The Paradox of the Sets

by Brian Stableford

  “Those are only the foothills,” said Linda, “compared to what we just missed. We must have shaved the tops off the mountains.”

  “Good job they’re volcanic,” I joked, weakly. “If they’d had proper peaks instead of craters....”

  Nathan stuck his head round the door. “She says she’s sorry,” he said.

  “Did you thank her?” asked Karen.

  “She wants to know if we got her pictures. I said we had some, but the unscheduled stop interfered somewhat. We have plenty of time to look them over, though. She says that she can make the first seventy or eighty miles by lorry, but that she’s not sure how much farther she can get before she has to start walking—or riding, at any rate. It’s going to take several days before she can get to us. It’s a long way—up as well as along.”

  “We know,” I told him.

  “Before the crash,” said Karen, in a thoughtful tone, “I had some print-out...not the shots of the mountains...the standard spy-eye stuff from a long way up. The computer analysis seemed crazy, but I hadn’t time to check it out because of getting ready for the special shots. I’ll take a look now.”

  She moved to the computer console and called up the images that the computer had put together from the high-altitude pictures. By image-intensification and augmentation the computer was supposed to be able to map out cultivated land and such industrial activity as oil refining and iron smelting—in fact, anything causing significant hot-spots where no hot-spots ought to be. She had an image displayed on the screen which showed the whole land surface on Mercator projection, and then cut it down rapidly to show Akhnaton and the greater part of Imhotep, ignoring the two minor land masses.

  “It can’t be right,” she said, immediately.

  I could see what she meant. The computer was telling us that by its calculations ninety percent of Akhnaton was under cultivation and most of Imhotep too. The hot spots were widely spaced but were distributed across both continents. Taken literally, that implied that Geb had a population in the hundreds of millions. That didn’t make sense. Unless....

  “Remember Attica,” I said.

  On Attica, one of the colonists had discovered a vocation which involved helping the aliens to build an empire and a civilization. In a few short generations be had worked wonders. But he had done nothing on this scale. The colonists of Geb had had longer, but this was balanced out by the fact that the natives of Geb hadn’t been nearly as advanced to start with as the primitive Ak’lehrian Empire. In their natural state they had no technology at all—not even fire.

  “If that’s real,” said Linda, “then this is success on a scale we couldn’t have dreamed possible.”

  Nathan came out to take a look. He didn’t say anything, but he stared long and hard. Finally, he said: “It’s impossible. There must be a malfunction.”

  “This is integrated from information the cameras took in while we were a long way up,” said Karen. “The computers were in perfect order. It may be a bug. There was a lot of cloud cover in the west and across Imhotep. It could be wrong—but it’s difficult to see how it could manufacture all those extra hot spots. You’d better check it with your charming friend on the ground.”

  “Three thousand people given six generations...,” began Linda, as Nathan disappeared again.

  “Forget it,” advised Karen. “Rabbits could do it. Not people. If they worked at breeding full time they’d just about make it. But a colony can’t just use its women as breeding machines. They’re half the labor force too.” She pursed her mouth as she noticed the unconscious pun, but no one had the bad taste to comment upon it.

  “They would need something like ten children each,” admitted Linda. “Every woman, every generation, and starting as young as possible. It doesn’t seem very likely.”

  “I make it more than that,” I said, struggling desperately with the mental arithmetic. “More like seventeen or eighteen children each.”

  “I think this is rather futile,” opined Karen. She was probably right.

  “If it’s true,” I said, “it has to be humans plus aliens. And even so it’s a miracle.”

  “The analysis checks out,” said Karen, blanking the screen. “If it’s a bug it’s a consistent bug.”

  “So get the prints,” I said. “All of them—high-altitude stuff, the ones you took over the mountains, the lot. We can see with our own eyes.”

  “It’s an awful lot of paper,” said Karen, dubiously.

  “We can recycle it,” I pointed out, impatiently.

  “Yes sir,” she said. I wasn’t about to be impressed by the sarcasm.

  Nathan reappeared to tell us that according to Mme. Levasseur the population of the world was considerably less than a million. Asked about the Set population she had confessed ignorance. She had not said anything to indicate that the Sets participated in human civilization, but she had not said anything specifically to the contrary. She appeared to have embarked upon a policy of being evasive.

  “Ask her why they have two whole continents under cultivation to feed a few hundred thousand people,” I suggested.

  “That’s not strictly true,” observed Karen. “What the display showed was the distribution of cultivated land rather than the gross amount. It may be that they’ve just spread themselves out thinly. There weren’t a vast number of hot spots—they were just much more widely scattered than we expected. Maybe they carved up the continents with the aid of a map and a ruler and gave the original colonists a small nation apiece.”

  “Some of them must have had a long walk,” I commented acidly.

  “She says that she’ll try to get to us as soon as possible,” said Nathan, ignoring the idle banter. “Within a week, she hopes.”

  “Great,” I muttered.

  “I’ll sign off now,” he said. “Give us time to collect ourselves. I’ll tell her we have to pick up the pieces.”

  By this time Conrad had arrived from Mariel’s cabin, and I brought him up to date with a few terse and well-chosen sentences.

  He seemed less taken aback by the revelation than we had. He simply said: “The aliens.”

  “If that’s so,” I said, “they must have come on a hell of a way in a hundred and fifty years. From virtual animality to integration in a fast-developing civilization.”

  “It must be the aliens,” said Linda, suddenly. “The range of the hot spots and the cultivation is practically the same as their range. Wherever there were aliens the humans have migrated. It can hardly be a coincidence.”

  The computer began to generate paper in vast quantities at Karen’s behest, and I stepped over to help her pull it out of the way. The stack, of photographs multiplied with awesome speed and efficiency. There were an awful lot of them.

  The old question, which had been displaced from my mind by the new mysteries, suddenly returned.

  Why on Earth—or on Geb—did Helene Levasseur want aerial photographs of the Isis mountains?

  “None of this makes any sense,” I said, with a faint note of complaint in my voice. “It’s going to drive us all mad if we’re going to have to wait a week even to begin to find out what’s going on.”

  Karen stood up with the last armful of photographs. She had some difficulty in balancing them on the mound of paper already occupying the table.

  “That’s the lot,” she said. “The answer just might be in there. Start looking.”

  As I stared at the stack my heart sank a little. It looked as if it would take us a week to look at them all.

  “Oh well,” I said. “These things are sent to try us.”

  “And this time,” put in Nathan, “they may well succeed.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  I set the cup of coffee down at Karen’s elbow and congratulated her on her devotion to duty. She looked up from the photograph which she had been earnestly studying.

  “I’m on shift anyhow,” she reminded me. “It’s you that’s crazy.”

  “Curiosity kills cats,” I observed, “but i
t only drives men mad.”

  It was, according to the ship’s time we’d been keeping for the last twelve days, the early hours of the morning. Outside, though, the day had already dawned. The day here was a little long, but assuming that the locals still cut it into twenty-four bits they would probably have called it eight o’clock. On the other hand, if they had been sensible enough to forget transition and use metric time, they’d call it by some designation that would be just about meaningless to my poor habit-damned brain.

  Everyone else was in bed. One by one they’d realized what a mammoth task was involved in hunting through pictures of hundreds of thousands of square miles of mountain range without knowing what to look for and secure in the knowledge that it probably wasn’t there anyhow.

  What we had found out, from the shots taken higher up, was that the computer had not lied. The population of Geb, be it human or alien or both, really was scattered across two continents, bringing fairly impressive tracts of ground under cultivation in widely separated regions and mining for fuels and ores in locations strung out across half the world. There were only three or four things that looked like towns and they weren’t very big. Even allowing for the cloud cover it seemed dubious that we’d missed any conglomeration of any real size. The people of Geb didn’t seem to be very gregarious. In fact they seemed to be getting about as far away from one another as possible. There had been one major visual clue to the technological status of the colony, and that was an impressive one, though I wasn’t sure what interpretation to put on it. They were good road-builders. Their highways were very long and very straight. They had one road which went east-west practically all the way across Akhnaton, skirting the Isis Mountains to the north but otherwise having scant respect for geographic features. From this main artery other roads extended, crossing hundreds of miles—and several extended well over a thousand—to other “towns” or even to large homesteads. Each of these minor roads also had its proliferations. You don’t build roads like that for horses, and you don’t build them overnight either. The colonists obviously had progressed as far as the internal combustion engine, and that in itself was a minor miracle. But they also must have a workforce of very considerable size.

  “I think we’re wasting our time,” said Karen. “If Nathan can’t prise any more information out of the woman, then we’re completely at sea. I reckon that a little plain bargaining is in order.”

  “We’re not here to bargain,” I said, patiently—knowing that she knew well enough—“we’re here to offer our services. They’re entitled to be secretive, or rude, or hostile, or suspicious. We’re not supposed to react in kind, even though the temptation might at times be great.” I said it knowing that I, too, had succumbed to temptation on occasion and retaliated. But this was a new world and the resolutions were still fresh.

  “The computer pattern-scan turned up nothing,” muttered Karen. “It’s pointed out a dozen pretty craters and some nice rock formations, but nothing else. Even if there’s something in the mountains as a whole, do you realize what a thin slice of them we’ve got on these pics? We were pretty low before we ditched. You could draw the area we’ve got as a thick-leaded line on a standard map.”

  “I wonder why she chose that line,” I said. “It’s only inclined a few degrees to the line of latitude, but it’s considerably distant from the line of latitude which passes through the position she gave us as her own. She didn’t mind us landing a hundred miles away from her if it would allow us to scan this particular area. When Pete said the first area was too broad she shortened it both sides to hold the same central corridor. Can you sort out the line of pictures which shows the territory dead center of the area—the central five miles or so.”

  “She didn’t know the exact whereabouts of what she wanted to find,” Karen pointed out. “She said it might take years of searching on the ground.” Even while she was complaining she was checking the serial numbers on a stack of photographs, sorting out the ones I wanted. I took another set and began doing likewise.

  “True,” I admitted, “but she has some reference point somewhere—a place to start at and work out from. And it must be on this central line somewhere.”

  It took us ten minutes to extract the sequence of shots we wanted, and a further ten to arrange them in the correct order.

  “Incidentally,” I said, as I began spreading them around the floor in a long curve that spiraled around the table and then began to overlap itself, “as we’ll have passed directly overhead of all these points, I guess we’re on this line too.”

  “Sure,” she said, extending a foot to tap the last photograph in the sequence and then moving it on a few inches to the non-existent frame which would have been next. “We’re about here. If you look west out of the ship’s cameras you should be able to see this ridge and the peak way back here.”

  I tiptoed over the layout to the console and got an image of the outside on the display screen. I rotated the scanner. “There’s the ridge,” she said. “And the middle one of those three peaks is the one under my big toe.”

  I looked down at the floor. “And the other two?”

  “They’re on the parallel sets of pictures.”

  It gave me a place to start. I began with the bit of empty floor that was our own position and began crawling along the spiral. My gaze went over the ridge—actually quite a gentle bump that was presumably a saddle strung between two mountains and separating two valleys—and then down a long shallow slope. The pictures were mottled with expanses of bare rock, rough grass and occasional areas of shrub. The farther down I went the greater grew the proportion of shrub, but there was very little heavily wooded land. At the bottom of the valley I crossed a stream and admired the lushest vegetation around, and then started climbing again—another long, shallow slope. There was nothing steep enough here to shield the bottom of the bowl from the wind, and I guessed that during the rainy season the storms could get pretty violent, which explained why the hold of the vegetation was a little precarious even though we were below the theoretical altitude of the tree line. I continued up the slope for a couple of frames, and was getting quite exhausted by the energy-sapping toil I could feel in my imagination.

  Then I came to a much steeper upslope which reared to a narrow ridge and then plummeted again into a great elliptical bowl—an egg-shaped crater. Here, because of the high walls, there was protection from wind, and the inside of the crater had taken full advantage of that fact. Here, as nowhere else, there was a truly rich flora—and no doubt fauna too. The long axis of the crater was about ten miles in extent—or so I estimated, because it ran slantwise across the track, and the corner of it was chopped off—while the shorter axis was about seven.

  “Look at that!” I said.

  Karen looked at it, then referred back to the computer scan we had carried out on the pictures.

  “The computer sorted that one out,” she said, as if that made it immediately uninteresting.

  “It’s a funny-looking crater,” I said. “And it’s in a funny place. It’s not on top of a mountain—in fact it’s on the lower slopes. That long hill continues from the other ridge, up and up and up. And look at these lines at the northern wall. They must be fissures of some kind. These blurry wisps here and there might be vapor being blown out of them. And what are these, half-hidden by the trees?”

  Karen got down on her hands and knees to look, but realized immediately how stupid we must have looked. She picked up the two frames containing most of the crater and put them back on the table where we could inspect them in a civilized manner. I checked the serial numbers and started rifling through the piles in search of the missing bit of the crater.

  “They look to me,” said Karen, “rather like circular tents. But I wouldn’t swear to it. No one would. And over here might be the roof of a cabin. But we’re at the limits of resolution here and my eye is going crazy trying to make it out.”

  “If we had an overlapping frame,” I said, “we could rig up a st
ereoscope and get a 3-D image.”

  She shook her head. “We weren’t taking them that quickly,” she said. “These are just broken bits of what was actually a much larger image.”

  “I think you’re right about the tents and the cabin,” I said, after long perusal and due consideration. “Someone’s in the crater. Mme. Levasseur didn’t mention that. If she knows about it, then the crater might be the point by which she set our course and selected the area for scanning. If she doesn’t know....”

  “...it might be what she’s looking for.”

  I pondered. “What kind of crater do you think that is?” I asked her.

  “Volcanic,” she answered. “What else?”

  “Elliptical in shape? On the lower slopes of a mountain?”

  She shrugged. “What both of us know about vulcanology could be written on the back of a postage stamp,” she pointed out. Which was true enough.

  She picked up another print from the floor and showed it to me. This was the one which included the actual mountain peak—the middle one of the three we could see through the scanner. There was no mistaking that one. It was volcanic all right, though seemingly long extinct. It had a big, deep cone which had solidified a long time ago. This crater too was filled with vegetation now, though it was by no means so rich as that in the egg-shaped crater, being several thousand feet higher up.

  “So okay,” I said. “Way back when there was a double blast, with fire belching out of the side of the mountain as well as the cone. I guess volcanoes aren’t any tidier than the rest of nature.”

  “It could hardly be the crater itself that Mme. Levasseur is looking for,” said Karen, picking up another thread. “It’s on the survey team’s maps, and it’s clearly visible from the slopes of the three peaks we can see. But if the people encamped in it are....”

  She stopped then.

  “Escaped criminals?” I suggested. “Leaders of the revolution? Escaped slaves?”