by Bill Adams
Wongama snorted and disappeared.
“Good job,” I said. “But you called these artifacts bad news.”
“The worst. Evidence of what every archaeologist fears most—a previous expedition. These are human tools, from about twelve hundred years ago, broken and discarded during a dig. If you hold the copper grip on this one up to the light, you can see a trademark…There. Roughly translated—”
“ ‘From the cooperative foundry at Holmscroft, Avalon,’ ” I read. “ ‘Labor intensive for real value. Manufactured 2480. Product—’ I guess it would be ‘design,’ a number of words borrowed from Svenska and Deutsch—‘Product design Guild-approved 2235 A.D.’ Let’s see. 2235 Oldstyle would be 290 in our calendar, early colonial period.”
“You have a good eye for Ur-Linguish, Commissioner.”
“You sound surprised.”
She smiled, for once. “Sorry. The last sub-commissioner I dealt with didn’t strike me as a real archaeologist.”
“Indeed. Now, where is Avalon?”
“Was. It was one of the early colonies from Old Northern Europe that first opened up this fringe—died out since, hundreds of years ago. Perhaps their digging party was the one that contaminated this planet with Terran life; the timing’s about right.
“And that’s the reason why there are no small artifacts. The place has already been stripped. No excuse to give up yet, though. Those old-timers didn’t have an Otis system. Now,” she added with sarcasm, “if only we had one…”
We were back outdoors again, heading, I feared, for the mysterious but inevitable Otis system. The sun was not yet high, but had already burned the last of the dew off the wheatlike grass. The background insect noise had shifted from the mating exotica of the night into a workaday droning.
We rejoined the rest of the expedition where they stood, surrounding a much larger field shelter and the jumble of machinery it contained. Ariel was with them, looking anxious in the face of a no-win situation. Either she’d permitted amateurs to ruin the area, or she hadn’t done enough to aid their efforts. Everyone was waiting to discover my attitude—including me.
The Otis system consisted of a number of boxy robots, quarter- to half-ton units, some with treads, some with ground-effect skirts, and even a few with legs. Diggers and loaders, I supposed. What appeared to be the master device was much larger, mounted on a half-track vehicle.
Lagado must have memorized the brochure that came with the system. “If we could only get it working,” he forced out before anyone else might speak, “we could excavate the whole area to twenty-five meters’ depth in less than a week. Vertical-face mode or level-stripping. Every cubic centimeter of dirt sifted. Every artifact preserved, boxed, and catalogued.” And how long could Condé’s barrow elude that kind of search, I wondered.
“We rented the system with a grant from my university,” Wongama began.
“We all chipped in,” Foyle said sharply.
“But there was no provision for repair.”
“The whole system’s down?” I asked. “Too bad. But sometimes there’s nothing—”
“The peripheral units have no autonomy!” Hogg-Smythe said, shaking her finger in my face. “A terrible design! The central unit’s down, and we can’t run even the simpler slave units off a wristcomp.”
“What a shame,” I said. “But sometimes there’s just nothing—”
“I’ve traced the trouble to one small module in the central unit,” Foyle announced. “I’m sure that if I could just use the construction crew’s diagnostic and coding equipment, I could clear it right up. But Citizen Arsenovich only gives me a song and dance about interactive feedback and taking no chances with the Mehta Corporation’s property, blah blah blah. Perhaps if someone more diplomatic than I were to ask him”—she turned to face me—“he’d be more tractable.”
“But there’s no problem there!” Ariel said with relief. “When you asked us before, you wanted the whole system analyzed. If you’ve really isolated one small module, I’m sure Wu will have no objection. And since the commissioner will be here all this week to personally supervise the Otis at work, it’s too good an opportunity to pass up. Pull the module and we’ll take it back with us right away.”
“Excellent!” Foyle said. Diplomatic relations had been restored. “The plain should dig quickly. I can’t wait to get a crack at Ken’s ridge—or even the marsh.”
“You could stay and lay the groundwork.” Ariel was all aid and comfort now. “I’ll fly back and make sure Wu repairs the module.”
“Better if it’s done by someone familiar with an Otis,” Foyle suggested. “I’ll come.”
“That’s unnecessary,” I said. “I’ll be glad to take care of the module personally.”
I beat down her objections with bland insistence. Ariel spoke for everyone else:
“I’m sure the commissioner knows what has to be done.”
◆◆◆
Foyle had bundled the module into a small box along with hard copies of the schematics and manual. I did not drop it out of the flitter at two thousand meters, but the temptation was strong.
As marsh, then forest, sped away beneath the two of us, Ariel plied me with endless questions about business opportunities and living conditions on other planets. I couldn’t tell her much. I’d tended to stay on the fringes of the human sphere, away from the central worlds directly administered by the Column; besides, I was distracted.
The Otis system raised questions in my mind. If such a thing existed anywhere, why should someone with Condé’s resources tell me that there had been no fast way to excavate his barrow?
On another front, why should the one unit to conk out be the indispensable one? It could be sabotage: one of the archaeologists trying to keep the others from a find he intended to smuggle out for himself—possibly even Condé’s barrow. That would almost put us on the same side. In any case, I would have to retain total control of the Otis module, run the diagnostics myself, and announce that it couldn’t be fixed.
Ariel was flying the craft from Bunny’s seat of the night before; she had the Standard F license you’d expect of a bright young executive. Sitting next to her, in front of the locked-out manual controls, I’d been trying to look as though I were used to being chauffeured. Neither of us was prepared when the most urgent of the warning panels’ three alarms went off.
The flitter suddenly decelerated and lost a little altitude, though Ariel kept it in trim. “Power loss to the outer port blower,” she told me. “No readout on why, so far. Had to shut it down smoothly—uneven torque can rip them apart. No problem, but—” We dipped again, and the change in impeller noise was obvious now. “That was the outer starboard,” she reported coolly. “Same thing. Must be a general power-plant malfunction, because the radio went, too. But there’s a battery backup, and I’ve put it on automatic distress.”
“How bad is it?” I asked.
“We could fly all day on the inboard blowers,” she said. “We probably will. But you’d better put down that box and fasten your seat belt.” She punched through various diagnostic paths. “Without knowing why we’re losing power, I can’t say we won’t lose more. And these birds aren’t like airplanes; you can’t keep them stable on one engine. If either wing goes, I’ll have to cut the other. And if the tailfan goes, it’s probably best to go ahead and cut them both. It won’t glide well, but a few seconds without spin is all we need to eject.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she added. “I don’t think it will come to that. We’re only a few kilometers from base now, and—”
The alarm sounded again. The lights for both the port and tail blowers flashed red. Ariel had preset the shutdown; it was smooth.
Nothing is quieter than an aircraft when first you cut off all the engines. But then you hear the whisper of the wind.
“That’s life,” Ariel said, her voice tight but controlled. The emulator board continued to flicker with status lights,
reporting on the automatic trim of our glide. Ariel’s hand flipped up the small protective bubble over the ejector-seat button. Through the noseport I could see a break in the surging forest, but too far ahead.
“Ready?” Ariel said, and I grabbed her wrist before she could push the red button.
“Don’t panic!” she ordered, struggling with me as I reached past her to hit two controls. The trim lights went out; the whole panel went dark. We stopped gliding and began to fall.
Chapter Seven
With the thought of sabotage already in my mind, I’d instinctively ripped Ariel’s hand away from the red button; it would have been too easy for someone to have booby-trapped the ejection seats. The rest was force of habit, if a hundred years out of date. I killed the Standard F dash in order to attempt a restart under good old manual control.
The tail of the flyer gave a sickening swing upward as we nose-dived into the trees. I had to release Ariel’s wrist to trim the foils, but she believed in me or my uniform and didn’t reach for the ejector again. I flipped the last toggle in the restart cycle and waited, waited, waited—some fraction of a second—the planet a spiked club swung at our faces.
But under direct control all five blowers caught. They registered full power—they’d never really lost it—and even though I knew, hauling back on the stick, that it was too late to avoid a crash, I had a measure of control now, and I could hope to make it survivable.
The nose pulled up sharply as we decelerated. We hit in a shallow dive rather than a plunge, and at first the thin treetops bent and parted beneath us, almost a safety net.
But then something wrenched us sideways with terrific force and an impeller sprayed green confetti across the noseport with a buzz-saw shriek that just as suddenly choked short. The opposite blower kicked upward, standing us on one wing even as we plowed ahead. I overcorrected. The craft bottomed and skipped, skipped and bottomed again randomly across the strange broken plain of treetops and upper branches. The rudder was gone and a second engine was smashed, while the whiplash and the whirling made real control impossible. All I could hope to do was hang on long enough to fire cushion-bursts at the last second, when we broke through—
Always a dream of falling—
“Wake up, sir!”
Crashing sounds became the lapping of liquid; onrushing leaves shrank to shining green pinpoints…
“Wha—?”
Distant darkness, starred with a thousand flashing lights, then a dark face, close, glistening with drops of sweat.
“You gotta wake up, sir, we’re counting on you!”
It was Entzwame, the chief petty officer in charge of security; he reached down through myriad swirling colors and shook my bare shoulder. I was in a glass coffin. No, a suspend-sleep tank. Warm water rinsed off the suspend-gel and warm drafts of orange air dried me, but inside I was still cold, blue to the bone.
I snatched at trailing mental wisps—which dream was this? The suspend-sleep tank had just sent me through one of my old outer-space fantasies: fighting the controls of a plunging shuttle with a beautiful girl at my side—infinitely preferable to real life on a navy ship. “I feel sick. Something wrong with the tank?” I asked. The words sounded as if I’d said them many times before, like an actor trapped in a long run. Trapped…“Did I miss a wake-up?”
“No! Please focus on me, sir. Here, sir. Look at me, you bastard, sir!”
“Larkspur? What the hell do you expect from him?” said a high-pitched voice. “He was half-crazy to begin with!”
Entzwame snarled. “Shut the fuck up!” Back to me: “Lieutenant Larkspur? You understand where you are, don’t you?”
“His eyes aren’t spinning too bad,” someone said. “Just get the codes out of him, maybe.”
I tried to sit up, but failed, while everything around me swam violently in shades of goose-shit green.
The captain’s face loomed over Entzwame’s shoulder. I was afraid he’d chew me out, but what he said in his Academy-accented baritone was, “And do you, in fact, know the muffin man?”
“Get him outta here,” Entzwame whispered to one side.
“The muffin man. The muffin man. And do you know where he lives?” the captain went on. “I know, oh yes, I know where he lives.” His professionally jovial face turned strange and sly. “I know where he is this very instant in space and time. But he’s out of space. And he’s out of time.”
A hand on his shoulder. The high-pitched voice again. “Here you go, Cap’n, thatta boy—You sure do know your knots, don’t you, sir?” And I recognized the speaker as he led the captain away—Fleischer, the cook. But we weren’t in the galley, or in the sleep bay either. We were on the bridge. The bridge of the Barbarossa, its banks of instruments flashing randomly and its holo globe displaying some milky and impossible hallucination.
I pulled myself up against one side of the glass tank, shivering in my nakedness. “Why wheel me onto the bridge? Where’s the O.O.D.? I feel whacked-out, Chief, did I miss a wake-up?”
“You gotta listen to me, Lieutenant,” Entzwame pleaded. “The sleep tanks went bad. All of them. A few of us at least got wake-ups, but we couldn’t get out and fix anything until just yesterday. And, Lieutenant, the officers didn’t get any weekly wake-ups. None of you except—”
“Who’s running the ship? How many weeks did I miss?”
“You gotta keep your grip now, Lieutenant, we’re counting on you. You’ve been under for four months, sir.”
“What? No.” I shook my head, and regretted it as things came apart, then flowed back together. “No, Chief. Four months is too much. People go crazy. Just one month without a reality check and you lose it all, Entzwame, you lose…everything. Who has the conn? The captain’s not—”
“He’s gone, Lieutenant. They’re all gone, Forrester, Ohara, Lumumba, they’re all stark raving, we got most of them tied down, you’re the last one to wake up and you gotta hold on.”
I slumped back into the gel pad. Cold, colder.
“I know this dream,” I said, trying to reassure him.
Entzwame shook me violently. “No!” he shouted. “No more dreams, sir! It’s worse than I said.”
“That’s right, worse, I remember this one. Shipboard emergency, captain helpless, it’s up to me. Fate of the ship, fate of the Alignment, fate of…” He didn’t look reassured; I had to stop babbling. Straight face, straight spine, play it out. “You say it’s worse than that?”
A big man, he yanked me up by the armpits, out of the tank. His face loomed before me, a reflection in smoked glass. “You’re with me now, aren’t you, sir?”
“What?…” So cold, fresh from the freezer, the drugs still in my blood…
A wizened white woman’s face erupted into existence next to me. “The computer’s sick, too,” she said, all the tragedy of time in her voice.
“Gladys,” Entzwame said tenderly. She winked a tear at me and disappeared.
“Look.” He flew me in his powerful warm arms to the captain’s board. The colored lights tried to blink in some pattern, but failed pathetically. I shook off Entzwame’s hands and managed to lean upright—but the holo tank refused to play its part. What was that, oozing against the gridlines? An insane amoeba, a woman’s passion, a coalescing galaxy? The scale had an error reading of plus or minus infinity, which was the length of my fingers as I reached for the function keys. Error calls marched up screens.
The skeleton crew had gathered around me in the requisite worshipful formation, though they kept flickering in and out, particularly Gladys—but that was only fair, she was a ranch hand from my uncle’s farm on Wayback, and didn’t belong there at all—and I was dutifully trying to feel my way into the savior-prince role. But it wasn’t coming. Data, data, everywhere, and not a thought to think.
Entzwame finally fed me a cue line. “The universe has shrunk, sir. Nothing in it but us, and today—it’s getting smaller, collapsing in on itself! That’s what the captain
said when he saw it.”
“Well, he’s hopeless, isn’t he? Get hold of yourself,” I said. It was ludicrous, but he took it from me; he wanted to hear it. “The computer’s sick, that’s all. We’re not reading the real universe. Am I the only officer on his feet?”
Entzwame shook his head, and mine spun. “Lieutenant Helter got out of his tank before anybody, sir, I don’t know why. He wasn’t even in the wake-and-walk rotation, but he got out—”
“Should have woken us,” I said.
“Shoulda let us out!”—a parrot shriek.
“Shuddup!” Entzwame turned back to me. “Helter’s not clear about when he got out, and the record’s been blanked. He looks sane, he talks sane, but crazy things have happened and only he could have done them. He’s fired the p-spacer at least once—”
“Okay, that’s why we have a praeterspace drive, in case the survey goes sour. So he tried to take us home?”
“No, sir, he sent us into p-space, but without a target star.”
“Can’t have, oh God, we could be anywhere in the universe, then…”
“The universe has shrunk, sir!”
“Will you shut up with that, Chief? Good man.” I swung back to recheck the screens, and—seeing its opportunity—the deck hit me very hard in the face.
Upright again. A large black hand caressed my face; a thumb pulled back my eyelid; a huge bloodshot eye peered into my brain. I almost fell into the shimmering chocolate pool, diving board quaking beneath my feet. But I shook off the hands again.
“Counting on you, sir.”
“I remember the scene, thanks.”
“Never mind the outside view, sir, it’s crazy. Gladys, show the lieutenant the p-space bay.” Small white hands flew over the keys.
It was like an Academy classroom exercise, emergency refitting. “That’s the field-shaper ring,” I said dutifully, “but the forward arc’s been disassembled. The p-space generator’s been retracted straight back across the cargo bay into the shuttle anterior, followed by the shaper—I know this one! Emergency two-man escape contingency for a wrecked ship—”