Collected Short Fiction, page 481
“Thanks, beautiful!” It was a husky whisper. He watched her touch the tip of her fine wire to the railing he had almost grasped. It made a tiny sun of white atomic flame. “Stupid of me. Of course they had to use seetee walks and rails, even here.”
They swam back from the deadly ramp.
“I wonder what this thing was for?” Ann whispered.
“Dunno, darlin’.” His voice was shaken, still. “Far too big for a ship. Besides, it couldn’t land in any atmosphere—because one half or the other would react. Must have been assembled out at space.” He made a puzzled shrug, in the armor. “May find out, inside.”
They dropped, toward the distant floor.
He waited, this time, for Ann to test it with her wire. It didn’t react. They came down upon it. In the center was a massive cradle, which must have carried the weight of that vanished ship in its berth. About the cradle were six holes, some four meters wide, yawning black and somehow ominous in the floor.
Ring-shaped heaps of crushed rock surrounded the holes. Anders stooped clumsily to scoop up an armored gloveful of pebbles, and peered at them under his head lamp.
“Ore!” he exclaimed. “Mostly meteoric nickel-iron.”
He looked up again, with new understanding, at the winding ramp and the platforms and the giant valve half open to the stars—and it gave him a curious brief sense of relief to recognize red Antares in the jeweled curve of the Scorpion.
“Ore?” questioned Ann.
“These openings are ore chutes,” he told her. “The Invaders must have had a terrene ore ship with a seetee bridge, or maybe equipped with remote control. Anyhow, seems they collected terrene ore—meteor drift, and such—and dumped it through these chutes.”
He was peering through the nearest black opening, and his voice turned triumphant.
“Must have had mills and furnaces and terrene machine shops down below. This thing’s going to make a pretty prize for Interplanet, beautiful! Just the blueprints for it would be worth more billions th—”
Ann screamed.
She uttered no ladylike squeal or yelp, but a deep-lunged shriek, which carried terror at high tension. Anders groped for his automatic and lunged to her side. Then he saw that she was standing still, merely pointing.
“Wh—” he stammered. “What is it?”
“Sorry.” She made a nervous little laugh. “I’m all right. Only a little jumpy. I didn’t mean to scare you. But—” Her voice turned husky, and he heard her gulp. “But yonder is a dead man.”
The searching beam of Anders’ head lamp found the dim figure, where she pointed. It was near the mighty curve of the wall. The dead man wore bulky space armor, black-painted. He sat on the floor, with steel-clad legs spread wide apart. His arms were closed fast around a massive iron bar, holding it upright. At the top of the bar, just above his dead helmet light, was the thick polished disk of a seetee bedplate.
The sight was grotesque. Anders thought the dead man resembled some clumsy toy, embracing the stem of a queer metal mushroom. He choked back a shocked, mirthless laugh.
The man in the black armor was really dead. His rigid, unnatural posture made that certain. With the slow escape of body heat from the suit, his flesh was probably already frozen nearly as hard as the iron stalk he supported.
“It isn’t Cap’n Rob.” Ann’s whisper had a shaky relief. “But who could it be? And why was he just sitting there, holding that thing in his arms?”
“S’pose he’s one of the men from the Martian,” Anders said. “Might be von Falkenberg, himself. He wanted one of those bedplates for a model, like your friend McGee. Prob’ly intended to carry it out to his ship. Maybe weld it to the hull—’course he couldn’t take it inside.”
Their lights probed upward.
“There’s where he got it,” Ann whispered suddenly. “He cut it out from under that ramp.” From the quiver of her breathless voice knew she she shuddered. “But what killed her?”
“Prob’ly ran a hand cutting torch off his own battery pack,” Anders suggested. “Used more juice than he thought. The bedplate has a couple of tons of mass, with that long stem. Maybe he forgot this permanent field. Anyhow, when he got the thing cut loose, he didn’t have power left to lift it.”
Ann’s voice shivered. “And he couldn’t put it down!”
“Not without blowing himself through the roof.” Anders stared at the figure in black. “The ramp was too high to lean it on, and he couldn’t let the seetee part touch the floor. He just had to sit and hold it balanced on the stem, till his batteries gave out and his air unit quit. Waiting, maybe for his friends to come back. Only they didn’t come.”
Ann turned away quickly.
“A ghastly way to die!” she whispered. “Even for Franz von Falkenberg!”
Anders was bending closer, with his head lamp on that frozen seated figure.
“But it wasn’t von Falkenberg!” His voice was startled, puzzled. “Anyhow, this isn’t Martian armor. Jovian. For here’s the mark, in Russian, of the Vladimir Rich Ulianov Arsenal, on Europa. Don’t quite understand—unless Soviet agents were after von Falkenberg, too.”
“If the Jovians came, they’re dead!” Ann’s voice was high, breathless, dose to hysteria. “They’re all dead, now. Just like von Falkenberg, and dear old Cap’n Rob. Because this whole dreadful thing has been dead for eighty thousand years, and there’s nothing here but death.”
She caught his stiff glove, urgently.
“Please, Paul,” she begged him, “can’t we go back now, and get the Drakes? They know seetee. I think they could take one of those bedplates apart without getting killed. And that would be enough. There’s nothing else we need.”
He was silent, merely staring at the grotesque black thing sitting on the floor, supporting the rusted stem of that tall silver mushroom. She tugged at his glove, anxiously.
“Please,” she urged softly, “let’s get out while we can. This whole terrible machine is too strange, too different. We don’t know what it was for, or how it works. Anything we touch is likely to be deadly—like that railing. So, please!”
Anders turned away from the thing in black, to Ann. His helmet light fell through her face plate, so that he could see the brown curve of her cheek, and her freckled nose, and the frightened dark of her dilated, imploring eyes.
“Maybe you’ve got something, gorgeous.” His voice was grave and slow. “The thing makes me feel just the same way. I’m not quite sure we need anything out of it. Might be a stroke of luck for the human race, if the damned thing blew itself to neutrons.”
His eyes left her taut brown face. They followed the thin white beam of his head lamp, tracing that winding footway up and up into the thickening dark. The builders of it had used no steps, and the silver-colored railing seemed too high for men.
He lost the ramp in the blackness above, and his eyes hurried back to Ann. It was good to see the warm human curves of her brown cheek and forehead, and even the freckles on her nose. He squeezed her clutching glove.
“Don’t know what they were,” he told her slowly. “Seems they must have been different in quite a lot of ways. Science and culture must have been totally strange. Hard to say what an injection of their dead culture would do to ours.”
She watched him, anxious and silent.
“Dunno.” He shrugged, in the bulky armor. “No social philosopher, gorgeous. Don’t even know how to approach the question, except in engineering terms. But I do know that when you put together unlike things or forces, you’re apt to get a reaction.”
Her intent face seemed puzzled.
“Constructive, sometimes,” he continued softly! “Sometimes destructive. Sometimes neither. Unlike poles attract. A light metal and a poison gas give you common salt, with a good deal of heat and violence. Paragravity plus the old corporation laws made Interplanet. Men in high space make spatial engineers. One terrene ship plus one seetee meteor equals one blinding flash. So what will you get when you add the Invaders’ science to our civilization?”
“I don’t know, Paul.”
Ann’s hand was tense in his, and he felt her shiver. Her silvered armor drew closer to him. He saw her frightened eyes flash uneasily toward the man in black sitting with the fatal metal mushroom in his arms.
“But you will come?” she begged. “Let’s get away!”
“ ’Fraid not, gorgeous.” He shrugged again. “Don’t mind my speculations. I’m just an engineer, and I’ve got a job to do. Don’t know about the consequences, but they’re outside my field.”
He looked at the luminous watch on his sleeve.
“Let’s try the ore bins, next. Bound to be terrene. Want to find out what they did with this machine. And we still have the most of our twenty-four hours. Want to come along?”
“Please—” She choked off her breathless protest, when she saw that he was moving. “I’m coming, Paul.”
She followed him away from the man in black, to the lip of the nearest dark opening. He was stooping over it, peering down into the chasm beneath the floor. Dimly, far beneath, he could see the gray pile of ore, heaped against vast dark walls.
“On we go, beautiful,” he said cheerfully. “For dear old Interplanet—”
Stepping over the rim, he heard the dry little sound in her throat, as if she had tried to scream and couldn’t. He felt the quick snatch of her hand, at the neck strap of his armor. The thrust of her suit hauled him back.
“Now listen, gorgeous.” He grinned at her. “If you can’t take it, you’ll just have to go back and wait with Protopopov—”
Still she couldn’t speak, but he followed her pointing sleeve. He saw where his foot had started a little heap of broken rock to running in a thin stream down the chute. But what was strange about that?
“Don’t you see?” Her voice came at last, dry and frightened. “Don’t you see what happens to the pebbles?”
XIII.
For a moment he stared blankly. Then at last he saw that each little falling rock, when it had dropped a certain short distance below the floor, began to crumble and dissolve. Hard nuggets of metoric iron fell into fine gray dust.
Anders suddenly wanted to sit down. His skin felt clammy, and he thought he was going to be sick. He pressed down with his chin, to open the receiver in the front of his helmet intended for such emergencies. But the nausea passed, and he tried to grin at Ann.
“It didn’t touch you?” she whispered.
He shook his head, in the big helmet. His throat was too tight and dry to let him speak. He kicked weakly, to start another little slide of rock fragments into that black pit. With a sick fascination, he watched them break into impalpable dust.
“Clever gadget,” he gulped at last. “Used to hope I could hit on something like it, for our peegee refineries. S’pose it’s just some sort of field that temporarily breaks molecular bonds. Stuff just falls to individual atoms!”
“Please,” Ann whispered shakily. “Now won’t you come back to the ship?”
“Embarrass me.” He made a hollow little laugh. “Saving my life every fifteen minutes. But Interplanet is going to need this little gadget, y’know, nearly as much as that bedplate. Handy for mining, and drilling terraformer shafts, as well as milling ore. Billions in it—every shareholder can keep another mistress and grow another chin.” He managed to grin. “Thanks again, gorgeous, but I can’t stop now.”
“Oh, Paul, I . . . I hate you? Damn Interplanet!”
Then she was silent behind him, as he moved away. He looked back. In the clumsy armor, she looked very small and lonely in that huge dark pit. Suddenly he wanted very much to go back to her. But she was still the enemy.
“Sorry, beautiful,” he called. “Maybe you shouldn’t keep saving me.”
She made an angry little gasp, and followed him.
He lifted off the floor, toward a broad projecting platform twenty meters above. It was built against the rusty wall, and he saw no bright bedplates under it. He knew it must be terrene. But Ann swam silently ahead, and he waited for her to test it with the wire.
“Safe,” she said stiffly.
They dropped on the end of it. The bright-railed seetee footway sloped close above, supported on dark-stemmed silver mushrooms. There was a little landing, where the Invaders must have stood to watch their terrene machines on this platform. The landing seemed too narrow for human comfort, and the railing looked too high for men.
“A terrene dock.” Anders flashed his head lamp about the long rusty platform. “They must have used it to load terrene machinery and supplies into the ore ship.”
His searching light found a broad black doorway yawning in the rusty wall behind it. Two narrow railways were laid out through the doorway, across the platform. The rails ended sharply, and he thought they must have joined others on the vanished ship. His light found the black shape of a small rail car, and he moved quickly toward it.
“Now we’re finding things!” he called cheerfully to Ann. “Must have had their terrene repair shops and warehouses, for the ship, somewhere beyond that door. All we’ve got to do is follow the tracks.”
“Stop!” she whispered suddenly. “I can’t scream any more.”
But he had already halted. At the side of the rusty little car, something made a queer black heap on the dock. That something had been a man in dirigible armor. Both legs were sliced cleanly off, close to the body. The blood had dried, in the vacuum of space, to a thin brown stain spattered on the tracks.
Anders went up to it, gingerly, in spite of Ann’s sharp cry of protest. He found the little silver plate on the breast of the black camouflaged armor. It, too, had been manufactured at the Vladimir Ilich Ulianov Arsenal.
He turned cautiously to the car. Its low metal bed carried a bulky machine. A number of round shafts projected through the top of the rectangular metal case. They had triangular heads, as if shaped to be turned with a special tool. Sunk in the end of it toward the dead man he saw two hollow copper-colored cups, each with a tiny diamond point projecting from the bottom.
“Must be some sort of mining machine,” he decided at last. “Prob’ly used that bondbreaking field, projected to make a cutting blade. Must have made it to slice up meteors too big to handle. Our Jovian friend didn’t know it was loaded.”
Ann looked uneasily at her watch.
“Now, Paul,” she whispered hopefully, “can’t we go?”
He had started around the end of the little car. Her voice turned him back, in front of the dark yawning doorway. Behind the oval lens, his light found Ann’s taut protesting face.
“I’m going on,” he told her. “Hood will want more notes and pictures. Still got to find out what the whole damned thing was built for. Better wait for me, beautiful. I’ll try to be careful—but don’t you forget the time.”
He was about to go on, but her anxious face held his glance. The stray wisp of dark hair across her brown forehead made her look like a lost, frightened child. She seemed tired, and hurt, and desperately afraid. He saw quick tears start into her gray eyes. He expected some hysterical outburst. But she only made a bleak little nod, and started to follow him.
Then something moved.
The chance sweep of Anders’ head lamp caught the movement. It was on another projecting platform, far across the great pit, and far above them. The beam was too faint, at that distance, to show any details. And the moving thing dropped quickly out of sight.
Anders was frozen. A tingling paralysis seized him. Sudden sweat chilled him. For a moment he couldn’t move, or speak, or even breathe. Because the moving thing was one of the Invaders.
That was his first shocking apprehension. His fevered imagination tried to turn the furtive shadow he had glimpsed, into something that used a sloping ramp instead of steps, something that could reach a handrail far too high for a man.
“Ann!” He got back his breath, and whispered to her. She hadn’t seen it. She didn’t understand, but now that icy paralysis was broken. He caught her glove and pulled her flat on the rusty platform, close to the little car.
“What is it?” she gasped.
“Thought it was one of the Invaders.” He made a weak little laugh, at his own alarm. “Stupid of me, because it’s hiding on that terrene dock. Gave me quite a jolt. S’pose it’s just a man.”
Perhaps, he thought fleetingly, there was little reason for his belief. Such men as Franz von Falkenberg were deadly as anything he knew. But he was used to dealing with men, and he couldn’t even imagine anything to fit the doors and ramps and railings that the Invaders must have used.
“Cut off your light,” he whispered.
He snapped off his own, and rose cautiously. It gave him a cold, lonely unease to be thus cut off from Ann. He was glad to feel her glove touch his armored sleeve. For a moment the pit seemed utterly dark, save for the stars beyond the valve. Then another red point came out, nearer, trembling with transmitted speech.
“Ann?” The voice was a gentle drawl, “Ann O’Banion?”
Her own helmet light flashed on again.
“Cap’n Rob?” she cried breathlessly. “It’s really you?”
She lifted away from the platform. Anders snapped on his own head lamp, and soared after her. She dropped to that higher dock, where Rob McGee was waiting. Stubby in his silvered armor, the little spaceman seemed hardly as tall as Ann. He waddled nimbly to meet her, and reached out his gloves. Through his thick lens, Anders had a glimpse of his square leathery face, his squinted eyes bright with tears of joy.
This platform, Anders saw, was like the one they had left. The spiral footway slanted over it, with another oddly narrow landing from which the tall Invaders must have watched the terrene machines they had built but must not touch. Two narrow rusty railways ran back across the platform, through a broad doorway into the dark.
Anders dropped watchfully to the other end of the dock, beyond the little railways. He saw that McGee wore an antique space pistol, snapped to his belt. Anders leveled his own spatial automatic.
“H’lo, McGee,” he said curtly. “Keep your hands where they are. Let me take your gun.”
