The Black Galaxy

CHAPTER FOUR Dead World

HE SAT down to draw plans and make calculations. But within seconds he was asleep. It was not only the sixty-some hours of unremitting tensity but the strain of worrying about what might be happening back on Earth that had worn him out. It would be believed of course that he had taken off in the Stellaris deliberately as an act of resentment at having his command taken away from him.

And of course he would be classed as a traitor or murderer or worse and immediately the Space Project Committee would set to work to duplicate the Stellaris and send it off—undoubtedly without orders to be wary of metal pyramids. He had to get back to Earth in time to stop that—which was patently impossible He could not hope to get the Stellaris or Kit back to Earth at all.

He slept and Kit stood valiantly beside the almost empty control-board. The Stellaris moved on toward the unnamed planet of an unknown sun, its acceleration giving the effect of weight for its occupants. Word went about the oddly-assorted ship's company of an approaching landing, and they cheered.

The girl biologists, in charge of the air purifying plant brought it back to proper functioning. The hydroponic vegetables had borne a small crop of edibles, despite the alternations of gravity with no gravity at all. The crop was very small but there were not many to eat it. Four painters, two electricians, three arc-welders and five girls had remained in the ship during the lunch-hour which seemed so long ago.

Presently a painter came to the control-room to present a complaint Kit put her finger to her lips, pointed to Rod and beckoned. She explained the significance of the spring, whispering, and made Rod as comfortable as she could without waking him. Then she went about the ship, talking earnestly to every individual.

It was a very good idea, because with continued normal feeling of weight, something like normal mental processes returned to the unwitting voyagers. They began to realize that none of Earth's other planets was suited for human use and that it was not likely that this unknown world would be of any value for them.

They realized, too, the utter lack of preparation for interstellar travel. There was not even food, save for the garden in the air-purifying room. But Kit managed to change their forebodings to no worse than anxious curiosity and when they had reached that stage they were prepared to act as intelligently as they could. So the situation, as far as the crew was concerned, was much more hopeful.

Kit waked Rod when their chosen planet loomed large before them. He opened his eyes as a voice bellowed monotonously, "No-o-o radar!" from somewhere below in the ship.

"We're almost there," said Kit anxiously, "and we don't know how to land."

Rod was instantly awake. He stared at the disk—big as a dinner-plate—on the planet ahead. The sensation of weight proved that the Stellaris was hurtling toward it at ever-increasing speed.

"We'll switch to pressor-beams and slow up," he said. "So far, pretty good!"

He sent calls through the ship, warning of the change-over. There was a bare second of weightlessness, then all floors became ceilings and all ceilings floors. It was purely a guesswork process. Rod could estimate the planet's distance only by the time needed for the pressor-beams to hit it.

He could not estimate the ship's speed at all. But he set to work to improvise landing tactics by rule of thumb. As a first measure he shifted the beams to one side of the planet so that the Stellaris would no longer head straight for the center of the visible hemisphere.

It was necessary to remember that the danger from alien space-ships might easily be greater here than anywhere else in the universe. The Stellaris might actually have come back to normal space so far within the empire of the pyramid-builders that radar beams and scouts were considered unnecessary. She could, conceivably, be heading for the very stronghold of the alien race and could have been undetected only because such an approach was unimaginable. But it was not likely.

The Ship's course altered almost imperceptibly. She had been approaching too fast for an endurable stop short of the strange world's surface. Now she went angling over to a line that would carry her past. But the great disk enlarged and grew greater and they saw seas upon it and clouds and vast areas of green vegetation. When the ship shot past the twilight zone the surface was within mere thousands of miles.

Rod said, "I wish we had a telescope on board. I'm not sure, but I saw some splotches that could be cities."

"Do you think—?"

"I'm not guessing," he told her. "I'm taking a chance. If they beam us it's the pyramid people. If they don't, it isn't. But there must be plenty of civilization in our galaxy. The fact that they had a trick all worked out to get warning when we made space-ships rather hints at that.

"If there are two civilizations there are probably hundreds of thousands. There must be too many for the pyramid people to wipe out so they only set traps for them and knock them off when they reach a space-ship culture."

Kit said uneasily, "That—ship certainly turned something on us, without trying to signal us first and we were plainly running away and not trying to fight them."

"Not surprising," said Rod briefly. "I saw the bas-reliefs they made of humans." The memory of them was clear.

He had. On the pyramid on Calypso there had been modeled human figures. They should have been irresistible as incitements to curiosity, so that the doors would be opened. But the figured people were not modeled by friendly artists. The figures had been made by craftsman who despised their models.

No artist can keep himself out of his work and the figures had actually made Rod angry at the scorn implicit in their making. They pictured humans with strict accuracy but managed somehow to classify them as beasts and vermin. Men would not have pictured men with such scorn.

Rod had felt instant suspicion and hostility toward the builders of the pyramid and was disinclined to do anything they planned for him to do. That was why he'd cut into the pyramid instead of hopefully opening its doors—and that was why there was as yet no warning that humans had achieved space-travel.

Kit said presently, "You're planning to land, Rod. Can we test the air?"

"The sun's the same color as ours at home," Rod told her. "It must have nearly the same spectrum. And the vegetation's green. The chemistry must be the same. If plants use chlorophyl here to utilize sunlight like ours, the air must be oxygen and nitrogen and C0₂. Other gases wouldn't work, we can't even guess at the proportions."

"And the—gravity?" she said uneasily.

"We've nothing to measure it with," he said with a shrug. "But we do know that we didn't have to push unbearably to get over to one side and run past. We practically tested the gravity with our feet—high up as we are." Then he looked at her sharply. "I had some sleep, Kit I doubt that you did. Better go get some."

She hesitated, and looked at him wistfully. He said heavily, "I'm not very romantic, am I? But I've got plenty on my mind. The people in that space-ship tried to kill us out of hand. They must have killed off the Martians.

"They'll kill not only us but everybody back on Earth if they catch us and find out our physical structure and check it with the records they'll undoubtedly have made when they modeled those figures on the Calypso pyramid. So we've got not only our own lives to think of but literally everybody else's.

"I've got to try to figure out a way to finish this ship, and arm it somehow—but I've got the beginning of an idea—and I've got to concoct some way to blow it and us literally to atoms if we're caught and killed. And after all that I'm—well—I'm very much in love with you and I've got to figure out something to make you safe."

He stood doggedly by the controls, holding the force-field switches against the springs that would throw the Stellaris into other-space if he should be killed where he stood. Kit's eyes softened.

"I—see. We can't think about us. Not yet."

"Not yet," he agreed heavily. "If we're safe here—and I'm beginning to think we are—I'm going to try to get the Stellaris down. If those splotches are cities the inhabitants may be anything and they may be friendly or not, civilized or not But I'm hoping they're not the people who tried to kill us."

He turned back to the vision-ports. They were over the night-side of the planet and to one side—actually it felt as if the planet were below—there was only the blank black bulk of the unknown world. It was hardly a thousand miles away but the Stellaris could not be checked to land on it without killing all on board by multiple-gravity deceleration.

Then the dark globe lay behind and it was time to change back to tractor-beams to pull back toward it and lessen the ship's headlong speed toward infinity. And then, hours later, the again-remote planet ceased to dwindle and grew large once more and he juggled alternate tractor and pressor-beams to bring the Stellaris close to its day-side, then to match speed with the planet's surface. At long last he dared let the clumsy hulk which was the Earth-ship down into atmosphere.

Bellowing came from below 'No-o-o-o radar!" And then a new voice called "No-o-o-o radio!" Because a civilization which did not have space-ships or even radar could have broadcast-waves in its atmosphere, as Earth had dune for nearly a hundred years before space-travel became possible to its people.

The ship went heavily lower and lower, more and more slowly in relation to the jungle underneath. Where the ship approached there was jungle. There were rivers. Far away there were the slopes of a mountain range and, off to one side the authentic blue of a sea. The ship went soggily down and down, its small and accidental crew gazing at the scene no human eyes had ever before looked at—lower still and individual jungle-growths became visible.

There was a straight streak which looked like a highway of some sort The Stellaris floated onward, rocking a little on the pressor-beams which supported it. Then a city appeared at the horizon. There were towers and pinnacles and a myriad prismatic flashings of reflected sunlight.

But there was no movement, no smoke, no aircraft overhead, no signs of alarm or recognition of the Stellaris' existence. The ship was only two thousand feet up and there were deep depressions in the vegetation below where its pressor-beams touched ground to uphold it.

The city drew near. And it was dead. There was no life anywhere. But it had not been dead long because the jungle had not yet encroached on it. It was simply dead—undevastated untouched, unharmed but dead.

Rod brought the ship to a wallowing stop over the very center of the metropolis. It reached for miles in every direction.

On a basis of human occupancy, it could have housed a population of millions. Yet there was no movement below. Rod began painstakingly to let down for a landing in a central open space.

Kit said in a strained voice; "Rod! Those little things on the highway. Colored things! Brightly-colored!"

"My guess," said Rod briefly, "is that they're the inhabitants. People who could build a city like this would be pretty civilized. No reason why they shouldn't wear brightly-colored clothes."

"But they're not moving!"

"My guess," said Rod again, "is that they're dead." "A plague?"

"No. Our friends," said Rod grimly. "A civilization that could build this city would be close to space-travel. Maybe they sent a ship to that snow-covered planet and found a pyramid there and opened it up to see who among their ancestors had gone there first—and called in our friends to exterminate them."

She stared at him in horror. His face was very white. He nodded toward the very center of the open space into which the Stellaris descended. There was a bright metal pyramid there.

"If, by any chance, there was a space-ship off on a voyage when this world was murdered and it came back after the murderers had left," said Rod harshly, "they'd probably think that some survivors had left word for them in that And they'd open it"

"At a guess that pyramid on Calypso would have killed me too if I'd opened it in the normal way. Very probably that was it. The ones who summoned the murders wouldn't live to know what they'd done or take back any word of what a pyramid implied."

The ship hovered only a hundred feet above the ground. Slowly, slowly, slowly, Rod eased it downward. He expected an impact but the Stellaris touched the strange world's surface with a surprising and quite accidental gentleness.

Without explanation Rod went to the air-lock and closed the inner door. He cracked the outer door and sniffed cautiously. He tried again. He took a deep breath. The air seemed to him to be perfectly adequate.

To make sure, he stepped outside and breathed deeply. He felt a bitter amusement at the difference between this instant of landing on a strange world of another sun, and the way he'd pictured it while the Stellaris was building.

He hadn't thought that the landing would be made from an almost unmanageable hulk, unequipped for landing or navigation or even the testing of air, lost utterly in space, with the despairing knowledge that probably the best that could be hoped was that the dozen or so humans on the ship might manage to find a place of perpetual exile with a murderous alien race for enemies.

The air was good but nothing else was promising.

If the ship that had contacted the Stellaris had reported its encounter a galaxy-wide search for a race attaining space-travel might be already under way. If they found Earth.

For that matter, Earth's cities might already be filled with crumpled figures. Earth's air might already be empty of fliers. Earth's cities might already be as dead as this one. Rod Cantrell looked at tumbled heaps of garments on the pavements about him and cursed thickly.