Clifford Simak - Grotto of the Dancing Deer - And Other Stories

We walked for quite a while, leaving paint markers along the walls to lead us back to the entrance. Get lost inside a place like that and one could wander maybe half a lifetime finding his way out.

We were looking for something—almost anything—but we didn’t find a thing except those filing cases.

So we went into one of the rooms to have a look inside the files.

Pancake was disgusted. “There won’t be nothing but records in those files. Probably in a lingo we can’t even read.”

“There could be anything inside those files,” said Frost. “They don’t have to be records.”

Pancake had a sledge and he lifted it to smash one of the files, but I stopped him. There wasn’t any use doing it messy if there was a better way.

We fooled around a while and we found the place where you had to wave your hand to make a drawer roll out.

The drawer was packed with what looked like sticks of dynamite. They were about two inches in diameter and a foot, or maybe a little more, in length, and they were heavy.

“Gold,” said Hutch.

“I never saw black gold,” Pancake said.

“It isn’t gold,” I told them.

I was just as glad it wasn’t. If it had been, we’d have broken our backs hauling it away. Gold’s all right, but you can’t get rich on it. It doesn’t much more than pay wages.

We dumped out a pile of the sticks and squatted on the floor, looking them over.

“Maybe it’s valuable,” said Frost, “but I wouldn’t know. What do you think it is?”

None of us had the least idea.

We found some sort of symbols on each end of the sticks and the symbols on each stick seemed to be different, but it didn’t help us any because the symbols made no sense.

We kicked the sticks out of the way and opened some more drawers. Every single drawer was filled with the sticks.

We went into some other rooms and we waved our hands some more and the drawers came popping out and we didn’t find anything except more sticks.

When we came out of the silo, the day had turned into a scorcher. Pancake climbed the ladder to stack us up some grub and the rest of us sat down in the shade of the ship and laid several of the sticks out in front of us and sat there looking at them, wondering what we had.

“That’s where we’re at a big disadvantage,” said Hutch. “If a regular survey crew stumbled onto this, they’d have all sorts of experts to figure out the stuff. They’d test it a dozen different ways and they’d skin it alive almost and they’d have all sorts of ideas and they’d come up with some educated guesses. And pretty soon, one way or another, they’d know just what it was and if it was any use.”

“Someday,” I told them, “if we ever strike it rich, we’ll have to hire us some experts. The kind of loot we’re always turning up, we could make good use of them.”

“You won’t find any,” said Doc, “that would team up with a bunch like us.”

“Where do you get ‘bunch-like-us’ stuff?” I asked him, a little sore. “Sure, we ain’t got much education and the ship is just sort of glued together and we don’t use any fancy words to cover up the fact that we’re in this for all we can get out of it. But we’re doing an honest job.”

“I wouldn’t call it exactly honest. Sometimes we’re inside the law and sometimes outside it.”

That was nonsense and Doc knew it. Mostly where we went, there wasn’t any law.

“Back on Earth, in the early days,” I snapped back, “it was folks like us who went into new lands and blazed the trails and found the rivers and climbed the mountains and brought back word to those who stayed at home. And they went because they were looking for beaver or for gold or slaves or for anything else that wasn’t nailed down tight. They didn’t worry much about the law or the ethics of it and no one blamed them for it. They found it and they took it and that was the end of it. If they killed a native or two or burned a village or some other minor thing like that, why, it was just too bad.”

Hutch said to Doc: “There ain’t no sense in you going holy on us. Anything we done, you’re in as deep as we are.”

“Gentlemen,” said Doc, in that hammy way of his, “I wasn’t trying to stir up any ruckus. I was just pointing out that you needn’t set your heart on getting any experts.”

“We could get them,” I said, “if we offered them enough. They got to live, just like anybody else.”

“They have professional pride, too. That’s something you’ve forgotten.”

“We got you.”

“Well, now,” said Hutch, “I’m not too sure Doc is professional. That time he pulled the tooth for me—”

“Cut it out,” I said. “The both of you.”

This wasn’t any time to bring up the matter of the tooth. Just a couple of months ago, I’d got it quieted down and I didn’t want it breaking out again.

Frost picked up one of the sticks and turned it over and over, looking at it.

“Maybe we could rig up some tests,” he suggested.

“And take the chance of getting blown up?” asked Hutch.

“It might not go off. You have a better than fifty-fifty chance that it’s not explosive.”

“Not me,” said Doc. “I’d rather just sit here and guess. It’s less tiring and a good deal safer.”

“You don’t get anywhere by guessing,” protested Frost. “We might have a fortune right inside our mitts if we could only find out what these sticks are for. There must be tons of them stored in the building. And there’s nothing in the world to stop us from taking them.”

“The first thing”, I said, “is to find out if it’s explosive. I don’t think it is. It looks like dynamite, but it could be almost anything. For instance, it might be food.”

“We’ll have Pancake cook us up a mess,” said Doc.

I paid no attention to him. He was just needling me.

“Or it might be fuel,” I said. “Pop a stick into a ship engine that was built to use it and it would keep it going for a year or two.”

Pancake blew the chow horn and we all went in.

After we had eaten, we got to work.

We found a flat rock that looked like granite and above it we set up a tripod made out of poles that we had to walk a mile to cut and then had to carry back. We rigged up a pulley on the tripod and found another rock and tied it to the rope that went up to the pulley. Then we paid out the rope as far as it would go and there we dug a foxhole.

By this time, the sun was setting and we were tuckered out, but we decided to go ahead and make the test and set our minds at rest.

So I took one of the sticks that looked like dynamite and while the others back in the foxhole hauled up the rock tied to the rope, I put the stick on the first rock underneath the second and then I ran like hell. I tumbled into the foxhole and the others let go of the rope and the rock dropped down on the stick.

Nothing happened.

Just to make sure, we pulled up and dropped the rock two or three times more and there was no explosion.

We climbed out of the foxhole and went over to the tripod and rolled the rock off the stick, which wasn’t even dented.

By this time, we were fairly well convinced that the stick couldn’t be set off by concussion, although the test didn’t rule out a dozen other ways it might blow us all up.

That night, we gave the sticks the works. We poured acid on them and the acid just ran off. We tried a cold chisel on them and we ruined two good chisels. We tried a saw and they stripped the teeth clean off.

We wanted Pancake to try to cook one of them, but Pancake refused.

“You aren’t bringing that stuff into my galley,” he said. “You do, you can cook for yourselves from now on. I keep a good clean galley and I try to keep you guys well fed and I ain’t having you mess up the place …”