“Did Dr. Rasmussen get the block I sent over this morning after we landed?”
Bernssen nodded. “The pilot delivered it. What’s in it?”
“An explanation for all this, I think,” Ralston said.
Bernssen didn’t reply. He would hardly believe an archaeologist held such knowledge.
“It’s all chaotic behavior,” Ralston went on. “Induced, I think, by something that passed by Alpha 3 over ten thousand years ago. The weather’s different now, the native populace died out, their sun’s exploding.”
Bernssen looked on all this as another proof that Ralston had become quite insane.
“Stay out of the direct sunlight, if you can,” Bernssen advised. “The proton storms that hit now and again get through even the atmosphere and give quite a jolt. We’ll give you warning on those so you can get underground. Justine thinks the atmosphere will boil off before too much longer.”
“All the more reason to get to work,” Ralston said. He stared at the master controller. The complex device could drive a thousand different machines. They had only a few dozen. He flipped the switch. Grinding noises from outside the plastic shelter told of the automated collector equipment beginning operation. Ralston glanced outside and saw the automated probes vanishing through the copper door.
But for all the spectroscopic analyses, for all the photos and probings, the real work lay with him and Leonore. The dioramas “spoke” only to the human mind.
Ralston waited for Leonore to bid her farewells to Bernssen in private before he went outside to join her. Bernssen’s land crawler vanished behind a brown cloud of mud and spray and soon passed beyond limits of hearing.
Leonore sighed. “He’s really upset with me for coming back. Nels said that the weather patterns are totally unpredictable now. No matter how much their meteorologist studies the satellite photos, he can’t guess what’ll happen for longer than a few hours.”
“Chaos is accelerating,” Ralston mused. “It’s almost as if it were a virus that’s finally spread throughout the body, destroying all systems.”
“Or an echo that’s finally returned,” she said. “As much as your theory bothers me, it seems to fit what we know of Alpha 3. Their decline came too fast.”
“The epilepsy epidemic is a strong argument that I’m right. Such an affliction couldn’t have been caused by an ordinary disease and gone undetected. The evidence points to the natives as being fairly advanced in medicine.”
“It’s almost as if it were a capricious act of God,” Leonore said. “He reached out His finger and touched the world, and its people died. And then its biome died. And then the sun.”
“I think I interested Westcott enough in the problem to give it a few minutes’ thought. He’ll be trying to track the path of whatever it is that passed by. A device, I’m calling it. I refuse to believe such a chaotic field might exist naturally.”
“Do you think it was a weapon that got away from the natives?”
“I think it’s much older. The dioramas we’ve examined show them to be at peace for some time. I think the device came through on a more cosmic journey. I hope Westcott can pinpoint where it might have started—and where it went.”
“Went?” Leonore’s .question hung in the air.
“I don’t think it stayed here. It went on. Somewhere.”
Leonore looked up into the overcast sky and shuddered. Lightning bolts of unimaginable proportions leaped from cloud to cloud and the first hints of rain began, virgas trailing down from the sky and drawing lacy fingers across the muddy terrain. She squinted at the sudden flashes, then turned to the supervisor and made a few minor adjustments.
“Static electricity’s a problem,” she said, not wanting to confront the idea of chaos forcing itself on any world she knew. “But we can compensate. Got it grounded pretty well.”
Ralston nodded. They had set the data collection equipment in motion. Now they—he—had to do the rest. Ralston silently gestured for Leonore to pick up her camera and join him underground.
He’d have to selectively pick which dioramas to enter and which to avoid. After all, Ralston wanted as much information as possible—and without ending up like the natives. Or Yago de la Cruz.
“The weather’s driving me wild,” Leonore Disa said. “How do you stand it?”
“I don’t try,” Ralston said. “I ignore it. He weaved from lack of sleep and from entering and experiencing twelve of the dioramas in the past planetary day. For a little over seventeen hours he had been swept back in time to an alien world, a world filled with birdlike natives and strange rituals and thought patterns—and he had lived their lives and learned the lessons they taught to their young. Ralston wobbled a bit, then sank down. One of the supervisor’s data probes beeped. He moved out of its way. It hummed in contentment and entered the diorama he had just vacated.
“It’s not getting any of the impressions I did, is it?” he asked. Ralston closed his eyes and wished for a month’s sleep. But too much remained to be done. The threat of the nova hung over him like a sharp sword on a weakening thread.
Leonore didn’t have to check the supervisor block circuits to know the answer. She shook her head.
Ralston looked along the corridor. Hundreds more of the dioramas remained. He increasingly felt the pressures of time. Justine Rasmussen had called twice to check on them, to urge them to leave. Nels Bernssen had called three more times. Ralston appreciated their solicitude but hated the interruptions.
The last call, however, had worn at him the most. Dr. Rasmussen claimed that the weather patterns had turned completely chaotic. Some sections between the solar physics site and the underground museum had been flooded to the point that travel might be impossible, even with the crawlers.
“There’s so many to go,” Leonore said, almost wistfully. “Can we make any progress at all?”
“You’re still worried about lingering effects, aren’t you?” he asked. Ralston thought his graduate assistant had summed it up well when she said that echoes of the cause had finally returned and were now being heard. Echoes of chaos, he mused. The primary cause of such disorder had passed ten thousand years ago, killing Alpha 3’s populace, but the final result only now became apparent.
Ralston reached out and a static charge leaped from his finger to one of the IR probes. The robot flinched, as if it were human. He knew the master supervisor corrected current levels internally in the probe to keep the data uncompromised.
“I think that the natives carried the seeds of destruction within them. Whatever caused the epilepsy in de la Cruz must have been present in their population, also. Their telepathic projector transmitted it—can still transmit it.”
“Pick the wrong scene to examine and you’ll end up like de la Cruz. Not a cheerful notion,” said Leonore.
“Any luck on removing the scenes and maintaining the projection?” The primary task, as he saw it, was not to personally examine as many of the dioramas as he could but to find a method of removing them intact and keeping them workable. The IC starship in orbit around Muckup had ample cargo space for dozens of the dioramas.
“Some,” said Leonore. “The supervisor is still analyzing the strengths of various EM fields. Unusual intensity readings point to a possible mechanism being in the walls and in the figures themselves. We…”
The beeping of the com unit interrupted her. Almost angrily, Ralston grabbed it and snapped, “What is it?”
“Michael?” came Justine Rasmussen’s voice. The interference caused by the lightning, the intense aurora, and the solar radiation bathing their com satellite made her sound weak, vulnerable. Ralston softened somewhat. The fatigue wore on him as much as his frustration at not making more progress.
“Yes, Justine?” Since she’d called on a first-name basis, he’d respond similarly.
“We have troubles here. Like that you found in the native population. Like the student’s.”
“Epilepsy?”
“Six of our techs are dow
n. The automedic has them heavily sedated. One broke his thigh bone thrashing around.”
“Did they come across another museum? Like the one here?” Ralston had visions of the physicists blundering about in the dioramas, experiencing the long-lost culture as Yago de la Cruz had done—and dying because of it.
“No.” That answer chilled Ralston even more. The echoes from the past came back even stronger. He almost heard them creating chaos all around. “They tend to be the staff on planet the longest, however. Most of us are relative newcomers compared to them.”
“I’ve been working on the assumption that the effects of the chaos device remained, even though the device itself went on,” he explained. “The most obvious effects are the unpredictable weather and Alpha Prime going nova.”
“It’s a radiation rather than a poison? Can we shield against it?”
She approached the problem as a physicist. Block it out; keep working; study it later under controlled conditions. Chaos followed no rules.
“Is Bernssen all right?” Ralston asked, seeing Leonore’s anguished face.
“Nels is as strong as a bull. Nothing stops him,” came the gratifying answer. “But I have ordered a termination of all experiments over the next three days. Four days from now we lift for orbit. Conditions then will determine if we stay any longer or star for Novo Terra immediately. I thought you should know.”
“Thank you, Justine. Is there anything we can do?”
“Our automedic isn’t equipped to handle six at once. Can Nels bring three of the, uh, victims over so yours can care for them? You might have to shuttle them to your starship if things turn suddenly worse.”
Ralston knew that conditions could only deteriorate.
“Bring them over. We can use Bernssen’s help shutting down our own work.”
“Michael, no!”
Ralston motioned Leonore to silence. The signal broke up continually and he strained to hear Justine Rasmussen.
“…over right away. Look for him within a few hours. The mud plains are especially treacherous now.”
“All right, Justine. Thank you again for the warning.”
Ralston clicked off the com unit and sat, feeling curiously drained. All their work had been for nothing. The cloak of chaos had descended and hid knowledge from his eyes now.
“Michael, something’s wrong.”
“What?” He sat up, instantly alert. It took him several seconds to realize what it was. He relaxed again, as much as he could. “The rain’s stopped. That’s all.”
“But the storm just started.”
He tried to keep from screaming at her. What else did Leonore expect from chaotic behavior? It started, it stopped—at random. Their macroscopic world had become as indeterminate as the quantum mechanical domain. Anything might happen.
Anything.
FIFTEEN
“The sky’s on fire,” Leonore Disa said in a hushed tone. She stood at the base of the stairs leading to the alien museum, staring up at the dancing veils of lacy, electrical aurora. “The last time it was only white. Now I see reds and even blues and greens.”
“Heavy ionization,” said Nels Bernssen. He moved beside her, one arm circling her waist.
“It’s so beautiful. I can hardly believe that this is the final performance.”
“Curtain’s coming down,” agreed Bernssen. “You and Ralston about got your equipment packed away?”
“I told him it’d be all right to leave the supervisor,” she said. “Daddy’ll never miss it, especially if he gets some cut of the profits off the find. Michael agreed that since it was, in a way, IC’s grant that got us back here in time, the company ought to have a minority share in any profits.”
“Does that mean you’ve figured out the telepathy gadget? That’ll bring in a planet’s ransom in licensing fees.”
“The licensing fees belong to the University. The monetary split will get nasty before everyone’s finished. And no, we’re still no closer to figuring it out, but Michael thinks he has a way of getting the information. He won’t say how.”
Leonore looked out at the desolate mud flats where they had packed a half dozen of the dioramas. They had taken tridee photos, run the analyzer for precise locations, had put all their data through the supervisor, done everything within their power to record in the hope of reconstructing on Novo Terra. But Leonore held little hope for that. The natives of Alpha 3 had been more clever than they. If only a full-scale expedition had been possible!
Engineers might have torn apart the displays and found the answer. Or xenopsychologists skilled with alien thought. Or any of a score of other researchers. She and Ralston were experts at uncovering, not figuring out how these devices worked.
And always the specter of the nova hung over them like the angel of death. There simply hadn’t been adequate time to explore, to think, to try theory after theory until truth became obvious. No good science would be done on Muckup.
“It’s starting to rain again,” she said, pulling away from the museum door as a gust of wind stung her face. “Let’s go see if Michael needs us.”
“I want to check on the others,” Bernssen said, worry creeping into his voice. “The automed doesn’t seem to do very much for them. It pumps in tranquilizers but little else.”
“If they’ve come down with what affected de la Cruz, there’ll be neurological damage that can’t heal.” Leonore swallowed hard. “If we don’t leave Muckup, we might all end up that way.”
“How cheerful,” Bernssen said, worry giving a brittle edge to his voice.
“How much longer?” came Ralston’s shouted question. “As much as an hour?”
“The shuttle pod’s ready to go within the hour,” said Bernssen. “The last of the diorama crates needs to be loaded. The robots are working on them now, but the rain might slow them down. Call it two hours until launch.”
“Good. As soon as the robots are finished with the important stuff, get them all here. I want the supervisor’s full attention directed on this single diorama.” Ralston pointed to one with four figures huddled around a low table. All stared at a blank sheet on the table as if it contained the wisdom of the universe.
“What’s so important about this one?” asked Bernssen.
“Maybe nothing, but I’m betting everything on it being pivotal. The later ones”—Ralston pointed down the corridor to his right—“were obviously constructed within a few years of their eventual collapse. I feel those hold the most danger for anyone entering.”
“Like de la Cruz,” Leonore said in a whisper so low only Bernssen heard.
“This one seems to have been constructed after the object—what I’m calling the chaos device—passed but before the decline became obvious to everyone.”
“You make it sound as if the people in this sideshow knew what it was,” said Bernssen.
“I think that’s true.”
“But there’s not enough time to study it. There are four figures. That,” said Leonore, mentally calculating, “might be as long as ten hours of telepathic lessons.”
Robots clanked down the corridor, some dripping chunks of mud. Ralston no longer cared. Within weeks or even days, the entire planet would be superheated vapor. Preservation of his find no longer mattered in the face of such cosmic catastrophe.
“All here?” Ralston asked. His face paled as he considered the danger in what he was about to do. He wobbled slightly and caught himself against the wall.
“Ready for dismantling, Michael.” Leonore looked up from the remote panel. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Yes. Now listen carefully and don’t argue. I want the entire display removed intact. Blast a hole through the roof and lift it out in one piece. Load it onto the shuttle immediately. Then I want you to gather anything important—don’t miss a single block circuit!—and then get yourself and Bernssen’s colleagues onto the shuttle.”
“We can start them right now, if you like,” said Bernssen. “That’d speed up the transfer.
”
Ralston wasn’t thinking straight. All he wanted was assurance that this particular diorama reached orbit and the IC star-ship cargo bay intact.
“Do it however you like.”
Leonore made a single adjustment to the remote panel. Outside, robots began shifting the anesthetized victims of the chaos device to the shuttle.
“You make it sound as if you won’t be able to supervise,” said Leonore.
“I’ve left my notes in the analyzer, if anything happens. I’m sure they won’t blame you.”
“What are you going to do?” Leonore asked sharply.
“As soon as I enter the diorama, begin removal.”
“With you in it? Are you crazy?” Bernssen’s shock turned his face into a flowing putty mask of confusion.
“I don’t want to kill myself, but this means too much not to make one last try. If I activate the telepathic projection circuit, then you move the entire diorama, perhaps we can keep it intact until we get back to Novo Terra.”
“Michael, this is ridiculous.”
Leonore’s protest fell on deaf ears. Ralston stepped forward, chose his subject, turned and assumed that posture. He reeled a bit as the mental projection took hold. He sensed a substantial difference in the “texture” of the thoughts, a definite indication of change from the earliest dioramas. Then he became lost in arcane discussions and melted into his role.
“He’s lost it,” said Bernssen. “I’ll get him out of there and…”
“No!”
“Leonore, we can’t ship him back like this. It might kill him.”
“What’s he got to lose, Nels? His life? That’s a small price to pay if he learns how this device works. And if he returns to Novo Terra without it, what are they going to do to him?”
“The psychologists would get him,” Bernssen said in a choked voice. “If they find him guilty of de la Cruz’s death, they’ll wipe his mind and rehab him.”
[Weapons of Chaos 01] - Echoes of Chaos Page 17