“I don’t think we went into hyper! What happened?”
They were up and about, watching the vision plate of the ship. Renfry’s guess was right. For instead of the complete blankness which closed in upon them when they made a big inter-system jump, they saw now the receding orb of the desert planet, its face a mass of shifting color as they withdrew from it.
“Must be heading for another planet in this same system,” Ashe supplied one answer. And, as the hours wore on, they believed that was the right one. The ship now appeared to be on course for the third planet of that unknown sun.
“Do we visit them all?” inquired Ross with some of his old flippancy. “If so— why? Milk delivery?”
Three days went by, four. They ate the alien food and moved restlessly about the ship, unable to pay attention for any length of time to anything but the screen in the control cabin. Then on the sixth day, came the signals of an approaching landing.
On the vision plate the goal showed a vivid blue-green, patched here and there with orange-red. It was arresting in its splashes of contrasting color. They had drawn lots for the occupancy of the three seats in the control cabin, and the odd man to be relegated to the bunk below. So Travis now lay alone and unseeing in the heart of the throbbing globe, wondering what new future they must confront.
The ship set down this time in the planet’s day. The Apache freed himself from his straps, stumbled in the return clutch of gravity to the ladder and climbed up to share the others’ view of the new world.
“No—!”
The ruined towers standing starkly to portion off the expanse of the fueling port had speared as straightly into the sky—but they had not been like this one. Against a background of cloudless, delicate pink, was an opaline dome, curved in flowing lines which spiraled up in turn to a fragile, frosting lace. It was impossible to believe that this was the result of man’s construction.
Tom lace…. As he studied those lifting spans, Travis could mark the breaks which spoiled the perfect pattern. Yet in spite of that damage there was still the fantastic beauty of foam and light and play of rainbow color. It rose out of dark foliage with a tinge of blue which was not a part of the green of his own world’s leaves.
And those leafy branches stirred almost languidly as if light breezes pulled at them, showing here and there a touch of other colors. Fruit? Flowers?
Renfry brought their attention away from the scene which was so ethereal as to seem unreal.
“Look!”
He was on his feet before the main control board, his hands grasping the back of the pilot’s seat so tightly that the muscles stood out on his taut arms. For the board had taken on life. They had witnessed the flickers of light which had heralded the readying of the ship’s guns. This was something else—a line of small winks of brilliance flowing unevenly down the rows of levers and buttons. And where each flashed a lever arose, a button sank or snapped above the level of the board. There was a final burst of light from a spot Travis could have covered with his thumb. And there a lid opened, a cavity beneath disgorged a small, coin-shaped bit of red metal which tinkled out, to roll across the floor.
Renfry came to life, dove to catch it up. He held it in his hand as if the disk was something very precious indeed.
“Home port!” He swung about to face them, his eagerness lighting a flame in his eyes. “This is the home port! And I think I am holding the course tape!”
There could be no other explanation for what they had just witnessed. The journey plotted by a dying man had come to its full conclusion. That small button of metal Renfry had closed fist upon, held now not only the secret of their arrival— but of their return. If they were ever to regain their own world, it would be because they had solved the workings of that disk.
Yet Travis’ eyes went from the technician’s clenched hand and what it held, back to the vision plate. The picture there was of a gentle wind lifting flowering branches about a tower of opal against a sky of palest rose. And the immediate future seemed at that moment more entrancing than the more distant one.
Perhaps Ashe shared that feeling at the moment. For the senior time agent moved toward the inner ladder. He paused at the well and looked back over his shoulder, to say with a strange simplicity:
“Let us go out—now.”
12
If there had once been a wide landing strip here, the space was long since swallowed by a cover of green. From the mass crushed by the landing of the ship came the scent of growing things, some spicy, some rank.
The Terrans had not worn their helmets, nor did they need to here. A sunlight no stronger than that of early summer in the temperate zone of their own world greeted them. And there was no burden of sand in the soft wind which whirled flower petals and torn leaves from the wreckage under their feet.
Now that they had a wider view than that offered by the vision plate, they noted other breaks in the luxuriance of growing things. The opal tower with its fantastic form was flanked by another building as strange and as far removed from the style of its companion as the desert world was from this green one. For the massive blocks of dull red, geometric in their solidity, could not have sprung from the same creative imagination—or perhaps from even the same race or age.
And beyond that was another, with knife-sharp gables and narrow windows secretive in its gray walls. It had a pointed roof of some rough material, dull under the sun, and gave rootage in places to vines, even a small tree. But again it was not of the same vintage as the fairylike dome or the massive blocks.
“Why—?” Ross’s head turned slowly as he looked from one of those totally dissimilar buildings to the next. All were tall, dwarfing the globe, and all had their lower stories hidden by the vegetation.
Travis thought back to a past which seemed a little blurred by all which had happened lately. There were places on his own world where a Zuni village in miniature stood beside a Sioux lodge or an Apache wickiup.
“A museum?” He ventured the only explanation he could see.
Ashe’s face was pale under his fading tan. He stared raptly from dome to block, block to sharply accented gables. Or else a capital where each embassy built in their home style.”
“And now it is all dead,” Travis added. For that was true. This was as deserted as the fueling port.
“Capital perhaps—of a galactic empire. What there is to be learned here! A treasure house—” Ashe was breathing fast. “We may have the treasures of a thousand worlds to uncover here.”
“And who will ever know—or care?” Ross asked. “Not that I’m not ready to go and look for them.”
Travis tensed. There was a stirring in the mass of tangled vegetation where the grounding of the globe had flattened some of the fern trees, bearing with them others tied together by vines. He watched that shaking of bruised and broken branches. Something alive was working its way from a point about a hundred yards away from the ship toward the wall of still-standing plants, its progress marked by that movement. And the fugitive thing must be fairly large by the amount of displacement.
Had that crawling unseen thing been injured in the crash of the tree ferns? Was it now dragging itself off to die? Travis listened, striving to hear more than the rustling of the leaves. But if the thing was hurt, it made no complaint. Animal? Or—something else? Something as alien as the dune lurkers, more than animal, yet different from man as they knew man?
“It’s in cover now,” breathed Ross. “Couldn’t haye been too hurt or it wouldn’t have moved so lively.”
“I think we can believe that this world isn’t as empty as it might look to the first glance,” Ashe said a little dryly. “And what about those?”