As on a Darkling Plain

by Ben Bova

  “No... your name should be... ummm... to go with Lee. Robert! No, that’s been done. Donald. Don Lee. No. Ralph? Samuel? Abraham!”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Just a little. Do you like my music?”

  “Very much. What is it?”

  “Some early twentieth-century composer. Bachianas Brasileiras. Number Eight, I think.”

  He leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes listening. “Reminds me of topside, on the shore of the ammonia sea. When the tide shifts.”

  Marlene nodded. “The wind, and the dark, and...”

  He turned his head to look at her; she was close enough for him to smell the faint scent of her cologne, to feel a wisp of her long auburn hair.

  “You saved my life that day.”

  “Sid, don’t...”

  “Was it worth it? I’ve caused you a lot of grief, haven’t I?”

  “No. Yes.... It’s not your fault.”

  He slid his arm around her. She didn’t resist it, but she didn’t respond.

  “It’s taken me a long time to find out who I am and where I’m going,” he said.

  “Are you sure you know now?”

  “Yes. I want to love you. I want you to love me.”

  “Sid, you only want me when you’re alone, or hurt, or afraid.”

  “That’s not the way it is anymore.”

  Softly, she leaned her cheek against his shoulder. Her voice was a whisper. “I loved you so much, and I never asked for anything except for you to love me. But you never did. I was born ninety-seven years ago. The doctors say that biologically I’m between thirty and thirty-five. I want babies, Sid. I want a daughter and a son.”

  For a long moment he could think of nothing to say. “I never... never thought about children.”

  Marlene straightened up to face him. “Love is a great and wonderful thing,” she said dry-eyed, “and it heals all wounds and conquers all obstacles and turns ugly little girls into princesses. But I want babies. Two of them. Maybe more.”

  He heard himself chuckle nervously. “Right now?”

  “We can start now, if you want to.”

  He ran out of words again.

  Suddenly Marlene laughed. Not unkindly. “You should see your face. Oh my brave darling, you’re so terrified. This is unfair to you... first the buildings and now this.”

  “But...”

  “No.” She pulled away from his arms. “You’d better go. I’m sorry... I hate to make it sound so bitchy.”

  Totally confused, he said, “Give me a chance to sort this out, Marlene. I...”

  “Sid—Marty Richards asked me to marry him. He wants to take me away from all this and settle me down on some picturesque campus where we can ski in the winter and sail in the summer and make lots of babies.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I’m tired of being alone. I never realized how tired of it I was until Marty started filling my head with medieval romantic notions. Never realized how much mother instinct there is in me.”

  “I see.” All the old pain was suddenly flaming again, the memories of his own marriage, not the good part, not the earliest happy memories, but the hurt, the anger, the acid words.

  Slowly he got up from the couch. “It... it’s been one hell of a day,” he said, trying to make it sound casual. It sounded fatal.

  He got as far as the door, then turned and looked back at her. Marlene was still sitting on the couch, an indefinable smile on her lips.

  “If it makes any difference to you,” she said, “you’re still the one I love.”

  He held onto the door like a life raft.

  “Thanks.”

  Weeks lapsed into months and the work on Titan inched along. Charnovsky led a team of tunnelers while Richards and Kulaki waited impatiently. Peary didn’t actively hamper their work, but he didn’t help speed it. Every requisition for equipment or material, every shift of personnel, every change in plans or needs was met by kilometers of red tape: forms to fill out, reports to dictate, mistakes to correct. Lee spent most of his time shuffling paperwork and computer tapes—and storming through the administrative staff. Peary himself smiled and nodded and agreed. It was like trying to run through quicksand.

  But they forged on. Lee counted progress by the advance of the tunnel, meter by painful meter, through the bedrock under the ice. And the machines still ran with their mindless efficiency, doing whatever they were designed to do. Lee could hear the scornful laughter of the Others as the humans burrowed slowly toward the core of the machines. But now he also heard the laughter of humans. He didn’t want to think of Marlene and Richards together, laughing at him. But he did.

  He was sitting in the cafeteria, trying to forget about the paperwork that was heaped on his desk. It was late afternoon, the place was nearly deserted. Marlene was topside somewhere; most of the scientific staff were busy at tasks that were either necessary for the tunneling or busywork. The big wall screen was showing pictures of palm-decked tropical islands. It was supposed to be relaxing, Lee knew.

  A quartet of men, led by Dr. Kurtzman, clumped in and punched coffee selections at the wall panel. They still had the lower halves of pressure suits on, and boots. Tiredly, they turned and headed for Lee’s table.

  They sat down, weariness etched on their faces. And something else—fear? Anger?

  “Damned tunnel caved in on us,” Kurtzman said. “We were lucky to get out alive.”

  “What? Was anybody hurt?”

  Kurtzman nodded. “Two of Charnovsky’s people. They were up front with the laser head. Pascual says they’ll have to be shipped back to Earth.”

  Suddenly Lee felt as weary as they looked.

  “I told them there was a pocket of ice up ahead,” said one of the younger men, his face still grimy and set in a mask of anger and regret. “But they wouldn’t listen to me; I’m not a geologist so they just didn’t listen.”

  “How much of the tunnel went?” Lee asked.

  Kurtzman shrugged. “Ten-fifteen meters. A day’s work... double it, because now we’ll have to go through it with extra bracing to make sure it doesn’t fall in again.”

  “The laser head was smashed,” said another of the men. “We’ll have to get a replacement.”

  “Which means a new requisition and a two-month wait.”

  “There’s another head sitting in the communications center. It’s a spare for them.”

  Shaking his head, Lee said, “Peary will never give permission to use the spare communications laser. He’s going to be tough enough to settle down once he hears about the accident.”

  “We can ‘borrow’ the communications laser and modify it for tunneling. The guys there will let me take it. Peary and his people don’t have to know that ours was smashed up.”

  Lee hiked his eyebrows, then grinned at them. “No comment.”

  “Why bother?” Kurtzman asked.

  “Huh?”

  Staring down at his coffee cup, Kurtzman said, “So we steal another laser and get lucky and finish the tunnel. So what? Do you really think we’re going to learn anything about the machines?”

  Lee stared at him.

  One of the youngsters said, “But we’ve got to try, don’t we? We’ll never understand if we don’t try.”

  “Bullcrap,” Kurtzman said, slumping back tiredly in the plastic chair. “This isn’t going to be solved by putting pieces together, like a puzzle. It’s too big for us... those machines are beyond our mental capacity. Maybe in a century or two, or two hundred, we’ll get smart enough to figure out what they’re up to. But not now. They’re so far beyond us that it’s pathetic.”

  The kid sputtered, “But that... that’s unscientific!”

  “So?” Kurtzman shot back. “Do you see science making any great strides around here? I’m a physical chemist; what the hell am I doing digging tunnels? We’re in over our heads—no joke.”

  One of the others, who had been silent until now, agreed. “We might as well quit. Forget it and go
home. Let the machines go for another million years, if they want to. What difference does it make?”

  “That would be fine, wouldn’t it?” Lee said, his voice low and almost trembling with anger. “Give up and forget about it, without knowing where the machines came from, or what they’re doing, or why.”

  “How can we...”

  “Listen to me. It’s not just that they could be a weapon against us. They might be, but that’s not what’s really important. Those machines mark the limit of our ability to understand the physical universe. Do you know what that means?”

  Kurtzman sat up a little straighter in his chair.

  “If we turn our backs on those machines,” Lee went on, “we turn our backs on the basic premise of human thought. If we admit that we can’t understand the machines then we admit that there’s an absolute limit on our ability to understand the universe. We give in to the old witchdoctor’s claim that there are some things in the world that man must not tamper with, Dr. Frankenstein. Taboo!”

  “Yes, but...”

  “The basic premise of scientific thought is at stake out there! We’ve got to understand the machines! Our claim to the stars, to survival on our own world, is tied up in it.”

  Lee sat there on the edge of his chair, fists clenched, daring them to challenge his words. The young men stared back at him, looking surprised and perhaps even impressed.

  Kurtzman broke the mood with a chuckle. “Okay, boss, we’ll go back to the mines and dig some more. It’s just a lucky thing for us that you never went into politics. You can be a helluva demagogue when you want to be.”

  They completed the tunnel and celebrated. Then came the slow, hard work of examining the power core. Without interfering with it. An underground gallery was extended around the core’s glistening super-metal cylinder. A shipful of new detection instruments soon clogged the gallery’s rock floor.

  Richards and Kulaki worked for months. They probed and measured and calculated and held long headache sessions that extended all night. The other scientists went about their routine work, helping when they could, but mostly powerless to assist.

  Some scientists left, to be replaced by new men and women, faces young and eager to solve the riddle. Within weeks they aged noticeably.

  Lee occasionally saw Marlene, but they both had walls built up between them now. They weren’t strangers, but they behaved like strangers: polite, noncommittal, their lives touching only at the surface now.

  Except once, when he accidentally met her in the surface dome as she was coming in from a four-day trek to observe a storm system that had built up over the tidal sea.

  She was coming out of the locker area, tired and drained. Lee was on his way out to the tunnel, heading first for the lockers and a pressure suit.

  They exchanged meaningless pleasantries for a moment.

  “You’ve been working too hard,” Lee said abruptly.

  She shrugged. Looking upward toward the clear bubble of the dome. “It’s good to see the stars again. After four days in the storm you begin to wonder if they’re still there.”

  The dome was empty except for them. Lee stepped closer to her.

  “That bright one there,” she pointed, “is that Mars?”

  “No, I think it’s Jupiter.”

  “And where’s Earth?”

  He squinted and tried to ignore the distorted light reflections in the plastic dome. “Can’t find it. I think it’s on the other side of the sun now.”

  Marlene said, “They look so lonely out there.”

  “Lehman would call that projection.”

  She turned toward him. “I know. We’re the lonely ones, aren’t we?”

  He wanted to reach out, to hold her.

  But she brushed her hair back wearily and said, “I’ve got to get some sleep. I’m just about wiped out.”

  “I’ll walk you back to your place,” he said.

  “No. No, thanks... I wouldn’t be much company for you.” She tried a smile.

  He didn’t reply, just nodded and watched her walk slowly across the dome to the lift tube.

  Richards and Kulaki were ready to make their report. The conference room was crowded, not only with the scientific department heads, but with as many of the scientists and administrators as could be squeezed in. Peary was there, sitting up at the head of the table, beside Lee. Marlene sat beside Richards.

  When the room was absolutely filled, so that the last man in had to bring his own chair and plant it squarely in front of the door, Lee looked down the table to Richards.

  “Okay, Marty, it’s your show.”

  Richards stood up and walked toward the viewscreen at the head of the room. Peary had to turn his chair around. The physicist looked confident, eager to tell what he’d found. He was grinning his feline grin again. Lee thought, He’ll have that boyish look to him even when he’s eighty. Marlene was watching him intently.

  “Well, you all know that we’ve been poking into the power core down there in the salt mine,” someone chuckled at that, “for the past four months. It’s damned difficult to find out much about it in a passive way, but we’ve done the best we can.” From the size of his grin, Lee judged that Richards was deliberately underplaying it.

  He touched a dial set into the wall beside the viewscreen. The screen flickered into life, showing a hand-drawn graph.

  “This shows what we’ve been able to learn about the power core. Which isn’t a helluva lot. The key to it is the gravitational anomaly... it’s a tremendous concentration of mass. We did a variation of Cavendish’s experiment to determine the gravitational constant...”

  “Eighteenth-century physics,” Kurtzman muttered.

  “Yeah, but it works,” countered Richards. “The material in that core has a density on the order of a thousand tons per cubic centimeter.”

  Petkovitch, the astronomer, looked skeptical. “But that’s the density of degenerate material...”

  “Like you find in white dwarf stars,” Richards agreed.

  “Right.”

  The Pup’s a white dwarf, Lee thought.

  “But something that dense would sink right to the center of the planet,” Petkovitch insisted.

  Nodding, Richards said, “Sure. The cylinder must go down to the center. We’ve already started probe operations to check that out.”

  The audience stirred and began muttering.

  Richards silenced them by raising his voice a notch until they quieted down. “Now, we haven’t been able to determine just how they use this degenerate stuff to produce power... but my guess is that it’s hydrogen inside there and they’ve got some sort of thermonuclear fusion reactor buried inside the cylinder. We detected strong magnetic fields, about nine hundred Tesla, up at the top of the cylinder. Very localized, though; like the field coils for a reactor would be.”

  Kulaki chimed in from his seat halfway down the table, in his brittle tenor voice, “You see, they probably are using the hydrogen in a degenerate state because you can pack more of it into a given volume that way. That’s why the machines can run for millions of years!”

  “If it’s hydrogen,” somebody remarked.

  “It’s hydrogen all right,” Richards said. “I’m willing to bet on it.”

  No one offered serious disagreement.

  “Now the next step is tougher,” Richards said, looking straight at Peary. “We’ve got to put some sort of tracer on the energy coming out of the power core—where those strong magnetic fields are—and find out where the energy’s going.”

  “What kind of tracer?” Lee asked.

  “There are electrical currents coming out of the top of that cylinder,” Kulaki answered. “They ought to be very strong currents, but they’re not—they’re actually quite weak. We want to impose a modulating field on them, in pulses, so we can trace where the currents are going.”

  Before Lee could admit that he didn’t understand, Richards explained, “We can take one of the current paths and hit it with a short burst o
f energy that we create from our own equipment. Our burst will be a different frequency than the machine’s current; it’ll change the frequency of the machine’s current by a very slight factor. But we can follow that slug of altered current as it goes through the machinery in the buildings, and find out where it’s going.”

  Suddenly Peary said, “That’s tampering with the machines!”

  “Only in the very slightest way. It shouldn’t have any harmful effect on the machines.”

  “You don’t know that for sure!” Peary shouted, waggling a finger at the physicist.

  “No,” Richards admitted, “but all our calculations show...”

  “Never mind. I have my orders. No tampering with the machines. I should never have taken the risk of letting you fool around with the power core. That’s the end of it!” He pulled himself out of his chair and turned toward Lee. “This is your responsibility! No more tinkering with those machines at all! D’you understand? I don’t want anybody out there, for any reason at all. And that’s final!”

  Peary stamped out of the room, pushing people aside in his haste to get to the door.

  “He’s gone crazy,” somebody said.

  Lee frowned at him.

  Richards shrugged his shoulders. “Well, boss, what do we do now?”

  Lee could feel sheer fury welling up inside him. “The meeting’s over,” he said, his voice low and flat. “You can all leave. Except you, Marty.”

  They all filed out, murmuring, shaking their heads. But Marlene stopped at the door and turned back.

  “I want everybody out except Marty,” Lee repeated.

  “Let her stay,” Richards said. He was grinning again; not quite as self-satisfied as before, but almost.

  “All right,” Lee said. He walked to the viewscreen and turned off the slide that was still being shown. Turning back to them, he said:

  “Where in the hell do you keep your brains? Are you so goddamned smug that you really didn’t know how Peary would pop his cork? I told all of you that Peary is my problem, that I’ll handle him. Now you’ve pushed him into shutting down everything. All the work we’ve done and all we want to do—down the tubes, because you had to have a moment of glory.”