The Secret of Saturn’s Rings (17 page)

Back at the pit beneath the guard tower, they tied one end of the rope to a boulder sticking from the ground and then dropped the other end down the pit. Bruce switched on the lamp that swung from his space-suit's belt, and then slipped into the hole and down into the darkness. His father followed him closely.

The hole was no deeper than the height of the tower that had arisen from it. At the bottom, they stood on a pockmarked metal slab and looked about. To one side a door-sized gap opened upon blackness.

Bruce flashed his light. It shone down a long corridor, at the end of which he seemed to see a cavern-like space. He mentally shrugged off the chill that struck him, remembered that they had nothing at all to lose, and started off down the corridor, followed by Dr. Rhodes.

The walls of the place seemed to have been cut out of rock with no markings. When they reached the entry to the area at the end, they stood and flashed their lights.

It was a wide chamber, very wide, and stretched into the darkness beyond the reach of their beams.

All about them they could see odd-shaped boxes of stone. When Bruce looked closely at the nearest one he realized that it was the same size and form as the unearthly coffin in the tomb on the ring-moonlet. These were coffins containing the bodies of the last inhabitants of the Saturnian moons.

They walked on, side by side, through this hall of the dead. At one place, part of the wall had fallen through and tumbled a number of the odd boxes. Several had been broken open and Bruce could not help but glance inside.

There was nothing there, nothing but some fine gray dust. Of the appearance of the bodies, time had erased everything.

They walked on. Gradually the array of coffins came to an end and was replaced by various boxes and containers and piles of things. This was evidently a storeroom, but nothing could be made of what had been stored there. Vague outlines that seemed to suggest things such as clothing and perhaps food, but all, all was gray dust. When they touched anything, it simply shifted apart and flowed gently onto the ground. Some parts made of plastic remained intact and fell in shards and splinters. Here and there a bit of metal failed to fall apart.

Dr. Rhodes sighed. “I had hoped we could find something of use to us, but I am greatly afraid there will be only dust.”

“We must keep looking, Dad,” said Bruce. “Maybe something was intended to last . . . Hello, here’s the end.”

They had come to what was apparently the end of the cavern hall. Before them was a flat, polished, black surface. “Looks like a coating of something on this wall,” observed the old engineer. “Notice that the other walls are rough and unfinished.”

He reached out a hand, touched the wall, noted its smoothness, its absence of pocks and time scars. He took his short explorer-pick and tapped the wall. Instantly there was a crack and wide rays of breaking spread along the flat surface. “Ah, ha!” said Dr. Rhodes, and hit the wall sharply.

It broke apart like thin glass. As it fell, there was a sudden swoosh of air past their helmets, a brief but hard wind as imprisoned air escaped from beyond the cracked wall into the airlessness of Mimas. When the blowing stopped, they flashed their lights beyond.

They saw a second cavern hall before them. But this was different. This was shiny and bright as if almost new. Dust there was, but it did not conceal the state of preservation of what they saw.

It was machinery, metal objects standing on platforms, objects standing on rollers, devices that must have been used to make things. They walked into the new cavern and looked with wonder.

There was no storeroom of clothing or food here; it was a deposit of scientific achievement. Some of the devices seemed to be understandable. There were several that looked as if they could be used for digging, others obviously made things, for it could be seen where there were spaces for inserting raw materials and chutes for discharging a finished product. A number of devices seemed designed to serve as cars, for they had series of interlocking wheels that probably were used to roll the vehicle.

They walked on, examining, speculating. Dr. Rhodes paused before one device, studied it a minute and then reached out and pulled a lever, one of the few instances where something like an identifiable starting mechanism appeared.

For a moment nothing happened. Then there was a grinding sound as if some hidden wheels inside the thing were moving. A chugging was apparent in the vibrations in the floor. There was a little flare of electricity, and the sound stopped and the machine lapsed into silence again.

“Hmm,” said Dr. Rhodes, “that was very interesting. These things still have some power left in them—but not enough apparently to do too much. I suppose some sort of atomic battery powered them, and even after all this time, a charge remained.”

“What do you suppose the thing did?” asked Bruce.

His father shook his head. “Heaven alone knows now,” he said. “I’m afraid that a civilization of nonhumans would have needs we might never guess. It will take Earth’s engineers a long time to work it out, for they’ll have to take it apart. You and I will probably never know.”

Bruce said sharply, “Let’s not talk like that. Maybe there’s something here we can use to help us. Perhaps there’s atomic fuel here or something?”

“Very unlikely, in fact almost impossible,” said his father. “You see, even the most powerful radioactive substances have a definite lifetime, and die out . . .” He stopped short, exclaimed, “What was that?”

Bruce had heard it too—or rather felt it. A grinding noise in the ground, a sound as if something were rolling in the darkness, rolling toward them!

They turned to the source of the sound, but a number of bulky machines blocked their light. They felt the sound coming nearer, echoing through the stone floor and the soles of their metal shoes.

Then, around the comer of darkness there appeared a beam of reddish light, and behind it the metal front of a tall cylinder. As it came closer, they saw that the cylinder was mounted on a series of flat rollers. The light came from a spot somewhere in the cylinder’s center. Sprouting from the top and sides were a number of snakelike metallic arms waving toward them.

“Run!” Bruce shouted. “The thing’s a robot watchman! Don’t let it touch us!” He grabbed his father, and they started to run into the further darkness of the hall, while behind them the robot cylinder chugged and swung, its speed increasing slightly.

The two ran on into the darkness, past machines and exhibits that seemed to be gaining in size as they went deeper into the cavern. Behind them the red light of the pursuing robot was gaining slowly and its blood-colored glow cast a frightening light on the huge machines that stood in age-old silence in this lost cavern.

They had run for perhaps several hundred yards, and now only tremendous pieces of machinery stood around them. Bruce saw what looked like a huge construction machine, a towering device that seemed, as he ran past, to combine the qualities of a steam shovel with those of a concrete mixer. He caught glimpses of spouts on others, and big sweepers, and a device that looked like a tremendous land-boat mounted on dozens of giant rollers.

Now the robot was very close to them, and Bruce imagined they could almost feel the waving tips of its tentacles. They came at last to a tremendous thing that stretched across the cavern and blocked any further view. They dashed up to it breathlessly and turned, their backs to it, determined to make a desperate effort to beat off the guard robot with their bars and picks.

But Bruce was surprised to see that it was not as close to them as he had imagined. In fact, it was several yards behind and moving more slowly than when they had first sighted it.

As he watched, the robot rocked slowly toward them, seemed to move hesitantly, uncertainly. Its tentacles stopped waving, began to droop, its light flickered.

Then the robot came to a complete halt only a few more feet away. A tentacle waved uncertainly in their direction, the red beam flared up a bit sharply and then unexpectedly cut off.

For a moment they stood in darkness and in silence. In the whole mysterious cavern nothing moved.

Bruce stood and waited. Over his earphones came only the sound of his father breathing. In the cavern before them there was pitch darkness. He reached a hand down and switched on his belt light.

The beam shot out. Instantly they saw the robot. It was only a few feet away from them, apparently staring at them, motionless.

For a few seconds they stared back at it silently. Bruce whispered, “Its light is out. It isn’t moving. It looks sort of dead to me.”

“Maybe it’s a trick,” was his father’s whispered reply.

Bruce lifted a hand slowly. There was no response from the robot. Then he lifted his crowbar, reached out with it slowly and finally touched the metal surface of the cylinder body. There was no response.

Emboldened, he reached out further, poked at the thing, nudged its tentacles, which were hanging lifeless. He got no response. “I think it’s run down,” he said, “just like a toy with a spring engine.”

His father moved, walked slowly toward it, reached out a hand and grabbed a tentacle. The limp, metallic, hoselike thing was lifeless in his grip. Bruce tentatively tapped the light socket in the creature’s “head.” But still nothing.

“You’re right,” Dr. Rhodes finally explained. “It has actually run down! I never thought to live to see such a thing. Do you know what this means?”

“Why, Dad? What’s so remarkable about that?” Bruce said, walking around the creature to examine it on all sides.

“We’ve actually seen an atomic battery reach its end, Brace! Don’t you remember your lessons on radioactivity and the tables on the half-life of various substances?”

“So?” Bruce asked, still mystified.

“Atomically activated material remains charged and active for various periods of time. Some substances when so charged lose half their charge in a few hours or a few days, but all the heavy elements that go into our atomic batteries have their half-life period over thousands and even millions of years! You’ve seen the so-called perpetual lights and clocks on the market, advertised as good forever. Well, of course, nothing can go on forever, but those lights and clocks —like the battery in your space suit—actually do go on discharging their current for millions of years. That’s one of the real miracles of our twenty-first century Atomic Age.

“Well, here is a robot machine that must have been operating on some such battery—and it has finally run down! Do you realize all the millions of years that this watchman-machine has been standing in this underground museum motionless, waiting for an intruder? And when one finally comes, we two, it has just enough power left to start up, chase us a bit, and finally exhaust its charge entirely and die!”

Bruce nodded to himself. It was something awesome when you looked at it that way. “Why is everything in tills part of the cavern so well preserved compared to outside?” he asked.

His father replied slowly, “I wish I knew. There was some sort of gas that rushed out when we broke the seal on this section. It must have had some effect in delaying the aging of metal. I wish we had been able to capture some of that gas—would have been a big discovery itself.”

“Yes, if we could ever bring any of this knowledge home, Dad,” Bruce replied. “Let’s look around so we can write down everything we see for whoever finds us—or our bodies.” He shuddered as he said the last, but he was determined to carry on.

“Yes,” his father said. “For instance, what’s this end thing? I think we passed some big construction machines, some sort of land-buses, and so forth, but this one at the end we haven’t seen.”

They turned their backs on the lifeless robot and looked at the huge device that filled the end of the cavern, which was the last thing in the great underground storehouse of the last survivors of Mimas.

They turned their lights on it and saw a huge metal and plastic rack, stretching from one wall to the other. Something gleaming and golden was mounted on that rack, way over their heads. Bruce looked up, saw a little platform up there. His weight on Mimas being so slight, he knew he could jump up to it Obtaining his father’s consent, he bent his knees and leaped.

He caught the edge of the platform easily and found himself standing beside a circular doorway set in a huge metal cylindrical thing that towered up to the top of the cavern and whose base was sunk deep in the framework of the supporting rack. A wild notion struck Bruce as he caught the outlines of the thing. He reached out, pushed on the doorlike disk. After a few prods, it swung aside. Inside the cylinder he caught a glimpse of spidery runways, of beams and tubes, and he called excitedly to his father, “It looks like a space ship!”

“What!” In the next moment Dr. Rhodes had jumped up and the two of them were pushing inside the strange construction and examining it.

There was no doubt about it. They had found a space ship of the ancient men of Saturn’s lost moon, standing as the last and final exhibit in their civilization’s tomb. As they made their way excitedly around the inside of the great craft, they noticed the differences and the similarities to the ships of Earth.

For one thing, this craft seemed to lack any division into rooms or sections. The crew evidently walked along weird beams and trapezes around a hollow interior. Fully exposed to view were the rocket tubes, the fuel tanks mounted to the framework, the mixing chambers. Up at the head of the ship, a set of trapezes were suspended before a series of rods and handles that were obviously the controls. Other strange racks and spaces were about them, whose purpose defied their guesses.

“What kind of creatures were these, anyway?” Bruce remarked as he jumped lightly from catwalk to beam to gaze out of what had once been a porthole but was now a hollow hole in the surface, whose transparent substance had probably vanished into dust and gas an eternity ago.

“I would hate to speculate on it,” said his father, who was studying the rocket tubes in the rear. “I get the odd feeling that they combined the qualities of monkeys with those of spiders—with maybe a suggestion of something shelled as well. They built their robot with tentacles rather than hands, and it didn’t move on legs or wheels, but rather on rollers. No human culture would probably build in that fashion. But, Bruce, you should look at these rocket tubes, they’re absolutely amazing!”