The light floated lower and hovered, and again the globe elongated into a shape which could almost be human, though even Aurora could not have sworn to this now.
There was surprisingly little conversation. Everyone seemed too stunned for words.
Then Orlov said: “Well, I think I can speak with some authority when I say that we shan’t be moving from this camp for some time after all. We have to stay where the action is, don’t we? So we’d better get back and start unpacking again.”
“There go the comforts of home!” muttered Beaumont. “Do you think we should take this—whatever it is—back with us?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Verdet. “We’ve taken measurements all around, and got plenty of still and video records of where it was found. We can test it better back at camp.”
This time Lundquist had remembered to bring the collapsible stretcher in case of emergencies. They appropriated it to carry the artifact.
“Is it OK to lie it on its side, though?” asked Aurora. They all assumed that its intended orientation was as found when buried, with the engraved circle on the small sphere at the top.
Orlov shrugged. “Maybe it will tell us if it doesn’t like it,” he said.
As they placed the structure on the stretcher the lightform hovered close by, as though monitoring their activities. It followed them as they marched away, then seemed simply to fade.
“I feel sad,” said Minako.
“You think this thing and the light are connected in some way?” asked Beaumont.
“Well, don’t you? It seems logical, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. Maybe the—the object.... What are we going to call it, by the way? Maybe it’s done its job.”
Aurora said, “I think it’s some kind of beacon.”
“Could be,” said Beaumont. “Beacon. That’ll do as well for a name as anything, for now.” Then, to Orlov: “Look, it doesn’t need all of us to carry it back, does it? I’d like to carry on dowsing over a wider area. After all, where there’s one object there could be more.”
“OK. But you’re not staying here alone. I want to go back and examine this thing. Anne and Claude, will you stay here? I want one of you up on that scree slope. You can contact the camp from there; and be sure to make a report at least every five minutes. We don’t know what we’ve got here, so whatever you do keep in touch. Is that understood?”
* * * *
Beaumont continued striding across his grid for nearly an hour, with no further reaction from the rods. Heaving an exasperated sigh, he sank down onto a boulder.
“I’m going to take a drink, then I’ll move along the canyon, over that hump.” He indicated the low, sandy hill which rose towards one side, where a talus slope began to rise, narrowing in an inverted V towards the rim.
They all took a rest, then Verdet reported to Base what Beaumont was about to do.
Almost as soon as Beaumont stepped onto the incline, his rods jerked violently together.
“Wow! What’s this?” he exclaimed, obviously surprised by the strength of the reaction.
He continued crisscrossing the low hill, but his rods refused to part. “Whatever’s down there, it’s big!” he said squeakily. Verdet repeated this into his helmet mike for the benefit of those back in the Igloo.
By noting where the rods allowed themselves to be separated and where they stayed insistently together, Beaumont and Aurora marked out a rough circle nearly ten meters across. Then, to the surprise of the others, Beaumont snorted with laughter.
“Sorry!” he said. “But this suddenly reminded me of an old black-and-white movie I saw on TV once. Must have been made in the Fifties. The Thing—that was it! A bunch of scientists were at the North Pole or somewhere icy, and they marked out this circle—a shape they could see under the ice. It was a flying saucer—of course! Hey! I hope we don’t find a creature like they did. It was a sort of human carrot, and if I remember rightly it was after their blood. That was before Spielberg started making movies where the aliens were goody-goodies....”
Aurora smiled patronizingly. “Yes, well, we don’t want to let our imaginations to run away with us, do we? Don’t you think we ought to call the others here, to see what it is we’ve found?”
Verdet called Orlov to ask what progress was being made back at camp. He reported to Beaumont and Aurora that, the Igloo having now been repressurized, Orlov and Minako had shed their environment suits. They were avoiding touching the Beacon, limiting themselves to various instrumental tests. There was radioactivity somewhere within, it appeared, but not at any dangerous level, and there was a strong magnetic field. Nothing else, so far.
“You may not have noticed,” added Orlov, “but the Sun’s getting low. You’ll be in shadow very soon down there, and by the time we got to you it would be virtually dark. So I suggest that, as long as the area’s well marked, you come back here to the Igloo now and we’ll all go out again early tomorrow.”
Verdet agreed on behalf of the other two.
Before they returned, Beaumont walked over the area holding his pendulum. It told him that whatever lay below him was metallic, and deeper than the Beacon had been. The depth was no more than two or three meters, though, according to the pendulum.
“I can’t be sure, but there might be an even bigger mass buried below. There’s something peculiar about it. Maybe this is just the tip of the iceberg.” As it often did when he launched himself upon a theme, his face lit up with enthusiasm. “Hey, perhaps we’ve discovered a whole Martian city, buried down there!”
“Careful! We’re getting into the realms of fantasy again.” warned Aurora.
“Well, don’t you think all this is pretty fantastic?” he retorted.
* * * *
Early next day the party, short only of Verdet—left to man the communications desk and with instructions not to touch the Beacon while alone—straggled along the canyon. By the time they reached the circular area Aurora and Beaumont had marked out the previous day, a widening band of amber sunlight was creeping down the wall to greet them. They had brought trolleys packed with tools, extra oxygen and food packs, with the expectation of a long day ahead.
The hillock was made of fairly loose sand and dust, together with some rocks, and soon a haze filled the air as they scooped and dug away at it. The crevice into which Orlov had fallen, only a few meters away, was in bedrock, and it soon became apparent that it was the narrow end of a crack that rapidly became wider, ending in a dust-filled crater.
And in the crater was....
How were they going to tell Earth? It was fortunate they could transmit images. Otherwise no one would believe them when they reported that they’d found a flying saucer....
Well, not quite a saucer, but near enough. The object was certainly circular, but it was shaped more like a doughnut or an old-fashioned home-baked pie. On its upper surface, where the central hole curved down into the interior of the vehicle (if that’s what it was), grey metal merged imperceptibly into transparent perspex or something similar. This rose, in the center, to a low dome. The Perspex-like material was slightly yellowed and a little scarred, making it milky and translucent in a few places. Peering through it, they could dimly see an instrument panel inside what could surely only be a cockpit or control cabin some three meters across.
As they began to excavate the underside, it soon became evident to them that this was more complicated than the top surface, being scalloped or terraced in a number of concentric rings. As they continued digging they came across obvious signs of damage. The vehicle was not horizontal, but tilted at an angle; at its deepest point, where it was almost embedded in rock, the metal of the underside was badly crumpled around a hole which seemed to have been some kind of storage area, perhaps for a rover or similar very large vehicle.
* * * *
Back in the Igloo that evening, the whole crew gathered in the Refectory. Orlov had ordained that they all take showers, in view of their physical exertions, and they had changed a
nd eaten. Now they were slouching in their chairs. He had made his report to Earth, and sent as much data as he could. The response had been predictably stunned. He had left the scientists and media “experts” to mull over the news.
Now it was time for their own inquest.
Since it was thanks to him that the discoveries had been made, everyone tacitly agreed to let Beaumont have his say first.
“I think it’s pretty clear, isn’t it? What we have here is an alien spacecraft that has made a crash landing. Its crew managed to throw out, or plant, a distress beacon to attract the attention of a rescue party. Which, for some reason, never came.”
“Mmm, yes, that does seem a plausible explanation,” agreed Orlov. “But it begs a lot of questions. Why doesn’t the Beacon, if it really is a beacon, put out radio waves? Why didn’t another expedition come after the first? Why did they come to Mars—a dead world? Why didn’t they make contact on Earth? They’d obviously have been capable of doing that if they’d wanted to.”
“Perhaps they did,” said Bryan. “Let’s face it, there have been enough reports over the years of—well, you know, UFOs and all that....”
“For God’s sake, let’s not get into all that crap! But there’s another point,” said Verdet. “The craft is so small. Surely much too small for a starship. I can’t believe that it could have contained enough fuel, no matter what they might have used. It’s not as if it were a ramscoop, or something exotic like that, using interstellar hydrogen for fuel; they’d have needed to bring their own fuel with them wherever they went. And it’s not big enough to contain enough air, whatever they breathe, however efficient their recycling, for them to reach the Solar System from another star. Don’t forget, they would have had to travel at least five light years and more likely twice that—there are nine or ten stars within ten light years or so of here. Probably they’d have had to come a lot further than that.”
“Perhaps it’s only a sort of landing shuttle,” suggested Beaumont, apparently not put off by Verdet’s earlier comment. “Maybe there’s a mother ship still in orbit out there somewhere.”
“Oh, come off it,” said Lundquist. “There’s no way we wouldn’t have detected an object that big, anywhere in this part of space, with all our probes and deep-space scanners.”
“You’re forgetting one thing,” argued Beaumont. “Mars does have two quite peculiar satellites, and we haven’t got round to taking a good look at them yet. Maybe one of them’s an asteroid ark. If we were to send a proper expedition to Phobos, which is in a really odd, low orbit for a natural satellite, we might find that, deep below its dark, carbonaceous exterior, there lie tunnels—living quarters—motors or some sort of drive mechanism....”
“Steady, boy,” murmured Aurora.
“Anne...Aurora, you haven’t had much to say so far,” remarked Orlov.
“No. To be honest, I’m feeling—well, a bit overcome by it all. I can’t see anything wrong with any of the arguments we’ve heard, really, yet I don’t think any of you have hit on the answer. But I’m afraid I can’t suggest anything better. I’ll...I’ll need time to think about it.”
“Anyway, if Phobos were some kind of generation-starship or ark, surely we’d see some sign on its surface,” said Minako.
“You mean like ‘PLEASE ENTER TWO BY TWO’?” said Beaumont with a grin.
Minako ignored his interruption. “We’ve got plenty of high-definition images from unmanned probes, after all. And, even assuming you’re right and this is a shuttle that crash-landed, why haven’t we picked up anything from the mother ship itself?”
“I know you all think I’ve got too much imagination,” said Beaumont carefully, “but sometimes that’s what you need at moments like this. Don’t you see? All this could have happened centuries ago, before we even had radio. Or thousands of years—millions—back in the days of the dinosaurs, even! I know that UFOs and flying saucers are dirty words nowadays, but you can’t deny that ship is sort of disc-shaped, just like the ones that people have seen for centuries.”
“Which have never contacted anyone except some hicks out in the sticks,” drawled Lundquist. “And which, if I might remind you, you’ve already explained away very nicely as being due to earthlights.”
“Just because some—or even most—examples of a phenomenon can be shown to be due to one cause doesn’t mean that it’s the only answer,” snorted Beaumont. “There could be many explanations for similar-sounding reports.” He became aware of the scornful looks around him and added: “I’m just acting as Devil’s Advocate really, you understand?”
“Anyway,” Aurora interposed, “it doesn’t really look as if our Marslight was due to rocks fracturing or rubbing together or whatever, now, does it? Not now we’ve found the Beacon.”
The discussion continued for another hour, but everyone felt tired and eventually they decided, one by one, to call it a day.
It was as well that they’d turned in early, for they were woken before dawn by an unscheduled message alarm from the comm desk. The news of their discovery was filling the media back on Earth. There was widespread public hysteria.
After centuries of waiting, Earth knew that it was not alone.
OPEN SESAME!
...People are reacting in different ways. There’s a huge rise in the sales of books and data-wafers on astronomy, exobiology and SETI—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Radio astronomers have been “listening” for signals from other stars since the 1970s, with no success, even after they set up a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon. And a huge increase in the membership of UFO societies and what are sometimes spoken of as “nut cults”.
The presenter smiled disarmingly so as not to offend any member of her audience.
At the same time, many people are turning to the churches. Some just want to know the answer to the question: “Did God make the creatures who came in that spacecraft, as He made us—and do they therefore have immortal souls?” This is a question which theologians were trying to answer long before we had this concrete proof of the existence of life beyond Earth, so it will be interesting to see if they come up with anything new.
New religions are springing up, too, mostly based on the “Was Christ an astronaut?” hypothesis. They believe that the brilliant Star of Bethlehem which the Three Wise Men followed—meaning that it moved—was a “mother ship” in low Earth orbit and that Jesus came down from it by some method, presumably as a baby....
* * * *
Orlov grimaced disgustedly and turned down the volume. “What the hell have we started?” he asked no one in particular. He selected more random sections from the recording that had been transmitted from Earth, commenting: “Lots of UFO reports.... Texas farmer’s wife abducted by alien in a gown.... Spherical lights over Stonehenge...what rubbish! Come on. We’ve got work to do.
“Claude, you’ll want to look over their life-support system, and Bob, we might need your biological expertise—well, who knows? There may be bodies in there. I have to go, too, because we’ll probably need an engineer if we’re going to get inside the ship. Bryan: your...special skills have proved pretty useful so far. That leaves Minako and Anne—is it OK if we keep calling you Anne?—to deal with the comm desk and see if there’s anything new to be found out about the Beacon. Is that OK with everyone?”
Minako and Aurora eyed each other a little warily, but everyone nodded. The field team departed, laden with tools and instruments. They were planning, en route to the spaceship, to put a relay on the canyon rim so from now on there would be direct radio contact between the two groups.
Minako busied herself with the communications desk. Aurora, feeling rather depressed at being left out of the main action (but it was for the first time, she consoled herself), went over to the table where the Beacon sat.
Wearing surgical gloves left out for her by Lundquist, she tried to lift it and found that, even allowing for the low Martian gravity, it was remarkably light. By swinging it gently, she found t
hat most of its mass seemed to be centered somewhere near the base of the large sphere. A power source, perhaps. From the depths of her memory came an image of a doll she had once owned, for some reason called a Kelly; you could knock it, hit it, kick it, but it always swung upright. Probably you could have done the same with this if it hadn’t been for the tripod of thin legs on which it stood.
She took one of these in her hand and gently pushed, then gave it a screwing motion. Still with no sign of a seam, it silently vanished into the sphere. Almost simultaneously the other two did the same. She snatched her hand away, the other still supporting the artifact. But there was no real need, she found, for the Beacon did indeed remain upright, balanced on its low center of gravity. It rotated at the slightest touch.
Suddenly she felt a compulsion to touch the Beacon with her bare flesh. She knew it was against her instructions—but what harm could it do? If the thing was going to pick up any micro-organisms, it would have done so by now; they had no isolation procedure for anything this large. It seemed unlikely that it would itself hold any contamination not already present in the rocks and dust of Mars.
She peeled the thin, transparent glove off her right hand. For some reason she thought of Bryan. Nowadays he touched her hand whenever he could—but spacesuits were so impersonal! She imagined Mars with a breathable atmosphere, and the two of them walking hand in hand down the canyon, without a care in the world, a light wind ruffling their hair. For months they had breathed nothing but canned air. And it was becoming a bit stuffy in here, to say the least. Minako, she had noticed, had a strange odor; or perhaps she used an unusual perfume?
She sighed, then glanced round guiltily. Minako was still at the desk, screened from her. She could hear Orlov’s voice from the speaker, describing the ship, with its transparent dome on top. Somewhere a relay clicked and a motor hummed. It was never quiet on this expedition, she mused. Even alone, out on the surface in a spacesuit, there were noises from the circulation system, or the radio. Or her own amplified breathing.
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