Sargasso of Space sq-1

by Andre Norton

  “That’s a thought.” Wilcox pulled at his mike. “But they’ve never been on steady. We can wait for a break in their broadcast.”

  Rip and Mura came back to the wall. The vibration was a steady beat. Dane walked along to the right. He found a corner where the narrow valley went on—masked by the fog. And he was sure that as he shuffled along, his hand against the stone as a guide, that beat grew stronger. Could one by the sense of touch trace the installation? That was something to think about. What if they unfastened the ropes which had linked them to the crawler and made one long cord of them—an anchorage for a man to explore north-east? He retraced his path and reported to Wilcox, adding his suggestion.

  “We’ll see what the captain says,” was the astrogator’s answer.

  The chill which was part of the fog struck into them now that they were halted. Dane wondered how long Wilcox proposed to linger there. But through their touch on the wall they became aware that the beat of that distant discharge or energy was lessening, that one of the silent intervals was at hand. Wilcox, his fingers on the wall, adjusted the mike with his other hand, determined to make contact the first instant that he could.

  And when all but the faintest rumble was gone from the rock, he spoke swiftly in the verbal short-hand of the Traders. Their discoveries among the ruins were reported, as was the present impasse.

  There followed an anxious wait. They might be out of range of the Queen, even using the stepped-up com. But at last, through the crackle of static, their orders reached them—to make a short exploration along the valley if they wished. But to start back to the ship within the hour.

  Wilcox was helped from the crawler before they man-handled the unwieldy vehicle around and re-set its dial for the return journey. Then they tied the ropes into two longer lines for the explorers’ use.

  Dane did not wait for orders—after all, this was his project. He knotted one of those lines about his middle, leaving his hands free. Just as matter-of-factly Kosti took up the other, almost out of Rip’s hands, nor did the jetman pay any attention to Shannon’s protests.

  “It’s starting up again,” Mura reported from beside the cliff.

  Dane put his left hand on the wall and started off, with Kosti falling into step. They rounded the bend Dane had discovered into the continuation of the valley which was still packed with the cotton wool of the fog.

  It was plain that no crawler had ever advanced this far. The narrow way was choked with piles of loose debris over which they helped each other to keep their footing. And the vibration in the wall grew stronger as they went.

  Kosti thumped his fist against the stone as they paused for a breather.

  “Those drums—they sure keep it up.”

  The distant beat did carry with it some of the roll of a heavy drum.

  “Kinda like the Storm Dancers on Gorbe—just a little. And that’s devilish stuff, gets into your blood ’til you want to get out and prance along with them. This—well, it’s nasty down deep—plain nasty. And you get to believing something’s waiting out there—” the jetman’s hand indicated the fog, “just waiting to pounce!”

  They kept on, climbing now as each ridge of rubble they surmounted was a little higher than the preceding one. They must have been well above the surface of the valley where they had left the crawler when they came upon the strangest find of all.

  Dane, clinging to an outcrop in the wall to retain his balance, teetered on the top of a mound. His boot slipped and he tumbled forward before Kosti could snatch him back, rolling down until he brought up with a bruising bump against a dark object. Under his clawing hands he felt, not the rough gravel and earth of the valley, but something else—a smooth sleekness—Had he come upon another ruined building this far from the city?

  “Are you hurt?” called Kosti from above. “Look out, I’m coming down.”

  Dane backed away from his find as Kosti came down feet first in a slide, his boots ringing against that buried thing with the unmistakable clang of metal.

  “What the—!” The jetman was on his knees, feeling over that exposed surface. And he was able to identify it. “A ship!”

  “What?” Dane crowded in. But now he was able to see the curve of the plates, various other familiar details. They had come upon the wreckage of a crash—a bad crash. The ship had jammed its way into the narrow neck of the valley as if it were a cork pounded into a bottle. If they were to go any farther they would have to climb over it. Dane took up his helmet mike and reported the find to the three at the crawler.

  “The wreck of that ship you heard coming in?” Wilcox wanted to know. But Dane had seen enough to know that it was not.

  “No, sir. This has been here a long time—almost buried and there’s rust eaten in. Years since this one lifted, I think—”

  “Stay where you are—we’re coming up !”

  “You can’t bring the crawler, sir. Footing is bad.”

  In the end they did come, supporting Wilcox over the worst bits, keeping contact with the crawler by rope only. In the meantime Kosti prowled around and over the wreck, trying to find a hatch.

  “It’s a rim prospector of a sort,” he reported as soon as Wilcox was settled on a rock to view the find. “But there’s something odd about it. I can’t name the type. And it’s been rooted there a good time. That hatch ought to be about here.” He kicked at a pile of loose gravel which banked in one side of the metal hulk. “I think we could dig in.”

  Rip and Dane returned to the crawler and got the pioneer tools, always kept lashed to the under-carriage of that vehicle. With the shovel and lever they came back to work, taking turns at clearing the debris of years.

  “What did I tell you!” Kosti was exultant as a black arc which must mark the top of an open hatch was uncovered.

  But it was necessary to shift a lot more of the native soil of Limbo before any one of them could crawl into that hole. Rim prospectors were notoriously sturdy ships, if not so swift travellers. They had to be designed to withstand conditions which would shatter liners or disturb even the crack freight- and mail-ships of the Companies.

  And the condition of this one proved that its unknown builder had wrought even better than he had hoped. For the smash of its landing had not broken it into bits. Its carcass still hung together, although parts were telescoped.

  Kosti leaned on the shovel after he threw out the last scoop of earth. “I can’t place it—” He shook his head as if his inability to identify the type of ship worried him.

  “How could any one?” demanded Rip impatiently. “She’s nothing but a scrap heap.”

  “I’ve seen ’em smashed worse than this,” Kosti sounded annoyed. “But the structure—it’s wrong—”

  Mura smiled. “Rather I would say, Karl, that it is right. I know of no modern ship which could so well survive the landing this one made.”

  ” ‘No modern ship’?” Wilcox seized upon that “You have seen one like this before then?”

  Mura’s smile grew broader. “If I had seen one such as this plying its trade—then I would be five hundred, perhaps eight hundred years old. This resembles the Class Three, Asteroid Belt ships. There is one, I believe, on display in the Trade Museum at Terraport East. But how it came here—” he shrugged.

  Dane’s historical cramming had not covered the fine points of ship design, but Kosti and Rip both understood the significance of that, and so did Wilcox.

  “But,” the astrogator was the first to protest, “they didn’t have hyper-drive five hundred years ago. We were still confined to our own solar system—”

  “Except for a few crazy experimenters,” Mura corrected.

  “There are Terran colonies in other systems which are over a thousand years old, you know that. And the details of their flights are sagas in themselves. There were those who went out to cross the gap in frozen sleep, and those who lived for four, six and eight generations in ships before their far off descendants trod the worlds their ancestors had set course for. And there
were earlier variations of the hyper-drive, some of which may have worked, though their inventors never returned to Terra to report success. How an Asteroid prospector came to Limbo I cannot tell you, but it has been here a very long time, that I will swear to.”

  Kosti flashed his torch into the hole they had uncovered. “We can get in—at least for a way—”

  Before the smash the prospector had been a small ship with painfully confined quarters. Compared to her the Queen was closer to a liner. And Kosti had to turn back at the inner hatch, unable to squeeze his bulk through the jammed door space. In the end Mura and Dane alone were able to force a path to what had been combined storage and living quarters.

  But under the beam of their torches a fact was immediately clear. A great gap through which soil shifted faced them. This section had been ripped open on the other side, the hole later buried by a slide. But the smash had not done that, the marks of a flamer were plain on the metal. Some time after its crack-up the prospector had been burnt open, the reason plain. For the portion where they now stood had been stripped—although the traces of cargo containers were on the floor and along the crumpled walls.

  “Looted!” Dane exclaimed as the light swept from floor to wall.

  To his right was the telescoped section which must have contained the control cabin. There, too, were signs of the flamer but the unknown looters had had little luck beyond. For the holes revealed a mixture of rock and twisted metal which could never be salvaged. Everything forward of the one cargo section they stood in was a total loss.

  Mura fingered that slit in the wall. “This was done some time ago—maybe even years. But I think that it was done a long, long time after the ship crashed.”

  “Why did they they want to get in here?”

  “Curiosity—a desire to see what she was carrying. A prospector on a long course is apt to make surprising discoveries. And this ship must have had something worth the taking. It was looted. Then, so lightened, the wreckage may have turned over, perhaps earthquakes resettled it and buried it more completely. But it was looted—”

  “You don’t think that the survivors of its crew may have returned? They could have taken off in an escape flitter before the crash—”

  “No, there was too long a time between the crash and the looting. This ship was discovered by someone else and stripped. I do not think that they—” Mura pointed to the fore-compartment, “escaped.”

  Did Limbo have intelligent inhabitants, natives who could use a flamer to cut through ship alloy? but the globe things—Dane refused to believe that those queer creatures had looted the prospector.

  Before they climbed out of the ship Mura pushed as far as he could into the fore-section. And when he inched out again he was repeating a number.

  ”Xc—4 over 9532600,” he said. “Her registry, by some chance it is still visible. Remember that: Xc—4 over 9532600.”

  But Dane was interested in another point. “That’s Terran registry!”

  “I suspected that it would be. She is Asteroid class—perhaps an experimental ship with one of the very early hyper-drives. She might have been a private ship, the work of one or two men, an attempt to pioneer in a new direction. Could that tangle ever be uncoiled, our engineers ought to discover some interesting alternate of the usual engine. It could be worth the effort to break through just for that—”

  “Ahoy!” the voice from the outer air summoned. “What are you doing in there?”

  Dane spoke into his mike, outlining what they had found. Then they squeezed out through the hatch.

  “Stripped bare!” Kosti was openly disappointed. “Opened up and stripped bare. She must have been carrying something really worth while for all the trouble they took to do it.”

  “I’d rather know who stripped her. Even if it was done years ago,” was Rip’s comment and it was evident that Wilcox agreed with him.

  The astrogator pulled himself to his feet, leaning against a rock. “We’d better get back to the Queen.”

  Dane glanced around. He was sure that the fog was thinning here as it had back around the ruins. If it would just clear—then they could take up a flitter and really comb this district! They had discovered no trace of Ali anywhere, and each step they took seemed to plunge them only deeper into mystery.

  Rich and his party had vanished—into a stone wall if the crawler was to be relied upon. Now here was a ship which had been looted long after it had crashed. And somewhere deep in the heart of Limbo beat an unknown installation which might offer the worst threat of all!

  They went back to the crawler and by the time Wilcox was once more established on it, the fog was retreating, more swiftly now. As it lifted they read on the scraped walls, in the rutted soil that this was or had been a thoroughfare in good use. Those who had come and gone this path had made it a lane of travel before the arrival of the Queen, some of those marks were far more than a few days old.

  Survey’s tapes had said nothing of all this—the ruins, the installation, the wrecked ships. Why not? Had Survey’s report been edited? But Limbo had been put up to legal auction just as usual. Did it mean that Survey’s scout teams had not explored this continent to any extent—that seeing the evidence of a burn-off their investigation had been only superficial?

  It was raining now, a drizzle which worked into the high collars of their tunics and soaked the upper linings of their boots. Unconsciously their pace quickened as the crawler took the homeward trundle. Dane wished that there was some way they could cut cross country and shorten the march which lay between them and the Queen. But at least they no longer had to rope themselves to the carrier.

  They came into the ruins again, maintaining a careful watch for any signs of life there. The brilliant hues of the buildings were subdued by the lack of sunlight, but they still warred with one another and jolted Terran senses in a subtle fashion. Either the people who had built this city had a different type of vision, or a chemical reaction from the burn-off had altered the colour scheme for the worse. As it was none of the Traders felt exactly comfortable if they looked too long at those walls.

  “It isn’t altogether the colour—” Rip spoke aloud. “It’s their shape, too. Those angles are wrong—just enough wrong to be disturbing—”

  “The burn-off blast may have shaken them up,” offered Dane. But Mura was not ready to accept that.

  “No, Rip has it right. The colours, they are wrong for us, also the shapes. See that tower—over there? Only three floors remain, but once it was taller. Let your eye rise along the lines of those floors into space—where once must have been other walls, It is all wrong—those lines—”

  Dane saw what he meant. With imagination one could add floors to the tower—but when one did! For a moment he was dizzy as he tried that feat. It was very easy, after studying all this, to believe that the Forerunners had been alien, alien beyond any race that the Terrans, new come to the Galactic lanes, had encountered.

  He hurriedly averted his eyes from that tower, winced as his gaze swept across an impossibly scarlet foundation and fastened with relief on the comfortable monotone of the crawler and Wilcox’s square back in the drab brown Service tunic.

  But the astrogator had not joined his companions in their speculations concerning their surroundings. He was hunched over, both hands clutching the mike of the stepped-up com Kosti had not yet altered. And there was something in his posture which altered the others as they watched him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN:

  SARGASSO WORLD

  Dane strained to hear a hint of sound in his helmet phones. There was a far off click which faded quickly. But it was evident that Wilcox with his double powered com received more than that.

  The astrogator took one hand from the mike and gestured the others to come to the stalled crawler. Luckily no drone from the interference blanketed the air waves. And by some freak the word “stay” boomed suddenly in Dane’s ears.

  Wilcox looked up at them. “We’re not to go back now—”


  “What’s wrong?” Mura’s voice lost none of its mild tone.

  “The Queen’s surrounded—”

  “Surrounded!” “By whom?” “What happened?” the questions came together in a confused gabble.

  “They were fired upon when they tried to leave the ship. And there’s some reason why they can’t lift. We’re to keep clear until they can find out what’s behind it all—”

  Mura glanced over his shoulder at the valleys now unveiled as the mist drifted away in tattered streamers.

  “If we cut across the open,” he said slowly, “we can be seen with ease now that the fog is gone. But suppose we go back—along the valley mouths, paralleling the burnt-off country. We should reach a point opposite the Queen, and then we can climb the heights until we are able to see what is going on about her—”

  Wilcox nodded. “We’re not to try contact by com. They’re afraid we might be picked up.”

  Though the fog had lifted visibility was not good. It must be well into evening and the astrogator surveyed their present surroundings with disfavour. It was plain that they could not move through the rough foothill country in the dark. Their travels must wait until morning. But he did not order them to find shelter in the city buildings. Mura broke the short silence first.

  “There is the bubble—we could camp there for the night. I do not think it has been used since it was erected as a blind.”

  They seized upon that thankfully and the crawler made the return trip to the abandoned camp of the archaeologists. They unsealed the full door flap, allowing their carrier space to enter. And when that portal was closed again Dane had a feeling of relief. The walls enclosing them were Terran made, he had slept in such shelters before. And that familiarity was in a measure security against the alien quality of the city without.

  The bubble cut off the night winds and they were not too uncomfortable in spite of the lack of heat. Kosti who had been wandering about the hollow shell kicked at an inoffensive bit of rock.