The Fourth Murray Leinster Page 4

  I

  It was, as usual, a decision on which the question of peace or atomic war depended. The Council of the Western Defense Alliance, as usual, had made the decision. And, as usual, the WDA Coordinator had to tell the Com Ambassador that the Coms had won again. The WDA would not risk atomic war over a thirty-mile shift of a national border in southeast Asia.

  “Perhaps,” said the Com Ambassador politely, “it will be easier for you personally if I admit that our Intelligence Service has reported the decision of your Council.” He paused, and added, “in detail.”

  The Coordinator asked wearily, “How much detail?”

  “First,” said the Ambassador, “you are to insist that no decision has been reached. You are to play for time. If I do not agree, you are to offer to compromise. If I do not agree, you are to accept the settlement we suggested. But you are to ask urgently for time in which to remove the citizens we might feel ought to be shot. This is not an absolute condition, but you are to use every possible means to persuade me to grant it.”

  The Coordinator ground his teeth. But the Council wouldn’t go to war for a few thousand citizens of an Asiatic country—who would probably be killed in the war anyhow. There would be millions killed in Western countries if the war did come.

  “I have much respect for you,” said the Ambassador politely, “so I agree to three days of delay during which you may evacuate disloyal citizens by helicopter. On the fourth day our troops will move up to the new border. It would be unfortunate if there were clashes on the way.”

  “We can’t get them out in three days!” protested the Coordinator. “It’s impossible! We haven’t enough copters!”

  “With warning to flee,” said the Ambassador, “many can reach the new border on foot.”

  The Coordinator ground his teeth again. That would be a public disgrace—and not the first one—for the WDA for not protecting its friends. But the public in the Western nations did not want war. It would not allow its governments to fight over trivial matters. Its alliance could not make threats. On the other hand, the public in the Com nations had no opinions its governments had not decreed. The Com nations could threaten. They could even carry out threats, though made for trivialities. So the WDA found itself yielding upon one point after another. Eventually it would fight, and fight bravely, but too late.

  The Coordinator said heavily, “You will excuse me, Mr. Ambassador. I have to see about getting as many copters as possible to southeast Asia.”

  * * * *

  Some hundreds of light-years away, the Survey ship Lotus floated in space, a discreet number of millions of miles from the local sun. It was on a strictly scientific mission, so it would not be subject to Com suspicion of having undesirable political intentions. At least they hadn’t demanded to have an observer on board. Com intelligence reports were notoriously sound, however, and possibly spies had assured their employers that the Lotus’s mission was bona fide. Her errand was the mapping and first-examination of a series of sol-type solar systems. This was the ninth such system on the list. The third planet out from the sun, here, lay off to starboard. It was near enough to have a visible disk to the naked eye, and moderate magnification showed ice-caps and permanent surface markings that could be seas and continents. As was to be expected, it was very much like a more familiar third planet out—Earth.

  The skipper gave Nolan the job of remote inspection while the gross examination of the system went on. Nolan had a knack for such work, and much of it naturally fell to him.

  “Okay!” he said resignedly, “Another day, another world!”

  “My private nightmare,” said the skipper, with humor, “is bug-eyed monsters. Try not to find ‘em here, Nolan. Eh?”

  He’d said that eight times before on this voyage. Nolan said, “My private nightmare is getting home and finding out that while we’ve been finding new worlds for men to live on, they’ve started a war and made Earth a place to die on. Try to arrange that it doesn’t happen before we get home. Eh?”

  He’d said that eight times before on this voyage, too.

  “I wish us both luck. Nolan,” said the skipper. “But that ball out yonder looks plausible as a nest for bug-eyed monsters!”

  He shook his head and went out. He was still being humorous. Nolan set up his instruments and went to work. As he worked, he tried to thrust away the thoughts that came to everybody on Earth every day. They were as haunting, some light-centuries from Earth, as back at home. There was the base the Coms were building on the moon. The WDA had an observatory there, but the Coms were believed to be mounting many more rockets than telescopes. And there was that unsatisfying agreement made between the Coms and WDA just before the Lotus took off. Each promised solemnly to notify the other of all space take-offs before they happened. The idea was to prevent a mistake by which a Pearl-Harbor-style attack might be inferred when it wasn’t really happening. The fact that it could be prepared against was evidence of the kind of tension back on Earth.

  But the Lotus was far from home. She lay some seventy-odd millions of miles out from the sol-type star Fanuel Alpha, whose third planet Nolan was to look over.

  He sent off a distance-pulse and took angular measurements of the planet’s disk. The ratio of polar to equatorial diameters was informative. The polar flattening said that the day lasted about thirty hours. Almost like Earth’s. The equatorial diameter of 8200 miles was much like Earth’s. The inclination of the axis of rotation indicated seasons—not exaggerated, but much like the seasons on the third planet of Sol. The size of the ice-caps indicated the overall planetary temperature. There were clouds. In fact, there was a cloudmass in the southern hemisphere that looked just like an Earthly tropic storm undergoing the usual changes as it went away from the equator. This was very much like Earth! And the dark masses which were seas….

  * * * *

  Nolan frowned. Those mud-colored patches were water. Undoubtedly. A narrow-band light filter proved it. But the areas which were neither sea nor cloud mass? There were three levels of brightness to be seen on the disk outside the polar areas. One was sea-bottom. One was cloud. The other….

  Nolan fretted a little. There was something wrong. The solid ground surface of the planet was too light in color. It was such items that a person with a knack for it would notice sooner than a man without the knack. Vegetation should be more nearly midway between sea-bottom and cloud mass in color.

  Nolan fitted in the chlorophyll filter. On the planet of a sol-type sun, vegetation had to use chlorophyll or else. Through this filter the clouds would show, of course. They were white and reflected all colors of light. But no color that chlorophyll didn’t reflect could pass through the filter.

  The cloud masses showed clearly. Nothing else appeared. The filters would have shown vegetation. It didn’t. It said there wasn’t any.

  Nolan stepped up the magnification. He saw other things. He didn’t like them. He got some maximum-magnification pictures and interpreted them with increasing grimness.

  He went to make his report just as the system constants began to reach the skipper. The local sun’s mass was 1.3 sols. The solar rotation period was thirty-four days. There were sunspots of perfectly familiar kinds. The Lauriac Laws about the size and distribution of planets in a sol-type system were borne out. One was small, and its sunward side was probably at a low red heat. This was like Mercury. Planet Two, like its analogue Venus in the home system, would be resolutely unoccupiable by man. Planet Four—analogous to Mars—was smaller than Three and had a very thin atmosphere. There were gas-giants in orbits six and seven. Then a novelty Lauriac’s laws predicted things about fifth planets, too, but they’d never been verified because fifth planets were unstable. They blew up. Only fragments—asteroids—had so far been noted where fifth planets of sol-type suns ought to be. But there was a fifth planet here, rolling magnificently through emptiness. It matched the Lauriac predictions. It had an atmosphere, which should contain oxygen. It was the first sol-system fifth plan
et ever observed.

  There was a babble in the skipper’s office as the discoverers of the fifth planet told him about it.

  Nolan said curtly, “I’ve something more urgent to report. Planet Three ought to be like Earth. It was. It isn’t, any longer. It’s dead!”

  Nobody paid attention. There was a fifth planet! It was unparalleled! All the theories about the absence of fifth planets could now be checked!

  “I’m telling you,” said Nolan sharply, “that the third planet’s dead! It was alive, and something happened to it! It has seas and clouds and ice-caps, and they’re water! But its land surface is pure desert! Where life can exist, it does. Always! Life did exist here. Now it doesn’t.” He turned to the skipper, “Maybe bug-eyed monsters killed it, skipper. It looks to me like murder!”

  Then they stared at him. He spread out his pictures. He pointed out this item and that. They were conclusive. Nobody else might have realized the facts behind them quite so soon, but when put together they fitted.

  “Familiar, eh?” asked Nolan sardonically. “You recognize the pictures like them before. They weren’t made with cameras, like these, but artists drew them from descriptions of what would happen. Here it’s happened! I think,” he added, looking at the skipper, “that this is more important than fifth planets. I think we’d better go over and get what information we can and take it home. Death like this implies life a lot like men. If non-human creatures can do something as human as this, we’d better get the word back home so something can be done to get ready before we find them—or they find us.”

  The skipper went carefully over the pictures. On one he put his finger on a feature Nolan hadn’t mentioned. He seemed to wince.

  “I think you win, Nolan,” he said painfully. “We’ll send a drone down. I doubt we can land, but this ought to be checked. Immediately. Maybe I should add—inconspicuously.”

  * * * *

  “Confidentially,” said the Com Ambassador to the Coordinator of the WDA, “confidentially I agree that it is a trivial matter. But we are a new nation. Our people lack perspective. They rejoice in the strength and vigor of the nation of which they are citizens. They will not allow that nation to display what they consider weakness in any matter. One has to allow for a certain exuberance in the people of a nation newly freed from the tyranny of capitalists and warmongers such as still enslave the people of your countries. We cannot yield in this matter.”

  The Coordinator said:

  “To be confidential in my turn, we both know that what you just said simply isn’t true. Your government decides what its public shall think. It makes sure they don’t think anything it doesn’t want them to.”

  The Com Ambassador shrugged his shoulders. He was very polite. He did not even pretend to resent being called a liar.

  “Now, my country intends to move forward in this matter in ten days,” he observed. “And it would be deplorable if our soldiers were fired on.”

  II

  It turned out that it wouldn’t have mattered if the Lotus had sent screaming notifications of its presence throughout all nearby space. There were detectors out, of course, but they reported absolutely nothing as the Lotus moved on toward Planet Three. There was static from storms upon the planet. It grew louder as the survey ship approached. But there was no sign of anything alive.

  The Lotus cruised some two hundred miles above seas and cloud masses and desert, photographing as she followed a search pattern that covered all the sunlit hemisphere. There were mountains in the tropics which by all the rules of meteorology should have had rain forests at their feet. They didn’t. There was a river system which ran like the Nile for a thousand miles or more, through deserts like those of Egypt. There should have been at least a ribbon of vegetation along its banks. There wasn’t. Where it reached the sea was an enormous delta.

  A drone went down and reported temperatures and humidity and the composition of the atmosphere, and the radiation background count. One would have thought the records those of Earth. The background count was a trifle high—3.9 instead of 3.6—but there was eighteen per cent of oxygen in the atmosphere. The only oddity, there, was nearly a full per cent of helium. When the drone came up it brought samples of soil and sea water. There was no life in either. The soil was mostly mineral dust, but an electron microscope disclosed abraded fractions of pollen grains and the like. The sea water sample had evidently been picked up by the drone’s dredge from some shallow. There were tiny, silicious shells in it. Plankton. They had been alive, but were so no longer.

  * * * *

  “I think,” said Nolan, “that I make a landing. Right?”

  The skipper said crossly, “Yes. You’re the best man for it. You notice things. But I doubt you’ll learn very much.” He tapped the written report that the radiation background count was 3.9. “It happened a long time ago. A long, long time ago!” Then he said with a totally unsuccessful attempt at humor, “Try and find out that it was bug-eyed monsters, eh? It looks too much like Earth! I’d rather blame monsters than men!”

  Nolan growled and went to prepare for the landing. Two other men would go with him, of course. The Lotus wouldn’t descend. It cost fuel to make landings. Unless there was some remarkable specimen that a drone couldn’t handle the ship would stay aloft.

  So a drone took three of them down to ground, a second drone following with equipment. They had weapons, of course. Men never land anywhere without weapons. They had the material for a foam-house camp. They had a roller-jeep, running on huge inflated bags. It would run efficiently on anything from sand to swamp mud, and float itself across bogs or rivers. They had cameras and communicators. Nolan had picked Crawford for geology and Kelley for communications. They could get other specialists from the ship, if desirable.

  The ground where they landed was desert: nothing more. There were enormous dunes like gigantic frozen swells of sand. Sometimes there were miles between crests. They landed close to the mud banks northern ice-cap to avoid the deep gorges in which rivers ran farther south. On the first day they set up their camp.

  Mountains reared to the north of them, covered almost to their bases with ice. These they need not explore. Instruments would do most of the landing-party work, in any case. But they inflated small balloons and sent them skyward, to learn about currents of the upper air, and Crawford took painstaking photographs of dune formations, and they set up a weather radar. They checked the water recovery from the camp’s air-conditioner. It would supply their needs. When night drew near, with all instruments recording, they watched the sunset.

  * * * *

  It was amazing how splendid and how magnificent a sunset could be. Not many men see sunsets these days. The three of them, aground at the ice-cap’s edge, saw enormous mile-long dunes reaching away as far as it was possible to see. They cast black shadows. Then glories of crimson and gold rose from the western horizon of this dead and empty world. There was ice and snow upon the mountains, and unbelievable tints and blends of colors appeared there. After a long, long time the light faded away. Then there was nothing to see but the stars, and nothing to listen to at all. This world was dead. They went in their camp-house and shut out the dark and the silence.

  On the second day, Nolan went in search of permafrost. Their instruments faithfully recorded everything they needed except such items as this. Nolan found permanent ice in a valley of the northern mountains. It was perpetually frozen ground which might not have thawed in a thousand thousand years. He dug down through surface ice to the permanently frozen soil beneath it. That soil was not desert sand. And preserved in it Nolan found the blackened roots of plants, and the blackened blades of something like grass, and even some small, indefinite objects which had been seeds or fruit.

  They hadn’t died with the planet. They were far older than that catastrophe. But they were proof that once this world lived and throve.

  During what was left of the day-light, Nolan and Kelley went south to a river gorge and photographed it for the reco
rd. The river had cut a gorge a full two hundred feet deep in the wind-deposited dust which was everywhere. There were now-dry gullies which undercut the dune-sides and at times dumped mud into the slowly flowing liquid of the river. There were no colorings save dust and mud. The river itself was mud. It flowed very, very slowly and without elation.

  They came back depressed. An airless planet holds no life, but it defies life to establish itself. A methane-ammonia planet fights the intrusion of men with monstrous frigid storms. But this world was designed for life. That it was dead was tragedy. Its rivers flowed sullen, syrupy mud which moved reluctantly toward the lifeless seas.

  Kelley wouldn’t look at the sunset this second night. He went into the camp and turned on music. Crawford watched for a little while only. There were clouds. There were breezes. One knew that here and there rain fell in gentle showers which should have nourished grasses and flowers and filled the air with fragrance. But instead it fell upon impalpable dust and turned it to mud which flowed slowly into gullies and into rivers which were also mud and moved onward, until perhaps after years the soil would become part of a mud-bank in the ocean.

  Nolan came into the foam-walled house and said shortly, “We’ll finish up tomorrow and leave.”

  Kelley said abruptly. “Nobody’s made any guess about why everything died, here. But we all know!”

  Crawford said reflectively, “It must’ve taken a lot of intelligence to murder this planet. When d’you suppose it happened?”

  “Ten thousand—twenty thousand years ago,” said Nolan. “The whole place must have been radioactive, air and all. But if they used cobalt the background count could be down to 3.9 in ten or twenty thousand years.”

  “We haven’t,” said Kelley, “seen any craters. Even the pictures from out in space didn’t show bomb-craters.”

  “When everything died and turned to dust,” said Nolan, “there’d be dust storms. There still must be. They’d cover anything! There was a terrific civilization in part of what’s now the Sahara, back on Earth. By pure accident they’ve found a patch of highway and a post-house. Everything else is covered up. Cities, highways, dams, canals…. And that’s heavy sand instead of fine dust! The Lotus found some shadows on a photo. They want us to look and see what cast them. We’ll look at it tomorrow and then leave.”