TOTAL ECLIPSE

by John Brunner

  “Do not record! Wipe any automatic recording of this message! Wipe any record of the wiping! This is Rudolf Weil. We’ve been compelled to waste space this trip on bringing with us a military intelligence expert who’s convinced you’re adapting alien weaponry to conquer Earth. He’s empowered to close the base and take you home if he’s the slightest bit suspicious. This is my only chance to warn you, and at that I’m taking a hell of a risk. The ship is crawling with his bugs, as the base will be immediately we land. But right now he’s strapped down in his cabin for the approach and our gravity compensators are oscillating, which ought to blur most of his instruments, so I’ve gambled on transmitting this onetime self-destruct recording. Do not on any account mention it to him, and keep your fingers crossed! Ends!”

  IV

  Going in or out of a planetary gravitation well, the compensators often wandered as they struggled to maintain a steady 1 g pull, or, to be precise in the case of a trip to Sigma Draconis, the 1.08 which they had slowly built up to in order to prepare the passengers for landing on the larger planet. Leaving Earth, the effect had been quite mild, but during the approach they had oscillated with a vengeance. By the time the creaking of the hull announced touchdown Ian was feeling very giddy.

  For a while he lay in his bunk with his harness secured, listening as the faint hum of the power systems faded, and then all of a sudden found he was sniffing.

  The air was growing warmer and drier, and there was an odour in it which he didn’t recognise. A word burst into his mind like a magnesium flare:

  Alien!

  Instantly he was clawing at his harness release. Why the hell was he lying here like a dummy when outside was the whole new planet he had come here to explore?

  Not pausing to pick up any of his belongings, he raced along the spinal corridor towards the main exit lock.

  And stopped dead the moment he came in sight of it.

  Everybody else, including the colonel, waited with impatient scowls in the lock’s ante-section. The light of the new sun, reflected from a matt white bulkhead, showed that they were all staring towards the exit but making no move in that direction.

  Visions of disaster filled Ian’s mind. Nearest to him of the other passengers was Karen; he hurled a frantic question at her.

  “The general,” she explained in a soft but caustic tone, “is ensuring his immediate unpopularity. He has a bullhorn and a case full of spy-eyes. Take a look.”

  She moved aside. Rising on tiptoe and craning, Ian was just able to glimpse Ordoñez-Vico, framed in the lock aperture against blinding blue sky, tossing into the air literally by handfuls scores of light, off-white discs that soared away like the mythical “flying saucers” of last century.

  Beyond the lock the glare was too intense for Ian to make out more than the predictable fact that the base staff had come crowding into the open, but he couldn’t see their features.

  Abruptly a deep voice boomed, “Who the hell are you, and what do you think you’re doing?”

  His first task complete, Ordoñez-Vico slammed his case shut and raised his bullhorn, which he wore on a baldric. In a crisp bark he identified himself and described his mission.

  There was a stunned silence. Then there followed a roar of laughter, at first nervous, then mocking, and a clear high girl’s voice shouted, “Oh, wait till you’ve been here a couple of days! Then you’ll know the only secrets on this planet are the aliens’!”

  A rattle of applause greeted the remark.

  But it served mainly to make the general boil over. He raised his bullhorn again and bellowed, “You’ll regret that, young woman—I promise you! Over there I see the retiring director Dr. Rorschach—come here, please. And also Dr. Toko Nabura; is that you? I propose to start my investigation immediately. Take me on a complete guided tour of this base. And I shall also require unhindered access to your computerised data stores. As for the rest of you!”

  His voice rose sharply.

  “You will remain here until I return, in plain sight! If one of you so much as walks around to the far side of the ship, that will be sufficient reason for me to close the base and order your immediate embarkation, bringing nothing with you, not even clothes!”

  “He’s out of his mind,” Ian whispered.

  “Have you only just realised?” Karen murmured dryly.

  “Ah… General,” said the same deep voice as before, which Ian now recognised from recordings—it sounded different uttering an angry shout from what he had heard in normal conversational tones.

  “Yes, Director, what is it?”

  “We may at least move into the shadow of the ship?”

  “Ah… Very well, but remember my spy-eyes are keeping constant watch.”

  “And may we speak to our new colleagues?”

  Ordoñez-Vico hesitated. Rorschach went on, “We’re expecting news of our homes and families, you know, and of everything that’s been happening on Earth. And the ship’s visit has been somewhat delayed…”

  How are these people going to enjoy what they hear? The thought flashed across Ian’s mind. The Kenya-Uganda war, the Indonesian famine, the Argentine plague, that terrible tsunami with the two-thousand-mile fetch which devastated so much of South Japan, and everything else that’s created such havoc recently… Hard to imagine all that in two short years!

  “Very well,” Ordoñez-Vico said curtly. “You may talk together. But do so in plain sight of my spy-eyes at all times.”

  He marched pompously down the ship’s external ramp and vanished from Ian’s view.

  “I’ll be damned,” Karen said, exhaling gustily. “If ever a man combined maximum gall with minimum common sense… Oh, well; let’s get outside and see what this place really looks like.”

  The crew stood aside to let the passengers go out first, led by Achmed Hossein, who was due to replace Toko Nabura. Ian was last in line… and the moment he stepped out, the light hit him like a hammer. In his haste to leave his cabin he had omitted to bring dark glasses. But the last thing he wanted was to turn around and fetch them; even so trivial an act might make Ordoñez-Vico suspicious. He shaded his eyes with his hands, and shortly his vision adjusted enough to give him his first clear sight of mankind’s precarious stellar bridgehead.

  The base rested on the layer of ribbed, roughened glass into which a half-mile circle of the plateau had been fused prior to the original landing. Wind-borne sand grains had scratched and eroded it, but it was still hurtfully bright in full sunshine.

  The buildings were low, and clustered together. A sort of pseudopod extended from them to and past the edge of the glass circle. That was, so to speak, the base’s umbilical cord. It included a water pipe connected to a well sunk into a layer of what corresponded to chalk, where millions of litres of pure sweet rainwater had been trapped in an age when the climate hereabouts was different, and a conveyor to bring in native vegetation from the north coast, the only region where it was dense on the island. That was to supply the food converters, housed over there in a shed adjacent to the refectory and recreation complex and powered by solar mirrors on its roof. They processed the raw material into a remarkable variety of humanly edible dishes, not to mention excellent wine and beer, thanks to the care with which their master tapes had been programmed.

  It had always seemed ironical to Ian that when Yakov Berendt invented the food converter he had predicted in high excitement an end to famine. How could anybody go hungry, he demanded, when every tiny village and hamlet possesses a machine capable of turning any sort of plant from trees to algae into a nourishing, even a delicious diet?

  But people still starved, and not infrequently they did so by the million. Because such a machine large enough to feed even a hundred people cost as much as a light aircraft or a luxury yacht. Therefore the commonest purchasers of food converters were hotel and restaurant chains in the wealthy, not the impoverished, nations of Earth. The millennium seemed as far away as ever.

  Partway along this “umbilical cord�
� a building stood isolated from the rest, headquarters of the civil engineering section Karen was assigned to take over. Directly below lay a vein of high-quality iron ore, and all around, of course, were vast amounts of aluminium compounds. Solar furnaces, many built right here, provided plenty of metal for building purposes and simple maintenance of the less complex equipment. Plastics were also made there, from vegetation or the tarry bitumen equivalent of which a dozen deposits were known on the mainland opposite.

  Parked between there and the main portion of the base were five hovercraft: three light long-distance personnel transporters, two heavy-duty models. It was a slow way of getting around, but they floated, and by following all possible water routes, fuel requirements could be cut to a minimum, while they could cross all but the roughest ground. The base’s computers had long ago worked out optimum paths to any destination on the planet, using satellite maps.

  Ordinarily, apart from one on permanent reserve standby, the hovercraft would not have been here. The personnel spent most of their time far from base, digging for history.

  The only people who did usually remain here were the six members of the department which Toko Nabura was now scheduled to cede to the newcomer Achmed Hossein, plus the director and hitherto the chief medical biologist, because in an emergency he must be available to save life. But that situation would now change, since the two jobs were due to be combined in the person of Lucas Wong. In any case there had been few medical emergencies; almost no local organisms could infect human tissue, and when an exception did occur, the food converters could produce a tailored antibiotic within a matter of hours—a facility which unfortunately had not become available until the third trip, or it would have saved the lives of the two people who had died here.

  Likewise, there were six people in the civil engineering section, but apart from one person on base duty they were usually out at the various digs, supervising the sonic and electronic probes, the high-pressure hoses and the excavating machines needed to clear away the debris of a thousand centuries.

  The biologists spent even less time here, for they were constantly studying the flora and fauna in the hope of garnering clues to the natives’ disappearance, and—naturally—the archeologists were here the most seldom of all.

  It looked as though they had put the last two years to good effect. All around the base were cartons and crates and cases ready for shipment to Earth. Just so, no doubt, had the artefacts Ian had studied before departure awaited their turn on the loading conveyor.

  A tremor of excitement gripped him, mingled with annoyance because all that unique material was going to be flown out of his reach.

  Six administrative staff, six civil engineers, eight biologists, and ten—well, I guess I should think in terms of “ten of us” now. Total, thirty. Thirty to unriddle the mysteries of an entire planet! It’s absurd!

  Which was as far as his musings continued before he was distracted by a cry from the girl he had heard speak up before: black-haired, green-eyed, slim, unmistakably Catherine Polyzotis. Catching sight of Weil as he emerged from the shadow of the air lock in Ian’s wake, she shouted, “Rudolf! How’s my brother?”

  And before Weil had the chance to reply, a man’s voice was exclaiming:

  “I’ll be damned! They actually sent Ian Macauley! Oh, that’s wonderful—I never dared hope for such good luck!”

  V

  A moment later Ian found the celebrated Igor Andrevski pumping his hand vigorously and bombarding him with greetings, and one second later still Cathy was pushing past him to confront Weil.

  “What about Dugal?” she insisted.

  Memory whirred like a turbine: Oh, yes! She’s the one whose brother had—was it incurable leukemia?

  Andrevski broke off. Into a temporary local silence deep as a well Weil dropped words as heavy as stone.

  “Cathy, I’m very sorry. But he was dead before we returned home.”

  “Oh, how tragic!” Andrevski whispered.

  Ian was trying to think of something to say that would be sympathetic without being inane, when the girl simply sat down on the steps and buried her face in her hands.

  Weil was about to drop beside her and put his arm around her shoulders when Andrevski checked him with a gesture.

  “Leave her, Rudolf. I think I know her a little better than you do. She has been preparing herself for this bad news. Let her be alone to accept it in her own way.”

  Weil obeyed, although he looked doubtful, and went down to mingle with the others. Andrevski laid one thin hand on Cathy’s head for a moment, and then took Ian companionably by the arm.

  “Come, let me present you to the rest of your new colleagues. I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I am that you are here. After seeing your amazing analysis of the inscriptions from Mohenjo-Daro, and your work on Etruscan funerary motifs, and above all your reports from Zimbabwe, I said to myself, ‘That man absolutely must come to Sigma Draconis!’”

  Ian suffered himself to be led along. But all the time he was mechanically shaking hands with these strangers who were not strangers, whom he had already been introduced to when they were light-years distant from him, he was thinking a single repetitive thought:

  I never felt so strongly about anybody, not in my whole life, that I would sit down and weep in public at his death. I should be able to feel that deeply. I would like to. And I can’t.

  Overhead, like vultures, floated the spy-eyes Ordoñez-Vico had turned loose. One, no doubt drawn by some out-of-the-ordinary body secretion, swooped towards Cathy and hovered right above her.

  He wondered if the lure consisted in her tears.

  The wait was long and hot. After making his tour of the actual buildings, Ordoñez-Vico insisted on being shown all the alien artefacts which had so carefully been packaged for shipment, and seeing their work undone, some of the resident personnel began to grumble aloud, only to be hushed by Weil and his fellow crew members, who stressed that what the general had said was all too true; he was perfectly prepared to close the base.

  “Maybe we should arrange to—ah—lose him!” someone muttered.

  “Even that wouldn’t help” was Weil’s sour answer. “If he doesn’t come back to give his personal assurance there’s no plot being hatched here, that will be the end of starflight for good and all.”

  Still, if nothing else, this delay afforded Ian to hear the latest news of the excavations, and Andrevski was voluble on the subject. So were his other new co-workers, in particular the improbably named Olaf Mukerji whose parents had also been archeologists and who had met on a dig in the mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan, and the black American girl Sue Tennant with the short curly hair and the big disorganised teeth who had done excellent work in Mali, and Ruggiero Bono, a little tense man who despite his Italian name was Mexican by citizenship and had made notable contributions to the technique of artefact-dating, having switched to archeology from nuclear physics. And so on.

  “Yes, indeed: we’ve located several more city-sites, and their structure and contents do indicate we were right in our guess about a single focus from which civilisation and culture diffused without interruption over the entire planet, very much unlike our own stop-and-go-and-stop pattern, hm? Maybe they didn’t like to waste time! Right now we’re sinking our best efforts into the one we’ve code-named Peat.”

  “Why Pete?”

  “What? Oh! P-e-a-t, because the cover is mostly decayed vegetable matter and relatively easy to shift. I’ve been there a lot recently, with Cathy, who could tell you more than I can, I’m sure. Next most promising is the one we’ve called Ash, because it’s a Pompeii situation; the cover is friable volcanic dust and also easy to shift, though unfortunately the degree of preservation is a lot poorer—there were probably earth tremors. But that’s Olaf and Sue’s baby, so ask them for the latest. Then there’s one which we spotted on a satellite map and baptised Silt, which we’re not really into yet; it’s at a river mouth and seems to have been buried by fine soft m
ud and then heaved back towards the surface before the stuff compressed in deep water, so we’re pushing ahead there as well, mostly with the hoses.

  “We’ve been busy at the earlier sites, too, of course. Snowfall One yielded some fascinating stuff, though Snowfall Two had been subject to so much glacial action we decided we’d best leave it to a remote automatic analyser looking for anomalous concentrations of metal and such. And I’m afraid very little came of Seabed either, which we had high hopes of when the ship last called, because the aquatic life here is just as destructive as Earth’s and the seawater, if anything, more corrosive, so…” A shrug and a wave.

  Ian finally uttered the question which meant most to him: a single word.

  “Inscriptions?”

  “I should have mentioned them at once, shouldn’t I? Yes, there have been two very important developments in that area since the ship last called. First off, Lucas’s people established something that has absolutely convinced us this printed-crystal technique was their counterpart of writing. Some of the surviving species can actually imprint suitable rocks with a distorted trace of their own field—leaving a false spoor, as it were, to mislead predators that are hunting them down. And the second thing is that at each of the sites we’ve opened up in the past two years, we’ve found what we’ve nicknamed libraries. Large structures, jam-packed with printed crystals, and a great many of them with good loud patterns resonating in their structure. Plus, naturally, a lot more blanked by random noise.”

  “How many is a great many?” Ian breathed.

  “Oh, about thirty-five thousand. A few per cent.”

  “What?”

  “Damn it, how many books do you find in a human library?”

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant…” Ian clenched his fists. “Have you made any progress towards deciphering them?”

  Andrevski looked lugubrious. “None whatever. So far as the palaeolinguistic aspect is concerned, we’re relying entirely on you. Though naturally we’ll give you all the help we can.”