by David Geary
Carson complied. "If you like," he said. "But I think we'll be all right now."
She tried to bury herself in the snow, to hide from the clouds.
"It was never after us" said Carson.
"How can you say that?" Angela asked.
More lightning. "Right angles," he said. "It wanted the shuttle. Your flying box."
Over the next few hours, the electricity drained out of the heavens. They sat quietly, watching the storms clear off. "I think I understand why the Quraquat used the image of a Monument-Maker to portray Death," Frank said.
"Why?" asked Angela.
"Shoot the messenger. The Monument-Makers probably had no compunctions about landing, introducing themselves, and telling the Quraquat what the problem was." He smiled. "You know, Richard was right. There are no aliens. They all turn out to be pretty human."
"Like George," said Hutch.
Carson drew up his knees and wrapped his arms around them. "Yes," he said. He looked at Angela and explained: "They couldn't stop the goddam things, so they created a diversion. Made something else for them to attack."
"Well, something occurs to me" said Angela. "This thing"— she waved in the general direction of the sky—"was part of the wave that struck Beta Pac about 5000 b.c., Quraqua around 1000 b.c., and Nok in AD 400. More or less. Right?"
"Yes," said Carson.
"It's headed toward Earth." She looked unsettled.
Carson shrugged. "We've got nine thousand years to deal with it."
"You know," Hutch said, "Janet mentioned that we may already have had some direct experience with these things. She thinks the A wave correlates to Sodom."
Angela's eyes narrowed. "Sodom? Maybe." She fixed Carson with a tight smile. "But I'm not sure we've got as much time as you think. The B wave is still out there."
Hutch moved closer to her companions. The B wave, the wave that had struck Beta Pac in 13,000 B.C., and Quraqua four thousand years later, would be relatively close to Earth. "About a thousand years," she said.
"Well," said Carson, "whatever. Nine or one, I still think we've got plenty of time."
A shadow crossed Angela's face. "I suspect that's close to what the Monument-Makers said."
LIBRARY ENTRY
No successful probe of an Omega cloud in Sight has been made. Efforts to transmit signals through the objects have yielded no results as of this writing. (See Adrian Clement's excellent monograph, The Omega Puzzle, quoted in full in Appendix Hi, for a lucid discussion of the theoretical problems involved.)
The only attempts to take a manned vehicle beneath the outer layers were made 3 and 4 July, 2211, by Meg Campbell, on the Pasquarella. Campbell made consecutive descents to 80 meters and 630 meters. She failed to return from a third try.
A detailed analysis of the Omega clouds must apparently await the development of new technology.
—Janet Allegri, The Engines of God Hartley & Co., London (2213)
AFTERWORD
Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, NJ. April 2231.
To date, there are few substantive answers about the Monument-Makers. A vast ruin exists deep beneath the harbor city on Beta Pacifica III. It is known to be from the Cholois, or Monument-Maker, era. (The term means the Universal People, and it seems to have been used to include other intelligent species.) Excavation is proceeding with due caution. What is currently known is that Priscilla Hutchins' suggestion that a substantial number of the Cholois fled their home is correct. They planned, initiated, and may have completed, an intergalactic leap.
Surviving members of the species still exist on the home world. They are few, and have been reduced to a state of near-savagery. None have been found with any memory of their former greatness, save in their myths.
Recent investigations support the view that the inhabitants of the space station at Beta Pac III witnessed the destruction of their world by an Omega cloud, and chose to die in space rather than return to a devastated homeland. Investigation continues.
Attempts to inspect the Omega clouds (which were not named for Angela Morgan) have been uniformly unproductive. Strong electromagnetic fields are believed to contribute to the clouds' ability to retain their structure, but no one has explained satisfactorily how this could be.
They have turned out to be much less numerous than formerly supposed. It was something of an aberration that the Ashley Tee found two of them simultaneously in the same system. They are nevertheless uncomfortably plentiful, and there is no realistic hope that the solar system will not receive one or two unwelcome visitors in its own distant future.
Conferences have already been convened to plan a strategy, and to ensure that future generations are warned of the danger.
The central processing unit recovered by Maggie Tufu from the space station has been a trove of information about the so-called City-Builder era. The natives of that period were aware of their early exploits. But rather than serving as a source of pride, they provoked a sense of lost greatness and decay which slowed development, promoted decay, and induced dark ages.
The existence of the Omega clouds has raised deep-seated philosophical questions about the position of the human race in a universe now seen by many to be actively hostile. Return-to-nature movements have sprung up around the world, and there has also been a resurgence of fundamentalist religious groups, which had been in decline for decades.
Project Hope has proceeded successfully, and it now appears that the first human settlers will arrive on Quraqua well ahead of schedule.
Six additional monuments have been found. The Braker Society (named for its founder, Aran Braker, who died of a stroke during a demonstration outside the Smithsonian) has led a strong effort in recent years to recover the Great Monuments, and place them in Earth orbit. This effort has been encouraged by technological advances which would render the project feasible. Although the idea has found considerable popularity among the general public, opposition has come principally from the Academy and its allies, one of the more vocal of whom has been Melanie Truscott. These have been characterized as "Arconuts" by the Braker Society.
Starship design has improved significantly as a result of the experience of the Winckelmann. Secondary life support systems, capable of full manual operation, are now standard features.
Melanie Truscott's career went into eclipse for several years, owing to the Richard Wald incident. She came to the public's attention again in 2207 when she opposed an effort to resume massive logging in the Northwest. She lost that struggle, but was elected to the Senate in 2208.
lan Helm, who was Kosmik's director of southern icecap operations on Quraqua, escaped all blame for pushing the button. He has served several agencies and corporations in
high-level posts, and is currently Commissioner of the NAU Park Service.
The Great Telescope in Beta Pacifica shares many of the characteristics of a living organism, although it is not quite precise to say it is alive. It was once fully capable of collecting data across the spectrum. Its signals have never been translated satisfactorily into optical images. It is now believed that the software, whose methodology is only dimly understood, has malfunctioned.
Henry Jacobi died in Chicago after a long illness. His last years were embittered by a series of simmy versions of the rescue at the Temple, all of which portrayed him as reckless and blundering.
Frank Carson never did take the job with the Academy's personnel division. And despite his resolution after the deaths of Maggie Tufu and George Hackett, he returned to Beta Pacifica III, where he headed the Working Group for six years. He received full credit for leading the original expedition, and ranks in his own lifetime with Champollion, Larimatsu, and Wald. He married Linda Thomas, from the Temple mission, and is now the father of two redheaded girls. He is also Chairman of the Margaret Tufu Foundation, which provides research grants and educational aid to budding mathematicians.
Tourists at the Academy in Washington, D.C., often visit the George H
ackett wing of the main library. A striking photograph of Hackett, superimposed over a copy of the Casumel script which he helped rescue at Quraqua, dominates the west wall.
Maggie Tufu's brilliant account of the search for the meaning of the inscription at Oz, Philological Aspects of Casumel Linear, was published several years ago to unanimous acclaim. Edited by Janet Allegri, it is already recognized as a mathematical classic.
Allegri is now teaching at Oxford.
Priscilla Hutchins continues to pilot the Academy's ships. She has established a reputation of her own, and people meeting her for the first time are always surprised to discover that she is not quite as tall, or as beautiful, as they had expected. That comes later.
—David Emory