Doyle rubbed a dark mark in thin gray dust.
“They’ve been gone a long time.” His voice seemed oddly hushed, yet too loud in those silent rooms.
I began to open the drawers of desks and filing cabinets. They were empty. Bulletin boards had been stripped, floors swept clean. Even the wastebaskets had been neatly emptied.
A large portrait of Tyler in the commandant’s office had slipped askew on the wall. Doyle moved without thinking to set it properly straight. Cameron followed his movement, I noticed, with a curious sardonic expression, but silently.
“The evacuation must have been quite orderly.” Doyle shook his head, his eyes dark with bewilderment. “No sign of haste or panic. Now what could have caused them to go?"
We moved on, in search of the answer.
It wasn't famine. We walked through an empty mess hall. The long tables were all in line, filmed with dust Clean trays and silver lay in geometric order, where the last KP’s had left them for the last inspection. The warehouse beyond' was stacked high with crates and bags and cans of food, frozen now, still preserved.
Nor was it any biological killer, gone wild. We found hundreds of beds in a hospital tunnel, empty, their dusty sheets still neat and smooth. The pharmacy shelves were loaded with drugs, untouched.
“Power failure?" Cameron suggested. “If the pile had gone dead-”
Rory Doyle found the way, down a black and bottomless ladder-well, to the main power-pile. The massive concrete safety-wall shut us away from all the actual mechanism, but Cameron scanned the long banks of recording instruments and remote controls. He flashed his light on a distant conveyor-belt, motionless, still laden with bright aluminum cans.
“Nothing wrong,” he said. “The last operator discharged the pile—dumped the canned uranium out of the lattice, into the processing canyon underneath. There’s plenty of metal left, but it wasn’t charged again.”
On another black and silent passage, a little above, we came to the steel-walled dungeons of the guardhouse and the military prison. The armored doors stood open. The records had been removed. The prisoners were gone.
"Revolt, perhaps,” Doyle suggested. “Perhaps the prisoners escaped, and touched off a mutiny in the garrison—no, that couldn’t have been, or we’d see the marks of fighting. Perhaps it was revolution, on the earth. That might explain everything—if the missiles are used up.”
He led us up again, along an endless silent tunnel, and down another dark ladder-well. We spun stiff wheels to open three heavy safety-doors, and came at last into one of the magazines.
Doyle gasped, in blank astonishment.
For on row, as far as our lights could reach, long racks were loaded with the robot-missiles. They were sleek cylinders of bright metal, gracefully tapered, every part of them beautiful with precise machining. Space ships, really, they were six feet thick and sixty long, each powered with its own atomic generator, driven with its own ion-jets, controlled with the fine and costly mechanism of its own robot-pilot, each burdened with its own terrible cargo of plutonium-fused lithium hydrides or crystalline biotoxins.
Stunned, almost, Doyle walked to the nearest. He examined it expertly, lifting inspection plates, flashing his light on serial numbers. He came slowly back to us, baffled.
“All abandoned!” he muttered. “I can’t believe it. Why, those babies cost twenty million apiece, even in mass production. They are loaded with the finest precision machines that men ever made. One of them, in forty minutes, could obliterate a thousand square miles of earth. And never a one was fired!"
We climbed again, up a black narrow shaft, to the launcher which Doyle had once commanded. Bright, satiny metal shimmered against our lights. The huge vertical barrel cast monstrous, leaping shadows. Doyle slipped into a familiar seat and touched familiar buttons. An emergency engine began drumming. A huge periscope lens was suddenly bright with the broad crescent earth—with thin black cross hairs intersecting upon it.
He flashed his light on a blank log-sheet, and shook his head.
“Never a missile was fired.”
Cameron was whistling through his teeth—a gray bit of melody that made a grotesque counterpoint to the themes of lifeless quiet and ghastly dark and deadly cold, to the whole haunting riddle of the abandoned fortress.
“Are these weapons still serviceable?” he asked.
“Not without some missing parts.” Doyle opened an inspection door, to show a dark cavity. “The computer has been removed, and the gyros are gone from the projectiles.” “Too bad,” Cameron’s voice held the hint of irony. “I imagine Mr. Hudd is going to need them.”
“They can be repaired,” Doyle assured him soberly. “Our spares for the ships’ launchers are interchangeable.” Doyle looked at his chronometer. “Now it’s time to report to Mr. Hudd—that our mission has failed.”
The stem simplicity of the life-craft, when we were safely back aboard, seemed luxurious. We relaxed in the acceleration chairs and gulped hot soup against the chill of those abandoned tunnels while we answered the peevish and uneasy questions of little Victor Lord.
When the signal officer reported that he had contact with the Great Director, we crowded into the narrow television room. Hudd’s heavy, blue-wattled face filled the screen.
“Let’s have it, Jim.” His loud, hearty voice was edged with tension. “What happened to the fort?”
“Evacuated, Mr. Hudd.”
“But why?”
“We failed to discover that,” Cameron reported. “The withdrawal was deliberate and orderly. The records were mostly removed or destroyed; the weapons were disabled without unnecessary destruction; the men took their personal belongings. There’s no evidence whatever of trouble or violence.” “When did it happen?”
“About two years, I think, after the task force left. The dates on calendar pads and inspection cards show that men were here that long. The lowered air pressure, the accumulated dust, and the low counter readings we got about the main power plant—everything shows that they weren’t here much longer.”
Hudd turned, on the screen, to rap a few questions at Doyle and Lord. Lord’s uneasy insolence had changed to a silky deference, now. He explained that acceleration sickness had kept him on the life-craft
“A very puzzling situation.” Hudd’s frown showed his bewildered apprehension. “The entire task force, I feel, is in. danger, until we find out what happened.”
He straightened on the screen.
"Captain Doyle, you will proceed at once to the earth. You will land at Americania. Discover what happened to the Directorate—and what enemies we must destroy, to restore it. Take any precautions that you think necessary. But this time you must not fail.”
“Yes, Mr. Hudd.”
Hudd answered his smart salute, and looked at Lord.
“You, Mr. Lord, had better get well.”
IV
Our life-craft, next day, spiraled slowly down over Americania—the splendid capital city which Tyler had founded, sentimentally, upon the Midwestern farm where he was bom. Peering down through the ports, we felt an increasing sense of fearful puzzlement.
Wide suburban areas had been devastated by explosion or fire, so long ago that lush green forest had now overspread the blackened walls and the twisted frames of rust-red steel—but most of the city looked intact.
Avenue upon avenue, proud towers stood like monolithic memorials to history’s greatest empire. Tyler had commanded his architects to build for a thousand years. Americania was a city of granite—of gray colossal masses, pillared and towered with contrasting red granite, and purple,'and black.
Far below us, those stately avenues looked strangely empty. Nothing moved. Tall stacks rose from power plants and industrial buildings in the green-choked suburbs, but there was no smoke.
Was Americania all abandoned, like the moon?
Fear of that sent an uncomfortable prickling up my spine. I looked hopefully at my companions. Little Victor Lord had turned a sallow
gray, and sweat made dark blots through his shirt. His two SBI men, in their ominous black, had turned away from the ports; muttering together uneasily, they were inspecting the action of their automatics.
Jim Cameron swung from his port, whistling in a way he had, softly, through his teeth. The air was the light, lilting melody of an old love song. The dwarfish Squaredealer whirled on him, in a sudden, tight-lipped fury.
“Stop your impudent whistling!” Lord's wrath had its real origin, no doubt, in his own frightened bafflement, but his sleep-lidded eyes looked dangerous. Even after Cameron stopped the whistling, Lord was not appeased.
“Look at me, you feather merchant." Lord’s sharp nasal voice was angrily insolent. “Frankly, I don’t approve the confidence that Mr. Hudd has placed in you. Now I’m warning you—watch your step!”
His small quick hand hovered suggestively over the heavy automatic sagging at his hip.
“Whatever we find here,” he snarled, “my duty is to assure your continued loyalty to the Squaredeal Machine. Whatever happens, just remember that.”
“I’ll keep it in mind, Mr. Lord,” Cameron promised him evenly.
Captain Doyle set the life-craft down at last on Tyler Field—the immense space-port on the outskirts of the city. Once it had been the gateway to the planets. I could remember my childish awe at the rush and glitter and vastness of it, from twenty years ago—when we marched across it, bravely screeching out the Tyler song, on our way out to Fort American and the Dark Star. Now, when I saw it again through the small ports of the life-craft, the change made me almost ill.
Like Fort America, the space-port seemed abandoned. Here, however, weather and decay had kept at work. Green life had kept on, overflowing every plot of soil, bursting from every crack in the neglected pavements.
Long rows of shops and warehouses stood deserted. Doors yawned open. Neglected roofs were sagging. Ruined walls, here and there, were black from old fire. Every building was hedged with weeds and brush.
Far across the shattered pavements stood the saddest sight of all. A score of tall ships stood scattered across the blast-aprons, where they had landed. Though small by comparison with such enormous interstellar cruisers as the Great Director, some of them towered many hundred feet above the broken concrete and the weeds. They stood like strange cenotaphs to the dead Directorate.
Once they had been proud vessels. They had carried the men and the metal to build Fort America. They had transported labor battallions to Mars, dived under the clouds of Venus, explored the cold moons of Jupiter and Saturn. They had been the long arm and the mighty fist of Tyler’s Directorate, the iron heels upon the prostrate race of man.
Now they stood in clumps of weeds, pointing out at the empty sky they once had ruled. Red wounds marred their sleek skins, where here and there some small meteoric particle must have scratched the mirror-bright polish, letting steel go to rust, which, in the rains of many years, had washed in ugly crimson streaks down their shining sides.
One of them had fallen. The great hull was flattened from the impact, broken in two. Steel beams, forced through the red-stained skin, jutted like red broken bones. The apron was shattered beneath it, so that a thick jungle of brush and young trees had grown up all around it.
Captain Rory Doyle came silently down his ladder from the bridge. His square face was black with gloomy puzzlement—as any loyal spaceman’s should have been.
“A graveyard,” he muttered, “of fine old ships—my first training voyage to Mars was on the oldPaid Jones, yonder.” He turned sadly to us. “Gadgets ready, Mr. Cameron? Then let’s go out and see what unholy thing has happened to them."
“Hold on, Doyle!” Lord’s nasal voice was sharp with dread. “Shouldn’t we test the air? Suppose something has happened to the atmosphere?”
Doyle turned to Cameron, red brows lifted.
“I don’t think it’s necessary, Mr. Lord,” Cameron said respectfully. “You can see a gray squirrel scolding at us from the tree growing out of the apron, yonder, and a buzzard circling, toward the city. I think the air’s all right.”
“I’ll do the thinking.” The little Squaredealer drew himself up stiffly, in the sweat-blotched uniform. “Test it.” I found a test-flask, and took it down to draw a sample
through a tube In the inner valve. Cameron watchfully checked my reading of the colored indicators.
“It’s safe enough, Mr. Lord,” he reported crisply. “Oxygen normal. A bit of secondary radioactivity—due to our jets. No detectable toxic agents, chemical or biological.”
“Then were going out.” Doyle looked thoughtfully at Cameron and me. "I don’t know what we’re running into. If you wish, I’ll issue you arms.”
“No, you won’t!” The little Squaredealer barked out that sharp protest. "These men are suspected mutineers, Doyle. I’ll take no chances with them.”
Doyle’s square jaw slowly hardened.
“Mr, Lord,” he began. “I believe the SBI found nothing—”
“It doesn’t matter, Captain,” Cameron broke in. “We’ve gadgets enough to carry. Anyhow, I doubt that a pistol would be much use, where Fort America faded.”
Lord looked at him with a puzzled alarm in his sleepy-seeming eyes, and then muttered something to his two gunmen. Their uneasy eyes went to Cameron.
Doyle led the way down the ladder-well. Air hissed, and the valves clanged open. One by one, we stooped to follow him through the lock and jumped out between the shining stabilizers to mother earth.
We hurried away from the scorched concrete and smoking weeds about the little ship, where the ion-jet might have left a dangerous activity, before we stopped to catch our breath.
Earth! We had dreamed of it for twenty years. Here in the northern hemisphere, it was early summer; the sky was a wondrous milky blue, flecked with cottony cumulus. The forenoon sun struck with a hot, welcome force. The warm air was heady with a fragrance that stirred old memories— the rich strong smell of green life growing out of damp vegetal decay. I heard a heavy buzzing, half-remembered, and saw a bumble-bee.
The warm earth, alive—and a lone black bird, yonder, wheeling over an empty city.
Lord, running after us through the blackened weeds, let out a nasal yelp of horror. A white skull, which he had stumbled against, rattled and bounded before him. We found the rest of the skeleton, with a rust-caked revolver on the broken concrete beside it. Scraping about in the weeds, we discovered several shapeless lumps of heavy metal, dark from heat, and a bent penny that still showed Tyler’s profile. Cameron found the flattened cases of several ruined watches, and a woman’s diamond bracelet, the links half-fused and the stones burned black. Doyle picked up a wicked-looking stainless steel blade, its haft rotted away.
“A curious lot of loot.” Cameron stood up, puzzled. “All burned, the money melted down. Maybe he was struck by lightning. Or maybe looting just isn’t cricket.”
Lord stood off and fired a bullet into the skull, I suppose just to test his gun. Bone shattered into white dust. He holstered the automatic with an air of uneasy satisfaction, mopped the sweat off his narrow sallow face, and followed us watchfully.
We went on to the nearest ship. The bright curving hull towered three hundred feet, marred with long vertical streaks of rust. It was a stubby freighter; Doyle said it had been in the Martian metal trade.
We followed Doyle up a rusty accommodation ladder into the lock. The inner valve was closed, stiff with rust. We strained and hammered at the manual wheels until it groaned reluctantly open. A stale breath met us as we stumbled through the lock into dusty dark.
There was no power for lights or elevators. The interphone system was dead. We probed the silent dark with flashlights, and Doyle led the way up the ladder-shaft beside the elevator. Lord, with his two gunmen, decided to remain below. Doyle climbed into a cargo hold, and cursed in breath-taken astonishment.
“Plutonium!” A bewildered awe hushed his voice. “Hundreds of tons of refined plutonium in cadmium drums�
� enough to blow up half America—worth hundreds of millions.” His haunted eyes peered back at Cameron. “Why did they leave it?”
We climbed on, looking for the answer. Our feeble lights, as we passed, searched each dark compartment. Everything was left in order. The galley was clean. The atomic generator had been discharged and secured.
There were no other skeletons.
A hard climb brought us to the executive deck. We found dusty charts and orbit plots neatly folded, astrogation instruments safe in their racks. Doyle opened an unlocked safe, with a shout of triumph.
“Now well know—here’s the log."
He fumbled with the yellowing pages. Eagerly, we leaned to read the brief, routine entries which described an uneventful voyage from Mars. The four-hourly observations and computed positions were neatly entered, and the hourly checks of solar position and diameter. The date of the final entry corresponded with the dates on the calendar pads at Fort America. It was brief, neatly written, and completely exasperating:
“Routine landing at Tyler Field. Ship abandoned today, because of equalizer.”
That was all.
“I don’t get it.” Doyle shook his head, staring bleakly at that yellowed page. “A space-worthy ship. Competent officers, evidently, and a loyal crew. They make a routine voyage and a routine landing. Not a hint of anything unusual.”
He peered up at Cameron.
“Then something happens,” he muttered. “Something makes them walk off and leave their jobs and their duty and a ship and cargo worth hundreds of millions. I just don’t get it.”
We went back to move the life-craft nearer the deserted city. When we landed again, in a suburban area which had been seared and flattened by some tremendous blast, the counter showed a lingering trace of secondary activity in the blobs of fused debris.
“An atomic explosion,” Cameron decided.
“But not one of our standard robot-missiles,” Doyle added. “One shot from my launcher at Fort America would have leveled a hundred times this space.”
The Best of Jack Williamson Page 24