Authors: Hubbard,L. Ron
The doors were cracked open, just as he had left them so many years ago. Lying there, crusted with snow but just where he had dropped it, was the iron bar he had used to open the doors. The smell might or might not be there, for he was now wearing an air mask.
They had left just as soon as they could see to fly, and Jonnie had spotted them down accurately just before the door. Behind him in the canyon the Scots were unloading gear. The plane would have to leave and they would have to obliterate all tracks with snow before the recon drone came over on its daily round.
The calm voice of Robert the Fox was directing them: “Have you got the lamps? Check out the spare air bottles. Where is Daniel? Easy with those explosives….”
A Scot came up with a sledge hammer to open the door wider and Angus rushed over and pushed him aside. “No. No. No. ‘Tis just wanting a bit of penetrating oil.” Angus was popping the bottle of an oilcan. His voice sounded muffled through the air mask.
They were all getting air masks on. The historian had found it was very unhealthy to enter tombs. Something called “spores” sometimes came off bone dust of the long dead and made a man cough his lungs out.
“Mind if I slip in first, Jonnie?” said Angus. Jonnie took his shoulder pack so Angus could slide through. The mine lamp played on the interior. “Och! Enough dead men!” His oilcan was popping on hinges. “Try it, Jonnie.”
Jonnie put his shoulder to the doors and they swung back, shooting a blast of light down the stairs. Angus had stepped out of the way and was now wading on littered corpses, puffs of bone dust rising around his boots.
They all stood for a moment, looking down the steps, awed.
On this graveyard of a planet, they were no strangers to dead remains. They lay in structures and basements in abundance wherever there was any protection from wild animals or the weather, corpses more than a thousand years dead.
But reaching down this long flight of stairs were the remains of several hundred men. Protected from the air until a dozen years ago, their clothing, arms, and equipment were somewhat preserved, but the bones had gone to powder.
“They fell forward,” said Robert the Fox. “Must have been a regiment marching in. See? These two fellows at the top of the steps must have been closing the doors.”
“The gas,” said Jonnie. “They opened the doors to let the regiment in, looks like, and the gas hit them from the canyon.”
“Wiped the place out,” said Robert the Fox. “Listen, all of you. Don’t go in there without a tight air mask.”
“We ought to bury these men,” said the parson. “They each have little tags on them,” he picked one up. ” ‘Knowlins, Peter, Private USMC No. 35473524. Blood Type B.’ “
“Marines,” said the historian. “We’ve got a military base here all right.”
“Do you suppose,” said the parson to Jonnie, “that village of yours could once have been a marine base? It is different than other towns.”
“The village has been rebuilt a dozen times,” said Jonnie. “Robert, let’s go in.”
“Remember your priorities,” said Robert to the group. “Inventory only. Don’t touch records until they’re identified. This is a big place. Don’t stray or get lost.”
“We ought to bury these bodies,” said the parson.
“We will, we will,” said Robert. “All in good time. Gunners forward. Flush out and destroy any animals.”
Five Scots carrying submachine guns raced down the steps, alert for bears or snakes in hibernation or stray wolves.
“Ventilation team, stand by,” said Robert, and glanced over his shoulder to make sure the three assigned to carry the heavy mine ventilation fans were there and ready.
There was an uneven burst of fire below. The sub-Thompson ammunition was dud two rounds out of five, and to get a sustained burst one had to recock the bolt in mid-fire.
Robert’s small limited-range radio crackled. “Rattlesnakes. Four. All dead. End com.”
“Aye,” said Robert the Fox into the mike.
There was another ragged burst of fire.
The radio crackled. “Brown bear. Hibernating. Dead. End com.”
“Aye,” said Robert.
“Second set of doors, tight locked.”
“Explosives team,” Robert called over his shoulder.
“Naw, naw!” said Angus. “We may need those doors!”
“Go ahead,” said Robert. “Belay explosives team, but stand by.” Into the mike, “Mechanic en route.”
They waited. The radio crackled. “Doors open.” A pause. “Area beyond seems airtight. Probably no hostile animals beyond. End com.”
“Ventilation team. Forward,” said Robert.
The last man on that team was carrying a cage of rats.
Presently a current of air began to come out of the tomb.
The radio crackled: “Rats still alive. End com.”
“There you are, MacTyler,” said
Robert.
Jonnie checked his face mask and walked down through the dust of the stairs. He heard Robert firing the rest of the teams behind him and then giving orders to clean up the outside area and dust all traces with snow when the planes left. The orders sounded way off and thin in the booming caverns of the primary defense base of a long-dead nation.
Jonnie’s miner’s lamp played upon the floors and walls of what seemed like endless corridors and rooms.
The place was huge. Offices, offices, offices. Barracks. Storerooms. Their footsteps resounded hollowly, disturbing the millennia-long sleep of the dead.
The first find was a stack of duplicated routing plans for the base. A Scot found them in a reception desk drawer. They were not very detailed, apparently intended to route visiting officers around. The Scot got permission to distribute and, racing up, miner’s lamp bobbing, shoved a copy into Jonnie’s hand.
Level after level existed. There was not just a maze at one level but also mazes down, down, and down.
He was looking for an operations office, someplace where dispatches might mount up, where information was collected. Operations…operations…where would that be?
Behind him an argument broke out. It was Angus and Robert the Fox at the other end of the corridor.
Angus’s voice was raised. “I know it’s all by elevators!”
There was a murmur from Robert.
“I know it’s all electrical. I’ve been through all this before at the first school! Electrical, electrical, electrical! It takes generators. And they’re just piles of congealed rust! Even if you got one to run, there’s no fuel- it’s just sludge in the tanks. And even if you put in juice, those light bulbs won’t work and the electric motors are frozen solid.”
Robert murmured something.
“Sure the wires may be all right. But even if you got juice in them, all you’d have is an intercom and we’ve got that. So stick to miner’s lamps! I’m sorry, Sir Robert, but there’s just so much dinosaur you can revive from a pile of bones!”
Jonnie heard Robert laughing. He himself differed a little bit with Angus’s point of view. They did not know that there weren’t emergency systems that might work some other way, and they did not know that there might not be other fuels in sealed containers that might still function. The chances were thin, but they could not be ruled out. They were despairingly going to rig mine cables to get to the other levels when a Scot found ramps and stairwells going down.
Operations…operations…
They found a communications console, the communicator’s remains at the desk. Under the dust that had been his hand was a message:
“URGENT. Don’t fire. It isn’t the
Russians.”
“Russians? Russians?” said a Scot. “Who were the Russians?”
Thor had come, absent without leave from his shift at the lode but intending to get back. He was part Swedish. “They’re some people that used to live on the other side of Sweden. They were run by the Swedes once.”
“Don’t disturb any messages,” said Robert the Fox.
Operations…operations…
They found themselves in an enormous room. It had a huge map of the world on a middle table. Apparently clerks with long poles pushed little models around on the map. There were sidewall maps and a balcony overlooking it. Miner’s lamps flicked over maps, models, and the remains of the dead. Impressive and well preserved. There were lots of clocks, all stopped long ago.
A crude, hastily made cylinder model rested on the map just east of the Rockies. A long pole was still touching it, the last action of a dead arm. Another map on the wall was plotting the course of something and the last “X” was straight above this base.
It was too much data to sort out in a moment. Jonnie went on looking.
They found themselves in a nearby room. It had lots of consoles. “Top Secret” had been the name of this room.
One console said “Local Defense” and had a chart and map over it. Jonnie went to it and looked closely. “TNW Minefields,” he read.
Then suddenly he found himself looking at marks of the string mines in the meadow below them. “TNW 15.”
There was a firing button: “TNW 15.” But there were rows and rows of these buttons.
TNW? TNW?
The reedy voice of the historian piped up behind him. ” ‘TNW’ means ‘tactical nuclear weapons.’ Those are the mines!”
Angus came over. “Och! Electrical firing buttons. You push the console button and up they go.”
“Might also be fused for contact,” said Jonnie cautiously. “No wonder the
Psychlos thought these mountains were radioactive!”
“What’s a ’silo’?” said the parson at another board. “It says ‘Silo 1,’ ‘Silo 2′ and so on.”
“A silo,” said Thor, “is where you keep wheat. They used to have them in Sweden. You put wheat in them for storage.”
“I can’t imagine why they’d be that interested in wheat. Look at the way these buttons are marked. ‘Standby,’ ‘Ready,’ ‘Fire.’ “
The historian was hastily rifling through a dictionary he habitually carried. He found it. ” ‘1. A cylindrical upright storage facility for wheat, grain, and other foodstuffs. 2. A large, underground structure for the storage and launching of a long-range ballistic missile.’ “
Jonnie reached out and grabbed the parson’s wrist. “Don’t touch that console! It could contain emergency systems about which we know nothing.” He turned, excited. “Robert, get this whole board and layout picto-recorded. We have to know the exact location of every silo on that board. Those missiles might have uranium in them!”
They were in a storeroom area now. Angus had found a huge ring of keys and was scampering ahead of Jonnie, opening doors. Robert the Fox was following more sedately; he had his worn old cape wrapped very tightly about him for it was bitterly cold in this place- probably the temperature seldom rose much, even in summer. Robert’s radio crackled occasionally as some Scot elsewhere reported in- the radios worked well underground, designed for miner use.
Jonnie had not yet found all he wanted by a long shot. The planning of a battle against an enemy whose battle tactics were all but unknown was a chancy business. And he did not yet know exactly how the Psychlos had done it. So he had half an ear to Robert’s radio and was not paying all that much attention to Angus.
They were at a heavy door that said “Arsenal” and Angus was changing keys about to open it. Some faint hope that it might contain nuclear weapons rose in Jonnie. The door opened.
Boxes! Cases! Endless rows of them!
Jonnie played his lamp over the stencils. He did not know what all these letters meant: this military certainly loved to obscure things under letters and numbers.
Angus danced up with a book, fluttering the well-preserved pages. ” ‘Ordnance, Types and Models’!” he crooned. “All the numbers and letters will be here. Even pictures!” “inventory that,” said Robert the Fox to a Scot beside him who was making lists.
“Bazooka!” said Angus. “There, up there! Those long boxes! ‘Antitank, armor-piercing missile projectiles.’ “
“Nuclear?” asked Jonnie. “Non-nuclear. Says so.”
“I think” said Robert, “this is just their local arsenal for possible base use. They wouldn’t be supplying the whole army from this spot.”
“Lots of it,” said Angus.
“Enough for a few thousand men,” said Robert.
“Can I open a box?” asked Angus to Robert.
“One or two for now just to ascertain condition,” said Robert and waved a couple of the following Scots forward to assist.
Angus was flipping through the catalogue, miner’s lamp dancing on the pages. “Ah, here! ‘Thompson submachine gun’…” He stopped and looked up at the boxes. He shook his head and looked back at the page. “No wonder!”
“No wonder what?” prompted Robert, a bit impatient. The recon drone must have passed overhead by this time, and they had had no lunch and needed a break to recharge their air bottles outside.
“That ammunition we found was very well preserved. Airtight. Well, it maybe had to be. This sub-Thompson was a century out of date when we found the truckload. They must have just been sending them to the cadets to practice with. They were relics!”
Jonnie was not about to try to fight Psychlos with sub-Thompsons. He started to pass on.
Boxes were being opened behind him.
Angus raced up. His lamp was shining on an all-metal, light-weight hand rifle. It was block-solid covered with grease that ages ago had formed into a tight, hard cast.
“Mark 50 assault rifle!” said Angus. “The last thing they issued! I can clean these up so they purr!”
Jonnie nodded. It was a sleek weapon. “MAGAZINE” said the door ahead of him. It was a doubly thick door. Meant ammunition. Maybe tactical nuclear weapons?
Angus let another Scot open it for him. He was back there rummaging in cases.
A box right ahead, standing among vast tiers of boxes, said “Ammunition, Mark 50 Assault.” Jonnie took a jimmy out of his belt and pried open the top. It was not airtight. The cardboard dividers were decayed and stained.
The brass was okay and the bullet clean, but the primer at the bottom told its tale. The ammunition was dud. He called Angus and showed him the cartridge.
They went on looking for nuclear weapons.
More storerooms and more storerooms.
And then pay dirt!
Jonnie found himself looking at literally thousands of outfits, neatly arranged on shelves, even with sizes, complete with shoes and face-plated helmets, packed in a kind of plastic that was airtight and nearly imperishable: “COMBAT RADIATION PROTECTION UNIFORMS.”
His excited hands ripped open a package. Lead-impregnated clothing. Lead-glass faceplates.
And in mountain camouflage: gray, tan, and green.
Riches! The one thing that would let them handle radiation!
He showed Robert the Fox. Robert put it on the radio as real news but told the others to go on with their own searches and inventories.
They were on their way outside for food and air when another piece of news came through. It was Dunneldeen. Apparently he had relieved Thor, who had to go on shift at the mine. Dunneldeen wasn’t even supposed to be there. “We got some great big huge security safes here,” Dunneldeen’s voice came over the radio. “No combination. One is marked ‘Top Secret Nuclear’ and ‘Classified Personnel Only.’ ‘Manuals.’ We need an explosives team. End com.”
He guided them to him. Robert the
Fox looked at Angus and Angus shook his head. “No keys,” said Angus.
The explosives team rigged nonflame blasting cartridges to the hinges and everyone went into the next corridor while the explosives team trailed wire. They held their ears. The concussion was head-splitting. A moment later they heard the crash of a door hitting the floor. The fire member of the team raced in with an extinguisher but it was not needed.
Lamps beamed through the settling dust.
Presently they were holding in their hands operations manuals, maintenance manuals, repair manuals, hundreds and hundreds of separate manuals that gave every particular of every nuclear device that had been built, how to set it, fire it, fuse and defuse it, store it, handle it, and safeguard it.
“Now we’ve got everything but the nuclear devices,” said Robert the Fox.
“Yes,” said Jonnie. “You can’t shoot with papers!”