The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction MEGAPACK® (20 page)

And riding in a sort of howdah erected on the broad carapace were three gnorphs, peering curiously at the three spacesuited men bobbing in the water.

The rescue party was on time.

“Help!” cried Harskin. “Rescue us! Oh, I beg of you, rescue us, and we’ll be eternally obliged to you! Rescue us!”

He hoped the converter was translating the words with a suitable inflection of piteous despair.

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BE ADVISED ANTARES SYSTEM IN TERRAN FOLD. RIGELIANS ON HAND HAVE VALIDATED OUR TREATY WITH INHABITANTS OF FAFNIR, ANTARES’ ONE WORLD. ALL IS WELL AND NO CASUALTIES EXCEPT SHIP PECCABLE ACCIDENTALLY DESTROYED. FIFTEEN MEMBERS OF CREW LIVING IN DOME ON COMPANION WORLD FASOLT, THREE OF US LIVING ON FAFNIR. PLEASE SEND PICKUP SHIP DOUBLE FAST AS WE ARE CURRENTLY IN MENIAL SERVITUDE.

ALL THE BEST, LOVE AND KISSES, ETC.

Harskin

OZYMANDIAS

Originally published in
Infinity Science Fiction
, November 1958.

The planet had been dead about a million years. That was our first impression, as our ship orbited down to its sere brown surface, and as it happened our first impression turned out to be right. There had been a civilization here once—but Earth had swung around Sol ten-to-the-sixth times since the last living being of this world had drawn breath.

“A dead planet,” Colonel Mattern exclaimed bitterly. “Nothing here that’s of any use. We might as well pack up and move on.”

It was hardly surprising that Mattern would feel that way. In urging a quick departure and an immediate removal to some world of greater utilitarian value, Mattern was, after all, only serving the best interests of his employers. His employers were the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the United States of America. They expected Mattern and his half of the crew to produce results, and by way of results they meant new weapons and military alliances. They hadn’t tossed in 70 percent of the budget for this trip just to sponsor a lot of archaeological putterings.

But lucky for
our
half of the outfit—the archaeological putterers’ half—Mattern did not have an absolute voice in the affairs of the outfit. Perhaps the General Staff had kicked in for 70 percent of our budget, but the cautious men of the military’s Public Liaison branch had seen to it that we had at least some rights.

Dr. Leopold, head of the non-military segment of the expedition, said brusquely, “Sorry, Mattern, but I’ll have to apply the limiting clause here.”

Mattern started to sputter. “But—”

“But nothing, Mattern. We’re here. We’ve spent a good chunk of American cash in getting here. I insist that we spend the minimum time allotted for scientific research, as long as we
are
here.”

Mattern scowled, looking down at the table, supporting his chin on his thumbs and digging the rest of his fingers in hard back of his jawbone. He was annoyed, but he was smart enough to know he didn’t have much of a case to make against Leopold.

The rest of us—four archaeologists and seven military men; they outnumbered us a trifle—watched eagerly as our superiors battled. My eyes strayed through the porthole and I looked at the dry windblown plain, marked here and there with the stumps of what might have been massive monuments millennia ago.

Mattern said bleakly, “The world is of utterly no strategic consequence. Why, it’s so old that even the vestiges of civilization have turned to dust!”

“Nevertheless, I reserve the right granted to me to explore any world we land on, for a period of at least one hundred sixty-eight hours,” Leopold returned implacably.

Exasperated, Mattern burst out, “Dammit,
why?
Just to spite me? Just to prove the innate intellectual superiority of the scientist to the man of war?”

“Mattern, I’m not injecting personalities into this.”

“I’d like to know what you
are
doing, then? Here we are on a world that’s obviously useless to me and probably just as useless to you. Yet you stick me on a technicality and force me to waste a week here. Why, if not out of spite?”

“We’ve made only the most superficial reconnaissance so far,” Leopold, said. “For all we know this place may be the answer to many questions of galactic history. It may even be a treasure-trove of superbombs, for all—”

“Pretty damned likely!” Mattern exploded. He glared around the conference room, fixing each of the scientific members of the committee with a baleful stare. He was making it quite clear that he was trapped into a wasteful expense of time by our foggy-eyed desire for Knowledge.

Useless knowledge. Not good hard practical knowledge of the kind
he
valued.

“All right,” he said finally. “I’ve protested and I’ve lost, Leopold. You’re within your rights in insisting on remaining here one week. But you’d damned well better be ready to blast off when your time’s up!”

It had been foregone all along, of course. The charter of our expedition was explicit on the matter. We had been sent out to comb a stretch of worlds near the Galactic Rim that had already been brushed over hastily by a survey mission.

The surveyors had been looking simply for signs of life, and, finding none, they had moved on. We were entrusted with the task of investigating in detail. Some of the planets in the group had been inhabited once, the surveyors had reported. None bore present life.

Our job was to comb through the assigned worlds with diligence. Leopold, leading our group, had the task of doing pure archaeological research on the dead civilizations; Mattern and his men had the more immediately practical job of looking for fissionable material, leftover alien weapons, possible sources of lithium or tritium for fusion, and other such militarily useful things. You could argue that in a strictly pragmatic sense our segment of the group was just dead weight, carted along for the ride at great expense, and you would be right.

But the public temper over the last few hundred years in America had frowned on purely military expeditions. And so, as a sop to the nation’s conscience, five archaeologists, of little empirical consequence so far as national security mattered, were tacked onto the expedition.

Us.

Mattern made it quite clear at the outset that
his
boys were the Really Important members of the expedition, and that we were simply ballast. In a way, we had to agree. Tension was mounting once again on our sadly disunited planet; there was no telling when the Other Hemisphere would rouse from its quiescence of a hundred years and decide to plunge once more into space. If anything of military value lay out here, we knew we had to find it before They did.

The good old armaments race. Hi-ho! The old space stories used to talk about expeditions from Earth. Well, we
were
from Earth, abstractly speaking—but in actuality we were from America, period. Global unity was as much of a pipedream as it had been three hundred years earlier, in the remote and primitive chemical-rocket era of space travel. Amen. End of sermon. We got to work.

* * * *

The planet had no name, and we didn’t give it one; a special commission of what was laughably termed the United Nations Organization was working on the problem of assigning names to the hundreds of worlds of the galaxy, using the old idea of borrowing from ancient Terran mythologies in analogy to the Mercury-Venus-Mars nomenclature of our own system.

Probably they would end up saddling this world with something like Thoth or Bel-Marduk or perhaps Avalokitesvara. We knew it simply as Planet Four of the system belonging to a yellow-white FS IV Procyonoid sun, Revised HD Catalogue # 170861.

It was roughly Earthtype, with a diameter of 6100 miles, a gravity index of .93, a mean temperature of 45 degrees F. with a daily fluctuation range of about ten degrees, and a thin, nasty atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide with wisps of helium and hydrogen and the barest smidgeon of oxygen. Quite possibly the air had been breathable by humanoid life millions of years ago—but that was millions of years ago. We took good care to practice our breathing-mask drills before we ventured out of the ship.

The sun, as noted, was an FS IV and fairly hot, but Planet Four was a hundred eighty-five million miles away from it at perihelion, and a good deal further when it was at the other swing of its rather eccentric orbit; the good old Keplerian ellipse took quite a bit of punishment in this system. Planet Four reminded me in many ways of Mars—except that Mars, of course, had never known intelligent life of any kind, at least none that had troubled to leave a hint of its existence, while this planet had obviously had a flourishing civilization at a time when Pithecanthropus was Earth’s noblest being.

In any event, once we had thrashed out the matter of whether or not we were going to stay here or pull up and head for the next planet on our schedule, the five of us set to work. We knew we had only a week—Mattern would never grant us an extension unless we came up with something good enough to change his mind, which was improbable—and we wanted to get as much done in that week as possible. With the sky as full of worlds as it is, this planet might never be visited by Earth scientists again.

Mattern and his men served notice right away that they were going to help us, but reluctantly and minimally. We unlimbered the three small halftracks carried aboard ship and got them into functioning order. We stowed our gear—cameras, picks and shovels, camel’s-hair brushes—and donned our breathing-masks, and Mattern’s men helped us get the halftracks out of the ship and pointed in the right direction.

Then they stood back and waited for us to shove off.

“Don’t any of you plan to accompany us?” Leopold asked. The halftracks each held up to four men.

Mattern shook his head. “You fellows go out by yourselves today and let us know what you find. We can make better use of the time filing and catching up on back log entries.”

I saw Leopold start to scowl. Mattern was being openly contemptuous; the least he could do was have his men make a token search for fissionable or fusionable matter! But Leopold swallowed down his anger.

“Okay,” he said. “You do that. If we come across any raw veins of plutonium I’ll radio back.”

“Sure,” Mattern said. “Thanks for the favor. Let me know if you find a brass mine, too.” He laughed harshly. “Raw plutonium! I half believe you’re serious!”

* * * *

We had worked out a rough sketch of the area, and we split up into three units. Leopold, alone, headed straight due west, towards the dry riverbed we had spotted from the air. He intended to check alluvial deposits, I guess.

Marshall and Webster, sharing one halftrack, struck out to the hilly country southeast of our landing point. A substantial city appeared to be buried under the sand there. Gerhardt and I, in the other vehicle, made off to the north, where we hoped to find remnants of yet another city. It was a bleak, windy day; the endless sand that covered this world mounted into little dunes before us, and the wind picked up handfuls and tossed it against the plastic dome that covered our truck. Underneath the steel cleats of our tractor-belt, there was a steady crunch-crunch of metal coming down on sand that hadn’t been disturbed in millennia.

Neither of us spoke for a while. Then Gerhardt said, “I hope the ship’s still there when we get back to the base.”

Frowning, I turned to look at him as I drove. Gerhardt had always been an enigma: a small scrunchy guy with untidy brown hair flapping in his eyes, eyes that were set a little too close together. He had a degree from the University of Kansas and had put in some time on their field staff with distinction, or so his references said.

I said, “What the hell do you mean?”

“I don’t trust Mattern. He hates us.”

“He doesn’t. Mattern’s no villain—just a fellow who wants to do his job and go home. But what do you mean, the ship not being there?”

“He’ll blast off without us. You see the way he sent us all out into the desert and kept his own men back. I tell you, he’ll strand us here!”

I snorted. “Don’t be a paranoid. Mattern won’t do anything of the sort.”

“He thinks we’re dead weight on the expedition,” Gerhardt insisted. “What better way to get rid of us?”

The halftrack breasted a hump in the desert. I kept wishing a vulture would squeal somewhere, but there was not even that. Life had left this world ages ago. I said, “Mattern doesn’t have much use for us, sure. But would he blast off and leave three perfectly good halftracks behind? Would he?”

It was a good point. Gerhardt grunted agreement after a while. Mattern would never toss equipment away, though he might not have such scruples about five surplus archaeologists.

We rode along silently for a while longer. By now we had covered twenty miles through this utterly barren land. As far as I could see, we might just as well have stayed at the ship. At least there we had a surface lie of building foundations.

But another ten miles and we came across our city. It seemed to be of linear form, no more than half a mile wide and stretching out as far as we could see—maybe six or seven hundred miles; if we had time, we would check the dimensions from the air.

Of course it wasn’t much of a city. The sand had pretty well covered everything, but we could see foundations jutting up here and there, weathered lumps of structural concrete and reinforced metal. We got out and unpacked the power-shovel.

An hour later, we were sticky with sweat under our thin spacesuits and we had succeeded in transferring a few thousand cubic yards of soil from the ground to an area a dozen yards away. We had dug one devil of a big hole in the ground.

And we had nothing.

Nothing. Not an artifact, not a skull, not a yellowed tooth. No spoons, no knives, no baby-rattles.

Nothing.

The foundations of some of the buildings had endured,  though whittled down to stumps by a million years of sand and  wind and rain. But nothing else of this civilization had survived. Mattern, in his scorn, had been right, I admitted ruefully: this  planet was as useless to us as it was to them. Weathered foundations could tell us little except that there had once been a civilization here. An imaginative palaeontologist can reconstruct a dinosaur from a  fragment of a thighbone, can sketch out a presentable saurian with  only a fossilized ischium to guide him. But could we extrapolate a culture, a code of laws, a technology, a philosophy, from bare weathered building foundations?

Not very likely.

We moved on and dug somewhere else half a mile away, hoping at least to unearth one tangible remnant of the civilization that had been. But time had done its work; we were lucky to have the building foundations. All else was gone.

“Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away,”
I muttered.

Gerhardt looked up from his digging. “Eh? What’s that?” he demanded.

“Shelley,” I told him.

“Oh. Him.”

He went back to digging.

* * * *

Late in the afternoon we finally decided to call it quits and head back to the base. We had been in the field for seven hours and had nothing to show for it except a few hundred feet of tridim films of building foundations.

The sun was beginning to set; Planet Four had a thirty-five hour day, and it was coming to its end. The sky, always somber, was darkening now. There was no moon. Planet Four had no satellites. It seemed a bit unfair; Three and Five of the system each had four moons, while around the massive gas giant that was Eight a cluster of thirteen moonlets whirled.

We wheeled round and headed back, taking an alternate route three miles east of the one we had used on the way out, in case we might spot something. It was a forlorn hope, though.

Six miles along our journey, the truck radio came to life. The dry, testy voice of Dr. Leopold reached us:

“Calling Trucks Two and Three. Two and Three, do you read me? Come in, Two and Three.”

Gerhardt was driving. I reached across his knee to key in the response channel and said, “Anderson and Gerhardt in Number Three, sir. We read you.”