M 33 In Andromeda (ss) by A. E. van Vogt

Author:A. E. van Vogt [Vogt, A. E. van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi Short Story
Publisher: Astounding Science Fiction
Published: 1942-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

In the geology lab, Grosvenor watched the bank of instruments that registered the nature of the terrain below. Particularly, he stared with strained attention at the density recorder needle as it shifted along its thin range of mud, stone, clay, mud, water, fungi—

The needle jumped like flame in high wind—steel, clay, concrete, steel.

Steel!

Grosvenor reacted. His hand snatched up at the geared alarm, and tugged with the frantic sense that it was his strength that must stop the mighty ship. He let go only when the voice of Jarvis, his superior, rasped beside him, reporting to the control room:

. . Yes, Commander Morton, steel not just iron ore. Our instruments are registering developed metal, not nature in the raw. Depth? … What’s the depth there, Grove?”

“T-ten, twenty, f-fifty feet!” Grosvenor stammered. Inwardly, he cursed the way his heart was pounding, caught his voice into a stiff bar of sound. “It varies, and it’s spread over a wide area.”

Jarvis was saying into the communicator: “As you know, commander, we set our instruments at fifty feet maximum. This could be a city buried in the jungle mud.”

It was in a way. It was an incredible rubble of what had been a city. The scenes uncovered by the drillers were shambles. Everywhere was shattered steel and concrete and stone. And bodies!

The bodies were at the street line about fifty feet below the surface; a whole pack of them turned up where Grosvenor was directing a drilling crew. Everything stopped as the great men of the ship came over to examine the find.

“Rather badly smashed.” said Smith, “but I think I can piece together a coherent picture.”

His skillful fingers arranged an assembly of scattered bones into a rough design. “Four-legged.” he said. He turned a curious hazy light on the fragile structure. “This one has been dead about twenty-five years.”

He frowned, and picked up a bone, and brought the hazy, whitish light nearer to it. “Funny.” he said, “there’s a resinous substance on this end of the bone that’s impervious to ultra-light. It reflects it. In all my experience, nothing concrete, nothing except energy itself has ever stopped ultra-light. Kent, what do you make of that?”

He handed the bone over; and Grosvenor stood, watching and waiting. He felt fascinated, not by the mystery of the bone, but because time and again, since he had joined the ship’s company, he had tried to picture the difference between himself and these men.

Perhaps, he thought now, with intense absorption, it was this ability of theirs to concentrate utterly on some detail of their special science.

Whereas he, Grosvenor, had already rejected as irrelevant everything directly connected with the bones of these long-dead creatures. These were the pitiful victims, not the arrogant and deadly destroyers.

The shattered relics that lay around in such abundance might hold the secret of the fundamental physical character of a vanished race, but no clue could there be in them of the unimaginably merciless beings who had murdered them.

The incredible beings who went around deliberately jungle-izing habitable planets.

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