Third Planet by Murray Leinster (free novels to read TXT) 📗

"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 record. 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."

Crawford said deliberately:

"We three have had a preview of what Earth will be like before too long! I wonder if it would do any good on Earth to show them what we've found?"

"It's being argued on the ship," said Nolan. "Some say we'd better suppress the whole business."

Crawford considered.

"The Coms aren't a very believing people," he said slowly. "But our people are. If we report this, our people will believe it. But the Coms can tell their people it is lies. Our people will want peace more than ever if they see what a war will mean. But the big-shot Coms will just take that as a reason to demand some more concessions, and more, and more. Like demanding to build a base on the moon...."

"I'm going to bed," said Nolan. He added ironically, "I hope you have pleasant dreams!"

He did go to bed, but he slept very badly. The others slept no better. All three of them were up before sunrise. They saw it. And to Nolan the coming of the light seemed somehow like an eager arrival of the new day, anxious to see if some tiny thread of green somewhere lifted proudly from brown earth to greet it. But none ever did. Or would.

"We should be through by noon," said Nolan.

They set out in the jeep. They abandoned the camp. They would abandon the jeep, too, presently, when they went up the ship that waited in orbit.

They headed west, and Kelley took over the microwave set that sent a wide-fanning beacon skyward. The Lotus was in orbit now. Every ninety minutes she was overhead. She'd completed the mapping of the planet. Every square foot of its surface had been photographed from aloft.

They drove. The ungainly inflated bags which took the place of wheels rolled unweariedly, at first over dew-wetted dust and then over the minor gullies which, so near the ice-cap, were not yet gorges. They went on for twenty miles, and the abomination of desolation was all about them.

"We shouldn't tell about this back home," said Kelley abruptly. "If the Com people saw it, they'd know that no—" his tone was ironic—"national aspiration justified the risk of this. But they wouldn't see it. And our people might look at it and decide that anything was better than this. But it isn't."

Nolan said nothing. He didn't believe that the discovery of this dead planet could be kept a secret for very long.

The mountains drew back to northward and the desert took their place. The Lotus went by overhead, unseen. But it gave a message to Kelley.

"We're on course," he reported. "The ship just said so. Ten miles more."