Mission: Earth "Disaster" (24 page)

Hound said, "Because I'm going to hire these men to do the digging."

"Oh."

He struck up some kind of a crass commercial bargain in which the fifty men of the village would dig.

Cautioned numerous times not to catch the cuffs of my pants on thorns, we got back to the air-wagon.

There was no sign of any pitched shelters. A bang in the distance told me that Corsa's brother was utilizing the remaining light to shoot songbirds. Corsa was busy discussing animal husbandry with the herdsman.

Hound said, "I'm going to take the air-wagon back to town and get an advance on your next month's allowance. And I'm going to get you some digging clothes. You should have told me what you were up to. Sit right there on that rock until I come back."

He and Shafter threw the camping gear out and Hound took off. I sat on the rock and wondered what it would be like to live an unmanaged life. I was certain that Bob Hoodward didn't ever have such obstacles to overcome. Shafter was going around pushing a fuel rod in the ground and tapping it. Finally he said to me, "Young Monte, I can't tap the rod and read a meter at the same time. When I tap the rod, you walk around me fifteen or twenty feet away and watch the meter."

I did as he suggested. Almost at once I got a huge surge. Excitedly I began to tear out grass by the roots and scoop away sand. Shafter was right with me. We looked like a couple of sporting animals going down a varmint hole for the kill. Grass tufts were flying through the moonlight in one direction and sand in another.

"What are you doing?" said Corsa.

"We're going after buried treasure," said Shatter.

"Well, you shouldn't be digging this grassland up like that. You'll ruin their pasturage. Fill that hole up at once and replace the turf."

"Oh, we will, we will," I said. "Let's see what's down here first."

"Monte," she said severely, "I can see right now that you have a terrible amount to learn. When you dig up pasturage that way, you get erosion. I really sigh when I realize the terrible time I will have making an acceptable farmer out of you. You have no finer sensibilities. Cease and desist at once!"

Of course we had to stop. I went back and sat down on the rock, mourning. What the Devils had been down underneath there, giving that read on the analyzer?

The moons were well up when Hound came back. He had brought two footmen, a cook and a maid for Corsa. I got scolded because my lounge suit was now turf-stained.

They found a spring, erected inflatable shelters and belatedly we had a dinner they had brought from town.

But I was very cunning. You are lucky that I was, dear reader, for we never would have found out what happened after the Gris narrative left us in midair.

I waited until everybody was asleep. I crept out of my shelter and went back to the hole and began to dig. I was very quiet. I dug and scraped and brushed and wore my fingers to the bone.

And then, there in the green moonlight, I knelt there looking at it.

A CANNON WHEEL!

It was corroded and twisted. The rim was partially melted as from a flaming blast.

Clearly there had been a battle here!

My hopes soared.

Clearly I could put an end to the overmanagement of my life. Fame beckoned!

I came out of my trance. I rolled it over onto flat ground. I carefully filled the hole in although I couldn't find the turf.

I rolled the clumsy, battered wheel into my shelter and at last went to sleep. A blasting bustle awoke me. I couldn't find out what it was right away because Hound had to shave me and get me into some sport clothes and proper boots and even insisted I have breakfast. At last I got out of the shelter. The area was teeming with men from the village. They all had digging tools. They were standing around Corsa. My hopes soared. Maybe she was on my side. Then I overheard what she was saying.

She was telling them that the grazing area could be quadrupled ! if they dug certain trenches that would stop erosion and enlarge the spring. Certain actions, it seemed, would then create ponds from the occasional runoff of the rains.

"There's far too much spill into that chasm," she told them. "So here is your map. Now get to work."

They all went trudging off and she came over to me. "Now, I've , taken care of that for you, Monte. Why don't you go find my brother and help him shoot these songbirds. They're terrible for crops."

It was my turn to raise my eyes to the sky but, of course, I didn't. Not in front of her. Shafter and I had no choice but to follow the diggers about and hope they would hit something by accident. Almost at once we began to hit paydirt! (That's a mining term.) A digger threw some dirt aside and Shafter saw something glitter and was in there like a shot. He picked up something round and then said, "Blast, I thought it was a coin!" He threw it away and I picked it up quickly. A button! It had a symbol on it that looked like a bottle—no, a fat paddle with an upside-down handle! , THE APPARATUS!

Aha! The Gris confession was no myth! All that day I tagged around collecting things. Odds and ends of metal were evidently not unusual in this place. One of the men said they appeared on the ground every time it rained. This had been a vast encampment!

By evening I had a hoard that even included the remains of an electric whip!

Oh, I was getting warm. I didn't even mind a lecture by Corsa's brother, as he sorted out a mound of plumage, on what kind of songbird you had to get rid of first if you ever expected to get a wink of sleep. I wondered sourly to myself if Gris' ancestors had come from Modon. I wondered if my sanity could stand up to much more association with this pair. About midnight the conspiratorial voice of Shafter woke me up. "If we're ever going to find any buried treasure," he whispered, "we're going to have to work at night. Come along. I need somebody to read the meter."

We stealthily crept out of camp. "Now, today when I went into town to get a load of grass seed," he said, "I took a look at this place from the air. If this was ever a castle, when the earthquake knocked it over, it fell due west. There's a pattern of fallen stone that looks just like a tower when you see it from above. My hunch is that if you root around over there and if it ever had a strongroom, it would lie in that mess. So let's go."

We clambered over shattered piles of black basalt under the bright green moons. This was more like the kind of thing I thought Bob Hoodward would do. A wind had come up and it was moaning through the tumbled stones. The beginning lines of "An Ode to the Homeless Ghost" began to run through my head. I wasn't watching where I was going.

I FELL STRAIGHT DOWN!

Fifteen feet below I fetched up with a horrible thud!

Shafter's voice out in the night. "Hey, where'd you go?"

"I'm down here!" I yelled.

I could see his head above in the hole, silhouetted against the moon-hazed sky. "You shouldn't go running off that way! You could get hurt!"

"Could get hurt?" I wailed. "I'm smashed! Get me out of here!"

He shined a light down into the place. "Hey!" he said. "Good going! You found a room!"

I stopped feeling for broken bones and looked around. Yes, I was in what might have been a room.

Shafter got out a line but instead of hauling me up, he came down. "What's that you're lying on?" he said.

I looked.

A DOOR!

It was made out of impervious alloy and had been so covered with dust that it had taken my fall to expose it.

We uncovered it. Shafter used a disintegrator drill to remove the hinges and we managed to lay it aside. There was a gaping hole under it and when we shined in the torch, we were looking at a room lying on its side.

It had the collapsed remains of some furniture in it. We dropped down a rope into it. I righted a chair. It was an ornate antique. I thought maybe that we had gotten into some old tomb. I looked around for signs of a coffin or burial artifacts. There were only a lot of shards of glass.

"Let's see if there's any buried treasure back of these walls," said Shafter. "You read the meter. I'll get on some insulator gloves and bang this fuel rod."

Shortly the sparks were flying as he went along the walls. It made the air smell like ozone.

I was passing the meter along one wall. I got a tremendous read. Shafter rushed over to me. "Crashing cogwheels!" he said. "There must be metal back of there by the millions of tons!"

We went down the wall and found, under a cascade of stone, another door. We unburied it, disintegrated the hinges and removed it.

We were in another room.

I shined my torch. Just behind the place where I had gotten my read was the remains of a COMPUTER BANK!

"Oh, blast," said Shafter. "That isn't any treasure. My current was just energizing the electromagnetic coils. We been had!"

"No, we haven't!" I cried. I suddenly knew where we were. That antique throne chair in the other office, this door, the desks tumbled about, all compared with the Gris confession!

WE WERE IN THE TOWER OFFICES Of LOMBAR

HISST!

THAT WAS HIS COMPUTER CONSOLE!

Oh, the very thing I had hoped to find!

"Quick, Shatter!" I said. "Can you get power into that thing?"

He looked at it. When the tower had crashed, the retaining bolts had held. But it was a sorry-looking mess.

"Well, why?" said Shafter.

"To get the information out of it, of course!"

"Well, Monte, I hate to have to tell you this but if there had been anything left on those recordings, it's gone now."

"What do you mean?" I wailed.

"Well, we been sending hellish jolts of electricity around to find things and it would have wiped every cell in it."

I collapsed. What Bob Hoodward must have gone through!

If I got any more help on this project I might as well give up!

At length I climbed back up the lines we had left dangling and got outside. I sat down on a rock in the moonlight.

Prospects of Modon with Corsa and her brother or prospects of drudgery at dull desks were two types of torture it was impossible to choose between. The green haze in the sky was not emblazoned with my name. The mile-deep chasm looked very attractive. Dully, I began to compose "An Ode to a Snuffed-out Life."

Listlessly, all the next day, I loafed around, not even bothering to pick up the bits and pieces the land-reclamation project was turning up.

In the first place, I had had very little sleep. In the second place, I knew down deep that it was a good thing for this herding tribe to have more water and grass and I was sort of ashamed of myself for feeling so harshly about it. The Great Desert had once been a ferule plain, 125,000 years ago or more. It had the remains of primitive canals all through it. But the civilization had been wiped out and it had all gone to dust.

I began to ruminate upon the transient nature of cultures. They could be interrupted. For the first time I wondered about our own. It was, on the surface, quite stable. What if some cataclysmic war destroyed us in a puff of flame?

Before I had gotten very far with "An Ode to Vanished Glory," in a very sad meter that fitted my mood, I suddenly had an errant thought.

Maybe there wasn't any real cover-up. Maybe Voltar had wiped out Blito-P3. Maybe it simply wasn't there anymore. Maybe it had become an awful threat!

I mentioned it at supper. I said, "Say, do you suppose some unconquered planet far from here could have developed weapons that could defeat the Voltar Fleet and wipe out the Confederacy?"

"WHAT?" said Corsa's brother. "Wipe out 110 planets? You must be crazy."

"What planet are you talking about?" said Corsa.

"It is a planet designated on our charts—or used to be—Blito-P3. The name the inhabitants use is Earth."

"Does it have people on it?" said Corsa's brother.

"Yes. I guess you could call them Earthmen."

He let out a snort of laughter. "The Earthmen are coming!" he finally managed with a bucolic guffaw.

Corsa joined in with raucous laughter.

Her brother looked up at the twilight sky. "Get under cover quick! Strange ships are in the air!"

They really laughed.

I wouldn't have felt so bad about it but the staff around joined in.

"Oh, Monte," Corsa said at last, "you'll wreck my belly muscles yet! You are such a clown!"

I was trying to explain to them that what I had meant was that Voltar might have found it expedient to wipe the planet out because it somehow could have threatened us. But they weren't listening. They had the whole staff rushing out to make sure there was no enemy fleet in the sky, and they were pretending to see strange ships and running into each other with fake cries of horror at discovering the other was an Earthman just landed. They were awfully energetic. I guess the fresh night air does that to you. Later her brother amused himself by drawing what an Earthman must look like. He tried feelers and discarded that for horns and threw that away for blobs. Corsa gathered them up and said she couldn't wait to show them to her friends.

I retired early.

It was a good thing I did. About midnight, just when I had composed my tortured wits enough to drop off, Shatter woke me up.

I got some clothes on and followed his beckoning finger. When we were far enough from the camp to be able to talk normally, he said, "You should have told me you were looking for data banks. Is this a secret or something?"

I rued that I had not kept it more secret from that Modon pair.

"Yes, very much so," I said. "I'm trying to find out what happened after a confession I read. He left it all up in the air."

"Well, you just come along," Shafter said.

We were going to the village!

A very shadowy tribesman met us and led us onward. We went into what appeared to be a cave, stepping over bundles of hides. We went to the back.