by John Brunner
The cost mounted. Each trip pointed the way to refinements and modifications; each caused some trifling damage, so that one “might as well” incorporate an improvement as simply repair the faulty components… and each time the improvement cost more, called for subtler techniques, laid a heavier burden on the Starflight Fund.
People began to ask, “Why bother?” And there was no good answer—until the last grand fling, the shot to a star more distant than before but resembling Earth’s sun more nearly than its predecessors, revealed the terrifying fact symbolised by the incredible telescope.
There had been a high civilisation at Sigma Draconis.
It too had achieved spaceflight.
And it was gone. Vanished. Disappeared.
Whence the fearful, haunting question: Is the same likely to happen to us?
The immediate impact of the news was predictable. A special levy was raised for the Starflight Fund. Ten carefully chosen experts, together with the most compact and most advanced equipment both to keep them alive and to conduct research with on arrival, were hurriedly flown to the mystery planet.
The sense of alarm endured long enough to finance another visit, and another, and by the skin of humanity’s teeth, another yet. This was, to be precise, the fifth expedition. The first had been exploratory, in 2020; the next landed the nucleus of a permanent ground staff in 2022; the staff had been added to, ten at a time, in 2024 and 2026; now it was 2028 and this was the first rotation trip, the first time people who had been—who had survived—here since 2022 were due to be taken home.
But the trip was unique in another way, too. Never before had the ship been late. And it might become unique in still another respect, with the discontinuation of the base. It was not exactly in the lap of the gods, that… not unless there was a god called Ordoñez-Vico.
The apprehension had diminished. The sense of frustration had grown, as the third and fourth expeditions reported no progress. And then, all too typically…
There had been famine in half a dozen densely populated countries, all of whose governments were controlled by greedy, shortsighted, thoughtless men whose first reaction when the starving mobs came battering at their gates was to accuse a scapegoat. The Starflight Fund was an obvious target. Rumours took their rise: here’s another way the rich are cheating the poor, for if you hadn’t had to subsidise the fund, there’d be another million in the treasury to spend on food!
No mention, of course, of the fact that the Prime Minister had made his fortune by hoarding rice during the previous famine, or that the President’s brother owned the nation’s largest pharmaceutical factory and was taking a profit of 1700 per cent on every ampul of niacin, ascorbic acid and B12. That news was stale.
And then another, different, more dangerous story began to spread:
Out there they’ve found the weapons that killed the native race. They’re coming back to threaten you with them—they’re coming back to rule the world!
How anybody, no matter how ignorant, could take that seriously was a question that defeated Ian, let alone the problem of how sophisticated delegates to the United Nations could refer to it in their speeches and not burst out laughing. Still, it had happened… and that was why General Ordoñez-Vico had been given power to order the abandonment of the Draco base, and the abolition of the Starflight Fund, if any hint, clue, trifling suspicion, triggered his all too obvious latent paranoia.
And here he was, scowling as usual at Captain Bakongu whom he made no secret of hating both as a person and as a symbol—hailing as he did from an elitist, racialist, masculinist background—and saying to Colonel Weil, “Tell me something! Does this detour you’re making, like the pilot of an airliner bound for Rio who wants to show off the Sugarloaf, form part of your prescribed schedule?”
There was electric tension in the filtered, processed air. But Weil’s answer was perfectly polite… at first.
“Yes, General, it’s a regular feature of our visits. In fact”—and here malice stalked in, a twist of his voice, as it were—“I’m surprised to hear you ask. I gathered that you’d made an exhaustive study of the records from all our trips.”
Ordoñez-Vico responded in a manner they were all familiar with. He drew from his jacket a flat object, little larger than an old-fashioned pocket watch though a great deal heavier and square instead of round, and consulted the dials on its face with an important air.
It was, so the general had repeatedly declared, the most advanced lie detector ever devised, capable of catching out untruths by comparing the sonic profile of the speaker’s words with his or her bodily secretions. During the thirty days since they left Earth hardly one conversation with him—not that there were many all told—had been completed without this gadget being produced for examination.
“It’s not unknown for records to be falsified,” Ordoñez-Vico said. “But I am relieved to note that on this occasion you are telling the truth.” He repocketed the device. “Very well. I too require to see the vaunted telescope left behind by the alleged native species.”
At that everyone else in the cabin gasped: a wordless chorus of incredulity.
“You honestly think somebody invented the Draconians?” a voice blurted… and, as all eyes turned on him, Ian blushed almost as red as his carroty hair. Weil repressed a chuckle. Most of his passengers this time, like most of those on earlier voyages, were academic types, accustomed to the formal hierarchical environment of a university. Ian was a refreshing contrast. He had spent most of his career burrowing into the ground at remote archeological sites, or sitting up late alone in an isolated forest hut, refusing to see or speak to anybody as he reinvented from first principles the reasons why, in a long-lost civilisation, people had chosen this rather than any other symbol to convey that of all possible meanings.
If only he were not so shy… Of all the people I’ve Charoned here, I’d put my money on Ian to unravel this mystery. I’d have liked to get to know him a lot better.
But there were other and more immediate problems on Weil’s mind. He said crisply, “General, there is nothing alleged about the Draconians. They did reach their moon; they did build their scope; they did disappear! It will give me great personal pleasure to walk you around some of the sites that have been discovered and hear your version of how they were faked!”
He put an infinitesimal stress on the word walk, and there were discreet smiles on several faces. Ordoñez-Vico wore the softest and most delicate style of shoes. It was hard to picture him on an army route-march or up to his knees in a swamp.
But the irony was lost on him. He said, “I shall indeed accompany you, Colonel. I don’t intend to let you do anything on this planet without my knowledge.” And appended with a glower at the rest of the passengers: “Nor any of you, either!”
What might have flared in seconds into a blazing row was forestalled by a faint, faint sound from the communications panel and a sharp exclamation from Lieutenant Somogyi who was sitting before it with earphones on.
“Colonel, we have voice contact with the base, and they’re asking why we’re so late.”
“Don’t answer that!” Ordoñez-Vico barked. “Do no more than acknowledge!”
Somogyi—still under thirty, making only his second trip, engagingly youthful in many respects despite the sinister cast of his gypsylike features and his undeniably formidable intellect—looked blank, and thereby tempted the general into explanations.
“I want to catch them before they have a chance to cover up what they’re really doing!”
“In that case”—prompt from Captain Bakongu at the navigation panel—“all passengers should go immediately to strap-down stations. If we line up for an approach now, we can save a full braking orbit. We could be down in about forty-four minutes.”
“There’s your chance,” Weil said dryly. “Return to your cabins quickly, please.”
Fury and the urge to appear consistent struggled in Ordoñez-Vico’s face, but after a few seconds he swallowed his
annoyance and gave a nod.
“Yes, Colonel. You are correct; we should make our landing right away.”
And when the passengers had gone, escorted by Irene, Weil said more to the bulkheads than to Somogyi, “I wouldn’t care to set the record he’s about to: being the first man hated by literally everyone else on a whole damn’ planet!”
III
After the shock of finding the telescope, the first human visitors had judged it politic to do nothing whatever to offend its builders. Though they could spot no lighted cities on the night side of the planet, that meant nothing; the natives might have evolved beyond the need for them, or bypassed it. There was nothing but stellar static on the radio bands, but that was equally irrelevant; there might be long-distance communications techniques humans had not yet discovered. And at first glance it had been plain that the telescope was very, very old.
Weil, the junior member of the crew on that particular voyage, had snapped at a persistent reporter after his return, “Damn it, we expected to meet them, remember! For all we knew it could have been like sailing the Pinta into Greater Hamburg!”
Which would have made a telling point but for the fact that the reporter was from Singapore and had not been exposed in school to the details of Columbus’s explorations. He asked how to spell Pinta, consulted his portable reference computer, and inquired with no discernible trace of embarrassment what a twentieth-century sales slogan coined by the British Milk Marketing Board had to do with interstellar travel.
Anyhow: it was obvious at once that this world’s ecology must be similar to Earth’s, and that obligated the crew to sterilise their landing site. The only possible spot to touch down appeared to be on a half-desert island south of the equator, where a freak of geology had created a high plateau of barren rock and wind-sculpted sand, and a freak of meteorology kept the sky clear of cloud even during what their computers determined to be the counterpart of a monsoon season in these latitudes. Moreover, on the plateau, the partial pressure of oxygen was very close to Earth-normal. This was a fractionally larger planet, with a somewhat smaller and more distant moon, so at sea level its air was richer than humans were accustomed to… though incontestably breathable.
The landing site chosen for such admirable, commonsensical reasons had grown into the Draco Base. Cathy Polyzotis wished desperately she could be anyplace else.
Tempers were fraying and there were dismal looks on all the faces around her. Small wonder. The Stellaris was not a week late, not ten days late, but twelve and a half, and people were openly starting to predict that she would never come back: that there had been a war on Earth, or the Starflight Fund had been dissolved, or… There were nearly as many gloomy ideas circulating as there were about the fate of the Draconians.
The sky was as harsh as steel overhead. The air was full of inescapable dust borne on a breeze which never blessed this plateau with anything more refreshing than a tingle of salty mist from the waves that constantly broke on the rocky southeast coast. In the glare and heat and dryness the thirty humans on the planet fretted and argued and complained over and over about the news they were expecting from home, the indispensable new equipment they weren’t going to receive and countless other disappointments.
This is making me understand the classic summary of paranoia: “The universe is a gun and they’re pointing it at me!”
So many hopes had blown away on the salty wind, or evaporated towards the cruel sky. Two years ago, when she had been the youngest person ever to arrive at Sigma Draconis, she had been looking forward to the experience.
In spite of my fears about Dugal, I was excited. I…
She drove herself to be totally honest.
I didn’t doubt my dreams. I was sure we’d solve the riddle, and convinced I would make the key contribution. And I knew Dugal was as proud of me as I was of myself. Past tense. Living two full years in the shadow of this monumental fall from greatness… It’s not good for human beings to face the truth that a whole intelligent species can be mortal.
There was nothing superficially basic about this base; it had been designed by ingenious, thoughtful people, and though it was built of the simplest possible materials—metal plates, glass melted from local sand, and plastic processed out of a local crude oil, similar to bitumen—it was comfortable, practical, even attractive. And this, the communications and computer hall, was large enough for the thirty of them not to feel crowded together. It was not physical deprivation that was making for so many downcast looks.
How must Valentine Rorschach be feeling, who had come with the first full-manned expedition, had spent six years as the director, and was now compelled to depart with the mystery unsolved because of an arbitrary fiat from distant Earth? Was he wishing in his heart of hearts that the ship might not in fact arrive, so that he would not have to return with the knowledge of his failure?
And what about Lucas Wong, who had arrived in the second party, who notoriously did not want to inherit the directorship in addition to his departmental responsibilities as head of Biomedical Section, yet had been instructed to agree because a computer evaluation showed he was the most suitable of the senior personnel?
What about fragile, wrinkled Toko Nabura, keeping her watch at the communications console there at the far end of the hall, who had made their satellite links, and their data-storage and data-retrieval systems, into such a model of flawless reliability? How did she feel about being sent home, leaving her creation to a stranger? There was no way to judge her secret feelings, though. More than once in the past few days people had snapped at her, as though suspecting her of hiding the Stellaris in the crannies of hyperspace, and she had always replied in her normal soft tones, seemingly unaffected.
Yet was her fine-lipped mouth not turned down a fraction at the corners, were her eyes not a hint more narrowed than they used to be…?
It looked, indeed, as though only one out of them all had kept his cool, and that, as might have been predicted, was the chief archeologist Igor Andrevski, a lean man in his fifties much given to gesticulation, whose eyes were always bright under his shock of grey hair and whose mouth seemed always to be busy with words, or laughter, or at worst a grimace of sympathy for another person’s troubles.
He was certainly the best-liked member of the staff. In a sense he was an atavism; he should have been born in the great days when Schliemann at Troy, Woolley at Knossos, were converting legend into documented fact, rather than in an age when archeology had been distilled into a pattern of formal processes. He had been the ideal choice to head their most important department, even though political wrangling had delayed his appointment until 2024.
What would we do without Igor? Thank goodness he’s not due to be rotated home! I wonder why they didn’t pick him to be the new director instead of Lucas… Oh, I suppose sorting out our occasional rows and emotional crises would drag him away too often from what is after all the most important work we’re here to do.
She realised with surprise that thinking about Igor had made her smile a little. That guided her all the way to a private admission which only the strain of being isolated here (of being afraid! glossed her subconscious brutally) could have provoked.
Suppose they bring the news that Dugal has… died. Or even if he hasn’t! I would like, really, to have some other man in my life. A woman should have someone else besides an invalid brother, no matter how kind, how clever, how beloved. And out of all the men I’ve met, here or at home, despite his being twice my age, I’d like it to be Igor.
Only somewhere a long time ago in Igor’s life there had been a tragedy. He never referred to it, but it was known that it had involved a wife he adored, and a baby, and…
Anyhow, they weren’t there any longer, and his most profound passions, his most forceful drives, were sublimated into that uniquely rational form of quest for a vanished unrecoverable past: archeology.
Perhaps if I too were to lose the person dearest to me, a bond might—
But b
efore she had time to feel shocked at the idea welling from the depths of her mind, there was a cry from Toko.
“There she is!”
Everyone in the hall stopped in mid-word and spun to look her way. Above the communications panel, a screen where a blip had appeared, blue-white on white-green. A second elapsed, and then the hall was echoing to whoops of joy and the noise of stamping feet. The racket drowned out Toko’s exchange with the ship, and it was—or felt like—a long while before anybody noticed she was not smiling in relief.
A hush fell again. Brushing back hair that was no longer there, Director Rorschach said, “Toko, is something wrong?”
“I don’t know. I can’t get them to talk to me. All I heard was a curt acknowledgement of contact. I think it was the young man who made his first trip last time, Somogyi. And after that, nothing. Stellaris! Draconis Base calling! Why are you so late this trip?”
Silence. Somebody said, “You don’t suppose…?” And let the words hang in the air like smoke. All of them knew about the things that could theoretically go wrong as a ship emerged from qua-space, up to and including re-entry into the normal universe as a wave of neutrinos instead of solid matter.
Toko gestured at the screen where the blip still loomed reassuringly bright, while with her other hand tapping down switch after switch on the board before her. “Nothing wrong with her automatics or power systems! There’s Navigation Satellite One locking on her beam, there’s Two, there’s Seven just picking her up as she rounds the shoulder of the planet… All normal so far as the machinery’s concerned, and what’s more they seem to be tracking into a first-time landing orbit—”
She was interrupted. A voice they recognised, that of Weil, boomed from the speaker rigged to receive incoming messages from the ship.