Fiasco (41 page)

"More or less. It's complicated, involves a lot of things…"

"Did DEUS say that I was unfit to—?"

"DEUS cannot remove anyone from his post. You know that. It can disqualify through diagnosis, but no more than that. Decisions are made by the captain in conjunction with me, and if either one of us falls victim to a psychosis, the rest of the crew can assume command. So far, there is no psychosis. I only wish that you weren't so all-fired eager to land…"

The pilot unbuckled his belt and floated slowly upward. So that the artificial breeze would not carry him away, he held on to a hazel branch.

"Doctor, you're mistaken, you and DEUS…"

The current of air pushed at him so much, the entire shrub began to bend. Not wanting to uproot it, the pilot released the branch. He called out, flying toward the door:

"Lauger, on the
Eurydice,
said to me, 'You'll see the Quintans.' That's why I came…"

The ship jerked. Tempe was instantly aware: the wall of the greenhouse rushed at him. He twisted around in midair like a falling cat to break the impact, slid down the wall to the ground, which now pushed up hard beneath his feet. By flexing his knees, he could approximate the acceleration. It was not too great. Something, in any case, had happened. The corridor was empty, the sirens silent, but the voice of DEUS came from all sides.

"Man your stations. Quinta has answered. Man your stations. Quinta has answered."

Not waiting for Gerbert, he jumped into the nearest elevator. It creeped, took ages; the passing decks cast light, one after the other. The floor pressed more strongly—the
Hermes
now was accelerating over one g, but not by more (he thought) than half a g. In the upper control room, sunk in deep gray seats with raised headrests, were Harrach, Rotmont, Nakamura, and Polassar, while Steergard, leaning heavily on the railing of the main monitor, watched—as they all watched—the green words that marched across the screen.

…
WE GUARANTEE YOUR SAFETY ON OUR NEUTRAL TERRITORY FORTY SIXTH DEGREE LATITUDE ONE HUNDRED THIRTY NINTH LONGITUDE OUR SPACEPORT ACCORDING YOUR GRID OF MERCATOR WE ARE SOVEREIGN NEUTRAL OUR NEIGHBORS ALERTED HAVE APPROVED APPROACH OF YOUR PROBES WITHOUT PRIOR CONDITIONS GIVE US VIA NEODYMIUM LASER TIME OF ARRIVAL OF YOUR LANDER IN UNITS OF PLANET REVOLUTION BINARY NOTATION WE AWAIT WE WELCOME YOU

Steergard ran the whole message again for Gerbert and the monk as soon as they appeared. Then he sat in his chair and turned it to face the company.

"We received this answer a few minutes ago, from the point mentioned, in flashes having a solar spectrum. Jokichi, was it a mirror?"

"Probably. The light is noncoherent, through the window in the clouds. If it's a simple mirror, the area must be at least several hectares."

"Curious. The solaser received these flashes?"

"No. They were aimed at us."

"Interesting. What angular magnitude does the
Hermes
now have, seen from the planet?"

"An arc of several hundredths of a second."

"Even more interesting. The light wasn't collimated?"

"It was, but weakly."

"As with a parabolic mirror?"

"Or a series of flat mirrors positioned as required over a considerable area."

"It means that they knew where to find us. But how did they know?"

No one spoke.

"I'd like an opinion."

"They might have observed us when we launched the solaser," offered El Salam. Tempe had not noticed him until now: the physicist spoke from the lower control room.

"That was forty hours ago, and since then we have been moving without the drive," Polassar objected.

"Let's put that aside for the moment. Who has faith in this gracious invitation? No one? That is the most curious thing of all."

"It is too good to be true," came a voice from overhead. Kirsting stood on the railed walkway. "Although, on the other hand … if it's a trap, they might have come up with one less primitive."

"We'll see."

The captain rose. The
Hermes
went so evenly that the gravimeters all registered one, as if the vessel were at rest and docked on Earth.

"Attention, everyone. Polassar will feed DEUS the Chapter 19 program banks. El Salam will turn off the solaser and set the mask on it. Where is Rotmont? Good—prepare two heavy landers. The pilots and Dr. Nakamura will remain in the control room, and I'm going to take a quick bath and be back in a minute. Ah! Harrach, Tempe, make sure that anything that doesn't like ten g's is well anchored. Without my permission no one is allowed down in Navigation. That is all."

Steergard went around to all the consoles and, seeing that only the pilots had left their places, called from the door:

"Doctors, please, to their stations."

In a moment the control room was emptied.

Harrach changed his seat and, running his fingers over the keys, checked the condition of all the units from prow to stern on the lit-up diagrams of the interoceptors. Tempe was not needed there; he went over to the Japanese, who was examining the spectra of the Quintan signaling flashes on the table viewer. Tempe asked him what this Chapter 19 program was. Harrach inclined an ear, because he had never heard of it, either.

Nakamura looked up from the viewer and shook his head ruefully.

"Father Arago will be distressed."

"We're going over to a state of war? What's Chapter 19?" Tempe asked again.

"The contents of the keel hold no longer remain a secret, gentlemen."

"The one that's locked? Then there aren't striders there?"

"No. It contains a surprise for everyone. For DEUS, even. With the exception of the captain and my humble self."

Seeing the astonishment of the pilots, he added:

"SETI headquarters considered it advisable, gentlemen. Each of you took simulation training in landing solo. Each of you could therefore find himself in the situation, let us say, of a hostage."

"And DEUS?"

"It's a machine. Computers of the last generation can be broken into, too, even by remote, and have all their programs dumped."

"But to house a couple of special memory banks surely doesn't take an entire loading bay?"

"The banks are not there. The
Hermes
is there. A kind of mock-up of the
Hermes.
Beautifully, very carefully made. To serve, let us say, as bait."

"And that reserve program…?"

The Japanese sighed.

"An allusion, ancient. Closer to you than to me. Chapter 19 of the Book of Genesis. Sodom and Gomorrah. Unpleasant—especially for our apostolic delegate. I feel sorry for him."

Usually, when the ship moved under its own power, everyone on board—and especially in the mess hall—fell into a better mood, because one could forget, at least during meals, about the Gordian knot that was tightening around them more and more. The fact that one could sit at a table, pass dishes of food, pour soup into bowls and beer into glasses with no trouble, use a salt shaker, sugar one's coffee with a spoon—this was a liberation from the practices made necessary by weightlessness. The severing of the bonds of gravity, as has been said a thousand times, makes of a man's habits, and of his body as well, a laughingstock at every turn.

An absentminded astronaut was an astronaut covered with bumps and bruises, spilling all sorts of things on himself and on his clothes, and always flying across the cabin after escaping papers. When he found himself in a large area without "propulsion" materials, he was a creature more helpless than an infant, because one could not claw one's way out of being suspended in mid-air. Those caught in such straits saved themselves by resorting to throwing wristwatches and—if wristwatches did not suffice—jackets or sweaters. The laws of Newtonian mechanics allowed no exceptions: if an outside force did not act upon a body at rest, only the rule of action and reaction would ever move it.

Back in the time when he still cracked jokes, Harrach once said that the perfect murder could be committed in orbit, and it was doubtful that any court would convict the killer, because all one had to do was get the intended victim to strip for a bath and then give him a light push with a finger, just enough to make him hang between the floor, walls, and ceiling, where he would turn until he died of hunger. The killer could tell the judge that he had gone for a towel but got sidetracked. The failure to provide a towel was no crime, and, as everyone knew,
nullum crimen sine lege.
The penal code had not taken into account weightlessness and its criminal possibilities.

After the carrying out of the new orders, which Tempe referred to as a "state of war," the mood, even at the evening meal, did not improve. One might have taken the mess hall for the refectory of a monastery under a strict rule of silence. They ate, not particularly aware of what they ate, leaving that problem entirely to their stomachs, because they were digesting what Steergard had told them that afternoon. He had presented his plan of action, speaking so softly that he was barely audible. Anyone who knew him knew that this cold calm signified a rage.

"The invitation is a trap. If I am mistaken—which I hope I am—contact will take place. I do not see, however, any reason to be optimistic. The existence of a neutral government on a planet in the grip of at least a hundred years of cosmic war is possible, but it is not possible that a guest from outer space could be received without the consent of the warring parties. According to the message, that consent was given. I tried turning the situation around—that is, to imagine that we were one of the command centers of Quinta and faced with the problem of how to respond to the appeal issued by the intruder to the population at large.

"Such a command center by now knows a lot about the intruder. It knows that the intruder cannot be eliminated in space, having already attempted to do that with the means at its disposal—though possibly there are means remaining. It knows that the intruder is not truly aggressive, for although the intruder tried to force contact by a show of strength, it made the target of that show the unpopulated Moon, whereas with much less expenditure of energy it could have struck the ice ring, which is on the verge of collapse anyway. It also knows, obviously, that it alone—or it in temporary alliance with its enemies—was the main culprit responsible for the selenoclasm and the catastrophic consequences. It must know this, I repeat, because it is not possible to conduct military operations on an interplanetary scale without the help of competent scientists. The rest of the command center's knowledge is circumstantial. Long before mastering gravitation one learns its properties—to the extremes of the black holes. The way we repulsed their nocturnal attack was a surprise for them. If, however, they have physicists worth anything at all, they will realize that a gravitational defense, for a ship landed on the planet, is just as suicidal as a gravitational offensive. The ship could not produce, relativistically, a coherent gravity field of such a configuration without destroying both itself and the planet.

"I am sending two landers to the designated area and expect that they will find no threat, none whatever. If the Quintans wish to lure the
Hermes
to the planet, then the landers will return. Nor will they return empty-handed; something is already being staged for their benefit, in order to allay our fears and whet our interest. The hospitable Quintans will declare that true contact means a coming together of living beings, not of machines. Which cannot be denied. Therefore, if things proceed roughly as I have said, the
Hermes
will land, and then the matter will be settled once and for all. Once we recover the landers—but without taking them on board, because after everything that has happened I would rather err a hundred times on the side of caution than allow a single oversight—we will announce our arrival.

"Now to the details of the operation. After dispatching the landers, we move at medium power from Quinta to Sexta. Both, to our advantage, are in similar opposition to the Sun. Our probes have already studied Sexta, and we know that it is an airless globe with high seismic activity and therefore has not lent itself either to colonization or to the establishment of military bases. Such bases would be threatened more by the planet itself than by the enemy. We enter the shadow of Sexta, and the
Hermes
that emerges will be completely indistinguishable from our ship—at a distance. Up close, it's another story, but I think they will not interfere with it before entry into the atmosphere. Considering sidereal physics, they could safely attack it in the ionosphere—but I don't believe they will. The ship will be a prize far more valuable if it makes a soft, normal landing than if it is shattered. And, too, it will offer less resistance on the ground. A ship descending stern first, firing, has chances of maneuvering, escaping.

"That
Hermes
will send and receive radio signals, and will have an engine enabling it to land, though—granted, only once. There will be no direct communication between it and us. And then, depending on how it is greeted, we will respond."

"Sodom and Gomorrah?" asked Arago.

Steergard looked at the monk a while before answering, with undisguised rancor.

"We are sticking to the Holy Scriptures, Your Reverence, but availing ourselves of the first edition only. The new edition no longer applies, because we have already turned the other cheek more than once. The matter is not open to discussion. There's no point, since we won't be the ones choosing between the Old and New Testaments, they will. Is the solaser retuned?"

El Salam said that it was.

"And DEUS is now on Chapter 19? Good. Now let's take up the matter of the landers. Rotmont and Nakamura will be in charge of that. But after dinner."

No one saw the landers take off. Launched at midnight on automatic, they made straight for Quinta, while the
Hermes
turned its back on them and accelerated: reaching Sexta, seventy million kilometers distant, would take almost eighty hours at hyperbolic speed. In the electronics labs, production began of dispersons, until now not deployed in the reconnaissance. These—also called "bee's eyes"—were a swarm of millions of microscopic crystals; scattered in a million cubic miles of space around Sexta, they would serve as the
Hermes'
vision. Dispersed in the wake of the ship, they were its invisible, remote-control eyes. On Earth they had been used in aerial photography. Each crystal, smaller than a grain of sand, a transparent needle, corresponded to a single ommatidium, an optic cone of a bee's compound eye. The
Hermes
pulled this seeing tail after itself, to go behind Sexta and from there observe the fate of its computerized envoys. Also, after covering an appropriate distance, the ship ejected television probes with a great show of flame: its "official eyes," which the Quintans could and were even supposed to notice.