The City And The Stars - Arthur C. Clarke [99]
‘I received it when I landed.’
Alvin turned to Hilvar, the light of a new hope burning in his eyes.
‘There’s intelligence here! Can you sense it?’
‘No,’ Hilvar replied. ‘The place seems as dead to me as the first world we visited.’
‘I’m going outside to join the robot. Whatever spoke to it may speak to me.’
Hilvar did not argue the point, though he looked none too happy. They brought the ship to earth a hundred feet away from the dome, not far from the waiting robot, and opened the airlock.
Alvin knew that the lock could not be opened unless the ship’s brain had already satisfied that the atmosphere was breatheable. For a moment he thought it had made a mistake—the air was so thin and gave such little sustenance to his lungs. Then, by inhaling deeply, he found that he could grasp enough oxygen to survive, though he felt that a few minutes here would be all that he could endure.
Panting hard, they walked up to the robot and to the curving wall of the enigmatic dome. They took one more step—then stopped in unison as if hit by the same sudden blow. In their minds, like the tolling of a mighty gong, had boomed a single message:
DANGER. COME NO CLOSER.
That was all. It was a message not in words, but in pure thought. Alvin was certain that any creature, whatever its level of intelligence, would receive the same warning, in the same utterly unmistakable fashion—deep within its mind.
It was a warning, not a threat. Somehow they knew that it was not directed against them; it was for their own protection. Here, it seemed to say, is something intrinsically dangerous, and we, its makers, are anxious that no one shall be hurt through blundering ignorantly into it.
Alvin and Hilvar stepped back several paces, and looked at each other, each waiting for his friend to say what was in his mind. Hilvar was the first to sum up the position.
‘I was right, Alvin,’ he said. ‘There is no intelligence here. That warning is automatic—triggered by our presence when we get too close.’
Alvin nodded in agreement.
‘I wonder what they were trying to protect,’ he said. ‘There could be buildings—anything—under these domes.’
‘There’s no way we can find out, if all the domes warn us off. It’s interesting—the difference between the three planets we’ve visited. They took everything away from the first—they abandoned the second without bothering about it—but they went to a lot of trouble here. Perhaps they expected to come back some day, and wanted everything to be ready for them when they returned.’
‘But they never did—and that was a long time ago.’
‘They may have changed their minds.’
It was curious, Alvin thought, how both he and Hilvar had unconsciously started using the word ‘they’. Whoever or whatever ‘they’ had been, their presence had been strong on that first planet—and was even stronger here. This was a world that had been carefully wrapped up, and put away until it might be needed again.…
‘Let’s go back to the ship,’ panted Alvin, ‘I can’t breathe properly here.’
As soon as the airlock had closed behind them, and they were at ease once more, they discussed their next move. To make a thorough investigation, they should sample a large number of domes, in the hope that they might find one that had no warning and which could be entered. If that failed—but Alvin would not face that possibility until he had to.
He faced it less than an hour later, and in a far more dramatic form than he would have dreamed. They had sent the robot down to half a dozen domes, always with the same result, when they came across a scene which was badly out of place on this tidy, neatly packaged world.
Below them was a broad valley, sparsely sprinkled with the tantalising, impenetrable domes. At its centre was the unmistakable scar of a great explosion—an explosion which had thrown debris for miles in all directions and burned a shallow crater in the ground.
And beside the crater was the wreckage of a spaceship.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THEY LANDED CLOSE to the scene of this ancient tragedy, and walked slowly, conserving their breath, towards