Fiasco (25 page)

As the locational measurements came pouring in, DEUS made a system of coordinates, a kind of composite of spherical graphs. Distinguishing the "dead" satellites from the "live," or those drifting passively from those controlled or self-controlled, was an extremely difficult task. In the equation were many microscopic masses, all moving in the field of gravity of the large masses of Quinta and Quinta's Moon and Sun. Then the picture was sharpened, revealing a myriad of rocket and satellite remains. These frequently fell sunward. Some had the shape of toroids—doughnuts—from which jutted threadlike spikes. The largest, halfway between the planet and its Moon, showed some activity. The spikes were dipolar antennas and their emission, filtered out from the background noise of the planet, could be isolated as noise in the shortest ultraradio wavelengths. A part of this noise dropped to hard roentgen radiation, which did not reach the surface of Quinta because the atmosphere absorbed it.

Each day, DEUS added to the information acquired. Nakamura, Polassar, Rotmont, and Steergard racked their brains over this riddle composed of riddles. But the pilots did not enter into the scientific debates; they had formed their own opinion—in a nutshell, that Quinta was a planet of engineers afflicted with some mania. Or that—more bluntly—SETI had invested billions and lifted mountains in order to find a civilization gone berserk. But the pilots, too, sensed method in this madness. What came to mind was an image of "radio warfare" taken to the point of absurdity, where no one any longer transmitted anything, because each side drowned out the other.

The physicists tried to assist DEUS with hypotheses alien to humanity. Perhaps the inhabitants of Quinta differed anatomically and physiologically from us in so fundamental a way that pictures and speech were replaced, for them, by other, nonacoustic, nonvisual senses or codes. Tactile? Olfactory? A perception connected with gravity? And perhaps the noise was a transmission of energy and not of information. Perhaps the information was sent in wave-carrying fluxes not detectable by astrophysics. Perhaps, instead of continuing to filter in every possible way this seemingly senseless electromagnetic roar, one should overhaul completely the whole analytical program.

DEUS replied with its customary dryness and patience. Knowing much about human emotions, it experienced none itself.

"If the noise is a transmission of energy, there must exist receiving stations, which must let escape a certain minimum amount, a loss, for hundred-percent efficiency is impossible. But on the planet there are no receiving devices to be seen that are proportional to the power broadcast. Part of the power, able to pass through the atmosphere, is aimed at many of the orbiters. But other transmitters—and other orbiters—jam this directed radiation, and do so completely. It is as if a great crowd of people wishes to converse, but they all speak at once, raising their voices more and more. Even if each of the speakers has great wisdom, the resultant is a choral howl.

"Second, if certain bands are used for communication, they can appear as white noise if the channels of transmission are totally filled, but the Quintan noise possesses a curious quality. It is not 'absolute chaos.' Rather, it is the product of opposing emissions. Each transmitter holds exactly to a wavelength. Other transmitters either jam the first or dampen it by reversing the amplitude in phase."

DEUS illustrated for them this electromagnetic state of affairs by shifting the radio spectra to the visible zone. The white, tranquil face of the planet was replaced by a scene of multicolored vibrations. When DEUS made the coherent emitters green, their transmitters white, and the "counteremitters" purple, Quinta became a variegated ball of contending hues. Spreading purple engulfed the relays, reddening their white, and at the same time green flooded in. A blurring spiderweb of color ensued; at times one color would peak, then immediately fade away.

Meanwhile data were coming in from the probes that had been sent to reconnoiter Quinta's moon. Of the five, two had disappeared—it was not known how—at the periselenium, a point not visible from the
Hermes.
Steergard reprimanded Harrach for this carelessness; Harrach had neglected to send a reserve behind the patrol, which would have made constant monitoring of it possible even on the other side of the Moon. Three probes, however, had flown around the planet's satellite. Unable to break through the thicket of noise with a signal, they transmitted the pictures they had taken using a coded laser.

At first the information was so crowded that a single impulse, in a nanosecond, contained a thousand bits. After less than a minute of this emission, DEUS announced that from the aposelenium three Quintan orbiters, unnoticed until now because they were so small, were approaching the probes. DEUS discovered them from the heat their engines gave off in starting and by their acceleration, according to the Doppler effect. Nothing indicated that an order to intercept the patrol had been issued from the planet; there really would not have been time for that. The heated points now moved on a collision course. The captain ordered evasive action. The three-membered patrol then threw off its dummy exteriors, jettisoning before it a great quantity of metal foil and balloons, which had not fooled the interceptors. The patrol expelled a mist of sodium and shot oxygen into it, creating a fireball. The moment the Quintan rockets disappeared in it, the probes emerged from the burning cloud in a spiral and, instead of making for the ship, crashed into each other head-on and were thus atomized.

Steergard pulled in all the observational probes from their orbiting positions, and DEUS played back the results of the reconnaissance. On the opposite hemisphere of the Moon, barren and plowed with craters, a small flame possessing the spectrum of nuclear plasma went back and forth—so rapidly that, if the necessary concentrated magnetic field had not been holding it in rein, the thing would have flown off into space and been instantly extinguished. What was it that traveled back and forth there between two ancient craters, at a velocity of 60 kilometers per second? What was this
ignis fatuus
?

DEUS assured them that the planet had not discovered the
Hermes'
presence and therefore was not tracking it. There was no indication of tracking. Using Sexta's atmosphere as a lens for the radioscopes, DEUS had recorded the constant noise, the crackling that could be heard over it, which was caused by satellites striking the shield of ice.

There was a difference of opinion about what to do next. The men did not want to announce their arrival to the Quintans. The camouflage must remain in place—until they figured out at least one of the multitude of mysteries. They debated whether to send an unmanned lander to the far side of the Moon or to take the ship itself there. About the odds of success for either alternative DEUS knew as much as the crew: nothing. The auscultation performed by the patrol suggested that the Moon was uninhabited. It did have an atmosphere. Though one and a half times as massive as Earth's moon, it was unable to hold it. And the atmosphere's composition presented still another puzzle: noble gases—argon, krypton, and xenon, with a trace of helium. Without an artificial source to replenish it, the atmosphere would have escaped in the course of a few hundred years.

Even clearer evidence of engineering was the plasma flame. But the Moon was silent; it also did not have a magnetic field. Steergard decided to land with the ship. If any beings were there, they would be underground, far below the rocky crust riddled with craters and calderas. The frozen seas of lava gleamed in a circle of streaks radiating like meridian lines from the largest crater.

They would land, but first turn the
Hermes
into a comet. Out of valves in the hull that opened along the sides came a foam from tanks; inflated by injections of gas, the foam surrounded the entire vessel with a large cocoon of irregular, hardened bubbles. The
Hermes,
like a pit in a fruit, lay in a spongy mass of globules. Even from up close it looked like an elongated chunk of rock covered with craters. The burst bubbles made the surface resemble the crust of an asteroid bombarded for centuries by dust clouds and meteors. The drive, indispensable, would be the tail of the comet, which, as it approached the perihelion, would always be directed away from the sun—an illusion created by the drive deflectors. A precise spectral analysis would have revealed, of course, a pulse and composition of gases not found in any comet. But nothing could be done about that.

The
Hermes
moved with hyperbolic velocity from Sexta to the orbit of Quinta—such high-speed comets did exist, though they were rare, coming from outside the solar system. After two weeks of flight, it braked behind the Moon and sent out manipulators with television eyes. The illusion of an old, battered rock was perfect; only under a hard blow would the fake stone give elastically, like a balloon. The landing itself could not be disguised. As the ship entered the Moon's atmosphere stern-first, her fire burned away the covering over the nozzles; the rest was done by atmospheric friction. The red-hot camouflage was torn away and the naked metal colossus, bearing down on the flames beneath it, settled on six outspread legs, testing the strength of the ground first with a series of fired shells. For a while pieces of the burned covering rained around the ship. When this stopped, the men examined their surroundings from horizon to horizon. They were separated from the plasma pendulum by the bulging ridge of a large crater.

At the prevailing pressure of four hundred hectopascals, one could use copters for reconnaissance by air: overt reconnaissance. Thus began a game with rules as yet unknown, though the stake was known.

The copters, sent in a group of eight over a thousand-mile circle, went unmolested. From their pictures a map was made encompassing an area of eight thousand square kilometers around the point of touchdown. It was the map of a typical airless globe, with a random distribution of craters half filled with volcanic stuff, except in the northeast, where magnetostats were perpetuating a moving sphere of fire. The sphere sped above the rocky ground, which had been melted along its path into a hot, shallow canyon. The copters reentered this region and took measurements and spectral analyses both in the air and upon landing. One of them intentionally approached the sphere; before it was consumed, it recorded the sphere's exact temperature and radiant power, on the order of a trillion joules. The sphere was fed and guided by an alternating magnetic field that reached 10
¹⁰
gauss.

Steergard, taking soundings of the substratum of the canyon, had DEUS make a diagram of the network discovered there, which had junctions and numerous vertical shafts that went deep into the lithosphere. He did not appear surprised by this.

The purpose of the giant installation was unclear. There was no doubt, however, that the work had been abandoned while in full swing. All the entrances leading to galleries and shafts had been closed off or, rather, buried with explosive charges, the heavy machinery having first been thrown deep into the tunnels and wells. The plasma microsun was fed by thermoelectric transformers through a system of magneto-conduits that drew energy from the depths of the asthenosphere—about 50 kilometers beneath the outer mantle of the lunar crust.

Although he did send heavy all-terrain striders into that area to gather additional data and waited impatiently for their return, he gave orders for a prompt takeoff. The physicists, fascinated with the sublunar energy complex, would have been glad to stay longer and perhaps even to open up the stopped tunnels. Steergard refused. The captured satellites were incomprehensible; the construction begun in this desolate place with such vigor was incomprehensible; and even more incomprehensible (if incomprehensibility had degrees) was the abandonment of that work, as if in the panic of an evacuation. He did not say this to them; the thought that occurred to him he kept to himself.

Any detailed study of an alien technology was futile. Its fragments, like pieces of a broken mirror, would not yield a coherent picture; they were the indistinct result, only, of the thing that had shattered it.

The answer lay not in the tools of the civilization but in the civilization itself. Thinking this, he felt the full weight of the task entrusted to him.

Over the intercom, Arago asked if he could see him.

"Yes, but make it quick. We take off in less than an hour," he said, not delighted about the visit. Arago appeared immediately.

"I hope I'm not in your way…"

"You are, Reverend Father, in my way." Steergard did not rise, pointing to a chair. "However, in view of the nature of our … mission, I'm at your service."

"I have no special authorization and am no ambassador extraordinary. I was assigned my place as you were yours," the Dominican quietly replied. "With one difference. On my decisions nothing hinges. On yours, everything hinges."

"I know that."

"The inhabitants of this planet are like a living organism: one may study it as much as one likes, but one cannot ask it the sense of its existence."

"A jellyfish wouldn't answer. But a man?"

Steergard looked at him intently now, as if expecting something important.

"A man, yes, but not mankind. Jellyfish are not answerable. But each one of us is, for what we do."

"I see what you're driving at. The Reverend Father wants to know what course of action I've decided to take."

"Yes."

"We are coming out in the open."

"Asking to talk?"

"Yes."

"And if they cannot meet this request?"

Steergard rose, disturbed. Arago had penetrated to what he was concealing.

Standing so close to the monk that he practically touched his knees, he asked softly, "What else can we do?"

Arago got up, straightened, reached for the man's right hand, and clasped it.

"It's in good hands," he said, and left.

The captain put the ship, again enveloped in its mask, into stationary orbit around the Moon, above the hemisphere not visible from Quinta, and one by one called in his comrades, to ask them how they assessed the situation and what they would do in his place.