"EASY DOES IT NOW." Cully laid down the chisel he had been using
delicately and applied pressure with the flat of his hand.
The others weren't really breathing down his neck. But they did
struggle against the curiosity which made them crowd about the
engineer as he worked to open the cylinder.
"It's too light for an explosive," Hogan repeated for about the
fiftieth time since they had unloaded their find before the star
ship.
At a good vantage point up on the ramp Carlee Skort and Trude
Harmon sat together while the men below tried to hand Cully tools
he didn't need and generally got in each other's way. But now they
had come to the last moment of suspense. After more than an hour's
work the engineer had been able to force open the small seal
hatch.
Cully bumped heads with Kimber and Kordov as he flashed a torch
beam into the interior. Then, with infinite care, he began to hand
out to eager assistants a series of boxes, small round containers
and a larger, ornamented chest. All these were fashioned of the
same lightweight alloy as the large carrier and they appeared
unmarked by time.
"Cargo carrier," Kimber decided. "What can be in these?" He held
one of the smallest boxes to his ear and shook it cautiously, but
there was no answering rattle.
Kordov picked up the chest, examining its fastening carefully.
At last he shook his head and brought out a pocket knife, working
the blade into the crevice between lid and side, using it to lever
up the cover.
Soft creamy stuff puffed up as the pressure of the lid was
removed, fluffing over the rim. The First Scientist plucked it
carefully away in strips. As the late afternoon sun struck full on
the contents which had been protected by that packing, there was a
concerted gasp from the Terrans.
"What are they?" someone demanded.
Kordov picked up a fine entwisted strand, dangling its length in
the light.
"Opals?" he suggested. "No, these are too hard, cut in facets.
Diamonds? I don't think so. I confess I have never seen anything
like them before."
"A world's ransom," Dard did not know he had spoken aloud. The
wild beauty swinging from Kordov's hand drew him as no
man-fashioned thing had done before.
"Any more in there?" asked Kimber. "That's a large box to hold
only one item."
"We shall see. Girls," Kordov held out the rope of strange
jewels to the two women, "hang on to that."
Another layer of the packing was pulled out to display a pair of
bracelets. This time red stones which Santee identified.
"Them's rubies! I prospected in the Lunar mountains and found
some just like 'em. Good color. What else you got there, Tas?"
A third layer of packing led to the last and greatest wonder of
all—a belt, five inches wide, with a clasp so set in gems as to be
just an oval glitter—the belt itself fashioned of rows of tiny
crystalline chains.
Trude Harmon tried to clasp it about her waist to discover it
would not meet by inches. Nor was Carlee able to wear it
either.
"Must have been mighty slim, the girl what wore that!" Harmon
commented.
"Maybe she wasn't a girl at all," Carlee said.
And there was something daunting in that thought.
Carlee had been the first to put into words their lurking fear,
that those who had packed the carrier had been nonhuman.
"Well, bracelets argue arms," Rogan pointed out. "And that
necklace went around a neck. A belt suggests a waist—even if it is
smaller than yours, girls. I think we can believe that the lady
those were meant for wasn't too far removed from our norm."
Santee pawed another box away from the pile. "Let's see the
rest."
The boxes were sealed with a strip of softer metal which had to
be peeled from around the edge. And the first three they forced
contained unidentifiable contents. Two held packages of dried twigs
and leaves, the third vials filled with various powders and a dark
scum which might have been the remains of liquid. These were turned
over to Kordov for further investigation.
Of the remaining boxes three were larger and heavier. Dard broke
the end of the sealing strip on one and rolled it away. Under the
lid was a square of coarse woven stuff folded over several times to
serve as protective padding. Since this was like the jewel case the
others stopped their delving and gathered around as he
pulled the stuff loose. What he found beneath was almost as
precious in its way as the gems.
He dared not put his lingers on it, but worked it out of the
container gently by the end of the metal rod on which it was wound
in a bolt. For here was a length of fabric. But none of them—not
even those who could remember the wonders of the pre-Burn
cities—had ever seen anything such as this. It was opalescent,
fiery color rippled along every crease and fold as Dard turned it
around in the sunlight. It might have been spun from the substance
of those same jewels which formed the necklace.
Carlee almost snatched it from him and Trude Harmon inserted a
timid finger under the edge.
"It's a veil!" she cried. "How wonderful!"
"Open the rest of those!" Carlee pointed to the two similar
boxes. "Maybe there's more of this."
There was more fabric, not so sheer and not opalescent, but
woven of changing colors in delicate subtle shades the Terrans
could not put names to. Inspired by this find they plunged into a
frenzy of opening until Kordov called them to order.
"These," he indicated the wealth from the plundered boxes,
"can't be anything but luxury goods, luxury goods of a civilization
far more advanced than ours. I'm inclined to believe that this was
a shipment which never reached its destination."
"That tube we found the carrier in," mused Kimber.
"Suppose they shot such containers through tubes for long
distances. Even across the sea. We didn't transport goods that way,
but we can't judge this world by Terra. And they have no high tides
here."
"Tas, Sim," Carlee turned one of the bracelets around in hands
which bore the scars of the hardworking Cleft life, "could
they—are they still here? Those Others—?"
Kimber got to his feet, brushing the sand from his breeches.
"That's what we'll have to find out—and soon!" He squinted at
the sun. "Too late to do anything more today. But tomorrow—"
"Hey!" Rogan balanced on his palm a tiny roll of black stuff he
had just pried out of a pencil-slim container. "I think that this
is some kind of microfilm. Maybe we can check on that—if we can
rig up a viewer which will take it."
Kordov was instantly alert. "How many of those things in
there?"
Rogan took them one at a time from the box he had opened. "I see
twenty."
"Can you rig a viewer?" was Kordov's next question.
The techneer shrugged. "I can try. But I'll have to get at
machines we packed in the bottom storeroom—and that will take some
doing."
"And"—Cully had been poking about in the interior of the now
empty carrier—"there's an engine in here must have supplied the
motive power. I'd like to dig it out and see what makes it
tick."
Kimber ran his hands over the tight cap of his hair. "And you'll
need a machine shop to do that in, I suppose?" He was very close to
sarcasm. "There's the problem of those still in the ship—what will
we do?"
Carlee broke in. "You haven't found any signs of civilization
yet—except this. And you don't know how long this could have lain
where you discovered it. We can't hold off settlement until we are
sure. The cities, or centers of civilization—if there are any—may
he hundreds of miles away. Suppose a space ship had landed on Terra
in a center section of the Canadian northwest, on the steppes of
Central Asia, or in the middle of Australia—any thinly populated
district. It would have been months, perhaps years, before its
arrival became known—especially since Pax forbade travel. There
may exist a similar situation here. Our landing may go undiscovered
for a long time—if we do share this world."
"And that, you know," Kordov added, "is common sense. Let us
explore the valley—if it is promising, make a place there for our
people. But at the same time an exploring team can operate to map
the district. Only, let us not make contact with any race we find,
until we know its attitude."
"Or what manner of creature," Carlee said softly to herself.
"What manner of creature." Dard had caught that. Carlee most
likely believed that the intelligence which might share this world
was nonhuman. Man's old fear of the unknown, the not-understood,
would again haunt them. This was an alien world, could they ever
make it home?
"These—these are beautiful!" Trude Harmon had knelt beside him
in the sand to see the small carvings he was mechanically
unwrapping.
The one he held represented an animal which was a weird cross
between horse and deer—possessing flowing mane, tail and horns.
Presented as rearing, with snorting nostrils, it was a miniature of
savage fury. Tiny gems were set in the eye sockets and the hooves
were plated with a contrasting metal. Some master-craftsman had
endowed it with life.
"All these things—they are so wonderful!"
"They loved beauty," Dard answered her. "But I think that
these"—he picked up a second carving, representing quite a
different creature—a manikin with webbed feet, a monkey face and
hands lacking a thumb—"are all pieces to be used in a game. See,
here's another horned horse, but made of a different color, and
another webfooted monkey. Chessmen?"
"And a little tree!" She freed a third piece from its wrappings.
"A tree of golden apples!"
True enough, on the branches of the tone shaped tree there were
round gems of a glowing yellow. Golden apples! That story Lars used
to tell Dessie about the apples of the sun!
"Huh?" Harmon squatted down by his wife to see what held her
attention. "Apples? What's that about apples, Trude?"
She held out her hand with the small tree standing on its
flattened palm. "Golden apples! See, Tim?"
"Looks more like some kind of a pine to me." But he took the
tree gently. "Fruit—that's what those are supposed to be all
right." His eyes went past the starship to the open mouth of the
valley where the blue-green of growing things beckoned. "Might find
us a pine growin' apples at that, Trude. After them there flyin'
snakes, and floatin' spider-plants, and them green and yellow
duck-dogs what keep peekin' at us from holes yonder—well, I can
believe that we're gonna pick us apples offa pine trees, too. Only
we'd better get about the business of goin' to hunt them trees
pretty soon."
The business of hunting their future settlement began the next
morning. Kimber with Rogan and Santee took off in the sled to make
a circuit of the inner valley. When they signaled that they viewed
nothing disturbing there, a second exploring party set off on foot.
Cully, Harmon and Dard, with packets of supplies, stun rifles and
water-filled canteens progressed slowly up the river.
At the entrance to the inner valley the sand was broken by
patches of soil shading from red-yellow to a dark brown. In this
earth grew tufts and clumps of thin-bladed, very tough-stemmed
grass which in its turn gave way to small bushes, clothed with
ragged blue-green leaves.
All three of the explorers stopped short as the grass before
them swayed, masking the progress of some living thing. Dard was
the first to move forward with his silent woodsman's tread.
Cautiously he parted the tall stalks to see below him a real path,
as well marked as a Terran game trail, but in miniature. As the
swaying still continued he stood waiting, hardly daring to
breathe.
Around the roots of a low bush a small red-brown head, almost
indistinguishable from the bare earth of the trail, showed. Dard
waited. With a hop the traveler came into plain sight.
Close to the size of a Terran rat it hopped on large,
over-developed hind legs, between which bobbed a fluff of tail.
Small handlike paws hung down across its darker belly fur. The ears
were large, fan shaped, and fringed with the same fluff as the
tail. Black buttons of eyes showed neither pupil nor iris, and a
rounded muzzle ended in a rodent's prominent teeth. But Dard did
not have long to catalogue such physical points. It sighted him.
Then it gave a wild bound, making an about-face turn while in the
air—disappearing in a second. Dard was left to pick up from the
center of the trail the object it had just dropped in its
flight.
"Rabbit?" Harmon wondered, "or squirrel, or rat? How're we gonna
know? What did that critter drop, boy?"
Dard held a pod about three inches long, dark blue and shiny. He
surrendered it to Harmon who slit the outer covering with thumbnail
and shook out a dozen dark-blue seeds.
"Pears, beans, wheat?" Harmon's bewilderment showed signs of
irritation. "It grows, ripens this way, and it may be good to eat.
But," he turned to his companions and ended with an explosive,
"how're we ever gonna know?"
"Take 'em back and try 'em on the hamsters," Cully returned
laconically. "But that hopper sure could go, couldn't he?" Thus he
unconsciously christened the third type of fauna they had
discovered in the new world.
Harmon stowed seeds and pod away in a zipper-closed pocket
before they moved on through grass which arose waist high about
them. Here and there in it they spotted more of the seed pods.
In fact shortly the pod-headed plants were so thick around them
that they might have been swishing through a field of ripened
grain. Harmon broke silence:
"This remind you of anything?"
They regarded the expanse of blue doubtfully and shook their
heads.
"Well, it does me. This here looks jus' like a wheatfield all
ready t' be reaped! I tell you I'm a-thinkin' we're walkin' over
somebody's farm!"
"But there's no fences," protested Dard.
"No, but you take a farm that's not been touched for a good long
time—this stuff coulda jus' kept seedin' itself and spread out a
lot. I gotta feelin' this is part of a farm!"
With that Harmon took the lead, cutting across the narrowest
section of the ripe crop to a line of bushes. Now that his
attention had been stimulated by Harmon's theory Dard thought that
that clump of taller vegetation was strung out as if it might
provide a barrier for the grain, a fence for the field.
They worked their way around this line of brush to discover
Harmon's instinct right. For there was no disguising the
artificiality of the large dome flanked by several smaller ones
which stood surmounted and surrounded by rank vines, tall grass and
long unpruned shrubbery.
But it was not those domes which held the explorers' attention.
A constant murmur of sound and a flash of flying things drew them
to a tree standing in what once must have been the front yard—if
Those Others cultivated front yards.
"The golden apples!" Dard identified the tree from the carved
piece he had seen the night before.
Its symmetrical cone shape of blue-green provided the right
background for the yellow globes which dragged down branches with
their weight. And the air and grass about the tree were alive with
feasters.
The Terrans watched the wheeling birds—or were they oversized
butterflies—that settled and squabbled for a chance to sink beaks
into those ripened orbs. While, on the ground, there was a steady
coming and going of hoppers harvesting the soft fallen fruit. And
from that scene of activity the breeze wafted a scent which set the
watchers' mouths watering—semi-intoxicating with its promise of
juicy delights.
As the men advanced, the busy feeders displayed no signs of
alarm. One hopper ran straight between Cully's feet, a quarter
section of dripping fruit clasped in its arms. And a bird-butterfly
skimmed Dard's head on its way to the banquet.
"Well—for—!" Cully caught himself in midstride to avoid
stepping on a furry red-brown mass. He picked up one of the hoppers
in a completely comatose state. Harmon gave a bark of laughter.
"Dead drunk," he commented. "Seen chickens—pigs, too—get that
way on cider leavin's. Lookit here—this bird can't fly straight
neither!"
He was right. A lavender creature, whose wings were banded with
pale green and gray, flapped an erratic course to a nearby bush and
clung there as if it did not trust its powers for a farther
flight.
Cully laid down the limp hopper and picked one of the golden
apples. It snapped away easily, and he held it out for their closer
examination. The skin was firm over the pulp, and radiating out
from the stem were tiny rosy freckles. And the enticing scent was a
temptation hard to withstand. Dard wanted to snatch the fruit from
the engineer, to sink his teeth in that smooth skin and prove to
himself that it tasted as good as it smelled.
"Pity we ain't got a hamster with us to try it on. But we can
take some back. Iffen they're good," Harmon swallowed visibly, "we
can have us some real eatin'! Needn't let the critters take 'em
all. The fella what lived here, I bet he set a store by them there
things. Golden apples, yeah, that's jus' what they be. But they
ain't gonna run away, and me, I'd kinda like to see the house and
barns."
The house and barns, if those were the correct designations for
the domes, were half buried in twisting vines and rank growth. When
they broke their way through to what must have been the front door
of the largest dome, Cully let out his breath in a low whistle.
"Fight here. This door was smashed in from the outside."
Dard, accustomed to the violence of the raiding parties of Pax,
noted the broken scraps of metal on the portal and agreed. They
edged into a scene of desolation. The place had been looted long
ago, tough grass grew through a crack in the wall, and the litter
underfoot went to powder when their boots touched it. Dard picked
up a shred of golden glass which held a fairy tracery of white
pattern. But there was nothing whole left.
"Raiding party, all right," Harmon agreed, conditioned by his
Terran past. "Could be that they had them some Peacemen here too.
But it was a long time ago. We'd better let Kordov and the brains
prospect around in here. Maybe they can learn what really happened.
Wonder if the barn took a beatin'."
But what they did discover in the larger of the two remaining
domes brought a steady stream of curses from Harmon and made Dard's
skin crawl with its suggestion of wanton and horrible rapine. A
line of white skeletons lay along the wall, each in what seemed a
stall. Harmon tried to pick up an oddly shaped skull which went to
dust in his fingers.
"Left 'em to die of thirst and starvation!" gritted the farmer.
"Knocked off the people and jus' left the rest. They—they were
worse'n Peacemen—them what did this!"
"And they must have been the winners, too," observed Cully. "Not
too pleasant to think about."
All three started at a shout, and Dard swung his stun rifle
around at the entrance of that tragic barn. What if "they" were
returning? Then he forced imagination under control. This horror
had occurred years ago—its perpetrators were long since dead. But
had they left descendants—with the same characteristics?
Kimber came into the dome. "What're you doing in here?" he
wanted to know. "We've been watching you from the sled. What—what
in blue blazes is this?"
"Warning left by some very nasty people," Dard spoke up. "This
farm was raided and whoever did it left the animals penned up to
starve to death!"
Kimber walked slowly along that pitiful line of bones. His face
was very sober indeed.
"It's been a long time since this happened." It appeared to Dard
that the pilot was reassuring himself by that statement.
"Yeah," Harmon agreed. "A good long time. And they ain't bin
back since. Guess we can move down here and take over, sure. This
was a good farm once, no reason why it can't be one agin."
"EASY DOES IT NOW." Cully laid down the chisel he had been using
delicately and applied pressure with the flat of his hand.
The others weren't really breathing down his neck. But they did
struggle against the curiosity which made them crowd about the
engineer as he worked to open the cylinder.
"It's too light for an explosive," Hogan repeated for about the
fiftieth time since they had unloaded their find before the star
ship.
At a good vantage point up on the ramp Carlee Skort and Trude
Harmon sat together while the men below tried to hand Cully tools
he didn't need and generally got in each other's way. But now they
had come to the last moment of suspense. After more than an hour's
work the engineer had been able to force open the small seal
hatch.
Cully bumped heads with Kimber and Kordov as he flashed a torch
beam into the interior. Then, with infinite care, he began to hand
out to eager assistants a series of boxes, small round containers
and a larger, ornamented chest. All these were fashioned of the
same lightweight alloy as the large carrier and they appeared
unmarked by time.
"Cargo carrier," Kimber decided. "What can be in these?" He held
one of the smallest boxes to his ear and shook it cautiously, but
there was no answering rattle.
Kordov picked up the chest, examining its fastening carefully.
At last he shook his head and brought out a pocket knife, working
the blade into the crevice between lid and side, using it to lever
up the cover.
Soft creamy stuff puffed up as the pressure of the lid was
removed, fluffing over the rim. The First Scientist plucked it
carefully away in strips. As the late afternoon sun struck full on
the contents which had been protected by that packing, there was a
concerted gasp from the Terrans.
"What are they?" someone demanded.
Kordov picked up a fine entwisted strand, dangling its length in
the light.
"Opals?" he suggested. "No, these are too hard, cut in facets.
Diamonds? I don't think so. I confess I have never seen anything
like them before."
"A world's ransom," Dard did not know he had spoken aloud. The
wild beauty swinging from Kordov's hand drew him as no
man-fashioned thing had done before.
"Any more in there?" asked Kimber. "That's a large box to hold
only one item."
"We shall see. Girls," Kordov held out the rope of strange
jewels to the two women, "hang on to that."
Another layer of the packing was pulled out to display a pair of
bracelets. This time red stones which Santee identified.
"Them's rubies! I prospected in the Lunar mountains and found
some just like 'em. Good color. What else you got there, Tas?"
A third layer of packing led to the last and greatest wonder of
all—a belt, five inches wide, with a clasp so set in gems as to be
just an oval glitter—the belt itself fashioned of rows of tiny
crystalline chains.
Trude Harmon tried to clasp it about her waist to discover it
would not meet by inches. Nor was Carlee able to wear it
either.
"Must have been mighty slim, the girl what wore that!" Harmon
commented.
"Maybe she wasn't a girl at all," Carlee said.
And there was something daunting in that thought.
Carlee had been the first to put into words their lurking fear,
that those who had packed the carrier had been nonhuman.
"Well, bracelets argue arms," Rogan pointed out. "And that
necklace went around a neck. A belt suggests a waist—even if it is
smaller than yours, girls. I think we can believe that the lady
those were meant for wasn't too far removed from our norm."
Santee pawed another box away from the pile. "Let's see the
rest."
The boxes were sealed with a strip of softer metal which had to
be peeled from around the edge. And the first three they forced
contained unidentifiable contents. Two held packages of dried twigs
and leaves, the third vials filled with various powders and a dark
scum which might have been the remains of liquid. These were turned
over to Kordov for further investigation.
Of the remaining boxes three were larger and heavier. Dard broke
the end of the sealing strip on one and rolled it away. Under the
lid was a square of coarse woven stuff folded over several times to
serve as protective padding. Since this was like the jewel case the
others stopped their delving and gathered around as he
pulled the stuff loose. What he found beneath was almost as
precious in its way as the gems.
He dared not put his lingers on it, but worked it out of the
container gently by the end of the metal rod on which it was wound
in a bolt. For here was a length of fabric. But none of them—not
even those who could remember the wonders of the pre-Burn
cities—had ever seen anything such as this. It was opalescent,
fiery color rippled along every crease and fold as Dard turned it
around in the sunlight. It might have been spun from the substance
of those same jewels which formed the necklace.
Carlee almost snatched it from him and Trude Harmon inserted a
timid finger under the edge.
"It's a veil!" she cried. "How wonderful!"
"Open the rest of those!" Carlee pointed to the two similar
boxes. "Maybe there's more of this."
There was more fabric, not so sheer and not opalescent, but
woven of changing colors in delicate subtle shades the Terrans
could not put names to. Inspired by this find they plunged into a
frenzy of opening until Kordov called them to order.
"These," he indicated the wealth from the plundered boxes,
"can't be anything but luxury goods, luxury goods of a civilization
far more advanced than ours. I'm inclined to believe that this was
a shipment which never reached its destination."
"That tube we found the carrier in," mused Kimber.
"Suppose they shot such containers through tubes for long
distances. Even across the sea. We didn't transport goods that way,
but we can't judge this world by Terra. And they have no high tides
here."
"Tas, Sim," Carlee turned one of the bracelets around in hands
which bore the scars of the hardworking Cleft life, "could
they—are they still here? Those Others—?"
Kimber got to his feet, brushing the sand from his breeches.
"That's what we'll have to find out—and soon!" He squinted at
the sun. "Too late to do anything more today. But tomorrow—"
"Hey!" Rogan balanced on his palm a tiny roll of black stuff he
had just pried out of a pencil-slim container. "I think that this
is some kind of microfilm. Maybe we can check on that—if we can
rig up a viewer which will take it."
Kordov was instantly alert. "How many of those things in
there?"
Rogan took them one at a time from the box he had opened. "I see
twenty."
"Can you rig a viewer?" was Kordov's next question.
The techneer shrugged. "I can try. But I'll have to get at
machines we packed in the bottom storeroom—and that will take some
doing."
"And"—Cully had been poking about in the interior of the now
empty carrier—"there's an engine in here must have supplied the
motive power. I'd like to dig it out and see what makes it
tick."
Kimber ran his hands over the tight cap of his hair. "And you'll
need a machine shop to do that in, I suppose?" He was very close to
sarcasm. "There's the problem of those still in the ship—what will
we do?"
Carlee broke in. "You haven't found any signs of civilization
yet—except this. And you don't know how long this could have lain
where you discovered it. We can't hold off settlement until we are
sure. The cities, or centers of civilization—if there are any—may
he hundreds of miles away. Suppose a space ship had landed on Terra
in a center section of the Canadian northwest, on the steppes of
Central Asia, or in the middle of Australia—any thinly populated
district. It would have been months, perhaps years, before its
arrival became known—especially since Pax forbade travel. There
may exist a similar situation here. Our landing may go undiscovered
for a long time—if we do share this world."
"And that, you know," Kordov added, "is common sense. Let us
explore the valley—if it is promising, make a place there for our
people. But at the same time an exploring team can operate to map
the district. Only, let us not make contact with any race we find,
until we know its attitude."
"Or what manner of creature," Carlee said softly to herself.
"What manner of creature." Dard had caught that. Carlee most
likely believed that the intelligence which might share this world
was nonhuman. Man's old fear of the unknown, the not-understood,
would again haunt them. This was an alien world, could they ever
make it home?
"These—these are beautiful!" Trude Harmon had knelt beside him
in the sand to see the small carvings he was mechanically
unwrapping.
The one he held represented an animal which was a weird cross
between horse and deer—possessing flowing mane, tail and horns.
Presented as rearing, with snorting nostrils, it was a miniature of
savage fury. Tiny gems were set in the eye sockets and the hooves
were plated with a contrasting metal. Some master-craftsman had
endowed it with life.
"All these things—they are so wonderful!"
"They loved beauty," Dard answered her. "But I think that
these"—he picked up a second carving, representing quite a
different creature—a manikin with webbed feet, a monkey face and
hands lacking a thumb—"are all pieces to be used in a game. See,
here's another horned horse, but made of a different color, and
another webfooted monkey. Chessmen?"
"And a little tree!" She freed a third piece from its wrappings.
"A tree of golden apples!"
True enough, on the branches of the tone shaped tree there were
round gems of a glowing yellow. Golden apples! That story Lars used
to tell Dessie about the apples of the sun!
"Huh?" Harmon squatted down by his wife to see what held her
attention. "Apples? What's that about apples, Trude?"
She held out her hand with the small tree standing on its
flattened palm. "Golden apples! See, Tim?"
"Looks more like some kind of a pine to me." But he took the
tree gently. "Fruit—that's what those are supposed to be all
right." His eyes went past the starship to the open mouth of the
valley where the blue-green of growing things beckoned. "Might find
us a pine growin' apples at that, Trude. After them there flyin'
snakes, and floatin' spider-plants, and them green and yellow
duck-dogs what keep peekin' at us from holes yonder—well, I can
believe that we're gonna pick us apples offa pine trees, too. Only
we'd better get about the business of goin' to hunt them trees
pretty soon."
The business of hunting their future settlement began the next
morning. Kimber with Rogan and Santee took off in the sled to make
a circuit of the inner valley. When they signaled that they viewed
nothing disturbing there, a second exploring party set off on foot.
Cully, Harmon and Dard, with packets of supplies, stun rifles and
water-filled canteens progressed slowly up the river.
At the entrance to the inner valley the sand was broken by
patches of soil shading from red-yellow to a dark brown. In this
earth grew tufts and clumps of thin-bladed, very tough-stemmed
grass which in its turn gave way to small bushes, clothed with
ragged blue-green leaves.
All three of the explorers stopped short as the grass before
them swayed, masking the progress of some living thing. Dard was
the first to move forward with his silent woodsman's tread.
Cautiously he parted the tall stalks to see below him a real path,
as well marked as a Terran game trail, but in miniature. As the
swaying still continued he stood waiting, hardly daring to
breathe.
Around the roots of a low bush a small red-brown head, almost
indistinguishable from the bare earth of the trail, showed. Dard
waited. With a hop the traveler came into plain sight.
Close to the size of a Terran rat it hopped on large,
over-developed hind legs, between which bobbed a fluff of tail.
Small handlike paws hung down across its darker belly fur. The ears
were large, fan shaped, and fringed with the same fluff as the
tail. Black buttons of eyes showed neither pupil nor iris, and a
rounded muzzle ended in a rodent's prominent teeth. But Dard did
not have long to catalogue such physical points. It sighted him.
Then it gave a wild bound, making an about-face turn while in the
air—disappearing in a second. Dard was left to pick up from the
center of the trail the object it had just dropped in its
flight.
"Rabbit?" Harmon wondered, "or squirrel, or rat? How're we gonna
know? What did that critter drop, boy?"
Dard held a pod about three inches long, dark blue and shiny. He
surrendered it to Harmon who slit the outer covering with thumbnail
and shook out a dozen dark-blue seeds.
"Pears, beans, wheat?" Harmon's bewilderment showed signs of
irritation. "It grows, ripens this way, and it may be good to eat.
But," he turned to his companions and ended with an explosive,
"how're we ever gonna know?"
"Take 'em back and try 'em on the hamsters," Cully returned
laconically. "But that hopper sure could go, couldn't he?" Thus he
unconsciously christened the third type of fauna they had
discovered in the new world.
Harmon stowed seeds and pod away in a zipper-closed pocket
before they moved on through grass which arose waist high about
them. Here and there in it they spotted more of the seed pods.
In fact shortly the pod-headed plants were so thick around them
that they might have been swishing through a field of ripened
grain. Harmon broke silence:
"This remind you of anything?"
They regarded the expanse of blue doubtfully and shook their
heads.
"Well, it does me. This here looks jus' like a wheatfield all
ready t' be reaped! I tell you I'm a-thinkin' we're walkin' over
somebody's farm!"
"But there's no fences," protested Dard.
"No, but you take a farm that's not been touched for a good long
time—this stuff coulda jus' kept seedin' itself and spread out a
lot. I gotta feelin' this is part of a farm!"
With that Harmon took the lead, cutting across the narrowest
section of the ripe crop to a line of bushes. Now that his
attention had been stimulated by Harmon's theory Dard thought that
that clump of taller vegetation was strung out as if it might
provide a barrier for the grain, a fence for the field.
They worked their way around this line of brush to discover
Harmon's instinct right. For there was no disguising the
artificiality of the large dome flanked by several smaller ones
which stood surmounted and surrounded by rank vines, tall grass and
long unpruned shrubbery.
But it was not those domes which held the explorers' attention.
A constant murmur of sound and a flash of flying things drew them
to a tree standing in what once must have been the front yard—if
Those Others cultivated front yards.
"The golden apples!" Dard identified the tree from the carved
piece he had seen the night before.
Its symmetrical cone shape of blue-green provided the right
background for the yellow globes which dragged down branches with
their weight. And the air and grass about the tree were alive with
feasters.
The Terrans watched the wheeling birds—or were they oversized
butterflies—that settled and squabbled for a chance to sink beaks
into those ripened orbs. While, on the ground, there was a steady
coming and going of hoppers harvesting the soft fallen fruit. And
from that scene of activity the breeze wafted a scent which set the
watchers' mouths watering—semi-intoxicating with its promise of
juicy delights.
As the men advanced, the busy feeders displayed no signs of
alarm. One hopper ran straight between Cully's feet, a quarter
section of dripping fruit clasped in its arms. And a bird-butterfly
skimmed Dard's head on its way to the banquet.
"Well—for—!" Cully caught himself in midstride to avoid
stepping on a furry red-brown mass. He picked up one of the hoppers
in a completely comatose state. Harmon gave a bark of laughter.
"Dead drunk," he commented. "Seen chickens—pigs, too—get that
way on cider leavin's. Lookit here—this bird can't fly straight
neither!"
He was right. A lavender creature, whose wings were banded with
pale green and gray, flapped an erratic course to a nearby bush and
clung there as if it did not trust its powers for a farther
flight.
Cully laid down the limp hopper and picked one of the golden
apples. It snapped away easily, and he held it out for their closer
examination. The skin was firm over the pulp, and radiating out
from the stem were tiny rosy freckles. And the enticing scent was a
temptation hard to withstand. Dard wanted to snatch the fruit from
the engineer, to sink his teeth in that smooth skin and prove to
himself that it tasted as good as it smelled.
"Pity we ain't got a hamster with us to try it on. But we can
take some back. Iffen they're good," Harmon swallowed visibly, "we
can have us some real eatin'! Needn't let the critters take 'em
all. The fella what lived here, I bet he set a store by them there
things. Golden apples, yeah, that's jus' what they be. But they
ain't gonna run away, and me, I'd kinda like to see the house and
barns."
The house and barns, if those were the correct designations for
the domes, were half buried in twisting vines and rank growth. When
they broke their way through to what must have been the front door
of the largest dome, Cully let out his breath in a low whistle.
"Fight here. This door was smashed in from the outside."
Dard, accustomed to the violence of the raiding parties of Pax,
noted the broken scraps of metal on the portal and agreed. They
edged into a scene of desolation. The place had been looted long
ago, tough grass grew through a crack in the wall, and the litter
underfoot went to powder when their boots touched it. Dard picked
up a shred of golden glass which held a fairy tracery of white
pattern. But there was nothing whole left.
"Raiding party, all right," Harmon agreed, conditioned by his
Terran past. "Could be that they had them some Peacemen here too.
But it was a long time ago. We'd better let Kordov and the brains
prospect around in here. Maybe they can learn what really happened.
Wonder if the barn took a beatin'."
But what they did discover in the larger of the two remaining
domes brought a steady stream of curses from Harmon and made Dard's
skin crawl with its suggestion of wanton and horrible rapine. A
line of white skeletons lay along the wall, each in what seemed a
stall. Harmon tried to pick up an oddly shaped skull which went to
dust in his fingers.
"Left 'em to die of thirst and starvation!" gritted the farmer.
"Knocked off the people and jus' left the rest. They—they were
worse'n Peacemen—them what did this!"
"And they must have been the winners, too," observed Cully. "Not
too pleasant to think about."
All three started at a shout, and Dard swung his stun rifle
around at the entrance of that tragic barn. What if "they" were
returning? Then he forced imagination under control. This horror
had occurred years ago—its perpetrators were long since dead. But
had they left descendants—with the same characteristics?
Kimber came into the dome. "What're you doing in here?" he
wanted to know. "We've been watching you from the sled. What—what
in blue blazes is this?"
"Warning left by some very nasty people," Dard spoke up. "This
farm was raided and whoever did it left the animals penned up to
starve to death!"
Kimber walked slowly along that pitiful line of bones. His face
was very sober indeed.
"It's been a long time since this happened." It appeared to Dard
that the pilot was reassuring himself by that statement.
"Yeah," Harmon agreed. "A good long time. And they ain't bin
back since. Guess we can move down here and take over, sure. This
was a good farm once, no reason why it can't be one agin."