Murray Leinster

“ Above him rose stratified rocky pillars, dripping floods of sea-water, surrounded by maelstroms.
The flier went through between them. On beyond there were sheer cliffs against which the seas broke in frightful, explosive impacts.
A current behind the northern column swung the flier about. Brett was, for a moment, in the lee of that vast 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. ”

“ He dived. And as he plunged toward the monstrous swells he thought fleetingly of how unlike this was to his dreams of what the Expedition would be like. He'd hoped for a thrilling feeling of limitless isolation. Instead, he was in the midst of an aerial dog-fight.
He craned his neck to see up and behind. He saw a 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. ”

“ His voice grew stronger as Brett's hearing came back. And suddenly, it seemed, they were all released from the hypnosis of shock, and Belmont looked up from his radiation-counter and said in a sort of mild astonishment:
"Ten more seconds and we'd have known that!"
Then a babbling of voices. There was a crazy confusion all around. Voices cried. "We've got to move camp!" Voices asked imploringly, "Are we burnt? Are we burnt?" Halliday displayed unsuspected leadership and bellowed at them in a shaking voice and took matters in hand. ”

“ The ocean had been deep, deep blue and the light came only from that speckled brightness in the sky which was the heart of the Canis Venitici star-cluster. Now those stars had been left below the horizon behind him, though there were still other 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. ”

“ Brett went in through the opening Kent had made. The interior was brightly lighted now. It was illuminated as effectively and as thoroughly as a museum on Earth. Cables ran along the passageways. Just inside the first entrance generators hummed. It was remarkable how the members of the Expedition had made a researcher's dream of this cave-site. All archaeologists have dreamed of finding an ancient city intact and of making their camp among the objects of their study. All have had wistful fantasies of laboratory facilities at the very spots where their study-material exists. ”

“ Brett's words almost tumbled over each other, "It's a balloon, Halliday! It's a bag filled with helium, and pushed by a rocket! An old, forgotten way of traveling by air! It was in use for less than half a century! They didn't need motors to stay aloft! They float! The Aspasians have sent for them because they don't have fliers! They use these dirigible balloons at home, and rockets for space-travel! Now that they need to make an exhaustive hunt, they sent for these!"
Things fitted together now. Aspasia was a desert planet. Fliers would never be developed in a desert area, of course. ”

“ It was not plausible that Brett Carstairs should find a picture of a girl, to all appearances human, in millenia-old ruins on a planet some hundreds of lightyears from earth. But the whole affair was unlikely, beginning with the report of the exploring-ship which caused the Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition in the first place. Had it not been for the photographs and the ceramic artifacts, nobody would have believed that report. It simply was not credible that another intelligent race should have ever existed in the galaxy. ”

“ Every man in the Expedition had brought along something representative of his specialty. But Brett doubted that there was a saw or an axe or a good-sized knife in the company.
He himself was carrying his reproduction of an ancient bazooka, and his pockets were stuffed with the one-inch plastic rocket-shells he'd made for it to fire. Since there were no living animals on the planet, and their enemies were armed with atomic bombs, he was no more rational than the rest. ”

“ Kent stopped. Halliday, the Expedition head, turned his face to Brett.
"Specimens?"
"Us," said Brett harshly. "We set traps to collect specimens for study, when we're making an ecology-study of a planet! It would be logical for something intelligent to want to see specimens of the creatures that make garbage-pits and radar-beacons and landing plaques!" ”

“ A locket slipped off. He picked that up, too. It had the feel of a human artifact. It was. It had been made by hand.
There was a picture of a girl in it, under a protecting sheet of plastic. She was a human female, though her costume was like none that Brett had ever seen or heard of.
The picture was black-and-white—an ancient process—but it was unfaded, which meant that it had been made recently.
This, of course, was starkly impossible. One does not find a picture of a human girl in the ruins of an eight-thousand-year old culture, on a planet hundreds of lightyears from Earth. ”

“ That excitement lasted during the tedious journey in overdrive and during the long approach to planetary landing distance after the Ecology Bureau ship was back in normal space in the Elektra system. When it went into atmosphere on Thalassia and its repulsors droned above the illimitable waters of Thalassia's ocean, Brett watched with fascinated eyes. They had a twenty-thousand-mile reach in which to build up to mountainous heights. ”

“ The report of the exploring-ship was specific. There had once been a high civilization on both here and on the twin-planet Aspasia, which was invisible from where they were. Some eight thousand years before they'd battled to the death across the quarter-million miles of space that separated them. Fission bombs with cobalt cases poisoned the air of Thalassia; at the same time fusion bombs from Thalassia blasted the oasis cities of its twin-world to lakes of molten glass. Anyhow, there wasn't a living, air-breathing creature on Thalassia now. ”

“ Brett entered, blinking. The skeletons were well-enough preserved to be tragic, but he remembered that the ancient race had had six fingers and other not-quite-usual features. He looked. Yes. The interior of this place was squared and leveled. It had been worked into shape. There was a tunnel leading off to the left and he glanced in. A low-ceilinged room, crowded with objects in rows. Machines. More skeletons. He stood rocking on his feet with weariness. He thought: "Now we'll know something about a civilization that was wiped out while our ancestors were still hunting mammoths." ”

“ Brett saw a long cord dangling from its forward pointed end. Why should a spaceship have a cord dangling from its bow? And it moved visibly faster when its rockets fired. No rocket could visibly stir a mass of thousands of tons, such as a two-hundred-foot spaceship. ”

“ The Expedition became feverishly busy up on a mountainside. The electronicists constructed an object of wire strung on sticks cut from small trees with pocket-knives. He proudly detailed the mathematical principles involved in the reflection of a tight beam of high-frequency electricity. A communications man magnificently took a hand-light—brought nobody knew why through the perpetual day of Thalassia—and used stray objects from the pockets of the others to make a generator of microwaves out of iron particles in vegetable oil. ”

“ There had probably been only one rocket at a time trailing Brett's flier, from so great an altitude that he could not detect it. A rocket has not an indefinite flying life. There must have been a relay system to keep on Brett's track. But there'd been a cobalt-cased bomb handy to drop when he went to ground. It would normally have made a continuous lethal fall-out over a strip of ground many miles long. In a rainstorm like this, the fall-out should be shorter, but vastly more intense. ”

“ Nobody would normally use the sea on Thalassia! So nobody would have anticipated 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 point of view. He tended to interpret moving creatures with human beings and Earth-animals as references. ”

“ Perhaps for that very reason they came over to Thalassia to fight it out here, to end the danger to their race forever. It looks like that. I thought they'd be even more anxious to track me home than to kill me, so I found a storm-cloud and stayed in it till it came ashore, and I came down to camp here with the rain."
Halliday winced. But then he said hopefully:
"Very wise! But we're well hidden, and this is a large world. We've not much to fear from creatures with no more than a twentieth-century technology."
"Unless," said Brett, "they've got twentieth-century desperation as well. ”

“ You say it's desert on Aspasia where these creatures after us come from?"
"That's right," said Brett.
"Then they'll have dogs or something similar!" said Kent in happy authority. "That I know about! You take a savage who hunts with weapons, he'll have to start as a hunter to get the idea of weapons, with tools coming later. When he lives in the jungle, he lives by stalking. A dog's no good for stalking! You can't train an animal to keep quiet while his prey blunders nearer and nearer and then changes his mind and walks away. A dog's for open-country hunting. ”

“ But his personal reason for going was an anticipatory feeling of excitement at the idea of being left with a small group of human beings on a planet where even the skies were unfamiliar, and where they would be more terribly alone than any similar group had ever been before. ”

“ But balloons would float on, even if their motors failed, until some inhabited area was reached. Of course! To make a painstaking, inch-by-inch search of a continent, the primitive Aspasians would import these balloons, and they would be effective.
The silvery, melon-shaped object rose and fell in a gust of wind past a mountain-peak. The rockets jetted furiously and it climbed against the wind and went over the mountains and away. Brett racked his brains for details of this forgotten mode of transportation. ”

“ No bird-song. No insect-hum. Nothing but the ominous dull booming of the gigantic surf to the west. The ship that had brought them was long since in overdrive and unreachable by any means until it came back to normal space again.
They found where the beacon had been. It was gone. It had been a complex mechanism, powered by a pinch of atomic-pile residue. It should have sent out its signal, on a standard frequency, for years to come. It had been mounted on a solid concrete pillar, according to custom.
The concrete pillar was there, but the radar-beacon was not. ”

“ Halliday carried more hand-lights.
"Ah, Carstairs!" he said exuberantly. "You picked a lucky place! When I learned the firing-plaza had been booby-trapped I was really in despair! I thought any other site would be booby-trapped too. I thought we might be unable to work at all, but here we've got a bolt-hole they tried to make use of: Artifacts! Skeletons! We can get a marvelous picture of their civilization under stress! Marvelous!"
He bobbed into the hole in the wall and was gone.
Brett found a sleeping-bag and crawled into it. He went to sleep. ”

“ But from the seared and sandy surface of Aspasia small white threads appeared. They stretched toward Thalassia across the gulf. There were many of those threads. They were rocket-trails.
The enmity between the planets was not ended. A war-fleet roared toward the world that robot-rockets had killed before. Life had been found on it again. That life must be destroyed.
The strange, incurious stars watched all these things without emotion.
V
On Thalassia plants no longer seek to attract insects by bright colors or scent or nectar, because there are no insects. ”

“ Brett went to the second flier and loosened it.
He was aloft before the first flier had landed, and he headed north. An idea occurred to him, and he dropped lower. The planet Thalassia might be dead, but something other than men from Earth had been here very recently. Flying high would make him invisible to eyes on the ground, but would make him very visible indeed to detection-radar. If there were intelligent creatures on Thalassia now, they would take precautions against unexpected encounters with alien creatures. ”

“ A dead planet is gloomy enough in the daytime, with all its vegetation grieving that it has no purpose. At night it would be intolerable. And even in the daytime it would be wise to keep one's mind busy.
Brett kept his mind busy. ”

“ To get well away from the neighborhood of the camp.
"They'll bomb the surface of the ground," added Brett, "to knock in any caves or other installations we may hide in. And then I think they'll do some water-burst bombs to make sure that everything dies—nothing being supposed to be alive—in the biggest area they can imagine us as being in. It sounds extreme, but I think they'll do it. They mean business!"
Halliday nodded and continued to hike.
Janney, behind him, said: "There's no day and no night, and the trades blow all the time. But the trades should pick up a little after Elektra rises. ”