THE QUEST SEEMED hopeless from the start. Tuck had never been higher above the surface of Titan than the observation room of the Earth ship; he had never realized the vastness of the place. But now, as the Snooper skimmed higher and higher into the sun the realization drove home, and he stared bleakly down at the wild panorama spread out beneath them.
There was no break in the barren wildness. A few miles to the right he could see the oval dome of the colony, reflecting the early morning light, gleaming like a dull jewel as the lights within it blinked off one by one. But the colony lay totally isolated by miles and miles of endless rock. Even as they rose, the surface lost its detail and took on a different sort of wildness. It was a mammoth chunk of barren rock —
And somewhere down there five hundred people had carved out a tiny foothold, and from it were threatening the entire Solar System!
David Torm glanced down for an instant. “Not very pretty, eh?”
“It looks horrible. I don’t see how we could ever find anything.”
David chuckled. “Don’t give up yet.” He tipped the nose of the little ship down again, and curved in toward the colony. “We can’t see anything at all up this high — I just wanted to give you a picture of the surface.” He pointed off toward the rising sun. “The first thing I want to do is to go down there close to the surface and look for a fault I saw a couple of months ago. There was a big clordelkus there — the nasty things like oxygen, for dessert, I guess and he’d sucked up enough stone to start a cave-in over the tunnel. I mapped it, and didn’t pay too much attention to it, but it might get us inside the tunnels. If we spot that, so we know we can get in, we’ll start circling the colony in widening circles. That way we should spot anything that looks suspicious.”
“And if we don’t see anything?”
“Then we’ll try hunting from the inside.” The ship was quite low now, sweeping over the jagged land in a beeline for the sun. David handed Tuck a pair of binoculars. “I’ll make several runs of about five miles over the area — see if you can spot anything.”
“What am I looking for, exactly?”
“A deep cut.”
Tuck snorted. “The whole surface is full of deep cuts.”
“Sure, I know — but this will be sandbagged up, and you should be able to see the bags.” The ship cut even lower, and Tuck started scanning the ground as it whizzed by, looking for anything which might be an artificial cut. The ship reached the end of the run, made a quarter-mile arc, and sped back. The high rocky cliffs spun by them crazily; sometimes the ship jerked up abruptly, sometimes it nearly skidded on the ground, sending up whirlwinds of snow in its wake. Still Tuck saw nothing. He kept gripping at the instrument panel as the ship lurched and dropped, but there was just nothing to see.
“You do a good job of flying,” he said, as they skimmed along one of the runs.
“Lots of practice. I’d hoped to get into rocketry, and I learned everything I could from dad’s books — but it took a lot of flying hours, too.” The leader’s son looked over at Tuck. “I’m still going to get into rocketry,” he said. “Somehow, I’ll get a rocket built. We’re in a perfect place to base some real exploratory work here — study Saturn and her moons, all of them.” His eyes took a wistful light. “But that’s just the start. Someday, maybe even while I’m alive, somebody is going to break the space barrier. The real space barrier — ”
Tuck’s eyes glowed. “You mean discover an interstellar drive?”
David nodded. “God old Sol is just one star. There are millions of them waiting for us. When they build the first star-ship — that’s where I want to be.” He spun the scooter around for another run, then snorted in disgust. “This is getting us nowhere. Let’s take the colony as a hub and start circling.”
The sun rose higher and higher, a dim, small, feeble-looking sun, glowering out of a cloudless purple sky. Tuck’s eyes were smarting from the staring, but he kept the binoculars tight to his pressure helmet. An hour passed as they moved slowly out from the colony in ever-widening circles. Finally he dropped the binoculars disgustedly. “I wouldn’t see anything if it walked up and kicked me,” he growled. “All I see is gorges and cuts and cliffs — ”
“Want to let me look for a while?”
“And let me fly?” Tuck’s heart leaped.
“Think you can do it?”
“Of course. I won’t go as low as you are, but I can almost match it.” He held on as David slid into a long, even stretch, then rose higher and shifted the controls to automatic. The cockpit was a tight squeeze, but they managed to shift, and in a few moments Tuck’s hands were gripping the semicircular wheel, and he felt the little scooter responding to every touch, every movement. He brought the ship up in a high arc, exhilaration shooting through him to the depths of his bones. His mind went back for a second to the obstacle races he had flown back in school; then he brought the ship in low. He found the place where they had left their circles, and closed in, picking up a landmark in each quarter turn every time around, moving slowly outward. The colony grew farther and farther away as the minutes lengthened into another hour, and his hopes dwindled with every minute —
“Wait — ” David stared into the binoculars, shifting around as the ship left the ground behind. “Wait a minute — ”
“See something?”
David scowled. “Can’t tell. Bring her in very low, right over the stretch there — see the gorge running off at two o’clock? Try to follow it.” His voice was excited, and he peered down, holding the binoculars ready. Tuck swung the ship around and brought her in, scooping down as low as he dared. He could pay no attention to anything but the path the ship was taking, and he saw the walls of the gorge rise up on either side as they skimmed through. And then David let out a yip of glee. “Here,” he cried. “Let me take it. See what you see! Just this side of the gorge, over to the right — ”
Tuck relinquished the controls, peered through the binoculars at the jagged ground below. At first he could see nothing; then, as they swooped over, he saw what looked like a deep, black, perfectly rectangular hole —
“Looks like a cave-in!” He cried.
“Looks like it.”
“Is this the one you saw?”
“Nope. This is lots farther out.”
“Think we can get into it?”
“We can sure try!” He slid the ship down, searching for a smooth place to land. “At any rate, we’ll take a look. This may be our way into the tunnels.” He was busy at the controls for a few moments, and then the ship was down, and the sound of the jet was dying away in their ears. In a moment they were out, lumbering for the fault as fast as their clumsy suits would let them —
The hole was about thirty feet deep, perfectly rectangular at the top, but sloping up from the bottom on one side, as though one section of the tunnel had given way, and a landslide piled into it. As they stared, they could see at the bottom an opening, leading into a black hole that seemed to disappear into the wall of rock.
“It is a tunnel!” David was scrambling down the side, staring at the other side of the hole. Tuck hesitated.
“Seems odd there isn’t an alarm, if it goes into the tunnels — ”
David shook his head. “Not so strange. The colony end of the tunnel is completely blocked off by the cave-in. This must open into the outer end.”
Tuck peered down at him. “You think it’s cut off from the main tunnel back to the colony?”
David nodded. “And look there — ” He pointed to a large chunk of smoothly scooped-out rock lying in the debris. “Looks like we can thank our little silicon friend for this, too. Probably this cave-in is quite recent — ”
“Shall we go in?”
“Might as well — even if it is a dead end.” David climbed down to the bottom of the slide, cleared rocks away from the black hole, and stuck his head in. A moment later he looked back. “Come on. This goes quite a way in.”
Tuck clambered down, careful not to cut his pressure suit on the jagged rocks. Together they struggled through the tunnel, snapping on their helmet lamps as the darkness closed in on them. The tunnel was seven or eight feet high, and four feet wide, beamed heavily on the sides and overhead. Thirty yards ahead it curved to the left and disappeared into the darkness.
David stopped after a few steps, and turned to Tuck, a strange expression in his eyes. “Wait a minute,” he said softly.
“What’s wrong?” Tuck’s voice was a startled whisper.
“Everything!” David whispered back. “I’ve been thinking. I don’t remember any tunnel here. No tunnel of any sort. I’ve studied all the maps, and the maps say that there’s a large vein of radioactives between here and the colony — and no way to dig through it safely — ”
Tuck’s eyes widened. “This is a tunnel, map or no map — ” He stopped short, staring over his shoulder at the little patch of light, then back at David. “You mean — ”
“Has your Geiger been acting up since we came in here?”
“Not a peep.”
“That’s what I thought. There’s a tunnel through here, all right, but not through any radioactive vein, and not on any map that I’ve ever seen!” He jerked his head and started down the tunnel. “Buddy, we’re on to something!”
They plodded on in silence. The stillness of the place was oppressive, almost ghostly; their footsteps echoed and re-echoed in the darkness. As the tunnel curved, the opening to the outside disappeared, and they were in total darkness except for the flicker of their helmet lamps.
“Look!” said David suddenly.
Forty feet ahead the tunnel suddenly broke into a Y. One branch curved gently off to the left, and then down. The other cut sharply to the right. And at the junction was a large, dull metal object.
Tuck stopped short and stared. “What is it?”
“A pump and blower. There have been cave-ins before in this tunnel — and that means it’s an old one. And look at the beaming — wooden! They haven’t beamed tunnels with wood for years.”
“Let’s split up here,” said Tuck. “I’ll take the right, you take the left. Will the phones carry through this rock?”
“For a little way.”
“All right. Look — let’s each walk for ten minutes. Then come back. Meet me here in twenty minutes.”
“That’s good,” said David. “There’s something about this I don’t like.”
Tuck waved and started down the right-hand tunnel. It cut very sharply around, then suddenly straightened. Tuck walked slowly, the only sound those of his own footsteps. He shivered, suddenly, as he walked. A tunnel where there was no tunnel on the map — beyond a radioactive bed that didn’t exist. His heart pounded wildly. It could be only one thing. But what if they were caught down here, snooping into some strange underground vault that had been kept deadly secret for a century — what could they do? Tuck realized with a jolt that he hadn’t thought of weapons. With the tunnel open to the outside, a quick blow to smash his helmet would be the end —
The tunnel widened suddenly, and he was in a small room, packed to the ceiling with sandbags. And against one wall were boxes — he peered at them, curiously. They were aluminum cargo boxes, stacked one on top of another. Every box had a stencil on its side that read, “Titan Colony, via Rocket Freight,” followed by a date —
“Tuck!”
Tuck started violently as the cry burst into his earphones, and his heart pounded in his throat.
“What’s the matter, Dave?”
And then there was an excited shout in the ‘phones that Tuck couldn’t catch, and he heard the jog-jog-jog coming through of running feet in the other tunnel. He turned and rushed back down the tunnel toward the Y again, a thousand horrible phantoms welling up in his mind. His suit was clumsy; his feet slipped once, and he went crashing to the ground, a sharp pain wrenching at his shoulder, but he dragged himself up again, and rushed on. At the Y he ran into David head-on, frantic with excitement. “I’ve found it,” David choked between gasps. “Come on, I’ve found it — ”
He started back up the left-hand tunnel, with Tuck hard on his heels. The tunnel curved, and then dipped down, running straight for a hundred feet or more. Then David slowed down, waving him to a halt. Up ahead was an opening into something with gloomy gray light filtering out. But David was pointing to the strip of dull gray material that ran across the tunnel, three strips that blended almost perfectly with the uneven ground, arranged just close enough together so that anyone not watching the path carefully would step on one of the strips, with the little shiny metal detonator caps that followed the strips —
“Murexide!”
David nodded. “I barely spotted it.” Gingerly he stepped between the strips, then across to the other side, and Tuck followed, his heart in his throat. A perfect booby trap for one who wasn’t watching closely for just such a thing. On the other side they hesitated for a moment; then David urged him on with a wave of a hand, and they hurried again toward the opening, and stopped short, almost teetering on the drop that lay before them. And they stood there and stared, peering dumbfounded at the incredible thing they saw there before them in the gloom —
It was not a vault, nor a battle station, nor even a stockade. It was a ship, standing upright on its jets in a tall, narrow crevice, with the open top camouflaged and sealed with gray plastic sheeting that blended perfectly into the rock. A pale gray light filtered down from above, and the huge ship stood like a ghost, tall and silent in the gloom —
Tuck stared at David, dumbfounded. “But — but a ship! But there’s no place to go with a ship! They’d be hunted down, if it took a thousand years. There’s no place in the Solar System they could hide — ” His voice broke off with a gasp as the implication of his own words struck him.
There was only one place where a ship would be beyond pursuit. Completely and utterly beyond pursuit.
There was only one conclusion possible.
The ship was a star-ship.