Part 24 (1/2)

It took ten minutes of scrambling over the treacherous surface to reach Greg. Tom saw his brother tugging at a huge chunk of granite that was wedged into a crevice in the rock. Tom got there just as the Major and Johnny topped a rise on the other side and hurried down to them.

The rock gave way, rolling aside, and Greg reached down into the crevice. Tom leaned over to help him. Between them they lifted out the thing that had been wedged down beneath the boulder.

It was a metal cylinder, four feet long, two feet wide, and bluntly tapered at either end. In the sunlight it gleamed like polished silver, but they could see a hairline break in the metal encircling the center portion.

They had found Roger Hunter's bonanza.

In the cabin of the scout-s.h.i.+p they broke the cylinder open into two perfect halves. It came apart easily, a sh.e.l.l of paper-thin but remarkably strong metal, protecting the tightly packed contents.

There was no question what the cylinder was, even though there was nothing inside that looked even slightly familiar at first examination.

There were several hundred very tiny thin discs of metal that fit on the spindle of a small instrument that was packed with them. There were spools of film, thin as tissue but amazingly strong. Examined against the light in the cabin, the film seemed to carry no image at all ... but there was another small machine that accepted the loose end of the film, and a series of lenses that glowed brightly with no apparent source of power. There was a thick block of s.h.i.+ny metal covered on one side with almost invisible scratches....

A time capsule, beyond doubt. A confusing treasure, at first glance, but the idea was perfectly clear. A hard sh.e.l.l of metal protecting the records collected inside....

_Against what? A planetary explosion? Some sort of cosmic disaster that had blown a planet and its people into the fragments that now filled the Asteroid Belt?_

At the bottom of the cylinder was a small tube of metal. They examined it carefully, trying to guess what it was supposed to be. At the bottom was a tiny stud. When they pressed it, the cylinder began to expand and unfold, layer upon layer of thin glistening metallic material that spread out into a sheet that stretched halfway across the cabin.

They stared down at it. The metal seemed to have a life of its own, glowing and glinting, focussing light into pinpoints on its surface.

It was a map.

At one side, a glowing ball with a fiery corona, an unmistakeable symbol that any intelligent creature in the universe that was able to perceive it at all would recognize as a star. Around it, in clearly marked orbits, ten planets. The third planet had a single satellite, the fourth two tiny ones. The sixth eleven. The seventh planet had ten, and was encircled by glowing rings.

But the fifth planet was broken into four parts.

Beyond the tenth planet there was nothing across a vast expanse of the map ... but at the far side was another star symbol, this one a double star with four planetary bodies.

They stared at the glowing map, speechless. There could be no mistaking the meaning of the thing that lay before them, marked in symbols that could mean only one thing to any intelligence that could recognize stars and planets.

But in the center of the sheet was another symbol. It lay halfway between the two Solar Systems, in the depths of interstellar s.p.a.ce. It was a tiny picture, a silvery sliver of light, but it too was unmistakeable.

It could be nothing else but a Stars.h.i.+p.

Later, as they talked, they saw that the map had told each of them, individually, the same thing. ”They had a star-drive,” Tom said.

”Whatever kind of creatures they were, and whatever the disaster that threatened their planet, they had a star-drive to take them out of the Solar System to another star.”

”But why leave a record?” Greg wanted to know. ”If n.o.body was here to use it....”

”Maybe for the same reason that Earthmen bury time capsules with records of their civilization,” Major Briarton said. ”I'd guess that the records here will tell, when they have been studied and deciphered. Perhaps there was already some sign of intelligent life developing elsewhere in the Solar System. Perhaps they hoped that some of their own people would survive. But they had a star-drive, so some of them must have escaped.

And with the record here....”

”We may be able to follow them,” Greg said.

”If we can decipher the record,” Johnny Coombs said. ”But we don't have any clue to their language.”