Islands of Space Part 14

"Arcot--come here a minute," called Morey. Arcot dropped down to where Morey was looking at the globe. On the edge of one of the continents was a 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 almost certain it represents this very spot. Now look over here." He pointed to a spot which, according to the scale of the globe, was about five thousand miles away. Projecting from the surface of the bronze globe was a little silver tower.

"They want us to go there," continued Morey. "This was erected only shortly before the catastrophe; they must have put relics there that they want us to get. They must have guessed that eventually intelligent beings would cross s.p.a.ce; I imagine they have other maps like this in every large city.

"I think it's our duty to visit that cairn."

"I quite agree," a.s.sented Arcot. "The chance of other men visiting this world 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 the vast loneliness of s.p.a.ce. One is never so lonely as when he is with the dead, and the men began to realize that the original _Ancient Mariner_ had been more lonely with strange companions than they had been in the depths of ten million light years of s.p.a.ce.

They went back to the ship, floating through the last remnants of this world's atmosphere, back through the chill of the frozen gases to the cheering, warm interior of the ship.

It was a contrast that made each of them appreciate more fully the gift that a hot, blazing sun really is. Perhaps that was what made Fuller ask: "If this happened to a star so much like our sun, why couldn't it happen to Sol?"

"Perhaps it may," said Morey softly. "But the eternal optimism of man keeps us saying: 'It can't happen here.' And besides--" He put a hand on the wall of the ship, "--we don't ever have to worry about anything like that now. Not with ships like this to take us to a new sun--a new planet."

Arcot lifted the ship and flew over the cold, frozen ground beneath them, 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 at three 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 the powerful searchlight, he swept the area, looking for the tower he knew should 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 ga.s.ses by playing the energy of three powerful searchlights upon them, and in a few 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 a strong wall of iron or steel to protect it from corrosion. Certainly gold doesn't have enough tensile strength to hold itself up under this gravity--not in such ma.s.ses as that."

Arcot brought the ship down beside the tower and the men once more went out through the airlock into the cold of the almost airless world. They flew across to the pyramid and looked for some means of entrance. In several places, they noticed hieroglyphics carved in great, foot-high characters. They searched in vain for a door until they noticed that the pyramid was not perfect, but truncated, leaving a flat area on top. The only joint in the walls seemed to be there, but there was no handle or visible methods of opening the door.

Arcot turned his powerful light on the surface and searched carefully for some opening device. He found a bas-relief engraving of a hand pointing to a corner of the door. He looked more closely and found a small jewel-like lens set in the metal.

Suddenly the men felt a vibration! There was a heavy click, and the door panel began to drop slowly.

"Get on it!" Arcot cried. "We can always break our way out if we're trapped!"

The four men leaped on it and sank slowly with it. The ma.s.sive walls of the tower were nearly five feet thick, and made of some tough, white metal.

"Pure iron!" diagnosed Wade. "Or perhaps a silicon-iron alloy. Not as strong as steel, but very resistant to corrosion."

When the elevator stopped, they found themselves in a great chamber that was obviously a museum of the lost race. All around the walls were arranged models, books, and diagrams.

"We can never hope to take all this in our ship!" said Arcot, looking at the great collection. "Look--there's an old winged airplane! And a steam engine--and that's an electric motor! And that thing looks like some kind 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 books we can--making sure we get the introductory ones, so we can read the language.

"See--over there--they have marked those shelves with a single vertical mark. The ones next to them have two vertical marks, and next ones three. 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 out through the top of the pyramid to the ship and back for more.

Instead of flying back to the pyramid for the last load, Arcot announced that 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 to the ship with the last of the books.

Arcot had used a piece of tough, heavy plastic which would resist any corrosion the cold, almost airless world might have to offer.

Near the top, he had drawn a representation of their ship, and beneath it a representation of the route they had taken from universe to universe. The galaxy they were in was represented by a cloud of gas, its main identifying feature. Underneath the dotted line of their route through s.p.a.ce, he had printed "200,000,000,000, _u_".

Then followed a little table. The numeral "1" followed by a straight bar, then "2" followed by two bars, and so on up to ten. Ten was represented by ten bars and, in addition, an S-shaped sign. Twenty was next, followed by twenty bars and two S-shaped signs. Thus he had worked up to "100".

The system he used would make it clear to any reasoning creature that he had used a decimal system and that the zeroes meant ten times.

Next below, he had drawn the planetary system of the frozen world, and the 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 of two hundred billion units, where a distance of three hundred million miles was taken as the unit; they had, then, come from another galaxy.

Certainly any creature with enough intelligence to reach this frozen world 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 five hundred years after the catastrophe." He pointed at several of the other drawings.

They left the message in the tower, and Arcot closed the door, leaving the 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 the lens of a photoelectric cell. My flashlight opened the door. I didn't figure it out; it just worked accidentally."

Morey raised an eyebrow. "But if the darned thing is so simple, any creature, intelligent or not, might be able to get in and destroy the records!"

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 a s.p.a.ceship 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 began packing the precious books in specimen cases that had been brought for the purpose of preserving such things.

When the last of them was carefully stowed, they returned to the control room. They looked silently out across this strange, dead world, thinking how much it must have been like Earth. It was dead now, and frozen forever. The low hills that stretched out beneath them were dimly lighted by the weak rays of a shrunken sun. Three hundred million miles away, it glowed so weakly that this world received only a little more heat 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 it shone brilliantly. The men could see one constellation that grouped itself in the outlines of a dragon, with the sun of this system as its cold, baleful eye.

Gradually, Arcot lifted the ship, and, as they headed out into s.p.a.ce, they could see the dim frozen plains fall behind. It was as if a load of oppressing loneliness parted from them as they flew out into the vast s.p.a.ces of the eternal stars.

X

Arcot looked speculatively at the star field in the great broad window before him. "We'll want to find another G-0 sun, naturally, but I don't think we ought to go directly from here. If we did, we'd have to do a lot of backtracking to get back to this dead star. I suggest we go back to the edge of this galaxy, taking pictures on the way out, so that any future investigators can come in directly. It'll only take a few hours."