The Complete Short Stories

Eager to get Mayer down into the basin, and with my mind spinning like a disintegrating flywheel, it was only as the half-track roared up the table slope that I felt a first chilling pang of fear. Through the windscreen I hesitantly scanned the tilting sky. Soon after reaching the basin we would have to shut down for an hour, two of us crammed together in the fume-filled cabin, deafened by the engine, sitting targets with the periscope blinded by the glare.

The centre of the plateau was a pulsing blur, as the air trapped in the basin throbbed upward into the sun. I drove straight towards it, Mayer stiffening in his seat. A hundred yards from the basin’s edge the air suddenly cleared and we could see the tops of the megaliths. Mayer leapt up and swung out of the door onto the running board as I cut the engine and slammed the half-track to a halt by the rim. We jumped down, grabbing flare pistols and shouting to each other, slid into the basin and sprinted through the boiling air to the megaliths looming up in the centre.

I half-expected to find a reception party waiting for us, but the megaliths were deserted. I reached the pentagon fifty yards ahead of Mayer, climbed up and waited for him, gulping in the molten sunlight.

I helped him up and led him over to one of the megaliths, picked a column and began to read out the entries. Then I took him round the others, recapitulating everything I had discovered, pointing out the blank tablet reserved for Earth.

Mayer listened, broke away and wandered off, staring up dully at the megaliths.

‘Quaine, you’ve really found something,’ he muttered softly. ‘Crazy, must be some sort of temple.’

I followed him round, wiping the sweat off my face and shielding my eyes from the glare reflected off the great slabs.

‘Look at them, Mayer! They’ve been coming here for ten thousand years! Do you know what this means?’

Mayer tentatively reached out and touched one of the megaliths. ‘“Argive League XXV… Beta Tn-”’ he read out. ‘There are others, then. God Almighty. What do you think they look like?’

‘What does it matter? Listen. They must have levelled this plateau themselves, scooped out the basin and cut these tablets from the living rock. Can you even imagine the tools they used?’

We crouched in the narrow rectangle of shadow in the lee of the sunward megalith. The temperature climbed, forty-five minutes to noon, 105° ‘What is all this, though?’ Mayer asked. ‘Their burial ground?’

‘Unlikely. Why leave a tablet for Earth? If they’ve been able to learn our language they’d know the gesture was pointless. Anyway, elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence, and there’s something here that suggests the exact opposite. I’m convinced they expect that some time in the future we’ll take an active part in whatever is celebrated here.’

‘Maybe, but what? Think in new categories, remember?’ Mayer squinted up at the megaliths. ‘This could be anything from an ethnological bill of lading to the guest list at an all-time cosmic house party.’

He noticed something, frowned, then suddenly wrenched away from me. He leapt to his feet, pressed his hands against the surface of the slab behind us and ran his eyes carefully over the grain.

‘What’s worrying you?’ I asked.

‘Shut up!’ he snapped. He scratched his thumbnail at the surface, trying to dislodge a few grains. ‘What are you talking about, Quaine, these slabs aren’t made of stone!’

He slipped out his jack knife, sprung the blade and stabbed viciously at the megalith, slashing a two-foot-long groove across the inscriptions.

I stood up and tried to restrain him but he shouldered me away and ran his finger down the groove, collecting a few fragments.

He turned on me angrily. ‘Do you know what this is? Tantalum oxide!

Pure ninety-nine per cent paygold. No wonder our extraction rates are fantastically small. I couldn’t understand it, but these people—’ he jerked his thumb furiously at the megaliths ‘—have damn well milked the planet dry to build these crazy things!’

It was 115°. The air was beginning to turn yellow and we were breathing in short exhausted pants.

‘Let’s get back to the truck,’ I temporized. Mayer was losing control, carried away by his rage. With his big burly shoulders hunched in anger, staring up blindly at the five great megaliths, face contorted by the heat, he looked like an insane sub-man pinned in the time trophy of a galactic super-hunter.

He was ranting away as we stumbled through the dust towards the half-track.

‘What do you want to do?’ I shouted. ‘Cut them down and put them through your ore crushers?’

Mayer stopped, the blue dust swirling about his legs. The air was humming as the basin floor expanded in the heart. The half-track was only fifty yards away, its refrigerated cabin a cool haven.