Stan shrugged his shoulders.
“Once you admit that a thing is so,” he said drily, “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 afterward it was surely uninhabitable by any standard. There’s a dwarf star in the Crab Nebula which will melt iron four light hours away, and 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 blowup came, but some of the people survived. They’d stay underground for centuries. They’d have to! It might be fifty thousand years that 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 directly to power. You can take power—electricity—and make heat. Why not the other way about? For 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. 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 sixty 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 was a reason for getting upset when somebody started to meddle with it. 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 silence. Esther said slowly:
“It’s—very plausible, Stan. I believe it. 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. 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 pocket knife. If we can find the Erebus, 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 the Erebus again. It would feel so good to walk around without a spacesuit! And—” she added firmly; “after all, Stan, we are engaged! 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 repeatedly. They were remarkably unlike castaways in the space tale tape-dramas. 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 on; 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 wasn’t any. He’d found no small luxuries for Esther because there was literally nothing about but sand. 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.
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, 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 an 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 rectatigular edges of the grid shed appeared, breaking the sharp edge of dusk.
The Erebus had grounded roughly 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 they 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 circle 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.
Then he heard a tiny click. Sweat
ran down his face. He worked desperately to localize the signal Esther had set to working in the yacht before she left it. When at last he landed and was sure the Erebus was somewhere under the starlit sand about him, he looked at the power gauge and tensed his lips. He pressed his space helmet close to Esther’s, until it touched. He spoke, and his voice carried by metallic conduction without the use of radio.
“We might make it if we try now. But we’re going to need a lot of power at best. I’m going to gamble the local yokels can’t trace a skid drive and wait for morning, to harness the whirlwinds to do our digging for us.”
Her voice came faintly back to him by the same means of communication.
“All right, Stan.”
She couldn’t guess his intentions, of course. They were probably insane. He said urgently:
“Listen! The yacht’s buried directly under us. Maybe ten feet, maybe fifty, maybe Heaven knows how deep! There’s a bare chance that if we get to it we can do something, with what I know now about the machines in use here. It’s the only chance I know, and it’s not a good one. It’s only fair to tell you—”
“I’ll try anything,” said her voice in his helmet, “with you.”
He swallowed. Then he stayed awake and desperately alert, his suit microphones at their highest pitch of sensitivity, during the long and deadly monotonous hours of the night.
There was no alarm. When the sky grayed to the eastward, he showed her how he hoped to reach the yacht. The drive of the skid, of course, was not a pulsatory field such as even the smallest of space yachts used. It was more nearly an adaptation of a meteor repeller beam, a simple reactive thrust against an artificial mass field. It was the first type of electronic drive ever to lift a ship from earth. For takeoff and landing and purposes like meteor mining it is still better than the pulsating-field drive by which a ship travels in huge if unfelt leaps. But in atmosphere it does produce a tremendous back blast of repelled air. It is never used on atmosphere fliers for that very reason, but Stan proposed to make capital of its drawback for his purpose.
When he’d finished his explanation, Esther was more than a little pale, but she smiled gamely.
“All right, Stan. Go ahead!”
“We’ll save power if we wait for the winds,” he told her.
Already, though, breezes stirred across the dawn-lit sand. Already there were hot breezes. Already the fine, impalpable sand dust which settled last nightfall was rising in curious opaque clouds which billowed and curled and blotted out the horizon. But the grid was hidden anyhow by the bulge of the planet’s surface.
Stan pointed the little skid downward in a hollow he scooped out with his space-gloved hands. He set the gyros running to keep it pointed toward the buried yacht. He had Esther climb up behind him. He lashed the two of them together, and strapped down to the skid. He waited.
In ten minutes after the first sand grains pelted on his armor, the sky was hidden by the finer dust. In twenty there were great gusts which could be felt even within the spacesuits. In half an hour a monster gale blew.
Stan turned on the space skid’s drive. It thrust downward toward the sand and the buried yacht. It thrust upward against the air and pelting sand.
In three-quarters of an hour the sandstorm had reached frenzied violence, but the skid pushed down from within a little hollow. Its drive thrust up a spout of air. That spout drew sand grains with it. But it was needful to increase the power. After an hour a gigantic whirlwind swept around them. It tore at the two people and the tiny machine. It sucked up such a mass of powdery sand particles that its impact on the spacesuits was like a savage blow. Emptiness opened beneath the skid and sand went whirling up in a sand spout the exact equivalent of a water spout at sea. Stan and Esther and the skid itself would have been torn away by its violence but that the skid’s drive was on full, now. The absurd little traveler thrust sturdily downward. When sand was drawn away by wind, it burrowed down eagerly to make the most of its gain.
Its back thrust kept a steady, cone-shaped pressure on the sand which would have poured in upon it. Stan and Esther were buried and uncovered and buried again, but the skid fought valorously. It strove to dig deeper and to fling away the sand that would have hidden it from view. It remained, actually, at the bottom of a perpetually filling pit which it kept unfilled by a geyser of upflung sand from its drive.
In twenty minutes more another whirlwind touched the pit briefly. The skid—helped by the storm—dug deeper yet. There came other swirling maelstroms.
The nose of the skid touched solidly. It had burrowed down nearly fifty feet, with the aid of whirlwinds, and come to the yacht Erebus.
But it was another hour before accident and fierce efforts on Stan’s part combined to let him reach the airlock door, and maneuver the skid to keep that doorway clear, and for Esther to climb in—followed by masses of slithering sand—and Stan after her.
Inside the buried yacht, Stan fumbled for lights. He made haste to turn off the signaling device that had led him back to it deep under the desert’s surface. It was strangely and wonderfully still here, buried under thousands of tons of sand.
Esther slipped out of her spacesuit and smiled tremulously at Stan.
“Now—?”
“Now,” said Stan,” if you want to you can start cooking. We could do with a civilized meal. I’ll see what I can do toward a slightly less uncertain way of life.”
He went forward. The Erebus was a small yacht, to be sure. It was a bare sixty feet overall, and of course as a pleasurecraft it had no actual armament. But within two bulging blisters at the bow the meteor repellers were mounted. In flight, in space, they could make a two-way thrust against stray bits of celestial matter, so that if a meteor was tiny it was thrust aside, or if too large the Erebus swerved away. From within Stan changed the focus of the beams. They had been set to send out tiny artificial matter beams no larger than a rifle bore. At ten miles such a beam would be six inches across, and at forty a bare two feet. He adjusted both to a quickly widening cone and pointed one up, the other down. One would thrust violently against the sand under the yacht, and the other against the sand over it. The surface sand, at least, could rise and be blown away. The sand below would support the yacht against further settling.
He went back to where Esther laid out dishes.
“I’ve started something,” he told her. “One repeller beam points up to make the sand over our heads effectively lighter so it can be blown away more easily. The storm ought to burrow right down to us, with that much help. After we’re uncovered, we may, just possibly, be able to work up to the surface. But after that we’ve got to do something else. The repellers aren’t as powerful as a drive, and it’s hardly likely we could lift out of gravity on them. Even if we did, we’re a few light centuries from home. To fix our interstellar drive we need the help of our friends of the grid.”
Esther paused to stare.
“But they’ll try to kill us!” she protested. “They’ve tried hard! And if they find us we’ve no weapons at all, not even a hand blaster!”
“To the contrary,” said Stan drily, “we’ve probably the most ghastly weapon anybody ever invented, only it won’t work on any other planet than this.”
Then he grinned at her. He was out of his spacesuit too, now. The food he’d asked her to prepare was out on the table, but he ignored it. He took one step toward her. And then there came a muffled sound, picked up by the outside hull microphones. It grew in volume. It became a roar. Then the yacht shifted position. Its nose tilted upward.
“The first step,” said Stan, “is accomplished. I can’t stop to dine. But—”
He kissed her hungrily. Five days—six, now—in spacesuits with the girl one hopes to marry has its drawbacks. An armored arm around the hulking shoulders of another suit of armor—even with a pretty girl inside it—is not satisfying. To hold hands with three-eighth-inch space gloves is less than romantic. And to try to kiss a girl three-quarters buried in a space helmet leaves mu
ch to the imagination. Stan kissed her. It took another shifting movement of the yacht, which toppled them the length of the cabin, to make him stop.
Then he laughed and went to the control room. Vision screens were useless, of course. The little ship was still most of her length under sand, but the repellers’ cones of thrust had dug a great pit down to her. Now Stan juggled the repellers to take fullest advantage of the storm. At times—with both beams pushing up—the ship was perceptibly lifted by up-rushing air. Stan could be prodigal with power, now. The skid was sharply limited in its storage of energy, but all the space between the two skins of the Erebus was a power bank. It could travel from one rim of the galaxy to the other without exhausting its store. The upward lift of whirlwinds—once there were six within ten minutes—and the thrusts of the repellers gradually edged the Erebus to the surface.
Before nightfall, it no longer lay in a sand pit. It was only half-buried in sand. The winds died down to merely savage gales, at twilight, and then slowly diminished to more angry gusts. At long last there was calm and even the impalpable fine dust that settled last no longer floated in the air. The stars shone; Stan was ready.
He turned on the ship’s communicator and sent a full power wave out into the night. He spoke. What he said would be unintelligible, of course, but he said sardonically to the empty desert under the stars:
“Yacht Erebus calling! Down on the desert, every drive smashed, and not so much as a hand blast on board for a weapon. Maybe you’d like to come and get us!”
Then—and only then—he went and ate the meal Esther had made ready.
It was half an hour before the microphones gave warning. Then they relayed clankings and poundings and thuddings on the sand. It was the sound of heavy machines marching toward the Erebus. Scores of them. The machines separated and encircled the disabled yacht, though they were invisible behind the dunes all about. Then, simultaneously, they closed in.
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 56