by E. C. Tubb
But Brett brooded unhappily over the locket, since he had no chance to be useful at the moment. He told himself very carefully that the locket had been dropped by somebody on the exploring ship Franklin, and he’d happened to find it. The background might be Alpha Centaurus or Rigel. But he didn’t believe it.
The happy labor of the Expedition went on. Brett explored the cave again. Naturally. He checked the redisplacement boxes, set up around the artifacts he could tell something about in the course of several months of restoration. He looked at the skeletons. Halliday was zestfully at work on a modeled restoration of a Thalassian as he looked in life, based on the measurements of a skull. As Halliday modeled it, the Thalassian looked remarkably human.
“But,” said Brett, “aren’t you inclined to model the creature rather too much in our own image?”
Halliday was the Expedition’s sculptor as well as its head. He frowned.
“You are very annoying, Carstairs!” he said dourly. “They were humanoid. Save for a rather prognathous jaw and this difference—here—in the occiput, this could be a human skull! Oh, the sutures are different, too, but—”
Then he fumed.
“You have made me realize that there is no reason for my having assumed a human ear shape,” he snapped. “You irritate me! Go somewhere! Do something! You disagree with me too often, and too often I suspect that you are right! Contrive some project of your own, and let me make my own mistakes!”
Brett said slowly, because he had thought something out very carefully but still wasn’t confident of his reasoning.
“I’d like to take a look at Aspasia. Not by rocket,” he added painstakingly. “They would be looking for trouble! But the pilot book says there’s one island on the other hemisphere. I’d like to see if there’s another tripod set up on that. If I could record its signal where nobody’s been near it, we might be able to forge it for the firing plaza site. Simply to avoid attracting—ah—unfavorable attention.”
This was not all the truth. He was thinking again of the girl in the locket. But that was entirely too preposterous to mention. Halliday blinked at him, his hands covered with clay from his modeling. Then he added:
“I authorize that,” he said, “yes. But I make one stipulation. You will arrange to detect radar on your flier, and if a radar does play on you, you will make sure you do not lead any—ah—creatures back here to us.”
Brett agreed, wryly. He was a little relieved. But he asked:
“Are you worried, too, that whoever took the beacon at the firing plaza might want to take a human space ship to examine in the same way? To study it and perhaps duplicate it in quantity?”
Halliday sputtered.
“Of course I’m worried!” he said angrily. “If I could prevent a ship from coming here to pick us up I would—and remain here for always. It would be my duty! If there is an intelligent race which does not know of humanity’s existence—we do not want it to learn from a shattered space ship! We would not want them to know our interstellar drive! Certainly not if humanity were not aware that they had learned! But you, Carstairs, annoy me by thinking of the things that would keep me awake nights if there were nights here!”
Brett nodded thoughtfully. He’d been considering the fix the Expedition was in from many different angles. It was possible to acquire cold chills down one’s spine, any time, simply by imagining what might happen if an inimical race of intelligent creatures became possessed of an Earth interstellar ship and was able to fathom its workings. If Earth were unwarned, its first inkling of danger could be an attack as murderous as had been made on Thalassia—and on Aspasia, too.
Something had to be done to find out the actual extent of the danger. Brett had ideas of less than total fatality. But he needed to make sure.
He took three twenty-four-hour periods to get ready for the journey he was to make. The flier, of course, could stay aloft almost indefinitely. With the slightly lesser gravity of Thalassia, it could carry a heavier load, too.
He made one low level flight back to the original camp. The Geiger counter reading of radiation was a bare two points above normal for this world. He got some special equipment—taking care to leave the camp looking as if its owners had simply walked over to the firing plaza and had not come back. He worked. Then he consulted Janney about probable meteorological conditions.
He took off and flew a thousand miles along the coastline in what would be the radar shadow of the seacoast waves. After that he struck out across the ocean. The flier was a standard Earth type utility job, capable of speeds up to six hundred miles an hour, but cruising under three hundred. For work on the continent of Chios, Brett would not have worried about fuel. But according to the exploration ship report, he had a long, long journey before him.
He flew and flew and flew. It was very tedious, and it did not help that he was staking his life on a guess he was by no means sure about. He watched the flier on automatic control for four hours running. It did not change course by the fraction of a degree, nor change altitude by as much as fifty feet. In the end he went uneasily to sleep.
When he woke, the look of things had changed. The ocean had been deep, deep blue and the light came only from the speckled brightness in the sky which was the heart of the Canes Venatici star cluster. Now those stars had been left below the horizon behind him, though there were still speckles in the heavens. Rising, however, there was Elektra. It seemed exactly the size of Sol as seen from Earth, and its brightness was diminished just enough so he could bear to look at it directly. Warmth came from it. It was markedly yellower than Brett’s home sun. And the ocean below him had become an astonishing hue which was still blue, but verged upon purple.
These, though, were items he noticed later.
He saw Aspasia, already above the horizon.
It was monstrous in size. It was nearly four times the diameter of the moon as seen from Earth, and it filled sixteen times as much of the sky. It covered a larger space than Brett’s fist held before him. It was the size of a ship’s vision-port looked at five feet away. It seemed to crowd the heavens. It seemed plunging terribly toward Thalassia. It was like a gigantic missile falling, seeming forever about to crush the planet above which Brett’s small flier flew.
He stared at it for a long time before he could be quite reasonable about it. If he’d watched it rising as the flier made its way around Thalassia’s curve—gigantic even then, filling a quarter of a quadrant of the world’s edge—its present appearance might have been less of a shock. But he had slept until it was a fourth of the way up toward the zenith.
He saw it as sandy-colored, with mottled patches which he knew were deserts and precipitous mountain ranges. There were tiny blue pittings here and there, many of them. They would be the enormous blue-glass lakes the exploring ship had reported and believed to be the sites of once existent cities, melted to glassy liquid by fusion bombs from Thalassia in the long ago atomic war. They were solidified now. Brett saw some areas which might be merely semiarid plains. There were a few noticeable veinings which had olive-colored borders. They were Aspasia’s few and narrow seas. They were mere channels.
Seen with the naked eye, Thalassia’s sere and battered sister planet seemed very suitably named. It looked as the courtesan Aspasia might have looked when old and all her beauty gone, made grotesque by the bedizenments which once would have seemed so charming.
Brett Carstairs stared up at the world whose inhabitants had wiped out the race native to this and had in turn—so it appeared—been exterminated by the dying Thalassians as their cities became charnel houses and their continent a tomb.
As he stared, something said, “Beep” in the flier’s cabin. He jumped, and his heart climbed to his throat. He stared at the dial of his recently contrived radar detector. The needle flickered wildly, but settled nowhere at all. Brett nodded subduedly to himself. Anybody who was curious about men, and carried away their radar beacon and first landing plaque, and dug up a refuse pit to examine their ki
tchen midden—such a creature would want warning of a possible encounter. And such a warning had just been secured. That single startled chirp had been a radar impulse touching the flier. Things did not look good.
The flier went on and on over the wind-purple sea. Brett scanned the ocean. A monstrous swell, far away, broke in a smother of white foam. Some subsea mountain almost reached the surface. The giant ocean waves broke upon it, as they do on shallows and fishing banks on Earth. Here there was half a square mile of white.
The white was assurance that the flier was on course, but the radar chirp was even more important. It was ominous because it was solitary, though only a paleotechnologist would have realized it. Radar is an ancient device, of course. A modern radar brings back to a space ship an amount of detailed information which is really astonishing. But it does it with different impulses of different wave form and frequency. To Brett’s knowledge, not since the last war on Earth had any radar shut itself off when it contacted an object. It was a spotting device which did not betray its position to the thing it spotted.
Brett felt those unhappy cold prickles which are the signs of danger realized. Any rational man feels them. Only, a resolute man grows angry and becomes reckless because he is ashamed of being apprehensive.
Brett did.
He scowled and placed a reproduction of an ancient weapon handy. He had not the materials for a modern blaster, of course. But he’d gone back to the first camp and taken a drum of rocket fuel, and labored at the improvisation of an antique open breech gun. He made shells for it of plastic. The heavy rocket fuel would give mass to the missiles. He’d made what used to be called a bazooka. He drove the flier on.
The tip of an island rose above the horizon. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, it rose and grew. It was a group of rocky needles rising from the sea. It was the one island in a hemisphere of ocean. The outer needles or rocks were monstrous monoliths against which the giant sea swells crashed. There were single columns, hundreds of yards thick and hundreds of yards high, about and over which the spume flew wildly. There were surging maelstroms among those outer rocks. Wild swirlings, incredible violence, unpredictable floods raged in the channels between them. Had this been on Earth—but there were no such waves on Earth—the air about the island would have been a cloud of sea birds. But no life showed here. Naturally!
The island appeared very close, and Brett’s throat tended to become dry. There had been a single radar pulse, so there must be living creatures here. To them he would represent the most instructive of victims or most deadly of menaces.
There was a snapping sound. There was a hole in the flier’s cabin above his head. There were streaks of white vapor shooting on before him. There were more snappings, unspeakably venomous.
His hands broke the paralysis of shock. He dived. As he plunged toward the monstrous swells he craned his neck to see up and behind. He saw a winged thing plunging from the air above. A rocket. A small one. Its blast would be just about right to have made the small crater beside the now-demolished tripod where Firing Plaza One had been. Perhaps it was the rocket that had landed there to examine the beacon established by the Franklin, when that exploring ship made the first landing on this world. Perhaps it carried away the human device and the landing plaque, with what information it could gather from a refuse pit.
But now it dived furiously after him. There were flickering sparks. Streaks of vapor shot past him, and he felt the blank astonishment of a man backward in time. He’d been ashamed to contrive so primitive a weapon as a bazooka. But the pilot of the rocket was firing a machine gun, with tracer bullets to help his marksmanship!
Brett made his dive steeper. The rocket pulled out, feeling sure he was headed for a crash. It circled vengefully overhead. Its wings were small. It could not fly except at high speed.
Brett landed. The splash was satisfyingly violent, but it was actually a splendid landing in the very trough between two monstrous seas a hundred yards tall. It seemed that he had wrecked his flier in a moving, glassy-walled cañon of surging solidity. To the rocket, it should seem a certainty. Brett waited to see what the rocket would do.
It circled and circled. It needed information about creatures like Brett. If there were any craft available that could land and salvage Brett’s flier, they should risk anything to learn something of his race and kind.
But nothing happened. The rocket dived back toward the island. It sank low. It vanished.
Brett waited. His mouth was dry. He made fresh plans. He had been detected bumbling steadily across the ocean at a stodgy three hundred miles an hour. He had made no maneuvers of evasion when the rocket dived on him from overhead. It had been Brett’s absorption that allowed it, but the rocket could not be sure. The seeming crash into the sea—the whole appearance was of something which could not maneuver, in the charge of someone without skill. If they could come after him they wouldn’t expect resourcefulness. He could take off at will, and straight up. He could streak at twice the speed they knew of along between the rolling swells. He could fly like a gull between the wave crests, unreachable by missile-weapons and probably even more modern ones. He had a good chance to get away if only the occupants of the island did not have many small fliers, capable of hunting him at higher speed and with greater agility than he could summon.
Floating with seeming sogginess on the water, the flier rose and rose and rose. It reached a wave crest, and Brett saw the island again. It loomed high, now. He saw large sentinel columns of stone nearer than the island’s main mass. He saw the purplish seas go surging in between those columns, tilting up and foaming terribly about them, but with a tumult of water in the center remaining unbroken until farther on.
The wave crest passed, and the flier descended into the trough again. There was an enormously long wait before he was lifted up once more. He took a bearing then.
Again in the trough he used the flier’s drive to move him so his craft would be in a position to be tossed chiplike between the monstrous obstacles. When the island was hidden again, he used the drive a second time. A third.
Then the topmost peak of the island remained in sight even in the waves’ troughs. Brett let the flier drift aimlessly. It was carried toward the island by the swells and by the wind. He heard the roaring of the surf, such surf as only remote islands near Antarctica experience back at home. The booming became thunderous. It became intolerable. It became a cannonade of sound that human ears could not endure. And therefore it dulled because of its deafening volume.
The rocky sentinels loomed high. They were a little less than a mile apart, but the surf and acres of foam about their bases made the gap seem narrow indeed. The flier floated in seeming helplessness toward that opening.
Brett felt that acute shame which comes to a man because his body tenses and his throat dries up and his heart beats fast and his breath grows short. But his flier bobbed like a bit of flotsam on waves as high as most skyscrapers and whose troughs were deep as minor canyons. Above him loomed wave-torn, stratified rocky pillars, dripping floods of seawater, surrounded by whirlpools.
The flier went through between them. On beyond there were sheer cliffs against which the seas broke in frightful, explosive impacts with such a fury of foam and spray that the imagination was overwhelmed. Brett licked his lips. But he watched.
Then a current behind the northern column swung the flier about. Brett was, for a moment, in the lee of that huge buttress. The swells lessened. There was a vast, slow-moving eddy here. There was what could have been called a harbor, save that no imaginable ship could shelter in it. The flier, whirling slowly as it drifted, moved toward a more sheltered spot. Then a more sheltered spot still. Brett continued to watch. There were creatures here. They would want to know what queer sort of being disputed the possession of Thalassia with them…
He saw a movement among the rocks. Specks stirred, climbing swiftly down toward him. They seemed to slide down swiftly fastened cords from one shelf of stone to another. They were coming
to try to keep the flier from shattering before they could examine it, since it incredibly had survived this far.
Brett got his primitive weapon ready. The efforts of the creatures would be improvisation, of course. Nobody would normally use the sea on Thalassia! So nobody would have prepared a salvage operation such as these creatures meant to attempt.
An outward-jutting mass of stone formed a roof above the water where the flier drifted for a space, and the climbing creatures were out of sight. Brett could not make out what they were. But he reminded himself that like Halliday he had a tendency to see everything from an anthropocentric viewpoint. He tended to interpret moving creatures with human beings and Earth animals as references.
The current was very slow, here. The surgings of the water were less. The flier floated under an overhang so close that Brett feared it would be crushed. But then he came out. There was flat stone ahead, awash, wave-washed by trivial swells. The figures he had seen were almost at it. One did reach it and ran frantically in knee deep water to try to salvage, to grasp, at the very least and worst to see dearly inside the flier and observe its pilot.
Brett caught his breath. He did not believe it.
He stared into the face of a girl to all appearances human. She wore close-fitting garments of what looked like yellow silk, with brief drapings that had concealed the humanness of her form.
She looked at him. Her eyes widened with purest horror. Her expression was that of one who regards a frightful monster. She screamed—though Brett’s still-numbed ears heard it as only a thin, high-pitched cry—and she thrust back from the flier she had seemed so anxious to reach. Other figures, also human in appearances, came running as they dropped down cords from the cliff.
At sight of Brett they howled with fury. They plunged toward him, dragging out strange weapons with which to destroy him.