Time Traders (35 page)

"Wait!" Renfry caught at Ashe. "Something moved—over there!"

They had found weapons in the ship; now they drew those odd guns, twins to the one Ross had worn when Travis had first met him. The wind blew a fragment of long-dead vegetation before it. It caught against the globe and then was whirled away in a dreary dance.

But out of an opening at the foot of the red tower nearest to them something stirred. And Travis, watching that coil heading straight for them, froze. A snake? A snake unwinding to such a length that its questing head was approaching their stand while the end of its tail still lay within the ruin where it denned?

He took aim at that swaying coil. Then Renfry struck his wrist pads, knocking away the barrel of the weapon. And in that moment the Apache saw what the other had noticed first, that the snake was not a thing of flesh, skin, and supple bones, but of some manufactured material.

Something else moved through the door from which the snake had crawled. This newcomer strode forward by jerks, paused, came on, as if compelled to advance despite the limitations of ancient fabric and long wear. The thing was vaguely manlike in form, in that it advanced on stilt legs. But it had four upper appendages now folded against its central bulk, and where the head should have been there was a nodding stalk resembling the antennae of a com unit.

Its jerky walk with the many pauses conveyed internal discord, rust and wear, and the deterioration of time. How much time? The four humans stepped away from the ship, giving free passage to the strange partners from the tower.

"Robots!" Ross said suddenly. "They're robots! But what are they going to do?"

"Refuel, I think." Ashe rather than Renfry answered that.

"You've hit it!" The technician pushed forward. "But do they have fuel—now?"

"We'd better hope there is some left." Ashe sounded bleak. "I'd say we aren't supposed to stay here—better get back on board."

The threat of being trapped here, of locked controls raising the ship and leaving them marooned, induced something close to panic in all three hearers. They raced to the ladder and began to climb. But when they reached the air lock, Renfry remained at the open door, relating the movements of the robots.

"I think that animated pipeline's been connected—underneath. Can't see what the walker's doing—maybe he just stands by in case of trouble. And there's something coming through the hose—you can see it swell! We're taking on whatever we're supposed to have!"

"A fueling station." Ashe looked out over the wide stretch of crumbling towers and checkerboard landing spaces. "But look at the size of this place. It must have been constructed to handle hundreds, even thousands, of ships. And since they couldn't
all
be in to refuel at the same time, that presupposes a fleet"—he drew a deep breath of wonder—"a fleet almost beyond comprehension. We were right—this civilization was galaxy-wide. Maybe it spread to the next galaxy."

But Travis' eyes rested on the splintered cap of the tower from which the robots had come. "It looks like no one has been here for some time," he observed.

"Machines," Renfry answered, "will go on working until they run down. I'd say that walking one down there is close to its final stop. We triggered some impulse when we landed on the right spot. The robots were activated to do their job—maybe their last job. How long since they worked the last time? This may have kept going for a long part of that twelve thousand years you're always talking about—an empire dying slowly. But I wouldn't try to measure the time. These aliens knew machinery, and their materials are better than our best."

"I'd like to see the interior of one of those towers," Ashe said wistfully. "Maybe they kept records, had something we could understand to explain it all."

Renfry shook his head. "Wouldn't dare try it. We might raise before you got inside the door. Ahh—the walker is going back now. I'd say get ready for take-off."

They snugged the open port and the inner door of the space lock. Renfry, out of habit, went on up to the control cabin. But the other three took to their bunks. There was a waiting period and then once more the blast into space. This time they did not lose consciousness as they endured the stress of reentering space.

"Now what?" Hours later they squeezed into the mess cabin to hold a rather aimless conference concerning the future. Since no one had anything more than guesses to offer, none of them answered Renfry's question.

"I read a book once," Ross said suddenly with the slightly embarrassed air of one admitting to a minor social error, "that had a story in it about some Dutch sea captain who swore he'd get around the horn in one of those old-time sailing ships. He called up the Devil to help him and he never got home—just went on sailing through the centuries."

"The Flying Dutchman," Ashe identified.

"Well, we haven't called up any Devil," Renfry remarked.

"Haven't we?" Travis had spoken his thoughts, without realizing until they all stared at him that he was done so aloud.

"Your Devil being?" Ashe prompted.

"We were trying to get knowledge out of this ship—and it wasn't our kind of knowledge," he floundered a little, attempting to put into words what he now believed.

"Scavengers getting their just desserts?" Ashe summed up. "If you follow that line of reasoning, yes, you have a point. The forbidden fruit of knowledge. That was an idea planted so long ago in mankind's conscience that it lingers today as guilt."

"Planted," Ross repeated the word thoughtfully, "planted . . ."

"Planted!" Travis echoed, his mind making one of those odd jumps in sudden understanding of which he had only recently become conscious. "By whom?"

Then glancing around at the alien ship which was both their transport and their prison, he added softly, "By these people?"

"They didn't want us to know about them." Ross's words came in a rush. "Remember what they did to that Russian time base—traced it all the way forward and destroyed it in every era. Suppose they
did
have contacts with primitive man on our world—planted ideas—or gave them such a terrifying lesson at one time or other that the memory of it was buried in all their descendants?"

"There are other tales beside your Flying Dutchman, Ross," Ashe squirmed a little in his seat. None of the chairs in the ship quite fitted the human frame or provided comfort. "Prometheus and the fire—the man who dared to steal the knowledge of the gods for the use of mankind and suffered eternally thereafter for his audacity, though his fellow benefited. Yes, there are clues to back such a theory, faint ones." His eagerness grew as he spoke. "Maybe—just maybe—we'll find out!"

"The supply port was long deserted," Travis pointed out. "There may be nothing left of their empire anywhere."

"Well, we've not found the home port yet." Renfry got to his feet. "Once we set down there—I hadn't intended to say this, but if we ever get to the end of this trip, there's a chance we may get back, providing—" He drummed his fingers against the door casing. "Providing we have more than our share of luck."

"How?" demanded Ashe.

"The controls must now be set with some sort of a guide—perhaps a tape. Once we are grounded and I can get to work, that might just be reversed. But there are a hundred `ifs' between us and earth, and we can't count on anything."

"There's this, too," Ashe added thoughtfully to that faintest of hopes. "I've been studying the material we have found. If we can crack their language tapes—some of the records we have discovered here must deal with the maintenance and operation of the ship."

"And where in space are you going to find a Rosetta Stone?" returned Travis. He did not dare to believe that either of the two discoveries might be possible. "No common word heritage."

"Aren't mathematics supposed to be the same, no matter what language? Two and two always add to four, and principles such as that?" puzzled Ross.

"Please find me some symbols on any of those tapes you've been running through the reader that have the smallest resemblance to any numbers seen on earth." Renfry had swung back to the pessimistic side of the balance. "Anyway—I'm not meddling with the machines in that control cabin while we're still in space."

Still in space—how long were they going to keep on voyaging? And somehow they found this second lap of their journey into nowhere worse than the first. All of them had been secretly convinced that there was only one goal, that their first star port would be their last. But the short pause to refuel now promised a much longer trip. Their only way of telling time was by the hours marked on the dial of Renfry's watch. Days—Ashe made a record of those by counting hours. It was one week since they had left the fuel port—two days more.

Out of the sheer necessity for keeping their minds occupied, they pried at the puzzles offered them in the ship. Ashe had already mastered the operation of a small projector which "read" the wire-kept records, and so opened up not a new world, but worlds. The singsong speech which went with the pictures meant nothing to the humans. But the pictures—and such pictures! Three-dimensional, in full color, they allowed one a window on the incomprehensible life of a complex starfaring civilization.

Races, cultures, and only a third of them humanoid—were these factual records? Or were they fiction meant to divert and amuse during the long hours of space travel? Or real reports of some service action? They could guess at any answer to what they saw unrolled on the screen of the small machine.

"If this was a police ship and those are authentic reports of past cases," commented Ross, "they sure had their little problems." He had watched with rapt attention a lurid battle through a jungle on a waterlogged planet. The enemy there was represented by white amphibious things with a distracting ability to elongate parts of their bodies at will—to the discomfiture of opponents they were thus able to ensnare. "On the other hand," he went on, "these may be just cheer-for-the-brave-boys-in-blue story writing to amuse the idle hour. How are we to know?"

"There's one which I discovered this morning—of more interest to us personally." Ashe sorted through the plate-shaped containers of record wire. "Take a look at this now." He drew out the coil of the jungle battle and inserted the new spool.

Then they saw a sky, gray, lowering with thick clouds. Below it stretched a waste of what could only be snow such as they knew on their own world. A small party moved into the range of the picture, and the familiar blue suits of those in it were easy to distinguish against the gray-white of the monotonous background.

"Suggest anything to you?" Ashe asked of Ross.

Murdock was leaning forward, studying the picture with a new intentness that argued an unusual interest in so simple a scene.

There were four blue-suited, bald-headed humanoids. They wore no outer clothing and Travis remembered Ross's remarks concerning the insulating qualities of the strange material. Over their heads they did have the bubble helmets, and they were traveling at a slow pace which suggested treacherous footing.

The tape blinked in one of those quick changes to which the viewers had become accustomed. Now they must be surveying the same country from the viewpoint of one of the four blue-clad travelers. There was a sudden, breath-taking drop; the camera must have skimmed at top speed down into a valley. Before them lay a second descent—and the perspectives were out of proportion.

They were not distorted enough, however, to hide what the photographer wanted to record. The viewers were gazing down onto a wide, level space and in that, half buried in banks of drifted snow, was one of the large alien freighters.

"It can't be!" Ross's expression was one of startled surprise.

"Keep watching," Ashe bade.

At a distance, around the stranded half globe, black dots moved. They trailed off on a line marked clearly in the beaten snow. The path had been worn by a good amount of traffic. There was another disconcerting click and again they saw ice—a huge, murky wall of it, rearing into the gray sky. And directly to that wall of ice led the beaten path.

"The Russian time post! It must be! And this ship"—Ross was almost sputtering—"this ship must have been mixed up in that raid on the Russians!"

There was a last click and the screen went blank.

"Where's the rest?" Ross demanded.

"You've seen all there is. If they recorded any more, it's not on this spool." Ashe fingered the colored tag fastened to the container from which he had taken the coil. "Nothing else with a label matching this, either."

"I wonder if the Russians got back at them some way. If that was what killed off the crew later. Bio warfare . . ." Ross jiggled the switch of the projector back and forth. "I suppose we'll never know."

Then, over their heads, blasting the usual quiet of the ship, came the warning from the control cabin where Renfry kept his self-imposed watch.

"She's triggering for another break-through, fellas. Strap down! I'd say we're due for the big snap very soon!"

They hurried to the bunks. Travis pulled at his protecting webbing. What would they find this time? Another robot-inhabited way stop—or the home port they were longing to reach? He set himself to endure the wrench of the break-through from hyperspace to normal time, hoping that familiarity would render the ordeal easier.

Once more the ship and the men in it were wracked by that turnover which defied natural sensations.

"Sun ahead." Travis, opening his eyes, heard Renfry's voice, a little sharpened, through the ship-wide com. "One—two—four planets. We seem to be bound for the second."

More waiting time. Then once more descent into atmosphere, the return of weight, the vibration singing through walls and floors about them. Then the set-down, this time with a slight grating bump, as if the landing had not been so well controlled as it had at the fueling port.

"This is different . . ." Renfry's report trailed into silence, as if what he saw in the screen had shocked him into speechlessness.

They climbed to the control cabin and crowded below that window on the new world. It must be night—but a night which was alive with reddish light, as if some giant fire filled the sky with the reflection of its fury. And that light rippled even as flames would ripple in their leaping.