“Not much sand—you’d think there would be more . . . Hulloo!” There was an eagerness in that sudden exclamation. “This is something! Round plates set in circles all over—about the size of quarters. They are solid and you can’t move them.”
“Metal?”
“Nooo . . .” The reply was hesitant. “Seem more like some kind of glass, opaque rather than transparent.”
“Windows?” suggested Travis.
“Too small,” Ross protested. “But there are a lot of them—all over. Wait!” The urgency in that last cry alerted both the men on the ground. “Red—they’re turning red!”
“Get out of there! Jump!” Ashe’s order barked loudly in all their helmets.
Ross obeyed without question, landing with a paratrooper’s practiced roll on one of the dune crests. The others scrambled to join him, all their attention focused on the roof of the sealed building. Perhaps something in the sun-repelling qualities of their helmets enabled them to see those rays as faint reddish lines cutting up from the roof far into the sky.
The skin on Travis’ bare hands tingled with a pins-and-needles sensation as if the circulation in it had been arrested and was not coming back to duty. Ross scrambled up out of the sand and shook himself vigorously.
“What in the world is going on?” There was an unusual note of awe in his tone.
“I think—some fireworks to discourage you. I believe that we may assume whoever lives in there is definitely not at home to curious callers. Not only that, but the householder has some mighty unpleasant gadgets to back up his desire for privacy. Probably just as well we didn’t find his, her, or its front door unlocked.”
Travis could no longer see those thin fiery lines. Either the power had been shut off, or the rays were now past the point of detection by human eyes, even with the aid of the helmet. That coarse hair, the repulsive odor—and now this. Somehow the few facts did not add properly. The hair, of course, could have been left by a watchdog, or the equivalent on this particular planet of a watchdog. That supposition would also fit with the low entrance into the building. But a watchdog that kept to carefully chosen cover, the best in the whole landscape, and stayed to spy, maybe for hours, on the ship—? Those facts did not fit with the nature of any animal he had ever known. Rather, that action matched with intelligence, and intelligence meant man.
“I believe they are nocturnal,” Ashe said suddenly. “That fits with all we’ve seen so far. This sun glare may be as painful for them as it is for us without helmets. But at night—”
“Going to sit up and watch what happens?” Ross asked.
“Not out in the open. Not until we know more.”
Silently Travis agreed to that. There was a furtiveness about the last night’s spying which made him wary. And to his mind this world was far more frightening and sinister than the fueling port. Its very arid barrenness held a nebulous threat he had never sensed in the desert lands of his own planet.
They walked back to the ship, climbed the ladder, and were glad to close the port upon the dead white glare, to unhelm in the blue glow of the interior.
“What did you see?” Ashe asked Renfry.
“Murdock taking a high dive from the roof and then some red lines, very faint, shooting up from all over its surface. What did you do, push the wrong doorbell?”
“Probably waked somebody up. I don’t think that’s a very healthy place to go visiting. Lord—what a stink!” Ross ended, sniffing.
Ashe held on his palm the tuft of hair. The odor rising from it was not only noticeable in the usual scentless atmosphere of the ship, but penetrating in its foulness.
They carried the lock into the small cubbyhole which might once have been the quarters of the commander and where Ashe had assembled his materials for study. In spite of the noisome effluvia of their trophy, they gathered around as he pulled the tuft apart hair by hair and spread it flat.
“Those hairs—so thick!” Renfry marveled.
“If they are hairs. What I wouldn’t give for a lab!” Ashe folded a clear sheet of the aliens’ writing materials to imprison the lock.
“That smell—” Travis, remembering how he had handled the noisome find, rubbed his hand back and forth across his thigh.
“Yes?” Ashe prompted.
“Well—I think that comes from just plain filthiness, sir. Or, part might be because the hairs are from a creature we don’t know.”
“Alien metabolism.” Ashe nodded. “Each human group has a distinctive body odor far more apparent to others than to one of his own breed. But what are you getting at, Travis?”
“Well, if that does come from some—some man,” he used the term because he had no other—“and not from an animal, then I’d say he was living in a regular sty. And that means either a pretty low type of primitive, or a degenerate.”
“Not necessarily,” Ashe pointed out. “Bathing entails water, and we haven’t seen any store of water here.”
“Sure, there’s no water we can see. But they must have some. And I think—” Only there were few proofs he could offer to bolster his argument.
“Might be. Anyway, tonight we’ll watch and see what does come out of the booby-trapped box over there.”
They napped during the day, Renfry in the control cabin as usual. None of them could see any reason why the ship had earthed on this sand pile, and the very barrenness of the place reinforced Renfry’s belief that this could not be their ultimate goal. It was only logic that the ship must have originally voyaged from some center of civilization—and this was not that.
The glare of the sun was gone and dusk clothed the mounds of creeping sand when they gathered again at the door in the outer skin to watch the building and the stretch of ground lying between them and that enigmatic block.
“How long do you suppose we’ll have to wait?” Ross shifted position.
“No time at all,” Ashe answered softly. “Look!”
From behind the dune which marked the low doorway Travis had discovered, there showed a very faint reddish glow.
Had the flaming display of the late evening before been in progress, they could not have spotted that. And now, in the dusk, with the shapes of the dunes distorting vision, it was difficult to see. Ashe was counting slowly under his breath. As he reached “twenty” the glow vanished with a sudden completeness which suggested the slamming of a door.
Travis strained his eyes, watching the end of that masking dune. If the thing which had spied upon them the night before was coming back to the old position, the shortest route to take would cross that point. But he had seen nothing so far.
There was a very thin sound, but that came from the opposite direction, a whispering from the open country. Then a pat of arid air touched his cheek, wind rising with the coming of night. And the whispering must be sand grains moving under its first tentative stir.
“We could ambush one scout,” Ross observed wistfully.
“Their senses may be more acute than ours. Certainly if they are nocturnal, their night sight will be. And we can believe that they are already suspicious of us. Also, I’d like to know a little more about the nature of something or someone I’m going to lay a trap for.”
Travis only half heard Ashe. Surely he had seen a flicker of movement out there. Yes! His fingers closed on the older man’s arm in swift warning pressure. A blob of shadow had slipped from the end of the dune, skidded quickly into hiding, heading straight for the hollow behind the upended block of masonry. Was the spy now settled in for a long spell of duty in that improvised observation post? Or tonight would he, she or it venture closer to the ship?
The dusk deepened and with the coming of true dark the tongues of fire danced in the sky. Though the light afforded by that display was not steady, it did illuminate the smoother ground immediately about the globe. Any attack on the part of the unknown natives could be sighted by the men on guard above. The humans knew, though, that with the ladder up and open port some dozen feet removed from ground level, they had little to fear from any actual attempt to force their stronghold. Unless the creatures out there possessed weapons able to cut down the distance advantage.