Their deceleration spiral swept them around the planet, cutting lower into the atmosphere, braking against it. And still there was nothing but mountains and lakes and oceans and more mountains.
On the eighth run, Hellman caught sight of a solitary building on a mountain top. Casker braked recklessly, and the hull glowed red hot. On the eleventh run, they made a landing approach.
“Stupid place to build,” Casker muttered.
The building was doughnut-shaped, and fitted nicely over the top of the mountain. There was a wide, level lip around it, which Casker scorched as he landed the ship.
From the air, the building had merely seemed big. On the ground, it was enormous. Hellman and Casker walked up to it slowly. Hellman had his burner ready, but there was no sign of life.
“This planet must be abandoned,” Hellman said almost in a whisper.
“Anyone in his right mind would abandon this place,” Casker said. “There’re enough good planets around, without anyone trying to live on a needle point.”
They reached the door. Hellman tried to open it and found it locked. He looked back at the spectacular display of mountains.
“You know,” he said, “when this planet was still in a molten state, it must have been affected by several gigantic moons that are now broken up. The strains, external and internal, wrenched it into its present spined appearance and—”
“Come off it,” Casker said ungraciously. “You were a librarian before you decided to get rich on uranium.”
Hellman shrugged his shoulders and burned a hole in the doorlock. They waited.
The only sound on the mountain top was the growling of their stomachs.
They entered.
The tremendous wedge-shaped room was evidently a warehouse of sorts. Goods were piled to the ceiling, scattered over the floor, stacked haphazardly against the walls. There were boxes and containers of all sizes and shapes, some big enough to hold an elephant, others the size of thimbles.
Near the door was a dusty pile of books. Immediately, Hellman bent down to examine them.
“Must be food somewhere in here,” Casker said, his face lighting up for the first time in a week. He started to open the nearest box.
“This is interesting,” Hellman said, discarding all the books except one.
“Let’s eat first,” Casker said, ripping the top off the box. Inside was a brownish dust. Casker looked at it, sniffed, and made a face.
“Very interesting indeed,” Hellman said, leafing through the book.
Casker opened a small can, which contained a glittering green slime. He closed it and opened another. It contained a dull orange slime.
“Hmm,” Hellman said, still reading.
“Hellman! Will you kindly drop that book and help me find some food?”
“Food?” Hellman repeated, looking up. “What makes you think there’s anything to eat here? For all you know, this could be a paint factory.”
“It’s a warehouse!” Casker shouted.
He opened a kidney-shaped can and lifted out a soft purple stick. It hardened quickly and crumpled to dust as he tried to smell it. He scooped up a handful of the dust and brought it to his mouth.
“That might be extract of strychnine,” Hellman said casually.
Casker abruptly dropped the dust and wiped his hands.
“After all,” Hellman pointed out, “granted that this is a warehouse—a cache, if you wish—we don’t know what the late inhabitants considered good fare. Paris green salad, perhaps, with sulphuric acid as dressing.”
“All right,” Casker said, “but we gotta eat. What’re you going to do about all this?” He gestured at the hundreds of boxes, cans and bottles.
“The thing to do,” Hellman said briskly, “is to make a qualitative analysis on four or five samples. We could start out with a simple titration, sublimate the chief ingredient, see if it forms a precipitate, work out its molecular makeup from—”
“Hellman, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a librarian, remember? And I’m a correspondence school pilot. We don’t know anything about titrations and sublimations.”
“I know,” Hellman said, “but we should. It’s the right way to go about it.”
“Sure. In the meantime, though, just until a chemist drops in, what’ll we do?”
“This might help us,” Hellman said, holding up the book. “Do you know what it is?”
“No,” Casker said, keeping a tight grip on his patience.
“It’s a pocket dictionary and guide to the Helg language.”
“Helg?”
“The planet we’re on. The symbols match up with those on the boxes.”
Casker raised an eyebrow. “Never heard of Helg.”
“I don’t believe the planet has ever had any contact with Earth,” Hellman said. “This dictionary isn’t Helg-English. It’s Helg-Aloombrigian.”
Casker remembered that Aloombrigia was the home planet of a small, adventurous reptilian race, out near the center of the Galaxy.
“How come you can read Aloombrigian?” Casker asked.
“Oh, being a librarian isn’t a completely useless profession,” Hellman said modestly. “In my spare time—”
“Yeah. Now how about—”
“Do you know,” Hellman said, “the Aloombrigians probably helped the Helgans leave their planet and find another. They sell services like that. In which case, this building very likely is a food cache!”
“Suppose you start translating,” Casker suggested wearily, “and maybe find us something to eat.”
They opened boxes until they found a likely-looking substance. Laboriously, Hellman translated the symbols on it.
“Got it,” he said. “It reads:—‘Use Sniffners—The Better Abrasive.’ ”
“Doesn’t sound edible,” Casker said.
“I’m afraid not.”
They found another, which read: Vigroom! Fill all your stomachs, and fill them right!
“What kind of animals do you suppose these Helgans were?” Casker asked.
Hellman shrugged his shoulders.
The next label took almost fifteen minutes to translate. It read: Argosel makes your thudra all tizzy. Contains thirty arps of ramstat pulz, for shell lubrication.
“There must be something here we can eat,” Casker said with a note of desperation.
“I hope so,” Hellman replied.
At the end of two hours, they were no closer. They had translated dozens of titles and sniffed so many substances that their olfactory senses had given up in disgust.
“Let’s talk this over,” Hellman said, sitting on a box marked: Vormitish—good as it sounds!
“Sure,” Casker said, sprawling out on the floor. “Talk.”
“If we could deduce what kind of creatures inhabited this planet, we’d know what kind of food they ate, and whether it’s likely to be edible
