As he swallowed the last of his radish, h.e.l.lman stifled a sigh. Their last meal had been three days ago ... if two biscuits and a cup of water could be called a meal. This radish, now resting in the vast emptiness of their stomachs, was the last gram of food on board ship.
"Two planets," Casker said. "One"s burned to a crisp."
"Then we"ll land on the other."
Casker nodded and punched a deceleration spiral into the ship"s tape.
h.e.l.lman found himself wondering for the hundredth time where the fault had been. Could he have made out the food requisitions wrong, when they took on supplies at Calao station? After all, he had been devoting most of his attention to the mining equipment. Or had the ground crew just forgotten to load those last precious cases?
He drew his belt in to the fourth new notch he had punched.
Speculation was useless. Whatever the reason, they were in a jam. Ironically enough, they had more than enough fuel to take them back to Calao. But they would be a pair of singularly emaciated corpses by the time the ship reached there.
"We"re coming in now," Casker said.
And to make matters worse, this unexplored region of s.p.a.ce had few suns and fewer planets. Perhaps there was a slight possibility of replenishing their water supply, but the odds were enormous against finding anything they could eat.
"Look at that place," Casker growled.
h.e.l.lman shook himself out of his reverie.
The planet was like a round gray-brown porcupine. The spines of a million needle-sharp mountains glittered in the red dwarf"s feeble light. And as they spiraled lower, circling the planet, the pointed mountains seemed to stretch out to meet them.
"It can"t be all mountains," h.e.l.lman said.
"It"s not."
Sure enough, there were oceans and lakes, out of which thrust jagged island-mountains. But no sign of level land, no hint of civilization, or even animal life.
"At least it"s got an oxygen atmosphere," Casker said.
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, h.e.l.lman 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. h.e.l.lman and Casker walked up to it slowly. h.e.l.lman had his burner ready, but there was no sign of life.
"This planet must be abandoned," h.e.l.lman 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. h.e.l.lman 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."
h.e.l.lman 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, h.e.l.lman 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," h.e.l.lman 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," h.e.l.lman 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," h.e.l.lman said, still reading.
"h.e.l.lman! Will you kindly drop that book and help me find some food?"
"Food?" h.e.l.lman 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," h.e.l.lman said casually.
Casker abruptly dropped the dust and wiped his hands.
"After all," h.e.l.lman 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," h.e.l.lman said briskly, "is to make a qualitative a.n.a.lysis on four or five samples. We could start out with a simple t.i.tration, sublimate the chief ingredient, see if it forms a precipitate, work out its molecular makeup from--"
"h.e.l.lman, 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 t.i.trations and sublimations."
"I know," h.e.l.lman 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," h.e.l.lman 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," h.e.l.lman 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," h.e.l.lman said modestly. "In my spare time--"
"Yeah. Now how about--"
"Do you know," h.e.l.lman 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, h.e.l.lman 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.
h.e.l.lman 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 Sh.e.l.l LUBRICATION.
"There must be something here we can eat," Casker said with a note of desperation.
"I hope so," h.e.l.lman replied.
At the end of two hours, they were no closer. They had translated dozens of t.i.tles and sniffed so many substances that their olfactory senses had given up in disgust.
"Let"s talk this over," h.e.l.lman 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 for us."
"All we do know is that they wrote a lot of lousy advertising copy."
h.e.l.lman ignored that. "What kind of intelligent beings would evolve on a planet that is all mountains?"
"Stupid ones!" Casker said.
That was no help. But h.e.l.lman found that he couldn"t draw any inferences from the mountains. It didn"t tell him if the late Helgans ate silicates or proteins or iodine-base foods or anything.
"Now look," h.e.l.lman said, "we"ll have to work this out by pure logic--Are you listening to me?"
"Sure," Casker said.
"Okay. There"s an old proverb that covers our situation perfectly: "One man"s meat is another man"s poison.""
"Yeah," Casker said. He was positive his stomach had shrunk to approximately the size of a marble.
"We can a.s.sume, first, that their meat is our meat."
Casker wrenched himself away from a vision of five juicy roast beefs dancing tantalizingly before him. "What if their meat is our poison? What then?"
"Then," h.e.l.lman said, "we will a.s.sume that their poison is our meat."
"And what happens if their meat and their poison are our poison?"
"We starve."
"All right," Casker said, standing up. "Which a.s.sumption do we start with?"
"Well, there"s no sense in asking for trouble. This is an oxygen planet, if that means anything. Let"s a.s.sume that we can eat some basic food of theirs. If we can"t we"ll start on their poisons."
"If we live that long," Casker said.
h.e.l.lman began to translate labels. They discarded such brands as ANDROGYNITES" DELIGHT AND VERBELL--FOR LONGER, CURLIER, MORE SENSITIVE ANTENNAE, until they found a small gray box, about six inches by three by three. It was called VALKORIN"S UNIVERSAL TASTE TREAT, FOR ALL DIGESTIVE CAPACITIES.
"This looks as good as any," h.e.l.lman said. He opened the box.
Casker leaned over and sniffed. "No odor."
Within the box they found a rectangular, rubbery red block. It quivered slightly, like jelly.