The Lani People by Jesse F. Bone (best fiction books to read .txt) 📖

“Who cares about that? You’ll be protected.”

“All right—show me how to put it on. I’d rather be with you than worry about what you are doing.”

The suit was several sizes too large but it covered her adequately. Too adequately, Kennon decided. She looked like a pile of wrinkles with legs. He chuckled.

She glared. “So I’m funny,” she said. “Let me tell you something else that’s funny. I’m hot. I’m sweating. I itch. Now—laugh!”

“I don’t feel like laughing,” Kennon said. “I feel the same way.”

They approached the edge of the Pit carefully. Kennon kept checking the radiation counter. The needle slowly rose and steadied at one-half roentgen per hour as he thrust the probe over the rim of the depression. “It’s fine, so far,” he said encouragingly. “We could take this much for quite a while even without suits.” He lowered himself over the edge, sliding down the gentle slope.

“How is it down there?” Copper called. The intercom crackled in his ear.

“Fine—barely over one roentgen per hour. With these suits we could stay here indefinitely.” The sigh of relief was music in her ears. “This place is barely lukewarm.”

“That’s what you think,” Copper said.

“I mean radiation warm,” Kennon said. “Stay up there and watch me. I may need some things.”

“All right.” Copper squirmed inside the hot suit. The thing was an oven. She hoped that Kennon didn’t plan to work in the daytime. It would be impossible.

Kennon gingerly approached the ship. It was half buried in the loose debris and ash that had fallen or blown into the pit during the centuries it had rested there. It was old—incredibly old. The hull design was ancient—riveted sheets of millimeter-thick durilium. Ships hadn’t been built like that in over two thousand years. And the ovoid shape was reminiscent of the even more ancient spindizzy design. A hyperspace converter like that couldn’t be less than four millennia old. It was a museum piece, but the blue-black hull was as smooth and unblemished as the day it had left fabrication.

Space travel would have gotten nowhere without durilium, Kennon reflected. For five thousand years men had used the incredibly tough synthetic to build their spacecraft. It had given man his empire. Kennon gave the hull one quick glance. That part of the ship didn’t worry him. It was what he would find inside that bothered him. How much damage had occurred from two thousand or more years of disuse? How much had the original travelers cannibalized? How much could be salvaged? What sort of records remained? There were a thousand questions that the interior of that enigmatic hull might answer.

The upper segment of the airlock was visible. It was closed, which was a good sign. A few hours’ work with a digger should expose it enough to be opened.

“Copper,” he said, “we’re going to have to dig this out. There’s a small excavator in the cargo bed of the jeep. Do you think you can bring it down here?”

“I think so.”

“Good girl!” Kennon turned back to the ship. He was eager to enter it. There might be things inside that would settle the question of the Lani. The original crew had probably recognized the value of the hull as a repository as well as he did. But in the meantime there would be work—lots of it. And every step must be recorded.

It was the rest of the day’s work to expose the emergency airlock. The little excavator toiled over the loose ash for hours before it displaced enough to make the port visible, and the ash was not yet cleared away sufficiently to open the portal when darkness brought a halt to the work.

It would be impossible to unearth the spaceship with their low-capacity digger, Kennon decided. It would be difficult enough to clear the emergency airlock in the nose. But if the tubes and drive were still all right, by careful handling it should be possible to use the drive to blast out the loose ash and cinders which surrounded the hull.

Kennon reluctantly gave up the idea of entering the spaceship. That would have to wait until tomorrow. Now they would have to conceal the work and call it a day. A few branches and the big blocks of pumice would suffice for temporary camouflage. Later they could make something better. Anything in the jeep which might be useful was cached along with the radiation suits in the passageway through the lava wall—and in a surprisingly short time they were heading homeward.

Kennon was not too displeased. Tomorrow they would be able to enter the ship. Tomorrow they would probably have some of the answers to his questions. He looked ahead into the gathering night. The gray mass of the abandoned Olympus Station slipped below them as he lined the jeep along the path indicated by the luminous arrow atop the main building, set the controls on automatic, and locked the craft on the guide beacon in Alexandria’s tower. In a little less than an hour they would be home.