"SHE’S TRYING TO dig into that!” Kosti
marvelled.
Wilcox snapped out of his surprise and turned off the motor so
that the crawler stopped heaving, nuzzling the rock wall through
which its “memory” urged it.
“They must have put a false set of co-ordinates on
purpose,” suggested Rip.
But Dane, remembering that earlier trail which had ended in the
same fashion, stepped around Shannon and pressed his palms against
the slimy, wet surface of the rock. He was right!
Fainter than it had been in that other valley, the vibration
crept up his arms into his body. Not only that, but it was building
up, growing in strength even as he stood there. He could feel it
now in the ground, striking through the soles of his boots. And the
others caught it too.
“What in the—!” exploded Wilcox who had
hitched forward on the crawler to copy the experiment. “This
stuff must be hollow—that installation Tang talked
about—”
That was it, of course, the installation which the com-tech was
sure must rival Tarra’s largest computer, was broadcasting—not only in the sound waves picked up on the Queen, but
through the stuff of Limbo itself! But what was that vast power
being used for and why? And what was the trick which could send a
crawler through solid rock? For Dane did not agree with Rip that
the radar guide had been tempered with. If that had been done it
would have been more sensible to set it on a point far out in the
barrens, leading any would-be trackers into the midst of
nowhere.
“There’s a trick in this—” Wilcox
muttered as he moved his hand with patting motions across the
stone.
But Dane was sure that the astrogator was not going to spring
any hidden latch that way. His own examination of that other wall
in the bright light of day had taught him the futility of such a
hunt.
Kosti leaned against one of the caterpillar treads of the
crawler. “If it went through there once, it isn’t going
to do it now. We don’t know how to open the right door. A
stick of thorlite might just get us in.”
“Now that’s a course I can compute,
man.” Rip hunkered down, running his hands along the ground
line of that exasperating cliff. “How big a stick would do
it, do you think?”
But Wilcox shook his head. “You don’t lift ship
without coordinates. Here,” he swung to Kosti, “link
com-units with me and let’s see if with double power we can
raise the Queen.”
The jetman unhooked the energy core of his helmet com and joined
it to Wilcox’s in an emergency linkage.
“The installation is picking up voltage,” Dane
warned, judging by the vibration singing through his finger tips.
“Do you think you can break through the interference,
sir?”
“That’s a thought.” Wilcox pulled at his mike.
“But they’ve never been on steady. We can wait for a
break in their broadcast.”
Rip and Mura came back to the wall. The vibration was a steady
beat. Dane walked along to the right. He found a corner where the
narrow valley went on—masked by the fog. And he was sure that
as he shuffled along, his hand against the stone as a guide, that
beat grew stronger. Could one by the sense of touch trace the
installation? That was something to think about. What if they
unfastened the ropes which had linked them to the crawler and made
one long cord of them—an anchorage for a man to explore
north-east? He retraced his path and reported to Wilcox, adding his
suggestion.
“We’ll see what the captain says,” was the
astrogator’s answer.
The chill which was part of the fog struck into them now that
they were halted. Dane wondered how long Wilcox proposed to linger
there. But through their touch on the wall they became aware that the beat of that distant discharge or energy was
lessening, that one of the silent intervals was at hand. Wilcox,
his fingers on the wall, adjusted the mike with his other hand,
determined to make contact the first instant that he could.
And when all but the faintest rumble was gone from the rock, he
spoke swiftly in the verbal short-hand of the Traders. Their
discoveries among the ruins were reported, as was the present
impasse.
There followed an anxious wait. They might be out of range of
the Queen, even using the stepped-up com. But at last, through the
crackle of static, their orders reached them—to make a short
exploration along the valley if they wished. But to start back to
the ship within the hour.
Wilcox was helped from the crawler before they man-handled the
unwieldy vehicle around and re-set its dial for the return journey.
Then they tied the ropes into two longer lines for the
explorers’ use.
Dane did not wait for orders—after all, this was his
project. He knotted one of those lines about his middle, leaving
his hands free. Just as matter-of-factly Kosti took up the other,
almost out of Rip’s hands, nor did the jetman pay any
attention to Shannon’s protests.
“It’s starting up again,” Mura reported from
beside the cliff.
Dane put his left hand on the wall and started off, with Kosti
falling into step. They rounded the bend Dane had discovered into
the continuation of the valley which was still packed with the
cotton wool of the fog.
It was plain that no crawler had ever advanced this far. The
narrow way was choked with piles of loose debris over which they
helped each other to keep their footing. And the vibration in the
wall grew stronger as they went.
Kosti thumped his fist against the stone as they paused for a
breather.
“Those drums—they sure keep it up.”
The distant beat did carry with it some of the roll of a heavy
drum.
“Kinda like the Storm Dancers on Gorbe—just a
little. And that’s devilish stuff, gets into your blood ’til you
want to get out and prance along with them. This—well,
it’s nasty down deep—plain nasty. And you get to
believing something’s waiting out there—” the
jetman’s hand indicated the fog, “just waiting to
pounce!”
They kept on, climbing now as each ridge of rubble they
surmounted was a little higher than the preceding one. They must
have been well above the surface of the valley where they had left
the crawler when they came upon the strangest find of all.
Dane, clinging to an outcrop in the wall to retain his balance,
teetered on the top of a mound. His boot slipped and he tumbled
forward before Kosti could snatch him back, rolling down until he
brought up with a bruising bump against a dark object. Under his
clawing hands he felt, not the rough gravel and earth of the
valley, but something else—a smooth sleekness—Had he
come upon another ruined building this far from the city?
“Are you hurt?” called Kosti from above. “Look
out, I’m coming down.”
Dane backed away from his find as Kosti came down feet first in
a slide, his boots ringing against that buried thing with the
unmistakable clang of metal.
“What the—!” The jetman was on his knees,
feeling over that exposed surface. And he was able to identify it.
“A ship!”
“What?” Dane crowded in. But now he was able to see
the curve of the plates, various other familiar details. They
had come upon the wreckage of a crash—a bad crash.
The ship had jammed its way into the narrow neck of the valley as
if it were a cork pounded into a bottle. If they were to go any
farther they would have to climb over it. Dane took up his helmet
mike and reported the find to the three at the crawler.
“The wreck of that ship you heard coming in?” Wilcox
wanted to know. But Dane had seen enough to know that it was
not.
“No, sir. This has been here a long time—almost
buried and there’s rust eaten in. Years since this one
lifted, I think—”
“Stay where you are—we’re coming up
!”
“You can’t bring the crawler, sir. Footing is
bad.”
In the end they did come, supporting Wilcox over the worst bits,
keeping contact with the crawler by rope only. In the meantime
Kosti prowled around and over the wreck, trying to find a
hatch.
“It’s a rim prospector of a sort,” he reported
as soon as Wilcox was settled on a rock to view the find.
“But there’s something odd about it. I can’t name
the type. And it’s been rooted there a good time. That hatch
ought to be about here.” He kicked at a pile of loose gravel
which banked in one side of the metal hulk. “I think we could
dig in.”
Rip and Dane returned to the crawler and got the pioneer tools,
always kept lashed to the under-carriage of that vehicle. With the
shovel and lever they came back to work, taking turns at clearing
the debris of years.
“What did I tell you!” Kosti was exultant as a black
arc which must mark the top of an open hatch was uncovered.
But it was necessary to shift a lot more of the native soil of
Limbo before any one of them could crawl into that hole. Rim
prospectors were notoriously sturdy ships, if not so swift
travellers. They had to be designed to withstand conditions which
would shatter liners or disturb even the crack freight- and
mail-ships of the Companies.
And the condition of this one proved that its unknown builder
had wrought even better than he had hoped. For the smash of its
landing had not broken it into bits. Its carcass still hung
together, although parts were telescoped.
Kosti leaned on the shovel after he threw out the last scoop of
earth. “I can’t place it—” He shook his
head as if his inability to identify the type of ship worried
him.
“How could any one?” demanded Rip impatiently.
“She’s nothing but a scrap heap.”
“I’ve seen ’em smashed worse than this,”
Kosti sounded annoyed. “But the structure—it’s
wrong—”
Mura smiled. “Rather I would say, Karl, that it is right.
I know of no modern ship which could so well survive the landing
this one made.”
” ‘No modern ship’?” Wilcox seized upon
that “You have seen one like this before then?”
Mura’s smile grew broader. “If I had seen one such
as this plying its trade—then I would be five hundred,
perhaps eight hundred years old. This resembles the Class Three,
Asteroid Belt ships. There is one, I believe, on display in the
Trade Museum at Terraport East. But how it came here—”
he shrugged.
Dane’s historical cramming had not covered the fine points
of ship design, but Kosti and Rip both understood the significance
of that, and so did Wilcox.
“But,” the astrogator was the first to protest,
“they didn’t have hyper-drive five hundred years ago.
We were still confined to our own solar system—”
“Except for a few crazy experimenters,” Mura
corrected.
“There are Terran colonies in other systems which are over
a thousand years old, you know that. And the details of their
flights are sagas in themselves. There were those who went out to
cross the gap in frozen sleep, and those who lived for four, six
and eight generations in ships before their far off descendants
trod the worlds their ancestors had set course for. And there were
earlier variations of the hyper-drive, some of which may have
worked, though their inventors never returned to Terra to report
success. How an Asteroid prospector came to Limbo I cannot tell
you, but it has been here a very long time, that I will swear
to.”
Kosti flashed his torch into the hole they had uncovered.
“We can get in—at least for a way—”
Before the smash the prospector had been a small ship with
painfully confined quarters. Compared to her the Queen was closer
to a liner. And Kosti had to turn back at the inner hatch, unable
to squeeze his bulk through the jammed door space. In the end Mura
and Dane alone were able to force a path to what had been combined
storage and living quarters.
But under the beam of their torches a fact was immediately
clear. A great gap through which soil shifted faced them. This
section had been ripped open on the other side, the hole later buried by a slide. But the smash had not done that, the marks of
a flamer were plain on the metal. Some time after its crack-up the
prospector had been burnt open, the reason plain. For the portion
where they now stood had been stripped—although the traces of
cargo containers were on the floor and along the crumpled
walls.
“Looted!” Dane exclaimed as the light swept from
floor to wall.
To his right was the telescoped section which must have
contained the control cabin. There, too, were signs of the
flamer but the unknown looters had had little luck beyond. For the
holes revealed a mixture of rock and twisted metal which could
never be salvaged. Everything forward of the one cargo section they
stood in was a total loss.
Mura fingered that slit in the wall. “This was done some
time ago—maybe even years. But I think that it was done a
long, long time after the ship crashed.”
“Why did they they want to get in here?”
“Curiosity—a desire to see what she was carrying. A
prospector on a long course is apt to make surprising discoveries.
And this ship must have had something worth the taking. It was
looted. Then, so lightened, the wreckage may have turned over,
perhaps earthquakes resettled it and buried it more completely. But
it was looted—”
“You don’t think that the survivors of its crew may
have returned? They could have taken off in an escape flitter
before the crash—”
“No, there was too long a time between the crash and the
looting. This ship was discovered by someone else and stripped. I
do not think that they—” Mura pointed to the
fore-compartment, “escaped.”
Did Limbo have intelligent inhabitants, natives who could use a
flamer to cut through ship alloy? but the globe things—Dane
refused to believe that those queer creatures had looted the
prospector.
Before they climbed out of the ship Mura pushed as far as he
could into the fore-section. And when he inched out again he was
repeating a number.
”Xc—4 over 9532600,” he said. “Her
registry, by some chance it is still visible. Remember that:
Xc—4 over 9532600.”
But Dane was interested in another point. “That’s
Terran registry!”
“I suspected that it would be. She is Asteroid class—perhaps an experimental ship with one of the very early
hyper-drives. She might have been a private ship, the work of one
or two men, an attempt to pioneer in a new direction. Could that
tangle ever be uncoiled, our engineers ought to discover some
interesting alternate of the usual engine. It could be worth the
effort to break through just for that—”
“Ahoy!” the voice from the outer air summoned.
“What are you doing in there?”
Dane spoke into his mike, outlining what they had found. Then
they squeezed out through the hatch.
“Stripped bare!” Kosti was openly disappointed.
“Opened up and stripped bare. She must have been carrying
something really worth while for all the trouble they took to do
it.”
“I’d rather know who stripped her. Even if it was
done years ago,” was Rip’s comment and it was evident
that Wilcox agreed with him.
The astrogator pulled himself to his feet, leaning against a
rock. “We’d better get back to the Queen.”
Dane glanced around. He was sure that the fog was thinning here
as it had back around the ruins. If it would just clear—then
they could take up a flitter and really comb this district! They
had discovered no trace of Ali anywhere, and each step they took
seemed to plunge them only deeper into mystery.
Rich and his party had vanished—into a stone wall if the
crawler was to be relied upon. Now here was a ship which had been
looted long after it had crashed. And somewhere deep in the heart
of Limbo beat an unknown installation which might offer the worst
threat of all!
They went back to the crawler and by the time Wilcox was once
more established on it, the fog was retreating, more swiftly now.
As it lifted they read on the scraped walls, in the rutted soil
that this was or had been a thoroughfare in good use. Those who had come and gone this path had made it a lane of travel before
the arrival of the Queen, some of those marks were far more than a
few days old.
Survey’s tapes had said nothing of all this—the
ruins, the installation, the wrecked ships. Why not? Had
Survey’s report been edited? But Limbo had been put up to
legal auction just as usual. Did it mean that Survey’s scout
teams had not explored this continent to any extent—that
seeing the evidence of a burn-off their investigation had been
only superficial?
It was raining now, a drizzle which worked into the high collars
of their tunics and soaked the upper linings of their boots.
Unconsciously their pace quickened as the crawler took the homeward
trundle. Dane wished that there was some way they could cut cross
country and shorten the march which lay between them and the Queen.
But at least they no longer had to rope themselves to the
carrier.
They came into the ruins again, maintaining a careful watch for
any signs of life there. The brilliant hues of the buildings were
subdued by the lack of sunlight, but they still warred with one
another and jolted Terran senses in a subtle fashion. Either the
people who had built this city had a different type of vision, or a
chemical reaction from the burn-off had altered the colour scheme
for the worse. As it was none of the Traders felt exactly
comfortable if they looked too long at those walls.
“It isn’t altogether the colour—” Rip
spoke aloud. “It’s their shape, too. Those angles are
wrong—just enough wrong to be disturbing—”
“The burn-off blast may have shaken them up,”
offered Dane. But Mura was not ready to accept that.
“No, Rip has it right. The colours, they are wrong for us,
also the shapes. See that tower—over there? Only three
floors remain, but once it was taller. Let your eye rise along the
lines of those floors into space—where once must have been
other walls, It is all wrong—those lines—”
Dane saw what he meant. With imagination one could add floors to
the tower—but when one did! For a moment he was dizzy as he
tried that feat. It was very easy, after studying all this, to believe that the Forerunners had been alien, alien
beyond any race that the Terrans, new come to the Galactic lanes,
had encountered.
He hurriedly averted his eyes from that tower, winced as his
gaze swept across an impossibly scarlet foundation and fastened
with relief on the comfortable monotone of the crawler and
Wilcox’s square back in the drab brown Service tunic.
But the astrogator had not joined his companions in their
speculations concerning their surroundings. He was hunched over,
both hands clutching the mike of the stepped-up com Kosti had not
yet altered. And there was something in his posture which altered
the others as they watched him.
"SHE’S TRYING TO dig into that!” Kosti
marvelled.
Wilcox snapped out of his surprise and turned off the motor so
that the crawler stopped heaving, nuzzling the rock wall through
which its “memory” urged it.
“They must have put a false set of co-ordinates on
purpose,” suggested Rip.
But Dane, remembering that earlier trail which had ended in the
same fashion, stepped around Shannon and pressed his palms against
the slimy, wet surface of the rock. He was right!
Fainter than it had been in that other valley, the vibration
crept up his arms into his body. Not only that, but it was building
up, growing in strength even as he stood there. He could feel it
now in the ground, striking through the soles of his boots. And the
others caught it too.
“What in the—!” exploded Wilcox who had
hitched forward on the crawler to copy the experiment. “This
stuff must be hollow—that installation Tang talked
about—”
That was it, of course, the installation which the com-tech was
sure must rival Tarra’s largest computer, was broadcasting—not only in the sound waves picked up on the Queen, but
through the stuff of Limbo itself! But what was that vast power
being used for and why? And what was the trick which could send a
crawler through solid rock? For Dane did not agree with Rip that
the radar guide had been tempered with. If that had been done it
would have been more sensible to set it on a point far out in the
barrens, leading any would-be trackers into the midst of
nowhere.
“There’s a trick in this—” Wilcox
muttered as he moved his hand with patting motions across the
stone.
But Dane was sure that the astrogator was not going to spring
any hidden latch that way. His own examination of that other wall
in the bright light of day had taught him the futility of such a
hunt.
Kosti leaned against one of the caterpillar treads of the
crawler. “If it went through there once, it isn’t going
to do it now. We don’t know how to open the right door. A
stick of thorlite might just get us in.”
“Now that’s a course I can compute,
man.” Rip hunkered down, running his hands along the ground
line of that exasperating cliff. “How big a stick would do
it, do you think?”
But Wilcox shook his head. “You don’t lift ship
without coordinates. Here,” he swung to Kosti, “link
com-units with me and let’s see if with double power we can
raise the Queen.”
The jetman unhooked the energy core of his helmet com and joined
it to Wilcox’s in an emergency linkage.
“The installation is picking up voltage,” Dane
warned, judging by the vibration singing through his finger tips.
“Do you think you can break through the interference,
sir?”
“That’s a thought.” Wilcox pulled at his mike.
“But they’ve never been on steady. We can wait for a
break in their broadcast.”
Rip and Mura came back to the wall. The vibration was a steady
beat. Dane walked along to the right. He found a corner where the
narrow valley went on—masked by the fog. And he was sure that
as he shuffled along, his hand against the stone as a guide, that
beat grew stronger. Could one by the sense of touch trace the
installation? That was something to think about. What if they
unfastened the ropes which had linked them to the crawler and made
one long cord of them—an anchorage for a man to explore
north-east? He retraced his path and reported to Wilcox, adding his
suggestion.
“We’ll see what the captain says,” was the
astrogator’s answer.
The chill which was part of the fog struck into them now that
they were halted. Dane wondered how long Wilcox proposed to linger
there. But through their touch on the wall they became aware that the beat of that distant discharge or energy was
lessening, that one of the silent intervals was at hand. Wilcox,
his fingers on the wall, adjusted the mike with his other hand,
determined to make contact the first instant that he could.
And when all but the faintest rumble was gone from the rock, he
spoke swiftly in the verbal short-hand of the Traders. Their
discoveries among the ruins were reported, as was the present
impasse.
There followed an anxious wait. They might be out of range of
the Queen, even using the stepped-up com. But at last, through the
crackle of static, their orders reached them—to make a short
exploration along the valley if they wished. But to start back to
the ship within the hour.
Wilcox was helped from the crawler before they man-handled the
unwieldy vehicle around and re-set its dial for the return journey.
Then they tied the ropes into two longer lines for the
explorers’ use.
Dane did not wait for orders—after all, this was his
project. He knotted one of those lines about his middle, leaving
his hands free. Just as matter-of-factly Kosti took up the other,
almost out of Rip’s hands, nor did the jetman pay any
attention to Shannon’s protests.
“It’s starting up again,” Mura reported from
beside the cliff.
Dane put his left hand on the wall and started off, with Kosti
falling into step. They rounded the bend Dane had discovered into
the continuation of the valley which was still packed with the
cotton wool of the fog.
It was plain that no crawler had ever advanced this far. The
narrow way was choked with piles of loose debris over which they
helped each other to keep their footing. And the vibration in the
wall grew stronger as they went.
Kosti thumped his fist against the stone as they paused for a
breather.
“Those drums—they sure keep it up.”
The distant beat did carry with it some of the roll of a heavy
drum.
“Kinda like the Storm Dancers on Gorbe—just a
little. And that’s devilish stuff, gets into your blood ’til you
want to get out and prance along with them. This—well,
it’s nasty down deep—plain nasty. And you get to
believing something’s waiting out there—” the
jetman’s hand indicated the fog, “just waiting to
pounce!”
They kept on, climbing now as each ridge of rubble they
surmounted was a little higher than the preceding one. They must
have been well above the surface of the valley where they had left
the crawler when they came upon the strangest find of all.
Dane, clinging to an outcrop in the wall to retain his balance,
teetered on the top of a mound. His boot slipped and he tumbled
forward before Kosti could snatch him back, rolling down until he
brought up with a bruising bump against a dark object. Under his
clawing hands he felt, not the rough gravel and earth of the
valley, but something else—a smooth sleekness—Had he
come upon another ruined building this far from the city?
“Are you hurt?” called Kosti from above. “Look
out, I’m coming down.”
Dane backed away from his find as Kosti came down feet first in
a slide, his boots ringing against that buried thing with the
unmistakable clang of metal.
“What the—!” The jetman was on his knees,
feeling over that exposed surface. And he was able to identify it.
“A ship!”
“What?” Dane crowded in. But now he was able to see
the curve of the plates, various other familiar details. They
had come upon the wreckage of a crash—a bad crash.
The ship had jammed its way into the narrow neck of the valley as
if it were a cork pounded into a bottle. If they were to go any
farther they would have to climb over it. Dane took up his helmet
mike and reported the find to the three at the crawler.
“The wreck of that ship you heard coming in?” Wilcox
wanted to know. But Dane had seen enough to know that it was
not.
“No, sir. This has been here a long time—almost
buried and there’s rust eaten in. Years since this one
lifted, I think—”
“Stay where you are—we’re coming up
!”
“You can’t bring the crawler, sir. Footing is
bad.”
In the end they did come, supporting Wilcox over the worst bits,
keeping contact with the crawler by rope only. In the meantime
Kosti prowled around and over the wreck, trying to find a
hatch.
“It’s a rim prospector of a sort,” he reported
as soon as Wilcox was settled on a rock to view the find.
“But there’s something odd about it. I can’t name
the type. And it’s been rooted there a good time. That hatch
ought to be about here.” He kicked at a pile of loose gravel
which banked in one side of the metal hulk. “I think we could
dig in.”
Rip and Dane returned to the crawler and got the pioneer tools,
always kept lashed to the under-carriage of that vehicle. With the
shovel and lever they came back to work, taking turns at clearing
the debris of years.
“What did I tell you!” Kosti was exultant as a black
arc which must mark the top of an open hatch was uncovered.
But it was necessary to shift a lot more of the native soil of
Limbo before any one of them could crawl into that hole. Rim
prospectors were notoriously sturdy ships, if not so swift
travellers. They had to be designed to withstand conditions which
would shatter liners or disturb even the crack freight- and
mail-ships of the Companies.
And the condition of this one proved that its unknown builder
had wrought even better than he had hoped. For the smash of its
landing had not broken it into bits. Its carcass still hung
together, although parts were telescoped.
Kosti leaned on the shovel after he threw out the last scoop of
earth. “I can’t place it—” He shook his
head as if his inability to identify the type of ship worried
him.
“How could any one?” demanded Rip impatiently.
“She’s nothing but a scrap heap.”
“I’ve seen ’em smashed worse than this,”
Kosti sounded annoyed. “But the structure—it’s
wrong—”
Mura smiled. “Rather I would say, Karl, that it is right.
I know of no modern ship which could so well survive the landing
this one made.”
” ‘No modern ship’?” Wilcox seized upon
that “You have seen one like this before then?”
Mura’s smile grew broader. “If I had seen one such
as this plying its trade—then I would be five hundred,
perhaps eight hundred years old. This resembles the Class Three,
Asteroid Belt ships. There is one, I believe, on display in the
Trade Museum at Terraport East. But how it came here—”
he shrugged.
Dane’s historical cramming had not covered the fine points
of ship design, but Kosti and Rip both understood the significance
of that, and so did Wilcox.
“But,” the astrogator was the first to protest,
“they didn’t have hyper-drive five hundred years ago.
We were still confined to our own solar system—”
“Except for a few crazy experimenters,” Mura
corrected.
“There are Terran colonies in other systems which are over
a thousand years old, you know that. And the details of their
flights are sagas in themselves. There were those who went out to
cross the gap in frozen sleep, and those who lived for four, six
and eight generations in ships before their far off descendants
trod the worlds their ancestors had set course for. And there were
earlier variations of the hyper-drive, some of which may have
worked, though their inventors never returned to Terra to report
success. How an Asteroid prospector came to Limbo I cannot tell
you, but it has been here a very long time, that I will swear
to.”
Kosti flashed his torch into the hole they had uncovered.
“We can get in—at least for a way—”
Before the smash the prospector had been a small ship with
painfully confined quarters. Compared to her the Queen was closer
to a liner. And Kosti had to turn back at the inner hatch, unable
to squeeze his bulk through the jammed door space. In the end Mura
and Dane alone were able to force a path to what had been combined
storage and living quarters.
But under the beam of their torches a fact was immediately
clear. A great gap through which soil shifted faced them. This
section had been ripped open on the other side, the hole later buried by a slide. But the smash had not done that, the marks of
a flamer were plain on the metal. Some time after its crack-up the
prospector had been burnt open, the reason plain. For the portion
where they now stood had been stripped—although the traces of
cargo containers were on the floor and along the crumpled
walls.
“Looted!” Dane exclaimed as the light swept from
floor to wall.
To his right was the telescoped section which must have
contained the control cabin. There, too, were signs of the
flamer but the unknown looters had had little luck beyond. For the
holes revealed a mixture of rock and twisted metal which could
never be salvaged. Everything forward of the one cargo section they
stood in was a total loss.
Mura fingered that slit in the wall. “This was done some
time ago—maybe even years. But I think that it was done a
long, long time after the ship crashed.”
“Why did they they want to get in here?”
“Curiosity—a desire to see what she was carrying. A
prospector on a long course is apt to make surprising discoveries.
And this ship must have had something worth the taking. It was
looted. Then, so lightened, the wreckage may have turned over,
perhaps earthquakes resettled it and buried it more completely. But
it was looted—”
“You don’t think that the survivors of its crew may
have returned? They could have taken off in an escape flitter
before the crash—”
“No, there was too long a time between the crash and the
looting. This ship was discovered by someone else and stripped. I
do not think that they—” Mura pointed to the
fore-compartment, “escaped.”
Did Limbo have intelligent inhabitants, natives who could use a
flamer to cut through ship alloy? but the globe things—Dane
refused to believe that those queer creatures had looted the
prospector.
Before they climbed out of the ship Mura pushed as far as he
could into the fore-section. And when he inched out again he was
repeating a number.
”Xc—4 over 9532600,” he said. “Her
registry, by some chance it is still visible. Remember that:
Xc—4 over 9532600.”
But Dane was interested in another point. “That’s
Terran registry!”
“I suspected that it would be. She is Asteroid class—perhaps an experimental ship with one of the very early
hyper-drives. She might have been a private ship, the work of one
or two men, an attempt to pioneer in a new direction. Could that
tangle ever be uncoiled, our engineers ought to discover some
interesting alternate of the usual engine. It could be worth the
effort to break through just for that—”
“Ahoy!” the voice from the outer air summoned.
“What are you doing in there?”
Dane spoke into his mike, outlining what they had found. Then
they squeezed out through the hatch.
“Stripped bare!” Kosti was openly disappointed.
“Opened up and stripped bare. She must have been carrying
something really worth while for all the trouble they took to do
it.”
“I’d rather know who stripped her. Even if it was
done years ago,” was Rip’s comment and it was evident
that Wilcox agreed with him.
The astrogator pulled himself to his feet, leaning against a
rock. “We’d better get back to the Queen.”
Dane glanced around. He was sure that the fog was thinning here
as it had back around the ruins. If it would just clear—then
they could take up a flitter and really comb this district! They
had discovered no trace of Ali anywhere, and each step they took
seemed to plunge them only deeper into mystery.
Rich and his party had vanished—into a stone wall if the
crawler was to be relied upon. Now here was a ship which had been
looted long after it had crashed. And somewhere deep in the heart
of Limbo beat an unknown installation which might offer the worst
threat of all!
They went back to the crawler and by the time Wilcox was once
more established on it, the fog was retreating, more swiftly now.
As it lifted they read on the scraped walls, in the rutted soil
that this was or had been a thoroughfare in good use. Those who had come and gone this path had made it a lane of travel before
the arrival of the Queen, some of those marks were far more than a
few days old.
Survey’s tapes had said nothing of all this—the
ruins, the installation, the wrecked ships. Why not? Had
Survey’s report been edited? But Limbo had been put up to
legal auction just as usual. Did it mean that Survey’s scout
teams had not explored this continent to any extent—that
seeing the evidence of a burn-off their investigation had been
only superficial?
It was raining now, a drizzle which worked into the high collars
of their tunics and soaked the upper linings of their boots.
Unconsciously their pace quickened as the crawler took the homeward
trundle. Dane wished that there was some way they could cut cross
country and shorten the march which lay between them and the Queen.
But at least they no longer had to rope themselves to the
carrier.
They came into the ruins again, maintaining a careful watch for
any signs of life there. The brilliant hues of the buildings were
subdued by the lack of sunlight, but they still warred with one
another and jolted Terran senses in a subtle fashion. Either the
people who had built this city had a different type of vision, or a
chemical reaction from the burn-off had altered the colour scheme
for the worse. As it was none of the Traders felt exactly
comfortable if they looked too long at those walls.
“It isn’t altogether the colour—” Rip
spoke aloud. “It’s their shape, too. Those angles are
wrong—just enough wrong to be disturbing—”
“The burn-off blast may have shaken them up,”
offered Dane. But Mura was not ready to accept that.
“No, Rip has it right. The colours, they are wrong for us,
also the shapes. See that tower—over there? Only three
floors remain, but once it was taller. Let your eye rise along the
lines of those floors into space—where once must have been
other walls, It is all wrong—those lines—”
Dane saw what he meant. With imagination one could add floors to
the tower—but when one did! For a moment he was dizzy as he
tried that feat. It was very easy, after studying all this, to believe that the Forerunners had been alien, alien
beyond any race that the Terrans, new come to the Galactic lanes,
had encountered.
He hurriedly averted his eyes from that tower, winced as his
gaze swept across an impossibly scarlet foundation and fastened
with relief on the comfortable monotone of the crawler and
Wilcox’s square back in the drab brown Service tunic.
But the astrogator had not joined his companions in their
speculations concerning their surroundings. He was hunched over,
both hands clutching the mike of the stepped-up com Kosti had not
yet altered. And there was something in his posture which altered
the others as they watched him.