The Edge Of Beyond, page 8
`What do you reckon was the speed of the worst gusts?' Rex asked his father as they strode on.
`I'd say not less than three or four hundred miles an hour,' was the answer. 'They were certainly far in excess of anything ever experienced on Earth.'
`They could only have been caused by abnormal conditions, by which I mean conditions far removed from those we understand,' put in the Professor. 'The natives knew what was on the way, poor fellows, and did their best to warn us.'
`What a miserable existence theirs must be on a world like this,' said Tiger. 'No wonder they look fed up.'
`There are some faces one forgets, but those were two I shall never forget,' asserted Rex. 'I suppose they're happy enough in their own way but I couldn't help feeling terribly sorry for them.'
Quickening their steps they covered the last few yards to the end of the canyon and so to the open place where they had left the ship. A glance was enough to tell them what they were so anxious to know.
The ship was not there.
The knowledge that they were marooned produced in Rex the feeling that something inside him was sinking into his feet.
`So they've gone,' observed the Professor, without a trace of emotion.
`I was prepared for that,' stated Tiger. 'I'm relieved to know it. I was afraid we'd find the ship damaged beyond repair. That's what would have happened had it stayed here. Gator must have had the good sense to get clear.'
Rex looked up, his eyes scanning the empty space above them. They caught a movement, a white spot of reflected light, and focused on it. 'There they are,' he cried, pointing. 'Shall we try to make some smoke to let them see we're here?'
`I don't think there's any need for that,' answered Tiger. `They'll come back as soon as they see it's safe for them to land.'
`They're coming down now,' observed Rex, relief in his voice.
`Let us hope they don't get too near that mass of magnetism or they may find themselves stuck on it,' remarked the Professor.
`As we've no way of warning them they'll have to take their luck,' Tiger pointed out, philosophically.
They watched, and Rex's heart jumped into his mouth, as the saying is, when he saw the ship make a sudden swerve for no apparent reason. But Gator must have corrected the `bump' for he came on down, clearly making for the original landing ground.
Before the legs had touched they were running towards it. As far as Rex was concerned he felt he couldn't get off the beastly place soon enough.
The doors were opened and there stood Toby waiting to greet them. 'What happened to you?' he wanted to know, as they lost no time in getting aboard.
`Let me get my breath and I'll tell you,' panted Rex. 'But I warn you, you'll find our story hard to believe,' he added.
`Not I,' put in Vargo. 'I can believe anything, without the slightest strain on my credulity. Have you any reason for wishing to stay here or shall we leave?'
`Let us go,' decided the Professor. 'I think we've seen enough. But take care to keep well clear of the direction from which we came. I will tell you why presently.'
The ship took off on a course diagonally away from the danger spot. As soon as they were well clear, Rex, with interpolations by the Professor, described what had taken place in the canyon.
Vargo showed no surprise. When they had finished he said, simply : 'You will now perceive what I mean by unsuspected dangers, where all seems safe.'
`But who could have imagined anything so preposterous?' cried Rex.
`Nobody,' admitted Vargo. 'That is exactly the point I am trying to make. On unknown worlds there is always danger.' Gator put in a word.
'Gator wants to know where you would like to go next,' said Vargo.
`I see no reason to change our plan,' answered the Professor. 'Let us proceed to our original objective.'
`Do you mean Ardilla?'
`Yes.'
`As you wish,' acknowledged Vargo, evenly. 'I can only repeat, you have been warned.'
`The important thing is not to lose our way,' requested Rex, nervously. 'We did that once, and nothing could be more frightening than that.'
We shall see,' said Vargo.
The ship sped on through the great emptiness.
9 Forced landing
The ship was well out in the seldom-visited spaces of what the Minoan astronomers had classified as the Second Region when it happened. Rex was preoccupied at the time, stargazing in the literal sense of the word. He was, in fact, contemplating a skyscape as fascinating as any he had seen. Ardilla had been sighted and pointed out by Borron, but it had not held his attention for it was still a long way off, far beyond the system, or constellation, into which they were moving. It was these nearer bodies that had captured his interest.
The constellation was made up of several bodies obviously governed by a star so brilliant that it could only be a sun blazing with its own celestial fires. Nearer were several satellites which, reflecting the light of this sun, appeared against the darkness of empty space as the Moon appears from Earth. Rex could count seven. The largest was, or appeared to be, more than twice the size of his own familiar moon. The smallest was a trifle less.
There was nothing unusual in having a number of bodies in view, and close, at the same time. He had seen something of the sort during the exploration of the planetoids that form part of the Solar System. What was unusual was to see so many bodies of that size in such close proximity. That they were entering another solar system was clear. It was evidently well furnished with satellites.
It transpired that Borron and some of the older members of the crew had seen this formation before, but they had never actually passed through it. As far as they knew no Minoan ship had ever landed there, so the mass of these particular worlds was still unknown; but it was thought they were not very large.
Asked why these particular bodies had always been given a wide berth, as Gator alleged, Borron said that certain colours on most of them suggested the presence of gases that might be dangerous, and for that reason were best avoided. There was always a risk that a concentration of poisonous gas might affect the power units. It might even find its way into a ship. A landing would almost certainly demand the employment of spacesuits, he opined.
At this juncture there was no suggestion of making a landing. Rex could see these warning colours or rather, tints, for himself. They were quite pale : blues, mauves, and in one case, yellow.
The Professor made the remark that some of the bodies in the Galaxy were closer together than was generally supposed by astronomers on Earth.
It was then that the ship struck something, or something struck the ship. At all events there was a collision. There came a crack like a rifle shot and the ship reeled as if it had been struck a glancing blow. For a few seconds it continued to rock. There was a hiss of escaping pressure.
Rex's heart lurched. But there was no panic in the ship. Gator rapped out the word which Rex knew meant emergency, and in a matter of seconds everyone was wearing a mask connected with the air cylinder provided for the purpose. The crew began looking for the damage.
Rex assumed, and probably everyone in the ship assumed, that the ship had been struck by a meteorite. It was obviously not a large one or the damage would have been severe and therefore apparent instantly; but even a small one, one no larger than a pea, at the velocity at which they were travelling would have had enough force to penetrate the thin casing of the ship and perhaps go right through it. A glance revealed that by great good fortune no one had been struck by the object in its passage.
Rex had always known that this could happen. The Professor had known, and in his first ship, the Spacemaster, he had made provision for such an event. Which was just as well, for it had been struck on its first voyage. In space travel it was a hazard that had to be accepted. It would always be present no matter what advances were made in spaceship design. Space was bombarded constantly by pieces of matter which on Earth are called, or rather, miscalled, shooting stars. Only when such objects enter an atmosphere, when they become incandescent with heat by friction, can they be seen. In space it was impossible to see them, whether they were travelling in an orbit, moving towards the nearest source of gravity, or, as could happen, be stationary, held at the neutralization point of two or more gravities.
Considering the number of meteors and meteorites for ever hurtling through space the mystery to Rex was that collisions so seldom occurred, even making allowances for the vastness of space. As the Professor had once explained, there might be thousands of meteorites in the zone through which a ship was passing, yet so vast was space that the distances between them could make the chances of actual contact with one negligible. That, to Rex, was always a comforting thought.
The hole in the side of the ship, fortunately a tiny one, was found, and once located a temporary repair was made by covering it with one of the small metal plates carried for that purpose. It was a simple operation, for the pressure inside the ship was sufficient to hold it in place without any appliance or adhesive. The crew, assuming that the object had gone right through the ship, were looking for the exit hole when Rex recalled seeing, at the moment of impact, a sudden movement in a bundle of luggage as if it had been hit by something. Going over to it he found a small hole in the outer covering. Thus he followed through to a canvas grip of his own at the bottom of the pile. As there was no hole on the opposite side he opened the grip, knowing that the missile, its force checked by the things through which it had passed, must be inside. It was. As he shook out his clothes something hard rattled on the floor. He picked it up, looked at it, and passed it on to Vargo who, with the others, was watching him. `What do you make of that?' he asked. 'It doesn't look like a meteorite to me.'
`It isn't a meteorite,' said Vargo, and handed it to Gator, whose forehead puckered in a frown as he examined it.
The object was of some heavy metal, cylindrical in shape, perhaps two inches long and a quarter of an inch in diameter. It looked like a piece of slate pencil.
`This is part of a ship,' said Gator. `If it is not part of a ship it is part of something that was carried into space by a ship. It would be impossible for an object such as this to put itself in space. If, as I think, there has been an accident somewhere, there will be other parts of the same ship in the region.'
`The debris of a collision, perhaps,' suggested the Professor.
`Yes. Or the parts of a ship which, for some unknown reason, has broken up. In that case there will be larger parts.' We may run into them?'
`Yes.'
`What can we do about it?'
`Nothing. The pieces may have remained close together or they may have become widely separated. I think that is more likely or we should have encountered more than one piece.'
`It's an uncomfortable thought that we may collide with a mass of stuff at any moment,' put in Tiger.
`Can't we slow down, or something?' suggested Rex, vaguely.
`The only thing we might do is make a landing somewhere to give the debris a chance to disperse or leave the region entirely,' said Vargo, thoughtfully. 'It would be advisable to make a landing, anyway, so that our puncture can be properly and permanently repaired. Temporary coverings are apt to leak slightly, and on a long journey like this we cannot afford to waste air.'
`There are plenty of possible landing places in sight,' said the Professor.
`None that we know.'
`Then it will have to be one that we don't know,' returned the Professor, cheerfully, reaching for his caramels. 'We can always make tests. It wouldn't hurt us if we had to sit in our spacesuits for a little while.'
There was a short discussion between Vargo, Gator and Borron, as a result of which the ship was turned towards one of the nearer planets in view, the size of which, at the distance they were from it, was a matter for conjecture.
Rex looked again at the object that had pierced the ship. `What puzzles me is how this thing retained its shape. I would have expected it to buckle, or be flattened, when it hit the hard metal shell of our own ship.'
`Oh no,' answered the Professor. 'Have you never heard of the old trick of shooting a candle through a barn door?'
`I've heard of it but I always took it to be a joke.'
`There's no joke about it. It's a fact, governed by a simple law of physics, as you can prove for yourself when we return to Glensalich. But please don't shoot holes through my front door.'
Nothing more was said. Rex turned his attention to the planet that was now the objective. It appeared as a big balloon, for the most part silver but with just a trace of blue in it. In fact, it might have been their own Moon, the moon of Earth, that they were approaching in free fall, for Gator had already cut the power jets.
Rex had often landed on worlds the existence of which had not been known even to the Professor, but to set foot on one about which nothing whatever was known to the ship's company was, with the exception of the planet they had just left, a new experience. Wherefore the approach was made with more than usual caution, everyone watching the great globe of light, now rushing towards them, with interest not unmixed with apprehension. Not that the Minoans were afraid of death. The job they did demanded that they walked in the shadow of it always, so that from long familiarity they had ceased to fear it. They were under no compulsion. They received no pay, having no use for money. Why did they do it? Rex could only conclude that they were actuated by the same sense of curiosity as the Professor, to whom the appeal of the unknown was irresistible.
It was soon evident that the sphere towards which they were falling was no mere planetoid — or if it was it was a large one. The surface, as much as they could see of it from high above, appeared to present no unusual features. There was no sign of water, which, now that the world was a dull brown mass, would have revealed itself by reflection. It bore a strong resemblance to the moon of Earth without its craters or towering mountains. It looked more inviting than the two moons of Mars, although that was not saying very much. The place might, remarked the Professor, be a small planet in its own right.
Gator was now descending in steps; that is to say with pauses at intervals to check the instruments. His hands, Rex noticed, never left the controls, as if he was ready at an instant's notice to rocket away. Apparently nothing occurred to alarm him, for he continued on down and finally brought the ship to a halt at an altitude of a few hundred feet over a fairly open area of what in Central America would be called mesa. That is to say, it looked like a dry, sandy waste, well-studded with patches of coarse vegetation that might have been cactus, scrub heather or perhaps the giant lichen that occurred so commonly on some of the planetoids they had visited on their previous flights. In places there were wide areas of it without a break.
`There is an atmosphere here but I doubt if it would be safe for us to breathe it,' stated Vargo, after consulting with Borron.
`Of what is it composed, then?' inquired the Professor. `The usual things, but there is much carbon dioxide. There is also helium and argon in what might be dangerous quantities. To breathe such air might injure our lungs. That does not mean that nothing could live in such an atmosphere.'
`We could put on our spacesuits for the short time you will be repairing the ship,' suggested the Professor.
`That would be necessary if you intend to go out,' answered Vargo. 'But first we will confirm that there is no form of life here likely to cause trouble.'
Gator put the ship into horizontal flight, maintaining his height and swinging round in a wide circle.
`What are those things?' asked Rex.
The things to which he referred, which had come suddenly into view, looked like a cluster of large flat molehills. Together they formed a circle.
`Except that they appear to be made of mud instead of thatch and are not so high they remind me of the huts built by the tribes of Central Africa,' said Tiger.
`That is not a natural formation,' asserted Vargo. 'There must be a colony of living creatures there, but whether human or animal I would not care to say. I see nothing moving so the creatures responsible may be dead.'
`I can see another lot over there — two lots.' Rex pointed.
`This might be worth investigating,' said the Professor.
`No,' declined Vargo. 'We came here to repair the ship. If there are creatures there, and we disturb them, we might have to leave without having done that. The ship must come first.'
`Very well. It is for you to say,' agreed the Professor. Gator took the ship back to the level arid area. There spacesuits were put on by those who were going out, and preparations made for the work to be done. The ship then went on down and settled quietly, stirring up a fair amount of dust as it came to rest. The outside repair party went into the exit chamber.
`We'll watch them for a minute,' decided the Professor. 'If nothing happens we will follow them and stretch our limbs.
I would like to examine that vegetation. It looks unusual.'
The repair party could soon be seen outside doing what was necessary. The Professor, Rex, Tiger and Toby, watched for a little while then they too went out, Rex regretting that the cumbersome suits were necessary. They were, and always would be, a nuisance, he thought.
They tested the radio equipment without which conversation would not be possible.
`You'd better keep near the ship this time,' Tiger warned.
`Be sure I shall not go far,' replied the Professor, advancing towards the nearest clump of vegetation, which now revealed itself to be a mass of growth in the manner of the cactus commonly called prickly pear. The leaves were huge and bloated, and bristled with ferocious-looking spines. If ever a plant had protected itself this one certainly had, pondered Rex, looking at the three-inch-long needles.
The other most common growth was similar, but boasting a grotesque bulbous trunk might have claimed to be a tree. It carried, on the extreme top, some fruit of a livid blue colour. Again, both trunk and leaves sprouted spikes, so there seemed to be no possible hope of anyone or anything ever reaching the fruit. All the growths were obviously primitive, and from their bloated nature, for moisture storage, indicated a scarcity of water.
