The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (76 page)

When he’d finished his explanation, Esther was more than a little pale, but she smiled gamely.

“All right, Stan. Go ahead!”

“We’ll save power if we wait for the winds,” he told her.

Already, though, breezes stirred across the dawn-lit sand. Already there were hot breezes. Already the fine, impalpable sand dust which settled last nightfall was rising in curious opaque clouds which billowed and curled and blotted out the horizon. But the grid was hidden anyhow by the bulge of the planet’s surface.

Stan pointed the little skid downward in a hollow he scooped out with his space-gloved hands. He set the gyros running to keep it pointed toward the buried yacht. He had Esther climb up behind him. He lashed the two of them together, and strapped down to the skid. He waited.

In ten minutes after the first sand grains pelted on his armor, the sky was hidden by the finer dust. In twenty there were great gusts which could be felt even within the spacesuits. In half an hour a monster gale blew.

Stan turned on the space skid’s drive. It thrust downward toward the sand and the buried yacht. It thrust upward against the air and pelting sand.

In three-quarters of an hour the sandstorm had reached frenzied violence, but the skid pushed down from within a little hollow. Its drive thrust up a spout of air. That spout drew sand grains with it. But it was needful to increase the power. After an hour a gigantic whirlwind swept around them. It tore at the two people and the tiny machine. It sucked up such a mass of powdery sand particles that its impact on the spacesuits was like a savage blow. Emptiness opened beneath the skid and sand went whirling up in a sand spout the exact equivalent of a water spout at sea. Stan and Esther and the skid itself would have been torn away by its violence but that the skid’s drive was on full, now. The absurd little traveler thrust sturdily downward. When sand was drawn away by wind, it burrowed down eagerly to make the most of its gain.

Its back thrust kept a steady, cone-shaped pressure on the sand which would have poured in upon it. Stan and Esther were buried and uncovered and buried again, but the skid fought valorously. It strove to dig deeper and to fling away the sand that would have hidden it from view. It remained, actually, at the bottom of a perpetually filling pit which it kept unfilled by a geyser of upflung sand from its drive.

In twenty minutes more another whirlwind touched the pit briefly. The skid—helped by the storm—dug deeper yet. There came other swirling maelstroms.

The nose of the skid touched solidly. It had burrowed down nearly fifty feet, with the aid of whirlwinds, and come to the yacht
Erebus
.

But it was another hour before accident and fierce efforts on Stan’s part combined to let him reach the airlock door, and maneuver the skid to keep that doorway clear, and for Esther to climb in—followed by masses of slithering sand—and Stan after her.

Inside the buried yacht, Stan fumbled for lights. He made haste to turn off the signaling device that had led him back to it deep under the desert’s surface. It was strangely and wonderfully still here, buried under thousands of tons of sand.

Esther slipped out of her spacesuit and smiled tremulously at Stan.

“Now—?”

“Now,” said Stan,” if you want to you can start cooking. We could do with a civilized meal. I’ll see what I can do toward a slightly less uncertain way of life.”

He went forward. The
Erebus
was a small yacht, to be sure. It was a bare sixty feet overall, and of course as a pleasurecraft it had no actual armament. But within two bulging blisters at the bow the meteor repellers were mounted. In flight, in space, they could make a two-way thrust against stray bits of celestial matter, so that if a meteor was tiny it was thrust aside, or if too large the
Erebus
swerved away. From within Stan changed the focus of the beams. They had been set to send out tiny artificial matter beams no larger than a rifle bore. At ten miles such a beam would be six inches across, and at forty a bare two feet. He adjusted both to a quickly widening cone and pointed one up, the other down. One would thrust violently against the sand under the yacht, and the other against the sand over it. The surface sand, at least, could rise and be blown away. The sand below would support the yacht against further settling.

He went back to where Esther laid out dishes.

“I’ve started something,” he told her. “One repeller beam points up to make the sand over our heads effectively lighter so it can be blown away more easily. The storm ought to burrow right down to us, with that much help. After we’re uncovered, we may, just possibly, be able to work up to the surface. But after that we’ve got to do something else. The repellers aren’t as powerful as a drive, and it’s hardly likely we could lift out of gravity on them. Even if we did, we’re a few light centuries from home. To fix our interstellar drive we need the help of our friends of the grid.”

Esther paused to stare.

“But they’ll try to kill us!” she protested. “They’ve tried hard! And if they find us we’ve no weapons at all, not even a hand blaster!”

“To the contrary,” said Stan drily, “we’ve probably the most ghastly weapon anybody ever invented, only it won’t work on any other planet than this.”

Then he grinned at her. He was out of his spacesuit too, now. The food he’d asked her to prepare was out on the table, but he ignored it. He took one step toward her. And then there came a muffled sound, picked up by the outside hull microphones. It grew in volume. It became a roar. Then the yacht shifted position. Its nose tilted upward.

“The first step,” said Stan, “is accomplished. I can’t stop to dine. But—”

He kissed her hungrily. Five days—six, now—in spacesuits with the girl one hopes to marry has its drawbacks. An armored arm around the hulking shoulders of another suit of armor—even with a pretty girl inside it—is not satisfying. To hold hands with three-eighth-inch space gloves is less than romantic. And to try to kiss a girl three-quarters buried in a space helmet leaves much to the imagination. Stan kissed her. It took another shifting movement of the yacht, which toppled them the length of the cabin, to make him stop.

Then he laughed and went to the control room. Vision screens were useless, of course. The little ship was still most of her length under sand, but the repellers’ cones of thrust had dug a great pit down to her. Now Stan juggled the repellers to take fullest advantage of the storm. At times—with both beams pushing up—the ship was perceptibly lifted by up-rushing air. Stan could be prodigal with power, now. The skid was sharply limited in its storage of energy, but all the space between the two skins of the
Erebus
was a power bank. It could travel from one rim of the galaxy to the other without exhausting its store. The upward lift of whirlwinds—once there were six within ten minutes—and the thrusts of the repellers gradually edged the
Erebus
to the surface.

Before nightfall, it no longer lay in a sand pit. It was only half-buried in sand. The winds died down to merely savage gales, at twilight, and then slowly diminished to more angry gusts. At long last there was calm and even the impalpable fine dust that settled last no longer floated in the air. The stars shone; Stan was ready.

He turned on the ship’s communicator and sent a full power wave out into the night. He spoke. What he said would be unintelligible, of course, but he said sardonically to the empty desert under the stars:

“Yacht
Erebus
calling! Down on the desert, every drive smashed, and not so much as a hand blast on board for a weapon. Maybe you’d like to come and get us!”

Then—and only then—he went and ate the meal Esther had made ready.

It was half an hour before the microphones gave warning. Then they relayed clankings and poundings and thuddings on the sand. It was the sound of heavy machines marching toward the
Erebus
. Scores of them. The machines separated and encircled the disabled yacht, though they were invisible behind the dunes all about. Then, simultaneously, they closed in.

The landing beams of the
Erebus
flashed out. Light flickered in the chill darkness. The beams darted here and there.

Then the machines appeared. The scene was remarkable. Over the dunes marched gigantic metal monsters, many-legged, with bodies as great as the
Erebus
itself. Great bulges on their forward parts gave the look of eyes, as if these were huge insects marching to devour and destroy. As the landing light beams flickered from one to another of them, huge metallic tusks appeared, and toothed jaws—used for excavation. They were not machines designed for war, but they were terrifying, and they could be terrible.

Esther’s hand on Stan’s shoulder trembled as the monsters closed in. Then Stan, in the unarmed and seemingly defenseless little space yacht, swung the meteor repeller controls and literally cut them to pieces.

CHAPTER 6

“We’re barbarians,” said Stan, “compared to these folk. So we’ve an advantage. It’s likely to be only temporary, though!”

He watched the carcasses of the great machines, flicking the landing light beams back and forth. They were tumbled terribly on the ground. Some were severed in two or three places, and their separate sections sprawled astonishedly on a dune side. One was split through lengthwise. Another had all of one set of legs cut off clean, and lay otherwise unharmed but utterly helpless.

Out of that incapacitated giant a smaller version of itself crawled. It was like a lifeboat. Stan watched. Other small versions of the great machines appeared. One made a dash at the
Erebus
, and he cut it savagely in two. There was no other attack. Instead, the smaller many-legged machines ran busily from one to another of the wrecks—seeming to gather up survivors—and then went racing away into the dark. Then there was stillness.

“They knew we saw them,” said Stan grimly. “They knew we could smash them. They realized that I wouldn’t unless they attacked again. I wonder what they think of us now?”

“What you did to them was—awful,” said Esther. She shuddered. “I still don’t know what it was. I never heard of any weapon like that!”

“It could only exist here,” said Stan. He grimaced. “We’ve meteor repellers. They push away anything in their beam. I narrowed them to their smallest size and put full power into them. That was all.”

“But meteor repellers don’t cut!” protested Esther.

“These did,” said Stan. “They were working through sand, just that. They pushed it. With a force of eighty tons in a half-inch beam. The sand that was in the beam was shot away with an acceleration of possibly fifty thousand gravities—and more sand kept falling into the beam. Each particle was traveling as fast as a meteor when it hit, over there. When it struck it simply flared to incandescent vapor. No atomic torch was ever hotter! And there was no end to the sand I threw. You might say I cut those machines up with a sandblast, but there was never such a sandblast as this! It took a barbarian—like me—to think of it.”

He continued to watch the vision screens, filtered to view their surroundings by infrared and seeing nearly as brightly as if by day.

“Now,” he added, “I need to go over to those machines and get some stuff I think they’ve got in them. That’s what I provoked this attack for. But maybe the drivers are laying low to jump on me if I try it. I’ll have to wait until nearly dawn. They won’t risk waiting until almost time for the sandstorms! Not with fifty miles to travel back to the grid!”

He stayed on guard. Presently he yawned. He stood up and paced back and forth, glancing from time to time at the screen. After a long time Esther said:

“You didn’t sleep last night, Stan. Could I watch for a while so you can rest?”

“Mmmmm. Yes. If anything stirs, wake me. But I don’t look for action here. The real action will be back underground, where they’ll put their best brains to devising weapons. They ought to make up some pretty devices, too, but if they haven’t thought of such things for fifty thousand years or so it may take them a while to get started.”

He went back into the cabin and threw himself down. Almost instantly he was asleep. Esther watched the vision plates dutifully. There was silence and stillness everywhere. After a long time she looked in on the sleeping Stan. A little later she looked in again, reached over, and touched his hair gently. Later still she looked in yet again. She kissed him lightly—he did not wake—and went back to the control cabin, to watch the vision plates.

Nothing happened. Bright stars shone down on the night side of the desert world, and sandstorms raged and howled and blew frenziedly on the side under the dwarf white sun. But nothing happened in or near the
Erebus
.

Out in space, though, very many millions of miles away, a tiny mote winked into existence as if by magic, with the cutting off of its Bowdoin-Hall field drive. It hung seemingly motionless for a while, as if orienting itself. It seemed to locate what it sought, and vanished, but again winked into being a bare few thousand miles from the planet’s surface. It did not disappear again. It drove down toward the half-obscured disk at the normal acceleration of a landing drive. Toward dawn it screamed down into atmosphere above the planet’s surface. It drove on into the day, and into howling winds and far-flung sand. It rose swiftly, and went winging toward the summer polar cap. Khor Alpha’s single planet had gone unvisited by men during two centuries of interstellar travel, but now there had been three separate visitations within ten days.