For the next few seconds, the question seemed to be whether they'd
pile into the plain or the mountain first; and, for another improbable
moment, they were distinctly skidding along upside down. Then Peer got
them straightened out, and they soared up rapidly into the night sky
above Old Nameless.
Channok's hair settled slowly back into place.
Peer looked around at him, puzzled and rather pale.
"That's not the way it said in the manual!" she stated.
Channok whooped. Then he sat down on the floor, bent over and yelled.
When he got around to wiping the tears from his eyes, Peer was looking
down at him disgustedly from the control chair.
"It wasn't the way it said in the manual!" she repeated firmly. "We're
going to have to have this old crate overhauled before she'll be safe
to fly--and if you weren't my husband, I'd really let you have it now!"
He stood up, muttering some sort of apology.
"I've done some just as bad!" he assured her.
"Hum!" said Peer coldly, studying Old Nameless in the screen below
them. It seemed safe to pat her on the head then, but he kept his hand
well out of biting range.
"We'd better get back to that mountain and bury the _Ra-Twelve_ before
it gets too dark to find the spot," he suggested.
"It's still just in sight," said Peer. "You get the guns ready, and
I'll run us past it slowly."
Spaceships being what they were, there wasn't much ceremony about
caching the _Ra-Twelve_. Channok got the bow-turret out; and as Peer
ran the _Asteroid_ slowly along the mountainside a few hundred feet
above the _Ra-Twelve_, he cut a jagged line into the rock with the
gun's twin beams. A few dozen tons of rock came thundering down on the
_Ra-Twelve_.
They came back from the other side, a little higher up, and he loosened
it some more. This time, it looked as if a sizable section of the
mountain were descending; and when the dust had settled the _Ra-Twelve_
was fifty feet under a sloping pile of very natural-looking debris.
To get her out again, they'd only have to cut a path down to her lock
and start her drives. She'd come out of the stuff then, like a trout
breaking water....
Satisfied, they went off and got the _Asteroid_ on an orbit around
Old Nameless, not too far out. Peer had assured Channok that Santis'
investigations had proved the planet safe for human beings, so it
probably was. But he knew he'd feel more comfortable if they put in
their sleep-periods outside its atmosphere. Bathed in the dismal light
of its giant sun, Old Nameless looked like a desolate backyard of Hell.
It was rocky, sandy, apparently waterless and lifeless and splotched
with pale stretches of dry salt seas. Incongruously delicate auroras
went crawling about its poles, like lopsided haloes circling a squat,
brooding demon. It wasn't, Channok decided, the kind of planet he would
have stopped at of his own accord, for any purpose.
* * * * *
The cliff against which they had buried the _Ra-Twelve_ was the
loftiest section of an almost unbroken chain of mountains, surrounding
the roughly circular hundred-mile plain, which was littered with
beds of boulders and sand-hills, like a moon crater. What Peer had
referred to as the "Mound" lay approximately at the center of the
plain. It turned out, next morning, to be a heavily weathered,
dome-shaped structure half a mile high and five miles across, which
gave the impression that all but the top tenth of a giant's skull
had been buried in the sand, dented here and there with massive
hammers, and sprinkled thickly with rock dust. It was obviously an
artifact--constructed with hundred-foot bricks! As the _Asteroid_
drifted down closer to it, Channok became interested.
"Who built it?" he asked.
Peer shrugged. She didn't know. "Santis spent a few hours jetting
around the edges of it once," she said. "But he wouldn't tell us much;
and, afterwards, he wouldn't let us get nearer than a mile to it. He
didn't go back himself, either--said it was dangerous to get too close!"
It didn't look dangerous. But fifty thousand years ago, it might have
been a fortress of some sort.
"You oughtn't to be flying so low over it, even!" Peer said warningly.
"Right in the middle on top is where it's the most dangerous, Santis
said!"
Channok didn't argue the matter--they had to get Santis' special cargo
cached and off their hands first, anyway. He lifted the _Asteroid_
a mile or so and then brought her down a couple of miles beyond the
Mound, at the point Peer had designated.
They got out of the ship and gazed about the broken, rocky plain. The
red light of the Nameless Sun was spilling across it in what passed for
morning on this world. In it, the black mountain chains rearing about
the horizon and the craggy waves of flat land had the general effect
of a bomb-shattered and slowly burning city. Far off to their left, he
could see the upper half of the towering precipice which marked the
_Ra-Twelve's_ resting-place.
"How long a time did you say you spent here?" he asked.
Peer reflected. "About two Terra-months, I guess. I'm not sure, though.
That was a long time ago. My youngest brother Dobby wasn't born yet."