The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (72 page)

Even so near, no features, no natural formations appeared. There was only a vast brightness below him. He could make no guess as to his height nor—after he had slowed until the wind against his body was not detectable through the spacesuit—of his speed with relation to the ground. It was extraordinary. It occurred to him to drop something to get some idea, even if a vague one, of his altitude above the ground.

He did, an oil soaked rag from the tool kit. It went fluttering down and down—and abruptly vanished, relatively a short distance below him. It had not landed. It had been blotted out.

Tired as he was, it took him minutes to think of turning on the suit microphone which would enable him to hear sounds in this extraordinary world. But when he flicked the switch he heard a dull, droning, moaning noise which was unmistakable. Wind. Below him there was a sandstorm. He was riding just above its upper surface. He could not see the actual ground because there was an opaque wall of sand between. There might be five hundred feet between him and solidity, or five thousand, or there might be no actual solid, immovable ground at all. In any case, he could not possibly land.

He rose again and headed for the dark area he had noted. But a space skid is not intended for use in atmosphere. Its power is great, to be sure, when its power unit is filled. But Stan had come a very long way indeed since his departure from the
Stallifer
. And his drive had blown a fuse, once, which cost him power. Unquestionably, the blown fuse had been caused by the impinging of a Bowdoin-Hall field upon the skid. Some other space ship that the
Stallifer
, using Khor Alpha as a course guide, had flashed past the one planet system at many hundred times the speed of light. The pulsations of its drive field had struck the skid and drained its drive of power, and unquestionably had registered the surge. But it was not likely that it would be linked with Stan’s disappearance. The other ship might be headed for a star system which was light centuries from Earth, and a minute—relatively minute—joggle of its meters would not be a cause for comment. The real seriousness of the affair was that the skid had drained power before its fuse blew.

That property of a Bowdoin-Hall field, incidentally—its trick of draining power from any drive unit in its range—is the reason that hampers its use save in deep space. Liners have to be elaborately equipped with fuses lest in shorting each other’s drive they wreck their own. In interplanetary work, fuses are not even practical because they might be blown a hundred times in a single voyage. Within solar systems high frequency pulsations are used, so that no short can last more than the hundred-thousandth of a second, in which not even allotropic graphite can be ruined.

Stan, then, was desperately short of power and had to use it in a gravitational field which was prodigally wasteful of it. He had to rise high above the sandstorm before he saw the black area again at the planet’s very rim. He headed for it in the straightest of straight lines. As he drove, the power gauge needle flickered steadily over toward zero. A meteor miner does not often use as much as one earth gravity acceleration, and Stan had to use that much merely to stay aloft. The black area, too, was all of a hundred-odd miles away, and after some millions of miles of space travel, the skid was hard put to make it.

He dived for the black thing as it drew near, and on his approach it appeared simply impossible. It was a maze, a grid, of rectangular girders upholding a seemingly infinite number of monstrous dead-black slabs. There was a single layer of those slabs, supported by innumerable spiderly slender columns. Here, in the dawnbelt, there was no wind and Stan could see clearly. Sloping down, he saw that ten-foot columns of some dark metal rose straight and uncompromising from a floor of sand to the height of three hundred feet or more. At their top was the grid and the slabs, forming a roof some thirty stories above the ground. There were no underfloors, no crossways, no structural features of any sort between the sand from which the columns rose and that queer and discontinuous roof.

Stan landed on the ground at the structure’s edge. He could see streaks and bars of sky between the slabs. He looked down utterly empty aisles between the corridors and saw nothing but the columns and the roof until the shafts merged in the distance. There was utter stillness here. The sand was untroubled and undisturbed. If the structure were a shelter, it sheltered nothing. Yet it stretched for at least a hundred miles in at least one direction, as he had seen from aloft. As nearly as he could tell, there was no reason for its existence and no purpose it could serve. Yet it was not the abandoned skeleton of something no longer used. It was plainly in perfect repair. The streaks of sky to be seen between its sections were invariably exact in size and alignment. They were absolutely uniform. There was no dilapidation and no defect anywhere. The whole structure was certainly artificial and certainly purposeful, and it implied enormous resources of civilization. But there was no sign of its makers, and Stan could not even guess at the reason for its construction.

But he was too worn out to guess. On board the
Stallifer
, he’d been so sick with rage that he could not rest. On the space skid, riding in an enormous loneliness about a dwarf sun whose single planet had never been examined by men, he had to be alert. He had to find the system’s one planet, and then he had to make a landing with practically no instruments. When he landed at the base of the huge grid, he examined his surroundings wearily, but with the cautious suspicion needful on an unknown world. Then he made the sort of camp the situation seemed to call for. He clamped the space skid and his supplies to his spacesuit belt, lay down hard by one of the columns, and incontinently fell asleep.

He was wakened by a horrific roaring in his earphones. He lay still for one instant. When he tried to stir, it was only with enormous difficulty that be could move his arms and legs. He felt as if he were gripped by quicksand. Then suddenly, he was wide awake. He fought himself free of clinging encumbrances. He had been half-buried in sand. He was in the center of a roaring swirling sand devil which broke upon the nearby column and built up mounds of sand and snatched them away again, and flung great masses crazily in every direction.

As the enigmatic structure had moved out of the dawn belt into the morning, howling winds had risen. All the fury of a tornado, all the stifling deadliness of a sandstorm, beat upon the base of the grid. And from what Stan had seen when he first tried to land, this was evidently the normal daily weather of this world. If this were a sample merely of morning winds, by mid-day existence should be impossible. Stan looked at the chrono. He had slept less than three hours. He made a loop of line from the abandon ship kit and got it about the nearest pillar. He drew himself to that tall column. He tried to find a lee side, but there was none. The wind direction changed continually. He debated struggling further under the shelter of the monstrous roof. He stared up, estimatingly—

He saw slabs tilt. In a giant section whose limits he could not determine, he saw the rectangular sections of the roof revolve in strict unison. From a position parallel to the ground, they turned until the light of the sky shone down unhindered. Vast masses of sand descended—deposited on the slabs by the wind, and now dumped down about the columns’ bases. Then wind struck anew with a concentrated virulence, and the space between the columns became filled with a whirling giant eddy that blotted out everything. It was a monster whirlwind that spun crazily in its place for minutes, and then roared out to the open again. In its violence it picked Stan up bodily, with the skid and abandon ship kit still clamped to his spacesuit. But for the rope about the column he would have been swept away and tossed insanely into the smother of sand that reached to the horizon.

After a long time, he managed to take up some of the slack of the rope; to bind himself and his possessions more closely to the column which rose into the smother overhead. Later still, he was able to take up more. In an hour, he was bound tightly to the pillar and was no longer flung to and fro by the wind. Then he dozed off again. It was uneasy slumber. It gave him little rest. Once a swirling sand devil gouged away the sand beneath him so that he and his gear hung an unguessable distance above solidity, perhaps no more than a yard or so, but perhaps much more. Later he woke to find the sand piling up swiftly about him, so that he had to loosen his rope and climb wearily as tons of fine, abrasive stuff—it would have been strangling had he needed to breathe it direct—were flung upon him. But he did sleep from time to time.

Then night fell. The winds died down from hurricane intensity to no more than gale force. Then to mere frantic gusts. Then—the sun had set on the farther side of the huge structure to which he had tied himself—then there was a period when a fine whitish mist seemed to obscure all the stars. It gradually faded, and he realized that it contained particles of so fine a dust that it hung in the air long after the heavier stuff had settled.

He released himself from the rope about the pillar. He stood, a tiny figure beside the gargantuan columns of black metal which rose toward the stars. The stars themselves shone down brightly, brittly, through utterly clear air. There were no traces of cloud formation following the storm of the day. It was obvious that this was actually the normal weather of this planet. By day, horrific winds and hurricanes. By night, a vast stillness. The small size and indistinctness of the icecap he had seen was assurance that there was nowhere on the planet any sizable body of water to moderate the weather. With such storms, inhabitants were unthinkable. Life of any sort was out of the question. But if there were anything certain in the cosmos, it was that the structure at whose base he stood was artificial!

He flicked on his suit radio. Static only. Sand particles in dry air, clashing against each other, would develop changes to produce just the monstrous hissing sounds his earphones gave off. He flicked off the radio and opened his face plate. Cold dry air filled his lungs.

There were no inhabitants. There could not be any. But there was this colossal artifact of unguessable purpose. There was no life on this planet, but early during today’s storm—and he suspected at other times when he could neither see nor hear—huge areas of the roof plates had turned together to dump down their accumulated loads of sand. As he breathed in the first breaths of cold air, he heard a roaring somewhere within the forest of pillars. At a guess, it was another dumping of sand from the roof. It stopped. Another roaring, somewhere else. Yet another. Section by section, area by area, the sand that had piled on the roof at the top of the iron columns was dumped down between the columns’ bases.

Stan flicked on the tiny instrument lights and looked at the motor of the space skid. The needle was against the pin at zero. He considered, and shrugged. Rob Torren would come presently to fight him to the death. But it would take the
Stallifer
ten days or longer to reach Earth, then three or four days for the microscopic examination of every part of the vast ship in grim search for him. Then there’d be an inquiry. It might last a week or two weeks or longer. The finding would be given after deliberation which might produce still another delay of a week or even a month. Rob Torren would not be free to leave Earth before then. And then it would take him days to obtain a space yacht and—because a yacht would be slower than the
Stallifer
—two weeks or so to get back here. Three months in all perhaps. Stan’s food wouldn’t last that long. His water supply wouldn’t last nearly as long at that. If he could get up to the icecap there would be water, and on the edge of the ice he could plant some of the painstakingly developed artificial plants whose seeds were part of every abandon ship kit. They could live and produce food under almost any set of planetary conditions. But he couldn’t reach the polar cap without power the skid didn’t have.

He straddled the little device. He pointed it upward. He rose sluggishly. The absurd little vehicle wabbled crazily. Up, and up, and up toward the uncaring stars. The high thin columns of steel seemed to keep pace with him. The roof of this preposterous shed loomed slowly nearer, but the power of the skid was almost gone. He was ten feet below the crest when diminishing power no longer gave thrust enough to rise. He would hover here for seconds, and then drift back down again to the sand, for good.

He flung his kit of food. Upward. It sailed over the sharp edge of the roof and landed there. The skid was thrust down by the force of the throw, but it had less weight to lift. It bounced upward, soared above the roof, and just as its thrust dwindled again, Stan landed it.

He found—nothing.

To be exact, he found the columns were joined by massive girders of steel fastening them in a colossal open grid. Upon those girders which ran in a line due north and south—reckoning the place of sunset to be west—huge flat plates of metal were slung, having bearings which permitted them to be rotated at the will of whatever unthinkable constructor had devised them. There were small bulges which might contain motors for the turning. There was absolutely nothing but the framework and the plates and the sand some three hundred feet below. There was no indication of the purpose of the plates or the girders or the whole construction. There was no sign of any person or creature using or operating the slabs. It appeared that the grid was simply a monotonous, featureless, insanely tedious construction which it would have taxed the resources of Earth to build—it stretched far, far beyond the horizon—but did nothing and had no purpose save to gather sand on its upper surfaces and from time to time dump that sand down to the ground. It did not make sense.