So for days we pursued the search. We looked closely into forest and jungle areas. We studied valleys and mountaintops. We tracked rivers. And finally, on the fourth evening as we were getting ready to give it up, Belle broke in with news: “I have a building.”
Alex looked pleased, but he was careful not to allow his emotions to carry him away. “Where, Belle?”
“In the northern latitudes.” She gave us a picture. It looked like nothing more than an old, battered structure, a wreck half-buried in the snow-covered floor of a winter forest. Whatever color it might once have had was gone. It was a washed-out gray, completely enmeshed in vines and shrubs. One section of the structure appeared to have been shoved aside by the trees.
It might originally have been a polygon. There were multiple sides, though it was impossible to determine how many. Maybe eight or nine.
“How big is it?” asked Alex.
“Approximately forty meters across. Maybe a bit more. It’s hard to make out details. The forest has been growing around it for a long time.”
“How long?”
“Can’t really say. But I suspect it’s been here for millennia. And it appears to have had several levels. Probably four. So much of it is buried, it’s hard to be certain.”
“Can you see anything else there anywhere?”
“You mean around it?”
“Yes. Another building. A vehicle. Some tools. Anything at all.”
“Nothing artificial, Alex. It is possible there’s an entire city buried at the site. I’m not equipped to probe beneath surfaces. As you know.” Belle sounded annoyed. That might have been because she’d suggested that Alex equip the vehicle with penetrating sensors. At the time, it had seemed an unnecessary expense.
“What’s the atmosphere like?” I asked.
“Inadequate oxygen. You’ll need air tanks.”
Belle put together lunches for us. Chocolate chip cookies and chicken sandwiches. We picked up a cutter and some torches from storage, went down to the launch bay, and climbed into the lander. Alex put the sandwiches in the cooler and started going through the images of the wreckage while I munched on a cookie and ran systems checks. Then he took a long look at the surrounding forest. After a few minutes, he shook his head. “Makes no sense,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“There’s nothing else down there. Just this one place.”
“Optimum launch time in six minutes,” said Belle.
“We’ll go with that, Belle.” I closed the hatch. Belle began depressurizing the launch bay. Alex looked at the cookies, which were wrapped in plastic, lying in my lap. “What?” I said.
“How are they?”
“They’re good. Want one?”
“Sure. Start every mission with a cookie. It’s in the Antiquarian Guidebook.”
I gave him two and put the rest in a compartment while he brought his harness down and secured himself.
We sat talking about the polygon. Who had put it there? How old was it? Might this be where Tuttle found the tablet?
“Depressurization complete,” said Belle. “Launch in ninety seconds.” The bay door opened, and I released the locks.
“Whenever you’re ready, Belle,” I said.
She eased us out of the ship. I started the engines, and we began our descent.
It was just after sunrise when we glided in over the polygon. It was literally buried among the trees. They had thick trunks though they were not especially tall. The biggest might have been about thirty meters. They appeared gray and hard, more like rocks than living things. Broken branches lay everywhere.
The polygon itself was barely visible. I could easily have flown over it without noticing the thing.
Where the hell was everybody else on this world?
We couldn’t determine whether it had a front or back. Not that it mattered. I circled the area, looking for a place to land. There was no sufficiently open space within twenty kilometers of the structure. So I picked a spot where we’d do the least damage to the trees, and started down. We tore off a lot of branches along the way and finally settled into the shrubbery.
We got into our suits, checked the air—we had a four-hour supply in the tanks—checked the radios, and armed ourselves with scramblers. Then we climbed out through the airlock.
Alex led the way down the ladder, took out his weapon, and looked around. When he was satisfied we weren’t about to be attacked by anything, he signaled me to follow. I did, leaving the outer hatch open. I thought it was a good idea, in case we had to get back inside in a hurry.
It wasn’t.
The snow wasn’t deep. Hardscrabble grass poked up through it. We were about forty meters from the building. We each picked up a fallen branch and used it to poke at the vegetation as we proceeded. Nothing reacted, nothing attacked, but I’ll admit I’d take my chances with a saber-tooth anytime. We didn’t think the scramblers would be effective against plants. They disrupted nervous systems. I wasn’t sure they’d do much more than that. In the end, I thought, the cutter might be of more use.
But the weeds left us alone, and we got to the polygon without incident.
It appeared to be made of plastic, but the material was so old and so corrupted, it was hard to be certain what it was. I think it had originally been a blend of white and other colors, but they were gone now. The surface was only a series of ashen, gunmetal, smoky splotches. The structure was bent and smashed by falling limbs and trees. In places it had simply buckled. The roof was flat, and sections of it were submerged in earth and snow. Very little of it remained above ground. A good blizzard would have covered everything.
It appeared that it was really a collection of modules. “I’d like to find the place it was shipped from,” said Alex.
We found a couple of windows and doors, but the windows had crusted over, and the doors were sealed tight. They had over time melded with and become a permanent part of the walls. But mounted beside one we found a plaque.
It had three lines of characters. Alex wiped it off as best he could so he could see the symbols more clearly. “This one,” he said, pointing at one that might have been a reversed “E,” “is also on the satellite.” There were others.
None of them, however, matched anything on the tablet, though one or two were close.
“Why,” I asked, “put this place in the middle of a dense forest?”
Alex picked up a fallen branch and tossed it aside. “There might not have been a forest here at the time.” He tried rubbing down one of the windows. Turned on his lamp and tried to look through. I could make out an empty interior. Cold, dirty, snowy, and empty. We used a cutter to remove the window.
It was simply a large empty space. It would have been easier to come through the roof, which had cracked open. Sunlight filtered through the break. Alex held the lamp up so he could get a better look at the overhead. It sagged. Wires hung down out of it. “It’s about three and a half meters,” he said.
“Yes. About that.” Then I realized what he was saying. “Oh.”
“Whoever made this was about our size.”
“Well,” I said, “we didn’t really expect aliens.”
“No, I guess not, Chase.” He couldn’t hide the disappointment in his voice.
We found pieces of what had once been a table and chairs. Everything had come apart, collapsed, broken down, you name it. We put together one of the chairs, hoping, I guess, to discover that the seat was too narrow to accommodate a human. Or maybe that it was too low. Something hopeful.