As on a Darkling Plain

by Ben Bova

“Neanderthals?”

  “They were a colony of ours,” Lee realized. “They’re our brothers, not our enemies!”

  “But they’re Neanderthals.”

  “They’re human, they’re from Earth. We’re not enemies. The Others were another race, somebody else... an enemy that nearly wiped us both out and smashed Earth’s civilization. The Others built those damned machines on Titan, Ardraka’s people didn’t. And we didn’t destroy this world... the Others did!”

  “But that’s...”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “He is right,” Charnovsky said, his heavy bass rumbling through the other voices. They all stopped to hear him. “There are too many coincidences any other way. These people are completely human because they came from Earth. Any other explanation is extraneous. They are Neanderthal and we are Sapiens. Both are equally intelligent.”

  Lee grabbed the Russian by the shoulders. “Alex, we’ve got work to do! We’ve got to help them. We’ve got to introduce them to fire, and metals, and cereal grains...”

  Charnovsky laughed. “Yes, yes, of course. But not tonight, eh? Tonight we celebrate.”

  “No,” Lee said, realizing where he belonged. “Tonight I go back to them.”

  “Go back?” Marlene asked.

  “Tonight I go back with a gift,” Lee went on. “A gift from my people to Ardraka’s. A plastic boat from the skimmer. That’s a gift they’ll be able to understand and use.”

  Lehman said, “You still don’t know who built the machines on Titan.”

  “We’ll find out.”

  “And we’ll have to return to Earth before the next expedition can possibly get here.”

  “Some of us can wait here for the next expedition. I will, anyway.”

  Marlene didn’t say anything, but he saw in her eyes the bitter pain of death. I’ve lost her, he realized.

  With an ache of regret smoldering inside him, he turned to Lehman. “Would you ask Grote to take me back in the skimmer?”

  Lehman glanced at Marlene, then nodded.

  Lee went to her. “I’ve got to.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Maybe...”

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, then turned away.

  The Earth was the same, yet completely changed. Sidney Lee finally returned from Sirius, years after the other members of the first expedition. He came back to a world of twenty billion strangers. The cities felt bigger, more crowded, colder than he had remembered them. The university was hauntingly different: buildings where he remembered groves of trees, a gymnasium where the off-campus bar used to be, unfamiliar names and faces who spoke in words and expressions that seemed almost right but not really.

  Even the Training Center was busier, larger—and old. The trees were sturdy and mature now. The buildings had weathered.

  The lawns he remembered as newly seeded had more than a half-century of footpaths cut through rich, hardy grass.

  And Marlene wasn’t there.

  They honored him. They gave him awards, they offered him endowed chairs with full tenure, they held banquets for him, they invited him to lecture. He traveled the world for more than a year telling them of what he had learned, showing them pictures of Ardraka (who had died just before Lee left the planet), of Ardra and the rest of the Neanderthals.

  They argued with him. Wherever he went there were the debates, the clashes, the arguments. The bright young students listened to Lee’s theories about the Others and the machines on Titan. The old professors—younger than Lee but more aged—watched his pictures and heard his words with fear plain on their faces.

  All of anthropology was in ferment. Learned men turned their full wrath on Lee and his theories, fearful that their lifetimes of work would be washed away by a new chronology, a new ordering of the facts of human prehistory. Others, mostly the young, set out determinedly to find the evidence where it had always lain—in the earth.

  When the evidence began to come in from the first diggings, those opposed to Lee turned to ridicule, to statistics, to any arguments they could find rather than rethink their professions. For a while Lee fought back, traded evidence for insult, insisting everywhere that the earlier views of man’s ancestry and prehistory were mainly wrong, mistaken, based on scanty proof and pat assumptions.

  But wherever he went, whoever he argued against, whatever support he received, nowhere could he find Marlene.

  Finally very late one night, after a grueling battle with one of the world’s most famous anthropologists and debaters, Lee stood on the tiny balcony outside his room in a prefab plastic chrome hotel room. The city spread out before him in the warm night was (he was sure) either Dresden or Pretoria. That night he looked into the sky and saw the stars for the first time since returning to Earth. Really saw them, looking down on him hard and eternal, the uncompromising conscience of the world. Then he remembered that his real work had just begun. He knew where he should be.

  And he realized where she was, too.

  7. RETURN TO TITAN

  The shuttle settled slowly, descending from the dark sky of Titan on a tongue of plasma flame to the scarred landing shield.

  Before the engines had shut down, a flexible loading tube wormed its way from the domed terminal building toward the shuttle rocket. Automatically it lifted and attached itself to the shuttle’s airlock hatch.

  Sidney Lee was the only passenger. He walked slowly through the tube, alone, carrying a single travel kit in one hand. The air here felt different, cooler, fresher, than the air in the shuttle. He sensed the frigid ammonia atmosphere just centimeters away, on the other side of the tube’s thin plastic wall.

  Someone had scrawled on a curving overhead structural beam: ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.

  Thanks, Lee said to himself.

  The hatch at the other end of the tube opened automatically as Lee approached it. Standing on the other side of the hatch, inside the big empty dome of the terminal building, were three men: two youngsters and an old man who looked vaguely familiar.

  “Dr. Lee,” the old man said as he stepped forward and offered his hand, “I’m Kim Bennett....”

  Kim Bennett. Lee recalled a man his own age, quick, active, bright. The man in front of him was gray-eyed, stooped, wrinkled.

  “Of course, Kim. I’m sorry... it’s been a long time since...”

  Bennett smiled wryly. “Dr. Lee, I’m afraid you’re thinking of my father. He’s the one who went to school with you. I’m Kimbal Bennett, Jr.”

  Lee felt his hand slip out of Bennett’s grasp. “Oh,” he said, feeling as stupid as he sounded.

  “Dad died several years ago,” Bennett went on, “before you returned from Sirius, I guess it was.”

  “I’m... I am sorry....” Lee muttered.

  Bennett dismissed the problem with a smile. Turning, he introduced the two younger men. “This is Dr. Monsel, and Dr. Aiken.”

  They shook hands with some solemnity. Monsel was dark, deep-voiced, with a carefully trimmed beard. Aiken was golden-blond, chunky, pleasant-faced.

  “I’ll take your bag, Dr. Lee,” Aiken said. “Did you have any other luggage? Any equipment?”

  Lee had to smile at his solicitousness as he took the travel kit. “No, just this.”

  Monsel said, “The lift tube is this way.” Extending his hand toward Lee, “Uh, you might find the low gee here a bit difficult for walking, Dr. Lee...”

  “The ship spun down to Titan gee on the way here,” he answered. “They prepared me for it. And I was here before, you know.”

  Monsel’s dark face reddened noticeably.

  Bennett walked beside Lee, the two younger men slightly ahead of them, as they crossed the spacious dome. Hasn’t changed much, Lee saw. The dome was mostly empty. A surface tractor was parked by the main airlock, across the worn plastisteel floor. Here by the smaller airlock there were the same lockers for pressure suits and equipment
racks standing mutely. The four men were the only people in the dome.

  As they walked toward the lift tube, on the farthest side of the dome away from the airlocks, Lee glanced up at the dome’s clear top. Only a few stars shone through.

  “Saturn’s over behind us,” Bennett said softly.

  Lee turned and saw the fat gaudy curve of the giant planet, yellow and ochre and flame-orange stripes and the razor-thin line of the rings. A circus tent planet, an impossibility, a clown that grinned down on them as they scrabbled around the towers that the Others had left.

  “Um... the lift tube...” Bennett suggested gently.

  They went down the tube, dropping with blurring speed from the surface dome toward the living and working quarters of the underground center. The lift compartment was exactly as Lee had remembered it, except for being older, more scarred from three generations of boots and crates and frustrations pounding the floors and walls, wearing them into a tired metallic dullness. Graffiti were scribbled on the walls:

  The machines run on swamp gas.

  Sam Khinovy has frostbite of the brain.

  The eyes of Texas are looking the other way. The lift still worked smoothly, though. Lee remembered across the years the particular whine of this lift’s electrical motors. Keep working for another five hundred centuries and you’ll be half as good as the Others’ machines.

  The whining stopped and the car eased to a halt and the doors slid open and Marlene was there. Lee felt a jolt of electricity flash through him.

  She hadn’t changed. Tall, slim, auburn hair, incredible deep brown eyes, everything about her was beautiful. She was wearing a black jumpsuit, long sleeves, turtleneck, stretchpants. A green scarf at her throat for a touch of color.

  He heard himself croak, “Hi... hello.”

  “Sid, hello. How are you? I’m sorry I didn’t get up to the dome to meet you, but I...”

  “No, never mind. It’s okay. How are you?”

  He took her hand and held on to it and didn’t hear a word she said as he just watched her, watched her face and looked to see what was in her eyes as they walked down the corridor together. He was dimly aware that the once pristine-white walls were now covered with handwriting, drawings, even some strikingly good full-color abstracts.

  Abruptly they stopped in front of a numbered but nameless door set into the long, curving, graffiti-illustrated corridor. Lee suddenly realized that the three other men were still with them.

  “This is your place,” Bennett said. “I hope it’s all right.”

  “It will be,” Lee answered. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Aiken said, “If there’s anything wrong, or you need anything, you can call me.”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  Aiken handed him back his travel kit.

  “Why don’t you get yourself unpacked,” Bennett suggested, “and then give me a call? Have dinner at my place. There ought to be some first-rate Scotch among the cargo the shuttle just brought in.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  Bennett turned to Marlene. “You too, I know you’re not a Scotch drinker, but we can...”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. I’d like to, but I’m in the middle of a series of observations. I ought to be topside right now.”

  Lee stood there, feeling stupid and helpless, wishing they’d all stop being friendly and solicitous, wanting them to go away, all of them, except Marlene.

  She said to him, “Honest, Sid, I’m really stretching it now to be here at all. These atmospheric tide observations have to be done....”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I’ll call you later,” she said. And she turned and walked off down the corridor.

  He watched her for a moment, then muttered some banalities at Bennett and the others and went inside.

  His quarters were more spacious than his room had been the last time he was on Titan. There were three whole rooms, solid comfortable furniture, and wall-sized viewscreens in both the living room and bedroom. The smaller study had a desktop viewscreen.

  Somebody had programmed the wall screens to show views of Earth. The living room seemed to look out on a green meadow, complete with butterflies and a spindly-legged colt frolicking on the brown of a grassy hill. The bedroom showed the jeweled lights of a city at night. Lee looked around briefly for a control switch to shut them off.

  Finally he gave up, dropped his travel kit on the bed and punched the telephone button on the night table beside the bed.

  “Get Marlene Ettinger, please,” he said to the phone.

  In a few seconds, the phone’s contralto computer voice purred, “Miss Ettinger is not in her quarters.”

  Lee huffed. “I know. Find her.”

  He unzipped the travel kit and sprinkled its contents over the bed. The big viewscreen’s cityscape vanished and Marlene’s face filled the wall. Lee sank down onto the bed.

  “Oh, Sid. It’s you.”

  She was already in a pressure suit, he could see. Only the helmet wasn’t on yet.

  Suddenly he wasn’t sure of what he wanted to say. “Marlene... I can skip this dinner with Bennett. Why don’t you call me when you’re finished?”

  She shook her head and answered seriously, “I’m not sure how long this will take, Sid. And there’s a mountain of work for me to do. I’ve really got to run. I’ll call you tomorrow. All right?”

  He shrugged. “Tomorrow.”

  The screen went blank. Lee found that he was staring at it anyway. With an effort, he turned away.

  Bennett’s apartment was even bigger than Lee’s, but then the older man (born forty years after I was, Lee said to himself) had a wife and several Persian cats.

  They had a polite cocktail before dinner. Lee had forgotten the languid, slow-motion fall of liquids under Titan’s low gravity. You could spill a drink and then scoop it up in your glass before it hit the floor, if you were fast enough. Through the meal, Lee moved and talked mechanically, his mind on Marlene. After dinner Mrs. Bennett disappeared into another room while Lee and this younger-older man who looked like his classmate tried to relax over more Scotch.

  Lee slouched on the sofa, trying to at least look comfortable, while Bennett sat in a contour chair facing him.

  “The living quarters have changed a lot since the last time I was here,” Lee said, carefully trying to avoid references to time and age. “They’re absolutely luxurious now.”

  Bennett smiled sadly. “Of course. Well, why shouldn’t they be luxurious? When you were here last time this was a frontier outpost. Now it’s a museum.”

  “A museum? What do you mean?”

  The gray-haired man took a sip of Scotch before replying. “No one here has done any significant scientific work on the machines in years. We’re just caretakers.”

  “How can... but... I thought there was a lot of work going on here.”

  “There is,” Bennett said. “Things like Marlene’s atmospheric tides measurements. Good work, too. But it’s got nothing to do with the machines.”

  Lee could feel his forehead wrinkling into a frown. “I don’t understand.”

  “The machines have beaten us,” Bennett answered softly. “We’ll never understand them. Most of the permanent staff here is starting to look on them as religious totems, almost. They’re awed. I don’t blame them; so am I.”

  “You’re not serious....”

  Leaning forward and tapping a finger on Lee’s leg, Bennett said with quiet intensity, “It’s been just about seventy-five years since the machines were discovered, and we’ve gotten nowhere with them. I’ve spent my whole life here. I was born here on Titan. In three weeks I’m retiring and going Earthside. I’m through.”

  Lee said nothing.

  “That’s why I was so glad to learn that you were coming back here. I want you to take over my position. I’m supposed to be the head of the scientific staff here, but the job has amounted to nothing more than paper-shuffling.”

  “I can’t step in cold and...”
/>
  “Of course you can. The director has already approved it.”

  “But what about the people who’ve been working with you? The people who’ve been here for years? They’ll resent having me step in.”

  Bennett smiled again, but this time with real pleasure. “Didn’t you see the respect those two kids had for you this afternoon? You’re famous: the man who first deciphered the Martian script, who found the Neanderthals on Sirius.”

  “But...”

  “Listen,” Bennett insisted. “I’m asking you to take over a frustrating, maddening position. But I’ve done you one important favor. I’ve stocked the scientific staff here with as many eager youngsters as I could. I’ve spent the last year, ever since you returned from Sirius, cleaning out as much of the deadwood as I could. I was hoping you’d come back. I think you’ll find the best staff we’ve had here in a generation. And they—most of them, at least—they’ll look up to you. You’re a big man on this campus.”

  Shaking his head, Lee said, “No, I’m the man who cracked up the last time he was here. That’s one reason why I came back—to see if I can really face those machines again.”

  “You will; don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m not that sure....”

  “Listen, there’s something here that’s far worse than the machines. It’s the director we’ve got now—Charles Peary. He’s an ass. An ass with power. He sees his duty as protecting the machines from any scientific workers who might get finger smudges on them. He’s beaten many a good man down into a blubbering lump of frustration. All he wants to do is to sit here and collect his pay and turn the machines into a tourist attraction for religious pilgrims... and government officials.”

  Lee stared at the older man. “But you can’t let him get away with that!”

  Again Bennett smiled sadly, “I’m too old to fight him. And for all I know, he might be right. Maybe the machines are simply beyond our capacity to understand.”

  “No!”

  Shrugging, Bennett said, “All right. But I know this much: they’re beyond my capacity. I’m tired. I want to go back to Earth and find a quiet island someplace and spend the rest of my life soaking up the sun.”