In the end they did come, supporting Wilcox over the worst bits, keeping contact with the crawler by rope only. In the meantime Kosti prowled around and over the wreck, trying to find a hatch.
“It’s a rim prospector of a sort,” he reported as soon as Wilcox was settled on a rock to view the find. “But there’s something odd about it. I can’t name the type. And it’s been rooted there a good time. That hatch ought to be about here.” He kicked at a pile of loose gravel which banked in one side of the metal hulk. “I think we could dig in.”
Rip and Dane returned to the crawler and got the pioneer tools, always kept lashed to the under-carriage of that vehicle. With the shovel and lever they came back to work, taking turns at clearing the debris of years.
“What did I tell you!” Kosti was exultant as a black arc which must mark the top of an open hatch was uncovered.
But it was necessary to shift a lot more of the native soil of Limbo before any one of them could crawl into that hole. Rim prospectors were notoriously sturdy ships, if not so swift travellers. They had to be designed to withstand conditions which would shatter liners or disturb even the crack freight- and mail-ships of the Companies.
And the condition of this one proved that its unknown builder had wrought even better than he had hoped. For the smash of its landing had not broken it into bits. Its carcass still hung together, although parts were telescoped.
Kosti leaned on the shovel after he threw out the last scoop of earth. “I can’t place it—” He shook his head as if his inability to identify the type of ship worried him.
“How could any one?” demanded Rip impatiently. “She’s nothing but a scrap heap.”
“I’ve seen ’em smashed worse than this,” Kosti sounded annoyed. “But the structure—it’s wrong—”
Mura smiled. “Rather I would say, Karl, that it is right. I know of no modern ship which could so well survive the landing this one made.”
” ‘No modern ship’?” Wilcox seized upon that “You have seen one like this before then?”
Mura’s smile grew broader. “If I had seen one such as this plying its trade—then I would be five hundred, perhaps eight hundred years old. This resembles the Class Three, Asteroid Belt ships. There is one, I believe, on display in the Trade Museum at Terraport East. But how it came here—” he shrugged.
Dane’s historical cramming had not covered the fine points of ship design, but Kosti and Rip both understood the significance of that, and so did Wilcox.
“But,” the astrogator was the first to protest, “they didn’t have hyper-drive five hundred years ago. We were still confined to our own solar system—”
“Except for a few crazy experimenters,” Mura corrected.
“There are Terran colonies in other systems which are over a thousand years old, you know that. And the details of their flights are sagas in themselves. There were those who went out to cross the gap in frozen sleep, and those who lived for four, six and eight generations in ships before their far off descendants trod the worlds their ancestors had set course for. And there were earlier variations of the hyper-drive, some of which may have worked, though their inventors never returned to Terra to report success. How an Asteroid prospector came to Limbo I cannot tell you, but it has been here a very long time, that I will swear to.”
Kosti flashed his torch into the hole they had uncovered. “We can get in—at least for a way—”
Before the smash the prospector had been a small ship with painfully confined quarters. Compared to her the Queen was closer to a liner. And Kosti had to turn back at the inner hatch, unable to squeeze his bulk through the jammed door space. In the end Mura and Dane alone were able to force a path to what had been combined storage and living quarters.
But under the beam of their torches a fact was immediately clear. A great gap through which soil shifted faced them. This section had been ripped open on the other side, the hole later buried by a slide. But the smash had not done that, the marks of a flamer were plain on the metal. Some time after its crack-up the prospector had been burnt open, the reason plain. For the portion where they now stood had been stripped—although the traces of cargo containers were on the floor and along the crumpled walls.
“Looted!” Dane exclaimed as the light swept from floor to wall.
To his right was the telescoped section which must have contained the control cabin. There, too, were signs of the flamer but the unknown looters had had little luck beyond. For the holes revealed a mixture of rock and twisted metal which could never be salvaged. Everything forward of the one cargo section they stood in was a total loss.
Mura fingered that slit in the wall. “This was done some time ago—maybe even years. But I think that it was done a long, long time after the ship crashed.”
“Why did they they want to get in here?”
“Curiosity—a desire to see what she was carrying. A prospector on a long course is apt to make surprising discoveries. And this ship must have had something worth the taking. It was looted. Then, so lightened, the wreckage may have turned over, perhaps earthquakes resettled it and buried it more completely. But it was looted—”
“You don’t think that the survivors of its crew may have returned? They could have taken off in an escape flitter before the crash—”
“No, there was too long a time between the crash and the looting. This ship was discovered by someone else and stripped. I do not think that they—” Mura pointed to the fore-compartment, “escaped.”
Did Limbo have intelligent inhabitants, natives who could use a flamer to cut through ship alloy? but the globe things—Dane refused to believe that those queer creatures had looted the prospector.
Before they climbed out of the ship Mura pushed as far as he could into the fore-section. And when he inched out again he was repeating a number.
”Xc—4 over 9532600,” he said. “Her registry, by some chance it is still visible. Remember that: Xc—4 over 9532600.”
But Dane was interested in another point. “That’s Terran registry!”
“I suspected that it would be. She is Asteroid class—perhaps an experimental ship with one of the very early hyper-drives. She might have been a private ship, the work of one or two men, an attempt to pioneer in a new direction. Could that tangle ever be uncoiled, our engineers ought to discover some interesting alternate of the usual engine. It could be worth the effort to break through just for that—”
“Ahoy!” the voice from the outer air summoned. “What are you doing in there?”
Dane spoke into his mike, outlining what they had found. Then they squeezed out through the hatch.
“Stripped bare!” Kosti was openly disappointed. “Opened up and stripped bare. She must have been carrying something really worth while for all the trouble they took to do it.”
“I’d rather know who stripped her. Even if it was done years ago,” was Rip’s comment and it was evident that Wilcox agreed with him.
The astrogator pulled himself to his feet, leaning against a rock. “We’d better get back to the Queen.”
Dane glanced around. He was sure that the fog was thinning here as it had back around the ruins. If it would just clear—then they could take up a flitter and really comb this district! They had discovered no trace of Ali anywhere, and each step they took seemed to plunge them only deeper into mystery.
Rich and his party had vanished—into a stone wall if the crawler was to be relied upon. Now here was a ship which had been looted long after it had crashed. And somewhere deep in the heart of Limbo beat an unknown installation which might offer the worst threat of all!
They went back to the crawler and by the time Wilcox was once more established on it, the fog was retreating, more swiftly now. As it lifted they read on the scraped walls, in the rutted soil that this was or had been a thoroughfare in good use. Those who had come and gone this path had made it a lane of travel before the arrival of the Queen, some of those marks were far more than a few days old.
Survey’s tapes had said nothing of all this—the ruins, the installation, the wrecked ships. Why not? Had Survey’s report been edited? But Limbo had been put up to legal auction just as usual. Did it mean that Survey’s scout teams had not explored this continent to any extent—that seeing the evidence of a burn-off their investigation had been only superficial?
It was raining now, a drizzle which worked into the high collars of their tunics and soaked the upper linings of their boots. Unconsciously their pace quickened as the crawler took the homeward trundle. Dane wished that there was some way they could cut cross country and shorten the march which lay between them and the Queen. But at
