She looked at him in mute inquiry.
"For power," he said "and maybe something more. We might be able to
find out something. If there are inhabitants on this planet, for
instance. There can't be, but there's that beast--
"Maybe it's somehow connected with whatever or whoever built that
grid--that checkerboard arrangement I told you about. Something or
somebody built that, but I can't believe anything can live in those
sandstorms."
They'd followed the huge trail that had been visible on their first
landing in the polar regions. The great, two-yard-across pads of the
monster had made a clear trail for ten miles from the point of their
discovery. At the end of the trail there was a great gap in a cliff of
frozen sand. The Thing seemed to have devoured tons of ice-impacted
stuff. Then it had gone back into the swirling sandy wastes. It
carried away with it cubic yards--perhaps twenty or thirty tons--of
water-filled frozen sand.
But reason insisted that there could be no animal life on a planet
without plants, and no plants on a desert which was the scene of
daily typhoons, hourly hurricanes, and with no water anywhere upon it
save at the poles. And there was no vegetation there. A monster with
dozens of six-foot feet, and able to consume tons of wetted sand for
moisture, would need vast quantities of food for energy alone. And it
was unthinkable that food was to be found in the strangling depths of
perpetual sandstorms.
"There's another thing," Stan added. "With power to spare I could fuse
sand into something like a solid. Make a house, maybe, and chairs to
sit on, instead of having to wear our space suits all the time. Maybe
we could even heat the inside of a house!"
Esther smiled at him.
"Darling," she said wryly, "you've no idea how glad I'd be of a solid
floor to walk on instead of sand, and a chair to sit on, even if we
didn't have a roof!"
They had been, in effect, in the position of earth-castaways marooned
on a sand-cay which had not even seashells on it or fish around it.
There was literally nothing they could do but talk.
"And," she added, "if we could make a tub to take a bath in--"
She brightened at the thought. Stan hadn't told her of his own reasons
for having no hope. There was no point in causing her despair in
advance.
"We'll see what we see," he said. "Climb aboard."
The space skid was barely five feet long. It had a steering bar and a
thick body which contained its power-storage unit and drive. And there
was the seat which one straddled, and the strap to hold its passenger.
Two people riding it in bulky space suits was much like riding double
on a bicycle, but Stan would not leave Esther alone. Not since they'd
seen that horrifying trail!
They rose vertically and headed south in what was almost a rocket's
trajectory. Stan, quite automatically, had noted the time of sunrise at
the incredible structure beside which he'd landed. Later, he'd noted as
automatically the length of the planet's day. So to find his original
landing place he had only to follow the dawn line across the planet's
surface, with due regard for the time consumed in traveling.
They were still two hundred miles out in space when he sighted the
grid. He slanted down to it. It was just emerging from the deep black
shadow of night. He swooped to a landing on one of the hundred-foot
slabs of hinged metal three hundred feet above ground. It was clear of
sand. It had obviously been dumped.
Esther stared about her, amazed.
"But--people made this, Stan!" she insisted. "If we can get in touch
with them--"
"You sit over there," said Stan. He pointed to an intersection of the
criss-crossing girders. "It takes power to travel near a planet. My
power bank is half drained already. I'd better fill it up again."
He got out his cutting-torch. He turned it upon a motor-housing. The
plastic coating frizzled and smoked. It peeled away. Metal flared
white-hot and melted.
There was a monstrous creaking. All the plates in a square mile turned.
Swiftly. Only a desperate leap saved Stan from a drop to the desert
thirty stories below.
The great slabs pointed their edges to the sky. Stan waited. Esther
said startledly;
"That was on purpose, Stan!"
"Hardly," said Stan. "They'll turn back in a minute."
But they did not turn back. They stayed tilted toward the dawning sky.
"You may be right, at that," said Stan. "We'll see. Try another place."
Five minutes later they landed on a second huge slab of black metal,
miles away. Without a word, Stan ensconced Esther on the small platform
formed by crossing girders. He took out the torch again. The tiny,
blue-white flame. Smoke at its first touch. Metal flowed.
With a vast cachinnation of squeakings, a mile-square section shifted
like the first....
"Something," said Stan grimly, "doesn't want us to have power. Maybe
they can stop us, and maybe not."
The swelling which was the motor-housing was just within reach from
the immovable girder crossing on which Esther waited. Stan reached
out now. The torch burned with a quiet fierce flame. A great section
of metal fell away, exposing a motor exactly like the one he'd first
examined--slabs of allotropic graphite and all. He thrust in and cut
the cables. He reached in with the charging clips--
There was a crackling report in the space skid's body. Smoke came out.
* * * * *
Stan examined the damage with grimly set features.
"Blew another fuse," he told Esther. "We're licked. When I took power
the first time, I ruined a motor. It's been found out. So the plates
turned, today, to--scare me away, perhaps, as soon as I cut into
another. When I didn't scare and severed the cables, high-voltage
current was shot into them to kill me or ruin whatever I was using the
power for. Whether there's life here or not, there's intelligence--and
a very unpleasant kind, too!"
He re-fused the skid, scowling.
"No attempt to communicate with us!" he said savagely. "They'd know
somebody civilized cut into that motor-housing! They'd know it was an
emergency! You'd think--"
He stopped. A faint, faint humming sound became audible. It seemed to
come from nowhere in particular--or from everywhere. But it was not the
formless humming of a rising wind. This sound was a humming punctuated
by hurried, rhythmic clankings. It was oddly like the sound of cars
traveling over an old-fashioned railway--one with unwelded rail joints.
Then Esther jerked her head about.
"Stan! Look there!"
Something hurtled toward them in the gray dawn light. It was a machine.
Even in the first instant of amazement, Stan could see what it was
and what it was designed to do. It was a huge, bulbous platform above
stiltlike legs. At the bottoms of the legs were wheels. The wheels
ran on the cross-girders as on a railroad track, and the body of the
thing was upraised enough to ride well above the sidewise-tilted slabs.
There were other wheels to be lowered for travel on the girders which
supported the slabs.
It was not a flying device, but a rolling one. It could travel in
either of two directions at right angles to each other, and had been
designed to run only on the great grid which ran beyond the horizon.
It was undoubtedly a maintaining machine, designed to reach any spot
where trouble developed, for the making of repairs, and it was of such
weight that even the typhoonlike winds of a normal day on this world
could not lift it from its place.
It came hurtling toward them at terrific speed. It would roll
irresistibly over anything on the girders which were its tracks.
"Get on!" snapped Stan. "Quick!"
Esther moved as swiftly as she could, but space suits are clumsy
things. The little skid shot skyward only part of a second before the
colossus ran furiously over the place where they had been. A hundred
feet beyond, it braked and came to a seemingly enraged stop. It stood
still as if watching the hovering, tiny skid with its two passengers.
"It looks disappointed," said Stan dourly. "I wonder if it wants to
chase us?"
He sent the skid darting away. They landed. In seconds the vibration
caused by the huge machine's motion began and grew loud. They saw it
race into view. As it appeared, instantly a deafening clamor began.
Slabs in all directions rose to their vertical position, so that the
two humans could not dodge from one row of girders to another. And then
with a roar and a rush the thing plunged toward them once more.
Again the skid took off. Again the huge machine overran the spot where
they had been, then stopped short as if baffled. Stan sent his odd
craft off at an angle. Instantly the gigantic thing was in motion,
moving in lightning speed in one direction, stopping short to move on a
new course at right angles to the first, and so progressing in zigzag
but very swift pursuit.
"'Won't you land so I can crush you?' said the monster to us two," said
Stan dryly. "They won't let us have any more power, and we haven't any
more to waste. But still--"
He listened to his suit-radio, twisting the tuning dials as he sent the
skid up in a spiral.
"I'm wondering," he observed, "if they're trying to tell us something
by radio. And meanwhile I'd like a more comprehensive view of this
damned checkerboard!"
A faint, faint, wavering whine came into the headphones.
"There's something," he commented "Not a main communication wave,
though. A stray harmonic--and of a power beam, I think. They must use
plenty short waves!"
But he was searching the deadly monotony of the grid below him as he
spoke. Suddenly, he pointed. All the area below them to the horizon
was filled with geometric shapes of grids and squares. But one space
was different from the rest. Four squares were thrown into one, there.
And as the skid dived for a nearer view, that one square was seen to be
a deep, hollow shaft going down toward the very vitals of this world.
As Stan looked, though, it filled swiftly with something rising from
its depths. The lifting thing was a platform, and things moved about on
it.
"That's that!" said Stan hardly.
He shot the skid away in level flight at topmost speed, with the great
rolling machine following helplessly and ragingly on its zigzag course
below.
The horizon was dark, now, with the coming night. As Stan lifted
for the rocketlike trajectory that would take him back to the polar
regions, the white sun sank fiercely. There was a narrow space on which
the rays smote so slantingly that the least inequality of level was
marked by shadow. Gigantic sand dunes were outlined there. But beyond,
where the winds began, there was only featureless swirling dust.
Stan was very silent all the way back. Only, once, he said calmly, "Our
power units will soak up a pretty big charge in a short time. We packed
away some power before the fuse blew."
There was no comment for Esther to make. There was life on the planet.
It was life which knew of their existence and presence--and had tried
to kill them for the theft of some few megawatts of power. It would not
be easy to make terms with the life which held other life so cheaply.
With the planet's only source of power now guarded, matters looked less
bright than before. But after they had reached the icecap, and when
they slanted down out of the airlessness to the spot which was their
home because their seeds had been planted there--as they dived down for
a landing, their real situation appeared.
There was a colossal object with many pairs of legs moving back and
forth over the little space where their food plants sprouted. In days,
those plants would have yielded food. They wouldn't yield food now.
Their garden was being trampled to nothingness by a multilegged machine
of a size comparable to the other machine which had chased them on
the grid. It was fifty feet high from ground to top, and had a round,
tanklike body all of twenty feet in diameter. Round projections at
one end looked like eyes. It moved on multiple legs which trampled in
orderly confusion. It stamped the growing plants to pulped green stuff
in the polar sand. It went over and over and over the place where
the food necessary for the humans' survival had promised to grow. It
stamped and stamped: It destroyed all hope of food. And it destroyed
all hope.
Because, as Stan drove the skid down to see the machine more clearly,
it stopped in its stamping. It swung about to face him, with a
curiously unmachinelike ferocity. As Stan veered, it turned also. When
he sped on over it and beyond, it wheeled and came galloping with
surprising speed after him.
Then they saw another machine. Two more. Three. They saw dark specks
here and there in the polar wastes, every one a machine like the one
which had tramped their food supply out of existence. And every one
changed course to parallel and approach the skid's line of travel. If
they landed, the machines would close in.
There was only so much power. The skid could not stay indefinitely
aloft. And anywhere that they landed--
* * * * *
But they did land. They had to. It was a thousand miles away, on the
dark side of the planet, in a waste of sand which looked frozen in the
starlight. The instant the skid touched ground, Stan made a warning
gesture and reached over to turn off Esther's suit-radio. He opened his
own face-plate and almost gasped at the chill of the midnight air. With
no clouds or water vapor to hinder it, the heat stored up by day was
radiated out to the awful chill of interstellar space at a rate which
brought below zero temperatures within hours of sundown. At the winter
pole of the planet, the air itself must come close to turning liquid
from the cold. But here, and now, Stan nodded in his helmet as Esther
opened her face-plate.
"No radio," he told her. "They'll hardly be able to find us in several
million square miles if we don't use radio. But now you get some sleep.
We're going to have a busy time, presently!"
Esther hesitated, and said desperately, "But--who are they? What are
they? Why do they want to kill us?"
"They're the local citizens," said Stan. "I was wrong, there are
inhabitants. I've no more idea what they may be like than you have.
But I suspect they want to kill us simply because we're strangers."
"But how could an intelligent race develop on a planet like this?"
demanded Esther unbelievingly. "How'd they stay alive while they were
developing?"
Stan shrugged his shoulders.
"Once you admit that a thing is so," he said dryly, "you can figure out
how it happened. This sun is a dwarf white star. That means that once
upon a time it exploded. It flared out into a nova. Maybe there were
other planets nearer to it than this, and they volatilized when their
sun blew up. Everything on this planet, certainly, was killed, and for
a long, long time after it was surely uninhabitable by any standard.
There's a dwarf star in the Crab Nebula which will melt iron four
light-hours away--land that was a nova twelve hundred years ago. It
must have been bad on this planet for a long time indeed.
"I'm guessing that when the first explosion came the inner planets
turned to gas and this one had all its seas and forests and all its
atmosphere simply blasted away to nothingness. Everything living on its
surface was killed. Even bacteria in the soil turned to steam and went
off into space. That would account for the absolute absence of life
here now."
"But--" said Esther.
"But," said Stan, "the people--call them people--who lived here
were civilized even then. They knew what was coming. If they hadn't
interstellar drive, flight would do them no good. They'd have nowhere
to go. So maybe they stayed. Underground. Maybe they dug themselves
caves and galleries five--ten--twenty miles down. Maybe some of those
galleries collapsed when the blow-up came, but some of the people
survived. They'd stayed underground for centuries. They'd have to! It
might be fifty thousand years they stayed underground, while Khor Alpha
blazed less and less fiercely, and they waited until they could come up
again.
"There was no air for a while up here. They had to fight to keep alive,
down in the planet's vitals. They made a new civilization, surrounded
by rock, with no more thought of stars. They'd be hard put to it for
power, too. They couldn't well use combustion, with a limited air
supply. They probably learned to transform heat to power direct. You
can take power--electricity--and make heat. Why not the other way
about? For maybe fifty thousand years, and maybe more, they had to
live without even thinking of the surface of their world. But as the
dwarf star cooled off, they needed its heat again."
He stopped. He seemed to listen intently. But there was no sound in the
icy night. There were only bright, unwinking stars and an infinity of
sand--and cold.
"So they dug up to the surface again," he went on. "Air had come back,
molecule by molecule from empty space, drawn by the same gravitation
that once had kept it from flying away. And the fused-solid rock of
the surface, baked by day and frozen by night, had cracked and broken
down to powder. When air came again and winds blew, it was sand. The
whole planet was desert. The people couldn't live on the surface again.
They probably didn't want to. But they needed power. So they built that
monster grid they're so jealous of."
"You mean," Esther demanded incredulously, "that's a generator?"
"A transformer," corrected Stan. "Solar heat to electricity. Back on
Earth the sun pours better than a kilowatt of energy on every square
yard of Earth's surface in the tropics--over three million kilowatts to
the square mile. This checkerboard arrangement is at least a hundred
and fifty by two hundred miles. The power's greater here, but, on
Earth, that would mean ninety thousand million kilowatts. More than a
hundred thousand million horsepower--more than the whole Earth uses
even now!
"If those big slabs convert solar radiation into power--and I charged
up the skid from one of them--there's a reason for the checkerboard,
and there's a reason for dumping the sand--it would hinder gathering
power--and there's a reason for getting upset when somebody started to
meddle with it. And they're upset! They'll have the conservation of
moisture down to a fine point, down below, but they made those leggy
machines to haul more water, from the poles. When they set them all to
hunting us, they're very much disturbed! But luckily they'd never have
worked out anything to fly with underground and they're not likely to
have done so since--considering the storms and all."
There was a short silence. Then Esther said slowly, "It's--very
plausible, Stan. I believe it. And they'd have no idea of space travel,
so they'd have no idea of other intelligent races, and actually they'd
never think of castaways. They wouldn't understand, and they'd try
to kill us to study the problem we presented. That's their idea, no
doubt. And they've all the resources of a civilization that's old and
scientific. They'll apply them all to get us--and they won't even think
of listening to us! Stan! What can we do?"
Stan said amusedly, there in the still, frigid night of an unnamed
planet, "Why--we'll do plenty! We're barbarians by comparison with
them, Esther, and barbarians have equipment civilized men forget. All
savages have spears, but a civilized man doesn't even always carry a
pocketknife. If we can find the _Erebus_, we can probably defy this
whole planet--until they put their minds to developing weapons. But
right now you go to sleep. I'll watch."
Esther looked at him dubiously. Five days of sandstorms should have
buried the little yacht irrecoverably.
"If it's findable," she said. Then she added wistfully, "But it would
be nice to be on the _Erebus_ again. It would feel so good to walk
around without a space suit! And--" she added firmly, "after all, Stan,
we are engaged! And if you think I like trying to figure out some way
of getting kissed through an opened face-plate--"