THE BURNT PLANET-2
737 Words
THE COMMANDER SMILED an unwilling agreement, but he stayed in the open door, searching the gathering darkness toward the city. He could not shake loose from the feeling of doom that had settled on him as soon as they had made their landfall and clambered from the airlocks of the spaceship. This was a strange world, the commander thought to himself. It seemed to have everything—everything but intelligent inhabitants. They had circled it for two days before they had chosen this wide green valley for their landfall. They had seen cities, many of them, great cities along seacoasts and in rich plains, cities in mountains and in valleys, but nowhere had they seen life.
The first cautious explorations after the landing that morning had shown that there was plenty of good water. The soil seemed rich, and vegetation grew in profusion, even among the ruins they had warily skirted. The atmosphere was perfect ... it was what they had searched for through the long bitter years ... this stable atmosphere with its abundance of life-giving oxygen. And minerals aplenty ... the burned and blasted metal skeletons of the ruined city showed that. The commander told himself that he was a fool for worrying, when he should be shouting with joy at his luck.
There was a shout from the outpost, a laugh, and then his second-in-command loped through the rain, smiling broadly. Behind him were the others, laughing and joking, shrugging their packs to the ground. Gladness and wonder were in their faces and their voices, and the commander knew that this was the world they had sought for so long.
The lieutenant ducked into the doorway and paused to warm himself at the little thermal unit. He wiped the rain from his face, reached for the wine bottle beside the astrogator’s work board, and tilted it.
“This is it, sir,” he said. He was young, and Fate had been good to him, and he was exulting in it. “It’s everything we ever dared dream about. It will support the whole race, every one of us, I think, if the rest of this world is anything like what we’ve seen this day.”
The commander grinned back at him, relief plain in his face. He was phrasing the message that he would send home across the void, the message they had waited for down through the weary years, the years that had rolled by while the land burned up under a blazing sun, while the water disappeared and the atmosphere became thin.... But there was still in him the doubt, the remnant of fear....
“Did you,” he spaced the words carefully, “find any sign of—intelligent life?”
The lieutenant’s smile faded. He glanced quickly out at the men, breaking out their rations, resting from the labor, and looked back at his captain. He nodded.
“Tracks,” he said. “We came across them leading out of the deserted city.”
“Many?”
“I don’t think so. Five or six, perhaps. And we found where they had killed one of the small animals and eaten it.”
“Did they seem—intelligent? Really, I mean?”
The lieutenant shrugged. “Who knows? They’re bipeds, at any rate. We followed the tracks, but they had taken to a small stream bed, and we lost them.”
The commander pondered. Then he made his decision.
“In a country as large as this,” he said, “five or six can’t make any difference to us, not even to a small party like our own. And certainly not when the ships begin arriving from home.”
The lieutenant leaned back on his pack, his face content. The commander sat at a field desk and started writing, carefully, knowing that what he wrote would someday be in every textbook. The message was not difficult, really. Thousands of space captains had phrased the message in their minds down through, the years of The Search. So had he, time and again, as he lay in his bunk or watched the wheeling stars from the bridge. In the glow of the thermal unit his stern face glowed with pride and the certainty that it was his ship that had saved a world....
In another hut the scholar stared thoughtfully at the thing he had found in the old house where they had discovered the tracks. There had been a language on this dead world, and in his hand he held some of the brown mouldering pages upon which the language had been written. He applied his scholar’s mind to the puzzle....
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- Writer
