Jackpot

Clifford D. Simak Jackpot

I found Doc in the dispensary. He had on quite a load. I worked him over some to bring him half awake.

'Get sobered up,' I ordered curtly. 'We made planet-fall. We've got work to do.' I took the bottle and corked it and set it high up on the shelf, where it wasn't right at hand.

Doc managed to achieve some dignity. 'You needn't worry, Captain. As medic of this tub…'

'I want all hands up and moving. We may have something out there.'

'I know,' Doc said mournfully. 'When you talk like that, it's bound to be a tough one. An off-beat climate and atmosphere pure poison.'

'It's Earth-type, oxygen, and the climate's fine so far. Nothing to be afraid of. The analysers gave it almost perfect rating.'

Doc groaned and held his head between his hands. 'Those analysers of ours do very well if they tell us whether it is hot or cold or if the air is fit to breathe. We're a haywire outfit, Captain.'

'We do all right,' I said.

'We're scavengers and sometimes birds of prey. We scour the Galaxy for anything that's loose.'

I paid no attention to him. That was the way he always talked when he had a skin full.

'You get up to the galley,' I told him, 'and let Pancake pour some coffee into you. I want you on your feet and able to do your fumbling best.'

But Doc wasn't ready to go just yet. 'What is it this time?'

'A silo. The biggest thing you ever saw. It's ten or fifteen miles across and goes up clear out of sight.'

'A silo is a building to store winter forage. Is this a farming planet?'

'No,' I said, 'it's desert. And it isn't a silo. It just looks like one.'

'Warehouse?' asked Doc. 'City? Fortress? Temple?but that doesn't make any difference to us, does it, Captain? We loot temples, too.'

'Get up!' I yelled at him. 'Get going.'

He made it to his feet. 'I imagine the populace has come out to greet us. Appropriately, I hope.'

'There's no populace,' I said. 'The silo's just standing there alone.'

'Well, well,' said Doc. 'A second-storey job.'

He started staggering up the catwalk and I knew he'd be all right. Pancake knew exactly how to get him sobered up.

I went back to the port and found that Frost had everything all set. He had the guns ready and the axes and the sledges, the coils of rope and the canteens of water and all the stuff we'd need. As second in command, Frost was invaluable. He knew what to do and did it. I don't know what I'd have done without him.

I stood in the port and looked out at the silo. We were a mile or so away from it, but it was so big that it seemed to be much closer. This near to it, it seemed to be a wall. It was just Godawful big.

'A place like that', said Frost, 'could hold a lot of loot.'

'If there isn't someone or something there to stop us taking it. If we can get into it.'

'There are openings along the base. They look like entrances.'

'With doors ten feet thick.'

I wasn't being pessimistic. I was being logical?I'd seen so many things that looked like billions turn into complicated headaches that I never allowed myself much hope until I had my hands on something I knew would bring us cash.

Hutch Murdock, the engineer, came climbing up the catwalk. As usual, he had troubles. He didn't even stop to catch his breath. 'I tell you,' he said to me, 'one of these days those engines will just simply fall apart and leave us hanging out in space light-years from nowhere. We work all the blessed time to keep them turning over.'

I clapped him on the shoulder. 'Maybe this is it. Maybe after this we can buy a brand-new ship.'

But it didn't cheer him up. He knew as well as I did that I was talking to keep up my spirit as well as his. 'Someday,' he said, 'we'll have bad trouble on our hands. Those boys of mine will drive a soap bubble across three hundred light-years if it's got an engine in it. But it's got to have an engine. And this wreck we got…'

He would have kept right on, but Pancake blew the horn for breakfast.

Doc was already at the table and he seemed to be functioning. He had a moderate case of shudders and he seemed a little pale. He was a little bitter, too, and somewhat poetic. 'So we gather glory,' he told us. 'We go out and lap it up. We haunt the ruins and we track the dream and we come up dripping cash.'

'Doc,' I said, 'shut up.'

He shut up. There was no one on the ship I had to speak to twice.

We didn't dally with the food. We crammed it down and left. Pancake left the dishes standing on the table and came along with us.

We got into the silo without any trouble. There were entrances all around the base and there weren't any doors. There was not a thing or anyone to stop us walking in.

It was quiet and solemn inside?and unspectacular. It reminded me of a monstrous office building.

It was all cut up with corridors, with openings off the corridors leading into rooms. The rooms were lined with what looked like filing cases.

We walked for quite a while, leaving paint markers along the walls to lead us back to the entrance. Get lost inside a place like that and one could wander maybe a lifetime finding his way out.

We were looking for something?almost anything?but we didn't find a thing except those filing cases. So we went into one of the rooms to have a look inside the files.

Pancake was disgusted. 'There won't be nothing but records in those files. Probably in a lingo we can't even read.'

'There could be anything inside those files,' said Frost. 'They don't have to be records.'

Pancake had a sledge and he lifted it to smash one of the files, but I stopped him. There wasn't any use doing it messy if there was a better way.

We fooled around a while and we found the place where you had to wave your hand to make a drawer roll out.

The drawer was packed with what looked like sticks of dynamite. They were about two inches in diameter and a foot, or maybe a little more, in length, and they were heavy.

'Gold,' said Hutch.

'I never saw black gold,' Pancake said.

'It isn't gold,' I told them.

I was just as glad it wasn't. If it had been, we'd have broken our backs hauling it away. Gold's all right, but you can't get rich on it. It doesn't much more than pay wages.

We dumped out a pile of the sticks and squatted on the floor, looking them over.

'Maybe it's valuable,' said Frost, 'but I wouldn't know. What do you think it is?'

None of us had the least idea.

We found some sort of symbols on each end of the sticks and the symbols on each stick seemed to be different, but it didn't aelp us any because the symbols made no sense.

We kicked the sticks out of the way and opened some more drawers. Every single drawer was filled with the sticks.

When we came out of the silo, the day had turned into a scorcher. Pancake climbed the ladder to stack us up some grub and the rest of us sat down in the shade of the ship and laid several of the sticks out in front of us and sat there looking at them, wondering what we had.

'That's where we're at a big disadvantage,' said Hutch. 'If a regular survey crew stumbled onto this, they'd have all sorts of experts to figure out the stuff. They'd test it a dozen different ways and they'd skin it alive almost and they'd have all sorts of ideas and they'd come up with some educated guesses. And pretty soon, one way or another, they'd know just what it was and if it was any use.'

'Someday,' I told them, 'if we ever strike it rich, we'll have to hire us some experts. The kind of loot we're always turning up, we could make good use of them.'