From the Ocean from teh Stars (94 page)

"I believe this is the ship that landed on the first planet we visited."

Hilvar nodded, preferring not to waste air. The same idea had al
ready occurred to him. It was a good object lesson, he thought, for in
cautious visitors. He hoped it would not be lost on Alvin.

They reached the hull and stared up into the exposed interior of the
ship. It was Uke looking into a huge building that had been roughly
sliced in two; floors and walls and ceilings, broken at the point of the
explosion, gave a distorted chart of the ship's cross section. What strange
beings, wondered Alvin, still lay where they had died in the wreckage
of their vessel?

"I don't understand this," said Hilvar suddenly. "This portion of the
ship is badly damaged, but it's still fairly intact. Where's the rest of it?
Did it break in two out in space, and this part crash here?"

Not until they had sent the robot exploring again, and had them
selves examined the area around the wreckage, did they learn the an
swer. There was no shadow of doubt; any reservations they might have
had were banished when Alvin found the line of low mounds, each ten
feet long, on the little hill beside the ship.

"So they landed here," mused Hilvar, "and ignored the warning.
They were inquisitive, just as you are. They tried to open that dome."

He pointed to the other side of the crater, to the smooth, still un
marked shell within which the departed rulers of this world had sealed their treasures. But it was no longer a dome: it was now an almost com
plete sphere, for the ground in which it had been set had been blasted
away.

"They wrecked their ship, and many of them were killed. Yet despite
that, they managed to make repairs and leave again, cutting off this
section and stripping out everything of value. What a task that must have been!"

Alvin scarcely heard him. He was looking at the curious marker that
had first drawn him to this spot—the slim shaft ringed by a horizontal circle a third of the way down from its tip. Alien and unfamiliar though
it was, he could respond to the mute message it had carried down the
ages.

Underneath those stones, if he cared to disturb them, was the answer to one question at least. It could remain unanswered; whatever these
creatures might have been, they had earned their right to rest.

Hilvar scarcely heard the words Alvin whispered as they walked
slowly back to the ship.

"I hope they got home," he said.

"And where now?" asked Hilvar, when they were once more out in space.

Alvin stared thoughtfully at the screen before replying.

"Do you think I should go back?" he said.

"It would be the sensible thing to do. Our luck may not hold out much longer, and who knows what other surprises these planets may have waiting for us?"

It was the voice of sanity and caution, and Alvin was now prepared to give it greater heed than he would have done a few days before. But he had come a long way, and waited all his life, for this moment; he would not turn back while there was still so much to see.

"We'll stay in the ship from now on," he said, "and we won't touch surface anywhere. That should be safe enough, surely."

Hilvar shrugged his shoulders, as if refusing to accept any responsibility for what might happen next. Now that Alvin was showing a certain amount of caution, he thought it unwise to admit that he was equally anxious to continue their exploring, though he had long ago abandoned all hope of meeting intelligent life upon any of these planets.

A double world lay ahead of them, a great planet with a smaller satellite beside it. The primary might have been the twin of the second world they had visited; it was clothed in that same blanket of livid green. There would be no point in landing here; this was a story they already knew.

Alvin brought the ship low over the surface of the satellite; he needed no warning from the complex mechanisms which protected him to know that there was no atmosphere here. All shadows had a sharp, clean edge, and there were no gradations between night and day. It was the first world on which he had seen something approaching night, for only one of the more distant suns was above the horizon in the area where they made first contact. The landscape was bathed in a dull red light, as though it had been dipped in blood.

For many miles they flew low above mountains that were still as jagged and sharp as in the distant ages of their birth. This was a world that had never known change or decay, had never been scoured by winds and rains. No eternity circuits were needed here to preserve objects in their pristine freshness.

But if there was no air, then there could have been no life—or could there have been?

"Of course," said Hilvar, when Alvin put the question to him, "there's nothing biologically absurd in the idea. Life can't originate in airless space—but it can evolve forms that will survive in it. It must have

happened millions of times, whenever an inhabited planet lost its at
mosphere."

"But would you expect
intelligent
life forms to exist in a vacuum?
Wouldn't they have protected themselves against the loss of their air?"

"Probably, if it occurred
after
they achieved enough intelligence to
stop it happening. But if the atmosphere went while they were still in the
primitive state, they would have to adapt or perish. After they had
adapted, they might then develop a very high intelligence. In fact, they
probably would—the incentive would be so great."

The argument, decided Alvin, was a purely theoretical one, as far as
this planet was concerned. Nowhere was there any sign that it had ever
borne life, intelligent or otherwise. But in that case, what was the pur
pose of this world? The entire multiple system of the Seven Suns, he was
now certain, was artificial, and this world must be part of its grand de
sign.

It could, conceivably, be intended purely for ornament—to provide
a moon in the sky of its giant companion. Even in that case, however, it
seemed likely that it would be put to
some
use.

"Look," said Hilvar, pointing to the screen. "Over there, on the right."

Alvin changed the ship's course, and the landscape tilted around
them. The red-lit rocks blurred with the speed of their motion; then the
image stabilized, and sweeping below was the unmistakable evidence of
life.

Unmistakable—yet also baffling. It took the form of a wide-spaced
row of slender columns, each a hundred feet from its neighbor and twice as high. They stretched into the distance, dwindling in hypnotic perspec
tive, until the far horizon swallowed them up.

Alvin swung the ship to the right, and began to race along the line of
columns, wondering as he did so what purpose they could ever have
served. They were absolutely uniform, marching in an unbroken file
over hills and down into valleys. There was no sign that they had ever
supported anything; they were smooth and featureless, tapering very
slightly toward the top.

Quite abruptly, the line changed its course, turning sharply through
a right angle. Alvin overshot by several miles before he reacted and was
able to swing the ship around in the new direction.

The columns continued with the same unbroken stride across the landscape, their spacing perfectly regular. Then, fifty miles from the last
change of course, they turned abruptly through another right angle. At
this rate, thought Alvin, we will soon be back where we started.

The endless sequence of columns had so mesmerized them that when it was broken they were miles past the discontinuity before Hilvar cried out and made Alvin, who had noticed nothing, turn the ship back. They
descended slowly, and as they circled above what Hilvar had found, a
fantastic suspicion began to dawn in their minds—though at first neither
dared mention it to the other.

Two of the columns had been broken off near their bases, and lay
stretched out upon the rocks where they had fallen. Nor was that all;
the two columns adjoining the gap had been bent outward by some ir
resistible force.

There was no escape from the awesome conclusion. Now Alvin knew
what they had been flying over; it was something he had seen often
enough in Lys, but until this moment the shocking change of scale had
prevented recognition.

"Hilvar," he said, still hardly daring to put his thoughts into words,
"do you know what this is?"

"It seems hard to believe, but we've been flying around the edge of a
corral. This thing is a fence—a fence that hasn't been strong enough."

"People who keep pets," said Alvin, with the nervous laugh men
sometimes use to conceal their awe, "should make sure they know how
to keep them under control."

Hilvar did not react to his forced levity; he was staring at the broken
barricade, his brow furrowed with thought.

"I don't understand it," he said at last. "Where could it have got
food on a planet like this? And why did it break out of its pen? I'd give a
lot to know what kind of animal it was."

"Perhaps it was left here, and broke out because it was hungry,"
Alvin surmised. "Or something may have made it annoyed."

"Let's go lower," said Hilvar. "I want to have a look at the ground."

They descended until the ship was almost touching the barren rock,
and it was then that they noticed that the plain was pitted with innumer
able small holes, no more than an inch or two wide. Outside the stockade,
however, the ground was free from these mysterious pockmarks; they
stopped abruptly at the line of the fence.

"You are right," said Hilvar. "It was hungry. But it wasn't an animal: it would be more accurate to call it a plant. It had exhausted the soil in
side its pen, and had to find fresh food elsewhere. It probably moved
quite slowly; perhaps it took years to break down those posts."

Alvin's imagination swiftly filled in the details he could never know
with certainty. He did not doubt that Hilvar's analysis was basically cor-

rect, and that some botanical monster, perhaps moving too slowly for the eye to see, had fought a sluggish but relentless battle against the barriers that hemmed it in.

It might still be alive, even after all these ages, roving at will over the face of this planet. To look for it, however, would be a hopeless task, since it would mean quartering the surface of an entire globe. They made a desultory search in the few square miles around the gap, and located one great circular patch of pockmarks, almost five hundred feet across, where the creature had obviously stopped to feed—if one could apply that word to an organism that somehow drew its nourishment from solid rock.

As they lifted once more into space, Alvin felt a strange weariness come over him. He had seen so much, yet learned so little. There were many wonders on all these planets, but what he sought had fled them long ago. It would be useless, he knew, to visit the other worlds of the Seven Suns. Even if there was still intelligence in the Universe, where could he seek it now? He looked at the stars scattered like dust across the vision screen, and knew that what was left of time was not enough to explore them all.

A feeling of loneliness and oppression such as he had never before experienced seemed to overwhelm him. He could understand now the fear of Diaspar for the great spaces of the Universe, the terror that had made his people gather in the little microcosm of their city. It was hard to believe that, after all, they had been right.

He turned to Hilvar for support. But Hilvar was standing, fists tightly clenched and with a glazed look in his eyes. His head was tilted on one side; he seemed to be listening, straining every sense into the emptiness around them.

"What is it?" said Alvin urgently. He had to repeat the question before Hilvar showed any sign of hearing it. He was still staring into nothingness when he finally replied.

"There's something coming," he said slowly. "Something that I don't understand."

It seemed to Alvin that the cabin had suddenly become very cold, and the racial nightmare of the Invaders reared up to confront him in all its terror. With an effort of will that sapped his strength, he forced his mind away from panic.

"Is it friendly?" he asked. "Shall I run for Earth?"

Hilvar did not answer the first question—only the second. His voice was very faint, but showed no sign of alarm or fear. It held rather a vast