Мюррей Лейнстер - The Wailing Asteroid

"Supplies came up this ramp," said Sandy.

It was a statement which should have been startling, but Burke nodded.

Sandy went on, carefully, "That cube about a supply–officer's duties was pretty explicit. Things were getting difficult."

Burke did not seem to hear. They went on and on. They came to the place where Keller had turned aside. Burke silently indicated the turning. They moved along this other gallery.

"Joe," said Sandy pleadingly. "Is it really so bad?"

"Strictly speaking, I don't see a chance. But that's just the way it looks now. There must be something that can be done. The trick is to find it. Meantime, why panic?"

"You—act queer," protested Sandy.

"I feel queer," he said. "I know various ways to approach problems. None of them apply to this one. You see, it isn't really our problem. We're innocent bystanders, without information about the situation that apparently will kill us and everybody back on Earth. If we knew more about the situation, we might find some part of it that could be tackled, changed. There may be something in this case—perhaps a message left by the garrison for the people who sent them here. I can't see why it'd be placed here, though."

He slowed, looking down one cross–gallery after another.

"Here it is."

They'd come to the clumsily–made case with the inscription on it. It was placed against the wall of a corridor, facing the length of another gallery which came from the side at this point. A little distance down the other passage, the line of doors was broken by an archway which gave upon a hewed–out compartment. The opening was wide enough to show a fragment of a metal floor. There was no sign of any contents. Other compartments nearby were empty. The placing of the inscribed box was inexplicable. But the inscription was sharply clear.

"Maybe," suggested Sandy forlornly, "it says something like 'Explosives! Danger!'"

"Not likely," said Burke.

He'd examined the box before. He'd brought along a tool suited to the job of opening it. He set to work, then stopped.

"Sandy," he said abruptly, "I think the gravity–generator's a couple of corridors in that direction. Will you look and see if there are any tools there that might be better than this? Just look for a place where tools might be stored. If you find something, call me."

She went obediently down the lighted, excavated corridor. She reached the vast cavern. Here there were myriad tube–lights glowing in the ceiling—and the gravity machine. It was gigantic. It was six storeys high and completely mysterious.

She looked with careful intentness for a place where tools might have been kept by the machine's attendants.

She saw movement out of the corner of her eye, but when she turned there was nothing. There could be no movement in the fortress unless by machinery or one of the five humans who'd come so recently. The asteroid had been airless for ten thousand years. It was unthinkable that anything alive, even a microbe, could have survived. So Sandy did not think of a living thing as having made the movement. But movement there had been.

She stared. There were totally motionless machines all about. None of them showed any sign of stirring. Sandy swallowed the ache in her throat and it returned instantly. She moved, to look where the movement had been. She glanced at each machine in turn. One might have made some automatic adjustment. She'd tell Burke.

She passed a fifteen–foot–high assembly of insulators and bright metal, connected overhead to other cryptic things by heavy silvery bars. She passed a cylinder with dials in its sides.

She saw movement again. In a different place. She spun around to look.

Something half the height of a man, with bird–legs and feet and swollen plumage and a head with an oversized beak which was pure caricature—something alive and frightened fled from her. It waddled in ridiculous, panicky haste. It flapped useless stumps of wings. It fled in terrified silence. It vanished.

The first thing that occurred to Sandy was that Burke wouldn't believe her if she told him.

Burke found her, rooted to the spot. He had a small metal box in his hand. He didn't notice her pallor nor that she trembled.

"I may have something," he said with careful calm. "The case had this in it. There's a black cube in the box. The case seems to have been made to hold and call attention to this cube. I'll take it up to the instrument–room and use a reader on it."

He led the way. Sandy followed, her throat dry. She knew, of course, that he was under almost intolerable emotional strain. He'd brought her along to be with her for a few moments, but he was so tense that he could think of nothing personal to say. Now it was not possible for him to talk of anything at all.

Yet Sandy realized that even under the stress that pressed upon him, he'd asked her to go look for tools in the gravity–machine room because she'd spoken of possible danger in the opening of the case. He'd gotten her away while he opened it.

When they reached the ship–lock he said briefly, "I want to hurry, Sandy. Wait for me in the ship?"

She nodded, and went to the small spacecraft which had brought them all from Earth.

When she saw Pam, inside, she said shakily, "Is—anybody else here?"

"No," said Pam. "Why?"

Sandy sat down and shivered.

"I think," she said through chattering teeth, "I think I'm going to have hysterics. L–listen, Pam! I—I saw something alive! It was like a bird this high and big as a—There aren't any birds like that! There can't be anything alive here but us! But I saw it! And it saw me and ran away!"

Pam stared and asked questions, at first soothing ones. But presently she was saying indignantly, "I do believe it! That's near the place where I smelled fresh air!"

Of course, fresh air in the asteroid, two hundred and seventy million miles from Earth, was as impossible as what Sandy had seen.

Holmes came in presently, depressed and tired. He'd been filling his mind with the contents of black cubes. He knew how cooking was done in the kitchens of the fortress, some eons since. He knew how to prepare for inspection of the asteroid by a high–ranking officer. He was fully conversant with the bugle–calls once used in the fortress in the place of a public–address loud–speaker system. But he'd found no hint of how the fortress received its supplies, nor how the air was freshened, nor how reinforcements of men used to reach the asteroid. He was discouraged and vexed and weary.

"Sandy," said Pam challengingly, "saw a live bird, bigger than a goose, in the gravity–machine room."

Holmes shrugged.

"Keller's fidgeting," he observed, "because he thinks he's seen movements in the vision–plates that show different inside views of this thing. But he isn't sure that he's seen anything move. Maybe we're all going out of our minds."

"Then Joe's closest," said Pam darkly. "He worries about Sandy!"

"And very reasonably," said Holmes tiredly. "Pam, this business of figuring that there's something deadly on the way and nothing to do about it—it's got me down!"

He slumped in a chair. Pam frowned at him. Sandy sat perfectly still, her hands clenched.

Burke came back twenty minutes later. His expression was studiedly calm.

"I've found out where the garrison went," he said matter–of–factly. "I'm afraid we can't get any help from them. Or anybody else."

Sandy looked at him mutely. He was completely self–controlled, and he did not look like a man resolutely refusing to despair, but Sandy knew him. To her it seemed that his eyes had sunk a little in his head.

"Apparently there's nobody left on the world the garrison came from," said Burke in the tone of someone saying perfectly commonplace things, "so they didn't go back there and there's no use in our trying to make a contact with that world. This was an outpost fortress, you know. It was reached from somewhere far away, and carved out and armed to fight an enemy that didn't attack it for itself, but to get at the world or worlds that made it."