Stan nodded at a patch of frost on the darker side of a half-mile sand dune.
“Sleeping,” he said dryly,” will be done in spacesuits. 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—
“Darn!” 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 life 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. Each footprint was two yards across.
CHAPTER 4
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 seeds 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 savage of Earth. They had no shelter. There was no building material but sand. They slept in their spacesuits 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. 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 the Stallifer. 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—”
Esther nodded.
“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!” said Stan.
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 past 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. 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. It was unthinkable that food was to be found in the strangling depths of 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 spacesuits all the time. Maybe we could even heat the inside of a house!”
Esther smiled at him.
“Darling,” she said wrily, “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,” said Stan. “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. There was the seat which one straddled, and the strap to hold its passenger. Two people riding it in bulky spacesuits 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 been dumped.
Esther stared about her, amazed.
“But—people made this, Stan!” she insisted. “If we can get in touch with them—”
“You sit there,” said Stan briefly. He pointed to an intersection of the crisscrossing 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 shortly. “We’ll see. I’ll 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. The torch burned with quiet fierce flame. A great section of metal fell away, exposing a motor exactly like the one he’d 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 said shortly. “We’re licked. When I took power the first time, I temporarily 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 the cables 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. It was not the formless humming of a rising wind, though the before-dawn twilight was already light and the sky was bright with approaching day. 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. 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 maintenance 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 would not lift it from its place.
It came hurtling toward them at terrific speed. It would roll irresistably over anything on the girders which were its tracks.
“Get on!” snapped Stan. “Quick!”
Esther moved as swiftly as she could, but spacesuits 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. 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 with 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 and let me crush you, said the monster to us two,” said Stan drily. “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 of 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 the geometric shapes of grid and squares. But one space was different from the rest. Four squares were thrown into one, there. 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 hardily.
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 bright, now, with the sunrise. As Stan lifted for the rocketlike trajectory that would take him back to the polar regions, the white sun came up fiercely. There was a narrow space on which the dawn rays smote so slantingly that the least inequality of level was marked by shadow. Gigantic sand dunes were outlined there. Beyond, where the winds began, there was only featureless swirling dust.
Stan was very silent all the way back. Only once he said shortly:
“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. After they had reached the icecap, they slanted down out of 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 tramped 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. It destroyed all hope.
Because, as Stan drove the skid down to see the machine more closely, 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. Every one changed course to parallel and approached 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—
CHAPTER 5
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?”
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 55