Murray Leinster - Second Landing

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SECOND LANDING

"The exploring ship Franklin made its first landing on a remarkable wide-beach on the western coast of Chios, the

largest land mass on Thalassia. Using the longest axis of the continent as a base, and the pointed end as seen from

space as O", this beach bears 246° from the median point of the base line. . . . The Franklin later berthed inland some

jour miles 360° from Firing Plaza One on the chart. There is a pleasant savannah here, with a stream of water

apparently safe for drinking . . ."

Astrographic Bureau Publication 11297, Appendix to Space Pilot Vol. 460, Pp. 58-59.

IT WAS NOT plausible that Brett Carstairs should find a picture of a girl, to all appearances human, in millenia-old ruins

on a planet some hundreds of light years from Earth. But the whole affair was unlikely, beginning with the report of

the exploring ship which caused the Thalassia-Asprasia Expedition in the first place. If it hadn't been for photographs

and the ceramic artifacts, nobody would have believed that report. It simply was not credible that another intelligent

race should ever have existed in the galaxy. In two centuries of exploration, no hint of extraterrestrial reasoning beings

had been found before. But the exploration ship's narrative didn't stop at one impossibility

about the twin worlds Thalassia and Aspasia, revolving perpetually about each other as they trailed the satellite sun

Rubra on its course. The report wasn't content to claim one intelligent race to have existed. It claimed two. And it

offered evidence that some thousands of years before they had fought each other bitterly and mercilessly, and that they

had exterminated each other in an interplanetary war which lasted only days or even hours—which was hard to

believe.

But the picture of the girl was more impossible than anything else. Brett didn't believe it, even when he held it in his

hand. He didn't dare mention it until the thing was all over. •

He didn't find it at the actual beginning, of course. There were preliminaries. The Thalassia-Aspasia, Expedition

worked under handicaps. It was based on the exploring ship's report and had to be organized by the Records Division

of the Astrographic Survey—which never has any money to spare—and there had to be much skimping in every way

and only volunteers could be afforded for the job. Even a ship couldn't be hired for it. The general public was much

more excited about the colonization of nearby planetary systems than hi research on a planet that wouldn't be needed

for colonization in a thousand years. So the Expedition was very small—no more than a dozen members altogether—

and it would be landed on Thalassia from an Ecology Bureau ship and left there. It would probably be called for in six

months or so. Probably. Even then, what it found out might not matter to anybody else.

Brett joined up because it was his only chance for adventure and because his hobby warranted his inclusion in the

staff. He could drive a flier of course—everybody could —but he'd specialized in paleotechnology, the study of

ancient industrial processes. If there really had been an intelligent race or races out in space, he could make better

guesses than most at how the alien machinery worked and how its factories produced. But his personal reason for

going was an odd, anticipatory feeling of excitement at the idea of being left with a small group of human beings on a

planet where not even the skies were familiar, from which Sol itself was invisible, and where they would be more ter-

ribly alone in a waste of emptiness than any similar group had ever been before.*

That excitement lasted during the long journey hi overdrive and during the almost-as-long approach to planetary

landing distance after the Ecology Bureau ship was back in normal space hi the Elektra system. When it went into

atmosphere on Thalassia and its repulsors droned above the illimitable waters of Thalassia's ocean, Brett watched with

fascinated eyes. Waves of this ocean had a twenty thousand mile reach in which to build up to mountainous heights.

At this season of the twin planets' year, they had the equivalent of trade winds to urge them on. When they reached the

shores of Chios, the planet's only continent, the waves were three hundred feet high, and they seemed to fling spray

and spume almost out to space itself. Brett watched the swirling maelstroms and dramatic tumult of the struggle

between sea and land. He remembered that at the very edge of the wave-washed area there were to be found the only

moving living things on the continent. They were marine forms like crabs, which scuttled out of the water to forage

and darted back to the monstrously tumultuous coastal foam.

Watching from the Ecology ship, Brett heard the report, that the radar beacon on Chios wasn't working, and he

watched as the ship found Firing Plaza Number One and the ruined refugee-settlement nearby, and hovered there to

make quite sure of its position before it descended gently at the landing place the exploring ship had advised for later

visitors.

It was a pleasant savannah, and the stream ran as clear as crystal. But the Ecology Bureau ship had been grudgingly

loaned, and it had urgent business elsewhere. Its cargo ports opened and the Expedition's supplies went out to ground

hi a swiftly flowing stream. They piled up moun-tainously, so it seemed, and at that they weren't too complete. The

biggest crates were two atmosphere fliers and a short range rocket. The fuel for the rocket made a bigger heap than all

the rest of the equipment together. There were plastic tarpaulins to cover everything. There were houses

* Note: The survival of the crew of the exploring ship Durwent on Lundstrom IV for some years after their shipwreck was not known at this

time.

to be unfolded and braced back—but at least they weren't inflatable shelters!—and there was a spare beacon. But there

wasn't much else but food. The unloading took less than two hours.

Then the skipper of the Ecology Bureau ship asked politely if there were anything else. Minutes later the cargo ports

closed and the personnel lock shut, and the ship's repulsors began to drone. It heaved up slowly until it was a few

thousand feet up and then went into interplanetary drive and plummeted toward the sky. It would come back in six

months, most likely, or another ship would come in its stead. And the Expedition would have to be ready to leave.

That was when Brett Carstairs realized the silence on Thalassia. The Expedition's members set to work to make camp.

There was a breeze and the vegetation was reasonably familiar in smell, at least—chlorophyl and its associated

compounds are found on the oxygen planets of all sol-type stars—and the tree leaves rustled naturally enough. The

small stream at the landing place made pleasant liquid sounds. But that was all. No insect stirred or whirred or

stridulated. No bird sang. No squirrel barked. No reasonable facsimile of any noise made by any living creature came

to the ears of the Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition. The only noises were the voices of the Expedition members

themselves, and the bumpings they made with the boxes and crates, and the breeze and the dull booming of the

mountainous surf to the westward. Brett caught himself listening uneasily.

"I didn't realize," he said ruefully to Kent, on the other end of a crate that would be a chair presently, "that it was going

to sound so lonely."

"It's been lonely here for a good many thousand years," said Kent phlegmatically, "since the race on this planet and the

characters on the other one killed each other off."

He put down his end of the crate. He and Brett opened it. They began to assemble the furnishings of the Expedition's

housing. All about them was jungle. The clearing in which they worked had a ground cover like ivy running on the

ground. It was broad-leaved instead of narrow-leaved as grasses are, and Brett had a feeling that there should be

crawling things under it.

But there weren't. The report of the exploring ship was explicit. There had been a very high civilization here, once.

And another on the from-here-invisible twin planet As-pasia. Some eight thousand years ago they'd fought each other

terribly across the half million miles of space that separated them. Fission bombs with cobalt cases poisoned the air of

Thalassia, at the same time that fusion bombs from Thalassia blasted the oasis cities of its twin world to lakes of

molten glass. There wasn't a single, air-breathing creature left alive on Thalassia. Not any more.

The air was clean of radioactivity now, to be sure. Carbon-14 and Cobalt-60 determinations timed the deadly war at

very close to eight thousand years before. Now there was vegetation and the ocean swarmed with marine organisms

from plankton to fish. But there was no moving creature left on the land of the nearly Earth-sized world.

Brett labored on. The atmosphere on Thalassia was depressing. It was a dead world despite its forests and jungles.

Everything that had wings or a throat—even teeth to bite or stings to sting with—had died milennia ago with the

doomed creatures whose friable skeletons the exploring ship had found about the firing plaza. They'd died of the

bombs from the other planet, which was forever invisible from here. They'd been murdered. Butchered. The forests

had no purpose with no animals to live in them. There was a feeling of grief in the air, as if even the trees mourned.

Brett wanted to go over to the firing plaza and see where at least there had been living things, even if the only sure

knowledge about them was that they had died in the act of firing giant rockets to avenge the extermination of their

race. When they died, Thalassia was already a charnel house. Now—

There was quiet. A terrible quiet. The Expedition members braced their houses, moved the laboratory equipment

inside, uncrated their fliers and tied them down, ran their power lines, dug their refrigeration pits, put in sanitary

equipment and set their water recovery plant to work. It was safer to condense water from the air than to use the local

water supplies which might still carry undesirable trace elements. Brett began to worry that it would be too late to go

to the firing plaza before dark. Then he remembered. He looked up at the sky. It was mostly blue, but

it was speckled. There was a dull red pinpoint of light near the horizon. That wasn't Elecktra, the sun and center of

gravity of this system. It was Rubra, the red dwarf, the satellite sun the size of Earth's Jupiter, which shared an orbit

with the twin planets. They were in Trojan relationship to it, sixty degrees behind as it sped sullenly about its primary.

Elecktra itself was not visible. But there was no night.

Off to what ought to be the west there was a spotty bright luminosity hi the sky. It was the star cluster Fanis Venitici,

on whose fringe this solar system lay. The multiple suns of the cluster swarmed so closely and shone so brightly at the

cluster's heart that even thirty light years away they gave Thalassia more light than its own and proper sun.

There would be no night on Thalassia.

Brett had known it, of course, but nevertheless he was relieved. A dead planet is gloomy enough in the daytime, with

all its vegetation grieving that it has no purpose. At night it would be intolerable. Even hi the daytime it would be hard

to keep one's mind busy.

Brett worked at it. He had driven pegs and was tying down the tarpaulin over a mound of crates when he saw the heap

of dirt. It did not have any ground cover plants on it. It was piled up. It had been rained on, but it was freshly dug.

Brett pounded two more pegs and double-knotted the ropes that would hold the tarpaulin in any wind. Then he

jumped. Kent, by that time, was pounding in more pegs on the other side of the pile of stores.

Brett stared at the piled-up dirt. It was surprisingly Earthlike. The top of the ground was dark humus from rotted

vegetation, and six or eight inches down it turned to clay, very much like a freshly dug hole on Earth. But there

shouldn't be any freshly dug hole on Thalassia! Nothing lived here! Nothing!

But there was a freshly dug hole hi the ground, with clay on top of the thrown out humus.

Brett stopped driving pegs and went to make sure. He stared down. He felt himself growing queasy—sickish— and

pale. There were scraps of human-made paper at the bottom of the hole. There were traces of the rotted debris any

group of humans will discard, but which humans auto-

matically put out of sight before they leave any stopping place. This savannah had been the berthing place of the

exploring ship Franklin. This was where the explorers had buried their trash. Something had dug it up.

More, something had very carefully sorted it out, as human scientists sort out the rubbish heaps—the kitchen

middens—of a forgotten culture to find out what made it tick.

Something had carefully examined an exploring ship's kitchen midden to find out what sort of beings human beings

might be. Men from Earth wouldn't have needed to do that. They knew.

Something intelligent and curious, but not from Earth, had wanted to know about men, on a planet where there had

been nothing even breathing, much less intelligent, for eight millenia. But something had been alive on the dead planet

Thalassia. It had wanted to know about the men who'd camped here from the exploring ship two years before.

Brett was pale when he called Kent to look. Kent looked phlegmatically down into the hole and said:

"That's the Franklin's garbage pit. Why'd they dig it up again?"

Brett said:

"They didn't. Somebody not on the Franklin dug it up. Lately. It's been rained on, but nothing's grown over it. In two

years it would have been washed flat and covered over. This was dug long after the Franklin left. Lately. Probably

within days. Just before we arrived."

He shouted, and the trees nearby echoed back his voice with a hair-raising resonance. Halliday, the official head of the

Expedition, came fretfully to see what was the matter. Brett showed him. Halliday stared blankly for a second. He

even began to frown because Brett had called him for nothing. But then the breath went out of him with a curious

whooshing sound. His face went quite gray.

"And the ship's gone!" he said irritably. "It can't take word back! There is life here after all! Intelligent life! We're at its

mercy!"

Which was absolutely true. Because Thalassia was dead, and below-the-horizon Aspasia with it. There could be no

animals to hunt or need defense from: no birds or small

creatures to collect. This was strictly an archaeological expedition to work on two worlds which had committed

suicide together. So there were no defense weapons in the Expedition's equipment. Heat guns, yes. They were handy

for lighting fires. There were some explosives for shifting rock. But there were no more weapons capable of defending

men against really dangerous creatures than a man will take on a camping trip in a national park on Earth. And the

Expedition could not communicate with other humans for at least six months. They were hundreds of light years from

help.

Brett said slowly:

"On the ship, just before we landed, I heard it said that the radar-beacon on the ground here wasn't working. I think,

sir, we'd better go over to the firing plaza and find out the worst."

They went to the firing plaza. There had been a beacon there, left to notify Earth ships where the first exploring ship

had landed. It would also notify any other intelligent race which dealt in such things as radar. There were a dozen men

who went uneasily to see if anything had happened to make their landing unfortunate. They were defenseless, and

more isolated from their kind than any humans had ever been before.

There was no sound anywhere save the wind in the trees. No bird song. No insect cry. Nothing but the ominous dull

booming of the gigantic surf to the west. The ship that had brought them was long since in overdrive and unreachable

by any means until it came back to normal space again.

They found where the beacon had been. It was gone. It had been a complex mechanism, powered by a pinch of atomic

pile residue. It should have sent out its signal, on a standard frequency, for years to come. It had been mounted on a

solid concrete pillar, according to custom.

The concrete pillar was there, but the radar beacon was not. It had been cut from its anchorage with something like a

torch which cut the metal smoothly. There was as yet no oxidation on the severed surfaces.

The first landing plaque had been removed from the same column. It was the plaque which recited that the exploring

ship Franklin had made a first landing on this

planet on such and such a day and year, Earth Calendar. Close by the column there was a rocket blast crater in the

ground—a small one, perhaps six or seven feet across. It was fresh. A rocket had landed here and removed the man-

made objects after studying a human refuse pit. Within days. Certainly within weeks.

It had left something of its own behind, though. There was a metal tripod set up on the ground. It was about man-

height high, with a box at its top shaped like an inverted cone. There were round holes on four sides of the box. It was

not placed on any foundation—simply set up on the ground for some temporary purpose. And left behind.

Kent, his face blankly curious, moved to approach it.

"Hold up!" said Brett, very pale. "That could be a thing to collect specimens!"

Kent stopped. Halliday, the Expedition head, turned his face to Brett.

"Specimens?"

"Us," said Brett harshly. "We set traps to collect specimens for study when we're making an ecology study of a planet!

It would be logical for something intelligent to want to see specimens of the creatures that make garbage pits and radar

beacons and landing plaques!" ,

There was a long pause. Then Halliday said in a flat voice:

"Yes. There are eyes in the thing, too. Or lenses. It could be a collection trap. Or it could be transmitting pictures of us

to somewhere, on a frequency our ship wasn't set to detect. We will—go back to the camp and think it over."

He moved to go back, and the others with him. The alien tripod glittered in the peculiar dead-white light which did not

come from the sun. Brett stared at it as he moved to follow the others. This was a singularly unsatisfactory state of

affairs. Humans do not like to feel defenseless. Brett hated the tripod he was afraid for anybody to touch. He did not

even feel that his specialty of paleotechnology qualified him to guess what it was. It could be a trap, or a beacon, or a

transmitter. It could be anything.

His foot caught in something as he moved away from

it. His heart jumped into his throat. It could be a trip wire. . .

But it wasn't. It was a tiny golden chain, very humanlike in manufacture. It had broken. Brett picked it up very

cautiously. A locket started to slither off. He picked that up, too. It had the feel of a human artifact. It was. It had been

made by hand.

There was a picture of a girl in it, under a protecting sheet of plastic. She was a human girl, though her costume was

like none that Brett had ever seen or heard of. The picture was black-and-white—an ancient process—but it was

unfaded, which meant that it had been made recently.

This, of course, was starkly impossible. One does not find a picture of a human girl in the ruins of an eight-thousand-

year-old culture, on a planet hundreds of light years from Earth. Not a picture in an antiquated medium, long

forgotten, and with a background neither this planet nor of Earth. It was so completely impossible that Brett knew he

wouldn't dare show it to any of bis companions. They wouldn't believe he'd found it. It couldn't be!

". . . The Elektran solar system displays certain anomalies, not only in the existence of a satellite sun Rubra, no larger

than a gas-giant planet. . . (but in) the twin worlds Thalassia and Aspasia, each nearly seven thousand miles in

diameter, which revolve about each other at a distance of only 250,000 miles. Tidal strains have long since ended

their diurnal rotation and they turn the same faces toward each other during their period of revolution of not quite

twenty-five days. This nearness and the development of intelligent races on both planets led to the development of

interplanetary communication between them some

time between 7000 and 11,000 years ago. The tragic results of this communication . . .

Astrographic Bureau Publication 11297, Appendix to Space Pilot Vol. 460, Sector XXXIV. P. 56.

A TRENCHING machine with its buckets removed went toiling painfully up to the alien tripod some six hours later. It

was under remote control. It skirted the elongated opening of a concrete tunnel, made by the long dead six-fingered

race of which the exploration ship had found skeletal remains. There were thirty or more of those tunnels, which of

course no member of the Expedition had yet entered. But the Franklin's report said that they had been launching tubes

for giant rockets. The rockets had gone roaring out over the ocean, rising steadily, until they swept round the curve of

the planet to blast across space and loose destruction upon the sister world Aspasia. The firing plaza took its name

from these tunnels. The refugee settlement—still-roofed houses of lignin plastic—had obviously been the shelter in

which the dying, despairing Thalassians lived while they took their revenge for the destruction of their race.

The trench-digger ground and rumbled and blundered on its way. Once a side tread slipped and it stalled in a thicket of

trees it could not push down. It backed out and went bumbling on toward the bright new metal of the tripod.

Back at the camp, the vision screen which showed what the trenching machine saw pictured the firing plaza as looking

like an abandoned area of Earth, with long slanting shadows and stark contrasts of illumination.

The robot machine went on. It was taller than a man, and its outline from the front was not dissimilar. It approached

the glistening three-legged object with the inverted cane on top. At the camp, the members of the Expedition watched

the screen. Brett Carstairs felt acutely uncomfortable. He'd been suspicious because his training hi technical processes

naturally made bun suspect ancient psychological processes in all unfamiliar objects. But of

course the tripod could be completely harmless and incapable of doing damage—

It wasn't.

The trenching machine drew nearer. Twenty yards. Ten. Five yards. Ten feet, and the round holes in the conical

box looked more than ever like eyes. The trenching machine bumped the tripod. The tripod toppled over.

Back at the camp, there was a flash of light and the members of the Expedition looked at a blistered, blackened,

peeling screen. The sound of the detonation came seconds later, and it was like a blow in the chest. At the same

instant the ground bucked violently. There was a light brighter than the sun.

There was simply no virtue in running away. Brett said numbly to himself, though he didn't hear the words as

formed:

"Atomic explosion. We're dead, now."

He got up stiffly from his seat. He went outside the hut. He looked toward the firing plaza two miles away. There

was a hill between, but he saw a gigantic smoke ring spinning toward the sky. There was a horrible,

incandescent, two-branched fountain in the air. Flame poured up and poured up and poured up skyward, while

Brett did not realize that he was deafened and hardly perceived the incredible roar.

Others came out of the hut. Belmont, the nuclear man of the Expedition, very absurdly carried something from

his laboratory, at which he looked intently without raising his eyes to the sky. Halliday looked at the fountain of

flame with an expression of embittered indignation. Jannings, the meteorologist, stared and stared and then

ridiculously wetted his finger and held it up, his air one of complete absorption.

- One flame suddenly began to diminish. It failed rapidly in intensity. In seconds it had lessened to a mere glow

to be seen over the hillcrest between. The other flame burned more and more luridly—and abruptly stopped. But

the rising smoke ring still hurtled upward, expanding as it rose. It was ten thousand feet up. Fifteen thousand.

Jannings watched it with his head thrown back and his wetted finger still absurdly held aloft. His lips moved, but

Brett did not hear anything at all.

People did unreasonable things. Brett saw the Expedition's official flier pilot very solemnly take a cigarette from

his pocket and very solemnly tap it against the back of his hand and put it in his mouth and puff on it. He very

carefully blew a smoke ring of his own, staring blankly where the fountains of flame had risen. There was steam

rising there now.

Then Jannings' voice came, very faintly, like a remembered sound rather than like an actual noise.

"There's a wind from the ocean," said Jannings thinly. "It's blowing the atom cloud inland. There's a wind from

the ocean. It's blowing the atom cloud inland. There's a wind from the ocean—"

He repeated the words over and over, like an automaton. His voice grew stronger as Johnny's hearing came back.

And suddenly, it seemed, they were all released from a sort of hypnosis of shock, and Belmont looked up from

his radiation counter and said in a sort of mild astonishment:

"Ten more seconds and we'd have had a burning exposure!"

Then a babbling of voices. There was a crazy confusion all around. Voices cried, "We've got to move camp!"

Voices asked imploringly, "Are we burned? Are we burned?" Then Halliday displayed unsuspected leadership

and bellowed at them in a shaking voice and took matters in hand.

The first requisite was information. But an even greater need was action. It is not healthy to camp within two

miles of a recent atomic explosion site. Wind blowing from it to one's camp will hardly be salubrious. Halliday

crackled orders. While Brett helped loose one of the two fliers from its tie-down ropes, Halliday had other men

dragging out emergency rations and canteens and the rolled-up inflatable shelters that could be used to live in. As

he snapped instructions, Halliday interjected odd fragments of thought as if everything that came into his head

also came out of Ms mouth.

The flier took off vertically and swept toward the ocean, on shouted last minute instructions from Belmont to stay

upwind. Halliday stopped his stream of feverish instruction as Brett came back from the takeoff spot.

"Good work, Carstairs!" said Halliday. His thinning white hair blew erratically about his head. "Your suspi-

cions made that tripod go off with us two miles away instead of right on top of it."

Brett wetted his lips. He'd had time to begin to feel shaky, now, but the churning up of all his emotions somehow

made his mind work feverishly. He said abruptly:

"The tripod didn't explode. There were three things going off. One atomic explosion and two fizz-offs. Where the

bomb went off there couldn't have been anything left behind to make those flames!" Brett heard himself saying:

"The firing plaza was booby-trapped!"

Halliday had opened his mouth to shout an order, but he stopped short.

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摘要：

SECONDLANDING1"TheexploringshipFranklinmadeitsfirstlandingonaremarkablewide-beachonthewesterncoastofChios,thelargestlandmassonThalassia.Usingthelongestaxisofthecontinentasabase,andthepointedendasseenfromspaceasO",thisbeachbears246°fromthemedianpointofthebaseline....TheFranklinlaterberthedinlandsomej...

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Murray Leinster - Second Landing

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