Authors: Space Pioneers
He went down to Medical and submitted to
having his semicircular canals numbed to prevent nausea and his heart slowed
to avoid wasting energy. Then two orderlies helped him into his bulky
spacesuit, and he shuffled awkwardly out of the hospital section into the
anteroom of the personnel lock.
There
was only moon gravity here—about one-tenth g—and he flexed his arms and legs a
few times and checked his equipment. Before he finished Engelhart joined him,
face keen and sharp behind his transparent mask. He nodded, clicked on his
microphone and said, "Can you hear me, sir?"
"Loud
and clear.
Who've you picked to come with us?"
"Trooper Anson, sir.
He'll be here in a moment." He checked his oxygen supply with
practiced efficiency, turned his torch on and off a few times, and stamped to
make sure his joints were working freely.
Then Trooper Anson joined them, and they
moved cautiously into the lock and waited while the big doors behind them slid
shut. Before the others opened, a voice crackled in their phones.
"Keston
here, sir. We're keeping our 'scopes on you just in case, but I don't expect
you'll find trouble. We found one hole in the top of the building twenty feet
across."
Chang said, "Right. Stand by to open
locks. Ready?"
"Ready."
They
turned on their magnetic soles for the brief instant in which the air in the
lock
whooshed
out into free space with a thin scream, and then they moved forward to
the top of the ramp beyond and stood staring at a monument to a vanished race.
The stars filled the sky so brightly that
they had to shade their eyes to see it in the dim glow of the searchlight—a
vast and empty, and enigmatic, building.
Chang said slowly, "That's a lovely
piece of design, Engel-hart."
Engelhart
nodded behind his faceplate. "They never knocked
that
up on their first trip. I'd lay good money on there being a city under
here. I wonder why they abandoned it."
Chang
shrugged. "We'll find out later—perhaps. Shall we move?"
They
went down the metal ramp to the scorched rock at its foot, snapped off their
magnetic soles and began to
bound
in twenty-foot leaps
across the short mile that separated them from the building.
For a while there was no noise except star
static and the irregular thud after each jump as they landed with enough force
to disturb the microphones, and they braked gradually to a halt a few yards
from the open end of the building.
They stood surveying it.
After a pause, Chang said, "Anson!"
"Sir?"
"Shine your torch
inside, will you?"
A few seconds later a puddle of dazzling
light a few inches in diameter sprang up on the ground before them and leaped
into the cavernous hollow, widening as it did so. It showed nothing.
Chang said, "Switch it off," and
took the shade away from his faceplate.
After
a while he could make out a little of the interior by the starlight that
filtered through a dozen gashes in the vaulting roof. The main floor of the
hall was smooth and level, but stacked at the sides were crates, their metal
bright and untarnished in the airlessness, and a small vehicle stood parked
against one wall.
Far
at the back he could dimly discern something like an elevator shaft leading
down into the crust of the moon—presumably the city of which this was the
outward and visible sign.
He said, "Keston,
still watching us?"
"Of course, sir,"
Keston answered from the ship.
"We're
going inside. Your 'scopes'U
lose
us and I imagine
radar will, too. These walls are metal. I'll have Anson stay here, though, and
we'll relay messages through him. Got that?"
"Right, sir,"
said Keston.
Anson
had already taken his orders and moved off to one side. He was unfolding the
chair attachment of his suit as Chang and Engelhart took their first cautious
steps into the building, their torches shedding small circles of light that
dimmed to nothing a hundred feet away.
The floor, Chang noted, was metal, smooth and
unmarked save for a few bright scratches. He heard a thud then, both through
his earphones and by bone-conduction from the floor. He turned in astonishment
to see Engelhart making determined but fruitless efforts to lift his feet from
the floor.
Engelhart
cut short his startled exclamation. He said in a queer voice, "I just
switched on my magnets to see if the floor was magnetic, sir. Take a look at
it, will you?"
Chang
nodded and bent down, examining it. It was cobalt blue and magnetic, and the
durasteel knife built into his right glove blunted its tip against it. He
looked up and said in an awed voice, "That's durasteel, Engelhart."
"Yes, sir.
I thought so. And any race that can afford to throw it around like this
has my respect."
Chang got up slowly. "Mine too,
Engelhart," he said. "This place just couldn't be duplicated by man.
Why, any single planet wouldn't have enough durasteel to floor it. They got a
long way ahead of us, then. I wonder why they went."
Engelhart shrugged, and they went over to
inspect the crates piled up at the side, but they were empty, or contained no
more than the flotsam left by a swiftly ebbing tide of civilization—so much so,
that one would have sworn the users of the hammers and drill atop the open
crates had just put them down and would be back in a moment. The small vehicle
afforded no clues. It was apparently self-propelled, but there was no visible
power source, unless it absorbed induced electricity from the floor, or
broadcast energy; the controls, which might have helped them to picture the
creature who used them, had been pared down to a single rod bearing a simple
press-button on the tip that served for both steering and start-stop gear, and
there was no rest or seat.
Chang grunted, said, "That tells us a
lot!"
Engelhart
said, "Sir, I think if there is anything to be found here at all, it'll be
in the city beneath, and that may call for a full-scale investigation. Chances
are it'd be simpler to study the planet itself. If they've had space travel and
lost it, even if they haven't died off altogether, they won't present any
serious problem."
"Agreed.
But we'd best have a look at the entry to
the city beneath at least before we move on." Chang swept his torch-beam
around and froze suddenly, his free hand groping wildly for the blaster at his
side. Engelhart caught his muttered
exclamation,
followed his eye and almost cried out in horror.
Then
Chang relaxed, chuckling.
"Phew,
that
gave me a fright! I thought for a moment we'd run across an alien, but it's
only a robot. I wonder how long it's been here."
Engelhart
wiped his forehead a little shakily against the absorbent lining of his
helmet, and said with heartfelt relief, "Let's go take a look at it,
sir."
Together they leaped across the intervening
forty-odd yards and halted to survey the immobile robot. It was not purely uniform,
but like many human-built servitors a rough imitation of its creators. It was
about nine feet tall and faintly anthropoid in that it had a head, topping a
cylindrical body, but it had six limbs—two legs, four arms ending in delicate
plierlike devices with cutting, shaping and gripping appliances. Two lenses in
the front of its head, set close together, shone dully in the light of their
torches.
"Will you want this
taken back to the ship?" Engelhart asked.
"No,
that can wait. It's been here space knows how long already. It won't run away,
and another few days waiting won't hurt it. There are more urgent things to
do."
With
a lingering backward glance at the motionless machine, Engelhart turned to
follow the captain into the back of the hall, towards the downward-leading
shafts. They also had locks, as a precaution against meteor-damage to the outer
section, but at both ends they were fully open, and there was no air below.
Chang
shuddered slightly as he looked down five hundred feet into their black depths.
He said, "I wouldn't have liked to be down there when the first meteor
hit."
Engelhart said, "I don't think there was
anyone there then, sir. It looks to me as if they simply checked out in a big
hurry— they wouldn't have left the outer locks open otherwise."
"That's
a point," agreed Chang. "So there wouldn't be much below even if we
did try to climb in. I think you were right about the advisability of moving
downstairs right away. Let's go."
Engelhart
was shining his torch down the shaft without result. He said, "I notice
they did economize on the durasteel as far as lining the shaft goes. This
floor's only about six inches thick, but even so it's a pretty costly
extravagance—"
Chang turned sharply and stared back towards
the entrance where Trooper Anson was visible waiting patiently in radio view of
the ship.
"What is it,
sir?" Engelhart demanded.
Chang gestured with his
torch,
and the other automatically followed an extension of his line of motion up to
the jagged rents in the roof. He said, "See that big gash? How big a
meteor do you imagine it would take to make it?"
Engelhart
calculated rapidly. "I'd say it couldn't have been less than twenty feet
across, which means—eleven, twelve—a mass of maybe a hundred tons."
Chang began to move out across the floor,
switching his torch from side to side as he went. He said, "Since when has
six inches even of durasteel been able to take a kick like that? Can you see
any signs of meteor fragments or splash damage? Ah, here we are. Look—the
floor's been re-welded and ground smooth with a high velocity diamond buffer to
make it level. And it's just below the biggest meteor strike."
Engelhart,
glancing up at the thick-packed stars beyond the shattered roof, said,
"That's very strange, sir."
Chang was following the marks of the weld
around the floor. He said, half to himself, "Who repaired this floor? And
why didn't they fix the roof first to give themselves air to work in?"
"Maybe
they used robots for the job," suggested Engelhart. "That would account
for the presence of the one we saw."
"Could
do," said Chang, straightening up. "But then why didn't they finish
the job? What made them stop halfway? And will it do the same to us? Out of
here, Engelhartl Jump!"
Three quarters of an hour later he stood
gazing from the viewport in the nose of the ship while they lifted away from
the moon and began the leisurely topple into an orbit that would brush
atmosphere and allow them to settle without any fuss, letting the air do their
braking for them.
Behind
him Keston said suddenly, "Sir, Hardesty says he just picked up a flicker
from astem. It's gone into radar shadow now, but he says it didn't look like a
meteor—could have been a ship."
"Big or small?"
"Small, sir.
About the size of the rocket we found back on the moon."
"Then
it probably was that," said Chang, turning quickly. "Deeley,
Spinelli,
give
us a quick put-down."
"Do
you mean really quick or just quick, sir?" asked Spinelli. Deeley's hands
leaped for the Nav computer before him.
"Really quick.
A bottlestopper.
Pick the largest piece of
open-wide open—flat ground you can in the time.
Engelhart!"
Engelhart said without looking round from his control desk,
"Sir?"
"Get the men to battle stations again,
just in case." Engelhart nodded, pushed the red knob at the top left of
his board. A bell sounded faintly somewhere inship.
"Sir!"
"Yes, Spinelli?"
"Bottlestopper
coming up, sir. Well be down in about thirty seconds from—NOW!"