The door finally slammed shut. Hunter fell to the vault floor, blood oozing from more than a dozen places.
He was critically injured; he knew that.
But he was not dead. Not yet, anyway, and all because just as before, someone within the mind ring trip had saved his life.
It was Zarex's robot, the danker 33418, who found Hunter's burned and battered body atop the mesa.
As soon as it was discovered that the pilot — and the mind ring — were missing, the UPF commanders immediately went into action. The entire planet was scanned, all the domes in the command cluster were searched, but there was little doubt where Hunter would go. That's why the robot was dispatched. The power packs on the soles of his feet could move him quicker than any jet pack or shuttle. He made the two-mile trip from the base to the mesa in less than twenty seconds.
It wasn't a moment too soon.
When the robot arrived, Hunter's uniform was almost totally engulfed in flame, boots and crash helmet included. It was only that the thin atmosphere discouraged extremely hot fires that the pilot wasn't totally consumed. The robot immediately covered him with a flame retardant he kept inside his massive utility belt. This single act saved Hunter's life — at least for a while.
A shuttle bearing Zarex and Tomm arrived seconds later. The first thing they saw was a small storm of smoke rising from Hunter's smoldering body. They thought for certain he was dead, he looked that bad.
They picked him up, put him in the shuttle, and instantly rocketed away up to orbit. Hunter's injuries were so severe this time, he had to be rushed to the emergency cube in the sick bay aboard the starship America.
Hooked up to a life monitor during the frantic ten-minute trip, Hunter's body was showing only the barest of vital signs, and these were fading fast. He wasn't moving, his brain waves were all over the map, and he was still bleeding profusely.
And try as they might, they just couldn't get the mind ring off his head.
6
Erx and Berx never heard the alert that Hunter was missing.
They were still off on the eastern part of the base, supervising the blasting of the first mountain.
They'd been here for nearly seven hours. The spacemen weren't even bothering to block their ears anymore. The sonic gun had been firing away at the target, removing rocks and dirt and rearranging its craggy face one blast at a time. They were probably a hundred feet or more into the side of the mountain by now, and the hole itself was nearly five hundred feet across.
But still they had found nothing but more rocks and dirt underneath.
"It will be light soon," Berx said, as he passed his flask to Erx. Their slow-ship was slowly running out, too.
Erx drank and then just shook his head. "A few more, my brother," he said. "When we see the first light of the sun, then we will call it quits.
The weary UPF officer signaled his sergeant again, and the sonic gun delivered yet another massive blast to the side of the crumbling mountain. This blast didn't even shake up any dirt. There was no spray of rocks, no cloud of dust.
"That was strange," the UPF officer mumbled. "Increase the charge," he told the sergeant.
Another blast. Then another. Then another.
Still, the face of the mountain stubbornly remained unchanged.
Erx put the viz scope up to his eyes.
This was an odd sight. It appeared the sonic gun had been able to blast its way through a good amount of rock and dirt but was now battering against something that looked akin to a mineral called iron-slate.
Or maybe it was just iron.
Erx, Berx, and the UPF officer were quickly away on their jet packs. They arrived at the base of the mountain seconds later. They were presented with a sheer face of a solid material, stone gray in color, buried very deeply into the side of the mountain. Berx flew up inside the hole and, with his electric sword, started pounding on the wall. A slight echo came back to them.
All three just looked at each other, bewildered.
"My God," Erx breathed. "Hawk was right."
These strange mountains weren't mountains at all.
It took no less than 150 more rounds from the sonic gun to finally break through what turned out to be a wall of reionized iron.
The UPF blaster team then created a tunnel, which in turn revealed an ancient doorway. It was twenty feet high and more than half that wide.
Moving through the buried portal, Erx, Berx, and the UPC disintegration squad found themselves inside a vast cavern, an enormous domed structure that had been encased in tons of dirt from the planet's frequent dust storms. Over the course of being battered for several thousand years, the gigantic structure had become part of the landscape.
"I think we've seen this type of thing before," Erx said to Berx as they stumbled through the cavern — they had traveled in space together for more than a century. "Do you recall a world in the old Oshkosh-Sylesian System named Bynk? It had been a city-planet at one time, a metropolis that wrapped right around the planet. Then something hap-pened; the world was abandoned. The storms came, and the structures became one with the dirt.
"I do recall Bynk," Berx replied. "But I have a feeling this place will be much different than that."
The blaster crew quickly set up some dim, temporary lanterns, illuminating a small portion of the unnatural cave. It was clear this place was a warehouse of sorts. What they could see of the wall was lined with shelves, containers, row upon row, until they faded off into the darkness. A small network of jet tubes ran through the place like dried-up, cracked arteries. Tracks sunk into the cast iron floor told of an elaborate system of depositing whatever was kept here.
The blaster team opened several random containers. They were about twenty by ten by ten and shaped like large coffins. And inside? Clothing: in the first container, shirts and jackets. Inside the second, hundreds of pairs of pants. Inside another, nothing but women's shoes. In another, men's boots. Many of these articles were made of woven natural fibers and even rubber, materials practically unknown these days.
It was at that moment the blaster team activated a much larger bank of hovering lamps. For the first time, those inside could see just how big this place was. In a word, it was gigantic. They were actually on the upper level of a multilayered underground storage facility, a dome of now obvious design. And there were also tens of thousands— perhaps hundreds of thousands — of the dusty blue containers. Some were still up on the racks; others had fallen and smashed to the floor centuries ago.
Everyone present shrank back a little. They suddenly realized this was a very eerie place.
"Ghosts…" Erx whispered. "I can almost feel them."
"You mean the things that ghosts once owned," Berx replied, his voice low as well. "I fear this place is haunted."
As if to underscore that point, they both stumbled over one container that lay broken at their feet. It held not shoes or clothes or hats. It was filled with something else: toys.
It was an American UPF lieutenant named Kennedy who was pulling watch duty atop Space Dock #1 when it happened.
Sitting beside the blinking yellow orb, he'd just watched a two-ship formation of UPF corvettes sink over the horizon. He knew two more would soon be rising in the opposite direction. But for the moment, a brief one, the sky above him was clear.
That's how it was that Kennedy saw them first. A very faint string of dim lights — that was his initial impression. Almost dreamlike. But the orb had commenced blinking rapidly, and soon enough, Kennedy knew this was no illusion.
He wasn't sure what to do. The orb was blinking madly now — it was doing its job. He made a comm-cell call to Gordon's office up on America, as he'd been instructed to do, but strangely, there was no reply. The reason for this lonely duty was very, very top secret; Kennedy didn't want to broadcast any news on a cell that might have unwanted ears listening in. So he left a secure-bubble message for Gordon and then cranked up his viz scanner to full power and just watched.