Jackpot Read online

  Jackpot

  Clifford D. Simak

  Clifford D. Simak

  Jackpot

  I found Doc in the dispensary. He had on quite a load. I worked him over some to bring him half awake.

  "Get sobered up," I ordered curtly. "We made planet-fall. We've got work to do." I took the bottle and corked it and set it high up on the shelf, where it wasn't right at hand.

  Doc managed to achieve some dignity. "You needn't worry, Captain. As medic of this tub…"

  "I want all hands up and moving. We may have something out there."

  "I know," Doc said mournfully. "When you talk like that, it's bound to be a tough one. An off-beat climate and atmosphere pure poison."

  "It's Earth-type, oxygen, and the climate's fine so far. Nothing to be afraid of. The analysers gave it almost perfect rating."

  Doc groaned and held his head between his hands. "Those analysers of ours do very well if they tell us whether it is hot or cold or if the air is fit to breathe. We're a haywire outfit, Captain."

  "We do all right," I said.

  "We're scavengers and sometimes birds of prey. We scour the Galaxy for anything that's loose."

  I paid no attention to him. That was the way he always talked when he had a skin full.

  "You get up to the galley," I told him, "and let Pancake pour some coffee into you. I want you on your feet and able to do your fumbling best."

  But Doc wasn't ready to go just yet. "What is it this time?"

  "A silo. The biggest thing you ever saw. It's ten or fifteen miles across and goes up clear out of sight."

  "A silo is a building to store winter forage. Is this a farming planet?"

  "No," I said, "it's desert. And it isn't a silo. It just looks like one."

  "Warehouse?" asked Doc. "City? Fortress? Temple—but that doesn't make any difference to us, does it, Captain? We loot temples, too."

  "Get up!" I yelled at him. "Get going."

  He made it to his feet. "I imagine the populace has come out to greet us. Appropriately, I hope."

  "There's no populace," I said. "The silo's just standing there alone."

  "Well, well," said Doc. "A second-storey job."

  He started staggering up the catwalk and I knew he'd be all right. Pancake knew exactly how to get him sobered up.

  I went back to the port and found that Frost had everything all set. He had the guns ready and the axes and the sledges, the coils of rope and the canteens of water and all the stuff we'd need. As second in command, Frost was invaluable. He knew what to do and did it. I don't know what I'd have done without him.

  I stood in the port and looked out at the silo. We were a mile or so away from it, but it was so big that it seemed to be much closer. This near to it, it seemed to be a wall. It was just Godawful big.

  "A place like that", said Frost, "could hold a lot of loot."

  "If there isn't someone or something there to stop us taking it. If we can get into it."

  "There are openings along the base. They look like entrances."

  "With doors ten feet thick."

  I wasn't being pessimistic. I was being logical—I'd seen so many things that looked like billions turn into complicated headaches that I never allowed myself much hope until I had my hands on something I knew would bring us cash.

  Hutch Murdock, the engineer, came climbing up the catwalk. As usual, he had troubles. He didn't even stop to catch his breath. "I tell you," he said to me, "one of these days those engines will just simply fall apart and leave us hanging out in space light-years from nowhere. We work all the blessed time to keep them turning over."

  I clapped him on the shoulder. "Maybe this is it. Maybe after this we can buy a brand-new ship."

  But it didn't cheer him up. He knew as well as I did that I was talking to keep up my spirit as well as his. "Someday," he said, "we'll have bad trouble on our hands. Those boys of mine will drive a soap bubble across three hundred light-years if it's got an engine in it. But it's got to have an engine. And this wreck we got…"

  He would have kept right on, but Pancake blew the horn for breakfast.

  Doc was already at the table and he seemed to be functioning. He had a moderate case of shudders and he seemed a little pale. He was a little bitter, too, and somewhat poetic. "So we gather glory," he told us. "We go out and lap it up. We haunt the ruins and we track the dream and we come up dripping cash."

  "Doc," I said, "shut up."

  He shut up. There was no one on the ship I had to speak to twice.

  We didn't dally with the food. We crammed it down and left. Pancake left the dishes standing on the table and came along with us.

  We got into the silo without any trouble. There were entrances all around the base and there weren't any doors. There was not a thing or anyone to stop us walking in.

  It was quiet and solemn inside—and unspectacular. It reminded me of a monstrous office building.

  It was all cut up with corridors, with openings off the corridors leading into rooms. The rooms were lined with what looked like filing cases.

  We walked for quite a while, leaving paint markers along the walls to lead us back to the entrance. Get lost inside a place like that and one could wander maybe a lifetime finding his way out.

  We were looking for something—almost anything—but we didn't find a thing except those filing cases. So we went into one of the rooms to have a look inside the files.

  Pancake was disgusted. "There won't be nothing but records in those files. Probably in a lingo we can't even read."

  "There could be anything inside those files," said Frost. "They don't have to be records."

  Pancake had a sledge and he lifted it to smash one of the files, but I stopped him. There wasn't any use doing it messy if there was a better way.

  We fooled around a while and we found the place where you had to wave your hand to make a drawer roll out.

  The drawer was packed with what looked like sticks of dynamite. They were about two inches in diameter and a foot, or maybe a little more, in length, and they were heavy.

  "Gold," said Hutch.

  "I never saw black gold," Pancake said.

  "It isn't gold," I told them.

  I was just as glad it wasn't. If it had been, we'd have broken our backs hauling it away. Gold's all right, but you can't get rich on it. It doesn't much more than pay wages.

  We dumped out a pile of the sticks and squatted on the floor, looking them over.

  "Maybe it's valuable," said Frost, "but I wouldn't know. What do you think it is?"

  None of us had the least idea.

  We found some sort of symbols on each end of the sticks and the symbols on each stick seemed to be different, but it didn't aelp us any because the symbols made no sense.

  We kicked the sticks out of the way and opened some more drawers. Every single drawer was filled with the sticks.

  When we came out of the silo, the day had turned into a scorcher. Pancake climbed the ladder to stack us up some grub and the rest of us sat down in the shade of the ship and laid several of the sticks out in front of us and sat there looking at them, wondering what we had.

  "That's where we're at a big disadvantage," said Hutch. "If a regular survey crew stumbled onto this, they'd have all sorts of experts to figure out the stuff. They'd test it a dozen different ways and they'd skin it alive almost and they'd have all sorts of ideas and they'd come up with some educated guesses. And pretty soon, one way or another, they'd know just what it was and if it was any use."

  "Someday," I told them, "if we ever strike it rich, we'll have to hire us some experts. The kind of loot we're always turning up, we could make good use of them."

  "You won't find any", said Doc, "that would team up with a bunch like us."

  "Where do
you get 'bunch like us' stuff?" I asked him, a little sore. "Sure, we ain't got much education and the ship is just sort of glued together and we don't use any fancy words to cover up the fact that we're in this for all we can get out of it. But we're doing an honest job."

  "I wouldn't call it exactly honest. Sometimes we're inside the law and sometimes outside it."

  That was nonsense and Doc knew it. Mostly where we went, there wasn't any law.

  "Back on Earth, in the early days," I snapped back, "it was folks like us who went into new lands and blazed the trails and found rivers and climbed the mountains and brought back word to those who stayed at home. And they went because they were looking for beaver or for gold or slaves or for anything else that wasn't nailed down tight. They didn't worry much about the law or the ethics of it and no one blamed them for it. They found it and they took it and that was the end of it. If they killed a native or two or burned a village or some other minor thing like that, why, it was just too bad."

  Hutch said to Doc: "There ain't no sense in you going holy on us. Anything we done, you're in as deep as we are."

  "Gentlemen," said Doc, in that hammy way of his, "I wasn't trying to stir up any ruckus. I was just pointing out that you needn't set your heart on getting any experts."

  "We could get them," I said, "if we offered them enough. They got to live, just like anybody else."

  "They have professional pride, too. That's something you've forgotten."

  "We got you."

  "Well, now," said Hutch, "I'm not too sure Doc is professional. That time he pulled the tooth for me…"

  "Cut it out," I said. "The both of you."

  This wasn't any time to bring up the matter of the tooth. Just a couple of months ago, I'd got it quieted down and I didn't want it breaking out again.

  Frost picked up one of the sticks and turned it over and over, looking at it. "Maybe we could rig up some tests," he suggested.

  "And take the chance of getting blown up?" asked Hutch.

  "It might not go off. You have a better than fifty-fifty chance that it's not explosive."

  "Not me," said Doe. "I'd rather just sit here and guess. It's less tiring and a good deal safer."

  "You don't get anywhere by guessing," protested Frost.

  "We might have a fortune right inside our mitts if we could only find out what these sticks are for. There must be tons of them stored in the building. And there's nothing in the world to stop us from taking them."

  "The first thing", I said, "is to find out if it's explosive. I don't think it is. It looks like dynamite, but it could be almost anything. For instance, it might be food."

  "We'll have Pancake cook us up a mess," said Doc. I paid no attention to him. He was just needling me. "Or it might be fuel," I said. "Pop a stick into a ship engine that was built to use it and it would keep it going for a year or two."

  Pancake blew the chow horn and we all went in.

  After we had eaten, we got to work.

  We found a flat rock that looked like granite and above it we set up a tripod made out of poles that we had to walk a mile to cut and then had to carry back. We rigged up a pulley on the tripod and found another rock and tied it to the rope that went up to the pulley. Then we paid out the rope as far as it would go and there we dug a foxhole.

  By this time, the sun was setting and we were tuckered out, but we decided to go ahead and make the test and set our minds at rest.

  So I took one of the sticks that looked like dynamite and while the others back in the foxhole hauled up the rock tied to the rope, I put the stick on the first rock underneath the second and then I ran like hell. I tumbled into the foxhole and the others let go of the rope and the rock dropped down on the stick.

  Nothing happened.

  Just to make sure, we pulled up and dropped the rock two or three times more and there was no explosion.

  We climbed out of the foxhole and went over to the tripod and rolled the rock off the stick, which wasn't even dented.

  By this time, we were fairly well convinced that the stick couldn't be set off by concussion, although the test didn't rule out a dozen other ways it might blow us all up.

  That night, we gave the sticks the works. We poured acid on them and the acid just ran off. We tried a cold chisel on them and we ruined two good chisels. We tried a saw and it stripped the teeth clean off.

  We wanted Pancake to try to cook one of them, but Pancake refused.

  "You aren't bringing that stuff into my galley," he said. "You do, you can cook for yourselves from now on. I keep a good clean galley and I try to keep you guys well fed and I ain't having you mess up the place."

  "All right, Pancake," I said. "Even with you cooking it, it probably wouldn't be fit to eat."

  We wound up sitting at a table, looking at the sticks piled the centre of it. Doc brought out a bottle and we all had a drink or two. Doc must have been considerably upset to share his liquor with us.

  "It stands to reason", said Frost, "that the sticks are good for something. If the cost of that building is any indication their value, they're worth a fortune."

  "Maybe the sticks aren't the only things in there," Hutch pointed out. "We just covered part of the first floor. The might be a lot of other stuff in there. And there are all those other floors. How many would you say there were?"

  "Lord knows," said Frost. "When you're on the ground, you can't be sure you see to the top of it. It just sort of fades away when you look up at it."

  "You notice what it was built of?" asked Doc.

  "Stone," said Hutch.

  "I thought so, too," said Doc. "But it isn't. You remember those big apartment mounds we ran into in that insect culture out on Suud?"

  We all remembered them, of course. We'd spent days trying to break into them because we had found a handful of beautifully carved jade scattered around the entrance of one of them and we figured there might be a lot of it inside. Stuff like that brings money. Folks back in civilization are nuts about any kind of alien art and that jade sure enough was alien.

  We'd tried every trick that we could think of and we got nowhere. Breaking into those mounds was like punching a feather pillow. You could dent the surface plenty, but you couldn't break it because the strength of the material built up as pressure compressed the atoms. The harder you hit, the tougher it became. It was the kind of building material that would last forever and never need repair and those insects must have known they were safe from us, for they went about their business and never noticed us. That's what made it so infuriating.

  And material like that, I realized, would be just the ticket for a structure like the silo. You could build as big or as high as you had a mind to; the more pressure you put on the lower structure, the stronger it would be.

  "It means," I said, "that the building out there could be much older than it seems to be. It could be a million years or older."

  "If it's that old," said Hutch, "it could really be packed. You can store away a lot of loot in a million years."

  Doc and Frost drifted off to bed and Hutch and I sat there alone, looking at the sticks.

  I got to thinking about some of the things that Doc was always saying, about how we were just a bunch of cut-throats, and I wondered if he might be right. But think on it as hard and as honest as I could, I couldn't buy it.

  On every expanding frontier, in all of history, there had been three kinds of men who went ahead and marked out the trails for other men to follow—the traders and the missionaries and the hunters.

  We were the hunters in this case, hunting not for gold or slaves or furs, but for whatever we could find. Sometimes we came back with empty hands and sometimes we made a haul.

  Usually, in the long run, we evened out so we made nothing more than wages. But we kept on going out, hoping for that lucky break that would make us billionaires. It hadn't happened yet, and perhaps it never would. But someday it might. We touched the ghostly edge of hope just often enough to keep us thinking that it w
ould. Although, I admitted to myself, perhaps we'd have kept going out even it there'd been no hope at all. Seeking for the unknown gets into your blood.

  When you came right down to it, we probably didn't do a bit more harm than the traders or the missionaries. What we took, we took; we didn't settle down and change or destroy the civilizations of people we pretended we were helping. I said as much to Hutch. He agreed with me.

  "The missionaries are the worst," he said. "I wouldn't be a missionary no matter what they paid me."

  We weren't doing any good just sitting there, so I got up to start for bed. "Maybe tomorrow we'll find something else," I said.

  Hutch yawned. "I sure hope we do. We have been wasting our time on these sticks of dynamite." He picked them up and on our way up to bed, he heaved them out the port.

  The next day, we did find something else.

  We went much deeper into the silo than we had been before, following the corridors for what must have been two miles or more.

  We came to a big room that probably covered ten or fifteen acres aud it was filled from wall to wall with rows of machines, all of them alike.

  They weren't much to look at. They resembled to some extent a rather ornate washing machine, with a bucket seat attached and a dome on top. They weren't bolted down and you could push them around and when we tipped one of them up to look for hidden wheels, we found instead a pair of runners fixed on a swivel so they'd track in any direction that one pushed. The runners were made of metal that was greasy to the touch, but when you rubbed your fingers on them, no grease came off.

  There was no power connection.

  "Maybe it's a self-powered unit," said Frost. "Come to think of it, I haven't noticed any power outlets in the entire building."

  We hunted for some place where we could turn on the power and there wasn't any place. That whole machine was the smoothest, slickest hunk of metal you ever saw. We looked for a way to get into its innards, so we could have a look at them, but there wasn't any way. The jacket that covered the works seemed to be one solid piece without an apparent seam or a sign of a bolt or rivet.

  The dome looked as though it ought to come off and we tried to get it off, but it remained stubbornly in place.