The City And The Stars - Arthur C. Clarke [100]
‘Hilvar,’ he said, finding it hard to talk and walk at the same time, ‘I believe this is the ship that landed on the first planet we visited.’
Hilvar nodded, preferring not to waste air. The same idea had already occurred to him. It was a good object lesson, he thought, for incautious visitors. He hoped it would not be lost on Alvin.
They reached the hull, and stared up into the exposed interior of the ship. It was like looking into a huge building that had been roughly sliced in two; floors and walls and ceilings, broken at the point of the explosion, gave a distorted chart of the ship’s cross-section. What strange beings, wondered Alvin, still lay where they had died in the wreckage of their vessel?
‘I don’t understand this,’ said Hilvar suddenly. ‘This portion of the ship is badly damaged, but it’s fairly intact. Where’s the rest of it? Did it break in two out in space, and this part crash here?’
Not until they had sent the robot exploring again, and had themselves examined the area around the wreckage, did they learn the answer. There was no shadow of doubt; any reservations they might have had were banished when Alvin found the line of low mounds, each ten feet long, on the little hill beside the ship.
‘So they landed here,’ mused Hilvar, ‘and ignored the warning. They were inquisitive, just as you are. They tried to open that dome.’
He pointed to the other side of the crater, to the smooth, still unmarked shell within which the departed rulers of this world had sealed their treasures. But it was no longer a dome: it was now an almost complete sphere, for the ground in which it had been set had been blasted away.
‘They wrecked their ship, and many of them were killed. Yet despite that, they managed to make repairs and leave again, cutting off this section and stripping out everything of value. What a task that must have been!’
Alvin scarcely heard him. He was looking at the curious marker that had first drawn him to this spot—the slim shaft ringed by a horizontal circle a third of the way down from its tip. Alien and unfamiliar though it was, he could respond to the mute message it had carried down the ages.
Underneath those stones, if he cared to disturb them, was the answer to one question at least. It could remain unanswered; whatever these creatures might have been, they had earned their right to rest.
Hilvar scarcely heard the words Alvin whispered as they walked slowly back to the ship.
‘I hope they got home,’ he said.
‘And where now?’ asked Hilvar, when they were once more out in space.
Alvin stared thoughtfully at the screen before replying.
‘Do you think I should go back?’ he said.
‘It would be the sensible thing to do. Our luck may not hold out much longer, and who knows what other surprises these planets may have waiting for us?’
It was the voice of sanity and caution, and Alvin was now prepared to give it greater heed than he would have done a few days before. But he had come a long way, and waited all his life, for this moment; he would not turn back while there was still so much to see.
‘We’ll stay in the ship from now on,’ he said, ‘and we won’t touch surface anywhere. That should be safe enough, surely.’
Hilvar shrugged his shoulders, as if refusing to accept any responsibility for what might happen next. Now that Alvin was showing a certain amount of caution, he thought it unwise to admit that he was equally anxious to continue their exploring, though he had long ago abandoned all hope of meeting intelligent life upon any of these planets.
A double world lay ahead of them, a great planet with a smaller satellite beside it. The primary might have been the twin of the second world they had visited; it was clothed in that same blanket of livid green. There would be no