The Project Gutenberg eBook ofPlanet of SandThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Planet of SandAuthor: Murray LeinsterIllustrator: Lawrence Sterne StevensRelease date: June 16, 2022 [eBook #68331]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: Popular Publications, Inc, 1948Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLANET OF SAND ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Planet of SandAuthor: Murray LeinsterIllustrator: Lawrence Sterne StevensRelease date: June 16, 2022 [eBook #68331]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: Popular Publications, Inc, 1948Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Title: Planet of Sand
Author: Murray LeinsterIllustrator: Lawrence Sterne Stevens
Author: Murray Leinster
Illustrator: Lawrence Sterne Stevens
Release date: June 16, 2022 [eBook #68331]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Popular Publications, Inc, 1948
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLANET OF SAND ***
PLANET OF SANDBy Murray LeinsterTossed into the trackless Cosmos by hismortal enemy, shipwrecked on an unfriendlystar, he determined to defy the dangers ofnumberless nights, and, hunted turnedhunter, keep a tryst with Hate....[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced fromFamous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1948.Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Tossed into the trackless Cosmos by hismortal enemy, shipwrecked on an unfriendlystar, he determined to defy the dangers ofnumberless nights, and, hunted turnedhunter, keep a tryst with Hate....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced fromFamous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1948.Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He debated straggling farther under the shelter of the monstrous roof....
He debated straggling farther under the shelter of the monstrous roof....
He debated straggling farther under the shelter of the monstrous roof....
There was bright, pitiless light in the prison corridor of theStallifer. There was the hum of the air-renewal system. Once in every so often there was a cushioned thud as some item of the space ship's machinery operated some relay somewhere. But it was very tedious to be in a confinement cell. Stan Buckley—Lieutenant, J.G., Space Guard, under charges and under restraint—found it rather more than tedious.
He should have been upheld, perhaps, by the fact that he was innocent of the charges made against him by Rob Torren, formerly his immediate superior officer. But the feeling of innocence did not help. He sat in his cell, holding himself still with a grim resolution. But a deep, a savage, a corrosive anger grew and grew and grew within him. It had been growing in just this manner for weeks.
TheStalliferbored on through space. From her ports the cosmos was not that hostile, immobile curtain of unwinking stars the early interstellar travelers knew. At twelve hundred light-speeds, with the Bowdoin-Hall field collapsing forty times per second for velocity control, the stars moved visibly. Forty glimpses of the galaxy about the ship in every second made it seem that the universe was always in view.
And the stars moved. The nearer ones moved swiftly and the farther ones more slowly, but all moved. And habit made motion give the feeling of perspective, so that the stars appeared to be distributed in three dimensions and from the ship seemed very small, like fireflies. All the cosmos seemed small and almost cosy. The Rim itself appeared no more than a few miles away. But theStalliferheaded for Earth from Rhesi II, and she had been days upon her journey, and she had come a distance which it would stagger the imagination to compute.
In his cell, though, Stan Buckley could see only four walls. There was no variation of light; no sign of morning or night or afternoon. At intervals, a guard brought him food. That was all—except that his deep and fierce and terrible anger grew until it seemed that he would go mad with it.
He had no idea of the hour or the day when, quite suddenly, the pitiless light in the corridor dimmed. Then the door he had not seen since his entrance into the prison corridor clanked open. Footsteps came toward his cell. It was not the guard who fed him. He knew that much. It was a variation of routine which should not have varied until his arrival on Earth.
He sat still, his hands clenched. A figure loomed outside the cell door. He looked up coldly. Then fury so great as almost to be frenzy filled him. Rob Torren looked in at him.
There was silence. Stan Buckley's muscles tensed until it seemed that the bones of his body creaked. Then Rob Torren said caustically:
"It's lucky there are bars, or there'd be no chance to talk! Either you'd kill me and be beamed for murder, or I'd kill you and Esther would think me a murderer. I've come to get you out of this if you'll accept my terms."
Stan Buckley made an inarticulate, growling noise.
"Oh, surely!" said Rob Torren. "I denounce you, and I'm the witness against you. At your trial, I'll be believed and you won't. You'll be broken and disgraced. Even Esther wouldn't marry you under such circumstances. Or maybe," he added sardonically, "maybe you wouldn't let her!"
Stan Buckley licked his lips. He longed so terribly to get his hands about his enemy's throat that he could hardly hear his words.
"The trouble is," said Rob Torren, "that she probably wouldn't marry me either, if you were disgraced by my means. So I offer a bargain. I'll help you to escape—I've got it all arranged—on your word of honor to fight me. A duel. To the death." His eyes were hard. His tone was hard. His manner was almost contemptuous. Stan Buckley said hoarsely:
"I'll fight you anywhere, under any conditions!"
"The conditions," Rob Torren told him icily, "are that I will help you to escape. You will then write a letter to Esther, saying that I did so and outlining the conditions of the duel as we agree upon them. I will, in turn, write a letter to the Space Guard brass, withdrawing my charges against you. We will fight. The survivor will destroy his own letter and make use of the other. Do you agree to that?"
"I'll agree to anything," said Stan Buckley fiercely, "that will get my hands about your throat!"
Rob Torren shrugged.
"I've turned off the guard photocells," he said calmly. "I've a key for your cell. I'm going to let you out. I can't afford to kill you except under the conditions I named, or I'll have no chance to win Esther. If you kill me under any other conditions, you'll simply be beamed as a murderer." He paused, and then added, "And I have to come and fight you because a letter from you admitting that I've behaved honorably is the only possible thing that would satisfy Esther. You give your word to wait until you've escaped and I come for you before you try to kill me?"
Stan Buckley hesitated a long, long time. Then he said in a thick voice, "I give my word."
Without hesitation, Rob Torren put a key in the cell door and turned it. He stood aside. Stan Buckley walked out, his hands clenched. Torren closed the door and re-locked it. He turned his back and walked down the corridor. He opened the door at its end. Again he stood aside. Stan Buckley went through. Torren closed the door, took a bit of cloth from his pocket, wiped off the key, hung it up again on a tiny hook, with the same bit of cloth threw a switch, and put the cloth back in his pocket.
"The photocells are back on," he said in a dry voice. "They say you're still in your cell. When the guard contradicts them, you'll seem to have vanished into thin air."
"I'm doing this," said Stan hoarsely, "to get a chance to kill you. Of course I've no real chance to escape!"
That was obvious. TheStalliferwas deep in the void of interstellar space. She traveled at twelve hundred times the speed of light. Escape from the ship was impossible. And concealment past discovery when the ship docked was preposterous.
"That remains to be seen," said Torren coldly. "Come this way."
Torren went down a hallway. He slipped into a narrow doorway, unnoticeable unless one was looking for it. Stan followed. He found himself in that narrow, compartmented space between the ship's inner and outer skins. A door; another compartment; another door. Then a tiny air-lock—used for the egress of a single man to inspect or repair such exterior apparatus as the scanners for the ship's vision screens. There was a heap of assorted apparatus beside the air-lock door.
"I prepared for this," said Torren curtly. "There's a space suit. Put it on. Here's a meteor miner's space skid. There are supplies. I brought this stuff as luggage, in water-tight cases. I'll fill the cases with my bath water and get off the ship with the same weight of luggage I had when I came on. That's my cover-up."
"And I?" asked Stan harshly.
"You'll take this chrono. It's synchronized with the ship's navigating clock. At two-two even you push off from the outside of the ship. The drive field fluctuates. When it collapses, you'll be outside it. When it expands—"
Stan Buckley raised his eyebrows. This was clever! The Bowdoin-Hall field, which permits of faster-than-light travel, is like a pulsating bubble, expanding and contracting at rates ranging from hundreds of thousands of times per second to the forty-per-second of deep-space speed. When the field is expanding, and bars of an artificial allotrope of carbon are acted upon by electrostatic forces in a certain scientific fashion, a ship and all its contents accelerate at a rate so great that it simply has no meaning. As the field contracts, a ship decelerates again. That is the theory, at any rate. There is no proof in sensation or instrument readings that such is the case. But velocity is inversely proportional to the speed of the field's pulsations, and only in deep space does a ship dare slow the pulsations too greatly, for fear of complications.
However, a man in a space suit could detach himself from a space ship traveling by the Bowdoin-Hall field. He could float free at the instant of the field's collapse, and be left behind when it expanded again. But he would be left alone in illimitable emptiness.
"You'll straddle the space skid," said Torren shortly. "It's full powered—good for some millions of miles. At two-two exactly theStalliferwill be as close to Khor Alpha as it will go. Khor Alpha's a dwarf white star that's used as a course marker. It has one planet that the directories say has a breathable atmosphere, and list as a possible landing refuge, but which they also say is unexamined. You'll make for that planet and land. You'll wait for me. I'll come!"
Stan Buckley said in soft ferocity, "I hope so!"
Torren's rage flared.
"Do you think I'm not as anxious to kill you as you are to kill me?"
For an instant the two tensed, as if for a struggle to the death there between the two skins of the space ship. Then Torren turned away.
"Get in your suit," he said curtly. "I'll get a private flyer and come after you as soon as the hearing about your disappearance is over. Push off at two-two even. Make it exact!"
He went angrily away, and Stan Buckley stared after him, hating him, and then grimly turned to the apparatus that lay in an untidy heap beside the air-lock door.
Five minutes later he opened the outer door of the lock. He was clad in space armor and carried with him a small pack of supplies—the standard abandon-ship kit—and the little space-drive unit. The unit was one of those space skids used by meteor miners—merely a shaft which contained the drive and power unit, a seat, and a cross-shaft by which it was steered. It was absurdly like a hobby-horse for a man in a space suit, and it was totally unsuitable for interplanetary work because it consumed too much power when fighting gravity. For Stan, though, starting in mid-space and with only one landing to make, it should be adequate.
He locked the chrono where he could see it on the steering bar. He strapped the supply kit in place. He closed the air-lock door very softly. He waited, clinging to the outer skin of the ship with magnetic shoes.
The cosmos seemed very small and quite improbable. The specks of light which were suns seemed to crawl here and there. Because of their motion it was impossible to think of them as gigantic balls of unquenchable fire. They moved! To all appearances, theStalliferflowed onward in a cosmos perhaps a dozen miles in diameter, in which many varicolored fireflies moved with a vast deliberation.
The hand of the chrono moved, and moved, and moved. At two-two exactly, Stan pressed the drive stud. At one instant he and his improbable space steed rested firmly against a thousand-foot hill of glistening chrom-steel. The waverings of the Bowdoin-Hall field were imperceptible. The cosmos was small and limited and theStalliferwas huge. Then the skid's drive came on. It shot away from the hull—and the ship vanished as utterly as a blown-out candle flame. And the universe was so vast as to produce a cringing sensation in the man who straddled an absurd small device in such emptiness, with one cold white sun—barely near enough to show a disk—and innumerable remote and indifferent stars on every hand.
On the instant when the ship's field contracted and left him outside, Stan had lost the incredible velocity the field imparts. In the infinitesimal fraction of a second required for the field to finish its contraction after leaving him, the ship had traveled literally thousands of miles. In the slightly greater fraction of a second required for it to expand again, it had moved on some millions of miles. By the time Stan's mind had actually grasped the fact that he was alone in space, the ship from which he had separated himself was probably fifty or sixty millions of miles away.
He was absolutely secure against recapture, of course. If his escape went unnoticed for even half a minute, it would take all the ships of all the Space Guard a thousand years to search the volume of space in which one small space-suited figure might be found. And it was unlikely that his escape would be noticed for hours.
He was very terribly alone. A dwarf white sun glowed palely, many, many millions of miles away. Stars gazed at him incuriously, separated by light-centuries of space.
He started the minute gyroscopes that enabled him to steer the skid. He started in toward the sun. He had a planet to find and land on. Of course, Rob Torren could simply have contrived his escape to emptiness so that he might die and shrivel in the void, and never, never, never through all eternity be found again. But somehow, Stan had a vast faith in the hatred which existed between the two of them.
It was two days later when he approached the solitary planet of Khor Alpha. The air in his space suit had acquired that deadly staleness which is proof that good air is more than merely a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. He felt the sluggish discomfort which comes of bottled, repurified breathing-mixture. And as the disk of the planet grew large, he saw little or nothing to make him feel more cheerful.
The planet rotated as he drew near, and it seemed to be absolutely featureless. The terminator—the shadow line as sunlight encroached on the planet's night side—was a perfect line. There were, then, no mountains. There were no clouds. There seemed to be no vegetation. There was, though, a tiny polar icecap—so small that at first he did not discover it. It was not even a dazzling white, but a mere whitishness where a polar cap should be, as if it were hoarfrost instead of ice.
He went slanting down to match the planet's ground speed in his approach. Astride the tiny space skid, he looked rather like an improbable witch astride an incredible broomstick. And he was very, very tired.
Coming up in a straight line, half the planet's disk was night. Half the day side was hidden by the planet's bulge. He actually saw no more than a quarter of the surface at this near approach, and that without magnification.
Any large features would have been spotted from far away, but he had given up hope of any variation from monotony when—just as he was about to enter the atmosphere—one dark patch in the planet's uniformly dazzling white surface appeared at the very edge of day. It was at the very border of the dawn belt. He could be sure only of its existence, and that it had sharp, specifically straight edges.
He saw rectangular extensions from the main mass of it. Then he hit atmosphere, and the thin stuff thrust at him violently because of his velocity, and he blinked and automatically turned his head aside, so that he did not see the dark patch again before his descent put it below the horizon.
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 space suit—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 theStallifer. And his drive had blown a fuse, once, which cost him some power.
Unquestionably, the blown fuse had been caused by the impinging of a Bowdoin-Hall field upon the skid. Some other space ship than theStallifer, 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 light-centuries from Earth, and a minute—relatively a 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 drives 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 time 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 spidery slender columns. Here, in the dawn belt, 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 a height of three hundred feet or more. At their top were the grid and the slabs, forming a roof some thirty stories above the ground. There were no under-floors, no cross-ways, 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 columns 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 was 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 theStallifer, 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 space suit 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 he 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 incumbrances. 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 of it 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. And if this was a sample of merely morning winds, by midday existence would 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 farther 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. And 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 space suit. But for the rope about the column he would have been ripped 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. And 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, and it gradually faded, and he realized that it was 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, brittlely, 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. And the small size and indistinctness of the icecap he had seen was assurance that there was nowhere on the planet any sizeable body of water to moderate the weather. And with such storms, inhabitants were unthinkable. Life of any sort was out of the question. But if there was anything certain in the cosmos, it was that the structure at whose feet he stood was artificial!
He flicked on his suit-radio. Static only. Sand particles in dry air, clashing against each other, would develop charges 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 shrill outcry and 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 theStalliferten days or longer to reach Earth, then three or four days for the microscopic examination of every part of the vast ship in a grim search for him.
Then there'd be an inquiry. It might last a week or two weeks or longer. The findings 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 get hold of a space yacht and—because a yacht would be slower than theStallifer—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 as 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 managed to land.
He found—nothing.
To be exact, he found the columns 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—and did nothing and had no purpose save to gather sand on its upper surface and from time to time dump that sand down to the ground. It did not make sense.
Stan had a more immediate problem than the purpose of the grid, though. He was three hundred feet above ground. He was short of food and hopelessly short of water. When day came again, this place would be the center of a hurricane of blown sand. On the ground, lashed to a metal column, he had been badly buffeted about even in his space suit. Up here the wind would be much stronger. It was not likely that any possible lashing would hold him against such a storm. He could probably get back to the ground, of course, but there seemed no particular point to it.
As he debated, there came a thin, shrill whistling overhead. It came from the far south, and passed overhead, descending, and—going down in pitch—it died away to the northward. The lowering of its pitch indicated that it was slowing. The sound was remarkably like that of a small space craft entering atmosphere incompletely under control—which was unthinkable, of course, on the solitary unnamed planet of Khor Alpha. And Stan felt very, very lonely on a huge plate of iron thirty stories above the ground, on an alien planet under unfriendly stars, and with this cryptic engineering monstrosity breaking away to sheer desert on one side and extending uncounted miles in all others. He flicked on his suit-radio, without hope.
There came the loud, hissing static. Then under and through it came the humming carrier-wave of a yacht transmitter sending on emergency power.
"Help call! Help call! Space yachtErebusgrounded on planet of Khor Alpha, main drive burned out, landed in darkness, outside conditions unknown. If anyone hears, p-please answer! M-my landing drive smashed when I hit ground, too! Help call! Help call! Space yachtErebusgrounded on planet of Khor Alpha, main drive burned out, landed in darkness—"
Stan Buckley had no power. He could not move from this spot. TheErebushad grounded somewhere in the desert which covered all the planet but this one structure. When dawn came, the sandstorm would begin again. And with its main drive burned out, its landing drive smashed—when the morrow's storms began it would be strange indeed if the whirlwinds did not scoop away sand from about the one solid object they'd encounter, so that the little craft would topple down and down and ultimately be covered over, buried under maybe hundreds of feet of smothering stuff.
He knew theErebus. Of course. It belonged to Esther Hume. The voice from it was Esther's—the girl he was to have married, if Rob Torren hadn't made charges disgracing him utterly. And tomorrow she would be buried alive in the helpless little yacht, while he was unable to lift a finger to her aid.
He was talking to her desperately when there was a vast, labored tumult to the west. It was the product of ten thousand creakings. He turned, and in the starlight he saw great flat plates—they were fifty feet by a hundred and more—turning slowly. An area a mile square changed its appearance. Each of the flat plates in a hundred rows of fifty plates turned sidewise, to dump its load of settled sand. A square mile of plates turned edges to the sky—and turned back again. Creakings and groanings filled the air, together with the soft roaring noise of the falling sand. A pause. Another great section of a mile each way performed the same senseless motion. Pure desperation made Stan say sharply:
"Esther! Cut off for half an hour! I'll call back! I see the slimmest possible chance, and I've got to take it! Half an hour, understand?"
He heard her unsteady assent. He scrambled fiercely to the nearest of the huge plates. It was, of course, insane to think of such a thing. The plates had no purpose save to gather loads of sand and then to turn and dump them. But there were swellings at one end of each—where the girders to which they clung united to form this preposterous elevated grid. Those swellings might be motors. He dragged a small cutting-torch from the tool kit. He snapped its end. A tiny, savage, blue-white flame appeared in midair half an inch from the torch's metal tip.
He turned that flame upon the rounded swelling at the end of a monster slab. Something made the slabs turn. By reason, it should be a motor. The swellings might be housings for motors. He made a cut across such a swelling. At the first touch of the flame something smoked luridly and frizzled before the metal grew white-hot and flowed aside before the flame. There had been a coating on the iron.
Even as he cut, Stan realized that the columns and the plates were merely iron. But the sand blast of the daily storms should erode the thickest of iron away in a matter of weeks, at most. So the grid was coated with a tough, elastic stuff—a plastic of some sort—which was not abraded by the wind. It did not scratch because it was not hard. It yielded, and bounced sand particles away instead of resisting them. It would outwear iron, in the daily sand blast, by a million times, on the principle by which land vehicles on Earth use rubber tires instead of metal, for greater wear.
He cut away a flap of metal from the swelling. He tossed it away with his space-gloved hands. His suit-flash illuminated the hollow within. There was a motor inside, and it was remarkably familiar, though not a motor such as men made for the purpose of turning things. There was a shaft. There were four slabs of something that looked like graphite, rounded to fit the shaft. That was all. No coils. No armature. No sign of magnets.
Men used this same principle, but for a vastly different purpose. Men used the reactive thrust of allotropic graphite against an electric current in their space ships. The Bowdoin-Hall field made such a thrust incredibly efficient, and it was such graphite slabs that drove theStallifer—though these were monsters weighing a quarter of a ton apiece, impossible for the skid to lift. Insulated cables led to the slabs in wholly familiar fashion. The four cables joined to two and vanished in the seemingly solid girders which formed all the giant grid.
Almost without hope, Stan slashed through two cables with his torch. He dragged out the recharging cable of the skid. He clipped the two ends to the two cut cables. They sparked! Then he stared. The meter of the skid showed current flowing into its power bank. An amazing amount of current. In minutes, the power-storage needle stirred from its pin. In a quarter of an hour it showed half-charge. Then a creaking began all around.
Stan leaped back to one of the cross-girders just as all the plates in an area a mile square about him began to turn—all but the one whose motor-housing he had cut through. All the other plates turned so that their edges pointed to the stars. The sand piled on them by the day storm poured down into the abyss beneath. Only the plate whose motor-housing Stan had cut remained unmoving. Sparks suddenly spat in the metal hollow, as if greater voltage had been applied to stir the unmoving slab. A flaring, lurid, blue-white arc burned inside the housing. Then it cut off.
All the gigantic plates which had turned their edges skyward went creaking loudly back to their normal position, their flat sides turned to the stars. And nothing more happened. Nothing at all.
In another ten minutes, the skid's meter showed that the power bank was fully charged. And Stan, with plenty to think about, straddled the little object and went soaring to northward like a witch on a broom, sending a call on his suit-radio before him.
"Coming, Esther! Give me a directional and let's make it fast! We've got a lot to do before daylight!"
He had traveled probably fifty miles before her signal came in. Then there was a frantically anxious time until he found the little, helpless space yacht, tumbled on the desert sand, with Esther peering hopefully out of the air-lock as he swooped down to a clumsy landing. She was warned and ready. There was no hope of repairing the drive. A burned-out drive to operate in a Bowdoin-Hall field calls for bars of allotropic graphite—graphite in a peculiar energy state as different from ordinary graphite as carbon diamond is from carbon coal. There were probably monster bars of just such stuff in the giant grid's motors, but the skid could not handle them. For tonight, certainly, repair was out of the question. Esther had hooked up a tiny, low-power signaling device which gave out a chirping wave every five seconds. She wore a space suit, had two abandon-ship kits, and all the water that could be carried.
The skid took off again. It was not designed to work in a planet's gravitational field. It used too much power, and it wabbled erratically, and for sheer safety Stan climbed high. With closed faceplates the space-suited figures seemed to soar amid the stars. They could speak only by radio, close together as they were.
"Wh-where are we going, Stan?"
"Icecap," said Stan briefly. "North Pole. There's water there—or hoarfrost, anyhow. And the day storms won't be so bad if there are storms at all. In the tropics on this planet the normal weather is a typhoon-driven sandstorm. We'll settle down in the polar area and wait for Rob Torren to come for us. It may be three months or more."
"Rob Torren—"
"He helped me escape," said Stan briefly. "Tell you later. Watch ahead."
He'd had no time for emotional thinking since his landing, and particularly since the landing of the little space yacht now sealed up and abandoned to be buried under the desert sand. But he knew how Esther came to be here. She'd told him, by radio, first off. She'd had news of the charges Rob Torren had brought against him. She hadn't believed them. Not knowing of his embarcation for Earth for court-martial—the logical thing would have been a trial at advanced base—she'd set out desperately to assure him of her faith.
She couldn't get a liner direct, so she'd set out alone in her little space yacht. In a sense, it should have been safe enough. Craft equipped with Bowdoin-Hall drive were all quite capable of interstellar flight. Power was certainly no problem any more, and with extra capacitors to permit of low-frequency pulsations of the drive field, and mapped dwarf white stars as course markers, navigation should be simple enough. The journey, as such, was possibly rash but it was not foolhardy. Only—she hadn't fused her drive when she changed its pulsation-frequency. And when she was driving past Khor Alpha, her Bowdoin-Hall field had struck the space skid on which Stan was trying to make this planet, and the field had drained his power.
The short circuit blew the skid's fuse, but it burned out the yacht's more delicate drive. Specifically, it overloaded and ruined the allotropic carbon blocks which made the drive work. So Esther's predicament was caused not only by her solicitude for Stan, but by the drive of the skid on which he'd escaped from theStallifer.
He blamed himself. Bitterly. But even more he blamed Rob Torren. Hatred surged up in him again for the man who had promised to come here and fight him to the death. But he said quietly:
"Rob's coming here after me. We'll talk about that later. He didn't guess this place would be without water and with daily hurricanes everywhere except—I hope!—the poles. He thought I'd be able to make out until he could come back. We've got to! Watch out ahead for the sunset line. We've got to follow it north until we hit the polar cap. With water and our kits we should be able to survive indefinitely."
The space-suited figures were close together—in fact, in contact. But there was no feeling of touching each other through the insulating, almost inflexible armor of their suits. And sealed as they were in their helmets and communicating only by phone in the high stratosphere, neither could feel the situation suitable for romance. Esther was silent for a time. Then she said:
"You told me you were out of power—"
"I was," he told her. "I got some from the local inhabitants—if they're local."
"What—"
He described the preposterous, meaningless structure on the desert. Thousands of square miles in extent. Cryptic and senseless and of unimaginable significance.
"Every slab has a motor to turn it. I cut into a housing and there was power there. I loaded up with it. I can't figure the thing out. There's nowhere that a civilized or any other race could live. There's nothing those slabs could be for!"
There was a thin line of sunlight far ahead. Traveling north, they drove through the night and overtook the day. They were very high indeed, now, beyond atmosphere and riding the absurd small skid that meteor miners use. They saw the dwarf white sun, Khor Alpha. Its rays were very fierce. They passed over the dividing line between day and night, and far, far ahead they saw the hazy whitishness which was the polar cap of this planet.
It was half an hour before they landed, and when they touched ground they came simply to a place where wind-blown sand ceased to be powdery and loose, and where there was plainly dampness underneath. The sun hung low indeed on the horizon. On the shadow side of sand hillocks there was hoarfrost. All the moisture of the planet was deposited in the sand at its poles, and during the long winter nights the sand was frozen so that even during the summer season unthinkable frigidity crept out into every shadow.
Stan nodded at a patch of frost on the darker site of a half-mile sand dune.
"Sleeping," he said dryly, "will be done in space suits. This ground will be cold where the sun doesn't hit! Do you notice that there's no sign of anything growing anywhere? Not even moss?"
"It's too cold?"
"Hardly!" said Stan. "Mosses and lichens grow on Earth as far north as the ground ever thaws. And on every other planet I've ever visited. There'd be plants here if anywhere, because there's water here. There simply can't be any life on this planet. None at all!"
Then the absurdity of the statement struck him. There was that monstrous grid, made by intelligence of some sort and using vast resources. But—
"Dammit!" said Stan. "How can there be life here? How can plants live in perpetual sandstorms? How can animals live without plants to break down minerals and make them into food? How can either plants or animals live without water? If there were life anywhere, it would have to be near water, which means here. And if there's none here there can't be any at all—"
They reached the top of the dune. Esther caught her breath. She pointed.
There, reaching across the dampened sand, was a monstrous and a horrifying trail. Something had come from the zones where the sandstorms raged. It had passed this way, moving in one direction, and it had passed again, going back toward the stormy wastes. By the trail, it had ten or twelve or twenty legs, like some unthinkable centipede. The tracks of its separate sets of legs were separated by fifteen feet. And each footprint was two yards across.
For three days by the chrono on the space skid, the hard white sun Khor Alpha circled the horizon without once setting. Which was natural, because this was one of the poles of Khor Alpha's only planet, and this was summer. In those three days Stan and Esther saw no living thing. No bird, beast, or insect; no plant, moss, or lichen. They had planted the seeds from their abandon-ship kits—included in such kits because space castaways may have to expect to be isolated not for weeks or months, but perhaps for all their lives.
The weeds would produce artificially developed plants with amazing powers of survival and adaptation and food production. On the fourth day—clock time—the first of the plants appeared above the bank of damp sand in which they had been placed. In seven days more there would be food from them. If one plant of the lot was allowed to drop its own seeds, in time there would be a small jungle of food plants on which they could live.
For the rest, they lived in a fashion lower than any savages of Earth. They had no shelter. There was no building material but sand. They slept in their space suits for warmth. They had no occupation save that of waiting for the plants to bear food, and after that of waiting for Rob Torren to come.
And when he came—the presence of Esther changed everything. When Torren arrived to fight a duel to the death with Stan, the stake was to have been ultimately Esther's hand. But if she were present, if she knew the true story of Torren's charges against Stan and their falsity, he could have no hope of winning her by Stan's death. He would have nothing to gain by a duel. But he would gain by the murder of one or both of them. Safety from the remotest chance of later exposure, at any rate, and revenge for the failure of his hopes. And if he managed to kill Stan by any means, fair or foul, Esther would be left wholly at his mercy.
So Stan brooded, hating Rob Torren with a desperate intensity surpassing even the hatred he'd felt on theStallifer. A large part of his hatred was due to helplessness. There was no way to fight back. But he tried desperately to think of one.
On the fourth day he said abruptly, "Let's take a trip, Esther."
She looked at him in mute inquiry.
"For power," he said "and maybe something more. We might be able to find out something. If there are inhabitants on this planet, for instance. There can't be, but there's that beast—
"Maybe it's somehow connected with whatever or whoever built that grid—that checkerboard arrangement I told you about. Something or somebody built that, but I can't believe anything can live in those sandstorms."
They'd followed the huge trail that had been visible on their first landing in the polar regions. The great, two-yard-across pads of the monster had made a clear trail for ten miles from the point of their discovery. At the end of the trail there was a great gap in a cliff of frozen sand. The Thing seemed to have devoured tons of ice-impacted stuff. Then it had gone back into the swirling sandy wastes. It carried away with it cubic yards—perhaps twenty or thirty tons—of water-filled frozen sand.
But reason insisted that there could be no animal life on a planet without plants, and no plants on a desert which was the scene of daily typhoons, hourly hurricanes, and with no water anywhere upon it save at the poles. And there was no vegetation there. A monster with dozens of six-foot feet, and able to consume tons of wetted sand for moisture, would need vast quantities of food for energy alone. And it was unthinkable that food was to be found in the strangling depths of perpetual sandstorms.
"There's another thing," Stan added. "With power to spare I could fuse sand into something like a solid. Make a house, maybe, and chairs to sit on, instead of having to wear our space suits all the time. Maybe we could even heat the inside of a house!"
Esther smiled at him.
"Darling," she said wryly, "you've no idea how glad I'd be of a solid floor to walk on instead of sand, and a chair to sit on, even if we didn't have a roof!"
They had been, in effect, in the position of earth-castaways marooned on a sand-cay which had not even seashells on it or fish around it. There was literally nothing they could do but talk.
"And," she added, "if we could make a tub to take a bath in—"
She brightened at the thought. Stan hadn't told her of his own reasons for having no hope. There was no point in causing her despair in advance.
"We'll see what we see," he said. "Climb aboard."
The space skid was barely five feet long. It had a steering bar and a thick body which contained its power-storage unit and drive. And there was the seat which one straddled, and the strap to hold its passenger. Two people riding it in bulky space suits was much like riding double on a bicycle, but Stan would not leave Esther alone. Not since they'd seen that horrifying trail!
They rose vertically and headed south in what was almost a rocket's trajectory. Stan, quite automatically, had noted the time of sunrise at the incredible structure beside which he'd landed. Later, he'd noted as automatically the length of the planet's day. So to find his original landing place he had only to follow the dawn line across the planet's surface, with due regard for the time consumed in traveling.
They were still two hundred miles out in space when he sighted the grid. He slanted down to it. It was just emerging from the deep black shadow of night. He swooped to a landing on one of the hundred-foot slabs of hinged metal three hundred feet above ground. It was clear of sand. It had obviously been dumped.
Esther stared about her, amazed.
"But—people made this, Stan!" she insisted. "If we can get in touch with them—"
"You sit over there," said Stan. He pointed to an intersection of the criss-crossing girders. "It takes power to travel near a planet. My power bank is half drained already. I'd better fill it up again."
He got out his cutting-torch. He turned it upon a motor-housing. The plastic coating frizzled and smoked. It peeled away. Metal flared white-hot and melted.
There was a monstrous creaking. All the plates in a square mile turned. Swiftly. Only a desperate leap saved Stan from a drop to the desert thirty stories below.
The great slabs pointed their edges to the sky. Stan waited. Esther said startledly;
"That was on purpose, Stan!"
"Hardly," said Stan. "They'll turn back in a minute."
But they did not turn back. They stayed tilted toward the dawning sky.
"You may be right, at that," said Stan. "We'll see. Try another place."
Five minutes later they landed on a second huge slab of black metal, miles away. Without a word, Stan ensconced Esther on the small platform formed by crossing girders. He took out the torch again. The tiny, blue-white flame. Smoke at its first touch. Metal flowed.
With a vast cachinnation of squeakings, a mile-square section shifted like the first....
"Something," said Stan grimly, "doesn't want us to have power. Maybe they can stop us, and maybe not."
The swelling which was the motor-housing was just within reach from the immovable girder crossing on which Esther waited. Stan reached out now. The torch burned with a quiet fierce flame. A great section of metal fell away, exposing a motor exactly like the one he'd first examined—slabs of allotropic graphite and all. He thrust in and cut the cables. He reached in with the charging clips—
There was a crackling report in the space skid's body. Smoke came out.
Stan examined the damage with grimly set features.
"Blew another fuse," he told Esther. "We're licked. When I took power the first time, I ruined a motor. It's been found out. So the plates turned, today, to—scare me away, perhaps, as soon as I cut into another. When I didn't scare and severed the cables, high-voltage current was shot into them to kill me or ruin whatever I was using the power for. Whether there's life here or not, there's intelligence—and a very unpleasant kind, too!"
He re-fused the skid, scowling.
"No attempt to communicate with us!" he said savagely. "They'd know somebody civilized cut into that motor-housing! They'd know it was an emergency! You'd think—"
He stopped. A faint, faint humming sound became audible. It seemed to come from nowhere in particular—or from everywhere. But it was not the formless humming of a rising wind. This sound was a humming punctuated by hurried, rhythmic clankings. It was oddly like the sound of cars traveling over an old-fashioned railway—one with unwelded rail joints. Then Esther jerked her head about.
"Stan! Look there!"
Something hurtled toward them in the gray dawn light. It was a machine. Even in the first instant of amazement, Stan could see what it was and what it was designed to do. It was a huge, bulbous platform above stiltlike legs. At the bottoms of the legs were wheels. The wheels ran on the cross-girders as on a railroad track, and the body of the thing was upraised enough to ride well above the sidewise-tilted slabs. There were other wheels to be lowered for travel on the girders which supported the slabs.
It was not a flying device, but a rolling one. It could travel in either of two directions at right angles to each other, and had been designed to run only on the great grid which ran beyond the horizon. It was undoubtedly a maintaining machine, designed to reach any spot where trouble developed, for the making of repairs, and it was of such weight that even the typhoonlike winds of a normal day on this world could not lift it from its place.
It came hurtling toward them at terrific speed. It would roll irresistibly over anything on the girders which were its tracks.
"Get on!" snapped Stan. "Quick!"
Esther moved as swiftly as she could, but space suits are clumsy things. The little skid shot skyward only part of a second before the colossus ran furiously over the place where they had been. A hundred feet beyond, it braked and came to a seemingly enraged stop. It stood still as if watching the hovering, tiny skid with its two passengers.
"It looks disappointed," said Stan dourly. "I wonder if it wants to chase us?"
He sent the skid darting away. They landed. In seconds the vibration caused by the huge machine's motion began and grew loud. They saw it race into view. As it appeared, instantly a deafening clamor began. Slabs in all directions rose to their vertical position, so that the two humans could not dodge from one row of girders to another. And then with a roar and a rush the thing plunged toward them once more.
Again the skid took off. Again the huge machine overran the spot where they had been, then stopped short as if baffled. Stan sent his odd craft off at an angle. Instantly the gigantic thing was in motion, moving in lightning speed in one direction, stopping short to move on a new course at right angles to the first, and so progressing in zigzag but very swift pursuit.
"'Won't you land so I can crush you?' said the monster to us two," said Stan dryly. "They won't let us have any more power, and we haven't any more to waste. But still—"
He listened to his suit-radio, twisting the tuning dials as he sent the skid up in a spiral.
"I'm wondering," he observed, "if they're trying to tell us something by radio. And meanwhile I'd like a more comprehensive view of this damned checkerboard!"
A faint, faint, wavering whine came into the headphones.
"There's something," he commented "Not a main communication wave, though. A stray harmonic—and of a power beam, I think. They must use plenty short waves!"
But he was searching the deadly monotony of the grid below him as he spoke. Suddenly, he pointed. All the area below them to the horizon was filled with geometric shapes of grids and squares. But one space was different from the rest. Four squares were thrown into one, there. And as the skid dived for a nearer view, that one square was seen to be a deep, hollow shaft going down toward the very vitals of this world. As Stan looked, though, it filled swiftly with something rising from its depths. The lifting thing was a platform, and things moved about on it.
"That's that!" said Stan hardly.
He shot the skid away in level flight at topmost speed, with the great rolling machine following helplessly and ragingly on its zigzag course below.
The horizon was dark, now, with the coming night. As Stan lifted for the rocketlike trajectory that would take him back to the polar regions, the white sun sank fiercely. There was a narrow space on which the rays smote so slantingly that the least inequality of level was marked by shadow. Gigantic sand dunes were outlined there. But beyond, where the winds began, there was only featureless swirling dust.
Stan was very silent all the way back. Only, once, he said calmly, "Our power units will soak up a pretty big charge in a short time. We packed away some power before the fuse blew."
There was no comment for Esther to make. There was life on the planet. It was life which knew of their existence and presence—and had tried to kill them for the theft of some few megawatts of power. It would not be easy to make terms with the life which held other life so cheaply.
With the planet's only source of power now guarded, matters looked less bright than before. But after they had reached the icecap, and when they slanted down out of the airlessness to the spot which was their home because their seeds had been planted there—as they dived down for a landing, their real situation appeared.
There was a colossal object with many pairs of legs moving back and forth over the little space where their food plants sprouted. In days, those plants would have yielded food. They wouldn't yield food now.
Their garden was being trampled to nothingness by a multilegged machine of a size comparable to the other machine which had chased them on the grid. It was fifty feet high from ground to top, and had a round, tanklike body all of twenty feet in diameter. Round projections at one end looked like eyes. It moved on multiple legs which trampled in orderly confusion. It stamped the growing plants to pulped green stuff in the polar sand. It went over and over and over the place where the food necessary for the humans' survival had promised to grow. It stamped and stamped: It destroyed all hope of food. And it destroyed all hope.
Because, as Stan drove the skid down to see the machine more clearly, it stopped in its stamping. It swung about to face him, with a curiously unmachinelike ferocity. As Stan veered, it turned also. When he sped on over it and beyond, it wheeled and came galloping with surprising speed after him.
Then they saw another machine. Two more. Three. They saw dark specks here and there in the polar wastes, every one a machine like the one which had tramped their food supply out of existence. And every one changed course to parallel and approach the skid's line of travel. If they landed, the machines would close in.
There was only so much power. The skid could not stay indefinitely aloft. And anywhere that they landed—
But they did land. They had to. It was a thousand miles away, on the dark side of the planet, in a waste of sand which looked frozen in the starlight. The instant the skid touched ground, Stan made a warning gesture and reached over to turn off Esther's suit-radio. He opened his own face-plate and almost gasped at the chill of the midnight air. With no clouds or water vapor to hinder it, the heat stored up by day was radiated out to the awful chill of interstellar space at a rate which brought below zero temperatures within hours of sundown. At the winter pole of the planet, the air itself must come close to turning liquid from the cold. But here, and now, Stan nodded in his helmet as Esther opened her face-plate.
"No radio," he told her. "They'll hardly be able to find us in several million square miles if we don't use radio. But now you get some sleep. We're going to have a busy time, presently!"
Esther hesitated, and said desperately, "But—who are they? What are they? Why do they want to kill us?"
"They're the local citizens," said Stan. "I was wrong, there are inhabitants. I've no more idea what they may be like than you have. But I suspect they want to kill us simply because we're strangers."
"But how could an intelligent race develop on a planet like this?" demanded Esther unbelievingly. "How'd they stay alive while they were developing?"
Stan shrugged his shoulders.
"Once you admit that a thing is so," he said dryly, "you can figure out how it happened. This sun is a dwarf white star. That means that once upon a time it exploded. It flared out into a nova. Maybe there were other planets nearer to it than this, and they volatilized when their sun blew up. Everything on this planet, certainly, was killed, and for a long, long time after it was surely uninhabitable by any standard. There's a dwarf star in the Crab Nebula which will melt iron four light-hours away—land that was a nova twelve hundred years ago. It must have been bad on this planet for a long time indeed.
"I'm guessing that when the first explosion came the inner planets turned to gas and this one had all its seas and forests and all its atmosphere simply blasted away to nothingness. Everything living on its surface was killed. Even bacteria in the soil turned to steam and went off into space. That would account for the absolute absence of life here now."
"But—" said Esther.
"But," said Stan, "the people—call them people—who lived here were civilized even then. They knew what was coming. If they hadn't interstellar drive, flight would do them no good. They'd have nowhere to go. So maybe they stayed. Underground. Maybe they dug themselves caves and galleries five—ten—twenty miles down. Maybe some of those galleries collapsed when the blow-up came, but some of the people survived. They'd stayed underground for centuries. They'd have to! It might be fifty thousand years they stayed underground, while Khor Alpha blazed less and less fiercely, and they waited until they could come up again.
"There was no air for a while up here. They had to fight to keep alive, down in the planet's vitals. They made a new civilization, surrounded by rock, with no more thought of stars. They'd be hard put to it for power, too. They couldn't well use combustion, with a limited air supply. They probably learned to transform heat to power direct. You can take power—electricity—and make heat. Why not the other way about? For maybe fifty thousand years, and maybe more, they had to live without even thinking of the surface of their world. But as the dwarf star cooled off, they needed its heat again."
He stopped. He seemed to listen intently. But there was no sound in the icy night. There were only bright, unwinking stars and an infinity of sand—and cold.
"So they dug up to the surface again," he went on. "Air had come back, molecule by molecule from empty space, drawn by the same gravitation that once had kept it from flying away. And the fused-solid rock of the surface, baked by day and frozen by night, had cracked and broken down to powder. When air came again and winds blew, it was sand. The whole planet was desert. The people couldn't live on the surface again. They probably didn't want to. But they needed power. So they built that monster grid they're so jealous of."
"You mean," Esther demanded incredulously, "that's a generator?"
"A transformer," corrected Stan. "Solar heat to electricity. Back on Earth the sun pours better than a kilowatt of energy on every square yard of Earth's surface in the tropics—over three million kilowatts to the square mile. This checkerboard arrangement is at least a hundred and fifty by two hundred miles. The power's greater here, but, on Earth, that would mean ninety thousand million kilowatts. More than a hundred thousand million horsepower—more than the whole Earth uses even now!
"If those big slabs convert solar radiation into power—and I charged up the skid from one of them—there's a reason for the checkerboard, and there's a reason for dumping the sand—it would hinder gathering power—and there's a reason for getting upset when somebody started to meddle with it. And they're upset! They'll have the conservation of moisture down to a fine point, down below, but they made those leggy machines to haul more water, from the poles. When they set them all to hunting us, they're very much disturbed! But luckily they'd never have worked out anything to fly with underground and they're not likely to have done so since—considering the storms and all."
There was a short silence. Then Esther said slowly, "It's—very plausible, Stan. I believe it. And they'd have no idea of space travel, so they'd have no idea of other intelligent races, and actually they'd never think of castaways. They wouldn't understand, and they'd try to kill us to study the problem we presented. That's their idea, no doubt. And they've all the resources of a civilization that's old and scientific. They'll apply them all to get us—and they won't even think of listening to us! Stan! What can we do?"
Stan said amusedly, there in the still, frigid night of an unnamed planet, "Why—we'll do plenty! We're barbarians by comparison with them, Esther, and barbarians have equipment civilized men forget. All savages have spears, but a civilized man doesn't even always carry a pocketknife. If we can find theErebus, we can probably defy this whole planet—until they put their minds to developing weapons. But right now you go to sleep. I'll watch."
Esther looked at him dubiously. Five days of sandstorms should have buried the little yacht irrecoverably.
"If it's findable," she said. Then she added wistfully, "But it would be nice to be on theErebusagain. It would feel so good to walk around without a space suit! And—" she added firmly, "after all, Stan, we are engaged! And if you think I like trying to figure out some way of getting kissed through an opened face-plate—"
Stan said gruffly, "Go to sleep!"
He paced up and down and up and down. They were remarkably unlike castaways in the space tale magazines. In those works of fiction, the hero is always remarkably ingenious. He contrives shelters from native growths on however alien a planet he and the heroine may have been marooned; he is full of useful odd bits of information which enable him to surprise her with unexpected luxuries, and he is inspired when it comes to signaling devices. But in five days on this planet, Stan had been able to make no use of any natural growth because there weren't any. He'd found no small luxuries for Esther because there was literally nothing about but sand. And there was strikingly little use in a fund of odd bits of information when there was only desert to apply it to—desert and sandstorms.
What he'd just told Esther was a guess; the best guess he could make, and a plausible one, but still a guess. The only new bit of information he'd picked up so far was the way the local inhabitants made electric motors. And he had to bet his and Esther's life on that!
He watched the chrono. And a good half hour before night would strike the checkerboard grid, he was verifying what few preparations he could make. A little later he waked Esther. And just about twenty minutes before the sunset line would reach the grid, they soared upward to seek it. If Stan's plan didn't work, they'd die. He was going to gamble their lives and the last morsel of power the skid's power unit contained, on information gained in two peeps at slab-motors on the grid, and the inference that all motors on this planet would be made on the same principle. Of course, as a subsidiary gamble, he had also to bet that he in an unarmed and wrecked space yacht could defy a civilization that had lived since before Khor Alpha was a dwarf star.
They soared out of atmosphere on a trajectory that saved power but was weirdly unlike any normal way of traveling from one spot on a planet's surface to another. Beneath them lay the vast expanse of the desert, all dense, velvety black except for one blindingly bright area at its western rim. That bright area widened as they neared it, overtaking the day. Suddenly the rectangular edges of the grid shed appeared, breaking the sharp edge of dusk.
TheErebushad grounded about fifty miles northward from the planet's solitary structure. Stan turned on his suit-radio and listened intently. There was no possible landmark. The dunes changed hourly during the day and on no two days were ever the same. He skimmed the settling sand clouds of the dusk belt. Presently he was sure he had overshot his mark.
He circled. He circled again. He made a great logarithmic spiral out from the point he considered most likely. The power meter showed the drain. He searched in the night, with no possible landmark. Sweat came out on his face.