Mayer had met Tallis only once, and had never heard about the deaths of the two geologists.
'Damned fools, what were they looking for? Nothing to do with geology, Murak hasn't got one.'
Pickford, the old agent down at the depot, was the only person on Murak who remembered the two men, but time had garbled his memories.
'Salesmen, they were,' he told me, blowing into his pipe. 'Tallis did the heavy work for them. Should never have come here, trying to sell all those books.'
'Books?'
'Cases full. Bibles, if I recall.'
'Textbooks,' I suggested. 'Did you see them?'
'Sure I did,' he said, puttering to himself. 'Guinea moroccos.' He jerked his head sharply. 'You won't sell them here, I told them.'
It sounded exactly like a dry piece of academic humour. I could see Tallis and the two scientists pulling Pickford's leg, passing off their reference library as a set of commercial samples.
I suppose the whole episode would eventually have faded, but Tallis's charts kept my interest going. There were about twenty of them, half million aerials of the volcano jungle within a fifteen-mile radius of the observatory. One of them was marked with what I assumed to be the camp site of the geologists and alternative routes to and from the observatory. The camp was just over ten miles away, across terrain that was rough but not over-difficult for a tracked car.
I still suspected I was getting myself wound up over nothing. A meaningless approach arrow on the charts, the faintest suggestion of a cryptic 'X', and I should have been off like a rocket after a geldspar mine or two mysterious graves. I was almost sure that Tallis had not been responsible, either by negligence or design, for the deaths of the two men, but that still left a number of unanswered questions.
The next clear day I checked over the half-track, strapped a flare pistol into my knee holste'r and set off, warning Pickford to listen out for a mayday call on the Chrysler's transmitter.
It was just after dawn when I gunned the half-track out of the observatory compound and headed up the slope between two battery farms, following the route mapped out on the charts. Behind me the telescope swung slowly on its bogies, tirelessly sweeping its great steel ear through the Cepheid talk. The temperature was in the low seventies, comfortably cool for Murak, the sky a fresh cerise, broken by lanes of indigo that threw vivid violet lights on the drifts of grey ash on the higher slopes of the volcano jungle.
The observatory soon fell behind, obscured by the exhaust dust. I passed the water synthesizer, safely pointed at ten thousand tons of silicon hydrate, and within twenty minutes reached the nearest cone, a white broad-backed giant two hundred feet high, and drove round it into the first valley. Fifty feet across at their summits, the volcanoes jostled together like a herd of enormous elephants, separated by narrow dust-filled valleys, sometimes no more than a hundred yards apart, here and there giving way to the flat mile-long deck of a fossil lava lake. Wherever possible the route took advantage of these, and I soon picked up the tracks left by the Chrysler on its trips a year earlier.
I reached the site in three hours. What was left of the camp stood on a beach overlooking one of the lakes, a dismal collection of fuel cylinders, empty cold stores and water tanks sinking under the tides of dust washed up by the low thermal winds. On the far side of the lake the violet-capped cones of the volcanoes ranged southwards. Behind, a crescent of sharp cliffs cut off half the sky.
I walked round the site, looking for some trace of the two geologists. A battered tin field-desk lay on its side, green paint blistered and scratched. I turned it over and pulled out its drawers, finding nothing except a charred notebook and a telephone, the receiver melted solidly into its cradle.
Tallis had done his job too well.
The temperature was over 1000 by the time I climbed back into the half-track and a couple of miles ahead I had to stop as the cooling unit was draining power from the spark plugs and stalling the engine. The outside temperature was 130¡, the sky a roaring shield, reflected in the slopes around me so that they seemed to stream with molten wax. I sealed all the shutters and changed into neutral, even then having to race the ancient engine to provide enough current for the cooler. I sat there for over an hour in the dim gloom of the dashboard, ears deadened by the engine roar, right foot cramping, cursing Talus and the two geologists.
That evening I unfurled some crisp new vellum, flexed my slide rule and determined to start work on my thesis.
One afternoon, two or three months later, as we turned the board between chess games, Mayer remarked: 'I saw Pickford this morning. He told me he had some samples to show you.'
'TV tapes?'
'Bibles, I thought he said.'
I looked in on Pickford the next time I was down at the settlement. He was hovering about in the shadows behind the counter, white suit dirty and unpressed.
He puffed smoke at me. 'Those salesmen,' he explained. 'You were inquiring about. I told you they were selling Bibles.'
I nodded. 'Well?'
'I kept some.'
I put out my cigarette. 'Can I see them?'
He gestured me round the counter with his pipe. 'In the back.'
I followed him between the shelves, loaded with fans, radios and TV-scopes, all outdated models imported years earlier to satisfy the boom planet Murak had never become.
'There it is,' Pickford said. Standing against the back wall of the depot was a three-by-three wooden crate, taped with metal bands. Pickford ferreted about for a wrench. 'Thought you might like to buy some.'
'How long has it been here?'
'About a year. Tallis forgot to collect it. Only found it last week.'
Doubtful, I thought: more likely he was simply waiting for Tallis to be safely out of the way. I watched while he prised off the lid. Inside was a tough brown wrapping paper. Pickford broke the seals and folded the sides back carefully, revealing a layer of black morocco-bound volumes.
I pulled out one of them and held the heavily ribbed spine up to the light.
It was a Bible, as Pickford had promised. Below it were a dozen others.
'You're right,' I said. Pickford pulled up a radiogram and sat down, watching me.
I looked at the Bible again. It was in mint condition, the King James Authorized Version. The marbling inside the endboards was unmarked. A publisher's ticket slipped out onto the floor, and I realized that the copy had hardly come from a private library.
The bindings varied slightly. The next volume I pulled out was a copy of the Vulgate.
'How many crates did they have altogether?' I asked Pickford.
'Bibles? Fourteen, fifteen with this one. They ordered them all after they got here. This was the last one.' He pulled out another volume and handed it to me. 'Good condition, eh?'
It was a Koran.
I started lifting the volumes out and got Pickford to help me sort them on the shelves. When we counted them up there were ninety in all: thirty-five Holy Bibles (twenty-four Authorized Versions and eleven Vulgates), fifteen copies of the Koran, five of the Talmud, ten of the Bhagavat Gita and twenty-five of the Upanishads.
I took one of each and gave Pickford a £10 note.
'Any time you want some more,' he called after me. 'Maybe I can arrange a discount.' He was chuckling to himself, highly pleased with the deal, one up on the salesmen.
When Mayer called round that evening he noticed the six volumes on my desk.
'Pickford's samples,' I explained. I told him how I had found the crate at the depot and that it had been ordered by the geologists after their arrival. 'According to Pickford they ordered a total of fifteen crates. All Bibles.'
'He's senile.'
'No. His memory is good. There were certainly other crates because this one was sealed and he knew it contained Bibles.'
'Damned funny. Maybe they were salesmen.'
'Whatever they were they certainly weren't geologists. Why did Tallis say they were? Anyway, why didn't he ever mention that they had ord
ered all these Bibles?'
'Perhaps he'd forgotten.'
'Fifteen crates? Fifteen crates of Bibles? Heavens above, what did they do with them?'
Mayer shrugged. He went over to the window. 'Do you want me to radio Ceres?'
'Not yet. It still doesn't add up to anything.'
'There might be a reward. Probably a big one. God, I could go home!'
'Relax. First we've got to find out what these so-called geologists were doing here, why they ordered this fantastic supply of Bibles. One thing: whatever it was, I swear Tallis knew about it. Originally I thought they might have discovered a geldspar mine and been double-crossed by Talus - that sonic trip was suspicious. Or else that they'd deliberately faked their own deaths so that they could spend a couple of years working the mine, using Talus as their supply source. But all these Bibles mean we must start thinking in completely different categories.'
Round the clock for three days, with only short breaks for sleep hunched in the Chrysler's driving seat, I systematically swept the volcano jungle, winding slowly through the labyrinth of valleys, climbing to the crest of every cone, carefully checking every exposed quartz vein, every rift or gulley that might hide what I was convinced was waiting for me.
Mayer deputized at the observatory, driving over every afternoon. He helped me recondition an old diesel generator in one of the storage domes and we lashed it on to the back of the half-track to power the cabin heater needed for the 30¡ nights and the three big spotlights fixed on the roof, providing a 360¡ traverse. I made two trips with a full cargo of fuel out to the camp site, dumped them there and made it my base.
Across the thick glue-like sand of the volcano jungle, we calculated, a man of sixty could walk at a maximum of one mile an hour, and spend at most two hours in 70¡ or above sunlight. That meant that whatever there was to find would be within twelve square miles of the camp site, three square miles if we included a return journey.
I searched the volcanoes as exactingly as I could, marking each cone and the adjacent valleys on the charts as I covered them, at a steady five miles an hour, the great engine of the Chrysler roaring ceaselessly, from noon, when the valleys filled with fire and seemed to run with lava again, round to midnight, when the huge cones became enormous mountains of bone, sombre graveyards presided over by the fantastic colonnades and hanging galleries of the sand reefs, suspended from the lake rims like inverted cathedrals.
I forced the Chrysler on, swinging the bumpers to uproot any suspicious crag or boulder that might hide a mine shaft, ramming through huge drifts of fine white sand that rose in soft clouds around the half-track like the dust of powdered silk.
I found nothing. The reefs and valleys were deserted, the volcano slopes untracked, craters empty, their shallow floors littered with meteor debris, rock sulphur and cosmic dust.
I decided to give up just before dawn on the fourth morning, after waking from a couple of hours of cramped and restless sleep.
'I'm coming in now,' I reported to Mayer over the transmitter. 'There's nothing out here. I'll collect what fuel there is left from the site and see you for breakfast.'
Dawn had just come up as I reached the site. I loaded the fuel cans back onto the half-track, switched off the spotlights and took what I knew would be my last look round. I sat down at the field desk and watched the sun arching upward through the cones across the lake. Scooping a handful of ash off the desk, I scrutinized it sadly for geldspar.
'Prime archezoic loam,' I said, repeating Tallis's words aloud to the dead lake. I was about to spit on it, more in anger than in hope, when some of the tumblers in my mind started to click.
About five miles from the far edge of the lake, silhouetted against the sunrise over the volcanoes, was a long 100foot-high escarpment of hard slate-blue rock that lifted out of the desert bed and ran for about two miles in a low clean sweep across the horizon, disappearing among the cones in the south-west. Its outlines were sharp and well defined, suggesting that its materials pre-dated the planet's volcanic period. The escarpment sat squarely across the desert, gaunt and rigid, and looked as if it had been there since Murak's beginning, while the soft ashy cones and grey hillocks around it had known only the planet's end.
It was no more than an uninformed guess, but suddenly I would have bet my entire two years' salary that the rocks of the escarpment were archezoic. It was about three miles outside the area I had been combing, just visible from the observatory.
The vision of a geldspar mine returned sharply!
The lake took me nearly halfway there. I raced the Chrysler across it at forty, wasted thirty minutes picking a route through an elaborate sand reef, and then entered a long steeply walled valley which led directly towards the escarpment.
A mile away I saw that the escarpment was not, as it first seemed, a narrow continuous ridge, but a circular horizontal table. A curious feature was the almost perfect flatness of the table top, as if it had been deliberately levelled by a giant sword. Its sides were unusually symmetrical; they sloped at exactly the same angle, about 35¡, and formed a single cliff unbroken by fissures or crevices.
I reached the table in an hour, parked the half-track at its foot and looked up at the great rounded flank of dull blue rock sloping away from me, rising like an island out of the grey sea of the desert floor.
I changed down into bottom gear and floored the accelerator. Steering the Chrysler obliquely across the slope to minimize the angle of ascent, I roared slowly up the side, tracks skating and racing, swinging the half-track around like a frantic pendulum.
Scaling the crest, I levelled off and looked out over a plateau about two miles in diameter, bare except for a light blue carpet of cosmic dust.
In the centre of the plateau, at least a mile across, was an enormous metallic lake, heat ripples spiralling upwards from its dark smooth surface.
I edged the half-track forward, head out of the side window, watching carefully, holding down the speed that picked up too easily. There were no meteorites or rock fragments lying about; presumably the lake surface cooled and set at night, to melt and extend itself as the temperature rose the next day.
Although the roof seemed hard as steel I stopped about 300 yards from the edge, cut the engine and climbed up onto the cabin.
The shift of perspective was slight but sufficient. The lake vanished, and I realized I was looking down at a shallow basin, about half a mile wide, scooped out of the roof.
I swung back into the cab and slammed in the accelerator. The basin, like the table top, was a perfect circle, sloping smoothly to the floor about one hundred feet below its rim, in imitation of a volcanic crater.
I braked the half-track at the edge and jumped out.
Four hundred yards away, in the basin's centre, five gigantic rectangular slabs of stone reared up from a vast pentagonal base.
This, then, was the secret Tallis had kept from me.
The basin was empty, the air warmer, strangely silent after three days of the Chrysler's engine roaring inside my head.
I lowered myself over the edge and began to walk down the slope towards the great monument in the centre of the basin. For the first time since my arrival on Murak I was unable to see the desert and the brilliant colours of the volcano jungle. I had strayed into a pale blue world, as pure and exact as a geometric equation, composed of the curving floor, the pentagonal base and the five stone rectangles towering up into the sky like the temple of some abstract religion.
It took me nearly three minutes to reach the monument. Behind me, on the sky-line, the half-track's engine steamed faintly. I went up to the base stone, which was a yard thick and must have weighed over a thousand tons, and placed my palms on its surface. It was still cool, the thin blue grain closely packed. Like the megaliths standing on it, the pentagon was unornamented and geometrically perfect.
I heaved myself up and approached the nearest megalith. The shadows around me were enormous parallelograms, their angles shrinking as the sun blazed up
into the sky. I walked slowly round into the centre of the group, dimly aware that neither Tallis nor the two geologists could have carved the megaliths and raised them onto the pentagon, when I saw that the entire inner surface of the nearest megalith was covered by row upon row of finely chiselled hieroglyphs.
Swinging round, I ran my hands across its surface. Large patches had crumbled away, leaving a faint indecipherable tracery, but most of the surface was intact, packed solidly with pictographic symbols and intricate cuneiform glyphics that ran down it in narrow columns.
I stepped over to the next megalith. Here again, the inner face was covered with tens of thousands of minute carved symbols, the rows separated by finely cut dividing rules that fell the full fifty-foot height of the megalith.
There were at least a dozen languages, all in alphabets I had never seen before, strings of meaningless ciphers among which I could pick odd cross-hatched symbols that seemed to be numerals, and peculiar serpentine forms that might have represented human figures in stylized poses.
Suddenly my eye caught:
CYR*RK VII A*PHA LEP**IS *D 1317
Below was another, damaged but legible.
AMEN*TEK LG*V *LPHA LE*ORIS AD 13**
There were blanks among the letters, where time had flaked away minute grains of the stone.
My eyes raced down the column. There were a score more entries:
PONT*AR*H*CV ALPH* L*PORIS A* *318 MYR*K LV* A**HA LEPORI* AD 13*6 KYR** XII ALPH* LEP*RIS AD 1*19
The list of names, all from Alpha Leporis, continued down the column. I followed it to the base, where the names ended three inches from the bottom, then moved along the surface, across rows of hieroglyphs, and picked up the list three or four columns later.
The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1 Page 12