In any event, once we had thrashed out the matter of whether or not we were going to stay here or pull up and head for the next planet on our schedule, the five of us set to work. We knew we had only a week—Mattern would never grant us an extension unless we came up with something good enough to change his mind, which was improbable—and we wanted to get as much done in that week as possible. With the sky as full of worlds as it is, this planet might never be visited by Earth scientists again.
Mattern and his men served notice right away that they were going to help us, but reluctantly and minimally. We unlimbered the three small halftracks carried aboard ship and got them into functioning order. We stowed our gear—cameras, picks and shovels, camel’s-hair brushes—and donned our breathing-masks, and Mattern’s men helped us get the halftracks out of the ship and pointed in the right direction.
Then they stood back and waited for us to shove off.
“Don’t any of you plan to accompany us?” Leopold asked. The halftracks each held up to four men.
Mattern shook his head. “You fellows go out by yourselves today and let us know what you find. We can make better use of the time filing and catching up on back log entries.”
I saw Leopold start to scowl. Mattern was being openly contemptuous; the least he could do was have his men make a token search for fissionable or fusionable matter! But Leopold swallowed down his anger.
“Okay,” he said. “You do that. If we come across any raw veins of plutonium I’ll radio back.”
“Sure,” Mattern said. “Thanks for the favor. Let me know if you find a brass mine, too.” He laughed harshly. “Raw plutonium! I half believe you’re serious!”
We had worked out a rough sketch of the area, and we split up into three units. Leopold, alone, headed straight due west, towards the dry riverbed we had spotted from the air. He intended to check alluvial deposits, I guess.
Marshall and Webster, sharing one halftrack, struck out to the hilly country southeast of our landing point. A substantial city appeared to be buried under the sand there. Gerhardt and I, in the other vehicle, made off to the north, where we hoped to find remnants of yet another city. It was a bleak, windy day; the endless sand that covered this world mounted into little dunes before us, and the wind picked up handfuls and tossed it against the plastic dome that covered our truck. Underneath the steel cleats of our tractor-belt, there was a steady crunch-crunch of metal coming down on sand that hadn’t been disturbed in millennia.
Neither of us spoke for a while. Then Gerhardt said, “I hope the ship’s still there when we get back to the base.”
Frowning, I turned to look at him as I drove. Gerhardt had always been an enigma: a small scrunchy guy with untidy brown hair flapping in his eyes, eyes that were set a little too close together. He had a degree from the University of Kansas and had put in some time on their field staff with distinction, or so his references said.
I said, “What the hell do you mean?”
“I don’t trust Mattern. He hates us.”
“He doesn’t. Mattern’s no villain—just a fellow who wants to do his job and go home. But what do you mean, the ship not being there?”
“He’ll blast off without us. You see the way he sent us all out into the desert and kept his own men back. I tell you, he’ll strand us here!”
I snorted. “Don’t be a paranoid. Mattern won’t do anything of the sort.”
“He thinks we’re dead weight on the expedition,” Gerhardt insisted. “What better way to get rid of us?”
The halftrack breasted a hump in the desert. I kept wishing a vulture would squeal somewhere, but there was not even that. Life had left this world ages ago. I said, “Mattern doesn’t have much use for us, sure. But would he blast off and leave three perfectly good halftracks behind? Would he?”
It was a good point. Gerhardt grunted agreement after a while. Mattern would never toss equipment away, though he might not have such scruples about five surplus archaeologists.
We rode along silently for a while longer. By now we had covered twenty miles through this utterly barren land. As far as I could see, we might just as well have stayed at the ship. At least there we had a surface lie of building foundations.
But another ten miles and we came across our city. It seemed to be of linear form, no more than half a mile wide and stretching out as far as we could see—maybe six or seven hundred miles; if we had time, we would check the dimensions from the air.
Of course it wasn’t much of a city. The sand had pretty well covered everything, but we could see foundations jutting up here and there, weathered lumps of structural concrete and reinforced metal. We got out and unpacked the power-shovel.
An hour later, we were sticky with sweat under our thin spacesuits and we had succeeded in transferring a few thousand cubic yards of soil from the ground to an area a dozen yards away. We had dug one devil of a big hole in the ground.
And we had nothing.
Nothing. Not an artifact, not a skull, not a yellowed tooth. No spoons, no knives, no baby-rattles.
Nothing.
The foundations of some of the buildings had endured, though whittled down to stumps by a million years of sand and wind and rain. But nothing else of this civilization had survived. Mattern, in his scorn, had been right, I admitted ruefully: this planet was as useless to us as it was to them. Weathered foundations could tell us little except that there had once been a civilization here. An imaginative palaeontologist can reconstruct a dinosaur from a fragment of a thighbone, can sketch out a presentable saurian with only a fossilized ischium to guide him. But could we extrapolate a culture, a code of laws, a technology, a philosophy, from bare weathered building foundations?
Not very likely.
We moved on and dug somewhere else half a mile away, hoping at least to unearth one tangible remnant of the civilization that had been. But time had done its work; we were lucky to have the building foundations. All else was gone.
“Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away,” I muttered.
Gerhardt looked up from his digging. “Eh? What’s that?” he demanded.
“Shelley,” I told him.
“Oh. Him.”
He went back to digging.
Late in the afternoon we finally decided to call it quits and head back to the base. We had been in the field for seven hours and had nothing to show for it except a few hundred feet of tridim films of building foundations.
The sun was beginning to set; Planet Four had a thirty-five hour day, and it was coming to its end. The sky, always somber, was darkening now. There was no moon. Planet Four had no satellites. It seemed a bit unfair; Three and Five of the system each had four moons, while around the massive gas giant that was Eight a cluster of thirteen moonlets whirled.
We wheeled round and headed back, taking an alternate route three miles east of the one we had used on the way out, in case we might spot something. It was a forlorn hope, though.
Six miles along our journey, the truck radio came to life. The dry, testy voice of Dr. Leopold reached us:
“Calling Trucks Two and Three. Two and Three, do you read me? Come in, Two and Three.”
Gerhardt was driving. I reached across his knee to key in the response channel and said, “Anderson and Gerhardt in Number Three, sir. We read you.”
A moment later, somewhat more faintly, came the sound of Number Two keying into the three-way channel, and I heard Marshall saying, “Marshall and Webster in Two, Dr. Leopold. Is something wrong?”
“I’ve found something,” Leopold said.
From the way Marshall exclaimed “Really!” I knew that Truck Number Two had had no better luck than we. I said, “That makes one of us, then.”