As on a Darkling Plain

by Ben Bova

  Lee could feel the change in attitude throughout the underground community over the next few days. An invisible but almost palpable wave of tension swept through every office, every lab, every section of the tight-knit center. Not everyone believed Lee’s theory about the Others, but they couldn’t look at the alien buildings now without wondering.

  Peary called him in to his office and said, “I hear you made quite a speech to the scientific staff a couple days ago. Got ‘em all fired up.”

  “I told them what I thought we should be doing, and why.”

  The director scratched at his beard. “Good. Good. I want you to know that I’ll back you all the way. Whatever you want, I’ll do my best to help you get it.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Provided, of course, you don’t try tampering with the machines.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Lee said honestly. “Not until we understand them.”

  “See, they could be sending out a signal of some sort, and if we interrupt their functioning...”

  “I know. I agree with you.”

  “Good. Long as we understand each other.”

  The next evening was Bennett’s last on Titan, and the scientific staff threw a party for him. In his own quarters, since they were the largest available. The five-room apartment was jammed with people. Almost all of the hundred-odd scientists were there, plus many of the administrators and community workers. The party spilled out into the corridor. There was noise and laughter and the clatter of glasses and ice.

  Lee and Marlene arrived at the same time, had a drink together, drifted apart, found themselves together again in a corner of Bennett’s kitchen.

  “Have you learned how to make coffee yet?” she asked, standing up close to him to be heard over the noise of the crowd.

  He grinned. “Yes. It’s not so tough, once you get the hang of it.”

  Somewhere music was playing and he wanted to dance with her, hold her, but there were too many people plastered too close together to do anything but talk and drink.

  “Hello, Sid. You’re blocking the icemaker.”

  He turned and saw Rich Lehman, blond, trim, tanned, and smiling.

  “Oh. Hello,” Lee said to the psychiatrist. He stepped away from the freezer. Lehman pushed his plastic tumbler into the ice slot and two big cubes chunked down into it.

  “When did you get in?” Marlene asked Lehman.

  “This morning, on the ship that’s going to take Bennett out.” He flashed his smile at both of them and then headed for the bar in the living room.

  Lee watched him disappear into the crowd.

  “What’s the matter?” Marlene asked.

  “He’s here to keep an eye on me. It may not be the official reason for his coming to Titan, but he’s following me.”

  Marlene did a double-take. “Sid, that’s...” Her voice trailed off.

  “I know. It’s paranoid.”

  “Well...”

  “You ask him and I’ll bet he’ll admit it. He started acting as my conscience back at Sirius. I think he enjoys the feeling of godhood it gives him.”

  With a slightly shaky laugh, Marlene said, “Who’s analyzing whom?”

  * * *

  The last day of the week came. In the underground community each day looked exactly like every other day. But this morning, after Bennett’s party, Lee awoke with a dull headache. Charnovsky and his damned vodka. After pills and coffee, he dressed and headed for the conference room.

  He was the first one there and sat alone for a fidgety few minutes. Then the others filed in: Richards and Kulaki, talking earnestly together in the physics/electronics jargon that was half mathematical symbols; bearded Ray Kurtzman; somber-faced Petkovitch, the astronomer; Childe, mathematician; and Charnovsky, scowling with a hangover that he was too stubborn to admit to or medicate.

  One by one, they went through their ideas and suggestions. Lee let them talk informally, didn’t pick out the speaker, allowed them to hassle it out back and forth among themselves.

  Gradually it became clear that the only one with a really new idea was Richards. Lee found himself wishing it had been someone else.

  “There’s a gravitational anomaly in the center of the building cluster,” he explained. “Like the mascons on Luna, except smaller but more intense. If you compute the density of Titan and take a look at the stuff that this world’s made of, you find pretty quick that the mascon at the buildings can’t be natural...”

  “Very true,” Charnovsky rumbled. “The densest material on this ice-puff is chondritic rock. No metals to speak of.”

  “So there’s a mascon at the site of the alien buildings,” Petkovitch said, with a slight middle-European accent. “What does this prove?”

  Richard turned his All-American smile on the astronomer. “Doesn’t prove anything... yet. But why would they want such a concentration of high-density material? I think it’s for power.”

  Kulaki burst in, “It could be the power source for the whole complex of buildings and machines. If it is, we might be able to trace the power flow and then learn who’s doing what to whom!”

  Lee sat back. “Do you really think so?”

  Shrugging, Richards answered, “It’s a place to start.”

  “Okay then. Let’s get started on it.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Kurtzman. He looked Lincolnesque in his beard, but his accent was from New York. “You’re forgetting our friend Peary. To get at that mascon, we’re going to have to rip out some of the machinery....”

  “Not if we tunnel in from the outside,” Richards countered. “The mascon must go a long way below the surface. We can reach it by going under the buildings.”

  So he’s thought that out too, Lee grumbled to himself, then felt even worse that he was displeased by Richards’ thoroughness.

  Kurtzman was saying, “I’ll bet Peary still says no.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth,” Lee spoke up, “I don’t intend to ask Peary for permission. I’m simply going to tell him what we’re doing.”

  Kurtzman looked surprised, Richards pleased, the others halfway in-between.

  “Start work on this now, this morning,” Lee went on. “Gather the men and equipment you need. Alex, can you help them with the tunneling?”

  Charnovsky nodded, wincing from his headache. “We must go through bedrock, of course. Drilling tunnels in the surface lawyers of ice is impossible unless you have elaborate equipment.”

  Lee said, “All right. Let’s get moving on this. Now!”

  They got up from their chairs, Charnovsky and Richards talking together, joined by Kulaki and Kurtzman. They looked and sounded eager. Petkovitch and Childe stayed on the fringes of the animated conversation.

  Lee touched the phone button on the communicator panel set into the side of the table. “Mr. Peary, please.” In less than a minute he made an appointment to see the director right after lunch.

  Marlene was at the cafeteria. Lee told her about the meeting.

  “And now you’re going to tackle Peary,” she said.

  “Right.”

  She looked at him intently. “Sid, there’s one other hurdle you’ve got to get over. The buildings themselves.”

  He said nothing.

  “You’ve been here nearly a week without going out there. You’re going to have to face it sooner or later.”

  Nodding, he asked, “Been talking to Lehman?”

  She smiled at him but didn’t answer.

  “Okay. Right after my talk with Peary. I’ll call you.”

  “Tunnel under the buildings?”

  Behind his patriarchal beard, Peary looked startled. He edged forward in his contoured chair and put sweaty palms down on the desktop.

  “That’s right. We’ll go through bedrock. Charnovsky will head the actual tunneling operation. We can easily avoid the building foundations.”

  “But why...”

  “It’s the mascon. Richards thinks it might be the power source for the machines, and the other scientist
s feel he’s probably right.”

  Peary blinked slowly. “But if you tamper with the power source you’ll turn off the machines.”

  “We won’t tamper with it. We just want to see what it is, where the power comes from, and where it’s going.”

  “No,” Peary said, shaking his head. “It’s too risky. You might destroy something.”

  “Give those men credit for a little intelligence,” Lee snapped. “They won’t damage anything.”

  Peary’s head kept swinging back and forth, his eyes half shut. “No, I can’t allow it. I can’t...”

  Lee’s fists clenched. “We’re doing it. This project has been agreed upon by the scientific staff. Unanimously. You can’t stand in our way.”

  The director looked up and almost smiled. “You’ll need to get your equipment requisitions signed. And your manpower allocations,” he said slyly.

  Lee could feel a hot flame trembling inside him. “If you get in our way, you’d better be prepared for a trip back to Earth to argue this out in front of the general chairman.”

  Peary’s mouth dropped open. “Chairman O’Banion? Do you know him?”

  “Not personally. But I’ll take this fight straight to him, if you force me to. And I do know that he’s spent his whole life trying to find out about these machines. His career’s based on it—ever since he brought the first Jupiter mission back safely.”

  Peary fingered his beard again and shifted his gaze away from Lee. “Well now, there’s no need to go all the way to O’Banion’s level. No need to go Earthside at all. I’m only concerned with the problem of accidentally harming the machines, and also about the safety of your men. Drilling tunnels...”

  “Charnovsky knows what he’s doing. We have enough laser equipment and conveyors to do the job, as long as we stay in bedrock.”

  “Well, I don’t know....”

  “Come on, Charles. You’ll be a hero, once we find the power source. It’ll be the first major stride made here in years. O’Banion and everybody else Earthside will congratulate you.”

  “If it works.”

  “It will.”

  “And if there’s no problems... or disasters.”

  You can always take the Japanese solution. Aloud, Lee answered, “Certainly there’s some risk. But it’s pretty small, I’m not going to let them run wild, I promise you that.”

  “Well... all right, I guess.”

  “Fine,” Lee got up and left the director’s office before Peary could change his mind.

  Marlene was waiting for him in the dome topside, at the equipment lockers. She was already encased in a flame-red pressure suit. Lee found a suit that fit him and, with her help, wormed into it.

  “I have a van ready for us at the main airlock,” she said after they checked out each other’s pressure seals and life systems.

  With their bubble helmets under their arms, they clumped across the dome’s plastisteel floor toward the parking area where several vans waited. Lee could feel his pulse starting to race. They entered the main airlock chamber, where a couple of technicians rechecked their suits and radios while another tech drove an electric van up for them.

  Finally they climbed up into the van.

  “Want me to drive?” Marlene asked.

  “Okay,” Lee slid over.

  The air pumped out of the airlock chamber and the outer hatch slid open. Marlene turned on the van lights and they rolled out into Titan’s unbreathable atmosphere.

  There was no paved highway, but three generations of vans had worn a clearly discernible road into the ice surface. They crossed a bleak frozen plain, bluish-white in the dim twilight from the distant sun. The stars twinkling in the sky made the barren scene look even colder. The path climbed across a row of tumbled hills, and as they made a turn around the highest bluff, Saturn came into view.

  “It’s a compensation, isn’t it?” Marlene said.

  Lee nodded.

  Saturn hung huge and low on the horizon, three times larger than Earth’s full moon, casting shadows stronger than the sun’s.

  Soon they were down on the plain again, but now it was a shattered, broken expanse of jagged rock and ice, as if some huge fist had pounded it over and over again. A greenish methane cloud drifted over Saturn’s circus-striped face, making the landscape even darker.

  “There we are,” Marlene said, looking straight ahead.

  Lee saw the buildings and felt his throat go dry.

  Marlene parked the van next to a pair of others, near the wall of the nearest building. They loomed straight up from the dark, gloomy plain, gaunt specters with smooth polished walls. There were five squared-off featureless buildings ringed around a central pentagonally shaped tower that swept upward in a series of spires.

  Lee made his hands stop shaking and put on his helmet. Then they popped the doors to the van and climbed down to the crunchy ice surface.

  A single door had been cut into the wall in front of them. Lee remembered it from ages ago. He had been among the crew that had finally succeeded in pouring enough laser energy into the metallic wall to burn through it. No one else had dared to tamper with the buildings or the machines once they had gotten inside and seen what was there.

  He could feel it sweeping over him as they walked the few steps from the van to the doorway: the tension, the twisting nerves, as if a deeply buried memory was writhing in his mind. Even before they stepped inside he could sense the driving, throbbing purposefulness of the machines.

  And then they were inside, surrounded by them, row on row, tier on tier, inhuman, untiring, infallible machines humming, chattering, whining, filling the vast building with the rumbling power of their work. Driving, constantly driving at their unknown tasks. Along trackways that snaked through the maze of machinery, little oblong vehicles glided, levitated several centimeters off the track by some unknown force.

  No matter where the two invading humans went along the twining trackways, one of these gray, snub-nosed vehicles hung behind them, vibrating like a tuning fork, watching them as if to make sure they didn’t touch anything. The way a guard dog watches trespassing children.

  He could feel it again—the alienness, the lurking presence of an intelligence that scorned the intruders from Earth. Every nerve in his body screamed the same message: get out, get away, this thing is evil, hostile, a weapon against all mankind. No matter what doubts anyone had about the reason for these machines, here Lee knew. This is the product of a cosmic hatred, the work of those who seek to destroy us, our ancient enemy, the unknown nameless Others.

  “Are you all right?”

  Marlene’s voice in his earphones snapped him back to reality.

  “Do I look green?”

  She came up close enough so that their helmets nearly touched. “A little green,” she said with a grin. “It gives me the creeps, too. Want to go?”

  “Can we get to the mascon Richards is interested in?”

  She looked at him. “Where the tower is?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You really want to go in that deep?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “All right.”

  They trudged slowly along the trackways, always followed by a guardian vehicle a few meters behind them. Lights had been strung by the human intruders long ago, and they reflected off Marlene’s helmet, warped and distorted by its curve, as Lee followed her. Deeper into the maze of machines they went, while Lee’s every nerve was screaming to get away. But he stayed behind Marlene, jaw clenched until it ached, making himself follow her, step by agonized step.

  Down several levels they went, until finally Marlene pointed out across a catwalk railing to a shining metal cylinder as broad as a sequoia bole that sank down and down until it was lost in the darkness far below.

  “That’s it.”

  Lee leaned over the rail and peered into the shadows below. “I expected to see... something more mechanical.”

  “This is the center of the complex. The tower’s straight o
ver our heads.”

  Lee looked up, but rows of trackways and machinery tiers blocked his view. He had never been this deep inside the buildings before.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go back.”

  They walked in silence while the machines vibrated the ammoniated air around them. Then, at last, they were outside.

  Lee found that he was sweating.

  The other two vans were gone; theirs was the only one parked on the rough icefield outside. They climbed in, sealed the cab and lifted off their helmets.

  Lee let out a long, impassioned gasp of air.

  “Sid, you did really well. I’m proud of you.”

  He tried to smile, but it was weak. “I feel like a kid who’s just dared the local bully and gotten away with it.”

  “You deserve a drink.”

  He leaned back happily and let her drive the van back to the dome.

  Hours later, after several drinks and a dinner that Marlene cooked herself, they were sitting together on the couch in her apartment, drinking cognac and listening to music tapes.

  “Where’d you get these snifters?” Lee asked her.

  She swirled the brandy in the big graceful snifter. “I always take them with me, wherever I go. I had them on Sirius, we just never got a chance to use them.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No....”

  He laughed and lifted his glass to her. “Ad astra.”

  “Amen.”

  For a few moments the only sound in the room was the music: dark, moody, restless.

  “Answer me a question?” Marlene said.

  “Sure, if I can.”

  “Why did your parents name you Sidney?”

  He blinked. “Is this the beginning of a joke?”

  “No, I’m curious.”

  “About my name?”

  She nodded and suppressed a giggle.

  “Well... my father was half Chinese and half Spanish. My mother was an Irish Jew. I guess Sidney was the only name they could agree on that wouldn’t offend the grandparents.”

  “It doesn’t fit,” Marlene insisted.

  “I’ve never really cared for it.”