Fiasco (43 page)

CROWNING CONCLUSION

But it was not the conclusion. Against a harsh halogen light there were dark, headless crustaceans on the gentle slope of a mountainside, like a herd of cattle grazing in an alpine pasture. In vain did the eye try to identify them. Were they large tortoises? Giant coleoptera? The picture lifted, went along an increasingly steep wall of rock with black recesses, grottoes, caves; it was not water that flowed from them, but perhaps a slurry, a brown-yellow vomitus. Then, on a purple, gently undulating background, words began to march.

WE ACCEPT YOUR ARRIVAL SHIP OF REST MASS LIMIT THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND TONS METRIC AT SPACEPORT AAO
35
AS SHOWN GIVE TIME WE GUARANTEE YOU PEACE FORGETTING BY YOUR CYLINDRICAL PROJECTION OF MERCATOR MERIDIAN
135
PARALLEL
48
WE AWAIT YOUR SIGNAL ANNOUNCEMENT ARRIVAL

The monitor went blank. Daylight flooded the control room. The second pilot, very pale, his hands unconsciously pressed to his chest, still stared at the empty screen. Harrach struggled with himself. Large beads of sweat trickled down the man's forehead and rested on his thick blond brows.

"It's blackmail," he blurted. "They … to put the blame on us for that…"

Tempe started, as if suddenly awakened.

"But, you know," he said quietly, "it's true. Did anyone invite us here? We landed smack in the middle of their misfortune … to increase it."

"Enough of that!" Harrach snapped. "If you must do penance, go to that priest of yours, don't try converting me. It's not only blackmail, it's more cunning… Yes, I can see how they'd love to get us on their hook. Use your head, Mark.
That
wasn't our fault. It was they who—"

"Use
your
head." Tempe got up, unable to sit still. "No matter how the game ends, what we did, we did. Contact between intelligences—my God. If you have to curse someone, then curse SETI, curse CETI, curse the day you decided to become a 'psychozoic discoverer.' Better yet, keep your mouth shut. That's the smartest thing that you can do."

That afternoon, the Open Sesame containing the landers was pulled on board. Arago asked Steergard for a general meeting to discuss future courses of action. Steergard refused point-blank. There would be no meetings, no councils, until the final phase of the program was completed. Adorned with a gamma laser, the fake
Hermes
disappeared behind the curve of Sexta and made full speed for Quinta, exchanging with it the prearranged sign and countersign.

As soon as he was off duty, Tempe tried to see the captain. The captain refused: alone in his cabin, he was seeing no one. The pilot rode down to the middle level—he hadn't the nerve to go to the monk—but turned back halfway and asked on the intercom for Gerbert, who was not in his room. Gerbert was in the mess hall, with Kirsting and Nakamura. The ship maneuvered to provide a little thrust; they remained in shadow and had weak gravitation. At the sight of people eating, Tempe realized that he had not put a thing into his mouth since dawn. He joined them, silent, with a plate of roast beef and rice, but when he touched the meat with his fork he became—for the first time in his life—nauseous because of the meat's grayish fibers. He had to eat, however, so he scraped his plate into the kitchen vac and took from the automat an instant-heated vitamin porridge. To fill the stomach with something. No one spoke to him. It was only when he had tossed his plate and spoon into the washer that Nakamura, with a faint smile, called him over. Tempe sat down opposite the Japanese, who wiped his lips with a paper napkin. When Kirsting left, when the two of them were alone with Gerbert, Nakamura cocked his head in the way he had, his black hair combed flat, and looked expectantly at the pilot. The pilot shrugged, which meant that he had nothing to say. Nothing.

"When we turn our backs on the world, the world does not go away," said the physicist suddenly. "Where there is mind, there is also cruelty. They go together. One should accept this, since it cannot be changed."

"And why is the captain seeing no one?" the pilot said.

"He is entitled," the Japanese replied, unruffled. "The captain, like all of us, must save face. When he is alone, too. Dr. Gerbert suffers, our pilot Tempe suffers, but
I
do not suffer. As for Father Arago—I don't even want to think about Father Arago…"

"How is it … that you don't suffer?" Tempe didn't understand.

"I don't have the right," Nakamura calmly explained. "Modern physics demands an imagination that shrinks from nothing. It is no credit to me; it is a gift of my predecessors. I am not a prophet, not a clairvoyant. I am merely objective when it is necessary to be objective. Otherwise I, too, would be unable to eat meat. Who was it that said
Nemo me impune lacessit?
Does he now regret his words?"

The pilot paled.

"No."

"Good. Your buddy Harrach is putting on quite a show, the mask of fury fixed on his face, like a demon in our Kabuki theater. One should be neither angry nor despairing, neither feel pity nor seek revenge. And you yourself now know why. Or am I mistaken?"

"No," said Tempe. "It's that we don't have the right."

"Exactly. The conversation is concluded. In thirty"—he consulted his watch—"in thirty-seven hours the
'Hermes'
will be landing. Who is on duty then?"

"Both of us. Orders."

"You won't be alone."

Nakamura rose, nodded to them, and left. In the empty mess hall the washer hissed softly, and there was a light breeze from the air conditioning. The pilot glanced at the physician, who continued to sit motionless, his head in his hands, staring into space. Tempe left the man there without exchanging a word with him. There was nothing, really, to say.

The landing of the
"Hermes"
turned out to be spectacular. Descending toward the designated point on the planet, it belched such fire from its stern that the burn, transmitted by the myriads of tiny eyes dispersed in space, entered the milky fullness of the clouds like an incandescent needle, tearing it apart, beneath, into a whirl of pinkening scuds. Into this window, this hole cleared by flame, the ship sank, then disappeared. Wisps of feathery cirrocumuli, spiraling inward, began to close the breach in Quinta's cloud cover, but they had not yet filled it when a yellow light burst up through them. After nine minutes—the time required for a signal to travel the distance separating the observers from the planet—the transmitter of the fake
Hermes,
aimed at Sexta, beamed for the first and last time. The clouds once again parted in that place, but more gradually, gently. In the control room full of people there was a sound like a short, stifled sigh.

Steergard, the unblemished, white face of Quinta at his back, called DEUS.

"Give me an analysis of the explosion."

"I have only the emission spectrum."

"Give the cause of the explosion, based on that spectrum."

"It will be uncertain."

"I know. Go ahead."

"Very well. Four seconds after the drive was shut off, the reactor core blew up. Should I give the cause variants?"

"Yes."

"First: a stream of neutrons, at a high-low frequency designed to penetrate the housing of the pile, struck the stern. The reactor, though shut off, began functioning as an amplifier, and an exponential chain reaction was triggered in the plutonium. The second variant: the armor plate at the stern was pierced by a cumulative charge with a cold anomalon warhead. Should I give the reasoning behind the first variant?"

"Go ahead."

"An attack of the ballistic type would demolish the entire ship. A neutron blow, on the other hand, could knock out just the power source, if the assumption is that there are biological creatures on board and that they will be separated, therefore, from the engine area by radiation-proof shielding. Should I show the spectra?"

"No. Enough."

Only now did Steergard notice that he was standing in the white light of Quinta as in a halo. Without looking, he turned off the picture and was silent for a moment, seeming to digest the words of the machine.

"Does anyone wish to take the floor?"

Nakamura raised his eyebrows and slowly, with great gravity, as if formally offering condolences, said:

"I stand behind the first hypothesis. The ship was to have lost power while the crew emerged from the attack in one piece. With injuries, but alive. One cannot learn much from corpses."

"Who disagrees?" asked the captain.

All were silent—not so much because of what had happened and what had been said as because of the look on Steergard's face. Hardly opening his mouth, as if seized with lockjaw, he said:

"Come, doves, you champions of peace and mercy, speak up, give us—and give them—a chance to be saved. Convince me that we should go back, bringing Earth the small consolation that there exist worlds worse than ours. And leaving
them
to their own doom. For the duration of such persuading I cease to be your captain. I am the grandson of a Norwegian fisherman; I am a simple man who has overreached himself. I will listen to any and all arguments—to insults, too, if someone considers that necessary. What I hear will be erased from DEUS's memory. Go ahead."

"This is not humility, this is sarcasm. The symbolic resignation from your position of captain does not change the fact." Arago, as if wanting to be better heard, stepped forward from the rest. "But if each man is to act according to his conscience to the end, whether he is in a drama or a black comedy—because he did not choose the play himself and does not know his lines by heart, like an actor—then I say this: Killing, we save no one, we save nothing. Deception lay behind the mask of the
Hermes,
and it lies behind the mask of seeking contact at any price. The thirst is not for knowledge but for vengeance. Whatever you do—if you do not retreat—will result in a fiasco."

"And retreat would not constitute a fiasco?"

"No," replied Arago. "You know with certainty that you can bloody them. But you know nothing else with certainty."

"That is true. Are you finished, Father? Who else wishes to speak?"

"I do."

It was Harrach.

"If you decide to retreat, Captain, I will do everything in my power to prevent it. You'll have to bind me hand and foot. I know that, according to DEUS, I've become abnormal. All right. But we are, every one of us here, abnormal. We did all we possibly could to convince them that we presented no threat. For four months we let ourselves be attacked, lured, betrayed—and if Father Arago represents Rome here, then let him remember what his Saviour said to Matthew: 'I came not to send peace, but a sword.' And if… But I've talked too much. Do we vote?"

"No. Five hours have passed since their disappointment. We cannot delay. El Salam, you will start up the solaser."

"Without warnings?"

"It's a bit late in the day for that. How much time do you need?"

"Sixteen minutes, back and forth, for the sign and countersign, plus positioning. It can fire in twenty minutes."

"Fire away."

"By the program?"

"Yes, for an hour. Nakamura, let's have the viewer. Whoever doesn't want to watch can leave."

Well hidden in the mask's dust cloud, whose radiance was induced by Zeta, the solaser opened fire at one in the morning—a three-hour delay, because Steergard wanted perfect collimation. To hit the ring along its tangent, at the exact point where the trap had been set for them, it was necessary to wait for the planet to rotate into position.

Eighteen terajoules shot out in a sword of light. The jump in the photometers showed that the solar blade, invisible in empty space, had traveled sideways. Brushing the edge of the ring, it peeled off the outer rim. The scene, though it was deaf and dumb and an outstretched palm could easily have covered it, demonstrated the full power taken from the Sun when that power was released in the collision between the light—harder than steel—and the circle of ice spread over thousands of miles. The center of the blow they saw first as a sparkling gap out of which poured a blizzard of swelling white clouds laced with unusual, trembling, arching rainbows. The ice ring boiled, steamed, and—turning to gas—immediately froze and scattered into the void beyond the conflagration, making a long, streaming veil that trailed the planet. It then set behind the disk, since the laser was striking in the direction opposite to the rotation. Steergard had ordered the slanted, gleaming ring to be hit in such a way as to pry it out of its dynamic equilibrium. The power packed inside the solaser was sufficient for seven minutes of terajoule surgery.

"On target," said DEUS.

The outer ring was already breaking up. The inner ring, separated from it by a space six hundred miles wide, was alive with turbulence caused by the changes in the angular momentum. When the circle of ice, sweeping toward the darkness, reached with its long-maned clouds beyond the dayside hemisphere and disappeared in the shadow of the nightside, Quinta's horizon shone as though behind it there rose a second, twin sun through pillars of smoke and rainbows—a sun that cast a smooth blood-red glow on the curved sea of clouds. The view of this terrible catastrophe was magnificent. The light caught in trillions of ice crystals from the butchered ring produced a cosmic fireworks that dimmed every constellation in the starry sky. It was breathtaking. The people in the projection room instinctively shifted their eyes from the upper monitor, in which an eccentric laser diamond trembled just above the sun, to the main screen, where a constant, unpulsed beam of power stripped fractured layers, slabs, snow-white floes from the circle of ice.

Could
they
have anticipated such a cataclysm? From the planet it must have looked like an uncanny, unending explosion high in the heavens. But they were probably unable to see the rainbows shooting upward like lightning bolts, because billions of ice fragments already were hurtling down on them. Mountains of ice, seething and thundering, fell from tattered clouds, but this was no thrilling sight for the ones who perished beneath that roaring avalanche.