Noon: 22nd Century tnu-1

by Boris Strugatsky

  Mboga walked next to Ryu with a light gliding step. The grass seemed to flow around him.

  “On the other hand there are birds up here,” Ryu continued. “They’re very large and sometimes they fly very low. One almost grabbed my radar set.”

  Komov, without slowing down, looked into the sky, shading his eyes with a hand. “By the way,” he said. “I should send a radiogram to the Sunflower. May I use your communicator?”

  “By all means,” said Ryu. “You know, Percy Dickson wanted to shoot one. A bird, I mean. But Gorbovsky wouldn’t let him.”

  “Why not?” asked Mboga.

  “I don’t know,” said Ryu. “But he was dreadfully angry; he even wanted to take everyone’s weapons away.”

  “He did take them away from us,” Fokin said. “There was a great flap at the Council. If you ask me, it became very ugly. Gorbovsky simply ladled out his authority on top of everyone.”

  “Except Tora-Hunter,” noted Tanya.

  “Yes, I took a gun,” Mboga said. “But I understand Gorbovsky. You don’t feel like shooting here.”

  “Still, Gorbovsky is a peculiar man,” declared Fokin.

  “Possibly,” said Ryu with restraint.

  They approached the low circle of the door to the spacious laboratory dome. Over the dome three gridwork radar dishes turned in various directions.

  “You can pitch your tents here,” said Ryu. “And if you need it, I’ll give you a team of cybers, and they’ll build you something more substantial.”

  Komov looked at the dome, looked at the puffs of red and black smoke behind the laboratory, and then looked back at the gray roofs of the city and said guiltily, “You know, Ryu, I’m afraid we’ll be in your way here. Wouldn’t it be better if we got settled in the city? Eh?”

  “Besides, there’s a smell of burning here,” added Tanya. “And I’m afraid of the cybers.”

  “I’m afraid of the cybers too,” Fokin said decisively.

  Offended, Ryu shrugged his shoulders. “As you like,” he said. “I think it’s very nice here myself.”

  “Tell you what,” said Tanya. “We’ll put up the tents and you can move in with us. You’ll like it, you’ll see.”

  “Hmm,” said Ryu. “Maybe… But for now you’re all invited to my place.”

  The archaeologists stooped down and walked toward the low door. Mboga went last, and he did not even have to bow his head.

  Ryu hesitated at the threshold. He looked back and saw the trampled ground, the yellowed crushed grass, the dismal pile of lithoplast, and he thought that somehow there really was a smell of burning here.

  The city consisted of a single street, very broad, overgrown with thick grass. The street extended almost due north and south, and stopped close to the river. Komov decided to make camp in the center of the city. The setting up started at around 3:00 p.m. local time (a day on Leonida was twenty-seven hours some minutes).

  The heat seemed to grow worse as the afternoon wore on. There was no breeze, and warm air shimmered over the gray parallelepipeds of buildings. It was a bit cooler only in the southern part of the city, near the river. There was a smell of, in Fokin’s words, hay and “a touch of chlorella plantation.”

  Komov took Mboga and Ryu, who had offered his help, got in the helicopter, and set off for the boat to get equipment and provisions, while Tanya and Fokin surveyed the city. There was relatively little equipment, and Komov transferred it in two trips. When he had come back the first time, Fokin, while helping with the unloading, had stated somewhat pompously that all the buildings in the city were quite similar in size.

  “Very interesting,” Ryu said politely.

  This showed, Fokin stated, that all the buildings had one and the same function. “All we have to do is establish what,” he added as an afterthought.

  When the helicopter returned the second time, Komov saw that Tanya and Fokin had set up a high pole and had raised over the city the unofficial flag of the Pathfinders-a white field with a stylized depiction of a heptagonal nut. A long time ago, almost a century back, one prominent spaceman and fervent opponent of the study of the evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence in outer space had once said heatedly that the only evidence that he was ready to consider irrefutable would be a wheel on an axle, a diagram of the Pythagorean theorem carved onto a cliffside, or a heptagonal nut. The Pathfinders had accepted the challenge and had emblazoned their flag with a depiction of a heptagonal nut.

  Komov saluted the flag gladly. Much fuel had been burned and many parsecs had been traveled since the flag had been created. It had first flown over the circular streets of the empty city on Mars. At that time the fantastic hypothesis that both the city and the Martian satellites could have a natural origin had still had currency. At that time even the most daring Pathfinders merely considered the city and the satellites to be the sole remains of a mysterious vanished Martian civilization. And many parsecs had to be traveled, and much ground had to be dug, before only one hypothesis remained unrefuted: the empty cities and the abandoned satellites had been built by visitors from an unknown distant planetary system. But this city on Leonida…

  Komov got the last pack out of the helicopter cabin, jumped into the grass, and slammed the door shut. Ryu went up to him, and said while rolling down his sleeves, “And now I must leave you, Gennady. I have a sounding in twenty minutes.”

  “Of course,” said Komov. “Thank you, Ryu. Come have supper with us.”

  Ryu looked at his watch and said, “Thank you, but I can’t guarantee it.”

  Mboga, leaning his carbine against the wall of the nearest building, inflated a tent right in the middle of the street. He watched Ryu leave and then smiled at Komov, parting the gray lips on his small wrinkled face. “This is verily a planet with all the conveniences, Gennady,” he said. “Here we walk around weaponless, pitch tents right on the grass. And this…” He nodded in the direction of Fokin and Tanya. The Pathfinder archaeologist and the archaeological engineer, having trampled down the grass around them, were fussing over the autolab in the shade of a building. The archaeological engineer wore shorts and a silk sleeveless blouse. Her heavy shoes adorned the roof of the building, and her coverall lay next to the packs. Fokin, wearing gym shorts, was tearing off his sweat-drenched jacket.

  “Good grief,” Tanya was saying, “How did you connect the batteries?”

  “In a minute, in a minute, Tanya,” Fokin answered vaguely.

  “No,” said Komov. “This isn’t Pandora.” He dragged a second tent out of the pack and set about fitting the rotary pump to it. No, this isn’t Pandora, he thought. On Pandora they had forced their way through murky jungles wearing heavy-duty spacesuits, carrying cumbersome disintegrators with the safety catches off. It squished underfoot, and with every step multilegged vermin ran every which way, while overhead two blood-red suns shone dimly through the tangle of sticky branches. And it was not only Pandora! On every planet with an atmosphere the Pathfinders and the Assaultmen moved with the greatest caution, driving before them columns of robot scouts, self-propelled biolabs, toxicanalyzers, condensed clouds of universal virophages. Immediately after landing, a ship’s captain was required to burn out a safety zone with thermite. It was considered an enormous crime to return to a ship without a preliminary, very careful disinfection and disinfestation. Invisible monsters more terrible than the plague or leprosy lay in wait for the unwary. It had happened only thirty years back.

  It could happen even now on Leonida, the planet with all the conveniences. There were microfauna here too, and very abundant they were. But thirty years ago, small Doctor Mboga had found the “battery of life” on fierce Pandora, and Professor Karpenko on Earth had discovered bioblockading. One injection a day. You could even get by with one a week. Komov wiped his damp face and started undoing his jacket.

  When the sun had sunk toward the west and the sky in the east had turned from a whitish color to dark violet, they sat down to supper. The camp was ready. Three tents crossed
the street, and the packs and boxes of equipment were neatly stacked along the wall of one of the buildings. Fokin, sighing, had cooked supper. Everyone was hungry, and consequently they did not wait for Ryu. From the camp they could see that Ryu was sitting on the roof of his laboratory, doing something with the antennas.

  “Never mind—we’ll leave some for him,” Tanya promised.

  “Go ahead,” said Fokin, starting to eat his boiled veal. “He’ll get hungry and he’ll come.”

  “You picked the wrong place to put the helicopter, Gennady,” said Tanya. “It blocks off the whole view of the river.”

  Everyone looked at the helicopter. It really did destroy the view.

  “You get a fine river view from the roof,” Komov said calmly.

  “No, really,” said Fokin, who was sitting with his back to the river. “There’s nothing tasteful around here to look at.”

  “What do you mean nothing?” Komov said as calmly as before. “What about the veal?” He lay down on his back and started looking at the sky.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking about,” Fokin retorted, wiping his mustache with a napkin. “How will we dig into these graves?” He tapped his finger against the nearest building. “Shall we go under, or cut into the wall?”

  “That’s not quite the problem,” Komov said lazily. “How did the owners get in?—that’s the problem. Did they cut into the walls too?”

  Fokin looked thoughtfully at Komov and asked, “And what in fact do you know about the owners? Maybe they didn’t need to get in there.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Tanya. “A new architectural principle. Somebody sat down on the grass, put walls and a ceiling around himself, and… and…”

  “And went away,” Mboga finished.

  “Well, suppose they really are tombs?” Fokin insisted.

  Everyone discussed this proposal for some time.

  “Tatyana, what do the analyses say?” asked Komov.

  “Limestone,” said Tanya. “Calcium carbonate. Plus many impurities, of course. You know what it’s like? Coral reefs. And the more so, since the building is made out of a single piece.”

  “A monolith of natural origin.”

  “Here we go again with that natural business!” cried Fokin. “It’s a scientific law: you have only to find new evidence of aliens, and immediately people appear to declare that it’s a natural formation.”

  “It’s a natural proposition,” said Komov.

  “Tomorrow we’ll put together the intravisor and have a look,” Tanya promised. “The main thing is that this limestone has nothing in common with the stuff that the city on Mars is built from. Or the amberine of the city on Vladislava.”

  “So someone else is wandering among the planets,” said Komov. “It would be nice if this time they left us something a little more substantial.”

  “If we could just find a library,” moaned Fokin. “Or some sort of machinery!”

  They fell silent. Mboga got out a short pipe, and started filling it. He squatted, looking pensively over the tents into the bright sky. Under the white kerchief, his small face had a look of complete peace and satisfaction.

  “It’s peaceful,” said Tanya.

  Boom! Bang! Rat-tat-tat! came from the direction of the base.

  “The devil!” muttered Fokin. “What in hell do we need that for?”

  Mboga blew a smoke ring, and, watching it rise, said softly, “I understand, Boris. For the first time in my life I myself feel no joy in hearing our machines at work on an alien planet.”

  “It’s somehow not alien, that’s the thing,” said Tanya.

  A large black beetle flew in from somewhere or other, buzzing noisily, circled over the Pathfinders twice, and left. Fokin sniffed softly, and buried his nose in his bent elbow. Tanya got up and went into the tent. Komov got up too and stretched happily. It was so quiet and nice around that he was completely nonplussed when Mboga suddenly jumped up on his feet as if shot from a gun, and then froze, with his face turned toward the river. Komov turned his head in that direction too.

  Some sort of enormous black hulk was moving toward the camp. The helicopter partly hid it, but they could see it sway as it walked, and could see the evening sun gleam on its moist shiny sides, which were puffed out like the belly of a hippopotamus. The hulk moved fairly rapidly, brushing aside the grass, and Komov saw with horror that the helicopter was swaying and had slowly started to tip over. Between the wall of a building and the belly of the helicopter a massive low forehead with two enormous bulges stuck out. Komov saw two small dull eyes, staring, as it seemed, straight at him. “Look out!” he yelled.

  The helicopter tipped over, propping itself up in the grass on its rotor vanes. The monster kept moving toward the camp. It was no less than ten feet tall. Its striped sides rose and fell evenly, and they could hear measured, noisy breathing.

  Behind Komov’s back, Mboga cocked the carbine with a click. Then Komov came to himself and backed toward the tent. Fokin scrambled quickly back on all fours, overtaking him. The monster was already just twenty paces away.

  “Can you manage to break camp?” Mboga asked quickly.

  “No,” answered Komov.

  “Then I’m going to fire,” said Mboga.

  “Wait a moment,” said Komov. He stepped forward, waved his arm, and shouted “Stop!”

  For an instant the mountain of meat on the hoof did stop. The knobby forehead suddenly lifted up, and a mouth as capacious as a helicopter cabin, stuffed with green grass cud, gaped open.

  “Gennady!” cried Tanya. “Get back at once!”

  The monster emitted a prolonged screeching sound and moved forward even faster.

  “Stop!” Komov shouted again, but now without much enthusiasm. “Evidently it’s herbivorous,” he stated, and moved back toward the tents.

  He looked back. Mboga was standing with his carbine at his shoulder, and Tanya was already covering her ears. Next to Tanya stood Fokin, with a pack on his back. “Are you going to shoot at it today or not?” Fokin yelled in a strained voice. “It’ll make off with the intravisor or—”

  Ka-thwak! Mboga’s semiautomatic hunting carbine was a .64 caliber, and the kinetic energy of the bullet at a distance of ten paces equaled nine tons. The bullet landed in the very center of the forehead between the two bulges. The monster sat down hard on its rear. Ka-thwak! The second bullet turned the monster over on its back. Its short fat legs moved convulsively through the air. A “kh-h-a-a-a” came from the thick grass. The black belly rose and fell, and then all was quiet. Mboga put the carbine down. “Let’s go have a look,” he said.

  The monster was no smaller in size than an adult African elephant, but it more resembled a gigantic hippopotamus.

  “Red blood,” said Fokin. “And what is this?” The monster lay on its side, and along its belly extended three rows of soft protuberances the size of a fist. A shiny thick liquid oozed from the growths. Mboga suddenly inhaled noisily, took a drop of liquid on the tip of a finger, and tasted it.

  “Yuck!” said Fonin.

  The same expression appeared on all their faces.

  “Honey,” said Mboga.

  “You don’t say!” exclaimed Komov. He hesitated, then also extended a finger. Tanya and Fokin watched his movements with disgust. “Real honey!” he exclaimed. “Lime-blossom honey!”

  “Doctor Dickson had said that there are many saccharides in this grass,” said Mboga.

  “A honey monster,” said Fokin. “Pity we did him in.”

  “We!” exclaimed Tanya. “Good grief, go put away the intravisor.”

  “Well, okay,” said Komov. “What do we do now? It’s hot here, and with a carcass like this next to the camp…”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Mboga. “Drag the tents twenty paces or so down the street. I’ll make all the measurements, look it over, and then annihilate it.”

  “How?” asked Tanya.

  “With a disintegrator. I have a disintegrator. And you, Tanya, get away fro
m here. I am now going to embark on some very unappetizing work.”

  They heard footsteps, and Ryu jumped out from behind the tent with a large automatic pistol. “What happened?” he asked, panting.

  “We killed one of your hippopotamuses,” Fokin explained pompously.

  Ryu quickly looked everyone over and immediately relaxed. He stuck his pistol in his belt. “Did it charge?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” Komov answered confusedly. “If you ask me, it was simply out for a stroll, but we have to stop it.”

  Ryu looked at the overturned helicopter and nodded.

  “Can’t we eat it?” Fokin shouted from the tent.

  Mboga said slowly, “It looks like somebody has already tried eating it.”

  Komov and Ryu went over to him. With his fingers, Mboga was feeling broad, deep, straight scars on the loin parts of the animal. “Powerful fangs did that,” said Mboga. “Ones sharp as knives. Someone took off slices of five or six kilos each with one swipe.”

  “Some sort of horror,” Ryu said very sincerely.

  A strange, prolonged cry sounded high in the sky. Everyone looked up.

  “There they are!” said Ryu.

  Large light-gray birds like eagles rushed headlong down on the city. One behind another, they dropped from an enormous altitude. Just over the humans’ heads they spread broad, soft wings and darted upward just as violently, pouring waves of warm air over the humans. They were enormous birds, larger than terrestrial condors or even the flying dragons of Pandora.

  “Meat eaters!” Ryu said excitedly. He started to draw the pistol from his belt, but Mboga seized him firmly by the arm.

  The birds rushed over the city and off into the violet evening sky to the west. When the last of them had disappeared, the same disturbing prolonged cry sounded.

  “I was ready to fire,” Ryu said with relief.

  “I know,” said Mboga. “But it seemed to me—” He stopped.

  “Yes,” said Komov. “It seemed that way to me too.”

  Upon consideration, Komov ordered the tents to be moved not merely twenty paces, but onto the flat roof of one of the buildings. The buildings were low—only seven feet or so high—so it was not difficult to climb on top of them. Tanya and Fokin put the packs with the most valuable instruments on the roof of the next building over. The helicopter was not damaged. Komov took it up and landed it neatly on the roof of a third building.