As on a Darkling Plain

by Ben Bova

Ludongo heard it over the intercom. “Thank all the gods of Earth!”

  I see my own mouth grinning. “Bromley’s got nothing to say?”

  “We had to put him under sedation,” Speer answers.

  I try to explain to Speer what happened. He listens without a word, without even nodding.

  “I guess I blamed myself for Marlene’s death,” I tell him. “I guess I unconsciously wanted to join her, or punish myself, or something like that.”

  “But how could you blame yourself for an accident? If the booster exploded, how could it be your fault?”

  Ludongo breaks in, “What booster exploded? There have been no accidents among the star missions. All the ships took off on schedule. I have a friend on the Sirius mission; they didn’t lose anyone in an accident.”

  “No, you’re wrong.... I saw it.... In my dreams I keep seeing it again.... The noise and flames and smoke.”

  “There were no accidents.”

  Could it have been just a normal lift-off I was watching? The booster rising up and out of the smoke, the flame coming from the normal rocket exhaust?

  “The announcer... I remember now. They even showed telescopic pictures of the booster making rendezvous with the starship, in orbit.... It didn’t explode!”

  “Then why did you think she was dead?” Speer asks.

  The answer comes immediately. “She is dead. For me she’s dead. By the time she comes back from Sirius, I’ll be an old man. She’ll still be about thirty-five. I’ve lost her for good.”

  Speer, “And your dreams kept forcing you to look at the situation. They were trying to make you... well, wake up.”

  “But I didn’t want to dream.”

  “Of course. You wanted to hide inside the ship, in the computer. You wanted to stop being human, because that’s painful. But your dreams wouldn’t let you do it.”

  “But in the meantime the captain...”

  Speer shrugs. “I don’t know about the captain. I put him in the cryogenic locker; I hope that when we get back to Earth he can be revived. I think he’ll be all right, but you can never tell....”

  Voronov’s not dead! But Marlene is... she really is. If I ever see her again, she won’t even recognize me.

  SENSORS DETECT OCEAN SURFACE. ESTIMATED TIME TO SURFACE ONE HOUR THIRTY MINUTES PLUS OR MINUS FIVE PERCENT.

  “Okay, back to work. Doc, you’d better check Ling and Bromley, see if they’re okay. Then come back here. Dr. Ludongo, it might be a good idea to strap down. There’ll be turbulence when we get closer to the surface and even more in the atmosphere.”

  Ludongo nods into the intercom camera. Speer pulls himself out of the captain’s couch and goes aft.

  We’re going to make it. We’re going to live. I’m going to get back to that beautiful blue planet and get rid of these damned gills and breathe sweet air again.

  Give me a complete systems check.

  WORKING.

  Turbulence coming up. But we’ll get through it. She’s a good ship. I can reconnect with the controls now, it’ll be okay. We’ll get through the clouds and back home again.

  It’ll be good to be able to look at the stars again.

  The Jupiter mission opened new fields of biology and planetology to the fear-driven men of Earth. But it shed no light on the Titan machines. A generation of men went to Saturn’s dark satellite: scientists, soldiers, philosophers, engineers, theologians, even politicians. They tried to deduce or estimate or reason out or calculate or have revealed to them the true purpose behind the inhumanly efficient machines. From neutron beam probes to prayers, nothing worked. The machines kept their secret. And men began to realize that the answer, if it was ever found, would come from beyond the solar system.

  On the starships, the generation passed in cryogenic sleep. Sidney Lee spent the years in stasis, dreaming the same relentless dream of the buildings on Titan. He didn’t dream of Sylvia, or of the stars, or of the future or the past. Only of the buildings, the machines that blindly obeyed a builder who had left Earth’s solar system countless millennia ago.

  6. THE SIRIUS MISSION

  Lee opened his eyes.

  “What is it?”

  Carlos Pascual was smiling down at him, his round dark-skinned face relaxed and almost happy. “We are there... here, I mean. We are braking, preparing to go into orbit.”

  Lee blinked and sat up. “We made it?”

  “Yes, yes,” Pascual answered softly as his eyes shifted to the bank of indicators on the console behind Lee’s shoulder. “The panel claims that you are alive and well. How do you feel?”

  That took a moment’s thought. “A little hungry.”

  “A common reaction.” The smile returned. “You can join the others in the galley.”

  The expedition’s medical chief helped Lee to swing his legs over the edge of the couch, then left him and went to the next unit, where a blond woman lay still, sleeping. With an effort, Lee recalled her: Doris McNertny, primary biologist, backup biochemist. Lee pulled a deep breath into his lungs and tried to get started. The overhead light panels, on full intensity now, made him want to squint.

  Standing was something of an experiment. No shakes, Lee thought gratefully. The room was large and circular, with no viewports. Each of the twenty hibernation couches had been painted a different color by some psychology team back on Earth. Most of them were empty now. The remaining occupied ones had their lids off and the life-system connections removed as Pascual, Tanaka, and May Connearney worked to revive the people. Despite the color scheme, the room looked and smelled clinical.

  The galley, Lee focused his thoughts, feeling momentarily like a true sixty-year-old, is in this globe, one flight up. The ship was built in globular sections that turned in response to g-pulls. With the main fusion engines firing to brake their approach to final orbit, “up” was temporarily in the direction of the engines’ thrustors. But inside the globes it didn’t make much difference.

  He found the stairwell that ran through the globe. Inside the winding metal ladderway the rumbling vibrations from the ship’s engines were echoing strongly enough to be heard as actual sound.

  “Sid! Good morning!” Aaron Hatfield had stationed himself at the entrance to the galley and was acting as a one-man welcoming committee.

  There were only a half-dozen people in the galley. Of course, Lee realized. The crew personnel are at their stations. Except for Hatfield, the people were bunched at the galley’s lone viewport, staring outside and speaking in hushed subdued whispers.

  “Hello, Aaron.” Lee didn’t feel jubilant, not after a thirty-year sleep. He tried to picture how Sylvia must look and found he couldn’t do it. She must be nearly sixty by now.

  Hatfield took his arm and towed him to the dispenser counter. “Coffee, spirits, adrenalin.... Take your pick.”

  Hatfield was the expedition’s primary biochemist, a chunky, loud-speaking, overgrown kid whom it was impossible to dislike, no matter how he behaved. Lee knew that Hatfield wouldn’t go near the viewport because the sight of space, of emptiness, terrified him.

  “Hey, there’s Doris!” Hatfield shouted to no one, and scampered to the entrance as she stepped uncertainly into the galley.

  Lee dialed for coffee, and with the hot cup in his hand walked slowly toward the viewport.

  “Hello, Sid,” Marlene said as he came up alongside her. The others at the viewport turned and muttered their greetings.

  “How close are we?” Lee asked.

  Charnovsky, the geologist, answered positively, “Two days before we enter final orbit.”

  The stars crowded out the darkness beyond their viewport; millions of them, spattered against the blackness like droplets from a paint spray. In the faint reflection of the port’s plastic Lee could see six human faces looking lost and awed.

  Then the ship swung, ever so slightly, in response to some command from the crew and the computers. A single star—close and blazingly powerful—slid into view, lancing painfully brilliant light throug
h the polarizing viewport. Lee’s eyes snapped shut, but not before the glare burned its afterimage against his closed eyelids.

  They all ducked back instinctively.

  “Welcome to Sirius,” somebody said.

  Picture our solar system. Now replace the sun with Sirius A, the Dog Star: a young, blue star, nearly twice as hot and big as the sun. Take away the planet Uranus, nearly two billion kilometers from the sun, and replace it with the white dwarf Sirius B, the Pup: just as hot as Sirius A, but collapsed to a hundredth of a star’s ordinary size. Now sweep away all the planets between the Dog and the Pup except two: a bald chunk of rock the size of Mercury orbiting some 100 million kilometers from A, and an Earth-sized planet some seven times farther out.

  Give the Earth-sized planet a cloud-sprinkled atmosphere, a few large seas, some worn-down mountain chains, and a thin veneer of simple green life clinging to its dusty surface. Finally, throw in one lone gas giant planet, far beyond the Pup, nearly four billion kilometers from A. Add some meteoroids and comets and you have the Sirius system.

  “They should have named this ship Afterthought,” Lee said to Charnovsky.

  “You don’t like Sagan?” the Russian muttered as he pushed a pawn across the board between them. They were sitting in the light-paneled rec room. A few others were scattered around the semicircular room, reading, talking, dictating messages that wouldn’t reach Earth for more than eight years. Soft music purred in the background.

  The Earth-like planet—officially, Sirius A-2—swung past the nearest viewport. The ship had been in orbit for nearly three weeks, and rotating about its long axis to keep a half-g feeling of weight for the scientists.

  “We were sent here as an afterthought,” Lee continued. “Nobody expects us to find anything. Most of the experts back on Earth didn’t really believe there could be an Earth-like planet around a blue star.”

  “They were correct,” Charnovsky said. “Your move.”

  Lehman, the psychiatrist, pulled up a web chair to the kibitzer’s position between Lee and Charnovsky.

  “Mind if I watch?” He was small but trim and athletic-looking; kept himself tanned under the UV lamps in the ship’s gym room.

  Within minutes they were discussing the chances of finding anything on the planet below them.

  “You sound terribly pessimistic,” the psychiatrist said.

  “The planet looks pessimistic,” Charnovsky replied “It was scoured clean when Sirius B exploded, and life has hardly had a chance to get started again on its surface.”

  “But it is Earth-like, isn’t it?”

  “Hah!” Charnovsky burst. “To a simple-minded robot it may seem Earth-like. The air is breathable. The chemical composition of the rocks is grossly similar. But no man would call that desert an Earth-like world. There are no trees, no grasses, it’s too hot, the air is too dry....”

  “And the planet’s too young to have evolved an intelligent species,” Lee added. “Which makes me the biggest afterthought of all.”

  “Well, there might be something down there for an archaeologist to puzzle over,” Lehman countered. “Things will look better once we get down to the surface. I think we’re all getting a touch of cabin fever in here.”

  “Is that your professional opinion, Doctor?” Lee asked.

  Before Lehman could reply, Lou D’Orazio—the ship’s geophysicist and cartographer—came bounding through the hatchway of the rec room. Taking advantage of the half-gravity, he crossed to their chess table in two jumps.

  “Look at this!”

  He slapped a still-warm photograph on the chess table, scattering pieces over the floor. Charnovsky swore something in Slavic, and everyone in the room turned.

  It was one of the regular cartographic stereo photos, crisscrossed with grid lines. It showed the shoreline of one of the planet’s mini-oceans. A line of steep bluffs followed the shore.

  “It looks like an ordinary...”

  “Aspette uno momento.... Wait a minute.... See, here.” D’Orazio pulled a magnifier from his coverall pocket. “Look!”

  Lee peered into the magnifier. Fuzzy, wavering, gray...

  “It looks like...”

  Lehman said, “Whatever it is, it’s standing on two legs.”

  “It’s a man,” Charnovsky said flatly.

  Within minutes the whole scientific staff had piled into the rec room and crowded around the table, together with all the crew members except the two on duty in the command globe. The ship’s automatic cameras took twenty more photographs of the area before their orbit carried them over the horizon from the spot.

  Five of the pictures showed the shadowy figure of a bipedal creature.

  The spot was in darkness by the time their orbit carried them over it again. Infrared and radar sensors showed nothing.

  They squinted at the pictures, handed them from person to person, talked and argued and wondered through two entire eight-hour shifts. Crewmen left for duty and returned to the rec room again. The planet turned beneath them and once again the shoreline was bathed in Sirius’ hot glow. But there was no trace of the humanoid; neither the cameras, the manned telescopes, nor the other sensors could spot anything.

  One by one, men and women left the rec room, sleepy and talked out. Finally, only Lee, Charnovsky, Lehman, and Captain Rassmussen were left sitting at the chess table with the finger-smudged photos spread out before them.

  “They’re men,” Lee murmured. “Erect bipedal men.”

  “It’s only one creature,” the captain said. “And all we know is that it looks something like a man.”

  Rassmussen was tall, ham-fisted, rawboned, with a ruddy face that could look either elfin or Viking but nothing in between. His voice, though, was thin and high. To the everlasting gratitude of all aboard, he had fought to get a five-year supply of beer brought along. Even now, he had a mug tightly wrapped in one big hand.

  “All right, they’re humanoids,” Lee conceded. “That’s close enough.”

  The captain hiked a shaggy eyebrow. “I don’t like jumping at shadows, you know. These pictures...”

  “Men or not,” Charnovsky said, “we must land and investigate closely.”

  Lee glanced at Lehman, straddling a turned-around chair and resting his arms tiredly on its back. The psychiatrist said nothing, he merely watched.

  “Oh, we’ll investigate,” Rassmussen agreed, “but not too fast. If they are an intelligent species of some kind, we’ve got to go gingerly. I’m under orders from the Council, you know.”

  “They haven’t tried to contact us,” Lee said. “That means they either don’t know we’re here, or they’re not interested, or...”

  “Or what?”

  Lee knew how it would sound, but he said it anyway. “Or they’re waiting to get their hands on us.”

  Rassmussen laughed. “That sounds dramatic, sure enough.”

  “Really?” Lee heard his voice as though it were someone else’s. “Suppose the humanoids down there are the same race that built the machines on Titan?”

  “Nonsense,” Charnovsky blurted. “There are no cities down there, no sign whatsoever of an advanced civilization.”

  The captain took a long swallow of beer. Then, “There’s no sign of Earth’s civilization on the planet either, you know. Yet we are here, sure enough.”

  Lee’s insides were fluttering now. “If they are the ones who built on Titan...”

  “It is still nonsense!” Charnovsky insisted. “To assume that the first extraterrestrial creature resembling a man is representative of the race that visited the solar system hundreds of centuries ago... ridiculous! The statistics alone put the idea in the realm of fantasy.”

  “Wait, there’s more to it,” Lee said. “Why should a visitor from another star go to the trouble of building machines that work for centuries without stopping?”

  They looked at him, waiting for him to answer his own question: Rassmussen with his Viking’s craggy face, Charnovsky trying to puzzle it out in his ow
n mind, Lehman calm and half-amused.

  “The Titan buildings are more than alien,” Lee said. “They’re hostile. Call it an assumption, a hypothesis. But I can’t picture an alien race building machinery like that except for an all-important purpose. That purpose was military.”

  Rassmussen looked truly puzzled now. “Military? But who were they fighting?”

  “Us,” Lee answered. “A previous civilization on Earth. A culture that arose before the Ice Ages, or maybe during them, in one of the long, warm stretches in between glaciations. A human culture that went into space, met an alien civilization, and was smashed so badly that there’s hardly a trace of it left.”

  Charnovsky’s face was reddening with the effort of staying quiet.

  “I know it’s conjecture.” Lee went on quietly, “but if there was a war between ancient man and the builders of the Titan machines, then the two cultures must have arisen close enough to each other to make war possible. Widely separated cultures can’t make war, they can only contact each other every few centuries or millennia. The aliens had to come from a nearby star... like Sirius.”

  “No, no, no!” Charnovsky pounded a fist on his thigh. “It’s preposterous, unscientific! There is not one shred of evidence to support this... this pipe dream!”

  “What about the ruins on Mars?” Lee asked.

  “They were built by the same race as on Titan.”

  “No.” Lee shook his head. “I’d have never been able to decipher a completely alien language...”

  “The Martian script has no relation to any language on Earth.”

  “I know. But the thinking in it is human, not alien.”

  “Bah.” Charnovsky looked hopelessly disgusted.

  But Rassmussen was thoughtful. “Still...”

  “Still it is nonsense,” Charnovsky repeated. “The planet down there holds no interstellar technology. If there ever was one, it was blasted away when Sirius B exploded. Whoever is down there, he has no cities, no electronic communications, no satellites in orbit, no cultivated fields, no animal herds... nothing!”