Tance was walking slowly toward the gun, peering nearsightedly up at it. “Quite complex, isn’t it? All those vanes and tubes. I suppose this is some sort of a telescopic sight.” His gloved hand touched the end of a long tube.
Instantly the gun shifted, the barrel retracting. It swung —
“Don’t move!” Dorle cried. The barrel swung past them as they stood, rigid and still. For one terrible moment it hesitated over their heads, clicking and whirring, settling into position. Then the sounds died out and the gun became silent.
Tance smiled foolishly inside his helmet. “I must have put my finger over the lens. I’ll be more careful.” He made his way up onto the circular slab, stepping gingerly behind the body of the gun. He disappeared from view.
“Where did he go?” Nasha said irritably. “He’ll get us all killed.”
“Tance, come back!” Dorle shouted. “What’s the matter with you?”
“In a minute.” There was a long silence. At last the archeologist appeared. “I think I’ve found something. Come up and I’ll show you.”
“What is it?”
“Doric, you said the gun was here to keep the enemy off. I think I know why they wanted to keep the enemy off.”
They were puzzled.
“I think I’ve found what the gun is supposed to guard. Come and give me a hand.”
“All right,” Doric said abruptly. “Let’s go.” He seized Kasha’s hand. “Come on. Let’s see what he’s found. I thought something like this might happen when I saw that the gun was –”
“Like what?” Nasha pulled her hand away. “What are you talking about? You act as if you knew what he’s found.”
“I do.” Doric smiled down at her. “Do you remember the legend that all races have, the myth of the buried treasure, and the dragon, the serpent that watches it, guards it, keeping everyone away?”
She nodded. “Well?”
Doric pointed up at the gun.
“That,” he said, “is the dragon. Come on.”
Between the three of them they managed to pull up the steel cover and lay it to one side. Doric was wet with perspiration when they finished.
“It isn’t worth it,” he grunted. He stared into the dark yawning hold. “Or is it?”
Nasha clicked on her hand lamp, shining the beam down the stairs. The steps were thick with dusk and rubble. At the bottom was a steel door.
“Come on,” Tance said excitedly. He started down the stairs. They watched him reach the door and pull hopefully on it without success. “Give a hand!”
“All right.” They came gingerly after him. Doric examined the door. It was bolted shut, locked. There was an inscription on the door but he could not read it.
“Now what?” Nasha said.
Doric took out his hand weapon. “Stand back. I can’t think of any other way.” He pressed the switch. The bottom of the door glowed red. Presently it began to crumble. Doric clicked the weapon off. “I think we can get through. Let’s try.”
The door came apart easily. In a few minutes they had carried it away in pieces and stacked the pieces on the first step. Then they went on, flashing the light ahead of them.
They were in a vault. Dust lay everywhere, on everything, inches thick. Wood crates lined the walls, huge boxes and crates, packages and containers. Tance looked around curiously, his eyes bright.
“What exactly are all these?” he murmured. “Something valuable, I would think.” He picked up a round drum and opened it. A spool fell to the floor, unwinding a black ribbon. He examined it, holding it up to the light.
“Look at this!”
They came around him. “Pictures,” Nasha said. “Tiny pictures.”
“Records of some kind.” Tance closed the spool up in the drum again. “Look, hundreds of drums.” He flashed the light around. “And those crates. Let’s open one.”
Doric was already prying at the wood. The wood had turned brittle and dry. He managed to pull a section away.
It was a picture. A boy in a blue garment, smiling pleasantly, staring ahead, young and handsome. He seemed almost alive, ready to move toward them in the light of the hand lamp. It was one of them, one of the ruined race, the race that had perished.
For a long time they stared at the picture. At last Doric replaced the board.
“All these other crates,” Nasha said. “More pictures. And these drums. What are in the boxes?”
“This is their treasure,” Tance said, almost to himself. “Here are their pictures, their records. Probably all their literature is here, their stories, their myths, their ideas about the universe.”
“And their history,” Nasha said. “We’ll be able to trace their development and find out what it was that made them become what they were.”
Doric was wandering around the vault. “Odd,” he murmured. “Even at the end, even after they had begun to fight they still knew, someplace down inside them, that their real treasure was this, their books and pictures, their myths. Even after their big cities and buildings and industries were destroyed they probably hoped to come back and find this. After everything else was gone.”
“When we get back home we can agitate for a mission to come here,” Tance said. “All this can be loaded up and taken back. We’ll be leaving about –”
He stopped.
“Yes,” Doric said dryly. “We’ll be leaving about three day-periods from now. We’ll fix the ship, then take off. Soon we’ll be home, that is, if nothing happens. Like being shot down by that –”
“Oh, stop it,” Nasha said impatiently. “Leave him alone. He’s right: all this must be taken back home, sooner or later. We’ll have to solve the problem of the gun. We have no choice.”
Doric nodded. “What’s your solution, then? As soon as we leave the ground we’ll be shot down.” His face twisted bitterly. “They’ve guarded their treasure too well. Instead of being preserved it will lie here until it rots. It serves them right.”
“How?”
“Don’t you see? This was the only way they knew, building a gun and setting it up to shoot anything that came along. They were so certain that everything was hostile, the enemy, coming to take their possessions away from them. Well, they can keep them.”
Nasha was deep in thought, her mind far away. Suddenly she gasped. “Doric,” she said. “What’s the matter with us? We have no problem. The gun is no menace at all.”
The two men stared at her.
“No menace?” Doric said. “It’s already shot us down once. And as soon as we take off again –”
“Don’t you see?” Nasha began to laugh. “The poor foolish gun, it’s completely harmless. Even I could deal with it.”
“You?”
Her eyes were flashing. “With a crowbar. With a hammer or a stick of wood. Let’s go back to the ship and load up. Of course we’re at its mercy in the air: that’s the way it was made. It can fire into the sky, shoot down anything that flies. But that’s all. Against something on the ground it has no defenses. Isn’t that right?”
Doric nodded slowly. “The soft underbelly of the dragon. In the legend, the dragon’s armor doesn’t cover its stomach.” He began to laugh. “That’s right. That’s perfectly right.”
“Let’s go, then,” Nasha said. “Let’s get back to the ship. We have work to do here.”
It was early the next morning when they reached the ship. During the night the Captain had died, and the crew had ignited his body, according to custom. They had stood solemnly around it until the last ember died. As they were going back to their work the woman and the two men appeared, dirty and tired, still excited.
And presently, from the ship, a line of people came, each carrying something in his hands. The line marched across the gray slag, the eternal expanse of fused metal. When they reached the weapon they all fell on the gun at once, with crowbars, hammers, anything that was heavy and hard.
The telescopic sights shattered into bits. The wiring was pulled out, torn to shreds. The delicate gears were smashed, dented.
Finally the warheads themselves were carried off and the firing pins removed.
The gun was smashed, the great weapon destroyed. The people went down into the vault and examined the treasure. With its metal-armored guardian dead there was no danger any longer. They studied the pictures, the films, the crates of books, the jeweled crowns, the cups, the statues.
At last, as the sun was dipping into the gray mists that drifted across the planet they came back up the stairs again. For a moment they stood around the wrecked gun looking at the unmoving outline of it.
Then they started back to the ship. There was still much work to be done. The ship had been badly hurt, much had been damaged and lost. The important thing was to repair it as quickly as possible, to get it into the air.