“This is…” For once, Charlie was at a loss for words.
“Scary,” I said. “I wonder if it’s just here, or everywhere.”
“I think everywhere,” the sheriff said, and squatted down. He came up with a gaudy diamond ring, an obvious Earth antique. “No scavengers came through here.”
Mystery or no, we were all famished, and searched out the cafeteria.
We didn’t bother with the refrigerator and freezer, but found a pantry with some boxes of fruit, meat, and fish. After a quick meal, we split up to search the place for some clue as to how long it had been deserted; what had happened,
The sheriff found a yellowed newspaper, dated 14 Galileo 128. “As we might have guessed,” he said. “The same day we started back, allowing for relativity.”
“So they disappeared the same time that our antimatter did.” My watch beeped, reminding me that it was almost time for Marygay to pass overhead. The three of us were just able to push open an emergency door.
The sky was slightly hazy, or we might have been able to see the escape ships as three close white spots drifting across the sky.
We were only able to talk for a few minutes, but there wasn’t that much to say. “Two unexplainable things happening at the same time most likely had the same cause.”
She said they’d continue a visual inspection from orbit. They didn’t have anything sophisticated, but Number Three had powerful binoculars. They could see our shuttle and the line it had made in the snow, landing, and the other shuttle, conspicuous under a snow-shedding tarpaulin.
The escape ships would have to land on their tails, so there had better be no one living within a few kilometers of where they came down–else there would be no one living. Our shuttle’s gamma-ray blast wasn’t 1 percent of the larger ships’.
It looked like that wouldn’t be a problem.
If there were people living in town, we’d have to go out into the country and find an alternative landing spot big enough and flat enough. I could think of a couple of farms I wouldn’t mind seeing put to that use, just for old times’ sake.
We found cold-weather gear in a locker room in the basement, bright orange coveralls that were lightweight and oily to the touch. I knew that it wasn’t oil, just some odd polymer that trapped a millimeter of vacuum between the suit’s layers, but they still felt greasy.
Hoping against hope, we went into the service garage, but the vehicles’ fuel cells were all dead. The sheriff remembered about an emergency vehicle, though, that we found parked outside. Designed to work in situations where power wasn’t available, it had a small plutonium reactor.
It was an ungainly garish thing, a bright yellow box set up for firefighting, remote rescue, and immediate medical aid. It was wide enough inside for six beds, with room for nurses or surgeons to move around them.
Getting into it was a problem, the doors locked shut with ice. We got a couple of heavy screwdrivers from the garage and chipped our way inside.
The lights came on when the door opened, a good sign. We turned the defroster on high and looked around–a handy mobile base of operations, now and when the rest of the crowd came down, as long as the plutonium held out.
A “remaining hours of operation” readout said 11,245. I wondered how to interpret that, since it probably used more power charging up a mountainside than sitting here with its lights on.
When the windshield was clear, the sheriff sat down in the driver’s seat. Charlie and I strapped ourselves into hard chairs behind him.
“The enabling code for emergency vehicles used to be five-six-seven,” he said. “If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to figure out a way to subvert it.” He punched those numbers into a keypad and was rewarded with a chime.
“Destination?” the vehicle asked.
“Manual control,” the sheriff said.
“Proceed. Drive carefully.”
He put the selector on FORWARD and the electric motor whined, increasing in pitch and volume until all six wheels broke free of the ice with a satisfying crunch. We lurched forward and the sheriff steered the thing cautiously around to the front of the spaceport, and took the road toward town.