That evening I unfurled some crisp new vellum, flexed my slide rule and determined to start work on my thesis.
One afternoon, two or three months later, as we turned the board between chess games, Mayer remarked: ‘I saw Pickford this morning. He told me he had some samples to show you.’
‘TV tapes?’
‘Bibles, I thought he said.’
I looked in on Pickford the next time I was down at the settlement. He was hovering about in the shadows behind the counter, white suit dirty and unpressed.
He puffed smoke at me. ‘Those salesmen,’ he explained. ‘You were inquiring about. I told you they were selling Bibles.’
I nodded. ‘Well?’
‘I kept some.’
I put out my cigarette. ‘Can I see them?’
He gestured me round the counter with his pipe. ‘In the back.’
I followed him between the shelves, loaded with fans, radios and TV-scopes, all outdated models imported years earlier to satisfy the boom planet Murak had never become.
‘There it is,’ Pickford said. Standing against the back wall of the depot was a three-by-three wooden crate, taped with metal bands. Pickford ferreted about for a wrench. ‘Thought you might like to buy some.’
‘How long has it been here?’
‘About a year. Tallis forgot to collect it. Only found it last week.’
Doubtful, I thought: more likely he was simply waiting for Tallis to be safely out of the way. I watched while he prised off the lid. Inside was a tough brown wrapping paper. Pickford broke the seals and folded the sides back carefully, revealing a layer of black morocco-bound volumes.
I pulled out one of them and held the heavily ribbed spine up to the light.
It was a Bible, as Pickford had promised. Below it were a dozen others.
‘You’re right,’ I said. Pickford pulled up a radiogram and sat down, watching me.
I looked at the Bible again. It was in mint condition, the King James Authorized Version. The marbling inside the endboards was unmarked. A publisher’s ticket slipped out onto the floor, and I realized that the copy had hardly come from a private library.
The bindings varied slightly. The next volume I pulled out was a copy of the Vulgate.
‘How many crates did they have altogether?’ I asked Pickford.
‘Bibles? Fourteen, fifteen with this one. They ordered them all after they got here. This was the last one.’ He pulled out another volume and handed it to me. ‘Good condition, eh?’
It was a Koran.
I started lifting the volumes out and got Pickford to help me sort them on the shelves. When we counted them up there were ninety in all: thirty-five Holy Bibles (twenty-four Authorized Versions and eleven Vulgates), fifteen copies of the Koran, five of the Talmud, ten of the Bhagavat Gita and twenty-five of the Upanishads.
I took one of each and gave Pickford a £10 note.
‘Any time you want some more,’ he called after me. ‘Maybe I can arrange a discount.’ He was chuckling to himself, highly pleased with the deal, one up on the salesmen.
When Mayer called round that evening he noticed the six volumes on my desk.
‘Pickford’s samples,’ I explained. I told him how I had found the crate at the depot and that it had been ordered by the geologists after their arrival. ‘According to Pickford they ordered a total of fifteen crates. All Bibles.’
‘He’s senile.’
‘No. His memory is good. There were certainly other crates because this one was sealed and he knew it contained Bibles.’
‘Damned funny. Maybe they were salesmen.’
‘Whatever they were they certainly weren’t geologists. Why did Tallis say they were? Anyway, why didn’t he ever mention that they had ordered all these Bibles?’
‘Perhaps he’d forgotten.’
‘Fifteen crates? Fifteen crates of Bibles? Heavens above, what did they do with them?’
Mayer shrugged. He went over to the window. ‘Do you want me to radio Ceres?’
‘Not yet. It still doesn’t add up to anything.’
‘There might be a reward. Probably a big one. God, I could go home!’
‘Relax. First we’ve got to find out what these so-called geologists were doing here, why they ordered this fantastic supply of Bibles. One thing: whatever it was, I swear Tallis knew about it. Originally I thought they might have discovered a geldspar mine and been double-crossed by Tallis – that sonic trip was suspicious. Or else that they’d deliberately faked their own deaths so that they could spend a couple of years working the mine, using Tallis as their supply source. But all these Bibles mean we must start thinking in completely different categories.’
Round the clock for three days, with only short breaks for sleep hunched in the Chrysler’s driving seat, I systematically swept the volcano jungle, winding slowly through the labyrinth of valleys, climbing to the crest of every cone, carefully checking every exposed quartz vein, every rift or gulley that might hide what I was convinced was waiting for me.
Mayer deputized at the observatory, driving over every afternoon. He helped me recondition an old diesel generator in one of the storage domes and we lashed it on to the back of the half-track to power the cabin heater needed for the –30° nights and the three big spotlights fixed on the roof, providing a 360° traverse. I made two trips with a full cargo of fuel out to the camp site, dumped them there and made it my base.
Across the thick glue-like sand of the volcano jungle, we calculated, a man of sixty could walk at a maximum of one mile an hour, and spend at most two hours in 70° or above sunlight. That meant that whatever there was to find would be within twelve square miles of the camp site, three square miles if we included a return journey.
I searched the volcanoes as exactingly as I could, marking each cone and the adjacent valleys on the charts as I covered them, at a steady five miles an hour, the great engine of the Chrysler roaring ceaselessly, from noon, when the valleys filled with fire and seemed to run with lava again, round to midnight, when the huge cones became enormous mountains of bone, sombre graveyards presided over by the fantastic colonnades and hanging galleries of the sand reefs, suspended from the lake rims like inverted cathedrals.
I forced the Chrysler on, swinging the bumpers to uproot any suspicious crag or boulder that might hide a mine shaft, ramming through huge drifts of fine white sand that rose in soft clouds around the half-track like the dust of powdered silk.
I found nothing. The reefs and valleys were deserted, the volcano slopes untracked, craters empty, their shallow floors littered with meteor debris, rock sulphur and cosmic dust.
I decided to give up just before dawn on the fourth morning, after waking from a couple of hours of cramped and restless sleep.
‘I’m coming in now,’ I reported to Mayer over the transmitter. ‘There’s nothing out here. I’ll collect what fuel there is left from the site and see you for breakfast.’
Dawn had just come up as I reached the site. I loaded the fuel cans back onto the half-track, switched off the spotlights and took what I knew would be my last look round. I sat down at the field desk and watched the sun arching upward through the cones across the lake. Scooping a handful of ash off the desk, I scrutinized it sadly for geldspar.
‘Prime archezoic loam,’ I said, repeating Tallis’s words aloud to the dead lake. I was about to spit on it, more in anger than in hope, when some of the tumblers in my mind started to click.
About five miles from the far edge of the lake, silhouetted against the sunrise over the volcanoes, was a long 100-foot-high escarpment of hard slate-blue rock that lifted out of the desert bed and ran for about two miles in a low clean sweep across the horizon, disappearing among the cones in the south-west. Its outlines were sharp and well defined, suggesting that its materials pre-dated the planet’s volcanic period. The escarpment sat squarely across the desert, gaunt and rigid, and looked as if it had been there since Murak’s beginning, while the soft ashy cones and grey hillocks ar
ound it had known only the planet’s end.
It was no more than an uninformed guess, but suddenly I would have bet my entire two years’ salary that the rocks of the escarpment were archezoic. It was about three miles outside the area I had been combing, just visible from the observatory.
The vision of a geldspar mine returned sharply!
The lake took me nearly halfway there. I raced the Chrysler across it at forty, wasted thirty minutes picking a route through an elaborate sand reef, and then entered a long steeply walled valley which led directly towards the escarpment.
A mile away I saw that the escarpment was not, as it first seemed, a narrow continuous ridge, but a circular horizontal table. A curious feature was the almost perfect flatness of the table top, as if it had been deliberately levelled by a giant sword. Its sides were unusually symmetrical; they sloped at exactly the same angle, about 35°, and formed a single cliff unbroken by fissures or crevices.
I reached the table in an hour, parked the half-track at its foot and looked up at the great rounded flank of dull blue rock sloping away from me, rising like an island out of the grey sea of the desert floor.
I changed down into bottom gear and floored the accelerator. Steering the Chrysler obliquely across the slope to minimize the angle of ascent, I roared slowly up the side, tracks skating and racing, swinging the half-track around like a frantic pendulum.
Scaling the crest, I levelled off and looked out over a plateau about two miles in diameter, bare except for a light blue carpet of cosmic dust.
In the centre of the plateau, at least a mile across, was an enormous metallic lake, heat ripples spiralling upwards from its dark smooth surface.
I edged the half-track forward, head out of the side window, watching carefully, holding down the speed that picked up too easily. There were no meteorites or rock fragments lying about; presumably the lake surface cooled and set at night, to melt and extend itself as the temperature rose the next day.
Although the roof seemed hard as steel I stopped about 300 yards from the edge, cut the engine and climbed up onto the cabin.
The shift of perspective was slight but sufficient. The lake vanished, and I realized I was looking down at a shallow basin, about half a mile wide, scooped out of the roof.
I swung back into the cab and slammed in the accelerator. The basin, like the table top, was a perfect circle, sloping smoothly to the floor about one hundred feet below its rim, in imitation of a volcanic crater.
I braked the half-track at the edge and jumped out.
Four hundred yards away, in the basin’s centre, five gigantic rectangular slabs of stone reared up from a vast pentagonal base.
This, then, was the secret Tallis had kept from me.
The basin was empty, the air warmer, strangely silent after three days of the Chrysler’s engine roaring inside my head.
I lowered myself over the edge and began to walk down the slope towards the great monument in the centre of the basin. For the first time since my arrival on Murak I was unable to see the desert and the brilliant colours of the volcano jungle. I had strayed into a pale blue world, as pure and exact as a geometric equation, composed of the curving floor, the pentagonal base and the five stone rectangles towering up into the sky like the temple of some abstract religion.
It took me nearly three minutes to reach the monument. Behind me, on the sky-line, the half-track’s engine steamed faintly. I went up to the base stone, which was a yard thick and must have weighed over a thousand tons, and placed my palms on its surface. It was still cool, the thin blue grain closely packed. Like the megaliths standing on it, the pentagon was unornamented and geometrically perfect.
I heaved myself up and approached the nearest megalith. The shadows around me were enormous parallelograms, their angles shrinking as the sun blazed up into the sky. I walked slowly round into the centre of the group, dimly aware that neither Tallis nor the two geologists could have carved the megaliths and raised them onto the pentagon, when I saw that the entire inner surface of the nearest megalith was covered by row upon row of finely chiselled hieroglyphs.
Swinging round, I ran my hands across its surface. Large patches had crumbled away, leaving a faint indecipherable tracery, but most of the surface was intact, packed solidly with pictographic symbols and intricate cuneiform glyphics that ran down it in narrow columns.
I stepped over to the next megalith. Here again, the inner face was covered with tens of thousands of minute carved symbols, the rows separated by finely cut dividing rules that fell the full fifty-foot height of the megalith.
There were at least a dozen languages, all in alphabets I had never seen before, strings of meaningless ciphers among which I could pick odd
cross-hatched symbols that seemed to be numerals, and peculiar serpentine forms that might have represented human figures in stylized poses.
Suddenly my eye caught:
CYR*RK VII
A*PHA LEP**IS
*D 1317
Below was another, damaged but legible.
AMEN*TEK LC*V
*LPHA LE*ORIS
AD 13**
There were blanks among the letters, where time had flaked away minute grains of the stone.
My eyes raced down the column. There were a score more entries:
PONT*AR*H*CV
ALPH* L*PORIS
A* *318
MYR*K LV*
A**HA LEPORI*
AD 13*6
KYR** XII
ALPH* LEP*RIS
AD 1*19
....................................
....................................
.....................
....................................
....................................
.....................
The list of names, all from Alpha Leporis, continued down the column. I followed it to the base, where the names ended three inches from the bottom, then moved along the surface, across rows of hieroglyphs, and picked up the list three or four columns later.
M*MARYK XX*V
A*PHA LEPORI*
AD 1389
CYRARK IX
ALPHA *EPORIS
AD 1390
....................................
....................................
.....................
I went over to the megalith on my left and began to examine the inscriptions carefully.
Here the entries read:
MINYS-259
DELT* ARGUS
AD 1874
TYLNYS-413
DELTA ARGUS
*D 1874
....................................
....................................
.....................
There were fewer blanks; to the right of the face the entries were more recent, the lettering sharper. In all there were five distinct languages, four of them, including Earth’s, translations of the first entry running down the left-hand margin of each column.
The third and fourth megaliths recorded entries from Gamma Grus and Beta Trianguli. They followed the same pattern, their surfaces divided into eighteen-inch-wide columns, each of which contained five rows of entries, the four hieroglyphic languages followed by Earth’s, recording the same minimal data in the same terse formula: Name – Place – Date
I had looked at four of the megaliths. The fifth stood with its back to the sun, its inner face hidden.
I walked over to it, crossing the oblique panels of shadow withdrawing to their sources, curious as to what fabulous catalogue of names I should find.
The fifth megalith was blank.
My eyes raced across its huge unbroken surface, marked only by the quarter-inch-deep grooves of the dividing rules some thoughtful master mason from the stars had chiselled to tabulate the entries from Earth that had never come.
I returned to the other megaliths and for half an hour read at random, arms outstretched involuntarily across the great
inscription panels, fingertips tracing the convolutions of the hieroglyphs, seeking among the thousands of signatures some clue to the identity and purpose of the four stellar races.
COPT*C LEAGUE MILV
BETA TRIANGULI
*D 1723
ISARI* LEAGUE *VII
BETA *RIANGULI
AD 1724
MAR-5-GO
GAMMA GRUS
AD 1959
VEN-7-GO
GAMMA GRUS
AD 1960
TETRARK XII
ALPHA LEPORIS
AD 2095
Dynasties recurred again and again, Cyrark’s, Minys-’s, -Go’s, separated by twenty-or thirty-year intervals that appeared to be generations. Before AD 1200 all entries were illegible. This represented something over half the total. The surfaces of the megaliths were almost completely covered, and initially I assumed that the first entries had been made roughly 2200 years earlier, shortly after the birth of Christ. However, the frequency of the entries increased algebraically: in the 15th century there were one or two a year, by the 20th century there were five or six, and by the present year the number varied from twenty entries from Delta Argus to over thirty-five from Alpha Leporis.
The last of these, at the extreme right corner of the megalith, was:
CYRARK CCCXXIV
ALPHA LEPORIS
AD 2218
The letters were freshly incised, perhaps no more than a day old, even a few hours. Below, a free space of two feet reached to the floor.
Breaking off my scrutiny, I jumped down from the base stone and carefully searched the surrounding basin, sweeping the light dust carpet for vehicle or foot marks, the remains of implements or scaffolding.
But the basin was empty, the dust untouched except for the single file of prints leading down from the half-track. I was sweating uncomfortably, and the thermo-alarm strapped to my wrist rang, warning me that the air temperature was 85°, ninety minutes to noon. I re-set it to 100°, took a last look round the five megaliths, and then made my way back to the half-track.
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 13