She sighed, and shook her head. “We better hope it’s the radio,” she said softly. “I don’t pick up anything at all, in any broadcast frequency. It’s as if…”
“But it’s only been twenty-four years,” Steve said. Anita finished the thought. “Not long enough for everyone to die out.”
“I don’t suppose it takes too long,” Chance said. “Not if you work at it.”
“You know,” I said, “it’s just possible everybody left.”
“In what?” Steve gestured at the square of sky. “We took the only ship.”
“Man said there were thousands parked back by Earth. It would be a huge undertaking, but if they had to, they could evacuate Middle Finger in less than a year.”
“Some ecological catastrophe,” Marygay said. “All those mutations, the crazy weather.”
“Or another war,” Chance said. “Not with the Taurans. There are probably worse ones out there.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” I said. “They probably left a note. Or a lot of bones.”
——————————————————————————–
Chapter twenty
It took ten hours to maneuver the three ships to within reach of the shuttle, skimming three hundred kilometers over the planet’s surface. I got into the roomy one-size fits-everybody space suit and, after a clumsy hug from Marygay, managed to jet myself from airlock to airlock with only one overshoot.
The readout over my eye said the shuttle’s air was good, temperature cold but liveable, so I climbed out of the big suit and called the other two over. I had decided to take Charlie down, and, in case there was something Man could understand better than us, the sheriff. I would have taken Antres 906 if it could have been squeezed into the suit. The Taurans may have left a Braille note saying, “Die, human scum,” or something.
I asked the shuttle what was going on, but got no answer. Not surprising; it didn’t need a lot of brainpower to maintain a low parking orbit. But under normal circumstances, it would automatically have tapped into a brain planetside, to answer my questions.
I’d sort of expected grisly skeletons sitting in the acceleration couches. But there was no sign of human habitation, except for some coveralls floating around loose. I assumed the shuttle had been sent into orbit under autopilot.
After Charlie and the sheriff made their way over, and stashed the three suits and got everybody strapped in, I punched in the one-digit command for “Return to Centrus.” (So much for weeks in the ALSC machine.) The shuttle waited eleven minutes, and then began to angle down into the atmosphere.
We approached the small spaceport from the east, over the exurbs of Vendler and Greenmount. It was early thaw, snow still on the ground. The sun was coming up, but there was no smoke rising from chimneys. No floaters or people in evidence.
There were only two allowable landing paths, dead east and dead west, both fenced off from horizon to horizon. That wasn’t out of fear of crashing, although that might have occurred to somebody. Its primary function was to protect people from the shuttle’s gamma-ray exhaust, taking off.
The horizontal landing was smooth. Not a peep from the control tower. No floater came out to greet us, surprise. I popped the airlock and a light staircase spidered down.
Gravity was both reassuring and tiring. Our flight suits were not quite thick enough for the damp cold, and we were all shivering–even the genetically perfect sheriff–by the time we’d covered the kilometer back to the main building.
It was almost as cold inside, but at least there was no wind.
The offices were deserted and dusty. As far as we could tell, there was no power in the building. There was little disorder, just a few paper spills and drawers left open. No sign of panic or violence–no unsightly clutter of bodies or bones.
No notes written in the dust either: BEWARE, THE END IS NIGH. It was as if everybody had stepped out for lunch and kept going.
But they had left their clothes behind.
All along the corridors and behind most of the desks were tired bundles of clothing, as if each person had stopped where they were, undressed, and left. Flattened by years of gravity, stiff and dusty, most of the clothing was still identifiable. Business clothes and work coveralls, and a few uniforms. All of the inner and outer clothing piled on top of shoes.