The Wailing Asteroid by Murray Leinster (short novels to read TXT) 📖

curled up on one of the side-wall bunks in the upper compartment of the spaceship.

"We'll go downstairs," said Sandy.

Pam parted her lips to speak, and did not. They disappeared down the stair to the lower room. Then Sandy came back and picked up the extra cubes.

"Joe said to move them," she explained.

She disappeared again. Holmes settled himself comfortably. He was one of those fortunate people who are able to relax at will. Actually, in his work he normally did his thinking while on his feet, moving about his yacht-building plant or else sailing one of his own boats. He simply was not a sit-down thinker. Sitting, he could doze at almost any time he pleased, and for a yachtsman it was a useful ability. He could go for days on snatched catnaps when necessary. Conversely he could catnap practically at will.

He yawned once or twice and settled down confidently. In five minutes or less ...

He wriggled down into an opening barely large enough to admit his body. The top clamped and sealed overhead. He fitted his feet into their proper stirrup-like holders and fixed his hands on the controls. There was violent acceleration and he shot away and ahead. Behind him the jagged shape of the fortress loomed. He swung his tiny ship. He drove fiercely for the tiny rings of red glow which centered themselves in the sighting-screen before him. He drove and drove, while the fortress dwindled to a dot and then vanished.

On either side of his ship a ten-foot steel globe clung. He checked them over, tense with the realization that he must very soon be within the practical timing-range of the new Enemy solid missiles. He made minute adjustments in the settings of the globes.

He released them together. They went swinging madly away at the end of a hair-thin wire which would sustain the tons of stress that centrifugal force gave the spheres. They spiraled toward darkness with its background of innumerable stars. The Enemy would be puzzled, this time! They'd developed missile-weapons with computing sights. In their last attack, five hundred years before, the Enemy had been defeated by the self-driving globes that had an utterly incredible acceleration. It was reported from the Cathor sector that in this current attack they had missile-weapons with a muzzle-velocity of hundreds of miles per second, which could actually anticipate a globe with a hundred-sixty-gravity drive. They could fire a solid shot to meet it and knock it down, because of some incredible computer-system which was able to calculate a globe's trajectory and meet it in space. They were smart, the Enemy!

The two globes went spinning toward the Enemy. Linked together, they spun round and round and no conceivable computer could calculate the path of either one so a projectile could hit. They did not travel in a straight line, as a trajectory in space should be. Whirling as they did around a common center of gravity, with the plane of their circling at a sharp angle to their line of flight, it was not possible to range them for gunfire. Their progress was in a series of curves, each at a different distance, which no mere calculator could solve without direction. A radar could not pick up the data a computer would need. One or the other globe might be hit, but it was far from likely.

The pilot of the one-man ship saw the blue-white flame of a hit. He flung his ship about and sped back toward the fortress. The Enemy would beat this trick, in time. Four thousand years before they'd almost won, when they invaded the Old Nation. They were getting bolder now. There was a time when a sound beating sent them back beyond the Coal-sack to lick their wounds for two thousand years or better. Lately they came more often. There'd been a raid in force only five hundred years back, and only fifteen before that ...

Holmes, obviously, had the odd dream Burke had prophesied. But Burke was up in the instrument-room by then. Keller gazed absorbedly at a vision-plate. It showed a section of the exterior surface of the asteroid—harsh, naked rock, with pitiless sunlight showing the grain and structure of the rock-crystals. Where there was shadow, the blackness was absolute. As Burke entered, Keller turned a knob. The image changed to a picture of a compartment inside the fortress. It was a part of the maze of rooms and galleries that none of the newcomers had visited. Panels and bus-bars and things which were plainly switches covered its walls. It was a power-distribution center. Keller turned the knob back, and the view of the outside of the asteroid returned.

Keller turned and blinked at Burke, and then said happily, "Look!"

He went to another vision-screen with an image of another part of the outer surface. He turned that knob, and the image dissolved into another. This was a gigantic room, lighted like more familiar places. In its center there was an enormous, gigantic machine. There were domes of metal, with great rods of silvery stuff reaching across emptiness between them. There were stairs by which one could climb to this part and that. Judging by the steps and the size of the light-tubes, the machine was the size of a four-storey house. And on the floor there were smaller machines, all motionless and all cryptic.

Keller said with conviction, "Power!"

Burke stared. Keller recovered the original view and went to still other plates. In succession, as he turned the knobs, Burke saw compartment after compartment. There was one quite as huge as the one containing the power-generating machine. It contained hemispheres bolted ten feet above the floor on many columns. There was a network of bus-bars, it seemed, overlying everything, and there were smaller devices on the floor below it.

"Gravity!" said Keller with conviction.

"Good enough," said Burke. "We've found something too, which may be useful with those machines. If we can—"

Keller held up his hand and went to one special screen. When he changed the image, the new one was totally unlike any of the others. This was a close-up. It showed a clumsy, strictly improvised and definitely cobbled metal case against a wall. It had been made by inept hands. It was remarkable to see such indifferent workmanship here. But the really remarkable thing was that the face of the box contained an inscription, burned into the metal as if by a torch. The symbols had no meaning to Burke, of course. But this was an inscription in a written language.

Keller rubbed his hands, beaming.

"It could be a message for somebody who'd come later," said Burke. "It's hard to think of it being anything else. But it wasn't placed for us to find. It should have been set up beside the ship-lock we were expected to come in by and did come in by."

"We'll see," said Keller zestfully. "Come on!"

Burke followed him. Keller seemed somehow to know the way. They went all the way back to the ship-lock, passed it, and then Keller dived off to the right, down an unsuspected ramp. There were galleries running in every direction here, crossing each other and opening upon an indefinite number of what must have been storerooms. Presently Keller pointed.

There was the case against the wall. It faced a wide corridor. It did not belong here. It was totally unlike any other artifact they had seen, because it seemed to have been made totally without skill. Yet there was an inscription—and the making of written records had appeared to be a skill the former occupants of the asteroid had not possessed. Keller very zestfully essayed to open it. He failed.

Burke said, "We'll have to use tools to get it open."

"Somebody made it," said Keller, "just before the garrison went away. They made it here!"

"Quite likely," agreed Burke. "We'll get at it presently. Now listen, Keller! I came along because a message might be useful. I think Holmes has found out something, though what it may be I can't guess. Come along with me. There've been developments and I want to hold a council of war. And I think I do mean war!"

He led the way back toward the ship. When they arrived, Holmes was awake and growling because of Burke's absence.

"You win," he told Burke. "I had a dream, and it wasn't a dream. I know something about those metal globes. They've got drives in them, and they can accelerate to a hundred and sixty gees, and I don't think I'll ride one."

Wryly, he told Burke what he'd experienced.

"I'm not too much surprised," said Burke. "I've managed two cube-experiences myself. I figure that these cubes trained men to operate things, without training their brains in anything else. They'd make illiterates into skilled men in a particular line, so anybody could do the work a highly trained man would otherwise be needed for. In one of my two cube-dreams I was a gun-pointer on one of those machines up on the third level. In the second cube-dream I was a rocket-pilot."

"No rockets in my cube," protested Holmes.

"Different period," said Burke. "Maybe, anyhow. In my dream we were using rockets to fight with, and the war was close. The enemy had taken some planets off Kandu—wherever that is!—and the situation was bad. We went out of here in rockets and fought all over the sky. But then there were supplies coming from home, and fresh fighting men turning up." He stopped abruptly. "How'd they come? I don't know. But I know they didn't come in spaceships. They just came, and they were new men and we veterans patronized them. The devil! Holmes, you say the globes have a hundred-sixty-gee drive! Nobody'd use rockets if drives like that were known!"

"To stay in the party," Sandy said suddenly, with something like defiance, "I tried a cube, too. And I was a sort of supply-officer. I had the experience of being responsible for supply and being short of everything and improvising this and that and the other to keep things up to fighting standard. It wasn't easy. The men grumbled, and we lacked everything. There was no fighting in my time, and there hadn't been for centuries. But we knew the Enemy hadn't given up and we had to be ready, generation after generation, even when nothing happened. And we knew that any minute the Enemy might throw something unexpected, some new weapon, at us."

"History-cubes," said Keller interestedly. "Different periods. Right?"

"Dammit, yes!" said Burke. "We've got accounts of past times and finished battles, but we need to know who's coming and what to do about it! Maybe the rocket-dream was earliest in time. But how could a race with nothing better than rockets ever get here? And how could they supply the building of a place like this?"

There was no answer. Facts ought to fit together. When they don't, they are useless.

"We've got snatches of information," said Burke. "But we don't know who built this fort, or why, except that there was a war that lasted thousands of years, with pauses for centuries between battles." He waved a hand irritably. "The Enemy tries to think up new weapons. They do. They try them. So far, they've been countered. But we're not prepared to fight a new weapon. Maybe the fort is set to battle old ones, but we don't know how to use it even for that! We've got to—"

"I think—" began Keller.

"I'd give plenty for a service manual on the probably useless weapons we do have," said Burke angrily. "Incidentally, Keller just found what may be an explanation of how and why this place was abandoned."

Keller said suddenly, "Where would service manuals be?"

He moved, almost running, toward the air-lock. Burke started to swear, and stopped.

"A service-and-repair manual," he snapped, "would be near the equipment it described. How many little shelves with boxes on them have we seen? They're just the right size to hold cubes! And where are they? Next to those fighting machines next to the door of the room where the ten-foot globes are! There's a shelf of them in the instrument-room! Let's find out how to fight with this misbegotten shell of a space-fort! There'll be no help coming to us, but if the Enemy's held off for thousands of years while this civilization fell apart, we might as well try to hold it together for a few minutes or seconds longer! Let's go get some real instruction-cubes!"

Keller was already gone. The others followed. Once they saw Keller in the far, far distance, hastening toward the instrument-room. Behind him, after almost running down the long corridor, Burke swung into the room where hundreds of ten-foot metal globes waited for the fortress to be remanned and to go into action again. Inside the door he found the remembered shelf, with two small boxes fastened to it. He pulled down one box and opened it. There was a black cube inside it. He thrust