The Third Science Fiction Megapack Page 33

  “Wha-a-a-at?”

  “There were three bombs,” said Brett shakily, “and only one went off properly. The two fizz-offs—they didn’t make critical mass fast enough. Their active material vaporized instead of detonating. At a guess, they were too old to work right.”

  “Too old—”

  Brett made a helpless gesture.

  “I know it sounds crazy! But new bombs should blow! And there was a war on this planet once. The people died. But they were getting even while they died. Wouldn’t it be reasonable that if they knew they were going to be wiped out, by radiation that poisoned the air they breathed but which would die out in time, wouldn’t it be reasonable that they should set booby-traps to kill their enemies if any of them lived and their descendants came here later?”

  The flier, circling two thousand feet up and to windward of the atom column, came streaking down toward the Expedition’s camp. Halliday opened his mouth, closed it, and came to a rational decision.

  “That will have to be discussed later. You fly? Take the second flier and scout a camping place not less than fifty miles up the coast. Pick a place that should not have any artifacts about. Then come back. We will shift camp to avoid possible radiation in case the wind changes. We don’t know whether it will or not, but we have to be out of range in any event.”

  He made a pushing motion at Brett and turned back to the work at hand. Brett went to the second flier and loosened it.

  He was aloft before the first flier had landed, and he headed north. An idea occurred to him, and he dropped lower. The planet Thalassia might be dead, but something other than men from Earth had been here very recently. Flying high would make him invisible to eyes on the ground, but would make him visible indeed to detection radar. If there were intelligent creatures on Thalassia now, they would take precautions against unexpected encounters with other creatures who dug garbage pits and set up radar beacons and first landing plaques. Very probably the tripod had been a device to give notice if these strange creatures returned. So it would be wise to fly low.

  He flew slowly—slowly enough to estimate distance and examine the shoreline. It was incredible. There were places where highlands ended abruptly at the shore. At those places mountainous masses of spray and foam shot upward where the breakers struck. There was one place where the beach matched the human exploring ship’s first beach touching. There was shining sand and boulders for a full mile inland. The breakers themselves rolled in like rows of skyscrapers and crashed with even more catastrophic sounds. On Earth, in the South Pacific, winds could blow completely around the Antarctic continent and build up waves with seventy foot crests. But Thalassia was all ocean save for the one continent and a few dependent, nearby islands. Trade winds blowing would have a twenty-thousand-mile reach in which to make these waves. The gravity here, too, was a little less than on Earth. They should be monstrous!

  So Brett Carstairs flew at five hundred feet above the ground, a mile inshore from the breaker line, and saw waves not less than three hundred feet high and often higher come roaring in toward him, and he saw them fling spume in masses higher than he flew. Sometimes he thought he saw living things in the water, but he was not sure. Once he did see a stranded sea monster, frayed and tattered by corruption, but that was not his present business.

  Just at the distance Halliday had named, he found a running stream winding down into the ocean, only to be lost in its surf. He followed it inland for some miles. He saw an adequate place of refuge for the Expedition. He landed. He made sure. The river was fresh and ran a hundred yards wide between steep cliffs, yet there was some clear ground and at least one spot where giant trees almost met above the water. The Expedition would be undetectable from the air, under the shelter of an overhanging shelf. Its fliers could be hidden under the leafy screen. It would do.

  It was on the way back that it occurred to Brett that the ship which would come to pick up the Expedition six months from now would not know where to look for it. And—it would be highly vulnerable to whatever had placed that metal tripod on the firing plaza.

  Then he thought to wonder what would happen if a ship landed on a firing plaza. Or in the ruins of a city. The exploring ship had not spotted any cities undestroyed by bombs. But just suppose…

  He landed, feeling an extremely queasy sensation at the pit of his stomach. When he saw the pictures of the plaza as it looked now, he was even less comfortable. The entire group of ancient rocket launching tunnels had been nearly two miles in extent. There was a half-mile crater where an atom bomb had gone off underground. It was a cleanly blasted hollow, lined with glass. It was nowhere near the spot where the tripod had been. There were two other incandescent holes, gaping wide and still pouring out clouds of steam. They were irregularly shaped and twenty feet or more across. There had been other bombs underground at those places, too, but instead of blasting in the millionth of a second they had gone off slowly, disintegrating in seconds and vaporizing most of their own material before it could disintegrate. The critical mass hadn’t been achieved quickly enough to blow them. It was exactly the kind of failure that could be expected of a brilliantly designed booby-trap that happened not to be sprung for some thousands of years. The location of these bombs, also, had no relationship to the position of the tripod.

  The blast had not been the tripod, but bombs buried by the long-exterminated inhabitants of Thalassia, to destroy any creature landing on their world after its air was sweet and clean again.

  Brett reported his choice of a new camping place. He found his guesses about the booby-trapping of the plaza accepted as verified. They were. But Halliday said querulously:

  “What the devil was the tripod?”

  “It could have been a beacon,” said Brett, “with variations. The exploring ship set up a beacon to guide Earth ships to its landing place, so they wouldn’t need to repeat all the work it had done. But suppose—well—people not from Earth wanted to find out if all the Thalassians were really dead? There was a beacon. Life had been around, recently. They might have dozens of these tripods at different places. Anything alive would go up to them and examine them. The eyes might modify the signal they sent. Anything intelligent and alive would be reported, either by a change in the tripod’s signal, or by the fact that its signal stopped.”

  Brett had worked out the notion during his flight to the north and back. Halliday blinked. He turned and barked at somebody. Emergency equipment was being loaded into both fliers. He turned back to Brett:

  “What set off the booby trap?”

  “The toppling of the tripod, most likely,” suggested Brett. “It would be sending a tight beam straight up. When it fell over, it would send that beam at the ground. High frequency surges would be induced. They could set off an electronic trigger that was designed to blow the bombs when a ship landed nearby. The creatures who were wiped out might want to kill their enemies whenever they turned up, even after thousands of years.”

  Then Halliday said in a flat voice:

  “But something did land! It took the human beacon, set up the tripod, and we saw its rocket crater where it took off.”

  “It wasn’t big,” said Brett. “If the Thalassians were pleasant enough, they might scheme so a scout ship could land and take off unharmed, but a passenger liner bringing colonists would be wiped out.”

  Halliday nodded sourly.

  “A nice thought! If you’re right, then that tripod might have been set up by the creatures the Thalassians set their booby-traps for! And if Aspasians are beginning to explore this planet again, they’ll take us for Thalassians! They’ll try to murder us.” Then he said bitterly: “How can we do our work if bloodthirsty creatures are trying to hunt us down and kill us? How can we do our work?”

  Brett offered no ideas. He helped load his flier, conferred briefly with the pilot of the other, and they took off together. He led the way to the campsite he’d chosen. He left his load and two passengers. The other flier did the same. They went back. Fifty mil
es along the coast. They loaded up. They returned. They went back again. Nobody thought of relaxing. At the new campsite a biologist was at work on nearby fruits, and someone was fishing. Fish, too, would be tested for edibility. Brett flew and flew and flew. One trip after another. The two fliers ferried supplies in quantity. Equipment was another matter. Once the route was established, the work grew tedious. Half an hour to load up. Ten minutes to fly fifty miles. Half an hour to unload.

  Because there was no night, exhaustion came upon Brett before he realized it. He had no time to examine the handmade golden locket in detail. He had it tucked carefully away and he almost resented it because it was so simply and starkly impossible. The girl was pretty enough. But she could not exist! And there was something more urgent on hand than speculations upon the reality of the impossible. The Expedition had to survive. Brett wearily applied his mind to make that practical.

  But weariness hit him suddenly. He nearly flubbed a landing on the river, at last. Halliday snapped at him:

  “We can’t move everything, Carstairs, but it is urgent that we get all possible supplies to this new site. You must be more careful!”

  Brett said tiredly:

  “It might be a good idea to leave behind as much as we can.”

  “What?” fumed Halliday. “Leave supplies we need?” Brett yawned uncontrollably.

  “Whoever or whatever left the tripod,” he said drearily, “will probably go back when it—they—find it has stopped reporting. There’ll be a bomb crater and the fizz off holes. If we’ve left a lot of stuff, houses and all the rest, they may think we simply went to the firing plaza to look at their tripod and didn’t come back. Because the bomb blew. That might be useful to us.”

  Halliday fumed again.

  “You irritate me,” he said peevishly. “I should think of such things, not you! But it is sound thinking. Go get some rest!”

  Brett got out of the flier. He stumbled up to the encampment under its shelf of stone. He heard the sound of chopping. There were cave mouths here, but the caves were shallow. Somebody was hacking at the back wall of one of them. It was a wall—an artificial wall. After eight thousand years it was not a solid barrier, and it had been hastily constructed. It was Kent who was hacking at the tiers of stones.

  “Looks like a sealed-up cave,” he told Brett phlegmatically. “It could be anything—even a place where Thalassians tried to seal themselves in with air-renewal apparatus to last out the time the air was poisoned. It wouldn’t work, of course. The air could’ve been deadly for five or fifty or five hundred years, depending on the amount of radioactivity in it. But if there’s any size to this, it might make a good shelter for us, and we ought to find some stuff in it.”

  Johnny nodded sleepily. He thought to look at his wrist chronometer. It was some thirty-eight hours since the Expedition’s landing. He’d worked steadily for all that length of time.

  Kent’s pick went through the wall. Nothing in particular happened. Kent pulled rocks away. Crumbled mortar came with them. He enlarged the hole in a matter-of-fact fashion. Presently it was of a size to permit easy entrance. No particular smell came out. The inside air was cooler. That was all. Kent went and got a hand-light. He cast its fierce glare inside. He nodded his head, put down the light, and went away.

  Brett picked up the light and threw it through the opening. He saw shining wet walls, and stalactites and stalagmites. There was an artificial curved ramp leading away somewhere between a pair of limestone cave formations. There was a curious small heap on the artificially flattened floor. He focused the light on it.

  Bones. They looked human. They were cemented to the floor by an aeons-old layer of glistening, almost transparent mineral.

  Brett entered, blinking. The skeletons were well-enough preserved to be tragic, but he remembered that the ancient race had had six fingers and other not-quite-usual features. He looked. Yes. The interior of this place was squared and leveled. It had been worked into shape. There was a tunnel leading off to the left and he glanced in. A low-ceiling room, crowded with objects in rows. Machines. More skeletons. He stood rocking on his feet with weariness. He thought: “Now we’ll know something about a civilization that was killed while our ancestors were still hunting mammoths.” He should have been excited, but somehow he wasn’t. Then he realized why.

  The objects so neatly arranged in rows were not machines. They had been, but they weren’t any longer. They were heaps of rust. Swollen, nodular distorted heaps of oxide of iron and copper and—yes—even aluminum. They were old! They were mineralized. But they had been mineralized after they had been destroyed.

  He heard voices. Kent was bringing the rest of the Expedition inside. Lights flickered and flashed. He heard shoutings. Men crowded past the compartment he stared at, exclaimed exultantly, and went on. Voices echoed eerily. The mood of the Expedition was the excited rejoicing of children with a newly discovered playground. But what they were exploring was a tomb. Here despairing six-fingered creatures had walled themselves in from the light and air of their own world to try to outlive its poisoning. They had expected perhaps a thousand years of entombment. But it was forever.

  Brett was too tired for any emotional reaction. He found himself mumbling:

  “They forgot that there’s always some water in caves. Water makes them. And water seeping down would be radioactive. So they died.”

  He made his way heavily back toward the opening Kent had made. He went to the outer cave, where there were sleeping bags. Halliday met him. Halliday carried more hand-lights.

  “Ah, Carstairs!” he said exuberantly. “You picked a lucky place! When I learned the firing plaza had been booby-trapped I was really in despair! I thought any other site would be booby-trapped too. I thought we might be unable to work at all! But here we’ve got a bolt hole they tried to make use of! Artifacts! Skeletons! We can get a marvelous picture of their civilization under stress! Marvelous!”

  He bobbed into the hole in the wall and was gone.

  Brett found a sleeping bag and crawled into it. He went to sleep. It seemed to him that around him as he slept there were excited ejaculations and much scurrying about. The members of the Expedition were scientists come to examine a dead civilization. It had seemed that they would have nothing to examine and would soon be dead themselves. Now they had work to do, even in hiding. They rejoiced.

  But some time during his slumber, Brett dreamed. In his dream has saw the girl of the impossible handmade golden locket. He did not know where he was, but she looked at him. And her eyes grew wide and horrified. She screamed, and figures came running from somewhere. At sight of Brett they howled with fury and drew strange weapons and came rushing to kill him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “…On the hemisphere facing Aspasia, Thalassia’s twin planet, there is but one rocky island not constantly swept by the ocean’s giant swells. Evidences of former occupation exist here, but the island has been wave-swept in what must have been enormously violent storms, and only excavations for what may have been an observatory and military base remain…”

  Astrographic Survey Publication 11297.

  Appendix to Space Pilot Vol. 460, Sector XXXIV. P. 71.

  * * * *

  The contents of the cave were of interest to the biologist, the archeologists, the camera specialist, the specimen-preservation member of the Expedition’s staff, the paleontologist, the historian, to Halliday, Belmont, Janney—to everyone in fact, but Brett. They would have been of interest to him too, if it had happened that the cave were dry. But there was no single metal object not corroded out of all imaginable resemblance to its original form. The relatively few ceramic remains he could identify as having been made by injection-moulding and fired within their moulds. That meant a remarkably high state of civilization. But there was no object suitable for his examination as a technological object. The restoration specialist began the extremely tedious process of redisplacement on them. With suitable precautions, a heap of rust can electrolytical
ly be restored to its original condition of solidity and form—if the rust has not been disturbed. But it is an excruciatingly slow affair.

  Brett had no proper function in the cavern underground.

  He helped set up a sky-scanner outside. It would detect a repulsor field, meaning a human ship maneuvering in atmosphere. He helped set up an automatic signaling device to be triggered by the detection of such a field. It would instantly transmit to the Earth ship a warning of danger and the need for caution, and then shut off. If any space vessel came into Thalassia’s atmosphere using an Earth type drive, this combination of instruments would warn both ship and Expedition. After due assurance that each was what it claimed to be, they could get together, the Expedition could reembark, and everybody could get away from Thalassia. Then further action would be taken by the Earth government. This was Halliday’s decision, and it was reasonable enough.

  But after this prosaic matter was settled, Brett fidgeted. The other members of the Expedition were happy. The cave had been a sealed in life lock, in which Thalassians had hoped to survive their planet’s doom. They succeeded in leaving only innumerable objects and items informative to Earth scientists. There were the skeletons of more than three hundred of the six-fingered, six-toed bipeds for study. Either their air renewers had failed them, or radioactivity came down to the cave in the ground water. The cave was of great extent. It went deep into the hillside for more than half a mile, and many possible extensions had been sealed off, at that. All its new occupants, save Brett, exulted over the scientific material to be worked with. He brooded.

  Generators came from the first campsite, power lines ran into the cave, and the due examination of the ancient civilization of Thalassia began, though the investigators were in hiding even as they worked. Other city sites or possible unbombed settlements would have been ruled out anyhow, now, with knowledge of the Thalassian tendency toward booby-traps. But this site seemed safe enough. The creatures who occupied this expected to live, unlike those at the firing plaza. But as a general thing. Thalassian sites would have to be regarded with suspicion. The ancient dead had made no distinction in their enmity for the enemies who had destroyed them, and possible innocent explorers.