The Big Front Yard and Other Stories (15 page)

A low voice asked, “That you, Ira?”

“It's me, Bat Ears. I couldn't sleep. I'm worried.”

“You're always worried,” said Bat Ears. “It's an occu … occu …”

“Occupational?”

“That's it,” said Bat Ears, hiccoughing just a little. “That's the word I wanted. Worry is an occupational disease with you.”

“We're in a jam, Bat Ears.”

“There's been planets,” Bat Ears said, “I wouldn't of minded so much being marooned on, but this ain't one of them. This here place is the tail end of creation.”

They stood together in the darkness with the sweep of alien stars above them and the silent planet stretching off to a vague horizon.

“There's something here,” Bat Ears went on. “You can smell it in the air. Them fancy-pants in there said there wasn't nothing here because they couldn't see nothing and the books they'd read said nothing much could live on a planet that was just rocks and moss. But, me, I've seen planets. Me, I was planet-checking when most of them was in diapers and my nose can tell me more about a planet than their brains all lumped together, which, incidentally, ain't a bad idea.”

“I think you're right,” confessed Warren. “I can feel it myself. I couldn't before. Maybe it's just because we're scared that we can feel it now.”

“I felt it before I was scared.”

“We should have looked around. That's where we made our mistake. But there was so much work to do in the junkyard that we never thought of it.”

“Mac took a little jaunt,” said Bat Ears. “Says he found some towers.”

“He told me about them, too.”

“Mac was just a little green around the gills when he was telling me.”

“He told me he didn't like them.”

“If there was any place to run to, Mac would be running right now.”

“In the morning,” Warren said, “we'll go and see those towers.”

IX

They were towers, all right, and there were eight of them in line, like watchtowers that at one time had stretched across the planet, but something had happened and all the others had been leveled except the eight that were standing there.

They were built of undressed native rock, crudely piled, without mortar and with little wedges and slabs of stone used in the interstices to make the stones set solid. They were the kind of towers that might have been built by a savage race and they had an ancient look about them. They were about six feet at the base and tapered slightly toward the top and each of them was capped by a huge flat stone with an enormous boulder placed upon the slab to hold it in its place.

Warren said to Ellis, “This is your department. Take over.”

The little archaeologist didn't answer. He walked around the nearest tower and went up close to it and examined it. He put out his hands and acted as if he meant to shake the tower, but it didn't shake.

“Solid,” he said. “Well built and old.”

“Type F culture, I would say,” guessed Spencer.

“Maybe less than that. No attempt at an aesthetic effect – pure utility. But good craftsmanship.”

Clyne said, “Its purpose is the thing. What were the towers built for?”

“Storage space,” said Spencer.

“A marker,” Lang contradicted. “A claim marker, a cache marker …”

“We can find the purpose,” Warren said. “That is something we needn't argue nor speculate about. All we have to do is knock off the boulder and lift the cap and have a look inside.”

He strode up to the tower and started climbing it.

It was an easy thing to climb, for there were niches in the stones and hand and toe holds were not too hard to find.

He reached the top.

“Look out below,” he yelled, and heaved at the boulder.

It rolled and then slowly settled back. He braced himself and heaved again and this time it toppled. It went plunging off the tower, smashed to the ground, went rumbling down the slope, gathering speed, hitting other boulders in its path, zigzagging with the deflection of its course, thrown high into the air by the boulders that it hit.

Warren said, “Throw a rope up to me. I'll fasten it to the capstone and then we can haul it off.”

“We haven't got a rope,” said Clyne.

“Someone run back to the ship and get one. I'll wait here till he returns.”

Briggs started back toward the ship.

Warren straightened up. From the tower he had a fine view of the country and he swiveled slowly, examining it.

Somewhere nearby, he thought, the men – well, not men, but the things that built these towers – must have had their dwelling. Within a mile or so there had been at one time a habitation. For the towers would have taken time in building and that meant that the ones who built them must have had at least a semi-permanent location.

But there was nothing to see – nothing but tumbled boulder fields and great outcroppings and the blankets of primal plants that ran across their surfaces.

What did they live on? Why were they here? What would have attracted them? What would have held them here?

He halted in his pivoting, scarcely believing what he saw. Carefully he traced the form of it, making sure that the light on some boulder field was not befuddling his vision.

It couldn't be, he told himself. It couldn't happen three times. He must be wrong.

He sucked in his breath and held it and waited for the illusion to go away.

It didn't go away. The thing was there.

“Spencer,” he called. “Spencer, please come up here.”

He continued watching it. Below him, he heard Spencer scrabbling up the tower. He reached down a hand and helped him.

“Look,” Warren said, pointing. “What is that out there?”

“A ship!” cried Spencer. “There's another ship out there!”

X

The spaceship was old, incredibly old. It was red with rust; you could put your hand against its metal hide and sweep your hand across it and the flakes of rust would rain down upon the rock and your hand would come away painted with rust.

The airlock once had been closed, but someone or something had battered a hole straight through it without opening it, for the rim was still in place against the hull and the jagged hole ran to the ship's interior. For yards around the lock, the ground was red with violently scattered rust.

They clambered through the hole. Inside, the ship was bright and shining, without a trace of rust, although there was a coating of dust over everything. Through the dust upon the floor was a beaten track and many isolated footprints where the owners of the prints had stepped out of the path. They were alien tracks, with a heavy heel and three great toes, for all the world like the tracks of a mighty bird or some long-dead dinosaur.

The trail led through the ship back to the engine room and there the empty platform stood, with the engines gone.

“That's how they got away,” said Warren, “the ones who junked their engines. They took the engines off this ship and put them in their ship and then they took off.”

“But they wouldn't know –” argued Clyne.

“They evidently did,” Warren interrupted bluntly.

Spencer said, “They must have been the ones. This ship has been here for a long time – the rust will tell you that. And it was closed, hermetically sealed, because there's no rust inside. That hole was punched through the lock fairly recently and the engines taken.”

“That means, then,” said Lang, “that they did junk their engines. They ripped them out entire and heaved them in the junkpile. They tore them out and replaced them with the engines from this ship.”

“But why?” asked Clyne. “Why did they have to do it?”

“Because,” said Spencer, “they didn't know how to operate their own engines.”

“But if they didn't know how to operate their engines, how could they run this one?”

“He's got you there,” said Dyer. “That's one that you can't answer.”

“No, I can't,” shrugged Warren. “But I wish I could, because then we'd have the answer ourselves.”

“How long ago,” asked Spencer, “would you say this ship landed here? How long would it take for a spaceship hull to rust?”

“It's hard to tell,” Clyne answered. “It would depend on the kind of metal they used. But you can bet on this – any spaceship hull, no matter who might have built it, would be the toughest metal the race could fabricate.”

“A thousand years?” Warren suggested.

“I don't know,” said Clyne. “Maybe a thousand years. Maybe more than that. You see this dust. That's what's left of whatever organic material there was in the ship. If the beings that landed here remained within the ship, they still are here in the form of dust.”

Warren tried to think, tried to sort out the chronology of the whole thing.

A thousand years ago, or thousands of years ago, a spaceship had landed here and had not got away.

They another spaceship landed, a thousand or thousands of years later, and it, too, was unable to get away. But it finally escaped when the crew robbed the first ship of its engines and substituted them for the ones that had brought it here.

Then years, or months, or days later, the Earth survey ship had landed here, and it, too, couldn't get away – because the men who ran it couldn't remember how to operate its engines.

He swung around and strode from the engine room, leaving the others there, following the path in the dust back to the shattered lock.

And just inside the port, sitting on the floor, making squiggles in the dust with an awkward finger, sat Briggs, who had gone back to the ship to get a length of rope.

“Briggs,” said Warren sharply. “Briggs, what are you doing here?”

Briggs looked up with vacant, laughing eyes.

“Go away,” he said.

Then he went back to making squiggles in the dust.

XI

Doc Spears said, “Briggs reverted to childhood. His mind is wiped as clean as a one-year-old's. He can talk, which is about the only difference between a child and him. But his vocabulary is limited and what he says makes very little sense.”

“He can be taught again?” asked Warren.

“I don't know.”

“Spencer had a look at him. What does Spencer say?”

“Spencer said a lot,” Doc told him. “It adds up, substantially, to practically total loss of memory.”

“What can we do?”

“Watch him. See he doesn't get hurt. After a while we might try re-education. He may even pick up some things by himself. Something happened to him. Whether whatever it was that took his memory away also injured his brain is something I can't say for sure. It doesn't appear injured, but without a lot of diagnostic equipment we don't have, you can't be positive.”

“There's no sign of injury?”

“There's not a single mark anywhere,” said Doc. “He isn't hurt. That is, not physically. It's only his mind that's been injured. Maybe not his mind, either – just his memory gone.”

“Amnesia?”

“Not amnesia. When you have that, you're confused. You are haunted by the thought that you have forgotten something. You're all tangled up. Briggs isn't confused or tangled. He seems to be happy enough.”

“You'll take care of him, Doc? Kind of keep an eye on him?”

Doc snorted and got up and left.

Warren called after him. “If you see Bat Ears down there, tell him to come up.”

Doc clumped down the stairs.

Warren sat and stared at the blank wall opposite him.

First Mac and his crew had forgotten how to run the engines. That was the first sign of what was happening – the first recognizable sign – for it had been going on long before Mac found he'd forgotten all his engine lore.

The crew of investigators had lost some of their skills and their knowledge almost from the first. How else could one account for the terrible mess they'd made of the junkyard business? Under ordinary circumstances, they would have wrung some substantial information from the engine parts and the neatly stacked supplies. They had gotten information of a sort, of course, but it added up to nothing. Under ordinary circumstances, it should have added up to an extraordinary something.

He heard feet coming up the stairs, but the tread was too crisp for Bat Ears.

It was Spencer.

Spencer flopped into one of the chairs. He sat there opening and closing his hands, looking down at them with helpless anger.

“Well?” asked Warren. “Anything to report?”

“Briggs got into that first tower,” said Spencer. “Apparently he came back with the rope and found us gone, so he climbed up and threw a hitch around the capstone, then climbed down again and pulled it off. The capstone is lying on the ground, at the foot of the tower, with the rope still hitched around it.”

Warren nodded. “He could have done that. The capstone wasn't too heavy. One man could have pulled it off.”

“There's something in that tower.”

“You took a look?”

“After what happened to Briggs? Of course not. I posted a guard to keep everyone away. We can't go monkeying around with the tower until we've thought a few things through.”

“What do you think is in there?”

“I don't know,” said Spencer. “All I have is an idea. We know what it can do. It can strip your memory.”

“Maybe it's fright that did it,” Warren said. “Something down in the tower so horrible …”

Spencer shook his head. “There is no evidence of fright in Briggs. He's calm. Sits there happy as a clam, playing with his fingers and talking silly sentences – happy sentences. The way a kid would talk.”

“Maybe what he's saying will give us a hint. Keep someone listening all the time. Even if the words don't mean much …”

“It wouldn't do any good. Not only is his memory gone, but even the memory of what took it away.”