Darr Veter left the Altai’s control tower and passed through the library that had been re-equipped as a dormitory with two tiers of bunks. Cabins, dining-rooms, the cook’s galley, the side corridors and the forward engine room had all been fitted out with extra bunks. The planet-ship had been converted into a stationary base and was overcrowded. Scarcely able to drag his feet Darr Veter walked down the corridor panelled with plastics warm to the touch, and lazily opened and closed hermetically sealed doors.
He was thinking of astronauts who spent dozens of years inside such a ship without any hope of leaving it before the appointed time, a cruelly long one. He had been living there six months and every day had left the narrow confines to work in the oppressive spaces of interplanetary vacuum. He was already longing for his beautiful Earth with its steppes and seas and the teeming life of the big centres in the inhabited zones. But Erg Noor, Nisa Greet and twenty other people would have to spend ninety-two dependent years or a hundred and forty terrestrial years in a spaceship before it brought them back to their own planet. Not one of them could possibly live so long! Their bodies would be cremated and buried away on the distant planets of the green zirconium star!
Or they would die en route and their bodies enclosed in a funeral rocket would be sent out into the Cosmos just,as the funeral boats of their ancestors swept out to sea carrying dead warriors away with them. But such heroes as those who undertook life-long imprisonment in a spaceship without the hope that they, personally, would return, were unknown in the history of mankind. No, he was wrong, Veda would have rebuked him! How could he have forgotten the nameless fighters for the dignity and freedom of man in distant epochs who undertook even greater risks — horrible tortures and life-long imprisonment in damp dungeons. Yes, these heroes had been stronger and more worthy even than his contemporaries preparing to make their magnificent flight into the Cosmos to explore distant worlds!
And he, Darr Veter, who had never been away from his native planet for any length of time, was a pygmy compared with them and by no means an angel of heaven, as his infinitely dear Veda Kong had called him!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE STEEL DOOR
The robot tunneller had been working for twenty, days in the damp and gloom before it had finally cleared away the roof fall and bolstered up the ceiling. The road down into the cave was open and could be used as soon as it had been tested for safety. Other robots, small cars on caterpillar tracks, operated by Archimedean screws moved noiselessly down into the depths. At every hundred metres the instruments on the cars sent back reports on temperature, humidity and the content of the air. The cars cleverly overcame all obstacles and went down to a depth of four hundred metres. Following behind them Veda Kong and a group of historians descended into the treasure cave. Ninety years before that, when tests for subsoil waters were being made, indicators had shown a large quantity of metal amongst sandstone and limestone deposits that are not, in general, associated with metallic ores. It was soon discovered that the place coincided with a description of the site of a cave, Halovkul, that had been mentioned in old legends. The name had originally been Hall of Culture in a language now dead. During a terribly devastating war, people who had believed themselves the most advanced in science and culture, hid the treasures of their civilization in a cave. In those distant days secrecy and mystery were very widespread.
Veda was quite as excited as the youngest of her assistants as she slid down the wet, red clay that formed the floor of the sloping entrance tunnel.
Her imagination drew pictures of magnificent halls, hermetically sealed safes containing films, drawings and maps, cupboards of tape recordings or the recordings of memory machines, shelves with jars of chemical compounds, alloys and medicines, stuffed animals, now extinct, in air- and water-tight glass-cases, prepared plants and skeletons put together from the fossilized bones of the past inhabitants of Earth. She even dreamed of slabs of silicoll in which the pictures of the most famous artists had been cast, whole galleries of sculptures of mankind’s best representatives, the most prominent people, skilful carvings of animals… models of famous buildings, inscriptions about outstanding events perpetuated in stone or metal….
Lost in her dreams Veda Kong found herself in a huge cave between three and four thousand square metres in extent. The vaulted ceiling was lost in the darkness and long stalactites glistened in the electric light. The cave was truly magnificent and, in realization of Veda’s dreams, machines and cupboards had been placed in the countless niches formed in the walls by the ribs and ledges of limestone. With shouts of joy the archaeologists spread around the perimeter of the cave: many of the machines standing in the niches, some of them retaining the polish on their glass and metal parts, were motor-cars of the type that pleased our distant ancestors to such an extent and were considered the highest technical achievement of human genius in the Era of Disunity. In that period, for some unknown reason, people built large numbers of vehicles capable of carrying only a few passengers. The construction of the cars reached a high level of elegance, the engines and steering mechanisms were very ingenious but in all else these vehicles were senseless. Hundreds of thousands of them filled the city streets and country roads carrying people who lived far from the places where they worked and hurried every day to reach their jobs and then get home again. The vehicles were dangerous to drive, killed a tremendous number of people every year and burned up millions and millions of tons of valuable organic substances accumulated in the geological past of the planet and in so doing poisoned the atmosphere with carbon monoxide. The archaeologists of the Great Circle Era were very disappointed when they discovered how much room had been devoted to these machines in the cave.
On low platforms, however, there were more powerful steam engines, electric motors, jet, turbine and nuclear motors. In glass show-cases covered with a coating of limestone there were vertical rows of instruments of all kinds, most likely they were TV receivers, cameras, calculating machines and other similar devices. This museum of machines, some of which had quite rusted away but others were in a good state of preservation, was of great historical value as it illustrated the technical level of civilization at a distant date, the majority of whose records had been lost in political and military disturbances.
Miyiko Eigoro, Veda’s faithful assistant who had again given up her beloved sea for the damp and darkness of underground exploration, noticed the black opening of a gallery at the far end of the cave, behind a big limestone pillar. The pillar turned out to be the limestone-covered skeleton of a machine and at its foot lay a heap of plastic dust, the remains of the door that had once covered the entrance to the gallery. Advancing step by step, guided by the red cable of the scouting machines, the archaeologists got into the second chamber that was almost at the same level and was filled with hermetically sealed cupboards of metal and glass. A long English inscription in big letters ran round the vertical walls that had, in places, collapsed. Veda had to stop for a moment to decipher it.
With the boastfulness that was typical of the ancient individualists, the builders of the caves informed their descendants that they had reached the heights of knowledge and were preserving their magnificent achievements for posterity.