So he saw what he might otherwise have missed—a depression marked in the soil where the sand had not drifted. On impulse he rubbed his fingertips hard across that faint mark. There was a greasy feel. He unfastened his helmet long enough to raise those same investigating fingers to his nostrils.
A rank odor—sweat of something alive—something with filthy body habits. He was sure of it! And because that thing must have crouched here for a long time in its well-chosen hiding place to watch the ship undetected, he could also believe it possessed intelligence—of a kind. Snapping down his helmet once more, he reported his find over the com.
“You say it must have been there for some time?” Ashe’s voice floated back.
“Yes. And it can’t have been gone long either.” He was basing all his deductions upon that lingering taint which had been imparted by a warm body to the dusty earth within the small shelter.
“No tracks?”
“They wouldn’t show in this stuff.” Travis scuffed his foot across a small fan of sand. No, no tracks. But there could only be one place from which the hidden watcher had come—those buildings half concealed by the creeping dunes. He stood up, walked forward, his hand swinging very close to the weapon at his belt. The sense of danger was very strong.
Ashe stood before the midpoint of the buildings—there was really only one as they could see now. Each of its two outlying wings was connected by a low-lying, windowless passage to the main block. Travis was familiar with the effects of wind and blown-sand erosion upon rock outcrops. Here the same factors had operated to pit surfaces, round and polish away corners and edges, until the walls were like the dunes rising about them.
There were no windows—no visible doorways. But at the end of the wing before Travis there was a dip in the sand dune, breaking the natural line chiseled by the wind. It was a break unusual enough to catch his alerted attention.
“Over here,” he called softly, forgetting that the helmet com and not the air waves carried his voice. Slowly, with the caution of a stalker after wary game, he moved toward that break in the dune. There were no tracks, yet he was almost certain that the disturbance had been recent and made by the passage of something moving with a purpose—not just the result of a vagary of the night wind.
He rounded the pointing finger of one dune which rose at his shoulder height against the wall, and knew he was right. The sand had obviously been thrust back—blocked loosely on either side—as if some door had opened outward from the building, pushing the sand drift before it.
“Cover him!” Ashe’s shadow crossed the sun-drenched sand of the dune, met the other one cast by Ross. With the two time agents at his back, the Apache began a detailed inspection of that length of wall.
Although his eyes could detect no difference in that surface, his fingers did when he ran them along about waist level. There was a strip here, extending down to the ground, which was not of the same texture as the substance above and to the sides. But though he pressed, pulled, and applied his weight to move it in every way he could think to try, there was no yielding. He was sure that that portion could open, to cause the marks in the sand.
At last, getting down on his hands and knees, Travis crawled along, trying to force fingertips under at ground’s edge. And so he discovered a harsh tuft of protruding hair. Combined efforts of knife tip and fingers worked the wisp loose. It was coarse stuff, coarser than any animal’s he had ever seen, each separate hair was larger than six strands of a horse’s mane. And it was gray-white in color, melting into the shade of the sand so it could not be distinguished against the dunes.
Having a greasy feel, it clung to Travis’ fingers. He did not really need the evidence of his nose to tell him that it was rankly odorous. He brought it back to Ashe, his distaste in handling it growing steadily. The latter put the trophy away in one of his belt pockets.
“Any chance of opening that?” Ashe indicated the hidden door in the wall.
“Not that I can see,” Travis returned. “It is probably secured on the inside.”
They studied the building dubiously. Behind its length, as far as they could judge, there was only a waste of sand dunes reaching out and out to the sky rim where the fire had played the night before. If there was any riddle to be solved, its answer lay inside this locked box and not in the desert countryside.
“Ross, you stay here. Travis, move on to the end of the wing. Stay there where you can see Ross—and me, as I go along the back.”
Ashe used the same care as the Apache had done, running his hands along the eroded surface, seeking any indication of another door which might possibly be forced. He went the entire length of the building and came back—with nothing to report.
“There were windows once and a door. But they were all walled up a long time ago, sealed tight now. We might pick out the sealing, given time and the right tools.”
Ross’s voice came through the helmet coms. “Any chance of getting in through the roof, chief?”
“If you’re game to try—up with you!”
Travis stood against the wall which refused to give up its secrets and Ross used him as a ladder, mounting to the roof. He moved inward and the two left on the ground lost sight of him. But on Ashe’s orders he made a running commentary of what he saw through the com.
“Not much sand—you’d think there would be more . . . Hulloo!” There was an eagerness in that sudden exclamation. “This is something! Round plates set in circles all over—about the size of quarters. They are solid and you can’t move them.”
“Metal?”
“Nooo . . .” The reply was hesitant. “Seem more like some kind of glass, opaque rather than transparent.”
“Windows?” suggested Travis.
“Too small,” Ross protested. “But there are a lot of them—all over. Wait!” The urgency in that last cry alerted both the men on the ground. “Red—they’re turning red!”
“Get out of there! Jump!” Ashe’s order barked loudly in all their helmets.
Ross obeyed without question, landing with a paratrooper’s practiced roll on one of the dune crests. The others scrambled to join him, all their attention focused on the roof of the sealed building. Perhaps something in the sun-repelling qualities of their helmets enabled them to see those rays as faint reddish lines cutting up from the roof far into the sky.
The skin on Travis’ bare hands tingled with a pins-and-needles sensation as if the circulation in it had been arrested and was not coming back to duty. Ross scrambled up out of the sand and shook himself vigorously.
“What in the world is going on?” There was an unusual note of awe in his tone.
“I think—some fireworks to discourage you. I believe that we may assume whoever lives in there is definitely not at home to curious callers. Not only that, but the householder has some mighty unpleasant gadgets to back up his desire for privacy. Probably just as well we didn’t find his, her, or its front door unlocked.”
Travis could no longer see those thin fiery lines. Either the power had been shut off, or the rays were now past the point of detection by human eyes, even with the aid of the helmet. That coarse hair, the repulsive odor—and now this. Somehow the few facts did not add properly. The hair, of course, could have been left by a watchdog, or the equivalent on this particular planet of a watchdog. That supposition would also fit with the low entrance into the building. But a watchdog that kept to carefully chosen cover, the best in the whole landscape, and stayed to spy, maybe for hours, on the ship—? Those facts did not fit with the nature of any animal he had ever known. Rather, that action matched with intelligence, and intelligence meant man.
“I believe they are nocturnal,” Ashe said suddenly. “That fits with all we’ve seen so far. This sun glare may be as painful for them as it is for us without helmets. But at night—”
“Going to sit up and watch what happens?” Ross asked.
“Not out in the open. Not until we know more.”
Silently Travis agreed to that. There was a furtiveness about the last night’s spying which made him wary. And to his mind this world was far more frightening and sinister than the fueling port. Its very arid barrenness held a nebulous threat he had never sensed in the desert lands of his own planet.