An uncanny silence haunted it.
Quickly, they crossed the bare gravel of the rocket field, toward the other ship.
No name was painted on its tapering silver sides.
It was small, but new in design, modern and swift patterned after the latest geodesic cruisers of the Legion.
“A good ship,” Jay Kalam said.
“And her valves sealed, her ports closed, as if she were ready for flight.”
“Ah, so,” muttered Giles Habibula, hi a feeble, apprehensive tone.
His eyes were darting this way and that, with a furtive, nervous quickness.
His seamed yellow face was pale, his fat limbs trembling.
He contrived to walk so that he was between Bob Star and the commander.
“Ah, so,” he repeated. “But it isn’t.”
He was pointing at a dark, oily patch upon the gravel, beside the ship.
“The drain valves to her fuel tanks have been opened,” he said.
“Her precious fuel has all run out to waste upon the gravel.”
“That’s so,” said Jay Kalam, under his breath.
Giles Habibula shivered.
“I don’t like this stillness, Jay.
The place is too fearful silent.
Ah, some dreadful hand has touched this little world, Jay.
It’s dead, Jay.
Dead!
And no longer any fit dwelling for the living!”
They had come to the sealed entrance valve.
“It’s locked, Giles,” Jay Kalam said.
“Will you open it?”
“If you wish.”
The old man nodded reluctantly.
“But it’s nothing good we’ll find within.
The ache in my poor old bones tells me so.
We’ll find nothing but the ghastly tracks of horror.”
He fumbled in his big pockets for a scrap of wire, and waddled heavily to the lock.
Bob Star looked anxiously around him.
Silence was sawing at his nerves.
The long white house behind them was largely built, he saw, of native stone.
But its white, inviting luxury had been expensively finished with metal, glass, and tropical woods imported from the distant System—its materials represented the peril and the enormous cost of many a voyage of billions of miles.
Its dark windows stared at him vacantly.
A depressing spirit of empty desolation came out of it, and touched his soul with a cold chill of dread.
“While we wait, Bob,” Jay Kalam said, “will you take a look at the ultrawave station?
See if the transmitter is in working order.
And if the automatic printers have been taking down any newscasts.
It would take days to get an answer to any message, at this distance.
But perhaps we can learn how the System has been faring.”
He hastened away across the tiny field, and up the cragged height where the spidery tower stood.
Eerie stillness dogged him.
It was hard to keep from looking behind him.
He pushed open a swinging door, and entered the tiny, rock-walled room beneath the tower.
Horror thrust him back.
Every piece of equipment in the room was useless.
The receivers were dead. The printers were silent.
The transmitter had been wrecked, as cleverly and completely as the geodynes of the Halcyon Bird.