"Of course it wouldn't rhyme in a literal translation," Ernest said
mildly. "But that's the sense of it."
"Doggerel!" the skipper exclaimed. "Is this the message of the ages? Is
this the secret of the lost civilization?"
"There are others, too," Ernest said. He was the psychologist-linguist
of the crew. "You've got to expect them to be obscure at first. They
didn't purposely leave any message for us."
Ernest sorted through his scraps of paper and picked one out:
_They warn me once, they warn me twice.
Alas! my heedn't turns me spice._
"There seems to be something there," Ernest said.
The skipper snorted.
"No, really," Ernest insisted. "An air of pessimism--even doom--runs
all through this stuff. Take this one, for instance:
"_Music sings within my brain:
I think I may go mad again._"
"Now that begins to make some sense," said Rosco, the communications
chief. "It ties in with what Doc Braddon found."
The skipper looked searchingly at his technicians, as if he suspected a
joke. But they were serious.
"All right," the skipper said. "It baffles me, but I'm just a simple
spacefaring man. _You're_ the experts. I'm going to my cabin and
communicate with the liquor chest. When you think you've got something
I can understand, let me know. 'I think I may go mad again.' Huh! I
think I may get drunk, myself."
* * * * *
What the technicians of the research ship _Pringle_ were trying to
learn was why the people of Planetoid S743 had turned to dust.
They had thought at first they were coming to a living, if tiny, world.
There had been lights on the nightside and movement along what seemed
to be roads.
But when they landed and explored, they found only powder in the places
where there should have been people. There were heaps of fine-grained
gray powder in the streets, in the driving compartments of the small
cars--themselves perfectly preserved--and scattered all through the
larger vehicles that looked like buses.
There was powder in the homes. In one home they found a heap of the
gray stuff in front of a cookstove which was still warm, and another
heap on a chair and on the floor under the chair. It was as if a woman
and the man for whom she'd been preparing a meal had gone _poof_, in an
instant.
The crew member who'd been on watch and reported the lights said later
they could have been atmospherics. The skipper himself had seen the
movement along the roads; he maintained a dignified silence.
It had been a highly developed little world and the buildings were
incredibly old. The weather had beaten at them, rounding their edges
and softening their colors, but they were as sturdy as if they'd been
built last week.
All the cities on the little world were similar. And all were dead. The
_Pringle_ flew over a dozen of them, then returned to the big one near
the plain where the ship had come down originally.
The tallest building in each city was ornate out of all proportion to
the rest. The researchers reasoned that this was the palace, or seat of
government. Each of these buildings had a network of metal tubing at
its peak. Where there were great distances between cities, tall towers
rose from the plains or sat on tops of mountains, each with a similar
metal network at the apex.
The communications chief guessed that they were radio-video towers but
he was proved wrong. There were no radio or television sets anywhere,
or anything resembling them.
Still, it was obvious that they were a kind of communications device.
Doc Braddon got part of the answer from some of the gray dust he'd
performed an "autopsy" on.
The dust had been found in a neat mound at the bottom of a large metal
container on the second-story of a medium-sized dwelling. Doc theorized
that one of the people had been taking some sort of waterless bath in
the container when the dust death came. The remains were thus complete,
not scattered or intermingled as most of the others were.
Doc sorted the particles as best he could and found two types, one
definitely inorganic. He conferred with Rosco on the inorganic
residue. Rosco thought this might be the remains of a tiny pararadio
transceiver. Possibly each of the people had carried one around with
him, or built into him.
"We're only guessing that they were people," Doc said cautiously,
"though it would seem safe to assume it, since we've found dust
everywhere people could be expected to be. What we need is a whole
corpse."
While patrols were out looking for bodies Rosco tested his theory by
sending a radio signal from one of the towers and watching a feeble
reaction in the dust.
"If we can assume that they were people," Rosco said, "they apparently
communicated over distances by personalized radio. Maybe through a
mechanism built into the skull. Would that mean there wouldn't be any
written language, Ernest?"
Ernest Hotaling shrugged. "Not necessarily. I should think they'd have
kept records of some kind. They could have been written, or taped--or
chipped into stone, for that matter."
He asked the lieutenant to enlarge his search. "Bring me anything that
looks like a book, or parchment, or microfilm, or tape. If it's chipped
in stone," he added with a grin, "I'll come to it."
Meanwhile they ran off the film that had been grinding away
automatically ever since the planetoid came within photoradar range of
the ship. The film confirmed what the lookout reported--there had been
lights on the nightside.
Furthermore, one of the sensitized strips at the side of the film
showed that signals, which had been going out from the tower tops in a
steady stream, increased furiously as the _Pringle_ approached. Then,
as the ship came closer, they stopped altogether. At the same instant
the lights on the nightside of the planetoid went out. The film showed
that the road movement the skipper had seen stopped then, too.
Ernest tried to analyze the signals reproduced on the film. He had
small success. If they represented a language, it would take years
before he could even guess what they meant. The only thing he was sure
of was that the signals, just before they died, had become a thousand
times more powerful.
"Maybe that's what killed them," Rosco said.
"Possibly," Ernest said. "It begins to look as if the people were
deliberately killed, or committed suicide, all at once, when we hove
into sight. But why?"
"You tell me," Rosco said. "That sounds like your department."
But Ernest could tell him nothing until after the lieutenant came back
with a long slender cylinder enclosing a seemingly endless coil of fine
wire. The lieutenant also brought a companion cylinder, apparently a
means of playing back what was recorded on the coil.
Ernest experimented until he learned how to operate it, then shooed
everybody out of his cabin and went to work.
* * * * *
Ernest Hotaling had joined the crew of the research ship _Pringle_
on Ganymede as a replacement for Old Craddock, who'd decided on short
notice that thirty years of spacefaring were enough. It would be
another ten or twelve years before the _Pringle_ returned to Earth and
though Craddock was only seventy-eight his yearning to start a proper
bee farm became overwhelming.
The others were not unhappy about his departure. The swarm he'd kept
in his cabin was small but the bees were gregarious and were as likely
to be found in the recreation room as in their hive. So when Craddock
and the paraphernalia he'd collected over the decades had debarked,
the rest of the crew sighed in collective relief and the skipper went
looking for a replacement.
Ernest Hotaling, fresh out of Ganymede U., was the only man qualified,
on the record, for the job. He had the necessary languages and his
doctorate was in psychology, though his specialty was child therapy.
The skipper puzzled through the copy of Ernest's master's thesis. The
lad--he was twenty-three then--had devoted it to children's folklore.
The skipper, admittedly a simple man, wasn't sure it contributed
profitably to the world's knowledge to spend a year in the study and
explanation of _Winnie the Pooh_, or _Step on a crack/Break your
mother's back_, or _The Wizard of Oz_.
The skipper had gone to Space Prep at the age of fourteen and later to
the Academy itself and there were obviously wide areas of childhood
that had passed him by. He'd never heard of _Struwwelpeter_, for
instance, or _Ibbety bibbety gibbety goat_, and he wondered if a grown
man who immersed himself in this sort of thing was the one for the job.
What was worse was that Hotaling, according to the University yearbook,
was a poet.
But when the skipper interviewed Hotaling and found him to be a lean,
muscular young man who'd obviously had a haircut in the past week and
who laughed genuinely at one of the skipper's more purple stories, he
signed him on immediately.