Fiasco (30 page)

He was tired now, but still could not sleep. He flipped past several chapters and read the final one, on the procedure for contact.

The SETI Project had addressed the above problems as difficulties a guest might experience in communicating with his prospective host. The expedition therefore had been equipped with special devices for communication as well as with automata that would be able, in the absence of preliminary negotiations through an exchange of signals, to demonstrate the peaceful nature of the expedition prior to landing. The initial procedure had many steps. The first announcement of the arrival of the ship from Earth would be an emission of waves (ranges given in an appendix) in the radio, heat, light, ultraviolet, and particle-beam bands. If there was no response, or an unintelligible response, landers would be sent to all continents. The landers' guiding sensors would direct them toward large concentrations of buildings.

There were also plenty of sketches, diagrams, and specifications. In each lander there would be a transmitter-receiver and data about the Earth and its inhabitants. If this step, too, failed to elicit the desired reaction—the establishment of contact—heavier probes would be shot from the ship. These would have computers able to give instruction in the use of visual, tactile, and acoustic codes. The procedure was irreversible, with each step a continuation of the one preceding.

The first landers contained indicator-emitters that could be activated only by the brutal destruction of their shielding: destruction caused not by a malfunction or a hard landing but by intentional, nondiscursive dismantling. (The pilot smiled at this wording to describe a caveman type bashing the transistorized emissary of humanity with his flintstone club. "Nondiscursive dismantling" also took place, he thought, when without explanation you knocked someone's teeth down his throat.)

The indicators, grown from monocrystals, were so highly resistant that they could send a signal even if the lander was destroyed in a fraction of a second—blown up in midair, for instance, by an explosive. The program went on to describe in detail the different models for these messengers, and the volleys with which they should be dispatched, in synchronization, to the chosen landing fields, so that no region, no continent, would be privileged or omitted, etc.

The book also contained a dissenting opinion from a group of SETI experts who were extreme pessimists. There were no material devices, they stated, no dispatches or declarations easy to decipher, that could not be interpreted as a mask concealing aggression. This resulted simply from the inevitable difference in technological levels.

The phenomenon that in the nineteenth and especially twentieth centuries was called the "arms race" came into the world with the paleopithecanthropus, when he employed the long thighbones of antelopes as clubs, crushing more than chimpanzee skulls with them, since he was a cannibal. Then when science, the mother of accelerated technology, arose at the crossroads of the Mediterranean cultures, the military progress of the warring European nations—and later of the non-European—never gave one side an overwhelming advantage over another. The single exception to this rule was the atom bomb, but the United States enjoyed that monopoly only for the briefest moment in history.

But the technological gap between civilizations in the Universe had to be enormous. What is more, to hit upon a civilization endowed developmentally as Earth's was would be, practically speaking, impossible.

The thick volume included a number of other learned speculations. The visitor who initiated an underdeveloped host into the arcana of sidereal engineering might as well be giving children live hand grenades to play with—with the safety caps off. If, however, he did
not
reveal his knowledge, he risked being suspected of duplicity, of seeking to dominate, and thus he was damned either way.

The profundity of the arguments finally overcame the reader, who with the help of the SETI program fell into such a sound sleep that the book remained in his hand and the light of the lamp did not disturb him.

He was walking down a narrow, steeply downhill street, between houses, in the sun. Before the arches, children played. Laundry hung on lines at the windows. The uneven pavement, strewn with trash, banana peels, scraps of food, was cut by a gutter full of muddy water. Far at the foot of the hill was the port, crowded with sails. Shallow, lethargic waves lapped the beach; boats pulled up on the sand were separated by fishing nets. The sea, smooth to the horizon, gleamed with a ribbon of reflected sun. He smelled fried fish, urine, olive oil. He did not know how he got here, but knew that it was Naples. A small, swarthy girl ran, shouting at a boy who was fleeing with a ball. He would stop, pretend to throw her the ball, then dodge away before she could catch him. Other children shouted something in Italian. A woman was leaning out of a window; disheveled, in a chemise, she pulled in from the line stretched across the street her dry slips and skirts. Farther down began stone steps, cracked. Suddenly everything shuddered, there was a roar, walls began to crumble. He stood dumbfounded in a cloud of limestone dust, blinded. Something fell behind him. Women screamed—a rain of bricks—the thunder of the earthquake was deafening.
Terremoto, terremoto
—the cries were lost in the second, slowly building roll of thunder. Pieces of plaster fell on him; he covered his head with his arms, felt a blow in the face, and woke, but the earthquake did not go away. A tremendous weight pinned him to the bed. He tried to jump up; the belts held him. His book struck him in the forehead and flew to the ceiling. This was the
Hermes
, not Naples, but there was thunder and the walls reeled. He could feel the whole cabin moving. He hung, suspended. The lamp flickered. He saw the open book and a sweater flattened on the ceiling beneath him; from the upside-down shelves flew spools of film. It was not a dream, and it was not thunder. The sirens wailed. The light dimmed, flared, went out, and the emergency lights in the corners—of the floor now—switched on. He tried to find the clasps on the belts to release them, but the buckles, pressed by his chest, would not let go. His hands grew leaden; blood rushed to his head. He stopped struggling. He was thrown. The weight forced him now against the belts, now against the bed. He understood. He waited. Was this the end?

At that hour—it was after midnight—there was no one in the darkroom. Kirsting sat down in front of the dead visiscope, buckled himself in by feel, found the buttons like a blind man, and set the tape in motion. Across the white rectangle of the illuminated screen moved, one by one, tomograms, almost black, with masses of brighter, rounded lines like X-ray shadows. Frame after frame went by until he stopped the tape. He was examining the surface
SG
s of Quinta. Gently he turned the micron dial to find the best image. At the center was a bristling convergence, as of an atomic nucleus, which scattered in fragments radially when hit. He shifted the image from the formless, milky spot at the center to its attenuated periphery.

No one knew what the thing was. An inhabited building complex, a kind of giant city? On this frame one could see it in section, traced by nucleons of elements heavier than oxygen. Such tomography—three-dimensional, layered X-raying—of astronomical objects, known for a very long time, proved useful only for stars cooled to black dwarfs and for planets. But with all its ingeniousness,
SG
imaging had its limitations. The resolution was insufficient to allow one to distinguish the individual fossils, even if they were larger than the giant dinosaurs of the Mesozoic and Cretaceous. Nevertheless, he tried to make out the skeletons of the creatures of Quinta—and perhaps it was only those corresponding to people that filled this pseudocity, if indeed it
was
a metropolis of many millions. He reached the limit of resolution and crossed it. Then the tiny specters made of pale, trembling filaments were dispersed. The screen showed a dim chaos of motionless granulations.

As delicately as he could, he moved the micron dial back, and the shadowy image returned. He selected the sharpest
SG
s at the critical meridian and superimposed these until the contours of Quinta were lined up like a whole sheaf of X rays of the same object taken at high speed and composited. The "city" lay on the equator. The
SG
s had been made along the axis of Quinta's own magnetic poles, and along the tangent to the planet's crust. Therefore, if the building complex extended for thirty miles, the photographs cut through it obliquely—as if one were to X-ray from a suburb all the streets, squares, and houses between oneself and the opposite suburb. This yielded little. Looking upon a multitude of people from a height, one would see them in vertical foreshortening. But looking along the horizontal, one saw only the closest people, at the entrances to the streets. An X-rayed crowd would appear as a jumble of many skeletons. Granted, it was possible to distinguish the buildings from the pedestrians: since the buildings did not move, everything that remained in place over a thousand
SG
s could be filtered out. Vehicles could also be removed from the picture by a retouching process that erased anything that traveled faster than a man on foot. If one were dealing with a large terrestrial city, then houses, bridges, factories would vanish, along with cars and trains, leaving only the shadows of the pedestrians. But premises so strongly geo- and anthropocentric were of questionable value. Still, Kirsting hoped that he would be lucky.

He came to the darkroom often at night and went over the rolls of pictures countless times on the chance that he might accidentally select and juxtapose the right
SG
s and perhaps see—albeit poorly, in a fuzzy outline—the skeletons of these beings. Were they hominoid? Or even vertebrates? Was it calcium, compounds of calcium, that supported their frames, as with the terrestrial vertebrates? Exobiology considered the man shape to be unlikely, but osteological similarity to the skeletons of Earth was possible, considering the mass of the planet and the composition of the atmosphere. Free oxygen suggested the presence of vegetation, but plants would not engage in space travel or the manufacture of rockets.

Kirsting did not count on a hominoid bone structure, which was the outcome of intricate, interconnected paths in terrestrial evolution. But even bipedality and erect stature did not justify anthropomorphism. Thousands of prehistoric reptiles, after all, had walked on two legs. If one were to make SGs of a pack of running iguanodon fossils, at a great distance they would be indistinguishable from marathoners.

The sensitivity of the apparatus went far beyond the wildest dreams of the fathers of spin-resonance imaging. He could detect an eggshell, from the calcium, at a distance of a hundred thousand kilometers.

Sometimes it seemed to the scientist that he saw among the misty blotches microscopic threads brighter than the background, like a frozen Holbein dance of death photographed through a telescope. And that, if he increased the magnification a little, he would be able to see the skeletons in fact, and they would cease to be what his mind added to the trembling fibers, that were so indefinite and fleeting—like the canals seen by the ancient observers of Mars because they wanted so much to see them. When he stared too long at the groupings of weak, motionless sparks, his fatigued vision yielded to his will and then he could make out—almost—the milky dots of skulls and the hair-thin bones of spines and limbs. But when he blinked, his eyes burning from the strain, the illusion dissolved.

Kirsting switched off the instrument and got up. Squeezing his eyes shut in the total darkness, he summoned up the barely seen image, and the tiny skeletal apparitions returned, phosphorescent against velvet-black. By feel he released the holders and drifted toward the small ruby light above the exit. Blinded by the brightness of the corridor after being so long in the darkroom, he pressed into the recess of the door, which was padded with thick foam, instead of proceeding directly to the elevator, and this saved him when he was hit, to the accompaniment of thunder, by the blow of gravity. The night glowlamps went out, and along the length of the corridor that wheeled with the ship the emergency lights flashed on. But, unconscious, he did not see this.

Steergard did not turn in after the council, knowing that DEUS, no matter how many tactics it came up with, would saddle him with a choice—a choice that would amount to the alternative between incalculable risk and simple retreat. During the discussion he had maintained the pose of decisiveness, but now, alone, he felt helpless, more so that night than ever. It was growing harder for him to resist the temptation to commit the choice to chance. In one of the closets in the cabin he had—among his personal odds and ends—an old, heavy bronze coin with the profile of Caesar and, on the back, the Roman fasces. It was a memento from his father, a numismatist. Opening the closet, he still did not know if he would actually entrust the ship, the crew, the fate of the whole expedition to this, the largest coin in human history, although already he was saying to himself that the fasces would signify flight—for what else was retreat?—and the worn profile of the massive face, what might prove their doom. He overcame his hesitation, groped in the dim closet, and pulled out from one of the small compartments a flat coin-box. He opened it, turned the coin in his hand. Did he have the right…? It could not be tossed in weightlessness. He pressed the coin into a paper clip, switched on the electromagnet that was fastened beneath the desktop so that photographs or maps could be held in place with steel cubes. He pushed the piles of printouts and tapes to the sides and, like a boy (he had been a boy, once), set the coin spinning. It turned on the edge of the clip more and more slowly, describing small circles, then finally fell, pulled by the magnet, and showed tails. Retreat.

To sit, he grabbed the arms of the swivel chair, and no sooner did his shirt touch-adhere to the back than, before he was aware of it, he felt the blow. Barely perceptible at first, it grew in strength until an enormous force swept the films, papers, steel cubes, and dark-bronze coin off the desk and shoved him into the chair. The gravity intensified. With failing eyes, because the blood was leaving them, he could still see the rapid flickering of the round wall-lamp, and hear, feel, how through the steel walls, beneath their padding, ran a deep groan from all the ship's joints; and how, over the racket of objects flying in every direction—equipment not bolted down, articles of clothing—could be heard the distant howl of the sirens, a howl that seemed to come not from horns but from the ship itself, struck in its 170,000-ton body. And as he listened to this wailing and continual thunder, blinded by the terrible weight that forced his leaden body deep into the chair, he felt—passing out—relief.