Tunnel in the Sky (25 page)

   
Kilroy was lying down, watching the local equivalent of an ant. He seemed in no hurry to do anything else. Finally he answered, “Rod, you are bossing this party. Upstream, downstream- just tell me.”

   
“Oh, go soak your head.”

   
“On the other hand, a bush lawyer like Shorty might question Grant's authority to tell us to return at a given time. He might use words like 'free citizen' and 'sovereign autonomy.' Maybe he's got something- this neighborhood looks awfully far 'West of the Pecos.'“

   
“Well. .. we could stretch it a day, at least?. We won't be taking that side trip going back.”

   
“Obviously. Now, if I were leading the party- but I'm not.”

   
“Cut the double talk! I asked for advice.”

   
“Well, I say we are here to find caves, not to keep a schedule.”

   
Rod quit frowning. “Up off your belly. Let's go.”

   
They headed downstream.

   
The terrain changed from forest valley to canyon country as the stream cut through a plateau. Game became harder to find and they used some of their salt meat. Two days later they came to the first of a series of bluffs carved eons earlier into convolutions, pockets, blank dark eyes. “This looks like it.”

   
“Yes,” agreed Roy. He looked around. “It might be even better farther down.”

   
“It might be.”

   
They went on.

   
In time the stream widened out, there were no more caves, and the canyons gave way to a broad savannah, treeless except along the banks of the river. Rod sniffed. “I smell salt.”

   
“You ought to. There's ocean over there somewhere.”

   
“I don't think so.” They went on.

   
They avoided the high grass, kept always near the trees. The colonists had listed more than a dozen predators large enough to endanger a man, from a leonine creature twice as long as the biggest African lion down to a vicious little scaly thing which was dangerous if cornered. It was generally agreed that the leonine monster was the “stobor” they had been warned against, although a minority favored a smaller carnivore which was faster, trickier, and more likely to attack a man.

   
One carnivore was not considered for the honor. It was no larger than a jack rabbit, had an oversize head, a big jaw, front legs larger than hind, and no tail. It was known as “dopy joe” from the silly golliwog expression it had and its clumsy, slow movements when disturbed. It was believed to live by waiting at burrows of field rodents for supper to come out. Its skin cured readily and made a good water bag. Grassy fields such as this savannah often were thick with them.

   
They camped in a grove of trees by the water. Rod said, “Shall I waste a match, or do it the hard way?”

   
“Suit yourself. I'll knock over something for dinner.”

   
“Watch yourself. Don't go into the grass.

   
“I'll work the edges. Cautious Kilroy they call me, around the insurance companies.

   
Rod counted his three matches, hoping there would be four, then started making fire by friction. He had just succeeded, delayed by moss that was not as dry as it should have been, when Roy returned and dropped a small carcass. “The durnedest thing happened.”

   
The kill was a dopy joe; Rod looked at it with distaste. “Was that the best you could do? They taste like kerosene.”

   
“Wait till I tell you. I wasn't hunting him; he was hunting me.”

   
“Don't kid me!”

   
“Truth. I had to kill him to keep him from snapping my ankles. So I brought him in.

   
Rod looked at the small creature. “Never heard the like. Must be insanity in his family.”

   
“Probably.” Roy started skinning it.

   
Next morning they reached the sea, a glassy body untouched by tide, unruffled by wind. It was extremely briny and its shore was crusted with salt They concluded that it was probably a dead sea, not a true ocean. But their attention was not held by the body of water. Stretching away along the shore apparently to the horizon were millions on heaping millions of whitened bones. Rod stared. “Where did they all come from?”

   
Roy whistled softly. “Search me. But if we could sell them at five pence a metric ton, we'd be millionaires.”

   
“Billionaires, you mean.

   
“Let's not be fussy.” They walked out along the beach, forgetting to be cautious, held by the amazing sight. There were ancient bones, cracked by sun and sea, new bones with gristle clinging, big bones of the giant antelope the colonists never hunted, tiny bones of little buck no larger than terriers, bones without number of all sorts. But there were no carcasses.

   
They inspected the shore for a couple of kilometers, awed by the mystery. When they turned they knew that they were turning back not just to camp but to head home. This was as far as they could go.

   
On the trip out they had not explored the caves. On their way back Rod decided that they should try to pick the best place for the colony, figuring game, water supply, and most importantly, shelter and ease of defense.

   
They were searching a series of arched galleries water-carved in sandstone cliff. The shelf of the lowest gallery was six or seven meters above the sloping stand of soil below. The canyon dropped rapidly here; Rod could visualize a flume from upstream, bringing running water right to the caves. . . not right away, but when they had time to devise tools and cope with the problems. Someday, someday- but in the meantime here was plenty of room for the colony in a spot which almost defended itself. Not to mention, he added, being in out of the rain. Roy was the better Alpinist; he inched up, flat to the rock, reached the shelf and threw down his line to Rod- snaked him up quickly. Rod got an arm over the edge, scrambled to his knees, stood up- and gasped, “What the deuce!”

   
“That,” said Roy, “is why I kept quiet. I thought you would think I was crazy.

   
“I think we both are.” Rod stared around. Filling the depth of the gallery, not seen from below, was terrace on terrace of cliff dwellings.

   
They were not inhabited, nor had they ever been by men. Openings which must have been doors were no higher than a man's knee, not wide enough for shoulders. But it was clear that they were dwellings, not merely formations carved by water. There were series of rooms arranged in half a dozen low stories from floor to ceiling of the gallery. The material was a concrete of dried mud, an adobe, used with wood.

   
But there was nothing to suggest what had built them.

 
  
Roy started to stick his head into an opening; Rod shouted, “Hey! Don't do that!”

   
“Why not? It's abandoned.”

   
“You don't know what might be inside. Snakes, maybe.”

   
“There are no snakes. Nobody's ever seen one.

   
“No . . . but take it easy.”

   
“I wish I had a torch light.”

   
“I wish I had eight beautiful dancing girls and a Cadillac copter. Be careful. I don't want to walk back alone.”

   
They lunched in the gallery and considered the matter. “Of course they were intelligent,” Roy declared. “We may find them elsewhere. Maybe really civilized now- these look like ancient ruins.”

   
“Not necessarily intelligent,” Rod argued. “Bees make more complicated homes.”

   
“Bees don't combine mud and wood the way these people did. Look at that lintel.”

   
“Birds do. I'll concede that they were bird-brained, no more.

   
“Rod, you won't look at the evidence.”

   
“Where are their artifacts? Show me one ash tray marked 'Made in Jersey City.'“

   
“I might find some if you weren't so jumpy.”

   
“All in time. Anyhow, the fact that they found it safe shows that we can live here.”

   
“Maybe. What killed them? Or why did they go away?”

   
They searched two galleries after lunch, found more dwellings. The dwellers had apparently formed a very large community. The fourth gallery they explored was almost empty, containing a beginning of a hive in one corner. Rod looked it over. “We can use this. If may not

   
be the best, but we can move the gang in and then find the best at our leisure.”

   
“We're heading back?”

   
“Uh, in the morning. This is a good place to sleep and tomorrow we'll travel from 'can' to 'can't'- I wonder what's up there?” Rod was looking at a secondary shelf inside the main arch.

   
Roy eyed it. “Ill let you know in a moment.”

   
“Don't bother. It's almost straight up. We'll build ladders for spots like that.”

   
“My mother was a human fly, my father was a mountain goat. Watch me.

   
The shelf was not much higher than his head. Roy had a hand over- when a piece of rock crumbled away. He did not fall far.

   
Rod ran to him. “You all right, boy?”

   
Roy grunted, “I guess so,” then started to get up. He yelped.

   
“What's the matter?”

   
“My right leg. I think. . . ow! I think it's broken.” Rod examined the break, then went down to cut splints. With a piece of the line Roy carried, used economically, for he needed most of it as a ladder, he bound the leg, padding it with leaves. It was a simple break of the tibia, with no danger of infection.

   
They argued the whole time. “Of course you will,” Roy was saying. “Leave me a fresh kill and what salt meat there is. You can figure some way to leave water.”

   
“Come back and find your chawed bones!”

   
“Not at all. Nothing can get at me. If you hustle, you can make it in three days.”

   
“Four, or five more likely. Six days to lead a party back. Then you want to go back in a stretcher? How would you like to be helpless when a stobor jumps us?”

   
“But I wouldn't go back. The gang would be moving down here.”

   
“Suppose they do? Eleven days, more likely twelve- Roy, you didn't just bang your shin; you banged your head, too.”

   
The stay in the gallery while Roy's leg repaired was not difficult nor dangerous; it was merely tedious. Rod would have liked to explore all the caves, but the first time he was away longer than Roy thought necessary to make a kill Rod returned to find his patient almost hysterical. He had let his imagination run away, visioning Rod as dead and thinking about his own death, helpless, while he starved or died of thirst. After that Rod left him only to gather food and water. The gallery was safe from all dangers; no watch was necessary, fire was needed only for cooking. The weather was getting warmer and the daily rains dropped off.

   
They discussed everything from girls to what the colony needed, what could have caused the disaster that had stranded them, what they would have to eat if they could have what they wanted, and back to girls again. They did not discuss the possibility of rescue; they took it for granted that they were there to stay. They slept much of the time and often did nothing, in animal-like torpor.

   
Roy wanted to start back as soon as Rod removed the splints, but it took him only seconds to discover that he no longer knew how to walk. He exercised for days, then grew sulky when Rod still insisted that he was not able to travel; the accumulated irritations of invalidism spewed out in the only quarrel they had on the trip.

   
Rod grew as angry as he was, threw Roy's climbing

   
rope at him and shouted, “Go ahead! See how far you get on that gimp leg!”

   
Five minutes later Rod was arranging a sling, half dragging Roy, white and trembling and thoroughly subdued, back up onto the shelf. Thereafter they spent ten days getting Roy's muscles into shape, then started back.

   
Shorty Dumont was the first one they ran into as they approached the settlement. His jaw dropped and he looked scared, then he ran to greet them, ran back to alert those in camp. “Hey, everybody! They're back!”

   
Caroline heard the shout, outdistanced the others in great flying leaps, kissed and hugged them both. “Hi, Carol,” Rod said. “What are you bawling about?”