“Maybe not intelligent at all, then,” said Zeno. “Animals use tools.”
“Sharpening suggests patience and forethought,” I pointed out. It wasn’t conclusive, of course. Lots of animals think, after a fashion. Whether or not mice lay plans, dogs do.
“What’s this about a spear?” asked a new voice, with more than a hint of aggression. It was Juhasz, of course, and I could tell that he wasn’t pleased.
I repeated the story.
“You’re lying, Caretta,” he said. “This is some kind of trick.”
I was genuinely astonished.
“Why would we do that?” I asked.
“You know damn well why,” be told me. “You’re trying to sabotage this mission.”
He’s flipped, I thought. The paranoid streak has really cut loose.
“Are you sure you’ve got the right man here?” I asked him. “I’m not much of a mechanic, you know—tampering with attitude jets isn’t my line.”
“You’re crazy, Caretta.”
“Now I know you have the wrong man,” I snapped back.
“There is nothing,” he said, “in all the data transmitted back by our probes or by our landing party to suggest that there is intelligent life on Naxos. It’s impossible! There’s nothing more advanced than an amphibian—no reptiles, let alone mammals.”
“Well,” I said steadily, “there’s evidence now. And you don’t need fur in order to have a brain. The landing party found nothing because they landed in the wrong bloody place. Here is where the action is—in the swamps by starlight. And your malfunction dropped us right on the spot. Chance plays little tricks, no?”
“You’re the one who’s playing little tricks!” said Juhasz. “But it won’t work. You can’t abort the mission this way. In fact, you can’t abort it at all.”
I shook my head wearily, and handed the mike to Angelina.
“Captain Juhasz,” she said—sweetly enough, considering the circumstances—“this is Angelina Hesse. The artifact is real. It has clearly been shaped to serve a particular purpose, and used. That signifies intelligence, of a kind. It doesn’t mean that we have some alternative human race down here—just that there’s something which can think ahead well enough to make a weapon. Until we know more, we can’t say much about these creatures. Even birds and monkeys back home on Earth pick up quite complicated tricks and communicate them to one another by example. This may be nothing more. But it’s not a hoax, and Lee Caretta and I are not part of some conspiracy against you and your mission. I beg you to believe that.”
“I wish I could, Dr. Hesse,” said Juhasz. “Indeed, I wish it were so.” He said no more.
“Zeno?” she said.
“I heard everything,” confirmed Zeno. “What can I say?”
“The only person who’s going to convince him is Catherine d’Orsay,” she said. “And the only person who seems to be in a position to convince her is you. You’re the only one who can testify to Lee’s reliability.”
“I’ll try,” he promised.
Angelina switched off, and looked at me. I’d taken Harmall’s little device out of my pocket, and was contemplating it ruefully.
“It never occurred to me,” I said. “I think I loused it up.”
“Put it away,” she said, tired. “We’ve got a long way to go.”
Every step we took seemed to make it longer and more difficult. More complicated, at any rate.
“And to think,” I said, “that Schumann offered me the opportunity to say no. Never for a moment did I contemplate it. Why is it nothing ever turns out the way you expect it to?”
“I don’t know,” she said grimly.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“We’re entering the living quarters now,” said Zeno. His voice, even over the radio, was crystal clear and as steady as a rock. I didn’t make any acknowledgment. He knew that we were listening, and he and Vesenkov didn’t need any trivial interruptions. Angelina was busy unclogging the propeller. It was only the first time of that day, and we’d made good headway before it happened.
“Most of the bodies are in sleeping bags,” commented Zeno. “One is by the radio. One was trying to get into a sterile suit, but didn’t make it. Whatever hit them was fast. The bodies seem well-preserved. No immediately obvious outward signs to offer any clues. I’m putting the set down now—Vesenkov needs my hands. I’ll report anything that happens as we go.”
I turned away from the radio to look out through the open flap of the cupola, across the carpet of floating leaves.
“Don’t let it worry you,” I said, “but we’re being watched.”
Angelina didn’t even look up. “Where?” she asked.
“Away to starboard. Twenty meters. A pair of eyes, peeping above the surface.” I was looking in another direction now, trying to give no indication that I’d noticed. Her glance was equally casual.
“You’re right,” she said. “Which one of our nocturnal visitors might it be?”
“The eyes are the right size for the one that spat in my face,” I said, “but the position is wrong. Those are carried right on top of the head, just right for peeping.”
“You want to take a shot at him?”
“No. Anyhow, it might be a her. Do you think he or she is taking an intelligent interest?”
“Can’t tell,” she said. She turned the propeller experimentally with her finger, then began to set the motor back in operating position. “Shall we head in his direction?” she asked.
“He’d only duck under,” I said. “I’d rather see if he follows us. He might even get to like us eventually. Maybe we should throw him something to eat.”
“All we’ve got is some tissue-samples from the dead things on the islet,” she observed. “I’d rather not lose them, if you don’t mind.”
She started the motor, and guided us away in the direction we wanted to go. When I glanced back at the watcher, he’d vanished.
“Can we be out of this watery wilderness by tonight?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “We can get another fix on our position soon. Are you that keen to start walking?”
I don’t like walking much, but I liked wading even less. I said so.
A small creature like a basilisk lizard darted across the leaf-rafts away to port, steadying itself as it ran with a supple horizontally frilled tail. Colored insects settled briefly on the cupola, hitching a free ride for a little way. The sun was shining, but there were big cloudbanks gathering in the west and moving slowly toward us. It was obvious that we weren’t going to outrun them, and that we were in for more rain.
Angelina had picked up one of her sealed plastic bags and was looking intently at its contents.
“This milky white stuff that oozes out with the blood,” she said. “It’s strange.”
“It looks like the gel that oozes out of dead slugs in killing solution,” I observed.
“That thing you trod on was an invertebrate, wasn’t it?” she said.
“That’s right.”
“But the other was a glorified toad. No relation at all.”
“Apparently not.”
“Invertebrates use turgor pressure to maintain their shape,” she said. “You expect them to ooze. You don’t expect the same ooze from vertebrates.”
“Not much we can do until we have some idea of its biochemistry,” I pointed out.
“There’s something fundamentally peculiar about the animal kingdom in this life system,” she opined. I wasn’t going to disagree with her.
“Intelligent amphibians aren’t impossible,” I said. “Look at the fingers of Earthly frogs. It’s not difficult to imagine them being modified into hands with opposable thumbs. Some kinds of toad are very good at gripping, in fact. Living mostly underwater, they have the potential to develop big heads, relatively speaking. Looking at it objectively, one might wonder why the frogs didn’t make it on Earth. How wasteful to have to invent reptiles and mammals before turning out a really tip-top m
odel. If conditions had been right for Earth’s amphibians, the way they clearly were here...we might be descended from toads ourselves.”
“Warts and all,” she added.
“Wasn’t there some old saw about newts?” I asked her.
“Not that I recall.”
“It’s a pity we drove all the eccentric ones to extinction,” I observed. “It would have been interesting to have seen newts and axolotls in the flesh.”
“More eyes,” she said. “Starboard again, same distance. Two pairs.”
I looked. They were there all right. Not moving. Just watching us chug along past them.
“They’re not the spear-users,” I said. “They can’t be.” I didn’t like to sound too confident in saying so, though.
“The probes never picked up anything like them,” she pointed out.
We both knew that meant nothing. There are a million places on Earth where you could dump a probe which could sit there for years and not catch sight of anything more interesting than a cockroach. You could put one down in the middle of a zoo or a national park and still see nothing.
I called Ariadne in order to get a new precise fix on our position. The duty officer read the figures back to me, and reassured me that we were getting to the edges of the sticky region and that dry land shouldn’t be too far away.
“If I were you, though,” he said, “I’d try to find a river. It’s all pretty flat, so the waterways are moderately deep and slow-flowing.”
“You wouldn’t know, I suppose, whether there is a handy river?” I asked.
“I don’t know that there is,” he reported helpfully. “But that doesn’t mean to say that there definitely isn’t.”
I thanked him kindly. As he signed off, another voice chipped in.
“Hello,” it said. “This Vesenkov. Was definitely wrong. Not allergy. Is open and shut. Not virus either. Died of poison.”
“Poison!” I said. “What kind of poison?”
“One test,” he said. “I know, but need proof. Easy. Few minutes. Wait.”
I lowered the mike slowly.
“Hold on,” the duty officer was saying. “I’ll inform Captain Juhasz right away.”
Vesenkov wasn’t holding, though—he’d already gone.
“Zeno?” I said.
There was no reply.
I was still waiting when Juhasz came in. “What’s this about poison?” he wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” I told him. Then he started asking Zeno and Vesenkov to come in. Nobody took any notice. Vesenkov’s few minutes began to drag by.
The propeller caught up in some kind of vine, and the boat began to swing. I hauled it out of the water just as the rain began to fall. By the time I’d untangled it, Vesenkov still hadn’t reported back. When he did, the best part of an hour had gone by.
“Had to use lab,” he said. “Sorry. Two pair hands. Anyway, was right. Poison in water. Drank it with coffee.”
“You mean that their water supply became contaminated?” This from Juhasz.
“Yes,” replied Vesenkov. “Poison is nerve poison. Like some Earthly snake venom. Also like some Earthly chemical weapon. Quick paralysis. Low dose. No doubt at all.”
“How did it happen?” the captain wanted to know.
“Easy,” said Vesenkov. “Plain bloody murder.”
There was a moment of absolute silence.
“Say that again,” I said.
“Is murder,” he said. “No doubt at all. One more thing. Nineteen dead.”
“So?”
“Ought to be twenty. One gone. No trace.”
“Are you telling me,” said the captain, slowly, “that one of my crew members murdered the other nineteen, and then left the dome?”
“Is likely hypothesis,” said the Russian. There was a charming finality about the way he framed his sentences.
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Juhasz.
“Poison in water is fact,” said Vesenkov. “Supply is sealed and recycled.”
“It’s impossible,” said Juhasz.
“Is bloody obvious,” retorted the Russian.
“But why?”
“Your problem,” replied Vesenkov vindictively. “Not mine. My bit done.”
It couldn’t have cheered Juhasz up to realize that if what Vesenkov said was true, then he didn’t need us at all. If there was no fearsomely subtle alien plague, then one of his own people could have cracked the problem easily enough.
Fate seemed to be treating him just as harshly as it was treating us.
But Juhasz was by now well on the way to discovering another point of view.
“In that case,” he said, “the world is safe. I could send another crew down tomorrow.”
“Wouldn’t say so,” said Vesenkov, laconically. “People didn’t die of disease. Murderer may be sick. How else explain murder?”
I glanced at Angelina. If that line of thinking was correct, it might be our problem after all.
“In that case,” said the captain, “you’d better find him, hadn’t you?”
“Not him,” said Vesenkov. “Her. Is needle in haystack. Your problem, not mine.”
Juhasz switched off in exasperation. I sat back, replacing the mike in its cradle without having uttered a word since my single request for clarification.
“Crazy,” I said to Angelina quietly.
“It hadn’t occurred to me as the probable outcome,” she admitted.
“There isn’t any other way the water supply could have been contaminated, is there?”
“Who knows?” she said. “Cheer up. It looks at though there might still be mysteries left for us when we get there.”
“Sure,” I said. “As long as we don’t get murdered in our sleep on the way.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
With stops and starts and a couple of awkward detours, we didn’t manage to reach the edge of the marshland before nightfall, as I’d hoped we might. We decided against any further nocturnal excursions—the clouds, in any case, remained massed above us all night, and the rain never stopped. One of us sat up on guard at all times; I slept first, then took over from Angelina with rifle and flashlight at the ready. The night passed without incident.
We knew that we’d come just about as far as the waterways would take us when the trees began to bunch up and the rather scattered growth of the islets gave way to dense forest. We had to abandon the boat, though, long before we reached what I’d call dry land. For several hours we were squelching our way through ponds and reed beds, tiring ourselves out while making all of two kilometers an hours. Even when we were done with the bog, it didn’t get much easier. All that happened was that the undergrowth grew lusher and higher, so that instead of wading through water we were wading through matted grass and thorny vines. The only relief we got was in areas where the canopy formed by overlapping trees starved the ground of sunlight, so that we could stride out across a flat bed of humus. Such areas were surprisingly few and far between, considering that the forest seemed so dense. Our average speed increased, but it was obvious that sixty kilometers overland wasn’t going to be the nice brisk walk that it sounded. There seemed to be no escaping the fact that just as we’d been two nights in the swamp, so we’d be two nights in the forest. My embittered comment about our suits being just about ready to give up if and when we finally reached the dome seemed less of an exaggeration than when I’d made it.
Zeno, Vesenkov and Catherine d’Orsay seemed to be having a much easier time of it, now they’d got the bodies buried. Zeno gave us a report on how easy it would have been for anyone so inclined to poison the drinking water. The supply tank was beside the inner airlock, and the cover could be removed simply by lifting. It wasn’t sabotage-proof because it had never occurred to the designers that anyone would dream of sabotaging it. It wasn’t sealed because it was in an area which was itself supposedly sterile and fully protected. All the assassin had had to do was lift the cover momentarily, and tip the stuff in.
The only difficulty was in trying to imagine a reason why anyone would do such a thing. What motive could there possibly be? And what future for the murderer, who had apparently fled the scene of her crime in a sterile suit that would keep her fit and healthy for a couple of days and no more? Even if the environment was safe, and she’d shed the suit, what kind of life was she looking forward to, alone in an alien wilderness?
The possible presence on Naxos of intelligent—maybe humanoid—indigenes didn’t really add much to the imaginative resources out of which we tried to build an explanation. Unless, of course, you figured that the aliens had obtained some weird kind of control over the girl and compelled her to commit the murder; or, alternatively, that it was one of the aliens that had perpetrated the dire deed—either of which notions seemed a little far-fetched.
Inevitably, things got worse. That evening, as Angelina and I were trying to rig up some kind of makeshift tent using the cupola from the lifecraft and the membranes that had covered the fore and aft sections, we were hailed by the Ariadne.
“Dr. Caretta,” said a voice that I hadn’t heard over the link before, though it was one I recognized. “Come in Dr. Caretta.” There was something conspiratorial about the tone of the voice.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Dr. Caretta, this is Simon Norton. You remember me?”
“I remember.”
“I thought you ought to know,” he said. “Captain Ifere and some of the officers tried to seize control of the Earth Spirit an hour ago. They failed, but Jason Harmall and Captain Alanberg are under restraint aboard the Ariadne. The HSB is out. Captain Juhasz thought that ships from Earth were trying to reach us—I don’t know whether that’s true. Some of our own scientific officers have been confined. I don’t know what the captain intends to do. I’ve got to go now—I only took over while the tech answered the call of nature.”
I heard the click of the transmit button, before I could thank him. I didn’t like to ask if anyone at the dome was listening. If they were, they said nothing.
“Well,” I said to Angelina, “where the hell does that leave us?”
“It depends on what Juhasz has in mind,” she replied reasonably.
The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel Page 10