Galactic Derelict

12

If there had once been a wide landing strip here, the space was long since swallowed by a cover of green. From the mass crushed by the landing of the ship came the scent of growing things, some spicy, some rank.

The Terrans had not worn their helmets, nor did they need to here. A sunlight no stronger than that of early summer in the temperate zone of their own world greeted them. And there was no burden of sand in the soft wind which whirled flower petals and torn leaves from the wreckage under their feet.

Now that they had a wider view than that offered by the vision plate, they noted other breaks in the luxuriance of growing things. The opal tower with its fantastic form was flanked by another building as strange and as far removed from the style of its companion as the desert world was from this green one. For the massive blocks of dull red, geometric in their solidity, could not have sprung from the same creative imagination—or perhaps from even the same race or age.

And beyond that was another, with knife-sharp gables and narrow windows secretive in its gray walls. It had a pointed roof of some rough material, dull under the sun, and gave rootage in places to vines, even a small tree. But again it was not of the same vintage as the fairylike dome or the massive blocks.

“Why—?” Ross’s head turned slowly as he looked from one of those totally dissimilar buildings to the next. All were tall, dwarfing the globe, and all had their lower stories hidden by the vegetation.

Travis thought back to a past which seemed a little blurred by all which had happened lately. There were places on his own world where a Zuni village in miniature stood beside a Sioux lodge or an Apache wickiup.

“A museum?” He ventured the only explanation he could see.

Ashe’s face was pale under his fading tan. He stared raptly from dome to block, block to sharply accented gables. Or else a capital where each embassy built in their home style.”

“And now it is all dead,” Travis added. For that was true. This was as deserted as the fueling port.

“Capital perhaps—of a galactic empire. What there is to be learned here! A treasure house—” Ashe was breathing fast. “We may have the treasures of a thousand worlds to uncover here.”

“And who will ever know—or care?” Ross asked. “Not that I’m not ready to go and look for them.”

Travis tensed. There was a stirring in the mass of tangled vegetation where the grounding of the globe had flattened some of the fern trees, bearing with them others tied together by vines. He watched that shaking of bruised and broken branches. Something alive was working its way from a point about a hundred yards away from the ship toward the wall of still-standing plants, its progress marked by that movement. And the fugitive thing must be fairly large by the amount of displacement.

Had that crawling unseen thing been injured in the crash of the tree ferns? Was it now dragging itself off to die? Travis listened, striving to hear more than the rustling of the leaves. But if the thing was hurt, it made no complaint. Animal? Or—something else? Something as alien as the dune lurkers, more than animal, yet different from man as they knew man?

“It’s in cover now,” breathed Ross. “Couldn’t haye been too hurt or it wouldn’t have moved so lively.”

“I think we can believe that this world isn’t as empty as it might look to the first glance,” Ashe said a little dryly. “And what about those?”

“Those” came lightiy, drifting across the torn clearing caused by the descent of the globe. They flapped gossamer wings once or twice to keep air-borne, but their attention was manifesdy centered on the ship.

And what were they? Birds? Insects? Flying mammals? Travis could almost believe the four small creatures were a weird combination of all three species. Their long narrow wings, prismatic and close to transparent, resembled those of an insect. Yet they had bodies equipped with three legs, two smaller ones in front ending in there clawshaped digits, one larger limb in back with even more pronounced talons. Their heads seemed to be set directly on their shoulders with no visible neck and were round at the top, narrowing to a curved beak, while their eyes—four of them!—protruded on short stalks, two in front and two in back. And their triangles of bodies were clothed in plushy fur of a pale and frosted blue.

Slowly, in a solemn, silent procession, they drifted toward the ship. The second in line broke out of formation, dipped groundward. Its hind claws found anchorage on a stub of broken branch and its wings folded together above its back as might those of a Terran butterfly.

The two last in line flapped back and forth across the open port twice and then wheeled, flew off, mounting into the sky to clear the treetops. But the leader came on, until it hung, beating wings now and then to maintain altitude, direcdy before the entrance of the ship.

It was impossible to read any expression in those stalked eyes, a brilliant blue. But none of the four Terrans felt any repulsion or alarm as they had upon their encounter with the nocturnal desert people. Whatever the flyer was, they could not believe that it was either agressive or a possible danger to them.

Renfry expressed their common reaction to the creature first:

“Funny little beggar, isn’t he? Like to see him closer. If they’re all the same as him here, we don’t have to worry.”

Why the technician should refer to the winged thing as “he” was obscure. But the creature was attractive enough to hold their concentrated interest. Ross snapped his fingers and held out his hand in welcome.

“Here, boy,” he coaxed.

Those brilliant bits of blue winked as the eye stalks moved, the wings beat, and the flyer approached the port. But not close enough for the Terrans to touch. It hung there, suspended in mid-air for a long moment. Then with a flurry of beating wings, sparking rainbows, it mounted skyward, its partner taking off from the brush below at the same moment to join it. A few seconds later they vanished as if they had never been.

“Do you suppose it is intelligent?” Ross watched after the vanished flyer, his disappointment mirrored on his usually impassive face.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ashe replied. “Renfry,” he spoke to the technician, “you have your journey tape now. Can you reset it?”

“I don’t know. Wish I had a manual—at least some type of guide. Do you suppose you can find such a thing here?”

“Why are you in such a big hurry to leave, chief? We only got here and it looks like a pretty good vacation spot to me.” Ross raised his head a little to eye the dome where opal lights played under the sun’s rays.

“That is just why,” Ashe replied quiedy. “There are too many temptations here.”

Travis understood. To Ashe the appeal of those waiting buildings, of the knowledge which they might contain, must be almost overpowering. They could postpone work on the ship, delay and delay, fascinated by this world and its secrets. He knew the same pull, though perhaps in a lesser degree. Before it trapped them all, they must struggle against that enveloping desire to plunge into the green jungle, slash a path to the opal dome and see for themselves, what wonders it housed.

Ashe was sorely tempted. And because he was-the man he was, he must be fighting that temptation now, believing that if he once plunged -wholeheartedly into exploration, he might not be able to stop. Also Renfry was offering them an excuse to do just that by wishing for some aid in the problem of the tape.

An hour later the three of them did leave the ship, Renfry remaining in charge there. Using the lowest beam of the blasters, they cut a path into the woods. Travis picked up a flower head. Five wide petals, fluted, crinkled a little at the tips, were a deep cream in color, shading orange at the heart. Resting on his palm, those petals began to move visibly, closing until he held a bud instead of a flower. He could not toss away the blossom. Its color was too arresting, its spicy scent appealing. He worked the short stem into one of the latches of a belt pouch, where, the heat of his hand removed, the flower opened once again. Nor did it fade or droop in spite of the shortness of its stem.

Now, out of the direct rays of the sun, the Terrans found the air cool, moist, heavy with the odor of too luxuriant vegetation. Not that those odors were unpleasant—in fact, they were overpoweringly good. Spicy scents warred with perfumes and the sharper smell of earth as their feet scuffed through the mass of dead leaves.

“Whewl” Ross waved his hand back and forth in front of his face as if to set up a reviving current of air. “Perfume factory—or what have you I I feel as if I were burrowing through about a ton of roses!”

Ashe appeared to have lost some of his sombemess since they had left the ship. “With another of carnations thrown in,” he agreed. “I think I can detect”—he sniffed and then sneezed— “some cloves and maybe a few nutmegs into the bargain.”

Travis breathed shallowly. He had welcomed the mixture of perfumes minutes earlier. Now he found himself wishing instead to face a wind with a burden of sage and pinon in place of these cloying scents in their thick abundance.

The jungle grew clear up to the base of the opaline building. And the structure itself doomed far higher from ground level than had appeared true from the port of the ship. They worked their way along, hunting the entrance which must exist somewhere, unless the inhabitants had all worn wings.

Oddly enough—though there were windows in plenty of stories above, many opening on small airy balconies—the first story showed no openings at all. Here were panels set in carved frames alternating with solid blocks of the opal material. And each panel was patterned in a gleaming mosaic, not forming any recognized design but merely wedding color to color in blending shades.

The Terrans cut their way through underbrush and reached the end of the wall. This was a large building occupying the space of a normal Terran city block. But around the corner they found the door, at the head of a curling ramp. The portal extended almost the full height of the first story and it was open, a carved archway. The frame was like frozen lace, with here a curve and there a point cracked and gone.

They hesitated. Save for the sighing of the wind, the sound of leaf against moving leaf, and some small twitters and squeaks from the unseen inhabitants of the green world which lay about the foot of the ramp, there was quiet—the quiet of the forgotten.

Ashe stepped onto the ramp, his soft-shod feet making not the slightest whisper. He climbed the gentle slope almost reluctantly, as if he did not really want to know what waited within.

Travis and Ross came behind. There were pockets of dead leaves caught in the curves of the ramp, and more drifted inside the open portal. They shuffled through them, to come into a hall which was breath-taking in its height. For it went up and up, until they were dizzied when they tried to follow its inner spiral with their eyes. And covering this expanse was the great opaline dome. The sunlight shone through it, painting rainbows on walls and on the ramp which climbed in a coil along the walls, serving other archways of fetter-lace on every floor level.

Here there was none of the brilliance of the outside mosaics.

The spread of color was sharply reduced to soft, faded shades, a dusky violet, a pallid green, a dusty rose, a cream….

“…forty-eight—forty-nine—fifty! Fifty doors up and down that ramp at least.” Ross kept his voice to a murmur and yet that echo of a whisper carried eerily back to them. “Where do we start?” Now his tone was definitely higher, in challenge to that echo and the stillness which deadened it.

Ashe left them, crossed the expanse of hall, both of his hands going out to a niche. When they hurried after him they discovered he was holding a small statuette carved of a dusky violet stone. Like the blue flyers, the subject bore baffling resemblances to living things they knew, and yet was in its totality alien.

“Man?” Ross wondered. “Animal?”

“Totem? God?” Travis added out of his own knowledge and background.

“All or any,” conceded Ashe. “But it is a work of art.”

That they could all recognize, even if the subject still puzzled them. The figure was posed erect on two slender hind limbs, both of which terminated in feet of long, narrow, widely separated, clawed digits. The body, also slender but with a well-defined waist and broad shoulders, was closer to the human in general appearance, and there were two arms held aloft, as if the creature was about to leap outward into space. But it would have a better chance of survival in such a leap than those now passing the statuette from hand to hand. From the arms supported skin wing-flaps, extended on ribs not unlike those possessed by the Terran bats.

The head was the least human, almost grotesque in its ugliness to the time agents’ eyes. There were sharply pointed ears, overshadowing in their size and extension the rest of the features which were crowded together in the forepart of the face. Eyes were set deep within cavities under heavy skull ridges, the nose was simply a vertical slit above a mouth from which thin vestiges of lips curled back to display a usable and frightening set of fangs. And yet its ugliness was not repulsive, not horrifying. There was no clothing to suggest that it represented an intelligent being. Yet all of them were certain, the longer they examined the figure, that it had not been meant to portray an animal.

To the touch the violet stone was smooth and cool, and when Travis held it out into a patch of light from the dome, the statuette sparkled as might a gem. The careful detail of the figure was in contrast to the abstraction of the murals on the outer walls, more akin to the carvings on the dome and about the doorways.

Ross drew his finger along the interior of the niche where Ashe had found the image. Dust piled there was pushed out to the floor. How long had the winged one stood there undisturbed?

Ashe carried it in the crook of his arm as they went on— not up the spiral of the ramp but into the first of the open doorways on ground level. But the room beyond was empty, lighted through slits high on the wall. They wandered on. More empty rooms, no trace of those who had once lived here—if this had been a dwelling place and not a building of public use. It was as if the inhabitants when they had at last withdrawn, had stripped it bare, forgetting only the little statue in the hall.

As they came from the last bare chamber, Ross sighed and leaned against the wall.

“I don’t know how you feel about it,” he announced. “But I’ve swallowed more than my share of dust this past hour or so. Also breakfast was a long time back. A coffee break right about now—providing we had the coffee—might be heartening.”

They didn’t have coffee, but they had come provided with the foam drink from the ship. So, sitting in a row across the ramp, they sucked in turn from containers of that and ate some of the “com” cakes they carried for trail rations;

“Be good to have some fresh food,” Travis said wistfully. The rather monotonous diet from the ship’s stores satisfied hunger but did not appeal to his taste. He allowed himself the luxury of visualizing a sizzling steak and all that would accompany it back at the ranch.

“Maybe some on the hoof—out there.” Ross, his hands full, pointed with his chain toward the riot of greenery they could sight from their present perch. “We could go hunting….”

“How about that?” Travis roused and turned to Ashe eagerly. “Dare we try?”

But the older agent did not warm to the suggestion. “I wouldn’t kill—until I knew what I was killing.”

For a moment Travis did not understand, and then the meaning of the rather ambiguous statement sank in. How could they be sure that the prey was not—man! Or man’s equivalent here? But he still wanted that steak, with a longing which gnawed at him.

“Do we climb?” Ross stood up. “This’ll be an all-day job right here, if we stick to it. I’d say the cupboard’s bare, though.”

“Maybe.” Ashe cradled his bat-thing in his arm. “We can take a quick look through the ground floor of that big red block to the north.”

They fought their way through the thick wall of brush, grass, tree and vine to the red building of the monolithic architecture. Here again they faced an open door, this one narrow as the window slits, as if grudging any entrance at all.

“I’d say the guys who built this one didn’t like their neighbors too well,” Ross commented. “This could make a pretty good fort if you had to have one. That domed place is wide open.”

“Different peoples….” Travis had been a little in advance, lingering for a moment before he took the step which would bring him over the threshold. Once inside he froze.

“Trouble!” His blaster was out, ready to fire.

There was a wide hall before him, as there had been in the dome building. But where that had been clean and bare, this one was different.

A series of partitions some five or six feet high cut back and forth, chopping the floor space into a crazy quilt of oddly shaped and sized spaces, with litde chance to see from one to the next. But that did not bother Travis so much as the message recorded by his nose.

The odor of the night creatures had been something like this. It was the taint of a lair—a lair long in use. It smelled of decay, alien body reek, dried and rotted vegetation and animal matter. Something denned here, used this place freely for some time.

It was the eagerness of that strange hunter which betrayed it. A low, throaty murmur, such as a cat might utter when intent upon unsuspecting prey, carried across the shadows.

Travis spun around. He saw the hunched shape balancing on top of a partition, knew it was about to launch straight for him. And he pressed the firing button of the blaster as he brought it up.

The attacker was caught in mid-air. A terrible yowl of rage, and pain, echoed and re-echoed about the massive walls. A flailing limb, well provided with claws, raked across Travis’ body from the waist down, sending him reeling from the door into the greater gloom. Just then Ross and Ashe burst in, to center the full beams of their weapons on the rolling, caterwauling thing making a second attempt at Travis.

Whatever it was, the creature possessed abnormal vitality. It was not until those blast rays met and crossed in its body that it lay still. Travis scrambled to his feet, shaken. He knew that if he had not had that split second of warning, he would be dead—or so badly mauled he would have longed for death.

He limped back toward the door, his thigh and leg feeling numb from the force of that smashing stroke. But under his questing hand the fabric of the suit was untom, and there seemed to be no open wound.

“Did it get you?” Ashe came to meet him, pushing aside his hands to look at his body. Travis, still shaken, winced under the exploring probe of the other’s fingers.

“Just bruised. What was it?”

Ross arose from a gingerly inspection of the remains. “After the blasting we gave it, your guess is as good as mine. But it is sure sudden death on six legs—and that’s no overstatement.”

The blasters had not left too much to identify, that was true. But the thing had been six-legged, furred, and carnivorous—and it was about eight feet long with fangs and claws in proportion to the size.

“Sabertooth, local variety,” Ross remarked.

Ashe nodded to the outer world. “I suggest we make a strategic withdrawal. These may be nocturnal, too, but I’d rather not tangle with another in the jungle.”