no under-floors, no cross-ways, no structural
features of any sort between the sand from which the columns rose and
that queer and discontinuous roof.
Stan landed on the ground at the structure's edge. He could see streaks
and bars of sky between the slabs. He looked down utterly empty aisles
between the columns and saw nothing but the columns and the roof until
the shafts merged in the distance. There was utter stillness here. The
sand was untroubled and undisturbed. If the structure was a shelter, it
sheltered nothing. Yet it stretched for at least a hundred miles in at
least one direction, as he had seen from aloft. As nearly as he could
tell, there was no reason for its existence and no purpose it could
serve. Yet it was not the abandoned skeleton of something no longer
used. It was plainly in perfect repair.
The streaks of sky to be seen between its sections were invariably
exact in size and alignment. They were absolutely uniform. There was no
dilapidation and no defect anywhere. The whole structure was certainly
artificial and certainly purposeful, and it implied enormous resources
of civilization. But there was no sign of its makers, and Stan could
not even guess at the reason for its construction.
But he was too worn out to guess. On board the _Stallifer_, he'd been
so sick with rage that he could not rest. On the space skid, riding in
an enormous loneliness about a dwarf sun whose single planet had never
been examined by men, he had to be alert. He had to find the system's
one planet, and then he had to make a landing with practically no
instruments. When he landed at the base of the huge grid, he examined
his surroundings wearily, but with the cautious suspicion needful on
an unknown world. Then he made the sort of camp the situation seemed
to call for. He clamped the space skid and his supplies to his space
suit belt, lay down hard by one of the columns, and incontinently fell
asleep.
* * * * *
He was wakened by a horrific roaring in his earphones. He lay still
for one instant. When he tried to stir, it was only with enormous
difficulty that he could move his arms and legs. He felt as if he were
gripped by quicksand. Then, suddenly, he was wide awake. He fought
himself free of clinging incumbrances. He had been half buried in sand.
He was in the center of a roaring, swirling sand-devil which broke upon
the nearby column and built up mounds of sand and snatched them away
again, and flung great masses of it crazily in every direction.
As the enigmatic structure had moved out of the dawn belt into the
morning, howling winds had risen. All the fury of a tornado, all the
stifling deadliness of a sandstorm, beat upon the base of the grid. And
from what Stan had seen when he first tried to land, this was evidently
the normal daily weather of this world. And if this was a sample of
merely morning winds, by midday existence would be impossible.
Stan looked at the chrono. He had slept less than three hours. He made
a loop of line from the abandon-ship kit and got it about the nearest
pillar. He drew himself to that tall column. He tried to find a lee
side, but there was none. The wind direction changed continually. He
debated struggling farther under the shelter of the monstrous roof. He
stared up, estimatingly--
He saw slabs tilt. In a giant section whose limits he could not
determine, he saw the rectangular sections of the roof revolve in
strict unison. From a position parallel to the ground, they turned
until the light of the sky shone down unhindered. Vast masses of sand
descended--deposited on the slabs by the wind, and now dumped down
about the columns' bases. And then wind struck anew with a concentrated
virulence, and the space between the columns became filled with a
whirling giant eddy that blotted out everything.
It was a monster whirlwind that spun crazily in its place for minutes,
and then roared out to the open again. In its violence it picked Stan
up bodily, with the skid and abandon-ship kit still clamped to his
space suit. But for the rope about the column he would have been ripped
away and tossed insanely into the smother of sand that reached to the
horizon.
After a long time, he managed to take up some of the slack of the rope;
to bind himself and his possessions more closely to the column which
rose into the smother overhead. Later still, he was able to take up
more. In an hour, he was bound tightly to the pillar and was no longer
flung to and fro by the wind. Then he dozed off again.
It was uneasy slumber. It gave him little rest. Once a swirling
sand-devil gouged away the sand beneath him so that he and his gear
hung an unguessable distance above solidity, perhaps no more than a
yard or so, but perhaps much more. Later he woke to find the sand
piling up swiftly about him, so that he had to loosen his rope and
climb wearily as tons of fine, abrasive stuff--it would have been
strangling had he needed to breathe it direct--were flung upon him. But
he did sleep from time to time.
Then night fell. The winds died down from hurricane intensity to no
more than gale force. Then to mere frantic gusts. And then--the sun
had set on the farther side of the huge structure to which he had tied
himself--then there was a period when a fine whitish mist seemed to
obscure all the stars, and it gradually faded, and he realized that it
was particles of so fine a dust that it hung in the air long after the
heavier stuff had settled.
He released himself from the rope about the pillar. He stood, a tiny
figure, beside the gargantuan columns of black metal which rose toward
the stars. The stars themselves shone down brightly, brittlely, through
utterly clear air. There were no traces of cloud formation following
the storm of the day.
It was obvious that this was actually the normal weather of this
planet. By day, horrific winds and hurricanes. By night, a vast
stillness. And the small size and indistinctness of the icecap he
had seen was assurance that there was nowhere on the planet any
sizeable body of water to moderate the weather. And with such storms,
inhabitants were unthinkable. Life of any sort was out of the question.
But if there was anything certain in the cosmos, it was that the
structure at whose feet he stood was artificial!
He flicked on his suit-radio. Static only. Sand particles in dry air,
clashing against each other, would develop charges to produce just the
monstrous hissing sounds his earphones gave off. He flicked off the
radio and opened his face-plate. Cold dry air filled his lungs.
There were no inhabitants. There could not be any. But there was this
colossal artifact of unguessable purpose. There was no life on this
planet, but early during today's storm--and he suspected at other times
when he could neither see nor hear--huge areas of the roof-plates had
turned together to dump down their accumulated loads of sand. As he
breathed in the first breaths of cold air, he heard a shrill outcry
and a roaring somewhere within the forest of pillars. At a guess, it
was another dumping of sand from the roof. It stopped. Another roaring,
somewhere else. Yet another. Section by section, area by area, the sand
that had piled on the roof at the top of the iron columns was dumped
down between the columns' bases.
Stan flicked on the tiny instrument lights and looked at the motor of
the space skid. The needle was against the pin at zero. He considered,
and shrugged. Rob Torren would come presently to fight him to the
death. But it would take the _Stallifer_ ten days or longer to reach
Earth, then three or four days for the microscopic examination of every
part of the vast ship in a grim search for him.
Then there'd be an inquiry. It might last a week or two weeks or
longer. The findings would be given after deliberation which might
produce still another delay of a week or even a month.
Rob Torren would not be free to leave Earth before then. And then it
would take him days to get hold of a space yacht and--because a yacht
would be slower than the _Stallifer_--two weeks or so to get back here.
Three months in all, perhaps. Stan's food wouldn't last that long. His
water supply wouldn't last nearly as long as that.
If he could get up to the icecap there would be water, and on the
edge of the ice he could plant some of the painstakingly developed
artificial plants whose seeds were part of every abandon-ship kit.
They could live and produce food under almost any set of planetary
conditions. But he couldn't reach the polar cap without power the skid
didn't have.
He straddled the little device. He pointed it upward. He rose
sluggishly. The absurd little vehicle wabbled crazily. Up, and up, and
up toward the uncaring stars. The high thin columns of steel seemed to
keep pace with him. The roof of this preposterous shed loomed slowly
nearer, but the power of the skid was almost gone. He was ten feet
below the crest when diminishing power no longer gave thrust enough to
rise. He would hover here for seconds, and then drift back down again
to the sand--for good.
He flung his kit of food upward. It sailed over the sharp edge of the
roof and landed there. The skid was thrust down by the force of the
throw, but it had less weight to lift. It bounced upward, soared above
the roof, and just as its thrust dwindled again, Stan managed to land.
He found--nothing.
To be exact, he found the columns joined by massive girders of steel
fastening them in a colossal open grid. Upon those girders which ran
in a line due north and south--reckoning the place of sunset to be
west--huge flat plates of metal were slung, having bearings which
permitted them to be rotated at the will of whatever unthinkable
constructor had devised them.
There were small bulges which might contain motors for the turning.
There was absolutely nothing but the framework and the plates and the
sand some three hundred feet below. There was no indication of the
purpose of the plates or the girders or the whole construction. There
was no sign of any person or creature using or operating the slabs. It
appeared that the grid was simply a monotonous, featureless, insanely
tedious construction which it would have taxed the resources of Earth
to build. It stretched far, far beyond the horizon--and did nothing and
had no purpose save to gather sand on its upper surface and from time
to time dump that sand down to the ground. It did not make sense.
Stan had a more immediate problem than the purpose of the grid, though.
He was three hundred feet above ground. He was short of food and
hopelessly short of water. When day came again, this place would be
the center of a hurricane of blown sand. On the ground, lashed to a
metal column, he had been badly buffeted about even in his space suit.
Up here the wind would be much stronger. It was not likely that any
possible lashing would hold him against such a storm. He could probably
get back to the ground, of course, but there seemed no particular point
to it.
As he debated, there came a thin, shrill whistling overhead. It came
from the far south, and passed overhead, descending, and--going down
in pitch--it died away to the northward. The lowering of its pitch
indicated that it was slowing. The sound was remarkably like that of a
small space craft entering atmosphere incompletely under control--which
was unthinkable, of course, on the solitary unnamed planet of Khor
Alpha. And Stan felt very, very lonely on a huge plate of iron thirty
stories above the ground, on an alien planet under unfriendly stars,
and with this cryptic engineering monstrosity breaking away to sheer
desert on one side and extending uncounted miles in all others. He
flicked on his suit-radio, without hope.
There came the loud, hissing static. Then under and through it came the
humming carrier-wave of a yacht transmitter sending on emergency power.
"Help call! Help call! Space yacht _Erebus_ grounded on planet of Khor
Alpha, main drive burned out, landed in darkness, outside conditions
unknown. If anyone hears, p-please answer! M-my landing drive smashed
when I hit ground, too! Help call! Help call! Space yacht _Erebus_
grounded on planet of Khor Alpha, main drive burned out, landed in
darkness--"
Stan Buckley had no power. He could not move from this spot. The
_Erebus_ had grounded somewhere in the desert which covered all the
planet but this one structure. When dawn came, the sandstorm would
begin again. And with its main drive burned out, its landing drive
smashed--when the morrow's storms began it would be strange indeed if
the whirlwinds did not scoop away sand from about the one solid object
they'd encounter, so that the little craft would topple down and down
and ultimately be covered over, buried under maybe hundreds of feet of
smothering stuff.
He knew the _Erebus_. Of course. It belonged to Esther Hume. The voice
from it was Esther's--the girl he was to have married, if Rob Torren
hadn't made charges disgracing him utterly. And tomorrow she would be
buried alive in the helpless little yacht, while he was unable to lift
a finger to her aid.
* * * * *
He was talking to her desperately when there was a vast, labored tumult
to the west. It was the product of ten thousand creakings. He turned,
and in the starlight he saw great flat plates--they were fifty feet by
a hundred and more--turning slowly. An area a mile square changed its
appearance. Each of the flat plates in a hundred rows of fifty plates
turned sidewise, to dump its load of settled sand. A square mile of
plates turned edges to the sky--and turned back again. Creakings and
groanings filled the air, together with the soft roaring noise of
the falling sand. A pause. Another great section of a mile each way
performed the same senseless motion. Pure desperation made Stan say
sharply:
"Esther! Cut off for half an hour! I'll call back! I see the slimmest
possible chance, and I've got to take it! Half an hour, understand?"
He heard her unsteady assent. He scrambled fiercely to the nearest of
the huge plates. It was, of course, insane to think of such a thing.
The plates had no purpose save to gather loads of sand and then to turn
and dump them. But there were swellings at one end of each--where the
girders to which they clung united to form this preposterous elevated
grid. Those swellings might be motors. He dragged a small cutting-torch
from the tool kit. He snapped its end. A tiny, savage, blue-white flame
appeared in midair half an inch from the torch's metal tip.
He turned that flame upon the rounded swelling at the end of a monster
slab. Something made the slabs turn. By reason, it should be a motor.
The swellings might be housings for motors. He made a cut across such a
swelling. At the first touch of the flame something smoked luridly and
frizzled before the metal grew white-hot and flowed aside before the
flame. There had been a coating on the iron.
Even as he cut, Stan realized that the columns and the plates were
merely iron. But the sand blast of the daily storms should erode the
thickest of iron away in a matter of weeks, at most. So the grid was
coated with a tough, elastic stuff--a plastic of some sort--which was
not abraded by the wind. It did not scratch because it was not hard. It
yielded, and bounced sand particles away instead of resisting them. It
would outwear iron, in the daily sand blast, by a million times, on the
principle by which land vehicles on Earth use rubber tires instead of
metal, for greater wear.
He cut away a flap of metal from the swelling. He tossed it away with
his space-gloved hands. His suit-flash illuminated the hollow within.
There was a motor inside, and it was remarkably familiar, though not a
motor such as men made for the purpose of turning things. There was a
shaft. There were four slabs of something that looked like graphite,
rounded to fit the shaft. That was all. No coils. No armature. No sign
of magnets.
Men used this same principle, but for a vastly different purpose. Men
used the reactive thrust of allotropic graphite against an electric
current in their space ships. The Bowdoin-Hall field made such a thrust
incredibly efficient, and it was such graphite slabs that drove the
_Stallifer_--though these were monsters weighing a quarter of a ton
apiece, impossible for the skid to lift. Insulated cables led to the
slabs in wholly familiar fashion. The four cables joined to two and
vanished in the seemingly solid girders which formed all the giant grid.
Almost without hope, Stan slashed through two cables with his torch. He
dragged out the recharging cable of the skid. He clipped the two ends
to the two cut cables. They sparked! Then he stared. The meter of the
skid showed current flowing into its power bank. An amazing amount of
current. In minutes, the power-storage needle stirred from its pin. In
a quarter of an hour it showed half-charge. Then a creaking began all
around.
Stan leaped back to one of the cross-girders just as all the plates
in an area a mile square about him began to turn--all but the one
whose motor-housing he had cut through. All the other plates turned
so that their edges pointed to the stars. The sand piled on them by
the day storm poured down into the abyss beneath. Only the plate whose
motor-housing Stan had cut remained unmoving. Sparks suddenly spat
in the metal hollow, as if greater voltage had been applied to stir
the unmoving slab. A flaring, lurid, blue-white arc burned inside the
housing. Then it cut off.
All the gigantic plates which had turned their edges skyward went
creaking loudly back to their normal position, their flat sides turned
to the stars. And nothing more happened. Nothing at all.
In another ten minutes, the skid's meter showed that the power bank
was fully charged. And Stan, with plenty to think about, straddled the
little object and went soaring to northward like a witch on a broom,
sending a call on his suit-radio before him.
"Coming, Esther! Give me a directional and let's make it fast! We've
got a lot to do before daylight!"
He had traveled probably fifty miles before her signal came in. Then
there was a frantically anxious time until he found the little,
helpless space yacht, tumbled on the desert sand, with Esther peering
hopefully out of the air-lock as he swooped down to a clumsy landing.
She was warned and ready. There was no hope of repairing the drive. A
burned-out drive to operate in a Bowdoin-Hall field calls for bars of
allotropic graphite--graphite in a peculiar energy state as different
from ordinary graphite as carbon diamond is from carbon coal. There
were probably monster bars of just such stuff in the giant grid's
motors, but the skid could not handle them. For tonight, certainly,
repair was out of the question. Esther had hooked up a tiny, low-power
signaling device which gave out a chirping wave every five seconds. She
wore a space suit, had two abandon-ship kits, and all the water that
could be carried.
The skid took off again. It was not designed to work in a planet's
gravitational field. It used too much power, and it wabbled
erratically, and for sheer safety Stan climbed high. With closed
faceplates the space-suited figures seemed to soar amid the stars. They
could speak only by radio, close together as they were.
"Wh-where are we going, Stan?"
"Icecap," said Stan briefly. "North Pole. There's water there--or
hoarfrost, anyhow. And the day storms won't be so bad if there are
storms at all. In the tropics on this planet the normal weather is a
typhoon-driven sandstorm. We'll settle down in the polar area and wait
for Rob Torren to come for us. It may be three months or more."
"Rob Torren--"
"He helped me escape," said Stan briefly. "Tell you later. Watch ahead."
He'd had no time for emotional thinking since his landing, and
particularly since the landing of the little space yacht now sealed
up and abandoned to be buried under the desert sand. But he knew how
Esther came to be here. She'd told him, by radio, first off. She'd
had news of the charges Rob Torren had brought against him. She
hadn't believed them. Not knowing of his embarcation for Earth for
court-martial--the logical thing would have been a trial at advanced
base--she'd set out desperately to assure him of her faith.
She couldn't get a liner direct, so she'd set out alone in her little
space yacht. In a sense, it should have been safe enough. Craft
equipped with Bowdoin-Hall drive were all quite capable of interstellar
flight. Power was certainly no problem any more, and with extra
capacitors to permit of low-frequency pulsations of the drive field,
and mapped dwarf white stars as course markers, navigation should be
simple enough. The journey, as such, was possibly rash but it was
not foolhardy. Only--she hadn't fused her drive when she changed its
pulsation-frequency. And when she was driving past Khor Alpha, her
Bowdoin-Hall field had struck the space skid on which Stan was trying
to make this planet, and the field had drained his power.
The short circuit blew the skid's fuse, but it burned out the yacht's
more delicate drive. Specifically, it overloaded and ruined the
allotropic carbon blocks which made the drive work. So Esther's
predicament was caused not only by her solicitude for Stan, but by the
drive of the skid on which he'd escaped from the _Stallifer_.
* * * * *
He blamed himself. Bitterly. But even more he blamed Rob Torren. Hatred
surged up in him again for the man who had promised to come here and
fight him to the death. But he said quietly:
"Rob's coming here after me. We'll talk about that later. He didn't
guess this place would be without water and with daily hurricanes
everywhere except--I hope!--the poles. He thought I'd be able to make
out until he could come back. We've got to! Watch out ahead for the
sunset line. We've got to follow it north until we hit the polar cap.
With water and our kits we should be able to survive indefinitely."
The space-suited figures were close together--in fact, in contact. But
there was no feeling of touching each other through the insulating,
almost inflexible armor of their suits. And sealed as they were in
their helmets and communicating only by phone in the high stratosphere,
neither could feel the situation suitable for romance. Esther was
silent for a time. Then she said:
"You told me you were out of power--"
"I was," he told her. "I got some from the local inhabitants--if
they're local."
"What--"
He described the preposterous, meaningless structure on the desert.
Thousands of square miles in extent. Cryptic and senseless and of
unimaginable significance.
"Every slab has a motor to turn it. I cut into a housing and there was
power there. I loaded up with it. I can't figure the thing out. There's
nowhere that a civilized or any other race could live. There's nothing
those slabs could be for!"
There was a thin line of sunlight far ahead. Traveling north, they
drove through the night and overtook the day. They were very high
indeed, now, beyond atmosphere and riding the absurd small skid that
meteor miners use. They saw the dwarf white sun, Khor Alpha. Its rays
were very fierce. They passed over the dividing line between day and
night, and far, far ahead they saw the hazy whitishness which was the
polar cap of this planet.
It was half an hour before they landed, and when they touched ground
they came simply to a place where wind-blown sand ceased to be powdery
and loose, and where there was plainly dampness underneath. The sun
hung low indeed on the horizon. On the shadow side of sand hillocks
there was hoarfrost. All the moisture of the planet was deposited in
the sand at its poles, and during the long winter nights the sand was
frozen so that even during the summer season unthinkable frigidity
crept out into every shadow.
Stan nodded at a patch of frost on the darker site of a half-mile sand
dune.
"Sleeping," he said dryly, "will be done in space suits. This ground
will be cold where the sun doesn't hit! Do you notice that there's no
sign of anything growing anywhere? Not even moss?"
"It's too cold?"
"Hardly!" said Stan. "Mosses and lichens grow on Earth as far north as
the ground ever thaws. And on every other planet I've ever visited.
There'd be plants here if anywhere, because there's water here. There
simply can't be any life on this planet. None at all!"
Then the absurdity of the statement struck him. There was that
monstrous grid, made by intelligence of some sort and using vast
resources. But--
"Dammit!" said Stan. "How can there be life here? How can plants live
in perpetual sandstorms? How can animals live without plants to break
down minerals and make them into food? How can either plants or animals
live without water? If there were life anywhere, it would have to be
near water, which means here. And if there's none here there can't be
any at all--"
They reached the top of the dune. Esther caught her breath. She pointed.
There, reaching across the dampened sand, was a monstrous and a
horrifying trail. Something had come from the zones where the
sandstorms raged. It had passed this way, moving in one direction, and
it had passed again, going back toward the stormy wastes. By the trail,
it had ten or twelve or twenty legs, like some unthinkable centipede.
The tracks of its separate sets of legs were separated by fifteen feet.
And each footprint was two yards across.
* * * * *
For three days by the chrono on the space skid, the hard white sun Khor
Alpha circled the horizon without once setting. Which was natural,
because this was one of the poles of Khor Alpha's only planet, and this
was summer. In those three days Stan and Esther saw no living thing. No
bird, beast, or insect; no plant, moss, or lichen. They had planted
the seeds from their abandon-ship kits--included in such kits because
space castaways may have to expect to be isolated not for weeks or
months, but perhaps for all their lives.
The weeds would produce artificially developed plants with amazing
powers of survival and adaptation and food production. On the fourth
day--clock time--the first of the plants appeared above the bank of
damp sand in which they had been placed. In seven days more there would
be food from them. If one plant of the lot was allowed to drop its own
seeds, in time there would be a small jungle of food plants on which
they could live.
For the rest, they lived in a fashion lower than any savages of Earth.
They had no shelter. There was no building material but sand. They
slept in their space suits for warmth. They had no occupation save that
of waiting for the plants to bear food, and after that of waiting for
Rob Torren to come.
And when he came--the presence of Esther changed everything. When
Torren arrived to fight a duel to the death with Stan, the stake was
to have been ultimately Esther's hand. But if she were present, if she
knew the true story of Torren's charges against Stan and their falsity,
he could have no hope of winning her by Stan's death. He would have
nothing to gain by a duel. But he would gain by the murder of one or
both of them. Safety from the remotest chance of later exposure, at any
rate, and revenge for the failure of his hopes. And if he managed to
kill Stan by any means, fair or foul, Esther would be left wholly at
his mercy.
So Stan brooded, hating Rob Torren with a desperate intensity
surpassing even the hatred he'd felt on the _Stallifer_. A large part
of his hatred was due to helplessness. There was no way to fight back.
But he tried desperately to think of one.