Islands of Space
IX
Below the ship lay the unfamiliar panorama of an unknown world thatcircled, frozen, around a dim, unknown sun, far out in space. Cold andbleak, the low, rolling hills below were black, bare rock, coated inspots with a white sheen of what appeared to be snow, though each of themen realized it must be frozen air. Here and there ran strange riversof deep blue which poured into great lakes and seas of blue liquid.There were mighty mountains of deep blue crystal looming high, and inthe hollows and cracks of these crystal mountains lay silent, motionlessseas of deep blue, unruffled by any breeze in this airless world. It wasa world that lay frozen under a dim, dead sun.
They continued over the broad sweep of the level, crystalline plain asthe bleak rock disappeared behind them. This world was about tenthousand miles in diameter, and its surface gravity about a quartergreater than that of Earth.
On and on they swept, swinging over the planet at an altitude of lessthan a thousand feet, viewing the unutterably desolate scene of thecold, dead world.
Then, ahead of them loomed a bleak, dark mass of rock again. They hadcrossed the frozen ocean and were coming to land again--a land no moresolid than the sea.
Everywhere lay the deep drifts of snow, and here and there, throughvalleys, ran the streams of bright blue.
"Look!" cried Morey in sudden surprise. Far ahead and to their leftloomed a strange formation of jutting vertical columns, covered with thewhite burden of snow. Arcot turned a powerful searchlight on it, and itstood out brightly against the vast snowfield. It was a dead, frozencity.
As they looked at it, Arcot turned the ship and headed for it without aword.
It was hard to realize the enormity of the catastrophe that had broughta cold, bleak death to the population of this world--death to anintelligent race.
Arcot finally spoke. "I'll land the ship. I think it will be safe for usall to leave. Get out the suits and make sure all the tanks are chargedand the heaters working. It will be colder here than in space. Outthere, we were only cooled by radiation, but those streams are probablyliquid nitrogen, oxygen, and argon, and there's a slight atmosphere ofhydrogen, helium and neon cooled to about fifty degrees Absolute. We'llbe cooled by conduction and convection."
As the others got the suits ready, he lowered the ship gently to thesnowy ground. It sank into nearly ten feet of snow. He turned on thepowerful searchlight, and swept it around the ship. Under the warmbeams, the frozen gasses evaporated, and in a few moments he had clearedthe area around the ship.
Morey and the others came back with their suits. Arcot donned his, andadjusted his weight to ten pounds with the molecular power unit.
A short time later, they stepped out of the airlock onto the ice fieldof the frozen world. High above them glowed the dim, blue-white disc ofthe tiny sun, looking like little more than a bright star.
Adjusting the controls on the suits, the four men lifted into thetenuous air and headed toward the city, moving easily about ten feetabove the frozen wastes of the snow field.
"The thing I don't understand," Morey said as they shot toward the city,"is why this planet is here at all. The intense radiation from the sunwhen it went supernova should have vaporized it!"
Arcot pointed toward a tall, oddly-shaped antenna that rose from thehighest building of the city. "There's your answer. That antenna issimilar to those we found on the planets of the Black Star; it's a heatscreen. They probably had such antennas all over the planet.
"Unfortunately, the screen's efficiency goes up as the fourth power ofthe temperature. It could keep out the terrific heat of a supernova, butcouldn't keep in the heat of the planet after the supernova had died.The planet was too cool to make the screen work efficiently!"
At last they came to the outskirts of the dead city. The vertical wallsof the buildings were free of snow, and they could see the blank,staring eyes of the windows, and within, the bleak, empty rooms. Theyswept on through the frozen streets until they came to one huge buildingin the center. The doors of bronze had been closed, and through thewindows they could see that the room had been piled high with some sortof insulating material, evidently used as a last-ditch attempt to keepout the freezing cold.
"Shall we break in?" asked Arcot.
"We may as well," Morey's voice answered over the radio. "There may besome records we could take back to Earth and have deciphered. In a timelike this, I imagine they would leave some records, hoping that somerace _might_ come and find them."
They worked with molecular ray pistols for fifteen minutes tearing a waythrough. It was slow work because they had to use the heat ray pistolsto supply the necessary energy for the molecular motion.
When they finally broke through, they found they had entered on thesecond floor; the deep snow had buried the first. Before them stretcheda long, richly decorated hall, painted with great colored murals.
The paintings displayed a people dressed in a suit of some soft, whitecloth, with blond hair that reached to their shoulders. They wereshorter and more heavily built than Earthmen, perhaps, but there was agrace to them that denied the greater gravity of their planet. Themurals portrayed a world of warm sunlight, green plants, and tall treeswaving in a breeze--a breeze of air that now lay frozen on the stonefloors of their buildings.
Scene after scene they saw--then they came to a great hall. Here theysaw hundreds of bodies; people wrapped in heavy cloth blankets. And overthe floor of the room lay little crystals of green.
Wade looked at the little crystals for a long time, and then at thepeople who lay there, perfectly preserved by the utter cold. They seemedonly sleeping--men, women, and children, sleeping under a blanket ofsoft snow that evaporated and disappeared as the energy of the lightsfell on it. There was one little group the men looked at before theyleft the room of death. There were three in it--a young man, a fair,blonde young woman who seemed scarcely more than a girl, and betweenthem, a little child. They were sleeping, arms about each other, warm inthe arms of Death, the kindly Reliever of Pain.
Arcot turned and rose, flying swiftly down the long corridor toward thedoor.
"That was not meant for us," he said. "Let's leave."
The others followed.
"But let's see what records they left," he went on. "It may be that theywanted us to know their tragic story. Let's see what sort ofcivilization they had."
"Their chemistry was good, at least," said Wade. "Did you notice thosegreen crystals? A quick, painless poison gas to relieve them of thestruggle against the cold."
They went down to the first floor level, where there was a single greatcourt. There were no pillars, only a vast, smooth floor.
"They had good architecture," said Morey. "No pillars under all the vastload of that building."
"And the load is even greater under this gravity," remarked Arcot.
In the center of the room was a great, golden bronze globe resting on aplatform of marble. It must have been new when this world froze, forthere was no sign of corrosion or oxidation. The men flew over to it andstood beside it, looking at the great sphere, nearly fifteen feet indiameter.
"A globe of their world," said Fuller, looking at it with interest.
"Yes," agreed Arcot, "and it was set up after they were sure the coldwould come, from the looks of it. Let's take a look at it." He flew upto the top of it and viewed it from above. The whole globe was acarefully chiseled relief map, showing seas, mountains, and continents.
"Arcot--come here a minute," called Morey. Arcot dropped down to whereMorey was looking at the globe. On the edge of one of the continents wasa small raised globe, and around the globe, a circle had been etched.
"I think this is meant to represent this globe," Morey said. "I'm almostcertain it represents this very spot. Now look over here." He pointed toa spot which, according to the scale of the globe, was about fivethousand miles away. Projecting from the surface of the bronze globewas a little silver tower.
"They want us to go there," continued Morey. "This was erected onlyshortly before th
e catastrophe; they must have put relics there thatthey want us to get. They must have guessed that eventually intelligentbeings would cross space; I imagine they have other maps like this inevery large city.
"I think it's our duty to visit that cairn."
"I quite agree," assented Arcot. "The chance of other men visiting thisworld is infinitely small."
"Then let's leave this City of the Dead!" said Wade.
It gave them a sense of depression greater than that inspired by thevast loneliness of space. One is never so lonely as when he is with thedead, and the men began to realize that the original _Ancient Mariner_had been more lonely with strange companions than they had been in thedepths of ten million light years of space.
They went back to the ship, floating through the last remnants of thisworld's atmosphere, back through the chill of the frozen gases to thecheering, warm interior of the ship.
It was a contrast that made each of them appreciate more fully the giftthat a hot, blazing sun really is. Perhaps that was what made Fullerask: "If this happened to a star so much like our sun, why couldn't ithappen to Sol?"
"Perhaps it may," said Morey softly. "But the eternal optimism of mankeeps us saying: 'It can't happen here.' And besides--" He put a hand onthe wall of the ship, "--we don't ever have to worry about anything likethat now. Not with ships like this to take us to a new sun--a newplanet."
Arcot lifted the ship and flew over the cold, frozen ground beneaththem, following the route indicated on the great globe in the dead city.Mile after mile of frozen ice fields flew by as they shot over it atthree miles per second.
Suddenly, the bleak bulk of a huge mountain loomed gigantic before them.Arcot reversed the power and brought the ship to a stop. With thepowerful searchlight, he swept the area, looking for the tower he knewshould be here. At last, he made it out, a pyramid rather than a tower,and coated over with ice. They soon thawed out the frozen gasses byplaying the energy of three powerful searchlights upon them, and in afew minutes the glint of gold showed through the melting ice and show.
"It looks," said Wade, "as though they have an outer wall of gold over astrong wall of iron or steel to protect it from corrosion. Certainlygold doesn't have enough tensile strength to hold itself up under thisgravity--not in such masses as that."
Arcot brought the ship down beside the tower and the men once more wentout through the airlock into the cold of the almost airless world. Theyflew across to the pyramid and looked for some means of entrance. Inseveral places, they noticed hieroglyphics carved in great, foot-highcharacters. They searched in vain for a door until they noticed that thepyramid was not perfect, but truncated, leaving a flat area on top. Theonly joint in the walls seemed to be there, but there was no handle orvisible methods of opening the door.
Arcot turned his powerful light on the surface and searched carefullyfor some opening device. He found a bas-relief engraving of a handpointing to a corner of the door. He looked more closely and found asmall jewel-like lens set in the metal.
Suddenly the men felt a vibration! There was a heavy click, and the doorpanel began to drop slowly.
"Get on it!" Arcot cried. "We can always break our way out if we'retrapped!"
The four men leaped on it and sank slowly with it. The massive walls ofthe tower were nearly five feet thick, and made of some tough, whitemetal.
"Pure iron!" diagnosed Wade. "Or perhaps a silicon-iron alloy. Not asstrong as steel, but very resistant to corrosion."
When the elevator stopped, they found themselves in a great chamber thatwas obviously a museum of the lost race. All around the walls werearranged models, books, and diagrams.
"We can never hope to take all this in our ship!" said Arcot, looking atthe great collection. "Look--there's an old winged airplane! And a steamengine--and that's an electric motor! And that thing looks like somekind of an electric battery."
"But we can't take all that stuff," objected Fuller.
"No," Morey agreed. "I think our best bet would be to take all the bookswe can--making sure we get the introductory ones, so we can read thelanguage.
"See--over there--they have marked those shelves with a single verticalmark. The ones next to them have two vertical marks, and next onesthree. I suggest we load up with those books and take them to the ship."
The rest agreed, and they began carrying armloads of books, flying outthrough the top of the pyramid to the ship and back for more.
Instead of flying back to the pyramid for the last load, Arcot announcedthat he was going to leave a note for anyone who might come here later.While the others went back for the last load, he worked at drawing the"note".
"Let's see your masterpiece," said Morey as the three men returned tothe ship with the last of the books.
Arcot had used a piece of tough, heavy plastic which would resist anycorrosion the cold, almost airless world might have to offer.
Near the top, he had drawn a representation of their ship, and beneathit a representation of the route they had taken from universe touniverse. The galaxy they were in was represented by a cloud of gas, itsmain identifying feature. Underneath the dotted line of their routethrough space, he had printed "200,000,000,000, _u_".
Then followed a little table. The numeral "1" followed by a straightbar, then "2" followed by two bars, and so on up to ten. Ten wasrepresented by ten bars and, in addition, an S-shaped sign. Twenty wasnext, followed by twenty bars and two S-shaped signs. Thus he hadworked up to "100".
The system he used would make it clear to any reasoning creature that hehad used a decimal system and that the zeroes meant ten times.
Next below, he had drawn the planetary system of the frozen world, andthe distance from the planet they were on to the central sun he labeled"_u_". Thus, the finders could reason that they had come a distance oftwo hundred billion units, where a distance of three hundred millionmiles was taken as the unit; they had, then, come from another galaxy.Certainly any creature with enough intelligence to reach this frozenworld would understand this!
"Since the year of this planet is approximately eight times our own,"Arcot continued, "I am indicating that we came here approximately fivehundred years after the catastrophe." He pointed at several of the otherdrawings.
They left the message in the tower, and Arcot closed the door, leavingthe pyramid exactly as it had been before they had come.
"Say!" Morey commented, "how did you open and close that door, anyway?"
Arcot grinned. "Didn't you notice the jewel at the corner? It was thelens of a photoelectric cell. My flashlight opened the door. I didn'tfigure it out; it just worked accidentally."
Morey raised an eyebrow. "But if the darned thing is so simple, anycreature, intelligent or not, might be able to get in and destroy therecords!"
Arcot looked at him. "And where are your savages going to come from?There are none on this planet, and anyone intelligent enough to build aspaceship isn't going to destroy the contents of the tower."
"Oh." Morey looked a little sheepish.
They went into the airlock and took off their suits. Then they beganpacking the precious books in specimen cases that had been brought forthe purpose of preserving such things.
When the last of them was carefully stowed, they returned to thecontrol room. They looked silently out across this strange, dead world,thinking how much it must have been like Earth. It was dead now, andfrozen forever. The low hills that stretched out beneath them were dimlylighted by the weak rays of a shrunken sun. Three hundred million milesaway, it glowed so weakly that this world received only a little moreheat than it might have received from a small coal fire a mile away.
So weakly it flared that in this thin atmosphere of hydrogen and helium,its little corona glowed about it plainly, and even the stars around itshone brilliantly. The men could see one constellation that groupeditself in the outlines of a dragon, with the sun of this system as itscold, baleful eye.
Gradually, Arcot lifted the ship, and, as they headed out into space,they could s
ee the dim frozen plains fall behind. It was as if a load ofoppressing loneliness parted from them as they flew out into the vastspaces of the eternal stars.