Fiasco (24 page)

Even more curious were the small centers of destruction found in both satellites. These localized ravagings could not have been caused by any violent action from without. Most often, the compounds of the wires had been bitten through or gnawed at, producing tiny beadlike hollows. Rotmont, called in as a chemist, concluded that this was the work of highly active macromolecules. He was able to isolate a number of them. They had the shape of asynchronous crystals and preserved their selective aggressiveness. Some attacked only superconductors. He showed his colleagues, under the electron microscope, how the nonliving parasites ate their way into the filaments of a superconducting niobium compound, multiplying as more and more material was devoured. He did not think that these "viroids," as he called them, could have arisen spontaneously in the heart of the satellite. He assumed that the apparatus had been infected with the viroids during its original assembly. For what reason? An experiment? But in that case why send the satellites out into space?

Then there was the notion of premeditated sabotage during the construction of the devices. According to such an idea, a conflict lay behind these phenomena, the clash of opposing intentions. Some among the crew thought this conception smacked of anthropocentric chauvinism. Could not the problem have indeed been an ailment of the apparatus, on the molecular level? Something on the order of a cancer in nonliving mechanisms that had a subtle and complex microstructure? The logician-chemist ruled out this possibility for the first, older satellite, the turtle, which they had called "the moth" during the chase. For the second, however, he could not rule it out with the same certainty. Although they did not understand the purpose for which both space vehicles had been constructed, the progress in engineering that had taken place over the time between the building of the first and the second was striking. Notwithstanding, the "erosion viruses" had found vulnerable places to feed in both satellites.

Once on the trail of this idea, Rotmont could not and did not want to abandon it. The microelectronic examination of the samples taken from both captured devices proceeded rapidly, since the analyzer running it was under DEUS's control. Without that high-speed assistance even a year would not have sufficed for the necrohistology. The results indicated that certain components of both satellites had acquired a kind of resistance to the catalytic corrosion, and in a way so narrowly defined, so specific, that one could speak of an immunological reaction by analogy to living organisms and microbes. In their imagination formed the image of a micromilitary struggle, a war conducted without soldiers, cannons, bombs, and where the secret weapon, extremely precise, was a semicrystalline pseudoenzyme.

As sometimes happened in a stubbornly pursued investigation, the total sense of the discoveries made, instead of simplifying, actually became more and more complicated as the work progressed. The physicists, Rotmont, and Kirsting now practically never left the ship's main laboratory. On nonliving "culture dishes" dozens of varieties of "defense" and "attack" compounds multiplied. At the same time, the line between what constituted an integral part of the alien machinery and what had invaded it, to destroy it, grew fuzzy. Kirsting observed that in general no such line existed in any strictly objective sense. Suppose that there arrived on Earth an extremely wise supercomputer, which knew nothing about the phenomena of life because its electronic forebears had long ago forgotten that they had been built by biological beings. It saw and studied a man who had 1) a cold, and 2) colon bacilli in his intestines. Was the presence of viruses in the nose of the man his "integral, natural property" or not? Suppose the man, in the course of being examined, fell and acquired a lump on the head. The lump was a hematoma beneath the skin. The vessels suffered damage. But the lump could also be considered a kind of shock absorber created to protect the cranium from the next blow. Was such an interpretation impossible? It seemed comical to us, but this was not a joke—it concerned the whole scientific approach to the nonhuman.

Steergard, listening to the experts' arguments, merely nodded and gave them an additional five days for research. It was a heavenly dispensation. For the last half-century, the technobiotics of Earth had taken a completely different path. "Necroevolution" had been deemed unprofitable. There had been no conjecture, even, about any sort of eventual "machine speciation." But no one could say for sure that such a thing had not taken place on Quinta.

All the captain asked was, finally: Was the hypothesis of conflict between Quintan builders a premise on which future decisions of the reconnaissance had to be based?

But, presenting the analyses that they had made, the experts did not want to speak of anything so definite as a premise. There was nothing certain in their hypothesizing; there were no facts. They knew enough now to appreciate how shaky were the initial assumptions upon which their knowledge rested. An additional misfortune was the absence—in the younger wreck, too—of communication systems even slightly similar to what could be derived from the theory of finite automata and information theory. Had the viroids devoured such pseudonerve networks totally? Even so, traces should have remained, vestiges. Possibly they did remain, but the people were not able to recognize them. From a transistor radio or pocket calculator dropped under a steamroller, could one deduce Maxwell's theory, or Shannon's?

The final council took place in an atmosphere of unusual tension. Steergard gave up trying to elicit positive statements. He asked only if there was any evidence at all that the Quintans had mastered sidereal engineering. He considered this the most important question. If anyone guessed why the captain insisted on the point, he said nothing. So the
Hermes
drifted in darkness, and the men lost their way in a thicket of unknowns.

The pilots—Harrach and Tempe—listened to the proceedings in silence. Nor did the doctors speak. Arago had put aside his monk's garb and in the conversation (it somehow happened that they were sitting, the four of them, in the upper level, above the control room) not once referred to his earlier words, "And what if evil reigns there?" When Gerbert observed that expectations always fell short of the reality, Arago disagreed. Consider—he argued—the many obstacles we had overcome, obstacles that our ancestors, even in the twentieth century, had believed insurmountable. Consider how smoothly the voyage had gone. We had crossed light-years without casualties, the
Eurydice
had entered Hades unerringly, and we ourselves had penetrated the heart of the constellation Harpy, and only days or hours now separated us from the inhabited planet.

"You're giving us good therapy, Father," said Gerbert, laughing. He was the only one who still addressed the Dominican that way. He had difficulty dropping the "Father."

"It's the truth, nothing more. I can't tell you what will become of us. Such ignorance is our natural state."

"I know what you're thinking, Father," Gerbert said on impulse. "That the Creator didn't wish there to be such expeditions—such meetings, such 'intercourse' between civilizations—and therefore separated them with vast space. Yet here we have not only made a pie out of the apple of Eden, but are now sawing down the very Tree of Knowledge…"

"If you want to know my thoughts, I am at your service. I believe that the Creator limited us in nothing—in nothing. Meanwhile, it is unknown what will grow from the grafts on the Tree of Knowledge…"

The pilots did not hear the rest of the theological discussion, because the captain summoned them: he had set course for Quinta. After presenting the navigational trajectory, he added:

"There's an attitude on board I hadn't expected. Imaginations are running a little wild. As you know, there's constant talk about enigmatic conflicts, microweapons, nanoballistics, war. This is, I think, the ballast of preconceptions. If we start trembling from the dissection of a couple of wrecked satellites, we soon won't be able to function; every move we make will seem insanely reckless. I said this to the scientists, and I'm telling you, too. And now full speed ahead. To Septima you can use DEUS to hold the course. Then I want you at the wheel. Set up the shifts between you any way you like."

The ship's drive went on, and gravity, though weak, returned. Harrach went with Tempe to get the old science-fiction book taken from the
Eurydice.
When they parted at the cabin door, Harrach, much taller, leaned over, as if to divulge a secret, and said:

"Ter Horab knew who he was putting on the
Hermes.
Did you ever see better men?"

"Maybe, once. Not better. Men like himself."

The planet was encircled by a ring of ice chunks in an enormous but unstable sheet. The calculations made by Field and LoBianco immediately before the plunge of the
Eurydice
turned out to be correct. Having one large and three lesser divisions due to perturbation caused by Quinta's moon, the ring could last no more than a thousand years, since it increased its diameter while at the same time losing mass. The outer rim was widened by centrifugal forces; the inner, from atmospheric friction, turned into melting fragments and vapor, so that a portion of the water thrown into space by methods unknown returned to the planet in a never-ending rain. It was hard to believe that the Quintans had intentionally provided themselves with a downpour worthy of the Flood. The ring had initially contained three to four trillion tons of ice; each year it lost many billions.

In this lay a series of mysteries. The ring interfered with the climate of the entire planet. Besides the heavy rains, its mighty shadow fell across—during the planet's revolution around the sun—now the northern, now the southern hemisphere. The ring obstructed, reflected away the light of the sun, not only lowering the average temperature but also disturbing the circulation of trade winds in the atmosphere. The border regions on both sides of the shadow seethed with storms and cyclones.

If the inhabitants lowered the level of the oceans, surely they possessed sufficient power to give the upward water (a waterfall in reverse) double the speed, thereby sending the masses of ice beyond the vicinity of the globe so that they would either melt and evaporate in the Sun without a trace or, in the form of ice meteors, vanish among the asteroids.

With insufficient power the planners would not have attempted the job in the first place, knowing that it would be bungled. Predicting the collapse was a simple, elementary task. It was not an error in planetary engineering, therefore, but something else that halted the work begun many years before. This conclusion seemed inescapable.

The ring, a flat disk with a hole that had a diameter of fifteen thousand kilometers, inside which spun the girdled planet, was made up of hunks of ice in the middle belts, but of polarized crystals of ice on the outer edges—and that, too, must have been by design. In a word, the ring was controlled in motion and shape from the very beginning; it was guided into the plane of the equator, that being stationary. But on the inside, above the equator, it became chaotic and formless. Altogether, it looked like a space structure half completed and abandoned. Why?

From the oceans rose two large continents and one smaller. The smaller was about three times the area of Australia; since it lay at the northern polar circle, the crew called it Norstralia. The infrascope discovered warmer areas on the continents, but nonseismic; perhaps these were the thermal wastes of great power plants. They were not stations that used mined materials like oil or coal, nor did they use fuels of the nuclear type. The former would have betrayed themselves with air pollution; the latter, with radioactive ash. Earth, in the early phase of atomic energy production, had had no small problem with the safe removal of such ash. But for engineers able to throw a part of the ocean up out of the gravitational sink, ejecting radio wastes would have been child's play. Yet the ice of the ring showed no trace of radioactivity. Either the Quintans had developed another form of nuclear energetics, or else they had a totally different energetics. But what kind?

In the wake of the planet stretched a tail of gas, abundant in water vapor that came mainly from the ring.

The
Hermes
, hanging in stationary orbit behind Sexta (a planet like Mars but larger, with a dense atmosphere poisoned by continual volcanic exhalations and compounds of cyanide), sent out six probes to observe Quinta. These beamed back data continuously. From the data, DEUS composed a detailed picture of the planet. The most curious thing was the radio noise. At least several hundred powerful transmitters operated on the large land masses, with no apparent phase or frequency modulation: their emission was chaotic white noise. The antennas could be precisely located; they were directional or isotropic—as if the Quintans had decided to jam all channels of electromagnetic communication, from the shortest wavelengths to those of a kilometer. They could communicate only by lines, wires, cables. But what was the purpose of the noise, which took gigawatts to produce?

Even more curious—the "curiosities" of the planet multiplied with observation—were the artificial satellites. They numbered almost a million, in high and low orbits, some of which were nearly circular and some elliptical, with aphelions reaching far beyond the Moon. The probes of the
Hermes
also noted satellites in their own vicinity, and a few were eight to ten million kilometers out. The satellites differed considerably in size and mass. The largest were probably empty: unguided space balloons. Some had collapsed when their gas escaped. Every few days one of these lifeless satellites collided with the ring of ice, creating an impressive sight, with lightning flashes every color of the rainbow, since the Sun's rays were diffracted in the resultant cloud of ice crystals. Such a cloud dispersed slowly in space. On the other hand, the active satellites—active in that they moved in determined orbits that required constant course corrections, and changed shape in an incomprehensible way, like enormous rolls of metal foil—never collided with Quinta's ring. The three-dimensional map of the satellites, holographically made, at first glance resembled a giant swarm of bees, hornets, and microscopic flies circling the planet. But this many-layered throng was not randomly distributed. One immediately saw basic patterns in it: the satellites in the near orbits frequently traveled in groups of two or three, and the others (particularly in the stationary region, where each body was synchronous with the surface of the globe) moved toward and away from the Sun as in the figures of a dance.