Disaster

  It was my turn to raise my eyes to the sky but, of course, I didn’t. Not in front of her.

  Shafter and I had no choice but to follow the diggers about and hope they would hit something by accident.

  Almost at once we began to hit paydirt! (That’s a mining term.)

  A digger threw some dirt aside and Shafter saw something glitter and was in there like a shot. He picked up something round and then said, “Blast, I thought it was a coin!” He threw it away and I picked it up quickly.

  A button! It had a symbol on it that looked like a bottle—no, a fat paddle with an upside-down handle!

  THE APPARATUS!

  Aha! The Gris confession was no myth!

  All that day I tagged around collecting things. Odds and ends of metal were evidently not unusual in this place. One of the men said they appeared on the ground every time it rained. This had been a vast encampment!

  By evening I had a hoard that even included the remains of an electric whip!

  Oh, I was getting warm. I didn’t even mind a lecture by Corsa’s brother, as he sorted out a mound of plumage, on what kind of songbird you had to get rid of first if you ever expected to get a wink of sleep. I wondered sourly to myself if Gris’ ancestors had come from Modon. I wondered if my sanity could stand up to much more association with this pair.

  About midnight the conspiratorial voice of Shafter woke me up. “If we’re ever going to find any buried treasure,” he whispered, “we’re going to have to work at night. Come along. I need somebody to read the meter.”

  We stealthily crept out of camp. “Now, today when I went into town to get a load of grass seed,” he said, “I took a look at this place from the air. If this was ever a castle, when the earthquake knocked it over, it fell due west. There’s a pattern of fallen stone that looks just like a tower when you see it from above. My hunch is that if you root around over there and if it ever had a strongroom, it would lie in that mess. So let’s go.”

  We clambered over shattered piles of black basalt under the bright green moons. This was more like the kind of thing I thought Bob Hoodward would do.

  A wind had come up and it was moaning through the tumbled stones. The beginning lines of “An Ode to the Homeless Ghost” began to run through my head. I wasn’t watching where I was going.

  I FELL STRAIGHT DOWN!

  Fifteen feet below I fetched up with a horrible thud!

  Shafter’s voice out in the night. “Hey, where’d you go?”

  “I’m down here!” I yelled.

  I could see his head above in the hole, silhouetted against the moon-hazed sky. “You shouldn’t go running off that way! You could get hurt!”

  “Could get hurt?” I wailed. “I’m smashed! Get me out of here!”

  He shined a light down into the place. “Hey!” he said. “Good going! You found a room!”

  I stopped feeling for broken bones and looked around. Yes, I was in what might have been a room.

  Shafter got out a line but instead of hauling me up, he came down. “What’s that you’re lying on?” he said.

  I looked.

  A DOOR!

  It was made out of impervious alloy and had been so covered with dust that it had taken my fall to expose it.

  We uncovered it. Shafter used a disintegrator drill to remove the hinges and we managed to lay it aside. There was a gaping hole under it and when we shined in the torch, we were looking at a room lying on its side.

  It had the collapsed remains of some furniture in it. We dropped down a rope into it. I righted a chair. It was an ornate antique. I thought maybe that we had gotten into some old tomb. I looked around for signs of a coffin or burial artifacts. There were only a lot of shards of glass.

  “Let’s see if there’s any buried treasure back of these walls,” said Shafter. “You read the meter. I’ll get on some insulator gloves and bang this fuel rod.”

  Shortly the sparks were flying as he went along the walls. It made the air smell like ozone.

  I was passing the meter along one wall. I got a tremendous read. Shafter rushed over to me. “Crashing cogwheels!” he said. “There must be metal back of there by the millions of tons!”

  We went down the wall and found, under a cascade of stone, another door. We unburied it, disintegrated the hinges and removed it.

  We were in another room.

  I shined my torch. Just behind the place where I had gotten my read was the remains of a COMPUTER BANK!

  “Oh, blast,” said Shafter. “That isn’t any treasure. My current was just energizing the electromagnetic coils. We been had!”

  “No, we haven’t!” I cried. I suddenly knew where we were. That antique throne chair in the other office, this door, the desks tumbled about, all compared with the Gris confession!

  WE WERE IN THE TOWER OFFICES OF LOMBAR HISST!

  THAT WAS HIS COMPUTER CONSOLE!

  Oh, the very thing I had hoped to find!

  “Quick, Shafter!” I said. “Can you get power into that thing?”

  He looked at it. When the tower had crashed, the retaining bolts had held. But it was a sorry-looking mess.

  “Well, why?” said Shafter.

  “To get the information out of it, of course!”

  “Well, Monte, I hate to have to tell you this but if there had been anything left on those recordings, it’s gone now.”

  “What do you mean?” I wailed.

  “Well, we been sending hellish jolts of electricity around to find things and it would have wiped every cell in it.”

  I collapsed.

  What Bob Hoodward must have gone through!

  If I got any more help on this project I might as well give up!

  At length I climbed back up the lines we had left dangling and got outside. I sat down on a rock in the moonlight.

  Prospects of Modon with Corsa and her brother or prospects of drudgery at dull desks were two types of torture it was impossible to choose between. The green haze in the sky was not emblazoned with my name. The mile-deep chasm looked very attractive. Dully, I began to compose “An Ode to a Snuffed-Out Life.”

  PART SIXTY-SEVEN

  Chapter 8

  Listlessly, all the next day, I loafed around, not even bothering to pick up the bits and pieces the land-reclamation project was turning up.

  In the first place, I had had very little sleep. In the second place, I knew down deep that it was a good thing for this herding tribe to have more water and grass and I was sort of ashamed of myself for feeling so harshly about it. The Great Desert had once been a fertile plain, 125,000 years ago or more. It had the remains of primitive canals all through it. But the civilization had been wiped out and it had all gone to dust.

  I began to ruminate upon the transient nature of cultures. They could be interrupted. For the first time I wondered about our own. It was, on the surface, quite stable. What if some cataclysmic war destroyed us in a puff of flame?

  Before I had gotten very far with “An Ode to Vanished Glory,” in a very sad meter that fitted my mood, I suddenly had an errant thought.

  Maybe there wasn’t any real coverup. Maybe Voltar had wiped out Blito-P3. Maybe it simply wasn’t there anymore. Maybe it had become an awful threat!

  I mentioned it at supper. I said, “Say, do you suppose some unconquered planet far from here could have developed weapons that could defeat the Voltar Fleet and wipe out the Confederacy?”

  “WHAT?” said Corsa’s brother. “Wipe out one hundred and ten planets? You must be crazy.”

  “What planet are you talking about?” said Corsa.

  “It is a planet designated on our charts—or used to be—Blito-P3. The name the inhabitants use is Earth.”

  “Does it have people on it?” said Corsa’s brother.

  “Yes. I guess you could call them Earthmen.”

  He let out a snort of laughter. “The Earthmen are coming!” he finally managed with a bucolic guffaw.

  Corsa joined in with raucous laughter.

&
nbsp; Her brother looked up at the twilight sky. “Get under cover quick! Strange ships are in the air!”

  They really laughed.

  I wouldn’t have felt so bad about it but the staff around joined in.

  “Oh, Monte,” Corsa said at last, “you’ll wreck my belly muscles yet! You are such a clown!”

  I was trying to explain to them that what I had meant was that Voltar might have found it expedient to wipe the planet out because it somehow could have threatened us. But they weren’t listening. They had the whole staff rushing out to make sure there was no enemy fleet in the sky, and they were pretending to see strange ships and running into each other with fake cries of horror at discovering the other was an Earthman just landed. They were awfully energetic. I guess the fresh air of Modon does that to you.

  Later her brother amused himself by drawing what an Earthman must look like. He tried feelers and discarded that for horns and threw that away for blobs. Corsa gathered them up and said she couldn’t wait to show them to her friends.

  I retired early.

  It was a good thing I did. About midnight, just when I had composed my tortured wits enough to drop off, Shafter woke me up.

  I got some clothes on and followed his beckoning finger. When we were far enough from the camp to be able to talk normally, he said, “You should have told me you were looking for data banks. Is this a secret or something?”

  I rued that I had not kept it more secret from that Modon pair. “Yes, very much so,” I said. “I’m trying to find out what happened after a confession I read. He left it all up in the air.”

  “Well, you just come along,” Shafter said.

  We were going to the village!

  A very shadowy tribesman met us and led us onward. We went into what appeared to be a cave, stepping over bundles of hides. We went to the back.

  “I couldn’t stand to see you pouting,” said Shafter. “So last night I followed the cables from that console. I came out here!”

  He was pointing down a tunnel. I followed him. He opened a huge metal side door.

  It was a vast room full of tables, benches and cabinets. Pieces of hide and working tools lay all about.

  “They use it for a sort of factory to make clothes in. They had no way to get the cabinets open and didn’t need them anyway.”

  “What is this place?” I said, playing my light down the vast expanse of grimy, age-crusted cabinets.

  “The computer feeder room,” he said. He threw open a cabinet whose hinges he had disintegrated. “This is the place where they prepared the memory bank of that console.”

  I reached in and pulled out sheaves of paper.

  DOCUMENTS!

  These were the originals!

  RECORDING STRIPS!

  These were the first-generation recordings!

  “Will this do?” said Shafter.

  “Oh, thank heavens and all the Gods, yes!” I cried, my hands shaking.

  “Well, that’s a good thing,” said Shafter, “because you just bought the place.”

  PART SIXTY-SEVEN

  Chapter 9

  Rape, murder and sudden death: I was looking at so many crimes at once, it was a shocking mess!

  To me, raised in the belief that government is honest and does no wrong, protects its citizens and labors for the good of all, it was a terrible shock!

  No wonder they hid—what were these headed, the Coordinated Information Apparatus?—from the public view!

  Kidnap this one, assassinate that one, blackmail someone else. And silly crimes as well: “Poison his pet fish!” And crimes that were stupid: “Break the windows of his house so he’ll think the public don’t like him.” But dominant were awful crimes: “Rob a bank, plant the evidence on him, make it look like suicide.” “Kidnap his children and when he comes to get them back, murder them in front of his eyes.” A catalogue of villainy such as I had never seen stared at me from this data bank: slaughter, arson and revenge—destruction, hungry and rampant!

  How could this possibly be? Was THIS the government?

  All through the night and near to dawn I sorted through this fearful hoard, staggered in reality but too fixated to let the papers drop.

  “You better come away from there.” A voice was at my side. “The camp and village will be up soon and they’ll be wondering where you are.”

  “I’m halfway between the sixth and seventh hells,” I said. “I’ve just come on a small religious group the government harassed. The order here says to plant a whole false file into their church with their names forged to it. Then there’s going to be a raid and they’ll all be arrested and shot. Incredible!”

  “Come away,” said Shafter. “Your eyes are pretty wild.”

  He led me off and I went to bed to fall, dumbfounded, into fitful sleep.

  Hound routed me out, scolding me for getting my clothes and hair so thickly scummed with dirt. I didn’t tell him the shape my soul was in. I felt it was past washing.

  Midmorning, dear Corsa came bounding over. How much she looked like a farm animal, I unkindly thought. “Oh, Monte!” she said, sitting down at the camp table, crossing her beefy legs and emptying my canister of hot jolt, “I know you thought it would be awfully sweet of you to buy this place for me. Here are the deeds the village headman endorsed: aren’t they quaint? Squatter’s deeds, laying claim to abandoned land. They also make you responsible for any existing tenants. Valid enough, but really, Monte, it will cost a fortune to clear away those old black rocks and there’s hardly enough ground here to run my pets on. I know you mean well, Monte, but really, I sometimes wonder about your finer sensibilities. It is very plain that you need someone strong to take you in hand.” She patted me on the shoulder and left a bruise. “But never mind, we’ll get along just fine once we’re on Modon and I have the help of my family in shaping you up.”

  She threw the deeds down into the sweetbun syrup and galloped off.

  “A fine girl,” said Hound.

  He would think so, I thought privately. He weighs about three hundred pounds. I would have to weigh more than that and be a champion wrestler to boot to handle Corsa—and now, to this threat, she had added her family. Were they all like her brother? Charging around breaking bats and shooting songbirds?

  But I had a secret weapon. Despite the shock it gave me, I was certain I had my hands on a coverup to end all coverups. The matter was very dicey, of course. When I saw what a government could cover up, the task of uncovering it seemed monumental. But somehow I would get my name blazing across the sky yet! The Gris confession was an understatement of the way things ran!

  Having slept a bit in the afternoon, and although jaded from a dinner full of “The Earthmen Are Coming,” I was able to go to bed early, sneak out the back of the shelter and go with Shafter back to the tunnels.

  I saw tonight that what had preserved this area was that it had been below-ground level and whatever earthquake had overturned the place had left this whole level, and probably areas below, intact.

  “There’s an old cellological laboratory in there,” said Shafter, pointing to a door. “And right up here, there is what might have been a gymnasium or something. The tribesmen couldn’t get the doors open but I took care of that.”

  I looked into the place. The Countess Krak’s training rooms! I waded through clouds of dust that almost made a white fog in front of my lamp. Cabinets of training materials! I was looking for something—there it was! Blito-P3 materials! I opened a drawer. Aged newssheets in some strange language! Was that English? I didn’t dare touch them: after nearly a hundred years they were so yellow and decayed that, even in this dry desert air, they looked like they would go to powder.

  Back in the hall, Shafter said, “It’s lucky the tribesmen couldn’t open this next one.”

  I turned my light into it. An arsenal! Blastrifles, blasticks, grenades. They were in preservation boxes, all usable if you had power packs. But what was this? Hand firebombs, assassin scopes, poison, booby traps for ho
uses, on and on. Oh, they were very nasty people.

  “Lock that place up!” I told Shafter with a shudder as I came out.

  I went back to the computer feeder room, stifled my reaction to half-rotten hides and got back to work on the files. I just want you to know, reader, what I went through to finish this job!

  This night I was hopefully searching for more data about Blito-P3. After only a couple of hours, I came up with something shattering.