Collected Short Fiction, page 483
It was good to breathe. The gray fog was clearing, but still Anders didn’t want to move. He just lay there for a time, looking up through the lenses at her face. He liked the curve of her tanned cheek, and the tilt of her freckled nose.
He tried to speak again.
“Ann—” Her gray eyes, looking down at him, were clear and kind and honest. She waited, but he couldn’t go on. Speech was still too difficult, and something choked him. “I’m just glad—that you’re all right.”
She smiled a little, but her kind eyes stayed dark and solemn. She adjusted the air unit again, and then helped him sit up against the great curving wall. The gray fog was gone.
“Thanks, beautiful.” He grinned feebly. “Have I been out long?”
“A dreadful time.” She looked at her watch. “Must be four hours. I was afraid we couldn’t help you, till Cap’n Rob brought the batteries.”
“Where’s von Falkenberg?” he whispered anxiously. “With the Challenge?”
“Gone.” Her voice turned flat. “They just fired that one salvo. Cap’n Rob looked out, afterward. He saw them welding a seetee bedplate to the hull—one they had cut out, to take back to their lab. Then they left, at full acceleration.”
Staring at him with dark, strange eyes, she added:
“They were headed straight for Freedonia.”
“Thought they would,” Anders said.
“Now von Falkenberg will try to wreck the hammer and the shops, and everything we have on Freedonia.” Her low voice was bitter, almost accusing. “Old Jim Drake and Rick will probably be killed. They don’t even have a ship. They haven’t got a chance.”
“Sorry, beautiful,” Anders said.
“You ought to be,” she told him solemnly. “Because I know the Drakes would have given their work to the Mandate, to stop the Martians. We had agreed on that. But now the Martians will have seetee.”
She made a tired, hopeless gesture.
“Now there’s nothing that can stop them, not since you gave the Drakes away. Seetee can smash the Mandate, and overrun the planets. The Martian Reich will be worse than Interplanet ever was.”
Anders met her bitter eyes.
“ ’Fraid of that, beautiful. Von Falkenberg said I wasn’t very clever, and seems I haven’t been.” He shrugged, in the silver armor. “But there’s no use to talk about it now.”
Ann nodded gravely, beyond the lens.
“No use,” she agreed. “We’ll never know what happens: Even if von Falkenberg comes back with another expedition, to look for more loot for Mars, he’ll find us as dead as the Invaders.”
She glanced up at the winding empty footway where the seetee things had moved, with its railing too high for men to reach; at the landing where they must have stood, too narrow for the feet of men. He saw that she shivered.
“Where’s McGee?” he asked suddenly.
“Cap’n Rob went down inside again.” Her eyes dropped to the black yawning doorway, where the deadly little railways ran off the platform. Her tired voice had an edge of horror.
“What’s he doing?”
“Looking for more batteries,” she said. “He thought there must be some with charge left in them, on the Jovians who died down inside. He thought there might be enough to last a good many days.”
“So that’s the ending, gorgeous?” Anders gave her a bitter little grin. “We’re marooned here, like McGee was, half a billion kilometers from the nearest planet. Not a chance to get away, or even call for help. We just go out, with the last of the Jovians’ batteries?”
Her tired head nodded, in the big helmet.
“That’s the ending, Paul.”
He sat there a long time, just looking through the lenses at the childlike graveness of her face. He wanted very much to help her, and he was feeling stronger now. But there was nothing left that human strength could do.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry for you, and for poor little McGee. Don’t think I really mind quite so much, about myself. After all, gorgeous, I wasn’t really very proud of that job Hood gave me.”
“I knew you weren’t.”
“Then you’ll try to understand?” he whispered anxiously. “Understand that I had to try my best to do it, even if I didn’t like it much? Just because I was an Earthman and an Interplanet engineer?”
She put her glove in his.
“I understand,” she said.
“Thanks.” He squeezed her armored hand. “Now I s’pose we can be friends—now when nothing matters any more.” He grinned at her. “But you were a pleasant enemy, beautiful.”
“I’d rather be friends,” she said.
He could see the sober little smile on her brown childish face, lifting the firm curve of her lips. He thought he would like to kiss her, but for the two hard plates of leaded glass between.
They sat there on the dark platform. Anders still felt stronger. But he knew that any movement or exertion would drain vital current from the batteries, minutes and hours from their lives.
Ann didn’t speak. He began to feel that he could hear the silence of the dead Invaders. It was a heavy, oppressive stillness, that had endured since men were scarcely men. It became a smothering, dreadful thing, more terrible than sound.
He saw that Ann was watching the empty curve of that ramp and railing, with a dark terror in her eyes. He found that he was watching, too. They were waiting for the beings that had moved along that narrow, stepless footway, and used those railings above the reach of men.
He sat up, suddenly.
For he knew that only madness would ever walk those empty ramps again. The Invaders were dead. He wanted desperately to hear the warm sound of Ann’s voice, even though the photophone current might be draining away their lives.
“You must have had time to talk to McGee?” He looked at her, keenly. “Does he know anything about the Invaders—and what this machine was for?”
She stared for a moment through that broad doorway, where the harmless-seeming little railways ran into the. machine’s chasm of dead silent darkness. Anders thought she shivered.
“They weren’t men,” she whispered. “Cap’n Rob says you can tell that from the things they built. They must have been very tall, and they couldn’t climb steps, and none of their tools would be right for human hands—even if men could ever touch them.”
Are there any skeletons?”
Cap’n Rob didn’t find any,” she said. “He thinks maybe they all left the machine, at the last. Or maybe they just didn’t have skeletons. Cap’n Rob doesn’t know what they looked like, but he says he understands them.”
Her eyes lifted to that narrow winding footway, where once those contraterrene things had moved. She followed the gleam of the stars on that too-high railing, that it was death for a man to touch.
“Cap’n Rob must have had a pretty terrible time, at first.” Her low voice shivered again, “Marooned here, and hiding from the Jovians, and watching them die because they didn’t understand the machine.
“He doesn’t like to talk about it. You know he’s very sensitive, under that calm look of his, and he never talks very much. But we’ve been good friends, since I was just a little girl. He told me a good deal, while we were waiting.
“It was bad at first, he said. But pretty soon he began to understand the machine and the beings that made it. Then there wasn’t very much danger to him any longer, because he had begun to feel at home.”
Anders caught his breath. For the machine had become a living enemy to him, deadly and treacherous, colossal and inscrutable and implacable. It had trapped and destroyed a whole ship’s company of fighting spacemen and engineers. But little Rob McGee, quiet and mild and insignificant in his stubby armor, had said he felt at home!
“You know about his gift?” Ann went on, “How he always knows the time? How he could tell Rick the position and the mass of this machine, before he had ever seen it?” Anders nodded, with a remembered awe. “Cap’n Rob hates that gift,” her quiet voice continued. “Because it sets him apart from men. It makes him so terribly lonely. Perhaps he really is a mutant—though that’s a dreadful word. Because he has told me that human beings always seem a little strange, and hard for him to understand.
“But I think that gift is what saved his life, when the Jovian engineers were blundering into death all around him. Because he could always understand any machine, with just a glance. And he told me he knew the Invaders, just from their machines. They loved the beauty of mathematics, he said, because it is in all the things they made. Then he gave that apologetic little laugh of his, and said the Invaders were more rational than men.”
“Then McGee knows what this thing was?” Anders sat straighter again, and his voice had a brittle ring of excitement. In the dim ruddy glow of his helmet light, he searched Ann’s solemn face. “Did he tell you that?”
Her eyes were thoughtful, very grave.
“Cap’n Rob was talking just to me. But I suppose it’s all right for me to tell you. now that we aren’t enemies. Give me your word of honor, that you’re through with Interplanet?”
“Word of honor, beautiful.” Anders grinned. “If you think that matters now. And what was the machine?”
“A power plant,” she said.
“Eh?” He gulped a startled breath. “Power?”
“They burned terrene matter, against seetee.”
“Now I get it!” He stared down across the vast starlit cylinder, at the dim mass of that mighty cradle where a terrene ship had rested; at the dark yawning ore chutes, with their unseen bond-dissolving screens, that had received the terrene cargo.
“Now I see!” he whispered. “They scooped up terrene meteors and such, to be dumped in those chutes. S’pose they shipped seetee stuff from their own planet, to the other end of the machine?”
“That’s what Cap’n Rob says.”
“That’s power!” he exclaimed. “Our U-235 is no more than just a treadmill, compared to that. Use any elements for fuel, and the reaction is complete. But how did they use it, way out at space?”
“Cap’n Rob says they were experts, at power transmission,” the girl said. “You remember those five golden spikes—one of them broken off? Those were the terminals of their transmitter. He says they had receivers, on their spaceships and in the cities on their planet, tuned to pick it up.”
“Wireless transmission!” Anders was breathless. “What we’ve been dreaming of, for two hundred years. Y’know, beautiful, this machine could be the best thing that ever happened to the human race!”
“Or the worst,” she reminded him soberly, “if the Martians get it.”
He nodded, silent for a time.
“Too bad we failed,” he said at last. “ ’Cause y’see, beautiful, the big reason for all the conflict and rivalry between the planets—even for the war the Martians want to start—is the coming shortage of uranium. Never really plentiful. When you find it, only one part in two hundred is the power isotope. And even pure U-235 doesn’t give you the complete efficiency of the seetee reaction.”
An excitement grew, in his thoughtful voice.
“The Mandate was really set up for a kind of umpire, to keep the planets from fighting over the depleted deposits that are left. So far, it has kept a kind of uncertain peace. But seetee—in the right hands—could provide power to end all the famine and the fear and the struggle.”
Ann smiled faintly, beyond the thick lens.
“Now you’re talking like old Jim Drake, when men used to call him Seetee Drake,” she said. “That’s the way we always planned to use seetee—to make an end of crooked politics in the Mandate, and turn it into the basis of a real democratic union of the planets.”
“Could be done,” Anders said.
“But it won’t be.” She shook her tired head. “Not by the Martian Reich.”
Anders leaned wearily back against the tall rusted wall. For a time they were silent, thoughtful. Once again his eyes lifted to the narrow empty ramps of the Invaders, where men could never step.
“Wonder what their history was,” he said at last. “McGee learn anything?”
“Of course they must have come from a seetee system,” Ann told him. “Cap’n Rob said he hadn’t found anything that looked like books or records or even any marks on their machines—maybe they didn’t need to write. But he told me what he had surmised about them.”
“Let’s have it,” Anders urged.
Their photophone cells were dim, to save the precious current. Ancient shadows seemed to creep and thicken, all about the platform. Watching that narrow empty footway, as he listened, Anders tried to imagine something moving there—something that didn’t walk, taller than a man, and queerly thin.
“Cap’n Rob says there was some other disaster,” her grave low voice began. “Something hurled the Invader—the planet, I mean—out of its native seetee system. Perhaps some passing star pulled it off its orbit.
“The Invaders, anyhow—now I mean the people—must have had a high culture, already. If they hadn’t, they’d all have frozen to death. Because the planet must have wandered in interstellar space for thousands or maybe millions of years, without any sun.
“Cap’ll Rob thinks that is when they built the machine—when they saw they were going to be thrown off into space—to give them atomic heat and power during that endless dreadful night.
“Because the machine seems very old—all the terrene parts, that were hard for them to polish and repair. That’s why half of it’s so rusty. Cap’n Rob thinks they must have kept it running for hundreds of thousands of year, at least.
“Finally, more than eighty-seven thousand years ago, their dark wandering planet came into our system. It collided with the trans-Martian planet. The fragments made our minor planets, and the seetee drift. The Invaders managed to save their power plant, but not themselves.”
Her low voice faded into ancient silence. By the dim red glow of his helmet light, Anders could see her tired wondering face. She, too, was staring at that empty ramp, where the tall Invaders once had moved.
“What happened to them?” His voice was deeply puzzled. “With all their science, they should have been able to predict the collision, years ahead. Why, with the power from this machine, you could deflect even a planet enough to prevent collision!”
She nodded soberly, in the dim helmet.
“That’s what Cap’n Rob said. He doesn’t know what happened. Only the machinery looks as if it had been neglected, toward the end. The collector ships are lost, and the fuel in most of the bins is running low. That broken transmitter tower was never repaired.
“And Cap’n Rob thinks they weren’t expecting the collision, because the machine was still dangerously near when it happened. The reaction of its drive field against the fragments was what enabled him to find it, you know. He thinks perhaps they were still so close that the radiation killed the crew.
“Of course they couldn’t tell whether our system was going to be terrene or seetee, till they got here. Cap’n Rob thinks maybe they just forgot the difference. He thinks they must have tried to migrate to our planets, in the old spaceships they still knew how to operate—and just burned up when they touched the atmosphere.”
Beyond the pale red glow of their helmet lights, the dark seemed denser. Anders looked up again at the empty contraterrene footway, and the queerly narrow landings, and the handrails too high for the hands of men.
“S’pose their culture just decayed,” he suggested. “Died for want of contact, while they were out at space. No challenge. No conflict. No reaction of opposing forces. Must have been the machine itself that killed them—just because it worked too well.”
Staring into the starlit dark, however, he was still unsatisfied. For all that hypothetical drama of their triumph and tragedy, the Invaders were still enigma. The fate of those tall beings that had used no steps was still a riddle, as baffling as the puzzle of their beginning, or their language, or their physical appearance. He knew it was no use to search their empty ramps and landings. They were sunk forever into the black eternal mystery of time and space.
“Oh—Paul!”
Ann frightened him, with that breathless little cry. She clutched his steel sleeve, with a gesture of panic—for she, too, must have been watching that empty footway. Anders snatched for his gun, and found that it was gone.
But the thing that came out of that broad black doorway, out of the deadly mysterious depths of the machine, was nothing thin or tall or terrible. It was only little Rob McGee, quiet and half apologetic, smiling a little at Ann with his mild squinted eyes.
“Oh, Cap’n Rob!” She drew a quick relieved breath, and then asked him anxiously, “Did you find any batteries?”
“No batteries.” He shook his head, in the silvered helmet. “Ann, will you please come here? I’ve something to say to you.” He looked at Anders, and his voice was gently apologetic. “If you will excuse us, captain.”
Ann turned, with a puzzled manner. He gestured with his glove, into the black space from which he had come. She hesitated, with an apprehensive glance at Anders. But Rob McGee caught her armored hand. They lifted over the deadly little railways, and went back into the dark.
XV.
Anders turned his helmet light down to a faint red spark, to save the precious current. He made himself sit very still, to stanch the drain of power through the air unit. Alone in the starlit cylinder, he waited for Ann and McGee.
He tried to keep his eyes off the insoluble riddle of the narrow winding footway and the too-high rail above it. Resolutely, he looked out through the open valve. But even the familiar stars were cold and distant company.
He couldn’t help wondering whether Ann would come back. Perhaps little McGee had really found more charged batteries on the dead men, but not enough to share. After all, he reminded himself, he had been an enemy.
Grimly, he tried to tell himself that it didn’t matter very much. But it did. He wanted Ann. She was a warm bright lamp, that kept back the thin ghastly ghosts of the dead Invaders, waiting in the dark to creep back along their old footway when these human intruders were gone.
