by Andre Norton
“And you can fire them?”
“The chief—my chief—doped out that this does that”—Renfry fingered another switch he did not depress. “As far as I deduce, one of those king-sized blasters should just about clip across the roof of your strongbox. We can try it on for size any time you’re ready.”
But Ashe was rubbing his jaw in that absent-minded way which meant he had not yet come to a decision. “Too much guessing in all of this. We don’t know that we have to crack that place open in order to lift ship again. In fact, if we did crack it and couldn’t find what we needed—we wouldn’t be any better off. These natives must depend upon that shelter for their lives. Break it open and they’re just as dead as if we mowed them down with guns. They may not be anything or anybody we’d care to live with, but this is their world and we’re intruders. I’d like to wait a little before I try anything as drastic as blowing up the place.”
None of them was inclined to push him into action. Outside the flames beat into the night sky, and the white of the moon they had noted the night before was marred by a more yellow gleam from a smaller satellite trailing behind the larger. But of the activity of the dune skulkers the screen gave them no clue.
That came not by sight but by a startling shifting of the ship itself. How had the creatures outside achieved that movement? Perhaps, Travis imagined, by the sheer weight of many creeping bodies plastered to the hull. The globe canted from its landing position. And maybe that triggered the flying controls. For the now-familiar warnings of a take-off alerted them all.
“No!” Renfry protested, “we can’t—not yet—not until we know why.”
But the engines the humans did not understand, and could not hope to control, had no ears for that feeble defiance. Perhaps only a time limit had governed their visit, a full day and night of planetary time. Or maybe it was the strange attack of the hairy things.
And those creatures—would they free themselves in time, drop to the ground as the ship lifted, warned by the vibrations? Or would they cling in stupid concentration upon their attack, to be carried out into the freezing blackness of the eternal night?
The unwilling crew of the ship followed the old routine of strap down and wait for the wrench of blast-off, the break into hyperspace. Again they were being carried into the unknown with perhaps a long voyage ahead.
But it was not to be the same this time. Travis noticed the first departure from the usual routine. The take-off was not so severe—or else he had adjusted to it far better than he ever had before. He did not black out completely, nor did he have to undergo that terrible inner twisting. And he heard Renfry’s voice exclaim in wonder:
“I don’t think we went into hyper! What happened?”
They were up and about, watching the screen of the ship. Renfry’s guess was right. For instead of the complete blackness which closed in upon them when they made a big inter-system jump, they saw now the receding orb of the desert planet, its face a mass of shifting color as they withdrew from it.
“Must be heading for another planet in this same system,” Ashe supplied one answer. And, as the hours wore on, they believed that was the right one. The ship now appeared to be on course for the third planet of that unknown sun.
“Do we visit them all?” inquired Ross with some of his old flippancy. “If so—why? Parcel delivery?”
Three days went by, four. They ate the alien food and moved restlessly about the ship, unable to pay attention for any length of time to anything but the screen in the control cabin. Then on the sixth day, came the signals of an approaching landing.
On the screen the goal showed a vivid blue-green, patched here and there with orange-red under clouds. They had drawn lots for the occupancy of the three seats in the control cabin, and the odd man to be relegated to the bunk below. So Travis now lay alone and unseeing in the heart of the throbbing globe, wondering what new future they must confront.
The ship set down this time in the planet’s day. The Apache freed himself from his straps, stumbled in the return clutch of gravity to the ladder and climbed up to share the others’ view of the new world.
“No—!”
The ruined towers standing starkly to portion off the expanse of the fueling port had speared as straightly into the sky—but they had not been like this one. Against a background of cloudless, delicate pink, was an opaline dome. It curved in flowing lines which spiraled up in turn to a fragile frosting of lace. It was nothing like a human construction.
Torn lace . . . As he studied those lifting spans, Travis could mark the breaks which spoiled the perfect pattern. Yet in spite of that damage there was still the fantastic beauty of form and light and play of rainbow color. It rose out of dark foliage tinged with blue unlike the green of his own world’s leaves.
And those leafy branches stirred almost languidly as if light breezes pulled at them, showing here and there a touch of other colors. Fruit? Flowers?
Renfry brought their attention away from the scene which was so ethereal as to seem unreal.
“Look!”
He was on his feet before the main control board, his hands grasping the back of the pilot’s seat so tightly that the muscles stood out on his taut arms. For the board had taken on life. They had witnessed the flickers of light which had heralded the readying of the ship’s guns. This was something else—a line of small winks of brilliance flowing unevenly down the rows of levers and buttons. And where each flashed a lever arose, a button sank or snapped above the level of the board. There was a final burst of light from a spot Travis could have covered with his thumb. And there a lid opened and a cavity beneath disgorged a small, coin-shaped bit of red metal that tinkled out, to roll across the floor.
Renfry came to life, dove to catch it up. He held it in his hand as if the disk was something very precious indeed.
“Home port!” He swung about to face them, his eagerness lighting a flame in his eyes. “This is the home port! And I think I am holding the course tape!”
There could be no other explanation for what they had just witnessed. The journey plotted by a dying man had come to its full conclusion. That small button of metal Renfry had closed his fist upon, held now not only the secret of their arrival—but of their return. If they were ever to regain their own world, it would be because they had solved the workings of that disk.
Yet Travis’ eyes went from the technician’s clenched hand and what it held, back to the screen. The picture there showed a gentle wind lifting flowering branches about a tower of opal against a sky of palest rose. And the immediate future seemed at that moment more entrancing than the more distant one.
Perhaps Ashe shared that feeling at the moment. For the senior time agent moved toward the inner ladder. He paused at the well and looked back over his shoulder, to say with a strange simplicity:
“Let us go out—now.”
12
If there had once been a wide landing strip here, the space was long since swallowed by a cover of green. From the mass crushed by the landing of the ship came the scent of growing things, some spicy, some rank.
The humans had not worn their helmets, nor did they need to here. A sunlight no stronger than that of early summer in the temperate zone of their own world greeted them. And there was no burden of sand in the soft wind which whirled flower petals and torn leaves from the wreckage under their feet.
Now that they had a wider view than that offered by the screen, they noted other breaks in the luxuriance of growing things. The opal tower with its fantastic form was flanked by another building as strange and as far removed from the style of its companion as the desert world was from this green one. For those massive blocks of dull red, geometric in their solidity, could not have sprung from the same creative imagination—or perhaps from even the same race or age.
And beyond that was another, with knife-sharp gables and secretive windows piercing its gray walls. It had a pointed roof of some rough material, dull under the sun, and gave rootage in places to vi
nes, even a small tree. But again it was not of the same origin as the fairylike dome or the massive blocks.
“Why—?” Ross’s head turned slowly as he looked from one of those totally dissimilar buildings to the next. All were tall, dwarfing the globe, and all had their lower stories hidden by the vegetation.
Travis thought back to a past which seemed a little blurred by all which had happened lately. There were places on his own world where a Zuñi village in miniature stood beside a Sioux lodge or an Apache wickiup.
“A museum?” He ventured the only explanation he could see.
Ashe’s face was pale under his fading tan. He stared raptly from dome to block, block to sharply accented gables. “Or else a capital where each embassy built in their home style.”
“And now it is all dead,” Travis added. For that was true. This was as deserted as the fueling port.
“Capital perhaps—of a galactic empire. What there is to be learned here! A treasure house—” Ashe was breathing fast. “We may have the treasures of a thousand worlds to uncover here.”
“And who will ever know—or care?” Ross asked. “Not that I’m not ready to go and look for them.”
Travis tensed. There was a stirring in the mass of tangled vegetation where the grounding of the globe had flattened some of the fern trees, along with others tied to them by vines. He watched that shaking of bruised and broken branches. Something alive was working its way from a point about a hundred yards away from the ship toward the wall of still-standing plants. And the fugitive thing must be fairly large by the amount of displacement its progress caused.
Had that unseen crawling thing been injured in the crash of the tree ferns? Was it now dragging itself off to die? Travis listened, striving to hear more than the rustling of the leaves. But if the thing was hurt, it made no complaint. Animal? Or—something else? Something as alien as the dune lurkers, more than animal, yet different from man as they knew men?
“It’s in cover now,” breathed Ross. “Couldn’t have been too hurt or it wouldn’t have moved so lively.”
“I think we can believe that this world isn’t as empty as it might look to the first glance,” Ashe said a little dryly. “And what about those?”
“Those” came lightly, drifting across the torn clearing caused by the descent of the globe. They flapped gossamer wings once or twice to keep air-borne, but their attention was manifestly centered on the ship.
And what were they? Birds? Insects? Flying mammals? Travis could almost believe the four small creatures were a weird combination of all three. Their long narrow wings, prismatic and close to transparent, resembled those of an insect. Yet they had bodies equipped with three legs, two smaller ones in front ending in clawshaped digits, one larger limb in back with an even more pronounced talon. Their heads seemed to be set directly on their shoulders with no visible neck. These were round at the top, narrowing to a curved beak, while their eyes—four of them!—protruded on short stalks, two in front and two in back. And their triangles of bodies were clothed in plushy fur of pale and frosted blue.
Slowly, in a solemn, silent procession, they drifted toward the ship. The second in line broke out of formation, dipped groundward. Its hind claws found anchorage on a stub of broken branch and its wings folded together above its back, resembling a butterfly on Earth.
The two last in line flapped back and forth across the open port twice and then wheeled, flew off, mounting into the sky to clear the treetops. But the leader came on, until it hung, beating wings now and then to maintain altitude, directly before the entrance of the ship.
It was impossible to read any expression in those brilliantly blue stalked eyes. But none of the four humans felt any repulsion or alarm as they had upon their encounter with the nocturnal desert people. Whatever the flyer was, they could not believe that it was either aggressive or potentially dangerous.
Renfry expressed their common reaction to the creature first:
“Funny little beggar, isn’t he? Like to see him closer. If they’re all the same as him here, we don’t have to worry.”
Why the technician should refer to the winged thing as “he” was obscure. But the creature was attractive enough to hold their interest. Ross snapped his fingers and held out his hand in welcome.
“Here, boy,” he coaxed.
Those brilliant bits of blue winked as the eye stalks moved, the wings beat, and the flyer approached the port. But not close enough for the humans to touch. It hung there, suspended in mid-air for a long moment. Then with a flurry of beating wings, sparking rainbows, it mounted skyward, its partner taking off from the brush below at the same moment to join it. A few seconds later they vanished as if they had never been.
“Do you suppose it is intelligent?” Ross watched after the vanished flyer, his disappointment mirrored on his usually impassive face.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ashe replied. “Renfry,” he spoke to the technician, “you have your journey tape now. Can you reset it?”
“I don’t know. Wish I had a manual—at least some type of guide. Do you suppose you can find such a thing here?”
“Why are you in such a big hurry to leave, chief? We only got here and it looks like a pretty good vacation spot to me.” Ross raised his head a little to eye the dome where opal lights played under the sun’s rays.
“That is just why,” Ashe replied quietly. “There are too many temptations here.”
Travis understood. To Ashe the appeal of those waiting buildings, of the knowledge which they might contain, must be almost overpowering. They could postpone work on the ship, delay and delay, fascinated by this world and its secrets. He knew the same pull, though perhaps in a lesser degree. Before it trapped them all, they must struggle against that enveloping desire to plunge into the green jungle, slash a path to the opal dome, and see for themselves what wonders it housed.
Ashe was sorely tempted. And because he was the man he was, he must be fighting that temptation now, believing that if he once plunged wholeheartedly into exploration, he might not be able to stop. Also, Renfry was offering them an excuse to do just that by wishing for some aid in the problem of the tape.
An hour later the three of them did leave the ship, Renfry remaining in charge there. Using the lowest beam of the weapons, they cut a path into the woods. Travis picked up a flower head. Five wide petals, fluted, crinkled a little at the tips, were a deep cream in color, shading orange at the heart. Resting on his palm, those petals began to move visibly, closing until he held a bud instead of a flower. He could not toss away the blossom. Its color was too arresting, its spicy scent too appealing. He worked the short stem into one of the latches of a belt pouch, where, the heat of his hand removed, the flower opened once again. Nor did it fade or droop in spite of the shortness of its stem.
Now, out of the direct rays of the sun, the humans found the air cool, moist, heavy with the odor of luxuriant vegetation. Not that those odors were unpleasant—in fact, they were overpoweringly good. Spicy scents warred with perfumes and the sharper smell of earth as their feet scuffed through the mass of dead leaves.
“Whew!” Ross waved his hand back and forth in front of his face as if to set up a reviving current of air. “Perfume factory—or what have you! I feel as if I were burrowing through about a ton of roses!”
Ashe appeared to have lost some of his somberness since they had left the ship. “With another of carnations thrown in,” he agreed. “I think I can detect”—he sniffed and then sneezed—“some cloves and maybe a few nutmegs into the bargain.”
Travis breathed shallowly. He had welcomed the mixture of perfumes minutes earlier. Now he found himself wishing instead to face a wind with a burden of sage and piñon in place of these cloying scents in their thick abundance.
The jungle grew clear up to the base of the opaline building. And the structure itself loomed far higher from ground level than had appeared true from the port of the ship. They worked their way along, hunting the entrance which mu
st exist somewhere, unless the inhabitants had all worn wings. Oddly enough—though there were windows in plenty of stories above, many opening on small airy balconies—the first story showed no openings at all. Here were panels set in carved frames alternating with solid blocks of the opal material. And each panel was clad in gleaming mosaic, not forming any recognized design but merely wedding color to color in vivid shades.
The humans cut their way through underbrush and reached the end of the wall. This was a large building occupying the space of a normal Terran city block. But around the corner they found the door, at the head of a curling ramp. The portal extended almost the full height of the first story and it was open, a carved archway. The frame was like frozen lace, with here a curve and there a point cracked and gone.
They hesitated. Save for the sighing of the wind, the sound of leaf against moving leaf, and some small twitters and squeaks from the unseen inhabitants of the green world surrounding the foot of the ramp, there was quiet—the quiet of the forgotten.
Ashe stepped onto the ramp, his soft-shod feet making not the slightest noise. He climbed the gentle slope almost reluctantly, as if he did not really want to know what waited within.
Travis and Ross came behind. There were pockets of dead leaves caught in the curves of the ramp, and more drifted inside the open portal. They shuffled through them, to come into a hall which was breathtaking in its height. For it went up and up, until they were dizzied when they tried to follow its inner spiral with their eyes. And covering this expanse was the great opaline dome. The sunlight shone through it, painting rainbows on walls and on the ramp which climbed in a coil along the walls, serving other lacy archways on every floor level.
Here there was none of the brilliance of the outside mosaics. The spread of color was sharply reduced to soft, faded shades, dusky violet, pallid green, dusty rosy, pale cream . . .