Orphans of the Void
By MICHAEL SHAARA
Illustrated by EMSH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Finding a cause worth dying for is no
great trick—the Universe is full of them. Finding
one worth living for is the genuine problem!
In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet ofa star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stoodcounting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was anysignificance in the number. He had no idea.
"What do you make of it?" he asked.
Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried toscratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.
"Looks like a temporary camp," Ball said. "Very few buildings, and allbuilt out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways,maybe?"
Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weatheredstone jutted out of the sand before him.
"No inscriptions," he pointed out.
"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there'snot another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call itmuch of a civilization."
"You don't think these are native?"
Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.
Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of greatage. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old—too old.He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stoneridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticedthat the buildings had no airlocks.
Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: "Want to set up shop, Skipper?"
Steffens paused. "All right, if you think it will do any good."
"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. Thesethings are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. Andyou can see that the rock itself is native—" he indicated the ledgebeneath their feet—"and was cut out a long while back."
"How long?"
Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. "I wouldn't like to say off-hand."
"Make a rough estimate."
Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiledwryly and said: "Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know."
Steffens whistled.
Ball pointed again at the wall. "Look at the striations. You can tellfrom that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at leastseveral thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only afraction of that force."
The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been ininterstellar space for three hundred years and this was the firstuncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It wasan historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.
Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had builtthese had been in space for thousands of years.
Which ought to give them, thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell ofa good head-start.
While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffensremained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked drylyat the walls.
"Well," he said, "whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since."
"No? How can you be sure?" Steffens grunted. "A space-borne race wasroaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spearsa