He awoke swiftly, with a quick sense of urgency. Over his head he heard the sigh of the speaker from the control cabin.
“All ready,” came Renfry’s voice, thin, drained. Why, the technician must have worked through the night, eager to prove his handiwork.
“All ready.”
They still had time to say “no” to this crazy venture, to choose known perils against the unknown. Travis felt a surge of panic. His hands levered against the bunk, pushing his body up. He had to stop Renfry—they must not blast into space.
Then he lay down once more, made his hands clasp the bunk straps across his body, his lips pressed tightly together. Let Renfry push the proper button—soon! It was the waiting which always wore on a man. He felt the familiar vibration, singing through the walls, through his body. There was no going back now. Travis closed his eyes and tried not to stiffen his whole body in protest against that waiting.
“We’re out—safely.”
“So far—so good.” Another voice made answer to that over the com system.
Travis opened his eyes and wondered if anyone ever became fully inured to the discomfort of a planetary take-off. He had forgotten during the past days when they had been comfortably earth-bound what it meant to be wrenched into the heights beyond the atmosphere and gravity. But at least the tape had worked to the extent that they had lifted safely off world.
And their flight continued, until at length they all breathed easier and began to hold more confident feelings than just hope concerning their future.
“If we simply repeat the pattern,” Ashe observed thoughtfully on the evening of the fifth day, “we set down again on the desert world sometime tomorrow.”
“Be better if we could eliminate that stop,” Travis remarked. There was something in the desolate waste and the night things which repulsed him as nothing else had during this fantastic voyage.
“I’ve been thinking . . .” Ross glanced across the swinging seat to the pilot’s perch where Renfry spent most of his waking hours. “We refueled on the trip out—at the first port. Suppose—just suppose that we exhausted the supply there.”
Renfry grinned, a death’s-head stretch of skin across bones. His thumb jerked downward in the immemorial gesture of sardonic defeat. “Then we’ve had it, fella. Let’s hope that we can stretch our luck past that particular point along with all the rest of the elastic tricks.”
This time they downed on the desert port in the early morning, when the lavish display of flames along the horizon was paling into nothingness. They saw the blaze of the rising sun reflected too brightly from the endless drifts of sand.
“Two days here, roughly—if we do duplicate the pattern exactly.
Waiting two days, cooped up in the ship, not sure that they would take off again. At the thought of it, Travis shifted restlessly in his seat. And the specter Ross had evoked shared the narrow confines of the cabin with them all.
“Any walk-about?” Ross must be feeling it too—that goading desire to be busy, to drown in action ever-present fears.
“Not much reason for that,” Ashe replied calmly enough. “We’ll take a look outside—in daytime. Not that I believe there is much to see.”
The sun-repelling helmets on, they opened the outer hatch. They surveyed the expanse where the winds might have whittled new patterns among the dunes, but where they could see no change since their last visit. The enigmatic sealed buildings still squatted beyond, with no sign of life about.
“What did they do here?” Ross’s hands moved restlessly along the frame of the exit port. “There was some reason for this stop—there had to be. And why were those same things—people, animals, whatever they are—or were—on the other world, in the funnel-topped building?”
“Which are the exiles?” Ashe asked. “Is this their home world, while those others exist across the void and have for generations because they were not recalled in time? Or are these the exiles and the others are at home? We may never know the reason or answer to any questions about them.” He studied the squat building among the creeping dunes. “They must live underground, with the building covering the entrance. Perhaps they live underground on the other planet also. Once they must have been here to service ships—to maintain some necessary outpost.”
“And then,” Travis said slowly, “the ships didn’t come any more.”
“Yes. There were no more ships. Perhaps a whole generation waited—hoping for ships—for recall. Then they either sank into apathy and stagnation, to slide down the hill of evolution, or they more consciously adapted to their surroundings.”
“In the end, the result was the same,” Ross observed. “I don’t think those here are any different from the ones in the funnel building. And there they had a better world to adapt to.”
“Wait!” Travis had been studying that sand-enclosed block with interest. Now he thought that his memory of the place as it had been weeks earlier did not match what he saw now. “Was that elevation on the left there before?”
Ross and Ashe leaned forward, their attention settling on the end of the structure he indicated.
“You’re right, that’s new!” Ross’s affirmation came first. “And I don’t think that projection is made of stone like the rest, either.”
The block which had so oddly appeared on the corner of that distant roof did not flash like metal in the sun’s rays. But neither was it dull. There was a sleek sheen to it, such as might be displayed by opaque glass or obsidian. The hump had no openings that they could see, and what its purpose might be remained as much of a mystery as the rest of this age-old puzzle.
It remained so for only a few moments. Then came action the watchers in the ship did not expect. They had seen the rays which protected the roof of the building against assault or investigation. Now they witnessed the use of another aggressive weapon belonging to the men who had first erected that block.
What was it which lashed out, cracked a whip’s thong about the skin of the ship? A beam of fire? A bolt of energy? A force which the humans could neither imagine nor name?
Travis only knew that the energy wash of that blow crushed him back into the globe, hurled him into the inner door of the lock with Ross and Ashe thrust tight against him. Their bodies were flattened on the metal wall of the ship until the breath was forced from their lungs and the world went black about them.
Travis was on the floor, fighting for the air his body had to have, pain in bands about his chest. And before his blurred eyes was the open door of the port. In that moment all that mattered was that oblong of emptiness. Beneath the torture of his body, he knew that that space must be shut out for what lay beyond it meant final extinction.
He clawed at the body across his knees, turned over somehow and inched painfully from under its weight, moving in a worm’s progress toward the outer port. There was a singing in his ears, filling his head, adding to his daze. Then he was staring out into the glare of sun and sand.
At first he thought he was lightheaded. What he was seeing could not be true. For there was no wind, yet from the hidden floor of the landing space sand was rising in thin, unwavering sheets, walling in the globe. And those curtains of grit arose vertically, unmoved by any breeze! It could not happen—yet before his eyes it did.
He lunged to his knees, thrust against the door, shut out the curtains of sand, the harsh light of the sun, the thing which could not be true. And as his hands fumbled to shoot home the alien bolts, the pain lessened. He could breathe again without the constriction which had held his lungs imprisoned. He turned to the other two.