Fiasco (16 page)

"For two days we wandered, for there was no possible way to get bearings. Two, three, four times each day I would clamber up a mound higher than the others, to look for the mound of which Nfo Tuabé spoke. But all I saw was a forest of stone. The jungle behind us became a green strip, then a blue line on the horizon, then finally disappeared. Our water supply dwindled. But the mounds went on and on. Through my telescope I saw them merge in the far distance, like a field of corn. The lad amazed me. Without complaint he did everything that I did, but not knowing why or wherefore. We proceeded thus for four days. I was drunk with the sun. The sunglasses didn't help. There was a terrible glare in the sky—one could not look up before dusk—and the sand blazed like mercury. And all around, palisades of mounds, unending. No trace of any living creature. Even the vultures did not venture here. There was only an occasional, solitary cactus.

"Finally, in the evening, having rationed out the water for that day, I climbed to the top of a very large mound. I think the thing went back to the days of Caesar. Without hope now, I looked around, when suddenly I saw a black spot in the telescope. My first thought was that the glass was dirty. But no, it was that mound.

"The next day I got up when the sun was still below the horizon. I could barely waken my boy. We began to carry our things in the direction that I had marked on the compass. I had also made a sketch. Meanwhile the mounds, though a little lower, grew nearer to one another. Finally they formed such a stockade that I could not force my way through. The black boy still could, so I passed the packages to him between two columns of cement. Then I would squeeze through higher up. This lasted five hours, in which time we covered, perhaps, three hundred feet. I saw that we were accomplishing nothing, but I was in a fever. Not a fever, exactly, though I had a constant temperature of more than a hundred degrees. The climate must affect the brain. I took five sticks of dynamite and blew up the mound that stood in our way. We hid behind other mounds after I lit the fuse. The explosion was muffled, its force went downward. The ground shook. But the other mounds remained standing. Of the one blown up there were only large, crusty fragments, alive with writhing white bodies.

"Until now we had not harmed one another. But now the battle began. It was impossible to cross the crater made by the explosion. Tens of thousands of termites poured from the pit and spread in a mass, like a wave. They felt their way over every inch of ground. I lit the sulfur, put the tank on my back. You know what the device looks like: what gardeners use to spray shrubbery. Or a flame thrower. The acrid smoke burst from a nozzle I held in my hand. I put on a gas mask, gave one to the boy. Gave him, also, boots specially made for the purpose—wrapped in metal netting. In this way we were able to cross. I discharged a stream of smoke, which drove off the termites. The ones that didn't retreat perished. In one place I had to use the gasoline. Poured it out and lit it, creating a wall of fire between us and the torrent of termites.

"Some three hundred feet remained to the black termitarium. Sleep was out of the question. We sat by the continually belching tank, our flashlights on. What a night! Ever spend six hours in a gas mask? No? Try imagining what it is like to keep your face buried in hot rubber. When I wanted to breathe more freely, easing the mask away, I would choke on the smoke. And so the night passed. My boy shivered and shivered. I feared it might be a fever.

"The new day came, finally. We now had only one can of water left. It could last us, at best, if we drank sparingly, three days. It was necessary to return as quickly as possible."

The Professor stopped, opened his eyes, and gazed at the fireplace. The embers had turned completely gray. The lamp filled the room with a soft green light, as if filtered through a sheet of water.

"We reached the black mound."

He raised his hand.

"Like a bent finger. Like this. Smooth surface, as if polished. The thing was surrounded by low mounds that were, curiously, not vertical but inclined toward it: larvae of stone making a grotesque obeisance.

"I gathered all my supplies at one point on this circle—it measured some forty feet around—and set to work. I didn't want to destroy the black mound with the dynamite. The moment we entered this area, the termites ceased appearing. At last it was possible to remove the mask from my face. What a relief! For a few minutes, there was not a man on earth happier than I. The indescribable pleasure of breathing freely—and that mound, black, strangely bent, unlike anything I had ever known. Like a madman I danced and sang, not caring about the drops of sweat that rained from my brow. Poor Uagadu watched, frightened. Perhaps he thought that I was worshipping before a black idol…

"But I sobered quickly. There was little reason for rejoicing: the water was running out; the dried food barely sufficed for two days. True, there were the termites. The natives considered them a delicacy. But I could not bring myself to… Hunger, however…"

He broke off. His eyes glittered.

"To make a long story short, I knocked down that mound. Old Nfo Tuabé had spoken the truth."

He leaned forward. His features sharpened. The words came in a rush.

"There was, first, a layer of fibers, of a material of unusual smoothness and strength. Inside—a central chamber, surrounded by a thick coat of termites. Were they termites at all? I had never seen termites like these. Enormous, flat like a hand, covered with silver hairs, and having funnel-shaped heads that ended in something resembling antennae. These antennae were all touching a gray object no bigger than my fist. The insects were extremely old. Motionless, as if made of wood. They did not even attempt to defend themselves. The abdomens pulsed. But when I swept them from the central object—that round, strange thing—they perished instantly. Came apart beneath my fingers like rotten rags. I hadn't the time or the strength to study all this. I took the object from the chamber, locked it in a metal box, and immediately headed back with my Uagadu.

"I won't go into how I reached the coast. We encountered the red ants. I blessed the moment that I'd decided to drag back with me the single can of gasoline. If not for the fire… But enough of that. It's a separate story. I'll say only this: At the first stopping place I examined carefully the thing that I had taken from the black mound. When I cleaned off the deposits on it, it was revealed to be a perfect sphere, of a heavy substance that was transparent, like glass, but having a much higher index of refraction.

"And then, there in the jungle, a certain phenomenon manifested itself. At first, I paid no heed to it, thinking that I was imagining things. But when I reached the civilized areas on the coast, and afterward, I became convinced that it was not my imagination…"

He sank back into his chair and, almost completely in shadow, his head dark against the brighter background, said:

"I was plagued by bugs. Butterflies, moths, arachnids, hymenoptera, whatever you like. Day and night they followed me in a buzzing cloud. Or, rather, not me, but my baggage, the metal caisson box that contained the sphere. During the sea voyage, things were a bit better. Applying insecticides intensively, I rid myself of the pests. New ones didn't appear—there were none on the open sea. But the moment I landed in France, it began all over again. The ants were the worst. Wherever I stopped for more than an hour, ants showed up. Red ants, black ants, carpenter ants, pharaoh ants, large and small, they gathered at the box, engulfed it in a quivering mass, cut, ate through, destroyed all the coverings with which I had packed it, suffocated themselves, perished, ejected acid in an attempt to corrode the steel sides…"

He broke off.

"The house we're in now, its isolated situation, all the precautions I take, it's because I am constantly beset by ants."

He got up.

"I conducted experiments. Using a diamond drill, I broke from the sphere a piece no larger than a poppy seed. It exerts the same power of attraction as the entire sphere. I also found that if I surrounded the sphere with a thick jacket of lead, the effect ceased."

"Rays of some kind?" said the listener in a hoarse voice. As one hypnotized, he stared at the barely visible face of the old scientist.

"Possibly. I don't know."

"And … you have the sphere?"

"Yes. Would you care to see it?"

The listener jumped to his feet. The Professor opened the door for him, returned to the desk for the key, and hurried after his guest down the dim corridor. They entered a narrow cubicle without windows or furniture. In a corner stood a large, old-fashioned safe. Under the weak light of the naked bulb on the ceiling, the steel plates had a bluish cast. The Professor inserted the key with a sure hand and turned it. With the grating sound of bolts withdrawing, the heavy door opened. He stepped aside. The safe was empty.

The cabins of the physicists were located on the fourth deck. He could find his way around now on the
Eurydice.
He had studied the layout of the ship, so different from the ones he had flown. He did not know the names or purposes of many of the machines in the sternmost section, which was unoccupied and cut off from the rest of the hull by triple bulkheads. The grub-leviathan was crisscrossed with connecting tunnels, like a secret network through an elongated, cylindrical city.

In his muscles was the memory of moving down narrow corridors—either oval in cross section or circular like a well—where you floated weightless, here and there pushing lightly to change direction on the turns. But in freighters you could reach the hold more simply, via the ventilation shaft; all you had to do was turn on the air compressor and be carried in the roar of a strong wind, your legs dangling uselessly, like vestigial organs. He found himself missing weightlessness, which he had cursed so many times when making repairs, because Newton's laws kept reminding one of their existence. If he used a hammer without gripping something well with the other hand, he would end up doing cartwheels that were entertaining only to spectators.

The elevators—actually wheelless oval cars with windows so curved that one saw one's own reflection in them distorted and reduced—moved without a sound, giving the numbers of the sections passed and blinking at the right stop.

The corridor had a rough yet deep carpeting. Around a corner disappeared a vacuum cleaner, looking like a turtle with wands, while he walked past a row of doors that bulged slightly, as the wall did, and that had high thresholds with brass fittings—no doubt to satisfy the whim of some interior decorator. It was hard to think of any other reason. He stood before Lauger's cabin, suddenly unsure of himself. He was still unable to become one of the crew. Their friendliness at meals, the way one group and then another invited him to their table, seemed forced to him, as if they were trying to pretend that he was really one of them—and that his lack of an assignment was only temporary. True, he had talked with Lauger, and Lauger had assured him that he could drop in whenever he wished. But this, instead of giving him confidence, somehow put him on his guard. Lauger was not just anyone; he was the number-one physicist, and not merely on the
Eurydice.

He had never thought that he could be assailed with doubts about how to act with someone. Social grace was as out of place here as a parlor game in the vaults of the Great Pyramid. The door had no handle; a touch with the tips of the fingers, and it opened—so quickly that he almost drew back, like a savage before an automobile.

A spacious room. He was struck by its disorder. Among heaps of tapes, photographic plates, papers, and atlases stood a large desk, its top curved around in a half-ring with a swivel chair in the center. Behind it, on the wall, was a rectangle of black with moving dots of light. On either side of this flickering control panel hung large photographs—lit-up transparencies—of spiral nebulas, and farther on were vertical, pillarlike cylinders, partly opened, full of pigeonholes for computer disks. In the left corner stood a huge rhomboid machine with a chair attached at the base. The thing went up through the ceiling, and from a slot under a binocular eyepiece emerged a tape, in small jumps, bearing some kind of graph. The tape collected in coils on the floor, which was covered by an old Persian rug with a worn hieroglyphic pattern. It was the rug that amazed him. A cylinder-column vanished, revealing an entrance to an adjoining room. Lauger was standing there, in linen trousers and a sweater, with a head of overgrown hair, and gave him a smile that was both understanding and innocent. The face was fleshy, as of a child aged before its time—no more resembling the face of a creator of high abstractions than did Einstein's in the days when Einstein still worked in a government office.

"Hello," said the visitor.

"Enter, colleague, enter. It's good you came: at one blow you can delve into physics and metaphysics…"

He added, in explanation:

"Father Arago is with me."

The visitor followed Lauger into the other cabin, which was smaller, with a covered bunk and several chairs around a table, at which the Dominican was examining a diagram through a magnifying glass—or perhaps it was the computerized map of a planet, having lines of latitude across it.

Arago pulled out a chair near him. The three sat down.

"This is Mark. You know him, Father?" asked Lauger and, before he could reply, went on:

"I can guess your problem, Mark. It's hard to have a man-to-man talk with a machine."

"The machine is not to blame," observed the Dominican, irony in his voice. "It says what was put into it."

"That is, what
you
put into it," the physicist corrected him with the smile of an opponent. "The theories don't agree. Not that they ever did. We are talking, Mark, about the fate of civilizations 'above the window,'" he explained to the visitor. "But since you came in the middle of our argument, let me summarize the beginning for you. You're aware that the old notions about ETI have changed. Even if there are a million civilizations in the galaxy, their duration is so dispersed in time that it is impossible first to communicate with the host of a planet and then drop in on him. Civilizations are harder to catch than a mayfly that lives for one day. We look for pupas, therefore, and not the adults. Do you know what the window of contact is?"