Philip Dick: Survey Team

“Not a failure,” Judde corrected. “They lived, at least. This place was no good any more. Better to live as savages on a strange world than stay here and die. So they say, on these cylinders.”

“Come along,” Young said to Halloway. The two men stepped outside the semantics hut. It was night. The sky was littered with glowing stars. The two moons had risen. They glimmered coldly, two dead eyes in the chilly sky.

“This place won’t do,” Young stated. “We can’t migrate here. That’s settled.”

Halloway eyed him. “What’s on your mind?”

“This was the last of the nine planets. We tested every one of them.” Young’s face was alive with emotion. “None of them will support life. All of them are lethal or useless, like this rubbish heap. The whole damn solar system is out.”

“So?”

“We’ll have to leave the solar system.”

“And go where? How?” Young pointed toward the Martian ruins, to the city and the rusted, bent rows of towers. “Where they went. They found a place to go. An untouched world outside the solar system. And they developed some kind of outer-space drive to get them there.”

“You mean—”

“Follow them. This solar system is dead. But outside, someplace in some other system, they found an escape world. And they were able to get there.”

“We’d have to fight with them ifwe land on their planet. They won’t want to share it”

Young spat angrily on the sand. “Their colonies deteriorated. Re- ber? Broke down into barbarism. We can handle them. We’ve got everything in the way of war weapons—weapons that can wipe a planet clean.”

“We don’t want to do that.” “What do we want to do? Tell Davidson we’re stuck on Terra? Let the human race turn into underground moles? Blind crawling things . -. .”

“If we follow the Martians we’ll be competing for their world. They found it; the damn thing belongs to them, not us. And maybe we can’t work out their drive. Maybe the schematics are lost.” Judde emerged from the semantics hut. “I’ve some more information. The whole story is here. Details on the escape planet. Fauna and flora. Studies of its gravity, air density, mineral possessions, soil layer, climate, temperature—every thing.”

“How about their drive?” “Breakdown on that, too. Everything.” Judde was shaking with excitement. “I have an idea. Let’s get the designs team on these drive schematics and see if they can duplicate it. If they can, we could follow the Martians. We could sort of share their planet with them.”

“See?” Young said to Halloway. “Davidson will say the same thing. It’s obvious.”

Halloway turned and walked off.

“What’s wrong with him?” Judde asked.

“Nothing. He’ll get over it.”

Young scratched out a quick message on a piece of paper. “Have this transmitted to Davidson back on Terra.”

Judde peered at the message. He whistled. “You’re telling him about the Martian migration. And about the escape planet.”

“We want to get started. It'll take a long time to get things under way.”

“Will Halloway come around?” “He’ll come around,” Young said. “Don’t worry about him.”

Halloway gazed up at the towers. The leaning, sagging towers from which the Martian transports had been launched thousands of years before.

Nothing stirred. No sign of life. The whole dried-up planet was dead.

Halloway wandered among the towers. The beam from his helmet cut a white path in front of him. Ruins, heaps of rusting metal. Bales of wire and building material. Parts of uncompleted equipment. Half-buried construction sections sticking up from the sand.

He came to a raised platform and mounted the ladder cautiously. He found himself in an observation mount, surrounded by the remains of dials and meters. A telescopic sight stuck up, rusted in place, frozen tight.

“Hey,” a voice came from below. “Who’s up there?” “Halloway.”

“God, you scared me.” Carmichael slid his blast rifle away and climbed the ladder. “What you doing?”

“Looking around.”

Carmichael appeared beside him, puffing and red-faced. “Interesting, these towers. This was an automatic sighting station. Fixed the take-off for supply transports. The population was already gone.” Carmichael slapped at the ruined control board. “These supply ships continued to take-off, loaded by machines and dispatched by machines, after all the Martians were gone.”

“Lucky for them they had a place to go.”

“Sure was. The minerals team says there’s not a damn thing left here. Nothing but dead sand and rock and debris. Even the water’s no good. They took everything of value.”

“Judde says their escape world is pretty nice.”

“Virgin.” Carmichael smacked his fat lips. “Never touched. Trees and meadows and blue oceans. He showed me a scanner translation of a cylinder.”

“Too bad we don't have a place like that to go. A virgin world for ourselves.”

Carmichael was bent over the telescope. “This here sighted for them. When the escape planet swam into view a relay delivered a trigger charge to the control tower. The tower launched the ships. When the ships were gone a new flock came up into position.” Carmichael began to polish the encrusted lenses of the telescope, wiping the accumulated rust and debris away. “Maybe we’ll see their planet.” In the ancient lenses a vague luminous globe was swimming. Halloway could make it out, obscured by the filth of centuries, hidden behind a curtain of metallic particles and dirt.

Carmichael was down on his hands and knees, working with the focus machanism. “See anything?” he demanded.

Halloway nodded. “Yeah.” Carmichael pushed him away. “Let me look.” He squinted into the lens. “Aw, for God’s sake!” “What’s wrong? Can’t you see it?”

“I see it,” Carmichael said, getting down on his hands and knees again. “The thing must have slipped. Or the time shift is too great. But this is supposed to adjust automatically. Of course, the gear box has been frozen for—”

“What’s wrong?” Halloway demanded.

“That’s Earth. Don’t you recognize it?”

“Earth!”

Carmichael sneered with disgust. “This fool thing must be busted. I wanted to get a look at their dream planet. That’s just old Terra, where we came from. All my work trying to fix this wreck up, and what do we see?”

“Earth!” Halloway murmured. He had just finished telling Young about the telescope.

“I can’t believe it,” Young said. “But the description fitted Earth thousands of years ago . .

“How long ago did they take off?” Halloway asked.

“About six hundred thousand years ago,” Judde said.

“And their colonies descended into barbarism on the new planet.”

The four men were silent. They looked at each other, tight- lipped.

“We’ve destroyed two worlds,” Halloway said at last. “Not one. Mars first. We finished up here, then we moved to Terra. And we destroyed Terra as systematically as we did Mars.”

“A closed circle,” Mason said. “We’re back where we started. Back to reap the crop our ancestors sowed. They left Mars this way. Useless. And now we’re back here poking around the ruins like ghouls.”

“Shut up,” Young snapped. He paced angrily back and forth. “I can’t believe it.”

“We’re Martians. Descendants of the original stock that left here. We're back from the colonies. Back home.” Mason’s voice rose hysterically. “We’re home again, where we belong!”

Judde pushed aside the scanner and got to his feet “No doubt about it. I checked their analysis with our own archeological records. It fits. Their escape world was Terra, six hundred thousand years ago.”