Title: Second landing
Author: Leinster, Murray
Language: English
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                            Second Landing

                              A Novel by
                            MURRAY LEINSTER

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                 Thrilling Wonder Stories Winter 1954.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]



                                   I

    The exploring-ship Franklin made its first landing on a remarkable
    wide beach on the western coast of Chios, the largest land-mass on
    Thalassia. Using the longest axis of the continent as a base, and
    the pointed end as seen from space as 0°, this beach bears 246°
    from the median point of the base-line.... The Franklin later
    berthed inland some four miles 360° from Firing Plaza Number One
    on the chart. There is a pleasant savannah here, with a stream of
    water apparently safe for drinking.--_Astrographic Bureau
    Publication 11297, Appendix to Space Pilot Vol. 460, Sector XXXIV,
    pg. 58-59._

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. No hint of
extra-terrestrial reasoning beings had been found in two centuries of
exploration. But the exploration-ship's stilted narrative didn't stop
at one impossibility. It said that on the twin worlds Thalassia and
Aspasia, revolving perpetually about each other as they trailed the
satellite-sun Rubra on its course, not one, but _two_, intelligent
races had existed. It offered some evidence that some thousands of
years before they had fought, bitterly and mercilessly, and that they
had exterminated each other in an interplanetary atomic war which
lasted only days or even hours. It was hard to believe.

But the picture of the girl was more impossible than anything else.
Brett didn't believe it. He didn't quite dare mention it until the
thing was all over.

He didn't find it at the very beginning, of course. There were
preliminaries. The Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition was handicapped from
the start by the lack of funds. The general public was much more
excited about colonization of nearby planetary systems than research
on a planet that wouldn't be colonized in a thousand years. So the
Expedition was very small--no more than a dozen members altogether--and
it landed on Thalassia from an Ecology Bureau ship. It would be picked
up in six months or so. Probably. Even then, what it found might not
matter to anybody else.

Brett joined up because it was his only chance at adventure and because
his hobby warranted his inclusion in the staff. He could drive a flier,
of course--everybody could--but he'd specialized in palaeotechnology,
the study of ancient industrial processes. If there really had been
an intelligent race or races out in space, he would make better
guesses than most at how its machinery operated and what its factories
produced. 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.

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. At this season of the twin planets'
year, they had the equivalent of trade winds to urge them on.

When they reached the shore of Chios, the planet's only continent, they
were three-hundred feet high. Brett could see the swirling maelstroms
and dramatic tumult of the struggle between sea and land. He remembered
that at the very edge of the wave-washed area there were to be found
the only living moving things on the continent. They were crablike
marine forms which scuttled out of the water to forage, then darted
back to the tumultuous coastal foam.

       *       *       *       *       *

The spaceship settled lower and lower--and the word went around that
the radar-beacon on Chios wasn't working--and hovered over Firing Plaza
Number One and the ruined refugee settlement nearby. It then descended
gently at the landing-place which the exploring-ship had advised for
later visitors.

It was a pleasant savannah, and the stream ran clear as crystal. But
the Ecology Bureau ship had been grudgingly loaned, and it had urgent
business elsewhere. It opened its cargo-ports and the Expedition's
supplies went out to ground in a swiftly-flowing stream. They piled up
mountainously, so it seemed, and at that they were not too complete.
The biggest crates were two atmosphere-fliers and a short-range
rocket. The fuel for the rocket made a bigger heap than all the rest
of the equipment put together. There were plastic tarpaulins, houses
to be unfolded and braced back--but at least they weren't inflatable
shelters--and a spare beacon. But that was all. The unloading took
under two hours.

Then the skipper of the Ecology Bureau shop asked politely if there was
anything else. Minutes later the cargo-ports closed and the personnel
lock shut, and the ship's repulsors began to drone. It heaved up slowly
until it was a few thousand feet high and then went into interplanetary
drive and plummeted toward the sky. It would come back in six months,
most likely, or another ship would come in its stead, and the
Expedition would have to be ready to leave.

That was when Brett Carstairs realized the silence on Thalassia. The
Expedition's members set to work to make camp. There was a breeze, and
the vegetation was reasonably familiar in smell at least--chlorophyll
and its associated compounds are found on the oxygen planets of all
sol-type stars--and the leaves on the trees rustled naturally enough.
The small stream at the landing-place made pleasant liquid sounds. But
that was all. No insect stirred or whirred or stridulated. No bird
sang. No squirrel barked, nor any reasonable facsimile of any noise
made by any living creature came to the ears of the Thalassia-Aspasia
Expedition. The only sounds were the voices of the Expedition members
themselves, and the noises they made with the boxes and crates, and the
breeze and the dull booming of the thundering surf to west-ward. Brett
caught himself listening uneasily.

"I didn't realize," he said ruefully to Kent, at the other end of
the crate that would presently be furniture--"that it would sound so
lonely."

"It's been lonely here for a good many thousand years," Kent answered
phlegmatically, "since the races on these twin planets killed each
other off."

Kent set down his end of the crate, and he and Brett began to assemble
the furnishings of the Expedition's housing. All about them was jungle.
The clearing in which they worked had a ground-cover like ivy running
on the ground. It was broadleaved instead of narrowleaved as grasses
are, and Brett had a feeling that there could be crawling things under
it.

But there couldn't. 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.

The air was no longer radioactive. Carbon-14 and Cobalt-60
determinations timed the deadly war at very close to eight thousand
earth-years before. Now there was vegetation and to spare, and the
ocean swarmed with marine organisms from plankton up to fish. But there
was no moving creature left on the land.

Brett labored on. The atmosphere on Thalassia was depressing. It was a
dead world despite its forests and jungles. Everything that had eyes
or wings or a throat--even teeth to bite or stings to sting with--had
died eons ago with the doomed creatures whose friable skeletons the
exploring-ship had found about the firing-plaza. They'd been killed by
the bombs from the other planet which was forever invisible from here.
They'd been murdered. Butchered. The forests had no purpose with no
animals to live in them. There was a feeling of grief in the air, as if
even the trees mourned.

Brett wanted to go over to the firing plaza and see where living things
had been, even if the only knowledge about them was that they had died
in the act of firing giant rockets to avenge the extermination of their
race. When they died, Thalassia was already a charnel-house.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now all was quiet. Terribly quiet. The Expedition members braced their
houses and moved the laboratory equipment inside, and uncrated their
fliers and tied them down, and ran their power lines and dug their
refrigeration-pits and put in sanitary facilities and set their
water-recovery plant at work. It was safer to condense moisture from
the air than to use local water supplies which might carry undesirable
trace-elements.

Brett began to worry that it would be too late to go to the
firing-plaza before dark. Then he remembered. He looked up at the
sky. It was mostly blue, but speckled. There was a dull red pin-point
of light near the horizon. It wasn't Elektra, the sun and center of
gravity of this system. It was Rubra, the red dwarf, the satellite-sun,
the size of Sol's Jupiter, which shared an orbit with the twin planets.
They were in Trojan relationship to it, sixty degrees behind as it sped
sullenly about its primary. Elektra itself was not visible. But there
was no night.

Off to what ought to be the west there was a spotty bright luminosity
in the sky. It was the star-clustered Canis Venitici, on whose fringe
this solar system lay. And the multiple suns of the cluster swarmed
so closely and shone so brightly at the cluster's heart that even
twenty-eight lightyears away they gave Thalassia more light than its
own and proper sun.

There would be no night on Thalassia.

Brett had known it, of course, but all the same he was relieved. 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. He had driven pegs and was tying down the
tarpaulin over a mound of crates when he saw the heap of dirt. It
did not have any ground-cover on it. It was piled up. It had been
rained on, but it was freshly dug. Brett pounded two more pegs, and
painstakingly knotted the ropes that would hold the tarpaulin in any
wind. Then he jumped. Kent, by that time, was pounding in more pegs on
the other side of the pile of stores.

Brett stared at the piled-up dirt. It was surprisingly Earthlike. The
top of the ground was dark humus from rotted vegetation, and six or
eight inches down it should be clay, very much as in a fresh-dug hole
on Earth. But there shouldn't be any fresh-dug hole on Thalassia!
Nothing lived here. Nothing!

But there was a fresh-dug hole in the ground, with clay on top of the
thrown-out humus.

Brett stopped driving pegs and went over. He stared down, and
felt himself growing very pale and sick. There were scraps of
paper--human-made paper--at the bottom. There were traces of the
rotted debris that any group of humans will discard, but which humans
automatically put out of sight before they leave any stopping-place.
This savannah had been the berthing-place of the exploring-ship
_Franklin_. This was where they had buried their trash. Something had
dug it up.

More, something had very carefully sorted it out, as human scientists
sort out the rubbish-heap--the kitchen-midden--of a forgotten culture
to find out what made it tick.

Something had carefully examined an exploring-ship's kitchen-midden
to find out what sort of beings human beings might be. Men from Earth
wouldn't have needed to do that. They knew.

Something intelligent and curious, but not from Earth, had wanted to
know about men, on a planet where nothing had lived for eight millenia.
But something had been alive on the dead planet Thalassia. It had
wanted to know about the men who'd camped here from the exploring-ship
two years before.

Brett was white when he called Kent to look. Kent looked phlegmatically
down into the hole and said:

"That's the _Franklin's_ garbage-pit. Why'd they dig it up again?"

Brett said:

"They didn't. Somebody else dug it up. Lately. It's been rained on,
but nothing's grown over it. In two years it would have been washed
flat and covered over. This was dug long after the _Franklin_ left.
Recently--probably within days--just before we arrived."

He shouted, and the nearby trees echoed his voice with a chilling
resonance. Halliday, the official head of the Expedition, came
fretfully to see what was the matter. Brett showed him. Halliday stared
blankly for a second. He even began to frown because Brett had called
him for nothing. But then the breath went out of him with a curious
whooshing sound. His face went quite gray.

"And the ship's gone!" he said irritably. "It can't take word back!
There is life here after all--intelligent life! And we're at its mercy!"

Which was absolutely true. Because this was strictly an archaeological
expedition to work on two worlds which had committed suicide together.
So there were no defensive weapons in the Expedition's equipment.
Heat-guns, yes. They were handy for lighting fires. There were some
explosives for shifting rock. But there were no more weapons capable of
defending men against really dangerous creatures than a man will take
on a camping-trip in a national park on Earth. And the Expedition could
not communicate with other humans for at least six months. They were
hundreds of lightyears from help.

Brett said slowly, "On the ship, just before we landed, I heard that
the radar-beacon on the ground here wasn't working. I think, sir, we'd
better go over to the firing-plaza and find out the worst."

       *       *       *       *       *

They went over to the firing-plaza. There had been a beacon there, left
to notify Earth-ships where the first exploring-ship had landed. It
would also notify any other intelligent race which dealt in such things
as radar. There were a dozen men who went uneasily to see if anything
had happened to make their landing unfortunate. They were defenseless,
and more isolated from their kind than any humans had ever been before.

There was no sound anywhere save the wind in the trees. 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. It had
been cut from its anchorage with something like a torch which cut the
metal smoothly. There was as yet no oxidation on the severed surfaces.

The first-landing plaque had been removed from the same column. It was
the plaque which recited that the exploring-ship _Franklin_ had made
a first-landing on this planet on such and such a day and year, Earth
Calendar. Close by the column there was a rocket-blast crater in the
ground, a small one, perhaps six or seven feet across. It was fresh. A
rocket had landed here and removed the man-made objects after studying
a human refuse-pit. Within days. Certainly within weeks.

It had left something of its own behind, though. There was a metal
tripod set up on the ground. It was about man-high, with a box at its
top shaped like an inverted cone. There were round holes on four sides
of the box. It was not placed on any foundation, simply set up on the
ground for some temporary purpose. And left behind.

Kent moved to approach it.

"Hold on!" said Brett, very pale. "That could be a thing to collect
specimens!"

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!"

There was a long pause. Then Halliday said in a flat voice:

"Yes. There are eyes in the thing, too. Or lenses. It could be a
collection-trap. Or it could be transmitting pictures of us elsewhere,
on a frequency our ship wasn't set to detect. Let's go back to the camp
and think it over."

He moved to go back, and the others with him. The alien tripod
glittered in the peculiar dead-white light which did not come from the
sun. Brett started to follow the others. His foot caught in something
as he moved away from the tripod. His heart jumped into his throat. It
could be a trip-wire....

But it wasn't. It was a tiny golden chain, very humanlike in
manufacture. It had broken. Brett picked it up very cautiously. 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. Not a picture in an
antiquated medium, long forgotten, and with a background neither of
this planet nor of Earth's. It was so completely impossible that Brett
knew he wouldn't dare show it to any of his companions.

They wouldn't believe it wasn't a "plant" or a fake.



                                  II

    The Elektran solar system displays certain anomalies, not only in
    the existence of a satellite-sun Rubra, no larger than a gas-giant
    planet ... (but in) the twin worlds Thalassia and Aspasia, each
    nearly seven thousand miles in diameter, which revolve about each
    other at a distance of only 250,000 miles. Tidal strains have long
    since ended their diurnal rotation and they turn the same faces
    toward each other during their period of revolution of not quite 25
    days. This nearness and the development of intelligent races on
    both planets led to the development of interplanetary communication
    between them some time between 7,000 and 11,000 years ago. The
    tragic results of this communication--_Astrographic Bureau
    Publication 11297, Supplement to Space Pilot Vol. 460, Sector XXXIV,
    p. 56._


A trenching-machine with its buckets removed went toiling painfully
up to the alien tripod some six hours later. It was under remote
control. It skirted the elongated opening of a concrete tunnel, made
by the long-dead, six-fingered race of which the exploration-ship had
found skeleton remains. There were thirty or more of those tunnels,
which of course no member of the Expedition had yet entered. But the
_Franklin's_ report said that the tunnels had been launching tubes
for giant rockets. The rockets had gone roaring out over the ocean,
rising steadily, until they swept round the curve of the planet
to blast across space and loose destruction upon the sister-world
Aspasia. The firing-plaza took its name from these tunnels. The
refugee-settlement--shelters of lignin plastic--had evidently been the
shelter in which the dying, despairing Thalassians lived while they
took their revenge.

The trench-digger ground and rumbled and blundered on its way. Once a
side-tread slipped and it stalled in a thicket of trees it could not
push down. It backed out and went bumbling on toward the bright new
metal of the tripod.

Back at the camp, the vision-screen which showed what the
trenching-machine saw showed the firing-plaza as looking like an
abandoned area of Earth, with long, slanting shadows and sharp
contrasts of light and dark.

The robot machine went on. It was taller than a man, and its outline
from the front was not dissimilar. It approached the glistening
three-legged object with the inverted cone on top. At the camp, the
members of the Expedition watched the vision-screen. Brett Carstairs
felt acutely uncomfortable. He'd been suspicious because his training
in ancient technical processes naturally made him suspect ancient
psychological processes in all unfamiliar objects. But of course the
tripod could be completely harmless and incapable of doing damage....

It wasn't.

The trenching-machine drew nearer. Twenty yards. Ten. Five yards. Ten
feet, and the round holes in the conical box looked more than ever like
eyes. The trenching-machine bumped the tripod. It toppled over.

Back at the camp there was a flash of light and the members of the
Expedition looked at a blistered, blackened, peeling screen. The sound
of the detonation came seconds later, and it was like a fist in the
chest. At the same instant the ground bucked violently. There was a
light brighter than the sun.

There was simply no virtue in running away. Brett said numbly to
himself, though he didn't hear the words as formed:

"_Atomic explosion. We're dead, now._"

He rose stiffly from his seat and left the hut. He looked toward the
firing-plaza two miles away. There was a hill between, but he saw a
gigantic smoke-ring spinning toward the sky. There was a horrible,
incandescent, two-branched fountain in the air. Flame poured sky-ward,
while Brett, deafened, hardly perceived the incredible roar.

Others came out of the hut. Belmont, the nuclear man of the Expedition,
very absurdly carried something from his laboratory, at which he looked
intently without raising his eyes to the sky. Halliday looked at the
fountain of flame with an expression of embittered indignation.
Janney, the meteorologist, stared and stared and then ridiculously wet
his finger and held it up, his air one of complete absorption.

       *       *       *       *       *

One flame suddenly began to diminish. It failed rapidly in intensity.
In seconds it had lessened to a mere glow to be seen over the hillcrest
between. The other flame burned more and more luridly--and abruptly
stopped. But the rising smoke-ring still hurtled upward, expanding as
it rose. It was ten thousand feet up. Fifteen thousand. Janney watched
it with his head thrown back and his wetted finger still absurdly held
aloft. His lips moved, but Brett did not hear anything at all.

People did unreasonable things. Brett saw the Expedition's official
flier-pilot solemnly take a cigarette from his pocket, tap it against
the back of his hand, put it slowly in his mouth and puff on it. He
very carefully blew a smoke-ring of his own, staring blankly where the
fountains of flame had risen. There was steam rising there now.

Then Janney's voice came, very faintly, like a remembered sound rather
than like an actual noise.

"There's a wind from the ocean," said Janney thinly. "It's blowing the
atom-cloud inland. There's a wind from the ocean. It's blowing the
atom-cloud inland. There's a wind from the ocean--"

He said it over and over, like an automaton. 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 first requisite was information. There was an even greater need
for action. It is not healthy to camp within two miles of a recent
atomic-explosion site. Wind blowing from it to one's camp will hardly
be salubrious. Halliday crackled orders. While Brett helped loose
one of the two fliers from its tie-down ropes, Halliday had other
men dragging out emergency rations and canteens and the rolled-up
inflatable shelters that could be used to live in. As he snapped
instructions, Halliday interjected odd fragments of thought as if
everything that came into his head also came out of his mouth.

The flier took off vertically and swept toward the ocean, on shouted
last-minute instructions from Belmont to stay upwind. Halliday stopped
his stream of feverish instructions as Brett came back from the
take-off spot.

"Good work, Carstairs!" said Halliday. His thinning white hair blew
erratically about his head. "Your suspicions made that tripod go off
with us two miles away instead of right on top of it."

Brett moistened his lips. He'd had time to begin to feel shaky, now,
but the churning-up of all his emotions somehow made his mind work
feverishly. He said abruptly:

"That tripod didn't explode. There were three things going off. One
atomic explosion and two fizz-offs. Where the bomb exploded, there
couldn't have been anything left behind to make those flames!" Brett
heard himself saying, "The firing-plaza was booby-trapped."

Halliday had opened his mouth to shout another order, but he stopped
short.

"_Wha-a-a-at?_"

"There were three bombs," said Brett shakily, "and only one went off
properly. The two fizz-offs--they didn't make critical mass fast
enough. Their active material vaporized instead of detonating. At a
guess, they were too old to work right."

"Too old--"

Brett made a helpless gesture.

"I know it sounds crazy! But new bombs should blow! And there was a war
on this planet once. The--people died. But they were getting even while
they died. Wouldn't it be reasonable that they should set booby-traps
to kill their enemies if any of them came here?"

The flier, circling two thousand feet up and to windward of the
atom-column, came streaking down toward the Expedition's camp. Halliday
opened his mouth, closed it, and came to a rational decision.

"That will have to be discussed later. You fly? Take the second flier
and scout a camping-place not less than fifty miles up the coast. Pick
a place that should not have any artifacts about. Then come back.
We'll shift camp to avoid possible radiation in case the wind changes.
We don't know whether it will or not, but we have to be out of range in
any case."

He made a pushing motion at Brett and turned back to the work at hand.
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. Very
probably the tripod had been a warning device left by the strange
creatures who had owned the locket and chain. It would be wise to fly
low.

       *       *       *       *       *

Brett flew slowly, slowly enough to estimate distance and examine the
shoreline. It was incredible. There were places where highlands ended
abruptly at the shore. At those places mountainous masses of spray and
foam shot upward where the breakers struck. There was one place where
the beach matched the human exploring-ship's first beach-touching.
There was shining sand and boulders for a full mile inland. The
breakers themselves rolled in like rows of skyscrapers and crashed with
even more catastrophic sounds. On earth, in the South Pacific, winds
could blow completely around the Antarctic continent and build up waves
with seventy-foot crests. But Thalassia was all ocean save for the one
continent and a few dependent, nearby islands. Trade winds blowing
would have had a twenty-thousand-mile reach in which to make these
waves. The gravity here, too, was a little less than on Earth. They
should be monstrous.

So Brett Carstairs flew at five-hundred feet above the ground, a mile
in-shore from the breaker-line, and saw waves some three-hundred feet
high roaring in toward him, and he saw them fling spume in masses
higher than he flew. Sometimes he thought he saw living things in the
water, but he was not sure. Once he did see a stranded sea-monster,
frayed and tattered by corruption, but that was not his present
business.

Just at the distance Halliday had named, he found a running stream
winding down into the ocean, only to be lost in its surf. He followed
it inland for some miles. He saw an adequate place of refuge for the
Expedition. He landed. He made sure. The river was fresh and ran a
hundred yards wide between steep cliffs, yet there was some clear
ground and at least one spot where giant trees almost met above the
water. The Expedition would be undetectable from the air, under the
shelter of an overhanging shelf. Its fliers could be hidden under the
leafy screen. It would do.

It was on the way back that it occurred to Brett that the ship which
would come to pick up the Expedition six months from now would not know
where to look for them. And, it would be highly vulnerable to whatever
had placed that metal tripod on the firing-plaza.

Then he thought to wonder what would happen if a ship landed on a
firing-plaza, or in the ruins of a city. The exploring-ship had not
spotted any cities undestroyed by bombs. But just suppose....

       *       *       *       *       *

He landed with an extremely queasy feeling at the pit of his stomach.
When he saw the pictures of the plaza as it looked now, he was even
less comfortable. The entire group of ancient rocket-launching tunnels
had been nearly two miles in extent. There was a half-mile crater where
an atom bomb had gone off underground. It was a cleanly blasted hollow,
lined with glass. It was nowhere near the spot where the tripod had
been. There were two other incandescent holes, gaping wide and still
pouring out clouds of steam. They were irregularly-shaped and twenty
feet or more across. There had been other bombs underground at those
places, too, but instead of blasting in the millionth of a second
they had gone off slowly, disintegrating in seconds and vaporizing
most of their own material before it could disintegrate. The critical
mass hadn't been achieved quickly enough to blow them. It was exactly
the kind of failure that could be expected of a brilliantly designed
booby-trap that happened not to be sprung from some thousands of
years. The location of these bombs, also, had no relationship to the
position of the tripod.

The blast had not been the tripod, but the bombs buried by the
long-exterminated inhabitants of Thalassia, to destroy any creature
landing on their world after its air was sweet and clean again.

Brett reported his choice of a new camping-place. He found his guesses
about the booby-trapping of the plaza accepted as verified. They were.
But Halliday said querulously:

"What the devil was the tripod?"

"It could have been a beacon," said Brett, "with variations.
The exploring-ship set up a beacon to guide Earth-ships to its
landing-place, so they wouldn't need to repeat all the work it had
done. But suppose--well--people not from Earth wanted to find out if
all the Thalassians were really dead? There was a beacon. Life had been
around, recently. They might have dozens of those tripods at different
places. Anything alive would go up to them and examine them. The eyes
might modify the signal they sent. Anything intelligent and alive would
be reported, either by a change in the tripod's signal, or by the fact
that its signal stopped."

Brett had worked out the notion during his flight to the North and
back. Halliday blinked. He turned and barked at somebody. Emergency
equipment was being loaded into both fliers. He turned back to Brett:

"What set off the booby-trap?"

"The toppling of the tripod, most likely," suggested Brett. "It would
be sending a tight beam straight up. When it fell over it would send
that beam at the ground. High-frequency surges would be induced. They
could set off an electronic trigger that was designed to blow the bombs
when a ship landed nearby. The creatures who were wiped out might want
to kill their enemies whenever they turned up, even after thousands of
years."

Then Halliday said in a flat voice:

"But something did land! It took the human beacon, and set up the
tripod; we saw the rocket-crater where it took off."

"It wasn't big," said Brett. "If the Thalassians were unpleasant
enough, they might scheme so that a scout-ship could land and take off
unharmed, but a passenger-liner bringing colonists would be wiped out."

Halliday nodded sourly.

"A nice thought! If you're right, then that tripod might have been set
up by the creatures the Thalassians set their booby-traps for! And if
Aspasians are beginning to explore this planet again, they'll take us
for Thalassians--they'll try to murder us!"

Brett offered no ideas. He helped load his flier, conferred briefly
with the pilot of the other, and they took off together. He led the way
to the campsite he'd chosen. He left his load and two passengers. The
other flier did the same. They went back. Fifty miles along the coast.
They loaded up. They returned. They were back again. Nobody thought of
relaxing. At the new campsite a biologist was at work on nearby fruits,
and someone was fishing. Fish, too, would be tested for edibility.
Brett flew and flew and flew. One trip after another. The two fliers
ferried supplies in quantity. Equipment was another matter. Once the
route was established, the work grew tedious. Half an hour to load up.
Ten minutes to fly fifty miles. Half an hour to unload.

       *       *       *       *       *

Because there was no night, exhaustion came upon Brett before he
realized it. He had no time to examine the golden locket in detail....

The thought uppermost in his mind was that the Expedition had to
survive. Brett wearily applied his mind to make that practical, but
weariness hit him suddenly. He nearly flubbed a landing on the river,
at last. Halliday snapped at him:

"We can't move everything, Carstairs, but it is urgent that we get all
possible supplies to this new site. You must be more careful!"

Brett said tiredly:

"It might be a good idea to leave behind as much as we can."

"What?" fumed Halliday. "Leave supplies we need?"

Brett yawned uncontrollably.

"Whoever or whatever left the tripod," he said wearily, "will probably
go back when it--they--finds it's stopped reporting. There'll
be a bomb-crater and the fizz-off holes. If we've left a lot of
stuff--houses and all the rest--they may think we simply went to the
firing-plaza to look at their tripod and didn't come back because the
bomb blew. That might be pleasant."

Halliday fumed again.

"You irritate me," he said peevishly. "I should think of such things,
not you! But it is sound thinking. Go get some rest!"

Brett got out of the flier. He stumbled up to the encampment under its
shelf of stone. He heard the sound of chopping. There were cave-mouths
here, but the caves were shallow. Somebody was hacking at the back wall
of one of them. It was a wall, an artificial wall. After eight thousand
years it was not a solid barrier, and it had been hastily constructed.
It was Kent who was hacking at the tiers of stones.

"Looks like a sealed-up cave," he told Brett phlegmatically. "It could
be anything, even a place where Thalassians tried to seal themselves in
with air-renewal apparatus to last out the time the air was poisoned.
It wouldn't work, of course. The air could've been deadly for five or
fifty or five-hundred years, depending on the amount of radioactivity.
But if there's any size to this, it might make a good shelter for us,
and we ought to find some stuff in it."

Brett nodded sleepily. He thought to look at his wrist-chronometer. It
was some thirty-eight hours since the Expedition's landing. He'd worked
steadily for all that length of time.

Kent's pick went through the wall. Nothing in particular happened.
Kent pulled rocks away. Crumbled mortar came with them. He enlarged the
hole in a matter-of-fact fashion. Presently it was of a size to permit
easy entrance. No particular smell emanated from it. The inside air
was cooler. That was all. Kent went and got a hand-light. He cast its
fierce glare inside. He nodded his head, put down the light and went
away.

Brett picked up the light and threw it through the opening. He saw
shining wet walls, and stalactites and stalagmites. There was an
artificial curved ramp leading away somewhere between a pair of
limestone cave-formations. There was a curious small heap on the
artificially flattened floor. He focused the light on it.

Bones. They looked human. They were cemented to the floor by an
eons-old layer of glistening, almost-transparent mineral.

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._" He should have been excited, but somehow
he wasn't. Then he realized why.

       *       *       *       *       *

The objects so neatly arranged in rows were not machines. They had
been, but they weren't any longer. They were heaps of rust. Swollen,
nodular, distorted heaps of oxide of iron and copper and--yes--even
aluminum. They were old! They were mineralized. But they had been
mineralized after they had been destroyed.

He heard voices. Kent was bringing the rest of the Expedition inside.
Lights flickered and flashed. He heard shoutings. Men crowded past the
compartment he stared at, exclaimed exultantly, and went on. Voices
echoed eerily. The mood of the Expedition was the excited rejoining
of children with a newly discovered playground. But what they were
exploring was a tomb. Here despairing six-fingered creatures had walled
themselves in from the light and air of their own world to try to
outlive its poisoning. They had expected perhaps a thousand years of
entombment. But it was forever.

Brett was too tired for any emotional reaction. He found himself
mumbling:

"They forgot that there's always some water in caves. Water makes them.
And water seeping down would be radioactive. So they died."

He made his way back toward the opening Kent had made. He went to the
outer cave, where there were sleeping-bags. Halliday met him. 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. It
seemed to him that around him as he slept there were excited cries and
much scurrying-about. The members of the Expedition were scientists
come to examine a dead civilization. It had seemed that they would have
nothing to examine and would soon be dead themselves. Now they had work
to do, even in hiding. They rejoiced.

But some time during his slumber, Brett dreamed. In his dream he saw
the girl of the impossible hand-made locket. He did not know where it
was, but she looked at him, and her eyes grew wide and horrified. She
screamed, and figures came running from somewhere. At sight of Brett
they howled with fury and drew strange weapons and came rushing to kill
him.



                                  III

    On the hemisphere facing Aspasia, Thalassia's twin planet, there is
    but one rocky island not constantly swept by the ocean's giant
    swells. Evidences of former occupation exist here, but the island
    has been wave-swept by enormously violent storms, and only
    excavations for what may have been an observatory and military base
    remain.--_Astrographic Survey Publication 11297. Appendix to Space
    Pilot Vol. 460, Sector XXXIV, p. 71._

The contents of the cave were of interest to the biologist, the
archaeologists, the camera specialist, the specimen-preservation member
of the Expedition's staff, the palaeontologist, the historian, to
Halliday, Belmont, Janney and everyone else but Brett. It would have
been of interest to him too, if it had happened that the cave was dry.
But there was no single metal object not corroded out of all imaginable
resemblance to its original form. The relatively few ceramic remains
he could identify as having been made by injection-molding and fired
within their molds. That meant a remarkably high state of civilization.
But there was no object suitable for his examination as a technological
object. The restoration specialist began the extremely tedious process
of re-displacement on them. With suitable precautions, a heap of
rust can electrolytically be restored to its original condition of
solidity and form--if the rust has not been disturbed. But it is an
excruciatingly slow affair.

Brett had no proper function in the cavern underground.

He helped set up a sky-scanner outside. It would detect a
repulsor-field meaning a human ship maneuvering in atmosphere. He
helped set up an automatic signalling device to be triggered by
the detection of such a field. It would instantly transmit to the
Earth-ship a warning of danger and the need for caution, and then
shut off. If any space vessel came into Thalassia's atmosphere using
an Earth-type drive, this combination of instruments would warn both
ship and Expedition. After due assurance that each was what it claimed
to be, they could get together, the Expedition could re-embark, and
everybody could get the hell away from Thalassia. Further action would
then be taken by the Earth government. This was Halliday's decision,
and it was reasonable enough.

But after this prosaic matter was settled, Brett fidgeted. The other
members of the Expedition were happy. The cave had been a sealed-in
life-lock, in which Thalassians had hoped to survive their planet's
doom. They succeeded only in leaving innumerable objects and items
informative to the Earth scientists. There were the skeletons of
more than three hundred of the six-fingered, six-toed bipeds for
study. Either their air-renewers had failed them, or radioactivity
came down to the cave in the ground-water. But the cave was of great
extent. It went deep into the hill-side for more than half a mile,
and many possible extensions had been sealed off, at that. All its
new occupants, save Brett, exulted over the scientific material to be
worked with. He brooded.

Generators came from the first campsite, powerlines ran into the cave,
and the due examination of the ancient civilization of Thalassia
began, though the investigators were in hiding even as they worked.
Other city-sites or possible unbombed settlements would have been
ruled out anyhow, now, with knowledge of the Thalassian tendency
toward booby-traps. But this site seemed safe enough. The creatures
who occupied this expected to live, unlike those at the firing plaza.
But as a general thing, Thalassian sites would have to be regarded
with suspicion. The ancient dead had made no distinction in their
enmity for the enemies who had destroyed them, and possible innocent
explorers, like man.

       *       *       *       *       *

The happy labor of the Expedition went on and Brett, brooding unhappily
over the locket, explored the cave again. Naturally. He checked the
re-displacement boxes, set up around the artifacts he could tell
something about in the course of several months of restoration. He
looked at the skeletons. Halliday was zestfully at work on a modeled
restoration of a Thalassian as he looked in life, based on the
measurements of a skull. As Halliday modeled it, the Thalassian looked
remarkably human.

"But," said Brett, "aren't you inclined to model the creature rather
too much in our own image?"

Halliday was the Expedition's sculptor as well as its head. He frowned.

"You are very annoying, Carstairs!" he said dourly. "They
were humanoid. Save for a rather prognathous jaw and this
difference--here--in the occiput, this could be a human skull! Oh, the
sutures are different, too, but--"

Then he fumed.

"You have made me realize that there is no reason for my having assumed
a human ear-shape," he snapped. "You irritate me! Go somewhere! Do
something! You disagree with me too often, and too often I suspect that
you are right! Contrive some project of your own, and let me make my
own mistakes!"

Brett said slowly, because he had thought something out very carefully
but still wasn't confident of his reasoning:

"I'd like to take a look at Aspasia.... Not by rocket," he added
painstakingly. "That would be looking for trouble! But the pilot
book says there's one island on the other hemisphere. I'd like to
see if there's another tripod set up on that. If I could record its
signal where nobody's been near it, we might be able to forge it for
the firing plaza site. Simply to avoid attracting--ah--unfavorable
attention."

"I authorize that," Halliday said, "but I make one stipulation. You
will arrange to detect radar on your flier, and if a radar does play on
you, you will make sure you do not lead any--ah--creatures back here to
us."

Brett agreed, wryly. He was a little bit relieved. But he asked:

"Are you worried, too, that whoever took the beacon at the firing plaza
might want to take a human spaceship to examine in the same way? To
study it and perhaps duplicate it in quantity?"

Halliday sputtered.

"Of course I'm worried!" he said angrily. "If I could prevent a ship
from coming here to pick us up I would--and remain here for always! It
would be my duty! If there is an intelligent race which does not know
of humanity's existence, we do not want it to learn from a shattered
spaceship! We would not want them to know about our interstellar drive!
Certainly not unless humanity was aware that they had learned! But you,
Carstairs, annoy me by thinking of the things that would keep me awake
nights--if there were such things as nights, here!"

Brett nodded thoughtfully. Something had to be done to find out the
actual extent of the danger. Brett had ideas of less than total
fatality, but he needed to make sure.

       *       *       *       *       *

He took three twenty-four-hour periods to get ready for the journey
he was to make. The flier, of course, could stay aloft almost
indefinitely. With the slightly lesser gravity of Thalassia, it could
carry a heavier load, too.

He made one low-level flight back to the original camp. The
geiger-counter reading of radiation was a bare two points above normal
for this world. He got some special equipment--taking care to leave
the camp looking as if its owners had simply walked over to the
firing-plaza and had not come back--and worked. Next he consulted
Janney about probable meteorological conditions.

Then he took off and flew a thousand miles along the coastline in what
would be the radar-shadow of the seacoast waves. After that he struck
out across the ocean. The flier was a standard Earth-type utility job,
capable of speeds up to six-hundred miles an hour, but cruising under
three-hundred. For work on the continent of Chios, Brett would not have
worried about fuel. But according to the exploration-ship report, he
had a long, long journey before him.

He flew and flew and flew. It was very tedious, and it did not help
that he was staking his life on a guess he was by no means sure about.
He watched the flier on automatic control for four hours running. It
did not change course by the fraction of a degree, nor change altitude
by as much as fifty feet. In the end he went uneasily to sleep.

When he woke, the look of things had changed. 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. And the ocean below him had become an astonishing hue which
was still blue, but verged upon purple.

These, though, were items he noticed later.

He saw Aspasia, already above the horizon.

It was monstrous in size. It was nearly four times the diameter of the
Moon as seen from Earth, and it filled sixteen times as much of the
sky. It covered a larger space than Brett's fist held before him.
It was the size of a ship's vision-port looked at five feet away.
It seemed to crowd the heavens. It seemed plunging terribly toward
Thalassia. It was like a gigantic missile falling. It was ominous ...
menacing ... grim and terrifying and horrible to look at, hanging so
close and seeming always about to crush the plane above which Brett's
small flier flew.

He stared at it for a long time before he could be quite reasonable
about it. If he'd watched it rising as the flier made its way around
Thalassia's curve--gigantic even then, filling a quarter of a quadrant
of the world's edge--its present appearance might have been less of a
shock. But he had slept until it was a fourth of the way up toward the
zenith.

He saw it as sandy-colored, with mottled patches which he knew were
deserts and precipitous mountain ranges. There were tiny blue pittings
here and there--many of them. They would be the enormous blue-glass
lakes the exploring-ship had sighted. These were believed to be the
sites of former cities, melted to glassy liquid by fusion-bombs from
Thalassia in the long-ago atomic war. They were solidified now, and
blue. Brett saw some areas which might be merely semi-arid plains. And
there were a few noticeable veinings which had olive-colored borders.
They were Aspasia's few and narrow seas. They were mere channels.

       *       *       *       *       *

Seen with the naked eye, Thalassia's sere and battered sister-planet
seemed very suitably named. It looked as the courtesan Aspasia might
have looked when old and with all her beauty gone: made grotesque by
the bedizenings which once would have seemed so charming.

Brett Carstairs stared up at the world whose inhabitants had wiped
out the race native to this and had in turn--so it appeared--been
exterminated by the dying Thalassians as their cities became
charnel-houses and their continent a tomb.

As he stared, something said "_Beep!_" in the flier's cabin. He jumped,
and stared at the dial of his recently-contrived radar-detector. The
needle flickered wildly, but settled nowhere at all. That single
startled chirp had been a radar-impulse touching the flier. Things did
not look good.

The flier went on and on over the wine-purple sea. Brett scanned the
ocean. A monstrous swell, far away, broke in a smother of white foam.
Some sub-sea mountain almost reached the surface. The giant ocean waves
broke upon it, as they do on shallows and on fishing-banks on Earth.
Here there was half a square mile of white.

The white was assurance that the flier was on course, but the
radar-chirp was even more important. It was ominous because it was
solitary, though only a palaeotechnologist would have realized it.
Radar is an ancient device, of course. Modern radar brings back to a
spaceship an astonishing amount of detailed information. To Brett's
knowledge, not since the last war on Earth had any radar shut itself
off when it contacted an object. Then it was a spotting device which
did not betray its position to the object it spotted.

Brett felt those unhappy cold prickles which are the signs of danger
realized. Any rational man feels them. Only a resolute man grows angry
and becomes reckless because he is ashamed of being apprehensive.

Brett did.

He scowled and placed a reproduction of an ancient weapon handy. He had
not the materials for a modern blaster, of course. But he'd gone back
to the first camp and taken a drum of rocket-fuel, and labored at the
improvisation of an antique open-breech gun. He'd made plastic shells
for it. The heavy rocket-fuel would give mass to the missiles. He'd
made what used to be called a bazooka. He drove the flier on.

The tip of an island rose above the horizon. It rose and grew with an
exceeding slowness. It was a group of rocky needles rising from the
sea. It was the one island in a hemisphere of ocean. The outer needles
of rock were monstrous monoliths against which the giant sea-swells
crashed. There were single columns, hundreds of yards thick and
hundreds of yards high, about and over which the spume flew wildly.
There were surging maelstroms among those outer rocks. Wild swirlings,
incredible violence, unpredictable floods raged in the channels between
them. Had this been on Earth--but there were no such violent waves on
Earth--the air about the island would have been a cloud of sea-birds.
But no life showed here. Naturally!

The island appeared very close, and Brett's head jerked as he heard a
snapping sound. There was a hole in the flier's cabin above his head.
There were streaks of white vapor shooting on before him. There were
more snappings, unspeakably venomous.

His hands broke the paralysis of shock. 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.

There were flickering sparks as it dived furiously after him. Streaks
of vapor shot toward him with amazing speed, and he felt the blank
astonishment of somebody sent backward in time. He'd been almost
ashamed to make so primitive a weapon as a bazooka. But the rocket
was shooting a machine-gun at him, with tracer-bullets to help in
marksmanship.

Brett made his dive steeper. The rocket pulled out, feeling sure he
was headed for a crash. It circled vengefully overhead. Its wings were
small. It could not fly except at high speed.

Brett landed. The splashing was satisfyingly violent, but it was
actually a splendid landing in the very trough between two monstrous
seas a hundred yards tall. It seemed that he had wrecked his flier in
a moving, glassy-walled canyon of surging solidity. To the rocket, it
should seem a certainty.

Brett waited to see what the rocket would do.

It circled and circled and circled. It needed information about
creatures like Brett. If there was any craft that could land and
salvage Brett's flier, they should risk anything to learn something of
his race and kind.

But nothing happened. The rocket dived back toward the island. It sank
low and vanished....

       *       *       *       *       *

Brett waited. His mouth was dry as he made fresh plans. He had been
detected bumbling steadily across the ocean at a stodgy three-hundred
miles an hour. He had made no maneuvers of evasion when the rocket
dived on him from overhead, and the whole impression was of something
which could not maneuver, in charge of someone without skill. If they
could come after him they wouldn't expect resourcefulness. He could
take off at will, and straight up. He could streak at twice the speed
they knew of along between the rolling swells. He could fly like a gull
between the wave-crests, unreachable by missile weapons and probably
even more modern ones. He had a good chance to get away if only the
occupants of the island did not have many small fliers capable of
hunting him at higher speed and with greater agility than he could
summon.

Floating with seeming sogginess on the water, the flier rose and rose
and rose. It reached a wave-crest, and Brett saw the island again. It
loomed high, now. He saw large sentinel-columns of stone nearer than
the island's main mass. He saw the purplish seas go surging in between
those columns, tilting up and foaming terribly about them, but with a
tumult of water in the center remaining unbroken until farther on.

The wave-crest passed, and the flier descended into the trough again.
There was an enormously long wait before he was lifted up once more. He
took a bearing then.

Again in the trough he used the flier's drive to move him so his craft
would be in a position to be tossed chiplike between the monstrous
obstacles. When the island was hidden again, he used the drive a second
time ... a third.

When the topmost peak of the island remained in sight between the
waves' troughs, Brett let the flier drift aimlessly. It was carried
toward the island by the swells and by the wind. He heard the roaring
of the surf--such surf as only remote islands near Antarctica
experience back at home. The booming became thunderous. It became
intolerable. It became a cannonade of sound that human ears could not
endure. And therefore it dulled because of its deafening volume.

The rocky sentinels loomed high. They were a little less than a mile
apart, but the surf and acres of foam about their bases made the gap
seem narrow indeed. The flier bobbed like a bit of flotsam on waves
as high as skyscrapers and whose troughs were deep as minor canyons.
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. Brett watched. There were creatures here, and they would want to
know what queer sort of being disputed the possession of Thalassia with
them....

       *       *       *       *       *

He saw a movement among the rocks. Specks stirred, climbing swiftly
down toward him. They seemed to slide down fastened cords from one
shelf of stone to another. They were coming to try to keep the flier
from shattering before they could examine it.

Brett got his primitive weapon ready. The efforts of the creatures
would naturally be improvisations. 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.

The current was very slow, here. The surgings of the water were less.
The flier floated under an overhang so close that Brett feared it
would be crushed. But then he came out. There was flat stone ahead,
wave-washed by trivial swells. The figures he had seen were almost at
it. One did reach it and ran frantically in knee-deep water to try to
see clearly inside the flier and observe its pilot.

Brett caught his breath. He did not believe it as he stared into
the face of a girl to all appearances human. She wore close-fitting
garments of what looked like yellow silk, with brief drapings that
scarcely concealed the humanness of her form.

She looked at him and her eyes widened with purest horror. Her
expression was that of one who regards a frightful monster. She
screamed--though Brett's still-numbed ears heard it as a thin,
high-pitched cry--and she thrust back from the flier she had seemed so
anxious to reach. Other figures, also human in appearance, came running
as they dropped down cords from the cliff.

[Illustration: The girl shrank back in horror and screamed.]

At sight of Brett they howled with fury. They plunged toward him,
dragging out strange weapons with which to destroy him.

Brett shot up from the heaving water at full acceleration, emergency
lift, reckless of the fuel cost and with his face dead-white and dazed.

He had a picture of that girl in his pocket....



                                  IV

    The arid and utterly monotonous desolation of Aspasia seems to
    negate at once any idea of surviving inhabitants, though the
    possibility cannot be entirely ruled out. The _Franklin_ cruised
    over all probable areas without making contact with intelligent
    life-forms. Yet civilization did exist here. Highways still in
    good repair exist. It seems likely, however, that its former
    culture was developed in oases in its deserts, in concentrated
    population-centers. The previously mentioned lakes of blue glass
    may be considered to cover the sites of such oases, melted down by
    fusion-bombs from Thalassia....

    After this disaster it would be expected that any survivors would
    live only in caves or other inconspicuous places, and would hand
    down legends of destruction coming from the sky. The _Franklin_,
    indeed, could have been hidden from....--_Astrographic Bureau
    Publication 11297, Appendix to Space Pilot Vol. 460, Sector XXXIV,
    p. 61._

Brett descended from a rainstorm to the small river before the
camp-cave. He'd been in the cloudbank for a period that had no
particular meaning because there was never any real night on Thalassia,
and he descended in a downpour that was like the heavens opening,
except that he'd been up where it started.

He got the flier under the overhanging trees a mile downstream from the
cave, lifted it to the riverbank, tied it securely and walked through
the more-than-tropical downpour to where the camp had been set up.

Kent peered at him phlegmatically over a barricade of stones. He put
away a heat-gun.

"Oh," he said calmly. "It's you. Halliday was talking about you
yesterday."

Brett rummaged for dry clothing. He toweled and shifted to other
garments. He asked over his shoulder:

"Everything all right?"

"This cave was booby-trapped too," said Kent. "We should have been
blown to hell when I broke down that stone wall." He paused and added.
"We weren't."

"Odd," said Brett, with irony. "Halliday's in the cave?"

He was. 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.

Here there was exactly that atmosphere. The doubtless irregular
original cave-system had been worked over by the Thalassians who tried
to make it a refuge for the ages. The walls and ceilings were sound.
The passageways were neatly chiseled. The larger chambers were cleared
of lime-formations and the walls made smooth. The debris from such
workings had been used for fills. It was startling to find a perfect
small city underground. Hundreds of human beings could have lived here.
There were open spaces hundreds of feet across. There were halls with
sixty-foot ceilings. There were even small cubicles as if for families.
With bright lights and ample space and the remains of ancient
occupation right at hand, this was close to an archaeologist's dream of
paradise.

But without any inconsistency at all, it was also a charnel-house.
The air was sweet and clean, now, but manlike creatures had died by
hundreds when the radioactive poison reached them even here. Seeping,
lime-burdened water oozed everywhere. The smooth flat floors were
covered by a glistening incrustation with minor ripples frozen upon it.
The walls reflected light like glass. And nothing that had been part
of the civilization of Thalassia remained intact. There were mounds
on the floors, now covered with the glassy calcium-carbonate coating,
or completely impregnated with it. Sometimes brightly-glazed bones
appeared among these mounds. Sometimes there were the brightly-colored,
rusted tints of metal objects long since vanished. Sometimes there was
no clue at all to what the vanished objects had been.

       *       *       *       *       *

Halliday was seated by a desk which once had been packing-cases. He
had half a dozen ceramic objects on the desk, used as paper-weights
against air-currents which did not exist underground. He was writing
exuberantly when Brett came in.

Halliday beamed.

"Ah, Carstairs!" he said happily. "You are our lucky member! We do
our work under absolutely perfect conditions--and it is your doing,
even if it was an accident. There are accident-prone individuals,
and they are Jonahs on an expedition like this. But you are a
favorable-coincidence-prone! I congratulate you!"

Brett sat down on a box which served well enough as a seat.

"I hear this cave was booby-trapped too."

"Yes," agreed Halliday blandly. "We smelled smoke. It was disturbing.
We traced it, and there was a bomb made ready to bring down the
cave about our ears. But the chemical explosive intended to bring
the priming-bomb slugs to critical mass had deteriorated. Unstable
compounds, you know. It merely smouldered, instead of blowing us up.
The Thalassians were not a forgiving type! They meant that if they
couldn't live on this planet, nobody else should!"

Brett said grimly:

"The Aspasians aren't a forgiving type either. I think it's certain
they are Aspasians. I found a base on the other side of the world. It
would be logical for them to make a base there. Nobody else would."

Halliday's eyebrows almost met in the center of his forehead. "No! What
are they like?"

"Technology about late twentieth-century, apparently," said Brett. "But
I'm not sure. They've rockets, chemical explosives, missile weapons,
synthetic fabrics and know electronics fairly well. They have good
radars. Their females have high social standing, a love of adventure
and take risks like the men."

"Evidently the base was not occupied," said Halliday briskly. "In any
case, we have our work--and plenty to work with! This was really an
incredible find, Carstairs! I've completed the restoration of a skull,
by the way, to the way the Thalassians must have looked in life. I'll
show you."

He swung about to a shelf behind him and lifted down what appeared to
be a portrait bust. He put it proudly on his desk.

"They had six fingers," he observed zestfully, "and were quite stocky
of build. But they were bipeds, a little shorter than we are, they wore
clothing...."

Brett looked. He said wryly:

"You've made the ears pointed. They were like ours. And prognathous jaw
or no prognathous jaw, we'd pass for them."

"How do you know?" demanded Halliday.

"An Aspasian girl saw me," said Brett unhappily. "And she screamed."

He carefully related the affair of the island. Halliday protested:

"But the exploring-ship saw no sign of life on Aspasia!"

"Maybe they hid," said Brett tiredly. "Maybe they thought the
_Franklin_ was a Thalassian ship, built by some who'd managed to live
through, as they did. 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. I suspect they are desperate and ready to fight to the last
among them to kill every one of us. They'll hunt us as we'd hunt the
devil--which is what they think we are!"

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a shouting at the entrance to the cave. It was Kent's voice.
Among the echoes, the words were indistinct, but Brett thought he might
have called something about a rocket. He shouted again. Halliday got up
and walked briskly toward the sound.

The floor of the cave bounced violently. The lights went out. There was
a crash like the end of the world, which lasted for a long half-minute.
In the cave, things fell. Walls cracked. Sections of roof plunged down
with thunderous impacts.

Then Kent's voice in the abysmal blackness.

"I heard a rocket-blast in the rain. I yelled. Then the bomb went off."
His voice, usually toneless, quavered a little. Then he got it under
control. "It was downstream, about where we keep the fliers, around the
curve in the riverbank. Lucky there is high ground between. But I saw
the light. Atom bomb." Then he added calmly, "The shelf of rock fell
down. We're buried in here."

Halliday rose to the emergency in his own manner.

"Somebody bring hand-lights and a counter," he snapped. "See if
anyone's hurt!" Then he said irritably. "If they're Aspasians--they
used cobalt bombs once. I hope they haven't used one now!"

But they had. Hand-lights came from the place where the supplies were
piled. The spreading shelf outside the camp, which had sheltered the
cave-entrance like a remarkably deep portico, had cracked from the
ground-shock and its outer edge tilted down into the water of the
river. There was a rill which ran underneath it from its upper edge,
and ran out again down below. A geiger counter showed radioactivity.
Not much yet, but some screens between the counter and the water
identified the radioactive material. Cobalt-60.

Halliday's voice cracked with exasperation. A cobalt-based bomb had
been dropped within a mile of the cave-entrance. Obviously, Brett's
idea of hiding in a storm-cloud hadn't been good enough. When he
landed, a bomb dropped. It indicated much better than twentieth-century
technique. It even looked as if it hadn't been intended to shoot him
down when he approached the island, but only to scare him back to his
base. Yes, they'd been pleased when he got away. This was the result.

"We seal up the cave-entrance," snapped Halliday angrily. "We can't
go outside. But there is air here which will not be immediately
contaminated. We will think it over."

Brett helped shovel wet earth to fill the solitary entrance to the
cavern with an airtight plug. He raged to himself at the disaster he'd
brought on the expedition. He'd been sure that he'd evaded all possible
trailing. There had been no radar! Could they have trailed him with
infra-red? That was late twentieth-century, too. There was no way to
shake that sort of trailing....

The Expedition was doomed. Much worse, in six months a ship would come
from Earth for its members. That ship would not expect attack. It would
be an easy target for the Aspasians. They'd smash the Earth-ship,
study it, and make a fleet of interstellar ships themselves. Having
fought one interplanetary war, they would never risk war against a
warned adversary. They'd strike at Earth with absolute ruthlessness and
ferocity....

       *       *       *       *       *

When there was a completely adequate seal filling the cave-entrance,
Brett reflected with a sort of sickish cynicism that history assuredly
repeated itself upon Thalassia. Eight thousand years ago, humanoid
creatures had sealed themselves in this same cavern, hopelessly hoping
to secure life for their descendants. They'd failed, and now a dozen
humans had sealed themselves in, making the same foredoomed gesture.

He leaned against a passage-wall. That girl would rejoice fiercely if
she knew.

Outside this sealed cave the rain poured down, washing the deadly
radioactives of this last bomb down into the earth itself. Already,
to take two breaths above-ground was to die. But presently deadly
ground-water would come down to this ancient shelter and this cave
would again become a lethal chamber.

After a little, Brett went heavily to the futile conference Halliday
was holding. The cave-lights were still out, and only hand-lights
illuminated the scene. Halliday gesticulated, his thinning white hair
stirring as he moved.

"Where's your floor-plan, Morton?" he cried angrily. "The floor-plan
of the entire cavern! You should have brought it! This is irritating
enough, without members of the Expedition acting like helpless
schoolgirls! Go get it! Janney! What is the weather outside?" He raised
his hand peevishly. "I know it is raining! What is the wind-direction
and speed?"

Janney said heavily:

"The wind's onshore, naturally! I told you yesterday that a tradewind
blows! Of course in a rainstorm it loses force. It probably blows
fifteen miles an hour, with gusts up to thirty or more."

Halliday clapped his hands sharply:

"Understand, everyone! We cannot stay here. We cannot go out of the
ordinary exit. We have to find a new exit, or make one. I believe the
rock-strata slant down toward the coast. Am I right, Simpson? Yes! It
is probable that some of the sealed-off branches of this cave-system
may reach the surface--or near it--upwind of the bomb-crater! They
would have been sealed off because they communicated with the air. The
seals are to be broken and radioactivity checked in the air coming
in...."

Kent's voice, phlegmatic as always:

"Make up packs to carry?"

"Naturally!" snapped Halliday. "This is a most irritating occurrence!
We had a perfect site for examination with all conveniences! Now it
must be abandoned and it will not be possible to examine it again for
years! Everyone should carry his written notes, but artifacts will have
to be left behind for food. It is infuriating!"

He fumed, but Brett found himself admiring Halliday.

       *       *       *       *       *

The dark and echoing caverns resounded to strange noises, after that.
The strangeness was largely due to the blackness which is not normal
anywhere on Thalassia. Men examined carefully-drawn maps, and found
sealing-off walls which blocked extensions of the cave-system. All
limestone caverns are somewhat similar. One passage might have been
blocked off because of a pothole leading to the surface, another
because of an underground stream which would bring radioactivity in its
waters. The Geiger counters gave grim news as one after another of the
seals were broken.

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.

It was. Air coming in the pierced walls that closed off unknown winding
passages showed an intensity of radiation that made Belmont whistle
softly.

"Right now," he told Brett, "the air outside is just about as
breathable as so much straight chlorine. It wouldn't be as painful to
the lungs, but the results would be the same."

Brett helped close up another small opening with mud. Twelve men, from
Earth and hundreds of lightyears from home, sealed in a cave that had
been a tomb for eight thousand years. Unknown stars made speckles of
light in the thin blue sky above the rain-clouds, at one place a nearby
star-cluster made a mottled illumination brighter than the local sun.
They were on a planet of water with but a single continent, and that
was empty of moving life. There was life only in that hopeless cavern
underground, and high in the air overhead, hovering until more hovering
things should come to drop more death.

Beyond the atmosphere there was nothing at all. From a sufficient
distance the globe which was Thalassia could be seen to be distorted,
bulging noticeably toward its similarly deformed twin-world Aspasia,
only a quarter-million miles away. They revolved about each other in
implacable enmity, turning always the same faces toward each other.

A long, long way away there was the yellow sun Elektra, spinning in
space, less bright than Sol but nearly as large. Nearer, and rolling
sullenly about its primary was the red-dwarf satellite-star Rubra.
The twin worlds followed it perpetually in its orbit in the Trojan
position. From space the dark carbon-clouds could be seen upon its
surface, forming in perpetual storms through which the fiery red of
hell-flame could be seen. Further out were more planets, Lucifer and
Titan and Argos, giant gas-worlds where life had never been. And
spinning brilliantly in the glare of Elektra, close in toward it,
blazed the little planet Melissa on its erratically inclined orbit,
circling Elektra in a year of less than a dozen weeks.

But there was not quite a sameness and a staleness in all the
happenings of empty space. Where the twin planets spun about each other
there was motion. It was tiny by comparison with the vastness all
about. 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. Plants
    which depended upon insects for fertilization have become extinct.
    Berry-bearing and fruit-bearing trees no longer compete for the
    carrying of their seeds by offering fragrance or taste. There are
    no birds. Even species which formerly found it advantageous to grow
    thorns for the discouragement of herbivorous animals no longer find
    the practice serviceable.... The flowers have lost their scent and
    the fruit its savor and even the thorns their sharpness, because
    there are no animals to take notice....--_Astrographic Bureau
    Publication 11297, Appendix to Space Pilot Vol. 460, Sector XXXIV,
    p. 75._

The sound of the surf gave them hope--that and the Geiger counter
readings. They climbed and crawled and wormed their way through
channels and around glistening-wet bulges of stone. They had ropes
around their waists like mountain-climbers, so that no one would fall
alone into the sometimes gaping depths they encountered.

Once Brett, in the lead, crawled upon his belly for more than a hundred
feet with rock touching his back all the way. He could not have done it
but for the assurance of the rope that he could be pulled back. Once
they had to use a small charge of explosive to break down a mass of
calcite which barred the way. They spent hours in the journey. But they
went on because to stop or turn backward was to die. And for the last
half-hour they did have the encouragement of the thunderous sound of
surf.

Then they came out quite undramatically from a hole with many brushwood
sticks in it, in the space between the roots of a giant tree. They
heard the surf clearly, then. They had crawled more than five miles
underground, and they were almost at the edge of the beach when they
reached the open air.

The jungle which here crowded the beach line was saturated, but the
rain had stopped. They moved in the direction that by convention was
called south. A magnetic compass pointed somewhere, and steadily,
but it bore no relationship to any astronomical phenomenon and they
could not take it seriously. When they moved south, they moved along
the shoreline toward their first camp and the shattered Firing Plaza
Number One. It was not an especially sensible direction to choose, but
they happened to have come out on that side of the river which ran
before their late cavern. They needed to get away from there. It was
doubtful whether it would be wise to wade a stream that ran through
cobalt-contaminated ground.

"If I read our enemies right, now," said Brett grimly to Halliday,
"after underestimating them before, they'll blast all the area around
my landing-place as soon as they can get bombs here. But it's been a
long time already."

Then he considered, and said more grimly still:

"I imagine that I had a rocket with a bomb on board, trailing me all
the time--all the way back from the island. The rocket changed from
time to time, but always there was a bomb ready. Yet after I did land,
the pilot had to putter around in the rainstorm a while before he could
find out just where to drop the bomb from, to have it land just right
and still have him out of the blast. If they went to all that trouble
to track me home, they'll really go to town on the place I landed!
Right?"

Halliday was hiking, with all the others after him. 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. More heat. If they want maximum spread of their radioactives,
they'll wait for that. They ought to think us pretty well smashed."

"We will move slanting inland," said Halliday, irritably. "There are
mountains. There could be updrafts on the slopes to carry even atomic
fall-outs over our heads."

       *       *       *       *       *

Brett said no more. They toiled through the forest. There were places
where the underbrush was thick, and they moved at a snail's pace or
worse. But there were other places where gigantic solemn treetrunks
rose from shadows so deep that there was heavy twilight and no
undergrowth at all. The rain had ended so recently that all trees still
dripped. But there was one variety of tree which seemed somehow to
gather up water in its broad leaves as if they were cups, and then let
it all go at once. Brett never knew the mechanism, but there were times
when water plunged down in coherent masses of gallons. When such a mass
of water hit a man, it could knock him down. Sometimes it did. At all
times the ground in such shadowed places was practically mud, which
clung to their feet and made walking heavy.

Brett found Kent struggling along beside him, phlegmatic as always.
Brett said dispassionately:

"If they land and try to track us down on foot they'd have an easy job
of it. Look at the trail we're leaving! And if they had dogs, we'd be
finished! They'd find us!"

Kent's features lighted up. Brett had never seen him so animated before.

"Dogs," said Kent pleasedly, "that's something I know something about!
Look here. 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. You see?
He's to run ahead and bring the hunted creature to bay, and dance about
him, barking, until the man comes up and kills the beast. Where you
find open country you find dogs. Deserts, too! The Arabs used to have
wonderful dogs! So the creatures on Aspasia would need dogs before they
got civilized, and they'd keep them after. We did!"

Brett went through a pool of water. Everybody had to wade through that
pool.

"Suppose the Aspasians run faster than their--ah--dogs?" he asked
drily, though he knew better. He still was not able to believe that the
girl he'd seen on the island, and whose picture was in his pocket, was
an Aspasian. The evidence was past questioning, but he couldn't accept
it. "Suppose they could run as fast as their prey?"

"Then they'd never get civilized," said Kent promptly, beaming.
"Nobody gets civilized unless he gains by it. Unless he needs to! If
our ancestors had been able to run down the creatures they hunted,
they'd never have bothered with more than clubs. We'd be trotting after
rabbits back on Earth, you and I, instead of being here. Eh?"

"I never thought--" Brett stopped.

       *       *       *       *       *

The ground quivered underfoot. A distinct, unsettled quivering. A tree
branch snapped somewhere and came crashing to the ground. The marching
party of twelve men stopped and listened. Long seconds later the sound
came. It was a crashing, horrific roar. The leaves quivered overhead
and a shower of water fell down from among the boughs.

"A bomb," acknowledged Halliday, looking up from his wrist-chronometer.
"But well away." He added firmly, "A solid-ground burst. They will
bracket their first bomb-crater on all sides. Then they'll drench the
area with radioactives from sea-water. We will push on."

He led on. Brett trudged after him. Half an hour later there was
another bomb. The delay was almost proof that Halliday had been right
about the solid-ground aspect. A bomb to be aimed for a particular spot
had to wait for the radiation from a previous bomb to clear away from
where it had to be to drop another.

Four times, as they struggled through the forest, they heard the
detonations. If some Thalassian hideaway had brought survivors through
the years of poisoned atmosphere, and if descendants of its original
occupants had at long last come out to the light of day, why, that
bombing should end any chance of further emergencies. If in addition
an area miles wide and deep was made uninhabitable by spray--then all
danger of the return of life to Thalassia at that place would become
unthinkable.

The men marched on. Hours passed. They began to lag and stumble when
they reached the foothills inland. There Halliday allowed a halt. They
had come nearly fifteen miles from the place where the cave-branch
ended. They were exhausted.

Brett regarded the packs each man had made up for himself. There were
oddities. Belmont carried four Geiger counters and their power-packs.
The packs were negligible in weight, but the utility of Geiger counters
to fugitives on Chios was debatable. Janney had his thermometers and
his barograph--Brett saw him winding it--besides a heavy notebook and
his food. Another pack included two cameras and an absurd load of film.
There was a neat assortment of insulated wire strapped to another
pack still, and a tiny pick and whisk for uncovering archaeological
specimens. 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.

       *       *       *       *       *

After a time, Brett moved up to where Halliday stretched wearily on the
ground. Halliday was probably the oldest man of the dozen, but he had
forced the pace until even the younger men were weary.

"I still feel disgraced," said Brett, "but I wanted to ask you
something."

Halliday said sharply, "I authorized your journey to the island, and I
told you that I considered the manner of your return quite sound. If
there was a mistake--and there was--I share in it. But what do you want
to ask?"

Brett hesitated, and shrugged.

"I suppose it is, whither are we drifting? We've got six months to
wait before a ship comes for us. When it comes, it will probably be
attacked, and we've no way to warn it. We haven't more than a ghost of
a chance of living six months, for that matter. I'd just like to know
if you have any plans for our survival and ultimate rescue."

Halliday sputtered. Then he said, in irritation, "Carstairs, there is
a time to act and a time to plan! At the moment, we need to act simply
to gain time to plan! I do have plans for survival for the moment.
I do not have plans as yet for contact with the rescue-ship when it
comes. But I have months in which to think that out! I shall deal with
it in due order of importance. The essential thing at this moment is
to get out of the area those damned Aspasians are going to drench with
sea-spray! We have, to be precise, to get them off our tails so we can
take measures for the future!"

Brett smiled warmly at the older man. Halliday was bluffing, but it was
a good bluff. Brett liked it. He said, "I was just talking to Kent.
Putting myself in the enemy's place."

Halliday's eyebrows rose.

"Well?"

"If Earth's old civilization had been smashed from a planet
like--say--Thalassia," said Brett, "and we'd managed, we thought,
to wipe out the Thalassians, and we'd built up our culture again but
were still scared of them, so we made a journey across space to make
sure ... and if we found creatures on the planet that we thought were
our old enemies, we'd do exactly what the Aspasians have done. And we'd
do one thing more."

Halliday said irritably:

"Come to the point! What would we do?"

"We'd send home for dogs," said Brett. "And we'd go around the outside
of the area we'd made deadly, and make sure that our enemies hadn't
come out on foot. We'd know they hadn't flown out. But the dogs would
tell us if they'd walked out."

Halliday stared. Then he groaned.

"Carstairs! You drive me mad! You think of the damnedest things!"

Brett amended hurriedly, "The only thing is that since Aspasia is
mostly desert, it's not likely they'd have much experience in following
a scent that was faulted by running water."

"Go away!" snapped Halliday. "And don't come talking to me unless you
think of something else!"

In ten minutes more he rose and summoned the party to further
journeying. The pause had seemed to stiffen unaccustomed muscle,
but they started off. In twenty minutes they came to a small stream.
Halliday faced back.

"We walk in this brook," he said peevishly, "in case we are trailed
with scent-trailing animals from Aspasia! No one is to put a foot on
dry land under any circumstances!"

He led the way downstream. Two miles, and the brook was joined by a
slightly larger one. Halliday turned and traced it back toward its
source. He was followed by all the line of burdened figures, splashing
wearily in his wake.

       *       *       *       *       *

An hour later the ground trembled underfoot. They were well up in the
hills then. They looked. An enormous column of darkness still uncoiled
toward the sky and as they stared it spread to the familiar mushroom
shape. It would be thirty thousand feet high, on this planet of
less-than-Earth gravity.

Halliday went on ... and on ... and on. The ground shook again. Later
it shook still again and again. There was a wall of gruesome darkness
against the sky. It loomed many times higher than mountains. They were
looking at the row of dark stalks through unsubstantial giants of ferns
when a seventh column arose.

They went on. They climbed and waded and waded and climbed. They came
to a narrow pass between two mountain-flanks. A stream gushed out of
the mountainside and fell forty feet and then came splashing down among
stones.

It wasn't the end of their watery highway. There was a pool below it.
There were two streams flowing from the pool. They had followed one up
to this spot. Now they followed the other down to the far side of the
mountains.

But the atomic cloud was moving inland. They looked up behind them,
and looming far above the range they had crossed there was the misty
forefront of the cloud of death. It was composed of water-vapor lifted
up for miles and blown to droplets and those blown to smaller ones
until it was the thinnest of fogs--but still deadly.

Halliday stared pugnaciously up at it. Then he chuckled.

"Gentlemen," he said with a jerky gesture, "there is an omen if you
happen to be superstitious. I advise it in this case for the pleasure
it brings. Elektra must be above the horizon, though we cannot see it
for this next range of hills. But its light strikes the atom-cloud.
And--do you not see a rainbow?"

It was not a very good rainbow, but it was there. It was strong in the
red, and lurid in the yellow, but the blue was deficient. Still, it was
a rainbow.

When they halted for the equivalent of a night's rest, Halliday called
Brett to him with a crook of his finger.

"Yes?" said Brett.

"I appoint you," said Halliday firmly, "to work out a plan. You
irritate me, but you think of things. Now I'm assigning you something
to think about full time."

"I'll try," said Brett. "What is it?"

Halliday puffed a little. He was not a young man. He was exhausted. But
his manner was dour and irritable as always.

"I think we are clear for the moment," he said peevishly. "If that
damned atomic cloud will only settle over the trail, and cover the
footprints we left before we began walking in stream beds--if that
happens, they'll believe us dead."

"They should," agreed Brett.

"But," rasped Halliday, "it will not follow that they will think they
have killed all Thalassians--such as they think us--in killing us few.
They will hunt this continent over!"

"It looks like it," admitted Brett. "After all, they've only seen one
man--me."

"Yes," snapped Halliday. "There is only one answer. Put your mind on
it. Find some way to make friends with them!"



                                  VI

    The continent Chios is ... the only considerable land-mass on
    the planet. It is densely covered with vegetation, and its former
    inhabitants must have had cultivated crops and very probably a
    dense population. However, its constant daylight negates the
    idea of the introduction of Earth plants, and the poor flavor
    and indifferent quality of such edible plants as are known
    makes subsistence on its native products a far from attractive
    prospect. In case of emergency, nourishment will be found
    in....--_Astrographic Bureau Publication 11297. Appendix to Space
    Pilot, Vol. 460. Sector XXXIV, p. 80._

There was no night or day upon Thalassia. In theory, at this particular
part of its year, the sun Elektra rose from somewhere along its
southeastern horizon and for not quite one hundred and fifty hours
crept upward in the eastern sky, and then for the same length of time
descended slowly toward the northeast. As it set, the star-clustered
Canis Venitici rose in the southwest and rose for a similar number of
hours and declined for the same to the northwest. At other seasons
these directions were reversed, and there was also a time when the sun
rose due south and set due north. Then there were eclipses. All of
which resulted from the fact that Thalassia and Aspasia revolved about
each other once in twenty-five days (Earth measurement) with their
common axis in the plane of the ecliptic, and had no diurnal rotation
at all. But the important thing was that Thalassia had no clear-cut day
and night.

Wherefore time passed confusingly. The twelve who had come to study the
fallen civilization of the planet had become fugitives, without hope.
They had no shelter and did not know which of some few coarse fruits
could be eaten, and there were half a dozen varieties of fresh-water
fish that were not unwholesome. The absence of fruit-eating birds or
animals had resulted in eight thousand years without natural selection,
and had produced part of this situation. The fresh-water fish,
incidentally, were mostly recent adaptations of marine forms which had
moved into the ecological niches left when the brooks and rivers of
Chios ran deadly poison down to the sea. Eating grew monotonous for the
twelve who hid.

And there was no alternation of day and night. It seemed to Brett that
their purposeless migration went on for years. They marched until they
were tired, and lay down and slept, and got up and marched until they
were tired again. They grew whiskery and unkempt, and they loathed the
food they had to eat, and all ideas of time lapsed in the unending day.

Objectively, they crossed a wide valley and came to an inland
mountain-chain, and followed that southward. Nothing of any consequence
happened at any time. Once they saw a spot where an obvious bomb-crater
had been blasted into the side of a mountain. It made a gigantic
scar which even eight thousand years had not healed over. But that
discovery, like all others, had no meaning.

Then, one day--one march--one period--in which they were all
awake--they came to a broad valley which would surely have made a
perfect location for a city. And it had been. The center was gone,
blasted flat and covered with jungle. But about the edges of the
obliterated blast-area there were crumbling structures of stone. There
were tumbling walls, and terraces distorted by tree-roots, and other
matters of that kind. The Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition could not
resist the lure of it. They carefully did not talk about the complete
hopelessness of their position, but here were ruined artifacts and
structures, and they yearned over them.

So they stopped to dig, and poke, and pry, and measure and zestfully to
dispute with each other over the meaning of this architectural feature
and that. It was not a reasonable thing to do, but there was no purpose
in being reasonable.

       *       *       *       *       *

Brett Carstairs could not join them. He could deduce the technical
processes of former years, but there was nothing for him to work on.
He tended to brood over the futility of all things and to think of
the girl. Her existence was undeniable. She must be rejoicing in the
conviction that he had been killed. And Brett, looking at her likeness,
did not rejoice.

On the second day they saw a ship of the enemy. It was a new-type ship,
and it was evidently hunting for signs of living things. It was not a
rocket, this time. Rockets move fast, but in atmosphere they are not
economical of fuel, and on Thalassia all fuel had to be brought across
space. So this was a new-type ship.

It was melon-shaped, with pointed ends. Its round sides glinted silver.
It moved very deliberately indeed, almost hovering. There were ports
along its bottom, but not elsewhere. It moved by occasional jettings of
rocket-fuel from astern.

Brett called sharply, and men passed the word. Within seconds the
personnel of the Expedition was invisible, hiding behind bushes and
trees. Brett slipped down to join them where they stared at the vessel
hungrily. They were a disreputable crew, now. Nobody shaved. They did
not look like a scientific group. Not at all.

"It's a spaceship all right," said Kent dispiritedly. "But is it ours?"

Halliday snapped, "Human spacecraft aren't streamlined. No sense in
streamlining for a vacuum. That's an Aspasian ship--hunting us!"

Something teasing and vague and annoying tickled the back of Brett's
mind.

"Now why," mused Janney, "does it use rockets? Rockets won't move a
mass like that! It must be two hundred feet long! Thousands of tons!"

The rockets of the ship flared again. It was silvery. It had ports only
in the bottom. 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.
No such small rockets as this, anyhow! It approached the mountains.

Its bow suddenly whipped around all of ten degrees, and then slowly
swung back. Then Brett noticed that the ship was not moving along the
line of its own axis. It did not progress precisely where it pointed.
It also moved a trifle sidewise, as if something pushed laterally
against it while it forged ahead. Such movement was impossible in a
spaceship weighing thousands of tons....

Then the fact clicked in Brett's mind. He cried out.

"They are twentieth-century technologists! That's no spaceship--it's a
dirigible!"

Halliday blinked.

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. Their motors would be
unreliable, at first, and over desert country a failed motor would
mean a dead passenger. 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.

Next mealtime his idea came to him. The food was even less appetizing
than usual. There would be food in that dirigible balloon. It would be
the only palatable foodstuff in hundreds of miles.

He led Halliday aside.

"I propose a gamble," he told the Expedition's leader. "It could get us
all killed. Or it could get us something we could probably eat. Or--it
might be a way to make friends. Do you want to take a chance?"

"Probably," said Halliday, frowning. "What is the idea?"

Halliday was emaciated, now. The food and the journeying on foot had
not been good for him. But he was still the leader.

"The firing-plaza was booby-trapped--" said Brett persuasively--"and
the cave. So this city's probably booby-trapped, too! Now, if we can
only make sure...."

It was a hairbrained scheme. It was not at all the sort of project that
would be authorized in a sombre policy-conference before an expedition
set out from Earth. One had to be desperate and half-starved and
practically without hope in order to conceive of it. But Brett made it
sound remarkably plausible. At that, however, Halliday pointed out that
it might not work and might lead instead to an unbearable concentration
of search just where they were.

But he approved it.

So Belmont abandoned archaeology and went over the center of the
city with his Geiger counters. The man who'd brought insulated wire
with him, because he wanted to, made investigations. Eventually he
contrived an induction-balance. With that and knowledge learned from
the booby-trap in the cavern which had not gone off, he determined
facts about underground arrangements that had not been disturbed for
centuries. There were four bombs underground. It should be possible to
set them off....

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.
It strongly resembled the apparatus with which Hertz first demonstrated
the existence of electro-magnetic radiation in the nineteenth century.
The hand-lamp battery, of course, would give some hundreds of watts
power for a few seconds only.

Then the Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition devoted itself to the project
of building the largest possible stock of dry branches and brushwood.
Twelve men worked at it for three days. They planned, indeed, as if for
a forest fire.

When the time came, Brett set light to the key area and made for the
mountainside. He was halfway there before the brushfuse burned to
produce an appreciable quantity of smoke. Then it abruptly began to
pour out thick, curling masses of brown vapor which was not supposed
to rise from the surface of Thalassia, because there should be nobody
living there.

       *       *       *       *       *

When he reached the ledge on the mountainside where the Expedition
waited, the whiskery and disreputable-seeming characters there were
fairly dancing with excitement. But for a long, long time nothing
happened. Smoke rose up in a column toward the sky. It was visible for
a very great distance indeed. But nobody came--for two hours.

Then Halliday fairly squealed in agitation:

"There's a ship!" he cried. "They saw it! It's coming!"

And from far over the mountains a ship was coming with jets of
rocket-fumes behind it. It bounced in the wind-currents of the
mountains. It came nearer, arriving at a point five miles from the
brushwood fire. It swept around to see it from upwind closer to where
the Expedition hopped and squirmed in its agitation. It was four miles
from the mountain-flank and still coming. It was midway between the
Expedition and the blaze which now covered half a square mile of jungle.

"Try Booby-trap One," commanded Brett eagerly. "If it misses try the
rest in turn! And don't look--"

The members of the Expedition sank down behind sheltering boulders.
Brett, himself, ducked to where he was sheltered from direct sight of
the booby-trap area, but where he could still see the bobbing airship.
Brett shielded his eyes with his hands against the possible light flash.

The electronicist at the tight-beam projector ducked his head and
stabbed twin wires together. There was a sharp, harsh, buzzing sound.
Down in the valley where the induction-balance had said a bomb lay
buried, a beam of high-frequency radio waves hit hard. They were very
much like the waves a tripod beacon had given off at Firing Plaza One.
They induced high-frequency currents underground.

This was the fierce bright light of the dawn of time, with all the
cosmos turned incandescent for an instant. The ground rose up and
bumped Brett fiercely. Then there was a sound as of doomsday, and rocks
and pebbles rolled and clattered down the mountainside.

Brett saw the shock wave of the explosion hit the dirigible. It was not
a sound-wave, but an expanding sphere of pure compression. He saw the
silvery, seemingly solid-metal but actual cloth bag dent in, exactly as
if pushed inward by a giant thumb.

Then the balloon popped like a rubber toy.

The atom-bomb cloud rose and rose to the high heavens. It formed a
mushroom-shape. But the tradewinds blew over the mountain-tops as over
Thalassia's sea. The cloud curled and curved, and lightnings flashed
and thunder rolled in it. But it would go away inland, too.

The Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition plunged down the mountainside in a
yelling small horde before the balloon had reached the ground. It was
a remarkable descent for the balloon, at that. Its bag had been burst
in a single monstrous rip, but it did not crash headlong. As the whole
object plummeted, the bag-material caught in the stiffening framework
inside its former hull. It acted, though inadequately, to check the
fall. The balloon reeled and swayed because of that parachuting
action, and it crashed into the branches of a great tree, and after
a fashion skidded out of them, and landed in a tangle of splintering
brace-members on the ground.

       *       *       *       *       *

Brett lost sight of it as he plunged down, with the reproduction of an
antique bazooka in his hand. He used it as a rod, in his haste. Then he
ran, and so did all the others until, panting, they came in sight of
the debris.

But they saw something more than debris. There was the brightly-clad
figure of one of the ship's crew on the ground. Another figure worked
furiously, not at the spilled-out body but at something caught in the
splintered framework. It came clear. It was a ball of considerable
size. It loosened and came free as if it had been designed to be
dropped. The straining figure pushed it fiercely until it was near
the prone figure on the ground. Then the laboring stopped, and that
crew-member stared desperately at the sky, and then fiercely all around.

Halliday groaned between pantings.

"A damned atomic bomb!" he gasped. "They'll set it off--to take us with
them--"

Brett raged. Then he heard his own voice shouting:

"Spread out, everybody! Show yourselves, but don't go closer!"

The figure heard his shout. It whirled upon him. It saw him and his
companions. But they stayed behind. And Brett would have shouted again,
but that his breath had left him.

He walked on, swallowing, his reproduction of an ancient bazooka
dangling in his hand. The figure by the object that must be a bomb--was
a girl. It was the girl whose picture he had in his pocket, or at the
least her identical twin. And she regarded him with evident hostility.

Brett walked forward, trying to get his breath back and his mind
straight. He'd thought of food, but now he thought of something else....

The figure on the ground stirred feebly. It turned its head. It was
a man. Human. Bearded ... bearded! This particular situation was
agonizing. In inherited, acquired, instinctive, legendary and religious
hatred of all things Thalassian, this girl was prepared to set off that
atom bomb. She would die in the flame, but so would he. At the moment,
the other eleven members of the Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition might not.
She waited impatiently for them to come closer.

Brett stopped. She moved toward the bomb, turning only to regard him
with eyes that seemed to flame. She reached out her hand.

And Brett did the only possible, the obvious and the inevitable thing.

Brett blew it up.

His action was instinctive, but also it was sound sense, because an
atomic bomb contains remarkably little explosive. It is different from
all other bombs in that what explosive it does contain exists only to
move slugs of fissionable material into a critical mass which then
detonates. There is no atomic explosive unless there is a critical
mass. Until it is actually fired, an atomic bomb is a rather delicate
piece of mechanism only.

Brett's bazooka-shell hit the case. The rocket-fuel in the shell blew.
It smashed in the case. It jammed the delicate mechanism. The actual
explosive in the bomb flared smokily, but it was not even enough to
singe the girl beside it. And Brett plunged forward and grabbed her
before she could take any further measures.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was great confusion, and then Kent came to Brett and said slowly,
"That whiskered man's got a broken leg. Better set it, eh?"

"I would," agreed Brett. He stared at the girl, both of whose wrists he
held firmly. She returned his gaze with eyes which had ceased to burn
as flames, and now were filled with an absolute, stunned astonishment.

Halliday came up a little later.

"Carstairs!" he said irritably. "That man with a beard--he is a man,
isn't he?"

"I hope so!" said Brett with deep earnestness.

He continued to look at the girl. She opened her mouth to catch her
breath in purest bewilderment.

"He's been pulling our beards!" said Halliday angrily. "He seemed
astonished when we set his leg. He almost fainted when he counted our
fingers. I can see that. We've got five fingers and the Thalassians
had six! But why the devil should he want to pull beards? Every one of
us, separately! He can't seem to get over the fact that we have five
fingers and grow whiskers! He's got a beard too!"

"Maybe," said Brett, "the Thalassians didn't have beards. Which may be
why he wears one. Maybe--I'll see."

Gently and respectfully but very firmly, he lifted the girl's right
hand to his chin. She had already stared at his fingers. Now she
grabbed at his beard. And though Brett's beard was no more than half an
inch long, she pulled it hard.

She called in an excited, agitated voice to the bearded man whose leg
was now in splints. Then she addressed Brett, pouring out a flood of
unintelligible phrases.

Halliday looked on with a cynical relief.

"She seems now," he observed, "to be neither notably ferocious nor
remarkably afraid. I suspect that if you turn her loose she will
probably signal for help. I only hope she'll explain that we aren't
Thalassians and that we have five fingers and pullable beards! I'd
never have guessed that the way to make friends with this people was
shoot at an atom bomb and let my fingers be counted and my whiskers
yanked to the roots!"

"Yes," said Brett absorbedly. He loosened his grip on the girl's
wrists. She looked at him with bright, still-surprised eyes. She looked
pleased, too. Almost happy.

"Carstairs!" fumed Halliday. "See if you can ask her how the hell human
beings got out here--dammit, Carstairs, talk to her and find out what
we've got to know or go crazy! They can't come from earth! Where the
devil did they come from?"

"I'm--getting ready to ask now," said Brett.

He fumbled in his pocket and found the locket he'd picked up on Firing
Plaza Number One. He handed it to the girl. She exclaimed, and called
something to the bearded man. He grunted, staring at the hands and
beards of the members of the Expedition and plainly making painful but
drastic readjustments of all his previous opinions. The girl looked
back at Brett, expectantly. He beamed suddenly. She smiled back,
flashing her white teeth.

He tapped himself on the chest, slowly, significantly.

"Brett," he said.

She cocked her head on one side, puzzled. Then she brightened. She
tapped him on the chest.

"Br-r-rette!" she said happily.

Communication between theoretically intelligent beings of two different
star-systems had begun.



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Second landing" ***


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