The City And The Stars - Arthur C. Clarke [98]
Alvin felt shaken, though he knew that they had been in no possible danger. He wondered what else lived down there beneath that innocent sward, which seemed positively to invite him to come out and run upon its springy surface.
‘I could spend a lot of time here,’ said Hilvar, obviously fascinated by what he had just seen. ‘Evolution must have produced some very interesting results under these conditions. Not only evolution, but devolution as well, as higher forms of life regressed when the planet was deserted. By now equilibrium must have been reached and—you’re not leaving already?’ His voice sounded quite plaintive as the landscape receded below them.
‘I am,’ said Alvin. ‘I’ve seen a world with no life, and a world with too much, and I don’t know which I dislike more.’
Five thousand feet above the plain, the planet gave them one final surprise. They encountered a flotilla of huge, flabby balloons drifting down the wind. From each semi-transparent envelope, clusters of tendrils dangled to form what was virtually an inverted forest. Some plants, it seemed, in the effort to escape from the ferocious conflict on the surface had learned to conquer the air. By a miracle of adaptation, they had managed to prepare hydrogen and store it in bladders, so that they could lift themselves into the comparative peace of the lower atmosphere.
Yet it was not certain that even here they had found security. Their downward-hanging stems and leaves were infested with an entire fauna of spidery animals, which must spend their lives floating far above the surface of the globe, continuing the universal battle for existence on their lonely aerial islands. Presumably they must from time to time have some contact with the ground; Alvin saw one of the great balloons suddenly collapse and fall out of the sky, its broken envelope acting as a crude parachute. He wondered if this was an accident, or part of the life-cycle of these strange entities.
Hilvar slept while they waited for the next planet to approach. For some reason which the robot could not explain to them, the ship travelled slowly—at least by comparison with its universe-spanning haste—now that it was within a solar system. It took almost two hours to reach the world that Alvin had chosen for his third stop, and he was a little surprised that any mere interplanetary journey should last so long.
He woke Hilvar as they dropped down into the atmosphere.
‘What do you make of that?’ he asked, pointing to the vision screen.
Below them was a bleak landscape of blacks and greys, showing no sign of vegetation or any other direct evidence of life. But there was indirect evidence; the low hills and shallow valleys were dotted with perfectly-formed hemispheres, some of them arranged in complex, symmetrical patterns.
They had learned caution on the last planet, and after carefully considering all the possibilities remained poised high in the atmosphere while they sent the robot down to investigate. Through its eyes, they saw one of the hemispheres approach until the robot was floating only a few feet away from the completely smooth, featureless surface.
There was no sign of any entrance, nor any hint of the purpose which the structure served. It was quite large—over a hundred feet high; some of the other hemispheres were larger still. If it was a building, there appeared to be no way in or out.
After some hesitation, Alvin ordered the robot to move forward and touch the dome. To his utter astonishment, it refused to obey him. This indeed was mutiny—or so at first it seemed.
‘Why don’t you do as I tell you?’ asked Alvin, when he had recovered from his astonishment.
‘It is forbidden,’ came the reply.
‘Forbidden by whom?’
‘I do not know.’
‘Then how—no, cancel that. Was the order built into you?’
‘No.’
That seemed to eliminate one possibility. The builders of these domes might well have been the race who made the robot, and might have included this taboo in the machine’s original instructions.
‘When did you receive the order?’