The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (75 page)

Stan was very silent all the way back. Only once he said shortly:

“Our power units will soak up a pretty big charge in a short time. We packed away some power before the fuse blew.”

There was no comment for Esther to make. There was life on the planet. It was life which knew of their existence and presence—and had tried to kill them for the theft of some few megawatts of power. It would not be easy to make terms with the life which held other life so cheaply.

With the planet’s only source of power now guarded, matters looked less bright than before. After they had reached the icecap, they slanted down out of airlessness to the spot which was their home because their seeds had been planted there. As they dived down for a landing, their real situation appeared.

There was a colossal object with many pairs of legs moving back and forth over the little space where their food plants sprouted. In days, those plants would have yielded food. They wouldn’t yield food now.

Their garden was being trampled to nothingness by a multilegged machine of a size comparable to the other machine which had chased them on the grid. It was fifty feet high from ground to top, and had a round, tanklike body all of twenty feet in diameter. Round projections at one end looked like eyes. It moved on multiple legs which tramped in orderly confusion. It stamped the growing plants to pulped green stuff in the polar sand. It went over and over and over the place where the food necessary for the humans’ survival had promised to grow. It stamped and stamped. It destroyed all hope of food. It destroyed all hope.

Because, as Stan drove the skid down to see the machine more closely, it stopped in its stamping. It swung about to face him, with a curiously unmachinelike ferocity. As Stan veered, it turned also. When he sped on over it and beyond, it wheeled and came galloping with surprising speed after him.

Then they saw another machine. Two more. Three. They saw dark specks here and there in the polar wastes, every one a machine like the one which had tramped their food supply out of existence. Every one changed course to parallel and approached the skid’s line of travel. If they landed, the machines would close in.

There was only so much power. The skid could not stay indefinitely aloft. And anywhere that they landed—

CHAPTER 5

But they did land. They had to. It was a thousand miles away, on the dark side of the planet, in a waste of sand which looked frozen in the starlight. The instant the skid touched ground, Stan made a warning gesture and reached over to turn off Esther’s suit radio. He opened his own face plate and almost gasped at the chill of the midnight air. With no clouds or water vapor to hinder it, the heat stored up by day was radiated out to the awful chill of interstellar space at a rate which brought below zero temperatures within hours of sundown. At the winter pole of the planet, the air itself must come close to turning liquid from the cold. But here, and now, Stan nodded in his helmet as Esther opened her face plate.

“No radio,” he told her. “They’ll hardly be able to find us in several million square miles if we don’t use radio. But now you get some sleep. We’re going to have a busy time, presently!”

Esther hesitated, and said desperately:

“But—who are they? What are they? Why do they want to kill us?”

“They’re the local citizens,” said Stan. “I was wrong. There are inhabitants. I’ve no more idea what they may be like than you have. But I suspect they want to kill us simply because we’re strangers.”

“But how could an intelligent race develop on a planet like this?” demanded Esther unbelievingly. “How’d they stay alive while they were developing?”

Stan shrugged his shoulders.

“Once you admit that a thing is so,” he said drily, “you can figure out how it happened. This sun is a dwarf white star. That means that once upon a time it exploded. It flared out into a nova. Maybe there were other planets nearer to it than this, and they volatilized when their sun blew up. Everything on this planet, certainly, was killed, and for a long, long time afterward it was surely uninhabitable by any standard. There’s a dwarf star in the Crab Nebula which will melt iron four light hours away, and that was a nova twelve hundred years ago. It must have been bad on this planet for a long time indeed. I’m guessing that when the first explosion came the inner planets turned to gas and this one had all its seas and forests and all its atmosphere simply blasted away to nothingness. Everything living on its surface was killed. Even bacteria in the soil turned to steam and went off into space. That would account for the absolute absence of life here now.”

“But—” said Esther.

“But,” said Stan, “the people—call them people—who lived here were civilized even then. They knew what was coming. If they hadn’t interstellar drive, flight would do them no good. They’d have nowhere to go. So maybe they stayed. Underground. Maybe they dug themselves caves and galleries five—ten—twenty miles down. Maybe some of those galleries collapsed when the blowup came, but some of the people survived. They’d stay underground for centuries. They’d have to! It might be fifty thousand years that they stayed underground, while Khor Alpha blazed less and less fiercely, and they waited until they could come up again. There was no air for a while up here. They had to fight to keep alive, down in the planet’s vitals. They made a new civilization, surrounded by rock, with no more thought of stars. They’d be hard put to it for power, too. They couldn’t well use combustion, with a limited air supply. They probably learned to transform heat directly to power. You can take power—electricity—and make heat. Why not the other way about? For fifty thousand years and maybe more they had to live without even thinking of the surface of their world. But as the dwarf star cooled off, they needed its heat again.”

He stopped. He seemed to listen intently. But there was no sound in the icy night. There were only bright, unwinking stars and an infinity of sand—and cold.

“So they dug up to the surface again,” he went on. “Air had come back, molecule by molecule from empty space, drawn by the same gravitation that once had kept it from flying away. The fused-solid rock of the surface, baked by day and frozen by night, had cracked and broken down to powder. When air came again and winds blew, it was sand. The whole planet was desert. The people couldn’t live on the surface again. They probably didn’t want to. But they needed power. So they built that monster grid they’re so jealous of.”

“You mean,” Esther demanded incredulously, “that’s a generator?”

“A transformer,” corrected Stan. “Solar heat to electricity. Back on earth the sun pours better than a kilowatt of energy on every square yard of Earth’s surface in the tropics, over three million kilowatts to the square mile. This checkerboard arrangement is at least a hundred and fifty by two hundred miles. The power’s greater here, but on earth that would mean ninety thousand million kilowatts. More than sixty thousand million horsepower, more than the whole Earth uses even now! If those big slabs convert solar radiation into power—and I charged up the skid from one of them—there’s a reason for the checkerboard, and there’s a reason for dumping the sand—it would hinder gathering power—and there was a reason for getting upset when somebody started to meddle with it. They’re upset! They’ll have the conservation of moisture down to a fine point, down below, but they made those leggy machines to haul more water from the poles. When they set them all to hunting us, they’re very much disturbed! But luckily they’d never have worked out anything to fly with, underground, and they’re not likely to have done so since, considering the storms and all.”

There was silence. Esther said slowly:

“It’s—very plausible, Stan. I believe it. They’d have no idea of space travel, so they’d have no idea of other intelligent races, and actually they’d never think of castaways. They wouldn’t understand, and they’d try to kill us to study the problem we presented. That’s their idea, no doubt. They’ve all the resources of a civilization that’s old and scientific. They’ll apply them all to get us, and they won’t even think of listening to us! Stan! What can we do?”

Stan said amusedly, there in the still, frigid night of an unnamed planet:

“Why—we’ll do plenty! We’re barbarians by comparison with them, Esther, and barbarians have equipment civilized men forget. All savages have spears, but a civilized man doesn’t even always carry a pocket knife. If we can find the
Erebus
, we can probably defy this whole planet, until they put their minds to developing weapons. But right now you go to sleep. I’ll watch.”

Esther looked at him dubiously. Five days of sandstorms should have buried the little yacht irrecoverably.

“If it’s findable,” she said. Then she added wistfully, “But it would be nice to be on the
Erebus
again. It would feel so good to walk around without a spacesuit! And—” she added firmly; “after all, Stan, we are engaged! If you think I like trying to figure out some way of getting kissed through an opened face plate—!”

Stan said gruffly:

“Go to sleep!”

He paced up and down repeatedly. They were remarkably unlike castaways in the space tale tape-dramas. In those works of fiction, the hero is always remarkably ingenious. He contrives shelters from native growths on however alien a planet he and the heroine may have been marooned on; he is full of useful odd bits of information which enable him to surprise her with unexpected luxuries, and he is inspired when it comes to signaling devices. But in five days on this planet, Stan had been able to make no use of any natural growth because there wasn’t any. He’d found no small luxuries for Esther because there was literally nothing about but sand. There was strikingly little use in a fund of odd bits of information when there was only desert to apply it to—desert and sandstorms. What he’d just told Esther was a guess; the best guess he could make, and a plausible one, but still a guess. The only new bit of information he’d picked up so far was the way the local inhabitants made electric motors.

He watched the chrono, and a good half-hour before night would strike the checkerboard grid he was verifying what few preparations he could make. A little later he waked Esther, just about twenty minutes before the sunset line would reach the grid, they soared upward to seek it. If Stan’s plan didn’t work, they’d die. He was going to gamble their lives and the last morsel of power the skid’s power unit contained, on information gained in two peeps at slab motors on the grid, and the inference that all motors on this planet would be made on the same principle. Of course, as a subsidiary gamble, he had also to bet that he in an unarmed and wrecked space yacht could defy a civilization that had lived since before Khor Alpha was a dwarf star.

They soared out of atmosphere on a trajectory that saved power but was weirdly unlike an normal way of traveling from one spot on a planet’s surface to another. Beneath them lay the vast expanse of the desert, all dense, velvety black except for one blindingly bright area at its Western rim. That bright area widened as they neared it, overtaking the day. Suddenly the rectatigular edges of the grid shed appeared, breaking the sharp edge of dusk.

The
Erebus
had grounded roughly fifty miles northward from the planet’s solitary structure. Stan turned on his suit radio and listened intently. There was no possible landmark. The dunes changed hourly during the day and on no two days were they ever the same. He skimmed the settling sand clouds of the dusk belt. Presently he was sure he had overshot his mark.

He circled. He circled again. He made a great logarithmic circle out from the point he considered most likely. The power meter showed the drain. He searched in the night, with no possible landmark. Sweat came out on his face.

Then he heard a tiny click. Sweat ran down his face. He worked desperately to localize the signal Esther had set to working in the yacht before she left it. When at last he landed and was sure the
Erebus
was somewhere under the starlit sand about him, he looked at the power gauge and tensed his lips. He pressed his space helmet close to Esther’s, until it touched. He spoke, and his voice carried by metallic conduction without the use of radio.

“We might make it if we try now. But we’re going to need a lot of power at best. I’m going to gamble the local yokels can’t trace a skid drive and wait for morning, to harness the whirlwinds to do our digging for us.”

Her voice came faintly back to him by the same means of communication.

“All right, Stan.”

She couldn’t guess his intentions, of course. They were probably insane. He said urgently:

“Listen! The yacht’s buried directly under us. Maybe ten feet, maybe fifty, maybe Heaven knows how deep! There’s a bare chance that if we get to it we can do something, with what I know now about the machines in use here. It’s the only chance I know, and it’s not a good one. It’s only fair to tell you—”

“I’ll try anything,” said her voice in his helmet, “with you.”

He swallowed. Then he stayed awake and desperately alert, his suit microphones at their highest pitch of sensitivity, during the long and deadly monotonous hours of the night.

There was no alarm. When the sky grayed to the eastward, he showed her how he hoped to reach the yacht. The drive of the skid, of course, was not a pulsatory field such as even the smallest of space yachts used. It was more nearly an adaptation of a meteor repeller beam, a simple reactive thrust against an artificial mass field. It was the first type of electronic drive ever to lift a ship from earth. For takeoff and landing and purposes like meteor mining it is still better than the pulsating-field drive by which a ship travels in huge if unfelt leaps. But in atmosphere it does produce a tremendous back blast of repelled air. It is never used on atmosphere fliers for that very reason, but Stan proposed to make capital of its drawback for his purpose.