Sci Fiction Classics Volume 3

by Vol 3 (v1. 2) (epub)

  Hodges turned around. "What is it?"

  Jones, still down on the sand, called up, "What is it, Dr. Smith? What's happening up there?"

  "This is just … no … this is amazing!"

  They were all going to the base of the column against which the ladder was leaning. So Rimkin went too.

  The white-suited figure on the top rung was peering into one of the eyes with a flashlight.

  "Dr. Smith, are you all right?"

  "Yes, yes. I'm fine. Please, just wait! But this …"

  "That's a low-power laser beam he's looking in there with," someone began.

  "He said be quiet," from someone else.

  I can hear five people breathing in my ears, Rimkin thought. What could he be looking at? "Dr. Smith," Rimkin called.

  "Shhhh!"

  Rimkin went on doggedly. "Can you describe what you're looking at."

  "Yes, I … think so. It's—it's Mars. Only, the way it must have been. A city, the city around this building. Roads. Machines that move, and a horizon full of man-made—buildings? Perhaps they're buildings. The picture moves—and the streets are full of creatures, like the statues. No, they're different. Some hurry … some go slowly … This whole plateau, all of High Weir, must have been some incredible acropolis for a mammoth cosmopolitan community. Wait! They're unveiling some sort of statue. Now they're presenting one of them to the people. Maybe a priest. Or a sacrifice—"

  After moments of silence, Mak said, "What pictures are you talking about?"

  "It's like looking through a window onto what must have been here … on this plateau perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago. As soon as I shine my laser light into the concaved surface, I'm suddenly looking out on three-dimensional moving scenes, just as real … just as strange …"

  Mak turned to Hodges. "Is it some sort of animated diorama?"

  "It's got to be some kind of hologram. A moving hologram!" At the top of the ladder, Dr. Smith finally looked down. "You've got to come up here and see this! I just wanted to look at the inside of the eye on this carving closely. I thought with the laser light I might detect crystalline structures, perhaps get a clue to what the eyes were made from. But I saw pictures!" He started down the ladder. "You've all just got to go up there and take a look!" Smith's indrawn breath roared in Rimkin's ear. "It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen."

  "Still think somebody came by and built this today just to get us off on a wild-goose chase, eh, Rimkin?" Hodges chided. "Let me go up and look. I've got my own beam, Dr. Smith." Hodges started up the rungs as Smith reached the bottom.

  Frowning behind his faceplate, Rimkin took out his own flash. For a moment, he fondled the tube; then he went back over the rusty sand tongues and purple stone to where the head had fallen. He looked at the whole eye. He looked at the broken one. He did not know what perversity made him crouch before the latter. He flicked on his laser beam.

  It took half an hour for Mak, Hodges, Jimmi, and Jones to climb the ladder, watch for two or three minutes, then climb down. They were gathering to go back to the skimmer when Jimmi saw Rimkin. She loped over to him.

  She laughed when she saw what he was doing. "Now, aren't we a bunch of dopes! Some of us could have looked at this one down here. Come on, we're going back now."

  Rimkin switched off his beam but still crouched before the tilted visage.

  "Oh, come on, Rimky. They're starting back already."

  Rimkin drew breath, then stood slowly. "All right." They started across the dressed stone flooring. The sand, fine as dust, spewed about their white boots like powdered blood.

  II

  The commons room of the skimmer was a traveling fragment of classical academia. The celitex walls looked depressingly like walnut paneling. Above the brass-fixtured folding desk surfaces, the microfilms were stacked behind naugahyde spines lettered in gold leaf. There was a mantelpiece above the heating nook. Glowing plates shot pale flickerings across the fur throws. The whole construct, with its balcony library cubicles (and a bust of Richard Nielson, president of Inter-Nal University, on his pedestal at the turn of the stairwell) was a half-serious joke of Dr. Edward Jones. But the university people, by and large, were terribly appreciative of the extravagant façade, after a couple of weeks in the unsympathetic straits of the military back at Bellona Base.

  Mak sat on the hassock, rolling the sleeves of his wool shirt over his truckdriver forearms. He had headed the Yugoslavian expedition that had unearthed Gevgeli Man. Mak's boulderlike build (and what forehead he had was hidden by a falling thatch of Sahara-colored hair) had brought the jokes in the anthropology department to new nadirs: "This is Dr. Mak Hargus, the Gevgeli Man … eh, man …"

  Mak raised the periscope of his briar from his shirt pocket. "Tell me about holograms. I've seen them, of course, the three-dimensional images and all. But how do they work? And how did the ancient Martians store all those pictures that just pop up under laser light?"

  Ling Wong Smith dropped his fists into the baggy pockets of his corduroy jacket. He and Mak gazed over the ferns in the window-box. Outside the tri-plex pane, across the dusty bruise of High Weir, the dark columns—twelve whole, seven broken—sketched the incredible culture they had viewed in the polished eyes along the carved lintel.

  Jimmi pushed her dark braid back from her shoulder and leaned on the banister to look.

  Ling Wong Smith turned away. "It's basically a matter of information storage, Mak." He lowered himself to the arm of the easy chair, meshed his long fingers, and bent forward so that his straight black hair slipped forward.

  "The Martians certainly stored one hell of a lot of information in those eyes," Hodges commented, coming jerkily down the stairs on her crutches. She was large, almost as large (and soft) as Mak was large (and hard). She had a spectacular record in cultural anthropology, and combined a sort of braying energy, enthusiastic idealism, and a quite real sensitivity (she had been a cripple since birth), with which she had managed to stagger through all sorts of bizarre cultures in East Africa, Anatolia, and Southern Cambodia to emerge with thorough and cohesive accounts of religions, mores, and manners. Her spacesuit was a prosthetic miracle that enabled her to move as easily as anyone while she wore it. But outside it, she still used aluminum crutches.

  From his go game with Jones in the corner, Rimkin watched her lurch down the stairs. She must think they're a psychological advantage, he decided.

  "Go on, Ling. Now tell us all about holograms." She picked up one crutch and waved it at the Chinese psychologist, only just avoiding the venerable Nielson.

  "Information storage," Smith repeated. "Basically it's a photograph, taken without a lens, but with perfectly parallel beams of light—the sort you get in laser light. The only scattering is that which comes from the irregularities of the surface of the object being recorded. The final plate looks like a blotchy configuration of grays—or mud, if it's in color. But when you shine the parallel beams of a laser light on this plate, you get a three-dimensional full-color image hanging over the plate—"

  "—that you can walk around," Mak finished.

  "You can walk around up to a hundred and eighty degrees," Smith amended. "It's just a completely different way of storing information than the regular photographic method. And it is far more efficient."

  Jones said softly, from across the gaming board, "It's your move, Rimky."

  "Oh." Rimkin picked up another black oval from his pot between his first two fingers and hesitated above the grid, dotted with white and black. Bits of information. He tried to encompass the areas of territory mapped below him, but they kept breaking up into small corner battles. "There." He clicked his stone to the board.

  Jones frowned. "Sure you don't want to take that move back?"

  "No. No, I don't."

  "You can, you know," Jones went on, affable. "This isn't chess. The rules are that you can take a move back if you—"

  "I know that," Rimkin said loudly. "Don't you think I know that? I want to go"—he l
ooked around and saw the others watching—"there!" The click of his stone had been very loud.

  "All right." Jones' stone ticked the board. "Double attari." But Rimkin was looking past Jones' small, heart-shaped Nigerian face to the others in the room, thinking, How can I tell them apart? They all just blend with one another. The room is round, their faces are round, stuck on little round bodies. Suddenly he closed his eyes. If they started talking, I know I wouldn't be able to tell any of them apart. How is one supposed to know? How?

  And if I opened my eyes?

  "Your move, Rimkin," Jones said. "I've got two of your stones in attari."

  Rimkin opened his eyes on the grid of black and white. "Oh," he said, and tried to strangle up a laugh. "Yes. That was a pretty silly move after all, wasn't it?"

  III

  Such an absurd move; he lay in his bunk with his eyes closed and his lips open over his teeth in a leer, trying to think of a better one. He hadn't slept in two nights. An hour like this … maybe it was only a few minutes, but it seemed like an hour … and he sat up.

  He swung the reading machine over his bed and rolled it to the closing of the Tractatus. He'd been rereading it the afternoon the skimmer had left Bellona: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann.… He pushed the machine aside and ran his hand under his undershirt. The skimmer would not leave till the morning. They should return to Bellona that night and report their discovery to the Those Who Were in Charge of Such Things. But the university people (especially the anthropology department) treasured their brief freedom. One more examination of the site tomorrow, a few cursory readings and measurements.…

  Rimkin walked barefoot into the hall. It must have only been a few minutes, because strips of light from reading machines underlined three doors. Which room belonged to whom? He knew, and yet somehow there seemed no way to know.…

  Down in the locks, he put his air suit on over his underwear. The plastic form-rings felt odd against his thighs and arms without the usual padding. He stepped into the lock.

  Outside, sharp stars dropped frostlights. The sand was filled with great, slopping puddles of ink. Cold, cold outside. The little motor humming in the vicinity of his chin kept the silicone circulating between the double thickness of his faceplate to avoid frosting. He stepped. And stepped. The desert sucked his boots.

  The others? It was not even that he disliked them. He was infinitely confused by them. Dune and shadow received him. As he walked, he looked up. One bright star was … moving. If he stood still, he could follow the movement distinctly. Phobos? Deimos? He knew it was one of the two tiny Martian moons. But for the life of him, Rimkin could not remember whether it was Fear or Terror that coursed the frozen jewelry of the Martian night.

  He saw the ruin.

  He tried to blank the struggling anxieties that squirmed into the edges of his consciousness. Seven hundred and fifty-odd vitally important enzyme reactions are occurring constantly in the human body. Were any one of them to break down for even two/three minutes, the body would die. So, just to fix the free fear that ranged his mind, he worried about one of these seven hundred and fifty-odd complex reactions suddenly coming to a halt: until he lost the subject of his worry in the coils of sand. And fear moved free above him, tangible as the slender columns, the sculpted architrave.

  He looked up at the faces, obscured by darkness. The eyes caught and grayed the starlight, and regarded him. Rimkin began to paw under the flap of his pack for his flash. He found it after much too much time—he had forgotten what he was looking for twice—and rotated the dispersal grid to break up the laser beam into ordinary light.

  He played the beam over the stones. They were gray now. He wondered if the purple were actually only a reflection from the desert. No, it was just the weakness of his beam. He walked along the sand to the place where the foundation could be mounted. He started to climb, once more aware of the inside of his suit against bare skin. The heating was working adequately, but the plastic and metal textures were so odd. He wanted to take the suit off and place his hand on the stone, then grew terrified that he might, because the Martian night was almost a hundred degrees below freezing.

  Rimkin stood on the edge of the foundation and fanned his light toward the fallen head. He approached across the sandy blocks. The smaller fragment of face lay like a saucer. Its half-eye had cracks all through. Rimkin squatted before the major portion of the face, leaned toward the fractured orb. He raised his flash, twisted back the dispersal-grid so that the bright, singular beam fell on the broken circle: flicker, and flicker, image and image. The fragmented orb began to weep the sights of ages.

  Dawn comes quickly on worlds with thin atmosphere. It climbed the dunes behind Rimkin and laid its blazing hands on his shoulders. And the mechanism of his suit began to hum and twitter about him to prepare for the two-hundred-degree rise that would occur in the next twenty minutes.

  "Rimkin …?"

  Who was breathing in his ear?

  "Rimkin, are you up there?"

  The voices had been calling for some time. But with just a sound coming out of a machine by your ear, how was he supposed to know what they were?

  "Rimky, there you are! What are you doing? Have you been here all morning?"

  He turned around—and fell over.

  "Rimkin!"

  He had been in one position for almost nine hours, and every muscle, once moved, was in agony. In the pain fogging his vision like heat, he watched the boiled potato jogging toward him in a cloud of fiery dust.

  Through his gasps he kept on trying to get out: "Why … who are … which … who are—?"

  "It's me, Evelyn."

  Evelyn, he thought. Who was Evelyn? "Who …?"

  She reached him. "Evelyn Hodges, who did you think it was? Are you hurt? Has something gone wrong with your suit? Oh, I knew I should have brought Mak out here with me. The outside temperature is about ten degrees Fahrenheit right now. But in fifteen minutes it'll be ninety or more. I can't get you back to the ship by myself."

  "No. No." Rimkin shook his head. "All right. My suit. I'm just…"

  "What is it then?"

  The pain was incredible, but for a moment he was in control enough to get out: "I'm just stiff.… I was in one position for so long. I just … just forgot."

  "How long is a long time?" Hodges demanded.

  "Almost all night, I guess." His arms weren't so bad. He pushed himself up and propped himself against the stone.

  Hodges bent down, picked up the flash (a feat she could only do with her specially constructed suit) and turned it around. "You've been looking at the pretty pictures?"

  Rimkin nodded. "Eh … yes."

  She made a sound that had something of confusion, something of frustration. "You just be glad I came looking for you!" She squatted beside him, and after much maneuvering, got herself seated. "I can never sleep past five-thirty in the morning anyway, and I got to thinking that perhaps I'd let myself get carried away a couple of times with you. You know, back at the base, with all those ribbons and brass flapping around, saying all those stupid things; we've all been under a bit of pressure. Early this morning I was in the hall, saw the light from your reading machine, and thought you might be up. I peeped in, because the door was open, but you weren't in bed. I figured you must be in the library; but the doors down to the port were open and your suit was gone—well, this is the only thing around worth going out to look at. You've been here since last night?"

  "Yes. I have."

  "Rimky," Hodges said after a few moments, "we're all oddballs in our way. You're really not all that strange when you start looking at the rest of us. Maybe you're just a little less used to fitting your angles into other people's spaces. But I have been doing some thinking. And I have a feeling I've put my finger on the reason you were so … well, preoccupied all last evening. Give me a listen and tell me if I'm right."

  She rocked a couple of times beside him to settle inside her blimp. "Yesterday I said something about the Martians having at l
east reached the level of the Greeks. But that was before we discovered the moving hologram records. That at least brings their technology—or one facet of it, at any rate—to a level comparable to the middle of the twentieth century. Or even well beyond. We still can't embed a moving hologramic image into a crystal that just starts to play back automatically under laser light. Now, if they were all that advanced, then there should be scads of written evidence around here. If not things like books, then at least carved in the stone. But there isn't a scratch, not a dated cornerstone, no mayor's name carved over the doorway. Hell, there're at least mason's marks on the blocks in the Khufu Pyramid. Now, you're our semanticist, Rimky, and it must be pretty important to you that there be some evidence of a Martian language. But the fact that there isn't any immediately visible about a structure this imposing, coupled with the fact that they obviously stored so much visually …" Her voice hung on the word as a card player's fingers might linger on a daring discard. "Well, there's a good possibility, Rimky, that they just weren't a verbal race, and they somehow managed to achieve this level of technology without ever employing written communication, sort of the same way the Incas and Mayas reached their cultural level and still managed totally to bypass the invention of the wheel. If that is the case, Rimky, that makes you sort of useless on this expedition. I could see that getting to you, upsetting you."

  He could tell she was waiting for some great reaction of relief now that a truth had outed. How did she expect to detect it? Perhaps the change in breathing would come through the suit phones. He tried to remember who she was. But there were all seven hundred and fifty-odd enzyme reactions to think about, to make sure that one of them didn't suddenly stop.…

  "You know," she was going on (Hodges? Yes, it was the Hodges woman). "I'm really the useless one on the expedition. You know what my talent is? I'm the one who can make friends with all sorts of Eskimos and jungle bunnies. And then there were the mountain cannibals in the Caucasus who wanted to make me their queen." She laughed metallically. "They certainly did. I don't care if I never see another piece of decayed yak butter again as long as I live. Rimky, I'm here just in case we run into a tribe of live Martians." She looked out across the barren copper. After a few more moments she said, "I think you'd pretty well agree there's a good deal more chance you'll find Martian writing than I'll find the models for those carvings up there, wandering around in nomadic tribes. And what's more, it does get under my skin. I guess, being on edge like that, I've occasionally said some things, some of them to you, I'd have best held in. If you've got a skill or a discipline, you want to use it. You don't want to drag it halfway across the solar system because there's a one-in-a-thousand chance somebody might just want a minute of your time." She patted his forearm. "Am I anywhere near it?"