"Of course you'll need maps. An army should never travel blind."
"Not much of an army. Six of us—seven, if Liddy Morse comes along."
"No. Not seven, and not six. I'm sorry, Dalton, I don't mind Morse going, if you want her; but Rombelle stays here."
"I need him ashore."
"You're not going ashore, either—at least, you're not going with the first party."
Chan stood up. "Don't give me that bullshit. I have to lead the shore party. Don't forget that I'm in charge now."
"No. You would have been in charge if we had reached the Geyser Swirl, but we never did. Look, Dalton, I'm not making a power play. I'm minimizing risks. No one in his right mind sends half the total strength of an expedition on a first scouting party, and I'm agreeing on close to that. Four people go. Maybe an alien, too—we can't control them. Pick who you like of your team, provided that it's not you and not Rombelle. You both stay here. I'm taking your word for it that Rombelle is something special when it comes to equipment fix-up."
"He is. That's why the shore party needs him."
"It's also the reason he can't go. Suppose there's mechanical trouble with this ship? It looks and sounds worse every hour. How would you like the shore party to be stranded, with no Hero's Return to come back to or to rely on for supplies?" Korin waited for Chan's slow nod. "Then that's the way it has to be. You'll think we're sending an army anyway, when you hear me talking to our crazy alien companions. I'm going to sound like rage and destruction for them. They'll shit bricks—I mean, if any of them shits anything at all."
* * *
After Dag Korin and Chan Dalton had left for the general's private quarters, the remaining party broke into two groups.
Most of the members of the old team, plus Liddy, drifted off toward the rear of the ship in the direction that Dag Korin and Chan Dalton had taken. The Stellar Group aliens followed the slow-moving Angel toward the ship's sunroom and garden. Remaining in the fire control room were only Tully O'Toole and Elke Siry.
"D'you mind if I stay? Or am I in your way?" Tully was hanging around, watching Elke and looking shaky and dejected.
"You're not in my way unless you interfere with my work." Elke was studying images taken by the two orbiters, selecting a few for display with increased detail. "You people really love Chan Dalton, don't you?"
"I can't speak for the rest, but he saved me from worse than death." When Elke gave him a skeptical glance from the corner of one eye, he went on. "I'm talking about Paradox addiction. Do you know what that is?"
She lost interest in the displays and turned to face him.
"Not exactly. But I know something that can match it." She pulled her high-necked white blouse all the way down to her right collarbone, to reveal ugly scar tissue in the shape of a fiery star.
"Slither!" In his astonishment Tully reached out to touch the blemish on her white skin, but she stiffened and jerked away. He sat back and shook his tousled head. "I can't believe this. You and Slither. It's so disgusting, and you're so—so—"
"Pure and spotless and absolutely perfect?" Elke gave him a grim smile, revealing the prominent canines. "I suppose you've been reading about me in the ship's files. You shouldn't believe most of that. I wrote it myself. I decided what to put in—and what to leave out."
"But Slither. How did you get hooked?"
"I was seventeen. That's when I knew I was more intelligent than anyone in the universe. I confused that with understanding about life. I'd heard of the Slithers—we all had—but I knew they could never snare me. I was too smart for that. But I let one sit on my shoulder, and it felt wonderful . . ."
"And it had you. Where did it lodge?"
"Right above my liver. I guess I was lucky, in three cases out of ten it heads for the brain."
"What saved you?"
"You mean who. General Korin served with my grandfather, out on the Perimeter. When my grandpa was dying, the General promised that when he came back to Sol he would look me up. I should have been easy to find, because I was a star researcher at the Trieste Institute for Advanced Study. And I was there—almost. General Korin tracked me down a kilometer or two away, in a Slither mating cellar. He confirmed who I was—I could still tell him my name—and he went away. He didn't try to talk to me, didn't ask what had happened. He came back the next day with three of his officers, bundled me up in a sheet, and shanghaied me away into space."
Elke studied Tully's gaunt features, then turned back to her work at the displays. "I didn't think so at the time, but I guess I had things easy. I had the operation for Slither removal and the chemotherapy to end Slither sexual addiction. But I was on Helene, with round-the-clock nursing, not in another universe wondering if I was ever going home. But you're improving, Tully. I see it every day. The worst is over."
"I'd like to think you're right, but I still dream each night. In my dream I'm sitting there with the little purple sphere in my fist, and I'm all set to touch it to my wrist. Deep inside I know that I mustn't, that if I do it will start all over again. But I can't stop my hand. It brings the Paradox globe closer and closer to my skin."
"Ah, I have a dream like that." Elke's face took on an odd wistfulness. "I'm sitting alone, and the Slither is still inside me. It begins calling, `Go and bring me a mate. Bring us both ecstasy.' It isn't lying. When you and somebody else with a Slither have sex it's too good to be true. So I start to stand up, and I'm on the way to the rendezvous point, and I have the promise of ecstasy squared. But I know it will soon lead to death."
"That's it! That's it exactly. You mustn't touch, but you want it so much. You've felt it, too." Again Tully reached out toward Elke, again he pulled back when he saw her flinch.
He cursed his own lack of sensitivity. No wonder, after being a Slither slave—say something, anything. "So it was Dag Korin saved you. I'd never have guessed that."
"Why else would I be here, on a ship lost at the end of the universe?" She would not look at him. She had focused her attention on the displays. "No, not lost in the universe. Lost in the multiverse, an infinite set of universes. I'm here for the same reason as you. You came because Chan Dalton wanted you to, I came because Dag Korin wanted me to. This turns out to be the most exciting thing that could happen to a scientist, but I didn't know that when I agreed to come. Couldn't you tell I was doing it for the General?"
Tully said nothing, and she looked away from the screens to stare at him. "What is it? What's wrong now?"
"Nothing."
"That's a lie, Tully O'Toole. Your face usually looks white as something dredged from the seabed, and now it's all pink. What did I say?"
"You said not a word. It's what I thought."
"So tell me what."
"It's so absurd. I thought that you were here because you were Dag Korin's"—Tully screwed up his face—"well, this only proves what an ass I am. I thought you were Dag Korin's mistress."
"A woman could do worse than General Korin, a lot worse. But me, his mistress? That's a laugh." Elke gave a snort that sounded nothing like a laugh. "I couldn't let him—or any man—"
Elke turned away and bent her blond head over the control board.
"I understand," Tully said quickly. "After the Slither, any touch would be too much. But it's all right now I know. Do you want me to go?"
"No, I'd rather that you stay. Two untouchables together. But I must keep on working."
"Of course you must. Can I help? I once had a working brain, and a good pair of eyes." Tully moved so that he could study the screen, being careful to keep well clear of Elke. "Do you know what you're looking at?"
"I'm learning. This is the view from one of the orbiters, just before it stopped recording. The smooth dark area is the sea, and the Hero's Return is about here." She stabbed at the screen with a long, tapering index finger. "You can't see us, of course, since we're down deep. But the little blob you see beside the inlet is the Mood Indigo."
"It's not in the water. It's on the shore."
"I know. The storm might have carried it there."
"Is it a wreck?"
"I don't know. But the most interesting part of this picture isn't in the sea area, except maybe for this one spot." Her finger moved left, to indicate a small white circle. "According to the inertial guidance system on this ship—which I'm going to assume still works correctly, even if the laws of physics are all a bit different here—according to the guidance system, that's where we first emerged into the Limbo ocean. So my thought is that the little disk is all that's left of the Link transition point. It comes and goes, and it's not there now. And don't ask me how it can be part underwater, instead of in a vacuum or a thin atmosphere, because I have no idea."
"And this thing?" Tully reached carefully over Elke's arm to indicate another part of the scene. "Like part of a great big ring."
"It is. The boundary is an exact circle when you make allowance for the look angle." Elke ran a finger along the smooth arc. "This marks the edge of a zone of destruction. It only shows on the land and not at sea. Inside this region there's nothing but blackened soil and dark gray rocks. Outside the burned part it's a mixture of green and orange. I'm betting that this was originally all growing plants. Somebody sterilized the whole inner region, about seven hundred square kilometers. And guess what's at the exact center of the black circle?"
"Tell me."
"Better than that, I'll show you." Elke tapped at the board in front of her, and the picture on the display expanded, zooming in on one small area. "This is the highest magnification the image can take without losing detail. But it's enough."
Tully counted six drab buildings of muddy yellow, running along each side of a long and narrow stretch of white. At each end of the strip, facing each other, sat two tiny tri-lobed shapes.
"A settlement," he said softly, "and funny-looking aircraft. I told you that the Bun was reliable. He said he saw one in the sky, and now we know he didn't lie."
"We do indeed." Tully and Elke had been so absorbed in the image that the voice from behind made them jump.
"Aircraft, yes," Dag Korin went on. He had entered the chamber silently and alone. "But I wouldn't call that a settlement. See the boundary fence, with guard posts all along it? Throw in the scorched-earth perimeter for kilometers in each direction, and you have yourself a classic military camp. Our head-up-their-wazoo Stellar Groupies can preach peace all they like, but whoever made that encampment had war on their minds. This isn't their home territory, either, or they wouldn't blast everything for miles around them. And don't be fooled by thinking this is all defenses. They may have only a few aircraft, but I'll bet they have other weapons."
"More than a few planes." Tully had been leaning close to the screen as the General spoke, studying the enlarged picture. "Look over here, well outside the camp. It's not easy to see them because they match the color of the ground. But isn't that more aircraft?"
"Six, seven, eight." The way that Dag Korin counted made each word sound like a curse. "Aye, and there's another batch of the damned things, farther over. They're camouflaged to match the background, but not very well. I'd have expected these alien buggers to do a better job, they're careful enough about other things. Maybe there's hope for us after all."
Elke was working the keypad in front of her. "Well, if there is hope," she said, "I'd credit our technology more than alien weaknesses. The orbiters had the best sensors that humans know how to build, and they could record signals at wavelengths all the way from ultraviolet to radar. Here's what the ground would look like if the orbiters only sensed the range of wavelengths that human eyes can see."
The picture as a whole remained the same—except that Tully, staring, could now see no details within the burned area. Buildings, boundary fence, airstrips, aircraft were gone. All had been swallowed up within the dark background.
"Well, I'll be damned." Korin squinted at the image. "Bring it back the way it was, Elke. Ah, that's better. We're going to need a couple of printed copies of this, with compass settings marked."
"No problem." Elke did not move, leaving it to the ship's computer to take the necessary action.
"Plus any other information we can deduce about what's down there. For instance, what do you make of that?" Korin was pointing to a pair of oval shapes, close to one cluster of the triple-lobed aircraft but much larger than any. "Can you make those bigger?"
Elke shrugged her thin shoulders. "I can enlarge the picture, but you won't get any more detail. We're at the resolution limit of the orbiter's sensors."
"Pity." Korin rubbed at his jaw. "Well, we'll find out soon enough if I'm right."
Tully didn't think that Dag Korin had a high opinion of him. In fact, he had overheard himself referred to by the General, soon after his arrival on board the Hero's Return, as `that long brain-dead streak of shivering misery.' Well, Tully had improved a lot since then, and Korin's favorite had also once been a Slither slave. He risked what might be a stupid question. "Sir, how do you know what those blobs might be? I can't make out any detail on them at all."
"No more can I, son, no more can I." Korin took a couple of steps away, as though he had said all he was going to, then swung around and added sharply, "I imagine, you see. What my eyes won't provide, I imagine with eighty years of war experience to guide me. And the more I look at that picture, the more a little voice inside me says, military expedition. Not a full-scale army, mind you, because the scale of operations is wrong for that. This is more like a scouting party, sent out to learn the lie of the land. Maybe sent to find out if Limbo is worth a bigger investment, or decide that the place is a dead loss and not worth another visit.
"Now, there's a logic to a scouting expedition, one that I'd suspect is common to all times and all species. First, you need a base of operations. We see that on the image. You also need the aircraft or ground vehicles to make sorties away from base, and you need to have enough of them to stand some losses from accidents or hostile action. That's what the aircraft are for. And there's one other must-have. You may be able to live off the land to some extent, but you'll need bigger transports—call them mother ships if you like—to bring you to your sphere of operations in the first place. Little scoutships won't be enough for that, and they won't be able to carry everything you need for weeks or months of operations. That's what I think the two ovals are. They brought them here to Limbo, through a Link point of their making and under their control. And in our present situation, those mother ships represent our own best shot at a way to go home."
Korin paused and frowned at the other two. "Now, that's my thinking. It may be wrong, so feel free to poke holes in it. Ask questions."
Elke said softly, "If you don't mind, I'd rather ask about the other part of what you said earlier."
"Other part."
"You told us, `we'll find out soon enough if I'm right.' What made you say that?"
"No secret there. We can't sit here until this ship rots around us. I'm organizing a shore party to explore the land—"
"That's terrific! I've been analyzing data from the orbiters, and I've been wondering about a thousand other things—"
"—but you won't be part of the shore group, Elke."
"What! I'm not an engineer. I don't know how to keep things running on the ship. But ashore, I can—"
"No. You have other things to do, and they may be a lot more important than going ashore. You were the one who came up with the idea that we're lost, not just somewhere in our own universe but somewhere in an infinity of universes. You're our best shot—I'd say our only shot—at cracking the secrets of the multiverse. I want you focused on that, and the properties of the alien Link. I want to know about other universes that we might be able to reach—are they more or less similar to our own, could humans survive in them. I don't want you distracted by thoughts of Limbo's other life-forms, or war games, or shore parties. Understood?"
It was a few moments before Elke turned away and said softly, "Yes, sir. I'll explore the multiverse, and the
Link."
Dag Korin nodded. Only Tully, sitting so that Elke had been forced to face him when she swiveled around, saw the look of secret joy—and wondered if this was exactly what Elke had wanted all along.
25: SHORE PLANS
Friday Indigo sat on a rock ledge with his legs immersed in water up to the mid-calf. He was inside a long, stone-walled room with a dark pool down the middle. The edge of the pool was marked by a set of tapered columns, conical towers taller than a man. Scores of lumbering Malacostracans, all bigger than Two-Four, scuttled and splashed to and fro at the poolside in what seemed like random motion.
The One stood motionless behind Friday. The thin snaky fingers had withdrawn little by little from his ears, until now they barely touched the skin.
"Once more we will test." The voice that Friday heard did not come from the translation unit. It was inside his head, warm and friendly and infinitely comforting. "Tell us your name."
"I am Friday Indigo."
"That is satisfactory." The tendrils withdrew completely, slithering back into the body of The One. "We detect no signal loss. We will later confirm the efficiency of operation over greater distances. Now, however, you will answer questions concerning your universe, your world, and your people. You have said that the universe from which you came has `countless' suns and many habitable worlds. How many suns? How many worlds? How many habitable worlds? How does your universe compare with this one?"
Friday struggled to answer. He wanted to do it right, with every nerve, with every brain cell, with every ounce of his strength and concentration. But he could not do it. He lacked information. At last he said, "In our universe, stars are organized into large groups called galaxies. Each galaxy contains many billions of stars. One star in every ten of our own galaxy has planets around it. One planet in a thousand is able to support life like our kind and yours. There are theories to explain why planets converge toward common life-supporting properties, but I do not understand them. We have little knowledge of any galaxy except the one that our own sun is in, but we think that they are all similar in their ability to create planetary systems, and that an equal fraction of planetary systems probably supports life. But I cannot compare with this universe, because I do not know the properties of this universe."
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