Fiasco (42 page)

In the control room, it was Tempe's watch. He checked the course and the growing crescent of Sexta on the monitor screens—and glanced now and then at Harrach, who was standing at his side, talking angrily. (Lately, Harrach seemed to flare up over the most inconsequential things; he would drop in on Tempe and hold forth at length, fuming.) Tempe did not interrupt the man, not wanting to agitate him more. Besides, they were not alone: in the control room, too, DEUS was watching over them. Tempe was not expert enough in computer architecture to be certain that a machine so quick, intelligent, and retentive did not have a trace of personal identity. The assurances of the textbooks and the experts did not convince him. He would have preferred to convince
himself
, but did not know how. But, then, there were more serious things on his mind. Did Nakamura truly sympathize with Father Arago? Tempe shivered at the thought of being in the apostolic delegate's shoes.

Arago, meanwhile, following the captain's suggestion, was considering—with Gerbert—the question of whether or not it was possible for the Quintans to deduce the biology of men from the landers that men constructed.

Although the landers had been meticulously sterilized before being dispatched to the planet, so that on their surfaces there would be not one epidermal cell from a finger, not one bacterium (of the kind that the human organism could never rid itself of entirely)—and although they were automata built without human hands, and their energy feeders and equipment for information exchange corresponded to terrestrial technology of eighty years before—Steergard had no intention of taking the electronic envoys on board when they returned. He considered that too risky. The first artifacts that the
Hermes
captured had shown the Quintans' astounding ability in parasite engineering. The landers, then, besides bringing important, innocent information, could also bring destruction—not in the form of microbes attacking at once, but of viruses or ultraviruses with a long incubation period. He therefore asked the doctors and Kirsting to come up with countermeasures.

The "neutral government" that had communicated with them agreed to the arrival of the landers, but in the course of further negotiations stipulated that the landers could not remain in contact with the
Hermes,
for that condition was imposed by the "neighboring parties." The planet, swallowing both probes with its atmosphere, wrapped itself in a curtain of intensified noise on all wavelengths. Had the men equipped the envoys with lasers able to pierce that shield of noise, they would have broken the accepted condition. It would have been even more obvious for the
Hermes
to poke at the sea of clouds and the radio chaos with its own lasers.

Nothing remained but to watch Quinta from behind Sexta via the clouds of holographic eyes. The operation was synchronized so that the two landers, sinking slowly toward the horizon, would reach Quinta just as the
Hermes
entered the shadow of Sexta. Everyone gathered in the control room and waited for the critical moment. The planet, white with clouds, filled the main screen; clearly visible were the swarms of combat satellites that crossed its featureless face as black dots. To be able to observe the entry of both rockets into the atmosphere, sodium and technetium had been added to their hypergolic fuel: the first colored the exhaust flame a bright yellow, the second tagged it with a spectral line not found in the spectra of the local sun or the Quintan orbiters. When the rockets plunged into the clouds, the threads of fire from the air friction and the retros began to diffuse. Then the billions of eyes, spread in an unseen tail a million miles in the wake of the
Hermes,
focused along the tangent on the point of the planned landing—and not in vain. Settling on hard ground in the space of several seconds, both vessels announced the conclusion of their flight with a double blaze of sodium, intentionally modulated, which immediately faded out.

With this the operation entered the next stage. The bottom armor of the
Hermes
split in half, into two giant arched gates, and from that Open Sesame crane arms pushed out into space an enormous metal cylinder that was to be the laboratory quarantine for the probes. Harrach seemed especially pleased with the stratagem. The others approved of Steergard's tactic and willingly pitched in, but they did so without enthusiasm: there was nothing to rejoice about. The first pilot, on the other hand, did not bother to conceal his evil glee—that they were going to take that war-loving bastard of a planet by the throat. He could hardly wait for the return of the plague-carrying landers, as if the whole point of the expedition was a brutal clash. Listening to the man go on and on, Tempe made little comment, thinking about the psychological changes in Harrach that DEUS must be taking note of, and felt ashamed of his colleague—even though at times he, too, was unable to say which he would have preferred: for the deep anger that had been building in the crew to turn out to be without foundation, or for
them
to force upon the crew the worst of all possible decisions. Yes, he himself now saw this civilization as an enemy, whose absolute evil justified the steps the men were taking. Nothing, now, was cloaked in secrecy. The solaser—extinguished and masked before—was being charged with solar energy. Not for signaling but to deal laser blows.

After forty-eight hours the holographic cloud announced that the envoys were returning. The two landers were supposed to signal—in the ultrashortwave band—when they were outside the orbit of the drifting fragments of the Moon, but only one did clearly: the other sent a gibberish of codes. Steergard divided his people into three groups. To the pilots he entrusted the launching of the fake
Hermes
into a solar trajectory; to the physicists, the receiving of the landers in the cylindrical chamber, which was some fifty miles away from the
Hermes;
and he put the physicians and Kirsting in charge of the biological examination of those landers, provided that the second group gave the go-ahead. Though thus divided, the crew kept abreast of the total situation. Harrach and Tempe—tracking the hollow giant, which set off unhurriedly on its way, with the fires from the robot welding still flickering across its hull—spoke by intercom with Nakamura's group, which was waiting for the landers. Polassar did not rule out the possibility of an ordinary malfunction in the babbling transmitter—but Harrach was positive, would bet his right arm, that it was the work of the Quintans. The fact was, Harrach
wanted
the treachery of the Quintans to come to light as soon as possible and to be—for everyone—the last straw. Tempe said nothing, wondering how a man so obsessed could still function in the responsible position of first pilot. Apparently, he could—seeing as DEUS had not yet informed the captain of Harrach's condition. Unless they had all of them fallen into a collective madness…

The quarantine cylinder, in the glare of floodlights surrounding it, received the landers with an open maw. At their control center, the physicists, after automata performed the preliminary examination, could not decide whether the damaged lander had been damaged by an accident or by design. This infuriated Harrach, who knew better: it was foul play, it was the Quintans! After an hour, however, it turned out that the probe had lost part of an antenna and its prow radiator in a collision with some small meteorite fragment or piece of metal. Such a collision, in that system, was not unlikely.

On the empty twin of the
Hermes,
moving away, the final welds still glowed in the darkness. The pilots could start the drive as soon as the captain gave the order, but he did not call them. He was waiting for the report of the experts. In what condition had the landers returned? And, most important, what information had they brought?

The information turned out to be extremely interesting, and the landers—if one did not count that minor mishap—untouched and wholly uncontaminated. Hearing this, Harrach could not help exclaiming:

"Snakes!"

"But even in Sodom there was a Lot," Tempe pointed out. He was dying to know the new discoveries about Quinta, which somehow were taking forever to reach the control room. Finally Nakamura took pity on the pilots and showed them, on a projector, the result of the lander reconnaissance as transmitted from the quarantine cylinder.

He began with the cartoons that the solaser had beamed to the planet. Then followed a long sequence of landscapes: nature preserves, possibly, untouched by civilization. Seashores, waves breaking on sand, red sunsets in low clouds, mountain forests a much darker green than the foliage on Earth. The enormous crowns of the trees were almost navy-blue.

Against this continually changing background shone letters.

ACCEPTANCE OF YOUR ROCKET MISSILE OF MASS LIMIT THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND TONS METRIC AGREED UPON WITH GUARANTEE OF YOUR PASSIVITY YOUR GOODWILL THIS IS SPACEPORT

Out of a heavy green mist emerged a vast surface, seen from a great height. It gleamed dully, like frozen mercury. Incredibly slender needles stood upon it at regular intervals, like pieces on a chessboard: stalagmites immaculately white, sharply pointed, and growing. Or, rather, they issued upward, wrapped at their bases in golden spiderwebs, until that motion ceased. On the far horizon, completely cloudless, birds flew, each bird having four independently moving wings. They must have been huge. They flew like cranes migrating from northern climes. Below, at the stalagmites—now recognizable, to human eyes, as rockets—tiny things shimmered, dark and multicolored; they swarmed up wide ramps into the white ships. Everyone leaned forward, straining his eyes to see, finally, what the Quintans looked like—but with no more success than a visitor from Neptune would have had, trying to make out the human form by scrutinizing a packed Olympic stadium from a mile away. The variegated, churning crowd continued to gather at the bottom of the ramps and to disappear, in rivers, inside the ships as bright as snow. On the hulls were perpendicular rows of hieroglyphics: shining, illegible inscriptions. The crowd now thinned, and everyone waited for the inevitable takeoff of that white flotilla. But—slowly, majestically—it began instead to sink.

The gold-bronze spiderwebs fell away from the hulls as if rotted through, making irregular circles on the ground. Now only the white prows jutted above the lake of flat mercury, and then they, too, entered dark-red wells, and no trapdoors or hatches closed over them—only that same matte mercury. The plain was featureless. From the edge of the screen slowly crawled a centipede—clearly mechanical, not a living creature—with a flat, truncated snout. From the snout poured a fountain of bright, yellowish fluid, which spread and at the same time bubbled as if boiling; when the stuff had all boiled away, the mercury turned black as tar. The centipede bent back, arching, so that its middle legs hung in midair; it turned directly toward the watching men and opened four eyes. Or were they windows? Or spotlights? But they looked like the large eyes of a fish: round, surprised, with thin-band, metallic irises and black, glittering pupils. This robot vehicle seemed to regard them thoughtfully, with concern, out of those four pupils, which were now no longer round but had narrowed like a cat's. At the same time something flickered—weak, blue—in their centers. Then the centipede fell, resuming its position on the black ground, and, swaying from side to side like a real centipede, trotted off out of the field of vision. There were no more birds in the sky, only the caption:

OUR SPACEPORT WE ACCEPT YOUR ARRIVAL CONTINUATION FOLLOWS

The continuation indeed followed, first with a thunderstorm. The downpour lashed a row of buildings with slanting rain—buildings connected by a multitude of overhead viaducts. A peculiar city in a cloudburst. The water coursed down oval roofs, poured from spouts at the bases of bridges—yet those were not bridges, they were tunnels with elliptic windows, and in their centers rushed streaks of fluttering light. An elevated railroad? Not a soul anywhere, the length of the streets … but because the buildings were in a cascade arrangement, like Toltecan pyramids cast in metal, there really were no streets. It was impossible to determine the ground level of the city, if this was in fact a city. The rain, whipped by the wind, drove in sheets of silver across gigantic structures; lightning struck without a sound; and from the pyramids the water streamed in a curious way. The gutters that collected it were raised at the ends, so that great torrents flew into the air and merged with the ever-pouring rain. But then one of the lightning bolts split up and froze into words of fire:

STORMS ARE ON OUR PLANET FREQUENT PHENOMENON

The image dimmed and went out. In a dingy grayness appeared outlines, broken silhouettes. Somewhere in the depths, a shuddering amalgamation of fire and clouds, or smoke. Layer upon layer of the rubble of enormous structures. In the foreground lay whitish blotches, as of the naked bodies of creatures torn apart, smeared with mud, in even rows. Above this vast cemetery, the color of iron, flashed the words:

THIS CITY WAS DESTROYED BY YOUR SELENOCLASM

The inscription vanished, and the picture wandered among the ruins, showing close-ups of incomprehensible mechanisms. One of these, reinforced all around with unusually thick metal, had been cracked open, and inside—here a telephoto lens zooming in—were, again, mangled remains, providing no clue as to the shape of what had lived, like human corpses pulled from mass graves, half rags and clay. Then—the camera retreating suddenly—again a great expanse of rubble, with deep excavations. In them, like beetles, squat bulldozers streaked with red gnawed at the debris, their mandibles working. The bulldozers pushed stubbornly, with difficulty, ramming the center of a split façade, white as alabaster, as milk, but singed by flame, until the wall crumbled and dust lifted in a rust-red cloud, blocking out the scene. For a few moments all that could be heard in the control room was rapid breathing and the tick of a second hand. The screen brightened. A strange diadem appeared, of crystal as transparent as a tear, with a hollow not made for any human skull, and corymbs sparkling like diamonds. Set in it, compact, a dodecahedron, a pale-pink spinel. Above this, the inscription: