Collected Short Fiction, page 480
He heard the quick little patch of her breath. He thought she was going to speak, but she didn’t. Tears made a bright sudden glitter in her eyes. After a moment she gulped, and turned quickly to unlock the door.
XI.
The tiny elevator dropped Anders to the after control room., Smaller than the bridge, it was padded with the same gray sealing plastic, crowded with duplicate instruments. Commander Protopopov turned, with his clumsy bearlike shamble, from the periscope hood. His flat animal eyes held a bright moronic curiosity.
“I’m going off the ship, commander,” Anders told him. “You’ll take command until I return. Hold a position twenty kilometers off that object. Permit no other men off the ship. I’m going alone, except for Miss O’Banion.”
“Aye, sir.” The huge exile made his blubbery chuckle. “So her pretty face is your safe conduct into the Martian citadel? Ah, captain, you’re clever with the women. I envy your technique!”
Anders managed a bleak little grin.
“Enemy action is still very likely, commander.” His voice rapped sharply. “What sort of action, I don’t quite know. You will take every precaution. Possibly the ship may have been only a decoy, intended to lure us into the range of some unfamiliar weapon.”
His own suggestion sent a chilly tingle down Anders’ spine. Something had happened to the Martian’s crew. They must have been dead or helpless or gone, before the Challenge fired. He couldn’t guess what McGee might have found and learned to use. This strange derelict of an alien culture might carry weapons completely unknown.
“Wait twenty-four hours, commander.” His voice turned brittle again. “If in that time we have not called or returned, you may consider that we are lost. Don’t send a rescue party. And don’t, under any circumstances, approach that object nearer than twenty kilometers.”
“Aye, sir,” the croaking whisper answered.
“If we don’t come back within twenty-four hours,” Anders continued, “it will be your duty to return to Pallasport at full acceleration. Maintain photophone silence. Keep the crew aboard when you land. You report to Commissioner Hood, in person. Give him the position and a full description of this object, as you have observed it. And tell him that it is what he sent me to find. You’ll remember that, commander?”
“Aye, captain.” Protopopov made his trained-animal salute, and his dark putty face brightened with conclusions of his own. “And Hood will order the Guard to attack it. That will mean war. And war means promotion!”
His hollow chuckle bubbled.
“You can trust me, captain!”
“Sure.” Anders grinned. “But I intend to come back.”
Ann O’Banion was waiting for him on the valve deck, a stiff and clumsy-seeming figure in the silvered bulk of her dirigible armor. Her gray eyes smiled through her face plate, watching him climb and twist into his own.
He snapped equipment to his belt: a heavy, lead-walled little spatial camera; fluorescent pencil and paper; a spare plug-in head lamp, more powerful than the adjustable photophone lights; his spatial automatic. The telephone rang. Muratori reported that the cruiser was in position.
Anders hung up the telephone. With an armored glove, he snapped his face plate shut. Ann followed him into the air lock. The inner valve clanged. Roaring economy pumps sucked the air from about them—and all sound with it, so they were left in a chasm of silence. At last the massive outer valve swung open, noiseless as a shadow. They swam out of the ship, into diamond-sifted night.
Anders looked back.
For a moment the Challenge was huge behind him. Its long guns were immense in silhouette, against the pale Galactic clouds. Somehow, they gave him a shock of unreasonable dread. He clutched unconsciously at his futile pistol. But it was much too late, he told himself, to mistrust his fellow officers.
The great valve slammed silently behind them, and the last glint of metal vanished. The camouflaged cruiser was only a long black shadow, across the glowing mist of stars. It dwindled rapidly. When he looked back again, he couldn’t find it.
The Sun struck against their backs, out of the empty north. The black ocean of space seemed about to drown its tiny disk. Its own cold rays, Anders knew, took nearly an hour on the way. It didn’t warm the insulated armor. He knew that the temperature was automatically right, but still something made him shiver.
The red glow of Ann’s photophone light was only a warm red star, a little nearer than the rest, flying beside him. A wave of bleak loneliness made him glad that she had come, in spite of all the risk.
He wanted to speak, just to feel the warmth of her voice. But loneliness put a choking constriction in his throat. The thing ahead struck him with an impact of frightened wonder. He couldn’t speak.
Against the stars, and the thin silver fog of suns too remote for the human eye to separate, the thing swiftly grew. The dome and the rim and the mighty curving ribs struck back the pale sunlight with a heatless glitter. The five golden spikes were bright enigmas. The rusted end was a red-black shadow, against the crystal black of space.
Anders stared at the deep dark scar, still faintly glowing with deadly radiations, where the Martian cruiser had plowed up annihilating fire. Again he was lost in brooding puzzlement, about the fate of the Martian’s crew. Franz von Falkenberg was clever, and he must have known seetee. Yet something about this machine must have destroyed the spy and all his men.
“Paul?”
Ann’s tiny muffled voice startled him at first, and then he was infinitely glad to hear it. He turned his plunging suit to face the red flickering point of her photophone light, inquiring anxiously:
“What is it, Ann?”
“Nothing.” Her troubled voice was clear in his helmet, when the pickup cells faced her. “Only I wanted to talk to you. That thing makes me feel so terribly young and small and lonely. I’m frightened, Paul—but still glad you let me come. Please, you don’t mind talking?”
“Not a bit, beautiful. Felt the same way. Her stiff silver sleeve pointed ahead.
“Queer, to think how old it is.” She spoke in an awed, hushed whisper. “It has been moving on this same orbit, just out from the Sun and back again, for twenty times the length of human civilization. So Jong it makes you shudder!”
Still it grew, and she made a little breathless sound.
“It’s so big—I had no idea!”
His engineer’s mind was busy, automatically making estimates of the machine’s dimensions, from the angle it had subtended at twenty kilometers.
“The long axis must be about six hundred meters,” he told her. “Between those cylinders—ports or valves, whatever they are. The short axis would be something like three hundred meters. Those needles are about that long. Those ribs must be twenty meters thick. The thing’s colossal!”
“Cap’n Rob, you know, said it had a mass of eighty million tons.” Her voice was troubled again. “What do you think became of him, Paul?”
“Let’s go on around it,” he suggested cheerfully. “May find McGee on the other side, safe aboard the Good-by Jane.”
Anders wasn’t sure, however, that he really wanted to find that odd little asterite. The back of his neck still prickled too easily, at the memory of that dead, drifting ship. McGee’s mathematical intuition had always seemed uncanny, and now there was no telling what he might have learned from this relic of an alien science.
They circled the machine, now only a kilometer away. They didn’t find the Good-by Jane. But Ann caught her breath, with a soft frightened gasp. Her armored sleeve pointed. Anders saw another dark scar, deeply grooved into the mirrorlike dome.
“That was the Jane!” The red undulating glow brought her crushed whisper. “I see it, now. Cap’n Rob tried to take shelter behind the machine. But von Falkenberg found him, and the guns battered him against it.”
“Might be, beautiful,” Anders cheerfully agreed. “Or might have been just a terrene meteor. Let’s go a little closer.”
The small red star of her helmet light swam on beside him. He felt grateful for its presence, even if she had to be an enemy. She spoke again, wonderingly:
“What makes half of it so bright, when the rest looks so rusty and old?”
“Just wondering,” he said. “Time to fire a shot.”
He moved a little ahead. Unsnapping the light but powerful spatial automatic from his belt, he aimed at the center of the rusty dome. The little weapon jerked silently in his stiff glove, and spat a thin yellow flame.
He watched for the bullet to strike, and saw nothing. He fired again, at one of the great rusted ribs, and then at the polar cylinder. Still nothing. But a fourth bullet, shot against the silver edge of the rim, made a silent blue explosion that blinded him.
“That’s it, beautiful!” he called softly. “Maybe they didn’t know how to put that plating on terrene metal. Or maybe the thing got caught in a whiff of seetee gas, when the planets collided. But anyhow it’s half terrene, and half seetee!”
He put back the gun.
“And now, gorgeous, we’re going to find the bedplate, for dear old Interplanet.” He grinned through the oval leaded lens. “S’pose that will be at the rim, where the two halves come together?”
Ann didn’t say anything.
As they dropped together toward the rim, Anders felt a new awed sense of the machine’s colossal size. For that massive circling band stood out a full twenty meters above the curve of the unlike domes. It was double, really. For the thin black line that seemed to separate the rusted ring from the polished one, was actually a space of more than half a meter.
Anders tipped his flying suit, to drop feet-first on the corroded ring. His gloved thumb was on the peegee rheostat, ready to anchor him down with a paragravity field. He was peering into that space between the unlike rings, trying to see what held them apart.
But Ann flashed in front of him.
“Just a minute, reckless.” She mocked his own tone. “I thought you’d have a trick or two to learn. You’ll find out you can’t take anything for granted, not with seetee.”
Carefully poised, above the broad pitted face of the rim, she unhooked a bit of thin wire from her belt, and reached out to touch it. Nothing happened.
“It’s all right,” she said.
Anders grinned, and they alighted on the ring. The rust-eaten surface of it was like a road, twenty meters wide, curving over the top of a rounded metal hill. Anders moved cautiously to the space that separated it from the other, silver-colored ring.
“Those are the bedplates!” Ann cried softly. “See—those disks!”
Then he saw that the narrow gap between the two unlike rings was spaced with thousands of thick disks. They had the same bright polish as the seetee ring, and they were fastened to it. But from the face of each thrust a thick stem of rusty terrene metal, welded to the terrene ring.
Leaning as close as he dared, Anders tried to see the joining line, where the projecting stem of the nearest unit came together with the face of the disk. The joint was so close he could see no space between.
That fact startled him, and he moved back suddenly. The terrene stem was in visible contact with the seetee disk. He knew it must have been there for many thousand years. Yet he couldn’t resist a feeling that they ought to erupt into annihilating flame.
“Look!” Ann’s voice was breathless. “There’s where Cap’n Rob cut out the bedplate he was going to bring us—before von Falkenberg caught him.”
Anders followed her along the terrene rim. She pointed, and he saw where the silvered seetee guard flange had been cut away, to make room for a man to slip down between the rings.
He thought it must have been a precarious feat, but one of the units had been removed. Three thick seetee straps, which anchored the meter-wide disk, had been burned in two. The heavy terrene stem had obviously been cut with an oxyhydrogen torch.
Anders backed cautiously away from his examination of that evidence, to find Ann looking at him. Beyond the heavy lens, he thought her gray eyes were quizzical. Her helmet light quivered with transmitted speech.
“Well, genius!” Her voice was softly mocking. “You’ve found the bedplate, for dear old Interplanet. So what are you going to do with it now?”
“Don’t quite know,” he told her gravely. “S’pose the only way is to take one of them apart, to see just what keeps it from blowing up. But that strikes me as a somewhat ticklish job.”
“It would be.” She nodded gravely, beyond the lens. “There must be some terrific tension, holding the surfaces from real contact. If you happened to release it, the thing would probably explode like a shipload of tritonite.”
“ ’Magine so, beautiful. What would you suggest?”
“I’m not working for Interplanet,” she told him sweetly. “It’s all your problem, smart-and-handsome.”
“And I intend to solve it,” he assured her curtly. “That cylinder looks like a valve, to me. The answer may be waiting, right inside. Coming, Miss O’Banion?”
XII.
Their dirigible suits lifted away from that broad ring of rusted metal. Anders saw that the red warm star of Ann’s helmet light was flying very close beside him. Her low voice reached him:
“I’m coming, Paul. And I don’t mind, really, if you want to call me beautiful.”
He laughed, with the sudden release of nervous tension. Impulsively, he reached out and caught the glove of her flying armor. She clung to his hand, as they soared over the immense curve of the rusted dome.
“Thanks.” He grinned through the leaded glass. “And glad you’re with me, beautiful. This thing’s so strange and old, it makes you feel uncomfortable. Feeling it’s almost haunted, by the ghosts of the things that built it. Beside them, you’re a very friendly enemy.”
They came over the dome, back in sight of the point where they had left the Challenge. He couldn’t help searching the star clouds of Andromeda, hoping to see its shadow. But of course it was much too far away.
They dropped toward the polar cylinder.
“Better let me go ahead,” he urged her. “Something happened to those Martians—we don’t know what. And if—” He paused a little, grinning. “Well, gorgeous, just be sure you’re back on the Challenge in plenty of time. Y’see, Protopopov has orders to leave us, if we aren’t back in twenty-four hours.”
Her glove clung tightly to his armored hand for a moment, and then she let it go. Once more she swam ahead of him, to test the rim of the cylinder with the thin wire. It didn’t react, and they alighted upon it.
“Odd!” Anders whispered. “Y’notice you don’t need your own peegee unit, to hold you down. This thing’s got a field of its own. Still active, after eighty thousand years. The Invaders must have conquered the field-loss problem, that we’ve been fighting ever since Maxim-Gore discovered paragravity.”
The thin, heatless rays of the far-off Sun still found them, on the lip of the hollow cylinder. But the inside, lit only by the stars, was a chasm of black mystery. They turned up their helmet lights for illumination, and. Anders plugged in the extra head lamp he had brought. But still the pale uneasy beams seemed too feeble to dispel the frozen, age-clotted shadows that filled the cylinder.
Ann stood on the broad rusty lip, staring down the rosy searching beam from her helmet. Her smallness, even in the bulging armor, gave Anders a new sense of the machine’s immense size. The black opening, he thought, must be fifty meters across.
As his eyes became accustomed to the fainter light, he made out huge flaps and hinges of rusty metal, down inside the lip. It was oddly difficult for him to puzzle out the way they worked—and he realized, with a chilly discomfort, that the very thought-patterns of their designers must have been completely alien. But after a moment he saw that they were the parts of an immense valve, which had closed the top of the cylinder. The valve was half open, now.
He moved toward it.
“Wait, Paul!” He could tell from Ann’s strained voice that she was trying not to shudder. “Do you think we’d better go on?” Then she must have seen that he didn’t mean to stop. “Wait for me!”
She leaped after him, off the rim. Slowly, resisting the pull of that strange paragravity field with the power of their armor, they floated down between the half-opened leaves of that tremendous valve.
The inside of the cylinder was a black enormous cavern. At first their feeble probing lights found nothing but further darkness. Slowly, however, Anders’ searching eyes became adjusted.
A long spiral footway ran around and around the vast curve of the wall, slanting downward. At intervals there were level platforms, with black doorways beyond them. The dim floor of the pit was a full hundred meters beneath.
“A berth!” he whispered suddenly. “This pit is just a berth for a spaceship—and it’s big enough to hold the Challenge a dozen times!”
He swam toward the nearest platform.
“These must have come level with the valves.” His voice was quick, excited. “And the thing—the Invaders—went up and down that narrow walk.” He remembered that other spiral way, in von Falkenberg’s film of the broken golden needle, and tried to picture this berth as it must have been in use.
“I wonder what they were?” His voice slowed and fell again, to a burden of ancient mystery. “Seems they preferred a sloping ramp, to steps. Some of these doorways look too tall and too narrow, for men. And that handrail is too high—”
“Don’t, Paul!”
Unthinkingly, he had reached out to that bright railing above the spiral ramp, where those other things had walked. Ann checked him, with that sharp cry of warning, and the shoulder of her darting armor brushed him away.
“Eh!” he gasped. “What—”
Then his startled voice dried up. For he saw the bright silver-colored disks of the bedplates, like geometric mushrooms on long rusty stems, that supported the curving footway. He saw that it didn’t touch the walls, and noticed the inside guard rails.
