The automedic hummed and whirred. The hose that Leonore had connected began to buck and swing about when the machine decided on the propter type and dosage of medication and began pumping it into de la Cruz’s bloodstream.
“Whew,” Ralston said, lowering de la Cruz flat onto his back. The student had gone limp with the influx of the drug. Ralston guessed the automedic had injected a tranquilizer.
He jumped when a siren went off and a bright red light flashed atop the machine.
“What’s that?” asked Leonore.
“De la Cruz just died.”
They stood and stared at the motionless body. Before dying, Yago de la Cruz had broken several bones. One compound fracture gleamed whitely where bone protruded from the flesh of his left arm. De la Cruz’s face showed no peace in death, either. The seizure had ripped him apart, inside and out, physically and emotionally.
Ralston took a blanket out of a supply box and covered de la Cruz’s face. It hid the graduate student’s features, but somehow the formless mound mocked Ralston more than the contorted face.
“It’s verd,” Asan said with more fervor than Ralston had seen in the rehabilitated felon before. “They’re going to brain-wipe you for certain. You’ll end up a rehab.” He didn’t need to add “just like me” to scare Ralston.
“I didn’t kill him. The automedic’s report will verify that.” Ralston tried not to sound too defensive. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but he knew that appearances were more important in academic circles than actions.
Yago de la Cruz had been his graduate student during this expedition. His ward had died under mysterious circumstances. It hadn’t been anyone’s fault, but the archaeology department investigation committee and the chairman wouldn’t care about that. They’d see this as a simple way of ridding themselves of Ralston. He had questioned policy one too many times, had tried to gain tenure in a system designed to reward obedience rather than brilliance, and had made damned few allies because of his stand for the Nex.
“He’s right, Asan,” Leonore spoke up. “The automedic shows some sort of massive neurological failure. It’s too complicated for its simple programming, but Michael didn’t cause de la Cruz’s death. We all saw what happened.”
Even a rehab like Asan caught the way Leonore now referred to her professor by his first name. Asan gave his neutral shrug that might mean anything. He turned and left.
“We’ve got to keep his body intact. Get it back to Novo Terra for an autopsy,” said Ralston.
“We don’t have the facilities,” Leonore pointed out. “What’s the usual procedure when someone dies in the field?”
“I don’t know,” Ralston admitted. “It’s never happened to me—or anyone I’ve even heard of.” The University of Ilium medical requirements for admission to a field program were as strict as any Ralston had ever seen; this was one of the few things done by the school that he approved of. Scanning the data on de la Cruz showed nothing to indicate why he had died in such agony.
“Do we bury him? Here?” The woman’s voice threatened to break with emotion. None of them cared for Muckup. The constant rains, the thin atmosphere, the slight gravity and the muddy desolation all wore on them. Even if they hadn’t liked de la Cruz, burying one of their own here seemed a travesty.
The war years came back to Ralston. The Nex hadn’t been interested in retrieving their dead, but they had developed extensive battle zone facilities for recovering wounded. One of their pickup methods might be worthwhile to try. He had nothing to lose, after all—and de la Cruz wouldn’t care.
Ralston went to the com unit and switched it on. The static wasn’t as bad as it had been during earlier calls to the solar physics site.
“Dr. Justine Rasmussen, come in. This is Ralston, over.”
Justine Rasmussen’s voice barked out, loud and clear and annoyed. “What is it, Ralston? I’m very busy right now.”
“We’ve had a medical emergency.”
“Need our doctor?”
“Automated?” he asked.
“Automedic Model 23.”
“That’s the same as ours. University standard issue.”
A long pause, then Rasmussen’s worried question crackled over the speaker. “That unit’ll handle just about anything. What’s the problem? Did your unit break down?”
“One of my students died.”
“You’re not distilling your own, are you? You are serious about a fatality?”
“Quite serious. I need a large dewar flask and liquid nitrogen for cooling it.”
“Corpse-sized dewar?” Justine Rasmussen caught on to Ralston’s idea quickly. “Will fly it over to you within the hour. Need more than, say, fifty liters of liquid nitrogen?”
“That will be adequate until the starship comes. The body will be starred back to the University.”
“You’ll be going with it, won’t you? Please remember what we spoke of earlier.”
“I know, I know,” Ralston said. “But it’ll take almost two months for the starship to arrive. Plenty of time to make a decision about the rest of the expedition returning.”
“The decision’s been made,” Rasmussen barked. “Alpha Prime is going nova. Our indications for it mount every day. There is no arguing with an exploding star, Doctor.”
“Keep us posted. And thanks for the dewar.”
Ralston flipped off the unit, then sat heavily in a sagging plastic chair. He wished he had a decent, comfortable one to sit in. He wished a lot of things. He hurt all over. Worst of all, a headache started behind his eyes. It felt as if someone kicked him with spiked boots.
“Michael?” came Leonore’s hesitant voice. He opened his eyes and stared at her. “I… I went through Yago’s things.” She held out an analyzer block circuit. “I think this is his recording of all he did within the catacombs.”
“He showed the camera shots,” Ralston said, more tired than ever. “He really panicked when I mentioned the analyzer, so I knew he had one running. Go on, put that in. Let’s see what the chinging son of a bitch did.”
Together they watched. With every subsequent shot, their puzzlement grew. The analyzer showed de la Cruz walking into a diorama, then freeze in a pose for several minutes before shivering as if cold, then collapsing.
“Check the radiation readings,” ordered Ralston.
“Nothing out of the ordinary. High static electricity readings, though. But that’s nothing unusual. We’ve fought them ever since we landed.”
“He shot these last night during the storm,” Ralston said. “Static electricity levels aren’t that high and might be caused by the lightning.” He punched the rapid advance sequencer. They watched silently as de la Cruz invaded one after another of the dioramas. Each time he emerged, his smile broadened. But Ralston clearly saw de la Cruz’s physical deterioration. At the end of the block’s recording, de la Cruz trembled with an intensity just short of an outright epileptic event.
“Do you think he caught something by going into the dioramas? Some alien disease?” Leonore’s voice had firmed. She was a scientist with a problem, and that precluded panic.
Ralston let her lean on that crutch—or whatever it was she depended on now to keep from screaming.
“You’re thinking I might have loosed something ominous that had been penned up in the catacombs,” he said.
“We, Michael. We were both there and we took the first photos.”
“That’s verd,” he said, hating the slang even as he used it. “Our analyzer will verify that.” He slammed his fist down hard against the table. The projector bounced and the picture shimmered. “Dammit, what happened to de la Cruz?”
“Poison?”
“Nothing I’ve come across indicates poison. Besides, the automedic would have found it quickly enough. It compared his current blood chemistry with his records. No, de la Cruz went into a diorama and something happened to him while he was inside. It wasn’t poison or disease.”
“Whatever occurred happened to him in eac
h one,” added Leonore. “The expression on his face when he left the first diorama changed from fear to… to triumph.”
“Run a comparison of his block and ours.” Ralston waited while the two blocks were checked-by the computer. He punched in a request for only radiation and chemical comparisons. In less than a minute the negative answer flashed on the readout screen.
“Nothing unusual on either block. Both readings matched within a half percent.”
“Nothing unusual at all, then,” said Ralston. “I’ve been over our data several times. Nothing lethal indicated in it.”
He rocked back in the chair and stared at the last image from de la Cruz’s data as it shone against the far wall. De la Cruz stood with that shit-eating grin on his face, as if he had just conquered the universe. Behind him stood a pair of the avian native figures. Ralston’s sharp eyes discerned minute differences in their bodies and faces. One might be male and the other female.
Other than this, he found nothing amiss. Certainly, he saw nothing fatal.
What had he loosed on this world? And did it matter, if Alpha Prime went nova?
Ralston had less than two months to discover the answer. Somehow, the thrill of his discovery bad faded considerably. It had been replaced by a cold fear clutching at his guts.
NINE
“Can you blame them, Michael?” asked Leonore Disa.
He could. But Ralston held down his temper. The past six weeks had been nothing less than hell. The students, except for Leonore, had refused to enter the underground museum, fearing a fate similar to de la Cruz’s. Ralston stared out the shelter door at the bright silver dewar the solar physics group had given them. Plumes of condensation wreathed the large flask; inside lay Yago de la Cruz’s frozen body. When the University starship arrived in a few days, the dewar and corpse would be the first items to go up.
Then Ralston and the students would follow. And his discovery would be lost for all time.
“I suppose it’s only human nature,” he said after a long pause. “They don’t want to die like he did.”
“They should have realized it was only a fluke, an accident of nature. Something made Yago susceptible to the messages. As long as they don’t enter the dioramas, they’d be safe. If they’d only think it through!”
Ralston didn’t argue with her. He wasn’t as sure about the cause of de la Cruz’s death as Leonore seemed. They had explored the dioramas far more carefully than de la Cruz. Starting with the first scene, they had spent a full week doing nothing but monitoring radiation from all frequencies. Along with this they had run a special analyzer with a surface acoustic wave sensor designed to pick up the most minute odors. Nothing unexpected had been found. No sign of danger.
That made the student’s death all the more frustrating to explain.
A full seven days of observation—and no clue as to what had happened to de la Cruz. Ralston had then entered the diorama as they’d witnessed de la Cruz do. The surprise he’d felt at the telepathic communication, the sense of being transported back to a culture and time far beyond his wildest dreams at first had almost overcome the history lesson slipping across the edges of his mind. He had left the diorama quickly, Leonore recording everything.
Their most sensitive instruments detected no trace of the telepathic message. The analyzer, however, picked up the pheromones denoting Ralston’s sudden fear, the sound of his heart hammering away, every physiological change he experienced as a result of the unexpected world forming within his head.
But the most careful examination by the automedic turned up no substantive neurological change.
Why had de la Cruz died when Ralston seemed unaffected?
Ralston had re-entered the first diorama and fully experienced the lesson. A change in orientation had produced a new and complementary version of the same lesson. And none of it impinged on their analyzer’s block circuits.
He had been extremely careful and had denied Leonore her wish to experience the dioramas personally. If anyone took the risk of death, it would be Michael Ralston. But their slow progress down the corridor of dioramas, each scene taking a full three days to experience and for Ralston to record all that had happened, produced no physiological changes in the archaeologist.
Working steadily, doing two dioramas a week and using the seventh day to go over their data, he and Leonore had finished examining only ten. Dozens more lay ahead—and the final ones which might hold the secret to de la Cruz’s death were more than a year away, if they continued on their current timetable.
“Nels called today,” Leonore said. Ralston pulled out of his introspection.
“What did he have to say?”
“The surface disturbances on the sun have quieted.”
Hope flared. “Then Alpha Prime isn’t going to blow? We can stay and finish our work?”
Leonore shook her head. Ralston’s hope died stillborn. “Nels doesn’t understand the dynamics of the nova process, but he says their current theory is that it doesn’t proceed in a linear fashion. There are odd spurts and surges, then a falling back into normal stellar behavior. But each leveling off comes at a higher and higher level, which makes new instabilities even worse. When they reach some unknown threshold, the star explodes.”
“But this tailing off in instability gives us more time?” Ralston clutched at the slimmest hope now. The dioramas constituted a major discovery that must be exploited fully. Without the graduate students helping him and Leonore, recording the pertinent data had gone much too slowly. Any additional time allotted by the capricious star could be put to good use.
“Maybe. I don’t know.” Leonore smiled wryly. “Remember, I met Nels when he was a tutor—a tutor I needed to get through elementary physics. Why not ask him what this means? Or Dr. Rasmussen?”
Ralston hadn’t gotten along well at all with Justine Rasmussen. Each subsequent call had become more brusque, colder. When she learned of de la Cruz’s death and its possible cause, she had prohibited any social contact between the two groups. Of all the people affected, Nels Bernssen and Leonore Disa felt this the most, but they had felt compelled to obey the order, even though no sign of disease, poison, or radiation had been detected since the deadly tragedy.
Ralston considered all his options. He had too few. He might stay and work alone, but if he did so, Rasmussen might refuse to allow him to leave the planet with her researchers when Alpha Prime reached nova stage. The fear of alien disease still struck at the hearts of many otherwise sane people. Even though expert xenobiologists had shown it was impossible for an alien virus or bacterium not based on DNA to do any real damage to a human, primitive fears still persisted. And those races that shared DNA with mankind had produced no disease that didn’t have an already existing—and known—counterpart. The human body was an ecology of living flora, microbes, and viruses. If an alien invader somehow found a niche and began growing, the body provided a natural defense to check it.
“Even though I wish there were a way of staying, I’ll return with the rest of you, I suppose,” he said. “The University will want to know firsthand the details of de la Cruz’s death.” Ralston laughed mirthlessly. “What I’ll be able to tell them isn’t going to be very enlightening, though.”
“There hasn’t been any hint of an answer in the dioramas?” Leonore asked.
“No, and you’re to stay away from them. Understand me? That is a direct order.”
“You’re not being affected. The constant med monitoring shows you within norms.” Leonore looked at her professor carefully. “But the last few readings have shown increased stress levels.”
“Really?” Ralston said sarcastically. “The find of all time lies under my feet, a student dies exploring it, and the damned star will go nova before I can do more than photograph lifeless figures. Stress? Whatever might cause stress?”
“Michael, please. You know what I mean. You’re taking this all on yourself.”
“I’m in charge. The excavations in the city have sho
wn nothing we haven’t already guessed.” He stared at the dewar with de la Cruz’s body and men past it to the direction of the copper door leading to fame and something even headier: knowledge.
“The answer is down there. I know it. And I won’t have time to find it!”
Frustration boiled over. Ralston stalked from the shelter just as the com unit beeped for his attention. He almost didn’t return to answer. Let Leonore talk to Justine Rasmussen. But duty drew him just as Leonore reached for the signal button.
“I’ll take it. Thanks.”
“Dr. Ralston?” came the physicist’s voice. “You still there?”
“Yes, Dr. Rasmussen, I’m still here. The alien slime monsters haven’t devoured me yet.”
“Your ship just shifted in. It’ll be in orbit the day after tomorrow, E.T.A. noon.”
He silently cursed. The damned pilot had come in exactly on target. A small error of just a microsecond of arc would have given an extra few days’ intra-system travel. And even worse, the starship would enter orbit at precisely the best time for transfer. The pilot wasted not a single nanosecond.
“When will you leave?” asked Ralston.
“Our ship starred a few days after yours,” she answered. “We’ll stay as long as possible, but there’s some discussion among my staff members about when that might be. The space-time tensors become distorted near a nova, and no one’s sure what this might mean to the starship’s engines.”
Ralston didn’t pretend to understand their concern, but it afforded him a chance. He mustered his courage, then almost blurted, “Could I stay behind and work, then leave with your group? I’m sure you’d have enough room aboard.”
“I don’t think that would be wise, Dr. Ralston,” came Justine Rasmussen’s cold voice. “There is still concern among my colleagues concerning the Pandora’s box you seem to have opened.”
“But—”
[Weapons of Chaos 01] - Echoes of Chaos Page 10