by James White
". . . Anyway," Silverman went on, "Mercer will go with you the first few times. But keep constant radio contact with each other and the ship at all times—that's the only way I have of knowing if you get into trouble."
Davies nodded. "What about this slush Mercer mentioned?"
"The 'snow' which was liquefied, and partly vaporized, by the flare of our chemical landing motors," he replied. "It will be solid again by the time you are ready to go out."
"Good," said Davies, and moved toward the spacesuit locker.
Ten minutes later Mercer and himself were at the foot of the retractable ladder which joined Hannibal's, stern airlock with the surface. The ship stood in the center of a roughly circular expanse of what looked like blue-gray fused glass, which crunched and tinkled faintly underfoot —the sound being transmitted through the fabric of their suits. Mercer pointed to the shock-absorber legs on the ship's four great stabilizer fins, and explained that a number of small explosive or incendiary charges would be needed to free the ship for takeoff.
Together they shuffled carefully across the frozen pond which encircled Hannibal and onto the snow, Mercer keeping a steadying hand on Davies' arm until he had accustomed himself to the light gravity. Even then the engineer steered a zigzag toward their objective so as to avoid the danger of his falling or snagging his suit against out-jutting rocks in his temporarily unbalanced condition. But by the time the nearest pressure dome was reached, Davies no longer needed the engineer's helping hand.
"... A rigid-walled pressure tent pierced for airlock and observation windows, and similar to the semi permanent installations used on Luna and Mars," Mercer was saying for the benefit of Silverman back at the ship. "I can see inside. It is empty, and there is a spiral stairway leading down to what must be an underground extension of the structure.
"This thing was never built by an Earth race," he went on, his voice quickening with excitement, "but the entry-lock mechanism seems straightforward enough. We could get inside with very little trouble—"
"No," Davies interrupted at that point. "I'm just as anxious as you are to get into that dome, but you must agree that some idea of the surface layout of the installation is necessary before investigating the interior."
"I suppose so," said Mercer grumpily. He had a last look through the transparent circle of plastic beside the entry-lock, then turned toward the next nearest dome.
They found that the alien base lay in a circle of about two hundred yards diameter surrounding a conical rock formation which resembled a scaled-down volcano. The pressure domes—there were eleven altogether—were merely the surface entry points for an installation which stretched for an unknown, but probably considerable, distance underground. Despite this, Davies was able to glimpse things through their observation windows that made him even more anxious than Mercer to get inside one of them.
In one he saw a desk and a few surprisingly ordinary chairs—though he knew that their ordinariness should not have surprised him, because one of these long-departed aliens had spent nearly two years, living, breathing and passing himself as a human being on Earth. But everything he saw was an indication that the aliens had made an orderly and unhurried withdrawal from their base on Titan, and the things which they had left behind were little more than junk. Here and there were discarded items of furniture or fittings, odd pictures left hanging on walls, and even neat piles of rubbish swept into corners.
It was these floor sweepings that had Davies burning with impatience to get inside.
There was no Rosetta Stone to help him here, Davies knew. It would be a far cry indeed from his deciphering of sand eroded ideographs or the even more difficult parchments unearthed sometimes by his university's archaeological team, but the challenge excited him. And there was, too, a certain amount of amusement to be found in the thought that he had come nine hundred million miles just to rummage in an alien wastepaper basket.
They were on their way back to the Hannibal, and passing close to the rocky pinnacle which dominated the base site, when Mercer halted suddenly and pointed. He said, "I thought I saw something funny at the base of that pinnacle . . ." He backed a few paces, stared hard toward the out-cropping, then retraced his steps. "Maybe it was a trick of the light, but I thought I saw—just for a second—the outline of a door. Do you see anything?"
Davies looked carefully at the spot indicated, then said, "No."
Mercer was silent for a moment, then: "We've a good twenty minutes air left. I think I'll have a closer look at that rock. Coming?"
Davies nodded, then realized that it was wasted effort inside his three-quarters opaque helmet and simply followed Mercer toward the outcropping.
"What is it? What have you found?" the captain, back in the ship, called anxiously. They had found something peculiar and had been studying it in silence. Mercer found his voice first.
"I'm not sure," he said. "There's something funny here. To me it looks as if a six-foot by four-foot rectangle of rock at the base of this pinnacle is foreign to its surroundings. Just as though a section of the original rock had been removed and later replaced with similar material from nearby whose cracks and fissures did not match up properly, and somebody had to chisel artificial extensions onto them—the fissures, I mean—to hide the fact. It was only by accident and a trick of the light that I noticed it at all." There was a tinge of uneasiness as well as puzzlement in his voice as he ended, "What was done out here, and why the camouflage?"
For several seconds there was a rustling silence in Davies' headphones, then Silverman said, "Better come back to the ship now. Maybe it is only a freak rock formation. . . ."
"You can't see it," said Mercer, "or you wouldn't say that."
The engineer was silent during their walk back to the ship until they were on the point of mounting the ladder to the stern airlock, then he asked suddenly, "Professor, are you sure this place is deserted?"
The tone of the question made the hairs at the back of Davies' neck prickle. Irritated, he ignored the sensation and replied, "I've told you everything I know. My information was that the base was to be found here, and it was. The same source stated that it was abandoned eighty years ago...."
I have told you everything I know, Davies repeated silently to himself as he began to feel the contagion of Mercer's uneasiness. But that did not mean that he knew everything ...
So far as Davies knew it had all started some eighty years ago when an alien scoutship operating from his base on Titan had cracked up on Earth. The pilot, who had taken the name of "Allen," had succeeded eventually in persuading a certain Dr. Mathewson—then in charge of a rocket experimental station—to give him a two-stage orbital vehicle, his idea being to modify this, to him, crude and antiquated vessel so that he could use it to join his friends on Titan before they left for their home system. Mathewson had been in serious trouble over the business until he had told of the exchange which "Allen" had made —namely, the theory and drawings for a spaceship power plant that was both cheap and efficient beyond the wildest dreams of the rocket technicians of that time.
The whole affair had been so thickly smothered in security blankets that it had suffocated, died and been forgotten—forgotten, that was, until a colleague of Davies' interested in the Cold War period of recent history had stumbled across the relevant documents. He had mentioned them to Davies, jokingly, because he was of the opinion that they were some form of hoax—a complicated attempt at misdirection similar perhaps, to the classic Man Who Never Was of an earlier period. But Davies had been interested enough to do a little digging.
Dr. Mathewson, the security officials and the technicians who had been attached to the experimental station had all died in the interim, of course, but Davies uncovered two very intriguing facts. One: the present-day method of propulsion in spaceships was called the Allen, or A-Drive. And Two: try as he could, Davies could find no trace of an inventor of this priceless boon to space travel.
It had been quite a struggle then to convince hi
s university of the desirability of searching Titan for traces of an alien base. But eventually, after Davies had made a nuisance of himself about the project for nearly six months, they had grudgingly agreed to finance a small expedition and the tiny Hannibal, together with Davies and its two-man crew had been dispatched. If—a very big "if"—Davies found anything, then a fully-equipped expedition would, of course, follow.
Well, thought Davies as he climbed out of his space-suit, we found the base. When we return with the news, specialists in all fields will come swarming out to this product of an alien civilization to gather up the crumbs of a vastly superior alien science left by that eighty-years-gone expedition. And who knew but that their work would be substantially assisted by a translation of the alien language performed by one Walter S. Davies, Doctor of Philosophy, etc, etc. ...
Davies pushed that pleasant daydream out of his mind as he grew aware that Captain Silverman was talking to him.
"I've been busy in the galley while you were out," Silverman said as he helped Davies stow away the suit on its special hanger. "After we've eaten I suppose you want to go out again?"
Davies nodded. "This time I intend to effect an entrance," he said, then catching the yearning, almost hungry expression on the captain's thin face he added, "No reason why you can't come, too."
"Sure you can come," said Mercer loudly. "The ship won't run away."
Silverman fought a brief and losing battle with his strong sense of duty. Curiosity won. He said, "Thank you, I'll come."
They entered the alien base with very little trouble to find it contained a residual atmosphere of nearly breathable density—a tribute to the eighty-years-gone builders of the installation. On the way out from the ship Davies had several times stressed the importance of care in handling artifacts and papers, citing instances where priceless manuscripts had been ruined through careless handling by ignorant workers at an excavation site. Nobody, he said, was to touch anything until he had at least photographed it in relation to other objects in the room, or exactly as the aliens had left it. He was, therefore, all ready to tear a lengthy strip off the engineer when Mercer automatically and unthinkingly flipped the toggle on something which looked like a light switch at the entrance to one of the compartments. But the angry word remained unuttered, because it was a light switch and the lights came on!
The investigation proceeded in high excitement and, with more than adequate lighting, at a steadily accelerating rate after that. They found that the base extended far underground and had living quarters for at least three hundred. There were administrative offices, labs and workshops—all stripped of the equipment that might have given them some idea of the work which had been carried out here. But there were clues to be found in the discarded papers and magazines and in the damaged or forgotten gadgets lying here and there, if Davies could unlock the language in which they were printed.
Mercer and Silverman were literally dancing with impatience during the first two hours: they wanted to know how and why the base was powered after all this time. Davies finally gave up the attempt to keep them with him. Their highly technical cross-talk continued to come to him over his suit radio as they tried to trace the base's lighting circuits back to a main power source.
Only one thing drove them back to the ship eventually: hunger.
Between and during mouthfuls the two ship's officers discussed in tones of great awe the power room of the alien base. Apparently power came from storage batteries, but the lines running from these small two-foot cubes of gray metal indicated a storage capacity that was incredible. If Earth science could analyze and duplicate those batteries it would be the equivalent of carrying a power station in a suitcase. The potentialities were vast beyond belief, Mercer and the captain agreed, and it was several minutes before the latter remembered his manners enough to ask Davies how he had made out in his own particular field.
"Well, there is plenty of printed material lying about," Davies replied carefully. "Once I'm able to translate it—"
"But how can you?" Silverman broke in suddenly. "As I see it, in order to translate a hitherto unknown language you must first have a ... a sort of bridge—passages written both in the unknown language and in one already known so that you can compare them, and transpose words or phrases. A sort of Rosetta Stone, in fact. But this is a completely alien language..."
Davies found himself warming to the captain. It was nice to find someone intelligent enough to appreciate another specialist's difficulties. He smiled and said, "But I have a Rosetta Stone, of sorts." He pointed suddenly. "Him!"
Mercer choked, spluttered, then got his breath back enough to exclaim, "Me? But my specialties are electronics and the A-Drive generators—"
"A product, as we now know, of alien science."
"But I don't know anything about languages!"
"That doesn't matter," said Davies, waving the engineer to silence. He spent a moment ordering his thoughts, then went on. "We are trying here to translate a language without a single clue as to its structure, the number of letters in its alphabet, or anything else at all beyond the fact that it belongs to a highly advanced, scientific civilization.
"But the work of the alien expedition seems to have been pretty comprehensive," Davies continued, his eyes still on Mercer's puzzled face, "and there are all sorts of charts and technical literature lying around. Well, I want you to go over those papers with me.
"You can see my idea now, I expect: a natural law or a chemical element is the same no matter what the language used to express or describe it. So if we find, say, a radio circuit diagram with the usual list of component values appended, you may be able to tell me that such-and-such a squiggle is the alien equivalent of a resistor or condenser—I wouldn't expect you to read the whole diagram, naturally—and we would have approximate meanings for a couple of alien words.
"The same applies to the Periodic Table of Elements, which would furnish a clue to their system of numbering ..."
Suddenly excited, Mercer said, "It might work at that. But—"
"But it will be a long, tedious job," Davies said. "The things I've mentioned will only give us a toehold on their language, nothing more. But a beginning is all I ask."
Davies and Mercer rose and began climbing into their spacesuits again, but Captain Silverman made no attempt to follow. He said, "I'm tired. It's been twenty hours or more since I've had any sleep, so I think I'll sling a hammock in the control room—that way I can hear you on the radio if you get into trouble. I'd advise you two to get some rest, too." A sudden, jaw-stretching yawn overtook him and he rubbed his eyes. As a parting shot at Mercer, he added, "The base won't run away, you know."
But the engineer and himself were too excited to think of sleep. In five minutes they were outside again, stepping out confidently toward the base. Davies had begun to get the hang of the long-striding and forward-leaning walk required for efficient movement in Titan's light gravity. But there was one cloud marring his otherwise sunny sky—a very small thing, really, but he might as well dispose of it now so that Mercer and he could get down to the really important work.
"Mr. Mercer," he said lightly, "from overhearing the discussion of the captain and yourself a few minutes ago, I know that you're itching to finish off a little investigation of your own. If you don't mind we'll attend to that first, otherwise you'll be no use to me at all."
Mercer chuckled, then suddenly he became serious. "The big mystery has to do with the power lines radiating from what I call the battery room," he explained. "I'm puzzled, because over half of the power available is not accounted for within the base—several of the power cables just disappear into a wall. The position of this wail, however, is close to that occupied on the surface by the pinnacle of rock I was suspicious about earlier. I can't explain it, but I have the feeling that that pinnacle is the center of this base in more ways than one . . ." He trailed off into silence, then added awkwardly, "But thanks for letting me get this particular bee out of my bonnet,
Professor. I'm very curious about this business, but didn't like to ask . . ."
Davies passed the thanks off with an embarrassed grunt. They altered direction to head toward the pinnacle.
At its base Mercer came close to Davies, flicked off the toggles of both their suit radios, then touched his helmet to the professor's. Strangely muffled after the tinny clarity of the suit phones, his voice came through to a rather startled Davies.
"Don't be alarmed," Mercer said. "I'm going to try climbing this thing, and don't want the captain to know about it. He would only worry and spoil his snooze—or maybe even forbid it. So when I switch our suit radios on again, keep all mention of climbing out of the conversation. That way, unless he goes to the view-port, he'll think we're just talking about something inside the base."
With their radios operating again Mercer turned and began heaving himself aloft with the ease of a practiced rock climber. After a moment's hesitation, Davies followed him at a slower pace.
"Well, well," said Mercer, when Davies reached the engineer's position. "What have we here?" Together they stared at something which resembled nothing so much as a nest of copper wires containing a single crystal egg. The nest was about six inches in diameter, the crystal roughly two inches, and though the device occupied the extreme tip of the pinnacle, there was enough shoulder to the outcropping to hide it from an observer at ground level.
"There's something funny about this, too," Mercer went on, indicating the rock surface to which they clung. "I've the feeling it's faked, possibly an extension of the original pinnacle made to hide the leads to this gadget up here..."
All at once Davies was not listening to Mercer anymore. He felt himself sweating. Before his eyes a crooked, black line had appeared in the rocky surface, widening rapidly and sprouting other black lines which likewise widened and sprouted. Cracks! he thought wildly, then suddenly he was falling, Mercer was falling and the surface to which they had been clinging had broken up and was falling with them into darkness. For a fleeting instant he realized that Mercer was right, the tip of the rock pinnacle had been a mere shell of plastic which had disintegrated under their combined weights, then his mouth opened in a cry of fear and astonishment as he plummeted downward.