From the Ocean from teh Stars (93 page)

it down and destroy the advantage it had won. Despite the fact that this
was a silent war, fought too slowly for the eye to see, the impression of
merciless, implacable conflict was overwhelming.

The plain, by comparison, appeared placid and uneventful. It was
flat, to within a few inches, right out to the horizon, and seemed to be
covered with a thin, wiry grass. Though they descended to within fifty
feet of it, there was no sign of any animal life, which Hilvar found some
what surprising. Perhaps, he decided, it had been scared underground by their approach.

They hovered just above the plain while Alvin tried to convince Hil
var that it would be safe to open the air lock, and Hilvar patiently ex
plained such conceptions as bacteria, fungi, viruses, and microbes—
ideas which Alvin found hard to visualize, and harder still to apply
to himself. The argument had been in progress for some minutes before
they noticed a peculiar fact. The vision screen, which a moment ago had
been showing the forest ahead of them, had now become blank.

"Did you turn that off?" said Hilvar, his mind, as usual, just one jump
ahead of Alvin's.

"No," replied Alvin, a cold shiver running down his spine as he
thought of the only other explanation. "Did
you
turn it off?" he asked the
robot.

"No," came the reply, echoing his own.

With a sigh of relief, Alvin dismissed the idea that the robot might
have started to act on its own volition—that he might have a mechanical
mutiny on his hands.

"Then why is the screen blank?" he asked.

"The image receptors have been covered."

"I don't understand," said Alvin, forgetting for a moment that the
robot would only act on definite orders or questions. He recovered him
self quickly and asked: "What's covered the receptors?"

"I do not know."

The literal-mindedness of robots could sometimes be as exasperating
as the discursiveness of humans. Before Alvin could continue the inter
rogation, Hilvar interrupted.

"Tell it to lift the ship—slowly," he said, and there was a note of
urgency in his voice.

Alvin repeated the command. There was no sense of motion; there
never was. Then, slowly, the image re-formed on the vision screen,
though for a moment it was blurred and distorted. But it showed enough
to end the argument about landing.

The level plain was level no longer. A great bulge had formed im-

mediately below them—a bulge which was ripped open at the top where
the ship had torn free. Huge pseudopods were waving sluggishly across
the gap, as if trying to recapture the prey that had just escaped from their
clutches. As he stared in horrified fascination, Alvin caught a glimpse of
a pulsing scarlet orifice, fringed with whiplike tentacles which were beat
ing in unison, driving anything that came into their reach down into that
gaping maw.

Foiled of its intended victim, the creature sank slowly into the
ground—and it was then that Alvin realized that the plain below was
merely the thin scum on the surface of a stagnant sea.

"What was that—
thing?"
he gasped.

"I'd have to go down and study it before I could tell you that," Hilvar replied matter-of-factly. "It may have been some form of primitive an
imal—perhaps even a relative of our friend in Shalmirane. Certainly it
was not intelligent, or it would have known better than to try to eat a
spaceship."

Alvin felt shaken, though he knew that they had been in no possible danger. He wondered what else lived down there beneath that innocent sward, which seemed to positively invite him to come out and run upon
its springy surface.

"I could spend a lot of time here," said Hilvar, obviously fascinated
by what he had just seen. "Evolution must have produced some very interesting results under these conditions. Not only evolution, but
devolu
tion
as well, as higher forms of life regressed when the planet was de
serted. By now equilibrium must have been reached and—you're not leaving already?" His voice sounded quite plaintive as the landscape
receded below them.

"I am," said Alvin. "I've seen a world with no life, and a world with
too much, and I don't know which I dislike more."

Five thousand feet above the plain, the planet gave them one final
surprise. They encountered a flotilla of huge, flabby balloons drifting
down the wind. From each semitransparent envelope, clusters of tendrils
dangled to form what was virtually an inverted forest. Some plants, it
seemed, in the effort to escape from the ferocious conflict on the surface
had learned to conquer the air. By a miracle of adaptation, they had
managed to prepare hydrogen and store it in bladders, so that they could
lift themselves into the comparative peace of the lower atmosphere.

Yet it was not certain that even here they had found security. Their
downward-hanging stems and leaves were infested with an entire fauna
of spidery animals, which must spend their lives floating far above the surface of the globe, continuing the universal battle for existence on their

lonely aerial islands. Presumably they must from time to time have some contact with the ground; Alvin saw one of the great balloons suddenly collapse and fall out of the sky, its broken envelope acting as a crude parachute. He wondered if this was an accident, or part of the life cycle of these strange entities.

Hilvar slept while they waited for the next planet to approach. For some reason which the robot could not explain to them, the ship traveled slowly—at least by comparison with its Universe-spanning haste—now that it was within a Solar System. It took almost two hours to reach the world that Alvin had chosen for his third stop, and he was a little surprised that any mere interplanetary journey should last so long.

He woke Hilvar as they dropped down into the atmosphere.

"What do you make of
that?"
he asked, pointing to the vision screen.

Below them was a bleak landscape of blacks and grays, showing no sign of vegetation or any other direct evidence of life. But there was indirect evidence; the low hills and shallow valleys were dotted with perfectly formed hemispheres, some of them arranged in complex, symmetrical patterns.

They had learned caution on the last planet, and after carefully considering all the possibilities remained poised high in the atmosphere while they sent the robot down to investigate. Through its eyes, they saw one of the hemispheres approach until the robot was floating only a few feet away from the completely smooth, featureless surface.

There was no sign of any entrance, nor any hint of the purpose which the structure served. It was quite large—over a hundred feet high; some of the other hemispheres were larger still. If it was a building, there appeared to be no way in or out.

After some hesitation, Alvin ordered the robot to move forward and touch the dome. To his utter astonishment, it refused to obey him. This indeed was mutiny—or so at first sight it seemed.

"Why won't you do what I tell you?" asked Alvin, when he had recovered from his astonishment.

"It is forbidden," came the reply.

"Forbidden by whom?"

"I do not know."

"Then how—no, cancel that. Was the order built into you?"

"No."

That seemed to eliminate one possibility. The builders of these domes might well have been the race who made the robot, and might have included this taboo in the machine's original instructions.

"When did you receive the order?" asked Alvin.

"I received it when I landed."

Alvin turned to Hilvar, the light of a new hope burning in his eyes.

"There's intelligence here! Can you sense it?"

"No," Hilvar replied. "This place seems as dead to me as the first
world we visited."

"Fm going outside to join the robot. Whatever spoke to it may speak
to me."

Hilvar did not argue the point, though he looked none too happy.
They brought the ship to earth a hundred feet away from the dome, not
far from the waiting robot, and opened the air lock.

Alvin knew that the lock could not be opened unless the ship's brain
had already satisfied itself that the atmosphere was breathable. For a
moment he thought it had made a mistake—the air was so thin and gave
such little sustenance to his lungs. Then, by inhaling deeply, he found
that he could grasp enough oxygen to survive, thought he felt that a few
minutes here would be all that he could endure.

Panting hard, they walked up to the robot and to the curving wall of
the enigmatic dome. They took one more step—then stopped in unison as if hit by the same sudden blow. In their minds, like the tolling of a
mighty gong, had boomed a single message:

DANGER. COME NO CLOSER.

That was all. It was a message not in words, but in pure thought.
Alvin was certain that any creature, whatever its level of intelligence,
would receive the same warning, in the same utterly unmistakable fash
ion—deep within its mind.

It was a warning, not a threat. Somehow they knew that it was not
directed
against
them; it was for their protection. Here, it seemed to
say, is something intrinsically dangerous, and we, its makers, are anxious
that no one shall be hurt through blundering ignorantly into it.

Alvin and Hilvar stepped back several paces, and looked at each
other, each waiting for the other to say what was in his mind. Hilvar was
the first to sum up the position.

"I was right, Alvin," he said. "There is no intelligence here. That
warning is automatic—triggered by our presence when we get too close."

Alvin nodded in agreement.

"I wonder what they were trying to protect," he said. "There could
be buildings—anything—under these domes."

"There's no way we can find out, if all the domes warn us off. It's interesting—the difference between the three planets we've visited. They

took everything away from the first—they abandoned the second with
out bothering about it—but they went to a lot of trouble here. Perhaps
they expected to come back some day, and wanted everything to be ready for them when they returned."

"But they never did—and that was a long time ago."

"They may have changed their minds."

It was curious, Alvin thought, how both he and Hilvar had uncon
sciously started using the word "they." Whoever or whatever "they" had
been, their presence had been strong on that first planet—and was even
stronger here. This was a world that had been carefully wrapped up, and put away until it might be needed again.

"Let's go back to the ship," panted Alvin. "I can't breathe properly
here."

As soon as the air lock had closed behind them, and they were at
ease once more, they discussed their next move. To make a thorough investigation, they should sample a large number of domes, in the hope
that they might find one that had no warning and which could be en
tered. If that failed—but Alvin would not face that possibility until he
had to.

He faced it less than an hour later, and in a far more dramatic form than he would have dreamed. They had sent the robot down to half a
dozen domes, always with the same result, when they came across a
scene that was badly out of place on this tidy, neatly packaged world.

Below them was a broad valley, sparsely sprinkled with the tantaliz
ing, impenetrable domes. At its center was the unmistakable scar of a
great explosion—an explosion that had thrown debris for miles in all
directions and burned a shallow crater in the ground.

And beside the crater was the wreckage of a spaceship.

☆
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

T
hey landed close to the scene of this ancient trag
edy, and walked slowly, conserving their breath, toward the immense,
broken hull towering above them. Only a short section—either the
prow or the stern—of the ship remained; presumably the rest had been
destroyed in the explosion. As they approached the wreck, a thought
slowly dawned in Alvin's mind, becoming stronger and stronger until it
attained the status of certainty.

"Hilvar," he said, finding it hard to talk and walk at the same time,