Islands of Space - John W. Campbell (pdf to ebook reader TXT) 📗

Not as strong as steel, but very resistant to corrosion.”

When the elevator stopped, they found themselves in a great chamber that was obviously a museum of the lost race. All around the walls were arranged models, books, and diagrams.

“We can never hope to take all this in our ship!” said Arcot, looking at the great collection. “Look⁠—there’s an old winged airplane! And a steam engine⁠—and that’s an electric motor! And that thing looks like some kind of an electric battery.”

“But we can’t take all that stuff,” objected Fuller.

“No,” Morey agreed. “I think our best bet would be to take all the books we can⁠—making sure we get the introductory ones, so we can read the language.

“See⁠—over there⁠—they have marked those shelves with a single vertical mark. The ones next to them have two vertical marks, and next ones three. I suggest we load up with those books and take them to the ship.”

The rest agreed, and they began carrying armloads of books, flying out through the top of the pyramid to the ship and back for more.

Instead of flying back to the pyramid for the last load, Arcot announced that he was going to leave a note for anyone who might come here later. While the others went back for the last load, he worked at drawing the “note.”

“Let’s see your masterpiece,” said Morey as the three men returned to the ship with the last of the books.

Arcot had used a piece of tough, heavy plastic which would resist any corrosion the cold, almost airless world might have to offer.

Near the top, he had drawn a representation of their ship, and beneath it a representation of the route they had taken from universe to universe. The galaxy they were in was represented by a cloud of gas, its main identifying feature. Underneath the dotted line of their route through space, he had printed “200,000,000,000, u.”

Then followed a little table. The numeral “1” followed by a straight bar, then “2” followed by two bars, and so on up to ten. Ten was represented by ten bars and, in addition, an S-shaped sign. Twenty was next, followed by twenty bars and two S-shaped signs. Thus he had worked up to “100.”

The system he used would make it clear to any reasoning creature that he had used a decimal system and that the zeroes meant ten times.

Next below, he had drawn the planetary system of the frozen world, and the distance from the planet they were on to the central sun he labeled “u.” Thus, the finders could reason that they had come a distance of two hundred billion units, where a distance of three hundred million miles was taken as the unit; they had, then, come from another galaxy. Certainly any creature with enough intelligence to reach this frozen world would understand this!

“Since the year of this planet is approximately eight times our own,” Arcot continued, “I am indicating that we came here approximately five hundred years after the catastrophe.” He pointed at several of the other drawings.

They left the message in the tower, and Arcot closed the door, leaving the pyramid exactly as it had been before they had come.

“Say!” Morey commented, “how did you open and close that door, anyway?”

Arcot grinned. “Didn’t you notice the jewel at the corner? It was the lens of a photoelectric cell. My flashlight opened the door. I didn’t figure it out; it just worked accidentally.”

Morey raised an eyebrow. “But if the darned thing is so simple, any creature, intelligent or not, might be able to get in and destroy the records!”

Arcot looked at him. “And where are your savages going to come from? There are none on this planet, and anyone intelligent enough to build a spaceship isn’t going to destroy the contents of the tower.”

“Oh.” Morey looked a little sheepish.

They went into the airlock and took off their suits. Then they began packing the precious books in specimen cases that had been brought for the purpose of preserving such things.

When the last of them was carefully stowed, they returned to the control room. They looked silently out across this strange, dead world, thinking how much it must have been like Earth. It was dead now, and frozen forever. The low hills that stretched out beneath them were dimly lighted by the weak rays of a shrunken sun. Three hundred million miles away, it glowed so weakly that this world received only a little more heat than it might have received from a small coal fire a mile away.

So weakly it flared that in this thin atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, its little corona glowed about it plainly, and even the stars around it shone brilliantly. The men could see one constellation that grouped itself in the outlines of a dragon, with the sun of this system as its cold, baleful eye.

Gradually, Arcot lifted the ship, and, as they headed out into space, they could see the dim frozen plains fall behind. It was as if a load of oppressing loneliness parted from them as they flew out into the vast spaces of the eternal stars.

X

Arcot looked speculatively at the star field in the great broad window before him. “We’ll want to find another G-0 sun, naturally, but I don’t think we ought to go directly from here. If we did, we’d have to do a lot of backtracking to get back to this dead star. I suggest we go back to the edge of this galaxy, taking pictures on the way out, so that any future investigators can come in directly. It’ll only take a few hours.”

“I think you’re right,” agreed Morey. “Besides, that will give us a wider choice of stars to pick our next G-0 from. Let’s get going.”

Arcot moved the red switch, and the ship shot away at half speed. They watched the green image of the white dwarf fade and then suddenly flare up and become bright again as they outraced the light that