Long Ago, Far Away

CHAPTER 2

The snow-mist blew aside and there was plainly a ship lying partly crushed upon the snow. Half its length was smashed, but he could see that it had never flown with wings. There weren't any.

"It looks like a spaceship," said Gail breathlessly.

Soames spoke between set teeth.

"That would finish things for all of us!"

And it would, without any qualifications. On a world already squabbling and divided into two main power-groups and embittered neutrals; on a world armed with weapons so deadly that only the fear of retaliation kept the peace.... Contact with a farther-advanced race would not unite humanity, either for defense or for the advantages such a contact might reasonably bring. Instead, it would detonate hatred and suspicion into madness.

A higher civilization could very well tip the scales, if it gave one side weapons. The world outside the Iron Curtain could not risk that the Iron Curtain nations become best friends of possible invaders. The communist leaders could not risk letting the free nations make alliance with a higher technology and a greater science. So actual contact with a more-advanced race would be the most deadly happening that could take place on the world as it was today.

Soames jumped out. He looked at the ship and felt sick. But he snapped a quick photograph. It had no wings and had never owned any. It had been probably a hundred feet long, all bright metal. Now nearly half of it was crushed or crumpled by its fall. It must have been brought partly under control before the impact, though, enough to keep it from total destruction. And Soames, regarding it, saw that there had been no propellers to support it or pull it through the air. There were no air-ducts for jet-motors. It wasn't a jet.

There were no rockets, either. The drive was of a kind so far unimagined by men of here and now.

Gail stood beside Soames, her eyes bright. She exclaimed, "Brad! It isn't cold here!"

The children looked at her interestedly. One of the girls spoke politely, in wholly unintelligible syllables. The girls might be thirteen or thereabouts. The boys were possibly a year older, sturdier and perhaps more muscular than most boys of that age. All four were wholly composed. They looked curious but not in the least alarmed, and not in the least upset, as they'd have been had older companions been injured or killed in the ship's landing. They wore brief garments that would have been quite suitable for a children's beach-party in mid-summer, but did not belong on the Antarctic ice-cap at any time. Each wore a belt with moderately large metal insets placed on either side of its fastening.

"Brad!" repeated Gail. "It's warm here! Do you realize it? And there's no wind!"

Soames swallowed. The camera hung from his hand. It either was or it could be a spaceship that lay partly smashed upon the ice. He looked about him with a sort of total grimness. There was a metal girder, quite separate from the ship, which had apparently been set up slantingly in the ice since the landing. It had no apparent purpose.

Captain Moggs said peremptorily:

"Children! We insist on speaking to your parents! At once!"

Gail moved forward. Soames saw, now, a small tripod near the ship. Something spun swiftly at its top. It had plainly been brought out from inside the strange vessel. For a hundred yards in every direction there was no wind or snow. More than that, the calm air was also warm. It was unbelievable.

"Do you hear me?" demanded Captain Moggs. "Children!"

Gail said in a friendly fashion, smiling at the girls:

"I'm sure you don't understand a word I say, but won't you invite us to visit?"

Her tone and manner were plainly familiar to the children. One of the two girls smiled and stood aside for Gail to enter the ship. Soames and Captain Moggs followed.

It was quite as bright inside the ship as out-of-doors. There were no lights. It was simply bright. A part of the floor had buckled upward, and the rest was not level, but the first impression was of brilliance and the second was of a kind of simplicity which was bewildering. And there was a third. It was of haste. The ship seemed to have been put together with such urgent haste that nothing had been done for mere finish or decoration.

"I want to speak to the parents of these children!" said Captain Moggs firmly. "I insist upon it!"

"I suspect," said Soames grimly, "that in the culture these children came from, the proper place for parents is the home. This is a child-size spaceship, you'll notice."

The size of the door and chairs proved it. He saw through a crumpled, open doorway into the crushed part of the ship. There was machinery in view, but no shafts or gears or power-leads. He guessed it to be machinery because it could not be anything else. He saw a dented case of metal, with an opened top. The boys had apparently dragged it into the relatively undamaged part of the ship to work upon its contents. He could see coils of bare metal, and arrangements which might have been inductances. He took a sort of forlorn pride in guessing that the thing was some sort of communication-device.

There was a board with buttons on it. It might be a control-board, but it didn't look like it. There was a metal box with a transparent plastic front. One could see cryptic shapes of metal inside. Two bright-metal balls mounted on a side-wall. They had holes in them, about the right size for the hands of children like these to enter. There was a two-foot, carefully machined spiral of metal, intruding into and lessening the living-space of the ship. These things had functions he could not even guess at. He found himself resentful of things which were obviously the developments of science, and he could not even guess what they were for.

But alien? He looked at the boys. They were human children. They had absolutely nothing of strangeness about them. Their hair, their eyes and eyelashes were normal. Their noses. Their lips. Their teeth. In every respect they were as human as he was, or Gail.

He looked to the most urgent problem of the moment. He snapped pictures, before anything else.

One of the boys turned to the dented metal case. He began to arrange its contents in a somehow final fashion. Soames guessed that it had been damaged in the landing, and they'd made a repair.

The second boy touched Soames' elbow and showed him the box with the clear plastic front. He touched it, and an image appeared in the plastic. It was an image of the landscape outside. He shifted the box, and the landscape image flashed sidewise. He touched another control. The landscape flowed swiftly toward the viewer. It raced. Presently the ground seemed to drop away and Soames found himself staring at a picture which showed the ice-sheet and the sky and—very far away—the dark blue line which was the sea, now a hundred miles distant.

The boy nodded and made delicate adjustments. Then Soames looked at an image of the Gissell Bay base from which he and the others had set out an hour before. It was a remarkably clear image. Soames could even see the supply-plane waiting on the runway until it was time for take-off. He knew unhappily that the box was something which was not a radar, but performed all the functions of one and so many others that it was a different thing entirely.

Then Gail said:

"Brad! Look at this!"

She held out two necklaces that the girls had given her. She showed him the ornaments at their ends. One was a very tiny horse. It was beautifully done, and obviously from life. The head was larger than an ordinary horse's head would be. The body was lightly built. Each of its tiny feet had three toes.

Gail watched Soames' face.

"You see? How about this?"

The ornament of the other necklace was a tiny metal fish. It had fins and a tail, but no scales. Instead, its body was protected by bony armor. It was a ganoid fish, like a sturgeon. But it was not a sturgeon, though sturgeons are now the main representatives of what once were innumerable ganoid species.

Soames shook his head, then spoke to Gail and Captain Moggs. "The ship was built for children to operate, I can't imagine why. But there's nothing like a weapon in view. I'm going to call Base before they get alarmed."

He made a report which sounded as if there were some minor trouble with the 'copter and he'd landed. It did not check with his last call speaking insistently of caution, but he couldn't help it. Other bases were on the same wave-length. He said he'd call back. He intended to call for help—in handling the matter of the children—as soon as it would seem plausible that he needed help to get off the ground again.

But he felt shaky, inside. The radar-report and the static and earth-shock and concussion-wave of the night before had been improbable enough. But this was more incredible still. The children's ship must have appeared in the middle of all those unlikely phenomena. It was reasonable for it to have crashed amid such violence. But where had it come from, and why?

They were human and they were members of a culture beside which the current culture on Earth was barbaric. It could not be an Earth civilization. On a world where for thousands of years men had killed each other untidily in wars, and where they now prepared to destroy themselves wholly in a final one, there was no possibility of such a civilization existing in secret. But where was it?

Soames stood by the 'copter, staring bemusedly at the ship. The two boys came out. They went briskly to the shattered part of the ship and picked up a metal girder neatly matching the one that leaned absurdly where it was fixed in the icy surface. By the ease of their movements, it could not be heavy. It would have to be aluminum or magnesium to be so light. Magnesium alloy, at a guess.

One boy held it upright by the slanting beam. The other produced a small object Soames could not see. He bent over the ice and moved his hand to and fro. The new girder sank into the ice. They slanted it to meet the one already fixed. They held it fast for a moment. They went back to the wrecked ship. The second girder remained fixed, like the first one.

Soames went to look. The metal beam was deeply imbedded in the ice which somehow did not chill the air above it.

He heard a small sound. One of the boys, the one in the brown, tunic-like shirt, swept something across the plating of the crumpled vessel. The plating parted like wet paper. Soames watched in a sort of neither believing nor unbelieving detachment. A whole section of plating came away. The boy in the brown tunic very briskly trimmed plating away from a strength-member and had a third metal beam. Whatever instrument he used, it cut metal as if it were butter.

Both boys brought the third beam to where the others leaned to form a tripod. But this third bit of metal was curved. They lowered it, and the boy in the brown tunic matter-of-factly sliced through the metal, took out a V-shaped piece, and obviously made the rest of the metal whole once more. They raised it again, the boy moved his hand over the ice, it sank into it, they held it a moment only, and went off to the ship.

Soames went numbly to see what had happened. He picked up scraps of the trimmed-away metal.

Soames puzzled over the metal scraps. They did not look cut. They had mirror-bright surfaces, as if melted apart. But there'd been no flame....

The boys reappeared with the dented case that Soames guessed was a communication device of some sort. They carried it to the new tripod. One of them carried, also, a complicated structure of small rods which could be an antenna-system to transmit radiation of a type that Soames could not conceive of.

Captain Moggs came towards him from the 'copter.

"I called Base," she said. "Two snow-weasels will start here within the hour. Another 'copter is due in from an advanced observation post at any moment. It will be sent here as soon as it arrives."

Soames wondered numbly just how indiscreet she'd been, in a short-wave conversation that could be picked up by any of the other-nation bases that cared to listen in. But, just then, Gail came out of the ship.

"Brad," she said anxiously, "what are the boys doing?"

Soames knew only too well. If the dented case contained a communicator, which would use so complicated an antenna as lay ready for use, there could only be one answer. And there could be only one thing for him to do, considering everything.

"They're shipwrecked. They're setting up something to signal for help with. They've landed on a world of rather primitive savages and they want somebody to come and take them away."

"It mustn't be permitted!" said Captain Moggs firmly. "The ship must be examined! In our modern world, with the military situation what it is...."

Soames looked at her ironically.

He had metal scraps in his hand, those he'd picked up to examine as a savage might examine sawdust. There was a threadlike extension of metal from one scrap. He twisted it off and put it on his sleeve. He struck a light with his cigarette lighter. He touched it to the fibre of metal. There was a burst of flame. His sleeve was singed.

"Mostly magnesium," he said detachedly. "It's possible that they don't think of fire as a danger. They may not use fire any more. We don't light our houses with open flames any longer. They may not use flames at all. But I'm a savage. I do."

He sorted through the bits of silvery metal. Another morsel had a wire-like projection. He saw the boy with the green tunic laying something on the snow, from the ship to the tripod.

"A power-line," he said appalled. "They've got to signal nobody knows how far, with nobody can guess how much power in the signal. And they use power-leads the size of sewing-thread! But of course the people who built this ship would have superconductors!" Then he said, "I may be committing suicide, but I think I ought to, rather than let ..."

He moved forward. His throat was dry. He struck his lighter and touched the flame to the thread of metal on the second scrap. It flared. He threw the whole piece just as all the flammable alloy caught fire. In mid-air it became a ball of savage white incandescence that grew larger and fiercer as it flew. It was a full yard in diameter when it fell upon the dented case the boys had brought here.

That burst into flame. The new-made tripod caught. Flame leaped thirty feet into the air. Soames was scorched and blinded by the glare. Then the fire died swiftly and snow-white ash-particles drifted down on every hand.

The boy in the brown tunic cried out fiercely. He held out his hand with the thing that had cut metal glittering in it.

Soames faced the fourteen-year-old grimly. The boy's face was contorted. There was more than anger in it. The boy in the green tunic clenched and unclenched his hands. His expression was purest horror. One of the girls sobbed. The other spoke in a tone of despair so great and grief so acute that Soames was almost ashamed.

Then the boy in the brown tunic spoke very, very bitterly to the girl who'd evidently said something to restrain him. He turned his eyes from Soames. He went into the ship, stumbling a little.

The whole air of the three remaining children changed utterly. They had been composed and confident and even zestful. They'd acted as if the wrecking of their ship were an adventure rather than a catastrophe. But now they were dazed by disaster. First one of the girls, and then the second boy, and then the other girl went despairingly into the ship.

Soames looked at Gail. The boy in the brown tunic had pointed at him with the object that cut metal plates in half. He'd been stopped, most likely, by the girl's grief-stricken words. Soames had a profound conviction that the boy could easily have killed him. He had an equally strong conviction that it could have been a low price to pay for preventing the rest of these children's race from finding Earth.

"I suppose," said Gail, "that you feel pretty badly."

"I'm a savage. I've destroyed their signalling device. I may have kept their civilization from destroying ours. I feel like a murderer," he told her grimly. "And of children, at that. With luck, I may have kept them from ever seeing their families again."

After a long time Gail said with a curiously mirthless attempt at humor:

"Do you know, this is the biggest news story that's ever happened? And do you know that nobody would believe it?"

"But this," said Captain Moggs firmly, "is a matter of such military importance that nothing must be said about it at all! Nothing!"

Soames made no comment, but he didn't think the matter could be kept secret.

They waited. The children stayed in the ship.

After a very long time the children appeared again. The girls' faces were tear-streaked. They brought small possessions and placed them neatly in the snow. They went back for more.

"At a guess," said Soames, "that super-radar of theirs has shown them a 'copter on the way. They know they can't stay here. I've made it impossible for them to hope to be found. They've got to let themselves be taken away and they want to keep these things."

The bringing-out of small objects ended. The boy in the brown tunic went back in the ship.

When he re-emerged, he said something in the bitterest of bitter voices. The girls turned their backs to the ship. The girl with brown eyes began to weep. The boy in the green tunic shifted the small tripod to a new position. As he carried it, the calmness and the warmth of the air changed remarkably. There was a monstrous gust of icy wind, and warm calm, and another gust. But when he put the tripod down again there was only calm once more.

Soames heard the droning of another 'copter, far away.

The boy in the green tunic held out his hand. It had the glittering tiny object in it. From a fifty-foot distance, he swept his hand from one end to the other of the wrecked ship. Flame leaped up. The magnesium-alloy vessel burned with a brightness that stung and dazzled the eyes. A monstrous, a colossal flaming flare leaped and soared ... and died. Too late, Soames fumbled for his camera. There was no longer a wrecked ship on the ice. There were only a few, smoking, steaming fragments.

When the second 'copter landed beside the first, the four children were waiting composedly to be taken away.