Chapter 24: City and Space Base

Once back on Endeavour, I called a meeting to describe what we had found and to discuss how to proceed. Phyllis claimed that her main task was to determine how to decipher the reading material that we had acquired. Of course, we might have no means of knowing how the language would sound unless the cylinders proved to be our 'Rosetta Stone'. Charles Benson volunteered to assist her.

At last, we were under way towards what we had taken to be the ruins of a city. So it proved. A few of the buildings towered up to six or seven stories, but had once been much higher. The quantity of surrounding rubble showed that. The extent of the ruins reminded me of Los Angeles, which would put the population around three million. I decided we should examine a home in the suburbs if we could find one that had not fallen into too much disrepair.

Too many of the domestic buildings looked as though they had been constructed mainly of timber, which had rotted away. In addition, in the dormitory suburbs, plant life had largely taken over leaving only house-shaped mounds lining what was left of the streets. Eventually, we came to a house with a large paved drive in the front, and patios that looked as though they were made of concrete, around the other three sides.

This time, our away team comprised Lieutenant June MacTavish, our Doctor, and Petty Officer Robert Wells, our Physicist. They were away for about three-quarters of an hour. When they returned we rose to fifteen thousand feet, an altitude at which we felt was outside the influence of the radiation. Some of us gathered in my ready room to hear their report. We left the microphones on so that their report would be recorded as well as heard throughout the Endeavour. Robert kicked off.

"There was only one skeleton left in the house. It looked almost human in appearance."

"One notable exception to the human look was that what we took for hands were funny looking. They had five digits," added June. "but I think it looked like three fingers and two thumbs, both opposed."

"Right. We think that he had been the gardener. There were what looked like garden tools where he was sitting. There was also a tumbler and a bottle beside him. It looked as though he had just passed out and then died."

"Anything else of interest?" I asked.

"Yes," replied June. "I searched their sleeping quarters. It looked as though they had left in a hurry. There were light and fancy clothes left spread around. The only hardwearing utility clothes I found looked as though they were just about worn out. It looks as though they packed and left in a hurry, knowing that they wouldn't be returning."

"I found a room that was either an office or study," said Robert. "In it was this leaflet in that plastic they use as paper. Here it is. It suggests that they were being evacuated into space. This diagram suggests that their destination was the second planet of the companion star. Their written language, although it's completely strange, looks as though it is constructed in the same manner as ours. I think that here," pointing to the back page, "this leaflet shows a spaceport or something like it, in that direction." He was pointing off the port bow.

"It seems," continued June "as though the family was the father, mother and two almost grown children going by their clothes. There's also either an older sister or other relative or a female servant. I lean to the latter idea. From the size of the gardener, it looks as though they were about twenty per cent taller than us. Here is a family picture album I found. To further determine their size, I also measured one of the doorways that appeared in one of their pictures."

I decided, following the discussion, that we should move to the Space Port, as our next point of exploration. Lifting to twenty thousand feet, we spotted what we took to be as our destination. As we approached it, the more we were convinced that we were right. As we descended to the Port, some twenty-five miles or so from the City we could see that it was surrounded by a high wire fence.

The strange thing about it was that it appeared to be surrounded by a drift of snow or white sand.

A closer inspection showed that it was a line of sun-bleached skeletons. Obviously there must have been a last minute panic effort to board a space ship before the atmosphere drenched the area with fatal radiation. Moving towards the office buildings, there were some spacecraft laid out horizontally fronted by plaques on stone bases They looked remarkably like the Apollo craft displayed at NASA. There seemed to be little more that we could discover and I decided that we should take off for the second planet, Alpha Centauri B to see if the survivors reached there safely.