The Unorthodox Engineers

of relief. A few seconds later they were running like half-blinded madmen through the corrosive waters in the direction of the base camp, heedless now of the cracking lightning which had withdrawn to the edge of the rain belt. They were fortunately within a few steps of the base when the wall of sharp, abrasive sand, whipped to fury by a fantastic driving wind, bore down upon them out of the deep purples of the approaching night.

Two

“Welcome to Tazoo, Lieutenant!” Colonel Nash beckoned him into the office.

Fritz explored the still-smarting skin on his face and hands, and was still painfully aware of the puffiness around his eyes. “Thank you, Colonel. That was quite an initiation ceremony out there!”

Colonel Nash smiled fleetingly. “Unpremeditated, I assure you, but the weather is part of the reason you’re here. A ground-cat is the toughest machine available, but as you saw for yourself, it’s totally incapable of standing up to the environment. The low pH of the rain conspires with the sand to etch and tear the guts out of any transportation contrivance we’ve yet imported to Tazoo. When you consider atmospheric chlorine, hydrogen chloride, free sulphuric acid, plus high humidity and extreme ultraviolet radiation together with an additional nightly sandblast, you can guess that corrosion prevention isn’t the least of our troubles.”

Fritz shuddered involuntarily.

“I must admit,” said Nash, “that I haven’t always seen eye to eye with you before on the subject of unorthodox engineering, but if you can come up with a reliable way to transport the archaeological teams around this place I’ll at least be open to persuasion. Certainly no orthodox methods can give us transport on Tazoo at a cost less than the total budget for the entire mission.”

“What facilities have we?” asked Fritz.

“Anything you can find, basically. If you need anything shipped out from Terra you’ll need a damn good case to get it because of shipping costs, not to mention the time-delays on freight movements. Certainly we can’t afford to bring any more vehicles out here to be ripped apart. I’m relying on you to delve into your unorthodoxy and come up with something practical.”

“What progress has been made here?” asked Fritz.

“A little, but slowly,” said Nash, “largely because of the aforementioned transport limitations.

Nevill’s team have uncovered some real architectural monstrosities, but the real prize will be finding anything like technological artifacts. If they can do that, and if they’re half as weird as the rest of this planet, it will require all of your peculiar genius to identify and interpret them. We’re expecting to find some very unorthodox engineering from a culture which died around the time the last ice-age began on Terra.”

“Have there been any signs of a highly scientific culture?” asked Fritz. “The reports I’ve read don’t go into much detail on that.”

“The preliminary survey party found signs that the Tazoons had visited both of the moons of this planet. And we’re reasonably certain that they also reached the next planet sunward in this system and actually established a base there.”

“All this sounds highly promising,” said Fritz. “But a hundred thousand years is a long time. Would there be anything left of machines and mechanisms after such a period?”

“Normally no, of course, but Nevill theorizes that to develop a high-level functional civilization under these climatic conditions the Tazoons must have had some pretty sophisticated technology. Certainly, they knew well enough what they were up against.”

Van Noon nodded. The trouble was that what was sophisticated technology to one culture, could be impenetrably obscure black magic to another. U.E. had come across one or two of those already…

“Furthermore,” Nash continued, “ the moist conditions don’t penetrate very far down into the sand, so that the deeper an artifact is buried the greater are its chances of long-term survival. Deep exploration at a really promising site should give us a slice of Tazoon civilization in a very reasonable state of preservation. The bottom line is that we need only one good site to justify the whole Tazoon expedition.” He glanced up at Fritz. “And that’s precisely what I want you to help us achieve.”

The next day Fritz found Philip Nevill in the Archaeological HQ, apparently none the worse for his previous day’s exposure.

“Hullo, Lieutenant van Noon. What can we do for you?”

“Fritz. I hope you can answer a question. Do you know what happened to the Tazoons themselves—I mean, why did they become extinct so swiftly when they had achieved such an apparently high technological level?”

Nevill scowled. “You’re equating technology with the ability to manipulate environment and thus ensure a higher survival potential.” He shrugged. “I’m afraid I can’t answer that. Indications are that they abandoned the populated areas en-masse and migrated towards the equatorial regions. From distribution figures it looks as though the entire population set out for the tropics and were decimated on the way.”

He rubbed his hands over his eyes. “Fritz, this suggests they were fleeing from something biologically intolerable which claimed a great number in flight. That’s our best guess”

“Drastic climatic change?” asked Fritz.

“Climatic, no—environmental, possibly. We looked for evidence of major climate changes, but there’s nothing significant that we can trace. The only thing that is recent, geologically speaking anyway, is the sand.”

“The sand?”

“Mmm. Probably the result of some ecological imbalance. The major plains appear to have once included prolific forests, such as are still to be found in places around the temperate belts. For some reason, drought or fire or blight perhaps, these forests died. The results were typically Terran in their inevitability.”

“Soil erosion.”

“Yes, exactly, and on a catastrophic scale. Once the sand got to work on the unprotected soil nothing thereafter got the chance to germinate. More soil dried up and blew away, hence more sand. We’re still picking up viable seeds from the deep diggings, but all the shallow seeds are either dead or had started growth only to be uprooted.”

“When did this happen—the erosion?”

“Can’t tell with certainty, but it appears to slightly pre-date the extinction of the Tazoons themselves. Whether these two factors are related is something only further research can prove. But it seems likely. Does that answer your question?”

“Yes, but only to pose another,” said Fritz. “I don’t understand how any culture technically able to explore the neighbouring satellites could have been wiped out by anything as foreseeable and reversible as soil erosion. And why migrate to the tropics when the soil fertility remained in the temperate belts?”

“I don’t know,” said Nevill honestly. “It’s a difficult problem. The Tazoons were not even humanoid, and the probability is that neither their physiology nor their culture had anything in common with our own. It could be very misleading if we attempted to interpret their actions by simple extrapolation of what we might have done in similar circumstances.”

“A good point,” agreed Fritz. “I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I’ll bear it in mind. Thanks, Philip, you’ve given me something to think about.”

Having established that the U.E. squad was reasonably well quartered, Fritz turned his attention to the transport problem. This brought him back to Jacko who had compiled a transport survey which he presented with as much enthusiasm as if it had been his own death warrant.

“We’re in trouble, Fritz. Of the thirty ground-cats originally provided for the enterprise only ten are still functioning. Two hundred hours operating life on Tazoo reduces a cat to a condition where you couldn’t sell it for scrap. By sorting bits and pieces we could probably reconstruct another couple of cats, but no matter how you cut it, it’s not going to be very long before we start walking.”

Fritz stared disconsolately at a virgin notebook. “What about tractors and heavy equipment?”

“They’re not too bad—but only by virtue of the fact that most of them are still in sealed crates. Once they’re broken-out there’s no reason to suppose they’ll last any longer than the cats do. This combination of corrosion and