Lost In Space

by Dave Van Arnam

  “Smith . . . Sometimes I think it would make this whole thing a whole lot easier if I could just hate him.”

  “John! He’s not a bad man—somehow, in spite of himself, he’s even likeable. In spite of all he’s done . . . ”

  “Oh, well, I suppose it’s simply that whenever he doesn’t see any way to give himself a special advantage, he pitches in and helps us as much as he can. When he’s not being lazy, that is. Come on, let’s do another instrument check. You’ve got the technique down almost pat, but you’re having trouble with the hull gauges, and . . . “

  Outside the impervious hull of the Jupiter II the endless stars streamed by like a river of incandescent sand or luminescent water. The cold vastness of eternity and infinity endured about them, uncaring, interminably there.

  And the ship sped on through the blackness between the endless stars . . .

  “Warning! Warning!” It was the ship’s Robot, keying into the intercom system. “The gyroscopes are failing! Faulty impulses are being fed into the drive mechanisms! Imperative the ship reach a planetary mass as soon as possible, in order to restabilize the ship. Warning! Warning!”

  Robinson flicked a switch and called to the Robot. “Are we currently near enough to a planet to land without using the gyros?”

  “Affirmative,” replied the Robot. ‘We are approximately seven hours from a solar system that contains at least one Earth-type planet.”

  “Will we be able to make it on manual before the drive gives out entirely?”

  “Affirmative,” repeated the Robot. “There will be no time to spare for preliminary orbital observations, however.”

  “Chart the course then, Robot. Check back with me, and we’ll set it up on the manuals. Meet me in the control room as soon as you have final figures.” Robinson switched off and got up.

  ‘Well, this time we get to land blind,” he said to his wife. “I guess I don’t have to tell you what that could mean.”

  Maureen rose and went to her husband. “As long as we are all together, we will simply face whatever we have to face, until this is all over.”

  Robinson looked at his wife, then took her in his arms. “Would I have the strength to endure all this, without you?”

  sShe comforted him for a moment, then said, “You have to get over to the control room. The Robot will probably be there already, and it sounds like time is going to be important, this time . . . ”

  He said nothing, but nodded and turned away.

  “Wonderful,” said Don West. “A strange planet that we don’t even get the chance to look at first, and not only that, we land at night. Well . . . ” He sighed. “I’ll go on guard first, if no one objects. I had a long nap before we landed, and I’m pretty well rested up. But I suggest we all arm ourselves now. There’s no telling what may be out there.”

  “Splendid,” said Dr. Smith. “That will give the rest of us a chance to get fully rested up to face the travails of the morning, and—”

  “I’ll be waking you up about an hour after estimated planetary midnight, Smith,” said Don harshly, “so don’t get started on any extra-long technicolor extravaganza dreams tonight.”

  “Hmpf,” said Smith. “I don’t see why the Robot can’t—”

  “The Robot is not authorized to make decisions, Dr. Smith,” Robinson broke in, “as you well know. In ordinary situations he would, it is true, serve quite adequately. But on this planet, we have absolutely no idea of what we may be up against. Seconds may count, in making decisions. Hence, one of us must be on guard.”

  “Oh, very well. But I can see it’s going to be a very long night.”

  A long night it was, and not a very restful one for the inhabitants of the Jupiter; all of them were well aware that at any moment their lives might be in danger from unknown menaces.

  But when dawn came at last, it found the Robinsons and Smith sleepy but relieved that nothing had, after all, happened.And when dawn came, it also became fairly obvious why nothing had happened.

  They were in the midst of a vast level plain, sparsely covered by a thin tough grass-like plant. To the horizon, there was no least variation in the absolute levelness of the ground, nor in the nature of the vegetation.

  Don whistled as all of them stood in the main control room, studying the various vision screens, all of which showed essentially the same scene no matter what direction they were set to scan.

  ‘This is one for the books,” he said. “Just off hand, you understand, I’ll say a planetary feature-or lack of feature—like this is geologically impossible.”

  “I’d say so too,” agreed Robinson. “Robot, can you give us any preliminary thoughts on the subject?”

  “There are some small raincloud formations on the distant horizon, in the direction of the planetary equator,” said the Robot. ‘This indicates that there are bodies of water elsewhere on the surface of the planet, which also indicates the possibility of other types of surface than the one we are at present viewing.”

  “A combination?” Smith was indignant. “That hardly seems—”

  “Listen,” said Robinson, “there’s no point in arguing details at this point. With the ship in the mess it is, it’s going to be risky moving it about unless we have to, so I’d say we’d better dig out the scoutcraft and do a scan from that. I’d like to find out if there’s any intelligent life—or remains of intelligent life—here, and any chance to find some of the metals were probably going to need for the repairs. Now, who wants to go with me, Dr. Smith? Don?”

  “I can probably do more here on board,” said Don. “If we’re going to move the ship at all before doing the major repairs, there are some things I can tinker with so she doesn’t blow up when we lift off.”

  “Ok, Dr. Smith, it looks like it’s you and me again,” said Robinson. “Let’s go check out the flier.”

  Below them the green-brown grass sped by smoothly and uneventfully, hour after hour, at a steady 700 miles an hour.

  “Lord,” said Robinson, “this has to be the dullest planet I have ever seen or heard of.”

  “Pity this wretched scoutcraft can’t achieve orbital speeds,” Smith observed, stifling a yawn. “At this rate it’s going to take us forever to find anything on this planet. If there’s anything to find, that is . . . ”

  “My God, look at that!” Robinson pointed off to the left.

  A thin high spire was visible on the far horizon; a slight scud of cloud had just been blown away, revealing it.

  Smith gave a deep sigh. “It was so peaceful . . . why can’t we find just one planet with nothing at all happening?”

  Robinson had turned the scoutcraft toward the spire, and increased speed to 900 miles an hour. “I don’t like to drive this ship past its limits, but I want to find out what’s going on,” he muttered, mostly to justify himself to himself.

  After a few minutes, Smith caught himself imitating Don’s whistle. “That spire must be a mile high!”

  “No,” said Robinson. “Look there, there’s a whole city showing up. That tower’s got to be at least two miles high ...”

  As they flew nearer, the nature of the city became clearer.

  It was immense.

  It covered what seemed to be over ten thousand square miles at least, and probably more.

  Its towers, none more than a third the height of the central tower they had spotted from afar, were both immense and lacy, with great spiralling walkways knitting the city together throughout its entire incredible expanse, a full hundred stories off the ground.

  “I could accept the size of the city, and the height of that central tower,” said Smith. “But those walkways! They don’t seem to have any supports at all, even when they extend over a dozen blocks!”

  “One thing’s for sure—these people were engineers,” said Robinson, agreeing.

  “ ‘Were’ ?” asked Smith.

  “Well, do you see any signs of any activity in that whole city, Dr. Smith?” Robinson said, with a touch of exasperation. �
��Or do you suppose it’s 10:30 and everybody’s knocked off for a coffee break—all 200 million of ’em?”

  “You’re right,” Smith said, startling Robinson by not showing any irritation at his sarcasm. “That city must cover an area the size of the Greater Megalopolis.”

  “Bigger, I think,” said Robinson. “I don’t know if it’s as long as from D.C. to Boston, but it’s certainly far wider. Amazing that there don’t seem to be any special geographical features even here, though.”

  “That’s not all that’s amazing,” Smith observed. “Just stop to think—how unlikely would it be to find Earth totally barren except for one huge metropolitan area from Boston through New York and Philadelphia to Baltimore and Washington. And nothing else on Earth except grass!”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Robinson said, his lips quirking in a smile. “I’ve read plenty of books where the world was taken over by grass, or by water, or giant rutabagas who start off by eating the Bronx. You know—it could happen.”

  “Certainly, my dear Professor,” Smith said, his voice sharper. “It could happen. But this place doesn’t exactly look like it’s been eaten by a giant rutabaga, does it?”

  Robinson shrugged, and slowed the scoutcraft so it glided slowly past one of the walkways a hundred stories from the maze of streets far below.

  They observed the long graceful curve of the walkway as it leaped from one lacy tower across a thousand yards to another.

  “Not even a guard rail to keep them from getting swept off in a high wind,” Robinson mused, and edged closer to the walkway.

  A slight crackle sounded, and a spark leaped from the walkway to the scoutcraft. Instinctively Robinson sheered off from the danger.

  “Well, there’s your guard rail, Professor,” said Smith. “Some kind of warning field for approaching craft, and perhaps it keeps people from falling off into the bargain.”

  “Whew! Well, you were saying about how unusual this place was, Dr. Smith. Relieve me, I’m all ears now!”

  “Very well,” Smith answered patronizingly. “Now then. I don’t see this as a disaster situation—rutabagas or seawater, as you said. I mean, why were the people all here? What was wrong with the rest of the planet? It’s a nice enough planet, you know. Judging from last night, it doesn’t get cold in the evening—we could have slept out on the grass! Not many clouds, so it either doesn’t rain at all, or just enough to keep the grass alive, I guess, at least.” Smith stopped in momentary confusion.

  “Maybe that’s what they did,” mused Robinson.

  “Did what?”

  “Slept out on the grass at night. I’m just making a wild guess, but it just occurred to me that if we’re not just hallucinating all this, if that city’s real, then I’ll bet they had some kind of matter transmitter, like they had on the planet Qandry. Work during the day in this monster of a city, have fun in the early evening, then zip out to the grass with an inflatable mattress or some such, and sleep under the stars.”

  “Really, Professor Robinson, I think that’s stretching it a bit far,” said Smith, his most dubious expression etched strongly into his long face. “Let it never be said that a Smith would put down a hypothesis merely for being imaginative—most of my own most inventive and productive hypotheses are wildly imaginative—but I can’t see it that way. What on Earth would people want to sleep out under the stars for, when they have this gorgeous city to spend all their time in?”

  “Well, for one thing, Dr. Smith,” Robinson said slowly, “we’re not on Earth and we have no idea of knowing what these ‘people’ might find simply pleasant to do.”

  For fifteen minutes they had cruised at random over the city, as countless miles of lacy towers and high winding walkways unrolled beneath them. Now Robinson adjusted their course for the central tower.

  “I can think of a practical reason for ‘sleeping out,’ as it were,” he said then. “It’s a little thing that’s causing a lot of problems on Earth today. Or,” he added hastily, “the Earth of two years ago.”

  “Rats,” he continued, and grinned involuntarily at Smith’s expression. “They first found out about it with rats—pack them too close together for too long a time, and they go out of their little rat minds . . .”

  “You get suicidal rats and homosexual rats and homicidal rats, snoops and cowards and . . . well, it’s fantastic, and the most fantastic thing is that as last century drew to a close, they found their lab experiments were checking out almost precisely the same, percentagewise, with the most carefully analyzed figures from all our overcrowded cities. They’d predicted the figures a long time ago. Now we know it’s true. And since it doesn’t look like we’re ever going to decentralize past a certain point, it looks like a problem that were going to have with us a long time.”

  “And it looks to me as if these people might have found an answer. It would depend on matter transmission, or something similar, of course, and it doesn’t really account for why everyone apparently lived in just this one city, with not even the sign of another one. Though of course we haven’t searched the whole planet, I’d probably bet you this is all we’ll find.”

  “Quite a speech, Professor Robinson,” Smith observed quietly. “I believe there may be something in what you say, granted your premise.”

  Robinson looked at Smith with some surprise.

  “I can, however, think of some questions we will want to find answers for. As you say, the first question is why did they build only one city on this planet? Hypothesis: this is not the planet on which the life-form originally developed, or else we would have seen signs of their previous habitations, before they took up living in this city. After all, that they should have evolved from the slime living entirely in one spot—and that one seemingly at random—is too much. My hypothesis falls, of course, if they are found to have been sufficiently good engineers to turn this whole planet into its present condition. Did they find it, then, this way? Or did they change it after reaching a certain level of development?”

  Robinson nodded. “I’m betting they did it deliberately. Look, I’m going to land the flier in that huge plaza in front of the central tower. I think were more apt to find out something meaningful—whether positive or negative—if we strike for the heart of things here.”

  “Yes,” said Smith. “Of course, I don’t know how much one could find out about Earth from wandering through the World Trade Towers, but . . . ”

  “Well, we’re bound to find something. Here we go.” The flier dropped effortlessly to the center of the plaza, and came to rest with only a slight bump. Robinson opened the hatch, and the two climbed down the ladder on the outside of the small craft. Robinson looked about him. The plaza was surfaced with a highly-polished blue stone. Bending down, he rubbed his hand over the surface, then looked at his fingers. “Clean,” he announced. “Absolutely clean. And a bit frightening to look at—like staring into a bottomless lake . . . ”

  “We Smiths prefer to look up instead of down, for inspiration,” Smith said, looking up and rubbing his neck, as his head craned upwards, following the soaring leap upwards of the central tower. “Whew! No building should be built that high—it hurts my neck!” Constructed of pale gray marble, the central tower had a soft sheen that accented the cleanliness of the plaza.

  Around the other sides of the plaza were grouped other, lower buildings. One, directly opposite the central tower, was only two stories high, a vision of slender columns and narrow, beautiful windows.

  And clean—everything was fresh, clean.

  “All right, how do they keep it this way,” demanded Robinson, rhetorically.

  “Well, let’s see. Do you recall the ship’s picking up any electric charges as we entered the city, anything like when we came too near the walkway?”

  “Nothing like that, but I wasn’t really looking for such a thing, either. Why?”

  ‘It needn’t really have been as dramatic as the walkway field, I suppose,” Smith mused, then stated firmly, “Hypothesis: an electr
ostatic field about the city, preventing casual dust from entering. Hence, the city remains clean. Possible?”

  “Possible. Look, we’ve got another problem, too.” Robinson had looked closer at what he had decided to name simply the Central Tower. Smith raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  “How do we get inside?” Robinson asked softly. Smith turned and looked, and said nothing; they walked toward the portico at the front of the Central Tower.

  As they approached it, they could see that the front of the building was an absolutely blank sheet of metal for the first four stories.

  “Maybe there’s a delivery entrance in the rear,” Smith muttered.

  They walked entirely around the building.

  There was nothing but a blank sheet of metal on all five sides, extending four stories up.

  “We could take up the flier and smash through a window above that wall,” Smith said, hopefully.

  “No,” said Robinson, “I’d rather avoid . . . provocation.”

  “Provoca—now who is going to know or care when you yourself proved that this city is absolutely uninhabited?” Smith was highly indignant.

  “I didn’t say there weren’t any people here. I said it didn’t look as if there were any people here. Why, there might be a group of starving savages living in the abandoned subways.” He chuckled, and continued. “Or they might have discovered the secret of invisibility, and be all around us right this moment!”

  Smith looked wildly about him for a moment, then looked at Robinson. “Ridiculous,” he said after a moment. “They’d at least make noise.”

  “Well, let’s see. It could be a holiday today, and everybody’s off to another planet, watching a good movie or something. And as soon as the movie’s over, ‘zip!’ here they are again, all 200 million of ’em! They seem to like this place clean. I wouldn’t like to be caught messing it up for them ...”