Title: Planet of Sand
Author: Leinster, Murray
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Planet of Sand" ***


                            PLANET OF SAND

                          By Murray Leinster

               _Tossed into the trackless Cosmos by his
              mortal enemy, shipwrecked on an unfriendly
              star, he determined to defy the dangers of
                 numberless nights, and, hunted turned
                  hunter, keep a tryst with Hate...._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
              Famous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1948.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]



[Illustration: He debated straggling farther under the shelter of the
monstrous roof....]


There was bright, pitiless light in the prison corridor of the
_Stallifer_. There was the hum of the air-renewal system. Once in every
so often there was a cushioned thud as some item of the space ship's
machinery operated some relay somewhere. But it was very tedious to be
in a confinement cell. Stan Buckley--Lieutenant, J.G., Space Guard,
under charges and under restraint--found it rather more than tedious.

He should have been upheld, perhaps, by the fact that he was innocent
of the charges made against him by Rob Torren, formerly his immediate
superior officer. But the feeling of innocence did not help. He sat in
his cell, holding himself still with a grim resolution. But a deep, a
savage, a corrosive anger grew and grew and grew within him. It had
been growing in just this manner for weeks.

The _Stallifer_ bored on through space. From her ports the cosmos
was not that hostile, immobile curtain of unwinking stars the early
interstellar travelers knew. At twelve hundred light-speeds, with the
Bowdoin-Hall field collapsing forty times per second for velocity
control, the stars moved visibly. Forty glimpses of the galaxy about
the ship in every second made it seem that the universe was always in
view.

And the stars moved. The nearer ones moved swiftly and the farther ones
more slowly, but all moved. And habit made motion give the feeling of
perspective, so that the stars appeared to be distributed in three
dimensions and from the ship seemed very small, like fireflies. All the
cosmos seemed small and almost cosy. The Rim itself appeared no more
than a few miles away. But the _Stallifer_ headed for Earth from Rhesi
II, and she had been days upon her journey, and she had come a distance
which it would stagger the imagination to compute.

In his cell, though, Stan Buckley could see only four walls. There was
no variation of light; no sign of morning or night or afternoon. At
intervals, a guard brought him food. That was all--except that his deep
and fierce and terrible anger grew until it seemed that he would go mad
with it.

He had no idea of the hour or the day when, quite suddenly, the
pitiless light in the corridor dimmed. Then the door he had not seen
since his entrance into the prison corridor clanked open. Footsteps
came toward his cell. It was not the guard who fed him. He knew that
much. It was a variation of routine which should not have varied until
his arrival on Earth.

He sat still, his hands clenched. A figure loomed outside the cell
door. He looked up coldly. Then fury so great as almost to be frenzy
filled him. Rob Torren looked in at him.

There was silence. Stan Buckley's muscles tensed until it seemed that
the bones of his body creaked. Then Rob Torren said caustically:

"It's lucky there are bars, or there'd be no chance to talk! Either
you'd kill me and be beamed for murder, or I'd kill you and Esther
would think me a murderer. I've come to get you out of this if you'll
accept my terms."

Stan Buckley made an inarticulate, growling noise.

"Oh, surely!" said Rob Torren. "I denounce you, and I'm the witness
against you. At your trial, I'll be believed and you won't. You'll
be broken and disgraced. Even Esther wouldn't marry you under such
circumstances. Or maybe," he added sardonically, "maybe you wouldn't
let her!"

Stan Buckley licked his lips. He longed so terribly to get his hands
about his enemy's throat that he could hardly hear his words.

"The trouble is," said Rob Torren, "that she probably wouldn't marry me
either, if you were disgraced by my means. So I offer a bargain. I'll
help you to escape--I've got it all arranged--on your word of honor to
fight me. A duel. To the death." His eyes were hard. His tone was hard.
His manner was almost contemptuous. Stan Buckley said hoarsely:

"I'll fight you anywhere, under any conditions!"

"The conditions," Rob Torren told him icily, "are that I will help you
to escape. You will then write a letter to Esther, saying that I did
so and outlining the conditions of the duel as we agree upon them. I
will, in turn, write a letter to the Space Guard brass, withdrawing my
charges against you. We will fight. The survivor will destroy his own
letter and make use of the other. Do you agree to that?"

"I'll agree to anything," said Stan Buckley fiercely, "that will get my
hands about your throat!"

Rob Torren shrugged.

"I've turned off the guard photocells," he said calmly. "I've a key for
your cell. I'm going to let you out. I can't afford to kill you except
under the conditions I named, or I'll have no chance to win Esther. If
you kill me under any other conditions, you'll simply be beamed as a
murderer." He paused, and then added, "And I have to come and fight you
because a letter from you admitting that I've behaved honorably is the
only possible thing that would satisfy Esther. You give your word to
wait until you've escaped and I come for you before you try to kill me?"

Stan Buckley hesitated a long, long time. Then he said in a thick
voice, "I give my word."

Without hesitation, Rob Torren put a key in the cell door and turned
it. He stood aside. Stan Buckley walked out, his hands clenched. Torren
closed the door and re-locked it. He turned his back and walked down
the corridor. He opened the door at its end. Again he stood aside. Stan
Buckley went through. Torren closed the door, took a bit of cloth from
his pocket, wiped off the key, hung it up again on a tiny hook, with
the same bit of cloth threw a switch, and put the cloth back in his
pocket.

"The photocells are back on," he said in a dry voice. "They say you're
still in your cell. When the guard contradicts them, you'll seem to
have vanished into thin air."

"I'm doing this," said Stan hoarsely, "to get a chance to kill you. Of
course I've no real chance to escape!"

That was obvious. The _Stallifer_ was deep in the void of interstellar
space. She traveled at twelve hundred times the speed of light. Escape
from the ship was impossible. And concealment past discovery when the
ship docked was preposterous.

"That remains to be seen," said Torren coldly. "Come this way."

       *       *       *       *       *

Torren went down a hallway. He slipped into a narrow doorway,
unnoticeable unless one was looking for it. Stan followed. He found
himself in that narrow, compartmented space between the ship's inner
and outer skins. A door; another compartment; another door. Then a tiny
air-lock--used for the egress of a single man to inspect or repair such
exterior apparatus as the scanners for the ship's vision screens. There
was a heap of assorted apparatus beside the air-lock door.

"I prepared for this," said Torren curtly. "There's a space suit.
Put it on. Here's a meteor miner's space skid. There are supplies. I
brought this stuff as luggage, in water-tight cases. I'll fill the
cases with my bath water and get off the ship with the same weight of
luggage I had when I came on. That's my cover-up."

"And I?" asked Stan harshly.

"You'll take this chrono. It's synchronized with the ship's navigating
clock. At two-two even you push off from the outside of the ship. The
drive field fluctuates. When it collapses, you'll be outside it. When
it expands--"

Stan Buckley raised his eyebrows. This was clever! The Bowdoin-Hall
field, which permits of faster-than-light travel, is like a pulsating
bubble, expanding and contracting at rates ranging from hundreds of
thousands of times per second to the forty-per-second of deep-space
speed. When the field is expanding, and bars of an artificial allotrope
of carbon are acted upon by electrostatic forces in a certain
scientific fashion, a ship and all its contents accelerate at a rate
so great that it simply has no meaning. As the field contracts, a ship
decelerates again. That is the theory, at any rate. There is no proof
in sensation or instrument readings that such is the case. But velocity
is inversely proportional to the speed of the field's pulsations, and
only in deep space does a ship dare slow the pulsations too greatly,
for fear of complications.

However, a man in a space suit could detach himself from a space ship
traveling by the Bowdoin-Hall field. He could float free at the instant
of the field's collapse, and be left behind when it expanded again. But
he would be left alone in illimitable emptiness.

"You'll straddle the space skid," said Torren shortly. "It's full
powered--good for some millions of miles. At two-two exactly the
_Stallifer_ will be as close to Khor Alpha as it will go. Khor Alpha's
a dwarf white star that's used as a course marker. It has one planet
that the directories say has a breathable atmosphere, and list as a
possible landing refuge, but which they also say is unexamined. You'll
make for that planet and land. You'll wait for me. I'll come!"

Stan Buckley said in soft ferocity, "I hope so!"

Torren's rage flared.

"Do you think I'm not as anxious to kill you as you are to kill me?"

For an instant the two tensed, as if for a struggle to the death there
between the two skins of the space ship. Then Torren turned away.

"Get in your suit," he said curtly. "I'll get a private flyer and come
after you as soon as the hearing about your disappearance is over. Push
off at two-two even. Make it exact!"

He went angrily away, and Stan Buckley stared after him, hating him,
and then grimly turned to the apparatus that lay in an untidy heap
beside the air-lock door.

Five minutes later he opened the outer door of the lock. He was clad
in space armor and carried with him a small pack of supplies--the
standard abandon-ship kit--and the little space-drive unit. The unit
was one of those space skids used by meteor miners--merely a shaft
which contained the drive and power unit, a seat, and a cross-shaft by
which it was steered. It was absurdly like a hobby-horse for a man in
a space suit, and it was totally unsuitable for interplanetary work
because it consumed too much power when fighting gravity. For Stan,
though, starting in mid-space and with only one landing to make, it
should be adequate.

He locked the chrono where he could see it on the steering bar. He
strapped the supply kit in place. He closed the air-lock door very
softly. He waited, clinging to the outer skin of the ship with magnetic
shoes.

The cosmos seemed very small and quite improbable. The specks of light
which were suns seemed to crawl here and there. Because of their motion
it was impossible to think of them as gigantic balls of unquenchable
fire. They moved! To all appearances, the _Stallifer_ flowed onward in
a cosmos perhaps a dozen miles in diameter, in which many varicolored
fireflies moved with a vast deliberation.

The hand of the chrono moved, and moved, and moved. At two-two
exactly, Stan pressed the drive stud. At one instant he and his
improbable space steed rested firmly against a thousand-foot hill of
glistening chrom-steel. The waverings of the Bowdoin-Hall field were
imperceptible. The cosmos was small and limited and the _Stallifer_ was
huge. Then the skid's drive came on. It shot away from the hull--and
the ship vanished as utterly as a blown-out candle flame. And the
universe was so vast as to produce a cringing sensation in the man who
straddled an absurd small device in such emptiness, with one cold white
sun--barely near enough to show a disk--and innumerable remote and
indifferent stars on every hand.

On the instant when the ship's field contracted and left him outside,
Stan had lost the incredible velocity the field imparts. In the
infinitesimal fraction of a second required for the field to finish
its contraction after leaving him, the ship had traveled literally
thousands of miles. In the slightly greater fraction of a second
required for it to expand again, it had moved on some millions of
miles. By the time Stan's mind had actually grasped the fact that he
was alone in space, the ship from which he had separated himself was
probably fifty or sixty millions of miles away.

He was absolutely secure against recapture, of course. If his escape
went unnoticed for even half a minute, it would take all the ships of
all the Space Guard a thousand years to search the volume of space in
which one small space-suited figure might be found. And it was unlikely
that his escape would be noticed for hours.

He was very terribly alone. A dwarf white sun glowed palely, many, many
millions of miles away. Stars gazed at him incuriously, separated by
light-centuries of space.

He started the minute gyroscopes that enabled him to steer the skid.
He started in toward the sun. He had a planet to find and land on. Of
course, Rob Torren could simply have contrived his escape to emptiness
so that he might die and shrivel in the void, and never, never, never
through all eternity be found again. But somehow, Stan had a vast faith
in the hatred which existed between the two of them.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was two days later when he approached the solitary planet of Khor
Alpha. The air in his space suit had acquired that deadly staleness
which is proof that good air is more than merely a mixture of oxygen
and nitrogen. He felt the sluggish discomfort which comes of bottled,
repurified breathing-mixture. And as the disk of the planet grew large,
he saw little or nothing to make him feel more cheerful.

The planet rotated as he drew near, and it seemed to be absolutely
featureless. The terminator--the shadow line as sunlight encroached
on the planet's night side--was a perfect line. There were, then, no
mountains. There were no clouds. There seemed to be no vegetation.
There was, though, a tiny polar icecap--so small that at first he
did not discover it. It was not even a dazzling white, but a mere
whitishness where a polar cap should be, as if it were hoarfrost
instead of ice.

He went slanting down to match the planet's ground speed in his
approach. Astride the tiny space skid, he looked rather like an
improbable witch astride an incredible broomstick. And he was very,
very tired.

Coming up in a straight line, half the planet's disk was night. Half
the day side was hidden by the planet's bulge. He actually saw no more
than a quarter of the surface at this near approach, and that without
magnification.

Any large features would have been spotted from far away, but he had
given up hope of any variation from monotony when--just as he was about
to enter the atmosphere--one dark patch in the planet's uniformly
dazzling white surface appeared at the very edge of day. It was at the
very border of the dawn belt. He could be sure only of its existence,
and that it had sharp, specifically straight edges.

He saw rectangular extensions from the main mass of it. Then he hit
atmosphere, and the thin stuff thrust at him violently because of his
velocity, and he blinked and automatically turned his head aside, so
that he did not see the dark patch again before his descent put it
below the horizon.

Even so near, no features, no natural formations appeared. There was
only a vast brightness below him. He could make no guess as to his
height nor--after he had slowed until the wind against his body was not
detectable through the space suit--of his speed with relation to the
ground. It was extraordinary. It occurred to him to drop something to
get some idea, even if a vague one, of his altitude above the ground.

He did--an oil-soaked rag from the tool kit. It went fluttering down
and down, and abruptly vanished, relatively a short distance below him.
It had not landed. It had been blotted out.

Tired as he was, it took him minutes to think of turning on the
suit-microphone which would enable him to hear sounds in this
extraordinary world. But when he flicked the switch he heard a dull,
droning, moaning noise which was unmistakable. Wind. Below him there
was a sandstorm. He was riding just above its upper surface. He could
not see the actual ground because there was an opaque wall of sand
between. There might be five hundred feet between him and solidity, or
five thousand, or there might be no actual solid, immovable ground at
all. In any case, he could not possibly land.

He rose again and headed for the dark area he had noted. But a space
skid is not intended for use in atmosphere. Its power is great, to be
sure, when its power unit is filled. But Stan had come a very long way
indeed since his departure from the _Stallifer_. And his drive had
blown a fuse, once, which cost him some power.

Unquestionably, the blown fuse had been caused by the impinging of
a Bowdoin-Hall field upon the skid. Some other space ship than the
_Stallifer_, using Khor Alpha as a course guide, had flashed past
the one-planet system at many hundred times the speed of light. The
pulsations of its drive field had struck the skid and drained its drive
of power, and unquestionably had registered the surge. But it was not
likely that it would be linked with Stan's disappearance. The other
ship might be headed for a star system light-centuries from Earth, and
a minute--relatively a minute--joggle of its meters would not be a
cause for comment. The real seriousness of the affair was that the skid
had drained power before its fuse blew.

That property of a Bowdoin-Hall field, incidentally--its trick of
draining power from any drive unit in its range--is the reason that
hampers its use save in deep space. Liners have to be elaborately
equipped with fuses lest in shorting each other's drives they wreck
their own. In interplanetary work, fuses are not even practical because
they might be blown a hundred times in a single voyage. Within solar
systems high-frequency pulsations are used, so that no short can last
more than the hundred-thousandth of a second, in which time not even
allotropic graphite can be ruined.

Stan, then, was desperately short of power and had to use it in a
gravitational field which was prodigally wasteful of it. He had to
rise high above the sandstorm before he saw the black area again
at the planet's very rim. He headed for it in the straightest of
straight lines. As he drove, the power-gauge needle flickered steadily
over toward zero. A meteor miner does not often use as much as one
earth-gravity acceleration, and Stan had to use that much merely to
stay aloft. The black area, too, was all of a hundred-odd miles away,
and after some millions of miles of space travel, the skid was hard put
to make it.

He dived for the black thing as it drew near, and on his approach it
appeared simply impossible. It was a maze, a grid, of rectangular
girders upholding a seemingly infinite number of monstrous dead-black
slabs. There was a single layer of those slabs, supported by
innumerable spidery slender columns. Here, in the dawn belt, there was
no wind and Stan could see clearly. Sloping down, he saw that ten-foot
columns of some dark metal rose straight and uncompromising from a
floor of sand to a height of three hundred feet or more. At their top
were the grid and the slabs, forming a roof some thirty stories above
the ground. There were no under-floors, no cross-ways, no structural
features of any sort between the sand from which the columns rose and
that queer and discontinuous roof.

Stan landed on the ground at the structure's edge. He could see streaks
and bars of sky between the slabs. He looked down utterly empty aisles
between the columns and saw nothing but the columns and the roof until
the shafts merged in the distance. There was utter stillness here. The
sand was untroubled and undisturbed. If the structure was a shelter, it
sheltered nothing. Yet it stretched for at least a hundred miles in at
least one direction, as he had seen from aloft. As nearly as he could
tell, there was no reason for its existence and no purpose it could
serve. Yet it was not the abandoned skeleton of something no longer
used. It was plainly in perfect repair.

The streaks of sky to be seen between its sections were invariably
exact in size and alignment. They were absolutely uniform. There was no
dilapidation and no defect anywhere. The whole structure was certainly
artificial and certainly purposeful, and it implied enormous resources
of civilization. But there was no sign of its makers, and Stan could
not even guess at the reason for its construction.

But he was too worn out to guess. On board the _Stallifer_, he'd been
so sick with rage that he could not rest. On the space skid, riding in
an enormous loneliness about a dwarf sun whose single planet had never
been examined by men, he had to be alert. He had to find the system's
one planet, and then he had to make a landing with practically no
instruments. When he landed at the base of the huge grid, he examined
his surroundings wearily, but with the cautious suspicion needful on
an unknown world. Then he made the sort of camp the situation seemed
to call for. He clamped the space skid and his supplies to his space
suit belt, lay down hard by one of the columns, and incontinently fell
asleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

He was wakened by a horrific roaring in his earphones. He lay still
for one instant. When he tried to stir, it was only with enormous
difficulty that he could move his arms and legs. He felt as if he were
gripped by quicksand. Then, suddenly, he was wide awake. He fought
himself free of clinging incumbrances. He had been half buried in sand.
He was in the center of a roaring, swirling sand-devil which broke upon
the nearby column and built up mounds of sand and snatched them away
again, and flung great masses of it crazily in every direction.

As the enigmatic structure had moved out of the dawn belt into the
morning, howling winds had risen. All the fury of a tornado, all the
stifling deadliness of a sandstorm, beat upon the base of the grid. And
from what Stan had seen when he first tried to land, this was evidently
the normal daily weather of this world. And if this was a sample of
merely morning winds, by midday existence would be impossible.

Stan looked at the chrono. He had slept less than three hours. He made
a loop of line from the abandon-ship kit and got it about the nearest
pillar. He drew himself to that tall column. He tried to find a lee
side, but there was none. The wind direction changed continually. He
debated struggling farther under the shelter of the monstrous roof. He
stared up, estimatingly--

He saw slabs tilt. In a giant section whose limits he could not
determine, he saw the rectangular sections of the roof revolve in
strict unison. From a position parallel to the ground, they turned
until the light of the sky shone down unhindered. Vast masses of sand
descended--deposited on the slabs by the wind, and now dumped down
about the columns' bases. And then wind struck anew with a concentrated
virulence, and the space between the columns became filled with a
whirling giant eddy that blotted out everything.

It was a monster whirlwind that spun crazily in its place for minutes,
and then roared out to the open again. In its violence it picked Stan
up bodily, with the skid and abandon-ship kit still clamped to his
space suit. But for the rope about the column he would have been ripped
away and tossed insanely into the smother of sand that reached to the
horizon.

After a long time, he managed to take up some of the slack of the rope;
to bind himself and his possessions more closely to the column which
rose into the smother overhead. Later still, he was able to take up
more. In an hour, he was bound tightly to the pillar and was no longer
flung to and fro by the wind. Then he dozed off again.

It was uneasy slumber. It gave him little rest. Once a swirling
sand-devil gouged away the sand beneath him so that he and his gear
hung an unguessable distance above solidity, perhaps no more than a
yard or so, but perhaps much more. Later he woke to find the sand
piling up swiftly about him, so that he had to loosen his rope and
climb wearily as tons of fine, abrasive stuff--it would have been
strangling had he needed to breathe it direct--were flung upon him. But
he did sleep from time to time.

Then night fell. The winds died down from hurricane intensity to no
more than gale force. Then to mere frantic gusts. And then--the sun
had set on the farther side of the huge structure to which he had tied
himself--then there was a period when a fine whitish mist seemed to
obscure all the stars, and it gradually faded, and he realized that it
was particles of so fine a dust that it hung in the air long after the
heavier stuff had settled.

He released himself from the rope about the pillar. He stood, a tiny
figure, beside the gargantuan columns of black metal which rose toward
the stars. The stars themselves shone down brightly, brittlely, through
utterly clear air. There were no traces of cloud formation following
the storm of the day.

It was obvious that this was actually the normal weather of this
planet. By day, horrific winds and hurricanes. By night, a vast
stillness. And the small size and indistinctness of the icecap he
had seen was assurance that there was nowhere on the planet any
sizeable body of water to moderate the weather. And with such storms,
inhabitants were unthinkable. Life of any sort was out of the question.
But if there was anything certain in the cosmos, it was that the
structure at whose feet he stood was artificial!

He flicked on his suit-radio. Static only. Sand particles in dry air,
clashing against each other, would develop charges to produce just the
monstrous hissing sounds his earphones gave off. He flicked off the
radio and opened his face-plate. Cold dry air filled his lungs.

There were no inhabitants. There could not be any. But there was this
colossal artifact of unguessable purpose. There was no life on this
planet, but early during today's storm--and he suspected at other times
when he could neither see nor hear--huge areas of the roof-plates had
turned together to dump down their accumulated loads of sand. As he
breathed in the first breaths of cold air, he heard a shrill outcry
and a roaring somewhere within the forest of pillars. At a guess, it
was another dumping of sand from the roof. It stopped. Another roaring,
somewhere else. Yet another. Section by section, area by area, the sand
that had piled on the roof at the top of the iron columns was dumped
down between the columns' bases.

Stan flicked on the tiny instrument lights and looked at the motor of
the space skid. The needle was against the pin at zero. He considered,
and shrugged. Rob Torren would come presently to fight him to the
death. But it would take the _Stallifer_ ten days or longer to reach
Earth, then three or four days for the microscopic examination of every
part of the vast ship in a grim search for him.

Then there'd be an inquiry. It might last a week or two weeks or
longer. The findings would be given after deliberation which might
produce still another delay of a week or even a month.

Rob Torren would not be free to leave Earth before then. And then it
would take him days to get hold of a space yacht and--because a yacht
would be slower than the _Stallifer_--two weeks or so to get back here.
Three months in all, perhaps. Stan's food wouldn't last that long. His
water supply wouldn't last nearly as long as that.

If he could get up to the icecap there would be water, and on the
edge of the ice he could plant some of the painstakingly developed
artificial plants whose seeds were part of every abandon-ship kit.
They could live and produce food under almost any set of planetary
conditions. But he couldn't reach the polar cap without power the skid
didn't have.

He straddled the little device. He pointed it upward. He rose
sluggishly. The absurd little vehicle wabbled crazily. Up, and up, and
up toward the uncaring stars. The high thin columns of steel seemed to
keep pace with him. The roof of this preposterous shed loomed slowly
nearer, but the power of the skid was almost gone. He was ten feet
below the crest when diminishing power no longer gave thrust enough to
rise. He would hover here for seconds, and then drift back down again
to the sand--for good.

He flung his kit of food upward. It sailed over the sharp edge of the
roof and landed there. The skid was thrust down by the force of the
throw, but it had less weight to lift. It bounced upward, soared above
the roof, and just as its thrust dwindled again, Stan managed to land.

He found--nothing.

To be exact, he found the columns joined by massive girders of steel
fastening them in a colossal open grid. Upon those girders which ran
in a line due north and south--reckoning the place of sunset to be
west--huge flat plates of metal were slung, having bearings which
permitted them to be rotated at the will of whatever unthinkable
constructor had devised them.

There were small bulges which might contain motors for the turning.
There was absolutely nothing but the framework and the plates and the
sand some three hundred feet below. There was no indication of the
purpose of the plates or the girders or the whole construction. There
was no sign of any person or creature using or operating the slabs. It
appeared that the grid was simply a monotonous, featureless, insanely
tedious construction which it would have taxed the resources of Earth
to build. It stretched far, far beyond the horizon--and did nothing and
had no purpose save to gather sand on its upper surface and from time
to time dump that sand down to the ground. It did not make sense.

Stan had a more immediate problem than the purpose of the grid, though.
He was three hundred feet above ground. He was short of food and
hopelessly short of water. When day came again, this place would be
the center of a hurricane of blown sand. On the ground, lashed to a
metal column, he had been badly buffeted about even in his space suit.
Up here the wind would be much stronger. It was not likely that any
possible lashing would hold him against such a storm. He could probably
get back to the ground, of course, but there seemed no particular point
to it.

As he debated, there came a thin, shrill whistling overhead. It came
from the far south, and passed overhead, descending, and--going down
in pitch--it died away to the northward. The lowering of its pitch
indicated that it was slowing. The sound was remarkably like that of a
small space craft entering atmosphere incompletely under control--which
was unthinkable, of course, on the solitary unnamed planet of Khor
Alpha. And Stan felt very, very lonely on a huge plate of iron thirty
stories above the ground, on an alien planet under unfriendly stars,
and with this cryptic engineering monstrosity breaking away to sheer
desert on one side and extending uncounted miles in all others. He
flicked on his suit-radio, without hope.

There came the loud, hissing static. Then under and through it came the
humming carrier-wave of a yacht transmitter sending on emergency power.

"Help call! Help call! Space yacht _Erebus_ grounded on planet of Khor
Alpha, main drive burned out, landed in darkness, outside conditions
unknown. If anyone hears, p-please answer! M-my landing drive smashed
when I hit ground, too! Help call! Help call! Space yacht _Erebus_
grounded on planet of Khor Alpha, main drive burned out, landed in
darkness--"

Stan Buckley had no power. He could not move from this spot. The
_Erebus_ had grounded somewhere in the desert which covered all the
planet but this one structure. When dawn came, the sandstorm would
begin again. And with its main drive burned out, its landing drive
smashed--when the morrow's storms began it would be strange indeed if
the whirlwinds did not scoop away sand from about the one solid object
they'd encounter, so that the little craft would topple down and down
and ultimately be covered over, buried under maybe hundreds of feet of
smothering stuff.

He knew the _Erebus_. Of course. It belonged to Esther Hume. The voice
from it was Esther's--the girl he was to have married, if Rob Torren
hadn't made charges disgracing him utterly. And tomorrow she would be
buried alive in the helpless little yacht, while he was unable to lift
a finger to her aid.

       *       *       *       *       *

He was talking to her desperately when there was a vast, labored tumult
to the west. It was the product of ten thousand creakings. He turned,
and in the starlight he saw great flat plates--they were fifty feet by
a hundred and more--turning slowly. An area a mile square changed its
appearance. Each of the flat plates in a hundred rows of fifty plates
turned sidewise, to dump its load of settled sand. A square mile of
plates turned edges to the sky--and turned back again. Creakings and
groanings filled the air, together with the soft roaring noise of
the falling sand. A pause. Another great section of a mile each way
performed the same senseless motion. Pure desperation made Stan say
sharply:

"Esther! Cut off for half an hour! I'll call back! I see the slimmest
possible chance, and I've got to take it! Half an hour, understand?"

He heard her unsteady assent. He scrambled fiercely to the nearest of
the huge plates. It was, of course, insane to think of such a thing.
The plates had no purpose save to gather loads of sand and then to turn
and dump them. But there were swellings at one end of each--where the
girders to which they clung united to form this preposterous elevated
grid. Those swellings might be motors. He dragged a small cutting-torch
from the tool kit. He snapped its end. A tiny, savage, blue-white flame
appeared in midair half an inch from the torch's metal tip.

He turned that flame upon the rounded swelling at the end of a monster
slab. Something made the slabs turn. By reason, it should be a motor.
The swellings might be housings for motors. He made a cut across such a
swelling. At the first touch of the flame something smoked luridly and
frizzled before the metal grew white-hot and flowed aside before the
flame. There had been a coating on the iron.

Even as he cut, Stan realized that the columns and the plates were
merely iron. But the sand blast of the daily storms should erode the
thickest of iron away in a matter of weeks, at most. So the grid was
coated with a tough, elastic stuff--a plastic of some sort--which was
not abraded by the wind. It did not scratch because it was not hard. It
yielded, and bounced sand particles away instead of resisting them. It
would outwear iron, in the daily sand blast, by a million times, on the
principle by which land vehicles on Earth use rubber tires instead of
metal, for greater wear.

He cut away a flap of metal from the swelling. He tossed it away with
his space-gloved hands. His suit-flash illuminated the hollow within.
There was a motor inside, and it was remarkably familiar, though not a
motor such as men made for the purpose of turning things. There was a
shaft. There were four slabs of something that looked like graphite,
rounded to fit the shaft. That was all. No coils. No armature. No sign
of magnets.

Men used this same principle, but for a vastly different purpose. Men
used the reactive thrust of allotropic graphite against an electric
current in their space ships. The Bowdoin-Hall field made such a thrust
incredibly efficient, and it was such graphite slabs that drove the
_Stallifer_--though these were monsters weighing a quarter of a ton
apiece, impossible for the skid to lift. Insulated cables led to the
slabs in wholly familiar fashion. The four cables joined to two and
vanished in the seemingly solid girders which formed all the giant grid.

Almost without hope, Stan slashed through two cables with his torch. He
dragged out the recharging cable of the skid. He clipped the two ends
to the two cut cables. They sparked! Then he stared. The meter of the
skid showed current flowing into its power bank. An amazing amount of
current. In minutes, the power-storage needle stirred from its pin. In
a quarter of an hour it showed half-charge. Then a creaking began all
around.

Stan leaped back to one of the cross-girders just as all the plates
in an area a mile square about him began to turn--all but the one
whose motor-housing he had cut through. All the other plates turned
so that their edges pointed to the stars. The sand piled on them by
the day storm poured down into the abyss beneath. Only the plate whose
motor-housing Stan had cut remained unmoving. Sparks suddenly spat
in the metal hollow, as if greater voltage had been applied to stir
the unmoving slab. A flaring, lurid, blue-white arc burned inside the
housing. Then it cut off.

All the gigantic plates which had turned their edges skyward went
creaking loudly back to their normal position, their flat sides turned
to the stars. And nothing more happened. Nothing at all.

In another ten minutes, the skid's meter showed that the power bank
was fully charged. And Stan, with plenty to think about, straddled the
little object and went soaring to northward like a witch on a broom,
sending a call on his suit-radio before him.

"Coming, Esther! Give me a directional and let's make it fast! We've
got a lot to do before daylight!"

He had traveled probably fifty miles before her signal came in. Then
there was a frantically anxious time until he found the little,
helpless space yacht, tumbled on the desert sand, with Esther peering
hopefully out of the air-lock as he swooped down to a clumsy landing.
She was warned and ready. There was no hope of repairing the drive. A
burned-out drive to operate in a Bowdoin-Hall field calls for bars of
allotropic graphite--graphite in a peculiar energy state as different
from ordinary graphite as carbon diamond is from carbon coal. There
were probably monster bars of just such stuff in the giant grid's
motors, but the skid could not handle them. For tonight, certainly,
repair was out of the question. Esther had hooked up a tiny, low-power
signaling device which gave out a chirping wave every five seconds. She
wore a space suit, had two abandon-ship kits, and all the water that
could be carried.

The skid took off again. It was not designed to work in a planet's
gravitational field. It used too much power, and it wabbled
erratically, and for sheer safety Stan climbed high. With closed
faceplates the space-suited figures seemed to soar amid the stars. They
could speak only by radio, close together as they were.

"Wh-where are we going, Stan?"

"Icecap," said Stan briefly. "North Pole. There's water there--or
hoarfrost, anyhow. And the day storms won't be so bad if there are
storms at all. In the tropics on this planet the normal weather is a
typhoon-driven sandstorm. We'll settle down in the polar area and wait
for Rob Torren to come for us. It may be three months or more."

"Rob Torren--"

"He helped me escape," said Stan briefly. "Tell you later. Watch ahead."

He'd had no time for emotional thinking since his landing, and
particularly since the landing of the little space yacht now sealed
up and abandoned to be buried under the desert sand. But he knew how
Esther came to be here. She'd told him, by radio, first off. She'd
had news of the charges Rob Torren had brought against him. She
hadn't believed them. Not knowing of his embarcation for Earth for
court-martial--the logical thing would have been a trial at advanced
base--she'd set out desperately to assure him of her faith.

She couldn't get a liner direct, so she'd set out alone in her little
space yacht. In a sense, it should have been safe enough. Craft
equipped with Bowdoin-Hall drive were all quite capable of interstellar
flight. Power was certainly no problem any more, and with extra
capacitors to permit of low-frequency pulsations of the drive field,
and mapped dwarf white stars as course markers, navigation should be
simple enough. The journey, as such, was possibly rash but it was
not foolhardy. Only--she hadn't fused her drive when she changed its
pulsation-frequency. And when she was driving past Khor Alpha, her
Bowdoin-Hall field had struck the space skid on which Stan was trying
to make this planet, and the field had drained his power.

The short circuit blew the skid's fuse, but it burned out the yacht's
more delicate drive. Specifically, it overloaded and ruined the
allotropic carbon blocks which made the drive work. So Esther's
predicament was caused not only by her solicitude for Stan, but by the
drive of the skid on which he'd escaped from the _Stallifer_.

       *       *       *       *       *

He blamed himself. Bitterly. But even more he blamed Rob Torren. Hatred
surged up in him again for the man who had promised to come here and
fight him to the death. But he said quietly:

"Rob's coming here after me. We'll talk about that later. He didn't
guess this place would be without water and with daily hurricanes
everywhere except--I hope!--the poles. He thought I'd be able to make
out until he could come back. We've got to! Watch out ahead for the
sunset line. We've got to follow it north until we hit the polar cap.
With water and our kits we should be able to survive indefinitely."

The space-suited figures were close together--in fact, in contact. But
there was no feeling of touching each other through the insulating,
almost inflexible armor of their suits. And sealed as they were in
their helmets and communicating only by phone in the high stratosphere,
neither could feel the situation suitable for romance. Esther was
silent for a time. Then she said:

"You told me you were out of power--"

"I was," he told her. "I got some from the local inhabitants--if
they're local."

"What--"

He described the preposterous, meaningless structure on the desert.
Thousands of square miles in extent. Cryptic and senseless and of
unimaginable significance.

"Every slab has a motor to turn it. I cut into a housing and there was
power there. I loaded up with it. I can't figure the thing out. There's
nowhere that a civilized or any other race could live. There's nothing
those slabs could be for!"

There was a thin line of sunlight far ahead. Traveling north, they
drove through the night and overtook the day. They were very high
indeed, now, beyond atmosphere and riding the absurd small skid that
meteor miners use. They saw the dwarf white sun, Khor Alpha. Its rays
were very fierce. They passed over the dividing line between day and
night, and far, far ahead they saw the hazy whitishness which was the
polar cap of this planet.

It was half an hour before they landed, and when they touched ground
they came simply to a place where wind-blown sand ceased to be powdery
and loose, and where there was plainly dampness underneath. The sun
hung low indeed on the horizon. On the shadow side of sand hillocks
there was hoarfrost. All the moisture of the planet was deposited in
the sand at its poles, and during the long winter nights the sand was
frozen so that even during the summer season unthinkable frigidity
crept out into every shadow.

Stan nodded at a patch of frost on the darker site of a half-mile sand
dune.

"Sleeping," he said dryly, "will be done in space suits. This ground
will be cold where the sun doesn't hit! Do you notice that there's no
sign of anything growing anywhere? Not even moss?"

"It's too cold?"

"Hardly!" said Stan. "Mosses and lichens grow on Earth as far north as
the ground ever thaws. And on every other planet I've ever visited.
There'd be plants here if anywhere, because there's water here. There
simply can't be any life on this planet. None at all!"

Then the absurdity of the statement struck him. There was that
monstrous grid, made by intelligence of some sort and using vast
resources. But--

"Dammit!" said Stan. "How can there be life here? How can plants live
in perpetual sandstorms? How can animals live without plants to break
down minerals and make them into food? How can either plants or animals
live without water? If there were life anywhere, it would have to be
near water, which means here. And if there's none here there can't be
any at all--"

They reached the top of the dune. Esther caught her breath. She pointed.

There, reaching across the dampened sand, was a monstrous and a
horrifying trail. Something had come from the zones where the
sandstorms raged. It had passed this way, moving in one direction, and
it had passed again, going back toward the stormy wastes. By the trail,
it had ten or twelve or twenty legs, like some unthinkable centipede.
The tracks of its separate sets of legs were separated by fifteen feet.
And each footprint was two yards across.

       *       *       *       *       *

For three days by the chrono on the space skid, the hard white sun Khor
Alpha circled the horizon without once setting. Which was natural,
because this was one of the poles of Khor Alpha's only planet, and this
was summer. In those three days Stan and Esther saw no living thing. No
bird, beast, or insect; no plant, moss, or lichen. They had planted
the seeds from their abandon-ship kits--included in such kits because
space castaways may have to expect to be isolated not for weeks or
months, but perhaps for all their lives.

The weeds would produce artificially developed plants with amazing
powers of survival and adaptation and food production. On the fourth
day--clock time--the first of the plants appeared above the bank of
damp sand in which they had been placed. In seven days more there would
be food from them. If one plant of the lot was allowed to drop its own
seeds, in time there would be a small jungle of food plants on which
they could live.

For the rest, they lived in a fashion lower than any savages of Earth.
They had no shelter. There was no building material but sand. They
slept in their space suits for warmth. They had no occupation save that
of waiting for the plants to bear food, and after that of waiting for
Rob Torren to come.

And when he came--the presence of Esther changed everything. When
Torren arrived to fight a duel to the death with Stan, the stake was
to have been ultimately Esther's hand. But if she were present, if she
knew the true story of Torren's charges against Stan and their falsity,
he could have no hope of winning her by Stan's death. He would have
nothing to gain by a duel. But he would gain by the murder of one or
both of them. Safety from the remotest chance of later exposure, at any
rate, and revenge for the failure of his hopes. And if he managed to
kill Stan by any means, fair or foul, Esther would be left wholly at
his mercy.

So Stan brooded, hating Rob Torren with a desperate intensity
surpassing even the hatred he'd felt on the _Stallifer_. A large part
of his hatred was due to helplessness. There was no way to fight back.
But he tried desperately to think of one.

On the fourth day he said abruptly, "Let's take a trip, Esther."

She looked at him in mute inquiry.

"For power," he said "and maybe something more. We might be able to
find out something. If there are inhabitants on this planet, for
instance. There can't be, but there's that beast--

"Maybe it's somehow connected with whatever or whoever built that
grid--that checkerboard arrangement I told you about. Something or
somebody built that, but I can't believe anything can live in those
sandstorms."

They'd followed the huge trail that had been visible on their first
landing in the polar regions. The great, two-yard-across pads of the
monster had made a clear trail for ten miles from the point of their
discovery. At the end of the trail there was a great gap in a cliff of
frozen sand. The Thing seemed to have devoured tons of ice-impacted
stuff. Then it had gone back into the swirling sandy wastes. It
carried away with it cubic yards--perhaps twenty or thirty tons--of
water-filled frozen sand.

But reason insisted that there could be no animal life on a planet
without plants, and no plants on a desert which was the scene of
daily typhoons, hourly hurricanes, and with no water anywhere upon it
save at the poles. And there was no vegetation there. A monster with
dozens of six-foot feet, and able to consume tons of wetted sand for
moisture, would need vast quantities of food for energy alone. And it
was unthinkable that food was to be found in the strangling depths of
perpetual sandstorms.

"There's another thing," Stan added. "With power to spare I could fuse
sand into something like a solid. Make a house, maybe, and chairs to
sit on, instead of having to wear our space suits all the time. Maybe
we could even heat the inside of a house!"

Esther smiled at him.

"Darling," she said wryly, "you've no idea how glad I'd be of a solid
floor to walk on instead of sand, and a chair to sit on, even if we
didn't have a roof!"

They had been, in effect, in the position of earth-castaways marooned
on a sand-cay which had not even seashells on it or fish around it.
There was literally nothing they could do but talk.

"And," she added, "if we could make a tub to take a bath in--"

She brightened at the thought. Stan hadn't told her of his own reasons
for having no hope. There was no point in causing her despair in
advance.

"We'll see what we see," he said. "Climb aboard."

The space skid was barely five feet long. It had a steering bar and a
thick body which contained its power-storage unit and drive. And there
was the seat which one straddled, and the strap to hold its passenger.
Two people riding it in bulky space suits was much like riding double
on a bicycle, but Stan would not leave Esther alone. Not since they'd
seen that horrifying trail!

They rose vertically and headed south in what was almost a rocket's
trajectory. Stan, quite automatically, had noted the time of sunrise at
the incredible structure beside which he'd landed. Later, he'd noted as
automatically the length of the planet's day. So to find his original
landing place he had only to follow the dawn line across the planet's
surface, with due regard for the time consumed in traveling.

They were still two hundred miles out in space when he sighted the
grid. He slanted down to it. It was just emerging from the deep black
shadow of night. He swooped to a landing on one of the hundred-foot
slabs of hinged metal three hundred feet above ground. It was clear of
sand. It had obviously been dumped.

Esther stared about her, amazed.

"But--people made this, Stan!" she insisted. "If we can get in touch
with them--"

"You sit over there," said Stan. He pointed to an intersection of the
criss-crossing girders. "It takes power to travel near a planet. My
power bank is half drained already. I'd better fill it up again."

He got out his cutting-torch. He turned it upon a motor-housing. The
plastic coating frizzled and smoked. It peeled away. Metal flared
white-hot and melted.

There was a monstrous creaking. All the plates in a square mile turned.
Swiftly. Only a desperate leap saved Stan from a drop to the desert
thirty stories below.

The great slabs pointed their edges to the sky. Stan waited. Esther
said startledly;

"That was on purpose, Stan!"

"Hardly," said Stan. "They'll turn back in a minute."

But they did not turn back. They stayed tilted toward the dawning sky.

"You may be right, at that," said Stan. "We'll see. Try another place."

Five minutes later they landed on a second huge slab of black metal,
miles away. Without a word, Stan ensconced Esther on the small platform
formed by crossing girders. He took out the torch again. The tiny,
blue-white flame. Smoke at its first touch. Metal flowed.

With a vast cachinnation of squeakings, a mile-square section shifted
like the first....

"Something," said Stan grimly, "doesn't want us to have power. Maybe
they can stop us, and maybe not."

The swelling which was the motor-housing was just within reach from
the immovable girder crossing on which Esther waited. Stan reached
out now. The torch burned with a quiet fierce flame. A great section
of metal fell away, exposing a motor exactly like the one he'd first
examined--slabs of allotropic graphite and all. He thrust in and cut
the cables. He reached in with the charging clips--

There was a crackling report in the space skid's body. Smoke came out.

       *       *       *       *       *

Stan examined the damage with grimly set features.

"Blew another fuse," he told Esther. "We're licked. When I took power
the first time, I ruined a motor. It's been found out. So the plates
turned, today, to--scare me away, perhaps, as soon as I cut into
another. When I didn't scare and severed the cables, high-voltage
current was shot into them to kill me or ruin whatever I was using the
power for. Whether there's life here or not, there's intelligence--and
a very unpleasant kind, too!"

He re-fused the skid, scowling.

"No attempt to communicate with us!" he said savagely. "They'd know
somebody civilized cut into that motor-housing! They'd know it was an
emergency! You'd think--"

He stopped. A faint, faint humming sound became audible. It seemed to
come from nowhere in particular--or from everywhere. But it was not the
formless humming of a rising wind. This sound was a humming punctuated
by hurried, rhythmic clankings. It was oddly like the sound of cars
traveling over an old-fashioned railway--one with unwelded rail joints.
Then Esther jerked her head about.

"Stan! Look there!"

Something hurtled toward them in the gray dawn light. It was a machine.
Even in the first instant of amazement, Stan could see what it was
and what it was designed to do. It was a huge, bulbous platform above
stiltlike legs. At the bottoms of the legs were wheels. The wheels
ran on the cross-girders as on a railroad track, and the body of the
thing was upraised enough to ride well above the sidewise-tilted slabs.
There were other wheels to be lowered for travel on the girders which
supported the slabs.

It was not a flying device, but a rolling one. It could travel in
either of two directions at right angles to each other, and had been
designed to run only on the great grid which ran beyond the horizon.
It was undoubtedly a maintaining machine, designed to reach any spot
where trouble developed, for the making of repairs, and it was of such
weight that even the typhoonlike winds of a normal day on this world
could not lift it from its place.

It came hurtling toward them at terrific speed. It would roll
irresistibly over anything on the girders which were its tracks.

"Get on!" snapped Stan. "Quick!"

Esther moved as swiftly as she could, but space suits are clumsy
things. The little skid shot skyward only part of a second before the
colossus ran furiously over the place where they had been. A hundred
feet beyond, it braked and came to a seemingly enraged stop. It stood
still as if watching the hovering, tiny skid with its two passengers.

"It looks disappointed," said Stan dourly. "I wonder if it wants to
chase us?"

He sent the skid darting away. They landed. In seconds the vibration
caused by the huge machine's motion began and grew loud. They saw it
race into view. As it appeared, instantly a deafening clamor began.
Slabs in all directions rose to their vertical position, so that the
two humans could not dodge from one row of girders to another. And then
with a roar and a rush the thing plunged toward them once more.

Again the skid took off. Again the huge machine overran the spot where
they had been, then stopped short as if baffled. Stan sent his odd
craft off at an angle. Instantly the gigantic thing was in motion,
moving in lightning speed in one direction, stopping short to move on a
new course at right angles to the first, and so progressing in zigzag
but very swift pursuit.

"'Won't you land so I can crush you?' said the monster to us two," said
Stan dryly. "They won't let us have any more power, and we haven't any
more to waste. But still--"

He listened to his suit-radio, twisting the tuning dials as he sent the
skid up in a spiral.

"I'm wondering," he observed, "if they're trying to tell us something
by radio. And meanwhile I'd like a more comprehensive view of this
damned checkerboard!"

A faint, faint, wavering whine came into the headphones.

"There's something," he commented "Not a main communication wave,
though. A stray harmonic--and of a power beam, I think. They must use
plenty short waves!"

But he was searching the deadly monotony of the grid below him as he
spoke. Suddenly, he pointed. All the area below them to the horizon
was filled with geometric shapes of grids and squares. But one space
was different from the rest. Four squares were thrown into one, there.
And as the skid dived for a nearer view, that one square was seen to be
a deep, hollow shaft going down toward the very vitals of this world.
As Stan looked, though, it filled swiftly with something rising from
its depths. The lifting thing was a platform, and things moved about on
it.

"That's that!" said Stan hardly.

He shot the skid away in level flight at topmost speed, with the great
rolling machine following helplessly and ragingly on its zigzag course
below.

The horizon was dark, now, with the coming night. As Stan lifted
for the rocketlike trajectory that would take him back to the polar
regions, the white sun sank fiercely. There was a narrow space on which
the rays smote so slantingly that the least inequality of level was
marked by shadow. Gigantic sand dunes were outlined there. But beyond,
where the winds began, there was only featureless swirling dust.

Stan was very silent all the way back. Only, once, he said calmly, "Our
power units will soak up a pretty big charge in a short time. We packed
away some power before the fuse blew."

There was no comment for Esther to make. There was life on the planet.
It was life which knew of their existence and presence--and had tried
to kill them for the theft of some few megawatts of power. It would not
be easy to make terms with the life which held other life so cheaply.

With the planet's only source of power now guarded, matters looked less
bright than before. But after they had reached the icecap, and when
they slanted down out of the airlessness to the spot which was their
home because their seeds had been planted there--as they dived down for
a landing, their real situation appeared.

There was a colossal object with many pairs of legs moving back and
forth over the little space where their food plants sprouted. In days,
those plants would have yielded food. They wouldn't yield food now.

Their garden was being trampled to nothingness by a multilegged machine
of a size comparable to the other machine which had chased them on
the grid. It was fifty feet high from ground to top, and had a round,
tanklike body all of twenty feet in diameter. Round projections at
one end looked like eyes. It moved on multiple legs which trampled in
orderly confusion. It stamped the growing plants to pulped green stuff
in the polar sand. It went over and over and over the place where
the food necessary for the humans' survival had promised to grow. It
stamped and stamped: It destroyed all hope of food. And it destroyed
all hope.

Because, as Stan drove the skid down to see the machine more clearly,
it stopped in its stamping. It swung about to face him, with a
curiously unmachinelike ferocity. As Stan veered, it turned also. When
he sped on over it and beyond, it wheeled and came galloping with
surprising speed after him.

Then they saw another machine. Two more. Three. They saw dark specks
here and there in the polar wastes, every one a machine like the one
which had tramped their food supply out of existence. And every one
changed course to parallel and approach the skid's line of travel. If
they landed, the machines would close in.

There was only so much power. The skid could not stay indefinitely
aloft. And anywhere that they landed--

       *       *       *       *       *

But they did land. They had to. It was a thousand miles away, on the
dark side of the planet, in a waste of sand which looked frozen in the
starlight. The instant the skid touched ground, Stan made a warning
gesture and reached over to turn off Esther's suit-radio. He opened his
own face-plate and almost gasped at the chill of the midnight air. With
no clouds or water vapor to hinder it, the heat stored up by day was
radiated out to the awful chill of interstellar space at a rate which
brought below zero temperatures within hours of sundown. At the winter
pole of the planet, the air itself must come close to turning liquid
from the cold. But here, and now, Stan nodded in his helmet as Esther
opened her face-plate.

"No radio," he told her. "They'll hardly be able to find us in several
million square miles if we don't use radio. But now you get some sleep.
We're going to have a busy time, presently!"

Esther hesitated, and said desperately, "But--who are they? What are
they? Why do they want to kill us?"

"They're the local citizens," said Stan. "I was wrong, there are
inhabitants. I've no more idea what they may be like than you have.
But I suspect they want to kill us simply because we're strangers."

"But how could an intelligent race develop on a planet like this?"
demanded Esther unbelievingly. "How'd they stay alive while they were
developing?"

Stan shrugged his shoulders.

"Once you admit that a thing is so," he said dryly, "you can figure out
how it happened. This sun is a dwarf white star. That means that once
upon a time it exploded. It flared out into a nova. Maybe there were
other planets nearer to it than this, and they volatilized when their
sun blew up. Everything on this planet, certainly, was killed, and for
a long, long time after it was surely uninhabitable by any standard.
There's a dwarf star in the Crab Nebula which will melt iron four
light-hours away--land that was a nova twelve hundred years ago. It
must have been bad on this planet for a long time indeed.

"I'm guessing that when the first explosion came the inner planets
turned to gas and this one had all its seas and forests and all its
atmosphere simply blasted away to nothingness. Everything living on its
surface was killed. Even bacteria in the soil turned to steam and went
off into space. That would account for the absolute absence of life
here now."

"But--" said Esther.

"But," said Stan, "the people--call them people--who lived here
were civilized even then. They knew what was coming. If they hadn't
interstellar drive, flight would do them no good. They'd have nowhere
to go. So maybe they stayed. Underground. Maybe they dug themselves
caves and galleries five--ten--twenty miles down. Maybe some of those
galleries collapsed when the blow-up came, but some of the people
survived. They'd stayed underground for centuries. They'd have to! It
might be fifty thousand years they stayed underground, while Khor Alpha
blazed less and less fiercely, and they waited until they could come up
again.

"There was no air for a while up here. They had to fight to keep alive,
down in the planet's vitals. They made a new civilization, surrounded
by rock, with no more thought of stars. They'd be hard put to it for
power, too. They couldn't well use combustion, with a limited air
supply. They probably learned to transform heat to power direct. You
can take power--electricity--and make heat. Why not the other way
about? For maybe fifty thousand years, and maybe more, they had to
live without even thinking of the surface of their world. But as the
dwarf star cooled off, they needed its heat again."

He stopped. He seemed to listen intently. But there was no sound in the
icy night. There were only bright, unwinking stars and an infinity of
sand--and cold.

"So they dug up to the surface again," he went on. "Air had come back,
molecule by molecule from empty space, drawn by the same gravitation
that once had kept it from flying away. And the fused-solid rock of
the surface, baked by day and frozen by night, had cracked and broken
down to powder. When air came again and winds blew, it was sand. The
whole planet was desert. The people couldn't live on the surface again.
They probably didn't want to. But they needed power. So they built that
monster grid they're so jealous of."

"You mean," Esther demanded incredulously, "that's a generator?"

"A transformer," corrected Stan. "Solar heat to electricity. Back on
Earth the sun pours better than a kilowatt of energy on every square
yard of Earth's surface in the tropics--over three million kilowatts to
the square mile. This checkerboard arrangement is at least a hundred
and fifty by two hundred miles. The power's greater here, but, on
Earth, that would mean ninety thousand million kilowatts. More than a
hundred thousand million horsepower--more than the whole Earth uses
even now!

"If those big slabs convert solar radiation into power--and I charged
up the skid from one of them--there's a reason for the checkerboard,
and there's a reason for dumping the sand--it would hinder gathering
power--and there's a reason for getting upset when somebody started to
meddle with it. And they're upset! They'll have the conservation of
moisture down to a fine point, down below, but they made those leggy
machines to haul more water, from the poles. When they set them all to
hunting us, they're very much disturbed! But luckily they'd never have
worked out anything to fly with underground and they're not likely to
have done so since--considering the storms and all."

There was a short silence. Then Esther said slowly, "It's--very
plausible, Stan. I believe it. And they'd have no idea of space travel,
so they'd have no idea of other intelligent races, and actually they'd
never think of castaways. They wouldn't understand, and they'd try
to kill us to study the problem we presented. That's their idea, no
doubt. And they've all the resources of a civilization that's old and
scientific. They'll apply them all to get us--and they won't even think
of listening to us! Stan! What can we do?"

Stan said amusedly, there in the still, frigid night of an unnamed
planet, "Why--we'll do plenty! We're barbarians by comparison with
them, Esther, and barbarians have equipment civilized men forget. All
savages have spears, but a civilized man doesn't even always carry a
pocketknife. If we can find the _Erebus_, we can probably defy this
whole planet--until they put their minds to developing weapons. But
right now you go to sleep. I'll watch."

Esther looked at him dubiously. Five days of sandstorms should have
buried the little yacht irrecoverably.

"If it's findable," she said. Then she added wistfully, "But it would
be nice to be on the _Erebus_ again. It would feel so good to walk
around without a space suit! And--" she added firmly, "after all, Stan,
we are engaged! And if you think I like trying to figure out some way
of getting kissed through an opened face-plate--"

Stan said gruffly, "Go to sleep!"

       *       *       *       *       *

He paced up and down and up and down. They were remarkably unlike
castaways in the space tale magazines. In those works of fiction, the
hero is always remarkably ingenious. He contrives shelters from native
growths on however alien a planet he and the heroine may have been
marooned; he is full of useful odd bits of information which enable
him to surprise her with unexpected luxuries, and he is inspired when
it comes to signaling devices. But in five days on this planet, Stan
had been able to make no use of any natural growth because there
weren't any. He'd found no small luxuries for Esther because there was
literally nothing about but sand. And there was strikingly little use
in a fund of odd bits of information when there was only desert to
apply it to--desert and sandstorms.

What he'd just told Esther was a guess; the best guess he could make,
and a plausible one, but still a guess. The only new bit of information
he'd picked up so far was the way the local inhabitants made electric
motors. And he had to bet his and Esther's life on that!

He watched the chrono. And a good half hour before night would strike
the checkerboard grid, he was verifying what few preparations he could
make. A little later he waked Esther. And just about twenty minutes
before the sunset line would reach the grid, they soared upward to
seek it. If Stan's plan didn't work, they'd die. He was going to
gamble their lives and the last morsel of power the skid's power unit
contained, on information gained in two peeps at slab-motors on the
grid, and the inference that all motors on this planet would be made
on the same principle. Of course, as a subsidiary gamble, he had also
to bet that he in an unarmed and wrecked space yacht could defy a
civilization that had lived since before Khor Alpha was a dwarf star.

They soared out of atmosphere on a trajectory that saved power but was
weirdly unlike any normal way of traveling from one spot on a planet's
surface to another. Beneath them lay the vast expanse of the desert,
all dense, velvety black except for one blindingly bright area at its
western rim. That bright area widened as they neared it, overtaking the
day. Suddenly the rectangular edges of the grid shed appeared, breaking
the sharp edge of dusk.

The _Erebus_ had grounded about fifty miles northward from the planet's
solitary structure. Stan turned on his suit-radio and listened
intently. There was no possible landmark. The dunes changed hourly
during the day and on no two days were ever the same. He skimmed the
settling sand clouds of the dusk belt. Presently he was sure he had
overshot his mark.

He circled. He circled again. He made a great logarithmic spiral out
from the point he considered most likely. The power meter showed the
drain. He searched in the night, with no possible landmark. Sweat came
out on his face.

Then he heard a tiny click. Sweat ran down his face. He worked
desperately to localize the signal Esther had set to working in the
yacht before she left it. When at last he landed and was sure the
_Erebus_ was under the starlit sand about him, he looked at the power
gauge and tensed his lips. He pressed his space helmet close to
Esther's, until it touched. He spoke, and his voice carried by metallic
conduction without the use of radio.

"We might make it if we try now. But we're going to need a lot of power
at best. I'm going to gamble the local yokels can't trace a skid drive
and wait for morning, to harness the whirlwinds to do our digging for
us."

Her voice came faintly back to him by the same means of communication.

"All right, Stan."

She couldn't guess his intentions, of course. They were probably
insane. He said urgently:

"Listen! The yacht's buried directly under us. Maybe ten feet, maybe
fifty, maybe Heaven knows how deep! There's a bare chance that if we
get to it we can do something, with what I know now about the machines
in use here. It's the only chance I know, and it's not a good one. It's
only fair to tell you--"

"I'll try anything," said her voice in his helmet, "with you."

He swallowed. Then he stayed awake and desperately alert, his
suit-microphones at their highest pitch of sensitivity, during the long
and deadly monotonous hours of the night.

There was no alarm. When the sky grayed to the eastward, he showed her
how he hoped to reach the yacht. The drive of the skid, of course,
was not a pulsatory field such as even the smallest of space yachts
used. It was more nearly an adaptation of a meteor-repeller beam, a
simple reactive thrust against an artificial-mass field. It was the
first type of drive ever to lift a ship from Earth. For take-off and
landing and purposes like meteor mining it is still better than the
pulsating-field drive by which a ship travels in huge if unfelt leaps.
But in atmosphere it does produce a tremendous black-blast of repelled
air. It is never used on atmosphere-flyers for that very reason, but
Stan proposed to make capital of its drawback for his purpose.

When he'd finished his explanation, Esther was more than a little pale,
but she smiled gamely.

"All right, Stan. Go ahead!"

"We'll save power if we wait for the winds," he told her.

Already, though, breezes stirred across the dawn-lit sand. Already they
were hot breezes. Already the fine, impalpable sand dust which settled
last at nightfall was rising in curious opaque clouds which billowed
and curled and blotted out the horizon. But the grid was hidden by the
bulge of the planet's surface.

Stan pointed the little skid downward in a hollow he scooped out with
his space-gloved hands. He set the gyros running to keep it pointed
toward the buried yacht. He had Esther climb up behind him. He lashed
the two of them together, and strapped them to the skid. And he waited.

In ten minutes after the first sand grains pelted on his armor, the sky
was hidden by the finer dust. In twenty there were great gusts which
could be felt even within the space suits. In half an hour a monster
gale blew.

Stan turned on the space skid's drive. It thrust downward toward the
sand and the buried yacht. It thrust upward against the air and pelting
sand.

In three-quarters of an hour the sandstorm had reached frenzied
violence--but the skid pushed down from within a little hollow. Its
drive thrust up a spout of air. That spout drew sand grains with it.
But it was needful to increase the power. After an hour a gigantic
whirlwind swept around them. It tore at the two people and the tiny
machine. It sucked up such a mass of powdery sand particles that their
impact on the space suits was like a savage blow.

Emptiness opened beneath the skid as sand went whirling up in a
sandspout the exact equivalent of a waterspout at sea. Stan and Esther
and the skid itself would have been torn away by its violence but that
the skid's drive was on full, now. The absurd little traveler thrust
sturdily downward. When sand was drawn away by wind, it burrowed down
eagerly to make the most of its gain.

Its back-thrust kept a steady, cone-shaped pressure on the sand which
would have poured in upon it. Stan and Esther were buried and uncovered
and buried again, but the skid fought valorously. It strove to dig
deeper and to fling away the sand that would have hidden it from view.
It remained, actually, at the bottom of a perpetually filling pit which
it kept from filling by a geyser of upflung sand from its drive.

       *       *       *       *       *

In twenty minutes another whirlwind touched the pit briefly. The
skid--helped by the storm--dug deeper yet. There came other swirling
maelstroms....

The nose of the skid touched solidity. It had burrowed down nearly
fifty feet, with the aid of whirlwinds, and come to the yacht _Erebus_.

But it was another hour before accident and fierce efforts on Stan's
part combined to let him reach the air-lock door, and maneuver the skid
to keep that doorway clear, and for Esther to climb in--followed by
masses of slithering sand--and Stan after her.

Inside the buried yacht, Stan fumbled for lights. He made haste to
turn off the signaling device that had led him back to it deep under
the desert's surface. And it was strangely and wonderfully still here,
buried under thousands of tons of sand.

Esther slipped out of her space suit and smiled tremulously at Stan.

"Now?"

"Now," said Stan, "if you want to, you can start cooking. We could do
with a civilized meal. And I'll see what I can do toward a slightly
less uncertain way of life."

He went forward. The _Erebus_ was a small yacht, to be sure. It was
a bare sixty feet over-all, and of course as a pleasure craft it had
no actual armament. But within two bulging blisters at the bow the
meteor-repellers were mounted. In flight, in space, they could make
a two-way thrust against stray bits of celestial matter, so that if
a meteor was tiny it was thrust aside, or if too large the _Erebus_
swerved away.

From within, Stan changed the focus of the beams. They had been set
to send out tiny reaction beams no larger than a rifle bore. At ten
miles such a beam would be six inches across, and at forty a bare two
feet. He adjusted both to a quickly widening cone and pointed one up,
the other down. One would thrust violently against the sand under the
yacht, and the other against the sand over it. The surface sand, at
least, could rise and be blown away. The sand below would support the
yacht against further settling.

He went back to where Esther laid out dishes.

"I've started something," he told her. "One repeller beam points up to
make the sand over our heads effectively lighter so it can be blown
away more easily. The storm ought to burrow right down to us, with
that much help. After we're uncovered, we may, just possibly, be able
to work the ship up to the surface. But after that we've got to do
something else. The repellers aren't as powerful as a drive, and it's
hardly likely we could lift out of gravity on them. Even if we did,
we're a few light-centuries from home. To fix our interstellar drive we
need the help of our friends of the grid."

Esther paused to stare.

"But they'll try to kill us!" she protested. "They've tried hard! And
if they find us we've no weapons at all--not even a hand-blaster!"

"To the contrary," said Stan dryly, "we've probably the most ghastly
weapon anybody ever invented--only it won't work on any other planet
than this."

Then he grinned at her. Now, he too was out of his space suit. The food
he'd asked her to prepare was out on the table, but he ignored it. He
took one step toward her. And then there came a muffled sound, picked
up by the outside hull-microphones. It grew in volume. It became a
roar. Then the yacht shifted position. Its nose tilted upward.

"The first step," said Stan, "is accomplished. I can't stop to dine.
But--"

He kissed her hungrily. Five days--six, now--in space suits with the
girl one hopes to marry has its drawbacks. An armored arm around the
hulking shoulders of another suit of armor--even with a pretty girl
inside it--is not satisfying. To hold hands with three-eighth-inch
space gloves is less than romantic. And to try to kiss a girl
three-quarters buried in a space helmet leaves much to the imagination.
Stan kissed her. It took another shifting movement of the yacht, which
toppled them the length of the cabin, to make him stop.

Then he laughed and went to the control room.

Vision screens were useless, of course. The little ship was still most
of her length under sand, but the repellers' cones of thrust had dug a
great pit down to her. Now Stan juggled the repellers to take fullest
advantage of the storm. At times--with both beams pushing up--the ship
was perceptibly lifted by uprushing air. And Stan could be prodigal
with power, now. The skid was sharply limited in its storage of energy,
but all the space between the two skins of the _Erebus_ was a power
bank. It could travel from one rim of the Galaxy to the other without
exhausting its store. And the upward lift of whirlwinds--once there
were six within ten minutes--and the thrusts of the repellers gradually
edged the _Erebus_ to the surface.

Before nightfall it no longer lay in a sand pit. It was only half
buried in sand. And when the winds died down to merely savage gales,
at twilight, and then slowly diminished to more angry gusts, and at
long last there was calm without and even the impalpable fine dust that
settled last no longer floated in the air, and the stars shone--then
Stan was ready.

He turned on the ship's communicator and sent a full-power wave out
into the night. He spoke. What he said would be unintelligible, of
course, but he said sardonically to the empty desert:

"Yacht _Erebus_ calling! Down on the desert, every drive smashed, and
not so much as a hand-blaster on board for a weapon. Maybe you'd like
to come and get us!"

Then--and only then--he went and ate the long delayed meal Esther had
made ready.

It was half an hour before the microphones gave warning. Then they
relayed clankings and poundings and thuddings on the sand. It was the
sound of heavy machines marching toward the _Erebus_. Scores of them.
The machines separated and encircled the disabled yacht, though they
were invisible behind the dunes all about. And then, simultaneously,
they closed in.

The landing beams of the _Erebus_ flashed out. Light flickered in the
chill darkness. The beams darted here and there.

Then the machines appeared. The scene was remarkable. Over the dunes
marched gigantic metal monsters, many-legged, with bodies as great as
the _Erebus_ itself. Great bulges on their forward parts gave the look
of eyes, as if these were huge insects marching to devour and destroy.
As the landing-light beams flickered from one to another of them, huge
metallic tusks appeared, and toothed jaws--used for excavation. They
were not machines designed for war, but they were terrifying, and they
could be terrible.

Esther's hand on Stan's shoulder trembled as the monsters closed in.
And then Stan, in the unarmed and seemingly defenseless little space
yacht, swung the meteor-repeller controls and literally cut them to
pieces.

"We're barbarians," said Stan, "compared to these folk. So we've an
advantage. It's likely to be only temporary, though!"

       *       *       *       *       *

He watched the carcasses of the great machines, flicking the
landing-light beams back and forth. They were tumbled terribly on the
ground. Some were severed in two or three places, and their separate
sections sprawled astonishedly on a dune-side. One was split through
lengthwise. Another had all of one set of legs cut off clean, and lay
otherwise unharmed but utterly helpless.

Out of that incapacitated giant a smaller version of itself crawled.
It was like a lifeboat. Stan watched. Other small versions of the
great machines appeared. One made a dash at the _Erebus_, and he
cut it savagely in two. There was no other attack. Instead, the
smaller many-legged machines ran busily from one to another of the
wrecks--seeming to gather up survivors--and then went racing away into
the dark.

Then there was stillness.

"They knew we saw them," said Stan grimly. "They knew we could smash
them. And they realized that we wouldn't unless they attacked again. I
wonder what they think of us now?"

"What you did to them was--awful," said Esther. She shuddered. "I still
don't know what it was. I never heard of any weapon like that!"

"It could only exist here," said Stan. He grimaced. "We've
meteor-repellers. They push away anything in their beam. I narrowed
them to their smallest size and put full power into them. That was all."

"But meteor-repellers don't cut!" protested Esther.

"These did," said Stan. "They were working through sand, just that.
They pushed it. With a force of eighty tons in a half-inch beam.
The sand that was in the beam was shot away with an acceleration of
possibly fifty thousand gravities--and more sand kept falling into the
beam. Each particle was traveling as fast as a meteor when it hit,
over there. When it struck, it simply flared to incandescent vapor. No
atomic torch was ever hotter! And there was no end to the sand I threw.
You might say I cut those machines up with a sand blast, but there was
never such a sand blast as this! It took a barbarian--like me--to think
of it!

"Now," he added, "I need to go over to those machines and get some
stuff I think they've got in them. That's what I provoked this attack
for. But maybe the drivers are laying low to jump on me if I try it.
I'll have to wait until nearly dawn. They won't risk waiting until
almost time for the sandstorms! Not with fifty miles to travel back to
the grid!"

He stayed on guard. Presently he yawned. He stood up and paced back
and forth, glancing from time to time at the screen. After a long time
Esther said:

"You didn't sleep last night, Stan. Could I watch for a while so you
can rest?"

"M'm-m. Yes. If anything stirs, wake me. But I don't look for action
here. The real action will be back underground."

He went back into the cabin and threw himself down. Almost instantly
he was asleep. Esther watched the vision-plates dutifully. There was
silence and stillness everywhere. After a long time she looked in on
the sleeping Stan. A little later she looked in again, reached over,
and touched his hair gently. Later still she looked in yet again. She
kissed him lightly--he did not wake--and went back to the control
cabin, to watch the vision-plates.

Nothing happened.

Out in space, though, very many millions of miles away, a tiny mote
winked into existence as if by magic, with the cutting off of its
Bowdoin-Hall field drive. It hung seemingly motionless for a while, as
if orienting itself. It seemed to locate what it sought--and vanished,
but again winked into being a bare few thousand miles from the planet's
surface.

It did not disappear again. It drove down toward the half-obscured disk
at the normal acceleration of a landing drive. Toward dawn it screamed
down into atmosphere above the planet's surface. It drove on into the
day, and into howling winds and far-flung sand. It rose swiftly, and
went winging toward the summer polar cap.

Khor Alpha's single planet had gone unvisited by men during two
centuries of interstellar travel, but now there had been three separate
visitations within ten days.

The last of the three visitors settled to ground where hoarfrost partly
whitened the desert's face. A full-power carrier-wave spread out from
it. And in the control room of the _Erebus_ a speaker suddenly barked
savagely:

"Stan Buckley! I'm here to kill you! Communicate!"

Esther gasped. She recognized the voice. Rob Torren! Back more than
two months before Stan had expected him! The words did not make sense
to her. Stan had tried to spare her despair by concealing the fact
that Torren's return would be to kill him, under a compact which her
presence here made void.

"Rob!" cried Esther softly into the transmitter. "Rob Torren! It's
Esther calling! Esther Hume!"

An indescribable sound from the speaker. With trembling hands she
adjusted the vision receiver. She looked into the taut, drawn, raging
features of Rob Torren. He stared at her out of the screen.

"Stan's asleep, Rob!" cried Esther eagerly. "He didn't expect you back
for a long time yet! You're wondering how I got here? Oh--"

Laughing a little, joyously, she told of her desperate voyage to be
with Stan when he should be tried, and how her drive had been burnt out
by impinging on the drive of the space skid on which Stan had left the
_Stallifer_. And of course she told of her subsequent meeting with Stan.

"And there are inhabitants here," she finished eagerly, "and they've
been trying to kill us."

She was all joy and relief at Torren's arrival. But his face was
ravaged by conflicting emotions, all of them intense and all harrowing.

"But--what's the matter, Rob?" she asked. "You look so queer!" Then she
added in abrupt, startled doubt. "And Rob! Why did you say you had come
back to kill Stan? You were joking, weren't you?"

He raged at her instantly. "He coached you, eh? To pretend you didn't
know anything? Trying to make me take you both to safety on a promise
of fighting me later? It won't work! I've a line on your wave and I'll
be coming! I'll be coming fast! And maybe you've no weapons, but I
have! I've a Space Guard one-man ship! I forced the _Stallifer_ to dock
at Lora Beta and put me ashore! I got this ship to hunt back for Stan,
claiming his recapture as my responsibility! I did plan to have him
write you a letter before I killed him, but since you know everything
now--"

She saw the beginning of an infuriated movement. Then the screen went
blank.

After a moment's frightened irresolution she went to Stan. She woke
him, and after the first three words he was sternly alert.

"This sets things up nicely!" he said bitterly. "You didn't know about
him, of course, but--our friends of the grid are concocting weapons
to destroy us, and now he's streaking here along his locator line to
blast us with everything a Space Guard ship can carry! And he'll have
long-range stuff! He can burn us to a crisp if we put a repeller beam
on him! We can't sand-blast him! We can't--"

He began to struggle swiftly into a space suit. Esther said:

"Wherever you're going, I'm going too!"

"You're not!" he said harshly. "You'll go in the control room with your
hands on the beam controls. If some of the local citizens are hiding in
those wrecks, you'll smash them if they jump me! I haven't so much as a
pocketknife! You've got to be my weapons while I dig into those wrecks!"

       *       *       *       *       *

He went swiftly out the air-lock with only a cutting-torch in his
hands. He fairly ran toward the débris of the attacking army of
machines. He reached the first. It had been sliced longitudinally in
half by a stream of sand particles traveling at fifty miles or better
per second, in a stream of air of the same velocity. Nothing could have
withstood such an attack. No material substance in the universe could
have resisted it. Four-inch plates of steel and foot-thick girders had
been cut through like so much dough, the severed edges gone not to
liquid but to vapor in the deadly stream.

The whole mechanism of the machine was exposed. The great biting jaws,
designed to tear away huge masses of intermingled sand and ice. The
tusks to break loose sections for the jaws to handle. The tanks to
contain the precious damp material. The machine had not been made for
fighting, but it, alone, could have torn the _Erebus_ to fragments.
With an army of such machines--

Stan clambered into the neatly halved shell with his cutting-torch. All
about him were small devices, cryptic things, the strictly practical
contrivances of a hundred-thousand-year-old civilization. He itched
to examine them, but he needed certain bars of allotropic graphite
he suspected would be here. They were. The motors which ran the leg
movements were motors like those which turned the great slabs. They
consisted of slabs of graphite and the metal which slid past them. That
was all. Only one special allotrope of graphite makes a motor of such
simplicity. Only--

He burdened himself with black, flaky bars, cutting ruthlessly through
machinery to which an engineer would have devoted months of study. He
had an even dozen of the bars in his arms when a sudden blast rocked
him. He whirled, and saw a small cloud of still incandescent vapor and
Something which was separating horribly into many steaming pieces.
Other Things seemed to leap to smother him under their weight. He could
not see them save as vague shapes, but he knew they were there.

Another exploded as Esther, in the _Erebus_ and watching with the
infrared scanner, desperately used the weapon which had never existed
before and could not be used anywhere save on this one planet.

Stan ran clumsily for the ship over the drifting, powdery sand.
Inhumanly resolute unhuman things leaped after him. He saw the flares
as Esther destroyed them. He knew that she was wide eyed and trembling
and sick with horror at what she had to do.

But he stumbled into the air-lock and dogged it shut behind him. And
Esther came running to greet him, not shaking and not trembling and not
horrified, but with burning eyes and the fiery anger of a Valkyrie. She
was not wearing her space suit.

"They tried to kill you!" she cried fiercely. "They were hiding!
They'd have murdered you--"

He put down his bars of allotropic graphite. He reached out to take her
in his arms. But--

"Damn these space suits!" he said furiously. "You'll have to wait to be
kissed until this job's finished!"

He tore up the flooring hatch above the little ship's drive. He jerked
off the housing.

"Keep watch!" he called to the control room. "At least one of the
machines must be waiting behind the dunes, hoping for a break!"

He worked with frantic haste, shedding his space suit by convulsive
movements. This should have been the most finicky of fine-fitting
jobs. To repair a Bowdoin-Hall drive unit by replacing its graphite
bars for maximum efficiency is a matter for micrometric precision.
But efficiency was not what he wanted, now, but speed. And these bars
almost fitted. They were vastly unlike the five-hundred-pound monsters
for the grid slabs. These should at least move the ship, and if the
ship could be moved--

He had two of them in place and six more to go when the speaker in the
control room blared triumphantly.

"Stan Buckley! Tune in! I'm right above your ship! Tune in!"

Stan swore in a sick disgust. Two out of eight was not enough. He was
helpless for lack, now, of time. And the corrosive hatred that comes
of helplessness filled him. He went into the control room and said
drearily to Esther:

"Sorry, my dear. Another twenty minutes and you'd have been safe. I
think we lose."

He kissed her, and with fury-steadied fingers tuned in the
communication-plate. Rob Torren grinned furiously at him.

"I thought I'd let you know what's happening," said Torren in a voice
that was furry with whipped-up rage. "I'm going to go back and report
that you were killed resisting arrest. I'm going to melt down the yacht
until it could never be identified as the _Erebus_--if anybody ever
sees it again! And--maybe you'll enjoy knowing that I did the things I
charged you with, and have the proceeds safely banked away! I faked the
evidence that proved it on you. And I hoped to have Esther, too, but
she's spoiled that by trying to come and help you! Now--"

"Now," said Stan coldly, "you'll stand off a good twenty miles and beam
us. You'll take no chances that we might be able to throw a handful
of sand at you! You'll be so damned cautious that you won't even come
close to see your success with your own eyes! You'll read it off on
instruments! You're pretty much afraid of me!"

"Afraid?" raged Rob Torren. "You'll see!"

The communication screen went blank. Stan leaped to the meteor-repeller
controls and stared at the vertical vision-plate which showed all the
sky above.

"Not the shadow of a chance," he said coldly, "but a beam does make a
little glow! If he misses us once--but he won't--maybe I can get in one
blast...."

There was tense silence. Deadly silence. The screen overhead showed a
multitude of cold, unwinking stars. One of them winked out and on again.

"I'll try--" began Stan.

Then the screen seemed to explode into light. Something flared like
a nova in the sky. Intolerable brilliance filled a quarter of the
screen--and faded. Swiftly. It went out.

Stan drew a deep breath.

"That," he said softly, "I think was a hundred thousand million
horsepower in a power beam. I think our friends the grid makers have
been working on armament to fight us with, and I think they've got
something quite good! They don't like strangers. Torren was a stranger,
and they got a shot at him, and they took it. And now they'll get set
to come over here after us. If you'll excuse me, I'll go back to the
drive!"

He returned to the cabin where two out of a necessary eight graphite
bars were in place. He worked. Fast. No man ever worked so fast or so
fiercely or with such desperately steady hands. In twenty minutes he
made the last, the final connection. And just as he dropped the hatch
in place, Esther called anxiously:

"More machines coming, Stan! The microphones pick them up!"

"Coming!" he told her briskly. He went to the instrument board and
threw switches here and there. "The normal thing," he said evenly,
"would be to lift from the ground here, on landing drive, and go into
field drive out of atmosphere. But we won't do it for two reasons. One
is that we have no landing drive. The other is that at normal take-off
acceleration, our friends of the grid would take a potshot at us with
the thing they used on Rob Torren. With a hundred thousand million
horsepower. So--here goes!"

He stabbed a simple push button.

With no perceptible interval and with no sensation of movement, the
_Erebus_ was out in deep space. The screens showed stars on every
side--all the stars of the Galaxy. And these were not the hostile,
immobile, unfriendly stars the first voyagers of space had seen. With
the Bowdoin-Hall field collapsing forty times a second, the stars moved
visibly. The nearer ones moved more swiftly and the farther ones more
slowly, but all moved. The cosmos seemed very small and almost cosy,
and the stars mere fireflies and the Rim itself no more than a few
miles away from them.

Stan watched. He said, "We're not making much time. Not over six
hundred lights, I'd say. But we'll get there."

"And--and when we do--"

"H'm," said Stan. "You can swear Torren said he'd committed the crimes
he charged me with and faked the evidence against me. With that
testimony, they'll examine the evidence as they do when there are no
witnesses. It'll fall down. And I'll be cleared."

"Stan!" said Esther indignantly. "I meant--"

"And when I'm cleared," said Stan, "we'll get married."

"That," admitted Esther, "is what I had in mind."

He kissed her, and stood watching the moving cosmos critically.

"Our friends the grid builders have gotten waked up now," he observed.
"They know they're not the only intelligent race in the universe, and
they may not like it. They're a fretful crew! But they'll have to be
made friends with. And quick, or they might cause trouble! I think I'll
apply to be assigned to the task force that will undertake the job. It
ought to be interesting! Not a dull moment!"

Esther scowled at him.

"Now," she protested, "you reduce me to being glad we're not making our
proper speed! Because after you get back--"

"Listen, my dear," said Stan generously, "I'll promise to come home
from time to time. And when I do I'll grab you like this, and kiss you
like this--" There was an interlude. "And do you think you'll manage to
survive?"

Esther gasped for breath. But she was smiling.

"I--I think I'll be able to stand it," she admitted.

"Good!" said Stan. "Now let's go have some breakfast!"



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Planet of Sand" ***

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