Back | Next
Contents

Chapter 26

Dwynnaith returned to the city in a blimp-like airship that came out for him. Carnaby, watching the clumsy-seeming contraption approaching, said, "A gasbag? A dirigible balloon? I thought these people were highly advanced, but . . ."

"And what's wrong with it, James?" Grimes asked him. "Why consume power just to stay aloft when, with aerostatic lift, you do it for free?"

"But the speed of the thing . . . Or the lack of speed, rather . . ."

"If you're in no great hurry," said the commodore, "an airship is at least as good as any other form of transport."

The Martian, still silent, was obviously communing with Mayhew. Then the telepath said, "He wants us to keep well away from the beacon, John."

"Why, Ken?"

"I'm . . . I'm not quite sure. Some mechanical technicality about anchoring . . ."

It was a pity, thought Grimes, that Mayhew was such a moron in all matters concerning machinery. But, probably, the airship would be lowering some kind of grapnel. It made sense. He and the others moved well away from the immediate vicinity of the still-flashing beacon.

The airship was by no means as primitive as it had seemed from a distance. As it approached it lost altitude, and Grimes could see the silvery mesh that enclosed the ballonnettes tightening, compressing the gasbags, reducing buoyancy. Here was no wasteful valving of gas. The ship came in very slowly at the finish, its single, pusher airscrew just ticking over. When it was almost directly over the beacon it stopped. There was a loud thung! and a metal projectile shot out and down from the gondola, burying itself in the soil. As it did so the grapnel arms opened, to grip firmly. The mooring line—a flexible wire, pencil-thin—tightened as a winch in the airship took the strain, hauling it down for the last few meters. Then it floated there, riding quietly to the slight breeze, the skids of its undercarriage just clear of the tops of the green plants.

Dwynnaith stood a little apart from the humans, issuing what sounded like a rapid-fire stream of orders. So he could speak, and so the airship's crew were not telepaths, thought Grimes, His voice was painfully shrill, as were the voices that answered him from inside the gondola. It was like the chirping of insects, or of birds. Like birds? wondered the commodore, the beginning of a wild surmise taking vague shape in his mind. Like birds? Somehow that tied in with the autumnal feel in the air. There was some correlation—but what?

Dwynnaith clambered with anthropoidal agility up a short ladder that was extended from the open door of the gondola. Grimes noted that as his weight came on it the gasbag was allowed to expand in compensation. He stood in the doorway which, although narrow, was quite wide enough to accommodate both himself and one of the crew members. The two attenuated beings were obviously waiting for something.

"The Carlotti transceiver . . ." said Mayhew.

The dismantled instrument was handed up and taken inside. The door slid shut. Abruptly the anchor jerked from the ground, its blades retracting. The airship bounded upwards, turning in a wide arc as it did so, flew steadily northwards. Soon it was no more than an almost invisible dot in the clear sky.

"And what happens now?" asked Carnaby.

"We wait," said Mayhew.

"For what?" demanded Sonya.

"If I knew, I'd tell you," replied the telepath testily.

* * *

So they waited.

They decided to live in the plastic domes that had been set up for their use; the temporary, inflatable dwellings offered far more comfort and privacy than the cramped quarters of the lifeboat. The furniture—beds and chairs and tables of a sort, also inflatable—must have teen especially made with human proportions in mind. There was no heating, although this did not much matter as the double skin formed adequate insulation against the coldness of the Martian night, and there was a good supply of blankets woven from some synthetic fibre. There was no lighting, but portable lamps could be brought in from the boat. There were no cooking facilities, but the lifeboat's galley could be used for the preparation of meals. No food was provided, but the boat's stores were very far from being exhausted.

There was food growing all around them, of course. The boat carried the means whereby spacemen stranded on an alien planet could test local foodstuffs to determine their suitability or otherwise for human consumption, and Brenda Coles was a qualified biochemist. She announced that the bean-like crop among which they were sitting was not only edible; it was highly nutritious. Unfortunately the flavor was vile, and nothing could be done to kill the taste.

Grimes said, after an experimental nibble and hasty spitting out, "Perhaps we would have been better off in Australia . . . Even witchety grubs'd taste better than this!"

He was not, after the first day or so, happy. There was so little to do. He would have liked to have taken the boat to make a detailed exploration of the countryside—but this, Mayhew assured him, would most certainly not be approved by the Martians. "We must stay here, John," he said firmly. "We must be ready to go to the city as soon as they send for us. Bear in mind that we are uninvited guests and that we must do nothing, nothing at all, to antagonize our hosts."

"But they will help us?"

"They think that they will be able to help us."

And with that Grimes had to be satisfied.

Of them all, only Brenda Coles seemed to be reasonably content. She was only a biochemist, not a xenobiologist, but she possessed a smattering of xenobiology and occupied herself by attempting to catalogue the flora and fauna in the vicinity of the camp. Carnaby helped her, although not with over-much enthusiasm. He complained, out of her hearing, "Damn it all, I'm a navigator, not a butterfly hunter!"

Not that the butterflies, so-called, were butterflies. They were winged arthropods of a sort—but arthropods are not warm-blooded, and these things were. In spite of this they had not survived the millennia prior to Man's first landing on Mars—but neither had much of anything else, plant or animal. Perhaps the great meteor shower which formed the craters had wiped out practically all life on the Red Planet—or would wipe out all life.

"But what about the cities?" asked Grimes, when this theory was advanced. "You can't tell me that each meteor had the name of a city written on it. There must have been something left for Men to find."

"But there wasn't," said Williams.

"No. There wasn't—save for a couple or three dubious artifacts."

"I think . . ." began Mayhew hesitantly, "I think that we arrived just before some sort of mass migration . . . An old world, senescent, and its people moving on to greener, fresher pastures . . ."

Carnaby picked up the home-made butterfly net that he had been using, pretended to strum it as though it were a guitar.

"I've laid around and played around, this old town too long" he sang.
"Summer almost gone, winter comin' on . . .
"I've laid around and played around this old town too long,
"And I feel I gottagotta travel on . . ."

"Mphm," grunted Grimes. "Yes, there is that sort of feel in the air. But . . ." Then he, too, sang, in spite of Sonya's protests.

"There's a lonesome train at six oh eight a-comin' through the town,
"A-comin' through the town, an' I'll be homeward bound,
"There's a lonesome train at six oh eight a-comin' through the town . . .
"An' I feel I gotta travel on . . ."

"No one's stopping you," said his wife acidly.

"You don't get the point. When you board that lonesome train you don't take the town with you. You leave it behind. You leave town, in fact."

"What are you drivin' at, Skipper?" asked Williams.

"I . . . I don't quite know. When I was a kid, when I was a cadet at the Survey Service academy, we were supposed to read selected Twentieth Century science fiction. Wild stuff, most of it, and well off the beam most of the time. And yet, after years, some of it sticks in my memory. There was one story about an invention called, I think, the spindizzy. It was a sort of anti-gravitational device that lifted entire cities and sent them whiffling around the galaxy as enormous spaceships with closed economies . . .

"What if the Martians have something of the kind in mind? What if those antennae on the towers of their cities, like Carlotti antennae, aren't for communication but are something on the same general lines as our Mannschenn Drive? After all, both the Mannschenn Drive and the Carlotti Communication System do funny things to Space and Time . . . Mphm. It could be that they've taken our Carlotti set so they can modify it so it can be used as an interstellar drive for the boat . . ."

"And if they have, if they can," asked Sonya, "where do we go to? And, come to that, why?"

Carnaby started to sing again.

"Sheriff an' police a-comin' after me,
"Comin' after me, a-comin' after me . . .
"Sheriff an' police a-comin' after me, "An' I feel I gotta travel on . . ."

Nobody thought that it was very funny.

Back | Next
Framed