“A whole world, armored?” marveled Bob Star.
“Is it metal?”
“It isn’t metal.”
Jay Kalam shook his head.
“I took time to examine it, after I finished those atmospheric tests—though I still don’t know what it is.”
He shrugged uneasily.
“Something harder than diamond and tougher than steel.
Acids don’t affect it.
It neither absorbs nor radiates heat.
Perhaps it isn’t actually matter at all, but another stable energy-field, more or less like that green barrier.”
Surprisingly, his tests had found a breatheable atmosphere.
A rich oxygen content made up for the low barometric pressure.
The surface gravitation, Bob Star had reported, was slightly less than Earth-standard.
Since the planet had four times the diameter of Earth, that meant that its relative density must be extremely low.
At a little distance from the Halcyon Bird, Jay Kalam paused, and they all looked back.
The silvery cruiser lay small and lonely upon that blue, jewel-smooth plain.
It was the only object upon the infinite world behind, a solitary gleam under the pale green sky.
Blue flame, as they looked, gushed suddenly from the gun turret.
The bright hull glowed swiftly red, and flames exploded from the ports.
The five went on, regretful, for it had been a faithful ship.
“They’ll surely find the wreck,” Jay Kalam said. “But I hope they’ll think we died in it.”
They plodded on, wearily dragging the sledges, toward the red riddle of that enormous machine, a hundred miles away.
Bob Star’s eyes rested on it, with an apathetic fascination.
It stood on a square platform, which might be, he estimated, two miles high and ten in length.
The machine towered above it, so immense that he dared not attempt to guess its height.
The blood-red stuff of it shone like metal.
There was a lofty frame of colossal beams and girders.
There were moving parts, so intricate, so strange, that he could readily find no name or explanation for them.
In particular, his eye was caught by a vast, shimmering white object, shaped like a flattened orange, that moved irregularly up and down between two colossal plates of crimson.
The whole was enclosed in a transparent greenish dome, that seemed somehow akin to the sky.
Despair took hold of him.
“Against the scale of that machine,” he muttered, “we’re no more than five flies.”
They plodded on.
In the pellucid atmosphere, the machine always looked almost near enough to touch.
And always it retreated, mockingly at their weary efforts.
At last, at the plaintive insistence of Giles Habibula, they halted.
The Halcyon Bird was lost to view.
They huddled in a lonely little circle by the sledges, on that shimmering vastness.
They drank, ate sparingly, and tried to rest.
There was no wind.
The cool air was oppressively still.
The green sky did not change.
There were no clouds.
“The planet doesn’t rotate,” Jay Kalam commented.
“There is no weather, nor even any time.
It is a world without change.”
A terrible silence overhung them.
Nothing lived or moved or gave voice upon all the empty plain.
The green sky was equally devoid of life or motion.
The cold disk of the purple sun hung steady, high above the straight horizon.