One and Wonder (3 page)

Pressed deep in the cushions, Lord sat peering back with confused suspicion in his yellow eyes. Fortunately for Cameron, he was now concerned with dangers more immediate than ideological heresy. His nasal voice rasped angrily: “Well? What happened then—according to your theory?” Cameron answered with an easy grin.

“Quite likely, the division of labor broke down at last.”

“Watch your manner, Mister.” Lord clearly didn't like his grin. “What
could break it down?”

“Rebellion, perhaps.” Cameron was properly respectful. “For America had a permanent garrison of nine thousand specialists in death. They were prepared to devastate any part of the earth—or all of it. Perhaps they were just too thorough.”

Uneasily, the little Squaredealer licked his thin lips. “Then why should the fort itself be silent?”

“Disease, perhaps—some biological weapon out of control.” In Cameron's blue eyes, I caught a faint glint of malicious amusement. “Or famine—maybe they left the earth unable to feed them. Or natural cataclysm.”

Lord fought the acceleration-pressure, to sit bolt upright. His bleak narrow face was filmed with sweat of effort—and of fear.

“Cataclysm?” He peered into Cameron's lean, sardonic face. “Explain!”

“Twenty years at space has shown us the insensate hostility of the universe.” Cameron's low voice deepened my own unease. “Man lives at the mercy of blind chance, surviving only through a peculiar combination of improbable factors. Just suppose we find the earth stripped of oxygen.” He grinned at Lord, satanically. “As efficiently as the planets of the Dark Star were robbed of uranium?”

Before we reached the moon, Lord had turned a sallow green with acceleration-sickness.

Fort America was hidden beneath a crater in the tawny desolation of the Mare Nubium. We wheeled above the mountain ring, just above the highest crags, searching the dozen miles of barren floor.

“It hasn't changed!” I whispered to Cameron. “The valves, the roads, the docks—just as they used to be!” I tried to point through the small quartz port. “There's where the
Great Director
stood.”

“But it has changed.” Cameron glanced at me; and the strong glare of the moonscape, striking his haggard face from below, made his habitual sardonic expression seem oddly diabolic. “It's abandoned, now.”

And I remembered. Great trucks once had rolled over that white web of roads. Colored signal lights had blinked and flickered from the domes over the pits. Tall, tapered ships had stood like rows of silver pillars on the immense, dark fields.

But now the crater was an empty bowl. The lowering sun made all the westward rim a jagged lip of shattered ebony. Sharp fingers of the dark crept across the empty miles, to clutch the empty domes and seize the empty roads.

Nothing moved, anywhere. No metal flashed beneath the sun. No signals flickered, now, out of the cold, increasing shadow. Men had been here once, armed with atomic science, bold with conquest. Now they were gone.

Yet the crater wasn't empty, quite—for it held a riddle. What had silenced man's greatest citadel? Cold dread sank into me, out of that black, expanding shadow. The brooding mystery of it numbed my senses like some spreading biotoxin.

We landed at last, well out in the retreating sunlight, on a concrete road near one of the valves. We clambered into space-armor—Cameron and I, and Captain Doyle. Laden with assorted equipment, we scrambled one by one through the small air-lock, leaping clumsily down to the moon. Victor Lord remained aboard. He was ill. I believe his apprehensive thoughts had fastened too strongly on Cameron's malicious suggestion of interstellar invasion. I think he expected us to encounter unearthly monsters lurking down in the pits and tunnels.

Beside the bright spire of the life-craft, we set up a portable radiation counter and a neutron detector. The counter started flashing rapidly, and I couldn't stop an apprehensive gesture toward the valves.

“Dangerous intensity!” My voice rang loud and strange in the spherical helmet. “The residue, maybe, from atomic weapons—though I don't see any craters.”

But Cameron was shaking his head, which looked queerly magnified inside the thick, laminated bubble of his helmet. “Just the normal secondary activity, excited by our own ion-blast.” His voice came on the microwave phone, dulled and distorted. “I think it's safe for us to go on.”

Moving clumsily with all our equipment, we moved a hundred yards to try again. Now the counter showed only the normal bombardment of solar and cosmic rays.

“Come along!” Doyle's deep voice roared in my phones. “Have a look—here's a whole row of wrecks. The mutineers must have caught them sitting. They're blown all to scrap.” Beside a huge deserted dock of gray pumice-concrete, he had discovered the dismembered remnants of half a dozen vessels. We approached cautiously, and paused again to test for dangerous radiations. There were none—for these skeletons of space-craft had been stripped by something other than mutiny.

This had been a repair-dock. Suddenly sheepish, Doyle pointed at abandoned cranes and empty jet-pits. The apparent wrecks had merely been cannibalized—their plates and valves and jets ripped out to repair other vessels.

“No mutiny!” Doyle made a disgusted sound. “Let's look below.”

For the actual fort was far beneath the crater. A vast web of tunnels, sheltered hangars, shops, barracks, magazines. The launching tubes, trained forever on the earth, were hidden in deep pits. Somewhere in that sublunar labyrinth, we could hope to find our riddle answered.

The nearest entrance shaft was topped with a low dome of concrete,
piled with pumice boulders by way of camouflage. The great armored valve was closed, unrusted, quite intact. Doyle spun a bright little wheel, outside.

“I was stationed here, before they picked me for the task force,” he said. “A robot-missiles officer—used to know my way around.”

The massive steel wedge failed to move, and Doyle turned to another, larger wheel. It resisted, and I came to help. Stubbornly, it yielded. The great wedge sank slowly.

“Power’s off.” Doyle was breathless with effort. “Manual emergency control!”

We shuffled at last into the huge dark chamber of the lock. Our battery lights cast flickering, fantastic shadows. Peering at a row of dials and gauges on the curved steel wall, Doyle punched a series of buttons.

Suddenly I felt a faint vibration. The huge wedge lifted behind us, shutting out the dark and harsh-lit moonscape. The chamber was a steel-jawed trap. I felt a tense unease, and the sudden boom of Doyle's voice startled me.

“The main power lines are dead. That's an emergency generator, with a chemical engine—there's one at each valve, to work the controls and energize the instruments.” He scanned the dials again. “Air inside—seven pounds. Better test it.”

When he turned another wheel, air screamed into the chamber. It brought back sound—the clink of our equipment, the clatter of our armored boots, the throb of the emergency engine beneath the metal deck.

We tested it. The counter gave only an occasional click and flash. I broke the glass nipple off a regulation testing tube, and Cameron leaned clumsily beside me to study the reaction of the colored paper indicators. “Okay,” he said. “Safe.”

We took off our armor. The air was fresh, but icy cold—we exhaled white mist. Hopefully, Doyle tried the telephone in the box beneath the dials. Dead silence answered him. Shivering—perhaps to a sense of something colder than the freezing air—he hung it up and opened the inner valve. The emergency power system didn't work the elevators. We climbed down a black ladder-well, into the silent citadel.

III

Fort America was dead.

The thrumming of the little emergency engine was muffled, as we climbed on down, and finally lost. We descended into appalling silence. So long as we moved, there was a comfortable rustle and clatter. When we
stopped to listen, there was nothing at all.

Everywhere, power lines were dead. Midnight shadows retreated grudgingly from our little battery lamps, and lay in wait at every turning. Beyond was total dark.

The heating system must have been shut off, months or years before, for the cold was numbing. Sweat had dampened my wool lined suit, in the heated armor, and now it was icy on my back. The chill of the rung sank through my thin gloves; my fingers were stiff and aching long before we reached a horizontal passage.

Gruesome expectations haunted me. I looked for frozen corpses, twisted with agony from quick biotoxins, or charred with atomic heat. Queerly, however, we found no mark of violence, nor any evidence of human death.

“They're just—
gone!
” Even the deep voice of Captain Doyle held a certain huskiness of dread. “Why—I can't imagine. Nothing wrong, no sign of any trouble.” He caught his breath, squared his shoulders. “We've got to find the answer. Let's try the commandant's office.”

He led the way along a black and soundless lateral tunnel, and opened an unlocked door. The series of rooms beyond was deserted—and quite in order. Empty chairs were neatly set behind the empty desks. Dead telephones were neatly racked in their cradles. Pens in their stands were neatly centered on green blotters, With the ink dried up. Doyle rubbed a dark mark in thin gray dust. “They've been gone a long time.” His voice seemed oddly hushed, yet too loud in those silent rooms.

I began to open the drawers of desks and filing cabinets. They were empty. Bulletin boards had been stripped, floors swept clean. Even the wastebaskets had been neatly emptied.

A large portrait of Tyler in the commandants office had slipped askew on the wall. Doyle moved without thinking to set it properly straight. Cameron followed his movement, I noticed, with a curious sardonic expression, but silently.

“The evacuation must have been quite orderly.” Doyle shook his head, his eyes dark with bewilderment. “No sign of haste or panic. Now what could have caused them to go?”

We moved on, in search of the answer.

It wasn't famine. We walked through an empty mess hall. The long tables were all in line, filmed with dust. Clean trays and silver lay in geometric order, where the last KP's had left them for the last inspection. The warehouse beyond was stacked high with crates and bags and cans of food, frozen now, still preserved.

Nor was it any biological killer, gone wild. We found hundreds of beds in a hospital tunnel, empty, their dusty sheets still neat and smooth. The
pharmacy shelves were loaded with drugs, untouched.

“Power failure?” Cameron suggested. “If the pile had gone dead—”

Rory Doyle found the way, down a black and bottomless ladder-well, to the main power-pile. The massive concrete safety-wall shut us away from all the actual mechanism, but Cameron scanned the long banks of recording instruments and remote controls. He flashed his light on a distant conveyor-belt, motionless, still laden with bright aluminum cans.

“Nothing wrong,” he said. “The last operator discharged the pile—dumped the canned uranium out of the lattice, into the processing canyon underneath. There's plenty of metal left, but it wasn't charged again.”

On another black and silent passage, a little above, we came to the steel-walled dungeons of the guardhouse and the military prison. The armored doors stood open. The records had been removed. The prisoners were gone.

“Revolt, perhaps,” Doyle suggested. “Perhaps the prisoners escaped, and touched off a mutiny in the garrison—no, that couldn't have been, or we'd see the marks of fighting. Perhaps it was revolution, on the earth. That might explain everything—if the missiles are used up.”

He led us up again, along an endless silent tunnel, and down another dark ladder-well. We spun stiff wheels to open three heavy safety-doors, and came at last into one of the magazines.

Doyle gasped, in blank astonishment.

For on row, as far as our lights could reach, long racks were loaded with the robot-missiles. They were sleek cylinders of bright metal, gracefully tapered, every part of them beautiful with precise machining. Space ships, really, they were six feet thick and sixty long, each powered with its own atomic generator, driven with its own ion-jets, controlled with the fine and costly mechanism of its own robot-pilot, each burdened with its own terrible cargo of plutonium-fused lithium hydrides or crystalline biotoxins.

Stunned, almost, Doyle walked to the nearest. He examined it expertly, lifting inspection plates, flashing his light on serial numbers. He came slowly back to us, baffled. “All abandoned!” he muttered. “I can't believe it. Why, those babies cost twenty million apiece, even in mass production. They are loaded with the finest precision machines that men ever made. One of them, in forty minutes, could obliterate a thousand square miles of earth. And never a one was fired!”

We climbed again, up a black narrow shaft, to the launcher which Doyle had once commanded. Bright, satiny metal shimmered against our lights. The huge vertical barrel cast monstrous, leaping shadows. Doyle slipped into a familiar seat and touched familiar buttons. An emergency engine began drumming. A huge periscope lens was suddenly bright with the broad crescent earth—with thin black cross hairs intersecting upon it.

He flashed his light on a blank log-sheet, and shook his head.

“Never a missile was fired.”

Cameron was whistling through his teeth—a gray bit of melody that made a grotesque counterpoint to the themes of lifeless quiet and ghastly dark and deadly cold, to the whole haunting riddle of the abandoned fortress.

“Are these weapons still serviceable?” he asked.

“Not without some missing parts.” Doyle opened an inspection door, to show a dark cavity. “The computer has been removed, and the gyros are gone from the projectiles.”

“Too bad,” Cameron's voice held the hint of irony. “I imagine Mr. Hudd is going to need them.”

“They can be repaired,” Doyle assured him soberly. “Our spares for the ships’ launchers are interchangeable.” Doyle looked at his chronometer. “Now it's time to report to Mr. Hudd—that our mission has failed.”

The stern simplicity of the life-craft, when we were safely back aboard, seemed luxurious. We relaxed in the acceleration chairs and gulped hot soup against the chill of those abandoned tunnels while we answered the peevish and uneasy questions of little Victor Lord.